Connie hesitated.

“But don’t wish it to fail!” she said piteously.

“I think the sooner it is over the better,” said Sorell, with rather

stern decision. “Falloden ought never to have made the proposal, and it

was mere caprice in Otto to accept it. But you know what I think. I

shall watch the whole thing very anxiously; and try to have some one

ready to put into Falloden’s place—when it breaks down. Mrs. Mulholland

and I have it in hand. She’ll take Otto up to the cottage to-morrow,

and means to mother Radowitz as much as he’ll let her. Now then”—he

changed the subject with a smile—“are you going to enjoy your winter

term?”

His dark eyes, as she met them, were full of an anxious affection.

“I have forgotten all my Greek!”

“Oh no—not in a month. Prepare me a hundred lines of the ‘Odyssey,’

Book VI.! Next week I shall have some time. This first week is always a

drive. Miss Nora says she’ll go on again.”

“Does she? She seems so—so busy.”

“Ah, yes—she’s got some work for the University Press. Plucky little

thing! But she mustn’t overdo it.”

Connie dropped the subject. These conferences in the study, which had

gone on all day, had nothing to do with Nora’s work for the Press—that

she was certain of. But she only said—holding out her hands, with the

free gesture that was natural to her—

“I wish some one would give me the chance of ‘overdoing it’! Do set me

to work—hard work! The sun never shines here.”

Her eyes wandered petulantly to the rainy sky outside, and the

high-walled college opposite.

“Southerner! Wait till you see it shining on the Virginia creeper in

our garden quad. Oxford is a dream in October!—just for a week or two,

till the leaves fall. November is dreary, I admit. All the same—try and

be happy!”

He looked at her gravely and tenderly. She coloured a little as she

withdrew her hands.

“Happy? That doesn’t matter—does it? But perhaps for a change—one might

try—”

“Try what?”

“Well!”—she laughed, but he thought there were tears in her eyes—“to do

something—for somebody—occasionally.”

“Ask Mrs. Mulholland! She has a genius for that kind of thing. Teach

some of her orphans!”

“I couldn’t! They’d find me out.”

Sorell, rather puzzled, suggested that she might become a Home Student

like Nora, and go in for a Literature or Modern History Certificate.

Connie, who was now sitting moodily over a grate with no fire in it,

with her chin in her hands, only shook her head.

“I don’t know anything—I never learnt anything. And everybody here’s so

appallingly clever!”

Then she declared that she would go and have tea with the Master of

Beaumont, and ask his advice. “He told me to learn something”—the tone

was one of depression, passing into rebellion—“but I don’t want to

learn anything!—I want to do something!”

Sorell laughed at her.

“Learning is doing!”

“That’s what Oxford people think,” she said defiantly. “I don’t agree

with them.”

“What do you mean by ‘doing’?”

Connie poked an imaginary fire.

“Making myself happy”—she said slowly, “and—and a few other people!”

Sorell laughed again. Then rising to take his leave, he stooped over

her.

“Make me happy by undoing that stroke of yours at Boar’s Hill!”

Connie raised herself, and looked at him steadily.

Then gravely and decisively she shook her head.

“Not at all! I shall keep an eye on it!—so must you!”

Then, suddenly, she smiled—the softest, most radiant smile, as though

some hope within, far within, looked out. It was gone in a moment, and

Sorell went his way; but as one who had been the spectator of an event.

After his departure Connie sat on in the cold room, thinking about

Sorell. She was devoted to him—he was the noblest, dearest person. She

wished dreadfully to please him. But she wasn’t going to let him—well,

what?—to let him interfere with that passionate purpose which seemed to

be beating in her, and through her, like a living thing, though as yet

she had but vaguely defined it even to herself.

After tea, which Mrs. Hooper dispensed with red eyes, and at which

neither Nora nor Dr. Hooper appeared, Constance found a novel, and

established herself in the deserted schoolroom. She couldn’t go out.

She was on the watch for a letter that might arrive. The two banks were

only a stone’s throw apart. The local post should deliver that letter

about six.

Once Nora looked in to find a document, and was astonished to see

Connie there. But she was evidently too harassed and miserable to talk.

Connie listened uneasily to the opening and shutting of a drawer, with

which she was already acquainted. Then Nora disappeared again. What

were they trying to do, poor dears!—Nora, and Uncle Ewen? What could

they do?

The autumn evening darkened slowly. At last!—a ring and a double knock.

The study door opened, and Connie heard Nora’s step, and the click of

the letter-box. The study door closed again.

Connie put down her novel and listened. Her hands trembled. She was

full indeed of qualms and compunctions. Would they be angry with her?

She had meant it well.

Footsteps approaching—not Nora’s.

Uncle Ewen stood in the doorway—looking very pale and strained.

“Connie, would you mind coming into my study? Something rather strange

has happened.”

Connie got up and slowly followed him across the hall. As she entered

the study, she saw Nora, with blazing eyes and cheeks, standing by her

father’s writing-table, aglow with anger or excitement—or both. She

looked at Connie as at an enemy, and Connie flushed a bright pink.

Uncle Ewen shut the door, and addressed his niece. “My dear Connie, I

want you, if you can—to throw some light on a letter I have just

received. Both Nora and I suspect your hand in it. If so, you have done

something I—I can’t permit.”

He held out a letter, which Connie took like a culprit. It was a

communication from his Oxford bankers to Professor Hooper, to the

effect that, a sum of £1100 having been paid in to his credit by a

person who desired to remain unknown, his debt to them was covered, and

his account showed a balance of about six hundred pounds.

“My dear!”—his voice and hand shook—“is that your doing?”

“Of course it is!” interrupted Nora passionately. “Look at her, father!

How dared you, Connie, do such a thing without a word to father! It’s a

shame—a disgrace! We could have found a way out—we could!”

And the poor child, worn out with anxiety and lack of sleep, and in her

sensitive pride and misery ready to turn on Connie and rend her for

having dared thus to play Lady Bountiful without warning or permission,

sank into a chair, covered her face with her hands, and burst out

sobbing.

Connie handed back the letter, and hung her head. “Won’t you—won’t you

let the person—who—sent the money remain unknown, Uncle Ewen?—as they

wished to be?”

Uncle Ewen sat down before his writing-table, and he also buried his

face in his hands. Connie stood between them—as it were a prisoner at

the bar—looking now very white and childish.

“Dear Uncle Ewen—”

“How did you guess?” said Nora vehemently, uncovering her face—“I never

said a word to you!”

Connie gave a tremulous laugh.

“Do you think I couldn’t see that you were all dreadfully unhappy about

something? I—I made Alice tell me—”

“Alice is a sieve!” cried Nora. “I knew, father, we could never trust

her.”

“And then”—Connie went on—“I—I did an awful thing. I’d better tell you.

I came and looked at Nora’s papers—in the schoolroom drawer. I saw

that.” She pointed penitentially to a sheet of figures lying on the

study table.

Both Nora and her uncle looked up in amazement, staring at her.

“It was at night,” she said hurriedly—“last night. Oh, I put it all

back!”—she turned, pleading, to Nora—“just as I found it. You shouldn’t

be angry with me—you shouldn’t indeed!”

Then her own voice began to shake. She came and laid her hand on her

uncle’s shoulder.

“Dear Uncle Ewen—you know, I had that extra money! What did I want with

it? Just think—if it had been mamma! Wouldn’t you have let her help?

You know you would! You couldn’t have been so unkind. Well then, I knew

it would be no good, if I came and asked you—you wouldn’t have let me.

So I—well, I just did it!”

Ewen Hooper rose from his table in great distress of mind.

“But, my dear Connie—you are my ward—and I am your guardian! How can I

let you give me money?”

“It’s my own money,” said Connie firmly. “You know it is. Father wrote

to you to say I might spend it now, as I liked—all there was, except

the capital of my two thousand a year, which I mayn’t spend—till I am

twenty-five. This has nothing to do with that. I’m quite free—and so

are you. Do you think”—she drew herself up indignantly—“that you’re

going to make me happy—by turning me out, and all—all of you going to

rack and ruin—when I’ve got that silly money lying in the bank? I won’t

have it! I don’t want to go and live in the Cowley Road! I won’t go and

live in the Cowley Road! You promised father and mother to look after

me, Uncle Ewen, and it isn’t looking after me—”

“You can’t reproach me on that score as much as I do myself!” said Ewen

Hooper, with emotion. “There’s something in that I admit—there’s

something in that.”

He began to pace the room. Presently, pausing beside Connie, he plunged

into an agitated and incoherent account of the situation—of the efforts

he had made to get even some temporary help—and of the failure of all

of them. It was the confession of a weak and defeated man; and as made

by a man of his age to a girl of Connie’s, it was extremely painful.

Nora hid her eyes again, and Connie got paler and paler.

At last she went up to him, holding out again appealing hands.

“Please don’t tell me any more! It’s all right. I just love you, Uncle

Ewen—and—and Nora! I want to help! It makes me happy. Oh, why won’t you

let me!”

He wavered.

“You dear child!” There was a silence. Then he resumed—as though

feeling his way—

“It occurs to me that I might consult Sorell. If he thought it right—if

we could protect you from loss—!”

Connie sprang at him and kissed him in delight.

“Of course!—that’ll do splendidly! Mr. Sorell will see, at once, it’s

the right thing for me, and my happiness. I can’t be turned out—I

really can’t! So it’s settled. Yes—it’s settled!—or it will be

directly—and nobody need bother any more—need they? But—there’s one

condition.”

Ewen Hooper looked at her in silence.

“That you—you and Nora—go to Borne this Christmas time, this very

Christmas, Uncle Ewen! I think I put in enough—and I can give you such

a lot of letters!”

She laughed joyously, though she was very near crying.

“I have never been able to go to Home—Or Athens—never!” he said, in a

low voice, as he sat down again at his table. All the thwarted hopes,

all the sordid cares of years were in the quiet words.

“Well, now you’re going!” said Connie shyly. “Oh, that would be

ripping! You’ll promise me that—you must, please!”

Silence again. She approached Nora, timidly.

“Nora!”

Nora rose. Her face was stained with tears.

“It’s all wrong,” she said heavily—“it’s all wrong. But—I give in. What

I said was a lie. There is nothing else in the world that we could

possibly do.”

And she rushed out of the room without another word. Connie looked

wistfully after her. Nora’s pain in receiving had stirred in her the

shame-faced distress in giving that lives in generous souls. “Why

should I have more than they?”

She stole out after Nora. Ewen Hooper was left staring at the letter

from his bankers, and trying to collect his thoughts. Connie’s voice

was still in his ears. It had all the sweetness of his dead sister’s.

Connie was reading in her room before dinner. She had shut herself up

there, feeling rather battered by the emotions of the afternoon, when

she heard a knock that she knew was Nora’s.

“Come in!”

Nora appeared. She had had her storm of weeping in private and got over

it. She was now quite composed, but the depression, the humiliation

even, expressed in her whole bearing dismayed Connie afresh.

Nora took a seat on the other side of the fire. Connie eyed her

uneasily.

“Are you ever going to forgive me, Nora?” she said, at last.

Nora shrugged her shoulders.

“You couldn’t help it. I see that.”

“Thank you,” said Connie meekly.

“But what I can’t forgive is that you never said a word—”

“To you? That you might undo it all? Nora, you really are an absurd

person!” Connie sprang up, and came to kneel by the fire, so that she

might attack her cousin at close quarters. “We’re told it’s ‘more

blessed to give than to receive.’ Not when you’re on the premises,

Nora! I really don’t think you need make me feel such an outcast! I

say—how many nights have you been awake lately?”

Nora’s lip quivered a little.

“That doesn’t matter,” she said shortly.

“Yes, but it does matter! You promised to be my friend—and—you have

been treating me abominably!” said Connie, with flashing eyes.

Nora feebly defended herself, but was soon reduced to accept a pair of

arms thrown round her, and a soft shoulder on which to rest an aching

head.

“I’m no good,” she said desparingly. “I give up—everything.”

“That’s all right!” Connie’s tone was extremely cheerful. “Which means,

I hope, that you’ll give up that absurd copying in the Bodleian. You

get about twopence halfpenny for it, and it’ll cost you your

first-class. How are you going to get a First I should like to know,

with your head full of bills, and no sleep at nights?”

