ALL ALONG THE RIVER (continued 5)

“Martin is very late,” she said, looking up as Isola entered, “and he is generally a model of punctuality. I hope there is nothing wrong. Where have you been hiding yourself since lunch, Isa? Have you been lying down?”

“Yes, part of the time”—hesitatingly. “It is very late.”

“Twenty minutes to nine. Dale has been in twice in the last quarter of an hour to say that the dinner is being spoilt. Hark! There’s the door, and Martin’s step. Thank God, there is nothing wrong!” cried Allegra, getting up and going out to meet her brother.

Colonel Disney’s countenance as he stood in the lamplight was not so reassuring as the substantial fact of his return. It was something to know that he was not dead, or hurt in any desperate way—victim of any of those various accidents which the morbid mind of woman can imagine if husband or kinsman be unusually late for dinner; but that things were all right with him was open to question. He was ghastly pale, and had a troubled, half-distracted expression which seared Allegra almost as much as his prolonged absence had done.

“I am sure there is something wrong!” she said, when they were seated at dinner, and the parlour-maid had withdrawn for a minute or two in pursuance of her duties, having started them fairly with the fish.

“Oh no, there is nothing particularly amiss; I have been worried a little, that’s all. I am very sorry to be so unconscionably late for dinner, and to sit down in this unkempt condition. But I loitered at the club looking at the London papers. I shall have to go to London to-morrow, Isola—on business—and I want you to go with me. Have you any objection?”

She started at the word London, and looked at him curiously—surprised, yet resolute—as if she were not altogether unprepared for some startling proposition on his part.

“Of course not. I would rather go with you if you really have occasion to go.”

“I really have. It is very important. You won’t mind our deserting you for two or three days, will you, Allegra?” asked Disney, turning to his sister. “Mrs. Baynham will be at your service as chaperon if you want to go out anywhere while we are away. It is an office in which she delights.”

“I won’t trouble her. I shall stay at home, and paint all the time. I have a good deal of work to do to my pictures before they will be ready for the winter exhibition, and the time for sending in is drawing dreadfully near. You need have no anxiety as to my gadding about, Martin. You will find me shut up in my painting-room, come home when you will.”

Later, when she and her brother were alone in the drawing-room, she went up to him softly and put her arms around his neck.

“Martin, dearest, I know you have some great trouble. Why don’t you tell me? Is it anything very bad? Does it mean loss of fortune; poverty to be faced; this pretty home to be given up, perhaps?”

“No, no, no, my dear. The home is safe enough; the house will stand firm as long as you and I live. I am not a shilling poorer than I was yesterday. There is nothing the matter—nothing worth speaking about; blue devils, vapours if you like. That’s all.”

“You are ill, Martin. You have found out that there is something wrong with you—heart, lungs, something—and you are going to London to consult a physician. Oh, my dear, dear brother,” she cried, with a look of agony, her arms still clasped about his neck, “don’t keep me in the dark; let me know the worst.”

“There is no worst, Allegra. I am out of sorts, that’s all. I am going to town to see my lawyer.”

CHAPTER XV.

“MY LIFE CONTINUES YOURS, AND YOUR LIFE MINE.”

They started by the eleven-o’clock train from Fowey next morning, husband and wife, in a strangely silent companionship—Isola very pale and still as she sat in a corner of the railway carriage, with her back to the rivers and the sea. Naturally, in a place of that kind, they could not get away without being seen by some of their neighbours. Captain Pentreath was going to Bodmin, and insisted upon throwing away a half-finished cigar in order to enjoy the privilege of Colonel and Mrs. Disney’s society, being one of those unmeditative animals who hate solitude. He talked all the way to Par, lit a fresh cigar during the wait at the junction, and reappeared just as the colonel and his wife were taking their seats in the up-train.

“Have you room for me in there?” he asked, sacrificing more than half of his second cigar. “I’ve got the Mercury—Jepps is in for Stokumpton—a great triumph for our side.”

He spread out the paper, and made believe to begin to read with a great show of application, as if he meant to devour every syllable of Jepps’s long exposition of the political situation; but after two minutes he dropped the Mercury on his knees and began to talk. There were people in Fowey who doubted whether Captain Pentreath could read. He had been able once, of course, or he could hardly have squeezed himself into the Army; but there was an idea that he had forgotten the accomplishment, except in its most elementary form upon sign-boards, and in the headings of newspaper articles, printed large. It was supposed that the intensity of effort by which he had taken in the cramming that enabled him to pass the ordeal of the Examiners had left his brain a blank.

“You’re not going further than Plymouth, I suppose?” he asked.

“We are going to London.”

“Are you really, now? A bad time of year for London—fogs and thaws, and all kinds of beastly weather.”

And then he asked a string of questions—futile, trivial, vexing as summer flies buzzing round the head of an afternoon sleeper; and then came the welcome cry of Bodmin Road, and he reluctantly left them.

The rest of the journey was passed almost in silence. They had the compartment to themselves for the greater part of the time, and they sat in opposite corners, pretending to read—Isola apparently absorbed in a book that she had taken up at random just before she started, when the carriage was at the door, and while Allegra was calling to her to make haste.

It was Carlyle’s “Hero Worship.” The big words, the magnificent sentences, passed before her eyes like lines in an unknown language. She had not the faintest idea what she was reading; but she followed the lines and turned the leaf at the bottom of a page mechanically.

Martin Disney applied himself to the newspapers which he had accumulated on the way—some at Par, some at Plymouth, some at Exeter, till the compartment was littered all over with them. He turned and tossed them about one after the other. Never had they seemed so empty—the leaders such mere beating the air; the hard facts so few and insignificant. He glanced at Isola as she sat in her corner, motionless and composed. He watched the slender, white hands turning the leaves of her book at regular intervals.

“Is your book very interesting?” he asked, at last, exasperated by her calmness.

He had been attentive and polite to her, offering her the papers, ordering tea for her at Exeter, doing all that a courteous husband ought to do; but he had made no attempt at conversation—nor had she. This question about the book was wrung from him by the intensity of his irritation.

“It is a book you gave me years ago at Dinan,” she answered, looking at him piteously. “‘Hero Worship.’ Don’t you remember? I had never read anything of Carlyle’s before then. You taught me to like him.”

“Did I? Yes, I remember—a little Tauchnitz volume bound in morocco—contraband in England. A cheat—like many things in this life.”

He turned his face resolutely to the window, as if to end the conversation, and he did not speak again till they were moving slowly into the great station, in the azure brightness of the electric light.

“I have telegraphed for rooms at Whitley’s,” he said, naming a small private hotel near Cavendish Square, where they had stayed for a few days before he started for the East.

“Do you think it would be too late for us to call at Hans Place before we go to our hotel?”

She started at the question. He saw her cheeks crimson in the lamplight.

“I don’t think the lateness of hour will matter,” she said, “unless Gwendolen is dining out. She dines out very often.”

“I hope to-night may be an exception.”

“Do you want very much to see her?” asked Isola.

“Very much.”

“You are going to question her about me, I suppose?”

“Yes, Isola, that is what I am going to do.”

“It is treating me rather like a criminal; or, at any rate, like a person whose word cannot be believed.”

“I can’t help myself, Isola. The agony of doubt that I have gone through can only be set at rest in one way. It is so strange a thing, so impossible as it seems to me, that you should have visited your sister while I was away, although no letter I received from you contained the slightest allusion to that visit—an important event in such a monotonous life as yours—and although no word you have ever spoken since my return has touched upon it; till all at once, at a moment’s notice, when I tell you of your journey from London and the slander to which it gave occasion—all at once you spring this visit upon me, as if I ought to have known all about it.”

“You can ask Gwendolen as many questions as you like,” answered Isola, with an offended air, “and you will see if she denies that I was with her in the December you were away.”

Colonel Disney handed his wife into a station brougham. The two portmanteaux were put upon the roof, and the order was given—99, Hans Place—for albeit Mr. Hazelrigg’s splendid mansion was described on his cards and his writing-paper as The Towers, it is always as well to have a number for common people to know us by.

No word was spoken during the long drive from Paddington; no word when the neat little brougham drew up in front of a lofty flight of steps leading up to a Heidelberg doorway, set in the midst of a florid red-brick house, somewhat narrow in proportion to its height, and with over much ornament in the way of terra cotta panelling, bay and oriel, balcony and pediment.

A footman in dark green livery and rice powder opened the door. Mrs. Hazelrigg was at home. He led the way to one of those dismal rooms which are to be found in most fine houses—a room rarely used by the family—a kind of pound for casual visitors. Sometimes the pound is as cold and cheerless as a vestry in a new Anglican church; sometimes it affects a learned air, lines its walls with books that no one ever reads, and calls itself a library. Whatever form or phase it may take, it never fails to chill the visitor.

There was naturally no fire in this apartment. Isola sank shivering into a slippery leather chair, near the Early English fender; her husband walked up and down the narrow floor space. This lasted for nearly ten minutes, when Gwendolen came bursting in, a vision of splendour, in a grey satin tea-gown, frothed with much foam of creamy lace and pale pink ribbon, making a cascade of fluffiness from chin to slippered toes.

