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The Tyranny of Weakness

by Charles Neville Buck · English · Gutenberg #21689 · 541,376 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Tyranny of Weakness

Author: Charles Neville Buck

Illustrator: Paul Stahr


        
Release date: June 6, 2007 [eBook #21689]

Language: English

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Produced by David Garcia, Martin Pettit and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Kentuckiana Digital Library)






THE TYRANNY OF WEAKNESS

BY

CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK

AUTHOR OF

"THE CALL OF THE CUMBERLANDS,"
"DESTINY," Etc.

Frontispiece by
PAUL STAHR

[Illustration: Publisher's logo]

NEW YORK
W. J. WATT & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

[Illustration: Stuart was a memory and she was trying very hard to make
him even less than that]

COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY
W. J. WATT & COMPANY

_OTHER BOOKS BY_ CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK

     THE KEY TO YESTERDAY
     THE LIGHTED MATCH
     THE PORTAL OF DREAMS
     THE CALL OF THE CUMBERLANDS
     THE BATTLE CRY
     THE CODE OF THE MOUNTAINS
     DESTINY


PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
BROOKLYN. N. Y.




THE TYRANNY OF WEAKNESS



CHAPTER I


They were types in embryo, but of course they did not know it. No more
would a grain of wheat and a poppy seed dropping side-by-side in a
fallow place reflect upon their destinies, though one might typify a
working world's dependence for bread; the other a dreaming world's
reliance for opium.

They were a boy and a girl stepping artlessly into the wide chances of a
brand-new and vastly interesting adolescence. Just now her young eyes
were provocative with the starry light of mischief. His were smoldering
darkly under her badgering because his pride had been touched to the
quick. His forefathers had been gentlemen in England before they were
gentlemen in the Valley of Virginia and his heritage of knightly blood
must not be made a subject of levity. But the girl reflected only that
when his dark eyes blazed and his cheeks colored with that dammed-up
fury she found him a more diverting vassal than in calmer and duller
moods. A zoo is more animated when the beasts are stirred into action.

"What was it that General Breckinridge said, Stuart?" She put the
question innocently. "When the Newmarket cadets made their charge?"

"He said--" Suddenly the boy caught the riffled mockery of her eyes and
abruptly his inspired recital broke off in exasperation, "May I ask just
why you find that such a funny story?" he inquired with ironical
dignity. "Most people seem to think it was rather pitiful than comic to
send to their slaughter boys almost young enough to be in the nursery."

The eyes of Conscience Williams twinkled. "Maybe it isn't the story
itself that's funny," she deigned to admit. "When your father told it, I
cried--but when you tell it your face is so furious that--that you seem
about to begin the war between the states all over again."

"Of course that makes it perfectly clear." Into the manner of young Mr.
Stuart Farquaharson came now the hauteur of dignified rebuke. He
enveloped himself in a sudden and sullen silence, brooding as he sat
with his eyes fixed on his riding boots.

"What did General Breckinridge say?" She prompted persistently. Such
sheer perversity maddened him. He had been reciting to her a story of
exalted heroism--the narrative of how the boy cadets had hurled their
young bodies against the Northern cannon and of how General Breckinridge
had prayed for forgiveness as he gave the command which sent this
flowering youth to its fate. And she found it amusing! He could not see
how genuinely comic was his own unreconstructed ardor--how exaggerated
was his cocksure manner--how thoroughly he spoke as though he himself
had bled on the field of honor.

From her hammock she watched him with serene and inscrutable
complacency, from under long, half-closed lashes. In his gaze was
inarticulate wrath, but back of that--idolatry. He had from birth
breathed an atmosphere of traditions in which the word "chivalry" was
defined, not as an obsolete term, but as a thing still kept sacredly
aflame in the hearts of gentlemen. To the stilted gallantry of his
boyhood, ideals had meant more than ideas until Conscience Williams had
come from her home on Cape Cod and turned his life topsy-turvy. Since
her advent he had dreamed only of dark eyes and darker hair and crimson
lips. He had rehearsed eloquent and irresistible speeches, only to have
them die on a tongue which swelled painfully and clove to the roof of
his mouth when he essayed their utterance. Then had come an inspiration.
The stirring narration of how the Newmarket cadets had charged the
Northern guns was to have been his cue, carrying him with the momentum
of its intrinsic heroism over the ramparts of tongue-tied shyness. That
was what he had essayed this morning, aided and abetted by the tuneful
fragrance of June in Virginia. The stage had been set--his courage had
mounted--and before he had reached his magnificent peroration, she had
laughed at him. Ye Gods! She had affronted the erstwhile Confederate
States of America and his spirit was galled.

Suddenly Conscience looked up and met his gaze penitently. It was a
change from mockery so swift and complete that he should have suspected
it, but he saw only a flash of sun through dark clouds.

"Do you like poetry?" she abruptly demanded.

"Like poetry!" Again the boy's countenance needed a twinkle of merriment
to redeem it from a too serious acceptance of self. "Not to like
poetry--if it's real poetry--is simply to be a plain clod." He spoke
with an oracular and pedantic assurance which challenged the girl's
mischief afresh.

"Shall I recite you something?" was her mild and seemingly placating
suggestion, "just to see if it is real poetry?"

"Will you? I wish you would." He bent forward in eager anticipation.
Verse should pave the way with music for the avowal which he had so far
failed to force across the barrier between heart and lips.

She rose from the hammock and stood beside one of the broad verandah
pillars, very straight and slender and flower-like, with the June sun on
her hair. Stuart's heart was conscious of a sudden glow. A boy new to
love, like a man new to drink, can recognize from a sip an elation that
the jaded taste has forever forfeited. Then in a rich voice with a
slightly exaggerated elocution, Conscience began:


     "Up from the meadows, rich with corn, clear in the cool September
       morn,
     The clustered spires of Frederick stand, green-walled by the hills
       of Maryland."


Those schools wherein the last of the Farquaharsons had derived his
primary education had not starred or featured the poems of John
Greenleaf Whittier. Stuart's eyes dwelt devouringly on the
elocutionist--as yet unruffled by suspicion. They were doing their best
to say the things at which his lips balked. But as the recitation
proceeded their light died from hope to misery and from misery to the
anger of hurt pride. He stood very rigid and very attentive, making no
effort to interrupt, but holding her gaze defiantly as she went on:


     "Up the street came the Rebel tread, Stonewall Jackson riding
       ahead.
     Under his slouch hat left and right, he glanced and the old flag
       caught his sight."


At these lines the boy flinched, but still he said nothing. Like a
soldier who stands at attention under the threat of a firing squad he
listened to the end--or rather to the stanzas which recite:


     "'Shoot, if you must at this old gray head, but spare your
       country's flag,' she said.
     A flush of manhood, a look of shame, into the face of their leader
       came...."


That was too much! The man of whom these impious words were spoken was
that gallant knight, without reproach, whose name is hallowed in every
Southern heart. Very slowly Stuart Farquaharson raised his hand.

"I think," he announced with a shake of repressed fury in his voice,
"I'll have to go home now. Good afternoon."

"Then you don't like poetry?"

"I don't consider that poetry," he said with a dignity which an
archbishop might have envied. "I consider it slander of a dead hero."

"You mean, then," Conscience seemed a little frightened now and her
utterance was hurried and fluttering, "that you are mad and are going?
You never go until later than this."

It was difficult to be both courteous and honest, and Stuart's code
demanded both.

"I expect there wasn't ever the same reason before."

This time it was the girl's eyes that leaped into flame and she stamped
a small foot.

"Did you ever have any _fun_ in your life?" she demanded. "You know
perfectly well that I teased you just because you were such a solemn owl
that you're not far from being a plain, every-day prig. All right; go if
you like and don't come to see me again until you get over the idea that
you're a--a--" she halted for a word, then added scornfully--"a
combination high priest and Prince of Wales."

Stuart Farquaharson bowed stiffly.

"All right," he said. "I won't forget. Good-by."

       *       *       *       *       *

At the dinner table that evening Mrs. Farquaharson noted with concern
the trance-like abstraction in which her son sat, as one apart. Later as
she mixed for the General the night-cap toddy, which was an institution
hallowed by long usage, she commented on it.

"I'm afraid Stuart isn't well," she volunteered. "He's not a moody boy
by nature, and he doesn't seem himself to-day. Perhaps we had better
send him to Doctor Heathergill. It wouldn't do for him to fall ill just
when he's starting to college."

The General studied the toddy as though it held the secrets of a seer's
crystal. "Your very good health, my dear." He raised the glass and about
his gray eyes came the star-point wrinkles of an amused smile, "I
noticed that Stuart didn't ride over to see the little Williams girl
to-night. Wasn't that unusual?"

Mrs. Farquaharson nodded her head. "He must have been feeling positively
ill," she declared. "Nothing less could have kept him away."

But the father, who had never before shown evidence of a hard heart,
permitted his quizzical twinkle to broaden into a frank grin, "With
every confidence in Dr. Heathergill, I doubt his ability to aid our
declining son."

"Then you think--?"

"Precisely so. The little girl from the North has undertaken a portion
of the boy's education which is as painful to him as it is essential."

"He's been perfectly lovely to her," defended the mother indignantly.
"It's a shame if she's hurt him."

The General's face grew grave.

"It's a God's blessing, I think." He spoke thoughtfully now. "Stuart is
a sentimentalist. He lives largely on dreams and poetry and ideals."

"Surely, General--" Sometimes in the moment of serious connubial debate
Mrs. Farquaharson gave her husband his title. "Surely you wouldn't have
him otherwise. The traditions of his father and grandfathers were the
milk on which he fed at my breast."

"By which I set great store, but a child must be weaned. Stuart is
living in an age of shifting boundaries in ideas and life.

"I should hate to see him lower his youthful standards, but I should
like to see him less in the clouds. I should like to see him leaven the
lump with a sense of humor. To be self-consciously dedicated to noble
things and yet unable to smile at one's ego is to be censorious, and to
be censorious is to be offensive."

"But he's just a child yet," argued Stuart's mother. "For all his height
and strength he's hardly more than a boy after all."

"Quite true, yet to-night he's tossing in his bed and breathing like a
furnace because his heart is broken for all time. It's all very well to
swear:


           "To love one maiden only, cleave to her
     And worship her by years of noble deeds,


but for him that day is still far off. Meanwhile he's got to have his
baptism of fire. It's a mighty good thing for a boy like Stuart to begin
taking a little punishment while he's young. Young hearts, not less than
young bones, mend quicker and better. He's over intense and if he got
the _real_ before he's had his puppy loves it would go hard with him."




CHAPTER II


When Stuart presented himself at breakfast the next morning his eyes
were black-ringed with sleeplessness, but his riding boots were freshly
polished and his scarf tied with extra precision. It was in the mind of
the youngest Farquaharson to attain so personable an appearance that the
lady who had cast aside his love should be made to realize what she had
lost as they passed on the highway.

Then he went to the stables to have Johnny Reb saddled and started away,
riding slowly. When he came in view of the house which she sanctified
with her presence, a gray saddle mare stood fighting flies and stamping
by the stone hitching post in front of the verandah, and each swish of
the beast's tail was a flagellation to the boy's soul. The mare belonged
to Jimmy Hancock and logically proclaimed Jimmy's presence within.
Heretofore between Stuart and Jimmy had existed a cordial amity, but now
the aggrieved one remembered many things which tainted Jimmy with
villainy and crassness. Stuart turned away, his hand heavy on the bit,
so that Johnny Reb, unaccustomed to this style of taking pleasure sadly,
tossed his head fretfully and widened his scarlet nostrils in disgust.

Ten minutes later the single and grim-visaged horseman riding north came
upon a pair riding south. Johnny Reb's silk coat shone now with sweat,
but his pace was sedate. The love-sick Stuart had no wish to travel so
fast as would deny the lady opportunity to halt him for conversation.
Conscience and Jimmy were also riding slowly and Stuart schooled his
features into the grave dignity of nobly sustained suffering. No
Marshal of France passing the Emperor's reviewing stand ever rode with a
deeper sense of the portentous moment. With his chin high and his face
calm in its stricken dignity he felt that no lady with a heart in her
soft bosom could fail to extend proffers of conciliation. In a moment
more they would meet in the narrow road. His face paled a shade or two
under the tension--then they were abreast and his heart broke and the
apple of life was dead sea fruit to his palate. She had spoken. She had
even smiled and waved her riding crop, but she had done both with so
superlative an indifference that it seemed she had not really seen him
at all. She was chatting vivaciously with Jimmy and Jimmy had been
laughing as raucously as a jackal--and so they had passed him by. The
event which had spelled tragedy for him; robbed him of sleep and
withered his robust appetite had not even lingered overnight in her
memory. The dirk was in Stuart Farquaharson's breast, but it was yet to
be twisted. Pride forbade his shaking Johnny Reb into a wild pace until
he was out of sight. The funereal grandeur of his measured tread must
not be broken, and so he heard with painful distinctness the next remark
of Jimmy Hancock.

"What in thunder's eatin' on Stuty--" (sometimes, though not encouraged
to do so, young Mr. Farquaharson's intimates called him by that shameful
diminutive.) "He looks like a kid that's just been taken back to the
barn and spanked."

"Did he?" asked the young lady casually, "I really didn't notice."

Ye Gods! He, wearing his misery like a Cæsar's toga, compared by this
young buffoon to a kid who had been spanked! _She_ had not noticed it.
Ye Gods! Ye Gods!


Ten days passed and the visit of Conscience Williams was drawing to an
end. Soon she would go back to those rock-bound shores of New England
where in earlier days her ancestors had edified themselves with burning
witches. She would pass out of his life but never out of his memory. His
heart would go with her, but though it killed him he would never modify
the rigors of his self-appointed exile from her presence until an
advance came from her.

Each night he secretly stole over to a point of ambuscade from which he
could see the shimmery flash of her dress as she moved about the porch,
cavaliered by the odious Jimmy and his fellows. On these nocturnal
vigils he heard the note of her heedless laughter while he crouched
embittered and hidden at a distance. There was in those merry peals no
more symptom of a canker at her heart than in the carol of a bird
greeting a bright day. She did not care and when the one maiden whom he
wished to worship by years of noble deeds did not care--again the only
answer was "Ye Gods!"

These were not matters to be alleviated by the comforting support of a
confidant and he had no confidant except Cardinal Richelieu. The
cardinal was more frequently addressed as Ritchy and his nature was as
independent of hampering standards as his origin warranted. The
Cardinal's face--a composite portrait of various types of middle-class
dog-life--made pretense useless and early in his puppy career he seemed
to realize it and to abandon himself to a philosophy of irresponsible
pleasure. But Ritchy's eye had taken on a saddened cast since the blight
had fallen on his master. He no longer frisked and devised, out of his
comedian's soul, mirth-provoking antics. It was as though he understood
and his spirit walked in sorrow.

A night of full-mooned radiance came steeping the souls of the young
Knight and the young Cardinal in bitter yet sweet melancholy. Two days
more and Conscience would be gone from the Valley of
Virginia--returning to Cape Cod. Then Stuart would write over the door
of his life "Ichabod, the glory is departed." To-night he would stalk
again to his lonely tryst beneath the mock-orange hedge, which gave
command of the yard and porch, and when she had gone to her room, he
could still gaze upon the lighted window which marked a sacred spot. At
a sedate distance in the rear proceeded the Cardinal, who had
judiciously made no announcement of his coming. He knew that there was
an edict against his participation in these vigils, based on a theory
that he might give voice and advertise his master's presence, but it was
a theory for which he had contempt and which he resented as a slur upon
his discretion.

When Stuart Farquaharson crouched in the lee of heavily shadowed
shrubbery the Cardinal sat on his haunches and wrinkled his unlovely
brow in contemplative thought. Not far away masses of honeysuckle
climbed over a rail fence festooned with blossom. Into the night stole
its pervasive sweetness and the old house was like a temple built of
blue gray shadows with columns touched into ivory whiteness by the
lights of door and window. A low line of hills loomed beyond, painted of
silver gray against the backdrop of starry sky and the pallor of moon
mists. From the porch came the desultory tinkle of a banjo and the
voices of young people singing and in a pause between songs more than
once the boy heard a laugh--a laugh which he recognized. He could even
make out a scrap of light color which must be her dress. Such were the
rewards of his night watch, a melancholy and external gaze upon a
Paradise barred to him by a stubbornness which his youth mistook for
honorable pride.

At last two buggies rattled down the drive with much shouting of
farewells and ten minutes later Jimmy's saddle horse clattered off at a
gallop. The visitors were gone silence was left behind them. But
Conscience did not at once turn into the house and close the door behind
her. She stood by one of the tall pillars and the boy strained his gaze
to make out more than the vague outline of a shadow-shape. Then slowly
she came down the stairs and out onto the moonlit lawn, walking
meditatively in the direction of Stuart Farquaharson's hiding place. The
boy's heart leaped into a heightened tattoo and he bent eagerly forward
with his lips parted. She moved lightly through the luminance of a world
which the moon had burnished into tints of platinum and silver, and she
was very lovely, he thought, in her child-beauty and slenderness, the
budding and virginal freshness that was only beginning to stir into a
realization of something meant by womanhood. He bent, half kneeling, in
his ambuscade with that dream of love which was all new and wonderful: a
thing of such untarnished romance as only life's morning can give to the
young.

Then into the dream welled a futile wave of resentment and poisoned it
with bitterness. She had played with him and mocked him and cast him
aside and to her he was less than nothing. A few moments ago her voice
had drifted to him in an abandonment of merriment though she was going
away without seeing him. Night after night he had come here, merely for
the sad pleasure of watching her move through the shadows and the
distance.

Now, unconscious of his nearness, the girl came on until she halted
beyond the fence, not more than ten yards away. Cardinal Richelieu
fidgeted on his haunches and silenced, with a difficult self-repression,
the puzzled whine which came into his throat. The tempered spot-light of
the moon was on Conscience's lashes and lips, and the boy stiffened into
a petrified astonishment, for quite abruptly and without warning she
carried both slim hands to her face and her body shook with something
like a paroxysm of sobs.

In a moment she took her hands away and her eyes were shining with a
tearful moisture. A lock of hair fell over her face. She tossed it back,
then she moved a few steps nearer and rested both arms on the top rail
of the fence. In them she buried her cheeks and began to cry softly.
Stuart Farquaharson could almost have touched her but he was quite
invisible. He felt himself an eavesdropper, but he could not escape
without being seen.

The case was different with Cardinal Richelieu. Repressed emotions have
been said to kill strong men. They did not kill the Cardinal, but they
conquered him. From his raggedly whiskered lips burst a growl and a yawp
which, too late, he regretted.

The girl gave a little scream and started back and Stuart realized it
was time to reassure her. He rose up, materializing into a tall shape in
the shadows like a jinn conjured from empty blackness.

"It's only me--Stuart Farquaharson," he said, and Conscience gave a
little outcry of delight in the first moment of surprise. But that she
swiftly stifled into a less self-revealing demeanor as she demanded with
recovered dignity, "What are you doing here?"

The boy vaulted the fence and stood at her side while the mollified
Cardinal waved a stubby tail, as one who would say--"Now you see it took
my dog sense to bring you two together. Without me you were quite
helpless."

"Why were you crying, Conscience?" Stuart asked, ignoring alike her
question and the rebuke in her voice, but she reiterated, "What are you
doing here?"

The moon showed a face set with the stamp of tragedy which he imagined
to have settled on his life, but his eyes held hers gravely and he was
no longer hampered with bashfulness. The sight of her tear-stained
faced had freed him of that.

"I come here every night," he acknowledged simply, "to watch you over
there on the porch--because--" He balked a moment there, but only a
moment, before declaring baldly what he had so often failed to announce
gallantly--"Because I'm crazy about you--because I love you."

For a moment she gazed up at him and her breath came fast, then she
suggested, a little shaken, "It isn't much farther on to the house. You
used to come the whole way."

"You told me not to."

"If you had--had cared very much you would have come any way."

"I've cared enough," he reminded her, "to sit out here every night until
you put out your light and went to sleep. If you had wanted me you'd
have said so."

Impulsively she laid a trembling hand on his arm and spoke in rushing
syllables. "I thought you'd come without being sent for--then when I
knew you wouldn't, I couldn't hear it. I wrote you a note to-night.... I
was going to send it to-morrow.... I'm going home the next day."

A whippoorwill called plaintively from the hillside. He had spoken and
in effect she had answered. All the night's fragrance and cadence merged
into a single witchery which was a part of themselves. For the first and
most miraculous time, the flood tide of love had lifted them and their
feet were no longer on the earth.

