Front matter (continued 2)

He peered through the glass in the door. As in his dream, something lay in the passage beyond, some glove or handkerchief or crumpled letter, with a shaft of sunlight upon it from an open door. No one came to open to him; but Roger, knocking there, was conscious of the presence of Ottalie by him and in him; he felt her brushing past him, a rustling, breathing beauty, wearing a great hat, and those old pearl earrings which trembled when she turned her head. But no Ottalie came to the door, no Agatha, no old Mrs. Hicks the caretaker. The flat was empty. After a couple of minutes of knocking, an old, untidy, red-faced woman came out from the flat beneath, gasping for breath, with her hand against her side.

"No use your knockin'," she said crustily. "They're gawn awy. They i'n't 'ere. They're gawn awy."

"When did they go?" asked Roger, filled suddenly with leaping fire.

"They're gawn awy," repeated the old woman. "No use your knockin'. They're gawn awy." She gasped for a moment, eyeing Roger with suspicion and dislike; then turned to her home with the slow, uncertain, fumbling movements of one whose heart is affected.

Roger was left alone on the stairs, aware that he had come too late.

The stairs were covered with a layer of sheet-lead. When the old woman had shut her door, Roger grovelled down upon them, lighting match after match, in the hope of finding footmarks which might tell him more. Agatha had rather long feet, Ottalie's were small, but very well proportioned. Mrs. Hicks's feet were disguised by the boots she wore. A scrap of brown linoleum on the stair-head bore evident marks of a man's hobnail boots which had waited there, perhaps for an answer. There were other, non-committal marks, which might have been made by anybody. On the whole, Roger fancied that a woman had made them, when going out, with dry shoes, that morning. The problem now was, had she left London for Ireland or for the Continent? With some misgivings, he decided against Ireland. On former occasions she had always made her stay in London after her visit to the Continent. If she had been staying in London for more than one night, she would have written to him; he would have seen her. As she had not written to him, she was plainly going abroad, probably for a month or six weeks, after resting for one night on the way. He would not see her till the middle of the summer. That she had been in town, for at least one night, was plain from what the woman had said. The thought that only a few hours ago she had passed where he stood, came home to him like her touch upon him. He sat down upon the stair-head till his disappointment was mastered.

He took a last look through the door-glass at the crumpled thing, glove, letter, or handkerchief, lying in the passage. Then he went out into the avenue. The disappointment was very bitter to him. It was so strong an emphasis upon the prophetic quality of his dream. Ottalie had been there, waiting for him. He had come there too late. He had missed her. The thought that he had missed her, suggested the cause. He would have to go back to Pollock. He could not leave his friend alone in that wild state of mind. A smaller man would perhaps have felt resentment against the cause. Roger was without that littleness. He saw only the tragic irony. He saw life being played upon a great plan. He felt himself to be a fine piece set aside from his own combination by one greater, stronger, more wonderful. It seemed very wonderful that he had been kept (so unexpectedly) from Ottalie, by the one thing in the world strong enough so to keep him. Nothing but a matter of life and death could have kept him from her.

A lively desire sprang up in him to know whither she had gone. This (he thought) he could find out, without difficulty, from a Bradshaw. If she were going to Greece, she would go by one of two ways. For a few minutes he had the hope that she might not yet have left London, that he might catch her at the station. A Bradshaw showed him that this was possible, since, going by one route, she would not have to start till after seven in the evening. But, if she had chosen that route, why should she have closed the flat so early? He saw no answer to the question. Still, the uncertainty preyed upon him and flattered him at the same time. She might be there at seven. He would go to the station, in any case. Would it were seven! He had nine hours to live through.

He walked hurriedly to the National Gallery. He remembered, when he entered, that he had made no rendezvous with Pollock. He expected to find him before the Ariadne. He was not there. He was not before his other favourite, The Return of Ulysses. He was not in any of the little rooms opening off the Italian rooms. A hurried walk round all the foreign schools showed that Pollock was not in that part of the Gallery at all. Very few people were in the Gallery at that hour. There could be no mistake. He tried the English rooms, without success. He described Pollock to the keepers of the lower stairs. "No, sir. No one's gone down like that." Search in the basement, in the little rooms where the Turner water-colours and Arundel prints are kept, showed him that Pollock was not in the Gallery. He wished to be quite certain. He made a swift beat of the French and Spanish rooms, and thence, by the Dutch and Flemish schools, to the Italian rooms. Here he doubled back upon his tracks, to avoid all possibility of mistake. He was now certain Pollock was not in the Gallery. Very probably he had never entered it. What had become of him?

He could hardly have gone to the Portrait Gallery, he thought. Yet it was possible. Pollock was in an excited state of mind. He was hardly in a fit state to be out alone. Roger felt anxious. He hurried to the Portrait Gallery. After a long search, upstairs and downstairs, in those avenues of painted eyes, he decided that Pollock was not there, either. He must have gone to Bondini's. Suffolk Street was only a quarter of a mile away. Roger hurried on to look for him at Bondini's. But no. He was not at Bondini's. Where, then, could he be?

By this time, Roger was alarmed for his friend. He thought that something must have happened to Kitty. He took a cab to Vincent Square to make sure. Pollock let him in. He was smoking a cigarette. His bandage gave him a one-eyed look, infinitely depressing.

"I'm sorry, Roger," he said; "I couldn't keep away from Kitty. She's quieter, but no better. O God, Roger, I don't know how men can be unkind to women. I don't know what I shall do without her, if anything happens to her."

"You must not lose heart, like this," Roger said. "I understand, very well, what you are feeling. But you ought not to expect evil in this way. Very, very few cases go wrong, now. I was afraid that something had happened to you. Will you come to my rooms for a game of chess? Then we could lunch together, and go on, perhaps, to Henderson's. He has finished the picture he was working on."

Pollock was not to be tempted. He would not leave Kitty. After talking with him for nearly an hour, Roger left him, promising to come back before long, to enquire.

When he got outside, into the street, with no definite, immediate object to occupy his mind, he was assailed by the memories of his succession of mishaps. He could not say that one of them hurt more than another. The loss of Ottalie, following so swiftly on the dream, made him miserable. The destruction of his play by the critics made him feel not exactly guilty, but unclean, as though the rabble had spat upon him. He felt "unclean," in the Levitical sense. He had some hesitation in going to mix with his fellows.

He kept saying to himself that if he were not very careful, the world would be flooding into his mind, trampling its garden to mud. It was his duty to beat back the world before it fouled his inner vision. If he were not very careful he would find that his next work would be tainted with some feverish animosity, some personal bitterness, or weakness of contempt. It was his duty as a man and as an artist to prevent that, so that his mind might be as a hedged garden full of flowers, or as a clear, unflawed mirror, reflecting only perfect images. The events of the night before had broken in his barriers. He felt that his old theory, laid aside long before, when he first felt the fascination of modern artistic methods, was true, after all; that the right pursuit of the artist was the practice of Christianity. He found in the National Gallery, in the battle picture of Uccello, in the nobleness of that young knight, riding calmly among the spears, a healing image of the artist. He lingered before that divine young man with the fair hair until one o'clock. He passed the afternoon at a table in the British Museum, reading all that he could find about Ottalie. There was her name in full in the Irish Landed Gentry. There were the names of all her relatives, and the names of their houses. It was an absurd thing to read these entries, but the names were all stimulants to memory. He knew these people and places. They took vivid shape in his mind as he read them. He had read them before, more than once, when the craving for her had been bitter in the past. He knew the names of her forebears unto the third and fourth generation. A volume of Who's Who gave him details of her living relatives. A married uncle's recreations were "shooting and hunting." A maiden aunt had published Songs of Quiet Life, in 1902. Her older brother, Leslie Fawcett, had published a novel, One Summer, in 1891. Both these volumes lay beside him. He read them again, for the tenth time. Both were very short works; and both, he felt, helped him to understand Ottalie. Neither work was profound; but both came from a sweet and noble nature, at once charming and firm. There were passages in the songs which were like Ottalie's inner nature speaking. In the novel, in the chapter on a girl, he thought that he recognised Ottalie as she must have been long ago.

The volume of the Landed Gentry gave him pity for the historian who would come a century hence, to grub up facts for his history. Ottalie, dear, breathing, beautiful woman, witty, and lovely-haired, and noble like a lady in a poem, would be to such a one "3rd dau.," or, perhaps, mere "issue."

At five o'clock, he put away his books. He went to drink tea at a dairy, in High Holborn. He entered the place with some misgivings, for his two emotions made the world distasteful to him. The memory of the night before made him feel that he had been whipped in public. The thought of Ottalie made him feel that the real world was in his brain. He shrank from meeting anybody known to him. That old feeling of "uncleanness" came strongly over him. The stuffy unquiet of the Museum had at least been filled by preoccupied, selfish people. Here in the tea-shop, everybody stared. All the little uncomfortable tables were peopled by pairs of eyes. He felt that a woman giggled, that a young man nudged his fellow. Stepping back to let a waitress pass, he knocked over a chair. The place was cramped; he felt stupidly awkward and uncomfortable. He blushed as he picked up the chair. Everybody stared. It seemed to him that they were saying, "That is Mr. Naldrett, the author of the piece which was booed off last night. They say it's very immoral. Millie was there. She said it was a silly lot of old-fashioned stuff. What funny eyes he's got. And look at the way he puts his feet."

