CHAPTER IV

A month had gone by, and during that month, except for the time he

was with Saidie in the bungalow, Hamilton, had he been less of a

philosopher, would have been extremely uncomfortable.

The Commissioner's wife had completely and entirely espoused the

cause of Mrs. Hamilton, and had insisted on her leaving the hotel

and coming to stay with her. Everywhere that the Commissioner's

wife went, riding or driving, Mrs. Hamilton accompanied her; and

whenever he met the two women, his wife threw him a mild,

reproachful glance of martyred virtue, while the Commissioner's

wife glared upon him in stony wrath.

Hamilton took no notice of either glance, but passed them as if

neither existed. The Commissioner looked miserably guilty whenever

he encountered Hamilton's amused, penetrating eyes, and avoided

him as much as possible. The Commissioner's house was completely

shut to him; he never approached it now except on official

business, and nearly every house in the station followed its

example. The story of Mrs. Hamilton's woes and wrongs had spread

all over the community, and proved a theme of delightful and

never-ending interest to all the ladies of the station. They were

unanimous in supporting her. Not one voice was raised in favour of

Hamilton. He was a monster, a heartless libertine, given over to

all sorts of terrible vices. Tales of the fearful doings in the

desert bungalow, where Hamilton and Saidie lived the gay, bright,

joyous life of two human beings, happily mated, as Nature intended

all things to be, spread over the station, and the stony stare of

the women upon Hamilton, when they met him, mingled insensibly with

a shrinking horror that greatly amused him.

Nobody spoke to him except in his business capacity. Every one

avoided him. He was practically ostracised. Mrs. Hamilton, on the

other hand, went everywhere, and thoroughly enjoyed herself in the

_rôle_ of gentle forgiving martyr that she played to perfection.

Being plain and unattractive to men, she was thoroughly popular

with the women, and they were never tired of condoling with her on

having such a brute of a husband. What more natural, poor dear!

than that she should refuse to live with him in India, if the

climate did not suit her? So unreasonable of him to expect it! The

question of a family, too! why, what woman was there now who did

not hate to have her figure spoiled, and object to be always in the

sick-room and nursery? So natural that she did not wish those

disagreeable passionate relationships: a man could not expect that

sort of thing from his wife! And then the money, too! she had never

had more than half his income all these twenty years! It seemed to

them that she had been wonderfully good and resigned.

Such was the talk at the afternoon teas, and the married men at the

club, coached by their wives, and being in the position of the fox

who had lost his brush, and wished no other fox to retain his,

condemned Hamilton quite as freely.

"It was beastly rough on his wife," they agreed, "to set up a

black dancing-girl under her eyes."

Hamilton cared not at all for the social life of the station, and

was greatly relieved by not having invitations to give or to

answer. All that he regretted was the ultimate resignation of his

post, which, he foresaw, would be the result of all this scandal

sooner or later.

Saidie, with Oriental quickness, had soon grasped the whole

situation, and had flung herself at his feet in a passion of tears,

begging him to send her away or to kill her rather than let her

presence make him unhappy. Hamilton had some difficulty in turning

her mind from the resolve to kill herself by way of serving him;

and it was only his solemn oath to her that she was the one single

joy and happiness of his life, that with her in his arms he cared

about nothing else, that if he lost her his life was at an end,

which pacified and at last convinced her.

Another month went by, and Mrs. Hamilton began to tire of her

position. She felt she was not making Hamilton half unhappy enough.

She had had but one idea, and that was to separate him from Saidie,

and in this she had failed. He had not even been turned out of his

post. He had been expelled from the social life of the station; but

she knew he would not feel that, that he would only welcome the

greater leisure he had to spend in his Eden with _her_. To play the

martyr for a time had been interesting, but its pleasure was

beginning to wane; moreover, she could not stay permanently with

the Commissioner's wife. She grew restless: she must carry out her

plan somehow. When Hamilton's life was completely wrecked, she

would be ready to return to England--not till then; and she lay

awake at nights grinding her long, narrow, wolf-like teeth together

as she thought of Hamilton in the desert bungalow.

One morning, after a nearly sleepless night, she got up and looked

critically at her face in the glass. Old and haggard as usual it

looked; but to-day, in addition to age and care, a specially evil

determination sat upon it.

"Life is practically done with," she thought, looking at it. "I

have only this one thing to care about now, and I'll do it somehow

before I go. If I can't enjoy my life, he shan't enjoy his."

She turned from the glass, and commenced dressing. The evil look

deepened on her face from minute to minute, and the word "Beast!"

came at intervals through her teeth.

Outside the window of her charming room all was waking in the

joyous dawn of the East. Long shadows lay across the velvet green

slopes of the Commissioner's lawn as the sun rose behind the

majestic palms that shaded it; floods of golden light were rippling

softly over roses and stephanotis, opening bud after bud to the

azure above them; the gay call of the birds rang through the clear

morning air; the perroquets swung in ecstasy on the bamboo

branches, crying out shrill comments on each other's toilet. The

scent of a thousand blossoms rose up like some magic influence,

stealing through the sparkling sunlight into the room, and played

round the thin face of the woman within, but it could make no

message clear to her. Every sense of hers had long been sealed to

all joy by hate.

At breakfast she announced her intention of leaving India by the

following mail, and not all the kind pressure brought to bear upon

her by the Commissioner's wife could induce her to postpone her

departure. She was gentle, calm, and resigned in manner, as usual,

excessively grateful for all they had done for her, and the

kindness shown her. She spoke very sweetly of her husband, told

them how she had hoped by coming out to induce him to leave the

evil life he was leading; but she saw now that these things lay in

higher hands than hers, and she felt all she could do was to pray

and hope for him in silence.

"Why don't you divorce him?" broke in the Commissioner abruptly and

quickly, anxious to get it out before his wife could stop him. He

tugged violently at his moustache, waiting for her answer. If she

would do that, he was thinking, what a relief for that poor devil

Hamilton!

"Divorce him?" returned Mrs. Hamilton resignedly. "Never! It is a

wife's duty to submit to whatever cross Providence lays upon her,

but divorce seems to me only the resource of abandoned women."

The Commissioner's wife nodded her head in majestic approval. The

Commissioner got up abruptly, breakfast being concluded. He said

nothing, but his mental ejaculation was, "Old hag! knows she

couldn't get any one else, nor half such a handsome allowance!"

The day for Mrs. Hamilton's departure came, and on its morning

Hamilton found a note from her on his office desk. He took it up

and opened it with a feeling of repulsion.

"DEAR FRANK,--I am leaving by the noon boat for England. They

seem to have altered their time of sailing to twelve instead

of seven P.M.

"I am sorry my visit here has caused you trouble. Do not be

too hard on me. I am leaving now, and do not intend to worry

you again. You must lead your own life until, perhaps, some

day you wish to return to me. You will find me ready to

welcome you. Good-bye, and forgive any pain I have caused

you.--Your affectionate wife,

JANE."

Hamilton read this note with amazement, and a sense of its falsity

swept over him, as if a wind had risen from the paper and struck

his face. But as men too often do, he tried to thrust away his

first true instincts, and replace their warning with a lumbering

reason. He sat deep in thought, gazing at the table before him. If

it were true, if she were really going, if she really meant

good-bye, what a relief! But it was impossible, unless, indeed, she

had accomplished her plan, and had heard that he had been, or was

about to be dismissed from his post.

This seemed to throw a light upon the matter, and with the idea of

finding confirmation of this in some of the other letters awaiting

him, he started to go through them. It was a heavy post-bag, and

gave him much to attend to. He went through the letters, but found

nothing relative to himself in them, and settled down to his work.

Twelve, one, and two passed, and he looked up at the clock,

wondering if she were really gone. He seemed to have no inclination

for lunch, so he worked on without leaving the office, and only

rose to clear his desk when it was time to leave for the day.

To-morrow he would learn definitely what passengers the out-going

boat had carried. He would not stay this evening to find out. He

felt ill, listless; he only wanted to be back with Saidie in the

restful shade of the palms.

As he rode across the desert that evening an indefinable depression

hung over him. Never since he had found Saidie had that melancholy,

once so natural, come back to him. Her spirit, whether she were

absent or present, seemed always with him--a gay, bright, beautiful

vision ever before his eyes, giving him the feeling that he was

looking always into sunlight. But to-night there seemed emptiness,

gloom about him.

"It's the weather," he muttered, and looked upward to the curious

sky. It was gold, gleaming gold; but close to the horizon lay two

bright purple bars, like lines of writing in the West: the prophecy

of a storm, and the heat seemed to hang in the air that not a

faintest breath moved.

Swiftly and evenly the great camel bore him, its well-beloved

master, over the rippling sand towards the palms in the golden

west, but the approaching night travelled faster than they, and it

was quite dark, with a sullen heavy darkness, before they reached

the bungalow. It seemed very quiet, with an indefinable sense of

stillness in the garden and wide hall. Neither Saidie nor any

servant came to meet him, and it was quite dark: no lamp had been

lighted. With a sudden throb of terror in his heart, Hamilton

paused and called "Saidie."

There was no response, no sound. Striking a match, Hamilton

deliberately lit a lamp. Some great evil was upon him, and with a

curious calmness he went forward to meet it. He went upstairs and

pushed open the door of their bedroom, shielding the light with his

hand and seeking first with his eyes the bed. Saidie lay there: the

exquisite form, in its transparent purple gauze, lay composed upon

the bed, a little to one side. The glorious hair, unbound, rippled

in a dark river to the floor; the head rested sideways as in sleep,

upon the pillow. In silence Hamilton approached; near the bed his

foot slid suddenly; he looked down; there was a tiny lake of

scarlet blood, blackening at its edges, blood on the wooden

bedstead side, blood on the purple muslin over the perfect breasts.

