PART IV

XXXV

DIVORCE-COURT proceedings can be confidently abandoned to the admirable frankness of the Sabbath press. The “Strong romance” had produced some excitement in cultured circles, and provided the Saltire moralists with a fable that promised to serve for many generations. Seeing that there had been no defence, and that the case had progressed with unsensational speed, it had failed to become notorious in any popular sense. Fashion had not flattered it, nor had it been wildly paragraphed in the evening papers. There had been no thrashing out of delicate details, so that the “mess” was not highly savored enough to please the public palate.

Honest gold had gilded the tongues of unprejudiced and veracious witnesses. Truth, hired for the occasion, had blown her brazen trumpet in the court, a fine fan-fan in praise of justice. Maltravers’ guineas had instilled wondrous intelligence into sundry rustic noddles. Ophelia, a matrimonial martyr, had been crowned with the crown of virgin liberty.

One night in early spring you might have seen a white-faced man writing at a table in the third-floor room of a Bloomsbury lodging-house. A cheap brass lamp shed an unpleasant savor from beneath its yellow paper shade. The table-cloth, a dingy red, was smutched with ink-stains and the dyes of many dinners. Faded chromographs covered the walls. The carpet was threadbare, the chintz curtains dirty. A few live coals still smoked in the unpolished grate.

Midnight was at hand; a church clock in the neighborhood had chimed the quarter. The footfalls in the street grew few and infrequent. London, vast, palpitating giant, had turned from toil to brief, healthless sleep. Her myriad fires burned dim under the stars. Her great heart slackened from the moil of greed and care.

The man before the lamp labored and bent his brows. Papers and a few books were squandered on the table, while under the lamp stood a bowl of golden primroses, children of joy, fair stars of the dawning year. The man’s pen scratched feverishly over the paper. Often he would pause, stare at the lamp, glance at the golden flowers, and smile. His eyes were lustreless and heavy, his face thin. From time to time he would take up a written page, stare at the scrawled and erasured sheet, smite out a word with a stroke of the pen, sigh, and toss the page aside with a twinge of despair.

As the clock chimed midnight the door opened, and a girl in a red gown came in from the dark landing. Her hair, noosed with a strand of blue, poured over her white ears and about her shapely throat. There were shadows under her eyes; she looked thinner and more ethereal than of yore; the June freshness upon her face had faded to a more pearly gleam.

A brighter lustre kindled in the man’s tired eyes. The vision was gracious and fair to him as some green and dewy garden in a golden desert. He leaned back from his labor, took a deep breath as to fill his heart with the breath of youth. Joan came softly towards him, adorable as love moving amid summer roses. The room with all its ugly penury seemed transformed by the glamour of her presence there.

She stood behind his chair, pillowing his head upon her breast, bending her face to his, so that her hair shone bright about his forehead.

“Dear, you are working too late.”

“Am I?”

“You look tired to death.”

“Not yet,” he answered her, smiling in her eyes. “Can I tire with love at my right hand?”

“Ah,” she said, touching his hair with her white fingers, “you try yourself too much; come with me, and sleep.”

He took her hand and held it over his heart.

“Gold, gold, gold, what a task-master art thou!”

“Is not the tale nearly ended?”

“No, not yet. This sensational stuff baffles me; I cannot force the vulgar speed enough. It is not easy to prostitute one’s art to fill the public maw. I wish to Heaven we could hear from Garfield.”

She sighed slightly; her arm quivered beneath his head and her eyes grew wistful.

“How much misery I have brought to you!” she said.

“Misery!”

“Shame and hunger.”

“Joan!”

He turned in his chair, drew her into his arms so that her head rested on his shoulder as she kneeled beside him. Her hair threaded his black coat with gold.

“Joan, wife, never speak so to me.”

“It is the truth.”

“A splendid truth to me. Would I return to my vile servitude and lose the glory of you out of my heart?”

She sighed deeply, the sigh of a woman well beloved, and looked up at him from amid her hair.

“I am utterly happy,” she said, “for we are together.”

“And that is heaven.”

“For me.”

She laid her fingers upon his closed lids and kissed his lips.

“You must rest to-night,” she said, “for you are weary, and a tired brain thinks but feebly. Come, I will gather your papers and put out the lamp. I am your wife, and I must care for you.”

XXXVI

POVERTY, when the bride of need, is in truth a skeleton in ragged raiment. Those folk who prate of the beauties of indigence and of the divine unselfishness of so saintly a state should test the superstition with some leaning towards truth. God help those who are born both proud and poor. God help those who have fallen from the car of opulence into the slough of hunger and of need.

Joan and Gabriel had discovered the many curses of that cultured poverty which is the most piteous product of a diseased civilization. They found the old quip true, that greed, not God, rules the hearts of the many. Penury had encompassed them. Children of an ungenerous shame, they braved the hundred ignominies that poverty creates. Economy was with them, as with thousands of their fellows, a juggling with coins, a plotting with pence, a combat with trifles. Their very existence was a contorted and twisted struggle to escape the coils of annihilation. They had become as drift-wood on the billows of the great city. Alone in the vast solitudes of that human sea, they struggled for life, unknown, abandoned to their own fate, acknowledged of none.

It was such a trial as sours the soul and fills the heart with malice towards those careless of the miseries of their fellows. Like twin shoots cut from a green and luxuriant tree, they had been thrust into sand and left to suck sustenance from brine. They were together, and their love sustained them. It strengthened the man’s heart like wine, touched him with a lustre of heroism, chastened his whole soul.

Gabriel began to comprehend in those troublous days the strange, rich beauty of a woman’s love. Joan’s tenderness, her transcendent courage, kept him mellowed against the gall of care. She was as sunshine and the perfume of roses amid rotting ruins, a shaft of joy gleaming amid gloom. Self seemed never with her. There was never a frown upon her face, an unworthy word upon her lips. She moved through the sordid realism of life unconsciously divine, spontaneously beautiful.

Though hope still trimmed her lamp, the hand of tragedy beckoned through the hangings of the future. Spring had spread her nets of gold and sapphire in the woods; tree called unto tree under the wakening moon; the sap of youth stirred in the earth’s red heart. In the great city the sky alone shone clear and generous, hanging like a blue pall above the pit of labor and disease.

With Joan and Gabriel their store of gold had dwindled like sand in an upturned hour-glass. No harvest had fallen to their lot; no cup had brimmed with the coming of the year. Effort had brought no echo of hope, and the man’s pen seemed to have labored through the nights for naught. Many a package had gone out from the little room; none had returned with the kiss of peace.

It was a spring evening, clear and bright. A swift sunset had brandished the crimson banners of romance above the gray and grinding tide of toil. A film of green had spread over the few pools of nature in the living desert. The restless fires of barter were startling the thin gloom. A last quaver of joy seemed to fall from the ensanguined clouds.

From the door of a pawnshop in a hurrying highway a man stepped out with his hat drawn down over his brows. He glanced half furtively hither and thither, as one new to the ignominies of defeat. A girl in a green cloak, with red roses in her hat, came to him gray-eyed from the dusk of the streets. The man colored as she drew near, and held out a hand with a scanty store of gold glistening in its palm.

“All this?” she asked him, with an eager increase of color.

“Three pounds.”

“Riches.”

He smiled, sadly enough, as she took a faded purse and engulfed the gold.

“It was Judith’s gift to me,” he said, “a marriage present. Poor little Judith, if she but knew its fate! To what ends love falls.”

“I should have loved your sister.”

“Ah, she is soul of your soul, little wife.”

They passed on together into a more populous highway, where the flood of life ran strong and eager. White faces flickered by them, gay, heavy, or morose. The tide of toil gushed past on every hand, bearing the galleys of misery or greed. The painted moths of passion fluttered from darkened byways to jig and glitter in the glow of the many lamps. Opulence rolled on in sable and white. From many a street penury and despair rushed like noisome water from some thundering mill.

The man and the woman passed from the highway into a quiet square where bare trees and the turrets of an antique inn rose against the colorless sky. A garden lay shadowy under the bleak and arid walls. There was even a suggestion of solemnity in the silence of the place, with the muffled roar of toil flooding from the distance. Joan’s arm rested in Gabriel’s. The warm dusk of the great square was welcome after the turmoil of the streets.

“What a city is this,” said the girl, looking up into the man’s face. “At first I thought that it would stifle me with its dust and din. Think of Domremy and its woods and waters. I often say to myself, ‘How can these people have souls?’ From my heart I pity the poor.”

“Are we not among them?”

“Struggling against fate.”

“And starvation.”

The man sighed, glanced at the stars in the vault above, and at the great silver rim of the moon doming the house-tops.

“Often this city,” he said, “this maelstrom of misery, makes me think there is no God.”

Joan’s arm tightened on his.

“Much is dark and strange to us,” she said.

“Dark indeed.”

“You are cast down, dear, to-night.”

“I am heavy of heart.”

She drew very close to him, still gazing in his face.

“Is it so ill with us?”

“In a month,” he answered her, “unless fortune pities us, we must starve. God knows, I have pride. I cannot whine. The world seems deaf to the children of shame.”

They passed on awhile in silence, threading dark streets and lurid highways where the torch of passion flickered by. Many men stared in Joan’s fair face as she moved like Truth at the side of Love. The unclean air was webbed with gold. The dance of death went merrily on. To the stars many a church held an iron cross, and the dead moon climbed in the heavy sky.

Down a dusky street they saw the gleam of water under the moon. Turning, they came to where the river swept with its black bosom under the stars. Like a great scimitar it seemed to cleave the city’s heart.

The man and the woman leaned on the parapet and watched the restless tide swirl by. Many lights flashed on the dusky water, symbolic of hope on the stream of years. The ebb and flow was as the life of the city, dark and unceasing under the stars.

Joan’s face was turned to the heavens; her hand, clasped by Gabriel’s, rested on the cold stone. She stood so close to him that he felt her take her breath.

“You cannot write to your father,” she said to him, as though suggesting his own thoughts.

“It would be useless.”

“No, you could not beg of him. What of your sister?”

“Judith?”

“Yes; she loves you.”

“I could not beg from a girl.”

She looked out over the river. The moon now shone upon it, spreading a glittering track of light. A myriad clocks seemed chiming the hour.

“I have less pride,” she said.

“Joan.”

“It is I who have brought this shame and poverty upon you. I can plead with my own father.”

He looked at her in silence and his hand tightened upon hers. The river glittered, a black band streaked with silver; roof and spire glimmered under the moon. The lessening roar of the great loom of life rose upon the night breeze. As for Joan, she was dreaming of the Mallan water, the green woods, and the roses that would crimson her old home. The trees would be flowering in the orchard; the almond had waved its pink pennons athwart the blue. There would be a thousand violets purpling the grass.

“I will go to Rilchester,” she said. “I will see my father; there were mellow seasons in him when the sun shone warm. There may be justice left within his heart.”

“I doubt it,” Gabriel answered her, watching the moonlight on the river.

“Nevertheless, I will try,” she said. “I will go to him alone.”

XXXVII

MR. MINCE, ruddy and effulgent, spread his palms to the glow of his study fire. Muddy boots steamed before the fender. Mrs. Mince, duster in hand, was brushing the rain and mud from her husband’s trousers. The vicarage cat, perched on a footstool as on a pulpit, purred forth a feline hymn of peace.

Mrs. Mince drew the tea-table before the fire, sat down with lavish lap in a basket-chair, took up the sugar-tongs, and held them poised like a miniature spear.

“So the old man is dying,” she said, with a slight sniff, thrusting out her slippered feet before the fire and taking the warmth into her bosom.

“Sinking fast,” the vicar answered her; “the last ebb of the tide. A singular man—a most singular man. Marjoy tells me he can’t last a week.”

Mrs. Mince dropped three cubes of sugar with deliberation into her husband’s cup.

“What a moral,” she observed, reflectively; “what a living text on the vanity of riches. Mammon deserts a rich man at the grave; he trusteth in gold and findeth it dust. Zeus Gildersedge might leave a legacy to the ‘living.’ The porch needs repairing, and we cannot afford to pay for dilapidations.”

Mr. Mince stared at the fire and smiled.

“There is that daughter,” the vicaress continued, “a dreadful drab; left her father in his old age to run away with that blackguard Gabriel Strong. I wonder what has become of them.”

“Can’t say,” said the clergyman.

“Gone to the bad, of course. Such women always gravitate to the gutter. I’ve no sympathy with the slut. He won’t leave her anything.”

Mr. Mince lifted the lid of the muffineer; a fragrant steam ascended therefrom; his eyes sparkled as he replenished his plate.

“Terrible, terrible,” he observed. “Ah, my dear, the way of transgressors is hard, their feet light upon stony places. Sad, most sad. I like these muffins.”

Mrs. Mince adjusted the tea-cosey and settled herself comfortably in the arm-chair. The black cat, abandoning its rostrum, migrated to the lady’s lap and lay curled there, licking her paws.

“The girl had had no education,” said the vicaress. “I believe she had never been inside a church. What can you expect of a wench who has never been confirmed and knows nothing of the catechism? Such barbaric ignorance is inconceivable in these days; a most dreadful instance of neglect. What about the old man’s money?”

Mr. Mince’s soul expanded in the fragrant atmosphere of home. He lolled in his chair with the two lower buttons of his waistcoat unfastened and his bald head pillowed on a faded green cushion. He stretched the soles of his gray, besocked feet to the fire, twitching his toes as they tingled on the fender.

