VII. SPLENDIDE MENDAX…

VII. SPLENDIDE MENDAX

Unpunctuality could not be cited as among Madame de Vallorbes' offenses. Yet, on the morning in question, she was certainly very late for the twelve o'clock breakfast. Richard Calmady--awaiting her coming beneath the glistering dome of the airy pavilion, set in the angle of the terminal wall of the high-lying garden--had time to become conscious of slight irritation. It was not merely that he was constitutionally impatient of delay, but that his nerves were tiresomely on edge just now. Trifles had power to endanger his somewhat stoic equanimity. But when at length Helen emerged from the house irritation was forgotten. Moving through the vivid lights and shadows of the ilex and cypress grove, her appearance had a charm of unwonted simplicity. At first sight her graceful person had the effect of being clothed in a religious habit. Richard's youthful delight in seeing a woman walk beautifully remained to him. It received satisfaction now. Helen advanced without haste, a certain grandeur in her demeanour, a certain gloom, even as one who takes serious counsel of himself, indifferent to external things, at once actor in, and spectator of, some drama playing itself out in the theatre of his own soul. And this effect of dignity, of self-recollection, was curiously heightened by her dress--of a very soft and fine, woolen material, of spotless white, the lines of it at once flowing and statuesque. While as head-gear, in place of some startling construction of contemporary, Parisian millinery, she wore, after the modest Italian fashion, a black lace mantilla over her bright hair.

Arrived, she greeted Richard curtly, and without apology for delay accepted the contents of the first dish offered to her by the waiting men-servants, ate as though determinedly and putting a force upon herself, and--that which was unusual with her before sundown--drank wine. And, watching her, involuntarily Richard's thought traveled back to a certain luncheon party at Brockhurst, graced by the presence of genial, puzzle-headed Lord Fallowfeild and members of his numerous family, when Helen had swept in, even as now, had been self-absorbed, even as now. Of the drive to Newlands, all in the sad November afternoon, following on that luncheon, he also thought, of communications made by Helen during that drive, and of the long course of event and action directly or indirectly consequent on those communications. He thought of the fog, too, enveloping and almost choking him, when in the early morning driven by furies, still virgin in body as in heart, he had ridden out into a blank and sightless world hoping the chill of it would allay the fever in his blood,--and of the fog again, in the afternoon, from out which the branches of the great trees, like famine-stricken arms in tattered draperies, seemed to pluck evilly at the carriage, as he walked the smoking horses up and down the Newlands' drive, waiting for Helen to rejoin him. And now, somehow, that fog seemed to come up between him and the well-furnished breakfast-table, between him and the radiant expanse of the vivacious, capricious, half-classic, half-modern, mercantile city outstretched there, teeming, breeding, fermenting, in the fecundating heat of the noonday sun. The chill of the fog struck cold into his vitals now, giving him the strangest physical sensation. Richard straightened himself in his chair, passed his hands across his eyes impatiently. Brockhurst, and all the old life of it, was a subject of which he forbade himself remembrance. He had divorced himself from all that, cut himself adrift from it long ago. By an act of will, he tried to put it out of his mind now. But the fog remained--an actual clouding of his physical vision, blurring all he looked upon. It was horribly uncomfortable. He wished he was alone. Then he might have slipped down from his chair and, according to his poor capacity of locomotion, sought relief in movement.

Meanwhile, silently, mechanically, Helen de Vallorbes continued her breakfast. And as she so continued, in addition to his singular physical sensations of blurred vision and clinging chill, he became aware of a growing embarrassment and constraint between himself and his companion. So far, his and her intercourse had been easy and spontaneous, because superficial. Since that first interview on the terrace a tacit agreement had existed to avoid the personal note. Now, for cause unknown, that intercourse threatened entering upon a new phase. It was as though the concentration, the tension, which he observed in her, and of which he was sensible in himself, must of necessity eventuate in some unbosoming, some act--almost involuntary--of self-revelation. This unaccustomed silence and restraint seemed to Richard charged with consequences which, in his present condition of defective volition, he was powerless to prevent. And this displeased him, mastery of surrounding influences being very dear to him.

At last, coffee having been served, the men-servants withdrew to the house, but the constraint was not thereby lessened. Helen sat upright, her chin resting upon the back of her left hand, her eyes, under their drooping lids, looking out with a veiled fierceness upon the fair and glittering prospect. Richard saw her face in profile. The black mantilla draped her shoulders and bust with a certain austerity of effect. It was evident that--by something--she had been stirred to the extinction of her habitual vivacity and desire to shine. And Richard, for all his coolness of head and rather cynical maturity of outlook, had a restless suspicion of going forth--even as on that foggy morning at Brockhurst--into a blank and sightless world, full of hazardous possibility, where the safe way was difficult of discovery and where masked dangers might lurk. Solicitous to dissipate his discomfort he spoke a little at random.

"You must forgive me for being such an abominably bad host," he said courteously. "I am not quite the thing this morning, somehow. I had a little go of fever last night. My brain is like so much pulp."

Helen dropped her hand upon the table as though putting a term to an importunate train of thought.

"I have always understood the villa to be remarkably free from malaria," she remarked abstractedly.

"So it is. I quite believe that. The servants certainly keep well enough. But so, unfortunately, is not the port."

Helen turned her head. A vertical line was observable between her arched eyebrows.

"The port?" she repeated.

Richard swallowed his black coffee. Perhaps it might steady him and clear his head. The numbness of his faculties and senses alike exasperated him, filling him with a persuasion he would say precisely those things wisdom would counsel to leave unsaid.

"Yes--you know I generally go down and sleep on board the yacht."

There was a momentary pause. Madame de Vallorbes' lips parted in a soundless exclamation. Then she pushed back the modest folds of the mantilla, leaving her neck free. The action of her hands was very graceful as she did this, and she looked fixedly at Richard Calmady.

"I did not know that," she said slowly. Then added, as though reasoning out her own thought:--"And Naples harbour is admittedly one of the most pestilential holes on the face of the earth. Are you not tempting providence in the matter of disease, Richard? Are you not rather wantonly indiscreet?"

"On the contrary," he answered, and something of mockery touched his expression, "I see it quite otherwise. I have been congratulating myself on the praiseworthy abundance of my discretion."

And the words were no sooner out of his mouth than Richard cursed himself for a bungler, and a slightly vulgar one at that. But upon his hearer those same words worked a remarkable change. Her gloom, her abstraction, departed, leaving only a pretty pensiveness. She smiled with chastened sweetness upon Richard Calmady--a smile nicely attuned to the semi-religious simplicity of her dress.

"Ah! perhaps we are both a trifle out of sorts this morning!" she said. "I, too, have had my little turn of sickness--sickness of heart. And that seems unfair, since I rose in the best disposition of spirit. Quite early I went to confession."

"Confession?" Richard repeated. "I did not know your submission to the Church carried you to such practical lengths."

"Evidently we are each fated to make small discoveries regarding the habits of the other, to-day," she rejoined. "Possibly confession is to me just what those nights spent on board the yacht, lying in that malodorous harbour, are to you!"

Helen's smile broadened to a dainty naughtiness, infinitely provoking. But pensiveness speedily supervened. She folded her hands upon the edge of the table and looked down at them meditatively.

"I relieved my conscience. Not that there was much to relieve it of, thank heaven! We have lived austerely enough most of us, this winter in France. Only it becomes a matter of moral, personal cleanliness, after a time, all that--exaggerated, but very comfortable. Just as one takes one's bath twice daily, not that it is necessary but that it is a luxury of physical purity and self-respect, so one comes to go to confession. That is a luxury of moral purification. It is as a bath to the soul, ministering to the perfection of its cleanliness and health."

She looked up at Richard smiling, that same dainty naughtiness very present.

"You observe I am eminently candid. I tell you exactly how my religion affects me. I can only reach high-thinking through acts which are external and concrete. In short, I am a born sacramentalist."

And Richard listened, interested and entertained. Yet, since that strange blurring of fog still confused his vision and his judgment, vaguely suspicious that he missed the main intent of her speech. Suspicious as one who, listening to the clever patter of a conjurer, detects in it the effort to distract attention from some difficult feat of legerdemain, until that feat has passed from attempt merely into accomplished fact.

"And, indirectly, that is where my heart-sickness comes in," she continued, with a return to something of her former abstraction and gloom. "I was coming away, coming back here--and I was very happy. It is not often one can say that. And then--pouf---like that," she brought her hands smartly together, "the charming bubble burst! For, upon the very church steps, I met a man whom I have every cause to hate."

As she spoke, the fog seemed to draw away, burnt up by the great, flaming sun-god there. Richard's brain grew clear--clearer, indeed, than in perfect health--and his still face grew more still than was, even to it, quite natural.

"Well?" he asked, almost harshly.

And Helen, whose faith in her own diplomacy had momentarily suffered eclipse, rejoiced. For the tone of his voice betrayed not disgust, but anxiety. It stirred her as a foretaste of victory. And victory had become a maddening necessity to her. Destournelle had forced her hand. His natural infirmity of purpose relieved her of the fear he could work her any great mischief. Yet his ingenuity, inspired by wounded vanity, might prove beyond her calculations. It is not always safe to forecast the future by experience of the past in relation to such a being as Destournelle! Therefore it became of supreme importance, before that gentleman had time further to obtrude himself, to bind Richard Calmady by some speech, some act, from which there was no going back. And more than just that. The sight of her ex-lover, though she now loathed him--possibly just because she so loathed him--provoked passion in her. It was as though only in a new intrigue could she rid herself of the remembrance of the old intrigue which was now so detestable to her. She craved to do him that deepest, most ultimate, despite. And passion cried out in her. The sight of him, though she loathed him, had made her utterly weary of chastity. All of which emotions--but held as hounds in a leash, ready to be slipped when the psychological moment arrived, and by no means to be slipped until the arrival of it--dictated the tenor of her next speech.

"Well," she answered, with an air of half-angry sincerity altogether convincing, "I really don't know that I am particularly proud of the episode. I know I was careless, that I laid myself open to the invidious comment, which is usually the reward of all disinterested action. One learns to accept it as a matter of course. And you see Paul Destournelle----"

"Oh, Destournelle!" Richard exclaimed.

"You have read him?"

"Every one has read him."

"And what do you think of him?"

"That his technique is as amazingly clever as his thought is amazingly rotten."

"I know--I know," she said eagerly. "And that is just what induced me to do all I could for him. If one could cut the canker away, give him backbone and decency, while retaining that wonderful technique, one would have a second and a greater Theophile Gautier."

Richard was looking full at her. His face had more colour, more animation, than usual.

"If--yes--if," he returned. "But that same if bulks mighty big to my mind."

"I know," she repeated. "Yet it seemed to me worth the attempt. And then, you understand,--who better?--that if one's own affairs are not conspicuously happy, one has all the more longing the affairs of others should be crowned with success. And this winter specially, among the sordid miseries, disgraces, deprivations, of the siege, one was liable to take refuge in an over-exalted altruism. It was difficult in so mad a world not to indulge in personal eccentricity--to the neglect of due worship of the great goddess Conventionality. With death in visible form at every street corner, one's sense of humour, let alone one's higher faculties, rebelled against the futility of such worship. So many detestable sights and sounds were perpetually presented to one--not to mention broth of abominable things daily for dinner--that one turned, with thanksgiving, to beautiful form in art, to perfectly felicitous words and phrases. The meaning of them mattered but little just then. They freed one from the tyranny of more or less disgusting fact. They satisfied eye and ear. One asked nothing more just then--luckily, you will say, since the animal Destournelle has very surely nothing more to give."

In speaking, Helen pushed her chair back, turning it sideways to the table. Her speech was alive with varied and telling inflections. Her smallest gesture had in it something descriptive and eloquent.

"And so I fell to encouraging the animal," she continued, almost plaintively, yet with a note of veiled laughter in her voice. "Reversing the order of Circe--Naples inclines one to classic illustration, sometimes a little hackneyed--by the way, speaking of Naples, look at the glory of it all just now, Richard!--I tried to turn, not men to swine, but swine to men. And I failed, of course. The gods know best. They never attempt metamorphosis on the ascending scale! I let Destournelle come to see me frequently. The world advised itself to talk. But, being rather bitterly secure of myself, I disregarded that. If one is aware that one's heart was finally and long ago disposed of, one ceases to think seriously of that side of things. You must know all that well enough--witness the sea-born furnishings of my bedroom up-stairs!"

For half a minute she paused. Richard made no comment.

"Hard words break no bones," she added lightly. "And so, to show how much I despised all such censorious cackle, I allowed Destournelle to travel south with me when I left Paris."

"You pushed neglect of the worship of conventionality rather far," Richard said.

Helen rose to her feet. Excitement gained on her, as always during one of her delightful improvisations, her talented viva voce improvements on dry-as-dust fact. She laughed softly, biting her lip. More than one hound had been slipped by now. They made good running. She stood by Richard Calmady, looking down at him, covering him, so to speak, with her eyes. The black mantilla no longer veiled her bright head. It had fallen to the ground, and lay a dark blot upon the mellow fairness of the tesselated pavement. White-robed, statuesque--yet not with the severe grace of marble, but with that softer, more humanly seductive grace of some figure of cunningly tinted ivory--she appeared, just then, to gather up in herself all the poetry, the intense and vivid light, the victorious vitality, of the clear, burning, southern noon.

"Ah, well, conventionality proved perfectly competent to avenge herself!" she exclaimed. "The animal Destournelle took the average, the banal view, as might have been anticipated. He had the insane presumption to suppose it was himself, not his art, in which I was interested. I explained his error, and departed. I recovered my equanimity. That took time. I felt soiled, degraded. And then to-day I meet him again, unashamed, actually claiming recognition. I repeated my explanation with uncompromising lucidity----"

Richard moved restlessly in his chair, looking up almost sharply at her.

"Waste of breath," he said. "No explanation is lucid if the hearer is unwilling to accept it."

And then the two cousins, as though they had reached unexpectedly some parting of the ways, calling for instant decision in respect of the future direction of their journey, gazed upon one another strangely--each half defiant of the other, each diligent to hide his own and read the other's thought, each sensible of a crisis, each at once hurried and arrested by suspicion of impending catastrophe, unless this way be chosen that declined--though it seemed, in good truth, not in their keeping, but in that of blind chance only that both selection and rejection actually resided. And, in this strait, neither habit of society, fine sword-play of diplomacy and tact, availed to help them. For suddenly they had outpaced all that, and brought up amongst ancient and secular springs of action and emotion before which civilisation is powerless and the ready tongue of fashion dumb.

But even while he so gazed, in fateful suspense and indecision, the fog came up again, chilling Richard Calmady's blood, oppressing his brain as with an uprising of foul miasma, blurring his vision, so that Helen's fair, downward-gazing face was distorted, rendered illusive and vague. And, along with this, distressing restlessness took him, compelling him to seek relief in change of posture and of place. He could not stop to reckon with how that which he proposed to do might strike an onlooker. His immediate sensations filled his whole horizon. Silently he slipped down from his chair, stood a moment, supporting himself with one hand on the edge of the table, and then moved forward to that side of the pavilion which gave upon the garden. Here the sunshine was hot upon the pavement, and upon the outer half of each pale, slender column. Richard leant his shoulder against one of these, grateful for the genial heat.

Since her first and somewhat inauspicious meeting with him in childhood, Helen had never, close at hand, seen Richard Calmady walk thus far. She stared, fascinated by that cruel spectacle. For the instant transformation of the apparently tall, and conspicuously well-favoured, courtly gentleman, just now sitting at table with her, into the shuffling, long-armed, dwarfed and crippled creature was, at first utterly incredible, then portentous, then, by virtue of its very monstrosity, absorbing and, to her, adorable, whetting appetite as veritable famine might. Chastity became to her more than ever absurd, a culpable waste of her own loveliness, of sensation, of emotion, a sin against those vernal influences working in this generous nature surrounding her and working in her own blood. All the primitive instinct of her womanhood called aloud in her that she must wed--must wed. And the strident voice of the great, painted city coming up to her, urgent, incessant, carried the same message, as did the radiant sea, whose white lips kissed the indented coast-line as though pale and hungry with love. While the man before her, by his very abnormality and a certain secretness inevitable in that, heightened her passion. He was to her of all living men most desirable, so that she must win him and hold him, must see and know.

In a few steps, light as those of the little, rose-crowned dancer of long ago, she followed him across the shining floor. There was a point of north in the wind, adding exhilaration to the firm sunshine as ice to rare wine. The scent of narcissus, magnolia, and lemon blossom was everywhere. The cypresses yielded an aromatic, myrrh-like sweetness. The uprising waters of the fountain, set in the central alley, swerved southward, falling in a jeweled rain. Helen, in her spotless raiment, came close and Richard Calmady turned to her. But his eyes no longer questioned hers. They were as windows opening back on to empty space, seeing all, yet telling nothing. His face had become still again and inscrutable, lightened only by that flickering, mocking smile. It seemed as though the psychological moment were passed and social sense, ordinary fashions of civilised intercourse, had not only come back but come to stay.

"I think we will omit Destournelle from our talk in future," he said. "As a subject of conversation I find he disagrees with me, notwithstanding his felicity of style and his admirable technique. I will give orders which, I hope, may help to protect you from annoyance in future. In this delightful land, by wise exercise of just a little bribery and corruption, it is still possible to make the unwelcome alien prefer to seek health and entertainment elsewhere. Now, will you like to go back to the house?"

The approach to the pavilion from the lower level of the garden was by a carefully graded slope of Roman brick, set edgewise. At regular intervals of about eighteen inches this was crossed--on the principle of a gang-plank--by raised marble treads. Without waiting for his cousin's reply, Richard started slowly down the slope. At the best of times this descent for him demanded caution. Now his vision was again so queerly blurred that he miscalculated the distance between the two lowest treads, slipped and stumbled, lunging forward. Quick as a cat, Madame de Vallorbes was behind him, her right hand grasping his right elbow, her left hand under his left armpit.

"Ah! Dickie, Dickie, don't fall!" she cried, a sudden terror in her voice.

Her muscles hardened like steel. It needed all her strength to support him, for he was heavy, his body inert as that of one fainting. For a moment his head rested against her bosom; and her breath came short, sighing against his neck and cheek.

By sheer force of will Richard recovered his footing, disengaging himself from her support, shuffling aside from her.

"A thousand thanks, Helen," he said.

Then he looked full at her, and she--untender though she was--perceived that the perspective of space on which, as windows might, his eyes seemed to open back, was not empty. It was peopled, crowded--even as those steep, teeming byways of Naples--by undying, unforgetable misery, humiliation, revolt.

"Yes, it is rather unpardonable to be--as I am--isn't it?" he said. Adding hastily, yet with a certain courteous dignity:--"I am ashamed to trouble you, to ask you--of all people--to run messages for me--but would you go on to the house----"

"Dickie, why may not I help you?" she interrupted.

"Ah!" he said, "the answer to that lies away back in the beginning of things. Even unlucky devils, such as myself, are not without a certain respect for that which is fitting, for seemliness and etiquette. Send one of my men please. I shall be very grateful to you--thanks."

And Helen de Vallorbes, her passion baulked and therefore more than ever at white heat, swept up the paved alley, amid the sweet scents of the garden, beneath the jeweled rain of the fountain, that point of north in the wind dallying with her as in laughing challenge, making her the more mad to have her way with Richard Calmady, yet knowing that of the two--he and she--he was the stronger as yet.

VIII. IN WHICH HELEN DE VALLORBES LEARNS HER RIVAL'S NAME

"I hear Morabita sings, in Ernani, at the San Carlo on Friday night. Do you care to go, Helen?"

The question, though asked casually, had, to the listener, the effect of falling with a splash, as of a stone into a well, awakening unexpected echoes, disturbing, rather harshly, the constrained silence which had reigned during the earlier part of dinner.

All the long, hot afternoon, Madame de Vallorbes had been alone--Richard invisible, shut persistently away in those rooms of the entresol into which, as yet, she had never succeeded in penetrating. Richard had not proposed to her to do so. And it was part of that praiseworthy discretion which she had agreed with herself to practise--in her character of scrupulously unexacting guest--only to accept invitations, never to issue them. How her cousin might occupy himself, whom even he might receive, during the time spent in those rooms, she did not know. And it was idle to inquire. Neither of her servants, though skilful enough, as a rule, in the acquisition of information, could, in this case, acquire any. And so it came about that during those many still bright hours, following on her rather agitated parting with Richard at midday, while she paced the noble rooms of the first floor--once more taking note of their costly furnishings and fine pictures, meeting her own restless image again and again in their many mirrors--and later, near sundown, when she walked the dry, brown pathways of the ilex and cypress grove, the wildest suspicions of his possible doings assailed her. For she was constrained to admit that, though she had spent a full week now under his roof, it was but the veriest fringe, after all, of the young man's habits and thought with which she was actually acquainted. And this not only desperately intrigued her curiosity, but the apartness, behind which he entrenched himself and his doings, was as a slight put upon her and consequent source of sharp mortification. So to-day she ranged all permitted spaces of the villa and its grounds softly, yet lithe, watchful, fierce as a she-panther--her ears strained to hear, her eyes to see, driven the while by jealousy of that nameless rival, to remembrance of whom all the whole place was dedicated, and by baffled passion, as with whips.