He sat down in a corner, from which he could survey the room. A paper lay upon the table; he picked it up abstractedly. It was a copy of The Post Meridian. Somebody had rested butter upon the upper part of it. He glanced at it for an instant, just long enough to see a leading article below the grease mark. "Drama and Decency," ran the scarehead. It went on to say that the London public had once again shown its unerring sense of the fitness of things over Mr. Naldrett's play. He dropped the paper to one side, and wiped the hand which had touched it. He felt beaten to bay. He stared forward at the house so fiercely that a timid lady, of middle age and ill-health, possibly as beaten as himself, turned from the chair opposite before she sat down. There were no friends of his there, except a red-haired, fierce little poet, who sat close by, reading and eating cake. The yellow back of Les Fleurs du Mal was propped against his teapot. He bit so fiercely that his beard wagged at each bite. Something of the fierceness and passion of the Femmes Damnées, or of le vin de l'Assassin, was wreaked upon the cake. There came a muttering among the bites. The man was almost reading aloud. A memory of Baudelaire came to Roger, a few grand melancholy lines:—

He wondered if it would be like that. A waitress brought him tea and toast. He poured a little tea into his cup, thinking of a man now dead, who had drunk tea there with him a year ago. One was very callous about the dead. He wondered if the dead were callous about the living, or whether they had of grandes douleurs, as the poet thought. He felt that he would not mind being dead, but for Ottalie. He wondered whether Ottalie had read the papers. He buttered some toast and laid it to one side of his plate, a sort of burnt offering to the dead. A line on the bill of fare caught his eye. "Pan-Bos. Our new Health Bread. Per Portion, 2d." His tired mind turned it backwards, ".d2 ,noitroP reP daerB." "I am going mad," he said to himself. "Shall I go to Ireland to-night?"

Something warned him that if he went to Ireland, Ottalie would not be there. With Ottalie away, it would be intolerable. There would be her house, up on the hills, and all those sycamores, like ghosts in the twilight, ghosts of old men brooding on her beauty, like the old men in Troy when Helen passed. No. He could not bear Ireland with her away. He thought of the boat train with regret for the old jolly jaunts. The guard with a Scotch accent, the carriage in front which went on to Dundee, the sound of the beautiful Irish voice ("voce assai più che la nostra viva"), and then the hiring of rug and pillow, knowing that one would wake in Scotland, among hills, running water, a "stately speech," and pure air. It would not be wise to go to Ireland. If he went now, with Ottalie away, he might not be able to go later, when she would be there. It would be nothing without her. Nothing but lonely reading, writing, walking, and swimming. It would be better not to go. Here the poet gulped his cake, rose, and advanced on Roger.

"How d'you do?" he said, speaking rapidly, as though his words were playing tag. "I've just been talking to Collins about you. He's been telling me about your play. I hear you had a row, or something."

"Yes. There was a row."

"Collins has been going for you in The Daystar. He says you haven't read Aristotle, or something. Have you seen his article?"

"No. I haven't seen it."

"Oh, you ought to read it. Parts of it are very witty. It would cheer you up."

"What does he say?"

"He says that— Oh, you know what Collins says. He says that you— I believe I've got it on me. I cut it out. Where did I put it?"

"Never mind. I'm not interested in Collins."

"Aren't you? He's very good. I suppose your play'll be produced again later?"

"I think not."

He got rid of the poet, paid his bill, and walked out. Outside he ran into Hollins, the critic of The Week. He would have avoided Hollins, but Hollins stopped him.

"Ah, Naldrett," he said. "I've just been going for you in The Week. What do you mean by that third act? Really. It really was—"

It gave Roger a kind of awe to think that this man had been damning other people's acts before he was born.

"What was wrong with the third act? You didn't hear it."

"You must read M. Capus," said Hollins, passing on. "I shall go for you until you do."

A newsboy, with a voice like a bird of doom, flying in the night, held a coloured bill. "Drama and Decency," ran the big letters. Another, offering a copy, shewed, as allurement, "'ceful Fracas." The whole town seemed angry with him. He crossed into Seven Dials, and along to St. Martin's Lane, where he knew of a quiet reading-room. Here he hid.

IV

There's hope left yet. The Virgin Martyr.

At seven o'clock he went to the station, hoping (against his better judgment) that he might see Ottalie at the train. The train was very crowded. The travellers wore the pleased, expectant look with which one leaves an English city. Ottalie was not among them. He went down the train twice, in opposite directions, without success. She was not there. She must have started that morning. He had missed her.

He sat down on one of the station benches. His world seemed slipping from him. He told himself that to-morrow he would have to work, or all these worries would destroy him. He felt more lonely than he had ever felt in his life. A week before, he would have had O'Neill, Pollock, and another friend, now abroad. O'Neill was gone, without a farewell. Pollock was fighting his own battles, with poor success. Ottalie was thundering across France, or, perhaps, just drawing into Paris.

A longing to see some one drove him out of the station. He walked to Soho, to a Spanish restaurant, where some of his friends sometimes dined.

Here, at night, the curious may visit Spain, and hear the guttural, lisping speech, and munch upon chuletas, and swallow all manner of strangeness in cazuelas. Very bold young men cry aloud there for "Mozo," lisping the z. The less bold signal with the hand. The timid point, and later, eat that which is set before them, asking no question, obeying Holy Writ, though without spiritual profit.

On entering the place, he bowed to the Scotch-looking, heavily-earringed Spanish woman, who sat at the desk reading Blanco y Negro. She gave him a "Buenas tardes," without lifting her eyes. Then came, from his right, a cry of "Naldrett!"

Two painters, a poet, and proportionable woman-kind, were dining together there, over the evening papers.

"How are you?" said one of the painters.

"We've just been reading about you," said the other.

"Reading the most terrible things," said the poet.

"Shew him The Orb. The Orb's the best."

"No. Shew him The Planet. The one who says he ought to be prosecuted."

Roger, refusing Orb and Planet, shook hands with one of the ladies. She was a little actress, delicate, fragile, almost inhuman, with charm in all she did. She said that she had been reading his book of The Handful, and had found it very "interesting." She wanted Roger to come to tea, to talk over a scheme of hers. It dawned on Roger that she was saving him from his friends.

"You're the man of the moment," said the poet.

"Don't you pay any attention to any of them," said the painter who had first spoken. "You may be quite sure that when one has to say a thing in a hurry, as these critics must, one says the easiest thing, and the thing which comes handiest to say. If I paid attention to all they say about me I should be in a lunatic asylum. Besides, what does it matter what they say? Who are they, when all is said?"

The talk drifted into a wit combat, in which the seven set themselves to define a critic with the greatest possible pungency and precision. Having done this, to their own satisfaction, they set themselves to the making of a composite sonnet on the critic, upon the backs of bills of fare. One of the painters drew an ideal critic, in the manners, now of Tintoret, now of Velasquez, now of Watteau. The other, who complained that old masters ought to be ranked with critics, because they spoiled the market for living painters, drew him in the manner of Rops.

After dinner, Roger walked home by a roundabout road, which took him past his theatre. A few people hung about outside it, staring idly at a few others who were entering. His play was still running, it seemed, in spite of the trouble. Falempin was brave.

He walked back to his rooms, wondering why he had not gone to Ireland that night. London oppressed and pained him. He thought it an ugly city, full of ugly life. He was without any desire to be a citizen of such a city. He disliked the place and her people; but to-night, being, perhaps, a little humbled by his misfortunes, he found himself wondering whether all the squalor of the town, its beastly drinking dens, its mobs of brainless, inquisitive shouters, might not be changed suddenly to beauty and noble life by some sudden general inspiration, such as comes to nations at rare times under suffering. He decided against it. Patience under suffering was hardly one of our traits.

On his sitting-room table was a letter from Ottalie, bearing the London post-mark across the Greek stamps, and underneath them the legend, "2d. to pay." By the date on the letter it had been ten days in getting to him. He opened it eagerly, half expecting to find in it the very letter of the dream, though something told him that the dream-letters had contained her essential thoughts, the letter in his hand the worldly covering of those thoughts, translated into earthly speech with its reservations and half-heartedness. He learned from this letter that she had been for a month in Greece, and was now coming home. She would be for four days, from the 7th to the 11th, at her flat in London. She hoped to see him there, before she returned to Ireland. To his amazement the postscript ran: "I have read your last book. It reads like the diary of a lost soul," the very words seen by him in dream. For the moment this did not move him so deeply as the thought that this was the 11th of the month. She had been in London with him for the last three or four days, and he had never known it. He had seen her light blown out the night before. If he had had a little sense he would have called on her early that morning before he had breakfasted. Had he done so, he would have seen her, he would have driven with her to the station, he could, perhaps, have travelled with her to Ireland. The bitterness of his disappointment made him think, for a moment, meanly of Agatha, who, in his fancy, had kept them apart. He suspected that Agatha had held back the letter. How else could it have been posted in London with Greek stamps upon it?