Nora flushed fiercely.

“I want to earn my living—I mean to earn my living! And how do you

know—after all”—she held Connie at arm’s length—“that Mr. Sorell’s

going to approve of what you’ve done? And father won’t accept, unless

he does.”

Connie laughed.

“Mr. Sorell will do—exactly what pleases me. Mr. Sorell”—she began to

search for a cigarette—“Mr. Sorell is an angel.”

A silence. Connie looked up, rather surprised.

“Don’t you agree?”

“Yes,” said Nora in an odd voice.

Connie observed her. A flickering light began to play in the brown

eyes.

“H’m. Have you been doing some Greek already?—stealing a march on me?”

“I had a lesson last week.”

“Had you? The first I’ve heard of it!” Connie fluttered up and down the

room in her white dressing-gown, occasionally breaking into a

dance-step, as though to work off a superfluity of spirits.

Finally she stopped in front of Nora, looking her up and down.

“I dare you to hide anything again from me, Nora!”

Nora sat up.

“There is nothing to hide,” she said stiffly.

Connie laughed aloud; and Nora suddenly sprang from her chair, and ran

out of the room.

Connie was left panting a little. Life in Medburn House seemed

certainly to be running faster than of old!

“I never gave him leave to fall in love with Nora!” she thought, with

an unmistakable pang of common, ordinary jealousy. She had been so long

accustomed to take her property in Sorell for granted!—and the summer

months had brought her into such intimate contact with him. “And he

never made love to me for one moment!—nor I to him. I don’t believe

he’s made love to Nora—I’m sure he hasn’t—yet. But why didn’t he tell

me of that Greek lesson?”

She stood before the glass, pulling down her hair, so that it fell all

about her.

“I seem to be rather cut out for fairy-godmothering!” she said

pensively to the image in the glass. “But there’s a good deal to do for

the post!—one must admit there’s a good deal to do—Nora’s got to be

fixed up—and all the money business. And then—then!”

She clasped her hands behind her head. Her eyelids fell, and through

her slight figure there ran a throb of yearning—of tender yet

despairing passion.

“If I could only mend things there, I might be some use. I don’t want

him to marry me—but just—just—”

Then her hands fell. She shook her head angrily. “You humbug!—you

humbug! For whom are you posing now?”

CHAPTER XVII

Falloden had just finished a solitary luncheon in the little

dining-room of the Boar’s Hill cottage. There was a garden door in the

room, and lighting a cigarette, he passed out through it to the terrace

outside. A landscape lay before him, which has often been compared to

that of the Val d’Arno seen from Fiesole, and has indeed some common

points with that incomparable mingling of man’s best with the best of

mountain and river. It was the last week of October, and the autumn was

still warm and windless, as though there were no shrieking November to

come. Oxford, the beautiful city, with its domes and spires, lay in the

hollow beneath the spectator, wreathed in thin mists of sunlit

amethyst. Behind that ridge in the middle distance ran the river and

the Nuneham woods; beyond rose the long blue line of the Chilterns. In

front of the cottage the ground sank through copse and field to the

river level, the hedge lines all held by sentinel trees, to which the

advancing autumn had given that significance the indiscriminate summer

green denies. The gravely rounded elms with their golden caps, the

scarlet of the beeches, the pale lemon-yellow of the nearly naked

limes, the splendid blacks of yew and fir—they were all there, mingled

in the autumn cup of misty sunshine like melting jewels. And among

them, the enchanted city shone, fair and insubstantial, from the depth

below; as it were, the spiritual word and voice of all the scene.

Falloden paced up and down the terrace, smoking and thinking. That was

Otto’s open window. But Radowitz had not yet appeared that morning, and

the ex-scout, who acted butler and valet to the two men, had brought

word that he would come down in the afternoon, but was not to be

disturbed till then.

“What lunacy made me do it?” thought Falloden, standing still at the

end of the terrace which fronted the view.

He and Radowitz had been nearly three weeks together. Had he been of

the slightest service or consolation to Radowitz during that time? He

doubted it. That incalculable impulse which had made him propose

himself as Otto’s companion for the winter still persisted indeed. He

was haunted still by a sense of being “under command”—directed—by a

force which could not be repelled. Ill at ease, unhappy, as he was, and

conscious of being quite ineffective, whether as nurse or companion,

unless Radowitz proposed to “throw up,” he knew that he himself should

hold on; though why, he could scarcely have explained.

But the divergences between them were great; the possibilities of

friction many. Falloden was astonished to find that he disliked Otto’s

little fopperies and eccentricities quite as much as he had ever done

in college days; his finicky dress, his foreign ways in eating, his

tendency to boast about his music, his country, and his forebears, on

his good days, balanced by a brooding irritability on his bad days. And

he was conscious that his own ways and customs were no less teasing to

Radowitz; his Tory habits of thought, his British contempt for vague

sentimentalisms and heroics, for all that _panache_ means to the

Frenchman, or “glory” to the Slav.

“Then why, in the name of common sense, are we living together?”

He could really give no answer but the answer of “necessity”—of a

spiritual need—issuing from a strange tangle of circumstance. The

helpless form, the upturned face of his dying father, seemed to make

the centre of it, and those faint last words, so sharply, and, as it

were, dynamically connected with the hateful memory of Otto’s fall and

cry in the Marmion Quad, and the hateful ever-present fact of his

maimed life. Constance too—his scene with her on the river bank—her

letter, breaking with him—and then the soft, mysterious change in

her—and that passionate, involuntary promise in her eyes and voice, as

they stood together in her aunts’ garden—all these various elements,

bitter and sweet, were mingled in the influence which was shaping his

own life. He wanted to forgive himself; and he wanted Constance to

forgive him, whether she married him or no. A kind of sublimated

egotism, he said to himself, after all!

But Otto? What had really made him consent to take up daily life with

the man to whom he owed his disaster? Falloden seemed occasionally to

be on the track of an explanation, which would then vanish and evade

him. He was conscious, however, that here also, Constance Bledlow was

somehow concerned; and, perhaps, the Pole’s mystical religion. He asked

himself, indeed, as Constance had already done, whether some

presentiment of doom, together with the Christian doctrines of

forgiveness and vicarious suffering, were not at the root of it? There

had been certain symptoms apparent during Otto’s last weeks at Penfold

known only to the old vicar, to himself and Sorell. The doctors were

not convinced yet of the presence of phthisis; but from various signs,

Falloden was inclined to think that the boy believed himself sentenced

to the same death which had carried off his mother. Was there then a

kind of calculated charity in his act also—but aiming in his case at an

eternal reward?

“He wants to please God—and comfort Constance—by forgiving me. I want

to please her—and relieve myself, by doing something to make up to him.

He has the best of it! But we are neither of us disinterested.”

The manservant came out with a cup of coffee.

“How is he!” said Falloden, as he took it, glancing up at a still

curtained window.

The man hesitated.

“Well, I don’t know, sir, I’m sure. He saw the doctor this morning, and

told me afterwards not to disturb him till three o’clock. But he rang

just now, and said I was to tell you that two ladies were coming to

tea.”

“Did he mention their names?”

“Not as I’m aware of, sir.”

Falloden pondered a moment.

“Tell Mr. Radowitz, when he rings again, that I have gone down to the

college ground for some football, and I shan’t be back till after six.

You’re sure he doesn’t want to see me?”

“No, sir, I think not. He told me to leave the blind down, and not to

come in again till he rang.”

Falloden put on flannels, and ran down the field paths towards Oxford

and the Marmion ground, which lay on the hither side of the river. Here

he took hard exercise for a couple of hours, walking on afterwards to

his club in the High Street, where he kept a change of clothes. He

found some old Marmion friends there, including Robertson and Meyrick,

who asked him eagerly after Radowitz.

“Better come and see,” said Falloden. “Give you a bread and cheese

luncheon any day.”

They got no more out of him. But his reticence made them visibly

uneasy, and they both declared their intention of coming up the

following day. In both men there was a certain indefinable change which

Falloden soon perceived. Both seemed, at times, to be dragging a weight

too heavy for their youth. At other times, they were just like other

men of their age; but Falloden, who knew them well, realised that they

were both hag-ridden by remorse for what had happened in the summer.

And indeed the attitude of a large part of the college towards them,

and towards Falloden, when at rare intervals he showed himself there,

could hardly have been colder or more hostile. The “bloods” were broken

up; the dons had set their faces steadily against any form of ragging;

and the story of the maimed hand, of the wrecking of Radowitz’s career,

together with sinister rumours as to his general health, had spread

through Oxford, magnifying as they went. Falloden met it all with a

haughty silence; and was but seldom seen in his old haunts.

And presently it had become known, to the stupefaction of those who

were aware of the earlier facts, that victim and tormentor, the injured

and the offender, were living together in the Boar’s Hill cottage where

Radowitz was finishing the composition required for his second musical

examination, and Falloden—having lost his father, his money and his

prospects—was reading for a prize fellowship to be given by Merton in

December.

It was already moonlight when Falloden began to climb the long hill

again, which leads up from Folly Bridge to the height on which stood

the cottage. But the autumn sunset was not long over, and in the

mingled light all the rich colours of the fading woodland seemed to be

suspended in, or fused with, the evening air. Forms and distances,

hedges, trees, moving figures, and distant buildings were marvellously

though dimly glorified; and above the golds and reds and purples of the

misty earth, shone broad and large—an Achilles shield in heaven—the

autumn moon, with one bright star beside it.

Suddenly, out of the twilight, Falloden became aware of a pony-carriage

descending the hill, and two ladies in it. His blood leapt. He

recognised Constance Bledlow, and he supposed the other lady was Mrs.

Mulholland.

Constance on her side knew in a moment from the bearing of his head and

shoulders who was the tall man approaching them. She spoke hurriedly to

Mrs. Mulholland.

“Do you mind if I stop and speak to Mr. Falloden?”

Mrs. Mulholland shrugged her shoulders—

“Do as you like, my dear. Only don’t expect me to be very forthcoming!”

Constance stopped the carriage, and bent forward.

“Mr. Falloden!”

He came up to her. Connie introduced him to Mrs. Mulholland, who bowed

coldly.

“We have just been to see Otto Radowitz,” said Constance. “We found

him—very sadly, to-day.” Her hesitating voice, with the note of wistful

appeal in it, affected him strangely.

“Yes, it has been a bad day. I haven’t seen him at all.”

“He gave us tea, and talked a great deal. He was rather excited; but he

looked wretched. And why has he turned against his doctor?”

“Has he turned against his doctor?” Falloden’s tone was one of

surprise. “I thought he liked him.”

“He said he was a croaker, and he wasn’t going to let himself be

depressed by anybody—doctor or no.”

Falloden was silent. Mrs. Mulholland interposed.

“Perhaps you would like to walk a little way with Mr. Falloden? I can

manage the pony.”

Constance descended. Falloden turned back with her towards Oxford. The

pony-carriage followed at some distance behind.

Then Falloden talked freely. The presence of the light figure beside

him, in its dark dress and close-fitting cap, seemed to thaw the chill

of life. He began rapidly to pour out his own anxieties, his own sense

of failure.

“I am the last man in the world who ought to be looking after him; I

know that as well as anybody,” he said, with emphasis. “But what’s to

be done? Sorell can’t get away from college. And Radowitz knows very

few men intimately. Neither Meyrick nor Robertson would be any better

than I.”

“Oh, not so good—not nearly so good!” exclaimed Constance eagerly. “You

don’t know! He counts on you.”

Falloden shook his head.

“Then he counts on a broken reed. I irritate and annoy him a hundred

times a day.”

“Oh, no, no—he does count on you,” repeated Connie in her soft,

determined voice. “If you give up, he will be much—much worse off!”

Then she added after a moment—“Don’t give up! I—I ask you!”

“Then I shall stay.”

They moved on a few steps in silence, till Connie said eagerly—

“Have you any news from Paris?”

“Yes; we wrote in the nick of time. The whole thing was just being

given up for lack of funds. Now I have told him he may spend what he

pleases, so long as he does the thing.”

“Please—mayn’t I help?”

“Thank you. It’s my affair.”

