Chapter XLVIII…

Chapter XLVIII

HOW JIM ADDED STORIES TO HIS AIR-CASTLE, AND SMOKED HIS LAST PIPE. HOW HE KNEW CHALLIS'S VOICE AGAIN. WHO HAD TO BE AT THE PARK GATE BY NINE. HOW JIM HEARD THE MOTOR COMING BACK, AND LIZARANN'S VOICE. HOW ATHELSTAN TAYLOR ARRIVED WITHOUT HER. OF JIM'S DEATH AND HERS

Athelstan Taylor and Aunt Bessy were at breakfast when the telegram came to say all was "over unexpectedly; writing." It was opened by the Rector, who rose and handed it to his sister-in-law; then passed on to the door in time to stop an incursion of Phoebe and Joan with "Aunty's coming directly, chicks. Run away now." But not in time to prevent Joan having good grounds for asking Phoebe why Aunt Bessy was crying.

Aunt Bessy was, no doubt. And the Rector was completely upset, too, for the moment. He had not the least expected anything so soon. But his work was cut out for him now. "I must go to poor Jim at once," he said.

"Oh, Athel, Athel!" said Aunt Bessy through her sobs. "You know, don't you, dear, that Jim would have been told before if I had had my way?" It was what Athelstan himself afterwards spoke of to Adeline Fossett as "poor Bessy's I-told-you-so consolation." The Rector was grieved for her grief, and knew that this expedient would really help her to bear it, so he was not going to grudge her all she could get from it.

"I know, Bess," said he. "Perhaps I was wrong. However, I didn't see quite what else to do. And I never imagined anything so sudden as this. Poor Jim!"

But it was only an easement, to be used and discarded. Miss Caldecott was ready to surrender the point--certainly wouldn't rub it in. "P-perhaps you were right, after all!" said she. Her grief for Lizarann was very real. And how was she to tell Phoebe and Joan?

"You may trust me to do whatever can be done for poor Jim, Bess. I shall go to him at the Well at once. He won't be absolutely unprepared by the time I tell him, because he knows my foot on the road a long way off, and he will know something has happened by my coming so early. It's not half-past eight yet. I shall be with him soon after nine."

"Won't he think you're bringing her with you? She was to have come here first, you know. That was the arrangement."

"Oh no! He never used to expect her till he heard her call, 'Pilot.' You know?"

"Oh, I know! Poor little Lizarann!"

* * * * *

And all those weary hours of the watchers by the bedside of his dying child, Jim had slept sound, treasuring in the heart of his dreams the inheritance of that last lucky memory of overnight. Old David's tale of how he was condemned in boyhood, to live after all into his hundredth year, stayed by Jim as a pledge of a sure Lizarann in the days to come--a very sure one in that St. Augustin's summer that was all but due now. Jim had slept sound, and the story does not grudge him his sweet delusions. The heart-tonic of that false diagnosis of eighty years ago took a variety of dream-forms before the morning, but never lost its savour. By turns it would be a thing and an incident. Jim had hardly time to appreciate the draught of nectar it became, when it had changed, even as it touched his lips, to a triumphant arrival in a glorious port, after stormy seas, with a wreck in tow, called the Lizarann. Jim would fain have kept that dream, to see that wreck refitted ready for sea. But then of a sudden, the wreck was no wreck, but a tree, and Lizarann was up in the tree. And Jim was just thinking now that he would see what Lizarann was really like, without any wonderment why she was never visible before, when the tree changed its identity and became old David himself, or his story; Jim was not clear which. But through these dreams, and others, the interwoven warmth of joy was always the same--the reinforced hope the old chap's yarn had left behind.

Nevertheless, when Jim woke he found it hard to remember where on 'arth he was; and didn't remember, at first. But he knew that when he did it would be nice. And so it was. It was old Margy's cottage, and Lizarann was coming back to it. Jim noticed that everything said so to him. A voluble hen, however anxious she was he should know about her egg, made frequent reference to Lizarann's return. A blackbird conversed with a family of wrens about it, and a linnet endorsed their view, that Lizarann was certainly coming back. A herd of cows, going leisurely to pasture, lowed a great deal about it, and repeated to each other again and again, "Lizarann is coming back," as they died away in the distance musically. And Jim knew that, far afield, a thousand larks were all of a tale, above the shorn crops in the blue heaven, telling each other Lizarann was on the road--was coming back once more to her Daddy. His little dog especially was clear about it, but was also clear that it would never do to neglect official obligations, and dragged Jim to the well-head with all his wonted enthusiasm. He was perfectly competent to give due notice of her arrival, but business was business.

The essentials of Jim's breakfast, arranged overnight, scarcely brought him in contact with human converse, because the very little girl, who came with milk, and took ba'ack t'yoother joog, was so absorbed in her task as to be able to think of nothing else, and speechless. Besides, she had misgivings that the little dog wanted her blood, and made her visit as short as possible. But when Jim arrived at his well-head, he soon got a chance to speak of his hopes to a fellow-creature, although it was a young one--too young to talk the matter out with. It was not always easy to identify these youngsters, as they made no allowance for blindness; only nodding affirmatives when asked their names right. Jim had to impute wrong names, and provoke corrections.

"You're little Billy Lathrop, young man, I take it?"

"No-ah be-ant. Oy be Ma-atthew Ree-ad doon th' la-an--two dower off Lathrop's."

"I reckoned you might be. It's your brother Jack I've to thank for the loan of this young tyke. He'll be wanting to see him back. Suppose you was to tell him he may have him back to-morrow. Or next day at farthest. A smart young character like you can begin larnin' to carry messages."

"Oy'll tell un."

"Because Lizarann's coming back--that's what you've got to tell. Who is it's a-coming back, hey?"

"L'woyzara-ann."

"My little maid, d'ye see?"

"Yower little may-ud."

"That's a likely young customer. Now mind you tell your brother Jack just that and nothing else, Matthew Read." And Matthew Read departed with his pails, leaving Jim all the happier for having, as it were, substantialized and filled out his hopes by this little performance.

The pipe Jim lighted with a vesuvian after discharging a few more water-claims, now and then recurring to the subject nearest his heart with the more talkworthy claimants, was as happy a pipe as he had ever smoked. As the sun rose higher, a full-blooded southern Phoebus with no stint of heat in his veins, he could rejoice in the evident influence of this mysterious St. Augustin, of whom he had never heard before, but who clearly could make a summer for him and his little lass. It was coming, and so was she. She would not, maybe, be her old self for a bit. But, then, no more had old David been. And that was eighty-four years ago--over half a century before Jim was born! Any number of glorious expectations might entrench themselves behind such a precedent--making a fortress in his soul against Despair.

Who says tobacco cannot be enjoyed in the dark? Jim had heard that story, and thought to himself as he cleared his pipe of ashes that he could tell another tale. But what was that pipe to the pipes he would smoke when his little lass was back, to make all this caution in lighting them needless? It was as good as having eyes himself to have the child beside him. But suppose now he had been blind from birth! Think of what it would have been like to have never a tale to tell to his little lass! He had so lost himself in his love for the child that this little bit of optimism came spontaneously, without a shade of bitter comment about being thankful for small mercies.

It was curious to him now--admittedly so--that he had shrunk from hearing again the sound of the waves, seeing he was actually looking forward to hearing Lizarann tell of them. It was on one account a disappointment to him, that since she was taken away to Chalk Cliff the weather had been so calm. It was true that the one letter she had written him--just at the time of that slight fluctuation upwards in the first week of her stay--had told of a rough sea, with such big waves; but then it had told also of how a pleasure-boat had been shoved off and a lady got wet through. Would that rough sea help him to tell her, better than before, what the waves were like when he was on that steamer in the China seas, and a typhoon swept the decks clear?

Talking was going on, down the road. Somebody was referring to the Rectory, speaking of it as the parsonage. Jim listened. Pa'arson had coom whoam yesterday. That was all right, but had no one else come to the Rectory? Yesterday was exactly six weeks and a day since Lizarann's departure. But Jim had hedged against despair with constant self-reminders that her not having come need mean nothing. So he could ask questions, equably.

"News of th' Master, belike, Jarge?" He affected great ease of speech--a chatty nonchalance--as he awaited the arrival of the voice he had recognized at the road-end of the avenue to his Well. He had stumped along it quick, though, for a wooden leg and a stick.

"Nowt amiss has gotten t' Maister," said the bee-tender, taking time. "Not for to reach my ears, this marn'n."

"Thought I heard some guess-chap give him his name, Jarge. Yonder along, a good cast down the road. Who might you have been talking to?"

"Po-ast."

"Ah!--and what said the Post?"

Jarge took more time, during which Jim urged him to fix his mind firmly on the Rector. Jarge had understood that the Rector had come home, and that the Post's son had just gone off to him with a telegram when the Post left home. This was as much as Jarge could be expected to know all at once, outside bee-craft; so Jim spared him further catechism. "Thank 'ee kindly, Jarge!" said he. "What o'clock might you make it?" Jarge made it a qwoo-aater to eight-yut by th' soon, and Jim thanked him again, and stumped back to the well-head.

In his sanguine mood, he took a rose-coloured view of that telegram. Lizarann and Teacher had not come back yet, but it heralded their coming. Why!--what else could it be, unless it was no consarn of his, anyhow? He lit another pipe, and gave himself to happy anticipations; for the influence of old David's early experience was strong on him. Being alone, he talked to his little dog, to whom he could speak freely; for with his keen hearing he could be sure he was alone, even if the young pup's quiescence had been no proof. It wouldn't be but a day, or two at most--so Jim told that pup--before Jack Read could reclaim his property; if, indeed, he hadn't got a better little tyke by now, as very like was the case; a superior article altogether, to whom Keating was unknown, and who especially never ran after chickens. However, it wouldn't do to make too sure, because maybe the little lass wouldn't, just yet awhile, be allowed out by the doctor on cold mornings, in which case things would have to remain as they were for a bit of time. But a day would come when little tykes would be superfluities, and Jack Read might have this one back, and see what he could do towards larning him better manners in the house. The object of these remarks misconceived the drift of them altogether, and, taking them for recognition of his own merits, heaved a sigh over the shortcomings of other little dogs, and fell asleep in the sun.

Jim sat again alone and smoked, and listened to the growing sounds of the day, the insect life stirring in the sunshine, the birds that meant to sing the summer out; growing fewer now, but revived by St. Augustin, evidently. He could hear, at the interval of each new furrow, the team of horses in an old-world plough swing round; and the ploughman's voice, now near and clear, now at the far hedge of his field, and dim. Somewhere a long way off a threshing-machine was droning, and as the sound of it came and went, and rose and fell with the wind, Jim thought of his little lass; and how that one letter of hers old Margy had re-read to him so often had told how she had heard the sea sound so through the night, now more, now less. If she had not come back to the Rectory yesterday, as he hoped, was she up now and out on the beach?... but no--hardly! It was barely eight o'clock. Yes--there went the church-bells! But he could not count the strokes for the noise some hedge-sparrows made suddenly, almost close to his ear.

That was a harvest cart with a many horses, Jim supposed, and every horse with bells. Going to load up, at a guess; for it was soon gone by, and its bells a memory. Then another sound of wheels stole in, and grew. Not a cart; carts rattle. Some sort of carriage, coming from Furnival Station. Not indigenous to this village; Jim had learned every native wheel by heart. Not a very dashing carriage neither! It went slow, and the horse seemed to think of every step. A hired fly from the station, of course! Why didn't Jim spot that before?

Now, suppose it had been eight in the evening, it might have been Teacher bringing Lizarann from the station. At this time in the morning ridiculous, of course! Still, the thought was nice.

That fly had pulled up on the road, and not so far off. Jim could hear interchanges between the driver and his fare, evidently male and English. Did Jim know that voice?

"All right--pull up here! I'll get down and walk the rest of the way. How far is it?"

"For to step it afut? Twenty minutes, easy."

"Which does 'easy' mean?"

"Easy for time, mister. You'll have to be a bit brisk to do it in twenty minutes. Give you twenty-three, to do it without idlin'."

A foot on the road, a coach-door that wouldn't hasp, a discovery that the driver has only one and elevenpence change for half-a-sovereign, and then the half-sovereign is on its way back to Furnival, and the fare has started on his twenty-three minutes' walk, with some of the change in his pocket. But he is not going to do it without idling, it seems.

Jim heard him approach the well-gap, and come to a stand. Then he turned up the brick pathway. Now, who was this chap going to be?

"Well, Jim Coupland! Where's Lizarann? I've come to pay her a visit. And you too!"

Jim knew Challis again the moment he heard his voice close. "Aha!" he exclaimed joyfully. "You're the gentleman. Came with the Master nigh a month agone!" And the cordiality of Blind Samson's big right hand was all the greater that it was welcoming, not only a friend, but what was in a sense the dawn of Lizarann. For this gentleman, whose name had slipped Jim's memory, would never have asked for her on insufficient grounds. In a flash of his mind, Jim had inferred that his visitor, on his way to the Rectory, had decided--from information received--that his lassie, due there the day before, would be, or might be, already with her father at the Abbey Well. A very reasonable view! It was almost an assurance that his child had arrived, that this gentleman should speak of her thus.

Challis left his hand in Jim's, while he said, "But where's the kid?"

Said Jim, with confidence, "If you'd come another half-hour later, I lay you'd have found her, back with her Daddy. Six martal weeks she's been away. But you'll find her at the Master's, I take it, or meet on the road."

Challis's voice hung fire a little as he answered, "I'm not on my way to the Rectory now. I shall have to pay my respects to Miss Coupland later. Jolly glad she's back, though, Jim, for your sake! How's she coming on? All the better for the sea, I'll answer for it." Jim was not the one to be behindhand in optimism. "Done her a warld o' good, I'm told! Only, ye see, I haven't set eyes on the Master this week past, and I have to put my dependence on the two little ladies, seeing the old mother at the cottage has gone to London."

At this point Jim saw his way to still further flattering his certainty of Lizarann's return by sending a message about her to his sister, so he let Aunt Stingy into the conversation provisionally. He worded a couleur de rose account of his invalid, subject to reserves, and asked Challis to be the bearer of it.

"What's that, Jim?... Ah, to be sure; I had forgotten that. Mrs. Steptoe's your sister. Yes--I'll tell her." His manner was unsettled, tense, exalté, but not that of a man preoccupied with any but pleasant thoughts. Jim felt that some inquiry after this relative of his would not be out of place. He hoped she was giving satisfaction to "the mistress," and half suggested that her cooking was what he was asking about. His shrewd hearing detected discomfort in Challis's reply: "Oh aye--yes! Very good wholesome cooking!" Had he touched a sore subject? He decided that he had, and was sorry when the gentleman said abruptly: "That's all right enough. Can't stop now! Got to get to the Park Gate by nine. How far do you make it out to the Park Gate?" Jim gave what information he had to give; but Challis remembered quite enough of the ground to know that the fly-driver's estimate was a low one; in fact, it had been the interest of the latter to minimize the distance, in order to get away as soon as he could. "I shall have to look alive," said Challis. He shook Jim's hand cordially, and started.

In the accident of passing words it had so chanced that if either of these two men had been asked--how came he to know that Lizarann had returned to the Rectory?--he would have referred to the other as an authority. Challis's confidence that he would find Lizarann at the Well was only the echo of some words of the Rector's three weeks previously, fixing the date of her return; while Jim's assurance that she was at the Rectory was based on Challis's way of taking her presence at the Well for granted. Certainly when they parted, each had an image in his mind of the invalid back again, much improved, and looking forward to her meeting with her Daddy.

Such serene unconsciousness of the truth as Jim's was at this moment strikes harshly on one's sense of probability; but, probable or no, it was actual. Jim had not experienced such happiness since his child left him to live, during her absence, on hopes of her return in renewed health. She was coming now; not a doubt of it! She was actually near at hand; so near that, with a guide, he could almost have walked the distance on his wooden leg. She was coming....

Then a gust of disbelief that anything so good could be his, so soon, seized on his faculties, and made his judgment dizzy. He must be silent and patient, and wait.

But with this added assurance of Lizarann, pending or near at hand, Time got a quality of tediousness. The half-hour that followed on Challis's invasion seemed longer than all the previous half-hours of the morning added together. Till then Jim had been making all allowance for the chance that Lizarann was not due till to-morrow, or even next day. The question was an open one. Challis had managed to leave behind him an implication that she had arrived. How the sluggard minutes would crawl now, till she came! Well--patience!

Why was the gentleman going to the Park, not the Rectory? Pending Lizarann, Jim thought it worth while to wonder at this; or, indeed, at any other trifle that would hold his mind for a moment, and help his patience. He had hardly noticed Challis's distrait manner at the time, but it came back to him now. Yes--why was the gentleman not going to the Rectory? Of course, he was only known to him as a guest there; might have been a perfect stranger at the Hall, for anything that appeared to the contrary. But it was the way he had disclaimed the Rectory that clashed with Jim's slight knowledge of him. "Not on his way" there now! "However, it was no concern of Jim's, anyhow! Think of Lizarann again--only Lizarann!"

His mind ran back to the old match-selling days in Bladen Street. There was the terrible January night again, no darker than his day was now, for all he felt St. Augustin's sun on his hands and face; for all he knew at a guess how the white road would have glared on the eyes he had lost, even as his last memory of daylight blazed on them still, leagues away in Africa. There was he again!--a spot in the darkness that was his lot for ever; a something made of sick torture, borne in a litter; and then the voice of his little lass, and the touch of her lips as he lay.... Well!--at least he had a man's heart in him then, and, crushed as he was, made light of his agony, to spare her. That was a consolation to him now.

His lot for ever! His lot, that is, so long as he himself should live to bear it. His lot, till what was left of what was once a man was laid by what once was Dolly, in a grave! Then touch and hearing would be gone too, and he and Dolly alike forgotten in the black void of the time to come.... What did he matter? He flung the unconsidered unit, himself, aside, in view of a new terror that came suddenly--an image of his little lass without her Daddy. That was too much pain to bear. To think of the lassie left alone!

But why think of it at all, yet awhile? Might not he see her again within the hour? Was it not a chance that even now she was on her way, coming----coming?...

What was that? A dog's bark he knew quite well--the Rector's dog--somewhere over by the Rifle Butts. Near a mile off--yes!--but clear to the sharpened hearing of a blind man. Equally clear to his dog too, asleep in the sun, and calling for prompt action. The little tyke started up, barking in reply, and scoured away to make his presence felt elsewhere. Jim's thought stopped, that he might listen for a distant step on the road, a step he knew well. A great swinging stride unlike any other man's in those parts--how mistake it? But another quarter of an hour must pass before either could have articulate speech of the other, mere shouting apart. Jim was just on the very verge of his release from suspense, and could not bear to wait a moment longer, patience or no! He started along the paved way that led to the road, guiding himself, as he could well do, by touching the curb with his stick. It was all plain sailing to him, so far, and no guide was needed.