“What a most astonishing thing!” she cried, after kissing Isola, and holding out both her plump, white hands to the colonel. “Have you dear, good people dropped from the clouds? I thought you were nearly three hundred miles away when the man came to say you were waiting to see me. It is a miracle we are dining at home to-night. We are so seldom at home. Of course you will stay and dine with us. Come up to my room and take off your hat, Isa. No, you needn’t worry about dress,” anticipating Disney’s refusal; “we are quite alone. I am going to dine in my tea-gown, and Daniel is only just home from the city.”

“You are very kind; no, my dear Mrs. Hazelrigg, we won’t dine with you to-night,” answered Disney. “We have only just come up to town. We drove across the park to see you before going to our hotel. Our portmanteaux are waiting at the door. We are in town for so short a time that I wanted to see you at once—particularly as I have—a rather foolish question to ask you.”

His voice grew husky, though he tried his uttermost to maintain a lightness of tone.

“Ask away,” said Gwendolen, straightening herself in her glistening grey gown, a splendid example of modern elegance in dress and demeanour, and altogether a more brilliant and imposing beauty than the pale, fragile figure sitting in a drooping attitude beside the fireless hearth. “Ask away,” repeated Gwendolen, gaily, glancing at her sister’s mournful face as she spoke. “If I can answer you I will—but please to consider that I have a wretched memory.”

“You are not likely to forget the fact I want to ascertain. My wife and I have had an argument about dates—we are at variance about the date of her last visit to you—while I was away—and I should like to settle our little dispute, though it did not go so far as a wager. When was she with you? On what date did she leave you?”

All hesitation and huskiness were gone from manner and voice. He stood like a pillar, with his face turned towards his sister-in-law, his eyes resolute and inquiring.

“Oh, don’t ask me about dates,” cried Gwendolen, “I never know dates. I buy Letts in every form, year after year—but I never can keep up my diary. Nothing but a self-acting diary would be of any use to me. It was in December she came to me—and in December she left—after a short visit. Come, Isa. You must remember the dates of your arrival and departure, better than I. You don’t live in the London whirl. You don’t have your brains addled by hearing about Buenos Ayres, Reading and Philadelphias, Berthas, Brighton A’s, and things.”

Martin Disney looked at her searchingly. Her manner was perfectly easy and natural, of a childlike transparency. Her large, bright, blue eyes looked at him—fearless and candid as the eyes of a child.

“You ought to remember that it was on the last day of the year I left this house,” said Isola, in her low, depressed voice, as of one weary unto death. “You said enough about it at the time.”

“Did I? Oh, I am such a feather-head, tête de linotte, as they used to call me at Dinan. So it was—New Year’s Eve—and I was vexed with you for not staying to see the New Year in. That was it. I remember everything about it now.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Hazelrigg,” said Martin Disney, and then going over to his wife, he said gravely, “Forgive me, Isola, I was wrong.”

He held out his hands to her with a pleading look, and she rose slowly from her chair, and let her head fall upon his breast as he put his arms round her, soothing and caressing her.

“My poor girl, I was wrong—wrong—wrong—a sinner against your truth and purity,” he murmured low in her ear; and then he added laughingly, to Gwendolen, “Were we not fools to dispute about such a trifle?”

“All married people are fools on occasion,” answered Mrs. Hazelrigg. “I have often quarrelled desperately with Daniel about a mere nothing—not because he was wrong, but because I wanted to quarrel. That kind of thing clears the air—like a thunderstorm. One feels so dutiful and affectionate afterwards. Dan gave me this sapphire ring after one of our biggest rows,” she added, holding up a sparkling finger.

Daniel Hazelrigg came into the room while she was talking of him, a large man, with a bald head and sandy beard, a genial-looking man, pleased with a world in which he had been permitted always to foresee the rise and fall of stocks. The Hazelriggs were the very type of a comfortable couple, so steeped in prosperity and the good things of this world as to be hardly aware of any keener air outside the gardenia-scented atmosphere of their own house; hardly aware of men who dined badly or women who made their own gowns; much less of men who never dined at all, or women who flung themselves despairing from the parapets of the London bridges.

Mr. Hazelrigg came into the room beaming, looked at his wife and smiled, as he held out his hand to Colonel Disney, looked at his sister-in-law and smiled again, and held out his hand to her, the smile broadening a little, as if with really affectionate interest.

“I’m very glad to see you, my dear Mrs. Disney; but I can’t compliment you upon looking as well as you did when we last met.”

“She is tired after her long journey,” said Gwendolen, quickly. “That’s all there is amiss.”

“The sooner we get to our hotel the better for both of us,” said Disney. “We are dusty and weather-beaten, and altogether bad company. Good night, Mrs. Hazelrigg.”

“But surely you’ll stop and dine; it’s close upon eight,” remonstrated Hazelrigg, who was the essence of hospitality. “You can send on your luggage, and go to your hotel later.”

“You are very good, but we are not fit for dining out. Isola looks half dead with fatigue,” answered Disney. “Once more, good night.”

He shook hands with husband and wife and hurried Isola to the door.

“Be sure you come to me the first thing to-morrow,” said Gwendolen to her sister. “I shall stay in till you come, and I can drive you anywhere you want to go for your shopping—Stores, Lewis and Allanby’s—anywhere. I want to show you my drawing-room. I have changed everything in it. You’ll hardly know it again.”

She and her husband followed the departing guests to the hall, saw them get into the little brougham and drive off into the night; and then Gwendolen put her arm through her husband’s with a soft clinging affectionateness, as of a Persian cat, that knew when it was well housed and taken good care of.

“Poor Isa! how awfully ill she looks,” sighed Gwendolen.

“Ghastly. Are all women alike, I wonder, Gwen?”

“I think you ought to know what kind of woman I am by this time,” retorted his wife, tossing up her head.

Martin Disney and his wife were alone in their sitting-room at the hotel, somewhat bare and unhomelike, as hotel rooms must always be, despite the march of civilization which has introduced certain improvements. He had made a pretence of dining in the coffee-room below, and she had taken some tea and toast beside the fire; and now at ten o’clock they were sitting on each side of the hearth, face to face, pale and thoughtful, and strangely silent.

“Isola, have you forgiven me?” he asked at last.

“With all my heart. Oh, Martin, I could never be angry with you—never. You have been so good to me. How could I be angry?”

“But you have the right to be angry. I ought not to have doubted. I ought to have believed your word against all the world; but that man raised a doubting devil in me. I was mad with fears and suspicions, wild and unreasonable—as I suppose jealousy generally is. I had never been jealous before. Great God! what a fearful passion it is when a man gives himself up to it. I frightened you by my vehemence, and then your scared looks frightened me. I mistook fear for guilt. Isola, my beloved, let me hear the truth from your own lips—the assurance—the certainty,” he cried with impassioned fervour, getting up and going over to her, looking down into the pale, upturned face with those dark, earnest eyes which always seemed to search the mysteries of her heart. “Let there be no shadow of uncertainty or distrust between us. I have heard from your sister that you were with her when you said you were. That is much. It settles for that vile cad’s insinuated slander; but it is not enough. Let the assurance come to me from your lips—from yours alone. Tell me—by the God who will judge us both some day—Are you my own true wife?”

“I am, Martin—I am your own true wife,” she answered, with an earnestness that thrilled him. “I have not a thought that is not of you. I love you with all my heart and mind. Is not that enough?”

“And you have never wronged me? You have been true and pure always? I call upon God to hear your words, Isola. Is that true?”

“Yes, yes; it is true.”

“God bless you, darling! I will never speak of doubt again. You are my own sweet wife, and shall be honoured and trusted to the end of my days. Thank God, the cloud is past, and we can be happy again!”

She rose from her low seat by the fire, and put her arms round his neck, and hid her face upon his breast, sobbing hysterically.

“My own dear girl, I have been cruel to you—brutal and unkind; but you would forgive me if you knew what I have suffered since noon yesterday; and, indeed, my suffering began before then. That man’s harping on Lostwithiel’s name in all his talk with you—his air of meaning more than he said—and your embarrassment, awakened suspicions that had to be set at rest somehow. Remember the disadvantages under which I labour—the difference in our ages; my unattractiveness as compared with younger men. These things predisposed me to doubt your love. I have not had a moment’s peace since the night of that odious dinner-party. Yes; I have felt a new sensation. I know what jealousy means. But it is past. Praise be to God, it is past. I have come out of the cloud again. Oh, my love, had it been otherwise! Had we been doomed to part!”

“What would you have done, Martin?” she asked, in a low voice, with her face still hidden against his breast, his arms still round her.

“What would I have done, love? Nothing to bring shame on you. Nothing to add to your dishonour or sharpen the agony of remorse. I should have taken my son—my son could not be left under the shadow of a mother’s shame. He and I would have vanished out of your life. You would have heard no more of us. The world would have known nothing. You would have been cared for and protected from further evil—protected from your own frailty. So far, I would have done my duty as your husband to the last day of my life; but you and I would never have looked upon each other again.”

Colonel Disney and his wife stayed in London two days; perhaps to give a colour to their sudden and in somewise unexplained journey; but Isola refused all her sister’s invitations, to lunch, to drive, to dine, to go to an afternoon concert at the Albert Hall, or to see the last Shakespearean revival at the Lyceum. She pleaded various excuses; and Gwendolen had to be satisfied with one visit, at afternoon teatime, when husband and wife appeared together, on the eve of their return to Cornwall.

“It was too bad of you not to come to me yesterday morning, as you promised,” Gwendolen said to her sister. “I stayed indoors till after luncheon on your account; and the days are so short at this time of year. I couldn’t do any shopping.”

