Chapter VII…

Chapter VII

When Rosamund, Robin and the nurse came back to London on the last day of September, Beatrice and Daventry were settled in their home. They had taken a flat in De Lorne Gardens, Kensington, high up on the seventh floor of a big building, which overlooked from a distance the trees of Kensington Gardens. Their friends soon began to call on them, and one of the first to mount up in the lift to their “hill-top,” as Daventry called their seventh floor, was Mrs. Clarke. A few nights after her call the Daventrys dined in Little Market Street, and Daventry, whose happiness had raised him not only to the seventh-floor flat, but also to the seventh heaven, mentioned that she had been, and that they were going to dine with her at Claridge’s on the following night. He enlarged, almost with exuberance, upon her savoir-vivre, her knowledge and taste, and said Beattie was delighted with her. Beatrice did not deny it. She was never exuberant, but she acknowledged that she had found Mrs. Clarke attractive and interesting.

“A lot of the clever ones are going to-morrow,” said Daventry. He mentioned several, both women and men, among them a lady who was famed for her exclusiveness as well as for her brains.

Evidently Mrs. Chetwinde had been speaking by the book when she had said at the trial, “If she wins, she wins, and it’s all right. If she gets the verdict, the world won’t do anything, except laugh at Beadon Clarke.” No serious impression had apparently been left upon society by the first disagreement of the jury. The “wild mind in the innocent body” had been accepted for what it was. And perhaps now, chastened by a sad experience, the wild mind was on the way to becoming tame. Dion wondered if it were so. After dinner he was undeceived by Daventry, who told him over their cigars that Mrs. Clarke was positively going back to live in Constantinople, and had already taken a flat there, “against every one’s advice.” Beadon Clarke had got himself transferred, and was to be sent to Madrid, so she wouldn’t run against him; but nevertheless she was making a great mistake.

“However,” Daventry concluded, “there’s something fine about her persistence; and of course a guilty woman would never dare to go back, even after an acquittal.”

“No,” said Dion, thinking of the way his hand had been held in Mrs. Chetwinde’s drawing-room. “I suppose not.”

“I wonder when Rosamund will get to know her,” said Daventry, with perhaps a slightly conscious carelessness.

“Never, perhaps,” said Dion, with equal carelessness. “Often one lives for years in London without knowing, or even ever seeing, one’s next-door neighbor.”

“To be sure!” said Daventry. “One of London’s many advantages, or disadvantages, as the case may be.”

And he began to talk about Whistler’s Nocturnes. Dion had never happened to tell Daventry about Jimmy Clarke’s strained hip and his own application of Elliman’s embrocation. He had told Rosamund, of course, and she had said that if Robin ever strained himself she should do exactly the same thing.

That night, when the Daventrys had gone, Dion asked Rosamund whether she thought Beattie was happy. She hesitated for a moment, then she said with her usual directness:

“I’m not sure that she is, Dion. Guy is a dear, kind, good husband to her, but there’s something homeless about Beattie somehow. She’s living in that pretty little flat in De Lorne Gardens, and yet she seems to me a wanderer. But we must wait; she may find what she’s looking for. I pray to God that she will.”

She did not explain; he guessed what she meant. Had she, too, been a wanderer at first, and had she found what she had been looking for? While Rosamund was speaking he had been pitying Guy. When she had finished he wondered whether he had ever had cause to pity some one else--now and then. Despite the peaceful happiness of his married life there was a very faint coldness at, or near to, his heart. It came upon him like a breath of frost stealing up out of the darkness to one who, standing in a room lit and warmed by a glowing fire, opens a window and lets in for a moment a winter night. But he shut his window quickly, and he turned to look at the fire and to warm his hands at its glow.

Mrs. Clarke rapidly established a sort of intimacy with the Daventrys. As Daventry had helped to fight for her, and genuinely delighted in her faculties, this was very natural; for Beatrice, unlike Rosamund, was apt to take her color gently from those with whom she lived, desiring to please them, not because she was vain and wished to be thought charming, but because she had an unusually sweet disposition and wished to be charming. She was sincere, and if asked a direct question always returned an answer that was true; but she sometimes fell in with an assumption from a soft desire to be kind. Daventry quite innocently assumed that she found Mrs. Clarke as delightful as he did. Perhaps she did; perhaps she did not. However it was, she gently accepted Mrs. Clarke as a friend.

Dion, of course, knew of this friendship; and so did Rosamund. She never made any comment upon it, and showed no interest in it. But her life that autumn was a full one. She had Robin; she had the house to look after, “my little house”; she had Dion in the evenings; she had quantities of friends and acquaintances; and she had her singing. She had now definitely given up singing professionally. Her very short career as an artist was closed. But she had begun to practise diligently again, and showed by this assiduity that she loved music not for what she could gain by it, but for its own sake. Of her friends and acquaintances she saw much less than formerly. Many of them complained that they never could get a glimpse of her now, that she shut them out, that “not at home” had become a parrot-cry on the lips of her well-trained parlor-maid, that she cared for nobody now that she had a husband and a baby, that she was self-engrossed, etc., etc. But they could not be angry with her; for if they did happen to meet her, or if she did happen to be “at home” when they called, they always found her the genial, radiant, kind and friendly Rosamund of old; full, apparently, of all the former interest in them and their doings, eager to welcome and make the most of their jokes and good stories, sympathetic towards their troubles and sorrows. To Dion she once said in explanation of her withdrawal from the rather bustling life which keeping up with many friends and acquaintances implies:

“I think one sometimes has to make a choice between living deeply in the essentials and just paddling up to one’s ankles in the non-essentials. I want to live deeply if I can, and I am very happy in quiet. I can hear only in peace the voices that mean most to me.”

“I remember what you said to me once in the Acropolis,” he answered.

“What was that?”

“You said, ‘Oh, Dion, if you knew how something in me cares for freshness and for peace.’”

“You remember my very words!”

“Yes.”

“Then you understand?”

“And besides,” he said slowly, and as if with some hesitation, “you used to long for a very quiet life, for the religious life; didn’t you?”

“Once, but it seems such ages ago.”

“And yet Robin’s not a year old yet.”

She looked at him with a sudden, and almost intense, inquiry; he was smiling at her.

“Robino maestro di casa!” he added.

And they both laughed.

Towards the end of November one day Daventry said to Dion in the Greville Club:

“Beatrice is going to give a dinner somewhere, probably at the Carlton. She thought of the twenty-eighth. Are Rosamund and you engaged that night? She wants you, of course.”

“No. We don’t go out much. Rose is an early rooster, as she calls it.”

“Then the twenty-eighth would do capitally.”

“Shall I tell Rose?”

“Yes, do. Beattie will write too, or tell Rosamund when she sees her.”

“Whom are you going to have?”

“Oh, Mrs. Chetwinde for one, and--we must see whom we can get. We’ll try to make it cheery and not too imbecile.”

As Daventry was speaking, Dion felt certain that the dinner had an object, and he thought he knew what that object was. But he only said:

“It’s certain to be jolly, and I always enjoy myself at the Carlton.”

“Even with bores?” said Daventry, unable to refrain from pricking a bubble, although he guessed the reason why Dion had blown it.

“Anyhow, I’m sure you won’t invite bores,” said Dion, trying to preserve a casual air, and wishing, for the moment, that he and his friend were densely stupid instead of quite intelligent.

“Pray that Beattie and I may be guided in our choice,” returned Daventry, going to pick up the “Saturday Review.”

Rosamund said of course she would go on the twenty-eighth and help Beattie with her dinner. She had accepted before she asked who were the invited guests. Beattie, who was evidently quite guileless in the matter, told her at once that Mrs. Clarke was among them. Rosamund said nothing, and appeared to be looking forward to the twenty-eighth. She even got a new gown for it, and Dion began to feel that he had made a mistake in supposing that Rosamund had long ago decided not to know Mrs. Clarke. He was very glad, for he had often felt uncomfortable about Mrs. Clarke, who, he supposed, must have believed that his wife did not wish to meet her, as her reiterated desire to make Rosamund’s acquaintance had met with no response. She had, he thought, shown the tact of a lady and of a thorough woman of the world in not pressing the point, and in never seeking to continue her acquaintance, or dawning friendship, with him since his wife had come back to town. He felt a strong desire now to be pleasant and cordial to her, and to show her how charming and sympathetic his Rosamund was. He looked forward to this dinner as he seldom looked forward to any social festivity.

On the twenty-sixth of November Robin had a cold! On the twenty-seventh it was worse, and he developed a little hard cough which was rather pathetic, and which seemed to surprise and interest him a good deal. Rosamund was full of solicitude. On the night of the twenty-seventh she said she would sit up with Robin. The nurse protested, but Rosamund was smilingly firm.

“I want you to have a good night, Nurse,” she said. “You’re too devoted and take too much out of yourself. And, besides, I shouldn’t sleep. I should be straining my ears all the time to hear whether my boy was coughing or not.”

Nurse had to give in, of course. But Dion was dismayed when he heard of the project.

“You’ll be worn out!” he exclaimed.

“No, I shan’t But even if I were it wouldn’t matter.”

“But I want you to look your radiant self for Beattie’s dinner.”

“Oh--the dinner!”

It seemed she had forgotten it.

“Robin comes first,” she said firmly, after a moment of silence.

And she sat up that night in an arm-chair by the nursery fire, ministering at intervals to the child, who seemed impressed and heartened in his coughings by his mother’s presence.

On the following day she was rather tired, the cough was not abated, and when Dion came back from business he learnt that she had telegraphed to Beattie to give up the dinner. He was very much disappointed. But she did really look tired; Robin’s cough was audible in the quiet house; the telegram had gone, and of course there was nothing more to be done. Dion did not even express his disappointment; but he begged Rosamund to go very early to bed, and offered to sleep in a separate room if his return late was likely to disturb her. She agreed that, perhaps, that would be best. So, at about eleven-thirty that night, Dion made his way to their spare room, walking tentatively lest a board should creak and awaken Rosamund.

Everybody had missed her and had made inquiries about her, except Mrs. Clarke and Daventry. The latter had not mentioned her in Dion’s hearing. But he was very busy with his guests. Mrs. Clarke had apparently not known that Rosamund had been expected at the dinner, for when Dion, who had sat next her, had said something about the unfortunate reason for Rosamund’s absence, Mrs. Clarke had seemed sincerely surprised.

“But I thought your wife had quite given up going out since her child was born?” she had said.

“Oh no. She goes out sometimes.”

“I had no idea she did. But now I shall begin to be disappointed and to feel I’ve missed something. You shouldn’t have told me.”

It was quite gravely and naturally said. As he went into the spare room, Dion remembered the exact tone of Mrs. Clarke’s husky voice in speaking it, the exact expression in her eyes. They were strange eyes, he thought, unlike any other eyes he had seen. In them there was often a look that seemed both intent and remote. Their gaze was very direct but it was not piercing. There was melancholy in the eyes but there was no demand for sympathy. When Dion thought of the expression in Rosamund’s eyes he realized how far from happiness, and even from serenity, Mrs. Clarke must be, and he could not help pitying her. Yet she never posed as une femme incomprise, or indeed as anything. She was absolutely simple and natural. He had enjoyed talking to her. Despite her gravity she was, he thought, excellent company, a really interesting woman and strongly individual. She seemed totally devoid of the little tiresomenesses belonging to many woman--tiresomenesses which spring out of vanity and affectation, the desire of possession, the uneasy wish to “cut out” publicly other women. Mrs. Clarke would surely never “manage” a man. If she held a man it would be with the listless and yet imperative grip of Stamboul. The man might go if he would, but--would he want to go?

In thinking of Mrs. Clarke, Dion of course always considered her with the detached spectator’s mind. No woman on earth was of real importance to him except Rosamund. His mother he did not consciously count among women. She was to him just the exceptional being, the unique and homely manifestation a devoted mother is to the son who loves her without thinking about it; not numbered among women or even among mothers. She stood to him for protective love unquestioning, for interest in him and all his doings unwavering, for faith in his inner worth undying, for the Eternities without beginning or ending; but probably he did not know it. Of Rosamund, what she was, what she meant in his life, he was intensely, even secretly, almost savagely conscious. In Mrs. Clarke he was more interested than he happened to be in any of the women who dwelt in the great world of those whom he did not love and never could love.

Had the dinner-party he had just been to been arranged by Daventry in order that Rosamund and Mrs. Clarke might meet in a perfectly natural way? If so, it must have been Daventry’s idea and not Mrs. Clarke’s. Dion had a feeling that Daventry had been vexed by Rosamund’s defection. He knew his friend very well. It was not quite natural that Daventry had not mentioned Rosamund. But why should Daventry strongly wish Mrs. Clarke and Rosamund to meet if Mrs. Clarke had not indicated a desire to know Rosamund? Daventry was an enthusiastic adherent of Mrs. Clarke’s. He had, Dion knew, a chivalrous feeling for her. Having helped to win her case, any slight put upon her would be warmly resented by him.

Had Rosamund put upon her a slight? Had she deliberately avoided the dinner?

Dion was on the point of getting into the spare-room bed when he asked himself that question. As he pulled back the clothes he heard a dry little sound. It was Robin’s cough. He stole to the door and opened it. As he did so he saw the tail of Rosamund’s dressing-gown disappearing over the threshold of the nursery. The nursery door shut softly behind her, and Dion got into bed feeling heartily ashamed of his suspicion. How low it was to search for hidden motives in such a woman as Rosamund. He resolved never to do that again. He lay in bed listening, but he did not hear Robin’s cough again, and he wondered if the child was already old enough to be what nurses call “artful,” whether he had made use of his little affliction to get hold of his providence in the night.

What a mystery was the relation of mother and little child! He lay for a long while musing about it. Why hadn’t he followed Rosamund over the threshold of the nursery just now? The mystery had held him back.

Was it greater than the mystery of the relation of man to woman in a love such as his for Rosamund? He considered it, but he was certain that he could not fathom it. No man, he felt sure, knew or ever could know how a mother like Rosamund, that is an intensely maternal mother, regarded her child when he was little and dependent on her; how she loved him, what he meant to her. And no doubt the gift of the mother to the child was subtly reciprocated by the child. But just how?

Dion could not remember at all what he had felt, or how he had regarded his mother when he was nine months old. Presently he recalled Hermes and the child in that remote and hushed room hidden away in the green wilds of Elis; he even saw them before him--saw the beautiful face of the Hermes, saw the child’s stretched-out arm.

Elis! He had been wonderfully happy there, far away in the smiling wilderness. Would he ever be there again? And, if fate did indeed lead his steps thither, would he again be wonderfully happy? Of one thing he was certain; that he would never see Elis, would never see Hermes and the child again, unless Rosamund was with him. She had made the green wilderness to blossom as the rose. She only could make his life to blossom. He depended upon her terribly--terribly. Always that love of his was growing. People, especially women, often said that the love of a man was quickly satisfied, more quickly than a woman’s, that the masculine satisfaction was soon followed by satiety. Love such as that was only an appetite, a species of lust. Such a woman as Rosamund could not awaken mere lust. For her a man might have desire, but only the desire that every great love of a man for a woman encloses. And how utterly different that was from physical lust.

He thought of the maidens upholding the porch of the Erechtheion. His Rosamund descended from them, was as pure, as serene in her goodness, as beautiful as they were.

In thinking of the beloved maidens he did not think of them as marble.

Before he went to sleep Dion had realized that, since Rosamund was awake, the reason for his coming to the spare room did not exist. Nevertheless he did not go to their bedroom that night. Robin’s little dry cough still sounded in his ears. To-night was Robin’s kingdom.

In a day or two Robin was better, in a week he was perfectly well. If he had not chanced to catch cold, would Rosamund have worn that new evening-gown at the Carlton dinner?

On that question Dion had a discussion with Daventry which was disagreeable to him. One day Daventry, who had evidently been, in silence, debating whether to speak or not, said to him:

“Oh, Dion, d’you mind if I use a friend’s privilege and say something I very much want to say, but which you mayn’t be so keen to hear?”

“No, of course not. We can say anything to each other.”

“Can we? I’m not sure of that--now.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Oh, well--anyhow, this time I’ll venture. Why did Rosamund throw us over the other night at almost the last moment?”

“Because Robin was ill.”

“He’s quite well now.”

“Why not. It’s ten days ago.”

“He can’t have been so very ill.”

“He was ill enough to make Rosamund very anxious. She was up with him the whole night before your dinner; and not only that, she was up again on the night of the dinner, though she was very tired.”

“Well, coming to our dinner wouldn’t have prevented that--only eight till ten-thirty.”

“I don’t think, Guy, you at all understand Rosamund’s feeling for Robin,” said Dion, with a sort of dry steadiness.

“Probably not, being a man.”

“Perhaps a father can understand better.”

“Better? It seems to me one either does understand a thing or one doesn’t understand it.”

There was a not very attractive silence which Daventry broke by saying:

“Then you think if Beattie and I give another dinner at the Carlton--a piece of reckless extravagance, but we are made on entertaining!--Robin won’t be ill again?”

“Another dinner? You’ll be ruined.”

“I’ve got several more briefs. Would Robin be ill?”

“How the deuce can any one know?”

“I’ll hazard a guess. He would be ill.”

Dion reddened. There was sudden heat not only in his cheeks but also about his heart.

“I didn’t know you were capable of talking such pernicious rubbish!” he said.

“Let’s prove whether it’s rubbish or not. Beattie will send Rosamund another dinner invitation to-morrow, and then we’ll wait and see what happens to Robin’s health.”

“Guy, I don’t want to have a quarrel with you.”

“A quarrel? What about?”

“If you imply that Rosamund is insincere, is capable of acting a part, we shall quarrel. Robin was really ill. Rosamund fully meant to go to your dinner. She bought a new dress expressly for it.”

“Forgive me, old Dion, and please don’t think I was attacking Rosamund. No. But I think sometimes the very sweetest and best women do have their little bit of insincerity. To women very often the motive seems of more importance than the action springing from it. I had an idea that perhaps Rosamund was anxious not to hurt some one’s feelings.”

“Whose?”

After a slight hesitation Daventry said:

“Mrs. Clarke’s.”

“Did Mrs. Clarke know that Rosamund accepted to go to your dinner?” asked Dion abruptly, and with a forcible directness that put the not unastute Daventry immediately on his guard.

“What on earth has that to do with it?”

“Everything, I should think. Did she?”

“No,” said Daventry.

“Then how could--?” Dion began. But he broke off, and added more quietly:

“Why are you so anxious that Rosamund should know Mrs. Clarke?”

“Well, didn’t Mrs. Clarke ages ago express a wish to know Rosamund if the case went in her favor?”

“Oh, I--yes, I fancy she did. But she probably meant nothing by it, and has forgotten it.”

“I doubt that. A woman who has gone through Mrs. Clarke’s ordeal is generally hypersensitive afterwards.”

“But she’s come out splendidly. Everybody believes in her. She’s got her child. What more can she want?”

“As she’s such a great friend of ours I think it must seem very odd to her not knowing Rosamund, especially as she’s good friends with you. D’you mind if we ask Rosamund to meet her again?”

“You’ve done it once. I should leave things alone. Mind, Rosamund has never told me she doesn’t want to know Mrs. Clarke.”

“That may be another example of her goodness of heart,” said Daventry. “Rosamund seldom or never speaks against people. I’ll tell you the simple truth, Dion. As I helped to defend Mrs. Clarke, and as we won and she was proved to be an innocent woman, and as I believe in her and admire her very much, I’m sensitive for her. Perhaps it’s very absurd.”

“I think it’s very chivalrous.”

“Oh--rot! But there it is. And so I hate to see a relation of my own--I count Rosamund as a relation now--standing out against her.”

“There’s no reason to think she’s doing that.”

An expression that seemed to be of pity flitted over Daventry’s intelligent face, and he slightly raised his eyebrows.

“Anyhow, we won’t bother you with another dinner invitation,” he said.

And so the conversation ended.

It left with Dion an impression which was not pleasant, and he could not help wondering whether, during the conversation, his friend had told him a direct and deliberate lie.

No more dinners were given by Beattie and Daventry at the Carlton. Robin’s health continued to be excellent. Mrs. Clarke was never mentioned at 5 Little Market Street, and she gave to the Leiths no sign of life, though Dion knew that she was still in London and was going to stay on there until the spring. He did not meet her, although she knew many of those whom he knew. This was partly due, perhaps, to chance; but it was also partly due to deliberate action by Dion. He avoided going to places where he thought he might meet her: to Esme Darlington’s, to Mrs. Chetwinde’s, to one or two other houses which she frequented; he even gave up visiting Jenkins’s gymnasium because he knew she continued to go there regularly with Jimmy Clarke, whom, since the divorce case, with his father’s consent, she had taken away from school and given to the care of a tutor. All this was easy enough, and required but little management on account of Rosamund’s love of home and his love of what she loved. Since Robin’s coming she had begun to show more and more plainly her root-indifference to the outside pleasures and attractions of the world, was becoming, Dion thought, week by week, more cloistral, was giving the rein, perhaps, to secret impulses which marriage had interfered with for a time, but which were now reviving within her. Robin was a genuine reason, but perhaps also at moments an excuse. Was there not sometimes in the quiet little house, quiet unless disturbed by babyhood’s occasional outbursts, a strange new atmosphere, delicate and subdued, which hinted at silent walks, at twilight dreamings, at slowly pacing feet, bowed heads and wide-eyed contemplation? Or was all this a fancy of Dion’s, bred in him by Rosamund’s revelation of an old and haunting desire? He did not know; but he did know that sometimes, when he heard her warm voice singing at a little distance from him within their house, he thought of a man’s voice, in some dim and remote chapel with stained-glass windows, singing an evening hymn in the service of Benediction.