He stood and listened, waiting for the approaching footsteps. He could hear his own little deserter's bark, no great distance down the road; and through it, at intervals, the bark of the other dog, coming slowly nearer. But otherwise, nothing outside the sum of noises he could know the day by from the night, a monotone with here and there a special sound of beast or bird or insect. Yes!--there was another sound, some way off still; the motor-car that had passed the cottage last night, coming from the Hall. Jim knew its special hoot of old; could have sworn to it among a dozen others.

An old turf-cutter was near enough to see Jim at this moment, and, after, told what he saw. This man was some way off, trimming the roadside turf; but his eyes were good, though he was deaf as any post.

He saw Jim--so his tale ran--standing where the path began, close against the road. He seemed to be listening for something. Quite unexpectedly he saw him throw up his arms as though surprised or delighted; but of this the old man, hearing nothing, could not speak with certainty. He had somehow an impression, though, that Jim was "raising a great shouting." Then he saw him step suddenly into the road, and limp with his stick, but with wonderful activity, towards the twist in its course that it makes round the clump of thorn-trees that shuts in the Abbey Well. The old turf-cutter saw him last just as he turned that corner.

Immediately after, a motor-car, going at a mad speed, tore along the road from the Park. Whether this car was sounding its trumpet the deaf man could not say. All he knew was that it followed without slacking down round the corner Jim had been last seen at. It vanished in a thick cloud of its own dust. The deaf man "misdoubted something had gone wrong," not from any noise, of course, but because he "watched along the road" for the dust-cloud, and none came. He suspected nothing, however, beyond some hitch in the car's working-gear, until some ten minutes later, when the motor came back, slowly--or relatively slowly. Then he saw that it contained a young lady, who looked, he said, "all mazed and staring like"; a gentleman, who lay back with blood running down his face, and seemed "no ways better than dead," and the chauffeur. Then a little dog came barking down the road, and went after the motor-car. He could see it was barking. That was all he could tell. He laid his turf-spud aside, and went along the road to find Jim and learn what he could of the mishap.

* * * * *

Athelstan Taylor left the Rectory, with a heavy heart, shortly before nine o'clock. He knew he should find Jim at the Abbey Well, and he wanted to make sure the news should not reach him through any other channel. It would inevitably leak out now. He knew well how things of the kind will travel, contrary to all calculations.

It occurred to him just as he was starting that if he took his dog with him, Jim's prevision of something wrong, which he looked to as likely to make his task easier, would have time to mature before his arrival. Jim would hear the dog's bark, and recognize it, long before his own footsteps could reach his ears. He had not at first intended to have the animal with him, but he now went back and released him, and felt that the idea was a good one. He could cover the ground, going by the short-cut near the Rifle Butts, in less than half-an-hour. He might be hindered on the way, but at least he would be as quick as he could. No one should be beforehand with Jim, if he could help it.

The hindrances were few and slight. Two or three colloquies of as many minutes each, ending with apologies for their brevity, made up the total of delay. Twenty-five minutes may have passed since Challis left Jim to keep his appointment, when the Rector reached the Rifle Butts and took the path that goes across from them to the Abbey Well; it branches off from the path Lizarann and Joan followed to go to the cottage.

What ensued does not explain itself, unless it is made quite clear that the curve in the road round the Abbey Well was no mere kink, but a full curve, like the letter U. One side of this U looked towards the Hall, the other to the village; and beyond it the turning for Thanes Castle, along which the motor-car came last night. The point to keep in mind is that the entrance to the Abbey Well gave towards the Hall, not the village. Nevertheless, the Well was visible from the Rifle Butts through a gap in the trees, which grew thicker on each side of the curve of the road, concealing a portion of it very completely. It was into this the motor-car vanished from the eyes of the deaf turf-cutter.

Athelstan Taylor, half broken-hearted as he thought of the task before him, had a struggle with himself not to flinch from it, and slacken the speed that was bringing it so near. He could see, shortly after passing the Rifle Butts, the figure of Lizarann's Daddy, and could picture to himself his unsuspicious ignorance. How sick he felt! How glad he would be when it was over!

He saw Jim rise from his seat and make for the entrance, and conjectured that his own footstep was the cause. He saw him stop and wait when he reached the road, and then lost sight of the entry for a moment. But he thought he heard Jim shout, as he had heard him often shout before now, in answer to little Lizarann's call of "Pilot." When he next saw the entry there was no Jim.

He had to go only the length of the curve to get to the place where he saw Jim last. He was within five minutes of it now. Courage!

That was the motor-car from the Hall making that hideous noise. Louis Rossier, the chauffeur, going by himself, of course! He always broke out of bounds when alone, and that speed was something awful. The Felixthorpes must have stayed at Thanes. Bess had said they were there; and now M. Louis was going to fetch them. Would he never slacken down at that bend in the road? Apparently not. A terrible corner that, to whirl a motor round at sixty miles an hour! He could hear Jim's little dog bark in answer to his own, but he was still some minutes' walk from the road....

What was that cry? What were those cries, rather--cries of panic or of warning, with a woman's shriek above them? And what was that terrible cry in a voice he knew?--Jim's voice!

Then he was conscious, in spite of distance, of rapid, panic-stricken interchange of speech. Two voices, a man's and a woman's, mixed with the pulsations of the shut-off machinery of the car, checked in its course. Then of alternations of the sounds of the working-gear, which he knew meant the turning of the car in the narrow space. Then, as he reached the spot, the sound of its resumed movement, and its trumpet-signal again. When he arrived it was vanishing, but he took little heed of it or its contents. All his thought was for the man who lay, crushed and groaning, on the bare road in the sun. Would his message need to be given now?

"Twice over's soon told, Master, and there an end!" Those seemed to be Jim's words to the man who kneeled over him, not daring to touch him yet till he should know more. Should he examine him where he lay, or try at once to move him off the road?

"Oh, Jim--Jim Coupland--who has done this?" He raised the head that lay in the dust with cautious strength, fearing that any touch might only be so much more needless pain. But there was no appearance of flinching; and he raised him further yet, to rest against his knee; then carefully wiped the forehead, red with blood from a cut on the temple, but still there was no sign of flinching from his touch. "Can you bear to be lifted, Jim?... Say if I hurt you."

"Ah!--get me up out of the gangway. I'm a job for the doctor, I take it...." His voice became inaudible, but not before the word "Water!" had passed his lips. The old turf-cutter was coming slowly. If he could be raised and moved to a safe place by the roadside, for the moment, further help could be got. The Rector knew the old man would not hear if he spoke at his loudest, but he contrived to make him understand. Between them they raised poor Jim gently, and got him out of the blazing sun. His fortitude was great to utter no sound--or, was he injured to death, and half insensible? The Rector recalled what he had heard of him in that old accident, and thought the former.

No, he was not insensible! For when they had laid him on some soft bracken a little way off the road, and the old man had gone for assistance to the nearest cottage--for he himself did not dare to leave him--Jim tried again to speak.

"What, Jim? Say it again!" The Rector put his ear close to catch the words.

"Make the best of me, and let my lassie come!" He was wandering, clearly. But it was easy to see his meaning--that he wished to seem as little hurt as might be to his child, whom he imagined near at hand. Easier still when he added, "She came afore. Let her come now!"

"Lizarann is not here now, Jim." The speaker's voice half choked him. But why was this worse than the other telling would have been?

He was speaking again. It was only repetition. "She came afore. Let her come now!" His voice was all but inaudible, and the Rector's words had been lost upon him.

The deaf old man had done his errand well. The daughter of the little roadside inn, quicker of foot than he, came bringing water, and, what was needed too, brandy. Speech came again after a mouthful, swallowed with difficulty.

"Am I a bad sight, master? Let the lassie come! Never you fear for her! She's used to her Daddy." He spoke so naturally, all allowance made for pain resolutely kept at bay, that his only hearer--for the girl from the inn heard nothing--was quite at a loss. A bald truth was safe for the moment, though.

"Lizarann is not here, Jim. She cannot come to you now." The last words almost said why as well! Then both Jim's hearers heard what came quite distinctly from his lips: "What's got the lassie, Master, my lassie? I tell ye, I heard her sing out 'Pi-lot!' Aye!--once and again, 'Pi-lot!' when you was coming across the common yonder!"

But whether he himself heard the only reply Athelstan Taylor could force his lips to--"Not with me, Jim; Lizarann was not with me"--no one ever knew. For all he said was, "My little lass!" and never spoke again.

His shattered body was carried to old Margy's cottage, but the moment of death was hard to determine. All that came to light from the post-mortem examination was that the spine was injured beyond all hope of recovery, and that this was only one of several injuries, any of which might have caused death.

* * * * *

The windows of the ward at the Nursing Home at Chalk Cliff stand wide to allow the sweet air from the sea to come and go at will. All has been done that Death has left to do for Lizarann Coupland. Her end and its cause are certified by medical authority, and registered officially, and a little coffin has been ordered, in which the tiny white thing, like an image well carved in alabaster, that Adeline Fossett and her friend Miss Jane know is under that sheet on the bed, is to be interred shortly, as soon as its Daddy's wishes are known. They never will be, but neither lady knows that yet.

"Poor little darling!" said Miss Fossett. "Do you recollect, Jane, those very last words she said?"

"About the Pilot?"

"No, no--after that. I wasn't sure you heard. I had tried to tell her what ... what it was ... and I couldn't find words. But I fancy the little thing half understood, too. What she said was--quite clearly--'But who's a-going to tell my Daddy?'" It was so like herself. The speaker breaks down; but then, you see, she had taken Lizarann to her heart so thoroughly--was thinking she would never have another child she should be so fond of. Miss Jane is used to these things, and affects strength.

"I think it will be ready for the flowers now," she says, and removes that sheet. Yes, the handkerchief round the face may come away. The two ladies place flowers round the little alabaster head. It is the head, one would say, of a sweet little girl, and the mouth is not too large for beauty now, although that line of black is in the lips.

* * * * *

So it came to pass that neither Lizarann nor her Daddy lived to mourn the loss of the other. The child was never an orphan, and the father only childless an hour or so. And Lizarann never knew what his employment had been, but cherished to the last an untainted memory of those happy days when she led him home, blind but otherwise uninjured, from the honourable fulfilment of some mysterious public service. And yet, had she known, would she have thought it other than right? For, was it not Daddy?

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Chapter XLIX

JUDITH'S VAGARIES. HOW SHE BROUGHT SIR ALFRED CHALLIS, INSENSIBLE, TO ROYD HALL IN A MOTOR. A MESSAGE PER MR. BROWNRIGG TO THE RECTOR. HOW TO PROBE THE MYSTERY. JUDITH'S RESERVE. PUBLIC IMPATIENCE. THE CHAUFFEUR'S TESTIMONY

Royd Hall was at its quietest that morning when the young man Samuel answered the bell from his master's bedroom, and found the Baronet still in bed, at a few minutes after nine. The old gentleman must have dozed off again after ringing it, because Samuel had to knock twice before he said "Come in."

"I thought you rang, sir," said Samuel.

"I did ring. Who was that went away in the motor five minutes ago?"

Samuel was not going to admit that the motor had been gone a full quarter of an hour. It would have been disrespectful to suggest that his master had been asleep unawares, so he accepted the five-minute estimate. "I believe it was Miss Judith, sir; but I couldn't say, to be certain."

"Just ask. What o'clock is it?"

"It's gone nine, some minutes, sir."

"This coffee's cold ... never mind!... I suppose I went to sleep again.... Oh, Samuel!..." Samuel, departing, paused. "See that the cold douche is cold. It was neither one thing nor the other yesterday."

"Sure to be cold, sir, now! Because both the other gentlemen's run it on." To those acquainted with the heating gear of bathrooms the way the old supply proves lukewarm, and nothing bracing comes to pass, is well known. The Baronet referred to it again as he met Samuel returning on his way to the bath. Was he sure it was cold? Yes, Samuel was; and that was Miss Judith, he found, that had gone off in the motor, after breakfasting early in her own room. As witness Mr. Elphinstone and Miss Judith's maid Tilley.

Sir Murgatroyd never wondered much at anything his family did. He had a beautiful faith that everything was all right always, and asked few or no questions. Still, he would wonder a little, tentatively, at rare intervals. Only he strained at gnats and swallowed camels. This time he swallowed the camel of Judith's early departure after a solitary breakfast. That was all right--it was some appointment with the Duchess, "or something." But he strained at the gnat of her having left her little attendant behind. He had a superstition that the absence of any two persons, known to be together, was never a thing to cause anxiety; but he was liable to fidgeting about any of his family unaccounted for, if he supposed them to be alone. There may be other people like him.

It was this superstition that caused Sir Murgatroyd to say to Lady Arkroyd--through a door between their rooms that he opened on purpose, having become aware of the departure of her ladyship's maid--"What has Judith gone out so early for?" To which the reply was: "You must speak plainer. I can't hear you while you shave." For during shaving the shaver's attention cannot be fully given to speech, owing to the interdependence of razor, eye, and jaw in a delicate relation to one another, to say nothing of the care needed to preserve a soapless mouth.

So Sir Murgatroyd wound up his shave before he spoke again, adding to his first question the words, "In the motor."

"How do you know she went in the motor?"

"Samuel said so. Besides, I heard it go."

"I suppose I was asleep.... Oh no!--I can't account for Judith's vagaries. She goes her own way. I suppose she's taken the child with her--her maid, I mean?"

"Why, no, she hasn't! That's just it...."

"I didn't mean that. I meant that if she hadn't, Cintilla would know." That is to say, her ladyship washed her hands of any complicity in the Bart.'s superstition spoken of above. She always, in talking of her husband, to the Duchess for instance, affected a Spartan stolidity; saying that no one who did not know him as she did would ever suspect Murgatroyd of being such an hysterical character.

Nevertheless, she felt curiosity about Judith, and bade Mrs. Cream, her own lady's-maid, summon Cintilla to give evidence. Only first she closed the door into her husband's room, not to be open to any imputation of hysteria. The Baronet accepted his exclusion the more readily that he had just rung for Samuel. For his relation towards that young man, who was officially his valet, was that he allowed him to help him on with his coat as soon as he himself was otherwise complete. He had to, or Samuel wouldn't have been his valet.

It was nearly a quarter to ten when her ladyship said to her son-in-law and Mr. Brownrigg, the only guest outside the family, that we were frightfully late at breakfast. She said it on the long terrace the breakfast-room opens on, where the two gentlemen had been for some time wondering whether they were to have any. A peacock shrieked a condemnation of late breakfast; and the Baronet, appearing last, took the sins of the congregation on his shoulders. His lateness eclipsed all previous lateness.

But he must needs make matters worse; for after communications about Sibyl, and record of her husband's conviction that that young lady would pay attention to her medical adviser, and not appear at breakfast, he inquired about Judith's escapade, as a Baronet inquires when he really wants to know, not as mere passing chat. To which her ladyship replied, as one whose patience is tried by an inopportune husband: "There, my dear, Judith is all right if you'll only leave her alone. I know all about her. She's gone to go somewhere with Thyringia, and won't be back till I don't know when. Now don't hinder, and do let's have breakfast.... No, Elphinstone, don't sound the gong on my account. We's all here. I do hate that banging." For her husband, the fidget, had suggested absurdly that perhaps Judith was back, and didn't know breakfast was ready. "Besides, she had breakfasted, anyhow!" adds her ladyship.

Lord Felixthorpe has a word of illumination for the Baronet, who acquiesced in the will of a senior officer. It causes him to recur to the subject again, saying, "Frank says Judith asked for the car yesterday ..." and to be again extinguished with an impatient, "My dear!--do you suppose I don't know all about it?" from her ladyship.

* * * * *

When that scanty gathering of four persons sat down to breakfast at the table where last year this story told of so large an assemblage, Royd Park and mansion alike seemed a haven of serenest peace, sheltered from impact with the outer world, and unconscious of its turmoil. Every sound of living creatures was as good as silence--articulate with its denials of discord. Even the peacock's screech upon the lawn fell in with the music of the wood-doves in the beech-woods--just a high staccato note; no more!--and the gobble of a turkey from the stable-yard, across the big red wall there, was modulated to its place as an instrument the composer should not use too freely, though full of spirit. A million undertones of insects; a perspective of scattered voices afar, each fainter than the last; the sound of the manger-chain of a horse in the groom's hands--all agreed that whatever that railway-whistle might mean about the world a league and more away, here in this sacred enclosure was peace--peace guaranteed by a bygone peace of vanished years, and a security of entail. Peace without end, Amen!

So much so that when the motor-trumpet was suddenly audible, but unmistakably, beyond the Park Gate on the road from the village, each of the four at breakfast looked at some other, and said--there it was! But they were undisturbed in their minds, and gave various consideration to Yorkshire ham and filleted plaice and potted beef and Keiller, and all that one associates with clean damask and steaming urns. The Baronet only said, with apparent sense of relief: "I thought she could hardly have gone for the whole day." To which his wife replied: "Oh, my dear, how funny you are! Don't you know Judith?" And then they talked current topics of the day--Raisuli and Employer's Liability.

The motor-trumpet close at hand, and wheels! Now we shall know. But not so soon that we need leave Morocco for a moment. And Mr. Brownrigg will take half a cup more coffee.

What is that, Elphinstone? May Mr. Elphinstone speak to her ladyship? He may; so he does, in an undertone. Her ladyship says, "I'll come," and then to Mr. Brownrigg, "The milk's beside you," and follows the butler from the room. All the three men look at each other. "Something wrong!" says Lord Felixthorpe. He and the Baronet look the inquiry at one another, "Ought we not to follow?" and both answer, "Yes!" at once, aloud. Mr. Brownrigg neglects his coffee and follows, looking concerned and apprehensive.

There is a lobby between the dining-room and the entrance-hall to the house, and her ladyship meets them in it, returning. She says to her husband: "Oh, my dear!--you will have to come, about this." She is looking ashy white, and when she has spoken sinks down on a wall-seat in a recess, saying: "Oh dear! Do go out and see." She is quite overcome by something.

A new identity comes suddenly on Sir Murgatroyd. "See to her, Frank," he says. "Is Mrs. Cream there--yes?--See to your mistress, Cream." And goes out.

The butler is just beyond the lobby, and the firm voice of the Baronet is audible above his terrified undertone. "Who is it?... Sir Alfred Challis?... Badly?" The speaker then passes out of hearing, going to the entrance-hall.

Mrs. Cream has come, and finds that her mistress has not fainted away, though not far short of it. Her ladyship rallies, saying to her son-in-law: "Never mind me, Frank!" Whereupon Lord Felixthorpe says: "You'll excuse me, Brownrigg, but I must see to my wife. She'll be frightened if I don't." And goes three steps at a time up a side-staircase, leaving Mr. Brownrigg embarrassed, and feeling in the way.