Mrs. Hazelrigg was one of those young women for whom life is flavourless when they have nothing to buy. She was so well supplied with everything that women desire or care for that she had to invent wants for herself. She had to watch the advertisements in order to tempt herself with some new wish; were it only for a patent toast-rack, or a new design in ivory paper-knives. The stationers helped to keep life in her by their new departures in writing-paper. Papyrus, Mandarin, Telegraphic, Good Form, Casual, mauve, orange, scarlet, verdigris green. So long as the thing was new it made an excuse for sitting in front of a counter and turning over the contents of a show-case.

“You never came to look at my drawing-room by daylight,” she went on complainingly. “You can’t possibly judge the tints by lamplight. Every chair is of a different shade. I think you have treated me shamefully. I have sent you more telegrams than I could count. And I had such lots to talk about. Have you heard from Dinan lately?”

“Not since August, when mother wrote in answer to our invitation for her and father to spend a month with us. I felt it was hopeless when I wrote to her.”

“Utterly hopeless! Nothing will tempt her to cross the sea. She writes about it as if it were the Atlantic. And Lucy Folkestone tells me she is getting stouter.”

“You mean mother?”

“Yes, naturally. There’s no fear of Lucy ever being anything but bones. Mother is stouter and more sedentary than ever, Lucy says. It’s really dreadful. One doesn’t know where it will end,” added Gwendolen, looking down at her own somewhat portly figure, as if fearing hereditary evil.

“I shall have to take Isa and the boy to Dinan next summer,” said Disney. “It is no use asking the father and mother to cross the channel; though I think they would both like to see their grandson.”

“Mother raved about him in her last letter to me,” replied Gwendolen. “She was quite overcome by the photograph you sent her, only she has got into such a groove—her knitting, her novel, her little walk on the terrace, her long consultations with Toinette about the smallest domestic details—whether the mattresses shall be unpicked to-day or to-morrow, or whether the lessive shall be a week earlier or a week later. It is dreadful to think of such a life,” added Gwendolen, as if her own existence were one of loftiest aims.

CHAPTER XVI.

“SORROW THAT’S DEEPER THAN WE DREAM, PERCHANCE.”

Life flowed on its monotonous course, like the Fowey river gliding down from Lostwithiel to the sea; and there seemed nothing in this world that could again disturb Martin Disney’s domestic peace. Vansittart Crowther made no further attempt to avenge himself for the night attack upon his gates; nor did he demand any apology for the vulgar abuse which he had suffered in the sanctuary of his own library. This he endured, and even further outrage, in the shape of the following letter from Colonel Disney:—

“Sir,

“As you have been pleased to take a certain old-womanish interest in my domestic affairs, I think it may be as well to satisfy your curiosity so far as to inform you that when your solicitor travelled in the same train with my wife, she was returning from a visit to her married sister’s house, a visit which had my sanction and approval. I can only regret that her husband’s modest means constrained her to travel alone, and subjected her to the impertinent attentions of one cad and to the slanderous aspersions of another.

“I have the honour to be, “Yours, etc., “Martin Disney.”

Mr. Crowther treated this letter with the silent contempt which he told himself it merited. What could he say to a man so possessed by uxorious hallucinations, so steeped in the poppy and mandragora of a blind affection, that reason had lost all power over his mind.

“I spoke plain enough—as plain as I dared,” said Mr. Crowther. “He may ride the high horse and bluster as much as he likes. I don’t think he’ll ever feel quite happy again.”

Yet in spite of hints and insinuations from the enemy at his gates, Martin Disney was happy—utterly happy in the love of his young wife, and in the growing graces of his infant son. He no longer doubted Isola’s affection. Her tender regard for him showed itself in every act of her life; in every look of the watchful face that was always on the alert to divine his pleasure, to forestall his wishes. Mrs. Baynham went about everywhere expatiating on the domestic happiness of the Disney family, to whom she was more than ever devoted, now that she felt herself in a manner related to them, having been elevated to the position of godmother to the firstborn—a very different thing to being godmother to some sixth or seventh link in the family-chain, when all thought of selection has been abandoned, and the only question mooted by the parents has been, “What good-natured friend can we ask this time?”

Captain Hulbert took his yacht to other waters in November, only to come sailing back again in December, when he finally laid up the Vendetta in winter quarters, and took up his abode at the Mount, where he availed himself of his brother’s stud, which had been reduced to two old hunters and a pair of carriage-horses of mediocre quality. And so the shortening days drew on towards Christmas; baby’s first Christmas, as that small person’s adorers remarked—as if it were a wonderful thing for any young Christian to make a beginning of life—and all was happiness at the Angler’s Nest. All was happiness without a cloud, till one morning—Allegra and her brother being alone in the library, where she sometimes painted at her little table-easel, while he read—she put down her palette and went over to him, laying her hand upon his shoulder as he sat in his accustomed place in the old-fashioned bow-window.

“Martin, I want to speak to you about Isola,” she said, rather tremulously.

“What about her? Why, she was here this minute,” he exclaimed. “Is there anything amiss?”

“I do not think she is so strong as she ought to be. You may not notice, perhaps. A woman is quicker to see these things than a man—and she and I used to walk and row together—I am able to see the difference in her since last year. She seems to me to have been going back in her health for the last month or two, since her wonderful recovery from her illness. Don’t be anxious, Martin!” she said, answering his agonized look. “I feel sure there is nothing that a little care cannot cure; but I want to put you on your guard. I asked her to let me send for Mr. Baynham, and she refused.”

“Why, he sees her two or three times a week—he is in and out like one of ourselves.”

“But he doesn’t see her professionally. He comes in hurriedly late in the evening—or between the lights—to fetch his wife. He is tired, and we all talk to him, and Isa is bright and lively. He is not likely to notice the change in her in that casual way.”

“Is there a change?”

“Yes, I am sure there is. Although I see her every day, I am conscious of the change.”

“Baynham shall talk to her this afternoon.”

“That’s right, Martin—and if I were you I’d have the doctor from Plymouth again.”

Life had been so full of bliss lately, and yet he had not been afraid. Yes, it was the old story. “Metuit secundis.” That is what the wise man does. Fools do otherwise—hug themselves in their short-lived gladness, and say in their hearts, “There is no death.”

Mr. Baynham came in the afternoon, in answer to a little note from Martin Disney, and he and Isola were closeted together in the library for some time, with baby’s nurse in attendance to assist her mistress in preparing for the ordeal by stethoscope. Happily that little instrument which thrills us all with the aching pain of fear when we see it in the doctor’s hand, told no evil tidings of Isola’s lungs or heart. Thero was nothing organically wrong—but the patient was in a very weak state.

“You really are uncommonly low,” said Mr. Baynham, looking at her intently as she stood before him in the wintry sunlight. “I don’t know what you’ve been doing to yourself to bring yourself down so much since last summer—after all the trouble I took to build you up, too. I’m afraid you’ve been worrying yourself about the youngster—a regular young Hercules. I don’t know whether he’d be up to strangling a pair of prize pythons; but I’m sure he could strangle you. I shall send you a tonic; and you’ll have to take a good deal more care of yourself than you seem to have been taking lately.”

And then he laid down severe rules as to diet, until it seemed to Isola that he wished her to be eating and drinking all day—new-laid eggs, cream, old port, beef-tea—all the things which she had loathed in the dreary days of her long illness.

Mr. Baynham had a serious talk with the colonel after he left Isola, and it was agreed between them that she should be taken to Plymouth next day to see the great authority.

“You are giving yourself a great deal too much trouble about me, Martin,” she said. “There is nothing wrong. I am only a little weak and tired sometimes.”

Her husband looked at her heart-brokenly. Weak and tired. Yes; there were all the signs of failing life in those languid movements of the long, slender limbs, in the transparent pallor of the ethereal countenance. Decay was lovely in this fair young form; but he felt that it was decay. There must be something done to stop Misfortune’s hastening feet.

He questioned his wife, he questioned his own memory, as to when the change had begun, and on looking back thus thoughtfully it seemed to him that her spirits and her strength had flagged from the time of Captain Hulbert’s arrival at Fowey. She had seemed tolerably cheerful until then, interested in life, ready to participate in any amusement or occupation of Allegra’s; but from the beginning of their yachting excursions there had been a change. She had shrunk from any share in their plans or expeditions. She had gone on board the yacht—on the two or three occasions when she had been persuaded to go—with obvious reluctance, and she had been silent and joyless all the time she was there. Within the last fortnight, when Captain Hulbert had pressed her to go to luncheon or afternoon tea at the Mount, she had persistently refused. She had begged her husband to take Allegra, and to excuse her.

“The walk up the hill would tire me,” she said.

“My love, why should we walk? I will drive you there, of course.”

“I really had rather not go. I can’t bear leaving baby so long; and there is no necessity for me to be with you. Allegra is the person who is wanted. You must understand that, Martin. You can see how much Captain Hulbert admires her.”

“And I am to go and play propriety while you do baby-worship at home. Rather hard upon me.”

This kind of thing had occurred three or four times since the sailor’s establishment at the Mount, and Colonel Disney had attached no significance to the matter; but now that he had begun to torture himself by unending speculations upon the cause of her declining health, he could but think that Captain Hulbert’s society had been distasteful to her. It might be that Mr. Crowther’s insulting allusions to Lord Lostwithiel had made any association with that name painful; and yet this would seem an overstrained sensitiveness, since her own innocence of all evil should have made her indifferent to a vulgarian’s covert sneers.

