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Jane Oglander

by Marie Belloc Lowndes · English · Gutenberg #37243 · 420,815 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Jane Oglander

Author: Marie Belloc Lowndes


        
Release date: August 28, 2011 [eBook #37243]
                Most recently updated: July 11, 2013

Language: English

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Credits: E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries (http://www.archive.org/details/americana)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JANE OGLANDER ***


E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made
available by Internet Archive/American Libraries
(http://www.archive.org/details/americana)



Note: Images of the original pages are available through
      Internet Archive/American Libraries. See
      http://www.archive.org/details/janeoglander00lown





JANE OGLANDER

by

Mrs. Belloc Lowndes


     "Something even more imperious than reason admonishes us that
     life's inmost secret lies not in the slow adaptation of man to
     circumstance, but in his costly victories and splendid defeats."







New York
Charles Scribner's Sons
1911

Copyright, 1911, by
Charles Scribner's Sons

Published April, 1911




JANE OGLANDER




PROLOGUE

    "Elle fut née pour plaire aux nobles âmes,
    Pour les consoler un peu d'un monde impur."


Jane Oglander was walking across Westminster Bridge on a late September
day.

It was a little after four o'clock--on the bridge perhaps the quietest
time of the working day--but a ceaseless stream of human beings ebbed to
and fro. She herself came from the Surrey side of the river, and now and
again she stayed her steps and looked over the parapet. It was plain--or
so thought one who was looking at her very attentively--that she was
more interested in the Surrey side, in the broken line of St. Thomas's
Hospital, in the grey-red walls of Lambeth Palace and the Lollards'
Tower, than in the mass of the Parliament buildings opposite.

But though Miss Oglander stopped three times in her progress over the
bridge, she did not stay at any one place for more than a few
moments--not long enough to please the man who had gradually come up
close to her.

Having first noticed her in front of the bridge entrance of St. Thomas's
Hospital, this man had made it his business to keep, if well behind,
then in step with her.

A human being--and especially a woman--may be described in many ways.
For our purpose it was fortunate that on this eventful afternoon of her
life Miss Oglander happened to attract the attention of an observer,
who, if then living in great penury and solitude, was yet destined to
become what a lover of literature has described as the greatest
interpreter of the human side of London life since Dickens.

When he was not writing, this man--whose name, by the way, was Ryecroft,
and whose misfortune it was to be temperamentally incapable of
sustained, wage-earning work--spent many hours walking about the London
streets studying the human side of London's traffic, and especially that
side which to a certain type of observer, of saunterer in the labyrinth,
is full of ever recurring mystery and charm. He wrote of the depths,
because the depths were all he knew, with an intimate and a terrible
knowledge. But he had your true romancer's craving for romance, and his
eager face with its curiously high, straight forehead crowned with a
shock of rather long auburn hair, was the face and head of the idealist,
of the humourist, and--now that he is dead, why not say so?--of the
lover, of the man that is to whom the most interesting thing in the
world remains, when all is said and done,--woman, and man's pursuit, not
necessarily conquest, of the elusive creature.

Ryecroft had been already on Westminster Bridge for some time before he
became aware that a feminine figure of more than common distinction and
interest, a young lady whose appearance and light buoyant step sharply
differentiated her from those about her, was walking toward him. As he
saw her his eyes lighted up with a rather pathetic pleasure, and in an
instant he had become sensitively aware of every detail of her dress.
She wore a plain grey coat and skirt, and a small hat of which the
Mercury wings, to the whimsical fellow watching her, evoked the Hellas
of his dreams. A black and white spotted veil, which, as was then the
fashion, left the wearer's delicately cut sensitive mouth bare, shadowed
her hazel eyes.

Ryecroft noticed--he always saw such things--that the young lady wore
odd gloves, the one on her right hand was light grey, that clothing her
left moleskin in colour. The trifling fact pleased him. It showed, or so
he argued with himself, that this sweet stranger had a soul above the
usual pernickety vanities of young womanhood.

For a moment their eyes met, and he admired the gentle, not unkind
indifference with which she received his eager, measuring glance.

In a sense, Jane Oglander never saw at all the man who was gazing at her
so intently, and he never saw her again, but for some moments--perhaps
for as long as half an hour--this singular and gifted being felt himself
to be in sensitive, even close, sympathy with her, and in his emotional
memory she henceforth occupied a niche labelled "The Lady of Westminster
Bridge."

Ryecroft allowed Miss Oglander to pass by him, and then quietly and very
unobtrusively he followed her; stopping when she stopped, following the
direction of her eyes, trying as far as might be to think her thoughts,
and meanwhile weaving in his mind a portrait of her having as little
relation to reality as has a woodland scene in tapestry to a real sun
and shadow-filled glade.

"Here," he said to himself, "is a girl who is assuredly not accustomed
to walking the more populous thoroughfares of London by herself. Were
she quite true to type she would be what they called 'chaperoned' by a
lady's maid, that is by a woman who would be certainly aware that I was
following them, and who would probably take my attention for herself. A
dozen men might follow this young lady and she would not be aware of
their proximity. There is something about her of Una, but Una so
completely protected by a quality in herself, and by her upbringing and
character, that she has no need of a lion.

"For me she holds a singular appeal, because she is unlike the only
woman I ever have the chance of meeting, and because we, that gentle,
austerely attractive creature and I, have much in common. Effortless
she has achieved all that I long for and that I know I shall never
obtain--intellectual distinction in those she frequents, the
satisfaction attendant on proper pride, and doubtless, in her daily
life, refined beauty of surroundings. She is very plainly dressed, but
that is because she has a delicate and elevated taste, and happily
belongs to that small, privileged class which is able to pay the highest
price, and so command the best type of gown, the prettiest shoes, the
best fitting gloves--even if she wears them odd--and the most becoming
hat.

"But what has Una been doing on the Surrey side of the Thames?"

Ryecroft smiled; he thought the answer to his question obvious.

"She has been"--he went on, talking to himself, and forming the words
with his lips, for he was a very lonely man--"to St. Thomas's Hospital,
either to see some friend who is in the paying ward, or to visit a poor
person in whom she is--to use the shibboleth of Mayfair--'interested.'
It is a more or less new experience, and though she is evidently in a
hurry, she cannot help lingering now and again, thinking over the
strange, dreadful things with which she has, doubtless for the first
time, now come in contact. She doesn't care for the Houses of
Parliament--they represent to her the thing she knows, for she often
takes part in that odd rite, 'Tea on the Terrace.' But she is
timorously attracted to the other side--to the dark, to the pregnant
side of life. And above all what fascinates her is the river--the river
itself, at once so like and so unlike the Thames she knows above
Richmond where she goes boating with her brothers' friends, with the
young men with whom she seems on such intimate terms and of whom she
knows so extraordinarily little, and who treat her, very properly, as
something fragile, to be cared for, respected...."

When she reached the end of the bridge, after looking to the right and
to the left, the young lady walked across the roadway with an assured
step, and Ryecroft's eager, sensitive face brightened. This was in the
picture, the picture he had drawn and coloured with his own pigments.
"For this kind of young Englishwoman the traffic stops instinctively of
itself," he said to himself; "and she has no fear of being run over"
(perhaps it should be added, that this little one-sided adventure of
Henry Ryecroft's took place before the advent of the trams). And still
he followed, keeping close behind her. Suddenly she turned toward the
Underground Railway, and this annoyed him; he had hoped that she (and
he) would walk down Great George Street, across the two parks, and so
into old Mayfair.

As an alternative he had promised himself the pleasure of seeing her get
into a hansom-cab. Were she to disappear into the ugly gulf of the
Underground it would disappoint him unreasonably. But stop! She had
turned her back on the cavernous entrance to the station and she was
gazing down at the posters of the evening papers.

The placards were all emblazoned with the same piece of news,
differently worded: "General Lingard in London," "Reception of Lingard
at Victoria," "Return of a Famous Soldier."

Ryecroft's lip curled. He had an intellectual contempt for the fighting
man as such, and a horror, nay a loathing, of war. He knew what even a
brief and successful war means to those among whom his own lot was cast,
the London woman whose son, whose brother, whose lover is so often
called Thomas Atkins.

And now, at last, he heard his lady's voice. She beckoned to the
smallest and most ragged of the lads selling newspapers:--

"I want all to-night's papers:" her voice fell with an agreeable cadence
on Ryecroft's ears. He was singularly susceptible to the cadences of the
human voice, and he thought he had never heard a sweeter. She took a
shilling out of her purse, and, rather to his surprise, he saw that her
purse was small, black and worn.

"How much?" she asked gently.

The boy hesitated, and then answered, "Five-pence halfpenny."

She handed him a shilling. "You can keep the change," she said, and a
very charming smile quivered across her face, "for yourself."

The man who was watching her felt touched--unreasonably moved. "Thank
God," he said to himself, "that, unlike many of her friends, she has
nothing to do with the C.O.S.!"

Then to Ryecroft's surprise, instead of going on as he expected her to
do--he had already made up his mind that she was taking the papers home
to an invalid father, or to a brother who had hurt himself in one of
those mad games in which, as the watcher knew well, the young English
oligarch delights to spend his spare time--the young lady turned, and
crossed over again on to the bridge, but this time she chose the other
side, the side which commands the more beautiful view of the London
river.

"Dear me," he said to himself, "the plot thickens!" and then he suddenly
told himself that of course she was going back to the hospital. The
person she was going to see had asked for an evening paper, and in her
generosity she had bought them all.

But on the bridge she stayed her steps, and, opening one of the papers,
spread it out against the parapet, and began eagerly reading it,
unheeding of the human stream flowing to and fro behind her.

Ryecroft gently approached closer and closer to her, and at last he was
able to see what it was she was bending over and reading with such
intentness: "_General Lingard's Home-coming._" "_Splendid Reception at
Victoria Station._" So was the column headed, and already her eyes had
travelled down to the last paragraph:

     "To conclude: by his defeat of the great Mahomedan Emir of Bobo,
     General Lingard has added to the British Crown another magnificent
     jewel in the Sultanate of Amadawa."

Then came a cross-head--"Pen Portrait."

     "Lingard is above all things a fighter. His eye is keen, alert,
     passionless. He is a tall man, and he dominates those with whom he
     stands. His life as a soldier has been from the beginning a wooing
     of peril, and as a result he has commanded a victorious expedition
     at an age when his seniors are hoping to command a regiment. He
     does not talk as other men talk--he is no teller of 'good stories.'
     He is a Man."

Jane Oglander looked up, and there came a glow--a look of proud, awed
gladness on her face.

Then, folding the paper, she walked steadily on. But though she crossed
over the bridge as if she were going to the hospital, to the side
entrance where visitors are admitted, she walked on past the mass of
buildings. Then she turned sharply to the left, Ryecroft still
following, till she came to a small row of houses, respectable, but poor
and mean in appearance, in a narrow street which was redeemed to a
certain extent by the fact that there was a Queen Anne church at one end
of it, and next to the church a substantial rectory or vicarage house.
To Ryecroft's measureless astonishment, she opened her purse, took out a
latch-key and let herself into the front-door of one of the small
houses....

Three weeks later Henry Ryecroft happened to be in that same
neighbourhood, and he suddenly remembered his Lady of Westminster
Bridge. Greatly daring--but he ever loved such daring--he rang at the
door of the house at which he had seen her go in.

A typical Londoner of the hard-working, self-respecting class answered
his ring. She stood for a moment looking at him, waiting for him to
speak.

"Is the lady in?" he asked, feeling suddenly ashamed and foolish. "I
mean the young lady who lives here."

"Miss Oglander?" said the woman. "No, she's away. But I'll give you her
address."

She handed him a piece of paper on which was written in what he thought
was a singularly pretty handwriting:--

    MISS OGLANDER,
     Rede Place,
      Redyford,
       Surrey.

He took the little piece of paper and walked away. When he found himself
on the bridge he dropped the paper into the river. "Oglander," he said
to himself, "a curious, charming name, rhyming with Leander,
philander----" he shook his head and smiled, "no, no, not philander," he
said, speaking the words aloud. "Lavender, that's what her name should
rhyme to,--Lavender...."

Henry Ryecroft, in his way a philosopher, would have been at first
gently amused, and then perhaps moved and interested, had he known both
how right and how wrong had been the kitcat portrait he had evolved out
of his inner consciousness.

He had been right as to the type. He had even been successful in
realizing something of Miss Oglander's inward mind and character from
her outward appearance, but he had been quite wrong as to the present
circumstances of her life.

It was true that she belonged to the privileged class who alone in the
seething world of London have the command of money, and also the
command, materially speaking, of the best. But if born and bred in the
west of London, she now belonged by deliberate choice to the south side
of the Thames. At a moment when she desired to hide herself from the
world, she had chosen that ugly, formless district of London which lies
between Westminster Bridge and Vauxhall Bridge because a distant
relation of her mother's had married a clergyman whose parish lay there,
and he had offered to find her in that parish plenty of hard work to
still her pain.

As a young girl, Jane Oglander had lived the life that Ryecroft imagined
her to be living now. While keeping house for a bachelor brother, she
had seen, from a pleasantly sheltered standpoint, all that was most
agreeable and amusing in the cultivated London world. Treated with the
gentle gallantry and respect Ryecroft had supposed by her brother's
friends, she was--as is so often the case with a young woman who has
been almost entirely educated by men and surrounded with masculine
influences--graver, less frivolous, more austerely refined than were
most of her contemporaries.

Her nature, the core of her, was happy, tender, sensitive, capable also
of a depth of feeling--and feeling always implies a certain
violence--unsuspected by those round her. Thanks to the circumstances of
her birth and upbringing Jane Oglander might conceivably have lived a
long beneficent life, and have finally slipped out of that life without
becoming aware that there were such tragic things as sin, shame, and
acute suffering in the world.

Humility was not lacking to one endowed with many of the other endearing
graces. Jane Oglander was very conscious of the lack in herself of those
practical qualities which make their fortunate possessors ever punctual
and unforgetful of the minor duties of life. She would forget to answer
unimportant letters, mistake the hour of unessential invitations,
arrive late for trains, and, as we have seen, tempt gifts her way by
putting on odd articles of clothing which her wiser friends always wore
in pairs.

But she was never found lacking in that beautiful quality which the
French call _la politesse du coeur_. Thus, her mental lapses were
never of a nature to hurt the feelings or the pride of those whose
feelings and whose pride are often regarded by people more fortunate in
a material sense than themselves as so unimportant as to be probably
non-existent.

First her father, and then her brother, had been instinctively careful
that she should only know the best of life. They had preserved her with
firm decision from any of those influences which might have injured,
thrown ever so small a speck or blemish, on her feminine delicacy. Her
father's death, occurring when she was eighteen, had meant that the
first year of her life as a grown-up girl had been spent in sincere
mourning.

Two very happy years had followed, and then on a certain thirteenth of
September--that is, almost exactly five years ago--there had befallen
Jane Oglander a thing which befalls daily, it might be said hourly, some
unfortunate human being.

There had cut right into and across her young, peaceful life a tragedy
full of ignoble horror, of that horror which attracts the eager interest
and attention of the morbid, the idle, and the vulgar.

Jane Oglander's kind brother, some years older than herself, whom she
had taken as completely on trust as all normal young women take those
who are near and dear to them, had left the club where he had been
dining, and hailing a cab, had driven to a distant quarter of the town,
a quarter of which the very name was unknown to his sister and to those
with whom she generally associated. There, in the space of a very few
moments, he had killed, not only a man who was regarded as in a special
sense his friend and as a peculiarly harmless individual, but also the
woman with whom he had found this man.

Certain circumstances of the affair, circumstances of quite an everyday
nature, though they had appeared to the amazed and agonised sister
incredible, had roused a good deal of public sympathy with Jack
Oglander. Though the fact that he had taken a pistol with him, as well
as some confidences he had made to yet another friend who had played a
minor part in the sordid drama, pointed to premeditation, the verdict
had been manslaughter.

Fortunately, as everyone except his poor sister thought, Jack Oglander
fell ill and died a normal death in the prison infirmary within two
months of his trial.

Friends had rallied--too many rather than too few--round the unfortunate
girl; but her best friends, those to whom she felt she owed the
greatest gratitude, were a certain Richard Maule, one of the trustees
of her small fortune, and Richard Maule's wife, Athena.

Mr. Maule, at the time of the tragedy already an invalid, had been able
to do nothing in an active sense, but his country house, Rede Place, had
immediately become, whenever she chose that it should be so, Miss
Oglander's home. In this matter the husband and wife were one in a sense
they had scarcely ever been, but in the happy, cloudless days which now
seemed to have belonged to a former existence, Jane Oglander had already
become as much as a young girl can be to a married woman some years
older than herself, Mrs. Maule's closest friend.

With these two dear friends was joined in the same wordless sense of
deep gratitude Dick Wantele, Richard Maule's cousin, and in this affair
his spokesman and representative.

It was this young man who, shaking himself free of a constitutional
lethargy, had become the indispensable adviser and friend of both
brother and sister; it was he who had persuaded Jack Oglander to plead
"not guilty"; it was he who had gone to great personal trouble in order
that Miss Oglander might be spared, as much as was possible, the
dreadful publicity into which each such tragic happening brings innocent
victims.

During the weeks which elapsed between the arrest and the trial, Miss
Oglander learnt to lean on Dick Wantele, to ask for, and defer to, his
advice, far more than she was at the time aware. Wantele's tact and good
feeling, and his intelligent withholding of the sympathy with which she
was at that time nauseated, were almost uncannily clever considering the
end he had in view.

An offer of marriage very seldom takes a woman by surprise, but twice
Jane Oglander was so surprised immediately after her brother's arrest.

The very next day a man much older than herself--whom she had regarded
with the kindly affection and indifference with which girls so often
regard one whom they unconsciously consider as a contemporary of their
parents rather than their own--had come and implored her to marry him
there and then. He was a member of the administration then in office,
and he had hinted that by doing this--that is, by marrying him--she
would almost certainly benefit her brother's cause. But though she was
touched, and touched to tears, by the strangely worded proposal, it
formed but an incident, to herself an unimportant incident, in days
crowded with such pain and amazing unhappiness.

Some weeks later, while driving back with Jane Oglander from her first
interview with her brother in prison, during that long--it appeared to
her that endless--drive from Holloway to Westminster, Dick Wantele also
asked her to marry him, and this offer she also refused. But Wantele
would not allow his disappointment to affect their apparently placid
friendship. He it was who brought her the news that her brother was ill,
and he was actually present at Jack Oglander's mournful deathbed in the
prison infirmary.

Rather ruefully aware that it was so, Dick Wantele now stood to Jane
Oglander much in the position her dead brother had once stood. She had
come to feel for him a deep unquestioning affection; it was to him she
would have turned in any new distress.

They met frequently, for though Miss Oglander had become absorbed in the
work among the London poor to which she henceforth dedicated her life,
her happiest, her only peaceful days--for she took keenly to heart the
material cares and sorrows of those with whom she was brought in
contact--were the weeks she spent each year at Rede Place.

When there, the thrice welcome guest of Richard and Athena Maule, and of
their kinsman and housemate Dick Wantele, Jane's content would have been
absolute had her host and hostess been on the terms of amity Miss
Oglander supposed all married people as noble as Richard and as good and
beautiful as was Athena should be. But she had in this matter, as one so
often has to do when dealing with a dual human relation, to compromise.
She gave, that is, her grateful love to both these people who, if
themselves on unhappy terms, were yet one in their affection for her.

It was to her an added perplexity and pain that her friend Dick sided
with his cousin Richard Maule rather than with Richard's wife Athena.
Nay, he went further--he took no pains to conceal his contemptuous
indifference to the beautiful woman who was perforce his housemate for
much of the year. Small wonder that Mrs. Richard Maule generally
absented herself from home when her friend Jane Oglander was there to
take the place only a woman can fill in a country house of which the
master is an invalid, his heir a bachelor.

So it was that the two women only saw much of one another when Mrs.
Maule was in London.




CHAPTER I

    "A flag for those who go out to war,
    A flag for those who return,
    A flag for those who escape hell fire,
    And a flag for those who burn."


In spite of many a proverb to the contrary, a plan or plot, when
carefully imagined and carried out by an intelligent human being, does
not often miscarry or go wrong.

The fact that Mrs. Kaye was now sitting staring through the window of
the little waiting-room of Selford Junction was the outcome of a
plan--what she knew well the one most concerned would have called a
plot--which had succeeded beyond her expectations. She had come there
secretly in order that she might see the last, the very last, of her son
now starting on his way to rejoin his regiment in India. She was here in
direct disobedience to his wish, aware that had he known she would be
there he would have found some way of eluding her vigilance.

