It was barely five o'clock, and the balmiest summer day at Herion is wont
to waken, like a spoilt child, in a bad temper of angry wind and lashing
rain. Lynette, who had risen from her bed and thrown her dressing-gown
about her, to kneel on the broad window-seat and look out upon this
strange new world, shivered, standing barefoot on the mossy carpet. Then
she looked round the room, and smiled with delight. For she had found it,
upon her arrival of the previous night, a reproduction, down to the
smallest detail, of her blue-and-white bedroom at Harley Street, with this
notable difference--that on the wall facing the bed-head hung a fine copy
of a Millais portrait that was one of the treasures of Bawne House. Lady
Bridget-Mary, in the glory of her beautiful youth, shone from the canvas
splendid as a star.
How kind, how kind of Owen!... Her eyes filled as she gazed, comparing the
glowing, radiant face upon the canvas with the enlarged photograph of the
Mother in her habit that stood in an ebony and silver frame upon a little
table beside the bed. A worn "Garden of the Soul" lay near, and the
"Imitation" of inspired A Kempis. Both had been the Mother's gifts. The
Breviary and the Little Office of Our Lady had belonged to the dead.
Lynette had brought these treasured possessions with her from Harley
Street, leaving the ivory Crucifix hanging in its place above the vacant
pillow. So many sleepless nights she had known of late upon that pillow
that there were faint bluish-shaded hollows under the beautiful eyes, and
wistful lines about the mouth.
Since the revelation made to her by her own heart, when the heavy tress of
hair dropped from her bosom upon the unconscious breast above which she
bent, an insurmountable wall of diffidence and shyness upon her side, and
of stern, self-concentrated isolation on her husband's, had risen up
between them, dwarfing the barrier that was already there.
His writing-table lamp had burned through the nights, but she had never
ventured upon another stolen visit to Saxham's consulting-room. The memory
of that kiss she had put upon the velvety-smooth space above the broad
meeting eyebrows stung in her like a sense of guilt, and yet it had its
sweetness. She had claimed her right. The man was hers, though she might
never be his.... To know it was to realise at once her riches and her
poverty.
Out of a vague yearning and a formless, nameless pain had come to her the
knowledge of the true herb needed for her healing. The unsated hunger for
sympathy and love and loveliness, the loneliness that gnawed him, she
comprehended now. And as she looked about her at the dainty,
carefully-chosen furniture, and the exquisite old-world-patterned chintz
draperies, recognising what his care had been to please her, and how every
little taste and preference of hers had been remembered and gratified, a
sense of her own ingratitude pierced her to the quick.
She had parted from Owen without one tender word, without even one glance
of greater kindness than she would have bestowed upon a stranger. She
ached with futile remorse at the recollection of that frigid, distant
good-bye at Euston Station, when Lady Hannah's shrill laugh had jangled
through Major Bingo's blustering admonitions to perspiring porters to put
the luggage in one compartment, to stow canvas bags of golf-clubs and
fishing-rods in the racks, and to damage bicycles at their personal peril,
since the company evaded liability.
It had been Saxham's wish that Lady Hannah and Major Wrynche should be his
wife's guests at Plas Bendigaid. Looking from her bedroom casements over
the syringas and lilacs and larches, the laburnums and hawthorns and
hollies of the low-walled garden that ended at the sheer cliff-edge, from
whence you looked down upon the tops of the pines and chestnuts, whose
green foliage hid the shining metals of the iron way, and made a sea of
verdure in place of the salt blue waves that once had lapped and sighed
there--gazing across the powdery sand-dunes that were prickly with
sea-holly and gay with flaunting poppies and purple scabious, the pink and
white convolvulus, and the thorny yellow dwarf rose, that somehow finds
nourishment in the pale sand of Herion Links, to the line of white
breakers that rose and fell more than a mile away. Lynette sighed a small
sigh of resignation at the prospect of long weeks to be spent in the
society of these pleasant, well-bred, rather fidgety people Owen had
chosen to bear her company.
Of course, Owen could not leave his patients! He had explained that, and
Lady Hannah and her big Major were old friends of hers and his. And the
little woman with the jangling laugh and the snapping black eyes had known
the Mother in her youth....
At that remembrance Lynette's eyes went lovingly to the copy of the
Millais portrait, and as the sun burst through the streaming wind-chased
clouds, and smote bright diamond-rays from the dripping window-panes, the
firm lips seemed to curve in the rare, sudden smile, the great grey eyes
to gleam with life and tenderness.