CHAPTER XVII.

“THE YEAR OF THE ROSE IS BRIEF.”

Mr. Baynham accompanied his patient and her husband to Plymouth, where the family adviser of Trelasco had a long and serious talk with the leading medical light of the great seaport. The result of which consultation—after the tossing to and fro of such words as anæmia, atrophy, family history, hysteria, between the two doctors, as lightly as if diseases were shuttle-cocks—was briefly communicated to Colonel Disney in a sentence that struck terror to his heart, carefully as it was couched. It amounted in plain words to this: We think your wife’s condition serious enough to cause alarm, although there are at present no indications of organic disease. Should her state of bodily weakness and mental depression continue, we apprehend atrophy, or perhaps chronic hysteria. Under these circumstances, we strongly recommend you to give her a change of scene, and a milder winter climate even than that of the west of England. Were she living in Scotland or Yorkshire we might send her to Penzance; but as it is we should advise either a sea voyage, or a residence for the rest of the winter at Pau, Biarritz, or on the Riviera.

Modern medicine has a high-handed way of sending patients to the uttermost ends of the earth; and although Martin Disney thought with a regretful pang of the house and stables that he had built and beautified for himself, the garden where every shrub was dear, yet he felt grateful to the specialist for not ordering him to take his wife to the banks of the Amazon or to some sheltered valley in Cashmere. Pau is not far—the Riviera is the beaten track of civilized Europe, the highway road to Naples and the East. He thought of the happy honeymoon, when he and his bright young wife had travelled along that garden of oranges and lemons, between the hills and the sea, and how there had been no shadow on their lives except the shadow of impending separation, about which they had talked hopefully, trying to believe that a year or two would not seem very long, trying to project their thoughts into that happy future when there should be no more parting.

This—this dreary present—was that future which they had pictured as a period of unalloyed bliss. What had the future brought to that hopeful husband, going forth at the call of duty, to return with fondest expectations when his work was done? What but a year and a half of wedded life overshadowed by disappointment, darkened by vague doubts? And now came the fear of a longer parting than had lain at the end of his last Italian journey.

The patient herself was told nothing except that change to a warmer climate would be good for her, and that her husband had promised to take her to the South soon after Christmas.

“You will like to go, won’t you, Isola?” he asked her tenderly, as they drove back to the station alone, leaving Mr. Baynham to follow his own devices in the town. “You will enjoy seeing the places we saw together when our marriage was still a new thing?”

“I shall like to go anywhere with you, Martin,” she answered. “But is it really necessary to go away? I know you love Trelasco.”

“Oh, I have the Cornishman’s passion for his native soil; but I am not so rooted to it as to pine in exile. I shall be happy enough in the South, with my dear young wife; especially if I see the roses come back to your cheeks in that land of flowers.”

“But it will cost you such a lot of money to take us all away, Martin; and you could not leave Allegra or the baby. Doctors have such expensive ideas.”

“Allegra, and the boy! Must we take them, do you think, love?”

“We could not leave him,” said Isola, horrified at the bare suggestion; “and it would be very hard to leave Allegra. She bore all the burden of my illness. She has been so good and unselfish. And she will so revel in the South. She has never travelled, she, for whom Nature means so much more than it can for you or me.”

“Well, we will take Allegra, and the boy, whose railway ticket will cost nothing, and his nurse. There is a shot in the locker still, Isa, in spite of last year’s building operations, which cost a good deal more than I expected. We will all migrate together. Consider that settled. The only question that remains is the direction in which we shall go. Shall we make for the Pyrenees or the Maritime Alps? Shall we go to Pau, and Biarritz, or to the Riviera, Hyères, Cannes, Nice?”

Isola was in favour of Pau, but after much consultation of books recording other people’s experiences, it was finally decided that of all places in the world, San Remo was the best winter home for Martin Disney’s wife.

“You can take her up to the Engadine in June,” said Mr. Baynham, who had a superficial familiarity with the Continent from hearing his patients talk about their travels, he himself never having left Cornwall, except for a plunge into the metropolitan vortex during the Cattle Show week. “Or you may spend your summer in Auvergne—unless you want to come home as soon as the cold weather is over.”

“I shall do whatever may be best for her—home or otherwise,” answered Disney. “You may be sure of that.”

The doctor went back to his wife, with whom he always discussed everything, except purely professional matters—there were even occasions when he could not refrain from enlarging upon the interesting features of some very pretty case—and was enthusiastic in his praise of Colonel Disney.

“I never saw such devotion,” he said. “Any other man would think it hard lines to have to strike his tent at a day’s notice, and go off to winter at a strange place, among invalids and old women; but Disney says never a word of his own inclinations or his own inconvenience. He positively adores that young woman. I only hope she’s worth it.”

“She’s very fond of him, Tom,” replied Mrs. Baynham, decisively. “There was a time when I was rather doubtful about that. She seemed listless and indifferent. But since the baby came she has been growing fonder and fonder of her husband. I flatter myself I am a pretty good judge of countenances, and I can read hers. I’ve seen her face light up when the colonel came into the room. I’ve seen her go over to him shyly, as if it were still their honeymoon. She’s a very sweet creature. I took to her from the first; and I shall be dreadfully upset if she goes into a decline.”

The doctor shook his head despondently.

“There’s nothing to fight with in her case,” he said, “and there’s very little to fall back upon. I can’t make her out. She has gone off just like a girl who was simply fretting herself to death; and yet, if she’s fond of her husband, what in Heaven’s name is there for her to fret about?”

“Nothing,” answered his wife. “It’s just a delicate constitution, that’s all. She’s like one of those grape hyacinths that never will stand upright in a vase. The stem isn’t strong enough.”

Allegra was all sympathy and affection. She would go with them—yes, to the end of the world. To go to San Remo would be delightful.

“It is a deliciously paintable place, I know,” she said, “for I have seen bits of the scenery often enough in the exhibitions. I shall work prodigiously, and earn a small fortune.”

She told her brother in the most delicate way that she meant to pay her own expenses in this Italian tour; for of course when Isola should be strong enough they would go about a little, and see the Wonderland of Italy.

Martin protested warmly against any such arrangement.

“Then I shall not go,” she exclaimed. “Do you think me one of the incapable young women of the old school—unable to earn a sixpence, and wanting to be paid for and taken care of like a child? I would have you to know, sir, that I am one of the young women of the new school, who travel third-class, ride on the tops of omnibuses, and earn their own living.”

“But I shall take a house at San Remo, Allegra. Do you expect me to turn innkeeper—charge you for your bed and board?”

“Oh, you are monstrously proud. You can do as you like in your own house, I suppose. But all travelling and hotel expenses will be my affair, remember that.”

“And you don’t mind leaving Trelasco?”

“I am like Ruth. You are my home and my country. Where thou goest I will go.”

“And Captain Hulbert—how will he like to lose you?”

“What am I to Captain Hulbert?” she asked, trying to laugh off the question, but blushing deeply as she bent over her colour-box, suddenly interested in the littered contents.

“A great deal, I fancy, though he may not have found plain speech for his feelings yet awhile.”

“If—if you are not a very foolish person, and there is any foundation for your absurd idea, Captain Hulbert will know where to find us. He can spread his wings and follow.”

“The Vendetta? Yes, she is pretty familiar with the bays and bights of the Mediterranean. No doubt he will follow us, dear. But I should like him to speak out before we go.”

“Then I’m afraid you will be disappointed. He likes coming here—he likes you and Isola, and perhaps he likes me, pretty well, after a fashion; but sailors are generally fickle, are they not? And if he is at all like his brother, Lord Lostwithiel, who seems to have a dreadful reputation, judging by the way people talk of him here——”

“He is not like his brother in character or disposition. If he were, I should be sorry for my sister to marry him.”

“Have you such a very bad opinion of his brother?” asked Allegra, shocked and grieved that any one closely allied to John Hulbert should bear an evil repute.

“Perhaps that would be too much to say. I know so little about him. I have scarcely seen him since he was a lad—only I have heard things which have prejudiced me,” continued Disney, lapsing into moody thoughtfulness.

Was it not Mr. Crowther’s insolence, and that alone, which had prejudiced him against Lostwithiel—had made the very name hateful to him? Yes, that was the cause of his aversion. He had disproved those insolent insinuations; he had exploded the covert slander and rebuked the slanderer; but he had not forgotten. The wound still rankled.

CHAPTER XVIII.

“NO SUDDEN FANCY OF AN ARDENT BOY.”

It was Christmas Eve. All things were arranged for departure on the 28th, which would give time for their arrival at San Remo on New Year’s Day. They were to travel by easy stages, by Amiens, Basle, and Lucerne. A good deal of luggage had been sent off in advance, and trunks and portmanteaux were packed ready for the start; so that the travellers could take their ease during the few days of Christmas church-going and festivity. Isola’s spirits had improved wonderfully since the journey had been decided upon.

“It seems like beginning a new life, Martin,” she told her husband. “I feel ever so much better already. I’m afraid I’m an impostor, and that you are taking a great deal of unnecessary trouble on my account.”