Hamilton, his body growing rigid, put out his hand to her forehead;

it was cold. He set down the lamp and turned her face towards it,

putting his arm under her head. Her lips were stone colour, the

lids were closed over the eyes; the face was the face of death.

In those moments Hamilton realized that his own life was over.

Saidie was dead--murdered. The world then was simply no more for

him. All was finished: he himself was a dead man. Only one thing

remained, one duty for him. To avenge her! Then utter rest and

blackness. He looked round thinking. The room was quite empty,

undisturbed. The great pearls on Saidie's neck were untouched. They

gleamed gently in the pale light from his lamp. No robber, no

outsider had been here. Then, in the darkened room, leapt up before

him the truth: a white, blonde face seemed looking at him from the

walls--the thick pale lips, the half-closed sinister eyes, the lean

long figure of his wife rose before him.

"But she was to leave by the morning's boat," he muttered. Then

... a thought struck him. He withdrew his arm gently from the

passive head, lighted another lamp, putting it on a bracket in the

wall, and left the room, descending to the vacant hall. He went to

the verandah and called to his servants. They came, a trembling

crowd, with upraised hands, and fell flat before him, weeping and

striking their heads on the ground.

"It is not our fault, Light of Heaven, Father of the Poor, the

Mem-Sahib came--the white Mem-Sahib. We are poor men; we have no

fault at all."

Hamilton listened for a moment to the storm of words and protesting

cries. Then he raised his hand and there was silence, but for a

sound of rising wind without and the sobbing of the natives.

"Pir Bakhs," he said to the head of them all, the butler, "tell me

all you know. Your mistress is dead. Who is responsible?"

The butler came forward and fell at his master's feet with clasped

hands.

"Lord of the Earth, I know nothing but this. At five all was quiet

in the house, and our mistress sat in the garden singing. Then

came to the door two runners with a palanquin. They asked to see

our mistress. I said wait. I went to the garden. I said the white

Mem-Sahib has come in a palanquin. My mistress said, 'I will see

her.' She went to the drawing-room, and the white Mem-Sahib came

in, and they drank tea together. Your servant is a poor man, and he

saw no more till the runners went away with the palanquin. So we

said, 'The white Mem-Sahib has gone,' and my mistress said to me

she felt drowsy and must sleep, and went upstairs to the Light of

Heaven's room and shut the door. And your servant was laying the

table in your honour's dining-room a little later, and he went to

close the jillmills,[1] for the wind was rising, and your servant

saw through the jillmill the white Mem-Sahib again getting into her

palanquin that had appeared once more at the back, and the runners

ran with it very fast into the desert; then your servant ran out to

ask the other servants why the white Mem-Sahib had come back, and

the ayah met him at the door and said she had found our mistress

killed in her room; and your honour's servant is a poor man, and

has wept ever since."

[Footnote 1: Wooden shutters.]

Hamilton listened in perfect silence. The man's face was lined with

grief, the tears rolled in streams down his livid cheeks. A wail

went up from the other servants at his words. Hamilton and his

mistress were their idols, and his grief was very real to

themselves.

Hamilton stretched out his hand to the trembling man with a benign

gesture.

"Pir Bakhs, I believe you. You have served me many years, and never

lied to me. This is another's work, not yours. Be at peace. You

have no fault."

The butler wept louder, and the others wailed with him, calling

upon Heaven to bless their master and avenge their mistress.

Hamilton turned from them to the dark dining-room, which he crossed

to the hall; through this he walked in the darkness as a blind man

walks, to the entrance.

He tore the wood-work door open, wrenching it from its hinges, and

looked out into the night. A dust-storm was raging in the desert

beyond the compound, and its stinging blasts of wind, laden with

sand, drove heavily over the exquisite masses of bloom, the

glorious and delicate scented blossoms of the garden. It tore off

the flowers remorselessly, and even for the moment he stood there,

a rain of thin, white, shredded petals was flung into his face. The

branches of the trees groaned and whined in the thick darkness, the

swish of broken and bent bamboo came from all sides, the roar of

the dust driven through the foliage filled his ears. The garden,

the beautiful, sheltered garden, scene of their delights, was being

ruthlessly destroyed, even as his life had been; it was expiring in

agony, even as he would shortly expire: to-morrow it would be

desolate, a shattered wreck under the dust, even as he, in a little

while--But something should be done first.

Leaving the doorway open, letting the dust-laden wind tear

shrieking through the silent house, he plunged into the roaring

darkness. He took the centre path that led straight to the compound

gate. The unhappy bushes and tortured branches of the trees, bent

and twisted by the onrushing wind, lashed his face and body as he

went down the path. He did not feel their stinging blows. On, on to

the desert he went blindly but steadily in the thick darkness.

When he got beyond the compound gate, out of the shelter of the

garden, the weight of the wind almost bore him down; but as he

faced its blast, his eyes saw, not so very far, out on the plain,

dull in the whirling mist, the dancing uncertain light of a carried

lantern. As the tiger darts forward on its prey, as the snake

springs to the attack, Hamilton leapt forward into the wall of wind

that faced him and ran at the dancing light.

Choked with sand, blinded, suffocated and breathless, but full of

power to kill, he was on it at last, and flung himself with sinewy

hands on the swaying, covered sedan chair, between the two bearers,

who, bewildered and helpless in the sudden storm, were groping

slowly across the plain. With a shriek they dropped the handles, as

Hamilton flung himself suddenly on the chair; the lantern fell into

the sand and went out. The natives, thinking the devil, the actual

spirit of the storm, had overtaken them, fled howling into the

blackness, their cries swallowed up like whispers in the roar of

the wind. As the chair struck the sand, the woman within thrust her

head with a cry through the open side. Hamilton seized it by the

neck. Out! out of the sedan chair, through the burst-open door, he

pulled the wretched creature by her head, and then flung her with

all his force upon the sand.

The raging wind swept past them in sheets of dust, bellowing as it

went. He knelt on her body; his hands ground into her neck. Through

the darkness he saw beneath him the thin, white oval of the face,

with its eyes bulging, starting out of the head, its lips writhing

in agony; two white hands beat helplessly in the black air beside

him. He looked hard into her eyes, bending down to her close, very

near, as his hands sank deeper into her neck, his fingers locked

more tightly round it. In a few seconds the light of the eyes went

out, the hands ceased to beat the air. Saidie was avenged. With a

laugh that rang out into the noise of the storm, the man got up

from the limp body and stood by it, in the echoing darkness. Then

he kicked it, so that it rolled over, and the sand came up in

waves eager to bury it.

In an hour woman, sedan chair, lantern would all be beneath a level

plain of sand.

He turned back towards the bungalow. "Saidie," he murmured, and the

storm-wind seemed to rave "Saidie!" "Saidie!" round him, to whirl

the name upwards to the dim stars, glimmering one here and there,

far off and veiled in the heavens. He went back; the wind helped

him. On its wings he seemed borne back to his house, through the

tortured garden, through the gaping doorway, over the shattered

door he passed, and then up the stairs to their room.

After the inferno of the desert the inside of the house seemed

quiet, and in their room the lamps burned steadily, but low. Their

oil was used up, their life, like his, was nearly done. The bed

stood there and on its calm white stillness lay Saidie, waiting for

him, for him alone, as always.

He went up to her and stood there.

"Saidie?" but she did not answer. He lay down beside her gently, so

as not to break her slumber, and then drew her to his breast. Ah

his treasure! his world! Surely now all was well since she was

safe in his arms! He did not feel the deathly coldness. There was a

whizzing in his brain where Nature had laid her finger on a vein,

and broken it that he might be released from sorrow and die.

"Saidie?" he murmured again as her breast pressed his, and put his

lips to hers.

As his life had first dawned in her kiss, so it went back now to

the lips that had given it, and in that kiss he died.

II

There was complete silence in the large room, filled with long,

wavering shadows that the flickering firelight chased over the

walls and amongst the gilt-edged tables.

Beyond the windows the dusk was gathering quickly in the wind-swept

street, beneath the leaden sky. From the pane nearest the fire a

side-light fell across a man's figure leaning against the corner of

the mantel-shelf. A ruddy glow from the hearth struck upon the silk

skirt of a girl leaning back in the easy-chair beneath the other

corner.

Her face is lost in the shadow.

He is a good-looking fellow, very. The high white collar that shows

up in the dusk is fastened round a long, well-set neck; the figure

in the blue serge suit is straight and pleasing, and the shoulders

erect and slim.

The girl's eyes, looking out of the shadow, take in these points,

and the pleasure they give her seems inextricably confused with

dull pain. Her gaze passes on to his face, and rests eagerly,

almost thirstily, upon it.

There is light enough still to show her its well-cut oval, spoiled

now by the haggard falling in of the cheeks, the lines in the

forehead, and the swellings beneath the eyes.

He shifts his position a little and glances through the window. His

eyes are full of irritation, and the girl knows it, though they are

turned from her. She gives a suppressed, inaudible sigh; his

attitude now brings out the impatient discontent on his mouth and

the rigid determination of the chin.

