She gave him a startled look. But they were already on the threshold of

the dining-room, where a butler and two footmen waited. The husband and

wife took their places opposite each other in the stately panelled

room, which contained six famous pictures. Over the mantelpiece was a

half-length Gainsborough, one of the loveliest portraits in the world,

a miracle of shining colour and languid grace, the almond eyes with

their intensely black pupils and black eyebrows looking down, as it

seemed, contemptuously upon this after generation, so incurably lacking

in its own supreme refinement. Opposite Lady Laura was a full-length

Van Dyck of the Genoese period, a mother in stiff brocade and ruff,

with an adorable child at her knee; and behind her chair was the great

Titian of the house, a man in armour, subtle and ruthless as the age

which bred him, his hawk’s eye brooding on battles past, and battles to

come, while behind him stretched the Venetian lagoon, covered dimly

with the fleet of the great republic which had employed him. Facing the

Gainsborough hung one of Cuyp’s few masterpieces—a mass of shipping on

the Scheldt, with Dordrecht in the background. For play and interplay

of everything that delights the eye—light and distance, transparent

water, and hovering clouds, the lustrous brown of fishing boats, the

beauty of patched sails and fluttering flags—for both literary and

historic suggestion, Dutch art had never done better. Impressionists

and post-impressionists came down occasionally to stay at Flood—for Sir

Arthur liked to play Mæcenas—and were allowed to deal quite frankly

with the pictures, as they wandered round the room at dessert,

cigarette in hand, pointing out the absurdities of the Cuyp and the

Titian. Their host, who knew that he possessed in that room what the

collectors of two continents desired, who felt them buzzing outside

like wasps against a closed window, took a special pleasure in the

scoffs of the advanced crew. They supplied an agreeable acid amid a

general adulation that bored him.

To-night the presence of the pictures merely increased the excitement

which was the background of his mind. He talked about them a good deal

at dinner, wondering secretly all the time, what it would be like to do

without them—without Flood—without his old butler there—without

everything.

Douglas came down late, and was very silent and irresponsive. He too

was morbidly conscious of the pictures, though he wished his father

wouldn’t talk about them. He was conscious of everything that meant

money—of his mother’s pearls for instance, which she wore every evening

without thinking about them. If he did well with the pictures on the

morrow she might, perhaps, justly keep them, as a dowry for Nelly. But

if not—He found himself secretly watching his mother, wondering how she

would take it all when she really understood—what sort of person she

would turn out to be in the new life to which they were all helplessly

tending.

After dinner, he followed his father into the smoking room.

“Where is the catalogue of the pictures, father?”

“In the library, Duggy, to the right hand of the fire-place. I paid a

fellow a very handsome sum for making it—a fellow who knew a lot—a real

expert. But, of course, when we published it, all the other experts

tore it to pieces.”

“If I bring it, will you go through it with me?”

Sir Arthur shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t think I will, Duggy. The catalogue—there are a great many

marginal notes on it which the published copies haven’t got—will tell

you all I know about them, and a great deal more. And you’ll find a

loose paper at the beginning, on which I’ve noted down the prices

people have offered me for them from time to time. Like their

impudence, I used to think! I leave it to you, old boy. I know it’s a

great responsibility for a young fellow like you. But the fact is—I’m

pumped. Besides, when they make their offer, we can talk it over. I

think I’ll go and play a game of backgammon with your mother.”

He threw away his cigar, and Douglas, angry at what seemed to him his

father’s shirking, stood stiffly aside to let him pass. Sir Arthur

opened the door. He seemed to walk uncertainly, and he stooped a great

deal. From the hall outside, he looked back at his son.

“I think I shall see M’Clintock next time I’m in town, Duggy. I’ve had

some queer pains across my chest lately.”

“Indigestion?” said Douglas. His tone was casual.

“Perhaps. Oh, they’re nothing. But it’s best to take things in time.”

He walked away, leaving his son in a state of seething irritation.

Extraordinary that a man could think of trumpery ailments at such a

time! It was unlike his father too, whose personal fitness and

soundness, whether on the moors, in the hunting field, or in any other

sort of test, had always been triumphantly assumed by his family, as

part of the general brilliance of Sir Arthur’s role in life.

Douglas sombrely set himself to study the picture catalogue, and sat

smoking and making notes till nearly midnight. Having by that time

accumulated a number of queries to which answers were required, he went

in search of his father. He found him in the drawing-room, still

playing backgammon with Lady Laura.

“Oh Duggy, I’m so tired!” cried his mother plaintively, as soon as he

appeared. “And your father will go on. Do come and take my place.”

Sir Arthur rose.

“No, no, dear—we’ve had enough. Many thanks. If you only understood its

points, backgammon is really an excellent game. Well, Duggy, ready to

go to bed?”

“When I’ve asked you a few questions, father.”

Lady Laura escaped, having first kissed her son with tearful eyes. Sir

Arthur checked a yawn, and tried to answer Douglas’s enquiries. But

very soon he declared that he had no more to say, and couldn’t keep

awake.

Douglas watched him mounting the famous staircase of the house, with

its marvellous _rampe_, bought under the Bourbon Restoration from one

of the historic chateaux of France; and, suddenly, the young man felt

his heart gripped. Was that shrunken, stooping figure really his

father? Of course they must have M’Clintock at once—and get him away—to

Scotland or abroad.

“The two gentlemen are in the red drawing-room, sir!” Douglas and his

father were sitting together in the library, after lunch, on the

following afternoon, when the butler entered.

“Damn them!” said Sir Arthur under his breath. Then he got up, smiling,

as the servant disappeared. “Well, Duggy, now’s your chance. I’m a

brute not to come and help you, my boy. But I’ve made such a mess of

driving the family coach, you’d really better take a turn. I shall go

out for an hour. Then you can come and report to me.”

Douglas went into the red drawing-room, one of the suite of rooms

dating from the early seventeenth century which occupied the western

front of the house. As he entered, he saw two men at the farther end

closely examining a large Constable, of the latest “palette-knife”

period, which hung to the left of the fire-place. One of the men was

short, very stout, with a fringe of grey hair round his bald head, a

pair of very shrewd and sparkling black eyes, a thick nose, full lips,

and a double chin. He wore spectacles, and was using in addition, a

magnifying glass with which he was examining the picture. Beside him

stood a thin, slightly-bearded man, cadaverous in colour, who, with his

hands in his pockets, was holding forth in a nonchalant, rather

patronising voice.

Both of them turned at Douglas’s entrance, surveying the son of the

house with an evident and eager curiosity.

“You are, I suppose, Mr. Douglas Falloden?” said the short man,

speaking perfect English, though with a slight German accent. “Your

father is not able to see us?”

“My father will be pleased to see you, when you have been the round of

the pictures,” said Douglas stiffly. “He deputes me to show you what we

have.”

The short man laughed.

“I expect we know what you have almost as well as you. Let me introduce

Mr. Miklos.”

Douglas bowed, so did the younger man. He was, as Douglas already knew,

a Hungarian by birth, formerly an official in one of the museums of

Budapest, then at Munich, and now an “expert” at large, greatly in

demand as the adviser of wealthy men entering the field of art

collecting, and prepared to pay almost anything for success in one of

the most difficult and fascinating _chasses_ that exist.

“I see you have given this room almost entirely to English pictures,”

said Mr. Miklos politely. “A fine Constable!”—he pointed to the picture

they had just been considering—“but not, I think, entirely by the

master?”

[Illustration: Herr Schwarz was examining a picture with a magnifying

glass when Falloden entered]

“My great-grandfather bought it from Constable himself,” said Douglas.

“It has never been disputed by any one.”

Mr. Miklos did not reply, but he shook his head with a slight smile,

and walked away towards a Turner, a fine landscape of the middle

period, hanging close to the Constable. He peered into it

short-sightedly, with his strong glasses.

“A pity that it has been so badly relined,” he said presently, to

Douglas, pointing to it.

“You think so? Its condition is generally thought to be excellent. My

father was offered eight thousand for it last year by the Berlin

Museum.”

Douglas was now apparently quite at his ease. With his thumbs in the

armholes of his white waistcoat, he strolled along beside the two

buyers, holding his own with both of them, thanks to his careful study

of the materials for the history of the collection possessed by his

father. The elder man, a Bremen ship-owner,—one Wilhelm Schwarz—who had

lately made a rapid and enormous fortune out of the Argentine trade,

and whose chief personal ambition it now was to beat the New York and

Paris collectors, in the great picture game, whatever it might cost,

was presently forced to take some notice of the handsome curly-headed

youth in the perfectly fitting blue serge suit, whose appearance as the

vendor, or the vendor’s agent, had seemed to him, at first, merely one

more instance of English aristocratic stupidity.

As a matter of fact, Herr Schwarz was simply dazzled by the contents of

Flood Castle. He had never dreamt that such virgin treasures still

existed in this old England, till Miklos, instructed by the Falloden

lawyer, had brought the list of the pictures to his hotel, a few days

before this visit. And now he found it extremely difficult to conceal

his excitement and delight, or to preserve, in the presence of this

very sharp-eyed young heir, the proper “don’t care” attitude of the

buyer. He presently left the “running down” business almost entirely to

Miklos, being occupied in silent and feverish speculations as to how

much he could afford to spend, and a passion of covetous fear lest

somehow A——, or Z——, or K——, the leading collectors of the moment,

should even yet forestall him, early and “exclusive” as Miklos assured

him their information had been.

They passed along through the drawing-rooms, and the whole wonderful

series of family portraits, Reynolds’, Lawrences, Gainsboroughs,

Romneys, Hoppners, looked down, unconscious of their doom, upon the

invaders, and on the son of the house, so apparently unconcerned. But

Douglas was very far from unconcerned. He had no artistic gift, and he

had never felt or pretended any special interest in the pictures. They

were part of Flood, and Flood was the inseparable adjunct of the

Falloden race. When his father had first mooted the sale of them,

Douglas had assented without much difficulty. If other things went, why

not they?

But now that he was in the thick of the business, he found, all in a

moment, that he had to set his teeth to see it through. A smarting

sense of loss—loss hateful and irreparable, cutting away both the past

and the future—burnt deep into his mind, as he followed in the track of

the sallow and depreciatory Miklos or watched the podgy figure of Herr

Schwarz, running from side to side as picture after picture caught his

eye. The wincing salesman saw himself as another Charles Surface; but

now that the predicament was his own it was no longer amusing. These

fair faces, these mothers and babies of his own blood, these stalwart

men, fighters by sea and land, these grave thinkers and churchmen, they

thronged about him transformed, become suddenly alien and hostile, a

crowd of threatening ghosts, the outraged witnesses of their own

humiliation. “For what are you selling us?”—they seemed to say.

“Because some one, who was already overfed, must needs grab at a larger

mess of pottage—and we must pay! Unkind! degenerate!”

Presently, after the English drawing-rooms, and the library, with its

one Romney, came the French room, with its precious Watteaus, its

Latours, its two brilliant Nattiers. And here Herr Schwarz’s coolness

fairly deserted him. He gave little shrieks of pleasure, which brought

a frown to the face of his companion, who was anxious to point out that

a great deal of the Watteau was certainly pupil-work, that the Latours

were not altogether “convincing” and the Nattiers though extremely

pretty, “superficial.” But Herr Schwarz brushed him aside.

“_Nein, nein, lieber freund_! Dat Nattier is as fine as anything at

Potsdam. Dat I must have!” And he gazed in ecstasy at the opulent

shoulders, the rounded forms, and gorgeous jewelled dress of an

unrivalled Madame de Pompadour, which had belonged to her brother, the

Marquis de Marigny.

“You will have all or nothing, my good sir!” thought Falloden, and

bided his time.

Meanwhile Miklos, perceiving that his patron was irretrievably landed

and considering that his own “expert” dignity had been sufficiently

saved, relaxed into enthusiasm and small talk. Only in the later

Italian rooms did his critical claws again allow themselves to scratch.

A small Leonardo, the treasure of the house, which had been examined

and written about by every European student of Milanese art for half a

century, was suavely pronounced—

“A Da Predis, of course, but a very nice one!” A Bellini became a

Rondinelli; and the names of a dozen obscure, and lately discovered

painters, freely applied to the Tintorets, Mantegnas and Cimas on the

walls, produced such an effect on Herr Schwarz that he sat down

open-mouthed on the central ottoman, staring first at the pictures and

then at the speaker; not knowing whether to believe or to doubt.

