ALL ALONG THE RIVER (continued 7)

“Tell her that I have set my heart upon seeing her married,” said Isola, in a low voice.

“Why, of course, you will see her married, whether she be married in Rome or at Trelasco. That is no argument.”

“But it is; indeed it is. Tell her that, if I am to be at her wedding, it must be soon, very soon. Life is so uncertain at best—and, although I feel well and strong, sometimes—to-day, for instance—there are other times when I think the end is nearer than even my doctor suspects. And I know by his face that he does not give me a long lease of life.”

“My dear Mrs. Disney, this is morbid. I am grieved to hear you talk in such a strain.”

“Don’t notice that. Don’t say anything depressing to Allegra. I want her to go off to her Venetian honeymoon very happily—with not one cloud in her sky. She has been so good and dear to me. It would be hard if I could not rejoice in her happiness. I have rejoiced in it always; I shall take pleasure in it to the end of my life. It is the one unclouded spot——.” She stopped with a troubled air. “Yes, it is a happy fate—to have cared for one, and one only, and to be loved again. Will you do what I ask you, Captain Hulbert? will you hurry on the wedding—for my sake?”

“I would do anything difficult and unwelcome for your sake—how much more will I hasten my own happiness—if I can. But Allegra is a difficult personage—as firm as rock when she has once made up her mind. And she has made up her mind to stay with you till you are quite well and strong again.”

“She need not leave me for ever, because she marries. She can come back to me after a long honeymoon. We can all meet in Switzerland in August—if—if I go there with Martin, as he proposes.”

“Well, I will try to bend that stubborn will.”

“And you don’t mind having a quiet wedding, if she consents to a much earlier date?”

“Mind? The quieter the better for me! I think a smart wedding is a preventive of matrimony. That sounds like a bull. I will say I think there are many wretched bachelors living in dismal chambers, and preyed upon by landladies, who might have been happily married, but for the fear of a smart wedding. We will have as quiet a wedding as you and Disney can desire; but I should like Lostwithiel to be present. He is my only near relation, and I don’t want to cut him on the happiest day of my life. Why, Mrs. Disney, you are trembling! You have agitated yourself about this business; you have talked too much for your strength. Let me take you back to the carriage.”

“Presently—yes, yes. The heat overcame me for a moment, that’s all. Would you mind not waiting for Lord Lostwithiel? I want the marriage to be at once—directly—as soon as Father Rodwell can get it arranged. And you don’t know where a telegram would reach your brother?”

“Indeed, I do not; but by speculating a few messages of inquiry I could soon find out the whereabouts of the Eurydice.”

“Don’t wait for that. There would be delay. There must be delay if you have to consult any distant person’s convenience. We are all here—you and Allegra, and Martin and I—and Father Rodwell would like to marry you. What do you want with anybody else?”

“Upon my word, I think you are right! Allegra is a creature of impulse—where principle is not at stake. If I asked her to marry me six weeks hence she would parley and make terms. If I ask her to marry me in a few days—before we leave Rome—she may consent. Have you talked to your husband? Is he of your opinion?”

“I have said nothing to him; but I know he would be pleased to see you and Allegra bound together for life.”

“I will talk to him this afternoon. One can get everything one wants in Rome, I believe, from a papal dispensation down to an English solicitor. If we can but rattle through some kind of marriage settlement to your husband’s satisfaction we can be married on the earliest day to which my darling will consent. God bless you, Mrs. Disney, for your unselfish thought of other people’s happiness! You are not like most invalids, who would let a sister languish in lifelong spinsterhood rather than lose her as a nurse. God grant that your unselfishness may be recompensed by speedy recovery!”

“There will be a weight off my mind when you and Allegra are married,” said Isola, gravely.

They walked slowly back to the spot where they had left their companions. A pair of oxen, with an empty cart, were standing in the road below the tomb, their driver lounging across the rough vehicle—man and beasts motionless as marble. Allegra sat on a hillock opposite, sketching the group. She had bribed the man to draw up for a brief halt while she made her sketch. The massive heads were drooping under the afternoon sun; the tawny and cream-hued coats were stained with dust and purpled with the sweat of patient labour. The creatures looked as gracious and as wise as if they had been gods in disguise.

“Now, Allegra,” said her brother, emptying the ashes out of his pipe, “are you ready to go home?”

“Yes, I have just jotted down what will serve to remind me of those splendid beasts; but I should like to have them standing there all day, so that I could paint them seriously. They are the finest models I have seen in Rome. Have you two quite finished your secrets and mysteries?” she asked, smiling at Isola, who was looking brighter than usual.

“Yes; I have said all I had to say, and have been answered as I wished to be answered. I shall go home very happy.”

“That’s a good hearing,” said Disney, as he helped her into the landau.

Allegra had talked of wanting to revisit Caracalla’s Baths, a wish of which Isola reminded her as they drove back to the city, along the Appian Way: whereupon Captain Hulbert suggested that he and his sweetheart should stop to explore the ruins, while Disney and Isola went home.

Allegra blushed and consented, always a little shy at being alone with her lover, especially since he had pleaded so earnestly for a summer honeymoon.

“Mrs. Disney, your right place in Rome would be the Embassy,” murmured Hulbert as he shut the carriage door; “you are a born diplomatist.”

“What makes my dearest look so pleased and happy this afternoon?” asked Disney, as he changed to the seat beside his wife.

“I am glad because I think Captain Hulbert will persuade Allegra to marry him before we leave Rome. I begged him to hasten their marriage. That was my mystery, Martin. That was what he and I were talking about.”

“But why wish to hasten matters, dear? They are very happy as it is—and a year is not a long engagement.”

“Too long for me, Martin. I want to see her happy—I want to see them married before——”

“Before what, dear love?” he asked tenderly.

“Before we leave Rome.”

“That would be very short work. We leave in a fortnight. The weather will be growing too hot for you if we linger later.”

“Yes, but everything can be settled in less time than that. Ask Father Rodwell. He knows Rome so well that he can help you to arrange all details.”

“I thought that every young woman required at least six months for the preparation of her trousseau?”

“Not such a girl as Allegra. She is always well dressed, and her wardrobe is the perfection of neatness—but she is not the kind of girl to make a fuss about her clothes. I don’t think the trousseau will create any difficulty.”

“And when she is gone, what will you do without your devoted companion? Who will nurse you and take care of you?”

“Löttchen, or any other servant,” she answered, with a kind of weary indifference. “It would be very hard if my bad health should stand in the way of Allegra’s happiness. So long as you will stay with me and be kind to me, Martin, I need no one else.”

Tears were streaming down her cheeks as she turned from him, pretending to be interested in the convent walls on the edge of the hill below which they were driving.

“So long as I stay with you! My darling, do you think business or pleasure, or any claim in this world, will ever take me from you any more? All your hours are precious to me, Isola. I hardly live when I am away from you. Wherever your doctor may send you, or your own fancy may lead you, I shall go with you, unhesitatingly—without one regret for anything I leave behind.”

“Don’t say these things,” she cried suddenly, with a choking sob; “you are too good to me. There are times when I can’t bear it.”

CHAPTER XXVI.

“SO, FULL CONTENT SHALL HENCEFORTH BE MY LOT.”

Allegra was not inexorable. There, in the ruins of the Imperial baths, where Shelley dreamed the wonder-dream of his Prometheus, Captain Hulbert pleaded his cause. Could love resist the pleading of so fond a lover? Could art withstand the allurements of Venice—Titian and Tintoret, the cathedral of St. Mark and the Palace of the Doges, the birthplace of Desdemona and of Shylock, the home of Byron and of Browning?

She consented to a Roman marriage.

“I can’t help wishing I could be a Papist just for that one day,” she said lightly. “An Anglican marriage seems so dry and cold compared with the pomps and splendours of Rome.”

“Dearest, the plainest Christian rites are enough, if they but make us one.”

“I think we are that already, John,” she answered shyly; and then, nestling by his side as they sat in the wide solitude of that stupendous pile, she took his hand and held it in both her own, looking down at it wonderingly—a well-formed hand, strong and muscular, broadened a little by seafaring.

“And you are to be my husband,” she said. “Mine! I shall speak of you to people as my own peculiar property. ‘My husband will do this or that.’ ‘My husband has gone out, but he will be home soon.’ Home. Husband. How strange it sounds!”

“Strange and wonderful now, love. Sweet and familiar before our honeymoon is ended.”

They went out of the broad spaces that were once populous with the teeming life of Imperial Rome, splendid with all that art could create of beauty and of grandeur—wrapt in the glamour of their dream. They walked all the way to the Piazza di Spagna in the same happy dream, as unconscious of the ground they trod on as if they had been floating in the air.

They were a very cheerful party at dinner that evening. Father Rodwell dined with them, and was delighted at the idea of having to marry these happy lovers. He took the arrangement of the ceremony into his own hands. The English chaplain was his old friend, and would let him do what he liked in his church.

“It is to be a very quiet wedding,” said the colonel, when the three men were smoking together in a loggia, looking on the little garden of orange trees and oleanders, in the grey dim beginning of night, when the thin crescent moon was shining in a sky still faintly flushed with sunset. “Isa could not stand anything like bustle or excitement. Luckily we have no friends in Rome. There is no one belonging to us who could be aggrieved at not being invited.”