* * * * *

When Sir Murgatroyd set foot outside his house, the first thing he saw was the face of his daughter, still seated in the car, supporting the head of the man who was with her, but shrinking from it, covered as it was with some shawl or cloth, in terror. The first words he heard, above the drumming beat of the stationary car's machinery and the hysterical excitement of the chauffeur, dismounted from his seat, were a relief to him. His daughter, at any rate, was uninjured, or only shaken at the worst. "I am not the least hurt," she said, with perfect self-command, though in a bewildered, stony way. Her dress was not soiled or seriously disordered, so she could not have been thrown from the car.

His hearers at first thought M. Louis incoherent. "C'était la faute de ce sacré aveugle--qui m'y trouvera à redire--moi? Qu'ai-je pu faire, moi?--c'est l'arbre du frein qui m'a trompé. J'ai tiré la manivelle--oui!--et elle m'a trompé. Peste soit de cet aveugle...." And so on. He was understood by no one.

"Get this man out of the way; he's no use. Where's Bullett?" Thus the Baronet. "Now, Elphinstone, get that deck-chair--the long one, you know--look sharp about it!" Elphinstone departed, as Bullett, the model groom, came running. "The roan, in the dogcart," said his master; and then: "Yes, my dear, you shall tell me directly." For Judith was beginning: "It has not been my fault...." She was speaking like a woman in a dream, or one half waking from one.

Her father only glanced at the white face with the blood on it, then covered it again. "He might be able to get some brandy down," said he. He stood with his finger on Challis's pulse till it came, and then tried to get him to swallow some, but without success. "We must get him in," he said. "Where's Frank?" Samuel testified that his lordship was just coming downstairs. The fact was that his lordship, although his solicitude for his wife had been appreciated, had been told not to be absurd, but to go away and make himself useful.

He arrived just as the long deck-chair was brought--one such as one sees on passenger boats for India and China--and assisted in transporting the man who lay absolutely insensible on it to the room he had occupied when he had visited the house as a guest--the room where he missed that postscript of Marianne's, and probably sowed the seeds of all this mischief. It was easy for three to carry the chair--one on either side and one behind--so the Baronet left it to his son-in-law and Elphinstone and Samuel, and went to speak to Bullett, who had just arrived with the dogcart. On his way, coming from the lobby, he met Mr. Brownrigg, looking horribly shocked.

"Is it Challis?" said that gentleman. The Baronet nodded.

"It's the author," said he. "Is my wife still there?" He pointed to the lobby.

"She has gone upstairs to Lady Felixthorpe, I think. Can I be of any service?"

"A thousand thanks! I don't know of anything.... Yes, I do, though. My groom is just going to bring the doctor. Will you ride with him and call at the Rectory?--tell Taylor of this, and get him to come at once. He and Mr. Challis--Sir Alfred Challis I should say--were great friends. He'll come."

"I will go with pleasure," said Mr. Brownrigg. He went with pleasure, evidently. It is, of course, a great satisfaction to be of use in any painful crisis.

Sir Murgatroyd, as he turned to the entrance-door again, met Judith, who was accompanied by her little maid, terrified beyond measure, but behaving well. She gave an inanimate face to her father to kiss, saying collectedly, but in the same stony way: "There really is no occasion for anxiety about me. I am perfectly safe. Only don't ask me to talk about it now." Her father followed her in silence to the door of her room, when she turned and spoke again, after a visible effort that failed. "Is he killed?" she said, forcing the word out.

"Oh no!--no, no!--no such thing! Stunned--contused--that sort of thing! I've sent Bullett for Pordage. I should have sent the car, but Monsieur Louis isn't in a state to manage it. There would have been another accident.... What?"

"Tell them--mamma and Sibyl--not to disturb me. I will tell you after.... No! When the doctor has seen him, tell my little maid here. She will bring me word." And then Judith, whose beauty had lost nothing by the shock she has sustained--if anything, the reverse--vanishes into her room, and her father hears the key in the lock turned significantly. In the old Baronet's look now, roused as he is from his easy-going homeliness, and with a certain resolve growing on him, one sees that that beauty is not inherited from her mother alone. He goes straight to the room where the injured man lies, still insensible and motionless, still with a low pulse that neither gains nor loses. The doctor cannot be very long, if Bullett finds him at home. His practice is to remain at home in the morning.

* * * * *

"Do you know anything of all this?" Sir Murgatroyd asks the question of his wife and younger daughter in the bedroom of the latter, where he has found them, white and frightened--talking in a nervous undertone, but quickly, and as folk talk who can tell things.

"She has been seeing him. Sibyl says so."

"Seeing Challis?"

"Of course. But she hasn't spoken of him to me for a month--quite a month." This was her ladyship.

"I told you it would be no use, madre," says Sibyl. "But you wouldn't listen to me."

"My dear--how unreasonable you are! How was it possible for your father and me to allow it to go on? You may say what you like, but he is a married man...."

"All I say is, you made matters worse."

"Never mind that now!" said the Baronet. "What I want to hear is--how did Sib know this was going on?"

Sibyl is quite clear on that point. "Judith met him in the Park the day before we came, last month. Old Mrs. Inskip saw them together, behaving like a couple of--like lovers." Her tone is one of reprobation and disgust. She goes on to tell how she had interviewed the centenarian on the subject, and been fully enlightened.

"That is all at an end now, anyhow." So says the Baronet, but when his wife says "Why?" he does not answer, but goes on as to another point reflectively. "Judith must have met him on her way to Thanes.... Where did he join her--this morning, I mean?"

Both ladies strike a new clue. "Was she going to Thanes at all?" And Sibyl adds: "I don't believe she was."

"You said you knew she was, Therèse," says Sir Murgatroyd, addressing his wife by her name--a thing that always means, with him, a definite attitude of some sort. She is on her mettle directly, for expostulation or defence.

"My dear, I never said anything of the sort. She talked yesterday of going to-day, and, of course, I supposed she had. That little girl of hers only said she said she might not be back to lunch." Her ladyship exonerates herself at some length, denying what she had said plainly an hour before at breakfast.

Her husband treats the point as an open one, to avoid indefinite discussion of it. "I see," he says. "It was only your inference. I wonder if that crazy French chap has come to his senses. It's no use my talking to him. I can't understand three words he says." Then, at Sibyl's suggestion, he went away to his son-in-law, who was still with the injured man, to get him to interview the bewildered chauffeur, and see what could be made of his testimony. During Lord Felixthorpe's absence he remained by Challis, still perfectly insensible on the bed, but apparently only stunned, like a man in a deep sleep. He breathed regularly, and though his pulse dragged a little, it was quite steady. Sir Murgatroyd felt only moderate uneasiness about him. He had himself been thrown from his horse in the hunting-field, and remained insensible till next day.

Lord Felixthorpe returned. The chauffeur's account of the thing, now that his mind was more settled, was that, in order to avoid a collision with a man in the road, he had swerved at a sharp corner. Challis started to his feet at the moment, and was thrown over the edge of the car, falling on his head in the road. "Mademoiselle"--so ran M. Louis' testimony--"était terriblement épouvantée, mais elle ne s'est pas évanouie," Lord Felixthorpe translated, for the benefit of the Baronet. "Alors," said M. Louis, "nous avons soulevé le corps, nous deux, dans l'automobile, et Mademoiselle m'a crié--en avant, vite, vite! Et moi, j'ai retourné vite, vite! Qu'est ce qu'on aurait voulu de plus?" Questioned as to where Challis had got into the car, he replied--at the Park Gate; as to what he understood its destination to be, that he did not know anything except that it was about forty miles off, but that Monsieur had a map with the route marked; as to when Miss Arkroyd had requisitioned the car, that she had spoken about it to him overnight. Milord had instructed him that it would not be required during the day, as he himself should monter à cheval, and Miladi would remain at home. It was to be at Mademoiselle's disposal, or Miladi Arkroyd's. "Effectivement," said he, in an injured tone, "j'ai suivi mes renseignements, et je ne suis pas à blâmer." His lordship had then explained to him that he need not be so touchy; no one was blaming him. There was another point. Who was the man who caused the car to swerve, and was he hurt? Monsieur Louis replied with the Frenchest of shrugs, "Mais je ne sais pas! Comment voulez-vous que je sache?--quelque vagabond--quelque mendiant!" He turned the conversation to the damage done to a tyre.

Had Lord Felixthorpe heard the chauffeur's words on his first arrival, a suspicion he now felt that M. Louis was keeping something back would have been greatly strengthened. Sir Murgatroyd may have noticed the discrepancy, but he said nothing at the time. His only remark was, "We shall know more of this soon."

Presently Lord Felixthorpe said: "It certainly does occur to me that my sister-in-law would be able to contribute some valuable information, and I do not understand that she is any the worse for this mishap, fright apart. Why should we not...?" He stopped short; for his father-in-law had touched him with his finger, saying only, "Frank!" The manner of it made him end with, "Why--do you know anything?"

"When was that Bill to go into Committee--the Deceased Wife's Sister--you know?"

"What's to-day? Saturday? It was yesterday, Friday. Why?... Do you suppose...?"

"It may have something to do with this--mind you, I only say may have!... I suppose the Times has come?"

"I'll see." He went out and spoke to Elphinstone over the great staircase, and returned. "I've told him to bring the papers here."

"Yes--here we are!" said the Baronet, five minutes after, controlling an outspread sheet of last night's Debates. He went on, reading scrapwise: "'Lord Shaftesbury moved amendment to remove from Bill retrospective character ... very indistinctly heard in gallery ... no real hardship would be inflicted by amendment ... persons who had contracted these marriages fully conscious of legal consequences involved' ... hm-hum!" and so on. "Where's the end of it? ... oh--here! 'Amendment withdrawn.' Yes, Frank, that may have something to do with it--may have a great deal!"

"I'm not sure that I follow. Has it to do with...?" He dropped his voice, and looked towards the motionless figure on the bed.

"Of course it has ... he won't hear--you needn't be uneasy. I was just like that.... Well!--we'll talk outside if you like.... Yes, look at this, Frank: Prorogation is next Wednesday, when this Bill will receive the Royal Assent, and become law. Until next Wednesday at midday, or thereabouts, Challis's wife isn't his wife, and any woman he marries on Monday or Tuesday is. He couldn't even be convicted of bigamy unless his first marriage was held legal, and that would be rather discourteous to the Royal Assent on Wednesday. Now do you see?"

"Surely you never can imagine...."

"Well!"

"Surely you never can imagine that Sir Challis and Ju were going to make a runaway match of it, to outwit the action of this Bill...."

"I can only see this," says the Baronet: "that if they did not do so, they were losing the only chance they had left of making an honourable match of any sort or kind. Isn't that the doctor?"

It is the footstep of the roan, unmistakable, and the wheels of the dogcart, at speed. It is poor little Lizarann's friend, Dr. Sidrophel. But all his old look has left him--a look as though he was born to be amused, and found his patients diverting--as he comes quickly to Challis's room, meeting the two gentlemen on the way, to whom he speaks very little. He nods once or twice, in reply to a brief abstract of the accident, saying only, "Let's have a look at him!" He finds time to say that the Rector could not come, but would come later. There was a good deal to be done. The Baronet did not seem to understand this.

The household has fought shy of touching an insensible patient, pending a doctor on the way, especially as there is no visible hæmorrhage. The blood from a cut on the temple was not renewed when the face was wiped with a sponge on his first arrival at the house. The doctor makes a very rapid examination. "You wish him to remain here, Sir Murgatroyd?" he says.

"To remain here? Of course I do."

"Then I must have his clothes off first. The cut's nothing on the forehead. That can wait."

The coat must be sacrificed, but it can't be helped. Slit up the sleeves, and off with it! Better than jarring him about in his present state. Once wardrobe-saving is discarded, it is easy work to get the author in trim for a careful overhauling. No bones broken, is the verdict. All the worse! His head took most of his weight, and bore the shock. A broken knee-joint might have spared his brain. As it is, Dr. Pordage seems to think the net volumes may come slower in the future. Besides, you never can tell at first about the spine in cases of this sort.

For the present, concession must be made to treatment. It never does to do absolutely nothing. So let's have mustard and hot water to the feet, and ammonia to the nostrils, and try to get a little brandy down his throat. But quiet is the thing. Presently, all that seems feasible has been done, and quiet is to have its opportunity. Still, quite insensible!

Ought not Mrs. Challis, or Lady Challis, whichever she is, to be communicated with? The question is a joint-stock one in which Lady Arkroyd and Sibyl have shares, having come into conference. Of course, they were not on terms--her ladyship says this--but is that our concern?

"I shouldn't put it on that, Lady Arkroyd," says the doctor. "He'll probably be conscious in a few hours. Better not alarm her needlessly. If he continues unconscious for twenty-four hours ... why, then we might think about it. But I don't suppose him to be in any danger." The speaker's serious manner, unlike himself, seemed out of keeping with his light estimate of Challis's danger.

"We haven't got her address, so we can't, and there's no use talking about it. Unless Judith knows. Only it seems she's not to be got at." This is Sibyl, not without asperity.

"How is Miss Arkroyd?" says the doctor, whose emphasis on the verb means, "I am conscious that I ought to have asked before, and my doing it now is rather a formality." Lady Arkroyd testifies that Judith is in her room lying down, but was all right when she spoke to her through the door--oh yes!--she seemed perfectly right, but had locked herself in, and wanted to be quiet. The Baronet says, to his wife only, "Perhaps we had better leave her alone, Therèse." And Therèse replies, "Oh, I'm sure I don't want to meddle with her." Impatience with Miss Arkroyd is in the air. She is credited with being the underlying cause of all this disturbance.

There is a surprise in the bush for her father; only half-informed, so far. For the doctor, departing, pauses and says gravely, hesitatingly: "I believe--but I don't know--that the inquest will be on Monday, or Tuesday."

"The inquest!--Why inquest? What inquest?" The Baronet is absolutely in the dark about everything but Challis's mishap. His wife, better informed by the groom during the doctor's visit to his patient, touches him on the arm, saying, "My dear, Dr. Pordage is referring to the man ..." and falters.

"There was a man killed," says Sibyl abruptly. "We supposed you knew."

"A man killed! Good God! I knew nothing. What man?"

Sibyl's husband overhears, and comes quickly. "What is that about a man killed?" he says. He also is completely taken aback.

Then Lady Arkroyd says again. "We thought you knew." And the doctor follows, saying collectedly, "Jim Coupland, the man at the Abbey Well, was struck by the motor-car and killed. The Rector found him lying dead in the road. That is why Mr. Taylor did not accompany me. He will be here shortly, and will tell you more than I can."

Sir Murgatroyd gazes from one to the other, shocked and speechless. Lord Felixthorpe, nearly as much concerned, says below his breath, "That miscreant Rossier never said a word to me of this." But he is preoccupied and ill-at-ease about his wife, who will be none the better just now for upsets and tragic surprises. He persuades her to go back to the quiet of her room, in spite of her protests that he is nonsensical, saying as he goes away with her, "We'll have that French scoundrel up when I come back. I won't be three minutes." But he was a little longer, and when he returned, the doctor, who was wanted elsewhere, was on his way back. He found his father-in-law alone in the library, sitting with his head on his hand, as though completely oppressed and stunned with what he had heard. "Oh, Frank," said the old gentleman, "this is horrible!" He had made sure that the patient upstairs was properly looked to, and had sat down to rest and be quiet until Athelstan Taylor's arrival. But the chauffeur might be sent for.

* * * * *

A female servant, told off to mount guard over the patient, and report any change or movement, had been at her post about a quarter of an hour, when Miss Arkroyd opened the door and came into the room. "Don't go, Hetty," was all she said. She looked as white--so Hetty reported afterwards--as the clean wristband that young woman made use of in illustration. Also, her hair was all coming down. She stood at the bedside maybe a minute, maybe two--Hetty couldn't say--then touched the inanimate hand on the coverlid. "Oh no; she never took hold," said Hetty. "Touched and drew back like!" Then she turned to the girl and said, "Have you heard what the doctor said?" rather as if she took scanty information for granted. "But, of course, I could tell her all right," said Hetty, who had been taking notice. "Only she didn't any more than just stop to hear, but went. My word!--she was looking bad."

She must have slipped back quietly into her room after this, taking the young girl Cintilla with her. For when her mother, an hour later, after consultation as to the wisdom of the step, went to her door to try again for admission, it was opened by Cintilla, and Judith's voice said, "Oh yes, come in; I want to hear what the doctor said." But her speech was so composed as scarcely to comply with the show of feeling the circumstances demanded, even if the runaway match idea was not a well-grounded one.

M. Rossier did not make a good figure when summoned to appear in the library. He bristled and stood on his defence at once, instead of making, as requested, a simple statement of his version of the facts. Perhaps Sir Murgatroyd would have done more wisely not to remind a witness under examination that he himself was a Justice of the Peace; it tended to invest him with the character of a Juge d'Instruction, and M. Louis with that of "the accused." The latter was as strange to the idea of waiting for a proof of guilt as the former to that of demanding a proof of innocence.

Oh yes!--there was a man in the road--what did M. Louis know? He came from a sentier by the roadside. But, said his master, speaking French de rigueur, as English was not understood, "Cet homme était au mi-chemin," meaning in the middle of the road. M. Louis misunderstood, or pretended to. "J'avais passé le mi-chemin," said he, meaning, apparently, half-way to the village. Then he tried to assist by speaking English. "He wass bloke ze hackross," and then finished naturally with, "Que diable allait il faire au milieu de la rue?"

"Ou--avez--vous--vu--dernièrement--cet homme?" said the Baronet, a loud word at a time, to make sure of reaching that strange organism, a foreigner's brain. M. Louis understood, anyhow.

"A peine l'ai-je vu! Je n'ai fait que jeter un coup d'oeil, et pst!--il est disparu. Je ne l'ai pas cru blessé. Pour moi, il n'a pas souffert la moindre égratignure. Que voulez-vous? On ne peut pas avoir l'oeil à tout!" But his speech was not absolutely consistent, for he added, "Pourquoi diable ne put-il s'abriter sous la haie?" He evidently thought the road belonged to the motor interest, and that the world ought to run for the nearest sheltered corner at the sound of his horn.

Lord Felixthorpe endeavoured to impress him with the advisability of telling the truth, as a mere matter of policy. There would be a case to go to a Jury, unless the inquest decided that Jim Coupland had died by the Visitation of Providence. But M. Louis might feel secure of fair treatment; and, unless he had sinned grossly, need be under no apprehension of serious consequences to himself. As the chauffeur knew he had sinned grossly, in not slacking speed at the curve, his apprehensions continued. But he seemed convinced, when he went away, that it might be wisest to say the least possible for the present.