“It’ll be very, very expensive.”

“I shall manage it.”

“It would be kinder”—her voice shook a little—“if I might help.”

He considered it—then said doubtfully:

“Suppose you provide the records?—the things it plays? I don’t know

anything about music—and I have been racking my brains to think of

somebody in Paris who could look after that part of it.”

Constance exclaimed. Why, she had several friends in Paris, in the very

thick of the musical world there! She had herself had lessons all one

winter in Paris at the Conservatoire from a dear old fellow—a Pole—a

pupil of Chopin in his youth, and in touch with the whole Polish colony

in Paris, which was steeped in music.

“He made love to me a little”—she said, laughing—“I’m sure he’d do

anything for us. I’ll write at once! And there is somebody at the

Embassy—why, of course, I can set all kinds of people to work!”

And her feet began to dance along the road beside him.

“We must get some Polish music”—she went on—“there’s that marvellous

young pianist they rave about in Paris—Paderewski. I’m sure he’d help!

Otto has often talked to me about him. We must have lots of Chopin—and

Liszt—though of course he wasn’t a Pole!—And Polish national

songs!—Otto was only telling me to-day how Chopin loved them—how he and

Liszt used to go about the villages and farms and note them down. Oh,

we’ll have a wonderful collection!”

Her eyes shone in her small, flushed face. They walked on fast, talking

and dreaming, till there was Folly Bridge in front of them, and the

beginnings of Oxford. Falloden pulled up sharply.

“I must run back to him. Will you come again?”

She held out her hand. The moonlight, shining on his powerful face and

curly hair, stirred in her a sudden, acute sense of delight.

“Oh yes—we’ll come again. But don’t leave him!—don’t, please, think of

it! He trusts you—he leans on you.”

“It is kind of you to believe it. But I am no use!”

He put her back into the carriage, bowed formally, and was gone,

running up the hill at an athlete’s pace.

The two ladies drove silently on, and were soon among the movement and

traffic of the Oxford streets. Connie’s mind was steeped in passionate

feeling. Till now Falloden had touched first her senses, then her pity.

Now in these painful and despondent attempts of his, to adjust himself

to Otto’s weakness and irritability, he was stirring sympathies and

enthusiasms in her which belonged to that deepest soul in Connie which

was just becoming conscious of itself. And all the more, perhaps,

because in Falloden’s manner towards her there was nothing left of the

lover. For the moment at any rate she preferred it so. Life was all

doubt, expectation, thrill—its colour heightened, its meanings

underlined. And in her complete uncertainty as to what turn it would

take, and how the doubt would end, lay the spell—the potent tormenting

charm—of the situation.

She was sorry, bitterly sorry for Radowitz—the victim. But she loved

Falloden—the offender! It was the perennial injustice of passion, the

eternal injustice of human things.

When Falloden was half-way up the hill, he left the road, and took a

short cut through fields, by a path which led him to the back of the

cottage, where its sitting-room window opened on the garden and the

view. As he approached the house, he saw that the sitting-room blinds

had not been drawn, and some of the windows were still open. The whole

room was brilliantly lit by fire and lamp. Otto was there alone,

sitting at the piano, with his back to the approaching spectator and

the moonlit night outside. He was playing something with his left hand;

Falloden could see him plainly. Suddenly, he saw the boy’s figure

collapse. He was still sitting, but his face was buried in his arm

which was lying on the piano; and through the open window, Falloden

heard a sound which, muffled as it was, produced upon him a strange and

horrible impression. It was a low cry, or groan—the voice of despair

itself.

Falloden stood motionless. All he knew was that he would have given

anything in the world to recall the past; to undo the events of that

June evening in the Marmion quadrangle.

Then, before Otto could discover his presence, he went noiselessly

round the corner of the house, and entered it by the front door. In the

hall, he called loudly to the ex-scout, as he went upstairs, so that

Radowitz might know he had come back. When he returned, Radowitz was

sitting over the fire with sheets of scribbled music-paper on a small

table before him. His eyes shone, his cheeks were feverishly bright. He

turned with forced gaiety at the sight of Falloden—

“Well, did you meet them on the road?”

“Lady Constance, and her friend? Yes. I had a few words with them. How

are you now? What did the doctor say to you?”

“What on earth does it matter!” said Radowitz impatiently. “He is just

a fool—a young one—the worst sort—I can put up with the old ones. I

know my own case a great deal better than he does.”

“Does he want you to stop working?” Falloden stood on the hearth,

looking down on the huddled figure in the chair; himself broad and tall

and curly-haired, like the divine Odysseus, when Athene had breathed

ambrosial youth upon him. But he was pale, and his eyes frowned

perpetually under his splendid brows.

“Some nonsense of that sort!” said Radowitz. “Don’t let’s talk about

it.”

They went into dinner, and Radowitz sent for champagne.

“That’s the only sensible thing the idiot said—that I might have that

stuff whenever I liked.”

His spirits rose with the wine; and presently Falloden could have

thought what he had seen from the dark had been a mere illusion. A

review in _The Times_ of a book of Polish memoirs served to let loose a

flood of boastful talk, which jarred abominably on the Englishman.

Under the Oxford code, to boast in plain language of your ancestors, or

your own performances, meant simply that you were an outsider, not sure

of your footing. If a man really had ancestors, or more brains than

other people, his neighbours saved him the trouble of talking about

them. Only the fools and the _parvenus_ trumpeted themselves; a process

in any case not worth while, since it defeated its own ends. You might

of course be as insolent or arrogant as you pleased; but only an idiot

tried to explain why.

In Otto, however, there was the characteristic Slav mingling of quick

wits with streaks of childish vanity. He wanted passionately to make

this tough Englishman feel what a great country Poland had been and

would be again; what great people his ancestors had been; and what a

leading part they had played in the national movements. And the more he

hit against an answering stubbornness—or coolness—in Falloden, the more

he held forth. So that it was an uncomfortable dinner. And again

Falloden said to himself—“Why did I do it? I am only in his way. I

shall bore and chill him; and I don’t seem to be able to help it.”

But after dinner, as the night frost grew sharper, and as Otto sat over

the fire, piling on the coal, Falloden suddenly went and fetched a warm

Scotch plaid of his own. When he offered it, Radowitz received it with

surprise, and a little annoyance.

“I am not the least cold—thank you!”

But, presently, he had wrapped it round his knees; and some restraint

had broken down in Falloden.

“Isn’t there a splendid church in Cracow?” he asked casually,

stretching himself, with his pipe, in a long chair on the opposite side

of the fire.

“One!—five or six!” cried Otto indignantly. “But I expect you’re

thinking of Panna Marya. Panna means Lady. I tell you, you English

haven’t got anything to touch it!”

“What’s it like?—what date?” said Falloden, laughing.

“I don’t know—I don’t know anything about architecture. But it’s

glorious. It’s all colour and stained glass—and magnificent tombs—like

the gate of heaven,” said the boy with ardour. “It’s the church that

every Pole loves. Some of my ancestors are buried there. And it’s the

church where, instead of a clock striking, the hours are given out by a

watchman who plays a horn. He plays an old air—ever so old—we call it

the ‘Heynal,’ on the top of one of the towers. The only time I was ever

in Cracow I heard a man at a concert—a magnificent player—improvise on

it. And it comes into one of Chopin’s sonatas.”

He began to hum under his breath a sweet wandering melody. And suddenly

he sprang up, and ran to the piano. He played the air with his left

hand, embroidering it with delicate arabesques and variations, catching

a bass here and there with a flying touch, suggesting marvellously what

had once been a rich and complete whole. The injured hand, which had

that day been very painful, lay helpless in its sling; the other

flashed over the piano, while the boy’s blue eyes shone beneath his

vivid frieze of hair. Falloden, lying back in his chair, noticed the

emaciation of the face, the hollow eyes, the contracted shoulders; and

as he did so, he thought of the scene in the Magdalen ballroom—the

slender girl, wreathed in pearls, and the brilliant foreign

youth—dancing, dancing, with all the eyes of the room upon them.

Presently, with a sound of impatience, Radowitz left the piano. He

could do nothing that he wanted to do. He stood at the window for some

minutes looking out at the autumn moon, with his back to Falloden.

Falloden took up one of the books he was at work on for his fellowship

exam. When Radowitz came back to the fire, however, white and

shivering, he laid it down again, and once more made conversation.

Radowitz was at first unwilling to respond. But he was by nature

_bavard_, and Falloden played him with some skill.

Very soon he was talking fast and brilliantly again, about his artistic

life in Paris, his friends at the Conservatoire or in the Quartier

Latin; and so back to his childish days in Poland, and the uprising in

which the family estates near Warsaw had been forfeited. Falloden found

it all very strange. The seething, artistic, revolutionary world which

had produced Otto was wholly foreign to him; and this patriotic passion

for a dead country seemed to his English common sense a waste of force.

But in Otto’s eyes Poland was not dead; the White Eagle, torn and

blood-stained though she was, would mount the heavens again; and in

those dark skies the stars were already rising!

At eleven, Falloden got up—

“I must go and swat. It was awfully jolly, what you’ve been telling me.

I know a lot I didn’t know before.”

A gleam of pleasure showed in the boy’s sunken eyes.

“I expect I’m a bore,” he said, with a shrug; “and I’d better go to

bed.”

Falloden helped him carry up his books and papers. In Otto’s room, the

windows were wide open, but there was a bright fire, and Bateson, the

ex-scout, was waiting to help him undress. Falloden asked some

questions about the doctor’s orders. Various things were wanted from

Oxford. He undertook to get them in the morning.

When he came back to the sitting-room, he stood some time in a brown

study. He wondered again whether he had any qualifications at all as a

nurse. But he was inclined to think now that Radowitz might be worse

off without him; what Constance had said seemed less unreal; and his

effort of the evening, as he looked back on it, brought him a certain

bitter satisfaction.

The following day, Radowitz came downstairs with the course of the

second movement of his symphony clear before him. He worked feverishly

all day, now writing, now walking up and down, humming and thinking,

now getting but of his piano—a beautiful instrument hired for the

winter—all that his maimed state allowed him to get; and passing hour

after hour, between an ecstasy of happy creation, and a state of

impotent rage with his own helplessness. Towards sunset he was worn

out, and with tea beside him which he had been greedily drinking, he

was sitting huddled over the fire, when he heard some one ride up to

the front door.

In another minute the sitting-room door opened, and a girl’s figure in

a riding habit appeared.

“May I come in?” said Connie, flushing rather pink.

Otto sprang up, and drew her in. His fatigue disappeared as though by

magic. He seemed all gaiety and force.

“Come in! Sit down and have some tea! I was so depressed five minutes

ago—I was fit to kill myself. And now you make the room shine—you do

come in like a goddess!”

He busied himself excitedly in putting a chair for her, in relighting

the spirit kettle, in blowing up the fire.

Constance meanwhile stood in some embarrassment with one hand on the

back of a chair—a charming vision in her close fitting habit, and the

same black _tricorne_ that she had worn in the Lathom Woods, at

Falloden’s side.

“I came to bring you a book, Otto, the book we talked of yesterday.”

She held out a paper-covered volume. “But I mustn’t stay.”

“Oh, do stay!” he implored her. “Don’t bother about Mrs. Grundy. I’m so

tired and so bored. Anybody may visit an invalid. Think this is a

nursing home, and you’re my daily visitor. Falloden’s miles away on a

drag-hunt. Ah, that’s right!” he cried delightedly, as he saw that she

had seated herself. “Now you shall have some tea!”

She let him provide her, watching him the while with slightly frowning

brows. How ill he looked—how ill! Her heart sank.

“Dear Otto, how are you? You don’t seem so well to-day.”

“I’ve been working myself to death. It won’t come right—this beastly

_andante_. It’s too jerky—it wants _liaison_. And I can’t hear it—I

can’t hear it!—that’s the devilish part of it.”

And taking his helpless hand out of the sling in which it had been

resting, he struck it bitterly against the arm of his chair. The tears

came to Connie’s eyes.

“Don’t!—you’ll hurt yourself. It’ll be all right—it’ll be all right!