“I had some very serious words with Zeus Gildersedge,” he said. “I found him to-day in a subdued and penitent spirit, thanks to the good counsel that I had left to germinate in his heart. He grew quite trustful, spoke to me about his money and his daughter. He confessed that he was troubled about the wench.”

“Surely, Jacob,” said the vicaress, “you did not advise him to try his strength by worrying about so abandoned a hussy?”

Mr. Mince sipped his tea, besprinkling his waistcoat with customary libations.

“My dear,” he retorted, “I had more Christian forethought than to increase the old man’s troubles. In fact, I told him that it would be an absolute sin for him to darken his last moments with reflections that were unnecessary and unpleasant.”

“Admirable tact, my dear.”

“I demonstrated to him how little the girl deserved his remembrance or claimed his pity.”

“Exactly.”

“That she had wilfully deserted him to follow a notorious blackguard.”

“Precisely.”

“That certain folk are undeserving of consideration, and that one must set one’s face sternly against impertinent iniquity and gross ingratitude.”

“My dear,” said the vicaress, “you have the spirit of a Solomon. If Zeus Gildersedge left the girl any of his money it would only fall into the hands of that young brute Gabriel Strong. And such a circumstance could only be deplored as the actual subsidizing of immorality.”

Mr. Mince sat up suddenly in his chair, as though the idea had stimulated his spinal marrow.

“Pomponia,” he said, “you are a most intelligent woman; strangely enough, that is the very argument I used to impress my point upon Zeus Gildersedge.”

The vicaress refilled her husband’s cup.

“The old man saw the wisdom of your words?” she asked.

“Absolutely. My logic triumphed.”

The pair subsided into silence for a season, a peaceful interlude suffused as with a beatific sanctity. The fire jigged and flickered in the grate. Mr. Mince’s gray socks smoked. The black cat purred beneath the vicaress’s bony hand.

“And the money?” she said, at last, her large, yellow face gleaming in the fire-light.

Her husband awoke as from some saintly reverie.

“Zeus Gildersedge stated certain facts to me,” he said, “facts that I may confide to your admirable discretion.”

“Of course, my dear.”

“Mrs. Primmer and I were witnesses to his will. He has left the bulk of his money to charitable enterprises and missions.”

“Most creditable.”

“A solid annuity has been settled on Mrs. Primmer.”

“A most deserving woman.”

“He has also bequeathed a certain sum to be used by me in the parish—to be used, my dear, at my own discretion.”

“Excellent man.”

“I must confess, Pomponia, that Zeus Gildersedge is departing this world with a chastened and regenerate soul.”

“Due, my dear Jacob, to your Christian zeal.”

“I shall bury him in Saltire church-yard, and make no charge for it upon his estate.”

Mrs. Mince beamed on him out of the fulness of her heart.

“You are a good man, Jacob,” she said; “may Heaven recompense you according to your deserts. I am a proud woman and a proud wife. You fulfil my ideals. Let me give you some more tea.”

“Only one more cup, my dear,” said the vicar, “and then I must complete my Sabbath sermon.”

XXXVIII

UP the long road from Rilchester came Joan, her wet skirt blown about her by the wind. Weary though she was, the breeze had kissed fresh color into her face, and her eyes were brave under the faded roses in her old straw hat. Overhead the sky hurried, gray and sullen, unsilvered by the sun. Rain fell in swift, hurrying showers, dimming the landscape, wiping out the sea. The trees moaned and waved to one another, troubled by the restless melancholy of the wind.

Joan’s eyes brightened as she drew near towards her old home. The meadows rippled at her feet; the great trees called to her like old playmates out of the woods; the very wind blew blithely in her hair. The past rushed back, vivid and wistful; memories of her childhood glimmered through her brain. Yonder in the valley lay the Mallan water, where she had first met Gabriel when the woods were green.

Betimes Burnt House rose up before her in the east, its red roof warm above the yews and cypresses, its old wall filleting the brow of the hill. Joan’s heart beat fast, and for the moment her eyes were dim. Was there yet hope for her within those well-loved walls? How would her father greet her?—as of old with his rude, rough tongue?

She reached the iron gate and set it creaking on its rusty hinges. The shrubs and trees were wild and untrammelled as of yore. They seemed to welcome her like green-limbed guardians of the past, tossing their hands, breathing forth deep greetings. Joan saw the track of wheels upon the grass-grown drive, tracks freshly graven, glistening with the rain. To the left the orchard flashed before her eyes, with petals rosy and white scattered by the wind upon the tall, rank grass. Primroses and hyacinths were in bloom there, and daffodils shook their golden faces to the breeze.

She crossed the stretch of gravel and entered the old porch. Her hand held the iron handle; the bell clamored through the silent house. She waited with her heart hurrying, her eyes watching the waving trees. Slow footsteps sounded within. The great door opened a very little and Mrs. Primmer’s yellow face peered out from the gloom.

Joan confronted her with no wavering or fear, the sense of innocence strong within her heart. The woman’s figure closed the entry; with one bony hand she held the door.

“Well, mistress?”

There was an insolence in the very word that made Joan color. She moved forward a step, but Mrs. Primmer did not falter.

“Make way, please.”

“Mr. Gildersedge is ill.”

“My father ill?”

“He maunt see nobody; I have my orders.”

It was plain to Joan that the woman’s rudeness arose from no superabundance of sincere concern. There was an intentional insult in her very attitude. Joan’s gray eyes kindled; she was no child to be shamed and frightened by a frowning face.

“I have come,” she said, quietly, “to see my father.”

“Doctor’s orders—”

“Make way, woman.”

She stepped in and set one hand on Mrs. Primmer’s shoulder. There was no unseemliness in this strength of hers. The hireling fell back even as a hireling should.

“Stand aside!”

“I’ve had my orders.”

“And your pay.”

Joan crossed the hall, unfastening her hat and ignoring the lean, black figure by the door. She climbed the oak stairway, halted in the gallery above, turning to find Mrs. Primmer had followed from the hall. Throwing her hat upon a broad window-sill, she looked down on the woman with a dignity that was not mute.

“Stay,” she said, stretching out a hand.

“Dr. Marjoy told me—”

“Are you the mistress of this house?”

“You won’t get anything out of him, young woman.”

“Spare your words,” said the girl, calmly. “I have come to see my father, and to see him alone. Go back to the kitchen. That is your proper place.”

Very pale but very purposeful, Joan moved down the gallery towards her father’s room. She halted a moment outside the door, listening, watching to see whether the woman followed. There were no sounds save the moaning of the wind, the chattering of the casements, and the beating of boughs against the panes.

Very quietly Joan turned the handle and stood on the threshold of her father’s room. The old man’s bed faced the broad window, where rain clouds raced over the rolling downs. He lay half propped upon pillows, staring at the sullen sky, his thin hands stretched upon the coverlet.

It was not till Joan had closed the door and moved forward into the room that her father awoke to her presence there. A great change had come over him those winter months, for disease had dragged him near to the grave. The yellow skin hung in folds about the neck, the eyes were sunken, the lips bloodless and marked by the teeth. It was the face of the dead more than of the living, sharp, earthy, and repulsive, still infinitely cunning.

When Zeus Gildersedge saw his daughter, a look of peculiar vindictiveness sharpened his thin face. He strove to rise higher in the bed, his yellow talons clawing at the coverlet as he raised himself upon his elbows, the muscles contracted in his pendulous throat. As by instinct Joan had started towards him to help him as of old; the look in his sunken eyes beat her back.

“So you have sneaked home,” he said to her, breathing hard, his eyes glistening with an indescribable malice.

“Father!”

“To beg, eh?”

“Can a daughter beg?”

“He has deserted you, the fine fellow—”

“No, no, not that.”

Zeus Gildersedge propped himself upon his pillows, his birdlike head straining forward upon its yellow neck.

“You have timed it well, eh?”

“Timed it, father?”

“To sneak back and play the pretty penitent and finger the old man’s money.”

“We are poor, father.”

“Poor, eh?”

“The world has wronged us.”

There was an unhallowed smirk on Zeus Gildersedge’s face.

“What about your father?” he asked; “you didn’t come to see him. No, by God! He can die, and that’s about the best thing you think he can do.”

“Father!”

She stretched out her hands to him as though to stem back his taunting words. Zeus Gildersedge was a dying man; the bitterness of the approaching hour, the sordid realism of his past, only incensed him against his fate. There was none of the mild solemnity of death in that dark room. Nothing but malice seemed quick in the lean body, nothing but mocking anger alive in the dim eyes.

“Is it my money you want?” he panted. “I am to be deserted, am I, and then squeezed on my death-bed like a sponge, to keep you and your blackguard from the gutter? Gold, is it? Curse them, they’re all scrambling for it—the parson, the doctor, that woman in the kitchen. What do they care about me—what do they care about me, I say? By God, wench, I won’t give you a farthing!”

He sank back upon his pillows, seized with a spasmodic fit of coughing. His face grew dusky, his eyes suffused. The veins were turgid and swollen in the straining neck; one claw of a hand was hooked in the collar of his shirt.

Joan stood and gazed at him, mute and impotent. His words had stunned her and she could not think. Rain came rattling against the window; storm-clouds darkened the room; the wind moaned in the chimney and whistled over the roof.

The old man upon the bed had recovered his breath. He struggled up and gestured at her with one trembling hand, his eyes shining with a peculiar brightness in his dusky face.

“Get out from here!” he cried.

“Father!”

“I’ll not be bled upon my death-bed. Away, you wastrel! Starve, starve! I’ll not pay for your shame.”

She drew back from him, shuddering. An utter hopelessness descended upon her soul. She knew full well at last that there was no pity in her father’s heart.

“I will go,” she said, moving towards the door.

“Out of my house, you wanton.”

He was leaning from his pillows, his face distorted, one outstretched hand pointing her away. Joan had opened the door; she halted for a moment on the threshold.

“God forgive you,” she said.

“Forgive me!” he screamed; “by God, you have the impudence of the devil!”

Joan went out and closed the door, leaned against the wainscoting with her hand over her eyes. Slowly her strength came back to her. She passed down the old gallery, filled with sad memories of the past, took her hat from off the window-sill, and went down the stairs. In the dusk of the hall Mrs. Primmer met her. Joan swept by the woman without a word, unlatched the door, and went out into the wind and rain.

But before night came Zeus Gildersedge lay dead.

XXXIX

HAGGARD and weary, Joan turned her back upon her old home, and struggled on against the wind towards Rilchester and the sea. Brave woman that she was, the tragic hour beside her father’s bed had benumbed her courage and deepened the forebodings that crowded upon her heart. She had gone hungry since the morning, and for the last two months she had faced starvation with Gabriel in the great city. As she held on against the whirling wind under the gray and hurrying sky, her strength began to ebb from her like wine from some cracked and splendid vase. Her feet lagged along the broad high-road as the wind moaned and the rain beat in her face.

Coming to the cross-roads where the highway from Saltire curled from the woods, she sank down on a granite heap under the shelter of the hedge. In the utter distress of the hour, she still held her old straw hat forgotten in her right hand. Great faintness came over her as she sat there half sheltered from the wind. With trembling fingers she unfastened the collar of her dress, and bowed her head down almost to her knees.

It was as Joan grieved thus with her golden head adroop under the sullen sky that one of those strange crossings of the threads of fate knitted two destinies into one common coil. From Rilchester up the long, listless road came the slim figure of a woman, clad in gray with a knot of violets over her bosom, and her pale face turned wistfully towards the heavens. It was Judith Strong who walked with the wind, returning from one of those long rambles she and Gabriel had enjoyed of old. The days had passed very heavily for Judith since her brother’s tragedy. She loved to be alone amid the woods and by the sea, brooding on the strange sadnesses of life, its lost ideals, and its broken dreams.

Judith, coming to the cross-roads, saw the bowed figure throned on the heap of stones under the hedge. There was something so forlorn and piteous about the woman seated there that Judith stood still, forgetful of her own sad thoughts. She saw the bowed head, the hanging hands, the desolate pose of the whole figure. Her woman’s sympathy awoke at once, for those who have grieved are quick to discover grief.

Joan, hearing footsteps on the road, looked up and turned her face to the mild, questioning eyes that stared her over. Judith had halted by the grass. Some hidden flash of sympathy seemed to leap instinctively from heart to heart. Where had they met and touched before? What common bitterness had smitten both? There were vague memories in Judith’s mind, a prophetic instinct that seemed to tell of all the sadness they had known together.

The two women looked into each other’s eyes with one long, unwavering look that hid some mystery from them both. Judith was the first to break the silence. She might have passed on, but that was not a true woman’s way.

“Are you ill? Let me help you.”

At the sound of that voice, so like Gabriel’s in its mellow tone, a wave of color warmed Joan’s face, for she half guessed who stood before her. There were the same clear eyes, the same delicate features, pure and mobile, sensitive as light. Yet Joan’s heart failed her for the moment; her pride was quick in her despite her misery.

“I am tired,” she said, hanging her head a little, “and have walked too far. I shall be better soon.”

To Judith there was a pathos in the voice that made her heart open like a budding rose. Some deep instinct urged her on, to take rebuffs if they should come.

“Have I not seen your face before?”

Drawing near, she sat down beside Joan on the stones. The move was too sudden to be prevented. Yet Joan would not look into Judith’s eyes, but drew her wet cloak round her and hardened her heart.

“I am only tired,” she said; “please do not trouble over me. I shall be strong again when I have rested.”

Judith touched the other’s cloak.

“Why, you are drenched!” she said; “have you far to go?”

There were lines as of pain about Joan’s mouth; she shivered in the wind and seemed to strive for her breath.