Falloden stood a little apart, listening, a smile on his handsome

mouth.

“We should know nothing about Rondinelli,” said Miklos at last,

sweetly—“but for the great Bode—”

“_Ach_, Bode!” said Herr Schwarz, nodding his head in complacent

recognition at the name of the already famous assistant-director of the

Berlin Museum.

Falloden laughed.

“Dr. Bode was here last year. He told my father he thought the Bellini

was one of the finest in existence.”

Miklos changed countenance slightly.

“Bode perhaps is a trifle credulous,” he said in an offended tone.

But he went back again to the Bellini and examined it closely.

Falloden, without waiting for his second thoughts, took Herr Schwarz

into the dining-room.

At the sight of the six masterpieces hanging on its walls, the Bremen

ship-owner again lost his head. What miraculous good-fortune had

brought him, ahead of all his rivals, into this still unravaged hive?

He ran from side to side,—he grew red, perspiring, inarticulate. At

last he sank down on a chair in front of the Titian, and when Miklos

approached, delicately suggesting that the picture, though certainly

fine, showed traces of one of the later pupils, possibly Molari, in

certain parts, Herr Schwarz waved him aside.

“_Nein, nein!_—Hold your tongue, my dear sir! Here must I judge for

myself.”

Then looking up to Falloden who stood beside him, smiling, almost

reconciled to the vulgar, greedy little man by his collapse, he said

abruptly—

“How much, Mr. Falloden, for your father’s collection?”

“You desire to buy the whole of it?” said Falloden coolly.

“I desire to buy everything that I have seen,” said Herr Schwarz,

breathing quickly. “Your solicitors gave me a list of sixty-five

pictures. No, no, Miklos, go away!”—he waved his expert aside

impatiently.

“Those were the pictures on the ground floor,” said Falloden. “You have

seen them all. You had better make your offer in writing, and I will

take it to my father.”

He fetched pen and paper from a side-table and put them before the

excited German. Herr Schwarz wrinkled his face in profound meditation.

His eyes almost disappeared behind his spectacles, then emerged

sparkling.

He wrote some figures on a piece of paper, and handed it to Douglas.

Douglas laughed drily, and returned it.

“You will hardly expect me to give my father the trouble of considering

that.”

Herr Schwarz puffed and blowed. He got up, and walked about excitedly.

He lit a cigarette, Falloden politely helping him. Miklos advanced

again.

“I have, myself, made a very careful estimate—” he began,

insinuatingly.

“No, no, Miklos,—go away!—go away!” repeated Schwarz impatiently,

almost walking over him. Miklos retreated sulkily.

Schwarz took up the paper of figures, made an alteration, and handed it

to Falloden.

“It is madness,” he said—“sheer madness. But I have in me something of

the poet—the Crusader.”

Falloden’s look of slightly sarcastic amusement, as the little man

breathlessly examined his countenance, threw the buyer into despair.

Douglas put down the paper.

“We gave you the first chance, Herr Schwarz. As you know, nobody is yet

aware of our intentions to sell. But I shall advise my father to-night

to let one or two of the dealers know.”

“_Ach, lieber Gott!_” said Herr Schwarz, and walking away to the

window, he stood looking into the rose-garden outside, making a curious

whistling sound with his prominent lips, expressive, evidently, of

extreme agitation.

Falloden lit another cigarette, and offered one to Miklos.

At the end of two or three minutes, Schwarz again amended the figures

on the scrap of paper, and handed it sombrely to Falloden.

“Dat is my last word.”

Falloden glanced at it, and carelessly said—

“On that I will consult my father.”

He left the room.

Schwarz and Miklos looked at each other.

“What airs these English aristocrats give themselves,” said the

Hungarian angrily—“even when they are beggars, like this young man!”

Schwarz stood frowning, his hands in his pockets, legs apart. His

agitation was calming down, and his more prudent mind already half

regretted his impetuosity.

“Some day—we shall teach them a lesson!” he said, under his breath, his

eyes wandering over the rose-garden and the deer-park beyond. The

rapidly growing docks of Bremen and Hamburg, their crowded shipping,

the mounting tide of their business, came flashing into his mind—ran

through it in a series of images. This England, with her stored wealth,

and her command of the seas—must she always stand between Germany and

her desires? He found himself at once admiring and detesting the

English scene on which he looked. That so much good German money should

have to go into English pockets for these ill-gotten English treasures!

What a country to conquer—and to loot!

“And they are mere children compared to us—silly, thick-headed

children! Yet they have all the plums—everywhere.”

Falloden came back. The two men turned eagerly.

“My father thanks you for your offer, gentlemen. He is very sorry he is

not able to see you as he hoped. He is not very well this afternoon.

But I am to say that he will let you have an answer in twenty-four

hours. Then if he agrees to your terms, the matter will have to go

before the court. That, of course, our lawyers explained to you—”

“That will not suit me at all!” cried Herr Schwarz. “As far as your

father is concerned, my offer must be accepted—or rejected—now.”

He struck his open hand on the polished mahogany of the table beside

him.

“Then I am very sorry you have had the trouble of coming down,” said

Falloden politely. “Shall I order your carriage?”

The great ship-owner stared at him. He was on the point of losing his

temper, perhaps of withdrawing from his bargain, when over Falloden’s

head he caught sight of the Titian and the play of light on its shining

armour; of the Van Dyck opposite. He gave way helplessly; gripped at

the same moment by his parvenu’s ambition, and by the genuine passion

for beautiful things lodged oddly in some chink of his common and

Philistine personality.

“I have the refusal then—for twenty-four hours?” he said curtly.

Falloden nodded, wrote him a statement to that effect, ordered whisky

and soda, and saw them safely to their carriage.

Then pacing slowly through the rooms, he went back towards the library.

His mind was divided between a kind of huckster’s triumph and a sense

of intolerable humiliation. All around him were the “tribal signs” of

race, continuity, history—which he had taken for granted all his life.

But now that a gulf had opened between him and them, his heart clung to

them consciously for the first time. No good! He felt himself cast

out—stripped—exposed. The easy shelter fashioned for him and his by the

lives of generations of his kindred had fallen in fragments about him.

“Well—I never earned it!”—he said to himself bitterly, turning in

disgust on his own self-pity.

When he reached the library he found his father walking up and down

deep in thought. He looked up as his son entered.

“Well, that saves the bankruptcy, Duggy, and—as far as I can see—leaves

a few thousands over—portions for the younger children, and what will

enable you to turn round.”

Douglas assented silently. After a long look at his son, Sir Arthur

opened a side door which led from the library into the suite of

drawing-rooms. Slowly he passed through them, examining the pictures

steadily, one by one. At the end of the series, he turned and came back

again to his own room, with a bent head and meditative step. Falloden

followed him.

In the library, Sir Arthur suddenly straightened himself.

“Duggy, do you hate me—for the mess I’ve made—of your inheritance?”

The question stirred a quick irritation in Falloden. It seemed to him

futile and histrionic; akin to all those weaknesses in his father which

had brought them disaster.

“I don’t think you need ask me that,” he said, rather sharply, as he

opened a drawer in his father’s writing-table, and locked up the paper

containing Herr Schwarz’s offer.

Sir Arthur looked at him wistfully.

“You’ve been a brick, Duggy—since I told you. I don’t know that I had

any right to count upon it.”

“What else could I do?” said Douglas, trying to laugh, but

conscious—resenting it—of a swelling in the throat.

“You could have given a good many more twists to the screw—if you’d

been a different sort,” said his father slowly. “And you’re a tough

customer, Duggy, to some people. But to me”—He paused, beginning again

in another tone—

“Duggy, don’t be offended with me—but did you ever want to marry Lady

Constance Bledlow? You wrote to me about her at Christmas.”

Douglas gave a rather excited laugh.

“It’s rather late in the day to ask me that question.”

His father eyed him.

“You mean she refused you?”

His son nodded.

“Before this collapse?”

“Before she knew anything about it”

“Poor old Duggy!” said his father, in a low voice. “But perhaps—after

all—she’ll think better of it. By all accounts she has the charm of her

mother, whom Risborough married to please himself and not his family.”

Falloden said nothing. He wished to goodness his father would drop the

subject. Sir Arthur understood he was touching things too sore to

handle, and sighed.

“Well, shake hands, Duggy, old boy. You carried this thing through

splendidly to-day. But it seems to have taken it out of me—which isn’t

fair. I shall go for a little walk. Tell your mother I shall be back in

an hour or so.”

The son took his father’s hand. The strong young grasp brought a

momentary sense of comfort to the older man. They eyed each other, both

pale, both conscious of feelings to which it was easier to give no

voice. Then their hands dropped. Sir Arthur looked for his hat and

stick, which were lying near, and went out of the open glass door into

the garden. He passed through the garden into the park beyond walking

slowly and heavily, his son’s eyes following him.

CHAPTER XIV

Out of sight of the house, at the entrance of the walk leading to the

moor, Sir Arthur was conscious again of transitory, but rather sharp

pains across the chest.

He sat down to rest, and they soon passed away. After a few minutes he

pursued his walk, climbing towards the open stretches of heathery moor,

which lay beyond the park, and a certain ghyll or hollow with a wild

stream in it that cleft the moor high up—one of his favourite haunts.

He climbed through ferny paths, and amid stretches of heather just

coming to its purple prime, up towards the higher regions of the moor

where the millstone grit cropped out in sharp edges, showing gaunt and

dark against the afternoon sky. Here the beautiful stream that made a

waterfall within the park came sliding down shelf after shelf of

yellowish rock, with pools of deep brown water at intervals, overhung

with mountain ash and birch.

After the warm day, all the evening scents were abroad, carried by a

gentle wind. Sir Arthur drank them in, with the sensuous pleasure which

had been one of his gifts in life. The honey smell of the heather, the

woody smell of the bracken, the faint fragrance of wood-smoke wafted

from a bonfire in the valley below—they all carried with them an

inexpressible magic for the man wandering on the moor. So did the

movements of birds—the rise of a couple of startled grouse, the

hovering of two kestrels, a flight of wild duck in the distance. Each

and all reminded him of the halcyon times of life—adventures of his

boyhood, the sporting pleasures of his manhood. By George!—how he had

enjoyed them all!

Presently, to his left, on the edge of the heathery slope he caught

sight of one of the butts used in the great grouse-shoots of the moor.

What a jolly party they had had last year in that week of wonderful

October weather! Two hundred brace on the home moor the first day, and

almost as many on the Fairdale moor the following day. Some of the men

had never shot better. One of the party was now Viceroy of India;

another had been killed in one of the endless little frontier fights

that are the price, month by month, which the British Empire pays for

its existence. Douglas had come off particularly well. His shooting

from that butt to the left had been magnificent. Sir Arthur remembered

well how the old hands had praised it, warming the cockles of his own

heart.

“I will have one more shoot,” he said to himself with passion—“I will!”

Then, feeling suddenly tired, he sat down beside the slipping stream.

It was fairly full, after some recent rain, and the music of it rang in

his ears. Stretching out a hand he filled it full of silky grass and

thyme, sniffing at it in delight. “How strange,” he thought, “that I

can still enjoy these things. But I shall—till I die.”

Below him, as he sat, lay the greater part of his estate stretching

east and west; bounded on the west by some of the high moors leading up

to the Pennine range, lost on the east in a blue and wooded distance.

He could see the towers of three village churches, and the blurred

greys and browns of the houses clustering round them—some near, some

far. Stone farm-buildings, their white-washed gables glowing under the

level sun, caught his eye, one after the other—now hidden in wood, now

standing out upon the fields or the moorland, with one sycamore or a

group of yews to shelter them. And here and there were larger houses;

houses of the middle gentry, with their gardens and enclosures. Farms,

villages, woods and moors, they were all his—nominally his, for a few

weeks or months longer. And there was scarcely one of them in the whole

wide scene, with which he had not some sporting association; whether of

the hunting field, or the big autumn shoots, or the jolly partridge

drives over the stubbles.

But it suddenly and sharply struck him how very few other associations

he possessed with these places spread below him in the declining August

sunshine. He had not owned Flood more than fifteen years—enough however

to lose it in! And he had succeeded a father who had been the beloved

head of the county, a just and liberal landlord, a man of scrupulous

kindness and honour, for whom everybody had a friendly word. His ruined

son on the moorside thought with wonder and envy of his father’s

popular arts, which yet were no arts. For himself he confessed,—aware

as he was, this afternoon, of the presence in his mind of a new and

strange insight with regard to his own life and past, as though he were

writing his own obituary—that the people living in these farms and

villages had meant little more to him than the troublesome conditions

on which he enjoyed the pleasures of the Flood estates, the great

income he drew from them, and the sport for which they were famous. He

had his friends among the farmers of course, though they were few.

