The Shibboleth

Front matter

BY MRS. VERE CAMPBELL AUTHOR OF 44 THE CRIME OF KEZIAH KEENE, " u OF THIS DEATH, " &C. LONDON WARD AND DOWNEY Ltd. 12 YORK STREET COVENT GARDEN W.C. THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED TO MY FAITHFUL FRIEND MARION AS A STANDING TEIBDTE TO WHAT I AND MY CHILDREN OWED TO HER DEVOTION IN THOSE TIMES WE PASSED THROUGH TOGETHER DURING ITS PROGRESSION. CONTENTS PAGE Prologue 1 Book 1 15 Book II . . 137 Book III 204 Interlude 239 Book IV 250 L'envoi

Prologue

. All in a moment, Ralph Eyrith was tired of living. He lifted his eyes : the house was before him — long, low, white, with green lattices — and there was moonshine. The sensation became acute, and, as the man felt with a certain shock of resignation, irrevocable. He went round into the garden, and from a dusky corner a woman called to him: "Ralph" — there was only the voice and the drip of a fountain — "Ralph, come here." The dusky corner had a great lily in it the colour of the moon, and the woman lay on cushions spread upon the ground, with a bare arm curled about the stem of the flower. The man seated himself upon the lion-upheld brim of the fountain : the shadow of the lily stirred ; the woman's slumberous lips broke apart with a delicate flash ; the life of her gleamed through the lashes of lazily-dropped lids.

She said not a word though, and after a moment, the basin-brim being very low, Eyrith bent, lifted himself with a pair of lightly slippered feet upon his knee, and began to jingle the sequins that broidered the woman's skirt and tinkled about her ankles. "A terrible thing has happened," he said presently, " I am spiritually wide awake ; it is serious : I am afraid there is absolutely nothing left I can give myself to induce me to go to sleep again: to doze, to even close my eyes, to so much as compose myself with the thought of it. " The woman tilted her heelless slipper on to the arc of her toes. "Oh, Ralph Eyrith," she said, and murmured it so sleepily that neither lips nor lids seemed to stir; "oh, Ralph Eyrith, you are very tiresome. What has wakened you now ? " "I am more than wakened," he said, "I have done with sleep and dreams, at least on my own account, for ever; I tell you it is a terrible thing.

I am forty five : I must live for another twenty, thirty years, wide awake : a solitary dreamer who cannot dream. I ought to have slept another five-and-twenty years." , The slipper was balanced to a nicety: the woman tossed it lightly into the speaker's face. "Bah!" she said, "why don't you?" "I can't, you see," he answered. "Repetition deadens the force of most things. There are so few dreams, and I have slept too sufficiently. I have made the round of the circle. The chain of sensation is completed : the shock, I suppose, wakened me." The woman shook off some of her sloth, and, rising, swept the lily back : then breaking into a few notes of a song, all at once stopped, spread her arms wide and laughed. The next moment there was a sound all shaken about, like the faint glee of a witch riding somewhere near, tree-top high, then the soft, languorous sighing of rustling robes : the little feet were gone from the man's knee.

"I would rather have my head here," said the woman, and tossed it back into the moonshine. "Come, kiss me." He stooped : his face was superlatively cut, very delicate, thin, and with peevish brows; the beauty at his knee took it between her palms, and caressed him with a slow, rich languor, that should thrill far more than pant, or throb, or fire, "I am almost tired of it, too," she said. "It comes to that when, if the gift be pleasant, it scarcely matters whose it be. But there is nothing else! Oh sky, oh moon, oh tree, oh flowers, is there?" She laughed and threw herself still further back: and throwing her arms again wide, one hand slipped into the still, dark, moonlit water: she tossed a few drops, like up-thrown pearls, into Ralph Eyrith's face. " Oh man, tell me, is there ? " " I suppose not, and you see, oh woman, it is not in the least enough " " To keep you asleep another twenty years !

Well, wake for five, for six, for ten, then Estelle will be old enough to know a lullaby: and you will sleep to dream again, and when next you wake it will be time to die, and you will dream no more. You make a great fuss, ah me ! because it is such a very little thing. " And she danced her feet on the cushions, shaking about again the sound of the sequins like a witch's ringing glee, and wound her arms in her long hair ; she expanded her big throat, and her bosom swelled with deep, lazy breaths, drawing in the dreaming and the meaning of the night. Eyrith moved, and she dropped away from him, laughing with languishing lids, prone upon her cushions again. He considered her with his peevish brows, well-drawn over his light-hued, narrowed eyes ; he was perfectly reconciled with, yet fretful at, his own satiety.

