"My dear child, you should let him know. In justice to him."

His words irritated Althea vaguely, as a little professional mannerism

might irritate us in the surgeon fighting for our lives.

"Oh, have patience! I am going to tell you everything. It is the man

whose book I sent you to read. Mr. Prentice, a friend of mine, a

journalist, brought him to me last summer. He was quite unknown in

London and was finding a difficulty in even getting it considered. He

is not quite a stranger to us; at least, we know who he is. My father

is a friend of some of the rich branch of his family in Connecticut. My

publishers made difficulties, of course, but the thing was in a fair

way of being settled--"

"But surely, my child, his opinions shocked you?"

"Not at all, Father!" Noticing his surprise: "You must take my word for

that. It is so hard when one is leading two lives--the artist's and the

other. There seems no contact between them--no common ground. I have

had no temptation myself to such things, and so the question had never

arisen for me personally. No, I was conscious of nothing but the joy,

the privilege of helping a fellow-worker toward his reward."

"When did you first find it a matter of conscience?"

"Once when I went to confession to Father Mephan at the Priory. I

mentioned it almost casually. To my surprise, he took the matter most

seriously--said I was incurring a tremendous responsibility, and that

if one soul was led by it to love God less, the sin would be at my

door. I had to get the manuscript back from the publishers. Oh! it was

weary work."

"Mephan pronounced against the book, of course."

"Yes. I told him that to my knowledge the writer was a good man--in

his way almost saintly. I knew him well enough by then to say that.

But he said it didn't matter--that Antichrist had his own prophets and

confessors, and even martyrs. Is that so?"

"I fear it is."

"He said something else stranger still. He said the virtue that was

outside the Church was a greater danger than the wickedness. Do you

believe that?"

"No, I don't. I think virtue, of any sort, is quite secure from

popularity. But go on. You have told me nothing of the man himself."

"He continued to visit us. He was lonely and embittered at first, but

it wore off. He is very handsome. I was proud to be able to show such

a fellow-countryman after some that have been at our house. The men

liked him, and I know the women envied him to me. Oh! a woman can see.

I got him to tell me some of his life. It's wonderful! He seems to have

deliberately sought out pain and labor as though some inward need of

his soul impelled him to it. He does not know God, but he has never

lost the spiritual vision. His heart is as clean as a child's and as

simple. He has his faults. He hates the rich; but there is not a trace

of envy in his hatred. He is not even like Mill--led to the love of

the many by the hatred of the few. It is simply the holy hunger and

thirst after justice."

"My dear, you are painting a very good man. Did you never try to

influence him toward the truth?"

"Father Vernon, do you believe in my sincerity or not?"

"I do, indeed."

"Then, believe me when I tell you it's not possible. Perhaps in years

and years to come; but his heart will have to be broken first. No, his

virtue is the virtue of Marcus Aurelius--of Julian. He has all the

sadness of the old, stoical, pagan world. Will you think me exaggerated

if I tell you how he affects me?"

"I think not."

"Well, I feel as though some great angel, neither of light nor

darkness, neither fallen nor confirmed, to whom the test for or against

God has never been offered, has folded his wings and dropped gently at

my feet. I have but one fear--that he will spread them as quietly and

take flight."

Two red spots glowed on her cheeks as she spoke. Vernon, considering

her, suddenly realized how ill she was looking. There was even on her

face an expression that, as a priest, it was part of his office to

watch for.

"When did this thing happen--the thing that makes you so unhappy?"

"Last Thursday. He had dined with us. I had been feeling ill all day.

Since the summer I have been frightened two or three times--it is my

head I think--but I have put off getting any advice. He could not

have asked for an explanation at a worse time; but I had no right to

withhold it. I tried to explain, even offered him money, and then----"

"Yes, and then?"

"Oh, Father Vernon, he grew so big! He seemed to tower. Everything else

was small. Yes--let me tell the truth--religion, priests, even God--we

all seemed to be a little band of intriguers trying to pull him down.

He told me to burn his book, turned on his heel. I knew he wouldn't

come back, and so--and so--I'm only a woman: I babbled something or

other that was in my heart, and he took me--in his--arms."

She leaned forward, put her elbows on her knees, and looked into the

fire. The action was deliberate. One never would have guessed what a

storm was rending her breast.

"He kissed me only once," she went on. "He was very gentle. Then

we sat down, and I found out that, all the time while I had been

condescending, advising, putting him at his ease, I was nothing to him

but just a little, lonely, spoilt girl."

"Have you seen him since?"

"No."

"Nor written?"

"No."

"He has called, of course?"

"Yes. I have not been at home to him."

"Then--the thing is over."

"Read this!" She drew a letter from the bosom of her dress and handed

it to him. She watched him narrowly as he read it, but his expression

of grave concern did not alter.

"Are you alone in town?" he asked, when he had read it through.

"My father and most of the servants are at Hindhead. I should have gone

with them on Saturday, but I waited because----Oh! I just waited----"

"Do you want this back?" said Vernon, still holding the letter between

his fingers.

"Burn it, please. No, wait a minute! Tear me off the signature first. I

want that."

She pressed the little shred of paper against her lips.

"Oh! I love him _so_, I love him _so_," she moaned.

Vernon crumpled the sheets of paper one by one and threw them all into

the fire together. The flames caught them at once. The writing glowed

red, then white. The draught from the chimney rustled the ashes to and

fro in the grate.

"Well," she asked, almost roughly, "what am I to do?"

"There is but one thing--your duty. I cannot soften it."

"_Duty!_" she repeated, in a terrible voice. For a moment Vernon

thought a nerve-crisis was at hand; but she fought it down. The wit

that was almost the woman's second nature came uppermost.

"It's a pretty trap, isn't it? There ought to have been a notice-board

on my narrow way, Father Vernon: 'Beware man-traps and canons.' God's

ways are a little _impish_ at times, don't you think so? Can I see

him?"

"I think not, dear child. It will only make it harder for you both."

"Pah! You say that, but you really don't trust me. You're only a man,

after all. Can I write the letter here? It won't be very long."

Without a word he wheeled his writing-chair round for her, and pulled

out unheaded note-paper and plain envelopes. She wrote a letter of

six or eight pages quietly, without hesitating, except just at the

end, when Vernon noticed her lips were pursed and her eyes swimming in

tears. The second letter was a much shorter affair, and she enclosed in

it the slip of paper which she had saved from the burnt letter. It lay

on the top, and he noticed the address was that of a bank.

"I will leave these with you to post," she said; "then you will feel

quite safe. I shall go down to Hindhead to-morrow and stay a good

while, I think. I like watching the spring come. Good-bye; and remember

it is by what you _didn't_ say to-night that I measure your

sympathy. I don't think I could have stood platitudes."

"My child, I preach to those who are bearing their cross, not to those

whom God has nailed to it. Before them I dare only kneel and pray."

"Oh, I felt it! I felt it! Something seemed to come out of you and

break my will suddenly. Besides"--she hesitated--"besides, there's

always something a woman keeps back, they say. I think, perhaps, he is

saved from great unhappiness by what you have made me do to-night. I

can't say more, even to you."

"My dear, love is never sent idly, never in vain. It is from our

ignorant misuse, our blind misapprehension of its meaning, that the

pity and the waste come about. Many a precious purpose is brought to

nothing by the world's superstition of the happy ending. In love, as

in life, those who seek selfishly forever seek vainly; even as they

grasp it, the radiant vision turns a corpse within their arms. It is

they who humbly and submissively--no matter how hard the law, how

intolerable the accident--follow the inscrutable finger beckoning them

from pleasant ways, to stumble upon the road that is narrow and steep

and dark, who have their heart's desire given them in the end.... Yes!

Who is it?"

There was a knock at the door.

"Please, farver, it's Mrs. Murnane come about Jimmy's charackter for

the 'am-and-beef shop."

"Say I'm coming.... Would you like to spend a few minutes with me in

the church before you go? We have the Forty Hours' devotion this week.

I can let you out by the side door into the street. I suppose you have

your car?"

She passed before him down the staircase and along a white-washed

corridor, whose bluntly pointed windows and doorways were wreathed by

texts in Gothic lettering. Mrs. Murnane, a woman with a commanding

eye and great digestive capacity, was sitting on a long bench in the

hall; the ham-and-beef aspirant, a knock-kneed lad who seemed to grow

more uncertain and wavering of outline as he receded from his enormous

boots to his cropped white head, sat by her side with an air of being

in custody. Behind the bench successive sessions of unwashed heads had

besmeared the wall with a grimy average of height.

The church was dark, and silent too; not with the mere absence of

sound, but with a positive and penetrative stillness that seemed to

radiate from one white disk, rimmed and rayed with gold, and enthroned,

amid a phalanx of tapers and sweet waxen flowers, in one of the side

chapels. A lad in a scarlet cassock and laced cotta was extinguishing

a guttering candle, almost beyond his reach. As he rose on tiptoe

the long pole trembled in his hands like a fishing-rod. Within the

rails two men, their heads sunk beneath their shoulders, and without

the rails two nuns, in broad white _cornichons_ and turned-back

sleeves of serge, watched the host motionlessly. On a votive-wheel near

by many tapers, some white, some red, were blazing and dripping. The

smell of incense was everywhere.

She knelt upon a rush-seated _prie-dieu_ in the same posture of

absorbed devotion as the others, but her thoughts strayed, like a

child's brought to church by an elder sister. She tried to count the

tapers--how many red? how many white?--wondered what the nuns' faces

were like behind the flapped white caps. The scene took shape in her

head in little biting phrases, just as another kind of artist would

have seen it in tone and composition. She was rather restless, wanted

to be gone, and even said to herself that this last move of Father

Vernon's was in doubtful taste. After going through so much----!

But the silence, the stillness, the enervating loaded atmosphere gained

her little by little. She had an access of devotion: tapers, flowers,

prostrate fellow-worshippers were all part of some intimate rite of

which there were two protagonists--that white sphere toward which, from

time to time, she stole an awed glance, and she--a white host herself,

with tired, folded pinions, submissive, only waiting for fire from

heaven to complete the sacrifice....

... Oh, God--the pain! the pain in her head! She wanted to scream, to

faint, but her horror, the refined woman's horror of any "scene," kept

her dumb and almost still. She prayed, wildly and incoherently--pressed

her gloved fingers into her temples; her forehead was damp with

perspiration....

