“Yes?”

“Yes. She called here to see us--she was in London. She had got our

address from Abner Preep before leaving America. I gave her the address

of your studio, but she said she was uncertain whether she would have

time to look you up. She seems to be secretary to Mrs. Verder, the

Woman’s Rights woman, goes about with her everywhere. Linda Verder’s

lectures--you remember them at the St. James’s Hall in July. She’s in

Scotland now, and later on, Ruth writes to me (for I asked her to

correspond with me a little) they’re going to Paris for a course, under

the patronage of the American Embassy. They’ll stay in Paris some time,

as Linda Verder wants a rest badly, and has a lot of American friends

there. Then they go to Australia and New Zealand. Curious, isn’t it?”

“How did she look?”

“Ruth? Oh, she’s gone off a good deal, to my thinking. She must be

getting pretty old now--about as old as you, which is young for a man,

but old for a woman. But her eyes are fine, and there’s a sweetness--I

can’t describe it. She says she used to teach Sunday-school in the

States, and, though she enjoys travelling about, regrets having had to

give up her class. Fancy! She used to be such a smart girl, too, and I

should have thought the deacon had disgusted her with religion. You know

she won’t have anything to do with him.”

“Is he still alive?”

“Oh, he’s just as spry as ever. His father’s curled up his toes, though.

Old Hey had the old man from Digby to live with him, and they used to go

at it hammer and tongs.”

Billy could extract no further answer. But he would not let his brother

go that night, insisting he must sleep with him as usual in the spare

bed in his bedroom.

About nine o’clock Rosina sent a specially nice supper for two down to

the study. Matthew roused himself to eat a morsel to keep Billy company,

and then, before going to his sleepless couch in Billy’s room, bethought

himself of whiling away the time by answering some letters which had

been bulking his inner coat-pocket for days. One of these was a

reverential request for an autograph, addressed from a fine-sounding

country house, and backed by the compulsive seduction of a stamped

envelope.

His emotions were exhausted. He wrote apathetically, “Yours truly,

Matthew Strang,” writing very near the top of the note-paper for fear of

fraud, and cutting off the Camden Town heading.

The celebrity was at home for once.

CHAPTER VI

A DEVONSHIRE IDYL

The old-fashioned yellow coach, top-heavy with pyramidal luggage,

rattled along the Devonshire coast, striking its apex against

over-arching boughs, and Matthew Strang sat on the box-seat, forgetting

London in the prospect of Eleanor Wyndwood and in the view of white and

red houses scattered like wild-flowers about a steep green hill

overhanging the curve of a lovely bay.

For Rosina had continued obdurate and invisible; she had sent up

breakfast from the kitchen without appearing, and with an irritating air

of cooking for a gentleman-boarder, and he, fretful and anguished after

a wretched wakeful night, had fled, snarling even at Billy, who would

have stayed him further. The remembrance of her cantankerousness and of

his own ill-humor had accompanied him all the way to Devonshire, but the

sight of the sea--rolling vast and green and sun-dimpled--the wrinkled

unaging sea, had calmed him. His burdens fell from him. The last vapors

of London, the torpid miasma of the packed streets, the cabbage odors of

Camden Town, were blown afar; he drew deep breaths of the delicious

air.

How lucky it was Rosina had shied at the suggestion which he had thrown

out on the reckless impulse of a desperate moment! How could they

possibly live together any more? To draw the same atmosphere with her

was stifling; and at the thought his deep inspirations took on a new

voluptuousness of freedom regained. Decidedly he had not counted the

cost when the quixotic proposal sprang to his lips. For that atmosphere

meant death to his soul--nothing less; death to all his new stirrings

and yearnings--asphyxiation to his Art. Ah! the good salt air, let it

blow on his free forehead, let it play among his early-graying locks.

Let it whisper the brave dreams of youth till the nimble blood tingles

and the eyes are wet with tears. Let him feel the freshness of morning,

though the sun is hastening westward, and the best of the day is spent.

The coachman blows his horn, and the hills are filled with the echoes of

romance. Away with the clogging mists and the moral fogs of the town,

away with the moody vision of a narrow-souled virago in a gray house in

a drab labyrinth, and ho! for the enchanted cliffs and waters, where

loveliness broods like light over earth and sea, and a spirit that is

half a woman and half the soul of all beauty waits with swelling bosom

and kindling eyes. Oh, the bonny horses, the spanking quartette, how

they sweep round the curves and dash down the dales, and how gallantly

the ruddy-faced driver holds them in the hollow of his hand! What

delightful villages, primitive as the rough stone of which they are

built, what quaint old hostels and archaic streets steeped in the

mingled scent of the sea and the moors! Here be old-world orchards, here

be cosey cottages and sweet homely gardens, gay with nasturtiums and

hollyhocks and scarlet-runners, with roses and pansies.

Ta-ra! Ta-ra-ra-ra! Ta-ra! The driver airily salutes the afternoon. Over

the ferny walls of the Devonshire lanes, the outside passengers behold

the red crags perching picturesquely on the sea-front like petrified

monsters of an earlier era, and the trail of redder gold quivering

across the great water; the wind rises and flecks the shimmering green

as with a flock of skimming sea-birds. Oh, the beauty of the good round

earth, the beauty forgotten and blotted out in the reeking back streets

of great cities! Oh, gracious privilege of the artist, to seize a

moment of the flowing loveliness of all things; to pass it through the

alembic of his soul, and give it back transfigured and immortal.

“To feel Beauty growing under one’s hand.” The words were

Eleanor’s--they chimed celestially in his ears, not as words, but as

_her_ words, stored up as in a phonograph with every dainty intonation,

but with their music sweetened rather than deadened. All she had ever

said to him he could recall as from a box of heavenly airs. Every

syllable had the golden cadence of poesie. To love her was to be young

again, fit for every high emprise, sensitive to every tremor of fantasy

and romance.

“Stiff collar-work that, sir.”

The driver’s tongue was clattering tirelessly--of his horses, which,

more sensible than men, wouldn’t touch a drop more than was good for

them; of his life on the box from boyhood, his easy-going content, his

pioneer daughter, the first in those parts to wear spectacles; his

pleasure in seeing gentlefolk come down to circulate the money, his

scorn of chapel-goers; but Matthew Strang’s private phonograph was

performing with equal indefatigability, and his spirit leaped

incessantly from one to the other, touched to a large geniality for

horn-blowing humanity.

The sun was sinking royally in the sea, like a Viking in his burning

vessel, when the coach obligingly drew up with a flourish of the horn

and a scattering of chickens and a barking of dogs at the farm where

Herbert had his headquarters. He was disappointed not to find Herbert

there to receive him, as he had telegraphed his advent; but just as he

was comfortably installed and was beginning to wonder whether he should

start dining alone, that ever-young gentleman galloped up, flushed with

health and sun and exercise, and, leaping from his horse, gave Matthew

such hearty greeting that the painter had a grateful sense of being

welcomed to an ancient seignorial home by a bluff and hospitable squire.

“I’ve been working at the portrait,” Herbert explained, ascending to his

room with his hand affectionately on the shoulder of Matthew, who was

thus forced to remount the stairs. “Of course I keep my painting kit at

their place. And a jolly old place it is, with the sea cleaning the

doorsteps, or pretty nearly. They’re beastly comfortable, with their

London servants and carriages, and they’ve a motherly old person who

seems a combination of cook and chaperon, and turns out delicious

dishes, and they’ve taken on a native girl to help them--a sweet simple

creature with cheeks like strawberries and cream. Do you remember the

lady who said strawberries and cream needed only to be forbidden to be

an ecstasy? These _are_ forbidden. Oh, don’t look glum, I haven’t

indulged. Forbidden fruit is out of season. I’m tired of it. It’s

generally canned. And I have had too much of the foreign brands--ugh! I

can see the litter of broken tins. I’m developing a healthy taste for

the fresh-growing article, without any prohibitive tariff.”

Matthew turned to grasp his friend’s hand silently, as though sealing

some compact. He felt it was Eleanor whose magnetism had uplifted

Herbert to that reverence for womanhood he himself had always

entertained. It was impossible to live under her spell and remain

coarse. And, paradoxically enough, he was glad Herbert was living on a

higher plane--it strengthened him in his own purely spiritual devotion

to the beautiful friend of his soul. How stupid to have hesitated; how

commonplace and ignoble to have gone to see Rosina for fear of Eleanor’s

influence upon him. Like the old Roman, he had lost a day. And he had

uselessly harrowed his soul to boot.

And yet, perhaps, not altogether uselessly, he reflected consolingly.

The visit had laid the ghost of remorse; the full daylight had been

turned upon the situation; he had seen beyond reach of further doubt

that he was not to blame for it; that he was the victim of the blind

tragedy of circumstance. True, the full daylight had also revealed that

Rosina was taking the situation far more tragically than he had ever

allowed himself to suspect; it was pitiful, but it could not be helped.

His own mother had fared far worse, her living death had taught him

resentful resignation to the workings of fate. No, Rosina must be put on

one side. He had lost happiness; his Art at least must be saved.

Waiting for Herbert to change his clothes, he looked out of the

ivy-wreathed, diamond-paned casement, and saw a lonely white wraith of a

moon glimmering in the great spaces over the great lonely deep, and

heard the moan of the waves under the wind’s lash, and watched the

sunset dying in pale greens and pinks and saffrons; and so, in an

exalted mood, went down to dinner.

It was getting towards nine o’clock when the cousins lit their cigars

and strolled along the cliffs, their feet taking them westwards, where

phosphorescent streaks of light green lingered in the sky, sending out

thinner lucent shoots to join the eastern gray.

“I’ll show you the house--it’s not more than a mile,” Herbert

volunteered.

“We can’t call to-night,” said Matthew.

“What! Not with a madcap like Olive? You don’t mind my calling her

Olive, do you, old man?”

“No,” laughed Matthew.

“Well, then! If I may call her Olive, why mayn’t I call on her in the

evening? But that’s an argument rather in Olive’s vein, though it

appears to puzzle you--ha! ha! ha! But you mustn’t bring your London

etiquette down here with you, my boy,” he went on in a harangue tempered

by puffs--”you’d better send it back by the carrier to-morrow if you

packed it in your luggage by mistake. We’re in another world, and in an

earlier century. What a superficial view to think contemporaries live in

the same century! These people--as yet unsophisticated by the

tourist--are living in the seventeenth century A.D. at the latest;

they’d burn Olive for a witch if they knew her as I do, the droll elf,

with her masculine brain and her tricksy femininity. I think I’ve lived

in every place and time under the sun. I’ve been with fourteenth-century

brigands and sixth-century monks. And in Jerusalem with the Jews I was

back in the B.C. ages. I really think all the centuries live side by

side. There must have been A.D. people in the B.C. times, just as there

are B.C. people living in A.D. times. Fancy thinking these bucolics an

evolutionary advance on Pericles and Horace. Evolution must move like

those waves down below, sending scouts out here and there far in

advance of the general march of the waters, whenever there’s a hollow

curve in the coast. I’m a twenty-fifth century man myself, which makes

the nineteenth call me godless and immoral. But what were we talking

about?”

“Goodness knows. Oh, I know--”

“I’m aware you are goodness incarnate,” interpolated Herbert.

“I was saying we couldn’t call on Mrs. Wyndwood to-night.”

“Ah, but why shouldn’t Mrs. Wyndwood want a stroll after dinner as much

as we? I told her of your wire. What more natural than that they should

stroll eastward?” And Herbert smiled mysteriously, as one with

experience. “I told you we made our own etiquette--laws are for the

benefit of the community. _We_ are the community, we four, the only

civilized beings in a loutish world. We began as a triumvirate, but your

coming has changed the form of government. You are the fourth party. We

are now--what shall I say?--a constitutional quartette.”

As Herbert rattled on, Matthew felt more and more the fascination of his

gay cousin, whose white teeth flashed as facetiously as in the days of

yore, and whose lissome figure was a continuous pleasure to the artistic

eye. Gratitude mingled with his admiration; but for Herbert’s ingenuity

he would never have been a citizen of the earthly paradise that was

opening before him. The smoke of his cigar rose like incense on the

solemn air, upon which the sound of the wind and the sea broke like a

hush. Under foot were gorse and bracken, mixed with sparse sprouts of

grass; overhead a rich yellow half-moon, partly hidden by scowling

clouds, but throwing a band of pale gold, that changed with the

deepening dusk to rippling silver, across the sombre bay, in whose

distant cliffs the lights of vague scattered villages twinkled

mysteriously, suggesting romantic windows of illumined hollow chambers

in the steep rock. And presently white figures were seen advancing

slowly to meet them, pausing each instant as if to drink in the beauty

of the night.

“Ah, there they are!” cried Herbert.

“No, there are three of them,” said Matthew, in disappointed tones.

“That’s the maid, carrying a reserve of wraps, you duffer! Don’t throw

away your cigar. There’s Olive herself with a cigarette, if my eyes do

not deceive me.”

