ALL ALONG THE RIVER (continued 2)

Isola rose to take leave, after having let her tea get cold, and dropped half her cake on the Persian rug. She felt shyer in that house than in any other. She had a feeling that there she was weighed in the balance and found wanting; that unfriendly eyes were scrutinizing her gloves and hat, and appraising her features and complexion. She felt herself insignificant, colourless, insipid beside that brilliant Miss Crowther, with her vivid beauty, and her self-assured airs and graces.

Tabitha urged her to be of good heart when she hinted at these feelings.

“Why, Lord have mercy upon us, ma’am, however grand they may all look, it’s nothing but wool—only wool; and I heard there used to be a good deal of devil’s dust mixed with it, after this Mr. Crowther came into the business.”

The dusk was thickening as she went along the short avenue which led to the gates. Mr. Crowther, having built his house in a wood, had been able to cut himself out a carriage drive, which gave him an avenue of more than two centuries’ growth, and thus imparted an air of spurious antiquity to his demesne. He felt, as he looked at the massive boles of those old Spanish chestnuts, as if he had belonged to the soil since the Commonwealth.

Even the lodge was an important building, Tudor on one side, and monastic on the other; with that agreeable hodge-podge of styles which the modern architect loveth. It was a better house than the curate lived in, as he often told Miss Crowther.

Isola quickened her pace outside that solemn gateway, and seemed to breathe more freely. She hurried even faster at the sound of a footstep behind her, though there was no need for nervous apprehensions at that early hour in the November evening on the high road between Fowey and Trelasco. Did she know that firm, quick footfall; or was it an instinctive avoidance of an unknown danger which made her hurry on till her heart began to beat stormily, and her breath came in short gasps?

“My dear Mrs. Disney, do you usually walk as if for a wager?” asked a voice behind her. “I can generally get over the ground pretty fast, but it was as much as I could do to overtake you without running.”

He was not breathless, however. His tones were firm and tranquil. It was she who could scarcely speak.

“I’m afraid I am very late,” she answered nervously.

“For what? For afternoon tea by your own fireside? Have you anybody waiting for you at the Angler’s Nest, that you should be in such a hurry to get home?”

“No, there is no one waiting, except Tabitha. I expect no one.”

“Then why walk yourself into a fever?”

“Tabitha gets fidgety if I am out after dusk.”

“Then let Tabitha fidget! It will be good for her liver. Those adipose people require small worries to keep them in health. You mustn’t over-pace yourself to oblige Tabitha.”

She had slackened her steps, and he was walking by her side, looking down at her from that superb altitude which gave him an unfair advantage. How could she, upon her lower level, escape those searching glances?

She knew that her way home was his way home, so far as the bend of the road which led away from the river; and to avoid him for the intervening distance would have been difficult. She must submit to his company on the road, or make a greater effort than it was in her nature to make.

“You mean to go to this ball, don’t you?” he asked earnestly.

“I think not.”

“Oh, but pray do! Why should you shut yourself from all the pleasures of this world, and live like a nun, always? You might surely make just one exception for such a grand event as the Hunt Ball. You have no idea how much we all think of it hereabouts. Remember, it will be the first public dance we have had at Lostwithiel for ever so many years. You will see family diamonds enough to make you fancy you are at St. James’s. Do you think Major Disney would dislike your having just one evening’s dissipation?”

“Oh no, he would not mind! He is only too kind and indulgent. He would have liked me to spend the winter with my sister in Hans Place, where there would have been gaieties of all kinds; but I don’t want to go into society while Martin is away. It would not make me happy.”

“But if it made some one else happy—if it made other people happy to see you there?”

“Oh, but it would not matter to anybody! I am a stranger in the land. People are only kind to me for my husband’s sake.”

“Your modesty becomes you as the dew becomes a rose. I won’t gainsay you—only be sure you will be missed if you don’t go to the ball. And if you do go—well, it will be an opportunity of making nice friends. It will be your début in county society.”

“Without my husband? Please don’t say any more about it, Lord Lostwithiel. I had much rather stay at home.”

He changed the conversation instantly, asking her what she thought of Glenaveril.

“I think the situation most lovely.”

“Yes, there we are all agreed. Mr. Crowther had the good taste to find a charming site, and the bad taste to erect an architectural monstrosity, a chimera in red brick. There was a grange once in the heart of that wood, and the Crowthers have the advantage of acorns and chestnuts that sowed themselves while the sleepy old monks were telling their beads. How do you like Miss Crowther?”

“I hardly know her well enough to like or dislike her. She is very handsome.”

“So was Rubens’ wife, Helena Forman; but what would one do in a world peopled with Helena Formans? There are galleries in Antwerp which no man should enter without smoke-coloured spectacles, if he would avoid being blinded by a blaze of red-haired beauty. I am told that the Miss Crowthers will have, at least, a million of money between them in days to come, and that they are destined to make great matches. Perhaps we shall see some of their soupirants at the ball. Since the decay of the landed interest, the chasse aux dots has become fiercer than of old.”

This seemed to come strangely from him who had already been talked of as a possible candidate for one of the Miss Crowthers. It would be such a particularly suitable match, Mrs. Baynham, the doctor’s wife, had told Isola. What could his lordship look for beyond a fine fortune and a handsome wife?

“They would make such a splendid pair,” said Mrs. Baynham, talking of them as if they were carriage-horses.

Mrs. Disney and her companion crossed a narrow meadow, from the high road to the river-path which was the nearest way to the Angler’s Nest. The river went rippling by under the gathering grey of the November evening. On their right hand there was the gloom of dark woods: and from the meadow on their left rose a thick white mist, like a sea that threatened to swallow them up in its phantasmal tide. The sound of distant oars, dipping with rhythmical measure, was the only sound except their own voices.

Did that three-quarters of a mile seem longer or shorter than usual? Isola hardly knew; but when she saw the lights shining in Tabitha’s kitchen, and the fire-glow in the drawing-room, she was glad with the gladness of one who escapes from some fancied danger of ghosts or goblins.

Lostwithiel detained her at the gate.

“Good night,” he said; “good night. You will change your mind, won’t you, Mrs. Disney? It is not in one so gentle as you to be inflexible about such a trifle. Say that you will honour our ball.”

She drew herself up a little, as if in protest against his pertinacity.

“I really cannot understand why you should care whether I go or stay away,” she said coldly.

“Oh, but I do care! It is childish, perhaps, on my part, but I do care; I care tremendously; more than I have cared about anything for a long time. It is so small a thing on your part—it means so much for me! Say you will be there.”

“Is that you, ma’am?” asked Tabitha’s pleasant voice, while Tabitha’s substantial soles made themselves audible upon the gravel path. “I was beginning to get fidgety about you.”

“Good night,” said Isola, shortly, as she passed through the gate.

It shut with a sharp little click of the latch, and she vanished among the laurels and arbutus. He heard her voice and Tabitha’s as they walked towards the house in friendly conversation, mistress and maid.

There was a great over-blown Dijon rose nodding its heavy head over the fence. Roses linger so late in that soft western air. Lostwithiel plucked the flower, and pulled off its petals one by one as he walked towards the village street.

“Will she go—will she stay—go—stay—go—stay?” he muttered, as the petals fluttered to the ground.

“Go! Yes, of course she will go,” he said to himself as the last leaf fell. “Does it need ghost from the grave or rose from the garden to tell me that?”

CHAPTER IV.

“DREAMING, SHE KNEW IT WAS A DREAM.”

Isola and Lostwithiel met a good many times after that walk through the autumn mists. She tried her utmost to avoid him. She went for fewer walks than of old; nay, she chiefly confined her perambulations to those domestic errands which Tabitha imposed upon her, and such afternoon visits as she felt it incumbent upon her to pay, in strict return for visits paid to her. Major Disney had begged her to be exact in such small ceremonies, and to keep upon the best possible terms with his friends. “I love every soul in the place, for old sake’s sake,” he told her; and for old sake’s sake Isola had to cultivate the people her husband had known all his life.

She tried to avoid Lostwithiel, but Fate was against her, and they met. He was unvaryingly courteous. He said no word which could offend the most sensitive of women. Prudery itself could have had no ground for alarm. He did not again allude to the ball, or his wishes upon that point. He talked of those common topics of interest to which every day and every season give rise, even in a Cornish village; and yet in this common talk acquaintance ripened until it became friendship unawares. And then—as all sense of shyness and reserve upon Isola’s part gave way to a vague, reposeful feeling, like drifting down a sunlit river, with never a breath of chilling wind—they began to exchange confidences about their past lives. Unawares Martin Disney’s wife found herself entering into the minutest details about the people she had met on that level road of a monotonous girlhood by which she had come to be what she was. Unawares she betrayed all her feelings and opinions, her likes and dislikes, and even the little weaknesses and eccentricities of her parents—her sister—her wealthy brother-in-law. Never before had she found so good a listener. Her husband had been all affectionate interest in the things that concerned her; yet she had often discovered that his mind was wandering in the midst of some girlish reminiscence; and he had a tiresome trick of forgetting all those particulars about her friends which would have enabled him to distinguish the personages of a story. He had to be told everything afresh at each recurrence of those names that were so familiar to her. Nor had he Lostwithiel’s keen sense of humour, and quick perception of the ridiculous side of life, whereby many a small social sketch fell flat.