It was going now. Yes. In wave after wave, each less poignant than the

one before, the pain left her. She lifted her head, wet her lips--wiped

her forehead with the handkerchief still damp from her tears. Her eyes

were tired and dim; the altar swam mistily. She looked across to Father

Vernon, and he, noting her restlessness at last, rose and, with a low

genuflection on both knees, beckoned her, and passed before her from

the church.

In the open air she revived, and even began to doubt the reality of

what she had just undergone. There is a dream-like quality about

intense pain that makes it hard to estimate it truly afterward. The

car was waiting, in a dark slum that had once been a walled country

lane smelling of mould and verdure. Even now the warm restlessness of

spring could be felt in its fetid air. The chauffeur sat sideways upon

his seat, reading some strange by-product of literature in a green

cover. A dozen or so of ragged children, shock-headed and sore of face,

clustered round the headlights like so many poor scorched flies. She

shared the coppers in her purse between them.

"Write me from Hindhead," Vernon said, at the door of the car; "and

come to see me again when you get back. Be sure, my dear, God has some

great mercy for you after this. And if I were you, I should see some

one about the headaches. Nerves? Oh, yes! but it never does harm to

have good advice. Good-bye, good-bye! God bless you, my dear. Now then,

babies, why aren't the lot of you in bed?"

* * * * *

The car rolled, smoothly and swiftly, southward and westward. Through

brawling, chaffering Saturday night markets; through the old "Square

Mile," deserted now, its mysterious lanes coiling away to left and

right in tortuous perspective; across the Circus, in whose midst the

bronze archer poises himself, choosing his prey and aiming his unseen

arrow day and night at the spinning wheel of pleasure; round the sweep

of the Quadrant--and home. Two and two, two and two; the men leaning

over the women, the women leaning toward the men. Nature, after all,

was slightly vulgar. To be placed--by circumstances--out of reach of

its allurement had compensations--lent dignity to the point of view. It

was almost enough to make one turn to virtue to have to share vice with

so many....

There she went again! Phrases, phrases! Well, it was just as well,

since, after all, there wasn't much else left for her now. How tired

she was of it all! And what was the great mercy that Father Vernon had

predicted so confidently?... Home, at last.

* * * * *

"Three hours, probably more," the doctor said. It was Pemmer-Lloyd, the

great cancer specialist from Weymouth Street, just round the corner.

He was in golfing tweeds, and felt justly aggrieved that, with so many

general practitioners in the neighborhood, he should have been called

away from breakfast, for this. The nine forty-five to Amersham was out

of the question now.

One window-blind had been drawn up, crookedly and hurriedly, and

through the rhomboidal opening a sinister light fell upon the disorder

of the room. Two frightened maids and a housekeeper stood at the foot

of the bed, watching the doctor, with inane hope upon their faces. One

of the maids was crying, but looking about her curiously at the same

time.

"Done? No! of course nothing can be done. Am I not telling you she has

been dead over three hours. Had any doctor been attending her lately?"

"Not to our knowledge, sir."

"There may have to be an inquest, then. In that case you must see that

nothing is touched. Have the family been advised?"

"No, doctor. I thought first----"

"Wire and 'phone them immediately! _immediately!_ and the police

as well. Here is my card for the inspector. I shall have to stay at

home all day now. In a case like this, you should always call a general

practitioner."

* * * * *

They say she must have been reading a great part of the night. Two

books were on the table near her bed--"Madame Bovary," and "The

Imitation of Christ." Flaubert and à Kempis! Poor Althea! It was almost

your life's epitome.

XV

A LAST WISH

Many will remember the profound impression that Althea's death created.

It extended far beyond the circles that her novels had reached. There

was something about that last mysterious journey through London--the

sudden, unheralded end, at some conjectural hour, when the great

heart of the city was beating its faintest, that struck the popular

imagination, always ready to be harrowed, and secretly grateful, I

believe, for evidence that fate works with an even grimness under all

the inequalities of rank or fortune. I attended the funeral, combining

for the last time my professional duties with the privileges of an old

but lately neglected friend, and saw her committed to the awakening

earth. She was buried with all the pomp and circumstance that the

church of her adoption gives its children as a last assurance of its

own unshaken power, but through all the chants and absolutions the

chill human ache of an irreparable loss persisted, as, through the

perfume of incense and flowers, the raw smell of the polished elm

coffin pierced to the sense. The church was crowded with her friends;

wreaths and crosses, lyres with snapped strings, broken columns of rare

exotic flowers, all symbols of untimely end, were banked round the

catafalque, but the coffin itself was stark and bare, covered thinly

by a pall of purple silk wrought at its hem with passion flowers. The

girls in some refuge or another, poor soiled doves whose unwearied

friend she had been, had sat up, it was said, night and day in order to

complete it.

About the time that references to Mrs. Hepworth's career were ceasing

to appear even in the minor papers, rumors of a theatrical hoax

began to circulate through London. The new dancer, whom the zealous

friendship of a certain well-known sporting baronet had forced upon

an unwilling management, would not, after all, appear in the new play

that was to replace the _Motor Girl_ at the Dominion some time in

May. "_Would not appear!_" Imagine what an eye trained to cheat

the censor of his spoil could make of that; with what significance a

tongue, thrust into a leathery cheek not quite innocent of biscuit and

cheese, at the Bedford Street Bodega, could invest those three little

words.

"_Will not appear_, my boy. Catch on? Why won't she? That's the

joke, my boy. Because she's got to stop at home and _nurse her

mother_."

Imagine it! just once, and then let us pass on into sweeter air. Even

if it must be the air of a sick-room. For many weeks Fenella hardly

breathed any other. During that first breathless rally which hardly

gave thought to the final issue, and during which a spoonful of broth

swallowed, an hour's quiet rest or a fall in temperature were triumphs

repaying the sleepless night, dull eye, and hollow cheek a hundredfold,

career, character, seemed very empty, shadowy words. Even if one of

the vile journals in pink and blue and yellow covers addressed in a

handwriting needlessly disguised, which, be sure of it, the postman

did not fail to deliver at Number Eleven, had reached her, had not--as

all were, in fact, been torn from its wrapper by honest Frances' grimy

hand to light parlor or kitchen fire--I doubt very much whether the

marked paragraph would have had power to inflict one pang upon her

self-respect, or bring one drop of blood to her cheek.

How much she loved her mother, how far the wholesome, homely

_fact_ of her had been the basis of all happiness in life, Nelly

had not guessed until now, when the thought must be faced of its

speedy change to a mere memory. A reproachful memory, alas! She looked

back on her girlhood--her school-days, and saw herself heedless and

heartless. How niggardly of love she had been, how chary in response!

She even accused herself of a little snobbishness in her mother's

regard--unjustly, since it was from the innate expansiveness of the

older woman and not from the accident of station or manner that her

own finer nature had shrunk. But, in circumstances like these, to be

conscious of a finer nature does not administer much comfort.

Mrs. Barbour rallied a little from the first stroke, but never rose

from her bed, and never spoke intelligibly again. Sometimes, by bending

close to her lips and straining every sense, Fenella fancied she could

construe the formless gabble into words, but into the words even her

affection could read no meaning. During the day, indeed, her presence

seemed to agitate the invalid to such an extent that the nurse had to

be roused and the desperate effort to speak cut short by some opiate

or injection. Once, driven almost mad at sight of her mother's mental

suffering, Fenella took a sheet of stiff white cardboard, propped the

sick woman upon a pillow, and put a pencil into the palsied hand.

Slowly, with infinite pains on the one hand and infinite patience on

the other, five dreadful letters took shape upon the writing-pad; five

letters such as a dying man might scrawl with a finger dipped into his

heart's blood:

"D--A--N--C--E."

A light broke upon the girl. "You want me to go on rehearsing? Is that

it, mother?"

Oh! what joy in the poor fading eyes at being at last understood. The

trembling head nodded again and again, and fell back on the pillow

exhausted.

"I will then, dear!" Fenella whispered in her mother's ear. "I'll go

and put my things on at once."

She came back, dressed as for the street, and kissed her mother

good-bye. Ten minutes afterward, in response to a stealthy knock at

the door, the little Scotch nurse whispered that the patient was fast

asleep.

From now until the day on which the slowly curdling brain ceased to

receive any impression at all the little loving conspiracy of lies

went on. Every morning, at the usual hour of her departure for the

theatre, Fenella, in hat and long coat, kissed her mother's cheek and

forehead, and asked her how the night had passed--that night whose

every hour she often had watched. At seven o'clock, dressed again, she

came back, having first laid her cheek to the marble mantelpiece in

the drawing-room, that it might be convincingly cold. (The best women

have these depths in deception, this recognition of the importance of

trifles.) She would sit down upon the bed and regale her duped parent

with a long and elaborate history of the day's doings--what Mr. Dollfus

had said, what Mr. Lavigne had said--how tiresome the chorus were,

how jealous the leading lady--how set, above all, were all signs and

portents toward ultimate triumph. Her achievement in this new field

stirred even little Frances, now become a person of vast importance and

responsibility, to involuntary admiration.

"Miss! You can't 'alf tell 'em!" that little helpmeet would say,

harkening her.

Whenever a protracted illness has ended in death it is a commonplace of

comfort with well-meaning but shallow folk to say, "You must all feel

it a _merciful release_." Apart from its sincerity, the phrase is

founded upon a misconception of human feeling. No dead are missed so

much as the dead who have been long a-dying. The presence of a perilous

illness brings many an evil into a house; it at least casts one out.

_Ennui_ never reigns in the house that has the straw in front of

its railings. A great drama is going on, and there never is a moment

when one may not steal upstairs on tiptoe to measure its progress.

Hence, apart altogether from sorrow, a strange emptiness in life when

all is over, a bitter superadded regret for the close, shadowed room,

haunted by broken murmurs, that was once the core of a whole polity of

existence.

In her sad absorption Fenella forgot Sir Bryan all but completely. He

wrote to her often. His letters, headed in black or blue, or embossed

whitely in thick square letters--"The Turf Club"; "369 Mount Street,

Tel. 9087 Mayfair"; "Coffers Castle. Parcels: Balafond Stn. N. B.

R."--lay strewn about her dressing-table or stuck carelessly behind

looking-glasses, for all the world, represented now by Nurse Ursula or

Frances, to read if they would. (We will not suspect Nurse Ursula of

such a thing for a moment, and on any that have been placed in my hands

there is no such grimy finger-print as I am sure Frances would have

left.) She answered rarely, and then only in little set missives, mere

bulletins of her mother's health. She begged his pardon for leaving so

many of his letters _unansered_. She was quite well, thank him,

had had a quiet night, and felt quite _enegetic_. The doctor had

been and said mother's _strenth_ was well maintained. She thanked

him for the lovely grapes from Stanmore. She hoped that "Mud-Major"

would win in the big race at Liverpool, and she remained sincerely

his--Fenella Powys Barbour. She had decided on the full signature in

letters to Lumsden. It sounded stately, and enforced respect. She would

have been vastly surprised seeing the sort of respect with which the

misspelt little notes were treated.