"But--but--" stammered the boy, moistening his lips, "you were singing
and laughing with Jimmy Hancock and the rest ten minutes ago, and now--"

The girl's delicately rounded chin came up in the tilt of pride.

"Do you think I'd show them how I felt?" she demanded. "Do you think
I'd tell anybody--except you."

Stuart Farquaharson had a sensation of hills and woods whirling in
glorified riot through an infinity of moon mists and star dust. He felt
suddenly mature and strong and catching her in his arms he pressed her
close, kissing her hair and temples until she, fluttering with the
wildness of her first embrace of love, turned her lips up to his kisses.

But soon Conscience drew away and at once her cheeks grew hot with
blushes and maidenly remorse. She had been reared in an uncompromising
school of puritanism. Her father would have regarded her behavior as
profoundly shocking. She herself, now that it was over, regarded it so,
though she wildly and rebelliously told herself that she would not undo
it, if she could.

"Oh," she exclaimed in a low voice, "oh, Stuart, what were we thinking
about!"

"We were thinking that we belong to each other," he fervently assured
her. "As long as I live I belong to you--and to no one else, and you--"

"But we're only children," she demurred, with a sudden outcropping of
the practical in the midst of romanticism. "How do we know we won't
change our minds?"

"I won't change mine," he said staunchly. "And I won't let you change
yours. You will write to me, won't you?" he eagerly demanded, but she
shook her head.

"Father doesn't let me write to boys," she told him.

"At least you'll be back--next summer?"

"I'm afraid not. I don't know."

Stuart Farquaharson drew a long breath. His face set itself in rigid
resolve.

"If they send you to the North Pole and stop all my letters and put a
regiment of soldiers around you, and keep them there, it won't alter
matters in the long run," he asseverated, with boyhood assurance, "You
belong to me and you are going to marry me."

A voice from the house began calling and the girl answered quickly, "I'm
just in the garden. I'll be right in." But before she went she turned to
the boy again and her eyes were dancing incorrigibly.

"You won't go out and join any Newmarket cadets or anything and get
killed meanwhile, will you?"

"I will not," he promptly replied. "And when we have a house of our own
we'll have framed copies of Barbara Freitchie hanging all over the place
if you want them."

To Stuart Farquaharson just then the future seemed very sure. He had no
way of knowing that after to-morrow years lay between the present and
their next meeting--and that after that--but of course he could not read
the stars.




CHAPTER III


The sand bar rose like a white island beyond the mild surf of the shore,
distant enough to make it a reservation for those hardier swimmers who
failed to find contentment between beach and float. Outside the bar the
surf boiled in spume-crowned, and went out again sullenly howling an
in-sucking of sands and an insidious tug of undertow.

One head only bobbed far out as a single swimmer shaped his course in
unhurried strokes toward the bar. This swimmer had come alone from the
hotel bath-houses and had strolled down into the streaming bubbles of an
outgoing wave without halting to inspect the other bathers. There was a
businesslike directness in the way he kept onward and outward until a
comber lifted him and his swimming had begun.

The young man might have been between twenty and twenty-five and a Greek
feeling for line and form and rhythmic strength would have called his
body beautiful. Its flesh was smooth and brown, flowing in frictionless
ease over muscles that escaped bulkiness; its shoulders swung with a
sort of gladiatorial freedom. But the Hellenic sculptor would have found
the head suited to his use as well as the torso and limbs, for it was a
head well shaped and well carried, dominated by eyes alert with
intelligence, and enlivened with humor.

As he rocked between crest and trough, the swimmer's glance caught the
shattered form of a breaker at the end of the bar. He liked things to be
the biggest of their sort. If there was to be surf, he wanted it to be
like that beyond, with a fierce song in its breaking and the foam of the
sea's endless sweat in its lashings.

When at last he let himself down and his feet touched bottom, he wiped
the brine out of his eyes and hurried up the shallow rise--then halted
suddenly. The bar had appeared empty of human life, but now he caught a
glimpse of a head and a pair of shoulders and they were feminine. A
normal curiosity as to further particulars asserted itself. He had a
distinct feeling of apprehension lest the face, when seen, should prove
a disappointment, because unless it was singularly attractive--more
attractive than wits warranted by any law of probability--it would be
distressingly out of keeping with the charm and grace of the figure
which came into full view as he waded ashore in spite of the masses of
dark and lustrous hair which fell free. The unknown lady was sitting on
the sand with her back half turned and, in the soaked and clinging silk
of her bathing dress, she had an alluring lissomness of line and curve.
If her face _did_ match her beauty of body she would have rather more
than one woman's share of Life's gifts, he philosophized, and by
Nature's law of compensation she would probably be vapid and insipid of
mind.

But while he was engaging himself in these personal speculations the
lady herself was obviously quite serene in her ignorance of his presence
or existence. She conceived herself to be in sole possession of her
island kingdom of an hour and was complacently using it as an exclusive
terrain.

She had removed her blue bathing cap and tossed it near by on the sand.
She had let her hair out free to the sun, in whose light it glowed
between the rich darkness of polished mahogany and the luster of jet.

After all perhaps he had better announce himself in some audible fashion
since, secure in her supposed isolation, the other occupant of the bar
proceeded to remove a silk stocking, which matched the cap in color,
and to examine with absorbed interest what he supposed to be a
stone-bruise on an absurdly small and pink heel. Discreetly he coughed.

The young woman looked quickly over her shoulder and their eyes met. A
perfunctory apology for invasion shaped itself in his mind, but remained
unuttered. He stood instead, his lips parted and his eyes brimming with
astonishment. The face not only met the high requirements set for it by
his idea of appropriateness, but abundantly surpassed the standard.
Moreover, it was a face he recognized. He was not at first quite certain
that her recognition of him had been as swift. A half dozen years,
involving the transition from boyhood to manhood might have dimmed his
image in her memory, so he hastened to introduce himself, striding
across as she came a little confusedly to her feet--one silk shod and
one bare.

"Heaven be praised, Conscience," he shouted with an access of boyish
elation in his voice. "This is too lucky to believe. Don't say you've
absolutely forgotten me--Stuart Farquaharson."

She stood there before him, dangling a stocking in her left hand as she
extended her right. Dark hair falling below her waist framed a face
whose curves and feature-modelings were all separate delights uniting to
make a total of somewhat gorgeous loveliness. Her lips were crimson
petals in a face as creamy white as a magnolia bloom, and her dark eyes
twinkled with inward mischief. It was a face which in repose held that
serenely grave quality which a painter might have selected for his study
of a saint--and which, when her little teeth flashed and her eyes
kindled in a smile, broke into a dazzling and infectious gayety. She was
smiling now.

"'Up from the meadows rich with corn'?" she inquired, as though they had
parted yesterday.

Stuart Farquaharson broke into a peal of laughter as he caught the
extended hand in both his own and finished the quotation.


     "Clear in the cool September morn, the clustered spires of
       Frederick stand,
     Green-walled by the hills of Maryland ...


By the way," his voice took on a note of sudden trepidation--"you aren't
married, are you?"

It was a point upon which she did not at the moment resolve his doubts.
She was standing at gaze herself, critically taking him in. She let her
appraisal begin at the dark hair which the water had twisted into a
curling lawlessness and end at his feet which were somewhat small for
his stature. The general impression of that scrutiny was one which she
secretly acknowledged to be startlingly, almost thrillingly, favorable.
Then she realized that while one of her hands continued to dangle a wet
stocking, the other was still tightly clasped in his own and that he was
repeating his question.

"Why do you ask?" she naïvely inquired, as she quietly sought to
disengage her imprisoned fingers.

"Why!" he echoed, in a shocked voice, pretending unconsciousness of her
efforts at self-liberation. "Why does one ever ask a vital question? The
last time I saw you I told you candidly that I meant to marry you. If
you're already married--why, it might complicate matters, don't you
think?"

"It _might_," the young woman conceded. "It might even alter matters
altogether--but don't you think that even for a reunion we seem to have
shaken hands almost long enough?"

With reluctance he released the captive fingers and reminded her that he
was still unanswered.

"No," she told him, "I'm not married so far--of course I've tried hard,
but the honest gander hasn't volunteered."

"Thank God!" was his instant and fervent comment.

Beyond her were the sands of the bar and the Atlantic Ocean stretching
unbroken to the Madeiras and a flawless sky against which the gulls
dipped and screamed.

She was straight and vivid, and his pulses quickened, taking fire. Sun,
air and water; sparkle, radiance and color--these things were about him
filling his senses with delight and she seemed to epitomize them all in
a personal incarnation.

"Don't let me keep you standing," he begged her, belatedly remembering
his manners. "You were taking your case when I came. Besides, Old
Neptune in person will be along soon to claim this sandbar for himself.
Meanwhile, 'The time has come,' the walrus said, 'to talk of many
things.'"

"As for instance?"

"As for instance that there's less of the fortuitous in this meeting
than appears upon the surface."

"Then you knew I was on the sandbar?"

Stuart Farquaharson shook his head. "I didn't even know that you were at
Chatham. I just got here this morning driving through to Provincetown.
But I did know that you were on Cape Cod, and that is why I'm on Cape
Cod."

She dropped lightly to the sand and sat nursing her knees between
interlocked fingers. Stuart Farquaharson spread himself luxuriantly at
length, propped on one elbow. He could not help noting that the bare
knee was dimpled and that the curved flesh below it was satin-smooth and
the hue of apple blossoms. The warm breeze kept stirring her hair
caressingly and, against the glare, she lowered her long lashes, half
veiling her eyes. But at his avowal of the cause of his coming her lips
curved with humorous scepticism.

"I'm afraid you acted very hastily," she murmured. "You've only known I
was here for about six years."

He nodded, entirely unruffled.

"I have only recently been promoted to the high office of 'Master of my
fate'--but before we get to that--where are you stopping?"

"Our party will be here at Chatham for several days. We're stopping at
The Arms."

"You speak of a party, and that makes me realize the imperative need of
improving this golden moment," Stuart Farquaharson announced urbanely,
"because I have certain rude and elementary powers of deduction."

"Which lead you to what conclusion?" She turned eyes riffled with
amusement from the contemplation of a distant sail to his face, and he
proceeded to enlighten her.

"To two. First, that in Chatham, Massachusetts, as in the Valley of
Virginia, there is probably a Jimmy Hancock buzzing about. Secondly,
that since 'misfortunes come not single spies, but in battalions,' there
are probably a flock of Jimmies. By the by, will you swim out here with
me to-morrow morning?"

"To-morrow morning," she demurred. "I believe I have an engagement for a
horseback ride with Billy Stirling. We're going to look at a wind mill
or something."

The man shook his head in mock distress.

"I knew it," he sighed, then his tone grew serious and he began to speak
rapidly. "You say I've known where you were for six years and that's
true. It's also true that until this summer, I haven't in any genuine
sense been the master of my movements. Four years were spent in college,
and two in law school. There were vacations, of course, but my mother
claimed them at home. She is dead now, and her last few years were years
of partial invalidism--so she wanted her family about her."

"Oh," the girl's eyes deepened with sympathy. "I didn't know that. She
was, I think, almost the loveliest woman I ever knew. She was everything
that blue blood ought to be--and so rarely is."

"Thank you. Yes, I think my mother was just that--but what I meant to
claim was that this summer is the first I have been free to use in
whatever way I wanted: the first time I've been able to say to myself,
'Go and do whatever seems to you the most delightful thing possible in a
delightful world.' What I did was to come to Cape Cod and why I did it
I've already told you."

Conscience studied his expression and back of the whimsical glint in his
eyes she recognized an entire sincerity. Perhaps he had retained out of
boyhood some of that militant attitude of believing in his dreams and
making them realities. She found herself hoping something of the sort as
she reminded him, "After I had outgrown pigtails, you know, they would
have let me read a letter from you--if it had arrived."

"Certainly. There were a good many times when I started to write; a good
many times when I got as far as a half-finished letter. But I always
tore it up. You see, it never appeared to me that that was the way. A
letter from me, after a long absence would have been a shadowy sort of
message. I couldn't guess how clearly you remembered me or even whether
you remembered me at all. You were a child then, who was growing into a
woman. Your life was an edifice which you were building for yourself.
What niches it had for what saints and deities, I couldn't hope to know.
I might have been scornfully thrust in among the cobwebs with other
promiscuous rummage of outgrown days. I might have been hardly more
important than the dolls that preceded me in your affections by only a
couple of years. How could I tell?" He paused and questioned her with
direct eyes. "No, I meant to come back into your life not as a ghost
speaking from the past but as a man intent on announcing himself in
person. It was no part of my scheme that you should say, 'Oh, yes, I
remember him. A long, thin kid with a vile temper. I used to love to
stir him up and hear him roar.' That's why I never wrote."

Her smile was still a little doubtful and so he went on.

"It would have been too easy for you to have simply dropped me cold. Now
it happens that in life I am endowed with a certain india-rubber
quality. I am practically indestructible. When you biff me into the
corner I can come bouncing back for more. In short, I am not so easy to
be rid of, when I'm on the ground."

Conscience laughed. They were still young enough to respond thrillingly
to the remembered fragrance of honeysuckle and the plaintive note of the
whippoorwill, and perhaps to other memories, as well.

She rose abruptly and went down to the water's edge where she stood with
the breeze whipping the silk draperies of her blue bathing skirt against
her knees and stirring her hair into a dark nimbus about her head. After
retrieving from the sand the blue cap and the blue stocking, her
companion followed her.

"Now that I'm here," he asseverated, "I hold that we stand just where we
stood when we parted."

But at that she shook her head and laughed at him. "Quite the reverse,"
she declared. "I hold that by years of penitence I've lived down my
past. We're simply two young persons who once knew each other."

"Very well," acceded he. "It will come to the same thing in the end. We
will start as strangers, but I have a strong conviction that when we
become acquainted, I'm going to dog your steps to the altar. I'm willing
to cancel all the previous chapter, except that I sha'n't forget it....
Can _you_ forget it?"

She flushed, but shook her head frankly, and answered without evasion,
"I haven't forgotten it yet."

He was gazing into her face with such a hypnotism of undisguised
admiration that she smilingly inquired, "Well, have I changed much?"

"You have. You've changed much and radiantly. Since you insist on
regarding me as a new acquaintance I must be conservative and
restrained, so I'll only say that you have the most flawless beauty I've
ever seen."

"The tide is rising," she reminded him irrelevantly. "We'd better be
starting back." She put her hands up to her wind-blown hair and began
coiling it into abundant masses on her head, while he was kneeling on
the sand and tying the ribbon of her bathing slipper.

They crossed the bar and went into the water, swimming side by side with
easy strokes, and when the return trip was half completed they saw the
head of another swimmer coming out.

"That's Billy Stirling," she told him. "He seems to have guessed where I
was."

"I was right," sighed the Virginian. "He out-Jimmies Jimmy Hancock. I
don't like this Stirling person."

"You don't know him yet, you know."

"Quite true, but I don't have to know him to dislike him. It's a matter
of general principle."

But in spite of his announcement, Stuart did like Billy Stirling. He
liked him from the moment that gentleman thrust a wet paw out of the
water to shake hands and tossed the brine from a grinning face to
acknowledge the girl's introduction. He liked him even better for the
Puck-like irresponsibility of his good humor as, later on, he introduced
Stuart to the others of the party.

"Now that you've met this crew, you are to consider yourself a member,"
declared Stirling, though he added accusingly, "I promoted this
expedition and used great discrimination in its personnel. It struck me
as quite complete before your intrusion marred its symmetry, but you're
here and we've got to make the best of you."

The women differed with Mr. Stirling and scathingly told him so, to his
immense delight.

"The difference between a party made up in handcuffed pairs, like this
has been, and one equipped with an extra man or two is the exact
difference between frugal necessity and luxury," protested Henrietta
Raven, sententiously.

"I suppose you get the fact that these guileless kids over here are our
venerated chaperons?" said the host with a pointed finger. "They are so
newly-wed that they still spoon publicly--which is disgraceful, of
course, but reduces the obnoxiousness of chaperons."

The week that followed in Chatham was a momentous time and a turning
point for the young Virginian. In a way it was epochal in his life.
Though he was assimilated into the party as if he had been one of them
from childhood, he found little opportunity to be alone with Conscience.
Indeed the idea came to him at first vaguely, then persistently, that
she herself was seeking to avoid anything savoring of the quality of a
tête-à-tête.

The realization haunted and troubled him because even in this general
association, her personality had flashed varyingly and amazingly from
many facets. The dream which had meant so much to his boyhood was
swiftly ripening also into the dream of his manhood, or, as he would
have expressed it, a fulfillment. His heart had been fallow when he had
first known her. It had not been subjected to subsequent conquest and
now its predisposed allegiance was ready to grow with tropical swiftness
into a purposeful and fiery ardor.




CHAPTER IV


Stuart Farquaharson had that habit of self-analysis which often
compelled him to take his own life into the laboratory of reflection and
study its reactions with an almost impersonal directness. That analysis
told him that Conscience Williams, had she chosen to do so, might have
imposed upon him the thrall of infatuation, even had there been no
powerful appeal to his mentality. Every fiery element that had lain
dormant in his nature was ready to leap into action, in response to a
challenge of which she was herself unconscious--a challenge to the
senses. And yet he recognized with an almost prayerful gratitude that it
was something paramount to physical lure, which beckoned him along the
path of love. Into the more genuine and intimate recesses of her life,
where the soul keeps its aloofness, she had given him only keyhole
glimpses, but they had been such glimpses as kindled his eagerness and
awakened his hunger for exploration. There had been candid indications
reënforced by a dozen subtler things that her liking for him was more
than casual, and yet she denied him any chance to avow himself, and
sometimes, when he came suddenly upon her, he discovered a troubled
wistfulness in her face which clouded her eyes and brought a droop to
the corners of her lips.

On one such occasion as he was passing an old house with a yard in which
the grass was tall and ragged and the fruit trees as unkempt and
overgrown as a hermit's beard he saw her standing alone by one of the
tilting veranda posts. The sunshine was gone from her dark eyes, so that
they seemed darker than ever--and haunted with an almost tragic
wistfulness. She had the manner of one facing a ghost which she had
vainly sought to lay. He came so close before he spoke her name that she
turned toward him with a start, as though he wakened her suddenly out of
somnambulism, but even as she wheeled, her face brightened and a
bantering merriment sounded in her voice, countering all his solicitous
inquiries with gay retorts.

When a week of charming but unsatisfying association had passed Stuart
Farquaharson felt that the time had come when he must talk with her less
superficially. It was as if they had only waded in the shallows of
conversation--and he wanted to strike out and swim in deeper waters. The
opportunity, when it came, was not of his own making. It was an evening
when there was dancing in the large lounge of The Arms. Farquaharson and
Conscience had gone, between dances, to the tiled veranda overlooking
the sea. The moon was spilling showers of radiance from horizon to
shore, and making of the beach a foreground of pale silver. The veranda
itself was a place of blue shadows between the yellow splotches of the
window lights. After a little she laid a hand lightly on Stuart's arm.

"Don't you want to take me for a stroll on the beach?" she asked a shade
wearily. "I'm tired of so many people."

They followed the twisting line of the wet sands and at last halted by
the prow of a beached row-boat, where the girl enthroned herself, gazing
meditatively off to sea.

"Conscience," he asked slowly, "you have used a diplomacy worthy of a
better cause, in devising ways to keep me from talking with you
alone--why?"

"Have I done that?" she countered.

"You know you have. Of course you've known I wanted to make love to you.
Why wouldn't you let me?"

"Because," she answered gravely, meeting his eyes with full candor, "I
didn't want you to--make love to me. I'm not ready for that."

"I haven't said I wasn't willing to wait, have I?" he suggested quietly.
"You don't appear to throw barriers of silence between yourself and
Billy."

"No. That's different.... I'm not--" Suddenly she broke off and laughed
at herself.

Then a little startled, at her own frankness, she admitted in a low
voice, "I'm not afraid of Billy's unsettling me."

The man felt his temples throb with a sudden and intoxicating elation.
He steadied himself against its agitation to demand,

"And you are--afraid that I might?"

She was sitting with the moonlight waking her dark hair into a somber
luster and a gossamer shimmer on the white of her evening gown. Her
hands lay unmoving in her lap and she slowly nodded her confession.

"You see," she told him, after another long pause, "it's a
thing--falling in love--that I should do rather riotously--if I did it
at all. I shouldn't be able to think of much else."

Stuart Farquaharson wanted to seize her in his arms and protest that she
could never love him too riotously, but he instead schooled his voice to
a level almost monotonous.

"I fell in love with you--back there in the days of our childhood," he
said slowly. "Maybe it was only a boy's dream--then--but now it's a
man's dream--a life dream. You will have to be won out of battle, every
wonderful reward does--but victory will come to me." His voice rose
vibrantly. "Because winning it is the one inflexible purpose of my life,
dominating every other purpose."

