VI. WHICH TELLS OF STRANGE ENCOUNTERS…

VI. WHICH TELLS OF STRANGE ENCOUNTERS

A few hours afterwards Gaston sat on his horse, in a quiet corner of the grounds, while his uncle sketched him. After a time he said that Saracen would remain quiet no longer. His uncle held up the sketch. Gaston could scarcely believe that so strong and life-like a thing were possible in the time. It had force and imagination. He left his uncle with a nod, rode quietly through the park, into the village, and on to the moor. At the top he turned and looked down. The perfectness of the landscape struck him; it was as if the picture had all grown there--not a suburban villa, not a modern cottage, not one tall chimney of a manufactory, but just the sweet common life. The noises of the village were soothing, the soft smell of the woodland came over. He watched a cart go by idly, heavily clacking.

As he looked, it came to him: was his uncle right after all? Was he out of place here? He was not a part of this, though he had adapted himself and had learned many fine social ways. He knew that he lived not exactly as though born here and grown up with it all. But it was also true that he had a native sense of courtesy which people called distinguished. There was ever a kind of mannered deliberation in his bearing--a part of his dramatic temper, and because his father had taught him dignity where there were no social functions for its use. His manner had, therefore, a carefulness which in him was elegant artifice.

It could not be complained that he did not act after the fashion of gentle people when with them. But it was equally true that he did many things which the friends of his family could not and would not have done. For instance, none would have pitched a tent in the grounds, slept in it, read in it, and lived in it--when it did not rain. Probably no one of them would have, at individual expense, sent the wife of the village policeman to a hospital in London, to be cured--or to die--of cancer. None would have troubled to insist that a certain stagnant pool in the village be filled up. Nor would one have suddenly risen in court and have acted as counsel for a gipsy! At the same time, all were too well- bred to think that Gaston did this because the gipsy had a daughter with him, a girl of strong, wild beauty, with a look of superiority over her position.

He thought of all the circumstances now.

It was very many months ago. The man had been accused of stealing and assault, but the evidence was unconvincing to Gaston. The feeling in court was against the gipsy. Fearing a verdict against him, Gaston rose and cross-examined the witnesses, and so adroitly bewildered both them and the justices who sat with his grandfather on the case, that, at last, he secured the man's freedom. The girl was French, and knew English imperfectly. Gaston had her sworn, and made the most of her evidence. Then, learning that an assault had been made on the gipsy's van by some lads who worked at mills in a neighbouring town, he pushed for their arrest, and himself made up the loss to the gipsy.

It is possible that there was in the mind of the girl what some common people thought: that the thing was done for her favour; for she viewed it half-gratefully, half-frowningly, till, on the village green, Gaston asked her father what he wished to do--push on or remain to act against the lads.

The gipsy, angry as he was, wished to move on. Gaston lifted his hat to the girl and bade her good-bye. Then she saw that his motives had been wholly unselfish--even quixotic, as it appeared to her--silly, she would have called it, if silliness had not seemed unlikely in him. She had never met a man like him before. She ran her fingers through her golden- brown hair nervously, caught at a flying bit of old ribbon at her waist, and said in French:

"He is honest altogether, sir. He did not steal, and he was not there when it happened."

"I know that, my girl. That is why I did it."

She looked at him keenly. Her eyes ran up and down his figure, then met his curiously. Their looks swam for a moment. Something thrilled in them both. The girl took a step nearer.

"You are as much a Romany here as I am," she said, touching her bosom with a quick gesture. "You do not belong; you are too good for it. How do I know? I do not know; I feel. I will tell your fortune," she suddenly added, reaching for his hand. "I have only known three that I could do it with honestly and truly, and you are one. It is no lie. There is something in it. My mother had it; but it's all sham mostly." Then, under a tree on the green, he indifferent to village gossip, she took his hand and told him--not of his fortune alone. In half-coherent fashion she told him of the past--of his life in the North. She then spoke of his future. She told him of a woman, of another, and another still; of an accident at sea, and of a quarrel; then, with a low, wild laugh, she stopped, let go his hand, and would say no more. But her face was all flushed, and her eyes like burning beads. Her father stood near, listening. Now he took her by the arm.

"Here, Andree, that's enough," he said, with rough kindness; "it's no good for you or him."

He turned to Gaston, and said in English:

"She's sing'lar, like her mother afore her. But she's straight."

Gaston lit a cigar.

"Of course." He looked kindly at the girl. "You are a weird sort, Andree, and perhaps you are right that I'm a Romany too; but I don't know where it begins and where it ends. You are not English gipsies?!" he added, to the father.

"I lived in England when I was young. Her mother was a Breton--not a Romany. We're on the way to France now. She wants to see where her mother was born. She's got the Breton lingo, and she knows some English; but she speaks French mostly."

"Well, well," rejoined Gaston, "take care of yourself, and good luck to you. Good-bye--good-bye, Andree." He put his hand in his pocket to give her some money, but changed his mind. Her eye stopped him. He shook hands with the man, then turned to her again. Her eyes were on him--hot, shining. He felt his blood throb, but he returned the look with good- natured nonchalance, shook her hand, raised his hat, and walked away, thinking what a fine, handsome creature she was. Presently he said: "Poor girl, she'll look at some fellow like that one day, with tragedy the end thereof!"

He then fell to wondering about her almost uncanny divination. He knew that all his life he himself had had strange memories, as well as certain peculiar powers which had put the honest phenomena and the trickery of the Medicine Men in the shade. He had influenced people by the sheer force of presence. As he walked on, he came to a group of trees in the middle of the common. He paused for a moment, and looked back. The gipsy's van was moving away, and in the doorway stood the girl, her hand over her eyes, looking towards him. He could see the raw colour of her scarf. "She'll make wild trouble," he said to himself.

As Gaston thought of this event, he moved his horse slowly towards a combe, and looked out over a noble expanse--valley, field, stream, and church-spire. As he gazed, he saw seated at some distance a girl reading. Not far from her were two boys climbing up and down the combe. He watched them. Presently he saw one boy creep along a shelf of rock where the combe broke into a quarry, let himself drop upon another shelf below, and then perch upon an overhanging ledge. He presently saw that the lad was now afraid to return. He heard the other lad cry out, saw the girl start up, and run forward, look over the edge of the combe, and then make as if to go down. He set his horse to the gallop, and called out. The girl saw him, and paused. In two minutes he was off his horse and beside her.

It was Alice Wingfield. She had brought out three boys, who had come with her from London, where she had spent most of the year nursing their sick mother, her relative.

"I'll have him up in a minute," he said, as he led Saracen to a sapling near. "Don't go near the horse."

He swung himself down from ledge to ledge, and soon was beside the boy. In another moment he had the youngster on his back, came slowly up, and the adventurer was safe.

"Silly Walter," the girl said, "to frighten yourself and give Mr. Belward trouble."

"I didn't think I'd be afraid," protested the lad; "but when I looked over the ledge my head went round, and I felt sick--like with the channel."