“To Rilchester,” she said, “and then—”

“And then?”

“To London, if I can catch a night train.”

There was sudden silence between them, such a silence that their very hearts seemed to beat in rhythm, one with another. Judith’s eyes were full of light, a lustre of pity as though she guessed some part of the sorrow the other bore. Her heart grew full of dim surmises like a sky half smitten with the dawn.

“To London?” she asked.

Joan did not answer her.

“You must not go to-night or you will catch your death chill. Have you not got a home near?”

Then, like the breaking of gossamer by too heavy a dew, Joan’s courage seemed to fail her of a sudden and she broke into piteous weeping. No petulant child’s tears were they, but the grief of one whose cup of suffering was full. Judith’s words had shaken her very soul. She covered her wet face with her hands and bowed her head down over her knees.

As for Judith, the strong presence of such grief as this stirred to the deeps her woman’s nature. A meaner woman would have fallen to texts, or to juggling glibly with God’s name. Judith’s heart beat straight towards the truth, and she did not squander empty words.

Putting her arm about Joan’s waist, she drew her close to her, even into her bosom, feeling the intake of her breath under the damp clothes and the rain-drenched cloak.

“Tell me,” she said, “what troubles you. Am I not a woman, also? May I not have some share in this?”

Joan took her hands from before her face. In her eyes there burned a new courage, shining through a mist of tears. Should she not tell the truth for good or evil, silence this friend, or challenge her full trust?

“Tell me,” she said, “are you Judith Strong?”

“I am Judith Strong.”

“And I am Joan—Joan Gildersedge.”

The two women sat and looked into each other’s eyes, as though each were striving to read the other’s thoughts. Judith’s arm rested on Joan’s shoulder. She did not flinch from her or turn away.

Perhaps Joan felt the earnest searching of Judith’s eyes, eyes that watched a brother’s honor. The fear of her condemnation grew great within Joan’s heart, the dread that calumny had outpaced her here.

“Yes, I am Joan Gildersedge,” she said, speaking as though her breath were short, with sharp pauses between each sentence; “you know all, yes, don’t speak to me yet. Gabriel—Gabriel and I went away together; for when they accused us falsely my father turned me from my home. Gabriel, who is always noble, surrendered all for my sake, and we lived together through those awful days. They said I ruined him; but no, no, it was not I who ruined Gabriel, but those who lied and perjured the whole truth. Gabriel was always noble, and he loved me, and I him.”

Judith swept out her right hand as though to clasp her, but Joan’s hand put her back.

“Listen,” she said, still speaking breathlessly, “for I would have you hear the whole. Gabriel and I—Gabriel and I hid ourselves in London and tried to live as best we could. We had but little money, and no work came. Soon we began to starve and starve, and in my anguish for him I came here again to see my father, even that he might take pity on us and give us help. But no; though he is dying, he turned me away with curses. And that is why I sit here in the rain.”

There was a clear light in Judith’s eyes, like the light in a mother’s eyes whose pride is perfected in her child. She set both her hands upon Joan’s shoulders, held her at arm’s-length, and looked into her face.

“Joan Gildersedge,” she said.

“Judith.”

“Well did I know my brother’s heart; now I know also the full reason of his great love. Were I a man, should I not love you even as Gabriel loves? Come, you are my sister, and I am proud of it.”

Silently, while the wind whistled over the hedgerows, these two good women looked long into each other’s eyes. The tears were dry upon Joan’s cheeks, but on Judith’s lashes there were fresh tears. Bending herself, she kissed Joan Gildersedge upon the mouth, held both her hands clasped fast between her own.

“That men have lied,” she said, “I believe full well, since I have seen you, I who am Gabriel’s sister. Yet is there not joy in such a grief as this, since love has triumphed over wrong and pain?”

Joan looked at her, even as one who sees pure water bubbling in a desert place.

“I had not thought that any could believe,” she said, “for the whole world seems built upon distrust.”

Judith took the wet cloak from Joan’s shoulders. Her own gray coat was dry, for she had sheltered from the showers under the trees. She gave it to Joan and would not be rebuked therefrom.

“To London,” she said, “you must not go to-night.”

Joan blushed, touched by an act that had more honest sympathy than had a hundred words. Since she was weary and tired at heart, such tyranny was very sweet.

“But what of Gabriel?” she asked.

“Gabriel can wait,” Judith answered her, with a smile; “you are my charge, and I will play my brother’s keeper. Shall I risk your health on such a night! No, I have come by other plans. Can you walk with me one short mile?”

Some faint color had risen to Joan’s cheeks. She stood up like one half dazed, one hand still clasped in Judith’s, the other holding her wet skirt.

“Where shall I go?” she asked.

“Come; leave the where to me.”

Not a mile from the cross-roads towards Saltire lived an old widow whom Judith had mothered in her winter years. The widow’s cottage was set back from the road amid trees and meadows, all alone. To this same cottage Judith took Joan that windy evening, like some kind fairy radiant in doing good. She would lodge Joan there for her sake and for Gabriel’s, and tread the dream-path she herself had made.

Thus these two, sisters in charity, came that evening to the little cottage and knocked at the door under the tiled porch. Judith went in while Joan waited in the twilight. She heard the voice of Gabriel’s sister conjuring for her comfort in the cottage room. Nor did the old woman hesitate to comply, for Judith’s asking was law with the honest poor.

Widow Milton was soon laying wood in the parlor grate and setting a chair for the drying of Joan’s wet clothes. Judith came out to Gabriel’s wife in the twilight, with a wonderful smile on her pale face.

“Go in, sister,” she said, “the old lady can be trusted. Stay, promise me, till I come again.”

And Joan promised, with her arms about Judith’s neck.

XL

MAJOR MALTRAVERS had taken a “hunting-box” early in the year in perilous proximity to Gabingly Castle. Maltravers had remained a god above the clouds through the autumn and early winter, both for expediency’s sake and to prevent any unnecessary linking-up of incidents. His name had not appeared in the cause of justice, for Gabriel’s undefended suit had led to no ransacking of evidence on Ophelia’s side. The soldier had soon become popular in the neighborhood, and he was even formally introduced to Ophelia on the hunting-field by Miss Mabel Saker, who posed as a mutual friend. Maltravers, being an excellent horseman and a good man at the flask, had soon won the esteem of the “young bloods” of the neighborhood. His keen, jockey-like face and trim, tailor-made figure were to the fore in many a gusty gallop, and his voice rang as clear as the huntsman’s horn.

Ophelia had ridden to many a meet, sitting her thoroughbred like a queen, and staring full in the whole world’s face. There was no wavering of her vivid eyes, no tinge of discomfort upon her cheeks. Had she not been proved an honest woman, one who had been wronged and whom the law had righted? A fair dame she seemed with her coat buttoned tight over her smooth, full bust, her rich hair closely plaited under her hat. Men saw that Maltravers was often beside her, twirling his mustachios, staring in her face. Her friends whispered that she would soon be comforted for the loss of a husband and a home.

Yet human schemes come often to naught when the raw elements are in the ascendant. As the year wore on towards the spring a pair of brown eyes had challenged the blue. Miss Mabel Saker had been established at Gabingly since the autumn as Ophelia Gusset’s bosom friend. It was noted by the vigilant at the “meets” that Maltravers’ black horse stood more often beside Miss Saker’s bay mare. The soldier was one of those mutable beings whose honor was “blinkered” by an immoderate vanity. As for Miss Saker, she was his very twin in such sentiments as cheated the heart.

Possibly none of the sweet gossips of the neighborhood saw much in the drama to point a moral, for, superficial as is the veil that covers deceit, it is rarely rent by the professional gossip, but rather by the hand that scorns all guile. There is more error in habitual prejudice than in that calm sincerity which is slow to condemn, and the pessimist sees his own sour face reflected in all things, be they foul or clean. Maltravers’ name had never entered the zone of scandal that had played about Gabriel’s honor. He was considered to be a mere sportsman who had heard of the excellence of the Rilchester pack and had come for a gallop over the Mallan meadows.

Whatever the reasons might be, the fact remained that Maltravers was less Ophelia’s hero than he had been when she was Gabriel’s wife. Possibly she had expected too much from a man whose vigorous egoism clashed with her own. Such a passion as theirs was utterly selfish, and as such was doomed to no true consummation.

Ophelia was the last woman in the world to abide a rival, even in the minor matter of dress. Moreover, she had always considered Miss Mabel Saker as a protégée and a disciple, a foil to her own more lavish beauty. She had never been jealous of her friend, for the simple reason that she had never possessed sufficient respect for Miss Saker’s fascination to inspire the passion. Hence she had been slow at first to realize the change in Maltravers’ humor, nor did she suspect him of any inward disloyalty to herself.

There was no great vice in Mabel Saker. She was mischief personified, a vain, merry creature, with a mind like a spice-box and eyes like amber. If a man admired her, she had neither the heart nor the character to treat him with surliness. Being so inured to sentimental pleasantries, she was not easily frightened by anything she might see in a man’s eyes. Flirtation was merely a recreation with her, an amusement no more serious than fly-fishing or the aesthetic appreciation of a musical comedy. She was a woman of no ideals, few convictions. She lived her sensuous, merry existence in the sun, and never delved around her for the problems that yawn like primeval forests about the fair meads of life.

Maltravers jested with her, and she took his jests as she would have taken a flask of scent or many such trifles, in delicate acknowledgment of her own charms. She did not consider Ophelia’s powerful pride or her aggressive egoism that could suffer no shadow. Hence she was unable at first to comprehend Ophelia’s change of temper, her petulance, the true reason of their frequent bickerings. Miss Saker had much of the vixen in her, in the spiteful sense. She was too shallow and boisterous to appreciate the negative passions in a friend; she had too little sympathy to treat seriously and honorably the injured pride of a fellow-woman. Hence she tossed her head and bridled at what she was pleased to call Ophelia’s “whims.” And, being a creature of contradictory impulses, she took pleasure in aggravating her friend’s impatience and in playing the tormentor with true feminine agility.

Gay swimmer that she was, Miss Saker soon discovered herself beyond the shallows of her frivolous philosophy. The climax came with an abruptness that startled even her futile soul. And since Mabel Saker was a woman who heartily detested any troubling of her sensuous good-humor, she was soon every whit as bitter as Ophelia and as reasonless as a frightened ape.

The storm broke one evening after a dinner-party at the castle. Maltravers had lavished his fascinations in Miss Saker’s service and had left Ophelia to a casual friend. By the fatefulness of coincidence, Ophelia had come upon the pair seated under the palms in a corner of the conservatory. Moreover, she had seen Maltravers take the flower the brunette had pinned over her heart.

About midnight, the very night after Joan had taken lodging in Widow Milton’s cottage, Mabel Saker was in her bedroom unravelling her dark hair. To her came Ophelia fully dressed, her face pale as china, her lips almost bloodless, her eyes peculiarly bright. There was a restrained fury in her look, an atmosphere about her that boded ill for the friendship between the two.

It was a woman’s quarrel that night, swift, malicious, and contemptible. As is the case in some such feminine fracas, the disputants grew the more bitter, the more icily eager with every word. Gibe stabbed at gibe and taunt at taunt. There was no generosity in their passion to give human pathos to the scene.

Ophelia leaned against an escritoire and watched with her hard blue eyes the flushed and dishevelled woman before her. They were both breathless for the moment, like two duellists who shrink back dazed after some fierce locking of their swords. The younger woman tossed back her hair, her bosom rising and falling rapidly as in an ecstasy of unspeakable anger.

“Are you mad?” she said. “This is too utterly ridiculous.”

Ophelia laughed, her white face shining with her scorn.

“It is the fashion to think others ridiculous,” she retorted, “when all the folly is one’s own.”

“Tell me, whose fault is it?”

“I am asking you the same question.”

“Because a man pays me small attentions am I to snub him like a barmaid?”

“Small attentions—well phrased, indeed!”

“Is it my fault if he prefers me to you?”

“Is it his fault if you throw yourself under his feet every hour of the day? Leave him alone, or you shall pay for it.”

Miss Saker sat up stiffly in her chair, her face quivering as the words smote her.

“This is your gratitude after I have been such a friend to you! Oh, my God, I will be even with you, and that quickly. What of Gabriel Strong, and the girl you ruined? What of Jim’s cunning and bribery? Don’t I know all about this? Pay for it, indeed!”

Miss Saker recovered her composure of a sudden, went to the glass and began to braid her hair. She held the pins between her quivering lips, her hands working feverishly, her eyes hot and strained. Ophelia watched her as though half repentant, more from fear of what might follow than out of pity for her friend.

“What are you doing, Mab?”

Mabel Saker paid no heed to her, but went to the wardrobe, drew out a morning gown and coat, donned them, and took a hat from the bonnet rack.

“Have I hurt you, Mab?”

The brunette turned on her with eyes afire. She was a woman out of whose heart all pity and forgiveness had fled. Nothing but infinite resentment ruled her impulses.

“I will not stay in this house another hour.”

“But it is midnight; what will people say?”

“I don’t care. You have insulted me too badly, and you shall pay for it.”

She started aside towards the wall and seized the bell-rope that hung beside the bed. Ophelia moved towards her with hand outstretched. She was too late, however, either for penitence or intimidation. Ten times or more Mabel Saker had jerked at the cord, and the bell clamored distantly in the silence of the house.

XLI

A LETTER came to Gabriel in his dingy rooms, where he was waiting to hear news of Joan and of her quest. There had not been money enough to take both of them to Rilchester, when possible defeat would have burdened the journey home. Gabriel had never known the full divinity of Joan’s love till she parted from him with a brave smile in her dear eyes. Her womanly courage had revealed itself to him in all its pathetic beauty when her golden head sunned the shadows of the room no more.

