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Rest Harrow: A Comedy of Resolution

by Maurice Hewlett · English · Gutenberg #8464 · 539,626 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Rest Harrow: A Comedy of Resolution

Author: Maurice Hewlett


        
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8464]
                Most recently updated: March 15, 2018

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK REST HARROW: A COMEDY OF RESOLUTION ***




Produced by Charles Franks, Carel Miske and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team








REST HARROW

A COMEDY OF RESOLUTION

By Maurice Hewlett


“Rest Harrow grows in any soil.... The seeds may be sown as soon as
ripe in warm, sheltered spots out of doors.... It is a British plant.”
 --WEATHERS


With Illustrations By Frank Craig


THI KANNICTHI




CONTENTS


BOOK I     OF THE NATURE OF A PROLOGUE, DEALING WITH A BRUISED PHILOSOPHER IN
RETIREMENT

BOOK II     SANCHIA AT WANLESS HALL

BOOK III     INTERLUDE OF THE RECLUSE PHILOSOPHER

BOOK IV     SANCHIA IN LONDON

BOOK V     OF THE NATURE OF AN EPILOGUE, DEALING WITH DESPOINA




ILLUSTRATIONS (not available in this edition)


Wrote deliberately to each of her sisters

The hum of cities, and buzz of dinner tables . . sound in his ears not
at all.

The housekeeper! This--person!

He had eloquence, he thought, as he watched her, he had won. But he was
anxious. She was such a deep one.

Ploughman in the vales would sometimes see his gaunt figure on the
sky-line.

“Well, Sanchia,” he said, “here I am.”

The great music went sobbing and chiding through her frame, like wounded
nightingales.

Senhouse came back to her bedside and put a little flower into her hand




[Illustration: Wrote deliberately to each of her sisters.]




BOOK I -- OF THE NATURE OF A PROLOGUE, DEALING WITH A BRUISED PHILOSOPHER IN RETIREMENT




I


An observant traveller, homing to England by the Ostend-Dover packet
in the April of some five years ago, relished the vagaries of a curious
couple who arrived by a later train, and proved to be both of his
acquaintance. He had happened to be early abroad, and saw them come on.
They were a lady of some personal attraction, comfortably furred,
who, descending from a first-class carriage, was met by a man from a
third-class, bare-headed, free in the neck, loosely clad in grey flannel
trousers which flapped about his thin legs in the sea-breeze, a white
sweater with a rolling collar, and a pair of sandals upon brown and
sinewy feet uncovered by socks: these two. The man's garniture was
extraordinary, but himself no less so. He had a lean and deeply bronzed
face, hatchet-shaped like a Hindoo's. You looked instinctively for rings
in his ears. His moustache was black and sinuous, outlining his
mouth rather than hiding it. His hair, densely black, was longish and
perfectly straight. His eyes were far-sighted and unblinking; he smiled
always, but furtively, as if the world at large amused him, but must
never know it. He seemed to observe everything, except the fact that
everybody observed himself.

To have once seen such a man must have provided for his recollection;
and yet our traveller, who was young and debonnaire, though not so young
as he seemed, first recognised the lady. “Mrs. Germain, by George!” This
to himself, but aloud, “Now, where's she been all this time?” The frown
which began to settle about his discerning eyes speedily dissolved in
wonder as they encountered the strange creature in the lady's company.
He stared, he gaped, then slapped his thigh. “Jack Senhouse! That's the
man. God of battles, what a start! Now, what on earth is Jack Senhouse
doing, playing courier to Mrs. Germain?”

That was precisely the employment. His man had handed the lady out of
her compartment, entered it when she left it, and was possessing
himself of her littered vestiges while these speculations were afloat.
Dressing-case, tea-basket, umbrellas, rugs, and what not, he filled his
arms with them, handed them over to expectant porters, then smilingly
showed their proprietress the carriage ridded. He led the way to the
steamer, deposited his burdens and saw to the bestowal of others,
fetched a chair, wrapped her in rugs, found her book, indicated her
whereabouts to a mariner in case of need. All this leisurely done, in
the way of a man who has privilege and duty for his warrants. Enquiring
then, with an engaging lift of the eyebrows, whether she was perfectly
comfortable, and receiving with a pleasant nod her answering nod of
thanks, he left her and returned to the train. Tracked through the
crowd, and easily by his height, bare head, and leisurely motions, he
was next seen shouldering a canvas bag on his way back to the
boat. Jack's belongings, his bag of tricks; Jack all over, the same
inexhaustible Jack! It was delightful to our traveller to find Jack
Senhouse thus verifying himself at every turn. He was for the steerage,
it appears--and of course he was!--where depressed foreigners share with
bicycles, motor cars, and newly boiled pigs the amenities of economical
travel. In this malodorous and slippery well his interested friend
saw him sit down upon his bundle, roll a cigarette, and fall into easy
conversation with an Italian voyager who, having shaved, was now putting
on a clean collar and a tartan necktie.

The traveller, Mr. William Chevenix, who had watched him so long, a
well-dressed and cheerful Englishman of some five-and-thirty summers,
with round eyes in a round and rosy face, now assuring himself that he
would be damned if he didn't have it out with the chap, descended the
companion, picked his way through the steerage, and approached the
seated philosopher. He saw that he was known, and immediately. Nothing
escaped Senhouse.

“How d'ye do, how d'ye do?” He held out his hand. Senhouse rose and
grasped it. The Italian took off his hat, and strolled away.

“I'm very well, thanks,” he said. “Have you noticed those shores
beyond the canal? Samphire there just as we have it at home. Leagues of
samphire.”

The younger man looked in the direction indicated cheerfully and
blankly. “'The samphire by the ocean's brim,'” he said lightly. “I
attach no importance to it whatever, but it's very like you to lift
one into your privacy at a moment's notice. I'm all for the formalities
myself, so I observe that I haven't seen you for years. Years! Not
since--why, it must be eighteen.”

“It's precisely eight,” said Senhouse, “and I've been abroad for four of
them.”

His friend inspected him with candid interest. “At your old games, I
take it. You've filled England with hardy perennials and now you're
starting on Europe. Great field for you. You'll want a pretty big
trowel, though. A wheelbarrow might be handy, I should have said.”

Senhouse fired. “I've been planting the Black Forest, you see. Great
games. They gave me a free hand, and ten thousand marks a year to spend.
I've done some rather showy things. Now I want to go to Tibet.”

The other's attention had wandered. “I saw you come on board,” he said.
“I watched you play the Squire of Dames to a rather pretty woman whom I
happen to know. She was a Mrs. Germain in those days.”

“She still calls herself so,” Senhouse said. He was staring straight
before him out to sea. The steamer was under way.

“Married a queer old file in Berkshire, who died worth a plum. Goodish
time ago. They called him Fowls, or Fowls of the Air. So she's still a
widow, eh?”

Senhouse nodded. “She's his widow.” Then he asked, “You know her? You
might go and amuse her. I can't, because of these bonds.” He exhibited
his sockless feet with a cheerful grin.

“Oh, I shall, you know,” he was assured. “You're not dressy enough for
Mrs. Germain. She'd never stand it.”

“She doesn't,” said Senhouse. “She dislikes a fuss, and thinks me rather
remarkable.”

“Well,” said the other, “I think she's right. You always were a
conspicuous beggar. Now look at me. Think I'll do?”

Senhouse peered at him. “I think you are exactly what she wants just
now,” he said. “Go in and approve yourself, Chevenix.”

Mr. Chevenix, the spick and span, had something on his mind, however,
which he did not know how to put. He continued to reflect upon Mrs.
Germain, but only by way of marking time. “She used to be very good fun
in my young days. And she made things spin in Berkshire, they tell me.
I know she did in London--while it lasted. What's she doing? There was a
chap called Duplessis, I remember.”

“There still is,” Senhouse said, but in such a manner as to chalk No
Thoroughfare across the field. Chevenix perceived this rather late
in the day, and ended his ruminations in a whistle. “She kept him
dangling--” he had begun. Instead of pursuing, he said abruptly, “I say,
you remember Sancie Percival, of course.”

A change came over Senhouse's aspect which a close observer might have
noticed. He was very quiet, hardly moved; but he seemed to be listening
with all his senses, listening with every pore of his skin. “Yes,”
 he said, slowly. “Yes, I do; I'm not likely to forget her. She was my
dearest friend, and is so still, I hope.”

The solemnity of his intended message clouded Mr. Chevenix's candid
brow. “She's still at Wanless, you know.”

Senhouse set a watch upon himself. “No doubt she is,” he said. “She's
well?”

The other probed him. “She's never made it up with her people. I think
she feels it nowadays.”

Senhouse asked sharply, “Where's Ingram?”

“Ingram,” said Chevenix, “is just off for a trip. He's to be abroad for
a year. India.”

Senhouse shivered. “Alone?”

“Well, without her, anyhow. He always was a casual beggar, was Nevile.”
 He could see now that he was making a hit. “Got old Senhouse where he
lives,” he told himself, and then continued. “Fact is, I've been out
with him as far as Brindisi. He asked me to. I had nothing to do. But
I want to see Sancie Percival again. I was awfully fond of her--of
the whole lot of them.” He reflected, as a man might deliberate upon
familiar things, and discover them to be wonders. “What a family they
were, by Jove! Five--of--the--loveliest girls a man could meet with.
Melusine, what a girl she was! Married Tubby Scales--fat chap with a
cigar. Vicky, now. How about Vicky? She was my chum, you know. She's
married, too. Chap called Sinclair--in the Guides. But Sancie beat them
all in her quiet way. A still water--what?”

Senhouse, his chin clasped in his bony hands, contemplated the sea.
His face was drawn and stern. There was a queer twitching of the
cheek-bones. “Got him, by Jove!” said Mr. Chevenix to himself, and
pushed on. “I say, I wish you'd go and see her,” he said.

Senhouse got up and leaned over the bulwarks. He was plainly disturbed.
Chevenix waited for him nervously, but got nothing.

Then he said, “The fact is, Senhouse, I think that you should go. You
were the best friend she ever had.” Senhouse turned him then a tragic
face.

“No, I wasn't,” he said. “I think I was the worst.”

Chevenix blinked. “I know what you mean. If it hadn't been for you and
your confounded theories, you imply that she--”

“I don't know--” Senhouse began. “God only knows what she might have
done. She was not of our sort, you know. I always said that she was
unhuman.”

“That's the last thing she was,” said Chevenix, neatly. Senhouse scorned
him.

“You don't know anything about it,” he said. “What are the doings of
this silly world, of our makeshift appearances, to the essentials?
Antics--filling up time! You speak as if she gave Ingram everything, and
lost it. She did, but he never knew it--so never had it. Ingram had what
he was fitted to receive. Her impulse, her impulsion were divine. She
has lost nothing--and he has gained nothing.”

“If you talk philosophy I'm done,” cried Mr. Chevenix. “Well, I say to
you, my boy, Go and see her. She's so far human that she's got a tongue,
and likes to wag it, I suppose. I don't say that there's trouble, and I
don't say there's not. But there are the makings of it. She's alone, and
may be moped. I don't know. You'd better judge for yourself.”

Senhouse, trembling from his recent fire, turned away his face. “I don't
know that I dare. If she's unhappy, I shall be in the worst place I ever
was in my life. I don't know what I shall do.”

“That's the first time you ever said that, I'll go bail,” Chevenix
interrupted him. But Senhouse did not hear him.

“I did everything I could at the time. I nearly made her quarrel with
me--I dared do that. I went up to Wanless and saw Ingram. I hated the
fellow, I disapproved of him, feared him. He was the last man in the
world I could have tackled with a view to redemption. He was almost
hopelessly bad, according to my view of things. Fed by slaves from the
cradle, hag-ridden by his vices; a purple young bully, a product of
filthy sloth, scabbed with privilege. I saw just how things were. She
pitied him, and thought it was her business to save him. She did
nobly. She gave herself for pity; and if she mistook that for love, the
splendid generosity of her is enough to take the breath away. The world
ought to have gone down on its knees to her--but it picked up its
skirts for fear she might touch them. What a country! What a race! Well,
feeling towards her as I did, and loathing him, I urged him to marry
her--to make her his property for life. Dead against my conviction, mind
you, but what else could I do? God help me, I played the renegade to
what I sincerely believed. I couldn't see her done to death by a world
of satyrs.”

“Of course you couldn't, my dear man,” cried Chevenix. “Girls of her
sort must be married, you know.”

“I don't know anything of the kind,” replied Senhouse, fiercely; “but I
loved her. You may put it that I funked. I did--and to no purpose.”

“If you were to see her now,” Chevenix put in, “you could do some good.
She'll be pretty lonely up there.” Senhouse got up.

“I'll see her,” he said. “Whatever happens.”

“Right,” said Chevenix. “That's a good man. That's what I wanted of you.
I'll tell her that you're coming. Now I'm going to do the civil to Mrs.
Germain.”

Senhouse had turned away, and was leaning over the bulwarks, lost in his
thoughts. He remained there until the passage was over.

Mr. Chevenix, having approached the lady with all forms observed, made
himself happy in her company, as, indeed, he did in all. “Now this is
very jolly, Mrs. Germain, I must say. I'm a companionable beggar, I
believe; and here I was in a ship where I didn't know a living soul
until I met you and Senhouse. Didn't even know that you knew Senhouse.
Queer fish, eh? Oh, the queerest fish in the sea! But you know all that,
of course.”

Mrs. Germain, a brunette with the power of glowing, coloured becomingly,
and veiled her fine eyes with somewhat heavy and heavily-fringed
eye-lids. “Oh, yes,” she said, “I have known him for a long time.”

“Met him abroad, I suppose--tinkering round, as he does. The everlasting
loafer, artist, tinker, poet, gardener. 'Pon my soul, he's like the
game we used to do with cherry-stones round the pudding plate. Don't you
know? Soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, and all the rest. He's all those
things, and has two pair of bags to his name, and lives in a cart, and's
a gentleman. Not a doubt about that, mind you, Mrs. Germain.”

She smiled upon him kindly. “None at all,” she said. “I like him
extremely.”

“You would, you know,” said Chevenix, his tones rich in sympathy. “All
women do. You couldn't help it. You've got such a kind heart. All women
have. Now, I've known Senhouse himself five or six years, but I've known
about him for at least eight. I used to hear about him from morn to dewy
eve, once upon a time, from one--of--the--loveliest and most
charming girls you ever met in your life. Did you know her? A Miss
Percival--Sanchia Percival. We used to call her Sancie. Thought you
might have met her, perhaps. No? Well, this chap Senhouse would have
gone through the fire for her. He would have said his prayers to her.
Did you ever see his poems about her? My word! He published 'em after
the row, you know. He as good as identified her with--well, we won't
mention names, Mrs. Germain, but he identified her with a certain holy
lady not a hundred miles from the Kingdom of Heaven. Blasphemous old
chap--he did, though.”

Mrs. Germain, toying with her scent-bottle, was interested. “I never
heard him speak about a Miss Percival,” she said. She used a careless
tone, but her flickering eyelids betrayed her.

“You wouldn't, you know,” he told her with the same sympathetic
earnestness. “There was too much of a row. He was cut all to pieces. I
thought he'd go under; but he's not that sort. Who called somebody--some
political johnny--the Sea-green Incorruptible? Oh, ask me another! You
might call old Senhouse the Green-tea Irrepressible; for that was his
drink (to keep himself awake all night, writin' poems), and there never
was a cork that would hold him down--not even Sancie Percival. No, no,
out he must come--fizzling.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Germain, still looking at her fingers in her lap.
“I'm very much interested. You mean that he was very much--that he paid
her a great deal of attention?”

Chevenix stared roundly about him. “Attention! Oh, heavens! Why, three
of his letters to her would fill _The Times_ for a week--and he kept
it up for years! She used to get three a week--budgets! blue-books! For
simple years! Attentions!” He shook his head. “The word's no good. He
paid nobody anything at all when she was in the same county. He used
to sit listening to her thrilling the waves of air. He used to hear
her voice in the wind--and when it changed, he used to fire off his
answers!”

Mrs. Germain laughed--whether at Chevenix or his preposterous hero is
not to be known. “You are rather absurd,” she said. “Mr. Senhouse never
gave me the idea of that sort of person. Why did they never--?”

Chevenix narrowed his eyes to the merest slats. “_Marry?_” he said, in
an awed whisper. “Is that what you mean?”

Mrs. Germain showed him her soft brown orbs, which for two seasons had
been said to be the finest pair of dark eyes in London. “Yes,” she said,
“I do mean that. How clever of you to guess!”

Chevenix bowed to her. “Not at all,” he said. “I'm quite good at that
kind of thing. You have to be, if you knock about. Besides, that's the
whole point. Bless you! He would just as soon have married Diana of the
Ephesians. He said so. I heard him. He would have thought it an insult
to hint at it. Didn't I tell you that he was a poet?”

“Yes,” the lady said quickly. “You did. But I suppose poets occasionally
marry.”

“Not that sort,” Chevenix pronounced, with a shake of the head. “At
least, they don't marry the right person. They never do. Or there are
two or three persons. Look at Shelley. Look at Dante. I happen to know
all about both of 'em. Senhouse drank 'em up--and gave 'em out like
steam. He thought no end of Dante and Shelley. As a matter of fact, he
didn't believe in marriage, as a game--as a kind of institution, you
know. He thought it devilish wrong--and said so--and that's where the
trouble was. Marry Sancie! I wish to heaven he had. There'd have been
no trouble at all. They were made for each other. She loved his fun--and
was easy with him, you see. She was queerish, too--a shy young bird; but
she was quite at home with him. No, no. The trouble really began with
him putting her out of conceit with marriage. And then she didn't care
for him in that sort of way, then. And then--well, the less said the
better.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Germain, absorbed by the devolutions of the tale. “Oh!”

“'Oh's the sort of expression one used at the time,” said Chevenix.
“There wasn't much else to be said. It was a holy row.” He mused, he
brooded, and said no more. Luckily for him, he discovered Dover at hand,
and escaped. Mrs. Germain was put into a first-class carriage by
two attendant squires, provided with tea and a foot-warmer; and then
Chevenix bowed himself away and Senhouse disappeared. She had a novel
on her knees, but read little. She looked out of window, frowning and
biting her red lip. When she reached Victoria she tightened both lips,
and you saw that, so compressed, they made a thin red line straight
above a square chin. Her charm and favour both lay, you then discovered,
in expression.

Senhouse, hatless and loose-limbed, stood at the door to help her out.
She accepted his services, and was put into a cab.

“Where's he to take you?” he asked her pleasantly.

She said at once, “To Brown's Hotel.” Then, before she got in, with a
hand, unperceived by the general, just touching his arm, “Jack, I want
to speak to you, but not to-night. Will you come in the morning, please?
I am rather tired, and shall dine early and go to bed. Is my maid here?”
 She looked about. “Oh, I suppose she's seeing to the luggage. You might
find her, and tell her where to come to.”

Senhouse smiled and nodded. “Certainly. All these things shall be done.
Anything else before you go off?”

She hesitated for a minute, then said, “Yes, there _is_ one more thing.
You mustn't come to Brown's like that. You must put on ordinary things.”

He raised his eyebrows, then laughed--throwing his head up. “Wonderful
lady! Wherewithal shall I be clothed? Do you really think these things
matter?”

She was firm. “I really do. I hope you will be kind enough
to--to--please me.”

He looked very kindly at her. “My dear,” he said, “of course I shall. Be
quite easy about it.” He held out his hand. “Good night, Mary.”

She took it, but didn't meet his look. “Good night,” she said, and drove
away without another signal.

Senhouse, shouldering his bundle, found the lady's maid, and gave her
her sailing orders. His manner to her was exactly that which he had
shown to the mistress, easy, simple, and good-humoured. Leaving her,
he went a leisurely way through the press, and took a tram-car from the
corner of Vauxhall Bridge Road in the direction of Battersea.




II


Senhouse, after a night of solitary musing upon certain waste places
known best to outlanders, walked up Saint James's Street at six o'clock
in the morning, talking lightly and fiercely to himself. A long life of
loneliness had given him that habit incurably. Discovering the hour by a
clock in Piccadilly, he realised that it was too early to wait upon Mrs.
Germain in Albemarle Street, so continued his way up the empty hill,
entered the Park, and flung himself upon the turf under the elms. Other
guests were harboured by that hospitable sward, shambling, downcast lice
of the town. These, having shuffled thither, dropped, huddled and slept.
His way was not theirs: to him the open space was his domain. He ranged
the streets, one saw, as if they had been the South Downs, with the long
stride and sensitive tread of a man who reckons with inequalities
of footing. The country and the town were earth alike, though now of
springing grass and now again of flagstones.

His face, after a night of fierce self-searching, looked its age, that
of a man past forty; his aspect upon affairs was no more a detached
observer's; his eyes were hard, his smile was bleak. Sodden misery,
stupor, and despair lay all about him, and would have drawn his pitying
comments if it had not been so with him that all his concern must be for
himself.

“She wants me, and I must go to her,” was the burden of his thought;
but, like a recurring line in a poem, it concluded very diverse matter.