"On my soul," he said, "I don't know what I am going to do with myself! Can't you awake too?" She lifted her arms high above her head : " Tra la la, tra la la; " she fluted. " Oh, Ralph Eyrith, how mad you grow ! Awake, what to do — wish myself asleep again ? " The soft mystery of the lovely and the melancholy, renewing itself with each pulsation of the Eastern night, stole along the garden, touched the lily and the water, lingered on the woman's face, and passed, like the notes of music pass, untranslated, irresistible, thence to the other's soul. " I wish you would wake, " he said suddenly. " Come, you understand me a good way ; that is great deal ; that is more than I ever attained with anyone yet; try to understand me altogether." " Not I, " she said, snatching it in a light breath from the roulades of a little song she had begun to troll, as from some hidden warble that took its way without her care, she lying lazily at ease.

"Not I." Then when the song was done, and as if she suddenly bethought herself the question had been worth more weight in answer, the woman turned upon her side. "I would not understand you if I could," she said. " That is because I understand you just so far. " Ralph's face sharpened into lines of absolute concern. "There is Estelle," said the woman, watching him, "she is mad. She might understand you altogether: she is not a woman — yet." Eyrith lifted his hand with a gesture as though inspira tion had come to him, then he mused, his chin in his hand, his eyes on the ground, and the woman trolled her song again. At last Ralph rose, and stood a moment looking idly down at her, lying as idly at his feet. "I really don't know how to thank you," he said, carelessly, " you have given me a most tremendous idea.

It was always latent; you, my beauty, have shaped it to my hand. There is Estelle : a tremendous idea ! there is Estelle ; mad ! So much the better ; and not a woman — "Yet" — it was the murmur of the silkiest, the sleep iest of voices, " Yet, I said. " " Yet, I say ; your debtor for reminding me of it. Not a woman yet, an invaluable suggestion : Estelle never shall be a woman— never shall be this." He laughed a little, and with a gesture flung his meaning over the recumbent figure, from loosened hair to up-tipped feet. The woman laughed back, with a suspicion of viciousness, but far more of an ineffable disdain. "An' it could be. it might be," she laughed. "What will you make of her? What you will make of her! Oh Ralph Eyrith." Then suddenly she clapped her hands, and leapt to her feet; it was like the merry rill of an echoed demon-chorus : turbaned figures moved from the court yard into the garden, strings were twanged and a cymbal tossed ; with a bound the woman was in the unshadowed moonshine, in the space cleared there, and there she began to dance.

Eyrith strolled towards the house, turned and strolled back again ; he looked up at the house, and saw the face of a girl at an unlat ticed window ; behind her stood a black who drew a comb in and out her hair. The girl watched the dancing woman with her thumb beneath her chin, her in-shut fingers beneath her mouth ; her eyes were gloomy ; one of her tresses fell far down against the white wall. The lily in the dusky corner stood up and caught a gleam of light, like light upon a silver spear, springing from an ambushed band ; the trees were still, there was a great black shadow, and the woman leaped and tossed and swayed and swung in the light. Eyrith watched the girl watching the woman. The dance grew wild and mad. There was a soft and sibilant accompaniment coming from the shadow conveying inexpressible, insidious excitement.

At last the dancer couched ; the jangle of the sequins and the tinsel and the gewgaws sank and stilled ; then with a bound, and a great shrill and shiver from head to foot of sound and shade and gleam, the woman whirled and sprang. Ralph caught her with careless arms, a careless word on his lips : he was looking still at the girl at the lattice, and she with great gloomy darknesses, spark-lit in the moonlight under sullen brows, followed the woman's spring, and stared at the two — the pant and the gasping laugh, and the bared throat, and the man's hand broadened out, and showing plain under the woman's heart against the red silk bodice. " She sees too much of this, " thought Eyrith, but he kissed the woman, who tossed away from him and vanished. Someone gathered up the cushions; figures stole across the light and stole away ; the girl was gone from the lattice ; the man leant against the wall beneath it.