"We must look out sharp," said Sir Murgatroyd, "and make sure the Coroner's Jury is fairly chosen. I can't have any leniency shown to County Families, Frank. I'm inclined now towards seeing what I can make of Judith. I see no use putting it off.... By-the-bye, Frank, what did that story-telling Mossoo mean by talking about a blind man--avoogle's blind, isn't it?--and then saying he hardly saw Jim?... what?..."

"I didn't hear him say anything about a blind man."

"No, no--before you came--when he first came back. He said 'avoogle.'"

"I expect he knows all about it. See what Judith has to say!"

Sir Murgatroyd didn't seem at all in a hurry for his interview with his daughter. He hung about, finishing topics up. He dropped his voice to say, "Poor Jim! Taylor said he was just expecting his little girl back. And now she'll come back and find him lying dead."

"Ah--the nice little girl, Lizarann. Yes--I had forgotten Lizarann. Poor little woman!" For remember it was this young swell who had made Lizarann's acquaintance near two years since, in Tallack Street. Do you recollect?--when William Rufus called him Scipio.

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Chapter L

OF MARIANNE AT BROADSTAIRS, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A "DREADNOUGHT." AND HOW SHE READ OF HER HUSBAND'S ACCIDENT ON ITS ARMOUR-PLATES, AND AT ONCE STARTED FOR ROYD. BUT SUPPOSE THEY CALLED HER "LADY CHALLIS"!

Marianne Challis, or, as she preferred to be called, Craik, had sentenced herself to an embittered life, and knew it. But she had, as we have said, so much in her of the dogged tenacity and vengefulness of a Red Indian brave that scarcely any idea of surrender had ever, so far, entered her mind. Whenever the smallest suspicion of wavering had approached its outskirts, during the year and a half of her residence with her mother at Broadstairs, she had at once brought into the field an auxiliary force, the consolation to her conscience that she was, at least, no longer "living in sin" with the father of her children. Even if her jealousy of what she found a satisfaction in calling his "connection with" Miss Arkroyd--a phrase first used, dexterously, by Charlotte Eldridge--had been ill-founded, which it wasn't, it would have been a misapprehension to be thankful for, in that it had made her alive to the heinousness of her immoral life, and qualified her to go before the Bar of an Offended God, not only with mere lame apologies for the existence of her two girls, but with a statement of account, claiming payment of Joy over the Sinner that Repenteth. Where would have been the use of pleading, before that Awful Throne, that she was "only Kate's half-sister"?

This story knows that accusation will be brought against it of "sneering" at things sacred; but let the accuser try to depict the frame of mind of this poor lady without seeming to do so. Marianne had accepted her mother's Choctaw Deity, a creation of the sullen vices of her own mind, on the strength of an assurance that he was also the God of the man who paid, in Syria, the penalty of the most intrepid and magnificent attempt to touch the hearts of men the world has ever known. Let him be sure that when he talks of "things sacred" he is really holding those things sacred that that man was tortured to death for proclaiming the truth of, two thousand years ago, and that he is not exalting the comicalities of a Theologism.

But the outcome of it all was an embittered life for Marianne. And the bitterness was bound to come out--could not be concealed. It showed itself in severity towards her children to some extent, but very much more in acrimony towards her mother. It was just as well, perhaps, that the safety-valve existed. The worthy old lady would have been quarrelling with some one else if she had not quarrelled with her daughter; so it was all one to her.

This old lady was the soul of dissension and savage righteousness. It must not be understood that what Bob called a "regular set-to between Gran and the Mater" was of daily occurrence. Often a week would pass without a battle-royal. But no hour ever passed without an exchange of shots. Bob's reports to his father of the life at Belvedere Villa, Broadstairs, were highly coloured, perhaps, but they enabled the author to picture to himself a daily routine not far from the truth. When Bob stated that Old Gran was all shaky-waky with rage to begin with, and would pucker up and fly at a moment's notice if you didn't look uncommon sharp, Challis accepted the first clause of the indictment as a false diagnosis of the tremulousness of old age; the second as realistic poetry; and the condition precedent of immunity at the end as an admission that his son's own attitude was not always faultless. When that young man said it was "pray, pray, pray, all day long," and he didn't see the fun, his father perceived that his meaning was that religious exercises were protracted beyond usage, for instance, of the Deanery at Inchester; where, according to Bob, it was "once and done with." Besides, the Dean didn't snuffle, and Old Gran did. Challis remarked that Bob would have cut a poor figure as a Hindu Yogi, and felt grateful in his heart to Dean Tillotson for not snuffling. It might arrest a violent reaction on Bob's part against all Religion, Law, Order, and Morality. For Challis would not trust anyone but himself without the first; weak natures, like other people's, might lose touch with the other three as well, and take to the secret manufacture of melinite. He never suspected himself of a weak nature.

These illuminations had been thrown on Belvedere Villa after Bob's first visit there, a year since. This August he was acquiring more dignified forms of speech, befitting a fifth-form boy. But he was still capable of saying that he had seen "awfully little" of his Governor these holidays. Indeed, if he had not gone with him to a place in Derbyshire for a week, he would hardly have set eyes on him. Then if his Governor was stopping on a week at this beastly little place--Heaven knows why!--why shouldn't he? Why was he to go to Broadstairs? However, he went. And from Broadstairs he wrote to his Governor, at Brideswell-Poulgreave, Derby, saying that Gran was "as bad, if not worse, than ever," and provoked severe criticism of his English in reply. He had his revenge, though, for he pelted his Governor with samples of the same solecism, cut from current literature, till the accumulations became quite formidable.

It may seem strange, but the story must record it, that almost the only thing that gave poor Marianne any real pleasure during this year-and-a-half in her mother's house was the reading from time to time in the newspapers of the literary successes of "Titus"; for to her he never ceased to be Titus. So self-contradictory was her frame of mind that, when "Aminta Torrington" made such a sensation just after Christmas, her bosom swelled with pride over the play's success, just as though she herself had been by the author's side at the fall of the curtain. Her curiosity was intense to know whether or not the name of the actress who personated Aminta was her own or one assumed by that detestable woman to whom she owed all her unhappiness. "Silvia Berens" puzzled her, because it sounded familiar. But not sufficiently so to be sure she had known it in those last days she had spent at the Hermitage.

It was a grievous vexation to have no one she could take into her confidence. She would have shrunk from showing her inner mind to her mother, even if there had been the slightest prospect of the old woman knowing anything on dramatic or literary subjects; and when she threw out a feeler to Charlotte Eldridge, that lady irritated her by taking for granted that the pleasure she had expressed was a creditable impulse of generosity, and not spontaneous at all. Just like Charlotte! And all the while her pleasure was a reality she had a right to indulge in--a luxury she could allow herself without any weak concession to feelings she had destined to extinction.

For the fact is Marianne had never ceased to love the father of her children. Can a woman ever succeed in doing so, except by hating him? Now, Choctaw as she was, she was under no obligation to detest her husband as long as she could fully gratify her hatred elsewhere. Judith Arkroyd had the full benefit of it--drew the fire of her batteries on herself. Oh, the hypocrisy of that letter the girl had the impertinence to write to her! But she saw through it. As for Titus, did she not know him well enough to know he would be mere wax in the hands of a designing woman like that? Oh yes!--she knew how to flatter him, no doubt! And how to make the best of herself, too. Charlotte could at least sympathize about that; she knew the sort this Judith was! Indeed, Charlotte had been liberal in her realistic suggestions about Judith, who may have been in some ways no better than she made her out, but who was certainly short of the standard of depravity this moralist vouched for in telegraph-girls, her bêtes-noires in all that touched the purity of the domestic hearth. Charlotte's sidelights on the Tophet incident, as explained in "that hypocritical letter from the girl herself," would have done credit to Paul de Kock.

Chewing this cud--or these cuds; which should it be?--would take the poor woman so perilously near a fit of exculpation of Titus that she was often forced to have recourse to the old story of their consanguinity to keep her resentment up to the mark. Yes!--she would--she could--go through a mental operation technically called "forgiving" Titus. But go back to him? No! She had sinned, all those years, in ignorance, and with a false ideal of her husband, who had now fallen from his high estate. And look you!--it was not only this Judith business. How about that other story? How about that Steptoe story, not an hour's walk from here? She found the neighbourhood of Ramsgate oppressive to her.

No--she could never go back to Titus, whatever happened. Not even if this Bill that was to come into Parliament were to make marriages like hers and Titus's lawful for the future. What was wrong was wrong, and how the House of Lords could make it right was more than Marianne could understand. She wasn't aware that it was the House of Lords that originally made it wrong.

But if she did her duty towards the supposed instructions of Holy Writ--which she did not doubt could be found somewhere, as her mother was so positive about them--she might claim as a set-off the pleasure of reading the literary columns of the daily Press in the hope of coming on Titus's name. She did more reading in that year-and-a-half than she had done in all the rest of her life put together. And as she was not literate enough to skim, she had to plod; and plodding is slow work in the columns of a voluminous Sunday paper--the largest possible paper in the smallest possible type. But one does get a lot for one's penny, whether it's Lloyd's Weekly, or the Dispatch, or the People; and there's sure to be all the theatrical news and recent publications, whichever you take. So Marianne pored intently over one or the other, every Sunday afternoon, on the sofa; while her parent dipped into sermons, or ran her eye through the Prayer-book, now and then looking at the newspaper. Not, that is to say, in the mere cant sense of the phrase, but glaring at it wolfishly over her own more legible type, with a basilisk eye to slay the profane intruder. The presence of the unhallowed secular abomination in the house on the Lord's Day was a bone of contention between the mother and daughter; but the old lady had had to give in, and every Sunday afternoon saw strained relations in abeyance, and the tension of a skin-deep concord, that might or might not last until the children should be allowed down, and given the obnoxious thing to make boats of.

On this particular Sunday--the day following the events of last chapter--Marianne's attention seemed deeper and more prolonged than usual. She had found something that interested her. It was taxing her apprehension severely, and she had no one to go to for enlightenment. But it is not human to accept exasperation in silence, and Marianne saw a prospect of relief in putting her mother's uselessness as an informant on record. So she said, as though referring to a matter of course, "I suppose it's no use asking you what these Parliament things mean," and went on reading.

Few people admit complete ignorance in any department without a struggle. "Perhaps I know nothing about anything," said the old woman, snarling meekly. "Perhaps I know more than you choose to think I know. Now snap!" These last words claimed the position of a private reflection made by a person of rare self-restraint in a den of mad dogs. There was nothing unlike her mother in them, and Marianne left them unnoticed, and continued:

"I suppose you don't know what is meant by 'an amendment to remove from the Bill its retrospective character'?" For Marianne had got at the report of the sitting of the House of Lords of two days since; and though she had kept herself uninformed, intentionally, on the subject related to, still, when she saw it all in print, her curiosity took the bit in its teeth, and she read.

"It happens that you are entirely wrong, because it happens that that is just the one thing I do happen to know. But I shall not talk about it on this day." This resolution lasted quite three minutes, when the speaker resumed, under a kind of protest that the little she had to say wouldn't count. "You know perfectly well what Mr. Tillingfleet said in his last letter about this wicked Bill business."

"What did he say?"

"You know perfectly well"

"I do not."

The self-denying ordinance of Sabbath silence became too hard to keep. The old lady broke out, "You know perfectly well that Mr. Tillingfleet said that, if this Bill was given a retrospective character, you would have to be Mr. Challis's wife again, and live with him, whether you liked it or not."

"I don't recollect that he said any such thing. I don't believe he did."

"You can get his letter and look at it, if you doubt your mother's word on Sunday." This was not an admission of fibs on week-days; it referred to the intensification of unfiliality as a Sabbath vice. The speaker closed her eyes and began saying nothing about the subject again, in fulfilment of her manifesto.

Marianne ran her eyes over the scanty fringe of letters stuck in the mirror-frame over the chimney-piece. Mr. Tillingfleet's business handwriting was soon found. "He does say no such thing," said she, after reading it to herself. "What he says is absolutely and entirely different."

"I am corrected. When you are quiet once more, perhaps you will kindly tell me what he says?"

"Grandmamma, I tell you plainly it is no use trying to make me out in a temper, because I'm not...."

"Go on. I am accustomed to being snapped at."

"I shall not go on if you talk like that."

"I have no wish to hear the letter again. Don't read it if you don't want to. I know perfectly well what's in it." The venerable lady then murmured to herself, most offensively, "Three little Liver Pills." It was one of her practices to sketch correctives for controversial opponents, the doses increasing in proportion to the degree of diversity of opinion.

Marianne, armed with a combative immobility of face and monotony of accent, read aloud from Mr. Tillingfleet's letter. "'The retrospective action of the measure now before Parliament will, if carried, seriously affect the relations of Sir Alfred Challis and your daughter. It will undoubtedly determine the technical legitimacy of their children, and give their de facto father a legal right to their guardianship.' There!" says Marianne in conclusion, replacing the letter in the looking-glass.

But her mother rallies her forces with asperity against the assumptions of this monosyllable, saying enigmatically that she is "not going to be 'there'd.'" It is ridiculous, she says, to pretend that she said that Mr. Tillingfleet said there was anything in the Bill to compel anyone to do anything. But, for all that, Marianne would have to live with her husband again, or go without her children.

Marianne walked up and down the room over this, chafing. She couldn't believe such disgraceful injustice was possible. Besides, if the Bill passed ever so, Titus would never have the meanness to take her children from her. To think that, all this year past, he could have married that girl at any moment, and then to have a right to his children!

Grandmamma said she would never be the least surprised at any freethinker committing bigamy. All freethinkers committed something, or many things, for that matter, avoiding felony from motives of policy. "He knows that his children are contrary to the Act of Parliament now, and that he's no right to them, and that's why he keeps his distance. You'll see, Marianne, that it will be quite another story if this wicked Bill passes."

"I don't believe it. Anyhow, it hasn't passed yet! Besides, the amendment was withdrawn."

"Well!"

"Well, of course! Then the Bill won't have a retrospective character." But the old lady was too sharp to fall into this topsy-turvy view of the case, and presently succeeded in convincing her daughter of her mistake. However, Perplexity was only scotched, not killed. "Suppose Titus had married this girl already, I mean, and the Bill passes, which of us would be his wife? I don't see how any amount of retrospects could unmarry them." Thus Marianne; and her mother can't meet the difficulty off-hand.

But consideration lights on a solution. "It would make your children legitimate, and he would claim them," says she, with the sort of glee in ambush people feel over a fellow-creature caught in a legal man-trap.

But Marianne's short sight is often clear sight. "What rubbish!" says she. "If Miss Arkroyd had a baby.... No!--I don't care, Grandmamma. She wouldn't be Titus's wife, if she married him at all the churches in London, and you know it.... Yes!--I say again, if she had a baby, Titus would have two legitimate families at once, and she would be his Law-wife, and I shouldn't. It's silly!"

Those who read the Debates on this question at the time--it is not so long ago all this happened--will remember that arguments akin to this one of Marianne's repulsed the forlorn hopes of the Bill's opponents, and clinched its retrospective character. What has happened to women who had married their sister's husbands, and been superseded by a "lawful" wife, before the passing of this Bill, the story knows not. Have the husbands been convicted of retrospective bigamy?

But this story has little more concern with the intricacies of difficult legislation in this matter than with those that have arisen in any other coercion by Law of the private lives of the non-aggressive classes. It is hopeless, apparently, to look forward to a day when the guiding rule of the law-giver will be non-interference with all but molestation; but one may indulge in satisfaction at each removal from the Statute Book of an enactment that infringes it.

Marianne's last speech, recorded above, shows a curious frame of mind. She had thrust her husband away from her in a fit of jealousy--not an ill-grounded one, by any means--and had bolstered up her conscience by what she more than half suspected to be a false pretext; but one in which she felt sure of the support of Grundydom in Great Britain, passim. How if this new legislation, or abrogation of old legislation, should undermine the fortress of her powerful allies, and leave a small and unconsidered band of bigots to fight the battle of an imaginary consanguinity? Those are not the words of her mind--only the gist of her thought. What she said to herself was that now there was to be an Act of Parliament everyone would go round the other way. To her that included the thought that the old catchwords that had done duty for so long would begin to ring false when brought into collision with that powerful agency, a Parliamentary majority. Since she had been dwelling so constantly on the subject she had more than once found herself face to face with impeachments of well-worn arguments derived from Scripture; notably when she found that one Biblical denunciation treated a marriage with a woman who might have one day become her husband's Deceased Wife's Sister, but who would not have been so when he married her, unless he had waited for that sine qua non, his wife's death. Thoughts of this sort strengthened and multiplied as the time drew nearer for this Parliamentary discussion, and here was the Bill apparently going to become Law, and by a backhanded thrust to make her Titus's "Law-wife" again, as well as what her own heart in some mysterious way proclaimed her to be--namely, his real wife, whatever that meant! She was certainly in a very curious, confused, self-contradictious frame of mind, was Marianne.

Perhaps her contradiction and confusion had never been much greater than on this Sunday afternoon, where the story has left her for so long, feverishly pacing up and down the room, after puzzling her poor stupid head trying to follow the Debate, and make some sense of it. She had succeeded in finding out that the Bill was nearly through Parliament, and that it would affect her and Titus more than she had conceived possible hitherto. She was working herself up into a state of bitten lips and sobs kept in abeyance. Her mother was not the person to encourage this sort of thing. "If you must prowl, Marianne," said she, "can't you go and prowl somewhere else?"

Her daughter may have shown her state of mind; for as she returned to her sofa, her amiable mother added, "If you are going to sniff and make a scene, Marianne, you had better have the children down." The old woman was sitting with her eyes shut, and really had very slight data to go on.

"Whatever Titus was, at least he wasn't unkind!" said Marianne tartly. But she touched the bell-handle, and its sound was followed by the prompt appearance of Mumps and Chobbles, now no longer known by those names, which had been to some extent their father's private property. The younger child came into the room shouting, with jumps as emphasis, "Now we may have the Thunday papers to make boats of, long ones and short ones."

The construction of a Navy had been a great pièce de résistance at the Hermitage in old days. The vessels had weak points; notably that when the deck was flattened out on completion, the cut-water was apt to part amidships, unless firmly held together by a neighbouring shipwright, or stuck together with a pin. But this last practice was looked upon with suspicion, as hardly legitimate. The question does not arise, so far as we are aware, at Chatham or Devonport; as in no case are ships first constructed with decks analogous to the bottoms of wine-bottles seen from within, and levelled down before launching.

Traditions of bygone Dockyards naturally survived, and gave rise to controversy. Marianne was always in dread of some painful reminder of the past during ship-building. But it kept the children quiet; so, though she had not seen the whole of the paper, owing to the difficulty of analyzing that Debate, she conceded it to the Contractors.