Gaston had seen Alice Wingfield several times at church and in the village, and once when, with Lady Belward, he had returned the archdeacon's call; but she had been away most of the time since his arrival. She had impressed him as a gentle, wise, elderly little creature, who appeared to live for others, and chiefly for her grandfather. She was not unusually pretty, nor yet young,--quite as old as himself,--and yet he wondered what it was that made her so interesting. He decided that it was the honesty of her nature, her beautiful thoroughness; and then he thought little more about her. But now he dropped into quiet, natural talk with her, as if they had known each other for years. But most women found that they dropped quickly into easy talk with him. That was because he had not learned the small gossip which varies little with a thousand people in the same circumstances. But he had a naive fresh sense, everything interested him, and he said what he thought with taste and tact, sometimes with wit, and always in that cheerful contemplative mood which influences women. Some of his sayings were so startling and heretical that they had gone the rounds, and certain crisp words out of the argot of the North were used by women who wished to be chic and amusing.

Not quite certain why he stayed, but talking on reflectively, Gaston at last said:

"You will be coming to us to-night, of course? We are having a barbecue of some kind."

"Yes, I hope so; though my grandfather does not much care to have me go."

"I suppose it is dull for him."

"I am not sure it is that."

"No? What then?"

She shook her head.

"The affair is in your honour, Mr. Belward, isn't it?

"Does that answer my question?!" he asked genially.

She blushed.

"No, no, no! That is not what I meant."

"I was unfair. Yes, I believe the matter does take that colour; though why, I don't know."

She looked at him with simple earnestness.

"You ought to be proud of it; and you ought to be glad of such a high position where you can do so much good, if you will."

He smiled, and ran his hand down his horse's leg musingly before he replied:

"I've not thought much of doing good, I tell you frankly. I wasn't brought up to think about it; I don't know that I ever did any good in my life. I supposed it was only missionaries and women who did that sort of thing."

"But you wrong yourself. You have done good in this village. Why, we all have talked of it; and though it wasn't done in the usual way--rather irregularly--still it was doing good."

He looked down at her astonished.

"Well, here's a pretty libel! Doing good 'irregularly'? Why, where have I done good at all?"

She ran over the names of several sick people in the village whose bills he had paid, the personal help and interest he had given to many, and, last of all, she mentioned the case of the village postmaster.

Since Gaston had come, postmasters had been changed. The little pale- faced man who had first held the position disappeared one night, and in another twenty-four hours a new one was in his place. Many stories had gone about. It was rumoured that the little man was short in his accounts, and had been got out of the way by Gaston Belward. Archdeacon Varcoe knew the truth, and had said that Gaston's sin was not unpardonable, in spite of a few squires and their dames who declared it was shocking that a man should have such loose ideas, that no good could come to the county from it, and that he would put nonsense into the heads of the common people. Alice Wingfield was now to hear Gaston's view of the matter.

"So that's it, eh? Live and let live is doing good? In that case it is easy to be a saint. What else could a man do? You say that I am generous--How? What have I spent out of my income on these little things? My income--how did I get it? I didn't earn it; neither did my father. Not a stroke have I done for it. I sit high and dry there in the Court, they sit low there in the village; and you know how they live. Well, I give away a little money which these people and their fathers earned for my father and me; and for that you say I am doing good, and some other people say I am doing harm--'dangerous charity,' and all that! I say that the little I have done is what is always done where man is most primitive, by people who never heard 'doing good' preached."

"We must have names for things, you know," she said.

"I suppose so, where morality and humanity have to be taught as Christian duty, and not as common manhood."

"Tell me," she presently said, "about Sproule, the postmaster."

"Oh, that? Well, I will. The first time I entered the post-office I saw there was something on the man's mind. A youth of twenty-three oughtn't to look as he did--married only a year or two also, with a pretty wife and child. I used to talk to them a good deal, and one day I said to him: 'You look seedy; what's the matter?' He flushed, and got nervous. I made up my mind it was money. If I had been here longer, I should have taken him aside and talked to him like a father. As it was, things slid along. I was up in town, and here and there. One evening as I came back from town I saw a nasty-looking Jew arrive. The little postmaster met him, and they went away together. He was in the scoundrel's hands; had been betting, and had borrowed first from the Jew, then from the Government. The next evening I was just starting down to have a talk with him, when an official came to my grandfather to swear out a warrant. I lost no time; got my horse and trap, went down to the office, gave the boy three minutes to tell me the truth, and then I sent him away. I fixed it up with the authorities, and the wife and child follow the youth to America next week. That's all."

"He deserved to get free, then?"

"He deserved to be punished, but not as he would have been. There wasn't really a vicious spot in the man. And the wife and child--what was a little justice to the possible happiness of those three? Discretion is a part of justice, and I used it, as it is used every day in business and judicial life, only we don't see it. When it gets public, why, some one gets blamed. In this case I was the target; but I don't mind in the least--not in the least. . . . Do you think me very startling or lawless?"

"Never lawless; but one could not be quite sure what you would do in any particular case." She looked up at him admiringly.

They had not noticed the approach of Archdeacon Varcoe till he was very near them. His face was troubled. He had seen how earnest was their conversation, and for some reason it made him uneasy. The girl saw him first, and ran to meet him. He saw her bright delighted look, and he sighed involuntarily. "Something has worried you," she said caressingly. Then she told him of the accident, and they all turned and went back towards the Court, Gaston walking his horse. Near the church they met Sir William and Lady Belward. There were salutations, and presently Gaston slowly followed his grandfather and grandmother into the courtyard.

Sir William, looking back, said to his wife: "Do you think that Gaston should be told?"

"No, no, there is no danger. Gaston, my dear, shall marry Delia Gasgoyne."

"Shall marry? wherefore 'shall'? Really, I do not see."

"She likes him, she is quite what we would have her, and he is interested in her. My dear, I have seen--I have watched for a year."

He put his hand on hers.

"My wife, you are a goodly prophet."

When Archdeacon Varcoe entered his study on returning, he sat down in a chair, and brooded long. "She must be told," he said at last, aloud. "Yes, yes, at once. God help us both!"

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VII. WHEREIN THE SEAL OF HIS HERITAGE IS SET

"Sophie, when you talk with the man, remember that you are near fifty, and faded. Don't be sentimental." So said Mrs. Gasgoyne to Lady Dargan, as they saw Gaston coming down the ballroom with Captain Maudsley.

"Reine, you try one's patience. People would say you were not quite disinterested."

"You mean Delia! Now, listen. I haven't any wish but that Gaston Belward shall see Delia very seldom indeed. He will inherit the property no doubt, and Sir William told me that he had settled a decent fortune on him; but for Delia--no--no--no. Strange, isn't it, when Lady Harriet over there aches for him, Indian blood and all? And why? Because this is a good property, and the fellow is distinguished and romantic-looking: but he is impossible--perfectly impossible. Every line of his face says shipwreck."

"You are not usually so prophetic."

"Of course. But I am prophetic now, for Delia is more than interested, silly chuck! Did you ever read the story of the other Gaston--Sir Gaston--whom this one resembles? No? Well, you will find it thinly disguised in The Knight of Five Joys. He was killed at Naseby, my dear; killed, not by the enemy, but by a page in Rupert's cavalry. The page was a woman! It's in this one too. Indian and French blood is a sad tincture. He is not wicked at heart, not at all; but he will do mad things yet, my dear. For he'll tire of all this, and then--half-mourning for some one!"