Nor did superstition fail to add its word of ill-omen at this juncture. A carrion crow, long-legged, heavy of beak, alighting on the clustered curls of the marble bust of Homer, startled her with vociferous croakings. A long, narrow, many-jointed, blue-black, evil-looking beetle crawled from among the rusty, fibrous, cypress roots across her path. A funeral procession, priest and acolytes, with lighted tapers, sitting within the glass-sided hearse at head and foot of the flower-strewn coffin, wound slowly along the dusty, white road--bordered by queer growth of prickly-pear and ragged, stunted palm-trees--far below. She crossed herself, turning hurriedly away. Yet, for an instant, Death, triumphant, hideous, inevitable, and all the spiritual terror and physical disgust of it, grinned at her, its fleshless face, as it seemed, close against her own. And alongside Death--by some malign association of ideas and ugly antic of profanity--she saw the bel tete de Jesu of M. Paul Destournelle as she had seen it this morning, he looking back, hat in hand, as he plunged down the break-neck, Neapolitan side-street, with that impish, bleating, goatlike laugh.

By the time the dinner-hour drew near she found her outlook in radical need of reconstruction, and to that end bade Zelie dress her in the crocus-yellow brocade, reserved for some emergency such as the present. It was a gown, surely, to restore self-confidence and induce self-respect! Fashioned fancifully, according to a picturesque, seventeenth-century, Venetian model, the full sleeves and the long-waisted bodice of it--this cut low, generously displaying her shoulders and swell of her bosom--were draped with superb guipure de Flandres a brides frisees and strings of seed pearls. All trace of ascetic simplicity had very certainly departed. Helen was resplendent--strings of seed pearls twisted in her honey-coloured hair, a clear red in her cheeks and hard brilliance in her eyes, bred of eager jealous excitement. She had, indeed, reached a stage of feeling in which the sight of Richard Calmady, the fact of his presence, worked upon her to the extent of dangerous emotion. And now this statement of his, and the question following it, caused the flame of the inward fires tormenting her to leap high.

"Ah! Morabita!" she exclaimed. "What an age it is since I have heard her sing, or thought about her! How is her voice lasting, Richard?"

"I really don't know," he answered, "and that is why I am rather curious to hear her. There was literally nothing but a voice in her case--no dramatic sense, nothing in the way of intelligence to fall back on. On that account it interested me to watch her. She and her voice had no essential relation to one another. Her talent was stuck into her, as you might stick a pin into a cushion. She produced glorious effects without a notion how she produced them, and gave expression--and perfectly just expression--to emotions she had never dreamed of. At the best of times singers are a feeble folk intellectually, but, of all singers I have known, she was mentally the very feeblest."

"No, perhaps she was not very wise," Helen put in, but quite mildly, quite kindly.

"And so if the voice went, everything went. And that made one reflect agreeably upon the remarkably haphazard methods employed by that which we politely call Almighty God in His construction of our unhappy selves. Design?--There's not a trace of design in the whole show. Bodies, souls, gifts, superfluities, deficiencies, just pitched together anyhow. The most bungling of human artists would blush to turn out such work."

Richard spoke rapidly. He had refused course after course. And now the food on his plate remained untasted. Seen in the soft light of the shaded candles his face had a strange look of distraction upon it, as though he too was restless with an intimate, deep-seated restlessness. His skin was less colourless than usual, his manner less colourless also. And this conferred a certain youthfulness on him, making him seem nearer--so Helen thought--to the boy she had known at Brockhurst, than to the man, whom lately, she had been so signally conscious that she failed to know.

"No, I hope Morabita's voice remains to her," he continued. "Her absolute nullity minus it is disagreeable to think of. And much as I relish collecting telling examples of the fatuity of the Creator--she, voiceless, would offer a supreme one--I would spare her that, poor dear. For she was really rather charming to me at one time."

"So it was commonly reported," Helen remarked.

"Was it?" Richard said absently.

Though as a rule conspicuously abstemious, he had drunk rather freely to-night, and that with an odd haste of thirst. Now he touched his champagne tumbler, intimating to Bates, the house-steward--sometime the Brockhurst under butler--that it should be refilled.

"I can't have seen Morabita for nearly three years," he went on. "And my last recollections of her are unfortunate. She had sent me a box, in Vienna it was I think, for the Traviata. She was fat then, or rather, fatter. Stage furniture leaves something to desire in the way of solidity. In the death scene the middle of the bed collapsed. Her swan-song ceased abruptly. Her head and heels were in the air, and the very largest rest of her upon the floor, bed and bedclothes standing out in a frill all around. It was a sight discouraging to sentiment. I judged it kinder not to go to supper with her after the performance that night."

Richard paused, again drained his glass.

"I beg your pardon," he said, "what atrocious nonsense I am talking!"

"I think I rather enjoy it," Madame de Vallorbes answered. She looked at the young man sideways, from under her delicate eyelids. He was perfectly sober--of that there was no question. Yet he was less inaccessible, somehow, than usual. She inclined to experiment.--"Only I am sorry for Morabita in more ways than one, poor wretch. But then perhaps I am just a little sorry for all those women whom you reject, Richard."

"The women whom I reject?" he said harshly.

"Yes, whom you reject," Helen repeated.--Then she busied herself with a small black fig, splitting it deftly open, disclosing the purple, and rose, and clear living greens of the flesh and innumerable seeds of it, colours rich as those of a tropic sky at sunset.--"And there are so many of those women it seems to me! I am coming to have a quite pathetic fellowship for them." She buried her white teeth in the softness of the fig.--"Not without reason, perhaps. It is idle to deny that you are a pastmaster in the ungentle art of rejection. What have you to say in self-defense, Dickie?"

"That talking nonsense appears to be highly infectious--and that it is a disagreeably oppressive evening."

Helen de Vallorbes smiled upon him, glanced quickly over her shoulder to assure herself the servants were no longer present--then spoke, leaning across the corner of the table towards him, while her eyes searched his with a certain daring provocation.

"Yes, I admit I have finished my fig. Dinner is over. And it is my place to disappear according to custom."--She laid her rosy finger-tips together, her elbows resting on the table. "But I am disinclined to disappear. I have a number of things to say. Take that question of going to the opera, for instance. Half Naples will be there, and I know more than half Naples, and more than half Naples knows me. I do not crave to run incontinently into the arms of any of de Vallorbes' many relations. They were not conspicuously kind to me when I was here as a girl and stood very much in need of kindness. So the question of going to the San Carlo, you see, requires reflection. And then,"--her tone softened to a most persuasive gentleness,--"then, the evenings are a trifle long when one is alone and has nothing very satisfactory to think about. And I have been worried to-day, detestably worried."--She looked down at her finger-tips. Her expression became almost sombre. "In any case I shall not plague you very much longer, Richard," she said rather grandly. "I have determined to remove myself bag and baggage. It is best, more dignified to do so. Reluctantly I own that. Here have I no abiding city. I wish I had, perhaps, but I haven't. Therefore it is useless, and worse than useless, to play at having one. One must just face the truth."

She looked full at the young man, smiling at him, as though somehow forgiving him a slight, an unkindness, a neglect.

"And so, just because to you it all matters so uncommonly little, let us talk rather longer this evening."

She rose.

"I'll go on into the long drawing-room," she said. "The windows were still open there when I came in to dinner. The room will be pleasantly cool. You will come?"

And she moved away quietly, thoughtfully, opened the high double-doors, left them open, and that without once looking back. Yet her hearing was strained to catch the smallest sound above that which accompanied her, namely, the rustling of her dress. Then a queer shiver ran all down her spine and she set her teeth, for she perceived that halting, shuffling footsteps had begun to follow those light and graceful footsteps of her own.

"Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute," she said to herself. "I have no fear for the rest."

Yet, crossing the near half of the great room, she sank down on a sofa, thankful there was no farther to go. In the last few minutes she had put forth more will-power, felt more deeply, than she had supposed. Her knees gave under her. It was a relief to sit down.

The many candles in the cut-glass chandeliers, hanging from along the centre of the painted ceiling, were lighted, filling the length and breadth of the room with a bland, diffused radiance. It touched picture and statue, tall mirror, rich curtain, polished woodwork of chair and table, gleaming ebony and ivory cabinet. It touched Helen de Vallorbes' bright head and the strings of pearls twisted in her hair, her white neck, the swell of her bosom, and all that delicate wonder of needlework--the Flanders' lace--trimming her bodice. It lay on her lap, too, as she leaned back in the corner of the sofa, her hands pressed down on either side her thighs--lay there bringing the pattern of her brocaded dress into high relief. This was a design of pomegranates--leaves, flowers, and fruit--and of trailing, peacock feathers, a couple of shades lighter than the crocus-yellow ground. The light took the over-threads and stayed in them.

The window stood wide open on to the balcony, the elaborately wrought-ironwork of which--scroll and vase, plunging dolphin and rampant sea-horse--detached itself from the opaque background of the night. And in at the window came luscious scents from the garden below, a chime of falling water, the music, faint and distant, in rising and falling cadence of a marching military band. In at it also, and rising superior to all these in imperativeness and purpose, came the voice of Naples itself--no longer that of a city of toil and commerce, but that of a city of pleasure, a city of licence, until such time as the dawn should once again break, and the sun arise, driving back man and beast alike to labour, the one from merry sinning, the other from hard-earned sleep. And once again, but in clearer, more urgent, accents, the voice of the city repeated its message to Helen de Vallorbes, calling aloud to her to do even as it was doing, namely, to wed--to wed. And, hearing it, understanding that message, for a little space shame took her, in face both of its and her own shamelessness, so that she closed her eyes, unable for the moment to look at Richard Calmady as he crossed the great room in that bland and yet generous light. But, almost immediately, his voice, cold and measured in tone, there close beside her, claimed her attention.

"That which you said at dinner rather distresses me, Helen."

Then, shame or no shame, Madame de Vallorbes, of necessity, opened her eyes. And, so doing, it needed all her self-control to repress a cry. She forced her open hands down very hard on the mattress of the sofa. For Richard leaned his back against the jamb of the open window, and she saw his face and all his poor figure in profile. His left hand hung straight at his side, the tips of his fingers only just not touching the floor. And again, as at midday the spectacle of his deformity worked upon her strangely.

"What of all that which I said at dinner distresses you?" she asked gently, with sudden solicitude.

"You showed me that I have been a wretchedly negligent host."--In speaking, the young man turned his head and looked at her, paused a moment, almost startled by her resplendent aspect. Then he looked down at his own stunted and defective limbs. His expression became very grim. He raised his shoulders just perceptibly. "I reproach myself with having allowed you to be so much alone. It must have been awfully dull for you."

"It was a little dull," Helen said, still gently.

"I ought to have begged you to ask some of the people you know in Naples to come here. It was stupid of me not to think of it. I need not have seen them, neither need they have seen me."

He looked at her steadily again, as though trying to fix her image in his memory.

"Yes, it was stupid of me," he repeated absently. "But I have got into churlish, bachelor habits--that can hardly be helped, living alone, or on board ship, as I do--and I have pretty well forgotten how to provide adequately for the entertainment of a guest."

"Oh! I have had that which I wanted, that which I came for," Helen answered, very charmingly,--"had it in part, at all events. Though I could have put up with just a little more of it, Dickie, perhaps."

"I warned you, if you remember, that opportunities of amusement--as that word is generally understood--would be limited."

"Amusement?" she exclaimed, with an almost tragic inflection of contempt.

"Oh yes!" he said, "amusement is not to be despised. I'd give all I am worth, half my time, to be amused--but that again, like hospitality, is rather a lost art with me. You remember, I warned you life at the villa in these days was not precisely hilarious."

Helen clapped her hands together.

"Ah! you are wilfully obtuse, you are wilfully, cruelly pigheaded!" she cried. "Pardon me, dear Richard, but your attitude is enough to exasperate a saint. And I am no saint as yet. I am still human--radically, for my own peace of mind lamentably, human. I am only too capable of being grieved, humiliated, hurt. But there, it is folly to say such things to you! You are hopelessly insensible to all that. So I take refuge in quoting your own words of this morning against you--that no explanation is lucid if the hearer refuses to accept it."

"I am dull, no doubt, but honestly I fail to see how that remark of mine can be held to apply in the present case."

"It applies quite desolatingly well!" Helen declared, with spirit. Then her manner softened into a seductiveness of forgiveness once again.--"And so, dear Richard, I am glad that I had already determined to leave here to-morrow. It would have been a little too wretched to arrive at that determination after this conversation. You must go alone to hear your old flame, Morabita, sing. Only, if her voice is still as sympathetic as of old, if it moves you from your present insensibility, you may read remembrance of some aspects of my visit into the witchery of it if you like. It may occur to you what those aspects really meant."

Helen smiled upon him, leaning a little forward. Her eyes shone, as though looking out through unshed tears.

"It's not exactly flattering to one's vanity to be compelled to depute to another woman the making of such things clear. But it is too evident I waste my time in attempting to make them clear myself. No explanation is lucid, et caetera----"

Helen shook back her head with an extraordinary charm of half-defiant, half-tearful laughter. She was playing a game, her whole intelligence bent on the playing of it skilfully. Yet she was genuinely touched. She was swayed by her very real emotion. She spoke from her heart, though every word, every passing action, subserved her ultimate purpose in regard to Richard Calmady.

"And, after all, one must retain some remnant of self-respect with which to cover the nakedness of one's---- Oh yes! decidedly, Morabita's voice had best do the rest."

Richard had moved from his station in the window. He stood at the far end of the sofa, resting his hands on the gilded and carven arm of it. Now the ungainliness of his deformity was hidden, and his height was greater than that of his companion, obliging her to look up at him.

"I gave you my word, Helen," he said, "I have no notion what you are driving at."

"Driving at, driving at?" she cried. "Why, the self-evident truth that you are forcing me rather brutally to pay the full price of my weakness in coming here, in permitting myself the indulgence of seeing you again. You told me directly I arrived, with rather cynical frankness, that I had not changed. That is quite true. What I was at Brockhurst, four years ago, what I then felt, that I am and that I feel still. Oh! you have nothing to reproach yourself with in defect of plain speaking, or excess of amiable subterfuge! You hit out very straight from the shoulder! Directly I arrived you also told me how you had devoted this place--with which, after all, I am not wholly unconnected--to the cult, to the ideal worship, of a woman whom you loved."

"So I have devoted it," Richard said.

"And yet I was weak enough to remain!"

The young man's face relaxed, but its expression remained enigmatic.

"And why not?" he asked.

"Because, in remaining, I have laid myself open to misconstruction, to all manner of pains and penalties, not easy to be endured, to the odious certainty of appearing contemptible in your estimation as well as in my own."

Helen patted her pretty foot upon the floor in a small frenzy of irritation.

"How can I hope to escape, since even the precious being whom you affect to worship you keep sternly at arm's length, that is among the other pleasing things you confided to me immediately on my arrival--lest, seen at close quarters, she should fall below your requirements and so you should suffer disillusion. Ah! you are frightfully cold-blooded, repulsively inhuman. Whether you judge others by yourself, reckoning them equally devoid of natural feeling, or whether you find a vindictive relish in rejecting the friendship and affection so lavishly offered you----"

"Is it offered lavishly? That comes as news to me," he put in.

"Ah! but it is. And I leave you to picture the pleasing entertainment afforded the offerer in seeing you ignore the offering, or, worse still, take it, examine it, and throw it aside like a dirty rag! In one case you underline your rejection almost to the point of insult."

"This is very instructive. I am learning a whole lot about myself," Richard said coolly.

"But look," Madame de Vallorbes cried, "do you not prefer exposing yourself to the probability of serious illness rather than remain under the same roof with me? The inference hits one in the face. To you the pestilential exhalations, the unspeakable abominations, of Naples harbour appear less dangerous than my near neighbourhood."

"You put it more strongly than I should," he answered, smiling. "Yet, from a certain standpoint, that may very well be true."

For an instant Helen hesitated. Her intelligence, for all its alertness, was strained exactly to appraise the value of his words, neither over, nor under, rating it. And her eyes searched his with a certain boldness and imperiousness of gaze. Richard, meanwhile, folding his arms upon the carven and gilt frame of the sofa, looked back at her, smiling still, at once ironically and very sadly. Then swift assurance came to her of the brazen card she had best play. But, playing it, she was constrained to avert her eyes and set her glance pensively upon the light-visited surface of her crocus-yellow, silken lap.

"I will do my best possible to accept your nightly journeys as a compliment in disguise, then," she said, quite softly. "For truly, when I come to think of it, were she, herself, here--she, the woman you so religiously admire that you take elaborate pains to avoid having anything on earth to do with her--were she herself here you could hardly take more extensive measures to secure yourself against risk of disappointment, hardly exercise a greater rage of caution!"

"Perhaps that's just it. Perhaps you have arrived at it all at last. Perhaps she is here," he said.

And he turned away, steadying himself with one hand against the jamb of the window, and shuffled out slowly, laboriously, onto the balcony into the night.

For a quite perceptible length of time Helen de Vallorbes continued to contemplate the light-visited surface of her crocus-yellow, silken lap. She followed the lines of the rich pattern--pomegranate, fruit and blossom, trailing peacock's feather. For by such mechanical employment alone could she keep the immensity of her excitement and of her triumph in check. To shout aloud, to dance, to run wildly to and fro, would have been only too possible to her just then. All that for which she had schemed, had ruled herself discreetly, had ridden a waiting race, had been hers, in fact, from the first--the prize adjudged before ever she left the starting-post. She held this man in the hollow of her hand, and that by no result of cunning artifice, but by right divine of beauty and wit and the manifold seductions of her richly-endowed personality. And, thinking of that, she clenched her dainty fists, opened them again, and again clenched them, upon the yielding mattress of the sofa, given over to an ecstasy of physical enjoyment, weaving even as, with clawed and padded paws, her prototype the she-panther might. Slowly she raised her downcast eyes and looked after Richard Calmady, his figure a blackness, as of vacancy, against the elaborate wrought-ironwork of the balcony. And so doing, an adorable sensation moved her, at once of hungry tenderness and of fear--fear of something unknown, in a way fundamental, incalculable, the like of which she had never experienced before. Ah! indeed, of all her many loves, here was the crown and climax! Yet, in the midst of her very vital rapture, she could still find time for remembrance of the little, crescent-shaped scar upon her temple, and for remembrance of Katherine Calmady, who had, unwittingly, fixed that blemish upon her and had also more than once frustrated her designs. This time frustration was not possible. She was about to revenge the infliction of that little scar! And, at the same time the intellectual part of her was agreeably intrigued, trying to disentangle the why and wherefore of Richard's late action and utterances. While self-love was gratified to the highest height of its ambition by the knowledge that not only in his heart had she long reigned, but that he had dedicated time and wealth and refined ingenuity to the idea of her, to her worship, to the making of this, her former dwelling-place, into a temple for her honour, a splendid witness to her victorious charm, a shrine not unfitting to contain the idol of his imagination.

For a little space she rested in all this, savouring the sweetness of it as some odour of costly sacrifice. For whatever her sins and lapses, Helen de Vallorbes had the fine aesthetic appreciations, as well as the inevitable animality, of the great courtesan. The artist was at least as present in her as the whore. And it was not, therefore, until realisation of her present felicity was complete, until it had soaked into her, so to speak, to the extent of a delicious familiarity, that she was disposed to seek change of posture or of place. Then, at last, softly, languidly, for indeed she was somewhat spent by the manifold emotions of the day, she rose and followed Richard into the starless, low-lying night. Her first words were very simple, yet to herself charged with far-reaching meaning--as a little key may give access to a treasure-chest containing riches of fabulous worth.

"Richard, is it really true, that which you have told me?"

"What conceivable object could I have in lying?"

"Then why have you delayed?--why wasted the precious days--the precious months and years, if it comes to that?"

"How in honour and decency could I do otherwise--circumstances being such as they are, I being that which I am?"

The two voices were in notable contrast. Both were low, both were penetrated by feeling. But the man's was hoarse and rasping, the woman's smooth and soft as milk.

"Ah! it is the old story!" she said. "Will you never comprehend, Dickie, that what is to you hateful in yourself, may to some one else be the last word of attraction, of seduction, even?"

"God forbid I should ever comprehend that!" he answered. "When I take to glorying in my shame, pluming myself upon my abnormality, then, indeed, I become beyond all example loathsome. The most deplorable moment of my very inglorious career will be precisely that in which I cease to look at myself with dispassionate contempt."

Helen knelt down, resting her beautiful arms upon the dark hand-rail of the balcony, letting her wrists droop over it into the outer dimness. The bland light from the open window dwelt on her kneeling figure and bowed head. But it was as well, perhaps, that the night dropped a veil upon her face.

"And yet so it is," she said. "You may repudiate the idea, but the fact remains. I do not say it would affect all women alike--affect those, for instance, whose conception of love, and of the relation between man and woman, is dependent upon the slightly improper and very tedious marriage service as authorised by the English Church. Let the conventional be conventional still! So much the better if you don't appeal to them--meagre, timid, inadequate, respectable--a generation of fashion-plates with a sixpenny book of etiquette, moral and social, stuck inside them to serve for a soul."

Helen's voice broke in a little spasm of laughter, and her hands began, unconsciously, to open and close, open and close, weaving in soft, outer darkness.

"We may leave them out of the argument.--But there remain the elect, Richard, among whom I dare count myself. And over them, never doubt it, just that which you hate and which appears at first sight to separate you so cruelly from other men, gives you a strange empire. You stimulate, you arrest, you satisfy one's imagination, as does the spectacle of some great drama. You are at once enslaved and emancipated by this thing--to you hateful, to me adorable--beyond all measure of bondage or freedom inflicted upon, or enjoyed by, other men. And in this, just this, lies magnificent compensation if you would but see it. I have always known that--known that if you would put aside your arrogance and pride, and yield yourself a little, it was possible to love you, and give you such joy in loving as one could give to no-one else on earth."