The plan she had made had succeeded by its very simplicity.

After the quiet, measured "Good-bye and God bless you, Bayworth!"
uttered by the father to his only son at the gate of the
poverty-stricken garden of the vicarage; after the mother's more
emotional farewell, Mrs. Kaye, leaving her husband to go out into the
village, had hastened back to the house. There she had flung on her
shabby bonnet, and waiting a moment till the trap in which her boy was
driving to Selford Junction, some four miles off, had turned the corner,
she had gone quickly out of the garden. Walking at a rapid pace, for she
was still a vigorous woman, she had taken a short cut across the fields
to the small station where she knew she would be able to catch the slow
local train which was run in connection with the London express.

Once at Selford Junction, it had been a comparatively easy matter for
her to slip into the waiting-room and take up her station close to the
grimy window commanding the platform alongside of which the express had
already drawn up.

Mrs. Kaye had had two motives in doing what she had done. Her first and
very natural motive was that of seeing the last, the very last, of her
son. Her second, which she hid even from herself, was to discover why he
had refused, with a certain fierce decision, her company as far as
Selford Junction, where, ever since he was a little boy bound for his
first school, she--his mother--had always gone with him when there had
come the hard moment of saying good-bye.

To the tired labourer in the further corner of the waiting-room; to the
sickly-looking, weary working woman, accompanied by two children, who
had unwillingly made way for her, the sight of Mrs. Kaye was familiar,
and, in an apathetic way, unpleasing.

Each of them--even the children--had disagreeable associations with her
tall, spare figure, her severe looking weather-beaten face, crowned with
still abundant fair hair streaked with grey. They knew, with a long,
contemptuous knowledge, her short black serge skirt and the
old-fashioned beaded mantle, which formed her usual week-day, outdoor
costume in any but the very hottest weather.

The poor are better judges of character than the rich. Mrs. Kaye's hard
good sense and intelligent idea of justice, secured her the grudging
respect of her husband's parishioners, but her rigid closeness about
money--which they argued must mean either exceptional poverty or else
unusual meanness--alienated them. And yet the working woman, sitting
there, looked at Mrs. Kaye with a certain furtive sympathy. She well
knew that Bayworth Kaye--he had been christened Bayworth because it was
his mother's maiden name--was leaving for India that day.

Now Bayworth was in a sense part of the village. He had been born at the
Vicarage. His father's parishioners had followed him through each of the
stages of his successful young life, and they all liked him; partly
because the kind of success Bayworth Kaye had achieved is not the kind
which arouses dislike or envy, and even more because he was an
open-handed and good-natured young gentleman, very unlike--so the
villagers would have told you--either his gentle, unpractical father or
his hard mother.

Also, and this was very present to the woman now watching Mrs. Kaye,
"th' parson's son" had been, during the last few months, the hero of one
of those dramas which, because of certain elemental passions slumbering
in all men and in most women, whatever their rank or condition, always
arouse a certain uneasy, speculative interest and sympathy in the
onlooker. All unconsciously the village was grateful to young Kaye for
having provided them with something to talk about, something to laugh
about, something, above all, to relieve the uneventful dullness of their
lives.

This was why the man and woman whom Mrs. Kaye--if she was conscious of
their presence at all--regarded as merely of the earth, earthy, were
keenly aware of the last act of the tragi-comedy being played before
their eyes. They knew why their clergyman's wife was sitting here in the
waiting-room, instead of standing out on the platform saying a last word
to her son; and over each stolid face there came, when the eyes of these
same faces thoroughly realised at what the lady sitting by the window
was looking, an expression of cunning amusement, as well as of doubtful
sympathy.

Mrs. Kaye's eyes were fixed on a group composed of two people, a man and
a woman. The man--her son Bayworth Kaye--was standing inside one of the
first-class carriages of the London express; and below him on the
platform, her right hand resting on the sash of the open carriage
window, stood Mrs. Maule, the woman whom Mrs. Kaye had only half
expected to see there. In coming to Selford Junction to see the last of
Bayworth Kaye, Mrs. Maule was doing a very daring thing; those of her
neighbours and acquaintances whose opinion counted in the neighbourhood
would have said a very improper and shocking thing.

To Mrs. Kaye--such being her nature--there was a certain cruel
satisfaction in the knowledge that she had been right in her suspicion
as to why her son had told her that he would far prefer, this time, to
say good-bye at home. Given all that had gone before, it was not
surprising that Mrs. Kaye had guessed the reason why her boy had refused
her company at Selford Junction.

And yet, now that the reason stood before her, embodied in a slim,
gracefully posed figure which she and the two dumb spectators of the
little scene knew to be that of the squire's wife, she felt a dull pang
of resentful surprise.

She had hoped against hope that Bayworth would be here alone, and that
there might perhaps come her chance of a last word which would break
down the high, gateless barrier which had risen during the last few
months between herself and her son. Mrs. Kaye staring dumbly through the
waiting-room window knew that last word would never now be uttered.

Young Kaye's good-looking, fair face--the look of breeding derived from
his mother's forebears crossed with the more solid good looks which had
been his father's--was set in hard lines; yet he was making a gallant
effort to bear himself well, and he was smiling the painful smile which
is so far removed from mirth. The anguished pain of parting, the agony
he was feeling had found refuge only in the eyes which were fixed on his
companion's face.

Mrs. Kaye tried to see if that beautiful face, into which her son was
gazing with so strange and tragic a look of hungry pain, reflected any
of his feeling. But the delicately pure profile, the perfect curve of
cheek and neck, the tiny ear half concealed by carefully dressed masses
of dark hair, in their turn covered by a long grey veil becomingly wound
round the green deer-stalker hat, revealed nothing.

Now and again she could see Mrs. Maule's red lips--lips that told of
admirable physical fitness--move as if in answer to something the other
said.

Bayworth Kaye was leaning out, speaking earnestly. With a sudden gesture
his lean, brown fingers closed on the little gloved hand resting on the
window-sill. Mrs. Kaye could not hear what her son was saying, and she
would have given the world to know, but in the composed, steady glance
directed by her through the waiting-room window there was nothing to
show the bitter, helpless anger which oppressed her.

The excursion train for which the express had been waiting glided into
the station. Mrs. Kaye reminded herself with a strange mixture of
feelings that the time was growing very short; that not long would her
eyes be offended, as they were now being offended. In five minutes the
London train was due to start.

And then there came over the mother an overmastering desire which swept
everything before it. She must hear what it was her boy was saying; she
must see him clearly once more; she must run the risk of his becoming
aware that she had spied on him.

Mrs. Kaye rose from the hard wooden seat, and she made what was for her
a mighty effort to open the grimy waiting-room window; but it remained
fast.

Words were muttered behind her, words of which in her agitation she was
quite unconscious.

"Help the lady, can't ye!"

The big labourer in the corner rose to his feet; he lumbered across the
boarded floor, and laid his mighty shoulder against the sash; the flange
gave way, and as the window opened there seemed to rush in a loud,
confused wave of sound. A crowd of Saturday holiday-makers were
streaming over the platform, and as they swayed backwards and forwards
they completely hid for a moment the man and woman on whom Mrs. Kaye's
eyes had been fixed.

Then, as if the scene before her had been stage-managed by some master
of his craft, the crowd thinned, divided in two, seeking on either side
the few third-class carriages in the express, and Mrs. Kaye once more
saw her son and Athena Maule; saw, with a sharp pang, that the look of
strain and anguish had deepened on Bayworth Kaye's face, that his poor
pretence at a smile had gone.

The train groaned and moved a little forward, bringing the first-class
carriages quite close to the waiting-room window. Putting out her hand,
Mrs. Kaye could almost have touched Mrs. Maule on the shoulder; she
shrank back, but the two on whom her whole attention was fixed were so
far absorbed in each other as to be quite oblivious of everything round
them. And at last Mrs. Kaye heard the voice she loved best in the world,
nay the only voice she had ever really loved--asking the pitiful, futile
little question:

"Athena? Darling--say you're sorry I'm going!"

There was a pause, and then the woman to whom the question had been put
did in answer a very extraordinary thing. After having looked round, and
with furtive, deliberate scrutiny noted that the platform was now
practically deserted save for one man standing some way off, facing the
bookstall and with his back to the express--she moved for a moment up on
to the step of the railway carriage and turned her face, the lovely face
now flushed with something like tenderness and pity, up to the young
man.

"Of course I'm sorry you're going----"

Her clear, delicately modulated tones floated across the short space to
where Mrs. Kaye was sitting.

"Kiss me," breathed the beautiful lips; and then with a touch of
impatience, "You can kiss me good-bye. Don't you understand?"

His sudden response, the way his arm shot out and crushed her face, her
slender shoulders, was far more than she had bargained for. She stepped
back and shook herself like a bird whose plumage has been ruffled.

And then the train began to move.

Young Kaye leant out, dangerously far, but, in answer to a slight
movement of Mrs. Maule's hand, he sank back quite out of his mother's
sight. She heard his last hoarse cry of "good-bye," and for the moment
it had a strange effect on her heart. It seemed to set a seal on her
deep pain and wrath, to bring a certain fierce comfort in the knowledge
that her boy was gone, that he had left the shameful joy of the last
year, the tragic pain of the last few weeks, behind him. She even told
herself that, in the years that must elapse before he came home again,
he would have time to forget--as men do forget--the woman who had made
such a fool and worse, such a traitor, of him.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Maule stood for a while looking after the train. Things had not
fallen out quite as she had expected them to do. She sometimes--not
often--acted on sheer impulse, but she seldom did so without very soon
repenting of it. She had been suddenly moved to do a daring thing,--one
of those things which give a sharp edge to a blurred emotion. But she
had not known how to allow, so she told herself, frowning, for the
existence in the subject of her experiment of an unreasonably primitive
violence of feeling.

She moved back and looked about her with an uncomfortable, rather
fearful, look in her eyes. As she did so, the man standing by the
bookstall also moved, and she became aware, with the quick instinct she
had for such things, that he had a striking, in fact, a very peculiar
face. She hoped he had seen nothing of that foolish little scene with
Bayworth Kaye.

As she looked at the stranger--he was still unconscious of her
presence--a wave of colour came over her face, or rather over as much of
her face as the veil swathed about her hat allowed to be seen of it.
With a curious, impulsive, un-English movement she pulled off one of her
gloves and put up her hand to her hot cheek. Then she turned abruptly
and began walking to the further end of the platform.

Mrs. Kaye, looking grimly after her, believed that Athena Maule had seen
her, and, having the grace to be ashamed, had blushed. But, in so
thinking, the clergyman's wife made one of her usual mistakes concerning
the men and women with whom her life brought her into unwilling contact.
Mrs. Maule had not seen her, and had she done so it may be doubted
whether she would have felt any more ashamed or annoyed than she did
now.

       *       *       *       *       *

With a feeling of infinite lassitude, of physical as well as mental
fatigue, Mrs. Kaye turned her back on the window through which she had
seen a sight which was to remain with her for ever.

There were still some minutes to run before there would come into the
station the local train in which she could return to her now empty home,
and so drearily her mind went back, taking a rapid survey of the whole
of her son's short life and hitherto most prosperous career.

Mrs. Kaye came herself of a long line of distinguished soldiers, and
even before her child's birth she had been determined that he should
follow in the footsteps of her own people, not in those of his mild,
kindly father's. From his cradle the lad had been dedicated to the god
of battles, and only the mother herself knew what her intention had
cost her in the way of self-denial and of incessant effort.

Inadequate as had been their clerical income, supplemented by pitifully
small private means, she and her husband had grudged nothing to
Bayworth. Mrs. Kaye was a clever woman, cleverer than most; she had been
at some pains to find out the best way in which to put a boy through the
modern military mill, and everything had gone with almost fairy-like
smoothness from first to last.

From the preparatory school, where she had ascertained that he would
have among his mates the sons of the then Minister for War, down to the
day when he had won the Sword of Honour at Sandhurst, young Kaye had
been everything that even his exacting mother had desired. Nay more, he
had once or twice said a word--only a word, but still it had amply
repaid Mrs. Kaye for all she had gone through--implying that he
understood the sacrifices his father and mother had made for his sake.

When he had been specially chosen to take part in a dangerous frontier
expedition, it was his father who had appeared miserably anxious, but it
was with his mother, softened, carried out of herself, that the whole
neighbourhood had eagerly sympathised when there had come the glorious
news that Bayworth Kaye had been mentioned in despatches for an act of
reckless courage and gallantry, and recommended for the Victoria Cross.

Then had followed the lad's happy home-coming, and quite suddenly,
before--so it now seemed to his mother--Bayworth had been back a week,
Mrs. Maule had thrown over him the web of her fascinations. Not content
with having him constantly about her at Rede Place, she had procured for
him invitations to the houses where she stayed, and made him her slave
in a sense Mrs. Kaye had not known men could be enslaved.

Mother and son had had one painful discussion in which the mother had
been worsted. With terror she had plumbed for a moment the hidden depths
of her boy's heart. "You tell me there has been talk," he said very
quietly. "If you will give me the name of any man who has talked
unbecomingly of Mrs. Maule, I will deal with him----" "Deal with him,
Bayworth? What could you do?" "I could kill him." He had uttered the
words almost indifferently, and Mrs. Kaye looking into his set face had
said no more.

It was well that his father had known and suspected nothing.

The whole matter was to Mrs. Kaye the more amazing and iniquitous
because she had hitherto always defended Mrs. Maule when that lady's
conduct was discussed, as it constantly was discussed, in the
neighbourhood of Rede Place. At Redyford Vicarage such talk had never
been tolerated; and with a few stinging words of rebuke Mrs. Kaye had
ever put the gossips in their places.

It had suited her far better to have to deal with a brilliant,
beautiful, rather reckless woman, who was much away from home, and who
always treated her with the courtesy and indifferent good-humour due to
an equal, rather than with the type of great lady to whom she knew some
of the other clergy's wives were in subjection.




CHAPTER II

     "L'opinion dispose de tout. Elle fait la beauté, la justice, et le
     bonheur qui est le tout du monde."


To say that the most important events of life often turn on trifling
incidents has become a truism, and yet it may be doubted if any of us
realise how especially true this is concerning the greatest of human
riddles, the riddle of sex.

Had the man of whose presence on the platform of Selford Junction Mrs.
Maule had become aware, turned round and watched the London express
before it steamed out of the station, his own immediate future, to say
nothing of that secret, inner life of memory which each human being
carries as a burden, might have been considerably modified. But at the
moment when Mrs. Maule had been engaged in trying her not very happy
experiment with Bayworth Kaye, the only other occupant of the platform
was staring with a good deal of interest and curiosity at a long row of
illustrated newspaper pages pinned dado-wise round the top of the
bookstall.

The newsagent's clerk, when arranging his wares that morning, had had
what he felt to be an unusually bright idea. Picking out what he
considered the two most attractive items in the illustrated paper with
which he was dealing, he had repeated these items alternately with what
to most onlookers would have seemed an irritating regularity.

The two pages he had selected for this honour were very different. The
one consisted of a set of photographs, nine officers in uniform:
_General Hew Lingard and his Staff, just returned home after the
victorious Amadawa Expedition_. "Here," the bookstall clerk had probably
argued unconsciously, and quite wrongly, to himself, "is a page that
will interest gentlemen and boys. Now I must find something that will
cause ladies to purchase the paper," and he had accordingly put next to
the page of military portraits one consisting of a single
illustration--the reproduction of a beautiful painting of a beautiful
woman.

The man staring up at the black and white pages was true to what the
clerk took to be the masculine type of newspaper buyer and reader, for
he devoted his whole attention to the group of military portraits. He
had, however, a special reason for staring up as he was now doing at the
rather absurd dado, for it was his own portrait which occupied the place
of honour in the centre of the page.

Being the manner of man he was, Hew Lingard felt at once elated and
ashamed at seeing himself hung up in this queer pillory of fame. He was
moved more than he would have cared to admit, even to himself, at seeing
the honour paid to that old photograph taken some seven years before,
at a time when he was out of love with life, having been, as he
imagined, shelved by a small home appointment.

The portraits of his staff were comparatively new; they had doubtless
been supplied in haste by the happy mothers and sisters of the sitters,
and his grey eyes, set under deep overhanging brows, rested on them
proudly. It was to these eight comrades--so he would have been the first
to admit, nay to insist--that he had owed much of the sudden
overwhelming success which had now come to him.

At last he resolutely concentrated his attention on the opposite
illustration, and coming up a little closer to the stall, he read what
was printed underneath:

"This modern picture, only painted ten years ago, fetched ten thousand
pounds at Christie's last week. It is a portrait of the beautiful Mrs.
Richard Maule in the character of a Greek nymph. Mrs. Maule, before her
marriage to the well-known owner of Rede Place, one of the show places
of Surrey, was Miss Athena Durdon. Her father was British Consul at
Athens, and her mother a Greek lady of rank; hence her interesting and
unusual Christian name."

"Why, it's Jane's friend," he said to himself. "How very odd that I
should see it here and now!"

General Lingard had glanced at the illustration, when his eye had first
caught sight of it, with distaste. But now that he knew that this rather
fantastic picture was a painting of the dearest friend of the woman who
was going to be his wife, he looked with kind, considering, and even
eager eyes at the Greek nymph.

The famous soldier did not find it easy to adjust his imaginary portrait
of Athena Maule, Jane Oglander's Athena, to this lovely embodiment of a
pagan myth. But artists, or so he supposed, sometimes times take strange
liberties with their sitters--besides, this was not in any sense a
portrait....

"Your train's in, sir. Redyford is the second station from here."

He turned away and walked quickly to the side-platform where the short
local train was standing ready to start.

       *       *       *       *       *

There were still some minutes to spare, and Mrs. Maule, on her way to
the train, stopped and looked up with a curious sensation in which
pleasure and anger both played a part, at the dado formed of the two
pages taken from the _Illustrated London News_.

Only one of those pages--that which was a reproduction of the picture
sold the week before at Christie's--attracted her attention and aroused
in her very mixed sensations: pleasure at the thought that her portrait
should be displayed in a fashion so wholly satisfying to her own
critical and now highly educated taste; anger at the knowledge that the
splendid painting had been sold to an American, instead of taking
its place in the picture-gallery of Rede Place. When the picture had
suddenly come into the market, she had ardently desired that her
husband should buy it, and she had even ventured to convey her wish to
him through his cousin, Dick Wantele, but to her mortification Richard
Maule had refused.

Mrs. Maule now remembered with a sharp pang of self-pity the
circumstances which had surrounded the painting of this picture. A
portrait which her husband had commissioned the famous artist to paint
of her was scarcely begun when the painter, who had taken an adjoining
villa to theirs at Naples for the winter, had asked her whether she
would sit to him in the character of a Greek nymph. Pleased and
flattered, she had assented. Then, mentioning what she was about to do
to her then indulgent and adoring husband, he, to her great
astonishment, had disliked the idea: disliked it sufficiently to beg her
as a personal favour to himself to make some excuse for not keeping her
promise.

But even in those malleable days Athena Maule was incapable of denying
herself a fleeting gratification. While appearing to assent to her
husband's wish she had secretly fulfilled her promise to the artist, and
the picture had excited such keen admiration when it was first exhibited
that it had made Mrs. Richard Maule's beauty famous even before she came
to England. The episode had also resulted in her first serious quarrel
with Richard Maule.

When he had first seen the painting--for rather against her will the
great artist had insisted on showing it to him--Mr. Maule had expressed
an admiration it was impossible not to feel for the technical qualities
of the work, but he had refused, with angry decision, any thought of
commissioning a replica for Rede Place.

       *       *       *       *       *

At last Mrs. Maule made her way to the train, and deliberately she chose
a carriage which had, as its one occupant, the man she had noticed
standing by the bookstall a quarter of an hour before. She had liked the
look of him then, and she liked it even more now. She wondered where he
was going to stay--whether with people she knew.

As she sat down in the opposite corner, she glanced at him with
instinctive interest and curiosity; he was lean and brown, and his face
had the taut, tense look of the man who achieves--whose life is spent in
combating forces greater than himself.

She longed for something to distract her mind from the emotion--a
mingling of impatient annoyance and self-pity--induced by her parting
scene with Bayworth Kaye. She blamed herself for having come to Selford
Junction; they, she and Bayworth, had said good-bye, in a real sense,
yesterday. Why, acting on a good-natured impulse, had she been so
foolish as to write him a last word saying she would come and see him
off? He had not understood, poor fellow--men never did. Instead of
having something touching, sentimental--in a word, soothing to look
back to--there would only be a sad, painful memory. She was still, even
now, haunted by young Kaye's desperate, unhappy eyes--and yet she had
been so kind, so very kind to him!

