PART II

XIV

SNOW covered the world, a dense dirge of white sounding deep into the black web of the woods. Clouds moved low in the sky, heavy and morose, unsilvered by the sifting sun. The hills were like the great billows of a milky sea. A silence as of suspense seemed to press ponderous and prophetic upon the land.

England again: sullen skies and the sullen atmosphere of Saltire society! Autumn had passed in a wizard blaze of gold. Sympathies had clashed at the outset like brazen cymbals. At Paris millinery had appealed to the one, the Louvre had possessed the other. At Rome the feminine mind had yawned under the shadow of St. Peter’s, while the male had moved musingly amid ruins. Florence had proffered nothing to Ophelia save opportunities for grumbling over the _table d’hôte_; Raphael and the great Michael had called to Gabriel from the Accademia delle Bell’ Arti. At Ravenna the man had meditated over the tomb of Dante. At Venice the brackish flavor of the canals had eliminated the least leaning towards romance in the Honorable Ophelia’s skull. The affair had proved to her one long progress of monotonies. She had yawned through Italy as she would have yawned through the pages of _The Pilgrim’s Progress_. The antique exasperated her beyond belief; its dim philosophy offended the sensuous greed of the present. She had more than once suggested to Gabriel that he had been formed by nature to be a frowsy curio dealer, hoarding mediævalisms in a dusty shop. The temper of neither had improved during the sojourn amid vineyards and olive thickets. The woman’s mood had grown symbolical of Etna; the man’s had ascended towards Alpine regions of perpetual snow.

An irreligious man may be a very passable creature; an irreligious woman is a production more sinister than a double-headed leopard. Love and the adoration of a deity should be woven up in a true woman’s heart like the purple and gold threads of a sacramental garment. Atheism in a woman is an offence against the spirit of maternity. The Gusset girls had been bred upon an apathetic culture-ground and fostered on certain pert ethical concoctions that based a complacent liberty on reason. They went to church on occasions, and encouraged the bourgeois folk in a creed that they had been taught to regard with benignant condescension. Lord Gerald detested lengthy sermons and anything bordering on Calvinism. In the one brief burst of mental energy of youth he had imbibed the tenets of a certain philosophical school, and these rather flimsy convictions had propped him in an amiable epicureanism for the remainder of his earthly existence.

That she may escape the inherent perversity of her nature, a woman without a creed must indeed be possessed by phenomenal instincts towards saintliness. Nor was Ophelia Strong anything of a saint, even in the most lax rendering of the epithet. She was a woman of the world; a very modern production, an admixture of the extreme pleasurableness of imperial Rome with the cool and impertinent independence of the moneyed scion of contemporary life. The smart lady of fashion cannot be expected to garb herself in dowdy and bourgeois morality. The domestic virtues are becoming obsolete in many feminine brains. They are to be classed with samplers, crochet-work, cookery books, tracts, and other relics of vulgar superstition. Ophelia Strong was one of those ladies who live to the minute, revel in sensations, and believe in the employment of certain fashionable and shady members of the medical profession.

There was little cause for wonder that Gabriel and his wife should have discovered traces of mutual incompatibility before many months had elapsed. The one lived for the life within, the other for the life without. Marry an Acrasia to a St. Christopher and you will provide material enough to keep cynics employed for a century. There is no inherent unreason in strife under particular circumstances. A man may as well attempt to cultivate the Sahara as to perfect home life with a woman pledged to the demon worship of all that is vain and artificial. The modern fashionable person is an enlightened and independent spirit. A splendid emancipation scoffs at the barbarous ethics of the parlor. Æsthetic and piquant mischief is preferred to sincerity garbed in black bonnet, mackintosh, and galoshes.

Thus it may be recorded without exaggeration that a four months’ honeymoon on the Continent had not bourgeoned into deep marital blessedness. Gabriel and his wife had returned to Saltire in a certain dubious temper that did not flatter the future with prospects of peace. There were errors on both sides; inconsistencies in either character. A look of heavy petulance reigned on the woman’s face, and she had become addicted to hysterical outbursts of passion. Gabriel still wore his melancholy, Werther-like smile. The evolutions of marriage had not astonished his reason. The first squabble in a Parisian hotel had prepared him for the mockery that was to be. He was a man who could distil a species of melancholy intoxication from his own troubles. They barred him in upon himself and intensified to his mind the face of the girl who had stirred his blood in the summer that had gone. It is only when night comes that man beholds the stars.

Saltire had welcomed the couple with quivering tongues. Mrs. Marjoy’s spectacles had glimmered feverishly in the Saltire drawing-rooms, and her charity had dipped its forked irony in vinegar as of yore. The Misses Snodley were sentimental and expectant. Even John Strong’s enthusiasm was still rosy as a peony and bathotic as stale beer. He and Lord Gerald were much at dinner together, and political problems hung heavy over these Titanic minds. It was decreed as a matter of course that the young folk were supremely contented, bathed in a dotage of sensuous bliss. The Misses Snodley declared that Ophelia looked twice the woman since the hallowed influence of marriage had breathed upon her soul. As for Gabriel, they could vow that he had the orthodox joy of paternity gravely writ upon his face. And yet Mrs. Marjoy licked her teeth and sneered.

It was winter, late in January, with snow on the ground and no wind moving. The Saltire hills were white under the moon, checkered with the black umbrage of the woods. Stars gemmed the bare trees, that rose gaunt, tumultuous, and morose about the tiled roofs of The Friary. A warm glow streamed betwixt damask curtains, tincturing the snow. A ghostly quiet brooded calm and passionless in the night. The dark pines on the hills stood like a silent host, watchful, multitudinous, mute.

Gabriel and his wife were at dinner, embalmed in the sanctity of matrimonial solitude. A shaven-faced man-servant stood behind Gabriel’s chair. Candles were burning on the table under red lace shades. A silver epergne full of Christmas roses stood upon a richly embroidered centre of green and gold. Glass and silver scintillated on the immaculate cloth. The greater part of the room lay in shadow.

Ophelia, in a light blue tea-gown, sipped her claret and looked unseraphically at the man half hidden from her by flowers. Tension had arisen that day over certain very minor matters, domestic and otherwise. The conversation during dinner had been unimaginative and monosyllabic. The starched and glazed man-servant by the sideboard had stood, chin in air, staring into space.

Ophelia dispelled at last a silence that had lasted for some minutes.

“Going skating to-morrow?”

“Possibly.”

The wife toyed with a savory and looked at her plate.

“Do you ever make up your mind on any subject under the sun?” she remarked, with a crude curl of her long lip.

“I never trouble my brain, dear, over trifles.”

“What a limp animal you are. Pah, there’s too much pepper in this stuff! Take it away, James. And you can go. Leave the crumbs; we’ll picnic over dessert.”

The man whisked the plates away, set wines and liqueurs on the table, and departed, closing the door gently. Ophelia pulled a dish of preserved fruit towards her and nibbled irritably.

“Look here, Gabriel,” she said.

Her husband began handling a pair of silver nut-crackers.

“Well, dear?”

“I wish you wouldn’t be so curt before the servants. They might think we’d been married ten years by your manners. You never seem to consider me. If I wish a thing you immediately contradict me. I suppose my very wishing it is enough to set your temper on edge. You never seem to think I need amusing.”

“My dear girl, I suppose I am dull at times.”

“Dull! You put it mildly.”

“Indeed!”

“For Heaven’s sake, stop cracking those nuts. I have a beastly headache, and you fidget me to death. You men are so abominably selfish. Do you ever realize that we have been stuffed down in this place a month; I am getting sick of being bored out of my skin every hour of the day. I tell you, I can’t stand it; it’s getting on my nerves. We must rake up a house-party or do something outrageous. I never imagined you could be such a brutal dullard.”

The man laughed half cynically. The philosophic part of him was amused despite the occasion.

“You forget that we have become orthodox and respectable,” he said, “that we are expected to rent a pew in church, subscribe to missionary enterprises, exist on hash for lunch, and renounce the devil and all his angels. I am sorry I have contrived to become so abominably orthodox. I am only endeavoring to live up to middle-class ideals, dumpling-and-treacle philosophy, the ethics of top-hats and mid-day dinners on Sunday. Perhaps you might suggest some new and original piece of wickedness.”

The sally had no emollient effect upon Ophelia’s petulance. Her claws were out; and she was not a woman who could regain her amiability within half a day. She could lose most things, even her purse, with facility, but a grievance clung like a rubefacient plaster.

“One would think you had married me to be amused,” she said.

“Yours is the Eve’s part of the compact.”

“As a matter of fact, you seem to care more for a shilling volume of essays than for my company.”

“Really!”

“No woman should allow a library to exist in her house.”

“My dear girl, you are surely not jealous of Schopenhauer?”

“I have never heard of the fellow.”

“Perhaps it is as well; he is somewhat caustic.”

The wife gathered her gown and prepared to depart to the drawing-room. Gabriel opened the door for her. She gave him a look as she went out.

“I shall expect you in half an hour for billiards.”

“I will attempt to be punctual. Tell James to serve my coffee in the library.”

“Drat the library.” came the retort.

Now whether it was pure perversity on Gabriel’s part, or the romantic mesmerism of the work on which he was engaged, an honest eighty minutes had passed before he appeared in the red-and-white salon. Clouds had blackened still further the spiritual atmosphere. The fire had died to embers; a cheap novel lay dishevelled on the hearth-rug as though precipitated there in a moment of irritation. Ophelia was sitting with her feet on the fender, her chin resting on her clinched fists.

Gabriel closed the door gently, picked up the book, appropriated a chair, and sat down. He was even impolitic enough to yawn behind his hand. The storm seethed two paces away, gathering satirical bitterness over the listless fire.

“I hope you have amused yourself.”

The man glanced up, more surprise than apology upon his face. He was in a conciliatory mood; his wife’s voice was more than ominous of injured sentiment.

“I have been writing,” he said; “the hour after dinner is one of my most enlightened periods. My imagination kindles.”

“Imagination!”

The twinge of irony was admirable.

“You surely don’t consider such stuff literature?”

“I have hopes for myself.”

The lady tittered amiably and exhaled transcendent pity.

“Your conceit is really very amusing,” she remarked. “It is really too funny to think that you take yourself seriously. You—an author! My dear Gabriel, you are really too absurd.”

Now a man perhaps is never so sensitive as in the matter of mental acumen. Scoff at his ability as at a fond and fatuous delusion, a ridiculous piece of egotism, and you bid fair to touch his vanity to the quick. You may insult his figure with impunity, but it is dangerous to blaspheme against his mind.

“My dear girl, I hardly expect you to sympathize with me on such subjects.”

“Naturally you consider me beneath your notice.”

“You are not a competent critic.”

“No, I am a woman with common-sense.”

Gabriel stared hard at the fire.

“Can I expect you to understand the deeper side of my soul?” he said.

“Well, dear, the domestic side is shallow enough for me to form a fair estimate of the literary.”

The man winced despite himself.

“You are very kind,” he said.

“I only want to protest against your abominable selfishness.”

“Selfishness!”

The wife flung herself back upon her cushions.

“Perhaps you think yourself insulted,” she said. “You marry a woman, neglect her, treat her to inconceivable dulness on all possible occasions. You give her the residuum of your intellect, the lees of your leisure. Books, books, twaddle, twaddle, from morning to night. I did not marry a library or a second-hand book-store. Do you ever consider my position?”

The man still stared into the grate.

“I have given you a home and myself,” he said. “You cannot expect me to dangle at your skirts all day long. I have lived much with books and my own thoughts till now; you must understand that I cannot give up all that was great in my mind before our marriage. Is all the selfishness on my side?”

“At any rate, all the dulness seems on mine.”

“What more do you desire me to give you?”

“A little consideration might be courteous. Am I to be boxed up in a country-house with a tea merchant’s son who thinks he is a genius and leaves me to exist on novels and coffee. You forget that I am not a frump of fifty. I want to live, although you have married me.”

“Live, by all means,” said the man.

“I want some pleasure in life.”

“Excitement and fashionable bonbons, I suppose.”

The woman lost the remnant of her temper and flashed up on the instant.

“Gabriel, I won’t be jeered at like this. You are an utter brute. Stay here and grub in your books like a hermit. I am not going to be a martyr to your vanity. I’m sick of your sour face. Thank Heaven, I can find amiability outside my own home. I shall take a holiday.”

The man stood up and still stared apathetically at the fire. His shoulders drooped and he looked sullenly dejected.

“Try a change, dear, by all means,” he said; “you seem to need it. I am a bit of a bookworm, I know. You must make allowance for me. I suppose you don’t want such a dull dog to travel with you.”

“Thanks. I can enjoy myself better alone.”

“Very good.”

“There is no need for me to come between you and your genius. No. I am not so vain as to desire that.”

A quarter of an hour later Gabriel had drawn back the curtains and thrown open the French window that looked out upon the lawns. Snow sparkled at his feet. The trees rose dark and solemn from the immaculate plain of winter; the stars were frost-brilliant in the heavens. Near stood a tall cypress with its shelving ledges gleaming white with snow. The keen breath of the night wrapped the man in a clear and spiritual atmosphere.

Snow upon the trees and on the hills! Snow, pure, passionless, and silent, flickered over by the faint wisdom of the stars! All the sweat and turmoil of the world seemed congealed into soundless sleep. The blood of the earth lay frozen in its great passionate heart. Love, hardened into ice, stood a purple pool of lifeless wine. A million centuries might have elapsed till the sun had waned into a half-molten sphere; and the earth, cold and immaculate at last, rushed icy-bosomed through perpetual night. A dead planet, a ghost world, a moon staring spectre-like on the blood-red passions of living stars! A dead planet, treading the universal cycle, cold, sunless, and without sin! The million atomic struggles tombed; the ant-heap of humanity petrified in the past! What, then, are the woes of man, when God’s eyes have watched the death agony of a thousand worlds!

And yet this microcosm outvapors the universe. His passions aspire to stir the faintest ripples of the most infinite ether. Framed in the likeness of God, his sphere is limitless, his future unfathomed. The old mythologies raised him amid the stars. Mayhap in ages to come he is transmogrified into a radiant being moving amid the vapors of a more stupendous sun.

And Gabriel! Gabriel thought on matters less sidereal at that moment. The stars were given sedilia whence they might stare upon the portentous tragedy working in the soul of a minor poet. The man had married clay, clay hot from the kiln of fleshliness; it had warmed him, but now it was as cold as the very snow. He had bartered away the spirit, and materialism had him wrist and ankle. The small stars of idealism had toppled out of the heavens. He was setting them back one by one like an artist frescoing the dome of a temple. Still, a woman held him by the loins; the Church had blessed the embrace, for the perpetuation of demi-gods and the unctuous preservation of morality. The problem was threadbare enough in all truth, and yet problems possess the power of perpetual rejuvenescence. Sin, error, and pain, those elixirs of life, keep the world quivering in the primal throes of existence. The Christian and the Buddhist tug at humanity, head and tail, while Death throws pebbles into an open grave.