The glimpses she caught of her new friend’s past existence enthralled her. It was to see new vistas opening into unknown worlds; the world of university life; the world of society, English and continental, with all its varieties of jargon; the world of politics, and literature, and art. It charmed him to see her interest in all those unknown things and people.

“You would very soon be tired of it, and would come back to Trelasco—like the hare to her form—or like me,” he said, smiling at her ardent look. “Believe me, it is all dust and ashes. My happiest hours have been on board a yacht, with only half a dozen good books, and ten or a dozen ignoramuses in blue serge for my companions.”

She was to go to the Hunt Ball after all; not because he wished it, but because other people had taken her affairs in hand, and decided that she should go. Dr. and Mrs. Baynham had decided for her. Mrs. Vansittart Crowther had decided for her, and had sent her a ticket with her love by that very footman whose appearance when he opened the door always crushed her, and who had given her a frightful shock when she danced into the kitchen to speak to Tabitha, and found him meekly sitting on a Windsor chair, with his knees drawn up nearly to his chin. Lastly, Tabitha had decided; and Tabitha’s opinion went for more than that of anybody else.

“You want a little bit of change and gaiety,” said the faithful stewardess. “You have been looking pale and worried ever since you had that bad news from Broomer,” this was Tabitha’s nearest approach to Burmah, “and you’ll be all the better for an evening’s pleasure. It isn’t as if you had to buy a dress, or even a pair of gloves. You’ve only worn your wedding-dress at three parties since you came home from your honeymoon, and it’s as fresh as if you’d been married yesterday. You’ve got everything, and everything of the best. Why shouldn’t you go?”

Isola could advance no reason, except her vague fear that her husband might not approve of her appearing at a public ball without him; but at this objection honest Tabitha snapped her fingers.

“I’ll answer for Mr. Martin,” she said. “He’ll be pleased for you to enjoy yourself. ‘Don’t let her mope while I’m away, Tabby,’ he said to me the day before he started for foreign parts. He’d like you to be at the ball. You’ll have Mrs. Baynham to take care of you, and what can you want more than that, I should like to know?”

Mrs. Baynham, the portly doctor’s wife, was, in Tabitha’s mind, the representative of all the respectabilities. How could a girl just out of her teens—a girl who loved dancing, and had been told she danced exquisitely—turn a deaf ear to such arguments, put forward by the person to whose care her husband had in some wise confided her. If Tabitha approved, Isola thought she could not do wrong in yielding; so the simply-fashioned white satin gown—made in Paris, and with all Parisian chic—was taken out of the pot-pourri perfumed drawer. Gloves and fan, and little white slippers were passed in review. There was nothing wanted. The carefullest housewife need not have hesitated on the score of economy.

So the question was finally settled—she was to go to the Hunt Ball. A fly was engaged for her especial service, so that she might not crowd Mrs. Baynham, who was to take two fresh, fat-cheeked nieces, who looked as if they had been fed from infancy upwards upon apple pasties and clotted cream. She was to drive to Lostwithiel in the fly from the Maypole Inn, and she was to join Mrs. Baynham in the cloak-room, and make her entrance under that lady’s wing.

This final decision was arrived at about ten days before the event, and for nine of those intervening days Isola’s life went by as if she were always sitting in that imaginary boat drifting down a sunlit river; but on the day of the dance, after just half an hour’s quiet walk with Lostwithiel on the towpath, she went back to the cottage pale as ashes; and sat down at her little davenport in the drawing-room, trembling, breathless, and on the verge of hysteria.

She opened the drawers of the davenport one after another, looking for something—helplessly, confusedly, as one whose brain is half distraught. It was ten minutes before she found what she wanted—a sheaf of telegram forms.

“To Major Disney, Cornwall Fusiliers, Rangoon.—Let me go to you at once. I am miserable. My heart will break if you leave me here.”

This was the gist of a message which she wrote half a dozen times, in different words, upon half a dozen forms. Then she tore up all but the last, threw that into a drawer, and began to pace the room feverishly, with her hands clasped before her face.

What fever-fraught vision was it that those hands tried to shut out from her burning eyes? So little had happened—so little—only half an hour’s quiet walk along the towpath, where the leafless willows had a grim, uncanny look, like those trees whose old grey branches seemed the arms of the Erlking’s daughters, beckoning the child as he nestled in his father’s arms, riding through the night. So little—so little—and yet it meant the lifting of a veil—the passage from happy innocence to the full consciousness of an unholy love. It meant what one kiss on trembling lips meant for Paolo and Francesca. It meant the plunge into a gulf of dark despair—unless she had strength to draw back, seeing the abyss at her feet, warned of her danger.

What had he said? Only a few agitated words—only a revelation. He loved her, loved her with all the passion of his passionate soul; loved her as he had never loved before. They all tell the same story, these destroyers of innocence; and, for that one burning moment, they all mean what they say. Every seducer has his hour of sublime truthfulness; of generous feeling; of ardent heroic aspirations; the hour in which he would perish for the woman he loves; cut off his right hand; burn out his eyes; leap off a monument; do anything except surrender her, except forego his privilege to destroy her.

It was not too late. The warning had come in time—just in time to save her. She knew now to what ocean that drifting boat was carrying her—through the sunny atmosphere, between the flowery shores of dreamland. It was taking her to the arctic ocean of shame and ruin—the great sea strewn with the corpses of women who had sinned, and suffered, and repented, and died—unforgiven of mankind—to wait the tribunal of God.

“Oh, lor!” cried Tabitha, bursting into the room. “I thought you were never coming home. You ought to go and lay down for two or three hours after your tea, or we shall have you fainting away before the night’s over. You’ve not been eating enough for a healthy canary bird for the last week.”

“I’m not very well, Tabbie. I don’t think I’ll go to the ball.”

“Not go! and when the fly’s ordered—and will have to be paid for whether or no; for Masters told me he could have let it twelve deep. Not go! and disappoint Mrs. Baynham, who has set her heart on taking you; and Mrs. Crowther, who gave you the ticket! Why, it would never do! You’ll feel well enough when you’re there. You won’t know whether you’re standing on your head or your heels. It’s past five o’clock, and your tea has been ready in the study since a quarter to.”

“How do you send telegrams to India, Tabitha?”

“Lor, ma’am, how should I know? From the post-office, I suppose, pretty much like other telegrams. But they cost no end of money, I’ll be bound. You’re not wanting to send a telegram to the major, are you, ma’am, to ask his leave about the ball?”

“No; I was only wondering,” Isola answered feebly.

She shut and locked the davenport, leaving her message in the drawer. She meant to send it—if not to-day, to-morrow; if not before the ball, after the ball. She felt that her only hope of peace and safety and a clear conscience was at her husband’s side. She must go out to him yonder in the unknown land. She must get to him somehow, with or without his leave—with or without his help. She would brave anything, hazard anything to be with that faithful friend and defender—her first love—her brave, self-denying, God-fearing lover. She felt as if there were no other safety or shelter for her in all the world.

“God will not help me unless I help myself,” she muttered distractedly, as she sat in her low chair by the fire, with her head flung back upon the cushions and the untouched meal at her side. Tabitha had left off providing dinner for her, at her particular request. She had neither heart to sit down alone to a formal dinner nor appetite to eat it; so Tabitha had exercised all her skill as a cook, which was great, in preparing a dainty little supper at nine o’clock; and it had irked her that her mistress did such scant justice to the tempting meal.

Isola fell asleep by the fire, comforted by the warmth, worn out by nights that had been made sleepless by vague agitation—by the living over again of accidental meetings, and friendly conversations—not by fear or remorse—for it was only this day that the danger of that growing friendship had been revealed to her. It was only to-day that she knew what such friendships mean. She slept a feverish sleep, from sheer exhaustion, and dreamt fever-dreams.

Those willows on the bank had recalled Goethe’s “Erl König”—the ballad she had learnt by rote in her earliest German studies—and the willows and the ballad were interwoven with her dreams. It was Martin Disney who was riding his charger along a dark road, and she was sitting in front of his saddle, clinging to him, hiding her face upon his breast, and the willows were beckoning—she knew those gaunt arms were beckoning to her, although her eyes were hidden—and he was following. He was thundering behind them, on a black horse. Yes, and then the dream changed—the dreamer’s wandering thoughts directed by another reminiscence of those girlish studies in German poetry. She was Lenore, and she was in the arms of her dead lover. She felt that bony arm—Death’s arm—clutching her round the waist. Her streaming hair mingled with the streaming mane of that unearthly horse. She was with Lostwithiel—in his arms—and they were both dead and both happy—happy in being together. What did they want more than that?

“Vollbracht, vollbracht ist unser Lauf! Das Hochzeitbette, thut sich auf! Die Todten reiten schnelle! Wir sind, wir sind, zur Stelle.”

She woke with the chill of the charnel-house freezing her blood. The fire had gone out. Tim had curled himself at her feet in the folds of her gown. The Persian was staring discontentedly at the ashes in the grate, and Tabitha’s sturdy footsteps might be heard in the room above, bustling to and fro, and anon poking the fire, and putting on coals, making all snug and ready for her mistress’s toilet.

Isola rang, and Susan, the parlour-maid, brought in the lamp.

“I came twice before, ma’am; but you were fast asleep, so I took the lamp back to the pantry.”

Isola looked at the clock. Ten minutes to nine, and she was to meet Mrs. Baynham in the cloak-room at half-past ten. Ten o’clock was the hour on the card, and the fat-faced nieces were feverishly afraid that all the eligible partners would be snapped up by those wise virgins who appeared earliest on the scene.

