"Save for a trifling go of fever now and again, illness has given me the

go-by equally with accident. But, for all my ignorance of such

afflictions I know, beyond all shadow of doubt, that a few repetitions of

the experience of last night must close any man's account. Experiment is

more enlightening than argument. There is no shaking the knowledge you

arrive at through it."

McCabe, standing at ease by the open window, untidy, hirsute, unkempt,

rammed his hands down into his gaping trouser pockets and nodded

unwilling agreement.

"The attack was bad," he said. "I'm not denying it was murderously bad.

And all the harder on you because, but for the one defaulting organ, your

heart, you're as sound as a bell. You're a well enough man to put up a

good fight; and that, you see, cuts both ways, be danged to it."

"A chain is no stronger than its weakest link.--You know as well as I do

the Indian appointment will never be gazetted."

"There you have me, Sir Charles, loath though I am to admit as much. I'd

be a liar if I denied it would not."

"How long do you give me then? Months, or only weeks?"

"That depends in the main on yourself, in as far as I can presume to

pronounce. With care"--

"Which means sitting still here"--

"It does."

Charles Verity raised his shoulders the least bit.

"Not good enough, McCabe," he declared, "not good enough. There are rites

to be duly performed, words to be said, which I refuse to neglect. Oh,

no, don't misunderstand me. I don't need professional help to accomplish

my dying. Were I a member of your communion it might be different, but I

require no much-married parsonic intermediary to make my peace with God.

I am but little troubled regarding that. Shall not the judge of all the

earth do right?--Nevertheless, there remain rites to be decently

performed. I must make my peace with man--and still more with

woman--before I go hence and am no more seen. But, look here, I have no

wish to commit myself too soon, and risk the bathos of an anti-climax by

having to perform them twice, repeat them at a later date.--So how long

do you give me--weeks? Too generous an estimate? A week, then

or--well--less?"

"You want it straight?"

"I want it straight."

"More likely days. God grant I am mistaken. With your fine constitution,

as I tell you, you are booked to put up a good fight. All the same, to be

honest, Sir Charles, it was touch and go more than once last night."

In the room an interval of silence, and without song of the robins and

murmur of the sea, nearer now and louder as the rising tide lapped up the

sands at the back of the Bar. The faint yellow-pink after-thought of

sunrise and pencillings of tarnished cloud alike had vanished into the

all-obtaining misty blue of the upper sky. Heading for the French coast,

a skein of wild geese passed in wedge-shaped formation with honking cries

and the beat of strong-winged flight. The barrow creaked again, wheeled

some few yards further along the battery walk.

"Thanks--so I supposed," Sir Charles Verity calmly said.

He stretched himself, falling into a less constrained and careful

posture. Leaned his elbow on the chair-arm, his chin in the hollow of his

hand, crossed the right leg over the left.

"Twenty-four hours will give me time for all which is of vital

importance. The rest must, and no doubt perfectly will, arrange

itself.--Oh! I'll obey you within reasonable limits, McCabe. I have no

craving to hurry the inevitable conclusion. These last hours possess

considerable significance and charm--an impressiveness even, which it

would be folly to thrust aside or waste."

Once more he looked up, his tone and expression devoid now of all

bitterness.

"I propose to savour their pleasant qualities to the full. So make

yourself easy, my good fellow," he continued with an admirable

friendliness. "Go and get your breakfast. Heaven knows you've most

thoroughly earned it, and a morning pipe of peace afterwards.--The bell

upon the small table?--Yes--oh, yes--and Hordle within earshot. I've

everything I require; and, at the risk of seeming ungrateful, shall be

glad enough of a respite from this course of food and drink, potions and

poultices--remedial to the delinquent flesh no doubt, but a notable

weariness to the-spirit.--And, see here, report to the two ladies, my

sister and--and Damaris, that you leave me in excellent case, free of

discomfort, resting for a time before girding up my loins to meet the

labours of the day."

Charles Verity closed his eyes in intimation of dismissal, anxious to be

alone the better to reckon with that deeper, final loneliness which

confronted him just now in all its relentless logic.

For, though his mind remained lucid, self-realized and observant, his

control of its action and direction was incomplete owing to bodily

fatigue. Hence it lay open to assault, at the mercy of a thousand and one

crowding thoughts and perceptions. And over these he desired to gain

ascendency--to drive, rather than be driven by them. The epic of his

three-score years, from its dim, illusive start to this dramatic and

inexorable finish--but instantly disclosed to him in the reluctant

admissions of the good-hearted Irish doctor--flung by at a double, in

coloured yet incoherent progression, so to speak, now marching to

triumphant blare of trumpet, now to roll of muffled drum. Which

incoherence came in great measure of the inalienable duality of his own

nature--passion and austerity, arrogance and self-doubt, love--surpassing

most men's capacity of loving--and a defacing strain of cruelty,

delivering stroke and counter-stroke. From all such tumult he earnestly

sought to be delivered; since not the thing accomplished--whether for

fame, for praise or for remorse--not, in short, what has been, but what

was, and still more what must soon be, did he need, at this juncture,

dispassionately to contemplate.

That sharp-toothed disappointment gnawed him, is undeniable, when he

thought of the culminating gift of happy fortune, royally satisfying to

ambition, as unexpectedly offered him as, through his own unlooked-for

and tragic disability, it was unexpectedly withdrawn. But disappointment

failed to vex him long. A more wonderful journey than any possible

earthly one, a more majestic adventure than that of any oriental

proconsulship, awaited him. For no less a person than Death issued the

order--an order there is no disobeying. He must saddle up therefore, bid

farewell, and ride away.

Nor did he flinch from that ride with Death, the black captain, as

escort, any more than, during the past night, he had flinched under the

grip of mortal pain. For some persons the call to endurance brings actual

pleasure--of a grim heroic kind. It did so to Charles Verity. And not

only this conscious exercise of fortitude, this pride of bearing bodily

anguish, but a strange curiosity worked to sustain him. The novelty of

the experience, in both cases, excited and held his interest, continued

to exercise it and to hold.

Now, as in solitude his mental atmosphere acquired serenity and

poise--the authority of the past declining--this matter of death

increasingly engrossed him. For it trenches on paradox, surely, that the

one absolutely certain event in every human career is also the most

unexplored and practically incredible.--An everyday occurrence, a

commonplace, concerning which there remains nothing new, nothing

original, to be written, sung or said; yet a mystery still inviolate,

aching with the alarm of the undiscovered, the unpenetrated, to each

individual, summoned to accept its empire! He had sent others to their

death. Now his own turn came and he found it, however calmly considered,

a rather astounding business. An ending or a beginning?--Useless, after

all, to speculate. The worst feature of it, not improbably, this same

preliminary loneliness, this stripping naked, no smallest comfort left

you of human companionship, or even of humble material keepsake from out

the multitude of your familiar possessions here in the dear accustomed

human scene.

The gates of death open. You pass them. They close behind you. And what

then?--The whole hierarchy of heaven, the whole company of your

forerunners thither--beloved and honoured on earth--may be gathered to

hail the homing soul within those amazing portals; or it may drop, as a

stone into a well, down the blank nothingness of the abyss.--Of all

gambles invented by God, man or devil--so he told himself--this daily,

hourly gamble of individual dissolution is the biggest. Man's heart

refuses the horror of extinction, while his intellect holds the question

in suspense. We hope. We believe. From of old fair promises have been

made us; and, granted the gift of faith, hope and belief neighbour upon

assurance. But certainty is denied. No mortal, still clothed in flesh,

has known, nor--the accumulated science of the ages notwithstanding--does

know, actually and exactly, that which awaits it.

Thus, anyhow, in the still, tender brightness of the autumn morning,

while Nature and men alike pursued their normal activities and

occupations, did this singular matter appear to Charles Verity--he,

himself, arbitrarily cut off from all such activities and occupations

in the very moment of high fruition. Had death been a less eminent

affair, or less imminent, the sarcasm of his position might have seemed

gross to the point of insult. But, the longer he envisaged it, the more

did the enduring enigma and its accompanying uncertainty allure. Not as

victim, but rather as conqueror of the final terror, did he begin to

regard himself.

Meanwhile, though reason continued to hold the balance even between

things positively known and things imagined only and hoped for, the

god-ward impulse strengthened in him. Not by conscious or convincing

argument from within, but by all-powerful compulsion from without, was

his thought borne onward and upward to increasing confidence. So that he

asked himself--as so many another, still unwearied, still enamoured of

attainment, has asked in like case--whether impending divorce of soul and

body may not confer freedom of a wider range and nobler quality, powers

more varied and august than the mind, circumscribed by conditions of time

and sense, has yet conception of?

To him such development seemed possible--certainly. Probable?--Ah, well,

perhaps--perhaps. Which brought him back to his former contention, that

its inherent loneliness constitutes the bitterest sting of death.

Smiling, he quoted the ancient, divinely tender saying: "There is a child

in each one of us which cries at the dark."

While, in swift reaction, he yearned towards battle where amid the

fierce and bloody glory of the fight, souls of heroes troop forth

together, shouting, into everlasting day or--sceptical reason shaking a

sadly sage head once again--into everlasting night.

He stretched out his hand instinctively for the bell on the little table

at his elbow. Hordle answered his summons, grey of countenance from

alarm, anxiety, and broken rest.

"Let Miss Damaris know I shall be glad to see her when she is free to

come to me," he said.

And here, although our damsel's reputation for courage and resource may,

thereby, sustain some damage, I am constrained to state that while in the

sick-room Miss Felicia shone, Damaris gave off but a vacillating and

ineffective light.

