Front matter (continued 2)

The observation was an order, and Rosamond assented to it as such. Short of actual illness, when the precautions surrounding her would have been of the most minute, not to say wearisome nature, the wife of the Lieutenant-Governor was expected to fulfil the duties of her state of life to the last detail.

"And it's quite settled," added Sir Arthur, lightly, "that you intend to supply the material Bethune requires yourself."

She sat up in bed, with a sudden fierce movement. And, catching her head in her hands, turned a white desperate face upon him.

"Yes, yes," she cried, "Oh God, yes!"

Sir Arthur was amazed. So much so, indeed, that even as last night, amazement superseded his very natural vexation.

"Why, Rosamond! Really, my love. I am afraid, my love, that Aspasia is right, that you are not well. This is the second time in twenty-four hours that you have answered me in this—in really, what I may call—quite with temper, in fact. I'm afraid, dear, that you cannot be well. I shall certainly request Saunders to look in this evening."

Lady Gerardine fell back upon her pillow, and then, lifting the heavy mass of her hair, swept it across her face like a sheltering wing, as if, even in the dim room, she could not endure the gaze of human eyes upon her. Sir Arthur, for all his science of life, could not but own to himself that he was nonplussed. He shrugged his shoulders. Fortunately, sensible men were not expected to understand the whims of the charming but irresponsible sex. Rosamond was evidently not the thing, and therefore was to be indulgently excused. In spite of which philosophic conclusion his attitude towards his secretaries and other subordinates that morning was marked with unwonted asperity.

"Something's turned our seraphic old ass a trifle sour," Mr. George Murray remarked to his junior, with a grin.

* * * * *

Under the veil of her hair Rosamond would have called, if she could, on all the shades of the world to come and cover her; would have gladly sunk under them, away from the light of life and the pain of living, somewhere where all would be dark and all quiet, where she might be forgotten—and allowed to forget.

CHAPTER VIII

"Jani," said her mistress, "bring me Captain English's box!"

The ayah stared as if she could not have heard aright. There followed a strange oppressive silence, in which the lapping of the waters in the inner marble spaces seemed to take whispering voices of amazement. Then Lady Gerardine, standing straight and impassive by her dressing-table, her head just turned aside from the reflection of her own beauty, repeated her order in the same hard, uninflected tone.

"Captain English's box; bring it to me."

Jani looked sharply up at the speaker's face and clapped her hands together with the wail of the children of her race when sudden trouble comes upon them.

"Ai, ai!"

"Go," said Lady Gerardine.

Grudgingly Jani turned to obey. She went, muttering to herself, groping in her soul for the reason of this strange and most unexpected order—an order so out of keeping with the whole tenor of her mistress's life, that it rang in her ears like a menace of calamity.

* * * * *

It was a small thing enough, a common battered tin box, to rank with such importance. But it held tragedy: more than tragedy, a woman's murdered youth. Well did Jani remember the day it had come back to the little home, up in the hills—all that was left to them of their handsome young lord. They could not carry Rosamond back her dead; what soldier's widow can hope for that last tragic comfort? But the few tangible traces he had left behind him; these were hers by right, and to her they were brought, with scarcely less reverence than if they had been his honoured remains—the journal he had kept for her during yonder endless months of siege; the letters he had written her, never to post; his notes; sundry trifling belongings, marked with that poignant personal touch which seems to inflict the hardest pain of all.

One can kneel in uplifted resignation beside the awful grandeur of the soul-abandoned clay. But the old pipe, burned down on one side, the worn glove ... over these trivial relics the heart breaks. Rosamond English, in her nausea of misery, her rebellion against the unaccepted unrealisable sorrow, could not look at them, could not touch the poor memorials. She thrust them back into the battered box away from her sight, and with them all the garnered treasures of her brief girlhood and of her briefer wifehood: the simple keepsake, the dried flowers—sprig from her wedding bouquet, bridal wreath—the letters to the betrothed, the first letters to the wife. Things of no worth, yet full of hideous potentialities of grief: symbols of what had been, what might have been. "Away, away with them!" cried her sick heart, "out of my sight for ever!"

And now she was to break open the coffin to look upon the horror of the murdered thing that was her youth; she who had nailed it down so fast, buried it so deep!

Jani laid the box at her mistress's feet and loosened the cords slowly and with protest.

"Go, leave me now," said Rosamond, "and let no one disturb me. Leave me!" she ordered sharply, as once more the ayah hesitated. And Jani slunk away, dragging noiseless feet, her dim mind filled with inarticulate foreboding.

Rosamond drew a long breath as the hangings fell. Surely, surely, if there be anything to which one has a right, in this grinding world, it is to be alone with one's dead!

* * * * *

She took the key from where she had herself placed it ready to her hand on the table: a black rusty thing amid all the jewels and costly trinkets which it was Sir Arthur Gerardine's pleasure to provide for the adornment of the most beautiful of all his attributes—his wife. She knelt down and inserted it in the lock; and then she paused, passing her hand across her damp forehead.

Inexorable fate! She for years had walked in the company of some creature of horror, the face of which had been mercifully veiled; she had carried a mortal anguish cunningly lulled to sleep. Now her hand must lift the veil.... Now no opiate would further serve her: she must face the pain.

For a moment yet she hesitated: the last recoil of the flesh. Then the courage which despair or resignation lends—that rise of the spirit to meet the inevitable which seldom fails even the lowest human being at the end—brought back strength sufficient. She turned the key, drew out the rusty hasp, and opened the casket of her dead past.

* * * * *

The breath that rushed at her from the gaping box seized her by the throat. The unfading scent of the faded orange blossom; the very atmosphere of the lost presence, of the tobacco he had been wont to use, of the Russian-leather pocket-books she had given him; a faint, faint whisper of the English lavender her hands had been so careful to set for him, since he loved it. And, over all, through all, some odour of the siege: of strife, fever, bloodshed, and death—eastern, indescribable, terrible! Her soul sickened away.

No, the past was not dead! It had but lain in wait for her all these years. It had but gathered force to spring upon her in the fated hour. None can escape destiny. Here was the cup she had refused to drain; here were the tears of which she had cheated her heart; here, even, was the intensity of her lost youth, that she might mourn the husband of her girlhood as it had been written she must mourn.

She rose to her feet. A cry rang in her ears like the cry of an animal hurt; and she never knew that it had come from her own lips. Through gathering mists she saw Jani reappear and run towards her; and, summoning all her failing energies in one supreme effort, she called out in distinct tones:

"Close the box and let no one touch it."

Then she fell like a mown lily, straight and long, beside it.

CHAPTER IX

For thirty-six hours the unconsciousness for which she had longed cradled Rosamond, and when she came to herself it was slowly and with dimness. Three times, indeed, did day and night slip by her in her darkened and silent room before she even began to wonder how it was she should be left in such peace. But upon the fourth dawn, as the sun set to work to paint once more the jewel glories of her walls, memory came back upon her like a torrent.

She sat up, wildly crying:

"Jani, the box! What have they done with the box?"

The ayah's arms were round her in a second. Jani whispered and soothed her mistress as, long ago, she had soothed her nursling. Safe was the mem sahib's box; no one should lay finger on it but herself. But the mem sahib must be good and sleep, for Jani was by her. And Rosamond let her head rest gratefully upon the wasted bosom that once had held such loving bounties for her, and from thence slid back upon her pillows into forgetfulness again. She was weary still, with a great and blessed weariness.

* * * * *

Dr. Saunders paid brief daily visits. In Sir Arthur's opinion he was inclined to make culpably light of the whole affair—to allow those unimportant fever cases in the compound to weigh against the indisposition of the Lieutenant-Governor's wife.

It is a notable fact that the medical man treats the feminine syncope as not calling for much notice. And though the excellent Scot conceded that there might be some shock caused by the fall, to account for the prolonged unconsciousness, he declined to admit to Sir Arthur there was ground for anxiety or to recommend any treatment but quiet—absolute quiet. The preliminary symptom of irritability towards himself which Sir Arthur commented upon as extraordinary and alarming, Dr. Saunders in so many words declined, as a waste of time, even to discuss.

Nevertheless, as days succeeded each other and the patient's languor, not to say apathy, continued unabated, Dr. Saunders abruptly changed his tactics and informed his Excellency that he had better lose no time in sending his wife home.

"Pack her off," he said brusquely.

"Pack her off!" The choice of words was as unfitting as the idea they embodied was distasteful.

"I thought," said Sir Arthur, loftily, "that you were aware, Dr. Saunders, of my intention of progressing homewards next month."

"Well, I should pack off Lady Gerardine by the next boat," said the doctor, no whit abashed. "There's a good deal of sickness about, and I should not like to take the responsibility of keeping her on here in this condition. She's in a queer low state—damn queer low state, Sir Arthur."

Sir Arthur puffed an angry breath down his nostrils and fixed a withering gaze on the other's dry, impassive countenance.

What sort of a physician was this who, having charge of the precious health of such a distinguished household, could allow one of its most important members to get into a damn queer low state and then brazenly announce the fact? Sir Arthur, a spot of red anger burning upon each cheekbone, gave Dr. Saunders clearly to understand how grossly he had failed in his post of trust, and announced his own intention of procuring higher opinion without delay. Whereat the doctor shrugged his shoulders and drove off in his little trap at break-neck speed, as philosophically as ever.