Then came the thought that she had not gone to Ireland that morning. He had never known her go back to Ireland by the day-boats. She liked to sleep in the train, and save the daylight for life. His knowledge of her told him what had happened. She had taken her luggage to the station, soon after breakfast. Having done this, she had passed the day in amusement, dined at the station hotel, and now—

He sat down, beaten by this last disappointment. Now she was steaming north in the night express to Port Patrick. She had only just gone. She was within a dozen miles of him. The train did not start till eight. It was now only fourteen minutes past. If he had not been a fool; if he had only come home instead of going to the station!

"Selina," he cried down to the basement, "when did this letter come? This letter with the foreign stamp."

"Just after you'd gone out this morning, sir."

Five minutes' patience would have altered his life.

"A lady come to see you, sir."

"What was her name?"

"She didn't leave a name, sir."

"What was she like? When did she come?"

"She came about a few minutes before nine, sir. She seemed very put out at not finding you."

"Had she been here before?"

"I think she was the lady come here one time with another lady, a dark lady, when you 'ad the suite upstairs, sir. I think she come in one evenin' when you read to them."

Ottalie had been there. It must have been Ottalie.

"I told her you was gone awy, sir. You 'adn't said where to."

He thanked Selina. He bit his lips lest he should ask whether the visitor had worn earrings. He went back into his room and sat down. He had not realised till then how much Ottalie meant to him. A voice rang in his brain that he had missed her, missed her by a few minutes, through his own impatience, through some chance, through some juggling against him of the powers outside life. All his misery seemed rolled into a leaden ball, which was smashing through his brain. The play was a little thing. The loss of John was a little thing. Templeton was farcical, the critics were little gnats, but to have missed Ottalie, to have lost Ottalie! He tasted a moment of despair.

Despair does not last long. It kills, or it goads to action. With Roger it lasted for a few seconds, and then changed to a passion to be on the way to her. But he would have to wait, he would have to wait. There were all those interminable hours to wait. All a whole night of purgatory. What could he do meanwhile? How could he pass that night? What could he do? Work was impossible. Talk was impossible. He remembered then, another thing.

He opened his Bradshaw feverishly. Yes. There was another boat-train to Holyhead. He could be in Dublin a little after dawn the next day; "8.45 from Euston." He could just do it. He would catch that second boat-train. It was a bare chance; but it could be done. He could be with Ottalie by the afternoon of the next day. But money; he had not enough money. Five minutes to pack. He could spare that; but how about money? To whom could he go for money? Who would have money to lend upon the instant? It would have to be some one near at hand. Every second made his task harder. Where would there be a cab? Which of his friends lived on the way to Euston? Who lives between Westminster and Euston? It is all park, and slum, and boarding-house. Big Ben, lifting his voice, intoned the quarter.

He caught a cab outside Dean's Yard. He drove to a friend in Thames Chambers. The friend lent him a sovereign and some loose silver. He had enough now to take him to Ireland. He bade the cabman to hurry. The newsboys were busy in the Strand. They were calling out something about winner, and disaster. He saw one newsbill flutter out from a man's hand. "British Liner Lost," ran the heading. He felt relieved that the monkey-mind had now something new to occupy it. The changing of the newsbill heading made him feel cleaner.

Up to the crossing of Holborn, he felt that he would catch the train. At Holborn the way was barred by traffic. The Euston Road was also barred to him. He missed the train by rather more than a minute. He was too tired to feel more disappointment. The best thing for him to do, he thought, would be to sleep at home, catch the boat-train in the morning and travel all day. That plan would land him in Ireland within twenty-four hours. He could then either stay a night in port, or post the forty miles to his cottage. In any case he would be with Ottalie, actually in her very presence, within forty hours. By posting the forty miles he might watch the next night outside her window, in the deep peace of the Irish country, almost within sound of the sea. The thought of the great stars sweeping over Ottalie's home, and of the moon coming up, filling the valley, and of the little wind which trembled the leaves, giving, as it were, speech to the beauty of the night, moved him intensely. In his overwrought mood, these things were the only real things. The rest was all nightmare.

Driving back from Euston, he noticed another affiche, bearing the words, "Steamer Sunk. Lives Lost." He paid no attention to it. He wondered vaguely, as he had often wondered in the past, what kind of a mind browsed upon these things. A disaster, an attack upon the Government, and a column of betting news. That was what God's image brooded upon, night after night. That was what God's image wrote about nightly, after an expensive education.

He was very tired; but there could be no rest for him till he had enquired after Mrs. Pollock. She had given birth to a little girl, who was likely to live. She herself was very weak, but not in serious danger. Pollock was making good resolutions in a mist of cigarette smoke. Roger was not wanted there. He went home, to bed, tired out. He slept heavily.

He was fresh and merry the next morning. He packed at leisure, breakfasted at ease, and drove away to the station, feeling like a boy upon a holiday. He was leaving this grimy, gritty wilderness. He was going to forget all about it. In a few hours he would be over the border, in a new land. That night he would be over the sea, so changed, and in a land so different, that all this would seem like a horrid, far-away dream, indescribably squalid and useless. London was a strong, poisonous drug, to be taken in minute doses. He was going to take a strong corrective.

The train journey was long and slow; but after Carlisle was passed, his mind began to feel the excitement of it. In a couple of hours he would be in a steamer, standing well forward, watching for the double lights to flash, and the third light, farther to the south, to blink and gleam. The dull, low, Scottish landscape, where Burns lived and Keats tramped, gave way to irregular low hills, indescribably lonely, with boggy lowland beneath them and forlorn pools. He looked out for one such pool. He had often noticed it before, on his journeys that way. It was a familiar landmark to him. Like all the rest of that Scottish land, it was associated in his mind with Ottalie. All the journey was associated with her. He had travelled past those hills and pools so often, only to see her, that they had become a sort of ritual to him, a part of seeing her, something which inevitably led to her. After the hill with the cairn, he saw his landmark. There glittered the pool under the last of the sun. The little lonely island, not big enough for a peel, but big enough, years ago, for a lake-dwelling, shone out in a glimmer of withered grass. A few bents, bristling the shallows, bowed and bowed and bowed as the wind blew. A reef of black rocks glided out at the pool's end, like an eel swimming. Roger again had the fancy, which had risen in his mind before a dozen times, when passing the pool, that he would like to be a boy there, with a toy boat. Another landmark tenderly looked for, was a little white house rather far from the line, high up on the moor. He had once thought (in passing) that that would be a pleasant place for a week's stay when he and Ottalie were married. The tenderness of the original fancy lingered still. It had become an inevitable part of the journey. After a few minutes of looking, it came into view, newly whitewashed, or, it may be, merely very bright in the sunset. A woman stood at a little garden gate. He had seen her there once before. Perhaps she looked out for this evening train. It might be an event in her life. She must be very lonely there, so many miles from anywhere. After this, he saw only one more landmark, a copse of spruce-fir by the line. A faint mist was gathering. There was going to be a fog. The boat would make a slow passage.

The mist was dim over everything when the train stopped. He got out on to a platform which was wet with mist. Wet milk-cans gleamed. Rails shone below his feet. A bulk of a mail-train rose up, vacant and dim. People shouted and passed. There was a hot whiff of ship's engine. A man passed, with nervous hurry, carrying two teacups from the refreshment-room. Somebody cried out to come along with the mails. An Irish voice answered excitedly, with a witty bitterness which defined the owner to Roger, in vivid outline. Mist came driving down under the shed. A few moist steps took him to a rail of chains, beyond which was motionless sea, a dim, grey-brown under the mist, with a gull or two drifting and falling. A row of lights dimly dying away beyond, shewed him the steamer. The gangway slanted down, dripping wet from the handrail. A man was saying that "Indeed, it was," in the curt, charming accent of the hills.

He did not recognise the steamer. Her name, seen upon a life-belt, was new to him. He did not remember a Lady of Lyons on this line. He laid his bag in a corner of the saloon, where already timid ladies were preparing for the worst, by lying down, under rugs, with bottles of salts at hand. The smell of the saloon, the smells of disinfectant, oil, rubber, and food, mixed with the sickliness of a place half aired and overheated, drove him on deck again. An elderly man was telling his wife that it had been a terrible business. The lady answered with the hope that nothing would happen to them, for what would poor Eddie do?