“I played the traitor to her; I could not wait--and yet I must have
known. I said to myself, It is enough to have known and loved her; watch
her happy, and thank God. That should have been enough for any man who
had ever seen the blue beam of her eyes shed in kindliness upon him; but
I grew blind and could not see. I lost my lamp and went astray. I ran
about asking one after another to stop the bleeding of my wound. God is
good. After eight years, _she wants me, and I must go to her._

“I love her, as I have always loved; for she is always there, and I have
come back. She can never change, though her beauty grow graver, and all
knowledge of the vile usage of the world have passed before her young
eyes. Artemis no more, for she has stooped to the lot of women; but
still invincibly pure, incapable of sin, though she know it all. It
can never touch her; she goes her way. She wears a blue gown now, not a
white one. Demeter, the sad, bountiful Mother she will be--yet the same
woman, the sweet and grave, the inflexible, the eternal. And, standing
as she has always stood, _she wants me, and I must go to her._

“I remember the wonder, I remember the morning glory of her first
appearing. The spell of the woods was upon her. Bare-headed, gowned in
white, she girt up her vesture and dipped her white limbs in the pool.
I went to her, all my worship in my face; I worked with her at her task.
Together we pulled the weed, we set the lilies free. High-minded as a
goddess, she revealed herself to me. I was the postulant, dumb before
the mysteries; I adored without a thought. I was nothing, could be
nothing, to her but her lover--and now _she wants me, and I must go to
her._

“For two years I was close to her side--either I or my words never left
her. She became humble, suffered me to lead her, opened to me her mind,
shared with me her secret thoughts. I told her the truth; I hid nothing
from the first. From the first day she knew that I loved her. There was
no presumption in this--I asked nothing, expected nothing. I told her
often that I looked forward to her wedded state--and then it came, and
I was not ready for it as it came. Horrible thing, her nobility was her
punishment. She has suffered, she suffers; _she wants me, and I must go
to her._

“How am I to go, tied and bound as I am? What can I do? I have been
false to my vows. I belong in duty to another world, to another woman,
who can command me as she will. I don't know, I don't see. I know only
one thing, and see only her, calling me with her inflexibly grave eyes.
_She wants me, and I must go to her.”_

He got up and left the Park. It was ten o'clock of an April morning.
Crocuses--her flowers--were blowing sideways under a south-west wind.
Blue sky, white clouds, shining on the just and the unjust, covered her
in Yorkshire and him, her grim knight, in Mayfair. He stalked, gaunt
and haggard-eyed, down the hill, threading his way through the growing
traffic of the day, and faced his business with the lady in the case.

Mrs. Germain was serious when he entered her sitting-room. She was in
a loose morning gown of lace and pink ribbon. Pink was her colour. Her
dark eyes looked heavy. She should have been adorable, and she was--but
not to him just now. He stood before her, looked at her where she sat
with her eyes cast down at her hands in her lap. She had let them rest
upon him for the moment of his entry, but had not greeted him.

Now, as he stood watching her, she had no greeting.

“Good morning, Mary,” he said presently, and she murmured a reply. He
saw at once that she was prepared for him, and began in the middle.

“A friend of mine,” he said, “is alone and unhappy. I heard of it
yesterday from Chevenix. I must go and see her. I shan't be away long,
and shall then be at your disposition.”

Her strength lay in her silence. She sat perfectly still, looking at her
white hands. Her heavy eyelids, weighted with all the knowledge she had,
seemed beyond her power of lifting. He was driven to speak again, and,
against his will, to defend himself.

“I am in a hatefully false position. I ought to have told you long ago
all about it. It seemed impossible at the time, and so from time to
time, to open the shut book. I closed it deliberately, and from the time
of doing it until this moment I have never spoken of it even to myself.
Chevenix, who knew her well, broke it open unawares yesterday, and now
we must read in it, you and I.”

He stopped, took breath, and began again. “I don't see how you can
forgive me, or how I can, so to speak, look myself in the face again. I
have played the knave so long with you that it is perhaps the greatest
knavery I can commit to be honest at last. But I am going to do it,
Mary. I want to tell you the whole story. You have told me yours.”

Her eyes flickered at that, but she said nothing. Passive as she sat,
heavy in judgment, she was yet keenly interested. All her wits were at
work, commenting, comparing, judging, and weighing every word that he
said.

He told her a strange, incoherent story of poet's love. This mysterious,
shrouded Sanchia figured in it as the goddess of a shrine--omnipresent,
a felt influence, yet never a woman. He spoke her name with a drop of
the voice; every act of hers, as he related it, was coloured by sanction
to seem the dealing of a divine person with creeping mankind. To Mrs.
Germain it was all preposterous; if she had owned the humorous sense it
would have been tragically absurd. For what did it amount to, pray,
but this, that Jack Senhouse had been in love with a girl who had loved
somebody else, had married her choice, and was now repenting it? Jack,
then, in a pique, had trifled with her, Mary Germain, and made love to
her. Now he found that this Sanchia was to be seen he was for jumping
back. Was he to jump, or not to jump? Did it lie with her? Jack seemed
to think that it did.

If it did, what did she want? As to one thing she had long been clear.
Jack Senhouse was a good lover, but would be an impossible mate. She
had found his gypsy tent and hedgerow practice in the highest degree
romantic. With gypsy practice he had the wheedling gypsy ways. An
adventure of hers in the North, for instance--when, panic-struck, she
had fled to him by a midnight train, had sought him through the dales
and over limestone mountains through a day and night, and cried herself
to sleep, and been found by him in the dewy dawn and soothed by his
masterful cool sense--wasn't this romantic? It had drawn her to him as
she had never before been drawn to a man. She felt that here at last was
a man indeed to be trusted. For she had been there with him, and not a
living soul within miles, entirely at his discretion, and he had not so
much as kissed her fingers. No, not even that, though he had wanted
to. That she knew, as women do know such things. Romantic, indeed,
trustworthy! Why, a Bayard, a Galahad of a gypsy! After this adventure,
after he had driven her back to her duty, she had owned allegiance to
nobody else in the world. And when her husband died she had renounced
her widow-right, embraced hardship, kept herself by teaching; and when,
finally, he came to her and offered her her choice, she had chosen
Poverty for her lord as single-heartedly as ever did Francis find his
lady in a beggar's garb.

And that being done, it did not “do.” That was how she put it now; but
the process had been slow, and never defined. He had carried her off to
Baden for his work of naturalising plants. He had a great name for that,
a European name. In three weeks his work absorbed him; within that time
she knew that she was no mate for him. You can't be picturesque
for ever, she thought. She had never reckoned with his incredible
simplicity, and never for a moment connected his talk with his acts.
Perhaps this Jack was the only really logical man in the world. Now she
found that in talking of Poverty as the only happiness, he literally
and really believed it so. He would own nothing but the barest
necessities--neither pictures, nor furniture, neither clothes nor books.
Pictures, furniture? Why, he had no roof to shelter them! Clothes? Where
was he to carry them, if not on his back? Books? He had half-dozen,
which contained all the wisdom of the world. So he used to cry. Now,
this might be as it was; but when he seemed to expect her to be of the
same mind and behaviour, you will see that he must needs be mad.

Yet so it was. He had lived in a tent for twenty years, so took his tent
to Germany, and went on living in it. In that, with complete gravity, he
received the Grand Duke of Baden, and several uniformed high officials,
who wore plumed headgear and incredibly high collars, and glittering
boots of patent leather. Folded superbly in cloaks of milky blue,
they looked to Mary like gods; to Senhouse they were amusing
fellow-creatures, interested in his plants and plans. He spread maps on
the ground and followed his racing finger with racing speech. His German
was faulty, but exceedingly graphic. His words shook the tent curtains.
Within half-an-hour, such was the infection of his eloquence, he had
most of his company on their knees beside him, and the Grand Duke,
accommodated with a camp-stool, buried his hand in his beard and
followed every line without a breath. Of all in that tent, she, Mary
Germain, had been the only person to feel the indescribable squalor in
the situation--and she the only one who might have been born to it; for
her upbringing had been humble, and her rise in the world sudden and
short of durance. But she knew now that she had hardly been able to live
it out for very shame.

Directly the visitors had departed there had been a scene--she in tears
of vexation which scalded, and he concerned at her trouble, but unable
for the life of him to see what it was all about. He had been kindness
itself. He always was the kindest and gentlest creature. If she wanted
a house, hotel or what not, she should have it. In fact, he got her one,
installed her, and undertook to keep her there. She bit her lip now to
remember that she had agreed--and the ensuing difficulties. He had no
money, and would have none of his own, and he refused to live under a
roof on any terms whatsoever. Of ten thousand marks a year, which he was
to receive from his Grand Duke, half was to be hers; he would see her
when she would, and she might follow him about as she would--or not, if
she would not. He could not see that there was anything extraordinary in
these propositions. To him it was the simplest thing in the world that
two people should do as they pleased. Society? What in the name of
God had society to do with it? She remembered her tears, and his blank
dismay when he saw them. He thought that she was unhappy, and so she
was; but she was grievously angry also, that she could not make him see
what things would “do” and what things “never do.”

His work had inflamed him; he had marched from place to place,
unencumbered and without a thought or care in the world--inspired with
his scheme, in which plants stood for the words in a poem. He slept out
many nights on the Felsenberg, on the ground, wrapped in a cloak. He
disappeared for weeks at a time in impenetrable forests, sharing
the fires of charcoal-burners, mapping, planning, giving orders to a
secretary from the Botanical Department, as wild as a disciple should
be. There was nothing for her, poor lady, but to sit about in hotel
saloons--as the widow of an English gentleman, occasionally visited by
an eccentric friend. So she put it for the benefit of society; but this
had not been her idea of things when she had tumbled into Senhouse's
arms--nor had it been his.

Her ruling idea in these days of disenchantment and discomfort--and
it was her ruling idea still--was to preserve appearances. The great,
invincible, fundamental instinct of the class from which she had
sprung--to keep oneself unspotted by the world. The variation upon
the text is Senhouse's own, done in a moment of exasperation over her
untiring effort to appear what she was not and did not want to be. She
loved the man sincerely; if she had been married to him she would have
kept faithfully to his side. But she had no lines; her wedding ring was
not of his giving. Without these assurances she simply could not love
him. It came to that.

He had, when they had approached the matter of alliance, put aside
marriage, literal marriage, as out of the question. He took it airily
for granted that she agreed with him. The servitude of the woman which
it implied was to him unspeakably wicked. He could not have treated the
vilest woman in such a manner. But he had reckoned without the woman
in her case. To her, freedom to love, without sanction or obligation,
destroyed love. When he found that out, which he did after a year of
her German vexations, he offered himself and his convictions to her. He
humbled himself before her--but by that time she would not. By that time
she had recovered her widow's portion (which had been dependent upon her
remaining sole), and was entitled to some thousands a year and a good
dower-house in Berks. She declined to marry him, and acted as such.
She had been his wife in fact for a quarter of a year; she was his
friend--as he was hers--for the rest of their time abroad. He had
respected her wish, but had kept himself at her free disposal, until
now of late, when this disturbing Sanchia Percival arose out of the
nothingless and was shown to her as a goddess newly from the shades. And
so now here sat Mrs. Germain, with her eccentric friend pale and gaunt
before her, unlike himself as she had always known him, about to take
her at her word, and to behave as a friend might. What should she say?

He would come back if she chose; he had said so--and he was incapable of
lies. If he came back, and if she chose, he would marry her, and be the
imperturbable, delightful, incalculable, impossible companion she had
always known him. He would marry her--and decline to come under her
roof. He would, perhaps, pitch his tent in her paddock; he would sit at
her table in sweater and flannels, sandals on his feet, while she and
her guests were in the ordinary garb of--gentlefolks. Gentlefolks! Yes.
But the maddening and baffling thought was a conviction that he would be
the greatest gentleman there. She knew that. Lord of his mind, lord of
his acts, easy in his will, and refusing to bow to any necessity but
that, he would be the superior of them all. Could this be borne? Or
could she bear to surrender so rare a friend to a Miss Percival?

Who could Miss Percival be? It was a good name--better than Middleham,
which had been her own, as good as Germain, which had been her
husband's. Sanchia, an extraordinary name, an unusual name. It sounded
Spanish and aristocratic. The Honourable Hertha de Speyne: she had known
the daughter of a noble house so styled in her governess days, her
days of drudgery, and even now it had a glamour for her, who had since
hobnobbed with many honourables, flirted with many young lords, and
been kissed by a duchess. Miss Sanchia Percival: the Honourable Sanchia
Percival. No doubt this was a high lady. And she must be beautiful, or
Jack wouldn't speak of her as he had. He hushed his voice down, he
spoke as if she were a goddess, as if to disobey her call was out of the
question. A dull heat stirred deeply within her, and she found herself
setting her teeth together. No! Jack had brought her to this pass--and
she would not be left there.

These were the thoughts of Mrs. Germain as she sat very still, with
heavy-lidded eyes, listening to Senhouse's story. He ended it in these
words: “You charmed me, Mary, and you still charm me. You are very
sweet, and I shall never want a dearer mate than you might be, if you
would. I vow to you that you are the only woman with whom I have wished
to live, as we might live if you would. I can't make you see, I'm
conscious, what I feel about Sanchia--but it's certainly not that. My
little dear, can't you trust me?” He looked down, and saw her tears
slowly dropping; he was very much moved, knelt by her side. She turned
her face away, dangerously moved also. She struggled with her tears, her
face contorted, her bosom heaving in riot. Senhouse took her hands, but
she wrenched them away and covered her face with them. Passion grew
upon her, passion of regret, of loss, of rage, of desire--“Oh, leave me,
leave me! Oh, cruel, cruel! No man in the world could be so cruel--” and
then she sprang up, and faced him, flushed and fierce as a woman whom
love has made mad.

“I believed in you, I gave you everything I had. You have had it, and
you leave me. I made no pretences--I told you all my secrets. You said
that you loved me--and now you leave me. Go, please. I hope I shall
never see you again.”

Her great eyes loomed in her hot face like beacons. Her colour was high,
her lips vivid. She looked as beautiful as an Indian flower. She was
fighting for her own like a cat. An absent, shadowy, icily-pure Sanchia
could never contend with this quivering reality of scarlet and burning
brown; and the man stood disarmed before her, watching her every
movement and sensible of every call of her body. Her wild words provoked
him, her beauty melted him; pity for her, shame, memories of what he
had believed her, impossible visions of what she might be; he was tossed
this way and that, was whirled, engulfed, overwhelmed. There is only one
end to such strifes. With a short cry, he threw up his arms.

“God help us, I stay,” he said.




III


Hear now of the immediate end. This gentleman, a philosopher and poet,
rich in theory, having reached a middle point in his career, had found
that he had, without knowing it, encountered a Fact which had gripped
him in a vital part, squeezed the very fibres of him, sucked him
apparently dry of human juices, even of the zest to live, and presently
departed, leaving him faint by the wayside. Not until he was clean gone
did he have the least suspicion that it had been there, and (if he could
have known it) the first glimmering of reawakening pulse in him was the
considering of its nature. Brooding upon it, while he grieved over his
languor, he discovered that it had not been hard and scaly, like
your ordinary vampire, but soft-lipped, brown-eyed, warm-fleshed,
cloudy-haired; in fact, a pretty woman. Now, in all his previous
relations with that sex, while he had given much of himself, he had
never met before with a woman whose need was the measure of her allure.
If she had not wanted him so much, he would never have thought of her
twice. But this was precisely what had happened. She had acted upon him
as a vacuum upon air. Her helplessness, her ignorance, her appealing
belief in him, her clinging power, heightening her physical charm, had
sucked him in a stream; and when she was full of him, he was empty. She
had been the first to find it out. Having trailed him in her wake for
a season, against his instincts, against his conscience, she presently
coaxed him to let her go. Let her go! He asked nothing better than to
see her happy, and saw no other way of being so himself. When she had
gone, and was safely married to an old admirer, our expended friend lay,
like a gaffed salmon, faintly flapping on the bank. For a year or more
he lay, and dated his recovery of tone from the moment of finding out
the nature of his disaster. “She was hungry, and I fed her. She was
thirsty, and I gave her drink. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken
away. Blessed, by all means, be the name of the Lord.”

He proposed now to resume his former life of sojourn in tents and
desultory practice of the arts, a life which, as it was at once highly
practical and entirely dependent upon enjoyment, we may call one of
contemplative activity. For twenty years he had not lived in a house,
slept in a bed, or owned anything beyond the barest necessities. (The
only thing he had, indeed, found himself owning, had at last removed
itself.) He had been by turns poet, painter-in-water-colours, tinker,
botaniser, antinomian, and anarchist; and attributed his success in
all these busy walks to the fact that he was as strongly averse to the
possession of property as he was incapable of getting any. Here, then,
was his capital, with which to commence the world again.

With this at his back, you would have said, he had but to pack his
knapsack, stow his tent, and take to the road. But that was not so.

He had, with the purest intentions, broken all the laws of Society.
Entitled to a competence, he had had neither house nor gear, earned just
so much as would keep him in food. He knew what it was to go without
a dinner, and what to sleep under the stars. Yet he had been
extraordinarily happy. He had held up his head, and kept it, alike with
the learned--for he had learning--and with the simple, whose simplicity
he shared. He had had the knack, in fact, of getting himself accepted on
his own terms, exorbitant as they were; and of both rich and poor
alike he had demanded entire equality. “Barefoot I stand,” had been
his proposition, “of level inches with your lordship, or with you, my
hedgerow acquaintance. Take me for a man, decently furnished within, or
take me not at all. Take me never, at least, for a clothes-horse.”
 In all these things, which he had proclaimed far and wide, in divers
tongues, all of them eloquent, he had violated the unwritten laws of our
country as great and small know them to be. Chiefest he broke them in
being happy. That was outrageous. But he was now, it seemed, confronted
with a Law of Nature when he found that, having broken with a way of
life, you cannot resume it, not because it isn't there (for there it
is), but rather because you are not there yourself. You are elsewhere,
and the road is hard to find. At forty-two you are not the mountaineer
of thirty-five. Worse than that, worst sign of all, you don't want to
be.

Here was a shock for the poet in him, which it was the philosopher's
task to allay. In heated debate the two contended for his reasonable
soul.

_Poet_. I am young.

_Philosopher_. You put it so. You are forty-two, and as old as you feel.

_Poet_. Away with you. I am young, I tell you. There are worlds to see.

_Philosopher_. Europe, Asia, Africa--

_Poet_. Alas! I have never been to Tibet.

_Philosopher_. My friend, if you wished to see Tibet you would be
half-way there by now. I know you so well. Believe me you have seen more
than enough. The world is so much larger than you, that five-and-twenty
acres in Sussex will yield you more wonders than you can use. Take them,
make them yours, and from them build up your Tibet. I understood that
you were a poet.

_Poet_. My heart fails me. I have loved and lost. I have seen the dawn,
and it has blinded me.

_Philosopher_. Mary is happy. You could never have made her so.

_Poet_. A sweet, good girl, but--I was not speaking of Mary.

_Philosopher_. So I supposed. Let me remind you--

_Poet_. Remind me of nothing. I remember everything. She was like the
dayspring from on high. When I think of Greece, I think not of Plato
and Sophocles, but of things more delicate and shy; of the tender
hedge-flowers of the Anthology, of Tanagra and its maidens in reedy
gowns, of all of this in a sweet clean light, as she was, and is, and
must be. Ah, and I think of her, as I saw her first in the woodland, in
her white gown, with the sun upon her hair. She was like the fluting of
a bird; she was clear melody. She girt herself high and set her foot in
the black water. She dipped her pure body in above the knees; she, the
noblest, the wholesomest the youngest of the gods. Remind me of nothing,
I beg you.

_Philosopher_. I must really remind you of this. You renounced her of
your own deliberation, and promised to dance at her wedding.

_Poet_ (with a sob). So I would, God bless her!

_Philosopher_. That is a charitable sentiment. I have done you good.

_Poet_. You are an ass.

I have summarised an argument which was really prolonged and very
acrimonious. The philosopher prevailed, and the poet, beaten at
every point, forswore what ambitions remained to him, built himself a
shepherd's hut in a valley of the Wiltshire Downs, and planned out his
memoirs in three stout volumes. He believed that he had reached that
stage in life where retrospect is all.

Volume I., _Open Country;_ Volume II., _Halfway House;_ Volume III.,
_Shepherd's Crown_--are titles which indicate the scope and spirit of
the projected work. They were characteristically chosen before a line
was written; nor, indeed, was a single other word put to paper, not
so much as an Advice to the Reader, for two years. The building of
his house with his own hands, and the disposition of the land about it
occupied him for the better part of one; the next, with its progressive
seasons of fruition, was spent in meditative ecstasy; by the beginning
of the third his cure was complete. The poet in him was now the
philosopher's humble servant, as should surely always be the case.
Resolved that the world should be sweetened yet, he attacked his book.

He began with the third volume, in which, under the heading of
_Shepherd's Crown_, he proposed to discharge himself of the conclusions
of his ripened manhood upon the world, as he now saw it from his grassy
outlook. Not yet could he trust himself with _Open Country_. That was
for Thoughts. That was to be filled with spheral music which lay under
lock and bolt deep within his nature. Before he could set that free to
throb and beat in his brain, he must be quite sure that it could not win
a way back into his heart. For she of whom it must consist, whose very
name was music, whose presence, as he said, was like the fluting of a
bird, was the renounced, impossible She; that She whom for reason clear
and good he had loved (upon his knees, with covered eyes), and suffered
go her ways. The philosopher was clear upon the point that Volume I.
must be withheld for a season, and that Volume II., if it was to deal
with the enchantment of the flitted Mary, must wait also. Mary must be
charitably handled; give her time. In Volume the third, now, we were
to have neither music on the one hand, nor the sharp fragrance of loose
hair and warm breath on the other; but green thoughts, rather, “calm
of mind, all passion spent,” as surely at forty-two it must be. Let the
wise book deal with life, not the living; with love, not of woman; with
death, but not of the body.

Early in the third year this wanderer, come to anchor, began his book,
and at his desk I propose to leave him until near the end of mine. But,
that he shall know the man again when the tale hath need of him, the
reader will be pleased to accompany me into his neighbourhood for a
moment.

Into the great ridge of chalk which is the backbone of South Wilts, and
runs east and west from Sarum to Shaftesbury, there cuts up from the
south a deep, winding, and narrow valley. The hills, between whose
breasts it runs a turfy way, fold one into the other; a man coming up
from Blandford, and minded to strike across country to Marlborough,
might well pass within two hundred yards of our recluse and never see
a sign of him. It was at the head of this glen, sheltered by hills from
north, east, and west, but open full to the south, he had built his
one-storied, deep-eaved house of larch and shingles. Here, under
the sky, he watched and laboured and slept, and saw nobody, living
principally on vegetables of his own growing, and cheese, which he
made from the milk of a flock of goats. Bread he had once a week from
a peasant's cottage at the valley's foot; gypsy folk brought him
occasionally tea and tobacco. For the most part he drank water, and was
too good a traveller to be rooted to his pipe.