Imagination is by no means invariably beneficent. The very liveliness of

the perceptions which it engenders may intimidate and incapacitate. Upon

Damaris imagination practised this mischief. Becoming, for the time, that

upon which she looked, sharing every pang and even embroidering the

context, she weakened, in some sort, to the level of the actual sufferer,

helpless almost as he through the drench of overwhelming sympathy. She

had been taken, poor child, at so villainous a disadvantage. Without

preparation or warning--save of the most casual and inadequate--her

humour wayward, she a trifle piqued, fancying her pretty clothes, her

pretty looks, excited, both by the brilliant prospect presented by the

Indian appointment and by her delicate passage of arms with Carteret, she

was compelled of a sudden to witness the bodily torment of a human being,

not only by her beloved beyond all others, but reverenced also. The

impression she received was of outrage, almost of blasphemy. The cruelty

of life lay uncovered, naked and open to her appalled and revolted

consciousness. She received a moral, in addition to a physical shock,

utterly confounding in its crudity, its primitive violence.

The ravage of pain can be, in great measure, surmounted and concealed;

but that baser thing, functional disturbance--in this case present as

heart spasm, threatening suffocation, with consequent agonized and

uncontrollable struggle for breath--defies concealment. This

manifestation horrified Damaris. The more so that, being unacquainted

with the sorry spectacle of disease, her father, under the deforming

stress of it, appeared to her as a stranger almost--inaccessible to

affection, hideously removed from her and remote. His person and

character, to her distracted observation, were altered beyond recognition

except during intervals, poignant to the verge of heart-break, when

passing ease restored his habitual dignity and grace.

Thus, while Miss Felicia and Carteret--with Hordle and Mary Fisher as

assistants--ministered to his needs in as far as ministration was

possible, she stood aside, consumed by misery, voluntarily effacing

herself. Backed away even against the wall, out of range of the

lamp-light, stricken, shuddering, and mute. Upon Dr. McCabe's arrival and

assumption of command, Carteret, finding himself at liberty to note her

piteous state, led her out into the passage and then to the long

drawing-room, with gentle authority. There for a half-hour or more--to

him sadly and strangely sweet--he sat beside her, while the tears

silently coursed down her cheeks, letting her poor proud head rest

against his shoulder, his arm supporting her gracious young body still

clothed in all the bravery of her flowered silken sunshine dress.

Later, Mary bringing more favourable news of Sir Charles--pain and

suffocation having yielded for the time being to McCabe's

treatment--Carteret persuaded her to go upstairs and let the said Mary

put her to bed. Once there she slept the sleep of exhaustion, fatigue and

sorrow mercifully acting as a soporific, her capacity for further thought

or feeling literally worn out.

During that session in the drawing-room Damaris, to his thankfulness, had

asked no questions of him. All she demanded child-like, in her extremity,

had been the comfort and security of human contact. And this he gave her

simply, ungrudgingly, with a high purity of understanding, guiltless of

any shadow of embarrassment or any after-thought. Their lighter, somewhat

enigmatic relation of the earlier evening was extinguished, swamped by

the catastrophe of Charles Verity's illness. Exactly in how far she

gauged the gravity of that illness and its only too likely result, or

merely wept, unnerved by the distressing outward aspect of it, Carteret

could not determine. But he divined, and rightly, that she was in process

of ranging herself, at least subconsciously, with a new and terrible

experience which, could she learn the lesson of it aright would temper

her nature to worthy issues.

Hence, with a peculiar and tender interest, he watched her when, coming

down in the morning, he found her already in the dining-room, the

pleasant amenities of a well-ordered, hospitable house and household

abundantly evident.

Whatever the tragic occurrences of the last twelve hours, domestic

discipline was in no respect relaxed. The atmosphere of the room

distilled a morning freshness. Furniture and flooring shone with polish,

a log fire, tipped by dancing flames, burned in the low wide grate. Upon

the side-table, between the westward facing windows, a row of silver

chafing-dishes gave agreeable promise of varied meats; as did the tea and

coffee service, arrayed before Damaris, of grateful beverage. While she

herself looked trim, and finished in white silk shirt and russet-red

suit, her toilet bearing no sign of indifference or of haste.

That her complexion matched her shirt in colour--or rather in all absence

of it--that her face was thin, its contours hardened, her eyebrows drawn

into a little frown, her eyes enormous, sombre and clouded as with

meditative thought, increased, in Carteret's estimation, assurance of her

regained self-mastery and composure. Nor did a reticence in her manner

displease him.

"I have persuaded Aunt Felicia to breakfast upstairs," she told him. "Dr.

McCabe sends me word he--my father--wishes to rest for the present, so I

engaged Aunt Felicia to rest too. She was wonderful."

Damaris' voice shook slightly, as did her hand lifting the coffee-pot.

"She stayed up all night. So did you, I'm afraid, didn't you,

Colonel Sahib?"

"Oh, for me that was nothing. A bath, a change, and ten minutes out there

on the battery watching the sun come up over the sea," Carteret said. "So

don't waste compassion on me. I'm as fit as a fiddle and in no wise

deserve it."

"Ah! but you and Aunt Felicia did stay," she repeated, her hands still

rather tremulously busy with coffee-pot and milk jug. "You were faithful

and I no better than a shirker. I fell through, miserably lost myself,

which was selfish, contemptible. I am ashamed. Only I was so startled. I

never really knew before such--such things could be.--Forgive me, Colonel

Sahib. I have been to Aunt Felicia and asked her forgiveness

already.--And don't think too meanly of me, please. The shirking is over

and done with for always. You may trust me it never will happen again--my

losing myself as I did last night, I mean."

In making this appeal for leniency, her eyes met Carteret's fairly for

the first time; and he read in them, not without admiration and a twinge

of pain, both the height of her new-born, determined valour and the depth

of her established distress.

"You needn't tell me that, you needn't tell me that, dear witch," he

answered quickly. "I was sure of it all along. I knew it was just a phase

which would have no second edition. So put any question of shame or need

of forgiveness out of your precious head. You were rushed up against

circumstances, against a revelation, calculated to stagger the most

seasoned campaigner. You did not shirk; but it took you a little time to

get your bearings. That was all. Don't vex your sweet soul with quite

superfluous reproaches.--Sugar? Yes, and plenty of it I am afraid.--But

you, too, must eat."

And on her making some show of repugnance--

"See here, we can't afford to despise the day of small things, of minor

aids to efficiency, dearest witch," he wisely admonished her.

Whereupon, emulous to please him, bending her will to his, Damaris

humbled herself to consumption of a portion of the contents of the

chafing-dishes aforesaid. To discover that, granted a healthy subject,

sorrow queerly breeds hunger, the initial distaste for food--in the main

a sentimental one--once surmounted.

Later McCabe joined them. Recognized Damaris' attitude of valour, and

inwardly applauded it, although himself in woeful state. For he was hard

hit, badly upset. Conscious of waste of tissue, he set about to restore

it without apology or hesitation, trouble putting an edge to appetite in

his case also, and that of formidable keenness. Bitterly he grieved,

since bearing the patient, he feared very certainly to lose, an uncommon

affection. He loved Charles Verity; while, from the worldly standpoint,

his dealings with The Hard meant very much to him--made for glory, a

feather in his cap visible to all and envied by many. Minus the fine

flourish of it his position sank to obscurity. As a whist-playing,

golf-playing, club-haunting, Anglo-Indian ex-civil surgeon--and Irishman

at that--living in lodgings at Stourmouth, he commanded meagre

consideration. But as chosen medical-attendant and, in some sort,

retainer of Sir Charles Verity he ranked. The county came within his

purview. Thanks to this connection with The Hard he, on occasion, rubbed

shoulders with the locally great. Hence genuine grief for his friend was

black-bordered by the prospect of impending social and mundane loss. The

future frowned on him, view it in what terms he might. To use his own

unspoken phrase, he felt "in hellishly low water."

One point in particular just now worried him. Thus, as fish, eggs,

porridge, hot cakes, honey, and jam disappeared in succession, he opened

himself to Damaris and Carteret. A difficult subject, namely that of a

second opinion.--Let no thought of any wounding of his susceptibilities

operate against the calling in of such. He was ready and willing to meet

any fellow practitioner they might select--a Harley Street big-wig, or

Dr. Maskall, of Harchester, whose advice in respect of cardiac trouble

was wide sought.

He had, however, but just launched the question when Hordle entered and,

walking to the head of the table, addressed Damaris.

"Sir Charles desires me to say he will be glad to see you, miss, when you

are at liberty," he told her in muffled accents.

She sprang up, to pause an instant, irresolute, glancing wide-eyed

at Carteret.

He had risen too. Coming round the corner of the table, he drew back her

chair, put his hand under her elbow, went with her to the door.

"There is nothing to dread, dearest witch," he gently and quietly said.

"Have confidence in yourself. God keep you--and him.--Now you are quite

ready? That's right.--Well, then go."

Carteret waited, looking after her until, crossing the hall followed by

Hordle, she passed along the corridor out of sight. Silent, preoccupied,

he closed the door and took a turn the length of the room before resuming

his place at the opposite side of the table to McCabe, facing the light.

The doctor, who had ceased eating and half risen to his feet at the

commencement of this little scene, watched it throughout; at first

indifferent, a prey to his own worries, but soon in quickening interest,

shrewd enquiry and finally in dawning comprehension.

"Holy Mother of Mercy, so that's the lay of the land, is it?" and his

loose lips shaped themselves to a whistle, yet emitted no sound. To

obliterate all signs of which tendency to vulgar expression of

enlightenment he rubbed moustache, mouth and chin with his napkin,

studying Carteret closely meanwhile.

"In the pink of condition, by Gad--good for a liberal twenty years yet,

and more--bar accident. Indefinite postponement of the grand climacteric

in this case.--All the same a leetle, lee-tie bit dangerous, I'm

thinking, for both, if she tumbles to it."

Then aloud--"Has the poor darling girl grasped the meaning of her

father's illness do you make out, Colonel grasped the ugly

eventualities of it?"

Carteret slowly brought his glance to bear on the speaker.

"I believe so, though she has not actually told me as much," he

said--"And now about this question of a second opinion, McCabe?"

The easily huffed Irishman accepted the reproof in the best spirit

possible, as confirming his own perspicacity.

"Quite so. Flicked him neatly on the raw, and he winced. All the same

he's a white man, a real jewel of a fellow, worthy of good fortune if the

ball's thrown his way. I wonder how long, by-the-by, this handsome game's

been a-playing?"