There were men who had cringed to him, and whom he had rewarded. And

Laura had given away plentifully in the villages. But his chief agent

he knew had been a hard man and a careless one; and he had always

loathed the trouble of looking after him. Again and again he had been

appealed to, as against his agent; and he had not even answered the

letters. He had occasionally done some public duties; he had allowed

himself to be placed on the County Council, but had hardly ever

attended meetings; he had taken the chair and made a speech

occasionally, when it would have cost him more effort to refuse than to

accept; and those portions of the estate which adjoined the castle were

in fairly good repair. But on the remoter farms, and especially since

his financial resources had begun to fail, he knew very well that there

were cottages and farm-houses in a scandalous state, on which not a

farthing had been spent for years.

No, it could not be said he had played a successful part as a

landowner. He had meant no harm to anybody. He had been simply idle and

preoccupied; and that in a business where, under modern conditions,

idleness is immoral. He was quite conscious that there were good men,

frugal men, kind and God-fearing men, landlords like himself, though on

a much smaller scale, in that tract of country under his feet, who felt

bitterly towards him, who judged him severely, who would be thankful to

see the last of him, and to know that the land had passed into other

and better hands. Fifty-two years of life lived in that northern Vale

of Eden; and what was there to show for them?—in honest work done, in

peace of conscience, in friends? Now that the pictures were sold, there

would be just enough to pay everybody, with a very little over. There

was some comfort in that. He would have ruined nobody but himself and

Duggy. Poor Laura would be quite comfortable on her own money, and

would give him house-room no doubt—till the end.

The end? But he might live another twenty years. The thought was

intolerable. The apathy in which he had been lately living gave way. He

realised, with quickened breath, what this parting from his inheritance

and all the associations of his life would mean. He saw himself as a

tree, dragged violently out of its native earth—rootless and rotten.

Poor Duggy! Duggy was as proud and wilful as himself; with more

personal ambition however, and less of that easy, sensuous

recklessness, that gambler’s spirit, which had led his father into such

quagmires. Duggy had shown up well these last weeks. He was not a boy

to talk, but in acts he had been good.

And through the man’s remorseful soul there throbbed the one deep,

disinterested affection of his life—his love for his son. He had been

very fond of Laura, but when it came to moments like this she meant

little to him.

He gave himself up to this feeling of love. How strange that it should

both rend and soothe!—that it and it alone brought some comfort, some

spermaceti for the inward bruise, amid all the bitterness connected

with it. Duggy, in his arms, as a little toddling fellow, Duggy at

school—playing for Harrow at Lord’s—Duggy at college—

But of that part of his son’s life, as he realised with shame, he knew

very little. He had been too entirely absorbed, when it arrived, in the

frantic struggle, first for money, and then for solvency. Duggy had

become in some ways during the last two years a stranger to him—his own

fault! What had he done to help him through his college life—to

“influence him for good,” as people said? Nothing. He had been

enormously proud of his son’s university distinctions; he had supplied

him lavishly with money; he had concealed from him his own financial

situation till it was hopeless; he had given him the jolliest possible

vacation, and that was all that could be said.

The father groaned within himself. And yet again—how strangely!—did

some fraction of healing virtue flow from his very distress?—from his

remembrance, above all, of how Duggy had tried to help him?—during

these few weeks since he knew?

Ah!—Tidswell Church coming out of the shadows! He remembered how one

winter he had been coming home late on horseback through dark lanes,

when he met the parson of that church, old and threadbare and

narrow-chested, trudging on, head bent, against a spitting rain. The

owner of Flood had been smitten with a sudden compunction, and

dismounting he had walked his horse beside the old man. The living of

Tidswell was in his own gift. It amounted, he remembered, to some £140

a year. The old man, whose name was Trevenen, had an old wife, to whom

Sir Arthur thought Lady Laura had sometimes sent some cast-off clothes.

Mr. Trevenen had been baptising a prematurely born child in a high

moorland farm. The walk there and back had been steep and long, and his

thin lantern-jawed face shone very white through the wintry dusk.

“You must be very tired,” Sir Arthur had said, remembering

uncomfortably the dinner to which he was himself bent—the chef, the

wines, the large house-party.

And Mr. Trevenen had looked up and smiled.

“Not very. I have been unusually cheered as I walked by thoughts of the

Divine Love!”

The words had been so simply said; and a minute afterwards the old

pale-faced parson had disappeared into the dark.

What did the words mean? Had they really any meaning?

“The Divine Love.” Arthur Falloden did not know then, and did not know

now. But he had often thought of the incident.

He leaned over, musing, to gather a bunch of hare-bells growing on the

edge of the stream. As he did so, he was conscious again of a sharp

pain in the chest. In a few more seconds, he was stretched on the

moorland grass, wrestling with a torturing anguish that was crushing

his life out. It seemed to last an eternity. Then it relaxed, and he

was able to breathe and think again.

“What is it?”

Confused recollections of the death of his old grandfather, when he

himself was a child, rose in his mind. “He was out hunting—horrible

pain—two hours. Is this the same? If it is—I shall die—here—alone.”

He tried to move after a little, but found himself helpless. A brief

intermission, and the pain rushed on him again, like a violent and

ruthless hand, grinding the very centres of life. When he recovered

consciousness, it was with the double sense of blissful relief from

agony and of ebbing strength. What had happened to him? How long had he

been there?

“Could you drink this?” said a voice behind him. He opened his eyes and

saw a young man, with a halo of red-gold hair, and a tremulous, pitying

face, quite strange to him, bending over him.

There was some brandy at his lips. He drank with difficulty. What had

happened to the light? How dark it was!

“Where am I?” he said, looking up blindly into the face above him.

“I found you here—on the moor—lying on the grass. Are you better? Shall

I run down now—and fetch some one?”

“Don’t go—”

The agony returned. When Sir Arthur spoke again, it was very feebly.

“I can’t live—through—much more of that. I’m dying. Don’t leave me.

Where’s my son? Where’s my son—Douglas? Who are you?”

The glazing eyes tried to make out the features of the stranger. They

were too dim to notice the sudden shiver that passed through them as he

named his son.

“I can’t get at any one. I’ve been calling for a long time. My name is

Radowitz. I’m staying at Penfold Rectory. If I could only carry you! I

tried to lift you—but I couldn’t. I’ve only one hand.” He pointed

despairingly to the sling he was wearing.

“Tell my son—tell Douglas—”

But the faint voice ceased abruptly, and the eyes closed. Only there

was a slight movement of the lips, which Radowitz, bending his ear to

the mouth of the dying man, tried to interpret. He thought it said

“pray,” but he could not be sure.

Radowitz looked round him in an anguish. No one on the purple side of

the moor, no one on the grassy tracks leading downwards to the park;

only the wide gold of the evening—the rising of a light wind—the

rustling of the fern—and the loud, laboured breathing below him.

He bent again over the helpless form, murmuring words in haste.

Meanwhile after Sir Arthur left the house, Douglas had been urgently

summoned by his mother. He found her at tea with Trix in her own

sitting-room. Roger was away, staying with a school friend, to the

general relief of the household; Nelly, the girl of seventeen, was with

relations in Scotland, but Trix had become her mother’s little shadow

and constant companion. The child was very conscious of the weight on

her parents’ minds. Her high spirits had all dropped. She had a

wistful, shrinking look, which suited ill with her round face and her

childishly parted lips over her small white teeth. The little face was

made for laughter; but in these days only Douglas could bring back her

smiles, because mamma was so unhappy and cried so much; and that mamma

should cry seemed to bring her whole world tumbling about the child’s

ears. Only Douglas, for sheer impatience with the general gloom of the

house, would sometimes tease her or chase her; and then the child’s

laugh would ring out—a ghostly echo from the days before Lady Laura

“knew.”

Poor Lady Laura! Up to the last moment before the crash, her husband

had kept everything from her. She was not a person of profound or

sensitive feeling; and yet it is probable that her resentment of her

husband’s long secrecy, and the implications of it, counted for a great

deal in her distress and misery.

The sale of the pictures, as shortly reported by Douglas, had

overwhelmed her. As soon as her son appeared in her room, she poured

out upon him a stream of lamentation and complaint, while Trix was

alternately playing with the kitten on her knee and drying furtive

tears on a very grubby pocket-handkerchief.

Douglas was on the whole patient and explanatory, for he was really

sorry for his mother; but as soon as he could he escaped from her on

the plea of urgent letters and estate accounts.

The August evening wore on, and it was nearing sunset when his mother

came hurriedly into the library.

“Douglas, where is your father?”

“He went out for a walk before tea. Hasn’t he come in?”

“No. And it’s more than two hours. I—I don’t like it, Duggy. He hasn’t

been a bit well lately—and so awfully depressed. Please go and look for

him, dear!”

Douglas suddenly perceived the terror in his mother’s mind. It seemed

to him absurd. He knew his father better than she did; but he took his

hat and went out obediently.

He had happened to notice his father going towards the moor, and he

took the same path, running simply for exercise, measuring his young

strength against the steepness of the hill and filling his lungs with

the sweet evening air, in a passionate physical reaction against the

family distress.

Five miles away, in this same evening glow, was Constance Bledlow

walking or sitting in her aunts’ garden? Or was she nearer still—at

Penfold Rectory, just beyond the moor he was climbing, the old

rectory-house where Sorell and Radowitz were staying? He had taken good

care to give that side of the hills a wide berth since his return home.

But a great deal of the long ridge was common ground, and in the

private and enclosed parts there were several rights of way crossing

the moor, besides the one lonely road traversing it from end to end on

which he had met Constance Bledlow. If he had not been so tied at home,

and so determined not to run any risks of a meeting, he might very well

have come across Sorell at least, if not Radowitz, on the high ground

dominating the valleys on either side. Sorell was a great walker. But

probably they were as anxious to avoid a casual meeting as he was.

The evening was rapidly darkening, and as he climbed he searched the

hillside with his quick eyes for any sign of his father. Once or twice

he stopped to call:

“Father!”

The sound died away, echoing among the fields and hollows of the moor.

But there was no answer. He climbed further. He was now near the stream

which descended through the park, and its loud jubilant voice burst

upon him, filling the silence.

Then, above the plashing of the stream and the rising of the wind, he

heard suddenly a cry:

“Help!”

It came from a point above his head. A sudden horror came upon him. He

dashed on. In another minute a man’s figure appeared, higher up, dark

against the reddened sky. The man put one hand to his mouth, and

shouted through it again—“Help!”

Douglas came up with him. In speechless amazement he saw that it was

Otto Radowitz, without a coat, bareheaded, pale and breathless.

“There’s a man here, Falloden. I think it’s your father. He’s awfully

ill. I believe he’s dying. Come at once! I’ve been shouting for a long

time.”

Douglas said nothing. He rushed on, following Radowitz, who took a

short cut bounding through the deep ling of the moor. Only a few yards

till Douglas perceived a man, with a grey, drawn face, who was lying

full length on a stretch of grass beside the stream, his head and

shoulders propped against a low rock on which a folded coat had been

placed as a pillow.

“Father!”

Sir Arthur opened his eyes. He was drawing deep, gasping breaths, the

strong life in him wrestling still. But the helplessness, the ineffable

surrender and defeat of man’s last hour, was in his face.

Falloden knelt down.

“Father!—don’t you know me? Well soon carry you home. It’s Duggy!” No

answer. Radowitz had gone a few yards away, and was also kneeling, his

face buried in his hands, his back turned to the father and son.

Douglas made another agonised appeal, and the grey face quivered. A

whisper passed the lips.

“It’s best, Duggy—poor Duggy! Kiss me, old boy. Tell your mother—that

young man—prayed for me. She’ll like to—know that. My love—”

The last words were spoken with a great effort; and the breaths that

followed grew slower and slower as the vital tide withdrew itself. Once

more the eyes opened, and Douglas saw in them the old affectionate

look. Then the lips shaped themselves again to words that made no

sound; a shudder passed through the limbs—their last movement.

