The Shuttle: By Frances Hodgson Burnett

“I see. Thank you,” stiffly and flushing. “You do not believe me.”

Her effect upon him was such that, for the moment, he found himself choosing to believe that he was in earnest. His desire to impress her with his mood had actually led to this result. She ought to have been rather moved—a little fluttered, perhaps, at hearing that she disturbed his equilibrium.

“You set yourself against me, as a child, Betty,” he said. “And you set yourself against me now. You will not give me fair play. You might give me fair play.” He dropped his voice at the last sentence, and knew it was well done. A touch of hopelessness is not often lost on a woman.

“What would you consider fair play?” she inquired.

“It would be fair to listen to me without prejudice—to let me explain how it has happened that I have appeared to you a—a blackguard—I have no doubt you would call it—and a fool.” He threw out his hand in an impatient gesture—impatient of himself—his fate—the tricks of bad fortune which it implied had made of him a more erring mortal than he would have been if left to himself, and treated decently.

“Do not put it so strongly,” with conservative politeness.

“I don’t refuse to admit that I am handicapped by a devil of a temperament. That is an inherited thing.”

“Ah!” said Betty. “One of the temperaments one reads about—for which no one is to be blamed but one’s deceased relatives. After all, that is comparatively easy to deal with. One can just go on doing what one wants to do—and then condemn one’s grandparents severely.”

A repellent quality in her—which had also the trick of transforming itself into an exasperating attraction—was that she deprived him of the luxury he had been most tenacious of throughout his existence. If the injustice of fate has failed to bestow upon a man fortune, good looks or brilliance, his exercise of the power to disturb, to enrage those who dare not resent, to wound and take the nonsense out of those about him, will, at all events, preclude the possibility of his being passed over as a factor not to be considered. If to charm and bestow gives the sense of power, to thwart and humiliate may be found not wholly unsatisfying.

But in her case the inadequacy of the usual methods had forced itself upon him. It was as if the dart being aimed at her, she caught it in her hand in its flight, broke off its point and threw it lightly aside without comment. Most women cannot resist the temptation to answer a speech containing a sting or a reproach. It was part of her abnormality that she could let such things go by in a detached silence, which did not express even the germ of comment or opinion upon them. This, he said, was the result of her beastly sense of security, which, in its turn, was the result of the atmosphere of wealth she had breathed since her birth. There had been no obstacle which could not be removed for her, no law of limitation had laid its rein on her neck. She had not been taught by her existence the importance of propitiating opinion. Under such conditions, how was fear to be learned? She had not learned it. But for the devil in the blue between her lashes, he realised that he should have broken loose long ago.

“I suppose I deserved that for making a stupid appeal to sympathy,” he remarked. “I will not do it again.”

If she had been the woman who can be gently goaded into reply, she would have made answer to this. But she allowed the observation to pass, giving it free flight into space, where it lost itself after the annoying manner of its kind.

“Have you any objection to telling me why you decided to come to England this year?” he inquired, with a casual air, after the pause which she did not fill in.

The bluntness of the question did not seem to disturb her. She was not sorry, in fact, that he had asked it. She let her work lie upon her knee, and leaned back in her low garden chair, her hands resting upon its wicker arms. She turned on him a clear unprejudiced gaze.

“I came to see Rosy. I have always been very fond of her. I did not believe that she had forgotten how much we had loved her, or how much she had loved us. I knew that if I could see her again I should understand why she had seemed to forget us.”

“And when you saw her, you, of course, decided that I had behaved, to quote my own words—like a blackguard and a fool.”

“It is, of course, very rude to say you have behaved like a fool, but—if you’ll excuse my saying so—that is what has impressed me very much. Don’t you know,” with a moderation, which singularly drove itself home, “that if you had been kind to her, and had made her happy, you could have had anything you wished for—without trouble?”

This was one of the unadorned facts which are like bullets. Disgustedly, he found himself veering towards an outlook which forced him to admit that there was probably truth in what she said, and he knew he heard more truth as she went on.

“She would have wanted only what you wanted, and she would not have asked much in return. She would not have asked as much as I should. What you did was not businesslike.” She paused a moment to give thought to it. “You paid too high a price for the luxury of indulging the inherited temperament. Your luxury was not to control it. But it was a bad investment.”

“The figure of speech is rather commercial,” coldly.

“It is curious that most things are, as a rule. There is always the parallel of profit and loss whether one sees it or not. The profits are happiness and friendship—enjoyment of life and approbation. If the inherited temperament supplies one with all one wants of such things, it cannot be called a loss, of course.”

“You think, however, that mine has not brought me much?”

“I do not know. It is you who know.”

“Well,” viciously, “there HAS been a sort of luxury in it in lashing out with one’s heels, and smashing things—and in knowing that people prefer to keep clear.”

She lifted her shoulders a little.

“Then perhaps it has paid.”

“No,” suddenly and fiercely, “damn it, it has not!”

And she actually made no reply to that.

“What do you mean to do?” he questioned as bluntly as before. He knew she would understand what he meant.

“Not much. To see that Rosy is not unhappy any more. We can prevent that. She was out of repair—as the house was. She is being rebuilt and decorated. She knows that she will be taken care of.”

“I know her better than you do,” with a laugh. “She will not go away. She is too frightened of the row it would make— of what I should say. I should have plenty to say. I can make her shake in her shoes.”

Betty let her eyes rest full upon him, and he saw that she was softly summing him up—quite without prejudice, merely in interested speculation upon the workings of type.

“You are letting the inherited temperament run away with you at this moment,” she reflected aloud—her quiet scrutiny almost abstracted. “It was foolish to say that.”

He had known it was foolish two seconds after the words had left his lips. But a temper which has been allowed to leap hedges, unchecked throughout life, is in peril of forming a habit of taking them even at such times as a leap may land its owner in a ditch. This last was what her interested eyes were obviously saying. It suited him best at the moment to try to laugh.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he threw off. “As if you were calculating that two and two make four.”

“No prejudice of mine can induce them to make five or six—or three and a half,” she said. “No prejudice of mine— or of yours.”

The two and two she was calculating with were the likelihoods and unlikelihoods of the inherited temperament, and the practical powers she could absolutely count on if difficulty arose with regard to Rosy.

He guessed at this, and began to make calculations himself.

But there was no further conversation for them, as they were obliged to rise to their feet to receive visitors. Lady Alanby of Dole and Sir Thomas, her grandson, were being brought out of the house to them by Rosalie.

He went forward to meet them—his manner that of the graceful host. Lady Alanby, having been welcomed by him, and led to the most comfortable, tree-shaded chair, found his bearing so elegantly chastened that she gazed at him with private curiosity. To her far-seeing and highly experienced old mind it seemed the bearing of a man who was “up to something.” What special thing did he chance to be “up to”? His glance certainly lurked after Miss Vanderpoel oddly. Was he falling in unholy love with the girl, under his stupid little wife’s very nose?

She could not, however, give her undivided attention to him, as she wished to keep her eye on her grandson and—outrageously enough fit happened that just as tea was brought out and Tommy was beginning to cheer up and quite come out a little under the spur of the activities of handing bread and butter and cress sandwiches, who should appear but the two Lithcom girls, escorted by their aunt, Mrs. Manners, with whom they lived. As they were orphans without money, if the Manners, who were rather well off, had not taken them in, they would have had to go to the workhouse, or into genteel amateur shops, as they were not clever enough for governesses.

Mary, with her turned-up nose, looked just about as usual, but Jane had a new frock on which was exactly the colour of the big, appealing eyes, with their trick of following people about. She looked a little pale and pathetic, which somehow gave her a specious air of being pretty, which she really was not at all. The swaying young thinness of those very slight girls whose soft summer muslins make them look like delicate bags tied in the middle with fluttering ribbons, has almost invariably a foolish attraction for burly young men whose characters are chiefly marked by lack of forethought, and Lady Alanby saw Tommy’s robust young body give a sort of jerk as the party of three was brought across the grass. After it he pulled himself together hastily, and looked stiff and pink, shaking hands as if his elbow joint was out of order, being at once too loose and too rigid. He began to be clumsy with the bread and butter, and, ceasing his talk with Miss Vanderpoel, fell into silence. Why should he go on talking? he thought. Miss Vanderpoel was a cracking handsome girl, but she was too clever for him, and he had to think of all sorts of new things to say when he talked to her. And— well, a fellow could never imagine himself stretched out on the grass, puffing happily away at a pipe, with a girl like that sitting near him, smiling—the hot turf smelling almost like hay, the hot blue sky curving overhead, and both the girl and himself perfectly happy—chock full of joy—though neither of them were saying anything at all. You could imagine it with some girls—you DID imagine it when you wakened early on a summer morning, and lay in luxurious stillness listening to the birds singing like mad.

Lady Jane was a nicely-behaved girl, and she tried to keep her following blue eyes fixed on the grass, or on Lady Anstruthers, or Miss Vanderpoel, but there was something like a string, which sometimes pulled them in another direction, and once when this had happened—quite against her will—she was terrified to find Lady Alanby’s glass lifted and fixed upon her.

As Lady Alanby’s opinion of Mrs. Manners was but a poor one, and as Mrs. Manners was stricken dumb by her combined dislike and awe of Lady Alanby, a slight stiffness might have settled upon the gathering if Betty had not made an effort. She applied herself to Lady Alanby and Mrs. Manners at once, and ended by making them talk to each other. When they left the tea table under the trees to look at the gardens, she walked between them, playing upon the primeval horticultural passions which dominate the existence of all respectable and normal country ladies, until the gulf between them was temporarily bridged. This being achieved, she adroitly passed them over to Lady Anstruthers, who, Nigel observed with some curiosity, accepted the casual responsibility without manifest discomfiture.

To the aching Tommy the manner in which, a few minutes later, he found himself standing alone with Jane Lithcom in a path of clipped laurels was almost bewilderingly simple. At the end of the laurel walk was a pretty peep of the country, and Miss Vanderpoel had brought him to see it. Nigel Anstruthers had been loitering behind with Jane and Mary. As Miss Vanderpoel turned with him into the path, she stooped and picked a blossom from a clump of speedwell growing at the foot of a bit of wall.

“Lady Jane’s eyes are just the colour of this flower,” she said.

“Yes, they are,” he answered, glancing down at the lovely little blue thing as she held it in her hand. And then, with a thump of the heart, “Most people do not think she is pretty, but I—” quite desperately—”I DO.” His mood had become rash.

“So do I,” Betty Vanderpoel answered.

Then the others joined them, and Miss Vanderpoel paused to talk a little—and when they went on she was with Mary and Nigel Anstruthers, and he was with Jane, walking slowly, and somehow the others melted away, turning in a perfectly natural manner into a side path. Their own slow pace became slower. In fact, in a few moments, they were standing quite still between the green walls. Jane turned a little aside, and picked off some small leaves, nervously. He saw the muslin on her chest lift quiveringly.

“Oh, little Jane!” he said in a big, shaky whisper. The following eyes incontinently brimmed over. Some shining drops fell on the softness of the blue muslin.

“Oh, Tommy,” giving up, “it’s no use—talking at all.”

“You mustn’t think—you mustn’t think—ANYTHING,” he falteringly commanded, drawing nearer, because it was impossible not to do it.

What he really meant, though he did not know how decorously to say it, was that she must not think that he could be moved by any tall beauty, towards the splendour of whose possessions his revered grandmother might be driving him.

“I am not thinking anything,” cried Jane in answer. “But she is everything, and I am nothing. Just look at her—and then look at me, Tommy.”

“I’ll look at you as long as you’ll let me,” gulped Tommy, and he was boy enough and man enough to put a hand on each of her shoulders, and drown his longing in her brimming eyes.

… . .

Mary and Miss Vanderpoel were talking with a curious intimacy, in another part of the garden, where they were together alone, Sir Nigel having been reattached to Lady Alanby.

“You have known Sir Thomas a long time?” Betty had just said.

“Since we were children. Jane reminded me at the Dunholms’ ball that she had played cricket with him when she was eight.”

“They have always liked each other?” Miss Vanderpoel suggested.

Mary looked up at her, and the meeting of their eyes was frank to revelation. But for the clear girlish liking for herself she saw in Betty Vanderpoel’s, Mary would have known her next speech to be of imbecile bluntness. She had heard that Americans often had a queer, delightful understanding of unconventional things. This splendid girl was understanding her.

“Oh! You SEE!” she broke out. “You left them together on purpose!”

“Yes, I did.” And there was a comprehension so deep in her look that Mary knew it was deeper than her own, and somehow founded on some subtler feeling than her own. “When two people want so much—care so much to be together,” Miss Vanderpoel added quite slowly—even as if the words rather forced themselves from her, “it seems as if the whole world ought to help them—everything in the world— the very wind, and rain, and sun, and stars—oh, things have no RIGHT to keep them apart.”

Mary stared at her, moved and fascinated. She scarcely knew that she caught at her hand.

“I have never been in the state that Jane is,” she poured forth. “And I can’t understand how she can be such a fool, but—but we care about each other more than most girls do— perhaps because we have had no people. And it’s the kind of thing there is no use talking against, it seems. It’s killing the youngness in her. If it ends miserably, it will be as if she had had an illness, and got up from it a faded, done-for spinster with a stretch of hideous years to live. Her blue eyes will look like boiled gooseberries, because she will have cried all the colour out of them. Oh! You UNDERSTAND! I see you do.”

Before she had finished both Miss Vanderpoel’s hands were holding hers.

“I do! I do,” she said. And she did, as a year ago she had not known she could. “Is it Lady Alanby?” she ventured.

“Yes. Tommy will be helplessly poor if she does not leave him her money. And she won’t if he makes her angry. She is very determined. She will leave it to an awful cousin if she gets in a rage. And Tommy is not clever. He could never earn his living. Neither could Jane. They could NEVER marry. You CAN’T defy relatives, and marry on nothing, unless you are a character in a book.”

“Has she liked Lady Jane in the past?” Miss Vanderpoel asked, as if she was, mentally, rapidly going over the ground, that she might quite comprehend everything.

“Yes. She used to make rather a pet of her. She didn’t like me. She was taken by Jane’s meek, attentive, obedient ways. Jane was born a sweet little affectionate worm. Lady Alanby can’t hate her, even now. She just pushes her out of her path.”

“Because?” said Betty Vanderpoel.

Mary prefaced her answer with a brief, half-embarrassed laugh.

“Because of YOU.”

“Because she thinks–-?”

“I don’t see how she can believe he has much of a chance. I don’t think she does—but she will never forgive him if he doesn’t make a try at finding out whether he has one or not.”

“It is very businesslike,” Betty made observation.

Mary laughed.

“We talk of American business outlook,” she said, “but very few of us English people are dreamy idealists. We are of a coolness and a daring—when we are dealing with questions of this sort. I don’t think you can know the thing you have brought here. You descend on a dull country place, with your money and your looks, and you simply STAY and amuse yourself by doing extraordinary things, as if there was no London waiting for you. Everyone knows this won’t last. Next season you will be presented, and have a huge success. You will be whirled about in a vortex, and people will sit on the edge, and cast big strong lines, baited with the most glittering things they can get together. You won’t be able to get away. Lady Alanby knows there would be no chance for Tommy then. It would be too idiotic to expect it. He must make his try now.”

Their eyes met again, and Miss Vanderpoel looked neither shocked nor angry, but an odd small shadow swept across her face. Mary, of course, did not know that she was thinking of the thing she had realised so often—that it was not easy to detach one’s self from the fact that one was Reuben S. Vanderpoel’s daughter. As a result of it here one was indecently and unwillingly disturbing the lives of innocent, unassuming lovers.

“And so long as Sir Thomas has not tried—and found out— Lady Jane will be made unhappy?”

“If he were to let you escape without trying, he would not be forgiven. His grandmother has had her own way all her life.”

“But suppose after I went away someone else came?”

Mary shook her head.

“People like you don’t HAPPEN in one neighbourhood twice in a lifetime. I am twenty-six and you are the first I have seen.”

“And he will only be safe if?”

Mary Lithcom nodded.

“Yes—IF,” she answered. “It’s silly—and frightful—but it is true.”

Miss Vanderpoel looked down on the grass a few moments, and then seemed to arrive at a decision.

“He likes you? You can make him understand things?” she inquired.

“Yes.”

“Then go and tell him that if he will come here and ask me a direct question, I will give him a direct answer—which will satisfy Lady Alanby.”

Lady Mary caught her breath.

“Do you know, you are the most wonderful girl I ever saw!” she exclaimed. “But if you only knew what I feel about Janie!” And tears rushed into her eyes.

“I feel just the same thing about my sister,” said Miss Vanderpoel. “I think Rosy and Lady Jane are rather alike.”

… . .

When Tommy tramped across the grass towards her he was turning red and white by turns, and looking somewhat like a young man who was being marched up to a cannon’s mouth. It struck him that it was an American kind of thing he was called upon to do, and he was not an American, but British from the top of his closely-cropped head to the rather thick soles of his boots. He was, in truth, overwhelmed by his sense of his inadequacy to the demands of the brilliantly conceived, but unheard-of situation. Joy and terror swept over his being in waves.

The tall, proud, wood-nymph look of her as she stood under a tree, waiting for him, would have struck his courage dead on the spot and caused him to turn and flee in anguish, if she had not made a little move towards him, with a heavenly, everyday humanness in her eyes. The way she managed it was an amazing thing. He could never have managed it at all himself.

She came forward and gave him her hand, and really it was HER hand which held his own comparatively steady.

“It is for Lady Jane,” she said. “That prevents it from being ridiculous or improper. It is for Lady Jane. Her eyes,” with a soft-touched laugh, “are the colour of the blue speedwell I showed you. It is the colour of babies’ eyes. And hers look as theirs do—as if they asked everybody not to hurt them.”

He actually fell upon his knee, and bending his head over her hand, kissed it half a dozen times with adoration. Good Lord, how she SAW and KNEW!

“If Jane were not Jane, and you were not YOU,” the words rushed from him, “it would be the most outrageous—the most impudent thing a man ever had the cheek to do.”

“But it is not.” She did not draw her hand away, and oh, the girlish kindness of her smiling, supporting look. “You came to ask me if–-“

“If you would marry me, Miss Vanderpoel,” his head bending over her hand again. “I beg your pardon, I beg your pardon. Oh Lord, I do.’

“I thank you for the compliment you pay me,” she answered. “I like you very much, Sir Thomas—and I like you just now more than ever—but I could not marry you. I should not make you happy, and I should not be happy myself. The truth is–-” thinking a moment, “each of us really belongs to a different kind of person.

And each of knows the fact.”

“God bless you,” he said. “I think you know everything in the world a woman can know—and remain an angel.”

It was an outburst of eloquence, and she took it in the prettiest way—with the prettiest laugh, which had in it no touch of mockery or disbelief in him.

“What I have said is quite final—if Lady Alanby should inquire,” she said—adding rather quickly, “Someone is coming.”

It pleased her to see that he did not hurry to his feet clumsily, but even stood upright, with a shade of boyish dignity, and did not release her hand before he had bent his head low over it again.

Sir Nigel was bringing with him Lady Alanby, Mrs. Manners, and his wife, and when Betty met his eyes, she knew at once that he had not made his way to this particular garden without intention. He had discovered that she was with Tommy, and it had entertained him to break in upon them.