Gabriel was at his supper, a sorry meal enough, when the letter came to him from Rilchester. He had been in a desperate mood all day, nor had he slept the previous night, with dark doubts fluttering through his brain like bats through a ruin. Why had not Joan returned? At the dim and half-desolate station, Gabriel had watched, waiting and waiting as each night train came in. He had spent the next day in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and by the river, hanging a haggard face over the stone parapet, too sick at heart to eat. How often had defeat smitten hope down into the dust! Ever and again he had wandered back to the hot, dusty by-street, hoping to find that Joan had returned.

When Gabriel looked at the letter that the dirty servant tossed onto the table, he flushed like a boy, and his heavy, sleepless eyes grew bright. The writing was Judith’s. Visions of green woods and golden meadows flashed up before him like romance, the warm scent of a woman’s hair, the memory of her pale face and shadowy eyes. Judith! How he loved that name! Were not all truth and beauty built therein, purity and pity, the divine tenderness that makes earth heaven?

He tore open the envelope and read the letter, leaning forward a little towards the window, his hands trembling markedly:

“MY DEAREST BROTHER [it began],—At last I am able to write to you after all these months of silence and distress. Oh, strange fate, that in finding a woman fainting on the road to Rilchester I should find my brother!”

The letter, warm and fragrant with the love of a good woman, went on to tell how Joan and Judith had come together after Joan’s flight from Zeus Gildersedge’s death-bed. The outpourings of hours of solitary yearning seemed to flow in the eager and impassioned words. Of Joan, Judith wrote with a fervor that brought a strange smile to Gabriel’s face:

“Now I can understand your love, brother, and your strong heroism in defying society for a woman’s sake. This dear Joan is blood of my blood, heart of my heart. In two days we have become as sisters. Ah, Gabriel, I would trust her, even if she had come to me from the gate of hell. But methinks she is more like Beatrice out of paradise.”

From such sisterly exultation Judith digressed to speak of John Strong:

“Father has aged since the autumn. He is whiter and stoops a little, and his eyes look tired. Poor father! he has always been a hard man, but I believe the ice is broken about his heart. Would to God he would be less proud! And yet I love this pride of his when he faces the prattlers here like a Brutus, and frowns back those he does not trust.

“Moreover, I am convinced that father has changed his opinions greatly, though he says but little. That woman—pardon me, Gabriel, for I hate her—has been brazening it about like any countess. That she is none too honest I would stake my soul. We of Gabingly and Saltire are like border barons locked in a death feud. Maltravers. Have you ever heard the name from Ophelia’s lips? Father has hinted that he has had his suspicions aroused by some casual circumstances that have been brought to his notice. Would to Heaven he would be more frank with me!

“Now, Gabriel, my own brother, let me plead with you as a sister. Joan must remain here; I have my reasons, and a woman’s wit is worth more than a lawyer’s tongue. As for yourself, stay in London till I bid you come.

“Joan is well. See, I enclose a short letter from her. Also a little money out of my allowance. Use it, dear Gabriel, and God bless you!

“Pardon the vagueness of all this; I write in great haste.

“JUDITH.”

Gabriel sat there in the twilight with the letters and bank-notes laid upon his knee. From without came the sound of a woman singing, singing in one of the dim and narrow rooms below his window. To Gabriel it seemed for the moment as the voice of some aspiring spirit climbing from the squalor of life into the more splendid land of dreams. It was but a poor, struggling child of art who sang, mocking with her melody the coarse cares of a loveless world.

He took Joan’s letter and read it as through a mist, halting often as though to hold and possess each word.

“DEAR HEART [it ran],—Judith, your sister, will have told you all; how we two have come together and how she has helped me. I had dreamed of noble women in the past, and now I have found one of my own flesh and blood and crown and all. Judith is wonderful; were she a queen, I could die for her as easily as I could fall asleep.

“Of my father I need write nothing, save that he is dead.

“Oh, my own, I stretch out my arms to you, and my heart is full. Yet must I stay here in exile, even as you must wait for what God shall give to us. I have great joy and faith in Judith, for like an angel she seems to press the clouds back from the world.

“Gabriel, good-night. There is a spirit in me that bids me hope.”

The man sat a long while in the silent room, while the night came down and the gloom increased. Out of the dusk, under the shadow of fruit-trees, within beck of a red rose, Gabriel beheld two women standing, fair women whose faces seemed to cleanse the world. Horror and despair seemed to faint away like black waters ebbing from before their feet. For in either hand there was a lamp, golden-tongued and stately, Faith out of Heaven.

The singing had ceased in the room below, and over the myriad roofs rose the solemn arch of the moon. Gabriel watched it climb the sky, till it seemed to hang like a mighty halo behind the iron cross of a church.

XLII

THEY buried Zeus Gildersedge in Saltire churchyard, Mr. Mince officiating, bleating through the burial service with his usual sentimental unction.

“Earth to earth, and dust to dust.”

Good gold also to the greedy, and the dead man’s store consecrated to strangers and to hirelings. Thus Zeus Gildersedge, who had never given a penny away gladly in his life, went to his last resting-place, and, Lazarus-like, lay in Charity’s bosom, while his child was barred out from before the gates of “the worthy.”

There was a goodly gathering about the grave, for the funeral had excited the curiosity of the villagers. Mrs. Mince was there in black gloves and black bonnet; also James Marjoy, pulling his ragged mustache; also his wife, eying creation irritably through her brimming glasses. Mrs. Primmer, hard mouthed and self-satisfied, stood beside the gravestone of a girl who had died in child-bed, dabbing her eyes at intervals with a large, white handkerchief. To judge by the dignity of the display, Zeus Gildersedge might have been one of the most respected of patriarchs, a man whose sympathies had fathomed the woes of many a poor fellow’s pocket.

At the end thereof, the crowd dwindled through the lych-gate, under the green chestnut-trees, and by the school-house where the children were at work. Mrs. Primmer, whose tongue had been busy ascribing Zeus Gildersedge’s death to his daughter’s “shocking interference,” accompanied Mrs. Mince up Saltire High Street to the vicarage. Mrs. Primmer carried a little black hand-bag, wherein lay the handkerchief she had used at the funeral, her post-office savings book, and several trinkets she had appropriated from Joan’s bedroom at Burnt House. Mrs. Primmer, in acknowledgment of her many virtues, was to be received once more at the vicarage as cook.

Dr. Marjoy and his wife drove home together, uninspired above their mean level of materialism by the miser’s funeral. The suggestiveness of the scene had been lost upon them—the subtlety of those significant words, “dust to dust.” They discussed the profits of the case over the tea-table, discussed it with that complacency that had accustomed them to existing upon the misfortunes of others.

“I should send in my account at once to the executors,” said the lady, eying the carpet and debating inwardly how much it would cost her to replace it with a new one.

“Mince and Lang are acting in the matter.”

Mrs. Marjoy frowned and fidgeted in her chair.

“How much have you charged?” she asked.

“Thirty pounds or so.”

“Make it fifty, dear; dead men can afford to pay. I am sure you were backward and forward enough.”

“I think it is only fair,” said the doctor, “that one should recuperate one’s self from the wealthy for the amount of time one has to waste gratuitously on the poor. It is an extraordinary thing, but whenever I get a bad diphtheria case it is always in a cottage, and one gets nothing out of it.”

“I thought the Robinsons’ baby was really going to have whooping-cough at last,” added Mrs. Marjoy, “but it turned out only a cold. That would have been a good case, James; people are always ridiculously anxious about an only child.”

The doctor sipped his tea.

“I think I might charge old Gildersedge’s estate sixty guineas,” he observed. “I spared the daughter any inquiries about that last attack of syncope.”

“His death lies at her door,” said Mrs. Marjoy, pursing up her mouth. “Infamous wench—attacking an old man on his death-bed. Nothing more has been seen of her; I suppose she has gone back to that young blackguard of a Strong.”

“At all events, Zeus Gildersedge did not leave her a farthing.”

“Vice must be suppressed,” quoth Mrs. Marjoy, with irritable unction.

Judith Strong had heard in Saltire of Zeus Gildersedge’s death, but she had kept the news from Joan, knowing that Gabriel’s wife had had sufficient sorrow since the autumn. The same day that the old man was buried in Saltire churchyard, Judith had ordered out her dog-cart and persuaded her father to drive with her towards the sea.

Judith seemed to be the one being in the world for whom John Strong had any sentimental respect. The merchant was a hard man, even as many men are hard who have buffeted their way to the van in their strenuous and materialistic struggle of the day. The aggressive and self-reliant elements of his nature had been exaggerated to a degree that rendered him often offensive to folk of finer fibre. John Strong’s vindictiveness towards his son had originated largely from outraged vanity and imbittered pride. It was not so much the offence, but the destructive and thorough sincerity of the deed that had made John Strong so implacable a Minos. Doubtless he would have ignored a guarded indiscretion. Gabriel’s whole-hearted enthusiasm in consummating his own social overthrow had maddened his father, to whom prudence was one of the prime virtues.

Yet John Strong had a heart in him under all the grim and orthodox materialism that had contracted about his character. Judith could remember the time when her father, less cumbered by the cult of gold, had romped with her like a great boy. Nor was it imbittered ambition alone that had whitened his hair and bowed his broad shoulders a little those winter months. Deep under the granite surface John Strong had loved his son, and loved him still with a doggedness that he himself perhaps would never have allowed.

Judith, warm-hearted woman, had suspected this same truth, and had drawn her dreams therefrom. Had not her father, silent and stubborn, watchful as some grizzled dog, confessed that he had received rumors that had set him pondering anew? There was old Symes, the solicitor at Rilchester, a fast friend, who had seen Ophelia at St. Aylmers while he was taking his own holiday there. Had not Symes sworn in confidence that he had seen this same Maltravers with Ophelia, this Maltravers whose name was now linked with hers? Then there were certain of The Friary servants, hired creatures whom John Strong had distrusted, and had taken pains to strengthen his distrust. Some such suggestive hints as these had fallen casually to him since the autumn; nor was he the man to throw a hint away.

John Strong climbed heavily into the dog-cart that day, and sat himself down beside Judith, telling the groom they did not need him for the afternoon. Judith touched the brown mare with the whip, and they swung away down the drive and under the great oaks of the home park. John Strong’s eyes wandered almost wistfully over the rich meadow-land, the woods, the fish-ponds glimmering below the garden. Had he not held this for his son, that son whom he had hoped to see more of an aristocrat than was his father?

As they went through Saltire they heard the church-bell tolling, slowly and heavily, from the tall spire.

“Who’s dead?” John Strong asked, as he saw people moving towards the gate.

“Zeus Gildersedge,” Judith answered, glancing at him slantwise as she drove.

She saw her father’s figure stiffen unconsciously, his forehead grow full of lines under the brim of his shooting-hat. His lids were half closed over his keen, gray eyes as they drove on down the street in the full glare of the sun.

“Zeus Gildersedge is dead, is he?”

“Yes, father.”

“His daughter’s doing, I suppose?”

“No, not that. He has been killing himself for years with wine and opium.”

“So. But how do you know that?”

Judith colored.

“Every one knows of it,” she said.

John Strong sat silent, staring southward where he could see Cambron Head and a streak of sea-blue in the distance. His mouth was not so implacable as of old, and there was something in his eyes that half suggested to Judith the thoughts that were in his heart.

“Girl,” he said suddenly.

Judith tightened her hold upon the reins.

“Did you ever see this wench? Don’t be afraid of telling the truth.”

“I have seen her, father.”

“Mere baggage, I suppose.”

“Gabriel thought her a noble woman. I think as Gabriel did.”

John Strong cast a rapid glance at his daughter’s face. There was some movement about his mouth—the hard lines were softer, the gray eyes less repellent.

“You mean to tell me that the woman is presentable?”

“Far more presentable than I am. Do you think Gabriel would have risked all for a slattern?”

John Strong winced.

“Then whose fault was it?” he asked.

“Whose, indeed?”

“You tell me that Gabriel is an honest man, that the girl is all that she should be, while the law has declared for the Gusset woman. How can these things harmonize?”

“My dear father, do you trust Ophelia Gusset?”

John Strong considered his reply a moment, like a witness confronting an expert advocate.

“The law trusted her,” he said.

“What is the law?”

“Common-sense, girl.”

“It was Ophelia’s word against Gabriel’s. You believed Ophelia.”

“The evidence was on her side. And why the devil should the woman kick up such a dust if she had suffered nothing?”

“Because that marriage was a mockery; because she did not love Gabriel; because she wanted to get back her liberty.”

John Strong leaned back and stared sullenly under his bushy brows towards the sea. Judith knew that he was thinking deeply, and that his thoughts were tinged with bitterness, the bitterness of a proud and self-righteous man half moved to confess himself deceived. Had not his own reason uttered these same words that he heard from Judith’s lips, and had he not hurled them again and again out of his heart with scorn?

“Judith,” he said, “I would give my right hand to know whether my son was a fool or a knave.”

“And the proof lies—”

“Partly with the woman for whom he ruined himself. Gabriel was always a dreamer and an enthusiast. I tried to break him of his Quixotism. That’s where we clashed.”

“And Joan Gildersedge?”

“The girl may have been an adventuress, or a mere twin fool to Gabriel. If I could have that girl’s heart like an open ledger before me, I wager I could discover who falsified the accounts.”