Douglas knelt on, looking closely into his father’s face, listening for

the breath that came no more. He felt rather than saw that Radowitz had

moved still further away.

Two or three deep sobs escaped him—involuntary, almost unconscious.

Then he pulled himself together. His mother? Who was to tell her?

He went to call Radowitz, who came eagerly.

“My father is dead,” said Falloden, deadly pale, but composed. “How

long have you been here?”

“About half an hour. When I arrived he was in agonies of pain. I gave

him brandy, and he revived a little. Then I wanted to go for help, but

he begged me not to leave him alone. So I could only shout and wave my

handkerchief. The pains came back and back—and every time he grew

weaker. Oh, it was _angina_. I have seen it before—twice. If I had only

had some nitrite of amyl! But there was nothing—nothing I could do.” He

paused, and then added timidly, “I am a Catholic; I said some of our

prayers.”

He looked gravely into Falloden’s face. Falloden’s eyes met his, and

both men remembered—momentarily—the scene in Marmion Quad.

“We must get him down,” said Falloden abruptly. “And there is my

mother.”

“I would help you to carry him, of course; but—you see—I can’t.”

[Illustration: Douglas knelt, looking into his father’s face, and

Radowitz moved farther away]

His delicate skin flushed deeply. Falloden realised for the first time

the sling across his shoulder and the helpless hand lying in it. He

turned away, searching with his eyes the shadows of the valley. At the

moment, the spot where they stood was garishly illuminated by the

rapidly receding light, which had already left the lower ground. The

grass at their feet, the rocks, the stream, the stretches of heather

were steeped and drenched in the last rays of sun which shot upon them

in a fierce concentration from the lower edge of a great cloud. But the

landmarks below were hard to make out—for a stranger’s eyes.

“You see that cottage—where the smoke is?”

Radowitz assented.

“You will find a keeper there. Send him with three or four men.”

“Yes—at once. Shall I take a message to the house?”

Radowitz spoke very gently. The red-gold of his hair, and his blue

eyes, were all shining in the strange light. But he was again as pale

as Falloden himself. Douglas drew out a pencil, and a letter from his

pocket. He wrote some words on the envelope, and handed it to Radowitz.

“That’s for my mother’s maid. She will know what to do. She is an old

servant. I must stay here.”

Radowitz rushed away, leaping and running down the steep side of the

hill, his white shirt, crossed by the black sling, conspicuous all the

way, till he was at last lost to sight in the wood leading to the

keeper’s cottage.

Falloden went back to the dead man. He straightened his father’s limbs

and closed his eyes. Then he lay down beside him, throwing his arm

tenderly across the body. And the recollection came back to him of that

hunting accident years ago—the weight of his father on his

shoulders—the bitter cold—the tears which not all his boyish scorn of

tears could stop.

His poor mother! She must see Radowitz, for Radowitz alone could tell

the story of that last half hour. He must give evidence, too, at the

inquest.

_Radowitz_! Thoughts, ironic and perverse, ran swarming through

Falloden’s brain, as though driven through it from outside. What a

nursery tale!—how simple!—how crude! Could not the gods have devised a

subtler retribution?

Then these thoughts vanished again, like a cloud of gnats. The touch of

his father’s still warm body brought him back to the plain, tragic

fact. He raised himself on his elbow to look again at the dead face.

The handsome head with its grizzled hair was resting on Radowitz’s

coat. Falloden could not bear it. He took off his own, and gently

substituted it for the other. And as he laid the head down, he kissed

the hair and the brow. He was alone with his father—more alone than he

ever would be again. There was not a human step or voice upon the moor.

Night was coming rapidly on. The stream rushed beside him. There were a

few cries of birds—mostly owls from the woods below. The dead man’s

face beside him was very solemn and quiet. And overhead, the angry

sunset clouds were fading into a dim and star-strewn heaven, above a

world sinking to its rest.

The moon was up before Radowitz came back to the little rectory on the

other side of the moor. Sorell, from whose mind he was seldom absent,

had begun to worry about him, was in fact on the point of setting out

in search of him. But about nine o’clock he heard the front gate open

and jumping down from the low open window of the rectory drawing-room

he went to meet the truant.

Radowitz staggered towards him, and clung to his arm.

“My dear fellow,” cried Sorell, aghast at the bay’s appearance and

manner—“what have you been doing to yourself?”

“I went up the moor for a walk after tea—it was so gorgeous, the clouds

and the view. I got drawn on a bit—on the castle side. I wasn’t really

thinking where I was going. Then I saw the park below me, and the

house. And immediately afterwards, I heard a groaning sound, and there

was a man lying on the ground. It was Sir Arthur Falloden—and he

died—while I was there.” The boy’s golden head dropped suddenly against

Sorell. “I say, can’t I have some food, and go to bed?”

Sorell took him in and looked after him like a mother, helped by the

kind apple-faced rector, who had heard the castle news from other

sources also, and was greatly moved.

When Otto’s exhaustion had been fed and he was lying in his bed with

drawn brows, and no intention or prospect of going to sleep, Sorell let

him tell his tale.

“When the bearers came, I went down with them to the castle, and I saw

Lady Laura”—said the boy, turning his head restlessly from side to

side. “I say, it’s awful—how women cry! Then they told me about the

inquest—I shall have to go to-morrow—and on the way home I went to see

Lady Connie. I thought she ought to know.”

Sorell started.

“And you found her?”

“Oh, yes. She was sitting in the garden.”

There was a short silence. Then Otto flung up his left hand, caught a

gnat that was buzzing round his head, and laughed—a dreary little

sound.

“It’s quite true—she’s in love with him.”

“With Douglas Falloden?”

Otto nodded.

“She was awfully cut up when I told her—just for him. She didn’t cry of

course. Our generation doesn’t seem to cry—like Lady Laura. But you

could see what she wanted.”

“To go to him?”

“That’s it. And of course she can’t. My word, it is hard on women!

They’re hampered such a lot—by all their traditions. Why don’t they

kick ’em over?”

“I hope she will do nothing of the kind,” said Sorell with energy. “The

traditions may just save her.”

Otto thought over it.

“You mean—save her from doing something for pity that she wouldn’t do

if she had time to think?”

Sorell assented.

“Why should that fellow be any more likely now to make her happy—”

“Because he’s lost his money and his father? I don’t know why he

should. I dare say he’ll begin bullying and slave-driving again—when

he’s forgotten all this. But—”

“But what?”

“Well—you see—I didn’t think he could possibly care about anything but

himself. I thought he was as hard as a millstone all through. Well, he

isn’t. That’s so queer!”

The speaker’s voice took a dreamy tone.

Sorell glanced in bitterness at the maimed hand lying on the bed. It

was still bandaged, but he knew very well what sort of a shapeless,

ruined thing it would emerge, when the bandages were thrown aside. It

was strange and fascinating—to a student of psychology—that Otto should

have been brought, so suddenly, so unforeseeably, into this pathetic

and intimate relation with the man to whom, essentially, he owed his

disaster. But what difference did it make in the quality of the Marmion

outrage, or to any sane judgment of Douglas Falloden?

“Go to sleep, old boy,” he said at last. “You’ll have a hard time

to-morrow.”

“What, the inquest? Oh, I don’t mind about that. If I could only

understand that fellow!”

He threw his head back, staring at the ceiling.

Otto Radowitz, in spite of Sorell’s admonitions, slept very little that

night. His nights were apt to be feverish and disturbed. But on this

occasion imagination and excitement made it impossible to stop the

brain process, the ceaseless round of thought; and the hours of

darkness were intolerably long. Memory went back behind the meeting

with the dying man on the hillside, to an earlier experience—an hour of

madness, of “possession.” His whole spiritual being was still bruised

and martyred from it, like that sufferer of old whom the evil spirit

“tore” in departing. What had delivered him? The horror was still on

him, still his master, when he became aware of that white face on the

grass—

He drowsed off again. But in his half-dream, he seemed to be kneeling

again and reciting Latin words, words he had heard last when his mother

was approaching her end. He was more than half sceptical, so far as the

upper mind was concerned; but the under-consciousness was steeped in

ideas derived from his early home and training, ideas of sacrifice,

forgiveness, atonement, judgment—the common and immortal stock of

Christianity. He had been brought up in a house pervaded by the

crucifix, and by a mother who was ardently devout.

But why had God—if there was a God—brought this wonderful thing to

pass? Never had his heart been so full of hatred as in that hour of

lonely wandering on the moor, before he perceived the huddled figure

lying by the stream. And, all in a moment, he had become his enemy’s

proxy—his representative—in the last and tenderest service that man can

render to man. He had played the part of son to Falloden’s dying

father—had prayed for him from the depths of his heart, tortured with

pity. And when Falloden came, with what strange eyes they had looked at

each other!—as though all veils had dropped—all barriers had, for the

moment, dropped away.

“Shall I hate him again to-morrow?” thought Radowitz. “Or shall I be

more sorry for him than for myself? Yes, that’s what I felt!—so

marvellously!”

So that when he went to Constance with his news, and under the emotion

of it, saw the girl’s heart unveiled—“I was not jealous,” he thought.

“I just wanted to give her everything!”

Yet, as the night passed on, and that dreary moment of the first

awakening earth arrived, when all the griefs of mankind weigh heaviest,

he was shaken anew by gusts of passion and despair; and this time for

himself. Suppose—for in spite of all Sorell’s evasions and

concealments, he knew very well that Sorell was anxious about him, and

the doctors had said ugly things—suppose he got really ill?—suppose he

died, without having lived?

He thought of Constance in the moonlit garden, her sweetness, her

gratefulness to him for coming, her small, white “flower-face,” and the

look in her eyes.

“If I might—only once—have kissed her—have held her in my arms!” he

thought, with anguish. And rolling on his face, he lay prone, fighting

his fight alone, till exhaustion conquered, and “he took the gift of

sleep.”

CHAPTER XV

Douglas Falloden was sitting alone in his father’s library surrounded

by paper and documents. He had just concluded a long interview with the

family lawyer; and a tray containing the remains of their hasty

luncheon was on a side-table. The room had a dusty, dishevelled air.

Half of the house-servants had been already dismissed; the rest were

disorganised. Lady Laura had left Flood the day before. To her son’s

infinite relief she had consented to take the younger children and go

on a long visit to some Scotch relations. It had been left vague

whether she returned to Flood or not; but Douglas hoped that the

parting was already over—without her knowing it; and that he should be

able to persuade her, after Scotland, to go straight to the London

house—which was her own property—for the winter.

Meanwhile he himself had been doing his best to wind up affairs. The

elaborate will of twenty years earlier, with its many legacies and

bequests, had been cancelled by Sir Arthur only six weeks before his

death. A very short document had been substituted for it, making

Douglas and a certain Marmaduke Falloden, his uncle and an eminent

K.C., joint executors, and appointing Douglas and Lady Laura guardians

of the younger children. Whatever property might remain “after the

payment of my just debts” was to be divided in certain proportions

between Douglas and his brother and sisters.

The estates, with the exception of the lands immediately surrounding

the castle, were to be sold to the tenants, and the dates of the

auction were already fixed. For the castle itself, negotiations had

been opened with an enormously successful soap-boiler from the north,

but an American was also in the market, and the Falloden solicitors

were skilfully playing the two big fish against each other. The sale of

the pictures would come before the court early in October. Meanwhile

the beautiful Romney—the lady in black—still looked down upon her

stripped and impoverished descendant; and Falloden, whose sole

companion she often was through dreary hours, imagined her sometimes as

tragic or reproachful, but more commonly as mocking him with a

malicious Irish glee.

There would be some few thousand pounds left for himself when all was

settled. He was determined to go into Parliament, and his present

intention was to stand for a Merton fellowship, and read for the bar.

If other men could make three or four thousand a year within three

years or so of being called, why not he? His character had steeled

under the pressure of disaster. He realised with a clearer

intelligence, day by day, all that had gone from him—his father—his

inheritance—the careless ease and self-assurance that goes with the

chief places at the feast of life. But if he must now drop to the lower

rooms, it would not be “with shame” that he would do that, or anything

else. He felt within himself a driving and boundless energy, an iron

will to succeed. There was even a certain bitter satisfaction in

measuring himself against the world without the props and privileges he

had hitherto possessed. He was often sore and miserable to his heart’s

depths; haunted by black regrets and compunction he could not get rid

of. All the same it was his fixed resolve to waste no thoughts on mere

happiness. His business was to make a place for himself as an able man

among able men, to ask of ambition, intelligence, hard work, and the

sharpening of brain on brain, the satisfaction he had once hoped to get

out of marriage with Constance Bledlow, and the easy, though masterly,

use of great wealth.