“You won’t keep us waiting in the cloak-room, will you, dear Mrs. Disney?” they pleaded coaxingly.

Was she to put on her finery and go! There would be time yet to send a note to Mrs. Baynham, excusing herself on the score of illness. The doctor’s party would not start before half-past nine. What was she to do? Oh, she wanted to see him once more—just once more—in the brightly-lighted rooms, amidst a crowd—in a place where he would have no chance of repeating those wicked, wicked words—of forgetting all that was due to his own honour and to hers. In the crowded ball-room there would be safety—safety even from evil thoughts. Who could think of anything amidst the sound of dance music, the dazzle of lamps and flashing of jewels?

She wanted to go to the ball, to wear her satin gown, to steep herself in light and music; and thus to escape from the dim horrors of that awful dream.

Tabitha seemed like a good angel, when she came in at this juncture with a fresh cup of tea and a plate of dainty little chicken sandwiches.

“Come now, ma’am, I shan’t let you go to the ball if you don’t take these. What, not a bit of fire—and you asleep here in the cold? What was that addle-pated Susan thinking about, I wonder? I’ll take the tray upstairs. There’s a lovely fire in your room, and everything ready for you to dress. I want to be able to tell Mr. Martin that his young wife was the belle of the ball.”

Isola allowed herself to be led upstairs to the bright, cheerful bedroom, with its pretty chintz-pattern paper, and photographs, and artistic muslin curtains, and glowing fire, and toilet-table, with its glitter of crystal and silver in the pleasant candlelight. She suffered herself to be fed and dressed by Tabitha’s skilful hands, almost as if she had been a child; and she came out of her dismal dream into the glad waking world, a radiant figure, with violet eyes and alabaster complexion, flushed by the loveliest hectic. The simply-made, close-fitting bodice, with folded crape veiling the delicate bust, and the pure pearly tint of the satin, set off her fragile beauty, while the long train and massive folds of the rich fabric gave statuesque grace to her tall, slim figure; but the crowning glory of her toilette was the garland of white chrysanthemums, for which Tabitha had ransacked all the neighbouring green-houses; a garland of fluffy, feathery petals, which reached in a diagonal line from her shoulder to the hem of her gown. It was her only ornament, for by some strange caprice she refused to wear the modest pearl necklace and diamond cross which had been her husband’s wedding gift.

“Not to-night, Tabbie,” she said; and Tabitha saw in this refusal only the coquetry of a lovely woman, who wanted to show the great ladies and squire’s wives how poor and common diamonds are by the side of youth and beauty.

“Well, you don’t want any jewels, certainly,” said Tabitha. “You look as if you were going to be married—all but the veil. Those chrysanthemums are ever so much prettier than orange blossoms. There’s the fly. Let me put on your cloak. It’s a beautiful night, and almost as mild as May. Everybody will be at the ball. There’s nothing to keep folks away. Well, I do wish the major was here to go with you. Wouldn’t he be proud?”

The stars were shining when Isola went along the gravel path to the gate where Masters’ fly was waiting, with blazing lamps, which seemed to put those luminous worlds yonder to shame. There was no carriage-drive to the hall door of the Angler’s Nest. The house retained all its ancient simplicity, and ignored the necessities of carriage people. Tabitha wrapped her mistress’s fur-lined cloak close round her, before she stepped into the fly, which was provided with those elaborate steps that seem peculiar to the hired brougham.

“Good night, Tabitha, and thank you for all the pains you’ve taken in dressing me—and for the lovely wreath. I shall come home early. I shan’t wait for Mrs. Baynham’s party.”

“Don’t you hurry,” said Tabitha, heartily. “The Hunt Ball only comes once a year, and you’d better make the most of it. I shan’t mind sitting up; and perhaps I shan’t be half so dull as you think for.”

The flyman shut the door, which nobody but himself could shut—another peculiarity of hired broughams. The fly vanished in the darkness, and Tabitha ran back to the house, where she found Susan waiting at the hall door in her jacket and hat, as near a reproduction of Mrs. Disney’s jacket and hat as local circumstances—or the difference between Bond Street and Lostwithiel—would allow.

“Have you locked and bolted the back doors?” asked Tabitha; “but, lor, I’ll go and look myself; I won’t trust to your giddy young brains. Mr. Tinkerly will be here with the cart directly. I’ve only got to put on my bonnet and dolman, after I’ve taken a look round, and put away Mrs. Disney’s jewel-box.”

Tabitha was no light-minded housekeeper, but she had her hours of frivolity, and she loved pleasure with the innocent freshness of a most transparent soul. Tinkerly, the butcher, had offered to drive the two ladies—Tabitha and Susan—into Lostwithiel in his tax cart, and, furthermore, to place them where they would see something of the ball, or at least of the company arriving and departing, and beyond all this to give them a snack of supper, “Just something to bite at and a glass of beer,” he told Tabitha deprecatingly, lest he should raise hopes beyond his power of realization.

He meant to do the thing as handsomely as circumstances would permit, certainly to the extent of cold boiled beef and pickles, with Guinness or Bass. He was a family man, of irreproachable respectability, and his meat was supposed to be unmatchable for thirty miles round. He grew it himself, upon those picturesque pastures which sloped skyward, dipping towards the blue of the river, rising towards the blue of the sky.

No precaution of lock, bolt, or bar did Tabitha neglect before she put on her best bonnet, and dignified black cloth dolman, heavy with imitation Astrachan. She and Susan were standing at the gate when Tinkerly drove up with his skittish mare and spring cart, a cart so springy that it threatened to heel over altogether when Tabitha clambered into the place of honour. Mr. Tinkerly’s foreman was sitting behind to take care of Susan, and the foreman was unmarried, and of a greasy black-haired comeliness, and there was none happier than Susan under those wintry stars—not even the great ladies in their family diamonds.

“What are diamonds,” said Susan, philosophically, with the foreman’s arm sustaining her at a sharp turn in the road, “if you don’t care for each other?”

CHAPTER V.

“AND THE CHILD-CHEEK BLUSHING SCARLET FOR THE VERY SHAME OF BLISS.”

People who were familiar with the Talbot Hotel, Lostwithiel, in its everyday aspect would hardly have recognized the old-fashioned hostelry to-night, under the transforming hand of the Hunt Club, with Lord Lostwithiel and Vansittart Crowther on the committee. The entrance hall, usually remarkable only for various cases of stuffed birds, and a monster salmon—caught in the Lerrin river in some remote period of history—was now a bower of crimson cloth and white azaleas. In the ball-room and ante-room, tea-room and supper-room, were more flowers, and more crimson cloth, while on every side brushes and vizards against the crimson and white panelling testified to the occasion. The dancing-room was very full when Mrs. Baynham’s party made their entrance, the matron in her historical black velvet—which had formed part of her trousseau thirteen years before, when she left the family residence in the chief street of Truro, and all those privileges which appertained to her as the only daughter of a provincial banker, to grace Dr. Baynham’s lowlier dwelling. The black velvet gown had been “let out” from time to time, as youth expanded into maturity: and there had been a new bodice and a real Maltese lace flounce within the last three years, which constituted a second incarnation; and Mrs. Baynham walked into the Talbot ball-room with the serene demeanour that goes with a contented mind. She was satisfied with herself, and she was proud of her party, the two fresh, rosy-cheeked girls in sky-blue tulle, Isola, looking like a Mary lily in her white satin raiment, and the village surgeon, who always looked his best in his dress clothes, newly-shaven, and, as it were, pulled together in honour of the occasion.

The room was full, and very full; but Lostwithiel was not there. Isola had an instinctive consciousness that he was missing in that brilliant crowd. People came buzzing round her, and she was made room for upon a raised bench opposite the gallery where a military band was playing a polka in which the brasses predominated to an ear-splitting extent.

The Glenaveril party made their entrance ten minutes later. The Crowther girls were not afraid of wanting partners. Most young men are glad to dance with half a million of money. There is always an off chance of a good thing, just as there is a chance of breaking the bank at Monte Carlo. Belinda looked superb in a cloud of tulle, like a goddess. Alicia looked too well on horseback to look well off. Her spare straight figure and sharp elbows were not at their best in evening dress. She wore black, and an infinity of bugles, and flashed and glittered more than any one else in the room, though she wore never a jewel.

“Worth, my dear,” said Mrs. Baynham to a blue niece, in a mysterious whisper; “I know his style.”

There was a buzz of conversation on that raised divan where the matrons were sitting with those newly arrived maidens who were like ships waiting to slide out of their cradles and float away to sea. Isola and the sky-blue nieces had not long to wait; especially Isola. Men were entreating the stewards to introduce them to that lovely fragile-looking creature in white satin—the best men in the neighbourhood, or those wandering stars from distant counties, or the London galaxy, “men with handles to their names,” as Mr. Baynham told Mrs. Crowther, resplendent in salmon brocade, and Venetian point.

“My presentation gown,” she informed the doctor’s wife; “the Court mantle is ruby velvet, lined with salmon satin. The weight of it almost pulled me backwards when I curtsied to the royalties—such a lot of them, and I’m afraid I curtsied rather too low to one of the Princesses, for I caught her taking me off when she returned my curtsy.”

Isola danced through the lancers as one in a dream. When the heart of a man is oppressed with care, “Ta-rarra, ta-rarra, ta-rà, ta-rà!” What foolishness it all seemed. And her husband in Burmah, hemmed round by murderous dacoits!