But Matthew Strang’s cigar went out ere the two parties--sauntering more

slowly than before they had become unconscious of each other--were

startled to find themselves face to face. His heart was beating

furiously as if he were really startled by the apparition of a queenly

figure and a lovely flushed face on the background of the night. A smile

danced in the eyes and parted the red lips with an expression of more

eager welcome than had ever been accorded him in town; and there was a

more intimate pressure in the clasp of the warm hand, subtly heralding a

new phase in their friendship, in this disappearance of the conventional

stage properties of the fashionable human scene, in this isolation amid

the primitiveness of nature, and of a humanity simpler than their own;

while Miss Regan’s cigarette and her frank laugh and hand-shake

indicated less subtly, but no less pleasantly, the commencement of a

semi-Bohemian artistic period which loomed more agreeably to Matthew

than any of the periods Herbert had boasted of living in.

“Welcome to the Creamery,” said Olive, “or rather to the Ice-Creamery,

as we’ve had to call it lately.”

“Then why don’t you put on your wraps?” said Matthew, anxiously.

“Oh, it’s comparatively tropical to-night, and we had to give Primitiva

a pretext for accompanying us. This is Primitiva (_née_ Rose) the

ex-post.” The pretty lass made a courtesy. “She was the post, you know,

when we first came. She used to bring letters from the post-office,

which is near you, and our first acquaintance with the post was to find

it in tears because it had lost a letter of ours. She had dropped it _en

route_.”

“Was it an important letter?” asked Matthew.

“That is very nearly a bull, Mr. Strang,” replied Olive. “However, as

the letter was picked up by a coast-guard, I am able to tell you it

wasn’t of the slightest importance--merely a request from Mr. Harold

Lavender to be allowed to dedicate his next book of poems to Nor. Still

it might have been important; it might have contained a P.O.M.”

“Do you mean a poem or a post-office order?” laughed Mrs. Wyndwood,

turning a flippant face towards Matthew’s, over which a cloud had come

like that now entirely over the moon.

“Neither,” said Olive, gravely; “a P.O.M., a proposal of marriage. But

wasn’t it odd to see the post crying? I fell in love with her at once. I

saw that such a quaint creature would do more good to me than to Her

Majesty’s service, and so, hey, presto! she was whisked from the

post-office and changed into a tire-woman.”

“And, oh! what a refreshing contrast with the London servant,” added

Mrs. Wyndwood. “Primitiva is really a servant, not a critic on the

hearth.”

“Yes,” said Olive, “she believes that all London ladies smoke, and

considers Nor eccentric for not indulging. And whatever I tell her is

gospel; she thinks I’m like George Washington--invariably truthful.”

“Then she thinks you eccentric, too,” said Herbert, smiling back.

Olive’s eyes danced; her lips quivered trying to keep back the smile of

response.

“Save your cynicism for town, sir,” she said. “Primitiva doesn’t think

anything of the kind. The world is not a whited sepulchre to her. It is

lucky I removed her from the sphere of your blighting influence.”

“Yes,” grumbled Herbert. “She’s our farmer’s daughter, Matt. And she

might have hovered about our dinner-table.”

“I couldn’t leave Marguerite in the way of Faust,” said Olive, plumply.

Matthew Strang winced; Miss Regan’s plain speaking grated upon him, and

he saw that Mrs. Wyndwood had lowered her eyes in like annoyance and had

commenced to walk homewards. And he resented this preoccupation with

Primitiva; he feared she was going to play the part of the dog, Roy.

Herbert hummed an operatic bar or two and broke off laughing: “I wish I

had Faust’s voice. A lovely tenor voice was apparently among the profits

of his bargain with the devil.”

Miss Regan laughed merrily. “Are you going back, Nor?” she called out.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Wyndwood. “We must say good-night.”

“Oh, we must see you home,” protested Matthew, as he moved to her side.

“There’s really no need,” she returned. “We sha’n’t meet anybody.”

“But it’s so dark,” said Matthew, for the moon still dallied behind its

cloud-rack, and threw only a faint wavering circle of light on the weird

water, though the stars were now clear enough.

“Then, come along!” cried Olive, bounding forwards, from Herbert’s side,

rather to his disgust. “Run straight home, Primitiva.” And, waving her

cigarette-tip in the darkness, she disappeared in the earth like a red

witch.

Herbert dashed after her down the cliff descent. The exhilaration of

their spirits caught Eleanor. She was swallowed down abruptly. Matthew

followed more cautiously, wondering. And then began a mad, unforgetable,

breakneck, joyous scramble in the darkness down the steepest and

craggiest of roughly worn paths, diversified by great sheer gaps without

foothold for a goat, down which they had to drop. At first Matthew tried

to steady and help himself by clutching at the vegetation and bushes

through which the path broke, but it was all blackberry-bushes and

prickly gorse, and his involuntary interjections were answered by peals

of mocking laughter from the invisible pioneer below.

“How do you like seeing us home?” she called up.

But Matthew was rapt far beyond the sting of taunts and

blackberry-bushes. Mrs. Wyndwood was only a few inches ahead of him;

every moment she turned to cheer him on, and her face was close to his,

and the divine darkness was filled with light and perfume. Twice or

thrice in this topsy-turvy harum-scarum descent she gave him a helping

hand, as one familiar with the ground, and he took it with no sense of

unmanliness. “Be careful here,” she said once, “or the brambles will

scratch your face,” and she looked up adorably from her insecure perch

below, holding the prickly net-work apart with her upper arm as he slid

cautiously towards her, blissfully conscious that this sharing of

common--if petty--peril was bringing them together beyond the reach of

ceremonial coldness for evermore. Sometimes the gray sea showed below

through the interstices on the left, and its dull boom mingled with the

gentle swish of the wind and the gurgle of a little water-fall. The last

twenty feet were the worst, and they were aggravated by the banter of

the couple safely below. Herbert had never caught up with Olive, who had

skeltered down like a wild-cat, leaving a trail of gay ejaculations; but

Mrs. Wyndwood herself had to be helped in the precipitous windings of

the base, with its tiny niches of crumbling stone at long intervals, and

now in sweet revenge Matthew held her hand to steady her from above,

while below Herbert waited with open arms for her final jump. An odd

recollection of his climbing down the steeple in Economy flashed through

his brain, as he himself half slipped, half leaped to the ground, hot

and red and breathless; and gratitude for the miraculous metamorphosis

in his fortunes added to the tenderness of his mood. How good it was to

be alive--there in the brave night, moneyed and famous and still young,

glowing with physical well-being--amid a joyous human company, with a

delightful friend and cousin, and two brilliant and beautiful ladies,

both members of that fashionable world which had once filled him with

envious bitterness, and one of them a woman whose presence made

everything magical. Rosina was very shadowy now.

They seemed in a great closed circle, walled by cliffs, with a roof

fretted by stars. Two glooming pools made dark patches in the lighter

soil, and they heard the stir of fish.

“A deserted stone quarry,” Olive explained.

“There are carp in the pools,” said Herbert.

“We live outside,” said Mrs. Wyndwood.

“It’s nearer over the cliff and more ladylike,” added Olive.

“It was hardly fair to Mr. Matthew Strang, though,” Eleanor remarked,

smiling. “We’ve all learned the way in the daylight. When you see it in

the morning, Mr. Strang, you’ll find it sometimes within a few inches

of the sheer precipice, and if you had caught hold of the bushes to stay

your fall you would have dropped them like a hornet’s nest. We ought to

have warned him--in the dark, too.”

“If we had warned him he would have fallen,” laughed Olive, gayly.

“Anybody could walk a four-inch plank over a precipice if he thought it

was on the ground. Ignorance is salvation. But you will have to come in,

Strangs, and brush yourselves before you go. What a nuisance your both

having the same name. When I insult Mr. Herbert I shall excite the

animosity of Mr. Matthew, and vice versa. I really think, Nor, we shall

have to call them by their Christian names.”

“Only when they’re together,” said Mrs. Wyndwood, smiling.

“We must always stick together, Matt,” cried Herbert, with jocose

enthusiasm. “Your hand, Matt.”

“We might call one the Painter,” began Mrs. Wyndwood, “and the other--”

“No, that’s ungrateful,” Olive remonstrated, “after the beautiful

success Mr. Herbert has made of you.”

“I meant Mr. Herbert,” replied Eleanor, roguishly, and for once Olive

had no retort ready.

“No, even taking the portrait into account, Matt’s the Painter,” said

Herbert, placing his hand lovingly on the shoulder of his friend, who

thrilled with a sense of his cousin’s large-heartedness. “Call me the

Playwright.”

“You are both Painters,” Miss Regan persisted. “But the problem is

solved--one is Mr. Herbert and the other Mr. Matthew.” She took

Eleanor’s arm and led the way to the house.

“Since when are you a playwright, Mr. Herbert?” asked Matthew, as they

fell a little into the rear.

“None of _your_ sarcasm, you beggar. I’ve always been a playwright.

Don’t you remember my doing a burlesque for the Academy students? I’m

writing a comedy in the evenings--the lessee of the Folly is a friend of

mine--I must make some money now--there’s that hundred pounds I owe

you--and I know I’m not going to make it by painting.”

“But surely you will let me know if you want anything,” said Matthew,

with genuine concern, for there seemed something immoral in the idea of

Herbert feeling the pinch of need, to say nothing of his shock at

finding that his cousin had run through all that money. Herbert had,

indeed, several times hinted at his impecuniosity, but Matthew had never

taken him seriously.

Herbert shook his head. “I know you’re a brick, old chap, but a hundred

pounds is as much as I care to owe any one man.”

“But you don’t consider me _any_ one man.”

“Ah! it’s awfully good of you to remember that I did as much for

you--comparatively speaking--in your tenpenny times, but still it isn’t

quite agreeable to find one’s bread on the waters after many days. I

never did like soaked bread, even in milk. The most I could do would be

to let you settle up every week with Primitiva’s father. But it’s really

halves, mind you, and when my comedy is produced, you’ll have to reckon

with me. They like what I’ve written--the women--they think it’ll make a

hit--I read them the night’s work after lunch the next day--of course, I

always lunch with them after the morning’s sitting. Ah, here we are!”

They had emerged from the sheltered quarry and met the smack of the salt

wind from the moaning sea-front. A lawn ran out to meet the pebbly

beach, from which it was separated by a low stone wall; the ancient

slate-roofed house stood out radiantly cheerful against the dusky

background of the night and the cliffs. Primitiva was at the door

looking out anxiously, and a man-servant shared her anxiety, or at least

her vigil.

“How delightful!” exclaimed Matthew.

“Yes, weren’t we lucky?” said Mrs. Wyndwood. “It’s an old family

residence. The owner kept it untenanted for thirty years, and has never

consented to let it before.”

The ladies took off their things while the men brushed themselves in the

hall, where, divided by a heavily carved barometer, a pair of faded

oil-paintings hung--a gentleman in a wig and a lady in a coif. These

reminded Miss Regan that Matthew must see how splendidly Herbert’s

portrait of Mrs. Wyndwood had turned out after all. “The rogue!” she

cried. “As soon as he thought the sittings were to cease, the picture

picked up wonderfully! And now he’s dilly-dallying with it again!”

So they wandered through the large rambling house with its old-fashioned

belongings till they reached the room which Herbert had been allowed to

use as a studio. Matthew saw with joy that Herbert had let the glorious

face and figure be as he himself had painted them in that spurt of

inspiration, and had confined his own attention to the minutiæ of the

dress, which was nearly finished. Olive held a lamp to it, awaiting his

praises. He had a moment of embarrassment.

“She is very beautiful,” he said, ambiguously, but rapturously. Then,

turning to Herbert, he added, heartily, “If your comedy is only as good,

old fellow--”

“It will be,” said Mrs. Wyndwood, enthusiastically. “Who should write

comedy if not a man like Mr. Strang--I mean Mr. Herbert--a man who has

seen the manners of men and cities? I should think he could do it even

better than he can paint.”

“But he has one disadvantage,” said Olive, gloomily. “He is witty.”

Herbert stood bowing with his hand on his breast in mock acknowledgment.

His boyish face looked flushed and handsome in the lamplight. Matthew

had a spasm of despair--a momentary sense of being an outsider.

“Don’t practise your footlights bow here,” said Olive. “No one has

called ‘author!’”

“‘Many are called, but few chosen,’” quoted Herbert.

“I wonder how I should come out under _your_ brush?” said Eleanor,

turning to Matthew. His black fit vanished; he was taken back again into

the charmed circle. But the question remained awkward.

“Not more beautiful than this,” he murmured. “Perhaps you will give me

the pleasure. I am here to paint--partly, that is.”

“Perhaps in town; not here. I want to be out and about. Olive, we must

give them something before they go back through the cold night.”

Olive rang the bell and ordered refreshment. They adjourned to the

drawing-room, a spacious apartment, with strange heavy antique furniture

and curious bronzes and vases, the _ensemble_ made more quaint by the

irrelevant presence of a grandfather’s chair, with its high, stiff

canvas back.

“I fished that up from the kitchen,” said Olive. “It’s jolly to sit

there and imagine one’s self an old crone nodding to one’s last sleep.”