Her voice sweetened yet more. She leaned forward, pressing her bosom against the rough ironwork of the balcony.

"I knew that, from the first hour we met, in the variegated, autumn sunshine, upon the greensward, before the white summer-house overlooking that noble, English, woodland view. I saw you, and so doing I saw mysteries of joy in myself unimagined by me before. It went very hard with me then, Richard. It has gone very hard with me ever since."

Madame de Vallorbes' words died away in a grave and delicate whisper. But she did not turn her head, nor did Richard speak. Only, close there beside her, she heard him breathe, panting short and quick even as a dog pants, while a certain vibration seemed to run along the rough ironwork against which she leaned. And by these signs Helen judged her speech, though unanswered, had not been wholly in vain. From below, the luscious fragrance of the garden, the chime of falling water, and the urgent voice of the painted pleasure-city came up about her. Night had veiled the face of Naples, even as Helen's own. Yet lines of innumerable lights described the suave curve of the bay, climbed the heights of Posilipo, were doubled in the oily waters of the harbour, spread abroad alluring gaiety in the wide piazzas, and shone like watchful and soliciting eyes from out the darkness of narrow street, steep lane, and cutthroat alley. While, above all that, high uplifted against the opacity of the starless sky, a blood-red beacon burned on the summit of Vesuvius, the sombre glow of it reflected upon the underside of the masses of downward-rolling smoke as upon the belly of some slow-crawling, monstrous serpent.

Suddenly Helen spoke once again, and with apparent inconsequence.

"Richard, you must have known she could never satisfy you--why did you try to marry Constance Quayle?"

"To escape."

"From whom--from me?"

"From myself, which is much the same thing as saying from you, I suppose."

"And you could not escape?"

"So it seems."

"But--but, dear Richard," she said plaintively, yet with very winning sweetness, "why, after all, should you want so desperately to escape?"

Richard moved a little farther from her.

"I have already explained that to you, to the point of insult, so you tell me," he said. "Surely it is unnecessary to go over the ground again?"

"You carry your idealism to the verge of slight absurdity," she answered. "Oh! you of altogether too little faith, how should you gauge the full flavour of the fruit till you have set your teeth in it? Better, far better, be a sacramentalist like me and embrace the idea through the act, than refuse the act in dread of imperiling the dominion of the idea. You put the cart before the horse with a vengeance, Dickie! There's such a thing as being so reverently-minded towards your god that he ceases to be the very least profit or use to you."

And again she heard that panting breath beside her. Again laughter bubbled up in her fair throat, and her hands fell to weaving the soft, outer darkness.

"You must perceive that it cannot end here and thus," she said presently.

"Of course not," he answered. Then, after a moment's pause, he added coldly enough:--"I foresaw that, so I gave orders yesterday that the yacht was not to be laid up, but only to coal and provision, and undergo some imperatively necessary repairs. She should be ready for sea by the end of the week."

Helen turned sideways, and the bland light, from the room within, touched her face now as well as her kneeling figure.

"And then, and then?" she demanded, almost violently.

"Then I shall go," Richard replied. "Where, I do not yet know, but as far, anyhow, as the coal in the yacht's bunkers will drive her. Distance is more important than locality just now. And I leave you here at the villa, Helen. Do not regret that you came. I don't."

He too had turned to the light, which revealed his face ravaged and aged by stress of emotion, revealed too the homelessness, as of empty space, resident in his eyes.

"I shall be glad to remember the place pleases and speaks to you. It has been rather a haven of rest to me during these last two years. You would have had it at my death, in any case. You have it a little sooner--that's all."

But Helen held out her arms.

"The villa, the villa," she cried, "what do I want with that! God in heaven, are you utterly devoid of all sensibility, all heart? Or are you afraid--afraid even yet, oh, very chicken-livered lover--that behind the beauty of Naples you may find the filth? It is not so, Dickie. It is not so, I tell you.--Look at me. What would you have more? Surely, for any man, my love is good enough!"

And then hurriedly, with a rustling of silken skirts, hot with anger from head to heel, she sprang to her feet.

Across the room one of the men-servants advanced.

"The carriage is at the door, sir," he said.

And Madame de Vallorbes' voice broke in with a singular lightness and nonchalance:--

"Surely it is rather imprudent to go out again to-night? You told me, at dinner, you were not well, that you had had a touch of fever."

She held out her hand, smiling serenely.

"Be advised," she said--"avoid malaria. I shall see you before I go to-morrow? Yes--an afternoon train, I think. Good-night, we meet at breakfast as usual."

She stepped in at the window, gathered up certain small properties--a gold scent-bottle, one or two books, a blotting-case, as with a view to final packing and departure. Just as she reached the door she heard Richard say curtly:--

"Send the carriage round. I shall not want it to-night."

But even so Helen did not turn back. On the contrary, she ran, light of foot as the little dancer, of long ago, with blush-roses in her hat, through all the suite of rooms to her own sea-blue, sea-green bedchamber, and there, sitting down before the toilet-table, greeted her own radiant image in the glass. Her lips were very red. Her eyes shone like pale stars on a windy night.

"Quick, quick, undress me, Zelie! Put me to bed. I am simply expiring of fatigue," she said.

Chapter IX

CONCERNING THAT DAUGHTER OF CUPID AND PSYCHE WHOM MEN CALL VOLUPTAS

The furniture, though otherwise of the customary proportions, had all been dwarfed. This had been achieved in some cases by ingenious design in its construction, in others by the simple process of cutting down, thus reducing table and chair, couch and bureau, in itself of whatever grace of style, dignity of age, or fineness of workmanship, to an equality of uncomely degradation in respect of height. The resultant effect was of false perspective. Nor was this unpleasing effect lessened by the proportions of the room itself. In common with all those of the entresol, it was noticeably low in relation to its length and width, while the stunted vaultings of its darkly-frescoed ceiling produced an impression of heaviness rather than of space. Bookcases, dwarfed as were all the other furnishings, lined the walls to within about two feet of the spring of the said vaulting. Made of red cedar and unpolished, the cornices and uprights of them were carved with arabesques in high relief. An antique, Persian carpet, sombre in colouring and of great value, covered the greater portion of the pale pink and gray mosaic pavement of the floor. Thick, rusty-red, Genoa-velvet curtains were drawn over each low, square window. A fire of logs burned on the open hearth. And this notwithstanding the unaccustomed warmth of the outside air, did but temper the chill atmosphere of the room and serve to draw a faint aroma from the carven cedar wood.

It was here, to his library,--carried down-stairs by his men-servants as a helpless baby-child might be,--that Richard Calmady had come when Helen de Vallorbes departed so blithely to her bedchamber. And it was here he remained, though nearly two hours had elapsed since then, finding sleep impossible.

For the wakefulness and unrest of rapidly breeding illness were upon him. His senses and his will had been in very active conflict. Desire had licked him, as with fiery tongues, driving him onward. Honour, self-contempt in face of temptation to sensual indulgence, an aspiration after somewhat stoic asceticism which had come to influence his action of late, held him back. But now, here and alone, the immediately provoking cause of passion removed, reaction against the strain of all that had very sensibly set in. He felt strangely astray, as though drifting at hazard upon the waters of an unquiet, mist-blinded sea. He was conscious of a deep-seated preoccupation regarding some matter, which he was alike unable to forget or to define. Formless images perplexed his vision. Formless thoughts pursued one another, as with the hurry of rumoured calamity, through his mind. A desolating apprehension of things insufficiently developed, of the inconclusive, the immature, the unattained, of things mutilated, things unfinished, born out of due time and incomplete, oppressed his fancy. Even the events of the last few hours, in which he had played so considerable a part, took on a shadowy semblance, ceased to appeal to him as realities, began to merge themselves in that all-pervading apprehension of defectiveness, of that which is wanting, lopped off, so to speak, and docked. It was to him as though all natural, common-sense relations were in abeyance, as though his own, usually precise, mental processes were divorced from reason and experience, had got out of perspective, in short--even as this low, wide, cedar-scented library, of which the vaulted ceiling seemed to approach unduly close to the mosaic, marble floor, and all its dwarfed furnishings, its squat tables and almost legless chairs, had got out of perspective.

The alternate purposeless energy and weariful weakness of fever, just as the alternate dry flush and trembling chill of it, distressed him. He had slipped on a smoking-coat, but even the weight of this thin, silk garment seemed oppressive, although, now and again, he felt as though around his middle he wore a belt of ice. Not without considerable exertion he rolled forward a couch--wide, high-backed, legless, mounted upon little wheels--to the vicinity of the fire. He drew himself up on to it and rested among the piled-up cushions. Perhaps, if he waited, exercising patience, sleep might mercifully visit him and deliver him from this intolerable confusion of mind. Deliver him, too, from that hideous apprehension of universal mutilation, of maimed purposes, maimed happenings, of a world peopled by beings maimed as he was himself, but after a more subtle and intimate fashion, a fashion intellectual or moral rather than merely physical, so that they had to him, just now, an added hatefulness of specious lying, since to ordinary seeing they appeared whole, while whole they truly and actually were not.

Sternly he tried to shake himself free of these morbid fancies, to bring his imagination under control and force himself once again to join hands with reality and common sense. And, to this end, he turned his attention to the consideration of practical matters. He dwelt on the details of the coaling and revictualing of his yacht, upon the objective of the voyage upon which he proposed to start a few days hence. He reviewed the letters which must be written and the arrangements which must be made with a view to putting his cousin legally in possession of the villa, the rent of which he proposed still to pay to her husband. This suite of rooms he would retain for his own use. That was necessary, obligatory. Yet, why must he retain it? He did not propose to return and live here at any future time. This episode was over--or rather, had it not simply failed of completion? Was it not, like all the rest, maimed, lopped off ungainly, docked? Then, where came in the obligation to reserve these rooms? He could not remember. Yet he knew that he was compelled to do so, because--because----

And, once again, Richard's power of concentration broke down. Once again his thought eluded him, becoming tangled, fugitive, not to be grasped. While, like swarms of shrill squeaking bats disturbed in the recesses of some age-old cavern by sudden intrusion of voices and of lights, half-formed visions, half-formed ideas, once again, flapped duskily about him, torturing in their multiplicity alike to his senses and his brain. He fought with them, striving to beat them off in a madness of disgust, half suffocated by the fanning of their foul and stifling wings. Then, exhausted by the conflict, he stumbled and fell, while they closed down on him. And he, losing consciousness, slept.

That unconsciousness lasted in point of fact but for a few minutes. Yet to Richard those minutes were as years, as centuries. At length, still heavy with dreamless slumber, he was aware of the stealthy turning of a key in a lock. Little padding foot-falls, soft as those of some strong, yet dainty, cat-creature crossed the carpet. A whisper of silk came along with them, like the murmur of the breeze in an oak grove on a clear, hot, summer noon, or the sibilant ripple of the sea upon spaces of fine-ribbed, yellow sand. And the impression produced upon Richard was delicious, as of one passing from a close room into the open air. Confusion and exhaustion left him. Energy returned. The energy of breeding fever merely, yet to him it appeared that of refreshment, of renewed and abounding health. He was conscious, too, of a will outside himself, acting upon his will--a will self-secure, impregnable, working with triumphant daring towards a single end. It certainly was unmaimed--in its present manifestation in any case. It told, and with assurance, of completion, of attainment. Yielding himself to it, with something of the recklessness a man yields himself to the poison which yet promises relief, Richard opened his eyes.

Before him stood Helen de Vallorbes. In one hand she carried a little lamp. In the other her high-heeled, cloth-of-gold slippers. Her feet were bare. In the haste of the journey, from her bedchamber up-stairs through the great rooms and down the marble stairs, the fronts of the sea-blue, sea-green dressing-gown she wore had flown apart, thus disclosing not only her delicate night-dress, but--since this last was fine to the point of transparency--all the secret loveliness of her body and her limbs. Her shining hair curled low upon her forehead, half concealed her pretty ears, and lay upon her shoulders like a little, golden cape. And, from out this brightness of her hair, the exultant laughter bubbling in her throat, the small lamp carried high in one hand, she looked down at Richard Calmady.

"I waited till the hours grew old and you did not come to me, so I have come to you, Dickie," she said. "Let what will happen to-morrow, this very certainly shall happen to-night--that with you and me Love shall have his own way, speak his own language, be worshipped with the rites, be found in the sacraments, ordained by himself, and to which all nature is, and has been, obedient since life on earth first began!"

Not till the gray of a rain-washed, windy morning had come, and Naples had put off its merry sinning, changing from a city of pleasure to a city of labour and, too often, of callously inflicted pain, did Helen de Vallorbes leave the cedar-scented library. The fire of logs had burnt itself out upon the hearth, and other fires, perhaps, had pretty thoroughly burnt themselves out likewise. Then, with the extinguished lamp in one hand and her high-heeled, cloth-of-gold slippers in the other, she had run swiftly, barefoot, up the cold, marble stairs, through the suite of lofty rooms, her image, in the bleak dimness of the wet morning, given back by their tall mirrors as that of no mortal woman but some fear-driven, hurrying ghost. Carefully closing the door of the bedchamber behind her, she threw her dressing-gown aside and buried herself in the luxurious softness of the unslept-in bed. And she was only just in time. Servants began to move to and fro. The house was awake.

X. THE ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION

Sullenly, persistently, the rain came down. In the harbour the wash was just sufficient to make the raveled fruit-baskets, the shredded vegetables, the crusts and offal thrown out from the galleys, heave and sway upon the oily surface of the water, while screaming gulls dropped greedily upon the floating refuse, and rising, circled over the black, liquid lanes and open spaces between the hulls of the many ships. But it was insufficient to lift the yacht, tied up to the southern quay of the Porto Grande. She lay there inert and in somewhat sorry plight under the steady downpour. For the moment all the winsome devilry of a smart, sea-going craft was dead in her, and she sulked, ashamed through all her eight hundred tons of wood and iron, copper, brass, and steel. For she was coaling, over-deck, and was grimy from stem to stern. While, arrayed in the cast clothes of all Europe, tattered, undersized, gesticulating, the human scum of Naples swarmed up the steep, narrow planks from the inky lighters and in over her side.

"Beastly dirty job this. Shan't get her paint clean under a week!" the first mate grumbled to his companion, the second mate--a dark-haired, dreamy-eyed, West-country lad, but just out of his teens.

The two officers, in dripping oilskins, stood at the gangway checking the tally of coal-baskets as they came on board. Just now there was a pause in the black procession, as an empty lighter sheered off, making room for a full one to come alongside, thus rendering conversation momentarily possible.

"Pity the boss couldn't have stayed on shore till we were through with it and cleaned up a bit," the speaker continued. "Makes the old man no end waxy to have any one on board when the yacht's like she is. I don't blame him. She's as neat and pretty as a white daisy in a green pasture when she's away to sea. And now, poor little soul, she's a regular slut."

"I know I'd 'ave stayed ashore fast enough if I was the boss," the boy said, half wistfully. "That villa of his is like a piece of poetry. I keep on saying over to myself how it looks."

"Oh! it's not so bad for foreign parts," the senior officer replied. "And you're young yet and soft, Penberthy. You'll come of that presently. England's best for houses, town and country, and most other things--women, and fights, and even sunshine, for when you do get sunshine at home there's no spite in it.--Hi! there you ganger," he shouted suddenly, and resentfully, leaning out over the bulwarks, "hurry 'em up a bit, can't you? You don't suppose I mean to stand here till the second anniversary of the Day of Judgment, watching your blithering, chicken-shanked macaronies suck rotten oranges, do you? Start 'em up again. Whatever are you waiting for, man? Start 'em up, I say."

The boy's dreamy eyes, full of unwritten verse, dwelt with a curious indifference upon the broken procession of ascending, black figures. He had but lately joined, and to him both the fine vessel and her owner were invested with a certain romance.

"What was the fancy for calling the yacht the Reprieve?" he asked presently.

"Wait till you've had the chance to take a good look at Sir Richard, and you'll answer your question yourself," the other man answered oracularly. Then he broke out again into sustained invective:--"Hold up there, you little fool of a tight-rope-dancing, bella Napoli gorilla, and don't go dropping good, honest, Welsh steam-coal overboard into your confounded, stinking local sewer! I don't care to see any of your blamed posturings, don't flatter yourself. Hold up you grimacing, great grandson of a lousy she-ape, can't you, and walk straight.--Take him all round Sir Richard Calmady's the best boss I ever sailed with--one of the sternest, but the civilest too.--Shove 'em along, ganger, will you. Shove 'em along, I say.--He's one of the few men I've loved, I'm not ashamed to say it, Mr. Penberthy, and about the only one I ever remember to have feared, in my life."

Meanwhile, if the scene to seaward was cheerless, that to landward offered but small improvement. For the murk of low-brooding cloud and falling rain blotted out the Castel S. Elmo, and the Capo di Monte and Pizzafalcone heights. Even the Castello del'Ovo down on the shore line, comparatively near at hand, loomed up but a denser mass of indigo-gray amid the all obtaining grayness. The tall multi-coloured, many-shuttered houses fronting the quays--restaurants, cafes, money-changers' bureaux, ships' chandlers, and slopshops--looked tawdry and degraded as a clown's painted face seen by daylight. Thick, malodorous vapours arose from the squalid streets, lying back on the level, and from the crowded shipping of the port. These hung in the stagnant air, about the forest of masts and the funnels of steamers. And the noise of the place was as that of Bedlam let loose.--The long-drawn, chattering rush of the coal pitched from the baskets down the echoing, iron shoots. The grate and scream of saws cutting through blocks of stone and marble. The grind of heavy wheels upon the broken, irregular flags. The struggling clatter of hoofs, lashing of whips, squeal of mules, savage voices raised in cries and imprecations. The clank and roar of machinery. The repeated bellowing of a great liner, blowing off steam as she took up her berth in the outer harbour. The shattering rattle of the chains of a steam crane, when the monster iron-arm swung round seeking or depositing its burden and the crank ran out in harsh anger, as it seemed, and defiance. And through all this, as under-current, the confused clamour of the ever-shifting, ever-present crowd, and the small, steady drip of the rain. Squalid, sordid, brutal even, the coarse actualities of her trade and her poverty alike disclosed, her fictions and her foulness uncondoned by reconciling sunshine, Naples had declined from radiant goddess to common drab.

It was in this character that Richard Calmady, driving yesterday, and for the first time, through the streets at noon, had been fated to see his so fondly-idealised city. It was in this character that he apprehended it again to-day, waiting in his deck-cabin until cessation of the rain and on-coming of the friendly dusk should render it not wholly odious to sit out on deck. The hours lagged, and even this bright and usually spotless apartment--with its shining, white walls, its dark, blue leather and polished, mahogany fittings--the coal dust penetrated. It rimmed the edge of the books neatly ranged on the racks. It smirched the charts laid out on the square locker-table below. It drifted in at the cabin windows, along with the babel of sound and the all-pervading stench of the port. This was, in itself, sufficiently distasteful, sufficiently depressing. And to Richard, just now, the disgust of it came with the heightened sensibility of physical illness, and as accompaniment to an immense private shame and immense self-condemnation, a conviction of outlawry and a desolation passing speech. He looked for comfort, for promise of restoration, and found none, in things material or things intellectual, in others or in himself. For his mind, always prone to apprehend by images rather than by words, and to advance by analogy rather than by argument, discovered, in surrounding aspects and surrounding circumstance, a rather hideously apt parable and illustration of its present state. Just as this seemingly fair city was proven, on intimate acquaintance, repulsive beyond the worst he had ever feared and earnestly refused to know of it, so a certain fair woman, upon whom, since boyhood, his best, most chivalrous, most unselfish, affections had centred, was proven--herself, moreover, flagrantly contributing to that proving--vile beyond all that rumor, heard and passionately denied by him, had ever ventured to whisper concerning her. Nor was the misery of this revelation lessened by the knowledge that his own part in it all had been very base. He had sinned before. He would sin again probably. Richard had long ceased to regard these matters from a strictly puritanic standpoint. But this particular sinning was different to any that had gone before, or which could come after it. For it partook--so at least, it now appeared to him--of the nature of sacrilege, since he had sinned against his ideal, degrading that to gross uses which he had agreed with himself to hold sacred, defiling it and, thereby, very horribly defiling himself.

And this disgrace of their relation, his own and hers, the inherent abomination of it all and its inherent falsity, had been forced home on him with a certain violence of directness just in the common course of daily happenings. For among the letters, brought to him along with his first breakfast, yesterday, after that night of secret licence, had been three of serious import. One was from Lady Calmady, and that he put aside with a certain anger, calling himself unwilling, knowing himself unfit, to read it. Another he tore open. The handwriting was unknown to him. He began reading it in bewilderment. Then he understood.