Yes, she had made a mistake in coming to Selford Junction. With a
pettish movement she pulled down her veil yet further over her face.

Three more travellers made sudden irruption into the railway carriage,
and both Athena Maule and the man opposite to her turned round with
frowning faces; they were one in their dislike of noise and vulgarity.
But the man soon looked away, indifferent to his surroundings; he opened
a German Service paper, and was soon reading it intently.

Athena Maule glanced distastefully at the three people who had just come
into the carriage. She knew them to be a Lady Barking and Lady Barking's
married daughter, very wealthy people new to the neighbourhood. They had
been pointed out to her by her husband's cousin, Dick Wantele, only a
day or two before, driving past in one of the horseless carriages which
were then becoming the fashion, but with which Richard Maule obstinately
refused to supersede--or even allow them to be added to--his stables.

She also knew, and in a more real sense, the man who was with the two
ladies. He was a Major Biddell, one of those men only to be found, so
Mrs. Maule now reminded herself, in hospitable England. Such men drift
about from country house to country house, making themselves useful to
the hostess; they are able to take part with modest success in any of
the games and sports that may be going on; and with advancing years they
endear themselves to the dowagers by an unceasing flow of malicious and
often very unsavory gossip.

Athena Maule had no use for this type of man, and as for the particular
specimen who was now fussing round his two companions, thrusting
illustrated papers into their hands, pulling up and down the window, and
offering to change seats with them--she remembered that she had snubbed
him once, cruelly. They had met at a moment when she was enjoying the
new, the intoxicating experience of a suddenly acclaimed beauty.

She turned her head away, for she did not wish to be recognised by Major
Biddell; and then, as the train moved out of the station, she suddenly
became aware, not without a certain amusement, that she was being
discussed by the two ladies.

The younger lady, "the vulgar married daughter," as Athena mentally
described her, had opened the illustrated paper with which Major Biddell
had provided her, and begun looking at the reproduction of the picture
which had fetched a record price at Christie's.

"If that is really like Mrs. Maule, then she's a very beautiful woman,"
she said thoughtfully. "Is she really very like that, Major Biddell? You
know her, don't you?"

"Oh yes. I know her quite well," he said promptly. "She often stays with
the Kershaws of Cumberland, old friends of mine."

He bent his sleek head over the page, and jerked his eyeglass in and out
of his right eye. "H'm," he said, "rather a fancy portrait that! I doubt
if the fair Athena was ever as lovely. Of course she may have been when
she first married poor Maule, a matter of fifteen to sixteen years ago."

"Has she been married as long as that?" said Lady Barking. "I _am_
surprised! I thought Mrs. Maule was still quite a young woman."

"She's fairly young still--but then Maule married her when she was
almost a child. She was Greek, you know, and the women blossom and fade
very quickly out there. But still, I'm not denying that she's
good-looking. In fact she's still an uncommonly handsome woman," he
admitted generously. "I saw her at Ascot this year, and I was quite
struck by the way she was wearing."

The elder lady leant forward with sudden eagerness. "If you know her so
well"--she hesitated--"I wonder if you would mind going over and seeing
her, Major? Rede Place is the only house that hasn't called on us since
we've been in the neighbourhood."

Major Biddell shook his head very decidedly.

"Oh no," he said, "you don't understand the kind, my dear lady! It's
true that I do know her very well in a sense--but the likes of her
doesn't condescend to look at the likes of me," he laughed
uncomfortably. "She has no use for any one who isn't in love with her,
or who hasn't been in love with her. The first time I saw her the whole
crowd were at her feet. I was the only one who stood apart, so you can
imagine whether she likes me or not!"

"Do tell us, Major Biddell; is it really true that----" the voice
dropped, but the two other silent, unknown occupants of the carriage
caught a word or two which the young lady who spoke them had certainly
not intended them to hear.

"They're all like that in her particular set," declared Major Biddell
briefly. He looked round uncomfortably. It is always a mistake to talk
of people, especially women, by their names, in a railway carriage or
any other semi-public place.

Then the mother chimed in: "One does hear very peculiar stories about
her, Major."

The little man winced. "Well," he said, "there's a lot of excuse for
her, isn't there? Think of the state Maule's in! There she is, a
beautiful woman tied to a kind of mummy!"

"I don't think a woman, however good-looking she may be, has any excuse
for breaking her marriage vows," said the elder lady uncompromisingly.

She felt that Major Biddell was not behaving very nicely to her. She had
understood that he was a very useful man to know, but during the last
two or three days it had begun to strike her that he was a selfish
little man. Of course he could have contrived a meeting between herself
and Mrs. Maule if he really had a mind to do so! She also felt indignant
with him for pretending to her and to her daughter that there was
nothing specially scandalous in the behaviour of Mrs. Maule.

Why, everybody knew what Mrs. Maule was like! Even before she, Lady
Barking, had become a part of Society, she had heard of the beautiful
Mrs. Maule and her "goings on"; and in this part of the world the
escapades of Mrs. Maule, the extraordinary things she had been known to
do, were the standing gossip dish of the neighourhood. Even now,
everyone was talking of the way in which she had bewitched young
Bayworth Kaye, the Redyford clergyman's son, during the last few months.
It was absurd for Major Biddell to pretend that Mrs. Maule was just like
everybody else!

Perhaps something of what she was feeling betrayed itself on her large,
round face, for Major Biddell moved a little nearer to her. After all,
Lady Barking was his hostess, and he desired to stay on at her
comfortable, luxuriously appointed house for at least another ten days.

"I see you know a good bit about her," he said, grinning. "I can tell
you one really funny story about her," and then he proceeded to tell it,
the two hanging on his lips, though the elder of his listeners felt
uncomfortable, half-ashamed at listening so eagerly to what in another
mood she would probably have described as "garbage."

A hand was suddenly laid on Major Biddell's shoulder. He faced about
quickly. A stranger of whose presence in the railway carriage he had
scarcely been aware, was standing before him, tall, grim, formidable.

"I must ask you, sir," the stranger spoke very clearly, "to withdraw
every word that you have said concerning Mrs. Richard Maule. As for the
story you have just told, you and I heard it at Undulah a good many
years ago. It was told--I remember the fact, if you do not--of another
lady, of, of--no matter--" he stopped himself abruptly.

Major Biddell jumped up. If no gentleman in the higher sense of the
word, he was also no coward.

"I shall say exactly what I like," he said sharply, "and I question your
right to interfere with me in any way. You say you met me at Undulah a
good many years ago? If that's the case, you have the advantage of me!"

There was a moment's pause; then it was broken by a nervous laugh and a
whisper from daughter to mother, "Poor man, I suppose he's another of
Mrs. Maule's victims!"

"Perhaps I should add," said the stranger, his voice thick with anger
and contempt, "that though I have never met Mrs. Maule, I know quite
enough of her to be assured that this vile gossip, these--these foul
allegations, are utterly, damnably untrue."

Major Biddell felt very much relieved. For a horrible moment he had
supposed, not unnaturally, that the man who had just administered so
sharp a rebuke to him was nearly related to Mrs. Maule. He had at once
realized that the speaker was a member of the profession he had once
adorned, nay more, he was uncomfortably aware that the man's dark face
had been seen by him before. The unpleasant stranger was eccentric--to
say the least of it. But of course there are such men in the
world--Major Biddell thanked God he hadn't hitherto met many such--who
go through life breaking lances for the sex.

The little scene was over in a very few moments, and, after one quick
look round, the woman who sat in the furthest corner had apparently
taken no interest in what was going on. Her face was turned away. She
was staring out of the narrow window. Major Biddell, glancing at her
apprehensively, could only see her slim, straight back, and the veil
twisted round her small hat hiding the dark shining coils of hair.

The train began to slow down. The two ladies got up with an air of
rather ostentatious relief. Major Biddell opened the door and jumped
out. He carefully helped his companions down the high steps. As all
three moved away, Lady Barking's sonorous voice could be heard saying,
"I should think that man was mad!"

"Oh no, he wasn't, mother," said her daughter loudly. "He's an adorer of
the lady--that's what it is. I expect he's on his way to stay there
now!"

"But they never have any visitors at Rede Place except that Miss
Oglander."

The train moved on. To the woman sitting in the corner the atmosphere of
the railway carriage was still charged with a not unpleasing
electricity.

Very deliberately she raised her veil and subjected the man sitting
opposite to a long, thoughtful scrutiny. She raked her memory in vain
for the strongly-drawn dark face, the large, loosely-made figure.

Suddenly he raised his eyes and met her full, considering glance. No,
they had never met before. No man who had ever known Athena Maule, even
for only a brief space of time, would look into her lovely, mobile face,
meet the peculiar glance of her large heavy-lidded violet eyes, as this
stranger was now doing, coldly, unchallengingly.

Mrs. Maule reddened, and hurriedly pulled down her veil. She felt--and
it was a disconcerting sensation--as if she had been snubbed.




CHAPTER III

    "The world is oft to treason not unkind,
    But ne'er the traitor can admirers find."


It was the evening of the same day.

Two men were sitting together in what was called the Greek Room by the
household of Rede Place.

The elder of the two was close to the fireplace, his stiff, thin hands
held out to the blue shooting flames of a wood fire. Although he was
dressed for dinner, there was that about him which suggested invalidism.
Cushions were piled behind him in the deep, capacious chair in which he
seemed to crouch rather than to sit, and a light rug was thrown across
his knees, although it was only the 1st of October.

This was Richard Maule, whose name was known to the cosmopolitan world
of scholars as a Hellenist, an authority on classical archæology, on the
slowly excavated story of long-buried civilizations. To those who dwelt
in the present, and who only cared for the things of to-day, he was
enviable as the owner of a delightful and, in its way, a famous estate
in Surrey.

Rede Place! The enchanting, rather artificial pleasaunce created out of
what had been a primeval stretch of woodland by an early Victorian
millionaire! The banker _virtuoso_, Theophilus Joy, had committed what
we should now consider the crime of pulling down a fine old Tudor
manor-house in order to reproduce in the keener English climate and
alien English soil those Palladian harmonies of form which have their
natural home only beneath southern skies.

There had been a time in the 'fifties and the 'sixties when Rede Place
had been a synonym for all that was exquisite and perfect in art and
life. But Richard Maule, though he shared many of the tastes, and had
inherited all the wealth of his grandfather, was a recluse. Not even the
possession of a singularly beautiful and attractive wife ever made him
throw open Rede Place in the old, hospitable, magnificent way in which
it had been thrown open during his own childhood and early youth.

As far as was possible, he lived alone--alone, that is, with the
companionship of his wife, when she was willing to favour him with her
companionship, and fortunate in the constant society of his kinsman,
Dick Wantele, whom all the world knew to be Richard Maule's ultimate
heir, that is, the future owner of Rede Place.

Each of the rooms of the long Italianate house was filled with curious,
rare, and costly works of art, offering many points of interest to the
collector and student, and this was specially true of the room in which
now sat Richard Maule and Dick Wantele.

In 1843 Theophilus Joy, the friend rather than the patron of Turner, had
persuaded that eccentric and secretive genius to accompany him from
Italy to Greece. The enduring result of this journey was a remarkable
series of water-colours forming the decoration of what was henceforth
called the Greek Room of Rede Place. Over the mantelpiece was a copy, by
the artist, of "Ulysses deriding Polyphemus." Below the Turner
water-colours, and forming a latticed dado round the room, were a row of
lacquered bookcases containing Richard Maule's unique collection of
books and pamphlets, in every language, dealing with the Greece of the
past and of the present.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dick Wantele sat as far from the fire as was possible, close to a window
which he would have preferred to have open. His long, angular figure was
bent almost in two over his knee, on which there lay propped up a block
of drawing paper. He was drawing busily, sketching a small house, by the
side of which was a rough plan of what was evidently to be the inside of
the house. A heavily-shaded lamp left in shadow his pale, lantern-jawed
face, only redeemed from real ugliness by its expression of alert
intelligence.

The two, unlike most men living in the difficult juxtaposition of owner
and heir, were on the most excellent terms the one with the other.
Theirs indeed was the happy kind of intimacy which requires no words,
no futile exchange of small talk, to prove kindliness and understanding;
and when at last Richard Maule spoke, he did not even turn round, for he
was used to the other's instant comprehension and sympathy.

"Then the Paches are bringing over General Lingard to dinner next
Tuesday?"

The younger man looked up quickly. "Yes, on Tuesday," he said. "Athena
seems to think that will be the best day for them to come. You see, Jane
Oglander will be here then."

"I'm glad of that," said Richard Maule.

"I hope their coming won't bore you, Richard. Athena couldn't get out of
it. You see Pache practically asked her to ask them over. They want to
show their lion, and they also want to entertain their lion! I confess
I'm rather looking forward to seeing Lingard."

"I've seen so many lions." Mr. Maule spoke with a touch of weary
irritation. And then he added, after a rather long pause, "I never cared
for soldiers, at any rate not for your modern man of war who goes out
with a Gatling gun to kill a lot of poor niggers."

"Lingard has done more than that, Richard. He succeeded where three
other men had failed, and what is really wonderful, he did it on the
cheap."

"That I admit _is_ wonderful," said Richard Maule dryly, "but I don't
suppose the people who are now fêting him are doing it as a reward for
his economy. However, no matter, we'll entertain the Pachian hero."

The mahogany door at the end of the long room opened, then it was closed
quietly, and a woman came in, bringing with her a sudden impression of
vitality, of youth, of buoyant strength into the shadowed, over-heated
room.

Athena Maule advanced with easy, graceful steps till she stood, a
radiant figure, in the circle of warring light cast by the fire and by
the shaded lamps. Her cheeks were flushed, tinted to an exquisite
carmine that seemed to leave more white her low forehead and now heaving
bosom.

She stopped just between the two men, glancing quickly first at one and
then at the other. And then at last, after a perceptible pause, she
spoke, her clear accents, slightly foreign in their intonation, falling
ominously on the ears of her small audience of two.

"I've just had a letter from Jane Oglander."

The younger of the two men wondered with a certain lazy amusement
whether Athena was aware of how dramatic had been her announcement of a
singularly insignificant fact. As to the older man--he who sat by the
fireplace--he had turned and deliberately looked away as the door
opened. But now it was he who spoke, and this to Dick Wantele was
significant, for Richard Maule very seldom spoke of his own accord, to
his wife.

"Then isn't she coming to-morrow? It seems a long time since Jane left
us--in August, wasn't it?"

"Jane Oglander," said Mrs. Maule, her left hand playing with the tassel
terminating the Algerian scarf which slipped below her bare dimpled
shoulders, "Jane Oglander wishes me to tell you both that--that she is
going to be married."

Richard Maule fixed his stern, sunken eyes on his wife. It was a
terrible look--a look of mingled contempt and hatred.

"Anyone we know?" asked Dick Wantele quietly.

Athena Maule looked at him with a grudging admiration. Dick was
certainly what some of her English friends called "game," and her French
friends "_crâne_." She had now lived in England for some eight years,
but she did not yet understand Englishmen and their ways; and of all the
strange Englishmen she had come across, there were few that struck her
as so queer--queer was the word--as her husband's cousin, Dick Wantele.
But he had long ceased really to interest her.

Walking slowly down the long gallery upstairs, Mrs. Maule had thought
deeply how she should make her startling announcement, how reveal the
news which had hurt her so shrewdly as to make her wish--such being her
nature--that others should share her pain.

She had thought of coming in with Jane Oglander's letter open in her
hand, but no, this she decided would be rather cheap, and would also in
a measure prepare Dick--it was Dick whom she wished to hurt, whom she
knew she would hurt. Richard Maule was incapable of being hurt by
anything. But still it was very pleasant to know that even Richard would
be irritated at the thought that Jane Oglander, who had now been for so
long the one healing, soothing presence in their sombre household, and
whom he had stupidly believed would end by marrying Dick Wantele was now
going to disappear into the morass of British matronhood.

"Anyone we know?" she repeated consideringly. "No, not exactly, but
someone who is quite famous and whom we shall know very soon."

Dick Wantele shrugged his shoulders with a nervous movement. His
cousin's wife was fond of talking in enigmas, especially to him, and
especially when she knew he desired to be told a simple fact simply and
quickly.

Then something unexpected happened. Richard Maule again spoke, and again
addressed his wife.

"I suppose," he said, "you mean General Lingard?"

"How did you know? Has Jane written to you?" Mrs. Maule flashed the
questions out.

The one who looked on was vividly aware that this was the first time, so
far as he knew, for years, that Athena Maule had asked direct questions
of her husband, questions demanding answers.

Even now Richard Maule did not vouchsafe his wife the courtesy of a
reply. It seemed to him that her questions answered themselves, and in
the negative.

But Dick Wantele got up. "Is this true, Athena?" he asked abruptly. "Is
Jane engaged to General Lingard? What an extraordinary thing! Why, he
hasn't been back from West Africa more than a fortnight."

She nodded. "Yes!--it's quite true. Apparently his parents were friends
of her father ages ago. She knew him when she was a child. They met
again quite by chance last time he was in England. Then he began to
write to her. It all seems to have been arranged by letter. At least she
says they corresponded all the time he was away, and then he appears to
have gone straight to her on the evening of the day he arrived in
London. I suppose," she concluded not very pleasantly, "that she could
not dash his triumph--and so she accepted him. It is very difficult,"
she continued, "for a woman to say no to a hero."

Dick Wantele smiled. His eyes met hers with a curious flash of rather
cruel raillery. Her own dropped for a moment; then they seemed to dilate
as she went on, "I really do know what I am talking about, for you see,
Dick, Richard was a hero when I married him. In Greece we all looked
upon the great, the noble, the famous Mr. Maule as quite a hero!"

For a moment she allowed her full glance to rest on the unheroic figure
crouching by the fire, and Dick Wantele felt keenly vexed with himself.
He was not often so foolish as to wage war with Richard Maule's wife in
Richard Maule's presence.

All three hailed with relief the interruption caused by the announcement
of dinner. Wantele got up with more alacrity than usual. He walked with
a quick, sliding step to where Mrs. Maule was still standing. With a
little bow he offered her his arm.

As they left the room Mr. Maule's valet came in by another door.
Quickly, noiselessly, he brought forward an invalid table and placed on
it a tray. There was soup, some whole-meal bread, a little very fine
fruit, and a small decanter of claret. Then after the man had asked, "Is
there anything else you require, sir?" and had noted the scarcely
perceptible shake of the head with which Mr. Maule answered him, the
master of Rede Place was left alone.

Richard Maule looked at the silver bowl containing his half-pint of
soup--everything he ate was measured and weighed and prepared with the
most scrupulous accuracy according to a great doctor's ordinance--with a
kind of fastidious distaste. Since his illness he had grown particular
about his food, and yet as youth and man no one had been more
indifferent than he to the kind of luxury by which most men set such
store. During the years which had immediately preceded his marriage, it
had been his boast that he could live for days and even weeks on the
rough, unpalatable fare dear to the Greek peasant.

Steadying his right hand with his left, he ate a spoonful of soup, then
pushed the bowl away. The news his wife had taken such malicious
pleasure in telling had disturbed and pained him more than he thought
anything could now disturb and pain him. He was attached to Jane
Oglander; she was the only human being apart from Dick whose presence
was, if not agreeable, at least not unpleasant to him. In the rare
moments of kindly thought and musing on the future which sometimes
visited him, he saw Jane mistress of Rede Place, bringing peace and,
what is so much nearer the heart of life, love satisfied, to Dick
Wantele. He had felt sure that Jane, with her tenderness, her simplicity
of nature, would end where most women of her type end, by surrender.

That she would marry anyone excepting Dick Wantele had seemed
impossible. But in this life, as Richard Maule had learnt far too late,
it is what would have seemed impossible which happens.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dick Wantele and Mrs. Maule sat opposite one another at a round table
set at one end of the great tapestry-hung dining-room. A stranger
seeing them would have thought the plain young man singularly blessed in
having so lovely a table-mate sitting with him at so perfectly cooked
and noiselessly served a meal as they were now enjoying.

But though there was a side of his nature peculiarly alive to certain
sensuous forms of beauty, to-night Wantele only saw in Athena the
malicious, almost the malignant, bearer of ill news.

But civilized man, if eating in company, must also talk, and so at last,
"One sees now," he said reflectively, "why the worthy Paches have been
so greatly honoured."

"What do you mean?" asked Mrs. Maule. It was, she found, sometimes
easier to ask Dick to explain himself than to try and guess what he
meant.

"I mean," said Wantele, "that one can now understand why General Lingard
accepted his dull relations' invitation. It was because he knew that his
young woman would be in the neighbourhood, staying here with us."