Gaston enjoyed talking with Mrs. Gasgoyne as to no one else. Other women often flattered him, she never did. Frankly, crisply, she told him strange truths, and, without mercy, crumbled his wrong opinions. He had a sense of humour, and he enjoyed her keen chastening raillery. Besides, her talk was always an education in the fine lights and shadows of this social life. He came to her now with a smile, greeted her heartily, and then turned to Lady Dargan. Captain Maudsley carried off Mrs. Gasgoyne, and the two were left together--the second time since the evening of Gaston's arrival, so many months before. Lady Dargan had been abroad, and was just returned.

They talked a little on unimportant things, and presently Lady Dargan said:

"Pardon my asking, but will you tell me why you wore a red ribbon in your button-hole the first night you came?"

He smiled, and then looked at her a little curiously. "My luggage had not come, and I wore an old suit of my father's."

Lady Dargan sighed deeply.

"The last night he was in England he wore that coat at dinner," she murmured.

"Pardon me, Lady Dargan--you put that ribbon there?"

"Yes."

Her eyes were on him with a candid interest and regard.

"I suppose," he went on, "that his going was abrupt to you?"

"Very--very!" she answered.

She longed to ask if his father ever mentioned her name, but she dared not. Besides, as she said to herself, to what good now? But she asked him to tell her something about his father. He did so quietly, picking out main incidents, and setting them forth, as he had the ability, with quiet dramatic strength. He had just finished when Delia Gasgoyne came up with Lord Dargan.

Presently Lord Dargan asked Gaston if he would bring Lady Dargan to the other end of the room, where Miss Gasgoyne was to join her mother. As they went, Lady Dargan said a little breathlessly:

"Will you do something for me?"

"I would do much for you," was his reply, for he understood!

"If ever you need a friend, if ever you are in trouble, will you let me know? I wish to take an interest in you. Promise me."

"I cannot promise, Lady Dargan," he answered, "for such trouble as I have had before I have had to bear alone, and the habit is fixed, I fear. Still, I am grateful to you just the same, and I shall never forget it. But will you tell me why people regard me from so tragical a stand- point?"

"Do they?"

"Well, there's yourself, and there's Mrs. Gasgoyne, and there's my uncle Ian."

"Perhaps we think you may have trouble because of your uncle Ian."

Gaston shook his head enigmatically, and then said ironically:

"As they would put it in the North, Lady Dargan, he'll cut no figure in that matter. I remember for two."

"That is right--that is right. Always think that Ian Belward is bad--bad at heart. He is as fascinating as--"

"As the Snake?"

"--as the Snake, and as cruel! It is the cruelty of wicked selfishness. Somehow, I forget that I am talking to his nephew. But we all know Ian Belward--at least, all women do."

"And at least one man does," he answered gravely. The next minute Gaston walked down the room with Delia Gasgoyne on his arm. The girl delicately showed her preference, and he was aware of it. It pleased him--pleased his unconscious egoism. The early part of his life had been spent among Indian women, half-breeds, and a few dull French or English folk, whose chief charm was their interest in that wild, free life, now so distant. He had met Delia many times since his coming; and there was that in her manner--a fine high-bred quality, a sweet speaking reserve--which interested him. He saw her as the best product of this convention.

She was no mere sentimental girl, for she had known at least six seasons, and had refused at least six lovers. She had a proud mind, not wide, suited to her position. Most men had flattered her, had yielded to her; this man, either with art or instinctively, mastered her, secured her interest by his personality. Every woman worth the having, down in her heart, loves to be mastered: it gives her a sense of security, and she likes to lean; for, strong as she may be at times, she is often singularly weak. She knew that her mother deprecated "that Belward enigma," but this only sent her on the dangerous way.

To-night she questioned him about his life, and how he should spend the summer. Idling in France, he said. And she? She was not sure; but she thought that she also would be idling about France in her father's yacht. So they might happen to meet. Meanwhile? Well, meanwhile, there were people coming to stay at Peppingham, their home. August would see that over. Then freedom.

Was it freedom, to get away from all this--from England and rule and measure? No, she did not mean quite that. She loved the life with all its rules; she could not live without it. She had been brought up to expect and to do certain things. She liked her comforts, her luxuries, many pretty things about her, and days without friction. To travel? Yes, with all modern comforts, no long stages, a really good maid, and some fresh interesting books.

What kind of books? Well, Walter Pater's essays; "The Light of Asia"; a novel of that wicked man Thomas Hardy; and something light--"The Innocents Abroad"--with, possibly, a struggle through De Musset, to keep up her French.

It did not seem exciting to Gaston, but it did sound honest, and it was in the picture. He much preferred Meredith, and Swinburne, and Dumas, and Hugo; but with her he did also like the whimsical Mark Twain.

He thought of suggestions that Lady Belward had often thrown out; of those many talks with Sir William, excellent friends as they were, in which the baronet hinted at the security he would feel if there was a second family of Belwards. What if he--? He smiled strangely, and shrank.

Marriage? There was the touchstone.

After the dance, when he was taking her to her mother, he saw a pale intense face looking out to him from a row of others. He smiled, and the smile that came in return was unlike any he had ever seen Alice Wingfield wear. He was puzzled. It flashed to him strange pathos, affection, and entreaty. He took Delia Gasgoyne to her mother, talked to Lady Belward a little, and then went quietly back to where he had seen Alice. She was gone. Just then some people from town came to speak to him, and he was detained. When he was free he searched, but she was nowhere to be found. He went to Lady Belward. Yes, Miss Wingfield had gone. Lady Belward looked at Gaston anxiously, and asked him why he was curious. "Because she's a lonely-looking little maid," he said, "and I wanted to be kind to her. She didn't seem happy a while ago."

Lady Belward was reassured.

"Yes, she is a sweet creature, Gaston," she said, and added: "You are a good boy to-night, a very good host indeed. It is worth the doing," she went on, looking out on the guests proudly. "I did not think I should ever come to it again with any heart, but I do it for you gladly. Now, away to your duty," she added, tapping his breast affectionately with her fan, "and when everything is done, come and take me to my room."

Ian Belward passed Gaston as he went. He had seen the affectionate passages.

"'For a good boy!' 'God bless our Home!"' he said, ironically.

Gaston saw the mark of his hand on his uncle's chin, and he forbore ironical reply.

"The home is worth the blessing," he rejoined quietly, and passed on.

Three hours later the guests had all gone, and Lady Belward, leaning on her grandson's arm, went to her boudoir, while Ian and his father sought the library. Ian was going next morning. The conference was not likely to be cheerful.

Inside her boudoir, Lady Belward sank into a large chair, and let her head fall back and her eyes close. She motioned Gaston to a seat. Taking one near, he waited. After a time she opened her eyes and drew herself up.

"My dear," she said, "I wish to talk with you."

"I shall be very glad; but isn't it late? and aren't you tired, grandmother?"