“I did not intend to interrupt Sir Thomas at his devotions,” he remarked to her after dinner. “Accept my apologies.”

“It did not matter in the least, thank you,” said Betty.

… . .

“I am glad to be able to say, Thomas, that you did not look an entire fool when you got up from your knees, as we came into the rose garden.” Thus Lady Alanby, as their carriage turned out of Stornham village.

“I’m glad myself,” Tommy answered.

“What were you doing there? Even if you were asking her to marry you, it was not necessary to go that far. We are not in the seventeenth century.

Then Tommy flushed.

“I did not intend to do it. I could not help it. She was so—so nice about everything. That girl is an angel. I told her so.”

“Very right and proper spirit to approach her in,” answered the old woman, watching him keenly. “Was she angel enough to say she would marry you?”

Tommy, for some occult reason, had the courage to stare back into his grandmother’s eyes, quite as if he were a man, and not a hobbledehoy, expecting to be bullied.

“She does not want me,” he answered. “And I knew she wouldn’t. Why should she? I did what you ordered me to do, and she answered me as I knew she would. She might have snubbed me, but she has such a way with her—such a way of saying things and understanding, that—that—well, I found myself on one knee, kissing her hand—as if I was being presented at court.”

Old Lady Alanby looked out on the passing landscape.

“Well, you did your best,” she summed the matter up at last, “if you went down on your knees involuntarily. If you had done it on purpose, it would have been unpardonable.”

CHAPTER XXXIV

RED GODWYN

Stornham Court had taken its proper position in the county as a place which was equal to social exchange in the matter of entertainment. Sir Nigel and Lady Anstruthers had given a garden party, according to the decrees of the law obtaining in country neighbourhoods. The curiosity to behold Miss Vanderpoel, and the change which had been worked in the well-known desolation and disrepair, precluded the possibility of the refusal of any invitations sent, the recipient being in his or her right mind, and sound in wind and limb. That astonishing things had been accomplished, and that the party was a successful affair, could not but be accepted as truths. Garden parties had been heard of, were a trifle repetitional, and even dull, but at this one there was real music and real dancing, and clever entertainments were given at intervals in a green-embowered little theatre, erected for the occasion. These were agreeable additions to mere food and conversation, which were capable of palling.

To the garden party the Anstruthers did not confine themselves. There were dinner parties at Stornham, and they also were successful functions. The guests were of those who make for the success of such entertainments.

“I called upon Mount Dunstan this afternoon,” Sir Nigel said one evening, before the first of these dinners. “He might expect it, as one is asking him to dine. I wish him to be asked. The Dunholms have taken him up so tremendously that no festivity seems complete without him.”

He had been invited to the garden party, and had appeared, but Betty had seen little of him. It is easy to see little of a guest at an out-of-door festivity. In assisting Rosalie to attend to her visitors she had been much occupied, but she had known that she might have seen more of him, if he had intended that it should be so. He did not—for reasons of his own—intend that it should be so, and this she became aware of. So she walked, played in the bowling green, danced and talked with Westholt, Tommy Alanby and others.

“He does not want to talk to me. He will not, if he can avoid it,” was what she said to herself.

She saw that he rather sought out Mary Lithcom, who was not accustomed to receiving special attention. The two walked together, danced together, and in adjoining chairs watched the performance in the embowered theatre. Lady Mary enjoyed her companion very much, but she wondered why he had attached himself to her.

Betty Vanderpoel asked herself what they talked to each other about, and did not suspect the truth, which was that they talked a good deal of herself.

“Have you seen much of Miss Vanderpoel?” Lady Mary had begun by asking.

“I have SEEN her a good deal, as no doubt you have.”

Lady Mary’s plain face expressed a somewhat touched reflectiveness.

“Do you know,” she said, “that the garden parties have been a different thing this whole summer, just because one always knew one would see her at them?”

A short laugh from Mount Dunstan.

“Jane and I have gone to every garden party within twenty miles, ever since we left the schoolroom. And we are very tired of them. But this year we have quite cheered up. When we are dressing to go to something dull, we say to each other, `Well, at any rate, Miss Vanderpoel will be there, and we shall see what she has on, and how her things are made,’ and that’s something—besides the fun of watching people make up to her, and hearing them talk about the men who want to marry her, and wonder which one she will take. She will not take anyone in this place,” the nice turned-up nose slightly suggesting a derisive sniff. “Who is there who is suitable?”

Mount Dunstan laughed shortly again.

“How do you know I am not an aspirant myself?” he said. He had a mirthless sense of enjoyment in his own brazenness. Only he himself knew how brazen the speech was.

Lady Mary looked at him with entire composure.

“I am quite sure you are not an aspirant for anybody. And I happen to know that you dislike moneyed international marriages. You are so obviously British that, even if I had not been told that, I should know it was true. Miss Vanderpoel herself knows it is true.”

“Does she?”

“Lady Alanby spoke of it to Sir Nigel, and I heard Sir Nigel tell her.”

“Exactly the kind of unnecessary thing he would be likely to repeat.” He cast the subject aside as if it were a worthless superfluity and went on: “When you say there is no one suitable, you surely forget Lord Westholt.”

“Yes, it’s true I forgot him for the moment. But—” with a laugh—”one rather feels as if she would require a royal duke or something of that sort.”

“You think she expects that kind of thing?” rather indifferently.

“She? She doesn’t think of the subject. She simply thinks of other things—of Lady Anstruthers and Ughtred, of the work at Stornham and the village life, which gives her new emotions and interest. She also thinks about being nice to people. She is nicer than any girl I know.”

“You feel, however, she has a right to expect it?” still without more than a casual air of interest.

“Well, what do you feel yourself?” said Lady Mary. “Women who look like that—even when they are not millionairesses— usually marry whom they choose. I do not believe that the two beautiful Miss Gunnings rolled into one would have made anything as undeniable as she is. One has seen portraits of them. Look at her as she stands there talking to Tommy and Lord Dunholm!”

Internally Mount Dunstan was saying: “I am looking at her, thank you,” and setting his teeth a little.

But Lady Mary was launched upon a subject which swept her along with it, and she—so to speak—ground the thing in.

“Look at the turn of her head! Look at her mouth and chin, and her eyes with the lashes sweeping over them when she looks down! You must have noticed the effect when she lifts them suddenly to look at you. It’s so odd and lovely that it—it almost–-“

“Almost makes you jump,” ended Mount Dunstan drily.

She did not laugh and, in fact, her expression became rather sympathetically serious.

“Ah,” she said, “I believe you feel a sort of rebellion against the unfairness of the way things are dealt out. It does seem unfair, of course. It would be perfectly disgraceful—if she were different. I had moments of almost hating her until one day not long ago she did something so bewitchingly kind and understanding of other people’s feelings that I gave up. It was clever, too,” with a laugh, “clever and daring. If she were a young man she would make a dashing soldier.”

She did not give him the details of the story, but went on to say in effect what she had said to Betty herself of the inevitable incidentalness of her stay in the country. If she had not evidently come to Stornham this year with a purpose, she would have spent the season in London and done the usual thing. Americans were generally presented promptly, if they had any position—sometimes when they had not. Lady Alanby had heard that the fact that she was with her sister had awakened curiosity and people were talking about her.

“Lady Alanby said in that dry way of hers that the arrival of an unmarried American fortune in England was becoming rather like the visit of an unmarried royalty. People ask each other what it means and begin to arrange for it. So far, only the women have come, but Lady Alanby says that is because the men have had no time to do anything but stay at home and make the fortunes. She believes that in another generation there will be a male leisure class, and then it will swoop down too, and marry people. She was very sharp and amusing about it. She said it would help them to rid themselves of a plethora of wealth and keep them from bursting.”

She was an amiable, if unsentimental person, Mary Lithcom —and was, quite without ill nature, expressing the consensus of public opinion. These young women came to the country with something practical to exchange in these days, and as there were men who had certain equivalents to offer, so also there were men who had none, and whom decency should cause to stand aside. Mount Dunstan knew that when she had said, “Who is there who is suitable?” any shadow of a thought of himself as being in the running had not crossed her mind. And this was not only for the reasons she had had the ready composure to name, but for one less conquerable.

Later, having left Mary Lithcom, he decided to take a turn by himself. He had done his duty as a masculine guest. He had conversed with young women and old ones, had danced, visited gardens and greenhouses, and taken his part in all things. Also he had, in fact, reached a point when a few minutes of solitude seemed a good thing. He found himself turning into the clipped laurel walk, where Tommy Alanby had stood with Jane Lithcom, and he went to the end of it and stood looking out on the view.

“Look at the turn of her head,” Lady Mary had said. “Look at her mouth and chin.” And he had been looking at them the whole afternoon, not because he had intended to do so, but because it was not possible to prevent himself from doing it.

This was one of the ironies of fate. Orthodox doctrine might suggest that it was to teach him that his past rebellion had been undue. Orthodox doctrine was ever ready with these soothing little explanations. He had raged and sulked at Destiny, and now he had been given something to rage for.

“No one knows anything about it until it takes him by the throat,” he was thinking, “and until it happens to a man he has no right to complain. I was not starving before. I was not hungering and thirsting—in sight of food and water. I suppose one of the most awful things in the world is to feel this and know it is no use.”

He was not in the condition to reason calmly enough to see that there might be one chance in a thousand that it was of use. At such times the most intelligent of men and women lose balance and mental perspicacity. A certain degree of unreasoning madness possesses them. They see too much and too little. There were, it was true, a thousand chances against him, but there was one for him—the chance that selection might be on his side. He had not that balance of thought left which might have suggested to him that he was a man young and powerful, and filled with an immense passion which might count for something. All he saw was that he was notably in the position of the men whom he had privately disdained when they helped themselves by marriage. Such marriages he had held were insults to the manhood of any man and the womanhood of any woman. In such unions neither party could respect himself or his companion. They must always in secret doubt each other, fret at themselves, feel distaste for the whole thing. Even if a man loved such a woman, and the feeling was mutual, to whom would it occur to believe it—to see that they were not gross and contemptible? To no one. Would it have occurred to himself that such an extenuating circumstance was possible? Certainly it would not. Pig-headed pride and obstinacy it might be, but he could not yet face even the mere thought of it—even if his whole position had not been grotesque. Because, after all, it was grotesque that he should even argue with himself. She—before his eyes and the eyes of all others—the most desirable of women; people dinning it in one’s ears that she was surrounded by besiegers who waited for her to hold out her sceptre, and he—well, what was he! Not that his mental attitude was that of a meek and humble lover who felt himself unworthy and prostrated himself before her shrine with prayers —he was, on the contrary, a stout and obstinate Briton finding his stubbornly-held beliefs made as naught by a certain obsession —an intolerable longing which wakened with him in the morning, which sank into troubled sleep with him at night—the longing to see her, to speak to her, to stand near her, to breathe the air of her. And possessed by this—full of the overpowering strength of it—was a man likely to go to a woman and say, “Give your life and desirableness to me; and incidentally support me, feed me, clothe me, keep the roof over my head, as if I were an impotent beggar”?

“No, by God!” he said. “If she thinks of me at all it shall be as a man. No, by God, I will not sink to that!”

… . .

A moving touch of colour caught his eye. It was the rose of a parasol seen above the laurel hedge, as someone turned into the walk. He knew the colour of it and expected to see other parasols and hear voices. But there was no sound, and unaccompanied, the wonderful rose-thing moved towards him.

“The usual things are happening to me,” was his thought as it advanced. “I am hot and cold, and just now my heart leaped like a rabbit. It would be wise to walk off, but I shall not do it. I shall stay here, because I am no longer a reasoning being. I suppose that a horse who refuses to back out of his stall when his stable is on fire feels something of the same thing.”

When she saw him she made an involuntary-looking pause, and then recovering herself, came forward.

“I seem to have come in search of you,” she said. “You ought to be showing someone the view really—and so ought I.”

“Shall we show it to each other?” was his reply.

“Yes.” And she sat down on the stone seat which had been placed for the comfort of view lovers. “I am a little tired— just enough to feel that to slink away for a moment alone would be agreeable. It IS slinking to leave Rosalie to battle with half the county. But I shall only stay a few minutes.”

She sat still and gazed at the beautiful lands spread before her, but there was no stillness in her mind, neither was there stillness in his. He did not look at the view, but at her, and he was asking himself what he should be saying to her if he were such a man as Westholt. Though he had boldness enough, he knew that no man—even though he is free to speak the best and most passionate thoughts of his soul—could be sure that he would gain what he desired. The good fortune of Westholt, or of any other, could but give him one man’s fair chance.

But having that chance, he knew he should not relinquish it soon. There swept back into his mind the story of the marriage of his ancestor, Red Godwyn, and he laughed low in spite of himself.

Miss Vanderpoel looked up at him quickly.

“Please tell me about it, if it is very amusing,” she said.

“I wonder if it will amuse you,” was his answer. “Do you like savage romance?”

“Very much.”

It might seem a propos de rien, but he did not care in the least. He wanted to hear what she would say.

“An ancestor of mine—a certain Red Godwyn—was a barbarian immensely to my taste. He became enamoured of rumours of the beauty of the daughter and heiress of his bitterest enemy. In his day, when one wanted a thing, one rode forth with axe and spear to fight for it.”

“A simple and alluring method,” commented Betty. “What was her name?”

She leaned in light ease against the stone back of her seat, the rose light cast by her parasol faintly flushed her. The silence of their retreat seemed accentuated by its background of music from the gardens. They smiled a second bravely into each other’s eyes, then their glances became entangled, as they had done for a moment when they had stood together in Mount Dunstan park. For one moment each had been held prisoner then—now it was for longer.

“Alys of the Sea-Blue Eyes.”

Betty tried to release herself, but could not.

“Sometimes the sea is grey,” she said.

His own eyes were still in hers.

“Hers were the colour of the sea on a day when the sun shines on it, and there are large fleece-white clouds floating in the blue above. They sparkled and were often like bluebells under water.”

“Bluebells under water sounds entrancing,” said Betty.

He caught his breath slightly.

“They were—entrancing,” he said. “That was evidently the devil of it—saving your presence.”

“I have never objected to the devil,” said Betty. “He is an energetic, hard-working creature and paints himself an honest black. Please tell me the rest.”

“Red Godwyn went forth, and after a bloody fight took his enemy’s castle. If we still lived in like simple, honest times, I should take Dunholm Castle in the same way. He also took Alys of the Eyes and bore her away captive.”

“From such incidents developed the germs of the desire for female suffrage,” Miss Vanderpoel observed gently.

“The interest of the story lies in the fact that apparently the savage was either epicure or sentimentalist, or both. He did not treat the lady ill. He shut her in a tower chamber overlooking his courtyard, and after allowing her three days to weep, he began his barbarian wooing. Arraying himself in splendour he ordered her to appear before him. He sat upon the dais in his banquet hall, his retainers gathered about him— a great feast spread. In archaic English we are told that the board groaned beneath the weight of golden trenchers and flagons. Minstrels played and sang, while he displayed all his splendour.”

“They do it yet,” said Miss Vanderpoel, “in London and New York and other places.”

“The next day, attended by his followers, he took her with him to ride over his lands. When she returned to her tower chamber she had learned how powerful and great a chieftain he was. She `laye softely’ and was attended by many maidens, but she had no entertainment but to look out upon the great green court. There he arranged games and trials of strength and skill, and she saw him bigger, stronger, and more splendid than any other man. He did not even lift his eyes to her window. He also sent her daily a rich gift.”

“How long did this go on?”

“Three months. At the end of that time he commanded her presence again in his banquet hall. He told her the gates were opened, the drawbridge down and an escort waiting to take her back to her father’s lands, if she would.”

“What did she do?”

“She looked at him long—and long. She turned proudly away—in the sea-blue eyes were heavy and stormy tears, which seeing–-“

“Ah, he saw them?” from Miss Vanderpoel.

“Yes. And seizing her in his arms caught her to his breast, calling for a priest to make them one within the hour. I am quoting the chronicle. I was fifteen when I read it first.”

“It is spirited,” said Betty, “and Red Godwyn was almost modern in his methods.”

While professing composure and lightness of mood, the spell which works between two creatures of opposite sex when in such case wrought in them and made them feel awkward and stiff. When each is held apart from the other by fate, or will, or circumstance, the spell is a stupefying thing, deadening even the clearness of sight and wit.

“I must slink back now,” Betty said, rising. “Will you slink back with me to give me countenance? I have greatly liked Red Godwyn.”

So it occurred that when Nigel Anstruthers saw them again it was as they crossed the lawn together, and people looked up from ices and cups of tea to follow their slow progress with questioning or approving eyes.

CHAPTER XXXV

THE TIDAL WAVE

There was only one man to speak to, and it being the nature of the beast—so he harshly put it to himself—to be absolutely impelled to speech at such times, Mount Dunstan laid bare his breast to him, tearing aside all the coverings pride would have folded about him. The man was, of course, Penzance, and the laying bare was done the evening after the story of Red Godwyn had been told in the laurel walk.

They had driven home together in a profound silence, the elder man as deep in thought as the younger one. Penzance was thinking that there was a calmness in having reached sixty and in knowing that the pain and hunger of earlier years would not tear one again. And yet, he himself was not untorn by that which shook the man for whom his affection had grown year by year. It was evidently very bad—very bad, indeed. He wondered if he would speak of it, and wished he would, not because he himself had much to say in answer, but because he knew that speech would be better than hard silence.

“Stay with me to-night,” Mount Dunstan said, as they drove through the avenue to the house. “I want you to dine with me and sit and talk late. I am not sleeping well.”

They often dined together, and the vicar not infrequently slept at the Mount for mere companionship’s sake. Sometimes they read, sometimes went over accounts, planned economies, and balanced expenditures. A chamber still called the Chaplain’s room was always kept in readiness. It had been used in long past days, when a household chaplain had sat below the salt and left his patron’s table before the sweets were served. They dined together this night almost as silently as they had driven homeward, and after the meal they went and sat alone in the library.

The huge room was never more than dimly lighted, and the far-off corners seemed more darkling than usual in the insufficient illumination of the far from brilliant lamps. Mount Dunstan, after standing upon the hearth for a few minutes smoking a pipe, which would have compared ill with old Doby’s Sunday splendour, left his coffee cup upon the mantel and began to tramp up and down—out of the dim light into the shadows, back out of the shadows into the poor light.

“You know,” he said, “what I think about most things— you know what I feel.”

“I think I do.”

“You know what I feel about Englishmen who brand themselves as half men and marked merchandise by selling themselves and their houses and their blood to foreign women who can buy them. You know how savage I have been at the mere thought of it. And how I have sworn–-“

“Yes, I know what you have sworn,” said Mr. Penzance.

It struck him that Mount Dunstan shook and tossed his head rather like a bull about to charge an enemy.

“You know how I have felt myself perfectly within my rights when I blackguarded such men and sneered at such women—taking it for granted that each was merchandise of his or her kind and beneath contempt. I am not a foul-mouthed man, but I have used gross words and rough ones to describe them.”

“I have heard you.”

Mount Dunstan threw back his head with a big, harsh laugh. He came out of the shadow and stood still.

“Well,” he said, “I am in love—as much in love as any lunatic ever was—with the daughter of Reuben S. Vanderpoel. There you are—and there I am!”

“It has seemed to me,” Penzance answered, “that it was almost inevitable.”