She had not interrupted him and now she was a little afraid of him--and
of herself. Perhaps it was only the moon--but the moon swings the tides.

"Stuart--" Her voice held a tremor of pleading. "If you do love
me--like that--you can wait. Just now I need you--but not as a lover. I
need you as a friend whom I don't have to fight."

The man straightened and bowed. "Very well," he said, "I can wait--if I
must. Your need comes first."

She gave him a grateful smile, then suddenly came to her feet and began
speaking with such a passionate earnestness as he had not before heard
from her lips.

"I think it's the right of every human being to live fully--not just
half live through a soul-cramping routine. I think it's the right of a
man or a woman to face all the things that make life, to _think_--even
if they make mistakes--to fight for what they believe, even if they're
wrong. I'd rather be Joan of Arc than the most sainted nun that ever
took the veil!"

The young man's face lighted triumphantly, because that was also his
creed. "I knew it!" he exclaimed. "I didn't have to hear your words to
know that marking time in an age of marching would never satisfy you."

"And yet every influence that means home and family seems bent on
condemning me to the dreariness and mustiness of a life that kills
thought. I've thought about it so much that I'm afraid I've grown
morbid." Once more her voice rang with passionate insurgency. "I feel as
if I were being sent to Siberia."

Stuart answered with forced composure through which the thrill of a
minute ago crept like an echo of departing trumpets. "Of course, I came
out here to declare my love. I had waited for this chance ... the sea
... the moon--well! It's rather like asking for a field-marshal's baton
and a curveting charger--and getting instead a musket and place in the
ranks. The man who doesn't serve where he's put isn't much good...." He
paused and then went on calmly, "What is this thing that haunts you?"

"When I finished at the preparatory school," she began, "father thought
I'd gone far enough and I _knew_ I needed college. At last I won a
compromise. I was to have one year by way of trial, and then he was to
decide which idea was right--his or mine."

"So now--"

"So now the jury has the case--and I'm terribly afraid I know the
verdict in advance. Father is a minister of the old school and the
unyielding New England type. I don't remember my mother, but sometimes I
think the inflammatory goodness at home killed her. In our house you
mustn't question a hell where Satan reigns as a personal god of
Damnation. To doubt his spiked tail and cloven hoofs, would almost be
heresy. That's our sort of goodness."

"And colleges fail to supply a course in the Chemistry of Brimstone," he
suggested.

"They don't even frown on such ungodly things as socialism and
suffrage," she supplemented.

He nodded. "They offer, in short, incubation for ideas questionably
modern."

Her voice took on a fiery quality of enthusiasm.

"Life was never so gloriously fluid--so luminous--before. Breadth and
humanity are being fought for. Men and women are facing things
open-eyed, making splendid successes and splendid failures." After a
moment's pause she added, wearily, "My father calls them fads."

"And you want to have a part in all that. You don't want only the
culture of reading the _Atlantic Monthly_ at a village fireside?"

"I want to play my little part in the game of things. The idea of being
shielded from every danger and barred off from every effort, sickens me.
If I am to lead a life I can be proud of, it must be because I've come
out of the fight unshamed, not just because no one ever let me go into a
fight."

She was standing in an attitude of tense, even rapt earnestness, her
chin high and her hands clenched. Her voice held the vibrance of a
dreamer and her eyes were looking toward the horizon as if they were
seeing visions off across the moonlit water.

"I might fail miserably, of course, but I should know that I'd had my
chance. The idea at home seems to be that a woman's goodness depends on
someone else keeping it for her: that she should stick her head into the
sand like an ostrich and, since she sees nothing, be womanly. If I have
a soul at all, and it can't sail beyond a harbor's breakwater, I have
nothing to lose, but if it can go out and come back safe it has the
right to do it. That's what college means to me: the preparation for a
real life: the chance to equip myself. That's why the question seems a
vital crisis--why _it_ is a vital crisis."

"Conscience," he said thoughtfully, "you have described the exact sort
of intolerant piety, which tempts one to admire brilliant wickedness.
You can't accept another's belief unless it's your own. That is one of
Life's categorical rules. It's not a problem."

"It's so categorical," she retorted quickly, "that there is no answer to
it except the facts. My father is old. He has burned out his life in his
fierce service of his God and his conscience. To tell him how paltry is
the sum of his life's effort, in my eyes, would be like laughing aloud
at his sermon."

"And yet you can't possibly take up the life of an outgrown age because
he prefers the thought of yesterday."

"I'm afraid I'll have to--and--"

"And what?"

"And I think--it's going to break my heart. I've got to live a lie to
keep a man, who regards a lie as a mortal sin, happy in the belief that
he has never tolerated a lie."

"My God, Conscience," Stuart broke out, "this is the New England
conscience seeking martyrdom. Life runs forward, not back. Rivers don't
climb hills."

"I have said that to myself a thousand times," she gravely replied, "but
it doesn't answer the question. There's no compulsion in the world so
universal as the tyranny of weakness over strength. Haven't you seen it
everywhere? Wherever people have to live together you find it. You find
the strong submitting to all sorts of petty persecutions, and petty
persecutions are the kind that kill, because the weak are nervous or
easily wrought up and must have allowances made for them. And the person
so considered always thinks himself strong beyond others and never
suspects the truth. Only the weak and foolish can strut independently
through life."

"And yet to draw the blinds and shut out the light of life because some
one else chooses to sit in the dark is unspeakably morbid."

Conscience shrugged her shoulders. "Sitting in the dark or living
righteously--there's no difference but point of view. My father has been
true to his convictions. The fact that his goodness is no broader than
his hymn book doesn't alter that." There was a pause, then suddenly the
girl laughed and stretched both arms out to sea. "Oh, well," she said,
"I don't often indulge in these jeremiads. Now it's over, and I've at
least got the summer ahead of me. I guess we'd better go back. I
promised Billy a dance."

She rose, but the Virginian stood resolutely in her path. "Just a moment
more," he begged. "It won't be love-making. The day we drove down to
Provincetown you were sitting on the sand dunes. For a background you
had the sea and sky--and they were gorgeous. But while I looked at it I
saw another picture, too. May I try to paint _that_ picture for you?"

"Surely, if you will."

"Well, I'm rather leaving the sunlight now," he admitted. "I'm painting
gray. I'm converting it into terms of winter storm and equinox. Last
year a ship was pounded to pieces in the bay while the people on
Commercial street looked helplessly on. It was the same sea, but it
wasn't smiling then. It wore the vindictive scowl of death. That's the
mood which has made this strip of coast a grave-yard of dead ships.
That's the mood, too, which has given color to the people's thought--or
taken the color out of it, leaving it stout and faded like weatherbeaten
timbers--making of it the untrustworthy thought of melancholia."

"And am I the spirit of that picture, too?"

"You are the exact antithesis of all that, but you are threatening to
fade into its grayness--and to deaden all the glow that was on the
palette with which God painted you."

They walked slowly back to the verandah, but paused a space before going
into the light and crowds where a waltz had just begun--and as they
waited a hotel page came dodging between the smoking, chatting loungers
calling her name--"Miss Conscience Williams--Miss Conscience Williams,"
and waving a yellow telegraph envelope.

The girl's face paled a little as she took the message from the urchin's
hand and her eyes widened in an expression of fear. But she tore the
covering and drew out the sheet deliberately, reading in the yellow
light that flooded through a window. Then an almost inaudible groan came
from her lips and she stood holding the paper so loosely that it slipped
from her fingers and drifted to the floor. Stuart retrieved it and
handed it to her, but she only commanded in a stunned voice, "Read it."

The man stepped from the shadow to the light and read:

"Your father had paralytic stroke. He wants to see you."

It was signed by initials which Stuart inferred to be those of the
elderly aunt of whom she spoken. He laid his hand very gently on her arm
and turned her a step to the side so that she passed out of the broad
band of window-light and stood in the shadow. The blaze from the
interior gave too much the effect of a spotlight playing on her eyes and
lips and brow, for him to be willing that the idling crowds of strollers
should read what he read there. He knew that in a moment she would
regain control sufficiently to face even the fuller publicity inside,
but during that moment she had the right to the limited privacy afforded
by the dark shadow of the tiled veranda.

She stood leaning against the wall for a moment, then she straightened
herself with an effort and pressed the tips of her fingers to her
temples.

"What can you get out of your car?" she asked. And the man answered
quickly, "As much speed as the roads let me--I have done sixty."

"Please take me home." The words came abruptly and with undisguised
wretchedness, "and take me _fast_."




CHAPTER V


Twenty minutes later Stuart Farquaharson swung himself to the driver's
seat of his low-hung roadster, and threw on the switch, while Billy
Stirling and the others stood at the curb, waving farewells and finding
nothing suitable to say.

The car went purring through the quiet streets where gabled houses slept
under the moon, but having passed the town limits, leaped into a racing
pace along the road for Orleans.

Stuart made no effort to talk and Conscience spoke only at long
intervals. She was gazing ahead and her eyes were wide and wet with
tears.

Once she leaned over to say: "If any of the things I said seemed
disloyal, please try to forget them. Of course, I'm only too glad he
wants me, and that I can help."

"I understand," he assured her. "I never doubted that."

The moon had set and it wanted only two hours of dawn when Conscience
roused herself from her revery to say, "It's the next gate--on the
right."

Wheeling the car into the driveway, he had a shadowy impression of an
old and gabled place, inky except for the pallid light of a lamp turned
low in an upper window.

As the girl hesitated on the verandah, he caught the complaining creak
of an old plank, and while she waited for her bag there came to his ears
the whining scrape of a tree branch against the eaves. The little voices
of the hermitage were giving their mouselike welcome.

With her key fitted in the door, Conscience turned and held out both
hands.

"You've been wonderful, Stuart," she said, with tears in her voice.
"You've understood everything and I want to thank you while we're here
alone. You'll come in, of course? I'm afraid it will be dismal, but the
hotel is worse."

The man shook his head. "No," he answered, as he pressed her hands in
his own, "I'll go back to the village and rouse up the hostelry, but I'm
coming to-morrow--to inquire."

Many dogs were aroused to a noisy chorus before his hammering on the
door of the old house which passed for a hotel received official
response, and the east was breaking into a pallid rosiness before his
thoughts permitted him to leave his seat by the window and stretch
himself wearily on his uninviting bed.

But when the sun had waked him at eight o'clock the landscape framed by
his window was a smiling one to which the youth in him responded and he
dressed clear-eyed and ready for a new day. In the hope that Conscience
had been able to sleep late, he meant to defer his visit of inquiry, and
in the meantime he breakfasted at leisure and went out to search for a
barber. The quest was not difficult, and while he awaited his turn he
sat against the wall, mildly amused at the scraps of local gossip that
came to his ears couched in homely vernacular.

"I heard that Eben Tollman cal'lates to jam Lige Heman with a
foreclosure on his mortgage. It's move out and trust in Providence for
Lige and Lige's." This comment came in piping falsetto from a thin youth
who had just been shaven raw, but still lingered in the shop, and it met
prompt reply from a grizzled old fellow with a wooden leg.

"Pshaw, Seth, that ain't no news. You can't scace'ly get folks excited
by a yarn about a shark's bitin' a cripple--but if you was to give in a
yarn about a cripple bitin' a shark--well, there'd be some point to
that. If you told where somebody had got a dollar away from Eben, now,
we'd call you a liar, I s'pose--and be right at that--but we'd listen."

"If you got a nickel from Tollman," retorted the first speaker, "you
couldn't put it in a slot machine. It would be squeezed till it was bent
double. Well, you can't blame him, I s'pose. He ain't got more'n a
million."

Just at that moment the door was opened by a gentleman entering from the
street, and Farquaharson was immensely diverted at the sudden hush in
which that particular vein of conversation died. It was an easy guess
that this was Eben Tollman himself.

The newcomer bore himself with a cold reserve of conscious superiority.
He might have been forty, though the humorless immobility of his face
gave him a seeming of greater age. In stature he was above the average
height and his eyes were shrewd and piercing. To the salutations of
those present, he responded with a slight, stiff inclining of his
head--and appeared to withdraw into the shell of self-sufficiency.

When Stuart, later, presented himself at the old manse, he found it a
venerable place, whose shingled roof was moss-green and whose gables
were honorably gray with age and service. An elderly servant directed
him to the garden, and elated at the prospect of a tête-à-tête among the
hedge rows, he went with a light step along the mossy path, noting with
what a golden light the sun filtered through the fine old trees and
flecked the sod. But inside the garden he halted among the flower
borders, for a glance told him that Conscience was not alone. She sat
leaning toward a wheel-chair, reading aloud from a book which he
divined, rather than recognized, to be a Bible. As he hurried forward
the girl looked up and rose to meet him with a swift eagerness of
welcome.

Because Stuart had catalogued Conscience's father, who was old enough to
be her grandfather, as a bigot and an obstructionist standing between
her and the sun, he was prepared to dislike him. Yet when he came up he
confessed to a sort of astonished admiration. He stood looking at a head
which suggested the head of a lion, full maned and white as a snow-cap,
shaggy and beetling of brow, and indomitable of eye. Such a man, had he
lived in another day, would have gone uncomplaining to the agonies of
the Inquisition--or as readily have participated in visiting
Inquisitional tortures on another. Yet it was a face capable of
kindliness, too, since its wrath was only for sin--or what it regarded
as sin.

He held out a hand in greeting.

"Conscience has told me how you rushed her home to me. It was very kind
of you. I was hungry to see her, but I hadn't dared to hope for her so
soon."

The old man spoke with a smile, but it was unconsciously pathetic.
Stuart could see that he was stricken not only in his useless legs but
also in his heart, though his eagle-like eyes were steady.

Conscience had been crying, but now she smiled and the two chatted with
a forced vivacity, pretending to ignore the thing of which each was
thinking and, though vivacity was foreign to his nature, the sufferer
joined in their conversation with a grim sort of self-effacement. Soon
they saw another figure approaching by the flagged path. It was the
figure of Eben Tollman and his manner was full of solicitude--but as he
talked with the father, Farquaharson saw him more than once steal covert
glances at the daughter. Obviously he bore, here, the relationship of
family friend, and though Conscience seemed to regard him as a member
of an older generation, he seemed to regard her as a contemporary.

In the days that followed Stuart Farquaharson's car standing at the
front of the old manse became a fixture in the landscape. The invalid
minister, seeking to accustom himself stoically to a pitiful anticlimax
of life, found in the buoyant vitality of this newcomer--of whom he
thought rather as a boy than a man--a sort of activity by proxy. He,
himself, moved only in a wheel chair, but Stuart could laughingly
override his protests and lift him with an easy strength into the seat
of the roadster to spin out across the countryside which he had told
himself he should hardly see again.

Even the spinster aunt, who had begun by regarding him with suspicion,
decided first that he was harmless, then that he was useful and finally
that he was charming.

Yet the young Virginian was not altogether beguiled into the hope that
this enviable status would be permanent. The talks and drives brought
incidental glimpses into the thoughts that had habitation under the
white mane and that came militantly out through the unyielding eyes even
in silence. Stuart winced often under the sting and irritation of a
bigotry which could, without question or doubt, undertake to rule
offhand and with absolutism on every question of right or wrong.

He was keeping and meant to keep a constant rein on his speech and
conduct, but he foresaw that, with all his restraint, a day might come
when the old puritan would divine the wide divergence of their thought
and have out upon him for one of the ungodly. Once he voiced something
of this to Conscience herself in the question, "How long do you think
your father will continue to welcome me here?"

Her eyes widened. "Welcome you? Why shouldn't he? He's leaning on you
as if you were a son. He declared his liking for you from the first
day."

Stuart shook his head in doubt and his eyes darkened with gravity. "It
never pays to blind one's eyes to the chances of the future," he said
slowly. "He won't continue to like me, I'm afraid. Just now he thinks of
us both as children. I am only your overgrown playmate--but realization
will come--and then--"

"You think that he will change?"

"I know it."

"Oh!" she exclaimed, and fell silent, but after a pause she spoke again
impulsively, with a note of fear in her voice. "You won't go away and
leave me here alone, will you--even if nobody else likes you?"

"No one but you can send me away--" he declared almost fiercely, "and
before you can do it you must prove yourself stronger than I."

She gave a little sigh of relief and fell to talking of other things. It
was when he rose to go and she walked to his car with him that he asked
with seeming irrelevance, "Has this Mr. Tollman ever--made love to you?"

She burst, at that, into a gale of laughter more spontaneous than any he
had heard since the telegram had sobered her. It was as though the
absurdity of the idea had swept the sky clear of everything but comedy.

"Made love to me!" she mockingly echoed. "Honestly, Stuart, there are
times when you are the funniest mortal alive--and it's always when
you're most serious. Picture the Sphinx growing garrulous. Picture
Napoleon seeking retreat in a monastery--but don't try to visualize Mr.
Tollman making love."

"Perhaps I'm premature," announced Farquaharson with conviction. "But
I'm not mistaken. If he hasn't made love to you, he will."

"Wherefore this burst of prophecy?"

"I don't have to be prophetic. I saw him look at you--and I didn't like
the way he did it. That man thinks he loves you."

"If so, he hasn't mentioned it to me."

"He will--I say 'thinks' he loves you," Stuart persisted in a level and
somewhat contemptuous voice, "because I don't believe he can really love
anything but himself and his money. But in a grasping, avaricious way he
wants you. His eyes betrayed him. He wants you in the fashion that a
miser wants gold. He wants you in the way a glutton wants a peach which
he has deliberately watched ripen until finally he says to himself,
'It's about ready to pick now.'"

A more intimate view of Eben Tollman failed to remove the initial
dislike, and yet Farquaharson acknowledged that nothing concrete was
added to the evidence of sheer prejudice. In his application to the
business affairs of the minister, he was assiduous and untiring, and the
invalid depended upon his advice as upon an infallible guidance. Stuart
told himself that to attribute this service of friendship to a selfish
motive was a meanness unworthy of entertainment, yet the suspicion
lingered. When they met, Tollman was always courteous and if this
courtesy never warmed into actual cordiality neither was it ever
tinctured with any seeming of dislike.

The summer had spent its heat and already there was a hint of autumn in
the air, but Stuart had kept his promise. There had been no lovemaking.

He and Conscience walked together one afternoon to a hill where they sat
with a vista of green country spread before them, just beginning to
kindle under the splendid torch of an incendiary autumn. Off beyond was
the sea, gorgeously blue in its main scheme, yet varying into subtle
transitions of mood from rich purple to a pale and tender green. The sky
was cloudless but there was that smoky, misty, impalpable thing like a
dust of dreams on the distance. The girl stood with one hand resting on
the gnarled bole of a pine. She wore a blue sweater, and her carmine
lips were more vivid because these months of anxiety had given to her
checks a creamy pallor. The man, standing at her elbow, was devouring
her with his eyes. She was gorgeous and wholly desirable and his heart
was flaming with emotions that ran the whole gamut of love's
completeness from clean passion to worship.

Yet he held his truce of silence and it was she herself who spoke at
last.

"The girls are all meeting on the campus--under the big trees about
now," she said, and her eyes held a far-away wistfulness. "They are
chattering foolishly and delightfully about their summer adventures ...
and the dormitories are being allotted. There'll be several new English
readers, I guess."

"Does it hurt as badly as that?" he asked, and her answer was a low,
rather hysterical little laugh, coming nearer bitterness than anything
he had ever heard from her lips before.

"You've been here. You've seen it all. Haven't you stopped instinctively
often when you broke into a sudden laugh with a moldy feeling around
your heart as if you'd shouted out in church? Haven't you watched
yourself and stultified yourself in every conversation, except when we
were alone, to keep from treading on the toes of some inch-wide
prejudice?"

"I've felt those things, of course--all of them." His reply was grave.
"But then, you see, you've been here, and that made the whole thing
lyric. The rest was just a somber background. It only made you stand out
the more triumphantly in contrast. It's like a Sorolla picture hung
against gray."

"We don't stand out against dull backgrounds--not for long," she
declared. "We fade into them." But after a moment she wheeled with a
sudden impulsiveness and gazed contritely into his face.

"Forgive me," she pleaded. "It's shameful and petty and mean to wreak
all my protests against you. You've been splendid. I couldn't have borne
it without you."

Stuart Farquaharson's cheeks paled under an emotion so powerful that
instead of exciting him it carried a sense of being tremendously
sobered--yet shaken and tried to the limit of endurance.

"You've forbidden me to make love to you," he said desperately, "and I'm
trying to obey, but God knows, dear, there are times when--" He broke
off with an abrupt choke in his throat.