Now, a practice obtained between them quite at variance with the care and foresight usually shown in the placing of new ships on the stocks. If in any of the Government Dockyards it is common for the actual length of a ship to remain an open question until the moment of construction, it should surely be made the subject of a question in Parliament! Mumps and Chobbles, having obtained the paper, differed about the length of the first hull to be put in hand. Chobbles preferred a normal full sheet, alleging that vessels built of two sheets were only just seaworthy, owing to weakness of the backbone. Mumps was ambitious, advocating a ship of huge length, made with two full sheets. Chobbles opposed this scheme on the ground that, if pushed, such a vessel would collapse, or go scrunch. Mumps, however, had set her heart on it.

"Papa thaid it wouldn't go scrunch--not if we sticked it over in the middle--not if we pulled bofe the edges across--not if we doo'd like viss." Mumps ended an imperfect description with a practical demonstration of how the vessel might be strengthened in the middle if some of the length were sacrificed. "Overlap" was the word she wanted.

"Then we must have wafers," said Chobbles. Because otherwise, you see, the ship might come in half, and founder--who knows?--with all on board.

"You may have wafers if you won't quarrel," said the mother of the shipwrights. And wafers being obtained from her writing-desk, a threat of violence from Mumps was withdrawn, and overlooked.

Now it so chanced that, the newspaper being large and difficult to control, Chobbles, as principal, gave instructions to Mumps to hold the two sheets the long ship was to be made from as directed, while she herself stuck the two together, cautiously advancing across the paper on her knees. A more mature shipwright would have wafered the two corners first, and distributed the remaining wafers over the space between, so as to make the most of them. As it turned out, Mumps shifted her corner while Chobbles was yet half-way, and when Chobbles completed, dismay ensued. For the paper didn't lie straight, and all the wafers were used up. Words followed, and recriminations. Mumps maintained that she had held on to her corner loyally, unwaveringly; Chobbles that she could not have done so, because she herself had selected a passage in large type as the point Mumps was to remain faithful to. She was in a position to show that if her little sister had adhered to her instructions, the accident would not have happened.

"What are those children fighting about?" said their Grandmamma, who had fallen asleep--had been snoring, in fact--and who waked suddenly. "It all comes, Marianne, of your letting them play on Sunday afternoon. When I was a child I should have been writing out the sermon, and well whipped if I couldn't recollect it...." And so forth.

"What's all that noise about, children?" said their mother. "If you can't make less I shall ring for Martha to take you back to the nursery. Be quieter!"

Chobbles plunged straight into indictment, Mumps into justification. "I said, 'Hold the corner to Motor Car,' and Mumps didn't."... "I did held it to Motor Car, and never leaved it loose one minute."... "You did not hold it to Motor Car, or it would be up against Motor Car now."... "Be-because you shov-oveled it all crooked, and it wors your fault and it worsn't my fault" ... and more to the same effect, came mixed with heart-broken lamentations over the ruin of the great ship's chances; for all the wafers but two were licked and used, and the wobble of the raw material was too disheartening for any attempt to be made to rectify it.

"It just serves you right for quarrelling about it," said Grandmamma savagely, taking a mean advantage of the difficulties youth has in convicting maturity of defective reasoning. "And it serves you right, Marianne, for letting the children have the horrible things at all." She went on to point out that all the benefit of Afternoon Service was lost if contact with such profanities was permitted afterwards.

Meanwhile Marianne, painfully conscious that in these days she could not say, as of old, "What would your father say if he heard you quarrel like that?"--for fear of complications--went to the children, still at daggers drawn over the newspaper on the floor, to make an official investigation of the facts.

Did not the story note, a page ago, that she had altogether missed a sheet of the paper? She had, and it was an important one; the one containing the very Latest Intelligence and Stop-the-press News. And the words "Motor Car," chosen by Chobbles as a finger-guide for her small sister, formed part of the following piece of Latest Intelligence:--"Fatal Motor-Car Accident.--An accident, which has already caused one death, and which it is feared may have other fatal results, occurred yesterday morning at Royd, in Rankshire, close to the seat of Sir Murgatroyd Arkroyd, Bart., some years since Member for the County. The car, the property of Lord Felixthorpe, Sir Murgatroyd's son-in-law, was turning a sharp corner near the picturesque and interesting spot known as 'The Abbey Well,' when the deceased, a man known as 'Blind Jim,' stepped incautiously into the middle of the road, so suddenly that the promptest action of the chauffeur in his application of the brake could not avert a catastrophe. Unfortunately, as the car swerved, one of its occupants, a gentleman whose name had not transpired at the moment of writing, rose to his feet in his apprehension that a mishap was impending, and was thrown violently into the road, falling on his head. He was conveyed to Royd Hall insensible, but we understand that hopes are confidently entertained of his recovery. We are glad to be able to add that the lady who was the other occupant of the car, Miss Judith Arkroyd, the eldest daughter of Sir Murgatroyd, had the good fortune to sustain no injury beyond the inevitable shock attendant on so tragic an occurrence." Jim's death was rather taken for granted in this paragraph; no doubt the wire on which it was founded had felt the greater importance of the motorists. No one ever knew who sent it. In such cases, no one ever does.

The overlap amidships just hid all but the first three lines; and when Marianne examined it, with a view to remedying the miscarriage, she attached no more importance to "Fatal Motor Accident," in large capitals, than to any other mishaps the newspaper world gets killed in. There are always accidents! But in the course of a laborious detachment of the last two or three wafers, to be employed in reconstruction if gummy enough, the words "Royd in Rankshire" were uncovered, and caught her eye.

"Stop, children!--don't fuss and worry. I want to read this.... Royd Hall in Rankshire."... The last words were said to herself in relief of thought, not as information for the children, who didn't matter.

"What's that about Royd in Rankshire?" Grandmamma waked suddenly, and put a good deal of side on her snarl, provisionally, not knowing how much acrimony might turn out to be needed.

"Wait till I've read it, and I'll tell you."

"Oh, don't tell me if you don't like. It's no concern of mine." Nevertheless, Marianne, after reading through the paragraph to herself--during which the old lady affected perusal of a sermon--took her anxiety to hear for granted, and read it through aloud. It met with the comment:

"I suppose that's what you grunted at, the first time?"

"Suppose what's what I grunted at ... oh! 'had the good fortune to sustain no injury,' do you mean? Well, Grandmamma, I suppose you wouldn't expect me to cry my eyes out if...."

"If 'handsome Judith' got her beauty spoiled--is that it?"

"I shouldn't cry my eyes out. I wonder who her other gentleman was, in the car! I'm glad it wasn't Titus, at any rate."

"How do you know?"

"Oh, mamma, how can you be such a fool, when Bob heard from his father only yesterday, at that place in Derbyshire; he got the letter this morning." Bob had been at Broadstairs a week at this date, and, in pursuance of a policy of avoiding his grandmother on Sundays, when she was liable to malignant forms of piety, had started early in the day to walk to Canterbury--his beloved Tillotson was staying there with an ecclesiastical relative--where he would stop the night, and whence he would walk back next day, accompanied probably by Tillotson. Well!--it was only eighteen miles!

Marianne was as sure that her husband was safe, leagues away from Royd Hall, yesterday morning, as she was that she had packed off Bob with sandwiches and cake after an early breakfast twelve hours ago, and that he and Tillotson were enjoying Choral Services and Purple Emperors alternately to their hearts' content. She was satisfied--not reasonably; but then, it was comfortable to be unreasonable--that he had posted the letter as soon as it was written; and as it reached on Sunday, it was posted on Saturday. What could be clearer?

She was so comfortable about it that she re-read the paragraph once or twice, not quite without a kindling hope that Miss Arkroyd's motoring about with a gentleman unnamed might "mean something"--mean something, that is, that would end the chapter of Titus's admiration for, or "connection with," Miss Arkroyd. It didn't matter which you called it.

One thing was clear enough. The injured man was a stranger to the purveyor of the news; not the owner of the car, just mentioned, nor any other of the habitués of Royd Hall, all of whom would be well known in the neighbourhood. Oh yes!--that was all right. She hoped, however, that if he was an aspirant to Miss Arkroyd's hand, he was not seriously damaged, so as to diminish his probabilities of success. As for "Blind Jim," she was sorry for him, with a general feeling that "handsome Judith" was responsible for his mishap, but without any definite recollection of him. She may never have heard him mentioned at all, for Mrs. Steptoe was not communicative about her brother; and although Challis had certainly made Lizarann's acquaintance before Marianne left her home, it was only on that last day of his abruptly terminated visit to Royd. And that was all ancient history by now.

She resumed the reconstruction question quite at ease in her mind; if anything, with a sense of something not unpleasant having happened. Further search yielded two or three more wafers, and the ship was completed and launched. But the resistance, to shearing-force, of the bolts that held the fore and aft parts together had not been properly calculated. A dissension between the owners led to an attempt to drag her two ways at once, and--to use very un-nautical language--she gave at the wafers. Mumps, seized with despair, was told that if she roared and stamped, she shouldn't be allowed to make ships at all; and her mother, to show that she was in earnest, picked up the shattered vessel, and proceeded to re-embody it as the Sunday paper. But a something caught her eye, and she read again.

A moment after Grandmamma, rousing herself wrathfully, exclaimed, "What is all this horrible noise about? Those children had better go upstairs. I tell you they shall go, Marianne; I won't have the noise any longer!" and began pulling the bell to summon Martha, the nurse. She must have taken a sound that came from her daughter for protest or remonstrance; for she stormed on, heedless that the voice of the two children had changed from mere unruliness to terror. "It's no use your saying 'yow,' because I tell you I won't have it. On Sunday afternoon, too!... What?" She turned furiously, but her fury gave place to alarm as she caught sight of her daughter, ashy white, gasping to speak, but speechless; clutching with one hand the paper that had been the ship, pointing to something in it with the other.

Then Marianne found a voice, or a voice she hardly knew as her own, to cry out chokingly, "Oh, Titus, Titus!--dying!" She relinquished the paper to her mother, saying, "Oh yes--here!--oh, here! Look, look! ..." still pointing, and then covering her eyes, with a cry of despair: "He is dying--dying! Oh, children, children, your father will die, and I shall not be beside him!"

"You fool!" said the old lady. "Don't go on like a mad thing. Before the children!" She was scared, but it must be admitted she showed discipline. "You might at least be quiet while I read it.... No!--Wait, Martha!... can't you see? ... you servants never can see...." She took the paper to the window--for the light was failing--and read to herself. After a minute, she said abruptly, "Ho!" and then sotto voce, "He'll die in her arms, at any rate." And then this venerable woman--let us hope with an affectation of indifference to the fate of her son-in-law, contrived something nearly approaching a snigger as an accompaniment to the remark, aloud, "He won't die! You needn't fret yourself. Handsome Judith will see that he's properly doctored up." Leniency might have supposed this an attempt to strengthen her daughter against her trouble by appealing to her resentment. If so, it was an impolitic one. For Marianne, apparently as a response, said decisively, "I shall go to him at once," and seemed to mean it.

"Don't be an idiot! You can't pay for your ticket. You haven't any money, and I shan't give you any." But it seemed that Marianne had money, so this attempt to hinder her departure only hastened it. She was not one to submit to coercion tamely. To be brief, she put a few necessaries in a bag, hugged her children well, consoling them as best she could, begged that the news should be kept from Bob till more was known--for this Marianne, with all her faults, had a strong leaven of family affection--and caught the quick train for London.

She would have travelled all night had there been a train. As it was, she was up very early at the Hotel, got a poor breakfast, and left Euston by the first express, before eight o'clock struck. Would Titus be alive on her arrival?

For the item of "Stop-the-press News" that had caught her eye, and thrown a light on the paragraph she had just read, ran as follows: "Name of gentleman thrown from motor-car yesterday morning at Royd, Sir Alfred Challis, well-known author and playwright; condition precarious, but not despaired of."

In the greatest stress of trouble absurd thoughts hang about like imps, and vex one with their insignificance. All through that five hours' rail Marianne was plagued with the question:--Suppose those people chose to address her as "Lady Challis," what should she do?

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Chapter LI

HOW CHALLIS CAME TO, AND SPOKE. BUT HE ASKED FOR MARIANNE, AND DIDN'T KNOW JUDITH FROM ADAM. HOW THE LATTER PROMISED TO TELL HER FATHER. THE WORLD'S GUESSES, MEANWHILE. HOW THE DUCHESS SAID WHAT THE POINT WAS, AND CHALLIS RELAPSED

It was on a Saturday, the twenty-fourth of August, that Alfred Challis met with his mishap, at half-past nine in the morning. It was not till eight o'clock on Monday that he began to regain consciousness, very slowly, having been nearly forty-eight hours speechless, and seemingly insensible.

Experience tends to show that in most cases of recovery from coma, whether the cause be traumatic or otherwise, the first memories that present themselves are those of the last events of which the patient has been conscious. With Challis it was otherwise. During his stupor he had forgotten, apparently, all about his accident--about what led to it--about Royd Hall, his infatuation for Judith, his wife's desertion. Nothing of the story of the past year-and-a-half was left when he first became aware that he was in a strange room, lying on luxurious pillows, with a great deal of bandage on his head and a great deal of pain inside it. What must seem strangest of all was that he had forgotten Judith herself!

For Judith, whose communications with her family will be easiest explained later, had been roused before her usual calling-time by her little maid, Cintilla, who announced joyously that if Judith pleased, miss, Sir Alfred Challis had spoken. "Did he ask for me?" said the young lady. But Cintilla couldn't say. The nurse didn't hear words. A nurse had been got from Grime on the Saturday afternoon.

"Ask the nurse not to talk to anyone else till I can come," said Judith. Then she scrambled into some clothes and a peignoir, and went straight to his bedside.

"My little Cintilla said Sir Alfred Challis had spoken, Miss O'Connor, but that you couldn't make out what he said?"

"Oh yes--I'm quite sure he spoke. But I shouldn't like to swear to the words, Miss Arkroyd."

"But short of swearing to them ... you've an impression?"

"Yes--but I think it must have been a mistaken one. I thought what he said was 'Polly Anne.'... Perhaps there's someone?..."

The story has more than once spoken of Judith Arkroyd's splendid nerve and powers of self-control--at least, against all moral disturbing forces. On this occasion the perfect self-possession with which she said, "Oh yes!--he was speaking of his wife," would have done credit to Julius Cæsar or Napoleon.

The nurse showed by a perfectly natural question her absolute unsuspicion of a fox under the cloak. "Had Lady Challis far to come?" For she must have been sent for--that saw itself.

"We don't know--I mean, we don't know where Lady Challis is. When Sir Alfred comes to himself, he will tell us.... Is he not speaking again?..." Yes, he was. Both listened. Judith was reflective a moment over what to do; then said: "Would you kindly knock at my father's door, and say we think Sir Alfred is coming to himself? Or tell James to tell him." The nurse thinks to herself: "More obvious, surely, for this young lady to hunt up her father, and leave the patient to me!" But Judith, seeing hesitation, suggests a motive. When Sir Alfred opens his eyes he may be alarmed to find himself alone with a professional nurse. Also, Judith is always authoritative.

She seemed half-frightened of the patient, left alone with him. Would not you, woman, who are reading this, have taken the hand of the man if you loved him? Did Judith love him? She did not take his hand. Do you find her inexplicable? She was not really so; it is only the story's want of skill that makes her seem so. Then, think of the conflict of feeling and motive under her circumstances.... However, let that wait!

Perhaps it was as well that she did not take his hand. Possibly what she did and said was safest, all things considered. She remained standing, immovable as a statue, by the bedside, and when his eyes opened and turned to her, more in inquiry than astonishment or alarm, said simply, "Well?" and waited for speech to come from him.

"Are you real?" said Challis. Her white, scared look and seeming shrinking from him grew more marked. His words, creepy and uncanny all the more that their speaker uttered them so equably, made her fear his reason had given way. Even those who have loved one demented will shrink from his insanity. But she kept her self-command, and replied with a voice under control:

"Scroop--do you not know me? I am Judith."

"Judith?"

"Yes--Judith Arkroyd. Do you not remember?"

"Judith Arkroyd--yes--a--oh yes!" There was an amiable air about him of a wish to be civil--an evasive acquiescence he might have shown to an attractive lady he had met in Society, and now met again and took the word of for her identity. He would talk a little, and something in the conversation would soon remind him whom he was speaking to. That sort of thing! His provisional pretence of recognition was more convincing a thousand times of his forgetfulness than any amount of denial of it would have been.

What could Judith do? Attack the position at once? Say to him: "Try to think! Try to recall all our love-passages of this year past! Remember the little garden in the moonlight, and your arms you found it so hard to restrain within the rules of good-breeding! Remember your mad, hot outburst, and your flight from an entichement you found insupportable; your quarrel with your wife; your troth-plight and mine; the tension of that Bill question. And last and most, or worst, that automobile and the man ahead, already as good as slain! Think of any of these things, and surely you will remember that this is I, Judith, that was to have been your wife!" All that this man must have forgotten, to forget her, rushed through Judith's mind, to take form in words should she nerve herself to utter it, or any choice from it. But the next thing he said clashed so ruthlessly with the last of her thought that speech on those lines was made hopeless.

"My head aches so confoundedly that I feel quite an idiot, and can't think of anything. But I can see one thing--someone is being very kind to me. I think if my wife were to come she would be able to thank you for me. Is she not here? Can she not be got? My wife Polly Anne?"

Yes--the barrier of his utter lack of recognition could not be surmounted yet, if ever. She must accept the rôle of a stranger; for now, certainly--perhaps for good. Luckily, he had closed his eyes as his voice grew fainter with his effort, and died out on his last word. She fought bravely against the tremulousness of her own to say: "We do not know where to send to her. Can you tell us?"

"Yes--but don't frighten her. Send it as from me. Say I have had a slight accident--that is it, I suppose?..."

"Yes, you have had an accident--a fall."

"... And am doing perfectly well. Mind you say that!"

"Oh yes--that shall be worded all right. But where are we to send?"

"Number eighty-three--I think it's number eighty-three--Great Coram Street." Again his great effort to speak overcame him; and, though he got through the last words plainly, they ended in a groan. Then Judith heard her father coming, and the nurse, and left the room to meet him. The nurse passed on into the room, but Sir Murgatroyd stopped to speak with his daughter. He looked ill and harassed, and his age was visible on him. The last two days had tried him, no doubt!

"They say Sir Alfred has spoken. Is that so?"

"Yes--he has been speaking to me. But, oh--papa--papa!..." It stopped him dead to hear the distress in her voice.

"Yes, dear child, what? Tell me--tell me all!..." It took her a moment to choke down a sob, and then it came.

"He does not know who I am--he does not know me." There is such a thing as a whisper, as well as a cry, of pain, and Judith's strong resolve of self-control curbed her last words down to one. Her father, as he took her in his arms, felt how she was trembling with the shock of her upset. She had borne the effects of the motor accident better than this.

The old gentleman kissed her tenderly, calling her by an old pet name he sometimes used. "Dear girl, dear Jujube," said he. "I am afraid you loved this man."