The higher medical opinion was procured. And though it was enveloped in phraseology better suited to the patient's distinguished station, it was substantially the same as the first—with the single difference that it seemed to take a more serious view of the case. Lady Gerardine was once more ordered home with the least possible delay, this time under penalties so obscurely hinted at as to seem far more alarming than the most explicit statement.

Sir Arthur's irritable anxiety caught fire again. He hastened the departure with as much energy as he had hitherto displayed in repudiating the idea. Truth to tell, no prescription could have well been less pleasing to him. Precluded himself by public business from leaving before his allotted time, not only would his stately "progress" home be sorely shorn of its chief adornment, but the visit of his distinguished relative, Lady Aspasia Melbury, would have to be unceremoniously postponed. Moreover, it was never part of his views of the marital state to allow his beautiful wife to remove herself more than a day's journey from his personal influence. Scornfully as he would have repudiated any suggestion of jealousy (and indeed, as Aspasia had asserted, he was perhaps too vain a man to entertain so unflattering a guest in the complacency of his thoughts), he had, whether from long residence in the East or natural disposition, an almost oriental manner of regarding the wife as an appanage to the man's estate—a satellite, pleasing and brilliant enough, but yet a mere satellite in the greater luminary's orbit of glory. And therefore, while feverishly speeding the necessary preparations, he could not but let it be seen that he was disappointed, not to say hurt, that there should be any necessity for them.

Lady Gerardine showed herself as gently indifferent to reproach as she had been to solicitude. But the physician's wisdom was so far justified that, from the moment she was told of his decision, she roused herself and began to take some interest in life again.

"Home," she said, "England! Oh, I am glad!"

And, by-and-by, when she was alone with Aspasia, she began, to the girl's delight, to discuss plans with quite an eagerness in her weak voice.

They were in a long cool room, one of the bygone zenana apartments preserved practically untouched, which opened upon the one side into the garden through the arches of a colonnade, and was secluded even from that quiet spot by marvellous stone lacework screens, each different down to the smallest detail of design, yet all in harmony. However the small dusky Eastern beauties may have rebelled in their day against these exquisite prison walls; the present Northern mistress of the whilom palace found pleasure in their very seclusion, their apartness; and, according to her wont, she feasted her soul lazily on their artistic perfections.

She was stretched on a highly painted Indian couch which had been converted into a sofa, and let her eyes wander from the carving of the window screens themselves to their even lovelier reflections, cut in grey shadow on the white marble of the pavement. From the inner rooms the waters of the baths played murmurous accompaniment to her thought and her interrupted speech. Aspasia, squatting on the rug at the foot of the couch, listened, commented, and suggested.

The latter had not yet quite overcome her horrified sense of guilt in connection with Lady Gerardine's singular breakdown. Without being able to piece together any reasonable explanation of late events, she felt instinctively that here was more than met the eye; that there was in the web of her aunt's life, so to speak, an under-warp of unknown colour and unexpected strength; that behind the placid surface there lay secret depths; and that her own trifling treachery had unwittingly set forces in motion with incalculable possibilities. She had gone about, these days, with a solemn look—a living presentment of childish anxiety. The scared shadow was still on her pretty face as she now sat in attendance.

"Home in six weeks..." said Rosamond, dreamily. "We shall still find violets amid the dark-green leaves, Baby, and brown and yellow chrysanthemums on the top of their frost-bitten stalks."

"And is it not jolly," said Aspasia, hugging her knees, "to think that we can go and paddle about in the wet as much as ever we like, without any one after us! And isn't it delightful to be going off just our two selves. Oh! Aunt Rosamond, you gave me an awful fright, you know; but really it was rather well done of you, to faint off like that. You see, the doctor says, whatever they do, now, they're not to contradict you. If ever I get an illness I hope it will be that sort. It is worth anything to be leaving Runkle behind."

Rosamond did not answer, unless a small secret smile in her pillows could be called an answer.

"I don't suppose," proceeded Baby, emboldened, "that you have ever been free from the dear Runkle for more than three days at a time since you married him."

The phrase being a mere statement of fact, it was again left without response.

"And really," pursued Aspasia, warming to her subject, "the way he pounced upon us last summer up in the hills was enough to ruin the nerves of a camel. No sooner gone than he was back. Positively one would rather have had him at home the whole time!"

Force of comparison evidently could no further go. Lady Gerardine gave one of her rare laughs. Baby's face was all wrathful gravity.

Poor Sir Arthur! Disciplinarian as he was, he failed to inspire his immediate circle with anything like average respect. It was a study in morals to watch the rapidity with which the first awe of some newly joined member of his English staff, the flattered reverential fascination produced by early intercourse with the great man, gave way to the snigger, the jeer, the grudging submission. But, serene in his own consciousness of power and his own heaven-born gift of applying it, Sir Arthur laid down the law smilingly and inflexibly; and the native world about him, at least, bowed to his rule with impassive face and supple back. And, if there were any symptoms of that mutiny which his niece declared a long continuance of his rule must inevitably foster, it is quite certain that he would have refused to believe in it until the rebel's knife was actually at his throat.

"Ah," cried he, coming in upon them at the sound of his wife's laugh, "that's better! I thought we should soon have you on the right road when Sir James took you in hand."

Sir James's harmless ammonia mixture, orange-scented, differed as little from Dr. Saunders' sedative drops as the pith of his flowery advice from the latter's blunt statement. But Dr. Saunders was in deep disgrace, and would probably remain so until the Governor's next colic.

Lady Gerardine's face had instantly fallen back to its usual expression of indifference.

"I hope you weren't listening," cried Aspasia, pertly, "we were just saying what a bore you are."

Sir Arthur laughed again, very guilelessly, and stooped to pinch her little pink ear.

"I have wired to Sir James to have his opinion upon the best resort for you in England, until my arrival, dear. His answer has just come."

He spread out the flimsy sheet and ran his short trim finger along the lines: "'Decidedly Brighton, Margate, or Eastbourne.' It is evident he thinks you require bracing."

"I have quite decided where I am going," answered Lady Gerardine, turning her head on her cushion to look at him.

"Eh?" cried Sir Arthur, scarce able to believe his ears.

"I have been unable to talk business, hitherto," proceeded his wife, gently. "But I wanted to tell you I have decided: I go to Saltwoods."

"To Saltwoods?" His eyes were fixed, protruding, in displeased amazement.

To Saltwoods, that paltry little Dorsetshire manor-house which, by the recent demise of Captain English's mother, had devolved upon his young widow! The Old Ancient House, as it was invariably called throughout the countryside, set in such preposterous isolation that the letting of it on any terms had ever remained an impossibility—the legacy was by no means acceptable to Sir Arthur. The various sums that he had already had to disburse for its upkeep and repairs had been a very just grievance with him; and one of the many matters of business he had resolved to accomplish on his return to England was the sale, at any loss, of this inconvenient estate.

"I mean to go there," said Lady Gerardine in the same tone of delicate deliberation, but sitting up among her cushions and pushing the hair from her forehead with the gesture that he had already learned to regard with some dismay as indicative of "her nervous moments." "Old Mary, the housekeeper, can easily get in a couple of country girls, and that will do for me and Aspasia very well."

"Preposterous! Now that's what I call perfectly idiotic! I don't want to find fault with you, my dear girl, and of course you've been ill and all that. But it's quite evident you are not yet in a state to see things in their right light. 'A case of sudden neurasthenia upon a highly sensitive organisation,' as Sir James says."

This was certainly a more suitable definition of her ladyship's malady than the "damn queer low state" of Dr. Saunders; and Sir Arthur rolled it with some complacency upon his tongue.

"There, there, we won't discuss the matter any more just now. Rely upon me to arrange all that is necessary in the most suitable and satisfactory manner." He drew a carved stool to the head of the couch, and possessed himself of her hand in his affectionate way. "There, there, she must not be worried!"

Across the fatigue of Lady Gerardine's countenance came an expression that was almost a faint amusement, tempered with pity. Aspasia watching, very demure, mouse-still, from her lowly post, found the situation one of interest.

"You are always kind," said Rosamond then; "but I shall be better at Saltwoods than anywhere. You forget that I have work to do."

"Work?" echoed Sir Arthur. He drew back to contemplate her uneasily; positively this sounded like wandering.

"It was your wish," she continued (could there lurk in that soft voice an undertone of resentment?), "that I should ... look over"—she hesitated as if she could not pronounce her dead husband's name and remodelled her phrase—"that I should assist Major Bethune with his book."

"Ah!"

Sir Arthur remembered. But the proposition was none the less absurd. That Lady Gerardine, too delicate to be able to remain with him—with him, Sir Arthur, the Lieutenant-Governor, at a moment when a hostess was eminently needed at Government House—should be taking into her calculations the claims of so unimportant a personality as that of poor dead and gone English, was, for all his consciously punctilious chivalry towards his predecessor's shade, a piece of irritating feminine perversity that positively stank in Sir Arthur's nostrils. He snorted. For a moment, indeed, he was really angry. And the sharpness of his first exclamation brought the blood racing to Aspasia's cheeks. She hesitated on the point of interference. But the invalid's unruffled demeanour made no demand upon assistance. Suddenly realising himself the unfitness of his tone towards a neurasthenic patient of highly sensitive organisation, Sir Arthur dropped from loud indignation to his usual indulgent pitch:

"See, my love, how perverse you are. First, when it seemed a mere matter of justice to poor English's memory and could have been accomplished with a very trifling expenditure of trouble, you were opposed to the matter. And now, when, as Sir James says, it is so important for you to have absolute rest, to put even your ordinary correspondence on one side, you tell me, childishly, that it is my wish you should work! I hope, I hope," said Sir Arthur, appealing to space, "that I am not an unreasonable man."