XV

THE Honorable Ophelia Strong had summoned to her side a certain friend of her youth, and departed from Saltire to an inland watering-place of repute. The pair had settled at a fashionable hydropathic establishment under the wing of an urbane and sympathetic medical gentleman. Neither Lord Gerald nor John Strong knew anything of the storms that had swept The Friary. They believed the atmosphere of the place to have been peaceful as a summer dawn.

It was promulgated in Saltire circles that Gabriel Strong’s wife had journeyed northward to Callydon for the sake of her health. The reason was sane enough, but, since Dr. Marjoy had not been consulted in the matter, his indefatigable mate had spread certain sinister suggestions through the neighborhood. And since the Saltire ladies were ready to accept any hint that was detrimental to the character of an absent sister, Mrs. Marjoy’s insinuations had bristled like Scotch thistles and flourished with exceeding rankness.

One evening late in February Mrs. Mince and the doctor’s wife had attended the Wednesday celebration of even-song at Saltire church. Mr. Mince had preached to seven ladies, the sexton, and the village idiot a very moving sermon upon spirituality, a sermon largely plagiarized from the works of a popular divine. After the service the ladies had taken leave of the vicar at the village cross. Mr. Mince had parted from them to call on Mr. Smith, the pork butcher, to arrange for the transference of the vicarage sow’s last litter into cash. Mrs. Mince and Mrs. Marjoy continued on their way, inspired by the imagined savor of toasted muffins that rose spiritually prophetic from Mrs. Marjoy’s tea-table.

“It is reported, my dear,” said Mrs. Mince, as she turned up her veil and tucked her black gloves into a ball—“it is reported that young Strong is to contest the constituency at the next election. Sir Hercules Dimsdale is retiring, dear old fellow! What changes we see as the years pass by!”

“Changes for the worse,” said Mrs. Marjoy. “Sir Hercules is such a gentleman; he always asks James to shoot with him twice a year. Young Strong a politician! Why, the cub has no more backbone than a jellyfish. His character would not stand an election.”

Mrs. Mince agreed with her usual flabby facility.

“There are such peculiar rumors abroad,” she said. “I cannot imagine where they come from. Most strange, Ophelia Strong going away like this. Don’t you think so, my dear?”

Mrs. Marjoy leered behind her spectacles.

“Very peculiar,” she said, suggestively.

“Most odd, particularly when they have been married such a short time. I wonder what the reason can be.”

“Health,” said the doctor’s wife.

“The woman looks well enough.”

“Quite robust.”

“Most odd,” observed the vicaress.

“My dear, there is no need to look far for an explanation. You see, Mrs. Strong did not consult James; a matter of diplomacy. The inference is inevitable.”

Both ladies tittered. Mrs. Mince helped herself to another muffin, and wiped her fingers on a very crumpled handkerchief.

“Dear! dear!” she observed; “I often wonder what we are coming to in these fast and atheistical days. Life will become a terrible problem for Christian women like ourselves in the future. If there were only more men like Jacob in the country. That sermon was really a masterpiece.”

“A most moving appeal.”

“I knew you would think so, my dear. I am always imploring Jacob to publish his sermons, but he is so beautifully modest. I am sure they would exert a great influence on the young men of England.”

“If they sold, my dear,” said Mrs. Marjoy.

“There could be no doubt on that point.”

Mrs. Marjoy shrugged her shoulders; her black hat sat awry on her frowzy brown hair.

“Cheap fiction floods the market,” she observed—“such stuff as young Strong would write. Imagine that young fool setting himself up to be an author.”

“Ridiculous!” said Mrs. Mince.

“And poetry, too! Of course, immoral verses are always fashionable. And as for the novels, I have to read such few as we get before I can let them pass into James’s hands. He is such an innocent man, and I could not let him imbibe such abomination. There is Cracow’s _Renovation_, for instance. I have just finished the book, and I shall burn it.”

“Please lend it to me first?” said the vicaress. “As a clergyman’s wife I like to dip into these things. One must be wise as to one’s times, my dear, or one can never confront evil properly.”

“Exactly,” said Mrs. Marjoy. “I have turned down the most scandalous pages.”

“That will save me time. I can read the worst, my dear, and so speak with authority. I will take the book home with me to-night.”

The conversation again reverted to Ophelia Strong’s pilgrimage to Callydon. Mrs. Marjoy’s explanatory suggestions were neither very magnanimous nor very refined. Both ladies grew exceedingly animated over so lofty a topic. They discovered much complacent self-flattery in the comparison of their opinions. Mrs. Mince made frequent references to the text of her husband’s sermon.

Previous to the vicaress’s departure Mrs. Marjoy stated certain postulates that deserve record, evidencing as they did the salubrious and Christian atmosphere of that unique and excellent woman’s mind.

All servants are emissaries of Satan.

All fashionable women imbibe brandy secretly.

All men are libertines with the exception of one’s own husband.

Only those people are respectable who happen to move in the same groove as one’s self.

That charity, as a virtue, is peculiar to women.

That Gabriel Strong was an unprincipled person.

That his wife wore figure-pads and dyed her hair.

That Mrs. Jumble was a preposterous pedant.

That she, Mrs. Marjoy, hungered after the philosophy of Christ with her whole soul.

That a really fascinating woman need not consider her complexion.

That one should never buy sausage-meat in June.

XVI

JUDITH STRONG had joined Gabriel at The Friary, and Judith was as far removed in soul from the Saltire dames as Aldebaran is from the moon. Saltire needed the magic of Ruskin; it was in its Ice Age, crusted by custom. There were discrepancies in Saltire that would not have shone with splendor upon the pages of _Sesame and Lilies_. For the Cordelias, the Virgilias, the Imogens, Saltire could have proffered Mrs. Marjoy or Mrs. Mince, or even that beglassed Diana, Miss Zinia Snodley of the irreproachable boots.

Of the malignities that sucked leechlike at his honor Gabriel Strong was most honestly ignorant. Many seasons elapse before man reads the unpropitious faces of his fellows, not dowering himself spontaneously with the power of arousing hatred in others. The child’s optimism dies slowly, as the white swans change to geese, the foaming chargers to long-eared asses. Envy is the unwilling flattery of the fool. The true man puts forward the shield of power and regains once more the golden age of youth by triumphing godlike over the malice of mediocrity.

Judith had found her brother full of a restless morbidity, his mind like a darkened mirror full of vague shadows and indefinite glimmerings of light. He was alternately silent and impulsively verbose; burdened either with a monotonous melancholy or a scintillant and flippant mirth. He would spend much of the day breasting the winter winds and the mists that hastened over the hills. Of his married life he said no word to her, nor dared she tempt him for all her love to a confession.

One evening, after playing Chopin’s Second Waltz, she had turned in the dusk to find him staring at the flames as they flung tragic shadows through the twilight. He looked like a Dante, gazing morose and mute upon the pessimisms of some under world. The music had moved him; she had read its echoes in his eyes. Going on her knees, she had taken his hands in hers and pleaded with him after the gracious manner of her heart.

“Gabriel, what ails you?” she had asked.

The man had put her hands gently from him and turned his face into the shadows.

“Nothing,” he had answered her.

“Can you not trust me?”

“Dear, I cannot trust myself.”

She had crept close to him and leaned her head against his shoulder.

“Gabriel, is it your marriage?”

“Do not ask me,” he had said.

“May I not help you?”

“No one can help me,” he had retorted, rising and leaving her alone by the fire.

One winter afternoon they wandered together on the hills above the sea. The day was cheerless and full of the piping of the wind. The sea ran gray and lustreless under a sullen sky, whose clouds trailed dim and rain-laden over the hills. The woods were gaunt and wild as with remorse. Dead leaves lay rotting in the lanes; in some of the more sheltered ditches snow still lingered.

The conversation had fallen upon elemental things—the thirst for love and man’s eternal yearning for a spiritual creed. Judith, divine woman that she was, possessed that clarity of thought that abhorred dogmas and embraced untainted truth. Religion to her was as spiritual sunlight diffusing itself throughout the world. To her sanctity did not emanate from the pulpit. She was no automaton stirred to moral activity by black-letter phrases and studied incantations. To her life was religion, each heart-beat a natural prayer. Her Christianity was not of the book and the pew, but a bright atmosphere surrounding all things.

Gabriel was in a bitter mood. He had long escaped from the sensuous stupor into which his marriage had plunged him, and the awakening was the more humiliating to his pride. The natural fires of the mind were stirring from the ashes of a dead and sensual desire. His thoughts spread towards the unknown and into the wilderness of beauty and romance. He had bartered his liberty for red pottage and the bondage irked his soul.

Brother and sister came nearer to each other’s heart that day as they wandered over the misty hills. Judith had caught the man’s humor, and her sympathies were awake like birds on a May morning. It was pure joy to her to feel that she had some share in the man’s musings.

“I am weary of orthodoxy,” he said to her, as they threaded a wood where the trees stood in a silver vapor.

“What is orthodoxy?” she asked, as she followed at his heels.

“The blind cult of custom.”

“Why trouble over such a grievance; the world is wide. Need one think with the mob?”

“In Saltire, yes.”

“Perhaps you are right,” she said to him, as she drew to his side and looked wistfully into his face.

Gabriel unbosomed to her.

“The place is like a stagnant pool to me,” he said, “covered with the scum of custom. To doubt, according to our neighbors, is a sin. He who weighs the problems of life is held to be an infidel. We are expected to receive Mr. Mince’s dogmas as the only exposition of all truth and knowledge. To experiment is infamous. We are hedged in with endless axioms as with thorns.”

Judith sighed and looked out over the sea.

“I fear you will find no rest in Saltire,” she said to him.

“Rest! No. Could it be possible? The place cramps and crushes my soul. There is no generosity, no hope, no idealism here. It is as a burial-ground for souls.”

“Escape from it.”

“Impossible.”

“And why?”

“What of Ophelia?”

They were both silent awhile, as though searching each other’s hearts. The wind tumbled the dead leaves at their feet; the clouds were gray and morose in the winter sky.

“Ah, Gabriel, it might have been otherwise.”

The man frowned and did not answer her.

“What of politics?” she asked him anon.

“I have pondered the question.”

“You would escape into a wider world—a world of endeavor and strong purpose.”

“Better than Saltire.”

“Better than mouldering here amid a decaying generation.”

“It is the fog of the place that chokes me.”

They had passed to the dull green of the meadows and skirted a ragged hedge where dead branches shook in the wind. A path curled from the wood above them, crossed the road that ran by the hedge, and threaded on through ploughed fields towards a thicket of pines. Gabriel and Judith had halted to gaze over the sea.

As they turned again towards the west a girl in a green cloak and russet skirt came out from the wood and followed the path that descended towards the lane. She carried her hat in her hand and walked bareheaded in the wind. Passing close to the pair, she glanced at Judith, then at Gabriel, halted a moment, and then hastened on with kindling cheeks over the meadows. It was thus that Gabriel and Joan Gildersedge met once more on the hills above the sea.

Judith had glanced unconsciously at her brother’s face. Its expression startled her. His eyes were full of a peculiar brightness, his cheeks afire, his lips parted. The face reminded her of some painting of Dante—Dante gazing upon Beatrice gliding athwart the path of life.

“Gabriel.”

The man darted a look at her and grew pale suddenly.

“What ails you?” she asked, with her hand on his arm.

“Nothing.”

“Are you ill?”

“No.”

“The wind is cold; let us go home.”

“Yes, let us go home.”

XVII

WINTER had intensified the loneliness that had fallen upon Joan Gildersedge’s heart. Of old, life had satisfied the girl; it no longer satisfied the woman. The lid of the casket had been lifted and the sunlight fell on the gems within, purple, vermilion, and green. The world had grown oracular. There was an ecstatic “Ah!” in the voice of the wind. The vellum had been torn from the mouth of the painted jar and odors roseate and rare were wafted up to the stars. She was ignorant in measure, yet quick with a strange, sweet intuition that made her eyes rich as purple clematis and bright as sunlit glass. She was even a most fascinating drama to herself; it was a pure and beautiful thing, this magic that had grown so silently within her heart. Like a white lily, green-stemmed and tall, it had put forth sudden bloom, and the fragrance hallowed the whole world.

Child that she was, her life had been lonely enough, and she had treasured the soul-picture of the strong face that had come to her through the summer silence. The man had spoken words to her, both of pain and delight—pain that they should be parted, delight that it was difficult to part. She thought of him always, yet knew no shame in the thought. As she would have recalled a golden meadow, or a glistening dawn, or an evening deep with amethystine silence, so she would remember the man’s voice and the eyes that had looked at her with a mute despair. She treasured the memory as a betrothed girl treasures the amulet that dangles over her heart. Pure, spontaneous, golden of soul, she had an earthly heaven in this love of hers. It was clean and spiritual, the virgin ecstasy of a woman, rich and fragrant as the meads of paradise.

She had taken Judith for Gabriel’s wife on the day she had passed them on the winter hill-side. The meeting had been a shock to Joan, and she had turned home with her whole soul shuddering. She felt miserable, humiliated, yet full of an exultant loneliness. Her love was inevitable to her, a book of dreams, sad yet splendid. Seeing that it filled her with transcendent instincts towards beauty, it had no sinister meaning for her heart. The problem surprised her in measure. Reality appeared to contradict truth. She had a species of conviction that by natural law Gabriel was hers and she Gabriel’s.

The last meeting had been oracular also in its effect upon the man. The look, half timid and pained, in the girl’s eyes remained with him vividly to the troubling of his spirit. The memory of it had been stamped upon his brain as with iron at white heat. This was but the fourth time that he had seen Joan Gildersedge, and each scene was a brilliant fresco, azure and green and gold. The winter landscape and the lonely eyes of the woman had touched all the slumbering idealism in his mind. His soul was like a deserted palace entered by its lord again. The jewelled casements glimmered in the sun; music and song moved mysterious through its gorgeous chambers; colors burned upon the walls; the odor of flowers breathed through its regenerate life.

Through manifold gradations Gabriel had come to a keen conception of a higher morality. He had flung away the yard-measure of superstition, and his possibilities were more magnificent and universal. From the rotting roofs of sectarianism his conception of love had risen to the spiritual azure of heaven. Animalism had ceased from his soul. It vexed him no longer; the tiger and the dog in him were inert and caged. It is only when man has purged himself of his baser instincts that he comprehends the wonderful significance of life.

Through the wilderness of speculation and desire Gabriel had come by a conviction that illumined his whole being. The inevitable laws of life were as plain to him as though written upon tablets of stone. He had erred and failed. Yet revelation had descended to him as he struggled towards the light. So long as animalism existed in his being, so long as fleshly things warred within his body, he was a bond-slave shackled from the supreme region of the ideal. Joan Gildersedge had ever been a white cloud to him, a golden vapor, beautifully pure. As the satyr squirming in the mire of an unlovely marriage he had dared not approach unto her soul. As the spirit man, the Christian, this high love was lawful and good unto his being. He was justified by the spirit. Though he were the bond-slave of an earthly houri nothing could prevent him aspiring to a divine love. Such a marriage was but a serf’s collar with the medallion of the beast thereon. A spiritual love could in no way make him false to a compact that had nothing of the divine in its consummation. He was the husband of one wife in the flesh. He could be the husband of one wife in the spirit.