With which, as requested, he returned to the rival claims of Harley

Street and Harchester in respect of a consulting physician.

Carteret proved a faithful prophet, for in truth there was nothing to

dread the beloved presence once entered, as Damaris thankfully

registered.

The sun by now topped the hollies and shone into the study, flinging a

bright slanting pathway across the dim crimson, scarlet and blue of the

Turkey carpet. Charles Verity stood, in an open bay of the great window,

looking out over the garden. Seen thus, in the still sunlight, the tall

grey-clad figure possessed all its accustomed, slightly arrogant repose.

Damaris thrilled with exalted hope. For the young are slow to admit even

the verdict of fact as final. His attitude was so natural, so unstrained

and unstudied, that the message of ghostly warning yesterday evening was

surely discounted; while the subsequent terror of the night, that hideous

battle with pain and suffocation, became to her incredible, an evil dream

from which, in grateful ecstasy, she now awoke.

Her joy found expression.

"Dearest, dearest, you sent for me.--Is it to let me see you are

really better, more beautifully recovered than they told me or I

ventured to suppose?"

Her voice broke under a gladness midway between tears and laughter.

"The envious blades of Atropos' scissors have not cut the mortal thread

yet anyhow," he answered, smiling, permitting himself the classic conceit

as a screen to possible emotion. "But we won't build too much on the

clemency of Fate. How long she proposes to wait before closing her

scissors it is idle to attempt to say."

He laid his hands on Damaris' shoulders. Bent his head and kissed

her upward pouted lips--thereby hushing the loving disclaimer which

rose to them.

"So we will keep on the safe side of the event, my wise child," he

continued. "Make all our preparations and thus deny the enemy any

satisfaction of taking us unawares.--Can you write a business

letter for me?"

"A dozen, dearest, if you wish," Damaris assented eagerly. Yet that

image of the scissors stayed by her. Already her joy was sensibly

upon the wane.

"Oh! one will be sufficient, I think--quite sufficient for this morning."

Charles Verity turned his head, looking seaward through the

tranquil sunshine.

"That Indian appointment has to be suitably thanked for and--declined."

Damaris drew back a step so as to gain a clearer view of him. The

hands resting on her shoulders were oddly inert, so she fancied,

forceless and in temperature cold. Even through the thickness of cloth

jacket and silk shirt she was aware of their lifelessness and chill.

This roused rebellion in her. Her instinct was for fight. She made a

return on McCabe's suggestion regarding further advice. She would

demand a consultation, call in expert opinion. The dear man with the

blue eyes--here her white face flushed rosy--would manage all that for

her, and compel help in the form of the last word of medical science

and skill.

"Might not your letter be put off for just a few days?" she pleaded, "in

case--until"--

But Charles Verity broke in before she could finish her tender protest,

a sadness, even hint of bitterness in his tone.

"You covet this thing so much," he said. "Your heart is so set on it?"

She made haste to reassure him.--No, no not that way, not for her. How

could it signify, save on his account? She only cared because greedy of

his advancement, greedy to have him exalted--placed where he belonged, on

the summit, the apex, so that all must perceive and acknowledge his

greatness. As to herself--and the flush deepened, making her in aspect

deliciously youthful and ingenious--she confessed misgivings. Reported

her talk with Carteret concerning the subject, and the scolding received

from him thereupon.

"One more reason for writing in the sense I propose, then," her father

declared, "since it sets your over-modest doubts and qualms at rest, my

dear. That is settled."

His hands weighed on her shoulders as though he suddenly needed and

sought support.

"I will sit down," he said. "There are other matters to be discussed, and

I can, perhaps, talk more easily so."

He went the few steps across to the red chair. Sank into it. Leaned

against the pillows, bending backward, his hand pressed to his left

side. His features contracted, and his breath caught as of one spent

with running. And Damaris, watching him, again received that desolating

impression of change, of his being in spirit far removed, inaccessible

to her sympathy, a stranger. He had gone away and rather terribly left

her alone.

"Are you in pain?" she asked, agonized.

"Discomfort," he replied. "We will not dignify this by the name of pain.

But I must wait for a time before dictating the letter. There's something

I will ask you to do for me, my dear, meanwhile."

"Yes"--He paused, shifted his position, closed his eyes.

"Have you held any communication with--"

He stopped, for the question irked him. Even at this pass it went against

the grain with him to ask of his daughter news of his son.

But in that pause our maiden's scattered wits very effectually

returned to her.

"With Darcy Faircloth?" she said. And as Charles Verity bowed his head in

assent--"Yes, I should have told you already but--but for all which has

happened. He was here the day before yesterday. He came home from church

with me.--That was my doing, not his, to begin with. You mustn't think he

put himself forward--took advantage, I mean, of your being away. If there

is any blame it is mine."

"Mine, rather--and of long standing. God forgive me!"

But Damaris, fairly launched now upon a wholly welcome topic, would have

none of this. To maintain her own courage, and, if it might be, combat

that dreaded withdrawal of his spirit into regions where she could not

follow, she braced herself to reason with him.

"No--there indeed you are mistaken, dearest," she gently yet confidently

asserted. "You take the whole business topsy-turvy fashion, quite wrong

way round. I won't weary you with explanations of exactly what led to

Darcy Faircloth coming here with me on Sunday. But you ought to know that

he and Aunt Felicia met. I hadn't planned that. It just happened. And she

was lovely to him--lovely to us both. She made him stay to

luncheon--inviting him in your name."

"I seem to possess a singular gift for saddling my relations with the

payment of my bad debts," Charles Verity remarked.

"But there isn't any bad debt--that's what I so dearly want you to

believe, what I'm trying so hard, Commissioner Sahib, to tell you,"

Damaris cried. "Afterwards, when he and I were alone by ourselves, the

ice broke somehow, he gave himself away and said beautiful things--things

about you which made me delightfully happy, and showed how he has felt

towards you all along."

Simply, without picking of her words, hesitation or artifice, Damaris

repeated that somewhat sinister tale of the sea. Of a sailing ship,

becalmed through burning days and stifling nights in tropic waters. Of

the ill-doings of a brutal, drunken captain. Of a fly-blown eating-house

in Singapore. Of the spiritual deliverance there achieved through sight

of Charles Verity's name and successful record in the columns of a

Calcutta newspaper; and the boy's resultant demand for the infliction of

some outward and visible sign, some inalienable stigmata, which should

bear perpetual witness to the fact of his parentage.

"So you see"--

Damaris kindled, standing before him, flamed indeed to a rare

carelessness of convention, of enjoined pruderies and secrecies.--

"You gave him the beautiful gift of life to begin with; and saved his

life later when he was so miserably tempted to end it. As he loves life,

where then is the debt?--Not on your side certainly, dearest."

Listening to which fondly exalted sophistries--for sophistries from

worldly and moral standpoint alike must he not surely pronounce

them?--Charles Verity still received comfort to his soul. They ought to

be reckoned mistaken, of course, transparently in error, yet neither son

nor daughter condemned him. Neither did his sister, in the pathetic

innocence and purity of her middle-age maidenhood.

This moved him to thankfulness, none the less genuine because shot with

self-mockery. For he was curious to observe how, as the last urgings of

ambition and thirst of power fell away from him,--he riding under escort

of Death, the black captain--all tributes of human tenderness and

approval gained in value.--Not the approval of notable personages, of

those high in office, nor even that of sympathetic critics and readers;

but of persons in his own immediate voisinage, bound to him by

friendship, by association, or the tie of blood.--Their good-will was

precious to him as never before. He craved to be in perfect amity with

every member of that restricted circle. Hence it vexed and fretted him to

know the circle incomplete, through the exclusion of one rather

flagrantly intimate example. Yet to draw the said member, the said

example, within the circle, yielding it the place which it might

rightfully aspire to occupy, amounted--after half a lifetime of

abstention and avoidance--to a rather tremendous demonstration, one which

might well be hailed as extravagant, as a courting of offence possible

only to a sentimental egoist of most aggravated kind.

And he was tired--had no smallest inclination towards demonstrations. For

the threatening of heart spasm, to which he lately denied the title of

pain, though of short duration, affected him adversely, sapping his

strength. His mind, it is true, remained clear, even vividly receptive;

but, just as earlier this morning, his will proved insufficient for its

direction or control. He mused, his chin sunk on his breast, his left

hand travelling down over the long soft moustache, his eyes half closed.

Thought and vision followed their own impulse, wandering back and forth

between the low-caste eating-house in the sweltering heat and perfumed

stenches of the oriental, tropic seaport; and the stone-built English

inn--here on Marychurch Haven--overlooking the desolate waste of

sand-hills, the dark reed-beds and chill gleaming tides.

For love of Damaris, his daughter, while still in the heat of his prime,

he had foresworn all traffic with women. Yet now, along with the tacitly

admitted claims of the son, arose the claim of the mistress, mother of

that son--in no sensual sort, but with a certain wildness of bygone

romance, wind and rain-swept, unsubstantial, dim and grey. Ever since

conviction of the extreme gravity of his physical condition dawned on

him, the idea of penetrating the courts of that deserted sanctuary had

been recurrent. In the summing up of his human, his earthly, experience,

romance deserved, surely, a word of farewell? Damaris' story served to

give the idea a fuller appeal and consistency.

But he was tired--tired. He longed simply to drift. It was infinitely

distasteful to him definitely to plan, or to decide respecting anything.

Meanwhile his continued silence and abstraction wore badly upon Damaris.

She had steeled herself; had flamed, greatly daring. Now reaction set in.

Her effort proved vain. She had failed. For once more she recognized that

an unknown influence, a power dark and incalculably strong--so she

figured it--regained ascendency over her father, working to the insidious

changing of his nature, strangely winning him away. Waiting for some

response, some speech or comment on his part, fear and the sense of

helplessness assailed, and would have submerged her, had she not clung to

Carteret's parting "God bless you" and avowed faith in her stability, as

to a wonder-working charm. Nor did the charm fail in efficacy.--Oh!

really he was a wonderful sheet-anchor, "the shadow of a great rock in a

weary land," that dear man with the blue eyes! Consciously she blessed

him.--And, thanks to remembrance of him, presently found voice and

purpose once again.