He turned to look at the clock.

She had asked him for five. He had ordered his horse accordingly, the

only beast still left in the Flood stables, and his chief means of

escape during a dreary fortnight from his peevish co-executor, who was

of little or no service, and had allowed himself already to say

unpardonable things about his dead brother, even to that brother’s son.

It was too soon to start, but he pushed his papers aside impatiently.

The mere prospect of seeing Constance Bledlow provoked in him a dumb

and troubled excitement. Under its impulse he left the library, and

began to walk aimlessly through the dreary and deserted house, for the

mere sake of movement. The pictures were still on the walls, for the

sale of them had not yet been formally sanctioned by the court; but all

Lady Laura’s private and personal possessions had been removed to

London, and dust-sheets covered the furniture. Some of it indeed had

been already sold, and workmen were busy packing in the great hall,

amid a dusty litter of paper and straw. All the signs of normal life,

which make the character of a house, had gone; what remained was only

the débris of a once animated whole. Houses have their fate no less

than books; and in the ears of its last Falloden possessor, the whole

of the great many-dated fabric, from its fourteenth century foundations

beneath the central tower, to the pseudo-Gothic with which Wyatt had

disfigured the garden front, had often, since his father’s death,

seemed to speak with an almost human voice of lamentation and distress.

But this afternoon Falloden took little notice of his surroundings. Why

had she written to him?

Well, after all, death is death, and the merest strangers had written

to him—letters that he was now wearily answering. But there had been

nothing perfunctory in her letter. As he read it he had seemed to hear

her very voice saying the soft, touching things in it—things that women

say so easily and men can’t hit upon; and to be looking into her

changing face, and the eyes that could be so fierce, and then again so

childishly sweet and sad—as he had seen them, at their last meeting on

the moor, while she was giving him news of Radowitz. Yet there was not

a word in the letter that might not have been read on the

house-tops—not a trace in it of her old alluring, challenging self.

Simplicity—deep feeling—sympathy—in halting words, and unfinished

sentences—and yet something conspicuously absent and to all appearance

so easily, unconsciously absent, that all the sweetness and pity

brought him more smart than soothing. Yes, she had done with him—for

all her wish to be kind to him. He saw it plainly; and he turned back

thirstily to those past hours in Lathom Woods, when he had felt

himself, if only for a moment, triumphant master of her thoughts, if

not her heart; rebelled against, scolded, flouted, yet still

tormentingly necessary and important. All that delicious friction,

those disputes that are the forerunner of passion were gone—forever.

She was sorry for him—and very kind. His touchy pride recoiled, reading

into her letter what she had never dreamt of putting into it, just

because of the absence of that something—that old tremor—those old

signs of his influence over her, which, of course, she would never let

him see again.

All the same he had replied at once, asking if he might come and say

good-bye before she left Scarfedale. And she had sent him a

telegram—“Delighted—to-morrow—five o’clock.”

And he was going—out of a kind of recklessness—kind of obstinate recoil

against the sorrowful or depressing circumstance of life. He had given

up all thoughts of trying to win her back, even if there were any

chance of it. His pride would not let him sue as a pauper; and of

course the Langmoors to whom she was going—he understood—from

Scarfedale, would take good care she did not throw herself away. Quite

right too. Very likely the Tamworths would capture her; and Bletchley

was quite a nice fellow.

When he did see her, what could they talk about? Radowitz?

He would like to send a message through her to Radowitz—to say

something—

What could he say? He had seen Radowitz for a few minutes after the

inquest—to thank him for his evidence—and for what he had done for Sir

Arthur. Both had hurried through it. Falloden had seemed to himself

stricken with aphasia. His mouth was dry, his tongue useless. And

Radowitz had been all nerves, a nickering colour—good God, how deathly

he looked!

Afterwards he had begun a letter to Radowitz, and had toiled at it,

sometimes at dead of night and in a feverish heat of brain. But he had

never finished or sent it. What was the use? Nothing was changed. That

black sling and the damaged hand in it stood for one of those hard

facts that no wishing, and no sentimentalising, and no remorse could

get over.

“I wish to God I had let him alone!”

That now was the frequent and bitter cry of Falloden’s inmost being.

Trouble and the sight of trouble—sorrow—and death—had been to him, as

to other men, sobering and astonishing facts. The most decisive effect

of them had been to make him vulnerable, to break through the hard

defences of pride and custom, so that he realised what he had done. And

this realisation was fast becoming a more acute and haunting thing than

anything else. It constantly drove out the poignant recollection of his

father’s death, or the dull sense of financial loss and catastrophe.

Loss and catastrophe might be at some distant time made good. But what

could ever give Radowitz back his art—his career—his natural object in

life? The hatches of the present had just got to be closed over this

ugly, irreparable thing. “I can’t undo it—nothing can ever be undone.

But I can’t spend my life in repenting it; one must just go forward,

and not let that, or anything else, hamstring a man who has got his

fight to fight, and can’t get out of it.”

Undo it? No. But were no, even partial, amends possible?—nothing that

could be offered, or done, or said?—nothing that would give Constance

Bledlow pleasure, or change her opinion?—efface that shrinking in her,

of which he hated to think?

He cudgelled his brains, but could think of nothing.

Money, of course, was of no use, even if he still possessed it.

Radowitz, in all matters connected with money, was hypersensitive and

touchy. It was well known that he had private means; and it was

certainly probable that he was now the richer man of the two.

No—there was nothing to be done. He had maimed forever the vital,

energising impulse in another human being, and it could never be

repaired. “His poor music!—_murdered_”—the words from Constance

Bledlow’s horror-stricken letter were always in his mind. And the day

after the inquest on Sir Arthur, he had had some conversation on the

medical points of his father’s case, and on the light thrown on them by

Radowitz’s evidence, with the doctor who was then attending Lady Laura,

and had, it appeared, been several times called in by Sorell during the

preceding weeks to see Radowitz and report on the progress of the hand.

“A bad business!” said the young man, who had intelligence and was

fresh from hospital—“and awful hard luck!—he might have hurt his hand

in a score of ways and still have recovered the use of it, but with

this particular injury”—he shook his head—“nothing to be done! And the

worst of it is that a trouble like this, which cuts across a man’s

career, goes so deep. The thing I should be most afraid of is his

general health. You can see that he’s delicate—narrow-chested—a bundle

of nerves. It might be phthisis—it might be”—he shrugged his

shoulders—“well, depression, bad neurasthenia. And the poor lad seems

to have no family—no mother or sisters—to look after him. But he’ll

want a lot of care, if he’s to pull round again. An Oxford row, wasn’t

it? Abominable!”

But here the sudden incursion of Lady Laura’s maid to ask a question

for her mistress had diverted the doctor’s thoughts and spared Falloden

reply.

A little later, he was riding slowly up the side of the moor towards

Scarfedale, looking down on a landscape which since his childhood had

been so intimate and familiar a part of himself that the thought of

being wrenched away from it, immediately and for good, seemed merely

absurd.

September was nearly gone; and the trees had long passed out of their

August monotony, and were already prophetic of the October blaze. The

level afternoon light was searching out the different planes of

distance, giving to each hedgerow, elm or oak, a separate force and

kingship: and the golden or bronze shades, which were day by day

stealing through the woods, made gorgeous marriage with the evening

purple. The castle, as he gazed back upon it, had sunk into the

shadows, a dim magnificent ghost, seen through mist, like the Rhine

maidens through the blue water.

And there it would stand, perhaps for generations yet, long after he

and his kindred knew it no more. What did the plight of its last owner

matter to it, or to the woods and hills? He tried to think of that

valley a hundred years hence—a thousand!—and felt himself the merest

insect crawling on the face of this old world, which is yet so young.

But only for a moment. Rushing back, came the proud, resisting sense of

personality—of man’s dominance over nature—of the Nietzschean “will to

power.” To be strong, to be sufficient to one’s self; not to yield, but

to be forever counterattacking circumstance, so as to be the master of

circumstance, whatever blows it might choose to strike—that seemed to

be the best, the only creed left to him.

When he reached the Scarfedale house, and a gardener had taken his

horse, the maid who opened the door told him he would find Lady

Constance on the lawn. The old ladies were out driving.

Very decent of the old ladies, he thought, as he followed the path into

the garden.

There she was!—her light form lost, almost, in a deep chair, under a

lime-tree. The garden was a tangle of late blooming flowers; everything

growing rank and fast, as though to get as much out of the soil and the

sun as possible, before the first frost made execution. It was

surrounded by old red walls that held the dropping sun, and it was full

of droning bees, and wagtails stepping daintily over the lawns.

Connie rose and came towards him. She was in black with pale pink roses

in her hat. In spite of her height, she seemed to him the slightest,

gracefullest thing, and as she neared him, she lifted her deep brown

eyes, and it was as though he had never seen before how beautiful they

were.

“It was kind of you to come!” she said shyly.

He made no reply, till she had placed him beside her under the lime.

Then he looked round him, a smile twitching his lip.

“Your aunts are not at home?”

“No. They have gone for their drive. Did you wish to see them?”

“I am in terror of your Aunt Winifred. She and I had many ructions when

I was small. She thought our keepers used to shoot her cats.”

“They probably did!”

“Of course. But a keeper who told the truth about it would have no

moral sense.”

They both laughed, looking into each other’s faces with a sudden sense

of relief from tension. After all the tragedy and the pain, there they

were, still young, still in the same world together. And the sun was

still shining and flowers blooming. Yet, all the same, there was no

thought of any renewal of their old relation on either side. Something

unexpressed, yet apparently final, seemed to stand between them;

differing very much in his mind from the something in hers, yet equally

potent. She, who had gone through agonies of far too tender pity for

him, felt now a touch of something chill and stern in the circumstance

surrounding him that seemed to put her aside. “This is not your

business,” it seemed to say; so that she saw herself as an

inexperienced child playing with that incalculable thing—the male.

Attempts at sympathy or advice died away—she rebelled, and submitted.

Still there are things—experiments—that even an inexperienced child, a

child “of good will” may venture. All the time that she was talking to

Falloden, a secret expectation, a secret excitement ran through her

inner mind. There was a garden door to her left, across a lawn. Her

eyes were often on it, and her ear listened for the click of the latch.

Meanwhile Falloden talked very frankly of the family circumstances and

his own plans. How changed the tone was since they had discussed the

same things, riding through the Lathom Woods in June! There was little

less self-confidence, perhaps; but the quality of it was not the same.

Instead of alienating, it began to touch and thrill her. And her heart

could not help its sudden tremor when he spoke of wintering “in or near

Oxford.” There was apparently a Merton prize fellowship in December on

which his hopes were set, and the first part of his bar examination to

read for, whether he got a fellowship or no.

“And Parliament?” she asked him.

“Yes—that’s my aim,” he said quietly. “Of course it’s the fashion just

now, especially in Oxford, to scoff at politics and the House of

Commons. It’s like the ‘art-for-arters’ in town. As if you could solve

anything by words—or paints!”

“Your father was in the House for some time?”

She bent towards him, as she mentioned his father, with a lovely

unconscious gesture that sent a tremor through him. He seemed to

perceive all that shaken feeling in her mind to which she found it so

impossible to give expression; on which his own action had placed so

strong a curb.

He replied that his father had been in Parliament for some twelve

years, and had been a Tory Whip part of the time. Then he paused, his

eyes on the grass, till he raised them to say abruptly:

“You heard about it all—from Radowitz?”

She nodded.

“He came here that same night.” And then suddenly, in the golden light,

he saw her flush vividly. Had she realised that what she had said

implied a good deal?—or might be thought to imply it? Why should

Radowitz take the trouble, after his long and exhausting experience, to

come round by the Scarfedale manor-house?

“It was an awful time for him,” he said, his eyes on hers. “It was very

strange that he should be there.”

She hesitated. Her lips trembled.

“He was very glad to be there. Only he was sorry—for you.”

“You mean he was sorry that I wasn’t there sooner—with my father?”

“I think that was what he felt—that there was only a stranger.”

“I was just in time,” said Falloden slowly. “And I wonder—whether

anything matters, to the dying?”

There was a pause, after which he added, with sudden energy—

“I thought—at the inquest—he himself looked pretty bad.”