It was such a relief to think that she would see Vansittart Crowther no more, that she could wander where she pleased without the hazard of meeting that satyr-like countenance, those pale protruding eyes, with malevolent stare—such a relief to know that she would be in a new country, where no one would know anything about her, or have any inclination to gossip about her. Something of her old gaiety and interest in life revived at the prospect of those new surroundings.

They were to put up at an hotel for the first few days, so as to take their time in looking for a villa. Two servants were to go with them—the colonel’s valet and handy-man, who was an old soldier, and could turn his hand to anything in house, or stable, or garden; and the baby’s nurse, a somewhat masterful person of seven and twenty, from the Fatherland, surnamed Grunhaupt, but known in the family by her less formidable domestic diminutive Löttchen. Other hirelings would be obtained at San Remo, but these two were indispensable—Holford, the soldier-servant, to bear all burdens, and Löttchen to take charge of the baby, to whom life was supposed to be impossible in any other care.

It was Christmas Eve—the mildest Christmas that had been known for a long time, even in this sheltered corner of the coast. Allegra had been busy all the morning, helping in the church decorations, and co-operating with Mr. Colfox in various arrangements for the comfort of the old and sick and feeble, among the cottages scattered over the length and breadth of a large parish. She had walked a good many miles, and she had stood for an hour in the church, toiling at the decoration of the font, which had been assigned to her, and which she covered with ferns, arbutus, and berberis foliage, in all their varieties of colour, from darkest bronze to vivid crimson, starred with the whiteness of Christmas roses; while the Miss Crowthers lavished the riches of the Glenaveril hothouses upon the pulpit, keeping themselves studiously aloof from Miss Leland.

Not a jot cared Allegra for their aloofness. She disliked their father, and she knew that her brother detested him, without having any clear idea of the cause. She was so thoroughly loyal to Martin that she would have deemed it treason to like any one whom he disliked; so had the daughters of Glenaveril been the most companionable young women in Cornwall she would have considered it her duty to hold them at arm’s length. Glenaveril and all its belongings were taboo.

She was very tired when she went home at four o’clock, just on the edge of dusk here—pitch dark, no doubt, in London and other great cities, where the poor, pinched faces were flitting to and fro in the fitful glare of the butcher’s gas, intent on finding a Christmas joint to fit the slenderest resources. Here, in this quiet valley, the reflected sun-glow still brightened sky, sea, land, and river, and the lamps had not yet been lighted in hall or drawing-room at the Angler’s Nest.

There was a pleasant alternation of firelight and shadow in the long double room, the flames leaping up every now and then, and lighting wall and bookcase, picture and bust, the blue and red of the Mandarin jars, and the golden storks on the black Japanese screen; but it was such a capricious light that it did not show Allegra some one sitting perdu in Martin Disney’s deep elbow chair, a person who sat and watched her with an admiring smile, as she flung off her little felt hat and fur cape, and stretched her arms above her head in sheer weariness, a graceful, picturesque figure, in her plain brown serge gown, belted round the supple waist, and clasped at the throat, like Enid’s, and with never an ornament except the oxydized silver clasps, and the serviceable chatelaine hanging at her side.

The tea-table was set ready in front of the fire, the large Moorish tray on bamboo legs. But there was no sign of Isola; so Miss Leland poured out a cup of tea and began to drink it, still unconscious of a pair of dark eyes watching her from the shadow of the big armchair.

“And am I to have no tea, Miss Leland?” asked a voice out of the darkness.

Allegra gave a little scream, and almost dropped her cup.

“Good gracious!” she exclaimed. “How can you startle any one like that? How do you know that I have not heart disease?”

“I would as soon suspect the goddess Hygeia of that, or any other ailment,” said Captain Hulbert, rising to his full six feet two, out of the low chair in the dark corner by the bookcase. “Forgive me for my bearishness in sitting here while you were in the room. I could not resist the temptation to sit and watch you for a minute or two while you were unconscious of my presence. It was like looking at a picture. While you are talking I am so intent upon what you say, and what you think, that I almost forget to consider what you are like. To-night I could gaze undistracted.”

“What absolute nonsense you talk,” said Allegra, with the sugar-tongs poised above the basin. “One lump—or two?”

“One, two, three—anything you like—up to a million.”

“Do you know that you nearly made me break a tea-cup—one of mother’s dear old Worcester tea-cups? I should never have forgiven you.”

“But as you didn’t drop the tea-cup, I hope you do forgive me for my stolen contemplation, for sitting in my corner there and admiring you in the firelight?”

“Firelight is very becoming. No doubt I looked better than in the daytime.”

“And you forgive me?”

“I suppose so. It is hardly worth while to be angry with you. I shall be a thousand miles away next week. I could not carry my resentment so far. It would cool on the journey.”

“A thousand miles is not far for the Vendetta, Miss Leland. She would make light of crossing the Pacific—for a worthy motive.”

“I don’t know anything about motives; but I thought you were fairly established at the Mount, and that you had made an end of your wanderings.”

“The Mount is only delightful—I might say endurable—when I have neighbours at the Angler’s Nest.”

“Martin will let this house, perhaps, and you may have pleasant neighbours in the new people.”

“I am not like the domestic cat. It is not houses I care for, but individuals. My affections would not transfer themselves to the new tenants.”

“How can you tell that? You think of them to-night as strangers—and they seem intolerable. You would like them after a week, and be warmly attached to them at the end of a month. Why, you have known us for less than three months, and we fancy ourselves quite old friends.”

“Oh, Miss Leland, is our friendship only fancy? Will a thousand miles make you forget me?”

“No, we could not any of us be so ungrateful as to forget you,” answered Allegra, struggling against growing embarrassment, wondering if this tender tone, these vague nothings, were drifting towards a declaration, or were as simply meaningless as much of the talk between men and women. “We can’t forget how kind you have been, and what delightful excursions we have had on the Vendetta.”

“The Vendetta will be at San Remo when you want her, Allegra. She will be as much at your command there as she has been here; and her skipper will be as much your slave as he is here—as he has been almost ever since he saw your face.”

This was not small talk. This meant something very serious. He had called her Allegra, and she had not reproved him; he had taken her hand and she had not withdrawn it. In the next instant, she knew not how, his arm was round her waist, and her head, weary with the long day’s work and anxieties, was resting contentedly on his shoulder, while his lips set their first kiss, tenderly, reverently almost, on her fair broad brow.

“Allegra, this means yes, does it not? Our lives have flowed on together so peacefully, so happily, since last October. They are to mingle and flow on together to the great sea, are they not, love—the sea of death and eternity.”

“Do you really care for me?”

“Do I really adore you? Yes, dear love. With all my power of adoration.”

“But you must have cared for other girls before now. I can’t believe that I am the first.”

“Believe, at least, that you will be the last, as you are the only woman I ever asked to be my wife.”

“Is that really, really true?”

“It is true as the needle to the north.”

“Yet they say that sailors——”

“Are generally tolerable dancers, and popular in a ball-room, especially when they are the givers of the ball—that they can talk to pretty women without feeling abashed—and that they contrive to get through a good deal of flirting without singeing their wings. I have waltzed with a good many nice girls in my time, Allegra, and I have sat out a good many waltzes. Yet I am here at your side, honestly and devotedly your own; and I have never loved any other woman with the love I feel for you. No other woman has ever held my whole heart; no, not for a single hour.”

“You make nice distinctions,” said Allegra, gently disengaging herself from his arm, and looking at him with a faint, shy smile, very doubtful, yet very anxious to believe. “I am dreadfully afraid that all this fine talk means nothing more than you would say to any of your partners, if you happened to be sitting out a waltz.”

“Should I ask any of my partners to be my wife, do you think?”

“Oh, you can withdraw that to-morrow—forget and ignore it. We may both consider it only a kind of under-the-mistletoe declaration, meaning no more than a mistletoe kiss. I believe when English people were domestic and kept Christmas, the head of the family would have kissed his cook if he had met her under the mistletoe.”

“Allegra, is it not cruel of you to be jocose when I am so tremendously serious?”

“What if I don’t believe in your seriousness?”

“Is this only a polite way of refusing me?” he asked, beginning to be offended, not understanding that this nonsense-talk was a hasty defence against overpowering emotion, that she was not sure of him, and was desperately afraid of betraying herself. “Am I to understand that you don’t care a straw for me?”

“No, no, no,” she cried eagerly, “as a friend, I like you better than any one else in the world; only I don’t want to give you more than friendship till I can trust you well enough to believe in your love.”

“Prove it, Allegra,” he cried, clasping her waist again before she was aware. “Put me to any test or any trial—impose any duty upon me. Only tell me that if I come through the ordeal you will be my wife.”

“You are not in a great hurry to fetter yourself, I hope?” she said.

“I am in a hurry—I long for those sweet fetters by which your love will hold me. I want to be anchored by my happiness.”

“Give me a year of freedom, a year for art and earnest work in Italy, a year for Martin and Isola, who both want me; and if this night year you are still of the same mind, I will be your wife. I will not engage you. You may be as free as air to change your mind and love some one else; but I will promise to be true to you and to this talk of ours till the year’s end—one year from to-night.”

“I accept your sentence, though it is severe; but I don’t accept my freedom. I am your slave for a year. I shall be your slave when the year is out. I am yours, and yours alone for life. And now give me that cup of tea, Allegra, which you have not poured out yet, and let us fancy ourselves Darby and Joan.”