The group behind him sloped sharply up to the ridge, which we call the
Race-Plain in those parts, and had nourished, when he first took up his
rest below it, little but nettles, mulleins, and scrub of elder. A few
fair trees--ash, thorn, spindle, service--struggled with the undergrowth
which should live. He was for the trees, needing their shade; cleared
the ground, terraced it with infinite pains, and utilised the water of
a mist pool which he had made on the high land by a system of canals of
remarkable neatness and ingenuity. Tree-trunks, split and hollowed out,
conveyed what water he wanted as and whither he would.

To the west of his dwelling the slope was gentler, and there woods and
brake-fern grew peacefully together and made a fine refuge from the
heats. Behind this shelter, hidden from sight of the house, he had a
broad lynch for his vegetables, and grew and protected them to be the
envy and despair of rabbits. In the woods, and below, in the valley
bottom, where wind-sown thorns made a natural park, his goats found
eatage. He reserved the terraces about the house for the flowers which
he loved and understood.

He was an expert gardener, who in his day had been famous for his skill
in naturalisation. His feats in this work have made a stir beyond our
shores. Alpine plants grow wild upon English rock-faces at his whim,
irises from the glaring crags of the Caucasus spread out their filmy
wings, when he bids them, on Devonshire tors. These wonders he chose
not to repeat--for reasons. Pence, to begin with, failed him. The work
itself was associated with the happiest and the saddest moments of his
life; he had not the heart to begin it. Moreover, in the course of his
year's work of house-building and settling in, he had kept an eye for
Nature's way in his valley, and when it came to making a flower-garden
he found that she had one there to his hand.

He said, “Nothing is lovelier in flowers than true colour. Form
is nothing to Nature; it is one of Art's tricks. Here I may have a
succession of pure washes by mere concentration of what I find. The
downs give me everything; all I have to do is to group them.

“Here is my design. For early spring, cowslips in a cloud. Scattered
broadcast, they are happy accidents which you come upon walking; but if
you mass them their scent tells, and you find they are nearer the colour
of oranges than of limes.

“For mid-April and early May I have the orchids--a blood-spatter on the
bottom; higher the flecked white, the pink, and the yellow with brown.
Then for a shelf among rocks the milk-worts, the sky-blue, the white and
the pink; with these I float out May like Fra Angelico. For June there
are Ragged Robins like filaments of rosy cloud, and Forget-me-not to
drift like wood-smoke over the chalk rubble. In July I have a pageant.
Foxglove and Eglantine make melodious my woods; Ladies' Slipper gives a
golden cope to the hillside, with purple campanula to wind about it like
a scarf. After this--August, September, October--our uplands faint
out in semitones: grey scabious, grey harebell, pale bed-straw, white
meadowsweet, like the lace of an old lady's cap. But even so, if I must
have a sunset glow of brown-pink, herb-willow gives it me. Pinch out the
leader of each slim spike, and you make a different plant of it.” Thus
the poet embroidered the philosopher's text, and kept away from his
memories, and husbanded his pence.

These things, at any rate, he did, collecting with diligence the plants
to his hand, separating them from the grasses and bents in which they
hid, massing them and marshalling to his purposes. The thing was done
with extreme art and infinite patience; the result, a rainbow stream of
colour through the working year.

He added a few foreign growths: cyclamen for the woods, because he
did not see how one could do without them who had once seen them in
Calabria; wild gladiolus, because it loved the corn, and there was land
in tillage within a mile of him; a few primulas for his conduit's
edges; wild crocus, because She whom he had loved best had loved them;
colchicums for the bottoms in Autumn, because once She, straying with
him in meadows, had picked some for her bosom and at parting given him
one. He had it still, though he never cared to look at it. She and it
belonged to his first volume, and neither crocus nor colchicum had been
added at the date of which I write. He planted them when he reopened
that book, and they are thriving now.

Here was work enough for a man somewhat mauled by the world to forget
his hard knocks withal; and he forgot them. Looking about him, the
length and breadth of his silent and lonely valley, he could see nothing
but amenity in the earth which owed man so little. It was so with him at
this time that the more he saw to love in Nature the less he could find
admirable in man, who denied her at every turn. It was men, not She, who
had given him his bruises; it was She, not men, who had taught him how
to forget them. When outraged Society cried him down for a breaker of
laws, he had replied that, so far as he knew, he had broken none of
Nature's; and had it been argued that we live otherwise than as the
beasts that perish, he would have retorted, “Whether the beasts perish
or not, it is very clear that they live to the full in this world, and
that we don't. Suppose they perish, at least they have lived. If we are
to live hereafter, as to which no one is certain, we are faced at our
temporal death with the fact that, born into this world with certain
faculties, instincts, appetites, and senses, we have let most of them
atrophy, and the rest rot, by many contributory causes, of which the
chief is over-eating. If I die, to live again, I have it behind me that
I have lived well already. I am that much to the good. And, that others
may have the same fortune, I shall devote what time remains to me to
teaching the truth, _The less you have the more you are._ This was his
intention when he sat down to pen his _Shepherd's Crown_; before he
dared look back upon _Open Country_, or to plant the sacred crocus, or
to look upon the dry colchicum flower which had been granted the grace
of a fair breast.”

[Illustration: The hum of cities and buzz of dinner tables ... sound in
his ears not at all.]

We meet him again, but not yet. We have him fast in his moorings, and
are to see him rather as a fixed point about which other wandering
lights stray in narrowing circles, to which they converge. We are to
conceive of him, if you please, as writing his Book, while the hum
of cities, and buzz of dinner-tables, noisy enough to us and full of
excitement, sound in his ears not at all. And when I have done, you will
discover, if you care, why he changed the title of his third volume from
_Shepherd's Crown_, and chose it to be called _Rest Harrow_.

The way thither is long, and many things are to happen to many people;
but little happens to him except the wheeling of the years.




BOOK II -- SANCHIA AT WANLESS HALL




I


A telegram was handed to her as she came in from the garden, her
broad-brimmed straw hat in her hand, and a bunch of fritillaries nodding
in her blouse. That dates and places her at once: the time was April,
and she was fond of curious flowers. She stood in the doorway to get the
sunset glow upon the missive, and was herself ensanguined and enhanced,
a sunny-haired, low-breasted young woman of middle height, rather
faintly coloured, wholesome to see, with a bowed upper lip, and clear,
grey-blue eyes of extreme directness and candour. A trick of looking
you full, of considering you and her answer together, she had--a mild,
steady beam, a radiance within the orb which told of a hidden glory. Her
brows were level, eyebrows arched; her bust, though set like Aphrodite's
of Melos, was full. The curving corners of the bow of her lips assured
her the possession, even when she was most serious, of a lurking smile.
Taking off her gardening gloves that she might break the red envelope,
she disclosed a pair of fine, white, nervous hands, and pointed fingers
which wore no rings.

The address, which she was careful to read before she tore the envelope,
was--

    Miss Percival, Wanless, Felsboro'.


Opening then, she read as follows:--


    Home to-morrow seven people Ingram.


If she frowned slightly, it was a mere approach of the fine eyebrows
to each other. She certainly smiled--wisely and meditatively, without
showing her teeth. She touched her chin--a rounded, full chin--with the
telegram, as she looked up at the maid who brought it.

“I must see Mrs. Benson about this. It's from Mr. Ingram.”

“Yes, Miss Percival.”

A friendly desire to share the puzzle was now manifest in the clear
eyes.

“You see, Minnie, it might mean one of two things, and I am not quite
sure which of them it does mean.” She looked again at the message with
amused interest; but one could not have said whether she was amused
at her interest, or interested in her amusement. That was part of Miss
Percival's charm, that she was always baffling you.

But Minnie, the maid, was demure and monotonous under the attack of
friendly desires. “No, Miss Percival,” she said, and added, “I am sure
I couldn't say.” She stood aside from the doorway as the young lady
entered the billiard-room, saying, as she went, “Ask Mrs. Benson to come
to my room, Minnie, please; and tell Frodsham I should like to see him
directly he comes to-morrow morning.”

She heard Minnie's “Very well, Miss Percival,” as she disappeared,
smiling still, and with a slight heightening of colour. When her colour
rose, it rose evenly, flooding her face and neck with the dawn-hue.
There were no patches or streaks of flame; she showed, as it were,
incandescent.

She crossed the hall in the deepening dusk, a fine, littered room, where
a great log-fire revealed the tall portraits of ladies and gentleman
of long ago--sportsmen with spaniels at their feet, general officers in
scarlet, pointing through smoke the direction of the enemy, a judge in
ermine and full bottomed wig, a lady in white satin leaning against a
broken column in a park, and backed by a brewing thunderstorm; and as
she went her way gave a couple of glances to right and left, picked up a
_Bradshaw_ from a side-table, stooped to put a tiger-skin straight. She
continued down a long corridor, swinging her hat, and entered an open
doorway at the extreme end. By the way she tossed the hat on to a chair
and stirred the crackling logs with the point of her shoe, it was to be
supposed that she was in her demesne. Standing with a foot on the fender
she presently fell into a reverie, and presently reopened and re-read
her telegram. Certainly she was smiling, and certainly her colour was
enhanced.

The room, though business-like, was feminine. It had a Chippendale
bureau between the windows, its pigeon-holes stuffed with papers; but
there were flowers upon it, and elsewhere many photographs, and pictures
evidently chosen by the tenant. The _Dante_ from the Bargello was one,
the three headless _Fates_ of the Parthenon another; the _Hermes_ and
the _Sophocles_, all in autogravure. It had a piano and a small bookcase
containing the poets in green morocco, a uniform set. Elsewhere, in a
larger bookcase, were miscellaneous volumes, by no means all novels,
though novels there were. One shelf was filled with household books:
cookery, bee-keeping, poultry, the _Dog in Health and Disease_, the
horse, the flower-garden, _Botany, British Edible Fungi_, the _World of
Vegetables_, were some of the subjects treated of. Below the bookcase
was a row of japanned tin boxes, carefully lettered in white paint.
House Accounts, Garden Accounts, Stable Accounts, one read. A fourth
bore the words “Wood Sales and Miscellaneous.”

If you were alone, waiting in the room, you would glance at the
photographs perched about, like alighting butterflies, upon piano and
mantelshelf and occasional table. You would pass over, I believe,
the children on ponies and in sailor suits, that elderly, ample lady,
brooched and in black, beaming under the status of Grandmamma, that
gaitered gentleman with a square-topped felt hat upon his head and
grizzled whiskers below his ears, in favour of a group of five girls
in black muslin and lace, sisters evidently, prosperously together, an
uncommonly happy five. They look on good terms with themselves and with
each other. They look frankly at you out of the frame--and how they
must have dazzled the photographer with their five pair of bright,
uncompromising eyes! Hands rest easily upon familiar shoulders, elbows
on knees. One of them smiles outright, two are very ready to smile; one
is more serious, as becomes the eldest of five; and one is round-cheeked
and solemn--the baby.

Miss Percival and her sisters, it's clear. One can't mistake the rounded
chin, the level brows, the promise of womanhood. Women should always be
photographed in evening dress if, like the Misses Percival, they have
nothing to hide. But now to pick out our Miss Percival. You will observe
that the young ladies' names are neatly printed beneath their persons.

Even if I were sure of dates, I should not insist upon the serious one.
So far as I can judge, the photograph is some eight or ten years old. I
go by the style of hair-dressing which it shows, and by the name of the
photographer, who signs from Wigmore Street. He is out of date; fashion
has deserted him. Then that grave, watchful young goddess, who sits
enthroned with her nymphs about her, must be a great deal older than our
lady of this room, of the doubtful smile and friendly desires. She has
the sedate air of eight-and-twenty, and by this time must be thirty-six
or even more. She is Philippa, anyhow, we read. Who comes next? Here is
Hawise, standing behind her of the throne and the centre, with a hand on
her bare shoulder. She is laughing, sleepily; she is distinctly pretty,
but distinctly, also, fat. She cannot be the owner of this room.

There's a taste for names in the Percival family: we have Philippa,
Hawise. Now for the seated pair, one on either side of Philippa: they
are Melusine, who has a long neck and a very demure look, and a great
deal of hair, and Victoria, who, having just tossed back her head, lifts
her chin and glimmers at you through half-shut eyes. Her lips laugh
snugly at some mischief meditating. Neither of these can be our lady,
who must therefore be the last and youngest, this child of eighteen
or so, round-cheeked, round-eyed and serious, with critical lids, like
those of the Farnese Hera, and a beautiful mouth: Sanchia-Josepha,
crouched on the floor at the feet of Philippa. A charming bevy of
maidens--Philippa, Hawise, Melusine, Victoria, Sanchia-Josepha; ten
years ago happily sisters and rich in promise, looking out boldly at the
veiled years ahead of them. Ten years ago? Call it eight, and you make
our Miss Percival, say, six-and-twenty by this time.

There are many other photographs--girls and women, most of them; but
here is a man, dignified by a place apart upon the bureau. He occupies
one side of it by himself, balanced by the sisters at the other. A
youngish man in yeomanry uniform he appears only in torso. He has the
smooth head of a soldier, and rather a low, but very square, forehead.
His eyes are smallish, and set deep. They look to be grey, light grey,
but may be light blue. He has a good nose, high-bridged, large, thin,
and practically straight. Such noses are seldom perfectly straight, and
his is not. I observe that he has curled his moustache with the tongs,
so that it is well away from his upper lip. If I had been he I should
not have done that. It is too much trouble--and if a man takes pains
about his toilette, those pains ought not to be evident. Moreover, the
mouth is by no means this young man's best feature. There is a twist,
the hint of a snarl in the upper lip. The lower protrudes. The gentleman
is the least in life underhung. Consider his chin. It has the jut of
the Hapsburgs', of Charles the Fifth's, not pronounced by any means,
but undoubtedly there. Firmness, or perhaps obstinacy, hard judgment, an
uneven temper, a leaning to autocracy, I read in this portrait. There is
no signature, nothing to tell you who he is. Certainly, no Percival.

I call your attention to one more photograph, in marked distinction to
others of your notice. Those were, in every sense, full--dress affairs;
this one, in all senses, undress. It is the work of an amateur, you
can see at once--small, rather blurred to begin with, not perfectly
focussed, and fading now towards the end of all such gear. It represents
a bareheaded young lady in a white gown pinned very high. She is
standing in a pond, with the water well over her knees. One hand keeps
her balance with a pole, the other grasps a streamer of water-weed.
Floating beyond her upon some kind of raft is a man, bareheaded also, in
a white sweater with a rolling collar. His face is shadowed--you can see
that his hair, black and straight, falls over his eyes. He is raking up
the weed with his hand, his arm bare to the shoulder. Below is written,
in a round, sprawling hand, “To Sanchia from Percy.” Both the workers
are intent upon their task, with no idea that they are posing. The girl
has a Greek face, and a very fine pair of legs heedlessly displayed. The
man is as thin as a gypsy. Out of the dark in which his face is hidden
gleam his white teeth. A classical, rather than romantic scene. The
absence of draperies suggest it; but the absence of self-consciousness
is conclusive.

But I keep Miss Percival too long at the fender. She had been standing
there for some minutes after her entry, first re-reading her telegram,
next stroking her chin with it. She was thoughtful still, and still
smiling. Once she looked over her shoulder through the window to the
dying day, and lightly sighed. The time was April's end, and had
been squally, with violent storms; but the last onslaughts of the
north-wester had routed the rain-clouds. The day was dying under a clear
saffron sky, and a thrush piped its mellow elegy. Miss Percival heard
him, and listened, smiling with her lips, and with her eyes also which
the serene light soothed. Her lips barely moved, just relaxed their
firm embrace, but no more. She held the light gratefully with her eyes,
seemed unwilling to lose a moment of it, wistful to be still out of
doors. Again she lightly sighed, and presently resumed her downward
gazing at the fire.

Knuckles quavered at the door. She straightened herself, turned, and
called out definitely, “Come in.” Mrs. Benson stood before her, vast,
massive, black-gowned, cloudy for trouble, a cook.

There was instantly to be observed in Miss Percival's lifted head and
eyes the same frank appeal for interchange of sentiments as had been
manifested to Minnie the maid. Her brows were smoothed out, her smile
became less dubious; her intention to be friendly was deliberately
expressed. But truth will have it that, just as before, Mrs. Benson's
guard turned out at the same moment, as at a signal. To vary the figure,
her vedettes, in touch with the advancers, fell back upon the main body.

If the young lady perceived this she did not cease to be amiably
disposed. “Oh, Mrs. Benson,” she said, “I've had a telegram.”

Mrs. Benson, with strict non-committal, lifted her eyebrows to “Well,
well!” It was as if she implied that such things were to be expected in
a world full of trouble. “So I hear, Miss Percival,” she grimly said.

“It's from Mr. Ingram, you know.”

“Ah, well--” Mrs. Benson could have been heard to sigh; but among the
many things which Miss Percival chose to ignore, this sort of thing was
one. Trouble to her, always, was a signal which braced the nerves and
sinews.

“It's to say--but I think you had better read it.” It was held out
unfalteringly, while Mrs. Benson dived for, opened, wiped, tested, and
fixed her spectacles. These operations concluded, it was received as
might have been a dangerous explosive.

Punctuating as she went, Mrs. Benson read, _“Home to-morrow--seven
people--Ingram.”_ Then she looked, confirmed in her omens, over the rim
of her spectacles. “Seven people, Miss Percival! A house-party! And, as
you may say, at a moment's notice. Dear, dear, dear!”

Miss Percival remained cheerful. “Oh, I don't read it like that,” she
said, went behind Mrs. Benson, and read over her shoulder, pointing
the words with a pencil still wet from her mouth. “'Home to-morrow,
seven--with people--Ingram.' That's what it must mean, of course.” She
spoke wooingly, but Mrs. Benson was not to be won.

“Then, why does he say 'Seven people,' Miss Percival? Why does he say
that?”

“But he doesn't, according to me.” She laughed. “He is telling us the
time of his train. How could we meet him and his people if he didn't?”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Benson, heavily prepared for the worst, “how could we?
That's where it is, you see. But of course he wouldn't think of _us_.”

“But he does, you know. He has. He says that he will have people with
him. That is to prepare us.” Mrs. Benson's fist crashed into the paper.

“How many people, Miss Percival? How many people? Why, seven, of course?
What else could it be? And where's the fish to come from for seven
people? And what about maids and valets? Does he count up the likes of
them? He's not Mr. Ingram if he does. Not he! Nor his father before him.
And what's Frodsham going to do about carriage-room for seven--and the
servants as well--and the luggage, and all? Dogs, very likely, dogs and
cats, and parrots. Who knows? I've seen 'em bring scritch-owls and
hawks on their wrists before now. Oh, they'll do anything, some of
'em--anything to be looked at. That's what it is; they want looking at.
And I'd look at 'em if I had my way!”

Mrs. Benson, shining with indignant heat, had to be pacified. She
required much tact, the exercise of a low and musical voice. It cooed
upon her like a dove's. Miss Percival used her hands, too, and in the
end had one of them on Mrs. Benson's shoulder. The charm worked. Dinner
should be cooked for five or six; Frodsham should meet the seven-four
from London with the omnibus and luggage-cart. There would be no dogs at
this time of year. Parrots were urged upon her again, but tentatively.
She chuckled them away, musically, with real relish for the picture.
She was sure there would be no parrots. Now she must see about the
bedrooms--but Mrs. Benson peered round into her glowing face.

“And what about your supper, Miss Percival? It's just upon ready. And
there's a sweet-bread.”

Miss Percival almost caressed the ridiculous good soul. Her arm remained
about her shoulder, her hand touched it. “How nice of you! I'll go and
get ready at once. Then I'll see what rooms we had better have. Wasn't
it lucky we did the drawing-rooms last week?”

Gloom gathered again. Mrs. Benson thought that some people didn't
deserve their luck. It was clear to whom she referred; certainly not
to Miss Percival, for instance. But the young lady, with really
extraordinary simplicity, replied that surely Mr. Ingram deserved credit
for having well-chosen his ministers. “Yourself,” she said, “for the
kitchen, and me for the hall.” She exploded this little bomb with some
heightening of colour.

Mrs. Benson, glancing at her sideways, observed the blush, and was
scared. She blinked. Miss Percival's blush deepened.

In the awkward pause that ensued the friendly hand was about to be
removed, when Mrs. Benson, with an effort which did honour to her
resources, said, “We all have our troubles, Miss Percival, else we
shouldn't be here, as the Bible says. The good Book! Well for them as
read therein. Now, only this afternoon Mr. Menzies was talking to me
about things at large, and he says, 'Mrs. Benson, what's to be done with
Struan Glyde?' quite sudden. So I says, 'And what should be done with
such a one, Mr. Menzies, but wallop him?' and he shakes his head and
says, 'He's on the catarampus, ma'am--in one of his black fits. Tells
me to go my way and let him alone; then turns his back.' Now, what about
such troubles as that, Miss Percival?”

Miss Percival looked serious, but not especially interested. Her eyes
looked before her, but seemed not to see anything. She asked, “What did
Mr. Menzies say to him next?” but if she was interested it was not in
that matter.

Mrs. Benson brandished her voice. “Ha, you may well ask me. 'No, my
man,' he says, 'but 'tis you that must go mine while I'm head-gardener
at Wanless,' he says. That's what Mr. Menzies told him, the elderly man
that he is--and now look at this. Young Glyde turns his back upon him,
with no more notice taken than you or I would have of a flea on the arm.
Insolence, that is. Downright insolence of an elderly man. Ah,” said
Mrs. Benson with tightening lips, “if you come to troubles!”

