BOOK III

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THE JUDGMENT HOUSE

by

Gilbert Parker

CONTENTS

I THE JASMINE FLOWER

II THE UNDERGROUND WORLD

III A DAUGHTER OF TYRE

IV THE PARTNERS MEET

V A WOMAN TELLS HER STORY

VI WITHIN THE POWER-HOUSE

VII THREE YEARS LATER

VIII "HE SHALL NOT TREAT ME SO"

IX THE APPIAN WAY

X AN ARROW FINDS A BREAST

XI IN WALES, WHERE JIGGER PLAYS HIS PART

XII THE KEY IN THE LOCK

XIII "I WILL NOT SING"

XIV THE BAAS

XV THE WORLD WELL LOST

XVI THE COMING OF THE BAAS

XVII IS THERE NO HELP FOR THESE THINGS?

XVIII LANDRASSY'S LAST STROKE

XIX TO-MORROW ... PREPARE!

XX THE FURNACE DOOR

XXI THE BURNING FIERY FURNACE

XXII IN WHICH FELLOWES GOES A JOURNEY

XXIII "MORE WAS LOST AT MOHACKSFIELD"

XXIV ONE WHO CAME SEARCHING

XXV WHEREIN THE LOST IS FOUND

XXVI JASMINE'S LETTER

XXVII KROOL

XXVIII "THE BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM"

XXIX THE MENACE OF THE MOUNTAIN

XXX "AND NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET!"

XXXI THE GREY HORSE AND ITS RIDER

XXXII THE WORLD'S FOUNDLING

XXXIII "ALAMACHTIG!"

XXXIV "THE ALPINE FELLOW"

XXXV AT BRINKWORT'S FARM

XXXVI SPRINGS OF HEALING

XXXVII UNDER THE GUN

XXXVIII "PHEIDIPPIDES"

XXXIX "THE ROAD IS CLEAR"

NOTE

Except where references to characters well-known to all the world occur

in these pages, this book does not present a picture of public or

private individuals living or dead. It is not in any sense a historical

novel. It is in conception and portraiture a work of the imagination.

"Strangers come to the outer wall--

(Why do the sleepers stir?)

Strangers enter the Judgment House--

(Why do the sleepers sigh?)

Slow they rise in their judgment seats,

Sieve and measure the naked souls,

Then with a blessing return to sleep.

(Quiet the Judgment House.)

Lone and sick are the vagrant souls--

(When shall the world come home?)"

"Let them fight it out, friend! things have gone too far,

God must judge the couple: leave them as they are--

Whichever one's the guiltless, to his glory,

And whichever one the guilt's with, to my story!

"Once more. Will the wronger, at this last of all,

Dare to say, 'I did wrong,' rising in his fall?

No? Let go, then! Both the fighters to their places!

While I count three, step you back as many paces!"

"And the Sibyl, you know. I saw her with my own eyes at

Cumae, hanging in a jar; and when the boys asked her, 'What

would you, Sibyl?' she answered, 'I would die.'"

"So is Pheidippides happy for ever,--the noble strong man

Who would race like a God, bear the face of a God, whom a

God loved so well:

He saw the land saved he had helped to save, and was suffered to tell

Such tidings, yet never decline, but, gloriously as he began

So to end gloriously--once to shout, thereafter to be mute:

'Athens is saved!' Pheidippides dies in the shout for his meed."

"Oh, never star

Was lost here, but it rose afar."

THE JUDGMENT HOUSE

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

THE JASMINE FLOWER

The music throbbed in a voice of singular and delicate power; the air

was resonant with melody, love and pain. The meanest Italian in the

gallery far up beneath the ceiling, the most exalted of the land in the

boxes and the stalls, leaned indulgently forward, to be swept by this

sweet storm of song. They yielded themselves utterly to the power of

the triumphant debutante who was making "Manassa" the musical feast of

the year, renewing to Covent Garden a reputation which recent lack of

enterprise had somewhat forfeited.

Yet, apparently, not all the vast audience were hypnotized by the

unknown and unheralded singer, whose stage name was Al'mah. At the

moment of the opera's supreme appeal the eyes of three people at least

were not in the thraldom of the singer. Seated at the end of the first

row of the stalls was a fair, slim, graciously attired man of about

thirty, who, turning in his seat so that nearly the whole house was in

his circle of vision, stroked his golden moustache, and ran his eyes

over the thousands of faces with a smile of pride and satisfaction

which in a less handsome man would have been almost a leer. His name

was Adrian Fellowes.

Either the opera and the singer had no charms for Adrian Fellowes, or

else he had heard both so often that, without doing violence to his

musical sense, he could afford to study the effect of this wonderful

effort upon the mob of London, mastered by the radiant being on the

stage. Very sleek, handsome, and material he looked; of happy colour,

and, apparently, with a mind and soul in which no conflicts ever

raged--to the advantage of his attractive exterior. Only at the summit

of the applause did he turn to the stage again. Then it was with the

gloating look of the gambler who swings from the roulette-table with

the winnings of a great coup, cynical joy in his eyes that he has

beaten the Bank, conquered the dark spirit which has tricked him so

often. Now the cold-blue eyes caught, for a second, the dark-brown eyes

of the Celtic singer, which laughed at him gaily, victoriously,

eagerly, and then again drank in the light and the joy of the myriad

faces before her.

In a box opposite the royal box were two people, a man and a very young

woman, who also in the crise of the opera were not looking at the

stage. The eyes of the man, sitting well back--purposely, so that he

might see her without marked observation--were fixed upon the

rose-tinted, delicate features of the girl in a joyous blue silk gown,

which was so perfect a contrast to the golden hair and wonderful colour

of her face. Her eyes were fixed upon her lap, the lids half closed, as

though in reverie, yet with that perspicuous and reflective look which

showed her conscious of all that was passing round her--even the effect

of her own pose. Her name was Jasmine Grenfel.

She was not oblivious of the music. Her heart beat faster because of

it; and a temperament adjustable to every mood and turn of human

feeling was answering to the poignancy of the opera; yet her youth,

child-likeness, and natural spontaneity were controlled by an elate

consciousness. She was responsive to the passionate harmony; but she

was also acutely sensitive to the bold yet deferential appeal to her

emotions of the dark, distinguished, bearded man at her side, with the

brown eyes and the Grecian profile, whose years spent in the Foreign

Office and at embassies on the Continent had given him a tact and an

insinuating address peculiarly alluring to her sex. She was well aware

of Ian Stafford's ambitions, and had come to the point where she

delighted in them, and had thought of sharing in them, "for weal or for

woe"; but she would probably have resented the suggestion that his

comparative poverty was weighed against her natural inclinations and

his real and honest passion. For she had her ambitions, too; and when

she had scanned the royal box that night, she had felt that something

only little less than a diadem would really satisfy her.

Then it was that she had turned meditatively towards another occupant

of her box, who sat beside her pretty stepmother--a big, bronzed,

clean-shaven, strong-faced man of about the same age as Ian Stafford of

the Foreign Office, who had brought him that night at her request. Ian

had called him, "my South African nabob," in tribute to the millions he

had made with Cecil Rhodes and others at Kimberley and on the Rand. At

first sight of the forceful and rather ungainly form she had inwardly

contrasted it with the figure of Ian Stafford and that other

spring-time figure of a man at the end of the first row in the stalls,

towards which the prima donna had flashed one trusting, happy glance,

and with which she herself had been familiar since her childhood. The

contrast had not been wholly to the advantage of the nabob; though, to

be sure, he was simply arrayed--as if, indeed, he were not worth a

thousand a year. Certainly he had about him a sense of power, but his

occasional laugh was too vigorous for one whose own great sense of

humour was conveyed by an infectious, rippling murmur delightful to

hear.

Rudyard Byng was worth three millions of pounds, and that she

interested him was evident by the sudden arrest of his look and his

movements when introduced to her. Ian Stafford had noted this look; but

he had seen many another man look at Jasmine Grenfel with just as much

natural and unbidden interest, and he shrugged the shoulders of his

mind; for the millions alone would not influence her, that was sure.

Had she not a comfortable fortune of her own? Besides, Byng was not the

kind of man to capture Jasmine's fastidious sense and nature. So much

had happened between Jasmine and himself, so deep an understanding had

grown up between them, that it only remained to bring her to the last

court of inquiry and get reply to a vital question--already put in a

thousand ways and answered to his perfect satisfaction. Indeed, there

was between Jasmine and himself the equivalent of a betrothal. He had

asked her to marry him, and she had not said no; but she had bargained

for time to "prepare"; that she should have another year in which to be

gay in a gay world and, in her own words, "walk the primrose path of

pleasure untrammelled and alone, save for my dear friend Mrs. Grundy."

Since that moment he had been quite sure that all was well. And now the

year was nearly up, and she had not changed; had, indeed, grown more

confiding and delicately dependent in manner towards him, though seeing

him but seldom alone.

As Ian Stafford looked at her now, he kept saying to himself, "So

exquisite and so clever, what will she not be at thirty! So well

poised, and yet so sweetly child-like dear dresden-china Jasmine."

That was what she looked like--a lovely thing of the time of Boucher in

dresden china.

At last, as though conscious of what was going on in his mind, she

slowly turned her drooping eyes towards him, and, over her shoulder, as

he quickly leaned forward, she said in a low voice which the others

could not hear:

"I am too young, and not clever enough to understand all the music

means--is that what you are thinking?"

He shook his head in negation, and his dark-brown eyes commanded hers,

but still deferentially, as he said: "You know of what I was thinking.

You will be forever young, but yours was always--will always be--the

wisdom of the wise. I'd like to have been as clever at twenty-two."

"How trying that you should know my age so exactly--it darkens the

future," she rejoined with a soft little laugh; then, suddenly, a cloud

passed over her face. It weighed down her eyelids, and she gazed before

her into space with a strange, perplexed, and timorous anxiety. What

did she see? Nothing that was light and joyous, for her small sensuous

lips drew closer, and the fan she held in her lap slipped from her

fingers to the floor.

This aroused her, and Stafford, as he returned the fan to her, said

into a face again alive to the present: "You look as though you were

trying to summon the sable spirits of a sombre future."

Her fine pink-white shoulders lifted a little and, once more quite

self-possessed, she rejoined, lightly, "I have a chameleon mind; it

chimes with every mood and circumstance."

Suddenly her eyes rested on Rudyard Byng, and something in the rough

power of the head arrested her attention, and the thought flashed

through her mind: "How wonderful to have got so much at thirty-three!

Three millions at thirty-three--and millions beget millions!"

... Power--millions meant power; millions made ready the stage for the

display and use of every gift, gave the opportunity for the full

occupation of all personal qualities, made a setting for the jewel of

life and beauty, which reflected, intensified every ray of merit.

Power--that was it. Her own grandfather had had power. He had made his

fortune, a great one too, by patents which exploited the vanity of

mankind, and, as though to prove his cynical contempt for his

fellow-creatures, had then invented a quick-firing gun which nearly

every nation in the world adopted. First, he had got power by a fortune

which represented the shallowness and gullibility of human nature, then

had exploited the serious gift which had always been his, the native

genius which had devised the gun when he was yet a boy. He had died at

last with the smile on his lips which had followed his remark, quoted

in every great newspaper of two continents, that: "The world wants to

be fooled, so I fooled it; it wants to be stunned, so I stunned it. My

fooling will last as long as my gun; and both have paid me well. But

they all love being fooled best."

Old Draygon Grenfel's fortune had been divided among his three sons and

herself, for she had been her grandfather's favourite, and she was the

only grandchild to whom he had left more than a small reminder of his

existence. As a child her intelligence was so keen, her perception so

acute, she realized him so well, that he had said she was the only one

of his blood who had anything of himself in character or personality,

and he predicted--too often in her presence--that she "would give the

world a start or two when she had the chance." His intellectual

contempt for his eldest son, her father, was reproduced in her with no

prompting on his part; and, without her own mother from the age of

three, Jasmine had grown up self-willed and imperious, yet with too

much intelligence to carry her will and power too far. Infinite

adaptability had been the result of a desire to please and charm;

behind which lay an unlimited determination to get her own way and bend

other wills to hers.

The two wills she had not yet bent as she pleased were those of her

stepmother and of Ian Stafford--one, because she was jealous and

obstinate, and the other because he had an adequate self-respect and an

ambition of his own to have his way in a world which would not give

save at the point of the sword. Come of as good family as there was in

England, and the grandson of a duke, he still was eager for power,

determined to get on, ingenious in searching for that opportunity which

even the most distinguished talent must have, if it is to soar high

above the capable average. That chance, the predestined alluring

opening had not yet come; but his eyes were wide open, and he was ready

for the spring--nerved the more to do so by the thought that Jasmine

would appreciate his success above all others, even from the standpoint

of intellectual appreciation, all emotions excluded. How did it come

that Jasmine was so worldly wise, and yet so marvellously the

insouciant child?

He followed her slow, reflective glance at Byng, and the impression of

force and natural power of the millionaire struck him now, as it had

often done. As though summoned by them both, Byng turned his face and,

catching Jasmine's eyes, smiled and leaned forward.

"I haven't got over that great outburst of singing yet," he said, with

a little jerk of the head towards the stage, where, for the moment,

minor characters were in possession, preparing the path for the last

rush of song by which Al'mah, the new prima donna, would bring her

first night to a complete triumph.

With face turned full towards her, something of the power of his head

seemed to evaporate swiftly. It was honest, alert, and almost brutally

simple--the face of a pioneer. The forehead was broad and strong, and

the chin was square and determined; but the full, dark-blue eyes had in

them shadows of rashness and recklessness, the mouth was somewhat

self-indulgent and indolent; though the hands clasping both knees were

combined of strength, activity, and also a little of grace.

"I never had much chance to hear great singers before I went to South

Africa," he added, reflectively, "and this swallows me like a storm on

the high veld--all lightning and thunder and flood. I've missed a lot

in my time."

With a look which made his pulses gallop, Jasmine leaned over and

whispered--for the prima donna was beginning to sing again:

"There's nothing you have missed in your race that you cannot ride back

and collect. It is those who haven't run a race who cannot ride back.

You have won; and it is all waiting for you."

Again her eyes beamed upon him, and a new sensation came to him--the

kind of thing he felt once when he was sixteen, and the vicar's

daughter had suddenly held him up for quite a week, while all his

natural occupations were neglected, and the spirit of sport was

humiliated and abashed. Also he had caroused in his time--who was there

in those first days at Kimberley and on the Rand who did not carouse,

when life was so hard, luck so uncertain, and food so bad; when men got

so dead beat, with no homes anywhere--only shake-downs and the Tents of

Shem? Once he had had a native woman summoned to be his slave, to keep

his home; but that was a business which had revolted him, and he had

never repeated the experiment. Then, there had been an adventuress, a

wandering, foreign princess who had fooled him and half a dozen of his

friends to the top of their bent; but a thousand times he had preferred

other sorts of pleasures--cards, horses, and the bright outlook which

came with the clinking glass after the strenuous day.

Jasmine seemed to divine it all as she looked at him--his primitive,

almost Edenic sincerity; his natural indolence and native force: a

nature that would not stir until greatly roused, but then, with an

unyielding persistence and concentrated force, would range on to its

goal, making up for a slow-moving intellect by sheer will, vision and a

gallant heart.

Al'mah was singing again, and Byng leaned forward eagerly. There was a

rustle in the audience, a movement to a listening position, then a

tense waiting and attention.

As Jasmine composed herself she said in a low voice to Ian Stafford,

whose well-proportioned character, personality, and refinement of

culture were in such marked contrast to the personality of the other:

"They live hard lives in those new lands. He has wasted much of

himself."

"Three millions at thirty-three means spending a deal of one thing to

get another," Ian answered a little grimly.

"Hush! Oh, Ian, listen!" she added in a whisper.

Once more Al'mah rose to mastery over the audience. The bold and

generous orchestration, the exceptional chorus, the fine and brilliant

tenor, had made a broad path for her last and supreme effort. The

audience had long since given up their critical sense, they were ready

to be carried into captivity again, and the surrender was instant and

complete. Now, not an eye was turned away from the singer. Even the

Corinthian gallant at the end of the first row of stalls gave himself

up to feasting on her and her success, and the characters in the opera

were as electrified as the audience.

For a whole seven minutes this voice seemed to be the only thing in the

world, transposing all thoughts, emotions, all elements of life into

terms of melody. Then, at last, with a crash of sweetness, the voice

broke over them all in crystals of sound and floated away into a world

of bright dreams.

An instant's silence which followed was broken by a tempest of

applause. Again, again, and again it was renewed. The subordinate

singers were quickly disposed of before the curtain, then Al'mah

received her memorable tribute. How many times she came and went she

never knew; but at last the curtain, rising, showed her well up the

stage beside a table where two huge candles flared. The storm of

applause breaking forth once more, the grateful singer raised her arms

and spread them out impulsively in gratitude and dramatic abandon.

As she did so, the loose, flowing sleeve of her robe caught the flame

of a candle, and in an instant she was in a cloud of fire. The wild

applause turned suddenly to notes of terror as, with a sharp cry, she

stumbled forward to the middle of the stage.

For one stark moment no one stirred, then suddenly a man with an

opera-cloak on his arm was seen to spring across a space of many feet

between a box on the level of the stage and the stage itself. He

crashed into the footlights, but recovered himself and ran forward. In

an instant he had enveloped the agonized figure of the singer and had

crushed out the flames with swift, strong movements.

Then lifting the now unconscious artist in his great arms, he strode

off with her behind the scenes.

"Well done, Byng! Well done, Ruddy Byng!" cried a strong voice from the

audience; and a cheer went up.

In a moment Byng returned and came down the stage. "She is not

seriously hurt," he said simply to the audience. "We were just in time."

Presently, as he entered the Grenfel box again, deafening applause

broke forth.

"We were just in time," said Ian Stafford, with an admiring, teasing

laugh, as he gripped Byng's arm.

"'We'--well, it was a royal business," said Jasmine, standing close to

him and looking up into his eyes with that ingratiating softness which

had deluded many another man; "but do you realize that it was my cloak

you took?" she added, whimsically.

"Well, I'm glad it was," Byng answered, boyishly. "You'll have to wear

my overcoat home."

"I certainly will," she answered. "Come--the giant's robe."

People were crowding upon their box.

"Let's get out of this," Byng said, as he took his coat from the hook

on the wall.

As they left the box the girl's white-haired, prematurely aged father

whispered in the pretty stepmother's ear: "Jasmine'll marry that

nabob--you'll see."

The stepmother shrugged a shoulder. "Jasmine is in love with Ian

Stafford," she said, decisively.

"But she'll marry Rudyard Byng," was the stubborn reply.

CHAPTER II

THE UNDERGROUND WORLD

"What's that you say--Jameson--what?"

Rudyard Byng paused with the lighted match at the end of his cigar, and

stared at a man who was reading from a tape-machine, which gave the

club the world's news from minute to minute.

"Dr. Jameson's riding on Johannesburg with eight hundred men. He

started from Pitsani two days ago. And Cronje with his burghers are out

after him."

The flaming match burned Byng's fingers. He threw it into the

fireplace, and stood transfixed for a moment, his face hot with

feeling, then he burst out:

"But--God! they're not ready at Johannesburg. The burghers'll catch him

at Doornkop or somewhere, and--" He paused, overcome. His eyes

suffused. His hands went out in a gesture of despair.

"Jameson's jumped too soon," he muttered. "He's lost the game for them."

The other eyed him quizzically. "Perhaps he'll get in yet. He surely

planned the thing with due regard for every chance. Johannesburg--"

"Johannesburg isn't ready, Stafford. I know. That Jameson and the Rand

should coincide was the only chance. And they'll not coincide now. It

might have been--it was to have been--a revolution at Johannesburg,

with Dr. Jim to step in at the right minute. It's only a filibustering

business now, and Oom Paul will catch the filibuster, as sure as guns.

'Gad, it makes me sick!"

"Europe will like it--much," remarked Ian Stafford, cynically, offering

Byng a lighted match.

Byng grumbled out an oath, then fixed his clear, strong look on

Stafford. "It's almost enough to make Germany and France forget 1870

and fall into each other's arms," he answered. "But that's your

business, you Foreign Office people's business. It's the fellows out

there, friends of mine, so many of them, I'm thinking of. It's the

British kids that can't be taught in their mother-tongue, and the men

who pay all the taxes and can't become citizens. It's the justice you

can only buy; it's the foot of Kruger on the necks of the subjects of

his suzerain; it's eating dirt as Englishmen have never had to eat it

anywhere in the range of the Seven Seas. And when they catch Dr. Jim,

it'll be ten times worse. Yes, it'll be at Doornkop, unless-- But, no,

they'll track him, trap him, get him now. Johannesburg wasn't ready.

Only yesterday I had a cable that--" he stopped short ... "but they

weren't ready. They hadn't guns enough, or something; and Englishmen

aren't good conspirators, not by a damned sight! Now it'll be the old

Majuba game all over again. You'll see."

"It certainly will set things back. Your last state will be worse than

your first," remarked Stafford.

Rudyard Byng drained off a glass of brandy and water at a gulp almost,

as Stafford watched him with inward adverse comment, for he never

touched wine or spirits save at meal-time, and the between-meal swizzle

revolted his aesthetic sense. Byng put down the glass very slowly,

gazing straight before him for a moment without speaking. Then he

looked round. There was no one very near, though curious faces were

turned in his direction, as the grim news of the Raid was passed from

mouth to mouth. He came up close to Stafford and touched his chest with

a firm forefinger.

"Every egg in the basket is broken, Stafford. I'm sure of that. Dr.

Jim'll never get in now; and there'll be no oeufs a la coque for

breakfast. But there's an omelette to be got out of the mess, if the

chef doesn't turn up his nose too high. After all, what has brought

things to this pass? Why, mean, low tyranny and injustice. Why, just a

narrow, jealous race-hatred which makes helots of British men. Simple

farmers, the sentimental newspapers call them--simple Machiavellis in

veldschoen!" *

* A glossary of South African words will be found at the end of the

book.

Stafford nodded assent. "But England is a very conventional chef," he

replied. "She likes the eggs for her omelette broken in the orthodox

way."

"She's not so particular where the eggs come from, is she?"

Stafford smiled as he answered: "There'll be a good many people in

England who won't sleep to-night some because they want Jameson to get

in; some because they don't; but most because they're thinking of the

millions of British money locked up in the Rand, with Kruger standing

over it with a sjambak, which he'll use. Last night at the opera we had

a fine example of presence of mind, when a lady burst into flames on

the stage. That spirited South African prima donna, the Transvaal, is

in flames. I wonder if she really will be saved, and who will save her,

and--"

A light, like the sun, broke over the gloomy and rather haggard face of

Rudyard Byng, and humour shot up into his eyes. He gave a low, generous

laugh, as he said with a twinkle: "And whether he does it at some

expense to himself--with his own overcoat, or with some one else's

cloak. Is that what you want to say?"

All at once the personal element, so powerful in most of us--even in

moments when interests are in existence so great that they should

obliterate all others--came to the surface. For a moment it almost made

Byng forget the crisis which had come to a land where he had done all

that was worth doing, so far in his life; which had burned itself into

his very soul; which drew him, sleeping or waking, into its arms of

memory and longing.

He had read only one paper that morning, and it--the latest attempt at

sensational journalism--had so made him blush at the flattering

references to himself in relation to the incident at the opera, that he

had opened no other. He had left his chambers to avoid the telegrams

and notes of congratulation which were arriving in great numbers. He

had gone for his morning ride in Battersea Park instead of the Row to

escape observation; had afterwards spent two hours at the house he was

building in Park Lane; had then come to the club, where he had

encountered Ian Stafford and had heard the news which overwhelmed him.

"Well, an opera cloak did the work better than an overcoat would have

done," Stafford answered, laughing. "It was a flash of real genius to

think of it. You did think it all out in the second, didn't you?"

Stafford looked at him curiously, for he wondered if the choice of a

soft cloak which could more easily be wrapped round the burning woman

than an overcoat was accidental, or whether it was the product of a

mind of unusual decision.

Byng puffed out a great cloud of smoke and laughed again quietly as he

replied:

"Well, I've had a good deal of lion and rhinoceros shooting in my time,

and I've had to make up my mind pretty quick now and then; so I suppose

it gets to be a habit. You don't stop to think when the trouble's on

you; you think as you go. If I'd stopped to think, I'd have funked the

whole thing, I suppose--jumping from that box onto the stage, and

grabbing a lady in my arms, all in the open, as it were. But that

wouldn't have been the natural man. The natural man that's in most of

us, even when we're not very clever, does things right. It's when the

conventional man comes in and says, Let us consider, that we go wrong.

By Jingo, Al'mah was as near having her beauty spoiled as any woman

ever was; but she's only got a few nasty burns on the arm and has

singed her hair a little."

"You've seen her to-day, then?"

Stafford looked at him with some curiosity, for the event was one

likely to rouse a man's interest in a woman. Al'mah was unmarried, so

far as the world knew, and a man of Byng's kind, if not generally

inflammable, was very likely to be swept off his feet by some unusual

woman in some unusual circumstance. Stafford had never seen Rudyard

Byng talk to any woman but Jasmine for more than five minutes at a

time, though hundreds of eager and avaricious eyes had singled him out

for attention; and, as it seemed absurd that any one should build a

palace in Park Lane to live in by himself, the glances sent in his

direction from many quarters had not been without hopefulness. And

there need not have been, and there was not, any loss of dignity on the

part of match-making mothers in angling for him, for his family was

quite good enough; his origin was not obscure, and his upbringing was

adequate. His external ruggedness was partly natural; but it was also

got from the bitter rough life he had lived for so many years in South

Africa before he had fallen on his feet at Kimberley and Johannesburg.

As for "strange women," during the time that had passed since his

return to England there had never been any sign of loose living. So, to

Stafford's mind, Byng was the more likely to be swept away on a sudden

flood that would bear him out to the sea of matrimony. He had put his

question out of curiosity, and he had not to wait for a reply. It came

frankly and instantly:

"Why, I was at Al'mah's house in Bruton Street at eight o'clock this

morning--with the milkman and the newsboy; and you wouldn't believe it,

but I saw her, too. She'd been up since six o'clock, she said. Couldn't

sleep for excitement and pain, but looking like a pansy blossom all the

same, rigged out as pretty as could be in her boudoir, and a nurse

doing the needful. It's an odd dark kind of beauty she has, with those

full lips and the heavy eyebrows. Well, it was a bull in a china-shop,

as you might judge--and thank you kindly, Mr. Byng, with such a jolly

laugh, and ever and ever and ever so grateful and so

wonderfully--thoughtful, I think, was the word, as though one had

planned it all. And wouldn't I stay to breakfast? And not a bit stagey

or actressy, and rather what you call an uncut diamond--a gem in her

way, but not fine beur, not exactly. A touch of the karoo, or the

prairie, or the salt-bush plains in her, but a good chap altogether;

and I'm glad I was in it last night with her. I laughed a lot at

breakfast--why yes, I stayed to breakfast. Laugh before breakfast and

cry before supper, that's the proverb, isn't it? And I'm crying, all

right, and there's weeping down on the Rand too."

As he spoke Stafford made inward comment on the story being told to

him, so patently true and honest in every particular. It was rather

contradictory and unreasonable, however, to hear this big, shy, rugged

fellow taking exception, however delicately and by inference only, to

the lack of high refinement, to the want of fine fleur, in Al'mah's

personality. It did not occur to him that Byng was the kind of man who

would be comparing Jasmine's quite wonderful delicacy, perfumed grace,

and exquisite adaptability with the somewhat coarser beauty and genius

of the singer. It seemed natural that Byng should turn to a personality

more in keeping with his own, more likely to make him perfectly at ease

mentally and physically.

Stafford judged Jasmine by his own conversations with her, when he was

so acutely alive to the fact that she was the most naturally brilliant

woman he had ever known or met; and had capacities for culture and

attainment, as she had gifts of discernment and skill in thought, in

marked contrast to the best of the ladies of their world. To him she

had naturally shown only the one side of her nature--she adapted

herself to him as she did to every one else; she had put him always at

an advantage, and, in doing so, herself as well.

Full of dangerous coquetry he knew her to be--she had been so from a

child; and though this was culpable in a way, he and most others had

made more than due allowance, because mother-care and loving

surveillance had been withdrawn so soon. For years she had been the

spoiled darling of her father and brothers until her father married

again; and then it had been too late to control her. The wonder was

that she had turned out so well, that she had been so studious, so

determined, so capable. Was it because she had unusual brain and

insight into human nature, and had been wise and practical enough to

see that there was a point where restraint must be applied, and so had

kept herself free from blame or deserved opprobrium, if not entirely

from criticism? In the day when girls were not in the present sense

emancipated, she had the savoir faire and the poise of a married woman

of thirty. Yet she was delicate, fresh, and flower-like, and very

amusing, in a way which delighted men; and she did not antagonize women.

Stafford had ruled Byng out of consideration where she was concerned.

He had not heard her father's remark of the night before, "Jasmine will

marry that nabob--you'll see."

He was, however, recalled to the strange possibilities of life by a

note which was handed to Byng as they stood before the club-room fire.

He could not help but see--he knew the envelope, and no other

handwriting was like Jasmine's, that long, graceful, sliding hand. Byng

turned it over before opening it.

"Hello," he said, "I'm caught. It's a woman's hand. I wonder how she

knew I was here."

Mentally Stafford shrugged his shoulders as he said to himself: "If

Jasmine wanted to know where he was, she'd find out. I wonder--I

wonder."

He watched Byng, over whose face passed a pleased smile.

"Why," Byng said, almost eagerly, "it's from Miss Grenfel--wants me to

go and tell her about Jameson and the Raid."

He paused for an instant, and his face clouded again. "The first thing

I must do is to send cables to Johannesburg. Perhaps there are some

waiting for me at my rooms. I'll go and see. I don't know why I didn't

get news sooner. I generally get word before the Government. There's

something wrong somewhere. Somebody has had me."

"If I were you I'd go to our friend first. When I'm told to go at once,

I go. She wouldn't like cablegrams and other things coming between you

and her command--even when Dr. Jim's riding out of Matabeleland on the

Rand for to free the slaves."

Stafford's words were playful, but there was, almost unknown to

himself, a strange little note of discontent and irony behind.

Byng laughed. "But I'll be able to tell her more, perhaps, if I go to

my rooms first."

"You are going to see her, then?"

"Certainly. There's nothing to do till we get news of Jameson at bay in

a conga or balled up at a kopje." Thrusting the delicately perfumed

letter in his pocket, he nodded, and was gone.

"I was going to see her myself," thought Stafford, "but that settles

it. It will be easier to go where duty calls instead, since Byng takes

my place. Why, she told me to come to-day at this very hour," he added,

suddenly, and paused in his walk towards the door.

"But I want no triangular tea-parties," he continued to reflect....

"Well, there'll be work to do at the Foreign Office, that's sure.

France, Austria, Russia can spit out their venom now and look to their

mobilization. And won't Kaiser William throw up his cap if Dr. Jim gets

caught! What a mess it will be! Well--well--well!"

He sighed, and went on his way brooding darkly; for he knew that this

was the beginning of a great trial for England and all British people.

CHAPTER III

A DAUGHTER OF TYRE

"Monsieur voleur!"

Jasmine looked at him again, as she had done the night before at the

opera, standing quite confidentially close to him, her hand resting in

his big palm like a pad of rose-leaves; while a delicate perfume

greeted his senses. Byng beamed down on her, mystified and eager, yet

by no means impatient, since the situation was one wholly agreeable to

him, and he had been called robber in his time with greater violence

and with a different voice. Now he merely shook his head in humorous

protest, and gave her an indulgent look of inquiry. Somehow he felt

quite at home with her; while yet he was abashed by so much delicacy

and beauty and bloom.

"Why, what else are you but a robber?" she added, withdrawing her hand

rather quickly from the too frank friendliness of his grasp. "You ran

off with my opera-cloak last night, and a very pretty and expensive one

it was."

"Expensive isn't the word," he rejoined; "it was unpurchasable."

She preened herself a little at the phrase. "I returned your overcoat

this morning--before breakfast; and I didn't even receive a note of

thanks for it. I might properly have kept it till my opera cloak came

back."