“And there is no one except Lostwithiel on my side who has the slightest claim to be present,” said Hulbert. “I am almost as well off as the Flying Dutchman in that respect. I am not troubled with relations. All the kinsfolk I have are distant, and I allow them to remain so. My dear Disney, so far as I am concerned, our wedding cannot be too quiet a business. It is the bride I want, mark you, not the fuss and flowers, wedding-breakfast, and bridesmaids. Let us be married at half-past ten, and drive from the church to the railway station in time for the noonday train. I have given up my dream of taking Allegra round Southern Italy to the Adriatic. We shall go to Florence first, and spend a few days in the galleries, and thence to Venice, where we will have the Vendetta brought to us, and anchored near the arsenal, ready to carry us away directly we are tired of the city of old memories.”

Father Rodwell left them and went into the drawing-room, where Isola and her sister-in-law were sitting in the lamplight—Isola’s hands occupied with that soft, fluffy knitting which seemed to exercise a soothing influence upon her nerves; Allegra leaning over the table, idly sketching random reminiscences of the Baths, the Tomb, the grave-eyed oxen, with their great curving horns and ponderous foreheads.

The priest was interested in watching Isola this evening. He saw a marked change in the expression of her countenance, a change which was perceptible to him even in her voice and manner—a brightness which might mean a lightened heart, or which might mean religious exaltation.

“Has she told him?” he wondered, studying her from his place in the shadow as the lamplight shone full upon her wasted features and hectic colouring. “Has she taken courage and confessed her sin to that loyal, loving husband, and is the burden lifted from her heart?”

No; he could not believe that she had lifted the veil from the sad secret of her past. Martin Disney’s unclouded brow to-night was not that of a man who had lately discovered that the wife he loved had betrayed him. There might be pardon—there might be peace between husband and wife after such a revelation; but there could not be the serenity which marked Martin Disney’s manner to his wife to-night. Such a thunder-clap must leave its brand upon the man who suffered it. No; her secret was still locked in her impenitent heart. Sorry—yes. She had drunk the cup of remorse in all its bitterness; but she knew not true penitence, the Christian’s penitence, which means self-abasement and confession. And yet she seemed happier. There was a look of almost holy resignation upon the pale and placid brow, and in the too-lustrous eyes. Something had happened—some moral transformation which made her a new being.

Father Rodwell drew his chair nearer to her, and looked at her earnestly with his cordial, almost boyish smile. He was a remarkably young-looking man, a man upon whom long years of toil in the dark places of the earth had exercised no wasting or withering influence. He had loved his work too well ever to feel the pressure of the burdens he carried. His gospel had been always a cheerful gospel, and he had helped to lighten sorrows, never to make them heavier. He was deeply interested in Isola, and had been watchful of all her changes of mood since their conversation in the shadow of the old Roman wall. He had seen her impressed by the history and traditions of the church, moved by the pathos of holy lives, touched almost to tears by sacred pictures, and he saw in her character and disposition a natural bent towards piety, exactly that receptive temperament which moves holy women to lives of self-abnegation and heroic endeavour. He had lent her some of those books which he loved best and read most himself, and he had talked with her of religion, careful not to say too much or with too strong an emphasis, and never by any word alluding to her revelation of past guilt. He wanted to win her to perfect trustfulness in him, to teach her to lean upon him in her helplessness; until the hour should come when she would let him lead her to her husband, in the self-abasement of the penitent sinner.

He knew that in this desire he exceeded the teaching of churchmen; that another priest in his place might have bade her keep her sad secret to the end, lie down with it in her early grave, be remembered as a saint, yet die knowing herself a sinner. If he had thought of the husband’s peace first, he would have counselled silence. But he thought most of this stricken soul, with wings that spread themselves towards heaven, held down to earth by the burden of an unpardoned sin.

He looked at her in the lamplight, and her eyes met his with a straighter outlook than he had seen in them for a long time. She looked actually happy, and that look of happiness in a face on which death has set its seal has always something which suggests a life beyond the grave.

“The excitement of this marriage question has brightened you wonderfully, Mrs. Disney,” he said. “We shall have you in high health by the wedding-day.”

“I am feeling better because I am so glad,” Isola answered naively, putting her hand into Allegra’s.

“I consider it positively insulting to me as a sister,” exclaimed Allegra, bending down to kiss the too-transparent hand—such a hand as she had seen in many a picture of dying saint in the Roman galleries. “You are most unaffectionately rejoiced to get rid of me. I have evidently been a tyrannical nurse, and a dull companion, and you breathe more freely at the prospect of release.”

“You have been all that is dear and good,” Isola answered softly, “and I shall feel dreadfully lonely without you; but it won’t be for long. And I shall be so comforted by the knowledge that nothing can come between you and your life’s happiness.”

The two men came in from the loggia, bringing with them the cool breath of night. Isola went to the piano and played one of those Adagios of Mozart’s which came just within the limit of her modest powers, and which she played to perfection, all her soul in the long lingering phrases, the tender modulations, with their suggestions of shadowy cathedral aisles, and the smoke of incense in the deepening dusk of a vesper service. Those bits of Mozart, the slow movements from the Sonatas, an Agnus Dei, or an Ave Maria from one of the Masses, satisfied Captain Hulbert’s highest ideas of music. He desired nothing grander or more scientific. The new learning of the Wagnerian school had no charm for him.

“If you ask me about modern composers, I am for Verdi and Gounod,” he said. “For gaiety and charm, give me Auber, Rossini, and Boieldieu—for pathos, Weber—for everything, Mozart. There you have the whole of my musical education.”

The question of settlements was opened seriously between Martin Disney and his future brother-in-law, early on the following morning. Hulbert wanted to settle all the money he had in the world upon Allegra.

“She is ever so much wiser than I am,” he said. “So she had better be my treasurer. My property is all in stocks and shares. My grandfather was fond of stock-jobbing, and made some very lucky investments which he settled upon my mother, with strict injunctions that they should not be meddled with by her trustees. My share of her fortune comes to a little over nine hundred a year. I came into possession of it when I came of age, and it is mine to dispose of as I like, trusts expired, trustees cleared off—in point of fact, both gone over to the majority, poor old souls, after having had many an anxious hour about those South American railway bonds, and Suez Canal shares, which turned up trumps after all. I’ve telegraphed to the family lawyer for a schedule of the property, and when that comes, just tie it all up in as tight a knot as the law can tie, and let it belong to Allegra and her children after her. Consider me paid off.”

Martin Disney laughed at the lover’s impetuosity—and told him that he should be allowed to bring so much and no more into settlement. Allegra’s income was less than two hundred a year, a poor little income upon which she had fancied herself rich, so modest is woman’s measure of independence as compared with man’s. It would be for the lawyer to decide what proportion the husband’s settlements should bear to the wife’s income. Father Rodwell had given Colonel Disney an introduction to a solicitor of high character, a man who had occupied an excellent position in London until damaged lungs obliged him to seek a home in the south.

With this gentleman’s aid, matters were soon put in train, and while the men were in the lawyer’s office, the two women were choosing Allegra’s wedding-gown.

The young lady had exhibited a rare indifference upon the great trousseau question. She was not one of those girls whose finery is all external, and who hide rags and tatters under æsthetic colouring and Raffaelle draperies. She was too much of an artist to endure anything unseemly in her belongings, and her everyday clothes, just as they were, might have been exhibited, like a Royal trousseau, without causing any other comment than, “How nice!” “What good taste!” “What exquisite needlework!”

The hands which painted such clever pictures were as skilful with the needle as with the brush, and Allegra had never considered that a vocation for art meant uselessness in every feminine industry. She had attended to her own wardrobe from the time she learnt plain sewing at her first school; and now, as she and Isola looked over the ample array of under-linen, the pretty cambric peignoirs, and neatly trimmed petticoats, they were both of one mind, that there was very little need of fuss or expenditure.

“I have plenty of summer frocks,” said Allegra. “So really there is only my travelling gown to see about, that is to say, the gown I am to be married in.”

“But you must have a real wedding-gown, all the same, a white satin gown, with lace and pearls,” pleaded Isola. “When you go to dinner-parties, by-and-by, you will be expected to look like a bride.”

“Dinner-parties! Oh, those are a long way off. We are not likely to be asked to any parties while we are wandering about Italy. I can get a gown when I go home.”

Allegra’s wedding-day had dawned—a glorious day—a day to make one drunken with the beauty of sky and earth; a day when the vetturini in the Piazza di Spagna sat and dreamt on their coach-boxes—narcotized by the sun—when the reds and blues in the garments of the flower-women were almost too dazzling for the eye to look upon, and when every garden in the city sent forth tropical odours of roses steeped in sunlight.

The church in which the lovers were to be made one was a very homely temple as compared with the basilicas yonder on the hills of Rome. But what did that matter to Allegra this morning as she stood before the altar and spoke the words which gave her to the man she loved? A flood of sunshine streamed upon the two figures of bride and bridegroom, and touched the almost spectral face of the bride’s sister-in-law, a face which attracted as much attention as the bride’s fresh bloom and happy smile. It was a face marked for death, yet beautiful in decay. The large violet eyes were luminous with the light of worlds beyond the world we know. There was something loftier than happiness in that vivid look, something akin to exaltation—the smile of the martyr at the stake—the martyr for whom Heaven’s miraculous intervention changes the flames of the death-pile into the soft fanning of seraphic wings; the martyr unconscious of earthly pains and earthly cruelties; who sees the skies opening and the glorious company of saints and angels gathered about the great white throne.