"Your choice of phrase," said Athena sharply, "is not very refined."

"Isn't it?" he said mildly. "But then, Athena, I don't know that I ever
set up to be a particularly refined person."

And then, as they sat sparring and jarring as they so often did at their
quickly-served meals, Dick Wantele gradually became aware that Mrs.
Maule was eating nothing, nay more, that her short upper lip was
trembling--large tears rolling down her cheeks.

"Why!--Athena?" he exclaimed. "You mustn't allow this unexpected news
to"--he hesitated for a word--"to upset you so much." He looked up
across at her with a not very kind curiosity. His light observant eyes
suddenly seized on what was to him an amazing sight, namely that a
folded letter, covered with a fine clear handwriting he knew with a dear
familiar knowledge, was working up out of Mrs. Maule's short bodice and
forming a grey patch on her white neck. In spite of himself, Wantele was
rather touched.

"Of course I have always known that Jane was devoted to you," he said
musingly, "but I didn't realise that the feeling was reciprocated to
such an extent as it seems to be!"

A flush of stormy anger reddened Mrs. Maule's face.

"With Jane often here it has been bad enough!" she said passionately.
"But what will my life be like henceforth?--I mean when I shan't even
have her to look forward to? Richard will force me to be here more than
ever now."

"I think you will still manage to be a good deal away----"

He had been right after all. Athena was only thinking of Jane Oglander's
marriage as it affected herself.

"Of course I shall stay away as much as I can!" she cried. "You and
Richard much prefer my absence to my presence----" her look challenged a
contradiction Wantele did not--could not utter.

"And then--and then that isn't all, Dick! I didn't mind being here when
Jane was here too to make things go well----"

"Perhaps Jane will sometimes leave her hero during the very few weeks of
the year that you are, as it were, in residence, Athena. He's going, it
seems, to be given a home appointment. I suppose they will be married
very soon?"

Wantele did not look at her as he spoke. He was tracing an imaginary
pattern on the tablecloth. The numbness induced by the horrible blow she
had dealt him was beginning to give way to stinging stabs of pain. He
longed to know more--to know everything--to turn as it were a jagged
knife in his heart-wound.

Mrs. Maule dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief, then she laughed.

"No, no, Dick," she cried, "there's no such luck in store for you--I
mean for us! We're going to lose Jane--once for all. Jane has taken it
rather badly. I never thought that dear saint would fall in love!" She
suddenly became aware that his eyes were fixed on the letter she had
thrust into the bodice of her gown when walking down the long gallery
upstairs. She took it out of her warm and scented bodice, and held it
out to him.

"I think you'd better read what she says."

Wantele looked at the pretty hand holding Jane Oglander's letter, but he
made no attempt to take the folded paper. "I should _like_ to read it--"
he said lightly, "but I think I'd better not."

"Yes, do read it, Dick. Why shouldn't you?" She added slowly, "There's
something about you in it too----"

Wantele hesitated, and then he fell. He leant over and took Jane
Oglander's letter from her hand. His own was shaking, and that angered
him. He turned his chair right round, and holding the two sheets of grey
paper up close to his eyes deliberately read them slowly through.

As at last he handed them back to her, he said quietly, "You told me a
lie just now, Athena. I am not mentioned in Jane's letter."

"Indeed you are!" She pointed to a thin line of writing across the top
of the second sheet.

"'I hope Dick won't mind much'--" she read aloud.

"There's something else!" he cried quickly, and getting up strode round
and took the letter again from her with a masterful hand. "'I hope Dick
won't mind much'--" he read aloud, "'or dear Richard either.'"

Then he let the letter drop on the cloth beside her. The numbness had
all gone, the pain he felt had become almost intolerable.

Mrs. Maule again tucked Jane Oglander's letter inside her bodice, then
she got up. As he held the door open for her, Wantele put his hand, his
cool, long-fingered, impersonal hand, on her arm.

"Athena," he said softly. "I wonder how it is that you have always had
the gift of making me do things of which I knew I should live to feel
ashamed. A unique gift, dear cousin----"

She turned and laughed mischievously up into his pale suffering face.
"The woman tempted me, and so of course I ate!" she exclaimed. "You're
not much of a man, Dick, but you have always been a thorough man in the
matter of making excuses for yourself!"




CHAPTER IV

    "He smarteth most who hides his smart
    And sues for no compassion."


After he had closed the door behind his cousin, Dick Wantele did not go
back to the little round table, its fruit and wine. Instead he began
walking up and down the dining-room, his hands clasped behind his back.
The reading of Jane Oglander's letter had brought with it sharp and
instant punishment.

Even to her dearest woman friend Jane had said little of her inmost
feelings, but the man who knew her with a far more intimate knowledge
than any other human being would ever know her, understood. Jane loved
Lingard. Loved him in a way he, Wantele, had not thought her capable of
loving, and the revelation hurt him horribly. Why had he failed where
another had succeeded with such apparent ease?

He felt a sudden hatred of the house he was in and of everything and
everybody in it. Feeling pursued, accompanied by mocking demons, he
hurried out of the dining-room and made his way into the square hall or
atrium, as old Theophilus Joy had called it. Each of the marble figures
there seemed alive to his humiliation and defeat.

Passing into a vestibule which led directly out of doors he put on a
light coat, for he was delicate, Mrs. Maule would have said over-careful
of himself--then he jammed a wide-brimmed soft hat on his head, and
quietly let himself out of the house.

It was a still, warm night, but the moist fragrant air was heavy with
the premonition of coming winter. Wantele walked a certain distance down
the broad carriage way, then he cut sharply to the left, among the
brambles and underwood, under high beech trees. Once there, he began to
walk more slowly, keeping to the narrow path by a kind of instinct.

He welcomed the tangible fact of solitude. Even were he urgently sought
for, it would be a long time before they could find him unless he
himself raised his voice and gave a hulloo. Richard, for once, must
spend his evening solitary.

Could she have seen Wantele's long thin face as it was now, serious with
the seriousness born of distress, Athena Maule would have been satisfied
that the news she had been at the pains to tell in so dramatic a fashion
had struck at the heart of at least one of her hearers.

Dick Wantele belonged to the type of man who achieves what he desires to
achieve because his desire is generally well within the measure of his
powers.

He had been confident that in time he would wear down Jane Oglander's
gentle resistance, and lately--all the very time she had been
corresponding with General Lingard, certainly receiving and perhaps even
writing love-letters--he had believed that she was making up her mind to
reward him for what had become his long fidelity. He had even gone so
far as to think that only Athena Maule's watchful antagonism stood
between Jane Oglander and himself.

To Wantele, the knowledge that he had been a fool stung intolerably. He
had one poor consolation, the consolation of knowing that he had hidden
successfully the various feelings provoked in him by the announcement,
both from the cruel eyes and from the kind eyes which had watched to see
how he took news which meant so much to him. But that, after all, was
but an ignoble consolation in his great bereavement.

Walking there in the darkness, with memory as his only companion, he
realised all too shrewdly what the disappearance of Jane Oglander from
his life would mean. Till to-night, Wantele had been wont to tell
himself bitterly that the existence he was forced to lead was one by no
means to be envied by other men of his age and standing. But he now
looked back to yesterday with longing, for yesterday still held a future
of which the major possibility was the fact that Jane might become his
wife.

He had first met Miss Oglander at a moment when he had just come through
a terrible secret crisis, one which had left him free of all the
familiar moorings of his early life.

He had touched pitch, and to his own conscience and imagination he had
been most vilely defiled. And yet circumstances had made it imperative
that he should not only pretend to be clean, but also that he should
affect complete ignorance of the pitch he had touched. Jane Oglander,
then a young, clear-eyed girl, with a certain tender gaiety, a
straightforward simplicity of nature which had strongly appealed to his
own more complex character, had helped him and indeed made it possible
for him to do this.

Then had come Jack Oglander's mad act and its awful consequences, and
even this had helped Dick Wantele further to obliterate the memory of
his own ignominious secret. He had thrown himself, with his cousin,
Richard Maule's, full assent, into the whole terrible business, and Jane
Oglander had found his dry sense and quiet, efficient help an untold
comfort. No wonder the ties of confidence and friendship between them
had grown ever closer and closer, seeming to justify the young man in
the hope that the time must come when Jane would become his wife.

To-night the news flung at him by Athena Maule wiped out the immediate
peaceful past, and phantoms which he believed himself to have banished
for ever sprang into being--dread reminders that no man can ever hope
to escape wholly from his past.

At last, with a feeling of lassitude and relief he came to a broad low
gate. The gate was locked, but he climbed over it, as he had often done
before. The path went on still under trees and among underwood till it
widened and became merged in a clearing, in the middle of which stood a
long low building still called by its old name of the Small Farm, and
now the home of one to whom Wantele often made his way in moments of
depression and revolt.

When Dick Wantele had first made Mabel Digby's acquaintance, she had
been a plain, observant, self-reliant little girl of nine, whose most
striking features were bright brown eyes set in a fair freckled face,
and masses of light yellow hair worn by her in two long pigtails. The
only child of a certain Colonel Digby, whose death had taken place when
she was sixteen, Mabel Digby had elected to go on living in the place
where her father had brought her motherless, seven years before, and
Dick Wantele had been largely instrumental in her settlement in the old
farmhouse which was on the edge of the Rede Place estate.

At first the governess who had brought her up, and who had educated her
in the old-fashioned, thorough, and perhaps rather limited way more
usual forty years ago than now, had lived with her; but when Mabel was
nineteen this lady had had to go back to her own people, and she had
had no successor.

To the scandal rather than to the surprise of the neighbourhood, Miss
Digby decided that henceforth she would live alone. She was well aware,
though those about her were not, that her father's old soldier servant
and his wife were really more efficient and vigilant chaperons than the
kind, gentle governess had been.

With Wantele the relations of Mabel Digby had always been of a
singularly close and sexless nature. She had naturally begun by looking
at him with her father's, the old Indian Mutiny veteran's eyes; that is,
she had been gently tolerant of his fads, while neither understanding
nor sharing them.

Then, as she grew older, as she read the books that he lent her and
talked over with her, she had moved some way from her father's--the
simple-minded soldier's--position, and she judged Dick Wantele rather
hardly, half despising him for having so contentedly, or so she thought,
sunk into the position of adopted son to his wealthy cousin. When she
had become aware that he desired to marry Jane Oglander, a fact of which
she had possessed herself by asking him the direct question, and
receiving an equally direct answer, she had at once decided that he was
not nearly good enough for the lady on whom he had fixed his affection,
and time had in no sense modified her first view.

Still, without her knowing it, Dick Wantele counted for much in Mabel
Digby's life. She was proud of his friendship and believed herself to be
the recipient of all his secrets. When he was attacked, as he often was
in her presence--for she was on the whole liked, and he was regarded by
the neighbourhood as "superior" and "supercilious"--she always took his
part.

Intimate as they were with one another, and with that comfortable
intimacy which knows nothing of the doubts or recriminations which lead
to what are significantly called "lovers' quarrels," there were subjects
on which neither ever touched to the other. Never since the day on which
Mabel Digby, at the time only fifteen, had asked him the indiscreet
question which she was now ashamed to remember, had either made any
allusion to Wantele's feeling for Jane Oglander. The other subject which
was taboo between them was Mabel Digby's relation to young Kaye.

Wantele was no schemer, but there was something in him which made him
aware of the schemes of others, even against his own will and desire. He
had become aware that Mrs. Kaye regarded Mabel Digby as a suitable
daughter-in-law elect, almost on the day that the thought had first
presented itself to the clergyman's wife and on Mabel's behalf he had at
once said to himself, "Why not?" But during the last year he had been
glad to believe that Mabel had so little suspected or assented to Mrs.
Kaye's wishes as to ignore her one-time playfellow's infatuation for
Athena.

       *       *       *       *       *

His eyes had become accustomed to the star-lit darkness, and he could
see the straight stone-flagged path which led to the porch of the Small
Farm. As he walked up it a dog rushed out from its kennel and began
barking. "Be quiet," said Wantele harshly. "Be quiet, old dog! Keep that
sort of thing for your enemies and the enemies of your mistress--not for
me."

Then he walked on, the dog at his heels, till he got to the porch. There
he waited for a moment, for it had suddenly occurred to him that Mabel
Digby might not be alone; one of the tiresome people who lived in
Redyford--the village which had now grown into a town--might be spending
the evening with her. Before knocking at her door he must assure himself
that she was alone. Old friends as he and she were, he had never come
there before so late as this.

He walked on past the porch, till he stood opposite the uncurtained
window of the curious hall dining-room of the person he had come to see.
He remembered that Colonel Digby had hated curtains, and that his
daughter shared the prejudice.

Mabel Digby was dressed in the rather old-fashioned looking high white
muslin dress she generally wore in the evening when at home by herself.
Her fair hair was drawn back very plainly from her forehead, and coiled
in innumerable plaits. Colonel Digby had desired his girl to do her hair
in that way when she had first turned it up, and by a queer little bit
of sentiment in a nature which prided itself on its lack of sentiment,
Mabel had always remained faithful to her father's fancy.

Sitting on a low chair between the deep fireplace and the long narrow
oak table which ran down the middle of the room, Mabel Digby was now
engaged in burning packets of letters, and she was going through the
disagreeable task in the rather precise way which made her do well
whatever she took in hand. Her long and not very easy task was nearly at
an end, and Wantele saw clearly the few letters that remained scattered
on the table. He recognised the bold black handwriting, the large square
envelopes, the blue Indian stamps.

"How odd," he told himself, "that the child should have waited till
to-night to burn these old letters of Bayworth Kaye!"

Mabel had never made any secret of her correspondence with the young
soldier. Still, when one came to think of it, it was odd that she had
troubled to keep Bayworth's letters--odder still that now to-night, the
day of Bayworth Kaye's departure, she should be burning them....

After all, why should he go in and see her now? People have to bear
certain troubles alone. Mabel Digby had set him, in this matter, a good
example.

Wantele turned on his heel. He walked on to the grass and plunged into
the herbaceous border which still formed a fragrant autumn hedge to the
little lawn. His object was to get away without being seen or heard, by
the gate which gave on to the country road and which formed the proper,
orthodox entrance to the Small Farm. But as he was making his way to the
gate the front door opened, and Mabel Digby came out into the darkness.

"Aren't you coming in, Dick?" she called out. "I couldn't think what had
happened to you! I saw you at the window, and then you disappeared
suddenly. Why didn't you let yourself in? The door isn't locked, but the
gate is." Mabel Digby had a loud, rather childish voice, but now Wantele
was glad enough to turn and follow her into the low-pitched living room
of the old farmhouse.

As he walked through into the curious and charming room, at once so like
and so unlike the living-rooms of the smaller farms on his cousin's
estate, he saw that Mabel Digby had thrown a large, brightly-coloured
Italian handkerchief over those of the letters which still remained on
the table.

"The women in the cottages do that," she said, following the direction
of his eyes. "When they hear the step of a visitor at the door, they
throw a dishcloth over whatever it is they want to hide, the little drop
of comfort or what not, but it doesn't deceive the visitor--at least it
never deceives me! I always know what there is under the dishcloth. And
you know--I mean you saw, Dick, what there is under my dishcloth."

She spoke quickly, a little defiantly. Her cheeks were burning, her
brown eyes very bright. She also felt unhappy, moved out of her usual
self to-night.

Wantele walked over to the fireplace. He sat down in the ingle nook and
held out his hands. He was a chilly creature, and though he had been
walking fast he felt curiously cold.

Poor little Mabel! This was interesting and--and rather sad. He wondered
uncomfortably how much she had seen, guessed, of Bayworth's infatuation
for Athena Maule. She must have seen something....

"Yes," he said at last. "It's never much use trying to prevent one's
neighbours knowing what one's got under one's dishcloth. But there have
never been any letters under mine. As a matter of principle I always
burn any letters I receive, however temporarily precious they may be."

"There's a great deal to be said for your plan," she said. Then she
began tearing up each of the few letters which remained on the long oak
table, and threw the pieces, one by one, into the heart of the fire.

He watched her in uncomfortable silence. At last she came and sat down
opposite Wantele.

"I suppose you have heard the great news," he said abruptly. "I mean,
the piece of good fortune which has befallen the Paches?"

The girl looked up. Wantele was still staring into the fire, but his
expression told her nothing.

"No," she said indifferently, "what is it?"

"They've got General Lingard staying with them, and they're bringing him
over to dinner on Tuesday. Athena is going to ask you to meet him."

"Lingard?" cried the girl. "Not Lingard of the Amadawa Expedition! D'you
really mean that I'm going to meet him?"

A ring of genuine pleasure had come into the young voice which a few
moments before had only too plainly told a tale of dejection and
bitterness.

Wantele turned and looked at her. For the first time that evening he
smiled broadly, and there came into his eyes the humorous light which
generally dwelt there.

"I suppose you know all about him," he said dryly. "I suppose you
followed every step of the Expedition?"

"Of course I did!" she exclaimed. "How father would have loved to meet
General Lingard"--there came a touch of keen regret into her voice.

"I expect you'll meet your hero very often before you've done with him,
Mabel"--as he said the words he struck a match and lit a cigarette--"for
he and Jane Oglander are going to be married."

"General Lingard and Jane Oglander?" Mabel could not keep a measure of
extreme surprise and excitement out of her voice, but she was, what her
dead father's old soldier servant always described her as being, "a
thorough little lady," and after hearing Wantele's quiet word of assent
to her involuntary question, she refrained, without any seeming effort,
from pursuing the subject.

At last Wantele got up. "Well," he said. "Well, Mabel? This is a queer,
'unked' kind of world, isn't it?"

She nodded her head, and without offering him her hand she unlatched the
door.

When she knew him to be well away, she came back and, laying her head on
the table, burst into tears. She loved Jane Oglander--she rejoiced in
Jane's good fortune--but the contrast was too great between Jane's fate
and hers.

But for Athena Maule, but for the spell Athena had cast over Bayworth
Kaye, she, Mabel, would probably by now have been Bayworth's wife, on
the way to India--India the land of her childish, of her girlish
dreams.




CHAPTER V

     "Nay, but the maddest gambler throws his heart."


Richard Maule waited a while to see if his cousin would come to him, and
then he went up to his bedroom.

He soon dismissed his man-servant, and the book he had meant to read in
the night--a book on the newly-revealed treasures of Cretan art--lay
ready to his feeble hand on the table by the wide, low bed which was the
only new piece of furniture placed there since the room had been the
nursery of his happy childhood. But he felt unwontedly restless, and
soon he began moving about the low-ceilinged, square room with dragging,
heavy footsteps.

When they had brought him back ill to death, as he had hoped, from Italy
eight years before, it was here that he had insisted on being put; and
there were good reasons for his choice, for the room communicated by
easy shallow stairs with that part of the house where were the Greek
Room, and the library which had been arranged for him by his grandfather
as a delightful surprise on his seventeenth birthday.

Mr. Maule's bedchamber was in odd contrast to the rest of Rede Place.
The furnishings were frankly ugly, substantial veneered furniture had
been chosen by the sensible, middle-aged woman to whom Theophilus Joy,
after anxious consultation with the leading doctor of the day, had
confided his precious orphan grandson. His old nurse's clean,
self-respecting presence haunted, not unpleasantly, the room at times
when Richard Maule only asked to forget the present in the past.

His wife, Athena, had never been in this room. Even when he was lying
helpless, scarcely able to make himself understood by his nurses, the
stricken man had been able to convey his strong wish concerning this
matter of his wife's banishment from his sick room to Dick Wantele, and
Athena had quietly acquiesced....

As time had gone on, Richard Maule had become in a very real sense
master of this one room; here at least none had the right to disturb him
or to spy on his infirmities unless he gave them leave.

He went across to the window which commanded a side view of the door by
which the inmates of Rede Place generally let themselves in and out.
Dick, so he felt sure, was out of doors--no doubt walking off, as the
young and hale are able to do, his anger and his pain.

A great yearning for his kinsman came over Richard Maule. Drawing the
folds of his luxurious dressing-gown round his shrunken limbs, he
painfully pushed a chair to a window and sat down there. And as he
looked out into the October night, waiting for the sound which would
tell him that Dick had come in, he allowed himself to do what he very
seldom did--he thought of the past and surveyed, dispassionately, the
present.

To the majority of people there is something repugnant in the sight of
an old man married to a lovely young woman, and this feeling is
naturally intensified when the husband happens to be in any way infirm.
Richard Maule was aware that these were the feelings with which he and
his wife had long been regarded, both by their immediate neighbours and
by the larger circle of the outer world where Mrs. Maule enjoyed the
popularity so easily accorded to any woman who contributes beauty and a
measure of agreeable animation to the common stock.

