PART I

FENELLA

_A NOVEL_

BY HENRY LONGAN STUART

_Author of "Weeping Cross"_

"NAY, MY MOTHER CRIED: BUT THEN THERE WAS

A STAR DID DANCE AND BENEATH IT

I WAS BORN"

GARDEN CITY

NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1911

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION

INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

CONTENTS

PART I

I. Morgengabe

II. Shadows Before

III. An Eclipse

IV. To Introduce Paul Ingram

V. "Sad Company"

VI. A Child Speaks the Truth

VII. Mostly Lady Anne

VIII. The Second Floor

IX. Sharland College

X. "The Way of a Maid"

XI. An Interlude

XII. Richmond Park

XIII. Find Soul--Find Sorrow

XIV. Athea Rees

XV. History of a Conversion

XVI. Hoa-haka-nana-ia

XVII. The Continental Express

XVIII. Amende Honorable

PART II

I. Financial Intelligence

II. Two Telegrams

III. In the Firelight

IV. An Affair of Outposts

V. Cicispeo

VI. The Benefit of the Doubt

VII. A Dress Rehearsal

VIII. Lady Anne's Deposition

IX. The Man at the Wheel

X. Monsieur de Valbonette

XI. "_Inextricabile Error_"

XII. A Catastrophe

XIII. New Wine--Old Bottle

XIV. Some Theories and a Way Out

XV. A Last Wish

XVI. Azrael

XVII. A Dream Comes True

XVIII. Ice to the Moon

XIX. The Wages

PART III

I. The Baths of Apollo

II. Lightning in the Fog

III. Valedictory

IV. Something Like Cloves

V. A Very Vulgar Chapter

VI. Genealogical

VII. The Waiting-Room

VIII. 'Twixt Shine and Shade

IX. Beaten at the Post

X. A Year and a Day

XI. Two Grains of Hope

PART I

I

MORGENGABE

Like the sudden, restless motion of a sleeper, a wave, marking the

tide's height, broke out of the slumberous heart of the sea, and

laid its crest low along the beach. Fenella, who had been swimming

to shore, rose in the foam, like that other woman in the morning of

the world, and began to walk slowly, wringing the salt water from her

hair, toward the bleached bathing hut that stood, by itself, under a

shoulder of the dunes. The backwash of the wave swirled past her bare

ankles as she walked. Beyond the strip of beach that it had covered

with weed and spume, the sand was hot and loose as ashes to the soles

of her feet. The noontide sun seemed to rob the earth at once of

motion, of sound, of color. It grizzled the long sharp grass with

which the sand hills were sparsely covered, quenched the red roofs of

the little cream-walled fishing village, and turned the watered lawn,

which lay at the foot of the flaunting summer hotel quarter of a mile

inland, to a level smudge of dark green. All sound was stilled--all

movement in suspense--all beauty, even, deferred. At such an hour, the

supreme of the sun's possession of the earth, none can stand, alone

and without shelter in its untempered light, and not realize that he

is intercepting an elemental force as relentless as it is impersonal.

Upon these barren, ragged edges of the earth, where the land casts

its detritus upon the sea, and the sea casts it back, transformed,

upon the land, it is felt to be what it truly is--a power that blights

as well as fosters--death no less than life. All that has its roots

firmly fastened in the soil--that has a purpose unfulfilled--fruit to

bear--pollen to sow, feels the impulse--spreads, aspires, swells, and

scatters. All that is weak or ephemeral--whose purposes are frustrated

or whose uses past, turns from that light and fervor--withers--bows its

head--wilts at the fiery challenge. To it the sun is a torch--the earth

an oven--noontide the crisis of its agony.

* * * * *

At the door of the gray bathing-hut the girl turned, and, bracing

herself, with her arms against her wet sides, to which her dark tight

bathing-dress clung sleek and shapely as its pelt to a seal, stood

for a moment looking out to sea. Her bosom rose and fell quickly, but

without any distress; her heart beat high with the sense, so rare to

women until of late, of physical powers put to the test. A mile out,

the fishing-boat to which she had swum--whose very bulwarks she had

touched--seemed to hang like some torpid bat--its claws hooked onto

the line where sea and sky met. She caught her breath at sight of the

distance she had ventured: nothing in her life, she felt, had been

pleasanter than this--to stand with the sun on her shoulders, the warm

sand over her toes, and to measure with a glance the cold, treacherous

and trackless space which, stroke by stroke, she had overcome.

Suddenly, and as though she remembered, she turned and looked inland.

High up on the dunes to her left a little black shadow spotted the

gray, reed-streaked expanse. Fenella waved one brown arm toward it, and

throwing back the wet hair from her forehead, peered anxiously under

her hand for some signal in reply. Apparently it came, for her face

changed. Something that had been almost austerity went out of it and

was replaced by a look so full of tender concern that the long-lashed

eyes and sensitive mouth seemed to brim over with it. A moment later,

and amid a charming confusion which draped the pegs and benches of

the hut, she was humming a waltz tune softly as she dressed. The

happy, interrupted melody filled the hot silence like the song of a

honey-seeking bee.

The blot upon the dunes was cast by a white sketching umbrella, lined

with green, whose long handle, spiked and jointed, was driven deep into

the loose soil. Near it, but somewhat away from the shadow, which the

southward roll of the earth was carrying farther and farther from his

shoulders, a man was sitting. He sat, with knees drawn up and with his

hands clasped across them, staring out upon the colorless ocean, over

which a slight haze was beginning to drift. A gaunt, large-framed man,

but with a physical economy in which fat had no place. The skin upon

the strong hands and lean neck was brown and loose, as though years of

exposure to a sun, fiercer and more persistent than that to which he

heedlessly bared his head now, had tanned it for all time. His hair,

thick, crisp, and grizzling at the temples, was cropped close over a

shapely head. A short beard, clipped to a point, left the shape of the

chin an open question, but his moustache was brushed away, gallantly

enough, from the upper lip, and showed all the lines of a repressed and

unhappy mouth. The prisoner, his dungeon once accepted, sets himself to

carve the record of his chagrins upon its walls; no less surely will

a soul, misunderstood and checked in its purposes, grave the tale of

its disappointments upon the prison-house of the flesh. On the face

that confronted the ocean now, infinite sadness, infinite distaste were

written plain.

He was oddly dressed, after a _bizarre_ fashion which complexity,

eager, we must suppose, for such simplifications as are within its

reach, occasionally affects. A coarse canvas smock, open at the throat,

such as fishermen wear, and dyed the color of their sails; corduroy

trousers of brown velvet, coarse gray knitted socks, that fell in

careless folds round his ankles and over the low iron-shod shoes. Under

all this uncouth parade one divined rather than saw fine linen.

Suddenly that view of the ocean in which was so little present help

was blotted out. From behind him two hands, cool and a little clammy

from prolonged immersion in salt water, were covering his eyes. Yet for

a while he did not move; possibly he felt the eclipse a grateful one.

It was not until the girl who had stolen upon him so silently shook him

gently and whispered in his ear that he took the hands from his eyes,

and, still without turning, laid them against his lips.

He might well have turned. For Fenella, one would think, would be

always worth another look. She was quite beautiful, with the precision

of color and texture that makes beauty for the artist, and sometimes,

be it said, obscures it for the general. She was pale, but not from

any retrenchment of the vital flame which burned, clear and ardent, in

her gaze--glowed in the red of her moist and tremulous mouth. Her eyes

were set full and a little far apart, and fringed with lashes that were

of an almost even length and thickness on the upper and lower lids.

Her face, broad at the temples and cheek bones, sloped to her chin

with a slight concavity of the cheeks, in which a sort of impalpable

dusk, that was not shadow, for no light killed it--nor bloom, for her

tint was colorless as a lily, and which was probably caused by the

minute and separately invisible down of the skin, seemed immanent. Her

hair, fine, abundant, and nearer black than brown, grew low and made

all manner of pretty encroachments upon the fair face. There was a

peak of it in the centre of her forehead, and two little tufts waved

near the temples which no mode of hairdressing had ever managed to

successfully include. Her neck was slight and childish--her breasts

scarcely formed, but her hips were already arched, of the true heroic

mould of woman, and the young torso soared from them with the grace and

strength of a dryad. Beyond all, face and figure possessed the precious

and indefinable quality of romance. Fenella upon the Barrière du Trône

in the livid light of a February morning--long, damp curls in which a

little powder lingers drooping upon her slender shoulders: Fenella in

_côte-hardie_ and wimple, gazing over moat and bittern-haunted

moorland from an embrasured château window of Touraine: Fenella

in robe of fine-fringed linen, her black hair crisped into spiral

ringlets, couched between the hooves of some winged monster of Babylon

or Tharshish, with the flame of banquet or sacrifice red upon her

colorless cheek. All these were imaginable.

She sank gracefully upon her knees in the yielding sand, and, putting

her hand across the man's shoulder, laid her cheek to his. The

spontaneity of the action and its tacit acceptance by her lover--for

he neither moved nor checked his reverie on its account--were eloquent

of self-surrender, and a witness also to the truth of the observation

that, in affairs of the heart, there is one who proffers love and one

who endures it. But she was over-young and over-fair to know the chill

of the unrequited kiss already.

"Are you still worrying, Paul?" she asked after a while, "still vexed

and disturbed? You needn't answer. Your forehead was all gathers and

tucks just now when I came behind you: I could feel every wrinkle. Tell

me, this minute," with playful peremptoriness; "was he anxious about

his young lady?"

"A little," her lover answered. "It's natural, isn't it?"

"But, dear, I swim so strongly," she pleaded. "There's no current when

the tide's at flood. And, oh! Paul, it was such _fun_. I swam

out to that fishing-boat you can _just--barely--see_. Look!"

and she turned the listless head with her hand; "it's over there. I

can tell you the exact number: _B759 Boulogne_. That shows I'm

not fibbing, doesn't it, Mister Ingram. I hung onto the side and

called out, '_Woilà!_' Have you ever noticed you can't say 'V'

when your mouth's full of saltiness? And the man was so scared. He

crossed himself twice, poor old soul, and his pipe nearly fell into

the sea. Can't you imagine what he'll say when he gets home '_Cette

Anglaise!--quelle effrontée!--quelle conduite!_' Now, who says I

can't speak French?--Oh! Paul; why aren't you a swimmer?"