She seemed to recoil from this placing of the fact on record. "That is all over now," said she stonily. "But you are a dear good papa"; and kissed him in return affectionately. He seemed relieved, and said: "But now you will tell me all about it." She replied: "I will. All!" And then her mother came, in haste, and all went together into Challis's room. But previous exertions had told upon the patient, and he was equal to no more than a few broken words of thanks, recognizing no one, but somehow conscious that he was being hospitably cared for, and that his visitors were his hosts.

* * * * *

Up to this time Judith's family had been kept in the dark about the important fact in the story of the accident--the reason why Judith and Challis were in the motor-car at all. Each may have had his or her surmise as to the object of their rendezvous and sudden departure, but they had not conversed openly about it, so far. Sibyl had certainly said to her husband in confidence, at an hour when she supposed all the rest of the house asleep: "You'll see that I'm right, Frank! It was an elopement, pre-arranged. Fancy their meeting by accident--parcel of nonsense!" To which her husband, who was going to sleep, and not in his usual linguistic form, had replied: "Oh, gammon, Sib!" Sibyl had then adduced reasons, such as that Challis could not have been on his way to the Rectory out there near the Park Gate; that the Duchess at least knew nothing of any appointment for Judith to come to the Castle at an hour which, according to her Grace, was "almost yesterday"; and that, most of all, M. Rossier had said Sir Alfred had a map in his pocket. What did Sir Alfred want with a map unless they were going a long distance? But his Lordship was not listening, and her Ladyship convicted him of it, and then both their ships went to sleep.

All this makes one see Judith, and how each member of her family, without being exactly afraid of her, left the elucidation of the mystery to the others. But behind a natural reluctance to belling the cat--though the metaphor is no doubt exaggerated--lay the feeling that the truth might work out as tragedy; the facts might contain the germs of heart-break. Silence certainly had its recommendations. Besides, explanation was inevitable in the end; so why analyze and probe now, with the uncertainty still hanging over us whether this gentleman would live or die; and the other uncertainty as to whether the inquest to-morrow would absolve the motor-car, or find that poor Jim had been the victim of its gross carelessness? Its owner was feeling bound to make a fight for its chauffeur, but he had told M. Rossier his mind as plainly as his French would permit.

As for poor Jim's death, there was no lack of perfectly honest and heart-felt sorrow for the tragical disaster on the part of any member of the family, except Judith. She said nothing, certainly; but surely it was a case in which a stony silence was ungraceful? However, her mother and sister let her go her own way. She was Judith!--and would be so to the end of the chapter.

Meanwhile it was a serious grief to the Baronet and Lord Felixthorpe, shared to a great extent by their respective wives, that poor Jim had left no family that would have been open to endowment or adoption. When Athelstan Taylor, arriving late on Saturday evening with Mr. Brownrigg, who had remained on at the Rectory, brought the full particulars of Jim's death, he had also the unpleasant task of crushing out all the plans Sir Murgatroyd and his wife were forming for Lizarann's benefit. They had all but adopted her in anticipation; indeed, a sort of competition for possession of the child had arisen between them and their son-in-law. But, alas!--poor little Lizarann, or the shell she had left, lay dead in the sound of the sea that was to have done her so much good. It was a cruel disappointment to Sir Murgatroyd.

The Rector's surmises, which he kept to himself, about the true story of the motor-car and Challis's meeting with Judith, were based on fuller information than the Baronet's. He was quite satisfied in his own mind that the pair had resolved to anticipate the retrospective operation of the measure before Parliament by constituting themselves legally man and wife, and making its action in their case impossible. He knew Challis's disposition was towards taking this step; and while he was far from having the heart to say, "Serve him right!" of the man who, when he went up to his bedside and touched him and spoke to him, lay dead and irresponsive--perhaps never to speak again--still, he could not but feel that in that man's place he would soonest have taken his chance of some possible reasonable operation of Law later on. Failing which he would--so he thought--have borne his lot courageously as in any other case where Duty bars the road that Inclination beckons us to take. But, then, how about that awkward thought--what right would he have had to prescribe his own high moralities to a woman whose sole crime would have been that she loved him? "Judge not, that ye be not judged," said he to himself, as he turned from the impassive figure on the bed. You see, he had never been under fire on that battle-field! But, whatever he thought, he said not a word of it to the Baronet or the Family, and he purposely avoided speech apart with Judith. He looked forward, by preference, to hearing the first explanation from Challis himself.

The doctor came and went--saw no danger--anticipated early return to consciousness--would not oppose Sir Murgatroyd wiring for Sir Rhyscombe Edison, if he thought it necessary; but he did not see, neither did a colleague, summoned from Grime to consult, what Sir Rhyscombe could say more than "Wait with patience!" Apparently there was no depression of the cranium, and certainly there was no fracture. Still, it was all for their interest that Sir Rhyscombe should come; the less responsibility for himself and Dr. Shaw Cox, the better for them! Sir Murgatroyd consented to let the wire he had written stand over till next day, though he nearly went back on his word when his wife said: "Just consider!--a two hundred pound fee!" As far as that went, he would have wired for the whole College of Surgeons if he had thought it his duty, and taken his chance of the workhouse.

Mr. Brownrigg the Grauboschite found his visit very different from what he had anticipated; and, indeed, felt himself very much de trop. He had been in the habit of regarding places like Royd Hall from their guest-recipient point of view--a kind of gratuitous taverns, or hydropathic establishments, rather, of a refined sort; where, provided always that he behaved sweetly, and tipped the servants liberally, all the currents of Life were to run smooth, and troubles be unknown. But this sudden inroad of Death and Misadventure had changed all that; and while he had to acknowledge to himself that his affection for his hosts had grown much greater since they became, as it were, human as well as merely opulent and amiable, he could not shut his eyes to the fact that the character of his visit had completely changed. Still less could he shut his eyes to that other fact--that he really wasn't wanted. Least of all when he found grounds for suspecting that his hostess was writing to put off other guests! He mooted the suggestion, with all due round-abouting, that he should return to his rooms at Cambridge to-morrow, and come another time.

But he was so sorry for himself that the Rector saw it, and good-naturedly suggested to Mr. Brownrigg that he should pay him a visit at the Rectory for a day or two before going home. Lady Murgatroyd had only postponed her house-party for a few days, just till all these troubles should blow over; and then, who knew but what Sir Alfred Challis would at least be well enough to be moved before the end of the week? Mr. Brownrigg accepted the invitation con amore.

And then, throughout a very cheerless and oppressed Sunday, slightly alleviated by callers, things went on without change. Judith scarcely left her room, and was reticent. Very little allusion was made to yesterday's events by the other members of the family in conversation with one another. It rarely went beyond an inquiry whether Challis had shown any sign of consciousness. None of the family appeared at Church--a very rare event in the annals of Royd.

Towards Judith the attitude of her mother and sister was a perfectly indescribable compromise between toleration and exasperation, good-will towards a blood relation in difficulties, and condemnation without benefit of clergy, all kept in abeyance pending illumination. Probably the freest speech on the matter was Lady Arkroyd's to the Duchess, when the latter, having been told all the facts in full, asked in her brief, incisive way--which none but a Duchess could have resorted to without seeming questionable form, dear!--"What were they up to, Therèse? That's the point!" and her ladyship replied: "Oh, of course we all know perfectly well, Thyringia. Only nobody's to say anything. They were going to take the wind out of the sails of this precious new bit of legislation by going through a ceremony, at any rate...."

"I see. A honeymoon under protest. I suppose Judith would have come back here and said nothing about it?"

"My dear, I really won't undertake to say what Judith would or wouldn't have done. She would have had to come back for her things, anyhow!"

Thyringia looked amused. Perhaps she was canvassing in her mind the sorry plight of a thingless bride. Many complications would suggest themselves to the mind of a Duchess of experience. "Not so much as a tooth-brush, poor girl!" said she. "However, she could have bought that at any chemist's shop. What are you going to do?"

"Why should we do anything? If that Bill passes...."

"My dear, it was through Committee in the Lords on Friday afternoon. The Bishop will be black in the face with rage. I shall see him in a day or two, and be able to twit him. Poor Dr. Barham!... But I don't see that there can be any marrying now--not till this Sir Alfred gets a divorce.... Can he?"

"No; he has the most exasperating wife. She is his wife now, or will be on Tuesday, if Murgatroyd is right! And she's quite sans reproche, as I understand. Isn't it a nuisance?"

"Do you want Judith to marry this man, Therèse?"

"My dear!--is it likely? But if the girl has set her heart on him, it is a nuisance to have him married to a woman who won't commit anything and make it possible...."

"Couldn't he force her to divorce him by...?"

"By committing something himself? Oh no!--she's too sharp for that. Of course, she wants to pay them out, and make it all as uncomfortable as possible. I'm sorry for Judith, but I must say it's a great deal her own fault. Oh dear!--why cannot people be ordinary and reasonable? Hush!--there she is...."

At the sound of an identifying skirt-rustle descending the stairs, the Duchess dropped her voice to say reflectively: "Yes--why can't the woman misbehave herself, and be hanged to her?" She was silent by the time the rustle reached the door. It was Judith, self-possessed, but pallid, who met a cautious half-approach to the burning subject of the day with, "Now do, dear Duchess, be a good woman, and don't ask me questions now. I'm coming over to-morrow, and I'll tell you all about it.... No, really, I can't tell you about it now, if I try; it only makes my head go round."

On which her Grace, telegraphed to aside by slightly raised eyebrows and an almost unperceptible shrug of Lady Arkroyd's shoulders, that seemed to mean, "You see?--Judith all over. I told you!" merged inquiry in mere commiseration. Oh no--she wasn't going to catechize and be odious. Poor child! How ill she was looking! And no wonder! It was all so dreadful. But, at any rate, she, Judith, was not to blame for this terrible mishap. No one would ever believe that!

"I'm not so sure even of that myself," said the young lady wearily. And the Duchess made a mental note that this girl really looked her loveliest in trouble. But this girl did not intend to s'appuyer on the topic. She had only come in just to say a word of greeting, and that she would come over to Thanes to-morrow. And now she must go and lie down, for her head was simply splitting. No; she knew Mr. Taylor was in the next room with the others, but she couldn't stay to talk even to him. Her mother must make her apologies. For this was in what was regarded as the confidential room of the house--the little cabinet off the first staircase landing, with the suite of buhl furniture that belonged to Cardinal Richelieu, or somebody; and the cinquecento Milanese armour, made for Galeazzo Sforza, who was a Monster of Iniquity. It was always spoken of as "the mezzanina room."

This may be enough to make it understood how a complete revelation of the circumstances preceding the accident was still to be made, two days after its occurrence; although pretty shrewd guesses of their general nature were afloat. It was with a sense of relief that Sir Murgatroyd said to his wife, as they came away from Challis's side, satisfied that, for the present at least, his revived powers of speech had lapsed, "Judith has promised to tell me the whole." And it was with a sense of relief that her mother heard him. For the doubt of what story might be still to come was more painful than any probable certainty would have been.

* * * * *

Down in the village and round the Abbey Well, and round Mrs. Fox's cottage and its tenant lying dead, survivors of the Feudal System hung about in groups, and spoke their pristine mother-tongue, an institution that has not been Americanized in Royd, so far. If that tenant's subtenant, the victim or bénéficiare of a recent writ of ejectment, was also hanging about, unseen owing to the Nature of Things, he must have lamented the pain he was giving, and the trouble his survivors were having with his residuum. Our interpretation of Jim Coupland's character favours that view, granting the needful assumptions. But, of course, he may have been extinct, whatever that means. Poor Jim!

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Chapter LII

OF JUDITH'S STATE OF MIND, AND HOW SHE TOLD HER FATHER, BUT DID NOT IMPRESS HIM AS HE WOULD HAVE WISHED. WHO KNOWS WHAT JUDITH WAS? OF A MYSTERIOUS VISITOR TO THE HALL. HOW NO ONE RECOGNIZED MARIANNE. IS MY HUSBAND DYING? A SCENE ON THE BIG STAIRCASE, AND HOW TWO TOFFS WERE FAR FROM ODIOUS. HOW THE NURSE RECOGNIZED ATHELSTAN TAYLOR. HOW JUDITH SAID GOOD-BYE TO CHALLIS. HOW IT CAME OUT WHO MR. KEITH HORNE'S FRIEND WAS

A sleepless night had preceded that interview between Judith and Challis, and she was not at her best when his wandering speech and cold unrecognition struck a chill to her soul. When a like event occurs--and it does chance, now and again--between folk who have been linked together for a lifetime, and the uninjured survivor, awaiting with the return of consciousness the accents and the look of the affection of a few hours ago, is repelled by the insensate stare of eyes that only see a stranger, the unimpassioned sound of a voice from which all tenderness has vanished, even then the trial is a hard one. But the memory of the past years is too strong to allow belief that the thing will last--it is dismissed as a passing nightmare, as the nurse by the bedside of fever dismisses the wanderings of delirium. It will last its time, and pass away and be forgotten.

A cool judgment and more experience might have told the girl to bear her soul in patience; to treat the wanderings of a brain shaken as Challis's had been as mere sleep-waking. But even had her self-possession been at its best, she had no long-past years of love to look back to, to give her confidence in its return with a returning calm of health. And not only this, but these same wandering words of his had shown how full his soul still was of the past in which she had no share. She had been allowed a peep into her lover's heart, and had felt the force of another love's preoccupation of it. If only his utterances had been stark rambling, mere Tom-of-Bedlam incoherence! But the worst of it was, their outward form was clothed in such a terrible sanity.

There was one thing in it that hit very hard--had a special sting of its own. Judith knew perfectly well about Challis's bygones. He had taken her into his confidence about the humble home of the days of his obscurity. His half-humorous reviews of his past had shown her plainly how little hold his first wife Kate--the "Ziz" of his novel--had ever had upon him. He had evidently wedded the wrong sister first. He spoke of Bob's mother with affection, certainly, but it was an affection that was artificial and perfunctory, whereas, even if he had never been passionately in love with Polly Anne--if no volcanic eruption had ever raged on account of this young person, whom Judith would have classed as an insignificant puss--still, that Deceased Wife's Sister seemed to have generated something that was at least a very good working substitute for a grande passion. What was the worth of all his protestations to her, Judith, if this memory of the days of Great Coram Street was to be the first resurrection of his mind from its temporary death?

But where was the use of answering the question now? Or any question at all, for that matter? Was not the last chance gone of passing the barrier that held them apart? Well--she had kept her share of the compact. "I am ready, if it can be arranged," she had said. And she had complied with every arrangement, stipulating only that the wedding was to be a mere legal precaution--a formal bar to the creation of a new obstacle by a retrospective mood of the Lords and Commons. It would keep the position unaltered; and that was only fair-play, surely! But now all was changed. She had always been alive to the fact that Marianne in esse, legally warranted in the appropriation of her husband's children, and canonically warranted in her paroxysm of sensitiveness to consanguinity, was a very different force to reckon with from Marianne in posse, sained and assoilzied by an Act of Parliament.

Did she, we may wonder, ask herself the question: If it were possible, even at this eleventh hour, to get that knot officially tied, and be ready to laugh at the "retrospective action" of the measure that would be the Law of the Land in forty-eight hours, would she be ready to jump at the opportunity? Or, was she not rather relieved at the turn things had taken? However, there was this to be considered:--if the motor accident had not happened, and the wedding had come off, she would never have had to face that blank stare of oblivion, and Great Coram Street! Some women won't marry a widower lest too many tender memories should still be treasured in some secret corner of his heart. That is unreasonable; because the source of them is supposed to be underground, or in Heaven, or in Purgatory, according to the façon-de-parler of the moment. But ... Great Coram Street! And the Deceased Wife's Sister still undeceased, and to be legalized retrospectively on Wednesday! Be it noted, though, that this is only conjecture! The story has no warrant for saying that any such thought crossed Judith's mind.

She made a clean breast of the whole matter to her father. She told him all about that last interview of hers with Challis at Trout Bend three or four weeks since; and of the arrangement they had made, and confirmed by subsequent correspondence. Challis was to reside for fifteen days at some place far enough from his or her ordinary residence to insure practical secrecy, where there was a parish-priest qualified to receive his affidavit and issue an ordinary marriage-licence. "I forget what he called him," said Judith. "Something like Harrogate." No doubt it was "surrogate." If in Challis's judgment the passing of the Bill should be put beyond reasonable doubt, he was at once to procure this licence, and make every necessary arrangement, keeping her fully informed. He had at first intended to procure a special licence, but had been deterred by someone telling him that such a licence might be refused, or at least delayed. He preferred the idea of dealing with a country parson with whom he could make acquaintance, and to whose local charities he could subscribe liberally. Besides, he could mesmerize that parson. You can't mesmerize Doctor's Commons.

The young lady then narrated, almost more graphically than seemed quite canny under her circumstances, her reception of a telegram the previous evening, fixing the time and place of their meeting in accordance with the terms of a letter of her own, which had told how her brother-in-law had placed the automobile at her disposal. She described the meeting at the Park Gate, minus its salutations; the rapid spin along the mile of road, till they reached the curve; Challis's appeal to the chauffeur for caution, and M. Rossier's contemptuous disregard; the sudden appearance of Jim as the car whirled round the corner; and how Challis, springing to his feet, was shot straight into the road at the very moment when she knew well, although her eyes had left him, that Jim was under the wheels; and then her own dazed condition, that almost grew to stupor as she rode back; and her arrival at home, when her mother, brought out by Elphinstone, simply ran back terrified. The Baronet suspected a shade of exaggeration here, and headed off an indictment of his wife for panic.

"But why the motor-car at all?" said he.

"We turned it all over," said the young lady, "and could see no other way. The railway was out of the question...."

"Why?"

"Well--picture me to yourself, meeting a swarm of locals on the platform at Furnival. And fancy my asking for the carriage! Where should I have said I was going? You've no idea, papa dear, what a poor liar I am! Not because I'm truthful, but because I'm stupid. Anyhow, we had taken the trains for granted; and when it came to Bradshaw, we found that to get to this obscure place and back would mean eight hours. And what was worst was that if there had been any accident or delay I should have been stranded till next day--at the Hare and Hounds I believe it would have been, as a matter of fact--and that wouldn't have suited me at all...."

"Yes--yes--you were quite right. How long was it to take with the motor?"

"Within five hours, all told. An hour and three-quarters of car each way. If all had gone well...."

"Why did Sir Alfred Challis come to meet you?"

Judith didn't seem over-clear on this point. "He made believe," she said, "that he thought we should lose the way. But I don't believe that was it. I believe the fun of the ride had more to do with it than anything."

The Baronet seemed a little froissé by something in his daughter's tone. "It has been a sorry piece of fun for him," said he. "And for you, too, my girl." For he was almost vexed with himself for allowing the inception of a thought of condemnation. See how much she must have suffered, this fool of a daughter of his!

