The Patricians

XX

IT was about noon, when, accompanied by Courtier, she rode forth.

The sou’westerly spell — a matter of three days — had given way before radiant stillness; and merely to be alive was to feel emotion. At a little stream running by the moor-side under the wild stone man, the riders stopped their horses, just to listen and inhale the day. The far sweet chorus of life was tuned to a most delicate rhythm; not one of those small mingled pipings of streams and the lazy air, of beasts, men, birds, and bees, jarred out too harshly through the garment of sound enwrapping the earth. It was noon — the still moment — but this hymn to the sun, after his too long absence, never for a moment ceased to be murmured. And the earth wore an under-robe of scent, delicious, very finely woven of the young fern-sap, heather-buds, larch trees not yet odorless, gorse just going brown, drifted wood-smoke, and the breath of hawthorn. Above earth’s twin vestments of sound and scent, the blue enwrapping scarf of air, that wistful wide champaign, was spanned only by the wings of Freedom.

After a long drink of the day, the riders mounted almost in silence to the very top of the moor. There again they sat quite still on their horses, examining the prospect. Far away to south and east lay the sea, plainly visible. Two small groups of wild ponies were slowly grazing toward each other, on the hillside below.

Courtier said in a low voice, ‘“Thus will I sit and sing, with thee in my arms; watching our two herds mingle together, and below us the far, divine, cerulean sea.’" And, after another silence, looking steadily in Barbara’s face, he added, ‘Lady Barbara, I am afraid this is the last time we shall be alone together. While I have the chance, therefore, I must do homage. You will always be the fixed star for my worship. But your rays are too bright; I shall worship from afar. From your seventh heaven, therefore, look down on me with kindly eyes, and do not quite forget me.’

Under that speech, so strangely compounded of irony and fervor, Barbara sat very still, with glowing cheeks.

‘Yes,’ said Courtier, ‘only an immortal must embrace a goddess. Outside the purlieus of Authority I shall sit cross-legged, and prostrate myself three times a day.’

But Barbara answered nothing.

‘ In the early morning,’ went on Courtier, ‘leaving the dark and dismal homes of Freedom, I shall look toward the Temples of the Great; there with the eye of faith I shall see you.’

He stopped, for Barbara’s lips were moving.

‘Don’t hurt me, please.’

Courtier leaned over, took her hand, and put it to his lips. ‘We will now ride on.’

That night at dinner, Lord Dennis, seated opposite his grand-niece, was struck by her appearance.

‘A very beautiful child,’ he thought; ‘a most lovely young creature!’

She was placed between Courtier and Lord Harbinger. And the old man’s still keen eyes carefully watched those two. Though attentive to their neighbors on the other side, they were both of them keeping the corner of an eye on Barbara, and on each other. The thing was transparent to Lord Dennis, and a smile settled in that nest of gravity between his white peaked beard and moustaches. But he waited, the instinct of a fisherman bidding him to neglect no piece of water, till he saw the child silent and in repose, and watched carefully to see what would rise. For all that she was calmly and healthily eating, her eyes stole round at Courtier. This quick look seemed to Lord Dennis perturbed, as though something were exciting her. Then Harbinger spoke, and she turned to answer him. Her face was calm enough now, faintly smiling, a little eager, provocative in its joy of life. It made Lord Dennis think of his own youth. What a splendid couple! If Babs married young Harbinger there would not be a finer pair in all England.

His eyes traveled back to Courtier. Manly enough! They called him dangerous! There was a look of effervescence, carefully corked down — might perhaps be attractive to a youngster! To his essentially practical and sober mind, a type like Courtier was puzzling. He liked the look of him, but distrusted his ironic expression, and that appearance of blood to the head. Fellow — no doubt — that would ride off on his ideas, humanitarian! To Lord Dennis there was something queer about humanitarians. They offended, perhaps, his dry and precise sense of form. They were always looking out for cruelty or injustice; seemed delighted when they found it; swelled up, as it were, when they scented it; and as there was a good deal about, were never quite of normal size. Men who lived for ideas — to one for whom facts sufficed, a little worrying.

But the sight of Barbara again brought him back to actuality. Was the possessor of that crown of hair and those divine young shoulders the little Babs who had ridden with him in the Row? Time was the Devil! Her eyes were searching for something; and following the direction of her glance, Lord Dennis found himself observing Milton. What a difference between those two! Both, no doubt, deep in that great trouble of youth, which sometimes, as he knew too well, lasted on almost to old age. It was a curious look the child was giving her brother, as if asking him to help her.

Lord Dennis had seen in his day many young creatures leave the shelter of their freedom and enter the house of the great lottery; many who had drawn a prize and thereat lost forever the coldness of life; many, too, the light of whose eyes had faded behind the shutters of that house, having drawn a blank. The thought of ‘little’ Babs on the threshold of that inexorable saloon, filled him with an eager sadness; and the sight of the two men watching for her, waiting for her, like hunters, was to him distasteful.

With the prophetic certainty which comes sometimes to the old, he felt sure that one or other of these two she would take; and in his jealousy he did not want her to take either. But if she must, then, for Heaven’s sake, let her not go running risks, and ranging as far as that red fellow of middle age, who might have ideas, but had no pedigree; let her stick to youth and her own order, and marry the young man, d——n him, who looked like a Greek god, of the wrong period, having grown a moustache.

You could n’t eat your cake and have it! She had said something the other evening about those two and the different lives they lived? Yes, some romantic notion or other was working in her! Adventure! Ah! but you must have it in your blood, like that glorious Anita of Garibaldi’s!

Again he looked at Courtier. The sort that rode slap-bang at everything. All very well! But Babs! No, no! There was another side to tittle Babs. She would want more, or was it less, than just a life of sleeping under the stars for the man she loved, and the cause he fought for. She would want pleasure, and not too much effort, and presently a little power; not the uncomfortable after-fame of a woman who went through fire and water; but the fame and power of beauty and prestige. This fancy, if it were a fancy, was nothing but the romanticism of a young girl. For the sake of a passing shadow, to give up substance? It would n’t do! And again Lord Dennis fixed his shrewd glance on his great-niece. Those eyes, that smile! Yes! She would grow out of this — and take the Greek god, the dying Gaul —whichever that young man was!

XXI

It was not till the very morning of polling day itself that Courtier left Monkland Court. He had already suffered for several days from a bad conscience; for his knee was practically cured, and he knew very well that it was Barbara, and Barbara alone, who kept him staying on. The atmosphere of the big house with its army of servants, the impossibility of doing anything for himself, and the feeling of hopeless insulation from the vivid and necessitous sides of life, galled him greatly. It inspired in him too a very genuine pity for these people, who seemed to him to lead an existence as it were smothered under their own social importance. It was not their fault. He recognized that they did their best. They were not soft or luxurious, they did not eat or drink or clothe themselves extravagantly, indeed they appeared to try and be simple, and this seemed to him to heighten the pathos of their situation. Fate had been too much for them. What human spirit could emerge untrammeled and unshrunk from that great encompassing host of material advantage? To a Bedouin like Courtier it was as if a subtle but very terrible tragedy was all the time being played before his eyes; and in the very centre of this tragedy was the girl who had for him such a great attraction. Every night, when he retired to that lofty room which smelt so good, and where without ostentation everything was so perfectly ordered for his comfort, he thought, ‘My God, to-morrow I’ll be off.’

But every morning when he met her at breakfast his thought was precisely the same, and there were moments when he caught himself wondering: ‘Am I falling under the spell of this existence, — am I getting soft?’ He recognized as never before that the peculiar artificial ‘hardness’ of the aristocrat was a brine or pickle in which, with the instinct of self-preservation, they deliberately soaked themselves, to prevent the decay of fibre, through too much protection. He perceived it even in Barbara, a sort of sentimentproof overall. And every day he was tempted to lay rude hands on it, to see whether he could not make her catch fire, and flare up with some feeling or idea. In spite of her tantalizing youthful self-possession, he saw that she felt this longing in him, and now and then he caught a glimpse of a streak of recklessness in her which lured him on.

And yet at last, when he was saying good-bye on the night before polling day, he could not flatter himself that he had really struck any spark from her. She gave him no chance, at that last interview, but stood amongst the other women, calm and smiling, as if determined that he should not again mock her with his ironical devotion.

He got up very early the next morning, intending to pass away unseen; and was in the car put at his disposal by half-past seven. He found it occupied by a little figure in a holland frock, leaning back against the cushions so that her small sandaled toes pointed up at the chauffeur’s back. This was indeed little Ann, who in the course of business had discovered it before the door. Her sudden little voice under her sudden little nose, friendly but not too friendly, was comforting.

‘Are you going? I can come as far as the gate.’

‘That is lucky.’

‘Yes. Is that all your luggage?’

‘ I m afraid it is.’

‘Oh! It’s quite a lot, really, is n’t it?’

‘As much as I deserve.’