"MONSIEUR,"--it ran,--"You are in process of exterminating me. But, since I have reason to believe that no sufficient opportunity has been afforded you of realising the enormity of your conduct, I rally the profoundness of nobility which I discover within me--I calm myself. I go further, I explain. Living in retirement, you may not have learned that I am in Naples. I followed your cousin here--Madame de Vallorbes. My connection with her represents the supreme passion of my passionate youth. At once a frenzy and an anodyne, I have found in it the inspiration of my genius in its later development. This work must not be put a stop to. It is too majestic, it is weighted with too serious consequences to the whole of thinking France, of thinking Europe. A less experienced woman cannot satisfy the extravagance of my desires, the demands of my all-consuming imagination. The reverence with which a person, such as yourself, must regard commanding talent, the concessions he must be willing to make to its necessities, are without limit. This I cannot doubt that you will admit. The corollary is obvious. Either, monsieur, you will immediately invite me to reside with you at your villa--thereby securing for yourself daily intercourse with a nature of distinguished merit--or you will restore Madame de Vallorbes to me without hesitation or delay. Her devotion to me is absolute. How could it fail to be so, since I have lavished upon her the treasures of my extraordinary personality? But a fear of insular prejudice on your part withholds her at this moment from full expression of that devotion. She suffers as well as myself. It will be your privilege to put a term to this suffering by requesting me to join her, or by restoring her to me. To do otherwise will be to prolong the eclipse of my genius, and thereby outrage the conscience of civilised humanity which breathlessly awaits the next utterance of its chosen poet. If you require the consolation of feminine society, marry--it would be very simple--some white-souled, English miss. But restore to me, to whom her presence is indispensable, this woman of regal passions. I shall present myself at your house to-day to receive your answer in person. The result of a refusal on your part to receive me will be attended by calamitous consequences to yourself.--Accept, monsieur, the expression of my highest consideration,

"PAUL AUGUSTE DESTOURNELLE."

For the moment Richard saw red, mad with rage at the insolence of the writer. And then came the question, was it true, this which the letter implied? Had Helen, indeed, lied to him? And, notwithstanding its insane vanity, did this precious epistle give a more veracious account of her relation to the young poet than that which she had herself volunteered? He tried to put the thought from him. Who was he--to-day of all days--to be nice about the conduct of another? Who was he to sit in judgment? So he turned to his correspondence again, taking another letter, at random, from the pile. And then, looking at the superscription, he turned somewhat sick.

"MON CHER,"--wrote M. de Vallorbes,--"My steward informs me that he has just received your draft for a quarter's rent of the villa. I thank you a thousand times for your admirable punctuality. Decidedly you are of those with whom it is a consolation to do business. Need I assure you that the advent of this money is far from inopportune, since a grateful country, while showering distinctions upon me with one hand, with the other picks my pocket. I find it not a little expensive this famous military service! But then, ever since I can remember, I have found all that afforded me the slightest, active pleasure equally that! And this sport of war, I promise you, is the most excellent sport in which I have as yet participated. It satisfies the primitive instincts more thoroughly than even your English fox-hunting. A battue of Communards is obviously superior to a battue of pheasants. To the dignity of killing one's fellow-men is added the satisfaction of ridding oneself of vermin. It becomes a matter of sanitation and self-respect. And this, indirectly, recalls to me, that report declares my wife to be with you at Naples. Mon cher je vous en fais cadeau. With you, at least, I know that my honour is safe. You may even instil into her mind some faint conception of the rudiments of morality. To be frank with you, she needs that. A couple of months ago she did me the honour to elope--temporarily, of course--with M. Paul Destournelle. You may have glanced, one day, at his crapulous verses. I suppose honour demanded that I should pursue the guilty pair and account for one, if not both, of them. But I was too busily engaged with my little Communards. We set these gentry up against a wall and dispose of them in batches. I have had a good deal of this, but, as I say, it has not yet become monotonous. Traits of individual character lend it vivacity. And then, putting aside the exigencies of my profession, I do not know that anything is to be gained by inviting public scandal. You have an English proverb to the effect that one should wash one's dirty linen at home. This I have tried to do, as you cannot but be aware, all along. If one has had the misfortune to marry Messalina, one learns to be philosophic. A few lovers more or less, in that connection, what, after all, does it matter? Indeed, I begin to derive ironical consolation from the fact of their multiplicity. The existence of one would have constituted a reflection upon my charms. But a matter of ten, fifteen, twenty, ceases to be in any degree personal to myself. Only I object to Destournelle. He is too young, too rococco. He represents a descent in the scale. I prefer des hommes mures, generals, ministers, princes. The devil knows we have had our share of such! Your generosity to her has saved us from Jews so far, and from nouveaux riches, by relieving the business of commercial aspects. Give her some salutary advice, therefore, mon cher, and if she becomes inconvenient forward her to Paris. I forgive to seventy-times-seven, being still proud enough to struggle after an appearance of social and conjugal decency. Enfin it is a relief to have unburdened myself for once, and you have been the good genius of my unfortunate menage, for which heaven reward you.--Yours, in true cousinly regard and supreme reliance on your discretion,

"LUIGI ANGELO FRANCESCO DE VALLORBES."

That this, in any case, had a stamp of sincerity upon it, Richard could not doubt. It must be admitted that he had long ceased to accept Madame de Vallorbes' estimate of her husband with unqualified belief. But, be that as it might, whether he were a consummate, or merely an average, profligate, one thing was certain that this man trusted him--Richard Calmady,--and that he--Richard Calmady--had very vilely betrayed that trust. He stared at the letter, and certain sentences in it seemed to sear him, even as the branding-iron used on a felon might. This was a new shame, different to, and greater than, any his deformity had ever induced in him, even as evil done is different to, and greater than, evil suffered. Morality may be relative only and conventional. Honour, for all persons of a certain standing and breeding, remains absolute. And it was precisely of his own honour that he had deprived himself. Not only in body, but in character, he was henceforth monstrous. For a while Richard had remained very still, looking at this thing into which he had made himself as though it were external and physically visible to him.

Then, suddenly, he had reached out his hand for his mother's letter. A decision of great moment was impending. He would know what she had to say before finally making that decision. He wondered bitterly, grimly, whether her words would plunge him yet deeper in this abyss of self-hatred and self-contempt.

MY DARLING,"--she wrote,--"I am foolishly glad to learn that you are back at Naples. It gives me comfort to know you are even thus much nearer home and in a country where I too have traveled and of which I retain many dear and delightful recollections. You may be surprised, perhaps, to see the unaccustomed address upon my note-paper and may wonder what has made me guilty of deserting my post. Now, since the worst of it is certainly over, I may tell you that my health has failed a good deal of late. Nothing of a really serious nature--you need not be alarmed about me. But I had got into a rather weak and unworthy state, from which it became very desirable I should rouse myself. Selfishness is insidious, but none the less reprehensible because it takes the apparently innocent form of sitting in a chair with one's eyes shut! However, that best of men, John Knott, brought very bracing influences to bear on me, convincing me of sin--in the gentlest way in the world--by means of Honoria St. Quentin. And so I picked myself up, dear Dickie,--picked the whole of myself up, as I hope, always saving and excepting my self-indulgent inertia,--and came away here to Ormiston. At first, I confess, I felt very much like a dog at a fair, or the proverbial mummy at a feast. But they all bore with me in the plenty of their kindness, and, in the last week, I have banished the mummy and trained the scared dog to altogether polite and pretty behaviour. Till I came back to it, I hardly realised how truly I loved this place. How should it be otherwise? I met your father first here after his third term at Eton. I remember he snubbed me roundly. I met him again the year before our marriage. Without vanity I declare that then he snubbed me not one little bit. These things are very far away. But to me, though far away, they are very vivid and very lovely. I see them as you, when you were small, so often pleaded to see a fairy landscape by looking through the large end of the gold and tortoise-shell spy-glass upon my writing-table. All of which may seem to you somewhat childish and trivial, but I grow an old woman and have a fancy for toys and tender make-believes--such as fairy landscapes seen through the big end of a spy-glass. The actual landscape, at times, is a trifle discouragingly rain-washed and cloudy!---Roger and Mary are here. Their two boys are just gone back to school again. They are fine, courteous, fearless, little fellows. Roger makes a rather superb middle-aged man. He has much of my father--your grandfather's reticence and dignity. Indeed, he might prove slightly alarming, was one not so perfectly sure of him, dear creature. Mary remains, as of old, the most wholesome and helpful of women. Yes, it is good to dwell, for a time, among one's own people. And I cannot but rejoice that my eldest brother has come to an arrangement by which, at his death, your Uncle William will receive a considerable sum of money in lieu of the property. This last will go direct to Roger, and eventually to his boys. If your Uncle William had a son, the whole matter would be different. But I own it would hurt me that in the event of his death there would be no Ormiston at Ormiston after these many generations. In all probability the place would be sold immediately, moreover, for it is an open secret that, through no fault of his own, poor man, William is sadly embarrassed in money matters. And he has other sorrows--of a rather terrible nature, since they are touched with disgrace. But here you will probably detect a point of prejudice, so I had better stop!--I look out upon a gray, northern sea, where 'the white horses fume and fret' under a cold, gray, northern sky. The oaks in the park are just thickening with yellow-green buds. And there, close to my window, perched on a topmost twig, a missel-thrush is singing, facing the wind like a gentleman. You look out upon a purple sea, I suppose, beneath clear skies and over orange trees and palms. I wonder if any brave bird pipes to you as my storm-cock to me? It brings up one's courage to hear his song, so strong and wild and sweet, in the very teeth of the gale too! But now you will have had enough of my news and more than enough. I write to you more freely, you see, than for a long time past, being myself more free of spirit. And therefore I dare add this, in all and every case, my darling, God keep you. And remember, should you weary of wandering, that not only the doors of Brockhurst, but the doors of my heart, stand forever wide open to welcome you home.--Yours always,

K. C."

Reading which gentle, yet in a sense daring, words, Richard's shame took on another complexion, but one by no means calculated to mitigate the burning of it. His treachery towards de Vallorbes became almost vulgar and of small moment beside his cruelty to this superbly magnanimous woman, his mother. For, all these years, determinately and of set purpose, defiant of every better impulse, he had hardened his heart against her. To differ from her, to cherish that which was unsympathetic to her, to put aside every tradition in which she had nurtured him, to love that which she condemned, to condemn that which she loved--and this, if silently, yet unswervingly--had been the ruling purpose of his action. That which had its origin in passionate revolt against his own unhappy disfigurement, had come to be an interest and object in itself. In this quarrel with her--a quarrel, intimate, pre-natal, anterior to consciousness and to volition--he found the justification of his every lapse, his every crookedness of conduct and of thought. Since he could not reach Almighty God, and strike at the eternal First Cause which he held responsible for the inalienable wrong done to him, he would strike, with cold-blooded persistence, at the woman whom Almighty God had permitted to be His instrument in the infliction of that wrong. And to where had that sustained purpose of striking led him? Even--so he judged just now--to the dishonour and desolation of to-day, following upon the sacrilegious licence of last night.

All this Richard saw with the alternately groping, benumbed, mental vision and the glaring, mental nakedness of breeding fever. Small wonder that looking for comfort, for promise of restoration, he found none in things material, in things intellectual, in others, or in himself! He felt outcasted beyond hope of redemption, but not repentant, hardly remorseful even, only aware of all that which had happened, and of his own state. For Lady Calmady's letter was to him little more, as yet, than a placing of facts. To trade upon her magnificent generosity of affection, and seek refuge in those outstretched arms now, with the mark of the branding-iron so sensibly upon him, appeared to him of all contemptible doings the most radically contemptible. Obviously it was impossible to go back. He must go on rather--out of sight, out of mind. Fantastic schemes of disappearing, of losing himself, far away, in remote and nameless places, among the coral islands of the Pacific or the chill majesty of the Antarctic seas, offered themselves to his imagination. The practical difficulties presented by such schemes, their infeasibility, did not trouble him. He would sever all connection with that which had been, with that which had made for good equally with that which had made for evil. By his own voluntary act and choice he would become as a man dead, the disgrace of his malformed body, the closer and more hideous disgrace of his defiled and prostituted soul, surviving in legend merely, as might some ugly, old-time fable useful for the frightening of unruly babies.

And to that end of self-obliteration he instantly applied himself, with outward calm, but with the mental hurry and restlessness of increasing illness. His first duty was to end the whole matter of his relation to Helen,--Helen shorn of her divinity, convicted liar and wanton, yet mistress still for him, as he feared, of mighty enchantments. So he wrote to her very briefly. The note should be given her later in the day. In it he stated that he should have left the villa before this announcement reached her, left it finally and without remotest prospect of return, since he could not doubt that she recognised, as he did, how impossible it had become that he and she should meet again. He added that he would communicate with her shortly as to business arrangements. That done, he summoned Powell, his valet, bidding him pack. He would go down to the yacht at once. He had received information which made it imperative that he should quit Naples immediately.

To be out of all this, rid of it, fairly started on the road of negation of social being, negation of recognised existence, infected him like a madness. But even the most forceful human will must bend to stupidities of detail and of material fact. Unexpected delays had occurred. The yacht was not ready for sea, neither coaled, nor provisioned, nor sound of certain small damages to her machinery. Vanstone, the captain, might mislay his temper, and the first mate expend himself in polysyllabic invective, young Penberthy cease to dream, stewards, engineers, carpenters, cooks, quartermasters, seamen, firemen, do their most willing and urgent best, nevertheless the morning of next day, and even the afternoon of it, still found Richard Calmady seated at the locker-table of the white-walled deck-cabin, his voyage towards self-obliteration not yet begun.

Charts were outspread before him, upon which, at weary intervals, he essayed to trace the course of his coming wanderings. But his brain was dull, he had no power of consecutive thought. That same madness of going was upon him with undiminished power, yet he knew not where he wanted to go, hardly why he wanted to go, only that a blind obsession of going drove him. He was miserably troubled about other matters too--about that same brief letter he had written to Helen before leaving the villa. He was convinced that he had written such a letter, but struggle as he might to remember the contents of it they remained to him a blank. He was haunted by the fear that in that letter he had committed some irremediable folly, had bound himself to some absurdly unworthy course of action. But what it might be escaped and, in escaping, tortured him. And then, this surely was Friday, and Morabita sang at the San Carlo to-night? And surely he had promised to be there, and to meet the famous prima donna and sup with her after the performance, as in former days at Vienna? He had not always been quite kind to her, poor, dear, fat, good-natured, silly soul! He could not fail her now.--And then he went back to a chart of the South Pacific again. Only he could not see it plainly, but saw, instead of it, the great folio of copper-plate engravings lying on the broad window-seat of the eastern bay of the Long Gallery at home. He was sitting there to watch for the race-horses coming back from exercise, Tom Chifney pricking along beside them on his handsome cob. And the long-ago, boyish desperation of longing for wholeness, for freedom, brought a moistness to his eyes, and a lump into his throat. And all the while the coal dust drifted in at each smallest crevice and aperture, and the air was vibrant with rasping, jarring uproar and nauseous with the stale, heavy odours of the city and the port. And steadily, ceaselessly, the descending rain drummed upon the roofing overhead.

At length a stupor took him. His head sunk upon his arms, folded upon those outspread charts, while the noise of all the rude activities surrounding him subtly transformed itself into that of a great orchestra. And above this, superior to, yet nobly supported by it, Morabita's voice rose in the suave and passionate phrases of the glorious cavatina--"Ernani, Ernani, involami, all aborito ampleso."--Yes, her voice was as good as ever! Richard drew a long breath of relief. Here, at least, was something true to itself, and amid so much of change, so much of spoiling, still unspoilt! He raised his head and listened. For something must have happened, something of serious moment. The orchestra, for some unaccountable reason, had suddenly broken down. Yes, it must be the orchestra which disaster had overtaken, for a voice very certainly continued. No, not a voice, but voices--those of Vanstone the captain, and Price the first mate, and old Billy Tinn the boatswain--loud, imperative, violently remonstrant, but swept under and swamped at moments by cries and volleys of foulest, Neapolitan argot from hoarse, Neapolitan throats. And that abruptly silenced orchestra?--Richard came back to himself, came back to actualities of environment and prosaic fact. An infinitely weariful despair seized him. For the sound that had reached so sudden a termination was not that of cunningly-attuned, musical instruments, but the long-drawn, chattering rush of the coal, pitched from the baskets down the echoing, iron shoots.

The cabin door opened discreetly and Powell, incarnation of decorous punctualities even amid existing tumultuously discomposing circumstances, entered.

"From the villa, sir," he said, depositing letters and newspapers upon the table.

Richard put out his hand, turned them over mechanically. For again, somehow, notwithstanding the babel without, that exquisite invitation--"Ernani, Ernani, involami,"--assailed his ears.

The valet waited a little, quiet and deferential in bearing, yet observing his master with a certain keenness and anxiety.

"I saw Mr. Bates, as you desired, sir," he said at last.

Richard looked up at him vaguely. And it struck him that while Powell was on shore to-day he had undoubtedly had his hair cut. This interested him--though why, he would have found it difficult to say.

"Mr. Bates thought you should be informed that a gentleman called early yesterday afternoon, as he said by appointment."

Yes--certainly Powell had had his hair cut.--"Did the gentleman give his name?"

"Yes, sir, M. Paul Destournelle."

Powell spoke slowly, getting his tongue carefully round the foreign syllables, and, for all the confusion of his hearer's mind, the name went home. Vagueness passed from Richard's glance.

"He was refused, of course."

"Her ladyship had given orders that should any person of that name call he was to be admitted."--Powell spoke with evident reluctance. "Consequently Mr. Bates was uncertain how to act, having received contrary orders from you, sir, the day before yesterday. He explained this to her ladyship, but she insisted."

Richard's mind had become perfectly lucid.

"Very well," he said coldly.

"Mr. Bates also thought you should know, sir, that after M. Destournelle's visit her ladyship announced she should not remain at the villa. She left about five o'clock, taking her maid. Charles followed with all the baggage."

The valet paused. Richard's manner was decidedly discouraging, yet, something further must at least be intimated.

"Her ladyship gave no address to Mr. Bates for the forwarding of her letters."

But here the cabin door, left slightly ajar by Powell, was opened wide, and that with none of the calm and discretion displayed by the functionary in question. A long perspective of grimy deck behind him, his oilskins shiny from the wet, with trim, black beard, square-made, bold-eyed, hot-tempered, warm-hearted, alert, humorous--typical West Countryman as his gentle dreamy cousin, Penberthy, the second mate, though of a very different type--stood Captain Vanstone. His easily-ruffled temper suffered from the after effects of what is commonly known as a "jolly row," and his speech was curt in consequence thereof.

"Sorry to disturb you, Sir Richard," he said, "and still more sorry to disappoint you, but it can't be helped."

Dickie turned upon him so strangely drawn and haggard a countenance, that Vanstone with difficulty repressed an exclamation. He looked in quick inquiry at the valet, who so far departed from his usual decorum as to nod his head in assent to the silent questioning.

"What's wrong now?" Richard said.

"Why, these beggarly rascals have knocked off. Price offered them a higher scale of pay. I had empowered him to do so. But they won't budge. The rain's washed the heart out of them. We've tried persuasion and we've tried threats--it's no earthly use. Not a basket more coal will they put on board before five to-morrow morning."

"Can't we sail with what we have got?"

"Not enough to carry us to Port Said."

"What will be the extent of the delay this time?" Richard asked. His tone had an edge to it.

Again Captain Vanstone glanced at the valet.

"With luck we may get off to-morrow about midnight."

He stepped back, shook himself like a big dog, scattering the water off his oilskins in a shower upon the slippery deck. Then he came inside the cabin and stood near Richard. His expression was very kindly, tender almost.

"You must excuse me, sir," he said. "I know it doesn't come within my province to give you advice. But you do look pretty ill, Sir Richard. Every one's remarking that. And you are ill, sir--you know it, and I know it, and Mr. Powell here knows it. You ought to see a doctor, sir--and if you'll pardon plain language, this beastly cess-pit of a harbour is not a fit place for you to sleep in."

And poor Dickie, after an instant of sharp annoyance, touched by the man's honest humanity smiled upon him--a smile of utter weariness, utter homelessness.

"Perfectly true. Get me out to sea then, Vanstone. I shall be better there than anywhere else," he said.

Whereupon the kindly sailor-man turned away, swearing gently into his trim, black beard.

But the valet remained, impassive in manner, actively anxious at heart.

"Have you any orders for the carriage, sir?" he asked. "Garcia drove me down. I told him to wait until I had inquired."

Richard was long in replying. His brain was all confused and clouded again, while again he heard the voice of the famous soprano--"Ernani, Ernani, involami."

"Yes," he said at last. "Tell Garcia to be here in good time to drive me to the San Carlo. I have an appointment at the opera to-night."

Chapter XI

IN WHICH DICKIE GOES TO THE END OF THE WORLD AND LOOKS OVER THE WALL

The opera box, which Richard Calmady had rented along with the Villa Vallorbes, was fifth from the stage on the third tier, to the right of the vast horseshoe. Thus situated, it commanded a very comprehensive view of the interior of the house. The parterre--its somewhat comfortless seats, rising as on iron stilts, as they recede, row by row, from the proscenium--was packed. While, since the aristocratic world had not yet left town, the boxes--piled, tier above tier, without break of dress-circle or gallery, right up to the lofty roof--were well-filled. And it was the effect of these last that affected Richard oddly, displeasingly, as, helped by Powell and Andrews,--the first footman, who acted as his table-steward on board the Reprieve,--he made his way slowly down to the chair, placed on the left, at the front of the box. For the accepted aspects and relations of things seen were remote to him. He perceived effects, shapes, associations of colour, divorced from their habitual significance. It was as though he looked at the written characters of a language unknown to him, observing the form of them, but attaching no intelligible meaning to that form. And so it happened that those many superimposed tiers of boxes were to him as the waxen cells of a gigantic honeycomb, against the angular darknesses of which little figures, seen to the waist, took the light--the blond face, neck and arms of some woman, the fair colours of her dress--and showed up with perplexing insistence. For they were all peopled, these cells of the honeycomb, and--so it seemed to him--with larvae, bright-hued, unworking, indolent, full-fed. Down there upon the parterre, in the close-packed ranks of students, of men and women of the middle-class, soberly attired in walking costume, he recognised the working bees of this giant hive. By their unremitting labour the dainty waxen cells were actually built up, and those larvae were so amply, so luxuriously, fed. And the working bees--there were so many, so very many of them! What if they became mutinous, rebelled against labour, plundered and destroyed the indolent, succulent larvae of which he--yes, he, Richard Calmady--was unquestionably and conspicuously one?