"I suppose you mean two people can live upon nothing?" His voice is

cold, even hostile, and he speaks apparently to the panes, but the

tones are well-bred and pleasing; and again the girl wonders dimly

which is the predominating sensation in her--pleasure or pain.

"No," she says, in rather a suffocated voice. "But I say, if either

person has enough, or the two together, it does not matter which

has it, or which has the most."

Silence, which her hesitating, timid voice breaks at last.

"Does it?"

"Yes, I think it does," he answered shortly. "The man must have

enough to support both, or he has no right to marry at all."

The girl's hands lock themselves together convulsively, unseen

behind her slight waist, laced so skilfully into the fashionable

bodice.

There is a hard decision in the incisive tones that does not belong

to the mere expression of a general theory--a cold authority and a

weight of personal conviction that turns the words into a statement

of rigid principle.

The girl feels almost dizzy, and she closes her hot eyelids

suddenly to shut out the line of that hard, obstinate chin.

"People's ideas on what is enough to support both vary so much,"

she says quietly, with well-bred indifference in her tone, while

her heart beats wildly as she waits for his next remark.

"Well, what would you consider enough yourself?" he says coldly,

after a slight pause, turning a little more towards her.

The red light glows steadily on her skirts, and he can see the

graceful outline of her knees under them, and one small foot upon

the hearthrug; the rest of the form is veiled in the shadow, except

one rounded line of a shoulder and the glint of light hair above.

He looks down at her, and there seems a sudden, nervous expansion

in his frame; outwardly there is not the faintest impatient

movement. He waits quietly for her reply.

The girl hesitates as she looks at him. To her, in her absorbing

love for the man before her, the question is an absurd mockery.

To reduce to a certain number of pounds this "enough," when for her

anything or nothing would be enough!

"I would rather starve to death in your arms than live another day

without you," is the current running under all her thoughts, and it

confuses them and makes it difficult for her to speak.

What shall she answer? To name a sum too small in his eyes will

be as great an error as to name one too large. He would only

think her a silly, sentimental girl, who knows nothing of what

she is talking about, and who has no knowledge and appreciation

of the responsibilities of life.

Besides, to name a very small income will be to conjure up before

his eyes the picture of a mean, pitiful, sordid existence, from

which she feels, with painful distinctness, he would turn with

disgust.

Poor? Yes, he has told her that he is poor, and she believes it;

but somehow--by contracting debt, probably--she thinks, as her

keen, observant eyes sweep over him, he manages at present to live

and dress as a gentleman.

Those well-cut suits, those patent shoes and expensive cigarettes;

these things, she feels instinctively, must be preserved for him,

or any form of life would lose its charm.

At the same time, she must mention something that is not hopelessly

beyond him. She recalls her own two hundred; surely, at the least,

he must be making one.

"I can hardly say," she murmured at last, "because personally I

think one can live on so very little; but I suppose most people

would say--well, about three hundred pounds a year."

"Oh! three hundred a year," he says, stretching out his hand for

the tea-cup on a low table beside him. The tea has grown cold in

the discussion of abstract questions. He takes the cup and sits

down deliberately in the corner of the couch opposite her, and

stirs the tea slowly.

"How much is that a week? Five pounds fifteen, isn't it? Well, now,

go on, see what you can make of it. Your house--the smallest--and

servants--"

"House and servants!" interrupts the girl, "but why have a house

and servants at all?"

"I don't know," he rejoins curtly, "because the girl generally

expects those things when she marries."

"Not all girls," she says, and one seems to hear the smile with

which she says it in her voice.

"You mean rooms?" he says quickly, with a gleam of pleasure

breaking for a moment across his face.

"Well--say rooms--you would want three--thirty shillings, I

suppose, at the least, and then another thirty for board. That

leaves two fifteen for everything else."

"Surely that's a good deal."

"Oh, I don't know; think of one's clothes," and Stephen stares

moodily into the fire, with a pricking recollection of a tailor's

bill for twenty odd in his drawer at home now.

Then, to remove the impression of selfish extravagance he feels he

may have given, he adds:

"And a man wants to give his wife some amusement, and three hundred

a year leaves nothing for that."

"Amusement!" the girl repeats, starting up and standing upright,

with one elbow just touching the mantelpiece, and the firelight

flooding her figure from the slim waist downwards. "What amusement

does a woman want if she is in love with the man she is living

with? The man himself is her amusement! To watch him when he is

occupied, to wait for him when he is away, to nurse him when he is

ill--that is her amusement: she does not want any other!"

Stephen stares at the flexible form, and listens to the words that

he would admire, only the cynical suspicion is in his mind that she

is talking for effect. His general habit was to consider all women

mercenary and untrustworthy. Deep in his heart--for he had a heart,

though contracted from want of use--lay a hungry desire to be

loved, really loved for himself; and the very keenness of the

longing, and the anxiety not to be deceived, lessened his powers of

penetration, and blinded him to the girl's character.

He laughs slightly. "You are taking a theatrical view of the whole

thing!"

"How do you mean?"

"Oh, well, that the wife really loves her husband and sticks to him

through everything, and they pass through unheard-of difficulties

together, and so on"; but he adds, with a faint yawn: "I've always

noticed that when the money goes the love disappears too. There's

no love where there's abject poverty."

"But three hundred a year is not abject poverty," answers the girl

in a quiet tone, not denying his theory for fear of being called

again theatrical.

"No," he admits. "Oh, it might do very well as long as there were

only two; but then, when there are children, it means a nurse, and

all sorts of expenses."

He says the words with a simplicity and directness that makes the

girl almost catch her breath. For these two were not on intimate

terms with each other, not even terms of intimate speaking.

Nothing had passed between them yet but the merest society phrases,

and before a certain quiet dinner one month back neither knew of

the other's existence. Since then some chance meetings on the

beach, the parade, the pier, a few long afternoon rows, between

then and now: these are the only nourishment the flame in either

breast has received--a flame kindled in a few long glances across

the dinner-table.

But this afternoon he has laid aside the customary phrases and

deliberately commenced the present conversation.

True, it is purely an abstract one--all theory and hypotheses. No

one could say otherwise if it were repeated. Not a personal word

has been uttered on either side; but the girl feels in the

determined tone of his voice, in the studied way he started it, in

the cold precision with which he follows it, that it is practically

a test conversation of herself, and that she is virtually passing

through an examination.

He has come this afternoon with a set of certain questions that he

means to put, to all of which her answers are received without

comment, and mentally noted down.

He neither repeats himself, nor presses a point, nor leaves out

anything on his mental list, nor allows any remark to lead away

from it.

He has also certain things he means to say, which he will say, as

he asks his questions, deliberately, one after the other; and then,

when he has heard and said all he intends, he will terminate the

conversation as decisively as he began it and go. The girl feels

all this, for her brain is as clear and keen as the glance of her

eyes.

She knows that he is testing her: that she stands upon trial before

him.

She has nothing to hide: only, that too great love and devotion,

that seems to swell and swell irrepressibly within her, and would

pour itself out in words to him, but that his tone, his manner,

his look keep it back absolutely, as a firm hand holds down the

rising cork upon the exuberant wine. And now, at this sentence

of his, her words fail her. They are strangers practically, that

is conventionally--quite strangers, she remembers confusedly--but

for this secret bond of passion, knit up between them, which both

can feel but both ignore.

The natural male in him, and the natural female in her, are

already, as it were, familiar, but the fashionable man and girl are

strangers still.

Then, now, how is she to say what she wishes to him? How can she

talk with this mere acquaintance upon this subject? The very word

"children" seems to scorch her lips. At the same time, familiarity

with him seems natural and unnatural; terrible, and yet simple.

Then, too, what are his views?

Will her next words shock him inexpressibly?

In her passionate, excitable brain, inflamed with love for the man,

the idea of maternity can merely present itself like an unwelcome,

grey-clad Quaker at a banquet.

She hesitates, choosing her words. She knows so little of the man

in front of her. His clothes, she sees, are of the newest cut, but

his notions may not be.

At last her soft, weak, timid voice breaks the pause.

"Do you think it necessary to have very large families?"

"No, I don't," he answers instantly with the energy and alacrity of

one who is glad to express his opinion. "No, I don't, not at all."

The girl's suspended breath is drawn again. Unlike himself in his

queries she presses her point home.

"Don't you think those marriages are the happiest where there are

no children?"

"Yes," he says decidedly, getting up and thrusting his hands into

his coat pockets. "Yes, I do--much the happiest."

There is silence. It is too dark for either to see the other's

expression. He stands irresolutely for a minute or two, and then

says with a disagreeable laugh:

"I should hate my own children! Fancy coming home and finding a lot

of children crying and screaming in the place."

To this the girl says nothing, and Stephen, after a minute's

reflection, softens his words.

"Besides, your wife's love, when she has children, is all given to

them."

"Yes," murmurs her well-bred voice. "Oh, yes, one is happier

without them."

Neither speak. They are agreed so far; there is a deep relief and

pleasure in the breast of each.

"Well," he says at last, rousing himself, "I must go. I shall be

late for dinner."

The girl leans down and stirs the fire into a leaping, yellow

blaze. It fills the room with light, and reveals them fully now to

each other.

She makes no effort to detain him, and they look at each other,

about to part.

The self-control of each is marvellous, and admirable for its mere

thoroughness and completeness.

He has large eyes, and they stare down at her haggardly, as he

stands facing her in the light. The hungry, hopeless look in those

eyes and the drawn lines in his face go to the girl's heart, and to

herself it seems literally melting into one warm flood of sympathy.