"Don't pity me!" said she. "But you are a dear, good papa always." There was something in this of her old tone of contrasting her experience with his simplicity. This belief in his pastoral character was a tradition in the family.

Perhaps it was a part of this character that made him feel that a blank was being left in their conversation that at least called for a passing word to fill it in. "This poor fellow's death ..." he began, taking for granted that Jim Coupland's share in the tragedy would be as prominent in his daughter's mind as his own. But she stopped him with an exclamation of alarm as he hesitated.

"Why should he die?" she cried. "There is no chance of his death. See what the doctors said--both of them...."

He interrupted her. "I was not speaking of Sir Alfred. I was speaking of Jim Coupland--the blind man, who was killed--is it possible you do not know that he died?" For, to hear her speak, no one could have dreamed she knew of that sombre background to a sad day's work, the man lying dead near at hand.

"Jim Coupland!" she repeated; and the tone of her reply grated on her father, to whom the thought of Jim's death was an ever-present burden. Again she repeated, "Jim Coupland!" with a fuller stress on each syllable that all but seemed contempt. "Yes--but what is Jim Coupland ... compared to...?" Then she qualified her words: "Oh, well, of course, one feels all that I suppose one ought to feel, but...."

"What what?"

"But it's no use pretending...."

"My dear Judith, I don't understand."

"My dear papa, do you mean to say that if you were in my place.... However, it really is no use talking about it." Her manner was excited and resentful, till she suppressed it with an effort, and calmed down to say: "Suppose we don't talk about it!"

There was a symptom of indignation in her father's tone as he replied: "We shall gain nothing by talking at all, Judith, if I am right about your meaning. I may be wrong, my dear"--he softened rather--"but what you seem to me to mean, by the way you speak about this poor fellow's shocking death, is ... well!--in short, is, that you are indifferent to it."

"Is it so very surprising? Would you not think me a hypocrite if I were to profess to be heart-broken about this--this wretched blind cripple, who was the cause of it all?"

This took place in the garden, where the father and daughter had walked apart, to be alone, away from the house. Judith had really been as anxious to speak with him as he with her. But she was not in love with this turn in the conversation. As she stood with bitten lip and flashing eye in front of the wires of a cage containing a sulphur-crested cockatoo--for they were close to the aviary where she and Challis had talked about the parroquets--a hideous shriek from the bird caught her last words, and almost seemed a vindictive endorsement of their spirit.

Her father, to whom the death of the innocent man was a thing that threw all other disquiets into the shade, suppressed whatever he felt of resentment or disgust, and showed only wonderment. "My dear child," said he, "you are not yourself. If you were, you could not say such things. I can hardly believe that you realize that the man is dead when you speak so." He stopped a moment, puzzled. "I suppose, though, he must have been still alive when you last saw him?"

"Oh yes, he was shouting. But I knew he went under the wheel. I felt him." Her father shuddered, but she seemed calm.

"Did you not see him again?"

"No--that was the last I saw of him. I never looked for him.... Well!--I thought Sir Alfred Challis was killed."

The Baronet felt apologetic. "I see, my dear, of course! Yes--yes--that would be so. I suppose the poor fellow must have had life enough in him to get off the road ... only ... well!--I don't understand...."

"What doesn't my papa understand?" There is again the shade of the old family tradition of patronage in her voice. Disinclination to accept it in this case may have roughened her father's reply a little:

"I don't understand what Taylor said. I'm sure--yes, I'm sure!--he said he found him lying in the road. You must have passed him as you returned?"

"Very likely."

"Judith!" This was sudden remonstrance, almost anger. But it softened as it had done before. "Well--well--perhaps it was only natural ... of course, I am forgetting...."

"Perhaps what was only natural?... Oh dear!--well, of course I know what you mean--my not being able to go into hysterics over this man's death. The circumstances are what I believe are called touching, no doubt, but...."

The Baronet was flushed, and quite angry at this. "The circumstances are what are rightly called touching," he said. "Poor Jim Coupland was coming out to meet him--so I understood the Rector--in the full expectation that he was bringing that dear little girl of his back to him. And he was only bringing the news of her death.... What did you say?..." For Judith had muttered sotto voce that then it didn't matter. But she did not repeat it, saying only, "I said nothing."

Her father did not believe this, and the end of his sentence hung fire, he looking doubtful. So Judith repeated his last words, to start him fresh. "'He was only bringing the news of the little girl's death' ... you were saying?..."

"Yes!--the news of her death. And then this damnable motor-car of yours comes tearing round the corner, with its damned hooting, and he's under the wheels in a moment! I shall tell Frank I won't have the thing in the house again, once he's taken it away. It's simply a horror and an abomination...." And so on. He was in want of a safety-valve, and here it was. The fact was that Judith's apathy about poor Jim had made him feel thoroughly uncomfortable; it was so unlike his measure and conception of what his family ought to be.

As for Judith, she may have felt that sort of alarm at this impetuous utterance that a child will remain susceptible of in later years, who would laugh at any like explosion of a non-parent. It is an inheritance from the nursery. Impressed by her father's denunciation of the motor-car, or possibly thinking to herself, "No more scenes, for Heaven's sake!" she relaxed so far as to say, formally, "I'm sorry for the little girl." But she spoiled whatever there was of graceful in a grudging concession by adding, "Perhaps that will satisfy you?"

The old gentleman said nothing, but looked at her, puzzled and hurt at what he shrank from thinking her heartlessness; trying to concoct excuses for it that would make her seem less ungracious. For he loved this daughter of his, so much so that even now he felt proud of her rich beauty, none the worse for all her stress and trouble. Indeed, as she stood there, caressing the great white bird that had shrieked--she had taken it as she spoke from its cage, and was kissing its terrifying beak with tenderness--her black mass of hair against its yellow crest; her ivory-white skin against the driven snow of its feathers, each made whiter in its own way by yet another white, the soft folds of a creamy summer dress most late Augusts would have condemned; her beautiful hand in the sun, with the bird's black claw upon its jewels--all these might have said a word in arrest of judgment to a parent readier to disbelieve in his daughter than Sir Murgatroyd. No doubt they influenced him to think that he had succeeded in glossing over what he would have condemned as callousness in one further away from him. But she--as other father's daughters are--was his little girl of twenty years ago grown up. She did not really mean this heartlessness, thought he; it was a sort of parti pris--a parade, an affectation!

Was he right, after all? Is the story wrong in its estimate of her? Has it laid too much stress on the hard side of this girl's character--its vanity and love of power? Some moralist has said that no mortal should be called heartless as long as he or she can fall in love. Judith Arkroyd must have been in love with Alfred Challis; for see what risks she was running to secure him! Why--yes!--to secure him; that was just it. She wanted him, and took the only road to possession that seemed open to her. Now if, when he lay insensible, that time when there was none to see, she had only stooped to kiss the inanimate hand, had even held it till the nurse returned! Should we not have felt more sorrow for her after that, when his returning speech showed how completely she had, for the moment, passed from his mind? No doubt she was in love with him, in one manner of loving. But there are so many!

This story is not going to break its heart about her--to chant dirges over the grave of her share of this grande passion. And its commiseration for her grows no mellower from dwelling on the fact it has to record: that exasperation against poor Jim Coupland, to whom she thought proper to ascribe the whole miscarriage of the scheme, was really a source of relief to her--a sort of counter-irritant. To her father, Jim's death and his child's filled the whole horizon--a black cloud. Challis's mishap he did not distress himself about; he would be all right presently--had he not spoken? As for his loss of memory, that meant nothing. Did he not himself, when he came round after his mishap, ask whether "the trout" had been taken, meaning the fox? Loss of memory was the rule, not the exception, in such cases. And as for the future of Challis and Judith, that was a difficulty there must be some legal way out of. It was incredible that Challis's wife should go on holding him at arm's length, and yet bar his union with another woman. Some solution of that problem could be found, Bill or no Bill! As for opposing his daughter's wishes, if they were really deep-rooted, that he would not do. All his opposition to Challis hitherto had been to him as Marianne's husband. If their marriage could be legally annulled or dissolved, he was not going to stand in the way of his daughter's happiness.

But this anger of hers against Jim showed her as a new Judith, whom he had never suspected the existence of. In her childhood she had been proud and domineering with her brothers and sisters--two elder brothers had died in the army, and a sister was married in India; none of them have crossed this story--but not, so far as her father knew, malignant or revengeful. It gave him a great discomfort at heart; set him wondering which of her ancestors on either side she had harked back to. Was it Josceline de Varennes, who, in one of those spirited middle ages, hid a knife under her bridal pillow and gave her first husband a warm reception to his couch, in order that she should marry Hugh Arkroyd? There was the knife, to prove it, in the glass cabinet with the green-dragon china service. But--as long ago as King Stephen! Oh no!--it was that old fiend of a great-grandmother of Therèse's. Every old family has an ancestral scapegoat, and a certain "Lady Sarah," of the days of the second George, was very popular in this one.

But Sir Murgatroyd scarcely did more than seek for the scapegoat, in case he should be forced to condemn this member of the congregation. He did not pass sentence. He only said gently, "You will feel differently, Judith dear, when you are yourself again. All this has upset you." In reply to which the young lady said wearily, "We shall see, I suppose, presently. I can't be very demonstrative about either now, though of course it's very sad, and so on, about the little girl." And then she talked to the parrot, kissing him and calling him her darling, and saying now he must go back in his wicked cruel cage. All which her father set down to mere bravado, and thought it best to say no more to her in her present mood. But he had a very serious look on his face as they walked towards the house together.

It was a relief to him to hear the robust musical voice of the Rector in the large drawing-room that opened on the lawn, which was their most natural way back into the house. But Judith paused on the terrace. "Oh dear!" said she. "There's our Father Confessor! I can't stand sympathy, and I don't want to be catechized, thank you! Be a dear good papa, and say pretty things for me!" And then, in spite of an attempt at remonstrance by her father, slipped away; going round by a side-terrace that, ending at the house-corner in a vague architectural effort three centuries old--a Nereid and a Triton and a sink, with an Ionic canopy over all to keep the rain off--allowed of an approach to the main façade of the house, and the carriage-drive through the beech avenue in the Park.

But she did not at once carry out her scheme of escape. The shadow of the Ionic canopy was sweet on the base of the sink, and the seat it made was tempting, and the cleanness of its moss and lichens acceptable even to a skirt of crêpe-de-Chine. It was only an old dress, too, according to Judith's ideas, so she spent a little time with the Triton and the Nereid before going on into the house. She felt stunned and bewildered, for all she had shown so bold a front, and was glad of rest.

Presently her desire to know that Challis was progressing got the better of a terror that was on her that his oblivion might be lasting. She could hear the voices of the party in the drawing-room still in conversation, the Rector's very distinctly; so she decided that she could slip indoors with safety, and rose to go.

A little diffident gate, that had shrunk away into the heart of a yew hedge, led out to the drive and entrance to the house; and one could see and not be seen there, even by visitors who had been over the ground before. Judith stopped at this gate, not to be caught by an early sample, unexplained. It was not yet twelve o'clock, and there at the door was a vehicle with one horse, steaming. And a lady in black was descending from it, and Samuel evidently meant to let her in. Judith waited for her to vanish; gave her ample time, more than enough, to be shown into the drawing-room, and then went straight on to the house.

The vehicle was a hired fly from Furnival, whose driver Judith at once recognized as an habitué of the railway-station. He was mopping his brow with his handkerchief, for the morning had become very hot; but he put his hat on to touch it to Miss Arkroyd, who of course was very familiar to him. Having done this, he took it off again, and went on mopping. He referred to the dryness of this sort of day pointedly; but Judith missed his sub-intent, and conceived that the position was covered by the approach of Bullett the groom, with a pail of water for the horse. The lady must have come straight from the train.

Judith looked through the glass door--as she thought, carefully--to make sure the great hall at the foot of the stairs was empty. She was quite without conjecture or suspicion as to who the visitor was, or she might not have contented herself so easily that the coast was clear. Anyhow, there was no one visible from where she stood and looked through. So she passed in and walked straight across to the stairs, and so up to the first landing. As she turned the angle, she saw a lady in black, whom she did not recognize, seated in the recess on the left, who rose when their eyes met. Not a bad-looking woman, of a sort, but not self-explanatory.

Count over the times Judith had met Marianne. They do not amount to much--at least, until that evening at the theatre. Two dinners and a visit in London a couple of years ago--consider how little that means to a young lady who may be under an equal social obligation to remember half-a-dozen new faces every day! Consider, too, that in this early time Mr. Challis was in the eyes of this young lady nothing beyond a popular author whose works she hadn't read; and as for his wife, why should she notice her at all? "Which was she, Sib?" we can fancy her asking. Was she, for instance, the underdressed one with the mole, or the rawboned giggler? Then, as to that visit to the play a few months later, think of the exciting pre-occupations! Is it certain that Miss Arkroyd paid as much attention to her hostess as you and I might have thought the circumstances demanded? Anyhow, there had been nothing to fix Marianne in Judith's memory to such an extent that she should recall at once the travel-worn--and trouble-worn--face she hardly glanced at, and would have left without a second look had its owner not risen, as though to speak. She might have done so, nevertheless, if it had not been for something in the visitor's action which suggested a lady kept outside the drawing-room rather than a person allowed inside the house. You know the sort of difference--the difference between subservient conciliation and conciliatory self-assertion.

What caught and retained Judith's second look was that this person answered to neither description. Her manner was sui generis, and the genus had in it a touch of something odd that wasn't insanity. Was it desperation? It was creditable to Judith's penetration that she at once dismissed the only idea that suggested itself. An image shot into her mind of Jim Coupland's sister, employed as cook by Challis, humorously described by him more than once. Stuff and nonsense!--out of the question!

"Are you ... being attended to?" She threw a slight smile of protest into the question, to guard against the possibility of wrong form. If she had mistaken the facts, her hearer would understand the implication of courtesy--no fear of misunderstanding between us!

"The young man went in. I can wait." The speaker looked away from Miss Arkroyd. Her manner was not conciliatory. But even then no idea crossed Judith's mind of who she actually was. In fact, prohibitives were at every point of the compass. How could the news have reached Marianne? How could she have come so quick to Royd?

"Is it anything I can do?" This was bald civility on the face of it; almost stipulated that it should be refused. The speaker's arrested foot on the next stair waited to go up when the refusal should warrant it. But it had to wait, long enough to make its owner wonder what was coming.

"Yes!--you can, Miss Arkroyd." Judith's good breeding concealed her surprise. She stood committed, and awaited the instruction. Was this tiresome person going to give it, or be choked by it? It came at last. "You can tell me whether my husband is dying or not."

And then Judith knew that she was face to face with Marianne Challis, the woman she had injured.

* * * * *

Sir Murgatroyd found his wife talking with Athelstan Taylor, of course about the current events. "This is good news about Challis," said the Rector. "Lady Arkroyd tells me he has recovered consciousness."

The Baronet demurred slightly. "Ye-es. At least, he has spoken."

"And not incoherently?"

"N-no. Oh no--not incoherently." But the stress on this word had reservation in it, and her ladyship exclaimed impatiently, "Oh, my dear, you always make the worst of everything!" A pitying smile, aside to the Rector, was quite a little essay on the unreasonableness of husbands--that intractable class. Mr. Taylor looked from one to the other. It would be early to take sides, but of course the prescribed form in such a case is to help the wife to commiserate her mate's shortcomings. It was safest to endorse the lady's view, provisionally.

"We mustn't expect too much at first," said he, deprecating the crude judgment of inexperience, a quality common to all our family except ourself. "The author won't be in trim for dictating copy for some days to come, I'm afraid." He hesitated a moment, before adding, "You have kept it from him, I suppose, for the present?"

"Mr. Taylor is referring to poor Coupland's death, my dear," said the Baronet. Which his wife resented slightly, as suggesting that her sympathies needed a stimulus. "Do you suppose I don't understand that, my dear?" said she sotto voce; a reply apart. But she might just as well have left the matter to stand there, and not let herself be betrayed into a candid admission that, in view of the sad end of poor little Lizarann, her father's death almost assumed the form of a Merciful Dispensation. We should be thankful, at least, that he had been spared the hearing of it.

"The whole thing has been terribly sad," said Athelstan Taylor. Indeed, he seemed as if he could hardly bear to speak of it. He turned from the subject abruptly. When could he look forward to seeing Challis without danger of his hurting himself by talking?

Sir Murgatroyd looked inquiry at his wife, and she at him. Then he took the reply on himself, as she seemed very doubtful. "The fact is, Rector," said he, "it isn't by any means certain that he would know you. He can hardly be said to have come to himself yet. What he said to...."

"What he said to the nurse was hardly sense," Lady Arkroyd struck in abruptly. No doubt she wanted to keep Judith out of it. But Sir Murgatroyd held to his purpose--would have no evasion or prevarication.

"I was not referring to what he said to the nurse, my dear Therèse. I was going on to speak of what he said to Judith. What did he say to the nurse?"

"Oh, I don't know! Tell it your own way." Lady Arkroyd abdicates.

Her husband did not notice her impatience, but continued: "It happened that my daughter was present when he showed consciousness, and he did not recognize her, and asked for his wife. It was a very singular thing, too, that when Judith told him we did not know where to write to her, he gave the address he lived at several years ago. But I cannot say that seems to me so strange as his non-recognition of Judith, considering...."

"My dear!" from the lady, remonstratively.

But the Baronet sticks to his colours, though he speaks temperately. "My dear Therèse, Mr. Taylor is so old a friend that I really do think it would be absurd to make any secrets. After all, what does the whole thing amount to?..." Here the Rector interrupted him.

"I think it's only fair of me, Lady Arkroyd, to say that I know all about it already. This poor chap--I'm not going to say a word in defence of him--took me into his confidence some weeks ago. That is to say, he sketched as possible the scheme which I now see he and Judith must have attempted to carry out. I tried to dissuade him from it, and, indeed, fancied he had given it up.... No; I thought it best to hold my tongue about it, in order to retain my influence with him. He had been speaking freely to me, assuming that what he said would go no farther, and I should only have lost my hold over him by talking to you of it, without any corresponding gain." This was in answer to what was evidently the beginning of a question: "Why was the knowledge of this plan to be kept from us?"

However, the Baronet was ready with ungrudging admission that the Rector had acted for the best; his wife with a rather more stinted allowance of assent. Of course, Judith would have gone her own way in any case ... but still!... "Are we not her parents? Should we not have been told on principle?" seemed to be an implication lurking behind lips that had shut it in, and leaking out through a stirring of the eyebrows. Her husband, averse to reserves, and noting this one, said, "What were you going to say, Therèse?"