"It wasn't quite such fun watching you," said Ingram; "the sea's such a

big thing. Why, your head looked no bigger than a pin's out on all that

water. Things happen so easily, too."

The girl felt him shiver, and tightened her hold on his shoulder.

"And you've such an imagination to plague you; haven't you, Paul? Oh

dear! Well--here's the pin sticking into you again: here's the head

back, safe and sound, light and empty as ever. Isn't it hard luck for

you?" And she laid it on his shoulder.

"Would you rather I didn't swim out so far again, Paul?" she asked

presently, in a softened voice.

"Why should I break your spirit?" the man argued, more reasonably,

perhaps, than he intended.

"Oh, but it isn't worth it if it worries you," his sweetheart said

earnestly. "Nothing's worth that, when you have so much to bear

besides. I've had my foolish way and now I promise you I'll paddle with

you, dear old muff, in two feet of water all the rest of the holidays."

Ingram turned to her now. "Nelly, I don't want to disappoint you,

but--but, there won't be any 'rest of the holidays' for us this summer."

She looked into his face; her own alarmed and pleading.

"You're not going, Paul? Oh, you promised to stay on until we all went

back together."

"I know, I know," he answered, with an impatience that was none the

less real because it was the expression of his reluctance to give pain.

Silken bonds strain at times.

"Something has happened then, since last night? What is it, dear?"

"I had a letter this morning. It had been waiting at the

'_Arrêt_.'"

"A letter at last! Oh! Paul--Why didn't you tell me? Is it good news?"

"Only a straw; but then, I'm a drowning man."

"Tell me! Tell me!" the girl insisted.

"It's from Prentice; the man you saw in Soho the night before we came

away. He's taken my MSS. to Althea Rees."

"You mean the woman who writes those queer books where every one talks

alike."

"What does it matter? The talk's all good. Anyhow, she's 'struck.'

Some one's actually struck at last. She's going to try and make her

own publishers do something. But she says she must see me first, and

Prentice thinks she's only passing through London."

Fenella's face clouded and was so far from expressing enthusiasm that

her lover looked at her rather ruefully.

"You don't seem very glad, Nelly."

Nelly kept her eyes averted. She had already taken her head from his

shoulder.

"I shouldn't care to publish anything," she declared slowly. "Not--that

way."

As though he had been waiting for her words, Paul Ingram sprang to

his feet. All his impatience and dissatisfaction seemed to boil over.

He began to pace the dunes like a caged animal, kicking the sand from

his feet and tugging fiercely at the grizzling beard that was a daily

reproach to his lack of achievement.

"That way! that way!" he repeated. "But isn't even 'that way' better

than no way at all? I tell you, Nelly, I'm discouraged, aghast, at

this conspiracy to keep a man bottled up and away from the people

for whom his message is intended. I haven't written like all these

clever--clever people; after a morning's motoring, and an afternoon

'over the stubble,' isn't that the expression?--three hours every

day, while the man is laying out the broadcloth and fine linen for a

dinner at eight. What I did was done with as much sweat and strain as

that shrimper uses down there, who's getting ready to push his net

through the sand as soon as the tide turns. And when the work is done,

between me and my public a soulless, brainless agency uprears itself

that weighs the result by exactly the same standards as it would weigh

a tooth-paste or a patent collar stud or a parlor game--as a 'quick

seller.'"

He would have said more, but Fenella was at his side, trying to reach

his lips with the only comfort the poor child had.

"Oh! Paul," she cried; "be patient just a little longer. Publish how

you can! I wasn't blaming you, dear. I only meant that--that working as

you do, it was only a question of time and you'd succeed without any

one's help. I don't feel uneasy or impatient about you."

Ingram sat down again, a little ashamed of his outburst, but his face

was still bitter.

"Just so," said he. "And it's precisely your limitless, superhuman

patience that's doing more than anything else to kill me by inches. It

would be a relief if you'd lose it sometimes, curse me--reproach me for

the failure I am. After all, how do you know all these duffers aren't

right? They're wonderfully unanimous."

Fenella sat silent for a few minutes, not resenting his words, but

racking her brain for some comforting parallel that would ring true and

not be repulsed.

"Do you remember, Paul," she said at last, "the story we read together

at Christmas about Holman Hunt? How he got so sick of the unsold

pictures hanging in his studio that he turned them all with their

faces to the wall? And yet one of those pictures was the 'Light of the

World.'"

But Ingram, even if he had an equal reverence for the work in question,

which I should doubt, was not an easy man to console. He brushed the

poor little crumb of comfort impatiently aside.

"There's no comparison at all," he declared. "A picture painted is a

picture painted. A glance can take it in, and a glance recover for

the artist all the inspiration and joy in his work that filled him

when he painted it. But what inspiration is there in a bundle of

dog-eared manuscript, that comes back to you with the persistence

of a cur you've saved from drowning? Besides, every artist worth the

name has his following, however small, who help him--flatter him

perhaps--anyhow, keep him sane. There's no unwritten law against

showing a canvas. But the unpublished author--the un-acted play

writer--is shunned like a man with the plague. Oh! don't I know it?"

Fenella gave a weary little sigh. Amid all this glorified space,

just to be alive seemed to her simple soul a thing to be deeply and

reverently thankful for. Her own blood was racing and tingling in her

veins, with the reaction from her long swim. She wanted to run, to

sing; above all, she wanted to dance. As for books, her own idea of a

book was a very concrete one, indeed. She knew that whole rooms were

filled with them, bookstalls littered by them, libraries building

everywhere to catch the overflow. She was familiar, for reasons that

will appear in their course, with the reading-room at the British

Museum. She had confronted that overwhelming fact. And yet, one book

could mean so much to this man that, for its sake, the holiday she had

so joyously planned had gone to pieces. The truth must be told. She had

to draw a rather big draft upon her love and loyalty.

"When are you going?" she asked, in a little flat voice.

"I ought to have caught the mid-day boat from Boulogne," the man

answered, with a briskness that sounded ungratefully in her ears. "But

it's too late for that to-day. There's another at six or seven. They

stop the Paris train for you here if you signal."

"Don't go till to-morrow, Paul," she urged patiently. "There's the

eclipse to-night, you know, and you promised we should watch it

together. Then we can talk things over quietly. I want--oh, I want

_so_ to help you! I have a sort of foolish plan in my own

head, but I'm afraid you'll laugh at it.... And there's poor mummy,

struggling over the sand with our luncheon. Run and help her, dear."

II

SHADOWS BEFORE

Mrs. Barbour was a comely, wholesome-looking body upon the descending

slope of fifty. Her face, like her daughter's, was of the _teint

mât_, and her homely English figure had what a flippant mind has

described as a "middle-aged spread" in its proportions. Her large

oval brooch, a cunning device in hair, proclaimed to these skilled in

rebus that without a cross there was no prospect of a crown, and a

black bonnet of low church tendencies, trimmed with little jet-tipped

tentacles that quivered and danced when she moved her head, honorably

crowned her abundant silver locks. She had declined Ingram's proffered

aid with a tenacity often to be noticed in those who have given hard

service all their lives, and as she drooped with weary finality

upon the sand, various parcels, string-bags, and small baskets were

distributed to right and left.

"Oh dear," she gasped breathlessly; "those dreadful, dreadful dunes."

"Have they tired you very much, mummy?" the girl asked concernedly, as

she unfastened the lavender bonnet-strings.

"The sand is so loose to-day with the great 'eat--_heat_." Mrs.

Barbour added the corrected version with almost lightning rapidity. One

of her peculiarities, which it is sufficient to have indicated once,

was a constant snatch at evasive aspirates. They can scarcely be said

to have really dropped; she caught them before they fell.

"No, Nelly," the good lady went on, while Ingram unravelled the

mysteries of the string-bag, and gathered driftwood for the fire.

"Here we are in France, where you've always wanted to be; but, another

year, if I'm consulted, Bognor or Westgate for me, my dear. Two hours'

comfortable travelling"--Mrs. Barbour ticked off the advantages of home

travel on her fingers one by one, and unconsciously quoted some railway

placard she had seen--"no Channel crossing, no customs, and the sea at

your door. And even when you've come all this way, no amusement, unless

you call a horrid Casino amusing, where grown men, and women who ought

to be sent home to finish dressing, make donkeys of themselves over

little lead horses."

"There's very good music there in the afternoon," Paul hazarded, who

was shaving a stick into kindling after the fashion of the Western

plains.

"Music--yes; but nothing really tuneful. Do you remember the Elite

Pierrots at Westgate, Nelly, last year, with the blue masks. That

dark-haired one, my dear, who used to sigh for the silvery moon and

cough so terribly in the intervals. Don't tell me he wasn't some one

in disguise. No! I hold to what I've said. The French don't understand

amusement."

The fire was lit, the kettle boiled, and luncheon eaten amid such

conversation as a garrulous old woman and two very preoccupied people

could contrive. Nelly was particularly silent, and had lost, besides,

what her mother was pleased to term her "sand appetite." The talk

ranged hither and thither listlessly. Paul's inability to swim, so

strange in a man who had girdled the earth, was discussed in all its

bearings till it could be borne no longer; the lurid history of Simone,

Mrs. Barbour's strapping, smiling bonne, unmarried and unmoral, was

matter for another half-hour. Followed various excursions into the

obvious, and a list of "discoveries" made that morning. Mrs. Barbour

collected facts like shells, and made some very pretty castles with

them, too, at times.

"... and Nelly, I believe I know who the two gentlemen are that you had

your adventure with yesterday."

Ingram raised his head at the two odious words very much as a horse

would do if you were to explode two fog signals under his nose in

succession; quickly enough, indeed, to intercept a warning and

reproachful glance that the girl sent her mother. Mrs. Barbour clapped

both hands playfully over her mouth. "Oh! now I _have_ done it!"

she exclaimed. Her eyes snapped with, perhaps, a shade more of malice

than a kind-hearted old lady's should ever hold. Without being a

scheming or a worldly woman, she resented a little, in her heart, the

monopoly which this man had established over her child; a man so alien

to her in thought, so sparing of speech, so remote from her ideal,

which, diffuse enough in all truth, would perhaps have found it nearest

realization just now in some florid, high-spirited lad, who would have

brought her his socks to darn and his troubles to soothe of an evening,

been "company," in a word, to the talkative, commonplace old woman. As

far as she was concerned, Ingram swallowed his disappointments, and she

rather suspected him of darning his own socks.