Miss Percival's tone was sympathetic, if her eyes were still sightless.
“Really! I'm very sorry. I'll see Mr. Menzies about it to-morrow, and
of course I'll talk to Struan. He _is_ difficult--it's very tiresome
of him. I saw him this afternoon but had no notion of all this. I can't
think how it is. Nerves, I suppose. He's a human creature, you see, as
well as a gardener.”

Mrs. Benson was incapable of seeing such a possible combination: her
explanation was simpler. Human! She scorned him. “Bad blood,” she said
with energy; “bad, black, gypsy blood. He'll be murdering one of us in
her bed in a day or two. You see if he don't.”

Miss Percival did not deny the suggestion. She considered it rather--its
effect, its effectiveness. “Struan is tiresome, of course,” she said,
“but I do think he has tried to restrain himself lately. He promised
me he would.” She turned her full gaze suddenly upon Mrs. Benson, and
almost disarmed that lady. “I like him, you know. He's very nice to me.”

Mrs. Benson gasped, but recovered just in time to resume the dark
oracles in her keeping. “Ah,” she said, “he _would_ be. If you can call
it nice--”

“He's wonderful in the garden,” Miss Percival calmly continued. “Even
Menzies admits it. He'll work all day. He's never tired.”

“Nor's a tiger,” the cook snapped. “Nor's a tom-cat.”

Miss Percival looked pitifully at her and smiled. “Poor Struan--you
don't like him. I'll see him to-night. I have an influence, I think.”

Mrs. Benson touched the hand that lay within her reach, which had lately
been upon her shoulder. “Don't, my dear, don't,” she said.

“Why not?” asked the lady with her lifted brows. “Why shouldn't I?”

“Influence! The likes of him!--Gypsy blood at midnight--soft-voiced,
murderous--”

She gave no coherent answer, but smiled always, then leaned forward and
stroked Mrs. Benson upon her personable cheek. “Dear old thing, let me
do as I like. It's much better for everybody,” she presently said.




II


It had clouded over after sunset: there was no moon visible, but an
irradiance was omnipresent, and showed the muffled yew-tree walks, and
the greater trees colossal, mountains overshadowing the land. Here and
there, as you went, glimmered daffodils, like the Pleiades half-veiled,
and long files of crocuses burned like waning fires.

Miss Percival, at about nine o'clock, came gently down one of these
alleys, with a scarf over her head and shoulders. She looked like a
nymph in Tanagra. And as if she knew where she was going, exactly, she
walked gently but unfalteringly between the linked crocus-beacons to
where the alley broadened into a bay of cut yews, to where ghostly white
seats and a dim sun-dial seemed disposed as for a scene in a comedy. The
leaden statue of a skipping faun would have been made out in a recess if
you had known it was there. And as she entered the place a figure seated
there, with elbows on knees and chin between his palms, looked up,
listening, watching intently, then rose and waited.

“Struan,” said Miss Percival comfortably, “are you there?”

“I'm here,” she was answered.

Thereupon she came easily forward and stood near him. She was in white
from top to toe; he could see the clean outline of her head and neck,
denned by the hooding scarf. He had not as yet taken off his hat, but
now, as she stood there silent, he slowly removed it. Still there was
nothing said. Miss Percival was very deliberate.

Presently she spoke. “You didn't tell me this afternoon that you'd had a
bother with Mr. Menzies. Why didn't you tell me?”

“Why should I tell you?” The words seemed wrung from him. “Why should
you care?”

“Of course I care,” she said. “You know that I care. Why didn't you tell
me? ... But I know why you didn't.”

“You do not.” He denied her hotly.

“Oh, but I do. Because you were ashamed.”

“It was not. I'm not ashamed. He's an old fool. He thinks he can teach
me my business. Melons! Plants! Why, I'm one of them. What can he teach
me?”

“He's a very good gardener,” Miss Percival began, but the rest was
drowned.

“Gardener--he! He's a botcher. He measures his melons by the pound. It's
money he wants, money-value. So much dung--so much meat. He says, 'Be
careful, you, of the water-pot; go steady with your syringe. You'll damp
off those plants it you're not handy,' he tells me. To me, this! Don't
I know what the life of a plant must have, and how, and where it must
be fed? He's an old fool, and you know it. And I'll not be told things
I have got by heart before a lad new to his breeches. Besides,” he added
darkly, “he'd vexed me before that, and bitterly.”

“How did he vex you?” Miss Percival's voice came cool and clear, but
commanding.

“That I cannot tell you,” said he.

“But I want to know.” This seemed to her sufficing reason.

But he was dogged. “Then I can't help you. You cannot be told.”

“But perhaps I ought to be told. Do you think I ought?”

“Indeed, I don't know.”

“Well, will you tell me?”

“I will not, indeed. That is, I cannot.”

“It's very extraordinary.”

He made no answer.

“Struan,” said Miss Percival, after a while, “you are angry.”

He turned quickly. “With you? Never.”

“I didn't say that. I said you were angry.”

He said, “Ah--and so I am.”

“I am included, I suppose.”

“You are not. It could not be.”

She laughed. “I don't know---”

He was vehement. “But you do know. You know it very well.”

She had no answer; but she smiled to herself; and I have no doubt she
knew.

For two minutes or more there was silence, a time of suspense. Then Miss
Percival said, “I've had a telegram. Mr. Ingram is coming to-morrow.”

To this he said nothing. She went on.

“He is bringing people with him. Mrs. Benson was very funny about it. He
is coming at seven with some people, and she would read it that he was
coming with seven people. When I asked her, how could we meet him if he
had not told us the time? she made a grievance of it, and said that was
so like him. So it is, of course.”

Struan remained speechless, and had turned away his face. Miss Percival
continued her reflections aloud.

“How long has he been away? More than a year. He wrote once from
Singapore--then from Rawal-pindi--and that was all, until I got this
telegram. He's very casual, I must say.” Here she paused.

Struan said suddenly, “Miss Percival, I'm going.”

She turned with interest, and asked, with not too much interest, “Oh!
Why?”

He said, “You know why.”

She lowered her voice by a tone, but no more. “I hope you won't. It
would be a pity. There's no real reason for it. I'll speak to Menzies
to-morrow. He doesn't mean any harm to you. He's only old and grumpy.”

“He's a fool,” said Struan. “Certainly, he's a fool. But that's neither
here nor there.”

Miss Percival, ignoring what she chose to ignore, said again, “I hope
you won't go.”

The young man shifted his ground, and dug his heel into the turf. “I
must--indeed, I must.”

“Where shall you go?”

“God knows.”

“Why must you go?”

“You know why.”

“Is it because of Menzies?”

He threw his head up. “Menzies, forsooth!” He scorned Menzies.

“Then I don't see why you should go. I shouldn't like it. I hope you
will stay.”

He looked at her now across the dusk, intensely. “You hope I will stay?”

“Yes, certainly I do.”

“You hope I will stay? You ask me to stay?”

She considered. Then she said, “Yes, I think so. Yes, I do.”

“Then,” said Struan, “God help us all. I stay.”

Miss Percival said cheerfully, “I'm so glad. I'll speak to Menzies
to-morrow, and get him to leave you alone. He knows how well you do
the melons, but of course he would never admit it.” She broke off the
interview shortly afterwards.

“I'm going to bed,” she told him. “I've got lots to do to-morrow. Heaps
of things. You must get me some of your flowers for the rooms.”

He was not appeased, “Menzies will do it,” he said. She laughed.

“You know what Menzies will say--'Pelargoniums for the hall, Miss
Percival, and some nice maidenhair.' He's not inventive, poor Menzies.”

“He's an old fool,” said Struan. “He takes flowers for spangles in a
circus.”

Miss Percival again laughed softly, and held out her hand. “Good-night,”
 she said. “I'm going.”

He touched her hand, and then put his own behind his back.

“Aren't you going to bed?” she asked him.

“Presently,” he said. “I'm going to walk round for a while.”

She hovered for a moment, seemed to hesitate, to weigh the attractions
of walking round. It had a charm. Then she decided.

“Good-night,” she bade him for the third time.

He grumbled his good-night, and watched her fade into the dark. Not
until she was completely hidden up did he put on his hat again. Then he
prowled noiselessly about among the breathing flowers.




III


Wanless, as they call it there,--Wanless Hall, Felsboro', as it is
politically,--stands squarely and deeply in the hills of a northern
county, plentifully embowered in trees, with a river washing its
southern side. To reach house from river you ascend a gentle slope of
lawns and groves for some hundreds of feet, then find a broad stepway.
That takes you to a terraced, parapeted garden very well tended, as one
should be which has four men at its disposition. There stands the house
of Wanless, stone-built in the days of Charles the Second--a gleaming,
grey front, covered to the first-floor windows with a magnolia of
unknown age. The main entrance faces north, from which point the true
shape of the place is revealed as a long body with wings, an E-shaped
house. Here are the carriage-drive and carriage-sweep; then there's a
belt of trees, and beyond that, shaped by the valley, which gradually
narrows to the incline of the hills, kitchen-gardens, glass-houses,
a pond (fed by a beck), water meadows, and hanging woods. Above those
again heather-clad slopes climb to piled rocks and a ragged sky-line. It
is a fine property with 5,000 acres of shooting, a good many farms, and
a hill village to its account. The lodge at the gate was half a mile
away, at the end of a good avenue of beech and sycamore.

Mr. Nevile Ingram who, at thirty, had still the air of a brisk young man
and was owner by inheritance of this place, arrived with his guests by
the 7.4 train from London. The omnibus brought the four of them, with
a maid sitting on the box beside Frodsham, and a bank of luggage
behind her head. No parrots, no dogs; but a Mr. Chevenix brought his
fishing-rods. Besides this Mr. Chevenix, who had been here before, there
was an elderly Mrs. Devereux, white-haired and short-sighted, who used,
whenever she could find them, a pair of long-handled glasses, and a
young Mrs. Wilmot, pretty, very fair, rather helpless. It was her maid
who shared the box-seat with Frodsham.

The absence of a footman at the station had been noted by Mrs. Devereux,
the absence of any man-servant at the house struck her as remarkable.
There was none, and had been none since Miss Percival assumed command;
but at this time Mrs. Devereux knew nothing of Miss Percival. Nevile
Ingram, banging the door open with his knee, jumped out first, and stood
to help the ladies; the next to emerge was Mr. Chevenix who, the moment
he touched earth, said “Right!” and looked as if he had sparkled. It
was clear that he had abundant health and was satisfied with all the
arrangements of Providence. He surveyed the house, the awaiting virgins
at the door, wished them both good evening, nosed the upper air, snuffed
the gale, said “Good old Wanless--my precious rods!” and dived for them
before the ladies could descend. Thereafter a timidly poising foot and
some robust breadth of stocking revealed the anxieties of Mrs. Devereux.
On alighting she shook herself like a hen, and her draperies rustled to
their length. She found her lorgnettes and surveyed (so to speak) the
absent men-servants with blank misgivings. A maid advanced for her
jewel-case, but Mrs. Devereux, shutting her eyes, said “Thanks, I carry
it,” and pressed it to her bosom. A butler would have had it. Meantime,
Mrs. Wilmot, a hand to each cavalier, was descending from the omnibus.
She was a pretty, bedraped lady, with wide blue Greuze eyes, and soft
lips, always wet and mostly apart. She murmured, “How kind you are to
me,” and liked it from Ingram to Chevenix. Ingram said nothing, but
Chevenix dropped down his brisk “By Jove, Mrs. Wilmot, that's nothing to
what I _could_ do for you--nothing at all.” And then they turned to the
house.

When Miss Percival, looking frailer than she really was because of her
black gown, fairer, that is, and paler, entered the hall, she found the
party at a loose end. Mr. Chevenix was in a deep chair, turning over
_Bradshaw_, and whistling softly to himself. Ingram, hands in pockets,
was deprecating the portraits of his ancestors to the two ladies, who
were not at all interested in them. He appeared to be considerably bored
by his guests, and they to be aware of it. Miss Percival's arrival was
timely, if only because she effectively chased out _ennui_. Chevenix, as
if he had been waiting for her, jumped up and went to meet her. He shook
hands. “Hulloa, Sancie!” he was heard distinctly to say. “By Jove, I'm
glad to see you again.” The latter sentence was not quite audible,
but sufficiently so to send Mrs. Devereux' lorgnettes up to her nose.
Sanchia herself, receiving civilities as if born to them, impelled her
to keep them there. She had appeared silently and suddenly out of
the blue. And now she hovered, smiling, fair, and unconcerned, like a
goddess out of a chariot come to deal judgment, and listened charitably
to Mr. Chevenix. How odd! How more than odd! Mrs. Wilmot looked as if
her eyes were full of tears, but let nothing escape her. As for Ingram,
he greeted the apparition with a smile and a nod sideways. But Mrs.
Devereux could have sworn to a scare in the eye. “How are you, Sanchia?”
 he said, and then to his guests, “Miss Percival will show you where you
all are, if you'll--Dinner's at half-past eight, I believe. At least,
it always used to be; but I've been away for a year, and they may have
changed all that. Have you, by the way?” he asked, with a sudden turn to
Miss Percival.

She looked calmly at him. “No. It's still at half-past eight,” she said.
He lit his cigarette.

“Will you show these ladies their rooms?” he required of her, adding
as an afterthought, “Mrs. Devereux, Mrs. Wilmot. Mrs. Wilmot has a maid
somewhere.”

It was a quasi-introduction, awkwardly done. Sanchia gravely bowed,
and all might have been well had not her gentle smile persisted. The
baffling quality of this, the archaic enigma of it, made Mrs. Wilmot
stare at her helpless with brimming blue eyes. It made Mrs. Devereux
shiver. It was she, however, who accepted the inclination of the head.
“Good evening to you,” she said. The housekeeper! This--person! The pair
of them followed her upstairs, Mrs. Devereux marching before, like one
of the old _regime_ to the guillotine, Mrs. Wilmot trailing in her wake.

Young Chevenix, when they had disappeared, returned with a grin to
his _Bradshaw_. “No change from Sanchia,” he said; and “Let's see:
_Birmingham depart_ 4.45. By Gad, that's a good train. No,” he resumed;
“no change out of Sancie. How long is it since you were here, Nevile?”

Ingram was staring blankly out of window. “I think a year. I don't know.
You went out with me to Brindisi, I believe, and that was April, and
so's this--just. So you can work it out. D'you want me to fix you up?
You're in the east wing, you know--I expect you are, anyhow. Where you
were before.”

“Right,” said Chevenix; “right. Only we're none of us where we were
before, my boy. Don't flatter yourself.” He shut _Bradshaw_ with a
bang, and went off, singing softly, to a tune of his own, “No change, no
change from Sanchia,” which he turned into “Who is Sanchia? What is she,
that all our swains...?”

[Illustration: The housekeeper! This--person!]

Miss Percival, having played the exact and perfect housekeeper
above--with no apparent interest in life but submergence in her
duties--returned to the ground floor and sought Minnie in the
dining-room. She made her survey calmly, and gave such orders as
pertained in smooth tones which could not jar. She seemed to consult
where she really directed. “Shall we have the _epergne?_ I think we
will, don't you? Yes. It's a grand occasion. I don't think we have ever
had ladies at Wanless before.” An admission which staggered Minnie. Her
“Oh, yes, Miss Percival,” and “Oh, no, Miss Percival,” were appreciative
and good to hear.

She was butler, we find, as well as housekeeper, for as she stood there,
meditating the table, Ingram came in, in a hurry, with ideas about wine.
He gave them out in jerks, without looking at her. Sherry, of course, a
hock, Lafite. No champagne: it's beastly unless you are tired. Oh, and
old brandy--the very old. Nothing of the sort to be had in India.
The climate kills it. He stood very close to her as he spoke. When he
remembered the brandy he put his hand on her shoulder, and finding it
there, kept it so. Minnie presently went out of the room upon affairs;
and then he looked into her face and said in a new tone, “How are you,
Sancie?” He let his hand slide down, encircled her waist lightly with
his arm. She gave him her grey eyes and a slow, patient smile. “I am
quite well,” she said. “Are you?” Ingram, watching her still, seemed
disconcerted, as if he wanted to say or do more, but couldn't, for some
reason. What he did was to remove his hand quickly and thrust it into
his trouser pocket. It might have been suddenly stung, judging from his
way of whipping it away. “Oh, I'm all right, of course. I must go and
dress, I suppose.” A year is a long time for an absence. In the doorway
he stopped and looked back, a last look. “Supper in my room, you know.
We'll talk.” She held to her mysteries, and he went.

Dinner passed gaily, Miss Percival away. Ingram was loquacious, though
rather caustic; Chevenix a good foil, easy-tempered, always at a run,
a very fair marksman for all his random shooting. His was that happy
disposition which finds Nature at large, including men, as precisely
there for his amusement. He relished, never failed to relish, the works
of God. But then he had perfect health. Mrs. Devereux was something of
a grandee, though not quite so much of one as she suspected. Her white
hair towered; she wore black velvet and diamonds. Mrs. Wilmot was very
much of a pretty woman, and knew to the turn of a hair how much. She had
the air of a spoiled child, which became her; was golden and rosy; could
pout; had dark blue eyes, which she could cloud at will, and fill, as we
know, with tears. She excelled in pathetic silences, to which her parted
lips gave an air of being breathless. She was beautifully dressed in
cloudy, filmy things, and had a soft, slight, drooping figure. Innocence
was her _forte_: her rings were superb.

One odd thing was noticeable, and noticed intensely by Chevenix, that
Ingram hardly ate anything, though he pretended to a hearty meal. It
came, Chevenix saw, to dry toast and three glasses of wine, practically.
But he made great play with knife and fork, and talked incessantly. He
revealed himself at every turn of his monologue--for it came to be
a monologue--as one of those men whose motives are so transparently
reasonable to themselves that they need never be at the trouble to
explain or defend any act of theirs. He was witty, though occasionally
brutal, as when he spoke of a dragoman he had had in Egypt, whose
defence of his _harem_ had cost him his place. This man, a cultivated
Persian, had proposed hospitality to his patron in Alexandria, where
he lived. Accepted, he had made a great supper for Ingram, invited his
friends and acquaintances, procured musicians and dancing-girls. It
was magnificent, Ingram allowed. The trouble came afterwards, when the
native guests had gone their ways and patron and host were together.
Ingram proposed a visit to the ladies--“the civil thing, it appeared to
me. But no, if you please! Mirza turned very glum, pronounced it not the
custom: I must excuse him, he says. But I say, Will they excuse _me_, my
good man? He makes a sour face, so of course I know that they won't,
and that he knows they won't. Then he marches away upon some errand or
another, and when he comes back finds me tapping at a door. You never
saw such a change in a chap; upon my soul, it was worth it. He went
white, he went grey, he went livid. His eyes were like stars. No, I'm
wrong. They were not. They were like the flaming swords which kept Adam
and Eve out of the garden. Magnificent police arrangements in Eden,
they had. I heard his breath whistle through his nose like the wind at
a keyhole. He says 'You mistake, sir. You forget. Or do I deserve to be
insulted?' I told him that I was the insulted person in the party, and
the ladies came next. I swear I heard a chuckle behind the door. That I
swear to.”

Chevenix, round-eyed and staring, was heard to mutter, “Good old Nevile!
Well, I'll be shot....” Ingram cut short his tale.

“I can't go into what followed. Much of it was irrelevant, all of it was
preposterous. It ended by Mirza directing me to the nearest hotel, in
perfect English. The crosser he got, the better his English. That's odd,
you know. Of course, I chucked the chap. He lost a soft billet.”

There were no comments from the auditory, save such as Mrs. Wilmot's
eyes may have afforded. She sighed, and laid her hand for one moment,
caressingly, upon her neck. Her rings were certainly superb.

The dessert being on the table, Minnie served the old brandy and
retired. Ingram drank of it freely, and began his cigarette the moment
that the coffee and spirit-flame appeared. The ladies withdrew to the
drawing-room, and Mrs. Wilmot sought the piano. But two chords had not
been touched before her eyes found those of Mrs. Devereux, who stood by
the fire. Eyebrows exchanged signals.

Then Mrs. Devereux said, “I am most uncomfortable,” and Mrs. Wilmot
sighed, “I know.”




IV


The quiet cause of discomfort, slippered and loose-robed, sat meanwhile
in an easy-chair, with her feet in the fender. Her hair floated free
about her shoulders, silky from the brush. She had a book on her knees,
but did not read it. Instead she looked into the fire, frowning.

Faint lines now printed themselves upon her face; two between her brows,
one defining the round of each fair cheek. Her eyes showed fathomless
sapphire: whatever her thoughts were of they held the secret close.
Their gaze was one of fascination, as if she saw things in the fire
terrible and strange, figures of the past or of the future, from which
she could not turn her face. The curve of her upper lip, where it lay
along its fellow and made a dimpled end, sharpened and grew bleak.
Poring and smiling into the fire, she looked like a Sibyl envisaging the
fate of men, not concerned in it, yet absorbed, interested in the play,
not at all in the persons. This friend of Mrs. Benson, this midnight
mate of young gardeners, disturber of high ladies' comfort, serene
controller of Wanless, she was, it would seem, all things to all men,
as men could take her. But now she had the fell look of a cat, the
long, sleek, cruel smile, the staring and avid eyes. A cat she might be,
playing with her own beating heart, patting it, watching its throbs.

These moments of witchcraft gazing were not many. They had been
deliberately begun, and were deliberately done with. Within their span
her cares were faced and co-ordinated; and the business over, she sighed
and sank more snugly into her chair. She leaned back; her hands crossed
themselves in her lap; she shut her eyes. All the lines upon her face
softened, melted away. She looked now like an Oread aswoon in the midday
heats, pure of thought or dread or memory. Her bosom below her laces
rose and fell gently. She slept.

Outside, in the dusky dark, was one who padded up and down the grass on
noiseless feet, passing and repassing the window, with an eye for the
narrow chink of light.