Then Conscience said in a changed and very gentle voice, "You wouldn't
have me until I could be utterly, unmistakably sure of myself, would
you?"

"No," he replied uncompromisingly, "the very intensity of my love would
make it hell for both of us unless you loved me--that way, too--but I
wish you were certain. I wish to God you were!"

Again she turned her eyes seaward, and when she spoke her voice was
impersonal, almost dead, so that he thought, with a deep misery, she was
trying to make it merciful in tempering her verdict.

"I am certain now," she told him, still looking away.

He came a step nearer and braced himself. He could forecast her words,
he thought--deep friendship but no more!

"Your mind is--definitely--made up?"

Very abruptly she wheeled, showing him a face transformed and
self-revealing. Against her ivory white cheeks her parted lips were
crimson and her eyes dilated and softly black. "I think I've known it
from the first," she declared, and her voice thrilled joyously. "Only I
didn't know that I knew."

There was no need to ask what she knew. Her eyes were windows flung open
and back of them was the message of her heart.

"I don't know how you love me," she went on tensely, "but if you don't
love me rather madly, it's all one sided."

As his arms closed about her, he knew that he was violently shaken, but
he knew that she was trembling, too, through all the magnificent
softness and slenderness of her. He knew that the lips against which he
crushed his kisses were responsive.

Later he declared, with a ring of triumph, "I told you when you were a
little girl that they might take you to the North Pole and surround you
with regiments of soldiers--but that I'd come to claim you. I tell you
that again. _He_ wrote our two names in one horoscope and it had to be."




CHAPTER VI


In the library at the old manse that afternoon there was less of
sunlight and joy. Shadows hung between the walls and there were shadows,
too, in the heart of one of the men who sat by a central, paper-littered
table.

It was at best a cheerless room; this study where the minister had for
decades prepared the messages of his stewardship--and sternly drawn
indictments against sin. In the drawers of the old-fashioned desk those
sermons lay tightly rolled and dusty. Never had he spared himself--and
never had he spared others. What he failed to see was that in all those
sheaves upon sheaves of carefully penned teaching, was no single relief
of bright optimism, no single touch of sweet and gracious tolerance, not
one vibrating echo of Christ's great soul-song of tenderness.

Now it was ended. He had dropped in the harness and younger men were
taking up the relay race. They were men, he feared, who were not to be
altogether trusted; men beguiled by dangerous novelties of trend. With
worldliness of thought pressing always forward; with atheism increasing,
they were compromising and, it seemed to him, giving way cravenly, step
by step, to encroachment.

But the conversation just now was not of religion, or even dogma which
in this room had so often been confused with religion. Eben Tollman was
sitting in a stiff-backed chair across from his host. His face wore the
immobile expression of a man who never forgets the oppressive fact that
he is endowed with dignity.

"Eben," said the minister, "for years you have advised me on all money
matters and carried the advice into effect. You have virtually annexed
my business to your own and carried a double load."

"You have devoted your life to matters of greater moment, Mr. Williams,"
unctuously responded the younger man. "Your stewardship has been to
God."

"I could have wished," the minister's face clouded with anxiety, "that I
might have seen Conscience settled down with a godly husband and a child
or two about her before I go. Those are restless days and a girl should
have an anchorage."

There was a pause and at its end Tollman said hesitantly, almost
tentatively, "There is young Mr. Farquaharson, of course."

"Young Mr. Farquaharson!" The minister's lower jaw shot out pugnaciously
and his eyes flashed. "Eben, don't be absurd. The two of them are
children. This boy is playing away a vacation. To speak of him as a
matrimonial possibility is to talk irresponsibly. You astonish me!"

"Of course, in some respects it seems anomalous." Tollman spoke
thoughtfully and with no resentment of his companion's temper. He was
quite willing that any objections to Stuart which were projected into
the conversation should appear to come from the other. "For example, his
people are not our people and the two codes are almost antithetical. Yet
his blood is blue blood and, after all, the war is over."

"If I thought that there was even a remote danger of this friendship
ever becoming more than a friendship, I'd have Conscience send him away.
I'd guard her from it as from a contagion." The announcement came
fiercely. "Young Farquaharson's blood is blood that runs to license. His
ideas are the ideas of a hard-drinking, hard-gaming aristocracy. But
nonsense, Eben, he's a harmless boy just out of college. I like him--but
not for my own family. What put such an absurdity into your head?"

"Possibly it is an absurdity." Tollman gave the appearance of a man
who, having suggested a stormy topic, is ready to relinquish it. In
reality he was making Williams say everything which he wished to have
said and was doing it by the simple device of setting up antagonism to
play the prompter. "What put it into my head was perhaps nothing more
tangible than their constant companionship. They are both young. He has
a vital and fascinating personality. There is a touch of Pan and a touch
of Bacchus in him that--"

"Those are somewhat pagan advantages," interrupted the minister with a
crispness which carried the bite of scorn.

"Pagan perhaps, but worth considering, since it is not upon ourselves
that they operate." Tollman rose and went over to the window which gave
off across the garden. He presented the seeming of a man whose thought
was dispassionate, and because dispassionate impossible to ignore. "This
young man has in his blood bold and romantic tendencies which will not
be denied. To him much that we revere seems a type of narrowness. His
ancestors have made a virtue of the indulgences of sideboard and card
table--but the boy is not to blame for that."

Eben Tollman was playing on the prejudices of his host as he might have
played on the keys of a piano. He maintained, as he did it, all the
semblance of a fair-minded man painting extenuations into his portrait
of the absent Farquaharson.

"And you call this predisposition to looseness and license a thing to be
condoned, to be mixed with the blood of one's own posterity? Eben, I've
never seen you make excuses for ungodliness before." The fierce old face
suddenly cleared. "But there--there! This is all an imaginary danger.
I'll watch them, but I'm sure that these two have no such reprehensible
thought."

Mr. Tollman took up his hat and gloves. "I will see you again
to-morrow," he said, as he passed out of the library, leaving the old
puritan behind him immersed in a fresh anxiety.

It was not the intention of William Williams to act with unconscientious
haste--but he would watch and weigh the evidence. He prided himself on
his rigid adherence to justice, and escaped the knowledge that his sense
of justice was a crippled thing warped to the shape of casuistry. If he
had permitted the affliction, which God had visited upon him, to blind
his eyes against duty to his daughter, he must rouse himself and remedy
the matter. It was time to put such self-centered sin behind him and
make amends. In this self-assumption of the plenary right to regulate
the life of his daughter, or any one else, there was no element of
self-reproach. He held God's commission and acted for God!

The gradual, almost imperceptible change of manner was observable first
to the apprehensive eyes of Stuart Farquaharson himself. The Virginian's
standards as to his bearing in the face of hostility were definite and
could be summed up in the length of an epigram: Never to fail of
courtesy, but never to surrender more than half of any roadway to
aggression. Yet here was a situation of intricate bearings and a man
whom he could not fight. A brain must be dealt with, too old for
plasticity, like sculptor's clay hardened beyond amendment of form. A
man whose fighting blood is hot, but whose spirit of sportsmanship is
true, can sometimes maintain a difficult peace where another type would
fail, and that was the task Stuart set himself. That same spirit of
sportsmanship would have meant to Williams only a want of seriousness, a
making play out of life. But to Stuart it meant the nearest approach we
have to a survival of chivalry's ideals: a readiness to accept
punishment without complaint: a willingness to extend every fair
advantage to an adversary: a courage to strive to the uttermost without
regard to the material value of the prize--and paramount to all the
rest, a scorn for any meanly gained advantage, however profitable. If
there was any value in his heritage of gentle blood and a sportsman's
training, it should stand him in good stead now, for the sake of the
girl he loved.

One evening in the garden Conscience asked him, "Do you think I
over-painted the somberness of the picture? But it's a shame for you to
have to endure it, too. I think the confinement is making Father more
irritable than usual."

The man shook his head and smiled whimsically.

"It's not the confinement. It's me. He's discovered that you and I have
grown up, and he's seeking to draw me into a quarrel so that he can
tender me my passports."

Conscience laid her hands on his arm and they trembled a little.

"I'm sure it isn't that," she declared, though her words were more
confident than her voice. "You've stood a great deal, but please keep it
up. It won't"--her voice dropped down the key almost to a whisper--"it
won't be for long."

       *       *       *       *       *

The hills were flaming these days with autumnal splendor. Conscience and
Stuart had just returned from a drive, laden with trophies of woodland
richness and color. About the cheerless house she had distributed
branches of the sugar maple's vermilion and the oak's darker redness,
but the fieriest and the brightest clusters of leafage she had saved for
the old library where the invalid sat among his cases of old sermons.

"Stuart and I gathered these for you," she told him as she arranged them
deftly in a vase.

The old man's face did not brighten with enjoyment. Rather it hardened
into a set expression, and after a moment's pause he echoed querulously,
"You and Stuart."

His daughter looked up, her attention arrested by his tone. "Why, yes,"
she smiled. "We went for a drive and got out and foraged in the woods."

"How long has Mr. Farquaharson been here now?"

"Something over six weeks, I believe."

"Isn't it nearer two months?"

The girl turned very slowly from the window and in the dark room her
figure and profile were seen, a silhouette against the pane with a
nimbus about her hair.

"Perhaps it is. Why?"

For a while the father did not speak, then he said: "Perhaps it's time
he was thinking of terminating his visit."

The girl felt her shoulders stiffen, and all the fighting blood which
was in her as truly, if less offensively than in himself, leaped in her
pulses. Defiant words rushed to her lips, but remained unsaid, because
something grotesque about his attempted movement in his chair
accentuated his helplessness and made her remember.

"What do you mean?" she asked in a level voice, which since she had
suppressed the passion came a little faint and uncertain.

"I had no objection," he replied quietly enough but with that inflexible
intonation which automatically arouses antagonism, since it puts into
its "I want's" and its "I don't want's" a tyrannical finality, "to this
young gentleman visiting us. I extended him hospitality. I even liked
him. But it has come rather too much, for my liking, to a thing that can
be summed up in your words of a minute ago--'Stuart and I.' It's time to
bring it to an end."

"Why should it come to an end, Father?" she asked with a terrific effort
to speak calmly.

"Because it might run to silly sentiment--and to such an idea I could
never give consent. This young man, though a gentleman by birth, is not
our sort of a gentleman. His blood is not the kind of blood with which
ours can be mixed: his ideas are the loose ideas that put pleasure above
righteousness. In short, while I wish to say good-by to him as agreeably
as I said welcome, the time has come to say good-by."

She came over and sat by his chair and let one hand rest on his white
hair. "Father," she said in a low voice, tremulously repressed, "you are
undertaking to rule offhand on a question which is too vital to my life
to be treated with snap judgment. I've tried to meet your wishes and I
want to go on trying, but in this you must think well before you take a
position so--so absolute that perhaps--"

He shook her hand away and his eyes blazed.

"I _have_ thought well," he vehemently declared. "I have not only
thought, but I have prayed. I have waited silently and watched in an
effort to be just. I have asked God's guidance."

"God's guidance could hardly have told you that Stuart Farquaharson has
loose ideas or that he's unrighteous or that his blood could corrupt our
blood--because none of those things are true or akin to the truth."

For an instant the old man gazed at her in an amazement which turned
quickly to a wrath of almost crazily blazing eyes, and his utterance
came with a violence of fury.

"Do you mean that such an unspeakable idiocy has already come to
pass--that you and this--this--young amateur jockey and card-player from
the South--" He broke suddenly off with a contempt that made his words
seem to curl and snap with flame.

The girl rose from her place on the arm of his chair. She stood
lancelike in her straightness and her eyes blazed, too, but her voice
lost neither its control nor its dignity.

"I mean," she said, "that this gentleman who needs no apologist and no
defense, has honored me by telling me that he loves me--and that I love
him."

"And his high courage has prevented him from admitting this to me and
facing my just wrath?"

"His courage has been strong enough to concede to my wish that I might
tell you myself, and in my own time."

The library door stood open and the hall gave out onto the verandah
where Stuart Farquaharson sat waiting for Conscience to return.

The minister attempted to rise from his chair and fell back into it,
with a groan, as he remembered his helplessness. That helplessness did
not, however, abate his anger, and his voice rose as it was accustomed
to rise when, pounding the pulpit pillow, he wished to drive home some
impassioned utterance, beyond the chance of missing any sleepy ear.

"If what you say is true, this man has abused my hospitality and used my
roof as an ambuscade to attack me. He is not, as you say, a man of honor
or of courage, but a coward and a sneak! I have more to say, but it had
better be said to him direct. Please send him to me."

The girl hesitated, then she wheeled with flaming face toward the chair.
"I have been willing," she said, "to smother my life in an effort to
meet your ideas, though I knew them to be little ideas. Now I see that
in yielding everything one can no more please you than in yielding
nothing. If he goes, I go, too. You may take your choice."

But as her words ended Conscience felt a hand laid gently on her
shoulder, and a voice whispered in her ear, "Don't, dear; this will
always haunt you. Leave it to me." Stuart turned her gently toward the
door, then faced the irate figure in the chair. In a voice entirely
quiet and devoid of passion he addressed its occupant. "I thought I
heard you call for me, sir. I am here."




CHAPTER VII


For a little while the study remained silent, except for the excited
panting of the minister, whose face was a mask of fury. The passion in
Conscience's eyes was gradually fading into an expression of deep
misery. The issue of cruel dilemma had come in spite of every defensive
effort and every possible care. It had come of her father's forcing and
she knew that he would make no concession. When Williams spoke his voice
came chokingly.

"Conscience, leave us alone. What I have to say to this man is a matter
between the two of us."

But instead of obeying the girl took her place at Stuart's side and laid
her hand on his arm.

"What you have to say to him, Father, is very much my affair," she
replied steadily. "My action for the rest of my life depends upon it."

"Dear," suggested the Virginian in a lowered voice, "you can trust me.
I'm not going to lose my temper if it's humanly possible to keep it.
There's no reason why you should have to listen to things which it will
be hard to forget."

"No," she declared with a decisiveness that could not be shaken, "I stay
here as long as you stay. When you go, I go, too."

Farquaharson turned to the minister, "I believe you called for me, sir,"
he repeated, in a tone of even politeness. "You have something to say to
me?"

The old man raised a hand that was palsied with rage and his voice
shook.

"I fancy you heard what I said of you. I said that you had abused my
hospitality and that you are a coward and a sneak. You are worse than
that; you are an infamous scoundrel."

Conscience felt the muscles in the forearm upon which her fingers rested
grow tense and hard as cables. She saw the face pale to lividness and
the lips stiffen, but except for that, the man made no movement, and for
some ten seconds he did not speak. They were ten seconds of struggle
against an anger as fierce as it was just, but at the end of that time
he inquired quietly, "Is that all you meant to say to me?"

"No! There's much more, but for most men that would be enough. To let it
go unanswered is a confession of its truth."

"My invariable answer to such words," said Stuart Farquaharson slowly,
"is made with a clenched fist. The triple immunity of your cloth, your
age and your infirmity denies me even that reply."

"And what immunity makes a denial unnecessary?"

"A denial would dignify a charge which I can afford to ignore as I
ignore vulgar talk that I hear in an alley."

The old man bent forward, glaring like a gargoyle, and his first
attempts to speak were choked into inarticulate rumblings by his rage.
His face reddened with a fever of passion which threw the veins on his
temples into purple traceries.

"I repeat with a full responsibility--with the knowledge that the God
whom I have tried to serve is listening, that you _are_ what I have
called you, because you have come into my house and practiced a
continuous and protracted deceit. You have abused the freedom granted
you as a guest to try to win my daughter away from everything worth
holding to and everything she has been taught. I was a blind fool. I was
a watchman fallen asleep at the gate--a sentry unfaithful at his post."
The voice of the minister settled into a clearer coherence as he went on
in deep bitterness. "You say I have accused you sternly. I am also
accusing myself sternly--but now the scales have fallen from my eyes and
I recognize my remissness. God grant I am not too late."

He paused for breath and his fingers clenched rigidly at the carvings of
his chair arms. "You know that my daughter is young and
inexperienced--an impressionable child not sufficiently seasoned in
wisdom to repudiate the gauzy lure of dangerous modernisms."

"Father," broke in Conscience during his accusing pause, "you are
starting out with statements that are unjust and untrue. I am not a
child and no one has corrupted my righteousness. We simply have
different ideas of life."

The minister did not take his eyes from the face of the young man and he
ignored the interruption of his daughter.

"I could not blame her: it was the natural spirit of unthinking youth.
You, however, did know the consequences. Here in my house--which you
must never reënter--you have incited my family against me to serve your
own covetous and lustful interests." Again he halted while the young
man, still standing as rigid as a bronze figure, his flushed face set
and his eyes holding those of his accuser with unblinking steadiness,
made no attempt to interrupt him.

"What, indeed, to you were mere questions of right or wrong? You had a
world of light and frivolous women to choose from, your own kind of
women who could dance and fritter life away in following fads that make
for license--but you must come into the household of a man who has tried
to fight God's battles; standing against these encroachments of Satan
which you advocate--and beguile my only daughter into telling me that I
must choose between surrender or the wretchedness of ending my life in
deserted loneliness."

Farquaharson, despite the storm which raged in his heart, answered with
every outward show of calmness, even with dignity.

"You accuse me of having made love to your daughter. For that I have no
denial. I have loved her since she was a child. I have told her so at
every opportunity, but that love has been honorable and free of deceit
and I know of no law which forbids a man of decent character to plead
his cause. That I should win her love is a marvelous thing, but, thank
God, I have it and hope to hold it till death."

"You have filched it! You have it as a thief has another man's purse or
another man's wife. You have gained favor by arousing discontent for a
Godly home: a home where she is sheltered and where she belongs."

There was a tense silence and Farquaharson's voice was almost gentle
when he next spoke.

"There is more than one way of looking at life--and more than one may be
right. Conscience wanted the wider scope which college would have given
her. She wanted it with all the splendid eagerness of a soul that wishes
to grow and fulfill itself. That rightful privilege you denied her--and
she has not complained. Why shouldn't she want life's fullness instead
of life's meagerness and its breadth instead of its bigotries? Is there
greater nobility in the dull existence of a barnacle that hangs to one
spot than in the flight of a bird? I have sought no quarrel and I have
cruelly set a curb upon my temper, but I have no apologies to make and
no intention of giving her up. I should be glad of your consent, but
with it or without it I shall continue to urge my love. It would be a
pity for you to force a breach."

"There is no question of my forcing a breach." The first words wore
spoken sharply, but as they continued they began again to rush and mount
into an access of passion. "You are as insolent as your words prove you
to be reckless. You have tried to corrupt every idea of righteousness
in my daughter's heart. It would almost appear that you have succeeded.
But I believe God is stronger than Satan. I believe my prayers and the
heritage of Godfearing forefathers will yet save her. As for you, you
are to leave my house and henceforth never to cross my threshold."

"Very well," answered Stuart quietly; then he added: "To what extent am
I indebted to Mr. Eben Tollman for your sudden discovery that I am a
sneak and a coward?"

"That," shouted the invalid, "proves your meanness of spirit. Had Mr.
Tollman held a brief for you he could not have defended you more
stoutly. He, too, was deceived in you, it seems."

"Stuart," suggested the girl, "it's no use. You can't change him now.
Perhaps when he's less angry--"

"Less angry!" screamed the old man. "For almost seventy years my wrath
against the machinations of hell has burned hot. If God grants me
strength to the end, it will never cool. You, too, have turned to my
enemies in my last days. You would leave me for a young wastrel who has
sung in your ears the song of a male siren. But before I will surrender
my fight for the dictates of the conscience God has given me to be my
mentor, I will see you go!"

"Father!" cried the girl. "You don't know what you're saying."

His face had become frenzied and purpled, his hands were shaking. His
voice was a thunder, rumbling with its agitation. "I must have sinned
deeply--but if the Almighty sees fit to take from me my health, my
child, my last days of peace on earth--if He chooses to chastise me as
He chastised Job--I shall still fight for His righteous will, and war on
the iniquitous chil--"

The last word broke with a choke in his throat. The white head rocked
from side to side and the hands clawed the air. Then William Williams
hunched forward and lurched from his chair to the floor.

In an instant Farquaharson was at his side and bending over the
unconscious form and a few minutes later, still insensible, the figure
had been laid on a couch and the roadster was racing for a physician.

When Conscience came out into the yard later, where her lover was
awaiting her, her lips were pale and her eyes tortured. She went
straight into his outstretched arms and with her head on his shoulder
sobbed out a misery that shook her. At last the man asked softly, "What
did the doctor say?" And she answered brokenly.

"It seems that--besides the paralysis he has a weak--heart."

The man held her close. "I wish to God it could have been averted. I
tried."