But this knowledge, painful as it might have been to a proud and
sensitive man, found Richard Maule almost indifferent. Had he been
compelled to define his feeling in words, he would probably have
observed that, after having brought his life to such utter shipwreck as
he had done, this added mortification was not of a nature to trouble him
greatly.

Richard Maule, in his day, and still by courtesy, a noted Hellenist, had
come to a sure if secret conclusion concerning human life. He believed
that the old Greeks were right in thinking that Fate dogs the steps of
the fortunate, and lies in ambush eager to deal those who are too happy
stinging, and sometimes deadly, blows. How else account for that which
had befallen himself?

Till he had been forty-four, that is, till only ten years ago--for
Richard Maule was by no means old as age counts now--his life had been,
so he was now tempted to think looking back, ideal from every point of
view.

True, he had lost both his parents in childhood, but he had been adored
and tenderly cherished by his mother's father, the cultivated, benignant
Theophilus Joy, of whom he often thought with a vivid affection and
gratitude seldom vouchsafed to the dead. He trusted that the old man in
the Elysian Fields was ignorant of the strange gloom which now enwrapped
Rede Place.

The Fate in which Richard Maule believed had only dealt two backward
blows at the cultivated hedonist whom Richard Maule now knew his
grandfather to have been. One had been the premature death, by
consumption, of the wife so carefully chosen, to whom there had never
been a successor; and then, twenty-two years later, the death of his
only child, Richard Maule's mother.

But these two offerings had satisfied grim Nemesis, and perhaps it was
open to question whether the creator of Rede Place had not spent a
really happier old age in moulding and fashioning his grandson, as far
as possible, to his own image, than if the beloved wife and only
daughter had lived.

In these latter days, when Richard Maule was enduring, not enjoying,
life, he was apt to find a certain consolation in going back to the days
of his delightful childhood. His grandfather had been the King, he the
Heir Apparent, of a kingdom full of infinite delights and happy
surprises to an imaginative and highly-strung little boy.

Each of the ornate rooms of Rede Place, each of the grassy glades
outside, was to him peopled with groups of agreeable ghosts--the ghosts
of the clever men and witty women whom his grandfather delighted to
bring there at certain times of each year, especially during the three
summer months, when the beautiful pleasaunce he had created out of an
equally exquisite wilderness was in glowing perfection.

The only dark period of the boy's life--and that he would now have been
unwilling to admit--was the two years spent at Eton--the Eton of the
'sixties. His grandfather, though worldly-wise enough not to wish the
lad to grow up too singular a human being, had not realized that the
life he had made his grandson lead up to the age of fourteen was not a
fit preliminary to a public school. At the end of two years the boy was
withdrawn from Eton and once more entrusted, as he had been before, to
the care of an intelligent tutor, and to teachers of foreign tongues.

Oxford proved more successful, but with Balliol, with which he had many
pleasant memories, Richard Maule had one sad association. It was while
he was sitting there in Hall that he had received the news of his
grandfather's death.

Then had begun for Richard Maule the second happy period of his life.

He had become a wanderer, but a wanderer possessed of the carpet of
Fortunatus, and with a youth, a vigour, a zest for life sharpened to
finer issues than had been the nature of Theophilus Joy.

Very soon Richard Maule made a real place for himself among that band of
thinkers and lovers of the best which may always be found at the apex of
every civilised society. His enthusiasm for the Greece of the past
translated itself into an ardent love of modern Attica. He built a villa
on Pentelicus, and there, within sight of the Ægean waters, he dreamed
dreams with the Greek patriots to whose aspirations he showed himself
willing to sacrifice, if need be, both blood and treasure. There also he
would bring together each winter bands of young Englishmen, dowered with
more romance than pence. The very brigands respected the rose-red marble
villa and its English owner, and Greece for many years was his true
country and his favourite dwelling-place.

This being so, it was perhaps not so very strange that in time Richard
Maule should have chosen an Ionian wife. His large circle--for in those
days the owner of Rede Place was a man with admiring friends in every
rank and condition of life, almost, it might be said, in every country
and capital of Europe--were much interested to learn that if Mrs. Maule
had borne before her marriage the respectable English name of Durdon,
she was through her Greek mother a Messala, the representative of a
house whose ancestors had borne titles transmitted to them from the days
when Venice held sway over the seven islands.

As was meet, the philo-Hellenist had met his future wife during a stay
in Athens, and to him there had been something at once fragrant and
austere in a courtship conducted in a rather humble villa reared on the
cliff at Phaleron, from whose cramped verandah there lay unrolled the
marvellous panorama of the plain of Athens, and eastwards, across the
bay, Hymettus.

It was there that Athena Durdon, her beauty made the more nymph-like and
ethereal by the opalescent light of a May moon, consented to exchange
the meagre life which had been led by her in the past as daughter of the
British Vice-Consul at Athens, for the life she had only known--but
known how well!--in dreams, that of the wife of an Englishman possessed
of a limitless purse and the key to every world.

Now, to-night, looking back on it all, stirred out of his usual
apathetic endurance by the knowledge of what Dick Wantele was feeling,
Richard Maule smiled, a grim inward smile, when he remembered how, even
during their brief honeymoon, spent at his ardent desire at Corinth,
Athena had made it quite clear that what she longed for was Paris,
London, or perhaps it would be more true to say the Champs Elysées and
Mayfair! They had been standing--he looking far younger than his
forty-five years, she in one of the white gowns in which he loved to see
her, but the simplicity of which she even then deplored--close to the
Pierian spring, when she had, by a few playful, but very eager, words
shown him what was in her heart.

       *       *       *       *       *

And yet, whatever he might now believe, during the first two years which
had followed his marriage Richard Maule had been a happy man--happier,
he had been then wont to assure himself, than in the days before he had
married his enchanting, wayward, and often tantalisingly mysterious
Athena. In those days none had ever seemed to regard Richard Maule as
unreasonably older than Athena, for he had retained an amazing look, as
also an amazing feeling, of youth.

Then in a day, an hour, nay a moment, he had been struck down.

Not even his cousin, the young man whom he now trusted and loved as men
only trust and love an only son, had ever received any explanation of
what had happened. To that stroke--that act of the malicious gods, as
Richard Maule believed--neither he nor his wife ever made any allusion;
indeed, when Dick Wantele had once spoken of the matter to Athena she
had shrunk from the subject with shuddering annoyance.

The facts were briefly these. Richard Maule, walking in the garden of a
villa he had taken close to Naples, had suddenly been seized with some
kind of physical attack. He had lain in the hot sun till by a fortunate
chance there had come up to where he was lying his wife, Athena herself.
She had been accompanied by a young man, an Italian protégé of the
Maules, who had discovered well-born musical genius starving in a garret
of the paternal palace he had had to let out in suites of apartments to
pay debts contracted not only by himself but by his brothers.

This youth had been treated with the kindliest, most delicate generosity
by the man whom he was wont to describe as his English saviour. The two,
Mrs. Maule and the young Italian count, had been in a summer-house not
many yards from where Mr. Maule must have fallen, but so absorbed had
they been in a score on which the count was working that they had heard
and seen nothing of what was happening in the garden outside.

One curious effect of the change in Mr. Maule's physical condition was
the sudden dislike, almost horror, he betrayed for the genius to whom he
had been so kind. So it had finally been arranged by Mrs. Maule, with,
it was understood, the full assent of her husband, that the young man
whose friendship with his benefactor had been so strangely and sadly
interrupted, should continue his musical studies at the latter's
expense, the only stipulation being that he should never come to England
when the Maules happened to be there.

Since that time, that is eight years ago, Richard Maule had practically
recovered, not his health, but what he was inclined to style with a
twisted smile, his wits.

       *       *       *       *       *

Suddenly Dick Wantele's dark figure emerged into the moonlight from
under the trees which in the daytime now formed a ruddy wall round the
formal gardens of Rede Place. Mr. Maule moved back from his window. He
did not wish Dick to think he had been waiting, watching for him.

And then the sight of the dark figure in the moonlight had recalled to
the owner of Rede Place other vigils kept by him during the last year.

Sometimes, very often of late, Bayworth Kaye, unthinking of the honour
of the woman he loved, had tried to lengthen the precious moments he was
to spend with her by striking across that piece of moonlit sward which
could be seen so clearly from Richard Maule's window.

But the young soldier had always left the house by a more secret
way--Athena had seen to that--a way that led almost straight from her
boudoir on the ground floor of the house into the Arboretum and so into
the wider stretches of the wooded park.




CHAPTER VI

     "Friendship, I fancy, means one heart between two."


Dick Wantele opened the door of the drawing-room. Lined with panels of
cedar-wood and sparsely furnished with fine examples of early French
Empire furniture, the great room looked, as did so many of the
apartments of Rede Place, foreign rather than English, and it was only
used by Mr. and Mrs. Maule on the rare occasions when they gave a
dinner-party.

The master and mistress of Rede Place were awaiting their guests.
Richard Maule, his figure looking thinner, more attenuated than ever,
leant heavily with his right hand on a stick, his left lay on the
mantelpiece. Dick noticed that he looked more alive than usual; there
were two spots of red on his cheeks. Mrs. Maule was moving restlessly
about the room: she disliked exceedingly finding herself alone with her
husband, and she seldom allowed so untoward an accident to befall her.

Wantele looked at her curiously. His cousin's wife had the power of ever
surprising him anew. To-night it was her dress which surprised him. It
was deep purple in tint, of a diaphanous material, and rendered
opalescent, shot with gleams of pale blue and pale yellow, by some
cunning arrangement of silk underneath. Made, as even he could see, with
but slight regard to the fashion of the moment, Wantele realised that
this gown, beautiful, even magnificent as was its effect, would not
appear a proper evening dress to the conventional eye of Mrs. Pache and
of Mrs. Pache's daughter.

A fold of the thin shimmering stuff veiled Athena's dimpled shoulders,
and swept up almost to her throat, and her arms gleamed whitely through
cunningly arranged twists of the same transparent stuff carried down to
the wrist.

Her dark, naturally curling hair, instead of being puffed out stiffly as
was the ugly fashion of the moment, was braided closely to her head, and
on her head was placed a wreath made of bunches of small deep purple
grapes unrelieved by leaves. The only ornament worn by her was a large
burnt topaz--that stone which fire turns a rose red tint--attached to a
seed pearl chain.

Wantele told himself with rueful amusement that Mrs. Pache would
probably take the opportunity of wearing this evening her ancient
diamond tiara and her most _décolleté_ gown.

"I suppose you'll come back here after dinner?" he addressed Athena, and
as he spoke he could not help telling himself that she was really
enchantingly lovely. Mrs. Maule looked to-night as if she had stepped
down from one of the friezes of the Parthenon, or perhaps had leapt from
a slender vase garlanded with nymphs dancing to the strains of
celestial music.

The Frenchman who had designed her dress was evidently, as are so many
modern Parisians, a lover and a student of Greek art.

"Yes, I suppose we must. It would be cruel to inflict Mrs. Pache and
Patty on Richard."

But she did not look at her husband while she spoke. She often conveyed
messages, and even asked questions of him, by the oblique medium of Dick
Wantele.

Richard Maule gave no sign of having heard her words.

"I suppose you will like to have a talk with General Lingard?" The young
man turned to the silent, frail-looking figure standing by the
mantelpiece. He was himself unaware of how much his tone changed and
softened when he addressed his cousin.

"Yes, I'd like a few words with General Lingard. I wonder if Jane has
told him that I'm her trustee. Perhaps he won't mind coming in alone to
me for a few moments."

       *       *       *       *       *

"Miss Digby."

The girl advanced into the room a little timidly. She had put on her
best evening gown in honour of the famous soldier who was Jane
Oglander's betrothed. It was a pale blue satin dress, touched here and
there with pink. Wantele told himself regretfully that Mabel Digby's
gown looked stiff, commonplace, in fact positively ugly, by contrast
with Athena's beautiful costume. He liked Mabel best in the plain coats
and skirts, the simple flannel or linen shirts, she always wore in the
daytime.

The door was again flung open, and a small crowd of people came into the
room. Mrs. Pache was wearing, as Wantele noticed with concern, her
tiara, and a mauve velvet dress which had done duty at one of the last
of Queen Victoria's Drawing-rooms. Hard on her mother followed Patty
Pache, looking as her type of young English womanhood so often looks,
younger than twenty-seven, which was her age; and then Mr. Pache and his
son Tom, the latter a neat young man with a pleasant job in the Board of
Trade, whom his mother fondly believed to be one of the governing forces
of the Empire. Lagging behind the others was a tall lean man wearing
old-fashioned, not very well-cut evening clothes. This must of course be
General Lingard, the guest of the evening.

Richard Maule steadied himself on his stick and took a step forward.
There was a moment of confused talking and of hand-shaking. Dick Wantele
and Mabel Digby drew a little to one side. Mrs. Pache's face broke into
a nervous smile. She was wondering whether high dresses were about to
become the fashion, or whether Mrs. Maule had a cold.

"May I introduce you," she said, "I mean may I introduce to you my
husband's cousin, General Lingard? I think you must have heard us speak
of him----"

Athena Maule held out her little hand; it lay for a moment grasped in
the strong fingers of her guest. She smiled up into his face, and
instantly Lingard knew her for the woman in the railway carriage, the
woman he had--snubbed; the woman he had--defended. "I have often heard
of General Lingard--not only from you"--she hesitated a moment--"but
also from others, dear Mrs. Pache."

Tom Pache gave a sudden laugh, as if his hostess had made an
extraordinarily witty joke, and Athena nodded at him gaily. He and she
were excellent friends, though Tom had never, strange to say, fallen in
love with her.

For a moment the five men stood together on the hearthrug.

No formal introduction had taken place between Wantele and Lingard, but
each man looked at the other with a keen, measuring look. "My cousin
never dines with us," Dick said in a low voice, "but we shall join him
after dinner. He is looking forward to a talk with you." Then he turned
to young Pache. "I'm afraid, Tom, you'll have to take in your sister.
There's no way out of it!"

Tom Pache made a little face of mock resignation.

"Isn't Miss Oglander here?" he whispered. "Why isn't Miss Oglander
here?" Then he drew the other aside. "I say, Dick, isn't this a _go_?"

Wantele nodded his head; a wry smile came over his thin lips. "Yes, it
_is_ rather a go," he answered dryly.

"We didn't even know Hew Lingard knew Miss Oglander!"

"And we only knew quite lately that you were related to General
Lingard."

Tom Pache grinned. "Father was his guardian, and would go on guardianing
him after he was grown up. He and my father had a row--years ago. But of
course we made it up with him when he blossomed out into a famous
character. Mother wrote and asked him to stay with us last time he was
in England. He wouldn't come then. But the other day he wrote her quite
a decent letter telling her of his engagement. They don't want it
announced--I can't think why----"

"I suppose they both hate fuss," said Wantele briefly. "We tried to get
Jane here before to-night--but she's nursing a sick friend, and she
can't come for another week. By the way, I've forgotten to ask how you
like your motor?"

"Ripping!" said young Pache briefly. "Unluckily Patty insists on driving
it, and father weakly lets her do it."

Dinner was announced, and the four curiously assorted couples went into
the dining-room.

While avoiding looking at him across the round table, Wantele was
intently conscious of the presence of the man who was to become Jane
Oglander's husband.

Hew Lingard was absolutely unlike what he had expected him to be.
Wantele had never cared for soldiers, while admitting unwillingly that
there must be in the great leaders qualities very different from those
which adorned his few military acquaintances. He had thought to see a
trim, well-groomed--hateful but expressive phrase!--good-looking man. He
saw before him a loosely-built, powerful figure and a dark, clean-shaven
face, of which the dominant features were the strong jaw and
secretive-looking mouth, which seemed rather to recall the wild soldier
of fortune of another epoch than the shrewd strategist and coldly able
organiser Lingard had shown himself to be.

Newspaper readers had been told how extraordinary was Lingard's personal
influence over his men. An influence exerted not only over his own
soldiers, but over the friendly native tribesmen.

Wantele, who read widely and who remembered what he read, recalled a
phrase which had caught his fancy, a phrase invented to meet a very
different case:

     "They grow, like hounds, fond of the man who shows them sport, and
     by whose hallo they are wont to be encouraged."

Lingard looked a man who could show sport....

Almost against his will, he could not help liking the look of Jane
Oglander's lover. There was humour as well as keen intelligence in Hew
Lingard's ugly face. When he smiled, his large mouth had generous curves
which belied the strong, stern jaw. Wantele divined that he was half
amused, half ashamed, at the honours which were now being heaped upon
him, and certainly he was doing his best to make all those about him
forget that he was in any sense unlike themselves.

Wantele also became aware, with a satisfaction he would have found it
hard to analyse, that General Lingard was paying no special attention to
his hostess; or rather, while paying Mrs. Maule all the attention that
was her due, there was quite wanting in his manner any touch of the
ardent interest, the involuntary emotion, which most men showed when
brought in contact for the first time with Athena. And yet how beautiful
she looked to-night! How full of that subdued, eloquent radiance which
is the dangerous attribute of a certain type of rare feminine
loveliness!

Mrs. Maule was making herself charming--charming, not only to the famous
soldier who was her guest, but also to the dull old man who sat on her
other side, and to his tiresome, pompous wife. She was also showing
surprising knowledge of those local interests which she was supposed to
despise.

Wantele's mind travelled back to the last time a dinner-party had been
given at Rede Place.

Jane Oglander had been there, and on that occasion Athena had been in
one of her ill moods, proclaiming with rather haughty irony her contempt
for the dull neighbourhood in which she had perforce to live during
certain portions of each year. Wantele remembered how he had watched her
with a certain lazy annoyance, too content to feel really angry, for
Jane Oglander had been divinely kind to him that day, and he had
thought--poor fool that he had been!--that at last he was adventuring
further than she had yet allowed him to do into her reserved, sensitive
nature.

How little we poor humans know of what the future holds for us! Till a
few days ago Dick had always thought of himself as a young man. To-night
he felt that youth lay behind him--so far behind as to be almost
forgotten--as the three young people talked and laughed across him to
one another.

Athena was now talking to Mr. Pache, inclining her graceful head towards
him with an air of amiable, placid interest; and, as Wantele noted with
satirical amusement, Mr. Pache had the foolish, happy look that even the
most sensible of elderly men assume when talking to a very pretty
woman.

Mrs. Pache did not look either happy or at ease. Even to a nimble mind
it is difficult entirely to readjust one's views of a human being. Till
a short time ago, in fact till his name began to be frequently mentioned
in the _Morning Post_, the worthy lady had considered Hew Lingard the
black sheep of her husband's highly respectable family.

There had once been a great trouble about him. That was a good many
years ago--perhaps as much as seventeen years ago, just at the time that
dear Tom had had the measles. She had tried to pump her husband about it
last night, but he had refused to say anything, which was very tiresome,
and she couldn't remember much about it.

Hew Lingard had got into a scrape with a woman; that static, dreadful
fact of course Mrs. Pache remembered. Such things are never forgotten by
the Mrs. Paches of this world. It was worse than a scrape, for Hew had
nearly _married_ a most unsuitable person--in fact he would have married
her if the person hadn't at the last moment made up her mind that he
wasn't good enough.

That was pretty well all Mrs. Pache could remember about it. She hadn't
forgotten that rather vulgar phrase "not good enough," because her
husband had come back from London to Norfolk, where they were then
living, and had walked into the room with the words: "Well, it's all
over and done with! She's gone and married another young fool whom she
has had up her sleeve the whole time! She didn't think Hew Lingard good
enough!"

Hew had taken the business very hard, instead of rejoicing as he ought
to have done at his lucky escape. And they, the Paches, had seen nothing
of him for many years.

Three years ago, however, dear Tom had made her write to Hew Lingard,
and though Hew had refused her kind invitation, he had written quite a
nice letter.

This time both she and her husband had written to him, reminding
him--strangely enough, they had both used the same phrase in their
letters--that "blood is thicker than water," and urging their now
creditable relative to pay them a _long_ visit.

In accepting the invitation, Hew Lingard had announced his engagement to
Jane Oglander--the Miss Oglander whom they all knew so well, the Jane
Oglander who was often, for weeks at a time, one of their nearest
neighbours, and who, everybody had thought, would end by marrying Dick
Wantele!

Still, to-night Mrs. Pache told herself that Hew Lingard's engagement to
Miss Oglander was odd--odd was the word which Mrs. Pache had used in
this connection, not once but many times, when discussing the matter
with her sleepy husband on the night Hew Lingard's letter had come, and
when eagerly talking it over with her daughter the next morning.