Ah, to spend a long, sweet summer here, alone with that dearest of all
companions! Lynette's white throat swelled at the thought, and a mist
blotted out the noble face, crowned with its diadem of rich black tresses.
She wiped the tears away, and beheld a world miraculously changed. For
land and sea were drenched in radiant sunshine.
She unlatched the casements and threw them wide, and clean, salt, sweet
air came streaming in, bringing the fragrance of mignonette and wallflower
and sweetbriar, and the aromatic smells of the larch and pine. She leaned
her white arms upon the grey stone window-sill, and drank the freshness
and fragrance. And it seemed to her that this ancient grange, perched on
the cliff-ledge in the tremendous shadow of Herion Castle, looking across
the restless grey-blue waters of Nantmadoc Bay to St. Tirlan's Roads, was
an ideal place to spend a honeymoon in, supposing you loved the man you
had married, and were loved by him?
Her bosom heaved and her wild heart fell to throbbing. A blush burned over
her, and she drove the thought away. It came back, whispering like a guest
who wishes not to be dismissed. It pleaded and urged and compelled.
Something like a strong hand closed upon her heart and drew her, drew
her.... A voice called to her in the silence that was only broken by the
voices of birds, and the rustling of wind-stirred leaves, and the crying
of the gulls above the white restless breakers. And the voice was Owen's.
How strangely he had looked and spoken in that last moment of their
parting! It came back in every detail for the hundredth time, as she
leaned her white arms upon the window-sill and looked out with wistful
eyes upon the beauty of the blossoming world.
"Good-bye, good-bye! Be happy--and forget!"
The train had begun to move as he uttered the words He had gripped her
hand painfully and released it. As he drew his arm sharply away, a button,
hanging loosely by a thread or two, became detached from his coat-cuff,
and fell upon the rubber matting of the corridor. She was conscious of the
button as Saxham and the crowded, grimy platform receded from her view.
And before she went back to her seat in the compartment that had been
reserved for herself and her fellow-travellers, she picked up the tiny
disc of black horn, and secretly kissed it, and slipped it into her purse.
She was silent and preoccupied during the eleven hours' journey, turning
over and over in her mind, mentally repeating with every shade of
expression that could vary their meaning, Saxham's strange words of
farewell.
She repeated them now aloud. They were tossed to and fro in her heart on
waves of wonder and regret and apprehension. Did Owen really believe that
to be happy she must forget him? Did he comprehend that she had long
arrived at the conclusion that this loveless, joyless companionship,
mocked by the name of marriage, was a miserable mistake?
He had never been under any illusion as concerned it. He had accepted the
iron terms of the contract she offered him with open eyes and full
knowledge. She heard his voice again, as it had spoken in the Cemetery at
Gueldersdorp, saying:
"Would I be content to enter, with you for my partner, into a marriage
that should be practically no marriage at all--a formal contract that is
not wedlock? That might never change as Time went on, and ripen into the
close union that physically and mentally makes happiness for men and women
who love? Is that what you ask me, Miss Mildare?"
That was just what she had asked. He had accepted her iron conditions, and
stipulated for nothing. He had given his all. What had she given him?
Nothing but suffering, being rendered pitiless by the ache and sting in
her own bosom--absorbed, swallowed up by her agony of grief for the
Mother, her passion of regret for dead Beauvayse.
Beauvayse.... Suppose he and Owen Saxham stood side by side down there on
the green short grass beneath her windows, which of the two men would
to-day be the dearer and the more desired? The tall, soldierly young
figure, with the sunburnt, handsome face, the gay, amorous, challenging
glance, the red mouth that laughed under the golden moustache, and the
shallow brain under the close-clipped golden curls, or the black-haired,
hulking Doctor, with the square-cut, powerful face and the stern blue
eyes, the man of heart and intellect, whose indomitable, patient
tenderness had led a stricken girl back from the borders of that strange
land where the brain-sick dwell, to wholesome consciousness of common
things, and renewed healthfulness of body and of mind?
She had hardly thanked him. She realised, with tears of shame, that this
inestimable service she had accepted as matter of course. It was the way
of Saxham's world to take of him and render nothing; he who was worthy to
be a King among his fellow-men had been their servant as long as she had
known him.
To call him hard and stern, and seek his aid and sympathy at every pinch;
to deem him cold and grudging, and accept his sacrifices as matter of
course--that was the way of the world with grim-jawed, tender-hearted Owen
Saxham. And she, who had done like the rest, knew him now, and valued him
for what he was, and--loved him!