He leaned back in his chair, pulled forward the velvet drapery so as to shut out the view of the house, and fixed his eyes upon the heads of the musicians in the orchestra. The overture was nearly over. The curtain would very soon go up. Then he observed that Powell still stood near him. The man was strangely officious to-day, he thought. Could that be connected in any way with the fact he had had his hair cut? For a moment the notion appeared to Dickie quite extravagantly amusing. But he kept his amusement, as so much else, to himself. And again the working bees, down in the parterre, attracted his attention. They were buzzing, buzzing angrily, displeased with the full-fed larvae in the boxes, because these last were altogether too social, talked too loud and too continuously, drowning the softer passages of the overture. Those dull-coloured insects had expended store of hard-earned lire upon the queer seats they occupied, mounted as upon iron stilts. They meant to have the whole of that which they had paid for, and hear every note. If they swarmed, now, swarmed upward, clung along the edges of those many tiers of boxes, punished inconsiderate insolence with stings?---It would hardly be unjust.--But there was Powell still, clad in sober garments. He belonged to the working bees. And Richard became aware of a singular diffidence and embarrassment in thinking of that. If they should swarm, those workers, he would rather the valet did not see it, somehow. He was a good fellow, a faithful servant, a man of nice feeling, and such an incident would place him in an awkward position. He ought to be spared that. Carefully Dickie reasoned it all out.

"You need not stay here any longer, Powell," he said.

"When shall I return, sir?"

The curtain went up. A roll of drums, a chorus of men's voices, somewhat truculent, in the drinking song.

"At the end of the performance, of course."

But the valet hesitated.

"You might require to send some message, sir."

Richard stared at the chorus. The opera being performed but this once, economy prevailed. Costumiers had ransacked their stock for discovery of garments not unpardonably inappropriate. The result showed a fine superiority to details of time and place. One Spanish bandit, a portly basso, figured in a surprising variety of Highland dress designed, and that locally, for a chieftain in the opera of Lucia di Lammermoor. His acquaintance with the eccentricities of a kilt being of the slightest, consequences ensued broadly humorous.--Again Dickie experienced great amusement. But that message?--Had he really one to send? Probably he had. He could not remember, and this annoyed him. Possibly he might remember later. He turned to Powell, forgetting his amusement, forgetting the too intimate personal revelations of the unhappy basso.

"Yes--well--come back at the end of the second act, then," he said.

If the bees swarmed it would be over by that time, he supposed, so Powell's return would not matter much one way or the other. A persuasion of something momentous about to be accomplished deepened in him. The madness of going, which had so pushed him earlier in the day, fell dead before it. For this concourse of living creatures must be gathered together to witness some event commensurate in importance with the greatness of their number. He felt sure of that. Yes--before long they would swarm. Incontestably they would swarm!--Again he drew aside the velvet drapery and looked down curiously upon the arena and its occupants. For a new idea had come to him regarding these last. They still presented the effect of a throng of busy, angry insects. But Richard knew better. He had penetrated their disguise, a disguise assumed to insure their ultimate purpose with the greater certainty. He knew them to be human. He knew their purpose to be a moral one. And, looking upon them, recognising the spirit which animated them, he was taken with a reverence and sympathy for average, toiling humanity unfelt by him before. For he saw that by these, the workers, the final issues are inevitably decided, by these the final verdict is pronounced. Individually they may be contemptible, but in their corporate intelligence, corporate strength, they are little short of majestic. Of art, letters, practical civilisation, even religion, even, in a degree, nature herself, they are alike architects and judges. It must be so. It always has been so time out of mind in point of fact. And then he wondered why they were so patient of constraint? Why had they not risen long ago and obliterated the pretensions of those arrogant, indolent larvae peopling the angular apertures of the honey cells--those larvae of whom, by birth and wealth, sinfulness and uselessness, he was himself so conspicuous an example?

But then still clearer understanding of this whole strange matter came to him.--They, like all else,--mighty though they are in their corporate intention,--are obedient to fate. They can only act when the time is ripe. And then he understood yet more clearly. Their purpose in congregating here, whether they were conscious of it or not, was retributive. They were present to witness and to accomplish an act of foreordained justice.--Richard paused a moment, struggling with his own thought. And then he saw quite plainly that he himself was the object of that act of foreordained justice, he himself was the centre of that dimly-apprehended, approaching event. His punishment, his deliverance by means of that punishment, was that which had brought this great multitude together here to-night. He was awed. Yet with that awe came thankfulness, gratitude, an immense sense of relief. He need not seek self-obliteration, losing himself in far-away, tropic islands, or the ice-bound regions of the uttermost South. He could stay here. Sit quite still even--and that was well, for he was horribly tired and spent. He need only wait. When the time was ripe, they would do all the rest--do it for him by doing it to him.--How finely simple it all was! Incidentally he wondered if it would hurt very much. Not that that mattered, for beyond lay peace. Only he hoped they would get to work pretty soon, so that it might be over before the end of the second act, when Powell, the valet, would come back.

Richard's face had grown very youthful and eager. His eyes were unnaturally bright. And still he gazed down at that great company. His heart went out to it. He loved it, loved each and every member of it, as he had never conceived of loving heretofore. He would like to have gone down among them and become part of them, one with them in purpose, a partaker of their corporate strength. But that was forbidden. They were his preordained executioners. Yet in that capacity they were not the less, but the more, lovable. They were welcome to exact full justice. He longed after them, longed after the pain it was their mission to inflict.--And they were getting ready, surely they were getting ready! There was a sensible movement among them. They turned pale faces away from the brilliantly lighted stage, and towards the great horseshoe of waxen cells enclosing them. They were busy, dull-coloured insects again, and they buzzed--resentfully, angrily, they buzzed.

Yet even while Dickie noted all this, greatly moved by it, appreciating its inner meaning, its profound relation to himself and the drama of his own existence, he was not wholly unmindful of the progress of the opera and the charm of the graceful and fluent music which saluted his ears. He was aware of the entrance of the hero, of his greeting by his motley-clad followers. He felt kindly, just off the surface of his emotion so to speak, towards this impersonator of Ernani. The young actor's appearance was attractive, his voice fresh and sympathetic, his bearing modest. But the aristocratic occupants of the boxes treated him cavalierly. The famous Milanese tenor, whose name was on the programme, having failed to arrive, this local, and comparatively inexperienced, artist had been called upon to fill his part. Therefore the smart world talked more loudly than before, while the democratic occupants of the parterre, jealous for the reputation of their fellow-citizen, broke forth into stormy protest. And Richard could have found it in his heart to protest also. For it was waste of energy, this senseless conflict! It was unworthy of the dignity of that dull-coloured multitude, on whom his hopes were so strangely set--of the men in whose hands are the final rewards and punishments, by whose voice the final judgment is pronounced. It pained him to see these ministers of the Eternal Justice thus led away by trivial happenings, and their attention distracted from the main issue. For what, in God's name, did he and his sentimental love-carrollings amount to, this pretty fellow of a player, this fictitious hero of the modern, Neapolitan, operatic stage? Weighed in the balances, he and his whole occupation and calling were lighter, surely, than vanity itself? Rightly considered, he and his singing were but as a spangle, as some glittering trifle of tinsel, upon the veil still hiding the awful, yet benign, countenance of that tremendous and so surely approaching event.--Let him sing away, then, sing in peace. For the sound of his singing might help to lighten the weariness of the hours until the supreme hour should strike, and the glittering veil be torn asunder, and the countenance it covered be at last and wholly revealed.

Reasoning thus, Richard raised his opera glasses and swept those many superimposed ranges of waxen cells. And the aspect of them was to him very sinister, for everywhere he seemed to encounter soft, voluptuous, brainless faces, violences of hot colour, and costly clothing cunningly devised to heighten the physical allurements of womanhood. Everywhere, beside and behind these, he seemed to encounter the faces of men, gluttonous of pleasure, hungering for those generously-discovered, material charms. They were veritable antechambers of vice, those angular-mouthed, waxen cells. And, therefore, very fittingly, as he reflected, he had his place in one of them, since he was infected by the vices, active partaker in the sensuality, of his class.--Oh! that the bees would swarm--swarm, and make short work of it all, inflict completeness of punishment, and thereby cleanse him and set him free! In its intensity his longing came near taking the form of articulate prayer.

And then his thought shifted once more, attaching itself curiously, speculatively, to individual objects. For his survey of the house had just now brought a box into view, situated on the grand tier and almost immediately opposite his own. It was occupied by a party of six persons. With four of those persons Richard was aware he had nothing to do. But with the remaining two persons--a woman fashioned, as it appeared, of ivory and gold, and a young man standing almost directly behind her--he had much, everything, in fact, to do. It was incomprehensible to him that he had not observed these two persons sooner, since they were as necessary to the accomplishment of that terrible, yet beneficent, approaching event as he himself was. The woman he knew actually and intimately, though as yet he could give her no name, nor recall in what his knowledge of her consisted. The young man he knew inferentially. And Dickie was sensible of regarding him with instinctive repulsion, since his appearance presented a living and grossly ribald caricature of a figure august, worshipful, and holy. Long and closely Richard studied those two persons, studied them, forgetful of all else, straining his memory to place them. And all the while they talked.

But, at last, the woman fashioned of ivory and gold ceased talking. She folded her arms upon the velvet cushion of the front of the box and gazed right out into the theatre. There was a splendid arrogance in the pose of her head, and in the droop of her eyelids. Then she looked up and across, straight at Richard. He saw her drooping eyelids raised, her eyes open wide, and remain fixed as in amazement. A something alert, and very fierce, came into her expression. She seemed to think carefully for a brief space. She threw back her head, and he saw uncontrollable laughter convulse her beautiful throat. And, at that same moment, a mighty outburst of applause and of welcome shook the great theatre from floor to ceiling, and, as it died away, the voice of the famous soprano, rich and compelling as of old, swelled out, and made vibrant with passionate sweetness the whole atmosphere. And Richard hailed that glorious voice, not that in itself it moved him greatly, but because in it he recognised the beginning of the end. It came as prelude to catastrophe which was also salvation.--Very soon the bees would swarm now! He rallied his patience. He had not much longer to wait.

Meanwhile he looked back at that box on the grand tier, striving to unriddle the mystery of his knowledge of those two persons. He needed glasses no longer. His sight had become preternaturally keen. Again the two were talking--and about him, that was somehow evident. And, as they talked, he beheld a being, exquisitely formed, perfect in every part, step forth from between the lips of the woman fashioned of ivory and gold. It knelt upon one knee. Over the heads of the vast, dull-coloured multitude of workers, those witnesses of and participators in the execution of Eternal Justice, it gazed at him, Richard Calmady, and at him alone. And its gaze enfolded and held him like an embrace. It wooed him, extending its arms in invitation. It was naked and unashamed. It was black--black as the reeking, liquid lanes between the hulls of the many ships, over which the screaming gulls circled seeking foul provender, down in Naples harbour.--And he knew the fair woman it came forth from for Helen de Vallorbes, herself, in her crocus-yellow gown sewn with seed pearls. And he knew it for the immortal soul of her. And he perceived, moreover, as it smiled on and beckoned him with lascivious gestures, that its hands and its lips were bloody, since it had broken the hearts of living women and torn and devoured the honour of living men.

"Ernani, Ernani, involami"--still the air was vibrant with that glorious voice. But the love of which it was the exponent, the flight which it counseled, had ceased, to Richard's hearing, to bear relation to that which is earthly, concrete, and of the senses. The passion and promise of it were alike turned to nobler and more permanent uses, presaging the quick coming of expiation and of reconciliation contained in that supreme event. For he knew that, in a little moment, Helen must arise and follow the soul which had gone forth from her--the soul of which, in all its admirable perfection of outward form and blackness of intimate lies and lust, was close to him--though he no longer actually beheld it--here, beside him, laying subtle siege to him even yet. Where it went, there, of necessity, she who owned it must shortly follow, since soul and body cannot remain apart, save for the briefest space, until death effect their final divorce. Therefore Helen would come speedily. It could not be otherwise--so, at least, he argued. And her coming meant the culmination. Then, time being fully ripe, the bees would swarm, swarm at last,--labour revenging itself upon sloth, hunger upon gluttony, want upon wealth, obscurity upon privilege,--justice being thus meted out, and he, Richard, cleansed and delivered from the disgrace of deformity now so hideously infecting both his spirit and his flesh.

Of this he was so well assured that, disregarding the felt, though unseen, presence of that errant soul, disdaining to do battle with it, he leaned forward once more, looking down into the close-packed arena of the great theatre. All those brilliant figures, members of his own class, here present, were matter of indifference to him. In this moment of conscious and supreme farewell, it was to the dull-coloured multitude that he turned. They still moved him to sympathy. Unconsciously they had enlightened him concerning matters of infinite moment. At their hands he would receive penance and absolution. Before they dealt more closely with him,--since that dealing must involve suffering which might temporarily cloud his friendship for them,--he wanted to bid them farewell and assure them of his conviction of the righteousness of their corporate action. So, silently, he blessed them, taking leave of them in peace. Then he found there were other farewells to be said.--Farewell to earthly life as he had known it, the struggle and very frequent anguish of it, its many frustrated purposes, fair illusions, unfulfilled hopes. He must bid farewell, moreover, to art as he had relished it--to learning, as he had all too intermittently pursued it--to travel, as he had found solace in it--to the inexhaustible interest, the inextinguishable humour and pathos, in brief, of things seen. And, reviewing all this, a profound nostalgia of all those minor happinesses which are the natural inheritance of the average man arose in him--happiness of healthy, light-hearted activities, not only of the athlete and the fighting-man, but of the playing-field, and the ball-room, and the river--happinesses to him inevitably denied. With an almost boyish passion of longing, he cried out for these.--Just for one day to have lived with the ease and freedom with which the vast majority of men habitually live! Just for one day to have been neither dwarf nor cripple, but to have taken his place and his chance with the rest, before it all was over and the tale told!

But very soon Richard put these thoughts from him, deeming it unworthy to dwell upon them at this juncture. The call was to go forward, not to go back. So he settled himself in his chair once more, pulling the velvet drapery forward so as to shut out the sight of the house. Bitterness should have no part in him. When that happened which was appointed to happen, it must find him not only acquiescent but serene and undisturbed. He composed himself, therefore, with a decent and even lofty pride. Then he turned his eyes upon the narrow door, there in the semi-obscurity of the back of the box, and waited. And all the while royally, triumphantly, Morbita sang.

During that period of waiting--whether in itself brief or prolonged, he knew not--sensation and thought alike were curiously in abeyance. Richard neither slept nor woke. He knew that he existed, but all active relation to being had ceased. And it was with painful effort he in a measure returned to more ordinary correspondence with fact, aroused by the sound of low-toned, emphatic speech close at hand, and by a scratching as of some animal denied and seeking admittance. Then he perceived that the door yielded, letting in a spread of yellow brightness from the corridor. And in the midst of that brightness, part and parcel of it thanks to the lustre of her crocus-yellow dress, her honey-coloured hair, her fair skin and softly-gleaming ornaments, stood Helen de Vallorbes. Behind her, momentarily, Richard caught sight of the young man whose face had impressed him as a ribald travesty of that of some being altogether worshipful and holy. The face peered at him with, as it seemed, malicious curiosity over the rounded shoulder of the woman of ivory and gold, The effect was very hateful, and, with a sense of thankfulness, Richard saw Helen close the door and come, alone, down the two steps leading from the back of the box. As she passed from the dimness into the clearer light, he watched her, quiescent, yet with absorbing interest. For he perceived that the hands of the clock had been put back somehow. Intervening years and the many events of them had ceased to obtain, so that, of all the many Helens, enchanting or evil, whom he had come to know, he saw now only one, and that the first and earliest--a little dancer, with blush-roses in her hat, dainty as a toy, finished to her rosy finger-tips and the toes of her pretty shoes, merry and merciless, as she had pirouetted round him mocking his shuffling, uncertain progress across the Chapel-Room at Brockhurst fifteen years ago.

"Ah! so you have come back!" he exclaimed, almost involuntarily.

Madam de Vallorbes pushed a chair from the front of the box into the shadow of the velvet draperies beside Richard.

"It is unnecessary that all Naples should take part in our interview," she said. She sat down, turning to him, leaning a little towards him.

"You do not deserve that I should come back, you know, Dickie," she continued. "You both deserted and deceived me. That is hardly chivalrous, hardly just indeed, after taking all a woman has to give. You led me to suppose you had departed for good and all. Why should you deceive me?"

"The yacht was not ready for sea," Richard said simply.

"Then you might, in common charity, have let me know that. You were bound to give me an opportunity of speaking to you once again, I think."

In his present state of detachment from all worldly considerations, absolute truthfulness compelled Richard. The event was so certain, the swarming of the bees so very near, that small diplomacies, small evasions, seemed absurdly out of place.

"I did not want to hear you speak," he said.

"But doesn't it strike you that was rather dastardly in face of what had taken place between us? Do you know that you appear in a new and far from becoming light?"

Denial seemed to Richard futile. He remained silent.

For a moment Helen looked towards the stage. When she spoke again it was as with reluctance.

"I was desperately unhappy. I went all over the villa in the vain hope of finding you. I went back to that room of yours in which we parted. I wanted to see it again."--Helen paused. Her speech was low-toned, soft as milk.--"It was rather dreadful, Dickie, for the place was all in disarray, littered with signs of your hasty departure, damp, cheerless--the rain beating against the windows. And I hate rain. I found there, not you--whom I so sorely wanted--but something very much else.--A letter to you from de Vallorbes."--Once more she paused. "I excuse you of anything worse than negligence in omitting to destroy it. Misery knows no law, and I was miserable. I read it."

Richard had listened with the same detachment, yet the same absorbed interest, with which he had watched her entrance. She was a wonderful creature in her adroitness, in her handling of means to serve her own ends! But he could not pay her back in her own coin. The time was too short for anything but simple truth. He felt strangely tired. These reiterated delays became harassing. If the bees would swarm, only swarm! Then it would be over, and he could sleep. He clasped his hands behind his head and looked at Madame de Vallorbes. Her soul kneeled on her lap, its delicate arms were clasped about her neck--black against the lustrous white of her skin and all those twisted ropes of seed pearls. It pressed its breasts against hers, amorously. It loved her and she it. And he understood that in the whole scope of nature there was but it alone, it only, that she ever had loved, or did, or could, love. And, understanding this, he was filled with a great compassion for her. And, answering her, his expression was gentle and pitiful. Still he needs must speak the truth.

"Perhaps it was as well that you should read Luigi's letter," he said.

She turned upon him fiercely and scornfully, yet even as she did so her soul fell to beckoning to him, soliciting him with evilly alluring gestures.

"My congratulations to you," she exclaimed, "upon your praiseworthy candour! I am to gather, then, that you believe that which my husband advises himself to tell you? Under the circumstances it is exceedingly convenient to you to do so, no doubt."

"How can I avoid believing it?" Richard asked, quite sweet-temperedly. "Surely we need not waste the little time which remains in argument as to that? You must admit, Helen, that Luigi's letter fits in. It supplies just the piece of the puzzle which was missing. It tallies with all the rest."

"All the rest?"

"Oh yes! It is part of the whole, precisely that part both of you and of Naples which I knew, and tried so hard not to know, from the first. But it is worse than useless to practice such refusals. The Whole, and nothing less than the whole, is bound to get one in the end. It is contrary to the nature of things that any integral portion of the whole should submit to permanent denial."--Richard's voice deepened. He spoke with a subdued enthusiasm, thinking of the dull-coloured multitude there in the arena and the act of retributive justice on the eve, by them, of accomplishment.--"It seems to me the radical weakness of all human institutions, of all systems of thought, resides in exactly that effort to select and reject, to exalt one part as against another part, and so build not upon the rock of unity and completeness, but upon the sand of partiality and division. And sooner or later the Whole revenges itself, and the fine-fanciful fabric crumbles to ruin, just for lack of that which in our short-sighted over-niceness we have taken such mighty great pains to miss out. This has happened times out of number in respect of religions, and philosophies, and the constitution of kingdoms, and in that of fair romances which promised to stand firm to all eternity. And now, now, in these last few days,--since laws which rule the general, also rule the individual life,--it has happened in respect of you, Helen, to my seeing, and in respect of Naples."--Richard smiled upon her sadly and very sweetly.--"I am sorry," he said, "yes, indeed, horribly sorry. It is a bitter thing to see the last of one's gods go overboard. But there is no remedy. Sorry or not, so it is."

Madame de Vallorbes looked at him keenly. Her attitude was strained. Her face sombre with thought.

"My God! my God!" she exclaimed, "that I should sit and listen to all this! And yet you were never more attractive. There is an unnatural force, unnatural beauty about you. You are ill, Richard. You look and you speak as a man might who was about to join hands with death."