She seated herself upon it forthwith, nid-nodding, and against the white

canvas her dark face shone, lovely and young and more provoking by the

suggestive contrast.

Herbert stood over her, fidgeting, his fingers drumming nervously on the

canvas awning.

She sprang up and threw back the lid of a mahogany instrument, and began

to play a joyous melody.

Matthew had seated himself in an arm-chair near the window. Eleanor, her

superb arms and neck bare, was opposite him, a wonderful white vision in

the soft-toned light. He caught her eyes and they smiled at him, the

friendly smile that means nothing and everything.

As Olive touched the keys, his breast grew tenderer; where had he heard

those tinkling harmonies before? His dead childhood came back to him for

a moment--it was a harpsichord, and the last person he had heard playing

it was Ruth Hailey. A vision of her girlish figure flitted before him,

then passed into the picture of the young woman with the sweet earnest

eyes that Billy had conjured up, then faded into the sweeter vision of

reality, as, through eyes still misty, he saw Eleanor’s bosom softly

rising and falling with the melody, the joyous soul of which sparkled in

her eager eyes. The tune grew merrier, madder. Herbert was at the

player’s side now; he was talking to her as her long, white fingers

darted among the keys. Suddenly the music jarred and stopped; Olive

leaped up and ran to the window and threw it open, and a cold wind swept

in, and the solemn sobbing of the waves.

“There it is,” she cried, “the great lonely blackness, roaring outside

like a wild beast in its lonely agony. We shut it out with our walls,

and hang them with pictures and plaques, but there it is all the same,

and all our tapestries cannot quite deaden its wail. Don’t you hear it

in the darkness, don’t you hear it crying out there--the pain of the

world?”

Mrs. Wyndwood sprang up in alarm and closed the window.

“Olive, Olive, calm yourself,” she said, tenderly, pressing the girl’s

face to her bosom.

Olive broke from her with a peal of laughter. “You look as if you had

seen a ghost, Nor. Are you afraid of the black night that you shut it

out? Are you out of tune with it already?”

“You exaggerate the pain of the world, dearest,” said Eleanor,

soothingly.

Herbert looked startled. “The pain of the world?” he said. “The futility

of the world, you mean. People eat and drink and go to theatres, and

over their graves the parson prates of infinities and immortalities.

Religion is too big for us. We’re like mice in a cathedral.”

“You are right.” Olive dropped wearily into the grandfather’s chair.

“God said, ‘Let man be,’ and _nascitur ridiculus mus_.”

Eleanor’s eyes kindled. “We are small most times,” she said. “But there

are moments when, as Wordsworth says:

“‘Through Love, through Hope, and Faith’s transcendent dower,

We feel that we are greater than we know.’

I’m not afraid, Olive. There! I open the window again. Come and

look--not at the black night, but up at the stars.”

Matthew’s soul melted in worship. He moved to her side and, refreshed by

the cool sea air, lifted his eyes to the far-sprinkled vault where the

moon had now suffused the dark clouds, which seemed to have grown light

and porous. The two infinities of sky and sea brooded together in the

night, ineffably solemn.

Olive would not budge. “The stars!” she shuddered. “Big, lonely worlds.”

Mrs. Wyndwood did not hear her. “Ah, there’s the Plough,” she said; “and

there’s the Polar Star in a straight line, and there’s Cassiopeia. And

that’s all I know. But, oh! surely they are havens of rest, where the

tears are wiped from all faces.” Her voice faltered, her face was rapt

as in prayer.

“Won’t you put something over your shoulders?” Matthew said, anxiously.

“No; it’s quite warm. Unless perhaps we take a turn up and down the

beach before you go; shall we? It looks so divine out there.”

He was startled and intoxicated by the proposal.

“Won’t you come, too, Olive? It’s nearly ten o’clock. We must be sending

them home to their farm, or Primitiva’s father will bar the door.

Already we have a reputation for witchcraft because our house shines

afar at eleven o’clock, a beacon of evil to all the neighboring hamlets.

In London we should just be preparing to go out.”

“I am tired, Nor. You can have a turn, if you like. You go, too, Mr.

Herbert.”

Herbert hesitated. “No, it wouldn’t be fair to leave you alone.”

“Does company prevent one from being alone?”

“I’ve _got_ to have a turn in a moment, anyhow,” said Herbert, weakly.

“A _re_turn, alas!”

“We’ll leave them to fight it out.” And Mrs. Wyndwood laid her hand a

moment on Matthew’s shoulder, thrilling him. They went out under the

stars. She had taken only a light, fleecy wrap, beneath which the white

shoulders were half defined, half divined. They went across the lawn and

through the gate, and crunching lightly over the little pebbles, walked

towards where the surf bubbled white in the grayness. All was very

still, save for the eternal monotone of the sea. There were a few yellow

glimmers from the villages on the cliffs. Far to the east a light-house

sent watery rays across the night. They stood without speaking, in a

religious ecstasy, breathing in the salt air.

At last the delicious silence was broken by her more delicious voice.

“I am so glad you came,” she said, simply.

His breast swelled painfully.

“You are very good to me.”

“Oh, I mean your cousin will have company.”

“Is that all?” he said, audaciously.

“And then, he likes to be with Miss Regan.”

“Is that all?”

She smiled.

“You are too ambiguous. The plain truth is that your cousin prefers to

talk to Miss Regan alone, and I didn’t care about appearing a marplot.

You know the proverb.”

He was never shrewd. Harassed as he had been by his own affairs,

Herbert’s admiration of Olive had never struck him as a serious passion.

He conceived his cousin as a philandering person, a man of many

flirtations. But now the suggestion that came from Eleanor’s lips seemed

to throw a flood of light on everything, even on Herbert’s remark about

forbidden fruit. For once Herbert was veritably in love. In his relief

at the butterfly’s choice of a definite flower he forgot to resent Mrs.

Wyndwood’s reason for giving himself her company.

“Are you sure it isn’t you he admires?” he asked, merely for the

pleasure of her denial.

“Oh no! I’m an old, staid, prosaic, mature widow. My romance is over,”

she sighed.

She never looked more spiritual than thus in the moonlight. But he could

never bring himself to the conventional compliments. He asked, simply:

“And what about Miss Regan?”

“Ah! I should not tell you if I knew, and I don’t know. I don’t profess

to understand Miss Regan. I never knew any one so easy to live with and

so difficult to understand. But, as she doesn’t understand herself, I

don’t feel humiliated. Of course she has always had men at her feet, and

she has refused one of the most brilliant _partis_ in the kingdom. I was

afraid she hated men, and I’m still uncertain. If she ever does marry I

think it will be to spite her relatives, to make them lament she has

thrown herself away. Did I tell you that she quarrelled with them all

and came to live with me?”

“Yes, you told me. And you were unhappy then?”

She passed her hand across her eyes, but did not speak.

“You are not unhappy now?”

She smiled. “Are you fishing for compliments?”

[Illustration: “ALL WAS VERY STILL SAVE FOR THE ETERNAL MONOTONE OF THE

SEA”]

“Indeed not. Only I am so sorry for you.” His voice trembled.

“Let us walk along,” she said.

He obeyed. “You are not angry with me for being sorry?” he faltered.

“No, sympathy is always sweet. Though I do not deserve it, some people

will tell you.”

“What people?” he asked, fiercely.

“Olive’s people. They all say I saddened my husband’s last hours. He was

brought home dead from the hunting-field, you know. He had been--but,

no! _de mortuis nil nisi bonum_.”

“Tell me,” he said, softly.

She began to speak, then broke off. “No, why should I tell you?” she

said, gently.

“Because--because--I want to be your friend.”

Her bosom heaved. She caught her breath.

“It was a vile sporting-house.” She shuddered. “He left me with an oath

on his lips.”

Matthew Strang was at boiling-point. He ground the pebbles furiously

under his foot. Oh, the infamy of Society! That this lily should have

been handled roughly! It was sacrilege. And yet, in some subtle way, he

felt her more human than before. She, too--painful as it was to realize

it--had known the mire of life; she, too, this delicate flower of

womanhood! though it had left her unsullied, ethereal still. Then she

would understand what he had gone through, she would know how coarse and

unlovely life could be. He felt strangely nearer to her heart at this

moment; some icy partition had melted away.

She ceased walking, and put both hands over her face. The fleecy wrap

quivered on her shoulders. He waited in silent reverence.

“Perhaps I _was_ inconsiderate,” she said at last, lifting her face

dimmed with tears, “not forbearing enough.”

“You angel!” he whispered.

“You’ll hear another story from his people. All--except Olive. They will

tell you that--that I am a--” she smiled wistfully--”a flirt.”

He had no words hot enough. He kicked a stone savagely. “The vile

slanderers!” he cried. “They are all tarred with the same brush. You’re

lucky to be done with them.”

“There was young Gerard Brode staying in the house, a mere boy up from

Oxford and bubbling over with Socialism. I was interested in his

theories and we had long talks, and I tried to convert Douglas--that was

my poor husband--and to persuade him that we ought to divide our

property with everybody; but he met me with coarse ribaldry, and said he

wasn’t going to divide his wife with any man, least of all a

whipper-snapper like Gerard Brode, and feeble taunts like that, and that

was the beginning of our dissensions.”

“Poor Mrs. Wyndwood!” he said, and felt it a sweet privilege to pity

her. “And so you spent your fortune on the movement.”

She smiled sadly. “Scarcely my fortune. Poor Douglas never lived to

inherit, and I wasn’t born with a gold spoon in my mouth, though it had

a crest on it. But who has been telling you about my indiscretions?” She

did not wait for an answer, adding: “But, there, you know all about me

now,” and her pathetic smile had a dazzling _camaraderie_, though it

flickered away as she wound up meditatively: “I wonder why I told you.

Shall we go in?”

“Not yet,” he pleaded, hastily. “Oh, if you knew how proud I am of your

confidences! That they should be made to me--to me! Oh, if you knew what

my life has been!” He felt choking.

“You terrify me,” she returned, lightly. “Nothing very dreadful, I

trust.”

“I am nothing, nobody.” He struggled with his voice. “I have slept in

the streets. I have consorted with the vilest.”

“All the more honor to you that you are fine.”

“Oh, if I had met you before! You would have inspired me, uplifted me.”

“No higher than you are.”

“Ah, you don’t understand. I have been so poor.”

“Poverty is not a crime.”

“I have been in prison.”

“You were innocent!” Her face shone.

“It was only for debt. I was the victim of a bankruptcy, and I have paid

it all off since. But the stain remains.”

“On the laws that put you there.”

He gulped down the great lump that made his throat dry and painful. “I

was born in a poor Nova-Scotian village. No one cared for Art.”

She stooped down and plucked up a sea-pink. “See! how sturdily it grows

among the stones!”

Now all the pent-up self-pity of the long, solitary years burst forth in

a great torrent, breaking through the proud, passionate reserve that no

living being had ever penetrated; his soul yielded up its secrets in a

strange blend of pride, self-depreciation, and yearning for the woman’s

sympathy.

“I have had to carry the hod, to climb the mast.”

“You climbed nearer heaven.”

“Ah, but I swabbed the deck.”

“You touched life at first hand. I have never envied you so much as now.

We never get near its secret, we idle rich.”

“You glorify my past for me. I see it now as a divine education. I have

been living for false ideals. Oh, if you could glorify my future!”

“I should be proud to inspire it!” The flash in her eyes passed to his.

“If I could see you every day, if I could tell you my hopes, my dreams.

But what am I asking? It is impossible. You are the beautiful Mrs.

Wyndwood, and I--”

“A genius, a Master! Towering over a humble slave!”

Her eyes, swimming in tears, but shining still, like stars through rain,

sought his in humble adoration. Never had he pictured such a look from

her. He shook, divining undreamed-of possibilities. For a moment he

forgot everything. He caught her hot hand and held it to his lips. In

that frenzy of divine fever, half fire, half tears, he felt again that

love rationalized life. An infinity of thought and emotion was

concentred in the instant; his long, sordid struggles, his craving for

happiness, the infinite yearning with which as a boy in a lonely forest

he had looked up at the stars. This was the secret of his yearning, this

the flash that illumined life. And underlying and intertangled with

everything, an astonishment at the vast sweep of life, the possibilities

it held. Last night Rosina and Camden Town; to-night Eleanor and the sea

and the stars.

She drew her hand away gently, though there was no rebuke in the

withdrawal, murmuring, “We must be going in,” and straightway the image

of Rosina arose sinister and vindictive, her voice raucous and strained

to a ghastly jocosity, crying, “Kisses, they’re off!” And then, as he

moved silently towards the house, thrilling with the memory of her hand

and her look, prisoned sobs still fluttering at his throat, he had a

sudden paradoxical intuition that if he spoke of his wife, as he had

been on the point of doing, something would go out of the magic of those

touches and glances, all spiritual though they were. The figure of

Rosina--sinister and vindictive--would stand between their souls,

troubling their most transcendental moments. Was not a man’s wife the

natural recipient of his confidences, the nurse of his Art? And then, if

Eleanor knew that he was ashamed of his wife, that he had always passed

as a bachelor, would she not deem him contemptible? The fine ethical

sense that had refused to despise him for material degradations, would

it not certainly scorn him for moral weaknesses? A great temptation took

him not to imperil by indiscreet speech the footing he had won. But his

soul had been moved to its depths. To be false--and with her!