Somebody near the gangway, a hills-man by his speech, probably the ticket-collector, or mate, was speaking in the intervals of work. He was checking the slinging-in of crates, and talking to an acquaintance. Roger had no wish to hear him. He was impatient for the ship to start. But sitting down there, wrapped in his mackintosh, he could not help overhearing odds and ends of a story among the clack of the winches. Something terrible had happened, and Tom would know about it, and, indeed, it was a sad thing for the widow O'Hara; but it was a quick death, anyway, and might come on any man, for the matter of that. Indeed, it was a quick death, and the fault lay in these fogs, which never gave a man a chance till she was right on top of you. What use were sidelights, when a fog might make a headlight as red as blood? She had come right into her, just abaft the bridge, and cut her clean down. They never saw a stim of her. She wasn't even sounding her horn. Yes. One of these big five-masted Yankee schooners. The John P. Graves. Just out of Glasgow. They hadn't even a look-out set. Taking her chance. Her crowd was drunk. And one of the dead was an English wumman only married that morning. No. The man was saved. Like a stunned man. The most of the bodies was ashore to the wast of the light. There was a fierce jobble wast of the light.

There had been a collision somewhere. There were always being collisions. Roger listened, and ceased to listen, thinking of that "Steamer Sunk, Lives Lost" on the London placard. He thought that these vivid, picturesque talkers, professional men; but full of feeling, gave such an event a kind of poetry, and made it a part of their lives, while the paper-reader, very far away in the city, glanced at it, among a dozen similar events, none of them closely brought home to him, or, indeed, to be understood by him, and dismissed the matter with an indifferent "Really. How ghastly!" He reproved himself for thinking thus. This collision had affected the men near him in their daily business. Londoners were affected by disasters which touched themselves. This disaster, whatever it was, did not touch him. He was in a contrary, bitter mood, too much occupied with himself to feel for others. He was thinking that the men who did most were self-centred men, shut away from the world without. A snail, suddenly stung on the tender horn, may think similarly.

It was dark night, but clear enough, when they reached Ireland. The lights in the bay shone as before. The lights on the island had not changed. One, high up, which he had often noticed, was as like a star as ever. Little glimmers of light danced before him, as he dined in the hotel, attended by a grave old waiter. The hotel was fuller than usual at that time of year. It was full of restless, anxious, sad-looking people, some of whom had been with him in the boat. They gave him the fancy that they had all come over for a funeral. After supping, he went hurriedly to bed.

In the morning, at breakfast, there were the same sad-looking people. They sat at the next table, talking in subdued voices, drinking tea. They were breakfasting on tea. An old woman with that hard, commercial face, assumed by predatory natures without energy, mothered the party. Her red eyes, swollen by weeping, emphasised the vulpine in her. A late-comer rustled up. "Alice won't come down," she said. "She'll have some tea upstairs."

The old woman, calling a maid, sent tea to Alice. A pale girl, daughter to the matron in all but spirit, snuffled on the perilous brink, worn out by grief and weariness. The old woman rebuked her. "We shall have to be starting in a minute." She had that cast-iron nature limited to itself. Roger wondered whether in old Rome, or Puritan England, that kind of character had been consciously bred in the race. He changed his table.

The waiter brought him a newspaper. He fingered it, and left it untouched. He was not going to open a paper till he could be sure that the uproar about him had been forgotten. He was a timorous, hunted hart. The hounds should not follow him into this retreat. He debated as he ate, whether he should bicycle, take the "long car," a forty-mile drive, or take train. Finally, seeing that the roads were dry, and the wind not bad, he decided to ride, sending his baggage by the car. He liked riding to Ottalie. It was a difficult ride, he thought, owing to the blasts which beat down from the hills, but there came a moment, as he well remembered, rather near to the end of the journey, when the hills gave place to mountains. Here the road, topping a crest, fell away, shewing a valley and a stretch of sea. Hills and headlands rolled north in ranks to a bluish haze. The crag beyond all rose erect from the surf, an upright, defined line in the blueness. From Ottalie's home, high up, he could see that great crag. With an opera-glass he could see the surf bursting below it. It was now eight o'clock. The morning boat was coming in. He would start. By lunch-time he would be in his little cottage above the sea. He would swim before lunch. After lunch he would climb through the long grey avenue of beeches to Ottalie's home. The old excitement came over him to give to his ardour the memory of many other rides to her.

Riding through the squalid town he found himself reckoning up little curious particular details of things seen by him on similar journeys in the past. The clatter of the "long car" behind him made him spurt ahead. It was a point of vanity with him to beat the car over the forty-mile course. The last thing noticed by him as he cleared the town was a yellow affiche, bearing the legend:

"LOSS OF THE 'LORD ULLIN' "CORONER'S VERDICT."

V

One news straight came huddling on another Of death, and death, and death. The Broken Heart.

The sun was golden over all the marvel of Ireland. The sea came in sight from time to time. Beyond a cliff castle a gannet dropped, white and swift, with a splash which faintly came to him a quarter of a mile away. Turning inland, he rode into the hills. Little low rolling green hills, wooded and sunny, lay ahead. On each side of him were pastures unspeakably green, sleepily cropped by cattle. He set himself to ride hard through this bright land. He spurted up the little hills, dipped down, and again climbed. He was eager to reach a gate on a hilltop, from which he could see the headland which shut him from the land of his desire. As he rode, he thought burningly of what that afternoon would be to him. Ottalie might not be there. She might be away. She might be out; but something told him she would be there. With Ottalie in the world, the world did not matter greatly. The thought of Ottalie gave him a fine sense, only properly enjoyed in youth, of his own superiority to the world. With a thumping heart, due not to emotion, but to riding uphill, he climbed the gate, and looked out over the beautiful fields to the distant headland. There it lay, gleaming, fifteen miles away. Beyond it was Ottalie. Protesters, in old, unhappy far-off times, had painted a skull and cross-bones on the gate, as, in other parts, they dug graves at front doors, or fired with lucky slugs from cover. The bones were covered with lichen, now; but the skull grinned at Roger friendly, as it had often grinned. Riding on, and glancing back over his shoulder, at risk of going into the ditch, he saw the skull's eyes fixed upon him.

The last part of the ride was downhill. He lifted his bicycle over a low stone wall, and vaulted over after it. The sea was within fifty yards of him, in brimming flood. Norah Kennedy, the old woman who kept house for him, was there at the door, looking out.

"Indeed, Mr. Naldrett," she began; "the blessing of God on you. I was feared the boat was gone down on you. It's a sad time this for you to be coming here. Indeed, I never saw you looking better. You're liker your mother than your da. He was a grand man, your da, of all the folks ever I remember. Indeed, your dinner is just ready for you. Will I wet the tea, sir?"

The old woman rambled on from subject to subject, glancing at each, so lightly, that one less used to her ways would not have suspected the very shrewd and bitter critic hidden beneath the charm of the superficial nature. Roger felt somehow that the critic was alert in her, that she resented something in his manner or dress. He concluded that he was late, or that she, perhaps in her zeal for him, had put on the joint too early. As usual, when she was not pleased, she served the dinner muttering personal remarks, not knowing (as is the way with lonely old people, who talk to themselves) that they were sometimes audible. "I'll do you no peas for your supper, my man," was one of her asides, when he helped himself sparingly to peas. "It's easy seen you're only an Englishman," was another, at his national diffidence towards a potato. Roger wondered what was wrong, and how soon he would become again "the finest young man ever I remember, except perhaps it was your da. Indeed, Mr. Roger, to see your da, and him riding wast in a red coat, you would think it was the Queen's man,* or one of the Saints of God. There was no one I ever seen had the glory on him your da had, unless it was yourself stepping." Roger's da had died of drink there, after a life passed in the preservation of the game laws.

* The late Prince Consort.

When his baggage arrived, he dressed carefully, and set out up the hill to Ottalie's house, which he could see, even from his cottage, as a white, indeterminate mass, screened by trees from sea-winds. The road branched off into a loaning, hedged with tumbled stone on each side. As he climbed the loaning, the roguish Irish bulls, coming in a gallop, at the sound of his feet, peered down at him, through hedges held together by Providence, or left to the bulls' imagination. A lusty white bull followed him for some time, restrained only by a foot-high wire.

"Indeed," said an old labourer, who, resting by the way, expressed sympathy both for Roger and the bull, "he's only a young bull. He wad do no one anny hurrt, except maybe he felt that way. Let you not trouble, sir."

Up above Ottalie's house was the garden. The garden wall backed upon the loaning. A little blue door with peeling, blistered paint, let him into the garden, into a long, straight rose-walk, in which the roses had not yet begun to bloom. A sweet-smelling herb grew by the door. He crumpled a leaf of it between his fingers, thinking how wonderful the earth was, which could grow this fragrance, out of mould and rain. The bees were busy among the flowers. The laurustine was giving out sweetness. In the sun of that windless afternoon, the smell thickened the air above the path, making it a warm clot of perfume, to breathe which was to breathe beginning life. Butterflies wavered, keeping low down, in the manner of butterflies near the coast. Birds made musical calls, sudden delightful exclamations, startling laughter, as though the god Pan laughed to himself among the laurustine bushes.