"It's never coming back," he answered; "and as for my overcoat, I

didn't know it had been returned. I was out all the morning."

"In the Row?" she asked, with an undertone of meaning.

"Well, not exactly. I was out looking for your cloak."

"Without breakfast?" she urged with a whimsical glance.

"Well, I got breakfast while I was looking."

"And while you were indulging material tastes, the cloak hid itself--or

went out and hanged itself?"

He settled himself comfortably in the huge chair which seemed made

especially for him. With a rare sense for details she had had this very

chair brought from the library beyond, where her stepmother, in full

view, was writing letters. He laughed at her words--a deep, round

chuckle it was.

"It didn't exactly hang itself; it lay over the back of a Chesterfield

where I could see it and breakfast too."

"A Chesterfield in a breakfast-room! That's more like the furniture of

a boudoir."

"Well, it was a boudoir." He blushed a little in spite of himself.

"Ah!... Al'mah's? Well, she owed you a breakfast, at least, didn't she?"

"Not so good a breakfast as I got."

"That is putting rather a low price on her life," she rejoined; and a

little smile of triumph gathered at her pink lips; lips a little like

those Nelson loved not wisely yet not too well, if love is worth while

at all.

"T didn't see where you were leading me," he gasped, helplessly. "I

give up. I can't talk in your way."

"What is my way?" she pleaded with a little wave of laughter in her

eyes.

"Why, no frontal attacks--only flank movements, and getting round the

kopjes, with an ambush in a drift here and there."

"That sounds like Paul Kruger or General Joubert," she cried in mock

dismay. "Isn't that what they are doing with Dr. Jameson, perhaps?"

His face clouded. Storm gathered slowly in his eyes, a grimness

suddenly settled in his strong jaw. "Yes," he answered, presently,

"that's what they will be doing; and if I'm not mistaken they'll catch

Jameson just as you caught me just now. They'll catch him at Doornkop

or thereabouts, if I know myself--and Oom Paul."

Her face flushed prettily with excitement. "I want to hear all about

this empire-making, or losing, affair; but there are other things to be

settled first. There's my opera-cloak and the breakfast in the prima

donna's boudoir, and--"

"But, how did you know it was Al'mah?" he asked blankly.

"Why, where else would my cloak be?" she inquired with a little laugh.

"Not at the costumier's or the cleaner's so soon. But, all this horrid

flippancy aside, do you really think I should have talked like this, or

been so exigent about the cloak, if I hadn't known everything; if I

hadn't been to see Al'mah, and spent an hour with her and knew that she

was recovering from that dreadful shock very quickly? But could you

think me so inhuman and unwomanly as not to have asked about her?"

"I wouldn't be in a position to investigate much when you were

talking--not critically," he replied, boldly. "I would only be thinking

that everything you said was all right. It wouldn't occur to me to--"

She half closed her eyes, looking at him with languishing humour. "Now

you must please remember that I am quite young, and may have my head

turned, and--"

"It wouldn't alter my mind about you if you turned your head," he broke

in, gallantly, with a desperate attempt to take advantage of an

opportunity, and try his hand at a game entirely new to him.

There was an instant's pause, in which she looked at him with what was

half-assumed, half-natural shyness. His attempt to play with words was

so full of nature, and had behind it such apparent admiration, that the

unspoiled part of her was suddenly made self-conscious, however

agreeably so. Then she said to him: "I won't say you were brave last

night--that doesn't touch the situation. It wasn't bravery, of course;

it was splendid presence of mind which could only come to a man with

great decision of character. I don't think the newspapers put it at all

in the right way. It wasn't like saving a child from the top of a

burning building, was it?"

"There was nothing in it at all where I was concerned," he replied.

"I've been living a life for fifteen years where you had to move

quick--by instinct, as it were. There's no virtue in it. I was just a

little quicker than a thousand other men present, and I was nearer to

the stage."

"Not nearer than my father or Mr. Stafford."

"They had a bigger shock than I had, I suppose. They got struck numb

for a second. I'm a coarser kind. I have seen lots of sickening things;

and I suppose they don't stun me. We get callous, I fancy, we

veld-rangers and adventurers."

"You seem sensitive enough to fine emotions," she said, almost shyly.

"You were completely absorbed, carried away, by Al'mah's singing last

night. There wasn't a throb of music that escaped you, I should think."

"Well, that's primary instinct. Music is for the most savage natures.

The boor that couldn't appreciate the Taj Mahal, or the sculpture of

Michael Angelo, might be swept off his feet by the music of a master,

though he couldn't understand its story. Besides, I've carried a banjo

and a cornet to the ends of the earth with me. I saved my life with the

cornet once. A lion got inside my zareba in Rhodesia. I hadn't my gun

within reach, but I'd been playing the cornet, and just as he was

crouching I blew a blast from it--one of those jarring discords of

Wagner in the "Gotterdammerung"--and he turned tail and got away into

the bush with a howl. Hearing gets to be the most acute of all the

senses with the pioneer. If you've ever been really dying of thirst,

and have reached water again, its sounds become wonderful to you ever

after that--the trickle of a creek, the wash of a wave on the shore,

the drip on a tin roof, the drop over a fall, the swish of a rainstorm.

It's the same with birds and trees. And trees all make different

sounds--that's the shape of the leaves. It's all music, too."

Her breath came quickly with pleasure at the imagination and

observation of his words. "So it wasn't strange that you should be

ravished by Al'mah's singing last night was it?" She looked at him

keenly. "Isn't it curious that such a marvellous gift should be given

to a woman who in other respects--" she paused.

"Yes, I know what you mean. She's so untrained in lots of ways. That's

what I was saying to Stafford a little while ago. They live in a world

of their own, the stage people. There's always a kind of

irresponsibility. The habit of letting themselves go in their art, I

suppose, makes them, in real life, throw things down so hard when they

don't like them. Living at high pressure is an art like music. It

alters the whole equilibrium, I suppose. A woman like Al'mah would

commit suicide, or kill a man, without realizing the true significance

of it all."

"Were you thinking that when you breakfasted with her?"

"Yes, when she was laughing and jesting--and when she kissed me

good-bye."

"When--she--kissed you--good-bye?"

Jasmine drew back, then half-glanced towards her stepmother in the

other room. She was only twenty-two, and though her emancipation had

been accomplished in its way somewhat in advance of her generation, it

had its origin in a very early period of her life, when she had been

allowed to read books of verse--Shelley, Byron, Shakespeare, Verlaine,

Rossetti, Swinburne, and many others--unchallenged and unguided. The

understanding of things, reserved for "the wise and prudent," had been

at first vaguely and then definitely conveyed to her by slow but subtle

means--an apprehension from instinct, not from knowledge. There had

never been a shock to her mind.

The knowledge of things had grown imperceptibly, and most of life's

ugly meanings were known--at a great distance, to be sure, but still

known. Yet there came a sudden half-angry feeling when she heard

Rudyard Byng say, so loosely, that Al'Mah had kissed him. Was it

possible, then, that a man, that any man, thought she might hear such

things without resentment; that any man thought her to know so much of

life that it did not matter what was said? Did her outward appearance,

then, bear such false evidence?

He did not understand quite, yet he saw that she misunderstood, and he

handled the situation with a tact which seemed hardly to belong to a

man of his training and calibre.

"She thought no more of kissing me," he continued, presently, in a calm

voice--"a man she had seen only once before, and was not likely to see

again, than would a child of five. It meant nothing more to her than

kissing Fanato on the stage. It was pure impulse. She forgot it as soon

as it was done. It was her way of showing gratitude. Somewhat

unconventional, wasn't it? But then, she is a little Irish, a little

Spanish, and the rest Saxon; and she is all artist and bohemian."

Jasmine's face cleared, and her equilibrium was instantly restored. She

was glad she had misunderstood. Yet Al'mah had not kissed her when she

left, while expressing gratitude, too. There was a difference. She

turned the subject, saying: "Of course, she insists on sending me a new

cloak, and keeping the other as a memento. It was rather badly singed,

wasn't it?"

"It did its work well, and it deserves an honoured home. Do you know

that even as I flung the cloak round her, in the excitement of the

moment I 'sensed,' as my young nephew says, the perfume you use."

He lifted his hand, conscious that his fingers still carried some of

that delicate perfume which her fingers left there as they lay in his

palm when she greeted him on his entrance. "It was like an incense from

the cloak, as it blanketed the flames. Strange, wasn't it, that the

undersense should be conscious of that little thing, while the

over-sense was adding a sensational postscript to the opera?"

She smiled in a pleased way. "Do you like the perfume? I really use

very little of it."

"It's like no other. It starts a kind of cloud of ideas floating. I

don't know how to describe it. I imagine myself--"

She interrupted, laughing merrily. "My brother says it always makes him

angry, and Ian Stafford calls it 'The Wild Tincture of

Time'--frivolously and sillily says that it comes from a bank whereon

the 'wild thyme' grows! But now, I want to ask you many questions. We

have been mentally dancing, while down beyond the Limpopo--"

His demeanour instantly changed, and she noted the look cf power and

purpose coming into the rather boyish and good-natured, the rash and

yet determined, face. It was not quite handsome. The features were not

regular, the forehead was perhaps a little too low, and the hair grew

very thick, and would have been a vast mane if it had not been kept

fairly close by his valet. This valet was Krool, a

half-caste--Hottentot and Boer--whom he had rescued from Lobengula in

the Matabele war, and who had in his day been ship-steward, barber,

cook, guide, and native recruiter. Krool had attached himself to Byng,

and he would not be shaken off even when his master came home to

England.

Looking at her visitor with a new sense of observation alive in her,

Jasmine saw the inherent native drowsiness of the nature, the love of

sleep and good living, the healthy primary desires, the striving,

adventurous, yet, in one sense, unambitious soul. The very cleft in the

chin, like the alluring dimple of a child's cheek, enlarged and

hardened, was suggestive of animal beauty, with its parallel suggestion

of indolence. Yet, somehow, too ample as he was both in fact and by

suggestion to the imagination there was an apparent underlying force, a

capacity to do huge things when once roused. He had been roused in his

short day. The life into which he had been thrown with men of vaster

ambition and much more selfish ends than his own, had stirred him to

prodigies of activity in those strenuous, wonderful, electric days when

gold and diamonds changed the hard-bitten, wearied prospector, who had

doggedly delved till he had forced open the hand of the Spirit of the

Earth and caught the treasure that flowed forth, into a millionaire,

into a conqueror, with the world at his feet. He had been of those who,

for many a night and many a year, eating food scarce fit for Kaffirs,

had, in poverty and grim endeavour, seen the sun rise and fall over the

Magaliesberg range, hope alive in the morning and dead at night. He had

faced the devilish storms which swept the high veld with lightning and

the thunderstone, striking men dead as they fled for shelter to the

boulders of some barren, mocking kopje; and he had had the occasional

wild nights of carousal, when the miseries and robberies of life and

time and the ceaseless weariness and hope deferred, were forgotten.

It was all there in his face--the pioneer endeavour, the reckless

effort, the gambler's anxiety, the self-indulgence, the crude passions,

with a far-off, vague idealism, the selfish outlook, and yet great

breadth of feeling, with narrowness of individual purpose. The rough

life, the sordid struggle, had left their mark, and this easy, coaxing,

comfortable life of London had not covered it up--not yet. He still

belonged to other--and higher--spheres.

There was a great contrast between him and Ian Stafford. Ian was

handsome, exquisitely refined, lean and graceful of figure, with a mind

which saw the end of your sentences from the first word, with a skill

of speech like a Damascus blade, with knowledge of a half-dozen

languages. Ian had an allusiveness of conversation which made human

intercourse a perpetual entertainment, and Jasmine's intercourse with

him a delight which lingered after his going until his coming again.

The contrast was prodigious--and perplexing, for Rudyard Byng had

qualities which compelled her interest. She sighed as she reflected.

"I suppose you can't get three millions all to yourself with your own

hands without missing a good deal and getting a good deal you could do

without," she said to herself, as he wonderingly interjected the

exclamation:

"Now, what do you know of the Limpopo? I'll venture there isn't another

woman in England who even knows the name."

"I always had a thirst for travel, and I've read endless books of

travel and adventure," she replied. "I'd have been an explorer, or a

Cecil Rhodes, if I had been a man."

"Can you ride?" he asked, looking wonderingly at her tiny hand, her

slight figure, her delicate face with its almost impossible pink and

white.

"Oh, man of little faith!" she rejoined. "I can't remember when I

didn't ride. First a Shetland pony, and now at last I've reached

Zambesi--such a wicked dear."

"Zambesi--why Zambesi? One would think you were South African."

She enjoyed his mystification. Then she grew serious and her eyes

softened. "I had a friend--a girl, older than I. She married. Well,

he's an earl now, the Earl of Tynemouth, but he was the elder son then,

and wild for sport. They went on their honeymoon to shoot in Africa,

and they visited the falls of the Zambesi. She, my friend, was standing

on the edge of the chasm--perhaps you know it--not far from

Livingstone's tree, between the streams. It was October, and the river

was low. She put up her big parasol. A gust of wind suddenly caught it,

and instead of letting the thing fly, she hung on, and was nearly swept

into the chasm. A man with them pulled her back in time--but she hung

on to that red parasol. Only when it was all over did she realize what

had really happened. Well, when she came back to England, as a kind of

thank-offering she gave me her father's best hunter. That was like her,

too; she could always make other people generous. He is a beautiful

Satan, and I rechristened him Zambesi. I wanted the red parasol, too,

but Alice Tynemouth wouldn't give it to me."

"So she gave it to the man who pulled her back. Why not?"

"How do you know she did that?"

"Well, it hangs in an honoured place in Stafford's chambers. I

conjecture right, do I?"

Her eyes darkened slowly, and a swift-passing shadow covered her

faintly smiling lips; but she only said, "You see he was entitled to

it, wasn't he?" To herself, however, she whispered, "Neither of

them--neither ever told me that."

At that moment the door opened, and a footman came forward to Rudyard

Byng. "If you please, sir, your servant says, will you see him. There

is news from South Africa."

Byng rose, but Jasmine intervened. "No, tell him to come here," she

said to the footman. "Mayn't he?" she asked.

Byng nodded, and remained standing. He seemed suddenly lost to her

presence, and with head dropped forward looked into space, engrossed,

intense.

Jasmine studied him as an artist would study a picture, and decided

that he had elements of the unusual, and was a distinct personality.

Though rugged, he was not uncouth, and there was nothing of the nouveau

riche about him. He did not wear a ring or scarf-pin, his watch-chain

was simple and inconspicuous enough for a school-boy--and he was worth

three million pounds, with a palace building in Park Lane and a feudal

castle in Wales leased for a period of years. There was nothing greatly

striking in his carriage; indeed, he did not make enough of his height

and bulk; but his eye was strong and clear, his head was powerful, and

his quick smile was very winning. Yet--yet, he was not the type of man

who, to her mind should have made three millions at thirty-three. It

did not seem to her that he was really representative of the great

fortune-builders--she had her grandfather and others closely in mind.

She had seen many captains of industry and finance in her grandfather's

house, men mostly silent, deliberate and taciturn, and showing in their

manner and persons the accumulated habits of patience, force, ceaseless

aggression and domination.

Was it only luck which had given Rudyard Byng those three millions? It

could not be just that alone. She remembered her grandfather used to

say that luck was a powerful ingredient in the successful career of

every man, but that the man was on the spot to take the luck, knew when

to take it, and how to use it. "The lucky man is the man that sits up

watching for the windfall while other men are sleeping"--that was the

way he had put it. So Rudyard Byng, if lucky, had also been of those

who had grown haggard with watching, working and waiting; but not a

hair of his head had whitened, and if he looked older than he was,

still he was young enough to marry the youngest debutante in England

and the prettiest and best-born. He certainly had inherent breeding.

His family had a long pedigree, and every man could not be as

distinguished-looking as Ian Stafford--as Ian Stafford, who, however,

had not three millions of pounds; who had not yet made his name and

might never do so.

She flushed with anger at herself that she should be so disloyal to

Ian, for whom she had pictured a brilliant future--ambassador at Paris

or Berlin, or, if he chose, Foreign Minister in Whitehall--Ian,

gracious, diligent, wonderfully trained, waiting, watching for his luck

and ready to take it; and to carry success, when it came, like a prince

of princelier days. Ian gratified every sense in her, met every demand

of an exacting nature, satisfied her unusually critical instinct, and

was, in effect, her affianced husband. Yet it was so hard to wait for

luck, for place, for power, for the environment where she could do

great things, could fill that radiant place which her cynical and

melodramatic but powerful and sympathetic grandfather had prefigured

for her. She had been the apple of that old man's eye, and he had

filled her brain--purposely--with ambitious ideas. He had done it when

she was very young, because he had not long to stay; and he had

overcoloured the pictures in order that the impression should be vivid

and indelible when he was gone. He had meant to bless, for, to his

mind, to shine, to do big things, to achieve notoriety, to attain

power, "to make the band play when you come," was the true philosophy

of life. And as this philosophy, successful in his case, was

accompanied by habits of life which would bear the closest inspection

by the dean and chapter, it was a difficult one to meet by argument or

admonition. He had taught his grandchild as successfully as he had

built the structure of his success. He had made material things the

basis of life's philosophy and purpose; and if she was not wholly

materialistic, it was because she had drunk deep, for one so young, at

the fountains of art, poetry, sculpture and history. For the last she

had a passion which was represented by books of biography without

number, and all the standard historians were to be found in her bedroom

and her boudoir. Yet, too, when she had opportunity--when Lady

Tynemouth brought them to her--she read the newest and most daring

productions of a school of French novelists and dramatists who saw the

world with eyes morally astigmatic and out of focus. Once she had

remarked to Alice Tynemouth:

"You say I dress well, yet it isn't I. It's my dressmaker. I choose the

over-coloured thing three times out of five--it used to be more than

that. Instinctively I want to blaze. It is the same in everything. I

need to be kept down, but, alas! I have my own way in everything. I

wish I hadn't, for my own good. Yet I can't brook being ruled."

To this Alice had replied: "A really selfish husband--not a difficult

thing to find--would soon keep you down sufficiently. Then you'd choose

the over-coloured thing not more than two times, perhaps one time, out

of five. Your orientalism is only undisciplined self-will. A little

cruelty would give you a better sense of proportion in colour--and

everything else. You have orientalism, but little or no orientation."

Here, now, standing before the fire, was that possible husband who, no

doubt, was selfish, and had capacities for cruelty which would give her

greater proportion--and sense of colour. In Byng's palace, with three

millions behind her--she herself had only the tenth of one million--she

could settle down into an exquisitely ordered, beautiful, perfect life

where the world would come as to a court, and--

Suddenly she shuddered, for these thoughts were sordid, humiliating,

and degrading. They were unbidden, but still they came. They came from

some dark fountain within herself. She really wanted--her idealistic

self wanted--to be all that she knew she looked, a flower in life and

thought. But, oh, it was hard, hard for her to be what she wished! Why

should it be so hard for her?

She was roused by a voice. "Cronje!" it said in a deep, slow, ragged

note.

Byng's half-caste valet, Krool, sombre of face, small, lean, ominous,

was standing in the doorway.

"Cronje! ... Well?" rejoined Byng, quietly, yet with a kind of smother

in the tone.

Krool stretched out a long, skinny, open hand, and slowly closed the

fingers up tight with a gesture suggestive of a trap closing upon a

crushed captive.

"Where?" Byng asked, huskily.

"Doornkop," was the reply; and Jasmine, watching closely, fascinated by

Krool's taciturnity, revolted by his immobile face, thought she saw in

his eyes a glint of malicious and furtive joy. A dark premonition

suddenly flashed into her mind that this creature would one day,

somehow, do her harm; that he was her foe, her primal foe, without

present or past cause for which she was responsible; but still a

foe--one of those antipathies foreordained, one of those evil

influences which exist somewhere in the universe against every

individual life.

"Doornkop--what did I say!" Byng exclaimed to Jasmine. "I knew they'd

put the double-and-twist on him at Doornkop, or some such place; and

they've done it--Kruger and Joubert. Englishmen aren't slim enough to

be conspirators. Dr. Jim was going it blind, trusting to good luck,

gambling with the Almighty. It's bury me deep now. It's Paul Kruger

licking his chops over the savoury mess. 'Oh, isn't it a pretty dish to

set before the king!' What else, Krool?"

"Nothing, Baas."

"Nothing more in the cables?"

"No, Baas."

"That will do, Krool. Wait. Go to Mr. Whalen. Say I want him to bring a

stenographer and all the Partners--he'll understand--to me at ten

to-night."

"Yes, Baas."

Krool bowed slowly. As he raised his head his eyes caught those of

Jasmine. For an instant they regarded each other steadily, then the

man's eyes dropped, and a faint flush passed over his face. The look

had its revelation which neither ever forgot. A quiver of fear passed

through Jasmine, and was followed by a sense of self-protection and a

hardening of her will, as against some possible danger.

As Krool left the room he said to himself: "The Baas speaks her for his

vrouw. But the Baas will go back quick to the Vaal--p'r'aps."

Then an evil smile passed over his face, as he thought of the fall of

the Rooinek--of Dr. Jim in Oom Paul's clutches. He opened and shut his

fingers again with a malignant cruelty.

Standing before the fire, Byng said to Jasmine meditatively, with that

old ironic humour which was always part of him: "'Fee, fo, fi, fum, I

smell the blood of an Englishman.'"

Her face contracted with pain. "They will take Dr. Jim's life?" she

asked, solemnly.

"It's hard to tell. It isn't him alone. There's lots of others that we

both know."

"Yes, yes, of course. It's terrible, terrible," she whispered.

"It's more terrible than it looks, even now. It's a black day for

England. She doesn't know yet how black it is. I see it, though; I see

it. It's as plain as an open book. Well, there's work to do, and I must

be about it. I'm off to the Colonial Office. No time to lose. It's a

job that has no eight-hours shift."

Now the real man was alive. He was transformed. The face was set and

quiet. He looked concentrated will and power as he stood with his hands

clasped behind him, his shoulders thrown back, his eyes alight with

fire and determination. To herself Jasmine seemed to be moving in the

centre of great events, having her fingers upon the levers which work

behind the scenes of the world's vast schemes, standing by the secret

machinery of government.

"How I wish I could help you," she said, softly, coming nearer to him,

a warm light in her liquid blue eyes, her exquisite face flushing with

excitement, her hands clasped in front of her.

As Byng looked at her, it seemed to him that sweet honesty and

high-heartedness had never had so fine a setting; that never had there

been in the world such an epitome of talent, beauty and sincerity. He

had suddenly capitulated, he who had ridden unscathed so long. If he

had dared he would have taken her in his arms there and then; but he

had known her only for a day. He had been always told that a woman must

be wooed and won, and to woo took time. It was not a task he

understood, but suddenly it came to him that he was prepared to do it;

that he must be patient and watch and serve, and, as he used to do,

perhaps, be elate in the morning and depressed at night, till the day

of triumph came and his luck was made manifest.

"But you can help me, yes, you can help me as no one else can," he said

almost hoarsely, and his hands moved a little towards her.

"You must show me how," she said, scarce above a whisper, and she drew

back slightly, for this look in his eyes told its own story.

"When may I come again?" he asked.

"I want so much to hear everything about South Africa. Won't you come

to-morrow at six?" she asked.

"Certainly, to-morrow at six," he answered, eagerly, "and thank you."

His honest look of admiration enveloped her as her hand was again lost

in his strong, generous palm, and lay there for a moment thrilling

him.... He turned at the door and looked back, and the smile she gave

seemed the most delightful thing he had ever seen.

"She is a flower, a jasmine-flower," he said, happily, as he made his

way into the street.

When he had gone she fled to her bedroom. Standing before the mirror,

she looked at herself long, laughing feverishly. Then suddenly she

turned and threw herself upon the bed, bursting into a passion of

tears. Sobs shook her.

"Oh, Ian," she said, raising her head at last, "oh, Ian, Ian, I hate

myself!"

Down in the library her stepmother was saying to her father, "You are

right, Jasmine will marry the nabob."

"I am sorry for Ian Stafford," was the response.

"Men get over such things," came the quietly cynical reply.

"Jasmine takes a lot of getting over," answered Jasmine's father. "She

has got the brains of all the family, the beauty her family never

had--the genius of my father, and the wilfulness, and--"

He paused, for, after all, he was not talking to the mother of his

child.

"Yes, all of it, dear child," was the enigmatical reply.

"I wish--Nelly, I do wish that--"

"Yes, I know what you wish, Cuthbert, but it's no good. I'm not of any

use to her. She will work out her own destiny alone--as her grandfather

did."

"God knows I hope not! A man can carry it off, but a woman--"

Slow and almost stupid as he was, he knew that her inheritance from her

grandfather's nature was a perilous gift.

CHAPTER IV

THE PARTNERS MEET

England was more stunned than shocked. The dark significance, the evil

consequences destined to flow from the Jameson Raid had not yet reached

the general mind. There was something gallant and romantic in this wild

invasion: a few hundred men, with no commissariat and insufficient

clothing, with enough ammunition and guns for only the merest flurry of

battle, doing this unbelievable gamble with Fate--challenging a

republic of fighting men with well-stocked arsenals and capable

artillery, with ample sources of supply, with command of railways and

communications. It was certainly magnificent; but it was magnificent

folly.

It did not take England long to decide that point; and not even the

Laureate's paean in the organ of the aristocracy and upper middle class

could evoke any outburst of feeling. There was plenty of admiration for

the pluck and boldness, for the careless indifference with which the

raiders risked their lives; for the romantic side of the dash from

Pitsani to the Rand; but the thing was so palpably impossible, as it

was carried out, that there was not a knowing mind in the Islands which

would not have echoed Rhodes' words, "Jameson has upset the apple-cart."

Rudyard Byng did not visit Jasmine the next evening at six o'clock. His

world was all in chaos, and he had not closed his eyes to sleep since

he had left her. At ten o'clock at night, as he had arranged, "The

Partners" and himself met at his chambers, around which had gathered a

crowd of reporters and curious idlers; and from that time till the grey

dawn he and they had sat in conference. He had spent two hours at the

Colonial Office after he left Jasmine, and now all night he kneaded the

dough of a new policy with his companions in finance and misfortune.

There was Wallstein, the fairest, ablest, and richest financier of them

all, with a marvellous head for figures and invaluable and commanding

at the council-board, by virtue of his clear brain and his power to

co-ordinate all the elements of the most confusing financial problems.

Others had by luck and persistence made money--the basis of their

fortunes; but Wallstein had showed them how to save those fortunes and

make them grow; had enabled them to compete successfully with the games

of other great financiers in the world's stock-markets. Wallstein was

short and stout, with a big blue eye and an unwrinkled forehead;

prematurely aged from lack of exercise and the exciting air of the high

veld; from planning and scheming while others slept; from an inherent

physical weakness due to the fact that he was one of twin sons, to his

brother being given great physical strength, to himself a powerful

brain for finance and a frail if ample body. Wallstein knew little and

cared less about politics; yet he saw the use of politics in finance,

and he did not stick his head into the sand as some of his colleagues

did when political activities hampered their operations. In

Johannesburg he had kept aloof from the struggle with Oom Paul, not

from lack of will, but because he had no stomach for daily intrigue and

guerrilla warfare and subterranean workings; and he was convinced that

only a great and bloody struggle would end the contest for progress and

equal rights for all white men on the Rand. His inquiries had been bent

towards so disposing the financial operations, so bulwarking the mining

industry by sagacious designs, that, when the worst came, they all

would be able to weather the storm. He had done his work better than

his colleagues knew, or indeed even himself knew.

Probably only Fleming the Scotsman--another of the Partners--with a

somewhat dour exterior, an indomitable will, and a caution which

compelled him to make good every step of the way before him, and so

cultivate a long sight financially and politically, understood how

extraordinary Wallstein's work had been--only Fleming, and Rudyard

Byng, who knew better than any and all.

There was also De Lancy Scovel, who had become a biggish figure in the

Rand world because he had been a kind of financial valet to Wallstein

and Byng, and, it was said, had been a real unofficial valet to Rhodes,

being an authority on cooking, and on brewing a punch, and a master of

commissariat in the long marches which Rhodes made in the days when he

trekked into Rhodesia. It was indeed said that he had made his first

ten thousand pounds out of two trips which Rhodes made en route to

Lobengula, and had added to this amount on the principle of compound

multiplication when the Matabele war came; for here again he had a

collateral interest in the commissariat.

Rhodes, with a supreme carelessness in regard to money, with an

indifference to details which left his mind free for the working of a

few main ideas, had no idea how many cheques he gave on the spur of the

moment to De Lancy Scovel in this month or in that, in this year or in

that, for this thing or for that--cheques written very often on the

backs of envelopes, on the white margin of a newspaper, on the fly-leaf

of a book or a blank telegraph form. The Master Man was so stirred by

half-contemptuous humour at the sycophancy and snobbery of his vain

slave, who could make a salad out of anything edible, that, caring

little what men were, so long as they did his work for him, he once

wrote a cheque for two thousand pounds on the starched cuff of his

henchman's "biled shirt" at a dinner prepared for his birthday.

So it was that, with the marrow-bones thrown to him, De Lancy Scovel

came to a point where he could follow Wallstein's and Rhodes' lead

financially, being privy to their plans, through eavesdropping on the

conferences of his chiefs. It came as a surprise to his superiors that

one day's chance discovery showed De Lancy Scovel to be worth fifty

thousand pounds; and from that time on they used him for many a purpose

in which it was expedient their own hands should not appear. They felt

confident that a man who could so carefully and secretly build up his

own fortune had a gift which could be used to advantage. A man who

could be so subterranean in his own affairs would no doubt be equally

secluded in their business. Selfishness would make him silent. And so

it was that "the dude" of the camp and the kraal, the factotum, who in

his time had brushed Rhodes' clothes when he brushed his own, after the

Kaffir servant had messed them about, came to be a millionaire and one

of the Partners. For him South Africa had no charms. He was happy in

London, or at his country-seat in Leicestershire, where he followed the

hounds with a temerity which was at base vanity; where he gave the

county the best food to be got outside St. Petersburg or Paris; where

his so-called bachelor establishment was cared for by a coarse,

gray-haired housekeeper who, the initiated said, was De Lancy's South

African wife, with a rooted objection to being a lady or "moving in

social circles"; whose pleasure lay in managing this big household

under De Lancy's guidance. There were those who said they had seen her

brush a speck of dust from De Lancy's coat-collar, as she emerged from

her morning interview with him; and others who said they had seen her

hidden in the shrubbery listening to the rather flaccid conversation of

her splendid poodle of a master.

There were others who had climbed to success in their own way, some by

happy accident, some by a force which disregarded anything in their

way, and some by sheer honest rough merit, through which the soul of

the true pioneer shone.

There was also Barry Whalen, who had been educated as a doctor, and,

with a rare Irish sense of adaptability and amazing Celtic cleverness,

had also become a mining engineer, in the days when the Transvaal was

emerging from its pioneer obscurity into the golden light of mining

prosperity. Abrupt, obstinately honest, and sincere; always protesting

against this and against that, always the critic of authority, whether

the authority was friend or foe; always smothering his own views in the

moment when the test of loyalty came; always with a voice like a young

bull and a heart which would have suited a Goliath, there was no one

but trusted Barry, none that had not hurried to him in a difficulty;

not because he was so wise, but because he was so true. He would never

have made money, in spite of the fact that his prescience, his mining

sense, his diagnosis of the case of a mine, as Byng called it, had been

a great source of wealth to others, had it not been for Wallstein and

Byng.

Wallstein had in him a curious gentleness and human sympathy, little in

keeping with the view held of him by that section of the British press

which would willingly have seen England at the mercy of Paul

Kruger--for England's good, for her soul's welfare as it were, for her

needed chastisement. He was spoken of as a cruel, tyrannical, greedy

German Jew, whose soul was in his own pocket and his hand in the

pockets of the world. In truth he was none of these things, save that

he was of German birth, and of as good and honest German origin as

George of Hanover and his descendants, if not so distinguished.