For this was love that had come upon her like a strong man armed, not as
he had shown himself to her before--laughing and merry, playful and
sweet.... This was no ephemeral, girlish passion, evoked by the beauty of
gay, wanton, grey-green jewel-eyes and a bold, smiling mouth. This was a
love that drew you with irresistible strength, and knitted you to the
soul, and the heart, and the flesh of another, until his breath became
your breath, and his life your life. It called you with a voice that
plucked at the secret chords of your being, and was stern and compelling
rather than sweet to implore. It drew you to the beloved, not with ribbons
of silk, but with ropes of tempered steel. It was potent and resistless
as death, and infinitely deeper than the grave. It reached out aspiring
hands beyond the grave, into Eternity. And, newly born as it rose in the
heart of this woman, it was yet as old as Eden, where Heavenly Love
created the earthly love, that is more than half-divine.
Why, why had he sent her away, bidding her be happy and forget him?... The
memory of his hollow eyes and haggard face pierced her to the quick. He
was ill--he was in trouble; he had sent her away that he might bear the
burden solely.... Or ... an iron hand closed upon her heart, and wrung it
until points of moisture started upon her fair temples under the fine
tendrils of her hair ... could the reason be--another woman?
Another woman?... She set her little teeth and drove the unworthy thought
away. But it came again and again--a persistent mental gadfly. Was Owen
not worthy of love? Suppose another sweeter, gentler creature had found a
throne in the heart that his wife had prized so lightly, would it be so
very strange, after all? Perhaps that was why he had asked her to forgive
him for having married her a little while ago!
She dropped her head upon her folded arms, and sobbed at the thought. Then
she dried her tears and rang for her maid, and presently came down to
breakfast with Lady Hannah, smiling and composed, cheerful and attentive
as a hostess ought to be. But her reddened eyelids told tales.
"Misses her Doctor, no doubt," thought Lady Hannah, as she commended the
country eggs and butter, and was enthusiastic over the thyme-scented Welsh
mountain-honey, and apologetic over the absence of her Bingo from the
board.
She would carry her nuisance his breakfast with her own hands, she vowed,
as he had left his man behind, on hearing from the Doctor that the house
was a small one.
"But why?" asked Lynette. "There is Marie, my maid, and the red-cheeked
parlourmaid, whose name I don't yet know, and Mrs. Pugh, the housekeeper
..."
"Who was Dr. Saxham's nurse when he was a little boy, and adores him. And
Mrs. Pugh's husband, who is gardener, and handy-man, and coachman when
required." Lady Hannah's laugh jangled out over the capacious tray,
containing the comprehensive assortment of viands representing what the
invalid was wont to term his "brekker." "But I'm not to be deprived of my
privilege, for all that. Do you suppose you young married creatures are
the only wives who enjoy cosseting their husbands? There! it's out, and I
ought to be ashamed of myself, I suppose, but I'm not. Is that collared
brawn on the sideboard? Bingo has a devouring passion for collared brawn."
She added a goodly slice to the contents of the tray. "I warn you, if you
regard the billing and cooing of a middle-aged couple as indecent," she
went on, "to look the other way a great deal while we're here. For I was
for the first time seriously smitten with my husband when he rode out to
meet me, returning from ignoble captivity in the tents of Brounckers,
eighteen months ago. When I nursed him through enteric in the Hospital at
Frostenberg--I won't disguise it--I fell in love! With a bag of bones, for
he was nothing else: but genuine passion is indifferent to the personal
appearance of the beloved object, though I hadn't suspected it before. The
wound completed my conquest, and since then I'm madly jealous if another
woman looks at him!... I see red--green would be a better colour--because
he prefers to have his valet brush his hair. I don't know that I didn't
reduce the holding capacity of this house by a storey--there's a pun for
you!--so as to engineer my hated rival being left at home in Wilton Place.
Is that lovely murrey-coloured stuff in the cut-glass jar quince
marmalade? No! I won't pamper Bingo, if he is the idol of my soul. And
please don't wait for me. He likes me to take off the tops of his eggs for
him, and he usually eats three...."
Lady Hannah tripped off with her load, and deposited it before the idol,
who was sitting up in a Japanese bed-jacket of wadded pink satin,
left-handedly reading the Herion newspaper that comes out once a week, and
is published at St. Tirlan's, twenty miles away.
"I've made a discovery," she announced. "No, don't look frightened. It's
only that poor Biddy's _belle trouvaille_ has got a heart. She's not the
tinted Canova-nymph, the piece of correct inanity, I honestly believed
her.... She idolised Biddy--small credit, for who could help it? She
submitted to be adored by that poor foolish boy who's dead.... Now she's
her black-avised Doctor's humble worshipper and slave."