He felt the beauty of the late Irish season as he had never before felt it. It stirred him to the excitement which is beyond poetry, to that delighted sensitiveness, in which the mind, tremulously open, tremulously alive, can neither select nor combine. He longed to be writing poetry; but in the open air the imagination is subordinated to the senses. The lines which formed in his mind were meaningless exclamations. Nature is a setting, merely. The soul of man, which alone, of created things, regards her, is the important thing.

The blinds of the sunny southern front were drawn down; but the marks of carriage wheels upon the drive shewed him that she had returned. After ringing, he listened for the crackled tinkle far away in the kitchen, and turning, saw a squirrel leap from one beech to another, followed by three or four sparrows. Footsteps shuffled near. Somewhere outside, at the back, an old woman's voice asked whiningly for a bit of bread, for the love of the Almighty God, since she was perished with walking and had a cough on her that would raise pity in a martial man. A younger voice, high, clear, and hard, bidding her whisht, and let her get out of it, ceased suddenly, in her prohibition. The door opened. There was old Mary Laverty, the housekeeper.

"How are you, Mary? Are you quite well?"

"I am, sir. I thank you."

"Is Miss Fawcett in?"

"Have you not heard, sir?"

"Heard what?"

"Miss Ottalah's dead, sir."

"What?"

"She was drowned in the boat that was run into, crossing the sea, two days ago. There was a fog, sir. Did no one tell you, sir?"

"No."

"There was eleven of them drowned, sir."

"Was she ... Is she lying here?"

"Yes, sir. She's within. The burying will no be till Saturday. She is no chested yet."

"Was Miss Agatha with her?"

"Miss Agatha was not in the cabbon. She was not wetted, indeed. She had not so much as her skirrt wetted, sir. She is within, sir."

"Do you think she would see me?"

"Come in, sir. I will ask."

He stepped in, feeling stunned. His mind gave him an image of something hauled ashore. There was an image of a dripping thing being carried by men up the drive, the gravel crunched under their boots—crunch—crunch in slow time, then a rest at the door, and then, slowly, into the hall, and drip, drip, up the stairs to the darkened bedroom. Then out again, reverently, fumbling their hats, to talk about it with the cook. He did not realise what had happened. Here he was in the room. There was his photograph. There was the Oriental bowl full of potpourri. Ottalie had been drowned. Ottalie was lying upstairs, a dead thing, with neither voice nor movement. Ottalie was dead. She had sat with him in that very room. The old precise sofa was her favourite seat. How could she be dead? She had been in London, asking for him, only two days before. Her letter was in his pocket. There was her music. There was her violin. Why did she not come in, as of old, with her smiling daintiness, and with her hands in great gardening gauntlets clasping tulips for the jars? That beauty was over for the world.

He was stunned by it. He did not know what was happening; but there was Agatha, motioning to him not to get up. He said something about pity. "I pity you." After a minute, he added, "My God!" He was trying to say something to comfort her. The change in her told him that it was all true. It branded it into him. Ottalie was dead, and this was what it meant to the world. This was death, this horror.

His mind groped about like a fainting man for something to clutch. Baudelaire's lines rose up before him. The sentiment of French decadence, with its fancy of ingratitude, made him shudder. A turmoil of quotations seethed and died down in him, "And is old Double dead?" "Come away, death," with a phrase of Arne's setting. A wandering strange phrase of Grieg.

He went up to Agatha and took her hands.

"You poor thing; you poor thing," he repeated. "My God, you poor women suffer!" The clock was ticking all the time. Some one was bringing tea to the next room. The lines in the Persian rug had a horrible regularity. "Agatha," he said. Afterwards he believed that he kissed her, and that she thanked him.

"I don't know. I don't know," she said. "Oh, I'm so very wretched. So wretched. So wretched. And I can't die." She shook in a passion of tears.

"She was wonderful," he said, choking. "She was so beautiful. All she did."

"She was with me a minute before," said Agatha. "We were on deck. She went down to get a wrap. It was so cold in the fog. I had left her wraps in the dining-room. It was my fault."

"Don't say that, Agatha. That's nonsense."

"I never saw her again. It all happened at once. The next instant we were run into. I couldn't see anything. There was a crash, which made us heel right over, and then there was a panic. I didn't know what had happened. I tried to get down to her; but a lot of half-drunk tourists came raving and fighting to get to the boats. I couldn't get to the doors past them. One of them hit me with his fist and swore at me. The ship was sinking. I nearly got to the door, and then a stewardess cried out that everybody was up from below, and then a great brute of a man flung me into a boat. I hit my head. When I came to, I distinctly felt some one pulling off my rings, and there was a sort of weltering noise where the ship had sunk. One of the tourists cried out: 'Wot-ow! A shipwreck; oh, Polly.' Everybody was shouting all round us, and there was a poor little child crying. I caught at the hand which was taking my rings." Here she stopped. There had been some final humiliation here. She went on after a moment: "The men said that every one had been saved. I didn't know till we all landed. Nor till after that even. It was so foggy. Then I knew.

"There was a very kind Scotch lady who took me to the hotel. She was very kind. I don't know who she was. The divers came from Belfast during the night. Ottalie was in the saloon. She was wearing her wraps. She must have just put them on. There were five others in the saloon. The inquest was ghastly. One of the witnesses was drunk, and the jury were laughing. The waiter at the hotel knew me. He wired to Leslie, and Leslie hired a motor and came over. Colonel Fawcett is in bed with sciatica. Leslie is arranging everything."

"Is Leslie here?"

"No. Maggie has bronchitis. He had to go back. He'll be here late to-night."

"I might have been with you, Agatha. If I'd stayed in another minute on Tuesday morning, I should have seen her. I should have travelled with you. It wouldn't have happened. I should have gone for the wraps."

"We saw you at your play, on Monday."

"I didn't know you were in town. Oh, if I had only known!"

"It was my fault that you did not know. I kept back her letter to you. I was jealous. I was wicked. I think the devil was in me."

"Don't think of that now," said Roger gently. He had known it from the first. "Is there anything which I can do, Agatha? Letters to write?"

"There are stacks of letters. They all say the same thing. Oh, I am so wretched, so very wretched!" The shuddering took hold of her. She wept in a shaking tremble which seemed to tear her in pieces.

"Agatha," said Roger, "will you come to Belfast with me? I will hire the motor in the village. I must get some flowers. It would do you good to come."

"No. I must stay. I shall only have her two days more."

He would have asked to look upon Ottalie; but he refrained, in the presence of that passion. Agatha had enough to bear. He would not flick her jealousies. Ottalie was lying just overhead, within a dozen feet of him. Ten minutes ago he had been thinking of her as a lover thinks of his beloved. His heart had been leaping with the thought of her. There she was, in that quiet room, behind the blinds, lying on the bed, still and blank. And where was what had made her so wonderful? Where was the spirit who had used her as a lodging? She had been all that makes woman wonderful. Beautiful with beauty of mind; a perfect, perfect spirit. And she was dead. She was lying upstairs dead. And here were her two lovers, listening to the clock, listening to the spade-strokes in the garden, where old John was at work. The smell of the potpourri, which she had made the summer before, seemed as strong as incense. The portrait by Raeburn, of her great-grandfather, looked down dispassionately, with eyes that were very like her eyes. The clock had told the time to that old soldier when he went to be painted. It had gone on ticking ever since. It had been ticking when the old soldier died, when his son died, when his grandson died. Now she was dead, and it was ticking still, a solemn old clock, by Frodsham, of Sackville Street, Dublin, 1797, the year before the rising. It would be ticking still, perhaps, when all the hearts then alive would have ceased to tick. There was something pitiless in that steady beat. Three or four generations of Fawcetts had had their lives measured by it, all those beautiful women and noble soldiers. All the "issue" mentioned in Burke.

He went out into the light. All the world seemed melted into emotion, and poured upon him. He was beaten. It poured upon him. He drew it in with his breath. Everything within sight was an agony with memories of her. "I must be doing something," he said aloud. "I must get flowers. I shall wake up presently." He turned at the gate, his mind surging. "Could Agatha be sure that she is dead? Perhaps I am dead. Or it may be a dream." It was not a dream.

At the bottom of the loaning he met a red-haired man from whom in old time he had bought a boat.

"It's a fine day, sir," said the man.

"John," said Roger, "tell Pat Deloney I want the car, to go to Belfast at once. I shall want him to drive. Tell him to come for me here."

"Indeed, sir," said John, looking at him narrowly. "There's many feeling that way. There was a light on her you'd think it was a saint, and her coming east with brightness."

After John had gone down to the village, there limped up an old, old, half-witted drunken poet, who fiddled at regattas. He saluted Roger, who leaned on a gate, staring uphill towards the house.