It is only part of the general injustice of life that while the man

who was doing his clumsy best to lighten her sorrow hardly stayed in

her mind a moment after she had cast his letters aside or scribbled an

answer to them, the false lover, who had kissed her in her own home,

loved and ridden away, haunted every hushed empty corner of it. Her

very unhappiness brought him back to her, as a new illness weakens the

smart of an old wound. She had an impulse once, which the lonely and

deserted will understand, to set her thoughts on paper in the form of a

letter to him.

"MY DARLING LOST LOVE" (she began),

"What years and years it [_sic_] seems to have past since I

saw your dear face----"

Then she stopped, and tore the sheet into little pieces. Anything

approaching literary composition suddenly became hateful. The thought

had occurred to her: How well the other woman could do this! The other

woman--in her grave nearly a month.

One morning, while she lingered outside her mother's door, after

perpetrating the customary deception, Frances, the begrimed, brought

her Lumsden's card in a corner of her apron. He was in the small

drawing-room, straight and fair and good to look upon, standing amid a

dusty huddle of chairs that had not been restored to their places since

the doctors consulted there a week ago.

"I came to see if you were killing yourself," he said, when they had

shaken hands and he had asked after her mother.

"Oh! I'm as strong as a horse."

"That remark rather loses its force with me, because I know something

about them. When did you take your feed--'horse'?"

"Sir Bryan! I eat with nurse."

"Oh! I know the sort of meals. You're dressed. Have you been out?"

"N--no."

"Just going then?"

Fenella blushed, but did not reveal the pious fraud.

"I've got the big car outside," said Lumsden. "Care to come for a run

till tea?"

The suggestion had its attractions.

"I must run upstairs first. You don't mind waiting a minute?"

Nurse not only gave permission, but a little straight hygienic talk

she had been saving up, too professional to be repeated here. Fenella

took her seat almost with a feeling of duty done. Bryan ordered the

chauffeur into the back and took the wheel himself.

"Tuck this round you. Now, where shall we go that's within reach?

Richmond?"

"Oh no!" hastily--"not Richmond. Let's go to Hampstead."

"No; I don't care for Hampstead," with a sudden shadow of distaste. Two

pasts met in their glance--her woman's fault of loving too well--and

his.

After a while the mere physical act of breathing fully and deeply

again, the rush of the spring air, pleasantly cold, past her pallid

cheeks, did their work, and unsealed the springs of joy in her own

young breast--a facile joy, born of health and perfect balance, for

which she had often blamed herself since the summer, ignorant of how

between it, as between every function of her body, and the ascetic

ideal which a heart, untimely chastened, sought to impose, there was

war declared, in which she was a mere battle-ground for contending

forces. It had rained hard in the forenoon. Now, level with their eyes,

a belated sun flooded the suburbs with temperate gold, spilled its

overflow on wet slate roofs, set bright jewels in the upper windows of

gray stucco houses, and wove a filagree pattern, beaded with tender

green buds in railed gardens and bristling walled shrubberies. Nothing

was beneath its glorifying magic. Between the flashing tram-rails

the very bed of the wide road seemed flooded with alluvial dust. A

wonderful sky country, all mountain and islet-strewn tarn--such a

landscape as may lie at the gate of dream-cities in the Alps--closed

the prospect into which they were rushing. The wheels hummed, the six

cylinders purred happily. She began to sing to herself, stretching her

neck and pouting her lips, a foolish little song she had caught from

one of the Dominion girls:

"I like your old French bonnet

With the ribbons on it,

And I like your cha-a-a-arming ways.

If you'll come to Parry

Then we two will marry

And our wedding march shall be the Marseillaise."

"Feeling happier, Flash?"

She had forgotten him. Now, as she turned, self-reproachful, at the

sound of his voice, the unreasonable little fit of happiness took

wing. Yet she could not but admire him. How cleverly and coolly he

drove! What chances he took! They were passing every one. Once, at

some congestion in the traffic, a policeman touched his helmet and let

him through. He seemed to feel this was a man not used to wait his

turn. Paul had once said to her that most men failed in life because

its detail was too much for them to tackle; at least, this was what

she made out of a rather more ornate speech. Bryan didn't seem to find

any difficulty. She remembered Jack Barbour's comprehensive phrase,

"Bryan's first-class in anything he takes up." Was it because she was

ambitious, aspiring, herself that she resisted this power, instead of

succumbing to it, as ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have

done, and being content to shine with a reflected glory? She had had

her own little dream of success--the packed theatre, the thunders of

applause, her name flashing and winking in letters of fire--part of

the madness of a great city by night--paragraphs, interviews. All very

mean and personal, no doubt, yet with an element in them that somehow

dignified the ambition. For to be the favorite of the public was what

she wanted--nothing else would do--the great good-hearted public, that

rings its hard-earned shilling or half-crown upon the ledge of the

ticket-office, shopman and clerk with honest wife and sweetheart at his

side, equally ready to laugh or cheer or cry, who dip a mutual finger

into a box of chocolates and believe that even a dancer can be an

honest girl.

XVI

AZRAEL

They stopped at a little place in a fold of the Chiltern Hills, a

mere roadside inn which the neighborhood of a fashionable golf-course

had galvanized into new and rather graceful life. The stone front was

covered in ivy, two wings of red brick terminated in sunny bay windows,

there was a bowling-green at the back, and an academician had repainted

the sign. A few men in tweeds and flannels whom Lumsden appeared to

know were strolling about the place, but abstained tactfully from more

than a passing greeting. While tea was getting ready the baronet lit

a cigar, and the girl gathered a bunch of primroses in the garden and

pinned them at her waist. Now that she had taken off the heavy coat

he had insisted on her wearing, he noticed for the first time the

shabbiness of her black house-frock. A white thread, dropped from some

needlework, clung to one sleeve.

Lumsden was a man for whom some kind of a love affair had always been a

necessity. Even before he left Eton he had had friends among women of

the world. His bluff, slangy manners covered a good deal of intensity

of a rather un-English sort. Men of Scotch race have a subtlety

denied to the obtuser Southron. They are both more steadfast and more

perfidious. His early manhood had been shaken by one great passion,

which had ended unhappily and which it is no part of our business to

disinter. A long series of inconclusive sentimental experiments had

followed it; inconclusive, because he had the grace or the vanity to

think that, had it been constancy he was seeking, he might often enough

have found it. The devotion, indeed, which one might strike up against

in unexpected quarters was, in his opinion, a serious drawback to

the game. He was a generous lover. The idol of the moment was always

bravely apparelled, always had plenty of tinsel on it, and if a sense

of its inadequacy oppressed him, he got rid of the feeling by putting

on a little more. All he had asked latterly was that it should simper

prettily and do him credit. He was deceived, of course, from time to

time, but never before his own waning attention had given betrayal at

once its justification and its clue. Thus it fell out that, although

his favored pastime had cost him a great deal of money, it had never

cost him what such a man would consider his self-respect. It will save

time to admit that his intentions toward his young cousin (she was not

really his cousin, we know, but he liked to speak of her, even think of

her so) had not been honorable. That she was kin and of the same caste

as himself had no weight with a man accustomed to divide women into two

classes--those he would not marry under any circumstances and those

whom he would only marry if there were no help for it. Fenella, to do

him justice (and, in a way, to do her justice too), had belonged to the

second class from the beginning, but her emergence from it now into a

category all by itself was not due to any recognition on his part of

her integrity--why should he recognize what he had not tempted?--but

simply and solely to the fact that the illness of that poor lady, her

mother, had upset all his early calculations. He had his own code of

conduct, and one of them was that you can not call at a girl's home,

inquire after the maternal health, send the invalid fruit and game, and

then--well, without an entire change in perspective as regards her. Of

late, indeed, she had lain in his imagination to a quite distressing

extent. The impulse that had made him give up a day's hunting and come

spurring to her side over ten miles of muddy ground had not failed

to repeat itself again and again. His thoughts turned toward her

incessantly. At every man's tale of fraud and wrong her image stirred

uneasily in his imagination, and the ideal, rather deferred than quite

disowned, to which his whole life had done violence, joined with his

passion in pleading for a reparation that was at once so easy and so

pleasant. Women are generally avenged competently by some woman. The

eclipse of the individual in the species never lasts. She emerges,

armed with all the old illusions, and often at the very moment when a

man is weakest to do battle with her.

Smoking silently, he looked at her now, busied with the pretty feminine

duties of milk-jug and sugar-tongs, marked the perceptible changes of

face and figure since their first encounter. His experience projected,

as it were, her maturity, even her gray hairs upon her--owned that she

would always be charming, always a sweet woman.

"Dreaming, Flash?"

She had only been respecting his own silent mood, but did not deny her

abstraction.

"I was thinking of the Dominion. When's the first night?"

"In about three weeks. It'll be _Hamlet_ without the prince for

some of us, eh, coz?"

She did not answer.

"You must only look upon it as put off for awhile," he said

reassuringly. "You'll get another chance."

She shook her head. "I don't feel I shall. Don't you ever feel there's

just one time for the one thing?"

"Even if I didn't, Shakespeare has. But you're over-young, Flash, to be

thinking of fortune at the ebb."

He looked down at her hand. There were no rings on it. He had a

suspicion that was confirmed when she snatched it off the table and put

it in her lap.

"Don't think me impertinent, but will it make much difference, I mean

financial difference, to you if your mother dies?"

"I don't know. I'm afraid so. But I have a little money coming to me

when I'm twenty-one. Not a lot."

"How old are you now?"

"Nearly nineteen."

"Two years! What are you going to do meanwhile?"

She shrugged her shoulders, or maybe shivered. Life _was_ gray

with the dream out of it.

"Work, I suppose--at something. I can always teach dancing again."

"Flash, I'm ungodly rich. Won't you let me----"

"_Bryan!_"

It was the first time she had ever called him familiarly by his name,

but her face was so shocked and white, her voice so like a real cry of

pain, that he did not notice it. He flushed, and churned the gravel

with his heel.

"What have I said? Do you know, young woman, I don't find the

expression on your face very flattering."

"Bryan! If I thought you meant what you've just said, you--I--we----"

"Well, what?"