"You aren't displeased with me, dearest?" she asked.

"Displeased?" Charles Verity repeated, at first absently. "Displeased, my

dear, no--why?"

"We didn't do wrong?"--labouring the point, the more fully to recall and

retain him--"Didn't take too much upon ourselves--Aunt Felicia, I mean,

and I--by persuading Darcy Faircloth to stay on Sunday, by entertaining

him when you were away? Or--or have I been stupid, dearest, and

thoughtlessly wearied you by talking too much and too long?"

"Neither," he said. "On the contrary, all you have told me goes to lessen

certain difficulties, make the crooked, in some degree, straight and

rough places plain."

For, if Faircloth had been here so recently, broken bread too in the

house, so he argued, it became the easier to bid him return. And Charles

Verity needed to see him, see him this morning--since purpose of

farewells, to be spoken in those long-deserted courts of romance,

stiffened, becoming a thing not merely to be turned hither and thither

in thought, but to be plainly and directly done.--"Send for him in your

own name," he said. "Explain to him how matters stand, and ask him to

talk with me."

And, as Damaris agreed, rejoiced by the success of her adventurous

diplomacy, making to go at once and give the required instructions--

"Stay--stay a moment," her father said, and drew her down to sit on the

chair-arm, keeping her hand in his, and with his other hand stroking it

wistfully. For though certain difficulties might be sensibly lessened,

they were not altogether removed; and he smiled inwardly, aware that not

even in the crack of doom are feminine rights over a man other than

conflicting and uncommonly ticklish to adjust.

"Before we commit ourselves to further enterprises, my darling, let us

quite understand one another upon one or two practical points--bearing in

mind the blades of Atropos' envious scissors. My affairs are in

order"--Damaris shrank, piteously expostulated.

"Oh! but must we, are we obliged to speak of those things? They grate on

me--Commissioner Sahib, they are ugly. They hurt."

"Yes--distinctly we are obliged to speak of them. To do so can neither

hasten nor retard the event. All the more obliged to speak of them,

because I have never greatly cared about money, except for what I could

do with it.--As a means, of vast importance. As an end,

uninteresting.--So it has been lightly come and lightly go, I am afraid.

All the same I've not been culpably improvident. A portion of my income

dies with me; but enough remains to secure you against any anxiety

regarding ways and means, if not to make you a rich woman. I have left an

annuity to your Aunt Felicia. Her means are slender, dear creature, and

her benevolence outruns them, so that she balances a little anxiously, I

gather, on the edge of debt. The capital sum will return to you

eventually. Carteret and McCabe consented, some years ago, to act as my

executors. Their probity and honour are above reproach.--Now as to this

place--if you should ever wish to part with it, let Faircloth take it

over. I have made arrangements to that effect, about which I will talk

with him when he comes.--Have no fear lest I should say that which might

wound him. I shall be as careful, my dear, of his proper pride as of my

own.--Understand I have no desire to circumscribe either your or his

liberty of action unduly. But this house, all it contains, the garden,

the very trees I see from these windows, are so knitted into the fabric

of my past life that I shrink--with a queer sense of homelessness--from

any thought of their passing into the occupation of strangers.--Childish,

pitifully weak-minded no doubt, and therefore the more natural that one

should crave a voice, thus in the disposition of what one has learned

through long usage so very falsely to call one's own!"

"We will do exactly what you wish, even to the littlest particular, I

promise you--both for Faircloth and for myself," Damaris answered,

forcing herself to calmness and restraint of tears.

He petted her hands silently until, as the minutes passed, she began once

more to grow fearful of that dreadful unknown influence insidiously

possessing him and winning him away. And he may have grown fearful of it

too, for he made a sharp movement, raising his shoulders as though

striving to throw off some weight, some encumbrance.

"There is an end, then, of business," he said, "and of such worldly

considerations. I need worry you with them no more. Only one thing

remains, of which, before I speak to others, it is only seemly, my

darling, I should speak to you."

Charles Verity lifted his eyes to hers, and she perceived his spirit as

now in nowise remote; but close, evident almost to the point of alarm. It

looked out from the wasted face, at once--to her seeing--exquisite and

austere, reaching forward, keenly curious of all death should reveal,

unmoved, yet instinct with the brilliance, the mirthfulness even, of

impending portentous adventure.

"You know, Damaris, how greatly I love and have loved you--how dear you

have been to me, dearer than the satisfaction of my own flesh?"

Speech was beyond her. She looked back, dazzled and for the moment

broken.

"Therefore it goes hard with me to ask anything which might, ever so

distantly, cause you offence or distress. Only time presses. We are

within sight of the end."

"Ah! no--no," she exclaimed, wrenching away her hands and beating them

together, passion of affection, of revolt and sorrow no more to be

controlled. "How can I bear it, how can I part with you? I will not, I

will not have you die.--McCabe isn't infallible. We must call in other

doctors. They may be cleverer, may suggest new treatment, new remedies.

They must cure you--or if they can't cure, at least keep you alive for

me. I won't have you die!"

"Call in whom you like, as many as you like, my darling, the whole

medical faculty if it serves to pacify or to content you," he said,

smiling at her.

Damaris repented. Took poor passion by the throat, stifling its

useless cries.

"I tire you. I waste your strength. I think only of myself, of my own

grief, most beloved, my own consuming grief and desolation.--See--I will

be good--I am good. What else is there you want to have me do?"

"This--but recollect you are free to say me nay, without scruple or

hesitation. I shall not require you to give your reasons, but shall bow,

unreservedly, to your wishes. For you possess a touchstone in such

questions as the one now troubling me, which, did I ever possess it, I

lost, as do most men, rather lamentably early in my career. If you suffer

me to do so, I will ask Darcy Faircloth to bring his mother here to me,

this evening at dusk, when her coming will not challenge impertinent

observation--so that I may be satisfied no bitterness colours her thought

of me and that we part in peace, she and I."

Damaris got up from her seat on the arm of the red-covered chair. She

stood rigid, her expression reserved to blankness, but her head

carried high.

"Of course," she said, a little hoarsely, and waited. "Of course. How

could I object? Wasn't it superfluous even to ask me? Your word,

dearest, is law."

"But in the present case hardly gospel?"

"Yes--gospel too--since it is your word. Gospel, that is, for me. Let

Darcy Faircloth bring his mother here by all means. Only I think,

perhaps, this is all a little outside my province. It would be better you

should make the--the appointment with him yourself. I will send to him

directly. Patch can take a note over to the island. I would prefer to

have Patch go as messenger than either of the other men."

She walked towards the door. Stopped half-way and turned, hearing her

father move. And as she turned--her eyes quick with enquiry as to his

case, but inscrutable as to her own--Charles Verity rose too and held

out his arms in supreme invitation. She came swiftly forward and kissed

him, while with all the poor measure of force left him, he strained her

to his breast.

"Have I asked too much from you, Damaris, and, in the desire to make

sure of peace elsewhere, endangered the perfection of my far dearer

peace with you?"

She leaned back from the waist, holding her head away from him and laid

her hand on his lips.

"Don't blaspheme, most beloved," she said, "I have no will but yours."

Again she kissed him, disengaged herself very gently, and went.

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH WHICH IS ALSO CHAPTER THE LAST

At Lady's Oak--an ancient forest boundary--where the main road forks,

Damaris swung the dog-cart to the left, across the single-arch stone

bridge spanning the Arne; and on, up the long winding ascent from the

valley-bottom to the moorlands patched with dark fir plantations, which

range inland from behind Stourmouth. This constituted the goal of her

journey; for, the high-lying plateau reached, leagues of open country are

disclosed north and west, far as the eye carries, to the fine bare

outline of the Wiltshire Downs. She asked for wide prospects, for air and

ample space; but as floored by stable earth rather than by the eternal

unrest and "fruitless, sonorous furrows" of the sea.

Ever since the day of the funeral, now nearly a fortnight ago, Damaris

had kept within the sheltering privacy of the house and grounds. That

day, one of soft drizzling rain and clinging ground fog, had also been to

her one of hardly endurable distraction. Beneath assumption of respectful

silence, it jarred, boomed, took notes, debated, questioned. Beneath

assumption of solemnity, it peeped and stared. Her flayed nerves and

desolated heart plagued her with suspicions of insincerity.

In as far as Colonel Carteret controlled proceedings all had been marked

by reverent simplicity. But where the carcass is, the eagles,

proverbially, gather. And unfeathered fowl, in their own estimation

eminently representative of that regal species, flocked to Deadham church

and to The Hard.

If--to vary our metaphor--some, in the past, inclined to stone the living

prophet, these now outvied one another in their alacrity to bedeck his

tomb. Dr. Cripps, for example, hurried to offer himself as pall-bearer--a

request the more readily disposed of that there was no pall. While

Archdeacon Verity, to cite a second example and from a higher social

level, supported by his elder son Pontifex--domestic chaplain to the

Bishop of Harchester--insisted on sharing with Canon Horniblow the

melancholy honour of reading the burial service.

For the rest, the head, and lesser members of the family, from the big

house at Canton Magna, were solidly, not to say rather aggressively in

evidence. With them Mrs. Cowden and her husband-satellite, the Honourable

Augustus joined forces on arriving from Paulton Lacy.--Lord Bulparc drove

over from Napworth Castle. The country, indeed, showed up with

commendable indifference to depressing atmospheric conditions. Marychurch

sent a contingent. Stourmouth followed suit in the shape of General

Frayling--attended by Marshall Wace in full clerical raiment--bearing a

wreath of palm, violets, and myrtle wholly disproportionate in bulk and

circumference to his own shrivelled and rather tottery form.--Of this

unlooked for advent more hereafter.--Other distinguished soldiers came

from Aldershot and down from town. A permanent Under Secretary, correct

but visibly bored, represented the India Office.