Fenella considered her mother for some time, though not as a resource

to evade her lover's eye.

"What a rummy way you have of putting things, mother!" she said at

last. "My 'adventure' with 'two gentlemen'!"

Paul's face was blank, like the page of a diary awaiting confidences.

Feeling herself at bay, Mrs. Barbour grew flustered and tearful.

"Well, well!" she exclaimed, waving her hands helplessly in the air.

"I'm sure I'm sorry, Nelly, since you choose to make such a mystery of

it. But what there is in it to make you both look as grave as judges,

I can't see. I'm sure that, as your mother, I'd be the first to be

offended if there was anything disrespectful."

An awkward silence followed her words, which Ingram was the first to

break.

"I think, perhaps, you'd best tell now, Nelly," he said quietly.

The girl blushed and covered her eyes for a moment with her hands.

"It's so--so _foolish_," she said, clenching them with an impatient

movement. "Oh, well, if I must, I must.... It was yesterday morning

while you were both at breakfast. I ran down, you know, to catch the

tide. After I had come out--oh, well, there wasn't a soul in sight--I

thought they would all be at breakfast at the _Grande Falaise_;

I was chilly, too, and there was a kind of tune in the sea. So, after

I'd taken off my wet bathing-suit, I threw on my kimono and began to

practise the last dance Madame de Rudder has been teaching me--you

know the one, mother, where she won't let me use my feet as much as I

want--out on the sand where it was hard. And then, like a little fool

I am, I forgot everything, until I heard some one clapping hands and

saying, 'Bravo!'--and I looked up--and there were two men on the dunes,

smoking cigars--I suppose they were coming from the golf links to the

hotel, and I don't know how long they'd been watching me, and--and,"

with sudden passion, "I just _hate_ you, Paul, for dragging it out

of me when I didn't want to tell."

And Fenella, already overwrought, hid her head in her mother's

capacious lap and had her cry out.

Mrs. Barbour stroked the dark head gently, but like the wise old mother

bird she was, made no attempt to check the burst of tears.

"Such a dancing girl she is," she murmured complacently, "and she

does hate to have it talked about so. Do you know, Mr. Ingram, I only

discovered it myself by accident, after it had been going on months and

months. Do you remember, dearie, that awful day, the first time I was

up after influenza, that Druce got the spot on her nose that the doctor

said was erysipelas, and Twyford scalded her arm and hand making a

poultice? It's the only time, I do believe, Nelly, I've ever spoken to

you crossly."

A muffled voice, "You were _horrid_, mummy."

"Well, there, I really was, Mr. Ingram. I pushed the child out of the

way and said, 'If you can't help, don't hinder. Run upstairs and play

with the other ornaments!' I didn't think any more about it, with all

that trouble on my hands, till about half an hour afterward, when down

comes Miss Rigby with her face white--you know what a coward she is,

Nelly--and in her dressing-gown, at nearly twelve! 'Do come up, Mrs.

Barbour,' she says, 'I believe Rock has gone mad in the box-room and

is dashing himself against the wall.' Oh dear! I ran upstairs with the

poker, and what do you think it was, Mr. Ingram. My own crazy child,

dancing and waving her arms about. Such a picture of fun as she looked!"

A hand was laid suddenly on her mouth, and a face, very flushed and

penitent in its tumbled dark hair, emerged from between the parental

knees.

"I'm a silly"--_sniff_--"fool"--_sniff_--said Fenella. "Paul,

gimme my hank."

Ingram passed the handkerchief across the smouldering blaze. The girl

looked at him as she blew her nose. He seemed absorbed, not angry, but

_queer_, she thought. She had never seen his face look so wan and

tired. He seemed to avoid her eyes.

"Aren't you well, Paul?" she asked at last.

Ingram seemed to shiver and then rouse himself. "I'm all right," he

said; "but I think I'll go back to the chalêt. I've got letters to

write. Isn't the sun grown pale? And I guess I've either caught cold or

some one's walking backward and forward over my grave."

They went home together, for the women would not be left behind,

taking the longer way in order to avoid the sand-hills. Along the

loose, tiring beach--dried sea waifs crackling underfoot, by the

_douane_ with its toy battery and lounging sentry; up a narrow

path that was half by-street and half flight of steps, near whose

summit a Christ flung his saving arms wide over a yellow _affiche_

of the _Courses_ at Wimereux, and into a straggling village

of low-browed houses, cream, pink, light-blue, and strong as

castles, through whose doorways leather-faced crones and tow-headed

children swarmed and tumbled. They were nearing the inn of the

_Toison d'Or_, where the new road to the hotel turns out of

the village, slowly, for Mrs. Barbour climbed with difficulty and

rejected assistance, when two men in tweed jackets, flat-capped and

flannel-trousered, swung round the corner. At their backs two shaggy

town urchins straggled along, each with an arsenal of clubs and cleeks

peeping over his shoulder. The two men raised their caps and bowed

slightly, but certainly not in response to any recognition that any of

the party accorded them. Fenella blushed and hung her head.

Paul turned sharply on his heel. "Are those the cads who stared at

you?" he asked, in a voice which he took no pains to render inaudible.

Nelly caught his arm before she answered. "Hush, dear! Yes. You're not

to be foolish," she added.

Her mother, glad of a respite, stopped and looked after them, too. She

held it a legitimate source of pride that she had always had an eye for

a fine man.

"Those _are_ the two, then," she said triumphantly, with an air

of sagacity justified. "Then, my dear, I can tell you who they are.

The short, dark one is Mr. Dreyfus--no, Dollfus--who manages the

'Dominion' in London, and the big, handsome one with the loose hair

under his cap at the back is Sir Bryan Lumsden, the millionaire, and a

_frightful_ reputation, my dear. Mrs. Lesueur told me all about

him this morning when she came in to borrow Simone for ironing."

Meantime, the two men whom they had passed turned likewise, but only

to whistle up their caddies, who, with an avidity for the "_p'tit

sou_" which would seem to be sucked in with the maternal milk in

French Flanders, were holding out claw-like hands to the family party

and more especially to Ingram, who had already acquired an unfortunate

reputation in this respect.

"What d'you make of it, Dolly?" the big man asked. "Husband?"

The Jew shook his head decisively. "No, no, my boy! She's not a marrit

woman. Relations, more likely. Eh?--ah?"

"Or lovers, likelier still. It's highly respectable, anyway. They've

got the old lady to come along. That looks as if he were French."

"I'd like to meet the liddle girl, alone," said Dollfus, fervently.

"Some dark night?--eh, Dolly!" remarked Sir Bryan, beginning to whip

the Dominion director's stout calves and thighs with the handle of the

putter he was carrying. "You're such a devil--such a devil, Dolly."

Mr. Dollfus raised a corrective hand.

"Don't mithtake my meaning, Lumpsden," he said, getting out of the

sportive baronet's long reach as quickly as was consistent with

dignity. "I only wanter tell her she's got a forchune in her feet and

legth if she'd go in training. I oughter know something about legth,

oughtn't I, old fellow. Becoth it's my bizzyness, ain't it, Lumpsden?"

"Tell the lunatic in the red shirt instead," the baronet suggested,

derisively. "She's bored, anyway. See her bat her eyelid when we bowed?

Oh yes, she did, Dolly. Just one little flicker--but I caught it.

Hullo! there's Grogan and old Moon at the tenth hole."

And, this being a world where the incredible is always happening, it is

possible that Bryan Lumsden didn't think of Fenella again that day.

III

AN ECLIPSE

Ingram took her down to the beach again that night, as he had promised,

through a sparse, pungent pine wood that by day and night seemed to

keep something of the peace of the primeval world in its coniferous

shade, and across a trackless little wilderness of sand-hills, scooped

and tortured by the earthquake storms of winter into strange, unnatural

contours, over which the moon to-night spread a carpet so white, so

deceptively level, that often they could only be guessed by the abrupt

rise or fall of the ground beneath one's feet. Rabbits popped in and

out of the earth, the sharp reeds that bind the sand barriers together

bit spitefully at the girl's tender ankles, and withered branches,

catching in her silk skirt, snapped dryly as her lover helped her

through the hedges with which the dunes are ribbed.

Although the night was cool, she was wearing the thin dress she had put

on for dinner. Over his shoulder Ingram had slung a soldier's cloak of

blue-gray cloth, long and wide, that was to cover them in to-night as

it had often covered them before. Fenella was already familiar with

its every fold--knew exactly when the rough backing of the clasp would

chafe her delicate cheek, could recall at any moment the peculiar

fragrance of cigar smoke with which the heavy frieze was impregnated,

and some other smell, stranger still, sweet, foreign and spicy, that

she could not define, but which, evanescent as it was--the very ghost

of an odor--clung obstinately to her skin and dress, and which she

loved to lie awake at night and feel exhaled from her thick hair like

some secret earnest of joy upon the morrow.

She slid her hand into the man's as they descended the slippery,

needle-carpeted path, and turned up a face to him in the darkness of

the wood that was contrite and humble as a reproved child's. She had

been a bad child, in fact; had failed in sympathy--had told him in her

passion that she hated him. Hated--him! When they had found the fire,

still smouldering, and had blown it into a blaze, she crept silently

within his arms, under the folds of the cloak, and, laying her head

upon his breast, watched the flames, creeping like fern-fronds through

the gnarled roots and sodden bleached faggots that Paul had heaped upon

it. She began to suck her thumb too: always with Fenella the sign of a

chastened spirit. The moon, serenely unconscious of the earth shadow

that was creeping upon her, made a path of crinkled glory across the

waters, straight toward them, and, like foam at the foot of a silver

cascade, the phosphorescent surf tumbled, soft and luminous, along the

shore.

"Are you warm enough?" Ingram asked presently, feeling a tremor,

perhaps, in the yielding figure that rested in his arms.

Fenella nodded her head, but she might more truly have told him that

she was cold and sick. For her the night was full of voices that

threatened her happiness. The ripple of the cold wind along dry grass

at her back, the soft thud and effervescence of the surf against

the sand, were all so many whispers telling her that her lover was

going--going to some other woman who could help him, and away from

the weak arms that only clung and hindered. She had no confidence in

herself--no belief in her own power to hold him a moment, once his

will should feel an alien attraction. The very profuseness of the

poor child's passion, its abandonment of one uninvaded reserve after

another, had been proof of this inward unrest. Let no mistake be made.