"I shall sleep better after," she responded, gently. She then began to review the past; her own long unhappiness, Robert's silence, her uncertainty as to his fate, and the after hopelessness, made greater by Ian's conduct. In low, kind words she spoke of his coming and the renewal of her hopes, coupled with fear also that he might not fit in with his new life, and--she could say it now--do something unbearable. Well, he had done nothing unworthy of their name; had acted, on the whole, sensibly; and she had not been greatly surprised at certain little oddnesses, such as the tent in the grounds, an impossible deer-hunt, and some unusual village charities and innovations on the estate. Nor did she object to Brillon, though he had sometimes thrown servants'-hall into disorder, and had caused the stablemen and the footmen to fight. His ear-rings and hair were startling, but they were not important. Gaston had been admired by the hunting-field--of which they were glad, for it was a test of popularity. She saw that most people liked him. Lord Dunfolly and Admiral Highburn were enthusiastic. For her own part, she was proud and grateful. She could enjoy every grain of comfort he gave them; and she was thankful to make up to Robert's son what Robert himself had lost--poor boy--poor boy!

Her feelings were deep, strong, and sincere. Her grandson had come, strong, individual, considerate, and had moved the tender courses of her nature. At this moment Gaston had his first deep feeling of responsibility.

"My dear," she said at last, "people in our position have important duties. Here is a large estate. Am I not clear? You will never be quite part of this life till you bring a wife here. That will give you a sense of responsibility. You will wake up to many things then. Will you not marry? There is Delia Gasgoyne. Your grandfather and I would be so glad. She is worthy in every way, and she likes you. She is a good girl. She has never frittered her heart away; and she would make you proud of her."

She reached out an anxious hand, and touched his shoulder. His eyes were playing with the pattern of the carpet; but he slowly raised them to hers, and looked for a moment without speaking. Suddenly, in spite of himself, he laughed--laughed outright, but not loudly.

Marriage? Yes, here was the touchstone. Marry a girl whose family had been notable for hundreds of years? For the moment he did not remember his own family. This was one of the times when he was only conscious that he had savage blood, together with a strain of New World French, and that his life had mostly been a range of adventure and common toil. This new position was his right, but there were times when it seemed to him that he was an impostor; others, when he felt himself master of it all, when he even had a sense of superiority--why he could not tell; but life in this old land of tradition and history had not its due picturesqueness. With his grandmother's proposal there shot up in him the thought that for him this was absurd. He to pace the world beside this fine queenly creature--Delia Gasgoyne--carrying on the traditions of the Belwards! Was it, was it possible?

"Pardon me," he said at last gently, as he saw Lady Belward shrink and then look curiously at him, "something struck me, and I couldn't help it."

"Was what I said at all ludicrous?"

"Of course not; you said what was natural for you to say, and I thought what was natural for me to think, at first blush."

"There is something wrong," she urged fearfully. "Is there any reason why you cannot marry? Gaston,"--she trembled towards him,--"you have not deceived us--you are not married?"

"My wife is dead, as I told you," he answered gravely, musingly.

"Tell me: there is no woman who has a claim on you?"

"None that I know of--not one. My follies have not run that way."

"Thank God! Then there is no reason why you should not marry. Oh, when I look at you I am proud, I am glad that I live! You bring my youth, my son back; and I long for a time when I may clasp your child in my arms, and know that Robert's heritage will go on and on, and that there will be made up to him, somehow, all that he lost. Listen: I am an old, crippled, suffering woman; I shall soon have done with all this coming and going, and I speak to you out of the wisdom of sorrow. Had Robert married, all would have gone well. He did not: he got into trouble, then came Ian's hand in it all; and you know the end. I fear for you, I do indeed. You will have sore temptations. Marry--marry soon, and make us happy."

He was quiet enough now. He had seen the grotesque image, now he was facing the thing behind it. "Would it please you so very much?!" he said, resting a hand gently on hers.

"I wish to see a child of yours in my arms, dear."

"And the woman you have chosen is Delia Gasgoyne?"

"The choice is for you; but you seem to like each other, and we care for her."

He sat thinking for a time, then he got up, and said slowly:

"It shall be so, if Miss Gasgoyne will have me. And I hope it may turn out as you wish."

Then he stooped and kissed her on the cheek. The proud woman, who had unbent little in her lifetime, whose eyes had looked out so coldly on the world, who felt for her son Ian an almost impossible aversion, drew down his head and kissed it.

"Indian and all?!" he asked, with a quaint bitterness.

"Everything, my dear," she answered. "God bless you! Good-night."

A few moments after, Gaston went to the library. He heard the voices of Sir William and his uncle. He knocked and entered. Ian, with exaggerated courtesy, rose. Gaston, with easy coolness, begged him to sit, lit a cigar, and himself sat.

"My father has been feeding me with raw truths, Cadet," said his uncle; "and I've been eating them unseasoned. We have not been, nor are likely to be, a happy family, unless in your saturnian reign we learn to say, pax vobiscum--do you know Latin? For I'm told the money-bags and the stately pile are for you. You are to beget children before the Lord, and sit in the seat of Justice: 'tis for me to confer honour on you all by my genius!"

Gaston sat very still, and, when the speech was ended, said tentatively:

"Why rob yourself?"

"In honouring you all?"

"No, sir; in not yourself having 'a saturnian reign'."

"You are generous."

"No: I came here to ask for a home, for what was mine through my father. I ask, and want, nothing more--not even to beget children before the Lord!"

"How mellow the tongue! Well, Cadet, I am not going to quarrel. Here we are with my father. See, I am willing to be friends. But you mustn't expect that I will not chasten your proud spirit now and then. That you need it, this morning bears witness."

Sir William glanced from one to the other curiously. He was cold and calm, and looked worn. He had had a trying half-hour with his son, and it had told on him.

Gaston at once said to his grandfather: "Of this morning, sir, I will tell you. I--"

Ian interrupted him.

"No, no; that is between us. Let us not worry my father."

Sir William smiled ironically.

"Your solicitude is refreshing, Ian."

"Late fruit is the sweetest, sir."

Presently Sir William asked Gaston the result of the talk with Lady Belward. Gaston frankly said that he was ready to do as they wished. Sir William then said they had chosen this time because Ian was there, and it was better to have all open and understood.

Ian laughed.

"Taming the barbarian! How seriously you all take it. I am the jester for the King. In the days of the flood I'll bring the olive leaf. You are all in the wash of sentiment: you'll come to the wicked uncle one day for common-sense. But, never mind, Cadet; we are to be friends. Yes, really. I do not fear for my heritage, and you'll need a helping hand one of these days. Besides, you are an interesting fellow. So, if you will put up with my acid tongue, there's no reason why we shouldn't hit it off."

To Sir William's great astonishment, Ian held out his hand with a genial smile, which was tolerably honest, for his indulgent nature was as capable of great geniality as incapable of high moral conceptions. Then, he had before his eye, "Monmouth" and "The King of Ys."

Gaston took his hand, and said: "I have no wish to be an enemy."