"I was wrong," said Lady Gerardine; "I do not intend to do it because it was your wish, but because it is now mine."

Once again Sir Arthur paused for want of the phrase that would lit his sense of the extraordinary attitude of his wife and yet not induce any recurrence of the dreaded symptoms. Then a brilliant solution of the difficulty flashed across his mind.

"I will write and inform Major Bethune of the necessary postponement of the whole affair. And now, not a word more."

Lady Gerardine smiled, but it was with lips that were growing pale.

"I have myself written to Major Bethune," said she. "It is all settled. He will be travelling by our boat and will come to me at Saltwoods as soon as I am ready for him."

She sank a fraction deeper among her cushions as she spoke, and a blue shade gathered about her mouth and nostrils. Aspasia scrambled to her feet in time to arrest the storm that was threatening in clouds upon her uncle's brow.

"For Heaven's sake," she cried, "hold your tongue and go away, Runkle. You'll kill her!" She dived for the smelling-salts and shrieked for Jani. "Good gracious," she rated him, holding the bottle with pink, shaky fingers to the waxen nostrils, "after all the doctors said, and everything!"

Sir Arthur retired, remarkably crestfallen, to his study. How was a man to exercise the proper marital control upon the marble-white obstinacy of a fainting woman?

Neurasthenic shock was a very fine diagnosis. But it was a question, after all—he lit his cheroot—whether a "damn queer state" did not more aptly picture the actual condition of affairs.

* * * * *

The receipt of a letter from Lady Aspasia Melbury was the first drop of balm in his Excellency's unwontedly distasteful cup. She pooh-poohed his old-fashioned suggestion that the hostess's enforced absence necessitated a postponement of her visit—announced her arrival at the prescribed time, and her conviction that she and her cousin would get on "like a house on fire." Such being the great lady's opinion, the great man was delighted; and, before many further hours had gone by, the younger and less important Aspasia, with hardly suppressed giggles, heard him hold forth at the dinner table to the following effect:

"What my wife requires really is absolute country quiet. I have arranged that she should pass her first weeks in England at her own little place in Dorsetshire, a charming old manor-house. She naturally does not wish to see much society till my return; and, anyhow, there is a small piece of work which she is undertaking at my suggestion." Here he whispered audibly to the General—his guest of the evening: "Poor English, you know—a little biography we are getting up about him. He was killed, you remember, in that Baroghil expedition."

"Umph, yes; I remember, Inziri Pass—seven years ago, nasty business," grumbled the General, as he guzzled his soup; and Aspasia's eyes danced and her cheeks grew pink with suppressed laughter. Young Simpson thought she was laughing at him, and became abjectly wretched for the evening.

* * * * *

Having re-established his supremacy to his own satisfaction, Sir Arthur took an enormous interest in the protocol of his wife's departure. As he himself intended to accompany her to Bombay—he was to meet Lady Aspasia at an intermediate town on her May north—all the pomp and circumstance in which his soul delighted was to grace the occasion: the escorts, the salutes, the special trains, and so forth. Finding that Major Bethune was bound by the same boat, he annexed him to his "progress," with a condescension peculiarly his own. "He is engaged in some literary work, at my request. A very good kind of fellow; very intelligent, too," he explained.

And so Raymond Bethune found himself one of the Lieutenant-Governor's brilliant retinue that autumn evening of the departure. "A silent, unemotional man," Sir Arthur might have added to his description, had he, in his own sublime content, ever thought of examining the impressions of others.

Yet, under his impassive exterior, Raymond Bethune was conscious of a keener interest than he had felt these many years. But it was not in the smartness of the Lieutenant-Governor's escort, in the gorgeousness of his equipages or the general splendour of the magnate himself that he found food for speculation; it was in the personality of Sir Arthur's wife—a repellent yet fascinating enigma. His thoughts perpetually worked round it without being able to solve it.

In another manner, a sweet, vague stirring of his being—totally new experience this!—the girlish presence of Aspasia filled his mind also to an unacknowledged degree. He felt as if his life had been caught up out of its own vastly different course and suddenly intertwined with that of these two women; the one whose every action, every word, was mysterious to him; and the other, clear to the eye as running water, child-heart, child-soul, impulse elemental, nature itself from her spontaneous laugh to her frank impertinence.

"Do you know," whispered Aspasia to him, as they stood side by side under the great colonnade waiting for their turn to descend to the carriage, "I have been hating myself ever since I was such a beast about poor Aunt Rosamond. I think it has half killed her, this business. Even the Runkle wants her to give it up while she's so ill."

The man's eyes had been lost in a musing contemplation of the rosy pointed face surrounded by diaphanous folds of grey gauze. A dainty figure was Aspasia in her soft greys—the sort of travelling companion a man might gladly take with him through the arid and dusty journey of life. But at these words his singular light gaze kindled.

"Surely," said he, "you do not connect Lady Gerardine's illness with anything that you or I have done? That would be absurd, in the circumstances"—he threw a scornful glance about him—"too absurd a proposition to be entertained for a moment." ("This sensibility in a woman who has consoled herself so quickly and to such good purpose!" he added to himself.)

"Oh," said Aspasia back, in a brisk angry whisper, "you don't understand, and neither do I. But I feel, and you don't ... and I think you are perfectly hateful!"

She had caught his look, followed his thought, and was indignant.

* * * * *

And now out into the divine Indian evening they set. The travellers, with their crowd of attendants, moved of necessity slowly, for Lady Gerardine went upon her husband's arm, in the languor of the semi-invalid. Through the frowning gateway, down the stairway they passed, to halt again before the last flight of steps, Rosamond drew herself away from Sir Arthur's support, leaned up against the rough stone slabs of the wall, and laid a slender gloved hand absently in one of five prints that mark it.

"Do you see those?" cried Baby turning, all her ill-humour forgotten in her desire to impart a thrilling piece of information to Major Bethune as he walked behind her. "Do you see those funny marks? Those are supposed to be made by the hands of the queens, when they came down to be burned. Ugh! I say, Aunt Rosamond, are not you rather glad you are not an ancient Indian princess, and that Runkle is not an old rajah, and that you've not got to look forward to frizzle on his pyre?"

"You forget," came Rosamond's dreamy voice in reply, "I should not have been alive to grace Sir Arthur's pyre. My ashes would have mingled with other ashes long, long before.... Oh, I'm not so sure," she went on, again fitting a delicate hand into the sinister prints, "I am not sure that it was not a kind law in the end."

"Gracious!" cried the irrepressible Aspasia, with a shriek and a laugh. And then she whispered, all bubbling mischief, into Bethune's ear: "The poor Runkle, he is not as bad as all that, after all!"

Then, at sight of his face, she suddenly fell grave; and the two stood looking at each other. Bethune had first been startled by Lady Gerardine's look and accents even more than by the words themselves. The next moment, however, he mentally shrugged the shoulder of contempt.

Whom did she think to take in by her affectation of sensibility, this languid, self-centred creature in the midst of her chosen luxury?

Thus, when his eyes met Aspasia's, they were sad with the scorn of things, sad for the sordid trickeries of the soul of her on whom the love of his dead friend had been lavished.

Sir Arthur, with touching unconsciousness of the interlude, was once again affectionately sustaining his wife. Then, as the procession moved on once more, Baby, troubled and discomfited—she could have hardly explained why—moved childishly close to Raymond Bethune, and shivered a little.

"I am glad to be getting away from this haunted place and this uncanny country," she whispered again. "I feel sure I should have ended by making one of these dreadful natives stick a knife into me. I am always plunging in upon their feelings and offending their castes, and all the rest of it. Just look at Saif-u-din's face—Runkle's new secretary—I never saw such a glare as he threw upon us all just now. I suppose he thought we were making fun of their precious suttee!" Aspasia's idea of native distinctions was still of the vaguest.

Bethune turned the keen gaze of the conscious dominator upon the man that Aspasia had indicated with her little indiscreet finger. The red-turbaned, artistically draped figure, with the noble dusky head and the fan-shaped raven beard, was striding in their wake with a serene dignity that looked as if nothing could ever ruffle it. Had he been ruffled? Had the glare existed merely in Aspasia's imagination? While recognising a Pathan (whose contempt for the Hindoo probably exceeded Baby's own), Bethune knew that it was quite possible the irritable pride of the mountain man had taken fire at some real or fancied slight; but the betrayal could have been no more than a flash.

The Major of Guides smiled to himself. He knew his native: the man who will never give you more than an accidental peep of the bared blade in the velvet sheath—no, not till he means to strike! About this fellow, a splendid specimen of the noblest race, a creature cut out of steel and bronze, there was, he thought, a more than usual sinister hint of the wild nature under all the exquisite manner and the perfect self-restraint; and he found himself regarding him with the complacent eye of the connoisseur. The artistic lion-tamer likes his lions savage.

As he looked he wondered once and again how one so evidently a son of the warlike Pathans could have sought the pacific calling of secretary.

Sir Arthur was taking his new toy down to Bombay with him, where there were, he had been informed, certain documents which might be of value to the "monumental work." And so it came to pass that Bethune and Muhammed Saif-u-din, destined to share one of the subordinate vehicles, found themselves presently standing side by side at the foot of the steps.