“My condition is such that it seems to ME that it would be inevitable in the case of any man. When I see another man look at her my blood races through my veins with an awful fear and a wicked heat. That will show you the point I have reached.” He walked over to the mantelpiece and laid his pipe down with a hand Penzance saw was unsteady. “In turning over the pages of the volume of Life,” he said, “I have come upon the Book of Revelations.”

“That is true,” Penzance said.

“Until one has come upon it one is an inchoate fool,” Mount Dunstan went on. “And afterwards one is—for a time at least—a sort of madman raving to one’s self, either in or out of a straitjacket—as the case may be. I am wearing the jacket —worse luck! Do you know anything of the state of a man who cannot utter the most ordinary words to a woman without being conscious that he is making mad love to her? This afternoon I found myself telling Miss Vanderpoel the story of Red Godwyn and Alys of the Sea-Blue Eyes. I did not make a single statement having any connection with myself, but throughout I was calling on her to think of herself and of me as of those two. I saw her in my own arms, with the tears of Alys on her lashes. I was making mad love, though she was unconscious of my doing it.”

“How do you know she was unconscious?” remarked Mr. Penzance. “You are a very strong man.”

Mount Dunstan’s short laugh was even a little awful, because it meant so much. He let his forehead drop a moment on to his arms as they rested on the mantelpiece.

“Oh, my God!” he said. But the next instant his head lifted itself. “It is the mystery of the world—this thing. A tidal wave gathering itself mountain high and crashing down upon one’s helplessness might be as easily defied. It is supposed to disperse, I believe. That has been said so often that there must be truth in it. In twenty or thirty or forty years one is told one will have got over it. But one must live through the years—one must LIVE through them—and the chief feature of one’s madness is that one is convinced that they will last forever.”

“Go on,” said Mr. Penzance, because he had paused and stood biting his lip. “Say all that you feel inclined to say. It is the best thing you can do. I have never gone through this myself, but I have seen and known the amazingness of it for many years. I have seen it come and go.”

“Can you imagine,” Mount Dunstan said, “that the most damnable thought of all—when a man is passing through it— is the possibility of its GOING? Anything else rather than the knowledge that years could change or death could end it! Eternity seems only to offer space for it. One knows—but one does not believe. It does something to one’s brain.”

“No scientist, howsoever profound, has ever discovered what,” the vicar mused aloud.

“The Book of Revelations has shown to me how—how MAGNIFICENT life might be!” Mount Dunstan clenched and unclenched his hands, his eyes flashing. “Magnificent—that is the word. To go to her on equal ground to take her hands and speak one’s passion as one would—as her eyes answered. Oh, one would know! To bring her home to this place—having made it as it once was—to live with her here—to be WITH her as the sun rose and set and the seasons changed—with the joy of life filling each of them. SHE is the joy of Life—the very heart of it. You see where I am—you see!”

“Yes,” Penzance answered. He saw, and bowed his head, and Mount Dunstan knew he wished him to continue.

“Sometimes—of late—it has been too much for me and I have given free rein to my fancy—knowing that there could never be more than fancy. I was doing it this afternoon as I watched her move about among the people. And Mary Lithcom began to talk about her.” He smiled a grim smile. “Perhaps it was an intervention of the gods to drag me down from my impious heights. She was quite unconscious that she was driving home facts like nails—the facts that every man who wanted money wanted Reuben S. Vanderpoel’s daughter—and that the young lady, not being dull, was not unaware of the obvious truth! And that men with prizes to offer were ready to offer them in a proper manner. Also that she was only a brilliant bird of passage, who, in a few months, would be caught in the dazzling net of the great world. And that even Lord Westholt and Dunholm Castle were not quite what she might expect. Lady Mary was sincerely interested. She drove it home in her ardour. She told me to LOOK at her—to LOOK at her mouth and chin and eyelashes—and to make note of what she stood for in a crowd of ordinary people. I could have laughed aloud with rage and self-mockery.”

Mr. Penzance was resting his forehead on his hand, his elbow on his chair’s arm.

“This is profound unhappiness,” he said. “It is profound unhappiness.”

Mount Dunstan answered by a brusque gesture.

“But it will pass away,” went on Penzance, “and not as you fear it must,” in answer to another gesture, fiercely impatient. “Not that way. Some day—or night—you will stand heretogether, and you will tell her all you have told me. I KNOW it will be so.”

“What!” Mount Dunstan cried out. But the words had been spoken with such absolute conviction that he felt himself become pale.

It was with the same conviction that Penzance went on.

“I have spent my quiet life in thinking of the forces for which we find no explanation—of the causes of which we only see the effects. Long ago in looking at you in one of my pondering moments I said to myself that YOU were of the Primeval Force which cannot lose its way—which sweeps a clear pathway for itself as it moves—and which cannot be held back. I said to you just now that because you are a strong man you cannot be sure that a woman you are—even in spite of yourself— making mad love to, is unconscious that you are doing it. You do not know what your strength lies in. I do not, the woman does not, but we must all feel it, whether we comprehend it or no. You said of this fine creature, some time since, that she was Life, and you have just said again something of the same kind. It is quite true. She is Life, and the joy of it. You are two strong forces, and you are drawing together.”

He rose from his chair, and going to Mount Dunstan put hishand on his shoulder, his fine old face singularly rapt and glowing.

“She is drawing you and you are drawing her, and each is too strong to release the other. I believe that to be true. Both bodies and souls do it. They are not separate things. They move on their way as the stars do—they move on their way.”

As he spoke, Mount Dunstan’s eyes looked into his fixedly. Then they turned aside and looked down upon the mantel against which he was leaning. He aimlessly picked up his pipe and laid it down again. He was paler than before, but he said no single word.

“You think your reasons for holding aloof from her are the reasons of a man.” Mr. Penzance’s voice sounded to him remote. “They are the reasons of a man’s pride—but that is not the strongest thing in the world. It only imagines it is. You think that you cannot go to her as a luckier man could. You think nothing shall force you to speak. Ask yourself why. It is because you believe that to show your heart would be to place yourself in the humiliating position of a man who might seem to her and to the world to be a base fellow.”

“An impudent, pushing, base fellow,” thrust in Mount Dunstan fiercely. “One of a vulgar lot. A thing fancying even its beggary worth buying. What has a man—whose very name is hung with tattered ugliness—to offer?”

Penzance’s hand was still on his shoulder and his look at him was long.

“His very pride,” he said at last, “his very obstinacy and haughty, stubborn determination. Those broken because the other feeling is the stronger and overcomes him utterly.”

A flush leaped to Mount Dunstan’s forehead. He set both elbows on the mantel and let his forehead fall on his clenched fists. And the savage Briton rose in him.

“No!” he said passionately. “By God, no!”

“You say that,” said the older man, “because you have not yet reached the end of your tether. Unhappy as you are, you are not unhappy enough. Of the two, you love yourself the more—your pride and your stubbornness.”

“Yes,” between his teeth. “I suppose I retain yet a sort of respect—and affection—for my pride. May God leave it to me!”

Penzance felt himself curiously exalted; he knew himself unreasoningly passing through an oddly unpractical, uplifted moment, in whose impelling he singularly believed.

“You are drawing her and she is drawing you,” he said. “Perhaps you drew each other across seas. You will stand here together and you will tell her of this—on this very spot.”

Mount Dunstan changed his position and laughed roughly, as if to rouse himself. He threw out his arm in a big, uneasy gesture, taking in the room.

“Oh, come,” he said. “You talk like a seer. Look about you. Look! I am to bring her here!”

“If it is the primeval thing she will not care. Why should she?”

“She! Bring a life like hers to this! Or perhaps you mean that her own wealth might make her surroundings becoming— that a man would endure that?”

“If it is the primeval thing, YOU would not care. You would have forgotten that you two had ever lived an hour apart.”

He spoke with a deep, moved gravity—almost as if he were speaking of the first Titan building of the earth. Mount Dunstan staring at his delicate, insistent, elderly face, tried to laugh again—and failed because the effort seemed actually irreverent. It was a singular hypnotic moment, indeed. He himself was hypnotised. A flashlight of new vision blazed before him and left him dumb. He took up his pipe hurriedly, and with still unsteady fingers began to refill it. When it was filled he lighted it, and then without a word of answer left the hearth and began to tramp up and down the room again—out of the dim light into the shadows, back out of the shadows and into the dim light again, his brow working and his teeth holding hard his amber mouthpiece.

The morning awakening of a normal healthy human creature should be a joyous thing. After the soul’s long hours of release from the burden of the body, its long hours spent— one can only say in awe at the mystery of it, “away, away”— in flight, perhaps, on broad, tireless wings, beating softly in fair, far skies, breathing pure life, to be brought back to renew the strength of each dawning day; after these hours of quiescence of limb and nerve and brain, the morning life returning should unseal for the body clear eyes of peace at least. In time to come this will be so, when the soul’s wings are stronger, the body more attuned to infinite law and the race a greater power—but as yet it often seems as though the winged thing came back a lagging and reluctant rebel against its fate and the chain which draws it back a prisoner to its toil.

It had seemed so often to Mount Dunstan—oftener than not. Youth should not know such awakening, he was well aware; but he had known it sometimes even when he had been a child, and since his return from his ill-starred struggle in America, the dull and reluctant facing of the day had become a habit. Yet on the morning after his talk with his friend— the curious, uplifted, unpractical talk which had seemed to hypnotise him—he knew when he opened his eyes to the light that he had awakened as a man should awake—with an unreasoning sense of pleasure in the life and health of his own body, as he stretched mighty limbs, strong after the night’s rest, and feeling that there was work to be done. It was all unreasoning— there was no more to be done than on those other days which he had wakened to with bitterness, because they seemed useless and empty of any worth—but this morning the mere light of the sun was of use, the rustle of the small breeze in the leaves, the soft floating past of the white clouds, the mere fact that the great blind-faced, stately house was his own, that he could tramp far over lands which were his heritage, unfed though they might be, and that the very rustics who would pass him in the lanes were, so to speak, his own people: that he had name, life, even the common thing of hunger for his morning food—it was all of use.

An alluring picture—of a certain deep, clear bathing pool in the park rose before him. It had not called to him for many a day, and now he saw its dark blueness gleam between flags and green rushes in its encircling thickness of shrubs and trees.

He sprang from his bed, and in a few minutes was striding across the grass of the park, his towels over his arm, his head thrown back as he drank in the freshness of the morning-scented air. It was scented with dew and grass and the breath of waking trees and growing things; early twitters and thrills were to be heard here and there, insisting on morning joyfulness; rabbits frisked about among the fine-grassed hummocks of their warren and, as he passed, scuttled back into their holes, with a whisking of short white tails, at which he laughed with friendly amusement. Cropping stags lifted their antlered heads, and fawns with dappled sides and immense lustrous eyes gazed at him without actual fear, even while they sidled closer to their mothers. A skylark springing suddenly from the grass a few yards from his feet made him stop short once and stand looking upward and listening. Who could pass by a skylark at five o’clock on a summer’s morning—the little, heavenly light-heart circling and wheeling, showering down diamonds, showering down pearls, from its tiny pulsating, trilling throat?

“Do you know why they sing like that? It is because all but the joy of things has been kept hidden from them. They knew nothing but life and flight and mating, and the gold of the sun. So they sing.” That she had once said.

He listened until the jewelled rain seemed to have fallen into his soul. Then he went on his way smiling as he knew he had never smiled in his life before. He knew it because he realised that he had never before felt the same vigorous, light normality of spirit, the same sense of being as other men. It was as though something had swept a great clear space about him, and having room for air he breathed deep and was glad of the commonest gifts of being.

The bathing pool had been the greatest pleasure of his uncared-for boyhood. No one knew which long passed away Mount Dunstan had made it. The oldest villager had told him that it had “allus ben there,” even in his father’s time. Since he himself had known it he had seen that it was kept at its best.

Its dark blue depths reflected in their pellucid clearness the water plants growing at its edge and the enclosing shrubs and trees. The turf bordering it was velvet-thick and green, and a few flag-steps led down to the water. Birds came there to drink and bathe and preen and dress their feathers. He knew there were often nests in the bushes—sometimes the nests of nightingales who filled the soft darkness or moonlight of early June with the wonderfulness of nesting song. Sometimes a straying fawn poked in a tender nose, and after drinking delicately stole away, as if it knew itself a trespasser.

To undress and plunge headlong into the dark sapphire water was a rapturous thing. He swam swiftly and slowly by turns, he floated, looking upward at heaven’s blue, listening to birds’ song and inhaling all the fragrance of the early day. Strength grew in him and life pulsed as the water lapped his limbs. He found himself thinking with pleasure of a long walk he intended to take to see a farmer he must talk to about his hop gardens; he found himself thinking with pleasure of other things as simple and common to everyday life—such things as he ordinarily faced merely because he must, since he could not afford an experienced bailiff. He was his own bailiff, his own steward, merely, he had often thought, an unsuccessful farmer of half-starved lands. But this morning neither he nor they seemed so starved, and—for no reason—there was a future of some sort.

He emerged from his pool glowing, the turf feeling like velvet beneath his feet, a fine light in his eyes.

“Yes,” he said, throwing out his arms in a lordly stretch of physical well-being, “it might be a magnificent thing—mere strong living. THIS is magnificent.”

CHAPTER XXXVI

BY THE ROADSIDE EVERYWHERE

His breakfast and the talk over it with Penzance seemed good things. It suddenly had become worth while to discuss the approaching hop harvest and the yearly influx of the hop pickers from London. Yesterday the subject had appeared discouraging enough. The great hop gardens of the estate had been in times past its most prolific source of agricultural revenue and the boast and wonder of the hop-growing county. The neglect and scant food of the lean years had cost them their reputation. Each season they had needed smaller bands of “hoppers,” and their standard had been lowered. It had been his habit to think of them gloomily, as of hopeless and irretrievable loss. Because this morning, for a remote reason, the pulse of life beat strong in him he was taking a new view. Might not study of the subject, constant attention and the application of all available resource to one end produce appreciable results? The idea presented itself in the form of a thing worth thinking of.

“It would provide an outlook and give one work to do,” he put it to his companion. “To have a roof over one’s head, a sound body, and work to do, is not so bad. Such things form the whole of G. Selden’s cheerful aim. His spirit is alight within me. I will walk over and talk to Bolter.”

Bolter was a farmer whose struggle to make ends meet was almost too much for him. Holdings whose owners, either through neglect or lack of money, have failed to do their duty as landlords in the matter of repairs of farmhouses, outbuildings, fences, and other things, gradually fall into poor hands. Resourceful and prosperous farmers do not care to hold lands under unprosperous landlords. There were farms lying vacant on the Mount Dunstan estate, there were others whose tenants were uncertain rent payers or slipshod workers or dishonest in small ways. Waste or sale of the fertiliser which should have been given to the soil as its due, neglect in the case of things whose decay meant depreciation of property and expense to the landlord, were dishonesties. But Mount Dunstan knew that if he turned out Thorn and Fittle, whom no watching could wholly frustrate in their tricks, Under Mount Farm and Oakfield Rise would stand empty for many a year. But for his poverty Bolter would have been a good tenant enough. He was in trouble now because, though his hops promised well, he faced difficulties in the matter of “pickers.” Last year he had not been able to pay satisfactory prices in return for labour, and as a result the prospect of securing good workers was an unpromising one.

The hordes of men, women, and children who flock year after year to the hop-growing districts know each other. They learn also which may be called the good neighbourhoods and which the bad; the gardens whose holders are considered satisfactory as masters, and those who are undesirable. They know by experience or report where the best “huts” are provided, where tents are supplied, and where one must get along as one can.

Generally the regular flocks are under a “captain,” who gathers his followers each season, manages them and looks after their interests and their employers’. In some cases the same captain brings his regiment to the same gardens year after year, and ends by counting himself as of the soil and almost of the family of his employer. Each hard, thick-fogged winter they fight through in their East End courts and streets, they look forward to the open-air weeks spent between long, narrow green groves of tall garlanded poles, whose wreathings hang thick with fresh and pungent-scented hop clusters. Children play ” ‘oppin” in dingy rooms and alleys, and talk to each other of days when the sun shone hot and birds were singing and flowers smelling sweet in the hedgerows; of others when the rain streamed down and made mud of the soft earth, and yet there was pleasure in the gipsying life, and high cheer in the fire of sticks built in the field by some bold spirit, who hung over it a tin kettle to boil for tea. They never forgot the gentry they had caught sight of riding or driving by on the road, the parson who came to talk, and the occasional groups of ladies from the “great house” who came into the gardens to walk about and look at the bins and ask queer questions in their gentry-sounding voices. They never knew anything, and they always seemed to be entertained. Sometimes there were enterprising, laughing ones, who asked to be shown how to strip the hops into the bins, and after being shown played at the work for a little while, taking off their gloves and showing white fingers with rings on. They always looked as if they had just been washed, and as if all of their clothes were fresh from the tub, and when anyone stood near them it was observable that they smelt nice. Generally they gave pennies to the children before they left the garden, and sometimes shillings to the women. The hop picking was, in fact, a wonderful blend of work and holiday combined.

Mount Dunstan had liked the “hopping” from his first memories of it. He could recall his sensations of welcoming a renewal of interesting things when, season after season, he had begun to mark the early stragglers on the road. The stragglers were not of the class gathered under captains. They were derelicts—tramps who spent their summers on the highways and their winters in such workhouses as would take them in; tinkers, who differ from the tramps only because sometimes they owned a rickety cart full of strange household goods and drunken tenth-hand perambulators piled with dirty bundles and babies, these last propelled by robust or worn-out, slatternly women, who sat by the small roadside fire stirring the battered pot or tending the battered kettle, when resting time had come and food must be cooked. Gipsies there were who had cooking fires also, and hobbled horses cropping the grass. Now and then appeared a grand one, who was rumoured to be a Lee and therefore royal, and who came and lived regally in a gaily painted caravan. During the late summer weeks one began to see slouching figures tramping along the high road at intervals. These were men who were old, men who were middle-aged and some who were young, all of them more or less dust-grimed, weather-beaten, or ragged. Occasionally one was to be seen in heavy beery slumber under the hedgerow, or lying on the grass smoking lazily, or with painful thrift cobbling up a hole in a garment. Such as these were drifting in early that they might be on the ground when pickers were wanted. They were the forerunners of the regular army.

On his walk to West Ways, the farm Bolter lived on, Mount Dunstan passed two or three of these strays. They were the usual flotsam and jetsam, but on the roadside near a hop garden he came upon a group of an aspect so unusual that it attracted his attention. Its unusualness consisted in its air of exceeding bustling cheerfulness. It was a domestic group of the most luckless type, and ragged, dirty, and worn by an evidently long tramp, might well have been expected to look forlorn, discouraged, and out of spirits. A slouching father of five children, one plainly but a few weeks old, and slung in a dirty shawl at its mother’s breast, an unhealthy looking slattern mother, two ancient perambulators, one piled with dingy bundles and cooking utensils, the seven-year-old eldest girl unpacking things and keeping an eye at the same time on the two youngest, who were neither of them old enough to be steady on their feet, the six-year-old gleefully aiding the slouching father to build the wayside fire. The mother sat upon the grass nursing her baby and staring about her with an expression at once stupefied and illuminated by some temporary bliss. Even the slouching father was grinning, as if good luck had befallen him, and the two youngest were tumbling about with squeals of good cheer. This was not the humour in which such a group usually dropped wearily on the grass at the wayside to eat its meagre and uninviting meal and rest its dragging limbs. As he drew near, Mount Dunstan saw that at the woman’s side there stood a basket full of food and a can full of milk.