‘Of course you don’t have to take guinea-pigs about with you?’

‘ Not as a rule.’

‘ I always do. There’s great-granny!'

It was indeed Lady Casterley, standing a little back from the drive, and directing a tall gardener how to deal with an old oak tree. Courtier, alighting, went towards her to say good-bye. The little old lady addressed him with grim cordiality.

‘ So you are going! I am glad of that, though I hope you quite understand that I like you personally.’

‘Quite! ’

Her eyes gleamed maliciously.

‘Men who laugh like you are dangerous, as I’ve told you before!’

Then, with great gravity, she added, ‘My granddaughter will marry Lord Harbinger. I mention that, Mr. Courtier, for your peace of mind. You are a man of honor; it will go no further.’

Courtier, bowing over her hand, answered, ‘He will be lucky.’

The little old lady regarded him unflinchingly.

‘He will, sir. Good-bye!’

Courtier smilingly raised his hat. His cheeks were burning. Regaining the car, he looked round. Lady Casterley was busy once more exhorting the tall gardener. The voice of little Ann broke in on his thoughts: —

‘I hope you’ll come again. Because I expect I shall be here at Christmas; and my brothers will be here then, that is, Jock and Tiddy, not Christopher, because he’s young. I must go now. Good-bye! Hallo, Susie!’

Courtier saw her glide away, and join the little pale adoring figure of the lodgekeeper’s daughter.

The car passed out into the lane.

If Lady Casterley had planned this disclosure, which indeed she had not, for the impulse had only come over her at the sound of Courtier’s laugh, she could not have devised one more effectual, for there was deep down in him all of a wanderer’s very real distrust, amounting almost to contempt, of an aristocrat or bourgeois, and all a man of action’s horror of what he called ‘puking and muling.’ The pursuit of Barbara with any other object but that of marriage had not occurred to one who had little sense of conventional morality, but much of self-respect; and a secret endeavor to cut out Harbinger, ending in a marriage whereat he would figure as a sort of pirate, was quite as little to the taste of a man not unaccustomed to think himself as good as other people.

He caused the car to deviate up the lane that led to Mrs. Noel’s, hating to go away without a word of cheer to her.

She came out to him on the veranda. From the clasp of her hand, thin and faintly browned, — the hand of a woman never quite idle, — he felt that she relied on him to understand and sympathize; and nothing so awakened the best in Courtier as such mute appeals to his protection.

He said gently, ' Don’t let them think you’re down’; then, squeezing her hand hard, ‘Why should you be wasted like this? It’s a sin and a shame.’

But he stopped at sight of her face, which without movement expressed so much more than his words. He had protested as a civilized man; her face was the protest of Nature, the soundless declaration of beauty wasted against its will, beauty that was life’s invitation to the embrace which gave life birth.

’I’m clearing out myself,’ he said. ‘You and I, you know, are not good for these people. No birds of freedom allowed! ’

Pressing his hand, she turned away into the house, leaving Courtier gazing at the patch of air where her white figure had stood. He had always had a special protective feeling for Audrey Noel, a feeling which with but little encouragement might have become something warmer. But since she had been placed in her anomalous position, he would not for the world have brushed the dew off her belief that she could trust him. And now that he had fixed his own gaze elsewhere, and she was in this bitter trouble, he felt on her account the rancor that a brother feels when Justice and Pity have conspired to flout his sister.

The voice of Frith the chauffeur roused him from gloomy reverie.

‘Lady Barbara, sir!’

Following the man’s eyes, Courtier saw against the skyline on the tor above Ashman’s Folly, an equestrian statue. He stopped the car at once, and got out.

He reached her at the ruin, screened from the road, by that divine chance which attends on men who take care that it shall. He could not tell whether she knew of his approach, and he would have given all he had, which was not much, to have seen through the stiff blue of her habit, and the soft cream of her body, into that mysterious cave, her heart; to have been for a moment, like Ashman, done for good and all with material things, and living the white life where are no barriers between man and woman. The smile on her lips so baffled him: puffed there by her spirit, as a first flower is puffed through the surface of earth to mock at the spring winds. How tell what it signified! Yet he rather prided himself on his knowledge of women, of whom he had seen something.

’I’m glad of this chance,’ he said, ‘to say good-bye as it should be said.'

Then, suddenly looking up, he saw her strangely pale and quivering.

' I shall see you in London! ’ she said; and touching her horse with her whip, without looking back, she rode away over the hill.

Courtier returned to the moor road, and getting into the car, muttered, ‘Faster, please, Frith!’

XXII

Polling was already in brisk progress when Courtier arrived in Bucklandbury; and partly from a not unnatural interest in the result, partly from a half-unconscious clinging to the chance of catching another glimpse of Barbara, he took his bag to the hotel, determined to stay for the announcement of the poll. Strolling out into the high street, he began observing the humors of the day. The bloom of political belief had long been brushed off the wings of one who had so flown the world’s winds. He had seen too much of more vivid colors to be capable now of venerating greatly the dull and dubious tints of blue and yellow. They left him feeling extremely philosophic. Yet it was impossible to get away from them, for the very world that day seemed blue and yellow, nor did the third color, red, adopted by both sides afford any clear assurance that either could see virtue in the other; rather, it seemed to symbolize the desire of each to have his enemy’s blood. But Courtier soon observed by the looks cast at his own detached, and perhaps sarcastic, face, that even more hateful to either soul than its antagonist, was the philosophic eye. Unanimous was the longing to heave half a brick at it whenever it showed itself. With its d——d impartiality, its habit of looking through the integument of things, to see if there was anything inside, he felt that they regarded it as the real adversary, the eternal foe to all the little fat ‘facts’ who, dressed in blue and yellow, were swaggering and staggering, calling each other names, wiping each other’s eyes, blooding each other’s noses.

To these little solemn delicious creatures, all front and no behind, the philosophic eye, with its habit of looking round the corner, was clearly detestable. The very yellow and very blue bodies of these roistering small warriors, with their hands on their tin swords and their lips on their tin trumpets, started up in every window and on every wall, confronting each citizen in turn, persuading him that they and they alone were taking him to Westminster. Nor had they apparently for the most part much trouble with citizens, who, finding uncertainty distasteful, passionately desired to be assured that the country could at once be saved by little yellow facts or little blue facts, as the case might be; who had, no doubt, a dozen other good reasons for being on the one side or the other; as, for instance, that their father had been so before them; that their bread was buttered yellow or buttered blue; that they had been on the other side last time; that they had thought it over and made up their minds; that they had innocent blue or naive yellow beer within; that his lordship was the man; or that the words proper to their mouths were ‘Chilcox for Bucklandbury’; and, above all, the one really creditable reason, that, so far as they could tell with the best of their intellect and feelings, the truth at the moment was either blue or yellow.

The narrow high street was thronged with voters. Tall policemen stationed there had nothing to do. The certainty of all that they were going to win, kept every one in good humor. There was as yet no need to break any one’s head; for though the sharpest look-out was kept for any signs of the philosophic eye, it was only to be found — outside Courtier — in the perambulators of babies, in one old man who rode a bicycle waveringly along the street and stopped to ask a policeman what was the matter in the town, and in two rather green-faced fellows who trundled barrows full of favors both blue and yellow.

But though Courtier eyed the ‘ facts’ with such suspicion, the keenness of every one about the business struck him as really splendid. They went at it with a will. Having looked forward to it for months, they were going to look back on it for months. It was evidently a religious ceremony, summing up most high feelings; and this seemed to one who was himself a man of action, natural, perhaps pathetic, but certainly no matter for scorn.

It was already late in the afternoon when there came debouching into the high street a long string of sandwichmen, each bearing before and behind him a poster containing these words in large dark-blue letters against a pale blue ground: —

Danger not Past

Vote for Milton and the Government And Save The Empire

Courtier stopped to look at them with indignation and surprise. Not only did this poster tramp in again on his convictions about peace, but he saw in it something more than met the unphilosophic eye. It symbolized for him all that was catch-penny in the national life, — an epitaph on the grave of generosity, unutterably sad. Yet from a party point of view what could be more justifiable? Was it not desperately important that every blue nerve should be strained that day to turn yellow nerves, if not blue, at all events green, before night fell. Was it not perfectly true that the Empire could only be saved by voting blue? Could they help a blue morning paper printing these words, ‘Fresh Crisis,’ which he had read that morning? No more than the yellows could help a yellow journal printing the words, ‘Lord Milton’s Evening Adventure.’ Their only business was to win, ever fighting fair.