In the midst of many friends, in the midst of the enormous City, Rosamund effected, or began to effect, a curiously intent withdrawal, and Dion, as it were, accompanied her; or perhaps it were truer to say, followed after her. He loved quiet evenings in his home, and the love of them grew steadily upon him. To the occasional protests of his friends he laughingly replied:

“The fact is we’re both very happy at home. We’re an unfashionable couple.”

Bruce Evelin, Esme Darlington and a few others, including, of course, Dion’s mother and the Daventrys, they sometimes asked to come to them. Their little dinners were homely and delightful; but Mr. Darlington often regretted plaintively their “really, if I may say so, almost too definite domesticity.” He even said to certain intimates:

“I know the next thing we shall hear of will be that the Leiths have decided to bury themselves in the country. And Dion Leith will wreck his nerves by daily journeys to town in some horrid business train.”

At the beginning of January, however, there came an invitation which they decided to accept. It was to an evening party at Mrs. Chetwinde’s, and she begged Rosamund to be nice to her and sing at it.

“Since you’ve given up singing professionally one never hears you at all,” she wrote. “I’m not going to tell the usual lie and say I’m only having a few people. On the contrary, I’m asking as many as my house will hold. It’s on January the fifteenth.”

It happened that the invitation arrived in Little Market Street by the last post, and that, earlier in the day, Daventry had met Dion in the Club and had casually told him that Mrs. Clarke was spending the whole of January in Paris, to get some things for the flat in Constantinople which she intended to occupy in the late spring. Rosamund showed Dion Mrs. Chetwinde’s note.

“Let’s go,” he said at once.

“Shall we? Do you like these crowds? She says ‘as many as my house will hold.’”

“All the better. There’ll be all the more to enjoy the result of your practising. Do say yes.”

His manner was urgent. Mrs. Clarke would be in Paris. This party was certainly no ingenuity of Daventry’s.

“We mustn’t begin to live like a monk and a nun,” he exclaimed. “We’re too young and enjoy life too much for that.”

“Do monks and nuns live together? Since when?” said Rosamund, laughing at him.

“Poor wretches! If only they did, how much--!”

“Hush!” she said, with a smiling pretense of thinking of being shocked presently.

She went to the writing-table.

“Very well, then, we’ll go if you want to.”

“Don’t you?” he asked, following her.

She had sat down and taken up a pen. Now she looked up at him with her steady eyes.

“I’m sure I shall enjoy it when I’m there,” she answered. “I generally enjoy things. You know that. You’ve seen me among people so often.”

“Yes. One would think you reveled in society if one only knew you in that phase.”

“Well, I don’t really care for it one bit. I can’t, because I never miss it if I don’t have it.”

“I believe you really care for very few things and for very few people,” he said.

“Perhaps that’s true about people.”

“How many people, I wonder?”

“I don’t think one always knows whom one cares for until something happens.”

“Something?”

“Until one’s threatened with loss, or until one actually does lose somebody one loves. I”--she hesitated, stretched out her hand, and drew some notepaper out of a green case which stood on the table--“I had absolutely no idea what I felt for my mother until she died. She died very suddenly.”

Tears rushed to her eyes and her whole face suddenly reddened.

“Then I knew!” she said, in a broken voice.

Dion had never before seen her look as she was looking now.

For a moment he felt almost as if he were regarding a stranger. There was a sort of heat of anger in the face, which looked rebellious in its emotion; and he believed it was the rebellion in her face which made him realize how intensely she had been able to love her mother.

“Now I must write to Mrs. Chetwinde,” she said, suddenly bending over the notepaper, “and tell her we’ll come, and I’ll sing.”

“Yes.”

He stood a moment watching the moving pen. Then he bent down and just touched her shoulder with a great gentleness.

“If you knew what I would do to keep every breath of sorrow out of your life!” he said, in a low voice.

Without looking up she touched his hand.

“I know you would. You could never bring sorrow into my life.”

From that day Dion realized what intensity of feeling lay beneath Rosamund’s serene and often actively joyous demeanor. Perhaps she cared for very few people, but for those few she cared with a force surely almost abnormal. Her mother had now been dead for many years; never before had Rosamund spoken of her death to him. He understood the reason of that silence now, and from that day the desire to keep all sorrow from her became almost a passion in him. He even felt that its approach to her, that its cold touch resting upon her, would be a hateful and almost unnatural outrage. Yet he saw all around him people closely companioned by sorrow and did not think that strange. Sorrow even approached very near to Rosamund and to him in that very month of January, for Beatrice had a miscarriage and lost her baby. She said very little about it, but Dion believed that she was really stricken to the heart. He was very fond of Beatrice, he almost loved her; yet her sorrow was only a shadow passing by him, not a substance pressing upon him. And that fact, which he realized, made him know how little even imagination and quiet affection can help men feel the pains of others. The heart knoweth only its own bitterness and the bitterness of those whom it deeply and passionately loves.

Chapter VIII

On January the fifteenth Rosamund put on the gown which had been bought for the Carlton dinner but not worn at it.

Although she had not really wanted to go to Mrs. Chetwinde’s party she looked radiantly buoyant, and like one almost shining with expectation, when she was ready to start for Lowndes Square.

“You ought to go out every night,” Dion said, as he put her cloak over her shoulders.

“Why?”

“To enjoy and to give enjoyment. Merely to look at you would make the dullest set of people in London wake up and scintillate. Don’t tell me you’re not looking forward to it, because I couldn’t believe you.”

“Now that the war-paint is on I confess to feeling almost eager for the fray. How nicely you button it. You aren’t clumsy.”

“How could I be clumsy in doing something for you? Where’s your music?”

“In my head. Jennie will meet us there.”

Jennie was Rosamund’s accompanist, a clever Irish girl who often came to Little Market Street to go through things with Rosamund.

“It will be rather delightful singing to people again,” she added in a joyous voice as they got into the hired carriage. “I hope I’ve really improved.”

“How you love a thing for itself!” he said, as they drove off.

“I think that’s the only way to love.”

“Of course it is. You know the only way to everything beautiful and sane. What I have learnt from you!”

“Dion,” she said, in the darkness, “I think you are rather a dangerous companion for me.”

“How can I be?”

“I’m not at all a piece of perfection. Take care you don’t teach me to think I am.”

“But you’re the least conceited--”

“Hush, you encourager of egoism!” she interrupted seriously.

“I’m afraid you’ll find a good many more at Mrs. Chetwinde’s.”

Dion thought he had been a true prophet half an hour later when, from a little distance, he watched and listened while Rosamund was singing her first song. Seeing her thus in the midst of a crowd he awakened to the fact that Robin had changed her very much. She still looked splendidly young but she no longer looked like a girl. The married woman and the mother were there quite definitely. Even he fancied that he heard them in her voice, which had gained in some way, perhaps in roundness, in mellowness. This might be the result of study; he was inclined to believe it the result of motherhood. She was wearing ear-rings--tiny, not long drooping things, they were green, small emeralds; and he remembered how he had loved her better when he saw her wearing ear-rings for the first time in Mr. Darlington’s drawing-room. How definite she was in a crowd. Crowds effaced ordinary people, but when Rosamund was surrounded she always seemed to be beautifully emphasized, to be made more perfectly herself. She did not take, she gave, and in giving showed how much she had.

She was giving now as she sang, “Caro mio ben.”

Towards the end of the song, when Dion was deeply in it and in her who sang it, he was disturbed by a woman’s whisper coming from close behind him. He did not catch the beginning of what was communicated, but he did catch the end. It was this: “Over there, the famous Mrs. Clarke.”

But Mrs. Clarke was in Paris. Daventry had told him so. Dion looked quickly about the large and crowded room, but could not see Mrs. Clarke. Then he glanced behind him to see the whisperer, and beheld a hard-faced, middle-aged and very well-known woman--one of those women who, by dint of perpetually “going about,” become at length something less than human. He was quite sure Mrs. Brackenhurst would not make a mistake about anything which happened at a party. She might fail to recognize her husband, if she met him about her house, because he was so seldom there; she would not fail to recognize the heroine of a resounding divorce case. Mrs. Clarke must certainly have returned from Paris and be somewhere in that room, listening to Rosamund and probably watching her. Dion scarcely knew whether this fact made him sorry or glad. He did know, however, that it oddly excited him.

When “Caro mio ben” was ended people began to move. Rosamund was surrounded and congratulated, and Dion saw Esme Darlington bending to her, half paternally, half gallantly, and speaking to her emphatically. Mrs. Chetwinde drifted up to her; and three or four young men hovered near to her, evidently desirous of putting in a word. The success of her leaped to the eye. Dion saw it and glowed. But the excitement in him persisted, and he began to move towards the far side of the great room in search of Mrs. Clarke. If she had just come in she would probably be near the door by which the pathetic Echo stood on her pedestal of marble, withdrawn in her punishment, in her abasement beautiful and wistful. How different was Rosamund from Echo! Dion looked across at her joyous and radiant animation, as she smiled and talked almost with the eagerness and vitality of a child; and he had the thought, “How goodness preserves!” Women throng the secret rooms of the vanity specialists, put their trust in pomades, in pigments, in tinctures, in dyes; and the weariness and the sin become lustrous, perhaps, but never are hidden or even obscured. His Rosamund trusted in a wholesome life, with air blowing through it, with sound sleep as its anodyne, with purity on guard at its door; and radiance and youth sparkled up in her like fountain spray in the sunshine. And the wholesomeness of her was a lure to the many even in a drawing-room of London. He saw powdered women, women with darkened eyebrows, and touched-up lips, and hair that had forgotten long ago what was its natural color, looking at her, and he fancied there was a dull wonder in their eyes. Perhaps they were thinking: “Yes, that’s the recipe--being gay in goodness!” And perhaps some of them were thinking, too: “We’ve lost the power to follow that recipe, if we ever had it.” Poor women! With a sort of exultation he pitied them and their husbands. A chord was sounded on the piano. He stood still. The loud buzz of conversation died down. Was Rosamund going to sing again so soon? Perhaps some one had begged for something specially beloved. Jennie was playing a soft prelude as a gentle warning to a few of those who seem ever to find silence a physical difficulty. She stopped, and began to play something Dion did not know, something very modern in its strange atmospheric delicacy, which nevertheless instantly transported him to Greece. He was there, even before Rosamund began to sing in a voice that was hushed, in a far-off voice, not antique, but the voice of modernity, prompted by a mind looking away from what is near to what is afar and is deeply desired.

“A crescent sail upon the sea, So calm and fair and ripple-free You wonder storms can ever be;

A shore with deep indented bays, And o’er the gleaming water-ways A glimpse of Islands in the haze;

A faced bronzed dark to red and gold, With mountain eyes that seem to hold The freshness of the world of old;

A shepherd’s crook, a coat of fleece, A grazing flock--the sense of peace, The long sweet silence--this is Greece.”

The accompaniment continued for a moment alone, whispering remoteness. Then, like a voice far off in a blue distance, there came again from Rosamund, more softly and with less pressure:

“----The sense of peace, The long sweet silence--this is Greece! This is Greece!”

It was just then that Dion saw Mrs. Clarke. She had, perhaps, been sitting down; or, possibly, some one had been standing in front of her and had hidden her from him; for she was not far off, and he wondered sharply why he had not seen her till now, why, till now, she had refrained from snatching him away from his land of the early morning. There was to him at this moment something actually cruel and painful in her instant suggestion of Stamboul. Yet she was not looking at him, but was directing upon Rosamund her characteristic gaze of consideration, in which there was a peculiar grave thoroughness. A handsome, fair young man, with a very red weak mouth, stood close to her. Echo was just beyond. Without speaking, Mrs. Clarke continued looking at Rosamund intently, when the music evaporated, and Greece faded away into the shining of that distance which hides our dreams. And Dion noted again, with a faint creeping of wonder and of doubt, the strange haggardness of her face, which, nevertheless, he had come to think almost beautiful.

The fair young man spoke to her, bending and looking at her eagerly. She turned her head slowly, and as if reluctantly towards him, and was evidently listening to what he said, listening with that apparent intentness which was characteristic of her. She was dressed in black and violet, and wore a large knot of violets in her corsage. Round her throat was clasped an antique necklace of dull, unshining gold, and dim purple stones, which looked beautiful, but almost weary with age. Perhaps they had lain for years in some dim bazaar of Stamboul, forgotten under heaps of old stuffs. Dion thought of them as slumbering, made drowsy and finally unconscious by the fumes of incense and the exhalations from diapered perfume vials. As he looked at Mrs. Clarke, the bare and shining vision of Greece, evoked by the song Rosamund had just been singing, faded; the peculiar almost intellectually delicate atmosphere of Greece was gone; and he saw for a moment the umber mystery of Stamboul, lifted under tinted clouds of the evening beyond the waters of the Golden Horn; the great rounded domes and tapering speary minarets of the mosques, couchant amid the shadows and the trailing and gauzy smoke-wreaths, a suggestion of dense masses of cypresses, those trees of the night which only in the night can be truly themselves, guarding the innumerable graves of the Turkish cemeteries.

From that moment he connected Mrs. Clarke in his mind with the cypress. Surely she must have spent very many hours wandering in those enormous and deserted gardens of the dead, where the very dust is poignant, and the cries of the sea come faintly up to Allah’s children crumbling beneath the stone flowers and the little fezes of stone. Mrs. Clarke must love the cypress, for about her there was an atmosphere which suggested dimness and the gathering shadows of night.

Greece and Stamboul, the land of the early morning and the wonder-city of twilight; Rosamund and Mrs. Clarke, standing there for a moment, in the midst of the shifting crowd, Dion traveled, compared, connected and was alone in the soul’s solitude.

Then Mrs. Chetwinde spoke to him, and he saw Bruce Evelin in the distance going towards Rosamund.

Mrs. Chetwinde told him that Rosamund had made a great advance.

“Now that she’s given up singing professionally she’s singing better than ever. That Grecian song is the distilled essence of Greece felt in our new way. For we’ve got our new way of feeling things. Rosamund tells us she repeated the words to Jennie Stileman, and Jennie had them set by a young Athenian who’s over here studying English. He catches the butterfly, lets it flutter for a moment in his hand and go. He doesn’t jab a pin into it as our composers would. Oh, there’s Cynthia! I hope she heard the last thing.”

“Yes, she did.”

“Ah?”

“I thought Mrs. Clarke was spending January in Paris.”

“She came back to-day, and sent round to ask if she might come.”

Mrs. Chetwinde wandered away, insouciant and observant as ever. Even at her own parties she always had an air of faintly detached indifference, never bothered about how “it” was “going.” If it chose to stop it could, and her guests must put up with it.

When she left him Dion hesitated. Mrs. Clarke had just seen him and sent him a grave nod of recognition. Should he go to her? But the fair young man was still at her side, was still, with his weak red mouth, talking into her ear. Dion felt a strange distaste as he saw those moving lips under the brushed-up, almost ridiculously small, golden mustache; and just as he was conscious of this distaste Mrs. Clarke got rid of the young man, and spoke to a woman. Then she moved forward slowly. Mr. Chetwinde spoke to her, moving his ample fan-shaped beard, which always looked Assyrian, though he was profoundly English and didn’t know it. She drew nearer to Dion as she answered Mr. Chetwinde, but in a wholly unconscious manner. To-night she looked more haggard even than usual, no doubt because of the journey from Paris. But Mrs. Chetwinde had once said of her: “Cynthia is made of iron.” Could that be true? She was quite close to Dion now, and he was aware of a strange faint perfume which reminded him of Stamboul; and he realized here in Lowndes Square that Stamboul was genuinely fascinating, was much more fascinating than he had realized when he was in it.

Mrs. Clarke passed him without looking at him, and he felt sure quite unconscious of his nearness to her. Evidently she had forgotten all about him. Just after she had gone by he decided that of course he ought to go and speak to her, and that to-night he must introduce Rosamund to her. Not to do so would really be rude. Daventry was not there to be chivalrous. The illness of Beattie, and doubtless his own distress at the loss of his unborn child, had kept him away. Dion thought that he would be unchivalrous if he now neglected to make a point of speaking to Mrs. Clarke and of introducing his wife to her.

Having made up his mind on this he turned to follow Mrs. Clarke, and at once saw that Esme Darlington, that smoother of difficult social places, was before him. A little way off he saw Mr. Darlington, with Rosamund well but delicately in hand, making for Mrs. Clarke somewhat with the gait of Agag. In a moment the thing was done. The two women were speaking to each other, and Rosamund had sent to Mrs. Clarke one of her inquiring looks. Then they sat down together on that red sofa to which Mrs. Clarke had led Dion for his first conversation with her. Esme Darlington remained standing before it. The full acquaintance was joined at last.

Were they talking about the baby? Dion wondered, as for a moment he watched them, forgetting his surroundings. Rosamund was speaking with her usual swift vivacity. At home she was now often rather quiet, moving, Dion sometimes thought, in an atmosphere of wide serenity; but in society she was always full of sunshine and eager life. Something within her leaped up responsively at the touch of humanity, and to-night she had just been singing, and the whole of her was keenly awake. The contrast between her and Mrs. Clarke was almost startling: her radiant vitality emphasized Mrs. Clarke’s curious, but perfectly natural, gravity; the rose in her cheeks, the yellow in her hair, the gaiety in her eyes, drew the attention to Mrs. Clarke’s febrile and tense refinement, which seemed to have worn her body thin, to have drained the luster out of her hair, to have fixed the expression of observant distress in her large and fearless eyes. Animal spirits played through Rosamund to-night; from Mrs. Clarke they were absent. Her haggard composure, confronting Rosamund’s pure sparkle, suggested the comparison of a hidden and secret pool, steel colored in the depths of a sunless forest, with a rushing mountain stream leaping towards the sea in a tangle of sun-rays. Dion realized for the first time that Mrs. Clarke never laughed, and scarcely ever smiled. He realized, too, that she really was beautiful. For Rosamund did not “kill” her; her delicacy of line and colorless clearness stood the test of nearness to Rosamund’s radiant beauty. Indeed Rosamund somehow enhanced the peculiarly interesting character of Mrs. Clarke’s personality, which was displayed, but with a sort of shadowy reticence, in her physique, and at the same time underlined its melancholy. So might a climbing rose, calling to the blue with its hundred blossoms, teach something of the dark truth of the cypress through which its branches are threaded.

But Mrs. Clarke would certainly never be Rosamund’s stairway towards heaven.

Some one he knew spoke to Dion, and he found himself involved in a long conversation; people moving hid the two women from him, but presently the piano sounded again, and Rosamund sang that first favorite of hers and of Dion’s, the “Heart ever faithful,” recalling him to a dear day at Portofino where, in a cozy room, guarded by the wintry woods and the gray sea of Italy, he had felt the lure of a faithful spirit, and known the basis of clean rock on which Rosamund had built up her house of life. Bruce Evelin stood near to him while she sang it now, and once their eyes met and exchanged affectionate thoughts of the singer, which went gladly out of the gates eager to be read and understood.

When the melody of Bach was finished many people, impelled thereto by the hearty giant whom Mrs. Chetwinde had most strangely married, went downstairs to the black-and-white dining-room to drink champagne and eat small absurdities of various kinds. A way was opened for Dion to Mrs. Clarke, who was still on the red sofa. Dion noticed the fair young man hovering, and surely with intention in his large eyes, in the middle distance, but he went decisively forward, took Mrs. Clarke’s listless yet imperative hand, and asked her if she would care to go down with him.

“Oh no; I never eat at odd times.”

“Do you ever eat at all?”

“Yes, at my chosen moments. Do find another excuse.”

“For going to eat?”

“Or drink.”

His reply was to sit down beside her. Mrs. Chetwinde’s dining-room was large. People probably knew that, for the drawing-room emptied slowly. Even the fair young man went away to seek consolation below. Rosamund had descended with Bruce Evelin and Esme Darlington. There was a pleasant and almost an intimate hush in the room.

“I heard you were to be in Paris this month,” Dion said.

“I came back to-day.”

“Aren’t you tired?”

“No. I want to speak to you about Jimmy, if you don’t mind.”

“Please do,” said Dion rather earnestly, struck by a sort of little pang as he remembered the boy’s urgent insistence that his visitor was to come again soon.

“I’m not quite satisfied with his tutor.”

She began to ask Dion’s advice with regard to the boy’s bringing up, explaining that her husband had left that matter in her hands.

“He’s very sorry and ashamed now, poor man, about his attacks on me, and tries to make up from a distance by trusting me completely with Jimmy. I don’t bear him any malice, but of course the link between us is smashed and can’t ever be resoldered. I’m asking you what I can’t ask him because he’s a weak man.”

The implication was obvious and not disagreeable to Dion. He gave advice, and as he did so thought of Robin at ten.

Mrs. Clarke was a remarkably sensible woman, and agreed with his views on boys, and especially with his theory, suddenly discovered in the present heat of conversation, that to give them “backbone” was of even more importance than to develop their intellectual side. She spoke of her son in a way that was almost male.

“He mustn’t be small,” she said, evidently comprehending both soul and body in the assertion. “D’you know Lord Brayfield who was talking to me just now?”

“You mean a fair man?”

“Yes, with a meaningless mouth. Jimmy mustn’t grow up into anything of that kind.”