She went back to her seat among the matrons, after almost curtly refusing either refreshment or a promenade through the rooms. Mrs. Crowther was saying solemnly, “I do believe Lord Lostwithiel is not coming after all, and yet he worked so hard on the committee, my husband said, and took such pains about the flowers, and what not.”

The tall, slim figure cut its way through the crowd two or three minutes later, and Lostwithiel was standing in front of Isola, and the two matrons.

He wore a pink coat, as became a member of the Lostwithiel Hunt, and the vivid colour accentuated the pallor of his long thin face. He talked to all the ladies on the divan; to the sky-blue nieces even, hoping that their cards were full.

“If not, I must bring you some men I know,” he said. “You mustn’t miss a dance.”

They blushed and trembled with delight, never before having been thus familiarly addressed by a peer of the realm. He asked Isola for her programme, with well-simulated indifference, yet with that air of profound respect with which he talked to all women.

“I hope you can spare me some waltzes,” he said.

“She is only just come,” said Mrs. Baynham.

“And yet her card is almost full. People have been very officious. Here is a poor little waltz—number seven. May I have that, and number eleven, and number——”

“Please don’t put down your name for anything later than number eleven. I shall be gone long before those late dances.”

“Oh, surely, you don’t mean to desert us early. Remember this is the one festive occasion of our lives as a sporting community. All our other meetings are given up to carking care, financial difficulties, and squabbling. I shall put down my name in these tempting blanks, and if you disappoint me—well—it will only be like my previous experiences as a fox-hunter.”

He gave her back her programme, with all the blanks filled in, and at the bottom a word written, and triply underscored,

ἉΝΑΓΚΗ.

They had talked of Victor Hugo’s romantic story—that romance which the great man so despised in after years that he was almost offended if any one presumed to praise it in his hearing, although in the half-century that has gone since Victor Hugo was a young man this story of Notre Dame has been unsurpassed as an example of the romantic novel. Lostwithiel had praised the book, and had talked of the monk Frollo, and his fatal love—and that word Fatality, graven upon the wall of his cell, and burnt into his soul.

Isola knew what those Greek letters meant. She dropped the little white and gold programme as if it had been an adder. He went away to a duty dance with a great lady of the district—a lady whose diamonds made a light about her wherever she moved; and then he waltzed with Belinda Crowther, to the admiration of the young lady’s mother, and of two or three other matrons on the divan by the door. Were they not a splendid couple, she so brilliantly fair, he dark and pale, bronzed slightly with exposure to the sun in warmer climates than this—not positively handsome, but with such an interesting countenance. So, and so, and so prosed the matrons, until various middle-aged cavaliers came to invite them to the tea-room, where there was the usual drawback in the shape of a frightful draught from open windows, which the dancers, coming in flushed and heated, voted delicious.

“This will be a good night’s work for me,” said Dr. Baynham, cheerfully, although he considered it his duty to warn his patients of their danger.

Conscience thus satisfied, he could look on complacently as they eat ices, and selected cool corners of the refreshment-room to flirt in.

“Next to a juvenile party, I don’t know anything better—from a professional point of view—than a public ball,” he said. “Your canvas corridors, decorated with flowers and bunting, are a fortune to a family practitioner.”

Isola danced every dance. She hardly knew who her partners were. She had only a sense of floating in a vortex of light and colour, to some swinging melody. Everything was dream-like—but not horrible, as in her dream by the fireside at home. This was a happy dream, as of a creature with wings, who knew not of care in the present or a soul to be saved in the future. And then came her waltz with Lostwithiel, and that strong arm was round her, bearing her up as a flower is borne upon a rushing tide, so that she had no consciousness of movement on her own part, only of floating, floating, floating, to that languid three-time melody.

It was the last popular waltz they were playing—a waltz that had been last summer’s delight in the arid gardens of South Kensington—“Il n’y a que toi;” a waltz with a chorus which the band trolled out merrily, at intervals, in the French of Stratford atte Bow.

“Il n’y a que toi,” whispered Lostwithiel, with his lips close to the soft brown hair above the white forehead. “Not a bad name for a waltz when one is waltzing with just one person in the world.”

Out in the cool night there was a little knot of people as merry after their homelier fashion as town and county in the ball-room. One of the windows had been opened at the top for ventilation, and this opening had been turned to advantage. A large, substantial kitchen table had been placed in front of the window, and upon this improvised platform stood Tabitha, Susan, the head chamber-maid, and the ostler’s wife—this last on sufferance, and evidently not in society—looking on at the ball. The window was under a verandah, that sloped above these spectators’ heads. They were thus in dense shadow, and unseen by the occupants of the lamp-lit room.

Susan was exuberant in her delight.

“I was never at a ball before,” she said. “Oh, ain’t it lovely? Don’t I wish I could dance like that? Lor, do look at that fat old party, spinning round like a teetotum! Well, I never did! Don’t she perspire!” exclaimed Susan, indulging in a running commentary which left much to be desired in the matter of refinement.

This unsophisticated damsel heartily admired youth and beauty, and the smart frocks and flashing gems; but she was cruelly hard upon those dancers whose charms were on the wane, or whose frocks were inferior or ugly.

“Well, I wouldn’t,” said Susan, “I wouldn’t go to a ball like this if I couldn’t have everythink nice. Look at that tall girl in yeller. Did you ever see such a scarecrow? I’d ever so much rather stay at home, or stand outside, like this. I should feel it better became me.”

Tabitha made no such remarks. She was singularly silent and thoughtful, as she stood looking down at the crowded room from her point of vantage on the kitchen table. She had only eyes for one figure—the willowy form in the glistening white satin gown, with the feathery Japanese chrysanthemums, a little crushed and faded by this time; or perhaps it may be said for two figures, since one followed the other as the shadow follows the substance. She saw them waltzing together, when supper was in full progress, and the room comparatively clear. She saw the graceful head inclining towards his shoulder, the slender waist held in his firm embrace; and it seemed to her that the waltz was an invention of the Arch Enemy. She thought of it very much as people thought seventy years ago when Byron wrote his poetical denunciation of the new dance. She saw those two moving slowly towards an adjacent ante-room, where banks of flowers, and a couple of sofas and low easy-chairs made a retreat which was half boudoir, half conservatory. She saw them moving side by side, talking to each other in tones so confidential that his head bent low over hers each time she spoke; and then she watched them sitting just within the doorway, at an angle where she could see their faces, and attitudes, still in the same confidential converse, she with downcast eyes, and he leaning forward with his elbow on his knee, and looking up at her as he talked.

“It is too bad of him,” muttered Tabitha, writhing at that spectacle. “Does he think what a child she is, and what harm he may be doing? It is wicked of him, and he knows it; and other people must notice them—other people must see what I see—and they will be talking of her, blighting her good name. Oh, if I could only get her away at once before people begin to notice her!”

She could see her young mistress’s face distinctly in the lamplight. Isola was very pale, and her face was full of trouble; not the face of a woman amusing herself with an idle flirtation, playing with fire without the least intention of burning her fingers. There were plenty of flirtations of that order going on in the Talbot ball-room; but this was not one of them. This meant peril of some kind. This was all evil. That pale face, those heavy eyelids, shrouding eyes which dared not look up. That tremulous, uncertain movement of the snowy ostrich fan! All these were danger signals.

“If I get her safe at home presently, I’ll open her eyes for her,” thought Tabitha. “I’ll talk to her as if I was her mother. God knows I should be almost as sorry as ever her mother could be if she came to any harm.”

If she came to any harm. What harm was there to fear for her, as she sat there, with Lostwithiel lounging across the low chair beside the sofa where she sat, leaning forward to look into her downcast face? What harm could come to her except that which meant destruction—death to peace, and gladness, and womanly fame? If there were danger it was a desperate danger, and Tabitha shuddered at the mere thought of that peril.

“But, lor, she’s little more than a child,” mused Tabitha. “She means no wrong, and she knows no wrong. She’s too innocent to come to any harm.”

Yet in the landlady’s snuggery, by-and-by, seated at the comfortable round table, with its spotless damask and bright glass and silver, Tabitha was quite unable to do justice to that snack which Mr. Tinkerly had ordered in her honour—a chicken and lobster-salad from the supper-room, and three parts of a pine-apple cream. Susan and the foreman fully appreciated these dainties; but Tabitha only munched a crust and sipped a tumbler of beer.

“I’m a little bit out of sorts to-night,” she said.

“I hope you haven’t taken cold, Mrs. Thomas,” said the polite Tinkerly. “Perhaps we ought to have brought another rug?”

“No, it isn’t that. I’ve been quite warm and comfortable. Eat your supper, Mr. Tinkerly, and don’t bother about me. I’ve been interested in looking on, and I’m too much took up with what I’ve seen to be able to eat.”

“Well, it was a pretty sight,” exclaimed Tinkerly, enthusiastically; “but I don’t think I ever saw such a mort of plain women in my life.”

“Lor, Mr. Tinkerly,” cried Susan, with a shocked air. “Why, look at our young mistress, and at Miss Crowther, and Miss Spenthrop from Truro, and Mrs. Pencarrow, and Lady Chanderville.”

“Well, I don’t say they’re all ugly. Some of ’em are handsome enough, and there’s plenty of thorough-breds among ’em, but there’s a sight of plain-headed ones. There’s quite as much beauty in your spear as there is among the county folks, Miss Susan. I’ll answer for that.”