"Never, _never_ could meet again."

Lumsden swallowed his humiliation, but it didn't go down very far.

"I beg your pardon. Will that do? There was some excuse for me, you

know. You let me help you once before."

"Not with money."

He wasn't in a mood to be very delicate. "Wasn't it?" he said with a

short laugh. "Never mind, then."

"Why do you laugh that funny way?" said Fenella, with unexpected

spirit. "You must tell me now. Did you have to pay Dollfus to take me?"

"Dear _ingénue_! Do you mean to say you've never suspected it? You

don't think Dollfus is in business for hygienic reasons, do you?"

"Much money?" she persisted.

"Oh, ask Joe," said Lumsden, rather wearily. "He's on the telephone."

Fenella beat her palms against the side of the chair. "I've been a

fool," she went on, in a fierce soliloquy, "a little, credulous

donkey. No wonder that girl thought me a fraud! And yet--I believed you

all believed in me. Do you think I'd ever have let you--unless I felt

sure? Oh! you must know it."

"My dear child, be content. You carry conviction. I acquit you from

this moment of everything unmaidenly, generosity included."

"Generosity!"

"Yes. It sometimes requires as much to take as to give. But you're like

all women."

"Why?"

"When they're not insulted at being offered money they're insulted it

isn't more."

"How dare you call me 'women'?"

"Does it hurt your dignity?"

"Never mind what it hurts. You've no right to speak that way, to class

me with--with others. Oh, yes, you have, though. I'd forgotten."

"Flash, let me tell you one thing: No matter how young or charming or

virtuous you may be, to keep harping on what you know hurts a man's

feelings is to be a shrew."

"Your 'feelings'!" The vexation went out of her face. She leaned

her chin on her hand and gave him a look so piercing, so direct and

unexpected, that it went through all his worldly armor.

"Well?" he asked, grimly, through his teeth. She never guessed the

restraint he was putting on himself. "Haven't I a right to any?"

She looked away without answering.

He got up abruptly. "Let's go home," he said. "We've had enough

heart-to-heart talk for one afternoon."

They rode back into the London lights in a silence which the gentleman

in the peaked cap who drove them probably misconstrued as perfect

accord. "They don't talk much, not w'en they're 'olding 'ands," he said

that night in his favored house of call. But he only held her hand

once, to say good-bye at the door.

"Have I been a prig?" asked Fenella, contritely.

He seemed to be turning the matter over, but was really thinking how

prettily penitence became her.

"Have I offended you?"

"I'll tell you whether you have some other time."

* * * * *

Apparently not beyond forgiveness, for he came again two days later

and took her for an hour's drive--and then the next day. Good or bad,

the habit formed itself. Two or three times she allowed herself to be

persuaded further, and let him take her to dinner. At such an hour the

big restaurants would not be very full; but it seemed Bryan could not

go anywhere without meeting a man he knew, and who, while speaking,

divided his attention pretty evenly between the baronet, half-turned

in his chair, holding the lapel of his friend's coat, and the pretty

stranger to whom he was not introduced. He was very kind and cousinly;

had theories as to what people should eat (he never asked her to drink)

when low-spirited and anxious, kept clear of the personal note, and

always saw she got back in time. Thus, little by little, the hint she

had received of a dangerous hardness in his nature was effaced. In

time of trouble the heart receives more impressions than the head,

and it is wonderful into what bulk tearful eyes can magnify a little

kindness. Fenella was to blame herself subsequently for her conduct

during the last days of her mother's life; but I think, perhaps too

indulgently, that it was only the instinct to grasp at enjoyment while

enjoyment was possible. The very pang of self-reproach with which she

took up her nightly task might have convinced her of this. Old habits

are not effaced in an instant. From babyhood she had known no surer

way to make her mother happy than by seizing all opportunities for

pleasure that came her way. Outsiders who suspect love because it falls

from some arbitrary standard they choose to set up have no idea how

often apparent heartlessness is justified by some such little secret

covenant between the loving and the loved. And then, though the period

of suspense was short, it passed so heavily. The days seemed counted

out with pitiful slowness by a power that knew how few they were.

Time, like distance, deceives when one is seeking the way. She was so

fearfully alone! Her vision sometimes ached at the obscurity of her own

destiny. In that still room uncertainties seemed to multiply, thicken

and coil, like smoke in a tunnel. She envied every one in turn--Nurse

Ursula, with her brisk professional manner and endless prospect of

clearly defined duty--cases to come running into perspective like beds

in a long ward; slatternly, pretty little Frances, with her brisk

love-passages in the area; the woman upon the bed, nearer with every

breath to a change that raises no problems but solves them all. She

often whispered in her mother's ear, "Mother, mother; take me with you.

Don't go without Nelly."

Foolish extravagances of an undisciplined heart. Even for death, Nelly,

we have to wait until the time for enjoying it is past.

* * * * *

Early one morning, following a night in which her mother had seemed

much easier, and in the very first hour of her untimely sleep, the

nurse shook her by the shoulder. In the one look that the two women

exchanged her news was told. Fenella huddled on her clothes and

followed to the sick-room. Her mother was breathing strangely. Every

inspiration was like the hiccough that follows a fit of weeping in

a child. Her brows were knitted--she seemed puzzled and absorbed.

Occasionally she tried to lift a hand stiffly and clumsily toward

her head. By noon all was over. The doctor called twice, and, for

the first time in many days, failed to write a new prescription. The

lawyer was telephoned for. About three o'clock in the afternoon two

decent pew-opening bodies were admitted without question, stole

upstairs, and, having performed their office, stole as quietly away.

The charwoman stayed for tea, and uncovered a rich vein of reminiscence

suitable for the occasion. The blinds were drawn down, the windows

opened. Outside, in the square, was heard the champing of bits, the

rattle of the harness, that poor Mrs. Barbour had loved to listen to of

an afternoon in spring or autumn.

Toward evening, when they were all done with the dead woman, Fenella

went softly upstairs. Nurse Ursula, upon whose breast, for want of a

nearer, the orphaned girl's first passion of grief had spent itself,

but whose attentions harassed her now, would have accompanied her, but

she would have no one. She approached the door full of awe as well as

sorrow. Within it seemed some dark angel, with brimming chalice, had

been waiting till she was calm enough to drink. There was something

sacramental in this first visit to her dead; her passion composed

itself for the encounter. Through the lowered blinds the afternoon

sun filled the room with a warm amber light. The windows were opened

slightly at the bottom, and the fresh spring wind puffed and sucked at

the light casement curtains. She laid her head down upon the pillow

and put her lips to the chill, sunken temples, upon which she felt

the hair still damp from the sweat of the death-struggle. As there

are depths in the sea which the hardiest diver cannot support save

with constraint of breathing, so there are depths of sorrowful reverie

wherein the soul abdicates for a time its faculties of memory and

comparison. Fenella did not cry nor remember nor rebel. The briny

flood rose quietly--encompassed her utterly--covered her insensibly at

the temperature of her own forsaken heart. Sorrow so deep has many of

sleep's attributes. She had been vaguely conscious for some time of a

knocking at the door before she raised her head. It was turned quite

dark; the charwoman, with a candle lighting up her frightened face,

stood in the open door.

"Mrs. Chirk! How dare you disturb me."

"Oh, miss, I'm sorry; but I knocked and knocked. Nurse is upstairs and

Frances is out, and there's two gentlemen below says they must see you.

I 'aven't told them nothink, miss, not knowin' as you'd 'ave me."

Some more of the dreary business of death, she concluded. She went

to her own room, bathed her eyes, dressed her hair hurriedly, and

came downstairs. She started as she opened the dining-room door. Her

visitors were Lumsden and the Dominion manager.

XVII

A DREAM COMES TRUE

The two men were in evening dress, standing a good way apart. Both

seemed ill at ease, and each showed it in a different fashion. Bryan

was pulling at his fair moustache, and Mr. Dollfus, his watch in

his hand, full of suppressed excitement, had evidently just checked

himself in a nervous pacing of the carpet. Before she could give her

indignation words, Bryan came quickly across the room, and kept her

silent with a gesture.

"Miss Barbour, just a word before you say anything, and before Dollfus

tells you our errand. I've brought him here to-night because I don't

want either you or him to reproach me afterward that I came between

you and even a hundred-to-one chance; but I want you to know before

he begins that the whole thing's against my judgment, and against

my inclination, too. Now then, Joe, fire away, and remember time's

valuable."

The Jew only seemed to have been waiting to burst forth.

"Mith Barbour," he exclaimed, with a nervous movement of his hands, and

lisping worse than ever, "I wantcher to thave me."

"To save you?"

"Yeth. Oh, don't look at me that way. I'm thpeakin' sense. Dontcher

know what's happenin' to-night?"

She shook her head.

"What!" he almost screamed; "you meanter thay you've forgotten. It's

the first night of the _Dime Duchess_. They're playin' the second

act now, and, by Gott, the piece is damned already!"

He wiped his dripping forehead with a big scented handkerchief, and

began to pace the floor again, flinging out his arms exuberantly.

"It's a conthpiracy from beginning to end," he cried, shrilly--"a

conthpiracy! I tell yer, Lumpsden, I bin in front, and I know a lot of

the faces. Fifty or sixty of Costello's people if there's vun. I'll

haf the law on him. But cher can't turn out sixty people, eh! They've

stopped Ormiston's encore twice; Mith Carthew's so frightened she can't

sing a note. Three months' work and thousants of pounds gone to h--ll

in a night, by Gott!"

"Stop swearing and raving, Joe, and tell the girl what you want."

Dollfus sobered himself with a great effort and wiped his mouth.

"Scuthe my langwitch, please, Miss Barbour," he said in a lower tone.

"I'm excited; I ain't meself. I wantcher ter come and dance."

Fenella stared at him. "To _dance_! to-night?"

Bryan, who had kept his back to them, turned his head now.

"That's right, Flash," he said over his shoulder, "my advice to you is

'don't you do it.' Joe's crazy, but he ain't exaggerating much. They're

pretty wild over something in front."

Dollfus shook his head despairingly from side to side.

"There you go Lumpsden, there you go agen. You're all wrong. I've bin

tellin' him that all the vay in the cab. He don't know the public like

I do. They're jutht in the mood now when somethin' new and somethin'

good'll carry 'em off their feet. Mith Barbour, I haf ter go back

anyhow. It'th for you ter decide. Will you come or wontcher?"

"Bryan," she said. "Doesn't he know?" pointing to the ceiling with her

head.