Fenella was a good girl, who could by no possibility become other than

a good woman: nevertheless it is as true as it is, perhaps, disquieting

that she might have remained at the same time happier and more maidenly

in contact with an affection less worthy and less spiritual than that

which she had encountered. For, so long as the attraction of sex for

sex, beneath all modern refinements and sophistications, remains

endowed with anything of the purpose for which nature instituted it--so

long as its repulsions are a definite distance, to be annihilated

toward a definite end, so long, if one party to the vital bargain hangs

unduly back, must the other press unduly forward.

She was silent so long that Ingram put out his hand, and, touching her

cheek, found it wet.

"You're crying!" he exclaimed sharply.

"I'm n-not," Fenella protested unevenly, and even as she spoke the

great drops splashed down on his hand.

"Nelly, look up! Do you love me as much as you say?"

"Oh, my heart!--my heart!" she sobbed, covering his mouth with kisses,

salt as the sea. And while she kissed him he was making a mental note

that women were unduly robust on the emotional side.

"If you do," said he, "you'll stop crying--at once."

He spoke so sternly that the girl clenched her hands and struggled and

fought with her sorrow.

"That's better," he said, when, by dint of swallowing her tears, she

was, outwardly at least, a little calmer. "I'm sorry if I spoke harshly

just now," he went on; "but everybody has a last straw. A woman crying

seems to be mine. It--it strains my heart."

"Do you think _I_ like it any better?" his sweetheart asked,

desperately.

"I suppose," he hazarded, with a shyness that was almost grotesque,

"it's because I'm going to-morrow."

"Oh yes, dear, yes," the girl told him, eagerly seeking relief in

words since tears were forbidden her. "Oh, Paul! how I shall miss

you! You don't know what it's meant to me to have you living in the

same house--to even know you were sleeping near me. Darling, do you

know I've sometimes wished you _snored_ so I might hear you at

night. Don't stop me, love!" she went on, buttoning and unbuttoning

his coat with nervous fingers. "Let me confess my full shamelessness.

I've even helped Simone do your room sometimes in the morning. You're

not shocked--are you? Oh! you _are_," she cried piteously, drawing

away from his arm. "You think me unmaidenly. But I can't _help_

it, love; I can't _help_ it. Don't you see? You are you. It's

different to all the rest of the world."

Ingram's chest rose and fell unevenly beneath her cheek. She could not

but perceive his distress.

"Listen, Nelly," he said huskily. "Don't cry again; but--but perhaps

it's a good thing for you I am going away for a while. Things are so

unsettled, and it may help you--get you used, supposing the worst

happens, to the _idea_. There's so much in custom--in habit."

"Paul!" she cried once, and grew rigid in his arms. It was a death-cry,

and he flinched. Who has struck at life and not drawn the blade away

quicker because the first blow went home.

"Nelly, I'm not young."

"I don't care if you were sixty--seventy." Fenella was not crying now,

but fighting for her love like the brave little girl she was.

"I'm a man without home, or country, or friends."

"I'm not a baby. I'll go with you wherever you like. We'll make them

for ourselves, together."

"And I'm deadly poor."

"I'll lend you money, Paul. How much do you want? I've seventy pounds

in the Post-Office."

I think if I had been Ingram and had only one more kiss to give, I

would have given it her for this; but I am trying to tell the truth;

and the truth is that these futile interruptions to his hateful task

harassed and angered him. It is so much easier to confess to sin than

to failure.

"Nelly! don't interrupt me! Let me say what I have to. I'm telling

you that at thirty-seven, an age when most men have home and wife and

children and see their way clear to the end, I haven't taken the first

step upon a road that is haunted by tragedy and littered with the bones

of those who have fallen by the way."

"I'll wait for you," said poor Fenella, but no longer with the same

energy. What a gorgon head has common-sense to turn hearts of flesh to

stone!

"Yes, you'll wait for me! Spend your youth waiting for me; your middle

age--waiting. We'll save every cent; spend hours figuring out on just

how much or how little life for two can be supported. Hundreds of

people are doing that to-day who, thirty years ago, would have been

setting out, full of hope and confidence, to make money. That's a

by-product of industrial development. And, if we're lucky, just about

the time your own daughters should be telling you their love affairs,

you'll come to me and we'll crawl away together to some cottage in

Cornwall, where I'll cultivate vegetables a little, rheumatically, and

at night you'll sit opposite me by the kitchen fire--we'll call it our

'ingle-nook'--and listen to an old man babbling of his wrongs between

spoonfuls of bread and milk, with enlightening criticisms upon the

fools who succeeded where he was too clever not to fail.

"You'll think it strange, I suppose," he went on, no more interrupted

now by her sobs than by the sough of the sea; "strange that I should

wait until now, just when I've heard I'm to have the chance I've

been whining for, to realize what a phantom I've committed myself to

following. But it's not as strange as it looks. As long as there's

some petty practical obstacle in the way, mercifully or unmercifully

everything else is obscured by it. It's like a hill, hiding the desert

you'll have to cross when you've climbed to the top. Oh, Nelly! look

at the moon!"

Little by little, as the man talked and the woman paid in tears and

heartscald for the reckless passion of her first love, the portent

they had come out to watch was passing over their heads. At first it

was but a spot--a little nibble at the silver rim of the great dead,

shining orb; then a stain, that grew and spread, as though the moon

were soaking up the blackness of the sky; last it took shape and form

of the world's circumference, and for once man might watch his earth

as, maybe, from some happier but still speculative planet his earth

is watched, and idly conjecture at what precise spot upon that smooth

segmental shadow any mountain or plain, roaring city or dark tumbling

ocean that he has mapped and named, might lie. Two thousand years

ago--a day as men have learned to count time--this man and woman, who

had come out to watch the moon's eclipse for mere diversion, for an

effect of light and shade, and who, in the multiplied perplexities of

their own artificial life had even forgotten to watch it at all, would

have been lying, prone upon their faces, wailing--praying until the

ominous shadow had passed, while in the fire before them some victim

of flock and herd smoked propitiation to the threatening heavens. And

out of all the straining and striving toward knowledge of those two

thousand years--out of all the Promethean struggle wherein learning,

hot to unlearn, can but lop off one visionary beak or claw to find

itself clutched more cruelly in another, not enough wisdom reached them

now to comfort one simple, trustful heart, or to teach an intellect

that had roamed the earth to its own undoing, the primal art of

all--how to rear a roof and feed a hearth for the loving creature that

clung at his breast.

* * * * *

No! Nelly wouldn't look at the moon. She left his arms and sat apart,

bolt upright; her lithe body quivering with resolution.

"Paul Ingram," she said incisively, "I've listened patiently to you and

you'll have to listen to me. You've been prophesying woe and misery,

and now it's my turn. Shall _I_ tell _you_ what's really

going to happen?"

Hope is like measles. No one is too young or too foolish to catch it

from. In spite of himself the man's face brightened.

"Well, what's going to happen?"

"As soon as we get home I'm going to have Mme. de Rudder to tea, just

our two selves, nice and comfy, and when she's lapped up her cream and

I've stroked her down a little, I'm going to say, 'Now, Madame! For the

last two years you've been buttering me up, to my face and behind my

back, and showing me round, and if you've meant half you said' (and I

think she does, Paul, though she's such an old pussy), 'there ought to

be a living for me somewhere.' And then--oh, Paul!--I'll work and I'll

work and I'll w-o-r-k-work. I'm not sure whether I'll see you"--with

an adorable look askance--"perhaps once a week, if you're good. And,

at the end of the year, I'll bring you a nice, newly signed contract

at--oh! well, _pounds_ a week, 'cos I've got a _head_, which

you'll never have, poor dear. And then--don't stop me please--we'll get

married, and have a little flat of our own or turn ma's lodgers out,

and you'll write your mis-e-ra-ble, _mis-e-ra-ble_ books all day,"

she took his head in her hands and shook it gently from side to side;

"and at night you'll call for me and I'll go home with you, sir, in my

own dear little taxicab, all warm and cosy from dancing--and, dear, you

shall never have another money trouble or even hear the word mentioned

as long as you live. Now, what does he think of that?"

She looked closely at her lover's face and suddenly shrank away, with a

little cry, at what she saw there.

"Think of it?" Paul repeated, his nostrils quivering. "I'll soon

tell you what I think of it. That if I didn't know your words were a

mere childish fancy--if I really thought you were going to dance on

the stage in London or Paris or New York or any city I've been in, I

believe, Nelly"--he paused a moment--"yes, I believe I could bear to

take you up in my arms, now, as you are, and carry you down to that sea

and hold you under until you were dead."

Fenella moaned and covered her face with her hands. Then she jumped up.

Paul caught at her silken skirt, a momentary cold fear at his heart.

"Nelly, stop! I know I shouldn't have said that."

She disengaged herself with a swift turn. "Let me go!" she cried

angrily. "I'm not the sort of person that commits suicide. You can

drown me afterward if you like. I'm going to dance first."

"To dance?" Ingram repeated, thunderstruck. "Out here? Sit down at

once! Sit down," he pleaded in a changed voice. "Be a good child."

"I'm not a child," she cried rebelliously; "that's the mistake you're

making. And I won't be forever checked and scolded by you, Paul. I will

have some comfort. Oh, I knew you'd laugh and storm. I'm only a silly

little thing that dances and that you pet when she's good"; her eyes

flamed at him. "But it means as much to me as your books and long words

do to you."

She stopped, not because she was ashamed, but because her mouth was

inconveniently full of the pins which she was pulling from a rather

elaborate "_chevelure_." She shook her head with the usual

transforming result, kicked off her shoes, and, bending down, began to

unfasten her long silk stockings under her skirt. Paul turned away his

head, and perhaps it was as well she did not see the disgust in the

averted face.

"Sing something," she commanded, throwing the long silk stockings on

the sand and stretching her bare toes.

"I don't know anything," doggedly.

"Oh yes, you do! Sing the Algerian recruit song."

"It's too sad for you in your present mood of exaltation."

Fenella did not seem to resent the withering tone. She had drawn a

little away from the fire and was looking upward, her hands clasped

behind her neck and under her hair.