She slept for a very short time. Towards ten o'clock she awoke.
Collecting herself luxuriously, she was seen to face her facts again.
Evidently they held her eyes waking; they were dreadfully there, still
unresolved or still unpalatable. Before them now she plainly quailed.
The flush of her sleep gave delicacy to her carven beauty; she looked
fragile and tremulous; it would seem that a little more pity of herself
would bring her to tears. As if she knew it, she took her measures, rose
abruptly, and after two turns about the room went to a safe, opened it,
and plunged herself into the ledger-book, which she took from it. Upon
that and a cash-box--with certain involuntary pauses, in which her eyes
concentrated and stared--she remained closely engaged until half-past
eleven.

At that hour, having ascertained it, she put by her work, went into
her bedroom, and began a deliberate and careful toilet. She was pale,
serious, and evidently rather scared at herself; she lifted her eyebrows
and opened wide her eyes. But she did what she had to do as daintily
as ever Amina, in the Arab tale, figured her rice. A person of great
simplicity, who did extraordinary things in an ordinary way, at the hour
when all Wanless was going to bed, she brushed and banded her shining
hair, and dressed herself in silk and lace as for a dinner party. To
herself in the glass she gave and received again a face of pure pity and
sorrow. She saw herself lovely and love-worthy, sleek under the caress
of her own beauty. Yet she knew exactly what she was about to do, and
how she would do it, and did not falter at all.

At a quarter past twelve her summons came--a knock at the door, the
turning of the handle, the push to open, and Ingram's voice. “Come
along, Sancie,” he said, and went away without any more ceremony. She
got up from her chair, put her book down, having marked her place, and
followed him after a few minutes' meditation. Ingram's quarters were on
the ground floor of the house, as hers were, but in the opposite wing.
She had two rooms in the western arm of the E; the whole of the eastern
was his.

He was at table when she came in and shut the door behind her, at a
table fairly naped, with fine glass, silver, and flowers upon it. There
was hothouse fruit, too, a melon, a little pyramid of strawberries
in fig-leaves. He was eating smoked salmon and bread and butter with
appetite. By his side, half empty, was a champagne glass. A pint bottle
stood at his elbow.

He hailed her gaily, with a jerk of his head, a “Come along,” and a
lifted glass. Leaning back as she came on, watching and waiting for her,
he stretched out his left arm. She smiled rather conventionally, did not
meet his eyes, but came within reach. His arm encircled her, and drew
her in. “Well, my girl, well!” he said, glancing up, laughing,
tempting her to laugh. She looked down gently, blushing a little, and
condescended to him, stooped and brushed his forehead with her lips.
Condescension expresses her act. It was exactly done as one would humour
an importunate child, excuse its childishness, and grant it its desire
of the moment.

So it must have been felt by him, for there was a sharp, short tussle
of wills. She would have had him contented, but he was not so to be
contented. There was a little struggle, much silent entreaty from
him, much consideration from her above him--her doubting, judging,
discriminating eyes, her smile, half-tender and half-scornful; but in
the end he kissed her lips, the more ardently for their withholding.
Then he allowed her to sit by the table, not far off, and resumed his
smoked salmon and his zest. She declined to share the meal; was neither
hungry nor thirsty, she said. “Have your own way, my dear,” he concluded
the match; “you'll feel all the better for it, I know.” She cupped her
chin in her hand, and watched the play of knife and fork, her thoughts
elsewhere.

“Now, Sancie,” he said presently, in his usual direct manner, “how long
is it since I've seen you?”

She answered at once, without looking up, “A year and ten days.”

He shook his head. “That's too long. That's absurd. I don't like that
kind of thing, as a man domestically inclined. But I've been a devil of
a way. I wrote to you--from where?”

“From Singapore,” she told him.

“So I did. I remember. But I went to Egypt before that. First-rate
place, Egypt. I know it well, but am always glad to be there. Fine river
of its own. We went to Khartoum, and two marches beyond; then Singapore
and the Straits, Burmah, Ceylon; then India. Didn't I write to you from
India?”

“Yes,” she told him. She was balancing a salt-spoon idly on a
wine-glass, and seemed scarcely to listen. He rattled on.

“Had great days in India. Shooting, fishing, pig-spearing; polo, dances,
rajahs, pretty women, pow-wows of sorts, and a chance of a fight. All in
a year, my friend--I beg your pardon--and ten days. Quick work, eh? One
crowded year of glorious life. A cycle of Cathay.”

She was looking at her saltspoon, stretched beyond her the length of her
arm. “I'm sure you were very happy.”

He looked at her directly. “Oh, I was, you know. Otherwise, I guess I
should have written. I was idiotically happy. And you?”

“I was busy,” she told him, “idiotically busy.” He laughed gaily.

“That's one for me--and a shrewd one. Oh, you deep-eyed scamp! Sancie,
you never give yourself away. I've noticed that many and many a time.
And not I only, I can assure you. Bill Chevenix, now---”

Her thoughts, her regard, were far away from a world of Ingrams and
Chevenixes. She may have heard, but she gave no sign. He rattled on.

“Oh, you're splendid, of course you're splendid. The comfort of you! I
go off to the ends of the world--without a care left behind me--or taken
with me, by Jove! No bothers, no worry--letters opened, the right ones,
answered and done with. Letters forwarded, the right ones, unopened.
How you can guess, it beats me! No worry. You don't ask me to write to
you--or expect it. You don't write to me--and I don't expect it. You
know me just as I know you. There's a confidence, a certainty about you.
That's what's so splendid. There can't be a girl in the world like you.”
 He clasped her in triumph. “My Sancie! Back I come at the end of my
time, and everything's in apple-pie order. And to crown all, there's
you at the door, to welcome me--and wait your turn--and wait your turn.
Always the same--my wise, fine Sanchia!” He leaned forward, picked up
and held her hand. “My dear, I love you,” he said, and jumped up and
kissed her. Then, as he stood above her, the triumphant young man, with
the hand of possession on her shoulder, “Upon my word,” he declared to
the assembled universe, “this is a very satisfactory world, so far as I
am concerned.”

When he was seated again, and invited her to talk domestic affairs, she
returned from her reverie, and gathered in all her self-possession. The
estate, the household, the parish, the county: there was no mistaking
his interest in these matters. He was interested in the smallest
particulars: her broods of young chicks, her pigeons, the tabby cat's
kittens, the Rector's baby. He asked searching questions. How many cows
were in milk just now; when would Menzies have asparagus fit to eat? The
servants--was all well there? Their young men? Nothing escaped him. She
was quite ready for him, took a dry tone, showed a slight sense of the
humour of the situation, descended to trifles, had statistics at her
fingers' ends. She met him, in a word, as he wished to be met, as
jointly concerned in these minute affairs.

He lit a cigar, and drew her to the fire. He would have had her on his
knee, but she would not. She sat on a straight chair beside his easy
one, and allowed him to play with her hand.

He talked now in jerks, between puffs, of his adventures; his first
shot at a tiger, some trouble with hillmen at Peshawur, a row at a
mess-table, in which two chaps lost their heads, and one his papers. He
had been present as a guest, but had kept well in the background. There
had been a lot of drinking done--luckily he was all right. He had a good
head, you see; could carry a lot of stuff.

He had, by the way, “picked up” that little Mrs. Wilmot on board ship.
She was coming home in the convoy of Mrs. Devereux. Of course he had
known Mrs. Devereux for years; she was an institution. The little Wilmot
person was a widow, it seemed. Niceish sort of young woman; knew the
Trenchards up here, was a kind of cousin of Lady Trenchard's. In fact,
she was going on to them from here; but not due for a week or so. She
had, you might say, asked to be asked, or spelled for it out of those
eyes of hers. You get awfully friendly on board ship, you must know. You
can say anything--and do most things--oh, all sorts of things! He had
no objection--to her coming, he meant; indeed, he rather liked the
young party. He thought Chevenix did, too. But Chevenix was very much at
Sanchia's disposal; “he talked a lot about seeing you again, my girl.”
 To meet him again might carry her mind back--how long? Eight stricken
years. Was it possible that she--he and she--had been here together
eight years? Yes, he could see that she remembered. Dear, sweet Sancie!

There was bravado here on his part, and nervousness to be discerned
beneath it; for it is most certain that her reverie was not exactly as
he would have it. Her chin was in her hand, her caught other hand lay
idle in his own; her eyes were far-gazing and sombre; her smile was
bleak. Whatever she heard, whatever she thought of, she betrayed
nothing.

Her brooding calm spurred him in that sensitive spot whose throb or ache
tells a man whether he is centre of a woman's mind or not. He must know
whether she was glad to have him back; the wanderer returned, eh? She
had not told him so yet, he must observe; no, nor looked it. She was
mysterious, it seemed to him. “And you can speak with your eyes, my
dear; none better. Your tongue was never very loose; but your eyes! Now,
you know what you can do with them, Sancie; you know very well. Speak to
me, then, my dear, speak to me. Speak to me only with thine ... no, not
_only!_ You can speak in a thousand ways--with your hands, with the tips
of your fingers placed here or there, with a bend of the head on that
lovely neck you have, with your faint colour, with your quick
breath.” ...

Fired by his own words, he worked himself into enthusiasm, was enamoured
of what himself proclaimed. “My beautiful--my goddess!” he called her,
and drew her to his heart.

And she allowed him, allowed herself to be pressed there, while within
her the dull fire smouldered, and the deep, slow resentment gathered
like clouds about the sun. But he held her face now between his two
hands and forced to meet his own her unresponsive eyes; and when with
ardour he had kissed her grave lips, the flippancy of a fool ruined
him, and his triumph was flattened into dust, as when one crushes a
puff-ball.

He suddenly held her at arms' length as he was struck by an idea. “Oh,
by the way, I forgot,” he said, and looked vaguely across the room.
“Claire is dead.”

Sanchia's eyes concentrated and paled. The pupils of them were specks.
She paled to the lips, then slowly flooded as with a tide of sanguine.
She withdrew herself from him; simply dropped him off her. She said
nothing; but she watched him steadily, while within her the masked fire
gleamed and fitfully leapt.

Bravado made him hold on to his airy tone. “She died, I'm told, at
Messina, some time in March. I heard it at Marseilles. Met a man who
told me. Yes! She's dead--and buried.”

Sanchia had nothing to say. She looked, however, towards the door--and
he detected that. Her silence spread about the room, caught him and
enveloped him. That she was calculating how long it would be before she
could escape by that door was absolutely clear, and the frost of her
silence struck down upon him so that he could not gainsay her purpose.
He paused irresolute, glancing askance at her directed eyes. Then he
gave in, left her, opened the door for her. She went out, folded in her
own mystery, but as she went by him he caught up her hand, and kissed
the fingers. They were very cold, and made him shiver.

“Good-night, my dear,” he said, all his dash gone out of him.

She said good-night very simply and went away. He looked after her until
she had turned the corridor, then went to the table and poured himself
brandy and soda-water, drank deeply, and set down the tumbler with a
crash. “By God! I am a fool,” he told himself.

From the garden that narrow chink of light which shone through Ingram's
shutter was seen to collapse by one who watched it. Shortly afterwards,
that same haunter of the dark saw a shining slit part the shutters of
a window in the west wing, and sighed, short and quick. He returned, to
prowl among the secret flowers.




V


When, after dinner, Mrs. Devereux had told her young friend that she
was uncomfortable, there had been no need of the words; but the slow
answering “I know” with which Mrs. Wilmot expressed sympathy was not
intended to imply that she shared the feeling. She herself was not at
all uncomfortable, because, while she saw the whole state of affairs,
she was not unhopeful of coping with it. Touching the place where the
tender point of her breast lay nestling, she assured herself that she
could hope. But Mrs. Devereux, moving about in worlds not realised, was
incensed. Nothing that followed during the next few days served to clear
the surcharged air. It is hard to say what vexed her most, where all
was as it should not be. Ingram, bluntly unconscious of her sufferings,
gloomed over his own; Chevenix spied about for what he could not find,
spy as he would, and made the cause of woe more conspicuous than ever.
As for her, the disastrous fair, the deliberation with which she went
about her duties, and ease with which she did or caused them to be done;
her self-possession, gentleness, suavity, yes! and benevolence, were
sights to make angels weep. Tears of blood! If Mrs. Devereux, by any
means, could have compressed tears of blood, they had been shed. Nothing
less vivid would have met the case: to exhibit her scarlet handkerchief
to Ingram with a “There, see, I weep. Tears of blood!” Day by day in
that mild spring weather, under pale blue skies, fanned by zephyrs, she
could but pace the terrace walks, and stiffen herself, and stare about
her--with dull disapproval for the very flowers, lest theirs, too,
should be frail beauty, and repeat for her only comfort that she
was most uncomfortable. So she was. But it was because she did not
understand, not because she did. Curiosity ravaged her.

On one of these days, breakfast over at half-past ten, young Mr.
Chevenix declared his intention with cheerfulness and point. “Twentieth
of April--Dizzy's birthday, or Shakespeare's. Nevile, I'm going to fish
your river. They are leaping like the boys in _Eugene Aram,_ and I'm
going to give them something to leap at. Now, what are all you people
going to do? Because, I'll be free with you, I don't want you to come
and look on. Mrs. Devereux, I let you off. You needn't gillie me.
Nevile, you run away and play. Amuse Mrs. Wilmot. Do now: she likes it.
I'm all right.”

The elder lady fixed him keenly with a look which saw through his saucy
assurance; Ingram's eyes sought those of Mrs. Wilmot across the table.
She lent him their wonder for a moment, then looked down at her bosom.
He was satisfied. There were still women in the world.

“What shall we do?” he asked her. “Will you be driven? Will you drive?
Will you ride?” Another shaft rewarded him, which said, “Do with me as
you will.”

Ingram rang the bell. Minnie appeared. “Tell Frodsham, the horses at a
quarter past eleven. I ride Sea-King, Mrs. Wilmot Lorna Doone. He had
better come--or Butters will do. That's all.”

Mrs. Devereux had been ignored, but was not displeased. It showed,
at least, that Ingram knew she was not to be disposed of like a white
rabbit. It was, however, necessary to say something, to declare one's
presence, as it were; so she collected her papers. “I have letters to
write. You will excuse me, I know.”

Chevenix sprang to the door. “By George, I should think so,” he said,
which was well intended, but too brisk. He bowed her out, shut her out,
and stood with his eyes on the others.

Ingram remained before the fire looking out of window. “She's in a wax.
I don't know why.”

“Oh, don't you, my boy?” said Chevenix to himself.

Mrs. Wilmot trifled with her tea-spoon. “And I don't care--much,” he
added. Mrs. Wilmot smiled.

Mr. Chevenix, going a-fishing, saw, as he had intended to see, Sanchia
in the rose-garden, talking to Struan Glyde, who was tying ramblers.
“Morning, Sanchia--morning, Glyde!” Each greeted him, but the youth
grimly.

He talked at large. “I'm for murder. I must flesh my steel. It's too
good a day to lose. Clouds scurry, sun is shy; air's balmy: a trout must
die. That is very nearly poetry, Sancie. It is as near poetry as I can
hope to get this side the harps and quires. Now, what on earth is Clyde
doing to his roses at this time of year?”

The dark-skinned, sharp-chinned young man, aproned and shirt-sleeved,
turned a shade darker. His black eyes glowed. He was quietly arrogant,
even to her. “It doesn't matter,” he had once told her, “what you say or
do. I love you, and that's the sum and end of it.” Now he allowed her to
answer for him.

“There was a wind in the night which tore them about. I asked him to
make them safe. I hate to think of their bruised ribs.”

Chevenix whistled his satisfaction with this and all things else. “I
see. Works of mercy. There's a blessing on that, somewhere and somewhen.
All to the good, you know, Clyde. You never know your luck, they tell
me.” He left Clyde and his roses, and turned to the young lady. “Well
now, look here, Sancie--if works of mercy are toward, what d'you say to
one on your own account? Here I stand, an orphan boy, upon my honour.
The master's gone riding with the widow.” He stopped his rattle, as
a thought struck him serious for a moment. “By George, and he's a
widower--so he is!” Discharged of that, he resumed--“Yes, and Mrs.
Devereux has got the hump, as they say--and here I am at your mercy, to
be made much of. Who's going to admire me? Who's going to hold my net?
Who's going to say, 'Oh, what a beauty!'” He had now got her thoroughly
at her old ease with him. Her eyes gleamed, and there was no doubting
her smile. “Now, I'll tell you what. Your roses are all right. Glyde
will see to that. You leave that to Glyde and his strong right arm. His
strength is as the strength of ten, because... you follow me, I think?
Now, Sancie, I put it to you--I'm an old friend of the family, and
haven't seen you for--how many years? Aren't you going to give me
half-an-hour of your morning?”

He pleaded by looks. He was quizzical, but in earnest. Her brow was
clear.

“Yes,” she said. “I'll come--for half-an-hour.”

“Right! Right, goddess of the silver brake. Come, hold the pass with
me.” He turned to go, and she caught him up. “I mix my poets like salad,
but that's because I'm in such high spirits. By Jove, Sancie, it _is_
good to see you again.” She met his laughing eyes with hers. She swam
by his side--took his net, and was happy. Her face glowed. She had the
power of casting troubles behind, recuperative power, resiliency. Glyde,
the olive-faced, watched them down the walk, and owned to a heart of
lead. “As well shut down the west wind as a spirit like hers!” He turned
to his affair.

Below the steps, in the nut-walk which led to the bridge, Chevenix
altered his tone. “It's good of you to come with me, Sancie, my dear.
I'm a very friendly beggar, and Nevile, you know--I say!” and he turned
her a sober face--“You know, I suppose? His wife--eh? Dead, you know.
Oh, but of course you did!”

She met him unfalteringly. “Yes, he told me.”

Chevenix shrugged. “I must say, you know--what? Oh, of course, it was a
ghastly affair all along. But _you_ know all that, as well as I do. Why,
her temper! Oh, awful! I've seen her myself dead-white in one of her
rages--she had hold of a wine-glass so hard that it snapped, and cut
her hand. She looked at the blood--she didn't know how it happened. And
he--well, _you_ ought to know--was as bad, in his way. 'Pon my soul,
Sancie, Vesuvius might just as well have married Etna--every bit. But
there! What's the good of talking! Everybody knew how it would be.”
 Words failing him, he stared about him.

“But still--oh, damn it all! To hear of your wife's death--casually--on
a platform--from a chap you happen to know--happen to have
met somewhere--oh, well, I call it casual. That's the word, I
believe--casual. Well, it _is_ pretty casual--what? Now, just tell me
what you think--between friends, of course.”

She stopped him: she was short in the breath. “I think not. If you don't
mind.”

He became as serious, immediately, as he was capable of being. “I'll do
as you like, my dear--but you'll let me say this, that if I could see
you with all your belongings about you again, I should sing a hymn.
That's all, Sancie; but it means a lot. When you went out of Great
Cumberland Place, it became, somehow, another kind of place. I hardly
ever go there now, you know. And now they're all married but you, and--I
say, you heard that Vicky had a son and heir? Did you hear that?”

She had averted her face, but she listened intensely, nodding her head.
“Yes, yes, I knew that. Papa told me. He always writes to me, you know;
from the office, poor darling!”

She appealed to him urgently. “Please don't talk about them just yet.
Please don't.”

He saw the mist in her eyes, and was afraid. “All right, Sancie, all
right. I'm frightfully sorry. Beastly painful all this, you know.” He
was much disturbed. To his simple soul a fine day, a fine-fettled river
demanded, as of right, a happy mood in man, for whom all things
were made. And a fine girl by his side, a good, a brave, a splendid
girl--down on her luck--on such a day! What could one do? If, when you
began, she choked you off! Wouldn't meet you half-way--bottled it up!
And here he was, geared for fishing, and without the heart to wet a
line, because of all this misery. Sanchia, sharply in profile to him,
from cheek to chin, from shoulder to low breast, all one sinuous, lax,
beautiful line, broke in on his rueful meditations. “There's a rise,”
 she said. “Look, look.”

His eye swept the river. “You're right. By Gad, that's a whacker. That's
a fish. Now, you stop just where you are, net in hand. Don't move, and
you shall see something.”

He left her, and ran stooping down the bank, all his little soul
concentrated in his cast. The dimpled water ran and swirled, the line
flashed in the sun. Three casts, four; a splash, a taut line, and his
shout, “Come on, quick; I've got him.” Sanchia glided swiftly down the
bank, her eyes alight, the lines of neck and shoulder finely alert.
Her eyes shone, her lips parted; she looked the Divine Huntress to whom
Senhouse had once likened her. She stooped, the net jerked; she watched,
waited, tense to the act. Within the swirling water the great fish
plunged: she watched, strung to the pounce; the net dipped and darted;
she lifted it to land.

Chevenix admired. “By George, you are a one--er, I must say! Born to it.
You strike like an osprey. That's a fish--what?” They peered together
into the net, where, coiled and massy, beaming rose and pale gold, the
trout writhed.

“Splendid!” breathed Sanchia, glowing and alight.

Chevenix gloried in her beauty. “If Nevile don't know what his chances
are--if he ain't on his knees--my heavens, what a mate for a chap!”

A shadow falling upon him caused him to look up. Mrs. Devereux, grey and
tall, boa'd, gloved, umbrella'd, stood regarding him and his companion
from the bank. Instinct prompted him immediately to screen Sanchia by
dragging her into the party. He held up the net and plunged. “First
prize,” he cried out, as heartfully as he could, “to me and Miss
Percival.”

“So I see,” said Mrs. Devereux. “Ah, good morning.”

This was to Sanchia's bland greeting, which, as always, made the lady
shiver. It is difficult to say what a shock it was to her to be greeted
cheerfully by Sanchia. To see one in so painful a situation occupied
by anything less painful, interested in anything at all, was truly
shocking. Mrs. Devereux's idea of irregularity was that it absorbed the
devoted victim, kept her aghast. If it did not, surely, there was no
reward left to the virtuous. But here we had a highly irregular young
woman behaving with extreme regularity. Was the world turning upside
down? Was black, then, really white? She shivered, she blinked her eyes;
but she descended the bank and stood beside the pair, yet rigidly apart.