Whether because of the interest he must have seen he had inspired in the officer, or whether he was simply drawn towards him by his racial military instincts, Raymond could not determine, but, as they halted, well-nigh shoulder to shoulder, the Pathan suddenly wheeled round, looked him full in the face in his turn, then smiled. It was a frank smile, showing a flash of splendid teeth; and it lit up the fierce, proud features in a way that was at once bright and sad.

"It would be curious," reflected Bethune, "to know what sort of a soul dwells in that envelope, which might become the greatest gentleman on earth. I'll warrant the fellow has many a bloody page in his story that a man might scarce look upon, and yet he has got a smile to stir you like a woman's."

The first horses of the escort began to move with much crisp action, for Sir Arthur was at last installed in his state chariot. Through the great glass windows he might be seen and admired of all beholders, feeling his wife's pulse with an air of profound concern; while she, submissive, her patient smile upon her lips, was gazing up into his face with gentle abstracted eyes.

"A model couple!" sneered Bethune to himself. And, turning impatiently aside to devote his attention to the more pleasing subject of the oriental, he found the latter just in the act of dropping his glance from the same spectacle, and thought to notice a flicker as of kindred scorn pass across the statuesque composure of the dark face.

"For ever will the East and the West be as poles apart," cogitated the soldier, even as M. Châtelard had done; "upon no point do they in their heart more despise us than in our subserviency to our women. I am not sure," he pursued to himself, cynically, as the splendid presence of Saif-u-din settled itself with dignity upon the seat beside him; "I am not sure but that the orientals knew what they were about when they made their laws concerning the false and mischievous sex."

Loud and deep rang the great guns of the salute: their Excellencies had started. Rosamond Gerardine was bound for England. In a waggon, at the tail of all the other equipages, sat Jani, withered and sad-faced, wrapt in her thoughts as closely as in her dusky chuddah. She would not talk with the bearers or even lament her coming exile. She held on tightly with one thin brown hand to a much-battered military tin case, which she herself had laid on the seat beside her. No one else would she permit to touch it. The other servants mocked her about it, vowing it was full of her hoardings and that they would rob her of it. At that she would menace them fiercely with her monkey paw. Strange, sad, inscrutable little Parca keeping guard on the fate of lives!

CHAPTER X

Bombay, a very dream-city, was fading—ever more dreamlike, enwrapped in pale-tinted sunset mists—into the distance.

The salt breeze was in their faces; in their ears was the rushing of the waters from the sides of the ship as she cut her way through. Already the something of England that the sea must always bring her children, the surroundings of an English ship especially, was about them! They seemed to have come from the land of languor and secret doings into open life, into simple action, into a busy, wholesome stir.

Beneath them pulsed the great heart of the ship, white foam pointing her way as she forged ahead. Behind her stretched the furrow of her course, two long lines, ever wider divergent till they lost themselves to the eye. And now, by some fantastic mirage effect, the great oriental port, with its glimmering minarets and cupolas, showed as if caught up into the sky itself. Let but this iron heart labour on a little while longer, let but this eager prow cut its way a little deeper towards the sunset, and the East would have vanished altogether.... The travellers would not even see the first glimmer of her evening lights hung a jewel necklace on the horizon, so swiftly had the sea laid hold of them.

Homeward bound! The step from pier to steamer had already severed the link of their strange affinity with the East. Its mystery had fallen from them. Already this was England. Rosamond Gerardine and Aspasia, side by side, watched the shores retreat, fade, sink, and vanish.

"Good-bye, India!" said Aspasia, her head sentimentally inclined, dropping at last the little handkerchief with which she had been frantically signalling long after there was any possibility of the vessel being descried from the land otherwise than as a black spot; "Good-bye, India, and hey for home!"

Lady Gerardine fixed the fading vision with wide, abstracted eyes.

"God grant," she said, under her breath, more to herself than to the girl beside her, "that I may never see those shores again!"

"Amen!" said Aspasia, cheerfully.

Rosamond laid her hand upon Aspasia's wrist as they leaned against the railings and pressed it with a grasp that almost hurt.

"An accursed land!" she went on, this time in a low, intense voice. It was as if she flung anathema to the retreating shores. "Cruel, cruel, treacherous! Oh, God, what has it not already cost us English! Is there a home among us that has not paid its blood tribute to that relentless monster? Listen, child. I was as young as you when I last beheld its shores—thus—from the sea. It was in the dawn (it is fit it should now be dusk), and we stood together as I stand beside you to-day. And I saw it grow out of the sky, even with the dawn, a city of rose, of pearl, beyond words beautiful—unimaginable, it seemed to me, in promise! He said to me: 'Look, there is the first love of my life; is she not fair? And I am bringing to her my other love ... and you two are all that I will have of life.' And then he laughed and said: 'It would be strange if I wanted more, with two such loves.' And, again: 'Not even for you could I be false to her.'"

Aspasia, mystified, turned her bright gaze full upon her aunt's face. In the pupils of Rosamond's eyes there was enkindled a sullen fire.

"He came back to her," she went on; "and she—that land—lay smiling in the sunrise to receive him. Oh, how she can smile and look beautiful, and smell fragrant, and caress, with the dagger hidden under the velvet, the snake in the rose, and the sudden grave yawning! I've never been home since," she said, with a sudden change of tone, bringing her glance back from the misty horizon, to fix it upon Aspasia with so piteous and haggard a look that the girl lost her composure. "And now I am coming home alone, and he remains there." She made an outward sweep with her left hand towards the north. "I am coming home alone. The other has kept him. She has kept him. I am alone: he is left behind."

"Who?" cried the bewildered Baby, who had utterly failed to seize the thread of her aunt's strange discourse. And, upon her usual impulsiveness springing to a conclusion of mingled amazement and derision: "Who—Runkle?" she exclaimed.

No sooner had the foolish cry escaped her lips than she could have bitten out her tongue for vexation.

A change came over Lady Gerardine's face, colder and greyer than even the rapid tropic evening that was closing upon the scene. The light went out in her eyes, to be replaced by a distant contempt. The features that had quivered with passion became set into their wonted mask of repose; it was as if a veil had dropped between them, as if a cold wind drove them apart.

"I was not speaking of your uncle," said Rosamond, at length, very gently. Then she suggested that as it was growing late they should take possession of their cabin.

And Aspasia, as she meekly acquiesced, trembled upon tears at the thought of her blundering. For one moment this jealously centred heart had been about to open itself to her; for one moment this distant enfolded being had turned to her as woman to woman; impelled by God knows what sudden necessity of complaint, of another's sympathy, of another's understanding, the lonely soul had called upon hers. And she, Aspasia—Baby, well did they name her so—had not been able to seize the precious moment! The sound of her own foolish laugh still rang in her ears, while the unconscious contempt in Rosamond's gaze scorched her cheeks.

* * * * *

From the very first day, fate, in the shape of an imperiously intimate Aspasia, drew Raymond Bethune, the saturnine lonely man, into the narrow circle of Lady Gerardine's 'board-ship existence. In her double quality of great lady and semi-invalid, the Lieutenant-Governor's wife was to be withdrawn from the familiar intercourse which life on a liner imposes on most travellers. It had been Sir Arthur's care to see that she was provided with an almost royal accommodation, which, as everything in this world is comparative, chiefly consisted in the possession of a small sitting-room over and above the usual sleeping-cabin.

Into these sacred precincts Miss Cuningham hustled Bethune unceremoniously, as the first dusk closed round their travelling home on the waste of waters.

"Steward! ... Oh, isn't it too bad, Major Bethune! I've been ringing like mad, and poor old Jani's bewildered out of her wits; and Gibbons—that's our English fool of a maid—she's taken to groaning already. There's not a creature to do anything for us, and that idiot there says he's nothing to say to the cabins!"

Her arms full of flowers, she stood close to him; and the fragrance of the roses and carnations came to him in little gushes with her panting breath. Her rosy face, in the uncertain light, had taken to itself an ethereal charm very different from its usual clear and positive outline. Hardly had this realisation of her personality come to him than, under the hands of the ship's servant she had so contemptuously indicated, the flood of the electric light leaped upon them. And behold, she appeared to him yet fairer—youth triumphant, defying even that cruel glare to find a blemish in bloom or contour.

"What do you want?" he asked, with the softening of his hard face which so few were ever privileged to see.

"A vase for our flowers—a big bowl. I hate messy little dabs; and I don't want them to die an hour before they can help it. Oh, a really big bowl, at once!"

Her residence in an Indian governor's palace had been short, but sufficient to give Miss Aspasia the habit of command.

Raymond Bethune gave his dry chuckle as he set to work to fulfil her behest.

"I've captured a salad bowl," cried he, almost jovially, when he returned; "and the head steward is in despair!"

"Tell him to steal the cook's pudding-basins," said Aspasia, and swept him back with her to the minute sitting-room.

Here sat Lady Gerardine, still wrapped in her cloak but bareheaded, under the shaded light. Leaning back among her cushions, her feet crossed on a footstool, she seemed to have taken full possession of her quarters. The narrow commonplace surroundings had already received her special personal imprint. The flowers, the cushions, a few books, a great cut-glass scent bottle—the very disorder even of a litter of rich trifles that had not yet found their place, removed the trivial impression of steamer upholstery. She received him without surprise, if without any mark of welcome; and Aspasia chattered, ordered, laughed, kept him employed and amused. Now and again Lady Gerardine smiled vaguely at her niece's outbursts. Bethune could not feel himself an intruder. And certainly it was better than his fourth share of a bachelor's cabin, better than the crowded saloon and smoking-rooms, with their pervading glare and odour of high polish.