"You did all you could," she declared. "But, Stuart, when he came back
to consciousness, his eyes were awful! I've never seen such terror in a
human face. He couldn't speak at first and when he could ... he
whispered in absolute agony, 'Has she gone?' He thought I'd left him
lying there--and gone with you."

"Great God!" It was more a groan than an exclamation.

"And when he saw me he stretched out his hands like a child and began
crying over me, but even then he said bitterly, 'That man's name must
never be mentioned in this house.'... What are we to do?"

"There is only one thing to do," he told her. "We are young enough to
wait. You can't desert a dying father."

While they talked the physician came out of the door.

"The patient will pull through this attack," he said briskly. "It's a
leaky valve. There is only one rule that I have to lay upon you. It is
absolutely vital that he shall not be excited. A blow with an ax would
be no more fatal than another such stroke."

Conscience looked desperately about her, as Stuart with the doctor
beside him started the car again down the drive. In a front window her
eyes lighted on a flaming branch of maple leaves. Only two hours ago she
and her lover had been watching the sunlight spill through the gorgeous
filter of the painted foliage. They had carried in their hearts the
spirit of carnival. Now the storm had broken and swept them.

She walked unsteadily to the veranda of the house and dropped down on
the steps. Her head was swimming and her life was in a vortex.




CHAPTER VIII


The days that followed were troubled days and they brought to
Conscience's cheeks an accentuated pallor. Under her eyes were smudges
that made them seem very large and wistful. The minister was once more
in his arm chair, a little more broken, a little more fiercely
uncompromising of aspect, but the one normal solution of such a spent
and burdensome life: the solution of death, stood off from him. Upon his
daughter, whose lips were sealed against any protest by the belief that
even a small excitement might kill him, he vented long and bigoted
sermons of anathema. In these sermons, possibly, he was guilty of the
very heresy of which his daughter had said he was so intolerant. He
seemed to doubt himself, these days, that Satan wore a spiked tail and a
pair of cloven hoofs. Of late he rather leaned to the belief that the
Arch-tempter had returned to walk the earth in the guise of a young
Virginian and that he had assumed the incognito of Stuart Farquaharson.

One refrain ran through every waking hour and troubled his sleep with
fantastic dreams. God commanded him to strip this tempter of his
habiliments of pretense and show the naked wickedness of his soul to the
girl's deluded eye. To that fancied command he dedicated himself as
whole-heartedly as a bloodhound gives itself to the man hunt.

To Stuart one day, as they walked together in the woods, Conscience
confessed her fear that this constant hammering of persecution would
eventually batter down her capacity for sane judgment and she ended with
a sweeping denunciation of every form of bigotry.

"Dear," he answered with the gravity of deep apprehension, "you say
that and you believe it and yet this same instinct of self-martyrdom is
the undertow of your life flood. If your given name didn't happen to be
Conscience your middle name would be just that."

"I suppose I have a conscience of a sort--but a different, sort, I hope.
Is that such a serious fault?" she asked, and because the strain of
these days had tired and rubbed her nerves into the sensitiveness of
exhaustion, she asked it in a hurt and wounded tone.

"It's an indispensable virtue," he declared. "Your father's conscience
was a virtue, too, until it ran amuck and became a savage menace. When
you were a child," he went on, speaking so earnestly that his brow was
drawn into an expression which she mistook for a frown of disapproval,
"your most characteristic quality was an irrepressible sense of humor.
It gave both sparkle and sanity to your outlook. It held you immune to
all bitterness."

"And now?" She put the query somewhat faintly.

"Now, more than ever, because the life around you is grayer, it's vital
that you cling to your golden talisman. To let it go means to be lost in
the fog."

They were strolling along a woodland path and she was a few steps in
advance of him. He saw her shoulders stiffen, but it was not until he
overtook her that he discovered her eyes to be sparkling with tears.

"What is it, dearest?" he contritely demanded, and after a long pause
she said:

"Nothing, except that I feel as if you had slapped me in the face."

"I! Slapped you in the face!" He could only reëcho her words in
bewilderment and distress. "I don't understand."

Laying a hand on her arm, he halted her in a place where the setting sun
was spilling streams of yellow light through the woodland aisles and
then her lips trembled; her eyes filled and she pressed both hands over
her face. After a moment she looked up and dashed the tears
contemptuously away.

"No, I know you don't understand, dear. It's my own fault. I'm a weak
little fool," she said, "But it's all gotten horribly on my nerves. I
can't help it."

"For God's sake," he begged, "tell me what I did or said?" And her words
came with a weary resignation.

"I think you had better put me out of your life, Stuart. I've just
realized how things really are--you've told me. I can't go because I'm
chained to the galley. While Father lives my place is here."

She broke off suddenly and his face took on a stunned amazement.

"Out of my life!" exclaimed the man almost angrily. "Abandon you to all
this abysmal bigotry and--to this pharisaical web of ugly dogmas!
Conscience, you're falling into a melancholy morbidness."

As she looked at him and saw the old smoldering fire in his eyes that
reminded her of his boyhood, a pathetic smile twisted the corners of her
lips.

"Yes--I guess that's just it, Stuart," she said slowly, "You see, I may
have to stay here until, as you put it, I'm all faded out in the fog. If
I've changed so much already there's no telling what years of it will
turn me into."

Stuart Farquaharson caught her impulsively in his arms and his words
came in tumultuous fervor.

"What I said wasn't criticism," he declared. "God knows I couldn't
criticize you. You ought to know that. This is the nearest we've ever
come to a quarrel, dear, since the Barbara Freitchie days, and it's
closer than I want to come. Besides, it's not just your laughter that I
love. It's all of you: heart, mind, body: the whole lovely trinity of
yourself. I mean to wage unabated war against all these forces that are
trying to stifle your laughter into the pious smirk of the pharisee.
There's more of what God wants the world to feel in one peal of your
laughter than in all the psalms that this whole people ever whined
through their noses. You're one of the rare few who can go through life
being yourself--not just a copy and reflection of others. A hundred
years ago your own people would probably have burned you as a witch for
that. They've discontinued that form of worship now, but the cut of
their moral and intellectual jib is, in some essentials, the same. Thank
God, you have a different pattern of soul and I want you to keep it."

She drew away from him and slowly her face cleared of its misery and the
eyes flashed into their old mischief-loving twinkle. "That's the first
real rise I've had out of you," she declared, "since Barbara waved the
stars and stripes at you. Then you were only defending Virginia, but now
you've assumed the offensive against all New England."

But even in that mild disagreement they had, as he said, come nearer
than either liked to a quarrel--and neither could quite forget it. Both
felt that the thin edge of what might have been a disrupting wedge had
threatened their complete harmony.

Because he could mark the transition of this thing called conscience
into an obsession, and because he, too, was worn in patience and
stinging with resentment against the injustice of the father, he fought
hotly, and his denunciations of various influences were burning and
scornful. So slowly but dangerously there crept into their arguments the
element of contention. Hitherto Stuart had made no tactical mistakes. He
had endured greatly and in patience, but now he was unconsciously
yielding to the temptation of assailing an abstract code in a fashion
which her troubled judgment might translate into attacks upon her
father. Out of that attitude was born for her a hard dilemma of
conflicting loyalties. It was all a fabric woven of gossamer threads,
but Gulliver was bound into helplessness by just such Lilliputian
fetters.

Late one night, when the moon was at two-thirds of fullness and the air
touched with frost, Stuart abandoned the bed upon which he had been
restlessly tossing for hours. He kindled a pipe and sat meditating, none
too cheerfully, by the frail light of a bayberry candle. Through the
narrow corridors and boxed-in stair wells of a ramshackle hotel, came no
sounds except the minors of the night. Somewhere far off a dog barked
and somewhere near at hand a traveling salesman snored. In the flare and
sputter of the charring wick and melting wax shadows lengthened and
shortened like flapping flags of darkness.

Then the jangle of the telephone bell in the office ripped the stillness
with a discordant suddenness which Farquaharson thought must arouse the
household, but the snoring beyond the wall went on, unbroken, and there
was no sound of a footfall on the creaking stair. At last Stuart,
himself, irritated by the strident urgency of its repetitions, reached
for his bath robe and went down. The clapper still trembled with the
echo of its last vibrations as he put the receiver to his ear and
answered.

Then he started and his muscles grew taut, for the other voice was that
of Conscience and it shook with terrified unevenness and a tremulous
faintness like the leaping and weakening of a fevered pulse. He could
tell that she was talking guardedly with her lips close to the
transmitter.

"I had to speak to you without waiting for morning," she told him,
recognizing his voice, "and yet--yet I don't know what to say."

Recognizing from the wild note that she was laboring under some
unnatural strain, he answered soothingly, "I'm glad you called me,
dear."

"What time is it?" she demanded next and when he told her it was well
after midnight she gave a low half-hysterical laugh. "I couldn't
sleep.... Father spent the afternoon exhorting me ... he was trying to
make me promise not to see you again ... and I was trying to keep him
from exciting himself." Her voice was so tense now as to be hardly
recognizable. "Every few minutes it looked as if he were about to fly
into a passion.... You know what that would mean ... and of course
I--I--couldn't promise."

She paused for breath, but before he could speak, rushed on.

"It's been an absolute reign of terror. Every nerve in my body is
jumping and quivering.... I think I'm going mad."

"Listen." The man spoke as one might to a child who has awakened,
terrified, out of a nightmare and is afraid to be alone. "I'm coming out
there. You need to talk to some one. I'll leave the car out of hearing
in the road."

"No, no!" she exclaimed in a wildly fluttering timbre of protest. "If he
woke up it would be worse than this afternoon--it might kill him!"

But Stuart answered her with a quiet note of finality. "Wrap up
well--it's cool outside--and meet me on the verandah. We can talk more
safely that way than by 'phone. I'm going to obey the doctor
implicitly--unless you fail to meet me. If you do that--" he paused a
moment before hanging up the receiver--"I'll knock on the door."

The moon had not yet set as he started on foot up the driveway of the
manse and the bare trees stood out stark and inky against the silver
mists. Before he was more than half-way to the house he saw her coming
to meet him, casting backward glances of anxiety over her shoulder.

She was running with a ghostlike litheness through the moonlight, her
eyes wide and frightened and her whole seeming one of unreasoning panic
so that the man, who knew her dauntlessness of spirit, felt his heart
sink.

"You shouldn't have done it," she began in a reproachful whisper. "You
shouldn't have come!" But he only caught her in his arms and held her so
close to his own heart that the wild palpitation of her bosom was calmed
against its steadiness. Her arms went gropingly round his neck and
clutched him as if he were the one stable thing that stood against an
allied ferocity of wind and wave.

"You needed me," he said. "And when you need me I come--even if I have
to come like a burglar."

The eyes which she raised to his face were tearless--but hardly sane.
She was fear-ridden by ghosts that struck at her normality and she
whispered, "Suppose he died by my fault?"

At all costs, the lover resolved, Conscience must leave this place for a
time--until she could return with a stabler judgment. But just now he
could not argue with her.

"We'll be very quiet," he said reassuringly. "If you hear any sound in
the house you can go back. You're overwrought, dearest, and I've only
come to be near you. Nobody will see me except yourself, but if at any
time before daylight you want me, come to your window and raise the
blind. I'll be where I can see."

For a while she clung to him silently, her breath coming fast. About
them the moon shed a softness of pale silver and old ivory. The silence
seemed to carry a wordless hymn of peace and though they stood in shadow
there was light enough for lovers' eyes. The driven restlessness that
had made Conscience doubt her sanity was slowly yielding to a sense of
repose, as the tautened anguish of a mangled body relaxes to the balm of
an anesthetic. Slowly the slenderly curved and graciously proportioned
modeling of her lithe figure quieted from spasmodic unrest and the wild
racing measure of her heart-beat calmed. Then she turned up her face.
Her eyes cleared and her lips tilted their corners in a smile.

"I'm a horrid little demon," she declared in a voice freighted with
self-scorn, but no longer panic-stricken. "I've always hated a coward,
and I'm probably the most amazingly craven one that ever lived. I do
nothing but call on you to fight my battles for me when I can't hold my
own."

"You're an adorable little saint, with an absurd leaning toward
martyrdom," he fervently contradicted. "Why shouldn't you call on me?
Aren't you fighting about me?"

Her dark eyes were for a moment serene because she was treasuring this
moment of moonlight and the respite of love against the chances of
to-morrow.

"Anyhow you came--" she said, "and since you did there's at least one
more fight left in me." Then her voice grew again apprehensive. "It was
pretty bad before ... just hearing you preached against and being afraid
to reply because ... of the warning. Now he wants my promise that I'll
dismiss you forever ... and the worst of it is that he'll pound on it to
the end. What am I to do?"

"Is there any question?" he gravely asked her. "_Could_ you make that
promise?"

"No--no!" He felt the figure in his arms flinch at the words, "There's
no question of _that_, but how am I to keep him from raging himself to
death?"

"Hasn't the doctor warned him that he mustn't excite himself?"

The dark head nodded and the fingers of the hands about his neck
tightened. "Of course," she said. "But there you have the tyranny of
weakness again. I must make the fight to keep him alive. He would
regard it as going righteously to death for his beliefs. That's just
the goodness-gone-wrongness of it all."

"Blessed are the self-righteous," mused Farquaharson half aloud, "for
they shall supply their own absolution." To himself he was saying, "The
wretched old hellion!"

"And then you see, after all," she added with the martyr's sophistry,
"in the fight for you, I'm only fighting for myself and in doing what I
can for him I'm trying to be unselfish."

"Listen," the man spoke carefully, "that, too, is the
goodness-gone-wrongness as you call it; the sheer perversion of a duty
sense. If it were just myself to be thought of, perhaps I couldn't fight
you on a point of conscience. But it isn't just me--not if you love me."

"Love you!" He felt the thrilled tremor that ran through her from head
to foot, and that made her bosom heave stormily. The moon had sunk a
little and the shadow in which they were standing had crawled onward so
that on her head fell a gleam of pale light, kindling her eyes and
touching her temples under the sooty shadows of her hair. Her lips were
parted and her voice trembled with the solemnity of a vow, too sacred to
be uttered without the fullest frankness. "In every way that I know how
to love, I love you! Everything that a woman can be to a man I want to
be to you and all that a woman can give to a man, I want to give to
you."

It was he who trembled then and became unsteady with the intoxication of
triumph.

"Then I'll fight for you, while I have breath, even if it means fighting
with you."

Suddenly she caught at his arm with a spasmodic alarm, and he turned his
head as the screeching whine of a window sounded in the stillness. The
effort to raise it cautiously was indicated not by any noiselessness
but by the long duration of the sound. Then a woman's head with hair in
tight pigtails stood out against the pallid light of a bedroom lamp,
turned low, and the whispered challenge came out to them. "Who's out
there?"

"Ssh!" cautioned the girl, tensely. "It's I, Auntie. Don't wake Father."

Grudgingly the window creaked down and for seconds which lengthened
themselves interminably to the anxious ears of the pair in the shadows,
they waited with bated breath. Then Stuart whispered, "You must go to
sleep now."

The rest of the far-spent night Stuart stood guard outside the house.
Once, a half hour after Conscience had gone in, her blind rose and she
stood silhouetted against the lamp-light. The man stepped out of his
shadow and raised a hand, and she waved back at him. Then the lamp went
out, and he surrendered himself to thought and resolves--and mistakes.
This submission to the tyranny of weakness had gone too far. She must go
away. He must take up the fight aggressively. He did not realize that he
who was fighting for her sense of humor had lost his own. He did not
foresee that he was preparing to throw the issue on dangerous ground,
pitting his stubbornness against her stubbornness, and raising the old
duel of temperaments to combat--the immemorial conflict between puritan
and cavalier.




CHAPTER IX


Stuart Farquaharson had tempered a dignified strength with a gracious
fortitude. He had endured slanderous charges and stood with the
steadiness of a reef-light when Conscience was steering a storm ridden
course, but the constant pressure on the dykes of his self-command had
strained them until they might break at any moment and let the flood of
passion swirl through with destructive power. He was being oppressed and
seeing Conscience oppressed by a spirit which he regarded as viciously
illiberal--and he accused Conscience, in his own mind, of blind
obedience to a distorted sense of duty. Unconsciously he was seeking to
coerce her into repudiating it by a form of argument in which the
graciousness of his nature gave way to a domineering insistence.
Unconsciously, too, that form of attack aroused in her an unyielding
quality of opposition.

When he saw her next after the mid-night meeting she had seemed more
normally composed and he had seized upon the occasion to open his
campaign. They had driven over and stopped the car at a point from which
they could look out to sea, and though the summer vividness had died out
of wave and sky and the waters had taken on a touch of a leaden
grimness, there was still beauty in the picture.

For awhile they talked of unimportant things, but abruptly Stuart said:
"Dearest, I told you that I meant to fight for you even if I had to
fight with you. That's the hardest form in which the battle could come,
but one can't always choose the conditions of war." He paused and,
seeing that his eyes were troubled, Conscience smiled encouragingly.

"At least," she laughed, "I believe you will wage war on me humanely."

The man went on hurriedly. "I've been talking with the doctor. He says
that your father's condition holds no immediate danger--danger of death,
I mean. Unless he suffers another stroke, he may live for years."

The girl nodded her head. "Yes, I know," she said wearily, "and for him
life only means continuation of suffering." She did not add that it
meant the same for her and Stuart, looking steadily into her face, said
with decision, "For awhile you must go away."

"I!" Her eyes widened with an incredulous expression as if she thought
she had misunderstood, then she answered slowly and very gently, "You
_know_ I can't do that, dear."

"I know that you must," he countered, and because he had keyed himself
for this combat of wills he spoke more categorically than he realized.
"At first thought, of course, you would feel that you couldn't. But your
ability to stand a long siege will depend on conserving your strength.
You are human and not indestructible."

She shook her head with a gentle stubbornness. "Stuart, dear, you're
trying to make me do a thing you wouldn't do yourself. A sentry placed
on duty can't go away until his watch is over--even if it's raw and
gloomy where's he's stationed."

"No, but soldiers under intolerable stress are relieved and given
breathing space whenever it's possible."

"Yes, whenever it's possible."

"It's possible, now, dearest, and perhaps it won't be later. You could
visit some friend for a few weeks and come back the better able to carry
on the siege. Otherwise you'll be crushed by the weight of the ordeal."

"Stuart," she began slowly, "who is there to take my place, even for a
few weeks?"

"And the whole intolerable situation arises," he broke out with a
sudden inflection of wrath, "from inert, thick-skulled bigotry. Thought
processes that are moral cramps and mental dyspepsia threaten to ruin
your entire life."

"Don't, dear--please!" She leaned toward him and spoke earnestly. "I
know it's hard to endure without retort, but please don't make me listen
to things like that about Father. It's bad enough without any more
recriminations."

Then logic retreated from Stuart Farquaharson. He, the gracious and
controlled, gave way to his first moment of ungenerous temper and
retorted bitterly.

"Very well, but it seems you can listen to his abuse of me."

Conscience flinched as if lash-stung and for an instant indignation and
anger kindled in her eyes only to die as instantly out of them, as she
bit her lip. When she spoke it was in an even gentler voice. "You know
why I listened to him, Stuart. You know that I didn't listen ... before
his stroke. I didn't listen when I told him that if you went, I went,
too, did I?"

The man's face paled and with a spasmodic gesture he covered it with his
hands. "My God!" he exclaimed, "I don't think I've ever said such a
damnably mean and caddish thing before--and to you!"

But Conscience bent over and drew his hands away from his face. "It
wasn't you. It was just the strain. You could make allowances for me
when I called you out to calm me in the middle of the night. I can make
them, too. Neither of us is quite sane."

But having had that warning of Stuart's slipping control, Conscience
kept locked in her own bosom certain fresh trials which discussion would
have alleviated. She did not tell him how she spent sleepless nights
devising plans to meet the grim insistence upon his banishment which
she knew the morning would bring. But she felt that the comfort of a
complete unburdening of her feelings had been curtailed and with a
woman's genius for sacrifice she uncomplainingly assumed that added
strain.

One afternoon Eben Tollman came out of the house, as she was walking
alone under the bare trees of the driveway, and stopped, hat in hand, at
her side.

"Conscience," he began thoughtfully, "Mr. Williams has just told me of
his insistence that Mr. Farquaharson shall not only be denied the house,
but sent away altogether. You must be carrying a pretty heavy load for
young shoulders."