“Otto Radowitz?” Constance covered her eyes with her hands a moment—a

gesture of pain. “Mr. Sorell doesn’t know what to do for him. He has

been losing ground lately. The doctors say he ought to live in the

open-air. He and Mr. Sorell talk of a cottage near Oxford, where Mr.

Sorell can go often and see him. But he can’t live alone.”

As she spoke Falloden’s attention was diverted. He had raised his head

and was looking across the lawn towards the garden entrance. There was

the sound of a clicking latch. Constance turned, and saw Radowitz

entering.

The young musician paused and wavered, at the sight of the two under

the lime. It seemed as though he would have taken to flight. But,

instead, he came on with hesitating step. He had taken off his hat, as

he often did when walking; and his red-gold hair _en brosse_ was as

conspicuous as ever. But otherwise what a change from the youth of

three months before! Falloden, now that the immediate pressure of his

own tragedy was relaxed, perceived the change even more sharply than he

had done at the inquest; perceived it, at first with horror, and then

with a wild sense of recoil and denial, as though some hovering Erinys

advanced with Radowitz over the leaf-strewn grass.

Radowitz grew paler still as he reached Connie. He gave Falloden a

short, embarrassed greeting, and then subsided into the chair that

Constance offered him. The thought crossed Falloden’s mind—“Did she

arrange this?”

Her face gave little clue—though she could not restrain one quick,

hesitating glance at Falloden. She pressed tea on Radowitz, who

accepted it to please her, and then, schooled as she was in all the

minor social arts, she had soon succeeded in establishing a sort of

small talk among the three. Falloden, self-conscious, and on the rack,

could not imagine why he stayed. But this languid boy had ministered to

his dying father! And to what, and to whom, were the languor, the

tragic physical change due? He stayed—in purgatory—looking out for any

chance to escape.

“Did you walk all the way?”

The note in Connie’s voice was softly reproachful.

“Why, it’s only three miles!” said Radowitz, as though defending

himself, but he spoke with an accent of depression. And Connie

remembered how, in the early days of his recovery from his injury, he

had spent hours rambling over the moors by himself, or with Sorell. Her

heart yearned to him. She would have liked to take his poor hands in

hers, and talk to him tenderly like a sister. But there was that other

dark face, and those other eyes opposite—watching. And to them too, her

young sympathy went out—how differently!—how passionately! A kind of

rending and widening process seemed to be going on within her own

nature. Veils were falling between her and life; and feelings, deeper

and stronger than any she had ever known, were fast developing the

woman in the girl. How to heal Radowitz!—how to comfort Falloden! Her

mind ached under the feelings that filled it—feelings wholly

disinterested and pure.

“You really are taking the Boar’s Hill cottage?” she asked, addressing

Radowitz.

“I think so. It is nearly settled. But I am trying to find some

companion. Sorell can only come occasionally.”

As he spoke, a wild idea flashed into Falloden’s brain. It seemed to

have entered without—or against—his will; as though suggested by some

imperious agency outside himself. His intelligence laughed at it.

Something else in him entertained it—breathlessly.

Radowitz stooped down to try and tempt Lady Marcia’s dachshund with a

piece of cake.

“I must anyhow have a dog,” he said, as the pampered Max accepted the

cake, and laid his head gratefully on the donor’s knee; “they’re always

company.”

He looked wistfully into the dog’s large, friendly eyes.

Connie rose.

“Please don’t move!” she said, flushing. “I shall be back directly. But

I must put up a letter. I hear the postman!” She ran over the grass,

leaving the two men in acute discomfort. Falloden thought again, with

rising excitement: “She planned it! She wants me to do something—to

take some step—but what?”

An awkward pause followed. Radowitz was still playing with the dog,

caressing its beautiful head with his uninjured hand, and talking to it

in a half whisper. As Constance departed, a bright and feverish red had

rushed into his cheeks; but it had only made his aspect more ghostly,

more unreal.

Again the absurd idea emerged in Falloden’s consciousness; and this

time it seemed to find its own expression, and to be merely making use

of his voice, which he heard as though it were some one else’s.

He bent over towards Radowitz.

“Would you care to share the cottage with me?” he said abruptly. “I

want to find a place to read in—out of Oxford.”

Radowitz looked up, amazed—speechless! Falloden’s eyes met Otto’s

steadily. The boy turned away. Suddenly he covered his face with his

free hand.

“Why did you hate me so?” he said, breathing quickly. “What had I done

to you?”

“I didn’t hate you,” said Falloden thickly. “I was mad.”

“Because you were jealous? What a fool you were! She never cared a

brass farthing for me—except as she, does now. She would like to nurse

me—and give me back my music. But she can’t—and you can’t.”

There was silence again. Otto’s chest heaved. As far as he could with

his one hand, he hid the tears in his eyes from his companion. And at

last he shook off emotion—with a laugh in which there was no mirth.

“Well, at least, I shouldn’t make such a row now as I used to

do—practising.”

Falloden understood his reference to the soda-water bottle fusillade,

by which the “bloods,” in their first attack upon him, had tried to

silence his piano.

“Can’t you play at all?” he said at last, choosing the easiest of

several remarks that presented themselves.

“I get about somehow on the keys. It’s better than nothing. And I’m

writing something for my degree. It’s rather good. If I could only keep

well!” said the boy impatiently. “It’s this damned health that gets in

the way.”

Then he threw himself back in his chair, all the melancholy of his face

suddenly breaking up, the eyes sparkling.

“Suppose I set up one of those automatic pianos they’re now talking

about—could you stand that?”

“I would have a room where I didn’t hear it. That would be all right.”

“There’s a wonderful idea I heard of from Paris a week or two ago,”

said Otto excitedly—“a marvellous electric invention a man’s at work

on, where you only turn a handle, or press a button, and you get

Rubinstein—or Madame Schumann or my country-man, Paderewski, who’s

going to beat everybody. It isn’t finished yet. But it won’t be for the

likes of me. It’ll cost at least a thousand pounds.”

“They’ll get cheaper,” said Falloden, his chin in his hands, elbows on

knees, and eyes fixed on his companion. It seemed to him he was talking

in a dream, so strange was this thing he had proposed; which apparently

was going to come to pass. At any rate Radowitz had not refused. He sat

with the dachshund on his knees, alternately pulling out and folding

its long ears. He seemed to be, all in a moment, in high spirits, and

when he saw Connie coming back through the garden gate, with a shy,

hesitating step, he sprang up eagerly to greet her. But there was

another figure behind her. It was Sorell; and at sight of him

“something sealed” the boy’s lips. He looked round at Falloden, and

dropped back into his chair.

Falloden rose from his seat abruptly. A formal and scarcely perceptible

greeting passed between him and Sorell. All Falloden’s irritable

self-consciousness rushed back upon him as he recognised the St.

Cyprian tutor. He was not going to stay and cry _peccavi_ any more in

the presence of a bloodless prig, for whom Oxford was the world. But it

was bitter to him all the same to leave him in possession of the garden

and Connie Bledlow’s company.

“Thank you—I must go,” he said brusquely, as Connie tried to detain

him. “There is so much to do nowadays. I shall be leaving Flood next

week. The agent will be in charge.”

“Leaving—for good?” she asked, in her appealing voice, as they stood

apart.

“Probably—for good.”

“I don’t know how to say—how sorry I am!”

“Thank you. But I am glad it’s over. When you get back to Oxford—I

shall venture to come and call.”

“That’s a promise,” she said, smiling at him. “Where will you be?”

“Ask Otto Radowitz! Good-bye!”

Her start of surprise pleased him. He approached Radowitz. “Shall I

hear from you?” he said stiffly.

“Certainly!” The boy looked up. “I will write to-morrow.”

The garden door had no sooner closed on Falloden than Radowitz threw

himself back, and went into a fit of laughter, curious, hollow

laughter.

Sorell looked at him anxiously.

“What’s the meaning of that, Otto?”

“You’ll laugh, when you hear! Falloden and I are going to set up house

together, in the cottage on Boar’s Hill. He’s going to read—and I’m to

be allowed a piano, and a piano-player. Queer, isn’t it?”

“My dear Otto!” cried Sorell, in dismay. “What on earth do you mean?”

“Well, he offered it—said he’d come and look after me. I don’t know

what possessed him—nor me either. I didn’t exactly accept, but I shall

accept. Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because Falloden’s the last person in the world to look after

anybody—least of all, you!” said Sorell with indignant energy. “But of

course it’s a joke! You mean it for a joke. If he proposed it, it was

like his audacity. Nobody would, who had a shred of delicacy. I suppose

he wants to disarm public opinion!”

Radowitz looked oddly at Sorell from under his finely marked eyebrows.

“I don’t believe he cares a hang for public opinion,” he said slowly.

“Nor do I. If you could come, of course that would settle it. And if

you won’t come to see me, supposing Falloden and I do share diggings,

that settles it too. But you will come, old man—you will come!”

And he nodded, smiling, at his quasi-guardian. Neither of them noticed

Connie. Yet she had hung absorbed on their conversation, the breath

fluttering on her parted lips. And when their talk paused, she bent

forward, and laid her hand on Sorell’s arm:

“Let him!” she said pleadingly—“let him do it!”

Sorell looked at her in troubled perplexity. “Let Douglas Falloden make

some amends to his victim; if he can, and will. Don’t be so unkind as

to prevent it!” That, he supposed, was what she meant. It seemed to him

the mere sentimental unreason of the young girl, who will not believe

that there is any irrevocableness in things at all, till life teaches

her.

Radowitz too! What folly, what mistaken religiosity could make him

dream of consenting to such a house-mate through this winter which

might be his last!

Monstrous! What kind of qualities had Falloden to fit him for such a

task? All very well, indeed, that he should feel remorse! Sorell hoped

he might feel it a good deal more sharply yet. But that he should ease

his remorse at Otto’s expense, by offering what he could never fulfil,

and by taking the place of some one on whom Otto could have really

leaned—that seemed to Sorell all of a piece with the man’s egotism, his

epicurean impatience of anything that permanently made him

uncomfortable or unhappy. He put something of this into impetuous words

as well as he could. But Otto listened in silence. So did Constance.

And Sorell presently felt that there was a secret bond between them.

Before the aunts returned, the rectory pony-carriage came for Radowitz,

who was not strong enough to walk both ways. Sorell and Constance were

left alone.

Sorell, observing her, was struck anew by the signs of change and

development in her. It was as though her mother and her mother’s soul

showed through the girl’s slighter temperament. The old satiric

aloofness in Connie’s brown eyes, an expression all her own, and not

her mother’s, seemed to have slipped away; Sorell missed it. Ella

Risborough’s sympathetic charm had replaced it, but with suggestions of

hidden conflict and suffering, of which Lady Risborough’s bright

sweetness had known nothing. It was borne in upon him that, since her

arrival in Oxford, Constance had gone through a great deal, and gone

through it alone. For after all what had his efforts amounted to? What

can a man friend do for a young girl in the fermenting years of her

youth! And when the man friend knows very well that, but for an iron

force upon himself, he himself would be among her lovers? Sorell felt

himself powerless—in all the greater matters—and was inclined to think

that he deserved to be powerless. Yet he had done his best; and through

his Greek lessons he humbly knew that he had helped her spiritual

growth, just as the Greek immortals had helped and chastened his own

youth. They had been reading Homer together—parts both of the “Iliad”

and the “Odyssey”; and through “that ageless mouth of all the world,”

what splendid things had spoken to her!—Hector’s courage, and

Andromache’s tenderness, the bitter sorrow of Priam, the pity of

Achilles, mother love and wife love, death and the scorn of death. He

had felt her glow and tremble in the grip of that supreme poetry; for

himself he had found her the dearest and most responsive of pupils.

But what use was anything, if after all, as Radowitz vowed, she was in

love with Douglas Falloden? The antagonism between the man of Sorell’s

type—disinterested, pure-minded, poetic, and liable, often, in action

to the scrupulosity which destroys action; and the men of Falloden’s

type—strong, claimant, self-centred, arrogant, determined—is perennial.

Nor can a man of the one type ever understand the attraction for women

of the other.

Sorell sat on impatiently in the darkening garden, hoping always that

Connie would explain, would confess; for he was certain that she had

somehow schemed for this preposterous reconciliation—if it was a

reconciliation. She wanted no doubt to heal Falloden’s conscience, and

so to comfort her own. And she would sacrifice Otto, if need be, in the

process! He vowed to himself that he would prevent it, if he could.