Through the open port-hole came the sound of the rushing, swirling waters, punctuated by the slap of some sudden wave against the flank of the ship. A wind had arisen, and now and again gusts, cold and briny, rushed in upon the warm inner atmosphere of flowers.

Lady Gerardine held a large bouquet of Niphetos roses, and her pale long fingers were busy unrolling the bonds that braced them in artificial deportment. Their petals, thought the man, were no whiter than her cheeks.

Presently Aspasia plunged her healthy pink hands down among the languid blossoms and began pulling out the wires.

"I shouldn't, if I were you," said Rosamond; and then she held up a spray. "See, the poor flower, all stained, all fallen apart, all broken. Never draw away the secret supports, Baby. It is better to hold one's head up, even with the iron in one's heart, and pretend it is not there."

Bethune looked at her, a little startled. In some scarcely tangible way the words seemed aimed at him; but he saw that for her, at that moment, he did not exist.

For the first time a pang of real misgiving shot through him. He seemed to behold her with new eyes. She struck him as very frail. Could it be true, or did he but imagine it, that that lovely head, once so defiantly uplifted against him, now drooped?

Feeling the fixity of his gaze upon her, she glanced up and then smiled. Strange being! Was he, then, so easily forgiven? His heart gave a sudden leap.

The memory of this first evening was one which haunted him all his life with a curious intimate sweetness.

* * * * *

Time passed as time will pass on board ship; vague hours resembling each other, dropping to dreamy length of days; days that yet lapse quickly and moreover work a sure but subtle change. No traveller that lands after a long sea journey is the same as he who started. Sometimes, indeed, he will look back upon his former self as upon another, with surprise.

So it was with Raymond Bethune; and if he came to view himself with surprise, still more inexplicable to him was the new Lady Gerardine as he learned to regard her. According to his presentiment, these two women—she to whose puzzling personality he had vowed antipathy, and she whose fresh young presence made dangerously strong demands upon his sympathy—soon began to absorb all the energies of his thoughts. To a man who had hitherto known no other emotion, outside a very ordinary type of home affection, than friendship for another man; whose life, with the exception of one brief period of glamorous hero-worship, had been devoted to duty in its sternest, most virile form, this mental pre-occupation over two women, both comparative strangers, was at first a matter for self-mockery. It was afterwards one of self-conflict. Whoso, however, has reached the point of actually combating an idea is already and obviously its victim, and the final stage of abandonment to the obsession cannot be very distant.

Looking back upon his memories, in later days, it was singular to him how completely the girl and the woman divided his most vivid impressions of that journey. If the vision of Aspasia, fresh as the spray, rosy as the dawn, coming to meet him of a morning, brisk and free, across the deck, her young figure outlined against sparkling sea and translucent sky, was a memory all pleasant and all sweet, the picture of that other, slow moving and pallid, so enwrapped in inexplicable mourning, so immeasurably indifferent to himself, was bitten into the tablets of his mind as with burning acid, fixed in lines of pain.

It is never flattering for a man to realise that he is of no consequence to a woman with whom he is brought into daily intercourse. And to feel that, though his acts have had a distinct influence upon her life, his personality has failed to make the smallest impression, is a situation certain to pique the most unassuming. In the end Bethune began to wish that Lady Gerardine had retained even her original attitude of resentment. Now and again, indeed, he would find her eye fixed upon him, but at the same time would know unmistakably that her thought was not with him. Sometimes her attitude of inexplicable sorrow seemed harder to bear than her first evidences of heartlessness.

One day Aspasia had suddenly attacked her aunt upon the subject of her black garb, crying, with her noted heedlessness:

"I declare, any one would think you were in mourning."

Lady Gerardine shifted her distant gaze from the far horizon to Aspasia's countenance, and her lips moved but made no sound. In her heart she was saying:

"How else should I clothe myself, when I am travelling with my dead?"

Almost as if he read her thought, Bethune sneered as he looked at her, and with difficulty restrained the taunt that rose to his tongue. "Lady Gerardine wears belated weeds!"

Her attitude of hopeless melancholy, her raiment of mourning, irritated him bitterly. Yet, while he looked at her in harshness, he marked the admirable white throat, rising like a flower stem from the dense black of her dress, and found himself wondering whether any shimmer of colour would have become her half so well.

Towards the end of their journey together he was once summoned to speak with her alone. It was about the forthcoming book. Nothing could be more brief, more businesslike than her words, more unemotional than her manner. She asked for his instructions; she discussed, criticised, concurred. It was obvious that, when she chose, her brain could act with quite remarkable clearness. It was also obvious that she had completely capitulated to his wishes; and yet never was victory more savourless.

At the conclusion of this conversation she settled with him that, when she had accomplished her part of the task, she would send for him. And as he withdrew, he felt himself dismissed from her thoughts, except as a mere instrument in what now seemed more her undertaking than his own. At heart he found it increasingly difficult to accept the position with good grace.

After this, during the few days of ship life together left to them, Lady Gerardine seldom admitted him to her company; and thus Raymond was the more thrown with Aspasia. The girl, unconventional by temperament and somewhat set apart by her position of "Governor's niece," unhesitatingly profited by a situation which afforded her unmixed amusement. She was not in love as yet with the Major of Guides. Indeed, she had other and higher ambitions. Aspasia's dream-pictures of herself were ever of a wonderful artist of world-wide celebrity, surrounded by a sea of clapping hands, graciously curtseying her thanks from the side of a Steinway grand.... But Bethune interested her, and there was something piquantly pleasant in being able to awaken that gleam in his cold, light eye, in noticing that the lines of his impassive face relaxed into softness for her alone.

One afternoon, as they sat on deck—the great ship cutting the blue waters of the Adriatic, between the fading of a glorious red and orange sunset and the rising of a thin sickle moon, Aspasia wrapped against the chilly salt airs in some of her aunt's sables, out of which richness the hardy, wild-flower prettiness of her face rose in emphatic contrast—she told him the story of her short life.

She spoke of her musical career, of the bright student days at Vienna; the hard work of them, the anguish, the struggle, the joy. Then of the death of her mother, and the falling of all her high hopes under the crushing will of Sir Arthur, her appointed guardian.

"When mother went," said Aspasia, "everything went." As she spoke two tears leaped out of her eyes, and hung poised on the short, thick eyelashes. "The Runkle thinks it's a disgrace for a lady to do anything in life. 'And, besides,' he says, 'she can't, and she'd better not attempt it.' But wait till I'm twenty-one," cried the girl, vindictively, "and I'll show him what his 'dear Raspasia's' got in her!"

She smiled in her young consciousness of power, and the big tears, detaching themselves, ran into her dimples. Raymond, looking at her with all the experience of his hard life behind him, and all the disillusion of his five-and-thirty years, felt so sudden a movement at once of pity and tenderness that he had to stiffen himself in his seat not to catch her in his arms and kiss her on those wet dimples as he would have kissed a child.

"Oh, you'll do great things," said he, in the tone in which one praises the little one's sand castle on the beach, or tin soldier strategy. "And may I come with a great big laurel crown, tied with gold ribbons, when you give your first concert in the Albert Hall?"

"Albert Hall," mocked she, "the very place for a piano recital!" Then she let her eyes roam out across the heaving space. Once more she saw herself the centre of an applauding multitude; but, in the foremost rank, there was the lean, brown face, and it was moved to enthusiasm, too. And, somehow, from that evening forth, the dream-visions of her future glory were never to be quite complete without it.

* * * * *

A mist-enwrapped, rain-swept shore, parting the dim grey sea and sky in twain, was their first glimpse of England after years of exile.

"Ugh," said Aspasia, shivering, "isn't it just like England to go and be damp and horrid for us!"

Lady Gerardine, looking out with eager straining gaze towards the weeping land, turned with one of her sudden, unexpected movements of passion upon the girl.

"I'm glad it's raining," she said. "I'm glad it's cold, and bleak, and grey. I'm glad to feel the raindrops beating on nay face. I'm sick of hard blue skies and fierce sunshine.... And the trees at Saltwoods will be all bent one way by the blowing of the wet sea wind. It's England, it's home; and, oh, I'm glad to be home!"

BOOK II

CHAPTER I

Rosamond Gerardine and Aspasia Cuningham lay back, silent, each in her corner of the railway carriage, while the English landscape flew by them, wet and green and autumn brown, gleaming in a fugitive yellow sunlight.

Aspasia still felt the pressure of Bethune's unconsciously hard hand-grip. His image, as he had stood bareheaded looking after the moving train, was still vivid before her eyes. His last words: "It is not good-bye," were ringing in her ears. His face had looked wistful, she thought; his cold glance had taken that warm good look she claimed as her own. She was glad it was not good-bye. And yet, as they steamed away, she, watching him as long as she could, saw, and could not hide it from herself, that it was upon Lady Gerardine his eyes were fixed at the last—fixed with an expression which had already become familiar to her. "One would think he hated her—sometimes," said shrewd Baby to herself, "and yet, when she's there, he forgets me. I might as well be dead, or a fright."

This puzzled her and troubled her, too, a little. She glanced across now at her aunt's abstracted countenance. "I am sure," she thought, in loyal admiration, "if he were madly in love with her, it would be only natural. But it's not love—it's more like hate and a sort of pain." With all her sageness, Baby was only eighteen.