Sir William rose, looking at them both. He could not understand Ian's attitude, and he distrusted. Yet peace was better than war. Ian's truce was also based on a belief that Gaston would make skittles of things. A little while afterwards Gaston sat in his room, turning over events in his mind. Time and again his thoughts returned to the one thing-- marriage. That marriage with his Esquimaux wife had been in one sense none at all, for the end was sure from the beginning. It was in keeping with his youth, the circumstances, the life, it had no responsibilities. But this? To become an integral part of the life--the English country gentleman; to be reduced, diluted, to the needs of the convention, and no more? Let him think of the details:--a justice of the peace: to sit on a board of directors; to be, perhaps, Master of the Hounds; to unite with the Bishop in restoring the cathedral; to make an address at the annual flower show. His wife to open bazaars, give tennis-parties, and be patron to the clergy; himself at last, no doubt, to go into Parliament; to feel the petty, or serious, responsibilities of a husband and a landlord. Monotony, extreme decorum, civility to the world; endless politeness to his wife; with boys at Eton and girls somewhere else; and the kind of man he must be to do his duty in all and to all!

It seemed impossible. He rose and paced the floor. Never till this moment had the full picture of his new life come close. He felt stifled. He put on a cap, and, descending the stairs, went out into the court-yard and walked about, the cool air refreshing him. Gradually there settled upon him a stoic acceptance of the conditions. But would it last?

He stood still and looked at the pile of buildings before him; then he turned towards the little church close by, whose spire and roof could be seen above the wall. He waved his hand, as when within it on the day of his coming, and said with irony:

"Now for the marriage-linen, Sir Gaston!"

He heard a low knocking at the gate. He listened. Yes, there was no mistake. He went to it, and asked quietly:

"Who is there?"

There was no reply. Still the knocking went on. He quietly opened the gate, and threw it back. A figure in white stepped through and slowly passed him. It was Alice Wingfield. He spoke to her. She did not answer. He went close to her and saw that she was asleep!

She was making for the entrance door. He took her hand gently, and led her into a side door, and on into the ballroom. She moved towards a window through which the moonlight streamed, and sat on a cushioned bench beneath it. It was the spot where he had seen her at the dance. She leaned forward, looking into space, as she did at him then. He moved and got in her line of vision.

The picture was weird. She wore a soft white chamber-gown, her hair hung loose on her shoulders, her pale face cowled it in. The look was inexpressibly sad. Over her fell dim, coloured lights from the stained- glass windows; and shadowy ancestors looked silently down from the armour-hung walls.

To Gaston, collected as he was, it gave an ominous feeling. Why did she come here even in her sleep? What did that look mean? He gazed intently into her eyes.

All at once her voice came low and broken, and a sob followed the words:

"Gaston, my brother, my brother!"

He stood for a moment stunned, gazing helplessly at her passive figure.

"Gaston, my brother!" he repeated to himself. Then the painful matter dawned upon him. This girl, the granddaughter of the rector of the parish, was his father's daughter--his own sister. He had a sudden spring of new affection--unfelt for those other relations, his by the rights of the law and the gospel. The pathos of the thing caught him in the throat--for her how pitiful, how unhappy! He was sure that, somehow, she had only come to know of it since the afternoon. Then there had been so different a look in her face!

One thing was clear: he had no right to this secret, and it must be for now as if it had never been. He came to her, and took her hand. She rose. He led her from the room, out into the court-yard, and from there through the gate into the road.

All was still. They passed over to the rectory. Just inside the gate, Gaston saw a figure issue from the house, and come quickly towards them. It was the rector, excited, anxious.

Gaston motioned silence, and pointed to her. Then he briefly whispered how she had come. The clergyman said that he had felt uneasy about her, had gone to her room, and was just issuing in search of her. Gaston resigned her, softly advised not waking her, and bade the clergyman good- night.

But presently he turned, touched the arm of the old man, and said meaningly:

"I know."

The rector's voice shook as he replied: "You have not spoken to her?"

"No."

"You will not speak of it?"

"No."

"Unless I should die, and she should wish it?"

"Always as she wishes."

They parted, and Gaston returned to the Court.

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VIII. HE ANSWERS AN AWKWARD QUESTION

The next morning Brillon brought a note from Ian Belward, which said that he was starting, and asked Gaston to be sure and come to Paris. The note was carelessly friendly. After reading it, he lay thinking. Presently he chanced to see Jacques look intently at him.

"Well, Brillon, what is it?!" he asked genially. Jacques had come on better than Gaston had hoped for, but the light play of his nature was gone--he was grave, almost melancholy; and, in his way, as notable as his master. Their life in London had changed him much. A valet in St. James's Street was not a hunting comrade on the Coppermine River. Often when Jacques was left alone he stood at the window looking out on the gay traffic, scarcely stirring; his eyes slow, brooding. Occasionally, standing so, he would make the sacred gesture. One who heard him swear now and then, in a calm, deliberate way,--at the cook and the porter,-- would have thought the matters in strange contrast. But his religion was a central habit, followed as mechanically as his appetite or the folding of his master's clothes. Besides, like most woodsmen, he was superstitious. Gaston was kind with him, keeping, however, a firm hand till his manner had become informed by the new duties. Jacques's greatest pleasure was his early morning visits to the stables. Here were Saracen and Jim the broncho-sleek, savage, playful. But he touched the highest point of his London experience when they rode in the Park.

In this Gaston remained singular. He rode always with Jacques. Perhaps he wished to preserve one possible relic of the old life, perhaps he liked this touch of drama; or both. It created notice, criticism, but he was superior to that. Time and again people asked him to ride, but he always pleaded another engagement. He would then be seen with Jacques plus Jacques's earrings and the wonderful hair, riding grandly in the Row. Jacques's eyes sparkled and a snatch of song came to his lips at these times.

No figures in the Park were so striking. There was nothing bizarre, but Gaston had a distinguished look, and women who had felt his hand at their waists in the dance the night before, now knew him, somehow, at a grave distance. Though Gaston did not say it to himself, these were the hours when he really was with the old life--lived it again--prairie, savannah, ice-plain, alkali desert. When, dismounting, the horses were taken and they went up the stairs, Gaston would softly lay his whip across Jacques's shoulders without speaking. This was their only ritual of camaraderie, and neglect of it would have fretted the half-breed. Never had man such a servant. No matter at what hour Gaston returned, he found Jacques waiting; and when he woke he found him ready, as now, on this morning, after a strange night.

"What is it, Jacques?!" he repeated.

The old name! Jacques shivered a little with pleasure. Presently he broke out with:

"Monsieur, when do we go back?"

"Go back where?"

"To the North, monsieur."

"What's in your noddle now, Brillon?"

The impatient return to "Brillon" cut Jacques like a whip.

"Monsieur," he suddenly said, his face glowing, his hands opening nervously, "we have eat, we have drunk, we have had the dance and the great music here: is it enough? Sometimes as you sleep you call out, and you toss to the strokes of the tower-clock. When we lie on the Plains of Yath from sunset to sunrise, you never stir then. You remember when we sleep on the ledge of the Voshti mountain--so narrow that we were tied together? Well, we were as babes in blankets. In the Prairie of the Ten Stars your fingers were on the trigger firm as a bolt; here I have watch them shake with the coffee-cup. Monsieur, you have seen: is it enough? You have lived here: is it like the old lodge and the long trail?"