Father Rodwell saw that spiritual expression in the pale, wasted face, and he told himself that a lost soul could not look out of eyes like those. If death were near, as he feared, the true repentance for which he had prayed many an earnest prayer was not far off.

Bride and bridegroom were to leave Rome by the mid-day train. Colonel Disney was going to see the last of them at the station, but Isola and her sister-in-law were to say good-bye in the vestry, and to part at the church door. And now Father Rodwell’s brief, but fervent, address had been spoken, the Wedding March pealed from the organ, and the small wedding-party went into the vestry to sign the registers.

Isola was called upon for her signature as one of the witnesses. She signed in a bold, clear hand, without one tremulous line, her husband looking over her shoulder as she wrote.

“That doesn’t look like an invalid’s autograph, does it, Hulbert?” he asked, snatching at every token of hope, unwilling to believe what his doctors and his own convictions told him—expecting a miracle.

They had warned him that he could not keep her long. They had advised him to humour her fancies, to let her be present at the wedding, even at the hazard of her suffering afterwards for that exertion and excitement. She would suffer more perhaps—physically as well as mentally—if she were thwarted in her natural wish to be by Allegra’s side on that day.

All was finished. Neither Church nor law could do anything more towards making the lovers man and wife. The law might undo the bond for them in the time to come, but the part of the Church was done for ever. In the eye of the Church their union was indissoluble.

Isola clung with her arms round the bride’s neck.

“Think of me sometimes, dearest, in the years to come. Think that I loved you fondly. Be sure that I was grateful for all your goodness to me,” she said tearfully.

“My own love, I shall think of you every day till we meet again.”

“And if we never meet again on earth—will you remember me kindly?”

“Isa, how can you?” cried Allegra, silencing the pale lips with kisses.

“You may be glad to think how much you did towards making my life happy—happier than it ought to have been.” Isola went on in a low voice. “Dearest, I am more glad of your marriage than words can say; and, Allegra, love him with all your heart, and never let your lives be parted—remember, dearest, never, never let anything upon this earth part you from him.”

Her voice was choked with sobs, and then came a worse fit of coughing than she had suffered for some time; a fit which left her exhausted and speechless. Her husband looked at her in an agony of apprehension.

“Let me take you home, Isa,” he said. “You’ll be better at home, lying down by your sunny window. This vestry is horribly cold. Hulbert, if you and Allegra will excuse me, I won’t see you off at the station. Father Rodwell will go with you, perhaps. He’ll be of more use than I could be; and we shall see each other very soon again in Switzerland, please God.”

“Yes, yes, There is no need for you to go,” Hulbert answered, grasping his hand, distressed for another man’s pain in the midst of his own happiness. There death, and the end of all joy—here the new life with its promises of gladness just opening before him. Such contrasts must needs seem hard.

They all went to the church door, where the carriages were waiting. Only a few idlers loitered about the pavement, faintly interested in so shabby a wedding—a poor array of one landau and one brougham, the brougham to take the travellers to the station, where their luggage had been sent by another conveyance.

The two women kissed each other once more before Allegra stepped into the carriage, Isola too weak for speech, and able only to clasp the hands that had waited on her in so many a weary hour; the clever hands, the gentle hands, to which womanly instinct and womanly love had given all the skilfulness of a trained nurse.

Disney lifted his wife into the landau, Father Rodwell helping him, full of sympathy.

“You’ll dine with us to-night, I hope,” said the colonel. “We shall be very low if we are left to ourselves.”

“I’ve an engagement for this evening—but—yes, I’ll get myself excused, and spend the evening with you, if you really want me.”

“Indeed we do,” answered Disney, heartily; but Isola was dumb. Her eyes were fixed upon the distant point at which the brougham had disappeared round a corner, on its way to the station.

CHAPTER XXVII

“GONE DEEPER THAN ALL PLUMMETS SOUND.”

Church bells are always ringing in that city of many churches, and there were bells ringing solemnly and slowly as Isola walked feebly up the two flights of stairs that led to Colonel Disney’s lodging. She walked even more slowly than usual, and her husband could hear her labouring breath as she went up, step by step, leaning on the banister rail. He had offered her his arm, but she had repulsed him, almost rudely, at the bottom of the stairs.

They went into the drawing-room, which was bright with flowers in a sunlit dusk, the sun streaming in through the narrow opening between the Venetian shutters, which had been drawn together, but not fastened. All was very still in the quiet house; so still that they could hear the splash of the fountain in the Piazza, and the faint rustling of the limes in the garden.

Husband and wife stood facing each other, he anxious and alarmed, she deadly pale, and with gleaming eyes.

“Well, she is gone—she is Mrs. Hulbert now, and she belongs to him and not to us any more,” said Disney, talking at random, watching his wife’s face in nervous apprehension of—he knew not what. “We shall miss her sadly. Aren’t you sorry she is married, Isola, after all?”

“Sorry! No! I am glad—glad with all my heart. I have waited for that.”

And then, before he was aware, she had flung herself at his feet, and was kneeling there, with her head hanging down, her hands clasped—a very Magdalen.

“I waited—till they were married—so that you should not refuse to let her marry—his brother—waited to tell you what I ought to have told you at once, when you came home from India. My only hope of pardon or of peace was to have told you then—to have left you for ever then—never to have dared to clasp your hand—never to have dared to call myself your wife—never to have become the mother of your child. All my life since that day has been one long lie; and nothing that I have suffered—not all my agonies of remorse—can atone for that lie, unless God and you will accept my confession and my atonement to-day.”

“Isola, for God’s sake, stop!”

Again the racking cough seized her, and she sank speechless at his feet.

He lifted her in his arms and carried her to the sofa, and flung open the shutters and let the light and air stream in upon her, as she lay prostrate and exhausted, wiping her white lips with a blood-stained handkerchief. He looked at her in a kind of horrified compassion. He thought that she was raving, that the excitement of the morning had culminated in fever and delirium. He was going to ring for help, meaning to send instantly for her doctor, when she stopped him, laying her thin cold hand upon his arm, and holding him by her side.

“Sit down by me, Martin—don’t stop me—I must tell you—all—the truth.”

Her words came slowly, in gasps; then with a great effort she gathered up the poor remnant of her strength, and went on in a low, tremulous voice, yet with the tone of one whose resolve was strong as death itself.

“There was a time when I thought I could never tell you—that I must go down to my grave with my sin unrevealed, and that you would never know how worthless a woman you had loved and cherished. Then, on my knees before my God, I vowed that I would tell you all, at the last, when I was dying—and death is not far off now, Martin. I have delayed too long—too long! There is scarcely any atonement in my confession now. I have cheated you out of your love.”

He looked at her horror-stricken, their two faces close to each other as he bent over her pillow.

No; this was no delirium—there was a terrible reality in her words. The eyes looking up at him were not bright with fever, but with the steady resolute soul within—the soul panting for freedom from sin.

“You have cheated me out of my love,” he repeated slowly. “Does that mean that you lied to me that night in London—that you perjured yourself, calling God to witness that you were pure and true?”

“I was true to you then, Martin. My sin had been repented of. I was your loving, loyal wife, without one thought but of you.”

“Loving, loyal!” he cried, with passionate scorn. “You had deceived and dishonoured me—you had made your name a by-word—a jest for such a man as Vansittart Crowther—and for how many more? You had lied, and lied, and lied to me—by every look, by every word that made you seem a virtuous woman and a faithful wife. My God, what misery!”

“Martin, have pity!”

“Pity! Yes, I pity the women in the streets! Am I to pity you, as I pity them? You, whom I worshipped—whom I thought as pure as the angels—wearing nothing of earth but your frail loveliness, which to me always seemed more of spirit than of clay. And you were false all the time—false as hell—the toy of the first idle profligate whom chance flung into your path? It was Lostwithiel! That man was right. He would hardly have dared to talk to you as he did if he had not been certain of his facts. Lostwithiel was your lover.”

“Martin, have pity!” she repeated, with her hands clasped before her face.

“Pity! Don’t I tell you that I pity you—pity you whom I used to revere! Great God! can you guess what pain it is to change respect for the creature one loves into pity? I told you that I would never hurt you—that I would never bring shame upon you, Isola. You have no unkindness to fear from me. But you have broken my heart, you have slain my faith in man and woman. I could have staked my life on your purity—I could have killed the man who slandered you—and you swore a false oath—you called upon Heaven to witness a lie!”

“I was a miserable creature, Martin. I could not bear to lose your love. If death had been my only penalty I could have borne it, but not the loss of your love.”

“And your sister and her husband? They were as ready with their lies as you were,” he exclaimed bitterly.

“Don’t blame Gwendolen. I telegraphed to her, imploring her to stand by me—to say that I was in London with her.”

“And you were not in London?”

“No, except to pass through, when—when I had escaped from him, and was on my way home.”