How completely had Raymond Bethune passed from Lady Gerardine's mind—even before he had passed from her sight!

She had nearly reached the end of her journey. The burning land she had left behind her—once the land of her desire—seemed now but a place visited in long evil dreams, where she had undergone unimaginable sufferings during the bondage of sleep. The humid air of England beat upon her face through the open window with a comforting assurance as of waking reality.

She had told herself she was travelling with her dead. Never for one hour of her long journey had she forgotten the meaning of that box under Jani's care. But, with every sunrise that marked a wider distance between her and India, she drew a freer breath. With every stage she felt herself less Lady Gerardine, wife; and more Mrs. English, widow. There was beginning to be an extraordinary restfulness in the sensation.

They sped through the New Forest glades, sodden after the rain, now flashing gold-brown with that shaft of sun; now black-green, cavernous, mysterious, where the pines grow close. And then came the moorland stretches, reaching up to a pale-blue cleft in the storm-weighted clouds. How cool it all was! How soft the colours! How benign the wet sky, how different from the metal glare of the land that had betrayed her!

And, by-and-by, white gleams of sunshine began to deepen into primroses and ambers; towards the west the sky grew ever clearer, and the leaden wrack, parting, showed an horizon like to a honey sea against the rising mists of evening. How beautiful was England!

When they got out at the little country station, in the rural heart of Dorset, the day was closing in. The vault of the heavens brooded over the earth with a cup-like closeness. November though it was, the air struck upon their cheeks as gently as a caress, all impregnated with the fragrance of wet green indefinably touched with the tart accent of decay.

Rosamond drew a long deep breath; it had a poignant pleasure in it; tears sprang to her eyes, but, for the first time in God knew how many years, there was a sweetness in them. Jani at her elbow shivered with an aguish chatter of teeth. With one hand she clutched her shawls across her little lean figure; with the other she held on fiercely to a battered tin box.

"Oh, Aunt Rosamond," cried Aspasia, ecstatically, as they got into the vehicle awaiting them, "it's a fly, it's a fly! Aren't you glad? Do you smell the musty straw? Oh! doesn't it bring back good old times? Don't you wish you may never sit in a state carriage again?"

It was a long drive, through winding lanes. Sometimes they strained uphill, sometimes they skirted the flat down; sometimes the branches of the overhanging trees beat against the roof of the carriage or in at the open window. At first the whole land was wonderfully still. They could hear the moisture drip from the leaves when the horses were at the walk. And, by-and-by, there grew out of the distance the faint yet mighty rumour of the sea. Within such short measure, then, this small, great England was meeting her salt limits! Across the upland down, presently, even on this silent evening, there rose a wind to sing of the surf. The trees by the roadside, in the copses amid fields, on the crest, etched against the glimmer of the sky, had all that regular inland bent that tells of salt winds.

At last the rickety fly began to jingle and jolt along a road that was hardly more than a track. The way dipped down an abrupt slope and then branched off unexpectedly into a side lane. Rosamond leaned out of the window; she felt they were drawing near her unknown home.

"Are we there?" cried Aspasia, entering into a violent state of excitement as they came to a halt before a swing gate.

Rosamond did not answer. She was looking with all her eyes, with all her heart. Sudden memories awoke within her—words, never even noted to be forgotten, began to whisper in her ears: "You never saw such a place, love. It isn't a place, it's a queer old house dumped down in a hollow of the downs. And the avenue—there isn't an avenue, it's a road through the orchard, and the orchard comes right up to the house—and you never saw such a bunch of chimney-stacks in your life. But such as it is, I love it. And some day we'll go and live there, you and I...." Here, then, were the orchard trees, twisted shapes, stretching out unpruned branches to them as they passed!

"I almost plucked an apple," cried Aspasia, from her side, with a childish scream.

The sky was rift just about the horizon—the afterglow primrose against the sullen gloom of the cloud banks. Cut into sharp silhouette against this pallid translucence, rose the black outline of the house and right across it the fantastic old-time chimney-stack, at sight of which Rosamond laughed low to herself as one who recognises the face of a friend. "You never saw such a bunch of chimney-stacks in your life!..."

A faint column of smoke ascended pale against the gloom where the chimneys lost themselves in the skies. As Rosamond noted it, her heart stirred; all was not dead then—the old house, his house, was alive and waiting for her!

They drew up close to the stone porch, open to the night, flush with the level of the out-jutting gables, and the driver, plunging into the black recess, sent the jangle of a bell ringing through inner spaces. In the waiting pause all was very silent, save the stealthy patter from the overgrown ivy clumps that hung across the entrance. There was a rustle, the hop of an awakened bird, quite close to Rosamond's ear, as she leaned out with the eagerness that had been growing upon her ever since her landing.

Then came steps within: the door was opened first but a little space, with the habitual precaution of the lowly caretaker, then suddenly drawn wide. A square of light that seemed golden was cut out of the darkness, and:

"You're welcome, ma'am," cried old Mary, tremulously smoothing her apron.

Lady Gerardine passed with fixed eyes and straight steps into the hall, but she turned quickly as the words struck her ear. Aspasia, following, saw her face illumined by a smile that was almost joy. And the girl became secretly a little alarmed; her aunt's ways had been all inexplicable to her of late.

Rosamond's heart was crying out within her, and it was with actual joy. "Welcome, ma'am," had said his servant—to old Mary the mistress of Saltwoods was Captain English's widow—even to herself might she not now cease to be Lady Gerardine for a brief respite? Oh, then would the manor-house be home indeed!

A great sense of peace, accompanied by a sudden lassitude, fell upon her; she sank into an armchair, flinging her arms wide with a gesture of relief. Opposite to her was a sturdy oaken table, upon which the housekeeper had just placed a hand-lamp. The light fell full upon a rack displaying a hunting-crop, a couple of rough walking-sticks; above, there was the sketch of a boy's face. Her gaze wandered, without at first taking in the meaning of what it saw.

Noise resounded from the porch; it was Jani, struggling with the coachman for the possession of the old regimental case.

Rosamond looked quickly up again at the bright living presentment on the wall; then she rose to her feet and staggered blindly through the nearest door. There, in sheltering darkness, Aspasia promptly overtook her, and was terrified, as she clasped her warm young arms round her aunt's figure, to find it torn by sobs.

"Let me be, let me be!" exclaimed Lady Gerardine, pushing the girl from her, "it is good to give way at last."

And Aspasia, pressing her face in wordless attempt at consolation against her aunt's cheek, found it streaming with a very torrent of tears.

* * * * *

"Ah," said old Mary, shaking her head, as Miss Cuningham presently besought her for the feminine panacea of tea, "poor lady, it's no wonder: he was a grand young gentleman!"

It was, indeed, evident that here Lady Gerardine could never be anything but Captain English's widow.

CHAPTER II

The manor-house was very old and very solid. It held nothing of any high value, perhaps, but it held nothing cheap or weak. It was complete before the days of machine-made furniture and of so-called æsthetic art, and those that had ruled over it since had been withheld by innate taste or a happy lack of means from adding to it either within or without. Thus it had remained at a standstill through an extraordinary lapse of years, and all was now beautifully, frankly old; it stood in its simplicity, perfect in antique shabbiness. Only without, the creepers flung ever new shoots about the sturdy strength of the stones. Only within, it was haunted by a memory, by a presence; and this presence was young even to boyhood. And the young ghost harmonised with the aged house, seemed to belong to it as surely as—year by year—the spirit of spring to the ancient garden.

Rosamond, whose life purpose had so long been to avoid the haunting of the past, awoke in the dawn of her first day at Saltwoods to find herself in a very habitation of memories; nay, more, to feel, in some inexplicable manner, that the dead were more alive in this house than the quick, and yet—strange mystery of the heart—that she was glad of it. She watched the dawn wax as on one memorable morning in her far-off Indian palace; not here on beetle's-wing green and eastern glow of carmine and purple, but upon brown of wainscot oak and dim rosebud of faded chintz. And, as the lights spread between the gaps of the shutters, there grew upon her from the panelled wall a strong young face with bold wide-open eyes—eyes very young, set under brows already thoughtful. A very English face, despite the olive of the cheek, the darkness of the hair, close-cut, that still had a crisp wave under the cock of the Sandhurst cap.

"I felt I was not alone," said Rosamond, half in dream, supporting herself on her elbow to look more nearly, "and so it was you!"

But the eyes were gazing past her, out on life, full of eagerness. And the close lips were set with a noble determination. What great things this boy soldier was going to make of his future!

Rosamond let herself fall back upon her pillows, something like a sob in her throat. Then, opposite to her, between the windows, she met full the glance of the same eyes that had but now avoided hers. They were child's eyes this time, gazing, full of soft wonder, out of a serious child's face, framed by an aureole of copper curls—the wonderful tint that is destined to turn to densest black.

Rosamond stretched at ease, resting her eyes on those of the lovely child's—childless woman, who had never desired children, began to picture to herself how proud a mother would be of such a little son as this. And then her mind wandered to the mother, who, lying where she now lay, had feasted her waking heart and gratified her maternal pride, so many mornings with this vision.

Then something began to stir in her that had not yet stirred before; an inchoate desire, an ache, a jealousy; yes, a jealousy of the dead woman who had borne such a child! She turned restlessly from the sight of the two pictures, flung herself to the far side of the bed, and sent her glance and thought determinedly wandering into the recess of an alcove where night still kept the growing light at bay.