But Therèse said, "Do wait, my dear!" to him, and to the Rector, "Would you excuse me one moment?... What is it, Samuel?" The last was because Samuel was in the room with a card on a hand-tray, to be dealt with furtively, if possible, its bearer's mission in life being self-subordination. Being called on to state what it was, he said it was a lady, and might she speak to her ladyship for a moment. This was a metaphrasis, because it was palpably a card, on which her ladyship read to herself the name "Mrs. M. Craik," and seemed none the wiser. Then she handed it to Sir Murgatroyd, who took his glasses to the reading of it, and said, "No, I don't know the name." Whereupon her ladyship said, "I suppose I must see her. You'll excuse me, Mr. Taylor?" and departed, after instructions to Samuel about the room the lady was to be shown into.

Now, if she had read the name aloud, the chances are that Athelstan Taylor, who had a lively enough recollection of his visit of intercession to Marianne's mother a year ago, would have remembered it. And then Lady Arkroyd would have known beforehand who it was she was on her way to interview.

As it was, she continued quite in the dark about the identity of "Mrs. M. Craik," until, following Samuel at what she thought a sufficient interval to allow of his disposing of the stranger as arranged, she came out upon a scene at the stairfoot in the entrance-hall that taxed her presence of mind; with a result that was not an uncommon one with her, that she could see no way of meeting the demand upon it, except by an appeal to her husband to rescue her. For, ready as she always was to set his judgment aside when doing so involved her in no difficulty, she always looked to him to extricate her when she found herself in a bad one.

"Oh, thank God if he is living ... if he is only living to speak to me once ... just once! Oh, do say again that he is not dead. I will never think ill of you again. Oh, do let me go to him where he is now...." Thus far the poor soul had spoken through a deluge of tears, when Lady Arkroyd came out from a side-door, and her mind said to her that if it was to be hysterics, she did wish Sir Murgatroyd would come. But as to exactly who this was, this female in black who was making a scene gratuitously, the thing of all others her ladyship hated, she was for the moment quite at a loss to guess. Of course, a moment's reflection would have made it clear, but, you see, she was so totally unprepared. Her first information as to whom she was speaking with--seeing that she was as much at sea about Marianne's personal identity as Judith had been at first--came from her daughter, standing handsome and impassive on the stairs, above this excited woman; making her seem a suppliant by her own unmoved placidity, and herself almost cruel by the severity of the contrast.

"This is Lady Challis, mamma." Judith's speech quite ignores the tension of the situation--passes it by. "She wishes to go to Sir Alfred. Is there any objection?" What can it matter to the speaker?--is the implication. Let her go to Sir Alfred, by all means!

Her mother's breath is fairly taken away. "Lady Challis!" she repeats. And then, as silence seems to wait for something else, the blankest interjection: "Oh-h-h!" with the minimum of meaning sound can convey.

Then poor Marianne, with no Charlotte at hand to suggest possible ugly interpretations, bursts out, "I am not Lady Challis. I am nothing of the sort. Dear Lady Arkroyd--you must remember me?--you came to see me at home. Do let me go--let me go to my husband!"

Lady Arkroyd was puzzled. Perhaps, after all, there had been a mistake at the outset, and there had been all along "something against" this impossible wife. Nothing suggested itself to her as a practicable course. This lady had turned to her with a beseeching face, for which she had "Why, of course!" ready in her heart, being quite a good-natured woman, but there were such odd complications afoot she could not utter it. Judith, from her security behind Marianne, was endeavouring to telegraph without audible speech the words "Deceased Wife's Sister"; and, indeed, after two or three repetitions, her mother caught the clue. But she was little, if any, the wiser; and it was then the prompting came to rush for succour to her husband, still talking to the Rector in the drawing-room.

"Do you mind my speaking to my husband for a moment first?" Marianne minds nothing, so long as it is on a road that leads to her object, and her ladyship goes quickly away.

"May I leave you alone for a few moments, Lady Challis?" says Judith, going. "Please step in here till my mother returns, and sit down." That is, into the little room off the landing. Judith goes upstairs quickly; and Samuel, always on the watch, officiates as pilot.

Lady Arkroyd walked back into the drawing-room. She looked despair before trusting herself to speech, and the action of her hands laid an imaginary case for despair before the two gentlemen, who stopped talking to hear its spoken particulars. Her husband encouraged revelation by saying "Well?" interrogatively.

"Oh, my dear, what is to be done? It's the Deceased Wife's Sister! I wish you would come."

The Baronet gives the slightest of whistles. "Where have you got her?" he asks.

"My dear, she's in hysterics!"

"Yes--but where?"

"In the front hall. And Judith is there with her!"

"I say, we'd better go." Thus the Baronet to the Rector, who assents without reserve. Observe that this colloquy has gone on in undertones. Not that anyone could hear--they might have shouted, for that matter--but to endorse the tension of the situation.

Arriving in the hall, and seeing first the place where Judith had been standing, her mother felt a sense of relief. Her absence made the position easier to deal with. But--where was the Deceased Wife's Sister? Samuel explained. He had shown the lady into the mezzanina room, as directed. Samuel felt proud of his Italian, over this.

Marianne had not been sorry to be alone again for a moment, after her first effort of self-announcement. She looked out through the window over the rounded slopes, thickly wooded enough to seem a stretch of forest; with the little groups of roe-deer in the glades the beech-woods grudged them, in their ambition to cover the whole land. She saw the wide level lawns, clothed with the grass of centuries, dreaming of the music of bygone scythes, before the days of mowing-machines and their economies of power no man stinted then; the peacocks walking with precision, and satisfied that they were appreciated; the beds ablaze with asters and marigolds, and dahlias, and standard roses still blooming, and proud of their little tickets that told what variety they were. She saw all these, and out beyond them the smoke-cloud of the great manufacturing centre, with its confidence of one day gobbling up the park and its wood and warren, vert and venison, and getting at its coal, and using it up to make steel armour-plates, that shall send other armour-plates to the bottom of the sea. Unless, indeed, civilization collapses; whereof it is not proper form to say--the sooner the better!

All this has nothing to do with Marianne, except, perhaps, as showing what a many things did not cross her mind that might have done so. The whole thing was dim to her, and swam about. Now that the excitement was less, she began to be afraid she might make a fool of herself and faint off, as she did that time with Charlotte Eldridge. She was sorry now that after travelling so far on a very poor breakfast in London, she had not had the sense to get a biscuit or a sandwich at Furnival. When Sir Murgatroyd and her ladyship came into the mezzanina room, they found her seated with closed eyes, and alarmingly white. But she rallied at the sound of their voices. Oh no!--she was all right. Now all she wanted was to know about her husband. Was he in danger? Had he been in danger?

The Baronet, in a voice good to banish hysteria in any form, justifiable or otherwise, rather outwent the truth in his testimony. Sir Alfred had never been in any danger at all! Who had told Lady Challis that story? The old gentleman's pooh-poohing laugh was pleasant to Marianne's ears. Only she didn't feel quite sure she wasn't an impostor. She had come on the distinct understanding--with whom, hard to specify--that Titus was dying. Had she been imposed upon?

"It was in the Sunday paper yesterday," she said. "And I saw it on all the posters at the stations, coming by rail."

"Those damnable newspapers--you'll excuse me, Lady Challis--I should have all the editors hanged if I had my way. Yes, I would indeed! Why, there never was any danger! These things happen every day." He went on to narrate how, when his mare Eurydice threw him at Stamford's Croft, he had been carried home unconscious, and remained so over two days. "But your mare had to be shot, my dear," said his wife, vaguely.

When Athelstan Taylor, who had hung back a moment to exchange a few words with the nurse, whom he had met on the stairs coming from Challis's bedside, followed his companions into the mezzanina room, he was surprised and pleased to find the Baronet apparently on the most comfortable and communicative terms with the embarrassing lady-visitor. It was all just as if none of the events that made the visit embarrassing had ever happened. Marianne might have been the wife of any neighbour, the victim of a bad accident; who had come at a summons to learn the worst, and was being assured that no bones were badly broken, and the patient in perfect trim for inspection without a shock to the feelings of the most sensitive. The escapade of Challis and Judith might have been a dream, and the terms he had been on with Marianne those of Philemon and Baucis. Ignoring was evidently the order of the day, and the Rector made up his mind to comply with it.

"This is our Rector, Lady Challis," said the old gentleman, introducing him. "The Rev. Athelstan Taylor. I think he will tell you he is just as confident as I am that Sir Alfred will be himself again in the course of a day or two--perhaps in a few hours. Eh, Rector?"

The voice of the big man with the fresh face, sun-tanned with a pedestrian summer, was a new reassurance to the frightened, worn-out woman. It said, filling the little room musically, "Every reason to suppose it, at any rate! I hope we shall all be as lucky if we are ever in as bad an accident, which Heaven forbid!" But an inflexion of his tone contained reference to other injury done in this accident, and made Marianne remember the details in the newspaper. "Was there not a man killed?" she asked.

All looked very sad. "Yes, unhappily," was the joint reply. The Rector began giving some particulars of Jim's death, but stopped. "You were just going up to Sir Alfred," he said. For the general bias of the party in the room, as he entered it, had seemed to be towards migration. The visitor had half-risen from a sofa, but had fallen back as the conversation showed signs of continuing.

Lady Arkroyd and her husband exchanged looks, and appeared to assent to the move. Marianne began to rise again, but with such visible sign of fatigued effort that the other three signalled to one another, so to speak, that this would never do! Lady Arkroyd spoke, preferring to indicate that her husband, with man's proverbial want of tact, was inconsiderately overlooking a guest's comfort. "My dear, I'm sure Lady Challis has had nothing to eat since she left London, and she was travelling all night. She's completely worn out." She added a corollary, "Men forget these things."

The Rev. Athelstan had a suggestion to make: "One minute," said he. "Just let me say ... I spoke to the nurse just now. She said Sir Alfred had not talked again, but had shown he wanted to get rid of the bandage on his head. She was going to take it off, as she says it isn't the least wanted. Lady Challis would just have time to get a little refreshed while she does it. And then Sir Alfred will be looking quite like himself. You know, there was no visible injury ever, except that scratch on the forehead--just a bit of plaister!"

And thus it came about that Marianne Challis was taking a cup of black coffee and a biscuit, but nothing else, thank you, in the house she had refused to follow her husband to over a year ago, at the very moment that his second return of consciousness prompted him to ask again for Polly Anne.

* * * * *

Judith, barely pausing to see that Marianne was "shown in" to the side-room--because it is not enough to know which door; you have to be properly shown in by a servant--had gone quickly to the patient's room, meeting the nurse by the way. She stopped her.

"Is Sir Alfred Challis conscious?"

"I think a little more so. He hasn't spoken, but he evidently wants that bandage off his head. I thought it might be better to mention it before taking it off. Not that I'm really afraid of the responsibility. Only it's as well to be on the safe side. Is Lady Arkroyd downstairs?"

"I think she's just coming up. Sir Alfred's wife is here."

"Oh, indeed. I hope she won't upset him. I shall find Lady Arkroyd downstairs.... Oh, by-the-bye, Miss Arkroyd, what did your mother say was the name of the big parson--Reverend what?"

"Reverend Athelstan Taylor."

"I thought so." And the nurse, a well-defined and explicit person, went downstairs as Judith passed on along the lobby.

The figure on the bed was moving slightly as she entered the room, feeling how venturesome her conduct was; and was evidently fidgeting, as the nurse had said, about the bandage. She went up and stood beside him, hiding a kind of desperation under an immovable exterior. Should she speak to him by name? If so, by what name? As his memory was playing such tricks, might not his present style and title be strange to him? Besides, she had never called him "Sir Alfred." And if she called him "Scroop," as she had done almost throughout, and still he did not recognize her, how then? But surely he was speaking again!

"You're very good--but what am I being kept here for? I say!--I hope Polly Anne's all right...."

"Please don't pull at that bandage; it shall be taken off as soon as the nurse comes back. Why shouldn't 'Polly Anne' be all right?" She couldn't help the inverted commas.

"Because she hasn't come. Did you send to the address I gave?"

Judith replied stonily, "Your wife is here. She will come directly.... Listen! Do you not know me?" For she knew how short their time must be; how brief and abrupt the farewell that had to be packed into it, whatever form it might take. She did not certainly know whether she hoped he would say "Yes."

He kept her waiting, to turn his eyes full on her and consider the point. "N-n-n-no!" said he, prolonging the first letter. "I don't think I do." His civil manner was heart-rending to the woman beside him. Recollect that only three days before, though they would not have become de facto man and wife, their compact of marriage would have been irrevocable! He kept his eyes still on her with a puzzled look, adding immediately after, "Could you not tell me of something to remind me?"

What to remind him of, and avoid all claim of tender memory for the past, in view of the fact that he might disallow that past altogether!--that was Judith's difficulty. She must keep to suggestions prosaic and bald--just the colourless events of daily life. She tried to speak with absolute calm indifference, tempered by good-will.

"Is it possible you do not remember this room--the room the German Baroness saw the ghost in?" She made a not too successful attempt at a laugh over this. "Why!--you slept here before!"

"Where is 'here'?"

"My father's house, Royd Hall. I am Judith Arkroyd."

Challis's voice and manner were like his old self again as he answered, "I do feel so out of it!" and laughed a sort of apology. "I'm horribly ashamed. I shall have to ask Polly Anne to jog my memory. Is she coming?"

"Oh yes--she's coming." Judith had hard work to refrain from breaking out "Have you forgotten Trout Bend and the convict's bridge; the little Tophet garden and the letter, and all my shawl in a blaze? Have you no memory of the play you wrote for me to play in; of your fatuous declaration of a passion a man of your sobriety should have been ashamed of; above all of our meeting of two days since, our reckless race along the sunlit road, and its tragic ending?" But she knew all this, that her tongue was itching to remind him of, was good for oblivion only; knew it by a thousand tokens, most of all by the revelation chance had given of the background of his mind. Even the knowledge that all fruition of their crazy scheme was perforce at an end was as nothing compared to that. Therefore she felt it safest to say curtly that Marianne was coming, and to add that the nurse would be back in a moment to remove the bandage.

Challis closed his eyes again with a tired sigh. "I can't trust myself to talk," said he. "All sorts of things keep coming into my head, and convincing me I must be out of my senses. But I'm clear about one thing. Someone is being very kind to me. I have a general impression that I don't deserve it, and I want to thank ... want to thank...." He seemed to give it up as a bad job, and to relapse into half-stupor.

Judith was fast coming to the conclusion that the sooner she and Challis saw the last of one another the better for both. But "to part at last without a kiss!" The words of Morris's poem came into her mind. Well--suppose in this case we were to say, "without a handshake"? That would be quite enough. At least, that knight beside the Haystack in the Floods would have known whom the kissed lips belonged to. Challis's disordered head had constituted him a stranger to her. All the same, to have the tale of their love end on a blank and vanish, and none write a word of epilogue--not so much as a bare finis!--grated on her sense of the fitness of things. She would just try to print the word herself, without provoking an appendix. If he was insensible again and did not hear her, what did it matter?

"The nurse will come directly," she repeated. "I have to go now. Good-bye!"

He opened his eyes again, rousing himself. "Oh--good-bye--good-bye!" said he. "I am sorry you have to go." He took her hand, shaking it frankly and warmly. She was afraid the touch of her own hand might bring back the past--the useless past--and almost stinted to return its pressure.

She turned in the doorway, and said, referring to footsteps approaching the room without, "Perhaps you will know this gentleman who is coming now, and he will tell you who I am." A bitterness in her heart made the last words come, and then she said to the nurse and Athelstan Taylor, who was with her, "He's been talking again, quite like himself, only he doesn't know me from Adam. But I fancy he'll soon be all right."

"That's good hearing," said the Rector cheerfully. "You'll find the Duchess downstairs. She's asking for you, to take you to Thanes."

"Oh, is she? I think I shall put my things on at once, and go with her." She went to her room and rang for her maid, whom she sent with a message to the Duchess. She would be ready in five minutes, she said, and meant to stop the night.

When the little handmaiden had finished her ministrations, and her mistress and the Duchess had driven away, she was found in tears by a fellow-servant, and explained them by saying Miss Judith was angry with her. Because she had never once called her Cintilla, but only Clemency, which was merely her proper name.

"My dear sir," said Challis to the Rector, standing by his bed, "you say, 'Don't I know you?' And you say it so confidently that it convinces me I ought to know you. But I can't say I do. Honour bright!"

"Never mind! Don't try to think about it. You'll come to rights presently. Let this good lady get that thing off your head. The best thing you can do is to lie still."

So Challis lay still and listened to the conversation. And this is what he heard:

"I hadn't flattered myself you would remember your humble servant, Mr. Taylor, but I felt pretty sure you wouldn't have forgotten the incident."

"I wasn't likely to do that. Faugh!--I've got the flavour of the place upon me still. That antiseptic sack and rubber gloves!--all the horror of it! But apart from that, the story the creature told was such a queer one."

"Seal of confession, I suppose?"

"Hardly that! But not, perhaps, to be repeated except to serve some special end. I understood he left it to my discretion."

"I had no motive but curiosity. Don't tell me!"

"How came you to remember my name?"

"I didn't. Miss Arkroyd told it me. I remembered your look when I showed you into the ward. But I ought to have remembered your name, because I posted Dr. Crumpton's letter to you...."

"I remember. It was to ask which of his aliases this man had given me. They didn't know what name to bury him under."

"Oh, I remember ... Thomas Essendean. No, it wasn't that. That was one they rejected. What was it he told you?"

"Kay Thorne, or perhaps Key--Key Thorne.... What?" For Challis, by this time bandageless and ready to receive visitors, but evidently glad to keep his head down on the pillow, had uttered an exclamation, without opening his eyes. "What's 'hullo,' Challis?" said the Rector. For a moment, he felt afraid that the patient's mind was wandering. But only for a moment. For when Challis spoke again, it was quite quietly and collectedly.

"Name of my first wife's first ... no!--I don't mean that. Name of a friend of mine eight--ten--years ago. Not Kaith; Keith Horne. He wasn't a shining light. He came to awful grief in the end. Penal servitude, I believe...."

"You mustn't tire yourself with talking," said the nurse. "We shall have her ladyship up directly. You know she's coming?"

"Oh no!--might my wife come? Her ladyship can come afterwards."

The Rector understood. He glanced at the nurse indicatively. "Mrs. Challis had better come first," he said. Then he said good-bye to Challis, and went his way. In the passage was Lady Arkroyd, followed by Marianne. "You'll find him immensely improved," said he. "I can't say he remembered me, but he will next time."

Then, as he shook hands with the scared and bewildered lady in black, he thought to himself, "Now, what a queer story I could tell you, if I didn't feel that the right course is to keep a lock on my tongue!"

For it had just come home to him that Marianne was not Challis's Deceased Wife's Sister at all, because "poor Kate" had never been his Deceased Wife. She was the late Mr. Keith Horne's! And as regarded the "living in sin business," evidently she was the real Simon Pure, and Marianne a mere pretender!

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