“Escaped! My God! What villainy must have been used against you—so young, so helpless! Tell me all—without reserve—as freely as you want to be forgiven.”

“I was not utterly wicked, Martin. I did not sin deliberately—I did not know what I was doing when I wrecked my life and destroyed my peace of mind for ever. I never meant to forget you—or to be false to you—but I was so lonely—so lonely. The days were so dreary and so long—even the short autumn days seemed long—and the evenings were so melancholy without you. And he came into my life suddenly—like a prince in a fairy tale—and at first I thought very little about him. He was nothing more to me than any one else in Trelasco—and then somehow we were always meeting by accident—in the lanes—or by the sea—and he seemed to care for all the things I cared for. The books I loved were his favourites. For a long time we talked of nothing but his travels, and of my favourite books. There was not a word spoken between us that you or any one else could blame.”

“A common opening,” said Martin Disney, with scathing contempt. “One of the seducer’s favourite leads.”

“And then, one evening in the twilight, he told me that he loved me. I was very angry—and I let him see that I was angry, and I did all I could to avoid him after that evening. I refused to go to the ball at Lostwithiel, knowing that I must meet him there. But they all persuaded me—Mrs. Crowther, Mrs. Baynham, Tabitha—they were all bent upon making me go—and I went. Oh, God, if I had but stood firm against their foolish persuasion, if I had but been true to myself! But my own heart fought against me. I wanted to see him again—if only for the last time. He had talked about starting for a long cruise to the Mediterranean. His yacht was ready to sail at an hours notice.”

“You went, and you were lost.”

“Yes, lost, irretrievably lost! It is all one long, wild dream when I look back upon it. He implored me to go away with him—but I told him no, no, no, not for worlds, nothing should ever make me false to my husband—nothing. I swore it—swore an oath which I had not the strength to keep. Oh, it was cruel, heartless, treacherous—the thing he did after that. When I was going away from the dance, he was there at my side—and he put me into the wrong carriage—his own carriage—and when I had been driven a little way from the hotel, the carriage stopped and he got in. I thought that he was driving me home. I asked him how he could be cruel as to be with me, in his own carriage, at the risk of my reputation—but he stopped me—shut my lips with his fatal kiss. Oh, Martin, how can I tell these things? The horse went almost at a gallop. I thought we should be killed. I was half fainting when the carriage stopped at last, after rattling up and down hill—and he lifted me out, and I felt the cold night-air on my face, the salt spray from the sea. I tried to ask him where I was,—whether this was home—but the words died on my lips—and I knew no more—knew no more till I woke from that dead, dull swoon in the cabin of the Vendetta, and heard the sailors calling out to each other, and saw Lostwithiel sitting by my side—and then—and then—it was all one long dream—a dream of days and nights, and rain, and tempest. I thought the boat was going down in that dreadful night in the Bay of Biscay. Would to God that she had gone down, and hidden me and my sin for ever! But she lived through the storm, and in the morning she was anchored near Arcachon, and Lostwithiel went on shore, and sent a woman in a boat, to bring me clothes, and to attend upon me; and I contrived to go on shore with the woman when she went back in the boat that had brought her, and I borrowed some money on my ring at a jeweller’s in Arcachon, and I left by the first train for Paris, and went on from Paris to London, and never stopped to rest anywhere till I got home.”

“May God bring me face to face with that ruffian who imposed upon your helplessness!” cried Martin Disney.

“No, no, Martin; he was not a ruffian. He betrayed me—but I loved him. He knew that I loved him. I was a great a sinner as be. I was his before he stole me from my home—his in mind and in spirit. It was our unhappy fate to love each other. And I forgave him, Martin. I forgave him on that night of tempest, when I thought we were going to die together.”

“You don’t expect me to forgive him, do you? You don’t expect me to forgive the seducer who has ruined your life and mine?”

“His brother is your sister’s husband, Martin?”

“I am sorry for it.”

“Oh, John Hulbert is good; he is frank and true. He is not like the other. But oh, Martin, pity Lostwithiel and his sin, as you pity me and my sin! It is past and done. I was mad when I cared for him—a creature under a spell. You won my heart back to you by your goodness—you made me more than ever your own. All that he had ever been to me—all that I had ever thought or felt about him—was blotted out as if I had never seen his face. Nothing remained but my love for you—and my guilty conscience, the aching misery of knowing that I was unworthy of you.”

He took her hand and pressed it gently in silence. Then, after a long pause, when she had dried the tears from her streaming eyes, and was lying faint, and white, and still, caring very little what became of her poor remnant of life, he said softly—

“I forgive you, Isola, as I pray God to forgive you. I have spent some happy years with you—not knowing. If it was a delusion, it was very sweet—while it lasted.”

“It was not a delusion,” she cried, putting her arms round his neck, in a sudden rapture at being pardoned. “My love was real.”

The door opened softly, and the kindly face of the Anglican priest looked in.

“I have seen the lovers on their way to Florence,” he said, “and have come to ask how Mrs. Disney is after her fatiguing morning.”

“I am happier than I have been for a long time,” answered Isola, holding out her hand to him. “I am prepared for the end, let it come when it may.”

He knew what she meant, and that the sinner had confessed her sin.

“Come out for a stroll with me, Disney,” he said, “and leave your wife to rest for a little while. I’m afraid she’ll miss her kind nurse.”

Disney started up confusedly, like a sleeper awakened, and looked at his watch.

“I believe I have a substitute ready to replace Allegra by this time,” he said, ringing the bell.

“Has the person from England arrived?” he asked the servant.

“Yes, sir. She came a quarter of an hour ago.”

“Ask her to come here at once.”

“Oh, Martin, you have not sent for a hospital nurse, I hope,” cried Isola, excitedly. “Indeed I am not so bad as that. I want very little help. I could not bear to have a stranger about me.”

“This is not a stranger, Isola.”

There came a modest knock at the door as he spoke.

“Come in,” he said; and a familiar figure in a grey merino gown and smart white cap with pink ribbons entered quietly and came to the sofa where Isola was lying.

“Tabitha!” she cried.

“Don’t say you’re sorry to see an old face again, Mrs. Disney. I told Mr. Martin that if you should ever be ill and want nursing I’d come to nurse you—if you were at the other end of the world—and Mr. Martin wrote and told me you wanted an old servant’s care and experience to get you over your illness—and here I am. I’ve come every inch of the way without stopping, except at the buffets, and all I can say is Rome is a long way from everywhere, and the country I’ve come through isn’t to be compared with Cornwall.”

She ran on breathlessly as she seated herself by that reclining figure with the waxen face. It may be that she talked to hide the shock she had experienced on seeing the altered looks of the young mistress whose roof she had left in the hour of shame. She had left her, refusing to hold commune with one who had sinned so deeply. The faithful servant had taken leave of her mistress in words that had eaten into Isola’s heart, as if they had been written there with a corrosive acid.

“I am very sorry for you, Mrs. Disney,” she said. “You are young and pretty, and you are very much to be pitied—and God knows I have loved you as if you were my own flesh and blood. But I won’t stay under the roof of a wife who has brought shame upon herself and has dishonoured the best of husbands.”

Isola had denied nothing, had acknowledged nothing, and had let Tabitha go. And now they met again for the first time after that miserable parting, and the servant’s eyes were full of pitying tears, and the servant’s lips spoke only gentlest words. What a virtue there must be in death, when so much is forgiven to the dying!

Martin Disney went out with the priest, but at the corner of the Piazza he stopped abruptly.

“Isola’s coughing fit has upset me more than it has her,” he said; “I’m not fit company for any one, so I think I’ll go for a tramp somewhere, and meet you later at dinner, when I’ve recovered my spirits a little.”

“A riverderci,” said the priest, grasping his hand. “I felicitate you upon this day’s union; a happy one, or I am no judge of men and women.”

“I don’t know,” Disney answered gloomily. “The woman is true as steel—the man comes of a bad stock. You know what the Scripture says about the tree and the fruit.”

“There never was a race yet that was altogether bad,” said the priest. “Virtues may descend from remote ancestors as well as vices,—I think you told me moreover that Captain Hulbert’s mother was a good woman.”

“She was. She was one of my mother’s earliest and dearest friends.”

“Then you should have a better opinion of her son. If ever I met a thoroughly good fellow in my life, I believe I met one the day I made Captain Hulbert’s acquaintance.”

“Pray God you may be right,” said Disney, with a sigh. “I am no judge of character.”

He turned abruptly, and skirted the hill on his way to the gardens of the Villa Borghese, where he found shade and seclusion in the early afternoon. The carriages of fashionable Rome had not yet begun to drive in at the gate. The cypress avenues, the groves of immemorial ilex, the verdant lawns where the fountains leapt sunward, were peopled only by creatures of fable, fixed in marble, faun and dryad, hero and god. Martin Disney plunged into the shadow of one of those funereal avenues, and—while the sun blazed in almost tropical splendour upon the open lawn in the far distance—he walked as it were in the deep of night, a night whose gloom harmonized with that darker night in his despairing heart.