The girl stood regarding her father's counselor gravely. He had never
appealed to her as a person inviting confidence, and she had thought of
his mind as cut to the same austere pattern as the minister's own. Yet
now his face wore an expression of kindliness and sympathy to which his
manner gave corroboration. Possibly she had misjudged the man and lost
his underlying qualities in her careless view of externals. Tollman
seemed to expect no answer and went on slowly, "I tried to point out to
your father the unwisdom of an insistence which must stir a spirit like
yours to natural opposition. I suggested that under the circumstances it
was scarcely fair."

"What did he say?" She put the inquiry with a level glance as if
reserving her right to accept or reject his volunteered assistance.

"He could only see his own side. He must do his duty, however hard he
found it."

Conscience remembered Stuart's warning that Tollman thought he loved
her, and smiled to herself. This voluntary championing of another man's
cause hardly seemed to comport with such a conception.

"I don't know what to do," she admitted wearily. "Obviously I can't make
the promise he asks and no more can I let him fly into a rage that may
kill him. I'm between the upper and nether mill-stones."

The man nodded with a grave and courteous comprehension.

"I hesitate to volunteer advice--and yet--" He came to a questioning
halt.

"Yes," she prompted eagerly. "Please go on."

"I had thought," he continued, with the diffident manner of a man
unaccustomed to proffering counsel before it was asked, "that, if you
cared to use me, I might be of some help--as an intermediary of sorts."

"An intermediary?" she repeated. Then more impulsively, because she felt
that her attitude had been wanting in graciousness, she added, "I know
you're offering to do something very kind, but I'm afraid I don't quite
understand."

"I think I am entirely in your father's confidence," he explained, "and
because, on many subjects, we hold common opinions, I can discuss--even
argue--matters with him without fear of antagonism or excitement to him.
Still I hope I am not too old to be in sympathy with your more youthful
and more modern outlook on life. If at any time I can help, please call
on me."

They had been walking toward his buggy at the hitching post--it was not
a new or particularly well-kept vehicle--and there they halted.

"This is good of you," she said, extending her hand cordially, and as he
took it he suggested, "Meanwhile an old man is not speedily weaned from
an idea which has taken deep root, and that brings me to another
suggestion." Once more he paused deferentially as if awaiting
permission, "if I may make it."

"I wish you would."

"It is the idea of Mr. Farquaharson's constant proximity and influence
which keeps your father's animosity stirred to combat. With a temporary
absence it would relax. I think it might even come to an automatic
end.... When Farquaharson returned Mr. Williams's mind might have lost
its inflammation."

He smiled and shook the reins over the back of the old horse and when he
drove away he left Conscience standing with her lips parted and her gaze
set.

Send Stuart away for a time! She had told that she could not stand it
without him, and now Tollman had expressed the unbiased view of one
whose personal desires were not blinding his judgment. She moved over to
the side of the road and leaned heavily against a tree. She felt as if
she were standing unprotected under the chilling beat of a cold and
driving rain, and her lips moved without sound, shaping again the three
words "send him away!"

She had been holding her lover at her side until she could see his
nerves growing raw under the stress of his worry about herself and the
temper which nature had made chivalric giving way to acerbity. Yes,
Tollman was right--it required a sacrifice to save a wreck--and because
he was right the sun grew dark and the future as black as the floor of
the sea.

But the next time she saw Stuart she did not broach the suggestion, nor
yet the next time after that. The man gave her no opportunity, so
indomitably was he waging his campaign to have her go. And as her
equally inflexible refusal stood impregnable against his assaults, he
grew desperate and reënforced his arguments with the accusation of
indifference to his wishes. In each succeeding discussion, his
infectious smile grew rarer and the drawn brow, that bore close kinship
to a frown, more habitual. His own talisman of humor was going from him,
and two unyielding determinations settled more and more directly at
cross odds.

When the breach came it was almost entirely the Virginian's fault, or
the fault of the unsuspected Hyde who lurked behind his Jekyll.

"Conscience," he pleaded desperately on the afternoon which neither of
them could ever remember afterwards without a sickness of the soul,
"you're simply building a funeral pyre for yourself. You're wrecking
your life and my life because of an insane idea. You're letting the
pettiest and unworthiest thing in you--a twisted instinct--consume all
that's vital and fine. You're worshiping the morbid."

"If I'm guilty of all that" she answered with a haunted misery in her
eyes which she averted her face to hide, "I'm hardly worth fighting for.
The only answer I have is that I'm doing what seems right to me."

"Can't you admit that for the moment your sense of right may be clouded?
All I ask is that you go for a while to the home of some friend, where
they don't rebuff the sunlight when it comes in at the window."

"Stuart," she told him gently but with conviction, "you have changed,
too. Once I could have taken your advice as almost infallible, but I
can't now."

The Virginian's face paled, and his question came with an irritable
quickness, "In what fashion have I changed?"

"In a way, I think I've recovered my balance," she said with deep
seriousness. "I couldn't have done it without you. You've taken my
troubles on yourself, but at a heavy price, dear. They've preyed on you
until now it's _you_ who can't trust his judgment. All you say
influences me, but it's no longer because of its logic, it's because I
love you and you're talking to my heart."

Farquaharson paced the frosty path of the woods where they were talking.
His face was dark and his movements nervous so Conscience would not let
herself look at him. She had something difficult to say and of late she
had not felt strong enough to spend vitality with wastefulness.

"You say I'm wrecking both our lives...." she went on resolutely. "I
don't want to wreck either ... but yours I couldn't bear to wreck. I
love you enough to make any sacrifice for you ... even enough to give
you up."

Stuart wheeled and his attitude stiffened to rigidity. The woods raced
about him in crazy circles, and before his eyes swam spots of yellow and
orange.

"Do you mean--" he paused to moisten his lips with his tongue and found
his tongue, too, suddenly dry--"do you mean that you've let this tyranny
of weakness conquer you? Have you promised to exile me?"

She flinched as she had flinched on the one other occasion when he had
accused her of a disloyalty which would have been impossible to her, but
she was too unhappy to be angry.

"No," she said slowly, "I haven't even considered such a promise. I said
just now that you had changed. The other Stuart Farquaharson wouldn't
have suspected me of that."

"Then what in Heaven's name do you mean?"

"I mean that you must go away--for awhile. It's only selfishness that
has blinded me to that all along. I'm killing all the best in you by
keeping you here."

"You are strong enough to bear the direct strain, I suppose," he accused
with a bitter smile. "But I'm too weak to endure even its reflection."

"It's always easier to bear trouble oneself," she reminded him with a
gracious patience, "than to see the person one loves subjected to it."

"When did you think of this?"

"I didn't think of it myself," she told him with candid directness. "I
guess I was too selfish. Mr. Tollman suggested it."

"Mr. Tollman!" The name burst from his lips like an anathema and a
sudden gust of fury swept him from all moorings of control. "You love me
enough to give me up--on the advice of my enemies! You are deaf to all
my pleadings, but to the casual suggestion of this damned pharisee you
yield instant obedience. And what he suggests is that I be sent away."

Her twisted fingers clenched themselves more tautly and had passion not
enveloped Stuart in a red wreath of fog he must have refrained from
adding to the acuteness of her torture just then.

"Why," she asked faintly, "should he be your enemy?"

"Because he wants you himself, because, with me disposed of, he believes
he can get what his unclean and avaricious heart covets as a snake
charms a bird, because--"

Conscience rose with an effort to her feet. Her knees were trembling
under her and her heart seemed to close into a painful strangulation.

"Stuart," she faltered, "if you think that my love can only be held
against any outsider by your being at hand to watch it, you don't trust
it as it _must_ be trusted--and it isn't worth offering you at all."

"You've fallen under the spell of these Mad Mullah prophets," he
retorted hotly, "until you can't trust yourself any longer. You've been
inflamed into the Mohammedan's spirit of a holy war and you're ready to
make a burnt offering of me and my love."

"Now," she said with a faintness that was almost a whisper, "you _must_
go, whether you agree or not. You distrust me and insult me ... and I
don't think ... I can stand many ... interviews like this."

But Farquaharson's curb had slipped. His anger was a frenzied runaway
which he, like a madman, was riding in utter recklessness.

"If I go now," he violently protested, "if I am sent into exile at the
behest of Tollman, my enemy, I go for all time, knowing that the woman I
leave behind is not the woman I thought I knew or the woman I have
worshiped."

Their eyes met and engaged in a challenge of wills in which neither
would surrender; a challenge which had built an issue out of nothing.
His burned with the moment's madness. Hers were clear and unflinching.

"If you _can_ go like that," she said, and the tremor left her voice as
she said it, "the man who goes isn't the man to whom I gave all my love
and to whom I was ready to give my life."

She straightened, sustained by a temporary strength, and stood clothed
in a beauty above any which even he had before acknowledged; a beauty
fired with the war spirit of a Valkyrie and of eyes regal in their
affronted dignity. "If you can feel about me as your words indicate, we
could never know happiness. The man whose love can make such accusations
isn't the Stuart Farquaharson that made me willing to die for him.
Perhaps after all I only _dreamed_ that man. It was a wonderful dream."

She carried the fingers of one hand to her temple in a bewildered
gesture, then shook back her head as one rousing oneself with an effort
from sleep. "If it was a dream," she went on with a forced courage,
"it's just as well to find it out in time."

"Then--" he made several attempts before he could speak--"then you are
sending me away. If that's true--as there's a God in Heaven, I'll never
come back until you send for me."

"As there's a God in Heaven," she answered steadily, almost
contemptuously, "I'll never send for you. You'll never come back unless
you come yourself--and come with a more absolute trust in your heart."

They stood under the leafless branches in a long silence, both white of
cheek and supremely shaken, until at last the man said huskily: "I
suppose I may take you to your gate?"

She shook her head. "No," she answered firmly, "I'm going across the
field. It's only a step." She turned then and walked away and as he
looked after her she did not glance backward. An erect and regal
carriage covered the misery of her retreat--but when she reached her
house she went up the stairs like some creature mortally wounded and as
she closed the door of her room, there came from her throat a low and
agonized groan. She stood leaning for a space against the panels with
her hands stretched out gropingly against the woodwork. Her lips moved
vacantly, then her knees gave way and she crumpled down and lay
insensible on the floor.




CHAPTER X


After awhile her lashes trembled and rose flickeringly upon the vague
perplexity of returning consciousness. Her head ached and her muscles
were cramped, because she had crumpled down as she stood, so that she
regained her feet falteringly and went with difficulty over to a chair
before the mirror of her dressing-table. For awhile she sat gazing dully
into her own reflected eyes. Under them were dark rings. Her cheeks were
pale and her whole face was stricken with the bleak hopelessness of
heartbreak. Her gaze fell on a framed photograph, just before her, and
she flinched. It was an enlarged snapshot of Stuart Farquaharson. But
other pictures more vitally near to her recent past were passing also
before her. She felt again the muscles of his forearms snap into
tautness as he stood silent under her father's insults. She felt the
strength of his embrace calming the panic of her own heart; the touch of
the kisses that had brought her both peace and ecstasy and wakened in
her latent fires. Surely if, at last, the hot temper had broken through
and blinded him with its glare of passion, it had not--could not--have
burned to ashes all the chivalric record of these trying months. Surely
it was a thing she could forgive. The man upon whom she had leaned so
long and whom she had known so well must be more real than this alien
revealed in an ungenerous half hour. The pale sunset died into the ashes
of twilight. Her bureau clock ticked out a full hour--and a second hour
while she sat almost immovable. She argued with herself that this
conflict which had so impalpably gathered and so suddenly burst in
storm was a nightmare coming out of the shadows and had no substance of
reality.

At last she lighted a lamp and moved wearily to her writing desk. Her
pen developed a mutinous trick of balking, and her eyes of staring,
unseeing, at the wall. But at last when she had torn up sheet after
sheet, she finished her task.


     "Dear Stuart," she had written. "You told me once that no one
     should send you away--not even I--unless I proved myself stronger
     than you. To-day you accused me of being the dupe of your
     enemies--and you are going--not because I am strong enough to
     banish you, but because you think me too weak to be trusted with
     your love. Without absolute trust we could never hope for
     happiness. So this isn't a plea, Stuart. It's not even an
     apology--except that I freely acknowledge a large share of
     fault--but I can't let you go without thanking you for all the
     gallant sacrifices you have made and for all the ways in which you
     have sought to stand between me and distress. Until to-day you
     have, under fire, proven true to your code of knighthood, and
     to-day I could forget--but could you? Of all the things I have ever
     said to you, of love, I have no syllable to retract. Even now I
     repeat it. I love you absolutely. When I suggested your leaving for
     a time I did a desperately hard thing--and you misunderstood it.
     Unless you can understand it, dear, it would do no good to come
     back, it would only mean other humiliating memories. This is not an
     easy letter to write and it's not well done. If your attitude of
     this afternoon is anything more than the delusion of anger--in
     other words, if your love is not one of complete trust, it's better
     that we shouldn't see each other again. If you can come in the
     spirit that I can receive you, to-day can be erased as if it had
     never happened--but until I have your answer (given after you have
     searched your heart) I shall be--but that is neither here nor
     there."


Tollman, who was taking supper at the manse that evening, noted the
pallor of her face, but made no comment. He had, in fact, already
divined a lover's quarrel and that was a thing into which even the most
friendly interference might well bring rebuff. But he was not surprised,
on leaving, to find Conscience waylaying him at the front door with an
envelope in her hand, which she asked him to post without fail in the
morning when after his invariable custom he drove to the village post
office. Within the last few days the invalid's irritability had taken
the form of intense dislike for the jingle of the telephone and in
deference to his whim it had been disconnected. Consequently the family
friend had of late both mailed and delivered notes between the lovers
and knew the handwriting of each.

That night Stuart slept not at all. For hours after he reached his room
in the hotel he paced it frantically. First cumulative anger, long held
in leash, swept him like a forest fire, charring his reason into
unreason. He had fought for Conscience and lost her. She had thrown her
lot with the narrow minds and cast him adrift. He had placed all his
trust in her and she had failed to rise above her heritage. But as the
night wore on a nauseating reaction of self-indictment followed. He saw
that he had grossly affronted her and brutally accused her. The
generosity and fairness he worshiped had had no part in his conduct. He,
too, spent hours writing, destroying and rewriting letters.

At last he let one stand.


     "But, dearest," he said at its end, "if you _do_ let me come back,
     you must still let me fight--not with temper and accusation, but
     patiently--against the strangling of your life. After this
     afternoon there can be no middle ground. I stand before you so
     discredited that unless you love me enough to forgive me you must
     hate me wholly and completely. If it's hate, I have earned it--and
     more, but if it _can_ still be love, I have a life to spend in
     contradiction of to-day. I shall remain here twenty-four hours
     waiting for my answer, and each hour until it comes will be a
     purgatory. I've forfeited my right to come to you without
     permission. I must wait for your verdict. I don't even claim the
     right to expect an answer--but I know you will give one. Not to do
     so would be to brand me, for life, not only with bitter hatred but
     bitter contempt as well."


At dawn, without having been to bed, he posted the letter and sat down
to wait with the anxiety of a defendant who has seen the jury locked
into its chamber of fateful decision.

When Eben Tollman came into the post office that morning, he called for
his mail and that of the Williams household.

Conscience's note to Stuart he did not mail. Stuart's letter to
Conscience he did not deliver, but later in the day he deposited both in
a strong-box in which he kept his private papers.

Three days Stuart Farquaharson spent waiting for an answer and while he
waited his face became drawn, and the ugly doubt of the first hours
settled into a certainty. There would be no answer. He had told her that
to ignore his plea would be the superlative form of scorn--and she had
chosen it.

Conscience, too, who had humbled herself, was waiting: waiting at first
with a trust which refused to entertain doubt, and which withered as the
days passed into such an agony that she felt she must go mad. If Stuart
had deliberately done _that_--she must make herself forget him because
to hold him in her heart would be to disgrace herself. The man, in the
hour of ugly passion, had been the real one after all; the other only a
pleasing masquerade!

"Did you mail my letter?" she finally demanded of Tollman, and he
smilingly responded. "I don't think I ever forgot to post a letter in my
life."

In a final investigation she walked to the village and inquired at the
hotel desk, "Is Mr. Farquaharson here?"

"No, Miss Conscience," the clerk smilingly responded, "he checked out
last night. Said he'd send his address later."

One afternoon several days later a stranger left the train at the
village and looked about him with that bored and commiserating
expression with which city men are apt to regard the shallow skyline of
a small town. He was of medium height and carefully groomed from his
well-tailored clothes to the carnation in his buttonhole and manicured
polish of his nails. His face, clean-shaven save for a close-cropped and
sandy mustache, held a touch of the florid and his figure inclined to
stoutness. At the livery stable where he called for a buggy, after
learning that no taxis were to be had, he gave the name of Michael Hagan
and asked to be directed to the house of Mr. Eben Tollman.

Mr. Tollman was obviously expecting his visitor, and received him upon
arrival in his austere study. Yet the fact that there was no element of
surprise in Mr. Hagan's coming failed to relieve Mr. Tollman of traces
of nervousness as he inquired, "You are Mr. Hagan?"

"Yes, Mr. Tollman, I came up in answer to your letter."

The stranger had no roving eye. He seemed, indeed, steady of hearing to
the verge of stolidity, yet in a few seconds he had noted and drawn
rapid conclusions from the environment. The cheerlessness of the house
had struck him and the somber room, decorated, if one calls it
decoration, with faded steel engravings of Landseer hunting dogs
guarding dead birds and rabbits, impressed him.

Mr. Tollman bowed coldly.

"The matter I wish to discuss with you is confidential," he began by way
of introduction, and Hagan smiled as he replied, "Most matters which
clients discuss with me, _are_ confidential."

Even with this reassurance, Mr. Tollman appeared to labor under
embarrassment and it was only after some thought that he suggested,
"This business is so new to me that I hardly know how to approach it."

"A man should be extremely frank with his physician or his lawyer,"
volunteered the newcomer. "It's even truer in the case of a detective."

"In this instance," Mr. Tollman proceeded with the wariness of one
wading into water of unknown depth, "I am acting for friends whose
business interests I represent, and who do not care to appear in the
matter. Therefore your dealings will be exclusively with me."

"Certainly, that's quite usual. Now, what's the nature of the case? Your
letter didn't indicate."

"Well, the fact is I wish to have a somewhat searching investigation
made into the personal character and conduct of a young gentleman, who
for reasons unnecessary to state, is of interest to my friends."

"Let me understand you clearly," prompted Mr. Hagan, with a briskness
that accentuated the other's air of secretiveness. "Is this man to be
shown up? Is that what you mean?"

Mr. Tollman stiffened. "I should suppose," he said with cool dignity,
"that would be dependent to a certain extent on the facts."

But Mr. Hagan had in his police-detective days made use of the third
degree, and when he next spoke his voice was firm almost to sternness.
"I thought," he reminded the other, "we were going to be frank."

Thus encouraged, Tollman proceeded slowly, "I'm not seeking to whitewash
the character of the gentleman, if that's what you mean."

"Good! Now, we're going somewhere. There are very few people who have no
skeletons in their closets."

The hand of the employer came up with fastidious distaste. "Let this be
understood from the beginning, Mr. Hagan, I have no wish to hear
anything but reports of results obtained. In the details of your work I
have not the slightest interest."

Mr. Hagan nodded, and inquired, "Is it with a view to criminal
prosecution, now, that this case is to be worked or--?" He paused
interrogatively.

"It is not. It is only necessary to convince a young lady, whose family
disapproves of the man, that their suspicions are based on fact. She is
so prejudiced in his favor, however, that the facts must be
substantial--and of a character calculated to weigh with a woman."

Hagan drew a cigar-case from his pocket, and proffered it, but his offer
being declined with a cold shake of the head, he settled himself as
comfortably as possible in his uncomfortable chair and engaged in
reflection. After digesting the preliminaries, he began to speak
musingly, as though to himself.

"Of course if the lady knew that detectives were working on the case,
the force of any disclosure would be discounted."

His eyes were on his employer as he spoke and he saw Tollman start.
Tollman's words, too, came with an impulsiveness which had been absent
heretofore.

"Neither of them must know, of course, that this investigation is being
made. Unless you can assure me on that point you mustn't undertake the
business."

With some difficulty the detective repressed a smile. "That goes
without saying, Mr. Tollman. Now if it could be shown that this man was
mixed up in some sort of a scandal--with a married woman, or a shady
one, for instance--that ought to fit the case, oughtn't it?"

"Precisely." Again Tollman's voice was tinged with an unaccustomed
quickness of interest, but at once, as though he had made a mistake, he
amended with a heavy gravity, "However, we can hardly forecast what you
will learn. I understand that he has directed his mail forwarded to an
apartment hotel near Washington Square in New York."

The two talked for perhaps forty minutes--though it must be admitted
that a portion of that time was devoted to a discussion of the terms of
employment. Mr. Tollman had never undertaken having a man shadowed
before and he regarded the fees as needlessly large.