"Just to get a note," she said, dreamily.

Without quite knowing why, and in the teeth of his own shy distaste,

Ingram began to sing. He had a fine baritone voice, to be exact where

exactness is not called for, full of strength and feeling, that was

none the less tuneful because it had only been trained to the tramp

of gaitered feet along the blinding white _chaussées_ of French

Africa. The song rose and fell, haunting and melodious--

"_Me voilà engagé

Pour l'amour d'une blond--e_...."

The fire was between them, throwing all the beach into shadow, and,

sung thus, squatted upon the sand, and his feet to the dying embers,

with the old song so many memories crowded upon the man's own brain--so

many visions peopled the lurid shadows around him--that he had arrived

nearly at its end before he thought of regarding the swaying, tossing

figure beyond with any degree of attention. But, when he did, the

last words died away in his throat. This is not the place to describe

Fenella Barbour's dancing. Many pens have done it justice. It has been

described and overdescribed--ignorantly arraigned and disingenuously

defended. Tyros of the press, anxious to win their spurs, and with a

store of purple phrases to squander, have attempted, through a maze of

adjectives and synonyms, to convey or reawaken its charm. She burst on

the world in a time when such things were already grown a weariness to

the plain man; yet never, I believe, was any success due more to the

frank and spontaneous tribute of the people who sit in cheap seats to a

wonderful thing wonderfully done, and less to the kid-gloved applause

of stalled and jaded eclecticism in search of new sensation. And the

key to it all, I believe--though mine is only one opinion among

many--was to be sought in the mechanical precision with which, through

all the changes and postures of arms and body above the hips, unstable

and sensuous as vapor, the feet below the swirling skirts beat--beat

out the measure of the dance unerringly and incisively as the

percussion of a drummer's sticks upon the sheepskin. It was this that,

for the man in the street at least, lifted her art out of trickery

and imposture and veiled indelicacy into some region where his own

criticism felt itself at home. "A clog-dancer with sophistications,"

she has been called; but at least it was upon honest toes and heels

that Fenella danced into popular favor.

And all this the man by the fire watched with a sinking heart. Not

altogether unmoved. He could not, being flesh and blood, remember that

the girl dancing before him had just left his arms, and at the close

of her transport would fling herself, breathless and glowing, into

them again, eager for his approval, and spending upon his lips the

aftermath of her excitement, without many a desire and emotion of his

youth awaking and clamoring for its deferred due. But his desires had

grizzled with his beard: he had analyzed the emotions and discarded

them. Where the passions are concerned intellect is never impartial. It

must be either oil or water--foster or extinguish. And he had chosen

once for all the harder way. He was full of shyness, constraint, and

the panic instinct of flight: shocked yet arrested, like some hermit

of the Libyan desert watching the phantoms of his old life at Rome or

Alexandria beckon him from his cave. Not only was the old dispensation

void. He could imagine no ground upon which it could be renewed. His

authority had been one of those gentle tyrannies of heart over heart,

that are valid only so long as they are unquestioned. Having claimed

her liberty, though it was but for an hour--resumed the possession of

herself though it was only to dazzle his eyes--Fenella became to him

from that moment a new woman, to be wooed and won afresh; and, being

a wistful far more than a lustful man, in the very measure that the

delayed revelation of her beauty penetrated his senses, he shrank

further and further from its recapture.

It must have been a strange sight, had any been there to see it. The

dying fire; the shadowed moon; the man with his head bent above his

knees; and the barefooted girl, with fluttering skirts and dishevelled

hair, singing and dancing on the sand before his averted face.

IV

TO INTRODUCE PAUL INGRAM

Exactly why it should be I who sit down to write of the loves and

errors of Paul Ingram, his descent into hell and resurrection

therefrom, is a thing that is not quite clear to me now, but which

will not become clearer the more I try to justify it. It is certainly

not because I was at one crisis of his life the instrument to save

him, since I know how very careless Fate can be in the choice of her

instruments. I am not his oldest friend, nor should I care to say--his

dearest. We have done a good deal of work together--shared a good

deal of opprobrium. I still bear upon my forehead the mark made by

a stone that was meant for a better man, on the wild night when the

Home Defence League roughs broke up our meeting at Silvertown. Yet,

and notwithstanding, I am by no means sure, should the inevitable

happen in my own lifetime, whether, of all the disciples who pass from

the oration at the graveside to the whispers over the funeral baked

meats, mine will be the pen chosen to write the life--mine the fingers

authorized to untie the letters--of Paul Ingram, novelist, dreamer, and

reformer.

A good deal of what I have written I was witness to myself; a good

deal more I learnt from Ingram during what, with so many cleaner and

pleasanter ways of leaving the world, we all hope will be his last

illness of the kind; and a not considerable part has been told me by

his wife, for whom it is notorious that I entertain an affection as

hopeless as it is happily engrossing. Even so, when all is admitted,

each part assigned to its proper source of inspiration, I am aware a

good deal will remain unaccounted for. This I have no alternative but

to leave to the sagacity of my readers. Even to their discretion--a

little.

To begin with myself, only that I may get myself the sooner out of the

way. My earlier years I have regarded from different points of view at

different periods of my life. It is only comparatively lately that I

have attained the true point of view and come to see that all the early

portion should be regarded as a joke. For what legend can ask to be

taken seriously whose sole remaining evidence is a small white towel,

of the sort technically known, I believe, as "huckaback," lying folded

now in a drawer of the desk at which I am writing. Two simple motions

of the extensor and flexor muscles of one arm, and the proof of former

greatness might lie beneath my eyes. But I will not make them. I know

too well what would happen next. My fingers would not rest until the

smooth bleached folds were shaken loose, nor my eyes until, written in

indelible ink that successive launderings have only made blacker, the

following legend appeared before them:

"J. B. PRENTICE.

Between-Maid--No. 8."

You see, when a man has fallen, suddenly, from a great height, he is

not expected to record his impressions as the third, the second, the

first floor windows flashed successively past his startled eyes. He

wakes up, if he wakes at all, in a nice, cosy atmosphere of iodoform,

neatly and securely packed in antiseptic dressing, with a fluffy,

frilly angel at his side, who has been waiting for those tired, tired

eyes to open, and who puts her finger to her lips, the moment they do,

for fear her voice shan't reach the muffled ears, and says--you know

what she says--

"Lie still! You're not to talk nor to agitate yourself."

So I don't propose to agitate myself, and though I've only just begun

to talk, it shall be of something better worth while. Farewell, then,

for the last time, great showy mansion among the Chislehurst hills,

with your orchard and shrubberies, flower gardens and pergolas, your

pineries and fineries, your two great cedars, inlaid in the pale enamel

of the sky, and shaven lawns, across which and toward the pink-striped

marquee a butler hurries with an armful of white napery and flashing

silver. And to you, dear little fellow-worker--Polly or Molly or Betsy,

as the case may be--who once wiped your honest, grimy phiz on No. 8, a

quite especial grip of the hand, wherever you be to-day. Your reproach

long since kissed away, I hope; suckling some good fellow's children;

cooking some good fellow's meals. Life is so hard on the between-maid.

* * * * *

When I awoke it was in a Pimlico bed-sitting-room, writing literally

for dear life, and for life that is growing dearer each year. I have

a fatal facility for descriptive writing, and my speciality is the

psychology of crowds. As old Winstanley of the _Panoply_ would say

when assigning me to anything I was to write up from the non-technical

point of view, Aeroplane Meet, Palace Cup-tie, Royal Progress or what

not: "Off with you, my boy! Column and a half, and a little more

'tripe' than last time. Turn 'em all loose, 'the hoarse cheer,' 'the

lump in the throat,' and the 'mist over the eyes.' Don't be afraid!

People have time for a little sentiment on Sundays."

I think they have. And I think I'm a witness to the price they are

prepared to pay for it. Once a year, too, I write a novel whose

circulation, for some occult reason, always stops short at eighteen

hundred. Often when I'm reporting a football match, or anything like

that, I try to count eighteen hundred, roughly, and imagine how my

people would look all bunched together. A good many readers, but--what

a gate!

Of all the pranks America has played upon us, I count not the least its

having sent us an Ingram as a recruit to the cause of reform. The name

is familiar over there, but it is quoted, I fancy, rather as a peg upon

which would-be subverters of established anarchy hang their arguments

than as authority for democratic ideals. Colonel Ingram, of Omaha,

president of the Mid-West Chilling and Transportation Syndicate, is

of the family; so is the Hon. Randolph Ingram, the great "Corporation

Judge" of the Supreme Court. Jared Ingram, of Milburn, author of that

contribution to Christian Unity, "A Rod for the Back of Dumb Devills,"

was one ancestor, and Elmer Ingram, the soldier-lawyer who helped to

bait Arnold to his treason and damnation, was another. These names are

not the fruit of any research on my part: I cull them from a little

book which I saw at Ingram's rooms quite early in our acquaintance, and

which, with a smile at my curiosity, he was good enough to lend me. It

was one of those boastful little pamphlets "for private circulation,"

which are multiplying across the Atlantic, as a caste which has secured

an undue share of material welfare becomes conscious of its origins

and uneasy amid the obliterations of the democratic spirit. Of those

we love, however, even the generations are dear to us, and I insist

on recalling, with vicarious pride, that "Hump. Ingraham and Damaris

his wyffe," who landed at South Bay from the brig _Steadfast_

in Worcester year, and rode off, saddle and pillion, through forest

paths to the clearing where their home was to be raised, were of

good and gentle English stock, from Ministerley in Derbyshire. Sweet

little Damaris (one almost loves her for her name) wilted and died

within the year, but the task of increasing and multiplying, and

getting hold of the land, was taken up by a sterner and, let us hope,

stronger, Deborah, eight months later, and thence the seed has spread,

through a riot of Bestgifts, Resolveds, Susannahs and Hepzibahs, broad

of breast and hip, strong of limb, stout and undismayed of heart.

Westward--always westward. Across Ohio and Indiana, striking its roots

north and south in farm and factory, store and workshop; halting here

for twenty, there for thirty, years, but always, as a new generation

grows to manhood, up and away again. Over the plains in crawling

wagons, too impatient to await the harnessing of the iron horse--the

riveting of the strangling fetters of steel: through the lawless and

auriferous canyons of Colorado and Nevada: blown along on the mad wind

of the 'forties and 'fifties, until, amid the grapes and roses of the

Pacific slope and upon the pearly Californian beach, a wind, warm and

wasted and very old from across the great still ocean, whispered them,

"Thus far!"