The yellows had not fought fair, they never did, and one of their most unfair tactics was the way they had of always accusing the blues of unfair fighting, an accusation truly ludicrous. As for truth! That which helped the world to be blue, was obviously true; that which did n’t, as obviously not. There was no middle policy! The man who saw things green was a softy, and no proper citizen. As for giving the yellows credit for sincerity, the yellows never gave them credit! For all that, the poster seemed to Courtier damnable, and raising his stick, he struck one of the sandwich-boards a resounding thwack. The noise startled a butcher’s pony standing by the pavement. It reared, then bolted with Courtier, who had seized the rein, hanging on. A dog dashed past, and Courtier tripped, still clinging to the rein. The pony, passing over him, struck him on the forehead with a hoof. For a moment he lost consciousness; but coming to himself quickly, refused assistance, and went to his hotel. He felt very giddy, and after bandaging a nasty cut, lay down on his bed.

It was here that Milton, returning from that necessary exhibition of himself, the crowning fact, at every polling centre, found him.

‘That last poster of yours!’ Courtier began, at once.

‘I’m having it withdrawn.’

‘It’s done the trick no doubt — congratulations — you’ll get in!’

‘When there is a desert between a man and the sacred city, he does n’t renounce his journey because he has to wash in dirty water on the way. But I knew nothing of that poster.’

‘My dear fellow, I never supposed you did.’

‘The mob,’ said Milton; ‘how I loathe it! ’

There was such pent-up fury in those words as to astonish even one whose life had been passed in conflict with majorities.

‘I hate its mean stupidities, I hate the sound of its voice, and the look on its face — it’s so ugly, it’s so little. Courtier, I suffer purgatory from the thought that I shall scrape in by the votes of the mob. If there is sin in using this creature I have expiated it.’

To this strange outburst Courtier at first made no reply.

‘You’ve been working too hard,’ he said at last; ‘you’re off your balance. After all, the mob’s made up of men like you and me.’

‘No, Courtier, the mob is not made up of men like you and me. If it were, it would not be the mob.’

’It looks,’ Courtier answered gravely, ‘as if you had no business in this galley. I’ve always steered clear of it myself.’

‘You follow your feelings. I have not that happiness.’

So saying, he turned to the door.

Courtier hastened after him.

‘Drop your politics, — if you feel like this about them; don’t waste your life following—whatever it is you follow; don’t waste hers!’

But Milton did not answer.

It was a wondrous still night, when, a few minutes before twelve, with his forehead bandaged under his hat, Courtier left the hotel and made his way towards the Grammar School for the declaration of the poll. A sound as of some monster breathing guided him, till, from a steep deserted street, he came in sight of a surging crowd that spread over the town square, a dark carpet patterned by splashes of lamplight. Above, high up on the little peaked tower of the Grammar School, presided a brightly lighted clock-face; and over the passionate hopes and aspirations in those thousands of hearts knit by suspense, the sky had lifted, and showed no cloud between them and the purple fields of air. To Courtier, walking down towards the square, the swaying white faces, turned all one way, seemed like the heads of giant wild flowers in a dark field, shivered by the wind. The night had charmed away the blue and yellow facts, and breathed down into that crowd the spirit of emotion. And he realized the beauty and the meaning of this scene, this expression of the quivering force, whose perpetual flux, controlled by the Spirit of Balance, was the soul of the world; thousands of hearts with the thought of self lost in one overmastering excitement!

An old man with a long gray beard, standing close to his elbow, murmured, ‘ ’T is anxious work — I would n’t ha’ missed this for anything in the world.’

‘Yes,’ answered Courtier, ‘it’s fine.’

‘Ay,’ said the old man, ‘it is fine. I’ve not seen the like o’ this since the great year — forty-eight. There they are — the aristocrats!’

Following the direction of that skinny hand, Courtier saw on a balcony Lord and Lady Valleys, side by side, looking steadily down at the crowd. There too, leaning against a window and talking to some one behind, was Barbara. Courtier heard the muttering of the old man, whose eyes had grown very bright, whose whole face seemed transfigured by intense hostility; and he felt drawn to this old creature, thus moved to the very soul. Then he saw Barbara looking down at him, with her hand raised to her temple to show that she saw his bandaged head. Courtier had the presence of mind not to lift his hat. Harbinger’s figure moved up beside her.

The old man spoke again.

‘Ah! you don’t remember fortyeight,’ he said; ‘there was a feeling in the people then — we should ha’ died for things in those days. I’m eighty-four,’ and he held his shaking hand up to his breast, ‘ but the spirit’s alive here yet! God send the Radical gets in!’

There was wafted from him a scent as of the earth.

Far behind, at the very edge of the vast dark throng, some voices began to sing, ‘Way down upon the Swanee Ribber.’ Taken up here and there, the tune floated forth, above the shuffling and talk.

It ceased suddenly, spurted up once more, and died, drowned by shouts of ‘Up Chilcox!’ ‘Milton forever!'

Then, in the very centre of the square, a stentorian baritone roared forth, ‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot!’

The song swelled, till every kind of voice, from treble to the old Chartist’s quavering bass, was chanting it; and the dark human field heaved with the movement of linked arms. Courtier found the soft fingers of a young woman in his right hand, the old Chartist’s dry, trembling paw in his left. He himself sang loudly. The grave and fearful music sprang straight up into the air, rolled out right and left, and was lost amongst the hills. But it had no sooner died away than the same huge baritone yelled, ‘God save the King!’ The stature of the crowd seemed to leap up two feet, and from under that platform of raised hats rose a stupendous shouting.

‘This,’ thought Courtier, ‘is religion!’

They were singing even on the balconies; by the lamplight he could see Lord Valleys’s mouth not opened quite enough, as though his voice were just a little ashamed of coming out, and Barbara, with her head flung back against the pillar, pouring out her heart. No mouth in all the crowd was silent. It was as though the soul of the English people were escaping from its dungeon of reserve, on the pinions of that song.

But suddenly, like a shot bird closing wings, the song fell silent and dived headlong back to earth. Out from under the clock-face had moved a thin dark figure. More came behind it. Courtier could see Milton. A voice far away cried, ‘Up Chilcox!’ A huge ‘Hush!’ followed; then such a silence that the sound of an engine shunting a mile away could be plainly heard.

The dark figure moved forward, and a tiny square of paper gleamed out white against, the black of his frock coat.

‘Ladies and gentlemen. Result of the poll: —

‘Milton: Four thousand eight hundred and ninety-eight.

‘Chilcox: Four thousand eight hundred and two.’

The silence seemed to fall to earth, and break into a thousand pieces. Through the pandemonium of cheers and groaning, Courtier with all his strength forced himself towards the balcony. He could see Lord Valleys leaning forward with a broad smile; Lady Valleys passing her hand across her eyes; Barbara, with her hand in Harbinger’s, looking straight into his face. He stopped. The old Chartist was still beside him, tears rolling down his cheeks into his beard.

Courtier saw Milton come forward, and stand unsmiling, deathly pale.

XXIII

At three o’clock in the afternoon of the 19th of July little Ann Shropton commenced the ascent of the main staircase of Valleys House, London. She climbed slowly, in the very middle, an extremely small white figure on those wide and shining stairs, counting them aloud. Their number was never alike two days running, which made them attractive to one for whom novelty was the salt of life.

Coming to that spot where they branched, she paused to consider which of the two flights she had used last, and unable to remember, sat down. She was the bearer of a message. It had been new when she started, but was already comparatively old, and likely to become older, in view of a design now conceived by her of traveling the whole length of the picture-gallery. And while she sat maturing this plan, sunlight flooding through a large window drove a white refulgence down into the heart of the wide polished space of wood and marble whence she had come. The nature of little Ann habitually rejected fairies and all fantastic things, finding them quite too much in the air, and devoid of sufficient reality and ‘go’; and this refulgence, almost unearthly in its traveling glory, passed over her small head and played strangely with the pillars in the hall, without exciting in her any fancies or any sentiment. The intention of discovering what was at the end of the picture-gallery absorbed the whole of her essentially practical and active mind.

Taking the left-hand flight of stairs, she entered that immensely long, narrow, and, with blinds drawn, rather dark saloon. She walked carefully, because the floor was very slippery here, and with a kind of seriousness due partly to the darkness and partly to the pictures. They were indeed, in this light, rather formidable, those old Caradocs — dark, armored creatures, some of them, who seemed to eye with a sort of burning, grim, defensive greed the small white figure of their descendant passing along between them. But little Ann, who knew they were only pictures, maintained her course steadily, and every now and then, as she passed one who seemed to her rather uglier than the others, wrinkled her sudden little nose. At the end, as she had thought, there was a door. She opened it, and passed on to a landing.

There was a stone staircase in the corner, and there were two doors. It would be nice to go up the staircase, but it would also be nice to open the doors. Going towards the first door, with a little thrill, she turned the handle. It was one of those rooms, necessary in houses, for which she had no great liking; and closing the door rather loudly, she opened the other door, finding herself in a chamber not resembling the rooms downstairs, which were all high and nicely gilded, but more like where she had lessons, low, and filled with books and leather chairs. From the end of the room which she could not see, she heard a sound as of some one kissing something, and instinct had almost made her turn to go away when the word ‘Hallo!’ seemed to open her lips. And almost directly she saw that granny and grandpapa were standing by the fireplace. Not knowing quite whether they were glad to see her, she went forward and began at once:—

‘Is this where you sit, grandpapa?’ ‘It is.’