Chevenix, having got her there, knew not what to do with her. It seemed
to him that he had better, on the whole, go on, so turned the lady a
knowing face.

“This is not the first time by any means that Miss Percival and I have
gone fishing, you must know. We began by tickling 'em--we were urchins
together, you see.”

“Really!” said Mrs. Devereux, who still saw nothing but depravity.

“I remember,” he went on, “the first time we went fishing. I was at
Alnmouth with a governess; awful lonely little beggar I was. I used
to moon about on the sands, while she read the _Morning Post_, with
spectacles and a red parasol. And I used to hanker about all the other
young 'uns, and wish I was one of 'em. _Her_ party was there, you
know--five of 'em, all girls and all pretty girls--eh, Sancie? I would
have given my hopes of heaven--if I'd had any, you know--to go and
paddle with 'em. Jolly party you were, my dear--jolly old plump papa,
rosy mamma--and Philippa like a young tree, and Melusine and Hawise
bright as apples; and then Vicky and you--little dears, you were. I was
like a spent salmon, I believe, lantern jawed, hollow-eyed little devil,
as solitary as sin.” He turned, flushed, to Sanchia, and put his hand
on her arm; she turned away her face, and Mrs. Devereux believed she saw
tears. “It was _you_ who took me in, you know.”

“No,” said Sanchia, turning him her shining eyes. “It was Vicky. She
asked you to come fishing.” He accepting her ruling.

“Bless me, it _was_ Vicky. Always a frisky one. But after that it was
always you and Vicky and me. And we had the time of our lives--at least,
I did.” Even Mrs. Devereux felt an emotion from the beam with which
Sanchia rewarded him--a tender, compassionate look, as if she understood
and excused him.

“You are old friends, I see,” she said; and her smile was not
unfriendly.

Chevenix shook his head wisely. “Frightfully old--I've known 'em
all--all my life.” Mrs. Devereux then made a distinct advance.

“It must be very nice for you,” she said to Sanchia.

Sanchia's eyes were now clear, and her smile absolutely general. “To
see Mr. Chevenix? Yes, indeed.” She collected herself. “But I'm afraid
I must go now. I've a great deal to do.” She admonished the young man.
“Now you had better catch some more,” she told him. “I must go.”

His face fell--without any regard for Mrs. Devereux--to “Oh, I say!” but
it was then revealed to him that there might be a part for him to play.
“Right, Sancie--you're mistress here. See you later.” He met her eyes
gallantly, and lifted his hat. Sanchia bent her head to Mrs. Devereux,
and went staidly away, her duties gathering in her brows. The elder
lady and the young man stood face to face without speaking. Then Mrs.
Devereux sat deliberately down, and Chevenix braced himself.

“You said just now,” the lady began, “to Miss Percival, that she was
mistress here. What did you mean by that, exactly?”

Chevenix sprang sideways to this flank attack. “Oh, you know, Mrs.
Devereux! you can't take a chap--literally--what?”

He wanted time; but she gave him none. “You must forgive an old woman of
the world--of a certain world. I come here--to a house which belonged
to Nevile's father, an old, old friend, and I find--installed--a young
lady--who does not dine--who is extremely capable. I am bewildered,
naturally.”

Chevenix's “I know, I know,” and his friendly nods ran on as an
accompaniment.

“And then,” said she, raising her voice, “I find that this young
lady--and you--are old friends. You speak of her--people--as if they
were really--of the sort which--as if she were--of the kind--whom--” It
was impossible. “Really,” she said, “it's most unusual. I don't frankly
know what I ought to do.”

Chevenix listened carefully to her truncated phrases, where what she did
not say was the most eloquent part of her discourse. He nodded freely
and sagely; he was conciliatory, but clear in opinion. “I know, I know,”
 he said. “It's very rum--you must naturally find it so. I know exactly
how you feel about it. Oh, rum's the only word for it. Or rummy. Yes,
you might call it rummy--or a go, you know--or anything like that.” Then
he grew plausible. “But I'm sure it's all right. It's a long story, but
I'm quite sure. You've no idea what a fine girl that is. Ah, but I
know it.” He tapped his forehead. “I saw the whole thing through--from
beginning to end. She's a perfect beauty, to begin with.”

That was a bad note. Mrs. Devereux asked him at once if he thought
that a good reason. “Well,” he said, “I do, you know--in a way. I can't
explain it--but I think you see it in her face, you know--and manner.
Yes, in her manner. She's uncommon, you see, most uncommon. And as cool
as--well, it would be hard to say how cool a hand I thought her.”
 He paused, having got off this effective estimate, round-eyed and
triumphant.

“It seems to me, Mr. Chevenix,” said the dry lady, “that the less you
say the better.”

“Not at all, Mrs. Devereux, not at all.” He was eager to explain. “I
don't think you quite follow me. What I meant to say was, that when a
young woman can be as cool as she can be; can run a big place like this,
and manage a staff of servants,--outdoors, mind you, and in; no steward,
only a bailiff; keep all the accounts; and hold her head up--for she
does that, you know, uncommonly well; why, then I say that she must be
allowed the benefit of the doubt, you know. You must say, 'Well, it's
rum, it's rummy,' or how you like to put it--'but she's got a head on
her shoulders, and I suppose she knows what she's doing. I suppose she's
seen her way.' For she's all right, you know, Mrs. Devereux; she's as
right as rain. It's irregular, dashed irregular--but, by George, I'll
tell you this, Nevile was in a bad way when he first met her; and she's
pulled him through. He's steady enough now, is Nevile. Don't drink--nor
do other things. He threatened to be a waster in his day; but he's no
waster now. She did that, you know; she pulled him through. Why, bless
your heart, Mrs. Devereux, he used to rave about her--rave, and chuck
himself about on sofas, and cry like anything, and bite his nails down.
There never was such a girl under heaven, he used to say. He called her
a goddess. Love! Oh, Lord! And I assure you, on my solemn oath, that he
never did a better day's work in his life, nor any girl a finer, than
when he put in his word for himself, poor devil, and she said, 'Yes,
I'll do it.'”

“Did she--” Mrs. Devereux asked, or began to ask, and he shrugged, and
exclaimed,

“Ah! There you have me. Now you've done it. I don't know. That's the
fact--I don't know. Everybody thought so. She went on as if she did; but
now,--no, I don't know. You see, she's such a cool hand, she's such a
deep one--you can't tell. There's no telling with that sort. All I can
say is, it looked uncommonly like the real thing. We all thought so
at the time. The symptoms were right enough--or wrong enough,
you'll say--and then, look at her since! She's stuck to him through
everything--good report, bad report, everything. She's chucked
her people--or been chucked. Had four beautiful sisters--glowing,
upstanding, fine girls, all of them; and chucked. Old father, in the
City: chucked. Mother, big, handsome, hot-tempered: chucked. And all for
Nevile, who (between ourselves) ain't worth it. He's not a bad one, but
he's not a good one, either. He's got a cruel temper, Nevile has--like
that ghastly wife of his. But--” he cried, opening his arms--“there you
are. They're like that, her sort. Mighty quiet about it, you know;
was turned into the streets, you may say; father, mother, sisters, all
showed their backs. What does she do? Sets her teeth together, looks
straight ahead, and takes old Nevile. And here she is now oh, as--right
as rain. What a girl, eh?”

Mrs. Devereux was certainly moved. She was almost prepared to admit a
genuinely exceptional case. But she had a question to ask. Did Ingram
intend to marry her--now?

At this Chevenix stepped back, as if to avoid a blow. “Ah!” he said.
“Ah! That's it. Ask me another.”

“Do you mean to say of your friend, and mine,” she pursued him, “that he
would dare--after all that you tell me--to---”

“No,” said Chevenix, in a desperate stew; “no, I don't mean that. I
think he would have her this moment--if he could get her. But--the
fact is--Well, you know--” and he glanced anxiously at the lady, “I've
nothing to go upon, absolutely nothing as yet; but the fact is, I'm not
sure whether she would take him, you know--now.”

“Is that possible?” was all the lady could find to say, with a throw-up
of the hands. “Is that possible?”

“Quite--with Sanchia,” said Chevenix. “Through with him, you know--got
to the bottom of him--sick of him. I believe he bores her, you know.”
 Mrs. Devereux looked at him, more in sorrow than in anger, and then
walked slowly away. Most eloquent comment.




VI


Whatever may have been the net result upon Mrs. Devereux's mind of the
explanatory revelations made upon the river bank, two things became
clear as day succeeded day. One was that Miss Percival avoided her,
the other that she sought out Miss Percival. Being entirely unable to
succeed, she did not renounce her now benevolent attitude towards the
young lady, but she decided to leave Wanless.

All that she could do, she did. No wheedling of Mrs. Wilmot's could draw
any further comment from her, and she said nothing to Ingram either for
or against what she supposed now to be the desire, the honourable desire
of his heart. Oddly enough, though it was against all her upbringing,
Chevenix had so far succeeded in impressing her that she rather
respected Sanchia the more for being cool now that rehabilitation was in
full sight, and practically within touch of her hand. Chevenix, in fact,
had made her see that Sanchia was a personality, not merely a pretty
woman. You can't label a girl “unfortunate” if, with the chance of being
most fortunate, she puts her hand to her chin, and reflects, and says,
Hum, shall I? or shall I not? Short of deliberately knocking at the
girl's door, she would have done anything to exchange views. That she
could not do. She found herself waiting about in corridors and halls for
Sanchia's possible passage. Once she had marked her down in the
garden, flower-basket on arm, scissors in hand. She had been fluttered,
positively felt her heart-beats, as she sailed down in pursuit; but then
Sanchia, under the brim of her garden hat, must have divined her, for,
with a few clear words of direction over her shoulder to the young
gardener who was helping her, she had steered smoothly away, and,
without running, could not have been caught. The thing was marked, not
uncivilly, but quite clearly. What could one do?

Two more days of fine weather and perplexity, and she announced her
departure as imminent. We were at Thursday. She must positively leave on
Monday. “No more letters to write about my shortcomings,” was Ingram's
comment upon this intelligence to Mrs. Wilmot apart. “It's a mistake to
have people to stay with you who've known you all their lives. They are
for ever at their contrasts: why isn't one still a chubby-faced boy, for
instance? They see you in an Eton jacket once, and you're printed in it
for ever. So you glare by contrast, you hurt, you wound. In other words,
you have character, you see, which is dashed inconvenient to a woman who
remembers you with none. You upset her calculations--and sometimes she
upsets yours. No offence to Mrs. Devereux; but I rather wish she hadn't
come.”

Mrs. Wilmot, who had no general conversation, thought that they ought to
be “nice” to Mrs. Devereux; to which Ingram replied, snarling, that
he was always “nice” to her, but that if a woman will spend her time
writing letters or disapproving of her host, she can't expect to be
happy in such a world as ours. But the worst of Mrs. Devereux, he went
on to say, was that she couldn't be happy unless she did disapprove of
somebody. Mrs. Wilmot, aware of whom the lady did disapprove, dug holes
in the turf, and wondered what she herself ought to do. Supposing Mrs.
Devereux went on Monday, ought not she--? Now, she didn't at all want to
go just now.

At luncheon Ingram proposed a visit--to certain Sowerbys of Sowerby,
and pointedly asked Mrs. Devereux to come. “You like her, you know. It's
beyond dispute. So I do hope you'll come. I'll drive you over in the
phaeton.”

Mrs. Devereux agreed to go. Chevenix said that he should fish. He hated
calling--except on Mrs. Devereux, of course. He braved the discerning
eyes of the lady, who had already caught him at his fishing.

The phaeton safely away, he found Sanchia, as he had hoped, in the
garden. Her gauntlets were on, an apron covered her; she was flushed
with the exercise of the hoe. Struan Glyde, silent and intent, worked
abreast of her. He had just muttered something or another which had
given her pause. She had her chin on her hands, her hands on her hoe,
while she considered her reply. Then Chevenix heard her slow, “Yes, I
suppose so. I don't like it at all, but I'm afraid you're right. We are
poor creatures, made to be underneath.”

The cheerful youth rubbed his head. “Candid--what? Where _have_ we got
to now?”

Glyde had stopped in the act to hoe: he was stopping still, his blade in
the ground, but he turned his face sideways to answer her. “Not so,”
 he said, “unless you will have it so. She is queen of the world who is
queen of herself.” Then Sanchia saw Chevenix, and waited for him.

“Philosophy--what?” the cheerful youth hailed them. “Plain living, hard
thinking, what? Upon my soul, you are a pair! Now, Miss Sancie, I can
expect the truth from you. What's Glyde preaching? Heresy? Schism?
Sudden death?”

“He was talking about women,” Sanchia told him.

“Ah,” the youth mused aloud. “He was, was he? Glyde on Woman. He ought
to wait for his beard to grow; then you might listen to him.”

Glyde, who was dumb in company, was hacking into the clods, while
Chevenix, to whom he was negligible, pursued his own affair.

“I say, Sancie, I'm going to ask a favour of you--not the first, by
any means; but I always was a sturdy beggar. The Lord loveth a sturdy
beggar, eh? Well, look here, I'm at a loose end again. Nevile's taken
'em out driving--to a tea-party--to the Sowerbys. I jibbed, though I was
asked. I lied, because they drove me into a corner. I couldn't face old
Sowerby's chin--and all those gels with their embroidered curates--what?
You know what I mean. I mean their church-work, and the curates they
do it for. So I said I was going fishing--which was a lie--and Mrs.
Devereux as good as said it was a lie. Now, suppose you invite me to
tea; how would that be?”

“Then you _do_ go fishing,” said Sanchia, and smiled. “Very well. I do
invite you.”

“Bravo! You're a true friend. O woman, in our hours of ease...! Trust me
for an apposite quotation ... and new, what? I believe I'm pretty good
at quotations. My people used to play a game. You write down a name on
a bit of paper; then you fold it down; then a quotation; then another
name. That's my vein of gold. Now you have it--the secret's out. I'm
coming, you know. I accept. Many thanks. What's your hour?”

“Half-past four,” she told him. He bowed, and left her with Glyde. He
turned to look at them as he left the walled garden, and saw them near
together,--Glyde vehement in his still way of undertones, she listening
as she worked.

At half-past four she received him in her room. Though her blouse was
of lace and her skirt of green cloth, she looked like a virgin of the
Athenian procession. Her clothes flowed about her, clung to her like
weed as she swam. As he met her friendly, silent welcome, he expressed
her to himself--“By the gods above, you are--without exception--the
healthiest--finest--bravest--young woman--that ever made the sun shine
in grey weather.” Aloud, he made things easy.

“Here's your tea-party, Sancie, dressed in its best, eager for the fray.
When I think of old Sowerby taking whisky-pegs while his family has tea
and curates, I bless my happy stars that I've got a friend at court--to
save me, don't you know, from the wicked man. When the wicked man--what?
You know the quotation, I expect. Not one of my best--but give me time.”

While she made tea he pried about her room, looking at photographs.
He paused here and there as one struck him, and commented aloud. “Old
Nevile, with his sour mouth. Looks as if the tongs had nipped him in the
act. Why _will_ he roll his moustache like that? It's not pretty--shows
him like a boar, with his tusks out, don't you think? But he's a
good-looking beggar, and knows it. Ah! and there you all are--or,
rather, were--all five of you! Philippa, Hawise, Melusine, Vicky, you.
What a bevy! I say--” He turned to her. “I met old Vicky, for a minute,
the other day. Met her in Bond Street. Sinclair'd got the pip, or
something, down at Aldershot. Expensive complaint, seemingly. So she'd
come up to see a palmist, or some kind of an expert about him. She spoke
of you, of her own accord. I said I was coming down here.”

Sanchia's hand at the kettle was steady, but her eyes flickered before
they took the veil. “Tell me about Vicky. What did she say--of me?”

Chevenix came to the tea-table and stood by her. “I think Vicky's
all right. I do indeed. It seems to me she'd give her ears to see
you--simple ears. Sinclair, you'll find, is the trouble. He's the usual
airy kind of ass. Makes laws for his womankind, and has 'em kept. Vicky
likes it, too.”

“I suppose he is like that,” Sanchia said, as if it was a curious case.
“I have never spoken to him. He was about, of course--but Vicky took
him up after--my time.” For a moment emotion, like a wet cloud, drifted
across her eyes. “I should like to see Vicky again. It's eight years.”

Chevenix was anxious. “I do think it could be managed, you know--with
tact. I'd do any mortal thing, Sancie--you know I would, but--” He
despaired. “Tact! Tact! That's what you want.”

Her soft mood chased away. She looked at him full. “I can't use what
you call tact with Vicky. That means that I am to grovel.” She drove him
back to his photographs. He peered into the little print on the wall.

“What have we here? A domestic scene, my hat! You appear to be
bathing--well over the knee, anyhow. High-girt Diana, when no man is by.
Awfully jolly you look. But he _is_ by. Who on earth's this chap?”
 He peered. Sanchia from her tea-table watched him, in happy muse. He
shouted his discovery. “I remember the chap! Now, what on earth was he
called? Your casual friend, who lived in a cart and only had three pair
of bags. Nohouse--Senhouse! That was the man.” He looked with interest
at the pair, then at Sanchia. “Mixed bathing--what?”

She laughed. “Yes--we both got wet to the skin. Percy Charnock took it
ages ago--oh, ages! Before I was out, or knew Nevile, or anybody except
you. It was ten years ago. I must have been eighteen. It was when I
was at Gorston with Grace Mauleverer--trying to save water-lilies from
drowning in green scum. He--Mr. Senhouse--came along in his cart, and
saw me, and lent me his bed for a raft--and worked it himself. That was
the first time I ever saw him--” she ended softly in a sigh: “before
anything happened.”

Chevenix listened, nodding at the photograph. “Wish to heaven, my dear,
nothing had ever happened. The less that happens to girls the better for
them, I believe. Not but what _this_ chap would have been all right. If
_he_ had happened, now! He was as mad as a hatter, but a real good sort.
Did I tell you?” He grew suddenly reminiscent. “I saw him a little more
than a year ago--with a pretty woman. Had a talk with him--asked him
to come up and have a look at you. It was when Nevile went off on this
trip. No, no, I liked old Senhouse. He was a nice-minded chap. Not the
kind to eat you up--and take everything you've got as if he had a
right to it. No. That's Nevile's line, that is. You wouldn't see Nevile
lending you his bed, or risking his life after water-lilies.”

Sanchia's eyes were narrow and critical. She peered as if she were
trying to find good somewhere in Nevile Ingram. “He'd risk anything to
get what he thought were his rights. But not upon a bed for a raft.
He'd write to London for the latest thing in coracles. He's very
conventional.”

“You have to be,” said Chevenix with sudden energy. He wheeled round
upon her as he spoke. “We all have to be. We go by clockwork. You get
the striking all wrong if you play tricks.” He resumed the photograph.
“By Jove, but that suits you. Child of Nature, what? I suppose you're
happiest when you're larking?”

“Mud-larking?” she asked him, laughing and blushing.

“Well, we'll say rampageing; going as you please.”

“Yes.” She owned to it without hesitation. “I can't be happy, I think,
unless I can do just what I like everywhere. It was one of the first
things Jack Senhouse ever taught me. He was an anarchist, you know--and
I suppose I'm one, too.”

“Your gypsy friend?” He jerked his head backwards to the photograph.
“By Jove, my dear,” he added, “you must have knocked him sideways--even
him--when you carried out his little ideas--as you did.”

She opened her eyes to a stare. She stared, rather ruefully. “Yes,” she
said, “I believe I did. I know I did. He was dreadfully unhappy. He and
I were never quite the same after that. But I couldn't help myself. It
was before me--it had to be done.”

“No, no, no!” cried he vehemently, but checked himself. “Pardon, Sancie.
We won't go over all that, but surely you see, now, that it won't do.
Now that escapade in the pond, you know. That was all right--with
only old Senhouse in the way. You must admit that you were rather
_decolletee_, to say the least of it. Now, would you say that you can do
those sort of things--go as you please, you know, anywhere?”

“Why not?” Her eyes were straightly at him.

“What! Whether you're seen or not?”

She frowned. “I don't want to know whether I'm seen or not.”

“And mostly you don't care?”

“And sometimes I don't care.”

“Ah,” said Chevenix, “there you are. Your 'sometimes' gives you away.”

She changed the subject. “Do have some tea. It will be quite cold.”

He had been staring again at the photograph--Sanchia's gleaming limbs,
the gypsy's intent face shadowed over the water. He now relinquished it
with an effort. “Thanks,” he said. “I like it cold.” He sat beside
her, and they talked casually, like old, fast friends, of mutual
acquaintance. But for him the air was charged; she was on his
conscience. Reminiscences paled and talk died down; he found himself
staring at the wall.

He resumed the great affair. “Nevile's rather jumpy, don't you think?”

Her serenity was proof. “Is he? Why should he be?”

“Ah, my dear!” cried the poor young man. “Let's say it's the old
Devereux. _Salmo deverox_, eh? Sounds fierce.”

Not a flicker. “Mrs. Devereux? What has she been doing to him?”

“Nothing,” he said; “and that's just it. She won't have anything to say
to him.”

Then she went a little too far. A man charged with friendly impulse,
charged also with knowledge, must be handled tenderly. You must not be
foolhardy. But here was bravado, nothing less. For she arched her brows,
and showed her eyes innocently wide. “Oh!” she said, “why? Why won't
Mrs. Devereux speak to Nevile?”

“Oh, come, you know.” He looked at her keenly. He didn't wink, but he
blinked. Then he crossed the room. “Look here, Sancie. Will you let me
talk to you--really--as an old friend?”

She looked up into his face, nodded and smiled. “Of course you may say
what you like.”

He sat by her, collecting himself. “Well, then, what I shall say is
just this. The whole thing is in your hands--now. You can put it square.
There's absolutely nothing in your way--now--well, now that Claire's
gone, you know.” He watched her anxiously for a sign, but got none. So
still she sat, glooming, watching herself--as on a scene.