“Darby and Joan,” echoed Allegra, as she filled his cup. “Must we be like that: old and prosy, sitting by the fire, while life goes by us outside? It seems sad that there should be no alternative between slow decay and untimely death.”

“It is sad; but the world is made so. And then Providence steeps elderly people in a happy hallucination. They generally forget that they are old; or at least they forget that they ever were young, and they think young people so ineffably silly that youth itself seems despicable to their sober old minds. But you and I have a long life to the good, dear love, before the coming of grey hairs and elderly prejudices.”

And then he began to talk of ways and means, as if they were going to be married next week.

“We shall have enough for bread and cheese,” he said. “I am better off than a good many younger sons; for a certain old grandfather of mine provided for the younger branches. It is quite possible that Lostwithiel may never marry—indeed, he seems to me very decided against matrimony, and in that case those who come after us must inherit title and estate in days to come.”

“Pray don’t talk so,” cried Allegra, horrified. “It sounds as if you were speculating upon your brother’s death.”

“On Lostwithiel’s death? Not for worlds. God bless him, wherever he may be. You don’t know how fond we two fellows are of each other. Only when a man is going to be married it behoves him to think even of the remote future. I shall have to talk to the colonel, remember; and he will expect me to be business-like.”

“I hope you don’t think Martin mercenary,” said Allegra. “There never was a man who set less value on money. It wouldn’t make any difference to him if you had not a penny. And as for me, I have a little income from my mother—more than enough to buy frocks and things—and beyond that I can earn my own living. So you really needn’t trouble yourself about me.”

There was a touching simplicity in her speech, mingled with a slight flavour of audacity, as of an emancipated young woman, which amused her lover, reminding him of a heroine of Murger’s, or Musset’s, a brave little grisette, who was willing to work hard for the ménage à deux, and who wanted nothing from her lover but love. He looked into the candid face, radiant in the fire-glow, and he told himself that this was just the one woman for whom his heart had kept itself empty, like a temple waiting for its god, in all the years of his manhood. And now the temple doors had opened wide, the gates had been lifted up, and the goddess had marched to her place, triumphant and all-conquering.

The clock on the mantelpiece struck six, and the old eight-day clock in the hall followed like a solemn echo. Captain Hulbert started up. “So late! Why, we have been talking for nearly two hours!” he exclaimed, “and I have a budget of letters to write for the night mail. Good-bye, darling—or I’ll say au revoir, for I’ll walk down again after dinner, and get half an hour’s chat with Disney, if you don’t think it will be too late for me to see him.”

“You know he is always pleased to see you—we are not very early people—and this is Christmas Eve. We were to sit round the fire and tell ghost-stories, don’t you remember?”

“Of course we were. I shall be here soon after nine, and I shall think over all the grizzly legends I ever heard, as I come down the hill.”

He went reluctantly, leaving her standing by the fire, a contemplative figure with downcast eyes. At a little later stage in their engagement no doubt she would have gone with him to the door, or even out to the garden gate, for a lingering parting under the stars—but there was a shyness about them both in this sweet dim beginning of their union, when it was so strange to each to have any claim upon the other.

“How lightly she took the whole business,” Captain Hulbert said to himself as he went up the hill. “Yet her voice trembled now and then—and her hand was deadly cold when first I clasped it. I think she loves me. A year,”—snapping his fingers gaily at the stars—“what is a year? A year of bliss if it be mostly spent with her. Besides, long engagements are apt to dwindle. I have seen such engagements—entered on solemnly like ours to-night—shrink to six months, or less. Why should one linger on the threshold of a new life, if one knows it is going to be completely happy?”

The blissful lover had not been gone five minutes when Isola came creeping into the room, and put her arm round Allegra’s neck and kissed her flushed cheek.

“Why, Isa, where have you been hiding all this evening?”

“I had fallen asleep in my room, just half an hour before tea, and when I awoke it was five o’clock, and Löttchen told me you and Captain Hulbert were in the drawing-room. And as I know you two have always so much to talk about, I thought I wouldn’t disturb you. So I let Löttchen make tea for me in the nursery, and I stayed there to play with baby. And here you are all in the dark.”

“Oh, we had the firelight—Parker forgot to bring the lamp.”

“And you forgot to ring for it,” said Isola, going over to the bow-window, and drawing back a curtain. “What a lovely sky! Who would think it was Christmas-time?”

The moon was in her second quarter, shining brilliantly, in the deep purple of a sky almost without a cloud.

“Will you put on your hat and jacket and come for a stroll in the garden, Isa?” asked Allegra. “It is a mild, dry night, and I don’t think the air can hurt you.”

“Hurt me! It will do me all the good in the world. Yes, I shall be ready in a moment.”

They went out into the hall, where Allegra packed her sister-in-law carefully in a warm, fur-lined jacket, and flung a tartan shawl round her own shoulders. Then they went out into the garden, and to the lawn by the river. The moon was shining on the running water, brightly, coldly, clear, while the meadows on the opposite bank were wrapped in faint, white mists, which made all the landscape seem unreal.

“Are you not too tired for walking here after your long day, Allegra?” Isola asked, when they had gone up and down the path two or three times.

“Tired, no. I could walk to Tywardreath. I could walk to the Mausoleum. Shall we go there? The sea must be lovely under that moon.”

“My dearest, it is nearly seven o’clock, and you have been tramping about all day. If you are not very tired, you must be very much excited, Allegra. I am longing to hear what it all means.”

“Are you really, now? Do you care about it, Isola? Can you, who are firmly anchored in the haven of marriage, feel any sentimental interest in other people, tossing about on the sea of courtship? Martin is to be told everything to-night—so you may as well know all about it now. You like Captain Hulbert, don’t you, Isola?”

“I do, indeed. I like him, and believe in him.”

“Thank Heaven! I should have been miserable if you had doubted or disliked him. He is to be my husband some day, Isa, if Martin approve—but not for a year, at least. Tell me, dear, are you glad?”

“Yes, I am very glad. God bless you, Allegra, and make your life happy—and free—from—care.”

She broke down with those last faltered words, and Allegra discovered that she was crying.

“My dearest Isa, don’t cry! I shall fancy you are sorry—that you think him unworthy.”

“No, no, no. It is not that. He is worthy. He is all that I could desire in the man who is to be your husband. No, I was only thinking how completely happy you and he must be—how cloudless your life promises to be. God keep you, and guard you, dear! And may you never know the pain of parting with the husband you love—with your protector and friend—as I have known it.”

“Yes, love; but that is all past and done with. There are to be no more farewells for you and Martin.”

“No, it is past, thank God! Yet one cannot forget. I am very glad Captain Hulbert has left the navy—that his profession cannot call him away from you.”

“No, he is an idle man. I dare say the time will come when I shall be plagued with him, and be almost obliged to suggest that he should keep race-horses, or go on the Stock Exchange, to occupy his time. I have heard women say that it is terrible to have a stay-at-home husband. Yet Martin is never de trop—but then Martin can bury himself in a book. He has no fidgety ways.”

“How lightly you talk, Allegra.”

“Perhaps that is because my heart is heavy—heavy, not with grief and care, but with the burden of perplexity and surprise, with the fear that comes of a great joy.”

“You do love him, then?” said Isola, earnestly. “You are glad.”

“I am very glad. I am glad with all my heart.”

“God bless you, dearest! I rejoice in your happiness.”

They kissed again, this time with tears on both sides; for Allegra was now quite overcome, and sobbed out her emotion upon her sister’s neck; they two standing clasped in each other’s arms beside the river.

“When I am dead, Allegra, remember always that I loved you, and that I rejoiced in your happiness as if it were my own.”

“When you are dead! How dare you talk like that, when we are taking you away to get well and strong, and to live ever so many years beyond your golden wedding? Was there ever such ingratitude?”

The odour of tobacco stole on the evening air, and they heard Martin’s firm tread approaching along the gravel path.

Isola put her arm through his, while Allegra ran into the house, and husband and wife walked up and down two or three times in the darkness, she telling him all about the wonderful thing that had happened.

“You are glad, are you not, Martin? You are as glad as I am?”

“Are you so very glad?”

“Yes, for I know that Allegra loves him, has loved him for a long time.”

“Meaning six weeks or so—allowing a fortnight for the process of falling in love. Is that what you call a long time, Isola?”

“Weeks are long sometimes,” she answered, slowly, as if her thoughts had wandered into another channel.

“Well, if Allegra is pleased, I suppose I ought to be content,” said Disney. “Hulbert seems a fine, frank fellow, and I have never heard anything to his discredit. He was popular in the navy, and was considered a man of marked ability. I dare say people will call him a good match for Allegra, so long as Lostwithiel remains a bachelor.”

“No one can be too good for Allegra, and only the best of men can be good enough. If I had my own way, I should have liked her to remain always unmarried, and to care for nothing but her nephew and you. I should have liked to think of her as always with you.”

The triangular dinner-party was gayer that evening than it had been for a long time. Isola was in high spirits, and her husband was delighted at the change from that growing apathy which had so frightened him. The ladies had scarcely left the table when Captain Hulbert arrived, and was ushered into the dining-room, where Martin Disney was smoking his after-dinner pipe in the chimney corner—the old chimney corner of that original Angler’s Nest, which had been a humble homestead two hundred years ago.

The two men shook hands, and then John Hulbert seated himself on the opposite side of the hearth, and they began to talk earnestly of the future, Martin Disney speaking with fond affection of the sister who had been to him almost as a daughter.