The parish, neglecting its accustomed industries and occupations,

mustered in strength; incited thereto, not only by the draw of recently

resurrected scandal, but by news of the appointment recently offered Sir

Charles Verity, which had somehow got noised abroad. The irony of his

illness and death occurring precisely when he was invited to mount

nothing less--according to local report--than an oriental throne,

sufficed to stir the most lethargic imagination. Moralists of the

Reginald Sawyer school might read in this the direct judgment of an

offended deity. Deadham, however, being reprehensibly clannish, viewed

the incident otherwise; and questioned--thanks to an ingeniously inverted

system of reasoning--whether the said Reginald Sawyer hadn't laid himself

open to a charge of manslaughter or of an even graver breach of the

Decalogue.

Theresa Bilson--in whose hat artificial buttercups and daisies hastily

made room for bows of crape--lurked in the humble obscurity of the free

seats near the west door. To right and left she was flanked by a guardian

Miss Minett; but these ladies to-day were but broken reeds on which to

lean. They still laboured under a sense of having been compromised, and

of resultant social ostracism. This, although their former parsonic

lodger had vanished from the scene on the day following his threatened

immersion--a half-hearted proposition on his part of "facing out the

undeserved obloquy, living down the coarse persecution" meeting with as

scant encouragement from his ecclesiastical superior, the vicar, as from

themselves. Theresa--it really was hard on her--shared their eclipse.

Hence the humble obscurity of the free seats, where she sniffed, dabbed

her eyes and gurgled, unheeded and unseen.

Finally young Tom Verity--home on his first long leave--having

accompanied the family party from Canton Magna and feeling his sense of

humour unequal to the continued strain of their sublime insularity,

benevolently herded two stately, though shivering, turbanned native

gentlemen, who reached Deadham during the early stages of the ceremony no

one quite knew whence or when. In the intervals of his self-imposed

duties, he found time to admire the rich unction of his father, the

Archdeacon's manner and voice.

"_Plus ça change, plus la même chose_," he quoted gleefully. "What a

consummate fraud the dear old governor is; and how deliciously innocent

of the fact, that he imposes upon no one half so successfully as he does

upon himself!"

Our young man also found time, from afar, to admire Damaris; but, let it

be added, to a very different tune. Her beauty came as surprise to him

as having much more than fulfilled its early promise. He found it

impressive beyond that of any one of the many ladies, mature or callow,

with whom it was his habit largely to flirt. So far he could

congratulate himself on having successfully withstood the wiles of

matrimony--but by how near a shave, at times by how narrow a squeak! If

that fine parental fraud, the Archdeacon, had but known!--Tom,

undeterred by the solemnity of the occasion, hunched up his shoulders

like a naughty boy expecting his ears boxed.--But then--thank the

powers, the Archdeacon so blessedly and refreshingly didn't, and, what

was more, didn't in the very least want to know. He never asked for

trouble; but, like the priest and Levite of sacred parable, carefully

passed by on the other side when trouble was about.

Our young friend looked again at Damaris. Yes--she had beauty and in the

grand manner, standing there at the foot of the open brick-lined grave,

calm, immobile, black-clad, white-faced, in the encircling melancholy of

the drizzling mist. With the family grouped about her, large-boned,

pompous, well-fed persons, impervious to general ideas as they were

imperviously prosperous, he compared her to a strayed deer amongst a

herd of store cattle. Really, with the exception of his cousin Felicia

and--naturally--of himself, the Verity breed was almost indecently true

to type. Prize animals, most of them, he granted, still cattle--for

didn't he detect an underlying trace of obstinate bovine ferocity in

their collective aspect?

Damaris' calm and immobility exceeded theirs. But in quality and source

how far removed, how sensitive and intelligent! Her mourning was in the

grand manner, too, her grief sincere and absolute to the extent of a

splendid self-forgetfulness. She didn't need to pose; for that forgotten

self could be trusted--in another acceptation of the phrase--never to

forget itself.

And here Tom Verity's agreeable frivolity, the astute and witty

shiftiness of mind and--in a degree--of practice, for which he so readily

found excuses and forgave himself, made place for nobler apprehensions.

Not merely Damaris', just now, rather tragic beauty moved and impressed

him; but some quality inherent in her upon which he felt disposed to

confer the title of genius. That was going far.--Mentally he pulled

himself up short.--For wasn't it going altogether too far--absurdly so?

What the dickens did this excessive admiration portend? Could he have

received the _coup de foudre_?--He had to-day a fancy for French tags, in

reaction from the family's over-powering Englishness.--That wouldn't suit

his book in the very least. For in the matters of the affections he held

it thriftless, to the confines of sheer lunacy, to put all your eggs into

one basket. He, therefore, politicly abstained from further observation

of Damaris; and, with engaging assiduity, reapplied himself to herding

the two native gentlemen through the remainder of the ceremony and, at

the conclusion of it, into the mildewed luxury of a Marychurch landau.

Deadham parish went home to its tea that evening damp, not to say

dripping, but well pleased with the figure it had cut in the public eye.

For it had contributed its quota to contemporary history; and what parish

can, after all, do more! Reporters pervaded it armed with note-books and

pencils. They put questions, politely requested a naming of names. The

information furnished in answer would reach the unassailable authority of

print, giving Deadham opportunity to read the complimentary truth about

itself. Still better, giving others opportunity to read the complimentary

truth about Deadham. Hence trade and traffic of sorts, with much

incidental replenishing of purses. Great are the uses of a dead prophet

to the keepers of his tomb! Not within the memory of the oldest

inhabitant had any funeral been so largely or honourably attended. Truly

it spelled excellent advertisement--and this although two persons,

calculated mightily to have heightened interest and brought up dramatic

and emotional values, were absent from the scene.

For Lesbia Faircloth, giving her barman and two women servants a holiday,

closed the inn at noon. Alone within the empty house, she locked the

outer doors. Drew the blinds, reducing the interior to uniform,

shadow-peopled obscurity, with the exception of her own bed-chamber.

There she left one small square window--set deep in the stone work of the

wall--open and uncurtained.

It faced the causeway and perspective of lane skirting the warren and

leading to the high road and village. Looking out thence, in winter when

the trees were bare, she could see Deadham church, crowning its

monticule, part of the sloping graveyard and, below these in the middle

distance, the roofs and gables of the village street.

To-day the view was obliterated. For here, at the river level, mist and

drizzle took the form of fog. Opaque, chill and dank, it drifted in

continuous, just perceptible, undulations past and in at the open

casement. Soon the air of the room grew thick and whitish, the dark oak

furniture and the floor boards furred with moisture. Yet, her methodical

closure of the house complete, Lesbia Faircloth elected to sit in full

inward sweep of it, drawing a straight-backed chair, mounted on roughly

carpentered rockers, close to the window.

A handsome woman still, though in her late fifties, erect and of

commanding presence, her figure well-proportioned if somewhat massive.

Her dark hair showed no grey. Her rather brown skin was clear, smooth and

soft in texture. Her eyes clear, too, watchful and reticent; on

occasion--such as the driving of a business bargain say, or of a drunken

client--hard as flint. Her mouth, a wholesome red, inclined to fullness;

but had been governed to straightness of line--will dominant, not only in

her every movement, but in repose as she now sat, the chair rockers at a

backward tilt, her capable and well-shaped hands folded on her black

apron in the hollow of her lap.

Putting aside all work for once, and permitting herself a space of

undisturbed leisure, she proceeded to cast up her account with love and

life in as clear-headed, accurate a fashion as she would have cast up the

columns of cash-book or ledger--and found the balance on the credit side.

So finding it, she turned her head and looked across the room at the wide

half-tester wooden bed, set against the inner wall--the white crochet

counterpane of which, an affair of intricate fancy patterns and

innumerable stitches, loomed up somewhat ghostly and pallid through the

gloom. A flicker of retrospective victory passed across her face,

attesting old scores as paid. For there, through sleepless nights,

nursing the ardours and disgust of her young womanhood, she lay barren

beside her apple-cheeked, piping-voiced spouse, his wife in name only.

There later, times having, as by miracle, changed for her, she gave

birth to her son.

If somewhat pre-christian in instinct and in nature, the child of a more

ancient and a simpler world, she was in no sort slow of intelligence or

wanton. What had been, sufficed her. She cried out neither for further

indulgence of passion, nor against barriers imposed by circumstance and

class. That which she had done, she had done open-eyed, counting and

accepting the cost. Since then wooers were not lacking; but she turned a

deaf ear to all and each. A frank materialist in some ways, she proved an

idealist in this. No subsequent love passage could rival, in wonder or

beauty, that first one; since, compared with Charles Verity, the men who

subsequently aspired to her favours--whether in wedlock or out--were, to

her taste, at best dull, loutish fellows, at worst no more than human

jackasses or human swine.

And, through it all, she possessed the boy on whom to spend her heart, in

whose interests to employ her foresight and singular capacity of

money-making. For love's sake therefore, and for his sake also, she had

lived without reproach, a woman chary even of friendship, chary, too, of

laughter, chary above all of purposeless gaddings and of gossip.

Business, and the boy's sea-going or returning, might take her as far as

Southampton, Plymouth, Cardiff, more rarely London or some northern port.

But Deadham village rarely beheld her, and never, it is to be feared, did

the inside of Deadham church.

Yet Deadham church bell plaintively, insistently tolling, the sound

reaching her muted by the thickness of the fog, kept her attention on the

stretch for the ensuing hour. Startling as it was poignant, Charles

Verity's demand to see her, six days ago, brought the story of her love

to full circle. Their meeting had been of the briefest, for he was

exhausted by pain. But that he had sent, and she had gone, was unlocked

for largesse on the part of fortune, sufficient to give her deep-seated

and abiding sense of healing and of gain. And this stayed by her now,

rather than any active call for mourning.

She inhaled the dank chillness of the fog gratefully. It suited the

occasion better far than sunshine and bright skies. For winter,

darkness, sullen flowing waters and desolate crying winds furnished the

accompaniment of those earlier meetings. Hearing the tolling bell she

strove to relive them, and found she did so with singularly mounting

wealth and precision of detail. Not only vision but sense pushed

backward and inward, revitalizing what had been; until she ached with

suspense and yearning, shrewdly evaded dangers, surmounted obstructions

by action at once bold and wary and tasted the transfiguring rapture of

the end attained.