It was such a conclusion as this that sent him errant like a young Sir Percival, the man of a new age, eager to live life under the benediction of a new philosophy. That day the wind was warm and vigorous. Rain had fallen early, but the sun had rent the clouds and flung torrents of gold dust down upon the world. All the earth glittered, the sea, the woods, the streams. The sky was like a garland of orange blooms about the brows of the day.

Gabriel Strong was in one of those transcendental moods when the mind is convinced of the existence of God. The law in his own heart led him instinctively to feel the presence of the Unseen, to realize the superb dignity of the divine will. He trod the hills as Christ trod the waves—serene, calmly exultant, conscious of heaven and his own soul. He beheld all things through the glittering idealism of love. Nothing was prosaic, nothing unintelligible.

Burnt House, with its red wall, its rusty gates, its sepulchral trees, rose before him like a romance. He passed up the tangled, grass-grown drive as one who fulfils the prophetic visions of the past. The cypresses bent to him in salutation. The laurels glistened, smiled in the sun. Even the iron bell rang joyous, pealing loudly through the solitary house.

A tall, angular woman in a white cap opened the oak door to Gabriel. There were hard lines about her mouth, her jaw was square, her colorless eyes critical. Her black dress fitted close about her austere figure, and she wore a heavy silver brooch at her throat. She had the air of a woman bred in whitewashed chapels amid the bleating of harmoniums and the singing of hymns. Her face was like a stone wall painted with a lying epitaph; her mouth like an oak money-trap inscribed with an insinuating text.

Gabriel asked for Joan Gildersedge.

The woman looked him over, pursed her lips, and frowned. Her eyes travelled from his forehead to his boots and remained fixed upon his collar.

“Miss Joan’s out.”

“Will she be back soon?”

“Can’t say.”

“Is it any use my waiting?”

The tart person was considering the situation and the nature of her visitor. She knew his face and yet could not fix a name to it for the moment.

“Better leave a card,” she said. “You might possibly find Miss Joan in the meadow. She’s vagarious, and I ain’t a prophet.”

“Which way?”

“Down the drive, sir, and by the path on the left.”

“Thanks.”

“What name, sir?”

“You need not trouble.”

Betwixt the laurels and the yews Gabriel met Joan Gildersedge as he was returning towards the gate. They came upon each other quite suddenly, the girl emerging from the narrow path that plunged into the wall of green. There was neither the time nor the desire perhaps for prevarication on either part. The color had deepened on Joan Gildersedge’s face. All psychological reflections were swallowed up in the action of the moment.

“You—here!”

She stood looking in his face, still blushing slightly and holding herself a little aloof. Her eyes had grown suddenly dark yet luminous, like a deep pool half lit by moonlight. Their expression was ineffably mysterious and alluring.

“I have come to you again,” said the man.

“Why?”

The sunlight quivered in Gabriel’s eyes. His head was uncovered, his hair touched with light. He answered her slowly like a man who ponders his thoughts and pays out his words like gold pieces out of a treasury.

“I will tell you presently.”

“The truth?”

“To you—the truth—always.”

She gave a short sigh and turned back into the wilderness of the drive. Infinite happiness shone on her face, a warm, spiritual radiance glowing through her delicate skin. Her lips were parted in a smile, a smile that seemed to flood down from her eyes, even to ripple from her glimmering hair.

“Come, let us go out together, watch the sea and talk. There are snowdrops in the meadow—my March children.”

The perfume of the rain-drenched cypresses breathed about them as they wound through the shrubbery. The wind shook spray from the thousand glittering fringes. Its voice was as the half-heard moan of violins. Together they came out into the meadow beyond the wavering, sun-streaked shadows of the trees. To the south the sea lifted up a band of silver towards the sky.

They stood under the shadow of the wall, where the wind tossed the cypress boughs upward into sudden gestures of despair. New life seemed to breathe in the breeze. Sun and shadow played over the world. The man and the girl looked in each other’s eyes a moment and were happy.

“You will tell me why you have come to me again,” Joan said.

Gabriel stood as though to take the salt sea-wind into his bosom. He smiled as he spoke to her.

“Because I have come by deeper truth.”

“You are married?”

“Yes.”

“Well?”

He frowned slightly and a shadow as of pain passed over his face. The girl was watching him with the calm content of one who trusts.

“You shall judge,” he said, “whether I desire to do you wrong or no. I thought once that I had no right to be near you, to hear you speak to me. It is the common verdict of the world that a man may not hold another woman to be nearer to his soul than is his wife. You understand me?”

“Yes,” she said, slowly, still looking in his face.

“Do you remember how the stars make one feel at night?”

“Well enough.”

“A yearning towards all that is noble, pure, and divine. Is there any evil in such a feeling?”

“How can there be?”

“And there are people in the world who seem to hang like stars over one’s soul. Is there sin in desiring to be near them, to be inspired towards truth by their beauty?”

“I cannot think it.”

“Nor I.”

“And so—?”

“I desire to be near you often. You speak to me of all my heart desires to be. That is all.”

“I understand,” she said, very slowly, with a strange light in her eyes—“I understand. Let it be so. Say no more.”

As when the moon rises, revealing splendors dusky and magnificent in some silent plain, so this sympathy, this dual comprehension, called into sudden radiance all that was fairest in the hearts of the man and the girl. A great calm seemed to steal upon both, gradual and infinite. For them the Eternal Spirit lifted up its blessed flame. For them the roses rushed into ruddy joy. For them the sea echoed the parables of the stars.

The girl had drawn closer to Gabriel; her hand brushed against his.

“I have been very lonely,” she said, “and it is not good to be alone.”

“No,” he said, in a voice that was half a whisper.

“There would be no loneliness—”

“If men were not fools and if women had not received the poison of the serpent.”

They were both silent for a season. Joan stooped down and gathered snowdrops as they grew against the wall. The man watched her. The flowers seemed emblems of what their love might be.

“I may see you again, then,” she said, presently, with a deep tone of content.

He stood back from her and looked towards the horizon. There was a radiance upon his face as though light fell on him out of heaven.

“Yes, if—”

“Well?”

“We vow here together.”

She waited.

“That I never touch you, never so much as touch your hand. That our flesh is severed absolutely; that only our spirits meet.”

“I will swear that,” she said, slowly.

So, under the sunlit sky and in the breath of the breeze, they swore both of them together a solemn oath, an oath to heaven.

XVIII

OPHELIA STRONG had discovered her escape from domesticities a relief after the irritations and petulances of the last few months. Married life had proved nothing to her save the inconsiderate bigotry of her husband and the selfishness of men who refuse to reconsider habits formed in bachelor days. Ophelia believed herself to be a most misunderstood and ill-used person, a woman sacrificed to the over-fervid rashness of her own heart. Her love, a very shallow stream dependent largely on the rainfall of flattery, could easily be turned into other channels. A devotee of sensations, vain and convictionless, it was the most natural problem for her to consider how best she could frame life afresh in order to produce the most palatable and abundant satisfactions to press into the cup of pleasure.

Had Ophelia Strong been possessed of the literary knack, the world would probably have received from her sundry erotic and hysterical effusions upon the supreme brutality of man. Ophelia was a feminine realist in the flesh, but she was unable to record her experiences on paper. Possessed of a grievance, the modern Sappho scrolls out her often sordid wisdom and barters her emotions for the dubious edification of the members of circulating libraries. It is necessary in these days for the feminine realist to display a vivid familiarity with physiological data. The morbid anatomy of her own physical being is placed on record with a sincerity worthy of an encyclopædist. Elaborately stained sections are often remarkably beautiful under the microscope. Even diseased tissues tinctured azure and red resemble fine arabesque on rich mosaics. Reflect on the suggestiveness of morbid changes, however, and you will perhaps feel that there is something unpleasant in watching a woman preparing specimens to prove how the bacteria of sin affected her moral tissues.

Ophelia Strong possessed a grievance—a grievance capable of being developed to picturesque effect. She had read much hysterical fiction, and was inclined to believe that there was a distinct melodramatic charm in posing as a woman with a past. It was interesting to be able to hint that her heart had been bruised and trampled by a brutal and insensate fate. Like many women, she began to develop a depraved thirst for sympathy and a spurious conviction of a hundred and one imaginary woes.

The particular hydropathic establishment patronized by Ophelia at Callydon was conducted in a style both plutocratic and pliant. The upholstery was sumptuous, the cooking excellent, the staff discreet and exceedingly servile. A very passable string band played in the winter-garden during the evening. The resident physician was a charming person with a pale face, a little black mustache, and beautifully manicured hands. He was the joy and salvation of all the dames who came to take the “waters.” In the height of his fame, the medical gentleman was permitted to prescribe for the Dowager Lady Punter’s poodle.

The etiquette of the establishment was remarkable for its pliability. There were charades, dances, concerts, billiard matches every evening; coaching parties, tennis tournaments, picnic expeditions during the day in summer. Golf appealed to the more strenuous. Flirtation bulked largely in the régime. Every one was expected to be jovial and mischievous. The society was mixed, but quite picturesque and genial. There was the usual array of stylish men, beautiful creatures who gravitated into Callydon at certain seasons of the year. There were maiden ladies of every age and complexion, powder-primed and natural. There were widows, charming souls! who delighted in the atmosphere of youth. There were earnest mothers who yearly brought bevies of daughters with a sly, matrimonial programme. There were elderly men who flirted extravagantly under the pretence of being grandfatherly and sympathetic. There were even a few solemn individuals who crept about morosely and seemed born out of season, individuals who frowned in the reading-room when any one chattered, refrained from festivities, and were generally objectionable. Last of all, there was Major Maltravers, the Admirable Crichton of the place, who played the violin and had learned morality at Simla.

Ophelia Strong’s first meeting with James Maltravers occurred on the Collydon golf-links, where she and Miss Mabel Saker had gravitated to play a nine-hole “single” before lunch. Major Maltravers happened to meet her in the doorway of the pavilion as she returned ruddy and victorious from her morning on the “downs.” The soldier was one of those persons who boasted a cosmopolitan excellence in sport. He could prate of his tiger-skins, his polo matches, his conquests _de cœur_ with the cheerful optimism of the army. A woman’s points were to him much on a par with those of a horse. He liked breed, spirit, a fine carriage, and the elastic grace of healthy animalism. Anæmia and spirituality were not noted in his programme.

The same evening he was introduced to Ophelia in the winter-garden by Mrs. Hayman, one of the elders of the community, and it was soon evident that he desired to make himself as interesting as his extensive experience and worldly fascination permitted. He was a tall, well-proportioned person with very regular teeth, deep-set eyes, and an emphatic chin. He possessed to perfection what would have been called the aristocratic air, and, despite his sporting proclivities, he dressed quietly and in perfect taste. His conversation partook of that hyperbolical and ironical method that passes for wit in certain circles. He was positively cultured in many ways; even attempted epigrams on occasions, and could quote German philosophy to impress the unlearned. For the rest, his complexion was pallid, his mustache shiny as jet, his person groomed with the most particular care. People considered him a very charming person, world-wise, cultured, a man who excelled in society, and could even express most graceful opinions concerning religion.

It was not long before he bestowed the larger share of his leisure upon Ophelia Strong and Miss Mabel Saker, her friend, as sparkling a brunette as ever sparkled in yellow-back fiction. They had played golf together, and the major had advanced so far in favor as to be able to discuss his own fancies and foibles with Ophelia. He admired her and the Trojan splendor of her beauty. Moreover, he was an interesting person, polished and rounded by long pilgrimages in the stream of life.

The winter-garden at Callydon was hung with electric lights screened under shades of olive-green silk. Its glass glittered above the dusky and profuse shadows of many palms; its floor was mosaiced green, blue, and white. Ophelia’s lounge-chair was lodged under a tall palm about whose brazen urn a rich company of arum lilies stood in bloom. A mass of azaleas colored a background about her white arms and neck, her lustrous hair and pale-blue dress. A fountain played close by, its spray glittering down with a musical cadence on the drenched green foliage of ferns.

The major had drawn a stool inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl beside Ophelia’s chair. Miss Mabel Saker had left them early to their own devices. The green palm with its group of white lilies seemed a species of oasis admirably placed for those who desired to be alone.

“Playing golf to-day?” the soldier was saying. “Not bad links, these. Bunkers jolly stiff; regular infernos. I went round in eighty. Play much, eh?”

“For health’s sake.”

“Nonsense.”

“Dr. Glibly’s advice. I am his patient.”

“Pardon the remark, but you don’t look delicate.”

“Appearances are often fallacious.”

“As a matter of fact,” said the major, with confident frankness, “my friend Graham was only saying to me this afternoon that you were the most healthy-looking June rose he had ever seen blooming outside the Callydon pavilion. Now, I come to consider it, you do appear a trifle tired. Shut me up, you know, if you think I’m too personal.”

“I prefer frankness,” said Ophelia.

Maltravers displayed his white teeth.

“It makes life more rational,” he observed.

“One always knows how one stands.”

The soldier produced a cigarette-case from the pocket of his elaborately braided dinner-coat. The string band in an alcove had struck up the overture to a popular comic opera. A party of girls came in from the vestibule, laughing and chattering, their dresses forming a brilliant mingling of colors under the palms.

“Do you mind smoke?” said the man, humming the chorus the band was playing.

“Not a bit. My husband smokes everywhere.”

“Lucky man. You spoil him, of course. Is he here with you?”

“No. He spends his time at home grubbing about in books.”

“Nonsense!”

“All husbands are spoiled,” said Ophelia.

The major elevated his eyebrows and appeared interested.

“What cynicism—at your age!”

“Oh, I am not so very young.”

“Four-and-twenty?”

“I did not refer to years, but to experience.”

The soldier leaned his elbows on his knees and adopted an attitude that was both respectful and sympathetic.

“I am sorry to hear you speak like that,” he said, with a chivalrous and fatherly air. “I hate to hear a woman hint at disappointments.”

Ophelia regarded the man interestedly from under her heavy aureole of hair. He seemed a blunt and brotherly person, and his ingenuous sympathy was quite fascinating, rendered to the languid accompaniment of a waltz.

“Some men are impossible creatures,” she said, fingering her rings. “For one thing, I was unfortunate in never possessing a brother.”

“Healthy friends, brothers,” observed the soldier. “I remember handling a whip once to good purpose. It instilled excellent moral tone into the young cub I chastened. All girls ought to have brothers.”

“Excellent in theory.”

“I never theorize. A man who has seen much of the world keeps to facts; theory is a perishable commodity. If a woman does not possess a brother by blood she ought to retain one by adoption.”

“The thing is to discover him.”

“There are plenty of decent, manly fellows knocking about the world,” said the soldier.