Connie eyed him wistfully. Confidences seemed to be on her very lips;

and then stopped there. In the end she neither explained nor confessed.

But when he was gone, she walked up and down the lawn under the evening

sky, her hands behind her—passionately dreaming.

She had never thought of any such plan as had actually sprung to light.

And she understood Sorell’s opposition.

All the same, her heart sang over it. When she had asked Radowitz and

Douglas to meet, each unbeknown to the other, when she had sent away

the kind old aunts and prepared it all, she had reckoned on powers of

feeling in Falloden, in which apparently only she and Aunt Marcia

believed; and she had counted on the mystical and religious fervour she

had long since discovered in Radowitz. That night—after Sir Arthur’s

death—she had looked tremblingly into the boy’s very soul, had

perceived his wondering sense of a special message to him through what

had happened, from a God who suffered and forgives.

Yes, she had tried to make peace.

And she guessed—the tears blinding her as she walked—at the true

meaning of Falloden’s sudden impulse, and Otto’s consent. Falloden’s

was an impulse of repentance; and Otto’s had been an impulse of pardon,

in the Christian sense. “If I am to die, I will die at peace with him.”

Was that the thought—the tragic and touching thought—in the boy’s mind?

As to Falloden, could he do it?—could he rise to the height of what was

offered him? She prayed he might; she believed he could.

Her whole being was aflame. Douglas was no longer in love with her;

that was clear. What matter, if he made peace with his own soul? As for

her, she loved him with her whole heart, and meant to go on loving him,

whatever any one might say. And that being so, she would of course

never marry.

Could she ever make Nora understand the situation? By letter, it was

certainly useless to try!

PART III

CHAPTER XVI

Constance Bledlow stepped out of the Bletchley train into the crowded

Oxford station. Annette was behind her. As they made their way towards

the luggage van, Connie saw a beckoning hand and face. They belonged to

Nora Hooper, and in another minute Connie found herself taken

possession of by her cousin. Nora was deeply sunburnt. Her colour was

more garishly red and brown, her manner more trenchant than ever. At

sight of Connie her face flushed with a sudden smile, as though the

owner of the face could not help it. Yet they had only been a few

minutes together before Connie had discovered that, beneath the

sunburn, there was a look of tension and distress, and that the young

brown eyes, usually so bright and bold, were dulled with fatigue. But

to notice such things in Nora was only to be scorned. Connie held her

tongue.

“Can’t you leave Annette to bring the luggage, and let us walk up?”

said Nora.

Connie assented, and the two girls were soon in the long and generally

crowded street leading to the Cornmarket. Nora gave rapidly a little

necessary information. Term had just begun, and Oxford was “dreadfully

full.” She had got another job of copying work at the Bodleian, for

which she was being paid by the University Press, and what with that

and the work for her coming exam, she was “pretty driven.” But that was

what suited her. Alice and her mother were “all right.”

“And Uncle Ewen?” said Connie.

Nora paused a moment.

“Well, you won’t think he looks any the better for his holiday,” she

said at last, with an attempt at a laugh. “And of course he’s doing ten

times too much work. Hang work! I loathe work: I want to ‘do nothing

forever and ever.’”

“Why don’t you set about it then?” laughed Connie.

“Because—” Nora began impetuously; and then shut her lips. She diverged

to the subject of Mr. Pryce. They had not seen or heard anything of him

for weeks, she said, till he had paid them an evening call, the night

before, the first evening of the new term.

Connie interrupted.

“Oh, but that reminds me,” she said eagerly, “I’ve got an awfully nice

letter—to-day—from Lord Glaramara. Mr. Pryce is to go up and see him.”

Nora whistled.

“You have! Well, that settles it. He’ll now graciously allow himself to

propose. And then we shall all pretend to be greatly astonished. Alice

will cry, and mother will say she ‘never expected to lose her daughter

so soon.’ What a humbug everybody is!” said the child, bitterly, with

more emphasis than grammar.

“But suppose he doesn’t get anything!” cried Connie, alarmed at such a

sudden jump from the possible to the certain.

“Oh, but he will! He’s the kind of person that gets things,” said Nora

contemptuously. “Well, we wanted a bit of good news!”

Connie jumped at the opening.

“Dear Nora!—have things been going wrong? You look awfully tired. Do

tell me!”

Nora checked herself at once. “Oh, not much more than usual,” she said

repellently. “And what about you, Connie? Aren’t you very bored to be

coming back here, after all your grand times?”

They had emerged into the Corn. Before them, was the old Church of St.

Mary Magdalen, and the modern pile of Balliol. In the distance

stretched the Broad, over which the October evening was darkening fast;

the Sheldonian in the far distance, with its statued railing; and the

gates of Trinity on the left. The air was full of bells, and the

streets of undergraduates; a stream of young men taking fresh

possession, as it were, of the grey city, which was their own as soon

as they chose to come back to it. The Oxford damp, the Oxford mist, was

everywhere, pierced by lamps, and window-lights, and the last red of a

stormy sunset.

Connie drew in her breath.

“No, I am not sorry, I am very glad to be back—though my aunts have

been great dears to me.”

“I’ll bet anything Annette isn’t glad to be back—after the Langmoors!”

said Nora grimly.

Connie laughed.

“She’ll soon settle in. What do you think?” She slipped her arm into

her cousin’s. “I’m coming down to breakfast!”

“You’re not! I never heard such nonsense! Why should you?”

Connie sighed.

“I think I must begin to do something.”

“Do something! For goodness’ sake, don’t!” Nora’s voice was fierce. “I

did think you might be trusted!”

“To carry out your ideals? So kind of you!”

“If you take to muddling about with books and lectures and wearing ugly

clothes, I give you up,” said Nora firmly.

“Nora, dear, I’m the most shocking ignoramus. Mayn’t I learn

something?”

“Mr. Sorell may teach you Greek. I don’t mind that.”

Connie sighed again, and Nora stole a look at the small pale face under

the sailor hat. It seemed to her that her cousin had somehow grown

beautiful in these months of absence. On her arrival in May, Connie’s

good looks had been a freakish and variable thing, which could be often

and easily disputed. She could always make a certain brilliant or

bizarre effect, by virtue of her mere slenderness and delicacy,

combined with the startling beauty of her eyes and hair. But the touch

of sarcasm, of a half-hostile remoteness, in her look and manner, were

often enough to belie the otherwise delightful impression of first

youth, to suggest something older and sharper than her twenty years had

any right to be. It meant that she had been brought up in a world of

elder people, sharing from her teens in its half-amused, half-sceptical

judgments of men and things. Nothing was to be seen of it in her roused

moments of pleasure or enthusiasm; at other times it jarred, as though

one caught a glimpse of autumn in the spring.

But since she and Nora had last met, something had happened. Some heat

of feeling or of sympathy had fused in her the elements of being; so

that a more human richness and warmth, a deeper and tenderer charm

breathed from her whole aspect. Nora, though so much the younger, had

hitherto been the comforter and sustainer of Connie; now for the first

time, the tired girl felt an impulse—firmly held back—to throw her arms

round Connie’s neck and tell her own troubles.

She did not betray it, however. There were so many things she wanted to

know. First—how was it that Connie had come back so soon? Nora

understood there were invitations to the Tamworths and others. Mr.

Sorell had reported that the Langmoors wished to carry their niece with

them on a round of country-house visits in the autumn, and that Connie

had firmly stuck to it that she was due at Oxford for the beginning of

term.

“Why didn’t you go,” said Nora, half scoffing—“with all those frocks

wasting in the drawers?”

Connie retorted that, as for parties, Oxford, had seemed to her in the

summer term the most gay and giddy place she had ever been in, and that

she had always understood that in the October and Lent terms people

dined out every night.

“But all the same—one can think a little here,” she said slowly.

“You didn’t care a bit about that when you first came!” cried Nora.

“You despised us because we weren’t soldiers, or diplomats, or

politicians. You thought we were a little priggish, provincial world

where nothing mattered. You were sorry for us because we had only books

and ideas!”

“I wasn’t!” said Connie indignantly. “Only I didn’t think Oxford was

everything—and it isn’t! Nora!”—she looked round the Oxford street with

a sudden ardour, her eyes running over the groups of undergraduates

hurrying back to hall—“do you think these English boys could ever—well,

fight—and die—for what you call ideas—for their country—as Otto

Radowitz could die for Poland?”

“Try them!” The reply rang out defiantly. Connie laughed.

“They’ll never have the chance. Who’ll ever attack England? If we had

only something—something splendid, and not too far away!—to look back

upon, as the Italians look back on Garibaldi—or to long and to suffer

for, as the Poles long and suffer for Poland!”

“We shall some day!” said Nora hopefully. “Mr. Sorell says every nation

gets its turn to fight for its life. I suppose Otto Radowitz has been

talking Poland to you?”

“He talks it—and he lives it,” said Connie, with emphasis. “It’s

marvellous!—it shames one.”

Nora shrugged her shoulders.

“But what can he do—with his poor hand! You know Mr. Sorell has taken a

cottage for him at Boar’s Hill—above Hinksey?”

Yes, Connie knew. She seemed suddenly on her guard.

“But he can’t live alone?” said Nora. “Who on earth’s going to look

after him?”

Connie hesitated. Down a side street she perceived the stately front of

Marmion, and at the same moment a tall man emerging from the dusk

crossed the street and entered the Marmion gate. Her heart leapt. No!

Absurd! He and Otto had not arrived yet. But already the Oxford dark,

and the beautiful Oxford distances were peopled for her with visions

and prophecies of hope. The old and famous city, that had seen so much

youth bloom and pass, spoke magic things to her with its wise, friendly

voice.

Aloud, she said—

“You haven’t heard? Mr. Falloden’s going to live with him.”

Nora stopped in stupefaction.

“_What?_”

Connie repeated the information—adding—

“I dare say Mr. Sorell didn’t speak of it to you, because—he hates it.”

“I suppose it’s just a theatrical _coup_,” said Nora, passionately, as

they walked on—“to impress the public.”

“It isn’t!—it isn’t anything of the kind. And Otto had only to say no.”

“It’s ridiculous!—preposterous! They’ll clash all day long.”

Connie replied with difficulty, as though she had so pondered and

discussed this matter with herself that every opinion about it seemed

equally reasonable.

“I don’t think so. Otto wishes it.”

“But why—but _why_?” insisted Nora. “Oh, Connie!—as if Douglas Falloden

could look after anybody but himself!”

Then she repented a little. Connie smiled, rather coldly.

“He looked after his father,” she said quietly. “I told you all that in

my letters. And you forget how it was—that he and Otto came across each

other again.”

Nora warmly declared that she had not forgotten it, but that it did not

seem to her to have anything to do with the extraordinary proposal that

the man more responsible than any one else for the maiming—possibly for

the death—of Otto Radowitz, if all one heard about him were true,

should be now installed as his companion and guardian during these

critical months.

She talked with obvious and rather angry common sense, as one who had

not passed her eighteenth birthday for nothing.

But Connie fell silent. She would not discuss it, and Nora was obliged

to let the subject drop.

Mrs. Hooper, whose pinched face had grown visibly older, received her

husband’s niece with an evident wish to be kind. Alice, too, was almost

affectionate, and Uncle Ewen came hurrying out of his study to greet

her. But Connie had not been an hour in the house before she had

perceived that everybody in it was preoccupied and unhappy; unless,

indeed, it were Alice, who had evidently private thoughts of her own,

which, to a certain extent, released her from the family worries.

What was the matter? She was determined to know.

It happened that she and Alice went up to bed together. Nora had been

closeted with her father in the little schoolroom on the ground floor,

since nine o’clock, and when Connie proposed to look in and wish them

good night, Alice said uncomfortably—

“Better not. They’re—they’re very busy.”

Connie ruminated. At the top of the stairs, she turned—

“Look here—do come in to me, and have a talk!”

Alice agreed, after a moment’s hesitation. There had never been any

beginnings of intimacy between her and Connie, and she took Connie’s

advance awkwardly.

The two girls were however soon seated in Connie’s room, where a

blazing fire defied the sudden cold of a raw and bleak October. The

light danced on Alice’s beady black eyes, and arched brows, on her thin

but very red lips, on the bright patch of colour in each cheek. She was

more than ever like a Watteau sketch in black chalk, heightened with

red, and the dress she wore, cut after the pattern of an

eighteenth-century sacque, according to an Oxford fashion of that day,

fell in admirably with the natural effect. Connie had very soon taken

off her tea-gown, loosened and shaken out her hair, and put on a white

garment in which she felt at ease. Alice noticed, as Nora had done,

that Connie was fast becoming a beauty; but whether the indisputable

fact was to be welcomed or resented had still to be decided.

Connie had no sooner settled herself on the small sofa she had managed

to fit into her room than she sprang up again.

“Stupid!—where are those letters!” She rummaged in various drawers and

bags, hit upon what she wanted, after an impetuous hunt, and returned

to the fire.

“Do you know I think Mr. Pryce has a good chance of that post? I got

this to-day.”

She held out a letter, smiling. Alice flushed and took it. It was from

Lord Glaramara, and it concerned that same post in the Conservative

Central Office on which Herbert Pryce had had his eyes for some time.

The man holding it had been “going” for months, but was now, at last,

gone. The post was vacant, and Connie, who had a pretty natural turn

for wire-pulling, fostered by her Italian bringing up, had been trying

her hand, both with the Chancellor and her Uncle Langmoor.

“You little intriguer!” wrote Lord Glaramara—“I will do what I can.

Your man sounds very suitable. If he isn’t, I can tell you plainly he

won’t get the post. Neither political party can afford to employ fools

just now. But if he is what you say—well, we shall see! Send him up to

see me, at the House of Lords, almost any evening next week. He’ll have

to take his chance, of course, of finding me free. If I cotton to him,

I’ll send him on to somebody else. And—_don’t talk about it!_ Your

letter was just like your mother. She had an art of doing these

things!”

Alice read and reread the note. When she looked up from it, it was with

a rather flustered face.

“Awfully good of you, Connie! May I show it—to Mr. Pryce?”

“Yes—but get it back. Tell him to write to Lord Glaramara to-morrow.

Well, now then”—Connie discovered and lit a cigarette, the sight of

which stirred in Alice a kind of fascinated disapproval,—“now then,

tell me what’s the matter!—why Uncle Ewen looks as if he hadn’t had a

day’s rest since last term, and Nora’s so glum—and why he and she go

sitting up at night together when they ought to be in their beds?”

Connie’s little woman-of-the-world air—very evident in this

speech—which had always provoked Alice in their earlier acquaintance,

passed now unnoticed. Miss Hooper sat perplexed and hesitating, staring

into the fire. But with that note in her pocket, Alice felt herself at

once in a new and detached position towards her family.

“It’s money, of course,” she said at last, her white brow puckering.

“It’s not only bills—they’re dreadfully worrying!—we seem never to get

free from them, but it’s something else—something quite new—which has

only happened, lately. There is an old loan from the bank that has been

going on for years. Father had almost forgotten it, and now they’re

pressing him. It’s dreadful. They know we’re so hard up.”

Connie in her turn looked perplexed. It was always difficult for her to

realise financial trouble on a small scale. Ruin on the Falloden scale

was intelligible to one who had heard much talk of the bankruptcies of

some of the great Roman families. But the carking care that may come

from lack of a few hundred pounds, this the Risboroughs’ daughter had

to learn; and she put her mind to it eagerly.

She propped her small chin on her hands, while Alice told her tale.

Apparently the improvement in the family finance, caused by Connie’s

three hundred, had been the merest temporary thing. The Reader’s

creditors had been held off for a few months; but the rain of

tradesmen’s letters had been lately incessant. And the situation had

been greatly worsened by a blow which had fallen just before the

opening of term.

In a former crisis, five years before this date, a compassionate

cousin, one of the few well-to-do relations that Mrs. Hooper possessed,

had come to the rescue, and had given his name to the Hoopers’ bankers

as guarantee for a loan of £500. The loan was to have been repaid by

yearly instalments. But the instalments had not been paid, and the

cousin had most unexpectedly died of apoplexy during September, after

three days’ illness. His heir would have nothing to say to the

guarantee, and the bank was pressing for repayment, in terms made all

the harsher by the existence of an overdraft, which the local manager

knew in his financial conscience ought not to have been allowed. His

letters were now so many sword-thrusts; and post-time was a time of

terror.

“Father doesn’t know what to do,” said Alice despondently. “He and Nora

spend all their time trying to think of some way out. Father got his

salary the other day, and never put it into the bank at all. We must

have something to live on. None”—she hesitated—“none of the tradesmen

will give us any credit.” She flushed deeply over the confession.

“Goodness!” said Connie, opening her eyes still wider.

“But if Nora knows that I’ve been telling you”—cried Alice—“she’ll

never forgive me. She made me promise I wouldn’t tell you. But how can

you help knowing? If father’s made a bankrupt, it wouldn’t be very nice

for you! How could you go on living with us? Nora thinks she’s going to

earn money—that father can sell two wretched little books—and we can go

and live in a tiny house on the Cowley Road—and—and—all sorts of absurd

things!”

“But Why is it Nora that has to settle all these things?” asked Connie

in bewilderment. “Why doesn’t your mother—”

“Oh, because mother doesn’t know anything about the bills,” interrupted

Alice. “She never can do a sum—or add up anything—and I’m no use at it

either. Nora took it all over last year, and she won’t let even me help

her. She makes out the most wonderful statements—she made out a fresh

one to-day—that’s why she had a headache when she came to meet you. But

what’s the good of statements? They won’t pay the bank.”

“But why—why—” repeated Connie, and then stopped, lest she should hurt

Alice’s feelings.

“Why did we get into debt? I’m sure I don’t know!” Alice shook her head

helplessly. “We never seemed to have anything extravagant.”

These things were beyond Connie’s understanding. She gave it up. But

her mind impetuously ran forward.

“How much is wanted altogether?”

Alice, reluctantly, named a sum not much short of a thousand pounds.

“Isn’t it awful?”

She sighed deeply. Yet already she seemed to be talking of other

people’s affairs!

“We can’t ever do it. It’s hopeless. Papa’s taken two little

school-books to do. They’ll kill him with work, and will hardly bring

in anything. And he’s full up with horrid exams and lectures. He’ll

break down, and it all makes him so miserable, because he can’t really

do the work the University pays him to do. And he’s never been

abroad—even to Rome. And as to Greece! It’s dreadful!” she repeated

mechanically.

Connie sprang up and began to pace the little room. The firelight

played on her mop of brown hair, bringing out its golden shades, and on

the charming pensiveness of her face. Alice watched her, thinking “She

could do it all, if she chose!” But she didn’t dare to say anything,

for fear of Nora.

Presently Connie gave a great stretch.

“It’s damnable!” she said, with energy.

Alice’s instinct recoiled from the strong word. It wasn’t the least

necessary, she thought, to talk in that way.

Connie made a good many more enquiries—elicited a good many more facts.

Then suddenly she brought her pacing to a stop.

“Look here—we must go to bed!—or Nora will be after us.”

Alice went obediently. As soon as the door had shut upon her, Connie

went to a drawer in her writing table, and took out her bank-book. It

had returned that morning and she had not troubled to look at it. There

was always enough for what she wanted.

Heavens!—what a balance. She had quite forgotten a wind-fall which had

come lately—some complicated transaction relating to a great industrial

company in which she had shares and which had lately been giving birth

to other subsidiary companies, and somehow the original shareholders,

of whom Lord Risborough had been one, or their heirs and

representatives, had profited greatly by the business. It had all been

managed for her by her father’s lawyer, and of course by Uncle Ewen.

The money had been paid temporarily in to her own account, till the

lawyer could make some enquiries about a fresh investment.

But it was her own money. She was entitled to—under the terms of her

father’s letter to Uncle Ewen—to do what she liked with it. And even

without it, there was enough in the bank. Enough for this—and for

another purpose also, which lay even closer to her heart.

“I don’t want any more new gowns for six months,” she decided

peremptorily. “It’s disgusting to be so well off. Well, now,—I wonder—I

wonder where Nora keeps those statements that Alice talks about?”

In the schoolroom of course. But not under lock and key. Nobody ever

locked drawers in that house. It was part of the general

happy-go-luckishness of the family.

Connie made up the fire, and sat over it, thinking hard. A new

cheque-book, too, had arrived with the bank-book. That was useful.

She waited till she heard the schoolroom door open, and Nora come

upstairs, followed soon by the slow and weary step of Uncle Ewen.

Connie had already lowered her gas before Nora reached the top landing.

The house was very soon silent. Connie turned her light on again, and

waited. By the time Big Ben had struck one o’clock, she thought it

would be safe to venture.

She opened her door with trembling, careful fingers, slipped off her

shoes, took a candle and stole downstairs. The schoolroom door creaked

odiously. But soon she was inside and looking about her.

There was Nora’s table, piled high with the books and note-books of her

English literature work. Everything else had been put away. But the top

drawer of the table was unlocked. There was a key in it, but it would

not turn, being out of repair, like so much else in the house.

Connie, full of qualms, slowly opened the drawer. It was

horrid—horrid—to do such things!—but what other way was there? Nora

must be presented with the _fait accompli_, otherwise she would upset

everything—poor old darling!

Some loose sheets lay on the top of the papers in the drawer. The first

was covered with figures and calculations that told nothing. Connie

lifted it, and there, beneath, lay Nora’s latest “statement,” at which

she and her father had no doubt been working that very night. It was

headed “List of Liabilities,” and in it every debt, headed by the bank

claim which had broken the family back, was accurately and clearly

stated in Nora’s best hand. The total at the foot evoked a low whistle

from Connie. How had it come about? In spite of her luxurious bringing

up, there was a shrewd element—an element of competence—in the girl’s

developing character, which was inclined to suggest that there need be

no more difficulty in living on seven hundred a year than seven

thousand, if you knew you had to do it. Then she rebuked herself

fiercely for a prig—“You just try it!—you Pharisee, you!” And she

thought of her own dressmakers’ and milliners’ bills, and became in the

end quite pitiful over Aunt Ellen’s moderation. After all it might have

been two thousand instead of one! Of course it was all Aunt Ellen’s

muddling, and Uncle Ewen’s absent-mindedness.

She shaded her candle, and in a guilty hurry copied down the total on a

slip of paper lying on the table, and took the address of Uncle Ewen’s

bank from the outside of the pass-book lying beside the bills. Having

done that, she Closed the drawer again, and crept upstairs like the

criminal she felt herself. Her small feet in their thin stockings

seemed to her excited ears to be making the most hideous and unnatural

noise on every step. If Nora heard!

At last she was safe in her own room again. The door was locked, and

the more agreeable part of the crime began. She drew out the new

cheque-book lying in her own drawer, and very slowly and deliberately

wrote a cheque. Then she put it up, with a few covering words—anxiously

considered—and addressed the envelope to the Oxford branch of a

well-known banking firm, her father’s bankers, to which her own account

had been transferred on her arrival at Oxford. Ewen Hooper had

scrupulously refrained from recommending his own bank, lest he should

profit indirectly by his niece’s wealth.

“Annette shall take it,” she thought, “first thing. Oh, what a row

there’ll be!”

And then, uneasily pleased with her performance, she went to bed.

And she had soon forgotten all about her raid upon Uncle Ewen’s

affairs. Her thoughts floated to a little cottage on the hills, and its

two coming inhabitants. And in her dream she seemed to hear herself

say—“I oughtn’t to be meddling with other people’s lives like this. I

don’t know enough. I’m too young! I want somebody to show me—I do!”

The following day passed heavily in the Hooper household. Nora and her

father were closeted together all the morning; and there was a sense of

brooding calamity in the air. Alice and Connie avoided each other, and

Connie asked no questions. After luncheon Sorell called. He found

Connie in the drawing-room alone, and gave her the news she was pining

for. As Nora had reported, a cottage on Boar’s Hill had been taken. It

belonged to the head of an Oxford college, who had spent the preceding

winter there for his health, but had now been ordered abroad. It was

very small, pleasantly furnished, and had a glorious view over Oxford

in the hollow, the wooded lines of Garsington and Nuneham, and the

distant ridges of the Chilterns. Radowitz was expected the following

day, and his old college servant, with a woman to cook and do

housework, had been found to look after him. He was working hard, at

his symphony, and was on the whole much the same in health—very frail

and often extremely irritable; with alternations of cheerfulness and

depression.

“And Mr. Falloden?” Connie ventured.

“He’s coming soon—I didn’t ask,” said Sorell shortly. “That arrangement

won’t last long.”