“You think so, father?”

“I have seen something of the world.”

“And Ophelia?”

He answered with an oath.

Before them ran a straight road. On the left towered a beech-wood, where huge trunks pillared the gloom under the dense cloud of green. On the right ran meadows ablaze with gold. Set back from the road stood a red-tiled cottage under the shade of two poplars and an elm. The white garden-gate blinked between two yew-trees at the end of a path that ran over the meadow.

Judith drew up suddenly by the roadside and sprang down into the grass. She took a strap from under the seat and tethered the mare to a stake in the hedge. Her father watched her with no great interest. Judith had many poor folk on her charity, and such visits as this were by no means rare.

“Come with me,” she said, holding out her hand to him.

“Who lives yonder? Old Milton? You don’t want me on these occasions.”

“Yes, I do want you, father. Old Widow Milton was very grateful for the seeds you sent her.”

“Seeds I sent her?”

“Yes, you remember, for her garden. Come. Jenny will be safe tied to the hedge.”

John Strong, rising with something betwixt a grunt and a sigh, clambered out of the trap and followed Judith over the stile. He did not trouble himself to understand her humor, and, moreover, he was busied with reflections of his own that drove Dame Milton and her small affairs into oblivion. He was thinking of Gabriel, and of what Judith had said to him as they drove from Saltire. Like a man who had lost his way in a fog, he peered round him into space, ignorant that the very path he sought curled close to his feet.

They came to the gate and entered the little front garden, bright with its flowers. Judith turned off along the brick path that ran round the cottage to where several fruit-trees overhung a patch of grass. Beds of cottage flowers bloomed in barbaric abundance about the lawn. Under a plum-tree was set a table covered with a clean, white cloth, and in an old arm-chair sat a girl reading.

John Strong had followed his daughter round the cottage, with his hands in his coat-pockets and his hat tilted over his eyes. He glanced half listlessly at the flowers, as though the opulence of his own garden had spoiled him for the humbler broideries of nature. He had no definite consciousness with regard to externals for the moment, and had followed Judith more from lack of thought than from any desire to speak with Widow Milton. Thus when he came to a sudden halt on the grass behind the cottage, and saw a pale, slim woman standing under a fruit-tree with an open book held in both her hands, he started, stiffened at the hips, and seemed not a little nonplussed by the unexpectedness of the vision.

His surprise was increased the more by Judith’s behavior. He saw his daughter go to the woman standing under the tree, kiss her, and thrust her back gently into the chair. A look, a word or two passed between them. Instinctively John Strong had taken off his hat. He stood irresolutely in the middle of the lawn, holding his hat between his hands, staring first at Joan and then at Judith.

But Gabriel’s sister had no intention of suffering the scene to degenerate into melodrama. She put a chair forward, took her father’s hat, smiled at him as though the situation was the most natural thing in the whole world.

“Sit down, father dear.”

And John Strong sat down.

Judith had flown to the cottage door.

“We are ready for tea, please, Mrs. Milton; there are three of us.”

She was back again in her white dress like a beam of light, her eyes tremulous, her face eager with the inspiration of the moment. Was not the delicate balance poised upon her diplomacy? She gave Joan one long, loving look, and then turned to watch her father.

As for John Strong, he sat there a man very ill at ease within himself, neither knowing whether to be angry nor upon what reason he could base his anger. Who was this white-faced woman with the splendid hair, whose half-frightened and mesmeric eyes stared at him from under the shadow of the tree? How had she come there, and what was she to Judith? John Strong’s eyes twinkled nervously over the half-reclining figure. He was expecting an introduction, but no such trite formality released him from his ignorance.

Judith’s voice reached his ear. It was a perilous hour for Gabriel and for Joan, and Judith’s courage rose to the occasion. Father and sister both looked to her for promptings, and Judith sustained the burden of it all.

“My father is a great gardener,” she said, flashing a look into Joan’s eyes.

“Ah, yes; I, too, know something of flowers, for I love them all.”

John Strong, autocrat though he was, accepted the opening gladly, even as a callow boy welcomes a partner’s sympathy at a dance. He awoke and expanded, grew warm and even eager. The two women encouraged him with that luminous interest that a philosopher loves in his disciples. Mysteries were unfolded, the subtleties in horticulture were discussed. John Strong, enthusiast that he was, grew the more surprised at the knowledge this mere woman possessed. Nor was her knowledge mere book-lore concerning birds and flowers, but the vivid wisdom of one who had waded through dew-drenched fields at many a dawn and watched wild life from many a woodland hermitage.

John Strong was very partial to a pretty woman, provided she had _l’air spirituel_ and a certain stateliness that suggested “birth.” This stranger under the fruit-tree was wonderfully intelligent, nor was there anything of the “blue” about her to arouse distrust. What eyes she had, and what a mouth! Who the dickens was she? What a goose Judith was to forget the decent formalities of society. Gabriel’s wife? Could it be possible?

Tea came. Mrs. Milton, in a clean apron and cap, beamed upon them like a ruddy cottage rose, honest and uncultivated.

Joan drew to the table, and John Strong watched her white, delicate hands hovering over the cups. He had grown silent of a sudden—thoughtful, restless. Joan’s eyes wavered up to his, large, limpid, and entreating.

“May I give you sugar?”

“Three lumps, please.”

“Cream?”

“Cream, thank you.”

“Won’t you sit in the shade. It is such a glare out there in the sun.”

John Strong edged his chair under the tree, while Judith watched him, smiling out of her dark eyes. It was all very simple, yet very strange. She wondered what thoughts were working in her father’s brain.

Half an hour passed, smoothly enough, and then came the leave-taking. Joan, very pale and a little defiant for all her wistfulness, stood up and looked into John Strong’s face. The gray eyes and the blue ones met and challenged each other steadily. Judith was watching Joan as a mother watches a child taking the first step on the stair of fame. It was Joan’s instinct that triumphed in that moment. She went straight up to John Strong, put up her mouth to him to be kissed.

And John Strong kissed her.

“Thank you,” was all she said.

As for Gabriel’s father, he spoke never a word as he drove home with Judith towards Saltire. His daughter watched him, biding her time, wondering whether he were angry or not, and what would follow if his pride should prove too strong.

It was not till he had entered his own lodge gates that John Strong spoke to Judith of the woman he had met at the cottage.

“Is she—?” he said.

“Yes—Gabriel’s wife.”

John Strong was silent again for fully a minute. Then he asked Joan a single question.

“Was this a plant?”

His daughter looked him full in the face.

“No, father,” she said; “I did not know we should drive there till after we heard the death-bell tolling.”

“This is the truth?”

“Have I ever lied to you in my life?”

XLIII

THE morning after Zeus Gildersedge’s burial, John Strong walked the terrace before Saltire Hall, a man much troubled within himself. Sentiment had always seemed so doubtful a virtue to the tea-merchant that he had for years regarded any such ebullition of the soul with intense suspicion. After a long talk with Judith the preceding night he had gone to bed in a mood so generous and pliant that his own daughter had been astonished at the sudden surrender of her father’s pride.

But with the morning, that sober hour when the mind gleams like a sphere of marble in the sun, John Strong’s emotions had cooled discouragingly. He viewed them on rising much as a masker regards the gay clothes he had worn the night before, when wine had cozened him out of his saner self. John Strong went down to breakfast and faced Judith stolidly over the massive oak table. She saw speedily that his mood had changed, and that he was much more the father she had known of old.

Judith, with a sense of emptiness at her heart, left him alone after the meal, to his papers and his pipe. John Strong smoked vigorously, biting the amber mouth-piece, twisting his papers to and fro with the viciousness of a man irritated by his own indecision. Judith, on the watch, saw her father pass out onto the terrace with his favorite dog following at his heels. By instinct she went to the organ that stood in the great gallery above the hall, and began to play some sad, heart-searching melodies religion had drawn from the deeps of the soul. The solemn tones pealed out into the sunlight with a passion that throbbed from the woman’s heart.

John Strong stood still to listen. The lines softened somewhat on his face and a slight tremor played about the dogged mouth. Few men, be they blunt Philistines, are inert to music when the tide of trouble runs deep. John Strong leaned against the balustrading of the terrace, and felt once more the throes of tenderness that sleep had wiped from out his brain.

It was even as he pondered thus, pacing to and fro, then halting for a time as though thought claimed every red spherelet coursing in his blood, that John Strong heard the sound of wheels upon the carriage-drive beyond the garden. The sound skirted the pines and laurels and the three great cedars, and ceased before the entrance on the northern front of the Hall. John Strong, with a shadow as of displeasure upon his face, turned towards the library window that opened upon the terrace.

Then he heard voices, a woman’s and a man’s. A door closed. John Strong halted in the sun. To him from the window came a man-servant, sleek and clean-shaven, treading deferentially towards his master.

“A lady to see you, sir.”

“What name?”

“She would give no name, sir.”

“Hum.”

“I showed her into the library.”

“What sort of lady, William?”

“Young, sir; came in a cab, one of Dixon’s traps from Rilchester. Hope I did right, sir; the lady said it was important.”

“Quite right,” said John Strong, moving in the direction of the library.

Within he found a smartly dressed, brown-haired woman in a pink toque seated with constrained precision in the middle of the sofa. The perfume of Parma violets filled the room. The stranger was palpably nervous, a little hot and flurried, like a woman who had hurried to catch a train. John Strong stared at her, hat in hand, questioned her as to the reason of the favor her presence conferred upon him.

“Mr. Strong?” she asked, tentatively, smiling forcedly, rising, and sinking again into her seat.

“I am John Strong, madam—”

“I have come on a very delicate matter—”

The ex-tea-merchant took a chair and settled himself so that he could see the woman’s face.

“A delicate matter?” he repeated, scenting charity, or a hospital donation.

“Most delicate, and to me—painful, Mr. Strong. Excuse me if I seem disconnected. I want you to promise—”

She hesitated a moment, and sat staring half apologetically into the old man’s face.

“Well, madam, what am I to promise?”

“That this visit of mine shall be kept a profound secret.”

John Strong elevated his eyebrows.

“If you will first tell me your name, madam—” he suggested.

“My name?”

“I shall be better able to understand the situation.”

The lady in the pink toque drew off her gloves with nervous jerks and laid them neatly in her lap. Then she put her veil up and moistened her lips with her tongue.

“My name is Mabel Saker,” she said, with her eyes fixed on the man’s face; “probably you remember that name.”

Most certainly John Strong remembered it. The expression on his massive and determined face betrayed the unpleasant familiarity of those few syllables. He sat in silence for the moment, his gray eyes fixed on the woman before him.

“So, madam,” he said, “you desire this interview to be kept secret. Will you kindly inform me what its purpose is?”

“Does my name suggest it to you?”

“I have my suspicions.”

“And you will consider any information I may give you as privileged?”

“How privileged, madam?”

“That you may make use of it where and when you like, provided my name is never mentioned.”

John Strong settled himself firmly in his chair like the man of weight and substance that he was.

“Well, madam,” he said, “I make you this promise. I suppose what you have to tell me concerns my son.”

Miss Saker touched her lips with her handkerchief and coughed suggestively. She assumed an air of reluctance with a cleverness that did her adaptability credit.

“Mr. Strong,” she said, impressively, “I have suffered greatly in my mind since certain unfortunate facts came to my knowledge. Doubt and indecision have made a martyr of me. You will sympathize, Mr. Strong, when I confess to you that I have been torn between friendship and a sense of duty.”

John Strong nodded like a judge.

“Let me assure you, madam, that you have my sympathy,” he said.

Miss Saker pressed her hand tragically to her forehead and aped the manner of a popular actress whom she admired.

“How dreadful a thing it is,” she observed, “to find that one has been deceived!”

“Most painful, madam.”

“Your son, Mr. Strong—”

“My son, yes, madam.”

“Was absolutely innocent, as was the girl whose honor they traduced.”

Miss Saker’s brown eyes were fixed expectantly upon the old man’s face. She had promised herself some dramatic excitement in watching the effect of her disclosures upon Gabriel’s father. The result was less sensational than she could have imagined. She saw the old man sink more deeply into his chair. His head was bowed down over his chest, and there was a sudden spasm as of pain upon his face.

“Please explain,” he said, in a strange voice.

Mabel Saker, somewhat frightened, pretended inordinate concern.

“Oh, Mr. Strong, the truth has been too much for you. I have been clumsy. Oh—”

The old man quieted her with a gesture of the hand.

“If you would be kind to me,” he said, “please tell me quickly all you know. It was a conspiracy, I suppose.”

Miss Saker began to lose her melodramatic action.

“Major Maltravers—”

“Major Maltravers. Exactly.”

“He was in love with Ophelia Gusset.”

“Exactly.”

“Ophelia was sick of your son.”

“So I have heard.”

“People wrote anonymous letters.”

“People do that sort of thing—women, I should have said.”

“You understand me.”

“Perfectly, madam; and the witnesses?”

Miss Saker put two plump fingers before her mouth.

“Bribery,” she lisped; “inquire at Callydon, Mr. Strong, and elsewhere; inquire at St. Aylmers. I need not advise you in this.”

“And the decree has been made absolute?”

“Six months—”

“It is too late, thank God, for mere intervention.”

Miss Saker stared.

“Why do you say ‘thank God’?” she asked.

“Because, madam, I would not have my son re-wedded to a devil.”

There was a short but impressive silence between them for a moment. Then Miss Saker stood up, tugging at her gloves. John Strong also rose like a man who was very tired.

“You understand, Mr. Strong,” she said, “what a terrible ordeal this has been to me.”