Great God, how he had loved her! How he had looked up to her, revering even her weakness as the expression of a childlike purity. And while he had been praying for her, and dreaming of her, and longing for her, and thinking of her as the very type of womanly chastity, unapproachable by temptation, unassailable, secure in her innocence and simplicity as Athene or Artemis with all their armour of defence; while he had so loved and trusted her, she had flung herself into the arms of a profligate—as easily won as the lightest wanton. She had done this thing, and then she had welcomed him, with wan, sweet smiles, to his dishonoured home. She had made him drink the cup of shame—a by-word it might be for the whole parish, as well as for that one man who had dared to hint at evil. And yet he had forgiven her—forgiven one to whom pardon meant only a peaceful ending; forgiven as a man holds himself forgiven by an all-merciful God, as he hears words of pity and promise murmured into his ear by the priest upon the scaffold, when the rope is round his neck and the drop is ready to fall. How could he withhold such pardon when he had been taught that God forgives the repentant murderer?

CHAPTER XXVIII.

“THOUGH LOVE AND LIFE AND DEATH SHOULD COME AND GO.”

Isola was alone in the spacious Roman drawing-room, its wide windows open to the soft, warm air. The sun was off that side of the house now, and the Venetian shutters had been pushed back; and between the heavy stone pillars of the loggia she saw the orange and magnolia trees in the garden, and the pale gold of the mimosas beyond. The sun was shining full upon the Hill of Gardens, that hill at whose foot Nero was buried in secret at dead of night by his faithful freedman and the devoted woman who loved him to the shameful end of the shameful life; that hill whose antique groves the wicked Cæsar’s ghost had once made a place of terror. The wicked ghost was laid now. Modern civilization had sent Nero the way of all phantoms; and fashionable Rome made holiday on the Hill of Gardens. A military band was playing there this afternoon in the golden light, and the familiar melodies in Don Giovanni were wafted ever and anon in little gusts of sweetness to the loggia where the vivid crimson of waxen camelias and the softer rose of oleander blossoms gave brightness and colour to the dark foliage and the cold white stone.

Isola heard those far-off melodies faint in the distance—heard without heeding. The notes were beyond measure familiar, interwoven with the very fabric of her life, for those were the airs Martin Disney loved, and she had played them to him nearly every evening in their quiet, monotonous life. She heard, unheeding, for her thoughts had wandered back to the night of the ball at Lostwithiel and all that went after it—the fatal night that struck the death-knell of peace and innocence.

How vividly she remembered every detail—her fluttering apprehensions during the long drive on the dark road, up hill and down hill; her eagerness for the delight of the dance, as an unaccustomed pleasure—a scene to which young beauty flies as the moth to the flame; her remorseful consciousness that she had done wrong in yielding to the temptation which drew her there; the longing to see Lostwithiel once more—Lostwithiel, whom she had vowed to herself never to meet again of her own free will. She had gone home that afternoon resolved to forego the ball, to make any social sacrifice rather than look upon that man whose burning words of love, breathed in her ear before she had enough of nerve or calmness to silence him, had left her scathed and geared as if the lightning had blasted her. She had heard his avowal. There was no room now to doubt the meaning of all that had gone before, no ground now for believing in a tender, platonic admiration, lapping her round with its soft radiance—a light, but not a fire. That which had burnt into her soul to-day was the fierce flame of a dishonouring love, the bold avowal of a lover who wanted to steal her from her husband, and make her a sinner before her God.

She knew this much—had brooded upon it all the evening—and yet she was going to a place where she must inevitably meet the Tempter.

She was going because it was expedient to go; because her persistent refusal to be there might give rise to guesses and suspicions that would lead to a discovery of the real reason of her absence. She had often seen the subtle process, the society search-light by which Trelasco and Fowey could arrive at the innermost working of a neighbour’s heart, the deepest mysteries of motive.

She was going to the ball after all, fevered, anxious, full of dim forebodings; and yet with an eager expectancy; and yet with a strange over-mastering joy. How should she meet him? How could she avoid him, without ostentatious avoidance, knowing how many eyes would be quick to mark any deviation from conventional behaviour? Somehow or other she was resolved to avoid all association with him; to get her programme filled before he could ask her to dance; or to refuse in any case if he asked her. He would scarcely venture to approach her after what had been said in the lane, when her indignation had been plainly expressed with angry tears. No, he would hardly dare. And so—in a vague bewilderment at finding she was at her journey’s end—she saw the lights of the little town close upon her, and in the next few minutes her carriage was moving slowly in the rank of carriages setting down their freight at the door of the inn.

Vaguely, as in a dream, she saw the lights and the flowers, the satin gowns and the diamonds, the scarlet and white upon the walls, brush and vizard, vizard and brush. He was not there. She looked along the crowd, and that tall figure and that dark head were absent. She ought to have been glad at this respite, and yet her heart grew heavy as lead.

Later he was there, and she was waltzing with him. At the last moment when he was standing before her, cool, self-possessed, as it were unconscious of that burning past, she had no more power to refuse to be his partner than the bird has to escape from the snake. She had given him her hand, and they were moving slowly, softly to the music of the soft, slow waltz. Myosotis, myosotis—mystic flower which means everlasting remembrance! Would she ever forget this night? Their last meeting—safest possible meeting-place here in the shine of the lamps—in the sight of the multitude. Here she could so easily hold him at a distance. Here she might speak to him lightly, as if she too were unconscious of the past. Here she was safe against his madness and her own weak unstable heart, which fluttered at his smallest word.

And so the night wore on, and she danced with him more times than she could count, forgetting, or pretending to forget, other engagements; going through an occasional waltz with another partner just for propriety’s sake, and hardly knowing who that partner was; knowing so well that there was some one else standing against the wall, watching her every movement, with the love-light in his eyes.

Then came the period after supper when they sat in the ante-room and let the dances go by, hearing the music of waltzes which they were to have danced together, hearing and heeding not. And then came a sudden scare at the thought of the hour. Was it late?

Late, very late!

The discovery fluttered and unnerved her, and she was scarcely able to collect her thoughts as he handed her into the carriage and shut the door.

“Surely it was a grey horse that brought me!” she exclaimed, and in the next minute she recognized Lostwithiel’s brougham, the same carriage in which she had been driven home through the rain upon that unforgotten night when his house sheltered her, when she saw his face for the first time.

Yes, it was his carriage. She knew the colour of the lining, the little brass clock, the reading-lamp, the black panther rug. She pulled at the check-string, but without effect. The carriage drove on, slowly, but steadily, to the end of the town. She let down the window and called to the coachman. There was only one man on the box, and he took no notice of her call.

Yes, he had heard, perhaps, for he drew up his horse suddenly by the road-side, a little way beyond the town. A man opened the door and sprang in, breathless after running. It was Lostwithiel.

“You put me into your carriage!” she cried distractedly. “How could you make such a mistake? Pray tell him to go back to the inn directly.”

They were driving along the country road at a rapid pace, and he had seated himself by her side, clasping her hand. He pulled up the window nearest her, and prevented her calling to the coachman.

“Why should you go back? You will be home sooner with my horse than with the screw that brought you.”

“But the fly will be waiting for me—the man will wonder.”

“Let him wonder. He won’t wait very long, you may be assured. He will guess what has happened. In the confusion of carriages you took the wrong one. Isola, I am going to leave Cornwall to-night—to leave England—perhaps never to return. Give me the last few moments of my life here. Be merciful to me. I am going away—perhaps for ever.”

“Take me home,” she said. “Are you really taking me home? Is this the right way?”

“Of course it is the right way. Do you suppose I am going to drive you to London?”

He let down the glass suddenly, and pointed into the night.

“Isola, do you see where we are? There’s the sign-post at the cross roads. There’s the tower of Tywardreath Church, though you can hardly see it in this dim light. Are you satisfied now?”

He had drawn up the glass again. The windows were clouded by the mist of their mingled breath; the atmosphere was faint with the odour of the faded chrysanthemums on her gown and the carnation in the lapel of his coat. All that she could see of the outer world was the blurred light of the carriage lamps. The high-spirited horse was going up and down the hills at a perilous pace. At this rate the journey could not take long.

And then—and then—he came back to the prayer he had breathed in her ear more than twelve hours ago in the wintry lane. He loved her, he loved her, he loved her! Could she refuse to go away with him—having woven herself into his life, having made him madly, helplessly in love with her? Could she refuse? Had any woman the right to refuse? He appealed to her sense of honour. She had gone too far—she had granted too much already, granting him her love. She was in his arms in the dim light, in the faint, dream-like atmosphere. He was taking possession of her weak heart by all that science of love in which he was past master. Honour, conscience, fidelity to the absent, piety, innocence were being swept away in that lava flood of passion. Helpless, irresolute, she faltered again and again. “Take me home, Lostwithiel! Have mercy! Take me home.”

He stopped those tremulous lips with a kiss—the kiss that betrays. The carriage dashed down a steep bill, rattled along a street so narrow that the wheels seemed to grind against the house-fronts on each side, down hill again, and then the horse was pulled up suddenly in a stony square, and the door opened, and the soft, fresh sea-breeze blew among her loosened hair, and upon her uncovered neck, and she heard the gentle plish-plash of a boat moored against the quay at her feet.

“This is not home!” she cried piteously.

“Yes, it is home, love, our home for a little while—the home that can carry us to the other end of the world, if you will.”