Maltravers lit a second cigarette, and nodded to two youths in evening dress who were passing, with the complacent patronage of a minister in power. He was one of these men who are never so happy as when they are monopolizing the individual attention of a pretty woman. Maltravers preferred to pose as a very superior and sagacious person.

“The folly of matrimony,” he said, “is that women will go and marry young idiots of five-and-twenty, and submit themselves to the conceited and priggish patronage of mere boys. Young men are unstable creatures, with the nonsense not knocked out of them by hard experience. Love runs with mumps and measles; we are all prone to it in youth.”

The man with the white teeth and the waxed mustache delivered himself of his convictions with concentrated adroitness. His attitude was extremely politic. At all events, it pleased the woman to whom his words were addressed.

“You approve, then,” she said, “of the man of forty as a matrimonial investment?”

“Certainly I do.”

“Rather an unromantic conclusion.”

“Not a bit of it,” retorted the soldier. “Do you think all the romance of life belongs to the treacly twenties? Your youth of the lily period will swear away his immortal soul ten times in two years. Your tough man of forty has lived through his inconsistencies, and falls in love at last with the grim seriousness of one who knows what it means to be in earnest. He does not prattle and sentimentalize for six months and then revert to a barmaid. He loves like the man he is. You will find I am right, perhaps, some day.”

Ophelia Strong smiled, it being her prerogative as a woman to seem amused. The veteran was refreshing and vigorous.

“Your views amuse me,” she said. “I am not so sure that there is not truth in what you say. Young men do not realize how much some things mean to a woman. We are very human.”

“Exactly; that is my chief point.”

“Then you believe that we need much humoring and a great measure of consideration?”

“You repeat my meaning.”

“Well?”

“A woman should find out whether a man knows how to love before she marries him.”

“How should she arrive at the conclusion?”

“If the man has any vanity, avoid him as you would avoid Satan. A man’s vices and foibles are more than half vanity. If you can tell the particular man that he is ugly or stupid, and he continues to adore you, then take him; he won’t make a bad husband.”

As may be inferred from the characters of the parties concerned and the circumstances in which they were situated, this first debate proved but the prologue to a gradual and more intimate acquaintanceship. Callydon was an amiable place, and the proclivities of its visitors were so familiar that no ill-natured criticisms were passed on ultra-Platonic friendships. Ophelia Strong was glad of the man’s countenance. When a woman’s vanity has conceived itself injured by fate, she is in a mood ripe for sympathies that can salve her smarting spirit. Nothing pleases her better than being able to hint at her woes to a friend of the opposite sex whose discretion had been matured by intimate contact with the world. It is the old fable of the child playing with fire, the inherent mischief of human nature experimenting with the morbid excitements of the more passionate affairs of the heart. However innocent be the delusion, the forbidden fruit glows amid the green leaves and the antique dragon lies grinning in the grass.

James Maltravers was a diplomat of a high psychological order. As a lover, he believed in dramaticisms of an elevated type, tragedy of a picturesque nature, moralities staged to a full orchestral accompaniment. He had studied the methods of certain up-to-date play-wrights, and had come to the conclusion that nothing impresses a woman more than the idea that a man is suffering untold ethical torments by reason of the inevitable fascination of her beauty. The picture of a moral hero struggling in the coils of love impressed him vividly with a sense of dramatic power. Such a conviction bade fair to shine with glorious persuasiveness before the fine vanity of the feminine soul. Paolo burning upon the grid of fate.

In due course he adopted an air of dejected melancholy in Ophelia’s presence, looked at her with sad, saturnine eyes, and seemed like a wounded stag too conscious of the barb. His conversation was often philosophical and pitched to a most elevating refrain. He looked blank verse even to the last tragic cadence of a monologue under the stars. He made much of chivalry; the subject served him well. It was a glittering cloak, a fine robe of tinsel and glass to ape majesty. It suited the man’s part with distinction. Maltravers went about on moral buskins, and was altogether a very impressive and romantic figure.

XIX

THE decision had been finally concluded by the members of the South Marchshire Executive Committee that Gabriel Strong, Esq., of The Friary, Saltire, should contest the constituency under Unionist colors at the next election. The government had long been in a ruinous condition, and an appeal to the electorate was imminent, according to the political prophets. Now Rilchester, the premier town in South Marchshire, was one of those intensely patriotic boroughs where political popularity depends largely on the number of guineas squandered by any prospective candidate in the patronage of local charities and local trade. The Rilchester electors were men of sense; they could not stomach a member from whose pockets there came no prophetic clink of gold. John Strong, hard-headed gamester, had contrived to create for himself a certain reputation in the place as a philanthropist and a benevolent patron of sport and pleasure. He had endowed beds at the hospital; he feasted the fisherfolk regularly each summer; he had subscribed with American prodigality to the founding of the working-men’s club. He had even provided the Rilchester rowing club with a racing eight for Moberly regatta. His money had been invested with lavish and consummate care to popularize the name of Strong. The ex-tea merchant already beheld his son a prophetic Pitt, stirring the noble enthusiasm of an empire, carving for himself a sacred niche in the golden fane of history.

Gabriel had been instructed in the subtle art of political fascination. He had attended at flower-shows and all social crushes, smiled and chatted to individuals of every shade and temper, shaken hands with mediocrities on every possible occasion, posed perpetually as an amiable, genial, and cultured young aristocrat. He was quite the Galahad of the Primrose Dames. Artistically attired, with an orchid in his button-hole, he presented himself at all functions of importance, culling possible votes by the magic of a pleasant personality.

The public gayeties that his father had forced upon him had in some measure distracted Gabriel from the melancholy realities of his marriage. With his usual amiable apathy, he acted as ever as the paid vassal of his father; his very household existed as a proof of his dependence on the parental favor. Moreover, there was a certain artificial stimulus in political life that pleased him for a season. He met pretty women who flattered him, mediocre folk who were “proud to make his acquaintance,” big-wigs who were willing to listen to his opinions and to nod approval when some apt phrase promised well for the spirit of debate. He had been something of an orator at Oxford, where his humanism had partaken of a Mazzinian flavor. Expediency, however, had warped his none too tough convictions into the deformed orthodoxy he was supposed to champion. His father’s ambition, also, generous as it was, promised to shed a glamour of ease over the common actualities of life.

Ophelia was still at Callydon suffering her self-love to recuperate after the first frank criticisms of married life. Gabriel had written to Dr. Glibly with regard to his wife’s health, and had received a very sentimental reply indited on scented paper and concluded with a fine flourish of degrees and qualifications. “Mrs. Strong,” wrote the doctor, “was still in that somewhat unstable state so common in women at certain eventful periods of life. She needed perfect rest—perfect rest and complete immunity from all domestic worries for the time being.” Gabriel could have confessed in his heart of hearts that the doctor’s letter was no black and dismal document. John Strong himself had questioned Gabriel as to his wife’s somewhat lengthy absence from home. “It would be well,” he said, “for Ophelia to partner her husband during the coming summer season, and to back him in his social duties, like the handsome and fashionable woman that she was.” Gabriel had spread Dr. Glibly’s letter for his father’s edification, but had offered no explanation as to the causes that had led to Ophelia’s “state of nervous prostration.” Nature could take the blame, and the sentiments woven through the affair were not such as Gabriel cared to trust to the parental conscience.

Despite the light of publicity that was gathering about his person, Gabriel appeared blind to the vast inconsistencies of his life. He drifted as he had ever done in a dream-ship on a sea of dreams. A face shone ever before his eyes, a face wistful as the sky at dawn. Two lives seemed to go forth from him like divergent highways: the one into smoke and turmoil, dust and all weariness; the other into green and brilliant deeps, unutterable shadow-lands of delight, vales of golden rest, hills where the red winds made music. Romance ran beneath his mundane being like a caverned river gorgeous with subterranean fire. There were two worlds within him, two creeds, two gods. He served both, strove to harmonize each, and heard not the peril prophetic upon the lips of fate.

It is difficult for a man whose thoughts are of the purest to comprehend the distorted image his deeds may create in the minds of others. The world is ever ready to suspect evil. Let a man act the Christ and he will assuredly be in danger of being dubbed “devil.” Fleshliness covers the eyes of the multitude with scales of crimson glass, and snow is tinted red by the gaze of the unclean.

Some such innocence of thought rendered Gabriel ingenuously blind to the sinister developments that might arise from his attitude towards the child of the hills. His love for her was as spiritual as moonlight—clear, calm, and infinitely pure. Even the splendid mediæval imagery that gemmed the very thought of her was hallowed to him as with a radiant glow of gold. The wings of angels, brilliant as sun-smitten snow, seemed to breathe and beat above her head. He was honest as the light in his love for her. He would as soon have shamed his homage by any baser feeling as have taken sacramental wine with the lips of a bacchanal.

Letters had passed between the two, and they had met more than once in secret since the March day when they had taken the oath together. A great love is always a pure love. With the multitude, contact engenders disenchantment, possession breeds indifference. Schopenhauer has said that Petrarch’s sonnets would have ceased abruptly if Laura had surrendered herself to his song. Apply the cynicism to the mere sexual instinct and there is truth in the gibe. The greatest love is that which is fated to brave tempests. To such a mind as Gabriel’s the starlike unapproachableness of the girl rendered her the more mysterious and divine. To him love imprisoned behind bars of gold was a rhapsody of exultation and despair.

Joan’s letters were quaint and ingenuous to a degree. She wrote in a bold, round hand, her words being the frank type of her thoughts—thoughts that shimmered with an intense perception of the splendor of nature. She approached life in her free and elemental fashion. Facts had no pedantic and foreordained significance for her. She had the air of an angel treading an unknown earth and marvelling at the inconsistencies thereof. Nor had she any knowledge of the doctrine of original sin.

“I am a mere child,” she wrote, “but it seems to me as though a man and a woman might make the earth a great garden, radiant with goodness as with flowers. This Bible that you gave me has been much with me of late. I had never read the book before. I cannot see why sin should enter into life. To me it seems inexplicable, an anomalous creation. What can sin give to men that it has such hold over them? To be true to truth seems to me as natural as to breathe or to sleep.”

And again:

“If we could all remain mere children! Youth is the key of joy. Age often seems to cover it with rust so that it can no longer unlock the treasures of life. You say that it is impossible to retain the innocence of childhood because of the utter hideousness of one’s elders. The ‘little ones’ are doomed to be ‘offended’ by experience. Why, then, should we not be bold enough to disregard those whom we despise?”

And again:

“I think I could die for an ideal. Whether we are immortal or no, I cannot see why a good man should fear death. If immortality proves real, then he is assured of heaven. If death be the end, then he but falls into an eternal sleep and is none the wiser. I could say to my soul, ‘I have lived my best, now let me sleep.’ The notion of doing one’s duty in order to bribe God does not please me.”

Gabriel was perhaps more personal in his statements. He found the girl’s heart a pure spring into which he might pour his thoughts, where they glistened like gems in a crystal setting.

“You are my great proof of immortality,” he wrote. “I cannot believe that such a soul as yours can end in dust. It would be blasphemy against the divine instinct. Your spirit can never die.”

Also:

“You have become a religion to me. In your eyes I see God and the heavens opened. Tell me, is there sin in such a creed?”

And again:

“You are like a great light in my heart; may your glory never cease from my soul. Through you I am transfigured; in your voice Eternity speaks to me.”

Joan carried Gabriel’s letters in her bosom in a case of green silk. They lay warm and still against her heart. She read them often, for they were like the words of a new world to her, eloquent and lovely.

XX

THE old castle of Domremy stood in a green valley running northward from the Mallan, a gray and solemn ruin bosomed in the tranquil shadows of the woods. Set in a broad moat as in a shield of silver, its black battlements rose black with their machiolated shadows against the blue background of sky. The clouds cast their shadows over the ruin like ghost memories of the past. There was a wild melancholy about the place, an infinite wistfulness that touched the heart. Romance seemed to tread the ruined walls, her sable hair sweeping in the wind, her wild voice weaving enchantments through the listening woods.

Gabriel had loved Domremy since the first June evening when its gray towers had dreamed to him from their green repose. In later years it had often solaced him with its plaintive loveliness, its eyrie whisperings of the past. Its grandeur had served as a bulwark against the prosaic sterility of modern minds. Like the dark and mysterious prophecy of some ancient alchemist, it put forth reality from the heart and throned the infinite in its stead.

Gabriel had spoken to Joan of the place in his letters. She knew Domremy well, had dreamed there even as he had done, and looked down upon the white lilies mimicking the face of the moon. The pair had plotted a tryst there, had met one April day on a path that ran from the hills, and wandered through the woods to the gray towers brooding over the water. They had climbed one of the turrets together, leaned upon the battlements, and turned back like children into the past.

The sky was dappled with innumerable isles of snow. The meadows were wondrous green under the blue heavens; the gnarled and naked trees glistened in the sun. Joan, her hat laid upon the parapet, stood like a damsel of old, her hair flashing gold in the eyes of romance. Gabriel leaned against the battlements two paces away, watching the woods and water and the face of the girl at his side.

“You are content?” he asked her.

She turned her eyes to his and smiled.

“Ask your own heart,” was her response.

Gabriel covered his eyes with his hand.

“How the past rises up to inspire me,” he said. “I could dream here day by day like a mystic, and know no sin. If we could stride back five centuries and take life like a crystal globe untarnished in our hands! Armor should flash in yonder woods; trumpets cry upon these towers. Ever should your face look out upon these meadows, like the face of evening out of a cloudless sky. As for me, I should be young again, and a man.”

She looked at him out of her trustful eyes of gray, while her face seemed full of a calm glory of honor. There was no shadow as yet over her soul.

“Would you begin life anew?”

The man’s hands gripped the stone.

“Would to God it could be so!” he said. “I have sold my soul’s birthright for red pottage, for unlovely ease, and cowardly sloth. Life is a battle-field, not a garden; I have been awakened to the truth too late.”

Joan pondered his words for a moment.

“Is it not possible to begin life anew?” she asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“We are so hedged by the ethics of the world that no escape is open. Fashion, vanity, prejudice, and greed—these are our task-masters. Life is like a path spiked on either side with thorns. We toil on in the dust while beyond us gleam the gardens of the blessed, unapproachable and lovely.”

“Who, then, are the blessed?”

“The blessed are those who have fought their fight like giants and have conquered. There are they who have scorned the laws of expediency and error. There are they who have lived true to their own souls. There are they who have not fallen to the flesh. Liberty is the guerdon, joy, and the light of truth.”

“And yet you are not among them.”

“I—indeed!”

There was a fine self-scorn in his voice that was almost dramatic.

“No,” he said; “I cannot flatter myself with any degree of heroism; it is only great souls who die for an ideal. The noblest life that was ever lived on earth had to end in a martyrdom that it might strike home to the hearts of men. I have been nothing but a martyr to my own egotism. Having once struck my colors to that black pirate Expediency on the high seas of life, I suppose I must be content to feel my soul in shackles.”