“I have not told you all, Mrs. Wyndwood.”

“You can tell me nothing nobler.”

That was like an icy wind. He walked on storm-tossed. They came to a

jutting crag, skirted it, and the house rose radiant in the hollow of

the cliff. He had an aching vision of their living there together, she

and he, with all the dear domesticities of wedded union. His fancy

feigned them re-entering now their joint domain. The pretence left his

heart sick and empty. They walked across the lawn. “You would not call

me noble,” he said, coming to an abrupt stand-still, “if you knew that

I--”

He flinched under the sceptical, confident smile she threw over her

shoulder.

“That I am married.”

The half-mocking smile faded from the beautiful face, and with it the

color. She turned her head again towards the house, but she was not

moving forward.

He was glad he had not to meet her eyes. The sea broke solemnly with a

fused roar of irregular waves, and he wondered why the sound was so

continuous. A cricket’s chirp in the cliff-bushes seemed to him

extraordinarily loud. He looked up at the stars. Were the tears, indeed,

wiped from all eyes in those shining islands, he thought, or were they

only dead, lonely worlds? Or were they alive and full of unhappy people

like the star he stood on?

She spoke at last, with a catch in her breath and a strained smile in

her voice.

“Why should that make me think less of you?”

He caught only the celestial reassurance of her reply. How fine, how

sympathetic she was! But he hastened to immolate himself. Her unexpected

question had thrown him off the track; he forgot that his _concealment_

of his marriage was the only circumstance for which he had foreseen the

world’s blame, and he answered, desperately,

“Because I married for money.”

“For money,” she repeated, in a toneless voice.

He was cold and sick with shame. Despite her experience of the coarser

side of life, such a contingency was, he felt, quite beyond her

comprehension. That money played no part in her consciousness he would

have divined, even if her friend had not informed him of the fact in

their first talk. An impulse had driven him to humble himself, a

counter-instinct now spurred him to excuse himself.

“It was to pursue my art career,” he said, deprecatingly. Even now he

would not speak of the younger children he had had to support.

She turned her head again, and the smile was struggling back, and her

voice had an echo of the old enthusiastic ring.

“Then you married for Art, not for money!”

“Ah, do not comfort me! My God, how I am punished!”

She veered round now. Her tones were low and trembling with compassion.

“Is she a bad woman?”

“She is worse! She is a good woman. All her thoughts are on the

household; it is unbearable. Never a thought of anything but the kitchen

and cabbages.”

“Poor woman!” she said.

The prisoned sobs could hardly be choked back now.

“The world does not know. I have been ashamed of her. Now you see how

low I am, you cannot respect me.”

Her voice was almost a whisper.

“I respect you the more for what you have done in despite of her. You

have had a hard life.”

“Oh, have I not?” and a sob escaped at last.

“Compose yourself. We must go in.”

“You will be my friend all the same?”

“Yes, I will be your friend. Your confidences are safe in my keeping.

There is my hand.”

He took it again and held it fast, feeling its warm response. “You make

me so happy! Life will not be empty now.” He struggled with the lump in

his throat. “With your friendship, what can I not achieve? You shall

tell me what I am to strive for.”

“It is too great a responsibility. It was all very well to criticise. I

sha’n’t know what to say.”

“You need say nothing. I shall look into your eyes and read it there.”

He looked into them now, and they were not lowered. They were full of

sympathetic sweetness, glistening behind tears.

“I am afraid they are rather red,” she said, with a melancholy smile.

“If I am not careful they may betray your confidences.”

She moved forward in the direction of the water, and he, turning on his

heel, followed, wondering. By a salt pool near the rim of the billows

she bent down and bathed her face. To see her half kneeling in the

moonlight affected him like reading poetry; and as she washed off the

traces of the tears he had made her shed, it seemed to him as if their

spiritual friendship were being consecrated by some mystic baptism.

They went in. Olive had not moved from her indolent attitude in the

grandfather’s chair. Herbert was standing at the window-curtain.

“I’m so glad you’ve come in,” she said, yawning. “Mr. Herbert has been

sulking at having been left behind, and I have been snapping his head

off for not leaving me to myself.”

“Yes; Miss Regan speaks the truth for once,” said Herbert, audaciously.

“Oh, I am glad Primitiva is not here to have her ideal shattered.

Good-night--before you get ruder.”

“Good-night,” he responded, “before you get truthfuller.”

“Take care of him to-night, Mr. Matthew. He is irresponsible. Don’t go

by the cliff route.”

“Not I. Good-night, Miss Regan. Good-night, Mrs. Wyndwood.” And that

dear secret pressure thrilled his palm again.

In a few moments the two cousins were marching with measured step along

the winding road. Herbert had lit a cigar, but Matthew was busy enough

chewing the cud of his memories.

“Olive was rather strange to-night,” said Herbert, breaking the silence

of the cliff-tops.

“Not more than usual, surely?” answered Matthew.

“That’s your conventionality and your ignorance of women. I never found

her strange except to-night with her nonsense about the pain of the

world.”

“She’s talked to me like that before several times; she thinks people

with souls can’t be happy. I suppose it’s Mrs. Wyndwood’s influence over

her natural flippancy.”

“Ah, perhaps so. But why so formal, Matt? You have my permission to call

her Eleanor.”

“Thank you,” said Matthew, with a forced smile.

“I hope you enjoyed your _tête-à-tête_ more than I did. Not that there

isn’t a certain fascination in sparring. But perhaps you fought, too.”

He returned a staccato “No.”

After a silence accentuated by the tramp, tramp of their automatic feet

as they swung along, he said: “I told her I was married.”

Herbert gave a long whistle. “The devil you did! And you don’t call that

fighting? What a knock-down blow!”

“What do you mean?” Matthew murmured.

“D’ you mean to say you don’t know the woman is in love with you?”

Matthew’s blood made delicious riot in his veins. He saw that strange

look of worship in her eyes again.

“Nonsense!” he jerked, thickly. “The Honorable Mrs. Wyndwood in love

with me!”

“I didn’t say the Honorable Mrs. Wyndwood. I said the woman. Trust me.

Behind all the titles and the purple and the fine linen--there’s flesh

and blood.”

“It is impossible. In love with _me_!”

“You may well be astonished, you duffer. To fix her affections on you

with me in the neighborhood! But women were always strange. And men were

deceivers ever.”

“All the more reason I shouldn’t deceive her. How glad I am I told her

the truth. I breathe easier, there’s a weight off my mind.”

“You selfish beggar! And now it’s all over between you, I suppose, and

our nice little constitutional quartette is broken up. And I thought it

was going to be so jolly when you came down. Heigho!”

“Don’t be afraid,” said Matthew, with a touch of bitterness.

“Eleanor--Mrs. Wyndwood and I are going to be better friends than

ever--thank God!”

“Thank whom? Don’t be blasphemous.”

“Thank God,” repeated Matthew, firmly.

“Oh, well, you were always a Methodist parson. But if I were a Jew, I

wouldn’t say grace over pork. Not a bad epigram that; I must get it into

my comedy.”

Matthew shuddered. Herbert’s tone was desecrating. “You don’t

understand,” he said.

“Don’t plume yourself on your superior intelligence, old man. Mine’s

quite equal to the study of Plato. It isn’t such Greek to me as you

imagine.”

“Well, whatever you think, you are quite wrong,” he replied, with

spirit. “Our friendship is on a different plane. It is based on our

common interest in Art--and Mrs. Wyndwood’s not the sort of woman you’ve

had experience of.”

“Well, that’s cool! How do you know what sort of women I’ve had

experience of? Besides, a woman is a woman. The world--our world, that

is--is full of Greek scholars who study Plato. Strictly under the rose.

Society is only an incarnate wink.”

“I should put that into the comedy,” sneered Matthew.

“It’s a quotation from it,” laughed Herbert. “Had you there, my boy.”

It nearly came to a quarrel. But Herbert good-naturedly said he must

save Matthew from himself, and he fervently hoped his cousin would not

confide in any more women. “You can’t syndicate a secret,” he said,

sternly.

At the house they had left, things were equally disturbed. Mrs. Wyndwood

retired at once to bed, throwing herself upon it in her clothes; and her

delicate white shoulders, which, like her emotions, had no need to be

covered up now, rose and fell spasmodically. After a while she got up,

bathed her eyes again, in fresh water this time, and went into Olive’s

room. Miss Regan was brushing her dusky tresses savagely. She had sent

her maid to bed.

“Nice hours,” she growled.

“You’ll catch cold, dear,” Eleanor replied, gently, for a window was

wide open at the bottom.

“Nonsense, Nor,” said Olive, petulantly. “I should like to sleep on the

beach.”

“What, in this costume?”

“One bathes in less. Still, while you’re here--”

She closed the window with a bang.

“Olive! You make my heart jump.”

“Really? I’m not a man.”

Mrs. Wyndwood colored painfully, then looked at her with brimming eyes

of reproach. “And this is my reward for leaving you _tête-à-tête_.”

“Leaving _me tête-à-tête_. I thought that was a by-product.”

Mrs. Wyndwood controlled her vexation. “I said just now I had never

known any one so easy to live with. Don’t make me change my opinion,

dear.”

“So you’ve been discussing me with Matthew! And what right have you to

discuss me with anybody? Oh, how hateful everybody is! I know what it

is. You’d like to see me brought down to your level.”

“Good-night, Miss Regan. You will apologize in the morning.”

“Don’t glare. The level of womanhood, if you like. You’ve loved a man.”

Eleanor’s face flushed. “That is the height of womanhood, Olive.”

“Oh yes--fine phrases! The height of womanhood!” She drew a comb

fiercely through her hair. “To hang on a man’s lips, to feel a foolish

sense of blankness when he isn’t there, and a great wave of joyful pain

when he heaves in sight again. To kiss his every little note! To think

of him and your trivial self as the centre of the universe, and to want

the planets to spin for your joint happiness--oh!” She pulled the comb

viciously through a knot.

“You describe it very accurately, Olive,” said her friend, maliciously.

“I’m quoting the novels. This passion that they crack up so much seems

nothing more than selfishness at compound interest.”

“Selfishness! When you yourself say it makes you yearn for the other

person’s happiness.”

“So that it may subserve yours.”

“You are a cynic.”

“What is a cynic? An accurate observer of life. Oh, you needn’t smile. I

know I’m quoting, but one can’t put quotation marks into one’s

conversation. You can’t face the facts of life, Nor. You like dull

people without insight.”

“I like you.”

“That’s too cheap. You like socialists and spiritualists and poets and

painters--the whole spawn of idealists. Bah! They ought to have a

month’s experience of a hospital.”

“The world isn’t a hospital ward, Olive. The people I like have the

truer insight.”

“What insight has your Matthew Strang?”

“He is as much yours as mine.”

“Don’t shuffle out of the question.”

“His insight expresses itself through his work. He doesn’t talk.”

“Is that a hit at his cousin?” queried Olive, savagely. “If so, it falls

remarkably flat, considering Herbert Strang paints as well as talks.”

“Olive, why will you put words into my mouth? You know how much I admire

Herbert Strang.”

“Ah, then you have more insight than I gave you credit for. You may even

understand that a cynic is only a disappointed idealist, a saint plus

insight. His soul is a palace of truth; society and its shams come to

the test, yield up their implicit falseness, and are scornfully

rejected. The stroke of wit is made with the sword of judgment. Its

shaft is the lightning of righteous indignation.”

Mrs. Wyndwood felt this might pass well enough for an analysis of

Olive’s own cynicism, but she had her doubts as to its applicability to

Herbert’s.

Olive puzzled her frequently, and shocked her not seldom, but she felt

instinctively that hers were the aberrations of a noble nature, while

the cynicisms of Herbert jarred upon her without such reassurance of

sweet bells jangled. Not that she doubted but that he, too, was much

more idealistic than he made himself out--did he not write charming

comedy love-scenes? Still he was a man who had seen the world, not a

crude girl like Olive, and in the face of Olive’s affectionate analysis

of Herbert--which she rightly divined owed less to reason than to the

growing love for him which she had long suspected in her turbulent

friend--Eleanor felt vaguely that while jarring notes may be struck from

the soundest keyboard, they may also be the index of an instrument

hopelessly out of tune. Of course Herbert was not that, she was sure; he

lacked Matthew’s idealism and manly beauty, but he was handsome, too, in

his daintier way, and charming and gifted, and probably the very husband

to put an end to Olive’s psychical growing-pains. All this mixture of

acute and feeble insight occupied Eleanor’s consciousness.

But all she said was, “Is that Emerson?”

“No, it’s me. Now go to bed and sleep on it.”

“I sha’n’t. I couldn’t sleep on anything so hard. Dear me, what a lot of

hair-pins you have! What nice ones! I must borrow some.”