The quay, and the water, and the few faint lights here and there grew dark, and she knew no more, till she heard the sailors crying, “Yeo, heave, yeo,” and the heavy sails flapping, and the creak of the boom as it swayed in the wind, and felt the dancing motion of the boat as she cut her way through the waves, felt the strong arm that clasped her, and heard the low, fond voice that murmured in her ear, “Isola, Isola, forgive me! I could not live without you.”

That which came afterwards had seemed one long and lurid dream—a dream of fair weather and foul; of peril and despair; of passionate, all-conquering love.

To-day, as she lay supine in the afternoon silence—lying as Tabitha had left her, in a fevered sleep—the vision of that past came back upon her in all its vivid colouring, almost as distinctly as it had re-acted itself in her hours of delirium, when she had lived that tragic chapter of her life over again, and had felt the fury of the waves and breathed the chill, salt air of the tempest-driven sea, and had seen the moon riding high amidst the cloud-chaos—now appearing, now vanishing, as if she too were a storm-driven bark in a raging sea.

Oh God! how vividly those hours came back! The awful progress from Ushant to Arcachon; the darkness of the brief day; the horror of the long night; the shuddering yacht, with straining spars, and broadside beaten by a heaving mass of water, that struck her with the force of a thousand battering-rams, blow after blow, each blow seeming as if the next must always be the last—the final crash and end of all things. The pretty, dainty vessel, long and narrow, rode like an eggshell on those furious waters—here a long wall of inky blackness, rising like a mountain-ridge, and bearing down on the doomed ship, and beyond, as far as the eye could reach, a waste of surf, livid in the moonlight. What helpless insignificance, as of a leaf tossed on a whirlpool, when that mountainous mass took the yacht and lifted her on cyclopean shoulders, and shook her off again into the black trough of the sea, as into the depths of hell! And this not once only, nor a hundred times only, but on through that endless-seeming night, on in the sickly winter dawn and in the faint yellow gleam of a rainy noontide—on through day that seemed mixed and entangled with night, as if the beginning of creation had come round again, and the light were not yet divided from the darkness.

Oh, those passionate, never-to-be-forgotten moments, when she had stood with him at the top of the companion, looking out upon those livid waters; fondly believing that each moment was to be their last; that the gates of death were opening yonder—a watery way, a gulf to which they must go down, in a moment, in a little moment, in a flash, in a breath, at the next, or the next, or the next mad plunge of that hurrying bark. Yes, death was there, in front of them—inevitable, imminent, immediate—and life and sin, shame, remorse, were done with, along with the years that lay behind them, a page blotted and blurred with one passionate madness, which had changed the colour of a woman’s life. She knew not how she bore up against the force of that tempest; clinging to him with her bare, wet arms; held up by him; crouching against the woodwork, which shook and rattled with every blow of the battering-rams. She only knew that his arms were round her, that she was safe with him, even when the leaping surf rose high above her head, wrapping her round like a mantle, blinding, drowning her in a momentary extinction. She only knew that his lips were close to her ear, and that in a momentary lull of those awful voices he murmured, “We are going to die, Isola! The boat cannot live through such a storm! We shall go down to death together!” And her lips turned to him with a joyful cry, “Thank God!” Then again, in a minute’s interval, he pleaded, “Forgive me, love; my stolen love, forgive me before we die!” And again, “Was it a crime, Isola?” “If it was, I forgive you!” she whispered, clinging to him as the blast struck them.

Cruel revulsion of feeling, bitter irony of Fate, when the great grim waves—which had seemed like living monsters hurrying down upon them with malignant fury to tear and to devour—when the awful sea began to roar with a lesser voice, and the thunder of the battering-rams had a duller sound, and the bows of the yacht no longer plunged straight down into the leaden-coloured pit; no longer climbed those inky ridges with such blind impetus, as of a cockle-shell in a whirlpool. Bitter sense of loss and dismay when the grey, cold dawn lighted a quieter sea, and she heard the captain telling Lostwithiel that they had seen the worst of the storm, and that there was no fear now. He was going to put on more canvas: and hadn’t the lady better go below, where it was warm. She needn’t feel anyway nervous now. They would soon be in the roadstead of Arcachon.

She had not felt the chill change from night to morning. She had not felt the surf that drenched her loose, entangled hair. She hardly know when or how Lostwithiel had wrapped her in his fur-lined coat; but she found that she was so enveloped presently when she stumbled and staggered down to the cabin, and flung herself face downward upon the sofa, in a paroxysm of impotent despair.

Death would have delivered her. The tempest was her friend; and the tempest had passed her by, and left her lying there like a weed, more worthless than any weed that over the sea cast up to rot upon the barren rocks. Yes, she was left there; left in a life that sin had blighted; loathsome to herself, hateful to her God.

She locked herself in the cabin, while the hurrying footsteps overhead told her that Lostwithiel was working with the sailors.

An hour later, and he was at the cabin door, pleading for one kind word, entreating her to let him see her, were it only for a few moments, to know that she was not utterly broken down by the peril she had passed through. He pleaded in vain. She would give no answer—she would speak no word. Indeed, in that dull agony of shame and despair it seemed to her as if a dumb devil had entered into her. Her parched lips seemed to have lost the power of speech. She lay there, staring straight before her at all the swinging things on the cedar panel—the books and photographs—and lamps and frivolities, vibrating with every movement of the sea. Her hands were clenched until the nails cut into the flesh. Her heart was throbbing with a dull, slow beat that made itself torturingly audible. Did God create His creatures for such agony? Had she been foredoomed everlastingly—in that awful incomprehensible ante-natal Eternity—foredoomed to this fallen state, to this unutterable shame?

Hours went by, she knew not how. Again and again Lostwithiel came to her door, and talked and entreated—Heaven knows how tenderly—with what deep contrition, with what fond pleading for pardon. But the dumb devil held her still. She wrapped herself in a sullen despair—not anger, for anger is active. Hers was only a supine resistance.

At last she heard him come with one of the sailors, and she could make out from their whispering talk that they were going to force open the door. Then she started up in a fury, and went and flung herself against the cedar panels.

“If you don’t leave me alone in my misery I will kill myself!” she cried.

The long night was over; and the sun was high. It seemed as if they were sailing over a summer sea, and through the scuttle port she saw a little foreign town nestling under the shelter of pine-clad hills.

She woke from brief and troubled slumbers to see this smiling shore, and at first she fancied they must have sailed back to Cornwall, and that this was some unknown bay upon that rock-bound coast; but the sapphire sea and the summer-like sunshine suggested a fairer clime than rugged Britain.

While she was looking out at the crescent-shaped bay, and the long line of white villas, the anchor was being lowered. The sea was almost as smooth as a lake, and those tranquil waters had the colour and the sheen of sapphire and emerald. She thought of the jasper sea—the sea of the Apocalypse, the tideless sea beside that land of the New Jerusalem where there are no more tears, where there can be no more sin, a city of ransomed souls, redeemed from all earth’s iniquity.

A boat was being lowered. She heard the scroop of the ropes in the davits; she heard footsteps on the accommodation-ladder, and then the dip of oars, and presently the boat passed between her and the sunlit waters, and she saw Lostwithiel sitting in the stern, with the rudder-lines in his hands, while two sailors were bending to their oars, with wind-blown hair and cheery, smiling faces, broad and red in the gay morning sunshine.

He was gone, and she breathed more freely. There was a sense of release in his absence; and for the first time she looked round the cabin, where beautiful and luxurious things lay, thrown here and there in huddled masses of brilliant colour. A Japanese screen, a masterpiece of rainbow-hued embroidery on a sea-green ground, flung against the panelling at one end—Persian curtains wrenched from their fastenings and hanging awry—satin pillows that had drifted into a heap in one corner—signs of havoc everywhere. She stood in the midst of all this ruin, and looked at her own reflection in a Venetian glass riveted to the panelling, about the only object that had held its place through the storm.

Her own reflection. Was that really herself, that ghastly image which the glass gave back to her? The reflection of a woman with livid cheeks and blanched lips, with swollen eyelids, and dark rings of purple round the haggard eyes, and hair rough and tangled as Medusa’s locks, and bare shoulders from which the stained satin bodice had slipped away. Her wedding-gown! Could that defiled garment—the long folds of the once shining satin, draggled and dripping with sea-water—could these tawdry rags be the wedding-gown she had put on in her proud and happy innocence in the old bedroom at Dinan, with mother, and servants, and a useful friend or two helping and hindering?

Oh, if they could see her now, those old friends of her unclouded childhood, the mother and father who had loved and trusted her, who had never spoken of evil things in her hearing, had never thought that sin could come near her! And she had fallen like the lowest of womankind. She had forfeited her place among the virtuous and happy for ever. She, Martin Disney’s wife! That good man, that brave soldier who had fought for Queen and country—it was his wife who stood there in her shame, haggard and dishevelled!

She flung her arms above her head and wrung her hands in a paroxysm of despair. Then, with a little cry, she plucked at the loose wild tresses as if she would have torn them from her head; and then she threw herself upon the cabin floor in her agony, and grovelled there, a creature for whom death would have been a merciful release.

“If I could die—if I could but die, and no one know!” she moaned.