Joan was pulling at the moss upon the stones with her long, white fingers. Her eyes were on the distant woods; they were dark as with thought, and wondrously pathetic.

“A new sun seemed to swim into the sky,” she said, “when I read of the martyrdom on Calvary. That was a great life.”

“A life that changed history,” he answered her. “There have been many theorists, but none save Christ who proved his philosophy perfect in his own person.”

Joan was silent again for a while. The shadows of thought had deepened in her eyes till they looked like two pools of gloom.

“I have been thinking of that parable,” she said.

“Which parable?” he asked her.

“That which tells of the pearl of great price—where the man sold all that he had in order to possess it.”

“Yes.”

“There is profound truth to me in the words. Cannot a man take his inspiration from such a parable—sell all, dare all, to gain that single pearl. Is the present so pleasant to him that he is afraid to fling himself giant-like against custom.”

Gabriel looked at her as a man might look at one who prophesies. There was a sudden kindling of courage upon his face, but again a cloud soon covered it.

“No,” he said, slowly, “such a thing cannot be.”

“Tell me why.”

“Because the world is too strong for us; because it is impious to risk a woman’s honor; because the bonds of society are too rigid.”

“And who forged these bonds of society?”

“Man.”

“Then cannot man break them also?”

“It demands too great a sacrifice of others; it outrages too grossly the hereditary instincts of the race.”

“Cannot a man free himself then from false ties?”

“Not always.”

“Because—”

“They are often of his own forging.”

“Yet he can break them.”

“And his word also?”

“Is it not better to break one’s word than to make life one long lie?”

“It would be a sin against society.”

“Perhaps you are right,” she said; “but I would rather be an outcast than a hypocrite.”

Simple and reflective as her words were, they stung the man like the thongs of a scourge.

“Joan!”

His voice startled her; she turned and looked in his face, read pain there and a tumult of thought.

“What have I said?” she asked him.

“You despise me!”

“Gabriel!”

She understood him with a sudden flash of sympathy.

“Ah! forgive me.”

Her fingers touched his and closed upon them with a quick, appealing pressure. Her face was turned to his with the rich innocence of truth.

“No,” he said, breathing fast; “do not touch me. Ah, God, do you not understand?”

She withdrew her hand, and her face grew pale again, her eyes shadowy even as with tears.

“Forgive me,” she said, slowly, as though speaking to her own soul. “I had hurt your heart and—”

“It is nothing,” he said to her.

“It is everything—to me,” she answered, sadly.

“Before God—remember that I honor you.”

She looked up at him suddenly with a great light in her eyes.

“Gabriel, I will not hurt your heart again. You are a good man, and may God bless you! I will remember our vow.”

Tragedy was moving upon the twain with ghastly step, her face muffled in her sable robe. They had created in their dreams a radiant Eden for their souls to wander in, yet the ancient dragon had squirmed in amid the leaves. Nothing is sacred in this world to the sordid sarcasms of the fool and the libertine. And the fatal chance that first parted the boughs and suffered the world to peer in upon their paradise was mean and prosaic enough in all truth.

That identical afternoon Mrs. Marjoy had driven a friend over, who was staying with her, to visit Domremy. They had left their phaeton at a cottage in the valley and had walked through the woods to the castle. The causeway crossed the moat from the north, and Mrs. Marjoy and her companion, an Australian lady, reached the place unseen by Gabriel and Joan, who were on one of the southern turrets. Thus it befell that at the very moment Mrs. Marjoy and her guest were standing in the ruins of the chapel the man and the girl passed out from the black yawn of the southern gate and crossed the central court towards the northern entry.

Mrs. Marjoy’s spectacled vision had doomed Gabriel to recognition. Herself unseen, that magnanimous lady watched the pair cross the court and disappear beneath the rotting portcullis of the northern gate. There was an intense and malicious satisfaction on Mrs. Marjoy’s red face. She displayed her teeth in a thin, cracked laugh, and gestured to her companion with her black umbrella.

“Did you see those two?” she said.

The Australian lady stared.

“That worthy, my dear Mrs. Grace, is supposed to be our future member of Parliament. A horribly profligate creature.”

“Indeed!” said the colonial lady, with some austerity.

“I knew we should catch him before long,” continued the doctor’s wife, beaming with the thought of enjoying another woman’s shame. “His wife is staying away. Poor Mrs. Strong, if she could only see her husband gadding about with one of his women from London. I always knew he was a dissolute person. Did you ever see such a depraved, loose, dowdy-looking creature as that girl?”

Mrs. Grace, a kindly woman, displayed some measure of surprise. Saltire society was fresh to her, and she was ignorant of the fact that Mrs. Marjoy considered herself a recording angel, by whose dictates man should stand or fall. Nor was Mrs. Grace in the habit of clutching at such violent conclusions, being herself a mother and a magnanimous woman of the world.

“As a matter of fact,” she remarked, “I thought that girl looked particularly sweet and pretty.”

Mrs. Marjoy glared and rattled the ribs of her umbrella. She always considered a difference of opinion as a personal affront. Only that morning she had declared to Dr. Marjoy that Mrs. Grace was a woman without strict convictions as to propriety, one of those flabby persons who never saw the glaring moral inconsistencies of others.

“I have suspected that man for a long while,” she now observed, with her usual sublime and eczematous hauteur. “Believe me, he is a most dissolute person.”

“Do you always base your conclusions on such slender evidence?” asked the lady from the antipodes.

“I never condemn others wantonly,” said the doctors wife. “I am a Christian.”

“And yet you say that a man is a rogue because you happen to see him walking alone with a woman whom you do not know.”

There was a scintillant and vindictive gleam in Mrs. Marjoy’s brown eyes. She pressed her lips into a tight line and prodded the turf with the point of her umbrella.

“I generally find that my inferences are correct,” she said.

“Indeed! I am glad to say we are more generous and healthy in the colonies.”

XXI

A DEEP and wonderful tone of tenderness had sounded in Joan Gildersedge’s heart since that brief passion-play amid the ruins of Domremy. It was an easier hand that had trimmed the lamp and scattered violet-dust over the snow-white altar. There was something more rich and maternal in her mood towards the man, something more passionate also, more red of heart. There was more mystery, more strangeness in her love than before. It was no longer an individual sentiment, a single vision of truth and beauty, a white statue scatheless in the sun. There was something sacrificial about it, a promise of universality that uttered the first exultant cry of martyrdom. She began to think more of the man’s soul than her own, to imagine his moods, to forecast his presentiments. Sympathy was the golden woof; the instinct of love, the subtle shuttle.

Gabriel Strong felt the change in the girl when he kept the promise he had made to her at Domremy, and came to see her at Burnt House, even in her own home. The contrasts in his existence smote him forcibly on the occasion. He had spent the previous day at Rilchester in political inanities, had attended a philanthropic meeting, and listened to platitudes falling like perpetual sand upon the brain. The sterility of the part he played had dawned upon him with amazing forcefulness. He had confessed to himself, as he had driven home at night, the unctuous hypocrisy of it all, the infirm purpose rusty as an old man’s love. The contrast touched him to the soul when he approached Burnt House the following afternoon, alone and on foot. The place seemed like a green and glorious refuge to him, where he could breathe in the essence of heaven and renew life as at some holy well.

The girl’s transfiguration reacted vividly upon his sensitive thought. She seemed to have grown taller, more stately, more serious. There was a species of infinite forethought in her manner towards him, a tender earnestness that made her gray eyes luminous and wonderful. It was a child’s countenance no longer, for the divine element had entered into her soul.

She took him with her onto the moors that noontide, where the hills stood purple against the sky and valleys were steeped in a glamour of mist. Walking close at his elbow, but looking seldom in his face, she spoke little, seeming intent rather on making her sympathy a refuge for the man’s tired thoughts. She was infinitely restful and tender, calm as moonlight upon still water. To Gabriel that afternoon she appeared as a twin sister to his own beloved Judith, save that she was crowned with a divine mystery such as a sister could never claim.

“You are tired,” she had said, as they crossed the moors and met a soft wind from the sea.

“Why do you think that?” he asked her, with a kind of quiet pain in his voice.

“I can see it in your eyes. Are not all your moods intelligible to me?”

“You are right,” he answered, with his melancholy smile; “the trivialities of life are beginning to weigh upon me. I would give much gold to be young again, and free.”

“Are you so old?”

“As old as a youth who has been bred in a dungeon, whose best years have been tombed in stone.”

“Perhaps you think too much,” she said.

“Perhaps! Who can help thinking when one has made mistakes. I hope to think some day for the benefit of others.”

“You would warn them?”

“Yes,” he said, with a sad simplicity; “that is the best use to which we can put our errors. But I am weary of psychology for the moment. Let us forget problems and be children.”

She looked over the world with half-closed lids, the sun beating upon her face.

“As you will,” she said, quietly; “and yet I think a time comes when it is impossible to be a child again, when the mind ceases to ebb and flow, but moves like a river perpetually towards the sea. The intense realism of life burns upon the brain and reduces the flimsier interests to ashes. Only the iron is left, and that is at white heat.”

“How do you know all this?” he asked.

“It is what life seems to be teaching me.”

“Yes,” he said, with a sudden, strange solemnity; “never more shall we be children on earth, for the heart of the child is tombed in the ice of knowledge. It is all plain to me now. Life is a grim thing to those who are only half strong. I have often thought of late that there is nothing left me worth living for.”

“Do you mean it?” she asked, almost hastily.

“No,” he said, looking in her eyes and reading his soul’s image in them; “I spoke only of the life that is; you are part of the ideal.”

There was a sudden, strange intensity of feeling upon her face. Her eyes were wide and appealing. She drew her breath in deeply like one who sings.

“Gabriel,” she said.

He glanced at her, and the color on his bronzed face deepened. His silence told her that he waited.

“I want to live; I want to be real to you, flesh and blood, a woman, not a mere spirit.”

“Joan!”

“Can I not be real to you?”

“You are the most splendid and ideal reality Heaven has ever vouchsafed to me.”

“Ah! not as I could wish,” she said. “We seem all intellect at times, you and I. Yet—if I say more I shall hurt you. Ah! God knows, I want to be a help to you.”

“Before God, you help me,” he said, drawing in a deep breath.

Beyond the moors the hills were streaks of blue in a golden atmosphere. The air was sultry, preternaturally clear, eloquent of stormy weather. Everywhere the gorse was tonguing into flame. The meadows were rimmed with gold as the two passed back towards the dark knolls of the yews and cypresses. There was a certain sadness over them both, a prophecy of evil that seemed to hover over their hearts like clouds over silent mountain tarns.

Joan stood in the gravel drive and swung her hat by the strings. She did not look at the man as she spoke.

“My father is in the garden,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Will you see him?”

“If you wish it,” he said, quickly.

“Wait. I will go to him first; he may be asleep.”

She disappeared amid the dark whorls of the cypress boughs like a white figure of truth. Gabriel leaned against the trellis and covered his face with his hand. Sudden foreboding, a sense of imminent woe, gathered about his soul like a heavy cloud massing overhead. A fatalistic spirit seemed to seize on him out of the unknown. Had he then driven the childhood out of this girl’s life and made her wise to her own distress. He was conscious suddenly of the supreme egotism that had grown up flesh of his flesh, spirit of his spirit. His face was white and strained when Joan reappeared from amid the trees.

“He is not there,” she said.

She marked the look on the man’s face—the gray, tired stare of one in pain.

“Gabriel, what ails you?”

Her eyes were very bright and eager, and there was a kind of half-fear on her face.

“Nothing,” he said. “I am only a little faint.”

She opened the heavy oak door, beckoned him across the hall, and led him into a large, shadowy room, lighted by three mullioned windows towards the west. Wainscoting covered the walls. The floor was of parqueterie carpeted with several old rugs. Antique china, interspersed with bowls of anemones, red and blue, filled the carved mantel-shelf. The grate was black and cumbersome, the hearth inlaid with tiles of a dark-green color. In the centre of the room a round mahogany table bore a great blue bowl ablaze with marsh marigolds. Heavy damask red curtains were half drawn across the window recesses. Joan flung one back, opened a casement frame, pointed Gabriel to the cushioned window-seat.

“Rest there, dear; I must go and find my father.”

The man leaned back against the panelling with a saddened sense of peace. The antique yet fragrant flavor of the room floated upon him, redolent of the past. There was infinite magic in the girl’s gentle masterfulness, and her words had set his heart hurrying. If this old house was only his own home, and Joan his wife, golden emblem of womanhood moving like sunlight in dark places! He played with the phantasm as a poet dallies with a splendid dream.

When Joan came back to him she came like the damsel of vision, gracious and adorable. She had loosed her hair upon her shoulders; there were red wind-flowers in the bosom of her creamy blouse; a belt of silver-work topped the smooth sweep of her olive-green skirt. Yet there was a tired look upon her face, as though she were keeping something hid within her heart. She sat down on a little tapestry-covered sofa, with her face towards the window.

“My father is asleep,” she said, with a pensive stare. “He is growing very weak and feeble. I have another woman to help me. I think she was hewn out of granite. Are you better now?”

“Yes,” he said, leaning back against the wainscoting and watching her face with a melancholy pride. “It is very restful here; I breathe the air that moves about you, and am at peace. You, too, look tired.”

Her face clouded suddenly, and there was a pathetic regret upon her lips that would have been piteous had not her gray eyes shone so bravely.

“It is my father,” she said. “I do not mind your knowing; it is a kind of nightmare to me. I do all that I can for him, and that seems little.”

“He is ill?”

“He is killing himself day by day.”

For the moment Gabriel found nothing to say to her, for fate shackled him. He would have given much to have been able to throw his manhood at the girl’s feet like an honest sword. But that same sword was rusted to its hypocritic sheath. He could but protest with his lips, pay verbal homage.

“This must be a heavy burden for you,” he said, presently.

“It is my duty.”

“You do not complain.”

“That were graceless,” she said, “and yet I do not know what I should do if I had not the thought of you ever with me.”

Their solitude was broken by the woman, Mrs. Primmer. Her face was hard and calculating. There was a certain critical vigilance in her eyes that made Gabriel restless. He felt that the woman was watching him almost like a spy, and that her verdict in no wise flattered the spirituality of his mission. Mrs. Primmer’s morality had been baked in a mould of clay. Charity had escaped in the process. Greed and self-satisfaction were lined and graven about her mouth.

Mrs. Primmer’s fingers lingered long over the table. She had a discordant habit of clattering and fidgeting with the china. She stole side glances the while at the man seated in the window recess.

“Has that woman been long with you?” Gabriel asked, when the door had closed again.

“A few months.”

“I suppose she is intensely respectable?”

“She is preferable to the other,” said Joan, with a sigh. “I wonder if there are many such women in the world?”

“As Mrs. Primmer?”

“Yes.”

“Thousands, unfortunately.”

“I think a woman with a soul of ice is the most terrible thing earth can show.”

“Malice incarnate, sharp of beak and red of claw.”