" If anything is to come of it," he reflected, " I must lose no time. Those who are cold, do not sleep well ; I must keep her cold. Hate thins the blood, she shall hate me, I will starve the woman in her to death. That is the first thing to do ! " His delicate features sharpened ; he began to walk to and fro with a certain curious caution, and his shoulders bowed. "I was thinking I should have to be her lover," he was reflecting. " Certainly, it seemed possible she should understand me later — what else have I her here for? — but since it so happens that I am awake already, I will see that she does not dream to that tune even to begin with. Easy to simulate ; she shall hate me ; she shall lust to kill me rather than caress me. This time, I will have the Dreamer, not the Dream. Yes ; Estelle shall understand me " The woman stole into the courtyard, lithe and feline, with steps that were as if lined with velvet, and her wrappings now all white, and chaste, and dumb.

She stared across at Eyrith with glittering eyes, her hands locked together low above her knees, her hair drawn back and bound like a Monica that prays. The thought came to her with an utter weariness that the man would leave her. She was stricken with sudden realization of an utter emptiness. " His doing," she said. She went across and touched him. " Well," she said, " madman, how does the idea work?" But the word was a caress. " Excellently well," said Eyrith, wheeling round, his eyes, too light in hue to glow, snapping with excitement, his delicate face sharpened into a keen, unpleasant eagerness : " I shall take her away : I shall starve all desire in myself and see to it that she knows none. I had thought I should have to be her lover, only her lover, and after that, wait and pry and see what could be done.

Now, small love between us : she shall go hungry, and cold, and hate me, but she shall understand me at the last — and for ever." "She will leave you," said the woman. " She may understand you, but she will leave you all the more." " So long as she understands me," answered Ralph, " she may leave me, and live in Hell for all I care : she will none the less come back." And this was in Tunis, in the Spring of the year. Somewhere at the same time, in the Spring of the year, anywhere within a thousand miles, a neophyte thought himself alive : the idea was clever as far as it went and so far as such ideas go. The neophyte was Latimer Uden. And in this same Spring of the year, a certain Christine Linn, in an English village far-away, divined unto herself the Unknown God ; and a cottage stood empty beside a stream, a little back from that village road, overshadowed by aspens, and hedged about, and shut in thickly by alders, and wild hazel trees.

It seemed to Latimer Uden that never should he get that odour of rosemary and rue out of his nostrils. This was putting it poetically ; he did not know rosemary nor rue, nor one from the other, nor the smell of either ; it was the odour of death — that itself — that haunted him, and the death was his mother's. Latimer had had a conventional respect for his mother, and imagined, though indeed without the slightest infatuation, accrediting the feeling entirely and of necessity to the bond of the flesh, that he hadhad some love for her. A letter came and told him she was dead. He took his feet down from the window-sill, stood up and stared out at the yellow sky, and at the yellow river and at the people that passed up and down. When he had done and turned away, knocked his pipe out against the shutter, and stooped to pick the letter from the floor, he knew that as for love— it was very little.

But death is far more creative than love. As a few days later Uden stood with his hand upon the woman's — his mother's— unfamiliar chamber-door, ready to push against and enter it, there was a hot tingle about his heart, and a sickening catch at his breath. The sight of the coffin curdled his blood. He had not seen a dead face in his life ; he went — and looked— turning down the sheet: dead — that was all. Simply dead — it was a great deal. He did not gaze long : the give and take between them was over in a moment, the impression instantaneous : the effects not to be worked out wholly in a lifetime. Uden felt this sufficiently not to attempt it standing there while he could keep the sheet uplifted and that most expressive face uncovered. The window was open, there was a wind blowing in with the moist and earthy smell of autumn ; there were evergreens, something delicately pungent, something nameless, no flowers, nothing sweet, only the * rosemary and rue."

Yes, Latimer carried away the odour of death, and herewith able to reckon growth, not by time, but by the happenings of it, commenced in something like earnest to be alive. He made no deductions — consequently ; that (the making of deductions), is a periodical result, not an accompaniment of living : but at some such period, in someone else's life, the deduction had been made, and set up by the way-side : " Death is more creative than love." Uden passed, read, and set his name to the legend. Some days after the funeral, the young man went round to a friend's chambers. He was dressed in mourning, making no great show of it ; sitting down silently he promptly began to smoke, smoking as if he had had a vast deal of practice ; he looked worried. As ground work he was swarthy, made on a fine scale, rugged and harsh in feature : he was young, but in another decade would look no older, nor, to casual observation, would he show much outer change throughout his life.