‘It’s nice, is n’t it, granny? Where does the stone staircase go to?’

‘To the roof of the tower, Ann.’

‘ Oh! I have to give a message, so I must go now.’

‘Sorry to lose you.’

‘Yes; good-bye!’

Hearing the door shut behind her, Lord and Lady Valleys looked at each other with a dubious smile.

The little interview which she had interrupted, had arisen in this way.

Accustomed to retire to this quiet and homely room, which was not his official study where he was always liable to the attacks of secretaries, Lord Valleys had come up here after lunch to smoke and chew the cud of a worry.

The matter was one in connection with his estate, Pendridny, in Cornwall. It had long agitated both his agent and himself, and had now come to him for final decision. The question affected two villages to the north of the property, whose inhabitants were solely dependent on the working of a large quarry, which had for some time been losing money.

A kindly man, he was extremely averse to any measure which would plunge his tenants into distress, and especially in cases where there had been no question of opposition between himself and them. But, reduced to its essentials, the matter stood thus: apart from that particular quarry the Pendridny estate was not only a going, but even a profitable concern, supporting itself and supplying some of the sinews of war towards Valleys House and the racing establishment at Newmarket, and other general expenses; with this quarry still running, allowing for the upkeep of Pendridny, and the provision of pensions to superannuated servants, it was a little the other way.

Sitting there, that afternoon, smoking his favorite pipe, he had at last come to the conclusion that there was nothing for it but to close down. He had not made this resolution lightly; though, to do him justice, the knowledge that the decision would be bound to cause an outcry in the local, and perhaps the national, press had secretly rather spurred him on to the resolve than deterred him from it. He felt as if he were being dictated to in advance, and he did not like dictation. Knowing that having to deprive these poor people of their immediate living was a good deal more irksome to him than to those who, he knew, would make a fuss about it, his conscience was clear, and he could discount that future outcry as mere party spite.

He had quite honestly tried to look at the thing all round, and had reasoned thus: ‘If I keep this quarry open, I am really admitting the principle of pauperization, since I naturally look to each of my estates to support its own house, grounds, shootings, and contribute towards the support of this house, and my family, and racing stable, and all the people employed about them both. To allow any business to be run on my estates which does not contribute to the general upkeep, is to protect and really pauperize a portion of my tenants at the expense of the rest; it is false economics, and secretly a sort of socialism. Further, if logically followed out, it might end in my ruin; and to allow that, though I might not personally object, would be to imply that I do not believe that I am, by virtue of my traditions and training, the best machinery through which the state can work to secure the welfare of the people.’

When he had reached that point in his consideration of a question, to which, in his position, he ought not perhaps to have been asked to supply an answer, his mind, or rather perhaps, his essential self, had not unnaturally risen up and said, ‘ Which is absurd! ’

Impersonality was in fashion, and as a rule he believed in thinking impersonally. There was a point, however, where the possibility of doing so ceased without treachery to one’s self, one’s order, and the country. And to the argument which he was quite shrewd enough to put to himself, sooner than have it put, that it was disproportionate for a single man by a stroke of the pen to be able to dispose of the livelihood of hundreds whose senses and feelings were similar to his own, he had answered, ‘If I didn’t, some plutocrat would—or, worse still, the state!’ Coöperative enterprise was, in his opinion, foreign to the spirit of the country, and there was, so far as he knew, no other alternative. Facts were facts, and not to be got over.

For all that, the necessity for this decision made him sorry, for if he had no great sense of cosmic humor, he was at least human, even humane.

He was sitting smoking his pipe and still staring at a sheet of paper covered with small figures when Lady Valleys entered.

Though she had come to ask his advice on a very different subject, she saw at once that he was vexed, and said, ‘What’s the matter, Geoff?’

Lord Valleys rose, went to the hearth, deliberately tapped out his pipe, then held out to her the sheet of paper.

‘That quarry! There’s nothing for it — it must go! ’

Lady Valleys’s face changed.

‘Oh, no! It will mean such dreadful distress.’

Lord Valleys stared at his nails. ‘ It’s putting a drag on the whole estate,’ he said.

‘I know, but how could we face the people, — I should never be able to go down there. And most of them have such enormous families.'

Lord Valleys continued to bend on his nails a slow, thought-forming stare; and Lady Valleys went on earnestly, —

‘Rather than that I’d make sacrifices. I ’d sooner it were let, than throw all those people out of work. I suppose it would let.'

' Let ? Best woodcock shooting in the world.'

Lady Valleys, pursuing her thoughts, went on, ‘In time we might get the people drafted into other things. Have you consulted Milton?'

‘No,’said Lord Valleys shortly, ‘and don’t mean to — he’s too unpractical.’

‘He always seems to know what he wants very well.’

‘I tell you,’ repeated Lord Valleys, ‘Milton ’s no good in a matter of this sort; he and his ideas throw back to the Middle Ages!’

Lady Valleys went closer, and took him by the lapels of his collar.

‘Geoff—really, to please me; some other way!5

Lord Valleys frowned, and stared at her for some time; at last he answered without moving, ‘That’s another thing. To please you — I ’ll leave it over another year.’

‘You think that’s better than letting?'

‘ I don’t like the thought of some outsider there. Time enough to come to that if we must. Take it as my Christmas present. You’ll be late for your meeting.’

Lady Valleys, rather flushed, bent forward and kissed his ear.

It was at this moment that little Ann had entered.

When she had gone, and they had exchanged that dubious look, Lady Valleys said, ‘I don’t get much time to talk to you. I came about Babs. I don’t know what to make of her since we came up. She’s not putting her heart into things.'

Lord Valleys answered almost sulkily, ‘It’s the heat, I should think — or love.’ For all his easy-going parentalism, he disliked the thought of losing the child for whom he really had a love and admiration.

‘ Yes,’ said Lady Valleys slowly, ‘ but with whom?'

‘Claud Harbinger, of course.'

‘I don’t know. There’s something queer about her. I’m not at all sure she has n’t got some sort of feeling for that Mr. Courtier.’

‘What!’ said Lord Valleys.

‘ Exactly! ’

Her husband had grown very red.

‘Confound it, Gertrude, this is past a joke — Milton’s business was quite enough for one year.'

‘For twenty,’ murmured Lady Valleys. ‘ I ’m watching her. I ’m told he’s going to Persia.’

‘And leaving his confounded bones there, I hope,’ muttered Lord Valleys. ’Really, it’s too much. I should think you’re all wrong, though.’

Lady Valleys’s face bubbled a little. Men were very queer about such things! Very queer and worse than helpless.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I must go to my meeting. I’ll take her, and see if I can get at something. I shall be late.’ And she went away.

It was the inaugural meeting of the Society for the Promotion of the BirthRate, at which she had to preside that afternoon. The scheme was one in which she had been prominent from the start, appealing as it did to her large and full-blooded nature. Many movements, to which she found it impossible to refuse her name, had in themselves but small attraction for her; and it was a real comfort to feel something approaching enthusiasm for one branch of her public work. Not that there was any academic consistency about her in the matter, for in private life amongst her friends she was not narrowly dogmatic on the duty of wives to multiply exceedingly. She thought imperially on the subject, without bigotry. Large healthy families, in all cases save individual ones! The prime idea at the back of her mind was — national expansion. Her motto, and she intended if possible to make it the motto of the League, was: De l’audace, et encore de l’audace! It was a question of the full realization of the nation. She had a real, and in a sense touching, belief in ‘the flag,’ apart from what it might cover. It was her idealism. ‘You may talk,’she would say, ‘as much as you like about directing national life in accordance with social justice! What does the nation care about social justice? The thing is much bigger than that. It’s sentimental. We must expand! ’

On the way to the meeting, occupied with her speech, she made no attempt to draw Barbara into conversation. The child was very languid and pale; still that must wait! And at any rate she was looking so beautiful that it was a pleasure to have her support.

In a little dark room behind the hall the committee were already assembled, and they went at once on to the platform.

XXIV

Unmoved by the stares of the audience, Barbara sat absorbed in her moody thoughts.

Into the three weeks since Milton’s election there had been crowded such a multitude of functions that she had found, as it were, no time, no energy to know where she stood with herself. Since that morning in the stable, when he had watched her with the horse Hal, Harbinger had seemed to live only to be close to her. And the consciousness of his passion gave her a tingling sense of pleasure. She had been riding and dancing with him, and sometimes this had been almost blissful. But there were times too — more frequent as her energy ebbed in the heat and glare of the season — when she felt — though always with a certain contempt of herself, as under that sunny wall below the tor — a queer dissatisfaction, a longing for something outside a world where she had to invent her own starvations and simplicities, to make-believe in earnestness.