Wallstein's eye was an eye of kindness, save in the vision of business;

then it saw without emotion to the advantage of the country where he

had made his money, and to the perpetual advantage of England, to whom

he gave an honourable and philanthropic citizenship. His charities were

not of the spectacular kind; but many a poor and worthy, and often

unworthy, unfortunate was sheltered through bad days and heavy weather

of life by the immediate personal care of "the Jew Mining Magnate, who

didn't care a damn what happened to England so long as his own nest was

well lined!"

It was Wallstein who took heed of the fact that, as he became rich,

Barry Whalen remained poor; and it was he who took note that Barry had

a daughter who might any day be left penniless with frail health and no

protector; and taking heed and note, it was he made all the Partners

unite in taking some financial risks and responsibilities for Barry,

when two new mines were opened--to Barry's large profit. It was

characteristic of Barry, however, that, if they had not disguised their

action by financial devices, and by making him a Partner, because he

was needed professionally and intellectually and for other business

reasons, nicely phrased to please his Celtic vanity, he would have

rejected the means to the fortune which came to him. It was a far

smaller fortune than any of the others had; but it was sufficient for

him and for his child. So it was that Barry became one of the Partners,

and said things that every one else would hesitate to say, but were

glad to hear said.

Others of the group were of varying degrees of ability and interest and

importance. One or two were poltroons in body and mind, with only a

real instinct for money-making and a capacity for constructive

individualism. Of them the most conspicuous was Clifford Melville,

whose name was originally Joseph Sobieski, with habitat Poland, whose

small part in this veracious tale belongs elsewhere.

Each had his place, and all were influenced by the great schemes of

Rhodes and their reflection in the purposes and actions of Wallstein.

Wallstein was inspired by the dreams and daring purposes of Empire

which had driven Rhodes from Table Mountain to the kraal of Lobengula

and far beyond; until, at last, the flag he had learned to love had

been triumphantly trailed from the Cape to Cairo.

Now in the great crisis, Wallstein, of them all, was the most

self-possessed, save Rudyard Byng. Some of the others were paralyzed.

They could only whine out execrations on the man who had dared

something; who, if he had succeeded, would have been hailed as the

great leader of a Revolution, not the scorned and humiliated captain of

a filibustering expedition. A triumphant rebellion or raid is always a

revolution in the archives of a nation. These men were of a class who

run for cover before a battle begins, and can never be kept in the

fighting-line except with the bayonet in the small of their backs.

Others were irritable and strenuous, bitter in their denunciations of

the Johannesburg conspirators, who had bungled their side of the

business and who had certainly shown no rashness. At any rate, whatever

the merits of their case, no one in England accused the Johannesburgers

of foolhardy courage or impassioned daring. They were so busy in trying

to induce Jameson to go back that they had no time to go forward

themselves. It was not that they lost their heads, their hearts were

the disappearing factors.

At this gloomy meeting in his house, Byng did not join either of the

two sections who represented the more extreme views and the unpolitical

minds. There was a small section, of which he was one, who were not

cleverer financially than their friends, but who had political sense

and intuition; and these, to their credit, were more concerned, at this

dark moment, for the political and national consequences of the Raid,

than for the certain set-back to the mining and financial enterprises

of the Rand. A few of the richest of them were the most hopeless

politically--ever ready to sacrifice principle for an extra dividend of

a quarter per cent.; and, in their inmost souls, ready to bow the knee

to Oom Paul and his unwholesome, undemocratic, and corrupt government,

if only the dividends moved on and up.

Byng was not a great genius, and he had never given his natural

political talent its full chance; but his soul was bigger than his

pocket. He had a passionate love for the land--for England--which had

given him birth; and he had a decent pride in her honour and good name.

So it was that he had almost savagely challenged some of the sordid

deliberations of this stern conference. In a full-blooded and manly

appeal he begged them "to get on higher ground." If he could but have

heard it, it would have cheered the heart of the broken and discredited

pioneer of Empire at Capetown, who had received his death-warrant, to

take effect within five years, in the little cottage at Muizenberg by

the sea; as great a soul in posse as ever came from the womb of the

English mother; who said as he sat and watched the tide flow in and

out, and his own tide of life ebbed, "Life is a three days' trip to the

sea-shore: one day in going, one day in settling down, and one day in

packing up again."

Byng had one or two colleagues who, under his inspiration, also took

the larger view, and who looked ahead to the consequences yet to flow

from the fiasco at Doornkop, which became a tragedy. What would happen

to the conspirators of Johannesburg? What would happen to Jameson and

Willoughby and Bobby White and Raleigh Grey? Who was to go to South

Africa to help in holding things together, and to prevent the worst

happening, if possible? At this point they had arrived when they saw--

... The dull dank morn stare in,

Like a dim drowned face with oozy eyes.

A more miserable morning seldom had broken, even in England.

"I will go. I must go," remarked Byng at last, though there was a

strange sinking of the heart as he said it. Even yet the perfume of

Jasmine's cloak stole to his senses to intoxicate them. But it was his

duty to offer to go; and he felt that he could do good by going, and

that he was needed at Johannesburg. He, more than all of them, had been

in open conflict with Oom Paul in the the past, had fought him the most

vigorously, and yet for him the old veldschoen Boer had some regard and

much respect, in so far as he could respect a Rooinek at all.

"I will go," Byng repeated, and looked round the table at haggard

faces, at ashen faces, at the faces of men who had smoked to quiet

their nerves, or drunk hard all night to keep up their courage. How

many times they had done the same in olden days, when the millions were

not yet arrived, and their only luxury was companionship and

champagne--or something less expensive.

As Byng spoke, Krool entered the room with a great coffee-pot and a

dozen small white bowls. He heard Byng's words, and for a moment his

dark eyes glowed with a look of evil satisfaction. But his immobile

face showed nothing, and he moved like a spirit among them his lean

hand putting a bowl before each person, like a servitor of Death

passing the hemlock-brew.

At his entrance there was instant silence, for, secret as their

conference must be, this half-caste, this Hottentot-Boer, must hear

nothing and know nothing. Not one of them but resented his being Byng's

servant. Not one but felt him a danger at any time, and particularly

now. Once Barry Whalen, the most outwardly brusque and apparently frank

of them all, had urged Byng to give Krool up, but without avail; and

now Barry eyed the half-caste with a resentful determination. He knew

that Krool had heard Byng's words, for he was sitting opposite the

double doors, and had seen the malicious eyes light up. Instantly,

however, that light vanished. They all might have been wooden men, and

Krool but a wooden servitor, so mechanical and concentrated were his

actions. He seemed to look at nobody; but some of them shrank a little

as he leaned over and poured the brown, steaming liquid and the hot

milk into the bowls. Only once did the factotum look at anybody

directly, and that was at Byng just as he was about to leave the room.

Then Barry Whalen saw him glance searchingly at his master's face in a

mirror, and again that baleful light leaped up in his eyes.

When he had left the room, Barry Whalen said, impulsively: "Byng, it's

all damn foolery your keeping that fellow about you. It's dangerous,

'specially now."

"Coffee's good, isn't it? Think there's poison in it?" Byng asked with

a contemptuous little laugh. "Sugar--what?" He pushed the great bowl of

sugar over the polished table towards Barry.

"Oh, he makes you comfortable enough, but--"

"But he makes you uncomfortable, Barry? Well, we're bound to get on one

another's nerves one way or another in this world when the east wind

blows; and if it isn't the east wind, it's some other wind. We're

living on a planet which has to take the swipes of the universe,

because it has permitted that corrupt, quarrelsome, and pernicious

beast, man, to populate the hemispheres. Krool is staying on with me,

Barry."

"We're in heavy seas, and we don't want any wreckers on the shore," was

the moody and nervously indignant reply.

"Well, Krool's in the heavy seas, all right, too--with me."

Barry Whalen persisted. "We're in for complications, Byng. England has

to take a hand in the game now with a vengeance. We don't want any

spies. He's more Boer than native."

"There'll be nothing Krool can get worth spying for. If we keep our

mouths shut to the outside world, we'll not need fear any spies. I'm

not afraid of Krool. We'll not be sold by him. Though some one inside

will sell us perhaps--as the Johannesburg game was sold by some one

inside."

There was a painful silence, and more than one man looked at his

fellows furtively.

"We will do nothing that will not bear the light of day, and then we

need not fear any spying," continued Byng.

"If we have secret meetings and intentions which we don't make public,

it is only what governments themselves have; and we keep them quiet to

prevent any one taking advantage of us; but our actions are

justifiable. I'm going to do nothing I'm ashamed of; and when it's

necessary, or when and if it seems right to do so, I'll put all my

cards on the table. But when I do, I'll see that it's a full hand--if I

can."

There was a silence for a moment after he had ended, then some one said:

"You think it's best that you should go? You want to go to

Johannesburg?"

"I didn't say anything about wanting to go. I said I'd go because one

of us--or two of us--ought to go. There's plenty to do here; but if I

can be any more use out there, why, Wallstein can stay here, and--"

He got no further, for Wallstein, to whom he had just referred, and who

had been sitting strangely impassive, with his eyes approvingly fixed

on Byng, half rose from his chair and fell forward, his thick, white

hands sprawling on the mahogany table, his fat, pale face striking the

polished wood with a thud. In an instant they were all on their feet

and at his side.

Barry Whalen lifted up his head and drew him back into the chair, then

three of them lifted him upon a sofa. Barry's hand felt the breast of

the prostrate figure, and Byng's fingers sought his wrist. For a moment

there was a dreadful silence, and then Byng and Whalen looked at each

other and nodded.

"Brandy!" said Byng, peremptorily.

"He's not dead?" whispered some one.

"Brandy--quick," urged Byng, and, lifting up the head a little, he

presently caught the glass from Whalen's hand and poured some brandy

slowly between the bluish lips. "Some one ring for Krool," he added.

A moment later Krool entered. "The doctor--my doctor and his own--and a

couple of nurses," Byng said, sharply, and Krool nodded and vanished.

"Perhaps it's only a slight heart-attack, but it's best to be on the

safe side."

"Anyhow, it shows that Wallstein needs to let up for a while,"

whispered Fleming.

"It means that some one must do Wallstein's work here," said Barry

Whalen. "It means that Byng stays in London," he added, as Krool

entered the room again with a rug to cover Wallstein.

Barry saw Krool's eyes droop before his words, and he was sure that the

servant had reasons for wishing his master to go to South Africa. The

others present, however, only saw a silent, magically adept figure

stooping over the sick man, adjusting the body to greater ease,

arranging skilfully the cushion under the head, loosening and removing

the collar and the boots, and taking possession of the room, as though

he himself were the doctor; while Byng looked on with satisfaction.

"Useful person, eh?" he said, meaningly, in an undertone to Barry

Whalen.

"I don't think he's at home in England," rejoined Barry, as meaningly

and very stubbornly: "He won't like your not going to South Africa."

"Am I not going to South Africa?" Byng asked, mechanically, and looking

reflectively at Krool.

"Wallstein's a sick man, Byng. You can't leave London. You're the only

real politician among us. Some one else must go to Johannesburg."

"You--Barry?"

"You know I can't, Byng--there's my girl. Besides, I don't carry enough

weight, anyhow, and you know that too."

Byng remembered Whalen's girl--stricken down with consumption a few

months before. He caught Whalen's arm in a grip of friendship. "All

right, dear old man," he said, kindly. "Fleming shall go, and I'll

stay. Yes, I'll stay here, and do Wallstein's work."

He was still mechanically watching Krool attend to the sick man, and he

was suddenly conscious of an arrest of all motion in the half-caste's

lithe frame. Then Krool turned, and their eyes met. Had he drawn

Krool's eyes to his--the master-mind influencing the subservient

intelligence?

"Krool wants to go to South Africa," he said to himself with a strange,

new sensation which he did not understand, though it was not quite a

doubt. He reassured himself. "Well, it's natural he should. It's his

home.... But Fleming must go to Johannesburg. I'm needed most here."

There was gratitude in his heart that Fate had decreed it so. He was

conscious of the perfume from Jasmine's cloak searching his senses,

even in this hour when these things that mattered--the things of

Fate--were so enormously awry.

CHAPTER V

A WOMAN TELLS HER STORY

"Soon he will speak you. Wait here, madame."

Krool passed almost stealthily out.

Al'mah looked round the rather formal sitting-room, with its somewhat

incongruous furnishing--leopard-skins from Bechuanaland; lion-skins

from Matabeleland; silver-mounted tusks of elephants from Eastern Cape

Colony and Portuguese East Africa; statues and statuettes of classical

subjects; two or three Holbeins, a Rembrandt, and an El Greco on the

walls; a piano, a banjo, and a cornet; and, in the corner, a little

roulette-table. It was a strange medley, in keeping, perhaps, with the

incongruously furnished mind of the master of it all; it was expressive

of tastes and habits not yet settled and consistent.

Al'mah's eyes had taken it all in rather wistfully, while she had

waited for Krool's return from his master; but the wistfulness was due

to personal trouble, for her eyes were clouded and her motions languid.

But when she saw the banjo, the cornet, and the roulette-table, a deep

little laugh rose to her full red lips.

"How like a subaltern, or a colonial civil servant!" she said to

herself.

She reflected a moment, then pursued the thought further: "But there

must be bigness in him, as well as presence of mind and depth of

heart--yes, I'm sure his nature is deep."

She remembered the quick, protecting hands which had wrapped her round

with Jasmine Grenfel's cloak, and the great arms in which she had

rested, the danger over.

"There can't be much wrong with a nature like his, though Adrian hates

him so. But, of course, Adrian would. Besides, Adrian will never get

over the drop in the mining-stock which ruined him--Rudyard Byng's

mine.... It's natural for Adrian to hate him, I suppose," she added

with a heavy sigh.

Mentally she took to comparing this room with Adrian Fellowes'

sitting-room overlooking the Thames Embankment, where everything was in

perfect taste and order, where all was modulated, harmonious, soigne

and artistic. Yet, somehow, the handsome chambers which hung over the

muddy river with its wonderful lights and shades, its mists and

radiance, its ghostly softness and greyness, lacked in something that

roused imagination, that stirred her senses here--the vital being in

her.

It was power, force, experience, adventure. They were all here. She

knew the signs: the varied interests, the primary emotions, music, art,

hunting, prospecting, fighting, gambling. They were mixed with the

solid achievement of talent and force in the business of life. Here was

a model of a new mining-drill, with a picture of the stamps working in

the Work-and-Wonder mine, together with a model of the Kaffir compound

at Kimberley, with the busy, teeming life behind the wire boundaries.

Thus near was Byng to the ways of a child, she thought, thus near to

the everlasting intelligence and the busy soul of a constructive and

creative Deity--if there was a Deity. Despite the frequent laughter on

her tongue and in her eyes, she doubted bitterly at times that there

was a Deity. For how should happen the awful tragedies which

encompassed men and peoples, if there was a Deity. No benign Deity

could allow His own created humanity to be crushed in bleeding masses,

like the grapes trampled in the vats of a vineyard. Whole cities

swallowed up by earthquake; islands swept of their people by a tidal

wave; a vast ship pierced by an iceberg and going down with its

thousand souls; provinces spread with the vile elements of a plague

which carpeted the land with dead; mines flooded by water or devastated

by fire; the little new-born babe left without the rightful breast to

feed it; the mother and her large family suddenly deprived of the

breadwinner; old men who had lived like saints, giving their all to

their own and to the world, driven to the degradation of the poorhouse

in the end--ah, if one did not smile, one would die of weeping, she

thought.

Al'mah had smiled her way through the world; with a quick word of

sympathy for any who were hurt by the blows of life or time; with an

open hand for the poor and miserable,--now that she could afford

it--and hiding her own troubles behind mirth and bonhommie; for her

humour, as her voice, was deep and strong like that of a man. It was

sometimes too pronounced, however, Adrian Fellowes had said; and Adrian

was an acute observer, who took great pride in her. Was it not to

Adrian she had looked first for approval the night of her triumph at

Covent Garden--why, that was only a few days ago, and it seemed a

hundred days, so much had happened since. It was Adrian's handsome face

which had told her then of the completeness of her triumph.

The half-caste valet entered again. "Here come, madame," he said with

something very near a smile; for he liked this woman, and his dark,

sensual soul would have approved of his master liking her.

"Soon the Baas, madame," he said as he placed a chair for her, and with

the gliding footstep of a native left the room.

"Sunny creature!" she remarked aloud, with a little laugh, and looked

round. Instantly her face lighted with interest. Here was nothing of

that admired disorder, that medley of incongruous things which marked

the room she had just left; but perfect order, precision, and balance

of arrangement, the most peaceful equipoise. There was a great carved

oak-table near to sun-lit windows, and on it were little regiments of

things, carefully arranged--baskets with papers in elastic bands;

classified and inscribed reference-books, scales, clips, pencils; and

in one clear space, with a bunch of violets before it, the photograph

of a woman in a splendid silver frame--a woman of seventy or so,

obviously Rudyard Byng's mother.

Al'mah's eyes softened. Here was insight into a nature of which the

world knew so little. She looked further. Everywhere were signs of

disciplined hours and careful hands--cabinets with initialed drawers,

shelves filled with books. There is no more impressive and revealing

moment with man or woman than when you stand in a room empty of their

actual presence, but having, in every inch of it, the pervasive

influences of the absent personality. A strange, almost solemn

quietness stole over Al'mah's senses. She had been admitted to the

inner court, not of the man's house, but of his life. Her eyes

travelled on with the gratified reflection that she had been admitted

here. Above the books were rows of sketches--rows of sketches!

Suddenly, as her eyes rested on them, she turned pale and got to her

feet. They were all sketches of the veld, high and low; of natives; of

bits of Dutch architecture; of the stoep with its Boer farmer and his

vrouw; of a kopje with a dozen horses or a herd of cattle grazing; of a

spruit, or a Kaffir's kraal; of oxen leaning against the disselboom of

a cape-wagon; of a herd of steinboks, or a little colony of meerkats in

the karoo.

Her hand went to her heart with a gesture of pain, and a little cry of

misery escaped her lips.

Now there was a quick footstep, and Byng entered with a cordial smile

and an outstretched hand.

"Well, this is a friendly way to begin the New Year," he said,

cheerily, taking her hand. "You certainly are none the worse for our

little unrehearsed drama the other night. I see by the papers that you

have been repeating your triumph. Please sit down. Do you mind my

having a little toast while we talk? I always have my petit dejeuner

here; and I'm late this morning."

"You look very tired," she said as she sat down.

Krool here entered with a tray, placing it on a small table by the big

desk. He was about to pour out the tea, but Byng waved him away.

"Send this note at once by hand," he said, handing him an envelope. It

was addressed to Jasmine Grenfel.

"Yes, I'm tired--rather," he added to his guest with a sudden weariness

of manner. "I've had no sleep for three nights--working all the time,

every hour; and in this air of London, which doesn't feed you, one

needs plenty of sleep. You can't play with yourself here as you can on

the high veld, where an hour or two of sleep a day will do. On-saddle

and off-saddle, in-span and outspan, plenty to eat and a little sleep;

and the air does the rest. It has been a worrying time."

"The Jameson Raid--and all the rest?"

"Particularly all the rest. I feel easier in my mind about Dr. Jim and

the others. England will demand--so I understand," he added with a

careful look at her, as though he had said too much--"the right to try

Jameson and his filibusters from Matabeleland here in England; but it's

different with the Jo'burgers. They will be arrested--"

"They have been arrested," she intervened.

"Oh, is it announced?" he asked without surprise.

"It was placarded an hour ago," she replied, heavily.

"Well, I fancied it would be," he remarked. "They'll have a close

squeak. The sympathy of the world is with Kruger--so far."

"That is what I have come about," she said, with an involuntary and

shrinking glance at the sketches on the walls.

"What you have come about?" he said, putting down his cup of tea and

looking at her intently. "How are you concerned? Where do you come in?"

"There is a man--he has been arrested with the others; with Farrar,

Phillips, Hammond, and the rest--"

"Oh, that's bad! A relative, or--"

"Not a relative, exactly," she replied in a tone of irony. Rising, she

went over to the wall and touched one of the water-colour sketches.

"How did you come by these?" she asked.

"Blantyre's sketches? Well, it's all I ever got for all Blantyre owed

me, and they're not bad. They're lifted out of the life. That's why I

bought them. Also because I liked to think I got something out of

Blantyre; and that he would wish I hadn't. He could paint a bit--don't

you think so?"

"He could paint a bit--always," she replied.

A silence followed. Her back was turned to him, her face was towards

the pictures.

Presently he spoke, with a little deferential anxiety in the tone. "Are

you interested in Blantyre?" he asked, cautiously. Getting up, he came

over to her.

"He has been arrested--as I said--with the others."

"No, you did not say so. So they let Blantyre into the game, did they?"

he asked almost musingly; then, as if recalling what she had said, he

added: "Do you mind telling me exactly what is your interest in

Blantyre?"

She looked at him straight in the eyes. For a face naturally so full of

humour, hers was strangely dark with stormy feeling now.

"Yes, I will tell you as much as I can--enough for you to understand,"

she answered.

He drew up a chair to the fire, and she sat down. He nodded at her

encouragingly. Presently she spoke.

"Well, at twenty-one I was studying hard, and he was painting--"

"Blantyre?"

She inclined her head. "He was full of dreams--beautiful, I thought

them; and he was ambitious. Also he could talk quite marvellously."

"Yes, Blantyre could talk--once," Byng intervened, gently.

"We were married secretly."

Byng made a gesture of amazement, and his face became shocked and

grave. "Married! Married! You were married to Blantyre?"

"At a registry office in Chelsea. One month, only one month it was, and

then he went away to Madeira to paint--'a big commission,' he said; and

he would send for me as soon as he could get money in hand--certainly

in a couple of months. He had taken most of my half-year's income--I

had been left four hundred a year by my mother."

Byng muttered a malediction under his breath and leaned towards her

sympathetically.

With an effort she continued. "From Madeira he wrote to tell me he was

going on to South Africa, and would not be home for a year. From South

Africa he wrote saying he was not coming back; that I could divorce him

if I liked. The proof, he said, would be easy; or I needn't divorce him

unless I liked, since no one knew we were married."

For an instant there was absolute silence, and she sat with her fingers

pressed tight to her eyes. At last she went on, her face turned away

from the great kindly blue eyes bent upon her, from the face flushed

with honourable human sympathy.

"I went into the country, where I stayed for nearly three years,

till--till I could bear it no longer; and then I began to study and

sing again."

"What were you doing in the country?" he asked in a low voice.

"There was my baby," she replied, her hands clasping and unclasping in

pain. "There was my little Nydia."

"A child--she is living?" he asked gently.

"No, she died two years ago," was the answer in a voice which tried to

be firm.

"Does Blantyre know?"

"He knew she was born, nothing more."

"We were married secretly."

"And after all he has done, and left undone, you want to try and save

him now?"

He was thinking that she still loved the man. "That offscouring!" he

said to himself. "Well, women beat all! He treats her like a

Patagonian; leaves her to drift with his child not yet born; rakes the

hutches of the towns and the kraals of the veld for women--always

women, black or white, it didn't matter; and yet, by gad, she wants him

back!"

She seemed to understand what was passing in his mind. Rising, with a

bitter laugh which he long remembered, she looked at him for a moment

in silence, then she spoke, her voice shaking with scorn:

"You think it is love for him that prompts me now?" Her eyes blazed,

but there was a contemptuous laugh at her lips, and she nervously

pulled at the tails of her sable muff. "You are wrong--absolutely. I

would rather bury myself in the mud of the Thames than let him touch

me. Oh, I know what his life must have been--the life of him that you

know! With him it would either be the sewer or the sycamore-tree of

Zaccheus; either the little upper chamber among the saints or eating

husks with the swine. I realize him now. He was easily susceptible to

good and evil, to the clean and the unclean; and he might have been

kept in order by some one who would give a life to building up his

character; but his nature was rickety, and he has gone down and not up."

"Then why try to save him? Let Oom Paul have him. He'll do no more

harm, if--"

"Wait a minute," she urged. "You are a great man"--she came close to

him--"and you ought to understand what I mean, without my saying it. I

want to save him for his own sake, not for mine--to give him a chance.

While there's life there's hope. To go as he is, with the mud up to his

lips--ah, can't you see! He is the father of my dead child. I like to

feel that he may make some thing of his life and of himself yet. That's

why I haven't tried to divorce him, and--"

"If you ever want to do so--" he interrupted, meaningly.

"Yes, I know. I have always been sure that nothing could be quite so

easy; but I waited, on the chance of something getting hold of him

which would lift him out of himself, give him something to think of so

much greater than himself, some cause, perhaps--"

"He had you and your unborn child," he intervened.

"Me--!" She laughed bitterly. "I don't think men would ever be better

because of me. I've never seen that. I've seen them show the worst of

human nature because of me--and it wasn't inspiring. I've not met many

men who weren't on the low levels."

"He hasn't stood his trial for the Johannesburg conspiracy yet. How do

you propose to help him? He is in real danger of his life."

She laughed coldly, and looked at him with keen, searching eyes. "You

ask that, you who know that in the armory of life there's one

all-powerful weapon?"

He nodded his head whimsically. "Money? Well, whatever other weapons

you have, you must have that, I admit. And in the Transvaal--"

"Then here," she said, handing him an envelope--"here is what may help."

He took it hesitatingly. "I warn you," he remarked, "that if money is

to be used at all, it must be a great deal. Kruger will put up the

price to the full capacity of the victim."

"I suppose this victim has nothing," she ventured, quietly.

"Nothing but what the others give him, I should think. It may be a very

costly business, even if it is possible, and you--"

"I have twenty thousand pounds," she said.

"Earned by your voice?" he asked, kindly.

"Every penny of it."

"Well, I wouldn't waste it on Blantyre, if I were you. No, by Heaven,

you shall not do it, even if it can be done! It is too horrible."

"I owe it to myself to do it. After all, he is still my husband. I have

let it be so; and while it is so, and while"--her eyes looked away, her

face suffused slightly, her lips tightened--"while things are as they

are, I am bound--bound by something, I don't know what, but it is not

love, and it is not friendship--to come to his rescue. There will be

legal expenses--"

Byng frowned. "Yes, but the others wouldn't see him in a hole--yet I'm

not sure, either, Blantyre being Blantyre. In any case, I'm ready to do

anything you wish."

She smiled gratefully. "Did you ever know any one to do a favor who

wasn't asked to repeat it--paying one debt by contracting another,

finding a creditor who will trust, and trading on his trust? Yet I'd

rather owe you two debts than most men one." She held out her hand to

him. "Well, it doesn't do to mope--'The merry heart goes all the day,

the sad one tires in a mile-a.' And I am out for all day. Please wish

me a happy new year."

He took her hand in both of his. "I wish you to go through this year as

you ended the last--in a blaze of glory."

"Yes, really a blaze if not of glory," she said, with bright tears, yet

laughing, too, a big warm humour shining in her strong face with the

dark brown eyes and the thick, heavy eyebrows under a low, broad

forehead like his own. They were indeed strangely alike in many ways

both of mind and body.

"They say we end the year as we begin it," he said, cheerily. "You

proved to Destiny that you were entitled to all she could give in the

old year, and you shall have the best that's to be had in 1897. You are

a woman in a million, and--"

"May I come and breakfast with you some morning?" she asked, gaily.

"Well, if ever I'm thought worthy of that honour, don't hesitate. As

the Spanish say, It is all yours." He waved a hand to the surroundings.

"No, it is all yours," she said, reflectively, her eyes slowly roaming

about her. "It is all you. I'm glad to have been here, to be as near as

this to your real life. Real life is so comforting after the mock kind

so many of us live; which singers and actors live anyhow."

She looked round the room again. "I feel--I don't know why it is, but I

feel that when I'm in trouble I shall always want to come to this room.

Yes, and I will surely come; for I know there's much trouble in store

for me. You must let me come. You are the only man I would go to like

this, and you can't think what it means to me--to feel that I'm not

misunderstood, and that it seems absolutely right to come. That's

because any woman could trust you--as I do. Good-bye."

In another moment she had gone, and he stood beside the table with the

envelope she had left with him. Presently he opened it, and unfolded

the cheque which was in it. Then he gave an exclamation of astonishment.

"Seven thousand pounds!" he exclaimed. "That's a better estimate of

Krugerism than I thought she had. It'll take much more than that,

though, if it's done at all; but she certainly has sense. It's seven

thousand times too much for Blantyre," he added, with an exclamation of

disgust. "Blantyre--that outsider!" Then he fell to thinking of all she

had told him. "Poor girl--poor girl!" he said aloud. "But she must not

come here, just the same. She doesn't see that it's not the thing, just

because she thinks I'm a Sir Galahad--me!" He glanced at the picture of

his mother, and nodded toward it tenderly. "So did she always. I might

have turned Kurd and robbed caravans, or become a Turk and kept

concubines, and she'd never have seen that it was so. But Al'mah

mustn't come here any more, for her own sake.... I'd find it hard to

explain if ever, by any chance--"

He fell to thinking of Jasmine, and looked at the clock. It was only

ten, and he would not see Jasmine till six; but if he had gone to South

Africa he would not have seen her at all! Fate and Wallstein had been

kind.

Presently, as he went to the hall to put on his coat and hat to go out,

he met Barry Whalen. Barry looked at him curiously; then, as though

satisfied, he said: "Early morning visitor, eh? I just met her coming

away. Card of thanks for kind services au theatre, eh?"

"Well, it isn't any business of yours what it is, Barry," came the

reply in tones which congealed.

"No, perhaps not," answered his visitor, testily, for he had had a

night of much excitement, and, after all, this was no way to speak to a

friend, to a partner who had followed his lead always. Friendship

should be allowed some latitude, and he had said hundreds of things

less carefully to Byng in the past. The past--he was suddenly conscious

that Byng had changed within the past few days, and that he seemed to

have put restraint on himself. Well, he would get back at him just the

same for the snub.

"It's none of my business," he retorted, "but it's a good deal of

Adrian Fellowes' business--"

"What is a good deal of Adrian Fellowes' business?"

"Al'mah coming to your rooms. Fellowes is her man. Going to marry her,

I suppose," he added, cynically.

Byng's jaw set and his eyes became cold. "Still, I'd suggest your

minding your own business, Barry. Your tongue will get you into trouble

some day.... You've seen Wallstein this morning--and Fleming?"

Barry replied sullenly, and the day's pressing work began, with the

wires busy under the seas.

CHAPTER VI

WITHIN THE POWER-HOUSE

At a few moments before six o'clock Byng was shown into Jasmine's

sitting-room. As he entered, the man who sat at the end of the front

row of stalls the first night of "Manassa" rose to his feet. It was

Adrian Fellowes, slim, well groomed, with the colour of an apple in his

cheeks, and his gold-brown hair waving harmoniously over his

unintellectual head.

"But, Adrian, you are the most selfish man I've ever known," Jasmine

was saying as Byng entered.

Either Jasmine did not hear the servant announce Byng, or she pretended

not to do so, and the words were said so distinctly that Byng heard

them as he came forward.

"Well, he is selfish," she added to Byng, as she shook hands. "I've

known him since I was a child, and he has always had the best of

everything and given nothing for it." Turning again to Fellowes, she

continued: "Yes, it's true. The golden apples just fall into your

hands."

"Well, I wish I had the apples, since you give me the reputation,"

Fellowes replied, and, shaking hands with Byng, who gave him an

enveloping look and a friendly greeting, he left the room.

"Such a boy--Adrian," Jasmine said, as they sat down.

"Boy--he looks thirty or more!" remarked Byng in a dry tone.

"He is just thirty. I call him a boy because he is so young in most

things that matter to people. He is the most sumptuous person--entirely

a luxury. Did you ever see such colouring--like a woman's! But selfish,

as I said, and useful, too, is Adrian. Yes, he really is very useful.

He would be a private secretary beyond price to any one who needed such

an article. He has tact--as you saw--and would make a wonderful master

of ceremonies, a splendid comptroller of the household and equerry and

lord-chamberlain in one. There, if ever you want such a person, or if--"

She paused. As she did so she was sharply conscious of the contrast

between her visitor and Ian Stafford in outward appearance. Byng's

clothes were made by good hands, but they were made by tailors who knew

their man was not particular, and that he would not "try on." The

result was a looseness and carelessness of good things--giving him, in

a way, the look of shambling power. Yet in spite of the tie a little

crooked, and the trousers a little too large and too short, he had

touches of that distinction which power gives. His large hands with the

square-pointed fingers had obtrusive veins, but they were not common.