Ordinarily he would have passed on, but, perhaps because of the human glow the morning had brought him, he stopped and spoke.

“Have you come for the hopping?” he asked.

The man touched his forehead, apparently not conscious that the grin was yet on his face.

“Yes, sir,” he answered.

“How far have you walked?”

“A good fifty miles since we started, sir. It took us a good bit. We was pretty done up when we stopped here. But we’ve ‘ad a wonderful piece of good luck.” And his grin broadened immensely.

“I am glad to hear that,” said Mount Dunstan. The good luck was plainly of a nature to have excited them greatly. Chance good luck did not happen to people like themselves. They were in the state of mind which in their class can only be relieved by talk. The woman broke in, her weak mouth and chin quite unsteady.

“Seems like it can’t be true, sir,” she said. “I’d only just come out of the Union—after this one,” signifying the new baby at her breast. “I wasn’t fit to drag along day after day. We ‘ad to stop ‘ere ‘cos I was near fainting away.”

“She looked fair white when she sat down,” put in the man. “Like she was goin’ off.”

“And that very minute,” said the woman, “a young lady came by on ‘orseback, an’ the minute she sees me she stops her ‘orse an’ gets down.”

“I never seen nothing like the quick way she done it,” said the husband. “Sharp, like she was a soldier under order. Down an’ give the bridle to the groom an’ comes over”

“And kneels down,” the woman took him up, “right by me an’ says, `What’s the matter? What can I do?’ an’ finds out in two minutes an’ sends to the farm for some brandy an’ all this basketful of stuff,” jerking her head towards the treasure at her side. “An’ gives ‘IM,” with another jerk towards her mate, “money enough to ‘elp us along till I’m fair on my feet. That quick it was—that quick,” passing her hand over her forehead, “as if it wasn’t for the basket,” with a nervous, half-hysteric giggle, “I wouldn’t believe but what it was a dream—I wouldn’t.”

“She was a very kind young lady,” said Mount Dunstan, “and you were in luck.”

He gave a few coppers to the children and strode on his way. The glow was hot in his heart, and he held his head high.

“She has gone by,” he said. “She has gone by.”

He knew he should find her at West Ways Farm, and he did so. Slim and straight as a young birch tree, and elate with her ride in the morning air, she stood silhouetted in her black habit against the ancient whitewashed brick porch as she talked to Bolter.

“I have been drinking a glass of milk and asking questions about hops,” she said, giving him her hand bare of glove. “Until this year I have never seen a hop garden or a hop picker.”

After the exchange of a few words Bolter respectfully melted away and left them together.

“It was such a wonderful day that I wanted to be out under the sky for a long time—to ride a long way,” she explained. “I have been looking at hop gardens as I rode. I have watched them all the summer—from the time when there was only a little thing with two or three pale green leaves looking imploringly all the way up to the top of each immensely tall hop pole, from its place in the earth at the bottom of it— as if it was saying over and over again, under its breath, `Can I get up there? Can I get up? Can I do it in time? Can I do it in time?’ Yes, that was what they were saying, the little bold things. I have watched them ever since, putting out tendrils and taking hold of the poles and pulling and climbing like little acrobats. And curling round and unfolding leaves and more leaves, until at last they threw them out as if they were beginning to boast that they could climb up into the blue of the sky if the summer were long enough. And now, look at them!” her hand waved towards the great gardens. “Forests of them, cool green pathways and avenues with leaf canopies over them.”

“You have seen it all,” he said. “You do see things, don’t you? A few hundred yards down the road I passed something you had seen. I knew it was you who had seen it, though the poor wretches had not heard your name.”

She hesitated a moment, then stooped down and took up in her hand a bit of pebbled earth from the pathway. There was storm in the blue of her eyes as she held it out for him to look at as it lay on the bare rose-flesh of her palm.

“See,” she said, “see, it is like that—what we give. It is like that.” And she tossed the earth away.

“It does not seem like that to those others.”

“No, thank God, it does not. But to one’s self it is the mere luxury of self-indulgence, and the realisation of it sometimes tempts one to be even a trifle morbid. Don’t you see,” a sudden thrill in her voice startled him, “they are on the roadside everywhere all over the world.”

“Yes. All over the world.”

“Once when I was a child of ten I read a magazine article about the suffering millions and the monstrously rich, who were obviously to blame for every starved sob and cry. It almost drove me out of my childish senses. I went to my father and threw myself into his arms in a violent fit of crying. I clung to him and sobbed out, `Let us give it all away; let us give it all away and be like other people!’ “

“What did he say?”

“He said we could never be quite like other people. We had a certain load to carry along the highway. It was the thing the whole world wanted and which we ourselves wanted as much as the rest, and we could not sanely throw it away. It was my first lesson in political economy and I abhorred it. I was a passionate child and beat furiously against the stone walls enclosing present suffering. It was horrible to know that they could not be torn down. I cried out, `When I see anyone who is miserable by the roadside I shall stop and give him everything he wants—everything!’ I was ten years old, and thought it could be done.”

“But you stop by the roadside even now.”

“Yes. That one can do.”

“You are two strong creatures and you draw each other,” Penzance had said. “Perhaps you drew each other across seas. Who knows?”

Coming to West Ways on a chance errand he had, as it were, found her awaiting him on the threshold. On her part she had certainly not anticipated seeing him there, but—when one rides far afield in the sun there are roads towards which one turns as if answering a summoning call, and as her horse had obeyed a certain touch of the rein at a certain point her cheek had felt momentarily hot.

Until later, when the “picking” had fairly begun, the kilns would not be at work; but there was some interest even now in going over the ground for the first time.

“I have never been inside an oast house,” she said; “Bolter is going to show me his, and explain technicalities.”

“May I come with you?” he asked.

There was a change in him. Something had lighted in his eyes since the day before, when he had told her his story of Red Godwyn. She wondered what it was. They went together over the place, escorted by Bolter. They looked into the great circular ovens, on whose floors the hops would be laid for drying, they mounted ladder-like steps to the upper room where, when dried, the same hops would lie in soft, light piles, until pushed with wooden shovels into the long “pokes” to be pressed and packed into a solid marketable mass. Bolter was allowed to explain the technicalities, but it was plain that Mount Dunstan was familiar with all of them, and it was he who, with a sentence here and there, gave her the colour of things.

“When it is being done there is nearly always outside a touch of the sharp sweetness of early autumn,” he said “The sun slanting through the little window falls on the pale yellow heaps, and there is a pungent scent of hops in the air which is rather intoxicating.”

“I am coming later to see the entire process,” she answered.

It was a mere matter of seeing common things together and exchanging common speech concerning them, but each was so strongly conscious of the other that no sentence could seem wholly impersonal. There are times when the whole world is personal to a mood whose intensity seems a reason for all things. Words are of small moment when the mere sound of a voice makes an unreasonable joy

“There was that touch of sharp autumn sweetness in the air yesterday morning,” she said. “And the chaplets of briony berries that look as if they had been thrown over the hedges are beginning to change to scarlet here and there. The wild rose-haws are reddening, and so are the clusters of berries on the thorn trees and bushes.”

“There are millions of them,” Mount Dunstan said, “and in a few weeks’ time they will look like bunches of crimson coral. When the sun shines on them they will be wonderful to see.”

What was there in such speeches as these to draw any two nearer and nearer to each other as they walked side by side— to fill the morning air with an intensity of life, to seem to cause the world to drop away and become as nothing? As they had been isolated during their waltz in the crowded ballroom at Dunholm Castle, so they were isolated now. When they stood in the narrow green groves of the hop garden, talking simply of the placing of the bins and the stripping and measuring of the vines, there might have been no human thing within a hundred miles—within a thousand. For the first time his height and strength conveyed to her an impression of physical beauty. His walk and bearing gave her pleasure. When he turned his red-brown eyes upon her suddenly she was conscious that she liked their colour, their shape, the power of the look in them. On his part, he—for the twentieth time— found himself newly moved by the dower nature had bestowed on her. Had the world ever held before a woman creature so much to be longed for?—abnormal wealth, New York and Fifth Avenue notwithstanding, a man could only think of folding arms round her and whispering in her lovely ear—follies, oaths, prayers, gratitude.

And yet as they went about together there was growing in Betty Vanderpoel’s mind a certain realisation. It grew in spite of the recognition of the change in him—the new thing lighted in his eyes. Whatsoever he felt—if he felt anything— he would never allow himself speech. How could he? In his place she could not speak herself. Because he was the strong thing which drew her thoughts, he would not come to any woman only to cast at her feet a burden which, in the nature of things, she must take up. And suddenly she comprehended that the mere obstinate Briton in him—even apart from greater things—had an immense attraction for her. As she liked now the red-brown colour of his eyes and saw beauty in his rugged features, so she liked his British stubbornness and the pride which would not be beaten.

“It is the unconquerable thing, which leads them in their battles and makes them bear any horror rather than give in. They have taken half the world with it; they are like bulldogs and lions,” she thought. “And—and I am glorying in it.”

“Do you know,” said Mount Dunstan, “that sometimes you suddenly fling out the most magnificent flag of colour—as if some splendid flame of thought had sent up a blaze?”

“I hope it is not a habit,” she answered. “When one has a splendid flare of thought one should be modest about it.”

What was there worth recording in the whole hour they spent together? Outwardly there had only been a chance meeting and a mere passing by. But each left something with the other and each learned something; and the record made was deep.

At last she was on her horse again, on the road outside the white gate.

“This morning has been so much to the good,” he said. “I had thought that perhaps we might scarcely meet again this year. I shall become absorbed in hops and you will no doubt go away. You will make visits or go to the Riviera—or to New York for the winter?”

“I do not know yet. But at least I shall stay to watch the thorn trees load themselves with coral.” To herself she was saying: “He means to keep away. I shall not see him.”

As she rode off Mount Dunstan stood for a few moments, not moving from his place. At a short distance from the farmhouse gate a side lane opened upon the highway, and as she cantered in its direction a horseman turned in from it— a man who was young and well dressed and who sat well a spirited animal. He came out upon the road almost face to face with Miss Vanderpoel, and from where he stood Mount Dunstan could see his delighted smile as he lifted his hat in salute. It was Lord Westholt, and what more natural than that after an exchange of greetings the two should ride together on their way! For nearly three miles their homeward road would be the same.

But in a breath’s space Mount Dunstan realised a certain truth—a simple, elemental thing. All the exaltation of the morning swooped and fell as a bird seems to swoop and fall through space. It was all over and done with, and he understood it. His normal awakening in the morning, the physical and mental elation of the first clear hours, the spring of his foot as he had trod the road, had all had but one meaning. In some occult way the hypnotic talk of the night before had formed itself into a reality, fantastic and unreasoning as it had been. Some insistent inner consciousness had seized upon and believed it in spite of him and had set all his waking being in tune to it. That was the explanation of his undue spirits and hope. If Penzance had spoken a truth he would have had a natural, sane right to feel all this and more. But the truth was that he, in his guise—was one of those who are “on the roadside everywhere—all over the world.” Poetically figurative as the thing sounded, it was prosaic fact.

So, still hearing the distant sounds of the hoofs beating in cheerful diminuendo on the roadway, he turned about and went back to talk to Bolter.

CHAPTER XXXVII

CLOSED CORRIDORS

To spend one’s days perforce in an enormous house alone is a thing likely to play unholy tricks with a man’s mind and lead it to gloomy workings. To know the existence of a hundred or so of closed doors shut on the darkness of unoccupied rooms; to be conscious of flights of unmounted stairs, of stretches of untrodden corridors, of unending walls, from which the pictured eyes of long dead men and women stare, as if seeing things which human eyes behold not—is an eerie and unwholesome thing. Mount Dunstan slept in a large four-post bed in a chamber in which he might have died or been murdered a score of times without being able to communicate with the remote servants’ quarters below stairs, where lay the one man and one woman who attended him. When he came late to his room and prepared for sleep by the light of two flickering candles the silence of the dead in tombs was about him; but it was only a more profound and insistent thing than the silence of the day, because it was the silence of the night, which is a presence. He used to tell himself with secret smiles at the fact that at certain times the fantasy was half believable—that there were things which walked about softly at night—things which did not want to be dead. He himself had picked them out from among the pictures in the gallery—pretty, light, petulant women; adventurous-eyed, full-blooded, eager men. His theory was that they hated their stone coffins, and fought their way back through the grey mists to try to talk and make love and to be seen of warm things which were alive. But it was not to be done, because they had no bodies and no voices, and when they beat upon closed doors they would not open. Still they came back—came back. And sometimes there was a rustle and a sweep through the air in a passage, or a creak, or a sense of waiting which was almost a sound.

“Perhaps some of them have gone when they have been as I am,” he had said one black night, when he had sat in his room staring at the floor. “If a man was dragged out when he had not LIVED a day, he would come back I should come back if—God! A man COULD not be dragged away—like THIS!”

And to sit alone and think of it was an awful and a lonely thing—a lonely thing.

But loneliness was nothing new, only that in these months his had strangely intensified itself. This, though he was not aware of it, was because the soul and body which were the completing parts of him were within reach—and without it. When he went down to breakfast he sat singly at his table, round which twenty people might have laughed and talked. Between the dining-room and the library he spent his days when he was not out of doors. Since he could not afford servants, the many other rooms must be kept closed. It was a ghastly and melancholy thing to make, as he must sometimes, a sort of precautionary visit to the state apartments. He was the last Mount Dunstan, and he would never see them opened again for use, but so long as he lived under the roof he might by prevision check, in a measure, the too rapid encroachments of decay. To have a leak stopped here, a nail driven or a support put there, seemed decent things to do.

“Whom am I doing it for?” he said to Mr. Penzance. “I am doing it for myself—because I cannot help it. The place seems to me like some gorgeous old warrior come to the end of his days It has stood the war of things for century after century—the war of things. It is going now I am all that is left to it. It is all I have. So I patch it up when I can afford it, with a crutch or a splint and a bandage.”

Late in the afternoon of the day on which Miss Vanderpoel rode away from West Ways with Lord Westholt, a stealthy and darkly purple cloud rose, lifting its ominous bulk against a chrysoprase and pink horizon. It was the kind of cloud which speaks of but one thing to those who watch clouds, or even casually consider them. So Lady Anstruthers felt some surprise when she saw Sir Nigel mount his horse before the stone steps and ride away, as it were, into the very heart of the coming storm.

“Nigel will be caught in the rain,” she said to her sister. “I wonder why he goes out now. It would be better to wait until to-morrow.”

But Sir Nigel did not think so. He had calculated matters with some nicety. He was not exactly on such terms with Mount Dunstan as would make a casual call seem an entirely natural thing, and he wished to drop in upon him for a casual call and in an unpremeditated manner. He meant to reach the Mount about the time the storm broke, under which circumstance nothing could bear more lightly an air of being unpremeditated than to take refuge in a chance passing.

Mount Dunstan was in the library. He had sat smoking his pipe while he watched the purple cloud roll up and spread itself, blotting out the chrysoprase and pink and blue, and when the branches of the trees began to toss about he had looked on with pleasure as the rush of big rain drops came down and pelted things. It was a fine storm, and there were some imposing claps of thunder and jagged flashes of lightning. As one splendid rattle shook the air he was surprised to hear a summons at the great hall door. Who on earth could be turning up at this time? His man Reeve announced the arrival a few moments later, and it was Sir Nigel Anstruthers. He had, he explained, been riding through the village when the deluge descended, and it had occurred to him to turn in at the park gates and ask a temporary shelter. Mount Dunstan received him with sufficient courtesy. His appearance was not a thing to rejoice over, but it could be endured. Whisky and soda and a smoke would serve to pass the hour, if the storm lasted so long.

Conversation was not the easiest thing in the world under the circumstances, but Sir Nigel led the way steadily after he had taken his seat and accepted the hospitalities offered. What a place it was—this! He had been struck for the hundredth time with the impressiveness of the mass of it, the sweep of the park and the splendid grouping of the timber, as he had ridden up the avenue. There was no other place like it in the county. Was there another like it in England?

“Not in its case, I hope,” Mount Dunstan said.

There were a few seconds of silence. The rain poured down in splashing sheets and was swept in rattling gusts against the window panes.

“What the place needs is—an heiress,” Anstruthers observed in the tone of a practical man. “I believe I have heard that your views of things are such that she should preferably NOT be an American.”

Mount Dunstan did not smile, though he slightly showed his teeth.

“When I am driven to the wall,” he answered, “I may not be fastidious as to nationality.”

Nigel Anstruthers’ manner was not a bad one. He chose that tone of casual openness which, while it does not wholly commit itself, may be regarded as suggestive of the amiable half confidence of speeches made as “man to man.”

“My own opportunity of studying the genus American heiress within my own gates is a first-class one. I find that it knows what it wants and that its intention is to get it.” A short laugh broke from him as he flicked the ash from his cigar on to the small bronze receptacle at his elbow. “It is not many years since it would have been difficult for a girl to be frank enough to say, `When I marry I shall ask something in exchange for what I have to give.’ “

“There are not many who have as much to give,” said Mount Dunstan coolly.

“True,” with a slight shrug. “You are thinking that men are glad enough to take a girl like that—even one who has not a shape like Diana’s and eyes like the sea. Yes, by George,” softly, and narrowing his lids, “she IS a handsome creature.”

Mount Dunstan did not attempt to refute the statement, and Anstruthers laughed low again.

“It is an asset she knows the value of quite clearly. That is the interesting part of it. She has inherited the far-seeing commercial mind. She does not object to admitting it. She educated herself in delightful cold blood that she might be prepared for the largest prize appearing upon the horizon. She held things in view when she was a child at school, and obviously attacked her French, German, and Italian conjugations with a twelve-year-old eye on the future.”

Mount Dunstan leaning back carelessly in his chair, laughed— as it seemed—with him. Internally he was saying that the man was a liar who might always be trusted to lie, but he knew with shamed fury that the lies were doing something to his soul—rolling dark vapours over it—stinging him, dragging away props, and making him feel they had been foolish things to lean on. This can always be done with a man in love who has slight foundation for hope. For some mysterious and occult reason civilisation has elected to treat the strange and great passion as if it were an unholy and indecent thing, whose dominion over him proper social training prevents any man from admitting openly. In passing through its cruelest phases he must bear himself as if he were immune, and this being the custom, he may be called upon to endure much without the relief of striking out with manly blows. An enemy guessing his case and possessing the infernal gift whose joy is to dishearten and do hurt with courteous despitefulness, may plant a poisoned arrow here and there with neatness and fine touch, while his bound victim can, with decency, neither start, nor utter brave howls, nor guard himself, but must sit still and listen, hospitably supplying smoke and drink and being careful not to make an ass of himself.

Therefore Mount Dunstan pushed the cigars nearer to his visitor and waved his hand hospitably towards the whisky and soda. There was no reason, in fact, why Anstruthers—or any one indeed, but Penzance, should suspect that he had become somewhat mad in secret. The man’s talk was marked merely by the lightly disparaging malice which was rarely to be missed from any speech of his which touched on others. Yet it might have been a thing arranged beforehand, to suggest adroitly either lies or truth which would make a man see every sickeningly good reason for feeling that in this contest he did not count for a man at all.