In the soberness of her middle years, occupied as she was with the rough,

exacting business of the inn, and with the management of accumulating

landed and other property--anxiety born of her son's perilous calling

never absent from her thought--Lesbia Faircloth inclined to live

exclusively in the present. Hence the colours of her solitary passion had

somewhat faded, becoming clouded and dim. Recent events--led by the ugly

publicity of Reginald Sawyer's sermon--served to revive those colours.

To-day they glowed rich and splendid, a robing of sombre glory to her

inward and backward searching sight.

The bell tolled quicker, announcing the immediate approach of the dead.

Lesbia listened, her head raised, her face, turned to open window, felt

over by the clammy, impalpable fingers of the fog.

Now they bore the coffin up the churchyard path, as she timed it. She

wondered who the bearers might be, and whether they carried it shoulder

high? The path was steep; and Charles Verity, though spare and lean,

broad of chest and notably tall. Bone tells. They would feel the weight,

would breathe hard, stagger a little even and sweat.

And with this visualizing of grim particulars, love, bodily love and

desire of that which rested stark and for ever cold within the narrow

darkness of the coffin--shut away from all comfort of human contact and

the dear joys of a woman's embrace--rushed on her like a storm, buffeted

and shook her, so that she looked to right and to left as asking help,

while her hands worked one upon the other in the hollow of her lap.

Nor did Darcy Faircloth figure in Deadham's record funeral gathering.

Upon the day preceding it, having watched by Charles Verity's corpse

during the previous night, he judged it well to take his new command--a

fine, five-thousand-ton steamer, carrying limited number of passengers

as well as cargo, and trading from Tilbury to the far East and to Japan,

via the Cape.

In his withdrawal, at this particular date, Miss Felicia hailed a counsel

of perfection which commanded, and continued to command, alike her

enthusiastic approval and unfeigned regret. For that he should so

seasonably efface himself, argued--in her opinion--so delightful a

nature, such nice thought for others, such chivalrous instincts and

excellent good taste!--All the more lamentable, then, effacement should

be, from social, moral or other seasons, required.--Yet for the family to

gain knowledge of certain facts without due preparation--how utterly

disastrous! Think of her half-sister, Harriet Cowden, for instance, with

a full-grown and, alas! wrong-way-about, step-nephew bounced on her out

of a clear sky, and on such an occasion too.--The bare notion of what

that formidable lady, not only might, but quite certainly would look and

say turned Miss Felicia positively faint.--No--no, clearly it had to

be--it had to be--or rather--she became incoherent--had not to be, if

only for dearest Charles's sake. Yet what a ten thousand pities; for

notwithstanding the plebeian origin on the mother's side, didn't

Faircloth--these reflections came later--really surpass every male Verity

present, young Tom included, though she confessed to a very soft spot in

her heart for young Tom?--Surpass them, just as her brother Charles had

always surpassed them in good looks and charm as in inches, above all in

his air of singular good-breeding? And how extraordinarily he had

transmitted this last to Faircloth, notwithstanding the--well, the

drawback, the obstacle to--Miss Felicia did not finish the sentence,

though in sentiment becoming sweetly abandoned. For how she would have

revelled, other things being equal--which they so deplorably weren't--in

shaking this singularly attractive nephew in the family's collective

face, just to show them what dearest Charles--who they never had quite

understood or appreciated--could do in the matter of sons, when he once

set about it, even against admittedly heavy odds!

As it was, she had to pacify her gentle extravagance by subjecting the

said nephew's hand to a long tremulous pressure at parting.--He, worn,

blanched, a little strange from the night's lonely and very searching

vigil; she patchily pink as to complexion, fluttered, her candid eyes

red-lidded.--Pacify herself by assuring him she could never express how

deeply she had felt his unselfish devotion during this time of

trouble--felt his--his perfect attitude towards her dearest brother--his

father--or the consideration he had shown towards Damaris and herself.

"You can count on my unswerving affection, my dear Darcy," she had

said. Adding with, to him, very touching humility--"And any affection

you have to give me in return I shall cherish most gratefully, be very

sure of that."

All which, as shall presently be shown, brings our narrative, though by

devious courses, back to Damaris sweeping the dog-cart to the left across

the bridge spanning the Arne, and on up the long winding ascent, from the

woods and rich meadows in the valley to the wide prospects and keener air

of the moorland above.

Until now, as already chronicled, she had remained in house or garden,

prey to an apathy which, while not amounting to definite ill-health,

refused interest and exertion. She could not shake it off. To her all

things were empty, blank, immensely purposeless. Religion failed to touch

her state--religion, that is, in the only form accessible. The interior

of some frowning Gothic church of old Castile, or, from another angle, of

some mellow Latin basilica, might have found the required mystic word to

say to her. But Protestantism, even in its mild Anglican form, shuts the

door on its dead children with a heavy hand.--And she suffered this

religious coldness, although any idea that death of the body implies

extinction of the spirit, extinction of personality, never occurred to

her. Damaris' sense of the unseen was too ingrained, her commerce with it

too actual for that. No--the spirit lived on. He, her most beloved, lived

on, himself, his very self; but far away from her. In just this consisted

the emptiness, the unspeakable and blank bitterness--he was somewhere and

she could not reach him. The dreadful going away of his spirit, against

which she had fought during the thirty-six hours of his illness, had

reached its ordained consummation--that was all.

The body which had contained and by that beloved spirit been so nobly

animated, in its present awful peace, its blind dumb majesty, meant

scarcely more to her than some alabaster or waxen effigy of her dead. It

was so like, yet so terrifyingly unlike Charles Verity in life!--She had

visited it morning and evening, since to leave it in solitude appeared

wanting in reverence. Throughout each night she thankfully knew that

either Carteret, McCabe or Faircloth watched by it. Yet to her it hardly

retained as much of her father's natural presence as the clothes he had

worn, the books and papers littering his writing-table, the chair he

preferred to sit in, his guns and swords upon the wall, or the collection

of fishing-rods, walking-sticks and his spud stacked in a corner.

After the strain and publicity of the funeral her apathy deepened,

perplexing and saddening Carteret and bringing Miss Felicia near to

veritable wailing. For while thanking them both she, in fact, put them

both aside. This in no sour or irritable humour; but with a listlessness

and apartness hopeless to overcome. She prayed them to give her time.

Soon she would begin again; but not just yet. She "couldn't begin again

to order--couldn't make herself begin again. They must not trouble, only

be patient with her, please, a little longer--she wasn't, indeed she

wasn't, pretending"--a statement which, in its simplicity, cut Carteret

to the quick--for "she meant to begin again directly she could."

To-day the weather took an encouraging turn for the better. Following

the spell of fog and wet a northerly wind at last arose. It swept the sky

clear of clouds, the land of melancholy vapours, begetting a brilliance

of atmosphere which wooed our maiden to come forth and once more affront

the open. She therefore ordered the dog-cart at two o'clock. Would

herself drive; and, "if Aunt Felicia didn't mind and think her

unsociable, would take Patch for sole company, because then"--renewed

apologies--"she needn't talk and she felt disinclined to do so."

During the first half mile or so, as must be confessed, each prick of

the black horse's ears and change in his pace sent a quake through her,

as did the sight of every vehicle upon the road she passed or met. Her

nerve was nowhere, her self-confidence in tatters. But, since this

parlous state was, in the main, physical, air and movement, along with

the direct call on her attention, steadied the one and knit up the

ravelled edges of the other. By the time the plateau was reached and the

hill lay behind her, she could afford to walk the horse, tentatively

invite her soul, and attempt to hold communion with Nature. Sorrow--as

well as the Napoleonic Patch--still sat very squarely beside her; but

the nightmare of mortality, with consequent blankness and emptiness, was

no longer omnipresent. Interest again stirred in her, the healthy

instinct of going on.

Except in the foreground, where foxy browns of withered bracken and

pink-shot browns of withered heather gave richness of tone, the colouring

of the great view was somewhat cold. It dealt in thin, uncertain green,

the buff of stubble, in sharp slate-like blues blended in places with

indigo, the black purple of hawthorn hedges and grey-brown filigree of

leafless trees.--This did her good, she asking to be strengthened and

stimulated rather than merely soothed. To feel the harsh, untainted wind

break against her, hear it shrill through the dry, shivering grasses of

the roadside and sturdy spires of heath, to see it toss the dark crests

and tufted branches of the outstanding firs at the edge of the

plantation, brought up her morale. Brought her resignation, moreover--not

of the self-indulgent order, of bowed head and languidly folded hands;

but of the sort which acknowledges loss and sorrow as common to the sum

of human experience, places it in its just relation to the rest, and,

though more heavily weighted than before, takes up the onward march,

sobered perhaps yet undismayed.

Sins of omission began to prick her. The domestic establishment ran on

wheels, even during the recent stress and agitation, though she had

ceased to exercise control over it. Now it must be reorganized--and

probably on a less liberal footing.--But these were minor questions,

comparatively simple to cope with. Her life had been full, it must find

fresh purpose, fresh interest and occupation, in a word, be refilled.

Literature allured her. She dreamed of wonderful tellings, dreamed of the

engrossing joys of the written word. But in what form--poetry, essay,

history, novel?--The extreme limitation of her own knowledge, or rather

the immensity of her own ignorance, confronted her. And that partly

through her own fault, for she had been exclusive, fastidious, disposed

to ignore both truths and people who offended her taste or failed to

strike her fancy. Hitherto she had been led by fancy and feeling rather

than by reasoned principle. She must at once simplify, broaden and

democratize her outlook. Must force herself to remember that respect is,

in some sort, due to everything--however unbeautiful, however even vile

or repugnant--which is a constant quantity in human affairs and human

character, due to everything in the realm of Nature also, however

repellent, if it _is_ really so, actually exists.