It was so _odd_ that Jane Oglander had never spoken of General Lingard.
Surely she must have known that they, the Paches, were closely related
to him? It was to be hoped that now Hew Lingard had become a great man,
he was not going to be ashamed of the relations who had always been so
kind to him, and who in the past, when he was an unsatisfactory,
eccentric young man, had always advised him for his good.

What a pity it was that Hew had been in such a hurry! From what they
could make out he must have gone and proposed to Miss Oglander the very
day of his arrival in London.

And then there was that disgraceful story about Miss Oglander's brother.
It was indeed a pity Hew Lingard hadn't waited a bit! He might marry
anybody now--a girl, for instance, whose people were connected with the
Government, someone who could help on dear Tom, and get him promotion.
Jane Oglander was very nice, thoroughly nice, but she would never be of
any use to the Pache family.

Such were the troubled and disconnected thoughts which hurried through
Mrs. Pache's mind while she listened with apparent attention to her odd,
but now celebrated kinsman. General Lingard was trying to make himself
pleasant to his cousin Annie by telling her of a missionary expedition
to Tibet.

Mrs. Pache had always been interested in missionaries; she was a
subscriber to the S.P.C.K. The Society's publications satisfied that
passion for romance which sometimes survives in the most commonplace
human being, especially if that human being be a woman.

Just now General Lingard was speaking with kindling enthusiasm of a
certain medical missionary's fine work in West Africa. But Mrs. Pache's
face clouded distrustfully. She had suddenly remembered a scene in her
school-room, her children, Tom and his sister, together with two little
friends, sitting round Hew Lingard listening with breathless interest to
the adventures of another missionary.

This divine had sent home as relics the clothes he had worn when he had
succeeded in converting a whole village in Africa, and Mrs. Pache
vividly recalled the foolish verses which Lingard had declaimed to her
young people with solemn face and twinkling eyes--verses which cruelly
misinterpreted the missionary's intention.

Against her will the jingling lines ran in her head--

    "He preached--and did not bore them;
    Their chief, a hoary man,
      Replied, 'We are converted,
    But, to turn to other topics,
      Betrousered and beshirted,
    You're _outré_ in the Tropics.'

      The preacher is convinced in turn
    And dresses--like his flock...."

She remembered with irritation how the children had insisted on making a
copy of these absurd, most unbecoming, rhymes, and how they had
continually sung them to the beautiful old tune of "She Wore a Wreath of
Roses."

Mrs. Pache allowed her eyes to wander round the table. How wizened and
old Dick Wantele was beginning to look! If poor Mr. Maule lasted much
longer, Wantele would be quite middle-aged before he came into this fine
property.

At one time--oh, long ago now, ten years ago, when they first moved into
the neighbourhood, when Patty was only sixteen--Mrs. Pache had had a
vague hope that Dick Wantele and her Patty might take a liking to one
another. Oddly enough, quite the opposite had happened! Though thrown
into the conventional intimacy induced by propinquity, Patty had
disliked Dick from the first; she thought him priggish and affected, and
he was never more than coldly civil; how odd now to think that till the
other day, they had all vaguely supposed that he would end by marrying
Miss Oglander....

Mrs. Pache looked fondly at her daughter. Patty didn't look as well as
usual to-night--her gown showed too much red arm. No doubt high evening
dresses were "coming in," for Mrs. Maule was generally in advance of the
fashion.

Patty was leaning forward trying to join in the conversation of Mrs.
Maule and of her father. Mrs. Pache wished pettishly that Hew Lingard
would stop talking. She wanted to hear what Patty was saying, and her
wish became at last painted very legibly on her face.

       *       *       *       *       *

"The Barkings? Oh, Mrs. Maule, they're such nice people! I do hope you
will call on them"--Patty's voice was raised in unusual animation. And
then her father's gruff voice broke in: "They were out when my wife
called on them; but Lady Barking wrote a note asking Patty over to
dinner. They have four men staying in the house just now, and only their
married daughter to entertain them."

"Wasn't it lucky? And I enjoyed myself so much!" Everyone looked at the
fortunate Patty. Even Wantele felt a thrill of lazy interest. Newcomers
in a country neighbourhood count for much, and rightly so, to the old
inhabitants.

"You remember what Halnaver House used to look like in the days of poor
dear old Lady Morell? Well, now it's quite different! You remember the
staircase, the famous old carved oak staircase?"

Patty looked round the table eagerly, and Wantele nodded assent.

"Well, they've taken the staircase away! They're building a most
delightful house in town, right in the middle of London, and yet it's to
be exactly like a country house! So they're going to put that oak
staircase there, and they've installed a lift at Halnaver instead! You
press a button and the lift takes you up to any floor--even right to the
very top of the house, where the garrets have been turned into the most
delightful bachelors' rooms----"

"Oh Patty, you didn't tell me that," cried her mother. "What an
extraordinary thing! Then where are the servants' quarters to be?"

"I did tell you, mother--I know I did! Where the old stables used to be,
of course! They've built a wing out there. It really has become a
wonderful house," said Patty happily. It was not often that she was
listened to with such respectful attention. "By simply pressing a button
as you lie in bed you can lock and unlock the door of your room!"

"The house must be all buttons"--observed Wantele thoughtfully.

But Patty went on: "One of the men staying there, a Major Biddell, said
he had never stayed in such a comfortable house! In fact he said--and he
seems to know everybody and go everywhere--that it was as comfortable as
the Paris Ritz Hotel. Indeed, he went further, and declared that not
even the Ritz Hotel has a quarter of the clever contrivances that Lady
Barking has managed to put into that poor old place!"

"There can be no doubt at all," said Mrs. Pache, "that the Barkings will
prove a most delightful addition to the neighbourhood." She looked
insistently at Athena Maule. "I do hope you are going to call on them,"
she said.

Athena looked down. Mrs. Pache noticed with some irritation that her
hostess had extraordinarily long and silken eyelashes. She almost
wondered if they could be real.

"I think not," Mrs. Maule at last answered, very quietly.

Lingard was struck by the purity of her enunciation. To Mrs. Maule her
father's tongue was an acquired language. As a child she had only spoken
modern Greek and French.

"I have seen the Barkings. Dick and I passed them once when we were
driving. And then last week I found myself, for a few minutes, in a
railway carriage with Lady Barking and her daughter----"

For a swift moment Athena, raising her eyes, looked straight at General
Lingard; then her violet, dark fringed eyes dropped, and she added, "I
dare say they are excellent people."

"They're much--much more than that!" cried Patty, offended.

"But surely a little noisy? I did not feel them to be of our sort--I
mean Richard's and mine," said Athena. "We are very quiet folk. No," she
threw her head back with the proud, graceful little gesture most of
those present were familiar with--"I do not think it likely that we
shall know the Barkings."

"Oh, but, Mrs. Maule, do stretch a point"--Patty's voice was full of
earnest entreaty. "They are so anxious to know you! They have heard so
much about Rede Place!" She turned appealingly to Wantele, but he
looked, as those about him so often saw him look, irritatingly
indifferent, almost bored.

Again Mrs. Maule smilingly shook her head.

"If they entertain as much as they are going to do, I'm sure that
friends of yours will often be staying with them," Patty said defiantly.

"I do not think that very likely." Mrs. Maule spoke with a touch of
scorn in her voice, and Patty Pache felt a wave of anger sweep through
her. She had _promised_ her new friends that Mrs. Maule should call at
Halnaver House.

"Then you'll be rather surprised to hear that even now there is a man
there, that Major Biddell--such an amusing, delightful man--who _does_
know you! Lady Barking wanted to send him over to call. He seemed rather
shy about it, but I told him that you and Dick were always pleased to
see people, even when Mr. Maule did not feel up to the exertion."

"I hope, Miss Patty, that you do not often take my name in vain"--there
was a touch of severity in Dick Wantele's voice.

She blushed uncomfortably. "Oh, but it's true!" she cried. "You and Mrs.
Maule often see people when Mr. Maule isn't well!"

As the ladies walked out of the room, Athena lingered a moment at the
door. "Please bring them all back to the drawing-room," she whispered
hurriedly to Wantele. "I wish to take General Lingard in to Richard
myself. Jane asked me to do so in her last letter."

Wantele looked at her musingly. He felt certain Jane had done nothing of
the kind. Athena was fond of telling little useful lies. It was a matter
of no importance.

       *       *       *       *       *

Twenty minutes later Athena Maule and Hew Lingard passed slowly across
the square atrium, which formed the centre of Rede Place.

Save for the white marble presences about them they were alone, alone
for the first time since that brief moment of dual solitude in the
railway carriage when Lingard had looked at her in cold, mute apology
for the scene he had provoked, and which she had perforce witnessed.

The door of the room they were approaching opened, and a man-servant
came out with a covered dish in his hand.

"My husband is not quite ready for us," Athena spoke a little
breathlessly. She felt excited, wrought up to a high pitch of emotion.
For once Chance, the fickle goddess, was on her side. "Shall we wait
here a few moments?" She led him aside into a deep recess.

Then, when the servant's footsteps had died away, she turned her face up
to him and Lingard saw that her beautiful mouth was quivering with
feeling, her eyes suffused with tears. So might Andromeda have stood
before Perseus when at last unloosened from the cruel rock, the living,
eloquent embodiment of passionate and innocent shame.

"I want to thank you----" she whispered. "And--and--let me tell you
this. Simply to know that there is in this base, hateful world a man who
could do what you did for a woman unknown to him, has altered my life,
given me courage to go on!"

Mrs. Maule spoke the truth as far as the truth was in her to speak. The
incident in the railway carriage had powerfully moved and excited her;
she had thought of little else even after Jane Oglander's letter
announcing her engagement had come to divert the current of her life.
Nay, the news conveyed in Jane's letter had brought with it the
explanation of what had happened. Athena had leapt instinctively on the
truth. Her unknown friend--her noble defender--could have been no other
than General Lingard himself, on his way to stay with the Paches.

It was Athena Maule, in her character of Jane Oglander's dearest friend,
who had made the quixotic stranger's sword spring from its scabbard. The
knowledge had stung; but she was now engaged in drawing the venom out of
the sting. It was surely her right to make this remarkable, this famous
man value and respect her for herself--not simply for Jane's sake.

"I wish I could have killed the cur!" Lingard's voice was low, but his
face had become fierce, tense--the face of a fighter in the thick of
battle.

Mrs. Maule was filled with a feeling of exquisite satisfaction. Once
more she found life worth living....

But General Lingard must not be allowed to forget Jane Oglander,
Athena's friend--Athena's almost sister--the one woman who loved and
admired her whole-heartedly, unquestioningly.

"Because of what you did the other day, and--and because of Jane"--her
voice shook with excitement--"we must be friends, General Lingard." She
held out her hand, and Lingard, taking the slender fingers in his, wrung
Athena's hand, and then with a sudden, rather awkward movement he raised
it to his lips.

"And now we must go on," she said quietly. "Richard is waiting for us."

All emotion has a common denominator. The last time Lingard had been as
moved as he was now was when he had parted from Jane Oglander in the
little sitting-room in that shabby house on the south side of the
Thames.

There was in Jane a certain austerity, a delicate reserve of manner,
which had made him feel that she was a creature to be worshipped from
afar, rather than a woman responsive to the man she loves.

Each happy day of the week they had spent together practically alone in
London, Lingard had had to woo her afresh. But that, to a man of the
great soldier's temperament, had been no matter for complaining. Her
scruples and delicacies had been met by him with infinite indulgence and
tenderness.

Then on the last day, they had had their first lovers' quarrel. He had
entreated her to come away with him, to accept, that is, the Maules'
eager invitation. Was he not going to the Paches' simply because they
lived near Rede Place? But Jane had promised to stay a week with a
friend who was ill--and she would not break her word. Lingard had become
suddenly angry, and in his anger had turned cold.

For the first time in his knowledge of her, tears had sprung to Jane's
eyes. Where is the man who does not early make the woman who loves him
weep? But these tears, or so it had seemed to him, had unlocked a deep
spring of poignant feeling in her heart, or perchance had made it
possible for her to allow her lover to know that it was there.

He had moved away from her side, and then, in a moment, had come from
her a smothered cry, a calling of her whole being for and to him. She
had thrown out her hands with the instinctive gesture of a child who
wishes to turn one who has been unkind, kind. And when she was in his
arms, there had come to her that sense of spiritual and physical
response which had brought to him the moment of exultant triumph he had
thought would never be his.

How strange that after that she should still have held out, still have
kept her word to the sick woman who needed her! It was of Jane
Oglander--of Jane as she had been, all tenderness and fire, on that day
when they had parted, that Lingard thought as he followed the woman whom
he now called friend into the room where Richard Maule sat waiting for
him.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Paches' horseless carriage was proceeding through the park at a pace
which two of the five sitting in it felt to be, if delightful, then
rather dangerous.

"Athena grows more beautiful every time I see her," said Tom Pache
suddenly. He and Hew Lingard were sitting side by side opposite Mr. and
Mrs. Pache. Patty was wedged in between her parents.

"I thought her gown very odd and unsuitable," said his mother sharply.
"It isn't as if she had a cold. I suppose she keeps her smart evening
gowns for her smart visits."

"Yes, I thought it a pity she should hide anything so good as her
shoulders," answered her son thoughtfully.

The man by his side made a restless movement, and increased the distance
between himself and his young cousin.

"I told you the Barkings had heard all about Athena Maule and Bayworth
Kaye, mother," said Patty eagerly.

"They probably know a great deal more than there is to know," said her
father gruffly. "People talk of London as the home of scandal. I say I
never heard as much scandal in my life as since we came to live in this
neighbourhood."

"But, father, you must admit Bayworth Kaye was quite cracked about
Athena? I don't think anyone could deny that who ever saw them together.
Why it made one feel quite uncomfortable!"

Lingard felt as if he must get out, away from these horrible people.
When he had last seen the Paches, Patty had been a pretty little girl,
pert perhaps, but not too much so in the eyes of the young, indulgent
soldier. He now judged her with scant mercy.

"I don't think Athena could very well help what happened," said Tom
Pache judicially. He and his father generally took the same side.
"Bayworth Kaye had the run of Rede Place since he was born. And
so--well, I don't suppose it took very long for the mischief to be
done--so far as he was concerned, I mean."

"Oh, but, Tom, it was much more than that! Athena could have helped
it--of course she could!" Patty's voice rose. "Why, she got him asked to
a lot of houses where she was staying herself, and they say in the
village that she gave him her key of the Garden Room. He used to stay
there fearfully late--long after Mr. Maule and Dick Wantele had gone to
bed!"

"It was very hard on Mabel Digby," said Mrs. Pache irrelevantly. She had
a tepid liking for her young neighbour.

"I don't think Mabel really cared for him, mother." There was a streak
of thin loyalty in Patty Pache's nature. "You know she was almost a
child when Bayworth Kaye first went to India."

"She was seventeen," said Mrs. Pache, "very nearly eighteen. And I know
they wrote to one another by every mail--his mother told me so."

"It's rather hard on the women of the neighbourhood, when one comes to
think of it," said Tom Pache, smiling in the darkness. "Athena's a
formidable rival." His mother and his sister felt that he spoke more
truly than he knew.

"There's only one person," cried Patty suddenly, "who's never been in
love with Athena! And it's so odd, because he's always with her--I mean
Dick Wantele."

"My dear child, how you let your tongue run on," said her mother
reprovingly. "You seem to forget that Athena is a married woman!" In
another, a more natural, tone she added: "And then Dick Wantele, as you
know perfectly well, has always been attached to----"

Her husband gave her a violent shove and she did not finish her
sentence. They had all forgotten the large, silent, alien presence of
Hew Lingard.




CHAPTER VII

     "Who ever rigged fair ships to lie in harbours?"


Dick Wantele was driving back to Rede Place from Selford Junction. He
had been away for four days, and now he was very glad to be home again.
He very seldom left Rede Place unless Jane Oglander was there,--in fact,
this was the first time he had gone away leaving Richard Maule and
Athena alone together since they had returned, eight years before, from
what had proved so disastrous a winter in Italy.

Wantele had grown accustomed to his servitude, but there came moments
when the strain of the life he was leading became intolerable, and then,
suddenly, he would go away for a few days, sometimes to an old friend,
sometimes alone.

This time both Richard and Athena had pressed him to keep an engagement
he had made some weeks before. He had known Richard's motive--Jane was
to arrive during his absence, and Richard had wished him to be spared
certain difficult moments--those of bidding Jane welcome, of wishing
Jane joy.

As to Athena's motive in wishing him away, he had been less clear. None
the less had he been sure that she had a motive.

And so he had gone, this time to an old college friend, and he had
enjoyed the desultory talking, the indifferent shooting, and the lazy
reading, he had managed to cram into his short holiday. He had now come
back, as he always did, after a thorough change of scene and of
atmosphere, feeling, if not a new man, then patched in places, and once
more facing life in his usual philosophical, slightly satirical, spirit.

Now their old coachman was telling him all sorts of bits of news that
amused him; for a great deal can happen, in fact a great deal always
does happen, during four days, in a country neighbourhood.

The most exciting bit of news was that of an accident to the Paches' new
motor. The coachman told the tale with natural relish.

"The hind wheel just sank down in that deep rut by that there Windy
Common corner--you know, sir. The machine went over as gentle as a
babby! But they had a rare job getting the queer thing righted again, so
I'm told, sir."

"I hope no one was hurt, Jupp?"

"Miss Patty--she as caused all the mischief--escaped scot free. But
Squire Pache, so they say, was shook something dreadful! And as for Mrs.
Pache, why, her arm was quite twisted. There's some people as says
she'll never get it right again."

"Oh, but that's a dreadful thing!" exclaimed Wantele, rousing himself.
He felt suddenly ashamed of his long and deep-seated dislike of Mrs.
Pache and of poor Patty. He and Jane Oglander might drive over there
this afternoon to enquire how they all were.

Then the young man's fair, lined face became overcast. He reminded
himself bitterly that Jane's time and thoughts now belonged to someone
else. Lingard would naturally spend every moment he could escape from
the afflicted Paches at Rede Place; and when he, her lover, was not
there, Jane would be closeted with Athena, or occupied in amusing
Richard.

"They do say, sir, that Mrs. Pache is so bad that she says she'll never
ride in that dratted motor-car again."

"That's bad, Jupp, very bad! I'll go over and enquire to-morrow
morning----By the way, when did the accident happen?"

"The very day after you left, sir."

They were now within the boundaries of Rede Place. The rather fantastic
foreign-looking house lay before them, its whiteness softened by the
ruddy autumn tints of the trees.

Wantele, for the first time in his life, felt a sudden dislike of the
place and of its artificial beauty sweep over him. His existence there
had only been rendered tolerable, kept warmly human, by the coming and
going of Jane Oglander.

No doubt she would now be in the hall, waiting for him alone--she always
did instinctively the kind, the tactful thing. But for the moment he had
no wish to see her. There ran a tremor through him, and the young horse
he was driving swerved violently. He flicked the horse sharply on the
under side. How--how stupid, how absurd of him to feel like this!

While he had been away he had tried to forget Jane, but whenever he was
alone, and during the long wakeful hours of each night, his thoughts had
enwrapped her more closely than ever. It seemed so strange that she
would no longer be free to console him, to chide him, to laugh at and
with him.

From to-day everything in their relationship would be changed. Even now,
Jane was probably with her lover. Wantele averted his thoughts quickly
from the vision his morbid imagination forced upon him. Lingard looked
the man to be a masterful, a happy wooer.

In two or three days the famous soldier would be an inmate of Rede
Place--his visit had been arranged just before Wantele had gone away.
Richard Maule had himself suggested it. In fact, as Athena had observed
on the day following their first acquaintance with Lingard, it seemed
absurd that such a man should be staying with the Paches....

They were now close to the house, and the thought of an immediate
meeting with Jane became suddenly intolerable to Wantele.

"I'll get out here," he said hurriedly, throwing the reins to Jupp. "You
can take my bag round while I walk up through the arboretum and let
myself in by the Garden Room."

In '51, when crystal houses, as they were called for a brief span,
became a fashion, Theophilus Joy had built a large conservatory on to
one end of his country house. Ugly though it was, the Garden Room, as it
soon became called, had greatly added to the amenities of Rede Place.
Fragrant and cool in summer, warm and scented in winter, it was
considered a delightful novelty by the old banker's guests.

Those had been the days when the boy Richard, moving among the amusing
and amused worldlings who formed his grandfather's large circle of
acquaintances, had not known that there were such things as disease,
tragedy, and passion in the world. Let us eat and be merry--so much of
his grandfather's philosophy young Richard had imbibed, and no more.