"Bout cher mother!" said Dollfus, who was watching her narrowly.

"Courthe I know the poor lady'th ill. But I'll take yer down and I'll

bring yer back. Think? Three quarters of an hour! You'll never be

mithed."

"Mr. Dollfus, mamma died this morning."

The Dominion manager took up his hat without a word and walked on

tiptoe to the door. Bryan followed and, if looks could have killed, Mr.

Dollfus's troubles would have been over then and there. In the hall the

little man turned.

"Mith Barbour, pleathe, _pleathe_ belief me. Not for a thousant

pounds, not for ten thousant, I vouldn't er had this happen. I couldn't

know, could I--ah? I gotter heart--eh? You von't t'ink the vorse of me?"

"Oh, come on!" said the baronet, taking hold of his sleeve. "Haven't

you done enough mischief already?"

"_Stop!_" cried Fenella, so loudly that both men obeyed. She

stood rigid for a moment, pressing her hands over her eyes. Across her

brain in letters like fire the last message from the beloved dead was

throbbing and glowing. "_Dance! Dance!_"

"I'll come, Joe!" she cried. "Just two minutes to put on my cloak,

that's all. Don't stop me, Bryan! I know what I'm doing. Let me pass!

Oh, I've had enough of its being made smooth and easy for me. I'm one

of the crowd to-night, and I'm going to help 'em pull the fat out of

the fire. I can do it, too. I never was afraid, and I've got a bit up

my sleeve you haven't seen."

She was gone and back in a moment, cloaked and with a little box under

her arm.

"My make-up box," she said, tapping it. "I just thought of it in time.

Have you got the car outside? How long'll it take? Mrs. Chirk!" she

called down the kitchen stairs. "Tell nurse I've been called away on

business and not to sit up."

"You're a herrowen, a herrowen," said Joe, dabbing at his eyes this

time, as they took their seats in the cab.

"Oh, no, I'm not, Joe. No more than any of the other girls. Do you

think I'm the only woman that's got to grin to-night when she'd rather

cry? I never was stage-struck, like other girls. I always knew it was

'work! work!' once you were over the floats. Don't look so glum, Bryan.

That's 'cos he only knows half our business, isn't it, Joe? He's only

a dabbler. It's bread and butter and a bed to lie on, and perhaps

medicine for somebody's mother, isn't it, Joe? Some of those girls told

me they'd been eighteen months out and three months rehearsing! Think

of it! Oh, why doesn't he get through the traffic?"

The front of the Dominion flashed past, festooned with boards

announcing that stalls and dress circle and amphitheatre were full. The

vestibule round the box office was crowded with men in dress clothes.

"They're just t'rough the second act," said Dollfus. "Now you know what

you've gotter do." And he repeated his instructions. At the stage door

he took her hand and pulled her after him, past the wicket and down the

whitewashed corridor, full of girls in spangled finery, who gazed at

her in amazement and drew aside to let them pass. Near the wings the

manager was pounced on by various subalterns, but he waved them aside

furiously.

"Go 'way! ask some vun else! Do somethin'! Getter hustle on! What

is it, Mr. Lavigne? Oh! the band parts for the cymbal dance. Take

'em rount to Steiner. I ain't the orchestra! Run up to your old

dressin'-room," he said, and let go of her hand; "I'll send up your

own dresser. Mr. Lavigne--have the old cue put back. You know. What's

it--'muffins'?"

Jack Ormiston was just finishing his third song as she came down

dressed, made up in vivid white and carmine, and with the little silver

cymbals on her hands. He tumbled off, breathless, perspiring through

his grease paint, and stood for a moment, his knees trembling, trying

to catch some encouragement amid the babel of cheers, counter--cheers,

whistles, cat-calls, and cries of "Order!" that followed him through.

And she had to face _that_ presently--unknown, untested, her name

not even on the programme.

"Do you think you can do it, Flash?" Bryan asks, nervously, chewing

his moustache. In defiance of the "well-known Dominion rule" he has

followed her behind.

"Wait and see!" she says, without looking at him, and next moment has

taken her cue and is on the stage.

In front the vast concavity of the auditorium sweeps away from her

feet, outward and upward. It is dark, confused and populous, full of

faces, like pebbles, she fancies, dragged seaward by a retreating

wave--flecked white with shirt fronts and fluttering programmes--a

hungry monster, ready to engulf her at a tremor or hint of fear. Its

hot breath mingles with the cold down-draught of the stage like the

flush and chill of an ague. Beyond the blurred footlights her eyes,

misty with emotion, watch the leader of the orchestra lifting the

first languid bars of the score. His head is turned toward her. In a

moment he will give her her signal. Yet, though not a single stroke

of his baton but is counted by her, as she waits, poised and tense,

for the note upon which, with a clash of cymbals and a tremor of her

whole body, the dance must begin, her thoughts, strangely detached and

visionary, stray far away from the present moment with its personal

crisis of success or failure, to brood, with a perverse preference,

over the two great sorrows of her life--the lover who forsook her at

the cross-roads of his own ambition because she had not wealth or wit

to hold him--the mother, deserted now in her turn, whose waxen fingers,

stitch by stitch, had sewn the very dress she is wearing, and who lies

at home unwatched or watched only by strangers on the first night

of her pitiful state. Life! life! this is life. Something beautiful

yet horrible, too. Something that in its demand for service--for

distraction--takes as little heed of the woman's breaking heart as it

took of the man's thwarted ambition.

"_B-r-r-r!_" The note is reached. As she clashes her cymbals

together all visions take flight. The music rises like a flood, pours

over the footlights, enters into her and possesses her utterly. She

has sold herself to it, and, true to the bargain, her bangled feet

beat--beat out the rhythm upon the boards as they once, upon the sand,

had beaten out a tune that one man and the eternal sea sang together.

Not a movement of her body above the waist but is poised upon them,

governed by their shifts and changes, and nothing is stranger than,

having watched them awhile at their work, quick and calculated as

the shuttle of a machine into which a brain of steel has been built,

to look upward to where arms and breast and head thrown back are all

partners in some dream of an unattained desire, that hovers just out

of reach of the inviting arms, swoops wilfully for a moment to touch

the pursed lips, and, just as it is clasped convulsively to the heaving

breast, escapes, to leave her gazing after it with set, expressionless

face and limbs, suddenly grown rigid again.

* * * * *

"_B-r-r-r!_" The cymbals bray their harsh discord anew. The music

begins, more faintly at first; slowly, slowly it woos the coy vision

back to her arms. Her face softens. Out of despair intenser desire is

born. Nearer and nearer still. But a new note of warning has crept

into the score. A muffled drum-tap, hardly heard at first, grows

louder--falls faster. And her face changes with it. To bewilderment,

horror succeeds rapidly. Either this is not the dream that fled her

arms before, or else some new significance in what she sees terrifies

her, now when it is too late. Straight and level as a blow it reaches

her. She covers her eyes, tries to strike it down, holds it from her

with outstretched hands, folds her arms across her breast to deny it

entrance. The music tears through crescendo to climax, and all the

time she is dancing as well as acting--dancing with all her strength

and skill. She cannot feel the tension of the audience, does not know

what a tribute is in its breathless attention. She only knows that

her dance is nearing its end and that they are silent. Why does no one

cheer or clap their hands? Is it possible that, amid those hundreds,

not one knows how well the thing is being done? Furore or failure:

this had been prophesied of her, and she had given no thought to the

alternative. It is to be failure then. All her work is to go for

nothing--her dishonor, the violence done her own feelings to-night--for

nothing. With success she might even have forgiven herself. A great

terror seizes her of the pitiless many-headed monster whom she has

wooed in vain and whose churlish silence has power to change all she

had thought inspiration into the dross of a crazy, heady folly. It is

beginning to murmur--to move restlessly. As she holds her arms out to

it in a sort of last abject appeal, the murmuring grows louder. It is

the wave, the wave again, of her first fancy, that has hung suspended

while she danced, and that now, gathering volume, rears its head to

finally overwhelm her with shame and confusion. She was mad to have

ventured! Nothing living can face it! She stifles a scream, dances out

the last furious finale of the orchestra, and falls prostrate, her arms

stretched out before her, the silver cymbals held upward.

Everything turns dark and thunderous. She feels the chorus sweep past

her with a glitter of gold legs and a stiff rustle of skirts; fancies

that the orchestra is playing again, but that something louder and

stormier is drowning it; gets shakily to her feet, takes one frightened

glance at the tumult before her, and, with a half curtsey, totters

through the wings. Mr. Dollfus rushes to meet her; he is shaking her

hands again and again, some one else is holding her round the waist and

whispering in her ear.

"Pull yourself together, Flash! It's all right. You must go on--once,

anyhow. Damn it, Joe, give the girl a few moments. Can't you see it's

got over her?"

"Did I--do--all right?" says Fenella, between gasps.

"All right?" Dollfus repeats, excitedly. "Cantcher hear 'em? Listen to

the noise! Wotcher think they mean? Come--surely to gootness, you're

ready now?"

She is calmer, and draws herself out of the baronet's arms.

"Go on, kid," he says, as he lets her go. "Go on, and taste popularity.

Take a good long drink of it, Flash."

As she came through the wings the dropping fire of applause exploded

into a roar again. It was nearly three minutes--I mean three real

minutes--before she was done kissing her hands to us all, and the play

was allowed to proceed to its triumphant finale. I happen to know,

because I was in front, and a good deal of what you have been reading

is my own impression, on record in the columns of the _Panoply_,

of the night Fenella Barbour came into her kingdom.

XVIII

ICE TO THE MOON

And yet an hour later, when the theatre was empty, the cheering and

the speeches done, and the linotypes were pecking various people's

impressions of a wonderful night into place, she was crying as though

her heart would break. She was sitting in Lumsden's study in a big

chintz-covered arm-chair. She had taken off her hat but not her

cloak, and her hair fell in some disorder over tear-stained cheeks.

The baronet sat on the edge of a table opposite her, his long shapely

black legs stretched out before him. He had changed his coat for a silk

dressing-jacket and was smoking a cigarette. In spite of his air of

being at home, something in his face, harassed and unquiet, checked the

inference that he was also at his ease. His thin hair was ruffled and

his eyes were a little bloodshot. Quite frequently he reached across to

a tray on which a syphon, a cut-glass bottle, and a long thin tumbler

kept cheerful company.

"Don't you think you've cried about enough, Flash?" he suggested,

presently.

She pressed a handkerchief, already wet through, against her eyes, but

made no attempt to check the flow. There was something disquieting in

this steady drain upon her emotions. It seemed to tell of a mortal

wound to affection or self-respect.