“Take them all and go.”

“Not yet.”

“I shall blow out the candles,” snapped Olive.

“I love talking in the dark. I’m pining for feminine conversation to

soothe my overwrought nerves. How pretty that lace is!” Eleanor touched

her friend’s shoulder cajolingly. “What exquisite things you have!

Everything--from hair-pins to carving-knives--perfect after its kind,

like the animals that went into the ark. It will be difficult to give

you a wedding present.”

Olive laughed, despite herself.

“The only wedding present a woman wants is a husband.”

“You have had plenty of those presents offered you, dear.”

Olive shuddered violently. “Imagine existence with a Guardsman

or--worse!--with that doddering young Duke! Dulness without idealism.

Your Matthew Strang is endurable--he has at least the family idealism,

the Strang goodness, though he carries it so much more heavily than his

cousin. But a lifetime with a dull man--who wouldn’t understand a

joke--who would smile and smile and be a hypocrite! Oh, ye gods! I

should shriek! In a year I should be in a lunatic asylum, or the Divorce

Court. Oh, why do you women who have been through the mill egg us girls

on? Is it the same instinct that makes an ex-fag send his boy to Eton?

Or do you think it improves our health? I know you think me hysterical.”

Mrs. Wyndwood flushed.

“Your tongue runs away with you, Olive. You’d do better to say your

prayers. I’ll leave you to them.”

Olive laughed hilariously. “Aha! I thought that would get you to go. You

always will forget that I’ve been in a hospital. Say my prayers, eh? Let

me see, what shall I say? The one I used to say in the hospital, ‘O

Lord, I beseech Thee, let not this be counted unto me for righteousness,

for Thou knowest, O Lord, that I can’t help it.’ But that’s not

applicable now. Suppose I say just what’s in my heart, as the

theologians recommend.” She went down on her knees and said solemnly:

“O Lord, don’t you think you are sometimes a little hard upon us? Don’t

you think we are born into a very confusing world? It would be so easy

to do Thy will, to make Thy will our will, if we only knew what it was.

Don’t you think that half our life that might be devoted to Thy service

is wasted because of the mist through which we grope, bearing the

offering of our life in quest of we know not what Divine altar, and

blurring the road more thickly with our tears?” She sprang up. “How’s

that for an addition to the Liturgy, Nor?”

“I am disgusted,” said Mrs. Wyndwood, sternly. “Both blasphemous _and_

ungrammatical.”

Olive threw herself back on the bed, laughing unrestrainedly: “You

delightful, stupid old thing. Ha! ha! ha! Blasphemous _and_

ungrammatical! You Dissenting Hellenist! Sacrilege and Syntax! Ha! ha!

ha! No, you sha’n’t escape. You must abide the question. Tell me, O

friend of my soul, why do women who have been unhappily married want to

see other women victimized equally, like people who have been fooled in

a penny show and come out laughing to beguile the other people?”

“That’s not a fair analogy,” said Eleanor, more gently.

Olive looked up archly, her arms under her head.

“No, perhaps not in your case. I dare say you’re quite capable of

marrying again, yourself. The triumph of hope over experience. Quotation

marks, please. You’re looking awfully handsome, Nor, and that saucy tilt

of your nose spoils you for a saint. Speaking as an ex-sculptress, it’s

like a blunt pencil.” She sprang up remorsefully: “Oh, I’m a beast. I

apologize to your nose. I forgot the tip was a sore point.”

Mrs. Wyndwood drew back in sorrowful hauteur. “I shall never marry

again, Olive,” she said, solemnly. There was an under-tone of self-pity,

and her eyes were moist. She turned hastily and walked from the room

with a firm, stately step.

Olive watched the sweep of the gown till it reached the door. Then she

gave chase and renewed her apologies, and let Eleanor sob out sweet

reconciliation on her shoulder.

After which she opened the window, sat on the side of the bed, and

screwed up her ripe red lips to produce a perplexed whistle.

CHAPTER VII

THE IDYL CONCLUDES

They fleeted the days delightfully, as men did in the golden world. They

rode together on the rolling moors, they drove through the Devonshire

lanes, they strolled through combe and copse, they climbed the tors,

they fished the leys, they swam in the sea, and when it was cloudy and

cold, and the wind wailed about the house like a woman in pain, they

listened to the comedy which Herbert wrote in those dreary days when the

ladies drove off to distant houses for lunch or tennis or croquet. For

they had not quite hidden their retreat or detached themselves from

their kind.

“There’s always scandal within a four-mile radius,” as Miss Regan put

it. “Is there on earth a greater piece of philanthropy than to give your

neighbors food for gossip? Man cannot live by bread alone.” Matthew

asked her in concern if his and Herbert’s visits were causing any talk.

“My dear Mr. Matthew,” she replied, scornfully, “even an actress cannot

escape scandal, especially if she goes into society. And truly society

is so corrupt, I have often wondered that actresses’ mothers allow them

to go into it!”

During one of these absences of the feminine element, when Herbert went

over to the house to put the last touches to the painted costume,

grumbling at the boredom of such finicking work, Matthew gladly relieved

him of the brush, and worked up the whole portrait, while Herbert lay

smoking and thinking out the comedy.

Partly out of bravado, partly to enjoy the series of lovely views of

dark-green sea and broken crags and nestling villages, the cousins

invariably arrived by the cliff-path, seeing the blackberries get riper

every day. Sometimes they found the ladies sitting reading on the top of

the cliff, which was furzy, with a road-side border of hemlock and

dandelions and blue orchids, amid which their dainty parasols showed

from afar like gigantic tropical flowers. Then while Matthew drowsed in

the light of the sun and of Eleanor, inhaling the odors of bracken and

thyme, lazily watching the white surf break far below, the brown

trawlers glide across the horizon, the swallows swarm on the beach, and

the wild ducks over the sea, Herbert and Olive would rattle away by the

hour, often in verbal duels. Matthew Strang thought he had never tasted

such pure intellectual joy. Art was often on the tapis; they classified

the skies--to-day a Constable, and yesterday a Turner, and to-morrow a

Corot. Herbert expounded glibly to the rapt Eleanor the Continental

ideas, descanting on Manet and Monet. Nature lay all around them like a

model to illustrate these theories, and Eleanor discovered all sorts of

shadows and subtle effects she had never noticed before, all with the

naïve joy of a child lighting on pretty treasures. She cried out that

Art taught people to see Nature. And the Impressionists were right. Look

over there! You couldn’t tell whether it was a pool or a pile of fish.

And the colors of things changed incessantly! Matthew would sometimes

put in a word when appealed to by her, but never when the subject was

music, concerning which he was as ignorant as the rest of the party was

learned. Once Herbert maintained that the musician was better off than

the painter, because his work remained, while pictures perished,

destroyed by the aniline and bitumen in their own colors. “Even Mona

Lisa’s smile will fade,” he said. “The artist lingers a little longer on

the stage than the actor. Pictures are but paltry things at best, and

few artists have brains or any large outlook upon life. They’re a petty,

quarrelsome clan.” Matthew did not deny it.

Olive cited sculpture as a more durable art than the musician’s, which

only lived when performed. Mrs. Wyndwood was convinced that the joy of

Art must be to the artist; she said she was fast acquiring a keen

interest in the subjective side of Art, and feeling a growing desire to

be an artist herself. The Spiritual was all very well, but it needed to

be expressed through the Beautiful.

Olive playfully suggested an expedition to the Latin Quarter; Mrs.

Wyndwood accepted it seriously and eagerly; she returned to the idea

again and again, both in public and in private. Why should they not go

to Paris for the winter, and Olive take up sculpture again, and initiate

her into the divine mysteries? To judge by the Strangs, artists must be

delightful creatures to live among, and sculpture seemed easier and

simpler than painting. Olive continued to play with the project. Herbert

sneered at the idea of Miss Regan’s return to the plaster of Paris.

Literature was, after all, the only art, he said. It contained

everything--music of words, painting of scenery, passion of drama. He

almost converted Mrs. Wyndwood. She quoted ecstatically, “_L’univers a

été fait pour aboutir à un beau livre_.” But a word from Matthew

restored the balance.

They talked of life, too, of fate, free-will, and knowledge absolute,

like Milton’s archangels. Herbert, as Lucifer, steadfastly took the

lowest views of human nature; now and then Olive’s eye, twinkling with

fun, met his as if in a secret understanding that Mrs. Wyndwood must be

shocked at all hazards. He fought for the doctrine that sin was a human

invention. “Let people have their fling. They exaggerate their powers of

sinning. They think they can draw on a boundless internal reservoir of

wickedness. As a matter of fact, their powers are singularly limited.

They have too much original goodness. For my part, alas! I have found

few opportunities of sinning.”

“And have you never found opportunities for remorse?” Mrs. Wyndwood

asked, scathingly.

“Alas! often, I tell you. Remorse for the sins I couldn’t do. The

remorse of your religious person is too often like the snivelling

repentance of the condemned criminal. That murderer felt a truer remorse

who was unexpectedly reprieved after indulging in an indigestible

breakfast.”

Olive laughed heartily. “That must go into the comedy.”

It had become their stock phrase. Then remembering her part in the

comedy was to score off Herbert, she capped his anecdote of the

condemned criminal by another about the politeness of a Frenchman, who,

ascending the scaffold, said to his neighbor in the tumbril, “_Après

vous_.”

Eleanor raised the talk to a more elevated plane, insisting on the value

of remorse, and of suffering generally. “I would not recall one of my

sufferings,” said she, with her simple earnestness. “If I didn’t suffer

I shouldn’t think I had grown.” And her eyes instinctively sought

Matthew’s, and he thought she was reminding him of the educative

efficacy of his own sufferings as well, and again Herbert’s philosophy

jarred.

And whatever she was saying or doing she always fell naturally into some

attitude that enchanted his eye by its unaffected grace; always wore an

expression whose sweetness and candor softened him in worship. Her

beauty--to a painter’s soul the miracle of miracles--she wore with a

royal unconsciousness; he could not understand it. She was so simple,

just like a human being. He saw her, not in her society drapings, but in

all moods and weathers, and she bore the test. On fishing days they

would draw up the boat in the centre of the nearest ley, where perch and

“rudd” abounded, the former avid of the gentles, the latter only less

eager for the paste, but demanding an iota of skill when hooked. Olive

would take no hand in this mild sport; she had given up hunting and

fishing, she said, when she rose in the ethical scale. Challenged as to

her readiness to eat meat and fish, she failed to see the relevancy of

the criticism. The reason she wouldn’t kill other creatures was not that

it gave them pain, but that it gave her pain; to eat them, on the

contrary, gave her pleasure. Mrs. Wyndwood, however, though not callous

enough to impale her own worms, was persuaded by Matthew to take a rod,

and beguiled numbers of perch, and admitted to a thrill of savage joy

each time she hauled up a leaping flash of silver. She was glad, though,

she said, that the poor little fishes had horny membranes for gills, so

that the hook should not hurt them; when it passed through the eye, she

trusted that the cornea was insensitive, too.

“But how would you feel,” Olive once remonstrated, “if, sitting at

dinner, just after swallowing a mouthful of mayonnaise, and in the

middle of a remark to your neighbor about the Rhine or the

Pre-Raphaelites, you were suddenly to find yourself rising towards the

ceiling, at the end of a rope fixed by a hook to your upper lip, and

arriving slowly but surely, despite your kicking and writhing, into a

stratum of air totally devoid of oxygen?”

Herbert Strang thought one would feel like a fish out of water, but

Matthew Strang eluded the point by drawing a pike across the track. The

bait of a captured roach had fetched the monster, whose struggles

interested even Olive, while Eleanor was wrought up to a wild enthusiasm

for Matthew’s prowess, and regretted that in Scotland she had always

refused to go to see the grouse-shooting.

“I hear they are doing badly this year,” Olive observed.

“Oh no, Olive,” cried Mrs. Wyndwood. “Didn’t we hear at the Archdeacon’s

yesterday that they were making excellent bags?”

“I meant the birds,” said Olive, dryly.

“Bother the birds! I should love to be a sportsman,” cried Eleanor,

exultantly landing her eleventh perch. They trooped like children to the

dinner-bell. “I can see how fascinating it must be. To actually _feel_

the struggle for existence; it brings you back to the primitive. You

touch reality; you remember you’re an animal.”

“Lunch always reminds me sufficiently of that,” said Olive.

“No,” Eleanor argued. “The napery and the flowers come between us and

the facts. How glorious it would be to be primitive!” Between Art and

Sport--with that charming impressionability of hers--she had drifted as

far from the spiritualities of Dolkovitch as, under the Russian’s

influence, from the Socialism of Gerard Brode.

Herbert, whose skill with the rod was not remarkable, diverged into an

account of his stay in a Servian fishing-village which was entirely

primitive, “so primitive,” he said, laughing, “that the wives do most of

the work.” He sketched the place with admirable literary touches.

“Sheepskin is their only wear,” he wound up. “In the winter they wear

the wool outside. In the summer they take off their skins and--no, not

sit in their bones, as Miss Regan is about to remark--but wear the wool

inside.”