“Do most people always seem bent on thinking the worst they can of their fellows?”

“It is partly the result of sectarianism.”

“What do you mean by sectarianism?”

“The exclusive and narrow religious spirit of fools—the spirit that prompts a man to say, ‘You do not believe what I believe, therefore you are damned.’”

“Are there, then, such absurd persons in the world?”

“Hundreds, mostly Christian.”

“Christian!”

“By profession.”

“But not in spirit.”

“Hardly.”

The sky had grown more overcast and a certain heavy torpor in the air gave promise of thunder. Masses of purple clouds stood piled in the west, cratered with burning pits of fire. A vast vault of ebony was rising towards the sun. Now and again a sudden gusty wind came breathing about the house, making the trees shudder as though they feared a storm.

“How black the sky grows,” said the girl, joining Gabriel in the window-seat.

“A storm threatens.”

“And the wind prophesies.”

Into the room a transient stream of sunlight poured. It burned in the girl’s hair and upon the flowers in her bosom, seeming to enhance the grim promise of the sky.

“What will you do?” she asked.

“Foul weather is nothing to me.”

“You must stay here till the storm has passed.”

“Perhaps,” said the man, looking at the clouds.

The west grew lurid. A tense silence weighed upon the world, a silence so solemn that the very trees might have stood watching for some miraculous portent in the sky. The laurels and the grass shone with a vivid green in the mysterious light. The purple clouds in the west had taken fire and were fringed with flame.

The wind rose. They heard it crying far away upon the hills, deep, hoarse, and distant. It gathered clamorous in the air, a great, solemn moan that seemed to surge from the east like the cavern cry of the dead. The trees stooped, swayed, tossed as in torture. Rain followed with the rattle of a cataract, a heavy mist shot through with the fiery spears of the setting sun. Lightning gleamed on the hills. The sky grew great with thunder. In the onrush of twilight the trees struggled in a tornado of wind and rain, while the house seemed to quake with the uproar of the storm.

The two in the window-seat had drawn closer as they watched the sky. There was a long silence between them. Once Joan’s hand touched Gabriel’s. They drew apart suddenly with a quick glance into each other’s eyes.

“I love such a storm,” said the girl.

“It is grand. I have often thought that I should like to end my life at such an hour as this.”

“More so than in a golden twilight?”

“It is mere superstition on my part,” he added. “Yet I have had a kind of presentiment that life will end for me in tragedy.”

“Why do you think that?” she asked, with a sudden glance into his eyes.

“Because the death is often an echo of the life, a storm-cry or a peaceful noise of flutes.”

The dusk had deepened rapidly; the rain still rushed upon the earth. The lightning had grown fitful in the west with a sullen roar of distant thunder. The wind had passed and was gone, as though some grim company of the damned had swept gibbering athwart the sky. There was no sound now save the rattle of the rain upon the laurels.

The dusk thickened to an eerie gloom. In the window-seat the man and the girl crouched like two silent children. Joan’s face was white as death in the dark; her eyes shone with a peculiar brilliancy; now and again there was a faint glimmer of light upon her hair.

“You cannot go yet,” she said.

“The sky may clear soon.”

There was the sound of a door opening stealthily. Gabriel, glancing over his shoulder, saw a white cap and a gray face peering through the dusk. Then there came a mumbled excuse and the door closed again. Mrs. Primmer had seen the two outlined together against the window. They were too perilously near, and in the dark also, to satisfy the lady’s conscience. She had drawn back with a hard smile and sundry feminine cogitations in her heart.

“The woman moves like a cat,” said Joan, leaning her head against the panelling.

“Mrs. Primmer?”

“Yes.”

He was silent a moment with a dark race of thought through his mind. The girl seemed absolutely unconscious of all evil, trustful as a child.

“I must go now,” he said.

“In this rain?”

“Yes. The sky is clearing. I will go to the door and look out.”

He spoke in a monotonous tone that hurt the girl’s heart for the moment; she did not realize the moral force of those few words. They passed through the darkened hall together and stood in the porch. The steady rattle of the shower was ceasing; it lessened minute by minute; soon there was nothing but the fall of the rain from the trees. A delicious fragrance breathed in the night air.

“I will take my chance,” said the man.

Joan stepped out with him into the drive.

“As far as the gate,” she said, half appealingly.

They passed down the drive into the dense umbrage of the yews and cypresses. Overhead a silvery film of clouds covered the sky; here and there a star flickered through. The west was still black as the mouth of a mighty cavern.

At the gate they stood a moment as though loath to part. The girl’s eyes looked very big and luminous in the dusk; her hair was a dark wreath about her face.

She gave him one of the red wind-flowers from her bosom.

“Good-night,” she said.

Her voice was very wistful, and she stood close to the man as he held the iron gate open with one hand.

“I shall see you again soon?” she asked.

A sudden hunger for her lips seized him, but he withheld the desire and drew back slowly from under the overhanging trees.

“Good-night,” he said to her.

“Good-night.”

She watched him turn and disappear into the darkness. Loneliness seemed to flood like black water into her heart. Her face was white and sorrowful as she passed back under the cloud-strewn sky.

XXII

AT Callydon the colors of life were being contrasted in bolder fashion and with more riotous effect. Vermilion was the prevailing dye. The sentimentalities had verged somewhat on heavy melodrama, and a suggestive voluptuousness in the staging had prolonged the play.

Two people mutually enamoured of an identical future are not long in coming to some understanding of each other’s hearts, particularly if the hearts in question possess more of the human element than the divine.

James Maltravers had succumbed seriously to interests that he had been almost brought to regard as the mere foibles of frivolity. And since his honor was a somewhat opalescent thing, blue and sincere one moment, red the next when caught in certain rays of the sun, it may be imagined that his conscience was nimble in the justification of his cause. The dramaticisms of life are in the higher sense wholly a matter of character. There is nothing so impressive as the grand temptation of a fine spirit; nothing more mean and contemptible than the facile sinning of a corrupt one. Incidents are what our souls make them, the song of the swan or the death-slime of the snail.

It had pleased Ophelia Strong to represent herself as a woman oppressed beneath a grievous and unkindly past. It had pleased her to pose picturesquely at her husband’s expense, to reverse the primitive fable, and accuse the marital Adam of leading evil into Eden. The assumption was easily upheld by ingenuity, much fanciful detail, and an intelligent disregard of truth. Having assumed an air of martyrdom, it was easy for her to procure artistic matter to color the romance.

As for the soldier, he was a man, and a sentimentalist in a somewhat florid school of realism. It was easy to discover chivalry in the affair—even to suffer chivalry to flame up into a more serious emotion. The woman stood in need of sympathy, made abundant pretence of desolation, posed very charmingly in the part like the interesting woman that she was. Maltravers soon discovered that sympathy was a very pleasant commodity for barter. It cost nothing, supplied infinite recreation, enhanced the charms of billiards and the like. He was quite prepared to echo Ophelia’s humor. Let her but pipe to him and he would dance.

It is sufficient for the needs of the narrative to record certain remarks that passed on one occasion between Ophelia Strong and her most Platonic confidant. Golf was the excuse, a foursome on the Callydon links, in which Miss Mable Saker and a male friend formed the opposition. Sundry disjointed sentences were possible as the game proceeded. The physical distractions present were useful in deducting from the gravity of the dialogue and shedding an air of flippant satiricism over the incidents.

“How is your bibliomaniac?” said the soldier, as the two were following on after a drive.

“Fairly frigid,” came the response.

“Has his magnificence favored you with a letter of late?”

“Not for ten days. You see, he is so much in demand as a genius.”

“Geniuses are dangerous folk—tar-barrels, dynamite. They need damping.”

They passed about the hem of a larch-wood where a thousand emerald points were shimmering in the sun. The gorse was ablaze on either side of the track. Down in the valley beneath them a lake flickered under the heavens, and they could catch the faint roar of the water as it foamed over the weir.

“I suppose your friends know all about it?” said the major, pulling the peak of his cap down to shade his eyes in the sun.

Ophelia glanced at his clean-shaven, jockey-like profile with critical approval.

“Not much.”

“Oh, but they ought to.”

Two small boys trespassed on the line of fire.

“Fore! you brats.”

The soldier’s voice rang clear and clarion-like. It seemed to come from his chest with a brisk and healthful forcefulness, a strenuous virility that was unproblematic and easeful.

“My dear girl, you are much too amiable,” he said, as they waded through a lagoon of heather.

“Am I?”

“You women are so patient; you will stand hell and damnation for the man you are fond of.”

Ophelia smiled.

“And you think I am still fond of him?” she said.

“Don’t ask me to be a prophet.”

“I am not a Mary or a Prudence.”

“Not so puritanically fatuous.”

“Hardly.”

“Matters often sift themselves,” he said; “gentlemen of that class usually unbuckle the strap with their own fingers sooner or later. All the better for society, you know. Indiscretions brought to light, judicial interference, a decree nisi, etc. Oh yes, these things can be managed.”

XXIII

MRS. MINCE was in possession of her husband’s study, a melancholy room whose single window looked forth upon a red-brick wall and a corner of Mr. Mince’s vegetable garden. The room was carpeted with red drugget and curtained with dingy green plush. A forcible aroma of stale tobacco-smoke pervaded the air. Ranged along one wall were a number of dilapidated leather chairs like needy pensioners, the seats of the uninitiated who came on certain occasions to receive wisdom from Mr. Mince’s lips. A deal bookcase stood with warped shelves beneath a ponderous infliction of theological literature. The very books appeared dreary monuments of a dogmatism that had outlived its age. As for the room, it seemed to smell of Calvin and to echo the barbaric incongruities of the Athanasian Creed. It suggested a geological museum in its atmosphere, save that geology stands in peril of being dubbed heretical, and Mr. Mince’s sacerdotal fossils were orthodox to the last letter.

Mrs. Mince was in possession of her husband’s desk-chair, that solemn pedestal whence the sage gave to Saltire those luminous moments of spiritual exaltation begot of brandy and tobacco. Opposite the vicaress, on one of the sedilia bankrupt of horse-hair, sat that estimable person Mrs. Primmer, who had dwelt as cook for seven years under the parsonic roof and had earned a reputation for sober saintliness and extreme economy. Mrs. Primmer was garbed in her best for the occasion, a lavish outlay of crape and jet beads testifying to the woe that had once made of her a widow. She was one of Mrs. Mince’s “props of honesty,” an estimable errant angel in cloth boots and crape.

The reason of Mrs. Primmer’s expedition that day was a certain matter that lay heavy on what she was pleased to call her conscience. Hers was a pilgrimage undertaken from honest motives, a most disinterested excursion. The vicaress and the ex-cook were keenly in sympathy on such a subject. With admirable ingenuity they veiled their too feminine propensities under the cassocks of duty and moral obligation.

“I think you were quite right, Eliza,” Mrs. Mince was saying, “to come to me in this matter. It most certainly needs careful consideration, and you have acted like a conscientious Christian woman. You are quite sure—now—as to the gentleman’s identity?”

“Certain,” replied the conscientious person, with a tense closure of the lips; “I have one of his handkerchiefs here, ma’am, marked with his name.”

“Dear, dear,” said the vicaress, “how very scandalous! They are always out together, you say? Dear, dear. I suppose all the offence is on his side, Mrs. Primmer?”

The ex-cook folded her bony hands over her black skirt and spoke with regretful candor.

“I’m afraid not, ma’am. The girl’s every bit as bad as the man.”

“Dear, dear,” said Mrs. Mince again, “how very scandalous, to be sure! only married eight months, and his wife away on a holiday. And you caught them in the dark, you say?”

“In the dark, ma’am, during that terrible storm on Wednesday night.”

“In the dark, yes.”

Mrs. Mince’s face was suffused with a shiny avidity; even her colorless eyes were eager.

“Well, ma’am, I shouldn’t like to say all I thought I saw.”

“Of course not, Eliza; it is too shocking a subject for clean-minded women to discuss. Dear, dear, how badly people turn out in this world; human nature has nothing but disappointments for us. Only to think of it,” and Mrs. Mince sighed.

“I thought I ought to come and ask your advice, ma’am,” said Mrs. Primmer, with great deference.

“It shows a most excellent spirit in you, Eliza.”

“The responsibility, ma’am, rather troubled me; I thought I would come to a good, godly lady for counsel. Old Mr. Gildersedge is weak and helpless, what with the drink and the like, poor old gentleman. He ain’t to be considered ‘compot mentis,’ as they call it, ma’am. I couldn’t see all this going on and say nothing to nobody.”

Mrs. Mince wiped her face with her handkerchief and seemed agreeably conscious of her own importance.

“You were quite right, Eliza,” she said; “this is a most painful discovery. I must talk it over with Mr. Mince and see what his Christian conscience suggests. For the present, I should keep the whole affair a profound secret. Silence is golden, Eliza, on occasions.”

“Certainly, ma’am.”

Mrs. Mince seemed to gather her soul for a final flight of charitable circumspection.

“You must go back,” she said, unctuously, “watch, and say nothing. Try to be the poor, deluded girl’s guardian angel in secret. It is sad—most sad. I only hope something may be done before it is too late; as the wife of one of the Father’s ministers I will think it over, and pray to the dear God for guidance. Now you must really go into the kitchen, Eliza, and get some tea.”

Mrs. Primmer’s stony face seemed to lighten seraphically at the suggestion.

“I’ve only done, ma’am,” she said, “what the dear Lord put into my heart to do. I thank Him every day of my life that he gave me seven years of sojourn under this good, saintly roof. Mr. Mince’s sermons, ma’am, always taught me to love the Holy Book and to look to Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. ‘God is love.’ I have that text you gave me over my bed, ma’am.”

“Ah, Eliza, we always try to do our best,” said Mrs. Mince, with an inimitable smirk in the direction of the vegetable garden.

When Mrs. Primmer had betaken herself to the scene of her past culinary prowess, Mrs. Mince panted up-stairs to her bedroom and proceeded to array herself in Sabbath attire. She donned her new bonnet with the red roses in it and her black silk dress. She buttoned on a new pair of glacé kid boots and hung her little gold cross on her bosom. Mrs. Mince’s toilet would have suggested a smart tea-party, a church service, or some important parochial function. Being in some vague way impressed by the onerous responsibility of her British matronship, she had donned full pontificals for the occasion. A state gossip, a most solemn scandal festival, was in the air, and with quaint feminine naïveté the vicaress had flown to her finery as though her attire should be in harmony with the splendor of her tidings.

Mrs. Mince threaded the archaic and picturesque Saltire High Street with a species of complacent waddle that characterized her mind. The glimpses of forestland and azure sky caught betwixt red roofs and bourgeoning orchards were foreign to her ken. She was a person who delighted in oil and vinegar. If you had shown her some masterpiece of art in the nude, she would have sniffed and remarked, “How very disgusting!” She possessed the mock modesty of coarse-minded persons—a mock modesty that waxes loud and aggressive to hide the nastiness beneath.