The conversation took a decidedly Doric turn as Mrs. Clarke developed her ideas of what a man ought to be. In the midst of it Dion remembered Dumeny, and could not help saying:

“But that type”--they had been speaking of what he considered to be Rosamund’s type of man, once described by her as “a strong soul in a strong body, and a soft heart but not a softy’s heart”--“is almost the direct opposite of the artistic type of man, isn’t it?”

Her large eyes looked “Well?” at him, but she said nothing.

“I thought you cared so very much for knowledge and taste in a man.”

“So I do. But Jimmy will never have knowledge and taste. He’s the boisterous athletic type.”

“And you’re glad?”

“Not sorry, at any rate. He’ll just be a thorough man, if he’s brought up properly, and that will do very well.”

“I think you’re very complex,” Dion said, still thinking of Dumeny.

“Because I make friends in so many directions?”

“Well--yes, partly,” he answered, wondering if she was reading his thought.

“Jimmy’s not a friend but my boy. I know very well Monsieur Dumeny, for instance, whom you saw, and I dare say wondered about, at the trial; but I couldn’t bear that my boy should develop into that type of man. You’ll say I am a treacherous friend, perhaps. It might be truer to say I was born acquisitive and too mental. I never really liked Monsieur Dumeny; but I liked immensely his musical talent, his knowledge, his sure taste, and his power of making almost everything flower into interestingness. Do you know what I mean? Some people take light from your day; others add to its light and paint in wonderful shadows. If I went to the bazaars alone they were Eastern shops; if I went with Dumeny they were the Arabian Nights. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“The touch of his mind on a thing gave it life. It stirred. One could look into its heart and see the pulse beating. I care to do that, so I cared to go about with Monsieur Dumeny. But one doesn’t love people for that sort of thing. In the people one loves one needs character, the right fiber in the soul. You ought to know that.”

“Why?” he asked, almost startled.

“I was introduced to your wife just now.”

“Oh!”

There was a pause. Then Dion said:

“I’m glad you have met.”

“So am I,” said Mrs. Clarke, in a voice that sounded more husky even than usual. “She sang that Greek song quite beautifully. I’ve just been telling her that I want to show her some curious songs I have heard in Turkey, and Asia Minor, at Brusa. There was one man who used to sing to me at Brusa outside the Mosquee Verte. Dumeny took down the melody for me.”

“Did you like the ‘Heart ever faithful’?”

“Of course it’s excellent in that sledge-hammer sort of way, a superb example of the direct. Stamboul is very indirect. Perhaps it has colored my taste. It’s full of mystery. Bach isn’t mysterious, except now and then--in rare bits of his passion music, for instance.”

“I wonder if my wife could sing those Turkish songs.”

“We must see. She sang that Greek song perfectly.”

“But she’s felt Greece,” said Dion. “And I think there’s something in her that----”

“Yes?”

“I only mean,” he said, with reserve in his voice, “that I think there’s something of Greece in her.”

“She’s got a head like a Caryatid.”

“Yes,” he said, with much less reserve. “Hasn’t she?”

Mrs. Clarke had paid his Rosamund two noble compliments, he thought; and he liked her way of payment, casual yet evidently sincere, the simple utterance of two thoughts in a mind that knew. He felt a sudden glow of real friendship for her, and, on the glow as it were, she said:

“Jimmy’s quite mad about you.”

“Still?” he blurted out, and was instantly conscious of a false step.

“He’s got an extraordinary memory for a biceps, and then Jenkins talks about you to him.”

As they went on talking people began coming up from the black-and-white dining-room. Dion said he would come to see Jimmy again, would visit the gymnasium in the Harrow Road one day when Jimmy was taking his lesson. Did Jimmy ever go on a Saturday? Yes, he was going next Saturday at four. Dion would look in next Saturday. Now Mrs. Clarke and Rosamund had met, and Mrs. Clarke evidently admired Rosamund in two ways, Dion felt quite different about his acquaintance with her. If it had already been agreed that Mrs. Clarke should show Rosamund Turkish songs, there was no need for further holding back. The relief which had come to him made Dion realize how very uncomfortable he had been about Mrs. Clarke in the immediate past. He was now thoroughly and cordially at his ease with her. They talked till the big drawing-room was full again, till Rosamund reappeared in the midst of delightful friends; talked of Jimmy’s future, of the new tutor who must be found,--a real man, not a mere bloodless intellectual,--and, again, of Constantinople, to which Mrs. Clarke would return in April, against the advice of her friends, and in spite of Esme Darlington’s almost frantic protests, “because I love it, and because I don’t choose to be driven out of any place by liars.” Her last remark to him, and he thought it very characteristic of her, was this:

“Liberty’s worth bitterness. I would buy it at the price of all the tears in my body.”

It was, perhaps, also very characteristic that she made the statement with a perfectly quiet gravity which almost concealed the evidently tough inflexibility beneath.

And then, when people were ready to go, Rosamund sung Brahm’s “Wiegenlied.”

Dion stood beside Bruce Evelin while Rosamund was singing this. She sang it with a new and wonderful tenderness which had come to her with Robin, and in her face, as she sang, there was a new and wonderful tenderness. The meaning of Robin in Rosamund’s life was expressed to Dion by Rosamund in this song as it had never been expressed before. Perhaps it was expressed also to Bruce Evelin, for Dion saw tears in his eyes almost brimming over, and his face was contracted, as if only by a strong, even a violent, effort he was able to preserve his self-control.

As people began to go away Dion found himself close to Esme Darlington.

“My dear fellow,” said Mr. Darlington, with unusual abandon, “Rosamund has made a really marvelous advance--marvelous. In that ‘Wiegenlied’ she reached high-water mark. No one could have sung it more perfectly. What has happened to her?”

“Robin,” said Dion, looking him full in the face, and speaking with almost stern conviction.

“Robin?” said Mr. Darlington, with lifted eyebrows.

Then people intervened.

In the carriage going home Rosamund was very happy. She confessed to the pleasure her success had given her.

“I quite loved singing to-night,” she said. “That song about Greece was for you.”

“I know, and the ‘Wiegenlied’ was for Robin.”

“Yes,” she said.

She was silent; then her voice came out of the darkness:

“For Robin, but he didn’t know it.”

“Some day he will know it.”

Not a word was said about Mrs. Clarke that night.

On the following day, however, Dion asked Rosamund how she had liked Mrs. Clarke.

“I saw you talking to her with the greatest animation.”

“Was I?” said Rosamund.

“And she told me it had been arranged that she should--no, I don’t mean that; but she said she wanted to show you some wonderful Turkish songs.”

“Did she? What a beautiful profile she has!”

“Ah, you noticed that!”

“Oh yes, directly.”

“Didn’t she mention the Turkish songs?”

“I believe she did, but only in passing, casually. D’you know, Dion, I’ve got an idea that Greece is our country, not Turkey at all. You hate Constantinople, and I shall never see it, I’m sure. We are Greeks, and Robin has to be a Greek, too, in one way--a true Englishman, of course, as well. Do you remember the Doric boy?”

And off went the conversation to the hills of Drouva, and never came back to Turkey.

When Friday dawned Dion thought of his appointment for Saturday afternoon at the gymnasium in the Harrow Road, and began to wish he had not made it. Rosamund had not mentioned Mrs. Clarke again, and he began to fear that she had not really liked her, although her profile was beautiful. If Rosamund had not liked Mrs. Clarke, his cordial enthusiasm at Mrs. Chetwinde’s--in retrospect he felt that his attitude and manner must have implied that--had been premature, even, perhaps, unfortunate. He wished he knew just what impression Mrs. Clarke had made upon Rosamund, but something held him back from asking her. He had asked her already once, but somehow the conversation had deviated--was it to Mrs. Clarke’s profile?--and he had not received a direct answer. Perhaps that was his fault. But anyhow he must go to the gymnasium on the morrow. To fail in doing that after all that had happened, or rather had not happened, in connexion with Mrs. Clarke would be really rude. He did not say anything about the gymnasium to Rosamund on Friday, but on the Saturday he told her what had been arranged.

“Her son, Jimmy Clarke, has taken a boyish fancy to me, it seems. I said I’d look in and see his lesson just for once.”

“Is he a nice boy?”

“Yes, first-rate, I should think, rather a pickle, and likely to develop into an athlete. The father is awfully ashamed now of what he did--that horrible case, I mean--and is trying to make up for it.”

“How?” said Rosamund simply.

“By giving her every chance with the boy.”

“I’m glad the child likes you.”

“I’ve only seen him once.”

“Twice won’t kill his liking,” she returned affectionately.

And then she went out of the room. She always had plenty to do. Small though he was, Robin was a marvelous consumer of his mother’s time.

When Dion got to the gymnasium Mrs. Clarke and Jimmy were already there, and Jimmy, in flannels and a white sweater, his dark hair sticking up in disorder, and his face scarlet with exertion, was performing feats with an exerciser fixed to the wall, while Mrs. Clarke, seated on a hard chair in front of a line of heavy weights and dumb-bells, was looking on with concentrated attention. Jenkins was standing in front of Jimmy, loudly directing his movements with a stentorian: “One--two--one--two--one--two! Keep it up! No slackening! Put some guts into it, sir! One--two--one--two!”

As Dion came in Mrs. Clarke looked round and nodded; Jimmy stared, unable to smile because his mouth and lower jaw were working, and he had no superfluous force to spare for polite efforts; and Jenkins uttered a gruff, “Good day, sir.”

“How are you, Jenkins?” returned Dion, in his most off-hand manner.

Then he jerked his hand at Jimmy with an encouraging smile, went over to Mrs. Clarke, shook her hand and remained standing beside her.

“Do you think he’s doing it well?” she murmured, after a moment.

“Stunningly.”

“Hasn’t he broadened in the chest?”

“Rather!”

She looked strangely febrile and mental in the midst of the many appliances for developing the body. Rosamund, with her splendid physique and glowing health, would have crowned the gymnasium appropriately, have looked like the divine huntress transplanted to a modern city where still the cult of the body drew its worshipers. The Arcadian mountains--Olympia in Elis,--Jenkins’s “gym” in the Harrow Road--differing shrines but the cult was the same. Only the conditions of worship were varied. Dion glanced down at Mrs. Clarke. Never had she seemed more curiously exotic. Yet she did not look wholly out of place; and it occurred to him that a perfectly natural person never looks wholly out of place anywhere.

“Face to the wall, sir!” cried Jenkins.

Jimmy found time for a breathless and half-inquiring smile at Dion as he turned and prepared for the most difficult feat.

“His jaw always does something extraordinary in this exercise,” said Mrs. Clarke. “It seems to come out and go in again with a click. Jenkins says it’s because Jimmy gets his strength from there.”

“I know. Mine used to do just the same.”

“Jimmy doesn’t mind. It amuses him.”

“That’s the spirit!”

“He finishes with this.”

“Already?” said Dion, surprised.

“You must have been a little late. How did you come?”

“On my bicycle. I had a puncture. That must have been it. And there was a lot of traffic.”

“Keep it up, sir!” roared Jenkins imperatively. “What’s the matter with that left arm?”

Click went Jimmy’s lower jaw.

“Dear little chap!” muttered Dion, full of sympathetic interest. “He’s doing splendidly.”

“You really think so?”

“Couldn’t be better.”

“You understand boys?”

“Better than I understand women, I expect,” Dion returned, with a sudden thought of Rosamund at home and the wonderful Turkish songs Mrs. Clarke wished to show to her.

Mrs. Clarke said nothing, and just at that moment Jenkins announced:

“That’ll do for to-day, sir.”

In a flood of perspiration Jimmy turned round, redder than ever, his chest heaving, his mouth open, and his eyes, but without any conceit, asking for a word of praise from Dion, who went to clap him on the shoulder.

“Capital! Hallo! What muscles we’re getting! Eh, Jenkins?”

“Master Jimmy’s not doing badly, sir. He puts his heart into it. That I must say.”

Jimmy shone through the red and the perspiration.

“He sticks it,” continued Jenkins, in his loud voice. “Without grit there’s nothing done. That’s what I always tell my pupils.”

“I say”--began Jimmy, at last finding a small voice--“I say, Mr. Leith, you haven’t hurried over it.”

“Over what?”

“Letting me see you again. Why, it’s--”

“Run along to the bath, sir. You’ve got to have it before you cool down,” interposed the merciless Jenkins.

And Jimmy made off with an instant obedience which showed his private opinion of the god who was training him.

When he was gone Jenkins turned to Dion and looked him over.

“Haven’t seen much of you, sir, lately,” he remarked.

“No, I’ve been busy,” returned Dion, feeling slightly uncomfortable as he remembered that the reason for his absence from the Harrow Road was listening to the conversation.

“Going to have a round with the gloves now you are here, sir?” pursued Jenkins.

Dion looked at Mrs. Clarke.

“Well, I hadn’t thought of it,” he said, rather doubtfully.

“Just as you like, sir.”

“Do, Mr. Leith,” said Mrs. Clarke, getting up from the hard chair, and standing close to the medicine ball with her back to the vaulting-horse. “Jimmy and I are going in a moment. You mustn’t bother about us.”

“Well, but how are you going home?”

“We shall walk. Of course have your boxing. It will do you good.”

“You’re right there, ma’am,” said Jenkins, with a sort of stern approval. “Mr. Leith’s been neglecting his exercises lately.”

“Oh, I’ve been doing a good deal in odd times with the Rifle Corps.”

“I don’t know anything about that, sir.”

“All right, I’ll go and change,” said Dion, who always kept a singlet and flannels at the gymnasium. “Then----” he turned to Mrs. Clarke as if about to say good-by.

“Oh, Jimmy will want to see you for a moment after his bath. We’ll say good-by then.”

“Yes, I should like to see him,” said Dion, and went off to the dressing cubicles.

When he returned ready for the fray, with his arms bared to the shoulder, he found Jimmy, in trousers and an Eton jacket, with still damp hair sleeked down on his head, waiting with his mother, but not to say good-by.

“We aren’t going,” he announced, in a voice almost shrill with excitement, as Dion came into the gymnasium. “The mater was all for a trot home, but Jenkins wishes me to stay. He says it’ll be a good lesson for me. I mean to be a boxer.”

“Why not?” observed the great voice of Jenkins. “It’s the best sport in the world bar none.”

“There!” said Jimmy. “And if I can’t be anything else I’ll be a bantam, that’s what I’ll be.”

“Oh, you’ll grow, sir, no doubt. We may see you among the heavy-weights yet.”

“What’s Mr. Leith? Is he a heavy-weight?” vociferated Jimmy. “Just look at his arms.”

“You’ll see him use them in a minute,” observed Jenkins, covering Dion with a glance of almost grim approval, “and then you can judge for yourself.”

“You can referee us, Jimmy,” said Dion, smiling, as he pulled on the gloves.

“I say, by Jove, though!” said Jimmy, looking suddenly overwhelmed and very respectful.

He shook his head and blushed, then abruptly grinned.

“The mater had better do that.”

They all laughed except Mrs. Clarke. Even Jenkins unbent, and his bass “Ha ha!” rang through the large vaulted room. Mrs. Clarke smiled faintly, scarcely changing the expression of her eyes. She looked unusually intent and, when the smile was gone, more than usually grave.

“I hope you don’t mind our staying just for a few minutes,” she said to Dion. “You see what he is!”

She looked at her boy, but not with deprecation.

“Of course not, but I’m afraid it will bore you.”

“Oh no, it won’t. I like to see skill of any kind.”

She glanced at his arms.

“I’ll get out of your way. Come, Jimmy!”

She took him by the arm and went back to the hard chair, while Dion and Jenkins in the middle of the floor stood up opposite to one another.

“Have you got a watch, Master Jimmy?” said Jenkins, looking over his shoulder at his pupil.

“Rather!” piped Jimmy.

“Well, then, you’d better time us if you don’t referee us.”

Jimmy sprang away from his mother.

“Keep out of our road, or you may chance to get a kidney punch that’ll wind you. Better stand here. That’s it. Three-minute rounds. Keep your eye on the watch.”

“Am I to say ‘Go’?” almost whispered Jimmy, tense with a fearful importance such as Caesar and Napoleon never felt.

“Who else? You don’t expect us to order ourselves about, do you?”

After a pause Jimmy murmured, “No” in a low voice. So might a mortal whisper a reply when interrogated from Olympus as to his readiness to be starter at a combat of the immortal gods.

“Now, then, watch in hand and no favoritism!” bellowed Jenkins, whose sense of humor was as boisterous as his firmness was grim. “Are we ready?”

Dion and he shook hands formally and lifted their arms, gazing at each other warily. Mrs. Clarke leaned forward in the chair which stood among the dumb-bells. Jimmy perspired and his eyes became round. He had his silver watch tight in his right fist. Jenkins suddenly turned his head and stared with his shallow and steady blue eyes, looking down from Olympus upon the speck of a mortal far below.

“Go!” piped Jimmy, in the voice of an ardent, but awestruck mouse.

Homeric was that combat in the Harrow Road; to its starter and timekeeper a contest of giants, awful in force, in skill, in agility, in endurance. Dion boxed quite his best that day, helped by his gallery. He fought to win, but he didn’t win. Nobody won, for there was no knock-out blow given and taken, and, when appealed to for a decision on points, Jimmy, breathing stertorously from excitement, was quite unable to give the award. He could only stare at the two glorious heroes before him and drop the silver watch, glass downwards of course, on the floor, where its tinkle told of destruction. Later on, when he spoke, he was able to say:

“By Jove!” which he presently amplified into, “I say, mater, by Jove--eh, wasn’t it, though?”

“Not so bad, sir!” said Jenkins to Dion, after the latter had taken the shower bath. “You aren’t as stale as I expected to find you, not near as stale. But I hope you’ll keep it up now you’ve started with it again.”

And Dion promised he would, put his bicycle on the top of a fourwheeler, sent it off to Westminster, and walked as far as Claridge’s with Mrs. Clarke and Jimmy.

The boy made him feel tremendously intimate with Mrs. Clarke. The hero-worship he was receiving, the dancing of the blood through his veins, the glow of hard exercise, the verdict of Jenkins on his physical condition--all these things combined spurred him to a joyous exuberance in which body and mind seemed to run like a matched pair of horses in perfect accord. Although not at all a conceited man, the feeling that he was being admired, even reverenced, was delightful to him, and warmed his heart towards the jolly small boy who kept along by his side through the busy streets. He and Jimmy talked in a comradely spirit, while Mrs. Clarke seemed to listen like one who has things to learn. She was evidently a capital walker in spite of her delicate appearance. To-day Dion began to believe in her iron health, and, in his joy of the body, he liked to think of it. After all delicacy, even in a woman, was a fault--a fault of the body, a sort of fretful imperfection.

“Are you strong?” he said to her, when Jimmy’s voice ceased for a moment to demand from him information or to pour upon him direct statement.

“Oh yes. I’ve never been seriously ill in my life. Don’t I look strong?” she asked.

“I don’t think you do, but I feel as if you are.”

“It’s the wiry kind of strength, I suppose.”

“The mater’s a stayer,” quoth Jimmy, and forthwith took up the wondrous tale with his hero, who began to consult him seriously on the question of “points.”

“If you’d had to give a decision, Jimmy, which of us would have got it, Jenkins or I?”

Jimmy looked very grave and earnest.

“It’s jolly difficult to tell a thing like that, isn’t it?” he said, after a longish pause. “You see, you’re both so jolly strong, aren’t you?”

His dark eyes gazed at the bulk of Dion.

“Well, which is the quicker?” demanded Dion.

But Jimmy was not to be drawn.

“I think you’re both as quick as--as cats,” he returned diplomatically, seeking anxiously for the genuine sporting comparison that would be approved at the ring-side. “Don’t you, mater?”

Mrs. Clarke huskily agreed. They were now nearing Claridge’s, and Jimmy was insistent that Dion should come in and have a real jam tea with them.

“Do, Mr. Leith, if you have the time,” said Mrs. Clarke, but without any pressure.

“The strawberry they have is ripping, I can tell you!” cried Jimmy, with ardor.

But Dion refused. Till he was certain of Rosamund’s attitude he felt he simply couldn’t accept Mrs. Clarke’s hospitality. He was obliged to get home that day. Mrs. Clarke did not ask why, but Jimmy did, and had to be put off with an evasion, the usual mysterious “business,” which, of course, a small boy couldn’t dive into and explore.

Dion thought Mrs. Clarke was going to say good-by without any mention of Rosamund, but when they reached Claridge’s she said:

“Your wife and I didn’t decide on a day for the Turkish songs. You remember I mentioned them to you the other night? I can’t recollect whether she left it to me to fix a time, or whether I left it to her. Can you find out? Do tell her I was stupid and forgot. Will you?”

Dion said he would.

“I think they’ll interest her. Now, Jimmy!”

But Jimmy hung on his god.

“I say, you’ll come again now! You promise!”

What could Dion do?

“You put your honor into it?” pursued Jimmy, with desperate earnestness. “You swear?”

“If I swear in the open street the police will take me up,” said Dion jokingly.

“Not they! One from the shoulder from you and I bet they lose enough claret to fill a bucket. You’ve given your honor, hasn’t he, mater?”

“Of course we shall see him again,” said Mrs. Clarke, staring at Dion.

“What curious eyes she has!” Dion thought, as he walked homeward.

Did they ever entirely lose their under-look of distress?

Chapter IX

That evening Dion told Rosamund what Mrs. Clarke had said when he parted from her at Claridge’s.

“I promised her I’d find out which it was,” he added. “Do you remember what was said?”

After a minute of silence, during which Rosamund seemed to be considering something, she answered:

“Yes, I do.”

“Which was it?”