Paul was the last Ingram that will ever be born in the old homestead.

His father he never saw; his sister died as a girl, and his mother,

struck down by some obscure woman's disease, moved, within his memory,

only from her bed to her chair, and from her chair to her bed again.

He says he was a lazy, loafing, dreamy boy, with very little interest

in anything beyond his meals; but the beautiful words in which he has

enshrined that early home for us are proof how busily his brain must

have been employed in those seemingly idle hours, and how keenly the

spiritual significance of all that he saw came home to him from the

first. Probably in the mere work of the house there was not enough

to occupy strong, bony hands, such as his. Successive mortgages had

nibbled the property away piecemeal, sparing only the house and yard;

and even for that the last mortgage was running a race with death. He

went to free school, but seems to have had few companions of his age.

The village was depopulated; the house-doors opened only on old faces.

He used sometimes to sit alone through a whole summer afternoon, he has

told me, swinging on the garden gate and whittling wood. From the fence

an old beaten track led away, through a marsh where a few ducks quacked

and waddled still, up the shoulder of a little hill, and away around

one of those woods of second growth that have sprung up all over the

old pilgrim clearings--right into the heart of the setting sun. Often,

he assures me, on looking up quickly from his whittling, he has seen an

arm and hand beckoning him westward, from the edge of the trees. Set

aside the stubborn mysticism that could conceive such a vision, and

can still maintain its actuality--is not the picture a sufficiently

haunting one? Within, the mother, waiting for death; outside, the lad,

straining to be gone. And the old wattled kitchen chimney, smoking

thinly, and the red glory through the sapling wood, and the drowsy

quack of the ducks!

After Mrs. Ingram's death the mortgage foreclosed upon the farm and

its contents with the precision and completeness of a highly organized

machine. It is proof how forced a growth the modern cult of the family

in America is, that it never seems to have occurred to son or mother

to appeal to any of the prosperous breed whom the old house had sent

forth. The land had long been earmarked for the great weighing-scale

factory that has since galvanized Milburn into strenuous life, and

made it a sort of industrial model, which commissions and deputations

from Europe are taken to see, presumably, says Ingram, as a warning

to what devilish lengths efficiency can be carried. The old homestead

was torn down to make a site for the boiler-house. Nothing is left of

it now except one rafter, in the lavishly endowed Museum, with what is

presumably an Indian arrow-head still embedded in the wood.

I am bound to add that my indignation upon the subject never roused

Paul to a corresponding heat. To his mind, already set upon first

causes, no doubt it seemed very natural, a mere incident in the

exploitation that dubs itself progress. He ate his last meal in the

despoiled kitchen, warmed his coffee over a few sticks on the hearth

that had burned away ten forests, and set off, by the path up the

hill and round the corner of the wood, to wherever the arm might be

beckoning him.

The lad was only fourteen when he left home, but tall and strong for

his years. He tramped to Philadelphia, "jumped" the freight by night

as it pulled out of the clattering, flaring yard, was shunted into

a siding at Scranton, forgotten, and found there three days later

starving and all but mad. From Scranton he beat his way to St. Louis;

washed dishes and set up pins in a skittle alley; tired soon of the

smoke and blood-warm water of the old French city; fed cattle in the

stockyards of Kansas, wrestled a drunken brakeman for his life on the

roof of the rocking, bumping cars halfway down the Missouri canyon, and

wrestled him so well that the man begged a job for him at the journey's

end. He was jacking wagons in the Union Pacific workshops at Rawlins

when the White River expedition came through, and joined the force as

teamster at a dollar a day. He smelt powder for the first time, lay

trapped for ten days in the stinking _corral_ at Snake River, when

the water failed and the relief went wide, and "Bummer Jim" and "Flies

Above," having thoughtfully strewn the carcasses of three hundred

slaughtered horses to windward, serenaded the poisoned pale-faces

nightly with copious obscenity, the burden of which was "come and be

killed." After the relief and disbandment of the force, he stayed on

in the Rockies and grew to manhood amid the silent aromatic barrenness

of its _mesas_ and _arroyos_. Settlers were dribbling into

the old Indian reservation. He was in turn horse-jingler, range-rider,

prospector, stage-driver; built fences, freighted logs, dug ditches;

spotted the banks of Bear Creek and Milk Creek, with his campfires

and tomato tins, and was happy, until something, indefinable as the

scent that steals down wind to the hunted stag, told him that the

civilization from which he had fled was hard upon his heels again. He

left Colorado the year before the railroad came through, and turned his

face east again.

* * * * *

I know I am telling the story of Ingram's early life very baldly and

badly. You see, there is so little romance in it; just the instinctive

repulsion that one so often notices in the history of the world's

reformers toward the thing they are to do battle with in the end. As

Paul used to tell it himself, leaning forward over the fire in my

stuffy little sitting-room, his strong, lean hands clasped round the

bowl of his pipe and the smoke drifting lazily about his moustache and

beard, it was only from an occasional gleam of the deep-set eye or

quiver of the thin nostril, as he talked, that one could gather how

deeply every lesson of force and fraud had sunk into his soul, to bear

its fruit later in unalterable resolve. I never saw him really moved

from his stoicism but once. We had been walking home together from

dinner through the West End streets and had been unwilling witnesses of

a sordid detail of their policing. A woman, crying and screaming, was

being led away, not roughly, I think, but very determinedly, by two men

in blue. Her hair had come loose, and one great curl hung to her waist.

Her fur stole had tumbled in the roadway, and some careless Samaritan

had thrown it over her shoulders, besmearing the velvet coat with mud.

We were very silent during the rest of the walk, and when we got to my

rooms Ingram unbosomed himself.

It was when he was working his way back east in the shiftless and

circuitous fashion that had become habitual to him. He got off the

train at a small city, the seat of a state university. He wouldn't

tell me the name, but I imagine it was somewhere in the Southwest. It

was eight o'clock on a fall morning, the hour at which the stores are

opening and the saloons being swept out. As he left the depot, his

grip in his hand, on a hunt for breakfast and work, he became aware

of some unusual excitement. Men were leaving their houses, collarless

and in shirt-sleeves--calling to one another and running down the

street. At the end, where it joined the main business avenue, a crowd

had gathered--old men, young men, even children, and a few women.

"And what do you think they were watching? Well, sir, there in God's

blessed morning light, three women in silk dresses, with satin shoes,

and bare heads and shoulders, were sweeping the filthy street with

brooms and shovels and pitching the mud into a zinc handcart. Think

of it, Prentice! Every one of them somebody's daughter--some mother's

little girl. They were all good-lookers; but one, who might be my own

child to-night, had a face like an angel--fallen if you like--with a

slender neck such as the artist men we've been talking to to-night

rave about, that's got those cute little blue shadows where it joins

the shoulders. She was the one that had the spade. A man in the crowd

told me what it all meant. They were sporting girls from a joint that

had been pulled three times in the last month. The magistrates had

got tired, and, instead of fining them, had worked in a state law two

hundred years old that treats such women as tramps and vagrants and

sets 'em to scavenging. 'And I guess,' my man adds, 'that's where they

b'long all right.' He was a patriarchal old billy-goat, Prentice, with

a nice long Pharisee beard, and, I'll bet, a sin for every hair. While

he was pitching me his simple lay, my little girl looks up, and, either

seeing I was a stranger or because mine was the only face there wasn't

contempt in--or worse--gave a sort of heart-breaking smile; and just as

I was trying not to see it, a lad behind me, with his hat over his eyes

and a cigar sticking out of his cheek, calls out:

"'Get on to Mamie, fellows, with the mud-scoop!'

"Well, Prentice," (Paul breathes hard) "I hit him, clean and sweet, on

the cheekbone, just under his damned leering swine's eye. It was very

irregular: I suppose I should have given him a chance, but, by God! I

couldn't wait. I've had to fight all my life, in warm blood and cold

blood, but I've never hit a man as hard as that before or since. He

went down like a skittle, and I thought I'd killed him; but the boy

was full of gall and devil, and knew a lot besides. He fought me five

minutes good before they carried him into a drug store. And how those

canting woman-drivers came round! They wanted me to drink, wanted to

carry my grip--asked me to name the job. But I went and sat in their

depot, without breakfast and with a face like a boil, for four hours

until the next train pulled out. I shook their mud off my feet pretty

smart. I'd have thrown away the shoes if I'd had another pair. But I

couldn't shake off what I'd seen.

"No, no, Prentice," he went on, stubbornly, as I, with my cockney

worldly wisdom, tried to argue him out of what I thought an unhealthy

view of a vexed question; "No, sir: you can split men up into sheep

and goats, bad cases and hard cases; but women stand or fall together.

Everything you do to one you do to the rest. On every woman's

face--good or bad, white or black--I've seen since, down to that woman

to-night, I've seen the shadow of the same wrong."

* * * * *

He was twenty-five years old when the desire of seeing Europe took

hold on him. He had no money, and, though he was strong and handy,

there was nothing he could do that any other strong man could not do

as well. He had his health, however, and staked that. Wages were high

in one department of the smelter at Leadville, for reasons that forced

themselves on the bluntest intelligence after a few months. He worked

there for a year, laying money by and fighting with the nausea that

grew upon him week by week. At the end of the twelve months, reeling,

half-blind, and with his teeth loose in their gums, but with more money

in his pockets than he had ever owned before, he turned his face to

the healing desert. An old miner turned ranchman found him at sunset

lying under a rock, his face pressed to the earth, and quivering, like

a landed trout, in the full grip of the deadly lead-sickness. He laid

him across his pony, took him to his mud-roofed hovel close by, kept

him for six months in his own blankets, gave him all the milk of his

one cow, drove him to the railroad as soon as he was able to travel,

and--bade him God-speed with a torrent of invective that struck even

Leadville dumb. Ingram had committed the capital error of offering

him pay for his hospitality, an error over which I believe he broods

to-day.

By the time he was fit to work again his savings were gone. He was

twenty-six, and Europe as far off as ever. This time, having damaged

his health, he staked his reason, and for two years herded sheep

on the Wyoming plains. Herding sheep seems at first cry a simple,

pastoral task, with Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Biblical Associations.