"Certainly," he intervened, smiling indulgently; "if ever I want a

comptroller, or an equerry, or a lord-chamberlain, I'll remember

'Adrian.' In these days one can never tell. There's the Sahara. It

hasn't been exploited yet. It has no emperor."

"I like you in this mood," she said, eagerly. "You seem on the surface

so tremendously practical and sensible. You frighten me a little, and I

like to hear you touch things off with raillery. But, seriously, if you

can ever put anything in that boy's way, please do so. He has had bad

luck--in your own Rand mine. He lost nearly everything in that,

speculating, and--"

Byng's face grew serious again. "But he shouldn't have speculated; he

should have invested. It wants brains, good fortune, daring and wealth

to speculate. But I will remember him, if you say so. I don't like to

think that he has been hurt in any enterprise of mine. I'll keep him in

mind. Make him one of my secretaries perhaps."

Then Barry Whalen's gossip suddenly came to his mind, and he added:

"Fellowes will want to get married some day. That face and manner will

lead him into ways from which there's only one outlet."

"Matrimony?" She laughed. "Oh dear, no, Adrian is much too selfish to

marry."

"I thought that selfishness was one of the elements of successful

marriages. I've been told so."

A curious look stole into her eyes. All at once she wondered if his

words had any hidden meaning, and she felt angrily self-conscious; but

she instantly put the reflection away, for if ever any man travelled by

the straight Roman road of speech and thought, it was he. He had only

been dealing in somewhat obvious worldly wisdom.

"You ought not to give encouragement to such ideas by repeating them,"

she rejoined with raillery. "This is an age of telepathy and

suggestion, and the more silent we are the safer we are. Now, please,

tell me everything--of the inside, I mean--about Cecil Rhodes and the

Raiders. Is Rhodes overwhelmed? And Mr. Chamberlain--you have seen him?

The papers say you have spent many hours at the Colonial Office. I

suppose you were with him at six o'clock last evening, instead of being

here with me, as you promised."

He shook his head. "Rhodes? The bigger a man is the greater the crash

when he falls; and no big man falls alone."

She nodded. "There's the sense of power, too, which made everything

vibrate with energy, which gave a sense of great empty places

filled--of that power withdrawn and collapsed. Even the bad great man

gone leaves a sense of desolation behind. Power--power, that is the

thing of all," she said, her eyes shining and her small fingers

interlacing with eager vitality: "power to set waves of influence in

motion which stir the waters on distant shores. That seems to me the

most wonderful thing."

Her vitality, her own sense of power, seemed almost incongruous. She

was so delicately made, so much the dresden-china shepherdess, that

intensity seemed out of relation to her nature. Yet the tiny hands

playing before her with natural gestures like those of a child had,

too, a decision and a firmness in keeping with the perfectly modelled

head and the courageous poise of the body. There was something regnant

in her, while, too, there was something sumptuous and sensuous and

physically thrilling to the senses. To-day she was dressed in an

exquisite blue gown, devoid of all decoration save a little chinchilla

fur, which only added to its softness and richness. She wore no jewelry

whatever except a sapphire brooch, and her hair shone and waved like

gossamer in the sun.

"Well, I don't know," he rejoined, admiration unbounded in his eyes for

the picture she was of maidenly charm and womanly beauty, "I should say

that goodness was a more wonderful thing. But power is the most common

ambition, and only a handful of the hundreds of millions get it in any

large way. I used to feel it tremendously when I first heard the stamps

pounding the quartz in the mills on the Rand. You never heard that

sound? In the clear height of that plateau the air reverberates

greatly; and there's nothing on earth which so much gives a sense of

power--power that crushes--as the stamps of a great mine pounding away

night and day. There they go, thundering on, till it seems to you that

some unearthly power is hammering the world into shape. You get up and

go to the window and look out into the night. There's the deep blue

sky--blue like nothing you ever saw in any other sky, and the stars so

bright and big, and so near, that you feel you could reach up and pluck

one with your hand; and just over the little hill are the lights of the

stamp-mills, the smoke and the mad red flare, the roar of great hammers

as they crush, crush, crush; while the vibration of the earth makes you

feel that you are living in a world of Titans."

"And when it all stops?" she asked, almost breathlessly. "When the

stamps pound no more, and the power is withdrawn? It is empty and

desolate--and frightening?"

"It is anything you like. If all the mills all at once, with the

thousands of stamps on the Rand reef, were to stop suddenly, and the

smoke and the red flare were to die, it would be frightening in more

ways than one. But I see what you mean. There might be a sense of

peace, but the minds and bodies which had been vibrating with the stir

of power would feel that the soul had gone out of things, and they

would dwindle too."

"If Rhodes should fall, if the stamps on the Rand should cease--?"

He got to his feet. "Either is possible, maybe probable; and I don't

want to think of it. As you say, there'd be a ghastly sense of

emptiness and a deadly kind of peace." He smiled bitterly.

She rose now also, and fingering some flowers in a vase, arranging them

afresh, said: "Well, this Jameson Raid, if it is proved that Cecil

Rhodes is mixed up in it, will it injure you greatly--I mean your

practical interests?"

He stood musing for a moment. "It's difficult to say at this distance.

One must be on the spot to make a proper estimate. Anything may happen."

She was evidently anxious to ask him a question, but hesitated. At last

she ventured, and her breath came a little shorter as she spoke.

"I suppose you wish you were in South Africa now. You could do so much

to straighten things out, to prevent the worst. The papers say you have

a political mind--the statesman's intelligence, the Times said. That

letter you wrote, that speech you made at the Chamber of Commerce

dinner--"

She watched him, dreading what his answer might be. There was silence

for a moment, then he answered: "Fleming is going to South Africa, not

myself. I stay here to do Wallstein's work. I was going, but Wallstein

was taken ill suddenly. So I stay--I stay."

She sank down in her chair, going a little pale from excitement. The

whiteness of her skin gave a delicate beauty to the faint rose of her

cheeks--that rose-pink which never was to fade entirely from her face

while life was left to her.

"If it had been necessary, when would you have gone?" she asked.

"At once. Fleming goes to-morrow," he added.

She looked slowly up at him. "Wallstein is a new name for a special

Providence," she murmured, and the colour came back to her face. "We

need you here. We--"

Suddenly a thought flashed into his mind and suffused his face. He was

conscious of that perfume which clung to whatever she touched. It stole

to his senses and intoxicated them. He looked at her with enamoured

eyes. He had the heart of a boy, the impulsiveness of a nature which

had been unschooled in women's ways. Weaknesses in other directions had

taught him much, but experiences with her sex had been few. The designs

of other women had been patent to him, and he had been invincible to

all attack; but here was a girl who, with her friendly little fortune

and her beauty, could marry with no difficulty; who, he had heard,

could pick and choose, and had so far rejected all comers; and who, if

she had shown preference at all, had shown it for a poor man like Ian

Stafford. She had courage and simplicity and a downright mind; that was

clear. And she was capable. She had a love for big things, for the

things that mattered. Every word she had ever said to him had

understanding, not of the world alone, and of life, but of himself,

Rudyard Byng. She grasped exactly what he would say, and made him say

things he would never have thought of saying to any one else. She drew

him out, made the most of him, made him think. Other women only tried

to make him feel. If he had had a girl like this beside him during the

last ten years, how many wasted hours would have been saved, how many

bottles of champagne would not have been opened, how many wild nights

would have been spent differently!

Too good, too fine for him--yes, a hundred times, but he would try to

make it up to her, if such a girl as this could endure him. He was not

handsome, he was not clever, so he said to himself, but he had a little

power. That he had to some degree rough power, of course, but power;

and she loved power, force. Had she not said so, shown it, but a moment

before? Was it possible that she was really interested in him, perhaps

because he was different from the average Englishman and not of a

general pattern? She was a woman of brains, of great individuality, and

his own individuality might influence her. It was too good to be true;

but there had ever been something of the gambler in him, and he had

always plunged. If he ever had a conviction he acted on it instantly,

staked everything, when that conviction got into his inner being. It

was not, perhaps, a good way, and it had failed often enough; but it

was his way, and he had done according to the light and the impulse

that were in him. He had no diplomacy, he had only purpose.

He came over to her. "If I had gone to South Africa would you have

remembered my name for a month?" he asked with determination and

meaning.

"My friends never suffer lunar eclipse," she answered, gaily. "Dear

sir, I am called Hold-Fast. My friends are century-flowers and are

always blooming."

"You count me among your friends?"

"I hope so. You will let me make all England envious of me, won't you?

I never did you any harm, and I do want to have a hero in my tiny

circle."

"A hero--you mean me? Well, I begin to think I have some courage when I

ask you to let me inside your 'tiny' circle. I suppose most people

would think it audacity, not courage."

"You seem not to be aware what an important person you are--how almost

sensationally important. Why, I am only a pebble on a shore like yours,

a little unknown slip of a girl who babbles, and babbles in vain."

She got to her feet now. "Oh, but believe me, believe me," she said,

with sweet and sudden earnestness, "I am prouder than I can say that

you will let me be a friend of yours! I like men who have done things,

who do things. My grandfather did big, world-wide things, and--"

"Yes, I know; I met your grandfather once. He was a big man, big as can

be. He had the world by the ear always."

"He spoiled me for the commonplace," she replied. "If I had lived in

Pizarro's time, I'd have gone to Peru with him, the splendid robber."

He answered with the eager frankness and humour of a boy. "If you mean

to be a friend of mine, there are those who will think that in one way

you have fulfilled your ambition, for they say I've spoiled the

Peruvians, too."

"I like you when you say things like that," she murmured. "If you said

them often--"

She looked at him archly, and her eyes brimmed with amusement and

excitement.

Suddenly he caught both her hands in his and his eyes burned. "Will

you--"

He paused. His courage forsook him. Boldness had its limit. He feared a

repulse which could never be overcome. "Will you, and all of you here,

come down to my place in Wales next week?" he blundered out.

She was glad he had faltered. It was too bewildering. She dared not yet

face the question she had seen he was about to ask. Power--yes, he

could give her that; but power was the craving of an ambitious soul.

There were other things. There was the desire of the heart, the longing

which came with music and the whispering trees and the bright stars,

the girlish dreams of ardent love and the garlands of youth and

joy--and Ian Stafford.

Suddenly she drew herself together. She was conscious that the servant

was entering the room with a letter.

"The messenger is waiting," the servant said.

With an apology she opened the note slowly as Byng turned to the fire.

She read the page with a strange, tense look, closing her eyes at last

with a slight sense of dizziness. Then she said to the servant:

"Tell the messenger to wait. I will write an answer."

"I am sure we shall be glad to go to you in Wales next week," she

added, turning to Byng again. "But won't you be far away from the

centre of things in Wales?"

"I've had the telegraph and a private telephone wire to London put in.

I shall be as near the centre as though I lived in Grosvenor Square;

and there are always special trains."

"Special trains--oh, but it's wonderful to have power to do things like

that! When do you go down?" she asked.

"To-morrow morning."

She smiled radiantly. She saw that he was angry with himself for his

cowardice just now, and she tried to restore him. "Please, will you

telephone me when you arrive at your castle? I should like the

experience of telephoning by private wire to Wales."

He brightened. "Certainly, if you really wish it. I shall arrive at ten

to-morrow night, and I'll telephone you at eleven."

"Splendid--splendid! I'll be alone in my room then. I've got a

telephone instrument there, and so we could say good-night."

"So we can say good-night," he repeated in a low voice, and he held out

his hand in good-bye. When he had gone, with a new, great hope in his

heart, she sat down and tremblingly re-opened the note she had received

a moment before.

"I am going abroad" it read--"to Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and St.

Petersburg. I think I've got my chance at last. I want to see you

before I go--this evening, Jasmine. May I?"

It was signed "Ian."

"Fate is stronger than we are," she murmured; "and Fate is not kind to

you, Ian," she added, wearily, a wan look coming into her face.

"Mio destino," she said at last--"mio destino!" But who was her

destiny--which of the two who loved her?

BOOK II

CHAPTER VII

THREE YEARS LATER

"Extra speshul--extra speshul--all about Kruger an' his guns!"

The shrill, acrid cry rang down St. James's Street, and a newsboy with

a bunch of pink papers under his arm shot hither and thither on the

pavement, offering his sensational wares to all he met.

"Extra speshul--extra speshul--all about the war wot's comin'--all

about Kruger's guns!"

From an open window on the second floor of a building in the street a

man's head was thrust out, listening.

"The war wot's comin'!" he repeated, with a bitter sort of smile. "And

all about Kruger's guns. So it is coming, is it, Johnny Bull; and you

do know all about his guns, do you? If it is, and you do know, then a

shattering big thing is coming, and you know quite a lot, Johnny Bull."

He hummed to himself an impromptu refrain to an impromptu tune:

"Then you know quite a lot, Johnny Bull, Johnny Bull,

Then you know quite a lot, Johnny Bull!"

Stepping out of the French window upon a balcony now, he looked down

the street. The newsboy was almost below. He whistled, and the lad

looked up. In response to a beckoning finger the gutter-snipe took the

doorway and the staircase at a bound. Like all his kind, he was a good

judge of character, and one glance had assured him that he was speeding

upon a visit of profit. Half a postman's knock--a sharp, insistent

stroke--and he entered, his thin weasel-like face thrust forward, his

eyes glittering. The fire in such eyes is always cold, for hunger is

poor fuel to the native flame of life.

"Extra speshul, m'lord--all about Kruger's guns."

He held out the paper to the figure that darkened the window, and he

pronounced the g in Kruger soft, as in Scrooge.

The hand that took the paper deftly slipped a shilling into the cold,

skinny palm. At its first touch the face of the paper-vender fell, for

it was the same size as a halfpenny; but even before the swift fingers

had had a chance to feel the coin, or the glance went down, the face

regained its confidence, for the eyes looking at him were generous. He

had looked at so many faces in his brief day that he was an expert

observer.

"Thank y' kindly," he said; then, as the fingers made assurance of the

fortune which had come to him, "Ow, thank ye werry much, y'r gryce," he

added.

Something alert and determined in the face of the boy struck the giver

of the coin as he opened the paper to glance at its contents, and he

paused to scan him more closely. He saw the hunger in the lad's eyes as

they swept over the breakfast-table, still heavy with uneaten

breakfast--bacon, nearly the whole of an omelette, and rolls, toast,

marmalade and honey.

"Wait a second," he said, as the boy turned toward the door.

"Yes, y'r gryce."

"Had your breakfast?"

"I has me brekfist w'en I sells me pypers." The lad hugged the

remaining papers closer under his arms, and kept his face turned

resolutely away from the inviting table. His host correctly interpreted

the action.

"Poor little devil--grit, pure grit!" he said under his breath. "How

many papers have you got left?" he asked.

The lad counted like lightning. "Ten," he answered. "I'll soon get 'em

off now. Luck's wiv me dis mornin'." The ghost of a smile lighted his

face.

"I'll take them all," the other said, handing over a second shilling.

The lad fumbled for change and the fumbling was due to honest

agitation. He was not used to this kind of treatment.

"No, that's all right," the other interposed.

"But they're only a h'ypenny," urged the lad, for his natural cupidity

had given way to a certain fine faculty not too common in any grade of

human society.

"Well, I'm buying them at a penny this morning. I've got some friends

who'll be glad to give a penny to know all about Kruger's guns." He too

softened the g in Kruger in consideration of his visitor's

idiosyncrasies.

"You won't be mykin' anythink on them, y'r gryce," said the lad with a

humour which opened the doors of Ian Stafford's heart wide; for to him

heaven itself would be insupportable if it had no humorists.

"I'll get at them in other ways," Stafford rejoined. "I'll get my

profit, never fear. Now what about breakfast? You've sold all your

papers, you know."

"I'm fair ready for it, y'r gryce," was the reply, and now the lad's

glance went eagerly towards the door, for the tension of labour was

relaxed, and hunger was scraping hard at his vitals.

"Well, sit down--this breakfast isn't cold yet.... But, no, you'd

better have a wash-up first, if you can wait," Stafford added, and rang

a bell.

"Wot, 'ere--brekfist wiv y'r gryce 'ere?"

"Well, I've had mine"--Stafford made a slight grimace--"and there's

plenty left for you, if you don't mind eating after me."

"I dusted me clothes dis mornin'," said the boy, with an attempt to

justify his decision to eat this noble breakfast. "An' I washed me

'ends--but pypers is muck," he added.

A moment later he was in the fingers of Gleg the valet in the

bath-room, and Stafford set to work to make the breakfast piping hot

again. It was an easy task, as heaters were inseparable from his

bachelor meals, and, though this was only the second breakfast he had

eaten since his return to England after three years' absence,

everything was in order.

For Gleg was still more the child of habit--and decorous habit--than

himself. It was not the first time that Gleg had had to deal with his

master's philanthropic activities. Much as he disapproved of them, he

could discriminate; and there was that about the newsboy which somehow

disarmed him. He went so far as to heap the plate of the lad, and would

have poured the coffee too, but that his master took the pot from his

hand and with a nod and a smile dismissed him; and his master's smile

was worth a good deal to Gleg. It was an exacting if well-paid service,

for Ian Stafford was the most particular man in Europe, and he had

grown excessively so during the past three years, which, as Gleg

observed, had brought great, if quiet, changes in him. He had grown

more studious, more watchful, more exclusive in his daily life, and

ladies of all kinds he had banished from direct personal share in his

life. There were no more little tea-parties and dejeuners chez lui,

duly chaperoned by some gracious cousin or aunt--for there was no

embassy in Europe where he had not relatives.

"'Ipped--a bit 'ipped. 'E 'as found 'em out, the 'uzzies," Gleg had

observed; for he had decided that the general cause of the change in

his master was Woman, though he did not know the particular woman who

had 'ipped him.

As the lad ate his wonderful breakfast, in which nearly half a pot of

marmalade and enough butter for three ordinary people figured, Stafford

read the papers attentively, to give his guest a fair chance at the

food and to overcome his self-consciousness. He got an occasional

glance at the trencherman, however, as he changed the sheets, stepped

across the room to get a cigarette, or poked the small fire--for, late

September as it was, a sudden cold week of rain had come and gone,

leaving the air raw; and a fire was welcome.

At last, when he realized that the activities of the table were

decreasing, he put down his paper. "Is it all right?" he asked. "Is the

coffee hot?"

"I ain't never 'ad a meal like that, y'r gryce, not never any time,"

the boy answered, with a new sort of fire in his eyes.

"Was there enough?"

"I've left some," answered his guest, looking at the jar of marmalade

and half a slice of toast. "I likes the coffee hot--tykes y'r longer to

drink it," he added.

Ian Stafford chuckled. He was getting more than the worth of his money.

He had nibbled at his own breakfast, with the perturbations of a

crossing from Flushing still in his system, and its equilibrium not

fully restored; and yet, with the waste of his own meal and the neglect

of his own appetite, he had given a great and happy half-hour to a waif

of humanity.

As he looked at the boy he wondered how many thousands there were like

him within rifle-shot from where he sat, and he thought each of them

would thank whatever gods they knew for such a neglected meal. The

words from the scare-column of the paper he held smote his sight:

"War Inevitable--Transvaal Bristling with Guns and Loaded to the Nozzle

with War Stores--Milner and Kruger No Nearer a Settlement--Sullen and

Contemptuous Treatment of British Outlander." ... And so on.

And if war came, if England must do this ugly thing, fulfil her bitter

and terrible task, then what about such as this young outlander here,

this outcast from home and goodly toil and civilized conditions, this

sickly froth of the muddy and dolorous stream of lower England? So much

withdrawn from the sources of the possible relief, so much less with

which to deal with their miseries--perhaps hundreds of millions, mopped

up by the parched and unproductive soil of battle and disease and loss.

He glanced at the paper again. "Britons Hold Your Own," was the heading

of the chief article. "Yes, we must hold our own," he said, aloud, with

a sigh. "If it comes, we must see it through; but the breakfasts will

be fewer. It works down one way or another--it all works down to this

poor little devil and his kind."

"Now, what's your name?" he asked.

"Jigger," was the reply.

"What else?"

"Nothin', y'r gryce."

"Jigger--what?"

"It's the only nyme I got," was the reply.

"What's your father's or your mother's name?"

"I ain't got none. I only got a sister."

"What's her name?"

"Lou," he answered. "That's her real name. But she got a fancy name

yistiddy. She was took on at the opera yistiddy, to sing with a hunderd

uvver girls on the styge. She's Lulu Luckingham now."

"Oh--Luckingham!" said Stafford, with a smile, for this was a name of

his own family, and of much account in circles he frequented. "And who

gave her that name? Who were her godfathers and godmothers?"

"I dunno, y'r gryce. There wasn't no religion in it. They said she'd

have to be called somefink, and so they called her that. Lou was always

plenty for 'er till she went there yistiddy."

"What did she do before yesterday?"

"Sold flowers w'en she could get 'em to sell. 'Twas when she couldn't

sell her flowers that she piped up sort of dead wild--for she 'adn't

'ad nothin' to eat, an' she was fair crusty. It was then a gentleman,

'e 'eard 'er singin' hot, an' he says, 'That's good enough for a

start,' 'e says, 'an' you come wiv me,' he says. 'Not much,' Lou says,

'not if I knows it. I seed your kind frequent.' But 'e stuck to it, an'

says, 'It's stryght, an' a lydy will come for you to-morrer, if you'll

be 'ere on this spot, or tell me w'ere you can be found.' An' Lou says,

says she, 'You buy my flowers, so's I kin git me bread-baskit full, an'

then I'll think it over.' An' he bought 'er flowers, an' give 'er five

bob. An' Lou paid rent for both of us wiv that, an' 'ad brekfist; an'

sure enough the lydy come next dy an' took her off. She's in the opery

now, an' she'll 'ave 'er brekfist reg'lar. I seed the lydy meself. Her

picture 's on the 'oardings--"

Suddenly he stopped. "W'y, that's 'er--that's 'er!" he said, pointing

to the mantel-piece.

Stafford followed the finger and the glance. It was Al'mah's portrait

in the costume she had worn over three years ago, the night when

Rudyard Byng had rescued her from the flames. He had bought it then. It

had been unpacked again by Gleg, and put in the place it had occupied

for a day or two before he had gone out of England to do his country's

work--and to face the bitterest disillusion of his life; to meet the

heaviest blow his pride and his heart had ever known.

"So that's the lady, is it?" he said, musingly, to the boy, who nodded

assent.

"Go and have a good look at it," urged Stafford.

The boy did so. "It's 'er--done up for the opery," he declared.

"Well, Lulu Luckingham is all right, then. That lady will be good to

her."

"Right. As soon as I seed her, I whispers to Lou 'You keep close to

that there wall,' I sez. 'There's a chimbey in it, an' you'll never be

cold,' I says to Lou."

Stafford laughed softly at the illustration. Many a time the lad

snuggled up to a wall which had a warm chimney, and he had got his

figure of speech from real life.

"Well, what's to become of you?" Stafford asked.

"Me--I'll be level wiv me rent to-day," he answered, turning over the

two shillings and some coppers in his pocket; "an' Lou and me's got a

fair start."

Stafford got up, came over, and laid a hand on the boy's shoulder. "I'm

going to give you a sovereign," he said--"twenty shillings, for your

fair start; and I want you to come to me here next Sunday-week to

breakfast, and tell me what you've done with it."

"Me--y'r gryce!" A look of fright almost came into the lad's face.

"Twenty bob--me!"

The sovereign was already in his hand, and now his face suffused. He

seemed anxious to get away, and looked round for his cap. He couldn't

do here what he wanted to do. He felt that he must burst.

"Now, off you go. And you be here at nine o'clock on Sunday-week with

the papers, and tell me what you've done."

"Gawd--my Gawd!" said the lad, huskily. The next minute he was out in

the hall, and the door was shut behind him. A moment later, hearing a

whoop, Stafford went to the window and, looking down, he saw his late

visitor turning a cart-wheel under the nose of a policeman, and then,

with another whoop, shooting down into the Mall, making Lambeth way.

With a smile he turned from the window. "Well, we shall see," he said.

"Perhaps it will be my one lucky speculation. Who knows--who knows!"

His eye caught the portrait of Al'mah on the mantelpiece. He went over

and stood looking at it musingly.

"You were a good girl," he said, aloud. "At any rate, you wouldn't

pretend. You'd gamble with your immortal soul, but you wouldn't sell

it--not for three millions, not for a hundred times three millions. Or

is it that you are all alike, you women? Isn't there one of you that

can be absolutely true? Isn't there one that won't smirch her soul and

kill the faith of those that love her for some moment's excitement, for

gold to gratify a vanity, or to have a wider sweep to her skirts? Vain,

vain, vain--and dishonourable, essentially dishonourable. There might

be tragedies, but there wouldn't be many intrigues if women weren't so

dishonourable--the secret orchard rather than the open highway and

robbery under arms.... Whew, what a world!"

He walked up and down the room for a moment, his eyes looking straight

before him; then he stopped short. "I suppose it's natural that, coming

back to England, I should begin to unpack a lot of old memories, empty

out the box-room, and come across some useless and discarded things.

I'll settle down presently; but it's a thoroughly useless business

turning over old stock. The wise man pitches it all into the junk-shop,

and cuts his losses."

He picked up the Morning Post and glanced down the middle page--the

social column first--with the half-amused reflection that he hadn't

done it for years, and that here were the same old names reappearing,

with the same brief chronicles. Here, too, were new names, some of

them, if not most of them, of a foreign turn to their syllables--New

York, Melbourne, Buenos Ayres, Johannesburg. His lip curled a little

with almost playful scorn. At St. Petersburg, Vienna, and elsewhere he

had been vaguely conscious of these social changes; but they did not

come within the ambit of his daily life, and so it had not mattered.

And there was no reason why it should matter now. His England was a

land the original elements of which would not change, had not changed;

for the old small inner circle had not been invaded, was still

impervious to the wash of wealth and snobbery and push. That refuge had

its sequestered glades, if perchance it was unilluminating and rather

heavily decorous; so that he could let the climbers, the toadies, the

gold-spillers, and the bribers have the middle of the road.

It did not matter so much that London was changing fast. The old clock

on the tower of St. James's would still give the time to his step as he

went to and from the Foreign Office, and there were quiet places like

Kensington Gardens where the bounding person would never think to

stray. Indeed, they never strayed; they only rushed and pushed where

their spreading tails could be seen by the multitude. They never got

farther west than Rotten Row, which was in possession of three classes

of people--those who sat in Parliament, those who had seats on the

Stock Exchange, and those who could not sit their horses. Three years

had not done it all, but it had done a good deal; and he was more

keenly alive to the changes and developments which had begun long

before he left and had increased vastly since. Wealth was more and more

the master of England--new-made wealth; and some of it was too

ostentatious and too pretentious to condone, much less indulge.

All at once his eye, roaming down the columns, came upon the following

announcement:

"Mr. and Mrs. Rudyard Byng have returned to town from Scotland for a

few days, before proceeding to Wales, where they are presently to

receive at Glencader Castle the Duke and Duchess of Sheffield, the

Prince and Princess of Cleaves, M. Santon, the French Foreign Minister,

the Slavonian Ambassador, the Earl and Countess of Tynemouth, and Mr.

Tudor Tempest."

"'And Mr. Tudor Tempest,'" Ian repeated to himself. "Well, she would.

She would pay that much tribute to her own genius. Four-fifths to the

claims of the body and the social nervous system, and one-fifth to the

desire of the soul. Tempest is a literary genius by what he has done,

and she is a genius by nature, and with so much left undone. The

Slavonian Ambassador--him, and the French Foreign Minister! That looks

like a useful combination at this moment--at this moment. She has a

gift for combinations, a wonderful skill, a still more wonderful

perception--and a remarkable unscrupulousness. She's the naturally

ablest woman I have ever known; but she wants to take short-cuts to a

worldly Elysium, and it can't be done, not even with three times three

millions--and three millions was her price."

Suddenly he got up and went over to a table where were several

dispatch-boxes. Opening one, he drew forth from the bottom, where he

had placed it nearly three years ago, a letter. He looked at the long,

sliding handwriting, so graceful and fine, he caught the perfume which

had intoxicated Rudyard Byng, and, stooping down, he sniffed the

dispatch-box. He nodded.

"She's pervasive in everything," he murmured. He turned over several

other packets of letters in the box. "I apologize," he said,

ironically, to these letters. "I ought to have banished her long ago,

but, to tell you the truth, I didn't realize how much she'd influence

everything--even in a box." He laughed cynically, and slowly opened the

one letter which had meant so much to him.

There was no show of agitation. His eye was calm; only his mouth showed

any feeling or made any comment. It was a little supercilious and

scornful. Sitting down by the table, he spread the letter out, and read

it with great deliberation. It was the first time he had looked at it

since he received it in Vienna and had placed it in the dispatch-box.

"Dear Ian," it ran, "our year of probation--that is the word isn't

it?--is up; and I have decided that our ways must lie apart. I am going

to marry Rudyard Byng next month. He is very kind and very strong, and

not too ragingly clever. You know I should chafe at being reminded

daily of my own stupidity by a very clever man. You and I have had so

many good hours together, there has been such confidence between us,

that no other friendship can ever be the same; and I shall always want

to go to you, and ask your advice, and learn to be wise. You will not

turn a cold shoulder on me, will you? I think you yourself realized

that my wish to wait a year before giving a final answer was proof that

I really had not that in my heart which would justify me in saying what

you wished me to say. Oh yes, you knew; and the last day when you bade

me good-bye you almost said as much! I was so young, so unschooled,

when you first asked me, and I did not know my own mind; but I know it

now, and so I go to Rudyard Byng for better or for worse--"

He suddenly stopped reading, sat back in his chair, and laughed

sardonically.

"For richer, for poorer'--now to have launched out on the first phrase,

and to have jibbed at the second was distinctly stupid. The quotation

could only have been carried off with audacity of the ripest kind. 'For

better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health,

till death us do part, amen--' That was the way to have done it, if it

was to be done at all. Her cleverness forsook her when she wrote that

letter. 'Our year of probation'--she called it that. Dear, dear, what a

poor prevaricator the best prevaricator is! She was sworn to me, bound

to me, wanted a year in which to have her fling before she settled

down, and she threw me over--like that."

He did not read the rest of the letter, but got up, went over to the

fire, threw it in, and watched it burn.

"I ought to have done so when I received it," he said, almost kindly

now. "A thing like that ought never to be kept a minute. It's a

terrible confession, damning evidence, a self-made exposure, and to

keep it is too brutal, too hard on the woman. If anything had happened

to me and it had been read, 'Not all the King's horses nor all the

King's men could put Humpty Dumpty together again.'"

Then he recalled the brief letter he had written her in reply. Unlike

him, she had not kept his answer, when it came into her hands, but,

tearing it up into fifty fragments, had thrown it into the

waste-basket, and paced her room in shame, anger and humiliation.

Finally, she had taken the waste-basket and emptied it into the flames.

She had watched the tiny fragments burn in a fire not hotter than that

in her own eyes, which presently were washed by a flood of bitter tears

and passionate and unavailing protest. For hours she had sobbed, and

when she went out into the world the next day, it was with his every

word ringing in her ears, as they had rung ever since: the sceptic

comment at every feast, the ironical laughter behind every door, the

whispered detraction in every loud accent of praise.

"Dear Jasmine," his letter had run, "it is kind of you to tell me of

your intended marriage before it occurs, for in these distant lands

news either travels slowly or does not reach one at all. I am fortunate

in having my information from the very fountain of first knowledge. You

have seen and done much in the past year; and the end of it all is more

fitting than the most meticulous artist could desire or conceive. You

will adorn the new sphere into which you enter. You are of those who do

not need training or experience: you are a genius, whose chief

characteristic is adaptability. Some people, to whom nature and

Providence have not been generous live up to things; to you it is given

to live down to them; and no one can do it so well. We have had good

times together--happy conversations and some cheerful and entertaining

dreams and purposes. We have made the most of opportunity, each in his

and her own way. But, my dear Jasmine, don't ever think that you will

need to come to me for advice and to learn to be wise. I know of no one

from whom I could learn, from whom I have learned, so I much. I am

deeply your debtor for revelations which never could have come to me

without your help. There is a wonderful future before you, whose

variety let Time, not me, attempt to reveal. I shall watch your going

on"--(he did not say goings on)--"your Alpine course, with clear

memories of things and hours dearer to me than all the world, and with

which I would not have parted for the mines of the Rand. I lose them

now for nothing--and less than nothing. I shall be abroad for some

years, and, meanwhile, a new planet will swim into the universe of

matrimony. I shall see the light shining, but its heavenly orbit will

not be within my calculations. Other astronomers will watch, and some

no doubt will pray, and I shall read in the annals the bright story of

the flower that was turned into a star!