Gaston sat up in bed, looked in the mirror opposite, ran his fingers through his hair, regarded his hands, turning them over, and then, with sharp impatience, said:

"Go to hell!"

The little man's face flushed to his hair; he sucked in the air with a gasp. Without a word, he went to the dressing-table, poured out the shaving-water, threw a towel over his arm, and turned to come to the bed; but, all at once, he sidled back, put down the water, and furtively drew a sleeve across his eyes.

Gaston saw, and something suddenly burned in him. He dropped his eyes, slid out of bed, into his dressing-gown, and sat down.

Jacques made ready. He was not prepared to have Gaston catch him by the shoulders with a nervous grip, search his eyes, and say:

"You damned little fool, I'm not worth it!" Jacques's face shone.

"Every great man has his fool--alors!" was the happy reply.

"Jacques," Gaston presently said, "what's on your mind?"

"I saw--last night, monsieur," he said.

"You saw what?"

"I saw you in the court-yard with the lady." Gaston was now very grave.

"Did you recognise her?"

"No: she moved all as a spirit."

"Jacques, that matter is between you and me. I'm going to tell you, though, two things; and--where's your string of beads?"

Jacques drew out his rosary.

"That's all right. Mum as Manitou! She was asleep; she is my sister. And that is all, till there's need for you to know more."

In this new confidence Jacques was content. The life was a gilded mess, but he could endure it now. Three days passed. During that time Gaston was up to town twice; lunched at Lady Dargan's, and dined at Lord Dunfolly's. For his grandfather, who was indisposed, he was induced to preside at a political meeting in the interest of a wealthy local brewer, who confidently expected the seat, and, through gifts to the party, a knighthood. Before the meeting, in the gush of--as he put it "kindred aims," he laid a finger familiarly in Gaston's button-hole. Jacques, who was present, smiled, for he knew every change in his master's face, and he saw a glitter in his eye. He remembered when they two were in trouble with a gang of river-drivers, and one did this same thing rudely: how Gaston looked down, and said, with a devilish softness: "Take it away." And immediately after the man did so.

Mr. Sylvester Gregory Babbs, in a similar position, heard a voice say down at him, with a curious obliqueness:

"If you please!"

The keenest edge of it was lost on the flaring brewer, but his fingers dropped, and he twisted his heavy watchchain uneasily. The meeting began. Gaston in a few formal words, unconventional in idea, introduced Mr. Babbs as "a gentleman whose name was a household word in the county, who would carry into Parliament the civic responsibility shown in his private life, who would render his party a support likely to fulfil its purpose."

When he sat down, Captain Maudsley said: "That's a trifle vague, Belward."

"How can one treat him with importance?"

"He's the sort that makes a noise one way or another."

"Yes. Obituary: 'At his residence in Babbslow Square, yesterday, Sir S. G. Babbs, M. P., member of the London County Council. Sir S. G. Babbs, it will be remembered, gave L100,000 to build a home for the propagation of Vice, and--'"

"That's droll!"

"Why not Vice? 'Twould be just the same in his mind. He doesn't give from a sense of moral duty. Not he; he's a bungowawen!"

"What is that?"

"That's Indian. You buy a lot of Indian or halfbreed loafers with beaver-skins and rum, go to the Mount of the Burning Arrows, and these fellows dance round you and call you one of the lost race, the Mighty Men of the Kimash Hills. And they'll do that while the rum lasts. Meanwhile you get to think yourself a devil of a swell--you and the gods! . . . And now we had better listen to this bungowawen, hadn't we?"

The room was full, and on the platform were gentlemen come to support Sir William Belward. They were interested to see how Gaston would carry it off.

Mr. Babbs's speech was like a thousand others by the same kind of man. More speeches--some opposing--followed, and at last came the chairman to close the meeting. He addressed himself chiefly to a bunch of farmers, artisans, and labouring-men near. After some good-natured raillery at political meetings in general, the bigotry of party, the difficulty in getting the wheat from the chaff, and some incisive thrusts at those who promised the moon and gave a green cheese, who spent their time in berating their opponents, he said:

"There's a game that sailors play on board ship--men-o'-war and sailing- ships mostly. I never could quite understand it, nor could any officers ever tell me--the fo'castle for the men and the quarter-deck for the officers, and what's English to one is Greek to the other. Well, this was all I could see in the game. They sat about, sometimes talking, sometimes not. All at once a chap would rise and say, 'Allow me to speak, me noble lord,' and follow this by hitting some one of the party wherever the blow got in easiest--on the head, anywhere! [Laughter.] Then he would sit down seriously, and someone else spoke to his noble lordship. Nobody got angry at the knocks, and Heaven only knows what it was all about. That is much the way with politics, when it is played fair. But here is what I want particularly to say: We are not all born the same, nor can we live the same. One man is born a brute, and another a good sort; one a liar, and one an honest man; one has brains, and the other hasn't. Now, I've lived where, as they say, one man is as good as another. But he isn't, there or here. A weak man can't run with a strong. We have heard to-night a lot of talk for something and against something. It is over. Are you sure you have got what was meant clear in your mind? [Laughter, and 'Blowed if we'ave!'] Very well; do not worry about that. We have been playing a game of 'Allow me to speak, me noble lord!' And who is going to help you to get the most out of your country and your life isn't easy to know. But we can get hold of a few clear ideas, and measure things against them. I know and have talked with a good many of you here ['That's so! That's so!'], and you know my ideas pretty well--that they are honest at least, and that I have seen the countries where freedom is 'on the job,' as they say. Now, don't put your faith in men and in a party that cry, 'We will make all things new,' to the tune of, 'We are a band of brothers.' Trust in one that says, 'You cannot undo the centuries. Take off the roof, remove a wall, let in the air, throw out a wing, but leave the old foundations.' And that is the real difference between the other party and mine; and these political games of ours come to that chiefly."

Presently he called for the hands of the meeting. They were given for Mr. Babbs.

Suddenly a man's strong, arid voice came from the crowd:

"'Allow me to speak, me noble lord!' [Great laughter. Then a pause.] Where's my old chum, Jock Lawson?"

The audience stilled. Gaston's face went grave. He replied, in a firm, clear voice.

"In Heaven, my man. You'll never see him more." There was silence for a moment, a murmur, then a faint burst of applause. Presently John Cawley, the landlord of "The Whisk o' Barley," made towards Gaston. Gaston greeted him, and inquired after his wife. He was told that she was very ill, and had sent her husband to beg Gaston to come. Gaston had dreaded this hour, though he knew it would come one day. A woman on a death-bed has a right to ask for and get the truth. He had forborne telling her of her son; and she, whenever she had seen him, had contented herself with asking general questions, dreading in her heart that Jock had died a dreadful or shameful death, or else this gentleman would, voluntarily, say more. But, herself on her way out of the world, as she feared, wished the truth, whatever it might be.

Gaston told Cawley that he would drive over at once, and then asked who it was had called out at him. A drunken, poaching fellow, he was told, who in all the years since Jock had gone, had never passed the inn without stopping to say: "Where's my old chum, Jock Lawson?" In the past he and Jock had been in more than one scrape together. He had learned from Mrs. Cawley that Gaston had known Jock in Canada.