"Indeed, Mr. Roger," said the old man; "there's a strong sorrow on the place this day. There was a light burning beyant. I seen the same for her da, and for her da's da. There was them beyant wanted her." He waited for Roger to speak, but getting no answer began to ramble in Irish, and then craved for maybe a sixpence, because "indeed, I knew your da, Mr. Roger. Ah, your da was a grand man, would turn the heads of all the women, and they great queens itself, having the pick of professors and prime ministers and any one they'd a mind to."

After a time, singing to himself in Irish, he limped on up the loaning to the house, to beg maybe a bit of bread, in exchange for the fact that he had seen a light burning for her, just as he had seen it for her da, her da's da, and (when the kitchen brandy had arisen in him) her da's da's da years ago.

The car came snorting up the hill, and turned in the broad expanse where the loaning joined the highway. John opened the door for Roger. "If I was a young gentleman and had the right to do it," he said, "I would go in a cyar the like of that cyar down all the craggy precipices of the world." The car shook, spat, and darted. "Will ye go by Torneymoney?" said Pat. "There's no rossers that way."

"By Torneymoney," said Roger. "Drive hard."

"Indeed," said Pat; "we will do great deeds this day. We will make a strong story by the blessing of God. Let you hold tight, your honour. There's holes in this road would give a queer twist to a sea-admiral."

The funeral was on Saturday. About a dozen men came. There were five or six Fawcetts and old Mr. Laramie, who had married Maisie Fawcett, Ottalie's aunt, one of the beauties of her time. The rest were friends from the countryside, Englishmen in faith, education, and feeling. They stood with bared heads in the little lonely Protestant graveyard, as Roman soldiers may have stood by the pyres of their mates in Britain. They were aliens there. They were part of the garrison. They were hiding under the ground something too good and beautiful to belong to that outcast country. Roger had the fancy that God would have to be very strong to hold that outpost. He had not slept for two nights. Sentiments and fancies were overwhelming him. It was one of those Irish days in which a quality or rarity in the air gives a magic, either alluring or terrible, to every bush and brook and hillock. He had often thought that Ireland was a haunted country. He thought so now, standing by Ottalie's grave. Just beyond the graveyard was the river, which was "bad," and beyond that again a hill. The hill was so "bad," that the beggarwomen, passing in the road, muttering at "the mouldy old Prots, playing at their religion, God save us," crossed themselves as they went by it. Roger prayed that that fair spirit might be at peace, among all this invisible evil. His hand went into his breast pocket from time to time to touch her letter to him. He watched Leslie Fawcett, whose face was so like hers, and old Mr. Laramie, who had won the beauty of her time, and an old uncle Fawcett, who had fought in Africa, sixty years before. The graves of other Fawcetts lay in that corner of the graveyard. He read their names, remembering them from Burke. He read the texts upon the stones. The texts had been put there in agonies of remorse and love and memory by the men and women who played croquet in an old daguerreotype in Ottalie's sitting-room. "He giveth His beloved sleep," and "It is well with the child," and one, a strange one, "Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay Thee all." They had been beautiful and noble, these Fawcetts. Not strong, not clever, but wonderful. They had had a spirit, a spiritual quality, as though for many, many centuries their women had kept themselves unspotted by anything not noble. An instinct for style running in the race of the Fawcetts for centuries had made them what they were.

A hope burned up in Roger like inspiration. All that instinct for fineness, that fastidious selection of the right and good which had worked to make Ottalie, from long before her birth, and had flowered in her, was surely eternal. She had used life to make her character beautiful and gentle, just as he had used life to discipline his mind to the expression of his imagination. "What's to come" was still unsure; but he felt sure, even as the trembling old incumbent reminded them that St. Paul had bidden them not to sorrow, that that devotion was stronger than death. Her spirit might be out in the night, he thought, as in time his would be; but what could assail that devotion? It was a strong thing, it was a holy thing. He was very sure that nothing would overcome it. Like many young men, ignorant of death, he had believed in metempsychosis. This blow of death had brought down that fancy with all the other card-houses of his mind. His nature was now, as it were, humbled to its knees, wondering, stricken, and appalled by possibilities of death undreamed of. He could not feel that Ottalie would live again, in a new body, starting afresh, in a new life-machine, with all the acquired character of the past life as a reserve of strength. He could only feel that somewhere in that great empty air, outside the precise definition of living forms, Ottalie, the little, conquered kingdom of beauty and goodness, existed still. It was something. Newman's hymn, with its lovely closing couplet, moved him and comforted him. One of the Fawcetts was crying, snuffling, with a firm mouth, as men usually cry. He himself was near to tears. He was being torn by the thought that Ottalie was lonely, very lonely and frightened, out there beyond life, beyond the order of defined live things.

He walked back with Leslie Fawcett. Agatha's mother was at the house; Leslie was stopping in the cottage with him.

"Poor little Ollie," said Leslie gently.

"She was very beautiful," said Roger. He thought, as he said it, that it was a strange thing for an Englishman to say to a dead woman's brother. "She was very beautiful. It must be terrible to you. You knew her in an intimate relation."

"Yes," said Leslie, looking hard at Roger, out of grave level eyes. "She was a very perfect character."

They were climbing the cliff road to the cottage. The sea was just below them. The water was ruffled to whiteness. Sullivan's jobble stretched in breakers across the bay from Cam Point. Gannets, plunging in the jobble, flung aloft white founts, as though shot were striking.

"You were very great friends," said Roger. "I mean, even for brother and sister."

"Johnny was her favourite brother, as a child," said Leslie. "You did not see much of Johnny. He was killed in the war. And then he was in India a long time. It was after Johnny's death that Ottalie and I began to be so much to each other. You see, Agatha was only with her about five months in the year. She was with us nearly that each year. She was wonderful with children."

"Yes," said Roger, holding open the gate of the little garden so that his guest might pass, "I know." He was not likely to forget how wonderful she had been with children. They went into the little sitting-room where Norah, in one of her black moods, gave them tea. After tea they sat in the garden, looking out over the low hedge at the bay. At sunset they walked along the coast to a place which they had called "the cove." They had used to bathe there. A little brook tumbled over a rock in a forty-foot fall. Below the fall was a pool, overgrown later in the year with meadow-sweet and honeysuckle, but clear now, save for the rushes and brambles. The brook slid out from the basin over a reddish rock worn smooth, even in its veins and knuckles, by many centuries of trickling. Storms had piled shingle below this side of water. The brook dribbled to the sea unseen, making a gurgling, tinkling noise. Up above, at the place where the fall first leapt, among some ash-trees, windy and grey, stood what was left of a nunnery, of reddish stone, fire-blackened, among a company of tumbled gravestones.

Of all the places sacred to Ottalie in Roger's mind, that was the most sacred. They had been happy there. They had talked intimately there, moved by the place's beauty. His most vivid memories of her had that beautiful place for their setting.

"Roger," said Leslie, "did you see her in town, before this happened?"

"No."

"You did not see her?"

"No. Not this time."

"She was going to see you."

"I believe she came just before she started. I had just gone out. We missed each other."

Leslie lifted his pince-nez. He was looking at Roger, with the grave, steady look by which people remembered him. Roger thought afterwards that his putting on of the pince-nez had been done tenderly, as though he had said, "I see that you are suffering. With these glasses I shall see how to help you."

"You were in love with her?" he asked, in a low voice.

"Yes. Who was not?"

"I have something to say to you about that. Have you ever thought of what marriage means? I am not talking of the passionate side. That is nothing. I am talking of the everyday aspect of married life. Have you thought of that at all?"

"All men have thought of it."

"Yes; I grant you. All men have thought of it. But do many of them think it home? Have you? I imagine that most men never follow the thought home; but leave it in day-dreams, and images of selfishness. I don't think that many men realise how infinitely much finer in quality the woman's mind is. Nor how much more delicately quick it is. Nor what the clash of that quickness and fineness, with something duller and grosser, may entail, in ordinary everyday life, to the woman."

"I think that I realise it."

"Yes, perhaps. Perhaps you do realise it, as an intellectual question. But would you, do most men, realise it as life realises it? It is one thing to imagine one's duty to one's wife, when, as a bachelor, used to all manner of self-indulgence, one sits smoking over the fire. But to carry out that duty in life taxes the character. Swiftness of responsion, tact, is rarer than genius. I imagine that with you, temporary sensation counts for more than an ordered, and possibly rigid, attitude, towards life as a whole."

"Both count for very much; or did. Nothing seems very much at this moment."

"Ottalie loved you," said Leslie simply. "But she felt that there was this want in you, of so thinking things home that they become character. She thought you too ready to surrender to immediate and, perhaps, wayward emotions. She was not sure that you could help her to be the finest thing possible to her, nor that she could so help you."

"How do you know this?"