“It has all been pretty obvious,” said Sir Nigel. “There is a sort of cynicism in the openness of the siege. My impression is that almost every youngster who has met her has taken a shot. Tommy Alanby scrambling up from his knees in one of the rose-gardens was a satisfying sight. His much-talked-of-passion for Jane Lithcom was temporarily in abeyance.”

The rain swirled in a torrent against the window, and casually glancing outside at the tossing gardens he went on.

“She is enjoying herself. Why not? She has the spirit of the huntress. I don’t think she talks nonsense about friendship to the captives of her bow and spear. She knows she can always get what she wants. A girl like that MUST have an arrogance of mind. And she is not a young saint. She is one of the women born with THE LOOK in her eyes. I own I should not like to be in the place of any primeval poor brute who really went mad over her—and counted her millions as so much dirt.”

Mount Dunstan answered with a shrug of his big shoulders:

“Apparently he would seem as remote from the reason of to-day as the men who lived on the land when Hengist and Horsa came—or when Caesar landed at Deal.”

“He would seem as remote to her,” with a shrug also. “I should not like to contend that his point of view would not interest her or that she would particularly discourage him. Her eyes would call him—without malice or intention, no doubt, but your early Briton ceorl or earl would be as well understood by her. Your New York beauty who has lived in the market place knows principally the prices of things.”

He was not ill pleased with himself. He was putting it well and getting rather even with her. If this fellow with his shut mouth had a sore spot hidden anywhere he was giving him “to think.” And he would find himself thinking, while, whatsoever he thought, he would be obliged to continue to keep his ugly mouth shut. The great idea was to say things WITHOUT saying them, to set your hearer’s mind to saying them for you.

“What strikes one most is a sort of commercial brilliance in her,” taking up his thread again after a smilingly reflective pause. “It quite exhilarates one by its novelty. There’s spice in it. We English have not a look-in when we are dealing with Americans, and yet France calls us a nation of shopkeepers. My impression is that their women take little inventories of every house they enter, of every man they meet. I heard her once speaking to my wife about this place, as if she had lived in it. She spoke of the closed windows and the state of the gardens—of broken fountains and fallen arches. She evidently deplored the deterioration of things which represented capital. She has inventoried Dunholm, no doubt. That will give Westholt a chance. But she will do nothing until after her next year’s season in London—that I’d swear. I look forward to next year. It will be worth watching. She has been training my wife. A sister who has married an Englishman and has at least spent some years of her life in England has a certain established air. When she is presented one knows she will be a sensation. After that–-” he hesitated a moment, smiling not too pleasantly.

“After that,” said Mount Dunstan, “the Deluge.”

“Exactly. The Deluge which usually sweeps girls off their feet—but it will not sweep her off hers. She will stand quite firm in the flood and lose sight of nothing of importance which floats past.”

Mount Dunstan took him up. He was sick of hearing the fellow’s voice.

“There will be a good many things,” he said; “there will be great personages and small ones, pomps and vanities, glittering things and heavy ones.”

“When she sees what she wants,” said Anstruthers, “she will hold out her hand, knowing it will come to her. The things which drown will not disturb her. I once made the blunder of suggesting that she might need protection against the importunate—as if she had been an English girl. It was an idiotic thing to do.”

“Because?” Mount Dunstan for the moment had lost his head. Anstruthers had maddeningly paused.

“She answered that if it became necessary she might perhaps be able to protect herself. She was as cool and frank as a boy. No air pince about it—merely consciousness of being able to put things in their right places. Made a mere male relative feel like a fool.”

“When ARE things in their right places?” To his credit be it spoken, Mount Dunstan managed to say it as if in the mere putting together of idle words. What man likes to be reminded of his right place! No man wants to be put in his right place. There is always another place which seems more desirable.

“She knows—if we others do not. I suppose my right place is at Stornham, conducting myself as the brother-in-law of a fair American should. I suppose yours is here—shut up among your closed corridors and locked doors. There must be a lot of them in a house like this. Don’t you sometimes feel it too large for you?”

“Always,” answered Mount Dunstan.

The fact that he added nothing else and met a rapid side glance with unmoving red-brown eyes gazing out from under rugged brows, perhaps irritated Anstruthers. He had been rather enjoying himself, but he had not enjoyed himself enough. There was no denying that his plaything had not openly flinched. Plainly he was not good at flinching. Anstruthers wondered how far a man might go. He tried again.

“She likes the place, though she has a natural disdain for its condition. That is practical American. Things which are going to pieces because money is not spent upon them—mere money, of which all the people who count for anything have so much—are inevitably rather disdained. They are `out of it.’ But she likes the estate.” As he watched Mount Dunstan he felt sure he had got it at last—the right thing. “If you were a duke with fifty thousand a year,” with a distinctly nasty, amicably humorous, faint laugh, “she would—by the Lord, I believe, she would take it over—and you with it.”

Mount Dunstan got up. In his rough walking tweeds he looked over-big—and heavy—and perilous. For two seconds Nigel Anstruthers would not have been surprised if he had without warning slapped his face, or knocked him over, or whirled him out of his chair and kicked him. He would not have liked it, but—for two seconds—it would have been no surprise. In fact, he instinctively braced his not too firm muscles. But nothing of the sort occurred. During the two seconds—perhaps three—Mount Dunstan stood still and looked down at him. The brief space at an end, he walked over to the hearth and stood with his back to the big fireplace.

“You don’t like her,” he said, and his manner was that of a man dealing with a matter of fact. “Why do you talk about her?”

He had got away again—quite away.

An ugly flush shot over Anstruthers’ face. There was one more thing to say—whether it was idiotic to say it or not. Things can always be denied afterwards, should denial appear necessary—and for the moment his special devil possessed him.

“I do not like her!” And his mouth twisted. “Do I not? I am not an old woman. I am a man—like others. I chance to like her—too much.”

There was a short silence. Mount Dunstan broke it.

“Then,” he remarked, “you had better emigrate to some country with a climate which suits you. I should say that England—for the present—does not.”

“I shall stay where I am,” answered Anstruthers, with a slight hoarseness of voice, which made it necessary for him to clear his throat. “I shall stay where she is. I will have that satisfaction, at least. She does not mind. I am only a racketty, middle-aged brother-in-law, and she can take care of herself. As I told you, she has the spirit of the huntress.”

“Look here,” said Mount Dunstan, quite without haste, and with an iron civility. “I am going to take the liberty of suggesting something. If this thing is true, it would be as well not to talk about it.”

“As well for me—or for her?” and there was a serene significance in the query.

Mount Dunstan thought a few seconds.

“I confess,” he said slowly, and he planted his fine blow between the eyes well and with directness. “I confess that it would not have occurred to me to ask you to do anything or refrain from doing it for her sake.”

“Thank you. Perhaps you are right. One learns that one must protect one’s self. I shall not talk—neither will you. I know that. I was a fool to let it out. The storm is over. I must ride home.” He rose from his seat and stood smiling. “It would smash up things nicely if the new beauty’s appearance in the great world were preceded by chatter of the unseemly affection of some adorer of ill repute. Unfairly enough it is always the woman who is hurt.”

“Unless,” said Mount Dunstan civilly, “there should arise the poor, primeval brute, in his neolithic wrath, to seize on the man to blame, and break every bone and sinew in his damned body.”

“The newspapers would enjoy that more than she would,” answered Sir Nigel. “She does not like the newspapers. They are too ready to disparage the multimillionaire, and cackle about members of his family.”

The unhidden hatred which still professed to hide itself in the depths of their pupils, as they regarded each other, had its birth in a passion as elemental as the quakings of the earth, or the rage of two lions in a desert, lashing their flanks in the blazing sun. It was well that at this moment they should part ways.

Sir Nigel’s horse being brought, he went on the way which was his.

“It was a mistake to say what I did,” he said before going. “I ought to have held my tongue. But I am under the same roof with her. At any rate, that is a privilege no other man shares with me.”

He rode off smartly, his horse’s hoofs splashing in the rain pools left in the avenue after the storm. He was not so sure after all that he had made a mistake, and for the moment he was not in the mood to care whether he had made one or not. His agreeable smile showed itself as he thought of the obstinate, proud brute he had left behind, sitting alone among his shut doors and closed corridors. They had not shaken hands either at meeting or parting. Queer thing it was—the kind of enmity a man could feel for another when he was upset by a woman. It was amusing enough that it should be she who was upsetting him after all these years—impudent little Betty, with the ferocious manner.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

AT SHANDY’S

On a late-summer evening in New York the atmosphere surrounding a certain corner table at Shandy’s cheap restaurant in Fourteenth Street was stirred by a sense of excitement.

The corner table in question was the favourite meeting place of a group of young men of the G. Selden type, who usually took possession of it at dinner time—having decided that Shandy’s supplied more decent food for fifty cents, or even for twenty-five, than was to be found at other places of its order. Shandy’s was “about all right,” they said to each other, and patronised it accordingly, three or four of them generally dining together, with a friendly and adroit manipulation of “portions” and “half portions” which enabled them to add variety to their bill of fare.

The street outside was lighted, the tide of passersby was less full and more leisurely in its movements than it was during the seething, working hours of daylight, but the electric cars swung past each other with whiz and clang of bell almost unceasingly, their sound being swelled, at short intervals, by the roar and rumbling rattle of the trains dashing by on the elevated railroad. This, however, to the frequenters of Shandy’s, was the usual accompaniment of everyday New York life and was regarded as a rather cheerful sort of thing.

This evening the four claimants of the favourite corner table had met together earlier than usual. Jem Belter, who “hammered” a typewriter at Schwab’s Brewery, Tom Wetherbee, who was “in a downtown office,” Bert Johnson, who was “out for the Delkoff,” and Nick Baumgarten, who having for some time “beaten” certain streets as assistant salesman for the same illustrious machine, had been recently elevated to a “territory” of his own, and was therefore in high spirits.

“Say!” he said. “Let’s give him a fine dinner. We can make it between us. Beefsteak and mushrooms, and potatoes hashed brown. He likes them. Good old G. S. I shall be right glad to see him. Hope foreign travel has not given him the swell head.”

“Don’t believe it’s hurt him a bit. His letter didn’t sound like it. Little Georgie ain’t a fool,” said Jem Belter.

Tom Wetherbee was looking over the letter referred to. It had been written to the four conjointly, towards the termination of Selden’s visit to Mr. Penzance. The young man was not an ardent or fluent correspondent; but Tom Wetherbee was chuckling as he read the epistle.

“Say, boys,” he said, “this big thing he’s keeping back to tell us when he sees us is all right, but what takes me is old George paying a visit to a parson. He ain’t no Young Men’s Christian Association.”

Bert Johnson leaned forward, and looked at the address on the letter paper.

“Mount Dunstan Vicarage,” he read aloud. “That looks pretty swell, doesn’t it?” with a laugh. “Say, fellows, you know Jepson at the office, the chap that prides himself on reading such a lot? He said it reminded him of the names of places in English novels. That Johnny’s the biggest snob you ever set your tooth into. When I told him about the lord fellow that owns the castle, and that George seemed to have seen him, he nearly fell over himself. Never had any use for George before, but just you watch him make up to him when he sees him next.”

People were dropping in and taking seats at the tables. They were all of one class. Young men who lived in hall bedrooms. Young women who worked in shops or offices, a couple here and there, who, living far uptown, had come to Shandy’s to dinner, that they might go to cheap seats in some theatre afterwards. In the latter case, the girls wore their best hats, had bright eyes, and cheeks lightly flushed by their sense of festivity. Two or three were very pretty in their thin summer dresses and flowered or feathered head gear, tilted at picturesque angles over their thick hair. When each one entered the eyes of the young men at the corner table followed her with curiosity and interest, but the glances at her escort were always of a disparaging nature.

“There’s a beaut!” said Nick Baumgarten. “Get onto that pink stuff on her hat, will you. She done it because it’s just the colour of her cheeks.”

They all looked, and the girl was aware of it, and began to laugh and talk coquettishly to the young man who was her companion.

“I wonder where she got Clarence?” said Jem Belter in sarcastic allusion to her escort. “The things those lookers have fastened on to them gets ME.”

“If it was one of US, now,” said Bert Johnson. Upon which they broke into simultaneous good-natured laughter.

“It’s queer, isn’t it,” young Baumgarten put in, “how a fellow always feels sore when he sees another fellow with a peach like that? It’s just straight human nature, I guess.”

The door swung open to admit a newcomer, at the sight of whom Jem Belter exclaimed joyously: “Good old Georgie! Here he is, fellows! Get on to his glad rags.”

“Glad rags” is supposed to buoyantly describe such attire as, by its freshness or elegance of style, is rendered a suitable adornment for festive occasions or loftier leisure moments. “Glad rags” may mean evening dress, when a young gentleman’s wardrobe can aspire to splendour so marked, but it also applies to one’s best and latest-purchased garb, in contradistinction to the less ornamental habiliments worn every day, and designated as “office clothes.”

G. Selden’s economies had not enabled him to give himself into the hands of a Bond Street tailor, but a careful study of cut and material, as spread before the eye in elegant coloured illustrations in the windows of respectable shops in less ambitious quarters, had resulted in the purchase of a well-made suit of smart English cut. He had a nice young figure, and looked extremely neat and tremendously new and clean, so much so, indeed, that several persons glanced at him a little admiringly as he was met half way to the corner table by his friends.

“Hello, old chap! Glad to see you. What sort of a voyage? How did you leave the royal family? Glad to get back?”

They all greeted him at once, shaking hands and slapping him on the back, as they hustled him gleefully back to the corner table and made him sit down.

“Say, garsong,” said Nick Baumgarten to their favourite waiter, who came at once in answer to his summons, “let’s have a porterhouse steak, half the size of this table, and with plenty of mushrooms and potatoes hashed brown. Here’s Mr. Selden just returned from visiting at Windsor Castle, and if we don’t treat him well, he’ll look down on us.”

G. Selden grinned. “How have you been getting on, Sam?” he said, nodding cheerfully to the man. They were old and tried friends. Sam knew all about the days when a fellow could not come into Shandy’s at all, or must satisfy his strong young hunger with a bowl of soup, or coffee and a roll. Sam did his best for them in the matter of the size of portions, and they did their good-natured utmost for him in the affair of the pooled tip.

“Been getting on as well as can be expected,” Sam grinned back. “Hope you had a fine time, Mr. Selden?”

“Fine! I should smile! Fine wasn’t in it,” answered Selden. “But I’m looking forward to a Shandy porterhouse steak, all the same.”

“Did they give you a better one in the Strawnd?” asked Baumgarten, in what he believed to be a correct Cockney accent.

“You bet they didn’t,” said Selden. “Shandy’s takes a lot of beating.” That last is English.

The people at the other tables cast involuntary glances at them. Their eager, hearty young pleasure in the festivity of the occasion was a healthy thing to see. As they sat round the corner table, they produced the effect of gathering close about G. Selden. They concentrated their combined attention upon him, Belter and Johnson leaning forward on their folded arms, to watch him as he talked.

“Billy Page came back in August, looking pretty bum,” Nick Baumgarten began. “He’d been painting gay Paree brick red, and he’d spent more money than he’d meant to, and that wasn’t half enough. Landed dead broke. He said he’d had a great time, but he’d come home with rather a dark brown taste in his mouth, that he’d like to get rid of.”

“He thought you were a fool to go off cycling into the country,” put in Wetherbee, “but I told him I guessed that was where he was ‘way off. I believed you’d had the best time of the two of you.”

“Boys,” said Selden, “I had the time of my life.” He said it almost solemnly, and laid his hand on the table. “It was like one of those yarns Bert tells us. Half the time I didn’t believe it, and half the time I was ashamed of myself to think it was all happening to me and none of your fellows were in it.”

“Oh, well,” said Jem Belter, “luck chases some fellows, anyhow. Look at Nick, there.”

“Well,” Selden summed the whole thing up, “I just FELL into it where it was so deep that I had to strike out all I knew how to keep from drowning.”

“Tell us the whole thing,” Nick Baumgarten put in; “from beginning to end. Your letter didn’t give anything away.”

“A letter would have spoiled it. I can’t write letters anyhow. I wanted to wait till I got right here with you fellows round where I could answer questions. First off,” with the deliberation befitting such an opening, “I’ve sold machines enough to pay my expenses, and leave some over.”

“You have? Gee whiz! Say, give us your prescription. Glad I know you, Georgy!”

“And who do you suppose bought the first three?” At this point, it was he who leaned forward upon the table—his climax being a thing to concentrate upon. “Reuben S. Vanderpoel’s daughter—Miss Bettina! And, boys, she gave me a letter to Reuben S., himself, and here it is.”

He produced a flat leather pocketbook and took an envelope from an inner flap, laying it before them on the tablecloth. His knowledge that they would not have believed him if he had not brought his proof was founded on everyday facts. They would not have doubted his veracity, but the possibility of such delirious good fortune. What they would have believed would have been that he was playing a hilarious joke on them. Jokes of this kind, but not of this proportion, were common entertainments.

Their first impulse had been towards an outburst of laughter, but even before he produced his letter a certain truthful seriousness in his look had startled them. When he laid the envelope down each man caught his breath. It could not be denied that Jem Belter turned pale with emotion. Jem had never been one of the lucky ones.

“She let me read it,” said G. Selden, taking the letter from its envelope with great care. “And I said to her: `Miss Vanderpoel, would you let me just show that to the boys the first night I go to Shandy’s?’ I knew she’d tell me if it wasn’t all right to do it. She’d know I’d want to be told. And she just laughed and said: `I don’t mind at all. I like “the boys.” Here is a message to them. `Good luck to you all.’ “

“She said that?” from Nick Baumgarten.

“Yes, she did, and she meant it. Look at this.”

This was the letter. It was quite short, and written in a clear, definite hand.

“DEAR FATHER: This will be brought to you by Mr. G. Selden, of whom I have written to you. Please be good to him. “Affectionately, “BETTY.”

Each young man read it in turn. None of them said anything just at first. A kind of awe had descended upon them— not in the least awe of Vanderpoel, who, with other multimillionaires, were served up each week with cheerful neighbourly comment or equally neighbourly disrespect, in huge Sunday papers read throughout the land—but awe of the unearthly luck which had fallen without warning to good old G. S., who lived like the rest of them in a hall bedroom on ten per, earned by tramping the streets for the Delkoff.

“That girl,” said G. Selden gravely, “that girl is a winner from Winnersville. I take off my hat to her. If it’s the scheme that some people’s got to have millions, and others have got to sell Delkoffs, that girl’s one of those that’s entitled to the millions. It’s all right she should have ‘em. There’s no kick coming from me.”

Nick Baumgarten was the first to resume wholly normal condition of mind.

“Well, I guess after you’ve told us about her there’ll be no kick coming from any of us. Of course there’s something about you that royal families cry for, and they won’t be happy till they get. All of us boys knows that. But what we want to find out is how you worked it so that they saw the kind of pearl-studded hairpin you were.”

“Worked it!” Selden answered. “I didn’t work it. I’ve got a good bit of nerve, but I never should have had enough to invent what happened—just HAPPENED. I broke my leg falling off my bike, and fell right into a whole bunch of them —earls and countesses and viscounts and Vanderpoels. And it was Miss Vanderpoel who saw me first lying on the ground. And I was in Stornham Court where Lady Anstruthers lives —and she used to be Miss Rosalie Vanderpoel.”