Mrs. Marjoy was at home, or in her lair, as certain uncharitable folk had expressed it. The doctor’s wife was in a particularly angelic mood. Mrs. Mince found Mrs. Marjoy closeted with the eldest Miss Snodley in her drawing-room. The mercurial lady was creaking to and fro in a patent-spring rocking-chair that needed oiling. She dribbled some lukewarm water into the exhausted teapot and greeted the vicaress with dubious delight.

Mrs. Mince had seated herself with a species of portentous calm. She looked supremely cheerful, big and beaming with the fat confessions stowed in her motherly bosom. Tidings of honey, vineyards, and much corn! The lady gloated like an Israelite over the promised spoiling of Canaan.

“Dear, dear, such news,” she said, fingering her fat wedding-ring, as though meditating upon the supreme respectability of her own lot.

The two listeners were “muzzles up” on the instant, like hounds that give tongue over a struck scent.

“What is it?”

“That Ginge girl’s engaged at last!”

“Nonsense.”

“That hussy!”

“Guess again, my dear.”

“Your cook’s gone wrong?” said Mrs. Marjoy, who had a particular grievance against domestics.

“No.”

“Some one has eloped?” ventured Miss Snodley.

“No, dear, much more exciting.”

“Tell us, then.”

Mrs. Mince took a deep breath and delivered herself of her tidings with fitting éclat.

“Young Strong has compromised himself?” she said.

There was a moment’s silence, then a kind of cackling outburst, like the pother in a farm-yard over the laying of an egg.

“Never,” said Miss Snodley.

“He has.”

“When—how?”

“I knew it,” quoth Mrs. Marjoy, with intense pride. “I always knew that fellow was a scoundrel.”

“And Ophelia?” said Miss Snodley.

The three ladies looked at one another and tittered.

“It will take the airs out of her,” said Mrs. Mince.

“Serve her right,” quoth the doctor’s wife.

“Those Gussets were always so stuck up,” said Miss Snodley.

Then they all stared at one another again, embraced rapturously in the spirit, and indulged in more tittering.

“Tell us all about it,” said Mrs. Marjoy, reserving her own Domremy episode as a finale.

They drew their chairs closer together, like Macbeth’s witches over their reeking caldron. Mrs. Mince related Mrs. Primmer’s experiences, with certain embellishments of her own, doing abundant justice, as was to be expected, to the sinister aspects of the romance. When she had talked her fill, Mrs. Marjoy capped the tale with her own conclusions drawn from the Domremy incident. Indeed, the three ladies enjoyed themselves with much thoroughness that afternoon. No such sport had fallen to their barbs since a local farmer had been accused of starving his pigs, a very minor excitement. Christians they were in name, yet the spirit of imperial Rome still lingered in their bosoms. To have witnessed a combat between wild beasts and slaves was a display beyond the possibilities of the civilized arena. Indeed, the very mention of it would doubtless have inspired them with unctuous horror and strident indignation. Yet there was little difference in the main betwixt the tiger-hearted dames of Rome and these modern ladies, save that the latter were hypocrites, the former honest even in their depravity. The pagans gloated over agonies in the flesh, the Christians over agonies in the spirit.

“What a scandal,” said the vicaress, with ill-concealed satisfaction, “if the affair comes to light!”

“As it must,” said Mrs. Marjoy, viciously; “and young Strong coming forward as our member, too! Nice sort of legislator to frame laws for the country’s good. Is it generally known yet?”

“My goodness! no,” quoth Mrs. Mince; “only Mrs. Primmer and ourselves are in the secret, so far as I can tell. The question is, what is to be done.”

The mind of this most moral trinity waxed meditative over the problem.

“I think Ophelia ought to be communicated with,” said the vicaress, after reasonable cogitation.

“Certainly,” observed the doctor’s wife, creaking to and fro in her chair.

“A matter of duty,” added Mrs. Mince.

“And charity,” said Miss Snodley, looking over the rims of her gold pince-nez.

They were all vastly serious over the business, exceedingly solemn, infinitely in earnest. The undercurrent of hypocrisy in their ethics did not seem to suggest itself to their minds. They were about to enjoy a triumph over a feminine autocrat, a woman disliked by reason of the superior comeliness of her person.

“Ophelia Strong must be warned,” said the vicaress, speaking as the most religious woman in Saltire.

“But by whom?” queried Miss Snodley.

Mrs. Marjoy’s aggressive voice claimed the responsibility.

“By us, of course,” she said.

For a moment they stared at one another in silence.

“How?” asked Miss Snodley, tentatively.

“By letter,” said the doctor’s wife.

“Anonymous, of course,” interposed Mrs. Mince, with hurried circumspection.

They debated the question briefly, and continued to satisfy the triple conscience as to the morality of the proceeding. Mrs. Marjoy possessed herself of her writing-case, and, after much tentative suggestion and voluminous wastage of paper, produced the following edifying document:

“As sincere and disinterested friends, we think Mrs. Strong ought to be warned of the danger that is threatening her domestic happiness. We do not desire to swear to facts or to make mere poisonous insinuations. As Christian women we only wish to put a sister on her guard. We hear that her husband has been acting unwisely. There is a serpent in the grass near Rilchester, at a place known as Burnt House. This letter is despatched by its writers through a deep sense of Christian duty and moral obligation. It had better be burned when it has been read.”

“There,” said Mrs. Marjoy, straightening herself in her chair, with an expression of pride, “that ought to fire the furnace. I have disguised my writing by scrawling it backhand. I am going into Rilchester to-morrow, and I can post it there. The postmark will help to keep its origin secret.”

“I wonder what will come of it,” said Mrs. Mince, with reflection.

“Poor Ophelia Strong!” sighed Miss Snodley, with a breath of penitence. “What if it proves a great blow to her. Perhaps—”

“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Marjoy, sharply; “don’t be sentimental, Zinia. We are only doing our duty.”

XXIV

BY Dr. Glibly’s advice Ophelia Strong had removed to a fashionable seaside town on the southern coast, so that after the keen, brisk air of Callydon she might become more acclimatized for the warmer temper of the Saltire woods. The change, moreover, had been rendered expedient by other considerations. Major Maltravers had himself advised it, and, as he could generally furbish up sufficient facile logic to uphold his opinions, Ophelia had come to have great faith in him. The soldier had been playing a most romantic and problematic part, a part well calculated to render unstable the equilibrium of any ordinary woman’s brain. As for Miss Mabel Saker, she accompanied the invalid with creditable devotion, perhaps to found new kingdoms of sentiment on the southern shores. Flirtation with the brunette was an amiable habit, a habit that she had the sense to preserve from dissipation.

St. Aylmers claimed the usual features of seaside health resorts. It possessed a pier, a handsome promenade, winter-gardens, a concert-hall, a string-band, hotels, hydros, and expensive lodging-houses. The parade crescented the sea with a scroll-work of many colors. Aloes set in large, green tubs punctuated the pavement. Here and there rose an oasis of flowers ringed round by vivid circles of grass and æsthetically trimmed hedges. Bathing-machines were trundled down the beach by superlatively obese horses, the very obesity of the animals enlisting the sympathies of the old ladies with the virtuous and kind-hearted proprietor. Bath-chairs idled from east to west, their inmates snuffing the sea breeze and watching the false green gleam in the eyes of the feminine sea. St. Aylmers boasted a phenomenal share of sunshine, and was beloved of self-satisfied carriage-folk, whose aristocratic noses were never incensed by the perfumes of cockle booths and perspiring East-End trippers. St. Aylmers was eminently refined. The pine-woods that rose like a coronet on the hills to the north appeared like a throng of obsequious officials keeping the doorway of culture. Everything was clean and brilliant about the town, smart, precise, and opulent.

Ophelia had taken up her abode at the Queen’s Hotel, on the sea front. The building was elaborately stuccoed, its façade radiant with gold-lettering, flowers in window-boxes, and sun-blinds white and red. The garden fronting the hotel was as sprucely kept as the meagre thatch on a military dandy’s poll. The pavements were tiled, purple and green and white. There was a flattering medallion of the reigning monarch over the handsome porch.

On a particular May morning Miss Saker and the invalid had hired one of the green-and-white bathing-machines and were revelling in the sea. A cloudless sky burned azure overhead and every wavelet was scalloped green and gold. The sands glistened like burnished brass. The moist swish of the ripples along the strand rose like a slumber-song, soothing the senses of numberless decrepit old gentlemen who had had their chairs set in the sun above the ladies’ bathing enclosure. The weather was benign enough even to soothe the irascible propensities of patriarchs afflicted with gout.

Ophelia Strong was a fine swimmer. Attired in a blue French bathing-dress, with a blue-and-white cap coffing her amber hair, she seemed a veritable Venus, sapphire, pearl, and ruby, gemming the sea. Taking the more fragile Mabel under her escort, she swam to a large boat anchored off the shore as a haven for those who preferred an ambitious swim. They climbed up the brass-tipped ladder into the boat, and sat in the sunshine as in a bath of gold, watching St. Aylmers stretching east and west beneath its coronet of pines.

Miss Saker tucked a brown curl under her red bathing-cap and glanced mischievously at her companion.

“I bet he will,” she remarked.

“Will what?”

“Come to-day.”

“Who?”

“Don’t pretend such innocence.”

The boat swayed with them lazily over the almost imperceptible swell. Miss Saker, as she scanned the parade with its garden of many-colored parasols, broke suddenly into exclamatory delight.

“I said so,” she laughed.

“Where?”

“Oh, my prophetic soul, I believe I can see the rogues over there by the big electric standard perched on the railings.”

Ophelia reconnoitred the parade in turn.

“I believe you are right,” she said.

Ophelia slipped over the gunwale and dropped gently into the tide. The water bubbled over her white shoulders, the sun shone in her hair. Mabel Saker followed down the steps. They swam shoreward together, laughing and chatting as the water rippled at their lips. Nor did the lessening distance dissolve the enchantment conjured up by the two exquisites upon the parade. The lifting of a hat, the wave of a hand, suggested a quick and mutual vigilance in the recognition.

While the two women ascended from the foam to the transfiguration of the toilet, Maltravers and his companion sat in the shadow of a groin, beguiling the time with cigarettes and confidential small-talk. The confessions of the average man would hardly edify the ear of the woman who honors him as lord. There is but little chivalry in smoking-rooms and before theatrical bars. Ribaldry generally passes for humor and nastiness for knowledge of the world. The philosophy of commercial travellers and army subalterns smacks forcibly of the flesh.

“I wonder how long the darlings will be lacing up their stays?” said the florid youth, who recognized in Maltravers a superior spirit, a sage erudite in the epicurism of life.

“Can’t tell,” said the elder.

The greetings were flippant, glib, leavened with smart innuendos and facile flattery. Two old gentlemen in bath-chairs by the promenade rail exchanged epigrams and recalled the romantic passages of their own youth. It was not long before the four separated, Miss Saker and the florid youth drifting towards the band-stand, while Maltravers and Ophelia wandered away along the beach.

Free of the promenade, Ophelia loosened her hair upon her shoulders, to dry in the sun. Like a gilded fleece it swept over her neck, bosom, and shoulders, fragrant with the salt breath of the sea. Her eyes were peculiarly brilliant and the sun had set a sunburned splendor on her cheeks. Her neck, bare above the low-cut collar of her blouse, had been touched with bronze since her short sojourn by the sea. Her sky-blue dress, fitting loosely about her fine figure, rippled with voluptuous folds. She seemed to walk the sands like some proud Cardiflamma, flashing her scarlet torch in the eyes of desire.

As they drew apart from the populous town the flippant temper of their meeting vanished more and more. There was silence about them save for the sound of the sea. A passionate gravity, a more potent power, seemed to weigh upon their hearts. There was a new significance in life for them. They were alone together with the future and their own thoughts.

“I have missed you,” said the woman, as they drew from the town and saw the blue crescent of a bay glimmer before them beneath white cliffs.

“And I, too,” said the man, with a species of melancholy self-suppression; “only fourteen days since you left Callydon. I never knew life could be so confoundedly dull.”

Their eyes met, flashed in a smile, and fell away again as though desirous of husbanding the impression.

“You are looking thin,” suggested the woman.

“Nonsense!”

“Don’t contradict me.”

“I have been sleeping badly,” said the soldier; “and, upon my soul, I have half-starved myself.”

“We must take care of you here.”

He laughed a deep quaver of sentiment.

“That hair of yours would flash heaven into any man’s heart,” he said.

They walked on a burnished stretch of sand, for the tide was low and the waves mere ripples. The sea was like a garment of many colors, ribbed with iridescent hues from cloud and sky. The cliffs rose like walls of ivory fringed with emerald silk, and the pines on the hills were webbed with a purple mist.

“Italian weather,” said the soldier, turning down the brim of his hat; “it is not often we get such a day in this damned climate. You know Italy?”

Ophelia’s mouth hardened.

“Italy!”

“A land to live in.”

“That depends on one’s companion.”

“Ah! I remember.”

“I spent my honeymoon there—a never-to-be-forgotten affair.”

“Was the bibliomaniac dull?”

“A sort of ‘Wandering Jew’ in trousers.”

“Let him evaporate,” said the soldier, with a laugh; “upon my soul, you are looking in splendid health.”

“To-day—perhaps,” she answered, with a reawakened smile.

They had left the town far behind by now, and the beach stretched solitary before them and utterly silent save for the moist sound of the sea. The ripples spent themselves in a glittering film of silver at their feet. The firm, smooth sand showed hardly any impress as they passed. It seemed difficult to believe that the sea was not ever thus, but that roaring waters trampled the shore and made the shingles shriek under lowering skies.

“I shall not forget my months at Callydon,” said the man, with deepening significance.

“Is there any need?” she answered.

“God knows! I have your picture here,” and he laid his big, brown hand over his heart.

Gabriel’s wife smiled with a suggestive intelligence.

“Callydon is not a lost Paradise,” she said, “nor are we Adam and Eve. Do you remember the various things you said to me that day when we were playing golf? They seem prophetic as I recall them now. Well, it will save us trouble.”

He glanced suddenly in her face with a keen, desirous look.

“What is it?”

“I have news for you.”

“No—not that.”

“Come, sit down, and you shall see.”

There were bowlders scattered under the cliffs. The two climbed the beach and chose a species of stone circle where they were sheltered from the sun. Ophelia leaned back against one of the stones, with Maltravers lying at her feet.

“Read that,” she said, taking a crumpled letter from her pocket and giving it into his hand; “it was forwarded from Callydon.”

The soldier sat up, squatted with his knees under his chin, and ran his eyes rapidly over the crumpled sheet. There was a certain rapacious and wolfish look upon his face. His mustaches twitched above his big, clean-shaven jaw; his brown hands trembled. At the end thereof he whistled softly through his teeth and stared out over the sea.

“By Jove,” he said, “what a coincidence!”

“Strange, only three weeks ago.”

“Yes, I prophesied this.”

“Are you glad?”

He turned suddenly and looked at her, and his eyes glistened. Gabriel’s wife reached for the letter. Their fingers met, and the man’s closed on hers; her hand was moist and warm, with the letter crumpled betwixt their palms.