The night was waning. Isola had ordered her carriage for half-past two: but three o’clock had struck from the church tower of Lostwithiel, and the dance was still at its height—at its best, the dancers said, now that the sensual attractions of the supper-room drew off a good many people, and left the floor so much clearer than before supper, when bulky middle-aged gentlemen, talking to the matrons seated upon the divan, had projected their ponderous persons into the orbit of the waltzers.

Isola and Lostwithiel had danced only two waltzes, but since two o’clock they had sat out several dances, Mrs. Disney having cancelled all her engagements after that hour by declaring that she would dance no more.

“I am dreadfully tired,” she told her partners piteously, and her pallor gave force to the assertion. “Please get some one else for our dance, Captain Morshead,” and so on, and so on, to half a dozen disappointed suitors.

Perhaps some of those who happened to be experienced in such complications may have divined which way the wind blew, for no one offered to sit out the promised dances, and Isola and Lostwithiel were left pretty much to themselves among the palms and orange-trees in the ante-room. They were not unobserved, however; and among the eyes which marked them with no friendly notice were the fine, steel-blue eyes of Miss Crowther.

“Is that a flirtation?” she asked Captain Morshead, glancing in the direction of the ante-room where those two were sitting, as she and Isola’s cast-off partner waltzed past the muslin-draped doorway.

“They seem rather fond of talking to each other, don’t they? Who was she? She’s uncommonly pretty.”

“Oh, her people were army, I believe—as poor as church mice—buried alive in Dinan.”

“At Dinan—and now she lives at Trelasco, she tells me. It seems scarcely worth while to have exhumed her in order to bury her again. Such a girl as that ought to be in London enjoying life.”

“Oh, but she’s a grass widow, don’t you know. Her husband is in Burmah. I don’t think it’s quite nice in her to be here to-night; only as my too good-natured mother sent her a ticket, I suppose I oughtn’t to say anything about it. Perhaps if mother sees the way she goes on with Lord Lostwithiel she’ll rather regret that ticket.”

What was Lostwithiel saying all this time in that gentle baritone, which was heard only by one listener? He was asking forgiveness for his indiscretion of the afternoon, and in that prayer for pardon was repeating his offence. Isola was less inclined to be angry, perhaps, now. The magic of the dance was still upon her senses, the dance which had brought them nearer than all the days they had met; than all their long confidential conversations on the heights above the harbour, or on the river path, or dawdling on the bridge. She had felt the beating of his heart against her own, breath mingling with breath, the thrilling touch of his encircling arm; and it was as if he had woven a spell around her which made her his. She had never danced with her husband, who had no love of that heathenish art. In all their brisk, frank courtship there had been no intoxicating hours. She hardly knew what dancing meant till she waltzed with Lostwithiel, who had something of the fiery ardour of a Pagan worshipping his gods in wild gyrations upon moonlit mountain or in secret cave. She let him talk to her to-night—let him pour out the full confession of his unhappy love. He spoke not as one who had hope; not with that implied belief in her frailty which would have startled her into prompt resistance. His accents were the accents of despair, his love was a dark fatality.

ἉΝΑΓΚΗ

“Why did you write that word?” she asked.

“Why? Because I could not give you back that card without some token of my passion—with only commonplace entries which Jones, Brown, and Robinson might write there. I want you to feel that you belong to me, somehow, in some way, as the spirits of the dead and the souls of the living belong to each other sometimes, by links which none can see. When I am at the other end of the earth I want to feel that there is something, if it were only a word, like a masonic sign, between us; if it were only a promise that in such or such a phase of the waning moon we would each look up and breathe the other’s name.”

“You are going away?”

“What else can I do? Can I stay? You tell me I made you miserable by what I said this afternoon. That means we must meet no more. I can’t be sorry for my offence. I cannot answer for myself. My love has passed the point of sanity and self-control. I have no option. I must offend you, or I must leave you.”

“You need not leave Trelasco,” she said gently. “I am going away to-morrow.”

“Going away! Where?”

“To London first, and then to India.”

“To Burmah? Impossible!”

“If not to the front, to the nearest convenient station. I am going to my husband; as nearly as I can reach him; and as quickly as I can make the journey.”

“You are dreaming.”

“No, I have quite made up my mind. I hated to be left behind last year; and now that his return is deferred my only chance of happiness is to go to him. Some one called me a grass widow the other day. What a detestable name!”

“Give me this one waltz?” he asked, without any comment upon her intended journey.

“Impossible. I told them all I shouldn’t dance any more.”

“Oh, your partners are all in the supper-room, I dare say. The dancing men go in last. Hark! it’s the Myosotis. Just one turn—only one.”

He had risen from his low seat, and she rose involuntarily at the sound of the opening bars. He put his arm round her gently, and drew her into the ball-room, waltzing slowly as they went, and then, with the sudden impetus of an enthusiastic dancer, he was whirling her round the room, and she know nothing, cared for nothing, in the confusion of light and melody.

“Think of me sometimes when you are far away!” he whispered, with his lips almost touching her forehead.

She did not resent that whisper. Already, within a dozen hours of his first offence, she had grown accustomed to his words of love. It seemed to her as if they had loved each other for years—had loved and had despaired long ago, in some dim half-remembered past. A passion of this kind is like a dream, in which an instant gives the impression of half a lifetime, of long memories and old habit.

The room was much clearer now.

“Is it very late?” asked Isola.

“About four.”

“So late—and I told the flyman half-past two. It is dreadful. Let us stop, please.”

He obeyed, and went with her towards the cloak-room. The seats were nearly empty now where the matrons had sat in their velvet and brocade, a gorgeous background to the clouds of tulle and sylph-like figures of the dancers. Mrs. Baynham was nowhere to be seen, and the diminished bundles of tabby-cat cloaks and Shetland shawls in the cloak-room indicated that a good many people had left. Isola put on her soft white shawl hurriedly, and went out into the hall, where Lostwithiel had gone to look for her carriage.

People were going away very fast, and through the open doorway there was a sound of voices and wheels; but, in spite of footmen, constables, and hangers-on, there seemed a prodigious difficulty in getting any particular carriage to the door.

It was a mild, misty night, and the moon, which had been counted on for the return home, was hidden behind a mass of black clouds—or in the expressive phraseology of one of the foxhunters, had gone to ground. Mrs. Disney waited near the door while Lostwithiel searched for her fly. There were several departures of other muffled figures, features undistinguishable behind Shetland wraps, or furry hoods, as the men hustled their womenkind into the carriages. It seemed an age to Isola, waiting there alone in the corridor, and seeing no mortal whom she knew among those passersby, before Lostwithiel came, hurried and breathless, to say that her carriage was just coming up to the door.

“Wrap your shawl round your head,” he said quickly, as he gave her his arm. “There’s a nasty damp fog—so,” muffling her, almost to blindness. “Come along.”

She looked at the carriage, with its lamps shining red against the grey mistiness like great fiery eyes, and then, glancing at the horse, she cried suddenly, “I’m afraid that’s the wrong fly. I think mine had a grey horse.”

“No, no, it’s all right. Pray don’t loiter in this chilling air.”

The carriage door was open, the constable standing by, bull’s-eye in hand, a pair of horses snorting close behind, another carriage coming up so near that the pole threatened destruction. There was no time for loitering. Everybody was in a hurry to get home. Isola stepped lightly into the brougham, which drove slowly off.

“Next carriage, Mrs. Brune Prideaux,” roared the constable. “Mrs. Prideaux’ carriage stops all the way.”

CHAPTER VI.

“A LOVE STILL BURNING UPWARD.”

It was early summer, summer in her first youth, when she is frivolous and capricious, laughs and weeps she knows not why; smiling through her tears, and never knowing her own mind for a week together; to-day gracious-tempered and tropical; to-morrow east-windy and morose. In a word, it was June, a season of roses and rains, blue skies and thunder-clouds. It was June, and Martin Disney was looking out of the window with a keen eager face, much bronzed, and somewhat haggard, after a fatiguing campaign, looking out across the vales and woods of his native county, as the Penzance train sped along the high-level line betwixt Plymouth and Par. Those keen, grey eyes of his, accustomed to searching out far-off objects, looked as if they could pierce through the green heart of the Cornish valleys to the sheltered little harbour of Fowey and the blue sea that opened wide to the far-off West.

His labours were over, and he was going to take his rest, going to hang up his sword, that sword which had done such good work, or to transform it into a reaping-hook. He was Colonel Disney now, had given the State his best service, and now, in the very prime and vigour of his manhood, the State had done with him, and he was free to do what he listed with the maturer half of his life. He would have been very sorry to retire from active service had it not been for that tender tie which gave such sweetness to the thought of retirement and tranquil days. He was going home. The word thrilled him like music; home to his fair young wife, his chosen one, his domestic divinity. He had not left off wondering how it had ever come to pass that so young and fair a creature could care for him.

“It isn’t as if I were one of your accomplished fellows,” he said to himself, “able to sing, or play the flute, or paint in water-colours. Except a very earnest love of a few good books, I have no culture. How can any girl in the present day care for a man without culture? I could never appreciate Keats, for instance; and not to appreciate Keats is to be an outsider in literature.”