“Neither, Dion. Mrs. Clarke has made a mistake. She certainly spoke of some Turkish songs for me, but there was never any question of fixing a day for us to try them over together.”

“She thinks there was.”

“It’s difficult to remember exactly what is said, or not said, in the midst of a crowd.”

“But you remember?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’d rather not try them over?”

“After what you’ve told me about Constantinople I expect I should be quite out of sympathy with Turkish music,” she answered, lightly and smiling. “Let us be true to our Greek ideal.”

She seemed to be in fun, but he detected firmness of purpose behind the fun.

“What shall I say to Mrs. Clarke?” he asked.

“I should just leave it. Perhaps she’ll forget all about it.”

Dion was quite sure that wouldn’t happen, but he left it. Rosamund had determined not to allow Mrs. Clarke to be friends with her. He wished very much it were otherwise, not because he really cared for Mrs. Clarke, but because he liked her and Jimmy, and because he hated the idea of hurting the feelings of a woman in Mrs. Clarke’s rather unusual situation. He might, of course, have put his point of view plainly to Rosamund at once. Out of delicacy he did not do this. His great love for Rosamund made him instinctively very delicate in all his dealings with her; it told him that Rosamund did not wish to discuss her reasons for desiring to avoid Mrs. Clarke. She had had them, he believed, before Mrs. Clarke and she had met. That meeting evidently had not lessened their force. He supposed, therefore, that she had disliked Mrs. Clarke. He wondered why, and tried to consider Mrs. Clarke anew. She was certainly not a disagreeable woman. She was very intelligent, thoroughbred, beautiful in a peculiar way,--even Rosamund thought that,--ready to make herself pleasant, quite free from feminine malice, absolutely natural, interested in all the really interesting things. Beattie liked her; Daventry rejoiced in her; Mrs. Chetwinde was her intimate friend; Esme Darlington had even made sacrifices for her; Bruce Evelin----

There Dion’s thought was held up, like a stream that encounters a barrier. What did Bruce Evelin think of Mrs. Clarke? He had not gone to the trial. But since he had retired from practise at the Bar he had never gone into court. Dion had often heard him say he had had enough of the Law Courts. There was no reason why he should have been drawn to them for Mrs. Clarke’s sake, or even for Daventry’s. But what did he think of Mrs. Clarke? Dion resolved to tell him of the rather awkward situation which had come about through his own intimacy--it really amounted to that--with Mrs. Clarke, and Rosamund’s evident resolve to have nothing to do with her.

One day Dion went to Great Cumberland Place and told Bruce Evelin all the facts, exactly what Mrs. Clarke had said and done, exactly what Rosamund had said and done. As he spoke it seemed to him that he was describing a sort of contest, shadowy, perhaps, withdrawn and full of reserves, yet definite.

“What do you think of it?” he said, when he had told the comparatively little there was to tell.

“I think Rosamund likes to keep her home very quiet, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Even her friends complain that she shuts them out.”

“I know they do.”

“She may not at all dislike Mrs. Clarke. She may simply not wish to add to her circle of friends.”

“The difficulty is, that Mrs. Clarke is such friends with Beattie and Guy, and that I’ve got to know her quite well. Then there’s her boy; he’s taken a fancy to me. If Mrs. Clarke and Rosamund could just exchange calls it would be all right, but if they don’t it really looks rather as if Rosamund--well, as if she thought the divorce case had left a slur on Mrs. Clarke. What I mean is, that I feel Mrs. Clarke will take it in that way.”

“She may, of course.”

“I wonder why she is so determined to make friends with Rosamund,” blurted out Dion abruptly.

“You think she is determined?” said Bruce Evelin quietly.

“Yes. Telling you had made me feel that quite plainly.”

“Anyhow, she’ll be gone back to Constantinople in April, and then your little difficulty will come to an end automatically.”

Dion looked rather hard at Bruce Evelin. When he spoke to Rosamund of Mrs. Clarke, Rosamund always seemed to try for a gentle evasion. Now Bruce Evelin was surely evading the question, and again Mrs. Clarke was the subject of conversation. Bruce Evelin was beginning to age rather definitely. He had begun to look older since Beattie was married. But his dark eyes were still very bright and keen, and one could not be with him for even a few minutes without realizing that his intellect was sharply alert.

“Isn’t it strange that she should go back to live in Constantinople?” Dion said.

“Yes. Not many women in her position would do it.”

“And yet there’s reason in her contention that an innocent woman who allows herself to be driven away from the place she lived in is a bit of a coward.”

“Beadon Clarke’s transferred to Madrid, so Mrs. Clarke’s reason--it was a diplomatic one--for living in Constantinople falls to the ground.”

“Yes, that’s true. But of course her husband and she have parted.

“Naturally. So she has the world to choose from.”

“For a home, you mean? Yes. It’s an odd choice, Constantinople. But she’s not an ordinary woman.”

“No, I suppose not,” said Bruce Evelin.

Again Dion was definitely conscious of evasion. He got up to go away, feeling disappointed.

“Then you advise me to do nothing?” he said.

“What about, my boy?”

“About Mrs. Clarke.”

“What could you do?”

Dion was silent.

“I think it’s better to let women settle these little things among themselves. They have a deep and comprehensive understanding of trifles which we mostly lack. How’s Robin?”

Robin again! Was he always to be the buffer between 5 Little Market Street and Mrs. Clarke?

“He’s well and tremendously lively, and I honestly think he’s growing better looking.”

“Dear little chap!” said Bruce Evelin, with a very great tenderness in his voice. “Dion, we shall have to concentrate on Robin.”

Dion looked at him with inquiry.

“Poor Beattie, I don’t think she’ll have a child.”

“Beattie! Not ever?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Dion was shocked and startled.

“But I haven’t heard a word--” he began.

“No. Both Beattie and Guy feel it terribly. I had a talk with Beattie’s doctor to-day.”

“How dreadful! I’m sorry. But----” He paused.

He didn’t like to ask intimate questions about Beattie.

“I’m afraid it is so,” said Bruce Evelin. “You must let us all have a share in your Robin.”

He spoke very quietly, but there was a very deep, even intense, feeling in his voice.

“Poor Beattie!” Dion said.

And that, too, was an evasion.

He went away from Great Cumberland Place accompanied by a sense of walking, not perhaps in darkness, but in a dimness which was not delicately beautiful like the dimness of twilight, but was rather akin to the semi-obscurity of fog.

Not a word more was said about Mrs. Clarke between Rosamund and Dion, and the latter never let Mrs. Clarke know about the Turkish songs, never fulfilled his undertaking to go and see Jimmy again. In a contest he could only be on Rosamund’s side. The whole matter seemed to him unfortunate, even almost disagreeable, but, for him, there could be no question as to whether he wished Rosamund’s or Mrs. Clarke’s will to prevail. Whatever Rosamund’s reason was for not choosing to be friends with Mrs. Clark he knew it was not malicious or petty. Perhaps she had made a mistake about Mrs. Clarke. If so it was certainly an honest mistake. It was when he thought of his promise to Jimmy that he felt most uncomfortable about Rosamund’s never expressed decision. Jimmy had a good memory. He would not forget. As to Mrs. Clarke, of course she now fully understood that Mrs. Dion Leith did not want to have anything to do with her. She continued to go often to Beattie and Daventry, consolidated her friendship with them. But Dion never met her in De Lorne Gardens. From Daventry he learnt that Mrs. Clarke had been extraordinarily kind to Beattie when Beattie’s expectation of motherhood had faded away. Bruce Evelin’s apprehension was well founded. For reasons which Daventry did not enter into Beattie could never now hope to have a child. Daventry was greatly distressed about it, but rather for Beattie’s sake than for his own.

“I married Beattie because I loved her, not because I wanted to become a father,” he said.

After a long pause he added, almost wistfully.

“As to Beattie’s reasons for marrying me, well, Dion, I haven’t asked what they were and I never shall. Women are mysterious, and I believe it’s wisdom on our part not to try to force the locks and look into the hidden chambers. I’ll do what I can to make up to Beattie for this terrible disappointment. It won’t be nearly enough, but that isn’t my fault. Rosamund and you can help her a little.”

“How?”

“She--she’s extraordinarily fond of Robin.”

“Extraordinarily?” said Dion, startled almost by Daventry’s peculiar emphasis on the word.

“Yes. Let her see a good deal of Robin if you can. Poor Beattie! She’ll never have a child of her own to live in.”

Dion told Rosamund of this conversation, and they agreed to encourage Beattie to come to Little Market Street as often as possible. Nevertheless Beattie did not come very often. It was obvious that she adored Robin, who was always polite to her; but perhaps delicacy of feeling kept her from making perpetual pilgrimages to the shrine before which an incense not hers was forever ascending; or perhaps she met a gaunt figure of Pain in the home of her sister. However it was, her visits were rather rare, and no persuasion availed to make her come oftener. At this time she and Dion’s mother drew closer together, The two women loved and understood each other well. Perhaps between them there was a link of loneliness, or perhaps there was another link.

Early in April Dion received one morning the following letter:

“CLARIDGE’S HOTEL 6 April

“DEAR MR. LEITH,--I feel pretty rotten about you. I thought when once a clever boxer gave his honor on a thing it was a dead cert. The mater wouldn’t let me write before, though I’ve been at her over it every day for weeks. But now we’re going away, so she says I may write and just tell you. If you want to say good-by could you telephone, she says. P’raps you don’t. P’raps you’ve forgotten us. I can tell you Jenkins is sick about it all and your never going to the Gim. He said to me to-day, ‘I don’t know what’s come over Mr. Leith.’ No more do I. The mater says you’re a busy man and have a kid. I say a true friend is never too busy to be friendly. I really do feel rotten over it, and now we are going.--Your affectionate JIMMY.”

Dion showed Rosamund the letter, and telephoned to say he would call on the following day. Jimmy’s voice answered on the telephone and said:

“I say, you have been beastly to us. The mater says nothing, but we thought you liked us. Jenkins says that between boxers there’s always a--”

At this point Jimmy was cut off in the flow of his reproaches.

On arriving at Claridge’s Dion found Jimmy alone. Mrs. Clarke was out but would return in a moment. Jimmy received his visitor not stiffly but with exuberant and vociferous reproaches, and vehement demands to know the why and wherefore of his unsportsmanlike behavior.

“I’ve ordered you a real jam tea all the same,” he concluded, with a magnanimity which did him honor, and which, as he was evidently aware, proved him to be a true sportsman.

“You’re a trump,” said Dion, pulling the boy down beside him on a sofa.

“Oh, well--but I say, why didn’t you come?”

He stared with the mercilessly inquiring eyes of boyhood.

“I don’t think I ever said on my honor that I would come.”

“But you did. You swore.”

“No. I was afraid of the policeman.”

“I say, what rot! As if you could be afraid of any one! Why, Jenkins says you’re the best pupil he’s ever had. Why didn’t you? Don’t you like us?”

“Of course I do.”

“The mater says you’re married, and married men have no time to bother about other people’s kids. Is that true?”

“Well, of course there’s a lot to be done in London, and I go to business every day.”

“You’ve got a kid, haven’t you?”

“Yes!”

“It’s a boy, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I say, how old is it?”

“A year and a month old, or a little over.”

Jimmy’s face expressed satire.

“A year and a month!” he repeated. “Is that all? Then it can’t be much good yet, can it?”

“It can’t box or do exercise as you can. You are getting broad.”

“Rather! Box? I should think not! A kid of a year old boxing! I should like to see it with Jenkins.”

He begin to giggle. By the time Mrs. Clarke returned and they sat down to the real jam tea, the ice was in fragments.

“I believe you were right, mater, and it was all the kid that prevented Mr. Leith from sticking to his promise,” Jimmy announced, as he helped Dion to “the strawberry,” with a liberality which betokened an affection steadfast even under the stress of blighting circumstances.

“Of course I was right,” returned his mother gravely.

Dion was rather glad that she looked away from him as she said it.

Her manner to him was unchanged. Evidently she was a woman not quick to take offense. He liked that absence of all “touchiness” from her, and felt that a man could rest comfortably on her good breeding. But this very good breeding increased within him a sense of discomfort which amounted almost to guilt. He tried to smother it by being very jolly with Jimmy, to whom he devoted most of his attention. When tea was over Mrs. Clarke said to her son:

“Now, Jimmy, you must go away for a little while and let me have a talk with Mr. Leith.”

“Oh, mater, that’s not fair. Mr. Leith’s my pal. Aren’t you, Mr. Leith? Why, even Jenkins says--”

“I should rather think so. Why--”

“You shall see Mr. Leith again before he goes.”

He looked at his mother, suddenly became very grave, and went slowly out of the room. It was evident to Dion that Mrs. Clarke knew how to make people obey her when she was in earnest.

As soon as Jimmy had gone Mrs. Clarke rang for the waiter to take away the tea-table.

“Then we shan’t be bothered,” she remarked. “I hate people coming in and out when I’m trying to have a quiet talk.”

“So do I,” said Dion.

The waiter rolled the table out gently and shut the door.

Mrs. Clarke sat down on a sofa.

“Do light a cigar,” she said. “I know you want to smoke, and I’ll have a cigarette.”

She drew out of a little case which lay on a table beside her a Turkish cigarette and lit it, while Dion lighted a cigar.

“So you’re really going back to Constantinople?” he began. “Are you taking Jimmy with you?”

“Yes, for a time. My husband raises no objection. In a year I shall send Jimmy to Eton. Lady Ermyntrude is furious, of course, and has tried to stir up my husband. But her influence with him is dead. He’s terribly ashamed at what she made him do.”

“The action?”

“Yes. It was she who made him think me guilty against his real inner conviction. Now, poor man, he realizes that he dragged me through the dirt without reason. He’s ashamed to show his face in the Clubs, and nearly resigned from diplomacy. But he’s a valuable man, and they’ve persuaded him to go to Madrid.”

“Why go back to Constantinople?”

“Merely to show I’m not afraid to and that I won’t be driven from my purpose by false accusations.”

“And you love it, of course.”

“Yes. My flat will be charming, I think. Some day you’ll see it.”

Dion was silent in surprise.

“Don’t you realize that?” she asked, staring at him.

“I think it very improbable that I shall ever go back to Constantinople.”

“And I’m sure you will.”

“Why are you sure?”

“That I can’t tell you. Why is one sometimes sure that certain things will come about?”

“Do you claim to be psychic?” said Dion.

“I never make verbal claims. Now about Jimmy.”

She discussed for a little while seriously her plans for the boy’s education while he stayed with her. She had found a tutor, a young Oxford man, who would accompany them to Turkey, but she wanted Dion’s advice on certain points. He gave it, wondering all the time why she consulted him after his neglect of her and of her son, after his failure to accept invitations and to fulfil pledges (or to stick to the understandings which were almost pledges), after the tacit refusals of Rosamund. Did it not show a strange persistence, even a certain lack of pride in her? Perhaps she heard the haunting questions which he did not utter, for she suddenly turned from the topic of the boy and said:

“You’re surprised at my bothering you with all this when we really know each other so slightly. It is unconventional; but I shall never learn the way to conventionality in spite of all poor Esme’s efforts to shepherd me into the path he thinks narrow and I find broad--a way that leads to destruction. I feel you absolutely understand boys, and know by instinct the best way with them. That’s why I still come to you.”

She paused. She had deliberately driven home her meaning by a stress on one word. Now she sat looking at him, with a wide-eyed and deeply grave fixity, as if considering what more she should say. Dion murmured something about being very glad if he could help her in any way with regard to Jimmy.

“You can be conventional,” she remarked. “Well, why not? Most English people are perpetually playing for safety.”

“I wish you wouldn’t go back to Constantinople,” said Dion.

“Why?”

“I believe it’s a mistake. It seems to me like throwing down a defiance to your world.”

“But I never play for safety.”

“But think of the danger you’ve passed through.”

The characteristic distressed look deepened in her eyes till they seemed to him tragic. Nevertheless, fearlessness still looked out of them.

“What shall I gain by doing that?” she asked.

“Esme Darlington once said you were a wild mind in an innocent body. I believe he was right. But it seems to me that some day your wild mind may get you into danger again and that perhaps you won’t escape from it unscathed a second time.”

“How quiet and safe it must be at Number 5!” she rejoined, without any irony.

“You wouldn’t care for that sort of life. You’d find it humdrum,” said Dion, with simplicity.

“You never would,” she said, still without irony, without even the hint of a sneer. “And the truth is that the humdrum is created not by a way of living but by those who follow it. Your wife and the humdrum could never occupy the same house. I shall always regret that I didn’t see something of her. Do give her a cordial ‘au revoir’ from me. You’ll hear of me again. Don’t be frightened about me in your kind of chivalrous heart. I am grateful to you for several things. I’m not going to give the list now. That would either bore you, or make you feel shy. Some day, perhaps, I shall tell you what they are, in a caique on the sweet waters of Asia or among the cypresses of Eyub.”

With the last sentence she transported Dion, as on a magic carpet, to the unwise life. Her husky voice changed a little; her face changed a little too; the one became slower and more drowsy; the other less haggard and fixed in its expression of distress. This woman had her hours of happiness, perhaps even of exultation. For a moment Dion envisaged another woman in her. And when he had bidden her good-by, and had received the tremendous farewells of Jimmy, he realized that she had made upon him an impression which, though soft, was certainly deep. He thought of how a cushion looks when it lies on a sofa in an empty room, indented by the small head of a woman who has been thinking, thinking alone. For a moment he was out of shape, and Mrs. Clarke had made him so.

In the big hall, as he passed out, he saw Lord Brayfield standing in front of the bureau speaking to the hall porter.

“Some day, perhaps, I shall tell you what they are, in a caique on the sweet waters of Asia or among the cypresses of Eyub.”

Dion smiled as he recalled Mrs. Clarke’s words, which had been spoken fatalistically. Then his face became very grave.

Suddenly there dawned upon him, like a vision in the London street, one of the vast Turkish cemeteries, dusty, forlorn, disordered, yet full of a melancholy touched by romance; and among the thousands of graves, through the dark thickets of cypresses, he was walking with Mrs. Clarke, who looked exactly like Echo.

A newsboy at the corner was crying his latest horror--a woman found stabbed in Hyde Park. But to Dion his raucous and stunted voice sounded like a voice from the sea, a strange and sad cry lifted up between Europe and Asia.

Chapter I

More than a year and a half passed away, and in the autumn of 1899 the Boer War broke out and the face of England was changed; for the heart of England began to beat more strongly than usual, and the soul of England was stirred. The winter came, and in many Englishmen a hidden conflict began; in their journey through life they came abruptly to a parting of the ways, stood still and looked to the right and the left, balancing possibilities, searching their natures and finding within them strange hesitations, recoils, affirmations, determined nobilities.

Dion had followed the events which led up to the fateful decision of Wednesday, October the eleventh, with intense interest. As the October days drew on he had felt the approach of war. It came up, this footfall of an enemy, it paced at his side. Would he presently be tried by this enemy, would it test him and find out exactly what metal he was made of? He wondered, but from the moment when the first cloud showed itself on the horizon he had a presentiment that this distant war was going to have a strong effect on his life.

On the afternoon of October the eleventh he walked slowly home from the City alone. There was excitement in the air. The voices of the newsvendors sounded fateful in his ears; the faces of the passers-by looked unusually eager and alert. As he made his way through the crowd he did not debate the rights and wrongs of the question about to be decided between Briton and Boer. His mind avoided thoughts about politics. For him, perhaps strangely, the issue had already narrowed down to a personal question: “What is this war going to mean to me?”

He asked himself this; he put the question again and again. Nevertheless it was answered somewhere within him almost as soon as it was put. If there came a call for volunteers he would be one of the many who would answer it. The call might not come, of course; the war might be short, a hole-and-corner affair soon ended. He told himself that, and, as he did so, he felt sure that the call would come.

He knew he would not hold back; but he knew also that his was not the eagerness to go of the man assumed by journalists to be the typical Englishman. He was not mad to plunge into the great game, reckless of the future and shouting for the fray. He was not one of the “hard-bitten raw-boned men with keen eyes and ready for anything” beloved of the journalists, who loom so large in the public eye when “big things are afoot.” On that autumn evening, as he walked homeward, Dion knew the bunkum that is given out to the world as truth, knew that brave men have souls undreamed of in newspaper offices. He perceived the figure of war just then as a figure terribly austere, grim, cold, harsh--a figure stripped of all pleasant flesh and sweet coloring, of all softness and warm humanity. It accompanied him like an iron thing which nevertheless was informed with life. Joy withered beside it, yet it had the power to make things bloom. Already he knew that as he had not known it before.

In the crowded Strand the voices of the newsvendors were insistently shrill, raucous, almost fierce. As he heard them he faced tests. Many things were going to be put to the test in the almost immediate future. Among them perhaps would be Rosamund’s exact feeling for him.

Upon the hill of Drouva they had slept in the same tent, husband and wife, more than three years ago; in green and remote Elis they had sat together before the Hermes, hidden away from the world and hearing the antique voices; in Westminster Robin was theirs; yet this evening, facing in imagination the tests of war, Dion knew that Rosamund’s exact feeling for him was still a secret from him. If he went to South Africa that secret must surely be revealed. Rosamund would inevitably find out then the nature of her feeling for him, how much she cared, and even if she did not tell him how much she cared he would know, he could not help knowing.

He knew with a terrible thoroughness this evening how much he cared for her.

He considered Robin.