“I understand, madam, and, believe me, I am grateful.”

“And your promise?”

“A promise, Miss Saker, is a promise.”

The woman in the pink toque smiled, but the smile vanished utterly as she met the old man’s gray eyes. There was something so subtle and contemptuous in the look he gave her that her vapid self-esteem and her facile hypocrisy seemed to wither in a moment.

“Good-bye,” she gushed, holding out a hand.

John Strong touched her fingers and walked with her towards the door.

“Good-bye, madam,” he said. “I hope you will have a pleasant drive to Gabingly.”

“Gabingly? Not Gabingly, Rilchester.”

“Pardon me, I was forgetting.”

“Rilchester. I leave for London to-night.”

When the woman in the pink toque with her silks and perfumes had gone, and the sound of the carriage wheels had died beyond the meadows, John Strong passed back to the library and found Judith standing by the window. There was so strange a look upon her father’s face that Judith gazed at him and was mute. Haggard as he looked, a certain grim joy seemed to shine in his gray eyes, a joy that betrayed the passions that were working in his heart. Judith went to him and held his arm.

“Father, what is it?” she asked.

He partly leaned upon her, with one hand upon her shoulder.

“I was in the wrong,” he said, doggedly.

“Father!”

“Gabriel shall come home.”

“Home!”

“And I, John Strong, will stand and fight beside my son.”

XLIV

THE master of Saltire was no mean enemy to be pitted against in such a feud as had arisen over Gabriel, his son. There was much of the bull-terrier about John Strong. He had been born of solid yeoman stock, folk who would have gone stubbornly to the stake rather than admit the power of the pope. Moreover, the ex-tea-merchant had learned to the full in his commercial life the sure power of gold. He had always laughed at socialism. Even Judith could remember him standing before a public building in France and staring contemptuously at the inscription:

“LIBERTÉ, ÉGALITÉ, FRATERNITÉ”

“Bosh!” he had ejaculated; “the Revolution did not abolish bullion.”

John Strong was not only a stubborn and a very wealthy man, but he was in that pugnacious mood that had served him so well in his commercial struggles in the past. He threw himself into the cause with something of the spirit of an old British sea-dog laying his ship “gun to gun” against the crack “thunderer” of the French fleet.

The day after his interview with Miss Saker, John Strong left by an early train for Rilchester, travelling alone, with no luggage to cumber him. Judith had driven over with him to Rilchester and had taken leave of him there. For fully a week John Strong was absent from Saltire Hall. He returned one evening unexpectedly, looking the more grim and resolved about the eyes, and having the air of a man very well satisfied with his venture.

The following morning he ordered his carriage out and drove in the direction of Gabingly, passing the castle on the south. Half an hour later he drew up before an old manor-house packed with tall chimney stacks and straggling gables. The garden was a wilderness, the house itself smothered in creepers. John Strong walked up the grass-grown drive, pulled the rusty bell-handle, and, withholding his name, desired to see Major Maltravers.

The master of Saltire was shown into the dining-room, that smelled of stale cigar-smoke. The room was but shabbily furnished in the early Victorian style, the panelled walls being hung with sporting prints, the heavy table littered with cheap periodicals, gloves, pipes, and ragged novels. It was some minutes before Maltravers entered, to find a stout, bull-necked little gentleman standing stolidly in the middle of the hearth-rug. The soldier was dressed as for riding, in checks and yellow gaiters, with a gold pin fastening his white stock. He took John Strong for a Rilchester tout or a travelling agent, and was more peremptory than polite in his method of address.

“Morning. Your business?”

“My business, sir, is of a private nature.”

“Private, eh? Take a seat. I’m busy; you must excuse me being in a hurry.”

The master of Saltire remained standing. There was a look of such implacable earnestness upon his massive face that Maltravers regarded him with more consideration than before.

“Well, sir,” he said, “what can I do for you?”

“Your ability to meet my demands is dependent upon circumstances.”

The soldier elevated his arched eyebrows, smiled, and showed his white teeth. He was in debt to no man, and yet this stout little fellow was wondrous like a dun.

“Demands?” he asked.

“I will explain them.”

“May I ask who the devil you are?”

“Certainly, sir; I am John Strong of Saltire.”

The soldier thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and slouching his shoulders, looked at the ex-tea-merchant with his alert, black eyes.

“Mr. Strong?” he repeated.

“John Strong.”

“Have we met before?”

“I guess not.”

“Will you sit down, sir?”

“No, sir; I prefer to stand.”

“As you like,” said the soldier, with a sniff; “kindly explain your business.”

John Strong did so; neither was the matter thereof particularly encouraging to James Maltravers’ self-esteem. The ex-tea-merchant was not a man given to mincing his epithets or performing his facts. He hit straight from the shoulder, and with solid effect.

Doubtless, according to dramatic ideals, Maltravers should have lit a cigarette and poised himself on the back of a chair with a cool and insolent complacency. He should have smiled, glittered with Mephistophelian cunning, and played his part like the clever egotist that he was. On the contrary, the soldier appeared suspiciously uncomfortable, and betrayed a certain uneasiness that even his military hauteur could not hide.

“Really,” he observed with much affectation of surprise, “these are extraordinary remarks, Mr. Strong. You must have been sitting in the sun.”

“No, sir, I have been at Callydon.”

“Callydon, eh?”

“And at St. Aylmers.”

“A pretty place enough.”

“And at Messrs. Goring’s office in London.”

The two men remained some seven paces apart and looked each other over. The soldier, suave and angular, stood with his feet planted wide apart, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his riding-breeches.

“I should be much obliged, Mr. Strong,” he observed, “if you would stop speaking in riddles.”

“Certainly,” retorted the other.

“Am I to understand—”

“You are to understand this, sir—I shall have you prosecuted for conspiring to defeat justice.”

“A large order, Mr. Strong.”

“A damned large order, sir—an order upon which I shall spend fifty thousand pounds with pleasure.”

The soldier stared at him, somewhat stupidly, it must be confessed, for one whose wit was usually so nimble. The whole truth was that Maltravers was a coward, not in the mere physical sense, but rather morally and ethically. Like many a selfish and sensual man, he could play the Pistol when his own sleek interests were threatened. His philosophy was Epicurean in the vulgar sense, a philosophy that shirked any overshadowing of its comfort.

“So, sir, you consider me a criminal?”

“I have my facts.”

The soldier seemed amused despite the gravity of the occasion; the elder man’s face was as stubborn as ever.

“I doubt very much whether you can prove anything.”

“You admit conspiracy.”

“Mr. Strong, am I a fool?”

A flicker of a smile passed over the master of Saltire’s face.

“One of your chief witnesses has confessed to me,” he said.

“Who?”

“Never mind, sir; keep to the point.”

Now it was only by subtle sword-play that such a man as John Strong could be delicately baffled. Maltravers, who now had his temper admirably under control, had adapted himself to the situation with the adroitness of an athlete. He was not fool enough to indulge in sword and buckler work, or to suffer himself to be bullied by an old plutocrat who had both the will and the means to make matters vastly uncomfortable for a gentleman of fashion. It was matador’s work this, to dangle the red rag of a woman’s honor before this bovine and stolid being, and to reserve the steel to consummate his own safety.

Thus Maltravers had the wit to see that he might turn the situation to his own credit by performing sundry subtle gyrations about the truth. He might victimize John Strong by making a victim of the very woman who trusted him. No very noble strategy this! But, then, who would be the wiser if the trick succeeded, and if John Strong recoiled from sacrificing a woman? Maltravers’ easy sophistry was capable of anæsthetizing his own none too vivid conscience.

“Believe me, Mr. Strong,” he began; “let me be frank with you. As an English gentleman, I should be sorry to see a woman’s honor dragged in the mire.”

“Don’t preach to me, sir, on honor,” quoth John Strong; “what about my son’s honor?”

“Your son, sir, was perhaps more fool than knave.”

“Indeed!”

“It seems to me, Mr. Strong,” said the soldier, with admirable magnanimity, “that we are both waxing hot over a matter which has passed beyond our control. Let us talk more calmly. What has been done has been done, and we are all of us human. You are aware, of course, that no legal readjustment can be made.”

“Fully aware.”

The soldier smiled again.

“Then I am to understand that your chief desire is to drag me down into the mud.”

“Exactly.”

“My dear sir, you are mistaken. Your vengeance would not fall upon me, nor should I be the one to suffer.”

“You insinuate—”

“I make no insinuations, sir. I repeat the suggestion that you only would sacrifice a woman.”

John Strong planted his feet more firmly on the hearth-rug and knitted his brows.

“Explain,” he said.

Maltravers adopted a more graceful and easy attitude, and spoke as a man who knew something of the world.

“Firstly, sir,” he observed, “you have to prove that I am a scoundrel.”

“True.”

“What are your chances? They are not very great, I must confess. But, Mr. Strong, have you considered the other side of the question. You desire to justify your son.”

“I do.”

“So you think you can improve matters by dragging all concerned again before the world. I presume you know something of the British public, what they would say in the matter. The pot and the kettle—there is much truth in the proverb. Another big scandal; all the old ladies shaking their heads over ‘a depraved and corrupt society.’”

John Strong was silent.

“Why not let matters stand?” said the soldier. “Perhaps I am not so bad as you think me. There is another person more deeply concerned, as I have suggested to you, but I will not betray a woman’s secret. If you persist, what will be the result? Two women besmirched the more and your own son rendered doubly ridiculous.”

The master of Saltire squared his shoulders and looked Maltravers over with his keen, gray eyes. There was much logic in the soldier’s argument, and John Strong, even in his most obstinate mood, was not a man who was blind to prudence.

“There is something in all this,” he observed, “but—”

“Well, sir?”

“I shall stand out for two things.”

“State them, Mr. Strong.”

“That you leave the neighborhood within a week.”

Maltravers’ black brows lifted a moment, but he smiled as before and seemed perfectly agreeable.

“A small matter,” he said. “I was preparing to leave, intending to travel abroad. There will be no difficulty in this.”

John Strong could not refrain from blurting out his thoughts.

“And Ophelia Gusset?”

“The Honorable Miss Gusset, Mr. Strong, is nothing to me.”

“Nothing to you?”

“Nothing, sir—nothing. What I have done I have done; it belongs to the past. Take the hint, sir; but understand, as a gentleman, I will not betray a woman. Her affairs are her affairs; I meddle no further. And the second demand?”

“That you inform me who it was that wrote a certain anonymous letter concerning my son.”

Maltravers, suave diplomat, contrived to conjure up a laugh over the question.

“Really, Mr. Strong,” he said, “I have not the faintest notion.”

“Impossible.”

Turning suddenly, the soldier strode to a bureau, unlocked it, fumbled in a pigeon-hole, drew out a crumpled sheet of note-paper, tossed it on the table before John Strong.

“The very letter,” he said, apparently much amused; “take it, sir, and unravel the mystery for yourself. Eve might have written it, so far as I am concerned.”

“And now—”

“We had better shake hands, Mr. Strong. Your son was innocent, perfectly innocent. This, of course, is in confidence. In the witness-box I should swear the opposite.”

“By God!” said the elder man, “where are we, on our heads or on our feet?”

“Ask God, sir,” said the soldier, “for is not God Himself a paradox?”

Thus, with this last gross piece of inconsistency, the parley ended, as many such a passage of passion has ended, and will end. Maltravers had sheltered himself behind the woman who had trusted him. Wrong-doer and avenger cried a truce over the business, shirking the last death-grip, the one from selfishness, the other because hearts more dear would have been the more deeply wounded. For man cannot conquer truth at times save by dragging the innocent through the dust, even as Achilles dragged Hector about the walls of Troy.

XLV

IN her turret-room at Gabingly, Ophelia sat before an open window with a letter lying in her lap. There was a look of apathy upon her face, an apathy so deep and utter that life seemed stagnant in her as though her heart stood still. Her eyes stared over the woods and meadows towards the sea, eyes that beheld nothing, comprehended nothing. Only her deep breathing betrayed the passions that still worked within.

It was Maltravers’ letter that lay open in her lap, the letter of a coward and a hypocrite, full of euphemistic cunning and of subtle sentiment. For an hour or more Ophelia had sat silent and motionless before the window, with the glib sentences ebbing and flowing through her brain. Anger had failed her in that hour; shame and loneliness seemed closing about her soul.

“MY DEAR PHYL [began the epistle],—I write to you in great haste, for my news is of such a nature that the more speedily it is told the better.

“Understand, in the first place, my dear girl, that what I am now doing is for your welfare, and goes grievously against the grain with me. We have ventured so much for each other in the past that this flouting at the eleventh hour comes like a thunderclap upon my soul.”

After some such preamble, Maltravers proceeded to paint a vivid picture of their betrayal and of John Strong’s relentless determination to unearth the truth. He described the interview at the manor, and recounted his own heroic stand and his desperate attempts to impress upon the master of Saltire the hopelessness of his cause. The letter went on to state that, though his arguments had brought John Strong to a temporary stand-still, he feared that the old man, “like a mad elephant, would soon break through the net.”

Finally came the real inspiration of the letter. The further linking of their names would be injudicious in the extreme. Maltravers would sacrifice himself. In fact, he had already left the neighborhood, having timed his flight so that the epistle should reach Ophelia after he had gone. This was “to insure the inevitable ending of a relationship that could only bring misery and misrepresentation upon both.”