Yet, in spite of his seven and forty years, in spite of his deficiencies, his homeliness, that young heart had gone out to him. She loved him, and his lot was full. There was nothing more upon God’s earth that he could desire, were it not a miracle, and that the mother he had so fondly loved might be given back to him, to share his happiness, to make the third in a trinity of trusting love. Since that could not be, there was nothing left for him to yearn for.

The beating of his heart quickened almost unbearably, as the train drew near Par. Isola would meet him at the Junction, perhaps. He had not announced the actual hour of his arrival, for matters had been a little uncertain when he wrote yesterday, and he had not cared to telegraph this morning before he left Paddington. Yet she would know that this was the only likely train for him to choose; and she would be at the Junction, he thought, smiling her glad welcome, a fair young face, rosy in the sunset; for it was evening as he drew near the end of his journey.

No; there was nobody he knew at the Junction. He walked up and down the platform, and stared about him in rather a forlorn way during the few minutes before the starting of the train for Fowey. She had not come to anticipate their meeting by an hour or so, as he had hoped, as he had felt almost certain, she would come.

It was more natural that she should wait and receive him at the Angler’s Nest, he told himself, sitting in the corner of the railway carriage presently, in a train of three coaches, steaming through the pretty picturesque country between Par and Fowey. In the colder light of reason it seemed preposterous to have expected to see her at the Junction. She would like to welcome him amidst her own surroundings, in the home to which she had doubtless given those little beautifying touches in honour of his coming, which are such delight to women, and which sometimes pass altogether unobserved by that pachydermatous animal, man! How slowly the engine moved along that little bit of line! Martin Disney sat with his face to the wind, and snuffed the sea breeze as if it had been the odour of home. He thought of Ulysses, and his return from distant lands. Would Tim, the fox terrier, know him? and Shah, the Persian cat? Perhaps not. Tim was no Argus; vastly affectionate and demonstrative, but not a dog to expire at one’s feet, in the rapture of his master’s return. Penelope would know him, and welcome him. That was enough for this modern Ulysses, who had no reason to disguise himself in re-entering his home—who had no fear of rival suitors, or interlopers of any kind. Penelope would welcome him, and trusty Tabitha. He thought of the old servant’s honest face with delight. She was something left to him out of boyhood and youth. He felt like a young man when he talked to her. She was the one strong link betwixt the present and the past. She was his memory embodied. He could refer to her as to a dictionary of days long gone. When did we do such and such a thing—or go to such a place? What was the name of the bay horse I bought at Plympton? Where did my mother pick up the Sheraton secretaire? Tabitha could answer all such trivial questions: and Tabitha could talk to him for hours of his mother’s words and ways—of the things that were only history.

At last! The train crept into the little station, nestling on the edge of a wood, and there was Fowey, homely, friendly little Fowey, so strange and yet so familiar; strange to eyes that had so lately looked upon the cities of the East; familiar to the man who had been reared in the neighbourhood, whose first impressions of God’s earth had stamped harbour and hills upon his brain, like an indelible picture. There was Masters’s fly, an eminently respectable vehicle that never touted for chance passengers, waiting for him. He was expected, evidently.

“Did Mrs. Disney send you?” he asked the driver.

“Yes, sir.”

How thoughtful of the young wife, who might be forgiven if she had left such a small duty unfulfilled. Yet he would have liked to see her sweet self at the station—only, as he had argued with himself just now, it would have discounted the home-welcome. It would have been an anti-climax.

Dearly as he loved that home river, and those fertile hills, and beautiful as they were after their kind, they could but seem small and tame to eyes that had looked upon the glories of the East. Disney contemplated the scene with a touch of sad surprise, wondering at this miniature loveliness; recalling the day when those steep hillsides, where the red cattle were grazing in the mists of eventide, had seemed grand in his sight. Now they had a kind of pitiful prettiness. His heart yearned towards them with compassion for their insignificance.

For nearly two years he had been moving about with his company in the land of jungle and mountain, and in that vast table-land through which the Salween river runs down to the Gulf of Martaban; and after those wider horizons, he found himself in a narrow road, shut in by grassy hills, and hugging the margin of a silver thread that called itself a river.

There is always a tinge of melancholy in that hour after sundown; and Martin Disney’s heart saddened a little as he looked at the quiet river, and the shadows on the hillside—that pale mistiness of summer evening which gives a ghostly touch to all things, as if it were a brief revelation of a spirit world. It is an hour at which even a strong man’s heart is apt to sink with a vague sense of fear.

The fly drew up at the little wooden gate between high hedges of escalonia, with glossy leaves and bright red blossom. A slender figure in a white gown was visible on the threshold, as Disney sprang out of the fly, and while the flyman was lifting down the luggage, that airy form flitted across the lawn, and Colonel Disney’s wife was standing shyly within the open gate, almost as if she had come out to receive a stranger.

He could not clasp her to his breast before a flyman; but he seized both her hands, gripped them convulsively, and then led her towards the house, leaving Masters’s man to deal as he pleased with portmanteaux and hat-box, gun-case and umbrella-case, despatch-box, and other chattels; to leave them out in the lane to the dews and the night-birds, if he so listed. Martin Disney had no consciousness of anything in this world except the woman by his side.

“My darling! my darling!” he ejaculated, in a choked voice, “how I have longed for this hour, with a longing that has been almost madness!”

And then he saw for the first time that her face was as white as her gown. Was it the twilight that made her look so pale? Could he wonder if the emotion of this supreme moment blanched that young cheek, when he, soldier and wayfarer upon the world’s roughest roads, felt like a child, striving to hold back his tears?

Lamps were burning in dining-room and drawing-room. He saw the table laid for dinner through the open door as he and Isola passed by; but the idea of eating and drinking seemed very far off just now. They went into the drawing-room together, where a solitary lamp was shining upon a table crowded with flowers, and where the scents of the garden came in through the open window. Here he satisfied the longing of his hungry heart, and took that fragile form in his arms, and kissed the pale cold lips. She lay upon his breast unresistingly; helpless, unresponsive, like a dead thing.

“Isola, have you forgotten that you once loved me?”

“Forgotten! No, no, no! There is no one in the world so good and true as you are. I love you with all my heart and soul.”

Her face was hidden on his breast, but she lifted up her arms and clasped them round his neck. He seated himself in his accustomed chair—it was standing where it had always stood before he went away—and took her upon his knee, as if she had been a child. Then a great storm of sobs suddenly burst from throat and bosom, a flood of tears streamed upon his breast, and he felt her arms trembling as they clasped his neck.

“My own dear love,” he murmured gently, “one would almost think you were sorry I have came back.”

She could not answer him at first for her sobs, but she shook her head, and at last the words, “No, no, no,” came from her lips; and he kissed and calmed her with almost fatherly gentleness. And then they went into the dining-room, where the soup-tureen was waiting for them on the sideboard, with a neat little parlour-maid—not Susan, but another—ready to minister to them.

The table had been decorated by Isola’s own hands. Dark crimson roses were lying on the fair white damask; one tall glass stood in the centre with three slim golden lilies, pale and heavy-headed, which filled the room with perfume. These came from one of the hothouses at Glenaveril, whence good-natured Mrs. Crowther had sent a basket of exotics in honour of the colonel’s return. The lamplight, the flowers, the pretty old Wedgwood service of creamy white and dull brown, made up a feast for Martin Disney’s eye, after a life spent mostly under canvas. He looked from the gaily adorned table to the face beside him, pallid and pinched, despite its sweetness.

“My dear one, you are looking very ill,” he said, with an anxious air.

“What an ungallant speech!” she answered, smiling at him with unexpected gaiety. “I have been fretting at your long, long absence, and you reproach me for my deteriorated appearance. Never mind, Martin, you will see how rosy and bright I shall get now our parting has come to an end.”

“Yes, love, we must coax the roses back to your cheeks. I must have a good mount ready for you when the cubbing begins, and a few morning gallops will soon make a change in my fragile wife’s appearance. And I’ll charter a yacht and steep you in ozone.”

“Oh, one gets enough of that on shore, there is no need to go further.”

“But I thought you adored yachting? It was one of our grand schemes for the future, to hire a modest little yawl and go round the coast to Clovelly. Have you forgotten?”

“No, no; only I don’t want you to waste your money—and, if we start a bigger stable——”

“Ah, you don’t know what a Crœsus I have become. You needn’t be afraid of ruining me. My poor lonely little wife. Why didn’t you send for Allegra?”

“She wouldn’t have been of any good to me. She is all that is sweet and lovable, and she is your sister; but she wouldn’t have filled your vacant place. I should have only felt lonelier for having to talk every day, and pretend a kind of happiness. Being alone, I could bury myself in a book, and forget my troubles.”

“This soup doesn’t look up to Tabitha’s old form. Do you know that among other delights of this earthly paradise I have been looking forward to Tabitha’s little dinners. I don’t believe there is a chef in Paris who can cook so well as that self-taught genius, who ripened into perfection by a process of gradual evolution, from the early days when my mother discovered that nobody could make arrowroot or cook a mutton cutlet as well as Tabitha. By-the-by, why has not that good soul shown herself? I thought she would have disputed with you for my first kiss.”

While he ran on in this fashion, Isola sat looking down at the table-cloth, pallid no longer, but crimson.

“Tabitha has gone!” she said abruptly.

“Tabitha gone—for a holiday?”

“No, she has left me, altogether.”