"Always yours sincerely, IAN STAFFORD."

From the filmy ashes of her letter to him Stafford now turned away to

his writing-table. There he sat for a while and answered several notes,

among them one to Alice Mayhew, now the Countess of Tynemouth, whose

red parasol still hung above the mantel-piece, a relic of the

Zambesi--and of other things.

Periodically Lady Tynemouth's letters had come to him while he was

abroad, and from her, in much detail, he had been informed of the rise

of Mrs. Byng, of her great future, her "delicious" toilettes, her great

entertainments for charity, her successful attempts to gather round her

the great figures in the political and diplomatic world; and her

partial rejection of Byng's old mining and financial confreres and

their belongings. It had all culminated in a visit of royalty to their

place in Suffolk, from which she had emerged radiantly and delicately

aggressive, and sweeping a wider circle with her social scythe.

Ian had read it all unperturbed. It was just what he knew she could and

would do; and he foresaw for Byng, if he wanted it, a peerage in the

not distant future. Alice Tynemouth was no gossip, and she was not

malicious. She had a good, if wayward, heart, was full of sentiment,

and was a constant and helpful friend. He, therefore, accepted her

invitation now to spend the next week-end with her and her husband; and

then, with letters to two young nephews in his pocket, he prepared to

sally forth to buy them presents, and to get some sweets for the

children of a poor invalid cousin to whom for years he had been a

generous friend. For children he had a profound love, and if he had

married, he would not have been content with a childless home--with a

childless home like that of Rudyard Byng. That news also had come to

him from Alice Tynemouth, who honestly lamented that Jasmine Byng had

no "balance-wheel," which was the safety and the anchor of women "like

her and me," Lady Tynemouth's letter had said.

Three millions then--and how much more now?--and big houses, and no

children. It was an empty business, or so it seemed to him, who had

come of a large and agreeably quarrelsome and clever family, with whom

life had been checkered but never dull.

He took up his hat and stick, and went towards the door. His eyes

caught Al'mah's photograph as he passed.

"It was all done that night at the opera," he said. "Jasmine made up

her mind then to marry him, ... I wonder what the end will be.... Sad

little, bad little girl.... The mess of pottage at the last? Quien

sabe!"

CHAPTER VIII

"HE SHALL NOT TREAT ME SO"

The air of the late September morning smote Stafford's cheeks

pleasantly, and his spirits rose as he walked up St. James's Street.

His step quickened imperceptibly to himself, and he nodded to or shook

hands with half a dozen people before he reached Piccadilly. Here he

completed the purchases for his school-boy nephews, and then he went to

a sweet-shop in Regent Street to get chocolates for his young

relatives. As he entered the place he was suddenly brought to a

standstill, for not two dozen yards away at a counter was Jasmine Byng.

She did not see him enter, and he had time to note what matrimony, and

the three years and the three million pounds, had done to her. She was

radiant and exquisite, a little paler, a little more complete, but

increasingly graceful and perfectly appointed. Her dress was of dark

green, of a most delicate shade, and with the clinging softness and

texture of velvet. She wore a jacket of the same material, and a single

brilliant ornament at her throat relieved the simplicity. In the hat,

too, one big solitary emerald shone against the lighter green.

She was talking now with animation and amusement to the shop-girl who

was supplying her with sweets, and every attendant was watching her

with interest and pleasure. Stafford reflected that this was always her

way: wherever she went she attracted attention, drew interest,

magnetized the onlooker. Nothing had changed in her, nothing of charm

and beauty and eloquence,--how eloquent she had always been!--of

esprit, had gone from her; nothing. Presently she turned her face full

toward him, still not seeing him, half hidden as he was behind some

piled-up tables in the centre of the shop.

Nothing changed? Yes, instantly he was aware of a change, in the eyes,

at the mouth. An elusive, vague, distant kind of disturbance--he could

not say trouble--had stolen into her eyes, had taken possession of the

corners of the mouth; and he was conscious of something exotic,

self-indulgent, and "emancipated." She had always been self-indulgent

and selfish, and, in a wilful, innocent way, emancipated, in the old

days; but here was a different, a fuller, a more daring expression of

these qualities.... Ah, he had it now! That elusive something was a

lurking recklessness, which, perhaps, was not bold enough yet to leap

into full exercise, or even to recognize itself.

So this was she to whom he had given the best of which he had been

capable--not a very noble or priceless best, he was willing to

acknowledge, but a kind of guarantee of the future, the nucleus of

fuller things. As he looked at her now his heart did not beat faster,

his pulses did not quicken, his eye did not soften, he did not even

wish himself away. Love was as dead as last year's leaves--so dead that

no spirit of resentment, or humiliation, or pain of heart was in his

breast at this sight of her again. On the contrary, he was conscious of

a perfect mastery of himself, of being easily superior to the situation.

Love was dead; youth was dead; the desire that beats in the veins of

the young was dead; his disillusion and disappointment and contempt for

one woman had not driven him, as it so often does, to other women--to

that wild waste which leaves behind it a barren and ill-natured soil

exhausted of its power, of its generous and native health. There was a

strange apathy in his senses, an emotional stillness, as it were, the

atrophy of all the passionate elements of his nature. But because of

this he was the better poised, the more evenly balanced, the more

perceptive. His eyes were not blurred or dimmed by any stress of

emotion, his mind worked in a cool quiet, and his forward tread had

leisurely decision and grace. He had sunk one part of himself far below

the level of activity or sensation, while new resolves, new powers of

mind, new designs were set in motion to make his career a real and

striking success. He had the most friendly ear and the full confidence

of the Prime Minister, who was also Foreign Secretary--he had got that

far; and now, if one of his great international schemes could but be

completed, an ambassadorship would be his reward, and one of

first-class importance. The three years had done much for him in a

worldly way, wonderfully much.

As he looked at the woman who had shaken his life to the centre--not by

her rejection of him, but by the fashion of it, the utter selfishness

and cold-blooded calculation of it, he knew that love's fires were out,

and that he could meet her without the agitation of a single nerve. He

despised her, but he could make allowance for her. He knew the strain

that was in her, got from her brilliant and rather plangent

grandfather. He knew the temptation of a vast fortune, the power that

it would bring--and the notoriety, too, again an inheritance from her

grandfather. He was not without magnanimity, and he could the more

easily exercise it because his pulses of emotion were still.

She was by nature the most brilliantly endowed woman he had ever met,

the most naturally perceptive and artistic, albeit there was a touch of

gorgeousness to the inherent artistry which time, training and

experience would have chastened. Would have chastened? Was it not,

then, chastened? Looking at her now, he knew that it was not. It was

still there, he felt; but how much else was also there--of charm, of

elusiveness, of wit, of mental adroitness, of joyous eagerness to

discover a new thought or a new thing! She was a creature of rare

splendour, variety and vanity.

Why should he deny himself the pleasure of her society? His

intellectual side would always be stimulated by her, she would always

"incite him to mental riot," as she had often said. Time had flown,

love had flown, and passion was dead; but friendship stayed. Yes,

friendship stayed--in spite of all. Her conduct had made him blush for

her, had covered him with shame, but she was a woman, and therefore

weak--he had come to that now. She was on a lower plateau of honour,

and therefore she must be--not forgiven--that was too banal; but she

must be accepted as she was. And, after all, there could be no more

deception; for opportunity and occasion no longer existed. He would go

and speak to her now.

At that moment he was aware that she had caught sight of him, and that

she was startled. She had not known of his return to England, and she

was suddenly overwhelmed by confusion. The words of the letter he had

written her when she had thrown him over rushed through her brain now,

and hurt her as much as they did the first day they had been received.

She became a little pale, and turned as though to find some other

egress from the shop. There being none, there was but one course, and

that was to go out as though she had not seen him. He had not even been

moved at all at seeing her; but with her it was different. She was

disturbed--in her vanity? In her peace? In her pride? In her senses? In

her heart? In any, or each, or all? But she was disturbed: her

equilibrium was shaken. He had scorched her soul by that letter to her,

so gently cold, so incisive, so subtly cruel, so deadly in its irony,

so final--so final.

She was ashamed, and no one else in the world but Ian Stafford could so

have shamed her. Power had been given to her, the power of great

riches--the three millions had been really four--and everything and

everybody, almost, was deferential towards her. Had it brought her

happiness, or content, or joy? It had brought her excitement--much of

that--and elation, and opportunity to do a thousand things, and to

fatigue herself in a thousand ways; but had it brought happiness?

If it had, the face of this man who was once so much to her, and whom

she had flung into outer darkness, was sufficient to cast a cloud over

it. She felt herself grow suddenly weak, but she determined to go out

of the place without appearing to see him.

He was conscious of it all, saw it out of a corner of his eye, and as

she started forward, he turned, deliberately walked towards her, and,

with a cheerful smile, held out his hand.

"Now, what good fortune!" he said, spiritedly. "Life plays no tricks,

practices no deception this time. In a book she'd have made us meet on

a grand staircase or at a court ball."

As he said this, he shook her hand warmly, and again and again, as

would be fitting with old friends. He had determined to be master of

the situation, and to turn the moment to the credit of his account--not

hers; and it was easy to do it, for love was dead, and the memory of

love atrophied.

Colour came back to her face. Confusion was dispelled, a quick and

grateful animation took possession of her, to be replaced an instant

after by the disconcerting reflection that there was in his face or

manner not the faintest sign of emotion or embarrassment. From his

attitude they might have been good friends who had not met for some

time; nothing more.

"Yes, what a place to meet!" she said. "It really ought to have been at

a green-grocer's, and the apotheosis of the commonplace would have been

celebrated. But when did you return? How long do you remain in England?"

Ah, the sense of relief to feel that he was not reproaching her for

anything, not impeaching her by an injured tone and manner, which so

many other men had assumed with infinitely less right or cause than he!

"I came back thirty-six hours ago, and I stay at the will of the

master-mind," he answered.

The old whimsical look came into her face, the old sudden flash which

always lighted her eyes when a daring phrase was born in her mind, and

she instantly retorted:

"The master-mind--how self-centred you are!"

Whatever had happened, certainly the old touch of intellectual

diablerie was still hers, and he laughed good-humoredly. Yes, she might

be this or that, she might be false or true, she might be one who had

sold herself for mammon, and had not paid tribute to the one great

natural principle of being, to give life to the world, man and woman

perpetuating man and woman; but she was stimulating and delightful

without effort.

"And what are you doing these days?" he asked. "One never hears of you

now."

This was cruel, but she knew that he was "inciting her to riot," and

she replied: "That's because you are so secluded--in your kindergarten

for misfit statesmen. Abandon knowledge, all ye who enter there!"

It was the old flint and steel, but the sparks were not bright enough

to light the tinder of emotion. She knew it, for he was cool and

buoyant and really unconcerned, and she was feverish--and determined.

"You still make life worth living," he answered, gaily.

"It is not an occupation I would choose," she replied. "It is sure to

make one a host of enemies."

"So many of us make our careers by accident," he rejoined.

"Certainly I made mine not by design," she replied instantly; and there

was an undercurrent of meaning in it which he was not slow to notice;

but he disregarded her first attempt to justify, however vaguely, her

murderous treatment of him.

"But your career is not yet begun," he remarked.

Her eyes flashed--was it anger, or pique, or hurt, or merely the fire

of intellectual combat?

"I am married," she said, defiantly, in direct retort.

"That is not a career--it is casual exploration in a dark continent,"

he rejoined.

"Come and say that to my husband," she replied, boldly. Suddenly a

thought lighted her eyes. "Are you by any chance free to-morrow night

to dine with us--quite, quite en famille' Rudyard will be glad to see

you--and hear you," she added, teasingly.

He was amused. He felt how much he had really piqued her and provoked

her by showing her so plainly that she had lost every vestige of the

ancient power over him; and he saw no reason why he should not spend an

evening where she sparkled.

"I am free, and will come with pleasure," he replied.

"That is delightful," she rejoined, "and please bring a box of bons

mots with you. But you will come, then--?" She was going to add, "Ian,"

but she paused.

"Yes, I'll come--Jasmine," he answered, coolly, having read her

hesitation aright.

She flushed, was embarrassed and piqued, but with a smile and a nod she

left him.

In her carriage, however, her breath came quick and fast, her tiny hand

clenched, her face flushed, and there was a devastating fire in her

eyes.

"He shall not treat me so. He shall show some feeling. He shall--he

shall--he shall!" she gasped, angrily.

CHAPTER IX

THE APPIAN WAY

"Cape to Cairo be damned!"

The words were almost spat out. The man to whom they were addressed

slowly drew himself up from a half-recumbent position in his

desk-chair, from which he had been dreamily talking into the ceiling,

as it were, while his visitor leaned against a row of bookshelves and

beat the floor impatiently with his foot.

At the rude exclamation, Byng straightened himself, and looked fixedly

at his visitor. He had been dreaming out loud again the dream which

Rhodes had chanted in the ears of all those who shared with him the

pioneer enterprises of South Africa. The outburst which had broken in

on his monologue was so unexpected that for a moment he could scarcely

realize the situation. It was not often, in these strenuous and

perilous days--and for himself less often than ever before, so had

London and London life worked upon him--that he, or those who shared

with him the vast financial responsibilities of the Rand, indulged in

dreams or prophecies; and he resented the contemptuous phrase just

uttered, and the tone of the speaker even more.

Byng's blank amazement served only to incense his visitor further.

"Yes, be damned to it, Byng!" he continued. "I'm sick of the British

Empire and the All Red, and the 'immense future.' What I want is the

present. It's about big enough for you and me and the rest of us. I

want to hold our own in Johannesburg. I want to pull thirty-five

millions a year out of the eighty miles of reef, and get enough native

labour to do it. I want to run the Rand like a business concern, with

Kruger gone to Holland; and Leyds gone to blazes. That's what I want to

see, Mr. Invincible Rudyard Byng."

The reply to this tirade was deliberate and murderously bitter. "That's

what you want to see, is it, Mr. Blasphemous Barry Whalen? Well, you

can want it with a little less blither and a little more manners."

A hard and ugly look was now come into the big clean-shaven face which

had become sleeker with good living, and yet had indefinably coarsened

in the three years gone since the Jameson raid; and a gloomy anger

looked out of the deep-blue eyes as he slowly went on:

"It doesn't matter what you want--not a great deal, if the others agree

generally on what ought to be done; and I don't know that it matters

much in any case. What have you come to see me about?"

"I know I'm not welcome here, Byng. It isn't the same as it used to be.

It isn't--"

Byng jerked quickly to his feet and lunged forward as though he would

do his visitor violence; but he got hold of himself in time, and, with

a sudden and whimsical toss of the head, characteristic of him, he

burst into a laugh.

"Well, I've been stung by a good many kinds of flies in my time, and I

oughtn't to mind, I suppose," he growled.... "Oh, well, there," he

broke off; "you say you're not welcome here? If you really feel that,

you'd better try to see me at my chambers--or at the office in London

Wall. It can't be pleasant inhaling air that chills or stifles you. You

take my advice, Barry, and save yourself annoyance. But let me say in

passing that you are as welcome here as anywhere, neither more nor

less. You are as welcome as you were in the days when we trekked from

the Veal to Pietersburg and on into Bechuanaland, and both slept in the

cape-wagon under one blanket. I don't think any more of you than I did

then, and I don't think any less, and I don't want to see you any more

or any fewer. But, Barry"--his voice changed, grew warmer,

kinder--"circumstances are circumstances. The daily lives of all of us

are shaped differently--yours as well as mine--here in this

pudding-faced civilization and in the iron conventions of London town;

and we must adapt ourselves accordingly. We used to flop down on our

Louis Quinze furniture on the Vaal with our muddy boots on--in our

front drawing-room. We don't do it in Thamesfontein, my noble

buccaneer--not even in Barry Whalen's mansion in Ladbroke Square, where

Barry Whalen, Esq., puts his silk hat on the hall table, and--and, 'If

you please, sir, your bath is ready'! ... Don't be an idiot-child,

Barry, and don't spoil my best sentences when I let myself go. I don't

do it often these days--not since Jameson spilt the milk and the can

went trundling down the area. It's little time we get for dreaming,

these sodden days, but it's only dreams that do the world's work and

our own work in the end. It's dreams that do it, Barry; it's dreams

that drive us on, that make us see beyond the present and the

stupefying, deadening grind of the day. So it'll be Cape to Cairo in

good time, dear lad, and no damnation, if you please.... Why, what's

got into you? And again, what have you come to see me about, anyhow?

You knew we were to meet at dinner at Wallstein's to-night. Is there

anything that's skulking at our heels to hurt us?"

The scowl on Barry Whalen's dissipated face cleared a little. He came

over, rested both hands on the table and leaned forward as he spoke,

Byng resuming his seat meanwhile.

Barry's voice was a little thick with excitement, but he weighed his

words too. "Byng, I wanted you to know beforehand what Fleming intends

to bring up to-night--a nice kind of reunion, isn't it, with war ahead

as sure as guns, and the danger of everything going to smash, in spite

of Milner and Jo?"

A set look came into Byng's face. He caught the lapels of his big,

loose, double-breasted jacket, and spread his feet a little, till he

looked as though squaring himself to resist attack.

"Go on with your story," he interposed. "What is Fleming going to

say--or bring up, you call it?"

"He's going to say that some one is betraying us--all we do that's of

any importance and most we say that counts--to Kruger and Leyds. He's

going to say that the traitor is some one inside our circle."

Byng started, and his hands clutched at the chairback, then he became

quiet and watchful. "And whom does Fleming--or you--suspect?" he asked,

with lowering eyelids and a slumbering malice in his eyes.

Barry straightened himself and looked Byng rather hesitatingly in the

face; then he said, slowly:

"I don't know much about Fleming's suspicions. Mine, though, are at

least three years old, and you know them.

"Krool?"

"Krool--for sure."

"What would be Krool's object in betraying us, even if he knew all we

say and do?"

"Blood is thicker than water, Byng, and double pay to a poor man is a

consideration."

"Krool would do nothing that injured me, Barry. I know men. What sort

of thing has been given away to Brother Boer?"

Barry took from his pocket a paper and passed it over. Byng scanned it

very carefully and slowly, and his face darkened as he read; for there

were certain things set down of which only he and Wallstein and one or

two others knew; which only he and one high in authority in England

knew, besides Wallstein. His face slowly reddened with anger. London

life, and its excitements multiplied by his wife and not avoided by

himself, had worn on him, had affected his once sunny and even temper,

had given him greater bulk, with a touch of flabbiness under the chin

and at the neck, and had slackened the firmness of the muscles.

Presently he got up, went over to a table, and helped himself to brandy

and soda, motioning to Barry to do the same. There were two or three

minutes' silence, and then he said:

"There's something wrong, certainly, but it isn't Krool. No, it isn't

Krool."

"Nevertheless, if you're wise you'll ship him back beyond the Vaal, my

friend."

"It isn't Krool. I'll stake my life on that. He's as true to me as I am

to myself; and, anyhow, there are things in this Krool couldn't know."

He tossed the paper into the fire and watched it burn.

He had talked over many, if not all, of these things with Jasmine, and

with no one else; but Jasmine would not gossip. He had never known her

to do so. Indeed, she had counselled extreme caution so often to

himself that she would, in any case, be innocent of having babbled. But

certainly there had been leakage--there had been leakage regarding most

critical affairs. They were momentous enough to cause him to say

reflectively now, as he watched the paper burn:

"You might as well carry dynamite in your pocket as that."

"You don't mind my coming to see you?" Barry asked, in an anxious tone.

He could not afford to antagonize Byng; in any case, his heart was

against doing so; though, like an Irishman, he had risked everything by

his maladroit and ill-mannered attack a little while ago.

"I wanted to warn you, so's you could be ready when Fleming jumped in,"

Barry continued.

"No; I'm much obliged, Barry," was Byng's reply, in a voice where

trouble was well marked, however. "Wait a minute," he continued, as his

visitor prepared to leave. "Go into the other room"--he pointed. "Glue

your ear to the door first, then to the wall, and tell me if you can

hear anything--any word I say."

Barry did as he was bidden. Presently Byng spoke in a tone rather

louder than in ordinary conversation to an imaginary interlocutor for

some minutes. Then Barry Whalen came back into the room.

"Well?" Byng asked. "Heard anything?"

"Not a word--scarcely a murmur."

"Quite so. The walls are thick, and those big mahogany doors fit like a

glove. Nothing could leak through. Let's try the other door, leading

into the hall." They went over to it. "You see, here's an inside

baize-door as well. There's not room for a person to stand between the

two. I'll go out now, and you stay. Talk fairly loud."

The test produced the same result.

"Maybe I talk in my sleep," remarked Byng, with a troubled, ironical

laugh.

Suddenly there shot into Barry Whalen's mind a thought which startled

him, which brought the colour to his face with a rush. For years he had

suspected Krool, had considered him a danger. For years he had regarded

Byng as culpable, for keeping as his servant one whom the Partners all

believed to be a spy; but now another, a terrible thought came to him,

too terrible to put into words--even in his own mind.

There were two other people besides Krool who were very close to Byng.

There was Mrs. Byng for one; there was also Adrian Fellowes, who had

been for a long time a kind of handy-man of the great house, doing the

hundred things which only a private secretary, who was also a kind of

master-of-ceremonies and lord-in-waiting, as it were, could do. Yes,

there was Adrian Fellowes, the private secretary; and there was Mrs.

Byng, who knew so much of what her husband knew! And the private

secretary and the wife necessarily saw much of each other. What came to

Barry's mind now stunned him, and he mumbled out some words of good-bye

with an almost hang-dog look to his face; for he had a chivalrous heart

and mind, and he was not prone to be malicious.

"We'll meet at eight, then?" said Byng, taking out his watch. "It's a

quarter past seven now. Don't fuss, Barry. We'll nose out the spy,

whoever he is, or wherever to be found. But we won't find him here, I

think--not here, my friend."

Suddenly Barry Whalen turned at the door. "Oh, let's go back to the

veld and the Rand!" he burst out, passionately. "This is no place for

us, Byng--not for either of us. You are getting flabby, and I'm

spoiling my temper and my manners. Let's get out of this infernal

jack-pot. Let's go where we'll be in the thick of the broiling when it

comes. You've got a political head, and you've done more than any one

else could do to put things right and keep them right; but it's no

good. Nothing'll be got except where the red runs. And the red will

run, in spite of all Jo or Milner or you can do. And when it comes, you

and I will be sick if we're not there--yes, even you with your

millions, Byng."

With moist eyes Byng grasped the hand of the rough-hewn comrade of the

veld, and shook it warmly.

"England has got on your nerves, Barry," he said, gently. "But we're

all right in London. The key-board of the big instrument is here."

"But the organ is out there, Byng, and it's the organ that makes the

music, not the keys. We're all going to pieces here, every one of us. I

see it. Herr Gott, I see it plain enough! We're in the wrong shop.

We're not buying or selling; we're being sold. Baas--big Baas, let's go

where there's room to sling a stone; where we can see what's going on

round us; where there's the long sight and the strong sight; where you

can sell or get sold in the open, not in the alleyways; where you can

have a run for your money."

Byng smiled benevolently. Yet something was stirring his senses

strangely. The smell of the karoo was in his nostrils. "You're not

ending up as you began, Barry," he replied. "You started off like an

Israelite on the make, and you're winding up like Moody and Sankey."

"Well, I'm right now in the wind-up. I'm no better, I'm no worse, than

the rest of our fellows, but I'm Irish--I can see. The Celt can always

see, even if he can't act. And I see dark days coming for this old

land. England is wallowing. It's all guzzle and feed and finery, and

nobody cares a copper about anything that matters--"

"About Cape to Cairo, eh?"

"Byng, that was one of my idiocies. But you think over what I say, just

the same. I'm right. We're rotten cotton stuff now in these isles.

We've got fatty degeneration of the heart, and in all the rest of the

organs too."

Again Byng shook him by the hand warmly. "Well, Wallstein will give us

a fat dinner to-night, and you can moralize with lime-light effects

after the foie gras, Barry."

Closing the door slowly behind his friend, whom he had passed into the

hands of the dark-browed Krool, Byng turned again to his desk. As he

did so he caught sight of his face in the mirror over the mantel-piece.

A shadow swept over it; his lips tightened.

"Barry was right," he murmured, scrutinizing himself. "I've

degenerated. We've all degenerated. What's the matter, anyhow? What is

the matter? I've got everything--everything--everything."

Hearing the door open behind him, he turned to see Jasmine in evening

dress smiling at him. She held up a pink finger in reproof.

"Naughty boy," she said. "What's this I hear--that you have thrown me

over--me--to go and dine with the Wallstein! It's nonsense! You can't

go. Ian Stafford is coming to dine, as I told you."

His eyes beamed protectingly, affectionately, and yet, somehow, a

little anxiously, on her "But I must go, Jasmine. It's the first time

we've all been together since the Raid, and it's good we should be in

the full circle once again. There's work to do--more than ever there

was. There's a storm coming up on the veld, a real jagged lightning

business, and men will get hurt, hosts beyond recovery. We must commune

together, all of us. If there's the communion of saints, there's also

the communion of sinners. Fleming is back, and Wolff is back, and

Melville and Reuter and Hungerford are back, but only for a few days,

and we all must meet and map things out. I forgot about the dinner. As

soon as I remembered it I left a note on your dressing-table."

With sudden emotion he drew her to him, and buried his face in her soft

golden hair. "My darling, my little jasmine-flower," he whispered,

softly, "I hate leaving you, but--"

"But it's impossible, Ruddy, my man. How can I send Ian Stafford away?

It's too late to put him off."

"There's no need to put him off or to send him away--such old friends

as you are. Why shouldn't he dine with you a deux? I'm the only person

that's got anything to say about that."

She expressed no surprise, she really felt none. He had forgotten that,

coming up from Scotland, he had told her of this dinner with his

friends, and at the moment she asked Ian Stafford to dine she had

forgotten it also; but she remembered it immediately afterwards, and

she had said nothing, done nothing.

As Byng spoke, however, a curious expression emerged from the far

depths of her eyes--emerged, and was instantly gone again to the

obscurity whence it came. She had foreseen that he would insist on

Stafford dining with her; but, while showing no surprise--and no

perplexity--there was a touch of demureness in her expression as she

answered:

"I don't want to seem too conventional, but--"

"There should be a little latitude in all social rules," he rejoined.

"What nonsense! You are prudish, Jasmine. Allow yourself some latitude."

"Latitude, not license," she returned. Having deftly laid on him the

responsibility for this evening's episode, this excursion into the

dangerous fields of past memory and sentiment and perjured faith, she

closed the book of her own debit and credit with a smile of

satisfaction.

"Let me look at you," he said, standing her off from him.

Holding her hand, he turned her round like a child to be inspected.

"Well, you're a dream," he added, as she released herself and swept

into a curtsey, coquetting with her eyes as she did so. "You're

wonderful in blue--a flower in the azure," he added. "I seem to

remember that gown before--years ago--"

She uttered an exclamation of horror. "Good gracious, you wild and

ruthless ruffian! A gown--this gown--years ago! My bonny boy, do you

think I wear my gowns for years?"

"I wear my suits for years. Some I've had seven years. I've got a

frock-coat I bought for my brother Jim's wedding, ten years ago, and it

looks all right--a little small now, but otherwise 'most as good as

new."

"What a lamb, what a babe, you are, Ruddy! Like none that ever lived.

Why, no woman wears her gowns two seasons, and some of them rather hate

wearing them two times."

"Then what do they do with them--after the two times?"

"Well, for a while, perhaps, they keep them to look at and gloat over,

if they like them; then, perhaps, they give them away to their poor

cousins or their particular friends--"

"Their particular friends--?"

"Why, every woman has some friends poorer than herself who love her

very much, and she is good to them. Or there's the Mart--"

"Wait. What's 'the Mart'?"

"The place where ladies can get rid of fine clothes at a wicked

discount."

"And what becomes of them then?"

"They are bought by ladies less fortunate."

"Ladies who wear them?"

"Why, what else would they do? Wear them--of course, dear child."

Byng made a gesture of disgust. "Well, I call it sickening. To me

there's something so personal and intimate about clothes. I think I

could kill any woman that I saw wearing clothes of yours--of yours."

She laughed mockingly. "My beloved, you've seen them often enough, but

you haven't known they were mine; that's all."

"I didn't recognize them, because no one could wear your clothes like

you. It would be a caricature. That's a fact, Jasmine."

She reached up and swept his cheek with a kiss. "What a darling you

are, little big man! Yet you never make very definite remarks about my

clothes."

He put his hands on his hips and looked her up and down approvingly.

"Because I only see a general effect, but I always remember colour.

Tell me, have you ever sold your clothes to the Mart, or whatever the

miserable coffin-shop is called?"

"Well, not directly."

"What do you mean by 'not directly'?"

"Well, I didn't sell them, but they were sold for me." She hesitated,

then went on hurriedly. "Adrian Fellowes knew of a very sad case--a

girl in the opera who had had misfortune, illness, and bad luck; and he

suggested it. He said he didn't like to ask for a cheque, because we

were always giving, but selling my old wardrobe would be a sort of

lucky find--that's what he called it."

Byng nodded, with a half-frown, however. "That was ingenious of

Fellowes, and thoughtful, too. Now, what does a gown cost, one like

that you have on?"

"This--let me see. Why, fifty pounds, perhaps. It's not a ball gown, of

course."

He laughed mockingly. "Why, 'of course,' And what does a ball gown

cost--perhaps?" There was a cynical kind of humour in his eye.

"Anything from fifty to a hundred and fifty--maybe," she replied, with

a little burst of merriment.

"And how much did you get for the garments you had worn twice, and then

seen them suddenly grow aged in their extreme youth?"

"Ruddy, do not be nasty--or scornful. I've always worn my gowns more

than twice--some of them a great many times, except when I detested

them. And anyhow, the premature death of a gown is very, very good for

trade. That influences many ladies, of course."

He burst out laughing, but there was a satirical note in the gaiety, or

something still harsher.

"'We deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us,'" he answered. "It's

all such a hollow make-believe."

"What is?"

She gazed at him inquiringly, for this mood was new to her. She was

vaguely conscious of some sort of change in him--not exactly toward

her, but a change, nevertheless.

"The life we rich people lead is a hollow make-believe, Jasmine," he

said, with sudden earnestness. "I don't know what's the matter, but

we're not getting out of life all we ought to get; and we're not

putting into it all we ought to put in. There's a sense of

emptiness--of famine somewhere."

He caught the reflection of his face in the glass again, and his brow

contracted. "We get sordid and sodden, and we lose the proportions of

life. I wanted Dick Wilberforce to do something with me the other day,

and he declined. 'Why, my dear fellow,' I said, 'you know you want to

do it?' 'Of course I do,' he answered, 'but I can't afford that kind of

thing, and you know it.' Well, I did know it, but I had forgotten. I

was only thinking of what I myself could afford to do. I was setting up

my own financial standard, and was forgetting the other fellows who

hadn't my standard. What's the result? We drift apart, Wilberforce and

I--well, I mean Wilberforce as a type. We drift into sets of people who

can afford to do certain things, and we leave such a lot of people

behind that we ought to have clung to, and that we would have clung to,

if we hadn't been so much thinking of ourselves, or been so soddenly

selfish."

A rippling laugh rang through the room. "Boanerges--oh, Boanerges Byng!

'Owever can you be so heloquent!"

Jasmine put both hands on his shoulders and looked up at him with that

look which had fascinated him--and so many others--in their day. The

perfume which had intoxicated him in the first days of his love of her,

and steeped his senses in the sap of youth and Eden, smote them again,

here on the verge of the desert before him. He suddenly caught her in

his arms and pressed her to him almost roughly.