Robin was now more than two and a half years old; a personage in a jersey and minute knickerbockers, full of dancing energy and spirits, full of vital interest in the smaller problems of life. He was a fidget and he was a talker. Out of a full mind he poured forth an abundant stream of words, carelessly chosen at times, yet on the whole apt to the occasion. His intelligence was marked, of course,--what very young child’s is not?--and he had inherited an ample store of the joie de vivre which distinguished his mother. The homeliness of feature which had marked him out in the baldhead stage of his existence had given place to a dawning of what promised to be later on distinct good looks. Already he was an attractive-looking child, with a beautiful mouth, a rather short and at present rather snub nose, freckled on the bridge, large blue eyes, and a forehead, temples and chin which hinted at Rosamund’s. His hair was now light brown, and had a bold, almost an ardent, wave in it. Perhaps Robin’s most marked characteristic at this time was ardor. Occasionally the mildly inquiring expression which Dion had been touched by in the early days came to his little face. He could be very gentle and very clinging, and was certainly sensitive. Often imagination, in embryo as it were, was shown by his eyes. But ardor informed and enveloped him, he swam in ardor and of ardor he was all compact. Even the freckles which disfigured, or adorned, the bridge of his nose looked ardent. Rosamund loved those freckles in a way she could never have explained, loved them with a strength and tenderness which issued from the very roots of her being. To her they were Robin, the dearest part of the dearest thing on earth. Many of her kisses had gone to those little freckles.

Dion might have to part not only from Rosamund but also from Robin.

He had become very fond of his little son. The detachment which had perhaps marked his mental attitude to the baby did not mark his mental attitude to the boy. In the Robin of to-day, the jerseyed and knickerbockered person, with the incessantly active legs, the eager eyes, the perpetually twittering voice, Dion was conscious of the spirit of progress. Already he was able to foresee the small school-boy, whom only a father could properly help and advise in regard to many aspects of the life ahead; already he was looking forward to the time when he could take a hand in the training of Robin. It would be very hard to go away from that little bit of quicksilver, very hard indeed.

But the thought which made his heart sink, which brought with it almost a sensation of mortal sickness to his soul, was the thought of parting from Rosamund. As he walked down Parliament Street he imagined the good-by to her on the eve of sailing for South Africa. That acute moment might never come. This evening he felt it on the way. Whatever happened it would be within his power to stay with Rosamund, for there was no conscription in England. If he went to South Africa then the action of leaving her would be deliberate on his part. Was there within him something that was stronger than his love for her? There must be, he supposed, for he knew that if men were called for, and if Rosamund asked, or even begged him not to go, he would go nevertheless.

Vaporous Westminster, dark and leaning to the great river, for how long he had not seen it, or realized what it meant to him! Custom had blinded his eyes and had nearly closed his mind to it. The day’s event had given him back sight and knowledge. This evening his familiarity with Westminster bred in him intensity of vision and apprehension. It seemed to him that scales had fallen from his eyes, that for the first time he really saw Parliament Street, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Bridge, the river. The truth was, that for the first time he really felt them, felt that he belonged to them and they to him, that their blackness in the October evening was part of the color of him, that the Westminster sounds, chimes, footfalls, the dull roar of traffic, human voices from street, from bridge, from river, harmonized with the voices in him, in the very depths of him. This was England, this closeness, this harmony of the outer to and with the inner, this was England saying to one of her sons, “You belong to me and I to you.” The race spoke and the land, they walked with Dion in the darkness.

For he did not go straight home. He walked for a long time beside the river. By the river he kissed Robin and he said good-by to Rosamund, by the river he climbed upon the troopship, and he saw the fading of England on the horizon, and he felt the breath of the open sea. And in the midst of a crowd of men going southward he knew at last what loneliness was. The lights that gleamed across the river were the last lights of England that he would see for many a day, perhaps forever; the chime from the clock-tower was the last of the English sounds. He endured in imagination a phantom bitterness of departure which seemed abominably real; then suddenly he was recalled from a possible future to the very definite present.

He met by the river two men, sleek people in silk hats, with plump hands--hands which looked as if they were carefully fed on very nutritious food every day by their owners--warmly covered. As they passed him one of those know-alls said to the other:

“Oh, it’ll only be a potty little war. What can a handful of peasants do against our men? I’ll lay you five to one in sovereigns two months will see it out.”

“I dare say you will,” returned the other, in a voice that was surely smiling, “but I won’t take you.”

“By Jove, what a plunger I am!” thought Dion. “Racing ahead like a horse that’s lost his wits. Ten to one they’ll never want volunteers.”

But Westminster still looked exceptional, full of the inner meaning, and somewhere within him a voice still said, “You will go.” Nevertheless he was able partly to put off his hybrid feeling, half-dread, half-desire. The sleek people in the silk hats had made their little effect on the stranger. “The man in the street is often right,” Dion said to himself; though he knew that the man in the street is probably there, and remains there, because he is so often wrong.

When he reached Little Market Street Dion told Rosamund there would be war in South Africa, but he did not even hint at his thought that volunteers might be called for, at his intention, if they were, to offer himself. To do that would not only be absurdly premature, but might even seem slightly bombastic, an uncalled-for study in heroics. He kept silence. The battles of Ladysmith, of Magersfontein, of Stormberg, of Colenso, unsettled the theories of sleek people in silk hats. England came to a very dark hour when Robin was playing with a new set of bricks which his Aunt Beattie had given him. Dion began to understand the rightness of his instinct that evening by the river, when Westminster had spoken to him and England had whispered in his blood. As he had thought of things, so they were going to be. The test was very great. It was as if already it stood by him, a living entity, and touched him with an imperious hand. Sometimes he looked at Rosamund and saw great stretches of sea rolling under great stretches of sky. The barrier! How would he be able to bear the long separation from Rosamund? The habit of happiness in certain circumstances can become the scourge of a man. Men who were unhappy at home could go to war with a lighter heart than he.

Just before Christmas the call for men came, and in Dion a hesitation was born. Should he go and offer himself at once without telling Rosamund, or should he tell her what he wished to do and ask her opinion? Suppose she were against his going out? He could not ask her advice if he was not prepared to take it. What line did he wish her to take? By what course of action would such a woman as Rosamund prove depth of love? Wouldn’t it be natural for a woman who loved a man to raise objections to his going out to fight in a distant country? Wouldn’t she prove her love by raising objections? On the other hand, wouldn’t a woman who loved a man in the greatest way be driven by the desire to see him rise up in an emergency and prove his manhood at whatever cost to her?

Dion wanted one thing of Rosamund at this moment, wanted it terribly, with longing and with fear,--the proof absolute and unhesitating of her love for him.

He decided to volunteer without telling her before hand that he meant to do so. He told no one of his intention except his Uncle Biron, whom he was obliged to consult as they were partners in business.

“You’re right, my boy,” said his uncle. “We’ll get on as best we can without you. We shall miss you, of course. Since you’ve been married your energy has been most praiseworthy, but, of course, the nation comes before the firm. What does your mother say?”

Dion was struck with a sense of wonder by this question. Why didn’t his uncle ask him what Rosamund had said?

“I haven’t spoken to her,” he answered.

“She’ll wish you to go in spite of all,” said his uncle gravely.

“I haven’t even spoken to Rosamund of my intention to enlist.”

His uncle looked surprised, even for a moment astonished, but he only said:

“She’s rather on heroic lines, I should judge. There’s something spacious in her nature.”

“Yes,” said Dion.

He pledged his uncle to silence. Then they talked business.

From that moment Dion wondered how his mother would take his decision. That he had not wondered before proved to himself the absorbing character of his love for his wife. He loved his mother very much, yet, till his uncle had spoken about her in the office, he had only thought about Rosamund in connection with his decision to enlist. The very great thing had swallowed up the big thing. There is something ruthless, almost at moments repellent, in the very great thing which rules in a man’s life. But his mother would never know.

That was what he said to himself, unconscious of the fact that his mother had known and had lived alone with her knowledge for years.

He offered himself for service in South Africa with the City Imperial Volunteers. The doctor passed him. He was informed that he would be sworn in at the Guildhall on 4th January. The great step was taken.

Why had he taken it without telling Rosamund he was going to take it?

As he came out into the dark winter evening he wondered about that almost vaguely. He must have had a driving reason, but now he did not know what it was. How was Rosamund going to take it? Suddenly he felt guilty, as if he had done her a wrong. They were one flesh, and in such a vital matter he had not consulted her. Wasn’t it abominable?

As soon as he was free he went straight home.

This time, as he walked homeward, Dion held no intercourse with Westminster. If he heard the chimes, the voices, the footfalls, he was not conscious of hearing them; if he saw the vapors from the river, the wreaths of smoke from the chimneys, the lights gleaming in the near houses and far away across the dark mystery of the water, he did not know that he saw them. In himself he was imprisoned, and against the great city in which he walked he had shut the doors.

He arrived at his house and put his hand in his pocket to get his latch-key. Before he was able to draw it forth the green door was opened and Beatrice came out.

“Dion!” she said, startled.

“You nearly ran over me!”

“What is it?” she asked. “What have you done?”

“But--”

“I know!” she interrupted.

She put out her hand and took hold of his coat sleeve. The action was startlingly impulsive in Beatrice, who was always so almost plaintive, so restrained, so dim.

“But you can’t!”

“I do. You are going to South Africa.”

He said nothing. How could he tell Beatrice before he told Rosamund?

“When are you going?”

“Is Rosamund in the house, Beattie?” he asked, very gently.

Beatrice flushed deeply, painfully, and took her hand from his sleeve.

“Yes. I’ve been playing with Robin, building castles with the new bricks. Good-by, Dion.”

She went past him and down the small street rather quickly. He stood for a moment looking after her; then he turned into the house. As he shut the door he heard a chord struck on the piano upstairs in Rosamund’s sitting-room. He took off his coat and hat and came into the little hall. As he did so he heard Rosamund’s voice beginning to sing Brahms’s “Wiegenlied” very softly. He guessed that she was singing to an audience of Robin. The bricks had been put away after the departure of Aunt Beattie, and now Robin was being sung towards sleep. How often would he be sung to by Rosamund in the future when his father would not be there to listen!

Robin was going to have his mother all to himself, and Rosamund was going to have her little son all to herself. But they did not know that yet. The long months of their sacred companionship stretched out before the father as he listened to the lullaby, which he could only just hear. Rosamund had mastered the art of withdrawing her voice and yet keeping it perfectly level.

When the song was finished, whispered away into the spaces where music disperses to carry on its sweet mission, Dion went up the stairs, opened the door of Rosamund’s room, and saw something very simple, and, to him, very memorable. Rosamund had turned on the music-stool and put her right arm round Robin, who, in his minute green jersey and green knickerbockers, stood leaning against her with the languid happiness and half-wayward demeanor of a child who has been playing, and who already feels the soothing influence of approaching night with its gift of profound sleep. Robin’s cheeks were flushed, and in his blue eyes there was a curious expression, drowsily imaginative, as if he were welcoming dreams which were only for him. With a faint smile on his small rosy lips he was listening while Rosamund repeated to him in English the words of the song she had just been singing. Dion heard her say:

“Sink to slumber, good-night, And angels of light With love you shall fold As the Christ Child of old.”

“There’s Fa!” whispered Robin, sending to Dion a semi-roguish look.

Dion held up his hand and formed “Hush!” with his lips. Rosamund finished the verse:

“While the stars dimly shine May no sorrow be thine.”

She bent and kissed Robin on the top of his head just in the middle, choosing the place, and into his hair she breathed a repetition of the last words, “May no sorrow be thine.”

And Dion was going to the war.

Robin slipped from his mother’s arm gently and came to his father.

“‘Allo, Fa!” he observed confidentially.

Dion bent down.

“Hallo, Robin!”

He picked the little chap up and gave him a kiss. What a small bundle of contentment Robin was at that moment. In South Africa Dion often remembered just how Robin had felt to him then, intimate and a mystery, confidential, sleepy with happiness, a tiny holder of the Divine, a willing revelation and a soft secret. So much in so little!

“You’ve been playing with Aunt Beattie.”

Robin acknowledged it.

“Auntie’s putty good at bricks.”

“Did you meet Beattie, Dion?” asked Rosamund.

“On the doorstep.”

He thought of Beattie’s question. There was no question in Rosamund’s face. But perhaps his own face had changed.

A tap came to the door.

“Master Robin?” said nurse, in a voice that held both inquiry and an admonishing sound.

When Robin had gone off to bed, walking vaguely and full of the forerunners of dreams, Dion knew that his hour had come. He felt a sort of great stillness within him, stillness of presage, perhaps, or of mere concentration, of the will to be, to do, to endure, whatever came. Rosamund shut down the lid of the piano and came away from the music-stool. Dion looked at her, and thought of the maidens of the porch and of the columns of the Parthenon.

“Rosamund,” he said,--that stillness within him forbade any preparation, any “leading up,”--“I’ve joined the City Imperial Volunteers.”

“The City Imperial Volunteers?” she said.

He knew by the sound of her voice that she had not grasped the meaning of what he had done. She looked surprised, and a question was in her brown eyes.

“Why? What are they? I don’t understand. And the Artists’ Rifles?”

“I’ve got my transfer from them. I’ve joined for the war.”

“The war? Do you mean----?”

She came up to him, looking suddenly intent.

“Do you mean you have volunteered for active service in South Africa?”

“Yes.”

“Without consulting me?”

Her whole face reddened, almost as it had reddened when she spoke to him about the death of her mother.

“Yes. I haven’t signed on yet, but the doctor has passed me. I’m to be sworn in at the Guildhall on the fourth, I believe. We shall sail very soon, almost directly, I suppose. They want men out there.”

He did not know how bruskly he spoke; he was feeling too much to know.

“I didn’t think you could do such a thing without speaking to me first. My husband, and you----!”

She stopped abruptly, as if afraid of what she might say if she went on speaking. Two deep lines appeared in her forehead. For the first time in his life Dion saw an expression of acute hostility in her eyes. She had been angry, or almost angry with him for a moment in Elis, when he broke off the branch of wild olive; but she had not looked like this. There was something piercing in her expression that was quite new to him.

“I felt I ought to do it,” he said dully.

“Did you think I should try to prevent you?”

“No. I scarcely knew what I thought.”

“Have you told your mother?”

“No. I had to tell Uncle Biron because of the business. Nobody else knows.”

And then suddenly he remembered Beattie.

“At least I haven’t told any one else.”

“But some one else does know--knew before I did.”

“I saw Beattie just now, as I said. I believe she guessed. I didn’t tell her.”

“But how could she guess such a thing if you gave her no hint?”

“That’s just what I have been wondering.”

Rosamund was silent. She went away from him and stood by the fire, turning her back to him. He waited for a moment, then he went to the hearth.

“Don’t you think perhaps it’s best for a man to decide such a thing quite alone? It’s a man’s job, and each man must judge for himself what he ought to do in such a moment. If you had asked me not to go I should have felt bound to go all the same.”

“But I should have said ‘Go.’ Then you never understood me in Greece? All our talks told you nothing about me? And now Robin is here--you thought I should ask you not to go!”

She turned round. She seemed almost passionately surprised.

“Perhaps--in a way--I wished to think that.”

“Why? Did you wish to despise me?”

“Rosamund! As if I could ever do that.”

“If you did a despicable thing I should despise you.”

“Don’t! I haven’t much more time here.”

“I never, never shall be able to understand how you could do this without telling me beforehand that you were going to do it.”

“It wasn’t from any want of respect or love for you.”

“I can’t talk about it any more just now.”

The flush on her face deepened. She turned and went out of the room.

Dion was painfully affected. He had never before had a serious disagreement with Rosamund. It was almost intolerable to have one now on the eve of departure from her. He felt like one who had committed an outrage out of the depths of a terrible hunger, a hunger of curiosity. He knew now why he had volunteered for active service without consulting Rosamund. Obscurely his nature had spoken, saying, “Put her to the test and make the test drastic.” And he had obeyed the command. He had wanted to know, to find out suddenly, in a moment, the exact truth of years. And now he had roused a passion of anger in Rosamund.

Her anger wrapped him in pain such as he had never felt till now.

The house seemed full of menace. In the little room the atmosphere was changed. He looked round it and his eyes rested on the Hermes. He went up to it and stood before it.

Instantly he felt again the exquisite calm of Elis. The face of the Hermes made the thought of war seem horrible and ridiculous. Men had learnt so much when Praxiteles created his Hermes, and they knew so little now. The enigma of their violence was as great as the enigma of the celestial calm which the old Greeks had perpetuated to be forever the joy and the rest of humanity. And he, Dion, was going to take an active part in violence. The unchanging serenity of the Hermes, which brought all Elis before him, with its green sights and its wonderful sounds, of the drowsy insects in the sunshine, of the sheep-bells, and of the pines whose voices hold within them all the eternal secrets, increased the intensity of his misery. He realized how unstable are the foundations of human happiness, and his house of life seemed crumbling about him.

Presently he went downstairs to his room and wrote letters to his mother and to Bruce Evelin, telling them what he had done.

When he had directed and stamped these letters he thought of Beattie and Guy. Beattie knew. What was it which had led her so instantly to a knowledge denied to Rosamund? Rosamund had evidently not noticed any difference in him when he came in that evening. But, to be sure, Robin had been there.

Robin had been there.

Dion sat before the writing-table for a long while doing nothing. Then a clock struck. He had only half an hour to spare before dinner would be ready. Quickly he wrote a few words to Beattie:

“MY DEAR BEATTIE,--You were right. I have volunteered for active service and shall soon be off to South Africa. I don’t know yet exactly when we shall start, but I expect they’ll hurry us off as quickly as they can. Men are wanted out there badly. Lots of fellows are coming forward. I’ll tell you more when I see you again. Messages to Guy.--Yours affectionately,

“DION”

It was not an eloquent letter, but Beattie would understand. Beattie was not a great talker but she was a great understander. He went out to put the three letters into the pillar-box. Then he hurried upstairs to his dressing-room. For the first time in his life he almost dreaded spending an evening alone with Rosamund.

He did not see her till he came into the drawing-room. As he opened the door he saw her sitting by the fire reading, in a dark blue dress.

“I’m afraid I’m late,” he said, as he walked to the hearth. “I wrote to mother, Beattie and godfather to tell them what I was going to do.”

“What you had done,” she said quietly, putting down the book.

“I haven’t actually been sworn in yet, but of course it is practically the same thing.”

He looked at her almost surreptitiously. She was very grave, but there was absolutely nothing hostile or angry in her expression or manner. They went into the dining-room, and talked together much as usual during dinner. As soon as dinner was over, and the parlor-maid had gone out, having finished her ministrations, which to Dion that night had seemed innumerable and well-nigh unbearable, he said:

“I’m dreadfully sorry about to-day. I did the wrong thing in volunteering without saying anything to you. Of course you were hurt and startled----”

He looked at her and paused.

“Yes, I was. I couldn’t help it, and I don’t think you ought to have done what you did. But you have made a great sacrifice--very great. I only want to think of that, Dion, of how much you are giving up, and of the cause--our cause.”

She spoke very earnestly and sincerely, and her eyes looked serious and very kind.

“Don’t let us go back to anything sad, or to any misunderstanding now,” she continued. “You are doing an admirable thing, and I shall always be glad you had the will to do it, were able to do it. Tell me everything. I want to live in your new life as much as I can. I want you to feel me in it as much as you can.”

“She has prayed over it. While I was writing my letters she was praying over it.”

Suddenly Dion knew this as if Rosamund had opened her heart to him and had told it. And immediately something which was like a great light seemed not only to illumine the present moment but also to throw a piercing ray backwards upon all his past life with Rosamund. In the light of this ray he discerned a shadowy something, which stood between Rosamund and him, keeping them always apart. It was a tremendous Presence; his feeling was that it was the Presence of God. Abruptly he seemed to be aware that God had always stood, was standing now, between him and his wife. He remembered the words in the marriage service, “Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.” “But God,” he thought, “did not join us. He stood between us always. He stands between us now.” It was an awful thought. It was like a great blasphemy. He was afraid of it. And yet he now felt that it was an old, old thought in his mind which only now had he been able to formulate. He had known without knowing consciously, but now he consciously knew.

He took care at this moment not to look at Rosamund. If he looked, surely she would see in his eyes his terrible thought, the thought he was going to carry with him to South Africa. Making a great effort he began to tell her all that he knew about the C.I.V. They discussed matters in a comradely spirit. Rosamund said many warm-hearted things, showed herself almost eagerly solicitous. They went up to sit by the fire in her little room. Dion smoked. They talked for a long time. Had any one been there to listen he would probably have thought, “This man has got the ideal wife. She’s a true comrade as well as a wife.” But all the time Dion kept on saying to himself, “This is the result of her prayers before dinner. She is being good.” Only when it was late, past their usual hour for going to bed, did he feel that the strong humanity in Rosamund had definitely gained ground, that she was being genuinely carried away by warm impulses connected with dear England, our men, and with him.

When they got up at last to go to bed she exclaimed:

“I shall always love what you have done, Dion. You know that.”

“But not the way of my doing it!” trembled on his lips.

He did not say it, however. Why lead her back even for a moment to bitterness?

That night he lay with his thoughts, and in the darkness the ray was piercing bright and looked keen like a sharpened sword.

Chapter II

On the fourth of January Dion and about nine hundred other men were sworn in at the Guildhall; on January the seventeenth, eight hundred of them, including Dion, were presented with the Freedom of the City of London; on the nineteenth they were equipped and attended a farewell service at St. Paul’s Cathedral, after which they were entertained at supper, some at Gray’s Inn and some at Lincoln’s Inn; on the twentieth they entrained for Southampton, from which port they sailed in the afternoon for South Africa. Dion was on board of the “Ariosto.”