“Boys,” said Bert Johnson, with friendly disgust, “he’s been up to his neck in ‘em.”

“Cheer up. The worst is yet to come,” chaffed Tom Wetherbee.

Never had such a dinner taken place at the corner table, or, in fact, at any other table at Shandy’s. Sam brought beefsteaks, which were princely, mushrooms, and hashed brown potatoes in portions whose generosity reached the heart. Sam was on good terms with Shandy’s carver, and had worked upon his nobler feelings. Steins of lager beer were ventured upon. There was hearty satisfying of fine hungers. Two of the party had eaten nothing but one “Quick Lunch” throughout the day, one of them because he was short of time, the other for economy’s sake, because he was short of money. The meal was a splendid thing. The telling of the story could not be wholly checked by the eating of food. It advanced between mouthfuls, questions being asked and details given in answers. Shandy’s became more crowded, as the hour advanced. People all over the room cast interested looks at the party at the corner table, enjoying itself so hugely. Groups sitting at the tables nearest to it found themselves excited by the things they heard.

“That young fellow in the new suit has just come back from Europe,” said a man to his wife and daughter. “He seems to have had a good time.”

“Papa,” the daughter leaned forward, and spoke in a low voice, “I heard him say `Lord Mount Dunstan said Lady Anstruthers and Miss Vanderpoel were at the garden party.’ Who do you suppose he is? “

“Well, he’s a nice young fellow, and he has English clothes on, but he doesn’t look like one of the Four Hundred. Will you have pie or vanilla ice cream, Bessy?”

Bessy—who chose vanilla ice cream—lost all knowledge of its flavour in her absorption in the conversation at the next table, which she could not have avoided hearing, even if she had wished.

“She bent over the bed and laughed—just like any other nice girl—and she said, `You are at Stornham Court, which belongs to Sir Nigel Anstruthers. Lady Anstruthers is my sister. I am Miss Vanderpoel.’ And, boys, she used to come and talk to me every day.”

“George,” said Nick Baumgarten, “you take about seventy-five bottles of Warner’s Safe Cure, and rub yourself all over with St. Jacob’s Oil. Luck like that ain’t HEALTHY!”

… . .

Mr. Vanderpoel, sitting in his study, wore the interestedly grave look of a man thinking of absorbing things. He had just given orders that a young man who would call in the course of the evening should be brought to him at once, and he was incidentally considering this young man, as he reflected upon matters recalled to his mind by his impending arrival. They were matters he had thought of with gradually increasing seriousness for some months, and they had, at first, been the result of the letters from Stornham, which each “steamer day” brought. They had been of immense interest to him— these letters. He would have found them absorbing as a study, even if he had not deeply loved Betty. He read in them things she did not state in words, and they set him thinking.

He was not suspected by men like himself of concealing an imagination beneath the trained steadiness of his exterior, but he possessed more than the world knew, and it singularly combined itself with powers of logical deduction.

If he had been with his daughter, he would have seen, day by day, where her thoughts were leading her, and in what direction she was developing, but, at a distance of three thousand miles, he found himself asking questions, and endeavouring to reach conclusions. His affection for Betty was the central emotion of his existence. He had never told himself that he had outgrown the kind and pretty creature he had married in his early youth, and certainly his tender care for her and pleasure in her simple goodness had never wavered, but Betty had given him a companionship which had counted greatly in the sum of his happiness. Because imagination was not suspected in him, no one knew what she stood for in his life. He had no son; he stood at the head of a great house, so to speak—the American parallel of what a great house is in non-republican countries. The power of it counted for great things, not in America alone, but throughout the world. As international intimacies increased, the influence of such houses might end in aiding in the making of history. Enormous constantly increasing wealth and huge financial schemes could not confine their influence, but must reach far. The man whose hand held the lever controlling them was doing well when he thought of them gravely. Such a man had to do with more than his own mere life and living. This man had confronted many problems as the years had passed. He had seen men like himself die, leaving behind them the force they had controlled, and he had seen this force— controlled no longer—let loose upon the world, sometimes a power of evil, sometimes scattering itself aimlessly into nothingness and folly, which wrought harm. He was not an ambitious man, but—perhaps because he was not only a man of thought, but a Vanderpoel of the blood of the first Reuben—these were things he did not contemplate without restlessness. When Rosy had gone away and seemed lost to them, he had been glad when he had seen Betty growing, day by day, into a strong thing. Feminine though she was, she sometimes suggested to him the son who might have been his, but was not. As the closeness of their companionship increased with her years, his admiration for her grew with his love. Power left in her hands must work for the advancement of things, and would not be idly disseminated—if no antagonistic influence wrought against her. He had found himself reflecting that, after all was said, the marriage of such a girl had a sort of parallel in that of some young royal creature, whose union might make or mar things, which must be considered. The man who must inevitably strongly colour her whole being, and vitally mark her life, would, in a sense, lay his hand upon the lever also. If he brought sorrow and disorder with him, the lever would not move steadily. Fortunes such as his grow rapidly, and he was a richer man by millions than he had been when Rosalie had married Nigel Anstruthers. The memory of that marriage had been a painful thing to him, even before he had known the whole truth of its results. The man had been a common adventurer and scoundrel, despite the facts of good birth and the air of decent breeding. If a man who was as much a scoundrel, but cleverer—it would be necessary that he should be much cleverer—made the best of himself to Betty–-! It was folly to think one could guess what a woman—or a man, either, for that matter—would love. He knew Betty, but no man knows the thing which comes, as it were, in the dark and claims its own—whether for good or evil. He had lived long enough to see beautiful, strong-spirited creatures do strange things, follow strange gods, swept away into seas of pain by strange waves.

“Even Betty,” he had said to himself, now and then. “Even my Betty. Good God—who knows! “

Because of this, he had read each letter with keen eyes. They were long letters, full of detail and colour, because she knew he enjoyed them. She had a delightful touch. He sometimes felt as if they walked the English lanes together. His intimacy with her neighbours, and her neighbourhood, was one of his relaxations. He found himself thinking of old Doby and Mrs. Welden, as a sort of soporific measure, when he lay awake at night. She had sent photographs of Stornham, of Dunholm Castle, and of Dole, and had even found an old engraving of Lady Alanby in her youth. Her evident liking for the Dunholms had pleased him. They were people whose dignity and admirableness were part of general knowledge. Lord Westholt was plainly a young man of many attractions. If the two were drawn to each other—and what more natural—all would be well. He wondered if it would be Westholt. But his love quickened a sagacity which needed no stimulus. He said to himself in time that, though she liked and admired Westholt, she went no farther. That others paid court to her he could guess without being told. He had seen the effect she had produced when she had been at home, and also an unexpected letter to his wife from Milly Bowen had revealed many things. Milly, having noted Mrs. Vanderpoel’s eager anxiety to hear direct news of Lady Anstruthers, was not the person to let fall from her hand a useful thread of connection. She had written quite at length, managing adroitly to convey all that she had seen, and all that she had heard. She had been making a visit within driving distance of Stornham, and had had the pleasure of meeting both Lady Anstruthers and Miss Vanderpoel at various parties. She was so sure that Mrs. Vanderpoel would like to hear how well Lady Anstruthers was looking, that she ventured to write. Betty’s effect upon the county was made quite clear, as also was the interested expectation of her appearance in town next season. Mr. Vanderpoel, perhaps, gathered more from the letter than his wife did. In her mind, relieved happiness and consternation were mingled.

“Do you think, Reuben, that Betty will marry that Lord Westholt?” she rather faltered. “He seems very nice, but I would rather she married an American. I should feel as if I had no girls at all, if they both lived in England.”

“Lady Bowen gives him a good character,” her husband said, smiling. “But if anything untoward happens, Annie, you shall have a house of your own half way between Dunholm Castle and Stornham Court.”

When he had begun to decide that Lord Westholt did not seem to be the man Fate was veering towards, he not unnaturally cast a mental eye over such other persons as the letters mentioned. At exactly what period his thought first dwelt a shade anxiously on Mount Dunstan he could not have told, but he at length became conscious that it so dwelt. He had begun by feeling an interest in his story, and had asked questions about him, because a situation such as his suggested query to a man of affairs. Thus, it had been natural that the letters should speak of him. What she had written had recalled to him certain rumours of the disgraceful old scandal. Yes, they had been a bad lot. He arranged to put a casual-sounding question or so to certain persons who knew English society well. What he gathered was not encouraging. The present Lord Mount Dunstan was considered rather a surly brute, and lived a mysterious sort of life which might cover many things. It was bad blood, and people were naturally shy of it. Of course, the man was a pauper, and his place a barrack falling to ruin. There had been something rather shady in his going to America or Australia a few years ago.

Good looking? Well, so few people had seen him. The lady, who was speaking, had heard that he was one of those big, rather lumpy men, and had an ill-tempered expression. She always gave a wide berth to a man who looked nasty-tempered. One or two other persons who had spoken of him had conveyed to Mr. Vanderpoel about the same amount of vaguely unpromising information. The episode of G. Selden had been interesting enough, with its suggestions of picturesque contrasts and combinations. Betty’s touch had made the junior salesman attracting. It was a good type this, of a young fellow who, battling with the discouragements of a hard life, still did not lose his amazing good cheer and patience, and found healthy sleep and honest waking, even in the hall bedroom. He had consented to Betty’s request that he would see him, partly because he was inclined to like what he had heard, and partly for a reason which Betty did not suspect. By extraordinary chance G. Selden had seen Mount Dunstan and his surroundings at close range. Mr. Vanderpoel had liked what he had gathered of Mount Dunstan’s attitude towards a personality so singularly exotic to himself. Crude, uneducated, and slangy, the junior salesman was not in any degree a fool. To an American father with a daughter like Betty, the summing-up of a normal, nice-natured, common young denizen of the United States, fresh from contact with the effete, might be subtly instructive, and well worth hearing, if it was unconsciously expressed. Mr. Vanderpoel thought he knew how, after he had overcome his visitor’s first awkwardness—if he chanced to be self-conscious—he could lead him to talk. What he hoped to do was to make him forget himself and begin to talk to him as he had talked to Betty, to ingenuously reveal impressions and points of view. Young men of his clean, rudimentary type were very definite about the things they liked and disliked, and could be trusted to reveal admiration, or lack of it, without absolute intention or actual statement. Being elemental and undismayed, they saw things cleared of the mists of social prejudice and modification. Yes, he felt he should be glad to hear of Lord Mount Dunstan and the Mount Dunstan estate from G. Selden in a happy moment of unawareness.

Why was it that it happened to be Mount Dunstan he was desirous to hear of? Well, the absolute reason for that he could not have explained, either. He had asked himself questions on the subject more than once. There was no well-founded reason, perhaps. If Betty’s letters had spoken of Mount Dunstan and his home, they had also described Lord Westholt and Dunholm Castle. Of these two men she had certainly spoken more fully than of others. Of Mount Dunstan she had had more to relate through the incident of G. Selden. He smiled as he realised the importance of the figure of G. Selden. It was Selden and his broken leg the two men had ridden over from Mount Dunstan to visit. But for Selden, Betty might not have met Mount Dunstan again. He was reason enough for all she had said. And yet–-! Perhaps, between Betty and himself there existed the thing which impresses and communicates without words. Perhaps, because their affection was unusual, they realised each other’s emotions. The half-defined anxiety he felt now was not a new thing, but he confessed to himself that it had been spurred a little by the letter the last steamer had brought him. It was NOT Lord Westholt, it definitely appeared. He had asked her to be his wife, and she had declined his proposal.

“I could not have LIKED a man any more without being in love with him,” she wrote. “I LIKE him more than I can say —so much, indeed, that I feel a little depressed by my certainty that I do not love him.”

If she had loved him, the whole matter would have been simplified. If the other man had drawn her, the thing would not be simple. Her father foresaw all the complications—and he did not want complications for Betty. Yet emotions were perverse and irresistible things, and the stronger the creature swayed by them, the more enormous their power. But, as he sat in his easy chair and thought over it all, the one feeling predominant in his mind was that nothing mattered but Betty—nothing really mattered but Betty.

In the meantime G. Selden was walking up Fifth Avenue, at once touched and exhilarated by the stir about him and his sense of home-coming. It was pretty good to be in little old New York again. The hurried pace of the life about him stimulated his young blood. There were no street cars in Fifth Avenue, but there were carriages, waggons, carts, motors, all pantingly hurried, and fretting and struggling when the crowded state of the thoroughfare held them back. The beautifully dressed women in the carriages wore no light air of being at leisure. It was evident that they were going to keep engagements, to do things, to achieve objects.

“Something doing. Something doing,” was his cheerful self-congratulatory thought. He had spent his life in the midst of it, he liked it, and it welcomed him back.

The appointment he was on his way to keep thrilled him into an uplifted mood. Once or twice a half-nervous chuckle broke from him as he tried to realise that he had been given the chance which a year ago had seemed so impossible that its mere incredibleness had made it a natural subject for jokes. He was going to call on Reuben S. Vanderpoel, and he was going because Reuben S. had made an appointment with him.

He wore his London suit of clothes and he felt that he looked pretty decent. He could only do his best in the matter of bearing. He always thought that, so long as a fellow didn’t get “chesty” and kept his head from swelling, he was all right. Of course he had never been in one of these swell Fifth Avenue houses, and he felt a bit nervous—but Miss Vanderpoel would have told her father what sort of fellow he was, and her father was likely to be something like herself. The house, which had been built since Lady Anstruthers’ marriage, was well “up-town,” and was big and imposing. When a manservant opened the front door, the square hall looked very splendid to Selden. It was full of light, and of rich furniture, which was like the stuff he had seen in one or two special shop windows in Fifth Avenue—places where they sold magnificent gilded or carven coffers and vases, pieces of tapestry and marvellous embroideries, antiquities from foreign palaces. Though it was quite different, it was as swell in its way as the house at Mount Dunstan, and there were gleams of pictures on the walls that looked fine, and no mistake.

He was expected. The man led him across the hall to Mr. Vanderpoel’s room. After he had announced his name he closed the door quietly and went away. Mr. Vanderpoel rose from an armchair to come forward to meet his visitor. He was tall and straight—Betty had inherited her slender height from him. His well-balanced face suggested the relationship between them. He had a steady mouth, and eyes which looked as if they saw much and far.

“I am glad to see you, Mr. Selden,” he said, shaking hands with him. “You have seen my daughters, and can tell me how they are. Miss Vanderpoel has written to me of you several times.”

He asked him to sit down, and as he took his chair Selden felt that he had been right in telling himself that Reuben S. Vanderpoel would be somehow like his girl. She was a girl, and he was an elderly man of business, but they were like each other. There was the same kind of straight way of doing things, and the same straight-seeing look in both of them.

It was queer how natural things seemed, when they really happened to a fellow. Here he was sitting in a big leather chair and opposite to him in its fellow sat Reuben S. Vanderpoel, looking at him with friendly eyes. And it seemed all right, too—not as if he had managed to “butt in,” and would find himself politely fired out directly. He might have been one of the Four Hundred making a call. Reuben S. knew how to make a man feel easy, and no mistake. This G. Selden observed at once, though he had, in fact, no knowledge of the practical tact which dealt with him. He found himself answering questions about Lady Anstruthers and her sister, which led to the opening up of other subjects. He did not realise that he began to express ingenuous opinions and describe things. His listener’s interest led him on, a question here, a rather pleased laugh there, were encouraging. He had enjoyed himself so much during his stay in England, and had felt his experiences so greatly to be rejoiced over, that they were easy to talk of at any time—in fact, it was even a trifle difficult not to talk of them—but, stimulated by the look which rested on him, by the deft word and ready smile, words flowed readily and without the restraint of self-consciousness.

“When you think that all of it sort of began with a robin, it’s queer enough,” he said. “But for that robin I shouldn’t be here, sir,” with a boyish laugh. “And he was an English robin—a little fellow not half the size of the kind that hops about Central Park.”

“Let me hear about that,” said Mr. Vanderpoel.

It was a good story, and he told it well, though in his own junior salesman phrasing. He began with his bicycle ride into the green country, his spin over the fine roads, his rest under the hedge during the shower, and then the song of the robin perched among the fresh wet leafage, his feathers puffed out, his red young satin-glossed breast pulsating and swelling. His words were colloquial enough, but they called up the picture.

“Everything sort of glittering with the sunshine on the wet drops, and things smelling good, like they do after rain— leaves, and grass, and good earth. I tell you it made a fellow feel as if the whole world was his brother. And when Mr. Rob. lit on that twig and swelled his red breast as if he knew the whole thing was his, and began to let them notes out, calling for his lady friend to come and go halves with him, I just had to laugh and speak to him, and that was when Lord Mount Dunstan heard me and jumped over the hedge. He’d been listening, too.”

The expression Reuben S. Vanderpoel wore made it an agreeable thing to talk—to go on. He evidently cared to hear. So Selden did his best, and enjoyed himself in doing it. His style made for realism and brought things clearly before one. The big-built man in the rough and shabby shooting clothes, his way when he dropped into the grass to sit beside the stranger and talk, certain meanings in his words which conveyed to Vanderpoel what had not been conveyed to G. Selden. Yes, the man carried a heaviness about with him and hated the burden. Selden quite unconsciously brought him out strongly.

“I don’t know whether I’m the kind of fellow who is always making breaks,” he said, with his boy’s laugh again, “but if I am, I never made a worse one than when I asked him straight if he was out of a job, and on the tramp. It showed what a nice fellow he was that he didn’t get hot about it. Some fellows would. He only laughed—sort of short— and said his job had been more than he could handle, and he was afraid he was down and out.”

Mr. Vanderpoel was conscious that so far he was somewhat attracted by this central figure. G. Selden was also proving satisfactory in the matter of revealing his excellently simple views of persons and things.

“The only time he got mad was when I wouldn’t believe him when he told me who he was. I was a bit hot in the collar myself. I’d felt sorry for him, because I thought he was a chap like myself, and he was up against it. I know what that is, and I’d wanted to jolly him along a bit. When he said his name was Mount Dunstan, and the place belonged to him, I guessed he thought he was making a joke. So I got on my wheel and started off, and then he got mad for keeps. He said he wasn’t such a damned fool as he looked, and what he’d said was true, and I could go and be hanged.”

Reuben S. Vanderpoel laughed. He liked that. It sounded like decent British hot temper, which he had often found accompanied honest British decencies.

He liked other things, as the story proceeded. The picture of the huge house with the shut windows, made him slightly restless. The concealed imagination, combined with the financier’s resentment of dormant interests, disturbed him. That which had attracted Selden in the Reverend Lewis Penzance strongly attracted himself. Also, a man was a good deal to be judged by his friends. The man who lived alone in the midst of stately desolateness and held as his chief intimate a high-bred and gentle-minded scholar of ripe years, gave, in doing this, certain evidence which did not tell against him. The whole situation meant something a splendid, vivid-minded young creature might be moved by—might be allured by, even despite herself.