She lifted herself up again upon her knees, and, with one hand upon the floor, looked round the walls of the cabin—looked at a trophy of Moorish and Italian arms which decorated the panelling, searching for some sharp dagger with which she might take her hated life. And then came the thought of what must follow death, not for her in the dim incomprehensible eternity, but for those who loved her on earth, for those who would have to be told how she had been found, in her draggled wedding-gown, stabbed by her own hand on board Lord Lostwithiel’s yacht. What a story of shame and crime for newspapers to embellish, and for scandal-lovers to gloat over! No! She dared not destroy herself thus. She must collect her senses, escape from her seducer, and keep the secret of her dishonour.

She took off her gown, and rolled train and bodice into a bundle as small as she could make them. Then she looked about the cabin for some object with which to weight her bundle. Yes, that would do. A little brass dolphin that was used to steady the open door. That was heavy enough, perhaps. She put it into the middle of her bundle, tied a ribbon tightly round the whole, and then she opened the scuttle port and dropped her wedding-garment into the sea. The keen fresh wind, the wind from pine-clad hills and distant snow mountains, blew in upon her bare neck and chilled her; but it helped to cool the fever of her mind, and she sat down and leant her head upon her clasped hands, and tried to think what she must do to free herself from the toils in which guilty love had caught her.

She must escape from the yacht. She must go back to England—somehow.

She thought that if she were to appeal to Lostwithiel’s honour some spark of better feeling would prevail over that madness which had wrecked her, and he would let her go, he would take her back to England, and facilitate her secret return to the home she had dishonoured. But could she trust herself to make that appeal? Could she stand fast against his pleading, if he implored her to stay with him, to live the life that he had planned for her, the life that he had painted so eloquently, the dreamy, beautiful life amidst earth’s most romantic scenes, the life of love in idleness? Could she resist him if he should plead—it might be with tears—he, whom she adored, her destroyer and her divinity? No, she must leave the yacht before he came back to her. But how?

There were only men on board. There was no woman to whose compassion she could appeal, no woman to lend her clothes to cover her. She saw herself once again in the Venetian glass, in her long trained petticoat of muslin and lace, so daintily fresh when she dressed for the ball—muslin and lace soddened by the sea, torn to shreds where her feet had caught in the flounces as she stumbled down the companion during last night’s storm. A fitting costume in which to travel from Arcachon to London, verily! She opened a door leading to an inner cabin, which contained bed and bath, and all toilet appliances. Hanging against the wall there were three dressing-gowns, the lightest and least masculine of the three being a robe of Indian camel’s hair, embroidered with gray silk—a shapeless garment with loose sleeves and a girdle.

Here, within locked doors, she made her hurried toilet, with much cold water. She brushed her long, ragged hair with one of the humblest of the brushes. She would not take so much as a few drops from the great crystal bottle of eau de Cologne which was held in a silver frame suspended from the ceiling. Nothing of his would she touch, nothing belonging to the man who wanted to pour his fortune into her lap, to make his life her life, his estate her estate, his name her name, could she but survive the ordeal of the divorce court, and shake off old ties.

She rolled her hair in a large coil at the back of her head. She put on the camel’s hair dressing-gown, and tied the girdle round her long, slim waist, and having done this she looked altogether a different creature from that vision of haggard shame which she had seen just now with loathing. She had a curious Puritan air in her sad coloured raiment, and braided hair.

Scarcely had she finished when she heard the dip of oars, and looking out in an agony of horror at the apprehension of Lostwithiel’s return, she saw a boat laden with two big milliner’s baskets, and with a woman sitting in the stem. The men who were rowing this boat were not of the crew of the Vendetta.

She had not long to wonder. She unlocked her door, and went into the adjoining cabin, while the boat came alongside, and woman and baskets were hauled upon the deck.

Three minutes afterwards the cabin-boy knocked at her door, and told her that there was a person from Arcachon to see her, a dressmaker with things that had been ordered for her.

She unlocked the door, for the first time since she locked it at dawn, and found herself face to face with a smiling young person, whose black eyes and olive complexion were warm with the glow of the south, golden in the eyes, carnation on the plump, oval cheeks.

This young person had the honour to bring the trousseau which Monsieur had sent for Madame’s inspection. Monsieur had told her how sadly inconvenienced Madame had been by the accident by which all her luggage had been left upon the quay at the moment of sailing. In truth it must have been distressing for Madame, as it had evidently been distressing for Monsieur in his profound sympathy with Madame, his wife. In the meantime she, the young person, had complied with Monsieur’s orders, and had brought all that there was of the best and most delicate and refined for Madame’s gracious inspection.

The cabin-boy brought in the two baskets, which the milliner opened with an air, taking out the delicate lingerie, the soft silk and softer cashmere—peignoirs, frilled petticoats, a fluff and flutter of creamy lace and pale satin ribbons, transforming simplest garments into things of beauty. She spread out her wares, chattering all the while, and then looked at Madame for approval.

Isola scarcely glanced at all the finery. She pointed to the only plain walking-gown among all the delicate prettinesses, the silks and cashmeres and laces—a grey tweed tailor-gown, with no adornment except a little narrow black braid.

“I will keep that,” she said, “and one set of under-linen, the plainest. You can take all the rest of the things back to your shop. Please help me to dress as quickly as you can—I want to go on shore in the boat that takes you back.”

“But, Madame, Monsieur insisted that I should bring a complete trousseau. He wished Madame to supply herself with all things needful for a long cruise in the south.”

“He was mistaken. My luggage is safe enough. I shall have it again in a few days. I only want clothes to wear for a day or two. Kindly do what I ask.”

Her tone was so authoritative that the milliner complied, reluctantly, and murmuring persuasive little speeches while she assisted Madame to dress. All that she had brought was of the most new—expressly arrived from Paris, from one of the most distinguished establishments in the Rue de la Paix. Fashions change so quickly—and the present fashions were so enchanting, so original. She must be pardoned if she suggested that nothing in Madame’s wardrobe could be so new or so elegant as these latest triumphs of an artistic faiseur. Madame took no heed of her eloquence, but hurried through the simple toilet, insisted upon all the finery being replaced in the two baskets, and then went upon deck with the milliner.

“I am going on shore to his lordship,” she said, with quiet authority, to the captain.

It was a deliberate lie—the first she had told, but not the last she would have to tell.

She landed on the beach at Arcachon—penniless, but with a diamond ring on her wedding finger—her engagement ring—which she knew, by a careless admission of Martin Disney’s, to have cost fifty pounds. She left the milliner, and went into the little town, dreading to meet Lostwithiel at every step. She found a complacent jeweller who was willing to advance twenty-five Napoleons upon the ring, and promised to return it to her on the receipt of that sum, with only a bagatelle of twenty francs for interest, since Madame would redeem her pledge almost immediately.

Furnished with this money she drove straight to the station, and waited there in the most obscure corner she could find till the first train left for Bordeaux. At Bordeaux she had a long time to wait, still in hiding, before the express left for Paris—and then came the long, lonely journey—from Bordeaux to Paris—from Paris to London—from London to Trelasco. It seemed an endless pilgrimage, a nightmare dream of dark night and wintry day, made hideous by the ceaseless throb of the engine, the perpetual odour of sulphur and smoke. She reached Trelasco somehow, and sank exhausted in Tabitha’s arms.

“What day is it?” she asked faintly, looking round the familiar room, as if she had never seen it before.

“Thursday, ma’am. You have been away ten days,” the old servant answered coldly.

It was only the next day that Tabitha told her mistress she must leave her.

“There is no need to talk about what has happened,” she said. “I have kept your secret. I have let no one know that you were away. I packed Susan off for a holiday the morning after the ball. I don’t believe any one knows anything about you—unless you were seen yesterday on your way home.”

Then came stern words of renunciation, a conscientious but rather narrow-minded woman’s protest against sin.

CHAPTER XXIX.

“I, YOU, AND GOD CAN COMPREHEND EACH OTHER.”

It was two months after Allegra’s wedding-day, and Martin Disney had been warned that the closing hour of the young life he had watched so tenderly was not far off. It might come to-morrow; or it might not come for a week; or the lingering flame might go flickering on, fainting and reviving in the socket, for another month. He must hold himself prepared for the worst. Death might come suddenly at the last, like a thief in the night; or by stealthy, gradual steps, and slowest progress from life to clay.

He sat beside Isola’s sofa in the Roman lodging as he had sat beside her bed in that long illness at Trelasco, when her wandering mind appalled him more than her bodily weakness. He watched as faithfully as he had watched then, but this time without hope.

Father Rodwell had been with her at seven o’clock upon the last three mornings, and had administered the sacrament to her and to her husband, and to the faithful Tabitha, one with them in piety and love. The priest thought that each celebration would be the last; but she rallied a little as the day wore on, and lived till sunset; lived through the long painful night; and another day dawned, and he found her waiting for him in the morning, ready to greet him with her pale smile when he appeared upon the threshold of her room, after going up the staircase in saddest apprehension, dreading to hear that all was over, except the funeral service and the funeral bell.