“Left you—altogether?” exclaimed Disney, with the tone of a man who could scarcely believe in his own sense of hearing, so astounding was the statement that met his ears. “Tabitha, my mother’s faithful old servant, who was like my own flesh and blood! What in God’s name made her leave you? Did you quarrel with her?”

He asked the question almost sternly. For the first time in his life he was angry with this dear fragile creature, the idol of his heart. He had loved Tabitha as servants are not often loved. He had left his young wife in her charge, desiring no better custodian, full of faith in Tabitha’s ability both to protect and counsel her girlish mistress.

“No, no; we did not quarrel. I liked Tabitha very much. I was almost as fond of her as you yourself could be.”

“And yet you dismissed her!” Disney retorted bitterly. “She was not smart enough for you, perhaps. Those Crowther people may have put it into your head that she was old-fashioned—that you could never have a modish household with such a humdrum old person at the head of it. Was that your motive?”

“Oh, Martin, how can you think me so frivolous? I hate smartness and pretension as much as you do. No, I should never have dismissed Tabitha. She left me of her own accord.”

“Why?”

“She wanted rest. She was too old for service, she told me. I tried to keep her. I humiliated myself so far as to beg her to stay with me”—the tears came into her eyes at the mere memory of that humiliation—“but she had made up her mind. She would not give way.”

“Where did she go?”

“To Falmouth—to live with her sister, a shoemaker’s widow. They let lodgings, I believe.”

“She must have gone mad! A lodging-house must be harder work than anything she had to do here.”

“Yes, I think it must.”

“When did she go?”

“At the beginning of the year—in January.”

“She left you six months ago, and in all that time you never told me she was gone.”

“I did not want you to know, for fear you should be worried or vexed.”

“I should have been both; but you ought to have told me. I had a right to know. I left you in her charge, Isola. You are much too young and too pretty to be living alone without some kind of dragon—and I knew Tabitha would be a very gentle dragon—a good motherly soul, able to wait upon you and look after your health, and yet grim enough to keep marauders off the premises. Indeed, my pet, you should have let me know of her departure without an hour’s delay. She was very wrong to go. It was a breach of faith I could never have expected.”

“Pray don’t be angry with her, Martin.”

“But I am angry. I have a right to be angry. I’ll go to Falmouth to-morrow, and have it out with her.”

“No, no, pray don’t! We parted good friends. She can say nothing to you more than she said to me. Pray don’t let there be any bad blood between you. What could be gained by your going? To-morrow, too—our first day together!”

“Well, it shall not be till the day after; but go I must. To-morrow I will revel in the delights of home, and my dear one’s society. To-morrow I will be drunken with joy. The day after will do for Tabitha.”

“I think it is making a great deal too much of her to go to Falmouth on purpose to see her,” said Isola, with a grain of pettiness; and then, after a pause, during which the colonel had been trying to appease a sharp appetite with the muscular leg of an elderly fowl, she said nervously—

“I’m afraid you are not enjoying your dinner.”

“What do I care for dinner on such a night as this; but, as a matter of plain truth, I must say that your new cook is a very bad substitute for Tabitha. Her soup was watery, her fish was greasy, her poultry is hardly eatable. If she has talents in any other line she is keeping them in reserve for another day. It may be that she excels in made-dishes—a misfortune for me, as I never eat them.”

“I had a splendid character with her,” said Isola, piteously, with the helpless feeling of a housewife who sees before her a dark prospect of bad dinners and marital grumblings, or the agonizing wrench involved in changing her cook.

“Yes, my love, people generally give splendid characters to servants they want to get rid of,” answered Disney, dryly.

These wedded lovers went out very early next morning to explore the gardens and meadows; Isola eager to point out various small improvements which she had made with the help of the old gardener, who would have plunged his hand and arm into a fiery furnace to procure plant or flower which his young mistress desired. Sweet words and sweet looks go very far in this world. They are a mighty revenue, and will often do their owner as good service as gold and silver.

Isola had worked in the garden with her own hands ever since the beginning of spring, the first tender opening of Earth’s heavy eyelids, her first pale smile of snowdrops, her broad laughter of daffodils, her joyous peal of bluebells, and riotous mirth of May blossom. She had toiled in the sweat of her brow so that the garden might be beautiful at mid-summer: for early in March there had come a letter full of rejoicing from that distant hill-kingdom, and she knew that the year of absence to which she had looked so hopelessly last November was commuted to half a year.

Martin Disney was full of admiration for his wife’s improvements. The old-fashioned borders were brimming over with old-world flowers; the shrubberies had grown out of knowledge; the escalonia hedge by the kitchen garden was a thing to wonder at.

“I remember the hedge at Tregenna Castle before that good old place was an inn,” said Martin; and then, having admired everything, he walked up and down the grass beside the laurel hedge with his wife—while the Satan-sent cook was spoiling the food that bounteous Nature had provided for man’s enjoyment—and questioned her about the life she had been leading in his absence.

“You used to write me such good letters, dearest, so full of detail, that I knew exactly how your days were spent, and could picture every hour of your life: but of late your descriptive powers have flagged. I dare say you got tired of writing long letters to a dull old fellow in India, who could never write you a clever letter in reply. It must have seemed a one-sided business?”

“Indeed, no, dear. Your letters had only one fault. They were never half long enough; but I knew how busy you were, and I thought it was so good of you never to miss a mail.”

“Good of me! Had there been twice as many mails I would not have willingly missed one. But there is no doubt your letters fell off after last autumn. They were sweet, and ever welcome to me—but they told me very little.”

“There was very little to tell.”

“Ah, but in the old days you used to make it seem so much. You had such a delightful way of describing trifling events. I thought at one time you had the makings of a Jane Austen; but afterwards I began to fear you must be out of health. Your letters had a low-spirited tone. There were no more of those sharp little touches which used to make me laugh, no more of those tiny word-pictures, which brought the faces and figures of my old neighbours before me.”

“You can hardly wonder if my spirits sank a little when you had been so long away. And then life seemed so death-like in its monotony. There were days when I felt I might just as well have been dead. There could be very little difference between lying under the earth and crawling listlessly on the top of it.”

“You were too much alone, Isola,” he answered, distressed at this revelation. “You ought to have sent for Allegra. I begged you to send for her, if you felt dull.”

“Do you think she could have cured my dulness?” exclaimed his wife, impatiently. “Life would have seemed still more tiresome if I had been obliged to talk when there was nothing to talk about, and to smile when I felt inclined to cry.”

“Ah, you don’t know what a companion Allegra is—brimming over with fun! She knows her Dickens by heart; and I never met with anybody who appreciated him as intensely as she does.”

“I don’t care about Dickens.”

“Don’t—care—about Dickens!”

He echoed her words as if almost paralyzed by horror.

“Not as I used to care. One’s taste changes as life goes on. Lately I have read nothing but Victor Hugo, and Keats, and Shelley.”

“Very well in their way, but not half cheery enough for a lonely little woman beside the Fowey river. You ought to have had Allegra. It would have been better for you and better for her. She is tired of the Art school; and the other pupils are tired of her. They are very fond of her; but she has done all the work twice over, and there is nothing more for her to do, unless we meant her to enter the Royal Academy and go in seriously for art, Mrs. Meynell tells me. According to that lady’s account my sister must be an Admirable Crichton in petticoats.”

“I have no doubt she is very clever and very nice; but, as I could not have you, I preferred being alone,” answered Isola.

She was walking slowly by his side along the closely shaven grass, and every now and then she stretched out a hand that looked semi-transparent, and gathered a flower at random, and then plucked off its petals nervously as she walked on. Her eyelids were lowered, and her lips were tightly set. Martin could but think there was a vein of obstinacy in this bewitching wife of his—a gentle resistance which would tend to make him her slave rather than her master in the days to come. He saw with pain that her cheeks were hollow and pinched, and that her complexion had a sickly whiteness. She had fretted evidently in those long months of solitude, and it would take time to bring back the colour and gaiety to her face. As for dulness, well, no doubt Fowey was ever so much duller than Dinan, where there were officers and tennis-parties and afternoon tea-drinkings, and a going and coming of tourists all the summer through, and saints’ days, and processions, and fêtes and illuminations in the market square, beneath the statue of Duguesclin.

“And how did the world use you, Isola?” he asked presently. “Was everybody kind?”

“Oh yes, people were very kind; especially Mrs. Baynham and Mrs. Crowther. They sent me ever so many invitations, and wanted me to go on their day every week.”

“And I hope you accepted their invitations.”

“I went to Mrs. Baynham’s sometimes on her day; but I didn’t care about going to Glenaveril. It is all too grand and too fine—and I don’t like Mr. Crowther.”

“He was always courteous to you, I hope?”

“Oh yes, he was particularly courteous. I have no reason for disliking him. He is my Dr. Fell—the reason why I cannot tell, but I would walk a mile to avoid meeting him.”

“Then we will not cultivate social relations with Glenaveril. We will visit at no house where my dearest does not feel happy and at ease. And as for the finery, I agree with you, there is something too much of it. I like powder and plush when the people they serve are to the manner born, and when powder and plush seem more natural than parlour-maids; but I don’t care for the solemn stateliness of a big establishment when it has been newly set up—at least, not by such folks as the Crowthers. There are some men to whom such surroundings seem natural, even though fortune has come late in life. Is the beautiful Belinda married yet?”

“No. I do not think she is as much as engaged.”