Ill! he looks ill and wretched, and she longs with a longing that

presses upon her, till it is like a physical agony, to give some

way to her feelings.

"Dearest, my dearest!" she is thinking, "if I might only tell

you--even a little--"

And Stephen stares at the soft face and warm lips, half-paralyzed

with desire to bend down and kiss them. How would a kiss be? how

would they--And so there is a momentary, barely perceptible pause,

filled with a painful intensity of feeling, to which neither gives

way one hair's breadth. Then he gives a curt laugh.

"We have discussed rather a difficult problem and not settled it,"

he says in a conventional tone.

"It seems to me quite simple," murmurs the girl, with a throat so

dry that the words are hardly audible.

He hears, but makes no reply beyond another slight laugh, as he

holds out his hand. The girl puts hers into it. There is a moderate

pressure only on either side, and then he goes out and shuts the

door, leaving the girl standing motionless--all the warm springs

in her heart frozen by his last cynical laugh.

Brookes finds his way down the stairs, through the unlighted hall,

and lets himself out in the chill October air.

He goes down the street feeling a confused sense of having

inflicted pain and left distress behind him, but his own sensation

of irritation, his own vexation and angry resentment against his

lot in life, all but obliterate it.

For some seconds he walks on with all his thoughts merged together

in a mere desperate and painful confusion. "Only a hundred a year!"

is his plainest, most bitter reflection. "Five-and-twenty, and only

earning a hundred a year!"

Brookes is not of a calm temperament. His nervous system is tensely

strung, and generally, owing to various incidental matters,

slightly out of tune, or at anyrate, feels so.

His circulation is rapid, every pulse beats strongly, and the blood

flows hotly in his veins.

His mental nature is of much the same order--passionate, excitable,

and impatient; but there is such a heavy curb-rein of control

perpetually upon it, that its three leading qualities jar inwardly

upon himself more than they show to outsiders.

Even now the confused, excited disorder in his brain is soon

regulated and calmed by his will, and as he walks on he lapses into

trying to recollect whether he has said all he meant to.

He concludes that he has, and a certain satisfaction comes over

him.

"Well, I have told her my views now," he reflects. "She sees what I

think, and what my principles are. She won't wonder that I say

nothing. I shall try for another post and a rise of salary, and

then--"

Stephen's character was a fine one in its way. The capacity for

self-command and self-denial was tremendous, his sense of honour

keen, his adherence to that which he conceived the right

inflexible, his will immutable; but of the subtler sweetness of

the human heart he had none.

Of sympathy, the divine [Greek: sym, pathos], _the suffering with_,

he had not the vaguest conception: of its faint and poor

reflections, pity and mercy, he had but a dim idea.

He stuck as well as he could to what he thought was the right

path, and as to the feelings of others, he could not be blamed for

not considering them, for he had never practically realized that

they had any.

In the present circumstances he had a few, fine, adamantine rules

for conduct, which he was going to steadfastly apply, and he

thought no more of the girl's feelings under them than one thinks

of the inanimate parcel one is cording with what one knows is good,

stout string.

In his eyes it was distinctly dishonourable for a man to engage a

girl to himself without a reasonably near prospect of marriage.

It was also decidedly ungentlemanly to propose to a girl if she had

money and you had none. Moreover, it was extremely selfish to

remove a girl from a comfortable position to a poorer one, though

she might positively swear she preferred it; and lastly, it was

unwise for various reasons, to be too amiable to the girl, or to

give any but the dimmest clue to your own feelings.

There was no telling--your feelings might change even--when you

have to wait so long--and then it was much better, _for the girl_,

that she should not be tied to you.

To visit the girl frequently, to hang about her to the amusement of

onlookers, to keep alive her passion by look and hint and innuendo,

to excite her by advances when he was in the humour, and studiously

repulse her when she made any, to act almost as if he were her

_fiancé_, and curtly resent it if she ever assumed he was more than

an ordinary friend--this line of action he saw no fault in. The

above were his views, and they were excellent, and if the girl

didn't understand them she might do the other thing.

Some weeks passed, and the man and the girl saw each other

constantly--three or four times in the week, perhaps more; and the

inward irritation grew intense, while their outward relations

remained unchanged.

There was a certain brutality that crept into the man's tones

occasionally when he addressed her, a certain savage irritability

in manner, that told the girl's keen intelligence something; some

involuntary sighs of hers as she sat near him, and an increasing

look of exhaustion on her face, that told him something. But that

was all.

There were no tender passages between them; none of the

conventional English flirting--matters were too serious, and the

nature of each too violent to permit of that. A little bitter,

more or less hostile, conversation passed between them on the

most trifling subjects in his long afternoon calls. A little

music would be attempted--that is, he would sing song after song,

while she accompanied him, but a song was rarely completed.

Generally, before or at the middle, he would seize the music in a

gust of irrepressible and barely-veiled irritability, and fling

it on the piano--yet they attempted the music with unwavering

persistence, and both rose to go to the instrument with mutual

alacrity.

There they were close to each other--so close that the warmth and

breath of their beings were interchanged. There in the pursuit of a

fallen sheet of music, his head bent down and touched hers. Once,

apparently to regain the leaf, his hand and arm leaned hard upon

her lap. One second, perhaps, no more; but the girl's whole

strained system seemed breaking up at the touch--her control

shattered, like machinery violently reversed.

The music leaf was replaced, but her hands had fallen nerveless

from the keys.

"It is hot. I can't go on playing. Put the window open, will you,

for me?"

Stephen walked to the window, raised it, and smiled into the dark.

That night it seemed to Stephen he could never force himself to

leave the girl. He prolonged the playing past all reasonable

limits, until May's sister laughingly reminded him that they were

only staying in seaside lodgings, and other occupants of the house

must be considered. Stephen reluctantly relinquished the friendly

piano, and then stood, with May's sweet figure beside him, and her

upraised face clear to the side vision of his eye, talking to her

sister.

At last, when every trifle is exhausted of which he can make

conversation, there comes a pause, a silence; he can think of

nothing more. He nerves himself, holds out his hand, and says,

"Good-night!"

May, influenced equally by the same indomitable aversion to be

separated from him, follows him outside the drawing-room, and

another pause is made on the stair. By this time a fresh stock of

chaff and light wit is ready in Stephen's brain, and he makes use

of anything and everything to procure him another moment at her

side; but of all the passion within him, of the ardent, impetuous

impulse towards her, nothing, not the faintest trace, shows.

A mere "Good-night!" ends their conversation at length, and the

girl did not re-enter the drawing-room, but passed straight up the

stairs to her own room.

"Does he care? Does he care or not?" she asked herself, walking

ceaselessly backwards and forwards. "If I only knew that he did!

This is killing me; and suppose, after all, he does not care!"

She almost reels in her walk, and then stretches her arms out on

her mantelpiece, and leans her head heavily upon them.

"So this is being in love!" she thinks, with a faint satirical

smile. "All this anxiety and pain and feeling of illness! Why, it

is as if poison had been poured through me."

Through the next day May lay pallid and silent on the couch,

without pretence of occupation, feeling too exhausted even to

respond to her sister's chaff and raillery.

It was only at dinner, when her brother-in-law informed his wife he

was sick of the place, and that nothing would induce him to stay

more than another week, that a stain of scarlet colour appeared in

May's cheeks and a terrified dilation in her eyes.

Her lids were lowered directly, and the blood receded again. She

made no remark, but at the close of dinner she excused herself, and

went upstairs alone.

Once in her room, she stripped off her dinner-dress and shoes, and

re-dressed in morning things. Her hands trembled so violently that

she could hardly fasten her bodice over the wildly-expanding bosom.

But her resolve was fixed. They were going in a week. To-morrow,

she knew, Stephen was leaving the place for a fortnight. She must

see him to-night.

When she is completely dressed, she pauses for a moment to choke

down the terrible physical excitement that seems to rob her of

breath and muscular power.

Then she passes downstairs quietly and goes out.

The night is still, cold, and dark.

May walks rapidly through the few streets that divide his house and

hers.

The few men she meets turn involuntarily to glance after the

splendid form that goes by them, and in her decisive walk, in the

eyes blind to them, they feel instinctively she is already owned,

mentally or actually, by some one other.

When she reaches Stephen's house, she learns he is in, and with a

great fear of him suddenly rushing over her, she sends word up to

him by the servant: Will he see her?

While she waits in the hall, her message is taken upstairs. May

leans against the wall, a terrible sick faintness, born of

excitement and hysteria, coming suddenly upon her.

There is a hall-chair, but her eyes are too darkened to see it; she

simply clings to the handle of the door, and lets her head sink

against the side of the passage.

Brookes is upstairs with his brother and two friends; they have

been playing cards, but a game is just over, and the men have got

up to stretch themselves.

Stephen himself is leaning back against the mantelpiece, as his

habit is, and yawning slightly. He has just been beaten, and he is

a man who can't play a losing game.

"No," his brother remarks. "I didn't know what the deuce 'Ladas'

meant till I looked it up; did you, Steve?"

"Oh, I should think every schoolboy would know that," is the curt

response, and at that moment the servant's knock comes at the door.

"Please, sir, there's a lady as wants to see you," the girl says

with a perceptible grin. "She said she wouldn't come up, and she's

waiting in the hall, sir."

There is a blank silence in the room. Brookes pales suddenly, and

his eyebrows, that habitually have a supercilious elevation, rise

still higher with annoyance.