"Can't understand a woman worshippin' a chap with a chin like the bows of
an armoured Destroyer, and eyebrows like another man's moustaches," Bingo
objected.
"Chin or no chin, eyebrows or not a hair, what does that count to a woman
in love?" She placed the laden tray before him, and with a maternal air
proceeded to tuck a napkin under his chin. He grumbled:
"There's no knowin' what will take the female fancy. But even if you
haven't harked away on a wrong scent, slave's a dash too strong. Struck me
they parted uncommon chilly and off-hand at Euston yesterday mornin',
considerin' they've not been married much above a year! Do take this thing
from round my neck! Makes me feel like Little Willie!"
Lady Hannah unpinned the napkin that framed the bulldog jowl, and said,
patting the sandy-pink bullet-head:
"That's what it is to be Eyes and No Eyes in amatory affairs. No Eyes sees
two people part, 'uncommon off-hand and chilly.'" She mimicked Bingo's
tone. "Eyes sees that and something more! A man's coat-button dropped on
the floor of a railway carriage, for instance, and a young woman who slyly
picks it up--silly little _gage d'amour_--and kisses it when a considerate
observer pretends not to be looking, and hides it away! Is that evidence,
Major Mole?"
"By the Living Tinker!" he thundered, "I wouldn't have believed it of
her!"
"Of course you wouldn't!" She rummaged in an open suit-case. "What necktie
do you want to wear to-day?"
He mumbled ruefully, eyeing her over the coffee-cup:
"Any of 'em. It don't matter which. They're all alike when you've tied
'em!"
She beamed at what seemed to her a gallant speech.
"_Sans compliment?_ You really mean it? And you won't miss Grindlay so
frightfully, after all?"
He shook his head ambiguously.
"I shan't begin really to suffer for Grindlay--not till it comes to
tubbin' with one fin."
"Mercy upon us!" She gasped in consternation. He said, controlling his
features from wreathing into triumphant smiles:
"You were so cast-iron certain you could fill his place, you know!"
Her bright black eyes were hidden under abashed and drooping eyelids.
Blushes played hide-and-seek in the small cheeks that were usually pale.
"In--in everything essential," she stammered, avoiding his intolerable
gaze.
"Then that's what it is to be Eyes and No Eyes in ordinary, everyday
affairs!" The man pursued his advantage pitilessly. "Didn't you regard it
as essential that I should wash?"
She winked tears away, though her laugh answered him.
"Most certainly I did, and do. One of the reasons that decided me on
marrying you was that you were invariably _propre comme un sou neuf_."
"I thought, on mature reflection," said Bingo, lying down under the
lightened tray with a replete and satisfied air, "that you would prefer a
clean husband to a dirty one. Therefore I engaged a bedroom for Grindlay
at the Herion Arms. That's his knock. Come in!"
The valet presented himself upon the threshold, backing respectfully at
sight of her ladyship, who gave him a gracious good-morning, dissembling
the intense relief experienced at sight of his smug, clean-shaven
countenance.
"Good-morning, Grindlay. I hope the Hotel people made you comfortable. And
now you have arrived to take responsibility off my hands," she announced,
"I'll go and get some breakfast."
"Haven't you ... You're joking!" The tray shot from the bed into
Grindlay's saving clutch as Bingo suddenly assumed the perpendicular. "You
don't mean to say that you've been starving all the time I've been gorging
myself like--like a boa-constrictor?" he demanded furiously. "Why on earth
are women such blessed----"
"--Idiots?" she supplied, turning on the threshold to launch her Parthian
shaft. "Because if they were intellectual, logical beings they would know
better than to lavish devotion upon stupid, selfish, unappreciative,
heartless, dull dolts of men!"
The door slammed behind an injured woman. Grindlay's face was a study in
immobility. Bingo, after a little more meditation, ponderingly rose and
submitted himself to the hands of the attendant. When the Major's toilet
had reached the stage of hair-parting, he roused himself from his
reflections with a sigh.
"Hold on. Put down that comb and go and ask her ladyship to be good enough
to step up here. Tell her that your style of hairdressin' don't suit me. I
want a little more imagination thrown into the thing! Hurry up, will you!"
"O Lord! What a liar I am!" he murmured fervently, addressing his
reflection in the glass. His wife's face appeared over his shoulder,
bright, alert, and pleased. She said, as she adroitly assumed the office
vacated by the discarded Grindlay, who discreetly delayed his re-entrance
on the scene:
"So you can't get on, it appears, without your blessed idiot?"