You’ll hear it in your mind.” And bending forward under a sudden

impulse, she took the maimed hand in her two hands—so small and

soft—and lifting it tenderly she put her lips to it.

He looked at her in amazement.

“You do that—for me?”

“Yes. Because you are a great artist—and a brave man!” she said,

gulping. “You are not to despair. Your music is in your soul—your

brain. Other people shall play it for you.”

He calmed down.

“At least I am not deaf, like Beethoven,” he said, trying to please

her. “That would have been worse. Do you know, last night Falloden and

I had a glorious talk? He was awfully decent. He made me tell him all

about Poland and my people. He never scoffed once. He makes me do what

the doctor says. And last night—when it was freezing cold—he brought a

rug and wrapped it round me. Think of that!”—he looked at

her—half-shamefaced, half-laughing—“_Falloden!_”

Her eyes shone.

“I’m glad!” she said softly. “I’m glad!”

“Yes, but do you know why he’s kind—why he’s here at all?” he asked her

abruptly.

“What’s the good of silly questions?” she said hastily. “Take it as it

comes.”

He laughed.

“He does it—I’m going to say it!—yes, I am—and you are not to be

angry—he does it because—simply—he’s in love with you!”

Connie flushed again, more deeply, and he, already alarmed by his own

boldness, looked at her nervously.

“You are quite wrong.” Her tone was quiet, but decided. “He did it,

first of all, because of what you did for his father—”

“I did nothing!” interposed Radowitz.

She took no notice.

“And secondly”—her voice shook a little—“because—he was sorry.

Now—now—he is doing it”—suddenly her smile flashed out, with its touch

of humour—“just simply because he likes it!”

It was a bold assertion. She knew it. But she straightened her slight

shoulders, prepared to stick to it.

Radowitz shook his head.

“And what am I doing it for? Do you remember when I said to you I

loathed him?”

“No—not him.”

“Well, something in him—the chief thing, it seemed to me then. I felt

towards him really—as a man might feel towards his murderer—or the

murderer of some one else, some innocent, helpless person who had given

no offence. Hatred—loathing—abhorrence!—you couldn’t put it too

strongly. Well then,”—he began poking at the fire, while he went on

thinking aloud—“God brought us together in that strange manner. By the

way”—he turned to her—“are you a Christian?”

“I—I don’t know. I suppose I am.”

“I am,” he said firmly. “I am a practising Catholic. Catholicism with

us Poles is partly religion, partly patriotism—do you understand? I go

to confession—I am a communicant. And for some time I couldn’t go to

Communion at all. I always felt Falloden’s hand on my shoulder, as he

was pushing me down the stairs; and I wanted to kill him!—just that!

You know our Polish blood runs hotter than yours. I didn’t want the

college to punish him. Not at all. It was my affair. After I saw you in

town, it grew worse—it was an obsession. When we first got to

Yorkshire, Sorell and I, and I knew that Falloden was only a few miles

away, I never could get quit of it—of the thought that some

day—somewhere—I should kill him. I never, if I could help it, crossed a

certain boundary line that I had made for myself, between our side of

the moor, and the side which belonged to the Fallodens. I couldn’t be

sure of myself if I had come upon him unawares. Oh, of course, he would

soon have got the better of me—but there would have been a struggle—I

should have attacked him—and I might have had a revolver. So for your

sake”—he turned to look at her with his hollow blue eyes—“I kept away.

Then, one evening, I quite forgot all about it. I was thinking of the

theme for the slow movement in my symphony, and I didn’t notice where I

was going. I walked on and on over the hill—and at last I heard a man

groaning—and there was Sir Arthur by the stream. I saw at once that he

was dying. There I sat, alone with him. He asked me not to leave him.

He said something about Douglas, ‘Poor Douglas!’ And when the horrible

thing came back—the last time—he just whispered, ‘Pray!’ and I said our

Catholic prayers that our priest had said when my mother died. Then

Falloden came—just in time—and instead of wanting to kill him, I waited

there, a little way off, and prayed hard for myself and him! Queer,

wasn’t it? And afterwards—you know—I saw his mother. Then the next day,

I confessed to a dear old priest, who was very kind to me, and on the

Sunday he gave me Communion. He said God had been very gracious to me;

and I saw what he meant. That very week I had a hemorrhage, the first I

ever had.”

Connie gave a sudden, startled cry. He turned again to smile at her.

“Didn’t you know? No, I believe no one knew, but Sorell and the

doctors. It was nothing. It’s quite healed. But the strange thing was

how extraordinarily happy I felt that week. I didn’t hate Falloden any

more. It was as though a sharp thorn had gone from one’s mind. It

didn’t last long of course, the queer ecstatic feeling. There was

always my hand—and I got very low again. But something lasted; and when

Falloden said that extraordinary thing—I don’t believe he meant to say

it at all!—suggesting we should settle together for the winter—I knew

that I must do it. It was a kind of miracle—one thing after

another—driving us.”

His voice dropped. He remained gazing absently into the fire.

“Dear Otto”—said Constance softly—“you have forgiven him?”

He smiled.

“What does that matter? Have you?”

His eager eyes searched her face. She faltered under them.

“He doesn’t care whether I have or not.”

At that he laughed out.

“Doesn’t he? I say, did you ask us both to come—on purpose—that

afternoon?—in the garden?”

She was silent.

“It was bold of you!” he said, in the same laughing tone. “But it has

answered. Unless, of course, I bore him to death. I talk a lot of

nonsense—I can’t help it—and he bears it. And he says hard, horrid

things, sometimes—and my blood boils—and I bear it. And I expect he

wants to break off a hundred times a day—and so do I. Yet here we stay.

And it’s you”—he raised his head deliberately—“it’s you who are really

at the bottom of it.”

Constance rose trembling from her chair.

“Don’t say any more, dear Otto. I didn’t mean any harm. I—I was so

sorry for you both.”

He laughed again softly.

“You’ve got to marry him!” he said triumphantly. “There!—you may go

now. But you’ll come again soon. I know you will!”

She seemed to slip, to melt, out of the room. But he had a last vision

of flushed cheeks, and half-reproachful eyes.

CHAPTER XVIII

On the day following Constance’s visit to the Boar’s Hill cottage she

wrote to Radowitz:—

“DEAR OTTO,—I am going to ask you not to raise the subject you spoke of

yesterday to me again between us. I am afraid I should find my visits a

pain instead of a joy, if you did so. And Mrs. Mulholland and I want to

come so much—sometimes alone, and sometimes together. We want to be

mother and sister as much as we can, and you will let us! We know very

well that we are poor painted things compared with real mothers and

sisters. Still we should love to do our best—_I_ should—if you’ll let

me!”

To which Otto replied:—

“DEAR CONSTANCE,—(That’s impudence, but you told me!)—I’ll hold my

tongue—though I warn you I shall only think the more. But you shan’t

have any cause to punish me by not coming. Good heavens!—if you didn’t

come!

“The coast is always clear here between two and four. I get my walk in

the morning.”

Two or three days a week accordingly, Constance, or Mrs. Mulholland, or

both took their way to the cottage. They did all that women with soft

hearts can do for a sick man. Mrs. Mulholland managed the servants, and

enquired into the food. Connie brought books and flowers, and all the

Oxford gossip she could collect. Their visit was the brightness of the

boy’s day, and thanks to them, many efforts were made to soften his

calamity. The best musical talent that Oxford could furnish was eager

to serve him; and a well-known orchestra was only waiting for the

completion of his symphony and the result of his examination to produce

the symphony in the hall of Marmion.

Meanwhile Connie very rarely saw Falloden—except in connection either

with Otto’s health, or with the “Orpheus,” as to which Falloden was in

constant communication with the inventor, one Auguste Chaumart, living

in a garret on the heights of Montmartre; while Constance herself was

carrying on an eager correspondence with friends of her own or her

parents, in Paris, with regard to the “records” which were to make the

repertory of the Orpheus. The automatic piano—or piano-player—which

some years later became the pianola, was in those days rapidly

developing. The difference between it and the Orpheus lay in the fact

that the piano-player required hands and feet of flesh and blood for

anything more than a purely mechanical rendering of the music provided

by the rolls; while in the Orpheus, expression, accent, interpretation,

as given by the best pianists of the day, had been already registered

in the cylinders.

On the pianola, or what preceded it—then as now—the player provided his

own rendering. But the Orpheus, the precursor also of types that have

since been greatly perfected, was played by an electrical mechanism,

and the audience was intended to listen to Chopin or Beethoven, to

Schumann or Brahms, as interpreted by the famous players of the moment,

without any intervening personality.

These things are very familiar to our generation. In the eighties, they

were only a vision and a possibility, and Falloden’s lavish expenditure

was in fact stimulating one of the first inventors.

But Connie also was playing an important part. Both Lord and Lady

Risborough had possessed devoted friends in Paris, and Connie had made

others of her own among the young folk with whom she had danced and

flirted and talked during a happy spring with her parents in the Avenue

Marceau. She had set these playfellows of hers to work, and with most

brilliant success. Otto’s story, as told by her vivacious letters, had

gone the round. No woman of twice her age could have told it more

adroitly. Otto appeared as the victim of an unfortunate accident in a

college frolic; Falloden as the guardian friend; herself, as his

lieutenant. It touched the romantic sense, the generous heart of

musical Paris. There were many who remembered Otto’s father and mother

and the musical promise of the bright-haired boy. The Polish colony in

Paris, a survival from the tragic days of Poland’s exodus under the

revolutionary skies of the thirties and the sixties, had been appealed

to, and both Polish and French musicians were already in communication

with Chaumart, and producing records under his direction. The young

Polish marvel of the day—Paderewski—had been drawn in, and his

renderings of Chopin’s finest work were to provide the bulk of the

rolls. Connie’s dear old Polish teacher, himself a composer, was at

work on a grouping of folk-songs from Poland and Lithuania—the most

characteristic utterance of a martyred people.

“They are songs, _chère petite_,” wrote the old man—“of revolt, of

exile, and of death. There is no other folk-song like them in the

world, just as there is no history in the world like Poland’s. Your

poor friend knows them all—has known them all from his childhood. They

will speak to him of his torn country. He will hear in them the cry of

the White Eagle—the White Eagle of Poland—as she soars wounded and

bleeding over the southern plains, or sinks dying into the marshes and

forests of Lithuania. It is in these songs that we Poles listen to the

very heart-beats of our outraged country. Our songs—our music—our

poets—our memories:—as a nation that is all we have—except the faith in

us that never dies. _Hinc surrectura!_ Yes, she shall rise again, our

Poland! Our hope is in God, and in the human heart, the human

conscience, that He has made. Comfort your friend. He has lost much,

poor boy!—but he has still ears to hear, a brain, an imagination to

conceive. Let him work still for music and for Poland—they will some

day reward him!”

And as a last contribution, a young French pianist, rising rapidly into

fame both as a virtuoso and a composer, was writing specially a series

of variations on the lovely theme of the “Heynal”—that traditional

horn-song, played every hour in the ears of Cracow, from the tower of

Panna Marya—of which Otto had spoken to Falloden.

But all these things were as yet hidden from Otto. Falloden and

Constance corresponded about them, in letters that anybody might have

read, which had behind them, nevertheless, a secret and growing force

of emotion. Even Mrs. Mulholland, who was rapidly endearing herself

both to Constance and Radowitz, could only guess at what was going on,

and when she did guess, held her tongue. But her relations with

Falloden, which at the beginning of his residence in the cottage had

been of the coldest, gradually became less strained. To his own

astonishment, he found the advice of this brusque elderly woman so

important to him that he looked eagerly for her coming, and obeyed her

with a docility which amazed himself and her. The advice concerned, of

course, merely the small matters of daily life bearing on Otto’s health

and comfort, and when the business was done, Falloden disappeared.

But strangely amenable, and even humble as he might appear in these

affairs to those who remembered his haughty days in college, for both

Constance and Mrs. Mulholland quite another fact emerged from their

experience of the cottage household during these weeks:—simply

this—that whatever other people might do or be, Falloden was steadily,

and perhaps unconsciously, becoming master of the situation, the

indispensable and protecting power of Otto’s life.