I must take Paul's word for it, then, that some special danger either

to body or soul attends it, and that few men retire from it with a

competence except to go into a madhouse or found a new religion. In

either case, he says, they will have seen "Hell on the plains." The day

before Ingram left for the sheep country he bought for a few dollars

the entire stock of a misguided Englishman who was trying to sell

second-hand books in Cheyenne City, loaded them into his grub-wagon

and read them, slowly, one by one, in the exact order or disorder in

which they were packed, and with a cold fear at his heart as the second

year drew to a close, that his shepherding would outlast them. It

seems absurd, but, as far as I can gather, this has been Ingram's sole

literary education.

Either the wages of loneliness, or, I fancy, something else of which

he has not told me, must have given Paul his heart's desire, for, two

years afterward, at the recruiting office in the Rue St. Dominique,

which has been many a good man's alternative to Seine water or the cold

muzzle-end, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion.

Whatever his reasons for this step (and I never was told them), I think

the five years that Paul spent under the iron discipline of the Legion

cured what, with all due allowance made for the strange ways by which

men find themselves, was becoming an incurable unrest. Among the sad

middle-aged soldiers who were his comrades, many of whom had come a

longer and a stranger way than he, to find a hard bed and a bloody

grave at the end, something, I believe, which he had roamed the world

a-seeking and which had evaded him till now, was found at last. Out of

that uneasy human cauldron, into which the deserter casts his broken

oath, and the _roué_ his disillusionment, and the unloved his

loneliness, and the branded their shame, and to which, as long as it

or its like shall endure, from time to time the artist will turn for

inspiration, the brave man for opportunity, the coward, perhaps, for

the stimulus which his own quailing heart denies him, and the saint for

relief of temptation, and the hungry for bread, a vision, I believe,

did arise for this lonely, unlettered American which the others missed,

a knowledge was gained that all the schools and universities of the

world could not have taught him: the vision and the knowledge of the

human heart.

He was thirty-four years old when he left the Legion--a little gaunt

and worn. He had given the world twenty years' hard service, and had a

worsted stripe on one arm for his earnings.

V

"SAD COMPANY"

I first met Ingram by chance at the old _Café à peu près_ in

Greek Street. The _À peu près_ of those days was far from being

the institution which, in the capable hands of Philippe, the sulky

waiter, who took to himself Madame's moustached daughter plus Madame's

economies, it has since become--an over-lighted, _bruyant_

restaurant of two stories and a basement, wherein an eighteen-penny

meal of six exiguous courses, served at inhospitable speed to hurried

suburban playgoers, is raised to the dignity of a _diner français_

by various red and yellow compounds which masquerade under the names of

the old French provinces of the _midi_. Then it was nothing but

a secluded back room, panelled and painted green, with an oval table

in the centre, round which the little circle of which I was, if not

an ornament, at least an accredited unit--free lances of the press,

war correspondents stranded during lengthening periods of peace and

ill-will among nations, obscure authors and unbought painters--met

nightly to dine and to nurse our chilled ambitions, under Madame's

supplemental smile and in the warmth of a roaring fire which, during

nine months of the year, was burning under the heavy Jacobean mantel.

Strangers were not exactly resented at the _À peu près_, but by an

elaborate unconsciousness of their presence, to which the Oxford manner

of one or two of us was a great assistance, we contrived for a long

time to keep the circle restricted. Thus it happened that the bronzed

and bearded man who spoke French so volubly at coming and going, and

who seemed so little discountenanced by our exclusive attitude--glad,

indeed, to be let alone--had been an irregular visitor for some weeks

before we entered upon any conversation. One night the talk had

turned, as it often did, upon the strong British preference for death

as a preliminary to appreciation in matters literary or artistic, and

little Capel, burrowing, as the subject drooped, into the obvious for a

suitable remark, repeated that well-known legend--Milton's ten pounds

for "Paradise Lost." The big man at my shoulder laughed.

"Fancy," said he, "any one getting as much as that for a poem to-day."

I turned, before the guard had descended on his eyes, and saw in them

an expression that I, of all men, should recognize at the first glance:

the sickness of the literary hope deferred.

We had become sufficiently intimate for me to receive a call from him,

at my rooms, during an attack of the gout, which is an inheritance from

Chislehurst, before he mentioned his book. I grieve to-day, remembering

how often he was on the point of doing so, and waited in vain for

the word from me that would have made the task less irksome than, I

am sure, it was at last. By what I know now isn't a coincidence, his

final appearance in Pimlico with the dreadful brown-paper parcel under

his arm followed upon a period of three or four months during which

he had practically disappeared from my consciousness. He looked worn,

I thought, and had a new trouble in his eyes. He told me his story

shamefacedly, and stammering like a schoolboy.

He had written a book, a novel, and could not get it published. None

of the houses to which he had offered it advanced any reason for

rejection, and in the one or two cases where he had pressed for one,

seemed to think his insistence a solecism. He understood I not only

wrote but published. Would it be troubling me unduly.... If I wasn't

too busy....

Well, it _was_ a great worry. I was busy just then too, after

my futile fashion; but somehow it didn't seem the thing to have that

man stammering and blushing before a wretched little ink-slinger

like myself, and I tendered the vague service that is known as one's

"best." But I was unaffectedly sorry the thing had happened. It is such

happenings that, in literary circles, write FINIS to many a

promising friendship. Ten men will lend you a pound for one that will

lend you his countenance.

It was six o'clock the next morning when my lamp suddenly flared

and went out. I stretched myself--realized that the fire was out as

well, that I was cold and stiff, that dawn was coming up over the

roofs of the stuccoed terrace opposite, and that the reason I had

forgotten light and fire and the march of time lay in a disreputable,

dog-eared typed manuscript that I had begun in weariness, gone on with

in half-resentful surprise, and finished in a complete oblivion of

everything save the swift rush of joys and fears, sorrows and mistakes

to a doom that never befell. I remember a funny swelled feeling, as

though I had been crying internally.

It is late in the day to attempt a criticism or even an appreciation

of "Sad Company." Even as it stands to-day, in the close stereotype

of the popular reprint, it is flawed and marred to my mind with many

a _naïveté_ and rawness, with here and there one of those lapses

into the banal that are an evil legacy to American literature from

the days of Poe and Hawthorne. Imagine what it must have been before,

fearfully and reverently, for I knew I was handling a masterpiece, I

helped brush off a little of the clay that still clung to it from the

pit in which it had been cast.

What I did, then and there, was to sit down, chilled and numbed as

I was, in the raw morning light, and write to Ingram bidding him,

on pain of perpetual displeasure, repair to me that evening, to be

severely rebuked for his presumption in having, without previous

apprenticeship or servitude, taken his livery and chair with the

pastmasters and wardens of his craft. This letter I carried downstairs

through the sleeping house, tremulous with the good consciences of my

fellow-lodgers, and slipped it in the pillar box at the corner of the

crescent. I remember I even chuckled as I posted it, to the evident

surprise of the stolid policeman who had wished me good morning. You

see, I thought I was making literary history.

I am sorry to say that my enthusiasm didn't communicate itself to

Paul. Six mute and incurious publishers were sitting too heavily on

his self-esteem for that. He even took their part, with a perversity I

have noticed before in the misunderstood of the earth. I have a theory

that books like his are posthumous children, and that the state of mind

which created them dies in giving them birth. What enraged him--what

baffled him, because it was contrary to every lesson his strenuous

life had taught him--was, that so much effort could be all in vain.

I imagine he wrote the book with difficulty and without conscious

exaltation of spirit.

"If I had put as much pains," I remembered his saying, "into any other

thing I've set my hand to, I should be either a famous man, or a very

rich one, to-day, Prentice."

And then, returning to the old grievance, that I could see had become a

prepossession--

"And yet--six men can't be all wrong."

"Of course they can," I exclaimed indignantly, "and sixty."

He shrugged his shoulders wearily. "What can a man do, then?"

"One thing you can do," I answered severely, "is to sit down opposite

me for a few hours a week and alter some of your modes of expression.

I've made a list of some: Listen here!

"'_Brightly shone the snow on the roof of the Rio Negro County

Farmers' Institute._' You mustn't say that."

"Why not?" asked Paul, simply; "it's the name."

"If you don't know why, I can't tell you. You must take it from me that

such a thing, in England, will almost secure rejection of itself. Then

again: we don't talk of a man's 'white linen shirt _bosom_.' The

word is _de mode_ for a woman, but used for a man, it's offensive.

And to say that Celia '_cached the mail-bags in a wash-out_,'

conveys no meaning at all to us."

Paul laughed out, and suddenly looked ten years younger.

"Sit down," he said, "and '_fais feu_!' Don't spare me!"

But the revision was a thankless task. Only a determination on my part

that such a book shouldn't be lost supported me through it at all.

Paul came to work irregularly, and in a mood that oscillated between a

careless acceptance of every suggestion I made and a peremptory refusal

to consider any alteration at all. But it was done at last, and I admit

I waited hopefully for news from Carroll and Hugus.

After three weeks, in fact, I got a postcard asking me to call.

Bonnyman was sitting in his sanctum, looking as young and as wise as on

the day he came down from Balliol, and with his habitual air of finding

the publishing trade a great lark.

"How's the industrious Prentice?" he cried, as soon as he saw me.

"What's he been doing with himself these many moons?"

I shook hands and sat down. I profess I have never felt so jumpy when

work of my own has been in question.

Bonnyman put his finger to his forehead. "What did I want to see you

about, Prentice?... Oh, yes!" He touched an electric button on his desk.

"Byrne!" said he to the clerk who answered it, "bring me down 'Sad

Company.' I sent it up to the packing-room the day before yesterday. It

ought to be ready."

My heart sank into my boots. "Aren't you going to publish it?" I

faltered.

Bonnyman shook his head.

"No go, my boy! No go at all. You've brought it to the wrong shop."

"It kept me awake a whole night," I flashed out angrily.

Bonnyman smiled and yawned. "Kept me awake too, because I'd slept in

the afternoon trying to read it."

"Oh! come now, Bonnyman," I protested. "You know better than that. Take

the one scene alone," I went on eagerly, "where Holt is sitting with

his dead wife, and the step-daughter comes to the door and he won't

open because----"

But Bonnyman went on shaking his head with the impenetrable

self-confidence any man acquires in time who exercises an habitual

right of veto.