She had seen Courtier three times. Once he had come to dine in response to an invitation from Lady Valleys, worded in that charming, almost wistful style, which she had taught herself to use to those below her in social rank, especially if they were intelligent; once at the Valleys House garden party; and, next day, having told him what time she would be riding, she had found him in the Row, not mounted, but standing by the rail just where she must pass, with that look on his face of mingled deference and ironic self-containment, of which he was a master. It appeared that he was leaving England; and to her questions why, and where, he had only shrugged his shoulders.

Up on this dusty platform, in the hot bare hall, facing all those people, listening to speeches whose sense she was too languid and preoccupied to take in, the whole medley of thoughts and faces round her and the sound of the speakers’ voices formed a kind of nightmare, out of which she noted with extreme exactitude the color of her mother’s neck under its large black hat, and a committee man to the right, biting his fingers under cover of a large blue paper. She realized that some one was speaking amongst the audience, speaking, as it were, in little bunches of words. She could see him, a small man in a black coal, with a white face which kept jerking up and down.

‘I feel that this is terrible,’ she heard him say; ‘I feel that this is blasphemy. That we should try to tamper with the greatest force, the greatest and the most sacred and secret — force, that — that moves in the world, is to me horrible. I cannot bear to listen; it seems to make everything so little!’

She saw him sit down, his features twitching uncontrollably; and her mother rise to answer: —

‘We must all sympathize with the sincerity, and to a certain extent with the intention, of our friend in the body of the hall. But we must ask ourselves, Have we the right to allow ourselves the luxury of private feelings in a matter which concerns the national expansion? We must not give way to sentiment. Our friend in the body of the hall spoke — he will forgive me for saying so — like a poet, rather than a serious reformer. I am afraid if we let ourselves drop into poetry, the birthrate of this country will very soon drop into poetry too. And that I think it is impossible for us to contemplate with folded hands. The resolution I was about to propose when our friend in the body of the hall —’

But Barbara’s attention had wandered off again into that queer medley of thoughts and feelings, out of which the little man had so abruptly roused her. Then she realized that the meeting was breaking up, and her mother saying, —

‘Now, my dear, it’s hospital day. We’ve just time.’

When they were once more in the car, she leaned back very silent, watching the traffic.

Lady Valleys eyed her sidelong.

‘What a little bombshell!’ she said, ‘from that small person! He must have got in by mistake. I hear Mr. Courtier has a card for Ellen Gloucester’s ball to-night, Babs.’

‘Poor man!’

‘ You will be there,’ said Lady Valleys dryly.

Barbara drew back into her corner.

‘Don’t tease me, mother!’

An expression of compunction crossed Lady Valleys’s face; she tried to possess herself of Barbara’s hand. But that languid hand did not return her squeeze.

‘I know the mood you’re in, Babs. It wants all one’s pluck to shake it off; don’t let it grow on you. You’d better go down to Uncle Dennis to-morrow. You’ve been overdoing it.’

Barbara sighed.

‘I wish it were to-morrow.’

The car had stopped, and Lady Valleys said, ‘Will you come in, or are you too tired? It always does them good to see you.'

‘You’re twice as tired as me,’ Barbara answered; ‘of course I’ll come.’

At the entrance of the two ladies, there rose at once a faint buzz and murmur. Lady Valleys, whose ample presence radiated suddenly a businesslike and cheery confidence, went to a bedside and sat down. But Barbara stood in a thin streak of the July sunlight, uncertain where to begin, amongst the faces turned towards her. The poor dears looked so humble, and so wistful, and so tired. There was one lying quite flat, who had not even raised her head to see who had come in. That slumbering, pale, high-cheekboned face had a frailty as if a touch, a breath, would shatter it; a wisp of the blackest hair, finer than silk, lay across the forehead; the closed eyes were deep sunk; one hand, scarred almost to the bone with work, rested above her breast. She breathed between lips which had no color. About her, sleeping, was a kind of beauty. And there came over the girl a queer longing to bend down and pay her reverence. The sleeper seemed so apart from everything there, from all the formality and stiffness of the ward. To look at her swept away the languid, hollow feeling with which she had come in; it made her think of the tors at home, when the wind was blowing, and all was bare, and grand, and sometimes terrible. There was something elemental in that still sleep.

An old lady in the next bed, with a brown wrinkled face and bright black eyes brimful of life, seemed almost vulgar beside such remote tranquillity, while she explained carefully to Barbara that a little bunch of heather in the better half of a soap-dish on the window-sill had come from Wales, because ‘my mother was born in Stirling, dearie; so I likes a bit of heather, though I never been out o’ Bethnal Green meself.’

But when Barbara again passed, the sleeping woman was sitting up, and looked but a poor ordinary thing — her strange fragile beauty all withdrawn.

It was a relief when Lady Valleys said, ‘My dear, my Naval Bazaar at five-thirty; and while I’m there you must go home and have a rest, and freshen yourself up for the ball. We dine at Plassey House.’

The Duchess of Gloucester’s ball, a function which no one could very well miss, had been fixed for this late date owing to the duchess’s announced desire to prolong the season and so help the hackney cabmen; and though everybody sympathized, it had been felt by most that it would be simpler to go away, motor up on the day of the ball, and motor down again on the following morning. And throughout the week by which the season was thus prolonged, in long rows at the railway stations, and on their stands, the hackney cabmen, unconscious of what was being done for them, waited, patient as their horses. But since everybody was making this special effort, an exceptionally large, exclusive, and brilliant company reassembled at Gloucester House.

In the vast ball-room, over the medley of entwined revolving couples, punkahs had been fixed, to clear and freshen the languid air; and these huge fans, moving with incredible slowness, drove a faint refreshing draught down over the sea of white shirt-fronts and bare necks, and freed the scent from innumerable flowers.

Late in the evening, close by one of the great clumps of bloom, a very pretty woman stood talking to Bertie. She was his cousin, Lily Malvezin, sister of Geoffrey Winlow, and wife of a Liberal peer, — a charming creature, whose pink cheeks, bright eyes, quick lips, and rounded figure endowed her with the prettiest air of animation. And while she spoke she kept stealing sly glances at her partner, trying as it were to pierce the armor of that self-contained young man.

‘No, my dear,’ she was saying in her mocking voice, ‘you’ll never persuade me that Milton is going to catch on. Il est trop intransigeant. Ah! there’s Babs!’

For the girl had come gliding by, her eyes wandering lazily, her lips just parted; her neck, hardly less pale than her white frock; her face pale, and with marked languor, under the heavy coil of her tawny hair; and her swaying body seeming with each turn of the waltz to be caught by the arms of her partner from out of a swoon.

With that immobility of lips learned by all imprisoned in society, Lily Malvezin murmured, ‘Who’s that she’s dancing with? Is it the dark horse?’

Through lips no less immobile, Bertie answered, ‘Forty to one, no takers.’

But those inquisitive bright eyes still followed Barbara, drifting in the dance like a great water-lily caught in the swirl of a mill-pool; and the thought passed through that pretty head, ‘She’s hooked him. It’s naughty of Babs, really!’ And then she saw leaning against a pillar another whose eyes also were following these two, and she thought, ‘Claud Harbinger— No wonder he’s looking like that. O Babs!’

By one of the statues on the terrace Barbara and her partner stood, where trees, disfigured by no gaudy lanterns, offered the refreshment of their darkness and serenity.

Wrapped in her new pale languor, still breathing deeply from the waltz, she seemed to Courtier too utterly moulded out of loveliness. To what end should a man frame speeches to a vision! She was but an incarnation of beauty imprinted on the air, and would fade out at a touch — like the sudden ghosts of enchantment that come to one under the blue, and the star-lit snow of a mountain night, or in a birch wood all wistful golden! Speech seemed but desecration! Besides, what of interest was there for him to say in this world of hers, so bewildering and of such glib assurance — this world that was like a building whose every window was shut and had a blind drawn down; a building that admitted none who had not sworn, as it were, to believe it the whole world, outside which were but the rubbled remains of what had built it; this world of society, in which he felt like one traveling through a desert, longing to meet a fellow creature!

The voice of Harbinger behind them said, ‘Lady Babs!’

Long did the punkahs waft their breeze over that brave-hued wheel of pleasure, and the sound of the violins quaver and wail out into the morning. Then quickly, as the spangles of dew vanish off grass when the sun rises, all melted away; and in the great rooms were none but flunkeys presiding over the polished surfaces, like flamingos by some lake-side at dawn.