He hesitates a single second, then, without a word in reply, he

crosses the room towards the door, and the servant retreats

hastily.

The men glance furtively at each other, but Stephen's devil of a

temper being well known, they forbear to laugh or even smile till

he is well out of the room. Brookes goes down the stairs with one

sentence only in his mind: Coming to my rooms, and making a fool

of me!

He is annoyed, intensely annoyed, and that is his sole feeling.

May is standing upright now in the centre of the hall under the

swinging lamp, and she watches him run lightly down the long flight

of stairs towards her with swimming eyes.

What is there in that figure of his that has so much influence on

her senses? More, perhaps, even than his face, do the lines of his

neck and shoulders and their carriage please her. All the pleasure

she can ever realise in life seems contained for her in that slim,

well-made frame, in its blue serge suit.

She makes one impetuous step forward, her whole form dominated,

impelled by the surge of ardent feelings within her, and holds out

one trembling, burning hand. Stephen, with a confused sense of its

being awfully bad form that she should be standing in his hall,

takes it in his right hand, feeling hastily for the lucifers with

his left.

"Er--come into the dining-room, won't you?" he says, with the

familiar, supercilious accent that with him is the expression of

suppressed annoyance and slight embarrassment.

He knows the rooms are unlet, and with gratitude for this

providential circumstance in his thoughts, and his heart beating

violently with sudden excitement now he is actually in her

presence, he turns the handle of the door and sets it wide open.

He strikes a match and holds it up, leaning back against the door,

for her to pass in before him.

As she does so, their two figures for one second almost touch each

other, and a sudden glow lights up in his veins. He feels it, and

it warns him instantly to summon his self-control. That before

everything.

The next moment he follows her into the room, lights the gas,

returns to the door, closes it, and then comes back towards the rug

where she is standing.

By this time his command is his own. His face is as calm as a mask.

His large eyes, somewhat bloodshot now from hours of smoking and a

sleepless night, rest upon her with cold enquiry.

She has seen them once, met them once, fixed, liquid, with

passionate longing upon hers; desperately she seeks in them now for

one gleam of the same light, but there is none. They and his face

are cloaked in a cold reserve. Sick, and with her heart beating to

suffocation, she says, as he waits for her to explain her presence:

"We are--going away."

Stephen's heart seems to contract at the words he had so often

dreaded to hear, heard at last.

His thoughts take a greyer hopelessness.

"Oh, really!" he says merely, the shock he feels only slightly

intensifying his habitual drawl. "Not immediately, I hope?"

Nothing to the nervous, excited, over-strained girl before him

could be more galling, more humiliating, more crushing than the

cold, conventional politeness of his tones and words.

This frightful fence of Society manner that he will put between

them--a slight, delicate defence, is as effectual as if he caused a

precipice by magic to yawn between them.

"No--not--not--quite immediately, but soon," she falters. "And it

seems as if I could not exist if--I--never see you."

There is a strained pause while they stand facing each other. He

is motionless; one hand rests in his pocket, the other hangs

nerveless at his side.

They look at each other. Each is thinking of the supreme

delight--even if momentary--the other's embrace could give if--but

the conditions in the respective minds are different--in his: "If I

thought it wise;" in hers: "If he only would."

"Well, we can write to each other," he says at last.

"Oh, but what are letters?" the girl says passionately; and then,

urged on hard by her love for him, her intuition of his love for

her, and her common-sense instinct not to throw away her life's

happiness for a misunderstanding or petty feeling of pride, she

adds: "You know--don't you?--that I care for you more than anything

else in the world."

Her tones are sharp with the intensity of feeling, and she

stretches both hands imploringly a little way towards him.

He sees them quiver and her face whiten, and the frightened appeal

increase in her pained eyes searching his face, and it is a

marvel--later, he marvels at it himself--how, with his own passion

keen and alive in him, he maintains his ground. But there is

something in the whole scene that jars upon him--something

theatrical that makes the thought flash upon him: Is it a got-up

thing?

This puts him on the defensive directly; besides, he resents her

coming to him in this way, and endeavouring to surprise from him

words he has already explained to her he is unwilling to say.

She is trying to rush him, he puts it to himself; and the thought

rouses all his own obstinacy and self-will.

When he chooses he will speak, and not before.

"It is very good of you to say so," he answers quietly, in a cold

formal tone, and the girl quivers as if he had struck her.

Now, in his lonely, sleepless nights, the misery on the white face

comes back and back to him in the darkness of his room, but then he

is blind to it.

In an annoyed mood to begin with, irritated beyond bearing by his

own helpless, ignominious position, as he fancies, he has no

perception left for his own danger of losing her.

And the man, who had lived till five-and-twenty, desiring real

love, and not knowing it, deliberately trampled upon it without

recognising what he did.

His words cut the girl terribly.

It seems impossible for the second that she can force herself to

speak again to him, but the terrible, irrepressible longing within

her nerves her for one more effort.

"Is that all you can tell me? Do you not care for me at all?"

He looks at her and hesitates. So modest, so appealing, so timid,

and yet so passionate! Surely this is genuine love for him. Why

thrust it back? But the thought recurs. No. She is rushing him; and

he declines to be rushed. Also a sort of half-embarrassment comes

over him, a nervous instinct to put off, ward off a scene in which

he will be called upon to demonstrate feelings he may not satisfy.

He laughs slightly, and says:

"Of course I do! I like you very much!"

The tones are slighting and contemptuous, enough so to convey

the polite warning: Don't go any further, and force me to be

positively rude to you.

Swayed by his strong physical passion, and blinded by the dogged

determination he has to remain master of it, he is absolutely

insensible of another's suffering.

Had the girl had greater experience with men, more hardihood and

less modesty; if she could have approached him, and taken his hands

and pressed them to her bosom; if she had had the courage to force

upon him the mysterious influence of physical contact, Stephen's

control would have melted in the kindled fire.

Words stir the brain, and through the brain, the senses; but with

some people it's a long way round.

Touch stirs the nerves, and its flame runs through the body like a

flying pain.

Stephen's physical nerves were far more sensitive than his brain,

and had the girl been a woman of the half-world, or even of the

world, she could have succeeded. But she was a girl; and her

modesty and innocence, the chastity of all her mental and physical

being, hung like dead weights upon her in the encounter.

His words, his tones, his glance simply paralyze her--not

figuratively, but positively. Her physical power to move towards

him, to make a further appeal to him, is gone. Speech is dried upon

her lips, wiped from them as a handkerchief passed over them might

take their moisture.

She looks at him, dumb, frenzied with the intense longing to throw

herself actually at his feet, but yet held back by some

irresistible power she cannot comprehend, any more than one can

comprehend the stifling, overpowering force in a nightmare.

It is the simple result of her life, her breeding, her virtue, her

character, her habits of control and reserve. She is the

fashionable, well-brought-up girl, with all her sensitive instincts

in revolt against forcing herself upon a man indifferent to her,

and full of an overwhelming instinctive timidity that her desire is

wild to break down and cannot.

She stares at him, lost in a sense of bitter pain. All her vigorous

life seems wrung with pain, and in that torture, in which every

nerve seems bruised and quivering, a faint smile twists at last the

pale, trembling lips. "You would have made a good vivisector!" she

says. Then, before he has time to answer, she turns the handle of

the door behind her, opens it and goes out.

A second after the street door closes, and Stephen stands on the

dining-room mat, looking down the empty hall. Thoroughly disturbed

and excited, with all his own passion surging heavily through his

blood, and her last sentence--that he does not understand any more

than he understands his own cruelty--ringing in his ears, he

hesitates a minute, and then re-enters the dining-room, shuts to

the door, and walks savagely up and down.

"Extraordinary girl!" he mutters. "What does she want? What can I

do? She knows I can say nothing at present, when I'm going into the

work-house myself! But what a splendid creature she is! Lots of

'go' in her. Well, I don't care. I'll have her one day; but there's

no use making a lot of talk about it now."

May walked away from his doorstep, no longer a sane human being,

responsible for its actions. The whole physical, nervous system,

weakened by months of self-control, and night following night of

sleeplessness, was hopelessly dislocated now.

The whole weight of her excited passion, flung back upon the

sensitive brain, turned it from its balance. It had been a

brilliant brain, and that very excitability that had lent its

brilliance was fatal to it now.

The hopeless passion ran like a corroding poison through the

inflammable tissue.

She had put the matter to the test, and found that truth of which

the mere possibility had been torture. He had absolutely rejected

her. "He could not care for me," she kept repeating, as the silent

air round her seemed full of his cold, short laughs.

His passion for her was dead. It had existed, surely--those looks

of his, the sudden violence of his touch when there was any excuse

for the slightest contact with her--or had it all been some curious

dream?

She could not tell now, but whether it had been or not, it was no

longer. To her that seemed the only explanation of his words and

tones. To the tender female nature the depth of brutality in the

passion of the male--that is, in fact, the very sign of it--remains

always an enigma.

After the scene just passed, it seemed to the girl impossible,

ludicrous, to suppose that Stephen loved her.

She had already made great allowance for him. She had a large share

of the gift of her sex--intuition; and she had understood more than

many women would have done, but to-night he had gone beyond the

limits of her imagination.

"No man would be so intensely unkind to a woman he cared for," she

argued. "For nothing, when there is no need."