"Blessed angel, you mean!" said mendacious Bingo, blinking under a Little
Lord Fauntleroy fringe. "You banged the door before I'd got out the word!"
"If I could believe that!" she sighed, and the ivory-backed hair-brushes
played rather a tremulous fantasia upon her idol's head, "perhaps I might
be induced to confide to you a piece of genuine Secret Intelligence."
"Concernin'----?"
"Concerning your wife, Hannah Wrynche."
"Well, what of her?"
She took him by the chin and began to part his hair. But her eyes were
misty, and her hand travelled unsteadily.
"This of her. She owned to you, months and months back, that in your place
she wouldn't have been one-millionth part as patient with a restless,
ambitious woman cursed with an especial capacity for getting herself and
other people into hot water." She made a little affected grimace that
masked a genuine smart. "Not hot water only--boiling lava
sometimes--fizzling vitriol----"
He said, looking kindly up at the small mobile face and quivering chin:
"Restlessness and ambition are in the blood, y' know, like gout and the
rest of it. You can't eradicate 'em, however much you try. It's like
shavin' a Danish carriage-dog to change his colour. You can't for nuts;
his spots are in his skin! See?"
"_Merci du compliment!_" Her jangling laugh rang out as if a stick had
been smartly rattled down the keys of a piano. But her eyes were wet. His
own eyes reverted to his reflection in the toilet-glass. Now his sudden
bellow made her drop the comb.
"My Aunt Maria! See what you've been and done! Made a Loop Railway down
the middle of my head, unless my liver's making me see things curly. Don't
swot at it any more; let that ass Grindlay earn his pay for once.... By
the Living Tinker! you're cryin'. Don't go and say I've been a brute!" he
pleaded.
"Darling!--dearest!--you haven't--you've never!... The boot's on the other
leg, though wild horses wouldn't get you to own as much!" His strong left
arm was round her slight waist, her wet cheek pressed against her Major's
bulldog jowl. Bingo cleared his throat in his ponderous, scraping way,
admitting:
"Well, perhaps I may have dropped a briny or so--of nights in bed at
Nixey's, or on duty at Staff Bombproof South, between ring-ups on the
telephone when the off-duty men were snorin', and one had nothin' on the
blessed earth to do but wonder whether one had a wife or not?"
"There were people ready to tell you--years before we saw
Gueldersdorp--that the one you'd got was as good as none...."
"Lucky for 'em they refrained from expressin' their opinions!" She felt
his great muscles swell as the big hand tightened on her waist. "Though,
mind you, there have been times when for your own sake, by Jingo! I'd have
given all I was worth to have you a bit more like other women----"
"Who weren't dying to dabble in Diplomacy and win distinction as War
Correspondents. Who funk raw-head and bloody bones"--she shook with a
nervous giggle--"and all that sort of thing.... Would it please you to
know that the plumes of my panache of ambition have been cut to the last
quill--that henceforth my sole aim is to rival the domestic Partlet,
clucking of barnyard matters in the discreet retirement of the coop?"
"You've said as much before!" he objected.
"But now I mean it! Put me to the test. Let the house in Wilton
Place--we'll live at Wrynche Rodelands, if you think you won't be bored?"
He bellowed joyously!
"Me bored! With ten thousand acres arable and wood and moorland to farm
and preserve and shoot over, two first-class packs meetin' within a
fifty-mile radius of my doorstep, the Committee of the local Polo
Association shriekin' for a President, and the whole County beggin' me
with tears in its eyes to take the hint a Certain Person dropped when he
gave me my C.B., and accept the Crown Commission as Lord-Lieutenant!
'Bored'--I like that!"
"If you would like it, be it!" she flashed. "Trust me to back you up. I
can and I will! I'll help you entertain the military authorities and their
women, keep the Rolls, sit on the Bench when you weigh in as Chief
Magistrate, and prompt you when you get into a hat. I'll be all things to
one man--and you shall be the man! Only"--she laughed hysterically, her
face hidden against his big shoulder--"I don't quite know how far these
things are compatible with my new role!"
"Of domestic Henny-Penny cluckin' in the Home Coop." His big hand patted
her almost paternally. "Leave cluckin' to hens with families. Do you
suppose I'm such a pachydermatous ass that I can't understand that home is
a make-believe to a real woman, when--when there isn't even one chicken to
tuck under her wing! Worse luck for me and you!"
She laughed wildly, lifting her wet, flushed face up to him. Her black
eyes were shining through the tears that rose and brimmed over and fell.
"If I told you that the luck had changed, would that make you happy?"
He cried out with a great oath:
"Yes, by G----!" and caught her to his leaping heart.