XXV

A brick dower-house of the FitzHarolds, just outside the little seaside town of Nettlefold, sheltered the tranquil days of Lord Dennis. In that south-coast air, sanest and most healing in all England, he aged very slowly, taking little thought of death, and much quiet pleasure in his life. Like the tall old house with its high windows and squat chimneys, he was marvelously self-contained. His books, for he somewhat passionately examined into old civilizations, and described their habits from time to time with a dry and not too poignant pen in a certain old-fashioned magazine; his microscope, for he studied infusoria; and the fishing-boat of his friend John Bogle, who had long perceived that Lord Dennis was the biggest fish he ever caught; all these, with occasional visitors, and little runs to London, to Monkland, and other country-houses, made up the sum of a life which, if not desperately beneficial, was uniformly kind and harmless, and, by its notorious simplicity, had a certain negative influence, not only on his own class, but on the relations of that class with the country at large. It was commonly said in Nettlefold that he was a gentleman; if they were all like him there was n’t much in all this talk against the lords. The shop people and lodging-house keepers felt that the interests of the country were safer in his hands than in the hands of people who wanted to meddle with everything for the good of those who were only anxious to be let alone. A man too who could so completely forget that he was the son of a duke that other people never forgot it, was the man for their money. It was true that he had never had a say in public affairs; but this was overlooked, because he could have had it if he liked, and the fact that he did not like, only showed once more that he was a gentleman.

Just as he was the personality of the little town against whom practically nothing was ever said, so was his house the one house which defied criticism. Time had made it utterly suitable. The ivied walls, and purplish roof lichened yellow in places, the quiet meadows harboring ponies and kine, reaching from it to the sea, — all was mellow. In truth, it made all the other houses of the town seem shoddy —standing alone beyond them, like its master, perhaps a little too æsthetically remote from common wants.

He had practically no near neighbors of whom he saw anything, except once in a way young Harbinger, three miles distant at Whitewater. But since he had the faculty of not being bored with his own society, this did not worry him. Of local charity, especially to the fishers of the town, whose winter months were nowadays very bare of profit, he was prodigal to the verge of extravagance, for his income was not great. But in politics, beyond acting as the figurehead of certain municipal efforts, he took little or no part. His Toryism indeed was of a mild order that had little belief in the regeneration of the country by any means but those of kindly feeling between the classes. When asked how that was to be brought about, he would answer, with his dry, slightly malicious suavity, that if you stirred hornets’ nests with sticks the hornets would come forth. Having no land, he was shy of expressing himself on that vexed question; but if resolutely attacked would give utterance to some such sentiment as this: ‘The land’s best in our hands on the whole, but we want fewer dogs in the manger among us.’

He had, as became one of his race, a feeling for land, tender and protective, and could not bear to think of its being put out to farm with that cold mother, the state. But though ironical over the views of Radicals or Socialists, he disliked to hear such people personally abused behind their backs. It must be confessed that if contradicted he increased considerably the ironical decision of his sentiments. Withdrawn from all chance of enforcing its views on others in public life, the natural decisiveness within was forced to find private expression at times.

Each year, towards the end of July, he placed his house at the service of Lord Valleys, who found it a convenient centre for attending Goodwood.

It was on the morning after the Duchess of Gloucester’s ball, that he received a note which ran as follows:

VALLEYS HOUSE.

DEAREST UNCLE DENNIS,

May I come down to you a little before time and rest? London is awfully hot. Mother has three functions still to stay for, and I shall have to come back again for our last evening, the political one, — so I don’t want to go all the way to Monkland; and anywhere else, except with you, would be racketty. Eustace looks so seedy. I ’ll try and bring him, if I may. Granny is terribly well.

Best love, dear, from your

BABS.

The same afternoon she came, but without Milton, driving up from the station in a fly. Lord Dennis met her at the gate, and having kissed her, looked at her somewhat anxiously, caressing his white peaked beard. He had never yet known Babs sick of anything, except when he took her out in John Bogle’s boat. She was certainly looking pale, and her hair was done differently, — a fact disturbing to one who did not discover it. Slipping his arm through hers, he led her out into a meadow still full of buttercups, where an old white pony, who had carried her in the Row twelve years ago, came up to them and rubbed his muzzle against her waist. And suddenly there rose in Lord Dennis the thoroughly discomforting and strange suspicion that, though the child was not going to cry, she wanted time to get over the feeling that she was. Without appearing to separate himself from her, he walked to the wall at the end of the field, and stood looking at the sea.

The tide was nearly up: the south wind driving over it brought to him the scent of the sea-flowers, and the crisp rustle of little waves swimming almost to his feet. Far out where the sunlight fell, the smiling waters lay white and mysterious in July haze, reminding him of far things. But Lord Dennis, though he had his moments of poetic feeling, was on the whole quite able to keep the sea in its proper place; for after all it was the English Channel, and like a good Englishman he recognized that if you once let things get away from their names, they ceased to be facts, and if they ceased to be facts, they became — the devil!

In truth, he was not thinking of the sea at all, but of Barbara. It was plain that she was in trouble of some kind. And the notion that Babs could find trouble in life was extraordinarily queer; for he felt, subconsciously, what a great driving force of disturbance was necessary to penetrate the hundred folds of the cloak enwrapping one so young and fortunate. It was not death, therefore it must be love; and he thought at once of that fellow with the red moustaches. Ideas were all very well, no one would object to as many as you liked, in their proper place, — the dinner-table, for example. But to fall in love, if indeed it were so, with a man who not only had ideas, but an inclination to live up to them, seemed to Lord Dennis outré.

She had followed him to the wall, and he looked at her dubiously.

‘ Come to rest in the waters of Lethe, Babs? By the way, seen anything of our friend Mr. Courtier? Very picturesque, that Quixotic theory of life!’

And in saying that, his voice (like so many refined voices which have turned their backs on speculation) was tripletoned, mocking at ideas, mocking at itself for mocking at ideas, yet showing plainly that at bottom it only mocked at itself for mocking at ideas, because it would be, as it were, crude not to do so.

But Barbara did not answer his question, and began to speak of other things. And all that afternoon and evening, she talked away so lightly that Lord Dennis, but for his instinct, would have been deceived.

That wonderful smiling mask — the inscrutability of youth — was laid aside by her at night. Sitting at her window, under the moon, ‘a goldbright moth slow-spinning up the sky,’ she watched the darkness hungrily, as though it were a great thought into whose heart she was trying to see. Now and then she stroked herself, getting strange comfort out of the presence of her body. She had that old unhappy feeling of having two selves within her. And this soft night, full of the quiet stir of the sea, and of dark immensity, woke in her a terrible longing to be at one with something, somebody, outside herself. At last night’s ball the ‘flying feeling’ had seized on her again, and was still there, a queer manifestation of the reckless streak in her. And this strange result of her contacts with Courtier, this cacoethes volandi, and feeling of clipped wings, hurt her — as being forbidden hurts a child.

She remembered how in the housekeeper’s room at Monkland there lived a magpie who had once sought shelter in an orchid-house from some pursuer. As soon as they thought him wedded to civilization, they had let him go, to see whether he would come back. For hours he had sat up in a high tree, and at last come down again to his cage; whereupon, fearing lest the rooks should attack him when he next took this voyage of discovery, they clipped one of his wings. After that the twilight bird, though he lived happily enough, hopping about his cage and the terrace which served him for exercise-yard, would seem at times restive and frightened, moving his wings as if flying in spirit, and sad that he must stay on earth.

So, too, at her window, Barbara fluttered her wings; then, getting into bed, lay sighing and tossing. A clock struck three; and seized by an intolerable impatience at her own discomfort, she slipped a motor-coat over her nightgown, put on slippers, and stole out into the passage. The house was very still. She crept downstairs, smothering her footsteps. Groping her way through the hall, inhabited by the thin ghosts of would-be light, she slid back the chain of the door, and ran towards the sea. She made no more noise running in the dew, than a bird following the paths of air; and the two ponies, who felt her figure pass in the darkness, snuffled, sending out soft sighs of alarm amongst the closed buttercups. She climbed the wall over to the beach. While she was running, she had fully meant to dash into the sea and cool herself, but it was so black, with just a thin edging scarf of white, and the sky was black, bereft of lights, waiting for the day!

She stood, and looked. And all the leapings and pulsings of flesh and spirit slowly died in that, wide, dark loneliness, where the only sound was the wistful breaking of small waves. She was well used to these dead hours, — only last night, at this very time, Harbinger’s arm had been round her in a last waltz. But here the dead hours had such different faces, wide-eyed, solemn; and there came to Barbara, staring out at them, a sense that the darkness saw her very soul, so that it felt, little and timid within her. She shivered in her fur-lined motoring coat, as if almost frightened at finding herself so marvelously nothing before that black sky and dark sea, which seemed all one, relentlessly great. And crouching down, she waited for the dawn to break.

It came from over the downs, sweeping a rush of cold air on its wings, flighting toward the sea. With it the daring soon crept back into her blood. She stripped, and ran down into the dark water, fast growing pale. It covered her jealously, and she set to work to swim. The water was warmer than the air. She lay on her back and splashed, watching the sky flush. To bathe like this in the half-dark, with her hair floating out, and no wet clothes clinging to her limbs, gave her the joy of a child doing a naughty thing. She swam out of her depth, then, scared at her own adventure, swam in again as the sun rose.