Back once more in his office in a building on Forty-second Street, Mr.
Hagan cut the end from a cigar and gazed out across the public library
and the park at its back. The frosted glass of his hall door bore the
legend, "The Searchlight Investigation Bureau. Private."

"Well, what did you find out about this job?" inquired a member of the
office force who had entered from a communicating room, and the chief
wrinkled his brow a little as he studied his _perfecto_.

"It's a dirty business, Schenk," he replied crisply. "It's the kind of
thing that gives knockers a license to put detectives in the same class
as blackmailers--and the old Whey-face himself is a tight-wad. He
wrangled over the price--but I made him come through."

"What does he want done?"

"He wants a guy framed. You remember what the bulls did for Big
Finnerty, when Finnerty was threatening to squeal to the District
Attorney's office about police graft?"

Schenk nodded. "They pulled the old stuff on him. Sent him to the
Island a year for gun-toting."

"Sure, and he didn't have a gat at that--that is, not until the bulls
planted it in his kick on the way to the station house." The dignity of
Mr. Hagan's consultation manner had dropped from him, and he had
relapsed into the gang argot with which police days had given him an
intimate familiarity.

"Sure he didn't. That's the way they frame a man. It's the way they
framed--"

"Can the reminiscence stuff," interrupted the head of the Searchlight
Investigation Bureau. "The point is that it's just about the deal we're
being hired to put over on this Farquaharson person. He wants to marry a
girl and we've got to frame him up with a dirty past--or present. Our
respected employer is a deacon and a pious hypocrite. He wants results
and he wants us to go the limit to get 'em. But he must never know
anything that soils the hem of his garment. He has no interest in the
petty doings of detectives. His smug face must be saved. He didn't tell
me this, but I wised myself to it right away. He's got his eye on that
girl, himself."

The winter came close on the heels of a short autumn that year and it
came with the bluster and roar of squalls at sea and the lashing of the
woods inland. For some weeks Conscience followed the colorless monotony
of her life with a stunned and bruised deadness about her heart. She had
shed no tears and the feeling was always with her that soon she must
awaken to a poignant agony and that then her mind would collapse.
Mechanically she read to her father and supervised the duties of the
attendant who had been brought on from Boston, but often when he spoke
to her he had to repeat his question, and then she would come back to
the present with a start.

The invalid had learned from Tollman that Farquaharson had gone away
after a quarrel, and he piously told himself that his prayers were
answered and his daughter had been snatched as a brand from the burning.
But for once an instinct of mercy tinged his dealings with the
frailities of humanity. He refrained from talking of Stuart and from the
pointing of morals. That would come later.




CHAPTER XI


Thinking through days when a cold and tortured moisture would burst out
on her temples and through nights when she lay wide-eyed and sleepless,
only one answer seemed to come to Conscience. All Stuart's love must
have curled in that swift transition into indifference and contempt.

Admitting that conclusion, she knew that her pride should make her hate
him, too, but her pride was dead. Everything in her was dead but the
love she could not kill and that remained only to torture her.

The most paradoxical thing of all was that in these troubled days she
thought of only one person as a dependable friend. Eben Tollman had
evinced a spirit for which she had not given him credit. It seemed that
she had been all wrong in her estimates of human character. Stuart, with
his almost brilliant vitality of charm, had after a quarrel turned his
back on her. Eben Tollman, who masked a diffident nature behind a
semblance of cold reserve, was unendingly considerate and no more asked
reward than a faithful mastiff might have asked it. It contented him to
anticipate all her wishes and to invent small ways of easing her misery.
He did not even seek to force his society and satisfied himself with
such crumbs of conversation as she chose to drop his way in passing. If
ever she should come out of this period of torpid wretchedness, she
would owe Tollman a heavy debt of gratitude.

Three months after the day when Mr. Hagan returned from Cape Cod, that
gentleman called into his private office a member of his staff, who
responded to the name of Henry Rathbone, and put him through a brief
catechism.

"What have you got on this Farquaharson party?" he inquired. "Tollman
complains that you're running up a pretty steep expense account and he
can't quite see what he's getting for his money."

Rathbone seated himself and nodded. "Mr. Tollman knows every move this
feller's made. You gotta give him time. A guy that think's he's got a
broken heart don't start right in on the gay life."

"Why don't he?" inquired Mr. Hagan with a more cynical philosophy. "I've
always heard that when a man thinks the world's gone to the bow-wows
he's just about ripe to cut loose. Don't this feller ever take a drink
or play around with any female companions?"

"You ain't got the angle straight on Farquaharson," observed the sleuth
who had for some time been Farquaharson's shadow. "He ain't that kind.
I'm living in the same apartment hotel with him and my room's next door
to his. I don't fall for the slush-stuff, Chief, but that feller gets my
goat. He's hurt and hurt bad. It ain't women he wants--it's _one_ woman.
As for female companions--he don't even seem to have any male ones."

"What does he do with his time?"

"Well, he went down to the farm for a few weeks and closed up the place.
He studied law, but he's passed it up and decided to write fiction
stories. Every morning he rides horseback in the park, and, take it from
me, those equestrian dames turn all the way round to rubber at him."

"What else does he do?"

"He walks miles, too. I fell in with him casual like one day and tagged
along. Well, he hiked me till my tongue hung out. We started at the Arch
and ended up at Dolrandi's café at the north end of the speedway--it
ain't but only about a dozen miles.... During that whole chummy little
experience he spoke just about a couple of times, except to answer my
questions. Sometimes when he thought I wasn't looking his eyes would get
like a fellow's I seen once in death-row up the river, but if he caught
me peepin' he'd laugh and straighten up sudden."

"Well, I don't suppose you can get anything on him till he gives you a
chance," said Mr. Hagan grudgingly, "but what this man Tollman wants is
results. He ain't paying out good money that he's hoarded for years,
just to get merit reports. He didn't wring it out of the local widows
and orphans just for that."

"I get you, and I'll keep watching. Since Farquaharson got this bug
about writing stories he's taken to rambling around town at night. I
said he didn't seem to want companions, but when he goes out on these
prowls he'll talk for hours with any dirty old bum that stops him and he
always falls for pan-handling. Beggars, street-walkers, any sort of old
down-and-outer interests him, if it's hard luck they're talking."

But the face which reminded Mr. Rathbone of the man who was awaiting the
electric chair was the public face of Stuart Farquaharson. He did not
see the same features during the hours when the door of his room was
closed. The hotel he had selected, near Washington Square, was a modest
place and his window looked out over roofs and chimney-pots and small
back yards.

There, sitting before his typewriter, his sleeves rolled above his
elbows, he sought to devote himself to his newly chosen profession: the
profession which he had substituted for law. Through a near-by window he
had occasional glimpses of a girl who was evidently trying to be an
illustrator. Stuart imagined that she was poor and ambitious, and he
envied her the zest of her struggle for success. He himself had no such
incentives. Poverty was not likely to touch him unless he became a
reckless waster, and he fancied that his interests were too far burned
to ashes for ambition. It was with another purpose that he forced
himself to his task. He was trying to forget dark hair and eyes and the
memory of a voice which had said, "Love you! In every way that I know
how to love, I love you. Everything that a woman can be to a man, I want
to be to you, and everything that a woman can give a man, I want to give
you."

And because he sought so hard to forget her, his fingering of the
typewriter keys would fall idle, and his eyes, looking out across the
chimney-pots, would soar with the circling pigeons, and he would see her
again in every guise that he remembered--and he remembered them all.

She had been cruel to the point of doing the one thing which he had told
her would brand him with the deepest possible misery--and which pledged
him in honor not to approach her again by word or letter without
permission. But that was only because the thing which he conceived to be
her heritage of narrowness had conquered her.

On the floor below was a young man of about his own age, who was also a
candidate for the laurels in literature. Stuart had met him by chance
and they had talked a little. This man's enthusiasms had gushed forth
with a vigor at which the Virginian marveled. For him ambition blazed
like an oriflamme and he had dared to gamble everything on his belief in
himself. With scant savings out of a reporter's salary in the West he
had come to wrest success from the town where all is possible, but now a
shadow of disappointment was stealing into his eyes. A fear was lurking
there that, after all, he might have mistaken the message of the Bow
Bells which had rung to him the Dick Whittington message that the city
was his to conquer.

Perhaps because Louis Wayne desperately needed to succeed, while Stuart
Farquaharson wrote only as an anodyne to his thoughts, Wayne vainly
peddled his manuscripts and almost from the first Stuart sold his at
excellent rates.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Reinold Heath was rarely in a sunny mood at the hour when her
coffee and rolls came to her, as she sat propped against the pillows of
the elaborately hung bed in her French gray and old-rose room. The same
hour which brought the breakfast tray brought Mrs. Heath's social
secretary and those duties which lie incumbent upon a leader of
society's most exploited and inner circles.

Mrs. Heath, kimono-clad in the flooding morning light, looked all of her
fifty years as she nodded curtly to her secretary. It was early winter
and a year had passed since Stuart had left Cape Cod.

"Let's get this beastly business done with, Miss Andrews," began the
great lady sharply. "What animals have you captured this time? By the
way, who invented week-ends, do you suppose? Whoever it was, he's a
public enemy."

The secretary arranged her notes and ran efficiently through their
contents. These people had accepted, those had declined; the
possibilities yet untried contained such-and-such names.

"Why couldn't Harry Merton come?" The question was snapped out
resentfully. "Not that I blame him--I don't see why any one comes--or
why I ask them for that matter."

"He said over the 'phone that he was off for a duck-shooting trip,"
responded Miss Andrews.

"Well, I suppose we can't take out a subpoena for him. He's escaped
and we need another man." Mrs. Heath drew her brow in perplexed thought,
then suddenly demanded: "What was the name of that young man Billy
Waterburn brought to my box at the horse show? I mean the one who rode
over the jumps like a devil and blarneyed me afterward like an angel."

The secretary arched her brows. "Do you mean the Virginian? His name was
Stuart Farquaharson."

"Do you know where he lives--or anything else about him?"

"Why, no--that is, nothing in the social sense." Miss Andrews smiled
quietly as she added, "I've read some of his stories in the magazines."

"All right. Find out where he lives and invite him in Merton's place.
Don't let _him_ slip--he interested me and that species is almost
extinct."

As Miss Andrew jotted down the name, Mrs. Heath read the surprised
expression on her face, and it amused her to offer explanation of her
whim.

"You're wondering why I'm going outside the lines and filling the ranks
with a nobody? Well, I'll tell you. I'm sick of these people who are all
sick of each other. The Farquaharsons were landed gentry in Virginia
when these aristocrats were still grinding snuff. Aren't we incessantly
cudgeling our brains for novelty of entertainment? Well, I've discovered
the way. I'm going to introduce brains and manners to society. I daresay
he has evening clothes and if he hasn't he can hire them."

Decidedly puzzled, Stuart Farquaharson listened to the message over the
telephone later in the day, but his very surprise momentarily paralyzed
his power of inventing a politely plausible excuse, so that he hung up
the receiver with the realization that he had accepted an invitation
which held for him no promise of pleasure.

It happened that Louis Wayne, who had by sheer persistency seized the
outer fringes of success, had come up with a new manuscript to read and
was now sitting, with a pipe between his teeth, in Stuart's morris
chair.

"Sure, go to it," he exclaimed with a grin, as Stuart bewailed his lack
of a ready excuse. "It'll be a bore, but it will make you appreciate
your return to the companionship of genius."

"The Crags" was that palatial establishment up the Hudson where the
Reinold Heaths hold court during the solstices between the months at
Newport and the brief frenzy of the New York season, and the house party
which introduced Stuart Farquaharson to Society with a capital S was
typical. One person in the household still had, like himself, the
external point of view, and her ditties threw her into immediate contact
with each new guest.

"Miss Andrews," he laughed, when the social secretary met him shortly
after his arrival, "I'm the poor boy at this frolic, and I'm just as
much at my ease as a Hottentot at college. When I found that I was the
only man here without a valet, I felt--positively naked."

The young woman's eyes gleamed humorously. "I know the feeling," she
said, "and I'll tell you a secret. I took a course of education in
higher etiquette from the butler. You can't do that, of course, but when
in doubt ask me--and I'll ask the butler."

But it was Mrs. Heath's prerogative to knight her protégés with the
Order of the Chosen, and Stuart Farquaharson would have graced any
picture where distinction of manner and unself-conscious charm passed
current.

"Who is the girl with the red-brown hair and the wonderful complexion
and the dissatisfied eyes?" he asked Miss Andrews later, and that lady
answered with the frankness of a fellow-countryman in foreign parts:

"Mrs. Larry Holbury. That's her husband over there--it's whispered that
they're not inordinately happy."

Farquaharson followed the brief glance of his companion and saw a man
inclining to overweight whose fingers caressed the stem of a cocktail
glass, and whose face was heavy with surliness.

It subsequently developed, in a tête-à-tête with the wife, that she had
read all of Mr. Farquaharson's stories and adored them. It leaked out
with an air of resignation that her husband was a bit of a brute--and
yet Mrs. Holbury was neither a fool nor a bore. She was simply a
composite of flirtatious instinct and an amazing candor.

In the life of Stuart Farquaharson the acceptance of that invitation
would have passed as a disconnected incident had it been altogether a
matter of his choosing, but he had let himself be caught. Mrs. Reinold
Heath had chosen to present him as her personal candidate for lionizing
and whom she captured she held in bondage.

"Honestly, now, Miss Andrews," he pleaded over the telephone when that
lady called him to the colors a second time, "entirely between
ourselves, I came before because I couldn't think of an excuse in time.
Let me off and I'll propose a substitute arrangement. Suppose we have
dinner together somewhere where the _hors d'oeuvres_ aren't all gold
fish."

Her laugh tinkled in the telephone. "I wish we could," she said. "I knew
you let yourself in for it the first time--but now you're hooked and you
_have_ to come." So he went.

On later occasions it was more flattering than satisfying to him that
the beautiful Mrs. Holbury should drop so promptly into a sort of easy
intimacy and treat him almost from the start with a proprietary manner.
It soon became an embarrassment of riches. Stuart was thinking of
himself as a woman-hater, these days, and he held a normal dislike for
wagging tongues. Holbury, too, who was reputed to be of jealous
tendency, seemed to regard him unfavorably and took no great pains to
affect cordiality.

One day Wayne dropped, coatless, into Farquaharson's room and grinned
as he tossed a magazine down on the table. "_Sic fama est_" was his
comment, and Stuart picked up the sheet which his visitor indicated with
a jerk of the thumb. The magazine was a weekly devoted ostensibly to the
doings of smart society, but its real distinction lay in its innuendo
and its genius for sailing so close to the wind of libel that those who
moved in the rarified air of exclusiveness read it with a delicious and
shuddering mingling of anticipation and dread. Its method was to use no
names in the more daring paragraphs, but for the key to the spicy, one
had only to refer back. The preceding item always contained names which
applied to both.

Stuart found his name and that of Mrs. Holbury listed in an account of
some entertainment--and below that:


     "A young Southerner, recently arrived and somewhat lionized, is
     whispered to be complicating the already uneven balance of
     domesticity in the home of a couple whose status in society
     antedates his own. This gallant has all the attractiveness of one
     untouched with ennui. He rides like a centaur, talks like a
     diplomat and flatters as only a Virginian or an Irishman can
     flatter. The same whisper has it that the husband suffers in the
     parallel."


Farquaharson's face darkened and he reached for his discarded coat.

"Hold on; you have company," suggested Wayne placatingly. "Where do you
think you're going in such hot haste?"

Stuart was standing with his feet well apart and his mouth set in a
stern line.

"Wayne," he said with a crisp and ominous decisiveness, "I've never
slandered any man intentionally--and I require the same decency of
treatment from others."

"Go easy there. Ride wide! Ride wide!" cautioned the visitor. "That
little slander is mild compared with many others in the same pages. Are
the rest of them rushing to the office to cane the editors? They are
not, my son. Believe me, they are not."

"They should be. Submission only encourages a scoundrel."

"In the first place they would find no one there but a rather fragile
and extremely polite young lady. The editor himself doesn't sit around
waiting to be horsewhipped. In the second, society tacitly sanctions and
supports that sheet. Your fashionable friends would call you a barbarian
and what is worse--a boob."

Farquaharson stood in a statuesque ire, and Wayne went philosophically
on. "Take the advice of a singularly wise bystander. At least treat it
with the contempt of silence until you've consulted the lady. Caning
people in New York is attended with some degree of notoriety and she
would have to share it. When you're in Rome, be as Romanesque as
possible."

"For my part," declared Stuart, "I like another version better. When
you're a Roman, be a Roman wherever you are."

Yet after some debate he took off his coat again and announced
cryptically, "After all, the one unpardonable idiocy is sectionalism of
code--damn it!"

He knew that Marian Holbury and her husband were near a break and that
the husband's jealousy looked his way. But, conscious of entire
rectitude, he gave no thought to appearances and treated the matter
lightly. But the Searchlight Investigation Bureau, whose employment had
been discontinued as not paying for itself, was now re-employed and
instructed to send a marked copy of the weekly to Miss Conscience
Williams. That copy was anonymously mailed, bearing a New York
postmark, and its sending was a puzzle which its recipient never solved.

Spring came, and Stuart, who had begun the writing of a novel, took a
small house in Westchester County, where he could work apart from the
city's excitement. Had he been cautious he would not have selected one
within two miles of the Holbury country house, yet the fact was that
Marian Holbury had discovered it and he had taken it because of its
quaintness. He had been there several weeks alone except for a man
servant when, one night, he sat under the lamp of his small living-room
with sheets of manuscript scattered about him. It was warm, with clouds
gathering for a storm, and the scent of blossoms came in through the
open doors and windows. There was no honeysuckle in the neighborhood,
but to his memory there drifted, clear and strong and sweet, the
fragrance of its heavy clusters.

He sat up straight, arrested by the poignancy of that echo from the
past. The typewriter keys fell silent and his eyes stared through the
open window, wide and full of suffering. He heard himself declaring with
boyhood's assurance, "They may take you to the North Pole and surround
you with regiments of soldiers--but in the end it will be the same."

Then without warning a wild sob sounded from the doorway and he looked
up, coming to his feet so abruptly that his overturned chair fell
backward with a crash.

"Marian!" he exclaimed, his voice ringing with shocked incredulity.
"What are you doing here--and alone?"

Mrs. Holbury stood leaning limply against the door-frame. She was in
evening dress, and a wrap, glistening with the shimmer of silver,
drooped loosely about her gleaming shoulders.

"It's over," she declared in a passionate and unprefaced outburst. "I
can't stand it! I'm done with him! I've left him!"

Stuart spread his hands in dumfounded amazement. "But why, in God's
name, did you come here? This is madness--this is inconceivable!"

She went unsteadily to the nearest chair and dropped into it. "I came to
stay--if you don't turn me out," she answered.




CHAPTER XII


Except for the low yet hysterical moaning of the woman in the chair and
the distant whistle of a Hudson River boat, there was complete silence
in the small room, while the man stood dumfounded and speechless.

Marian's evening gown was torn and one silk stocking sagged at the
ankle. Stuart Farquaharson noted these things vaguely and at last he
inquired, "How did you get here?"

Her answer came between sobs, "I walked."

"You have done an unspeakably mad thing, Marian," he said quietly. "You
can't stay here. There is no one in this house but myself; even my
servant is away to-night. Why didn't you go to 'The Crags'?"

She lifted a tear-stained face and shot her answer at him scornfully.
"'The Crags'! I had to talk to some one who was _human_. They would have
bundled me back with cynical advice--besides, they're off somewhere."

"You're in distress and God knows I sympathize with you. I shall
certainly offer no cynical advice, but I mean to call your husband on
the telephone and tell him that you're here."

He turned toward the side table and lifted the desk instrument, but with
the impetuous swiftness of a leopardess she came to her feet and sprang
upon him. For an instant he was borne back by the unexpected impact of
her body against his own and in that moment she seized the telephone
from his hand and tore loose its wires from the wall. Then she hurled it
with a crashing violence to the stone flagging of the hearth where it
lay wrecked, and stood before him a palpitating and disordered spirit of
fright and anger.

He had sought in that brief collision to restrain her, but she had
wrenched herself free so violently that she had torn the strap which
held her gown over one shoulder. Then as she reeled back, with a wildly
ungoverned gesture she ran her fingers through her hair until it fell in
tangled waves about her shoulders. It was perhaps a full minute before
she could speak and while she stood recovering her breath, Stuart
Farquaharson looked helplessly down at the instrument which she had
succeeded in rendering useless.