"I t-told you I should. You should have let me go home."

"My dear child, it's natural you should cry after what you've been

through. But there's a point where every one ought to stop. You'll make

yourself ill."

"I shall never forgive myself--_never, never_!"

This was a point of view that the baronet had evidently tried to combat

already, and unsuccessfully. He sighed, and took another drink.

"I'm bad--wicked--heartless and disgraced." She jumped up and began to

button her coat.

"I must go--at once!" she cried. "Where did you put my hat?"

"_Flash!_"

She was so near him that without rising he could put out his hand and

catch her arm. She looked at his face and sat down, weakly and as if

fascinated. He held her so for a few moments, and then turned his eyes

away.

"Don't be a little muff!" he said.

His words seemed to relieve a tension. She giggled hysterically.

"You're up here to-night," he went on deliberately, "because I made you

come up, and because I wasn't going to have you go home, after eating

nothing all day, to a house where every one's in bed, and cry yourself

to sleep or lie awake starving and self-reproachful. You won't be so

hard on yourself after eating and drinking something. Hello!"

There was a stir and tinkle of glass and china from the inner room.

Bryan threw the door open.

"Bring it in here, Becket," he said.

Two servants entered, carrying a tray. Quickly as a conjuror the elder

of the two cleared the low table, spread a fringed linen cloth and laid

out supper. There was soup in brown silver-covered bowls, and something

in a tureen with a white tongue of flame licking the bottom, and an

epergne of fruit topped with a big pine and a phalanx of thin glasses.

The footman put a pail on the ground full of cracked ice, out of which

three long bottle-necks were sticking. He began to cut the cork of one

of them loose.

"Anybody call while I was out, Becket?"

"Madame called about nine, Sir Bryan."

"Again?" he said, in a surprised voice.

"Yes, Sir Bryan."

"Did she leave any message?"

"She said you would probably hear from her to-night, Sir Bryan."

Lumsden looked at the clock and shrugged his shoulders.

"You needn't wait up, Becket," he said. "I'll telephone to the garage."

The outer door closed softly upon the two men. Neither of them had

looked at her once.

"Now then," said Lumsden, expanding hospitably. "Sit where you are and

I'll wait on you." He put a napkin over her knees, tilted the scalding

bouillon into her soup-plate, and filled two glasses with the spumy

wine. He emptied one himself and refilled it immediately.

"Aren't _you_ going to eat anything?" asked Fenella.

"Oh! I've had dinner. Besides, I'm a bit off my oats, Flash. Been

worried lately." He gazed at the fire awhile, chewing one end of his

moustache, but didn't enlarge upon the reason of his disquiet.

"Is that all you can eat?" he asked presently, seeing she put aside her

plate. "You must have some Hide-and-Seek, then. You should have taken

some first. It'll give you an appetite; and it'll give you a color

besides. That's another of my worries. You're too pale, child. Have you

always been so?"

"I suppose so."

"Oh! it's all right, then. Of course it's a divine color; but one

doesn't want an artistic effect at the expense of health. Well, Flash,

here's a toast: 'The New Life,' Miss Fenella Powys Barbour." He bowed

profoundly and emptied his glass.

Fenella just sipped her own wine. A suspicion that had crossed her mind

even in her own house, and again when Lumsden held her in the wings,

but which, in her excitement, she had forgotten, returned upon her.

Every time he filled and drained his glass fear clutched at her heart.

"What a rummy little face you made then, Flash. You won't do that when

you're ten years older. No, no! Thank God for the juice of the grape.

It's killed more men than bullets, but it's better to be full of it

than full of bullets. 'Ah! eh!' as Joe would say. Don't jump!--'tother

cork's just going."

"Bryan, don't drink any more. It--it isn't fair to me."

"Oh, oh! So that's the secret? That's why we're such a tongue-tied

little lady: that's why we've lost our appetite? My dear kiddie, you

surely don't think a bottle more or less makes any difference to an old

war-horse like myself. But I love you for hating it. It's a low taste

for a girl. I get fits of loathing myself; sometimes even the smell

suggests dyed hair. There, then!" He thrust the open bottle back into

the melting ice. "Now, turn to vinegar!... But I'll tell you a secret,

Flash. Half the work of the world is done by men who aren't quite sober

after nine o'clock. Just cosy, y' know. And the best paid half, too. I

could give you names that would surprise you. It's a rummy world."

He meditated awhile on the strangeness of the world against which he

had so little cause of complaint, shook his head, and, probably from

force of habit, mixed himself a whiskey and soda.

"What was I saying when we were interrupted? Oh, yes; I remember.

I'll tell you while I'm cutting up one of these little brown birds.

Why--just this, Flash. You're unhappy because you're confusing reasons

with motives. One can have all sorts of reasons, good and bad mixed,

but it's the motive that counts. Take yourself to-night. Why did you

come and dance? Well, Joe in tears is an affecting sight: that's one.

Then you don't like to see work and worry wasted: that's another. And I

think you're a helpful little baby. That makes three good 'uns. Suppose

in with all these there was a bit of vanity mixed, a little half-formed

wish to show 'em a trick or two and a very pretty shape...."

He stopped suddenly and threw down the knife and fork he had been

plying. "I say, Flash, don't you think you and I ought to know where we

stand?"

"Where we stand?" Her mouth went suddenly dry.

"Yes"--nervously but stubbornly--"where you and I stand. It's the

proper time for it. There's a new life beginning for you to-night,

Flash. I don't want to exaggerate it; I've seen too many of these

things end in smoke, and the time's gone by for any Lola Montes. The

world wants things just as bad, but it wants to pay less for 'em. But

you're good for three or four years, and that looks a long way ahead

to me. Flash, what do you think of me? I mean, personally. Bryan

Lumsden--the human animal?"

"How can I tell? I don't know you well enough."

"That's the sort of answer that tries to gain time and only loses it.

I'm playing _bona fide_, Flash: don't you play Punchinello. You're

woman enough to know the most important thing about me."

"Important for you, perhaps."

"Yes, my clever girl, and for you, too. You can't play the lone hand

forever. All life's a conspiracy against it. When fate throws two

people like you and me together, it doesn't let them go under an

explanation, at least. Let's have ours."

She covered her eyes. "Not to-night, Bryan; not to-night. Think what

I've been through."

"Yes, to-night, coz. Don't look scared. You ain't going to hear

anything you shouldn't. I'll begin at the beginning.... Nine or ten

months ago, you know, I was at La Palèze. I'd been asked to put money

in, and I went for a look. God knows why I stayed on. We didn't have

much to do in the evenings except talk scandal, and I admit there was a

good deal talked about a French artist and his pretty model, who were

staying together in the town. You've heard, perhaps, how common that

arrangement is all along the coast. But this time they said the model

was English, and even before I saw you I felt sorry for you. It's

a kind of national pride, I suppose. We ain't angels ourselves, but

we don't like to think of our own women that way, abroad. My bedroom

window looked right out along the beach, and when I was dressing for

dinner I used often to see you coming back along the sands. Do you

remember it?"

Fenella was leaning forward now, intense interest on her face, her lips

parted, and her eyes half closed.

"I know--I know," she broke in. "We used to go to Sables and have tea

in a little windy, boardy place that he said reminded him of America.

It was about half-past seven or seven when we used to come back, wasn't

it? And the hotel windows seemed to be all on fire, and the village all

low and gray and sad, and, however quick we walked, the streak from the

sun over the water kept up and dazzled us. And I used to stop and grub

for shells and funny things, and when I looked up he'd be miles ahead,

and I had to run--run--oh! I'm sorry for interrupting." She looked at

Lumsden and all the glow died out. "Go on, Bryan."

His mouth twitched and his face grew dark.

"Well, I spoke to you at last. I hope you remember that as vividly.

It didn't seem a great sin against propriety under the circumstances.

You'd gone before I found out who you were. If I had known, it might

have made a difference. Because I knew your father, Flash. I used to

spend my holidays at Lulford, often. Coffers was always let to some

rich cockney or other, and we used to live on the rent in Pimlico. He

taught me how to throw a fly. Then he dropped out. I heard he married

some one--who didn't--you know----"

"He married a farmer's daughter for love," said Fenella, proudly, but

inexactly.

"It doesn't matter. When I got back from New York just before

Christmas, Joe came to see me, full of news. He told me you had gone to

him asking for an engagement and that you were to spend Christmas at

Lulford. He wanted money. I wouldn't promise till I'd seen you. You

know what happened then, don't you, Flash?"

"I know some of it."

"I'll tell you the rest. When I came into the library, I won't say I

lost my heart. I'm not a man to be bowled over by the first piece of

plaintive prettiness with a white neck and a turned-down collar that

comes his way. I've seen pretty nearly every pose, and that's the one I

mistrust most. Besides, I already had La Palèze against you."

"It wasn't such a secret as you think. Other people had it against me

too."

"Yes. But with the unimportant difference that I got the credit of the

walks to Sables in the sunset and all the rest of the idyll."

"Which you never took the trouble to deny."

"Frankly, I never did, coz."

"Why not, please?"

"Ah! there you touch a kink in my nature that I can't explain."

"You saw that we were left alone. You must have noticed the women cut

me. Do you know that my own cousin spied on me at night and accused me

of wearing clothes and jewelry you'd bought for me?"

"Flash--don't scold! I didn't know all this; and if I had, it wouldn't

have upset me. It seemed more my business than any one else's what had

happened to you before."

"_You! you!_ Why is my reputation your affair?"

Instead of answering, he knelt down on the bearskin hearth-rug, and

leaned forward until their eyes were on a level.

"Look at me, Flash--straight! That's a good girl. Now, tell me this.

I've met Ingram once. If I were to know everything as, say, for

argument's sake, God knows it, is there any reason I shouldn't like to

meet him again?"

"_You'll--never--know._"

Of all the answers she could have made him, it was probably the one

for which he was least prepared. He jumped to his feet and stood,

baffled, pulling at his moustache and looking down on the floor. Then

he threw up his head.

"So be it," he said. "I'll take that risk with the others. Flash, will

you have me?"

She curled her lip.

"Oh! quite respectably. A man with his shirt outside his coat shall say

those few words first that mean so much."

"No, Bryan. I won't."