She dashed into her two garments, climbed the wall, and ran back to the house. All her dejection and feverish uncertainty were gone; she felt keen and fresh and very hungry, and stealing into the dining-room, began rummaging for food. She found biscuits, and was still munching, when in the open doorway she saw Lord Dennis, a pistol in one hand and a lighted candle in the other. With his carved features and white beard above an old blue dressing-gown, he looked impressive, having at the moment a distinct resemblance to Lady Casterley, as though danger had armored him in steel.

‘You call this resting!’ he said, dryly; then, looking at her drowned hair, added, ‘I see you have already intrusted your trouble to the waters of Lethe.’

Without answer, Barbara vanished into the dim hall and up the stairs.

XXVI

While Barbara was swimming to meet the dawn, Milton was bathing in those waters of mansuetude and truth which roll from wall to wall in the British House of Commons.

In that long debate on the land question, for which he had waited to make his first speech, he had already risen nine times without catching the Speaker’s eye, and slowly a sense of unreality was creeping over him. Surely this great chamber, where without end rose the small sound of a single human voice, and queer mechanical bursts of approbation and resentment, did not exist at all save as a gigantic fancy of his own! And all these figures were figments of his brain. And when he at last spoke, it would be himself alone that he addressed! The torpid air tainted with human breath, the unwinking stare of the countless lights, the long rows of seats, the queer distant rounds of pale listening flesh perched up so high, they were all emanations of himself! Even the coming and going in the gangway was but the coming and going of little willful parts of him. And rustling deep down in this Titanic creature of his fancy was the murmuration of his own unspoken speech, sweeping away the puff-balls of words flung up by that far-away, small, varying voice.

Then, suddenly, all that dream creature had vanished; he was on his feet, with a thumping heart, speaking.

Soon he had no tremors, only a dim consciousness that his words sounded strange, and a queer icy pleasure in flinging them out into the silence. Round him there seemed no longer men, only mouths and eyes. And he had enjoyment in the feeling that with his own mouth and eyes he was holding those hungry mouths and eyes dumb and unmoving. Then he knew that he had reached the end of what he had to say, and sat down, remaining motionless in the centre of a various sound, staring at the back of the head in front of him, with his hands clasped round his knee. And soon, when another little far-away voice was once more speaking, he took his hat, and glancing neither to right nor left, went out.

Instead of that sensation of relief and wild elation which fills the heart of those who have taken the first plunge, Milton had nothing in his deep, dark well but the waters of bitterness. In truth, with the delivery of that speech he had but parted with what had been a sort of anodyne to suffering. He had only put the fine point on his feeling of how vain was his career now that he could not share it with Audrey Noel. He walked slowly towards the Temple, along the river-side, where the lamps were paling into nothingness before that daily celebration of Divinity, the meeting of dark and light.

For Milton was not one of those who take things lying down; he took things desperately, deeply, and with revolt. He took them like a rider riding himself, plunging at the dig of his own spurs, chafing and wincing at the cruel tugs of his own bit; bearing in his friendless, proud nature all the burden of struggles which shallower or more genial natures shared with others.

He looked hardly less haggard, walking home, than some of those homeless ones who slept nightly by the river, as though they knew that to lie near one who could so readily grant oblivion, alone could save them from seeking that consolation. He was perhaps unhappier than they, whose spirits, at all events, had long ceased to worry them, having oozed out from their bodies under the foot of life.

Now that Audrey Noel was lost to him, her loveliness and that indescribable quality which made her lovable, floated before him, the very tortureflowers of a beauty never to be grasped, yet that he could grasp, if he only would! He was suffering, too, physically, from a kind of slow fever, the result of his wetting on the day when he last saw her. And through that latent fever, things and feelings, like his sensations in the House before his speech, were all as it were muffled in a horrible way, as if they all came to him wrapped in a sort of flannel coating, through which he could not cut. And all the time there seemed to be within him two men at mortal grips with one another; the man of faith in divine sanction and authority, on which all his beliefs had hitherto hinged, and a desperate, warmblooded, hungry creature. He was very miserable, craving strangely the society of some one who could understand what he was feeling, but, from long habit of making no confidants, not knowing how to satisfy that craving.

It was dawn when he reached his rooms; and, sure that he would not sleep, he did not even go to bed, but changed his clothes, made himself some coffee, and sat down at the window which overlooked the flowered courtyard.

In Middle Temple Hall a ball was still in progress, though the glamour from its Chinese lanterns was already darkened and gone. Milton saw a man and a girl, sheltered by an old fountain, sitting out their last dance. Her head had sunk on his shoulder; their lips were joined. And there floated up to t he window the scent of heliotrope, with the tune of the waltz that those two should have been dancing. This couple, so stealthily enlaced, the gleam of their furtively turned eyes, the whispering of their lips, that stony niche below the twittering sparrows, so cunningly sought out — it was the world he had abjured! When he looked again, they — like a vision seen — had stolen away and gone; the music too had ceased, there was no scent of heliotrope. In the stony niche crouched a stray cat watching the twittering sparrows.

Milton went out, and, turning into the empty Strand, walked on without heeding where, till towards five o’clock he found himself on Putney Bridge.

He rested there, leaning over the parapet, looking down at the gray water. The sun was just breaking through the heat haze; early wagons were passing, and already men were coming in to work. To what end did the river wander up and down? and a human river flow across it twice every day? To what end were men and women suffering? In all the full current of this life Milton could see no more aim than in the wheeling of the gulls in the early sunlight.

Leaving the bridge, he made towards Barnes Common. The night was still ensnared there on the gorse-bushes, gray with cobwebs and the starry dewdrops. He passed a tramp family still sleeping, huddled all together. Even the homeless lay in each others’ arms!

From the Common he emerged on the road near the gates of Ravensham, and turning in there, found his way to the kitchen-garden, and sat down on a bench close to the raspberry bushes. They were protected from thieves, but at Milton’s approach two blackbirds flustered out through the netting and flew away.

His long figure resting so motionless impressed itself on the eyes of a gardener, who caused a report to be circulated that his young lordship was in the fruit-garden. It reached the ears of Clifton, who himself came out to see what this might mean. The old man took his stand in front of Milton very quietly.

‘You have come to breakfast, my lord?’

‘If my grandmother will have me, Clifton.’

‘I understand your lordship was speaking last night.’

‘ I was. ’

‘You find the House of Commons satisfactory, I hope.’

‘Fairly, thank you, Clifton.’

‘They are not what they were in the great days of your grandfather, I believe. He had a very good opinion of them. They vary, no doubt.’

‘Tempora mutantur.’

‘That is so. I find quite a new spirit towards public affairs. The ha’penny Press; one takes it in, but one hardly approves. I shall be anxious to read your speech. They say a first speech is a great strain.’

‘It is, rather.’

’But you had no reason to be anxious. I’m sure it was beautiful.’

Milton saw that the old man’s thin sallow cheeks had flushed to a deep orange between his snow-white whiskers.

‘I have looked forward to this day,’ he stammered, ‘ever since I knew your lordship — twenty-eight years. It is the beginning.’

‘Or the end, Clifton.’

The old man’s face fell in a look of deep and concerned astonishment.

‘No, no,’ he said; ‘with your antecedents, never.’

Milton took his hand.

‘Sorry, Clifton, didn’t mean to shock you.’

And for a minute neither spoke, looking at their clasped hands as if surprised.

‘Would your lordship like a bath? her ladyship breakfasts at eight. I can procure you a razor.’

When Milton entered the breakfastroom, his grandmother, with a copy of the Times in her hands, was seated before a grape-fruit, which, with a shredded-wheat biscuit, constituted her first meal. Her appearance hardly warranted Barbara’s description of ‘terribly well ’; in truth, she looked a little white, as if she had been feeling the heat. But there was no lack of animation in her little dark gray eyes, nor of decision in her manner.

‘ I see,’ she said, ‘ that you’ve taken a line of your own, Eustace. I’ve nothing to say against that; in fact, quite the contrary. But remember this, my dear, however you may change, you must n’t wobble. Only one thing counts in that place, hitting the same nail on the head with the same hammer all the time. You are n’t looking at all well.’

Milton, bending to kiss her, murmured, ‘Thanks, I’m all right.’

‘Nonsense,’ replied Lady Casterley. ‘They don’t look after you. Was your mother in the House?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘ Exactly. And what is Barbara about? She ought to be seeing to you.’

‘ Barbara is down with Uncle Dennis.’

Lady Casterley set her jaw; then, looking her grandson through and through, said, ’I shall take you down there this very day. I shall have the sea to you. What do you say, Clifton?’

‘His lordship does look pale.’