“I thought Lostwithiel would have married her. She would have been a grand catch for him, and no doubt she would have snapped at a coronet, even without strawberry leaves. But I hear he is in South America orchid-hunting. He was always a capricious individual. There goes the gong for breakfast. I hope your cook can fry a rasher and boil an egg better than she can dress a dinner.”

They went in together to the pretty dining-room, so bright with books and flowers, and a life-sized girlish head in water-colours, by Dobson, R.A., over the chimney-piece, and Venetian glass here and there, that all characteristics of the ordinary eating-room were effaced, and only a sense of homeliness and artistic surroundings was left. Isola had been down at six, and her own hands had given the finishing touches to the room, and the flowers were of that morning’s gathering, and had the dew and the perfume of morning upon them. The room was so pretty, and Isola was so much prettier than the room, that a husband would have been of very dull clay had he troubled himself about the handiwork of the cook. Martin Disney was not made of dull clay, and he ate an overdone rasher and a hard-boiled egg without a murmur, and then set out for a long ramble with Isola.

They went up to the hill upon whose landward slope stood Lostwithiel’s old grey manor-house, with its gardens and park. Isola had not been there since that never-to-be-forgotten November evening when she met Lostwithiel in the rain. She had avoided the spot from that time forward, though she had no especial reason for avoidance, since there was no one there but Mrs. Mayne and her underlings. Lostwithiel and the Vendetta had sailed away into space directly after the Hunt Ball, and little had been heard of him save that dim rumour of orchid-hunting on the shores of the Amazon, which had filtered from the society papers down to Fowey, viâ the Western Daily Mercury.

Isola and her husband lingered for a long time upon the hilltop, he revelling in the familiar beauty of that magnificent stretch of cliff and sea, out to the dim slate colour of the Dodman Point, bay beyond bay, curving away towards Falmouth and the Lizard—while between that hill and the sea lay a world of fertile meadows and bright green cornfields, of hill and hollow, wood and common, copse and garden, a rich and smiling country, a land of summer flowers and plenteous growth.

“I never stand upon this hill without feeling proud of being a Cornishman,” said Disney, “and yet, after all, it is a foolish thing to be proud of an accident. My little Breton girl might as well be proud of being a countrywoman of Duguesclin’s.”

“Perhaps if I had been born anywhere else I should not have been so ready to fall in love with a soldier,” answered Isola. “I was brought up to think a knight and a warrior the one ideal: and so I was fascinated by the first soldier who took any notice of me.”

“But were you really fascinated, and were you really in love,” exclaimed Disney, infinitely delighted at this little speech of his wife’s, “in love with a battered campaigner—or did you just think you liked me a little bit, only because you wanted to get away from Dinan?”

“I really—really—really loved you,” she answered softly, looking up at him with eyes dimmed by tears, as he drew her nearer to him in his gladness. “I was not tired of Dinan—or my life there—and my heart went out to you at once, because you were good and noble, and seemed to care for me.”

“There was no seeming in it, Isola. I was knocked over at once, like a pigeon out of a trap. I had been in love with you three weeks—three centuries it seemed—before I could screw up my courage so far as to think of proposing for you. And then if Hazelrigg hadn’t helped me with your father, I don’t suppose I should ever have broken the ice. But when he—the colonel—showed himself so frank and willing—and the way was all made smooth for me from a domestic point of view—and when I saw that kind little look in your eyes, and the shy little smile—yes, you are smiling so now—I took heart of grace, and stormed the citadel. Do you remember the evening I asked you to be my wife, Isola; that starlit night when I had been dining with your people, and you and Gwendolen, and Hazelrigg and I went out upon the terrace to look at the stars, and the river, and the twinkling lights of the boats down by the quay, and the diligence driving over the bridge, deep, deep down in the valley below us? Do you remember how I lured you away from the other two, and how we stood under the vine-leaves in the berceau, and I found the words somehow—feeblest, stupidest words, I’m afraid—to make you know that all the happiness of my life to come depended upon winning you for my wife?”

“I remember as if it were last night,” she answered gravely. “But oh, how long ago it seems!”

“Why do you sigh as you say that?”

“Oh, one always sighs for the past! How can one help feeling sorry that it should be gone—so much of our lives and of ourselves gone for ever?”

“Oh, but when the future is so fair, when the present is so happy, there should be no more sighing. It is an offence against the Great Father of all, who has been so good to us.”

She did not answer, and they remained silent for some minutes, she seated on a bank covered with heather and wild flowers; he stretched on the short, sweet turf at her feet. The heather had not begun to show its purple bloom, but there was the gold of the gorse, and the brightness of innumerable wild flowers around and about them as they basked in the sunshine.

“Dearest, do you believe in dreams?” Disney asked suddenly.

“Sometimes—not much—dreams are often dreadful,” she answered, with a startled air.

“I don’t believe in them a bit,” he said, lifting himself into a sitting position, and addressing himself to her with increasing earnestness, “not now that I have you here safe within reach of my hand—so,” taking her hand in his, and keeping it clasped in both his own; “but I had a dream about you in Burmah, which kept me in a fever of anxiety for nearly a month. I should have telegraphed to ask if all was right with you, only I told myself that if anything was wrong Tabitha would instantly telegraph to me. I made her promise that before I left England. It was almost my last injunction. And to think that she left you half a year ago, and that anything might have happened to you after that, and that there was no one—no one——”

“But, you see, I am quite safe. There was no bad news to send you. Besides, if I had been ill, or anything had gone wrong, there was Mrs. Baynham. She has been like a mother to me. I am so sorry you feel vexed about Tabitha’s leaving me.”

“Doubly vexed, dear, because you left me in ignorance of the fact.”

“Pray don’t be angry with me, Martin, so soon,” she pleaded meekly.

“Angry, no. I am not angry. I don’t know how to be angry with you, Isola; but I can’t help being distressed. However, let the past be past. I shall never leave you to the care of strangers again till I die.”

Her only answer was to bend her head down to kiss the hands that clasped her own.

“Tell me about your dream,” she said, after a pause, with her forehead still resting on his hands, and her face hidden. “Was it something very awful?”

“It was all confusion—a wild chaos—a nightmare of strange sounds and sensations—tempest, fire, earthquake—I know not what—but it meant deadly danger for you—death perhaps. I saw you hanging in space—a white figure, with piteous, pain-wrought face. Never have I seen you look like that—your eyes staring wildly as if they were looking at death; your features drawn and rigid, and through all the confusion, and noise, and ceaseless movement, I was trying to follow you—trying, but impotently—to save you. The white figure was always before me—far off—yet visible every now and then across the darkness of a world where everything was shapeless and confused. But the worst of all was that every now and then a black wall rose up between your distant figure and the stony difficult path that I was treading—a wall against which I flung myself, mad with rage and despair, trying to tear the stones asunder with my hands, till the blood ran in streams from my fingers. It was a dream that seemed to last through a long night, holding in it the memory of a painful past; yet I suppose it was like other dreams—momentary, for I had heard three o’clock strike before I fell asleep, and when I sounded my repeater it was only a quarter past.”

“Rather a meaningless dream,” she said, in a sleepy voice, without looking up. “I don’t think it ought to have alarmed you.”

“Ah, it sounds meaningless to you; but to me it was full of meaning! The idea of danger to you was so intense—so real. The cold sweat of deadly fear was on my face when I awoke, and it was some minutes before I could get my senses clear of that ghastly horror, before I could realize where I was, and that the thing I had seen was a dream. That stone wall seemed still in front of me, and I had still the feeling that you were on the other side of it, in ever-increasing peril.”

“It was a horrid dream, certainly; but, you see, it had no meaning.”

“There were such strange things mixed up in it—thunder and lightning, a roaring wind, a sound of rushing waters; and then, amidst wind and thunder, there rose the dark barrier that shut out everything.”

“Was it long ago that you dreamt this horrid dream?”

“Yes, a long while. It was just before Christmas. I made a note of the dream in my journal—wrote it down in fear and trembling, lest there should be some kind of fulfilment. But then came your letter—written at the beginning of January, with your description of the ball—and I laughed at my folly in brooding so long upon that phantasmal picture. I remember, by the way, it was two or three nights after your ball that I dreamt my dream, while you no doubt were sleeping just a little sounder than usual after your gaieties.”

“Dreams are very strange,” said Isola, absently. “I wonder whether there is any good in them to counterbalance so much pain?”

CHAPTER VII.

“LOOK THROUGH MINE EYES WITH THINE, TRUE WIFE.”

There were steamers plying between Fowey and Falmouth in this summer weather, and Colonel Disney suggested next morning that Isola should go with him on his journey in search of Tabitha. They would go by water and return in the afternoon by rail. The morning was lovely, and the trip round the coast would be delightful.

“I don’t want to see Tabitha,” Isola answered, with a touch of impatience. “If you are so bent upon seeing her I had rather you went alone.”

“But I had rather not spend a whole day away from you. As for Tabitha, a visit of ten minutes will be quite enough for me. I have brought her a Rhampoor Chuddah—a warm red one. I have only to make her my little gift, and to say a few words—without any anger—about her breach of faith.”

“It was really not a breach of faith. I gave her full permission to go. I was getting just a little tired of her fussiness. She was not my old servant, you know, Martin. I had not been used to her all my life, as you have.”

“Ah, but she is so good—such a thoroughly good woman.”

“Yes, she is good, no doubt.”

“Well, we’ll go to Falmouth together, and you can stop at the Green Bank, where we can lunch, while I go and find Tabitha. You know her address, I suppose?”