"Don't be a little donkey, Flash. You don't realize what you're

throwing away. You don't know what a man like me is prepared to do,

once he's hard hit. Don't believe all the tales you hear. My heart's

been burgled, but it's never been raided before. You _are_ the

first, in a way. I'll be gentle--I'll be respectful--I'll be as like

the men in the novels girls read as I can. I know my faults. Haven't

I been holding myself in all the time? It's not as if I wanted you to

give up anything. You can live your own life, till you've tired of

it. I ain't"--he laughed shortly--"jealous of the public. And as for

the man you won't tell me about, you see I'm putting him out of the

question. He's gone, anyhow. And oh, Flash! I'll make your life a fairy

tale come true. Think of the dresses you'll have. I'll never be tired

of seeing you in new ones. And the travelling! We'll go all over the

earth. If you've got those new ideas, I'll settle money on you in a

lump. Then you won't feel bad asking me for it. I'll leave everything

to your own generosity. Could I say fairer? Could I offer more? Oh,

why don't you say something? How can you sit there and listen to me,

talking like some rotten old drysalting coronation knight?"

He knelt down on the hearth-rug again, unlocked her fingers, and took

them into his own--gently and with a sort of frightened respect for

the repulsion in her averted face. His own was flushed and ignobly

eager. His agitated breath, tainted with liquor and tobacco, seemed

to penetrate her fine dry hair to the scalp. Within, I suppose, was

ferment and chaos--blind, confident passion waiting impatiently on a

tenderness, felt indeed, but which seemed to perish on his lips in one

bald unconvincing speech after another, whose unworthiness he felt as

he uttered them. Somewhere inside the animal tegument that his life had

thickened and indurated he was groping for his starved, mislaid soul.

"Flash, why don't you speak? Haven't I eaten enough dirt yet? What

pleasure can there be in watching a human being grovel? Why don't you

say 'Yes'?"

"No--no--_no_!" she cried, passionately, stamping her foot.

"Bryan, don't touch me! I won't have you touch me! I've got a temper.

Oh, can't you see I'm not the sort of woman that gives herself twice."

She thrust him away and jumped up, pushing the arm-chair back on its

smooth casters. He rose, too, and picked a hair or two carefully from

his broad-clothed knees.

"I see," he said, gloomily and comprehensively. "It's a lesson not to

judge by faces. Yours has given me the sell of my life--but it's what

I've always maintained. The first man--the first man, however great a

hound he may be. You never catch him up."

"Think what you like of me," she cried indignantly, "but don't dare

suppose evil of him. You can't even imagine him. He's as far above me

and you, Bryan, as the stars are above the ground. You've met him, you

say. How could you look in his eyes and not be ashamed of all your

horrid, wicked knowledge? Oh!" she went on in a softer voice, "I don't

despise you, Bryan--truth and honor, I don't. I like you as a friend.

I've heard things about you; but I feel that if I was a man and had

your chances I mightn't be much better. That's honest, isn't it? You

and I are much about the same. We're fond of the world and pleasure

and all the good things money buys. What you offer dazzles me in a

way--'specially the clothes. Perhaps if I hadn't known him first--but

oh, Bryan, I _can't_--I can't come down after that! You don't know

how hard I fought for him. I found him at his work and I tempted him

away. I made myself pretty for him. I made all the advances. I'm full

of tricks, really. There's things even I couldn't tell. But they don't

mean the same to him, Bryan, as they would to us clay people. I don't

know what they do mean. I thought I might have in time. Because he was

always kind. He saw through me, I think, but my feelings never got

hurt. I think I was just a little bird that had come to drink out of

his hand, and he wouldn't frighten it away."

"It's a pity Mrs. Hepworth isn't alive," sneered Lumsden. "You and she

might compare notes."

"Is she dead?" said Fenella, in a still lower voice. "Poor thing;

that's it, then. She was ill and suffering and told him. He couldn't

resist those sorts of things--Paul couldn't."

"He must have been an amusing companion."

"Not amusing, Bryan, but, oh! something so much deeper. Don't think I

loved a muff. My darling is as strong and brave as he's good. I felt so

_safe_ with him. You don't know the terror a girl can feel of a

man she isn't sure of. It's like a nightmare where you can't run away.

I'd have gone tramping with Paul. I'd have slept under a hedge if he'd

had me in his arms. Now, don't you see how impossible it is? I'm tired,

Bryan, I _must_ go home. Will you 'phone for a cab?"

The dogged silence in which he listened to her, sitting on the edge of

the table, his hands thrust into his pockets and his head hanging down,

should have warned her. Now, when he lifted it and showed his face, she

measured the full extent of her folly in trusting herself to him. He

walked deliberately across the room and locked the outer door. With an

open laugh at her terrified face, he slipped the key into his pocket

and stood before her, his hands clutching the lapels of his smoking

jacket.

"Now then," he said, and took a deep breath. "You've had your

advantage and you've used it as a woman always does--mercilessly and

foolishly. It's my turn now."

She faced him bravely. "I know what you mean," she said without

flinching, and without raising her voice. "Don't go mad, Bryan! If you

destroy me, you destroy yourself."

"I'll take the risk," he answered. "I see you looking at the windows.

You're quite right. They ain't locked. You can throw one open now and

squeal. I shan't stop you. There's a bobby on point just round the

square. Tell _him_ your story. But, before you do, just look at

the clock, and think how you'll come out of the show-up yourself. Time

passes quickly in the kind of chat we've been having. I think, under

the circumstances, there's discredit enough for us both. You won't?

That's sensible. Now listen to me."

He stopped for a moment as though his mouth were dry, filled a glass

from the syphon and gulped it down. She watched his face with a sort

of disgusted fascination--the bloodshot, frowning eyes, the dilated

nostrils, and the twitching mouth.

"You say you've the same flesh and blood as myself, Flash. Perhaps you

can imagine, then, how it feels when you've chucked your heart at the

feet of the only woman in the world, and she's danced on it and kicked

it back to you. Pretty bad, I assure you. There's nothing like a little

real life to chase away the dreams you've been filling your head with."

She would have fainted if he had kept his eyes upon her; but he turned

aside to drink again, and when he looked up it was into the muzzle of a

little steel revolver. He didn't flinch or start--only kept quite still

and whistled softly under his breath.

"I'll shoot!" she said. "I swear I'll shoot, Bryan, if you don't unlock

the door and let me out. It's his present. He told me I'd want it. It

was under my pillow all the time at Lulford. I've had it in my coat

pocket every time I went out with you. Will you let me go?"

"No," he said. "Less than ever now."

Her hand wavered--steadied--tightened convulsively. Next moment he

had gripped her wrist. With a little cry of pain she let the revolver

go. It fell on the thick carpet almost as noiselessly as on grass. He

picked it up and examined it before he put it in his hip-pocket.

"By gad!" he exclaimed half under his breath. "She really pulled the

trigger. Why didn't he tell you to push the safety catch up first?"

She had fallen back in the arm-chair, quite beaten and crying.

"Have mercy on me, Bryan!"

"Oh, yes! I'll have mercy. I'm going into the library to collect my own

thoughts. I'll leave you here for a quarter of an hour. You can do a

lot of thinking in that time. All I've offered you stands. If you make

up your mind quicker than you expected, just knock at the door or call

me."

He opened the door of the inner room, looked at her for a few moments,

checked a sudden movement either of ruth or passion, and closed it

behind him. She heard him drag a chair along the floor and sit down.

Left alone, she looked quickly round her for a means of escape. The

windows were not bolted. She opened one, trembling at the slight noise

it made, and looked out. The street was twenty feet below her. Empty

asphalt stretched left and right, scalloped by the street lamps into

white semi-circles of incandescent light, whose dim edges touched one

another. There was a triangular open space across the road to her left.

Some hotel or club opened upon it. As she watched, one of the glass

leaves of the door swung open, and two men in evening dress came out.

They parted at the bottom of the steps with some light talk that ended

in a coarse unrestrained laugh. One took a cab, the other went swinging

along and still shaking with laughter, in the opposite direction. Call

for help!--tell her story!--to a world like this!

She closed the window and looked round her with that despairing glance

that leaves no corner unscanned. Suddenly her eyes were arrested in

their search. At the farthest end of the room, just beyond the light

of a shaded reading lamp, they caught the familiar ebony and silver of

a telephone apparatus. The nurse was not to leave them till to-morrow,

and she was sleeping in Miss Rigby's old room. They had decided to

give up their telephone, but there was a month or so of the old lease

still to run. She tiptoed across the room, lifted the receiver from its

bracket and put it to her ear. Silence for a long, long while. Then the

metallic sound of feet approaching along a zinc-covered floor.

"Number please?"

She tried to keep her voice low and steady.

"3087 Paddington."

"I can't hear you."

She ventured to speak a little louder, glancing over her shoulder as

she did so, and the man repeated the number. After what seemed an

eternity she heard a piping, sleepy little voice with a Scotch accent.

Thank God! It was nurse.

"Who are you?"

She had not answered when the receiver buzzed in her ear, nearly

deafening her. Another voice, louder, more urgent, broke in.

"Are you Mayfair? Is this Sir Bryan Lumsden's?"

"Oh! please go away," pleaded poor Fenella, "you're interrupting a

call."

"I _won't_ go away. We're Hampstead. Is this Lumsden's? It's

urgent. It's life or death. Tell him----"

She listened for a moment, then dropped the receiver with a scream.

Bryan burst into the room, haggard, his tie hanging loose.

"What's the matter? Are you hurt?"

"Oh, Bryan! There's some one on the telephone for you. They say your

son----I don't understand. It's something awful."

Lumsden caught the oscillating receiver and clapped it to his ear. This

is what she heard:

"_What!_ Both? _My God!_ The boy's alive? Have you got----?

What does he say? Yes! At once! _At--once!_"

He turned so quickly that Fenella, who was standing by his shoulder,

was nearly thrown over. She had to catch his arm to keep her balance.

"Is it bad news?"

"Yes, yes! Oh the devil!--the devil!"

"You'll want the car, won't you?"

"Yes. Do you know how to call it? Put the peg in the hole marked

'Garage!' Say: '_At once_--dressed or not.' I can drive."

He tried the outer door, cursed at finding it locked, then remembering,

took the key from his pocket and flung it open. He shouted. It seemed

scarcely a minute before the passage was full of servants, half

dressed, the women with their hair loose, and the men fastening their

braces--hardly two before the car was at the door, filling the quiet

street with the throb of its great pulse.

"Call a cab and get home quick," he said, as he twisted a white muffler

round his throat. "You'll find the number of a cab-rank in that red

book. Have you got money for your fare?"

"Can't I go with you, Bryan? Can't I help?"

Even in his distress he had time for a moment of surprised admiration.