"You exquisite siren--you siren of all time," he said, with a note of

joy in which there was, too, a stark cry of the soul. He held her face

back from him.... "If you had lived a thousand years ago you would have

had a thousand lovers, Jasmine. Perhaps you did--who knows! And now you

come down through the centuries purified by Time, to be my

jasmine-flower."

His lip trembled a little. There was a strange melancholy in his eyes,

belying the passion and rapture of his words.

In all their days together she had never seen him in this mood. She had

heard him storm about things at times, had watched his big impulses

working; had drawn the thunder from his clouds; but there was something

moving in him now which she had never seen before. Perhaps it was only

a passing phase, even a moment's mood, but it made a strange impression

on her. It was remembered by them both long after, when life had

scattered its vicissitudes before their stumbling feet and they had

passed through flood and fire.

She drew back and looked at him steadily, reflectively, and with an

element of surprise in her searching look. She had never thought him

gifted with perception or insight, though he had eloquence and an eye

for broad effects. She had thought him curiously ignorant of human

nature, born to be deceived, full of child-like illusions, never

understanding the real facts of life, save in the way of business--and

politics. Women he never seemed by a single phrase or word to

understand, and yet now he startled her with a sudden revelation and

insight of which she had not thought him capable.

"If you had lived a thousand years ago you would have had a thousand

lovers. Perhaps you did--who knows! ... And now you come down through

the centuries purified by Time--"

The words slowly repeated themselves in her brain. Many and many a time

she had imagined herself as having lived centuries ago, and again and

again in her sleep these imaginings had reflected themselves in wild

dreams of her far past--once as a priestess of Isis, once as a

Slavonian queen, once as a peasant in Syria, and many times as a

courtezan of Alexandria or Athens--many times as that: one of the

gifted, beautiful, wonderful women whose houses were the centres of

culture, influence, and power. She had imagined herself, against her

will, as one of these women, such as Cleopatra, for whom the world were

well lost; and who, at last, having squeezed the orange dry, but while

yet the sun was coming towards noon, in scorn of Life and Time had left

the precincts of the cheerful day without a lingering look.... Often

and often such dreams, to her anger and confusion, had haunted her,

even before she was married; and she had been alternately humiliated

and fascinated by them. Years ago she had told Ian Stafford of one of

the dreams of a past life--that she was a slave in Athens who saved her

people by singing to the Tyrant; and Ian had made her sing to him, in a

voice quite in keeping with her personality, delicate and fine and

wonderfully high in its range, bird-like in its quality, with trills

like a lark--a little meretricious but captivating. He had also written

for her two verses which were as sharp and clear in her mind as the

letter he wrote when she had thrown him over so dishonourably:

"Your voice I knew, its cadences and trill;

It stilled the tumult and the overthrow

When Athens trembled to the people's will;

I knew it--'twas a thousand years ago.

"I see the fountains, and the gardens where

You sang the fury from the Satrap's brow;

I feel the quiver of the raptured air

I heard you in the Athenian grove--I hear you now."

As the words flashed into her mind now she looked at her husband

steadfastly. Were there, then, some unexplored regions in his nature,

where things dwelt, of which she had no glimmering of knowledge? Did he

understand more of women than she thought? Could she then really talk

to him of a thousand things of the mind which she had ever ruled out of

any commerce between them, one half of her being never opened up to his

sight? Not that he was deficient in intellect, but, to her thought, his

was a purely objective mind; or was it objective because it had not

been trained or developed subjectively? Had she ever really tried to

find a region in his big nature where the fine allusiveness and

subjectivity of the human mind could have free life and untrammelled

exercise, could gambol in green fields of imagination and adventure

upon strange seas of discovery? A shiver of pain, of remorse, went

through her frame now, as he held her at arm's length and looked at

her.... Had she started right? Had she ever given their natures a

chance to discover each other? Warmth and passion and youth and

excitement and variety--oh, infinite variety there had been!--but had

the start been a fair one, had she, with a whole mind and a full soul

of desire, gone to him first and last? What had been the governing

influence in their marriage where she was concerned?

Three years of constant motion, and never an hour's peace; three years

of agitated waters, and never in all that time three days alone

together. What was there to show for the three years? That for which he

had longed with a great longing had been denied him; for he had come of

a large family, and had the simple primitive mind and heart. Even in

his faults he had ever been primitively simple and obvious. She had

been energetic, helping great charities, aiding in philanthropic

enterprises, with more than a little shrewdness preventing him from

being robbed right and left by adventurers of all descriptions; and

yet--and yet it was all so general, so soulless, her activity in good

causes. Was there a single afflicted person, one forlorn soul whom she

had directly and personally helped, or sheltered from the storm for a

moment, one bereaved being whose eyes she had dried by her own direct

personal sympathy?

Was it this which had been more or less vaguely working in his mind a

little while before when she had noticed a change in him; or was it

that he was disappointed that they were two and no more--always two,

and no more? Was it that which was working in his mind, and making him

say hard things about their own two commendable selves?

"If you had lived a thousand years ago you would have had a thousand

lovers.... And now you come down through the centuries purified by

Time, to be my jasmine-flower"--

She did not break the silence for some time, but at last she said: "And

what were you a thousand years ago, my man?"

He drew a hot hand across a troubled brow. "I? I was the Satrap whose

fury you soothed away, or I was the Antony you lured from fighting

Caesar."

It was as though he had read those lines written by Ian Stafford long

ago.

Again that perfume of hers caught his senses, and his look softened

wonderfully. A certain unconscious but underlying discontent appeared

to vanish from his eyes, and he said, abruptly: "I have it--I have it.

This dress is like the one you wore the first night that we met. It's

the same kind of stuff, it's just the same colour and the same style.

Why, I see it all as plain as can be--there at the opera. And you wore

blue the day I tried to propose to you and couldn't, and asked you down

to Wales instead. Lord, how I funked it!" He laughed, happily almost.

"Yes, you wore blue the first time we met--like this."

"It was the same skirt, and a different bodice, of course both those

first times," she answered. Then she stepped back and daintily smoothed

out the gown she was wearing, smiling at him as she did that day three

years ago. She had put on this particular gown, remembering that Ian

Stafford had said charming things about that other blue gown just

before he bade her good-bye three years ago. That was why she wore blue

this night--to recall to Ian what it appeared he had forgotten. And

presently she would dine alone with Ian in her husband's house--and

with her husband's blessing. Pique and pride were in her heart, and she

meant Ian Stafford to remember. No man was adamantine; at least she had

never met one--not one, neither bishop nor octogenarian.

"Come, Ruddy, you must dress, or you'll be late," she continued,

lightly, touching his cheek with her fingers; "and you'll come down and

apologize, and put me right with Ian Stafford, won't you?"

"Certainly. I won't be five minutes. I'll--"

There was a tap at the door and a footman, entering, announced that Mr.

Stafford was in the drawing-room.

"Show him into my sitting-room," she said. "The drawing-room, indeed,"

she added to her husband--"it is so big, and I am so small. I feel

sometimes as though I wanted to live in a tiny, tiny house."

Her words brought a strange light to his eyes. Suddenly he caught her

arm.

"Jasmine," he said, hurriedly, "let us have a good talk over

things--over everything. I want to see if we can't get more out of life

than we do. There's something wrong. What is it? I don't know; but

perhaps we could find out if we put our heads together--eh?" There was

a strange, troubled longing in his look.

She nodded and smiled. "Certainly--to-night when you get back," she

said. "We'll open the machine and find what's wrong with it." She

laughed, and so did he.

As she went down the staircase she mused to herself and there was a

shadow in her eyes and over her face.

"Poor Ruddy! Poor Ruddy!" she said.

Once again before she entered the sitting-room, as she turned and

looked back, she said:

"Poor boy ... Yet he knew about a thousand years ago!" she added with a

nervous little laugh, and with an air of sprightly eagerness she

entered to Ian Stafford.

CHAPTER X

AN ARROW FINDS A BREAST

As he entered the new sphere of Jasmine's influence, charm, and

existence, Ian Stafford's mind became flooded by new impressions. He

was not easily moved by vastness or splendour. His ducal grandfather's

houses were palaces, the estates were a fair slice of two counties, and

many of his relatives had sumptuous homes stored with priceless

legacies of art. He had approached the great house which Byng had built

for himself with some trepidation; for though Byng came of people whose

names counted for a good deal in the north of England, still, in newly

acquired fortunes made suddenly in new lands there was something that

coarsened taste--an unmodulated, if not a garish, elegance which "hit

you in the eye," as he had put it to himself. He asked himself why Byng

had not been content to buy one of the great mansions which could

always be had in London for a price, where time had softened all the

outlines, had given that subdued harmony in architecture which only

belongs to age. Byng could not buy with any money those wonderful

Adam's mantels, over-mantels and ceilings which had a glory quite their

own. There must, therefore, be an air of newness in the new mansion,

which was too much in keeping with the new money, the gold as yet not

worn smooth by handling, the staring, brand-new sovereigns looking like

impostors.

As he came upon the great house, however, in the soft light of evening,

he was conscious of no violence done to his artistic sense. It was a

big building, severely simple in design, yet with the rich grace,

spacious solidity, and decorative relief of an Italian palace: compact,

generous, traditionally genuine and wonderfully proportionate.

"Egad, Byng, you had a good architect--and good sense!" he said to

himself. "It's the real thing; and he did it before Jasmine came on the

scene too."

The outside of the house was Byng's, but the inside would, in the

essentials, of course, be hers; and he would see what he would see.

When the door opened, it came to him instantly that the inside and

outside were in harmony. How complete was that harmony remained to be

seen, but an apparently unstudied and delightful reticence was

noticeable at once. The newness had been rubbed off the gold somehow,

and the old furniture--Italian, Spanish--which relieved the

spaciousness of the entrance gave an air of Time and Time's eloquence

to this three-year-old product of modern architectural skill.

As he passed on, he had more than a glimpse of the ball-room, which

maintained the dignity and the refined beauty of the staircase and the

hallways; and only in the insistent audacity and intemperate colouring

of some Rubens pictures did he find anything of that inherent tendency

to exaggeration and Oriental magnificence behind the really delicate

artistic faculties possessed by Jasmine.

The drawing-room was charming. It was not quite perfect, however. It

was too manifestly and studiously arranged, and it had the finnicking

exactness of the favourite gallery of some connoisseur. For its

nobility of form, its deft and wise softness of colouring, its

half-smothered Italian joyousness of design in ceiling and cornice, the

arrangement of choice and exquisite furniture was too careful, too much

like the stage. He smiled at the sight of it, for he saw and knew that

Jasmine had had his playful criticism of her occasionally flamboyant

taste in mind, and that she had over-revised, as it were. She had, like

a literary artist, polished and refined and stippled the effect, till

something of personal touch had gone, and there remained classic

elegance without the sting of life and the idiosyncrasy of its

creator's imperfections. No, the drawing-room would not quite do,

though it was near the perfect thing. His judgment was not yet

complete, however. When he was shown into Jasmine's sitting-room his

breath came a little quicker, for here would be the real test; and

curiosity was stirring greatly in him.

Yes, here was the woman herself, wilful, original, delightful, with a

flower-like delicacy joined to a determined and gorgeous audacity.

Luxury was heaped on luxury, in soft lights from Indian lamps and

lanterns, in the great divan, the deep lounge, the piled-up cushions,

the piano littered with incongruous if artistic bijouterie; but

everywhere, everywhere, books in those appealing bindings and with that

paper so dear to every lover of literature. Instinctively he picked

them up one by one, and most of them were affectionately marked by

marginal notes of criticism, approval, or reference; and all showing

the eager, ardent mind of one who loved books. He noticed, however,

that most of the books he had seen before, and some of them he had read

with her in the days which were gone forever. Indeed, in one of them he

found some of his own pencilled marginal notes, beneath which she had

written her insistent opinions, sometimes with amazing point. There

were few new books, and they were mostly novels; and it was borne in on

him that not many of these annotated books belonged to the past three

years. The millions had come, the power and the place; but something

had gone with their coming.

He was turning over the pages of a volume of Browning when she entered;

and she had an instant to note the grace and manly dignity of his

figure, the poise of the intellectual head--the type of a perfect,

well-bred animal, with the accomplishment of a man of purpose and

executive design. A little frown of trouble came to her forehead, but

she drove it away with a merry laugh, as he turned at the rustle of her

skirts and came forward.

He noted her blue dress, he guessed the reason she had put it on; and

he made an inward comment of scorn. It was the same blue, and it was

near the same style of the dress she wore the last time he saw her. She

watched to see whether it made any impression on him, and was piqued to

observe that he who had in that far past always swept her with an

admiring, discriminating, and deferential glance, now only gave her

deference of a courteous but perfunctory kind. It made the note to all

she said and did that evening--the daring, the brilliance, the light

allusion to past scenes and happenings, the skilful comment on the

present, the joyous dominance of a position made supreme by beauty and

by gold; behind which were anger and bitterness, and wild and desperate

revolt.

For, if love was dead in him, and respect, and all that makes man's

association with woman worth while, humiliation and the sting of

punishment and penalty were alive in her, flaying her spirit, rousing

that mad streak which was in her grandfather, who had had many a

combat, the outcome of wild elements of passion in him. She was not

happy; she had never been happy since she married Rudyard Byng; yet she

had said to herself so often that she might have been at peace, in a

sense, had it not been for the letter which Ian Stafford had written

her, when she turned from him to the man she married.

The passionate resolve to compel him to reproach himself in soul for

his merciless, if subtle, indictment of her to bring him to the old

place where he had knelt in spirit so long ago--ah, it was so

long!--came to her. Self-indulgent and pitifully mean as she had been,

still this man had influenced her more than any other in the world--in

that region where the best of herself lay, the place to which her eyes

had turned always when she wanted a consoling hour. He belonged to her

realm of the imagination, of thought, of insight, of intellectual

passions and the desires of the soul. Far above any physical attraction

Ian had ever possessed for her was the deep conviction that he gave her

mind what no one else gave it, that he was the being who knew the song

her spirit sang.... He should not go forever from her and with so

cynical a completeness. He should return; he should not triumph in his

self-righteousness, be a living reproach to her always by his careless

indifference to everything that had ever been between them. If he

treated her so because of what she had done to him, with what savagery

might not she be treated, if all that had happened in the last three

years were open as a book before him!

Her husband--she had not thought of that. So much had happened in the

past three years; there had been so much adulation and worship and

daring assault upon her heart--or emotions--from quarters of unusual

distinction, that the finest sense of her was blunted, and true

proportions were lost. Rudyard ought never to have made that five

months' visit to South Africa a year before, leaving her alone to make

the fight against the forces round her. Those five months had brought a

change in her, had made her indignant at times against Rudyard.

"Why did he go to South Africa? Why did he not take me with him? Why

did he leave me here alone?" she had asked herself. She did not realize

that there would have been no fighting at all, that all the forces

contending against her purity and devotion would never have gathered at

her feet and washed against the shores of her resolution, if she had

loved Rudyard Byng when she married him as she might have loved him,

ought to have loved him.

The faithful love unconsciously announces its fidelity, and men

instinctively are aware of it, and leave it unassailed. It is the

imperfect love which subtly invites the siege, which makes the call

upon human interest, selfishness, or sympathy, so often without

intended unscrupulousness at first. She had escaped the suspicion, if

not the censure, of the world--or so she thought; and in the main she

was right. But she was now embarked on an enterprise which never would

have been begun, if she had not gambled with her heart and soul three

years ago; if she had not dragged away the veil from her inner self,

putting her at the mercy of one who could say, "I know you--what you

are."

Just before they went to the dining-room Byng came in and cheerily

greeted Stafford, apologizing for having forgotten his engagement to

dine with Wallstein.

"But you and Jasmine will have much to talk about," he said--"such old

friends as you are; and fond of books and art and music and all that

kind of thing.... Glad to see you looking so well, Stafford," he

continued. "They say you are the coming man. Well, au revoir. I hope

Jasmine will give you a good dinner." Presently he was gone--in a heavy

movement of good-nature and magnanimity.

"Changed--greatly changed, and not for the better," said Ian Stafford

to himself. "This life has told on him. The bronze of the veld has

vanished, and other things are disappearing."

At the table with the lights and the flowers and the exquisite

appointments, with appetite flattered and tempted by a dinner of rare

simplicity and perfect cooking, Jasmine was radiant, amusing, and

stimulating in her old way. She had never seemed to him so much a

mistress of delicate satire and allusiveness. He rose to the combat

with an alacrity made more agile by considerable abstinence, for clever

women were few, and real talk was the rarest occurrence in his life,

save with men in his own profession chiefly.

But later, in her sitting-room, after the coffee had come, there was a

change, and the transition was made with much skill and sensitiveness.

Into Jasmine's voice there came another and more reflective note, and

the drift of the conversation changed. Books brought the new current;

and soon she had him moving almost unconsciously among old scenes,

recalling old contests of ideas, and venturing on bold reproductions of

past intellectual ideals. But though they were in this dangerous field

of the past, he did not once betray a sign of feeling, not even when,

poring over Coventry Patmore's poems, her hand touched his, and she

read the lines which they had read together so long ago, with no

thought of any significance to themselves:

"With all my will, but much against my heart,

We two now part.

My very Dear,

Our solace is the sad road lies so clear...

Go thou to East, I West.

We will not say

There's any hope, it is so far away..."

He read the verses with a smile of quiet enjoyment, saying, when he had

finished:

"A really moving and intimate piece of work. I wonder what their story

was--a hopeless love, of course. An affaire--an 'episode'--London

ladies now call such things."

"You find London has changed much since you went away--in three years

only?" she asked.

"Three years--why, it's an eternity, or a minute, as you are obliged to

live it. In penal servitude it is centuries, in the Appian Way of

pleasure it is a sunrise moment. Actual time has nothing to do with the

clock."

She looked up to the little gold-lacquered clock on the mantel-piece.

"See, it is going to strike," she said. As she spoke, the little silver

hammer softly struck. "That is the clock-time, but what time is it

really--for you, for instance?"

"In Elysium there is no time," he murmured with a gallantry so

intentionally obvious and artificial that her pulses beat with anger.

"It is wonderful, then, how you managed the dinner-hour so exactly. You

did not miss it by a fraction."

"It is only when you enter Elysium that there is no time. It was eight

o'clock when I arrived--by the world's time. Since then I have been

dead to time--and the world."

"You do not suggest that you are in heaven?" she asked, ironically.

"Nothing so extreme as that. All extremes are violent."

"Ah, the middle place--then you are in purgatory?"

"But what should you be doing in purgatory? Or have you only come with

a drop of water to cool the tongue of Dives?" His voice trailed along

so coolly that it incensed her further.

"Certainly Dives' tongue is blistering," she said with great effort to

still the raging tumult within her. "Yet I would not cool it if I

could."

Suddenly the anger seemed to die out of her, and she looked at him as

she did in the days before Rudyard Byng came across her path--eagerly,

childishly, eloquently, inquiringly. He was the one man who satisfied

the intellectual and temperamental side of her; and he had taught her

more than any one else in the world. She realized that she had "Tossed

him violently like a ball into a far country," and that she had not now

a vestige of power over him--either of his senses or his mind; that he

was master of the situation. But was it so that there was a man whose

senses could not be touched when all else failed? She was very woman,

eager for the power which she had lost, and power was hard to get--by

what devious ways had she travelled to find it!

As they leaned over a book of coloured prints of Gainsborough, Romney,

and Vandyke, her soft, warm breast touched his arm and shoulder, a

strand of her cobweb, golden hair swept his cheek, and a sigh came from

her lips, so like those of that lass who caught and held her Nelson to

the end, and died at last in poverty, friendless, homeless, and alone.

Did he fancy that he heard a word breathing through her sigh--his name,

Ian? For one instant the wild, cynical desire came over him to turn and

clasp her in his arms, to press those lips which never but once he had

kissed, and that was when she had plighted her secret troth to him, and

had broken it for three million pounds. Why not? She was a woman, she

was beautiful, she was a siren who had lured him and used him and

tossed him by. Why not? All her art was now used, the art of the born

coquette which had been exquisitely cultivated since she was a child,

to bring him back to her feet--to the feet of the wife of Rudyard Byng.

Why not? For an instant he had the dark impulse to treat her as she

deserved, and take a kiss "as long as my exile, as sweet as my

revenge"; but then the bitter memory came that this was the woman to

whom he had given the best of which he was capable and the promise of

that other best which time and love and life truly lived might

accomplish; and the wild thing died in him.

The fever fled, and his senses became as cold as the statue of

Andromeda on the pedestal at his hand. He looked at her. He did not for

the moment realize that she was in reality only a girl, a child in so

much; wilful, capricious, unregulated in some ways, with the hereditary

taint of a distorted moral sense, and yet able, intuitive and wise, in

so many aspects of life and conversation. Looking, he determined that

she should never have that absolution which any outward or inward

renewal of devotion would give her. Scorn was too deep--that arrogant,

cruel, adventitious attribute of the sinner who has not committed the

same sin as the person he despises--

"Sweet is the refuge of scorn."

His scorn was too sweet; and for the relish of it on his tongue, the

price must be paid one way or another. The sin of broken faith she had

sinned had been the fruit of a great temptation, meaning more to a

woman, a hundred times, than to a man. For a man there is always

present the chance of winning a vast fortune and the power that it

brings; but it can seldom come to a woman except through marriage. It

ill became him to be self-righteous, for his life had not been

impeccable--

"The shaft of slander shot

Missed only the right blot!"

Something of this came to him suddenly now as she drew away from him

with a sense of humiliation, and a tear came unbidden to her eye.

She wiped the tear away, hastily, as there came a slight tapping at the

door, and Krool entered, his glance enveloping them both in one

lightning survey--like the instinct of the dweller in wild places of

the earth, who feels danger where all is most quiet, and ever scans the

veld or bush with the involuntary vigilance belonging to the life. His

look rested on Jasmine for a moment before he spoke, and Stafford

inwardly observed that here was an enemy to the young wife whose hatred

was deep. He was conscious, too, that Jasmine realized the antipathy.

Indeed, she had done so from the first days she had seen Krool, and had

endeavoured, without success, to induce Byng to send the man back to

South Africa, and to leave him there last year when he went again to

Johannesburg. It was the only thing in which Byng had proved

invulnerable, and Krool had remained a menace which she vaguely felt

and tried to conquer, which, in vain, Adrian Fellowes had endeavoured

to remove. For in the years in which Fellowes had been Byng's secretary

his relations with Krool seemed amiable and he had made light of

Jasmine's prejudices.

"The butler is out and they come me," Krool said. "Mr. Stafford's

servant is here. There is a girl for to see him, if he will let. The

boy, Jigger, his name. Something happens."

Stafford frowned, then turned to Jasmine. He told her who Jigger was,

and of the incident the day before, adding that he had no idea of the

reason for the visit; but it must be important, or nothing would have

induced his servant to fetch the girl.

"I will come," he said to Krool, but Jasmine's curiosity was roused.

"Won't you see her here?" she asked.

Stafford nodded assent, and presently Krool showed the girl into the

room.

For an instant she stood embarrassed and confused, then she addressed

herself to Stafford. "I'm Lou--Jigger's sister," she said, with white

lips. "I come to ask if you'd go to him. 'E's been hurt bad--knocked

down by a fire-engine, and the doctor says 'e can't live. 'E made yer a

promise, and 'e wanted me to tell yer that 'e meant to keep it; but if

so be as you'd come, and wouldn't mind a-comin', 'e'd tell yer himself.

'E made that free becos 'e had brekfis wiv ye. 'E's all right--the best

as ever--the top best." Suddenly the tears flooded her eyes and

streamed down her pale cheeks. "Oh, 'e was the best--my Gawd, 'e was

the best! If it 'd make 'im die happy, you'd come, y'r gryce, wouldn't

y'r?"

Child of the slums as she was, she was exceedingly comely and was

simply and respectably dressed. Her eyes were big and brown like

Stafford's; her face was a delicate oval, and her hair was a deep

black, waving freely over a strong, broad forehead. It was her speech

that betrayed her; otherwise she was little like the flower-girl that

Adrian Fellowes had introduced to Al'mah, who had got her a place in

the chorus of the opera and had also given her personal care and

friendly help.

"Where is he? In the hospital?" Stafford asked.

"It was just beside our own 'ome it 'appened. We got two rooms now,

Jigger and me. 'E was took in there. The doctor come, but 'e says it

ain't no use. 'E didn't seem to care much, and 'e didn't give no 'ope,

not even when I said I'd give him all me wages for a year."

Jasmine was beside her now, wiping her tears and holding her hand, her

impulsive nature stirred, her heart throbbing with desire to help.

Suddenly she remembered what Rudyard had said up-stairs three hours

ago, that there wasn't a single person in the world to whom they had

done an act which was truly and purely personal during the past three

years: and she had a tremulous desire to help this crude, mothering,

passionately pitiful girl.

"What will you do?" Jasmine said to Stafford.

"I will go at once. Tell my servant to have up a cab," he said to

Krool, who stood outside the door.

"Truly, 'e will be glad," the girl exclaimed. "'E told me about the

suvring, and Sunday-week for brekfis," she murmured. "You'll never miss

the time, y'r gryce. Gawd knows you'll not miss it--an' 'e ain't got

much left."

"I will go, too--if you will let me," said Jasmine to Stafford. "You

must let me go. I want to help--so much."

"No, you must not come," he replied. "I will pick up a surgeon in

Harley Street, and we'll see if it is as hopeless as she says. But you

must not come to-night. To-morrow, certainly, to-morrow, if you will.

Perhaps you can do some good then. I will let you know."

He held out his hand to say good-bye, as the girl passed out with

Jasmine's kiss on her cheek and a comforting assurance of help.

Jasmine did not press her request. First there was the fact that

Rudyard did not know, and might strongly disapprove; and secondly,

somehow, she had got nearer to Stafford in the last few minutes than in

all the previous hours since they had met again. Nowhere, by all her

art, had she herself touched him, or opened up in his nature one tiny

stream of feeling; but this girl's story and this piteous incident had

softened him, had broken down the barriers which had checked and

baffled her. There was something almost gentle in his smile as he said

good-bye, and she thought she detected warmth in the clasp of his hand.

Left alone, she sat in the silence, pondering as she had not pondered

in the past three years. These few days in town, out of the season,

were sandwiched between social functions from which their lives were

never free. They had ever passed from event to event like minor

royalties with endless little ceremonies and hospitalities; and there

had been so little time to meditate--had there even been the wish?

The house was very still, and the far-off, muffled rumble of omnibuses

and cabs gave a background of dignity to this interior peace and

luxurious quiet. For long she sat unmoving--nearly two hours--alone

with her inmost thoughts. Then she went to the little piano in the

corner where stood the statue of Andromeda, and began to play softly.

Her fingers crept over the keys, playing snatches of things she knew

years before, improvising soft, passionate little movements. She took

no note of time. At last the clock struck twelve, and still she sat

there playing. Then she began to sing a song which Alice Tynemouth had

written and set to music two years before. It was simply yet

passionately written, and the wail of anguished disappointment, of

wasted chances was in it--

"Once in the twilight of the Austrian hills,

A word came to me, beautiful and good;

If I had spoken it, that message of the stars,

Love would have filled thy blood:

Love would have sent thee pulsing to my arms,

Thy heart a nestling bird;

A moment fled--it passed:

I seek in vain

For that forgotten word."

In the last notes the voice rose in passionate pain, and died away into

an aching silence.

She leaned her arms on the piano in front of her and laid her forehead

on them.

"When will it all end--what will become of me!" she cried in pain that

strangled her heart. "I am so bad--so bad. I was doomed from the

beginning. I always felt it so--always, even when things were

brightest. I am the child of black Destiny. For me--there is nothing,

nothing, for me. The straight path was before me, and I would not walk

in it."

With a gesture of despair, and a sudden faintness, she got up and went

over to the tray of spirits and liqueurs which had been brought in with

the coffee. Pouring out a liqueur-glass of brandy, she was about to

drink it, when her ear became attracted by a noise without, a curious

stumbling, shuffling sound. She put down the glass, went to the door

that opened into the hall, and looked out and down. One light was still

burning below, and she could see distinctly. A man was clumsily,

heavily, ascending the staircase, holding on to the balustrade. He was

singing to himself, breaking into the maudlin harmony with an

occasional laugh--

"For this is the way we do it on the veld,

When the band begins to play;

With one bottle on the table and one below the belt,

When the band begins to play--"

It was Rudyard, and he was drunk--almost helplessly drunk.

A cry of pain rose to her lips, but her trembling hand stopped it. With

a shudder she turned back to her sitting-room. Throwing herself on the

divan where she had sat with Ian Stafford, she buried her face in her

arms. The hours went by.

CHAPTER XI

IN WALES, WHERE JIGGER PLAYS HIS PART

"Really, the unnecessary violence with which people take their own

lives, or the lives of others, is amazing. They did it better in olden

days in Italy and the East. No waste or anything--all scientifically

measured."

With a confident and satisfied smile Mr. Mappin, the celebrated

surgeon, looked round the little group of which he was the centre at

Glencader, Rudyard Byng's castle in Wales.

Rudyard blinked at him for a moment with ironical amusement, then

remarked: "When you want to die, does it matter much whether you kill

yourself with a bludgeon or a pin, take gas from a tap or cyanide of

potassium, jump in front of a railway train or use the revolting razor?

You are dead neither less nor more, and the shock to the world is the

same. It's only the housemaid or the undertaker that notices any

difference. I knew a man at Vleifontein who killed himself by jumping

into the machinery of a mill. It gave a lot of trouble to all

concerned. That was what he wanted--to end his own life and exasperate

the foreman."

"Rudyard, what a horrible tale!" exclaimed his wife, turning again to

the surgeon, eagerly. "It is most interesting, and I see what you mean.

It is, that if we only really knew, we could take our own lives or

other people's with such ease and skill that it would be hard to detect

it?"

The surgeon nodded. "Exactly, Mrs. Byng. I don't say that the expert

couldn't find what the cause of death was, if suspicion was aroused;

but it could be managed so that 'heart failure' or some such silly

verdict would be given, because there was no sign of violence, or of

injury artificially inflicted."

"It is fortunate the world doesn't know these ways to euthanasia,"

interposed Stafford. "I fancy that murders would be more numerous than

suicides, however. Suicide enthusiasts would still pursue their

melodramatic indulgences--disfiguring themselves unnecessarily."

Adrian Fellowes, the amiable, ever-present secretary and "chamberlain"

of Rudyard's household, as Jasmine teasingly called him, whose

handsome, unintellectual face had lighted with amusement at the

conversation, now interposed. "Couldn't you give us some idea how it

can be done, this smooth passage of the Styx?" he asked. "We'll promise

not to use it."

The surgeon looked round the little group reflectively. His eyes passed

from Adrian to Jasmine, who stood beside him, to Byng, and to Ian

Stafford, and stimulated by their interest, he gave a pleased smile of

gratified vanity. He was young, and had only within the past three

years got to the top of the tree at a bound, by a certain successful

operation in royal circles.

Drawing out of his pocket a small case, he took from it a needle and

held it up. "Now that doesn't look very dangerous, does it?" he asked.

"Yet a firm pressure of its point could take a life, and there would be

little possibility of finding how the ghastly trick was done except by

the aroused expert."

"If you will allow me," he said, taking Jasmine's hand and poising the

needle above her palm. "Now, one tiny thrust of this steel point, which

has been dipped in a certain acid, would kill Mrs. Byng as surely as

though she had been shot through the heart. Yet it would leave scarcely

the faintest sign. No blood, no wound, just a tiny pin-prick, as it

were; and who would be the wiser? Imagine an average coroner's jury and

the average examination of the village doctor, who would die rather

than expose his ignorance, and therefore gives 'heart failure' as the

cause of death."

Jasmine withdrew her hand with a shudder. "Please, I don't like being

so near the point," she said.

"Woman-like," interjected Byng ironically.

"How does it happen you carry this murdering asp about with you, Mr.

Mappin?" asked Stafford.

The surgeon smiled. "For an experiment to-morrow. Don't start. I have a

favorite collie which must die. I am testing the poison with the

minimum. If it kills the dog it will kill two men."