Matthew was thus led on to relate juvenile sporting experiences on the

shores of the Bay of Fundy, and finally his one encounter with a bear in

the Cobequid forest, which put the seal on Mrs. Wyndwood’s new-born

ardor for sport. This tame picking-up of perch palled; they must go

mackerel-fishing, she insisted. And so Matthew Strang arranged with a

fisherman to go out to sea in his boat next day. But the sea ran high,

and to the undisguised relief of Herbert, who felt himself rather cut

out by his cousin in these unliterary expeditions, Primitiva arrived the

first thing in the morning with a note from Mrs. Wyndwood, saying she

had forgotten the lawn-meet at Colonel Chesham’s to inaugurate the

season of the local pack, and she would ride over to that in the hope of

catching sight of a bit of the hunt. There was a postscript from Olive,

saying: “And, of course, I must go to chaperon her among all those men.”

Nevertheless, they went out in the boat late that same afternoon, when

the ocean was calm again and quivering in the sun. Their course lay

along a track of diamonds which seemed to dance off the water like a

million elves of light. By the time they returned, the path of diamonds

had changed to one of red gold. Delicious was the ripping sound of the

living boat tearing the water, as it dipped gently from side to side,

its white sail bellying gracefully. The sunset was strange: one dull red

narrow bar crowned by a ball of molten gold radiating four hazy spokes

like mill-sails. The ball gradually sank in the sea. In the south the

white sickle of the moon grew yellower and yellower; in the east fleecy

strips of cloud reflected the dying day. The colors of the cliffs still

stood out vivid. The moment was poetic; the air was charged with amorous

electricity. The talk drifted into love and marriage.

They played with the subject, skimming it gracefully, touching it with

subtle lights, flashed and withdrawn, shooting out audacities with

ingenuous impersonality, all four the while tingling with

self-consciousness from crown to sole.

Herbert said that to a woman love is a complete romance, to a man a

collection of short stories. Olive maintained that the reverse was true.

“Oh, if man knew woman!” she cried. “And you who pretend to write

comedies!”

Mrs. Wyndwood admitted that Byron was right about love being all in all

to a woman. “Nine-tenths of unmarried women,” she said, looking at

Herbert, “have never had a proposal.”

“Nine-tenths of married women more likely,” Olive flashed back.

In Matthew’s opinion marriage was a failure. Mrs. Wyndwood sadly

acquiesced. They sought the remedy.

“Marriage may be a failure, but not friendship,” Olive pronounced.

Now it was Matthew’s eyes that Eleanor’s sought, and his involuntarily

met hers. There was exaltation in this secret glance, and mutual

reassurance.

“Unless,” pursued Olive, “the friendship is contracted between persons

of different sex.”

Mrs. Wyndwood’s eyes drooped; then opened full again to note how Matthew

took the addendum. The friends perceived themselves reddening in

simultaneous confession that Olive was not so very wrong; an indefinable

expression, half abashment, half radiance, flickered over Eleanor’s

features; her glance, swift, probing, challenging, dazzled him; his

whole frame trembled at the thought that this heavenly creature could

love him. Then he grew chill again, for she cried, as in the highest

spirits:

“Oh, look at the sun! How comic!”

It had, indeed, become a clown’s face, swollen and bulbous and crossed

with red bars.

The talk went on to Woman’s Rights, and Matthew mentioned that he had an

indirect relation to the subject, because a girl he used to know in

childhood had become Linda Verder’s secretary.

“Is she pretty?” Mrs. Wyndwood asked.

“I don’t know; I’ve never seen her.”

“But you said you used to know her.”

“Oh! you mean Ruth Hailey. She used to be pretty, but my brother tells

me she’s gone off.”

“Haven’t you seen her yourself?”

“Oh! not for years.”

“I sent Mrs. Verder a subscription some few years ago,” said Mrs.

Wyndwood, “but I have ceased to believe in Woman’s Rights.”

“Woman’s Rights are a husband and children,” said Herbert, with his eye

fixed on Olive.

“It is a mistake for the movement to be led by women,” pursued Mrs.

Wyndwood.

“Oh, was that why you resigned when Lord Boscombe left the Council?”

asked Olive, innocently.

Eleanor looked annoyed. “You mean, Mrs. Wyndwood,” Matthew hastened to

say, “that they lay themselves open to the imputation of being soured

spinsters.”

“Precisely,” she replied. “Besides, they are crying for the moon.”

“Or the man in it,” muttered Olive.

“No; that’s ungenerous to your sisters,” said Eleanor.

“Why demand generosity?” Olive retorted. “We are all in the same trade.”

And she smiled audaciously at Herbert. “Even Mrs. Verder didn’t take up

with this movement till she lost her husband, and I’ll wager this Ruth

Bailey is an old maid.”

“Ruth Hailey,” corrected Matthew, flushing painfully, he scarcely knew

why, perhaps from sympathy with the aspersed friend of his childhood.

“She _is_ unmarried, but I am quite sure it must be from her own choice,

for she is very pretty.”

“You said she wasn’t,” said Mrs. Wyndwood, quickly.

He laughed confusedly. “I was thinking of the girl.”

The subject dropped.

Ere they got in the wind freshened and Matthew was busy with the sheet.

And now a proposition was broached which promised to bring a new

sensation into their comparatively sequestered existence. Light-hearted

discussions as to what they would do in the event of capsizing through

Matthew’s mishandling of the sail led to estimates of the distance they

could swim in their clothes. Mrs. Wyndwood could not swim at all, and

complained of the abrupt shelving of the beach, which gave her only a

few feet of splashing room, while Olive was sailing gloriously off in

search of the horizon. Herbert said that, like the man who was asked if

he could play the violin, he didn’t know if he could swim in his

clothes, because he had never tried, and, besides, he had his comedy in

his pocket, which was heavy enough to drag down a theatre. Olive said

she didn’t see that it made any difference whether a lady swam in her

clothes or not, especially if she was in evening dress. She claimed that

the cap and gown worn in the water were as heavy as men’s boating

flannels.

The upshot of the discussion was that Miss Regan challenged Mr. Matthew

Strang to a race in clothes, which, she insisted, must be new. “You

don’t go out getting capsized in old clothes,” she contended. “Boots you

needn’t have, nor a coat; people always have time to throw them off--in

books. I shall be clothed in a new yachting costume, superficially, of

course, to counteract your sheddings from above.”

“What waste!” remonstrated Eleanor.

“You who pretend to philanthropy!” mocked Herbert, mimicking her

intonation of “You who pretend to write comedies!”

“Waste? To learn to save my life! And don’t you see I shall forthwith

give away the spoiled costume to a poor creature who would never

otherwise have got it?” And Olive, who was quite serious, fell to

elaborating a facetious programme of “The Creamery Regatta.”

The regatta day duly arrived. Two bathing tents were erected on the

beach and decorated with flags. It was arranged that the competitors

should swim out leisurely together as far as they cared to go, then turn

and race for shore. Herbert was chosen referee; he offered to take them

out in a boat and then accompany them back, as a precaution, but Olive

laughed at him for an old woman. Eleanor, entering enthusiastically into

the fun, had ordered a silver cup from London, and was to present it to

the winner.

But the day opened badly, with fitful weather; a gray rain, and thunder

and lightning. They waited till the afternoon, when the sun burst out in

sudden fire, and in a moment the great stretch of gray cloud was

shrivelling off all around it like a burned cobweb. The eager combatants

dashed into their dressing-tents, and, emerging as lightly clad as was

compatible with the conditions, they plunged together into the great

sapphire sea. Olive’s yachting costume turned out to be a pair of

knickerbockers and a jacket, rather lighter than her ordinary bathing

costume, and Matthew had begged off his waistcoat, and was only hampered

by a white flannel shirt and trousers. The outward swim was an ecstasy;

the water was warm and sparkling with patches of molten silver breaking

up into little shining circles and reuniting; it sent a voluptuous

thrill to the palms to cleave its buoyant elasticity, and the forward

movement of the body was a rapture. Drawing in the balmy air with joyous

breaths, Matthew felt an immense gratitude for existence. There was

exhilaration in the mere proximity of Olive, with her lively snatches of

conversation. Her lovely flushed face and dripping hair went with him

like a mermaiden’s. The same thought struck her, for she began to sing

jerkily with her beautiful voice snatches of Heine’s ballad:

“Die schönste Jungfrau sitzet

Dort oben wunderbar,

Ihr gold’nes Geschmeide blitzet,

Sie kämmt ihr gold’nes Haar.”

“Yes, but you haven’t got golden hair,” the man laughed, joyously.

Farther and farther they swam into the vast shimmering blue, and ecstasy

made the pace brisker than they had meditated.

“Shall we start from here?” he asked, at last.

“No, not yet. I want a long race.”

They swam on. The brown trawling boats loomed plainer in the offing.

“Here?” said Matthew.

“No--a little farther, faint-heart!”

He turned on his back and propelled himself gently, gazing up in

luxurious content at the great circle of blue sky, cloud-mottled round

its rim. Olive, lying on her side, paddled lazily a little ahead.

“This is delicious!” she called back. “Clothes make no difference. But

fancy a clothed Lorelei!” And she began to sing again, with pauses for

breath:

“Den Schiffer im kleinen Schiffe

Ergreift es mit wildem Weh;

Er schaut nicht die Felsenriffe,

Er schaut nur hinauf in die Höh’.”

He threw the reply over his head: “You shall lure me no farther.” But

she mocked him, elated by the glory of motion, and witched him to follow

her till the shore was far.

At last they turned, trod water, Olive cried, “One, two, three,” and

they were off.

For some minutes they swam side by side, Olive making the pace, and

Matthew finding it no trouble to keep up with it; at last she made a

spurt and shot past him with a triumphant taunt; he allowed her to enjoy

some seconds of victory, then came up hand-over-hand and forged ahead.

He eased off and she overtook him; he spurted and she flagged; he let

her come up again and she came up with a sneer. Resolved to damp her

frolicsome spirits, he put on a powerful stroke and showed her a clean

pair of heels. She made a desperate effort and drew level with him

again. The instinct of victory was now aroused in the painter; he fixed

his eyes on the shore and settled steadily to the task of reaching it.

Very soon Olive was hopelessly in the rear. He still heard her vague

cries from afar. At last they died away entirely. He turned his head to

measure the interval. Olive was nowhere to be seen.

His heart contracted with a cold sick horror. He raced back with great

side strokes, shouting, “Miss Regan, Miss Regan, holloa!” The great

sparkling water stretched all around in deadly silent bareness, suddenly

become an evil enemy. He hoped desperately she was only swimming under

water for speed or to frighten him.

And then in a moment her head popped up to the right, and he saw from

the exhausted expression of the face and the spasmodic struggles of the

limbs that she had really gone under. In a few strokes he was at her

side. She still retained sufficient self-possession not to grab at him;

he supported her with one hand, then with the rest of his limbs he

struck out stoutly for home, she helping him with feeble movements.

After an interval of weakness and humility, she recovered somewhat and

smiled faintly.

“So you wouldn’t follow the Lorelei,” she spluttered, reproachfully.

“I am sorry I followed her so far,” he said, ruefully regarding the

distant shore.

Olive struggled for breath. “Prosaic man! I waited down there for you,

but I gave you up and came to the surface again.” She essayed sturdier

kicks.

“You only sank once?” he said.

“Yes; didn’t you hear me calling you to come?”

“I heard sounds, but I thought they were epigrams.”

“Brute! To hit a woman when she’s down. But I shall be better soon.... I

hope they can’t see us from shore.”

“Don’t talk! You brought Herbert an opera-glass to see we started fair.”

“Nonsense,” Olive gasped, indignantly.

“I distinctly remember it.”

“How dare you set up your memory against a drowning woman’s?”

He was glad to find her like herself, and not alarmed. Her strokes were

getting stronger now, but he still feared for the consequences if she

should suddenly lose her nerve. “What did you think of when you sank?”

he asked, lightly, to make her think the danger of sinking was over.

“Of Her--” she began, and stopped short. “Of her carryings-on at my

funeral, poor Nor. I was regretting I hadn’t made my will and left her

my nose.”

This sounded pure nonsense to her companion.

“I think I can go by myself now,” she added, after a long silence.

“Thank you so much for the use of your arm.”

“You are quite sure?” he said, anxiously.

“Yes. Of course, you have won.”

He removed his arm, but kept watchfully at her side. And his misgivings

were justified, for, after a slow twenty yards, her strokes became so

spent and irregular that he came to her assistance again, and she

accepted his support with a wan smile.

“It’s this soppy, clogging costume,” she said.

“You had better keep your breath in your lungs,” he said, not in rebuke,

but in hortation.

“I’ll inflate myself like an air-balloon,” she replied, humbly. “I am so

sorry to be such a nuisance.” And she turned upon her back and paddled

feebly in silence.