Strangely, perhaps, he was almost glad when the ship cast off and the shores of England faded and presently were lost beyond the horizon line. He was alone now with his duty. Life was suddenly simplified. It was better so. In the last days he had often felt confused, beset, had often felt that he was struggling in a sea of complications which threatened to overwhelm him. There had been too much to do and there had been too much to endure; he had been obliged to be practical when he was feeling intensely emotional. The effort to dominate and to conceal his emotion had sometimes almost exhausted him in the midst of all he had had to do. He had come to the knowledge of the fact that it is the work of the spirit which leaves the whole man tired. He was weary, not from hard energies connected with his new profession, not from getting up at dawn, marching through dense crowds of cheering countrymen, traveling, settling in on shipboard, but from farewells. He looked back now upon a sort of panorama of farewells, of partings from his mother, his uncle, Bruce Evelin, Guy, Beatrice, Robin, Rosamund.

Quite possibly all these human companions had vanished out of his life for ever. It was a tremendous thought, upon which he was resolved not to dwell lest his courage and his energies might be weakened.

Through good-bys a man may come to knowledge, and Dion had, in these last few days, gone down to the bedrock of knowledge concerning some of those few who were intimately in his life--knowledge of them and also of himself. Nobody had traveled to Southampton to see him off. He had a very English horror of scenes, and had said all his good-bys in private. With Bruce Evelin he had had a long talk; they had spoken frankly together about the future of Rosamund and Robin in the event of his not coming back. Dion had expressed his views on the bringing up of the boy, and, in doing so had let Bruce Evelin into secrets of Greece. The father did not expect, perhaps did not even desire, that the little son should develop into a paragon, but he did desire for Rosamund’s child the strong soul in the strong body, and the soft heart that was not a softy’s heart.

In that conversation Bruce Evelin had learnt a great deal about Dion. They had spoken of Rosamund, perhaps more intimately than they had ever spoken before, and Dion had said, “I’m bothering so much about Robin partly because her life is bound up with Robin’s.”

“Several lives are bound up with that little chap’s,” Bruce Evelin had said.

And a sudden sense of loneliness had come upon Dion. But he had only made some apparently casual remark to the effect that he knew Bruce Evelin would do his best to see that Robin came to no harm. No absurd and unnecessary promises had been exchanged between the old and the young man. Their talk had been British, often seemingly casual, and nearly always touched with deep feeling. It had not opened to Dion new vistas of Bruce Evelin. For a long time Dion had felt that he knew Bruce Evelin. But it had given him a definite revelation of the strong faithfulness, the tenacity of faithfulness in friendship, which was perhaps the keynote of Bruce Evelin’s character.

The parting from Guy had been less eventful. Nevertheless it had helped to get rid of certain faint misunderstandings which neither of the friends had ever acknowledged. Since the Mrs. Clarke episode Dion had been aware that Guy’s feeling towards him had slightly changed. They were such old and tried friends that they would always care for each other, but Guy could not help resenting Rosamund’s treatment of Mrs. Clarke, could not help considering Dion’s acquiescence in it a sign of weakness. These feelings, unexpressed, but understood by Dion, had set up a slight barrier between the two young men; it had fallen when they said good-by. Mrs. Clarke had been forgotten then by Guy, who had only remembered the gifts of war, and that possibly this was his final sight of old Dion. All their common memories had been with them when the last hand-clasp was given, and perhaps only when their hands fell apart had they thoroughly tested at last the strength of the link between them. They were friends for life without knowing exactly why. Thousands of Englishmen were in the same case.

Dion had gone to De Lorne Mansions to bid good-by to Beattie, and with her, too, he had talked about Robin. Beattie had known when Dion was coming, and had taken care to be alone. Always quiet, she had seemed to Dion quieter even than usual in that final hour by the fire, almost singularly timid and repressed. There had even been moments when she had seemed to him cold. But the coldness--if really there had been any--had been in her manner, perhaps in her voice, but had been absent from her face. They had sat in the firelight, which Beattie was always fond of, and Dion had not been able to see her quite clearly. If the electric light had been turned on she might have told him more; but she surely would not have told him of the quiet indifference which manner and voice and even inexpressive attitude had seemed to be endeavoring to convey to him. For Beattie’s only half-revealed face had looked eloquent in the firelight, eloquent of a sympathy and even of a sorrow she had said very little about. Whenever Dion had begun to feel slightly chilled he had looked at her, and the face in the firelight had assured him. “Beattie does care,” he had thought; and he had realized how much he wanted Beattie to care, how he had come to depend upon Beattie’s sisterly affection and gentle but deep interest in all the course of his life.

Quickly, too quickly, the moment had come for him to say the last word to Beattie, and suddenly he had felt shy. It had seemed to him that something in Beattie--he could not have said what--had brought about this unusual sensation in him. He had got up abruptly with a “Well, I suppose I must be off now!” and had thrust out his hand. He had felt that his manner and action were almost awkward and hard. Beattie had got up too in a way that looked listless.

“Are you well, Beattie?” he had asked.

“Quite well.”

“Perhaps you are tired?”

“No.”

“I fancied--well, good-by, Beattie.”

“Good-by, Dion.”

That had been all. At the door he had looked round, and had seen Beattie standing with her back to him and her face to the firelight, stooping slightly, and he had felt a strong impulse to go to her again, and to--he hardly knew what--to say good-by again, perhaps, in a different, more affectionate or more tender way. But he had not done it. Instead he had gone out and had shut the door behind him very quietly. It was odd that Beattie had not even looked after him. Surely people generally did that when a friend was going away, perhaps for ever. But Beattie was different from other people, and somehow he was quite sure she cared.

The three last good-bys had been said to his mother, Robin and Rosamund, in Queen Anne’s Mansions and Little Market Street. He had stayed with his mother for nearly two hours. She had a very bad cold, unbecoming, complicated with fits of sneezing, a cold in the “three handkerchiefs an hour” stage. And this commonplace malady had made him feel very tender about her, and oddly pitiful about all humanity, including, of course, himself. While they talked he had thought several times, “It’s hard to see mother in such a state when perhaps I shall never see her again. I don’t want to remember her with a cold.” And the thought, “I shan’t be here to see her get well,” had pained him acutely.

“I’m looking and feeling glazed, dee-ar,” had been her greeting to him. “My nose is shiny and my mind is woolly. I don’t think you ought to kiss me or talk to me.”

And then he had kissed her, and they had talked, intimately, sincerely. In those last hours mercifully Dion had not felt shy with his mother. But perhaps this was because she was never shy, not even in tenderness or in sorrow. She was not afraid of herself. They had even been able to discuss the possibility of his being killed in the war, and Mrs. Leith had been quite simple about it, laying aside all her usual elaboration of manner.

“The saddest result of such an honorable and noble end would be the loss to Robin, I think,” she had said.

“To Robin? But he’s got such a mother!”

“Do you think he doesn’t need, won’t need much more later on, the father he’s got? Dion, my son, humility is a virtue, no doubt, but I don’t believe in excess even in the practice of virtue, and sometimes I think you do.”

“I didn’t know it.”

“This going to the war is a splendid thing for you. I wouldn’t have you out of it even though----”

Here she had been overcome by a tremendous fit of sneezing from which she had emerged with the smiling remark:

“I’m not permitted to improve the occasion.”

“I believe I know what you mean. Perhaps you’re right, mother. You’re cleverer than I am. Still I can’t help seeing that Robin’s got a mother such as few children have. Look round at all the mothers you know in London!”

“Yes. Rosamund was created to be a mother. But just to-day I want to look at Robin’s father.”

And so they had talked of him.

That talk had done Dion good. It had set his face towards a shining future. If he came back from the war he now felt, through the feeling of his mother, that he would surely come back tempered, tried, better fitted to Robin’s uses, more worthy of any woman’s gift of herself. Without preaching, even without being remarkably definite, his mother had made him see in this distant war a great opportunity, not to win a V.C. or any splashing honor that would raise him up in the eyes of the world, but to reach out and grip hold of his own best possibilities. Had his mother done even more than this? Had she set before him some other goal which the war might enable him to gain if he had not already gained it? Had she been very subtle when seeming to be very direct? Even when she held him in her arms--despite the cold!--and gave him the final kiss and blessing, he was not sure. If it had been done it had been done with extraordinary delicacy, with the marvelous cunning of clever love which knows how to avoid all the pitfalls. And it had been done, too, with the marvelous unselfishness of which, perhaps, only the highest type of mother-love is capable.

After he had left his mother, and was just going out of the flat, Dion had heard through the half-open door a sound, a ridiculous sound, which had made him love her terribly, and with the sudden yearning which is the keenest pain of the heart because it defines all the human limitations: she was sneezing again violently. As he shut the front door, “If she were to die while I’m away, and I were to come back!” had stabbed his mind. Outside in the court he had gazed up at the towering rows of lighted windows and had said another good-by out there.

Shutting his eyes for a moment as the “Ariosto” plowed her way onwards through a rather malignant sea, Dion saw again those rows of lighted windows, and he wondered, almost as earnestly as a child wonders, whether his mother’s cold was better. What he had done, volunteering for active service and joining the C.I.V. battalion, had made him feel simpler than usual; but he did not know it, did not look on at his own simplicity.

And then, last of all, had come the parting from Robin and Rosamund.

Rosamund and Dion had agreed not to make very much of his departure to Robin. Father was going way for a time, going over the sea picturesquely, with a lot of friends, all men, all happy to be together and to see wonderful things in a country quite different from England. Some day, when Robin was a big as his father, perhaps he, too, would make such a voyage with his friends. Robin had been deeply interested, and had shown his usual ardor in comment and--this was more embarrassing--in research. He had wanted to know a great deal about his father’s intentions and the intentions of father’s numerous male friends. What were they going to do when they arrived in the extremely odd country which had taken it into its head to be different from England? How many male friends was father taking with him? Why hadn’t they all been to “see us?” Was Uncle Guy one of them? Was Mr. Thrush going too? Why wasn’t Mr. Thrush going? If he was too old to go was Uncle Guy too old? Did Mr. Thrush want to go? Was he disappointed at father’s not being able to take him? Was it all a holiday for father? Would mummy have liked to go? No lies had been told to Robin, but some of the information he had sought had been withheld. Dion had made skilful use of Mr. Thrush when matters had become difficult, when Robin had nearly driven him into a corner. The ex-chemist, though seldom seen, loomed large in Robin’s world, on account of his impressive coloring and ancient respectabilities. Robin regarded him with awful admiration, and looked forward to growing like him in some far distant future. Dion had frequently ridden off from difficult questions on Mr. Thrush. Even in the final interview between father and son Mr. Thrush had been much discussed.

The final interview had taken place in the nursery among Aunt Beattie’s bricks, by which Robin was still obsessed. Dion had sat on the floor and built towers with his boy, and had wondered, as he handled the bricks in the shining of the nursery fire, whether he would come back to help Robin with his building later on. He was going out to build, for England and for himself, perhaps for Robin and Rosamund, too. Would he be allowed to see the fruits of his labors?

The towers of bricks had grown high, and with it Dion had built up another tower, unknown to Robin, a tower of hopes for the child. So much ardor in so tiny a frame! It was a revelation of the wonder of life. What a marvel to have helped to create that life and what a responsibility. And he was going away to destroy life, if possible. The grotesqueness of war had come upon him then, as he had built up the tower with Robin. And he had longed for a released world in which his boy might be allowed to walk as a man. The simplicity of Robin, his complete trustfulness, his eager appreciation of human nature, his constant reaching out after kindness without fear of being denied, seemed to imply a world other than the world which must keep on letting blood in order to get along. Robin, and all the other Robins, female and male, revealed war in its true light. Terrible children whose unconscious comment on life bites deep like an acid! Terrible Robin in that last hour with the bricks!

When the tower had become a marvel such as had been seen in no nursery before, Dion had suggested letting it be. Another brick and it must surely fall. The moment was at hand when he must see the last of Robin. He had had a furtive but strong desire to see the tower he and his son had built still standing slenderly erect when he went out of the nursery. Just then he had been the man who seeks a good omen. Robin had agreed with his suggestion after a long moment of rapt contemplation of the tower.

“I wish Mr. Thrush could see it,” he had observed, laying down the brick he had taken up to add to the tower just before his father had spoken. “He would be pleased.”

The words had been lifted out on a sigh, the sigh of the wonder-worker who had achieved his mission. And then they had talked of Mr. Thrush, sitting carefully, almost motionless, beside the tower, and speaking softly “for fear.” The firelight had danced upon the yellow bricks and upon the cream-colored nursery walls, filtering through the high nursery “guard” which protected Robin from annihilation by fire, and the whisper, whisper of their voices had only emphasized the quiet. And, with every moment that went by, the lit-up tower had seemed more like a symbol to Dion. Then at last the cuckoo-clock had chimed and the wooden bird, with trembling tail, had made its jerky obeisance.

“Cuckoo!”

Dion had put his arm round the little figure in the green jersey and the tiny knickerbockers, and had whispered, still governed by the tower:

“I must go now, Robin.”

“Good-by, Fa,” Robin had whispered back, with his eyes on the tower.

With a very careful movement he had lifted his face to be kissed, and on his soft lips Dion had felt a certain remoteness. Did the tower stand between him and his little son as he said good-by to Robin?

Just as he had reluctantly let Robin go and, with his legs crossed, had been about to perform the feat of getting up without touching the floor with his hands, and without shaking the bricks in their places,--moved to this trifling bodily feat by the desire to confront his emotion with an adversary,--the door behind him had been opened. Already in movement he had instinctively half-turned round. Something had happened,--he never knew exactly what,--something had escaped from his physical control because his mind had abruptly been deflected from its task of vigilance; there had been a crash and a cry of “Oh, Fa!” from Robin, and he had met Rosamund’s eyes as the tower toppled down in ruin. Not so much as one brick had been left upon another.

Robin had been greatly distressed. Tears had come into his eyes, and for a moment he had looked reproachfully at his father. Then, almost immediately, something chivalrous had spoken within him, admonishing him, and he had managed a smile.

“It’ll be higher next time, Fa, won’t it?” he had murmured, still evidently fighting a keen disappointment.

And Dion had caught him up, given him a hug, whispered “My boy!” to him, put him down and gone straight out of the room with Rosamund, who had not spoken a word.

And that had been the last of Robin for his father.

In the evening, when Robin was asleep, Dion had said good-by to Rosamund. The catastrophe of the tower of bricks had haunted his mind. As he had chosen to make of the tower an omen, in its destruction he had found a presage of evil which depressed him, which even woke in him ugly fears of the future. He had had a great deal out of life, not all he had wanted, but still a great deal. Perhaps he was not going to have much more. He had not spoken of his fears to Rosamund, but had been resolutely cheerful with her in their last conversation. Neither of them had mentioned the possibility of his not coming back. They had talked of what probably lay before him in South Africa, and of Robin, and presently Rosamund had said:

“I want to make a suggestion. Will you promise to tell me if you dislike it?”

“Yes. What is it?”

“Would you mind if I succeeded in letting this house and went into the country with Robin to wait for your coming back?”

“Letting it furnished, do you mean?”

“Yes.”

“But won’t you be dull in the country, away from mother, and Beattie, and godfather, and all our friends?”

“I could never be dull with Robin and nature, never, and I wouldn’t go very far from London. I thought of something near Welsley.”

“So that you could go in to Cathedral service when ‘The Wilderness’ was sung!”

He had smiled as he had said it, but his own reference to Rosamund’s once-spoken-of love of the wilderness had, in a flash, brought the hill of Drouva before him, and he had faced man’s tragedy--remembered joys of the past in a shadowed present.

“Go into the country, Rose. I only want you to be happy, but”--he had hesitated, and then had added, almost in spite of himself--“but not too happy.”

Not too happy! That really was the great fear at his heart now that he was voyaging towards South Africa, that Rosamund would be too happy without him. He no longer deceived himself. This drastic change in his life had either taught him to face realities, or simply prevented him from being able to do anything else. He told himself the truth, and it was this, that Rosamund did not love him at all as he loved her. She was fond of him, she trusted him, she got on excellently with him, she believed in him, she even admired him for having been able to live as he had lived before their marriage, but she did not passionately love him. He might have been tempted to think that, with all her fine, even splendid, qualities, she was deprived of the power of loving intensely if he had not seen her with Robin, if he had not once spoken with her about her mother.

If he were killed in South Africa would Rosamund be angry at his death? That was her greatest tribute, anger, directed surely not against any human being, but against the God Whom she loved and Who, so she believed, ruled the world and directed the ways of men. Once Rosamund had said that she knew it was possible for human beings to hurt God. She had doubtless spoken out of the depths of her personal experience. She had felt sure that by her anger at the death of her mother she had hurt God. Such a conviction showed how she thought of God, in what a closeness of relation with God she felt herself to be. Dion knew now that she had loved her mother, that she loved Robin, as she did not love him. If he were to die she would be very sorry, but she would not be very angry. No, she would be able to breathe out a “farewell!” simply, with a resignation comparable to that of the Greeks on those tombs which she loved, and then--she would concentrate on Robin.

If he, Dion, were to be shot, and had time for a thought before dying, he knew what his thought would be: that the Boer’s bullet had only hit a man, not, like so many bullets fired in war, a man and a woman. And that thought would add an exquisite bitterness to the normal bitterness of death.

So Dion, on the “Ariosto,” voyaged towards South Africa, companioned by new and definite knowledge--new at any rate in the light and on the surface, definite because in the very big moments of life truth becomes as definite as the bayonet piercing to the man who is pierced.

His comrades were a mixed lot, mostly quite young. The average age was about twenty-five. Among them were barristers, law students, dentists, bank clerks, clerks, men of the Civil Service, architects, auctioneers, engineers, schoolmasters, builders, plumbers, jewelers, tailors, Stock Exchange men, etc., etc. There were representatives of more than a hundred and fifty trades, and adherents to nine religions, among the men of the C.I.V. Their free patriotism welded them together, the thing they had all spontaneously done abolished differences between Baptists and Jews, Methodists and Unitarians, Catholics and Protestants. The perfumery manager and the marine engineer comprehended each other’s language; the dentist and the insurance broker “hit it off together” at first sight; printers and plumbers, pawnbrokers and solicitors, varnish testers and hop factors--they were all friendly and all cheerful together. Each one of them had done a thing which all the rest secretly admired. Respect is a good cement, and can stand a lot of testing. In his comrades Dion was not disappointed. Among them were a few acquaintances, men whom he had met in the City, but there was only one man whom he could count as a friend, a barrister named Worthington, a bachelor, who belonged to the Greville Club, and who was an intimate of Guy Daventry’s. Worthington knew Daventry much better than he knew Dion, but both Dion and he were glad to be together and to exchange impressions in the new life which they had entered so abruptly, moved by a common impulse. Worthington was a dark, sallow, narrow-faced man, wiry, with an eager intellect, fearless and energetic, one of the most cheerful men of the battalion. His company braced Dion.

The second day at sea was disagreeable; the ship rolled considerably, and many officers and men were sea-sick. Dion was well, but Worthington was prostrated, and did not show on deck. Towards evening Dion went down to have a look at him, and found him in his bunk, lead-colored, with pinched features, but still cheerful and able to laugh at his own misery. They had a small “jaw” together about people and things at home, and in the course of it Worthington mentioned Mrs. Clarke, whom he had several times met at De Lorne Gardens.

“You know she’s back in London?” he said. “The winter’s almost impossible at Constantinople because of the winds from the Black Sea.”

“Yes, I heard she was in London, but I haven’t seen her this winter.”

“I half thought--only half--she’d send me a wire to wish me good luck when we embarked,” said Worthington, shifting uneasily in his bunk, and twisting his white lips. “But she didn’t. She’s a fascinating woman. I should have liked to have had a wire from her.”

“By Jove!” exclaimed Dion.

“What is it?”

“I’ve just remembered I got some telegrams when we were going off. I read one, from my wife, and stuffed the others away. There was such a lot to do and think of. I believe they’re here.”

He thrust a hand into one of his pockets and brought out four telegrams, one, Rosamund’s, open, the rest unopened. Worthington lay staring at him and them, glad perhaps to be turned for a moment from self-contemplation by any incident, however trifling.

“I’ll bet I know whom they’re from,” said Dion. “One’s from old Guy, one’s from Bruce Evelin, and one’s from----” He paused, fingering the telegrams.

“Eh?” said Worthington, still screwing his lips about.

“Perhaps from Beattie, my sister-in-law, unless she and Guy have clubbed together. Well, let’s see.”

He tore open the first telegram.

“May you have good luck and come back safe and soon.--BEATTIE--GUY.”

He opened the second. It was from Bruce Evelin.

“May you be a happy warrior.--BRUCE EVELIN.”

Dion read it more than once, and his lips quivered for a second. He shot a glance at Worthington, and said, rather bruskly:

“Beatrice and Guy Daventry and Bruce Evelin!”

Worthington gave a little faint nod in the direction of the telegram that was still unopened.

“Your mater!”

“No; she wrote to me. She hates telegrams, says they’re public property. I wonder who it is.”

He pushed a forefinger under the envelope, tore it and pulled out the telegram.

“The forgotten do not always forget. May Allah have you and all brave men in His hand.--CYNTHIA CLARKE.”

Dion felt Worthington’s observant eyes upon him, looked up and met them as the “Ariosto” rolled and creaked in the heavy gray wash of the sea.

“Funny!” he jerked out.

Worthington lifted inquiring eyebrows but evidently hesitated to speak just then.