She insisted upon getting up and going into the drawing-room, feeble as she was. Tabitha was so handy and so helpful that the fatigue of an invalid’s toilet was lightened to the uttermost. Tabitha and the colonel carried her from the bedroom to the drawing-room upon her couch, and carried the couch back to the bedside in the evening. Before noon she was lying in the sunlit salon, surrounded with flowers and photographs and books and newspapers, and all things that lighten the monotonous hours of sickness.

Nor was companionship ever wanting. Martin Disney devoted himself to her with an unfailing patience. Upon no pretence would he leave her for more than half an hour at a time—-just the space of a walk to the Hill of Gardens, or the length of the Via de’ Condotti and the Corso; just the space of a cigar in the loggia.

He read to her, he talked to her, he waited upon her. Tabitha and he were her only nurses; for Löttchen was a young woman of profound concentration of motive, and had early taken unto herself the motto, One baby, one nurse. She conscientiously performed her duty to her infant charge; but she rarely lifted a finger to help any one else.

It was drawing towards the end of July; the weather had been lovely hitherto—hot, and very hot, but not insupportable for those who could afford to dawdle and sleep away their mid-day and afternoon existence—who had horses to carry them about in the early mornings, and a carriage to drive them in moonlit gardens and picturesque places. In the suburbs of the great city, across the arid Campagna yonder, at Tivoli, and Frascati, and Albano, and Castel Gandolfo, people had been revelling in the summer, living under Jove’s broad roof, with dancing and sports, and music and feasting, and rustic, innocent kisses, snatched amidst the darkness of groves whose only lamps are fireflies—deep woods of ilex, where the nightingale sings long and late, and the grasshopper trills his good night through the perfumed herbage.

Here, in Rome, the heat was more oppressive, and the splashing of the city’s many fountains was the only relief from the glare and dazzle of the piazzas, the whiteness of the great blocks of houses in the new streets and boulevards. Blinds were lowered, and shops were shut, in the blinding noontide heat, and through the early afternoon the eternal city was almost as silent and reposeful as the sleeping beauty—to awaken at sundown to movement, and life, and music, and singing, in lighted streets and crowded cafes.

Suddenly, in the dim grey of the morning, the slumberous calm of summer changed to howling wind and tropical rain—torrential rain, that filled every gutter, and splashed from every housetop, and ran in wild cascades from every alley on the steep hillsides. The Campagna was one vast lake, illumined with flashes of lightning, and the thunder pealed and reverberated along the lofty parapets of the ruined aqueducts. The tall cypresses in the Pincian Gardens bent like saplings before that mighty wind, which seemed to howl and shriek its loudest as it came tearing down from the hill to whistle and rave among the housetops in the Piazza di Spagna.

“One would think the ghost of Nero were shrieking in the midst of the tempest,” said Isola, as she listened to the fitful sobbing of the wind late in the dull grey afternoon, while her husband and Father Rodwell sat near her couch, keeping up that sad pretence of cheerfulness which love struggles to maintain upon the very edge of the grave—the brokenhearted make-believe of those who know that death waits at the door. “There comes a shrill cry every now and then like the scream of a wicked spirit in pain.”

“Rome is full of ghosts,” answered the priest, “but there are the shadows of the good and the great as well as of the wicked. Walking alone in twilight on the Aventine, I should hardly be surprised to meet the spirit of Gregory the Great wandering amidst the scenes of his saintly life; nor do I ever go into the Pantheon at dusk without half expecting to see the shade of Raffaelle. And there are others—some I knew in the flesh—Wiseman and Antonelli, Gibson, the sculptor, consummate artist and gentlest of men—yes, Rome is full of the shadows of the good and the wise. One can afford to put up with Nero.”

“You don’t mean me to think that you believe in ghosts?” asked Isola, deeply interested.

It was only five o’clock, yet the sky was grey with the greyness of late evening. Here in this land of sunshine there had been all day long the brooding gloom of storm-clouds, and a sky that was dark as winter.

“I won’t analyze my own feelings on the subject; I will quote the words of a man at whose feet it was my happiness to sit sometimes when I was a lad at Oxford. Canon Mozley has not shrunk from facing the great problem of spiritual life in this world—of an invisible after-existence upon the earth when the body is dust. ‘Is the mother of our Lord now existing?’ he asks, and answers, ‘Yes. I believe that all fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters are now existing. Nature has disposed of their bodies as far as we can trace her work; but their souls remain. So I read in Homer, in Virgil, and in the New Testament. This existence I am permitted to believe is a conscious and active existence.’ Canon Mozley, the man who wrote those words, and much more in the same strain, was not an idle visionary. If he could afford to believe in the presence of the dead among us, why, so can I. And I believe that Gregory the Great has whispered at the ear of many a Holy Father in the long line of his successors, and has influenced many a Cardinal’s vote, and has been an invisible power in many a council.”

“I like to believe in ghosts,” said Isola, gently. “But I thank God those that I love are still in this life.”

She held out her hand with a curiously timid gesture to her husband, who clasped it tenderly, bending his lips to kiss the pale thin fingers. Oh, Death, pity and pardon are so interwoven with thine image that neither pride nor anger has any force against thy softening influence. She had been false. She had wronged him and dishonoured herself, cruelly, cruelly, most cruelly; but she had suffered and repented, and she was passing away from him. Let the broken spirit pass in peace!

That day wore itself out in storm and tempest, and the night came on like a fierce death-struggle; and the wind raved and shrieked at intervals all through the night; and again next day there were gloom and darkness, and a sky heaped up with masses of lead-coloured cloud; and again the torrential rain streamed from the housetops and splashed in the streets below; a dreary day to be endured even by the healthy and the happy—a day of painful oppression for an invalid. Isola’s spirits sank to the lowest depth, and for the first time since Allegra’s marriage she talked hopelessly of their separation.

“If I could only see her once more before I die,” she sighed.

“My dear love, you shall see her as soon as the railway can bring her here. Remember, it is you who have forbidden me to send for her. You know how dearly she loves you—how willingly she would come to you. I’ll telegraph to her within half an hour.”

“No, no, no,” Isola protested hurriedly. “No, we can never meet again in this world. I took my farewell of her in the church. I meant it to be farewell. I was very happy for her sake when I saw her married to the man she loved. It was a selfish repining that made me ask for her just now. I would not have her summoned here for worlds. She is so happy at Venice—happy in her honeymoon dream. Tell her nothing, Martin—nothing till you can tell her that my days have ended peacefully. She has borne her burden for me in the past. I want her to be free from all care about me—but not to forget me.”

“She will not forget, Isola. She loves you fondly and truly.”

“Yes, I am sure of that. She was dearer to me than my own sister—cared for me much more than Gwendolen ever cared, though Gwen and I were always good friends. Poor feather-headed Gwen! She writes me affectionate letters, hoping she may get to Italy in the autumn, though it is impossible for her to come just now. And mother and father write to me just in the same way—mother regretting that her health won’t allow her to leave Dinan; father hoping to see me in the autumn. Their letters are full of hopefulness,” she concluded, with a faint touch of irony.

Her husband read to her for the greater part of the long gloomy day. He read St. Thomas à Kempis for some part of the time. The book had been on the little table by her side throughout her illness. He read two or three of Frederick Robertson’s sermons, and for occasional respite from too serious thought he read her favourite poems—Adonaïs, Alastor, and some of Shelley’s lovely lyrics, and those passages in Childe Harold which had acquired a new charm for her since she had grown familiar with Rome.

“Read to me about Venice,” she said, “and let me think of Allegra and Captain Hulbert. I love to fancy them gliding along those narrow, picturesque streets, in the great, graceful, ponderous gondola I remember so well. It is so nice to know of their happiness—and to know that they need never be parted.”

So the long summer day—without the glow and glory of summer—wore on, and except for her excessive languor and feebleness there were no indications that the patient’s state was any worse than it had been for some weeks. The doctor came late in the afternoon, and felt her pulse, and talked to her a little; but it was easy to see that his visit was only a formula.

“You have such an excellent nurse, Mrs. Disney, that I consider my position almost a sinecure,” he said, smiling at the faithful Tabitha, who stood waiting for his instructions, and who never forgot the minutest detail.

Tabitha came in from the adjoining bedroom every now and then, and adjusted the pillows on the sofa, and sprinkled eau de Cologne, or fanned the invalid with a large Japanese fan, or arranged the silken coverlet over her feet, or brought her some small refreshment in the way of a cup of soup or jelly, and tenderly coaxed and assisted her to take it, talking just as much or as little as seemed prudent, always careful neither to fatigue nor excite her charge.

It was between eight and nine in the evening, and there was a gloomy twilight in the loggia, and in the garden beyond. The wind which had dropped in the afternoon had begun to rage again, as if not only Nero but all the wicked emperors were abroad in the air.

Isola had begged that one of the windows might be opened, in spite of the tempestuous weather; and the cold damp breath of the storm crept into the room and chilled Martin Disney as he sat by his wife’s sofa, reading a London paper that had come by the evening post.

The only artificial light in the room was a reading-lamp at the colonel’s elbow, shaded from the draught by the four-leaved screen which protected the invalid. The gloomy grey daylight had not quite faded, and through the half-open door opposite him Martin Disney saw the white marble wall of the staircase, and some oleanders in stone vases that stood on the spacious landing.