In this connection the mysterious and haunting question of sex obtruded

itself. And, along with it, the thought of two eminently diverse persons,

namely Lesbia Faircloth and the dear, the more than ever dear, man with

the blue eyes. That, in his agony, her father should have desired the

visit of the former, once his mistress, had been very bitter to bear,

provoking in Damaris a profound though silent jealousy. This had even

come in some degree between her and Faircloth. For, in proportion as

that visit more effectually united father and son, it abolished her

position as intermediary between the two.

Recalling the incident jealousy moved her now, so that she gathered up

the reins hastily and touched the horse with the whip. It sprang

forward, danced and behaved, before settling down to the swinging trot

which, in so handsome a fashion, ate up the blond road crossing the

brown expanse of moor.

Damaris was surprised and distressed by the vehemence of her own emotion.

That her jealousy was retrospective, and belonged to a past now over and

done with, she admitted. Yet, thinking of her father's demand to see

Lesbia, how amazingly deep it went, how profound, and lasting is the

empire of "feeling in _that_ way"--so she put it, falling back on her

phrase of nearly three years ago, first coined at St. Augustin.

And this was where Carteret came in.--For he alone, of all men, had made

her, Damaris, ever consciously "feel in _that_ way."--A fact of immense

significance surely, could she but grasp the full, the inner meaning of

it--and one which entered vitally into the matter of "beginning again."

Therefore, so she argued, the proposed simplifying, broadening,

democratizing of her outlook must cover--amongst how much else!--the

whole astonishing business of "feeling in _that_ way."

She shrank from the conclusion as unwelcome. The question of sex was

still distasteful to her. But she bade herself, sternly, not to shrink.

For without some reasoned comprehension of it--as now dawned on her--the

ways of human beings, of animals, of plants and, so some say, even of

minerals, are unintelligible, arbitrary, and nonsensical. It is the push

of life itself, essential, fundamental, which makes us "feel in _that_

way"--the push of spirit yearning to be clothed upon with flesh, made

visible and given its chance to enter the earthly arena, to play an

individual part in the beautiful, terrible earthly scene. Therefore she

must neglect it, reject it no longer. It had to be met and understood, if

she would graduate in the school of reality; and in what other possible

school is it worth while to graduate?

Reaching which climax in her argument, the selfishness of her recent

behaviour became humiliatingly patent to her. From the whole household,

but especially from Carteret and Aunt Felicia, she had taken all and

given nothing in return. She had added to their grief, their anxieties,

by her silence, her apathy, her whimsies.

"Patch," she asked suddenly, "which is the shortest way home, without

going through Stourmouth and Marychurch? "--And, under his instructions,

turned the dog-cart down a grassy side-track, heading south-east--her back

now to the wind and inland country, her face to the larger horizon, the

larger if more hazardous freedom of the sea.

Conversation, started thus by her enquiry, flourished in friendly,

desultory fashion until, about three-quarters of an hour later, the front

gates of The Hard came in sight. By then afternoon merged itself in early

evening. Lights twinkled in the windows of the black cottages, upon the

Island, and in those of Faircloth's inn. The sky flamed orange and

crimson behind the sand-hills and Stone Horse Head. The air carried the

tang of coming frost. Upon the hard gravel of the drive, the wheels of

the dog-cart grated and the horse's hoofs rang loud.

Another Damaris came home to the Damaris who had set forth--a Damaris

rested, refreshed, invigorated, no longer a passive but an active agent.

Nevertheless, our poor maiden suffered some reaction on re-entering the

house. For, so entering, her loss again confronted her as an actual

entity. It sat throned in the lamp-lit hall. It demanded payment of

tribute before permitting her to pass. Its attitude amounted, in her too

fertile imagination, to a menace. Here, within the walls which had

witnessed not only her own major acquaintance with sorrow, but so many

events and episodes of strange and, sometimes, cruel import--super-normal

manifestations, too, of which last she feared to think--she grew undone

and weak, disposed to let tears flow, and yield once more to depression

and apathy. The house was stronger than she. But--but--only stronger,

surely, if she consented to turn craven and give way to it?--Whereupon

she consciously, of set purpose, defied the house, denied its right to

browbeat thus and enslave her. For had not she this afternoon, up on the

moorland, found a finer manner of mourning than it imposed, a manner at

once more noble and so more consonant with the temper and achievements of

her beloved dead? She believed that she had.

On the hall table lay a little flight of visiting cards. Her mind

occupied in silent battle with the house, Damaris glanced at them

absently and would have passed on. But something in the half-deciphered

printed names caught her attention. She bent lower, doubting if she could

have read aright.

"Brig.-General and Mrs. Frayling."--Two smaller cards, also bearing the

General's name, ranged with two others bearing that of "The Rev. Marshall

Wace." A written inscription, in the corner of each, notified a leading

hotel in Stourmouth as the habitat of their respective owners.

This little discovery affected Damaris to a singular extent. She had

small enough wish for Henrietta Frayling's society at this juncture;

still less for that of her attendant singer-reciter-parson. Yet their

names, and the train of recollections evoked by these, made for the

normal, the average, and, in so far, had on her a wholesome effect. For

Henrietta, of once adored and now somewhat tarnished memory--soulless,

finished, and exquisitely artificial to her finger-tips, beguiling others

yet never herself beguiled beyond the limits of a flawless

respectability--was wonderfully at odds with high tragedies of

dissolution. How had the house received such a guest? How put up with her

intrusion? But wasn't the house, perhaps, itself at a disadvantage, its

sting drawn in presence of such invincible materialism? For how impress a

creature at once so light and so pachydermatous? The position lent itself

to rather mordant comedy.

In this sense, though not precisely in these phrases, did Damaris

apprehend matters as, still holding Henrietta Frayling's visiting card

in her hand, she crossed the hall and went into the drawing-room.

There, from upon the sofa behind the tea-table, through the warm soft

radiance of shaded lamps and glowing fire, Felicia Verity uplifted her

voice in somewhat agitated greeting. She made no preliminary affectionate

enquiries--such as might have been expected--regarding her niece's outing

or general well-being, but darted, not to say exploded, into the

declaration:

"Darling, I am so exceedingly glad you weren't at home!--Mrs.

Frayling's card?"

This, as the girl sat down on the sofa beside her.

"Then you know who's been here. I didn't intend to see anyone--unless

poor little Theresa--But no, truly no one. Both Hordle and Mary were off

duty--I ought not to have let them be away at the same time, perhaps, but

I did feel they both needed a holiday, don't you know.--And either they

had forgotten to give Laura my orders, or she lost her head, or was

talked over. I daresay Mrs. Frayling insisted."

"Henrietta is not easily turned from her purpose," Damaris said.

"Exactly.--A very few minutes' conversation with her convinced me of

that. And so I felt it would be unfair to blame Laura too severely. I

should suppose Mrs. Frayling excessively clever in getting her own way.

Poor Laura--even if she did know my orders, she hadn't a chance."

"Not a chance," Damaris repeated.

Once convalescence initiated, youth speedily regains its elasticity; and

Aunt Felicia with her feathers ruffled, Aunt Felicia upon the warpath

thus, presented a novel spectacle meriting observation. Evidently she and

Henrietta had badly clashed!--A nice little demon of diversion stirred

within Damaris. For the first time for many days she felt amused.

"Excessively clever," Miss Felicia continued.

--Without doubt the dear thing was finely worked up!--

"And, though I hardly like to make such accusation, none too scrupulous

in her methods. She leads you on with a number of irrelevant comments

and questions, until you find she's extracted from you a whole host of

things you never meant to say. She is far too inquisitive--too

possessive."

Miss Felicia ended on an almost violent note.

"Yes, Henrietta has a tiresome little habit of having been there first,"

Damaris said, a touch of weariness in her tone remembering past

encounters.

Miss Felicia, caught by that warning tone, patted her niece's rather

undiscoverable knee--undiscoverable because still covered by a heavy

fur-lined driving coat--lovingly, excitedly.

"If you choose to believe her, darling," she cried, "which I, for one,

emphatically don't."

Following which ardent profession of faith, or rather of scepticism, Miss

Felicia attempted to treat the subject broadly. She soared to

mountain-tops of social and psychological astuteness; but only to make

hasty return upon her gentler self, deny her strictures, and snatch at

the skirts of vanishing Christian charity.

"Men aren't so easily led away," she hopefully declared. "Nor can I think

Mrs. Frayling so irresistible to each and all as she wishes one to

imagine. She must magnify the number and, still more, the permanence of

her conquests. No doubt she has been very much admired. I know she was

lovely. I saw her once ages ago, at Tullingworth. Dearest Charles," the

words came softly, as though her lips hesitated to pronounce them in so

trivial a connection--"asked me to call on her as I was staying in the

neighbourhood. She had a different surname then, by the way, I remember."

"Henrietta has had four in all--counting in her maiden name, I mean."

"Exactly," Miss Felicia argued, "and that, no doubt, does prejudice me a

little against her. I suppose it is wrong, but when a woman marries so

often one can't help feeling as if she ended by not being married at

all--a mere change of partners, don't you know, which does seem rather

shocking. It suggests such an absence of deep feeling.--Poor thing, I

dare say that is just her nature; still it doesn't attract me. In fact

it gives me a creep.--But I quite own she is pretty still, and

extraordinarily well dressed--only too well dressed, don't you know, that

is for the country.--More tea, darling. Yes, Mrs. Cooper's scones are

particularly good this afternoon.--I wish I liked her better, Mrs.

Frayling, I mean, because she evidently intends to be here a lot in

future. She expressed the warmest affection for you. She was very

possessive about you, more I felt than she'd any real right to be. That,

I'm afraid, put my back up--that and one or two other things. She and

General Frayling think of settling in Stourmouth for good, if Mr. Wace is

appointed to the Deadham curacy."

"The curacy here?" Damaris echoed, a rather lurid light breaking

in on her.

Miss Felicia's glance was of timid, slightly distressed, enquiry.

"Yes," she said, "Mr. Wace has applied for the curacy. He and General

Frayling were to have an interview with Canon Horniblow this afternoon.