She was not an unreasonable, nor selfish, nor silly girl. Had

Stephen told her he loved her, but that they must suppress their

passion, that she must wait, she would have obeyed him, and waited

months, years, gone down to her grave waiting, in patient fidelity

to him. Her qualities of control were as fine as his, and her

devotion to a man who loved her would have been limitless, but,

acting according to his views, Stephen had taken some trouble to

convince her he was not the man, and she was convinced.

And being convinced, the vision of her life without him seemed just

then a dismal waste, impossible to face.

In most of the actions of the human being, the physical state of

the person at the time is the principal factor, and May's whole

physical frame, violently over-strained, craved for rest--rest that

the excited brain could not give. Rest was the urgent demand

pressed by the breaking nervous system, and from these two

thoughts--rest, oblivion--grew the dangerous thought of Death.

"Sleep and forget! but I can't," she thought, "and if I do, there

is the horrible awakening;" and again her fatigue suggested all the

past sleepless nights, and the craving of the body urged the brain

to find better means of satisfying it, in the same way as the

appetite for food forces the brain to devise methods for procuring

it.

She walked on in a straight line from Stephen's house, and the road

happened to pass a post-office. May stopped and looked absently

through its lighted, notice-covered panes.

"Send him a few lines," she thought; "because I am so stupid, I

could not tell him enough, and then--"

She did not finish the sentence, but all beyond was blank peace.

She went in, bought a letter-card, and wrote:--

"I could have loved you devotedly, intensely, had you wished

it, but you have made it clear to-night that you do not want

love--at any rate, not mine. I have discovered that I have

courage enough to die, but not to live without you. I am going

to the sea now, and in an hour we shall be separated for ever.

I shall know nothing and you will care nothing, so it seems a

good arrangement. My last thought will be of you, my last

desire for you, my last breath your name."

She fastened it with an untrembling hand, passed out of the office,

posted it, and went straight down a side street to the parade.

The night was still, bound in a frosty silence. The temperature

sank momentarily, and the icy grip intensified in the air.

Overhead the sky was black, and glittered coldly with the winter

stars. Beside and behind her and before her not a living

creature's footstep broke the silence. The sea lay smooth, black,

and motionless on her left, like some huge sleeping monster.

She walked on rapidly: a glorious, vigorous, living, youthful

figure, full of that tremendous activity of brain and pulse and

blood, so valuable when there is a use for it, so dangerous when

thrown back upon itself.

"How I could have loved him, worshipped him, lived for him, had he

but wanted me!" is the one instinctive cry of her whole nature.

At the first easy descent to the beach she turns from the parade,

and goes down, passing without hesitation from the light down to

the moist darkness of the beach. To get away into oblivion, to

escape from this maddening sense of pain, to lose it, let it go

from her like a garment in the black water, is her only impelling

instinct.

She sees the glimmer of the water before her without a shudder. How

much dearer and more inviting it seems to her tired eyes than her

bed at home, where so many, many sleepless, anguished nights have

been spent! Here--rest and sleep, with no awakening to a grey and

barren to-morrow. The thought of Death is lost. Desire for the

cessation of pain is keener at its height than even the desire for

life.

She stumbles on the wet, black beach at the water's edge, and then

finds where it is slipping like oil over the sand.

She walks forward, and the chill of the water rises round her

ankles, then her knees, then her waist, and then she throws herself

face forwards on it, as she once thought to fling herself on his

breast.

In a half-drunken satisfaction she stretches her arms out in it and

commences to swim towards the horizon. "Like his arms!" she thinks,

as the water encircles her. "Like his lips!" she thinks, as it

presses on her throat. "And as cold as his nature."

* * * * *

The following morning is calm and still--a perfect specimen of

wintry beauty. A light frost covers the ground and sparkles on the

trees.

There is a faint chill in the clear air, a tranquil calm on the

gently rising and falling sea and in the lucid sky.

The sunlight falling on Stephen's bed and across his sleeping face

shows a smile there, and his arm, lying on the coverlet--an arm

thinned by constant fever and night-sweats--rests, in his thoughts,

round her neck; that white neck so sweetly familiar in his dreams.

After a time he wakes and yawns, and turns his head heavily towards

the window; and farther as the happy unconsciousness of sleep

recedes from his face, and recollection and intelligence come back

to it, more clearly show the haggard lines, traced all over it, of

self-repression, seaming and marking it at five-and-twenty.

"Another day to be got through," he thinks merely, as Nature's most

precious gift--the light--pours glowing through the panes.

When half-an-hour later he opens his door to take in his boots, he

finds two letters with them, and at the sight of one his heart

beats hard.

The other is in the girl's handwriting, and he lays it on his

toilet-table, with the thought, "Asking me to go and see her, I

suppose," and turns to the other with a mad impatience.

This is evidently the official letter with reference to his

post--the post that means to him but this one thing: her

possession.

He bursts it open, and in less than two seconds his eye takes in

its news: he has the appointment.

The blood leaps over his face, and an exultant fire runs through

his frame and along his veins.

He replaces the letter quietly in its cover with but the slightest

tremor of his fingers.

Then he gets up from the bedside and stands in the middle of the

room, looking through the sparkling panes.

"I have her!" he is thinking. "Yes, by God! at last I have her!"

The day is glorified; life is transfigured.

Through his whole body mounts that boundless exhilaration of desire

on the point of satisfaction. Not momentary desire, easily and

recently awakened, but the long desire that has been goaded and

baited to fury through weeks and months of repression, and tempered

to a terrible acuteness in pain and suffering, like steel by flame.

And now triumph, and a delight beyond expression, bounds like an

electrified pulse throughout all his strong, vigorous frame.

The lines seem to fade from his face, the mouth relaxes, and then

he laughs, as he makes a step towards the window, flings it open,

and leans out into the keen air.

"At last I can speak out decently. No one could think I cared for

her money, or any of that rot now. How unexpected!--this morning!

Now I can tell her I'm free, independent! I am glad I waited--it

was much better. Far better, as I said, to be patient. Last night I

almost--and now I'm very glad I didn't."

He draws his head back, and turns to the glass to shave with a

light heart.

As he does so, he sees her letter again, and picks it up. "You

darling!" he thinks, "I'll make you understand all now."

Some miles westward of the pier, some fathoms deep, out of reach of

the quiet sunlight lying on the surface, tosses the girl's body,

senseless and pulseless, with all the million possibilities of

pleasure that filled those keen nerves and supple limbs gone out of

them for ever, and Stephen draws out her despairing letter of

eternal farewell, with a smile lighting up his handsome, pleasing

face.

"Yes, it was much better to wait," he murmurs, "I don't approve of

rushing things!"

III

CHAPTER I

It was morning on the Blue Nile. The turbulent blue river rolled

joyously between its banks, for it was high Nile, and a swift,

light breeze was blowing--the companion of the Dawn. The vault of

the sky seemed arched at a great height above the earth, springing

clearly, without any object to break the line from the horizon of

gold sand, and full of those white, filmy, light-filled gleaming

clouds that are one of the wonders and glories of Upper Egypt and

the Soudan. It was a morning and a scene to make a man's heart rise

high in his breast, and cry out, as his eyes turned from the

level-sanded desert floor, through sunlit space, to the vaulted

roof, "After all, the world is a good house to live in."

Slowly the strong yellow sunlight poured over the plain, the bank

and the river, gilding every ripple; and, as the light grew,

hundreds of delicate shapes--the forms of the ibis and flamingo

and crane, and other river-fowl--became visible, crowding down the

dark banks, with flapping of white and crimson wings, and

stretching of legs, and opening of beaks, rustling down, shaking

their feathers, to bathe and drink of the Blue River.

Wonderful light, and miraculous, gleaming, cloud-filled sky, and

wonderful birds preening their plumage and calling to each other,

and wonderful breeze-swept water, bluer than the bluest depths of

the Indian Ocean.

It was still so early that, in the whole stretch of rollicking,

tumbling, buoyant waters between bank and bank, only one piece of

river-craft could be seen. This pushed onward, cleaving through the

little billows in the teeth of the morning breeze. It was a tiny

naphtha launch--a horrid, fussy, smoking little thing, cutting

through breeze and water, and diffusing a scent of oil and greased

iron in the pure and radiant air. A white bird on the bank looked

at it, and rose with a startled note of alarm, and a flight of

lovely-salmon-coloured colleagues followed. The others merely

looked up and paused, with their wings wide stretched, and then

went on calmly with their toilets--they had seen it before.

In the launch, of which the whole centre was taken by the

naphtha-stove--the engine by courtesy--sat a young Englishman,

whose face had that frank, attractive look of one whose thoughts

are kindly, well disposed to all the world; and at stem and stern

stood, erect and silent, the white-clothed figure of a boy from

the Soudan. Lithe, graceful forms supported long necks and

straight-featured faces, black as if carved out of smooth ebony,

and contrasting strangely with the white turbans of stiff linen

twisted deftly into a high crest above the brows. Swiftly the

little boat ran on for a mile or two against wind, with its three

silent and motionless occupants; then one boy turned, and

pronounced solemnly the two words, "Mister, Omdurman!"

This was accompanied with a gracious wave of his hand towards the

bank, as he leant forward to stop the engine, and his companion

turned the boat to land.

Omdurman, as seen from the river level, looks like nothing but a

long streak of duller yellow on the real gold of the African sand.

Its tiny, square, flat-roofed mud-houses are not, with few

exceptions, higher than six feet, and there is nothing else save

them and their dreary, yellow-brown, muddy monotony in the whole

village: not a palm, not a flower, not one blade of grass, simply a

collection of low mud-houses, with trampled mud-paths between, and

here and there an open, brown, dusty square.

