Front matter (continued 2)

"You're a common impostor!" said the manager.

I edged along the lounge and peeped through the half-open door. The Grey One was standing with his legs apart, like the Colossus of Rhodes. Too much meat and drink had combined with anger and fear to turn his evil face nearly purple. At a safe distance stood the waiter, pale and excited, with the Grey One's bill on a silver salver. Two other waiters and the porter were massed across the doorway in case the Grey One should take to his long, horrid legs. The manager, implacable and contemptuous, leaned against his office door.

"What's all this beastly row about?" asked one of the guests of the hotel, a young Englishman, coming irritably out of the salle-à-manger.

"I'm deeply sorry, sir. This ... gentleman," said the manager, with a withering look at the Grey One, "has eaten his luncheon and doesn't want to pay for it."

"He won't pay," echoed the waiter feebly.

"It's a [----] lie," bellowed the Grey One. "I will pay. I want to pay. But I'm not going to be [----] well swindled. It's the same as knocking me down and going through my [----] pockets, and I'll see you in hell before I stand it!"

Another young Englishman came out and joined the first.

"What's up?" he asked.

"Dunno exactly," answered his friend. "Waiter says this chap's trying on a bilk. Chap himself says they've rooked him on his lunch."

"The gentleman would talk French," said the pale waiter, gaining courage. "I don't know French, nor 'e don't neither. I told 'im it was à la carte as soon as 'e pointed to the canteloup."

"It's a barefaced robbery," cried the Grey One, swearing dreadfully. "But it's no use trying it on me. My uncle knows France as well as he knows Battersea Park. And what did he tell me? That you don't pay more than three or four francs in France for a dinner fit for a lord! Why, even in the French resteronts in Soho, you don't pay more than eighteenpence for five courses."

The manager made a gesture of scorn and despair.

"Perhaps you'll tell us why you ordered a cigar and a whole bottle of Veuve Clicquot?" he asked.

"Don't go cross-examining me," roared the Grey One. "I know the ropes, so don't you forget it. Everybody knows that, in France, wine's cheaper than beer."

"That's it!" chuckled one of the young Englishmen gaily. "Wine's cheaper than beer, and therefore fizz is cheaper than bottled ale!"

"There you are!" cried the Grey One in triumph. "And as for your [----] old cigar, you don't have me there either. One of the fellows at our place came back from France only last week. At least, it was Holland he'd been to, but it's all the same. And what did he pay for the cigars he smuggled back? Three for tuppence! Beauties! Yet here it is in your [----] bill, 'Cigars, one franc.' I say it's----"

"You've said all I'm willing to listen to," retorted the manager, as the two young Englishmen went back to their feeding. "For the last time, are you going to pay?"

"I'll pay six francs and not a penny more," muttered the Grey One, distinctly frightened.

"You'll pay your bill," said the manager decidedly. "The total is thirty-one francs, seventy-five centimes. I can't have our guests annoyed by a minute's further argument. I recommend you to save yourself from very unpleasant consequences."

All the fight went out of the Grey One suddenly. He gazed wistfully at the door, which was still held in force by the menials. Then he fumbled in his pockets.

"I can't," he muttered sulkily. "I haven't got the money. I've only got twenty-four francs. And there'll be my bill at the Shevvle Daw."

"The Cheval d'Or!" echoed the manager. "If you're at the Cheval d'Or, what the deuce have you come lunching here for?"

"To meet some friends," said the Grey One brazenly. "They're staying in the hotel."

The manager was perturbed.

"What friends?" he asked.

"Two ladies," the Grey One replied.

Within the next minute the two ladies' names would have been asked for, and, no doubt, the hard-pressed brute would have given mine. I pulled the door open wide, and stepped into the hall.

"I can't help hearing," I said. "You talk so loud. What ladies do you mean?"

He jumped. Then he stood stark, as if he had been struck by lightning.

"Perhaps Madame knows something of this affair," the manager began in French.

"Only a little," I replied in English. "All I know is that this---- By the way, hadn't you better ask his name and address?"

"My name," he said wretchedly, "is Lamb--John Lamb. I'm head clerk at Phipps Brothers, the timber-merchants, Amelia Road, Shepherd's Bush. You'll have heard of Phipps Brothers?" he added imploringly.

"All I know of Mr. John Lamb," I went on, "is this. He stared at us all the way from Newhaven. He spied about, reading the names on our labels. He pushed himself on us at the Customs. He followed us to the Cheval d'Or, and practically drove us out of the rooms we had taken. He has dogged us through half the streets in Dieppe this morning. Lastly, he has given us the honour of his company at lunch."

The manager was about to work up, for my benefit, a polite adequacy of fiery indignation. But Mr. John Lamb forestalled him. Plucking up courage, he retorted impudently:

"Well, and what if it's true? We aren't in England, are we? Everybody knows they're more free-and-easy in France."

The manager was loaded and primed for an explosion. But I got in another word.

"Didn't I give you a broad enough hint at the Customs?" I asked.

"Yes," he said coarsely. "You did. But what about the other young lady? Let her come out here, fair and square, and say if she didn't egg me on. 'Tisn't my fault for thinking I was in for a soft thing. You're not to blame, of course. You've snubbed me right enough all along, no error. To tell the truth, Ma'am, I thought you were sick because it was the other young lady I was struck with, and not you."

What possessed him to add this insult to injury, when he was actually in the lion's mouth, only himself knows. It wasn't courage; for he had suddenly gone paler and shakier than before. Probably he was clinging in desperation to a last mad hope that he had indeed made a conquest of "the other young lady," and that she would rush out in my wake to intercede for him, and to set him free.

As I turned round and took my first step back to the drawing-room, the manager exploded like a thousand bombs. How the Grey One managed to stand unconsumed amidst those lightnings of wrath and thunderings of menace, I can't conceive. As to his past, the Grey One learned that he was directly descended from a long line of cads, rogues, gaol-birds, and impostors; and as to his future, it appeared that the greater part of it (after he had been soundly kicked, thrashed, and horse-whipped) was to be spent in a French prison. While this fiery storm was blazing and smashing around his grey cloth cap, I neither saw Mr. John Lamb, of Phipps Brothers, nor heard him. He took it lying down.

In the end, it turned out that Mr. Lamb was possessed of an English sovereign and the return half of a week-end ticket as well as his twenty-four francs. He paid; and was flung forth into the sunshine with just enough to face Madame Legendre and to keep himself alive until the boat starts for England, in the dark and the cold, a little after midnight.

From his final and ardent, but fruitless, plea that the manager should accept the deposit of his watch and ring, and allow him to send a post-office order from England to redeem them, I gathered that this was Mr. Lamb's first visit to France; that he has got leave from Phipps Brothers till Wednesday morning; and that Mrs. Lamb doesn't expect him back to Amelia Road until Tuesday night.

I'm sick of writing about the creature, so I'll stop. Yet, if I chance to wake up about three o'clock to-morrow morning, with the air nipping and the wind blustery and the moon overcast, I'm not sure that I sha'n't think of Mr. John Lamb, and feel just a tiny, wee bit sorry for him.

BOOK III

SAINTE VÉRONIQUE

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

Some of the Letters printed in Book III. are found in the MS. of the Diary only in abridgments, and one is missing altogether. The Transcriber has copied them from the originals in extenso, and has inserted them in their proper places.

BOOK III

Monday, 4 p.m.

At last!

It's like coming home. I'm in my dear old room; with the front window looking over the beck and the willows to the sea, and the side window opening on the orchard. The trees have grown since last year; and, if I leaned out far enough, there are three rosy apples that I could pluck straight from the branch as it sways in the soft wind.

The Dupoiriers are delighted I've come. Poor things, considering the gorgeous summer, they haven't been doing over well. Yet the hotel is sweeter than ever. Those stuffy velvet curtains, that I always loathed, have been taken out of the salon. It was a bit of a shock to see the summer-house stripped of creepers and painted white: but, if it's less picturesque, it is also more possible. Last year I didn't dare to sit in it because of the earwigs.

There's a new Marie. The old Marie, with the red hair, who wouldn't more than half-fill my water-jugs, left only last week. The new Marie is a black-haired, black-eyed one, and far nicer. There's a letter for me from Alice. And, of course, there's a letter for Susan from the regrettable Ruddington. But I'm not going to bother with either of them till I've had a peep at the path that winds along the beck to the sea.

In the summer-house.

I do wish Alice wouldn't!

She's found out somehow that Ruddington was at the Towers all through the last week of her visit. She's quite vicious about my running away. According to her first three pages, I "must get married some day," and Lord Ruddington has been, so to speak, restored to the county by Divine Providence for the express purpose of taking pity on my old-maidhood. To scamper off to Sainte Véronique is, therefore, to fly in Providence's face. Yet, according to Alice's fourth page, my flight to France looks "far more pointed" than if I'd stolidly stuck at home.

If a mere logical triumph were worth a single drop of ink, I might twit Alice with the inconsistency. If it's true that the calculating coyness of my maiden flight has already put it into His Highness's head that I am one of the candidates, I might fairly claim Alice's praise instead of her blame.

I shouldn't care so much if Alice weren't so insistently practical. She positively wants me to race back next week; and she says she can even manage Hugh, so that he'll bring her with him, and do his bird-slaughtering at Traxelby instead of at Maxfield. No doubt she is confident that, by October the 2d, the bag will be twenty pheasants, a dozen partridges, and one Lord.

I wonder what Alice would say if I wrote straight off and told her that Lord Ruddington, to my certain knowledge, has already disposed of his charms elsewhere? I wish I could tell her. It would be such hollow, tiresome work arguing with her on every ground save the solid fact.

Monday night.

The Lamb in Wolf's Clothing gave me a bad twenty-four hours on the boat and in Dieppe; but he has certainly done a power of good to Susan. She hasn't got over her surprise at my not giving her a lecture and a mighty scolding; and she's brimming over with silent gratitude.

Ruddington's letter is irritating, but, in a sense, rather nice. I didn't ask Susan to show it to me. I thought it would keep very well till to-morrow. But Susan has laid it inside my blotting-case. Rather graceful of her--unless she's afraid that a personal delivery of it would remind me of Mr. John Lamb, and wake up a dormant volcano! Here is the letter:--

RUDDINGTON TOWERS,

Saturday, September 8, 1906.

MY DEAR SUSAN,--I may begin this way, may I not?

Your letter this morning has brought me unspeakable relief and happiness. When Thursday's and Friday's posts were blank, I hardly restrained myself from waylaying you at Traxelby.

As it's utterly beyond me to thank you enough for your letter, I'll try a little grumbling instead. Is it not rather cruel to say that I must not write more than once a week? Once a week for a month means only four letters in all. Sha'n't we be almost as much strangers when you come back as when you went away?

When you come back! The words make my blood, run faster. They're like the refrain of a song. When you come back! They're the music I shall march by, and live my life by, till you come.

I enter into all you say about giving you a quiet month to think and to decide. I understand, and I admire it. And yet it's almost more than I can stand. To know where you are, to have the power to join you in a few hours, and yet to be forced to serve a month's imprisonment in England, is well-nigh too much for flesh and blood. As I laid down your letter this morning, I realized that by riding hard across Ruddington Heath I could have caught you for a moment at the station. But I set your sovereign command before my eyes ... and stayed at home! Ought you not to be very nice to me for being so good and obedient? For example, don't I deserve a long letter on Tuesday?

Till you come back, and for ever,

RUDDINGTON.

P.S.--Do not be angry with me for what I am going to say. Although I put it in a postscript, it is uppermost in my thoughts.

Pray don't think I'm about to try and coax you out of your month's reflection. Long and hard though I shall find it, I say. Have the month by all means. But is it necessary that you should pass the month in your present conditions?

It tortures me to know that while I will live this month in comfort and leisure, you will often find it difficult even to snatch the time for one weekly letter. Now that I know that no one else has won you, take my word for it, dearest, that no one else ever shall! Susan is going to be my Susan, even if I've to take her by storm.

What follows? This. From the moment of reading your letter, I promoted myself to be your protector to our lives' end. How then can I tolerate you remaining for another hour in a servile position for which you were never born--into which some hateful freak of Fate has thrust you, and out of which it is the greatest honour of my life to rescue you? It maddens me that, perhaps at this very moment, you are being ordered about, and made to fetch and carry for somebody who isn't fit to lace your shoes.

Reading this, you can easily be angry. But bear with me. There are so many ways in which a thing like this could be arranged without unseemliness. And, surely, nothing can be more unfitting than that you should be distracted from so solemn a decision by a fussy pressure of petty tasks. I entreat you to give me the great happiness of setting you free.

R.

His gentle Lordship does not condescend to state whether, in the event of Susan being "set free," he will forthwith send me, carriage paid, a new maid as fanciable and wholesome as Susan, with feet that move about, like Susan's, as quietly as two mice. But, of course, as I'm merely "somebody not fit to lace Susan's shoes," I don't count.

To-morrow there'll be the worry of sending off an answer. What will he say when he sees Susan's own handwriting? And how shall we explain the first letter being in mine? I suppose Susan had better make a clean breast of it. I expect his infatuation is proof even against Susan's blots and pot-hooks.

Now for bed.

Mardi; midi moins quart.

I have drunk coffee, with a big bright soup-spoon, out of a little white bowl with pink rosebuds inside and out. Also, I have eaten four croissants and a shameful quantity of Normandy butter. This was at eight o'clock. Since then I have followed the beck all the way to the sea; have bathed; have climbed the cliff; and have been to the post-office for stamps. Through the window I can see Georgette placing a blinding cut-glass decanter of fresh-drawn, foamy cider, full in the sun, on my table in the orchard. As Susan would say, "a feeling came over me" where the beck runs past the poplars. I couldn't help stamping my heel on the ground and saying, "It is true that I am back in Normandy."

After lunch, there'll be my letter to Alice. I sha'n't say anything about Ruddington, except that she mustn't go on being a tease. Then there'll be Susan's letter to the Lord of Burleigh. It would be inhuman to make him wait for it any longer.

Georgette has just brought out a melon. Its minutes are numbered. I haven't felt so hungry for ages.

I wonder what Mr. Lamb is doing, and what yarn he has spun at Amelia Road? Poor Gibson, too! If I were Susan, I think I'd send him just a Sainte Véronique post-card.

Deo gratias! "C'est servi!"

Tuesday night.

I am like a bird in a net.

After lunch, Susan came to me and begged pardon for asking if I "hadn't forgotten the post."

"No," I answered, "it doesn't go out for five hours. By the way, Susan, what are you going to say to Lord Ruddington?"

Her face fell.

"Please, Miss," she said, "I was thinking ... perhaps you would write the letter for me."

"No, Susan," I replied promptly, "I can't do that. If talking it over will help you, I'm willing. I don't mind even scribbling something out in pencil. But I can't write it. Surely it's bad enough that he's had one letter in my handwriting. I wouldn't have had it happen for the world. Besides, you'll have to write the letters yourself before long, so why not face it at once? We shall need to think out some way of explaining to him why the other handwriting was different."

While I was speaking, Susan was becoming more and more agitated; and when I ceased, she didn't answer.

"Come, Susan," I said kindly.

She began to weep.

"Oh, Miss!" she sobbed, "on Friday I told you a lie. I told you that I didn't copy it out in my own writing because I didn't think----"

She stopped.

"Well?" I said, after I had waited long enough.

"I thought, Miss," sobbed Susan, "I thought ... I was afraid, if he saw my writing, he might give me up. And what you'd wrote looked so beautiful and ladylike, Miss, that----"

She couldn't go on.

"Susan," I said, "you've acted very wrongly. You've done wrong to me, and you've deceived Lord Ruddington. Worse still, you've done wrong to yourself. If he really cared for you, he wouldn't have been turned away by bad writing. But he won't admire deceit. You've taken the first step on the wrong path, and you don't know what will be the end."

I am getting to be a practised preacher. Since last Thursday, I've laid down more of the moral law than in all the rest of my life. Susan heard me in meekness.

"I know it was wicked," she said; "but oh, Miss, do please, please write the letter to-day! It won't be many times more."

"If I do it one time more, I expect I shall have to do it fifty."

Susan looked mysterious.

"No, Miss," she said with assurance, "not fifty."

"Why not?" I asked. And, after some pressing, Susan confessed that she has snatched five hours from sleep since Friday for the express purpose of conforming her penmanship to the pattern of mine. She showed me some specimens, and I was astonished at the advance she had made.

"Well, Susan," I said at last, "I don't like it at all, and I'm very angry with you. But if there's any prospect of your going on improving like this in your writing, perhaps it will be as well for me to write your next two or three letters. Then I sha'n't need to be brought into the affair, so far as Lord Ruddington is concerned, at all."

Susan's gratitude was touching.

"I'll never forget how good you've been to me, Miss," she said, choking down a sob.

"Find Georgette," I said. "While she's clearing the table, bring down my writing-case. We'll do it under the trees."

Susan danced off with a skittishness that surprised me. When she came back, I asked her what she had decided to say.

"I was thinking, Miss," she said, "we might say how nice it would have been if he'd galloped over the Heath to the station. And don't you think, Miss, he would like to hear how we thought he was Mr. Lamb?"

"Never a word to him about Mr. Lamb as long as you live, Susan," I said peremptorily. "As for the Heath, it would have been very wrong of him. But how are you going to answer his postscript--this long bit at the end, all about your leaving me at once?"

"Leaving you, Miss?" asked Susan, mystified.

"Yes," I said, looking at her. "Don't you see? Lord Ruddington wants you to leave me at once."

Her face flushed with such genuine trouble that I forgave Susan everything, and took her back to my heart.

"Oh, no, Miss!" she cried. "I didn't understand he meant that. I wouldn't ever do that."

What Susan had taken the postscript to mean I have no notion. Nor do I know yet whether, in the near future, I shall be expected to give Susan and her spouse a suite of rooms at Traxelby, or whether she will offer me a housekeeper's place at the Towers. It is plain that she does not entertain the idea of our being parted.

I said:

"Lord Ruddington doesn't like to think that you are ... well, in any sense a servant. To put it plainly, he wants to find you money, so that you can begin to lead a lady's life at once. It does him credit. But, Susan, of course you can't take money from him. Have you saved anything?"

Susan says she has saved thirty pounds. And nothing could be sounder than the quickness and firmness with which she decided that cash transactions with Lord Ruddington just now are unthinkable. Nor can anything be more indisputable than her unweakened devotion to myself.

"You can go upstairs and practise handwriting," I told her. "Come down in about half an hour, and I shall have some sort of a letter ready."

But two half-hours passed in vain attempts to produce an epistle proper to Susan's temperament and intellect. I've realized this afternoon that I can never write a play. I tried hard to think and feel as Susan must think and feel; but I could only think and feel on my own account. At the end of an hour and a half, the best I had been able to achieve was this:--

SAINTE VÉRONIQUE,

Tuesday.

Yes. You may call me "Dear Susan." But you must not say "My," until it is true.

You say it was good of you not to ride over the Heath to the station. If you had done it, I should have been grieved.

We had a smooth crossing from Newhaven, and we stayed till Monday morning in Dieppe. I like Sainte Véronique, and do not want to spend my month anywhere else.

I am not angry with you for saying what you do about setting me free. How could I be anything but grateful for an offer that is so kindly meant and so delicately made?

To ease you of your kind fears on my account, let me tell you that I have always been happy with Miss Langley; and that, during this month, I shall have little work and plenty of leisure.

I look forward to receiving another letter from you on Monday.

SUSAN BRIGGS.

"It's beautiful, Miss!" said Susan dejectedly, after she had perused my effort. And she sat looking up into the sky, the picture of disappointment and indecision. I went to the rescue.

"Say what's in your mind, Susan. There's a 'but,' isn't there? It's beautiful, but ... what?"

"I was thinking," confessed Susan blushfully, "that it isn't..."

"Isn't what?"

"It isn't ... very loving."

"Loving?" I said. "What do you mean? Why, here you are, spending a month deciding whether you can try to care for Lord Ruddington or not. It isn't time yet to be 'loving.'"

"No," persisted Susan. "But I mean, Miss, won't he be disappointed?"

"You can't help that. You might as well say that he's disappointed because you don't pack your box and go straight off to Ruddington Towers."

Susan was unconvinced.

"What did you say yourself, Susan, last week? Didn't you say that it wouldn't be good for him to throw yourself at his head?"

When Susan first used it, the expression had irritated me; but it came in handily. Susan, however, thought otherwise. A spirit of revolt entered her soul, and I perceived the beginnings of her new pout.

"Do as you like, Susan, of course," I said. "It's your affair, not mine. But don't go and make another muddle as you did with Mr. John Lamb."

It went home. Indeed, I'm not sure that Mr. John Lamb wasn't, so to speak, a wolf with a silver lining. The merest whisper of his soft and innocent name is enough to scare Susan into the extreme of docility.

"Oh, no, Miss!" she said hurriedly. "The letter's beautiful. But don't you think...?"

"What?"

"Don't you think, Miss, it would be nice to ask for his photograph and a lock of his hair?"

While I was fighting down an impulse to laugh outright, it struck me that the photograph was rather a happy thought. With his photograph to study, I should at least be spared panicky announcements and "dreadful feelings" whenever Susan saw a strange Englishman at Sainte Véronique. Besides, I had no little curiosity to see what this mad Lord Ruddington might be like.

"A lock of hair is ridiculous," I said. "You must have been reading some trashy novelette. But a photograph's different. I'm glad you've thought of it. After all, Susan, you mightn't care to marry even Lord Ruddington if you found he was dreadfully ugly. Give me back the letter, and I'll add a postscript."

I wrote:--

P.S.--I feel that I haven't written you much of a letter; but there is so little to lay hold of. As I said before, you have seen me, but I have never seen you.

Will you not send me your photograph? When it comes, perhaps I shall remember that I have seen you, after all.

Where was it that you saw me?

Taking a little more liberty than was her wont, Susan peeped shyly over my shoulder while I wrote. As I put down the pen, she heaved a deep sigh of unaffected satisfaction.

"It's lovely, Miss!" she said fervently. "That's just what I must have meant--that part about wondering where he saw me--only I couldn't explain it. And it's put so short and ladylike."

"Don't say 'ladylike,' Susan," I said. "Give me an envelope."

I wrote out Lord Ruddington's name and address in the style of handwriting I had used throughout the letter. It was my own writing; but a little bigger, inkier, and slower than usual.

"You see, Susan," I explained, "I'm meeting you halfway. By the time he's had a letter or two from me written like this, you ought to be able to do something pretty near it yourself. Now go upstairs and bring down those French stamps. They're in my green bag."

While Susan was upstairs I took the letter out of the envelope and glanced through it once more. When I got as far as "I have always been happy with Miss Langley," the oddity struck me irresistibly. It was quite too comically reminiscent of the letters which girls used to write, under the governess's eye and at the governess's dictation, protesting their ideal happiness at school.

There was just time. I picked up the pen and wrote sideways along the margin of the letter:--

I suppose you think my mistress calls me "Briggs."

When Susan arrived with the stamps, the letter was back in its envelope, the flap was gummed down, and I was blinking peacefully at the sunlight on the sea.

Wednesday, noon.

I suppose it's true that every country gets the Government it deserves. But the maxim, like nearly all the maxims I've ever heard, is a heartless one.

Without doubt, France just now has got the Government which France deserves, as a whole. But the whole is made up of parts; and, unless my travels have misled me, there must be thousands of parts of France like Sainte Véronique. I have seen a dozen myself--rural communities, working hard and living decently, with the slated spire of their hoary parish church looking down upon them, as it looked down ages ago on their direct ancestors who first drained the valleys and set vines upon the hillsides. Here live and toil the men, and, more remarkable still, here live and toil and suffer the women, whose hard earnings are the war-chest of France when the professional politicians of Paris wantonly thrust the nation into some vainglorious adventure. Here was made and saved the treasure with which the invader was bought out when his armies were everywhere masters of French soil. And here are bred the supplies of sound human stuff--the healthy bodies, the healthy souls--to redress the awful balance of the towns, and to save France from becoming a ruin amid stinging weeds and insolent poppies.

Even an atheist statesman, if he's as truly a statesman as he's truly an atheist, ought to know that, in striking at the village churches, he is striking at the heart of French rural life; and that, in wounding French rural life in a vital spot, he will be severing arteries where Bismarck and Von Moltke only lanced small veins.

This morning has made me so sad. The sweet little white convent is shut up, the garden is full of nettles, two of the chapel windows are broken, the nuns are in England, and the lawyers have grown fat on the pickings. At the church, the statue of St. Veronica, over the west door, has a broken arm--snapped off on the day of the inventory. Meanwhile the weeks are drifting by; and, for all the old curé knows, he will be saying Mass in a barn before the winter is half over.

I mean to say, now and again, what France's million officials, from the President of their so free Republic down to the Saint Véronique postman, daren't say publicly and aloud in this land of liberty. I mean to say: "God save France!"

Thursday afternoon.

I wish Master Ruddie's photograph would come.

This morning, about eleven, a young Englishman suddenly walked in with a knapsack. The funny thing was that he didn't come by the road. He marched here straight from the beach, as if he'd just been thrown up by Jonah's whale.

He was a nice boy, and quite all right. Not another Mr. John Lamb. It seems he's tramping a hundred miles along the coast by the cliff-paths and the sands. He was dying to talk to me at lunch. Indeed, he looked even hungrier and thirstier for human companionship than for his omelette and roast chicken and cider, which is saying a very great deal. Now that it's too late, I'm sorry I didn't let him talk.

All the time he was here, Susan was nearly as silly as she was on the boat. She got it into her head that, as Ruddington wrote here on Saturday (thinking we were coming straight through), he must have been upset when Tuesday morning came without a letter; and that therefore the pretty boy with the knapsack was certainly he.

I was obliged to be very sharp with her. Heaven send the photograph soon! Because I will admit to this diary, when Susan has "a feeling" I can't help catching the complaint.

Before dinner.

It's just come. The photograph and a letter as well.

He says the photograph was only taken yesterday morning. It's a local thing, not retouched: so I suppose we can depend on it as a faithful likeness. If so, I must say I like him tremendously.

Susan is disappointed that he has no moustache. He looks like a young and fresh version of some handsome and benevolent Judge or Cardinal. He isn't the least bit flabby or silly-looking, as I expected. He has a scholar's head, but he's evidently a man of energy as well as of thought. I should say he has a tremendous will of his own. He doesn't look the sort to have fallen over ears in love with a china shepherdess like Susan at first sight. But there's the fact. And, although the stupid girl can't see it, and "never thought he would be like that, Miss," I don't know many women that wouldn't feel it a compliment to have him in love with them, either at the first sight, or the second, or the fiftieth. He looks handsome without being dandified, and brainy without being dry.

His letter this time is less old-fashioned and more easy. He says:--

MA CHÈRE SUZANNE,--You have commanded me not to say "My dear Susan," and behold! I obey.

I'm sorry to say it: but my dear Susan--I mean ma chère Suzanne--has a hard heart. Her letter to tell me that she's landed safe in Normandy without being shipwrecked or run over by a motor-car, only reached me this (Wednesday) morning: and, if I hadn't ridden into Derlingham and fished it up out of the post-office, I shouldn't have got it till to-morrow. If Suzanne were kind, she would have sent one line on Sunday.

It is an enormous relief to know that you are not hard-worked or unhappy. When I saw Miss Langley with you (once outside Traxelby Church, and twice in the street), I thought she seemed rather nice--though, to tell the truth, I didn't waste time looking at Miss Langley, when I could spend it looking at Suzanne.

Now about this horrible photograph. I've always hated photography and always shall. But your commands must be obeyed. So I went into the "studio" of the Derlingham "artist." The "artist" was a pasty-faced youth in a velvet coat with Byronic curls that must take hours every night. He wanted to do his worst, and to turn out something elaborate that wouldn't be ready for a week: but I gave him a maximum of three hours, and he has handed me the enclosed.

I expect a long answer to this, telling me all your doings, by return of post. And I shall be the most injured man in all England if Suzanne's own photograph is not enclosed with her long letter. More than ever, I am your RUDDINGTON.

"I like this letter, Susan," I said, putting it down again on the table.

"Yes, Miss," said Susan, without enthusiasm. And, after a pause, she added, "But don't you think, Miss, it begins rather funny?"

"No," I answered. "I think the beginning is rather neat. You've forgotten. In our last letter we told him he might call you Dear Susan, but he mustn't call you My. So, instead of calling you 'My,' he says he's going to call you 'Ma.'"

"Is that it?" asked Susan, pouting. "Well, I don't think I like it. That's what my uncle Bob used to call my aunt Martha."

"Your uncle Bob?" I echoed, stupefied.

"Yes, Miss. He called my aunt 'Ma,' and she called him 'Pa.' I don't like it, Miss. It sounds common."

When I had recovered enough gravity, I tried, for the twentieth time, to give Susan a rudimentary lesson in French. She endured my efforts with deference; but, underneath, I could see that her rustic British prejudice against France and all things French is unshaken. I honestly believe that, in Susan's opinion, to have set foot in France at all is a slight lapse from propriety, and a loss of the finest bloom from the soft cheek of one's maiden virtue. In France, the silly creature won't even touch beef, just because of some stupid tale of Gibson's about a roast horse. She firmly believes that out-and-out Frenchmen eat bullfrogs toasted whole on a fork; and that the French language is a ludicrous disability imposed on the natives by a strictly Protestant Deity as a just punishment for being papists and foreigners. Susan doesn't intend to lower herself by learning French any more than by learning to stammer, or to swear.

"What about your photograph, Susan?" I inquired, changing the subject. "You see he wants one. Did you happen to bring one with you?"

"No, Miss. It's two years since I had it took."

"Taken. Not took. Then what are you going to do?"

"I don't know, Miss."

"You ought to oblige him," I said. "Don't be so limp. Look at the trouble he took to get you his own portrait the very same day. I'm almost sure there's a photographer at Grandpont. Madame will know. It's only three miles. We'll go in the morning."

"Oh no, Miss!" gasped Susan, fluttering suddenly into liveliness. "Not in France, Miss!"

"Why not in France?"

"I shouldn't like to be photographed in France, Miss," said Susan decidedly. For a moment I almost felt as if I had proposed mixed bathing to the rector's virgin aunt. To be photographed in France sounded a degree or two worse than going to church décolletée. But a moment later I felt impatient and annoyed.

"Very well, Susan," I said shortly. "You may be sure I don't want to drag myself to Grandpont. Do whatever you please."

As usual, she became immediately and amply and sincerely penitent.

"It was very kind of you, Miss," she said humbly. "You're always too good to me. But I feel I couldn't go and be photographed in France."

"Then don't go and be photographed in France," I said, still ruffled. "So far as I'm concerned, it's settled and done with. Now I want to read the newspaper."

I could see with half an eye that there were uncountable things which Susan was yearning to talk over; but I was nearly at the end of my good-nature. With the little that remained, I tried to let Susan down gently. I picked up Lord Ruddington's photograph again and said:

"At any rate, you can't find much fault with his looks."

"No, Miss," responded Susan tepidly, "but I did think he would have a moustache."

Friday, sunrise.

An apple-branch has tapped at my window, and a lark is singing eagerly in the near sky.

This shall be a good day--as rosy as the apple's cheeks, as blithe as the lark's song. I hereby register a vow against Ruddington and all his words and works. We needn't send him his answer till to-morrow. So, to-day, Susan sha'n't mention him and I won't even think of him.

Somebody's left a clean, new, cheap copy of Les Chouans here. How I shall love reading it again. Except while I'm bathing and eating and sleeping, I mean to sit and read it on the cliffs all day.

After breakfast.

After all, Susan is awfully sweet. One can't stand aloof from her long.

While she was downstairs before breakfast allowing Georgette to practise on her in broken English, I went into her room to find a pair of scissors. As usual, it was as neat and nice as if it hadn't been slept in. But the thing that struck me was a leather photograph-frame on the mantelpiece.

I recognized the frame. It was a double one, which I had given Susan because I hated the colour. In the left-hand compartment Susan had placed the newly arrived photograph of Lord Ruddington. And facing him, on the right hand, was----Me!

It was that thing I got done last Easter. Until this morning, I'd forgotten that Susan had pleaded for a copy and that I had let her have one for her album. Suddenly to catch sight of myself beaming affectionately across the hinges of the frame at an equally affectionate-looking Lord Ruddington, was certainly a shock. But that Susan should have brought me all the way from England and have stuck me on her mantelpiece was another proof, though none was needed, of her genuine devotion.

I took the frame down and held it open in my hands. It was too comical. Ruddington and I are placed in ovals, like the August Young Personages in a Royal Wedding Supplement to an illustrated paper; and we are looking at one another with the most absurd happy-couple air imaginable. "Though I say it as shouldn't," we make an amazingly pretty pair. If Alice could see it, she would begin to cry.

I think I sha'n't tell Susan that I've seen it.

Noon.

I haven't read much of the Chouans. After my bathe, I kept Susan with me on the cliff. The grass was green, the sky was blue, and the sea was both. It was lovely to loll on the flowers and to listen to the sea--its deep speech at the cliff's foot, its soft murmurs in the sunlit distance.

Susan thinks Ruddington ought to tell her more about himself, and his conditions of life, both at the Towers and in town. I think she's right. Now that she's getting used to her good fortune, her talk has suddenly improved. She's dropping that raw and childish way of hers, and some of the things she said were quite sensible. If she goes on improving like this, she ought to be tolerably presentable at the month's end. No doubt it will take years to fill the gaping breaches in her knowledge; and her mind can never, from its very nature, expand enough to make her an all-round companion for such a man as Ruddington seems to be. But I take it that a grain or two of common-sense will be found mixed with his infatuation; and, if so, he will be prepared for a good deal of disenchantment. As for Susan, she'll always be pretty, and restful, and docile, and sweet: which means that if he is losing some things he is gaining others.

Alas, poor Gibson! I'm afraid his dreams are standing a poor chance of coming true. It's selfish of me not to have sent him a prudent line. I'll do it to-day. I'll tell him simply that all's well with Susan; and perhaps he will guess that all's up with himself.

Eight o'clock.

I walked alone this afternoon to Bérigny. The hamlet was deserted--or, at least, it looked so. The thatched black-and-white barns stood out sturdily in the bright, strong light, and Bérigny wore all its old prosperous air. But there wasn't a single body to be seen. I suppose every one was in the fields, or gone to market.

The church was open. I sat in it a few minutes: it was so cool and quiet. If I had felt suddenly tempted to steal an image, or to rob the box of Peter's Pence, there was none to say me nay.

The Bérigny churchyard looked sweeter than ever. I like it better than any other I have seen in France, because it is full of natural shrubs and flowers. There are hardly any of those frightful wire crosses and tin immortelles and iron wreaths, as big as cart-wheels, such as you see in dozens everywhere else. And the Bérigny churchyard isn't triste. As you sit on the warm stone platform of the Calvary, you look down over the orchards to the facing uplands--pastures of green velvet, wildly embroidered with, a million yellow flowers. Even the graves are not melancholy. It doesn't seem any more dreadful that the men and women of Bérigny should be fast asleep, like children in the bosom of their mother earth, than that last year's beech-leaves and pine-needles should be lying quietly under the ceaseless murmurs of this year's cool and shady green. Cheerful sounds arise from the valley as you sit and look down. There is blue smoke curling from one or two of the chimneys. Between the surges of light wind you can just hear the voice of the beck as it sings on its way down to Sainte Véronique. No, Bérigny churchyard is not melancholy: for in the midst of death you are in life.

There is a strange thing about some of the gravestones which I didn't notice when I was here before. Or, rather, I oughtn't to call them stones. They are woods. Over the humbler tombs stand rude memorials, each consisting of two short, slightly ornamented posts with a short broad plank fastened between. The plank is painted white; and upon it, in black letters, are displayed the name and age and birth-and-death dates of the man or woman asleep below.

At the bottom of each inscription there is an abbreviated formula which puzzled me sorely. It runs: "Un D. P. s. v. p." Not until I had almost given up trying to guess what it might mean, was the riddle solved. Behind the chancel I found a larger and newer grave on which the legend was spelt out at large in full: "Un De Profundis, s'il vous plait."

It filled my eyes so full with sudden tears that the solid world seemed to be wavering and dissolving as I beheld it. And, at the same time, the dim mysterious world beyond seemed suddenly clear and near. It was no longer the wind in the pines that I heard: it was a multitudinous whispering of spirit-voices pleading close to my ear: "If you please!"

I am wondering to-night whether I ever really and truly believed until to-day in the immortality of the soul. I am wondering whether I have ever done more than assent to the doctrine mechanically as a part of my childhood's creed, and as a postulate on which rest many familiar things in our literature and civilization.

Yes and No. In a sense I have believed, in a sense I have not. Until to-day, I have only thought of the disembodied soul in one or other of three different ways. I have thought of the soul as a cold abstraction, a philosopher's name for an antithesis to the body. Again, after I've listened to ghost-tales, I've thought of it ignobly--as a horror, a scary, frightful spook, a foul shape of night swooping horribly across the short sunlit path of our little life to remind us of the immeasurable cold and unending dark beyond. Last of all, after some stately obsequies, I've thought of the soul as living some supernal, Gothic life in a churchly heaven--a heaven where the sky is not a dome, but a pointed roof resounding for ever and ever and ever with Gregorian chants. That is to say, at the best I have imagined the soul clothed in a mediæval vestment, and living exaltedly, in an incalculable remoteness from to-day's crowded world of living and breathing women and men.

"A De Profundis ... if you please!" I suppose many people would find the "if you please" either ludicrous or irreverent, or both. At one time I might not have found anything in it myself, beyond a charming rustic naïveté. But this afternoon the truth rushed over me in a flood. The souls of the faithful departed are not thirteenth-century souls: they are not the shivering, pitiable ghosts such as engaged the fancy of savage men ten thousand years ago, or the still weaker brains of the Spiritualists of yesterday: they are not mere fictions of the philosopher, invented for convenience of argument. They live and rejoice and sorrow in an intensity of present being. To-night, I believe in the Communion of Saints. They exist as truly as the little black-haired child exists who stopped me outside Bérigny and said "s'il vous plait" when she asked me the time: as truly as Georgette when she says "if you please" and lays the cloth: as truly as Susan when she says "Please, do please, Miss," over a letter to Ruddington.

This afternoon, I couldn't say a "De Profundis" for the departed faithful of Bérigny because I'm too much of a heathen to have been taught it. But, before Sunday, I mean to buy a paroissien containing all these things, in French and Latin.

When I say my "De Profundis," can it do them any good? I don't know. Millions of people say it can't. But more millions of people say it can. And if I make a mistake, I would rather make it in giving than in withholding: just as it is better to say "Yes" to the beggar who may waste your sixpence on beer, than to say "No" to the beggar who may lie down and die for want of bread.

Bedtime.

What an irony!

This is the day when there was to be no Ruddington--the day that was to be as rosy as apples and as blithe as a lark.

As for Ruddington, I have only just finished re-reading his letter, which Susan has put by way of a hint in my writing-case.

As for rosiness and blitheness, I've spent my afternoon and evening like Hervey--I wonder if anybody ever read any more of his book than the title?--in Meditations Among the Tombs. My day has been ghost-wan, tomb-silent.

No. It has been as full of colour and of sound as could be. But the colours have been the grand and solemn hues of autumn, and the sounds have been majestical as organs and trumpets. To-day I have not been gay. But I have been happy. And I can't name any day at Sainte Véronique that I repent of less than this.

Saturday morning.

This is the answer I have written for Susan to send by the early post:--

DEAR LORD RUDDINGTON,--I am so sorry that you were anxious about me. But you must not forget the bargain. And the bargain does not allow of long replies "by return." Indeed, in writing this morning, I am breaking my own rule. When this is posted, I shall have received and answered two letters in one week.

Do not think me grudging or cold-blooded in standing fast to our arrangement. If letters are too frequent they will be short and scrappy, and thus they will fail of their object. For example, nothing could be more devoted and kind than your two notes this week; but they tell me so little about yourself, and hardly anything at all about your daily life, your thoughts, your work, your interests. At present I know no more about you than all Traxelby knew before you came to the Towers.

It is true there is the photograph, which I like very much--though you don't in the least resemble the picture my mind had formed! You were good to take all that trouble in Derlingham so as to get it done so quickly.

Unfortunately, I have no photograph of myself here, and there is no artist, not even a pasty-faced one, in Sainte Véronique. But why should you want my portrait if you have seen me three times?

I sha'n't expect an answer from you "by return;" but I shall expect your next week's letter to tell me more about yourself and your life.

Yours sincerely,

SUSAN BRIGGS.

Susan thinks my letter is beautiful, as usual. Or, if she doesn't think so, she says she does. But to know that she needn't be photographed in France has lifted such a weight off her spirits that she is prepared to be delighted with everything. After the first shock and the second explanation, she went up into heaven at finding that it was "proper" to say "Dear Lord Ruddington." Perhaps she expected me to begin the letter by calling him "Pa!"

It's all very amusing. But I must keep a watch on myself lest I take it too prankishly. After the future Lady Ruddington had graciously signified her approval of my reply to her noble owner, she went upstairs for her hat, and, while she was away, a madcap impulse got the better of me, just as it did on Tuesday. I picked up the pen and wrote along the margin:--

I was amused about those Byronic curls. But what do you know about them taking hours to do at night?

Now that it's too late, and Susan is on her way to the post-office, I do wish I hadn't said it. For half a dozen reasons, it was a mad thing to do.

His portrait is still facing mine in the leather frame. I took a peep at it just now when I came upstairs for this diary. And we've still got the same sort of a "Good-morning, Dear," honeymoon expression. I positively blushed, and put it down again as if it had been red hot.

I must see that Susan plods away at her handwriting--or, rather, at mine! It's plain now that Ruddington is in love with Susan, and that he means to marry her. Also, it's plain that Susan means to marry Lord Ruddington, whether she succeeds in falling in love with him or not. Up to the present no great harm is done, but I must wriggle out of the affair somehow before his letters become intimate and affectionate.

Poor, poor Gibson! I've written him a line, and shall post it myself.

Sunday, noon.

For the sake of his peace of mind, let us hope that Ruddington is Low Church. If he isn't, Susan will soon be on his nerves. There's precious little kneeling down and standing up at the Sainte Véronique parish Mass; but this morning I had to prod or pluck at Susan half a dozen times. When we came out she made wistful comparisons with Traxelby, and declared that she did so miss "a nice service."

Perhaps Ruddington is neither Low nor High. He says that one of the times when he saw Susan was in church. But Traxelby isn't his parish: so he must have been hunting Susan, not saving his soul.

I've given up wrestling with the Chouans. I'd forgotten the early part was so dry. Besides, it's nicer to potter about, and think and dream, not to mention that novel-reading is wicked on a Sunday.

Monday morning.

Susan has been difficult again. I'm sorry for her.

Last night she suddenly developed the liveliest interest in dress. In the past she hasn't been a girl to care excessively about it. That's why she has always looked so nice. But, last night, she said:

"I've been thinking, Miss, what ought I to wear the first time I go to see him?"

"You mean, Susan," I answered, "what ought you to wear the first time he comes to see you."

"Yes, Miss," said Susan absently. "I was thinking it would be nice if I had one of those cherry-coloured zephyrs, with elbow sleeves and a white sash."

I smiled.

"Do you think you can depend on yourself not to blush, Susan," I asked, "when he looks at you and speaks to you?"

"Oh no, Miss, I can't," answered Susan in a panic. "I shall be sitting, all the time, wanting the ground to open and swallow me."

"Then I don't think you should go in for anything cherry-coloured," I suggested. And I tried to go on with Les Chouans.

"Perhaps blue alpaca would be better, Miss," broke out Susan again, after long reflection. "Blue alpaca, made plain, with a little train. I could wear that lace collar you gave me, Miss, and have my hair done more on the top of my head."

"You'd look very nice, I'm sure, Susan," I replied. "But, if I were you, I shouldn't do anything of the kind. I suppose it will be at the Grange that you'll see him first. Some arrangement will have to be made. If so, it ought to please him best to see you as he saw you at Traxelby church."

I went on again with Les Chouans. Or, to be strictly truthful, I fixed my eyes again on the page.

"I beg your pardon, Miss," Susan began humbly, after five minutes of quiet; "but shall we be married in Traxelby church?"

"Most decidedly not," I answered, so emphatically that Susan positively jumped. "I haven't the ghost of a notion where in the world you'll be married. But it mustn't be Traxelby. Lord Ruddington will propose some suitable arrangement, and I shall see that it is satisfactory. Besides, all this can be talked over later on. It will be time enough to choose where you'll be married to Lord Ruddington when you've made up your mind whether you're going to marry him at all."

The bride began to pout.

I decided swiftly that it was high time to bring matters to a head. Traxelby church, indeed!

As likely as not, Susan would expect me to be a bridesmaid, with Uncle Bob giving her away, and Aunt Martha calling him "Pa." So I shut up the Chouans with a snap and put the question straight.

"Tell me, Susan. Have you made up your mind? If you've settled it that you mean to marry Lord Ruddington, we shall know where we are."

The pout vanished, and she hung her head. At last she answered:

"Yes, Miss. I mean, I'm not sure yet, Miss. But I'm sure that I shall be sure before long."

"Sure that you'll marry him?"

"Yes, Miss. I mean ... I think I shall."

I could get no more out of her, and in the end I turned surlier and snappier than I care to remember. Susan went to bed looking miserable.

This morning my conscience woke up as early as I did. Earlier: for it was wide awake while I was still half asleep, and I groped out into consciousness with a sense of recent meanness and unkindness to Susan. The more I woke, the clearlier I saw how natural it was of Susan, who knows no French and can speak with nobody here save me, to want to talk frocks.

When she came in at seven o'clock to open the curtains, I said in my friendliest tone:

"Well, Susan, I suppose you've decided to be married in white, with orange-blossoms and a veil?"

To my consternation she remained at the window, and did not turn round. Then she plunged for the door into her own room, and as she seized the handle, I heard a sob.

I jumped up and followed her to the threshold.

"Come, come, Susan!" I said. "You mustn't have such a thin skin. I never meant to hurt your feelings."

"You haven't, Miss," sobbed Susan, standing near me, but not showing her face. "It isn't you, Miss. But I can't bear it!"

"You can't bear what?"

"All of it, Miss. None of it. I woke up and thought about it in the night. It's dreadful!"

I couldn't guess what Susan couldn't bear, or what it was that was dreadful, and it didn't seem wise to press her. So I said nothing.

"You'll take cold, Miss," she cried, when she cast her first glance at me. And she bundled me back into bed.

I told her that she needn't have her breakfast with Georgette, and that she ought to drink chocolate instead of coffee.

"You'd better have a quiet day," I added. "This matter is getting on your brain. Give it a rest. That was one reason why I wanted you to wait a whole month. There's no need to brood over it day and night. The month has still three weeks to run."

She dried her eyes and was ever so grateful. But I am puzzled. Last night she seemed (as she has seemed all along) to take it as a matter of course that she will marry Ruddington. Her attitude has been that of a pretty, honest, modest, prosaic girl with an eye on the main chance. To find her suddenly all sensibility is a surprise.

Probably it isn't sensibility. It's nerves. Too much coffee: not enough sleep. Too much of her own thoughts: not enough human fellowship at a time when she sorely needs it.

Yet I can't overlook that she was disappointed with his photograph. It may well be that, in her better moments, my sweet Susan shrinks from marrying when she cannot love. Or is it that she is cowed by the difficulties of so huge a change in her rank and station? She shall have an easy day.

Tuesday, 10.15 a.m.

The Lord Ruddington would be speaking no more than the truth if he always signed himself Susan's Most Obedient Servant. He has been as prompt with his pen-and-ink Selbstbildniss as he was with the pasty-faced artist's photograph. He says:

MA SUZANNE,--It is Monday morning. When I have finished this, I shall have written you once this week; once last week (the Wednesday), and once the week before (on the Saturday). Yet I am scolded for breaking the rules. You must send me an exceptionally kind letter to soothe my wounded feelings.

It was unpardonably careless of me not to forward full particulars and references when I first applied for the post of Protector to Suzanne. But I have to-day filled up a form and am enclosing it with this. References are kindly permitted to the Derlingham photographer and to Mrs. Juggins, the housekeeper at Ruddington Towers.

I have taken conscientious pains to fill up the form correctly. For instance, I squandered a whole penny this morning weighing myself on an automatic machine at Derlingham station. To be precise, I have squandered tuppence; because the first machine which I bribed refused to weigh me, and insisted on presenting me with a bar of chocolate cream instead.

The news that you can't send me your portrait is desolating. It is another reason why you must be extra kind.

All your letters are precious. But I like the little bits you write up the sides best. Why can't I have a letter made up of little side-bits only?

RUDDINGTON.

The "enclosed form" is a formidable-looking sheet of blue foolscap divided into columns for questions and answers. It reads:

I don't know yet what Susan thinks of these documents. She has left them on my table without remark.

At the first glance I didn't like them. They smacked too much of the funny man labouring to be smart. But, after a second reading, I like them. After all, the poor boy couldn't very well sit down with a serious face and write out his own testimonial in cold ink. His wit might be sprightlier: but I begin to discern the gravity underlying it. His way of bringing it in that he has no Past, no entanglements, no old flames, is skilful and considerate. Perhaps this is the very point Susan has been worrying about. Who knows? Perhaps she has been fearing that she isn't the first simple beauty that his lordship has taken by storm. Perhaps she thinks he is an old-style lord, with a pretty taste in milk-maids, and therefore not much better than a new-style lord with a nasty appetite for ladies of the ballet.

Whatever am I to say if Susan asks me what he means by the little bits written up the sides?

Tuesday, 3 p.m.

My bathe made me tired. I sha'n't go out again to-day.

Susan is wooden-headed past belief. I was amused for a few moments at the odd comments she made on Ruddington's letter; but her dulness grows monotonous. She began:

"Don't you think, Miss, that ... that he writes rather strange?"

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"I mean, Miss," whispered Susan mysteriously, "do you think he's ... quite right in his head?"

"Well, Susan," I answered, "when one looks at the way he runs after a girl whom he's never spoken to, I admit it does make one wonder if he isn't a bit mad."

Susan pouted.

"I mean his letter, Miss," she said. "And this big blue paper."

"As for his letters, Susan," I replied, "I don't see much wrong with them. Aren't they bright, and frank, and kind?"

"Why does he say, Miss, that he's named Henry?"

"Simply because Henry is his name."

"But lords don't have any names, Miss, do they? I mean they only have surnames."

I asked for light.

"It was Mrs. Hobbs, the cook, that told me, Miss," Susan explained. "Mrs. Hobbs said that a lord could only have a surname--as it might be Ruddington--and the King could only have a Christian name--as it might be Edward. That's the difference, Miss, between a king and a lord--one can only have a Christian name, and the other can only have a surname. So how can he be named Henry?"

When I had finished laughing, I said:

"Susan, you remember Mrs. Hobbs's dreadful mousseline sauce? Till to-day, I would never have believed that there was any subject in the heavens above or in the earth beneath, about which Mrs. Hobbs knew less than she did about cooking. I was wrong."

"If he's proper Lord Ruddington, Miss, I don't see how he can be named Henry," persisted Susan doggedly. "I wonder, Miss, ought we to write to Mrs. Juggins?"

"Mrs. Juggins?"

"Yes, Miss. He says she's the housekeeper at the Towers."

Positively the stupid creature believed that Lord Ruddington had seriously referred her to an actually existing dame of the name of Juggins. Really, I haven't the patience to set down half the ridiculous things she said. She is certain that her letters don't weigh "all those ounces." She is aghast at the bad temper and obstinacy, which must truly be traits in Ruddington's character, "because he admits it, Miss, himself." She is surprised that he should be brooding so bitterly over his wasted tuppence; "though they do say, Miss, that the richer people are, the meaner they are in little things, and that's why they've got rich." She is not romantically exaltée at the news that he has never loved another. But she is grateful that he has got safely over the measles; because "Uncle Bob had them after he was grown up, and I did think, Miss, it looked so silly." And so on, and so on, and so on.

At last I begged her to stop chattering and sent her away. I can't understand her. Susan has always been unsophisticated, but it's something fresh for her to be vulgarly stupid and thick-headed.

The outlook is disconcerting. My letter-writing on her behalf gives Ruddington a false notion of her knowledge and her mental power. So long as she retains her charming simplicity no great harm will be done; for, after he is disillusionized about her brains, he can easily fall in love afresh with her naïveté. But this flat-footed, Hodge-like, charmless stupidity is quite another story.

She's too stupid even to ask about the little side-bits.

Waiting for tea.

It may be that the fears which kept Susan awake last night have frozen her wits. She has the air of dreading close quarters with this affair; of wanting to thrust it off an arm's-length while she gets time to think. I mustn't be too hard on her. The girl is passing through an ordeal; and I am a poor substitute for a mother or even for a bosom friend.

Wednesday morning.

I have taken a resolve.

There's been too much Ruddington. The inroads he makes on my Normandy rest-cure are absurd. I get my sun-bath and sea-bath every day; and that's all. It's time to put down my foot.

Fortunately, Susan agrees with me. She does not tell me why she has so suddenly fallen out of love with the idea of being raised to the peerage. It may be that she quails and shrinks from a destiny that is altogether out of scale with her nature. More probably it is some trifle, such as Ruddington's moustachelessness. But, although she gives no reasons, she agrees with me that it will be best to take the thing less busily for the next fortnight. I've pointed out to her that she knows as much about him now as she needs to know. It isn't as though she has to decide, here at Sainte Véronique, whether she will marry Lord Ruddington. She has only to settle whether she will let him see her next month face to face--whether she will let him press in person a suit which she will still be free to refuse.

We have decided that I shall write him a letter to-day such as will keep him quiet, and stop him bothering us. Then I shall be able to take a deep draught of my Normandy, as I take deep draughts of the cider. I have been here well over a week, and I hardly seem to have had one day free of him.

Later.

Here is my letter to her Henry, and it's going to be posted whether Susan likes it or not:

DEAR LORD RUDDINGTON,--Your letter and the big blue form amused me very much. It is interesting to have such an assortment of fresh facts about you--especially the obstinacy and the bad temper.

It is good news that you hate motor-cars. Nor should we become estranged over tobacco. But these are trifles, aren't they?

I hope you will not think that I am taking myself too seriously, or that I am unthankful for the trouble you take in writing such kind and open and lively letters. But (now that I have your photograph and know so much more about you) I am conscious of a desire for a week or so of detachment from details. I feel that I would like to go about my ordinary life until some light breaks on me suddenly and of its own accord. The more I deliberately seek light, the more it mocks and eludes me. I suppose the reason is that no amount of steadily "making up" one's mind can suffice instead of a free involuntary motion of the heart.

As you wrote to me on Monday, you would not in any case be writing again till Monday next. I like to have your letters; but, if you postpone your reply to this until rather late next week, I shall have the better chance of deciding whether we ought to meet or not.

Yours sincerely,

SUSAN BRIGGS.

After lunch.

The letter's gone.

Susan says she likes it.

I liked it too, until it was dropped into the post-box. But, at this moment, I am vainly asking myself what had become of my brains while I was writing it. It's the un-Susanishest letter that even my undramatic pen has compassed. Think of Susan being "conscious of a desire for detachment from details!" I can as easily imagine her ordering a grilled ichthyosaurus for breakfast.

Still, it's gone. And now I shall have a week's peace.

It seems the Belgian people who have had Dupoirier's Villa de la Mer for the season left yesterday. Dupoirier is cleaning up the blue-and-white bathing-hut on the beach. He's going to give me the key, and, if I like, I can stay down by the sea all day, so long as the weather's fine.

The Bathing-hut, Thursday afternoon.

This is perfect.

The bright-faced sea is crooning to itself like a happy child. The day is warm. Inland, it must be torrid.

I have had two dips, one snooze, and about three-quarters of a lunch. It would have been a lunch and a half if Georgette hadn't tripped over a stone on the way down and dropped the wing of a chicken into the beck. But the prawns, and the cold veal, with sauce rémoulade, and the great big pear, were quite enough if I hadn't grown so disgustingly greedy.

Off and on, I've read several square yards of French newspapers since ten o'clock. There seems to be a curse resting on all newspapers that are sold for a ha'penny, never mind what country they belong to. I feel as Susan felt when she missed "a nice service" after the parish Mass at Sainte Véronique church.

The best part of everything is to lie full back in the deck-chair and to look up at the larks in the sky. It's nice, too, to gaze over the blue-green water and to know there's a hundred miles of it between us and that worry of a Ruddington. I'm afraid he'll write a dozen pages on Monday. But, until the poor little fellow begins kicking and screaming for his Susan to be given to him at once, I can sit here while the wind and the sun mend my nerves and smooth the past fortnight's wrinkles out of my offended brow.

Friday night.

Henry Reginald has written. The sight of his envelope made me so angry that I nearly tore it open without waiting for Susan. After reading his outpouring I can't altogether blame him; but I am being badly treated by Fate. Things are worse muddled than ever.

He says:

MY DEAR SUSAN,--Seeing my handwriting again so soon, you will think that I am flouting your wishes. Not so. After I have finished this, I promise not to write you another line till you expressly give me leave.

From my own selfish point of view, I have known all along that I was foolish in pleading my cause by post instead of with the living voice. But to write seemed fairer to yourself; though I confess I could not have been easily content with letters had I known you were going to France.

In asking for a week of detachment, you are right. Indeed, I feel you have been most exquisitely right at every turn of my rude assault upon your peace. Therefore I agree, much as I shall miss your letters.

You think your letters have disappointed me; and I can discern that it is a pain to you to write them till they can flow from you more freely. But let me tell you why I prize them far more than I expected.

The day I first saw you with Miss Langley was a Saturday. You simply swept me off my feet. I had no more choice as to whether I should love you all my life or not than a cork has a choice between floating and sinking. It was the Derlingham banker who told me who you were. All that evening I sat alone in the dark, thinking. Or, rather, I didn't think. I just sat and looked, like a man in a trance, at the new world which had unrolled itself suddenly, solidly, splendidly right across the whole field of my vision.

I had always believed that love at first sight was out of my line. Indeed, I had believed that, nowadays, it was out of everybody's line; and I had suspected that, outside the romances, there had never been any such thing in the world. I had even begun to indulge a certain pride in my fastidiousness and self-control as regards women.

Don't be hurt, most dear lady, at the next step in my confession. If I must seem to disparage you for half a moment on paper, it is only that I may show why I shall revere and honour and cherish you for ever.

When I came out of that Saturday night dream or trance, I sank swiftly down, down, down into a pit of humiliation. I had always believed myself free from pride of rank or pride of wealth; but it was with an immense chagrin that I remembered how the banker had answered my off-hand question with the words "Miss Langley's maid." A blinding flash lit up all the opposition, and scorn, and ridicule I should have to undergo.

Not that it entered my mind, even at the zero of my humiliation, that I could ever give you up. The fact that you were my Destiny rose clear of my tumultuous emotions, as radiant and immutable as a virgin peak above the mean rage of a thunderstorm. But I fretted and fumed. You were the rose that I must needs gather; but why had Fate set you behind so huge and sharp and black a thorn? I asked bitterly why Fate could not have contrived that Miss Langley should have been Susan, and that you should have been Miss Langley, so that I could have come to the Grange a-wooing without a thousand maddening lets and hindrances.

Later on, and in a lesser degree, I also felt humiliated because I, who had been so proud of my cool head, suddenly found myself bowled over by mere beauty and grace, like a solitary corn-stalk before an autumn gale.

The next morning I slipped circumspectly into Traxelby church, just before the sermon. If you hold religion sacred and dear (as I feel sure you do), it may shock you to know that I looked at you through the pillars of the Langley monument for a quarter of an hour. But my thoughts were not sacrilegious. Although I thanked God for your beauty (and how beautiful you were that morning!), I worshipped God most because He had created your soul, your very self. As I watched you, I knew that you alone in all the world could charm away my spirit's restlessness and hunger--the hunger and the restlessness which I had hidden even from my own self. I recalled my loveless life; my boyhood spent among tutors and schoolmasters; my youth and early manhood at two schools and at three universities in three different countries; my last year--the year before I came back to the Towers--spent on cosmopolitan steamships and in unhomely hotels. I thought of the only women I have ever known well--my hard and shallow cousins, who are handsome and elegant only with the sort of handsomeness and elegance that ten thousand other hard and shallow women share with them. Then I looked at you again, and wanted to come home to you as a bird flies home to his nest.

As I walked back from church, I knew that my ignoble chagrin had melted and vanished at the second vision of you. Instead of exclaiming against Fate for placing you, as the word goes, "below me," I rejoiced that there was a sacrifice to be made--a way of proving to you that I was moved by Love alone. I laughed at myself for having wished you had been Miss Langley!

Perhaps I am supersensitive, ultradelicate. But I felt, on that Sunday morning, that if you had been Miss Langley, I might have shrunk from the wooing. The obviousness, the hard-headed, practical common sense of such a match would have put me off it. When every consideration of worldly suitability pointed to a joining of her name and lands and interests with mine, how could I have gone to Miss Langley on a simple errand of Love? I know of one gossip who had already linked her with me. How I should have cursed this rank of mine, which I never wanted, and this wealth of mine, which I never earned, if they had robbed me of the power to convince a woman of my love, and to woo her for herself alone!

I wrote to you on the Tuesday; and you kept me waiting four days. But I knew you would reply; even as I know that, when this month is over, Heaven will not suffer you to wrench your life away from mine. But, while I waited, I kept on schooling myself against every possible turn of events. And one thing for which I prepared my mind (forgive me again, dear lady!) was this. I expected your letter would be ... how shall I say it? Well, I expected a diamond--but a rough one! To be blunt, I knew that Oxford and Heidelberg and Salamanca had made me too punctilious; and I nerved myself for a letter from a sweet Susan, an adorable Susan, a wise Susan ... but a Susan who couldn't spell!

But what has happened? Of course, mere spelling and grammar are less than the dust in the balance; and if you sinned against them unto seventy times seven it would be nothing. But not only are Susan's letters better expressed than my own; they outstrip the utmost I ever dreamed of in the exquisite reverence with which they approach the sacred mystery of Love. Where I was merely superfine and sentimental, you are exalted, mystical. I honour your month of absence and your coming week of silence as I honour the retreats and meditations of a saint. Wealth and ease and rank cannot tempt you. They cannot even hurry you into doing what is right till you are persuaded that it is the right with your whole soul. The Susan I saw that Saturday morning swept me off my feet, robbed me of my free will. But the Susan who has written me four letters is so noble, so deep, so rich of spirit, that even if the spell of her beauty were broken, I should still devote my whole life to winning her, though the obstacles were a thousand times as great.

Why have I written all this? I will tell you. Because you are entering, so to speak, on a week's retreat; and upon your week's retreat hangs my fate. If I did not write this, the most recent letter of mine in your hands would be that schoolboyish blue paper with its long-drawn string of poor jokes. I did not mean it flippantly; but it is hard for a man to write about himself.

In a word, I write to ask that it shall be this present letter and not the other that you will call to mind when you are so good as to think of me.

No. I don't imagine you "take yourself too seriously." I have guessed that, like my own, your mind is more often gay than grave. But there is a time for everything; and I perceive that badinage is not the accompaniment I ought to be playing while you are making the momentous choice which I have so strangely laid upon you.

And now I steal out of your presence on tip-toe, and softly close the door. If you call, I shall be waiting. And if you do not call ... I shall be waiting still.

R.

Susan has been in to know what I think of the letter. I have told her I am busy, and have sent her away.

It's no use blinking the fact that I'm involved, up to the ears, in a very, very serious affair.

Midnight.

I can't sleep.

This is altogether too frightful.

Fortunately Susan was perfectly stolid. If she'd been awkward, goodness knows what I might have said or done. I simply told her that we must have a thorough talk, once for all, in the morning; and she went to bed without a murmur.

Susan a mystic! Susan approaching with exquisite reverence the sacred mystery of Love! Susan in retreat, like a saintly nun!

If I could only laugh and laugh and laugh till I woke up the whole hotel, it wouldn't so much matter. But I can't even smile. Ruddington is too terribly in earnest. And it's my fault.

Some parts of his letter I hate. I would never have believed that he could make so outrageously free with my name. So long as Susan is my maid, I call it abominable taste to drag me in like that. Indeed, I hardly see how I can do otherwise than wash my hands of the entire business forthwith.

But if I do ... what then? If Susan is left to concoct a reply, and to use a teaspoonful of ink to every page, it will be such a shattering bombshell in the golden midst of his dreams. And the man, on the whole, is too likeable for me to wound him deeply if I can help it.

Perhaps what I ought to do is to write by the same post as Susan, and with her full knowledge, a frank confession of my part in the affair. He will be astonished and disappointed and a bit hurt in his dignity, but he can't fairly resent my having helped Susan. After all, it's his fault, not mine, that he's perused my few short and insignificant letters through such rose-coloured glasses that they have seemed like the utterances of a divinity. It's his infatuation, far more than my bungling, which has magnified and idealized Susan into a goddess. Whether he can turn the telescope round, so to speak, and look at Susan through the other end till he sees her in all the tininess of her actual spiritual and mental stature; and whether, when he has seen her as she is, he can still go on worshipping her--all this is more his affair than mine. I'll write the letter now.

A quarter past one.

It's no good.

If I had written before his letter came to-night, I could have managed it. But now that he's brought me in by name, and has even discussed how he would have felt if he had been moved to make love to me...

No. I can't write. And if I could, I wouldn't. And I'm cold, and tired, and insulted, and distracted, and wretched. I'll back to bed.

Saturday, 2 p.m.

On second (or twenty-second) thoughts, I did not choose to have a detailed conference with Susan. I have not so much as told her how vastly it offends me to be discussed with her as Ruddington has done. If I betray annoyance, how can I expect a simple mind like Susan's to interpret my vexation otherwise than as the acidity of an unsuccessful rival for Lord Ruddington's hand? Lord Ruddington has cheapened me enough, and I will not make myself any cheaper.

Although she was stolid over it last night, the letter has warmed Susan into a remarkable state of expansion this morning, and she was sadly crestfallen when I showed no sign of going through the document chapter and verse. I took care that she should find me deep in my own correspondence, so that my inattention was less pointed.

I simply told her that it would be a good thing if she were able to take over the Ruddington correspondence herself immediately, as Lord Ruddington had already been seriously misled. Failing this, I gave her the following note, and told her to post it or not as she pleased:--

DEAR LORD RUDDINGTON,--I am grateful for your letter. And I am grateful to you for consenting to what you call my "retreat." When the retreat is over I shall not forget that I have a long letter of yours to answer. Meanwhile I will only beg, both for your sake and my own, that you will not form too high an opinion of--Yours very sincerely,

SUSAN BRIGGS.

Susan did not read the note in my presence. I have no idea what she will do.

Sunday: before church.

Half my month is gone. This makes the fifteenth morning since I landed in France, yet I don't remember waking up once with a completely easy mind. From Mr. John Lamb onwards, I have dwelt in the midst of alarms.

To-day shall prove whether I have any will-power or not. Sunday is a day of rest, and I am determined to have twenty-four hours' rest from Ruddington.

Susan is very commendably docile. She sees I have had enough of it, and she hasn't even told me whether she posted my note or not. Fortunately she is making much more of a pal of Georgette. Georgette progresses with her English marvellously. She adores Susan because Susan never tries to utter a single syllable of French.

I mean to hear Mass this morning at Bérigny. Georgette is taking Susan to bewail once more the lack of "a nice service" at Sainte Véronique.

Sunday afternoon.

I like the Bérigny papists better than the papists at Sainte Véronique. Barely sixty people assisted at the Mass; but the faith of these few twentieth-century men and women was as solid as the fifteenth-century piers and vaults that rose above our heads.

Being English, I ought to exclaim against the Bérigny mass-house, and to call its pictures and images and altars gaudy. But I understood this morning that the place was first and foremost a refuge for the simple and the poor. Of course, the austerity of our own church at Traxelby suits my personal ideas of reverence better. But I'm afraid that, in England, there may be some selfishness in our always conforming the insides of our churches to the taste of the Hall or to the taste of the rector's ladies. No doubt it helps the fortunate few to feel religious when they exchange the cosy richness wherein they have snuggled all the week for the big, bare sternness of cold, undissembled stone, and the uncompromising whiteness of twenty surplices. An hour and a half of it once a week corrects luxury and tones up fibres that are becoming enervated through all-day-long indulgence. One even finds a subtle pleasure in the slight discomfort and restraint; just as the man who has dined well and wined well for eleven months enjoys the fashionable hardships of a month's "cure" at a German spa. But I wondered this morning if our church interiors are equally helpful to the poor. If a contrast between the home and the church stimulates devotion, where do the poor come in? The only contrast they get is the contrast between a small bleakness and a big one; the contrast between grey and white; between ashes and snow.

Bérigny church is a spacious, warm, brightly coloured drawing-room for all Bérigny. Not even the drawing-room at Alice's, with its absurd excess of water-colours and prints and screens and embroideries and statuettes and curios, holds such a store of things to look at as the drawing-room at Bérigny. Over and above all the regulation sights of a typical French church, Bérigny has Our Lady of Bérigny, in queenly silver-tissue and with a golden crown on her sorrowful brow. From the bosses of the vaults in the aisles hang five or six fully rigged little ships--votive offerings of mariners snatched from shipwreck. High up on the south wall there are coloured wooden images, carved in the sixteenth century, such as St. Nicolas with a tubful of red-cheeked, chubby, naked babies, and St. Antony with his pig. Bérigny has both the Antonys. Not far from him of the pig, stands a modern statue of St. Antony of Padua, with a face like an angel's, and with the Holy Child seated on St. Antony's open book and nestling against St. Antony's breast.

It would have driven him stark mad if our Traxelby choir-master, with his petty efficiency and trivial thoroughness, could have heard the Bérigny organ pounding and blaring, and the Bérigny faithful bawling "Credo" through their noses. An untuneful but hearty lad on my left sang the whole creed through in Latin without a book. I wonder, would our Traxelby youths be a shade less loutish, a shade nearer to these courteous villagers of Bérigny, if they too were taught to dip a cup in the main stream of human culture, and to quaff ever so small a draught? I imagine it must be the beginning of a revolution, even in the humblest mind, when it makes room for fifty words of a language other than its own.

Sunday night.

Yes, I have some traces of will-power. I have wanted to ask Susan whether she posted my note; but I haven't asked her. And I have wanted to think about Ruddington's letter--not so much its galling references to myself, as the disclosure it makes of an uncommon personality in the midst of an uncommon situation. I have wanted to think about it all day--even in church. But I haven't yielded. Or, at most, I have yielded only a very little.

Monday morning.

Susan posted the letter.

I asked her after breakfast, in a casual sort of way, what she had done with it; and she answered, almost as casually, that she and Georgette posted it on Saturday afternoon. I could see that, for some reason, Susan didn't want to be cross-questioned.

"Susan," I said, when she came into the room again, "how many people know anything about this affair of Lord Ruddington?"