He did not answer, for his own nerve was giving way. The responsibility

weighed more than the burden, though that was heavy enough with the

double weight of superadded garments. He had a spasm of sickening

apprehension. His own strokes were getting jerkier; what if he should

fail to reach that strip of beach on which he dimly descried two

agitated figures! And in this tense, terrible moment the figures were

blotted out, he saw only the cliffs in the background and the white

sea-gulls overhead, and he was a boy again in the Bay of Fundy, swimming

in his clothes for dear life. The illusion was momentary, but it left

the memory. A sense of the tragic contrast between the ardent

Nova-Scotian lad, dreaming of pictures, and the popular London painter,

occupied his consciousness, while his limbs moved automatically

shoreward. Then he remembered that of the two who had struck out for

home on that memorable day the sailor had only put off the day of

drowning. And at the thought that ancient dead face swam up again in

front of him. Oh, it was horrible to die, to be dragged down out of the

sunlight, to leave a world which held Eleanor Wyndwood! What would

become of her? She would live to forget him; she would marry; another

man would hold her in his arms. Another man! Oh, direful thought,

bitterer than death! There was no need for his death ere another man

could possess her. She was only his friend; he had not wanted more than

her friendship. Oh, ghastly self-delusion! Olive’s sneer at the

friendship of the sexes rang in his brain, and that strange intoxicating

expression in Eleanor’s face--half abashment, half radiance--dispelled

the vision of his father’s. In a moment of delirium his lips touched her

warm cheek; it was her weight that was on his arm. What did it matter if

they had a gleam of happiness, he and Eleanor, both victims of an

unsatisfactory world? Was not the great, shining, mocking, remorseless

sea waiting to suck him down, indifferent to the aspirations and

agonizings of the long years? And then between his lips and hers the

dead stony face swam up again, and he turned on his back to escape it,

and found unexpected relief in the more reposeful attitude and in the

change of arm involved, for the left, which had supported Olive, had

grown numb. When, sufficiently rested, he turned again he saw with a

thrill of joy that the shore was perceptibly nearer. There were more

than two figures now; he made out Primitiva and the old cook. And

Herbert’s arm was round Mrs. Wyndwood’s waist, supporting her. A

powerful spurt brought him within clear hearing of Herbert’s hail.

“Shall I come out?”

Olive roused herself. “What for?” she sang out, lustily. “The race is

decided.”

“All right,” came the joyous reply. “I was sure Matt could manage it. I

wouldn’t spoil his chances of a medal.”

As they came nearer in he cheered them on with sportive ejaculations,

and confounded the beach because there wasn’t a single boat within half

a mile. When the couple scrambled on shore, shaking themselves like

spaniels, Mrs. Wyndwood dragged more heavily on Herbert’s sustaining

arm, and he saw that she had fainted. Almost at the same instant, by a

curious coincidence, the sun, upon which the clouds had gradually been

closing in, again disappeared, and the wail of the wind rang wilder

round the cliffs.

There was confusion in the household that afternoon. Mrs. Wyndwood soon

revived, but had to be put to bed, and Miss Regan, who was secretly

grateful for an excitement that kept her from assuming the invalid

herself, sat with her. The men hung about the house, anxious, and

receiving frequent reassuring bulletins by the lips of Primitiva.

Presently those pretty lips brought them an invitation to stay to seven

o’clock dinner, when Mrs. Wyndwood would try to come down to present the

cup. They need have no delicacy about the larder, for Colonel Chesham

had opportunely sent Mrs. Wyndwood a gift of grouse. They galloped over

the cliffs to get themselves into their dress-clothes. Meantime Mrs.

Wyndwood had fallen asleep, and at her bedside Olive Regan writhed in a

black paroxysm, asking herself why, having once gone down, she had

wanted to come up again.

The hostesses were a little late, but the reunion was gay beyond all

precedent. The last trappings of ceremony were thrown off. A Bohemian

merriment reigned, regardless of the liveried menial who alone sustained

the dignity of the dinner-table. Mrs. Wyndwood, looking a shade paler

and more spiritual, but no whit less beautiful than her wont, appeared

in a low white satin gown, with the same jewelled butterfly poised at

the bosom as on the night when Matthew had met her at the Academy

soirée. He fancied some occult significance in the circumstance. Olive

was in soft green that harmonized so suavely with her complexion as to

give her a less aggressive air than when she wore blue. There was a

fragrant tea-rose with a sprig of maiden-hair fern at her throat; and

the table was gay with many choice specimens of aster and hydrangea,

presents from Primitiva’s father. Outside the roar of the sea and the

wail of the wind emphasized the charm and comfort of the interior and

the gladness of being alive.

There was a wavering flush on Mrs. Wyndwood’s cheek and a shining

moisture in her eye as, before they sat down, she presented Matthew with

the cup, which Olive complained had been dashed from her lips.

Interrogated as to her sensations, she said she had a horrible feeling

of littleness in the midst of the great churn of waters and under the

naked sky. It did not seem the same sea she had been bestriding so

recklessly and voluptuously. She seemed to herself absolutely

unimportant--a mere atom in the blind wash of the waves, a straw they

would engulf, drift, or disgorge with equal indifference. It was this

thought that suddenly paralyzed her, and made her give up and go under;

when she came up, something not herself made her strain every sinew to

keep afloat.

“Something not ourselves that makes for life,” said Herbert.

She smiled.

“My last thought was of you,” she said, audaciously. “I determined to

send you a message by submarine cable.”

“I had the greatest ado to prevent Primitiva stripping and going out to

fetch you in,” he rejoined, laughing.

The incidents of the regatta continued to afford amusement from the

_hors d’œuvres_ to the dessert. At the fish Olive sprang up suddenly

and rushed to the window. Her exclamation of “The regatta fireworks!”

drew them all after her.

Herbert uttered the long-drawn “Oh!” of the spectators of pyrotechnics.

It was, indeed, an extraordinary set-piece, this sunset, in affinity

with the fitful tempestuous day--a sky steel-blue again, with great

broad sulphur-edged clouds of black smoke; on the upper rim of this

smoke, white clouds; towards the horizon, over the inhabited hills, a

lovely pale-green light, and on the right of that a monstrous

sulphur-cloud, its base hidden below the horizon; the shadow of this

brilliant cloud darkening to a purple and crimson beauty on the

ever-stirring water, and the cloud itself infiltrating its pores more

and more with sulphur and deepening momently to old gold; over the green

light, patches of bright gold; the left extremity of the sulphur-cloud

coming to meet it in spots of smoky red; every little pool of rain or

brine on the beach crimsoning and purpling in responsive radiance.

They returned to their fish, but watched from their seats till the

beautiful sulphur-cloud faded into a pale bluish blot. Mrs. Wyndwood,

observing it all minutely with her recently acquired artistic vision,

said she had never realized before how many editions a sunset went

through; she wondered how artists arrested it long enough to paint it.

Herbert said sunsets were not fixed but faked. He resumed his badinage

of Olive for her failure to see her whole life defile pictorially before

her; and she apologized for her forgetfulness on the ground that she

hadn’t arrived at drowning point. A discussion on memory ensued. Mrs.

Wyndwood acknowledged possessing a good verbal memory--especially for

poetry. Herbert said that he could only remember ideas, so that he

carried away nothing from contemporary literature. Only the Continentals

had ideas; the English were a wooden race, “the wooden heads of Old

England,” he said, derisively; he was glad of his infusion of French

blood, there was no salt in English life--nothing but putrefying

Puritanism. Olive said, although she was a Celt, she could remember

neither ideas nor words. Herbert asked what was her earliest

recollection. After screwing up her forehead in earnest effort she

replied, honestly, “I forget,” and he cried “Bull!” Mrs. Wyndwood

proffered her own earliest recollection--of gliding in her mother’s arms

in a gondola, with a boatman crying _Stali_--and was curious to know

Matthew’s. He replied mirthfully that he didn’t remember, and covered

his discomposure with champagne. He could not expose to strangers that

memory of his mother scolding his father, shrieking, vociferating,

offering to throw up the position, threatening to shoot herself. Even

Mrs. Wyndwood would never know that--no one would ever really see the

scars on his soul. The thought of her, now babbling harmlessly, saner in

her insanity than in her sanity, came up like the skeleton at the feast.

He put her resolutely outside with the night and the wind that wailed

like a woman. But he heard them moaning: “Oh, the pain of the world!”

After dinner they walked along the shore towards the neighboring

village. It blew half a gale now, but the air was not cold and the

ladies took only wraps. The quartette looked upon this deserted beach as

a private promenade, an appanage of the house. They walked two and two,

Matthew and Miss Regan, Herbert and Mrs. Wyndwood. There was only a rim

of orange all along the horizon; the rollers thundered on the stones,

smashing themselves in flying spray; a fierce undertow kept the waves

sandy for half a mile out; there was just light enough to distinguish

where the paler green commenced. The darkness grew rapidly as they

walked; the last faint reflection of sunset faded on the gray sea. An

unusual silence possessed them after the exuberance of the evening. They

stopped now and again to shake the little pebbles out of their shoes.

All was black when they reached the village. The beach was full of

wickerwork crab-pots, and the headless divided forms of skate and

dog-fish loomed uncannily from the poles on which they hung. They were

the crab-fishers’ bait. Only a stray mongrel represented the village,

which already slept. The sea was mournful and gloomy; its pitchy

blackness, over which the sky hinged like a half-raised gray lid, was

relieved only by its own broken lines of foam, which sometimes rolled

in six deep, looking exactly like streaks of phosphorescence on a dark

wall, and adding weirdness to the forlorn desolation of the scene. There

was no other line of light either on sea or land; the lonesome sea

tossed sleeplessly in its agony, howling and crying.

They turned back, interchanging companions. During the walk Mrs.

Wyndwood suddenly asked Matthew if his wife knew where he was: he said,

“No”; sometimes his brother Billy did; Billy lived with her: his man

forwarded all letters from his studio. After a long pause he added that

practically he had been separated from his wife for years. Eleanor

murmured again, “Poor woman,” and he was too shame-stricken to look her

in the face, and to read that the sympathy was for him. They relapsed

into silence, and indeed conversation was difficult.

The night had grown wilder, the wind blew more fiercely, drenching their

faces with salt spray, whirling them round and round and almost lifting

them off their feet. But the clouds were driven off and the

star-sprinkled heaven was revealed, majestic.

Near the house Mrs. Wyndwood and Matthew Strang stopped to admire the

sublime spectacle, sheltering themselves from the gale in a niche in the

cliff; the other two had already gone round the craggy projection which

hid the house.

They watched the mad cavalry charge of creaming billows; watched them

break, thundering and throwing their spray heavenwards like a continuous

play of white fountains all along the line of march. To the right,

beyond the village whence they had come, where the cliff jutted out at

its lowest level, a ghostly fountain leaped again and again sheer over

the top of the cliff with a crashing and splashing that was succeeded by

the long-receding moan of the back-drawn wave soughing through the

rattling pebbles.

Her face, flushed with the passion of the storm, showed divinely in the

dim starlight; beneath her wrap her bosom, panting from the walk in the

teeth of the wind, heaved with excitement; the gale had dishevelled her

hair. They scarcely spoke; the organ-roll of the sea crashed

majestically like the bass in some savage symphony of the winds.

Now at last the moon leaped out, framed in a weird cloud-rack; the

moonlight played on her loveliness and made it wonderful.

She moved slightly forward. “The cliff is too damp to lean upon,” she

murmured.

Audaciously he slipped a trembling arm against the rock and let her form

rest against that. She scarcely seemed conscious of him; she was

watching the rampant, seething waters, volleying their white jets

skyward with a crash of cannon that outroared the wind; her scarlet lips

were parted eagerly; the dreamy light had gone from her eyes; they

flashed fire.

“Oh, I could dare to-night!” she cried.

The wind blew her tresses into his face; the perfume of them stung his

blood. Her loveliness was maddening him. So close! so close! Oh, to

shower mad kisses upon her lips, her eyes, her hair! What did it matter,

there on that wild beach alone with the elements! He had been so near

death; who would have recked if he had been dead now, tossed in that

welter of waters?

The waves broke with a thousand thunders, the white fountains flew at

the stars; they seemed alive, exultant, frenzied with the ecstasy of

glorious living. Oh, for life--simple, sublime--the keen, tingling,

savage life of Vikings and sea-robbers in the days before civilization,

in the full-blooded days when men loved and hated fiercely, strenuously,

wrenching through rapine and slaughter the women they coveted. Ah,

surely he had some of their blood; it ran in his veins like fire; he was

of their race, despite his dreamings. He was his father’s son, loving

the storm and the battle.

The wind wailed; it was like the cry of his tortured heart, his yearning

for happiness. It rose higher and higher. A bat flew between them and

the moon. Eleanor nestled to him involuntarily; her face was very near

to his. It gleamed seductively; there was no abashment, only alluring

loveliness; the fire in her eyes kindled him now not to the secondary

life of Art, but to the primary life of realities. Could she not hear

his heart beat? Yes, surely the storm of the elements had passed into

her blood, too. Her face was ardent, ecstatic. His arm held her tight.

Oh, to stake the world on a kiss!