When Cawley had gone, Gaston turned to the other gentlemen present.

"An original speech, upon my word, Belward," said Captain Maudsley.

Mr. Warren Gasgoyne came.

"You are expected to lunch or something to-morrow, Belward, you remember? Devil of a speech that! But, if you will 'allow me to speak, me noble lord,' you are the rankest Conservative of us all."

"Don't you know that the easiest constitutional step is from a republic to an autocracy, and vice versa?"

"I don't know it, and I don't know how you do it."

"Do what?"

"Make them think as you do."

He waved his hand to the departing crowd.

"I don't. I try to think as they do. I am always in touch with the primitive mind."

"You ought to do great things here, Belward," said the other seriously. "You have the trick; and we need wisdom at Westminster."

"Don't be mistaken; I am only adaptable. There's frank confession."

At this point Mr. Babbs came up and said good-night in a large, self- conscious way. Gaston hoped that his campaign would not be wasted, and the fluffy gentleman retired. When he got out of earshot in the shadows, he turned and shook his fist towards Gaston, saying: "Half-breed upstart!" Then he refreshed his spirits by swearing at his coachman.

Gaston and Jacques drove quickly over to "The Whisk o' Barley." Gaston was now intent to tell the whole truth. He wished that he had done it before; but his motives had been good--it was not to save himself. Yet he shrank. Presently he thought:

"What is the matter with me? Before I came here, if I had an idea I stuck to it, and didn't have any nonsense when I knew I was right. I am getting sensitive--the thing I find everywhere in this country: fear of feeling or giving pain; as though the bad tooth out isn't better than the bad tooth in. When I really get sentimental I'll fold my Arab tent--so help me, ye seventy Gods of Yath!"

A little while after he was at Mrs. Cawley's bed, the landlord handing him a glass of hot grog, Jock's mother eyeing him feverishly from the quilt. Gaston quietly felt her wrist, counting the pulse-beats; then told Cawley to wet a cloth and hand it to him. He put it gently on the woman's head. The eyes of the woman followed him anxiously. He sat down again, and in response to her questioning gaze, began the story of Jock's life as he knew it.

Cawley stood leaning on the foot-board; the woman's face was cowled in the quilt with hungry eyes; and Gaston's voice went on in a low monotone, to the ticking of the great clock in the next room. Gaston watched her face, and there came to him like an inspiration little things Jock did, which would mean more to his mother than large adventures. Her lips moved now and again, even a smile flickered. At last Gaston came to his father's own death and the years that followed; then the events in Labrador.

He approached this with unusual delicacy: it needed bravery to look into the mother's eyes, and tell the story. He did not know how dramatically he told it--how he etched it without a waste word. When he came to that scene in the Fort, the three men sitting, targets for his bullets,--he softened the details greatly. He did not tell it as he told it at the Court, but the simpler, sparser language made it tragically clear. There was no sound from the bed, none from the foot-board, but he heard a door open and shut without, and footsteps somewhere near.

How he put the body in the tree, and prayed over it and left it there, was all told; and then he paused. He turned a little sick as he saw the white face before him. She drew herself up, her fingers caught away the night-dress at her throat; she stared hard at him for a moment, and then, with a wild, moaning voice, cried out:

"You killed my boy! You killed my boy! You killed my boy!"

Gaston was about to take her hand, when he heard a shuffle and a rush behind him. He rose, turned swiftly, saw a bottle swinging, threw up his hand . . . and fell backwards against the bed.

The woman caught his bleeding head to her breast and hugged it.

"My Jock, my poor boy!" she cried in delirium now. Cawley had thrown his arms about the struggling, drunken assailant--Jock's poaching friend.

The mother now called out to the pinioned man, as she had done to Gaston:

"You have killed my boy!" She kissed Gaston's bloody face.

A messenger was soon on the way to Ridley Court, and in a little upper room Jacques was caring for his master.

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IX. HE FINDS NEW SPONSORS

Gaston lay for many days at "The Whisk o' Barley." During that time the inn was not open to customers. The woman also for two days hung at the point of death, and then rallied. She remembered the events of the painful night, and often asked after Gaston. Somehow, her horror of her son's death at his hands was met by the injury done him now. She vaguely felt that there had been justice and punishment. She knew that in the room at Labrador Gaston Belward had been scarcely less mad than her son.

Gaston, as soon as he became conscious, said that his assailant must be got out of the way of the police, and to that end bade Jacques send for Mr. Warren Gasgoyne. Mr. Gasgoyne and Sir William arrived at the same time, but Gaston was unconscious again. Jacques, however, told them what his master's wishes were, and they were carried out; Jock's friend secretly left England forever. Sir William and Mr. Gasgoyne got the whole tale from the landlord, whom they asked to say nothing publicly.

Lady Belward drove down each day, and sat beside him for a couple of hours-silent, solicitous, smoothing his pillow or his wasting hand. The brain had been injured, and recovery could not be immediate. Hovey the housekeeper had so begged to be installed as nurse, that her wish was granted, and she was with him night and day. Now she shook her head at him sadly, now talked in broken sentences to herself, now bustled about silently, a tyrant to the other servants sent down from the Court. Every day also the headgroom and the huntsman came, and in the village Gaston's humble friends discussed the mystery, stoutly defending him when some one said it was "more nor gabble, that theer saying o' the poacher at the meetin.'"

But the landlord and his wife kept silence, the officers of the law took no action, and the town and country newspapers could do no more than speak of "A vicious assault upon the heir of Ridley Court." It had become the custom now to leave Ian out of that question. But the wonder died as all wonders do, and Gaston made his fight for health.

The day before he was removed to the Court, Mrs. Cawley was helped up- stairs to see him. She was gaunt and hollow-eyed. Lady Belward and Mrs. Gasgoyne were present. The woman made her respects, and then stood at Gaston's bedside. He looked up with a painful smile.

"Do you forgive me?!" he asked. "I've almost paid!"

He touched his bandaged head.

"It ain't for mothers to forgi'e the thing," she replied, in a steady voice, "but I can forgi'e the man. 'Twere done i' madness--there beant the will workin' i' such. 'Twere a comfort that he'd a prayin' over un."

Gaston took the gnarled fingers in his. It had never struck him how dreadful a thing it was--so used had he been to death in many forms--till he had told the story to this mother.

"Mrs. Cawley," he said, "I can't make up to you what Jock would have been; but I can do for you in one way as much as Jock. This house is yours from to-day."

He drew a deed from the coverlet, and handed it to her. He had got it from Sir William that morning. The poor and the crude in mind can only understand an objective emotion, and the counters for these are this world's goods. Here was a balm in Gilead. The love of her child was real, but the consolation was so practical to Mrs. Cawley that the lips which might have cursed, said:

"Ah, sir, the wind do be fittin' the shore lamb! I' the last Judgen, I'll no speak agen 'ee. I be sore fretted harm come to 'ee."

At this Mrs. Gasgoyne rose, and in her bustling way dismissed the grateful peasant, who fondled the deed and called eagerly down the stairs to her husband as she went.