There was something fantastic in the odd linking of incidents—Selden’s chance view of Betty as she rode by, his next day’s sudden resolve to turn back and go to Stornham, his accident, all that followed seemed, if one were fanciful —part of a scheme prearranged

“When I came to myself,” G. Selden said, “I felt like that fellow in the Shakespeare play that they dress up and put to bed in the palace when he’s drunk. I thought I’d gone off my head. And then Miss Vanderpoel came.” He paused a moment and looked down on the carpet, thinking. “Gee whiz! It WAS queer,” he said.

Betty Vanderpoel’s father could almost hear her voice as the rest was told. He knew how her laugh had sounded, and what her presence must have been to the young fellow. His delightful, human, always satisfying Betty!

Through this odd trick of fortune, Mount Dunstan had begun to see her. Since, through the unfair endowment of Nature—that it was not wholly fair he had often told himself— she was all the things that desire could yearn for, there were many chances that when a man saw her he must long to see her again, and there were the same chances that such an one as Mount Dunstan might long also, and, if Fate was against him, long with a bitter strength. Selden was not aware that he had spoken more fully of Mount Dunstan and his place than of other things. That this had been the case, had been because Mr. Vanderpoel had intended it should be so. He had subtly drawn out and encouraged a detailed account of the time spent at Mount Dunstan vicarage. It was easily encouraged. Selden’s affectionate admiration for the vicar led him on to enthusiasm. The quiet house and garden, the old books, the afternoon tea under the copper beech, and the long talks of old things, which had been so new to the young New Yorker, had plainly made a mark upon his life, not likely to be erased even by the rush of after years.

“The way he knew history was what got me,” he said. “And the way you got interested in it, when he talked. It wasn’t just HISTORY, like you learn at school, and forget, and never see the use of, anyhow. It was things about men, just like yourself—hustling for a living in their way, just as we’re hustling in Broadway. Most of it was fighting, and there are mounds scattered about that are the remains of their forts and camps. Roman camps, some of them. He took me to see them. He had a little old pony chaise we trundled about in, and he’d draw up and we’d sit and talk. `There were men here on this very spot,’ he’d say, `looking out for attack, eating, drinking, cooking their food, polishing their weapons, laughing, and shouting—MEN—Selden, fifty-five years before Christ was born—and sometimes the New Testament times seem to us so far away that they are half a dream.’ That was the kind of thing he’d say, and I’d sometimes feel as if I heard the Romans shouting. The country about there was full of queer places, and both he and Lord Dunstan knew more about them than I know about Twenty-third Street.”

“You saw Lord Mount Dunstan often?” Mr. Vanderpoel suggested.

“Every day, sir. And the more I saw him, the more I got to like him. He’s all right. But it’s hard luck to be fixed as he is—that’s stone-cold truth. What’s a man to do? The money he ought to have to keep up his place was spent before he was born. His father and his eldest brother were a bum lot, and his grandfather and great-grandfather were fools. He can’t sell the place, and he wouldn’t if he could. Mr. Penzance was so fond of him that sometimes he’d say things. But,” hastily, “perhaps I’m talking too much.”

“You happen to be talking about questions I have been greatly interested in. I have thought a good deal at times of the position of the holders of large estates they cannot afford to keep up. This special instance is a case in point.”

G. Selden felt himself in luck again. Reuben S., quite evidently, found his subject worthy of undivided attention. Selden had not heartily liked Lord Mount Dunstan, and lived in the atmosphere surrounding him, looking about him with sharp young New York eyes, without learning a good deal.

He had seen the practical hardship of the situation, and laid it bare.

“What Mr. Penzance says is that he’s like the men that built things in the beginning—fought for them—fought Romans and Saxons and Normans—perhaps the whole lot at different times. I used to like to get Mr. Penzance to tell stories about the Mount Dunstans. They were splendid. It must be pretty fine to look back about a thousand years and know your folks have been something. All the same its pretty fierce to have to stand alone at the end of it, not able to help yourself, because some of your relations were crazy fools. I don’t wonder he feels mad.”

“Does he?” Mr. Vanderpoel inquired.

“He’s straight,” said G. Selden sympathetically. “He’s all right. But only money can help him, and he’s got none, so he has to stand and stare at things falling to pieces. And—well, I tell you, Mr. Vanderpoel, he LOVES that place—he’s crazy about it. And he’s proud—I don’t mean he’s got the swell-head, because he hasn’t—but he’s just proud. Now, for instance, he hasn’t any use for men like himself that marry just for money. He’s seen a lot of it, and it’s made him sick. He’s not that kind.”

He had been asked and had answered a good many questions before he went away, but each had dropped into the talk so incidentally that he had not recognised them as queries. He did not know that Lord Mount Dunstan stood out a clearly defined figure in Mr. Vanderpoel’s mind, a figure to be reflected upon, and one not without its attraction.

“Miss Vanderpoel tells me,” Mr. Vanderpoel said, when the interview was drawing to a close, “that you are an agent for the Delkoff typewriter.”

G. Selden flushed slightly.

“Yes, sir,” he answered, “but I didn’t–-“

“I hear that three machines are in use on the Stornham estate, and that they have proved satisfactory.”

“It’s a good machine,” said G. Selden, his flush a little deeper.

Mr. Vanderpoel smiled.

“You are a businesslike young man,” he said, “and I have no doubt you have a catalogue in your pocket.”

G. Selden was a businesslike young man. He gave Mr. Vanderpoel one serious look, and the catalogue was drawn forth.

“It wouldn’t be business, sir, for me to be caught out without it,” he said. “I shouldn’t leave it behind if I went to a funeral. A man’s got to run no risks.”

“I should like to look at it.”

The thing had happened. It was not a dream. Reuben S. Vanderpoel, clothed and in his right mind, had, without pressure being exerted upon him, expressed his desire to look at the catalogue—to examine it—to have it explained to him at length.

He listened attentively, while G. Selden did his best. He asked a question now and then, or made a comment. His manner was that of a thoroughly composed man of business, but he was remembering what Betty had told him of the “ten per,” and a number of other things. He saw the flush come and go under the still boyish skin, he observed that G. Selden’s hand was not wholly steady, though he was making an effort not to seem excited. But he was excited. This actually meant—this thing so unimportant to multimillionaires —that he was having his “chance,” and his young fortunes were, perhaps, in the balance.

“Yes,” said Reuben S., when he had finished, “it seems a good, up-to-date machine.”

“It’s the best on the market,” said G. Selden, “out and out, the best.”

“I understand you are only junior salesman?”

“Yes, sir. Ten per and five dollars on every machine I sell. If I had a territory, I should get ten.”

“Then,” reflectively, “the first thing is to get a territory.”

“Perhaps I shall get one in time, if I keep at it,” said Selden courageously.

“It is a good machine. I like it,” said Mr. Vanderpoel. “I can see a good many places where it could be used. Perhaps, if you make it known at your office that when you are given a good territory, I shall give preference to the Delkoff over other typewriting machines, it might—eh?”

A light broke out upon G. Selden’s countenance—a light radiant and magnificent. He caught his breath. A desire to shout—to yell—to whoop, as when in the society of “the boys,” was barely conquered in time.

“Mr. Vanderpoel,” he said, standing up, “I—Mr. Vanderpoel—sir—I feel as if I was having a pipe dream. I’m not, am I?”

“No,” answered Mr. Vanderpoel, “you are not. I like you, Mr. Selden. My daughter liked you. I do not mean to lose sight of you. We will begin, however, with the territory, and the Delkoff. I don’t think there will be any difficulty about it.”

… . .

Ten minutes later G. Selden was walking down Fifth Avenue, wondering if there was any chance of his being arrested by a policeman upon the charge that he was reeling, instead of walking steadily. He hoped he should get back to the hall bedroom safely. Nick Baumgarten and Jem Bolter both “roomed” in the house with him. He could tell them both. It was Jem who had made up the yarn about one of them saving Reuben S. Vanderpoel’s life. There had been no life-saving, but the thing had come true.

“But, if it hadn’t been for Lord Mount Dunstan,” he said, thinking it over excitedly, “I should never have seen Miss Vanderpoel, and, if it hadn’t been for Miss Vanderpoel, I should never have got next to Reuben S. in my life. Both sides of the Atlantic Ocean got busy to do a good turn to Little Willie. Hully gee!”

In his study Mr. Vanderpoel was rereading Betty’s letters. He felt that he had gained a certain knowledge of Lord Mount Dunstan.

CHAPTER XXXIX

ON THE MARSHES

THE marshes stretched mellow in the autumn sun, sheep wandered about, nibbling contentedly, or lay down to rest in groups, the sky reflecting itself in the narrow dykes gave a blue colour to the water, a scent of the sea was in the air as one breathed it, flocks of plover rose, now and then, crying softly. Betty, walking with her dog, had passed a heron standing at the edge of a pool.

From her first discovery of them, she had been attracted by the marshes with their English suggestion of the Roman Campagna, their broad expanse of level land spread out to the sun and wind, the thousands of white sheep dotted or clustered as far as eye could reach, the hues of the marsh grass and the plants growing thick at the borders of the strips of water. Its beauty was all its own and curiously aloof from the softly-wooded, undulating world about it. Driving or walking along the high road—the road the Romans had built to London town long centuries ago—on either side of one were meadows, farms, scattered cottages, and hop gardens, but beyond and below stretched the marsh land, golden and grey, and always alluring one by its silence.

“I never pass it without wanting to go to it—to take solitary walks over it, to be one of the spots on it as the sheep are. It seems as if, lying there under the blue sky or the low grey clouds with all the world held at bay by mere space and stillness, they must feel something we know nothing of. I want to go and find out what it is.”

This she had once said to Mount Dunstan.

So she had fallen into the habit of walking there with her dog at her side as her sole companion, for having need for time and space for thought, she had found them in the silence and aloofness.

Life had been a vivid and pleasurable thing to her, as far as she could look back upon it. She began to realise that she must have been very happy, because she had never found herself desiring existence other than such as had come to her day by day. Except for her passionate childish regret at Rosy’s marriage, she had experienced no painful feeling. In fact, she had faced no hurt in her life, and certainly had been confronted by no limitations. Arguing that girls in their teens usually fall in love, her father had occasionally wondered that she passed through no little episodes of sentiment, but the fact was that her interests had been larger and more numerous than the interests of girls generally are, and her affectionate intimacy with himself had left no such small vacant spaces as are frequently filled by unimportant young emotions. Because she was a logical creature, and had watched life and those living it with clear and interested eyes, she had not been blind to the path which had marked itself before her during the summer’s growth and waning. She had not, at first, perhaps, known exactly when things began to change for her—when the clarity of her mind began to be disturbed. She had thought in the beginning—as people have a habit of doing—that an instance —a problem—a situation had attracted her attention because it was absorbing enough to think over. Her view of the matter had been that as the same thing would have interested her father, it had interested herself. But from the morning when she had been conscious of the sudden fury roused in her by Nigel Anstruthers’ ugly sneer at Mount Dunstan, she had better understood the thing which had come upon her. Day by day it had increased and gathered power, and she realised with a certain sense of impatience that she had not in any degree understood it when she had seen and wondered at its effect on other women. Each day had been like a wave encroaching farther upon the shore she stood upon. At the outset a certain ignoble pride—she knew it ignoble—filled her with rebellion. She had seen so much of this kind of situation, and had heard so much of the general comment. People had learned how to sneer because experience had taught them. If she gave them cause, why should they not sneer at her as at things? She recalled what she had herself thought of such things—the folly of them, the obviousness—the almost deserved disaster. She had arrogated to herself judgment of women—and men—who might, yes, who might have stood upon their strip of sand, as she stood, with the waves creeping in, each one higher, stronger, and more engulfing than the last. There might have been those among them who also had knowledge of that sudden deadly joy at the sight of one face, at the drop of one voice. When that wave submerged one’s pulsing being, what had the world to do with one—how could one hear and think of what its speech might be? Its voice clamoured too far off.

As she walked across the marsh she was thinking this first phase over. She had reached a new one, and at first she looked back with a faint, even rather hard, smile. She walked straight ahead, her mastiff, Roland, padding along heavily close at her side. How still and wide and golden it was; how the cry of plover and lifting trill of skylark assured one that one was wholly encircled by solitude and space which were more enclosing than any walls! She was going to the mounds to which Mr. Penzance had trundled G. Selden in the pony chaise, when he had given him the marvellous hour which had brought Roman camp and Roman legions to life again. Up on the largest hillock one could sit enthroned, resting chin in hand and looking out under level lids at the unstirring, softly-living loveliness of the marshland world. So she was presently seated, with her heavy-limbed Roland at her feet. She had come here to try to put things clearly to herself, to plan with such reason as she could control. She had begun to be unhappy, she had begun —with some unfairness—to look back upon the Betty Vanderpoel of the past as an unwittingly self-sufficient young woman, to find herself suddenly entangled by things, even to know a touch of desperateness.

“Not to take a remnant from the ducal bargain counter,” she was saying mentally. That was why her smile was a little hard. What if the remnant from the ducal bargain counter had prejudices of his own?

“If he were passionately—passionately in love with me,” she said, with red staining her cheeks, “he would not come—he would not come—he would not come. And, because of that, he is more to me—MORE! And more he will become every day —and the more strongly he will hold me. And there we stand.”

Roland lifted his fine head from his paws, and, holding it erect on a stiff, strong neck, stared at her in obvious inquiry. She put out her hand and tenderly patted him.

“He will have none of me,” she said. “He will have none of me.” And she faintly smiled, but the next instant shook her head a little haughtily, and, having done so, looked down with an altered expression upon the cloth of her skirt, because she had shaken upon it, from the extravagant lashes, two clear drops.

It was not the result of chance that she had seen nothing of him for weeks. She had not attempted to persuade herself of that. Twice he had declined an invitation to Stornham, and once he had ridden past her on the road when he might have stopped to exchange greetings, or have ridden on by her side. He did not mean to seem to desire, ever so lightly, to be counted as in the lists. Whether he was drawn by any liking for her or not, it was plain he had determined on this.

If she were to go away now, they would never meet again. Their ways in this world would part forever. She would not know how long it took to break him utterly—if such a man could be broken. If no magic change took place in his fortunes —and what change could come?—the decay about him would spread day by day. Stone walls last a long time, so the house would stand while every beauty and stateliness within it fell into ruin. Gardens would become wildernesses, terraces and fountains crumble and be overgrown, walls that were to-day leaning would fall with time. The years would pass, and his youth with them; he would gradually change into an old man while he watched the things he loved with passion die slowly and hard. How strange it was that lives should touch and pass on the ocean of Time, and nothing should result—nothing at all! When she went on her way, it would be as if a ship loaded with every aid of food and treasure had passed a boat in which a strong man tossed, starving to death, and had not even run up a flag.

“But one cannot run up a flag,” she said, stroking Roland. “One cannot. There we stand.”

To her recognition of this deadlock of Fate, there had been adding the growing disturbance caused by yet another thing which was increasingly troubling, increasingly difficult to face.

Gradually, and at first with wonderful naturalness of bearing, Nigel Anstruthers had managed to create for himself a singular place in her everyday life. It had begun with a certain personalness in his attitude, a personalness which was a thing to dislike, but almost impossible openly to resent. Certainly, as a self-invited guest in his house, she could scarcely protest against the amiability of his demeanour and his exterior courtesy and attentiveness of manner in his conduct towards her. She had tried to sweep away the objectionable quality in his bearing, by frankness, by indifference, by entire lack of response, but she had remained conscious of its increasing as a spider’s web might increase as the spider spun it quietly over one, throwing out threads so impalpable that one could not brush them away because they were too slight to be seen. She was aware that in the first years of his married life he had alternately resented the scarcity of the invitations sent them and rudely refused such as were received. Since he had returned to find her at Stornham, he had insisted that no invitations should be declined, and had escorted his wife and herself wherever they went. What could have been conventionally more proper—what more improper than that he should have persistently have remained at home? And yet there came a time when, as they three drove together at night in the closed carriage, Betty was conscious that, as he sat opposite to her in the dark, when he spoke, when he touched her in arranging the robe over her, or opening or shutting the window, he subtly, but persistently, conveyed that the personalness of his voice, look, and physical nearness was a sort of hideous confidence between them which they were cleverly concealing from Rosalie and the outside world.

When she rode about the country, he had a way of appearing at some turning and making himself her companion, riding too closely at her side, and assuming a noticeable air of being engaged in meaningly confidential talk. Once, when he had been leaning towards her with an audaciously tender manner, they had been passed by the Dunholm carriage, and Lady Dunholm and the friend driving with her had evidently tried not to look surprised. Lady Alanby, meeting them in the same way at another time, had put up her glasses and stared in open disapproval. She might admire a strikingly handsome American girl, but her favour would not last through any such vulgar silliness as flirtations with disgraceful brothers-in-law. When Betty strolled about the park or the lanes, she much too often encountered Sir Nigel strolling also, and knew that he did not mean to allow her to rid herself of him. In public, he made a point of keeping observably close to her, of hovering in her vicinity and looking on at all she did with eyes she rebelled against finding fixed on her each time she was obliged to turn in his direction. He had a fashion of coming to her side and speaking in a dropped voice, which excluded others, as a favoured lover might. She had seen both men and women glance at her in half-embarrassment at their sudden sense of finding themselves slightly de trop. She had said aloud to him on one such occasion—and she had said it with smiling casualness for the benefit of Lady Alanby, to whom she had been talking:

“Don’t alarm me by dropping your voice, Nigel. I am easily frightened—and Lady Alanby will think we are conspirators.”

For an instant he was taken by surprise. He had been pleased to believe that there was no way in which she could defend herself, unless she would condescend to something stupidly like a scene. He flushed and drew himself up.

“I beg your pardon, my dear Betty,” he said, and walked away with the manner of an offended adorer, leaving her to realise an odiously unpleasant truth—which is that there are incidents only made more inexplicable by an effort to explain. She saw also that he was quite aware of this, and that his offended departure was a brilliant inspiration, and had left her, as it were, in the lurch. To have said to Lady Alanby: “My brother-in-law, in whose house I am merely staying for my sister’s sake, is trying to lead you to believe that I allow him to make love to me,” would have suggested either folly or insanity on her own part. As it was—after a glance at Sir Nigel’s stiffly retreating back—Lady Alanby merely looked away with a wholly uninviting expression.

When Betty spoke to him afterwards, haughtily and with determination, he laughed.

“My dearest girl,” he said, “if I watch you with interest and drop my voice when I get a chance to speak to you, I only do what every other man does, and I do it because you are an alluring young woman—which no one is more perfectly aware of than yourself. Your pretence that you do not know you are alluring is the most captivating thing about you. And what do you think of doing if I continue to offend you? Do you propose to desert us—to leave poor Rosalie to sink back again into the bundle of old clothes she was when you came? For Heaven’s sake, don’t do that!”

All that his words suggested took form before her vividly. How well he understood what he was saying. But she answered him bravely.

“No. I do not mean to do that.”

He watched her for a few seconds. There was curiosity in his eyes.

“Don’t make the mistake of imagining that I will let my wife go with you to America,” he said next. “She is as far off from that as she was when I brought her to Stornham. I have told her so. A man cannot tie his wife to the bedpost in these days, but he can make her efforts to leave him so decidedly unpleasant that decent women prefer to stay at home and take what is coming. I have seen that often enough `to bank on it,’ if I may quote your American friends.”

“Do you remember my once saying,” Betty remarked, “that when a woman has been PROPERLY ill-treated the time comes when nothing matters—nothing but release from the life she loathes?”