“It’s from Mrs. Clarke.”

“Beastly of her!” tipped out Worthington. “What--she say?”

“Just wishes me well.”

And Dion stuck the telegram back into the flimsy envelope.

When he looked at it again that night he thought the woman from Stamboul was a very forgiving woman. Almost he wished that she were less forgiving. She made him now, she had made him in days gone by, feel as if he had behaved to her almost badly, like a bit of a brute. Of course that wasn’t true. If he hadn’t been married, no doubt they might have been good friends. As things were, friendship between them was impossible. He did not long for friendship with Mrs. Clarke. His life was full. There was no room in it for her. But he slightly regretted that he had met her, and he regretted more that she had wished to know Rosamund and him better than Rosamund had wished. He kept her telegram, with the rest of the telegrams he had received on his departure; now and then he looked at it, and wondered whether its wording was not the least bit indelicate. It would surely have been wiser if Mrs. Clarke had omitted the opening six words. They conveyed a reproach; they conveyed, too, a curious suggestion of will power, of quiet persistence. When he read them Dion seemed to feel the touch--or the grip--of Stamboul, listless apparently, yet not easily to be evaded or got rid of.

That telegram caused him to wonder whether he had made a really strong impression upon Mrs. Clarke, such as he had not suspected till now, whether she had not, perhaps, liked him a good deal more than she liked most people. “May Allah have you and all brave men in His hand.” Worthington would have been glad to have had that message. Dion had discovered that Worthington was half in love with Mrs. Clarke. He chaffed Dion about Mrs. Clarke’s telegram with a rather persistent gaiety which did not hide a faint, semi-humorous jealousy. One day he even said, “To him that hath shall be given. It’s so like a woman to sent her word of encouragement to the man who’s got a wife to encourage him, and to leave the poor beggar who’s got no one out in the cold. It’s a cruel world, and three-quarters of the cruelty in it is the production of women.” He spoke with a smile, and the argument which followed was not serious. They laughed and bantered each other, but Dion understood that Worthington really envied him because Mrs. Clarke had thought of him at the moment of departure. Perhaps he had been rather stupid in letting Worthington know about her telegram. But Worthington had been watching him; he had had the feeling that Worthington had guessed whom the telegram was from. The matter was of no importance. If Mrs. Clarke had cared for him, or if he had cared for her, he would have kept her message secret; as they were merely acquaintances who no longer met each other, her good wishes from a distance meant very little, merely a kindly thought, for which he was grateful and about which no mystery need be made.

Of course he must write a letter of thanks to Mrs. Clarke.

One day, after he had written to Rosamund, to Robin, to his mother, to Beattie and to Bruce Evelin, Mrs. Clarke’s turn came. His letter to her was short and cheery, but he was slow in writing it. There was a noise of men, a turmoil of activity all about him. In the midst of it he heard a husky, very individual voice, he saw a pair of wide-open distressed eyes looking directly at him. And an odd conviction came to him that life would bring Mrs. Clarke and him together again. Then he would come back from South Africa? He had no premonition about that. What he felt as he wrote his letter was simply that somehow, somewhere, Mrs. Clarke and he would get to know each other better than they knew each other now. Kismet! In the vast Turkish cemeteries there were moldering bodies innumerable. Why did he think of them whenever he thought of Mrs. Clarke? No doubt because she lived in Constantinople, because much of her life was passed in the shadow of the towering cypresses. He had thought of her as a cypress. Did she keep watch over bodies of the dead?

A bugle rang out. He put his letter into the envelope and hastily scribbled the address. Mrs. Clarke was again at Claridge’s.

* * * * *

Every man who loves very deeply wishes to conquer the woman he loves, to conquer the heart of her and to have it as his possession. Dion had left England knowing that he had won Rosamund but had never conquered her. This South African campaign had come upon him like a great blow delivered with intention; a blow which does not stun a man but which wakes the whole man up. If this war had not broken out his life would have gone on as before, harmoniously, comfortably, with the daily work, and the daily exercise, and the daily intercourse with wife and child and friends. And would he ever have absolutely known what he knew now, what--he was certain of it!--his mother knew, what perhaps Beattie and even Bruce Evelin knew?

He had surely failed in a great enterprise, but he was resolved to succeed if long enough life were given to him. He was now awake and walked in full knowledge. Surely, Rosamund being what she was, the issue lay with himself. If God had stood between them that must be because he, Dion, was not yet worthy of the full happiness which was his greatest earthly desire. Dion was certain that God did not stand between Rosamund and Robin.

He had dreams of returning to England a different, or perhaps a developed, man. The perfect lovers ought to stand together on the same level. Rosamund and he had never done that yet. He resolved to gain in South Africa, to get a grip on his best possibilities, to go back to England, if he ever went back, a bigger soul, freer, more competent, more generous, more fearless. He could never be a mystic. He did not want to be that. But surely he could learn in this interval of separation which, like a river, divided his life from Rosamund’s, to match her mysticism with something which would be able to call it out of its mysterious understanding. Instead of retreating to God alone she might then, perhaps, take him with her; instead of praying over him she might pray with him. If, after he returned from South Africa, Rosamund were ever again to be deliberately good with him, making such an effort as she had made on that horrible evening in Little Market Street when he had told her he was going on active service, he felt that he simply couldn’t bear it.

He put firmly aside the natural longings for home which often assailed him, and threw himself heart and soul into his new duties. Already he felt happier, for he was “out” to draw from the present, from the whole of it, all the building material it contained, and was resolute to use all that material in the construction of a palace, a future based on marble, strong, simple, noble, a Parthenon of the future. Only the weak man looks to omens, is governed in his mind, and so in his actions, by them. That which he had not known how to win in an easy life he must learn to win in a life that was hard. This war he would take as a gift to him, something to be used finely. If he fell in it still he would have had his gift, the chance to realize some of his latent and best possibilities. He swept out of his mind an old thought, the creeping surmise that perhaps Rosamund had given him all she had to give in lover’s love, that she knew how to love as child and as mother, but that she was incapable of being a great lover in man’s sense of the term when he applies it to woman.

Madeira was passed on January the twenty-fifth, and the men, staring across the sea, saw its lofty hills rising dreamily out of the haze, watchers of those who would not stop, who had no time for any eating of the lotus. Heat came upon the ship, and there were some who pretended that they heard sounds, and smelled perfumes wafted, like messages, from the hidden shores on which probably they would never land. Every one was kept busy, after a sail bath, with drilling, musketry instruction, physical drill, cleaning of accouterments, a dozen things which made the hours go quickly in a buzz of human activities. Some of the men, Dion among them, were trying to learn Dutch under an instructor who knew the mysteries. A call came for volunteers for inoculation, and both Dion and Worthington answered it, with between forty and fifty other men. The prick of the needle was like the touch of a spark; soon after came a mystery of general wretchedness, followed by pains in the loins, a rise of temperature and extreme, in Dion’s case even intense, weakness. He lay in his bunk trying to play the detective on himself, to stand outside of his body, saying to himself, “This is I, and I am quite unaffected by my bodily condition.” For what seemed to him a long time he was fairly successful in his effort; then the body began to show definitely the power of its weakness upon the Ego, to asset itself by feebleness. His will became like an invalid who is fretful upon the pillows. Soon his strong resolutions, cherished and never to be parted from till out of them the deeds had blossomed, lost blood and fell upon the evil day of anemia. He had a sensation of going out. When the midnight came he could not sleep, and with it came a thought feeble but persistent: “If she loves me it’s because I’ve given her Robin.” And in the creaking darkness, encompassed by the restlessness of the sea, again and again he repeated to himself the words--“it’s because I’ve given her Robin.” That was the plain truth. If he was loved, he was loved because of something he had done, not because of something that he was. Towards dawn he felt so weak that his hold on life seemed relaxing, and at last he almost wished to let it go. He understood why dying people do not usually fear death.

Three days later he was quite well and at work, but the memory of his illness stayed with him all through the South African campaign. Often at night he returned to that night on shipboard, and said to himself, “The doctor’s needle helped me to think clearly.”

The voyage slipped away with the unnoticed swiftness that is the child of monotony. The Southern Cross shone above the ship. When the great heat set in the men were allowed to sleep on deck, and Dion lay all night long under the wheeling stars, and often thought of the stars above Drouva, and heard Rosamund’s voice saying, “I can see the Pleiades.”

The ship crossed the line. Early in February the moon began to show a benign face to the crowd of men. One night there was a concert which was followed by boxing. Dion boxed and won his bout easily on points.

This little success had upon him a bracing effect, and gave him a certain prestige among his comrades. He did well also at revolver and musketry practice--better than many men who, though good enough shots at Bisley, found sectional practice with the service rifle a difficult job, were adepts at missing a mark with the revolver, and knew nothing of fire discipline. Because he had set an aim before him on which he knew that his future happiness depended, he was able to put his whole heart into everything he did. In the simplest duty he saw a means to an end which he desired intensely. Everything that lay to hand in the life of the soldier was building material which he must use to the best advantage. He knew fully, for the first time, the joy of work.

On a day in the middle of February the “Ariosto” passed the mail-boat from the Cape bound for England, sighted Table Mountain, and came to anchor between Robben Island and the docks. On the following morning the men of the C.I.V. felt the earth with eager feet as they marched to Green Point Camp.

Chapter III

“Robin,” said Rosamund, “would you like to go and live in the country?”

Robin looked very serious and, after a moment of silent consideration, remarked:

“Where there’s no houses?”

“Some houses, but not nearly so many as here.”

“Would Mr. Thrush be there?”

“Well no, I’m afraid he wouldn’t.”

Robin began to look decidedly adverse to the proposition.

“You see Mr. Thrush has always lived in London,” began Rosamund explanatorily.

“But so’ve we,” interrupted Robin.

“But we aren’t as old as Mr. Thrush.”

“Is he very old, mummie? How old is he?”

“I don’t know, but he’s a very great deal older than you are.”

“I s’poses,” observed Robin meditatively, slightly wrinkling his little nose where the freckles were. “Well, mummie?”

“Old people don’t generally like to move about much, but I think it would be very good for you and me to go into the country while father’s away.”

And taking Robin on her knees, and putting her arms round him, Rosamund began to tell him about the country, developing enthusiasm as she talked, bending over the little fair head that was so dear to her--the little fair head which contained Robin’s dear little thoughts, funny and very touching, but every one of them dear.

She described to Robin the Spring as it is in the English country, frail and fragrant, washed by showers that come and go with a waywardness that seems very conscious, warmed by sunbeams not fully grown up and therefore not able to do the work of the sunbeams of summer. She told him of the rainbow that is set in the clouds like a promise made from a very great distance, and of the pale and innocent flowers of Spring: primroses, periwinkles, violets, cowslips, flowers of dells in the budding woods, and of clearings round which the trees stand on guard about the safe little daisies and wild hyacinths and wild crocuses; flowers of the sloping meadows that go down to the streams of Spring. And all along the streams the twigs are budding; the yellow “lambs’ tails” swing in the breeze, as if answering to the white lambs’ tails that are wagging in the fields. The thrush sings in the copse, and in his piercing sweet note is the sound of Spring.

Bending over Robin, Rosamund imitated the note of the thrush, and Robin stared up at her with ardent eyes.

“Does Mr. Thrush ever do that?”

“I’ve never heard him do it.”

And she went on talking about the Spring.

How she loved that hour talking of Spring in the country with her human Spring in her arms. What was the war to her just then? Robin abolished war. While she had him there was always the rainbow, the perfect rainbow, rising from the world to the heavens and falling from the heavens to the world. The showers were fleeting Spring showers, and the clouds were fleecy and showed the blue.

“Robin, Robin, Robin!” she breathed over her child, when they had lived in the Spring together, the pure and exquisite Spring.

And Robin, all glowing with the ardor he had caught from her, declared for the country.

A few days later Rosamund wrote to Canon Wilton, who happened to be in residence at Welsley out of his usual time, and asked him if he knew of any pretty small house, with a garden, in the neighborhood, where she and Robin could settle down till Dion came back from the war. In answer she got a letter from the Canon inviting her to spend a night or two at his house in the Precincts. In a P.S. he wrote:

“If you can come next week I think I can arrange with Mr. Soames, our precentor, for Wesley’s ‘Wilderness’ to be sung at one of the afternoon services; but let me know by return what days you will be here.”

Rosamund replied by telegraph. Aunt Beatrice was installed in Little Market Street for a couple of nights as Robin’s protector, and Rosamund went down to Welsley, and spent two days with the Canon.

She had never been alone with him before, except now and then for a few minutes, but he was such a sincere and plain-spoken man that she had always felt she genuinely knew him. To every one with whom he spoke he gave himself as he was. This unusual sincerity in Rosamund’s eyes was a great attraction. She often said that she could never feel at home with pretense even if the intention behind it was kindly. Perhaps, however, she did not always detect it, although she possessed the great gift of feminine intuition.

She arrived by the express, which reached Welsley Station in the evening, and found Canon Wilton at the station to meet her. His greeting was:

“The ‘Wilderness,’ Wesley, at the afternoon service to-morrow.”

“That’s good of you!” she exclaimed, with the warm and radiant cordiality that won her so many friends. “I shall revel in my little visit here. It’s an unexpected treat.”

The Canon seemed for a moment almost surprised by her buoyant anticipation, and a look that was sad flitted across his face; but she did not notice it.

As they drove in a fly to his house in the Precincts she looked out at the busy provincial life in the narrow streets of the old country town, and enjoyed the intimate concentration of it all.

“I should like to poke about here,” she said. “I should feel at home as I never do in London. I believe I’m thoroughly provincial at heart.”

In the highest tower of the Cathedral, which stood in the heart of the town, the melodious chimes lifted up their crystalline voices, and “Great John” boomed out the hour in a voice of large authority.

“Seven o’clock,” said the Canon. “Dinner is at eight. You’ll be all alone with me this evening.”

“To-morrow too, I hope,” Rosamund said, with a smile.

“No, to-morrow we shall be the awkward number--three. Mr. Robertson, from Liverpool, is coming to stay with me for a few days. He preaches here next Sunday evening.”

Rosamund’s thought was carried back to a foggy night in London, when she had heard a sermon on egoism, and a quotation she had never forgotten: “Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat.”

“Can you manage with two clergymen?” said Canon Wilton.

“I’ll try. I don’t think they’ll frighten me, and I’ve been wishing to meet Mr. Robertson for a long time.”

“He’s a good man,” said Canon Wilton very simply. But the statement as he made it was like an accolade.

Rosamund enjoyed her quiet evening with the Canon in the house with the high green gate, the elm trees and the gray gables. As they talked, at first in the oak-paneled dining-room, later in the Canon’s library by a big wood fire, she was always pleasantly conscious of being enclosed, of being closely sheltered in the arms of the Precincts, which held also the mighty Cathedral with its cloisters, its subterranean passages, its ancient tombs, its mysterious courts, its staircases, its towers hidden in the night. The ecclesiastical flavor which she tasted was pleasant to her palate. She loved the nearness of those stones which had been pressed by the knees of pilgrims, of those walls between which so many prayers had been uttered, so many praises had been sung. A cosiness of religion enwrapped her. She had a delicious feeling of safety. They could hear the chimes where they sat encompassed by a silence which was not like ordinary silences, but which to Rosamund seemed impregnated with the peace of long meditations and of communings with the unseen.

“This rests me,” she said to her host. “Don’t you love your time here?”

“I’m fond of Welsley, but I don’t think I should like to pass all my year in it. I don’t believe in sinking down into religion, or into practises connected with it, as a soft old man sinks down into a feather bed. And that’s what some people do.”

“Do they?” said Rosamund abstractedly.

Just then a large and murmurous sound, apparently from very far off, had begun to steal upon her ears, level and deep, suggestive almost of the vast slumber of a world and of the underthings that are sleepless but keep at a distance.

“Is it the organ?” she asked, in a listening voice.

Canon Wilton nodded.

“Dickinson practising.”

They sat in silence for a long time listening. In that silence the Canon was watching Rosamund. He thought how beautiful she was and how good, but he almost disliked the joy which he discerned in her expression, in her complete repose. He rebuked himself for this approach to dislike, but his rebuke was not efficacious. In this enclosed calm of the precincts of Welsley where, pacing within the walls by the edge of the velvety lawns, the watchman would presently cry out the hour Canon Wilton was conscious of a life at a distance, the life of a man he had met first in St. James’s Square. The beautiful woman in the chair by the fire had surely forgotten that man.

Presently the distant sound of the organ ceased.

“I love Welsley,” said Rosamund, on a little sigh. “I just love it. I should like to live in the Precincts.”

That brought them to a discussion of plans in which Dion was talked of with warm affection and admiration by Rosamund; and all the time she was talking, Canon Wilton saw the beautiful woman in the chair listening to the distant organ. He knew of a house that was to be let in the Precincts, but that night he did not mention it. Something prevented him from doing so--something against which he struggled, but which he failed to overcome.

When they separated it was nearly eleven o’clock. As Rosamund took her silver candlestick from the Canon at the foot of the shallow oak staircase she said:

“I’ve had such a happy evening!”

It was a very sweet compliment very sweetly paid. No man could have been quite indifferent to it. Canon Wilton was not. As he looked at Rosamund a voice within him said:

“That’s a very dear woman.”

It spoke undeniable truth. Yet another voice whispered:

“Oh, if I could change her!”

But that was impossible. The Canon knew that, for he was very sincere with himself; and he realized that the change he wanted to see could only come from within, could never be imposed by him from without upon the mysterious dweller in the Temple of Rosamund.

That night Rosamund undressed very slowly and “pottered about” in her room, doing dreamily unnecessary things. She heard the chimes, and she heard the watchman calling the midnight hour near her window as “Great John” lifted up his voice. In the drawers where her clothes were laid the Canon’s housekeeper had put lavender. She smelt it as she listened to the watchman’s voice, shutting her eyes. Presently she drew aside curtain and blind and looked out of the window. She saw the outline of part of the great Cathedral with the principal tower, the home of “Great John”; she felt the embracing arms of the Precincts; and when she knelt down to say her prayers she thought:

“Here is a place where I can really pray.”

Nuns surely are helped by their convents and monks by the peace of their whitewashed cells.

“It is only in sweet places of retirement that one can pray as one ought to pray,” thought Rosamund that night as she lay in bed.

She forgot that the greatest prayer ever offered up was uttered on a cross in the midst of a shrieking crowd.

On the following day she went to the morning service in the Cathedral, and afterwards heard something which filled her with joyful anticipation. Canon Wilton told her there was a house to let in the Precincts.

“I’ll take it,” said Rosamund at once. “Esme Darlington has found me a tenant for No. 5, an old friend of his, or rather two old friends, Sir John and Lady Tenby. Where is it?”

He took her to see it.

The house in question had been occupied by the widow of a Dean, who had recently been driven by her health to “relapse upon Bournemouth.” It was a small old house with two very large rooms--one was the drawing-room, the other a bed-room.

The house stood at right angles to the east end of the Cathedral, from which it was only divided by a strip of turf broken up by fragments of old gray ruins, and edged by an iron railing, and by a paved passage-way, which led through the Dark Entry from the “Green Court,” where the Deanery and Minor Canons’ houses were situated, to the pleasaunce immediately around the Cathedral. To the green lawns of this wide pleasaunce the houses of the residentiary Canons gave access. One projecting latticed window of the drawing-room of Mrs. Browning’s house, another of the big bedroom above it, and the windows of the kitchen and the servants’ quarters looked on to the passage-way and the Cathedral; all the other windows looked into an old garden surrounded by a very high brick wall, a garden of green turf like moss, of elm trees, and, in summer, of gay herbaceous borders, a garden to which the voices of the chimes dropped down, and to which the Cathedral organ sent its message, as if to a place that knew how to keep safely all things that were precious. Even the pure and chill voices of the boy choristers found a way to this hidden garden, in which there were straight and narrow paths, where nuns might have loved to walk unseen of the eyes of men.

The Dean’s widow had left behind all her furniture, and was now adorning a Bournemouth hotel, in which her sprightly invalidism and close knowledge of the investments of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and of the habits and customs of the lesser clergy, were greatly appreciated. Some of the furniture did not wholly commend itself to Rosamund. There were certain settees and back-to-backs, certain whatnots and occasional tables, which seemed to stamp the character of the Dean’s widow as meretricious. But these could easily be “managed.” Rosamund was enchanted with the house, and went from room to room with Canon Wilton radiantly curious, and almost as excited as a joyous schoolgirl.

“I must poke my nose into everything!” she exclaimed.

And she did it, and made the Canon poke his too.

Presently, opening the lattice of the second window in the big, low-ceiled drawing-room, she leaned out to the moist and secluded garden. She was sitting sideways on the window-seat, of which she had just said, “I won’t have this dreadful boudoir color on my cushions!” Canon Wilton was standing behind her, and presently heard her sigh gently, and almost voluptuously, as if she prolonged the sigh and did not want to let it go.

“Yes?” he said, with a half-humorous inflection of the voice.

Rosamund looked round gravely.

“Did you say something?”

“Only--yes?--in answer to your sigh.”

“Did I? Yes, I must have. I was thinking----”

She hesitated, while he stood looking at her with his strong, steady gray-blue eyes.

“I was thinking of a life I shall never live.”

He came up to the window-seat.

“Some of it might have been passed in just such a garden as this within sound of bells.”

With a change of voice she added:

“How Robin will love it!”

“The life you will never live?” said the Canon, smiling gravely.

“No, the garden.”

“Then you haven’t a doubt?”