How he did it remained obscure. But Mrs. Mulholland at least—out of a

rich moral history—guessed that what they saw in the Boar’s Hill

cottage was simply the working out of the old spiritual paradox—that

there is a yielding which is victory, and a surrender which is power.

It seemed to her often that Radowitz was living in a constant state of

half-subdued excitement, produced by the strange realisation that he

and his life had become so important to Falloden that the differences

of training and temperament between them, and all the little daily

rubs, no longer counted; that he existed, so to speak, that Falloden

might—through him—escape the burden of his own remorse. The hard,

strong, able man, so much older than himself in character, if not in

years, the man who had bullied and despised him, was now becoming his

servant, in the sense in which Christ was the “servant” of his

brethren. Not with any conscious Christian intention—far from it; but

still under a kind of mysterious compulsion. The humblest duties, the

most trivial anxieties, where Radowitz was concerned, fell, week by

week, increasingly to Falloden’s portion. A bad or a good

night—appetite or no appetite—a book that Otto liked—a visit that

amused him—anything that for the moment contented the starved musical

sense in Otto, that brought out his gift, and his joy in it—anything

that, for the moment, enabled him to forget and evade his

injuries—these became, for Falloden also, the leading events of his own

day. He was reading hard for his fellowship, and satisfying various

obscure needs by taking as much violent exercise as possible; but there

was going on in him, all the time, an intense spiritual ferment,

connected with Constance Bledlow on the one side, and Otto Radowitz on

the other.

Meanwhile—what was not so evident to this large-hearted observer—Otto

was more than willing—he burned—to play his part. All that is mystical

and passionate in the soul of a Polish Catholic, had been stirred in

him by his accident, his growing premonition of short life, the

bitterness of his calamity, the suddenness of his change of heart

towards Falloden.

“My future is wrecked. I shall never live to be old. I shall never be a

great musician. But I mean to live long enough to make Constance happy!

She shall talk of me to her children. And I shall watch over

her—perhaps—from another world.”

These thoughts, and others like them, floated by day and night through

the boy’s mind; and he wove them into the symphony he was writing.

Tragedy, passion, melody—these have been the Polish heritage in music;

they breathe through the Polish peasant songs, as through the genius of

a Chopin; they are bound up with the long agony of Polish history, with

the melancholy and monotony of the Polish landscape. They spoke again

through the beautiful thwarted gift of this boy of twenty, through his

foreboding of early death, and through that instinctive exercise of his

creative gift, which showed itself not in music alone, but in the

shaping of two lives—Falloden’s and Connie’s.

And Constance too was living and learning, with the intensity that

comes of love and pity and compunction. She was dropping all her

spoilt-child airs; and the bower-bird adornments, with which she had

filled her little room in Medburn House, had been gradually cleared

away, to Nora’s great annoyance, till it was almost as bare as Nora’s

own. Amid the misty Oxford streets, and the low-ceiled Oxford rooms,

she was played upon by the unseen influences of that “august place,”

where both the great and the forgotten dead are always at work, shaping

the life of the present. In those days Oxford was still praising

“famous men and the fathers who begat” her. Their shades still walked

her streets. Pusey was not long dead. Newman, the mere ghost of

himself, had just preached a tremulous last sermon within her bounds,

returning as a kind of spiritual Odysseus for a few passing hours to

the place where he had once reigned as the most adored son of Oxford.

Thomas Hill Green, with the rugged face, and the deep brown eyes, and

the look that made pretence and cowardice ashamed, was dead, leaving a

thought and a teaching behind him that his Oxford will not let die.

Matthew Arnold had yet some years to live and could occasionally be

seen at Balliol or at All Souls; while Christ Church and Balliol still

represented the rival centres of that great feud between Liberal and

Orthodox which had convulsed the University a generation before.

In Balliol, there sat a chubby-faced, quiet-eyed man, with very white

hair, round whom the storms of orthodoxy had once beaten, like the

surges on a lighthouse; and at Christ Church and in St. Mary’s the

beautiful presence and the wonderful gift of Liddon kept the old fires

burning in pious hearts.

And now into this old, old place, with its thick soil of dead lives and

deeds, there had come a new seed, as to which no one could tell how it

would flower. Women students were increasing every term in Oxford.

Groups of girl graduates in growing numbers went shyly through the

streets, knowing that they had still to justify their presence in this

hitherto closed world—made by men for men. There were many hostile eyes

upon them, watching for mistakes. But all the generous forces in Oxford

were behind them. The ablest men in the University were teaching women

how to administer—how to organise. Some lecture-rooms were opening to

them; some still entirely declined to admit them. And here and there

were persons who had a clear vision of the future to which was trending

this new eagerness of women to explore regions hitherto forbidden them

in the House of Life.

Connie had no such vision, but she had a boundless curiosity and a

thrilling sense of great things stirring in the world. Under Nora’s

lead she had begun to make friends among the women students, and to

find her way into their little bed-sitting-rooms at tea time. They all

seemed to her superhumanly clever; and superhumanly modest. She had

been brought up indeed by two scholars; but examinations dazzled and

appalled her. How they were ever passed, she could not imagine. She

looked at the girls who had passed them with awe, quite unconscious the

while of the glamour she herself possessed for these untravelled

students, as one familiar from her childhood with the sacred places of

history—Rome, Athens, Florence, Venice, Sicily. She had seen, she had

trodden; and quiet eyes—sometimes spectacled—would flame, while her

easy talk ran on.

But all the time there were very critical notions in her, hidden deep

down.

“Do they never think about a _man_?” some voice in her seemed to be

asking. “As for me, I am always thinking about a man!” And the colour

would flush into her cheeks, as she meekly asked for another cup of

tea.

Sometimes she would go with Nora to the Bodleian, and sit patiently

beside her while Nora copied Middle-English poetry from an early

manuscript, worth a king’s ransom. Nora got sevenpence a “folio,” of

seventy-two words, for her work. Connie thought the pay scandalous for

so much learning; but Nora laughed at her, and took far more pleasure

in the small cheque she received at the end of term from the University

Press than Connie in her quarterly dividends.

But Connie knew very well by this time that Nora was not wholly

absorbed in Middle English. Often, as they emerged from the Bodleian to

go home to lunch, they would come across Sorell hurrying along the

Broad, his master’s gown floating behind him. And he would turn his

fine ascetic face towards them, and wave his hand to them from the

other side of the street. And Connie would flash a look at Nora,—soft,

quick, malicious—of which Nora was well aware.

But Connie rarely said a word. She was handling the situation indeed

with great discretion; though with an impetuous will. She herself had

withdrawn from the Greek lessons, on the plea that she was attending

some English history lectures; that she must really find out who fought

the battle of Hastings; and was too lazy to do anything else. Sometimes

she would linger in the schoolroom till Sorell arrived, and then he

would look at her wistfully, when she prepared to depart, as though to

say—“Was this what I bargained for?”

But she always laughed and went. And presently as she crossed the hall

again, and heard animated voices in the schoolroom, her brown eyes

would show a merry satisfaction.

Meanwhile Nora was growing thinner and handsomer day by day. She was

shedding awkwardness without any loss of that subacid sincerity that

was her charm. Connie, as much as she dared, took her dressing in hand.

She was never allowed to give a thing; but Annette’s fingers were quick

and clever, and Nora’s Spartan garb was sometimes transformed by them

under the orders of a coaxing or audacious Constance. The mere lifting

of the load of care had let the young plant shoot. So that many persons

passing Ewen Hooper’s second daughter in the street would turn round

now to look at her in surprise. Was that really the stout, podgy

schoolgirl, who had already, by virtue of her strong personality, made

a certain impression in the university town? People had been vaguely

sorry for her; or vaguely thought of her as plain but good. Alice of

course was pretty; Nora had the virtues. And now here she was, bursting

into good looks more positive than her sister’s.

The girl’s heart indeed was young at last, for the neighbourhood of

Connie was infectious. The fairy-godmothering of that young woman was

going finely. It was the secret hope at the centre of her own life

which was playing like captured sunshine upon all the persons about

her. Her energy was prodigious. Everything to do with money matters had

been practically settled between her and Sorell and Uncle Ewen; and

settled in Connie’s way, expressed no doubt in business form. And now

she was insisting firmly on the holiday visit to Rome, in spite of many

protests from Uncle Ewen and Nora. It was a promise, she declared.

Rome—Rome—was their fate. She wrote endless letters, enquiring for

rooms, and announcing their coming to her old friends. Uncle Ewen soon

had the startled impression that all Rome was waiting for them, and

that they could never live up to it.

Finally, Connie persuaded them to settle on rooms in a well-known small

hotel, overlooking the garden-front of the Palazzo Barberini, where she

had grown up. She wrote to the innkeeper, Signor B., “a very old friend

of mine,” who replied that the “_amici_” of the “_distintissima

signorina_” should be most tenderly looked after. As for the contessas

and marchesas who wrote, eagerly promising their “dearest Constance”

that they would be kind to her relations, they were many; and when Ewen

Hooper said nervously that it was clear he must take out both a

frock-coat and dress clothes, Constance laughed and said, “Not at

all!—Signer B. will lend you any thing you want,”—a remark which, in

the ears of the travellers to be, threw new and unexpected light on the

functions of an Italian innkeeper. Meanwhile she piled up guide-books,

she gathered maps; and she taught both her uncle and Nora Italian. And

so long as she was busied with such matters she seemed the gayest of

creatures, and would go singing and laughing about the house.

In another old house in Oxford, too, her coming made delight. She spent

many long hours beside the Master of Beaumont’s fire, gathering fresh

light on the ways of scholarship and scholars. The quarrels of the

learned had never hitherto come her way. Her father had never

quarrelled with anybody. But the Master—poor great man!—had quarrelled

with so many people! He had missed promotions which should have been

his; he had made discoveries of which others had got the credit; and he

kept a quite amazing stock of hatreds in some pocket of his vast

intelligence. Constance would listen at first to the expression of them

in an awed silence. Was it possible the world contained such mean and

treacherous monsters? And why did it matter so much to a man who knew

everything?—who held all the classics and all the Renaissance in the

hollow of his hand, to whom “Latin was no more _difficile_, than to a

blackbird ’tis to whistle”? Then, gradually, she began to have the

courage to laugh; to try a little soft teasing of her new friend and

mentor, who was at once so wonderful and so absurd. And the Master bore

it well, could indeed never have too much of her company; while his

white-haired sister beamed at the sight of her. She became the child of

a childless house, and when Lady Langmoor sent her peremptory

invitations to this or that country mansion where she would meet “some

charming young men,” Connie would reply—“Best thanks, dear Aunt

Langmoor—but I am very happy here—and comfortably in love with a

gentleman on the sunny side of seventy. Please don’t interfere!”

Only with Herbert Pryce was she ever thorny in these days. She could

not forgive him that it was not till his appointment at the

Conservative Central Office, due to Lord Glaramara’s influence, was

actually signed and sealed that he proposed to Alice. Till the goods

had been delivered, he never finally committed himself. Even Nora had

underrated his prudence. But at last one evening he arrived at Medburn

House after dinner with the look of one whose mind is magnificently

made up. By common consent, the drawing-room was abandoned to him and

Alice, and when they emerged, Alice held her head triumphantly, and her

lover was all jocosity and self-satisfaction.

“She really is a dear little thing,” he said complacently to Connie,

when the news had been told and excitement subsided. “We shall do

capitally.”

“_Enfin?_” said Connie, with the old laugh in her eyes. “You are quite

sure?”

He looked at her uneasily.

“It never does to hurry these things,” he said, rather pompously. “I

wanted to feel I could give her what she had a right to expect. We owe

you a great deal, Lady Constance—or—perhaps now—I may call you

Constance?”

Constance winced, and pointedly avoided giving him leave. But for

Alice’s sake, she held her tongue. The wedding was to be hurried on,

and Mrs. Hooper, able for once to buy new frocks with a clear

conscience, and possessed of the money to pay for them, was made so

happy by the bustle of the trousseau that she fell in love with her

prospective son-in-law as the cause of it. Ewen Hooper meanwhile

watched him with mildly shrewd eyes, deciding once more in his inner

mind that mathematicians were an inferior race.