They dropped Mrs. Frayling here on their way to the vicarage, and sent

the fly back for her. She talked a great deal about Mr. Wace and his

immense wish to come here. She gave me to understand it was his one

object to"--

The speaker broke off, raised her thin, long-fingered hands to her

forehead.

"I don't know," she said, "but really I feel perhaps, darling, it is

better to warn you. She implied--oh! she did it very cleverly, really, in

a way charmingly--but she implied that things had gone very hard with Mr.

Wace that winter at St. Augustin, and that all he went through has

remarkably developed and strengthened his character--that it, in fact,

was what determined him to take Holy Orders. His difficulties melted

before his real need for the support of religion. It would have all been

most touching if one had heard a story of such devotion from anyone

but--but her, about anyone but him--under the circumstances, poor young

man--because--darling--well, because of you."

"Of me?" Damaris stiffened.

"Yes--that is just the point. Mrs. Frayling left me in no doubt. She was

determined to make me understand just what Mr. Wace's attitude had been

towards you--and that it is still unchanged."

Damaris got up. Pulled off her driving coat, gloves and hat. Threw them

upon the seat of a chair. The act was symbolic. She felt suffocated,

impelled to rid herself of every impediment. For wasn't she confronted

with another battle--a worse one than that with the house, namely, a

battle with her long-ago baby-love, and her father's love

too--Henrietta.--Henrietta, so strangely powerful, so amazingly

persistent--Henrietta who enclosed you in arms, apparently so soft but

furnished with suckers, octopus arms adhering, never letting you go? She

had played with the idea of this intrusion of Henrietta's and its effect

upon Miss Felicia, at first as something amusing. It ceased to be

amusing. It frightened her.

"And my attitude is unchanged, too," she said presently, gravely proud.

"I didn't want to marry Marshall Wace then. I was dreadfully sorry when

Henrietta told me he cared for me. I don't want to marry him or have

him care for me one bit more now. I think it very interfering of

Henrietta to trouble you with this. It is not the moment. She might at

least have waited."

"So I felt," Miss Felicia put in. She watched her niece anxiously, as the

latter went across to the fire-place and stood, her back to the room,

looking down into the glowing logs.

For she had--or rather ought she not to have?--another communication to

make which involved the fighting of a battle on her own account, not

against Henrietta Frayling, still less against Damaris, but against

herself. It trembled on the tip of her tongue. She felt impelled, yet

sorrowed to utter it. Hence her wishes and purposes jostled one another,

being tenderly, bravely, heroically even, contradictory. In speaking she

invited the shattering of a dream of personal election to happiness--a

late blossoming happiness and hence the more entrancing, the more

pathetic. That any hope of the dream's fulfilment was fragile as glass,

lighter than gossamer, the veriest shadow of a shade, her natural

diffidence and sane sense, alike, convinced her. For this very cause, the

dream being of the sweetest and most intimate, how gladly would she have

cherished the enchanting foolishness of it a trifle longer!--Her act of

heroism would earn no applause, moreover, would pass practically

unnoticed. No one would be aware of her sacrifice. She would only gain

the satisfaction of knowing she had done the perfectly right and generous

thing by two persons who would never share that knowledge.--She

blushed.--Heaven forbid they ever should share it--and thank her.

"Mrs. Frayling--I don't want"--

Miss Felicia stopped.

"What don't you want?"--This from Damaris over her shoulder, the pause

being prolonged.

"To set you against her, darling"--

"I think," Damaris said, "I know all about Henrietta."

"She insinuates so much," Miss Felicia lamented.--"Or seems to do so. One

grows wretchedly suspicious of her meaning. Perhaps I exaggerate and

misjudge her.--She is quite confusingly adroit; but I extremely disliked

the way in which she spoke of Colonel Carteret."

Damaris bent a little forward, holding her skirt back from the scorch of

the fire, her eyes still downcast.

"How did she speak of him?"

"Oh! all she said was very indirect--but as though he had not played

quite fair with her on some occasion. And--it's odious to repeat!--as if

that was his habit with women, and with unmarried girls as well--as if he

was liable to behave in a way which placed them in a rather invidious

position while he just shuffled out of all responsibility himself. She

hinted his staying on with us here was a case in point--that it might

give people a wrong idea altogether. That, in short--at least thinking it

over I feel sure this is the impression she meant to convey to me--that

he is indulging his chronic love of philandering at your expense."

"And thereby standing in the light of serious lovers such as

Marshall Wace?"

After a moment Damaris added:

"Is that your idea of Colonel Carteret, Aunt Felicia?"

"Ah! No, indeed no," the poor lady cried, with rather anguished

sincerity. Then making a fine effort over herself:

"Least of all where you are concerned, my darling."

And she drifted hastily on to her feet. The curtains were still undrawn;

and, through the window opposite, she caught sight of a tall figure

coming up across the lawn in the frosty twilight.

"Pardon me if I run away. I've forgotten a note I meant to send to poor

little Theresa Bilson.--I must let Laura have it at once, or she mayn't

catch the postman," she said with equal rapidity and apparent

inconsequence.

As Felicia Verity passed out into the hall, at one end of the avenue of

stumpy pillars, Carteret came in at the other end through the garden

door. He halted a moment, dazzled by the warmth and light within after

the clair-obscure of the frosty dusk without, and looked round the room

before recognizing the identity of its remaining occupant. Then:

"Ah! you--dear witch," he said. "So you're home. And what of your drive?"

Damaris turned round, all of a piece. Her hands, white against the black,

the fingers slightly apart, still pressed back the skirt of her dress as

though saving it from the fire scorch, in quaintly careful childish

fashion. Her complexion was that of a child too, in its soft brightness.

And the wonder of her great eyes fairly challenged Carteret's wits.

"A babe of a thousand years," he quoted to himself. "Does that look grow

out of a root of divine innocence, or of quite incalculable wisdom?"

"I told you if you would be patient with me I should begin again. I have

begun again, dear Colonel Sahib."

"So I perceive," he answered her.

"Is it written so large?" she asked curiously.

"Very large," he said, falling in with her humour. "And where does the

beginning lead to?"

"I wish you'd tell me.--Henrietta has begun again too."

"I know it," he said. "Our incomparable Henrietta overtook me on her way

from here to the Vicarage, and bestowed her society on me for the better

part of half an hour. She was in astonishing form."

Carteret came forward and stood on the tiger skin beside Damaris. Mrs.

Frayling's conversation had given him very furiously to think, and his

thoughts had not proved by any means exhilarating.

"Does this recrudescence of our Henrietta, her beginning again, affect

the scope and direction of your own beginning again, dearest witch?" he

presently enquired, in singularly restrained and colourless accents.

"That depends a good deal upon you--doesn't it, Colonel Sahib?" our

maiden gravely answered.

Carteret felt as though she dealt him a blow. The pain was numbing. He

could neither see, nor could he think clearly. But he traced Mrs.

Frayling's hand in this, and could have cursed her elaborately--had it

been worth while. But was anything worth while, just now? He inclined to

believe not--so called himself a doating fool. And then, though

tormented, shaken, turned his mind to making things easy for Damaris.

"Oh! I see that," he told her. "And now you have got hold of your

precious little self again and made a start, it's easy enough to manage

your affairs--in as far as they need any management of mine--from a

distance. This beginning again is triumphant. I congratulate you! You're

your own best physician. You know how to treat your case to a marvel. So

I abdicate."

"But why? Why abdicate? Do you mean go away? Then Henrietta was right.

What she said was true. I never believed her. I"--

Damaris grew tall in her shame and anger. The solemn eyes blazed.

"Yes--pray go," she said. "It's unwarrantable the way I kept you

here--the way I've made use of you. But, indeed, indeed, I am very

grateful, Colonel Sahib. I ought to have known better. But I didn't. I

have been so accustomed all my life to your help that I took it all for

granted. I never thought how much I taxed your forbearance or encroached

on your time.--That isn't quite true though. I did have scruples; but

little things you said and did put my scruples to sleep. I liked having

them put to sleep.--Now you must not let me or my business interfere any

more.--Oh! you've treated me, given to me, like a prince," she declared,

rising superior to anger and to shame, her eyes shining--"like a king.

Nobody can ever take your place or be to me what you've been. I shall

always love to think of your goodness to--to him--my father--and to

me--always--all my life."

Damaris held out her hands.

"And that's all.--Now let us say no more about this. It's difficult. It

hurts us both, I fancy, a little."

But Carteret did not take her proffered hands.

"Dear witch," he said, "we've spoken so freely that I am afraid we must

speak more freely still--even though it pains you a little perhaps, and

myself, almost certainly very much more. I love you--not as a friend, not

as an amiable elderly person should love a girl of your age.--This isn't

an affair of yesterday or the day before yesterday. You crept into my

heart on your sixth birthday--wasn't it?--when I brought you a certain

little green jade elephant from our incomparable Henrietta, and found you

asleep in a black marble chair, set on a blood-red sandstone platform,

overlooking the gardens of the club at Bhutpur. And you have never crept

out of it again--won't do so as long as body and mind hang together, or

after. It has been a song of degrees.--For years you were to me a

delicious plaything; but a plaything with a mysterious soul, after which

I felt, every now and again, in worship and awe. The plaything stage came

to an end when I was here with you before we went to Paris, four years

ago. For I found then, beyond all question of doubt, that I loved you as

a man only loves once, and as most men never love at all. I have tried

to keep this from you because I have no right to burden your youth with

my middle-age."

Carteret smiled at her.

"It has not been altogether easy to hold my peace, dearest witch," he

said. "The seven devils of desire--of which you knew nothing, bless

you"--"I'm not sure that I do know nothing," Damaris put in quietly.

She looked him over from head to heel, and the wonder of her great

eyes deepened.

"It isn't wrong?" she said, brokenly, hoarsely. "I don't think it can

be wrong?"

Then, "You will be good to my brother, to Darcy Faircloth, and let me see

him quite, quite often!"

And lastly, her lips trembling:

"It is beautiful, more beautiful than I ever knew about, to have you for

quite my own, Colonel Sahib."