“Well!” she said.

They stared at each other a long while in silence, like those whose thoughts kindle and beacon from their eyes. The woman’s color deepened. Her bosom moved markedly; her white teeth showed between her lips.

“Jim!”

He unbuttoned her sleeve, bared her shapely forearm, and pressed his lips to it like one who sucks poison from a wound. She laughed softly, a sound that seemed to mimic the noise of the waves. Perhaps for one moment she remembered Gabriel, her husband, and that golden June evening in the Mallan meadows. The vision was transitory and powerless, a mere breath from the frozen past. Near her was the soldier’s bronzed, handsome face, with its hawk-like pride and the strong passion in its eyes.

“Well!” she said, at length.

“By God, Phyl, I can’t help it; don’t be hard on me; you make me mad.”

“Bide so,” she said, with a little pleasurable sucking in of her breath.

“Is it to be?”

“Need you ask that?”

He pressed her bare arm against his cheek, stretched himself at full length, and laid his head in her lap as she leaned against the stone. Gabriel’s wife bent over him and watched her own reflection in his eyes. She closed his lids with her finger-tips and let her hand rest on his forehead.

“You look tired, Jim.”

“Thinking hard, that is all.”

“What will you do?” she asked him, presently.

“Carry this through to the death,” he said, with a tightening of the jaw.

She looked over the face in her lap and away towards the sea, where gulls were sweeping like pure spirits over the blue. The transcendent egotism of the moment had made them both blind to the world that was beyond the mere ken of their senses. They were both happy in a desperate, headlong fashion. Ophelia still had Mrs. Marjoy’s letter crumpled in one hand.

“Jim, you are a man,” she said, “and no weakling. I am glad of that, for I will trust all to you. Yes, it must be so; we cannot hesitate.”

He opened his eyes and looked up at her with an expression of strenuous eagerness.

“I shall go to town to-night,” he said.

“So soon!”

“Well—”

“To-morrow.”

“Let it be to-morrow.”

“And then?”

“I shall employ agents, have them watched, collect evidence—it is very simple.”

“You have money?”

“I never lacked for that,” he said.

She brought her face near to his, her hair shrouding him in gold. The sun shimmered through upon them both. Her eyes commanded him, and he kissed her.

“I will go to-morrow,” he said.

“For life or death, Jim.”

“Phyl, you believe in me?”

“What a question, now!”

He held her hands, and spoke slowly, like a man taking a vow.

“The sin is not all ours,” he said, “and we cannot help it; as for the man, he is mere dust. If he had loved you, it would have been different. As it is, I will surrender to none, man or devil.”

XXV

IT was the day of the mass-meeting at Rilchester, when Gabriel Strong, gentleman, of The Friary, Saltire, was to be formally presented to electors of the place as the accepted candidate in the Unionist cause. The Rilchester town-hall had been retained for the occasion and prepared for the ceremony with bunting, palms, and flowers. Many of the local dignitaries, swollen big within Sabbath apparel, were purposing to represent the ancient and noble corporation of Rilchester on the platform that afternoon. The Golden Lion, the county hotel, was draped in red, white, and blue, for the members of the Conservative Association were giving a lunch there at five shillings a head. There was also a select Primrose League déjeuner at Lady Popham’s, where the knights and dames of the Rilchester habitation were to assemble before ascending in force to uphold the empire.

At Saltire Hall many tables were spread. John Strong, confident in purse and wine-cellar, revelled in his son’s publicity with a British pride. The coming oracle was himself modestly solemn and inclined towards silence. He kept Judith at his side, feeling in her nearness a peculiar yet powerful sense of comfort. The air was oleaginous with flattery and unction. Gabriel responded after lunch to the toast of his own success with a certain shy deference and timidity. He was one of those men apt to efface their convictions in the presence of strangers. His personality only unveiled itself to the intelligent sympathy of elect souls.

Many of the Saltire worthies were in attendance, attracted more as blue-bottles to fish-bones than being drawn thither by any superabundance of political fervor. Here were Mr. Mince, sublimely didactic and full of egregious hauteur; Dr. Marjoy, debonair and practice-pushing; Mr. Lang, the local notary, a shrivelled shred of sardonic whimsicality, a veritable wasp, forever marring the mellifluous productions of the vicar’s tongue. Mrs. Mince, who had favored champagne and salmon mayonnaise, had retired to the hall with an overladen look, and Mrs. Marjoy was seated beside her on one of the lounges. The two ladies were as critical as ever, even after the benign influence of lunch. They were very eager to detect any evidence that might reveal to them the productiveness of their most Christian epistle.

“The poet fellow looks a bit worried,” said Mrs. Marjoy, fanning herself with her handkerchief.

“Any man ought to look worried,” declared the vicaress, “who is leading a shockingly evil and double-faced life. We cannot escape from the prick of conscience, my dear. God’s laws move slowly, but oh—they are sure. I wonder why on earth they don’t bring us some coffee.”

The florid lady entered upon a further disquisition concerning the iniquities of mankind at large. Champagne had quickened her tongue, whereas the vicaress began to wax somnolent with a pleasant sense of satiety. She responded in monosyllables to Mrs. Marjoy’s dithyrambics on morals.

Sir Hercules Dimsdale, a hook-nosed veteran with a fine head of snowy hair, had drawn Gabriel aside into the conservatory for the purpose of political counsel. The baronet was a very pithy old gentleman, having imbibed a certain genial cynicism during his many years of political campaigning. Like a free lance, he had fought perhaps more for the love of fighting than from any intense enthusiasm of purpose.

“Ha, my boy, are you one of those rare young beings capable of listening to an old man’s patter?”

“I can take advice,” said Gabriel, with a smile.

“Then you are a paragon for your age. Don’t be too diffident to-day; arrogance counts for strength with the average Britisher. Stand up and talk like a Beaconsfield. Self-confidence is an Excalibur when the wielder is worthy. Above all things you must pretend to convictions, even if you don’t believe half you say. Talk as though you thought every man on the other side the most infernal jackass that ever chewed carrots.”

“I will strive not to hide my light under a bushel,” said the neophyte.

“Have you your crackers ready?”

“The customary gibes, Sir Hercules.”

“Your comic condiments. Always raise a laugh; it is nearly as effective as offering free drinks all round. And don’t forget to blarney the beggars. Stroke the local big-wigs the right way and they’ll purr like tom-cats; flatter their opinions; make ’em think they’re all statesmen.”

“I will do my best.”

“And then the catch sentiments, the gallery rhetoric—”

“Such as these: The grand and glorious future of our British empire! The splendid tenacity of the Anglo-Saxon race! Our stupendous commercial energy! The magnificent heroism of our army!”

“That’s it, that’s it. Always superlatives.”

“Claim all the fine statesmanship ever witnessed in the island as the special heirloom of our own party.”

“Exactly. And promise ’em everything, in reason and out of reason—old-age pensions, acres and cows, the moon, the immortal cherubim, anything, only be generous.”

“I will,” said the novice; “it is very easy to promise. And afterwards—”

“Oh, hang the afterwards! Win the seat. That’s what you’re talking for.”

At three o’clock Gabriel and his patrons were caught up into glory and carried towards Rilchester by a coach and four. There was a lavish following of friendly chariots along the old Roman highway. It was down hill to Rilchester, and the procession rattled through Saltire with horns blowing and a great jingling of harness. Sir Hercules was still playing the Nestor in the body of the coach; the reminiscences of forty years had bubbled up under the airy touch of John Strong’s champagne.

Politics have bulked largely on occasions in the literary stock-pot; much of the material has been sucked to the marrow. Nor was the pageant at Rilchester that day less commonplace or more unusual than any tramp can see for the shoving, perhaps ten times in his mortal career. There was a scattered gathering in the streets, bunting overhead, a moderate mob outside the public hall, a portrait of the Queen loyally pilloried over the stone balcony. Within there was the inevitable gathering of local somebodies on the platform, the usual assemblage of local nobodies in the hall. There was the eternal green baize table, the array of bent-cane chairs behind a bulwark of palms and flowers with the florist’s card carefully inserted amid the decorations. There were the usual smiling dames, the usual earnest patricians.

The proceedings may be summarized on account of the dismal prosaicisms of such a scene. Sir Hercules Dimsdale, as chairman, taking his applause with dignity, prepared to warm the hearts of those assembled towards the person of the projected candidate. With his usual genial wit and solid complacency he professed himself confident of the enthusiastic support of the meeting. There was never a more promising politician than the gentleman now presenting himself to the constituency. In Sir Hercules’ belief this young man was marked out by fortune for a brilliant and valuable career. Rilchester would be proud in the future of having given parliamentary birth to one of the ablest men of the younger generation.

It was after some such florid preamble that Gabriel stood up to face the most patriotic electors of Rilchester. He was palpably nervous, in a modest fashion that appealed perhaps to the parental instincts of his auditors. And yet a certain circumstance had come near marring his first serious public attempt at oratory. Looking down, he had seen suddenly under the fringe of palms a girl’s face staring up to his, a face aureoled with gold, the face of Joan Gildersedge, that Beatrice from the Rilchester hills.

Joan had heard incidentally from Gabriel of the affair, and had plotted in her heart how to behold the man’s triumph. She had come into Rilchester on foot and waited for an hour outside closed doors to gain good vantage. As she sat in the dingy hall she seemed to hallow it into a cedarn temple. There was a species of celestial pride upon her face and an eagerness that was almost pained in its intense thirst for the man’s triumph. To her the whole affair was vividly impressive, a most solemn conclave gathered for great ends. The chicanery, the stultiloquent bathos of much of it was hid from her ken. She took the applause as demonstrating enthusiasm and soulfulness, and hyperbolical oratory as expressing grandeur of conviction.

The recognition staggered Gabriel’s brain. Like a glare of light the girl’s face blinded thought for the moment. He was conscious only of her presence, the solemn stare of her gray eyes, the straining eagerness upon her lips. She was leaning forward like one who waits to catch the first notes of some noble song. Gabriel stood stiffly with head thrown back and shoulders squared, the fingers of his right hand fidgeting his notes. Strain as he would the thread of speech had broken on his tongue. Those on the platform, taking his silence for a lapse of memory, applauded zealously, an acclaim that was echoed through the hall.

Gabriel looked again at Joan and found his manhood on her face. Intuition spoke to him of the jealous pride that burned within her woman’s heart; she had come to see him triumph; it was enough. The wistful face aureoled with gold lifted him inspiredly above the present, transfigured the prosaic building into a shrine of grandeur, elevated the occasion above the common concourse to which it pandered. A breath as from Olympus touched his lips. He spoke, kindled, and held his theme.

Even the local socialists present were not averse to acknowledging the virtues of an honest optimism. As for the Primrose Dames, they were clapping their gloved hands with the furor of enthusiastic amateurs at a public rehearsal. The electors of Rilchester thundered approbation; Sir Hercules beamed on the assembly like a Moses. Thirty eloquent minutes had not caught Gabriel’s tongue wavering; he had flown from flight to finish. The reporter of the _Rilchester Guardian_, sucking inspiration from his pencil, jotted down certain euphemistical phrases—“the new Demosthenes,” “Burke redivivus,” and the like.

Questions were launched and answered; amiable passes of humor glittered, rapier-like, in the air. The assemblage with hoof and hand expressed itself enraptured, chanted “Rule Britannia” with great fervor, listened with docility to the meanderings of various local comets, applauded, and dispersed with glee. For Gabriel, keen of brain and flushed of face, there was a single trophy, the triumph fire in a woman’s eyes. For him a golden head moved through the press, sunning the prosaic shadows with Olympian gold.

“Excellent,” said Sir Hercules to John Strong, who was paternally elated; “a most inspiring oration, though a trifle bold. Thought the boy had stage fright at the first push. Excellent.”

“A slap-up jaw,” quoth the Conservative agent to a gentleman who wore a red carnation and yellow gaiters. “Fine young stallion. Well run him in with a ‘thou’ to the good, you bet.”

“Who would have thought it!” said Mrs. Mince. “Why, he spoke quite intelligently, though, of course, after Jacob’s eloquence it sounded flat and dull to me. I wonder who gave him all his ideas?”

“Dissolute young men have oily tongues,” said Mrs. Marjoy. “There will be a big crash in the Strong ‘market’ some day,” and she leered suggestively.

At Saltire Hall there was much decking of tables and shimmering of glass that night. Success spoke in the breath of the flowers and the bubbling mirth of champagne. Wines, white and red, flooded many dainty lips. Silks shivered and elaborate coiffures glimmered under the lamps. The panelled hall was a green gloom of shrubs and palms. The stairways shone with color. Luxury smiled in silver and gold, from the gleaming, snowy tables, from tapestries purple and green, from parquetry burnished like brass. Music moved in the air. Amethyst, diamond, and ruby breathed on the bosoms of women. Laughter, like a carillon of bells, ran through the well-thronged rooms.

The noise of an ephemeral triumph rang loud in Gabriel’s ears that night. The gilt card of social excellence was proffered to his fingers; the perfume of a facile and flattering life ascended into his nostrils. And yet through the gilded meshes of the net the one face gazed, fair as Truth, with eyes looking straight to the heart. Eyes, crystal bright, yet dim with immortal dreams!

Thus it came about that before the rout grew silent John Strong missed his son from the glare of the many lamps. Judith, his sister, went in search of him, clad in a rust-red gown that made more vivid the beauty of her hair and the white brilliance of her skin. In the library she found him, with a solitary candle burning on the mantel-shelf and the room in gloom. He was standing by an open window with the wind sweeping in as he looked out into the night.

“Gabriel,” she said, as she touched his sleeve.

He started, for he had not heard her enter and thought himself alone.

“Why have you left us?”

He did not look at her, but still stared out into the dark.

“I am tired,” he said.

“Of course, dear.”

“Is the nonsense over?”

Judith took his hand between hers and he did not resist her. Her voice was restful as a quiet wind through trees.

“What is the matter?” she asked him.

“Nothing.”

“Can you not tell me, your sister?”

He stood with slouched shoulders and face darkened in the shadows. The candle smoked and flickered on the mantel-shelf; the books glimmered gilt-lettered in the gloom like parables half cloaked in mystery.

“I am very weary of all this,” he said.

“When you have done so splendidly!”

“Splendidly, indeed!”

“Yes.”

“It was not I, but the soul of another in me.”

“Still these dark sayings.”

“All is dark, dear, save for the stars in the vault, and I have one star.”

“Gabriel!”

“All this is glare and mockery and discord. I hate, I loathe it. Only to be in the dark alone—that is all I desire. Leave me alone, dear, to-night.”

“But your father and the others?”

“They are content after their lights, so am I—here.”

“Come for my sake.”

“No, dear.”

“Not even for me?”

He bent and kissed her forehead.

“I obey my thoughts,” he said, “and they are too sacred for anything save solitude. Darkness is good in its season. We see less of earth, more of the universe. Good-night.”