Not even to Nora—only to Mrs. Mulholland, did Constance ever lift the

veil, during these months. She was not long in succumbing to the queer

charm of that lovable and shapeless person; and in the little

drawing-room in St. Giles, the girl of twenty would spend winter

evenings, at the feet of her new friend, passing through various stages

of confession; till one night, Mrs. Mulholland lifted the small face,

with her own large hand, and looked mockingly into the brown eyes:

“Out with it, my dear! You are in love with Douglas Falloden!”

Connie said nothing. Her little chin did not withdraw itself, nor did

her eyes drop. But a film of tears rushed into them.

The truth was that in this dark wintry Oxford, and its neighbouring

country, there lurked a magic for Connie which in the high summer pomps

it had never possessed. Once or twice, in the distance of a winding

street—on some football ground in the Parks—in the gallery of St.

Mary’s on Sunday, Constance caught sight, herself unseen, of the tall

figure and the curly head. Such glimpses made the fever of her young

life. They meant far more to passion than her occasional meetings with

Falloden at the Boar’s Hill cottage. And there were other points of

contact. At the end of November, for instance, came the Merton

Fellowship. Falloden won it, in a brilliant field; and Connie contrived

to know all she wanted to know as to his papers, and his rivals. After

the announcement of his success, she trod on air. Finally she allowed

herself to send him a little note of congratulation—very short and

almost formal. He replied in the same tone.

Two days later, Falloden went over to Paris to see for himself the

condition of the Orpheus, and to arrange for its transport to England.

He was away for nearly a week, and on his return called at once in

Holywell, to report his visit. Nora was with Connie in the drawing-room

when he was announced; and a peremptory look forbade her to slip away.

She sat listening to the conversation.

Was this really Douglas Falloden—this grave, courteous man—without a

trace of the “blood” upon him? He seemed to her years older than he had

been in May, and related, for the first time, to the practical

every-day world. This absorption too in Otto Radowitz and his

affairs—incredible! He and Connie first eagerly discussed certain

domestic details of the cottage—the cook, the food, the draughts, the

arrangements to be made for Otto’s open-air treatment which the doctors

were now insisting on—with an anxious minuteness! Nora could hardly

keep her face straight in the distance—they were so like a pair of

crooning housewives. Then he began on his French visit, sitting

sideways on his chair, his elbow on the back of it, and his hand thrust

into his curly mass of hair—handsomer, thought Nora, than ever. And

there was Connie listening spell-bound in a low chair opposite, her

delicate pale profile distinct against the dark panelling of the room,

her eyes fixed on him. Nora’s perplexed eyes travelled from one to the

other.

As to the story of the Orpheus and its inventor, both girls hung upon

it. Falloden had tracked Auguste Chaumart to his garret in Montmartre,

and had found in him one of those marvellous French workmen, inheritors

of the finest technical tradition in the world, who are the true sons

of the men who built and furnished and carved Versailles, and thereby

revolutionised the minor arts of Europe. A small pinched fellow!—with a

sickly wife and children sharing his tiny workshop, and a brain teeming

with inventions, of which the electric piano, forerunner of the

Welte-Mignons of later days, was but the chief among many. He had spent

a fortune upon it, could get no capitalist to believe in it, and no

firm to take it up. Then Falloden’s astonishing letter and offer of

funds, based on Radowitz’s report—itself the echo of a couple of

letters from Paris—had encouraged the starving dreamer to go on.

Falloden reproduced the scene, as described to him by the chief actor

in it, when the inventor announced to his family that the thing was

accomplished, the mechanism perfect, and how that very night they

should hear Chopin’s great Fantasia, Op. 49, played by its invisible

hands.

The moment came. Wife and children gathered, breathless. Chaumart

turned on the current, released the machinery.

“_Ecoutez, mes enfants! Ecoutez, Henriette_!”

They listened—with ears, with eyes, with every faculty strained to its

utmost. And nothing happened!—positively nothing—beyond a few wheezing

or creaking sounds. The haggard inventor in despair chased everybody

out of the room, and sat looking at the thing, wondering whether to

smash it, or kill himself. Then an idea struck him. In feverish haste

he took the whole mechanism to pieces again, sitting up all night. And

as the morning sun rose, he discovered in the very heart of the

creature, to which by now he attributed an uncanny and independent

life, the most elementary blunder—a vital connection missed between the

power-supplying mechanism and the cylinders containing the records. He

set it right; and nearly dead with fatigue and excitement, unlocked his

door, and called his family back. Then what triumph! What falling on

each other’s necks—and what a _déjeuner_ in the Palais Royal—children

and all—paid for by the inventor’s last napoleon!

All this Falloden told, and told well.

Connie could not restrain her pleasure as he came to the end of his

tale. She clapped her hands in delight.

“And when—when will it come!”

“I think Christmas will see it here. I’ve only told you half—and the

lesser half. It’s you that have done most—far the most.”

And he took out a little note-book, running through the list of visits

he had paid to her friends and correspondents in Paris, among whom the

rolls were being collected, under Chaumart’s direction. The Orpheus

already had a large musical library of its own—renderings by some of

the finest artists of some of the noblest music. Beethoven, Bach,

Liszt, Chopin, Brahms, Schumann—all Otto’s favourite things, as far as

Connie had been able to discover them, were in the catalogue.

Suddenly, her eyes filled with tears. She put down the note-book, and

spoke in a low voice, as though her girlish joy in their common secret

had suddenly dropped.

“It must give him some pleasure—it must!” she said, slowly, but as

though she asked a question.

Falloden did not reply immediately. He rose from his seat. Nora, under

a quick impulse, gathered up a letter she had been writing, and slipped

out of the room.

“At least”—he looked away from her, straight out of the window—“I

suppose it will please him—that we tried to do something.”

“How is he—really?”

He shrugged his shoulders. Connie was standing, looking down, one hand

on her chair. The afternoon had darkened; he could see only her white

brow, and the wealth of her hair which the small head carried so

lightly. Her childishness, her nearness, made his heart beat. Suddenly

she lifted her eyes.

“Do you know”—it seemed to him her voice choked a little—“how much—you

matter to him? Mrs. Mulholland and I couldn’t keep him cheerful while

you were away.”

He laughed.

“Well, I have only just escaped a catastrophe to-day.”

She looked alarmed.

“How?”

“I offended Bateson, and he gave notice!” Connie’s “Oh!” was a sound of

consternation. Bateson, the ex-scout had become a most efficient and

comfortable valet, and Otto depended greatly upon him.

“It’s all right,” said Falloden quickly. “I grovelled. I ate all the

humble-pie I could think of. It was of course impossible to let him go.

Otto can’t do without him. I seem somehow to have offended his

dignity.”

“They have so much!” said Connie, laughing, but rather unsteadily.

“One lives and learns.” The tone of the words was serious—a little

anxious. Then the speaker took up his hat. “But I’m not good at

managing touchy people. Good night.”

Her hand passed into his. The little fingers were cold; he could not

help enclosing them in a warm, clinging grasp. The firelit room, the

dark street outside, and the footsteps of the passers-by—they all

melted from consciousness. They only saw and heard each other.

In another minute the outer door had closed behind them. Connie was

left still in the same attitude, one hand on the chair, her head

drooping, her heart in a dream.

Falloden ran through the streets, choosing the by-ways rather than the

thoroughfares. The air was frosty, the December sky clear and starlit,

above the blue or purple haze, pierced with lights, that filled the

lower air; through which the college fronts, the distant spires and

domes showed vaguely—as beautiful “suggestions”—“notes”—from which all

detail had disappeared. He was soon on Folly Bridge, and hurrying up

the hill he pushed straight on over the brow to the Berkshire side,

leaving the cottage to his right. Fold after fold of dim wooded country

fell away to the south of the ridge; bare branching trees were all

about him; a patch of open common in front where bushes of

winter-blossoming gorse defied the dusk. It was the English winter at

its loveliest—still, patient, expectant—rich in beauties of its own

that summer knows nothing of. But Falloden was blind to it. His pulses

were full of riot. She had been so near to him—and yet so far away—so

sweet, yet so defensive. His whole nature cried out fiercely for her.

“I want her!—_I want her!_ And I believe she wants me. She’s not afraid

of me now—she turns to me. What keeps us apart? Nothing that ought to

weigh for a moment against our double happiness!”

He turned and walked stormily homewards. Then as he saw the roof and

white walls of the cottage through the trees his mood wavered—and fell.

There was a life there which he had injured—a life that now depended on

him. He knew that, more intimately than Connie knew it, often as he had

denied it to her. And he was more convinced than Otto himself—though

never by word or manner had he ever admitted it for a moment—that the

boy was doomed—not immediately, but after one of those pitiful

struggles which have their lulls and pauses, but tend all the same

inevitably to one end.

“And as long as he lives, I shall look after him,” he thought, feeling

that strange compulsion on him again, and yielding to it with mingled

eagerness and despair.

For how could he saddle Connie’s life with such a charge—or darken it

with such a tragedy?

Impossible! But that was only one of many reasons why he should not

take advantage of her through their common pity for Otto. In his own

eyes he was a ruined man, and having resolutely refused to live upon

his mother, his pride was little more inclined to live upon a wife,

common, and generally applauded, though the practice might be. About

five thousand pounds had been saved for himself out of the wreck; of

which he would certainly spend a thousand, before all was done, on the

Orpheus. The rest would just suffice to launch him as a barrister. His

mother would provide for the younger children. Her best jewels indeed

had been already sold and invested as a dowry for Nelly, who showed

signs of engaging herself to a Scotch laird. But Falloden was joint

guardian of Trix and Roger, and must keep a watchful eye on them, now

that his mother’s soft incompetence had been more plainly revealed than

ever by her widow-hood. He chafed under the duties imposed, and yet

fulfilled them—anxiously and well—to the amazement of his relations.

In addition he had his way to make in the world.

But Constance had only to be a little more seen and known in English

society to make the most brilliant match that any scheming chaperon

could desire, Falloden was aware through every pulse of her fast

developing beauty. And although no great heiress, as heiresses now go,

she would ultimately inherit a large amount of scattered money, in

addition to what she already possessed. The Langmoors would certainly

have her out of Oxford at the earliest possible moment—and small blame

to them.

In all this he reasoned as a man of his class and antecedents was

likely to reason—only with a bias against himself. To capture Connie,

through Otto, before she had had any other chances of marriage, seemed

to him a mean and dishonorable thing.

If he had only time—time to make his career!

But there would be no time given him. As soon as her Risborough

relations got hold of her, Constance would marry directly.

He went back to the cottage in a sombre mood. Then, as Otto proved to

be in the same condition, Falloden had to shake off his own depression

as quickly as possible, and spend the evening in amusing and

distracting the invalid.

But Fortune, which had no doubt enjoyed the nips she had inflicted on

so tempting a victim, was as determined as before to take her own

capricious way.

By this time it was the last week of term, and a sharp frost had set in

over the Thames Valley. The floods were out north and south of the

city, and a bright winter sun shone all day over the glistening

ice-plains, and the throng of skaters.

At the beginning of the frost came the news of Otto’s success in his

musical examination; and at a Convocation, held shortly after it, he

put on his gown as Bachelor of Music. The Convocation House was crowded

to see him admitted to his degree; and the impression produced, as he

made his way through the throng towards the Vice-Chancellor, by the

frail, boyish figure, the startling red-gold hair, the black sling, and

the haunting eyes, was long remembered in Oxford. Then Sorell claimed

him, and hurried him up to London for doctors and consultations since

the effort of the examination had left him much exhausted.

Meanwhile the frost held, and all Oxford went skating. Constance

performed indifferently, and both Nora and Uncle Ewen were bent upon

improving her. But there were plenty of cavaliers to attend her,

whenever she appeared, either on Port Meadow or the Magdalen flood

water; and her sound youth delighted physically in the exercise, in the

play of the brisk air about her face, and the alternations of the

bright winter day—from the pale blue of its morning skies, hung behind

the snow-sprinkled towers and spires of Oxford, down to the red of

sunset, and the rise of those twilight mists which drew the fair city

gently back into the bosom of the moonlit dark.

But all the time the passionate sense in her watched and waited. The

“mere living” was good—“yet was there better than it!”