A drowsiness fell over her mind again; with vague interest she found herself speculating what might the different objects be that the darkness still enwrapt partly from her sight.

Here was a high chair of unusual shape—a Prie-Dieu? Here was a gothic bracket, jutting from the wall above; thereon something glimmered palely forth; a statuette perchance, or alabaster vase of special slender art? Nay, not so, for now she could distinguish the wide-stretched arms, the pendant form; it was the carven ivory of a crucifix. The late Mrs. English's shrine, her altar? Rosamond's interest quickened—she had heard of this unknown relative's goodness from the son's lips, but had never heard this goodness specified as regarded religion. His mother, then, had been High Church ... Roman Catholic perhaps? Rosamond was almost amused, with the detached amusement of one to whom religion means little personal.

Under this impulse of curiosity she rose from her bed, pulled the window shutters aside to let in the day, and then went back to examine the alcove.

It held a shrine indeed, an altar to inevitable sacrifice, to the most sacred relics. Beneath the pallid symbol, figure of the Great Renunciation, was placed a closed frame. And all around and about, in ordered array, the records of a boy's life: medals for prowess in different sports; a cup or two; a framed certificate of merit; in front of the frame, a case bulging with letters. Upon each side of the altar hung shelves filled with books, some in the handsome livery of school prizes, some in the battered covers of the much-perused playroom favourite.

Rosamond stood and looked. A moment or two she hesitated, then she began to tremble. There was within her the old desire of flight, the old sick longing to hide away, to bury, to ignore. But something stronger than herself held her. The day was past when she could deny herself to sorrow. The cup was at her lips and she knew that she must drink.

She would open that letter-case, she would gaze at the face in the closed frame; her coward heart was to be spared no longer.

She took up a volume. As it fell apart she saw the full-page book-plate engraved with the arms of Winchester School and the fine copperplate inscription:

Anno Sæculari 1884 Præmium in re Mathematica Meritus et consecutus est Henricus English. (Hæc olim meminisse juvabit).

The life of Christopher Columbus.... It was bound in crimson calf, and the gilt edges of its unopened pages clung crisply together.

She replaced it on the shelf and, with the same dreary mechanical determination, drew forth another. The "Boy's own Book"; a veteran, this; from too much loving usage, dogs'-eared, scored with small grimy finger-prints; its quaint woodcuts highly coloured here and there by a very juvenile artist.

"To Henry English, on his ninth birthday, from his affectionate mother," ran the dedication, in a flowing Italian hand. A gift that had made a little lad very happy, some twenty-five years ago.

And now Rosamond's fingers hovered over the case of letters. Well did her heart forebode whose missives lay treasured there. Nevertheless, the sight of the handwriting struck her like a stab. Not yet could she summon strength to read those close-marked pages. Nay—were they even hers to read?

"Darling old Mammy—" this was not for her.

Yet she turned the sheets over and over, lingering upon them. Here was an envelope, endorsed in the same fair running hand as the book: "My beloved son's last letter." And here, on a card, was gummed a piece of white heather—memorial of God knows what pretty coquetry between the stalwart soldier and his "darling old Mammy."

What things must people live through—people who dare to love!

Rosamond had never loved. Had she not done well? When love offered itself to her she had been too young to know its face. And now.... She dropped the case from her hands as if it burnt her, and stood, poised for flight; then, as if driven by an invincible force, seized upon the closed frame, almost with anger. Fate held her, she could not escape.

Harry English, looking at her! Not the child, not the adolescent, but Harry the man as she, his wife, had known him. Even through the incomplete medium of a photograph, the strong black and white of his colouring, the bold line of his features, the concentrated purposeful expression, was reproduced with an effect of extraordinary vitality.

It seemed almost impossible to think of him as dead who could look at her so livingly from this little portrait.

* * * * *

Old Mary came in hurriedly.

"Here I am, ma'am, here I am! I heard you call."

Rosamond lifted dazed eyes. It took a perceptible space of time for the meaning of the words to filter to her brain. Then she said with vague impatience:

"I did not call."

"But you wanted me, surely," said the woman. Her glance wandered from the portrait in her new mistress's hand to the disorder on her old mistress's altar. "Surely you wanted me, ma'am."

She took a warm wrapper from the bed and folded it round Lady Gerardine. She supported her to an armchair and placed a cushion to her feet. The ministering hands were warm and strong; and Rosamond felt suddenly that in truth she was cold and weak, and that these attentions were grateful to her. She looked up again at the withered face, ethereally aged, at the blue eyes that seemed illumined from some source not of this world.

"Perhaps I did want you," she said.

A thin, self-absorbed, silent woman was old Mary. She regarded the world as with the gaze of the seer and moved within the small circlet of her duty wrapped in a mystic dignity of her own. Some held her in contempt, as madwoman; others in awe, as having "seen things."

If the manor-house had the reputation of being haunted, it was doubtless due to Mary's ways. No one from the neighbourhood would have consented to inhabit the ancient place with her. But fortunately Mary had a stout niece of her own, who averred that ghosts were indigestion, and who slept the sleep of the scrubber and the just, no matter what else might walk.

The housekeeper's strange eyes softened as she looked down into the fair pale face of her young master's widow.

"My dear lady that's gone," she said, "must be glad to know that there is another heart keeping watch here."

Her voice was soft and had a muffled sound as of one used to long silence. The tone seemed to harmonise with the singularity of the words. A small cold shiver ran over Rosamond; she stared without replying.

"The day the news came," proceeded the housekeeper, dreamily, "she set up that altar to him. And there she found peace."

As old Mary spoke, the habit of the trained servant was still strong upon her. She stooped to tuck in the fold of Rosamond's dressing-gown closer round her feet.

"There she prayed," she went on, as she straightened herself again, "and then, he came back to her in peace."

Rosamond closed the frame in her hands with a snap. She felt every impulse within her strike out against the mystic atmosphere that seemed to be closing round her.

"What are you saying?" she cried sharply. "In Heaven's name what do you mean? Who came back—the dead?"

Old Mary smiled again. She bent over the chair.

"Why, ma'am," she said, as if speaking to a frightened child, "you don't need to be told, a good lady like you: to those that have faith, there is no death."

"No death!" echoed Rosamond. "All life is death. Everything is full of death."

There was a strangling bitterness in her throat that broke forth in a harsh laugh. The placid room seemed to swim round with her; when she came to herself the servant was holding her hands once more. Her voice was falling into her ears with a measured soothing cadence:

"Not here. There is no death in this house. Don't you feel it, ma'am? It's not death that is here. Why, her that is gone, she passed from me there, in that bed, as the night passes into day. That is not death. Not an hour before the summons came for her she was wandering—as the doctor called it. I knew better. She saw him and was speaking to him. 'Ah, Harry,' she says, joyful, 'I knew you were not dead.' And then she turns to me. 'He is not dead, Mary,' she says, 'it was all a mistake.'"

Rosamond listened, her pale lips apart, her gaze dark and wondering.

"Why, ma'am," went on old Mary. "Haven't you felt it yourself, this night; didn't you feel his sweet company the minute you set foot in the house? I think it was my lady's great love that brought him back here. And now that she is gone, he's still here. And it's strange, he's here more than she is. She does not come as he does."

Her eyes became fixed on far-off things. Still clasping Rosamond's hand she seemed to transmit a glow, a warmth that reached to the heart. Rosamond's sick and cowering soul felt at rest as upon a strength greater than her own.

His company! Was that not what she had felt? Was it not that to which she had awakened? Ay, the old woman was right: it was sweet!

"There is no death," asserted old Mary, once again, "no death unless we make it. It's our fault if our dead do not live for us; it's our earthly bodies that won't acknowledge the spirit. It's we who make our dead dead, who bury them, who make corpses of them and coffins for them, to hide them away in the cold earth."

Rosamond wrenched her hands from the wrinkled grasp. She sprang to her feet, seized by a sudden anguish that was actual physical pain.

"Go, go!" she cried wildly. She was caught up as in a whirlwind of unimaginable terror. What had she done? Had she laid Harry English in the grave? Was he dead to her through her own deed, he that had lived on for his mother? Had she in her cowardice hammered him into his coffin, and would he always be a corpse to her because she had made him dead?

Through the inarticulate voices of her torment, she heard the door close and felt she was alone. And then she found herself upon her knees before the shrine, the photograph case still clenched between her fingers, praying blindly, madly, inarticulately—to what? she knew not. To the white Christ on the cross, who had risen from the dead? Or to the strong soldier whose image she held, and for whom there could be no rising again?

When the storm passed at length she was broken, chilled, and unconsoled. Old Mary's words came back to her: "She prayed there and she got peace." Well, the mother may have found peace in prayer. But for the wife, there was none! "He came back in peace"; he had not come back to her—to Rosamond, his wife!

A wave of revolt broke over her; against the God who had invented death for his creatures, or against stupid blind fate disposing of those human lives that have no God.

She rose slowly to her feet; her glance swept the homely room—the bed where the mother had died—to end once again upon the altar. What right had she, the old woman, to lay claim to Rosamond English's husband? The babe, the boy, may have been hers, let her have him! But the man—the man belonged to the wife. "And ye shall leave father and mother and cleave to one." "There is authority for it in your very scriptures," cried Rosamond, aloud. And, with fingers trembling with passionate eagerness she set to work to rob the frame of its treasure, the shrine of its chief relic.