In expression he would alter, not in lines : they were there, completed with his growth, and no polishing was meant. His friend looked him up and down. He was a man with a reputation as a " familiar " , that could throw the devil into the shade. " You don't want sympathy, and you don't want advice — " he was beginning. "You're mistaken, I do: advice, that's exactly it," put in Uden * Ah, exactly, as you say ; everyone takes advice just as they do water : neither of any moment till they fail : and water may fail, advice never: as, for instance, I advise you not to take it too quietly." " Why ? I see no good in kicking against the pricks, even if I were so inclined." " Traditional humbug," said the Familiar. " Very forcible argument though, I admit," he added, for it was tradition, and he knew it, that at this moment forced back his own tongue between his teeth.

Uden, opposite him there, had been badly wronged, but — by his mother. " I hate cant, " said Uden, suddenly and strongly, " I swear to you I don't know what I should have done, nor what I should not have done if I had not known it till afterwards." This was a mental reference, but its meaning seemed to make itself plain. " Look here, there'll be about five hundred pounds — my God, that's the whole of it, that, no profession, a damned bad training, no warning — friends — a pretty strong total, you'll allow, to set against the one fact of our relationship. I tell you — it can go no farther, as it will never cross my lips again— there was a moment— when the whole thing came to my ears — " He stopped and rose, as people do to overcome the nasty nausea of recollection, putting the cigar away as if that sickened him, and beginning to walk up and down — " Yes, I think old Rendel knew what he was about to tell me first," said Uden.

"'She's ruined you, my boy,' he said 'but she's upstairs still; go and have it out with her.' Well, I went. Death seemed just the insult that pointed the injury you see ... . " One's mother— and dead ! If I had seen her before I knew, I don't know, the conventional apart, that the memory would have softened me much when I should have come to know: but knowing it, as it happened, before I saw her .... well, it altered matters That she was my mother had the least of anything to do with it; but the two things: that she had wronged me and that she was dead amalgamated themselves into one tremendous something.... It was the arraigner: I somehow the accused — at any rate," he broke off with a laugh, " the matter was settled between us then, as a matter quite beyond the adjustment of anything this side the daisies.

And now to come back to common sanity: what's to be done?" The Familiar took a moment to consider, looked from Uden's hands to his head, then from his nose to his chin. "You are well-endowed, I fancy," he said, " but you lack one gift: you will never know truth from a lie. I should say that you would make an honest quack. I should qualify for it." Uden, whose mind was large, and in common with all such (mind or heart), had many careless habits, one of which was putting practice and sentiment in the same mortar, and grinding them with the same pestle, went away expressing gratitude for the idea, and at the same time the deliberate intention of acting upon it. When a year later someone asked the Familiar — who knew everyone that everyone who knew him knew — " What has become of that poor devil Uden?" the Familiar laughed — a rare sign of interest or amuse ment, it might always be either — and vouchsafed the information that "he was — 'studying medicine."

Two years later, a woman coming suddenly and alone to the Familiar's rooms, met Latimer Uden passing out of them. He looked at her, an exceedingly lovely woman, full in the face and passed on with a cavalier tilt of the hat. "Who is he?" asked the woman, when she had closed the door. "Southern blood there, surely?" " I don't think so, nor would you, if you looked again. That swarthy skin is deceptive : the fellow's eyes are light grey, and his hair nothing more than a devilish deep tan." And then they both laughed. "You epitomize completely," said she. "And — the name?" " Latimer Uden, my dear. You must have heard it, and of it. The young man whose mother was a widow, and whose father was a fool — not to have made his widow first, his will afterwards. "As it was, the Fool made the Will first, and, Fool and Jester being one, you know, left everything to the Widow, emphasizing the epitaphal joke, with a phrase that lost little time in shaping itself into the merry grin it disguised — 'in trust for our dear son Latimer' — and it being a big sum of money, a very big sum of money, and the Fool being in such a damned merry humour over the willing of it, there were no trustees: it was purely a sublime joke ....

Of course the Widow was worth the Will: when the money was gone, she met the crisis with some wit: she died. That was a little over two years ago, our swarthy friend having just come of age." " You take an interest in him, " said the woman judicially. "No more than you do." " I have seen him. " "So have I." She laughed. " And heard him probably as well .... How did he take the paternal jest?" " By the throat. Even a fool and his joke strangled and flung aside may gather a tragic air— not that Uden had any notion of being effective: only he has, I should think, a very ready sense of the morally dramatic. And the old lawyer seemed to know it: 'Your mother is dead; your mother has done you out of every stiver: go, and have it out with her upstairs.' He went, and — well, the dead had the best of the argument.