The Garden Room was still a delightful place, with its marble fountain
brought forty years before from Naples, its flowering creepers, and the
rare plants which still made it the pride of the head-gardener of Rede
Place.

Yet it was but little used. Now and again on a rainy day Richard Maule
would drag his feeble limbs along the warm moist stone pavement for the
little gentle exercise recommended by his old friend and neighbour, Dr.
Mannet. But he never did this when his wife was at Rede Place, for
Athena's boudoir, the sitting-room which she had herself chosen and
arranged to her fancy soon after her first coming to England, was the
end room on the ground floor of the house, and so next to the Garden
Room.

Some years before, when a neighbouring country house had been burgled,
new locks had been fitted to the various doors giving access to the
gardens and the park, and now the door of the Garden Room was always
kept locked. There were three keys--Wantele and Athena each had one, and
the head-gardener kept the third.

As Wantele passed through into the house, he heard the murmur of voices
in the boudoir; Athena's clear voice dominated by a man's deep,
vibrating tones.

Yes, instinct born of jealous pain had served him truly--Lingard was now
at Rede Place. They were there--Jane and Lingard--behind that door....

He hurried the quicker to escape from the sound of voices. The broad
corridor which had been a concession to English taste was very airless,
for in deference to Richard Maule's state of health the house was always
over-heated. Athena, too, had a dread, a hatred of cold; in all
essentials she was a southerner.

Dick Wantele loved wild weather and chill winter. He hated the languor
and heat in which he was condemned to spend so much of each day.

At last, when in the hall, Wantele stayed his steps.

During his brief absences from home letters were not sent on to him, for
he was always glad to escape for a few days from his usual
correspondence, letters connected with his cousin's affairs and with the
estate, important to the senders if not to the recipient. But there was
always a moment of reckoning when he came back, and now he knew that
there must be many little matters waiting to be dealt with. He might as
well find out what there was before going on to see Richard in the Greek
Room.

Then, while walking across to the marble table where his letters were
always placed, the young man was astonished to see on the floor a large
half-filled postman's sack. The label on it bore General Lingard's name;
the Paches' address had been crossed out, and that of Rede Place
substituted.

Really, it was rather cool of Lingard to have his correspondence sent on
in this fashion! It was also a proof that he must be spending the major
part of each day at Rede Place. Heavens! what a correspondence the man
must have. That was a privilege of fame he could well spare his
successful rival.

He turned to his own letters. There were many more than usual. And
then, as he tore the envelopes rapidly open, it seemed to him that most
of his acquaintances within a certain radius had written to him during
the four days he had been away!

Each letter he opened--and this both diverted and angered Wantele--ran
on the same theme and contained the same request.

"Dear Mr. Wantele--I am writing to you because Mrs. Maule may be away.
We hear that General Lingard is staying with you for a few days. It
would give us such pleasure if you would bring him over, either to lunch
or dinner, whichever suits you best. It will be an honour as well as a
pleasure to make General Lingard's acquaintance. If you will send me a
line by return, we could manage to make any day convenient that would
suit you and General Lingard."

Old friends, new friends, people whom he had never met and whom he had
no intention of meeting--were each and all in full cry.

The last letter he opened was in Tom Pache's handwriting. The young man
had written at his mother's dictation, and the note contained a long
list of the people whom she had promised to invite, or had actually
invited, to meet her famous relative.

There was a postscript from Tom himself.

"It is most awfully good of Mr. and Mrs. Maule to have asked Hew Lingard
over a few days before they expected him. As you see, mother's plans
are all upset, and she is dreadfully worried about it all."

Then Lingard was already here? Wantele wondered how he was to answer
those absurd letters--how to put off these people. He made a point of
being on good, if not on very cordial, terms with his neighbours. He and
Richard both acknowledged a certain duty to the neighbourhood. In spite
of Mr. Maule's physical condition, Rede Place did its fair share of
quiet, very quiet, entertaining, generally when Mrs. Maule happened to
be away and when Jane Oglander happened to be there.

Athena had long ago decided that her neighbours were the dullest set of
people to be found in an English countryside, and that the receiving of
them at lunch or dinner bored her to tears.

Well! There was nothing for it now but to go and consult Athena as to
what should be done. After all, she was the mistress of Rede Place, and
Richard was in no state to be asked tiresome questions or required to
make tiresome decisions.

Holding the letters which had so perturbed him in his hand, Wantele
slowly retraced his steps. He might as well meet Jane now as at any
other time or in any other way.

Wantele knocked at the door of the boudoir. Since her arrival at Rede
Place, eight years ago, he had remained on very formal terms with his
cousin's wife.

There fell a sudden silence on the occupants of the room, and then,
after a perceptible pause, Athena called out in her clear, exquisitely
modulated voice, "Come in. Who is it?"

Dick Wantele slowly turned the handle of the door, and in a flash he saw
that Jane Oglander was not there.

There were but two people in the room. One was Mrs. Maule; she was
sitting on a low seat close to the fire, her lovely head bent over an
embroidery frame; the other, General Lingard, was standing, looking down
at her with an eager, absorbed expression on his face.

Athena was wearing a white gown, fashioned rather like a monk's habit.
It left the slender, rounded column of her neck bare.

The intruder, feeling at once relieved and disappointed, stared
doubtfully at the famous soldier. General Lingard looked a younger man
than he had done the other night--younger and somehow different, far,
far more vividly alive. Perhaps it was his clothes; rough morning
clothes are more becoming to the type of man Wantele now took Lingard to
be than is evening dress. Both he and Mrs. Maule looked most happily and
intimately at ease.

Wantele felt a pang of angry irritation. How like Athena to take General
Lingard away from Jane! And to keep him with her while her friend was
doubtless engaged in doing what should have been her own job--that is,
in looking after Richard.

But many years had gone by since Athena had even made a pretence of
looking after Richard. Had Wantele been just, which he was at this
moment incapable of being, he would have admitted to himself that
Richard would have given Athena small thanks for her company.

"Dick! Is that you? Why, I thought you weren't coming back till the
afternoon! Have you seen Richard?"

Athena had a subtle way with her of making a man feel an intruder.

But Wantele held his ground.

"I always meant to come back in the morning," he said shortly. "No, I
haven't seen Richard."

"I'm glad you've come, for Richard's worried about some tiresome letters
he's had this morning."

"Is Jane with Richard?" he asked abruptly.

It was odd of General Lingard not to have come forward and shaken hands.
The soldier had just nodded--that was all. He also seemed to feel the
young man's presence an intrusion.

"Jane hasn't come. Didn't you know? I thought she would have written to
you. She is staying a week longer with that tiresome friend of hers.
There's to be an operation now, it seems, and the woman's implored Jane
to stay with her till it's over. Oh, but ever so many things have
happened----"

Athena put aside her work and got up. "The poor Paches have had a motor
accident, and so we--I mean Richard and I--asked General Lingard to
come here at once instead of waiting till the end of the week. I'm
afraid he's had rather a dull time, though the Paches have very kindly
allowed us to use their motor car--the car wasn't hurt in any way--" she
turned to her guest and smiled. "But now that you're back, Dick, it will
be all right."

She sat down again, and again bent over the embroidery frame. Each of
the men looking down at her felt himself dismissed.

Together they left the room, and Dick Wantele could have laughed aloud
to see General Lingard's air of discomfiture.

He thought he could reconstitute the events of the last three days. No
doubt Richard had insisted on Jane's lover being asked over to stay, and
Athena, as was her way, had resented the trouble of entertaining
Richard's guest.

Mrs. Maule had no liking for a man on half terms. With her it must be
all or nothing--too often it was all that she received; seldom, as in
this case--nothing. Wantele felt a malicious pleasure in the knowledge
that for once Athena's spells would be powerless, that in this unique
instance there was stretched before her a gateless barrier. Hew Lingard
was the lover of her friend, and Athena, so Wantele acknowledged, loved
Jane Oglander with whatever truth was in her.

Such were his disconnected thoughts as he walked silently by the other's
side. Yes, Lingard seemed strangely unlike the man who had dined there a
week ago. Dick Wantele possessed an almost feminine power of
observation, of intuition. He would have been a happier man had he
lacked it.

"I must go and find my cousin," he said at last. "I haven't seen him
yet. But he won't keep me long."

"Please don't trouble about me. I've a lot of letters to write. Mrs.
Maule has been good enough to give me a sitting-room."

Lingard spoke with a touch of rather curt impatience. He had no wish to
be entertained by this odd, idle young man. Mr. Maule's heir did not
attract him; Dick Wantele took too much upon himself.

Lingard was already on excellent terms with his host--his poor, feeble,
afflicted host. As for Mrs. Maule--he thought of her as Athena, had she
not already asked him to call her Athena?--she was, if only as Jane
Oglander's intimate friend, already set apart on a pedestal. And then
Athena had said a word--only a word--of the painful position she
occupied in her husband's house, that of an occasional and not very
welcome guest. It had made Lingard seethe with unspoken, but the more
deeply felt, indignation.

There is something moving, to a generous masculine mind something very
pathetic, in the sight of a beautiful woman hardly used by fate. Lingard
already suspected that in this case Dick Wantele played the ugly part of
fate. True, Jane seemed very fond of the young man, and he had been
good to her in the terrible affair of her brother; but the taste of
women in the matter of men is not always to be trusted.

General Lingard, in spite of the qualities which made him a successful
leader of fighting men, had not troubled himself, indeed he had not had
the time, to probe or question certain accepted axioms.

As the two came into the hall, Lingard stepped aside and took up the
heavy mail bag.

"Please don't do that! It must be awfully heavy!" The host in Dick
Wantele was roused. "It ought to have been put in your sitting-room long
ago."

Lingard gave a short, not very pleasant, laugh. He was very strong and
Wantele looked delicate, languid--not the sort of man Lingard liked or
was accustomed to meet. It was a pity Wantele had come back so soon. The
three days alone with Richard Maule--and with Athena--had been very
pleasant....

Dick went on, with his quick, light steps, into the Greek Room. He had
again shouldered his burden, and it was pressing on him even more hardly
than usual. If only Jane had been there! He now longed for her presence
as a man longs for a lamp in dark subterranean places from which he
knows no issue.

With a shock of surprise he realised that the letters he had meant to
show Athena were still in his hand, and that he had said nothing to her
of their contents.

He found Richard Maule sitting, as he always did sit in any but the
hottest summer weather, crouched up in front of the fire; but when Dick
came in Mr. Maule smiled as a man smiles at his own son, and the other
saw that his cousin looked more vigorous, more alive, than usual. There
was even a little colour in his white drawn cheeks.

It was a long time since they had had any visitor, any man that is,
staying at Rede Place; and Wantele now asked himself whether they were
wise in leading so quiet a life. Richard was evidently enjoying General
Lingard's visit.

"He's a good fellow, Dick. He grows on one with acquaintance. I don't
know but that Jane----" He stopped abruptly. The thought in his mind to
which he had all but given utterance was that Jane Oglander, after all,
had done well for herself. "He's not a bit spoilt. And yet there must be
a lot of people running after him! Just look at these letters! We shall
have to do something about them. Eh? Some of these people will have to
be asked here to meet him, I suppose?"

And Wantele, again with mingled annoyance and amusement, saw another
pile of notes--far smaller, it was true, than his own--lying on the
reading-desk which was always close to his cousin's hand.

"The duke has written to me. They want to have him over there for a
couple of nights--if we can spare him."

Mr. Maule smiled, not unkindly.

"It's evident we can't hope to keep the hero all to ourselves. It's
lucky Jane Oglander isn't here! I thought it such a pity yesterday, but
now I'm glad. We may be able to ask a few people over before she
arrives--when she's here, Lingard won't want a crowd about. We might
begin with the Sumners--you see they ask themselves, it's very good of
them, for to-morrow!" he laughed outright, a thin, satirical and yet
again not an unkindly laugh.

Dick had never seen his cousin so animated, so interested, in a word, so
amused, for years. He was rather surprised.

"It'll be an awful bore," he said slowly, "and Richard--are you sure
that you wish it? I think I could manage to put off most of these
people--I mean without giving offence."

"No, no, Dick! I know it'll give you a certain amount of trouble"--the
older man looked attentively at the younger--"but I've felt lately that
we didn't see enough people. I don't see why my state and Athena's
selfishness"--he uttered the word very deliberately--"should force you
to live such an unnatural life as you've now been leading for so
long----" He waited a moment and then said, more lightly, "I'm afraid
that we both, you and I, have grown to believe that Jane Oglander's the
only young woman in the world."

Wantele gave him a swift look.

"She's the only woman in the world for me," he muttered. "Lingard may be
a good fellow, Richard, but I wish--I would give a good deal to know
what Jane sees in him." He also was trying to speak lightly.

"Ah, one always feels that!" Richard Maule lay back in his chair. The
short discussion had tired him. "Then will you see about it all, Dick?"

"Yes," cried Wantele hastily, "of course I will! I agree that we've been
too much shut up."

He went back to Athena, and this time she welcomed him graciously. She
also had received letters asking for a peep of their hero.

Wantele looked at his cousin's wife with reluctant admiration. He had
not seen her looking as animated, as radiant as--as seductive as she
looked now for a very long time.

"Don't you see the change in Richard?" she asked eagerly. "He's become
quite another creature since General Lingard came here. I've always
thought you kept Richard far too much shut up, Dick----"

"You never said so before," he said sharply.

She shrugged her shoulders. "It was none of my business."

Her face clouded, and with hasty accord they changed the subject, and
with exactly the same words: "Who had we better ask first?" And then
they stopped, and laughed. For the moment these two, Richard Maule's
heir and Richard Maule's wife, were on more cordial terms than they had
been for years.

"You have now got all the letters," she cried gaily--"Richard's, mine,
and yours! Look them over, and make out a list--I'm sure you're much
better at that sort of thing than I am!"

He left her to carry out her behest.

If there was anything like real entertaining to be done at Rede Place,
all kinds of arrangements would have to be made, and the making of them
must fall on Dick Wantele. Athena had told the truth when she had
described herself to General Lingard as only a guest in her husband's
house. But she had omitted to add that it was an arrangement which had
hitherto suited her perfectly, and the only one she would have
tolerated.




CHAPTER VIII

     "To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."


During the days that followed Dick Wantele's return home, it seemed to
him as though a magic wand had been waved over Rede Place.

Mrs. Maule had no wish to keep her famous guest to herself. Even to the
two men who watched her with a rather cruel scrutiny so much was clear.
She seemed, indeed, to delight in exhibiting General Lingard to the
neighbourhood, and the neighbourhood were only too willing to fall in
with her pleasure.

The gatherings were small, when one came to think of it--eight or ten
people to lunch, ten or twelve people to dinner.

How accustomed Dick grew to the formula which had at first so much
surprised him! "Dear Mrs. Maule," or "Dear Mr. Wantele" (as the case
might be) "We hear that General Lingard is staying at Rede Place. It
would give us very great pleasure if you would bring him over to lunch
or dinner, whichever suits you best."

But there Athena wisely drew the line. No, she would not take General
Lingard, or allow him to be taken, here and there and everywhere! He
was at Rede Place for rest. But the agreeable people, the people who
would amuse and interest him, and the people who if dull had, as it
were, a right to meet the lion, were asked in their turn to come.

They would arrive about half-past one, filling the beautiful rooms
generally so empty of human sounds, with a pleasant bustle of talk and
laughter. They would lunch in the tapestry dining-room, none too young
or too old to enjoy the far-famed skill of Richard Maule's Corsican
chef; and then, according to their fancy, or according to Athena's whim,
they would wander about the house, looking at the pictures and fingering
the curios which enjoyed an almost legendary reputation; or better still
stream out into the formal gardens, now brilliant with strangely tinted
autumn flowers, and fantastically peopled with the marble fauns and
stone dryads brought from Italy and Greece by old Theophilus Joy.

Finally they would go away, thanking Athena earnestly for the delightful
time they had had and telling themselves and each other that Mrs. Maule
was, after all, a very charming person, and that the stories of her
heartless conduct to her husband, of her long absences from home, of
her--well--her flirtations, were probably all quite untrue!

The dinner-parties were slightly more formal affairs, but they also,
thanks to all those concerned--and especially to Mrs. Maule--were quite
successful, and very pleasant.

For the first time for many years, Athena Maule and Dick Wantele were
thrown into a curious kind of intimacy. They had constantly to consult
each other, and to confer together. "You see, I want to get all this
sort of thing over before Jane arrives!" she once exclaimed; and Wantele
had looked at her musingly. After all, perhaps she spoke the truth.

Strange ten days! No wonder that Dick Wantele was surprised, almost
bewildered, by Athena in her new rôle--by Athena, that is, in the part
of good-humoured, graceful, tactful hostess of Rede Place. Hitherto his
imagination had never followed his cousin's wife on the long visits she
paid to other people's houses. Now, with astonishment he realised that
she must be, even apart from her singular beauty, and what had become to
him her perverse, and most dangerous charm, an agreeable guest.

She thought of everything, she thought of everybody, even of Mabel
Digby. Mabel Digby was allowed to have her full share in the
festivities, in the glorifications--for they were nothing else--of
General Lingard, and that although Athena had never liked Mabel, and
thought her a tiresome, priggish girl. Yes, all that fell to Mrs.
Maule's share was managed with infinite tact, good humour, and good
taste. The guests were not allowed to bother Richard, or to interfere
with Richard's comfort and love of ease. Occasionally one or two old
friends, who perchance had hardly seen him for years, would be taken
into the Greek Room to talk to him for ten minutes....

Not the least strange thing was that General Lingard apparently enjoyed
it all. Sometimes, nay often, he said a deprecating word or two to one
or other of his hosts--a word or two implying that he saw the humour of
the whole thing. But within the next hour he would be accepting rather
shame-facedly the flattery lavished on him by some pretty, silly girl,
or, what was more to his credit, listening patiently to an older woman's
account of a son who was in "the service," and for whom the great man
she was speaking to might "do something."

       *       *       *       *       *

To the amateur soldier who in any capacity forms part of an army on
active service, the most extraordinary thing, that which at once strikes
his imagination and goes on doing so repeatedly until the campaign is
over, is the fact that for most of the weary time, he and his fellows
are fighting an invisible enemy.

During each of these long, unreal days when he had scarce a moment to
himself, for it fell to his share to see that everything ran smoothly,
Dick Wantele found himself engaged in close watchful combat with an
invisible foe. He would have given much to be convinced that he was
pursuing a phantom bred of his own evil imagination, and sometimes he
was so convinced.

Then the mists with which he was surrounded would part, suddenly, and
the fearsome thing was there, before him.

Mabel Digby was the first lantern which lighted up the dark recess into
which Wantele's mind was already glancing with such foreboding.

It was the third day after his return home, and with the aid of
telegrams and messengers a considerable party had been gathered together
for what had been a really amusing and successful luncheon party. When
the last guest--with the exception of Mabel, who hardly counted as a
guest--had been duly sped, Mrs. Maule and General Lingard slipped away
together; and Wantele offered to walk back with Mabel to the Small Farm.

They were already some way from the house, when she told him a piece of
news that was weighing very heavily on her heart.

"Have you been told," she asked, "about Bayworth Kaye? He's at Aden, it
seems, and seriously ill. They think it's typhoid. His parents only
heard yesterday. They're awfully worried about him. Mrs. Kaye can't make
up her mind whether she ought to go out to him or not."

And then, as he turned to her, startled, genuinely sorry, he saw a look
on her young face he had never seen there before; it was a terrible
expression--one of aversion and of passionate contempt.

Mrs. Maule and General Lingard were walking together, pacing slowly side
by side. Though a turn of the path brought them very near, Lingard was
so absorbed in what Athena was saying that he did not see Wantele and
Miss Digby. But Athena saw them, and with a quick, skilful movement she
guided her own and her companion's steps in a direction that made it
impossible for the four to meet.

Mabel Digby remained silent for some moments, and then she turned
abruptly to Wantele.

"Why isn't Jane Oglander here?" she asked. "I thought you expected her
last week. Her friend must be a very selfish woman!"

"I don't think Jane would care for the sort of thing we had to-day,"
Wantele said reflectively. Why had Mabel looked at Athena with so
strange--so--so contemptuous a look? "Still, she'll have to get used to
seeing him lionized."

"Write and ask her to come as soon as she can, Dick. It's--it's stupid
of her to stay away like that!"

Wantele glanced round at the speaker; and then, to his concern and
surprise, he saw that her face was flushed, her brown eyes soft with
tears. "I was thinking of Bayworth," she faltered. "He looked so
dreadfully unhappy when he went away, Dick, and--and I can't help
knowing why."

The hours and the days wore themselves away quickly--all too quickly for
Athena Maule and Hew Lingard, slowly and full of acute discomfort and
suspicion for Dick Wantele.