Soon it lay in her hand, the clipped photograph. She carried it away, from the altar to the window, and stood a long, long while, devouring it with her gaze. So had he looked. No man had ever bolder, truer eyes. Ah, and no woman but Rosamond had seen them flame into passion—passion that yet then had had no meaning for her who saw! And those lips, folded into sternness, had any one known them to break into lines of tenderness as they were used for her? None at least, not even his mother, had heard them whisper what they had whispered to the wife—to the wife whose ears had been deaf, then, as a child's, because of her uncomprehending heart!

What was it old Mary had said? "It is we who make our dead dead." And had he lived on in this house because of the love of a withered heart, and should he not live again for her, his wife who was young and strong—and still virgin to love?

What she had buried she would dig out of the earth again, were it with bleeding fingers. That voice should speak once more, were each accent to stab her with its poignancy of loss. He should live, were it to be her death.

With dilated nostrils, panting for breath, her hair floating behind her, beautiful in her thrall of passion like some Valkyrie rising over blood and death, she rushed to the door and summoned Jani with ringing call. There is an exaltation of spirit to which pain is highest joy, and Rosamond ran now to her sorrow as the mystic to his cross.

"Jani!" she called. "Bring me Captain English's box."

CHAPTER III

The days dropped into the cup of time; measures of light and shade, of waxing and waning, ushered in with pale winter dawns, huddled away in rapid gloomy twilights, according to the precise yearly formula.

But to Rosamond these hours in the forgotten old manor-house on the moorlands, where the winds were the only visitors, brought so great a change that it was as if a gate had been shut upon her former road.

A common prate is that Time works the changes in us. And when we look from the child to the man, it would seem absurd even to raise the question. Yet it is not time that works the mightiest changes. Nay, in the world of the soul time but emphasises. The great upheavals that obliterate in our lives all familiar landmarks—that do alter everything down to our most intimate capacity of feeling, are sometimes but the work of one instant. It is not time that ravages, it is not time that draws the wrinkle seared into the heart; not to time do we owe the spread of the grey, instead of the gold that used to colour the web of existence. A man may carry the singing soul of his April to the death-bed of his old body. Yet again the heart may wither in a span so short as scarce to be measured.

And sometimes a change, so complete that even within our own soul we find ourselves suddenly on foreign ground, will come without any striking external event, without any apparent outside reason. In the life of the soul a crisis has occurred—and lo! the very world of God is different. Nay, God himself is another to us.

During these short wind-swept November days in the green and brown manor-house, there, amid the solitary downs, did such a change come to Rosamond. Had she tried, she could scarce have found her old self again. But she did not try; for this new self was at peace, was wrapped in dreams of great sweetness, and yet awake to a life hitherto not even guessed at.

* * * * *

In the attic room that had been Harry's own, she sat alone. A furious shower was pattering on the tiles close over her head, a drenched ivy spray was beating against the gable window like a frantic thing that wanted shelter, a pair of sparrows were answering each other with defiant chirrup. Far below in the house, Aspasia was lustily calling upon a recreant kitten. In the moorland silence these few trivial sounds became insistent, and yet seemed but to assert the silence itself.

She was seated at the wide battered old writing-table which schoolboy Harry English had scored with penknife and chisel, burned and inkstained. Before her a small writing-desk was spread open, and two or three letters lay loosely under her clasped hands. Her eyes were musingly fixed upon the rain-beaten pane with the knocking ivy branch; her lips were parted by a vaguely recurrent smile. And, as the smile came and went, a transient red glowed faintly upon her cheeks.... The world for her now was not upon the edge of winter: it was spring. She was not Rosamond Gerardine, out of touch with life, she was not Rosamond English, widow—she was Rosamond Tempest, maid once more, on the threshold of her life, at the April of the year. And Harry English was her lover. And yet she was a Rosamond Tempest such as he had never known—such a Rosamond Tempest as had never yet existed.

She took the letter that lay uppermost to her hand. It was dated Saltwoods. Written here—at this very desk, no doubt. Perhaps with this very ivory penholder, fluted, yellow, stained, while he sat in this same Windsor chair.... Unconsciously she caressed the worn wooden arms whereon his arms must have rested. Then again she set herself to read:—

"Saltwoods, 19th April."

On that April 19, all those years ago, he was thinking of her, writing to her! And she—so many miles away, shut in by the dreariest prison walls fate had ever built round a young impatient soul—had then not the faintest hint of her deliverer's approach.

DEAR MISS TEMPEST,—I dare say you have quite forgotten me. I was the youngest griffin, just before the old Colonel's death. I hope you will not think it a great impertinence in me to write like this to you; but my leave is up in a week or so, and I don't like to leave England without having seen your father's daughter again. I can never forget how kind he was to me—and your mother too. It made all the difference to me; such a young fool as I was, and so new to India and everything. I find I know some of the fellows at Fort Monkton, and I'm going to stop there a few days. May I call—and if so, when? Yours sincerely, HARRY ENGLISH. P.S.—I've only just found out where you are.

To Rosamond—most unwilling inmate in a household where, if she was not actually a burden, the smallness of her pittance rendered her certainly no material gain—this letter had brought a sort of vision of the past, a gleam of bygone light which made the present even more intolerable by contrast. It had been something to her to think that she should meet some one at last belonging to her old life, some one who had known her in those glamorous years of her happiness, some one straight from the magic shores that had held her in her happy years.

From eight to sixteen had Rosamond Tempest spent her life between the little hill station, the refuge of their hot season, and the historic old northern town where her father's duty lay—a sort of little Princess Royal, with a hundred devoted slaves and a score of gallant young courtiers, the imperious favourite of the whole station, native and white alike.... Oh the rides in the dawn! oh the picnics by moonlight! the many-coloured, vivid days that went with such swing, where every man almost was a hero, where the very air seemed full of the romance of frontier fights, of raids, and big game hunts, of "Tiger, tiger, burning bright" in jungle haunts! ... It had been surely the cruellest stroke of fate that had thrust the little spoilt girl, the beloved only child, from this pinnacle of bliss and importance!

Between one day and another Rosamond had become the penniless orphan, whom nobody wanted ... whom it was so kind of Major and Mrs. Carter to escort back to England, whom it was almost superhumanly good of Uncle and Aunt Baynes to admit into their family.

"A self-centered child," said Mrs. "General Baynes." "A cold-blooded little wretch," opined her cousins. Well, it was a fact that, during the four years that elapsed between her departure from India and the receipt of Captain English's letter, Rosamond had not given a human being one word, one look in confidence....

Late April on the Hampshire coast, with the gorse breaking into gorgeous yellow flame, honey-sweet in the sunshine; with the white clouds scurrying across a blue sky, chased by the merriest madcap wind that ever scampered; with the waves breaking from afar off, dashing up a thousand diamonds falling over and over each other in their race for the beach, roaring on the shingle in clamorous good-fellowship, the foam creaming in ever wider circles. And, across the leaping belt of waters, green and amber and white, the island, flashing too: the windows and roofs of the happy-looking town throwing back the sun glances, set in smooth slopes, mildly radiating green, like chrysoprase and peridot....

* * * * *

Rosamond had dropped the letter from her hand; again she was dreaming. Not the plaint of the November wind round the gable roof of Saltwoods in her ears, but the chant of this April chorus on Alverstoke beach. Not the monotonous ting of Aspasia's finger exercise from the room below, but the irregular boom and thud of gun practice far out at sea, brought in by the gust. And the voice that fell into silence so far away between the wild Indian hills was speaking to her again. And she heard, heard for the first time....

Rosamond Gerardine, virgin of heart through her two marriages, was being wooed! And the virgin in her was trembling and troubled, as womanhood awoke.... He held her hands and looked into her eyes. His cheeks were pale under their bronze, his lips trembled—"Could you trust me? Do you think me mad? I've only known you four days, but I've dreamt of you, all my life.... Rosamond!"

The sea wind was eddying round them, the grasses at Rosamond's feet were nodding like mad things in the gusts. Her hair was whipped against her face. So, on this English shore, with the taste of the salt in their mouths, with the wild salt moist winds all about them—this Englishman wooed this English girl, to come away and be his love in the burning East. Yes, she could trust him. Who could look into his true eyes and not trust him? But then it was the thought of the East, the East of her lost childhood's joy, that won her. Now, back in England's heart, from an East abhorred, to the loathing as of blood and cruelty, it was the lover, it was the love!

Again she felt the touch of his first kiss. He had sought her lips, but she had turned her cheek. Now—the blood rushed up into her face; her heart beat faster, almost a faintness crept over her. She dropped her head upon her outstretched arms, her burning cheek upon his letter ... again his strong arms held her.

* * * * *

Once more they parted at the gate of the house that was her prison. He was going back to India in ten days, and she would go with him, confidently, gladly!

She walked up the path between the straggling wallflowers, the pungent marigolds, into the mean narrow hall. Then her only thought had been of sailing away from that sordid genteel abode, back to fair India, the land of her dreams. Now—now, as across these years she re-lived that great day of her youth, her heart was swooning over the memory of his kiss; her brain was filled with a vision of his tender trembling lips; of the light in his eyes as he looked back at her, of the swing of his broad shoulders as he rounded the crescent towards the fort.

* * * * *

Miss Aspasia Cuningham was in a decidedly bad temper. To be home again, in England, to have unlimited opportunity of working out the Leschetizky method on a superfine Steinway piano, the most complete immunity from interfering uncles, from social duties, philistine secretaries and attaches, appeared a most delightful existence—in theory. But, in practice it was dull. Yes, dull was the word.