Such in outline was the document with which this English gentleman relieved himself of a responsibility that he had so passionately assumed. There was much vapid and offensive sentiment, much pathetic posing crowded therein. Yet the letter reeked of hypocrisy—hypocrisy of the basest sort, even because it was pitched in a spiritually tragic key. Its scented sentiments stung far more deeply than the rough truth would have done, for there was an insult in the very cleverness of the thing, an insult exaggerated by the florid profession of feelings that the writer had never felt.

A woman is rarely deceived by a man whom she has loved, and Ophelia had gleaned the truth little by little those many weeks, the truth that the man’s passion had cooled, and that her love was no more to him the magic wine of life. Possibly she had fought against the conviction, even as a woman will fight against that which she knows in her heart of hearts to be true. The blow in itself was no sudden one to Ophelia, but the method of its administration appealed to her as brutal in the extreme.

She pictured the whole drama to herself as she sat at the window, brooding and brooding over the letter in her lap. She could see Maltravers confronted by John Strong, the leopard and the bull, guile and gold. She could imagine the disloyal promptings of his heart, his selfish scheming, his desire to escape from a predicament that had lost its passionate charm. Her woman’s instinct served her wonderfully in this. She could read the truth in every studied phrase of Maltravers’ letter.

The nature of her position dawned upon her relentlessly as the evening sunlight streamed in upon her sensual face and haughty eyes. The shame of it! the shame of it! This it was that smote her vanity to the core. Her overstrained imagination portrayed the future to her with a mordant realism that made her quail. She was only a woman, if a very imperfect one, and the motive towards audacity had vanished, leaving her unshielded and alone.

She reasoned thus as the day declined. John Strong would speak, for he was not the man to remain long silent. The whole country-side would take up the cry. The women, those women who loved her little, would point at her mockingly and clamor, “Clear yourself before us and the world, or be known as an adulteress and a liar.” They would shriek at her, these smug-mouthed women. And whence could come the refutation? Society would throw the gauntlet down, and who should stoop to take the challenge up?

Maltravers? Ay, he was the man, and thence rose the bitterest mockery of all. His very cowardice would condemn her, for like a false god he would not hear her cry, and fanaticism would rend her for his silence. For him she had risked all; for her he would venture nothing. Ignominy! ignominy! What was life worth to her that she should face such shame?

* * * * *

That night there was much hurrying to and fro in the galleries of the castle. Bells rang. White-faced servants stood gaping in the passageways, whispering together, awed and frightened. A lamp flashed to and fro in the stable-yard, where two grooms were saddling and bridling a horse, Ophelia’s horse, as good a beast as ever rode to hounds. Soon there came the sparking of hoofs on the cobbles, a scattering of pebbles along the drive.

A woman’s voice cried from the porch.

“This note, quick, John, to the doctor.”

“Saltire?”

“You know the house.”

“Damn it, yes.”

“Get on! get on!”

The man went away at a canter, a canter that steadied into a hard gallop as he passed the lodge and swung out into the high-road. He pulled his cap down over his eyes and gave the beast the whip. Overhead a full moon was shining, splashing the silent trees with silver, glimmering upon the distant sea. There was the scent of new-mown hay upon the warm night air. In the castle porch servants stood huddled, listening to the sound of hoofs that died away along the road.

Above in the turret bedroom Blanche Gusset, with her brown hair tumbled about her face, half lay upon the pillows, holding her sister in her arms. Outside in the gallery a smart maid stood listening, running every now and again to the stairhead to peer down into the hall beneath. A shaded lamp burned in the room, whose angles were full of solemn shadows. Ophelia, her face a dusky white, the pupils of her eyes dilated, lay in her sister’s arms breathing spasmodically with shallow span. She seemed half torpid, like one near death.

A table stood by the bed, bearing a glass and a flask of brandy, also a bottle of smelling-salts. Blanche, half witless yet methodical for all her terror, was bathing her sister’s face with scent. A crumpled letter and an empty phial lay near on the scarlet coverlet of the bed.

“Phyl,” she said, “Phyl,” putting her mouth close to her sister’s ear.

There was some slight brightening of the dilated eyes. Ophelia’s lips moved. Her hands, flickering to and fro, entwined themselves in Blanche’s hair.

“Jim,” she said—“I hear Jim’s voice—”

In some such fashion she maundered on. Blanche, vigorous being that she was, shuddered as though a cold wind played upon her bosom. She reached for the glass, gulped down some brandy, coughed, and called to the girl without the door.

“Florence! Florence!”

The door opened a very little and a white face peered in.

“Yes, miss.”

“How long—”

“How long, miss?”

“Oh, you fool. How long has John been?”

“Half an hour, miss.”

“Oh, my God, only half an hour!”

“The doctor’ll be here soon, miss; ’tis only four miles to Saltire.”

“Go down and listen.”

“Yes, miss.”

“Shut the door. Oh, my God!”

She turned again and hung over Ophelia, staring into the bedewed and dusky face. All the beauty had fled therefrom, for it was as the face of death, gray and inanimate. The widely dilated eyes seemed to gaze into the unknown, as though fathoming many a solemn truth.

Blanche trickled brandy between the parted lips, poured scent into the palm of her hand and dashed it in her sister’s face. She dragged her higher upon the pillows, the head with its golden mass of hair rolling upon her shoulder. The blue veins showed in the white neck, where all the muscles seemed tense as cords, striving and laboring for life and air.

Then through the window came the distant sound of wheels upon the road. Blanche gave a cry like a woman who hears the voice of a rescuer through the smoke of a burning house. The beat of hoofs came near apace. There was a hoarse grinding of the gravel before the house, hurried steps upon the stairs, the sound of a voice, quiet but confident, giving commands to the maid Florence.

James Marjoy entered, roughly dressed, as though he had but risen from bed. Calm and self-reliant, he was a changed being in such an hour as this; and though but “Mrs. Marjoy’s husband” in his own home, he was the man when ministering to the sick. His assistant, a tall, morose-faced Scotchman, followed at his heels. Blanche, freeing herself, ran to James Marjoy and seized his arm.

“Thank God you have come,” she said.

“Cocaine?”

“Cocaine, yes; the bottle is yonder—and that scoundrel’s letter. I heard her ring and found her like this. My poor father is away.”

The Scotchman was busy taking a hypodermic syringe from its case, his big, bony hands steady and unflurried, his solemn face devoid of all emotion. James Marjoy had given one glance at the figure upon the bed. He took Blanche Gusset gently by the arm and thrust her towards the door.

“Go, Miss Gusset,” he said.

“But—”

“Time is precious. We shall do better alone.”

The night was wellnigh spent and the moon hung low in the west when James Marjoy, haggard of face and weary about the eyes, came down to Blanche Gusset in the dining-room. A single candle burned upon the mantel-piece. Blanche, white as the bed-gown under her dressing-jacket, ran to the doctor and held his arm. Her eyes had that strange and terrible earnestness so tragic when seen in the eyes of a woman.

“Well?”

“We were in time.”

“Doctor—”

“Your sister will recover.”

“Thank God! thank God!”

She kissed James Marjoy’s hand and flung herself upon a sofa, weeping unrestrainedly like a little child.

XLVI

GABRIEL STRONG came up the road from Rilchester, swinging along between the high hedgerows, with the morning sun behind him. The sky was of limitless blue above, and beyond the deep woods and the green meadows rose Cambron Head, a purple height stemming the greens and azures of the sea. So lusty was the sunlight that the sand and shingle edging the great bay gleamed like bronze above the foam.

Gabriel, leaving the high-road, struck out a path over the meadows. The tall grass was ablaze with flowers—buttercups and golden trefoil, great white daisies, clover, purple vetches, delicate flax. Wild roses were opening upon the hedges. Odors of honeysuckle and of hay were in the air.

By an old oak that grew in the midst of a grass field Gabriel halted to rest and look upon the scenes he knew so well. Yonder was the hoary sea, and nearer still were the magic hills below old Rilchester where Joan had sunned the woodlands with her hair. Was it but yesterday that he had moped like an exile in that great labyrinth of brick and stone, knowing no man, known of none? Was it but yesterday that he had received that letter saying, “Come, come; the day is ours”?

That morning Gabriel had risen soon after dawn, like a school-boy yearning towards home. He had left London by the earliest train, and found the good borough of Rilchester but waking from its sleep. Even Judith had foreseen no such prodigal energy as this. There had been no one to meet him at the station, but Gabriel’s ardor was not to be damped that June.

With new color in his cheeks and a tremulous eagerness in his eyes, he came that morning towards the cottage in the fields where Joan, his wife, was lodged. He entered in at the little gate, smiling to himself even as a man might smile who climbed to meet love at the gate of heaven. Humble enough was the rose-grown porch, and humble the janitor who stood within. Yet all was heaven to Gabriel that June morning.

“Lor’, Mr. Strong!”

“Good-morning, Mrs. Milton.”

“Good-morning, sir. Glad to see you, sir. Come inside, sir.”

“My wife is here, Mrs. Milton?”

“Your wife, sir? To be sure, there is a lady here.”

Gabriel smiled, but there was no suspicion of bitterness in his eyes.

“My wife is with you, Mrs. Milton,” he said.

“Lor’, Mr. Strong, I was just now going to say—”

“Shall I find her in the garden?”

“If you please, sir. And may I say, sir, if it ain’t presumption in an old woman, that I never did believe them lies.”

Gabriel colored a little, but smiled in the old woman’s kindly face.

“Thank you, Mrs. Milton,” he said.

“’Twas this way, sir. Miss Judith, she says to me, sir, ‘My brother, Mrs. Milton—my brother is an English gentleman’; and what Miss Judith says, sir, might, I reckon, satisfy the old gentleman hisself.”

Gabriel, sped by a kindly gleam from the old lady’s eyes, passed round the cottage to the garden at the back. Under a fruit tree Joan was seated, gazing up at the sky through the green tracery of the leaves. An open book lay in her lap, a book that wept with those who mourned and rejoiced with those who sang.

Gabriel stood there in silence before her, waiting till her eyes should end their communing with heaven. The sunlight, flashing through the boughs, set a golden coronet upon her hair. At last she looked to the earth once more, saw Gabriel standing near the cottage, his hands stretched out to her, a lover’s hands.

She gave a low cry, did Joan, and thrusting the book aside, rose up and sped to him.

“Gabriel!”

“Wife!”

The woman’s head was on the man’s shoulder and his arms were close about her body. In that glad meeting came the full consummation of all prayer and hope. Together they stood under the summer sky, while the spirit of June breathed over field and garden. The red rose had kissed the white, and heaven’s dew had touched the heart of many a flower.

“God has answered us,” said Joan, at last, lifting up her radiant face.

And Gabriel kissed her.

“You are happy?” he asked.

“Happy! What can mere words declare?”

“That by your martyrdom you have made of me a man.”

Even at that moment Judith came flashing in, a fair vision of womanhood under the orchard trees. She had not dreamed to find Gabriel so soon returned. For all the bowl of life seemed brimming with joy that morning. Brother and sister stood hand to hand, looking deeply into each other’s eyes.

“Gabriel,” said the sister, “there is justice in this old world yet.”

“Who works for justice?”

“God,” she answered him, very simply. “Has science slain Him? Nay. Can the glib pen, the cunning instrument, tell us yet more than all our hearts have dreamed. The grander deeps are far beyond us still.”

Gabriel stood, gazing beyond the hills.

“You women are wonderful,” he said.

Joan smiled at Judith, Judith at Joan.

“Come, sister, read me the riddle.”

“Is it not faith,” she said, “that makes love love indeed?”

Before noon father and son had met in Saltire garden, under the cedar-tree at the end of the long lawn. They had gripped hands like men, and now paced shoulder to shoulder over the grass, talking together frankly and without restraint. The great trouble that had fallen upon both seemed to have strangled pride and to have broken down that barrier that had always stood between them. John Strong’s face was strangely altered. He seemed younger by some years, and he no longer stooped.

“Gabriel,” he said, bluntly, “whatever the past has brought us, let it be granted that I was the greater fool.”

“Not so, father,” retorted the son.

But even in the quaint thoroughness of his self-abasement, the elder man’s obstinacy played its part.

“Hang argument,” he said; “the facts are plain. No man likes owning that he was wrong, and I, sir, am no exception. But you struck for a principle, I for a prejudice. There is the truth in a nutshell.”

But Gabriel was not convinced.

“The fault was in measure mine,” he said, “even because I did not trust you as a son should.”

Under the trees, over the green grass below the banks of burning flowers, they saw Joan and Judith walking hand-in-hand. A calm light played upon Gabriel’s face; a smile flickered over John Strong’s stubborn mouth.

“Confound these women!” he said; “how they shame us.”

“True, sir, I have learned as much.”

“My own daughter has taught me a lesson.”

“And Joan has made a man of me.”

They met together under the cedar, Joan and Gabriel, Judith and her father. It seemed that they had communion in that hour and that the same spirit inspired them all.

John Strong reached out his hands to Judith and the other two.

“Come, lassies and lads,” he said, with a grim yet merry light in his gray eyes, “take hands and let us make our vow.”

“What shall we vow?” asked Judith, holding her father’s arm.

“To stand against slander.”

“Against slander,” said they all.

“Till death us do part.”

XLVII

WITH strange swiftness tidings of a fellow’s misfortune are carried by the wind and wafted into every willing ear. People are the more quick to receive the news of another’s failure in preference to some small glory that may have blessed some one among them. Save to the generous few, the follies of humanity fall like libations poured before the eternal ego. A man’s so-called friends are his most subtle enemies, for they stand ever ready to stab him, claiming hypocritical candor in justification of the deed. The world loves disaster even that it may point the obvious moral, smite its self-righteous bosom and exclaim, “God, I thank thee that I am no fool.”