"Oh, Flash!" he groaned, "there's no one like you. Come on, then, and

be in at the finish!"

XIX

THE WAGES

The chauffeur was fastening his leather gaiters as they came out.

"Frognal!" was all Bryan said. "And drive like h--ll!"

The lad touched his cap. As they took their seats, the car seemed to

bounce and then leap forward. The streets and squares were empty,

except for an occasional limping shadow on the pavement that stopped

short at their approach and turned to watch them past. From time to

time the chauffeur's shoulder dipped to one side, and the piercing wail

of a "Gabriel" horn went before them like an admonition of judgment

at hand. She knew then that they were nearing a corner, and that she

must hold her companion's arm, for the suddenly diverted impetus seemed

to heel the car over on two wheels and she could not keep her seat on

the inflated cushions except by clinging to him. But he never spoke to

her, or seemed to notice the clutch upon his sleeve. The muscles of his

forearm were always moving spasmodically, as if the anguish of waiting

found relief in some restless, regular motion of the hands. She knew he

had a trick of twisting his signet-ring round and round. The carriage

lamp was behind his head, and she only saw his face in silhouette. In

the dark lanes around Hampstead the car seemed to be plunging giddily

into a tunnel of light made by its own lamps.

It stopped, almost as suddenly as it had started, outside a thick

hedge of evergreens. Over an unpainted oak gate an electric light was

burning inside a tiny drop-lantern of frosted glass. Beneath it three

or four men were standing together; one of whom wore a flat braided

cap with a peak. Lumsden jumped out almost before the car had pulled

up, and, with a hasty word to the man in blue, disappeared. He had not

asked her to come in with him, and she was shy of renewing her offer of

service. She sat still in the corner where he had left her, and began

to look about her and take her bearings. The hedge was so high and the

house so far back that she could only see two of its gable windows. A

light, turned very low, showed in one of these. Across the road, on

the other side from the house, was a pebbled path with a fringe of

coarse grass at its further edge. In front of her a few lamps marked

out a curved perspective of road. Beneath it and beyond, the heath

lay in confused patches of various intensities of blackness. The sky

was paling over in the direction of Highgate, and a bird in a tree

overhead, roused probably by the glare of the lamps, was beginning to

pipe drowsily and tentatively.

A "_honk! honk!_" like the croak of some old marsh-haunting

reptilian bird, began to sound behind her from the direction in which

they had come. It grew louder. A motor-cab slowed up behind them, and

two men, one of whom carried a large bag, passed quickly into the

house. The two chauffeurs, avoiding the whispering group at the gate,

walked up and down together on the edge of the heath, smoking the

cigarette of freemasonry and stamping their feet, for the morning was

turning cold. A French maid-servant brought out a big cat-skin rug.

"For mademoiselle," she said. Her beady eyes scanned the girl curiously

as she tucked it round her.

It was broad daylight when Fenella woke, and the heath was a dull

sodden green under the window. Lumsden was shaking her by her shoulder.

She woke suddenly and completely, as we do from a sleep of which we are

half ashamed.

"Why didn't you call me before?"

"You were better asleep. You couldn't have done anything."

"Is--is the boy better?"

He shook his head, and put his hand to his throat as though his collar

irked him.

"Not--dead? Oh, Bryan!"

"_S--s-h!_ Just going. Come in now. I want you to see him first."

The house was quite new, full of quaint projecting windows planned to

trap the sun, with a tiled roof that dipped and rose in unexpected

places. A house of nooks and corners--built for light and air, and the

new religion of open window and running water over porcelain baths, in

which one feels death to be almost as incongruous as dust. Half the

hall door was of glass, in bubbly panes like the bottom of a bottle.

He held it open for her, and, bidding her follow, crossed the tiled

hall parlor to a white-railed and velvet-carpeted staircase. A red-eyed

maid-servant, carrying an enamelled pail and with a mass of soiled

linen over one arm, stood aside to let them pass. At the head of the

staircase was a square landing, lit by an octagonal turret skylight. A

great many doors opened off it. Bryan turned the handle of one.

"In here!" he said.

The room was large and gaily papered. In the centre was a brass-railed

cot. Its brass-railed sides had been lifted off and stood, behind it,

against the wall. All around the little bed, upon tables and even

chairs, were strange utensils, meaningless to the girl, some in glass,

others in shining white metal with tubes that coiled and trailed, and

linen, linen, everywhere that sheet or towel could be hung. The room

was as full of strange scents as of strange shapes, but that of rubber

overpowered all the rest, and was to be, for all time, the smell that

could most vividly recall the scene to the girl's memory. The blinds

were up, but no one had remembered to switch off the lights. Into one

corner of the room a pile of toys had been hastily swept; prominent

among them a great elephant brandished four lumpy wheeled legs in the

air.

Upon the bed a little lad of five or six was lying, covered with

clothes to his waist. Even now, with his poor little face lead-color,

and all the spun silk of his hair damped down on his forehead, he was

beautiful: with the hue of health on his cheek the face must have been

that of an angel. His fringed eyelids were closed, and had dark shadows

under them; his pinched nose was pitifully like Lumsden's. He seemed

to be very tired, and very glad that all these clever people had given

up exercising their skill upon him. For no one was doing anything now.

One man, in shirt sleeves, held his limp wrist in a great hairy paw,

and kept his eyes upon his watch; the other stood at his colleague's

shoulder with his hands behind his back, intent upon the shrunken

little face.

Lumsden cleared a chair, and, pulling it forward, bade the girl, with a

gesture, sit down.

"Any change, Webber?" he asked.

"It may be a few minutes yet. _Hush!_"

He got up and put his ear to the boy's mouth. A faint snore was

audible. He looked up at his partner.

"'Cheyne-Strokes' breathing beginning, Girling."

"Is he suffering?" Bryan asked. He seemed to have lost interest in the

technicalities of the question. "That's all I want to know."

"No, no," said the younger man. "Please believe us, Sir Bryan. He won't

have suffered from first to last."

"Why's it such a long business?"

"Oh! seven hours is nothing unusual. The power of resistance in

children his age is generally much greater. Twelve to fourteen is quite

common. I still believe, Webber, there was subcutaneous administration

as well."

"Perhaps. I could find no puncture, but his reaction to the ether

certainly looked like it."

As Webber spoke he dropped the wrist, pocketed his watch, and made a

sign to Lumsden.

"Can I take him up?" said the baronet.

"Yes. It doesn't matter now."

Bryan lifted the inert little body out of bed, held it to his breast,

and put his face down on the wet curls.

"_Squirrel! Squirrel!_" he whispered once or twice, and held him

closer.

"I can't hear anything now," he said at the end of a few minutes.

"Let me look at his eyes," said Webber.

Bryan gave a great wild laugh. "His eyes! Good God, man! what do you

think you'll see there? Eyes? He never had any. He was born blind."

He laid the body tenderly down on the bed, put one hand across his face

for a moment, and touched the weeping girl on the shoulder.

"Come down, Flash. I must send you home now. Don't cry so, girl! It's

not fair. This is _my_ funeral."

On the way to the head of the staircase they passed another door. He

laid his hand upon the brass knob.

"I promised I'd show you real life. There's more inside here. Do you

want to see it?"

"No! no!" The girl shrank away, and pulled her skirts from the panel.

"All right, then. Don't be afraid. I haven't been in myself yet. I'm

not going to. The fiend! oh! the fiend, Flash! A little child like

that--a little boy born blind! He never saw the sun. Look out of this

window over the heath and think of it. For all he ever saw he might

have lived and died at the bottom of a well. I used to describe things

for him though. He was stupid with some people, but he knew my voice.

Gad, how he knew it! You'd see the poor little devil's eyes straining,

straining, and he'd struggle and kick and push things out of the way

till he found me. Oh! the incarnate fiend!"

"Bryan! She's dead, remember."

"Dead! What do I care? If she wasn't I'd have killed her myself.

And she knew it. She was the one I cared for least. A cold, vicious,

bargaining jade. I tried to get the boy away, but she was too d--d

clever. So many hundreds a year more, that's all he meant to her.

Do you remember my asking you once if you were fond of kids? I

was thinking of him when I asked you that. Some day, perhaps--I

thought----'Cos some good women are the devil over things like that,

Flash; and if I'd had a dozen born right they shouldn't have come in

front of him--This is nice talk to a girl!"

"I don't mind, Bryan. I don't seem to mind a bit now. I think I've

missed my proper delicacy, somehow."

He stared at her. "You haven't missed your health, at any rate. You

must be a robust little animal for all your color. This time yesterday,

Flash, think of it! If it was put in a book, who'd believe it? I wonder

if everything that ever can happen a man and a girl has happened us, or

if there's more coming to-morrow."

They had been talking in the dining-room. He went over to the sideboard

for a drink and stopped suddenly. A half-crown was lying on the top of

the buffet. He brought it over to the light, lying flat in the palm of

his hand.

"This is a rummy coincidence, Flash," he said, without taking his

eyes off it. "D'you know, years and years ago in Vienna, where I

was a thing that danced and trailed the conquering sabre past the

_Töchterschulen_ in the _Hohenmark_ on court days, I spun a

coin this very size to decide a rather important matter for me. 'Tails

I go on; heads I go out.' I wasn't bluffing. I was pretty hard hit, or

thought I was. But I was young, too, and I'll never forget my feelings

when I looked down and saw the double eagle--I'd shut my eyes while it

spun, and I remember feeling behind in my hip pocket----Hello! Where

did this come from?"

He was holding Ingram's strange present in his hand.

"Of course. Another property. 'Act ii., scene 2: The lair of the wicked

baronet.' Do you want it back? No, I won't, though," snatching it back

as she reached for it. "Guns are for people who know how to let them

off."

He made a movement as though to put it back, then checked himself, and

balancing it in his hand looked from it to the coin and back again. The

half-crown lay now, head upward, upon the table.

Suddenly Fenella caught his arm. "Bryan! not that--not that!"

He seemed to rouse himself. "Not that?"--angrily. "Why not? What d'you

mean? How can you know what I was thinking of?"

His hand had closed upon the weapon. She loosened his fingers one by

one to find her own hand held fast.

"Bryan, perhaps I've been too hard on you to-night.

Suppose--suppose----Don't look at me that way or I'll stop. I don't

promise anything. I must have time. It won't be easy for either of us."

He bent his head and put his lips to the hand that had been held out to

slay him and to save him in one night.

"As you will, Flash. God bless you whatever you do with me."

"And now, dear, let me go," she said gently. "Remember, I have my own

dead to watch."