“Her mother was the sweetest and truest of women,” he said, “and her father had one of the most refined and delicate natures I ever met with in a man. I do not know that he was altogether fitted for the Church. He was wanting in energy and decision, or force of character; but he was a firm believer, pure-minded and disinterested, and he was an artist to the tips of his fingers. It is from him Allegra inherits her love of art; only while he was content to trifle with art she has worked with all the power of her strong, resolute temperament. She inherits that from her mother’s line, which was a race of workers, men with whom achievement was a necessity of existence—men who fought, and men who thought—sword and gown.”

Disney smiled at the stern condition of a year’s probation which Allegra had imposed upon her lover.

“Such sentences are very often remitted,” he said.

“I own to having some hope of mercy,” replied Captain Hulbert. “People have an idea that May marriages are unlucky; and perhaps we had better defer to a popular superstition. But it seems to me that June is a capital month for a yachtsman’s honeymoon; and if I can persuade my dearest to remit half my period of probation, and fix the 1st of June for our wedding, I should be just half a year happier than I am now.”

“Have you any notion yet what kind of life you are to lead after your marriage? I hope it will not be a roving life. Isola and I would like to have our sister near us.”

“And Allegra and I would like to study your liking,” laughed Hulbert. “We may wander a little on summer seas, but we will have our fixed abode, and it shall be near you. So long as Lostwithiel is a bachelor, we can make our home at the Mount; but fond as I am of that dear old place, I should be glad to see my brother married. There is something amiss in his present mode of life; and I have but too strong reason to fear that he is not a happy man.”

“Have you any idea of the cause of his unhappiness?”

“Only speculative ideas—mere theories that may be without foundation in fact. I fancy that he has burnt the lamp of life a little too furiously, and that the light has grown dim in the socket. The after-taste of a fiery youth is the taste of dust and ashes. There may be memories, too—memories of some past folly—which are bitter enough to poison his life. I know that he is unhappy. I have tried to find out the cause; and it all ends in this—an obstinate reserve on his part, and mere theorizing on mine.”

“I have heard that he lived in a bad set after he left the University?”

“A bad set—yes, that is it. A man who begins life in a certain circle is like a workman who gets his arm or his leg caught unawares in a machine worked by steam power. In an instant he is entangled past rescue. He is gone. A man takes the wrong road. Ten years afterwards, perhaps, when he is bald and wrinkled, he may pull himself up on the downward track and try to get rid of a bad reputation and make a fresh start; but those fresh starts rarely end in a winning race. I am very sorry for my brother. He is a warm-hearted fellow, with a good deal of talent; and he ought not to have made a bad thing of his life.”

“Let us hope that he has pulled up in time, and that he may get a young wife before he is many years older. I have no desire that my sister’s son should be a peer. I only want to see her happy with a husband who shall be worthy of her.”

CHAPTER XIX.

“I HAVE YOU STILL, THE SUN COMES OUT AGAIN.”

The new year was just a week old, and Isola and Allegra were standing on a terraced hillside in a country where January has noontides as brilliant and balmy as an English June. They had travelled up that almost perpendicular hill in a roomy landau drawn by a pair of strong horses, and now, near the summit of the hill, on the last of those many terraces that zig-zag up the face of the cliff, they had alighted from the carriage, and were standing side by side upon the broad white road, at an angle where the cliff dipped suddenly, clothed with the wild growth of stunted olive and bushy pine, down and down to the abyss where the blue sea looked like a sapphire at the bottom of a pit. They stood and gazed, and gazed again, almost bewildered by the infinite beauty and variety of that dazzling prospect.

Below them, in the shelter of the land-locked bay, Ospedaletti’s pavilioned Casino shone whitely out of a garden of palm and cactus, with terrace and balustrade vanishing down by the sea. To the right, the steep promontory of Bordighera jutted far out into the blue; and over the rugged crest of the hill Mentone’s long white front lay in a gentle curve, almost level with the sea—a strip of vivid white between the blue of the water and the gloom of that great barren mountain wall which marks the beginning of modern Italy. And beyond, again, showed the twin towers of Monaco; and further still, in the dim blue distance, rose the battlemented line of the Esterelles, dividing the fairyland of the Riviera from the workaday realities of shipbuilding Toulon and commercial Marseilles.

On this side of those pine-clad mountains there were only pleasure and fancy, wealth, fashion, the languid invalid, and the feverish gambler; on the other side there were toilers and speculators, the bourse and the port, the world of stern fact.

To the left, deep down within the hills, lay the little harbour of San Remo, with its rugged stone pier and its shabby old houses, and the old, old town climbing up the steep ascent to that isolated point where the white dome of the Sanctuary shone out against the milky azure of the noontide sky; and further and further away stretched the long line of the olive-clothed hills, to the purple distance, where the seamen’s church of Madonna della Guardia stands boldly out between sky and sea, as if it were a half-way house on the road to heaven.

“How lovely it all is!” cried Allegra. “But don’t you feel that one careless step upon that flowery edge yonder would send us whirling down the cliffs to awful, inevitable death? When that man passed us just now with his loaded cart, I felt sick with fear—the wheels seemed to graze the brink of the abyss as the horse crept slowly along—poor stolid brute!—unconscious of his danger. It is a dreadful drive, Isola, this zig-zag road to Colla—slant above slant, backwards and forwards, up the face of this prodigious cliff. I had to shut my eyes at every turn of the road, when the world below seemed to swim in a chaos of light and colour—so beautiful, so terrible! Do you see the height of those cliffs, terrace above terrace, hill above hill? Why, that level road at the very bottom is the top of a taller cliff than those I used to think so appalling at Broadstairs and Ramsgate!”

“I don’t think it would make much difference to a man who fell over the edge whether he fell here or in the Isle of Thanet,” said Martin Disney, as he stood, with his arm drawn through his wife’s, sweeping the prospect with his field glass.

“Oh, but it would! One would be only a sudden shock and a plunge into the sea, or swift annihilation on the rocks below; but from this awful height—think of the horror of it! To go whirling down, plucked at here by an olive branch, or there by a jagged rock, yet always whirling downward, rebounding from edge to edge, faster, and faster, and faster, till one were dashed into a shapeless mass on that white road yonder!”

“And to think of people living up there in the clouds, and going to sleep every night with the knowledge of this mighty wall and that dreadful abyss in their minds!” she concluded, pointing upward to where the little white town of Colla straggled along the edge of the hill.

They were going up to see the pictures and books in the little museum by the church. It was their first excursion, since their arrival in Italy, for Martin Disney had been anxious that his wife should be thoroughly rested after her long journey, before she was called upon to make the slightest exertion. She was looking better and stronger already, they were both agreed; and she was looking happier, a fact which gave her husband infinite satisfaction. They had come by the St. Gothard, had rested a night at Dover and a night at Basle, and had stopped at Lucerne for three days, and again a couple of days at Milan, and again at Genoa, exploring the city, and the Campo Santo in a leisurely way; Allegra exalted out of herself almost by the delight of those wonderful collections in the palaces of the Via Balbi—the Veroneses, the Titians, the Guidos—Isola languidly admiring, languidly wondering at everything, but only deeply moved when they came to the strange city of the dead, the scenic representation of sickness, calamity, grief and dissolution, in every variety of realistic representation or of classic emblem. Sculptured scenes of domestic sorrow, dying fathers, kneeling children, weeping widows—whole families convulsed in the throes of that last inevitable parting; the death of youth and beauty; the fallen rose-wreath; the funeral urn; the lowered torch; hyacinth and butterfly; Psyche and Apollo; the fatal river and the fatal boat; grimness and beauty—the actual and the allegorical curiously mixed in the sculptured images that line the cold white colonnades, where the footsteps of holiday-makers echo with a sepulchral sound under the vaulted roof. Here Isola was intensely interested, and insisted on going up the marble steps, flight after flight, and to the very summit of the hill of graves, with its wide-reaching prospect of mountain, and fort, and city, and sea.

“Think how hard it must be to lie here and know nothing of all that loveliness,” she said, her eyes widening with wonder as they gazed across the varied perspective of vale and mountain, out to the faint blue sea. “How hard, how hard! Do they feel it and know it, Allegra? Can this I—which feels so keenly, which only sleeps in order to enter a new world of dreams—busier and more crowded and more eventful than the real world—can this consciousness go out all at once like the flame of a candle—and nothing, nothing, nothing be left?”

“They are not here,” said Allegra, with gentle seriousness. “It is only the husk that lies here—the flower-seed has been carried off in God’s great wind of death—and the flower is blossoming somewhere else.”

“One allegory is as good as another,” said Isola. “We can but console ourselves with symbols. I don’t like this crowded city of the dead, Allegra. For God’s sake, don’t let Martin have me buried here, if I should die at San Remo!”

“Dearest, why will you harbour such ghastly thoughts?”

“Oh, it was only a passing fancy. I thought it just possible that if I were to die while we are in Italy, Martin might think to honour me by having me laid in this splendid cemetery. He seemed so struck by the grandeur and beauty of the monuments, just now, when we were in those colonnades down yonder.”

Colonel Disney had lingered a little way off to look at Mazzini’s monument. He came up to them now, and hurried them back to the gate, where their carriage was waiting. And so ended their last afternoon in Genoa; and the most vivid picture of the city and its surroundings that Isola carried away with her was the picture of those marble tombs upon the hill, and those tall and gloomy cypresses which are the trees of death.