"Hugo and water!" he said. "Who can't write it? No, Prentice. To tell

you the honest truth we're cutting out a lot of this problem stuff

lately. What we're specializing in at present is the 'light touch.' The

'light touch,'" he repeated, illustrating what the world is hungering

for, delicately, with an ivory paper cutter on his blotting-pad.

"'Polly Prattlings!'" I sneered.

"And d--d good stuff, too. Bring me some one like that, Prentice, and

we'll talk.--Don't get angry, old man! Who is your little friend?

American, ain't he?"

I nodded gloomily.

"Why don't he get a Rhodes scholarship and learn how to write English?"

"He's thirty-five," I said; "he's been all round the world and done

everything."

Bonnyman pulled a long face that sufficiently disposed of Ingram's

future. The brown-paper parcel was brought in and I slunk away with it

under my arm, like a man repulsed from a pawnshop.

I didn't see Ingram for a long time, and was secretly glad of it. For I

had no good news to give him. Other publishers were equally emphatic,

with unimportant variations of delay and discourtesy. I don't say

I lost faith in the book, but I did begin to doubt whether, in the

present state of things, great work was worth while. It was too much

like giving grand opera on a raft in mid-Atlantic.

At last, when I'd practically exhausted the firms I knew, and was

beginning to wonder whether we wouldn't have to come down to a

publication "by special arrangement," or a setting up in linotype by

one of the smaller provincial weeklies, an idea flashed into my head.

I knew one great writer, a woman, American, too; fashionable, rich,

but with a passionate reverence for all that was worthiest in letters.

She had succeeded by means of a brilliance and impetuosity of style

that had literally stormed the defences of dullness. In her books I

had noticed an underlying mysticism that I thought might find Paul's

work akin. It was a ticklish undertaking, and I hadn't done screwing up

my courage to it when Ingram suddenly reappeared. His long arm pushed

open the paper curtained door of the sanctum where we dined, one raw

night in June. By his side was absolutely the most beautiful girl I had

ever seen. She wore a long purple coat, cut very smartly, and a big

ribboned hat, and was swaying a little from side to side as though the

lapsed rhythm of some tune she had just heard was still in her feet.

She glanced round shyly but brightly and bowed with a pretty blush to

Caulfield. We all gaped, and old Smeaton's pipe suddenly smelt very

foul.

"Don't move!" said Ingram, as I made room for them at my side. "I

haven't come for dinner. Just to ask if you've had any news, before I

go away."

"No news at present," I confessed. "But I hope to have some soon."

He smiled a little grimly, and felt in his long rubber coat for a

pocketbook.

"If anything turns up in the next month or so, write me here," he said,

and handed me a card with an address scrawled across its face. "I'm

going to France for a few weeks. Come, Nelly!" and was gone with his

companion as abruptly as he had come.

"'Beauty like hers is genius,'" Capel quoted, breaking the silence with

an air of saying something apposite, for once.

"Who's the pretty lady, Caulfield?" asked old Smeaton. "She bowed to

you."

"She's a little person I've met at dances, and things," said Caulfield.

"Goes round with the De Rudder woman. Does _gavottes_ and

_pavanes_ and _corantos_ and all that sort of thing. Pretty

name, too,--'Fenella Barbour.'"

VI

A CHILD SPEAKS THE TRUTH

Fenella Barbour is the daughter of a clergyman of the Church of

England, who remained unbeneficed to the end of his life. Younger son

of a noble family, Scotch in origin but long settled in the Midlands,

handsome, intellectual, and much yearned upon, the Honorable Nigel

let opportunities for advantageous matrimony pass him one by one, to

marry, comparatively late in his life and outside of his own class, a

young parishioner with whose name the gossip of a small Cornish country

town had spitefully and quite unjustifiably coupled his. To the day of

her death Minnie Trevail never quite got over the surprise with which

she received her pastor's offer of an honorable share in board and

bed, and, whether it was gratitude or an uneasy sense that principles

which do not often make for a man's happiness had played her hand for

her, the fact remains, that to the end of his brief married life the

Reverend Nigel Barbour continued to be a sort of married bachelor, free

to come or go unquestioned, with a fine gift for silence and without

obvious enthusiasms, unless it were for the girl baby who would sit for

hours by his study fire, as he wrote his sermons, scolding her doll in

whispers, and to whose round cheek and fine dark curls his eyes strayed

oftener and oftener during the last year of his life.

Similarly circumstanced, other women by study, by observation, by an

endless self-correction, have lifted themselves in time to something

like a mental level with the men who have perversely chosen them. Not

necessarily from a sense of her own limitations, Mrs. Barbour never

tried. It is possible that she never, deliberately measuring the

sacrifice which the man had made for her good name, determined the

first sacrifice should be the last, but at least the unformed idea

governed all her conduct. She kept the ideals, the accents--inside the

house even the dress--of her class. For the spiritual companionship

which she could never give she substituted the silent and tireless

service of Martha. When her baby was born, she would have had the pain

and peril tenfold; pain and peril so dimly comprehended by the man who

smoothed her moist hair with an awkward hand, blinked his scholarly

eyes at this crude and rather unseemly mystery, and, once assured the

danger was past, went back to his weaving of words with a relief that

even his kindness failed to conceal.

Nigel Barbour was one of the killed in the terrible Clee Level

accident. He was returning from a New Year family gathering, the first

he had attended since his marriage, and it is typical of their married

relations that his wife never even "wondered" why she wasn't asked

too. If reconciliation which should include her was on its way, his

death disposed of the idea. Denied recognition during his lifetime his

widow refrained, with what all her friends considered great lack of

spirit, from attempting to win it after his death. He was uninsured,

and, of the slender inheritance that devolved upon her, a great part

consisted of house property at the "unfashionable" but expensive side

of the Park. One of the houses, a great stuccoed mansion in a secluded

square, happening to be empty at the time of her tragic bereavement,

she assumed the tenancy, furnished it, and, reserving for herself only

the basement and top floor, advertised discreetly but judiciously for

lodgers.

Although the business is one that seldom shows a profit, and although

in order to furnish the one house adequately she had been compelled

to mortgage the freehold of the other, yet, if happiness be revenue,

it is hard to see how she could have made a better investment. For

the first time in her life she tasted liberty. She had her great

house, her establishment, the direction of her three maids, and

the intense respect of family butchers, family bakers, and family

candlestick-makers in staid contiguous streets. On spring or autumn

afternoons the champing and clashing of bits and hoofs outside her

door, the murmurs of joyous life that floated along the hall and up

the wide stairs, sounded no less sweetly in her ears because it was

Miss Rigby or Lady Anne Caslon and not the Honorable Mrs. Barbour who

was at home to all the fine company. The "Honorable Mrs. Barbour!"

Often, in passing through the big bedrooms of the second floor, with

clean pillowcases or window blinds over her arm, she would stop and

look at her homely reflection in the long cheval glasses, with a little

inward smile at the incongruity. And yet in her heart, so sensitive

to the duties, so blind to the rights, of her equivocal position, the

obligations which the barren title involved were tacitly acknowledged.

If it conferred no privileges, it at least restrained her judgment upon

the caste, a corner of whose ermine rested, however grudgingly, upon

her own shoulder. She grew indisposed to gossip. Such of her relatives

and friends as called upon her while upon "day-trips" to London

found themselves cut short in their pursuit of one special branch of

knowledge. They went home to Cornwall declaring that Minnie had grown

"stuck-up."

But the rights which she abdicated so whole-heartedly for herself she

claimed with an added fierceness for Fenella. The child was a miracle

from the first. Even while it lay, a few pounds of pink flesh, in a

corner of one arm and drained her breast, she was worshipping it,

humbly and afar off. It is difficult to find words that adequately

convey her state of mind toward her daughter without entrenching on

a parallel that is sacred and therefore forbidden; but this much is

certain: had the legal quibble which can prove a child to be no blood

relation to its mother been propounded to Mrs. Barbour, it would have

found in her a tearful and reluctant but convinced witness to its

truth. For two successive nights before her baby's birth the same dream

had visited her. The great house of her brother-in-law, which she had

never seen, which her husband had never even thought of describing for

her, had appeared to her, wrapped in flame. Pushing her way through

the crowd that surrounded it and was watching it burn, after the

inconsequent manner of dream people, with quiet satisfaction, she had

run up tottering staircases and along choking passages, had reached a

splendid room of state upon whose canopied bed a little naked infant

lay, and, clasping it to her breast, had carried it out, smiling and

unharmed. Fenella was no more truly her child than she was the child of

the dream.

The little girl was four and still wore a black hair ribbon and a black

sash over her pinafore, when one afternoon in October a big shallow

barouche drove up to the door of No. 11 Suffolk Square. The springs

were very high, the harness was very brightly plated, the chestnut

horses, their heads held in by a torturing bearing rein, very shiny

and soapy. A faded, artificial woman, with a tall osprey in her black

bonnet, lolled back against the buff cloth cushions and regarded the

world through a tortoise-shell lorgnette. A girl, quite young, with

fair hair cut in a straight fringe across her forehead, sat up demurely

at her side.

Fenella was taking tea in great state and composure on the window-seat

of her nursery under the slates when the carriage drove up. A mug,

on which Puss-in-Boots brushed back his bristling whiskers with

one spirited paw, stood at her elbow, filled with a faintly tinted

decoction of warm milk and sugar. A bun, delicately nibbled all

round its lustrous circumference, was in her right hand, and a large

over-dressed doll, with a vacant blue-eyed face, rested insecurely in

the hollow of her left arm. From this household treasure her attention

was just beginning to stray. James, the coachman, had pulled across

the roadway, and was driving his fretful over-heated charges up and

down along the railings of the Square. Fenella pressed her forehead

against the cold window-pane.

"Gee-gees; gee-gees!" she soliloquized.

To her enter, without cue or warning, Druce the parlor-maid--also a

little the nursemaid--in great excitement, and breathless after a

non-stop run from the bottom of the house. The bun was snatched from

the chubby fingers, Marianne saved, timely, from a headlong course to

the floor, the Marquis of Carabas pushed unconstitutionally on one

side, and the napkin whisked off, all in four brisk movements.