“Oh no. When I know a thing there’s no room in me for hesitation. I shall love being here with Robin as I have never loved anything yet.”

The quarter struck in the Cathedral tower.

“Very different from South Africa!” said Canon Wilton.

Rosamund knitted her brows for a moment.

“I wonder whether Dion will come back altered,” she said.

“D’you wish him to?”

She got up from the window-seat, put out her hand, and softly pulled the lattice towards her.

“Not in most ways. He’s so dear as he is. It would all depend on the alteration.”

She latched the window gently, and again looked at the garden through it.

“I may be altered, too, by living here!” she said. “All alone with Robin. I think I shall be.”

Canon Wilton made no comment. He was thinking:

“And when the two, altered, come together again, if they ever do, what then?”

He had noticed that Rosamund never seemed to think of Dion’s death in South Africa as a possibility. When she spoke of him she assumed his return as a matter of course. Did she never think of death, then? Did she, under the spell of her radiant and splendidly healthy youth, forget all the tragic possibilities? He wondered, but he did not ask.

Mr. Robertson arrived at the Canon’s house just in time for the afternoon service--“my Wilderness service,” as Rosamund called it. The bells were ringing as he drove up with his modest luggage, and Rosamund had already gone to the Cathedral and was seated in a stall.

“I should like to have half an hour’s quiet meditation in church before the service begins,” she had remarked to Canon Wilton. And the Canon had put her in a stall close to where he would presently be sitting, and had then hurried back to meet Father Robertson.

“My Welsley!” was Rosamund’s thought as she sat in her stall, quite alone, looking up at the old jeweled glass in the narrow Gothic windows, at the wonderful somber oak, age-colored, of the return stalls and canopy beneath which Canon Wilton, as Canon-in-Residence, would soon be sitting at right angles to her, at the distant altar lifted on high and backed by a delicate marble screen, beyond which stretched a further, tranquilly obscure vista of the great church. The sound of the bells ringing far above her head in the gray central tower was heard by her, but only just heard, as we hear the voices of the past murmuring of old memories and of deeds which are almost forgotten. Distant footsteps echoed among the great tombs of stone and of marble, which commemorated the dead who had served God in that place in the gray years gone by. In her nostrils there seemed to be a perfume, like an essence of concentrated prayers sent up among these stone traceries, these pointed arches, these delicate columns, by generations of believers. She felt wrapped in a robe never woven by hands, in a robe that gave warmth to her spirit.

A few people began stealing quietly in through the narrow archway in the great screen which shut out the raised choir from the nave. Only one bell sounded now in the gray tower. A faint noise, like an oncoming sigh, above Rosamund’s head heralded the organ’s awakening, and was followed by the whisper of its most distant voice, a voice which made her think--she knew not why--of the sea whispering about a coral reef in an isle of the Southern Seas, part of God’s world, mysteriously linked to “my Welsley.” She shut her eyes, seeking to feel more strongly the sensation of unity. When she opened them she saw, sitting close to her in the return stalls, Father Robertson. His softly glowing eyes were looking at her, and did not turn away immediately. She felt that he knew she was his fellow-guest, and was conscious of a delicious sensation of sympathy, of giving and taking, of cross currents of sympathy between the Father and herself.

“I love this hour--I love all this!” she said to herself.

If only little Robin were submerged in the stall beside her!

The feet of the slow procession were heard, and the silver wand of the chief verger shone out of the delicate gloom.

When the anthem was given out Rosamund looked across at Canon Wilton, and her eyes said to him, “Thank you.” Then she stood up, folded her hands on the great cushion in front of her, and looked at the gray vistas and at the dim sparkle of the ancient glass in the narrow windows.

“The wilderness and the solitary places . . .”

She had spoken of this to Dion as they looked at Zante together, before little Robin had come, and she had said that if she had committed a great sin she would like to take her sin into the Wilderness, because purification might be found there. And she had meant what she said, had spoken out of her heart sincerely. But now, as she listened to this anthem, she saw a walled-in garden, with green turf like moss, old elm trees and straight narrow paths. Perhaps she had been mistaken when she had spoken of the sin and the Wilderness, perhaps she would find purification with fewer tears and less agony in the cloister, within the sound of the bells which called men to the service of God, and of the human voices which sang His praises. Saints had fled into the Wilderness to seek God there, but was He not in the Garden between the sheltering walls, ready there, as in the farthest desert, to receive the submission of the soul, to listen to the cry, “I have sinned”?

As in Elis the spell of the green wild had been upon Rosamund, so now the spell of these old Precincts was upon her, and spoke to her innermost being, and as in Elis Dion had been woven into her dream of the Wilderness, so now in Welsley Robin was woven into it. But Dion had seemed a forerunner, and little Robin seemed That for which she had long waited, the fulfilment of the root desire of her whole being as applied to human life.

When the service was over and the procession had gone out Rosamund sat very still listening to the organ. She believed that Canon Wilton had given the organist a hint that he would have an attentive hearer, for he was playing one of Bach’s greatest preludes and fugues. Father Robertson stayed on in his place. All the rest of the small congregation drifted away through the archway in the rood-screen and down the steps to the nave. The fugue was a glorious, sturdy thing, like a great solid body inhabited by a big, noble, unquestioning soul--a soul free from hesitations, that knew its way to God and would not be hindered from taking it. A straight course to the predestined end--that was good, that was glorious! The splendid clamor of the organ above her, growing in sonorous force, filled Rosamund with exultation. She longed to open her mouth and sing; the blood came to her cheeks; her eyes shone; she mounted on the waves of sound; she was wound up with the great fugue, and felt herself part of it. The gradual working up thrilled her whole being; she was physically and spiritually seized hold of and carried along towards a great and satisfying end. At last came the trumpet with its sound of triumphant flame, and the roar of the pedals was like the roaring of the sea. Already the end was there, grandly inherent in the music, inevitably, desired by all the voices of the organ. All the powers of the organ thundered towards it, straining to be there.

It came, like something on the top of the world.

“If I were a man that’s the way I should like to go to God!” said Rosamund to herself, springing up. “That’s the way, in a chariot of fire.”

Unconscious of what she was doing she stretched out her hands with a big gesture and opened her lips to let out a breath; then, in the gray silence of the now empty Cathedral, she saw Father Robertson’s eyes.

He stepped down from his stall and went out through the archway, and she followed him. On the steps, just beyond the rood-screen, she met a small, determined-looking man with hot cheeks and shining eyes. She guessed at once that he was the organist, went up to him and thanked him enthusiastically.

The organist was the first person she captivated in Welsley, where she was to have so many warm adherents very soon.

Father Robertson went back to Canon Wilton’s house while Rosamund talked to the organist, with whom she walked as far as a high wooden gate labeled “Mr. Dickinson.”

“You’ve got a walled garden too!” she remarked, as her companion took off his hat with an “I live here.”

The organist looked inquiring. Rosamund laughed.

“How could you know? It’s only that I’ve been visiting a delicious old house, with a walled garden, to-day. It’s to let.”

“Oh, Mrs. Duncan Browning’s!” said Mr. Dickinson. “I--I’m sure I hope you’re going to take it.”

“I may!” said Rosamund. “Good-by, and thank you again for your splendid music. It’s done me good.”

“My dear!” exclaimed Mr. Dickinson, about a minute later, bursting--rather than going--into his wife’s small drawing-room, “I’ve just met the most delightful woman, a goddess to look at, and as charming as a siren brought up to be a saint.”

“More epigrams, Henry!” murmured Mrs. Dickinson.

“She’s staying with Canon Wilton. She’s a thorough musician such as one seldom comes across. There’s a chance--I hope it materializes--of her taking--”

“Your tea is nearly cold, Henry.”

“Her name is Mrs. Dion Leith. If she really does come here we must be sure to--”

“Scones, Henry?”

Thus urged, Mr. Dickinson’s body for the moment took precedence of his soul.

Rosamund knew she was going to like Mr. Robertson as she liked very few people. She felt as if already she was his friend, and when they shook hands in Canon Wilton’s drawing-room she cordially told him so, and referred to the Sunday evening when she had heard him preach. The rooks were cawing among the elms in the Canon’s garden. She could hear their voices in the treetops while she was speaking. A wind was stirring as the afternoon waned, and there came a patter of rain on the lofty windows. And the voices of the rooks, in the windy treetops, the patter of the rain, and the sigh of the wind were delightful to Rosamund, because she was safely within the Precincts, like a bird surrounded by the warmth of its nest.

“I’m coming to live here,” she said to Mr. Robertson, as she poured out tea for the two clergymen. “My husband has gone to South Africa with the City Imperial Volunteers. He’s in business, so we live in London. But while he’s away I mean to stay here.”

And eagerly almost as a child, she told him about the house of the Dean’s widow, and described to him the garden.

“It’s like a convent garden, isn’t it?” she asked Canon Wilton, who assented. “That’s why I love it. It gives me the feeling of enclosed peace that must be so dear to nuns.”

Something in her voice and look as she said this evidently struck Mr. Robertson, and when she presently left the room he said to Canon Wilton:

“If I didn’t know that sweet woman had a husband I should say she was born with the vocation for a religious life. From the first moment I spoke to her, looked at her, I felt that, and the feeling grows upon me. Can’t one see her among sisters?”

“I don’t wish to,” said Canon Wilton bluntly. “Shall we go to my study?”

With the composed gentleness that was characteristic of him Father Robertson assented, and they went downstairs. When they were safely shut up in the big room, guarded by multitudes of soberly bound volumes, Canon Wilton said:

“Robertson, I want to talk to you in confidence about my guest, who, as you say, is a very sweet woman. You could do something for her which I couldn’t do. I have none of your impelling gentleness. You know how to stir that which dwells in the inner sanctuary, to start it working for itself; I’m more apt to try to work for it, or at it. Perhaps I can rouse up a sinner and make him think. I’ve got a good bit of the instinct of the missioner. But my dear guest there isn’t a sinner, except as we all are! She’s a very good woman who doesn’t quite understand. I think perhaps you might help her to understand. She possesses a great love, and she doesn’t know quite how to handle it, or even to value it.”

The clock struck seven when they stopped talking.

That evening, after dinner, Canon Wilton asked Rosamund to sing. Almost eagerly she agreed.

“I shall love to sing in the Precincts,” she said, as she went to the piano.

Father Robertson, who had been sitting with his back to the piano, moved to the other side of the room. While Rosamund sang he watched her closely. He saw that she was quite unconscious of being watched, and her unconsciousness of herself made him almost love her. Her great talent he appreciated fully, for he was devoted to music; but he appreciated much more the moral qualities she showed in her singing. He was a man who could not forbear from searching for the soul, from following its workings. He had met all sorts and conditions of men, and with few he had not been friends. He had known, knew now, scientists for whose characters and lives he had strong admiration, and who felt positive that the so-called soul of man was merely the product of the brain, resided in the brain, and must cease with the dispersal of the brain at death. He was not able to prove the contrary. That did not trouble him at all. It was not within the power of anything or of any one to trouble this man’s faith. He did not mind being thought a fool. Indeed, being without conceit, and even very modest, he believed himself to be sometimes very foolish. But he knew he was not a fool in his faith, which transcended forms, and swore instinctively brotherhood with all honest beliefs, and even with all honest disbeliefs. In his gentle, sometimes slightly whimsical way, he was as sincere as Canon Wilton; but whereas the Canon showed the blunt side of sincerity, he usually showed the tender and winning side. He found good in others as easily and as surely as the diviner finds the spring hidden under the hard earth’s surface. His hazel twig twisted if there was present only one drop of the holy water.

He discerned many drops in Rosamund. In nothing of her was her enthusiasm for what was noble and clean and sane and beautiful more apparent than in her singing. Her voice and her talent were in service when she sang, in service to the good. Music can be evil, neurotic, decadent and even utterly base. She never touched musical filth, which she recognized as swiftly as dirt on a body or corruption in a soul.

“We must have Bach’s ‘Heart ever faithful,’” said Canon Wilton strongly, when Rosamund, after much singing, was about to get up from the piano.

Almost joyfully she obeyed his smiling command. When at last she shut the piano she said to Father Robertson:

“That’s Dion’s--my husband’s--best-loved melody.”

“I should like to know your husband,” said Father Robertson.

“You must, when he comes back.”

“You have no idea, I suppose, how long he will be away?”

“No, nor has he.”

“Then what are you going to do about Mrs. Browning’s house?” said the Canon’s bass.

“Oh--well----”

Two lines appeared in her forehead.

“I thought of taking it for six months, and then I can see. My little house in Westminster is let for six months from the first of March.” She had turned to Father Robertson: “I’m only afraid----” She paused. She looked almost disturbed.

“What are you afraid of?” asked Canon Wilton.

“I’m afraid of getting too fond of Welsley.”

The Canon looked across at Father Robertson on the other side of the fireplace.

* * * * *

Rosamund went back to Robin and London on the following afternoon. In the morning she took Father Robertson to see Mrs. Browning’s house. Canon Wilton was busy. After the morning service in the Cathedral he had to go to a meeting of the Chapter, and later on to a meeting in the City about something connected with education.

“I shall be in bonds till lunch,” he said, “unless I burst them, as I’m afraid I sometimes feel inclined to do when people talk at great length on subjects they know nothing about.”

“Perhaps Mrs. Leith will kindly take me to see her house and garden,” observed Father Robertson.

Rosamund was frankly delighted.

“Bless you for calling them mine!” she said. “That’s just what I’m longing to do.”

The wind and the rain were till hanging about in a fashion rather undecided. It was a morning of gusts and of showers. The rooks swayed in the elm tops, or flew up under the scudding clouds of a treacherous sky. There was a strong smell of damp earth, and the turf of the wide spreading lawns looked spongy.

“Oh, how English this is!” said Rosamund enthusiastically to the Father as they set forth together. “It’s like the smell of the soul of England. I love it. I should like to lie on the grass and feel the rain on my face.”

“You know nothing of rheumatism evidently,” said Father Robertson, in a voice that was smiling.

“No, but I suppose I should if I gave way to my impulse. And the rooks would be shocked.”

“Do you mean the Cathedral dignitaries?”

They were gently gay as they walked along, but very soon Rosamund, in her very human but wholly unconscious way, put her hand on Father Robertson’s arm.

“There it is!”

“Your house?”

“Yes. Isn’t it sweet? Doesn’t it look peacefully old? I should like to grow old like that, calmly, unafraid and unrepining. I knew you’d love it.”

He had not said so, but that did not matter.

“There’s a dear old caretaker, with only one tooth in front and such nice eyes, who’ll let us in. Not an electric bell!”

She gave him a look half confidential, half humorous, and wholly girlish.

“We have to pull it. That’s so much nicer!”

She pulled, and the dear old caretaker, a woman in Cathedral black, with the look of a verger’s widow all over her, showed the tooth in a smile as she peeped round the door.

“And now the garden!” said Rosamund, in the withdrawn voice of an intense anticipation, half an hour later, when Father Robertson had seen, and been consulted, about everything from kitchen to attic.

She turned round to Mrs. Soper, as the verger’s widow--indeed she was that!--was called.

“Shall you mind if we stay a good while in the garden, Mrs. Soper? It’s so delightful there. Will it bother you?”

“Most pleased, ma’am! I couldn’t wish for anything else. You do hear the chimes most beautiful from there. But it’s very damp. That we must allow.”

“Are you afraid of the damp, Father?”

“Not a bit.”

“I knew you wouldn’t be,” she said, almost exultantly.

Mrs. Soper took her stand by the drawing-room window and gazed through the lattice with the deep interest which seems peculiar to provincial towns, and which is seldom manifested in capitals, where the curiosity is rather of the surface than of the very entrails of humanity. She showed the tooth as she stood, but not in a smile. She was far too interested in the lady and the white-haired clergyman to smile.

“I shouldn’t wonder but what they’re going to be married!” was her feminine thought, as she watched them walking about the garden, and presently pacing up and down one of the narrow paths, to the far-off wall that bordered one end of the Bishop’s Palace, and back again to the wall near the Dark Entry. Canon Wilton had not mentioned Rosamund’s name to the verger’s widow, who had no evil thoughts of bigamy. Presently the chimes sounded in the tower, and Mrs. Soper saw the two visitors pause in their walk to listen. They both looked upwards towards the Cathedral, and on the lady’s face there was a rapt expression which was remarked by Mrs. Soper.

“She do look religious,” murmured that lady to the tooth. “She might be a bishop’s lady when she a-stands like that.”

The chimes died away, the visitors resumed their pacing walk, and Mrs. Soper presently retired to the kitchen, which looked out on the passage-way, to cook herself “a bit of something” for the midday staying of her stomach.

In the garden that morning Rosamund and Father Robertson became friends. Rosamund had never had an Anglican confessor, though she had sometimes wished to confess, not because she was specially conscious of a burden of sin, but rather because she longed to speak to some one of those inmost thoughts which men and women seldom care to discuss with those who are always in their lives. In Father Robertson she had found the exceptional man with whom she would not mind being perfectly frank about matters which were not for Dion, not for Beattie, not for godfather--matters which she could never have hinted at even to Canon Wilton, whose strong serenity she deeply admired. Had any of her nearest and dearest heard Rosamund’s talk with Father Robertson that day, they would have realized, perhaps with astonishment, how strong was the reserve which underlay her forthcoming manner and capacious frankness about the ordinary matters of everyday existence.

“Father, a sermon from you changed my life, I think,” she said, when they had paced up and down the path only two or three times; and, without any self-consciousness, she told him of Dion’s proposal on that foggy afternoon in London, of her visit to St. Mary’s, Welby Street, and of the impression the sermon had made upon her. She described her return home, and the painful sensation which had beset her when she lost herself in the fog--the sensation of desertion, of a horror of loneliness.

“The next day I accepted my husband,” she said. “I resolved to take the path of life along which I could walk with another. I decided to share. Do you remember?”

She looked at him gently, earnestly, and he understood the allusion to his sermon.

“Yes, I remember. But,”--his question came very gently--“in coming to that decision, were you making a sacrifice?”

“Yes, I was.”

And then Rosamund made a confession such as she had never yet made to any one, though once she had allowed Dion to know a little of what was in her heart. She told Father Robertson of the something almost imperious within her which had longed for the religious life. He listened to the story of a vocation; and he was able to understand it as certainly Canon Wilton could not have understood it. For Rosamund’s creeping hunger had been not for the life of hard work among the poor in religion, not for the dedication of all her energies to the lost and unreclaimed, who are sunk in the mire of the world, but for that peculiar life of the mystic who leaves the court of the outer things for the court of the mysteries, the inner things, who enters into prayer as into a dark shell filled with the vast and unceasing murmur of the voice which is not human.

“I wished to sing in public for a time. Something made me long to use my voice, to express myself in singing noble music, in helping on its message. But I meant to retire while I was still quite young. And always at the back of my mind there was the thought--‘then I’ll leave the world, I’ll give myself up to God.’ I longed for the enclosed life of perpetual devotion. I didn’t know whether there was any community in our Church which I could join, and in which I could find what I thought I needed. I didn’t get so far as that. You see I meant to be a singer at first.”

“Yes, I quite understand. And the giving up of this mystical dream was a great sacrifice?”

“Really it was. I had a sort of absolute hunger in me to do eventually what I have told you.”

“I understand that hunger,” said Father Robertson.

Just then the chimes sounded in the Cathedral, and they stopped on the narrow path to listen, looking up at the great gray tower which held the voices sweet to their souls.

“I understand that hunger,” he repeated, when the chimes died away. “It can be fierce as any hunger after a sin. In your case you felt it was not free from egoism, this strong desire?”

“Your sermon made me look into my heart, and I did think that perhaps I was an egoist in my religious feeling, that I was selfishly intent on my own soul, that in my religion, if I did what I longed presently to do, I should be thinking almost solely of myself.”

Rather abruptly Father Robertson put a question:

“There was nothing else which drew you towards marriage?”

“I liked and admired Dion very much. I thought him an exceptional sort of man. I knew he cared for me in a beautiful sort of way. That touched me. And”--she slightly hesitated, and a soft flush came to her cheeks--“I felt that he was a good man in a way--I believe, I am almost sure, that very few young men are good in the particular way I mean. Of all the things in Dion that was the one which most strongly called to me.”

Father Robertson understood her allusion to physical purity.

“I couldn’t have married him but for that,” she added.

“If I had known you when you were a girl I believe I should not have expected you to marry,” said Father Robertson.

Afterwards, when he had seen Rosamund with Robin, he thought he had been very blind when he had said that.

“You understand me,” she said, very simply. “But I knew you would.”

“You have given up something. Many people, perhaps most people, would deny that. But I know how difficult it is”--his voice became lower--“to give up retirement, to give up that food which the soul instinctively longs to find, thinks perhaps it only can find, in silence, perpetual meditation, perpetual prayer, in the world that is purged of the insistent clamor of human voices. But”--he straightened himself with a quick movement, and his voice became firmer--“a man may wish to draw near to God in the Wilderness, or in the desert, and may find Him most surely in”--and here he hesitated slightly, almost as a few minutes before Rosamund had hesitated--“in the Liverpool slums. What a blessing it is, what an unspeakable blessing it is, when one has learnt the lesson that God is everywhere. But how difficult it is to learn!”

They walked together for a long time in the garden, and Rosamund felt strangely at ease, like one who has entered a haven and has found the desired peace. She had given up something, but how much had been given to her! In the shelter of the gray towers, and within the enclosing walls, she would go again to some of her dreams, while the chimes marked the passing of the quiet hours, and the watchman’s voice was lifted up to the stars which looked down on Welsley.

And Robin would be with her.