“Mind,” he said in a new tone. “You know all about me. I jibbed at first
when you broke away. I'll own to that. I couldn't do otherwise. Why, old
Senhouse himself went half off his head about it. Anything in the world
to get you out of it, I'd have done. Any mortal thing, my dear. But
there! There was no holding you--off you went! But when once the
thing was started--the extraordinary thing was that I was on your side
directly. And so I always have been. Ask Vicky--ask your mother. I've
done, in my quiet way, what you would never have asked of me. You must
forgive me--I've defended you everywhere. I won't mention names, but
I've explained your case, only lately, in a rocky quarter--and I know
I've made an impression. I'm not much good at talking, as a rule, but I
do believe that I put the thing rather well. You make your own laws--eh?
Like Napoleon Buonaparte--eh? And somehow--the way you do it--it's all
right, eh, Sancie?”

He got nothing from her. She sat on rigid, with unwinking eyes, staring
at herself, as she saw herself on the scene. Chevenix leaned to her.

“And Nevile knows it. He believes it. He would say it anywhere. He's
difficult, is Nevile; a wayward beggar. He's been his own master since
he was sixteen; asked, and had. It's hard to make him understand that he
can't go on. But he can't, the old sweep, when you put in your say. You
know his way--he puts his desires in the shape of truisms. He states
them--that's all he has to do--they become immutable laws. Very
imposing, his desires, put like that. They've imposed upon me; they've
imposed upon _you_ in their day. Well, with a man like that, you know,
you can't take him up too short. Go slow, go slow. What was it I heard
Clyde saying to you just now? Who's queen of herself is queen of the
world--what? Now, that's quite true. One for Clyde. Apply that to old
Nevile. Queen of herself! Why, what else are you? And what's Nevile
but the blundering world in a man's skin? Well, queen it, queen it--and
there's your kingdom under your feet. Marry the old chap, Sancie. You
put everything right; you take your proper place. The county! But what
are counties to you? You smile--and you may well smile. Let the county
go hang; but there's Vicky. She's more than county to you. There's
Melusine, there's Philippa, there's Hawise; there's your good old dad,
there's your lady mother. You get 'em all. And Nevile's biting his nails
for it. And a free man. Come now.”

She had listened, that's certain; she hadn't been displeased. He had
seen her eyes grow dreamy, he had marked her rising breast. Rising and
falling, rising and falling, like lilies swayed by flowing water. That
betokened no storm, nor flood; that meant the stirring of the still
deeps, not by violent access, but by slow-moving, slow-gathered, inborn
forces. Had he had eloquence, he thought, as he watched her, he had won.
But he was anxious. She was such a deep one.

[Illustration: He had eloquence, he thought, as he watched her, he had
won. But he was anxious. She was such a deep one.]

When she spoke there sounded to be a tinge of weariness in her voice;
she dragged her sentences, as if she foresaw her own acts, and was
tired in advance. She seemed almost to be pitying her fate. At first she
looked down at her hands in her lap, at her fingers idly interweaving;
but midway of her drawn-out soliloquy--for she seemed to be talking to
herself--she turned him her eyes, and he plumbed their depths in vain.

“It's very nice of you to be interested in me. You are much more
interested than I am--and it's a compliment, a great compliment. I think
you are very loyal--if I can call it loyalty--if you'll let me call it
that. I like my work here; I'm perfectly happy doing it. It was hard
at first. I knew absolutely nothing of housekeeping and managing
things when I came here. I had to work--to learn book-keeping
and accounts--cooking--building--carpentering--stock-raising--oh,
everything. I had to feel that I knew very nearly as much about
everything as the people who were to do what I told them. And of course
that was quite true; but it wasn't at all easy. It has taken me eight
years to get as far as I am now. And I could go on for years more.
There's nobody on the place whom I can't manage: they all like me. I'm
quite comfortable--if I can be let alone.”

... Speaking so, she believed it. But, thinking it over she was driven
to explain herself.

“People seem to think that girls--that women--care for nothing but
one thing--being married, I mean. I'm sure that's a mistake. One gets
interested, one may get absorbed--and then there's a difficulty. For
it's very true, I think, that unless we care for the one thing, and that
thing only, we don't care for it at all. At least, that is how I
feel about it. I have got lots of interests in life--all these things
here--management of things. I don't want Nevile--or to be married.
I don't want anything of the sort; I can't be bothered. I cared
once--frightfully; but now I don't care. All that was long ago; at the
beginning--eight years ago. Now it's done with, I only want to be let
alone--to do my work here. It doesn't seem to me much to ask; but--” ...

It was then that she looked at him, and was beyond the power of his
sounding. She grew vehement, full of still, passionless rage. She was
like a goddess pronouncing a decree; she was final.

“I don't want to marry Nevile. It bores me. And he doesn't want me,
really. He thinks he does, because he thinks that he can't have me any
other way. But he would be miserable, and so should I. It seems to me
impossible. You can't put life into dead things. When he came back
here the other day he had been away a year: a year and ten days. He had
written to me twice--”

Chevenix interrupted. “Excuse me,” he said. “How many times had you
written to him?” He had guessed at pique; but he was wrong.

She replied slowly. “I forwarded his letters. I hadn't written at all.”
 Her simplicity! Chevenix allowed her to go on.

“The thing--all that it began with--was over. I felt that. I showed him
that the first evening he was here. He has never spoken to me again--of
that sort of thing, and I don't think he ever will. He doesn't
understand being refused anything. I suppose he never has been before in
his life.”

“Weren't you, perhaps, a little bit short?” he hazarded; and she
considered the possibility.

“No, I don't think so. I wasn't more abrupt than he was--after a year.”
 She paused. “He threw out her death--Mrs. Ingram's death--” she
forced herself to the name--“quite casually, as if he had been saying,
'By-the-by, the Rector's coming to dine.' If he had wanted me, do you
think he would have put it like that?”

“Nevile,” said Chevenix, “would put anything--like anything. He's that
sort, you know. He'd take for granted that you understood lots of things
which he couldn't express. But I will say this for Nevile. He's not
petty. He's fairly large-minded. For instance, I'll bet you what you
like he didn't mind your not writing to him--or reproach you with it.”

She opened her eyes. “Of course he didn't. He was perfectly happy. He
told me he had been idiotically happy. He knew I was here, because
I forwarded his letters--and that was all he cared about. I was here
for--when he chose. I assure you he didn't want me at all until I showed
him that he couldn't have me.”

“But he did, you know,” said Chevenix; “he does. He was sure of you all
through, from the beginning, as you say. That's why he didn't write or
expect letters from you. He nattered himself that he was secure. Poor
old Nevile!” He felt sorry now for Ingram. She was really adamantine.

She arose, with matches in her hand, knelt before the fire and kindled
it. She blew into it with her mouth, and watched the climbing flames. “I
don't think you need pity Nevile, really,” she said. “He will always be
happy. But I am going to be made unhappy.” She proclaimed her fate as
a fact in which she had no concern at all. Chevenix rose and paced the
room.

“Well, you know--I must be allowed to say--your happiness is so
entirely in your own hands. It's difficult--I've no right to suggest--to
interfere in any way. I'm nothing at all, of course--”

“You are my friend, I hope,” she said, watching the young fire--still on
her knees before it, worshipping it, as it seemed. Chevenix expanded his
chest.

“You make me very proud. I thank you for that. Yes, I am your friend.
That's why I risk your friendship by asking you something. You won't
answer me unless you choose, of course. But--come now, Sancie, is there,
might there be--somebody else?”

She looked round at him from where she knelt. Her hands were opened to
the fire; her face was warmed by its glow; it was the pure face of a
seraph. “No. There's nobody at all--now.”

He was again standing before the little photograph of the nymph
thigh-deep in water. That seemed to attract him; but he heard her “now,”
 and started. “I take your word for it, absolutely. But, seeing what you
felt for Nevile in the beginning, I should have thought--in any ordinary
case--there must have been a tender spot--unless, of course, you had
changed your mind--for reasons--”

She got up from her knees, and stood, leaning by the mantelpiece. Her
low voice stirred him strangely.

“There are reasons. The spot, as you call it, is so tender that it's
raw.”

“Good Lord,” said Chevenix. “What do you mean?”

She was full of her reasons, evidently. Rumours of them, so to say,
drove over her eyes, showed cloudily and angrily there. Her beautiful
mouth looked cruel--as if she saw death and took joy in it. “I think he
is horrible,” she said. “I think he is like a beast. He doesn't love me
at all until he comes here--and then he expects me--Oh, don't ask me
to talk about it.” She stopped her tongue, but not her thought. That
thronged the gates of her lips. She hesitated, fighting the entry; but
the words came, shocked and dreadful. “He wants me, to ravage me--like a
beast.”

Chevenix began to stammer. “Oh, I say, you mustn't--Oh, don't talk like
that--”

The door opened, and Ingram came in.

He looked from one to the other, sharply. “Hulloa,” he said. “What are
you two about in here?”

Sanchia looked at the fire, and put her foot close to it, to be warmed.
“Tea-party,” said Chevenix. “That's it, Nevile.” He nodded sagely at
his host, and saw his brow clear. Ingram shut the door and came into the
room, to a chair. “That's all right,” he said. “I hope it was a livelier
one than mine. That old Devereux was on her high-stepper. I'm sick of
being trampled. I thought, though, that you had been having words. You
looked like it.”

Sanchia said, smiling in her queer way, “Oh, dear no. Mr. Chevenix is
much too kind for that. He's been talking very nicely to me. He's been
charming.”

“Oh, come, Sancie--” cried the brisk young man, quite recovered.

Ingram, in a stare, said, “Yes, Sancie, you may trust him. He's a friend
of ours.”

“I do trust him,” she said.

Chevenix said, “I shall go out on that. I declare my innings. Good-bye,
you two. I'll go and pacify the Devereux.” He hoped against hope that he
might have warmed her.

Ingram, when they were alone, threw himself back in his chair, crossed
one leg, and clasped the thin ankle of it. He had finely-made, narrow
feet, and was proud of his ankles. Sanchia was now again kneeling before
the fire.

“Quite right to have a fire,” he said. “It's falling in cold. There'll
be a frost. What was Chevenix saying about me?”

She had been prepared. “Nothing but good. He's your friend, as you
said.”

“I said 'our friend,' my dear.”

She looked at him. “Yes, certainly. He's my friend, too.”

“I hope he'll prove so. Upon my soul, I do.” He remained silent for a
time. Then he leaned forward suddenly, and held out his arms.

“Oh, Sancie,” he said, his voice trembling. “Love me.”

She looked at him with wide, searching, earnest eyes. They seemed to
search, not him, but her own soul. They explored the void, seeking for a
sign, a vestige, a wreck; but found nothing.

“I can't,” she said. Her voice was frayed. “The thing is quite dead.”

Ingram flushed deeply, but sat on, biting his lip, frowning, staring at
the young, mounting fire, which she, stooping over it, cherished with
her breath and quick hands.




VII


Ingram, at supper in his private room, had his elbows on the table, and
spoke between his fists to Chevenix, let into these mysteries for the
first time.

“I ought not to complain, you'll say, and in my heart of hearts I don't,
because I'm a reasonable man, and know that you don't make a row about
sunstroke or lightning-shocks. We call 'em the Act of God, and rule 'em
out in insurance offices. No, no, I see what I've let myself in for.
I've been away too much; she's got sick of it. I shall have to work at
it--to bring her round. By God, and she's worth it. She's a wonder.”

“Pity,” said Chevenix, “you've only just found it out.”

Ingram frowned, and waxing in rage, stared at his friend as if he had
never known him. “You don't know what you're talking about. Why, she
adored me. I was never more in love with a woman in my life than I was
with Sancie.”

Chevenix tilted back his chair. “Oh, you had it pretty badly--at the
time. The trouble with you is that you are such a chap for accepting
things. You're like a hall-porter in a Swiss hotel. You take things for
granted. Do nothing--hold out your hand--and get your perks. Perks! Why,
they ain't perks at all. They're bounty--what you get from a girl like
Sancie.”

All this Ingram took as his due--as due, that is, to a man of passion
and reasonable desires. He fell into a reverie. “Yes, yes, I know. She
was devilish fond of me.”

Chevenix gritted his teeth, but Ingram went on. “It was a false
position, I know, and I never ought to have looked at her twice. But she
was awfully queer or awfully deep--one never knew which. Why, when
we got thick together--always meeting out, always reading poetry and
philosophy--Shelley, Dante, Keats (I forget half their names now)--I
take my oath I hadn't a suspicion that she was getting to like me, in
that sort of way, as we call it. She made all the difference in the
world to me, I can tell you. You know what I was doing after Claire
bolted with that swine: killing time and killing myself--that's what I
was doing. It was like going into church out of the sun to hear her at
her poetry, and see her. Oh, a lovely girl she was!”

“She's a lovelier woman than you and I are fit to look at,” said
Chevenix, “if you ask me.”

“Damn you, I know all about that. D'you think I want telling, now that
I can't get her? Well, then I found out what was the matter with me--and
then we cleared the air.”

“Who had stuffed it up to begin with?” Chevenix murmured; but Ingram
ignored him.

“I told her the whole thing--”

“After she had found it out!” cried Chevenix with energy. “Let's have
cards on the table. I told Vicky all about it at a dance--and Vicky told
her.”

“I told her,” Ingram said, “that I was in love with her, and promised to
behave--and so I should have, only--”

“Only you didn't, old chap.”

“She loved me--there was no stopping it then. The thing was done. Mind
you, her people knew it all, too.”

“The mother always was a fool,” Chevenix agreed. “And she liked you.”

“I know she did. I took care of that.”

“Not a bit of it, my boy,” the other objected. “That's just what you
didn't do. She liked you because she thought you didn't care a curse
whether she liked you or not.”

Ingram raised his eyebrows at such _naivete_. “That's what I mean, of
course. So it went on all that summer. We used to shake when we met
each other, and be speechless. By heavens, what a time that was! Do you
remember the tea-party?”

Chevenix blinked. “I wasn't there; but I remember what happened
afterwards. The poor child--as white as a sheet--and every hand lifted
against her. By God, Nevile, what girls--mere chits--will go through!”

“I know,” said Ingram dreamily. “Isn't it awful?” Chevenix looked at
him. He was quite serious. What can you do with such a man as this?

“They left us alone in the room, you know,” Ingram continued. “Vicky
went out last and left us in there--and the whole place was charged with
electricity. You could feel it, smell it, hear it crackling all about.
My heart going like a drum; my ears buzzing with it all. I hadn't been
able to speak when they spoke to me. I don't know what the devil they
must have thought of me--and I didn't care a damn. And over across the
tea-table, on a low chair--there she sat--my girl! Her eyes downcast,
her mouth adroop.” He shut his eyes for a moment. “And Vicky went out,
and left us there!”

“You had it badly, old chap,” Chevenix said. “Go slow. Take your time.
Or chuck it, if you'd rather.”

Ingram appeared not to hear him; he was staring at the tablecloth, at
his two hands locked in front of him, and at his knuckles white under
the strain.

“I don't know how long I stood gaping at the window, I don't indeed.
I could feel her sitting shaking in her chair; but neither of us said
anything. Somebody came to take the tea out--and then I turned and
looked at her; and she turned and looked at me. Something drew me--set
me on the move. It was all over with me then. I went straight across the
room to her; I stood above her, I stooped and took her hands. I don't
know what I said: she looked at me all the time in a strange, clear way.
She got up--I was beside her, and took her. Not a word said. I had her
lips. Honey of flowers! Her soul came forth from them: new wine. Oh,
God! I thought so, anyhow. And so did she. Chevenix, she meant giving.”

Chevenix nodded shortly. He believed that. Ingram had covered his eyes.

He drained a glass before he went on with his account. “I suppose you
know the rest as well as I do. I never had the details out of her. One
of them--that Mrs. King--Philippa, it was--came slam into the room;
and what was there to do? I stuck it as long as I could--until I was
practically kicked out. The mother came back and turned me out. I had to
leave her to brave them all--and I never saw her again until I found out
where she was in London.”

“Don't you trouble to tell me all that part,” said Chevenix frowning at
him. “I know more about that than you do. I was in it. My head, how they
treated her! What I never did understand, you know, was how you found
out where she was.”

Ingram smiled. His memories now amused him. He looked straight at his
friend. “I'll tell you that. It was rather neat. You remember that chap
Senhouse--loafing kind of artist? Anarchist, gypsy-looking chap, who
wore no hat?”

Chevenix opened his eyes. “By George, I do!”

Ingram nodded. “She thought no end of him. He took her affair with me
very much to heart.”

“As well he might,” said Chevenix. “I fancy that you were the only
person who took it easy.”

“Sancie used to tell him everything,” Ingram went on, “and she told
him all the trouble. She'd been turned adrift with fifty pounds to her
name.”

“Not quite so bad as that,” Chevenix put in. “They locked her up with an
aunt, and she bolted.”

“Same thing,” said Ingram. “Well, this chap Senhouse comes here one day
in a mighty hurry--turns up at breakfast, and makes a row. Wants me to
swear I'll divorce and marry Sancie. Says he thinks I'm a blackguard and
all that, but that, on the whole, I'd better marry her. Refuses to give
me her address, all the same. We had a row, I remember, because he began
to tell me what he thought about her. The man was a bore, you know.”

Chevenix screwed up one leg. “All men are, if they're sweet on your
sweetheart, I suppose. He was worth fifty of you, all the same--but go
on.”

Ingram laughed. “I set my wits against his,” he said, “and found out
that he'd come straight from seeing her--in London. That was good enough
for me. I got rid of Master Senhouse, and went off to town. He had no
promises out of _me_, you may believe.”

Chevenix felt very sick, and looked it. “The less you say about your
promises, my good chap, the better I'll take it.” But Ingram by now had
got back to his holier reminiscences:--

“I hunted for her high and low for three months--advertised, turned
on detectives, I had even dared her friends' eyes and their cold
shoulders--couldn't hear anything ... I was walking in hell for three
months....

“Then, one day, I met her--in Chancery Lane. Of all squalid places on
earth--there....”

“I'd been to my lawyer's, in Lincoln's Inn. I'd settled money on her--in
case anything happened to me while I was abroad. I was going to travel,
because I'd given it up. And then I met her. Chancery Lane!

“I was passing some school or another--Commercial Academy--book-keeping,
shorthand, typewriting--that sort of place; a lot of ogling, giggling
girls, and boys after 'em, came tumbling down the steps--all sun-bonnets
and fluffy hair; and down the steps she came, too--Sanchia came--like a
princess. She was in white, my dear man--as fresh and dainty as a rose,
I remember. Daisies round a broad-brimmed straw: some books under her
arm. The sun was on her, lit the gold in her hair. She looked neither
right nor left, spoke to no one, had no one with her, or after her. She
was never showy. You had to know her well to see how lovely she was. She
never showed off well, and was always silent in company. Oh, but what a
girl!

“When she saw me she flushed all over, and stood. She stood on the last
step, and looked at me. Looked at me straight, as if she waited. I went
directly to her, and took her hand. She let me. I couldn't speak sense.
I said, 'You!' and she said, 'I knew I should see you like this.' It
sounded all right. I never questioned it.” ... He stared, then broke
out. “Good God, Bill! To think of her then--and to see her now! She
won't look at me! I don't exist.” He plunged his face between his hands,
and rocked himself about. Chevenix watched him without a word. Suddenly
he lifted his pinched face, and complained bitterly.

“I can't understand it--I don't know what's changed her. Why, it's awful
to make a chap suffer like this!” He stared about him. “Why, Bill,” he
said, hushing down his voice, “is she going to drop me, d'you think--let
me go to the devil?”

Chevenix rose and stood with his back to the fire. “I'll trouble you not
to whine, Nevile; I've got something to say to all this tale of yours.
I've got to ask you a thing or two. When you found her, now; and when
you knew all that she'd gone through--a child like that! You brought her
up here--hey?”

Without shifting his head to face his cross-examination, Ingram answered
between his hands--“No, I didn't. She wouldn't budge from her school
till she'd finished her course. I courted her for a month. It took me
all that to make her listen to reason.”

“Reason!” Chevenix rated him. “You call it reason!”

“It was what _she_ called it--not I,” said Ingram from between his
fists. Then he looked up. “She refused the idea of going abroad. Said
she wasn't at all afraid of people talking. Said she wanted to work for
me. Must be doing something, she said. I tell you, it was her idea
from the beginning. And I do say, myself, that it was reasonable.” He
searched for agreement in his friend's face, but got none. “It suited
better,” he said presently, with indifference. “It suited better--in
every way. I had to be here.”

“Why had you to be here, man?” Chevenix raised his voice. “What the
devil did it matter to you, having her, where you were?”

“It mattered a lot. I like this place. It's mine. I've got duties up
here. I'm a magistrate and all that.”

Chevenix was now very hot. “Magistrate be damned. Do you mean to tell
me that you profess to love a woman, and turn her into a servant because
you want to try poachers? And you talk about the sun in her hair! And
then--upon my soul, Ingram, you sicken me.”

“You fool,” said Ingram. “I tell you it was her own idea. She loves the
place. She loves it a lot more than she does me. It's been a continual
joy to her. Why, where would she have been while I was in India--all
that year--if she hadn't had all this in her hands? You don't know what
you're talking about.”

His voice rang down his scorn. Chevenix began to stammer.