The dramatic force of it was accepted and I don't know that Uden has ever mentioned the loss of the fortune since. Dramatic and chivalrous too. He was urged to ' go ' for the man who'd had the bulk of it, with a chance in equity of 'getting' him — but he and the dead had settled it between them." "Why do you take such an interest in him?" asked the woman, raising her eyes after a lazy pause. "My dear Rosemary, once indulge the notion that you're penetrative and good-bye to true discernment. When one person is under discussion between two others, one, I think you will find, brings the interest, the other supplies the talk. In the present instance, 1 am talking, I should not like to begin now to fail in courtesy to your wishes." "It is a mercy that everyone does not meet them with such deadly-refined intuition," she answered, but with the half-abstracted air of one who is mentally stirring, only burnt ashes, not live coal.

" But certainly you may, if you like, tell me anything else there is to tell — about Latimer Uden." The Familiar took up his parable with great gravity. " A fellow rather given to putting the cart before the horse, I imagine, " he said ; " very solid, with a splendid pride in himself, the taint of a soul in the blood, and given to star-gazing — can you make any thing of that? He goes in for cynicism, and thinks he can take his degree without cramming first with the voluptuary coach. He came to me a couple of years ago and asked my advice — are you smiling, my dear, or is it the shadow of your Gainsborough hat? — 'Be an honest quack,' I said. Sincerity in humbug is really the only conscientious advice left to a man to give — are you smiling again, Rosemary? You remember, of course, the time when I buckled it about you, my dear, like a corselet of steel " "Oh, I remember," said Rosemary easily, "but, for the life of me, I can no longer understand what it means : ' to remember, to remember,' there's no sense left in the phrase.

But du reste, mon ami, let us finish. What did this Latimer Uden do with the advice you gave him?" " Oh, he took it," answered the Familiar, most pro foundly grave, " but for the life of him he couldn't understand what it meant: 'an honest quack,' there was no sense in it for him. But du reste, to finish as you say, mon amie — he became a medical student." " Your wisdom sometimes evaporates in your wit," said Rosemary, with a careless annoyance. " I suppose Mr. Latimer Uden has to earn his living." And then, as if her companion's insight suddenly inspired her own, after a moment she broke into a tender mockery of laughter : and after an instant's silence laughed again, this time with the little note of mockery left out. " What a shame ! " she cried, " But it's the real thing .... I like him for it ... .

What was he here for just now ? " " Only to mention in a friendly way a few little items incidental to his life for the next year or so." " I am much too curious, " said the woman with a sigh that really sounded as if meant for one, "but — go on." " Well, I will," said the Familiar a little less gravely, " with a reservation. I am not without prin ciples. I never speak of items, either my own or other people's ; since for the essential meaning of happenings, it is— the item, you must seek. Therefore items confided to me are sacred— but, I'll tell you all about it instead ; most people think that is to hear everything, but you will comprehend it is only the best I can do. " Did you ever see the towers of Canchester Cathedral, Rosemary ? Within eye-shot of them lives a certain Dr. George Fairly, who wants a village assistant.

Latimer Uden came to-day to bid me good-bye : he is going to be that assistant. He has invested his capital in a license to kill or cure : this is a first dividend. " Rosemary, wan-looking, lovely, stared at the speaker divided between smile and frown. " Oh, how could you ?" Then, before the man could show care to answer, she rose, and thrust the whole thing from her with a gesture of weariness and self-disdain. " Say no more about it," she said. " There's the true ring in it. The dead woman, the holding of his tongue, the sentiment, the folly, the .... ha, ha — medical student, the country-assistantship" — she broke off laugh ing, and tossing back her hat and hair — " Yes, the true ring in it ; and let me catch only the echo of it any where it seems to break my heart." And this was in summer weather four years since the dance in the Tunis court-yard.

Christine Linn still mused in a stainless, sunny silence with an apocalyptic God, but the cottage amid the witch hazel trees, close to the softly stealing stream was no longer empty. A man and a girl lived there : a miser and his daughter : Ralph Eyrith and Estelle.