Now in Saltire charity abounded and the milk of human kindness flowed like water. The good news had spread even as a fire spreads over a dry heath before a western wind. The ladies of Saltire were in their element. For when a fair sister errs, her fellow-women lift up their voices and rejoice in that unctuous patois that passes for sure piety.

“Ophelia Gusset attempted to commit suicide!”

Then there was much wagging of heads, much holding up of hands. In tavern and in drawing-room the same tale was told, embellished with many a detail, colored with many a suggestive tint. Vain had been Blanche Gusset’s efforts to gloze and cover her sister’s deed. Hirelings are ever hirelings, and their tongues run fast. Groom, maid, and stable-boy spread the truth. Moreover, John Strong had spoken fearlessly, daring the law. Maltravers had fled, and Gabriel had returned home.

Many an inquiring spirit had analyzed the truth, not for the pure truth’s sake, but for the incense that might be extracted therefrom to delight the nostrils of society. Maltravers had evaporated; his horses had been sold in Rilchester. Ophelia Gusset had gone to Scotland for “her health.” The gates of Gabingly Castle were closed over the emptiness within, while John Strong and Gabriel his son had been seen in Saltire, side by side. The inference was obvious, the truth self-evident.

One of the first persons to call at Saltire Hall was Mr. Mince, glib-tongued and benignant. He shook hands with Gabriel with much fervor, like one welcoming a wronged man out of prison. He, Mr. Mince, had never doubted the matter for a moment. Moreover, John Strong’s gold piece had been absent from the plate for many months.

“As a Christian minister,” he said, “may I congratulate you, sir; on the wonderful workings of God’s providence.”

There was a subtle something in Gabriel’s eyes that even Mr. Mince’s complacency could not ignore.

“Ah, sir,” said the clergyman, “you think perhaps that we are hypocrites. As a humble and forgiving Christian, I do not resent the thought.”

“The world takes us, Mr. Mince,” Gabriel had answered him, “for what we seem and not for what we are.”

“But, Mr. Strong, is not the diagnosis often one of extreme complexity?”

“Not so complex, sir, to those who prefer to discover the evil rather than the good.”

Meanwhile John Strong had other strategies in view. He had ransacked his escritoire, where in the many pigeon-holes letters lay carefully hoarded. Methodical man that he was, he had sorted the documents through, reserved such as seemed needful, and enclosed them, with the anonymous letter Maltravers had surrendered to him, to a certain expert who dealt in the subtleties of caligraphy. John Strong had found that the hand-writing of the anonymous letter tallied with that of a certain epistle written to him by Mrs. Marjoy for her husband, concerning one of the Hall servants whom the doctor had attended. But the master of Saltire waited for an unbiassed opinion. He would make sure of his weapons before he attacked the redoubtable dragon of Saltire.

Thus, one afternoon, late in June, Mrs. Marjoy was darning stockings in her drawing-room when she received the news that John Strong of Saltire stood as a suppliant upon her threshold. Mrs. Marjoy sniffed at the necessity. She edged her work-basket under the sofa with her foot and deigned to receive the master of Saltire Hall. Doubtless these vulgar plutocrats desired to court the serene approval of her seraphic countenance.

She received John Strong with the air of a woman whose extravagant sense of “respectability” made her a fit compeer of the gods. Moreover, Mrs. Marjoy confounded staring and red-faced hauteur with stately aloofness and a distinguished air of reserve. She always glared at strangers through her spectacles as though she would demand many and abundant proofs of their gentility before she could deign to relax her vigilance. Mrs. Marjoy delighted in what she was pleased to call “a select circle,” acquaintances who were aristocratic enough to be toadied to, or friends familiar enough to deserve patronage.

Without rising from her chair, she extended a bony hand towards John Strong. It had always been her constant complaint that the Hall folk were “so detestably healthy.”

“Good-afternoon, Mr. Strong,” she observed; “I am afraid my husband is out.”

“So much the better, madam,” said the ex-tea-merchant. “I have driven round to have a short talk with you.”

Mrs. Marjoy stared. There was an expression upon John Strong’s face that she did not understand. Moreover, his confident and masterful air irritated her perpetual propensities towards tyranny. Mrs. Marjoy always regarded the spirit of independence in others as insufferable arrogance.

“One of your servants is ill, I suppose. My husband is very busy. Will to-morrow do?”

“On the contrary, madam, it is entirely a personal matter.”

“A personal matter, Mr. Strong?”

“Strictly personal.”

“Please explain.”

“With pleasure, madam.”

John Strong, drawing out his pocket-book with studied deliberation, unfolded a much-soiled sheet of note-paper and spread it upon his knee. The doctor’s wife watched him with the sincerest curiosity. As yet there was no suggestive irony in the appearance of the crumpled document.

“I have here, madam,” he said, “a certain letter.”

Mrs. Marjoy was sitting very stiff and straight in her chair.

“A letter that was written to my late daughter-in-law—”

“Indeed!”

“Containing certain libellous statements concerning my son.”

Mrs. Marjoy’s usually florid face grew a shade ruddier; her manner grew instantly more aggressive, and she began to twitch her shoulders, an infallible storm-signal to those who knew her.

“Well, Mr. Strong, what has all this to do with me?”

“Simply this, madam, that you wrote this letter and that I desire to discuss the situation with you.”

Mrs. Marjoy’s first impulse was to slap this stolid and masterful old gentleman’s face. She restrained herself from such a physical retort, remembering a certain fracas she had once had with a cook.

“How dare you, sir, make such an insinuation?”

“I insinuate nothing, madam.”

“Sir!”

“I am merely stating a fact.”

“You mean to tell me to my face that I am a liar?”

John Strong emphasized his words by beating his closed fist rhythmically upon his knee.

“No, madam, I am merely stating a fact. You wrote this letter. I should recommend you not to dispute the truth.”

Mrs. Marjoy half started from her chair. There was a look of such unsophisticated malignity in her brown eyes that John Strong gave thanks inwardly that he was not her husband.

“Am I to be insulted in my own house?” she asked.

John Strong ignored the side issue, being thoroughly convinced that he had the lady within his power.

“Libel, madam,” he continued, with great callousness—“libel is a serious matter. As you know, I am a wealthy man, a man of influence in the neighborhood.”

“Your vulgar money, sir!”

John Strong smiled, one of those peculiarly exasperating smiles that betray to the weaker disputants their own palpable inferiority.

“My vulgar money, madam,” he said, “could easily upset your husband’s trade. Why, by my soul, I have already bought this rented house of yours over your heads. I could drive you step by step out of Saltire, ay, and subsidize a dozen pill-peddlers in the neighborhood. My vulgar money, madam, is not a power to be scoffed at.”

Mrs. Marjoy seemed staggered.

“You consider yourself a gentleman?”

“I am an honest man, madam, and I am going to stand by my son.”

“Your son—poof!”

Mrs. Marjoy’s red face blazed. John Strong seemed as calm and undisturbed as though he were giving orders to a groom.

“Let me but catch one tag of scandal from your tongue, madam,” he said, “one single fabrication compromising my son’s honor, and, by my immortal soul, my vulgar money shall make Saltire too dear for you.”

“Preposterous!”

“The profession, madam, this noble profession, must stand well with society. A soft answer turneth away wrath, and a good manner bringeth in guineas. I like your husband, madam, for he has a heart in him. But remember that a doctor is dependent upon whims, and that your tongue may do much to work his ruin.”

Mrs. Marjoy was a woman whose whole courage resided in her temper. Her heroism was in this respect spasmodic, impressive, yet uncertain. She overpowered others by her gift of making life unlivable for those who withstood her will. Her husband had always preferred surrender for the sake of his own peace. But, like most women, when thoroughly frightened she was no longer the Medusa whose face petrified her enemies. In John Strong she had met her match.

Thus, after one shrewd glare at the tea-merchant’s obdurate face, she subsided somewhat suddenly in her chair and gave way to semi-hysterical tears. It was, indeed, an impressive sight to see Mrs. Marjoy weep. Yet there was no subtlety, no dramatic purpose in her grief. Her tears were the tears of an angry and impotent woman.

“This is mere brutality,” she said.

“Of course, madam, that letter was not brutal.”

“It was an honest letter.”

“You think so.”

“Mrs. Mince and Miss Snodley helped me to write it.”

“Indeed!” said John Strong, “then I trust that you will advise them to desist from such recreations in the future.”

“I shall appeal to my husband.”

“Do so, madam. Doubtless a libel action would improve his practice.”

John Strong, like a clever diplomat, had taken the measure of his adversary’s resources. He had frightened her sufficiently to prove that he was in grim earnest. Being no mere bovine bully, he adapted his methods to the exigencies of the situation, and proffered the lady a chance to regain her dignity.

“A year ago,” he began, “you probably believed that letter to be honest and sincere. But being a woman of sense, you will doubtless acknowledge that one’s opinions must change when new facts have been brought to light.”

Mrs. Marjoy mopped her glasses.

“I may have been mistaken,” she confessed.

“Of course, of course. We all make mistakes in life. You must pardon me if I have seemed over hard with you. Put yourself in my place, madam. Imagine how you would feel if a child of your own had suffered great wrong.”

Mrs. Marjoy’s tears still flowed. She swayed to and fro in her chair and dabbed her red face with her crumpled handkerchief. John Strong rose and prepared to depart.

“Come, madam,” he said, “I think we have talked sufficiently to bridge an understanding between us in this matter. Remember that facts are proving that my son is not the scoundrel you once believed him to be. Whether he was a fool or not, such a question is beyond the immediate issue. Now let me suggest to you that your course of action is plain.”

“Plain, Mr. Strong!”

“Respect the truth, madam, and I will respect your sex. May we be good friends in the future, for straight speaking does nobody any harm. But remember, madam, that I shall keep this letter, and that vulgar gold is a good lawyer. Also understand that this house you live in is my property, that half Saltire is in the palm of my hand. And remember, above all things, madam, that a woman’s tongue may ruin her husband.”

After the enunciating of such blunt truths, John Strong departed, leaving the lachrymose lady to her darning and her meditations. But Mrs. Marjoy was not a peaceful penitent. Though cowed and beaten, the original sin still stirred in her, for neither man nor angel can convert a shrew.

“Guor—how I hate that man,” she reflected. So to ease her temper, she proceeded to the kitchen and scolded her cook.

XLVIII

IT was evening, and Joan and Gabriel walked together under the great cedar-trees in the garden where the slanting sun streaked the long lawns with gold. The slim cypresses glittered under the sombre spirelets of the yews. Above, the garden, with its dreamy tapestries wrought out of living color, stretched towards the old house whose casements gleamed towards the sea.

Under the hoary and massive trees Gabriel and Joan walked hand-in-hand. Beauty seemed with them, as though they had stepped into some dim legend-land, where romance breathed over rich meadows and through waving woods. An Arthurian tenderness lived in the hour; envy and strife seemed banished even from thought.

Joan, radiant as faith, leaned within the hollow of Gabriel’s arm.

“Then even dreams come true,” she said to him.

There was an ardent light in the man’s eyes, such a light as kindles in the eyes of a seer.

“Was I not once tempted,” he answered her, “to embrace the thing that men call pessimism. For I was wounded of my fellows and knew not where to look for help. And there seemed so much horror in the world that even I half learned to jeer with those who mocked at my ideals.”

“No true man is a mocker, Gabriel.”

“Ay, and those who sneer betray the emptiness of their own mean minds.”

For a while they stood in silence, looking out towards the west. There was calm joy in the woman’s face, the joy of a woman whose love had conquered.

“The wise man ignores the vain, self-seeking, jealous horde,” she said, “where the envious intellect has stifled honor. Give me life where hearts are warm, where dissolute sophistry is unknown.”

Gabriel smiled at her, a lover’s smile.

“And once I doubted whether happiness could be found,” he said, “but now—”

“But now?” she asked.

“In a good woman’s love man comes near heaven. Give me simplicity: a quiet home, no matter how humble it may be, books, a few honest friends, some poor whom I may help.”

“Ah!” Joan said, “the city taught us that.”

“Vast Babel where every soul’s cry clashes. God, how my heart sickened in that place, where men scramble like swine over an unclean trough, gnashing against each other, wounding that they may live. Oh, material necessity, base need of gold! Happy are they who strive not but are content.”

The sun sank low behind the trees and the east was purpled with the night. So great was the silence that the very dew seemed to murmur as it fell from out the heavens. The utter azure was untroubled by a cloud; the windless west stood a vast sheet of gold.

“Have we not learned our lesson,” said the man—“to trust and labor and aspire?”

“Ah, Gabriel,” she answered, “to stand aside from those who bicker and deride, from those who stab their rivals with a lie, defaming truth in securing their own ends.”

“Yet, lest we forget—”

“Those whom prejudice has poisoned and gross greed crushed.”

“Ah, wife, God keep us children, blessed ever with an ever generous youth.”

Upon Joan’s face there shone an immortal glory, a look that was not begotten of the world.

“To help others,” she said. “May many a tired face brighten to my own; may weary eyes speak to me of the Christ; may Heaven descend in every good deed done.”

“Poverty and pain have taught us much.”

“To love pure living, the clean wind blowing from the sea, the scent of meadows streaming towards the dawn. To succor the unfortunate! To give, even as God has given to us!”

* * * * *

Transcriber’s Notes:

Spelling and hyphenation have been left as in the original. A few obvious typesetting errors have been corrected without note.

[The end of _The Slanderers_ by Warwick Deeping]