With blazing eyes and quivering nostrils, the woman rushed headlong into
explanation, accusation and pleading.

"If you telephoned that I was here he'd try to kill me. I tell you I'm
done with him! I hate him--hate him; don't you understand? He's been
drinking again and he's a beast. That's why I came ... that's why I had
to come.... I came to you because I thought you'd understand ... because
I thought ... you ... cared for me."

"I care enough for you to try to prevent your ruining your life by a
single piece of lunacy," he told her as he sought to steady her with the
directness of his gaze. "You don't have to go on with Holbury if you
choose to leave him, but this is the one place of all others for you to
avoid." He cast a hasty glance about him and then, hurrying to the front
of the room, closed the door and drew the blinds. For a half hour he
argued with forced calmness, but the ears to which he spoke were deaf to
everything save the wild instinct of escape.

"Here you are in a house that sits in full view from the road: doors and
windows open: you with your hair streaming and your gown disordered;
hairpins strewn about: the telephone dead. Now, I've got to walk to
your house and tell him."

Under the level insistence of his eyes she had fallen back a pace and
stood holding the unsupported gown over her bosom, but when he finished
with that final announcement, which seemed to her a threat, she sprang
forward again and threw her arms about him, not in an embrace but with
the instinct of a single idea: to prevent his carrying out his announced
intention.

Stuart attempted gently to disengage himself, but the soft arms clung
and the figure was convulsed with its agitation. "No, no!" she kept
repeating. "You sha'n't go. You sha'n't leave me here alone.... I
couldn't stand it."

"You walked two miles to get here and that took you about forty-five
minutes," he reminded her. "You've been here a half hour. Do you fancy
your husband's jealousy won't tell him where you went?" But the idea
terrified her into such renewed hysteria that he broke off and stood
silent.

The gathering clouds had broken now into a wild spring storm and the
rain was drumming like canister on the roof of Stuart's cottage, so they
did not hear the purr of a motor which stopped outside. They were
without warning when the door suddenly burst open, and across the bare
shoulder of the woman, who still hung sobbing to him, Stuart saw the
bloated and apoplectic face of Larry Holbury and at his back the
frightened countenance of two servants.

The husband came unsteadily several steps into the room, and lifted a
hand which shook as he pointed to the tableau. He addressed his
retainers in a voice which trembled with drink and rage, but even in its
thickness it was icy by virtue of a fury that had passed through all
period of bluster.

"I want you to look well at that," he said. "Mark every detail in your
memories, both of you. There they are--in each other's arms. Notice her
condition well, because, by God--"

Marian's scream interrupted his sentence, and the scream itself died
away in a quaver, as she faded into insensibility, and Farquaharson
lifted her clear of the floor and carried her to the lounge.

After that he turned to face Holbury and addressed him with a quietness
which the glitter in his eye contradicted. "This is a pity, Holbury. It
seems that you frightened her with some brutality. She lost her head and
came here. I was trying to persuade her to go back."

"Yes," Holbury's laugh rang with the uncontrolled quality of a maniac's.
"Yes, I know. You tore the clothes off of her trying to persuade her to
come back to me! Well, you needn't trouble about sending her back
now--the door's locked. She's yours. Do what you like with her. Of
course I ought to kill you, but I won't. I brought these men to
establish beyond doubt the identity of the co-respondent. It's a gentle
riddance--a crooked wife and a crooked paramour."

One of the men advanced into the room and ostentatiously gathered in a
couple of hairpins and a bit of torn lace, while Farquaharson crossed
and stood face to face with the irate husband.

"Do you mean that you believe that?" The question came with a deadly
softness.

"I don't have to believe. I have seen."

"Then," Stuart's words ripped themselves out like the tearing of cloth,
"send your damned jackals outside, unless you want them to see their
master treated as such a cur deserves."

A moment later the two servants were assisting Holbury to his motor, one
of them nursing a closed and blackened eye on his own account as a badge
of over-impetuous loyalty; and most of that night, while Marian Holbury
lay groaning on the couch, Stuart Farquaharson sat before his empty
hearth with eyes which did not close.

The Holbury divorce suit, after filling advance columns of spicy print,
was awarded with a sealed record and Farquaharson was given no
opportunity to tell his story to the public. He saw nothing more of
Marian and was widely accused of having compromised and then abandoned
her. So Stuart closed the house on the Hudson, as he had closed the
house in Virginia, and with a very bitter spirit went to Europe.

It was some time before this, perhaps several months, that Eben Tollman,
the indispensable friend--serving hitherto without reward or the seeking
of reward--ventured to aspire openly to more personal recognition. He
had been building slowly, and if perseverance is a merit, he deserved
success. Perhaps Conscience had changed. There had been many things to
change her. She had lived long without a break in an atmosphere which
she had dreaded and her father had not grown sunnier. A life of dogma
had acidulated into so impossible a fanaticism that in contrast Tollman
seemed to assume something like breadth of gauge.

The heart attacks which had been painted as such sure death had been a
greater threat to the girl than to the man whose heart was physically
involved. There had been two of them and both had been survived. William
Williams was a man who was always dying, but who never died. Yet these
seizures served their purpose since they kept the daughter freshly
reminded that a sword of Damocles hung over her--and that her father
must not be crossed. It became a thought with which she lived, with
which she slept, until it carried her to more and more absurd lengths of
self-effacement and ate out the heart of her independence. Of Eben
Tollman she no longer thought as a man old enough to be her father and
as impersonal as the Sphinx.

If he lacked the fire and buoyancy which had made association with
Stuart Farquaharson a thing of light and color and sparkle, so did her
whole life lack that fire in these gray days. So did she herself lack
it, she told herself wistfully. At all events he came nearer being
_fides Achates_ than any one else. Stuart was a memory and she was
trying very hard to make him even less than that--only the gnawing ache
in her heart wouldn't let her.

Yet when Tollman shifted her abstract acceptance of what he meant to her
to a question of a concrete application, she felt the sudden sinking of
despair.

All afternoon her father had been petulant and reminiscent. He had
seemed perversely bent on committing a righteous suicide by forcing her
to make him angry. He had cast into damnation all the "fads" and "isms"
of an ungodly present and, since he judged the time had come to point a
moral, he had buried Stuart Farquaharson at the bottom of the heap.

Even now Conscience winced under these tirades. The truth was that she
was heart-broken; that the image of Stuart, despite his feet of clay,
was still shrined in her life. But she was fighting that and she did not
know that the fight was hopeless.

So to-night, as she sat with a sewing basket in her lap and Tollman sat
across from her in the chair he had so often occupied of late, the
surprise came.

"Conscience," he said, and something in the tone of his voice caused her
to look suddenly up, "I've tried to be your friend because I've known
that it was only that way I could be anything."

Suddenly his voice leaped with a fierceness of which she had never
thought it capable. To her he had always been sort of extinct volcano,
and now he broke into eruption. "Must it always be only that? Is there
no hope for me?"

The piece of sewing in her hand dropped suddenly to her lap with the
needle thrust half through. She sat as if in tableau--a picture of
arrested motion.

She should have foreseen that the comfortable and platonic relation
could not last--but she had not foreseen it. It came with a shock and in
the wake of the shock came crowding pictures of all the rest of life,
painted in these dun tints of New England lethargy from which she had
prayed to be delivered. Then slowly and welling with disquiet, her eyes
rose to his and she found them full of suspense.

"I suppose," she answered in a bewildered tone, "I ought to have known.
But it's been so satisfying just as it was--that I didn't pause--to
analyze."

"Couldn't it still be satisfying, dear?" He took an eager step forward.
"Am I too much of a fossil?" He paused and then added with a note of
hurt. "I have felt young, since I've been in love with you."

The middle-aged lover stood bending forward, his face impatiently eager
and his attitude as stiffly alert as that of a bird dog when the quail
scent strikes into its nostrils.

"I've accepted all you had to give," she said with the manner of one in
the confessional, "and I never stopped to think that you might want
something more than I was giving." Still he waited and she hurriedly
talked on. "I must be honest with you. I owe you many debts, but that
comes first of all. I've tried to forget--tried with every particle of
resolution in me--but I can't. I still love him. I think I'll always
love him."

Tollman bowed. He made no impassioned protest and offered no reminder
that the man who still held her affection had proven himself an
apostate, but he said quietly. "I had hoped the scar was healed,
Conscience, for your own sake as well as mine. So long as I knew it hurt
you, I didn't speak."

For the first time in months tears started to her eyes and she felt
that she was wounding one who had practiced great self-sacrifice. He
spoke no more of his hopes until some time after the news came of
Stuart's participation in scandal.

At first Conscience instinctively refused that news credence, but in
many subtle and convincing ways corroboration drifted in and her father,
with his prosecutor's spirit, pieced the fragments together into an
unbroken pattern. Until this moment there had lurked in Conscience's
heart a faint ghost of hope that somehow the breach would be healed,
that Stuart would return. Now even the ghost was dead. She was sick,
unspeakably sick: with the heart-nausea of broken hope and broken faith.

Much of what she heard might be untrue, but it seemed established beyond
doubt that from her and from his early ideals--like the oath of Arthur's
knights--he had gone to careless living. He had played lightly with a
woman's honor and his own, and had not come out of the matter unsoiled.
Now nothing mattered much and if Tollman claimed the reward of his
faithfulness and her father would died happier for it why should she
refuse to consider them?

In these days the old man's urgency of Tollman's suit was rarely
silenced, but one afternoon he pitched it to a new key, and the girl's
habitual expression of weariness gave way to one of startled amazement.

"Of one phase of the matter," he said, "I have never spoken. I refrained
because Eben was unwilling that you should know, but justice is
justice--you should honor your benefactor."

"Honor my benefactor? I don't understand."

The old man shook his lion-like head and, out of the parchment of his
bony face, his eyes burned grimly.

"This house--this farm--all of it--we have only by the sufferance of
Eben's generosity, and yet I've heard men call him close."

Conscience thought that she had lost the possibility of being stunned,
but now she sat speechless as her father continued.

"I never was a competent business man and I put affairs in Eben's hands
too late. He concealed from me how dire my straits were--and our income
continued--but it was coming out of his resources--not mine. If Tollman
had chosen to demand payment, we would have been wiped out."

"How long have you known this?"

"Since shortly after my affliction came upon me."

Conscience moved over and stood by the window. She pressed her temples
with her finger tips and spoke in a dead quiet. "You have known--all
that time--and you never told me. You have urged his suit and you never
let me guess that my suitor had already--bought me and paid for me."

With a low and bitter laugh--or the fragment of a laugh, she turned and
left the room.

After weeks of patient silence, Tollman asked once more, "Conscience, is
there still no hope for me?" To his surprise she met his questioning
gaze very directly and answered,

"That depends on your terms."

"I make no terms," he hastened to declare. "I only petition."

"If you ask a wife who can be a real wife to you--who can give you all
her love and life--then the answer must still be no," she went on
steadily with something like a doggedness of resignation. "I can't lie
to you. I have only a broken heart. Beyond friendship and gratitude, I
have nothing to offer you. I can't even promise that I will ever stop
loving--him. But--" her words came with the flatness of unending
soul-fag--"I suppose I can give you the lesser things; fidelity,
respect; all the petty allegiance that can go on without fire or
spirit."

"I will take what you can give me," he declared, and at the sudden ring
of autumnal ardor in his voice and the avid light in his eyes, she found
herself shivering with fastidious distaste. She did not read the eyes
with full understanding, yet instinctively she shrank, for they held the
animal craving of a long-suppressed desire--the physical love of a man
past his youth which can satisfy itself with mere possession. "I will
take what you can give me, and I shall win your love in the end. I have
no fear; no doubts. I lack the lighter charms of a youthful cavalier,
but I believe I have still the strength and virility of a man." He
swelled a little with the strutting spirit of the mating male. "You will
learn that my heart is still the heart of a boy where you are conceded
and that our life won't be a shadowed thing."

"I must have time to think," she said faintly. "I don't--don't know
yet."

Driven by wanderlust and an unappeasable discontent, Stuart Farquaharson
had been in many remote places. Around those towns which were Meccas for
tourists he made wide detours. His family had jealously kept its honor
untarnished heretofore and though he bore himself with a stiffer outward
pride than ever, he inwardly felt that fingers of scandal were pointing
him out, through no misdeed of his own. Now he was back in Cairo from
the Sudan and the upper Nile, almost as brown and hard of tissue as the
Bedouins with whose caravans he had traveled and for the first time in
many weeks he could regain touch with his mail. That was a matter of
minor importance, but his novel had come from the press on the day he
sailed out of New York harbor and perhaps there awaited him at
Shepheard's some report from his publisher. That gentleman had predicted
success with an abundant optimism. Stuart himself had been sceptical.
Now he would know.

He sent his luggage ahead and drifted on foot with the tide. What a
place this would be, he reflected, to idle time away with the
companionship of love. His eyes narrowed painfully with a memory of how
Conscience and he had once talked of spending a honeymoon in Egypt. That
seemed as long ago as the age of Egypt itself and yet not long enough to
have lost its sting. Grunting and lurching along the asphalt, with bells
tinkling from their trappings, went a row of camels and camel-riders.
They threaded their unhurried way on cushioned hoofs through a traffic
of purring roadsters and limousines. Drawn by undersized stallions, an
official carriage clattered by. Its fez-crowned occupant gazed
superciliously out as the gaudily uniformed members of his _kavasse_ ran
alongside yelling to the crowds to make way for the Pasha! Fakirs led
their baboons, magicians carried cobras in wicker trays, and peddlers
hawked their scarabs and souvenirs. Against the speckless overhead blue,
rose the graceful domes and minarets of mosques and the fringed tops of
palms.

Farquaharson lightly crossed the terrace at Shepheard's Hotel and
traversed the length of the hall to the office at its back where mail is
distributed. For him there was a great budget and he carried it out to
one of the tables on the awninged terrace which overlooks the street.

Yes, here was the publisher's note. He tore the envelope. "You have
become famous," began his enthusiastic sponsor. "The thing has been a
knockout--the presses are groaning."

He read that letter and turned to others. A dramatist wished to convert
his book into a play ... several magazines wanted to know when his next
story would be complete ... two or three clipping bureaus wished to
supply him with the comments of the press ... many of the missives bore
the marks of much forwarding. Some had followed him half way around the
world. Then at the bottom of the pile he found a small but thickly
filled envelope. As it peeped out at him from under others his heart
leaped wildly and he seized it. It was addressed in the hand of
Conscience Williams. She had written to him! Why should she write except
to tell him he might come back? Cairo was a wonderful place! The entire
world was a wonderful place! A street fakir thrust a tray of scarabs up
from the sidewalk and grinned. Farquaharson grinned back and tossed him
_backsheesh_. Then he opened his missive. A young British army officer
looked on idly from the next table, amused at the boyish enthusiasm of
the American. As the American read the officer saw the delight die out
of his eyes and the face turn by stages to the seeming of a mummy.

Conscience had written a letter in which she suggested that, now at
least, they might say farewell in all friendliness. She was going to
marry Tollman, to whose great kindness she paid a generous tribute. The
date was not set but it would be some time that winter.

"I've had a great deal of time to think and little else to do, Stuart,"
she wrote, and at this point the penmanship had suffered somewhat in its
steadiness. "We have both had some troublesome times, but isn't there a
great deal we can remember of each other with pleasure? Can't it be a
memory which we need not avoid? I was bitterly rebellious and
heart-broken when you ignored the note in which I asked you, as humbly
as I could, to come back, but that is over now--"

_A note which asked him to come back!_ The letter fell from
Farquaharson's fingers. His hands themselves fell limp to the table. He
sat stupefied--staring and licking his lips.

The English officer rose and came over, dropping a kindly hand on his
shoulder.

"I beg pardon, sir," he said, "but are you ill? Can't I get a nip of
brandy?"

Stuart turned his head stupidly and looked up. Then slowly he pulled
himself together, with a shamed realization that the eyes of a hundred
pleasure-seekers had witnessed his collapse. He straightened and set his
jaw. "No, thank you. I'm all right," he declared. "I've been in the
desert, you see, and--" But the Englishman had nodded and gone back to
his table.

Ten minutes later, scornful of over-sea tolls, Farquaharson was filing a
cablegram. The letter had said she would be married "some time in the
winter." It was now past mid-winter. Would there be time? His hand
trembled with his haste as if the saving of a few seconds could avail.


     "Received no note from you. Wrote to you that night begging a
     chance," he scribbled, as his head swam with the effort and frenzy
     of his suspense. "Horrible mistake has occurred. Matter of life and
     death and thousand times more than that that you take no step till
     I see you. Am sailing by first boat. Wait."


That afternoon he dashed across the gangplank of a P. and O. steamer at
Alexandria just as the last whistle blew. While the propellers churned
the Mediterranean waters into a restless wake at the stern, Stuart
walked the decks like a man demented. Would there be time? His fingers
itched for his watch, because his obsession was the flight of hours. But
on the second day out a wireless message came, relaying from Cairo. The
man did not dare open it on deck. He took it to his cabin and there with
the slowness of deep fear, he unfolded the paper.




CHAPTER XIII


Against the stupor of Stuart Farquaharson's brain, as he sat in the
small stateroom of the P. and O. steamer, beat the fear of what he might
read.

Subconsciously his senses recorded small and actual things as the vessel
lurched through a heavy sea: the monotonous rat-tat of the brass
door-hook against the woodwork, and the alternating scraps of sky and
water as the circle of his port hole rose and fell across the line of
the horizon.

He was thinking of the letter that had come to Cairo--and lain there so
long unopened, but he was spared a knowledge of the suspense with which
Conscience had awaited an answer.

She had written it early in the fall and had mailed it endorsed "please
forward" in the care of his New York publishers, so that it had played
tag with him, never catching him, over the length of Europe and, after
that, had zig-zagged along the cities of the Levant and the fringes of
Africa.

Meanwhile, the man to whom it was addressed was wandering from the upper
Nile to Victoria Nyanza and beyond--where mail routes run out and end.
Acknowledging in her thoughts, from the first frost on Cape Cod to the
middle of winter, that temporizing only spelled weakness, Conscience had
none the less temporized. She said to herself: "Nothing he wrote _now_
would alter matters." Still with a somewhat leaky logic she added: "But
I'll give him a month to answer before I fix the date." When the month
had passed without result she granted herself other continuances, facing
alike, with a gentle obduracy, the pleas of her elderly lover and the
importunities of a father who threatened to murder himself with the
self-inflicted tortures of impatience.

At length she capitulated to the combined forces of entreaty, cajolery
and insistence. The fight was lost.

Through the preparations for that wedding she went without even the
simulation of joy or glamour. At least she would be honest of attitude,
but days which filled the house with wedding guests brought to her
manner a transformation. Her decision was made and if she was to do the
thing at all she meant to do it gallantly and with at least the outward
seeming of full confidence. She meant to betray to these visitors no
lurking misery of spirit; no note of struggle; no vestige of doubt. The
eyes which burned apprehensive and terror-stricken, throughout the
darkness of interminable nights, were none the less serene and regally
assured by day. The groom, too, seemed rejuvenated by such a spirit as
sometimes brings to autumn a summer quality more ardent than summer's
own. At the end of his _fiancée's_ doubtings, he fatuously told himself,
had come conviction. She knew at last how much stauncher a thing was his
own dependable strength and ripened manhood than the frothy charm of a
half-fledged gallant who had crumpled under the test.

Among the guests who for several days filled both the manse and
Tollman's house, were two who were not entirely beguiled by Conscience's
gracious and buoyant demeanor. One pair of these observant eyes was
violet blue and full of starry freshness. Intimate letters from
Conscience, in the old days, had invested Stuart Farquaharson with a
romantic guise for their possessor and Eben Tollman scarcely measured up
to that standard.

The other pair of eyes was neither young nor feminine, but elderly and
penetrating. Though Doctor Ebbett's temples were whitely frosted, he and
Eben Tollman had been classmates at Harvard. Now he was to be best man
at his friend's belated marriage. The work in which he had made his name
distinguished had to do with the human brain--its vagaries as well as
its normalities--and his thought was enough in advance of the general to
be frequently misunderstood and sometimes a target for lay ridicule.

On the evening after his arrival he sat in Eben Tollman's study with two
other men who were also classmates. Tollman himself was still at the
manse, and his guests were beguiling themselves with cigars which he had
furnished, and whiskey which he had not--and upon which he would have
frowned.

Over his glass Carton, the corporation lawyer, irrelevantly suggested:

"Eben seems a boy again. It makes us chaps whose children are almost
grown, feel relegated to an elder generation."

"Miss Williams," observed Henry Standing, "has a pretty wit and a
prettier face. I wanted to say to her: 'Now, my dear 

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