But Dickie's attention had wandered again. He pulled the velvet drapery aside somewhat, and gazed down into the crowded house. They lingered strangely in the performance of their mission, that dull-coloured multitude of workers!--Just then came another mighty outburst of applause, cries, vivas, the famous soprano's name called aloud. The sound was stimulating, as the shout of a victorious army. Richard hailed it as a sign of speedy deliverance, and sank back into his place.

"Oh yes!" he said civilly and lightly, "I fancy I am pretty bad. I am a bit sick of this continued delay, you see. I suppose they know their own business best, but they do seem most infernally slow in getting under weigh. I was ready hours ago. However, they must be nearly through with preliminaries now. And when once we're fairly into it, I shall be all right."

"You mean when the yacht sails?" Madame de Vallorbes asked. Still she looked at him intently. He turned to her smiling, and she observed that his eyes had ceased to be as windows opening back on to empty space. They were luminous with a certain gay content.

"Yes, of course--when the yacht sails, if you like to put it that way," he answered.

"And when will that be?"

The shout of the arena grew louder in the recall. It surged up to the roof and quivered along the lath and plaster partitions of the boxes.

"Very soon now. Immediately, I think, please God," he said.--But why should she make him speak thus foolishly in riddles? Of a surety she must read the signs of the approach of that momentous and beneficent event as clearly as he himself! Was she not equally with himself involved in it? Was she not, like himself, to be cleansed and set free by it? Therefore it came as a painful bewilderment and shock to him when she drew closer to him, leaned forward, laid her hand lightly upon his thigh.

"Richard," she said, very softly, "I forgive all. I am not satisfied with loving. I will come with you. I will stay with you. I will be faithful to you--yes, yes, even that. Your loving is unlike any other. It is unique, as you yourself are unique. I--I want more of it."

"But you must know that it is too late to go back on that now," he said, reasoning with her, greatly perplexed and distressed by her determined ignoring of--to him--self-evident fact. "All that side of things for us is over and done with."

Her lips parted in naughty laughter. And then, not without a shrinking of quick horror, Richard beheld the soul of her--that being of lovely proportions, exquisitely formed in every part, yet black as the foul, liquid lanes between the hulls of the many ships down in Naples harbour--step delicately in between those parted lips, returning whence it came. And, beholding this, instinctively he raised her hand from where it rested upon his thigh, and put it from him, put it upon her glistering, crocus-yellow lap where her soul had so lately kneeled.

"Let us say no more, Helen," he entreated, "lest we both forfeit our remaining chance, and become involved in hopeless and final condemnation."

But Madame de Vallorbes' anger rose to overwhelming height. She slapped her hands together.

"Ah, you despise me!" she cried. "But let me assure you that in any case this assumption of virtue becomes you singularly ill. It really is a little bit too cheap, a work of supererogation in the matter of hypocrisy. Have the courage of your vices. Be honest. You can be so to the point of insult when it serves your purpose. Own that you are capricious, own that you have lighted upon some woman who provokes your appetite more than I do! I have been too tender of you, too lenient with you. I have loved too much and been weakly desirous to please. Own that you are tired of me, that you no longer care for me!"

And he answered, sadly enough:--

"Yes, that last is true. Having seen the Whole, that has happened which I always dreaded might happen. The last of my self-made gods has indeed gone overboard. I care for you no longer."

Helen sprang up from her chair, ran to the door, flung it open. The first act of the opera was concluded. The curtain had come down. The house below and around, the corridor without, were full of confused noise and movement.

"Paul, M. Destournelle, come here," she cried, "and at once!"

But Richard was more than ever tired. The strain of waiting had been too prolonged. Lights, draperies, figures, the crowded arena, the vast honeycomb of boxes, tier above tier, swam before his eyes, blurred, indistinct, vague, shifting, colossal in height, giddy in depth. The bees were swarming, at last, swarming upward through seas of iridescent mist. But he had no longer empire over his own attitude and thoughts. He had hoped to meet the supreme moment in full consciousness, with clear vision and thankfulness of heart. But he was too tired to do so, tired in brain and body alike. And so it happened that a dogged endurance grew on him, simply a setting of the teeth and bracing of himself to suffer silently, even stupidly, all that might be in store. For the bees were close upon him now, countless in number, angry, grudging, violent. But they no longer appeared as insects. They were human, save for their velvet-like, expressionless eyes. And all those eyes were fixed upon him, and him alone. He was the centre towards which, in thought and action, all turned. Nor were the dull-coloured occupants of the parterre alone in their attack. For those gay-coloured larvae--the men and women of his own class--indolent, licentious, full-fed, hung out of the angular mouths of the waxen cells, above the crimson and gold of their cushions, pointing at him, claiming and yet denouncing him. And in the attitude of these the democratic and the aristocratic sections--he detected a difference. The former swarmed to inflict punishment for his selfishness, uselessness, sensuality. But the latter jeered and mocked at his bodily infirmity, deriding his deformity, making merry over his shortened limbs and shuffling walk. And against this background, against this all-enclosing tapestry of faces which encircled him, two persons, and the atmosphere and aroma of them, so to speak, were clearly defined. They were close to him, here within the narrow limits of the opera box. Then a great humiliation overtook Richard, perceiving that they, and not the people, the workers, august in their corporate power and strength, were to be his executioners.--No--no--he wasn't worth that! And, for all his present dulness of sensation, a sob rose in his throat. Madame de Vallorbes, resplendent in crocus-yellow brocade, costly lace, and seed pearls, the young man, her companion--the young man of the light, forked beard, domed skull, vain eyes and peevish mouth--the young man of holy and dissolute aspect--were good enough instruments for the Eternal Justice to employ in respect of him, Richard Calmady.

"Look, M. Destournelle," Helen said very quietly, "this is my cousin of whom I have already spoken to you. But I wished to spare him if possible, and give him room for self-justification, so I did not tell you all. Richard, this is my friend, M. Destournelle, to whom my honour and happiness are not wholly indifferent."

Dickie looked up. He did not speak. Vaguely he prayed it might all soon be over. Paul Destournelle looked down. He raised his eye-glass and bowed himself, examining Richard's mutilated legs and strangely-shod feet. He broke into a little, bleating, goat-like laugh.

"Mais c'est etonnant!" he observed reflectively.

"I was in his house," Helen continued. "I was there unprotected, having absolute faith in his loyalty."--She paused a moment. "He seduced me. Richard can you deny that?"

"Canaille!" M. Destournelle murmured. He drew a pair of gloves through his hands, holding them by the finger-tips. The metal buttons of them were large, three on each wrist. Those gloves arrested Richard's attention oddly.

"I do not deny it," Dickie said.

"And having thus outraged, he deserted me. Do you deny that?"

"No," Dickie said again. For it was true, that which she asserted, true, though penetrated by subtle falsehood impossible, as it seemed to him, to combat,--"No, I do not deny it."

"You hear!" Helen exclaimed. "Now do what you think fit."

Still Destournelle drew the gloves through his hands, holding them by the finger-tips.

"Under other circumstances I might feel myself compelled to do you the honour of sending you a challenge, monsieur," he said. "But a man of sensibility like myself cannot do such violence to his moral and artistic code as to fight with an outcast of nature, an abortion, such as yourself. The sword and the pistol I necessarily reserve for my equals. The deformed person, the cripple, whose very existence is an offense to the eye and to every delicacy of sense, must be condescended to, and, if chastised at all, must be chastised without ceremony, chastised as one would chastise a dog."

And with that he struck Richard again and again across the face with those metal-buttoned gloves.

Mad with rage, blinded and sick with pain, Dickie essayed to fling himself upon his assailant. But Destournelle was too adroit for him. He skipped aside, with his little, bleating, goat-like laugh, and Richard fell heavily full length, his forehead coming in contact with the lower step of the descent from the back of the box. He lay there, too weak to raise himself.

Paul Destournelle bent down and again examined him curiously.

"C'est etonnant!" he repeated.--He gave the prostrate body a contemptuous kick. "Dear madame, are you sufficiently avenged? Is it enough?" he inquired sneeringly.

And vaguely, as from some incalculable distance, Richard heard Helen de Vallorbes' voice:--"Yes--it is a little affair of honour which dates from my childhood. It has taken many years in adjusting. I thank you, mon cher, a thousand times. Now let us go quickly. It is enough."

Then came darkness, silence, rest.

Chapter I

IN WHICH MISS ST. QUENTIN BEARS WITNESS TO THE FAITH THAT IS IN HER

Honoria divested herself of her traveling-cap, thrust her hands into the pockets of her frieze ulster, and thus, bareheaded, a tall, supple, solitary figure, paced the railway platform in the dusk. Above the gentle undulations of the western horizon splendours of rose-crimson sunset were outspread, veiled, as they flamed upward, by indigo cloud of the texture and tenuity of finest gauze. And those same rose-crimson splendours found repetition upon the narrow, polished surface of the many lines of rails, causing them to stand out, as though of red-hot metal, from the undeterminate gray-drab of the track where it curved away, southeastward, across the darkening country towards the Savoy Alps. And from out the fastnesses of these last, quick with the bleak purity of snow, came a breathing of evening wind. To Honoria it brought refreshing emphasis of silence, and of immunity from things human and things mechanical. It spoke to her of virgin and unvisited spaces, ignorant of mankind and of obligation to his so many and so insistent needs. And there being in Honoria herself a kindred defiance of subjection, a determination, so to speak, of physical and emotional chastity, she welcomed these intimations of the essential inviolability of nature, finding in them justification and support of her own mental attitude--of the entire wisdom of which she had, it must be owned, grown slightly suspicious of late.

And this was the more grateful to her, not only as contrast to the noise and dust of a lengthy and hurriedly-undertaken journey, but because that same journey had been suddenly and, in a sense violently, imposed upon one whom she held in highest regard, by another whom she had long since agreed with herself to hold in no sort of regard at all. Since the highly-regarded one set forth, she--Honoria--of course, set forth likewise. And yet, in good truth, the whole affair rubbed her not a little the wrong way! She recognised in it a particularly flagrant example of masculine aggression. Some persons, as she reflected, are permitted an amount of elbow room altogether disproportionate to their deserts. Be sufficiently selfish, sufficiently odious, and everybody becomes your humble servant, hat in hand! That is unfair. It is, indeed, quite extensively exasperating to the dispassionate onlooker. And, in Miss St. Quentin's case, exasperation was by no means lessened by the fact that candour compelled her to admit doubt not only as to the actuality of her own dispassionateness, but, as has already been stated, to the wisdom of her mental attitude generally. She wanted to think and feel one way. She was more than half afraid she was much disposed to think and feel quite another way. This was worrying. And, therefore, it came about that Honoria hailed the present interval of silence and solitude, striving to put from her remembrance both the origin and object of her journey, while filling her lungs with the snow-fed purity of the mountain wind and yielding her spirit to the somewhat serious influences of surrounding nature. All too soon the great Paris-express would thunder into the station. The heavy, horse-box-like sleeping-car--now standing on the Culoz-Geneva-Bale siding--would be coupled to the rear of it. Then the roar and rush would begin again--from dark to dawn, and on through the long, bright hours to dark once more, by mountain gorge, and stifling tunnel, and broken woodland, and smiling coastline, and fertile plain, past Chambery, and Turin, and Bologna, and mighty Rome herself, until the journey was ended and distant Naples reached at last.

But Miss St. Quentin's communings with nature were destined to speedy interruption. Ludovic Quayle's elongated person, clothed to the heels in a check traveling-coat, detached itself from the company of waiting passengers, and blue-linen-clad porters, upon the central platform before the main block of station buildings, and made its light and active way across the intervening lines of crimson-stained metals.

"If I am a nuisance mention that chastening fact without hesitation," he said, standing on the railway track and looking up at her with his air of very urbane intelligence. "Present circumstances permit us the privilege--or otherwise--of laying aside restraints of speech, along with other small proprieties of behaviour commonly observed by the polite. So don't spare my feelings, dear Miss St. Quentin. If I am a bore, tell me so, and I will return, and that without any lurking venom in my breast, whence I came."

"Do anything you please," Honoria replied, "except be run over by the Paris train."

"The Paris train, so I have just learned, is an hour late, consequently its arrival hardly enters into the question. But, since you are graciously pleased to bid me do as I like, I stay," Mr. Quayle returned, stepping on to the platform and turning to pace beside her.--"What a gaol delivery it is to get into the open! That last engine of ours threw ashes to a truly penitential extent. My mouth and throat still claim unpleasantly close relation to a neglected, kitchen grate. And if our much vaunted waggon-lits is the last word of civilisation in connection with travel, then all I can say is that, in my humble opinion, civilisation has yet a most exceedingly long way to go. It really is a miraculously uncomfortable vehicle. And how Lady Calmady contrives to endure its eccentricities of climate and of motion, I'm sure I don't know."

"In her case the end would make any sort of means supportable," Honoria answered.

Her pacings had brought her to the extreme end of the platform where it sloped to the level of the track. She stood there a moment, her head thrown back, snuffing the wind as a hind, breaking covert, stands and snuffs it. A spirit of questioning possessed her, though not--as in the hind's case--of things concrete and material. It is true she could have dispensed with Mr. Quayle's society. She did not want him. But he had shown himself so full of resource, so considerate and helpful, ever since the news of Sir Richard Calmady's desperate state had broken up the peace of the little party at Ormiston Castle, now five days ago, that she forgave him even his preciousness of speech, even his slightly irritating superiority of manner. She had ceased to be on her guard with him during these days of travel, had come to take his presence for granted and to treat him with the comfortable indifference of honest good-fellowship. So, it followed that now, speaking with him, she continued to follow out her existing train of thought.

"I'm by no means off my head about poor Dickie Calmady," she said presently,--"specially where Cousin Katherine is concerned. I couldn't go on caring about anybody, irrespective of their conduct, just because they were they. And yet I can't help seeing it must be tremendously satisfying to feel like that."

"A thousand pardons," Ludovic murmured, "but like what?"

"Why as Cousin Katherine feels--just whole-heartedly, without analysis, and without alloy--to feel that no distance, no fatigue, no nothing in short, matters, so long as she gets to him in time. I don't approve of such a state of mind, and yet"--Honoria wheeled round, facing the glory of colour dyeing all the west--"and yet, I'm untrue enough to my own principles rather to envy it."

She sighed, and that sigh her companion noted and filed for reference. Indeed, an unusually expansive cheerfulness became, perceptible in Mr. Quayle.

"By the bye, is there any further news?" she inquired.

"General Ormiston has just had a telegram."

"Anything fresh?"

"Still unconscious, strength fairly maintained."

"Oh! we know that by heart!" Honoria said.

"We do. And we know the consequences of it--the sweet little see-saw of hope and fear, productive of unlimited discussion and anxiety. No weak letting one stand at ease about that telegram! It keeps one's nose hard down on the grindstone."

"If he dies," Honoria said slowly, "if he dies--poor, dear Cousin Katherine!--When can we hear again?"

"At Turin," Mr. Quayle replied.

Then they both fell silent until the far end of the platform was reached. And there, once more, Honoria paused, her small head carried high, her serious eyes fixed upon the sunset. The rosy light falling upon her failed to disguise the paleness of her face or its slight angularity of line. She was a little worn and travel-stained, a little disheveled even. Yet to her companion she had rarely appeared more charming. She might be tired, she might even be somewhat untidy, but her innate distinction remained--nay, gained, so he judged, by suggestion of rough usage endured. Her absolute absence of affectation, her unself-consciousness, her indifference to adventitious prettinesses of toilet, her transparent sincerity, were very entirely approved by Ludovic Quayle.

"Yes, that see-saw of hope and fear must be an awful ordeal, feeling as she does," Miss St. Quentin said presently. "And yet, even so, I am uncertain. I can't help wondering which really is best!"

"Again a thousand pardons," the young man put in, "but I venture to remind you that I was not cradled in the forecourt of the temple of the Pythian Apollo, but only in the nursery of a conspicuously Philistine, English country-house."

For the first time during their conversation Honoria looked full at him. Her glance was very friendly, yet it remained meditative, even a trifle sad.

"Oh! I know, I'm fearfully inconsequent," she said. "But my head is simply rattled to pieces by that beastly waggon-lit. I had gone back to what I was thinking about before you joined me, and to what we were saying just now about Cousin Katherine."

"Yes--yes, exactly," Ludovic put in tentatively. She was going to give herself away--he was sure of it. And such giving away might make for opportunity. In spirit, the young man proceeded to take his shoes from off his feet. The ground on which he stood might prove to be holy. Moreover Miss St. Quentin's direct acts of self-revelation were few and far between. He was horribly afraid those same shoes of his might creak, so to speak, thereby startling her into watchfulness, making her draw back. But Honoria did not draw back. She was too much absorbed by her own thought. She continued to contemplate the glory of the flaming west, her expression touched by a grave and noble enthusiasm.

"I suppose one can't help worrying a little at times--it's laid hold of me very much during the last month or two--as to what is really the finest way to take life. One wants to arrive at that fairly early; not by a process of involuntary elimination, on the burnt-child-fears-the-fire sort of principle, when the show's more than half over, as so many people do. One wants to get hold of the stick by the right end now, while one's still comparatively young, and then work straight along. I want my reason to be the backbone of my action, don't you know, instead of merely the push of society and friendship, and superficial odds and ends of so-called obligation to other people."

"Yes," Mr. Quayle put in again.

"Now, it seems to me, that"--Honoria extended one hand towards the sunset--"is Cousin Katherine's outlook on life and humanity, full of colour, full of warmth. It burns with a certain prodigality of beauty, a superb absence of economy in giving. And that"--with a little shrug of her shoulders she turned towards the severe, and sombre, eastern landscape--"that, it strikes me, comes a good deal nearer my own. Which is best?"

Mr. Quayle congratulated himself upon the removal of his shoes. The ground was holy--holy to the point of embarrassment even to so unabashable and ready-tongued a gentleman as himself. He answered with an unusual degree of diffidence.

"An intermediate position is neither wholly inconceivable nor wholly untenable, perhaps."

"And you occupy it? Yes, you are very neatly balanced. But then, do you really get anywhere?"

"Is not that a rather knavish speech, dear Miss St. Quentin?" the young man inquired mildly.

"I don't know," she answered, "I wish to goodness I did."

Now was here god-given opportunity, or merely a cunningly devised snare for the taking of the unwary? Ludovic pondered the matter. He gently kicked a little pebble from the dingy gray-drab of the asphalt on to the permanent way. It struck one of the metals with a sharp click. A blue-linen-clad porter, short of stature and heavy of build, lighted the gas lamps along the platform. The flame of these wavered at first, and flickered, showing thin and will-o'-the-wisp-like against the great outspread of darkening country across which the wind came with a certain effect of harshness and barrenness--the inevitable concomitant of its inherent purity. And the said wind treated Miss St. Quentin somewhat discourteously, buffeting her, obliging her to put up both hands to push back stray locks of hair. Also the keen breath of it pierced her, making her shiver a little. Both of which things her companion noting, took heart of grace.

"Is it permitted to renew a certain petition?" he asked, in a low voice.

Honoria shook her head.

"Better not, I think," she said.

"And yet, dear Miss St. Quentin, pulverised though I am by the weight of my own unworthiness, I protest that petition is not wholly foreign to the question you did me the honour to ask me just now."

"Oh! dear me! You always contrive to bring it round to that!" she exclaimed, not without a hint of petulance.

"Far from it," the young man returned. "For a good, solid eighteen months, now, I have displayed the accumulated patience of innumerable asses."

"Of course, I see what you're driving at," she continued hastily. "But it is not original. It's just every man's stock argument."

"If it bears the hall-mark of hoary antiquity, so much the better. I entertain a reverence for precedent. And honestly, as common sense goes, I am not ashamed of that of my sex."

Miss St. Quentin resumed her walk.

"You really think it stands in one's way," she said reflectively, "you really think it a disadvantage, to be a woman?"

"Oh! good Lord!" Mr. Quayle ejaculated, softly yet with an air so humorously aghast that it could leave no doubt as to the nature of his sentiments. Then he cursed himself for a fool. His shoes indeed had made a mighty creaking! He expected an explosion of scornful wrath. He admitted he deserved it. It did not come.

Miss St. Quentin looked at him, for a moment, almost piteously. He fancied her mouth quivered and that her eyes filled with tears. Then she turned and swung away with her long, easy, even stride. Mentally the young man took himself by the throat, conscience-stricken at having humiliated her, at having caused her to fall, even momentarily, from the height of her serene, maidenly dignity. For once he became absolutely uncritical, careless of appearances. He fairly ran after her along the platform.

"Dear Miss St. Quentin," he called to her, in tones of most persuasive apology.

But Honoria's moment of piteousness was past. She had recovered all her habitual lazy and gallant grace when he came up with her.

"No--no," she said. "Hear me. I began this rather foolish conversation. I laid myself open to--well to a snubbing. I got one, anyhow!"

"In mercy don't rub it in!" Mr. Quayle murmured contritely.

"But I did," Honoria returned. "Now it's over and I'm going to pick up the pieces and put them back in their places--just where they were before."

"But I protest!--I hailed a new combination. I discover in myself no wild anxiety to have the pieces put back just where they were before."

"Oh! yes, you do," Honoria declared. "At least, you certainly will when I explain it to you."--She paused.--"You see," she said, "it is like this. Living with and watching Cousin Katherine, I have come to know all that side of things at its very finest."

"Forgive me.--It? What? May I recall to you the fact of the Philistine nursery?"

The young lady's delicate face straightened.