The stillness and heat of the day were settling down now: the first

wild, cool youth of the morning was past, and the Englishman felt

the heat of the desert rise from the ground and strike his face,

like the blow of a flail, as he stepped on land. He expected the

Soudanese boys to follow, as they generally did on similar

excursions--one to secure the boat and sit and wait beside it, and

the other to accompany himself, carry his tripod and camera, and

act as guide and general escort. To-day the boy stood in the boat,

and addressed him earnestly:

"Boat wanted by other misters: let us go back: take them. We make

much money; come again evening, take you home."

"But, you young ruffians, what am I to do out here alone? I don't

know the way, and I want you to carry my things," expostulated the

Englishman, vainly trying to adjust a pair of blue goggles over his

eyes, smarting already in the intolerable glare from the sand,

while striving not to let drop his camera, fiercely cuddled under

one arm, and its tripod of steel legs and an overcoat balanced on

the other.

The black remained for a moment impassive, statuesque, wrapped in

reflection. Then he brightened:

"Me know," he said, suddenly springing from the boat. "Me take you

my house. Sister show you the way: sister carry mister's things."

The Englishman stared for a moment into the eager, intelligent

face, strangely handsome, though in ebony. After all, do we not

think a well-carved table beautiful, although sometimes, even

because, it is in ebony? Then _he_ brightened:

"Very good; take me to your house, and let me see your sister," he

said good-humouredly; adding inwardly, "If she's anything like you,

she'll be the very thing for the camera."

They turned from the cool, rolling, billowy water inwards towards

the desert and the huts of Omdurman, and the heat rose up and

struck their cheeks each step they took.

* * * * *

Merla stood that morning at her hut doorway looking out--out

towards the river she could not see, for the banks rise and the

desert falls slightly behind them. She stood on the threshold, and

the sun beat on her Eastern face, and showed it was very good. She

was sixteen, and, like her brothers who ran the naphtha launch for

the English, she was straight and erect, tall and lithe and supple,

with a wonderful stateliness and majesty of carriage, though she

had never been taught deportment nor attended physical culture

classes. Merla was beautiful, with the perfect beauty of line that

belongs to her race, and possessed the straight, high forehead, the

broad, calm brow that tells of its intelligence and nobility. She

knew, however, nothing of her own beauty. She never cared for

staring into the little squares of glass that the girls of the

village would buy in the market-place, nor coveted the long strings

of blue glass beads that the Bishareens brought in such numbers to

sell in Omdurman; nor did it specially please her to lay the beads

against her neck, and see them slide up and down on her smooth skin

as she breathed, though her companions would thus sit for hours

cross-legged before their little mirrors, breathing deep to note

how their beads rose and fell and glistened in the light.

Merla loved much better to steal out of the hut at night, when the

oil-lamp smoked against the mud wall and the air was heavy, into

the pure calm darkness of the desert, and gaze up at the stars, and

listen to the far-off tom-toms beating fitfully against the

stillness. And if ever any little coins came into her possession,

it seemed unkind to spend them on glass or beads when there was

always milk and oil needed in the house. And if, when these were

bought, there was any coin left, then her real luxury was to buy

food for the poor thin camel that lay at night in the mud-yard

behind their hut, and to go and feed it secretly in the starlight.

And she would press her hands into the soft fur of its neck as it

leant towards her, feeling that delight that springs from being

kind and loving, and being loved. The law of her life was love, a

law springing naturally in her mind, as the beauty and health in

her body. Her father, her mother, her brothers were all loved by

her; and, beyond these, the unfortunate camels and the donkeys

whose sides bled where the girths cut them as the careless

Englishmen rode them in and out of the village to and from the

Mahdi's tomb, and the lean, barking curs in the mud street that

seldom barked as she passed by. All these she loved and sympathised

with, though she had not been taught sympathy any more than she had

been taught grace.

This morning she was radiant and happy as she looked through the

quivering, yellow light that danced above the sand towards the

river. Last night she had fed the camel and caressed it, and she

had listened, half awe-struck, to the tom-toms in the distance. The

music had seemed to come to her ears with a new sound. The breeze

had blown from the river with a new kiss to her face. She was

growing into a woman, and the sap of life was rising fast and

vigorous within her, lifting her up with the boundless joy of life.

And as she looked, two white spots, a crested turban and a solar

topee, appeared over the edge of the bank, moving towards her.

"My sister!" said the Soudanese boy, with a regal air, when they

stood at the mudhouse door. And some instinct, as he was young and

foolish, made the Englishman drag off both goggles and solar topee

for a moment, and so Merla looked up and saw him with the sun

bright on his light Saxon hair and friendly blue eyes.

"Merla," went on the boy rapidly to his sister in his own tongue,

"this English mister from Khartoum must have a guide to Kerreree. I

go back to the boat: other Englishman want me. You go to Kerreree,

Show everything; carry black box for him--carry everything. Salaam,

Stanhope Mister."

And, without waiting for either assent or dissent, he swiftly, yet

without any loss of dignity or show of hurry, departed. Merla's

large eyes were downcast. She was a free woman, and came and went

unveiled, nor was it impossible for her to talk to the white

people, for her parents were poor and humble, and glad to make

piastres in any way they could. One of her sisters was a

water-carrier at the hotel in Khartoum, and she might be engaged

there also when she was older. But still she held her eyes down,

for she felt embarrassed and oppressed, and, besides, the topee and

the goggles had been replaced, and they spoilt the vision she had

seen first of the English face.

"Well, Merla, if that's your name, will you come with me?" the

Englishman said lightly. He knew the tongue well that her brothers

spoke, not in any of its refinement and subtlety, but in the

ordinary distorted way an Englishman usually speaks a foreign

tongue.

"I will ask if I may," she returned simply, in a low voice, and

drew back into the dark hut behind her. After a moment she

reappeared. "My mother and my brother have ordered it," she said

calmly. "I am ready."

Struck by the philosophic, impassive accent of her voice, and not

feeling at all flattered, the young man added in rather a nettled

tone:

"But I hope it's not disagreeable to you. You are willing to come?"

Then Merla looked at him steadily from under her calm,

widely-arching brows: "I am willing." A calm pride enwrapped all

her countenance, and it seemed as if she said it somewhat as a

victim might say, "I am willing," on being led to the altar of

sacrifice. Yet her eyes were radiant, and seemed to smile on him.

The young Englishman was puzzled, as young England mostly is by the

East, and, seeing this, the girl added, "Certainly I am willing; it

is fated I should go with you. Give me the black box."

But it goes against the grain of an Englishman to let a woman carry

his baggage, though he hires her to do it, and he held his camera

back from her.

"Take these," he said; "they are lighter," and he gave the little

tripod to her, and so they started down the mud sun-baked street

that leads through Omdurman to the desert, and out towards the

battle-ground of Kerreree. There were few people stirring; the men

had already started to their work in the fields by the Nile, or on

the river itself, and the women kept within the close darkness of

the huts mixing and baking meal for the evening's food. Merla

walked on swiftly and silently like a shadow at Stanhope's side

through the mud village, and then on into the silent heat of the

desert beyond. Here the fury of the sun was intense. The river was

out of sight, lying low between its banks. To infinite distance on

every side of them stretched the plain, and the soil here was not

golden sand, but curiously black, like powdered coal or lava. Not a

living thing moved near them; only, far away towards the horizon,

now and then passed a string of camels of some Bedouins travelling.

They walked on in silence. Stanhope found the walking heavy, as his

heeled boots sank into the loose, black soil, and it was difficult

to keep up with the swift, easy steps of the bare black feet beside

him. His duck suit was damp, and the line of flesh exposed between

cuff and glove on his wrist was burnt to a livid red already in the

smiting heat. Suddenly Merla's eyes fell on this, and she stopped.

Over her head she wore a loose veil of coarse white muslin. As she

stopped, she unwound this from her hair, and tore two strips from

it. Stanhope stopped too, well pleased at the pause.

"You burn your English skin; the flesh will come off," she said

gravely, and before he quite realised it, she had passed one of the

muslin strips round and tied it on his wrist. Stanhope's instinct

was to protest at once, but there was something in the girl's

earnestness and the tender interest with which she put the muslin

on his hand that checked him. Also the pain, whenever his sharp

cuff touched the seared skin, was unpleasant, and made him really

appreciate the improvised protection.

"Your pretty veil, Merla, you've torn it up for me," he remarked

regretfully as they started again. Merla glanced at him suddenly;

she said nothing, but the pride and joy in her eyes startled the

man beside her. He could find no more words, and silence fell

on them again till Merla roused him from a reverie by saying

indifferently:

"Look! that white heap there--bones, dead men, dead horses. This

side, white bones too; many dead here--many bones."

Stanhope looked round. Everywhere, scattered in heaps, shone the

white bones. They had come to the edge of the battlefield. Before

them rose the little hill of Teb-el-Surgham, crowned by its cairn

of black stones and rocks, surrounded by whitened bones and skulls,

from the summit of which the English watched the defeat of the

Khalifa's force. Stanhope cast his eyes over the dreary, black,

blood-soaked plain, on which there was no blade of grass, no plant,

no flower--only black rock and white bones, that shimmered together

in the torrid heat.

"Horrible! Merla, war is horrible! Come and sit down; I'm dead

tired. Let's sit down here against this rock and rest."