“You're hopeless, Nevile, utterly hopeless. Every word you say gives up
your case. What's it to do with you whether she likes it or not? I'm not
talking of her, but of you. You silly ass, don't you see where you are?
You fall in love with a woman and make her your head housemaid. Then you
say, Oh, but she likes it. It's not what she likes we're talking about;
it's what you can bring yourself to do with her. Wait a bit now. There's
more to it. You play about here, there, and all over the shop. Off
you go for three months at a time, sky-larking, shooting antelope,
pigeon-shooting, polo, and whatever. She sits here and minds the
gardeners--she whom you saw with the sun in her hair! Year in, year out
it goes on. Now here you are back from India. Good. You leave her for
a year, and write to her twice--then you say, Why, where would she have
been if she hadn't had something to do? The sun in her hair, hey? Love,
my good chap! You don't know how to spell the word. You ought not to
touch her shoe-string. You're not fit. By Gad, sir, and now I remember
something! And it's the truth, it's the bitter, naked, grinning truth.”
 He did remember something. He saw her curled-back lip--he saw her fierce
resentful eyes. He heard her say it: “I think he is like a beast. He
wants to ravage me--like a beast.” “You've been judged, Nevile,” he
said. “You've done for yourself. And now I'll go to bed.”

Ingram's face was very cloudy. He looked for a moment like quarrelling.
“Do you mean to leave me like this?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Chevenix, “I do. I don't want to stop and hear you protest
that you intend to marry her. Marry her! Why, man, if you'd meant to
marry her, you'd have posted home express from Marseilles the moment
you heard that you could do it. But no! You've got her there--in cap and
apron--she'll keep. You know she's here--you have your fling. And you
stop three days in Paris, and drop it to her casually, when you please,
that you're a free man. Yes, by George, I do mean to leave you like
this. You're best alone, by George. Good-night to you.”

He went smartly away; but he had worked himself into a shaking fit,
could not have slept to save his life. A cigar at the open window was
inevitable.

He leaned far into the night. It was densely dark, and had been raining.
Soft scud drifted over his face; clouds in loose solution drenched the
earth. He smoked fiercely, inhaling great draughts and driving them
out into the fog. Being no thinker, his sensations took no body, but
he broke out now and again with pishes and pshaws, or scornfully--“Old
Nevile--hungry devil, what? Stalking about like a beast. Oh, she was
right, she was right. Pish! And there's an end of it.”

He was aware of softly moving feet below--a measured tread. He listened
and heard them beyond dispute. “Nevile!” he said, “like a beast, padding
about his place.” He listened on, grimly amused. Let him pad and rage.

But he was to be startled. A voice hailed him, not Ingram's. “Beg your
pardon, sir.”

“Hulloa!” he cried. “Who are you, my man?”

“Glyde, sir. Is all well?”

“What do you mean, Glyde? What are you doing?”

“I was passing, sir, to my houses. I heard voices, and I wondered--”

“Oh!” he laughed. “You thought there was a scrap, did you? It's all
right, Glyde. I and the master were having a talk. Nothing for you to
worry about. I shared his lonely meal. Don't you be disturbed.”

“No, no, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Chevenix called to him when he was at some distance. “I say, Glyde.”

“Yes, sir?”

“You can go to bed. It's all right.”

“Thank you, sir. Good-night.”

He chuckled as he undressed. “Rum fish, Glyde. Watch and ward, what?
Watching his shield. Bless her, she's got friends, then.” He
considered for a while, flicking the glowing end of his cigar. “That
chap--Senhouse--Jack Senhouse. I wonder what's become of him.”




VIII


The discrepancies of an unfortunate party caused no disturbance to the
staff of Wanless Hall. Sanchia, whatever her private cares--and they
seemed less than those of other people on her account--suffered nothing
to interfere with her housekeeping. Ingram might rage for her in vain,
Chevenix agonise, or quarrel with his host and friend, Mrs. Devereux
disapprove to the point of keeping her room; but Sanchia, with front
serene, moved from office-table to kitchen, to the garden, to the
home-farm, interviewed Mrs. Benson, consulted with the stockman,
pored--her head close to Clyde's--over seed-pans and melon borders,
was keenly interested, judicial, reflective, pleading, coaxing by
turns--seemed, in fact, not to have a perplexity in her fair head. Her
health was superb, she never had an ache nor failed of an appetite. To
see her sitting in the stable-yard on a sunny morning, her lap full of
nozzling fox-hound pups, was to have a vision of Artemis Eileithyia. So,
it seemed, the grave mother-hound, erect on haunches, with wise ears,
and sidelong eyes showing the white, knew her certainly to be. Beside
and over her stood Frodsham of the stables, and his underlings, firmly
her friends.

She looked up, beaming. “Oh, Frodsham; aren't they sweet? One of them
tries to suck my finger. What are you going to call them? I do hope you
mean to keep them all.”

“I doubt they're too many for the old bitch, Miss Percival. She'll not
feed the lot of them. We'll be wise to duck the latest cast.”

“Oh, no,--please. I'll feed it--I will, really. I couldn't let you drown
it. Now, what are their names to be?”

“There's Melpomeen, Miss Percival, and Melody, and Melchior, and
Melchizedek. That's for the bitches.”

She quizzed him. “No, Frodsham, really that won't do. I'm not quite sure
about Melchizedek; but Melchior was a man--he was a king--a king of the
East. And I believe Melchizedek was an angel.”

Frodsham rubbed his chin. “May be you are right, Miss Percival. An
angel, was he now? Wings to him? 'Tis a name for a bird, then. If
we kept the hawks the old Squire used to love--there's a name for a
peregrine! Melchizedek--a fair mouthful.”

“A Priest for ever,” mused Jacobs, a wizened elder, the kennel man, who
yet bowed to the coachman in his own yard. “We may put him among the
dogs, I believe. We've Proteus, and Prophet; but no Priest.”

Frodsham looked to Sanchia for direction, ignoring Jacobs. She flashed
him a name. “Melisande, Frodsham. Call her Melisande, and save her life;
and she shall be mine. I'll look after her. Please do.” He owned to the
spell of her eyes, of the sun upon her hair. “Melisande she shall be,
Miss Percival, and your own,” he said. “The Missus shall rear her if the
old bitch won't. She's had six of her own, and knows what it is.”

Regretfully, one by one, she put the striving blind things down; then
rose and went her way into the gardens about the house. Slowly through
the kitchen gardens she passed. Glyde, thinning walled peach-trees,
saw her, felt her go. She shed her benediction upon him--“Good morning,
Struan,”--and went on. He watched her for a while, then turned fiercely
to his affair. Through dense shrubberies, over drenched lawns her way
was; it led her to the lily-pond, which lay hidden within rhododendron
walls, with a narrow cincture of grass path all about it. Dark-brown,
still and translucent like an onyx it lay before her. It was her haunt
of election when she was troubled, as now she was, when she gave herself
time to remember it.

She stood, her hands clasped before her, close to the water's brim, and
looked over the shining surface. She had never yet squarely faced her
difficulties. Her sceptre was slipping from her; her realm, usurped at
first, hers by sufferance first, but then by love of them she ruled,
could hold her but a little while more. The shadow of coming eclipse
made her eyes grow sombre. Doubt of the unknown made lax her lips.

If Nevile's wife, with all her sins clotted on her, was dead, what
was she herself going to do, or allow to be done? She had yielded to
love--her first love and her last; but that had been long ago. Love, the
fire, the trembling and the music in her heart; pride, the trust, the
loyalty, the bliss of service; the wonder, the swooning, the glory like
a sun upon her--all gone, burned out, or worked out. Why, how long had
it lasted her? Her lips stretched to a bleak smile to think of it. Three
months joy in herself, three months joy of him; then work, incessant and
absorbing; and then the growth of a new pride, the pride of mind (for
she found that she had a brain), and of a new love--for she found that
she loved the creatures more than man. Education indeed! To draw from
a child caught unawares the force and the brooding love of an
Earth-Goddess.

In the beginning, she could have told herself (but never did), she was
to be pitied, not blamed. Reticent among her free-speaking sisters, shy,
what the maids call “a deep one,” rarely a talker, keeping always her
own counsel, she had first been moved to utter herself by the extreme
carelessness of Ingram whether she did so or not. The blame--if it is
to be laid--must be upon her mother when she, knowing Ingram's story of
miserable marriage and separation, allowed the man to continue a friend
of the house, be much with her girl, and unfold himself under her
clear young eyes. What she was about--that masterful, self-absorbed
woman--there's no saying. It was always supposed that, with five
beautiful daughters to market, she had pushed Welbore Percival--Thomas
Welbore Percival, East India merchant of The Poultry--into lavish
entertainment of his friends and acquaintance. Ingram, a squire and son
of squires, was perhaps a shade above her degree; she may have required
him to give a tone. This, considering that wretched marriage of his--a
month's engagement in defiance of head-shaking, a blazing Hanover Square
wedding, a year's bickering, one month's acrimony (done by letter) and
Ingram's unquenchable hatred of the woman--this, I say, you may well
doubt. But I can give no other explanation. He came, he talked in his
high-voiced, querulous, bitter-humoured way, he saw and sought the grave
young Sanchia, and he won her pitying heart directly he had engrossed
her watching eyes.

She was a girl intensely interested in a hundred dawning things, to whom
love had come late. Until she was near twenty you would have thought her
sexless. Senhouse, her poetical friend and teacher--her only friend, her
only confidant--had dubbed her Artemis; and it may well have been his
adoring service of her pure flame which first turned it inwards, to
scorch her heart. All that she had learned of this scholar gypsy she
poured out as balm over the stricken Ingram, who swallowed it and her
together. Then the truth about him was blared upon her suddenly, and she
found that he was to be pitied. Guileless victim of a hateful woman
as she believed him then, she found that she held a store of balm. She
pitied him deeply, she opened, she poured out her treasure. Enthusiasm
for the saving work captained her thereafter; nothing would turn her
from her purpose. Ingram was to be saved by love: she gave him all.

To do him justice, a young man born to possess and command, he did his
best to repair what was beyond repair. He told her the truth unasked by
her; he confessed that he loved her, and owned that he had no business
to do it. Nearness, circumstance, brooding on that which was true of
both of them and must not be uttered by either, did the rest. Upon
that evening in the drawing-room when they found themselves alone,
each trembling under the god, they simply drifted together, and without
effort to resist, mingled their natures through the lips. Discovery,
earthquake and eclipse, her mother's chill rage, her father's tears,
her sisters' dismay; all this and more she endured. She passioned like
a young martyr. She admitted the facts without comment, and accepted the
consequences without a falter. They might have whelmed a greater
heart than hers; turned on to the town as she was to all intent, at
two-and-twenty, a girl with the face and figure of a goddess, with
fifty pounds between her and the devil. They might have sent her, at the
least, weeping and trembling into Ingram's arms. But they did not. She
was of finer clay. She took a lodging in Pimlico, and, to fit herself
for employment, went to school. The commercial course which she chose
was the shortest possible, but all that she felt she could afford. “My
dear young lady, we can only promise you a smattering--really no more
for the money.” “It must start me,” said Sanchia, and began. There was
a month more to run when Ingram found her, and, glad as she was of
him, doting and doted upon, in the first flood of youth and love, she
persisted in it, finished it out, and got her diploma for what it was
worth, before, as he put it, she would listen to reason.

It sounded extremely reasonable to him what he then proposed; and also
to her, though Chevenix scorned its propounder. As Ingram put it to her,
it attracted her newborn pride of knowledge. She was to flesh her steel,
so to speak, in reality: in plainer words, she, with her smattering of
accounts, was to manage a great house, an army of servants, possibly an
estate. Excessively in love as she was, with all the music of it in her
untried ears, she knew already in herself that her mind must have other
food than her heart's rapture. I think, indeed, that she would have
declined him altogether if he had proposed nothing more tangible to her
than perpetual honeymoon. That was what Senhouse would certainly have
proposed to her--she saw that in every look of his, and read it in
every line he sent her; but that had never attracted her. She had
given Senhouse her confidence, but not her heart. Ingram's proposals,
therefore, pleased her. She had not a sweet enough tooth, nor the taste
for flattery which the other involved. She was entirely without vanity.
Therefore, however little honourable and however much a lover of his
ease Ingram may have shown himself in making them, his reasonable
proposals were gratefully received. It was he who suggested, but she
who took the lead. She began immediately to plan her new career--was
perfectly business-like. Ingram was to leave London at once, and go to
Wanless--to his duties of the bench, his delights of the field, cares
of the farm. He was to announce to his househould his intention of
“settling down”; and he was to announce the advent of a housekeeper. In
this very outset of his bliss he must needs do as she bade him. He
went, and made her ways as smooth as they could be made. Her rooms
were assigned to her; her duties mapped out, the exact range of her
authority. Her wages were fixed, to be paid quarterly. She would take
nothing else from him--no jewellery (she wore nothing but simple things,
which had been given her by her parents or sisters--amber, a string of
cowries, an agate heart, a bangle or two), no frocks. She was to have
two hundred a year, and throughout her time to this present she had no
more, and kept herself exquisitely upon it, with a sense of what was
due to him, to herself, and to her position, which was admirable,
unhesitating, and never at fault. In due time she arrived and entered
upon her career. That which was unlawful seemed now justified; the
secret intimacy, the wedded amity, the giving, which was the dearest
gain she had. Discretion, on her side unsleeping, on his the more
effective because he never seemed to have any, secured them. There was
no open scandal among the neighbours; whatever the household may have
suspected, very little was said. Within a year her servants were her
slaves. The Rector, it is true, reproached her for not going to church.
She deprecated his indignation, but didn't go.

Up to the day when we first met with her, her garden-hat in her hand,
reading her telegram by the garden window, she had been eight years
governor of Wanless--and for nearly two of those years alone. For the
first two or three of them Ingram, revelling in his snug ease, with
little to do but devise things--alterations, extensions, ventures into
farming, and the like, which it was her delight to execute--never
left the county, hardly cared to leave the estate. He entertained very
sparingly: Chevenix came once or twice, his own brother, Maxwell
Ingram; there were some other dinner-parties to the countryside,
hunt-breakfasts, once a hunt-ball, at none of which ceremonies did she
appear. He endured these wearinesses, shrugging them away as soon as he
could, to hasten from a dinner of dry toast and knives and forks to his
room--the Master's room--where supper, Sanchia, sweet intimacy awaited
him. He spent thus by far the cleanliest and most sane years of his
wayward life. She soothed, amused, stimulated him at once. He taught her
all he knew of country-lore, gave her, as they say, “the hang” of
landed estate; he learned by teaching, and might have become a wholesome
gentleman.

But domestic business called him to London presently. He went, and
was away three months, with lawyers, fierce threatenings from Claire,
intermediaries, friends of both parties, and the rest of them. He was
worried, flurried, put into a rage; exploded, put himself a thousand
times in the wrong; finally, he came back to Wanless embittered and
restless. He came back to find himself welcome, but not excessively
so. At least he thought not. His extensions, suggested in that first
wonderful time--a range of glass-houses, new heating apparatus,
acetylene gas installations, were well advanced. Sanchia's brows were
often knit over estimates, specifications, and bills. He had to pay for
novelties from which the salt had evaporated; he was never very fond
of paying, and now, it seemed, he wasn't very fond of what he had to
pay for. Sanchia was kind to him, but there was a difference. She was
as happy as the day was long, always at work, outdoors or in, had not a
moment for him (business apart) until the very end of the day, when
(at eleven or so) she dressed with care and went to him at his supper.
Sanchia was perfectly happy; but he was not.

He stayed six months that year--from April to September; but then
went to Scotland, deer-stalking, shooting pheasants. He was back for
Christmas and brought a houseful of guests--all men. Again she welcomed
him, again she was kind. He was now a little blunted to the fine shades
of love, took his happiness as it happened to come, and could rub his
hands over the household blessing she was. By-and-by, at the end of
her fourth year, she took over the gardens as well as the house, was
accepted by Mr. Menzies as his liege-lady and by young Clyde as much
more than that. The estate-management, home-farm, woods, tenancies, were
given up to her at the end of the fifth year, just before Ingram sailed
for West Africa on a shooting expedition. By that time he had grown to
depend upon her entirely for everything. She was become the faithful
well-tried wife of standing, which in a man of Ingram's bone means
that nothing remained of love but entire confidence and occasional
gratification. After this, he left her for long periods together; for
the whole of the eighth year he was abroad, “idiotically happy,” as he
had told her.

During all this time no intercourse with her family--except those
furtive letters from her adoring old father, which were pitiful to
her, because they could not be answered as he would have had them; and
nothing from her friend of the Open, who had at last got himself a mate.
It seemed that she had made a clean break, and that nothing of what had
made her dawning life sweet and sane was to mingle with the sweetness
and sanity which she had brought into Wanless. And then--after eight
years--she caught herself looking back. And now--here was an end of the
dream.

If you are to ask me what had changed her regard for Ingram during that
solitary year, so that she received him at the end of it as she did,
I don't know that I can tell you. Slowly discovery--of herself, of
him--came to her, slowly combustible stuff was heaped within her; it
slowly kindled, and smouldered long. No doubt he himself blew it into
clear flame by his let-drop news of Claire's death. She had not known
that: she never read the newspaper, having neither time for the world's
affairs nor interest in them. Suddenly, by that, she was offended;
suddenly saw him as he really was, always had been, and always must be.
Suddenly, also, she saw herself, as brimming with life, energy to live
and to make live, at the end of her music-time. The folds fell from her
eyes, she could see Ingram as a man, squalid. Nay, more: she could now
see him as a beast, ravening. Thereupon he gave her horror, so that she
dared not look back upon her hours of blindness.

Perhaps he had offended her by his silence--his two letters, which she
had neither invited nor answered. That can hardly account for it,
since she had not written to him of her own initiative. Their parting
certainly had been discrepant: the clinging and wistfulness had been
hers, though she had uttered nothing of complaint or misgiving. But
perhaps he had been too gay and nonchalant, a little too much the
husband secure. For a week she had shivered at her loneliness; then she
had plunged anew into the flood of affairs, and had come out, as from
a cold bath, braced and tingling. Round went the wheels of Wanless.
The house was new-papered, painted, carpeted; every month brought new
wonders to the garden. Under Glyde's tuition, seeing with his eyes,
watching with his tensity of vision, she had come closely into Nature's
arms. Perhaps she was unwise with the young man: the fact is she never
stopped to consider him. She liked him and his queer, secret, passionate
ways. She took a royal line of her own. She required much of him, and if
he made much of it, she didn't know it. She dreamed no harm to him or to
herself. Her absorption in the business of the moment, or the needs,
was so manifest that not even the maids, who saw her frequently with the
youth, could have thought harm for a second. It was just Miss Percival
all over--as “keen as mustard.” Perhaps it was as much under Glyde's
fostering as any other nurture that she came, during that year alone, to
love the earth so well that she could appraise the worth of human love.
I don't know. It was a critical year for her.

As she was anything but a fool, there's no doubt that she came, before
the end of that year, to know what was the matter with Glyde. She had
had experience--of herself and another--and he was utterly incapable
of concealing his feelings. Of course she knew what was the matter with
him, and was tenderly and quietly amused. She approached him gradually,
let herself play elder sister, and let him play what he chose, within
severe limits, never overstepped by him, never unwatched by herself.
He was a passionate, sensitive, inarticulate creature, narrow-faced,
sharp-eyed, scowling and thin. He always looked cold, mostly angry,
and never seemed contented, even when his plants flowered themselves to
death to please him.

A woman, any woman, knowing that a man covets her possession, stores her
knowledge, exults in it in secret. It is a fund, a store against lean
years or wry ones. You can see it throned sedately in her eyes, when she
is with him, however much she may feel his absurdity or presumption. So
it was with Sanchia. She was fully conscious of Struan's preposterous
state, strictly the elder sister, never the patroness, for were they not
bond-slaves both? She patronised nobody at Wanless, yet, with a steady
eye for distances, kept a perfect length, varying with each oncomer.
With Mr. Menzies, lord of the gardens, so far on she came; with
Frodsham, master of horse and hound, so far; with the engineer so far;
with Minnie nearer; nearest of all with Mrs. Benson: her attitude to
the stout woman was that of favourite pupil to a family governess of
immemorial service. She could wheedle Mrs. Benson, and often did. The
elder sister attitude was kept for young Glyde; she admonished, scolded,
preached to him high doctrine of duty and honour; there was something
benignant, a sort of pitying care shed from above. To him she may have
been like Cynthia, stooping to the dreamer on Latmos. Whether she knew
that, she must have known a good deal. She knew, for instance, that he
kept vigil; for she had met him at night, as you have been told. She
knew where to find him. Nothing had ever passed between them, of course,
of her relations with the Master. I don't think that she was aware of
his sentry-go under the windows--first under Ingram's, then under hers.
I am sure she was not, or he would have heard of it in plain terms, have
seen her eyes grow hard, and her mouth stretch to bleakness. She was
capable of royal, cold rage when she was offended. But that he hated
Ingram must have been plain to her.

And now, as she stood at gaze, lonely and pensive by the black pond, she
saw that it was over, her busy life. She was at the end of her tether,
must lose her power and the sense of it. She was to begin the world
again, starting with her fifty pounds, and without that which had made
it a pride before. With a little shiver of self-pity, a half-sigh and a
tightening of the lips, she accepted her fate. That was her way.

She regretted nothing, asked neither for mercy nor allowance. What she
had done, she had done; if it was to be done with, she could not help
that; she must go her way. Never for an instant did it enter her head
that she could marry Ingram. Nothing that he had urged, or Chevenix
counselled, made the smallest difference to her. She did not love Nevile
any more; he was horrible to her: enough of that. Whatever her fate was
to be, she would accept it: she chose it so. Without reasoning it out,
that was final for her. She had always had _sic volo_ for her final
cause. _Stet pro ratione voluntas._ Marriage, even nominal marriage,
with Nevile was the accursed thing: none of it. And why? Because she
chose it so.

This was very sublime. I sing, or Mr. Senhouse sings, a Goddess in her
own Right. That is to be observed, or we fail. Persons have existed, and
do yet exist, who are law unto themselves, deliberate choosers of their
fate, deliberate allies of Atropos with the shears, who go what seems to
us, shivering on the brink of things, a bright and bloodstained way,
and furrow deeply into life, because it must be so, because so they will
have it. Great ones of time, a Caesar or so, a Catherine, a Buonaparte,
come handily to mind, who, wreaking countless woes, wrought evenly their
own. And since greatness is a relative term, and time an abstraction of
the mind

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