He was about to put the needle back into the case when Adrian Fellowes

held out a hand for it. "Let me look at it," he said. Turning the

needle over in his palm, he examined it carefully. "So near and yet so

far," he remarked. "There are a good many people who would pay a high

price for the little risk and the dead certainty. You wouldn't,

perhaps, tell us what the poison is, Mr. Mappin? We are all very

reliable people here, who have no enemies, and who want to keep their

friends alive. We should then be a little syndicate of five, holding a

great secret, and saving numberless lives every day by not giving the

thing away. We should all be entitled to monuments in Parliament

Square."

The surgeon restored the needle to the case. "I think one monument will

be sufficient," he said. "Immortality by syndicate is too modern, and

this is an ancient art." He tapped the case. "Turkey and the Mongol

lands have kept the old cult going. In England, it's only for the dog!"

He laughed freely but noiselessly at his own joke.

This talk had followed the news brought by Krool to the Baas, that the

sub-manager of the great mine, whose chimneys could be seen from the

hill behind the house, had thrown himself down the shaft and been

smashed to a pulp. None of them except Byng had known him, and the dark

news had brought no personal shock.

They had all gathered in the library, after paying an afternoon visit

to Jigger, who had been brought down from London in a special carriage,

and was housed near the servants' quarters with a nurse. On the night

of Jigger's accident Ian Stafford on his way from Jasmine's house had

caught Mr. Mappin, and the surgeon had operated at once, saving the

lad's life. As it was necessary to move him in any case, it was almost

as easy, and no more dangerous, to bring him to Glencader than to take

him to a London hospital.

Under the surgeon's instructions Jasmine had arranged it all, and

Jigger had travelled like royalty from Paddington into Wales, and there

had captured the household, as he had captured Stafford at breakfast in

St. James's Street.

Thinking that perhaps this was only a whim of Jasmine's, and merely

done because it gave a new interest to a restless temperament, Stafford

had at first rejected the proposal. When, however, the surgeon said

that if the journey was successfully made, the after-results would be

all to the good, Stafford had assented, and had allowed himself to be

included in the house-party at Glencader.

It was a triumph for Jasmine, for otherwise Stafford would not have

gone. Whether she would have insisted on Jigger going to Glencader if

it had not meant that Ian would go also, it would be hard to say. Her

motives were not unmixed, though there had been a real impulse to do

all she could. In any case, she had lessened the distance between Ian

and herself, and that gave her wilful mind a rather painful pleasure.

Also, the responsibility for Jigger's well-being, together with her

duties as hostess, had prevented her from dwelling on that scene in the

silent house at midnight which had shocked her so--her husband reeling

up the staircase, singing a ribald song.

The fullest significance of this incident had not yet come home to her.

She had fought against dwelling on it, and she was glad that every

moment since they had come to Glencader had been full; that Rudyard had

been much away with the shooters, and occupied in trying to settle a

struggle between the miners and the proprietors of the mine itself, of

whom he was one. Still, things that Rudyard had said before he left the

house to dine with Wallstein, leaving her with Stafford, persistently

recurred to her mind.

"What's the matter?" had been Rudyard's troubled cry. "We've got

everything--everything, and yet--!" Her eyes were not opened. She had

had a shock, but it had not stirred the inner, smothered life; there

had been no real revelation. She was agitated and disturbed--no more.

She did not see that the man she had married to love and to cherish was

slowly changing--was the change only a slow one now?--before her eyes;

losing that brave freshness which had so appealed to London when he

first came back to civilization. Something had been subtracted from his

personality which left it poorer, something had been added which made

it less appealing. Something had given way in him. There had been a

subsidence of moral energy, and force had inwardly declined, though to

all outward seeming he had played a powerful and notable part in the

history of the last three years, gaining influence in many directions,

without suffering excessive notoriety.

On the day Rudyard married Jasmine he would have cut off his hand

rather than imagine that he would enter his wife's room helpless from

drink and singing a song which belonged to loose nights on the Limpopo

and the Vaal.

As the little group drew back, their curiosity satisfied, Mr. Mappin,

putting the case carefully into his pocket again, said to Jasmine:

"The boy is going on so well that I am not needed longer. Mr. Wharton,

my locum tenens, will give him every care."

"When did you think of going?" Jasmine asked him, as they all moved on

towards the hall, where the other guests were assembled.

"To-morrow morning early, if I may. No night travel for me, if I can

help it."

"I am glad you are not going to-night," she answered, graciously.

"Al'mah is arriving this afternoon, and she sings for us this evening.

Is it not thrilling?"

There was a general murmur of pleasure, vaguely joined by Adrian

Fellowes, who glanced quickly round the little group, and met an

enigmatical glance from Byng's eye. Byng was remembering what Barry

Whalen had told him three years ago, and he wondered if Jasmine was

cognizant of it all. He thought not; for otherwise she would scarcely

bring Al'mah to Glencader and play Fellowes' game for him.

Jasmine, in fact, had not heard. Days before she had wondered that

Adrian had tried to discourage her invitation to Al'mah. While it was

an invitation, it was also an engagement, on terms which would have

been adequate for Patti in her best days. It would, if repeated a few

times, reimburse Al'mah for the sums she had placed in Byng's hands at

the time of the Raid, and also, later still, to buy the life of her

husband from Oom Paul. It had been insufficient, not because of the

value of the article for sale, but because of the rapacity of the

vender. She had paid half the cruel balance demanded; Byng and his

friends had paid the rest without her knowledge; and her husband had

been set free.

Byng had only seen Al'mah twice since the day when she first came to

his rooms, and not at all during the past two years, save at the opera,

where she tightened the cords of captivity to her gifts around her

admirers. Al'mah had never met Mrs. Byng since the day after that first

production of "Manassa," when Rudyard rescued her, though she had seen

her at the opera again and again. She cared nothing for society or for

social patronage or approval, and the life that Jasmine led had no

charms for her. The only interest she had in it was that it suited

Adrian from every standpoint. He loved the splendid social environment

of which Jasmine was the centre, and his services were well rewarded.

When she received Jasmine's proposal to sing at Glencader she had

hesitated to accept it, for society had no charms for her; but at

length three considerations induced her to do so. She wanted to see

Rudyard Byng, for South Africa and its shadow was ever present with

her; and she dreaded she knew not what. Blantyre was still her husband,

and he might return--and return still less a man than when he deserted

her those sad long years ago. Also, she wanted to see Jigger, because

of his sister Lou, whose friendless beauty, so primitively set, whose

transparent honesty appealed to her quick, generous impulses. Last of

all she wanted to see Adrian in the surroundings and influences where

his days had been constantly spent during the past three years.

Never before had she had the curiosity to do so. Adrian had, however,

deftly but clearly tried to dissuade her from coming to Glencader, and

his reasons were so new and unconvincing that, for the first time,--she

had a nature of strange trustfulness once her faith was given--a vague

suspicion concerning Adrian perplexed and troubled her. His letter had

arrived some hours after Jasmine's, and then her answer was

immediate--she would accept. Adrian heard of the acceptance first

through Jasmine, to whom he had spoken of his long "acquaintance" with

the great singer.

From Byng's look, as they moved towards the hall, Adrian gathered that

rumour had reached a quarter where he had much at stake; but it did not

occur to him that this would be to his disadvantage. Byng was a man of

the world. Besides, he had his own reasons for feeling no particular

fear where Byng was concerned. His glance ran from Byng's face to that

of Jasmine; but, though her eyes met his, there was nothing behind her

glance which had to do with Al'mah.

In the great hall whose windows looked out on a lovely, sunny valley

still as green as summer, the rest of the house-party were gathered,

and Jigger's visitors were at once surrounded.

Among the visitors were Alice, Countess of Tynemouth, also the

Slavonian ambassador, whose extremely pale face, stooping shoulders,

and bald head with the hair carefully brushed over from each side in a

vain attempt to cover the baldness, made him seem older than he really

was. Count Landrassy had lived his life in many capitals up to the

limit of his vitality, and was still covetous of notice from the sex

who had, in a checkered career, given him much pleasure, and had

provided him with far more anxiety. But he was almost uncannily able

and astute, as every man found who entered the arena of diplomacy to

treat with him or circumvent him. Suavity, with an attendant mordant

wit, and a mastery of tactics unfamiliar to the minds and capacities of

Englishmen, made him a great factor in the wide world of haute

politique; but it also drew upon him a wealth of secret hatred and

outward attention. His follies were lashed by the tongues of virtue and

of slander; but his abilities gave him a commanding place in the arena

of international politics.

As Byng and his party approached, the eyes of the ambassador and of

Lady Tynemouth were directed towards Ian Stafford. The glance of the

former was ironical and a little sardonic. He had lately been deeply

engaged in checkmating the singularly skilful and cleverly devised

negotiations by which England was to gain a powerful advantage in

Europe, the full significance of which even he had not yet pierced.

This he knew, but what he apprehended with the instinct of an almost

scientific sense became unduly important to his mind. The author of the

profoundly planned international scheme was this young man, who had

already made the chancelleries of Europe sit up and look about them in

dismay; for its activities were like those of underground wires; and

every area of diplomacy, the nearest, the most remote, was mined and

primed, so that each embassy played its part with almost startling

effect. Tibet and Persia were not too far, and France was not too near

to prevent the incalculably smooth working of a striking and

far-reaching political move. It was the kind of thing that England's

Prime Minister, with his extraordinary frankness, with his equally

extraordinary secretiveness, insight and immobility, delighted in; and

Slavonia and its ambassador knew, as an American high in place had

colloquially said, "that they were up against a proposition which would

take some moving."

The scheme had taken some moving. But it had not yet succeeded; and if

M. Mennaval, the ambassador of Moravia, influenced by Count Landrassy,

pursued his present tactics on behalf of his government, Ian Stafford's

coup would never be made, and he would have to rise to fame in

diplomacy by slower processes. It was the daily business of the

Slavonian ambassador to see that M. Mennaval of Moravia was not

captured either by tactics, by smooth words, or all those arts which

lay beneath the outward simplicity of Ian Stafford and of those who

worked with him.

With England on the verge of war, the outcome of the negotiations was a

matter of vital importance. It might mean the very question of

England's existence as an empire. England in a conflict with South

Africa, the hour long desired by more than one country, in which she

would be occupied to the limit of her capacity, with resources taxed to

the utmost, army inadequate, and military affairs in confusion, would

come, and with it the opportunity to bring the Titan to her knees. This

diplomatic scheme of Ian Stafford, however, would prevent the worst in

any case, and even in the disasters of war, would be working out

advantages which, after the war was done, would give England many

friends and fewer enemies, give her treaties and new territory, and set

her higher than she was now by a political metre.

Count Landrassy had thought at first, when Ian Stafford came to

Glencader, that this meeting had been purposely arranged; but through

Byng's frankness and ingenuous explanations he saw that he was

mistaken. The two subtle and combating diplomats had not yet conversed

save in a general way by the smoking-room fire.

Lady Tynemouth's eyes fell on Ian with a different meaning. His coming

to Glencader had been a surprise to her. He had accepted an invitation

to visit her in another week, and she had only come to know later of

the chance meeting of Ian and Jasmine in London, and the subsequent

accident to Jigger which had brought Ian down to Wales. The man who had

saved her life on her wedding journey, and whose walls were still

garish with the red parasol which had nearly been her death, had a

place quite his own in her consideration. She had, of course, known of

his old infatuation for Jasmine, though she did not know all; and she

knew also that he had put Jasmine out of his life completely when she

married Byng; which was not a source of regret to her. She had written

him about Jasmine, again and again,--of what she did and what the world

said--and his replies had been as casual and as careless as the most

jealous woman could desire; though she was not consciously jealous,

and, of course, had no right to be.

She saw no harm in having a man as a friend on a basis of intimacy

which drew the line at any possibility of divorce-court proceedings.

Inside this line she frankly insisted on latitude, and Tynemouth gave

it to her without thought or anxiety. He was too fond of outdoor life,

of racing and hunting and shooting and polo and travel, to have his eye

unnerved by any such foolishness as jealousy.

"Play the game--play the game, Alice, and so will I, and the rest of

the world be hanged!" was what Tynemouth had said to his wife; and it

would not have occurred to him to suspect Stafford, or to read one of

his letters to Lady Tynemouth. He had no literary gifts; in truth, he

had no "culture," and he looked upon his wife's and Stafford's interest

in literature and art as a game of mystery he had never learned.

Inconsequent he thought it in his secret mind, but played by nice,

clever, possible, "livable" people; and, therefore, not to be

pooh-poohed openly or kicked out of the way. Besides, it "gave Alice

something to do, and prevented her from being lonely--and all that kind

of thing."

Thus it was that Lady Tynemouth, who had played the game all round

according to her lights, and thought no harm of what she did, or of her

weakness for Ian Stafford--of her open and rather gushing friendship

for him--had an almost honest dislike to seeing him brought into close

relations again with the woman who had dishonourably treated him.

Perhaps she wanted his friendship wholly for herself; but that selfish

consideration did not overshadow the feeling that Jasmine had cheated

at cards, as it were; and that Ian ought not to be compelled to play

with her again.

"But men, even the strongest, are so weak," she had said to Tynemouth

concerning it, and he had said in reply, "And the weakest are so

strong--sometimes."

At which she had pulled his shoulder, and had said with a delighted

laugh, "Tynie, if you say clever things like that I'll fall in love

with you."

To which he had replied: "Now, don't take advantage of a moment's

aberration, Alice; and for Heaven's sake don't fall in love wiv me" (he

made a v of a th, like Jigger). "I couldn't go to Uganda if you did."

To which she had responded, "Dear me, are you going to Uganda?" and was

told with a nod that next month he would be gone. This conversation had

occurred on the day of their arrival at Glencader; and henceforth Alice

had forcibly monopolized Stafford whenever and wherever possible. So

far, it had not been difficult, because Jasmine had, not

ostentatiously, avoided being often with Stafford. It seemed to Jasmine

that she must not see much of him alone. Still there was some new cause

to provoke his interest and draw him to herself. The Jigger episode had

done much, had altered the latitudes of their association, but the

perihelion of their natures was still far off; and she was

apprehensive, watchful, and anxious.

This afternoon, however, she felt that she must talk with him. Waiting

and watching were a new discipline for her, and she was not yet the

child of self-denial. Fate, if there be such a thing, favoured her,

however, for as they drew near to the fireplace where the ambassador

and Alice Tynemouth and her husband stood, Krool entered, came forward

to Byng, and spoke in a low tone to him.

A minute afterward, Byng said to them all: "Well, I'm sorry, but I'm

afraid we can't carry out our plans for the afternoon. There's trouble

again at the mine, and I am needed, or they think I am. So I must go

there--and alone, I'm sorry to say; not with you all, as I had hoped.

Jasmine, you must plan the afternoon. The carriages are ready. There's

the Glen o' Smiling, well worth seeing, and the Murderer's Leap, and

Lover's Land--something for all tastes," he added, with a dry note to

his voice.

"Take care of yourself, Ruddy man," Jasmine said, as he left them

hurriedly, with an affectionate pinch of her arm. "I don't like these

mining troubles," she added to the others, and proceeded to arrange the

afternoon.

She did it so deftly that she and Ian and Adrian Fellowes were the only

ones left behind out of a party of twelve. She had found it impossible

to go on any of the excursions, because she must stay and welcome

Al'mah. She meant to drive to the station herself, she said. Adrian

stayed behind because he must superintend the arrangements of the

ball-room for the evening, or so he said; and Ian Stafford stayed

because he had letters to write--ostensibly; for he actually meant to

go and sit with Jigger, and to send a code message to the Prime

Minister, from whom he had had inquiries that morning.

When the others had gone, the three stood for a moment silent in the

hall, then Adrian said to Jasmine, "Will you give me a moment in the

ball-room about those arrangements?"

Jasmine glanced out of the corner of her eye at Ian. He showed no sign

that he wanted her to remain. A shadow crossed her face, but she

laughingly asked him if he would come also.

"If you don't mind--!" he said, shaking his head in negation; but he

walked with them part of the way to the ball-room, and left them at the

corridor leading to his own little sitting-room.

A few minutes later, as Jasmine stood alone at a window looking down

into the great stone quadrangle, she saw him crossing toward the

servants' quarters.

"He is going to Jigger," she said, her heart beating faster. "Oh, but

he is 'the best ever,'" she added, repeating Lou's words--"the best

ever!"

Her eye brightened with intention. She ran down the corridor, and

presently made her way to the housekeeper's room.

CHAPTER XII

THE KEY IN THE LOCK

A quarter of an hour later Jasmine softly opened the door of the room

where Jigger lay, and looked in. The nurse stood at the foot of the

bed, listening to talk between Jigger and Ian, the like of which she

had never heard. She was smiling, for Jigger was original, to say the

least of it, and he had a strange, innocent, yet wise philosophy. Ian

sat with his elbows on his knees, hands clasped, leaning towards the

gallant little sufferer, talking like a boy to a boy, and getting

revelations of life of which he had never even dreamed.

Jasmine entered with a little tray in one hand, bearing a bowl of

delicate broth, while under an arm was a puzzle-box, which was one of

the relics of a certain house-party in which a great many smart people

played at the simple life, and sought to find a new sensation in making

believe they were the village rector's brood of innocents. She was

dressed in a gown almost as simple in make as that of the nurse, but of

exquisite material--the soft green velvet which she had worn when she

met Ian in the sweetshop in Regent Street. Her hair was a perfect gold,

wavy and glistening and prettily fine, and her eyes were shining--so

blue, so deep, so alluring.

The boy saw her first, and his eyes grew bigger with welcome and

interest.

"It's her--me lydy," he said with a happy gasp, for she seemed to him

like a being from another sphere. When she came near him the faint,

delicious perfume exhaling from her garments was like those

flower-gardens and scented fields to which he had once been sent for a

holiday by some philanthropic society.

Ian rose as the nurse came forward quickly to relieve Jasmine of the

tray and the box. His first glance was enigmatical--almost

suspicious--then, as he saw the radiance in her face and the burden she

carried, a new light came into his eyes. In this episode of Jigger she

had shown all that gentle charm, sympathy, and human feeling which he

had once believed belonged so much to her. It seemed to him in the old

days that at heart she was simple, generous, and capable of the best

feelings of woman, and of living up to them; and there began to grow at

the back of his mind now the thought that she had been carried away by

a great temptation--the glitter and show of power and all that gold can

buy, and a large circle for the skirts of woman's pride and vanity. If

she had married him instead of Byng, they would now be living in a

small house in Curzon Street, or some such fashionable quarter, with

just enough to enable them to keep their end up with people who had

five thousand a year--with no box at the opera, or house in the

country, or any of the great luxuries, and with a thriving nursery

which would be a promise of future expense--if she had married him! ...

A kinder, gentler spirit was suddenly awake in him, and he did not

despise her quite so much. On her part, she saw him coming nearer, as,

standing in the door of a cottage in a valley, one sees trailing over

the distant hills, with the light behind, a welcome and beloved figure

with face turned towards the home in the green glade.

A smile came to his lips, as suspicion stole away ashamed, and he said:

"This will not do. Jigger will be spoiled. We shall have to see Mr.

Mappin about it."

As she yielded to him the puzzle-box, which she had refused to the

nurse, she said: "And pray who sets the example? I am a very imitative

person. Besides, I asked Mr. Mappin about the broth, so it's all right;

and Jigger will want the puzzle-box when you are not here," she added,

quizzically.

"Diversion or continuity?" he asked, with a laugh, as she held the bowl

of soup to Jigger's lips. At this point the nurse had discreetly left

the room.

"Continuity, of course," she replied. "All diplomatists are puzzles,

some without solution."

"Who said I was a diplomatist?" he asked, lightly.

"Don't think that I'm guilty of the slander," she rejoined. "It was the

Moravian ambassador who first suggested that what you were by

profession you were by nature."

Jasmine felt Ian hold his breath for a moment, then he said in a low

tone, "M. Mennaval--you know him well?"

She did not look towards him, but she was conscious that he was eying

her intently. She put aside the bowl, and began to adjust Jigger's

pillow with deft fingers, while the lad watched her with a worship

worth any money to one attacked by ennui and stale with purchased

pleasures.

"I know him well--yes, quite well," she replied. "He comes sometimes of

an afternoon, and if he had more time--or if I had--he would no doubt

come oftener. But time is the most valuable thing I have, and I have

less of it than anything else."

"A diminishing capital, too," he returned with a laugh; while his mind

was suddenly alert to an idea which had flown into his vision, though

its full significance did not possess him yet.

"The Moravian ambassador is not very busy," he added with an undertone

of meaning.

"Perhaps; but I am," she answered with like meaning, and looked him in

the eyes, steadily, serenely, determinedly. All at once there had

opened out before her a great possibility. Both from the Count

Landrassy and from the Moravian ambassador she had had hints of some

deep, international scheme of which Ian Stafford was the

engineer-in-chief, though she did not know definitely what it was. Both

ambassadors had paid their court to her, each in a different way, and

M. Mennaval would have been as pertinacious as he was vain and somewhat

weak (albeit secretive, too, with the feminine instinct so strong in

him) if she had not checked him at all points. From what Count

Landrassy had said, it would appear that Ian Stafford's future hung in

the balance--dependent upon the success of his great diplomatic scheme.

Could she help Ian? Could she help him? Had the time come when she

could pay her debt, the price of ransom from the captivity in which he

held her true and secret character? It had been vaguely in her mind

before; but now, standing beside Jigger's bed, with the lad's feverish

hand in hers, there spread out before her a vision of a lien lifted, of

an ugly debt redeemed, of freedom from this man's scorn. If she could

do some great service for him, would not that wipe out the unsettled

claim? If she could help to give him success, would not that, in the

end, be more to him than herself? For she would soon fade, the dust

would soon gather over her perished youth and beauty; but his success

would live on, ever freshening in his sight, rising through long years

to a great height, and remaining fixed and exalted. With a great belief

she believed in him and what he could do. He was a Sisyphus who could

and would roll the-huge stone to the top of the hill--and ever with

easier power.

The old touch of romance and imagination which had been the governing

forces of her grandfather's life, the passion of an idea, however

essentially false and meretricious and perilous to all that was worth

while keeping in life, set her pulses beating now. As a child her

pulses used to beat so when she had planned with her good-for-nothing

brother some small escapade looming immense in the horizon of her

enjoyment. She had ever distorted or inflamed the facts of life by an

overheated fancy, by the spirit of romance, by a gift--or curse--of

imagination, which had given her also dark visions of a miserable end,

of a clouded and piteous close to her brief journey. "I am

doomed--doomed," had been her agonized cry that day before Ian Stafford

went away three years ago, and the echo of that cry was often in her

heart, waking and sleeping. It had come upon her the night when Rudyard

reeled, intoxicated, up the staircase. She had the penalties of her

temperament shadowing her footsteps always, dimming the radiance which

broke forth for long periods, and made her so rare and wonderful a

figure in her world. She was so young, and so exquisite, that Fate

seemed harsh and cruel in darkening her vision, making pitfalls for her

feet.

Could she help him? Had her moment come when she could force him to

smother his scorn and wait at her door for bounty? She would make the

effort to know.

"But, yes, I am very busy," she repeated. "I have little interest in

Moravia--which is fortunate; for I could not find the time to study it."

"If you had interest in Moravia, you would find the time with little

difficulty," he answered, lightly, yet thinking ironically that he

himself had given much time and study to Moravia, and so far had not

got much return out of it. Moravia was the crux of his diplomacy.

Everything depended on it; but Landrassy, the Slavonian ambassador, had

checkmated him at every move towards the final victory.

"It is not a study I would undertake con amore," she said, smiling down

at Jigger, who watched her with sharp yet docile eyes. Then, suddenly

turning towards him again, she said:

"But you are interested in Moravia--do you find it worth the time?"

"Did Count Landrassy tell you that?" he asked.

"And also the ambassador for Moravia; but only in the vaguest and least

consequential way," she replied.

She regarded him steadfastly. "It is only just now--is it a kind of

telepathy'--that I seem to get a message from what we used to call the

power-house, that you are deeply interested in Moravia and Slavonia.

Little things which have been said seem to have new meaning now, and I

feel"--she smiled significantly--"that I am standing on the brink of

some great happening, and only a big secret, like a cloud, prevents me

from seeing it, realizing it. Is it so?" she added, in a low voice.

He regarded her intently. His look held hers. It would seem as though

he tried to read the depths of her soul; as though he was asking if

what had once proved so false could in the end prove true; for it came

to him with sudden force, with sure conviction, that she could help him

as no one else could; that at this critical moment, when he was

trembling between success and failure, her secret influence might be

the one reinforcement necessary to conduct him to victory. Greater and

better men than himself had used women to further their vast purposes;

could one despise any human agency, so long as it was not

dishonourable, in the carrying out of great schemes?

It was for Britain--for her ultimate good, for the honour and glory of

the Empire, for the betterment of the position of all men of his race

in all the world, their prestige, their prosperity, their patriotism;

and no agency should be despised. He knew so well what powers of

intrigue had been used against him, by the embassy of Slavonia and

those of other countries. His own methods had been simple and direct;

only the scheme itself being intricate, complicated, and reaching

further than any diplomatist, except his own Prime Minister, had

dreamed. If carried, it would recast the international position in the

Orient, necessitating new adjustments in Europe, with cession of

territory and gifts for gifts in the way of commercial treaties and the

settlement of outstanding difficulties.

His key, if it could be made to turn in the lock, would open the door

to possibilities of prodigious consequence.

He had been three years at work, and the end must come soon. The crisis

was near. A game can only be played for a given time, then it works

itself out, and a new one must take its place. His top was spinning

hard, but already the force of the gyration was failing, and he must

presently make his exit with what the Prime Minister called his Patent,

or turn the key in the lock and enter upon his kingdom. In three

months--in two months--in one month--it might be too late, for war was

coming; and war would destroy his plans, if they were not fulfilled

now. Everything must be done before war came, or be forever abandoned.

This beautiful being before him could help him. She had brains, she was

skilful, inventive, supple, ardent, yet intellectually discreet. She

had as much as told him that the ambassador of Moravia had paid her the

compliment of admiring her with some ardour. It would not grieve him to

see her make a fool and a tool of the impressionable yet adroit

diplomatist, whose vanity was matched by his unreliability, and who had

a passion for philandering--unlike Count Landrassy, who had no

inclination to philander, who carried his citadels by direct attack in

great force. Yes, Jasmine could help him, and, as in the dead years

when it seemed that she would be the courier star of his existence,

they understood each other without words.

"It is so," he said at last, in a low voice, his eyes still regarding

her with almost painful intensity.

"Do you trust me--now--again?" she asked, a tremor in her voice and her

small hand clasping ever and ever tighter the fingers of the lad, whose

eyes watched her with such dog-like adoration.

A mournful smile stole to his lips--and stayed. "Come where we can be

quiet and I will tell you all," he said. "You can help me, maybe."

"I will help you," she said, firmly, as the nurse entered the room

again and, approaching the bed, said, "I think he ought to sleep now";

and forthwith proceeded to make Jigger comfortable.

When Stafford bade Jigger good-bye, the lad said: "I wish I could 'ear

the singing to-night, y'r gryce. I mean the primmer donner. Lou says

she's a fair wonder."

"We will open your window," Jasmine said, gently. "The ball-room is

just across the quadrangle, and you will be able to hear perfectly."

"Thank you, me lydy," he answered, gratefully, and his eyes closed.

"Come," said Jasmine to Stafford. "I will take you where we can talk

undisturbed."

They passed out, and both were silent as they threaded the corridors

and hallways; but in Jasmine's face was a light of exaltation and of

secret triumph.

"We must give Jigger a good start in life," she said, softly, as they

entered her sitting-room. Jigger had broken down many barriers between

her and the man who, a week ago, had been eternities distant from her.

"He's worth a lot of thought," Ian answered, as the pleasant room

enveloped him, and they seated themselves on a big couch before the

fire.

Again there was a long silence; then, not looking at her, but gazing

into the fire, Ian Stafford slowly unfolded the wide and wonderful

enterprise of diplomacy in which his genius was employed. She listened

with strained attention, but without moving. Her eyes were fixed on his

face, and once, as the proposed meaning of the scheme was made dear by

the turn of one illuminating phrase, she gave a low exclamation of

wonder and delight. That was all until, at last, turning to her as

though from some vision that had chained him, he saw the glow in her

eyes, the profound interest, which was like the passion of a spirit

moved to heroic undertaking. Once again it was as in the years gone

by--he trusted her, in spite of himself; in spite of himself he had now

given his very life into her hands, was making her privy to great

designs which belonged to the inner chambers of the chancelleries of

Europe.

Almost timorously, as it seemed, she put out her hand and touched his

shoulder. "It is wonderful--wonderful," she said. "I can, I will help

you. Will let you let me win back your trust--Ian?"

"I want your help, Jasmine," he replied, and stood up. "It is the last

turn of the wheel. It may be life or death to me professionally."

"It shall be life," she said, softly.

He turned slowly from her and went towards the door.

"Shall we not go for a walk," she intervened--"before I drive to the

station for Al'mah?"

He nodded, and a moment afterward they were passing along the

corridors. Suddenly, as they passed a window, Ian stopped. "I thought

Mr. Mappin went with the others to the Glen?" he said.

"He did," was the reply.

"Who is that leaving his room?" he continued, as she followed his

glance across the quadrangle. "Surely, it's Fellowes," he added.

"Yes, it looked like Mr. Fellowes," she said, with a slight frown of

wonder.

CHAPTER XIII

"I WILL NOT SING"

"I will not sing--it's no use, I will not." Al'mah's eyes were vivid

with anger, and her lips, so much the resort of humour, were set in

determination. Her words came with low vehemence.

Adrian Fellowes' hand nervously appealed to her. His voice was coaxing

and gentle.

"Al'mah, must I tell Mrs. Byng that?" he asked. "There are a hundred

people in the ball-room. Some of them have driven thirty miles to hear

you. Besides, you are bound in honour to keep your engagement."

"I am bound to keep nothing that I don't wish to keep--you understand!"

she replied, with a passionate gesture. "I am free to do what I please

with my voice and with myself. I will leave here in the morning. I sang

before dinner. That pays my board and a little over," she added, with

bitterness. "I prefer to be a paying guest. Mrs. Byng shall not be my

paying hostess."

Fellowes shrugged his shoulders, but his lips twitched with excitement.

"I don't know what has come over you, Al'mah," he said helplessly and

with an anxiety he could not disguise. "You can't do that kind of

thing. It isn't fair, it isn't straight business; from a social

standpoint, it isn't well-bred."

"Well-bred!" she retorted with a scornful laugh and a look of angry

disdain. "You once said I had the manners of Madame Sans Gene, the

washer-woman--a sickly joke, it was. Are you going to be my guide in

manners? Does breeding only consist in having clothes made in Savile

Row and eating strawberries out of season at a pound a basket?"

"I get my clothes from the Stores now, as you can see," he said, in a

desperate attempt to be humorous, for she was in a dangerous mood. Only

once before had he seen her so, and he could feel the air charged with

catastrophe. "And I'm eating humble pie in season now at nothing a

dish," he added. "I really am; and it gives me shocking indigestion."

Her face relaxed a little, for she could seldom resist any touch of

humour, but the stubborn and wilful light in her eyes remained.

"That sounds like last year's pantomime," she said, sharply, and, with

a jerk of her shoulders, turned away.

"For God's sake wait a minute, Al'mah!" he urged, desperately. "What

has upset you? What has happened? Before dinner you were yourself;

now--" he threw up his hands in despair--"Ah, my dearest, my star--"

She turned upon him savagely, and it seemed as though a storm of

passion would break upon him; but all at once she changed, came up

close to him, and looked him steadily in the eyes.

"I do not think I trust you," she said, quite quietly.

His eyes could not meet hers fairly. He felt them shrinking from her

inquisition. "You have always trusted me till now. What has happened?"

he asked, apprehensively and with husky voice.

"Nothing has happened," she replied in a low, steady voice. "Nothing.

But I seem to realize you to-night. It came to me suddenly, at dinner,

as I listened to you, as I saw you talk--I had never before seen you in

surroundings like these. But I realized you then: I had a revelation.