"You know perfectly well what I mean," she said.--"That which we all think about so constantly, and yet affect to speak of as a joke or a slight impropriety--love, marriage, motherhood."

"Yes, Lady Calmady is a past-master in those arts," Mr. Quayle replied.--Again the ground was holy. He was conscious his pulse quickened.

"The beauty of it all, as one sees it in her case, breaks one up a little. There is no laugh left in one about those things. One sees that to her they are of the nature of religion--a religion pure and undefiled, a new way of knowing God and of bringing oneself into line with the truth as it is in Him. But, having once seen that, one can decline upon no lower level. One grows ambitious. One will have it that way or not at all."

Honoria paused again. The bleak wind buffeted her. But she was no longer troubled or chilled by it, rather did it brace her to greater fearlessness of resolve and of speech.

"You are contemptuous of women," she said.

"I have betrayed characteristics of the ass, other than its patience," Ludovic lamented.

"Oh! I didn't mean that," Honoria returned, smiling in friendliest fashion upon him. "Every man worth the name really feels as you do, I imagine. I don't blame you. Possibly I am growing a trifle shaky as to feminine superiority, and woman spelled with a capital letter, myself. I'm awfully afraid she is safest--for herself and others--under slight restraint, in a state of mild subjection. She's not quite to be trusted, either intellectually or emotionally--at least, the majority of her isn't. If she got her head, I've a dreadful suspicion she would make a worse hash of creation generally than you men have made of it already, and that"--Honoria's eyes narrowed, her upper lip shortened, and her smile shone out again delightfully--"that's saying a very great deal, you know."

"My spirits rise to giddy heights," Mr. Quayle exclaimed. "I endorse those sentiments. But whence, oh, dear lady, this change of front?"

"Wait a minute. We've not got to the end of my contention yet."

"The Paris train is late. There is time. And this is all excellent hearing."

"I'm not quite so sure of that," Honoria said. "For, you see, just in proportion as I give up the fiction of her superiority, and admit that woman already has her political, domestic, and social deserts, I feel a chivalry towards her, poor, dear thing, which I never felt before. I even feel a chivalry towards the woman in myself. She claims my pity and my care in a quite new way."

"So much the better," Mr. Quayle observed, outwardly discreetly urbane, inwardly almost riotously jubilant.

"Ah! wait a minute," she repeated. Her tone changed, sobered. "I don't want to spread myself, but you know I can meet men pretty well on their own ground. I could shoot and fish as well as most of you, only that I don't think it right to take life except to provide food, or in self-defense. There's not so much happiness going that one's justified in cutting any of it short. Even a jack-snipe may have his little affairs of the heart, and a cock-salmon his gamble. But I can ride as straight as you can. I can break any horse to harness you choose to put me behind. I can sail a boat and handle an axe. I can turn my hand to most practical things--except a needle. I own I always have hated a needle worse--well, worse than the devil! And I can organise, and can speak fairly well, and manage business affairs tidily. And have I not even been known--low be it spoken--to beat you at lawn tennis, and Lord Shotover at billiards?"

"And to overthrow my most Socratic father in argument. And outwit my sister Louisa in diplomacy--vide our poor, dear Dickie Calmady's broken engagement, and the excellent, scatter-brain Decies' marriage."

"But Lady Constance is happy?" Honoria put in hastily.

"Blissful, positively blissful, and with twins too! Think of it!--Decies is blissful also. His sense of humour has deteriorated since his marriage, from constant association with good, little Connie who was never distinguished for ready perception of a joke. He regards those small, simultaneous replicas of himself with unqualified complacency, which shows his appreciation of comedy must be a bit blunted."

"I wonder if it does?" Miss St. Quentin observed reflectively. Whereat Mr. Quayle permitted himself a sound as nearly approaching a chuckle as was possible to so superior a person.

"A thousand pardons," he murmured, "but really, dear lady, you are so very much off on the other tack."

"Am I?" Miss St. Quentin said. "Well, you see--to go back to my demonstration--I've none of the quarrel with your side of things most women have, because I'm not shut out from it, and so I don't envy you. I can amuse and interest myself on your lines. And therefore I can afford to be very considerate and tender of the woman in me. I grow more and more resolved that she shall have the very finest going, or that she shall have nothing, in respect of all which belongs to her special province--in regard to love and marriage. In them she shall have what Cousin Katherine has had, and find what Cousin Katherine has found, or all that shall be a shut book to her forever. Even if discipline and denial make her a little unhappy, poor thing, that's far better than letting her decline upon the second best."

Honoria's voice was full and sweet. She spoke from out the deep places of her thought. Her whole aspect was instinct with a calm and seasoned enthusiasm. And, looking upon her, it became Ludovic Quayle's turn to find the evening wind somewhat bleak and barren. It struck chill, and he turned away and moved westwards towards the sunset. But the rose-crimson splendours had become faint and frail, while the indigo cloud had gathered into long, horizontal lines as of dusky smoke, so that the remaining brightness was seen as through prison bars. A sadness, indeed, seemed to hold the west, even greater than that which held the east, since it was a sadness not of beauty unborn, but of beauty dead. And this struck home to the young man. He did not care to speak. Miss St. Quentin walked beside him in silence, for a time. When at last she spoke it was very gently.

"Please don't be angry with me," she pleaded. "I like you so much that--that I'd give a great deal to be able to think less of my duty to the tiresome woman in me."

"I would give a great deal too," he declared, regardless of grammar.

"But I'm not the only woman in the world, dear Mr. Quayle," she protested presently.

"But I, unfortunately, have no use for any other," he returned.

"Ah, you distress me!" Honoria cried.

"Well, I don't know that you make me superabundantly cheerful," he answered.

Just then the far-away shriek of a locomotive and dull thunder of an approaching train was heard. Mr. Quayle looked once more towards the western horizon.

"Here's the Paris-express!" he said. "We must be off if we mean to get round before our horse-box is shunted."

He jumped down on to the permanent way. Miss St. Quentin followed him, and the two ran helter-skelter across the many lines of metals, in the direction of the Culoz-Geneva-Bale siding. That somewhat childish and undignified proceeding ministered to the restoration of good fellowship.

"Great passions are rare," Mr. Quayle said, laughing a little. His circulation was agreeably quickened. How surprisingly fast this nymph-like creature could get over the ground, and that gracefully, moreover, rather in the style of a lissome, long-limbed youth than in that of a woman.

"Rare? I know it," she answered, the words coming short and sharply. "But I accept the risk. A thousand to one the book remains shut forever."

"And I, meanwhile, am not too proud to pass the time of day with the second best, and take refuge in the accumulated patience of innumerable asses."

And, behind them, the express train thundered into the station.

II. TELLING HOW, ONCE AGAIN, KATHERINE CALMADY LOOKED ON HER SON

The bulletin received at Turin was sufficiently disquieting. Richard had had a relapse. And when at Bologna, just as the train was starting, General Ormiston entered the compartment occupied by the two ladies, there was that in his manner which made Miss St. Quentin lay aside the magazine she was reading and, rising silently from her place opposite Lady Calmady, go out on to the narrow passageway of the long sleeping-car. She was very close to the elder woman in the bonds of a dear and intimate friendship, yet hardly close enough, so she judged, to intrude her presence if evil-tidings were to be told. A man going into battle might look, so she thought, as Roger Ormiston looked now--very stern and strained. It was more fitting to leave the brother and sister alone together for a little space.

At the far end of the passageway the servants were grouped--Clara, comely of face and of person, neat notwithstanding the demoralisation of feminine attire incident to prolonged travel. Winter, the Brockhurst butler, clean-shaven, gray-headed, suggestive of a distinguished Anglican ecclesiastic in mufti. Miss St. Quentin's lady's-maid, Faulstich by name, a North-Country woman, angular of person and of bearing, loyal of heart. And Zimmermann, the colossal German-Swiss courier, with his square, yellow beard and hair en brosse. An air of discouragement pervaded the party, involving even the polyglot conductor of the waggon-lits, a small, quick, sandy-complexioned, young fellow of uncertain nationality, with a gold band round his peaked cap. He respected this family which could afford to take a private railway-carriage half across Europe. He shared their anxieties. And these were evidently great. Clara wept. The old butler's mouth twitched, and his slightly pendulous cheeks quivered. The door at the extreme end of the car was set wide open. Ludovic Quayle stood upon the little, iron balcony smoking. His feet were planted far apart, yet his tall figure swayed and curtseyed queerly as the heavy carriage bumped and rattled across the points. High walls, overtopped by the dark spires of cypresses, overhung by radiant wealth of lilac Wisteria, and of roses red, yellow, and white, reeled away in the keen sunshine to the left and right. Then, clearing the outskirts of the town, the train roared southward across the fair, Italian landscape beneath the pellucid, blue vault of the fair, Italian sky. And to Honoria there was something of heartlessness in all that fair outward prospect. Here, in Italy, the ancient gods reigned still, surely, the gods who are careless of human woe.

"Is there bad news, Winter?" she asked.

"Mr. Bates telegraphs to the General that it would be well her ladyship should be prepared for the worst."

"It'll kill my lady. For certain sure it will kill her! She never could be expected to stand up against that. And just as she was getting round from her own illness so nicely too----"

Audibly Clara wept. Her tears so affected the sandy-complexioned, polyglot conductor that he retired into his little pantry and made a most unholy clattering among the plates and knives and forks. Honoria put her hand upon the sobbing woman's shoulder and drew her into the comparative privacy of the adjoining compartment, rendered not a little inaccessible by a multiplicity of rugs, traveling-bags, and hand-luggage.

"Come, sit down, Clara," she said. "Have your cry out. And then pull yourself together. Remember Lady Calmady will want just all you can do for her if Sir Richard--if"--and Honoria was aware somehow of a sharp catch in her throat--"if he does not live."

And, meanwhile, Roger Ormiston, now in sober and dignified middle-age, found himself called upon to repeat that rather sinister experience of his hot and rackety youth, and, as he put it bitterly, "act hangman to his own sister." For, as he approached her, Katherine, leaning back against the piled-up cushions in the corner of the railway carriage, suddenly sat bolt-upright, stretching out her hands in swift fear and entreaty, as in the state bedroom at Brockhurst nine-and-twenty years ago.

"Oh, Roger, Roger!" she cried, "tell me, what is it?"

"Nothing final as yet, thank God," he answered. "But it would be cruel to keep the truth from you, Kitty, and let you buoy yourself up with false hopes."

"He is worse," Katherine said.

"Yes, he is worse. He is a good deal weaker. I'm afraid the state of affairs has become very grave. Evidently they are apprehensive as to what turn the fever may take in the course of the next twelve hours."

Katherine bowed herself together as though smitten by sharp pain. Then she looked at him hurriedly, fresh alarms assaulting her.

"You are not trying to soften the blow to me? You are not keeping anything back?"

"No, no, no, my dear Kitty. There--see--read it for yourself. I telegraphed twice, so as to have the latest news. Here's the last reply."

Ormiston unfolded the blue paper, crossed by white strips of printed matter, and laid it upon her lap. And as he did so it struck him, aggravating his sense of sinister repetition, that she had on the same rings and bracelets as on that former occasion, and that she wore stone-gray silk too--a long traveling sacque, lined and bordered with soft fur. It rustled as she moved. A coif of black lace covered her upturned hair, framed her sweet face, and was tied soberly under her chin. And, looking upon her, Ormiston yearned in spirit over this beautiful woman who had borne such grievous sorrows, and who, as he feared, had sorrow yet more grievous still to bear.--"For ten to one the boy won't pull through--he won't pull through," he said to himself. "Poor, dear fellow, he's nothing left to fall back upon. He's lived too hard." And then he took himself remorsefully to task, asking himself whether, among the pleasures and ambitions and successes of his own career, he had been quite faithful to the dead, and quite watchful enough over the now dying, Richard Calmady? He reproached himself, for, when Death stands at the gate, conscience grows very sensitive regarding any lapses, real or imagined, of duty towards those for whom that dread ambassador waits.

Twice Katherine read the telegram, weighing each word of it. Then she gave the blue paper back to her brother.

"I will ask you all to let me be alone for a little while, dear Roger," she said. "Tell Honoria, tell Ludovic, tell my good Clara. I must turn my face to the wall for a time, so that, when I turn it upon you dear people again, it may not be too unlovely."

And Ormiston bent his head and kissed her hand, and went out, closing the door behind him--while the train roared southward, through the afternoon sunshine, southward towards Chiusi and Rome.

And Katherine Calmady sat quietly amid the noise and violent, on-rushing movement, making up accounts with her own motherhood. That she might never see Dickie again, she herself dying, was an idea which had grown not unfamiliar to her during these last sad years. But that she should survive, only to see Dickie dead, was a new idea and one which joined hands with despair, since it constituted a conclusion big with the anguish of failure to the tragedy of their relation, hers and his. Her whole sense of justice, of fitness, rebelled under it, rebelled against it. She implored a space, however brief, of reconciliation and reunion before the supreme farewell was said. But it had become natural to Katherine's mind, so unsparingly self-trained in humble obedience to the divine ordering, not to stay in the destructive, but pass on to the constructive stage. She would not indulge herself in rebellion, but rather fashion her thought without delay to that which should make for inward peace. And so now, turning her eyes, in thought, from the present, she went back on the baby-love, the child-love which, notwithstanding the abiding smart of Richard's deformity, had been so very exquisite to her. Upon the happier side of all that she had not dared to dwell during this prolonged period of estrangement. It was too poignant, too deep-seated in the springs of her physical being. To dwell on it enervated and unnerved her. But now, Richard the grown man dying, she gave herself back to Richard the little child. It solaced her to do so. Then he had been wholly hers. And he was wholly hers still, in respect of that early time. The man she had lost--so it seemed, how far through fault of her own she could not tell. And just now she refused to analyse all that. Upon all which strengthened endurance, upon gracious memories engendering thankfulness, could her mind alone profitably be fixed. And so, as the train roared southward, and the sun declined and the swift dusk spread its mantle over the face of the classic landscape, Katherine cradled a phantom baby on her knee, and sat in the oriel window of the Chapel-Room, at Brockhurst, with the phantom of her boy beside her, while she told him old-time legends of war, and of high endeavour, and of gallant adventure, watching the light dance in his eyes as her words awoke in him emulation of those masters of noble deeds whose exploits she recounted. And in this she found comfort, and a chastened calm. So that, when at length General Ormiston--incited thereto by the faithful Clara, who protested that her ladyship must and should dine--returned to her, he found her storm-tossed no longer, but tranquil in expression and solicitous for the comfort of others. She had conquered nature by grace--conquered, in that she had compelled herself to unqualified submission. If this cup might not pass from her, still would she praise Almighty God and bless His Holy Name, asking not that her own, but His will, be done.

It followed that the evening, spent in that strangely noisy, oscillating, onward-rushing dwelling-place of a railway-carriage, was not without a certain subdued brightness of intercourse and conversation. Katherine was neither preoccupied nor distrait, or unamused even by the small accidents and absurdities of travel. Later, while preparations were being made by the servants for the coming night, she went out, with the two gentlemen and Honoria St. Quentin, on to the iron platform at the rear of the swaying car, and stood there under the stars. The mystery of these last, and of the dimly discerned and sleeping land, offered penetrating contrast to the sleeplessness of the hurrying train with its long, sinuous line of lighted windows, and to the sleeplessness of her own heart. The fret of human life is but as a little island in the great ocean of eternal peace--so she told herself--and then bade that sleepless heart of hers both still its passionate beating and take courage. And when, at length, she was alone, and lay down in her narrow berth, peace and thankfulness remained with Katherine. The care and affection of brother, friends, and servants, was very grateful to her, so that she composed herself to rest, whether slumber was granted her or not. The event was in the hands of God--that surely was enough.

And in the dawn, reaching Rome, the news was so far better that it was not worse. Richard lived. And when, some seven hours later, the train steamed into Naples station, and Bates, the house-steward--the marks of haste and keen anxiety upon him--pushed his way up to the carriage door, he could report there was this amount of hope even yet, that Richard still lived, though his strength was as that of an infant and whether it would wax or wane wholly none as yet could say.

"Then we are in time, Bates?" Lady Calmady had asked, desiring further assurance.

"I hope so, my lady. But I would advise your coming as quickly as possible."

"Is he conscious?"

"He knew Captain Vanstone this morning, my lady, just before I left."

The man-servant shouldered the crowd aside unceremoniously, so as to force a passage for Lady Calmady.

"Her ladyship should go up to the villa at once, sir," he said to General Ormiston. "I had better accompany her. I will leave Andrews to make all arrangements here. The carriage is waiting."

Then, Honoria beside her, Katherine was aware of the hot glare and hard shadow, the grind and clatter, the violent colour, the strident vivacity of the Neapolitan streets, as with voice and whip, Garcia sprung the handsome, long-tailed, black horses up the steep ascent. This, followed by the impression of a cool, spacious, and lofty interior, of mild-diffused light, of pale, marble floors and stairways, of rich hangings and distinguished objects of art, of the soft, green gloom of ilex and myrtle, the languid drip of fountains. And this last served to mark, as with raised finger, the hush,--bland, yet very imperative--which held all the place. After the ceaseless jar and tumult of that many-days' journey, here, up at the villa, it seemed as though urgency were absurd, hot haste of affection a little vulgar, a little contemptible, all was so composed, so urbane.

And that urbanity, so bland, so, in a way, supercilious, affected Honoria St. Quentin unpleasantly. She was taken with unreasoning dislike of the place, finding something malign, trenching on cruelty even, in its exalted serenity, its unchanging, inaccessible, mask-like smile. Very certainly the ancient gods held court here yet, the gods who are careless of human tears, heedless of human woe! And she looked anxiously at Lady Calmady, penetrated by fear that the latter was about to be exposed to some insidious danger, to come into conflict with influences antagonistic and subtly evil. Wicked deeds had been committed in this fair place, wicked designs nourished and brought to fruition here. She was convinced of that. Was convinced further that those designs had connection with and had been directed against Lady Calmady. The thought of Helen de Vallorbes, exquisite and vicious,--as she now reluctantly admitted her to be,--was very present to her. As far as she knew, it was quite a number of years since Helen had set foot in the villa. Yet it spoke of her, spoke of the more dangerous aspects of her nature.--Honoria sighed over her friend. Helen had gone, latterly, very much to the bad, she feared. And as all this passed rapidly through her mind it aroused all her knight-errantry, raising a strongly protective spirit in her. She questioned just how much active care she might take of Lady Calmady without indiscretion of over-forwardness.

But even while she thus debated, opportunity of action was lost. Quietly, a great simplicity and singleness of purpose in her demeanour, without word spoken, without looking back, Katherine followed the house-steward across the cool, spacious hall, through a doorway and out of sight.

And that singleness of purpose, so discernible in her outward demeanour, possessed Katherine's being throughout. She was as one who walks in sleep, pushed by blind impulse. She was not conscious of herself, not conscious of joy or fear, or any emotion. She moved forward dumbly, and without volition, towards the event. Her senses were confused by this transition to stillness from noise, by the immobility of all surrounding objects after the reeling landscape on either hand the swaying train, by the bland and tempered light after the harsh contrasts of glare and darkness so constantly offered to her vision of late. She was dazed and faint, moreover, so that her knees trembled, her sensibility, her powers of realisation and of sympathy, for the time being, atrophied.

The house-steward ushered her into a large, square room. The low, darkly-painted, vaulted ceiling of it produced a cavernous effect. An orderly disorder prevailed, and a somewhat mournful dimness of closed, green-slatted shutters and half-drawn curtains. The furniture, costly in fact, but dwarfed, in some cases actually legless, was ranged against the squat, carven bookcases that lined the walls, leaving the middle of the room vacant save for a low, narrow camp-bed. The bed stood at right angles to the door by which Katherine entered, the head of it towards the shuttered, heavily-draped windows, the foot towards the inside wall of the room. At the bedside a man knelt on one knee, and his appearance aroused, in a degree, Katherine's dormant powers of observation. He had a short, crisp, black beard and crisp, black hair. He was alert and energetic of face and figure, a man of dare-devil, humorous, yet kindly eyes. He wore a blue serge suit with brass buttons to it. He was in his stocking-feet. The wristbands and turn-down collar of his white shirt were immaculate. Katherine, lost, trembling, the support of the habitual taken from her, a stranger in a strange land, liked the man. He appeared so admirable an example of physical health. He inspired her with confidence, his presence seeming to carry with it assurance of that which is wholesome, normal, and sane. He glanced at her sharply, not without hint of criticism and of command. Authoritatively he signed to her to remain silent, to stand at the head of the bed, and well clear of it, out of sight. Katherine did not resent this. She obeyed.

And standing thus, rallying her will to conscious effort, she looked steadily, for the first time, at the bed and that which lay upon it. And so doing she could hardly save herself from falling, since she saw there precisely that which the shape of the room and the disarray of it, along with vacant space and the low camp-bed in the centre of that space, had foretold--for all her dumbness of feeling, deadness of sympathy--she must assuredly see.--All these last four-and-twenty hours she had solaced herself with the phantom society of Dickie the baby-child, of Dickie the eager boy, curious of many things. But here was one different from both these. Different, too, from the young man, tremendous in arrogance, and in revolt against the indignity put on him by fate, from whom she had parted in such anguish of spirit nearly five years back. For, in good truth, she saw now, not Richard Calmady her son, her anxious charge, whose debtor--in that she had brought him into life disabled--she held herself eternally to be, but Richard Calmady her husband, the desire of her eyes, the glory of her youth--saw him, worn by suffering, disfigured by unsightly growth of beard, pallid, racked by mortal weakness, the sheet expressing the broad curve of his chest, the sheet and light blanket disclosing the fact of that hideous maiming he had sustained--saw him now as on the night he died.