Occasionally the young man tried to tell himself that perhaps the real
reason of his discontent was their guest's attitude to himself. It was
clear that the famous soldier did not like the younger of his hosts, in
fact he hardly made any attempt to conceal his prejudice, and the two
men, though of course forced into a kind of intimacy, saw as little as
they could of one another.

It was with his hostess that General Lingard spent every odd
moment,--every moment that he could spare from the work on which he was
engaged--a book he had promised to write by a certain date. And after a
very few days Wantele discovered with amusement, discomfiture, amazement
that Lingard was actually consulting Athena about his book, reading her
passages as he wrote them.

And then Wantele told himself with shame that the doing of this was not
so foolish or so strange, after all,--for the book was to appeal to the
general public, and Mrs. Maule might reasonably be supposed to belong to
that public.

But not even Wantele in his darkest, most suspicious moods suspected the
depth, the reality of Lingard's peril.

The exciting, exhilarating experiences which were now befalling him
produced on one who was essentially a man of action, not a philosopher
and thinker, an extraordinary mental and even physical effect.

The absurd homage, the crude flattery, to which Lingard found himself
subjected by the young and the foolish among Mrs. Maule's guests annoyed
rather than pleased him, but he would be moved to the soul when a word
said--often an awkward, shy word--showed how great was the place he had
conquered in the estimation of those of his fellow-countrymen and
countrywomen who were jealous for their country's glory.

He had instinctively discounted the newspaper fame showered so freely
upon him on his immediate arrival in England; he was humorously
conscious that he owed it in a great measure to the absence of any other
competing lion of the moment.

True, he had at once received a number of invitations from hostesses of
the kind who make it their business to secure the latest celebrity, and
he had grudged the time he spent over the writing of coldly civil
refusals. Lingard had also been plagued with innumerable letters from
people who vaguely hoped he would be able to do something which would
contribute in some way to their advancement, or that of their near
relations. And then there had come absurd and painful communications
from lunatics, begging-letter writers, and autograph hunters.

Not till he came to Rede Place did the position he had won become really
clear to him, though pride and good breeding made him appear to take his
triumph lightly.

And Athena Maule shared it all with him! The very letters he received
were, at her entreaty, shown to, and discussed with her in a way which
gave each of them a special value and importance. Athena was much more
impressed with his triumph than he allowed himself to be; and when alone
with her,--and they were very often alone together,--Lingard
unconsciously moved in a delightful atmosphere of subtle, wordless
sympathy and flattery.

Jane Oglander, absorbed in the physical crisis through which was passing
the friend with whom she was staying, became even to her lover
infinitely remote; though Lingard liked to remind himself, now and
again, that it was Jane who had given him his new, enchanting comrade
and friend.

Athena Maule appeared to Hew Lingard the most selfless human being he
had ever known. And yet, each day, when the guests, the people she so
kindly asked to meet him, were all gone, and when he and she were
enjoying an hour of rest and solitude together, to which he had now
learnt to look forward so eagerly, she was always ready to talk to him
about herself. Soon there was no subject of conversation between them
which held for Lingard so potent, so entrancing a lure.

There came a day when the soldier, more moved, more secretly excited,
more exhilarated than usual, was able to express to her something of
what he felt.

Among those who had been bidden to Rede Place was an old man, a Crimean
veteran who in his day had enjoyed, though of course on a smaller scale,
much the same kind of experience Hew Lingard was now passing through.
The two had been allowed, by tacit consent, to have a considerable
amount of talk together, and Lingard had been greatly touched and moved
by the other's words of understanding praise, and appreciation, of the
difficult, perilous task he had accomplished.

Sure of her sympathy and understanding, he told Mrs. Maule all that the
veteran's words had meant to him, and at once, as was her wont,--though
he remained quite unconscious of it,--she brought the subject round to
the personal, the intimate standpoint: "You don't know," she said
softly, "what it means to me to know that you met that dear old man
here."

And that had given him his chance of saying what he felt each day more
and more, namely that he owed everything, _everything_ to her,--to her
thoughtful kindness and to her instinctive knowledge of what would at
once please and move him.

How amazed he would have been could he have seen into Athena's heart!
She had thought it rather absurd that Lingard should care so much for
praise uttered by such an unimportant person as the poor, broken old
officer who led a quiet and rather eccentric existence on the edge of a
lonely common some way from Rede Place. He had originally come into the
neighbourhood in order to be near Mabel Digby's father, and Athena had
never thought him to be of the slightest consequence,--indeed, she had
only assented to his being asked to meet General Lingard because Mabel
had earnestly begged that he might be.

       *       *       *       *       *

Conscious hypocrisy is far rarer than the world is apt to believe, and
only succeeds in its designs with those who are mentally ill-equipped.
The women who work the most mischief in civilized communities are
supreme egoists, and an egoist is never a conscious hypocrite.

When dealing with a being of the opposite sex to her own, Athena Maule
always held up to his enraptured gaze a magic mirror in which was
reflected the beautiful and pathetic figure of a deeply injured woman:
one who had made a gallant fight against the harsh fate which had
married her to such a man as Richard Maule, and which placed her in
subjection to so cruel and contemptible a creature as was Richard's
kinsman and heir, Dick Wantele.

Mrs. Maule was also affected, and very powerfully so, by all that took
place during the ten days which elapsed between Dick Wantele's return
and Jane Oglander's arrival.

The people among whom she habitually lived knew nothing of such men as
Hew Lingard. Rich and idle always, vicious or virtuous according to
their temperament and the measure of their temptations, they had no use
for the great workers of the world, unless indeed those workers'
struggles, victories, and defeats lay in the world of finance.

Thus it was that General Lingard presented to Athena Maule the
attractive human bait of something new, untasted, unrehearsed.

She did not mean to act ill by Jane Oglander; on the contrary, as the
days went on, Lingard's betrothed became in Mrs. Maule's imagination a
cruel, almost a pitiless rival. She could not help contrasting her own
life with that which was now opening before her friend. Jane was about
to be lifted, through no merit, no effort of her own, into a delightful,
a passionately interesting and shifting atmosphere, that which surrounds
a commanding officer's wife in one of the great military centres of the
Empire at home or abroad.

Athena longed to try her power--the power she knew to be almost
limitless in one direction--on the type of man with whom Jane would
henceforth be surrounded, a type of whose very presence Jane, she knew
well, would scarcely be aware! It was strange, it--it was horrible to
think that Jane would be leading a delightful and stimulating existence
while she, Athena, would be going the same dreary round among the same
selfish, stupid people of whom she had grown so tired.

During those days when she was acting, for the first time, as the real
mistress of Rede Place, and as hostess to a man whom all the world
wished at that moment to meet and entertain, Mrs. Maule told herself
again and again, with deep, wordless anger, that life was indeed using
her hardly.

How ironic the stroke of fate which made a Jane Oglander be chosen by a
Hew Lingard! There was one consolation--but Athena was in no mood for
finding consolation--in the thought that both General Lingard and Jane
would ever regard Mrs. Richard Maule as the most welcome, the most
honoured of their guests. Thanks to that fact, she would enter and
doubtless achieve the social conquest of that official section of the
English world into which her incursions had been few and seldom
repeated.




CHAPTER IX

    "FERDINAND.--I have this night digged up a mandrake.
    CARDINAL.--Say you?
    FERDINAND.--And I am grown mad with it."


And now the evening of the last of their delightful days had come,--so
at least Athena Maule thought of it, for Jane Oglander was arriving the
next morning.

Wantele and Athena had had a sharp difference that afternoon. She wished
that the gay, the amusing doings of the last few days should continue,
and she had made out a further list--a short list, so she assured
herself,--of people who had been forgotten, and who might as well be
asked now. To her anger and surprise, Dick Wantele had refused her
reasonable request backing up his refusal with the authority of her
husband, of Richard himself.

"Richard thinks we've had enough of it, and that Jane would so hate it
all," he said, having reminded her half jokingly that they had arranged
everything of the kind should end with Jane Oglander's arrival. "I think
we owe Jane some consideration. She would be miserable married to a man
who was always being lionised in this absurd fashion----"

He stopped, then added lightly, "You don't know England, my dear cousin:
there will be a new lion soon, then our friend will have to take a back
place. To do him justice I think he's already getting rather sick of it
all!"

Mrs. Maule remained silent for a moment, and then she exclaimed, with a
rather curious look on her lovely face, "I don't agree! I think that he
enjoys it, Dick, and surely it is good for his career that he should do
so. Jane should understand that!"

Wantele lifted his eyebrows. It was a trick of his when surprised or
amused. "He will go on having plenty of that sort of thing after he's
married--if Jane lets him!"

Athena turned pettishly away. Thanks to Dick Wantele she was never
allowed to forget the fact that her delightful, her famous guest was
going to be married--and to her own dearest friend. Dick never spared
her. He seemed to delight in "rubbing it in." It was the more irritating
inasmuch as Hew Lingard never spoke to her of Jane.

During those pleasant, exciting days Mrs. Maule had sometimes asked
herself whether Lingard ever thought of Jane when--when he was with her,
with Athena. She had taken the trouble to find out, by means not wholly
creditable, that Lingard wrote to Jane every day; and there was always
one letter from the many that reached him each morning which he picked
out first and put in his pocket. The sight of his doing this gave Athena
a little pang of jealous pain. It annoyed her that any man when with
her should concern himself with another woman.

And then something else on this last day added to Mrs. Maule's
depression. Her husband was not well. He was feeling the effects of the
excitement of the last few days. Just after her unpleasant little
discussion with Dick, Richard Maule had addressed her directly--a thing
he scarcely ever did. "Aren't you going away?" he asked ungraciously. "I
thought you were going away as soon as Jane Oglander arrived."

She had answered briefly that her plans were changed, that she would not
be leaving Rede Place for nearly another month. But as, a moment later,
she had swept out of the room, she had told herself with rage that her
present life was intolerable,--that no woman had ever to put up with
such insults as she had to put up with, from Dick on the one hand, and
Richard on the other!

Within an hour her feelings were assuaged. Lingard, seeking her as he
had now fallen into the way of doing, had found her quivering with
anger, and what he took to be bitter pain.

She had told him of her husband's desire that she should leave Rede
Place on her friend's arrival, and he had received her confidences with
burning indignation and passionate sympathy. Nay more, the atmosphere
between them became electric, almost oppressive. Then, to Athena's sharp
surprise and annoyance, Lingard suddenly turned on his heel and left
the room, muttering something about having work to do.

       *       *       *       *       *

That evening, for the first time for many days, Athena, General Lingard,
and Dick Wantele dined without the restraining presence of strangers.
Dick, unlike the other two, was in good spirits, nay more, lively and,
in his own rather caustic way, amusing.

Jane Oglander would be here to-morrow! He dwelt on the thought with
satisfaction and an almost malicious pleasure. Ten days ago the thought
of seeing Jane at Rede Place had been painful, but now he would welcome
her presence. It was time, high time, she were here.

Now and again, while talking to Athena,--he could always compel her
attention,--he stole a glance at Jane Oglander's lover. Lingard did not
look as looks the man who is going to see his love on the morrow. His
expression was one of deep gravity, almost of suffering. There was a
strained look about his eyes, his mouth was set in grim lines, and
unless directly addressed he remained silent.

Mrs. Maule soon finished her more than usually frugal evening meal. She
got up and left the table, and as she did so Lingard sprang to the door.
He seemed to delight in rendering her the smallest personal service.

Before leaving the room, she turned round and addressed Wantele: "Don't
hurry," she said softly. "We won't go into the drawing-room to-night.
I've got to write some notes. Quite a batch of letters came this
afternoon. There were just one or two people I should have liked to have
asked next week--" she looked at him pleadingly, reproachfully....

Wantele stared at her coldly. "Of course you can ask one or two people,"
he said, and, with a slight smile, "Don't make yourself out more of a
martyr than you must, Athena!"

Hew Lingard, standing aside, his hand still on the handle of the door,
felt an overmastering impulse to go back to the table and strike Dick
Wantele's sneering face across the mouth. How awful to think, to see,
that such a woman as Athena Maule, so kind, so gentle, so generous,
so--so lovely and so defenceless, was subject to this young man's
insolence.

But he could do nothing--nothing; and Jane, amazing thought, was
actually fond of Wantele!

He shut the door behind his hostess and walked slowly back to the table.
There was a moment of awkward silence, and then Wantele broke it by
speaking of Jane. It was the first time her name had passed his lips in
Lingard's presence.

"Since Miss Oglander lost her brother in the strange and terrible way
you know," he said, "she has shrunk very much from seeing people, I mean
from mixing in ordinary society. That is one reason why she has always
enjoyed her visits here. The state of my cousin, Richard Maule's,
health compels us to lead a very quiet life." He forced himself to go
on: "Mrs. Maule, as you know, is a good deal away. She naturally does
not care for the extreme dulness, the solitariness, of the life----"

Lingard muttered a word of assent, but he made no other comment on the
other man's words. He took them to mean that Dick Wantele felt rather
ashamed of himself, as indeed he ought to do. Was it not pitifully clear
that Mrs. Maule, poor beautiful Athena, had no part or place in her
husband's house? All invalids tend to become self-absorbed and selfish;
but he judged Wantele hardly for encouraging, nay for fostering, Mr.
Maule's egoistic unkindness to his wife.

Both men were glad when the time came for them to part. Dick, as always,
went off to Richard, and Lingard, after a few unquiet moments in the
smoking-room, made his way slowly to Athena's boudoir, the charming,
restful room which, alone of the many rooms in the big quiet house,
seemed to be in a real sense her territory, and where he and she had
spent so many delightful hours together.

But to-night he was met there with something very like a rebuff.

Athena had been standing thinking, doing nothing, but when she heard
Lingard's now familiar steps in the corridor she moved swiftly to her
writing-table, and bent over it.

As he came in she lifted her head: "I really must finish these notes,"
she said deprecatingly. "You see, I had hoped to soften, if not
Richard's, then Dick's heart! Well, I failed, as I generally do fail
with him. And I feel"--her voice quivered--"very much as poor Cinderella
must have felt when the clock was about to strike twelve."

As he stood, irresolute, before her, she added, "Take a book and sit
down. I'll be as quick as I can." She got up with a swift movement and
put a box of cigarettes and matches close to his hand.

It was such a little thing, and yet, in the emotional state in which he
was now, Lingard felt touched, inexpressibly touched. How
extraordinarily kind and thoughtful she was! No wonder Jane was so fond
of her.

Mrs. Maule went back to her writing-table, intensely conscious that
Lingard's ardent, melancholy gaze was fixed on her. Now and again,
perhaps three or four times, she looked up for a moment and smiled, her
glance full of confident friendliness. But she did not speak, and thus
was spent one of the shortest and most poignant half-hours of Lingard's
life.

At last there came harsh, unwelcome interruption in the person of Dick
Wantele. For a moment he stood between them, his back to Lingard, facing
Athena.

"I've only come to tell you," he exclaimed, rather breathlessly, "that
Richard agrees that there are two or three more people we ought to ask.
I suggested the Dight-Suttons."

"I've just written, this moment, to say we can't have them," said Athena
slowly.

Dick shrugged his shoulders with what seemed to the man watching him an
unmannerly gesture of irritation. "I'm sorry," he said curtly. "I had no
idea that you would be writing to them to-night, or indeed to anyone
to-night. Surely to-morrow morning will be time enough. However, there
are one or two other people----"

Lingard got up. "I think I'll go out of doors for a bit," he said
abruptly. "I haven't walked enough to-day." It was horrible to him to
stand by and see Mrs. Maule insulted in her own house, in her own room.
He felt afraid that if he stayed there he would lose control of himself
and say something he would regret having said to Dick Wantele.

And Athena, moving to one side, saw his lowering face, and she felt a
thrill of possessive pride. What a man Lingard seemed by the side of
Dick Wantele! How well he must look in uniform. She wondered, jealously,
if Jane had ever seen him in uniform....

"Yes--do go out. And take the key--you know--the key of the Garden Room
off the mantelpiece. But you must get a coat. It's cold to-night."

He shook hands with them both, and went out. Dick only stayed a very few
moments,--long enough, however, to be told very plainly the names of the
people whom Athena wished to be invited. He went off to Richard with her
message.

Mrs. Maule began moving about the boudoir aimlessly. It was tiresome of
Lingard to stay out so long. She was used to another type of man,--one
more civilised, who would have understood in a moment what her quick
glance at him had tried to convey. That sort of man would have hung
about in the Garden Room till Dick Wantele had left her, and then he
would have come back at once.

But the great soldier--and the fact, it must be admitted, was part of
his attraction for Athena Maule--was not in the least like that.

Lingard knew nothing of flirtation, as the word was understood in Mrs.
Maule's circle. She supposed him, rightly, to be a man with but little
knowledge of the world in which the pursuit of the tenderer emotions is
carried to a fine art; she judged him, erroneously, to be a man
strangely lacking in certain primitive instincts. But that made the
state of bondage to which she had already reduced him the greater
triumph.

To a thinking mind there is something sombre, disturbing, in the thought
that the attraction of a man to a woman, whatever be the quality of that
attraction, manifests itself in much the same way.

Athena knew the signs. To-night every omen pointed one way. She put the
thought--the slightly insistent memory--of Jane away from her. Jane
should have known how to guard what had perhaps never been really hers.

She set her door ajar. It would be very annoying if General Lingard
were to come in and, as she knew he had done some nights ago, creep up
silently through the house....

At last there came the sounds of footfalls across the flags of the
Garden Room. Athena began to experience that curious sensation which
goes by the name of a beating heart. In other words, she felt strung up
to a high pitch of emotion.

Bayworth Kaye had given her some delicious moments, but she had never
felt with him what she felt now. For the first time Athena--skilful
huntress of men--had found a quarry worthy of pursuit. Was it possible
that to-night her quarry would elude her? Was it conceivable that
Lingard would push his scruples, his sense of absurd delicacy, as far as
that?

Athena had not yet learnt to reckon with Hew Lingard's conscience,--the
conscience, perhaps it would be more true to say the honour, he had
already deliberately thrust aside to-night, during those few unquiet
moments in the smoking-room.

She remained, however, absolutely still.

Lingard advanced a few steps nearer to the partly open door. He was
evidently hesitating, and Athena felt she could bear the suspense no
longer.

"Is anyone there?" she called out in a low voice. "Is it Hew?" She only
called him by that name when they were alone together.

He opened the door and came in.

"You must be cold," she said tremulously. "Do come nearer the fire."

Lingard came towards her. No, he was not cold. He had been walking,
covering miles in the hour he had spent trying to tire, to deaden,
himself out. It had been a terrible time of self-communion,
self-reproach, self-abasement.

The state he found himself in to-night recalled with piteous vividness
that episode of his stormy youth which had led to his long break with
the Paches.

It was horrible that he should couple, even in thought, Athena Maule and
that--that creature, over whom he had wasted, squandered, such treasures
of adoring love. Rosie had been one of those young ladies who, to use a
technical term, "walk on"; and because she was extraordinarily pretty,
she was always placed in the front row of the foolish musical comedy of
which he could still recall, not only every tune, but almost every word,
so often had he been to the theatre after that first meeting.

At the end of ten days,--he had known Athena Maule ten days, what a
strange coincidence!--at the end of ten days he had asked Rosie to marry
him. She had shilly-shallied for a while, and then, to his rapturous
surprise, she had said "Yes." How angry, how scandalised, how shocked
his relations had been!

Tommy Pache--in those days old Mr. Pache had been "Tommy" to his
relations--had hurried up to London and said all the usual things that
one does say to a young fool on such an occasion, but even he had been
struck by the girl's beauty, though of course Tommy had been careful not
to let this out to the others when he had got back to them.

How it all came back to him to-night! Lingard remembered the letters he
had received, the letters he had written. It had gone on for some
weeks--he couldn't quite remember how long now,--that time of anger, of
impatience, of longing, of rapture. And then, within a very few days of
that fixed for the quiet wedding which was to take place in a city
church,--he had always avoided that part of London ever since,--Rosie
had become the wife of another man, of a young idiot with a vacuous face
and an enormous fortune, of whom he had not even troubled to be jealous,
although his presence in the flat Rosie shared with another girl had
often made him impatient.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now Lingard felt desperately tired--tired in body, tired in spirit. But
he was glad--glad that he had disregarded the promptings of his
conscience, of his honour. It was delicious to be here indoors, with
this kind, this enchanting, this angelically beautiful woman close, very
close, to him.

Athena held out her foot to the fire, and Lingard, staring down, saw
that she was wearing a curious kind of slipper, one unlike any that he
had ever noticed on a woman

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