"She discussed it with me. She wanted my help. I said that I ought not to interfere, but that, on the whole, I thought that she was right. That, in fact, your love was not in the depths of your nature. I said this; but I added that you were too sensitive to impressions not to grow, and that (rightly influenced) there is hardly anything which you might not become. The danger which threatens you seems to me to threaten all artists. Art is a great strain. It compels selfishness. I have wondered whether, if things had been different, if you had married Ottalie, you could have come from creating heroines to tend a wife's headache; or, with a headache yourself, have seen the heroine in her. We have life before us. You are all tenderness and nobleness now. It is sad that we have not this always in our minds."

"Yes," said Roger. "We have life; and all my old life is a house of cards. Before this it seemed a noble thing to strive with my whole strength to express certain principles, and to give reality and beauty to imagined character. I worked to please her. And often I did not understand her, and did not know her. I have walked in her mind, and the houses were all shut up. I could only knock at the doors and listen. And now I never shall know. I only know that she was a very beautiful thing, and that I loved her, and tried to make my work worthy of her."

"She loved you, too," said Leslie. "Whatever death may be, we ought to look upon it as a part of life. Try to be all that you might have been with her. Never mind about your work. You have been too fond of emotional self-indulgence. Set that aside, and go on. She would have married you. Try to realise that. Her nature would have been a part of yours. All your character would have been sifted and tested and refined by her. Now let us go in, Roger. Tell me what you are going to do."

"There is not much to do. I must try to rearrange my life. But I see one thing, I think, that art is very frightful when it has not the seriousness of life and death in it."

"Yes," said Leslie. "Maggie and I went into that together. We built up a theory that the art life is strangely like the life of the religious contemplative. Both attract men by the gratification of emotion as well as by the possibility of perfection. One of the great Spanish saints, I think it is St. John of Avila, says that many novices deliberately indulge themselves in religious emotion, for the sake of the emotion, instead of for the love of God; but that the knowledge of God is only revealed to those who get beyond that stage, and can endure stages of 'stypticities and drynesses,' with the same fervour. It seems to us (of course we are both Philistines) that modern art does not take enough out of those who produce it. The world flatters them too much. I suspect that flattery of the world is going on in return."

"Not from the best."

Leslie shook his head unconvinced. "You are not producing martyrs," he said. "You do not attack bad things. You laugh at them, or photograph them, and call it satire. You belong to the world, my friend Roger. You are a part of the vanity of the world, the flesh, and the devil. You have not even made the idea of woman glorious in men's minds. Otherwise they would have votes and power in the Houses. Not one of you has even been imprisoned for maiming a censor of plays. All the generations have a certain amount of truth revealed to them. It is very dangerous to discover truth. You can learn what kind of truth is being revealed to an age by noting what kind of people give their lives for ideas. It used at one time to be bishops. Think of it."

Leslie talked on, shaping the talk as he had planned it beforehand, but pointing it so gently that it was not till afterwards that Roger, realising his motives, gave him thanks for his unselfishness. They stopped on the rushy hill below Ottalie's home, just as the sun, now sinking, flamed out upon her window, till it burned like the sun itself. To Roger it seemed like a flaming door. She had looked out there, from that window. Her little writing-table, with its jar of sweet peas, and that other jar, of autumn berries and the silvery parchment of honesty, stood just below it, on each side of the blotter, bound in mottled chintz. Leslie's talk came home to him fiercely. The clawings of remorse came. He knew the room. He had never known the inmate. She was gone. He had wasted his chance. He might have known her; but he had preferred to indulge in those emotions and sentiments which keep the soul from knowledge. Now she was gone. All the agony of remorse cried out in him for one little moment in the room with her, to tell her that he loved her, for one little word of farewell, one sight of the beloved face, so that he might remember it forever. Memories rose up, choking him. She was gone. There was only the flaming door.

"Roger," said Leslie, in his even, gentle voice, which had such a quality of attraction in it, "Maggie asked me to bring you back with me to stay a couple of weeks."

In his confused sleep that night he dreamed that Ottalie was lying ill in her room, behind a bolted copper door which gleamed. The passage without the room was lighted. People came to the door to knock. A long procession of people came. He saw them listening intently there, with their ears bent to the keyhole. They were all the people who had been in love with her. Some were relatives, some were men who had seen her at dances, some were women, some were old friends like himself. Last of all came an elderly lady carrying a light. She was dressed in a robe of dim purple. She, too, knocked sharply on the door. She lingered there, long enough for him to study her fine, intellectual face. It was the face of Ottalie grown old. The woman was the completed Ottalie.

For a moment she stood there listening, as one listens at the door of a sick-room. Then she knocked a second time, sharply, calling "Ottalie!" He saw then that it was not a door but a flame. He heard from within a strangled answer, as though some one, half dead, had risen to open. Some one was coming to the door. Even in his dream his blood leaped with the expectation of his love.

But it was not his love. It was himself, strangling in the flames to get to her. She reached her hand to him. Though the flames were stifling, he touched her. It was as though the agony of many years had been changed suddenly to ecstasy. "Roger," she said. Her hand caught him, she drew him through the fire to her. He saw her raise the candle to look at his face. For a moment they were looking at each other, there in the passage. The agony was over. They were together, looking into each other's eyes. He felt her life coursing into him from her touch.

Voices spoke without. Norah, at the door, was haggling. "Is that all the milk ye've brought, Kitty O'Hara?"

The dream faded away as the life broke in upon him. There was some word, some song. Some one with a fine voice was singing outside, singing in the dream, singing about a fever. Ottalie was holding him, but her touch was fading from his sense, and joy was rushing from him. Outside, on the top spray of the blackthorn, a yellow-hammer trilled, "A little bit of bread and no—che-e-e-e-se," telling him that the world was going on.

The fortnight passed. Roger was going back to London. The day before he sailed he rode over with Leslie to take a last look at Ottalie's home. He left Leslie at the cottage, so that he might go there alone. He walked alone up the loaning. Within the garden he paused, looking down at the house. The smell of the sweet verbena was very strong, in that mild damp air, full of the promise of rain. A paper was blowing about along the walk. A white kitten, romping out from the stable, pounced on it, worried it with swift gougings of the hind claws, then, spitting, with ears laid back and tail bristling, raced away for a swift climb up a pear-tree. Roger picked up the paper. It would be a relic of the place. He felt inclined to treasure everything there, to take the house, never to go away from it, or, failing that, to carry away many of her favourite flowers. He straightened the paper so that he might read it.

It was a double page from a year-old London paper entitled Top-Knots. It consisted of scraps of gossip, scraps of news, scraps of information, seasoned with imperial feeling. It had been edited by some one with a sense of the purity of the home. It was harmless stuff. The wisdom of the reader was flattered; the wisdom of the foreigner was not openly condemned. Though some fear of invasion was implied, its possibility was flouted. "It was a maxim of our Nelson that one Englishman was worth three foreigners." The jokes were feeble. The paper catered for a class of poor, half-educated people without more leisure than the morning ride to business, and the hour of exhaustion between supper and bed. It was well enough in its way. Some day, when life is less exhausting, men will demand stuff with more life. Something caught Roger's eye. He read it through. It was the first thing read by him since his arrival there.

"SLEEPING SICKNESS.

"It is not generally known that this devastating ailment is caused by the presence of a minute micro-organism in the human system. The micro-organism may exist in unsuspected harmlessness for many years in the victim's blood. It is not until it enters what is known to scientists as the cerebro-spinal fluid, or as we should call it, the marrow, that it sets up the peculiar symptoms of the dread disease which has so far baffled the ingenuity of our soi-disant savants. This terrible affliction, which is not by any means confined to those inferior members of the human race, the dusky inhabitants of Uganda, consists of a lethargy accompanied with great variations of temperature. So far the dread complaint is without a remedy. Well may the medico echo the words of the Prince of Denmark:

There was no more about the disease. The page ended with a joke about a mother-in-law. The paragraph made Roger remember an article which he had once read about the sudden rise of the sickness in some district in Africa. He remembered the photograph of a young African, who was dozing his life away, propped against a tree. The thought passed. In another instant he was full of his own misery again. But instead of throwing away the paper, he folded it, and put it in his pocket-case. It would remind him of that last visit to Ottalie's garden. He would keep it forever.

His wretchedness gave him a craving to be tender to something. He tried to attract the kitten, but the kitten, tiring of her romp, scampered to the garden wall to stalk sparrows. He plucked a leaf or two from the verbena. He went into the house.

Agatha welcomed him. She was writing replies to letters of condolence. The death had taken her hardness from her.

"Sit down and talk," she said. "What are you going to do?"

"That is like a woman," he said. "Women are wonderful. They use a man's vanity to protect themselves from his egotism. I came here to ask you that. What are you going to do?"

"I shall go on with my work," she said. "I am sure not to marry. I shall start a little school for poor girls."

"At Great Harley? But you were doing that before."

"Only in a very desultory sort of way. But now it is all different. Life has become so much bigger."

"Will you tell me about it? I should like to hear about it."