And on the second afternoon, out of the distance of Magdalen meadow, a

man came flying towards her as it seemed on the wings of the wind.

Falloden drew up beside her, hovering on his skates, a splendid vision

in the dusk, ease and power in every look and movement.

“Let me take you a run with the wind,” he said, holding out his hand.

“You shan’t come to any harm.”

Her eyes and her happy flush betrayed her. She put her hand in his, and

away they flew, up the course of the Cherwell, through the flooded

meadows. It seemed the very motion of gods; the world fell away. Then,

coming back, they saw Magdalen Tower, all silver and ebony under the

rising moon, and the noble arch of the bridge. The world was all

transmuted. Connie’s only hold on the kind, common earth seemed to lie

in this strong hand to which she clung; and yet in that touch, that

hold, lay the magic that was making life anew.

But soon the wind had risen gustily, and was beating in her face,

catching at her breath.

“This is too cold for you!” said Falloden abruptly; and wheeling round,

he had soon guided her into a more sheltered place, and there, easily

gliding up and down, soul and sense fused in one delight, they passed

one of those hours for which there is no measure in our dull human

time. They would not think of the past; they shrank from imagining the

future. There were shadows and ghosts behind them, and ahead of them;

but the sheer present mastered them.

Before they parted, Falloden told his companion that the Orpheus would

arrive from Paris the following day with a trio of French workmen to

set it up. The electric installation was already in place. Everything

would be ready by the evening. The instrument was to be placed behind a

screen in the built-out room, once a studio, which Falloden had turned

into a library. Otto rarely or never went there. The room looked north,

and he, whose well-being hung upon sunshine, disliked it. But there was

no other place for the Orpheus in the little cottage, and Falloden who

had been getting new and thick curtains for the windows, improving the

fire-place, and adding some armchairs, was eagerly hopeful that he

could turn it into a comfortable music-room for Otto in the winter

evenings, while he—if necessary—read his law elsewhere.

“Will you come for a rehearsal to-morrow?” he asked her. “Otto comes

back the day after.”

“No, no! I won’t hear anything, not a note—till he comes! But is he

strong enough?” she added wistfully. Strong enough, she meant, to bear

agitation and surprise. But Falloden reported that Sorell knew

everything that was intended, and approved. Otto had been very listless

and depressed in town; a reaction no doubt from his spurt of work

before the musical exam. Sorell thought the pleasure of the gift might

rouse him, and gild the return to Oxford.

CHAPTER XIX

“Have some tea, old man, and warm up,” said Falloden, on his knees

before a fire already magnificent, which he was endeavouring to

improve.

“What do you keep such a climate for?” growled Radowitz, as he hung

shivering over the grate.

Sorell, who had come with the boy from the station, eyed him anxiously.

The bright red patches on the boy’s cheeks, and his dry, fevered look,

his weakness and his depression, had revived the most sinister fears in

the mind of the man who had originally lured him to Oxford, and felt

himself horribly responsible for what had happened there. Yet the

London doctors on the whole had been reassuring. The slight hemorrhage

of the summer had had no successor; there were no further signs of

active mischief; and for his general condition it was thought that the

nervous shock of his accident, and the obstinate blood-poisoning which

had followed it, might sufficiently account. The doctors, however, had

pressed hard for sunshine and open-air—the Riviera, Sicily, or Algiers.

But the boy had said vehemently that he couldn’t and wouldn’t go alone,

and who could go with him? A question that for the moment stopped the

way. Falloden’s first bar examination was immediately ahead; Sorell was

tied to St. Cyprian’s; and every other companion so far proposed had

been rejected with irritation.

Unluckily, on this day of his return, the Oxford skies had put on again

their characteristic winter gloom. The wonderful fortnight of frost and

sun was over; tempests of wind and deluges of rain were drowning it

fast in flood and thaw. The wind shrieked round the little cottage, and

though it was little more than three o’clock, darkness was coming fast.

Falloden could not keep still. Having made up the fire, he brought in a

lamp himself; he drew the curtains, then undrew them again, apparently

that he might examine a stretch of the Oxford road just visible through

the growing dark; or he wandered in and out of the room, his hands in

his pockets whistling. Otto watched him with a vague annoyance. He

himself was horribly tired, and Falloden’s restlessness got on his

nerves.

At last Falloden said abruptly, pausing in front of him—

“You’ll have some visitors directly!”

Otto looked up. The gaiety in Falloden’s eyes informed him, and at the

same time, wounded him.

“Lady Constance?” he said, affecting indifference.

“And Mrs. Mulholland. I believe I see their carriage.”

And Falloden, peering into the stormy twilight, opened the garden door

and passed out into the rain.

Otto remained motionless, bent over the fire. Sorell was talking with

the ex-scout in the dining-room, impressing on him certain medical

directions. Radowitz suddenly felt himself singularly forlorn, and

deserted. Of course, Falloden and Constance would marry. He always knew

it. He would have served to keep them together, and give them

opportunities of meeting, when they might have easily drifted entirely

apart. He laughed to himself as he thought of Connie’s impassioned

cry—“I shall never, never, marry him!” Such are the vows of women. She

would marry him; and then what would he, Otto, matter to her or to

Falloden any longer? He would have been no doubt a useful peg and

pretext; but he was not going to intrude on their future bliss. He

thought he would go back to Paris. One might as well die there as

anywhere.

There were murmurs of talk and laughter in the hall. He sat still,

hugging his melancholy. But when the door opened, he rose quickly,

instinctively; and, at the sight of the girl coming in so timidly

behind Mrs. Mulholland, her eyes searching the half-lit room, and the

smile, in them and on her lips, held back till she knew whether her

poor friend could bear with smiles, Otto’s black hour began to lift. He

let himself, at least, be welcomed and petted; and when fresh tea had

been brought in, and the room was full of talk, he lay back in his

chair, listening, the deep lines in his forehead gradually relaxing. He

was better, he declared, a great deal better; in fact there was very

little at all the matter with him. His symphony was to be given at the

Royal College of Music early in the year. Everybody had been awfully

decent about it. And he had begun a nocturne that amused him. As for

the doctors, he repeated petulantly that they were all fools—it was

only a question of degree. He intended to manage his life as he pleased

in spite of them.

Connie sat on a high stool near him while he talked. She seemed to be

listening, but he once or twice thought, resentfully, that it was a

perfunctory listening. He wondered what else she was thinking about.

The tea was cleared away. And presently the three others had

disappeared. Otto and Constance were left alone.

“I have been reading so much about Poland lately,” said Constance

suddenly. “Oh, Otto, some day you must show me Cracow!”

His face darkened.

“I shall never see Cracow again. I shall never see it with you.”

“Why not? Let’s dream!”

The smiling tenderness in her eyes angered him. She was treating him

like a child; she was so sure he never could—or never would—make love

to her!

“I shall never go to Cracow,” he said, with energy, “not even with you.

I was to have gone—a year from now. It was all arranged. We have

relations there—and I have friends there—musicians. The _chef

d’orchestre_—at the Opera House—he was one of my teachers in Paris.

Before next year, I was to have written a concerto on some of our

Polish songs—there are scores of them that Liszt and Chopin never

discovered. Not only love-songs, mind you!—songs of

revolution—battle-songs.”

His eyes lit up and he began to hum an air—to Polish words—that even as

given out in his small tenor voice stirred like a trumpet.

“Fine!” said Constance.

“Ah, but you can’t judge—you don’t know the words. The words are

splendid. It’s ‘Ujejski’s Hymn’—the Galician Hymn of ’46.” And he fell

to intoning.

“Amid the smoke of our homes that burn,

From the dust where our brothers lie bleeding—

Our cry goes up to Thee, oh God!

“There!—that’s something like it.”

And he ran on with a breathless translation of the famous dirge for the

Galician rebels of ’46, in which a devastated land wails like Rachel

for her children.

Suddenly a sound rose—a sound reedy and clear, like a beautiful voice

in the distance.

“Constance!”

The lad sprang to his feet. Constance laid hold on him.

“Listen, dear Otto—listen a moment!”

She held him fast, and breathing deep, he listened. The very melody he

had just been humming rang out, from the same distant point; now

pealing through the little house in a rich plenitude of sound, now

delicate and plaintive as the chant of nuns in a quiet church, and

finally crashing to a defiant and glorious close.

“What is it?” he Said, very pale, looking at her almost threateningly.

“What have you been doing!”

“It’s our gift—our surprise—dear Otto!”

“Where is it? Let me go.”

“No!—sit down, and listen! Let me listen with you. I’ve not heard it

before! Mr. Falloden and I have been preparing it for months. Isn’t it

wonderful? Oh, dear Otto!—if you only like it!” He sat down trembling,

and hand in hand they listened.

The “Fantasia” ran on, dealing with song after song, now simply, now

with rich embroidery and caprice.

“Who is it playing?” said Otto, in a whisper.

“It _was_ Paderewski!” said Constance between laughing and crying. “Oh,

Otto, everybody’s been at work for it!—everybody was so marvellously

keen!”

“In Paris?”

“Yes—all your old friends—your teachers—and many others.”

She ran through the names. Otto choked. He knew them all, and some of

them were among the most illustrious in French music.

But while Connie was speaking, the stream of sound in the distance sank

into gentleness, and in the silence a small voice arose, naïvely,

pastorally sweet, like the Shepherd’s Song in “Tristan.” Otto buried

his face in his hands. It was the “Heynal,” the watchman’s horn-song

from the towers of Panna Marya. Once given, a magician caught it,

played with it, pursued it, juggled with it, through a series of

variations till, finally, a grave and beautiful modulation led back to

the noble dirge of the beginning.

“I know who wrote that!—who must have written it!” said Otto, looking

up. He named a French name. “I worked with him at the Conservatoire for

a year.”

Constance nodded.

“He did it for you,” she said, her eyes full of tears. “He said you

were the best pupil he ever had.”

The door opened, and Mrs. Mulholland’s white head appeared, with

Falloden and Sorell behind.

“Otto!” said Mrs. Mulholland, softly.

He understood that she called him, and he went with her in

bewilderment, along the passage to the studio.

Falloden came into the sitting-room and shut the door.

“Did he like it?” he asked, in a low voice, in which there was neither

pleasure nor triumph.

Connie, who was still sitting on the stool by the fire with her face

turned away, looked up.

“Oh, yes, yes!” she said in a kind of desperation, wringing her hands;

“but why are some pleasures worse than pain—much worse?”

Falloden came up to her, and stood silently, his eyes on hers.

“You see”—she went on, dashing tears away—“it is not his work—his

playing! It can’t do anything—can it, for his poor starved self?”

Falloden said nothing. But she knew that he felt with her. Their scheme

seemed to be lying in ruins; they were almost ashamed of it.

Then from the further room there came to their ears a prelude of

Chopin, played surely by more than mortal fingers—like the rustling of

summer trees, under a summer wind. And suddenly they heard Otto’s

laugh—a sound of delight.

Connie sprang up—her face transformed.

“Did you hear that? We have—we have—given him pleasure!”

“Yes—for an hour,” said Falloden hoarsely. Then he added—“The doctors

say he ought to go south.”.

“Of course he ought!” Connie was pacing up and down, her hands behind

her, her eyes on the ground. “Can’t Mr. Sorell take him?”

“He could take him out, but he couldn’t stay. The college can’t spare

him. He feels his first duty is to the college?”

“And you?” She raised her eyes timidly.

“What good should I be alone?” he said, with difficulty. “I’m a pretty

sort of a nurse!”

There was a pause. Connie trembled and flushed. Then she moved forward,

both her little hands outstretched.

“Take me with you!” she murmured under her breath. But her eyes said

more—far more.

The next moment she was in Falloden’s arms, strained against his

breast—everything else lost and forgotten, as their lips met, in the

just selfishness of passion.

Then he released her, stepping back from her, his strong face

quivering.

“I was a mean wretch to let you do that!” he said, with energy.

She eyed him.

“Why?”

“Because I have no right to let you give yourself to me—throw yourself

away on me—just because we have been doing this thing together,—because

you are sorry for Otto—and”—his voice dropped—“perhaps for me.”

“Oh!” It was a cry of protest. Coming nearer she put her two hands

lightly on his shoulders—.

“Do you think”—he saw her breath fluttering—“do you think I should let

any one—any one—kiss me—like that! just because I was sorry for them—or

for some one else?”

He stood motionless beneath her touch.

“You are sorry for me—you angel!—and you’re sorry for Otto—and you want

to make up to everybody—and make everybody happy—and—”

“And one can’t!” said Connie quietly, her eyes bright with tears.

“Don’t I know that? I repeat”—her colour was very bright—“but perhaps

you won’t believe, that—that”—then she laughed—“_of my own free will_,

I never kissed anybody before?”

“Constance!” He threw his strong arms round her again. But she slipped

out of them.

“Am I believed?” The tone was peremptory.

Falloden stooped, lifted her hand and kissed it humbly.

“You know you ought to marry a duke!” he said, trying to laugh, but

with a swelling throat.

“Thank you—I never saw a duke yet I wanted to marry.”

“That’s it. You’ve seen so little. I am a pauper, and you might marry

anybody. It’s taking an unfair advantage. Don’t you see—what—”

“What my aunts will think?” asked Constance coolly. “Oh, yes, I’ve

considered all that.”

She walked away, and came back, a little pale and grave. She sat down

on the arm of a chair and looked up at him.

“I see. You are as proud as ever.”

That hurt him. His face changed.

“You can’t really think that,” he said, with difficulty.

“Yes, yes, you are!” she said, wildly, covering her eyes a moment with

her hands. “It’s just the same as it was in the spring—only different—I

told you then—”

“That I was a bully and a cad!”

Her hands dropped sharply.

“I didn’t!” she protested. But she coloured brightly as she spoke,

remembering certain remarks of Nora’s. “I thought—yes I did think—you

cared too much about being rich—and a great swell—and all that. But so

did I!” She sprang up. “What right had I to talk? When I think how I

patronised and looked down upon everybody!”

“You!” his tone was pure scorn. “You couldn’t do such a thing if you

tried for a week of Sundays.”

“Oh, couldn’t I? I did. Oxford seemed to me just a dear, stupid old

place—out of the world,—a kind of museum—where nobody mattered. Silly,

wasn’t it?—childish?” She drew back her head fiercely, as though she

defied him to excuse her. “I was just amusing myself with it—and with

Otto—and with you. And that night, at Magdalen, all the time I was

dancing with Otto, I was aiming—abominably—at you! I wanted to provoke

you—to pay you back—oh, not for Otto’s sake—not at all!—but just

because—I had asked you something—and you had refused. That was what

stung me so. And do you suppose I should have cared twopence, unless—”

Her voice died away. Her fingers began fidgeting with the arm of the

chair, her eyes bent upon them.

He looked at her a moment irresolute, his face working. Then he said

huskily—

“In return—for that—I’ll tell you—I must tell you the real truth about

myself. I don’t think you know me yet—and I don’t know myself. I’ve got

a great brutal force in me somewhere—that wants to brush

everything—that hinders me—or checks me—out of my path. I don’t know

that I can control it—that I can make a woman happy. It’s an awful risk

for you. Look at that poor fellow!” He flung out his hand towards that

distant room whence came every now and then a fresh wave of music. “I

didn’t intend to do him any bodily harm—”

“Of course not! It was an accident!” cried Connie passionately.

“Perhaps—strictly. But I did mean somehow to crush him—to make it

precious hot for him—just because he’d got in my way. My will was like

a steel spring in a machine—that had been let go. Suppose I felt like

that again, towards—”

“Towards me?” Connie opened her eyes very wide, puckering her pretty

brow.

“Towards some one—or something—you care for. We are certain to disagree

about heaps of things.”

“Of course we are. Quite certain!”

“I tell you again”—said Falloden, speaking with a strong simplicity and

sincerity that was all the time undoing the impression he honestly

desired to make—“It’s a big risk for you—a temperament like mine—and

you ought to think it over seriously. And then”—he paused abruptly in

front of her, his hands in his pockets—“why should you—you’re so

young!—start life with any burden on you? Why should you? It’s

preposterous! I must look after Otto all his life.”

“So must I!” said Connie quickly. “That’s the same for both of us.”

“And then—you may forget it—but I can’t. I repeat—I’m a pauper. I’ve

lost Flood. I’ve lost everything that I could once have given you. I’ve

got about four thousand pounds left—just enough to start me at the

bar—when I’ve paid for the Orpheus. And I can’t take a farthing from my

mother or the other children. I should be just living upon you. How do

I know that I shall get on at the bar?”

Connie smiled; but her lips trembled.

“Do think it over,” he implored; and he walked away from her again, as

though to leave her free.

There was a silence. He turned anxiously to look at her.

“I seem”—said Connie, in a low voice that shook—“to have kissed

somebody—for nothing.”

That was the last stroke. He came back to her, and knelt beside her,

murmuring inarticulate things. With a sigh of relief, Connie subsided

upon his shoulder, conscious through all her emotion of the dear

strangeness of the man’s coat against her cheek. But presently, she

drew herself away, and looked him in the eyes, while her own swam.

“I love you”—she said deliberately—“because—well, first because I love

you!—that’s the only good reason, isn’t it; and then, because you’re so

sorry. And I’m sorry too. We’ve both got to make up—we’re going to make

up all we can.” Her sweet face darkened. “Oh, Douglas, it’ll take the

two of us—and even then we can’t do it! But we’ll help each other.”

And stooping she kissed him gently, lingeringly, on the brow. It was a

kiss of consecration.

A few minutes more, and then, with the Eighth Prelude swaying and

dancing round them, they went hand in hand down the long approach to

the music-room.

The door was open, and they saw the persons inside. Otto and Sorell

were walking up and down smoking cigarettes. The boy was radiant,

transformed. All look of weakness had disappeared; he held himself

erect; his shock of red-gold hair blazed in the firelight, and his eyes

laughed, as he listened silently, playing with his cigarette. Sorell

evidently was thinking only of him; but he too wore a look of quiet

pleasure.

Only Mrs. Mulholland sat watchful, her face turned towards the open

door. It wore an expression which was partly excitement, partly doubt.

Her snow-white hair above her very black eyes, and her frowning, intent

look, gave her the air of an old Sibyl watching at the cave’s mouth.

But when she saw the two—the young man and the girl—coming towards her,

hand in hand, she first peered at them intently, and then, as she rose,

all the gravity of her face broke up in laughter.

“Hope for the best, you foolish old woman!” she said to herself—“‘Male

and female made He them!’—world without end—Amen!”

“Well?” She moved towards them, as they entered the room; holding out

her hands with a merry, significant gesture.

Otto and Sorell turned. Connie—crimson—threw herself on Mrs.

Mulholland’s neck and kissed her. Falloden stood behind her, thinking

of a number of things to say, and unable to say any of them.

The last soft notes of the Prelude ceased.

It was for Connie to save the situation. With a gentle, gliding step,

she went across to Otto, who had gone very white again.

“Dear Otto, you told me I should marry Douglas, and I’m going to.

That’s one to you. But I won’t marry him—and he agrees—unless you’ll

promise to come to Algiers with us a month from now. You’ll lend him to

us, won’t you?”—she turned pleadingly to Sorell—“we’ll take such care

of him. Douglas—you may be surprised!—is going to read law at Biskra!”

Otto sank into a chair. The radiance had gone. He looked very frail and

ghostly. But he took Connie’s outstretched hand.

“I wish you joy,” he said, stumbling painfully over the words. “I do

wish you joy!—with all my heart.”

Falloden approached him. Otto looked up wistfully. Their eyes met, and

for a moment the two men were conscious only of each other.

Mrs. Mulholland moved away, smiling, but with a sob in her throat.

“It’s like all life,” she thought—“love and death, side by side.”

And she remembered that comparison by a son of Oxford, of each moment,

as it passes, to a watershed “whence equally the seas of life and death

are fed.”

But Connie was determined to carry things off with a laugh. She sat

down beside Otto, looking businesslike.

“Douglas and I”—the name came out quite pat—“have been discussing how

long it really takes to get married.”

Mrs. Mulholland laughed.

“Mrs. Hooper has been enjoying Alice’s trousseau so much, you needn’t

expect she’ll let you get through yours in a hurry.”

“It’s going to be my trousseau, not Aunt Ellen’s,” said Connie with

decision. “Let me see. It’s now nearly Christmas. Didn’t we say the

12th of January?” She looked lightly at Falloden.

“Somewhere near it,” said Falloden, his smile at last answering hers.

“We shall want a fortnight, I suppose, to get used to each other,” said

Connie coolly. “Then”—she laid a hand on Mrs. Mulholland’s knee—“you

bring him to Marseilles to meet us?”

“Certainly—at your orders.”

Connie looked at Otto.

“Dear Otto?” The soft tone pleaded. He started painfully.

“You’re awfully good to me. But how can I come to be a burden on you?”

“But I shall go too,” said Mrs. Mulholland firmly.

Connie exclaimed in triumph.

“We four—to front the desert!—while he”—she nodded towards Sorell—“is

showing Nora and Uncle Ewen Rome. You mayn’t know it”—she addressed

Sorell—“but on Monday, January 24th—I think I’ve got the date right—you

and they go on a picnic to Hadrian’s Villa. The weather’s arranged

for—and the carriage is ordered.”

She looked at him askance; but her colour had risen. So had his. He

looked down on her while Mrs. Mulholland and Falloden were both talking

fast to Otto.

“You little witch!” said Sorell in a low voice—“what are you after

now?”

Connie laughed in his face.

“You’ll go—you’ll see!”

The little dinner which followed was turned into a betrothal feast.

Champagne was brought in, and Otto, madly gay, boasted of his forebears

and the incomparable greatness of Poland as usual. Nobody minded. After

dinner the magic toy in the studio discoursed Brahms and Schumann, in

the intervals of discussing plans and chattering over maps. But Connie

insisted on an early departure. “My guardian will have to sleep upon

it—and there’s really no time to lose.” Every one took care not to see

too much of the parting between her and Falloden. Then she and Mrs.

Mulholland were put into their carriage. But Sorell preferred to walk

home, and Falloden went back to Otto.

Sorell descended the hill towards Oxford. The storm was dying away, and

the now waning moon, which had shone so brilliantly over the frozen

floods a day or two before, was venturing out again among the scudding

clouds. The lights in Christ Church Hall were out, but the beautiful

city shone vaguely luminous under the night.

Sorell’s mind was full of mingled emotion—as torn and jagged as the

clouds rushing overhead. The talk and laughter in the cottage came back

to him. How hollow and vain it sounded in the spiritual ear! What could

ever make up to that poor boy, who could have no more, at the most,

than a year or two to live, for the spilt wine of his life?—the rifled

treasure of his genius? And was it not true to say that his loss had

made the profit of the two lovers—of whom one had been the author of

it? When Palloden and Constance believed themselves to be absorbed in

Otto, were they not really playing the great game of sex like any

ordinary pair?

It was the question that Otto himself had asked—that any cynic must

have asked. But Sorell’s tender humanity passed beyond it. The injury

done, indeed, was beyond repair. But the mysterious impulse which had

brought Falloden to the help of Otto was as real in its sphere as the

anguish and the pain; aye, for the philosophic spirit, more real than

they, and fraught with a healing and disciplining power that none could

measure. Sorell admitted—half reluctantly—the changes in life and

character which had flowed from it. He was even ready to say that the

man who had proved capable of feeling it, in spite of all past

appearances, was “not far from the Kingdom of God.”

Oxford drew nearer and nearer. Tom Tower loomed before him. Its great

bell rang out. And suddenly, as if he could repress it no longer, there

ran through Sorell’s mind—his half melancholy mind, unaccustomed to the

claims of personal happiness—the vision that Connie had so sharply

evoked; of a girl’s brown eyes, and honest look—the look of a child to

be cherished, of a woman to be loved.

Was it that morning that he had helped Nora to translate a few lines of

the “Antigone”?

“Love, all conquering love, that nestles in the fair cheeks of a

maiden—”

It is perhaps not surprising that Sorell, on this occasion, after he

had entered the High, should have taken the wrong turn to St.

Cyprian’s, and wakened up to find himself passing through the Turl,

when he ought to have been in Radcliffe Square.