‘Have the carriage, and we’ll go from Clapham Junction. Thomas can go in and fetch you some clothes. Or, better, though I dislike them, we can telephone to your mother for a car. It’s very hot for trains. Arrange that, please, Clifton!’

To this project Milton raised no objection. And all through the drive he remained sunk in an indifference and lassitude which to Lady Casterley seemed in the highest degree ominous. For lassitude, to her, was the strange, the unpardonable, state. The little great lady — casket of the aristocratic principle — was permeated to the very backbone with the instinct of artificial energy, of that alert vigor which those who have nothing socially to hope for are forced to develop, lest they should decay and be again obliged to hope. To speak honest truth, she could not forbear an itch to run some sharp and foreign substance into her grandson, to rouse him somehow, for she knew the reason of his state, and was temperamentally out of patience with such a cause for backsliding. Had it been any other of her grandchildren she would not have hesitated; but there was that in Milton which held even Lady Casterley in check, and only once during the four hours of travel did she attempt to break down his reserve. She did it in a manner very soft for her, — was he not of all living things the hope, the pride, and the beloved of her heart? Tucking her little thin sharp hand under his arm, she said quietly, ‘ My dear, don’t brood over it. That will never do.’

But Milton removed her hand gently, and laid it back on the dust-rug; nor did he answer, or show other sign of having heard.

And Lady Casterley, deeply wounded, pressed her faded lips together, and said sharply, ‘Slower, please, Frith!’

XXVII

It was to Barbara that Milton unfolded, if ever so little, the trouble of his spirit, lying out that same afternoon under a tamarisk hedge with the tide far out. He could never have done this if there had not been between them the accidental revelation of that night at Monkland; nor even then perhaps had he not felt in this young sister of his the warmth of life for which he was yearning. In such a matter as love Barbara was the elder of these two. For, besides the motherly knowledge of the heart peculiar to most women, she had the inherent woman-of-the-worldliness to be expected of a daughter of Lord and Lady Valleys. If she herself were in doubt, it was not as with Milton, on the score of the senses and the heart, but on the score of her spirit and curiosity, which Courtier had awakened and caused to flap their wings a little. She worried over Milton’s forlorn case, and it hurt her to think of Mrs. Noel eating her heart out in that lonely cottage. Then, too, a sister so good and earnest as Agatha had ever inclined Barbara to a rebellious view of morals, and disinclined her altogether to religion. If those two could not be happy apart, let them be happy together, in the name of all the joy there is in life!

And while her brother lay face to the sky on the tamarisk bank, she kept trying to think how to mother him, conscious that she did not in the least understand the way he thought about things. Over the fields behind, the larks were hymning the promise of the unripe corn; the foreshore was painted all colors, from vivid green to mushroom pink; by the edge of the blue sea little black figures were stooping. The air smelled sweet in the shade of the tamarisk; there was ineffable peace. And Barbara, covered by the network of the sunlight, could not help a certain impatience with a suffering which seemed to her so corrigible by action. At last she ventured: —

‘Life is short, Eusty!’

Milton’s answer, given without movement, startled her.

‘Persuade me that it is, Babs, and I’ll bless you. If the singing of these larks means nothing, if that blue up there is a morass of our invention, if we are pettily creeping on, furthering nothing, if there’s no purpose in our lives, persuade me of it, for God’s sake!'

Carried suddenly beyond her depth, Barbara could only put out her hand, and say, ‘Oh! don’t take it so hard!’

‘ Since you say that life is short,’ Milton muttered, with his smile, ‘you should n’t spoil it by feeling pity! In old days we went to the Tower for our convictions. We can stand a little private roasting, I hope; or has the sand run out of us altogether?’

Stung by his tone, Barbara answered in rather a hard voice, ‘ What we must bear, we must, I suppose. But why should we make trouble? That’s what I can’t stand, and there’s so much of it! ’

‘O profound wisdom!’

Barbara flushed.

‘I love life!’ she said.

The galleons of the westering sun were already sailing in a broad gold fleet straight for that foreshore where the little black stooping figures had not yet finished their toil; the larks still sang over the unripe corn, when Harbinger, galloping along the sands from Whitewater to Sea House, came on that silent couple walking home to dinner.

It would not be safe to say of this young man that he readily diagnosed a spiritual atmosphere, but this was the less his demerit, since everything from his cradle up had conspired to keep the spiritual thermometer of his surroundings at sixty in the shade. And the fact that his own spiritual thermometer had now run up so that it threatened to burst the bulb, rendered him less likely than ever to see what was happening with other people’s. Yet he did notice that Barbara was looking pale, and — it seemed — sweeter than ever. With her eldest brother he always somehow felt ill at ease. He could not exactly afford to despise the uncompromising spirit of one of his own order; but he was no more impervious than others to Milton’s caustic, thinly-veiled contempt for the commonplace; and having the full-blooded belief in himself usual with men of fine physique, whose lots are so cast that this belief can never or almost never be really shaken, he greatly disliked the feeling he had, in Milton’s presence, of being a little looked-down on. It was an intense relief when, saying that he wanted a certain magazine, Milton strode off into the town.

For Harbinger, no less than for Milton and Barbara, last night had been bitter and restless. The sight of that pale swaying figure, with the parted lips, whirling round in Courtier’s arms, had clung to his vision ever since. In his own last dance with her he had been almost savagely silent, and only by a great effort restrained his tongue from biting allusions to that ‘prancing, redhaired fellow,’ as he secretly called the champion of lost causes. In fact, his sensations then and since had been a revelation to himself, or would have been if he could have stood apart to see them. True, he went about next day with his usual cool, off-hand manner, because one naturally did n’t let people see things; but it was with such an inner aching, and rage of want, and jealousy, as really to merit pity. Men of his physically big, rushing type, are the last to possess their souls in patience.

Walking home after the ball, he had determined to follow her down to the sea, where she had said, with a sort of malice it seemed, that she was going. After a second almost sleepless night he had no longer any hesitation. He must see her! He had a right after all to go to his own place; besides, he did not care even if it was a pointed thing to do. The more pointed the better! There was beginning to be roused in him an ugly stubbornness of male determination. She was not going to escape him.

But now that he was walking at her side, all that determination and assurance melted into a perplexed humility; and he marched along by his horse with his head down, just feeling the ache of being so close to her and yet so far; angry with his own silence and awkwardness, almost angry with her for her loveliness, and the pain it made him suffer. When they reached the house, and she left him at the stable yard, saying she was going to get some flowers, he jerked the beast’s bridle and swore at it for its slowness in entering the stable. He was terrified that she would be gone before he could get into the garden, and yet half-afraid of finding her there. But she had not yet gone in; she was plucking carnations by the ragged box-hedge which led to the glass-houses. And as she rose from gathering them, almost before he knew what he was doing, Harbinger had thrown his arm round her, held her in a vise, kissed her unmercifully.

She seemed to offer no resistance, her smooth cheeks growing warmer and warmer, even her lips passive; but suddenly he recoiled, and his heart stood still at his own outrageous daring. What had he done? And he saw her leaning back almost, buried in the ragged box-hedge, and heard her say, with a sort of faint mockery, ‘Well!'

He would have flung himself down on his knees to ask for pardon but for the thought that some one might come. He said hoarsely, ‘ By God, I was mad!' and stood glowering at her in a sullen suspense between hardihood and fear.

And he heard her say, quietly, ‘Yes, you were — rather.’

Then seeing her put her hand up to her lips as if he had hurt them, he muttered brokenly, ‘ Forgive me, Babs! ’

There was a full minute’s silence while he stood there, not daring to look at her, beaten all over by his emotions. Then, with a sort of bewilderment, he heard her say, ‘I did n’t mind it — for once! ’

He looked up at that. How could she love him, and speak so coolly! How could she not mind, if she did not love him! She was passing her hands over her face and neck and hair, repairing the damage of his kisses.

‘Now shall we go in?’ she said.

Harbinger took a step forward.

‘I love you so,’ he said; ‘I will put my life in your hands, and you shall throw it away.’

At these words, of whose exact nature he had very little knowledge, he saw her smile.

‘ If I let you come within three yards, will you be good?’

He bowed; and, silently, they walked towards the house.

It was a strange dinner that evening. But its comedy, too subtly played for Milton and Lord Dennis, seemed transparent to the eyes of Lady Casterley; for, when Harbinger had sallied forth to ride back along the sands, she took her candle and invited Barbara to retire. Then, having admitted her granddaughter to the apartment always reserved for herself, and specially furnished with practically nothing, she sat down opposite that tall, young, solid figure, as it were taking stock of it, and said, ‘So you are coming to your senses, at all events. Kiss me!’

Barbara, stooping, saw a tear stealing down the carved fine nose. Knowing that to notice it would be too dreadful, she rose, and went to the window. There, looking over the dark fields and sea, by the side of which Harbinger was riding home, she thought for the hundredth time, ‘So that’s what it’s like!’

(To be continued.)