You need not ask me what it was. I do not know quite. I cannot tell. It

is all vague, but it is startling, and it has gone through my heart

like a knife. I tell you this, and I tell you quite calmly, that if you

prove to be what, for the first time, I have a vision you are, I shall

never look upon your face again if I can help it. If I come to know

that you are false in nature and in act, that all you have said to me

is not true, that you have degraded me--Oh," she fiercely added,

breaking off and speaking with infinite anger and scorn--"it was only

love, honest and true, however mistaken, which could make what has been

between us endurable in my eyes! What I have thought was true love, and

its true passion, helped me to forget the degradation and the secret

shame--only the absolute honesty of that love could make me forget. But

suppose I find it only imitation; suppose I see that it is only

selfishness, only horrible, ugly self-indulgence; suppose you are a man

who plays with a human soul! If I find that to be so, I tell you I

shall hate you; and I shall hate myself; but I shall hate you more--a

thousand times more."

She paused with agony and appealing, with confusion and vague horror in

her face. Her look was direct and absorbing, her eyes like wells of

sullen fire.

"Al'mah," he replied with fluttered eagerness, "let us talk of this

later--not now--later. I will answer anything--everything. I can and I

will prove to you that this is only a mad idea of yours, that--"

"No, no, no, not mad," she interrupted. "There is no madness in it. I

had a premonition before I came. It was like a cloud on my soul. It

left me when we met here, when I heard your voice again; and for a

moment I was happy. That was why I sang before dinner that song of

Lassen's, 'Thine Eyes So Blue and Tender.' But it has come back.

Something deep within me says, 'He is not true.' Something whispers,

'He is false by nature; it is not in him to be true to anything or

anybody.'"

He made an effort to carry off the situation lightly. With a great

sense of humour, she had also an infinite capacity for taking things

seriously--with an almost sensational gravity. Yet she had always

responded to his cheerful raillery when he had declined to be tragical.

He essayed the old way now.

"This is just absurd, old girl;"--she shrank--"you really are mad. Your

home is Colney Hatch or thereabouts. Why, I'm just what I always was to

you--your constant slave, your everlasting lover, and your friend. I'll

talk it all over with you later. It's impossible now. They're ready for

you in the ball-room. The accompanist is waiting. Do, do, do be

reasonable. I will see you--afterwards--late."

A determined poignant look came into her eyes. She drew still farther

away from him. "You will not, you shall not, see me 'afterwards--late.'

No, no, no; I will trust my instinct now. I am natural, I am true, I

hide nothing. I take my courage in both hands. I do not hide my head in

the sands. I have given, because I chose to give, and I made and make

no presences to myself. I answer to myself, and I do not play false

with the world or with you. Whatever I am the world can know, for I

deceive no one, and I have no fears. But you--oh, why, why is it I feel

now, suddenly, that you have the strain of the coward in you! Why it

comes to me now I do not know; but it is here"--she pressed her hand

tremblingly to her heart--"and I will not act as though it wasn't here.

I'm not of this world."

She waved a hand towards the ball-room. "I am not of the world that

lives in terror of itself. Mine is a world apart, where one acts and

lives and sings the passion and sorrows and joys of others--all unreal,

unreal. The one chance of happiness we artists have is not to act in

our own lives, but to be true--real and true. For one's own life as

well as one's work to be all grease-paint--no, no, no. I have hid all

that has been between us, because of things that have nothing to do

with fear or courage, and for your sake; but I haven't acted, or

pretended. I have not flaunted my private life, my wretched sin--"

"The sin of an angel--"

She shrank from the blatant insincerity of the words, and still more

from the tone. Why had it not all seemed insincere before?

"But I was true in all I did, and I believed you were," she continued.

"And you don't believe it now?"

"To-night I do not. What I shall feel to-morrow I cannot tell. Maybe I

shall go blind again, for women are never two days alike in their minds

or bodies." She threw up her hands with a despairing helplessness. "But

we shall not meet till to-morrow, and then I go back to London. I am

going to my room now. You may tell Mrs. Byng that I am not well enough

to sing--and indeed I am not well," she added, huskily. "I am sick at

heart with I don't know what; but I am wretched and angry and

dangerous--and bad."

Her eyes fastened his with a fateful bitterness and gloom. "Where is

Mr. Byng?" she added, sharply. "Why was he not at dinner?"

He hailed the change of idea gladly. He spoke quickly, eagerly. "He was

kept at the mine. There's trouble--a strike. He was needed. He has

great influence with the men, and the masters, too. You heard Mrs. Byng

say why he had not returned."

"No; I was thinking of other things. But I wanted--I want to see him.

When will he be back?"

"At any moment, I should think. But, Al'mah, no matter what you feel

about me, you must keep your engagement to sing here. The people in

there, a hundred of the best people of the county--"

"The best people of the county--such abject snobbery!" she retorted,

sharply. "Do you think that would influence me? You ought to know me

well enough--but that's just it, you do not know me. I realize it at

last. Listen now. I will not sing to-night, and you will go and tell

Mrs. Byng so."

Once again she turned away, but her exit was arrested by another voice,

a pleasant voice, which said:

"But just one minute, please. Mr. Fellowes is quite right.... Fellowes,

won't you go and say that Madame Al'mah will be there in five minutes?"

It was Ian Stafford. He had come at Jasmine's request to bring Al'mah,

and he had overheard her last words. He saw that there had been a

scene, and conceived that it was the kind of quarrel which could be

better arranged by a third disinterested person.

After a moment's hesitation, with an anxious yet hopeful look, Fellowes

disappeared, Al'mah's brown eyes following him with dark inquisition.

Presently she looked at Ian Stafford with a flash of malice. Did this

elegant and diplomatic person think that all he had to do was to speak,

and she would succumb to his blandishment? He should see.

He smiled, and courteously motioned her to a chair.

"You said to Mr. Fellowes that I should sing in five minutes," she

remarked maliciously and stubbornly, but she moved forward to the

chair, nevertheless.

"Yes, but there is no reason why we should not sit for three out of the

five minutes. Energy should be conserved in a tiring world."

"I have some energy to spare--the overflow," she returned with a

protesting flash of the eyes, as, however, she slowly seated herself.

"We call it power and magnetism in your case," he answered in that low,

soothing voice which had helped to quiet storms in more than one

chancellerie of Europe.... "What are you going to sing to-night?" he

added.

"I am not going to sing," she answered, nervously. "You heard what I

said to Mr. Fellowes."

"I was an unwilling eavesdropper; I heard your last words. But surely

you would not be so unoriginal, so cliche, as to say the same thing to

me that you said to Mr. Fellowes!"

His smile was winning and his humour came from a deep well. On the

instant she knew it to be real, and his easy confidence, his assumption

of dominancy had its advantage.

"I'll say it in a different way to you, but it will be the same thing.

I shall not sing to-night," she retorted, obstinately.

"Then a hundred people will go hungry to bed," he rejoined. "Hunger is

a dreadful thing--and there are only three minutes left out of the

five," he added, looking at his watch.

"I am not the baker or the butler," she replied with a smile, but her

firm lips did not soften.

He changed his tactics with adroitness. If he failed now, it would be

final. He thought he knew where she might be really vulnerable.

"Byng will be disappointed and surprised when he hears of the famine

that the prima donna has left behind her. Byng is one of the best that

ever was. He is trying to do his fellow-creatures a good turn down

there at the mine. He never did any harm that I ever heard of--and this

is his house, and these are his guests. He would, I'll stake my life,

do Al'mah a good turn if he could, even if it cost him something quite

big. He is that kind of a man. He would be hurt to know that you had

let the best people of the county be parched, when you could give them

drink."

"You said they were hungry a moment ago," she rejoined, her resolution

slowly breaking under the one influence which could have softened her.

"They would be both hungry and thirsty," he urged. "But, between

ourselves, would you like Byng to come home from a hard day's work, as

it were, and feel that things had gone wrong here while he was away on

humanity's business? Just try to imagine him having done you a

service--"

"He has done me more than one service," she interjected. "You know it

as well as I do. You were there at the opera, three years ago, when he

saved me from the flames, and since then--"

Stafford looked at his watch again with a smile. "Besides, there's a

far more important reason why you should sing to-night. I promised some

one who's been hurt badly, and who never heard you sing, that he should

hear you to-night. He is lying there now, and--"

"Jigger?" she asked, a new light in her eyes, something fleeing from

her face and leaving a strange softness behind it.

"Quite so," he replied. "That's a lad really worth singing for. He's an

original, if ever there was one. He worships you for what you have done

for his sister, Lou. I'd undergo almost any humiliation not to

disappoint Jigger. Byng would probably get over his

disappointment--he'd only feel that he hadn't been used fairly, and

he's used to that; but Jigger wouldn't sleep to-night, and it's

essential that he should. Think of how much happiness and how much pain

you can give, just by trilling a simple little song with your little

voice oh, madame la cantatrice?"

Suddenly her eyes filled with tears. She brushed them away hastily.

"I've been upset and angry and disturbed--and I don't know what," she

said, abruptly. "One of my black moods was on me. They only come once

in a blue moon; but they almost kill me when they do." ... She stopped

and looked at him steadily for a moment, the tears still in her eyes.

"You are very understanding and gentle--and sensible," she added, with

brusque frankness and cordiality. "Yes, I will sing for Rudyard Byng

and for Jigger; and a little too for a very clever diplomatist." She

gave a spasmodic laugh.

"Only half a minute left," he rejoined with gay raillery. "I said you'd

sing to them in five minutes, and you must. This way."

He offered her his arm, she took it, and in cheerful silence he hurried

her to the ball-room.

Before her first song he showed her the window which looked across to

that out of which Jigger gazed with trembling eagerness. The blinds and

curtains were up at these windows, and Jigger could see her as she sang.

Never in all her wonderful career had Al'mah sung so well--with so much

feeling and an artist's genius--not even that night of all when she

made her debut. The misery, the gloom, the bitterness of the past hour

had stirred every fibre of her being, and her voice told with thrilling

power the story of a soul.

Once after an outburst of applause from the brilliant audience, there

came a tiny echo of it from across the courtyard. It was Jigger,

enraptured by a vision of heaven and the sounds of it. Al'mah turned

towards the window with a shining face, and waved a kiss out of the

light and glory where she was, to the sufferer in the darkness. Then,

after a whispered word to the accompanist she began singing Gounod's

memorable song, "There is a Green Hill Far Away." It was not what the

audience expected; it was in strangest contrast to all that had gone

before; it brought a hush like a benediction upon the great chamber.

Her voice seemed to ache with the plaintive depth of the song, and the

soft night filled its soul with melody.

A wonderful and deep solemnity was suddenly diffused upon the assembly

of world-worn people, to most of whom the things that mattered were

those which gave them diversion. They were wont to swim with the tide

of indolence, extravagance, self-seeking, and sordid pleasure now

flowing through the hardy isles, from which had come much of the

strength of the Old World and the vision and spirit of the New World.

Why had she chosen this song? Because, all at once, as she thought of

Jigger lying there in the dark room, she had a vision of her own child

lying near to death in the grasp of pneumonia five years ago; and the

misery of that time swept over her--its rebellion, its hideous fear,

its bitter loneliness. She recalled how a woman, once a great singer,

now grown old in years as in sorrow, had sung this very song to her

then, in the hour of her direst apprehension. She sang it now to her

own dead child, and to Jigger. When she ceased, there was not a sound

save of some woman gently sobbing. Others were vainly trying to choke

back their tears.

Presently, as Al'mah stood still in the hush which was infinitely more

grateful to her than any applause, she saw Krool advancing hurriedly up

the centre aisle. He was drawn and haggard, and his eyes were sunken

and wild. Turning at the platform, he said in a strange, hollow voice:

"At the mine--an accident. The Baas he go down to save--he not come up."

With a cry Jasmine staggered to her feet. Ian Stafford was beside her

in an instant.

"The Baas--the Baas!" said Krool, insistently, painfully. "I have the

horses--come."

CHAPTER XIV

THE BAAS

There had been an explosion in the Glencader Mine, and twenty men had

been imprisoned in the stark solitude of the underground world. Or was

it that they lay dead in that vast womb of mother-earth which takes all

men of all time as they go, and absorbs them into her fruitful body, to

produce other men who will in due days return to the same great mother

to rest and be still? It mattered little whether malevolence had

planned the outrage in the mine, or whether accident alone had been

responsible; the results were the same. Wailing, woebegone women wrung

their hands, and haggard, determined men stood by with bowed heads,

ready to offer their lives to save those other lives far down below, if

so be it were possible.

The night was serene and quiet, clear and cold, with glimmering stars

and no moon, and the wide circle of the hills was drowsy with night and

darkness. All was at peace in the outer circle, but at the centre was

travail and storm and outrage and death. What nature had made

beautiful, man had made ugly by energy and all the harsh necessities of

progress. In the very heart of this exquisite and picturesque

country-side the ugly, grim life of the miner had established itself,

and had then turned an unlovely field of industrial activity into a

cock-pit of struggle between capital and labour. First, discontent, fed

by paid agitators and scarcely steadied by responsible and level-headed

labour agents and leaders; then active disturbance and threatening;

then partial strike, then minor outrages, then some foolishness on the

part of manager or man, and now tragedy darkening the field, adding

bitterness profound to the discontent and strife.

Rudyard Byng had arrived on the scene in the later stages of the

struggle, when a general strike with all its attendant miseries, its

dangers and provocations, was hovering. Many men in his own mine in

South Africa had come from this very district, and he was known to be

the most popular of all the capitalists on the Rand. His generosity to

the sick and poor of the Glencader Mine had been great, and he had

given them a hospital and a club with adequate endowment. Also, he had

been known to take part in the rough sports of the miners, and had

afterwards sat and drunk beer with them--as much as any, and carrying

it better than any.

If there was any one who could stay the strike and bring about a

settlement it was he; and it is probable he would have stayed it, had

it not been for a collision between a government official and a miners'

leader. Things had grown worse, until the day of catastrophe, when Byng

had been sent for by the leaders of both parties to the quarrel. He had

laboured hours after hour in the midst of grave unrest and threats of

violence, for some of the men had taken to drinking heavily--but

without success. Still he had stayed on, going here and there, mostly

among the men themselves, talking to them in little groups, arguing

simply with them, patiently dealing with facts and figures, quietly

showing them the economic injustice which lay behind their full

demands, and suggesting compromises.

He was received with good feeling, but in the workers' view it was

"class against class--labour against capital, the man against the

master." In their view Byng represented class, capital and master, not

man; his interests were not identical with theirs; and though some were

disposed to cheer him, the majority said he was "as good a sort as that

sort can be," but shrugged their shoulders and remained obstinate. The

most that he did during the long afternoon and evening was to prevent

the worst; until, as he sat eating a slice of ham in a miner's kitchen,

there came the explosion: the accident or crime--which, like the lances

in an angry tumour, let out the fury, enmity, and rebellion, and gave

human nature its chance again. The shock of the explosion had been

heard at Glencader, but nothing was thought of it, as there had been

much blasting in the district for days.

"There's twenty men below," said the grimy manager who had brought the

news to Byng. Together they sped towards the mine, little groups

running beside them, muttering those dark sayings which, either as

curses or laments, are painful comments on the relations of life on the

lower levels with life on the higher plateaux.

Among the volunteers to go below, Byng was of the first, and against

the appeal of the mine-manager, and of others who tried to dissuade

him, he took his place with two miners with the words:

"I know this pit better than most; and I'd rather be down there knowing

the worst, than waiting to learn it up here. I'm going; so lower away,

lads."

He had disappeared, and for a long time there was no sign; but at last

there came to the surface three of the imprisoned miners and two dead

bodies, and these were followed by others still alive; but Byng did not

come up. He remained below, leading the search, the first in the places

of danger and exploration, the last to retreat from any peril of

falling timbers or from fresh explosion. Twelve of the twenty men were

rescued. Six were dead, and their bodies were brought to the surface

and to the arms of women whose breadwinners were gone; whose husbands

or sons or brothers had been struck out into darkness without time to

strip themselves of the impedimenta of the soul. Two were left below,

and these were brothers who had married but three months before. They

were strong, buoyant men of twenty-five, with life just begun, and home

still welcome and alluring--warm-faced, bonny women to meet them at the

door, and lay the cloth, and comfort their beds, and cheer them away to

work in the morning. These four lovers had been the target for the

good-natured and half-affectionate scoffing of the whole field; for the

twins, Jabez and Jacob, were as alike as two peas, and their wives were

cousins, and were of a type in mind, body, and estate. These twin

toilers were left below, with Rudyard Byng forcing his way to the place

where they had worked. With him was one other miner of great courage

and knowledge, who had gone with other rescue parties in other

catastrophes.

It was this man who was carried to the surface when another small

explosion occurred. He brought the terrible news that Byng, the rescuer

of so many, was himself caught by falling timbers and imprisoned near a

spot where Jabez and Jacob Holyhoke were entombed.

Word had gone to Glencader, and within an hour and a half Jasmine,

Al'mah, Stafford, Lord Tynemouth, the Slavonian Ambassador, Adrian

Fellowes, Mr. Tudor Tempest and others were at the pit's mouth,

stricken by the same tragedy which had made so many widows and orphans

that night. Already two attempts had been made to descend, but they had

not been successful. Now came forward a burly and dour-looking miner,

called Brengyn, who had been down before, and had been in command. His

look was forbidding, but his face was that of a man on whom you could

rely; and his eyes had a dogged, indomitable expression. Behind him

were a dozen men, sullen and haggard, their faces showing nothing of

that pity in their hearts which drove them to risk all to save the

lives of their fellow-workers. Was it all pity and humanity? Was there

also something of that perdurable cohesion of class against class; the

powerful if often unlovely unity of faction, the shoulder-to-shoulder

combination of war; the tribal fanaticism which makes brave men out of

unpromising material? Maybe something of this element entered into the

heroism which had been displayed; but whatever the impulse or the

motive, the act and the end were the same--men's lives were in peril,

and they were risking their own to rescue them.

When Jasmine and her friends arrived, Ian Stafford addressed himself to

the groups of men at the pit's mouth, asking for news. Seeing Brengyn

approach Jasmine, he hurried over, recognizing in the stalwart miner a

leader of men.

"It's a chance in a thousand," he heard Brengyn say to Jasmine, whose

white face showed no trace of tears, and who held herself with courage.

There was something akin in the expression of her face and that of

other groups of women, silent, rigid and bitter, who stood apart, some

with children's hands clasped in theirs, facing the worst with regnant

resolution. All had that horrible quietness of despair so much more

poignant than tears and wailing. Their faces showed the weariness of

labour and an ill-nourished daily life, but there was the same look in

them as in Jasmine's. There was no class in this communion of suffering

and danger.

"Not one chance in a thousand," Brengyn added, heavily. "I know where

they are, but--"

"You think they are--dead?" Jasmine asked in a hollow voice.

"I think, alive or dead, it's all against them as goes down to bring

them out. It's more lives to be wasted."

Stafford heard, and he stepped forward. "If there's a chance in a

thousand, it's good enough for a try," he said. "If you were there, Mr.

Byng would take the chance in the thousand for you."

Brengyn looked Stafford up and down slowly. "What is it you've got to

say?" he asked, gloomily.

"I am going down, if there's anybody will lead," Stafford replied. "I

was brought up in a mining country. I know as much as most of you about

mines, and I'll make one to follow you, if you'll lead--you've been

down, I know."

Brengyn's face changed. "Mr. Byng isn't our class, he's with capital,"

he said, "but he's a man. He went down to help save men of my class,

and to any of us he's worth the risk. But how many of his own class is

taking it on?"

"I, for one," said Lord Tynemouth, stepping forward.

"I--I," answered three other men of the house-party.

Al'mah, who was standing just below Jasmine, had her eyes fixed on

Adrian Fellowes, and when Brengyn called for volunteers, her heart

almost stood still in suspense. Would Adrian volunteer?

Brengyn's look rested on Adrian for an instant, but Adrian's eyes

dropped. Brengyn had said one chance in a thousand, and Adrian said to

himself that he had never been lucky--never in all his life. At games

of chance he had always lost. Adrian was for the sure thing always.

Al'mah's face flushed with anger and shame at the thing she saw, and a

weakness came over her, as though the springs of life had been suddenly

emptied.

Brengyn once again fastened the group from Glencader with his eyes.

"There's a gentleman in danger," he said, grimly, again. "How many

gentlemen volunteer to go down--ay, there's five!" he added, as

Stafford and Tynemouth and the others once again responded.

Jasmine saw, but at first did not fully realize what was happening. But

presently she understood that there was one near, owing everything to

her husband, who had not volunteered to help to save him--on the

thousandth chance. She was stunned and stricken.

"Oh, for God's sake, go!" she said, brokenly, but not looking at Adrian

Fellowes, and with a heart torn by misery and shame.

Brengyn turned to the men behind him, the dark, determined toilers who

sustained the immortal spirit of courage and humanity on thirty

shillings a week and nine hours' work a day. "Who's for it, mates?" he

asked, roughly. "Who's going wi' me?"

Every man answered hoarsely, "Ay," and every hand went up. Brengyn's

back was on Fellowes, Al'mah, and Jasmine now. There was that which

filled the cup of trembling for Al'mah in the way he nodded to the men.

"Right, lads," he said with a stern joy in his voice. "But there's only

one of you can go, and I'll pick him. Here, Jim," he added to a small,

wiry fellow not more than five feet four in height--"here, Jim Gawley,

you're comin' wi' me, an' that's all o' you as can come. No, no," he

added, as there was loud muttering and dissent. "Jim's got no missis,

nor mother, and he's tough as leather and can squeeze in small places,

and he's all right, too, in tight corners." Now he turned to Stafford

and Tynemouth and the others. "You'll come wi' me," he said to

Stafford--"if you want. It's a bad look-out, but we'll have a try.

You'll do what I say?" he sharply asked Stafford, whose face was set.

"You know the place," Stafford answered. "I'll do what you say."

"My word goes?"

"Right. Your word goes. Let's get on."

Jasmine took a step forward with a smothered cry, but Alice Tynemouth

laid a hand on her arm.

"He'll bring Rudyard back, if it can be done," she whispered.

Stafford did not turn round. He said something in an undertone to

Tynemouth, and then, without a glance behind, strode away beside

Brengyn and Jim Gawley to the pit's mouth.

Adrian Fellowes stepped up to Tynemouth. "What do you think the chances

are?" he asked in a low tone.

"Go to--bed!" was the gruff reply of the irate peer, to whom cowardice

was the worst crime on earth, and who was enraged at being left behind.

Also he was furious because so many working-men had responded to

Brengyn's call for volunteers and Adrian Fellowes had shown the white

feather. In the obvious appeal to the comparative courage of class his

own class had suffered.

"Or go and talk to the women," he added to Fellowes. "Make 'em

comfortable. You've got a gift that way."

Turning on his heel, Lord Tynemouth hastened to the mouth of the pit

and watched the preparations for the descent.

Never was night so still; never was a sky so deeply blue, nor stars so

bright and serene. It was as though Peace had made its habitation on

the wooded hills, and a second summer had come upon the land, though

wintertime was near. Nature seemed brooding, and the generous odour of

ripened harvests came over the uplands to the watchers in the valley.

All was dark and quiet in the sky and on the hills; but in the valley

were twinkling lights and the stir and murmur of troubled life--that

sinister muttering of angry and sullen men which has struck terror to

the hearts of so many helpless victims of revolution, when it has been

the mutterings of thousands and not of a few rough, discontented

toilers. As Al'mah sat near to the entrance of the mine, wrapped in a

warm cloak, and apart from the others who watched and waited also, she

seemed to realize the agony of the problem which was being worked out

in these labour-centres where, between capital and the work of men's

hands, there was so apparent a gulf of disproportionate return.

The stillness of the night was broken now by the hoarse calls of the

men, now by the wailing of women, and Al'mah's eyes kept turning to

those places where lights were shining, which, as she knew, were houses

of death or pain. For hours she and Jasmine and Lady Tynemouth had gone

from cottage to cottage where the dead and wounded were, and had left

everywhere gifts, and the promises of gifts, in the attempt to soften

the cruelty of the blow to those whose whole life depended on the

weekly wage. Help and the pledge of help had lightened many a dark

corner that night; and an unexplainable antipathy which had suddenly

grown up in Al'mah's mind against Jasmine after her arrival at

Glencader was dissipated as the hours wore on.

Pale of face, but courageous and solicitous, Jasmine, accompanied by

Al'mah, moved among the dead and dying and the bitter and bereaved

living, with a gentle smile and a soft word or touch of the hand. Men

near to death, or suffering torture, looked gratefully at her or tried

to smile; and more than once Mr. Mappin, whose hands were kept busy and

whose skill saved more than a handful of lives that night, looked at

her in wonder.

Jasmine already had a reputation in the great social world for being of

a vain lightness, having nothing of that devotion to good works which

Mr. Mappin had seen so often on those high levels where the rich and

the aristocratic lived. There was, then, more than beauty and wit and

great social gift, gaiety and charm, in this delicate personality? Yes,

there was something good and sound in her, after all. Her husband's

life was in infinite danger,--had not Brengyn said that his chances

were only one in a thousand?--death stared her savagely in the face;

yet she bore herself as calmly as those women who could not afford the

luxury of tears or the self-indulgence of a despairing indolence; to

whom tragedy was but a whip of scorpions to drive them into action. How

well they all behaved, these society butterflies--Jasmine, Lady

Tynemouth, and the others! But what a wonderful motherliness and

impulsive sympathy steadied by common sense did Al'mah the

singing-woman show!

Her instinct was infallible, her knowledge of how these poor people

felt was intuitive, and her great-heartedness was to be seen in every

motion, heard in every tone of her voice. If she had not had this work

of charity to do, she felt she would have gone shrieking through the

valley, as, this very midnight, she had seen a girl with streaming hair

and bare breast go crying through the streets, and on up the hills to

the deep woods, insane with grief and woe.

Her head throbbed. She felt as though she also could tear the coverings

from her own bosom to let out the fever which was there; for in her

life she had loved two men who had trampled on her self-respect, had

shattered all her pride of life, had made her ashamed to look the world

in the face. Blantyre, her husband, had been despicable and cruel, a

liar and a deserter; and to-night she had seen the man to whom she had

given all that was left of her heart and faith disgrace himself and his

class before the world by a cowardice which no woman could forgive.

Adrian Fellowes had gone back to Glencader to do necessary things, to

prepare the household for any emergency; and she was grateful for the

respite. If she had been thrown with him in the desperate mood of the

moment, she would have lost her self-control. Happily, fate had taken

him away for a few hours; and who could tell what might not happen in a

few hours? Meanwhile, there was humanity's work to be done.

About four o'clock in the morning, when she came out from a cottage

where she had assisted Mr. Mappin in a painful and dangerous operation,

she stood for a moment in reverie, looking up at the hills, whose peace

had been shrilly broken a few hours before by that distracted waif of

the world, fleeing from the pain of life.

An ample star of rare brilliancy came stealing up over the trees

against the sky-line, twinkling and brimming with light.

"No," she said, as though in reply to an inner voice, "there's nothing

for me--nothing. I have missed it all." Her hands clasped her breast in

pain, and she threw her face upwards. But the light of the star caught

her eyes, and her hands ceased to tremble. A strange quietness stole

over her.

"My child, my lost beloved child," she whispered.

Her eyes swam with tears now, the lines of pain at her mouth relaxed,

the dark look in her eyes stole away. She watched the star with

sorrowful eyes. "How much misery does it see!" she said. Suddenly, she

thought of Rudyard Byng. "He saved my life," she murmured. "I owe

him--ah, Adrian might have paid the debt!" she cried, in pain. "If he

had only been a man to-night--"

At that moment there came a loud noise up the valley from the pit's

mouth--a great shouting. An instant later two figures ran past her. One

was Jasmine, the other was a heavy-footed miner. Gathering her cloak

around her Al'mah sped after them.

A huddled group at the pit's mouth, and men and women running toward

it; a sharp voice of command, and the crowd falling back, making way

for men who carried limp bodies past; then suddenly, out of wild

murmurs and calls, a cry of victory like the call of a muezzin from the

tower of a mosque--a resonant monotony, in which a dominant principle

cries.

A Welsh preaching hillman, carried away by the triumph of the moment,

gave the great tragedy the bugle-note of human joy and pride.

Ian Stafford and Brengyn and Jim Gawley had conquered. The limp bodies

carried past Al'mah were not dead. They were living, breathing men whom

fresh air and a surgeon's aid would soon restore. Two of them were the

young men with the bonny wives who now with murmured endearments

grasped their cold hands. Behind these two was carried Rudyard Byng,

who could command the less certain concentration of a heart. The men

whom Rudyard had gone to save could control a greater wealth, a more

precious thing than anything he had. The boundaries of the interests of

these workers were limited, but their souls were commingled with other

souls bound to them by the formalities; and every minute of their days,

every atom of their forces, were moving round one light, the light upon

the hearthstone. These men were carried ahead of Byng now, as though by

the ritual of nature taking their rightful place in life's procession

before him.

Something of what the working-women felt possessed Jasmine, but it was

an impulse born of the moment, a flood of feeling begotten by the

tragedy. It had in it more of remorse than aught else; it was, in part,

the agitation of a soul surprised into revelation. Yet there was, too,

a strange, deep, undefined pity welling up in her heart,--pity for

Rudyard, and because of what she did not say directly even to her own

soul. But pity was there, with also a sense of inevitableness, of the

continuance of things which she was too weak to alter.

Like the two women of the people ahead, she held Rudyard's hand, as she

walked beside him, till he was carried into the manager's office near

by. She was conscious that on the other side of Rudyard was a tall

figure that staggered and swayed as it moved on, and that two dark eyes

were turned towards her ever and anon.

Into those eyes she had looked but once since the rescue, but all that

was necessary of gratitude was said in that one glance: "You have saved

Rudyard--you, Ian," it said.

With Al'mah it was different. In the light of the open door of the

manager's office, she looked into Ian Stafford's face. "He saved my

life, you remember," she said; "and you have saved his. I love you."

"I love you!" Greatness of heart was speaking, not a woman's emotions.

The love she meant was of the sort which brings no darkness in its

train. Men and women can speak of it without casting down their eyes or

feeling a flush in their cheeks.

To him came also the two women whose husbands, Jacob and Jabez, were

restored to them.

"Man, we luv ye," one said, and the other laid a hand on his breast and

nodded assent, adding, "Ay, we luv ye."

That was all; but greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down

his life for his friend--and for his enemies, maybe. Enemies these two

rescued men were in one sense--young socialists--enemies to the present

social order, with faces set against the capitalist and the aristocrat

and the landlord; yet in the crisis of life dipping their hands in the

same dish, drinking from the same cup, moved by the same sense of

elementary justice, pity, courage, and love.

"Man, we luv ye!" And the women turned away to their own--to their

capital, which in the slump of Fate had suffered no loss. It was

theirs, complete and paying large dividends.

To the crowd, Brengyn, with gruff sincerity, said, loudly: "Jim Gawley,

he done as I knowed he'd do. He done his best, and he done it prime. We

couldn't ha' got on wi'out him. But first there was Mr. Byng as had

sense and knowledge more than any; an' he couldn't be denied; an' there

was Mr. Stafford--him--" pointing to Ian, who, with misty eyes, was

watching the women go back to their men. "He done his bit better nor

any of us. And Mr. Byng and Jacob and Jabez, they can thank their stars

that Mr. Stafford done his bit. Jim's all right an' I done my duty, I

hope, but these two that ain't of us, they done more--Mr. Byng and Mr.

Stafford. Here's three cheers, lads--no, this ain't a time for

cheerin'; but ye all ha' got hands."

His hand caught Ian's with the grip of that brotherhood which is as old

as Adam, and the hand of miner after miner did the same.

The strike was over--at a price too big for human calculation; but it

might have been bigger still.

Outside the open door of the manager's office Stafford watched and

waited till he saw Rudyard, with a little laugh, get slowly to his feet

and stretch his limbs heavily. Then he turned away gloomily to the

darkness of the hills. In his soul there was a depression as deep as in

that of the singing-woman.

"Al'mah had her debt to pay, and I shall have mine," he said, wearily.

BOOK III