"Oh, it would only bore you. I shall just teach them the simplest things. How to darn clothes, how to cook, and perhaps a little singing. It isn't as though I were a learned person."

"How kind of you."

"It isn't kind at all."

"You will be taking girls of from thirteen to sixteen?"

"Yes. I've got no flair for very little children. Besides, there is nothing which I could teach them. I want to get hold of them at an age when I can really be of use to them."

She drummed a little with one foot.

"I wish that you would let me help you," he continued.

"Thank you very much. That is very kind of you. But I must do this quite by myself."

"What are you going to do with the flat in town?" he asked. "I should like to take it if you are going to give it up."

"Oh, I shall keep it on," she said. "I shall be up for week-ends a good deal, at any rate until I have got my class in working order."

"You will let me know if you ever want to give it up?"

"Yes. Certainly I will. Will you go back? I suppose you will be going back to your work. What are your plans? You never answered my question. You went flying off into apophthegms."

"I loved Ottalie, too," he answered. "I won't say as much as you did, for you knew her intimately. I never was soul to soul with her as you were; but I loved her. I want now to make my life worthy of her, as you do. But it won't be in my work. I don't know what it will be in. You women are lucky. You can know people like her."

"Yes. I shall always be glad of that," said Agatha. "Even the loss is bearable when I think that I knew her fully. Perhaps better than any one."

"Yes," he said. He paused, turning it over in his mind. "Life is a conspiracy against women," he added. "That is why they are so wonderful and so strange. I am only groping in the dark about her."

"Roger," said Agatha, speaking slowly, "I think I ought to tell you. I knew that you were in love with her. I was jealous of you. I did all that I could to keep you apart. She was in love with you. When she saw you at the theatre before the disturbance began, she would have gone to your box if I had not said that I was sure you would prefer to be alone. In the morning she saw what one of the papers said. She insisted on going to see you at your rooms. She said that she was sure you were expecting her, or that something had kept her letters from you. I told her that it wasn't a very usual thing to do. She said that she would talk about that afterwards. Afterwards, when she had gone, and failed to see you, she was horrified at what you might think of her."

It was very sweet to hear more of her, thus, after all was over. It was something new about her. He had never seen that side of her. He wondered how much more Agatha would tell him, or permit him to learn, in years to come. He saw that she was near tears. He was not going to keep her longer on the rack.

"Agatha," he said, "we have been at cross-purposes for a long time now. We have not been just to each other. Let it end now. We both loved her. Don't let it go on, now that she is dead. I want to feel that the one who knew her best is my friend. I want you to let me help you, as a brother might, whenever you want help. Will you?"

She said, "Thank you, Roger." They shook hands. He remembered afterwards how the lustre of the honesty shewed behind her head. A worn old panther skin, the relic of a beast which had been shot in India by Ottalie's father so many years before that the hairless hide was like parchment beneath the feet, crackled as she left the room. Roger plucked some of the silvery seed vessels for remembrance.

He stood in the hall for a moment trying to fix it in his mind. There was the barometer, by Dakins, of South Castle Street, in Liverpool, an old piece, handsome, but long since useless. There were the well-remembered doors. The dining-room door, the library door, the door leading into the jolly south room, the room sweet with the vague perfume, almost the memory of a perfume, as though the ghosts of flowers strayed there. The door of that room was open. Through its open windows he could see the blue of the bay, twinkling to the wind. Near the window was the piano, heaped with music. A waltz lay upon the piano: the Myosotis Waltz. Let no one despise dance music. It is the music which breaks the heart. It is full of lights and scents, the laughter of pretty women and youth's triumph. To the man or woman who has failed in life the sound of such music is bitter. It is youth reproaching age. It indicates the anti-climax.

He walked with Leslie through the village. The ragged men on the bridge, hearing them coming, turned, and touched what had once been their hats to them. They were not made for death, those old men. They were the only Irish things which the English tourist had not corrupted. They leant on the parapet all day. In the forenoons they looked at the road and at the people passing. In the afternoons, when the sun made their old eyes blink, they turned and looked into the water, where it gurgled over rusty cans, a clear brown peat-stream. A quarter of a mile up the stream was the graveyard, where the earth had by this time ceased to settle over Ottalie's face. On the grave, loosely tied with rushes, was a bunch of dog-roses.

They climbed the sharp rise beyond the bridge. Here they began to ride. They were going to ride thirty miles to the hotel. There they would sleep. In the morning Roger would take the steamer and return to London, where he would dree his weird by his lane as best he could.

The men on the quay were loading ore, as of old, into a dirty Glasgow coaster. One of them asked Roger which team had won at the hurling.

They ploughed through the red mud churned by the ore-carts. The schooner lay bilged on the sand, as of old, with one forlorn rope flogging the air. One or two golfers loafed with their attendant loafers on the links. They rode past them. Then on the long, straight, eastward bearing road, which rounds Cam Point, they began to hurry, having the wind from the glens behind them. Soon they were at the last gloomy angle from which the familiar hills could be seen. They rounded it. They passed the little turnpike. A cutter yacht, standing close inshore, bowed slowly under all sail before them. She lifted, poising, as the helm went down. Her sails trembled into a great rippling shaking, then steadied suddenly as the sheet checked. A man aboard her waved his hand to them, calling something. They spun downhill from the cutter. Now they were passing by a shore where the water broke on weed-covered boulders. From that point the road became more ugly at each turn of the wheel. It was the road to England.

They stopped at the posting-house so that a puncture might be mended while they were at tea. Tea was served in a long, damp, decaying room, hung with shabby stuff curtains. Vividly coloured portraits of Queen Victoria and Robert Emmet hung from the walls. On the sideboard were many metal teapots. On the table, copies of Commerce, each surmounted by a time-table in a hard red cover, surrounded a tray of pink wineglasses grouped about an aspodesta. On a piano was a pile of magazines, some of them ten years old, all coverless and dog's-eared. Roger picked up one of the newest of them, not because he wanted to read it, but because, like many literary men, he was unable to keep his hands off printed matter. He answered Leslie at random as he looked through it. There was not much to interest him there. Towards the end of it there was a photograph of an African hut, against which a man and woman huddled, apparently asleep. A white man in tropical clothes stood beside them, looking at something in a sort of test-tube.

"A COMMON SCENE IN THE SLEEPING SICKNESS BELT," ran the legend. Underneath, in smaller type, was written, "This photograph represents two natives in the last stages of the dread disease, which, at present, is believed to be incurable. The man in white, to l. of the picture (reader's r.), is Dr. Wanklyn, of the Un. Kgdm. Med. Assn. The photograph was taken by Mr. A. S. Smallpiece, Dr. Wanklyn's assistant. Copyright."

"What do you know of sleeping sickness, Leslie?" he asked.

"Sleeping sickness?" said Leslie. "There was an article about it in The Fortnightly, or one of the reviews. There was a theory that it is caused in some way by the bite of a tsetse fly."

"Yes," said Roger, "I remember that."

"Then when Maggie and I were staying at Drumnalorry we met old Dr. MacKenzie. He was out in Africa a great deal, fifty or sixty years ago. He was a great friend of my mother's. He told us at dinner one night that sleeping sickness is not a new thing at all, but a very old thing. The natives used to get it even in his day. He said that the tsetse fly theory was really all nonsense. He called it a pure invention, based on the discovery that yellow fever is spread by the white-ribbed mosquito. His own theory was that it was caused by manioc intoxication."

"That seems to me to be the prejudice of an old man. What is manioc?"

"A kind of a root, like cassava, isn't it?"

"Probably. What is cassava?"

"It's what they make bread of; cassava bread. It's poisonous until you bake it. Isn't that the stuff? Are you interested in sleeping sickness?"

"Yes. It has been running in my head all day. Look here. Here's a picture of two Africans suffering from it. Do they just sleep away like that?"

"I suppose so. They become more and more lethargic, probably, until at last they cannot be roused."

"How long are they in that condition?"

"I believe for weeks. Poor fellows; it must be ghastly to watch."

"There is no cure. There's no cure for a lot of things. Tetanus, leprosy, cancer. I wonder how it begins. You wake up feeling drowsy. And then to feel it coming on; and to have seen others ill with it. And to know at the beginning what you will have to go through and become. It must be ghastly."

"Here is tea," said Leslie. "By the way, sleeping sickness must be getting worse. It attacks Europeans sometimes. MacKenzie said that in his time it never did."

"Well," said Roger, "Europeans have given enough diseases to the Africans. It is only fair that we should take some in return."

They rode on slowly in the bright Irish twilight. When they were near the end of their journey they came to a villa, the garden of which was shut from the road by a low hedge. The garden was full of people. Some of them were still playing croquet. Chinese lanterns, already lit, made mellow colour in the dusk. A black-haired, moustachioed man with a banjo sat in a deck-chair singing. The voice was a fine bass voice, somehow familiar to Roger. It was wailing out the end of a sentimental ditty: