Part I INLAND

I

Unspeakable, unlikable, worse than all, unsketchable. A woman has no more formidable rival than her idea in the head of an imaginative young man, and Maurice Durant had been rash enough to fall in love with Miss Tancred before sight.

He was rash in everything. When the Colonel asked him down to Coton Manor for a fortnight, he accepted the invitation (with much pleasure) by return, and lay awake half the night with joyous anticipation. He was in the train steaming into the Midlands before he realized that he knew nothing of his host beyond a vague family tradition. He was his (Durant's) godfather; he was a retired Colonel of militia; he had given him (Durant) a hideous silver cup; but this was the first time he had given him an invitation. There was something more, too. Durant had spent the last seven years exploring every country but his own, and he was out of touch with family tradition; but now he thought of it he had—he certainly had—a distinct recollection of hearing his father say that of all his numerous acquaintance that fellow Tancred was quite the most intolerable bore.

He had been a little precipitate. Still, he said to himself, England was England, and if there was any fishing on the Colonel's land, or a decent mount in his stables, he thought he could pull through. Mrs. Tancred was dead; he did not certainly know that there was a Miss Tancred, but if there were he meant to flirt with her, and if the worst came to the worst he could always sketch her (the unsketchable!).

He had had plenty of time for anticipation during the slow journey on the branch line from the junction. The train crawled and burrowed into the wooded heart of the Midlands, passed a village, a hamlet, a few scattered houses, puffed and panted through endless lengths of arable and pasture land, drew up exhausted at the little wayside station of Whithorn-in-Arden, and left him in that prosaic wilderness a prey to the intolerable bore.

As ill-luck would have it, he had arrived at Coton Manor three hours before dinner. At the first sight of his host he had made up his mind that the Colonel would have nothing to say that could possibly keep him going for more than three minutes, yet the Colonel had talked for two hours. Durant had been counting the buttons on the Colonel's waistcoat and the minutes on the drawing-room clock, and wondering when it would be dinnertime. Once or twice he had caught himself looking round the room for some sign or token of Miss Tancred. He believed in her with a blind, unquestioning belief, but beyond a work-basket, a grand piano, and some atrocious water-colors, he could discover no authentic traces of her presence. The room kept its own dull counsel. It was one of those curious provincial interiors that seem somehow to be soulless and sexless in their unfathomable reserve. It was more than comfortable, it was opulent, luxurious; but the divine touch was wanting. It made Durant wonder whether there really was a Miss Tancred, much as you might doubt the existence of a God from the lapses in his creation. Still, he believed in her because there was nothing else to believe in. He had gathered from the Colonel's conversation that there was no fishing on his land, and no animal in his stables but the respectable and passionless pair that brought him from the station.

Could it be that there was no Miss Tancred?

Durant, already veering toward scepticism, had been about to plunge into the depths of bottomless negation when the Colonel rose punctually at the stroke of seven.

"My daughter," he had said, "my daughter will be delighted to make your acquaintance."

And Durant had replied that he would be delighted to make Miss Tancred's.

There was nothing else to be delighted about. He had divined pretty clearly that Miss Tancred's society would be the only entertainment offered to him during his stay, and the most outrageous flirtation would be justifiable in the circumstances; he had seen himself driven to it in sheer desperation and self-defense; he had longed hopelessly, inexpressibly, for the return of the absconding deity; he had looked on Miss Tancred as his hope, his angel, his deliverer. That she had not been at home to receive him seemed a little odd, but on second thoughts he had been glad of it. He would have distrusted any advances on her part as arguing a certain poverty of personal resource. Presumably Miss Tancred could afford a little indifference, a touch of divine disdain. And if indeed she had used absence as an art to stimulate his devotion, she was to be congratulated on her success. His dream had been nourished on this ambrosial uncertainty.

Upstairs in his bedroom mere emotional belief in Miss Tancred had risen to rational conviction. The first aspect of the guest-chamber had inspired him with a joyous credulity. It wooed him with its large and welcoming light, its four walls were golden white and warm, and in all its details he had found unmistakable evidences of design. There was an overruling coquetry in the decorative effects, in the minute little arrangements for his comfort. A finer hand than any housemaid's must have heaped that blue china bowl with roses, laid out that writing-table, and chosen the books in the shelf beside the bed. A woman is known by her books as by her acquaintance, and he had judged of the mind of this maiden, turning over the pages with a thrill of sensuous curiosity. This charming Providence had fitted his mood to perfection with these little classics of the hour, by authors too graceful and urbane to bore a poor mortal with their immortality. Adorable Miss Tancred! He was in love with her before sight, at half-sight.

For at the sound of a punctual gong he had hurried out on to the stairs, a door had opened on some unseen landing, he had heard a woman's step on the flight below; he had listened, he had watched, and as he caught the turn of her head, the rustle and gleam of her gown, some divine and cloudy color, silver or lavender or airy blue, he had been radiantly certain that his vision had passed before him. Down there somewhere it was making itself incarnate in the unknown. He felt already its reviving presence, the mysterious aura of its womanhood.

Hitherto his imagination had been guided by a profound sense of the justice that is in things. Destiny who had brought him to this deceitful place owed him compensation for the fraud, and an apology in person was really no more than his due. What if Miss Tancred were she, the supremely feminine, Destiny herself?

Under the echoing gallery the drawing-room had opened and closed upon her, and he had followed, his nerves tingling with the familiar prophetic thrill.

And this was Miss Tancred?

To begin with, he had never seen a woman more execrably dressed. No doubt it is the first duty of a woman's gown to clothe her, but apparently Miss Tancred's gown had a Puritan conscience, an almost morbid sense of its duty. It more than clothed her, it covered her up as if she had been a guilty secret; there was concealment and disguise in every crease of the awful garment. In its imperishable prudery it refused to define her by ever so innocent a curve; all its folds were implicated in a conspiracy against her sex. The effect, though striking, was obviously unstudied and inevitable, and he argued charitably that Miss Tancred was attired, not after her own mysterious and perverse fancy, but according to some still more mysterious and perverse doom. Happily she seemed unconscious of her appearance, and this unconsciousness had saved her.

For Miss Tancred was plain; and the irritating thing about her plainness was that it, at any rate, was not inevitable. She had had a hair's-breadth escape of being handsome in a somewhat original and eccentric way. And so her plainness was insistent; it would not let you alone, but forced you to look at it, worrying you with perpetual suggestions of the beauty it might have been. Her black hair grew low on the center of her forehead, whence it rose describing a semicircle above each temple; she had a short and salient Roman nose, black eyes, and straight black brows laid like an accent on the jutting eyebones. Her mouth—there might have been hope for her in her mouth, but for its singular unreadiness to smile; there was no hope for her in her sallow skin, the dull droop of her eyelids, her whole insupportable air of secrecy and reserve. A woman has no business to look like that.

There could be no hope for any woman whom Maurice Durant had pronounced unsketchable. He was tolerant with the tolerance of a clever young modern painter, trained to look for beauty (and find it, too) in the most unlikely places. He could find no beauty in Miss Tancred. She was useless for his purposes. Those lips had never learned to flirt, to chatter, to sing, to do anything spontaneous and natural and pleasing.

He shook hands with her in a paralytic manner, battering his brains for a reply to her polite commonplaces. Inwardly he was furious. He felt that he had been duped, tricked, infamously cheated of his legitimate desire; and he hated the woman as if she, poor soul, had been personally responsible.

It had bored him to listen to the Colonel, and he was sure it would bore him still more to talk to Miss Tancred; but for ten minutes he did his best to sustain a miraculous flow of sparkling monologue. If Miss Tancred was going to bore him, at any rate it would not be by her conversation. Some plain women he had known who had overcome plainness by vivacity and charm. Not so Miss Tancred. Being plainer than most she was bound to make a more than ordinary effort, yet she had adopted the ways of a consummately pretty woman who knows that nothing further is required of her. Did she think that he would go on forever battering his brains to create conversation out of nothing, when she clearly intimated that it was not worth her while to help him? Never in his life had he met a woman who inspired him with such invincible repugnance. He found himself talking to her at random like a man in a dream, and so indifferent to her opinion that he was not in the least distressed at his own imbecility; and Miss Tancred, like a lady in a dream, seemed to find his attitude entirely natural; perhaps she had read a similar antagonism in the faces of other men. (As it happened, repugnance was an emotion that Durant had frequently felt before, and certain emphatic lines about his nose and mouth had apparently been drawn there on purpose to express it.) Anyhow, Miss Tancred made no attempt to engage his attention, but turned her dull eyes to the Colonel, as if appealing to him to take the burden of Durant's entertainment on his own shoulders.

This the Colonel was perfectly prepared to do. It was evidently an understood thing that Miss Tancred should sit there, in that depressing attitude, while her father monopolized their guest. Durant hastily classified his host and hostess as the bore active and the bore passive. If Miss Tancred had ever had any interest or property in life she seemed to have made it over to the Colonel, together with a considerable portion of her youth. The Colonel wore his sixty years well out of sight, like an undergarment; you even felt that there might be something slightly indecorous in the suggestion that he wore them at all. He was alive to the finger-tips, alive in every feature of his aristocratic little face. He seemed at first rather uncertain how to take Durant, and looked him up and down as if in search of a convenient button-hole; he smiled innocently on the young man (Durant soon learned to know and dread that smile); nothing could have been more delicate and tentative than his approach. He had been silent for the last few minutes, lying low behind a number of the Nineteenth Century, for if he were a bore he had the dangerous power of masking his deadly qualities in an unreal absorption. At the signal that followed Durant's last desperate remark the Colonel's tongue leaped as from an ambush.

His first conversational maneuver was a feint. He inquired, with a certain affected indifference, what sort of weather Durant had met with on the journey down, and what sort he had left behind him in London; and then he seemed inclined to let the weather drop. But before Durant could get a word in edgeways he had taken it up again and was handling it like a master. Now he was playing with it, hovering round it lightly, with a tantalizing approach and flight; now he had gripped it tight, there was no more wandering from the point than may be seen in the vacillations of a well-behaved barometer; the slender topic seemed to grow under his touch, to take on the proportions of his own enormous egotism; he spoke of last autumn and the next parish as if he were dealing with immensities of time and space. And now the Colonel was merged and lost in his theme; he was whirled along with the stream of things, with moons and meteors, winds and tides, never for an instant compromising his character as a well-behaved barometer.

Never for an instant forgetting that he was a Tancred, with a pedigree dating from the days of feudalism. And after all he looked such a gentle little fellow that Durant could almost have forgiven him. He was so beautifully finished off. You could only say of him that he was fastidious, he had the prejudices of his class. He scorned to make conversation a sordid traffic in ideas. At any rate, Durant felt himself released from all obligation to contribute his share.

He had given it up, and was wondering how on earth they were to get through the evening. Various dreadful possibilities occurred to him; music (Miss Tancred and Beethoven on the grand piano); family prayers; cards; in some places they sat up half the night playing whist, a game that bored him to extinction. Thank heaven, as there were but three of them, it would not be whist. Meanwhile it was past eight and no dinner bell.

As if in answer to his thoughts the Colonel turned sharply to his daughter.

"Frida, are you sure that you wrote to Mrs. Fazakerly?"

"Quite sure."

"And are you equally certain that she is coming?"

"Quite certain. Unless she has been taken ill."

"What did you say? Taken ill? Taken ill?"

"I did not say she was taken ill, papa; I said nothing but illness would keep her from coming."

"Ah, a very different thing." He turned to Durant, blushing and bridling in his stiff collar as if the important distinction had been a subtlety of his own.

He curled himself up in his chair, and Durant caught him smiling to himself, a contemplative, almost voluptuous smile; was it at the prospect of another victim?

Who the devil, he wondered, is Mrs. Fazakerly?

II

Mrs. Fazakerly did not keep him wondering long. Already she was tripping into the room with a gleeful and inquisitive assurance. A small person, with a round colorless face and snub features finished off with a certain piquant ugliness. Her eyes seemed to be screwed up by a habit of laughter, and the same cheerful tendency probably accounted for the twisting of her eyebrows. Mrs. Fazakerly must have been forty and a widow. She was dressed with distinction in the half-mourning of a very black silk gown and a very white neck and shoulders. She greeted Miss Tancred affectionately, glanced at Durant with marked approval, and swept the Colonel an exaggerated curtsey, playfully implying that she had met him before that day. It struck Durant that nature had meant Mrs. Fazakerly to be vulgar, and that it spoke well for Mrs. Fazakerly that so far she had frustrated the designs of nature. He rather thought he was going to like Mrs. Fazakerly; she looked as if she would not bore him.

If Mrs. Fazakerly was going to like Durant, as yet her glance merely indicated that she liked the look of him. Durant, as it happened, was almost as plain for a man as Miss Tancred was for a woman; but he was interesting, and he looked it; he was distinguished, and he looked that, too; he was an artist, and he did not look it at all; he cultivated no eccentricities of manner, he indulged in no dreamy fantasies of dress. Other people besides Mrs. Fazakerly had approved of Maurice Durant.

Unfortunately the Colonel's instant monopoly of the lady had the effect of throwing Durant and his hostess on each other's mercy during dinner, a circumstance that seemed greatly to entertain Mrs. Fazakerly. Probably a deep acquaintance with Coton Manor made her feel a delightful incongruity in Durant's appearance there, since, as her gaze so frankly intimated, she found him interesting. He was roused from a fit of more than usual abstraction to find her little gray eyes twinkling at him across the soup. Mrs. Fazakerly, for purposes of humorous observation, used a pince-nez, which invariably leaped from the bridge of her nose in her subsequent excitement. It was leaping now.

"Mr. Durant, Miss Tancred is trying to say something to you."

He turned with a dim, belated courtesy as his hostess repeated for the third time her innocent query, "I hope you like your room?"

He murmured some assent, laying stress on his appreciation of the flowers and the books.

"You must thank Mrs. Fazakerly for those; it was she who put them there."

"Indeed? That was very pretty of Mrs. Fazakerly."

"Mrs. Fazakerly is always doing pretty things. I can't say that I am."

In Miss Tancred's eyes there was none of the expectancy that betrays the fisher of compliments. If she had followed that gentle craft she must have abandoned it long ago; no fish had ever risen to wriggling worm, to phantom minnow or to May-fly, to Miss Tancred's groveling or flirting or flight; no breath of flattery could ever have bubbled in men's eyes—those icy waters where she, poor lady, saw her own face. Durant would have been highly amused if she had angled; as it was, he was disgusted with her. It is the height of bad taste for any woman to run herself down, and the more sincere the depreciation the worse the offense, as implying a certain disregard for your valuable opinion. Apparently it had struck Mrs. Fazakerly in this light, for she shook her head reproachfully at Miss Tancred.

"If Mr. Durant had been staying with me, I should have packed him into the bachelor's bedroom with his Bible and his Shakespeare."

Miss Tancred, accused of graciousness, explained herself away. "I put you on the south side because you've just come from the Mediterranean; I thought you would like the sun."

Why could he not say that it was pretty of Miss Tancred?

The Colonel had pricked up his ears at the illuminating word.

"What sort of weather did you have when you were in Italy?"

It was the first time that he had shown the faintest interest in Durant's travels. He seemed to regard him as a rather limited young man who had come to Coton Manor to get his mind let out an inch or two.

Durant replied that as far as he could remember it was fine when he arrived in Rome two years ago, and it was fine when he left Florence the other day.

The Colonel shrugged his shoulders. "Ah, I don't call that weather. I like a variable barometer. I cannot stand monotony." As he spoke he looked at his daughter. In a less perfect gentleman there would have been significance in the look. As it was, it remained unconscious.

"The Colonel," Mrs. Fazakerly explained, "is studying the meteorology of Wickshire."

It seemed that Mrs. Fazakerly was studying the Colonel, that it was her business to expound and defend him. She had implied, if it were only by the motion of an eyelid, that all they had heard hitherto was by way of prologue; that the Colonel had not yet put forth his full powers. Her effervescent remark was, as it were, the breaking of the champagne bottle, the signal that launched him.

Meteorology apart, the Colonel, like more than one great philosopher, held that science was but another name for ignorance.

"But with meteorology," he maintained, "you are safe. You've got down to the bed-rock of fact, and it's observation all along the line. I've got fifteen little memorandum books packed with observations. Taken by myself. It's the only way to keep clear of fads and theories. Look at the nonsense that's talked in other departments, about microbes, for instance. Fiddlesticks! A microbe's an abstraction, a fad. But take a man like myself, take a man of even ordinary intelligence, who has faced the facts, don't tell me that he hasn't a better working knowledge of the subject than a fellow who calls himself a bacteriologist, or some other absurd name."

Durant remarked meekly that he didn't know, he was sure. But the Colonel remained implacable; his shirt-front dilated with his wrath; it was wonderful how so gentle a voice as the Colonel's contrived to convey so much passion. Meanwhile Miss Tancred sat absorbed in her dinner and let the storm pass over her head. Perhaps she was used to it.

"Fiddlesticks! If you don't know, you ought to know; you should make it your business to know. If I've got cholera I want to be told what'll cure me. I don't care a hang whether I'm killed by a comma bacillus or——"

"A full-stop bacillus," suggested Mrs. Fazakerly.

"The full-stop bacillus for choice—put you sooner out of your agony."

"For shame, Mr. Durant; you encourage him."

"I, Mrs. Fazakerly?"

"Yes, you. It was you who brought the Nineteenth Century into the house, wasn't it? Depend upon it, he's been reading something that he's disagreed with, or that's disagreed with him."

Durant remembered. There were things about bacteriology in that Nineteenth Century, and about hypnotism; the Colonel had apparently seized on them as on fuel for a perishing fire.

Heedless of the frivolous interruption, the little gentleman was working himself into a second intellectual fury.

"Take hypnotism again—there's another abstraction for you——"

Here Mrs. Fazakerly threw up her hands. "My dear Colonel, de grâce! If it's an abstraction, why get into a passion about it? Life isn't long enough. You're worrying your brain into fiddlesticks—fiddlestrings I mean, of course. This child doesn't look after you. You ought to have something tied over your head to keep it down; it's like a Jack-in-the-box, a candle blazing away at both ends, a sword wearing out its what's-his-name; it's wearing out your friends, too. We can't live at intellectual high pressure, if you can."

The Colonel softened visibly under the delicious flattery of her appeal; he smiled at her and at Durant; he came down from his heights and made a concession to the popular taste. "Well, then, take influenza——"

"We'd very much rather not take it, if it's all the same to you."

"Take what?"

"Why, the influenza—the bacilli, or whatever they are. Or do the bacilli take you?"

"My dear lady, you don't know what you're talking about. The bacilli theory is—is—is a silly theory."

And Durant actually smiled; for his own brain was softening under the debilitating influence. He would not be surprised at anything he might do himself; he might even sink into that sickly state in which people see puns in everything and everything in puns; it would be the effect of the place.

"Well, it made you very ill last winter, that's all I know."

The wrinkles stopped dancing over the Colonel's face; his shirt-front sank; he was touched with an infinite tenderness and pity for himself.

"Yes. But I had a fit of the real thing. It left me without a particle of muscle—legs mere thread-papers, and no brain——"

"Cherry-tart, Mr. Durant?"

The voice was Miss Tancred's. It was keen, incisive; it cut the Colonel's sentence like a knife. But if she had meant to kill it the unfilial attempt was foiled.

"No brain at all, Durant." He held up a forefinger, demonstrating on the empty air. "That, mind you, is the test, the mark of true influenza—the ut-ter, absolute collapse of brain power."

"Imbacillity, in short."

Having emitted this feeble spark, Durant's intellect went out altogether. Trusting to his face not to betray him, he inquired gravely if it was long since the Colonel's last attack of influenza.

But he had trusted rather too much to his face. A painful flush spread over it when he found Miss Tancred looking at him with a lucid, penetrating gaze. She had recognized his guilt; it was impossible to tell whether she had measured the provocation.

He, at any rate, had discovered the secret of her silence; it was not stupidity, it was shame. The spectacle of the Colonel's conversational debauches had weaned her forever from the desire of speech. For the rest of the meal he, too, sat silent, building a cairn of cherry-stones at the side of his plate; an appropriate memorial of a young man bored to death at a dinner-table.

III

"Well now," said the Colonel, rousing himself from a brief nirvana of digestion, "I hope that you will not be dull." He said it with the confidence of a man who has just laid before you a pretty convincing sample of his social powers.

Durant started; he was alone with the Colonel and the wine, and had just made the discovery that when the Colonel's face was at rest he was very like an owl.

"To-morrow we'll go exploring together. I should like to take you over my little property."

As a matter of fact, the property was considerable; but Durant noticed that its owner applied the endearing diminutive to every object that appealed specially to his egotism. It was a peculiarity of the Colonel that he was ready to melt with affection over the things that belonged to himself, and was roused almost to ferocity by whatever interested other people.

"I dare say it will be good for you to see some fresh faces and to be put—in touch—in touch with fresh ideas."

You would have said that Durant had been sitting for seven years with his feet on the fender while the Colonel roamed the world.

Durant agreed. He was being hypnotized by the hooked nose and the round hazel eyes with their radiating wrinkles. He had been five hours in Coton Manor, it felt like five years, and the evening had only just begun.

His host stared at him, fidgeted nervously for five minutes, plunged into nirvana again, emerged, and with a shamefaced smile suggested that the ladies would be getting impatient. In the drawing-room his nervousness increased; he went on like a person distracted with an intolerable desire; he sat down and got up again; he pirouetted; he played with ornaments; he wandered uneasily about the room, opening and shutting windows, setting pictures straight, and lighting candles; he was a most uncomfortable little Colonel of militia. And with every movement he revolved nearer and nearer to a certain table. The table stood in the background; Durant recognized it as the kind that opens and discloses the magic circle, the green land of whist. The table had a sweet and sinful fascination for the Colonel.

Durant had just pulled himself together, and determined that he could bear it if they didn't play some infernal game, if they didn't play whist. And now it seemed that whist was what they played, that whist of course was what Mrs. Fazakerly was there for. The Colonel looked from the table to the group, from the group to the table; there was calculation in his eye, an almost sensual anticipation. He seemed to be saying to himself, "One, two, three, four; the perfect number." Durant affected abstraction, and turning to the window gazed out into the dim green landscape. His host's eye followed him; it marked him down as the fourth; it hovered round him, dubious, vacillating, troubled. The Colonel had still some torturing remnants of a conscience; he had read the deep repugnance on the young man's face, and hesitated to sacrifice a guest on his first night. He turned helplessly to Mrs. Fazakerly, who put an end to his struggle.

She touched Durant lightly on the shoulder. "Come," she murmured gently, like a fate that pitied while she compelled. "Come. He wants his little game."

It was as if she had said, "My poor dear sacrificial lamb, he wants his little holocaust. There is no help for it. Let me show you the way to the altar."

"Frida!" It was the Colonel who spoke.

Miss Tancred spread open the table with the air of a high priestess, hieratic and resigned. The Colonel approached it, a lighted candle in each hand. For one moment of time the egotist seemed to be rapt beyond himself; he was serving the great god Whist. Cards were the Colonel's passion; he loved them with delight that was madness, madness that was delight. Cards for cards' sake, the pure passion, the high, immaculate abstraction; no gambling, mind you; no playing for penny points; no pandering to a morbid appetite for excitement. With cards in his hand the Colonel was transformed. He might be wedded to matter of fact, which is the grossest form of materialism; but at the green table he appeared as a devotee of the transcendent, the science of sciences, Whist.

Durant curled his long legs under the table and prepared for a miserable evening, while the Colonel's face beamed on him from between two candles.

"Durant," he said, "you are an acquisition. If it wasn't for you we should have to play with a dummy."

Durant replied mournfully that he was not great at the game, but he thought he was about as good as a dummy.

"Don't you be too sure of that," said Mrs. Fazakerly. "There's a great deal to be said for the dummy. He isn't frivolous, he never revokes, he never loses his little temper, and he plays the game."

"Yes, I think he can show you some very pretty science, Durant." The Colonel's mustache and eyebrows and all the wrinkles on his face were agitated, but he made no sound. The owl was pluming all his little feathers, was fluttering with mysterious mirth. Oh! he took the lady's humor, he could enter into the thing, he could keep the ball going.

"You see," Mrs. Fazakerly explained, "he has an intelligence behind him."

"A dummy inspired by Colonel Tancred would be terrible to encounter," said Durant.

Miss Tancred lifted her eyes from the cards she was shuffling. Again he felt her gaze resting upon him for a moment, the same comprehensive, disconcerting gaze. This time it had something pathetic and appealing in it, as if she implored him to take no further notice of her father's fatuity.

"Confound the old fellow," he said to himself; "why does he make me say these things?"

When they began Durant saw a faint hope of release in his own stupidity, his obvious unfitness for the game. By a studied carelessness, an artful exaggeration of his deficiencies, he courted humiliation, ejection in favor of the dummy. But, as it happened, either his evil destiny had endowed him with her own detestable skill, or else his stupidity was supreme. Trying with might and main to lose, he kept on winning with horrible persistency. He was on the winning side; he was made one with the terrible Miss Tancred; and for the first half hour he found a certain painful interest in watching that impenetrable creature.

Miss Tancred played the game; she played, now with the rhythm and precision of a calculating machine, now with the blind impetus and swoop of some undeviating natural force. It was not will, it was not intelligence; it was something beyond and above them both, infinitely more detached, more monotonous and cold; something independent even of her desire. Durant could see that she had as little love for the game as he had. She played because she always had played, by habit, a second nature that had ousted the first. Her skill was so unerring that for Durant it robbed the game of its last lingering attraction, the divine element of chance. One tinge of consciousness, one touch of fire, and it would have been sheer devilry. As it was he could have been sorry for her, though in her infinite apathy she seemed to be placed beyond his pity and her own. With no movement save in her delicate sallow fingers, she sat there like an incarnate Ennui, the terrible genius of the house.

The Colonel, though losing rapidly, was in high good humor. He displayed a chivalrous forbearance with the weakness of Mrs. Fazakerly, who committed every folly and indiscretion possible to a partner. He bowed when he dealt to her; he bowed when she dealt to him; he bowed when she revoked.

"'To err is human,'" said the Colonel.

"'To forgive, divine,'" said Mrs. Fazakerly, smiling at Durant, as much as to say, "You observe his appropriation of the supreme rôle?"

And indeed the Colonel bore himself with some consciousness of his metaphysical dignity. He was pleased with everybody, pleased with Durant, pleased with Mrs. Fazakerly, most particularly pleased with Colonel Tancred, late of the Wickshire militia.

And as the game wore on Durant realized the full horror of his position. The gallant Colonel was not going to leave that table till he had won, and he could never win. He frowned on Durant's proposal to change partners; he would accept no easy victory. They were in for a night of it. Durant was in torment, but he sat on, fascinated by the abominable beauty of his own play; he sat with every nerve on edge, listening to the intolerable tick of time.

Ten o'clock. He thought it had been midnight. He passed his hand over his face, as if to feel if it were stiffening in its expression of agony.

And all the time Mrs. Fazakerly kept on raising and dropping her eyeglass. Now and then she gave him a look that plumbed the sources of his suffering. It seemed to recommend her own courageous attitude, to say, "My dear young man, we are being bored to death; you know it, and I know it. But for Goodness' sake, let us die with pleasant faces, since we can but die."

And Durant felt that she was right. He fell into her mood, and passed from it into a sort of delirium. There could be no end to it; his partner's pitiless hands would never have done shuffling the cards. Black and red, red and black, they danced before him; they assumed extravagant attitudes; they became the symbols of tremendous mysteries. His head seemed to grow lighter; he was visited with fantastic impulses like the caprices of an intoxicated person. To turn on the Colonel and ask him what he meant by inflicting this torture on an innocent man, whose only crime had been to trust him too well; to shake the inscrutable Miss Tancred by the hand and tell her that he knew all—all, and that she had his sympathy; to fall on Mrs. Fazakerly's neck and cry like a child, he felt that he was capable of any or all of these things. As it was, his behavior must have been sufficiently ridiculous, since it amused Mrs. Fazakerly so much. The two had reached that topsy-turvy height of anguish that is only expressible by laughter. Theirs had a ring of insanity in it; it sounded monstrous and immoral, like the mirth of victims under the shadow of condign extinction. As for his play, he knew it was the play of a madman. And yet he still won; with Miss Tancred for his partner it was impossible to lose. She sat there unmoved by his wildest aberrations. Once, to be sure, she remarked with a shade of irritation in her voice (by some queer freak of nature her voice was unusually sweet), "Oh, there! We've got that trick again!" Like him, she would have preferred to lose, just to break the maddening monotony of it.

He pitied her. Once, in a lucid interval, he actually heard himself paying her a compliment, much as he would have paid a debt of honor. "Miss Tancred, how magnificently you play!" She answering, "I ought to. I've been doing nothing else since I was ten years old." It was simply horrible. The woman was thirty if she was a day.

Half past eleven. Midnight gathering in the garden outside. The room was reflected on the window-pane from the solid darkness behind it—the candles, the green table, the players—a fantastic, illusive scene, shimmering on the ground of night as on some sinister reality. Mrs. Fazakerly was dashing down her cards at random, and even the Colonel shuffled uneasily in his seat. At twelve he observed that none of them "seemed very happy in whist"; he proposed loo, a game in which, each person playing for his own hand, he could not be compromised by the ruinous folly of his partner.

At loo Miss Tancred, also untrammeled, rose to dizzying heights of play. She hovered over the green table, motionless like an eagle victory. Then she swooped, invincible. One against three she laid about her, slashed, confounded, and defeated the enemy with terrific slaughter. As Durant stammered, idiotic in his desperation, it was "a regular Water-loo."

The Colonel kept it going. He laughed, "Ha-ha! What do you say to a whiskey-and-water-loo? My head's as clear as daylight. I think I could stand another little game if we had some whiskey and water."

A movement of Mrs. Fazakerly's arm swept the pack on to the floor. "Frida," she cried, "take your father and put a mustard plaster on the back of his neck."

Miss Tancred rose. She just raised the black accent of her eyebrows as she surveyed the disenchanted table, the awful disorder of the cards. She looked at Durant and Mrs. Fazakerly with a passionless, interrogatory stare. Then suddenly she seemed to catch the infection of their dreadful mirth. It wrung from her a deeper note. She too laughed, and her laughter was the very voice of Ennui, a cry of bitterness, of unfathomable pain. It rang harsh upon her silence and was not nice to hear.

This unlooked-for outburst had the happy effect of bringing the evening to an end. It seemed to be part of the program that the Colonel should go home with Mrs. Fazakerly to take care of her, and that Miss Tancred should go with them both to take care of the Colonel. They had not far to walk; only through the park and across the road to a little house opposite the lodge gates.

While they were looking for their hats Durant was left for a moment alone with Mrs. Fazakerly. She sank into a seat beside him, unstrung, exhausted; she seemed to be verging on that state of nervous collapse which disposes to untimely confidence.

"I like whist," said Mrs. Fazakerly; "but it must be an awful game to play if you don't like it."

He followed her gaze. It was fixed on Miss Tancred's retreating figure.

"Why on earth does she play if she doesn't like it?"

Mrs. Fazakerly turned on him, suddenly serious.

"She plays because the Colonel likes it—because she is the best girl in the world, Mr. Durant."

He stood reproved.

IV

Three days passed; they brought nothing new; each was a repetition of the other; each merged itself in whist. No relief came from the outside world; the outside world must have found out long ago that it was not worth while driving many miles to call on the Tancreds.

Three days at Coton Manor would have been trying to anyone; to Durant they were intolerable. For limbs that had roamed the world to be tucked up under the Colonel's whist table, for a mind equally vigorous and vagrant to be tied to the apron-strings of the Colonel's intellect, was really a refinement of torture. Thrice Durant had tried to find an exit into the surrounding landscape, and thrice the Colonel had been too quick for him. He hovered perpetually round him; he watched his goings-out and his comings-in; there was no escaping his devilish ingenuity. While Durant was looking for a stick or a hat, he would secure him softly by the arm and lead him out for a stroll. He would say, "My dear Durant, the women are all very well in their way, but it is a luxury to have another man to talk to." He talked to Durant, leaning toward him lover-like, with the awful passion of the bore for his victim.

These strolls extended over several miles, without taking them beyond the bounds of Coton Manor. Durant began to disbelieve in the existence of a world beyond. Coton Manor had swallowed up the county; it seemed to have opened its gates and swallowed him up, too.

He told himself that he had done nothing to deserve his doom. He was not more selfish or more exacting than other men; he was not sensual; he had not made mere physical pleasure his being's end and aim. He had been content with a somewhat negative ideal, the mere avoidance of boredom. He never struggled or argued with it, but whenever and wherever he met it he had simply packed his portmanteau and gone away. This repugnance of his had entailed endless traveling, but Durant was a born traveler. Hitherto his life had been free from any care beyond the trouble of avoiding trouble. But he had been lax in this matter of Coton Manor; he had had reason enough to suppose that the visit would bring him face to face with the thing he feared, and he had rushed into the adventure with open arms. And now, this horror that he had eluded so successfully for seven years he was to know more intimately than his own soul; he was to sound all the depths beyond depths of boredom. He had stayed in dull places before, but their dulness struck him now as naïf and entertaining by comparison. Other people lapsed helplessly into dulness; at Coton Manor they cultivated it; they kept it up. What was worse, they took it for granted in other people. It never seemed to occur to Miss Tancred or the Colonel that Maurice Durant could be interesting, that he had done anything worth mentioning. Not that he was sensitive to their opinion, it was simply that this attitude of theirs appealed unpleasantly to his imagination, giving it a cold foretaste of extinction. It was as if his flaming intellectual youth, with all its achievements, had been dropped into the dark, where such things are forgotten. At Coton Manor his claim to distinction rested on the fact that he was the Colonel's godson. The Colonel had appropriated, absorbed him, swallowed him up.

The fact that Durant was lapped in material comfort only intensified his spiritual pangs. The Tancreds were rich, and their wealth was not of to-day or yesterday; they had the dim golden tone, the deep opulence of centuries. And they were generous, they gave him of their best; so that, besides being bored, he had the additional discomfort of feeling himself a bit of a brute. As he lay awake night after night in his luxurious bed he wondered how he ever got there, what on earth had induced him to accept their invitation. He cursed his infernal rashness, his ungovernable optimism; he had spent half his life in jumping at conclusions and at things, and the other half in jumping away from them, however difficult the backward leap. He had jumped at the Colonel's invitation.

To tell the truth, he would have jumped at anybody's at the time.

When he came back from his travels he had found himself a stranger in his own country. In every place he touched he had left new friends most agreeably disconsolate at his departure; he supposed (rashly again) that the old ones would be overjoyed at his return. As it happened, his reception in England was not cold exactly, but temperate, like the climate, and Durant had found both a little trying after the fervors and ardors of the South. The poor fellow had spent his first week at home in hansoms, rushing passionately from one end of London to the other, looking up his various acquaintances. He was disappointed, not to say disgusted, with the result. (Maurice Durant was always disgusted when other people failed to come up to his expectations.) His best friends were out of town, his second best were only too much in it. Many of them had abjured art and taken to stiff collars and conventions. He called on these at their offices. They were all diabolically busy in the morning and insufferably polite in the afternoon; they had flung him a nod or a smile or a "Glad to see you back again, old fellow," and turned from him with a preoccupied air. He remembered them as they were seven years ago, when they were all Bohemians together. They had no manners, good or bad, in those days, those young men; they called you by strange names; they posed you in peculiar attitudes and made abominable caricatures of your noble profile; but they would lend or borrow a five-pound note with equal readiness; they would give you a supper and a shake-down at any time of the night or morning. Now it seemed they thought twice about asking you to dinner, if indeed they thought about it at all. So Durant had been pleasantly surprised at his godfather's genial letter. Why, bless his little heart, the old boy had actually pressed him to stay for a fortnight.

Well, how was he to get through that fortnight? He decided that he would not get through it at all. He kept himself awake devising schemes for his liberation; he would find some business to take him up to town to-morrow; or, if he could not find it, he would invent it; he would send himself a telegram. And then, against his will, his mind began running on Miss Tancred. As he had been possessed by the ideal, so now he was haunted by the reality; it had a horrible fascination for him. He wondered if Miss Tancred had ever been young; he wondered if Miss Tancred had ever made a joke; he wondered if Miss Tancred had ever been in love. This third idea was so incongruous, so impossible, that at last he found himself dallying with it for the mere extravagant humor of the thing.

If he had only been able to make himself agreeable to Miss Tancred—for Miss Tancred, if she had the will, had certainly the power to help him. The unhappy young man had made a careful inspection of the stables to see if there was a lingering chance for him there. The sleek bays that brought him from the station—impossible; the Colonel's cob, a creature too safe to be exciting; and—yes, there was Miss Tancred's mare. The sight of the fiery little beast dancing in her stall had affected him with an uncontrollable desire to ride her. The groom, not without sympathy, had interpreted his longing glances.

"There's a-many casts sheep's eyes at that there mare, sir; but it 'ud be as much as my place is worth, sir, to let you or any other gentleman get atop of her. Nobody lays a 'and on that annymal but Miss Tancred. Miss Tancred's orders, sir."

He might have known it. Miss Tancred was good for nothing, not even for the loan of a mount.

Miss Tancred seemed aware that nothing was expected from her, and kept conscientiously out of his way. He saw nothing of her from breakfast till dinnertime and the evening, when she appeared as his official partner in the game of whist. What became of her in the meanwhile he did not know; he could only vaguely conjecture. She seemed to vanish, to lose herself in the vast workings of Coton Manor, or in that vaster entity, the Colonel.

By the fourth day Durant's irritable mood had changed to resignation. If he could not altogether adopt Mrs. Fazakerly's attitude and smile pleasantly into the jaws of dulness, he consented to be bored to death with a certain melancholy grace.

He had made a dash for freedom; he had actually started first thing in the morning with his sketching block and easel, and was congratulating himself on his benignant chance, when, as he sneaked round a corner of the house, the Colonel stepped out upon him from a side window. There was one hope for him. Rain had fallen over night, and the little gentleman was as yet in his slippers; he was feeling the damp gravel like a fastidious cat.

"Ah-ha!" said he, in the tone of joyful encounter. "And what do you propose to do with yourself this morning?"

Durant looked at his host with a sad reproachful gaze from which all bitterness had departed. He had felt inclined to reply that he proposed to commit suicide; as it was, he only said he thought of trying to sketch something.

The Colonel seemed a little offended at the proposal; it certainly implied that Durant had more confidence in his own resources than in those of the house.

"So that's your fad, is it? I think we can do better for you than that."

And as Durant had calculated he skipped back into the house, and before he could return with his boots on, Durant, by another miracle of chance or his own cunning, had contrived his escape.

He made his way up a slight slope, whence he could see far over the landscape. What he had as yet seen was not inspiring, the heavy full-blown charm of the Midlands in July, lonely, without any of the poetry of loneliness. As he looked about him he realized again that he was in the heart of the country, the great, slow, passionless heart whose pulses are interminable hours. If you love Nature as Durant loved her, for her sex with its divine caprices, its madness and its mystery, you will be disappointed with Wickshire. In Wickshire Mother Nature is no dubious Aphrodite; she is indissolubly married to man, and behaves like an ordinary British matron, comely and correct. Durant saw in the immediate foreground a paddock dotted with young firs, each in a ring fence, beyond the paddock a field of buttercups shining with a polished gleam, beyond the buttercups a horizon of trees. Before him to the southeast, soaring above the roofs of Whithorn-in-Arden, a church spire pointed the way to heaven; beyond that, traveling low above the railway cutting, a thin line of smoke indicated the way into the world. Behind him were more trees; the green crescent of the woods with the white front of Coton Manor shining in their arms like a heavy, foolish face. He had no patience with the landscape, with this Nature trimmed and tamed, these shaven meadows and clean-cut hedges and little rectangular plantations. It was a typical English landscape, a landscape most unnecessarily draped, where the bosom of the hills was always covered, and the very elms were muffled to their feet. A landscape destitute of passion and sensual charm, a landscape like Miss Tancred.

Miss Tancred. He no longer felt any wild resentment against that poor girl; he had learned to judge her leniently. If you live with bores you inevitably become a bore; at the same time, he admitted that she was doing her best not to bore him. Meanwhile he transferred his hatred to her surroundings.

This young man had no philosophy beyond the general impression that the universe was under infinite obligations to be good to him, a belief that had found itself rather rudely shaken. He chose his view and pitched his easel and relieved himself by one deep, metaphysical, soul-satisfying curse at the devilry of things. Then he set to work, and with the instinct of a born painter he tried to find possibilities in the despised landscape. Before long he had discovered mystery in the woods that lifted their heavy rounded contours to the sky, gathered and massed and piled on one another like clouds; deep mystery in their green, green drenched with liquid and aerial gray, pierced by thick black veins and hollowed into caverns of darkness and blue dusk. And, though he knew that he was tying himself to the place by taking it seriously, in an hour's time he was absorbed and happy.

He was startled by a voice behind him. "Do you think that it's so very beautiful?"

He turned round. Miss Tancred stood looking over his shoulders, not at him nor at his sketch, but at the distant prospect.

"It's—nice and open," he answered absently.

"Open? Wait till you've lived in it. To me it's like living with all the doors shut."

"Too many woods, perhaps. And yet there's always a charm about a wooded country; it's English."

"Yes, and, like everything English, it's much too serious, too conventional, too"—she paused for her epithet—"too disgustingly rich."

He was more startled than ever; she had put his own feeling about it into words.

"And then it's so painfully proper and respectable. Look at those ridiculous trees in their petticoats. English to a degree."

"Ah!—if you've been abroad——"

"I haven't been abroad."

"Proud insular boast!"

"I wasn't boasting. I was stating a fact."

"Well, you've some cause to boast. Not to have been abroad is distinction nowadays."

"If it comes to that I've never been out of this county, except to London now and then. You wouldn't think it."

He smiled, for it happened to be precisely what he had thought. It explained her somehow; he recognized in Miss Tancred the incurable provincial. To be sure, her sentiments were somewhat at variance with her character, an inconsistency not unusual in woman. All he said was, "It is a little extraordinary." He was wondering when she was going to go. She did not go.

"I'm glad you've discovered something to do here. It must be so deadly dull."

He found relief in ambiguity. "I am never dull"; adding irrelevantly, "it's a glorious view."

She brightened visibly. "If you like I can show you a better one than this. It's not so very far;"—she hesitated—"we might go to-morrow, perhaps; though it wouldn't be very amusing, I'm afraid."

Again he felt a touch of compunction. She had so clearly grasped the situation; she was so evidently sorry for him, so conscientious, even if mistaken, in her efforts to make amends, that he found her positively pathetic. He answered humbly that he would be delighted if she would be so good.

Then, conscientiously again, she left him. He watched her tall figure departing with energetic strides, and he decided that Miss Tancred was not so bad out of doors, but that she needed a large background.

The next morning he had the grace to remind her of her promise. They started at a rapid pace. Durant left the paraphernalia of his art behind him by way of intimating delicately that the hour was hers. Miss Tancred was evidently prepared for vigorous walking. She was dressed suitably and inoffensively in brown holland. She took him up a long, gradually rising hill to where a group of firs stood on an isolated mound.

Here Miss Tancred paused, with tilted profile, sniffing the ambient air. "This," she said, "is the highest point in the county; there is always a fresh breeze here; to-day you can smell the sea."

"Impossible; we must be right in the very center of England, about a hundred miles from the nearest coast."

"You can hear it, then. Shut your eyes and listen."

He obeyed. The wind moved and the firs gave out their voice. He opened his eyes and glanced at Miss Tancred. She was leaning up against a fir; her eyes looked straight past him into the distance; the wind had loosened the hair about her forehead; her lips were parted, her eyes shone; there was an eagerness in her face he had not yet seen there. It was as if a dead woman had been suddenly made alive before him. She was gazing and listening.

"If you've never been out of Wickshire, where have you heard the sea?"

She answered curtly, "I don't know where I've heard it"; then added, as if by way of apology for her manner, "Do you like it?"

"Immensely."

"Then you must come up whenever you want to. You can always be alone here."

She spoke as if she were giving him the freedom of her private sanctuary.

"Have you any sketches of those places you've been to abroad?"

"Sketches? Any amount."

"Have you brought them with you?"

He blushed. He had brought many sketches in the hope of showing them to a wealthy godfather and an admiring god-sister.

"Some—a few."

"I wish you'd show them to me."

"I shall be delighted." He blushed again, this time for pleasure. With the desire to bestow a little of it, he asked rashly, "Do you sketch, Miss Tancred? I saw some water-colors——"

"They were my mother's. I do nothing."

"Oh, I see." (They were going home now.) "I was wondering what on earth you found to do here."

"I? A great many things. Business chiefly. My father is secretary to the Primrose League. I write all his letters for him."

"That's one way of being secretary to the Primrose League."

"The usual way, I think. Secretaries generally have under-secretaries, haven't they? My father dictates."

Durant smiled. He could see him doing it. "What else does Colonel Tancred do?"

"He does no end of things. All the business of the estate; and he speaks, at meetings, everywhere. He has lectured——"

It was pathetic, her eagerness to vindicate his intellect, to record his achievements, to convince Durant that she was proud of him, not to let him see.

For the rest of the way she was silent, the light died out of her eyes with every turning, and by the time they had reached Coton Manor Miss Tancred was herself again.

At whist that evening nobody was pleased. The Colonel looked sulky and offended, possibly at Durant's disaffection; Durant was moodier than ever, and even Mrs. Fazakerly seemed depressed. Miss Tancred remained imperturbable and indifferent, she won every trick without turning a hair, but when it was all over she left the table abruptly. She was visibly distressed. Mrs. Fazakerly gazed after her with an affectionate stare. She turned to Durant.

"For goodness' sake," she whispered, "say something nice to her."

For the life of him Durant could think of nothing nice to say, beyond congratulating her on her success in the accursed game.

Mrs. Fazakerly chimed in, "With or without a partner Miss Tancred wins!"

"I always win. So, I imagine, does Mr. Durant."

"And why should I always win?"

"You? You win because you care nothing about the game."

V

If you had told Durant that the end of his first week would find him sitting under the firs in lonely conversation with Miss Tancred, he would have smiled at you incredulously. Yet so it was. Her fear of him, if fear it had been, and not indifference, was wearing away. She seemed anxious to make friends with him if possible in a less painfully conscientious manner, and he, on his side, was beginning to tolerate her. In fact, he went so far as to own that, if it had not been for that ridiculous idea of his, he would have tolerated her from the first. It was not her fault if he had been fool enough to fall in love with her before sight or at half-sight. She had disappointed him (hence his natural disgust); but the thing had happened many times before in his experience. After all, he had had no grounds for his passionate belief in Miss Tancred beyond the argument from defect, the vague feeling that Destiny owed him amends for her intolerable shortcomings. But Durant's mind was too sane and versatile to be long concerned with passion yet unborn. He was not one of those pitiable sentimentalists who imagine that every petticoat, or at any rate every well-cut skirt, conceals a probable ideal. Some women of his acquaintance had defined, not to say denounced, him as a consummate and dangerous flirt, but these were not the most discerning of their sex. Durant described himself more correctly as a sympathetic, though dispassionate, observer of womankind. In other words, he was not a vulgar flirt; he flirted with understanding.

An understanding without flirtation was springing up between him and Miss Tancred. In this God-forsaken place they were comrades in boredom and isolation. She had said nothing, but in some impalpable yet intimate way he knew that she, too, was bored, that the Colonel bored her. The knowledge lay between them unnamed, untouched by either of them; they passed it by, she in her shame and he in his delicacy, with eyes averted from it and from each other. It was as if the horror had crept out through some invisible, intangible doorway of confession; unseen, unapproached, it remained their secret and the source of their mutual pity. Meanwhile she no longer avoided him; on the contrary, she showed an unmistakable liking for his society. She would come while he was sketching and sit beside him for five minutes, fifteen minutes, half an hour, remaining silent, or merely exchanging a few frank words with him before she went her way. In these matters she was gifted with an unerring tact; without a hint on Durant's part she seemed to know to a nicety how far her presence was agreeable or otherwise.

This time he had gone up the hill after dinner, and had found her sitting in the accustomed place. They had been alone that evening, for the Colonel was dining intimately with Mrs. Fazakerly. That lady, with a refined friendliness that did her credit, had refrained from including Miss Tancred and Durant in the invitation, thereby insuring them one evening's immunity from whist. Durant could make no better use of his freedom than by spending it alone out of doors; it seemed that Miss Tancred had done the same with hers.

She was sitting there on the edge of the mound, clasping her knees and gazing into the distance. He apologized for his intrusion, and she waked from her abstraction with a dreamy air, making a visible effort to take him in and realize him. But, though she said simply that she was glad he had come, the effect of his coming was to plunge her into deeper abstraction. They sat for some time without speaking. Miss Tancred had a prodigious faculty for silence, and Durant let her have her way, being indeed indifferent to Miss Tancred's way.

At last she spoke.

"It's odd how some people take Nature," said she; "for instance, Mrs. Fazakerly says she loves it because it's so soothing. She might just as well say she liked listening to an orchestra because it sends her to sleep. She can't love it for its own sake."

"You'll think me horribly rude, but I doubt if any woman can. That is the one thing a woman is incapable of—a pure passion for Nature, a really disinterested love of life. It's an essentially masculine sentiment."

"I don't at all agree with you."

"Don't you? To begin with, it argues more vitality than most women have got. They take to it as a substitute for other things; and to be content with it would mean that they had exhausted, outlived the other things."

"What other things?"

She was studying every line of his young, repugnant face, and Durant was a little embarrassed by her steady gaze.

"Other interests, other feelings—whatever it is that women do care for most."

"I don't know anything about women."

Her remark might have borne various interpretations, either that she knew nothing about herself, that she despised her own sex too much to include herself in it, or that she had tacitly adopted Durant's attitude, which seemed to leave her altogether outside of the discussion. He talked to her unconsciously, without any desire to please, as if he assumed that she expected as little from him as he from her. She never reminded him that she was a woman. It would have been absurd if she had insisted on it, and whatever she was Miss Tancred was not absurd.

She went on calmly, "So I can't say what they care for most; can you?"

"You know my opinion. I wanted yours."

"Mine isn't worth much. But I should say that in these things no two women were alike. You talk as if they were all made of the same stuff."

"So they are inside—in their souls, I mean."

"There's more unlikeness in their souls, I imagine, than there ever is in their bodies; and you wouldn't say an ugly woman was quite the same as a pretty one, would you?"

"Yes; in the obvious sense that they are both women. I admit that there may be an ugliness that cancels sex, to say nothing of a beauty that transcends it; but in either case the woman is unique."

"And if the woman, why not her soul?"

"Because—because—because there is a certain psychical quality that is eternal and unchangeable; because the soul is the seat of the cosmic difference we call sex. In man or woman that is the one unalterable fact—the last reality."

He spoke coldly, brutally almost, as if he, like herself, was blind to the pathos of her ignored and rejected womanhood.

She seemed to be thinking that last point over.

"Yes," she said, "I'm glad you came. I believe you can help me."

"I shall be delighted if I can."

"What do you think of Mrs. Fazakerly?"

Durant was a little taken aback by the suddenness of the question.

"What should I think?"

"I—I hardly know."

She knitted her black brows till they almost touched, and propped her chin with her hand, as if she were oppressed with the weight of her own thoughts. It struck him that her provincial mind entertained an unreasonable suspicion of the consummate little widow, a woman's jealousy of the superior creature compact of sex; and a sense of justice made him inclined to defend Mrs. Fazakerly. Besides, he liked Mrs. Fazakerly; she, at any rate, was not a bore.

"She's a very amusing woman, and I should say she was an uncommonly good sort, too."

To his surprise her face brightened. "Should you? Should you say that she had a good heart?"

"Really, Miss Tancred, I can't see into Mrs. Fazakerly's heart, but I wouldn't mind betting——"

"That she's good? And affectionate? And straight?"

"Straight as a die."

"And honest?"

"Oh, Lord, yes." He wondered whatever primitive meaning she attached to the word.

"Well, if you think that——"

"Mind you, my opinion may be utterly worthless."

"No, no. It's just the very sort of opinion I want."

"Why should it be?"

"Because it's the opinion of a man of the world. Mrs. Fazakerly's a woman of the world, so I thought you'd understand her. I don't."

"I've known her exactly a week, and you?"

"Two years. But then I don't observe character, and you do. And yet I have an intuition."

"Then by all means trust your intuition."

"That's it—I daren't. The truth is, I'm afraid of myself—my motives."

"Your motives are not yourself."

"Aren't they? If it wasn't for them I should be certain. I see she's a dear little woman, and I know that I like her."

"Then, for Heaven's sake, go on liking her; it's the best thing you can do."

"Isn't it rather horrid to like a person just because they may be of use to you?"

"Not in the least. You were pleased to say I might be of use to you, and I'm sure I hope you like me."

"Yes, I like you; but I think I like you for yourself. I'm afraid of liking Mrs. Fazakerly from the wrong motive."

"You can't like her from the wrong motive. You can't have a motive at all, if it comes to that. You might have a motive for killing her, or for cultivating her acquaintance, but not for liking her. You either like a person or not, and there's an end of it."

"If your motives are not yourself, what are they?"

"Lord only knows. Forces, tendencies, that determine your actions, which are the very smallest part of you. What you call intuitions, your feelings—hate (I should say you were a good hater), and love——" (her eyes, which had been fixed on his, dropped suddenly), "don't wait for motives. They're the only spontaneous things about you, the only realities you know." (And of these he had said just now that the last reality was sex. It was his point of view, a point from which it appeared that for him Miss Tancred had no existence.) "Of course there may be some transcendental sense in which they're not realities at all; but as far as we are concerned they're not only real, but positively self-existent."

As he thus discoursed, Durant blinked critically at the sky, while his pencil described an airy curve on the infinite blue, symbolizing the grace, the fluency, and the vastness of his thought.

"They, if you like, are you. It's very odd that you don't seem to trust them more."

She had turned from him till her face was a thin outline against the sky. She had a fine head, and carried it well, too; and at the moment the twilight dealt tenderly with her dress and face; it purified the tragic pallor of her forehead and all but defined that vague, haunting suggestion of a possible charm. Durant had it a moment ago—there—then. Ah! now he had lost it.

"I daren't trust my feelings. I can't. There are too many of them. They won't work the same way. They're all fighting against each other."

"Then let them fight it out, and let the strongest win."

"If I only knew which was the strongest."

"You'll know some day. In the long run, you see, the strongest is bound to win."

"Not necessarily. There might be a number of little ones that all together would be stronger still."

"Oh, kill off the little beggars one at a time—go for them, throttle them, wring their necks, jump on them; and if they wriggle, stamp!"

"You can't jump on your own shadow. You can't stamp on them if they're you."

He groaned. Miss Tancred was getting too subtle; it was like sitting in the desert and playing at metaphysics with the Sphinx. He had had about enough of it. He rose, stretching his long limbs, and the action suggested the hideous tension of his intellect.

"You must let yourself go, Miss Tancred—let yourself go!" And he laughed at his own vision of Miss Tancred; Miss Tancred insurgent, Miss Tancred flamboyant, Miss Tancred voluptuous, volatile, victorious!

And then a thought struck him.

He turned and saw Miss Tancred still sitting motionless, nursing her knees; her pure inflexible profile glimmered against the dusk.

VI

Durant had an idea, or rather two ideas, one purely comic, the other comic or tragic, according to the way you took it. He first of all discovered that the Colonel was laying siege to the heart of Mrs. Fazakerly, and at the same time conducting his campaign with an admirable discretion. There never was a little Colonel of militia so anxious to avoid committing himself. Not that the event could be considered doubtful for a moment. Measuring all risks, it was in the highest degree incredible that he would be called upon to suffer the indignity of repulse.

There was nothing extraordinary in that. To be sure, on the first face and blush of it, Durant had wondered how on earth Mrs. Fazakerly could tolerate the Colonel; but, when he came to think of it, there was no reason why she should not go a great deal farther than that. The Colonel's dullness would not depress her, she having such an eternal spring of gaiety in herself. She might even find it "soothing," like the neighboring landscape. And as she loved her laughter, it was not improbable that she loved its cause. Then she had the inestimable advantage of knowing the worst of him; her intelligent little eyes had seen him as he was; she could lay a soft finger on all his weak spots. There was this to be said for the Colonel, that he was all on the surface; there was nothing, positively nothing, behind him. Besides, Mrs. Fazakerly was not exacting. She had not lived forty years in the world without knowing the world, and no doubt she knew it too well to ask very much from it. Then the fact remained that the Colonel was an immaculate gentleman, immaculately dressed, and he was not the only item in the program. Coton Manor would be thrown in, and there were other agreeable accessories. Mrs. Fazakerly's tastes were all of the expensive sort, and her ambition aimed at something vaster than the mere adornment of her own person. In her household she displayed a talent, not to say a genius, for luxurious order. But a little dinner at the cottage opposite the lodge gates had convinced Durant that this elegance of hers was of a fragile and perishable sort. The peculiar genius of Mrs. Fazakerly clamored for material and for boundless scope. It could not do itself justice under two thousand a year at the very least. As things stood its exuberance was hampered both as to actual space (her drawing-room was only eighteen feet by twelve) and as to the more glorious possibilities that depend on income. At Coton Manor she would have a large field and a free hand. Heaven only knew what Mrs. Fazakerly's mind was made up of; but quite evidently it was made up.

So far so good; but there was less certainty as to the Colonel's attitude. As yet nothing was to be seen, so to speak, but his attitudes, which indeed were extremely entertaining. The little gentleman was balancing himself very deftly on the edge of matrimony, and Durant watched with a fearful interest the rash advance and circumspect retreat, the oscillating hair's-breadth pause, the perilous swerve, and desperate contortion of recovery.

Durant felt for him; he had so much to lose. Under Miss Tancred the working of his household was already brought to such exquisite perfection that any change must be for the worse. He had found out what became of Miss Tancred in her mysterious disappearances. As far as he could see the business of the estate was entirely superintended by the lady. He came across her in earnest conversation with the gardener; he met her striding across the fields with the farm-bailiff; he had seen her once on her black mare inspecting some buildings on the farthest limit of the property, the obsequious builder taking notes of her directions. She was obviously a capable woman, a woman of affairs. He presumed that these matters, with her household and secretarial work, filled up her days; he knew too well that whist accounted for her evenings. He did not know if there was any margin, any dim intellectual region, out of time, out of space, where Miss Tancred's soul was permitted to disport itself in freedom; she seemed to exist merely in order to supply certain deficiencies in the Colonel's nature. Mrs. Fazakerly had once remarked that Frida was "her father's right hand." It would have been truer to have said that she was right hand and left hand, and legs and brain to the student of meteorology. There had evidently been some tacit division of labor, by which she did all the thinking and all the work while he did the talking. Thus, to continue Durant's line of argument, the Colonel's comfort was secured to him without an effort on his part (otherwise it would not have been comfort); and when all was said and done Mrs. Fazakerly was a most indifferent player of whist.

Then there was the Colonel's age. Durant knew a man who had taught himself the 'cello at fifty-five. But the Colonel was not that sort of adventurous dilettante. Neither was Mrs. Fazakerly exactly like a violoncello, she was more like a piano; while Miss Tancred, from the Colonel's point of view, was like a hurdy-gurdy. Not a difficult instrument the hurdy-gurdy; you have only to keep on turning a handle to make it go. To be sure, you can get rather more out of a piano; but pianos are passionate things, ungovernable and slippery to the touch. The Colonel was fond of the humbler instrument that gave him the sense of accomplishment without the effort, the joys of the maestro without his labor and his pain.

He was in a double dilemma. If he had to choose between Miss Tancred and Mrs. Fazakerly his choice would never be made. On the other hand, if he decided for both, his comfort would be more insecure than ever. There would be jealousy to a dead certainty; in all mixed households that was where the shoe pinched. To pursue that vulgar figure, the Colonel's daughter was like a pair of old and easy shoes made by a good maker, a maker on whom he could rely; a wife would be like new boots ordered rashly from an unknown firm. They would be his best pair, no doubt, but your best pair is generally the tightest. He had some trying years before him; and well, a man does not put on new boots for a long uphill scramble.

So the Colonel's breast was torn with internecine warfare, desire battling with habit, and habit with desire. No wonder if in that awful struggle the fate of one insignificant individual counted for nothing. Frida Tancred never had counted.

Durant admitted that his imagination was apt to work in somewhat violent colors, and that there might be a point of view from which the Colonel would tone down into a very harmless and even pathetic figure; for Mrs. Fazakerly he had no terrors. But there was the girl. It was hard to say exactly what he had done to her. Apparently he had taken her soul while it was young and squeezable, and had crushed it till it fitted into all his little habits; he had silenced her heart with commonplaces, and dulled her intellect with his incomprehensible fatuity. And through it all he had been the most innocent little gentleman alive. Oh, yes, he was pathetic enough in his way. He himself was only an instrument in the hands of irrepressible Nature who couples wild soul with tame, hot blood with cold blood, genius with folly, and makes her sport of their unhappy offspring. And Nature was playing a glorious game with Frida Tancred now.

That was Durant's second idea; the thought that had struck him so unpleasantly after his last interview with her. To put it coarsely, he had a suspicion, a fear, that Miss Tancred was beginning to fall in love with him. He might have known that it would happen. It was just the sort of damnable irony most likely to pursue that unfortunate woman. There could be no mistake about it; he knew it; he knew it by many subtle and infallible signs. Somewhere he had heard or read that no nice man ever knows these things. That was all nonsense; or, if it had any meaning at all, it could only mean that no nice man ever shows that he knows. The fact remained that if he had loved her he would not have known.

For the disagreeable circumstance itself he called Heaven to witness that he had not been to blame. He had been ready to do his part, to fall down and worship the unknown Miss Tancred, the Miss Tancred of his vision. The hour had been ripe, the situation also, and the mood; the woman alone had failed him. Heaven knew he had done nothing to make her care for him. True, he had given her a certain amount of his society; since she found a pleasure in it he would have been a brute to deny her that poor diversion, that miserable consolation for the tedium of her existence. Perhaps he had tried too much to be sympathetic; but who again would not have tried? He had given her nothing to go upon. What had he ever given her beyond some infinitesimal portion of his valuable time, at the most some luminous hour of insight, or perhaps a little superfluous piece of good advice that was of no possible use to himself? For these things she had given herself—given herself away. How ludicrously pathetic some women are! You do them some kindness on an afternoon when you have nothing better to do and they reward you with the devotion of eternity; for they have no sense of proportion. The awkward thing is that it lays you under an eternal obligation to do something or other for them, you don't know exactly what; an intolerable position for a nice man.

So Durant's first feelings were surprise, annoyance, and a certain shame. Then he began to feel a little flattered, being perfectly sure that Frida Tancred was not the woman to give herself away to any ordinary man. He was the first, the only one, the one in a thousand, who had broken down her implacable reserve. He ended by feeling positively proud of his power to draw out the soul of a creature so reticent and passionless and strange.

His time was not yet up, and the question was: Ought he to go or stay? He would have found or invented some pretext, and left long ago, but that in him the love of pleasure brought with it an equal fear of giving pain. It would give pain to the Colonel (who, after all, had received him kindly) if he went before his time. By the art of graceful evasion Durant had escaped many such an old gentleman as the Colonel; but when it came to doing the really disagreeable and ungraceful thing it seemed that his courage failed him.

There was no doubt in Miss Tancred's mind on the delicate point. She was even capable of making a sacrifice to keep him.

He met her one morning riding on her black mare. Miss Tancred looked well on horseback; the habit, the stiff collar, the hard hat, were positively becoming, perhaps because they left no room for decorative caprice. She drew up, and Durant ran his hand lovingly over the warm shining neck and shoulders of the mare. Miss Tancred's eyes followed the movements of his hand, then they traveled up his tall figure and down again.

"Your legs are rather long," said she, "and you're heavier than I am; but you can ride her if you like."

"I shouldn't think of it," said Durant, magnificently mendacious. He had been very early enlightened as to his chances with the mare; but the temptation to ride her had never died in him.

"Unless you ride," she continued, "there is nothing for you to do here. Then you'll be bored to death; and then, I suppose, you'll go?"

"And bury myself? And then?"

"You won't be buried long. You'll rise again fast enough, somewhere else."

"And what if I do go and do all these things?"

"Well, I don't want you to go—and do them."

She moved on, and he walked beside her, his hand on the mare's mane.

"I can't think why you've stopped so long. Every morning since you came I've been expecting you to go. I thought you'd say your father was dying, or that your partner was ill, and you had urgent business in town. It's what they all do. Do you know, we've asked no end of people down, and they never stay more than three days. They always get letters or telegrams, or something. No, I'm wrong; one man stopped a week. He sprained his ankle the first day, and left before he was fit to travel."

(Durant laughed. She really amused him, this ingénue of thirty, with the face of a Sphinx and the conversation of a child.)

"And they never come again. There's something about the place they can not stand."

They were walking leisurely together in full sight of Coton Manor. She gazed at it anxiously.

"Does it—does it look so very awful?"

"Well—architecturally speaking—no, of course it doesn't."

"Ah, you're getting used to it. Do you know you'll have been here a fortnight next Monday?"

About the corners of her mouth and eyes there played a dawning humor.

"Come, that sounds as if you did want me to go."

"No it doesn't. How could it? If you don't believe me, here's the proof—you can ride Polly every day if you'll stop another week."

Another week! Most decidedly she had a sense of the monstrous humor of the thing. If she could see it that way she was saved. He had not the heart to kill that happy mood by a coarse refusal; it would have been like grinding his heel on some delicate, struggling thing just lifting its head into life.

Besides, she had really touched him. His legs, as Miss Tancred had observed, were a little long, otherwise Durant had the soul and the physique of a tamer of horses. The sight of Polly filled him with desire that was agony and rapture; he saw himself controlling the splendid animal; he could feel her under him, bounding, quivering, pulsating, he himself made one with every movement of her nervous, passionate body. It was too much. Beside that large, full-blooded pleasure, his scruples showed colorless and light as air.

That happened on a Friday. He had only two clear days more. He found himself seriously considering the desirability of staying over Monday.

VII

As ill-luck would have it Saturday was a wet day, and Durant, instead of riding the mare, was wandering aimlessly about the house. He had finished all the books in his bedroom and was badly in want of more. He knocked up against Frida Tancred in a dark passage, apologized, and confided in her. As usual she was sorry for him.

"I'm afraid we haven't many books; but you'll find some of mine in here." She opened a door as she spoke, and passed on.

Durant found himself in a room which he had not yet investigated. It was somewhat bare as to furniture; it struck strange to his senses as if he had stumbled into another world; in some occult way it preserved a tradition of travel and adventure. The bookcase he came to inspect was flanked by a small cabinet of coins and curios—Italian, Grecian, Egyptian, and Japanese; the walls were hung with bad landscapes interspersed with maps.

One of these, an uncolored map of Europe, attracted his attention. It was drawn by hand in Indian ink, a red line and accompanying arrow heads followed the coast and strung together such inland places as were marked upon the blank. The line started from Southampton and reached the Mediterranean by the Bay of Biscay; it shot inland to the great cities of Italy, returning always to the sea. It skirted Greece, wound in and out of the Ionian islands, touched at Constantinople, ringed the Bosporus and the Black Sea, wheeled to Moscow and St. Petersburg, and then swept wildly up the north of Russia to Archangel and the Arctic Ocean; thence it followed the Scandinavian coast-line, darted to Iceland, and dipped southward again to Britain by way of the Hebrides. Off Queenstown the arrowheads pointed west, winged for the Atlantic. He found the same red line again on a blank map of Asia heading for India by China and Japan. An adventurous, erratic line, whose stages were now the capitals of the world, and now some unknown halting-place in the immeasurable waste. And what on earth did it mean? Was it the record of an actual journey, or some yet untraveled visionary route?

But it was not these things alone that gave the room its fantastic and alien air. What dominated the place was the portrait of a woman, a woman who had Frida's queer accented eyebrows and Frida's eyes, with some more fiery and penetrating quality of her own, something more inimitably fine and foreign. The portrait (which struck Durant as decidedly clever) was signed by some unknown Russian artist, and he recognized it as that of Frida's mother, the lady of the landscapes. He wondered if it was the demon of ennui that had driven poor Mrs. Tancred to the practice of her terrible art, if she had had a spite against Coton Manor, which she vented by covering its walls with bad pictures.

He turned to the bookcase. Frida's library offered him an amazing choice of polyglot fiction. It contained nearly all Balzac and the elder Dumas, Tolstoi and Turgenieff, Björnsen and Ibsen, besides a great deal of miscellaneous literature, chiefly Russian and Norwegian. Here and there he came across some odd volumes of modern Greek. A whole shelf was devoted to books of travel; grammars and dictionaries made up the rest. Miss Tancred's taste in books was a little outlandish, but it was singularly virile and robust. He had been prepared to suspect her of a morbid pedantry, having known more than one lady in her desperate case who found consolation in the dead languages. But Miss Tancred betrayed no ghoulish appetites; if she had a weakness for tongues, she had also the good taste to prefer them living.

Durant was so much absorbed in these observations that he did not hear her come into the room.

"Have you found anything you can read?" she asked.

"I've found a great deal that I can't read. You do go in strong for languages."

"That's nothing; my mother was a Russian, and Russians know every language better than their own. I don't know more than seven besides mine. And I can only read and write them. They will never be any use to me."

"How can you tell what may be of use to you? Even Mrs. Fazakerly, or I?" Durant was anxious to give a playful turn to that remarkable discussion they once had; he thus hoped to set the tone for all future conversations with Miss Tancred. "I admit that you can't live on languages, they are not exactly safety-valves for the emotions; nobody can swear in more than three of them at a time. I think music's better. Instead of playing whist you ought to play Chopin."

"It's better to play whist well than Chopin badly."

"Better to rule in Hades than fool in the other place, you think? Miss Tancred, you are as proud as Lucifer."

"I don't see that any good is got by murdering the masters."

"It saves some women from worse crimes, I believe. Why didn't you take to sketching, then? That only kills time."

Miss Tancred was splendid in her scorn. "Kill time with painting bad pictures? I'd rather time killed me."

Ah, that was what he liked about her. She had not revenged herself on Nature by making hideous caricatures of Nature's face; she did not draw in milk-and-water colors, and she did not strum. She had none of the exasperating talents, the ludicrous ambitions of the amateur; she was altogether innocent of intellectual vanity.

"That reminds me," said she, "that I've seen nothing of those wonderful sketches you said you'd show me."

He had clean forgotten the things. Well, he could hardly do better than exhibit them; it would keep her quiet, and save him from perilous personalities.

At first he thought the exhibition was going to give her more pain than pleasure. He sat beside her, and she took the sketches from him gingerly, one by one, and looked at them without a word. A visible nervousness possessed her; her pulses clamored, she seemed to struggle with her own unsteady breathing. Once, when in the transfer of a drawing her hand brushed against his, she drew it back again as if it had dashed against a flame. Durant had noticed once or twice before that she avoided his touch.

Suddenly she awoke out of the agony of her consciousness. One picture had held her longer than the rest.

"It's beautiful—beautiful," she murmured.

"I'm glad you like it," said Durant, pleased at her first sign of admiration.

"Oh, I don't mean your picture—I mean the place."

"It's not a very good picture perhaps——"

"I don't know whether it's good or bad; it seems to me rather bad, though I can't say what's wrong with it. It looks unfinished."

"It is unfinished, but that's not what's wrong with it. These are better—better painting."

His hand brushed hers in vain this time. She remained absorbed. "I don't care two straws about the painting; they may be masterpieces for all I know; it's that—that stretch of sand licked by the sea, and the grass trodden down by the wind—the agony and beauty and desolation of it——" She laid it down unwillingly, and took the others from his hand.

"Oh, what's this?"

"A wall in Suza."

"I've never seen anything like that. The light seems to be moving—soaking into it and streaming out again. It looks as if it would burn if you touched it."

The artist in him laughed for pure pleasure. "It's all very well, you know, but they must be infernally good if they make you feel like that."

"They may be. Have you seen all these things, or have you done any of them out of your head?"

"Seen them, of course. I never paint 'out of my head'; I haven't enough imagination."

"Show me more places where you've been. Tell me about them. You might have done that before."

He obeyed, giving her his experience, his richest and his best; he drew for her scenes and things, not in their crude and temporary form, but as they lived for him and for his art, idealized, eternalized by the imagination that sees them as parts of the immortal whole; and yet vivid, individual, drenched with the peculiar color that made them equally and forever one with the soul of Maurice Durant. She hardly seemed to heed, hardly seemed to listen or to follow. She looked as if hearing were already absorbed in sight.

Durant put a small oil painting into her hand. He had kept his finest to the last. "If you're fond of the sea that may please you."