“Yes,” he answered. “And to you nothing would matter but—excuse my saying it—your own damnable, headstrong pride. But Rosalie is different. Everything matters to her. And you will find it so, my dear girl.”

And that this was at least half true was brought home to her by the fact that late the same night Rosy came to her white with crying.

“It is not your fault, Betty,” she said. “Don’t think that I think it is your fault, but he has been in my room in one of those humours when he seems like a devil. He thinks you will go back to America and try to take me with you. But, Betty, you must not think about me. It will be better for you to go. I have seen you again. I have had you for—for a time. You will be safer at home with father and mother.”

Betty laid a hand on her shoulder and looked at her fixedly.

“What is it, Rosy?” she said. “What is it he does to you —that makes you like this?”

“I don’t know—but that he makes me feel that there is nothing but evil and lies in the world and nothing can help one against them. Those things he says about everyone—men and women—things one can’t repeat—make me sick. And when I try to deny them, he laughs.”

“Does he say things about me?” Betty inquired, very quietly, and suddenly Rosalie threw her arms round her.

“Betty, darling,” she cried, “go home—go home. You must not stay here.”

“When I go, you will go with me,” Betty answered. “I am not going back to mother without you.”

She made a collection of many facts before their interview was at an end, and they parted for the night. Among the first was that Nigel had prepared for certain possibilities as wise holders of a fortress prepare for siege. A rather long sitting alone over whisky and soda had, without making him loquacious, heated his blood in such a manner as led him to be less subtle than usual. Drink did not make him drunk, but malignant, and when a man is in the malignant mood, he forgets his cleverness. So he revealed more than he absolutely intended. It was to be gathered that he did not mean to permit his wife to leave him, even for a visit; he would not allow himself to be made ridiculous by such a thing. A man who could not control his wife was a fool and deserved to be a laughing-stock. As Ughtred and his future inheritance seemed to have become of interest to his grandfather, and were to be well nursed and taken care of, his intention was that the boy should remain under his own supervision. He could amuse himself well enough at Stornham, now that it had been put in order, if it was kept up properly and he filled it with people who did not bore him. There were people who did not bore him—plenty of them. Rosalie would stay where she was and receive his guests. If she imagined that the little episode of Ffolliott had been entirely dormant, she was mistaken. He knew where the man was, and exactly how serious it would be to him if scandal was stirred up. He had been at some trouble to find out. The fellow had recently had the luck to fall into a very fine living. It had been bestowed on him by the old Duke of Broadmorlands, who was the most strait-laced old boy in England. He had become so in his disgust at the light behaviour of the wife he had divorced in his early manhood. Nigel cackled gently as he detailed that, by an agreeable coincidence, it happened that her Grace had suddenly become filled with pious fervour—roused thereto by a good-looking locum tenens— result, painful discoveries—the pair being now rumoured to be keeping a lodging-house together somewhere in Australia. A word to good old Broadmorlands would produce the effect of a lighted match on a barrel of gunpowder. It would be the end of Ffolliott. Neither would it be a good introduction to Betty’s first season in London, neither would it be enjoyed by her mother, whom he remembered as a woman with primitive views of domestic rectitude. He smiled the awful smile as he took out of his pocket the envelope containing the words his wife had written to Mr. Ffolliott, “Do not come to the house. Meet me at Bartyon Wood.” It did not take much to convince people, if one managed things with decent forethought. The Brents, for instance, were fond neither of her nor of Betty, and they had never forgotten the questionable conduct of their locum tenens. Then, suddenly, he had changed his manner and had sat down, laughing, and drawn Rosalie to his knee and kissed her—yes, he had kissed her and told her not to look like a little fool or act like one. Nothing unpleasant would happen if she behaved herself. Betty had improved her greatly, and she had grown young and pretty again. She looked quite like a child sometimes, now that her bones were covered and she dressed well. If she wanted to please him she could put her arms round his neck and kiss him, as he had kissed her.

“That is what has made you look white,” said Betty.

“Yes. There is something about him that sometimes makes you feel as if the very blood in your veins turned white,” answered Rosy—in a low voice, which the next moment rose. “Don’t you see—don’t you see,” she broke out, “that to displease him would be like murdering Mr. Ffolliott—like murdering his mother and mine—and like murdering Ughtred, because he would be killed by the shame of things—and by being taken from me. We have loved each other so much—so much. Don’t you see?”

“I see all that rises up before you,” Betty said, “and I understand your feeling that you cannot save yourself by bringing ruin upon an innocent man who helped you. I realise that one must have time to think it over. But, Rosy,” a sudden ring in her voice, “I tell you there is a way out—there is a way out! The end of the misery is coming—and it will not be what he thinks.”

“You always believe–-” began Rosy.

“I know,” answered Betty. “I know there are some things so bad that they cannot go on. They kill themselves through their own evil. I KNOW! I KNOW! That is all.”

CHAPTER LX

“DON’T GO ON WITH THIS”

Of these things, as of others, she had come to her solitude to think. She looked out over the marshes scarcely seeing the wandering or resting sheep, scarcely hearing the crying plover, because so much seemed to confront her, and she must look it all well in the face. She had fulfilled the promise she had made to herself as a child. She had come in search of Rosy, she had found her as simple and loving of heart as she had ever been. The most painful discoveries she had made had been concealed from her mother until their aspect was modified. Mrs. Vanderpoel need now feel no shock at the sight of the restored Rosy. Lady Anstruthers had been still young enough to respond both physically and mentally to love, companionship, agreeable luxuries, and stimulating interests. But for Nigel’s antagonism there was now no reason why she should not be taken home for a visit to her family, and her long-yearned-for New York, no reason why her father and mother should not come to Stornham, and thus establish the customary social relations between their daughter’s home and their own. That this seemed out of the question was owing to the fact that at the outset of his married life Sir Nigel had allowed himself to commit errors in tactics. A perverse egotism, not wholly normal in its rancour, had led him into deeds which he had begun to suspect of having cost him too much, even before Betty herself had pointed out to him their unbusinesslike indiscretion. He had done things he could not undo, and now, to his mind, his only resource was to treat them boldly as having been the proper results of decision founded on sound judgment, which he had no desire to excuse. A sufficiently arrogant loftiness of bearing would, he hoped, carry him through the matter. This Betty herself had guessed, but she had not realised that this loftiness of attitude was in danger of losing some of its effectiveness through his being increasingly stung and spurred by circumstances and feelings connected with herself, which were at once exasperating and at times almost overpowering. When, in his mingled dislike and admiration, he had begun to study his sister-in-law, and the half-amused weaving of the small plots which would make things sufficiently unpleasant to be used as factors in her removal from the scene, if necessary, he had not calculated, ever so remotely, on the chance of that madness besetting him which usually besets men only in their youth. He had imagined no other results to himself than a subtly-exciting private entertainment, such as would give spice to the dullness of virtuous life in the country. But, despite himself and his intentions, he had found the situation alter. His first uncertainty of himself had arisen at the Dunholm ball, when he had suddenly realised that he was detesting men who, being young and free, were at liberty to pay gallant court to the new beauty.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing to him had been his consciousness of his sudden leap of antagonism towards Mount Dunstan, who, despite his obvious lack of chance, somehow especially roused in him the rage of warring male instinct. There had been admissions he had been forced, at length, to make to himself. You could not, it appeared, live in the house with a splendid creature like this one—with her brilliant eyes, her beauty of line and movement before you every hour, her bloom, her proud fineness holding themselves wholly in their own keeping—without there being the devil to pay. Lately he had sometimes gone hot and cold in realising that, having once told himself that he might choose to decide to get rid of her, he now knew that the mere thought of her sailing away of her own choice was maddening to him. There WAS the devil to pay! It sometimes brought back to him that hideous shakiness of nerve which had been a feature of his illness when he had been on the Riviera with Teresita.

Of all this Betty only knew the outward signs which, taken at their exterior significance, were detestable enough, and drove her hard as she mentally dwelt on them in connection with other things. How easy, if she stood alone, to defy his evil insolence to do its worst, and leaving the place at an hour’s notice, to sail away to protection, or, if she chose to remain in England, to surround herself with a bodyguard of the people in whose eyes his disrepute relegated a man such as Nigel Anstruthers to powerless nonentity. Alone, she could have smiled and turned her back upon him. But she was here to take care of Rosy. She occupied a position something like that of a woman who remains with a man and endures outrage because she cannot leave her child. That thought, in itself, brought Ughtred to her mind. There was Ughtred to be considered as well as his mother. Ughtred’s love for and faith in her were deep and passionate things. He fed on her tenderness for him, and had grown stronger because he spent hours of each day talking, reading, and driving with her. The simple truth was that neither she nor Rosalie could desert Ughtred, and so long as Nigel managed cleverly enough, the law would give the boy to his father.

“You are obliged to prove things, you know, in a court of law,” he had said, as if with casual amiability, on a certain occasion. “Proving things is the devil. People lose their tempers and rush into rows which end in lawsuits, and then find they can prove nothing. If I were a villain,” slightly showing his teeth in an agreeable smile—”instead of a man of blameless life, I should go in only for that branch of my profession which could be exercised without leaving stupid evidence behind.”

Since his return to Stornham the outward decorum of his own conduct had entertained him and he had kept it up with an increasing appreciation of its usefulness in the present situation. Whatsoever happened in the end, it was the part of discretion to present to the rural world about him an appearance of upright behaviour. He had even found it amusing to go to church and also to occasionally make amiable calls at the vicarage. It was not difficult, at such times, to refer delicately to his regret that domestic discomfort had led him into the error of remaining much away from Stornham. He knew that he had been even rather touching in his expression of interest in the future of his son, and the necessity of the boy’s being protected from uncontrolled hysteric influences. And, in the years of Rosalie’s unprotected wretchedness, he had taken excellent care that no “stupid evidence” should be exposed to view.

Of all this Betty was thinking and summing up definitely, point after point. Where was the wise and practical course of defence? The most unthinkable thing was that one could find one’s self in a position in which action seemed inhibited. What could one do? To send for her father would surely end the matter—but at what cost to Rosy, to Ughtred, to Ffolliott, before whom the fair path to dignified security had so newly opened itself? What would be the effect of sudden confusion, anguish, and public humiliation upon Rosalie’s carefully rebuilt health and strength—upon her mother’s new hope and happiness? At moments it seemed as if almost all that had been done might be undone. She was beset by such a moment now, and felt for the time, at least, like a creature tied hand and foot while in full strength.

Certainly she was not prepared for the event which happened. Roland stiffened his ears, and, beginning a rumbling growl, ended it suddenly, realising it an unnecessary precaution.

He knew the man walking up the incline of the mound from the side behind them. So did Betty know him. It was Sir Nigel looking rather glowering and pale and walking slowly. He had discovered where she had meant to take refuge, and had probably ridden to some point where he could leave his horse and follow her at the expense of taking a short cut which saved walking.

As he climbed the mound to join her, Betty rose to her feet.

“My dear girl,” he said, “don’t get up as if you meant to go away. It has cost me some exertion to find you.”

“It will not cost you any exertion to lose me,” was her light answer. “I AM going away.”

He had reached her, and stood still before her with scarcely a yard’s distance between them. He was slightly out of breath and even a trifle livid. He leaned on his stick and his look at her combined leaping bad temper with something deeper.

“Look here!” he broke out, “why do you make such a point of treating me like the devil?”

Betty felt her heart give a hastened beat, not of fear, but of repulsion. This was the mood and manner which subjugated Rosalie. He had so raised his voice that two men in the distance, who might be either labourers or sportsmen, hearing its high tone, glanced curiously towards them.

“Why do you ask me a question which is totally absurd?” she said.

“It is not absurd,” he answered. “I am speaking of facts, and I intend to come to some understanding about them.”

For reply, after meeting his look a few seconds, she simply turned her back and began to walk away. He followed and overtook her.

“I shall go with you, and I shall say what I want to say,” he persisted. “If you hasten your pace I shall hasten mine. I cannot exactly see you running away from me across the marsh, screaming. You wouldn’t care to be rescued by those men over there who are watching us. I should explain myself to them in terms neither you nor Rosalie would enjoy. There! I knew Rosalie’s name would pull you up. Good God! I wish I were a weak fool with a magnificent creature protecting me at all risks.”

If she had not had blood and fire in her veins, she might have found it easy to answer calmly. But she had both, and both leaped and beat furiously for a few seconds. It was only human that it should be so. But she was more than a passionate girl of high and trenchant spirit, and she had learned, even in the days at the French school, what he had never been able to learn in his life—self-control. She held herself in as she would have held in a horse of too great fire and action. She was actually able to look—as the first Reuben Vanderpoel would have looked—at her capital of resource. But it meant taut holding of the reins.

“Will you tell me,” she said, stopping, “what it is you want?”

“I want to talk to you. I want to tell you truths you would rather be told here than on the high road, where people are passing—or at Stornham, where the servants would overhear and Rosalie be thrown into hysterics. You will NOT run screaming across the marsh, because I should run screaming after you, and we should both look silly. Here is a rather scraggy tree. Will you sit on the mound near it—for Rosalie’s sake?”

“I will not sit down,” replied Betty, “but I will listen, because it is not a bad idea that I should understand you. But to begin with, I will tell you something.” She stopped beneath the tree and stood with her back against its trunk. “I pick up things by noticing people closely, and I have realised that all your life you have counted upon getting your own way because you saw that people—especially women —have a horror of public scenes, and will submit to almost anything to avoid them. That is true very often, but not always.”

Her eyes, which were well opened, were quite the blue of steel, and rested directly upon him. “I, for instance, would let you make a scene with me anywhere you chose—in Bond Street— in Piccadilly—on the steps of Buckingham Palace, as I was getting out of my carriage to attend a drawing-room—and you would gain nothing you wanted by it—nothing. You may place entire confidence in that statement.”

He stared back at her, momentarily half-magnetised, and then broke forth into a harsh half-laugh.

“You are so damned handsome that nothing else matters. I’m hanged if it does!” and the words were an exclamation. He drew still nearer to her, speaking with a sort of savagery. “Cannot you see that you could do what you pleased with me? You are too magnificent a thing for a man to withstand. I have lost my head and gone to the devil through you. That is what I came to say.”

In the few seconds of silence that followed, his breath came quickly again and he was even paler than before.

“You came to me to say THAT?” asked Betty.

“Yes—to say it before you drove me to other things.”

Her gaze was for a moment even slightly wondering. He presented the curious picture of a cynical man of the world, for the time being ruled and impelled only by the most primitive instincts. To a clear-headed modern young woman of the most powerful class, he—her sister’s husband—was making threatening love as if he were a savage chief and she a savage beauty of his tribe. All that concerned him was that he should speak and she should hear—that he should show her he was the stronger of the two.

“Are you QUITE mad?” she said.

“Not quite,” he answered; “only three parts—but I am beyond my own control. That is the best proof of what has happened to me. You are an arrogant piece and you would defy me if you stood alone, but you don’t, and, by the Lord! I have reached a point where I will make use of every lever I can lay my hand on—yourself, Rosalie, Ughtred, Ffolliott— the whole lot of you!”

The thing which was hardest upon her was her knowledge of her own strength—of what she might have allowed herself of flaming words and instant action—but for the memory of Rosy’s ghastly little face, as it had looked when she cried out, “You must not think of me. Betty, go home—go home!” She held the white desperation of it before her mental vision and answered him even with a certain interested deliberateness.

“Do you know,” she inquired, “that you are talking to me as though you were the villain in the melodrama?”

“There is an advantage in that,” he answered, with an unholy smile. “If you repeat what I say, people will only think that you are indulging in hysterical exaggeration. They don’t believe in the existence of melodrama in these days.”

The cynical, absolute knowledge of this revealed so much that nerve was required to face it with steadiness.

“True,” she commented. “Now I think I understand.”

“No, you don’t,” he burst forth. “You have spent your life standing on a golden pedestal, being kowtowed to, and you imagine yourself immune from difficulties because you think you can pay your way out of anything. But you will find that you cannot pay your way out of this—or rather you cannot pay Rosalie’s way out of it.”

“I shall not try. Go on,” said the girl. “What I do not understand, you must explain to me. Don’t leave anything unsaid.”

“Good God, what a woman you are!” he cried out bitterly. He had never seen such beauty in his life as he saw in her as she stood with her straight young body flat against the tree. It was not a matter of deep colour of eye, or high spirit of profile—but of something which burned him. Still as she was, she looked like a flame. She made him feel old and body-worn, and all the more senselessly furious.

“I believe you hate me,” he raged. “And I may thank my wife for that.” Then he lost himself entirely. “Why cannot you behave well to me? If you will behave well to me, Rosalie shall go her own way. If you even looked at me as you look at other men—but you do not. There is always something under your lashes which watches me as if I were a wild beast you were studying. Don’t fancy yourself a dompteuse. I am not your man. I swear to you that you don’t know what you are dealing with. I swear to you that if you play this game with me I will drag you two down if I drag myself with you. I have nothing much to lose. You and your sister have everything.”

“Go on,” Betty said briefly.

“Go on! Yes, I will go on. Rosalie and Ffolliott I hold in the hollow of my hand. As for you—do you know that people are beginning to discuss you? Gossip is easily stirred in the country, where people are so bored that they chatter in self-defence. I have been considered a bad lot. I have become curiously attached to my sister-in-law. I am seen hanging about her, hanging over her as we ride or walk alone together. An American young woman is not like an English girl—she is used to seeing the marriage ceremony juggled with. There’s a trifle of prejudice against such young women when they are too rich and too handsome. Don’t look at me like that!” he burst forth, with maddened sharpness, “I won’t have it!”

The girl was regarding him with the expression he most resented—the reflection of a normal person watching an abnormal one, and studying his abnormality.

“Do you know that you are raving?” she said, with quiet curiosity—”raving?”

Suddenly he sat down on the low mound near him, and as he touched his forehead with his handkerchief, she saw that his hand actually shook.

“Yes,” he answered, panting, “but ‘ware my ravings! They mean what they say.”

“You do yourself an injury when you give way to them”— steadily, even with a touch of slow significance—”a physical injury. I have noticed that more than once.”

He sprang to his feet again. Every drop of blood left his face. For a second he looked as if he would strike her. His arm actually flung itself out—and fell.

“You devil!” he gasped. “You count on that? You she-devil!”

She left her tree and stood before him.

“Listen to me,” she said. “You intimate that you have been laying melodramatic plots against me which will injure my good name. That is rubbish. Let us leave it at that. You threaten that you will break Rosy’s heart and take her child from her, you say also that you will wound and hurt my mother to her death and do your worst to ruin an honest man–-“

“And, by God, I will!” he raged. “And you cannot stop me, if–-“

“I do not know whether I can stop you or not, though you may be sure I will try,” she interrupted him, “but that is not what I was going to say.” She drew a step nearer, and there was something in the intensity of her look which fascinated and held him for a moment. She was curiously grave. “Nigel, I believe in certain things you do not believe in. I believe black thoughts breed black ills to those who think them. It is not a new idea. There is an old Oriental proverb which says, `Curses, like chickens, come home to roost.’ I believe also that the worst—the very worst CANNOT be done to those who think steadily—steadily—only of the best. To you that is merely superstition to be laughed at. That is a matter of opinion. But—don’t go on with this thing—DON’T GO ON WITH IT. Stop and think it over.”