Captain Vanstone, meanwhile reassured as to the newcomer's discretion and docility, applied his mind to his patient.

"See here, sir," he said, banteringly yet tenderly, "we were just getting along first-rate with these uncommonly mixed liquors. You mustn't cry off again, Sir Richard."

He slipped his arm under the pillows, dexterously raising the young man's head, and held the cup to his lips.

"My dear good fellow, I wish you would let me be," Dickie murmured.

He spoke courteously, yet there were tears in his voice for very weakness. And, hearing him, it was as though something stirred within Katherine which had long been bound by bitterness of heavy frost.

Vanstone shook his head.--"Very sorry, Sir Richard," he replied. "Daren't let you off. I've got my orders, you see."

The bold and kindly eyes had a certain magnetic efficacy of compulsion in them. The sick man drank, swallowed with difficulty, yet drank again. Then he lay back, for a while, his eyes closed, resting. And Katherine stood at the head of the bed, out of sight, waiting till her time should come. She folded her hands high upon her bosom. Her thought remained inarticulate, yet she began to understand that which she had striven so sternly to uproot, that which she had supposed she had extirpated, still remained with her. Once more, with a terror of joyful amazement, she began to scale the height and sound the depth of human love.

Presently the voice--whether that of husband or of son she did not stay to discriminate--it gripped her very vitals--reached her from the bed. She fancied it rang a little stronger.

"It is contemptibly futile, and therefore conspicuously in keeping with the rest, to have taken all this trouble about dying only, in the end, to sneak back."

"Oh! well, sir, after all you're not so very far on the return voyage yet!" Vanstone put in consolingly.

Richard opened his eyes. Katherine's vision was blurred. She could not see very clearly, but she fancied he smiled.

"Yes, with luck, I may still give you all the slip," he said.

"Now, a little more, sir, please. Yes, you can if you try."

"But I tell you I don't care about this business of sneaking back. I don't want to live."

"Very likely not. But I'm very much mistaken if you want to die, like a cat in a cupboard, here ashore. Mend enough to get away on board the yacht to sea. There'll be time enough then to argue the question out, sir. Half a mile of blue water under your feet sends up the value of life most considerably."

As he spoke the sailor looked at Katherine Calmady. His glance enjoined caution, yet conveyed encouragement.

"Here, take down the rest of it, Sir Richard," he said persuasively. "Then I swear I won't plague you any more for a good hour."

Again he raised the sick man dexterously, and as he did so Katherine observed that a purple scar, as of a but newly healed wound, ran right across Dickie's cheek from below the left eye to the turn of the lower jaw. And the sight of it moved her strangely, loosening that last binding as of frost. A swift madness of anger against whoso had inflicted that ugly hurt arose in Katherine, while her studied resignation, her strained passivity of mental attitude, went down before a passion of fierce and primitive emotion. The spirit of battle became dominant in her along with an immense necessity of loving and of being loved. Tender phantoms of past joy ceased to solace. The actual, the concrete, the immediate, compelled her with a certain splendour of demand. Katherine appeared to grow taller, more regal of presence. The noble energy of youth and its limitless generosity returned to her. Instinctively she unfastened her pelisse at the throat, took the lace coif from her head, letting it fall to the ground, and moved nearer.

Richard pushed the cup away from his lips.

"There's some one in the room, Vanstone!" he said, his voice harsh with anger. "Some woman--I heard her dress. I told you all--whatever happened--I would have no woman here."

But Katherine, undismayed, came straight on to the bedside. She loved. She would not be gainsaid. With the whole force of her nature she refused denial of that love.--For a brief space Richard looked at her, his face ghastly and rigid as that of a Corpse. Then he raised himself in the bed, stretching out both arms, with a hoarse cry that tore at his throat and shuddered through all his frame. And, as he would have fallen forward, exhausted by the effort to reach her and the lovely shelter of her, Katherine caught and, kneeling, held him, his poor hands clutching impotently at her shoulders, his head sinking upon her breast. While, in that embrace, not only all the motherhood in her leapt up to claim the sonship in him, but all the womanhood in her leapt up to claim the manhood in him, thereby making the broken circle of her being once more wholly perfect and complete, so that carrying the whole dear burden of his fever-wasted body in her encircling arms and upon her breast, even as she had carried, long since, that dear fruit of love, the unborn babe, within her womb, Katherine was taken with a very ecstasy and rapture of content.

"My beloved is mine--is mine!" she cried,--"and I am his."

Captain Vanstone was on his feet and half-way across the room.

"Man alive, but it hurts like merry hell!" he said, as he softly closed the door.

III. CONCERNING A SPIRIT IN PRISON

Upon those moments of rapture followed days of trembling, during which the sands of Richard Calmady's life ran very low, and his brain wandered in delirium, and he spoke unwittingly of many matters of which it was unprofitable to hear. Periods of unconsciousness, when he lay as one dead; periods of incessant utterance--now violent in unavailing repudiation, now harsh with unavailing remorse--alternated. And, at this juncture, much of Lady Calmady's former very valiant pride asserted itself. In tender jealousy for the honour of her beloved one she shut the door of that sick-room, of sinister aspect, against brother and friend, and even against the faithful Clara. None should see or hear Richard in his present alienation and abjection, save herself and those who had hitherto ministered to him. He should regain a measure, at least, of his old distinction and beauty before any, beyond these, looked on his face. And so his own men-servants--Captain Vanstone, capable, humorous, and alert--and Price, the red-headed, Welsh first-mate, of varied and voluminous gift of invective--continued to nurse him. These men loved him. They would be loyal in silence, since, whatever his lapses, Dickie was and always had been--as Katherine reflected--among the number of those happily-endowed persons who triumphantly give the lie to the cynical saying that "no man is a hero to his valet de chambre."

To herself Katherine reserved the right to enter that sinister sick-room whenever she pleased, and to sit by the bedside, waiting for the moment--should it ever come--when Richard would again recognise her, and give himself to her again. And those vigils proved a searching enough experience, notwithstanding her long apprenticeship to service of sorrow--which was also the service of her son. For, in the mental and moral nudity of delirium, he made strange revelation, not only of acts committed, but of inherent tendencies of character and of thought. He spoke, with bewildering inconsequence and intimacy, of incidents and of persons with whom she was unacquainted, causing her to follow him--a rather brutal pilgrimage--into regions where the feet of women, bred and nurtured like herself, but seldom tread. He spoke of persons with whom she was well acquainted also, and whose names arrested her attention with pathetic significance, offering, for the moment, secure standing ground amid the shifting quicksand of his but half-comprehended words. He spoke of Morabita, the famous prima donna, and of gentle Mrs. Chifney down at the Brockhurst racing-stables. He grew heated in discussion with Lord Fallowfeild. He petted little Lady Constance Quayle. He called Camp, coaxed and chaffed the dog merrily--whereat Lady Calmady rose from her place by the bedside and stood at one of the dim, shuttered windows for a while. He spoke of places, too, and of happenings in them, from Westchurch to Constantinople, from a nautch at Singapore to a country fair at Farley Row. But, recurrent through all his wanderings, were allusions, unsparing in revolt and in self-abasement, to a woman whom he had loved and who had dealt very vilely with him, putting some unpardonable shame upon him, and to a man whom he himself had very basely wronged. The name, neither of man nor woman, did Katherine learn.--Madame de Vallorbes' name, for which she could not but listen, he never mentioned, nor did he mention her own.--And recurrent, also, running as a black thread through all his speech, was lament, not unmanly but very terrible to hear--the lament of a creature, captive, maimed, imprisoned, perpetually striving, perpetually frustrated in the effort, to escape. And, noting all this, Katherine not only divined very dark and evil pages in the history of her beloved one, but a struggle so continuous and a sorrow so abiding that, in her estimation at all events, they cancelled and expiated the darkness and evil of those same pages. While the mystery, both of wrong done and sorrow suffered, so wrought upon her that, having, in the first ecstasy of recovered human love, deserted and depreciated the godward love a little, she now ran back imploring assurance and renewal of that last, in all penitence and humility, lest, deprived of the counsel and sure support of it, she should fail to read the present and deal with the future aright--if, indeed, any future still remained for that beloved one other than the yawning void of death and inscrutable silence of the grave!

The better part of a week passed thus, and then, one fair morning, Winter, bringing her breakfast to the anteroom of that same sea-blue, sea-green bedchamber--sometime tenanted by Helen de Vallorbes--disclosed a beaming countenance.

"Mr. Powell wishes me to inform your ladyship that Sir Richard has passed a very good night. He has come to himself, my lady, and has asked for you."

The butler's hands shook as he set down the tray.

"I hope your ladyship will take something to eat before you go down-stairs," he added. "Mr. Powell told Sir Richard that it was still early, and he desired that on no consideration should you be hurried."

Which little word of thoughtfulness on Dickie's part brought a roundness to Katherine's cheek and a soft shining into her sweet eyes, so that Honoria St. Quentin, sauntering into the room just then with her habitual lazy grace, stood still a moment in pleased surprise, noting the change in her friend's appearance.

"Why, dear Cousin Katherine," she asked, "what's happened? All's right with the world!"

"Yes," Katherine answered. "God's very much in His heaven, to-day, and all's right with all the world, because things are a little more right with one man in it.--That is the woman's creed--always has been, I suppose, and I rather hope always will be. It is frankly personal and individualistic, I know. Possibly it is contemptibly narrow-minded. Still I doubt if she will readily find another one which makes for greater happiness or fulness of life. You don't agree, dearest, I know--nevertheless pour out my tea for me, will you? I want to dispose of this necessary evil of breakfast with all possible despatch. Richard has sent for me. He has slept and is awake."

And as Miss St. Quentin served her dear friend, she pondered this speech curiously, saying to herself:--"Yes, I did right, though I never liked Ludovic Quayle better than now, and never liked any other man as well as I like Ludovic Quayle. But that's not enough. I'm getting hold of the appearance of the thing, but I haven't got hold of the thing itself. And so the woman in me must continue to be kept in the back attic. She shall be denied all further development. She shall have nothing unless she can have the whole of it, and repeat Cousin Katherine's creed from her heart."

Richard did not speak when Lady Calmady crossed the room and sat down at the bedside. He barely raised his eyelids. But he felt out for her hand across the surface of the sheet. And she took the proffered hand in both hers and fell to stroking the palm of it with her finger-tips. And this silent greeting, and confiding contact of hand with hand, was to her exquisitely healing. It gave an assurance of nearness and acknowledged ownership, more satisfying and convincing than many eloquent phrases of welcome. And so she, too, remained silent, only indeed permitting herself, for a little while, to look at him, lest so doing she should make further demand upon his poor quantity of strength. A folding screen in stamped leather, of which age had tempered the ruby and gold to a sober harmony of tone, had been placed round the head of the bed, throwing this last into clear, quiet shadow. The bed linen was fresh and smooth. Richard had made a little toilet. His silk shirt, open at the throat, was also fresh and smooth. He was clean shaven, his hair cropped into that closely-fitting, bright-brown cap of curls. Katherine perceived that his beauty had begun to return to him, though his face was distressingly worn and emaciated, and the long, purplish line of that unexplained scar still disfigured his cheek. His hands were little more than skin and bone. Indeed, he was fragile, she feared, as any person could be who yet had life in him, and she wondered, rather fearfully, if it was yet possible to build up that life again into any joy of energy and of activity. But she put such fears from her as unworthy. For were they not together, he and she, actually and consciously reunited? That was sufficient. The rest could wait.

And to-day, as though lending encouragement to gracious hopes, the usually gloomy and cavernous room had taken to itself a quite generous plenishing of air and light. The heavy curtains were drawn aside. The casements of one of the square, squat windows were thrown widely open. The slatted shutters without were partially opened likewise. A shaft of strong sunshine slanted in and lay, like a bright highway, across the rich colours of the Persian carpet. The air was hot but nimble, and of a vivacious and stimulating quality. It fluttered some loose papers on the writing-table near the open window. It fluttered the delicate laces and fine muslin frills of Lady Calmady's morning-gown. There was a sprightly mirthfulness in the touch of it, not unpleasing to her. For it seemed to speak of the ever-obtaining youth, the incalculable power of recuperation, the immense reconstructive energy resident in nature and the physical domain. And there was comfort in that thought. She turned her eyes from the bed and its somewhat sorrowful burden--the handsome head, the broad, though angular, shoulders, the face, immobile and mask-like, with closed eyelids and unsmiling lips, reposing upon the whiteness of the pillows--and fixed them upon that radiant space of outer world visible between the dark-framing of the half-open shutters. Beyond the dazzling, black-and-white chequer of the terrace and balustrade, they rested on the cool green of the formal garden, the glistering dome and slender columns of the pavilion set in the angle of the terminal wall.--And this last reminded her quaintly of that other pavilion, embroidered, with industry of innumerable stitches, upon the curtains of the state bed at home--that pavilion, set for rest and refreshment in the midst of the tangled ways of the Forest of This Life, where the Hart may breathe in security, fearless of Care, the pursuing Leopard, which follows all too close behind.--Owing to her position and the sharp drop of the hillside, Naples itself, the great painted city, its fine buildings and crowded shipping, was unseen. But, far away, the lofty promontory of Sorrento sketched itself in palest lilac upon the azure of the sea and sky.

And, as Katherine reasoned, if this fair prospect, after so many ages of tumultuous history and the shock of calamitous events, after battle, famine, terror of earthquake and fire, devastation by foul disease, could still recover and present such an effect of triumphant youthfulness, such, at once august and mirthful, charm, might not her beloved one, lying here broken in health and in spirit, likewise regain the glory of his manhood and the delight of it, notwithstanding present weakness and mournful eclipse?--Yes, it would come right--come right--Katherine told herself, thereby making one of those magnificent acts of faith which go so far to produce just that which they prophesy. God could not have created so complex and beautiful a creature, and permitted it so to suffer, save to the fulfilment of some clear purpose which would very surely be made manifest at last. God Almighty should be justified of His strange handiwork; and she of her love before the whole of the story was told.--And, stirred by these thoughts, and by the fervour of her own pious confidence, Katherine's finger-tips traveled more rapidly over the palm of that outstretched and passive hand. Then, on a sudden, she became aware that Richard was looking fixedly at her. She turned her head proudly, the exaltation of a living faith very present in her smile.

"You are the same," he said slowly. His voice was low, toneless, and singularly devoid of emotion.--"Deliciously the same. You are just as lovely. You still have your pretty colour. You are hardly a day older----"

He paused, still regarding her fixedly.

"I'm glad you have got on one of those white, frilly things you used to wear. I always liked them."

Katherine could not speak just then. This sudden and complete intimacy unnerved her. It was so long since any one had spoken to her thus. It was very dear to her, yet the toneless voice gave a strange unreality to the tender words.

"It's a matter for congratulation that you are the same," Richard went on, "since everything else, it appears, is destined to continue the same. One should have one thing it is agreeable to contemplate in that connection, considering the vast number of things altogether the reverse of agreeable which one fondly hoped one was rid of forever, and which intrude themselves."

He shifted himself feebly on the pillows, and the flicker of a smile crossed his face.

"Poor, dear mother," he said, "you see again, without delay, the old bad habit of grumbling!"

"Grumble on, grumble on, my best beloved," Katherine murmured, while her finger-tips traveled softly over his palm.

"Verily and indeed, you are the same!" Richard rejoined. Once more he lay looking full at her, until she became almost abashed by that unswerving scrutiny. It came over her that the plane of their relation had changed. Richard was, as never heretofore, her equal, a man grown.

Suddenly he spoke.

"Can you forgive me?"

And so far had Katherine's thought journeyed from the past, so absorbed was it in the present, that she answered, surprised:--

"My dearest, forgive what?"

"Injustice, ingratitude, desertion," Richard said, "neglect, systematic cruelty. There is plenty to swell the list. All I boasted I would do I have done--and more."--His voice, until now so even and emotionless, faltered a little. "I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son."

Katherine's hand closed down on his firmly.

"All that, as far as I am concerned, is as though it was not and never had been," she answered.--"So much for judgment on earth, dearest.--While in heaven, thank God, we know there is more joy over the one sinner who repents than over the ninety-and-nine just persons who need no repentance."

"And you really believe that?" Richard said, speaking half indulgently, half ironically, as if to a child.

"Assuredly, I believe it."

"But supposing the sinner is not repentant, but merely cowed?"--Richard straightened his head on the pillows and closed his eyes. "You gave me leave to grumble--well, then, I am so horribly disappointed. Here have life and death been sitting on either side of me for the past month, and throwing with dice for me. I saw them as plainly as I can see you. The queer thing was they were exactly alike, yet I knew them apart from the first. Day and night I heard the rattle of the dice--it became hideously monotonous--and felt the mouth of the dice-box on my chest when they threw. I backed death heavily. It seemed to me there were ways of loading the dice. I loaded them. But it wasn't to be, mother. Life always threw the highest numbers--and life had the last throw."

"I praise God for that," Katherine said, very softly.

"I don't, unfortunately," he answered. "I hoped for a neat little execution--a little pain, perhaps, a little shedding of blood, without which there is no remission of sins--but I suppose that would have been letting me off too easy."

He drew away his hand and covered his eyes.

"When I had seen you I seemed to have made my final peace. I understood why I had been kept waiting till then. Having seen you, I flattered myself I might decently get free at last. But I am branded afresh, that's all, and sent back to the galleys."

Lady Calmady's eyes sought the radiant prospect--the green of the garden, the slender columns of the airy pavilion, the lilac land set in the azure of sea and sky. No words of hers could give comfort as yet, so she would remain silent. Her trust was in the amiable ministry of time, which may bring solace to the tormented, human soul, even as it reclothes the mountainside swept by the lava stream, or cleanses and renders gladly habitable the plague devastated city.

But there was a movement upon the bed. Richard had turned on his side. He had recovered his self-control, and once more looked fixedly at her.

"Mother," he said calmly, "is your love great enough to take me back, and give yourself to me again, though I am not fit so much as to kiss the hem of your garment?"

"There is neither giving nor taking, my beloved," she answered, smiling upon him. "In the truth of things, you have never left me, neither have I ever let you go."

"Ah! but consider these last four years and their record!" he rejoined. "I am not the same man that I was. There's no getting away from fact, from deeds actually done, or words actually said, for that matter. I have kept my singularly repulsive infirmity of body, and to it I have added a mind festering with foul memories. I have been a brute to you, a traitor to a friend who trusted me. I have been a sensualist, an adulterer. And I am hopelessly broken in pride and self-respect. The conceit, the pluck even, has been licked right out of me."--Richard paused, steadying his voice which faltered again.--"I only want, since it seems I've got to go on living, to slink away somewhere out of sight, and hide myself and my wretchedness and shame from every one I know.--Can you bear with me, soured and invalided as I am, mother? Can you put up with my temper, and my silence, and my grumbling, useless log as I must continue to be?"

"Yes--everlastingly yes," Katherine answered.

Richard threw himself flat on his back again.

"Ah! how I hate myself--my God, how I hate myself!" he exclaimed.

"And how beyond all worlds I love you," Katherine put in quietly.

He felt out for her hand across the sheet, found and held it. There were footsteps upon the terrace to the right, the scent of a cigar, Ludovic Quayle's voice in question, Honoria St. Quentin's in answer, both with enforced discretion and lowness of tone. General Ormiston joined them. Miss St. Quentin laughed gently. The sound was musical and sweet. Footsteps and voices died away. A clang of bells and the hooting of an outward-bound liner came up from the city and the port.

Richard's calm had returned. His expression had softened.

"Will those two marry?" he asked presently.

Lady Calmady paused before speaking.

"I hope so--for Ludovic's sake," she said. "He has served, if not quite Jacob's seven years, yet a full five for his love."

"If for Ludovic's sake, why not for hers?" Dickie asked.

"Because two halves don't always make a whole in marriage," Katherine said.

"You are as great an idealist as ever!"--He paused, then raised himself, sitting upright, speaking with a certain passion.

"Mother, will you take me away, away from every one, at once, just as soon as possible? I never want to see this room, or this house, or Naples again. The climax was reached here of disillusion, and of iniquity, and of degradation. Don't ask what it was. I couldn't tell you. And, mercifully, only one person, whose lips are sealed in self-defense, knows exactly what took place besides myself. But I want to get away, away alone with you, who are perfectly unsullied and compassionate, and who have forgiven me, and who still can love. Will you come? Will you take me? The yacht is all ready for sea."

"Yes," Katherine said.

"I asked this morning who was here with you, and Powell told me. I can't see them, mother, simply I can't! I haven't the nerve. I haven't the face. Can you send them away?"

"Yes," Katherine said.

Richard's eyes had grown dangerously bright. A spot of colour burned on either cheek. Katherine leaned over him.

"My dearest," she declared, "you have talked enough."

"Yes, they're beginning to play again, I can hear the rattle of the dice.--Mother take me away, take me out to sea, away from this dreadful place.--Ah! you poor darling, how horribly selfish I am!--But let me get out to sea, and then later, take me home--to Brockhurst. The house is big. Nobody need see me."

"No, no," Katherine said, laying him back with tender force upon the pillows.--"No one has seen you, no one shall see you. We will be alone, you and I, just as long as you wish. With me, my beloved, you are very safe."