The moon was hidden again; they were alone in the mad, dim night; the

complexities of Society were far away. They looked at each other, and

through her eyes he seemed to see heaven.

A star fell overhead. It drew her eyes away a moment to watch its fiery

curve. He felt the spell was broken. The wind shrieked with an eldritch

cry, like the mocking threnody of his thwarted hope. He had a shuddering

remembrance of Mad Peggy. And straightway he saw her weird figure

dashing round the crag in the darkness--a shawl over her head, and a

lovely face, at once radiant and frenzied, gleaming from between its

dusky folds. His heart almost stopped, a superstitious thrill froze his

hot blood. Never to be happy! Ah, God! never! never! To thirst and

thirst, and nothing ever to quench his thirst!

Mrs. Wyndwood started forward. “Oh, there you are, Olive!”

The figure threw passionate arms round her. “Comfort me, darling; I am

engaged.”

* * * * *

For the happier Herbert had spoken. And Olive had listened shyly,

humbly, with tears, full of an exquisite uplifting emotion, akin to the

exaltation of righteousness, at the thought of giving herself to this

man, of living her life with and for the one true soul in the world.

They stood close to the hoary rim of the black welter; dusky figures,

wind-rocked and spray-drenched, a little apart from each other, the

shining house in the background.

“And when did you begin to think of me--in that way?” she faltered.

“I never thought of you in any other. But that night when Matthew

arrived, when you sat nid-nodding in the grandfather’s chair, you

maddened me; you were adorable! the contrast was exquisite. To think of

you--a wilful little misanthrope--to think of that glorious, wayward

creature fading away till she suited the chair. Oh, it was too--”

He broke off. Passion robbed him of words. He moved nearer--she drew

back.

“Oh, but will you still”--she hesitated, shy of the word--”love me when

I do suit the chair?”

“I shall always see you as you were then.”

She laughed with a half-sob.

“And just then,” she confessed deliciously, fluttering even now like a

bird in the net, “I was beginning to get frightened of you. I felt you

growing upon me, shadowing the horizon like the roc in the _Arabian

Nights_. And the pain of the world was outside--in the great black

night--calling to me in my slough of luxury.”

“You witch! Veil those eyes or I shall kiss them.”

She retreated.

“And why were you frightened of me?” he asked, tenderly.

She said, humbly, in little shy jerks: “I felt like in the sea this

morning--one little atom, and the whole world against me, and my own

weakness most of all.... I had prided myself on my swimming, and here

was I being dragged under ... just like other girls ... a victim to the

same ridiculous passion.”

“You delightful, candid creature! With me as the object?”

“Don’t be flippant now, Herbert.” How delicious his name sounded; it

made amends for the rebuke! “You do understand me. Marriage is a second

birth--voluntary, this time. It means accepting the universe, which was

thrust upon one unasked.”

“It means making the best of it.”

“Oh, surely it means more. It means passing it on to others. But I

surrender. I cannot live without you.”

“Olive!”

He sprang to take her, but she eluded him. “Look! the moon is covered up

again.”

“I only want to see your face.”

“Don’t talk like other men, though I have fallen like other girls.”

“No, you are always yourself, Olive--I have dreamed of this moment. I

would not have it otherwise--except perhaps with you in the

grandfather’s chair and a poke bonnet.”

“Now you are _your_self. This is such a conventional ending to a

holiday, we must preserve what originality we can.” She was recovering

her spirits.

“A conventional ending! Why, it’s a most romantic incongruous match. It

beats the comedy. I shall burn it.”

“No, let’s produce it--it wouldn’t cost much.”

“I am not worthy of you, Olive,” he said, with a quiver in his voice. “I

have nothing.”

“Oh! When you have my heart!”

“My queen of girls! But what of your relatives?”

A gleam of fun passed across her wet face. She had her droll look of

mischief.

“You are all of them. I was of age long ago--I am awfully old, you

know--you take me with your eyes open--”

“I can’t; yours dazzle me.”

“That’ll do for the comedy,” she laughed, gleefully. “Still, if you do

want me, there are only you and I to consider.”

“Only we two,” he murmured.

“We two,” she repeated, and her eyes were suffused with tender moisture.

There was a delicious silence. He tried to take her hand. This time she

abandoned it to him; a wave of moral emotion lifted her to the stars.

The wind wailed, the black sea crashed white at their feet, its whirling

brine blinded their eyes as with salt tears.

“Isn’t it curious?” she said, as they moved back a little, hand in hand.

“What, dearest?”

“That you and I should be made happier by our common perception of the

unhappiness of life?”

“Queer girl!” he thought. But he only squeezed her hand.

“The Catechism is right,” she went on, thoughtfully, proceeding to

misquote it. “The waves are too strong. It’s no use fighting against

your sex or your station. Do your duty in that state of life in which it

has pleased God to call you. But I would have that text taught to the

rich exclusively, not to the poor. The poor should be encouraged to

ascend; the rich should be taught contentment. Else their strength for

good is wasted fruitlessly.” And the electric current of love generated

by those close-pressed palms flashed to her soul the mission of a life

of noble work hand in hand.

Herbert scarcely heard her. The glow of her lovely face, the flashes of

feeling that passed over it, the tears that glistened on her

eyelashes--these absorbed his senses. Her generalizations were only a

vague, exquisite music. He lifted her hand and held it passionately to

his lips. She murmured, beseechingly:

“You will never disappoint me, Herbert?”

“My darling!” And he strove to draw her nearer and press his first kiss

upon those bewitching lips.

“Oh! there’s a star falling,” she cried, and slipped from his hold, a

beautiful Diana, virgin as the white spray and tameless as the night.

She had disappointed Herbert. He was puzzled. But as she disappeared

round the cliff in quest of the others, a smile of triumphant content

curled round his boyish lips.

“That’s the last touch of piquancy,” he murmured, as he chased her round

the crag.

CHAPTER VIII

ELEANOR WYNDWOOD

Two days after Herbert’s engagement, Matthew Strang left Devonshire on

the plea of a death in the family.

A letter from Billy had indeed brought the news that Rosina’s father was

no more. Matthew had never thought untenderly of old Coble; the mountain

of a man had acted generously after his lights, and now that his genial

roar had passed into the eternal silence, the pathos of death softened

his son-in-law towards his memory and towards the bereaved daughter.

Nevertheless, Matthew’s plea was only a pretext. He had no intention of

intruding upon Rosina. After her recent reception of him he had no

reason to suppose a visit would be welcome. The letter from Billy had

included no message from her, except a request, superfluously and

irritatingly formal, that she should be allowed to give house-room to

her aunt Clara, who had gone to live with old Coble when his daughter

married. His reply to Billy contained warmly sympathetic reference to

the loss of old Coble, and expressed his joy at the prospect of

receiving Miss Coble.

His real reason for fleeing from Devonshire was his discovery of his

real feeling towards Mrs. Wyndwood. When the frenzy of the stormy night

had merged in the sober reflections of the mild morning, he shuddered to

think how near he had gone to forfeiting her respect, to insulting her

by the revelation of a dishonorable passion. To continue in her daily

society would have been too great a torment, aggravated, as it must have

been, by the sight of Herbert’s happiness. Perhaps the rude reminder of

his domestic shackles contained in Billy’s letter strengthened his

resolve to tear himself away. Courtesy compelled him to leave behind him

an invitation to the ladies to take tea one day at his studio, which

neither had ever seen. How could he snap abruptly the links he had

forged with this delightful twain?

He threw himself with ardor into work, trying to soothe his pain by

expressing it in Art, as a woman sheds it away in tears. He toiled at a

symbolic picture to illustrate Rossetti’s sonnet, “Love’s Fatality.”

“Love shackled with Vain-longing, hand to hand.”

He put the figures in a vague landscape, but did not study his models in

the open, for he now had a desire to produce that fatness of effect

suggested by a concentrated studio light instead of the dry flatness

which the open air always diffused. He no longer pinned himself to

technical theories, finding by experience that he only invented them

afterwards to justify the procedure his instinct dictated for any

particular picture. But his progress with “Love’s Fatality” was slow and

unsatisfactory. He was feeling about, as it were, for a new manner

worthy of her who inspired it. He wrote her once telling her that it was

on the easel, and reminding her and Miss Regan of their promise to visit

him on their return from Devonshire, and he had from her an

answer--elegantly indited on dainty, crested paper, delicately

scented--which he held often to his lips with a rankling, gnawing pain

of unsatisfied and unspoken desire. She wrote that she was very anxious

to see the picture, and also to be back in town, for she was weary of

the country with its monotony, its lack of the complex thrill of

civilization. Not that the town held much to enthral her. Fortunately

Olive had consented to the Paris project; the girl did not want to marry

before next summer, and rather hailed the idea of a farewell

quasi-bachelor Bohemian period of art and liberty. What she, Eleanor,

would do when she lost Olive Heaven only knew. And then came the wail of

world-weariness which his ear had caught already in the first stages of

their acquaintanceship. He interpreted it in the light of his own blank

unrest, but to imagine her hungering for him as he hungered for her was

impossible to his reverent passion. That she admired and liked him he

could not doubt; and in one or two instants of mutual electricity he had

dared to think that Herbert was right, and that she loved him. But his

diffidence could never cherish the hope for more than a few seconds; and

even if she indeed loved him, he felt that her delicacy, her finer, more

ethereal ethical sense would preserve her from the wistful images that

tortured him. It was the memory of her unhappy marriage to which her

sadness must be due; no doubt, too, her life lacked love, though she

might not be consciously aware of it.

When she at last came to see the picture, he was startled to find her

alone, and the bearer of a message of apology from Miss Regan. His

studio being, so to speak, a place of business, he was not unused to

receive ladies in connection with commissions, but his poor, agonized

heart--that had so ached to see her again--pulsed furiously with mad

hope as her stately figure, clad in widow-like black that set off her

beauty in novel lights, moved slowly about the great studio, admiring

pictures which he would have hidden from her in the days when he thought

of her more as a spiritual critic than a woman. Now, even though she

stood before him making remarks, he was too distraught to catch the

purport of her criticisms. He followed her about in a haze, a dream,

speaking, replying, and feeling all the while as if it was all part of a

game of make-believe, and in a moment the thin pretence would be thrown

off and she would be in his arms. But the moments passed, the haze

cleared, and he realized that he was entertaining a fashionable,

self-possessed lady, wrapped up in artistic interest, with no apparent

relation to the woman who had flushed with the passion of the sea and

the winds on that night of stress and storm.

His mind flew back from her bodily presence to picture her leaning

against his arm, and the memoried vision seemed incredible. She was

unapproachably demure in her black-silk gown. Over the shoulders she

wore a short black-velvet cape embroidered in jet, with a beaded fringe,

finished off with a filmy black lace reaching just below the waist. When

she threw it back, Matt saw the great puff sleeves of her gown and a

turned-down collar that combined with them to give an old-world feeling.

At her throat was a soft ruche of black chiffon. And from this monotone

of black the blond skin of the throat and face rose dazzling, crowned by

a small pink bonnet, of shamrock shape, entirely composed of roses, with

a lace-and-jet butterfly fluttering over it. Now and then she pointed

out something with a long black-gloved forefinger. Her left hand held a

dainty little book, that looked--like herself--poetry. How far away she

seemed, standing thus at his side! He was in a fever of chills and

heats.

She stopped longest before his unfinished picture of “Love’s Fatality.”

He heard her approving his conception of

“Love shackled with Vain-longing, hand to hand,”

but, even as her ravishing lips spoke golden words of praise, his vain

longing to kiss them admonished him how feebly his symbols expressed the

heart-sickness he was feeling. The longer he heard the music of her

lauding voice, the more those gray eyes kindled below the pink bonnet in

adoration of his genius, the more his disgust with the picture grew; and

when a chance word of hers reminded him that the subject had already

been treated in the last Academy, he determined to destroy his work the

moment she was gone, though he had always been aware of the little skied

picture which had drawn Miss Regan’s eccentric attention. The last

vestiges of his hope of her love died as she discussed “Love’s

Fatality,” with apparent unconsciousness that to him, at least, the

picture stood for something personal; her aloofness was exacerbating.

The heats of his fever died; only the chill was left.

He gave her some tea, and became gradually aware that she was abnormally

loquacious and vivacious. He remembered to ask after Miss Regan’s

health, and was told that Olive was bright and gay, with only rare

reactions of pessimism. Mrs. Wyndwood wondered dolefully again what she

would do when Olive was married. His heart, bolder than his lips, beat

“Come to me. Come to me.” But she did not seem to catch its appeal,

though his eyes spoke, too. In his embarrassment he turned over the

pages of the dainty little book she had laid down on the table. He

started at finding it a new volume of Harold Lavender’s poems, and when

on the fly-leaf he read “To Eleanor” his face twitched noticeably.

“Ah, that was the book Mr. Lavender wrote about in the letter that

Primitiva lost,” she said, quickly. “It’s just out to-day.”

“I see he calls you Eleanor,” he observed, tonelessly.

“Yes,” she responded, smiling, “that is a poetic license. Besides, it is

a screen. There are so many Eleanors.”