Yes, she was better, gayer, and more active—more like the girl-wife whom Martin Disney had carried home to Cornwall, prouder than Tristram when he sailed away with Irish Isolt.

The Italian sunshine had revived his fading flower, Disney told himself, ready to love all things in a land that had brought the smiles back to his wife’s pale lips, and a delicate bloom to her wan cheeks. Yes, she was happier than she had been of late in Cornwall. He saw and rejoiced in the change.

They stayed at a hotel for more than a week, while they deliberated upon the choice of a villa. They found one at last, which seemed to realize their ideas of perfection. It was not a grand or stately dwelling. No marble bell-tower or architectural loggia attracted the eye of the passing pedestrian. It was roomy, and bright, and clean, and airy, built rather in the Swiss than the Italian style, and it stood upon the slope of the hill on the west side of the town, with nothing but olive-woods between its terraced garden and the road that skirted the sea. It was a reminiscence of the Alps, built by a retired merchant of Zurich, and its owner had called it Lauter Brunnen. The house was at most two years old; but life’s vicissitudes had left it empty for a year and a half, and the rent asked of Colonel Disney was much less than he had been prepared to pay.

The installation was full of delight for Isola and her sister-in-law. The house afforded innumerable surprises, unexpected nooks and corners of all kinds. There were lovely views from every window—east, west, north, or south—and there was a garden full of roses, a garden made upon so steep a slope that it was a succession of terraces, with but little intervening level ground, and below the lowest terrace the valley stretched down to the sea, a tangle of gnarled old olive trees, wan and silvery, with a ruined gateway just seen among the foliage at the bottom of a dim grey glade.

To the right, straggling along the edge of the wooded hill, appeared the white houses and churches, cupola, pinnacle, and dome of Colla, so scattered as to seem two towns rather than one, and with picturesque suggestions of architectural splendour that were hardly borne out by the reality, when one climbed those rugged mule-paths, and crossed the romantic gorge above the waterfall, and then upward and upward to the narrow alleys and crumbling archways, and the spacious old church with its lofty doorway standing high above the stony street.

Only a few paces from Colonel Disney’s villa there was a stately house that had gone to ruin. The roof was off in some places; there were neither floors nor windows left; and the walls were open to the wind and rain—frescoed walls, upon which might be traced figures of saint and martyr, angel and madonna. There was a spacious garden, with an avenue of cypresses—a garden where the flowers had been growing wild for years, and where Isola and Allegra wandered and explored as they pleased. It was higher on the hillside than their own villa, and from the eastward edge of this garden they looked—across a yawning gulf in which lay all the lower town of San Remo—to the Sanctuary and the Leper Hospital, conspicuous on the crest of the opposite hill.

The need for Citadel and Sanctuary had passed with the fiercer age in which they were built. Neither Saracen nor pirate menaced San Remo nowadays; but the old white walls made a picturesque note in the landscape, and the very name of Sanctuary had a romantic sound.

The first week in the new house was like a week in fairyland. The weather was peerless—a climate that makes people forget there is such a season as winter in the world—and the two girls wandered about in the olive woods and climbed the mule-paths all through the fresh balmy hours or in the hottest noontides sat in the deserted garden or in a sheltered corner near an old stone well—one of those wells which suggest the meeting of Isaac and Rebecca—and Allegra painted while Isola read to her, in the low sweet voice which lent new and individual music to the sweetest verse of her favourites, Byron, Keats, and Shelley.

In these sequestered spots, where only a peasant woman laden with a basket of olives, or a padre, going from Colla to San Remo, ever passed within sight of them, they read the Eve of St. Agnes and the Pot of Basil—the Prisoner of Chillon, Manfred, and all those familiar lyrics and favourite passages of Shelley which Isola held in her heart of hearts. The wonder-dream of Alastor—the passionate lament of Adonaïs, could not seem purer or more spiritual than the life of these young women in those calm days through which January slipped into February, unawares, like a link in a golden chain—a chain of sunshine and flowers.

In February came the Carnival; and pretty little rustic San Remo decked itself with bunting and greenery, and made believe to hold a Battle of Flowers, which had a certain village simplicity as compared with the serried ranks of carriages, the fashion, and beauty, and wealth of floral displays, along the Promenade des Anglais or the Croisette. With the Carnival came the mistral, which generally seems to be waiting round the corner ready to leap out upon the flower-throwers, to blight their bouquets, and blow dust into the eyes of beauty, and make the feeble health-seekers cower in the corners of their rose-decked carriages. This Lenten season was no exception to other seasons; and the calendar—which had been as it were in abeyance since New Year’s Day—came into force again—and stern and sterile Winter said, “Here am I. Did you think I had forgotten you?” The invalids were roughly awakened from their dream of Paradise, to discover that February even in San Remo meant February, and could not always be mistaken for May or June.

Isola felt the change, though she was hardly conscious of it on the day of the floral battle, when she was sitting in a roomy landau, covered with the dark shining foliage and pale yellow fruit from some of those lemon trees in the orchard where she and Allegra had spent their morning hours. Allegra had planned the decorations, and had gone down to the coach-house to assist in the work, delighted to chatter with the coachman in doubtful Italian, groping her way in a language in which her whole stock-in-trade consisted of a few quotations from Dante or Petrarch—and all the wise saws of Dr. Riccabocca.

“I would have none of that horrid pepper tree which pervades the place with its floppy foliage, and dull red fruit,” she told Isola, descanting on the result of her exertions. “I was rather taken with the pepper trees at first, but I am satiated with their languid grace. They are like the weeping ash or the weeping willow. There is no real beauty in them. I would rather have one of those cypresses towering up among the grey-green olives in the valley below Colla than all the pepper trees in the public gardens. I have used no flowers but narcissus; no colour but the pale gold of the lemons and the dark green of the leaves; except one bit of audacity which you will see presently.”

This was at noon, after two hours’ work in the coach-house. An hour later the carriage was at the door.

Allegra’s audacity was an Algerian curtain, a rainbow of vivid colour, with which she had draped the back of the landau, hiding all the ugliness of rusty leather. The carriage, or it might have been the two girlish faces in it, one so pale and gentle, the other so brilliant and changeful in its lights and shadows, made the point of attraction in the little procession. Everybody spoke of the two girls in the lemon landau, with the nice-looking, middle-aged man. Were they his daughters, people wondered, or his nieces; and at what hotel were they staying? It was a disappointment to discover that they were living in that villa to the west of the town, out of the way of everything and everybody, and that they were seldom to be seen in public, except at the new church, where they were regular worshippers.

“The man is Colonel Disney, and the tall, striking-looking girl is his wife,” said one person better informed than the rest, but making a wrong selection all the same.

CHAPTER XX.

“THOU PARADISE OF EXILES, ITALY.”

Isola was not quite so well after that drive in the February wind and dust. She developed a slight cough—very slight and inoffensive; but still it was a cough—and the kind and clever physician of San Remo, who came to see her once a week or so, told her to be careful. Mr. Baynham had written him a long letter about his patient, and the San Remo doctor felt a friendly interest in Isola and her sister-in-law, and the baby son in whom the whole family were so intensely interested. The infant had accepted the change in his surroundings with supreme complaisance, and crowed and chirruped among the lemons and the olives, and basked in the Southern sunshine, as his nurse wheeled his perambulator to and fro upon the terraced road behind the villa—the road which lost itself a little way further on amidst a wilderness of olives, and dwindled into a narrow track for man or mule.

The flower-battle was over, and the mistral had gone back to the great wind-cavern to lie in wait for the next golden opportunity; and the sun was shining once again upon the hills where the oil mills nestled, clinging to some rough ledge beside the ever-dropping waters, upon the labyrinthine lanes and alleys, the queer little flights of stone steps up which a figure like Ali Baba might generally be seen leading his heavily-laden, long-suffering donkey; upon arch and cupola, church and market-place, and on the triple rampart of hills that shuts San Remo from the outer world. The Disneys had been in Italy nearly seven weeks, and it seemed as natural to Isola to open her eyes upon the broad blue waters of the Mediterranean, the gorgeous sunrise, and the lateen sails, as on the Fowey river and the hills towards Polruan. She had taken kindly to this Italian exile. The sun and the blue sky had exercised a healing influence upon that hidden wound which had once made her heart seem one dull, aching pain. She loved this new world of wood and hill, and most of all she loved the perfect liberty of this distant retreat, and the consolations of solitude. As for the cough, or the pain in her side, or any of those other symptoms about which the doctor talked to her so gravely, she made very light of them. She was happy in her husband’s love, happy in his society, strolling with him in the olive wood, or the deserted garden, or down to the little toy-shop parade by the sea, where the band played once a week; or to the other garden in the town, where the same band performed on another day, and which was dustier and less airy than the little plantation of palm and cactus upon the edge of the sea. She went for excursions with him to points of especial beauty high up among the hills—to the chocolate mill, to San Romolo, she riding a donkey, he at the animal’s side, while the guide trudged cheerily in the dust at the edge of the mountain road. In the evening she played to him, or sat by his side while he smoked the pipe of rest, or worked while he read to her. They had never been more devoted to each other, never more like wedded lovers than they were now. People who only knew them by sight talked of them admiringly, as if their love were an interesting phenomenon.