Stanhope threw himself down by one of the rocks at the base of the

hill, and leant back against it. The girl took her place on the

sand opposite him, with her feet tucked under her. Not far from

them lay a skull, turned upwards to the glaring sky.

"Will you let me photograph you?" he asked after a minute's gazing

at the rich dark beauty of the youthful face, "or is it against

your customs?"

"It is against our customs," Merla answered, her hands closing hard

on the tripod beside her. What terror it would mean for her to

stand before that great black box, and have that evil black eye

glare upon her for long seconds! She had seen her countrywomen flee

shrieking to their huts, when the Englishmen approached with their

black boxes.

"But you will do it for me, won't you?" answered Stanhope

persuasively, having set his heart on the picture.

"Yes, I will do it for you; it is right, if you wish it," she

answered steadily.

Stanhope accepted at once such a convenient theory, and sprang up

to fix the tripod and the camera in order, and the girl sat still

on the sand watching him, cold with terror in the burning air.

"Now, pick up that skull and hold it out in your hand, so. Yes,

that's right. Now, stand a little further back. Yes, that's

perfect."

There was no difficulty in getting her to pose. The natural

attitudes of her race are all perfect poses. And Merla stood

erect, facing the camera, with the emblem of death in her hand.

"Thank you; I am very much obliged! That'll be a first-rate

picture," he said gratefully when he had finished, and Merla sat

down with a strange swimming feeling of joy rushing over her.

Stanhope was some time fussing with his camera, and putting it back

in its case out of the light. Then he wanted lunch, and drew forth

a sandwich-case and a wine-flask. The girl would only eat very

little, and would not taste the wine. Stanhope, who was very hungry

and thirsty, ate all his sandwiches and drank all the wine, and

began to feel very bright, refreshed, and exhilarated.

"Do you know you are very beautiful?" he remarked, as he stretched

himself comfortably in the shade of the rock and gazed at her,

seated sedately on the sand in front of him.

"Beautiful?" she repeated slowly, reflectively, "am I? The white

camel that lives down by the market square is beautiful, and so was

the Mahdi's tomb."

"Well, you are more beautiful even than the white camel or the

Mahdi's tomb," returned Stanhope, laughing. "And what do you think

of me?" he added curiously. "Where do I come in the list? somewhere

close after the white camel, I hope."

Then, as she gazed at him steadfastly, without replying at all, he

felt rather piqued, and took off his blue glasses and squared his

fine shoulders against the rock.

"Oh, you!" said the girl softly at last, "You are like nothing on

earth, lord! You are like the sun when he first comes over the

plain, or the moon at night, when it floats, white and shining,

through the blue spaces!"

She sat sedately still, but her breast heaved under the straight,

white tunic: her eyes were full of soft fire: her voice was low,

and quivered with enthusiasm. Stanhope flushed scarlet. Confused

and startled, he stared into her eyes, and so they sat, silent,

gazing at each other.

* * * * *

That same afternoon there was a big fair or bazaar in the trampled

mud square in the centre of the Soudanese village that lies higher

up the river at the back of Khartoum. The place was gay with colour

and crowded with moving figures. From long distances, from far-off

villages down and up the river, the natives had come in, either to

sell or to buy along the wide, dusty road that went out from either

side of the square, leading each way north and south. The mud-huts

stood all round the square, backed by some date-palms, for Khartoum

and the village behind it are more favoured with shade than

sun-baked Omdurman. And in the centre of the square stood or sat

the natives, buying and selling, chaffering and gesticulating. Some

were Bishareens, with straight forms and features, and black bodies

almost covered with long strings and chains of beads. They stood

about gracefully to be admired, with their wooly hair fluffed out

at right angles to their head, for the occasion. Some were

corn-merchants, sitting leisurely before a heap of golden grain

piled up loosely on the ground. Others stood by patiently with

their fowls or goats or camels, feeding them with green fodder; and

others had vivid scarlet rugs and carpets of native make spread out

on the uneven ground. And all day long the noise of the merchants,

and the cry of the fowls, and the groan of the camels, and the

dust of the square, and the smoke of the cooking fires went up from

the bazaar.

In one corner of it, on a square of blue carpet, spread beneath his

camel's nose, sat a merchant who had been observed to come early to

the fair. He appeared to be a man of some substance, for he was

clothed, and the camel kneeling beside him was fat and sleek, and

would easily make two of the thin camels of Khartoum. Opposite him,

sitting on his heels and holding out two lean hands to tend the

small fire that smoked between them, was another, obviously poorer,

from his smaller amount of dress and flesh.

"It is true: your Merla is the pearl of the desert. I have heard it

from my mother," observed the merchant reflectively. "Still, think,

my brother, a good riding camel that can be hired out to the

Englishmen every day for thirty piastres the day; in a short time

you will feed on goat's flesh, and wear boots, with all that

money."

The black eyes of the listener sparkled, but he objected shrewdly

enough.

"My daughter eats not as much as a camel, and the English want not

a camel every day."

The stranger, fat and comfortable-looking, with a certain amount of

opulent Oriental good looks, waved his hand with a lordly gesture.

"Let it not be said that Balloon is an oppressor of the poor. Give

me the pearl, and this knife shall go with the camel, also this

piece of blue carpet--a noble offer, my brother; where will you

find such another?"

He drew from his crimson sash a longish knife, keen-bladed, with

trueblue, Eastern steel, and having a good bone-handle, on which

the fingers clasped easily. The other took the knife and gazed at

it intently.

"'Tis but a poor thing," he said at last, indifferently thrusting

it into the cloths twisted round his waist. "Yet the camel and the

carpet may suit me, and, as you say, you need not the girl at

present, I will agree, as I am a poor man, and the poor are ever

under the heel of the rich. The girl shall be sent to your house on

your return."

"I go now northwards, and shall return by the full moon; disappoint

me not, Krino or it shall be evil for you."

"I disappoint no man," replied Krino calmly, taking over from the

other the string of the camel, and the fine beast turned its dark,

soft head, and looked with liquid eyes on its new owner.

The sky began to show an orange and crimson glow behind the palms,

and many cooking-fires now gleamed like spots of blood upon the

sand, and the figures still came and went, and talked and bartered,

for the goods were not nearly all sold, and the heaps of fine corn

were still high in many places, and the fair would go on to-morrow

and the next day. But Krino got up and took his way homeward,

exulting over his bargain, and leading the camel.

At the same hour, lower down the Nile, at Omdurman, the river lay

calm now, without a ripple, and bathed in gold; a stream of liquid

gold it seemed, asleep between its deep-green banks, and only now

and then did a white-sailed felucca glide by in the golden evening

light.

Two figures came down from the desert to the Nile out of the flat,

heated air of the plain to the divine freshness by the water.

Here, in the cool, golden light, they paused slow and reluctant to

part.

"Good-night, Merla! Are you unhappy that I must go?"

The girl raised her face, and looked at him with steadfast eyes.

"The sun gilds the black rock, but the rock cannot expect the sun

to stay. I am quite happy. Good-night!"

Another moment and the little launch had sprung out from the deep

shadowed bank on to the golden surface, and was steaming, amidst

the gold and rosy ripples, back to Khartoum.

When Merla reached the little enclosure of stamped clay round her

hut, she saw a new camel feeding there, and cried out for joy. She

ran to it and clasped her hands about its velvet neck, and called

to her father, as he sat smoking at the doorway, a dozen questions.

Where had it come from? Whose was it? But the old man only chuckled

and laughed, and would not answer.

"No, no," he thought, watching her with pride, as she played round

the camel, "let the maiden wait to know the joy in store for her

till the full moon; she is but a child."

Stanhope went that night to a dance at the palace at Khartoum, but

he was late in arriving, and seemed very dull and absent-minded

when he came, and flattered the women less than usual. "He used to

be such a nice boy when he first came here," they complained

amongst themselves, "but he was quite horrid to-night--he must be

in love," and they all laughed, for every one knew there was no one

in Khartoum to fall in love with except themselves, and he had not

led any one of them to suppose she was the favoured one.

CHAPTER II

The night was calm, and in the purple, star-filled sky the moon was

rising. It was at the full. The naphtha launch was on the river,

but it moved silently; current was with it, and the light airs

favourable, so there was no need of the engine; one single sail

carried the boat easily over the buoyant water. The stars and the

rising moon gleamed in the smooth, black ripples. Stanhope sat in

the boat thinking, wrapped in a cruel reverie.

He felt he had sailed the craft of his life too near the perilous

shore of unconventionality, and now he saw the rocks ahead of him

plainly, on which it would be torn in pieces. Yet how to turn back,

or move the helm to steer away from them?

"A month ago," he thought, as his eye caught the reflection of the

rising moon in the water, "when that moon was young, I was free.

Not a soul cared for me, whether I lived or died, and I cared for

no one." Now there was one, he knew, who lived upon his coming,

whose feet ran to meet him, whose eyes strained their vision to see

his first approach. And he, too; he was no longer free. His heart

went out to that other heart, beating for him alone so truly, so

faithfully, full of such unquestioning adoration and obedience, in

mud-walled sun-parched Omdurman.

When the launch touched the bank, he sprang out and walked swiftly

up to their usual meeting-place: the deserted mud enclosure of a

deserted hut--an unlovely meeting-place enough--but filled with the

sweet air of the desert night and the royal light of the stars.

"My lord looks weary to-night," said Merla softly, after they had

greeted each other, and had sat down side by side with their backs

to the low wall.