Mrs. Gasgoyne then came back, sat down, and said: "Now you needn't fret about that any longer--barbarian!" she added, shaking a finger. "Didn't I say that you would get into trouble? that you would set the country talking? Here you were, in the dead of night, telling ghost stories, and raking up your sins, with no cause whatever, instead of in your bed. You were to have lunched with us the next day--I had asked Lady Harriet to meet you, too!--and you didn't; and you have wretched patches where your hair ought to be. How can you promise that you'll not make a madder sensation some day?"

Gaston smiled up at her. Her fresh honesty, under the guise of banter, was always grateful to him. He shook his head, smiled, and said nothing.

She went on.

"I want a promise that you will do what your godfather and godmother will swear for you."

She acted on him like wine.

"Of course, anything. Who are my godfather and godmother?"

She looked him steadily, warmly in the eyes: "Warren and myself."

Now he understood: his promise to his grandmother and grandfather. So, they had spoken! He was sure that Mrs. Gasgoyne had objected. He knew that behind her playful treatment of the subject there was real scepticism of himself. It put him on his mettle, and yet he knew she read him deeper than any one else, and flattered him least.

He put out his hand, and took hers.

"You take large responsibilities," he said, "but I will try and justify you--honestly, yes."

In her hearty way, she kissed him on the cheek. "There," she responded, "if you and Delia do make up your minds, see that you treat her well. And you are to come, just as soon as you are able, to stay at Peppingham. Delia, silly child, is anxious, and can't see why she mustn't call with me now."

In his room at the Court that night, Gaston inquired of Jacques about Alice Wingfield, and was told that on the day of the accident she had left with her grandfather for the Continent. He was not sorry. For his own sake he could have wished an understanding between them. But now he was on the way to marriage, and it was as well that there should be no new situations. The girl could not wish the thing known. There would be left him, in this case, to befriend her should it ever be needed. He remembered the spring of pleasure he felt when he first saw other faces like his father's--his grandfather's, his grandmother's. But this girl's was so different to him; having the tragedy of the lawless, that unconscious suffering stamped by the mother upon the child. There was, however, nothing to be done. He must wait.

Two days later Lady Dargan called to inquire after him. He was lying in his study with a book, and Lady Belward sent to ask him if he would care to see her and Lord Dargan's nephew, Cluny Vosse. Lady Belward did not come; Sir William brought them. Lady Dargan came softly to him, smiled more with her eyes than her lips, and told him how sorry she had been to hear of his illness. Some months before Gaston had met Cluny Vosse, who at once was his admirer. Gaston liked the youth. He was fresh, high- minded, extravagant, idle; but he had no vices, and no particular vanity save for his personal appearance. His face was ever radiant with health, shining with satisfaction. People liked him, and did not discount it by saying that he had nothing in him. Gaston liked him most because he was so wholly himself, without guile, beautifully honest.

Now Cluny sat down, tapped the crown of his hat, looked at him cheerily, and said:

"Got in a cracker, didn't he?"

Gaston nodded, amused.

"The fellows at Brooke's had a talkee-talkee, and they'd twenty different stories. Of course it was rot. We were all cut up though and hoped you'd pull through. Of course there couldn't be any doubt of that-- you've been through too many, eh?"

Cluny always assumed that Gaston had had numberless tragical adventures which, if told, must make Dumas turn in his grave with envy.

Gaston smiled, and laid a hand upon the other's knee. "I'm not shell- proof, Vosse, and it was rather a narrow squeak, I'm told. But I'm kept, you see, for a worse fate and a sadder."

"I say, Belward, you don't mean that! Your eyes go so queer sometimes, that a chap doesn't know what to think. You ought to live to a hundred. You'll have to. You've got it all--"

"Oh no, my boy, I haven't got anything." He waved his hand pleasantly towards his grandfather. "I'm on the knees of the gods merely."

Cluny turned on Sir William.

"It isn't any secret, is it, sir? He gets the lot, doesn't he?"

Sir William's occasional smile came.

"I fancy there's some condition about the plate, the pictures, and the title; but I do not suppose that matters meanwhile."

He spoke half-musingly and with a little unconscious irony, and the boy, vaguely knowing that there was a cross-current somewhere, drifted.

"No, of course not; he can have fun enough without them, can't he?"

Lady Dargan here soothingly broke in, inquiring about Gaston's illness, and showing a tactful concern. But the nephew persisted:

"I say, Belward, Aunt Sophie was cut up no end when she heard of it. She wouldn't go out to dinner that night at Lord Dunfolly's, and, of course, I didn't go. And I wanted to; for Delia Gasgoyne was to be there, and she's ripping."

Lady Dargan, in spite of herself, blushed, but without confusion, and Gaston adroitly led the conversation otherwhere. Presently she said that they were to be at their villa in France during the late summer, and if he chanced to be abroad would he come? He said that he intended to visit his uncle in Paris, but that afterwards he would be glad to visit them for a short time.

She looked astonished. "With your uncle Ian!"

"Yes. He is to show me art-life, and all that."

She looked troubled. He saw that she wished to say something.

"Yes, Lady Dargan?!" he asked.

She spoke with fluttering seriousness.

"I asked you once to come to me if you ever needed a friend. I do not wait for that. I ask you not to go to your uncle."

"Why?"

He was thinking that, despite social artifice and worldliness, she was sentimental.

"Because there will be trouble. I can see it. You may trust a woman's instinct; and I know that man!" He did not reply at once, but presently said:

"I fancy I must keep my promise."

"What is the book you are reading?!" she said, changing the subject, for Sir William was listening.

He opened it, and smiled musingly.

"It is called Affairs of Some Consequence in the Reign of Charles I. In reading it I seemed to feel that it was incorrect, and my mind kept wandering away into patches of things--incidents, scenes, bits of talk --as I fancied they really were, not apocryphal or 'edited' as here."

"I say," said Cluny, "that's rum, isn't it?"

"For instance," Gaston continued, "this tale of King Charles and Buckingham." He read it. "Now here is the scene as I picture it." In quick elliptical phrases he gave the tale from a different stand-point.

Sir William stared curiously at Gaston, then felt for some keys in his pocket. He got up and rang the bell. Gaston was still talking. He gave the keys to Falby with a whispered word. In a few moments Falby placed a small leather box beside Sir William, and retired at a nod. Sir William presently said: "Where did you read those things?"

"I do not know that I ever read them."

"Did your father tell you them?"

"I do not remember so, though he may have."

"Did you ever see this box?"

"Never before."

"You do not know what is in it?"

"Not in the least."

"And you have never seen this key?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"It is very strange." He opened the box. "Now, here are private papers of Sir Gaston Belward, more than two hundred years old, found almost fifty years ago by myself in the office of our family solicitor. Listen."

He then began to read from the faded manuscript. A mysterious feeling pervaded the room. Once or twice Cluny gave a dry nervous kind of laugh. Much of what Gaston had said was here in stately old-fashioned language. At a certain point the MS. ran:

"I drew back and said, 'As your grace will have it, then--"'

Here Gaston came to a sitting posture, and interrupted.

"Wait, wait!"

He rose, caught one of two swords that were crossed on the wall, and stood out.

"This is how it was. 'As your grace will have it, then, to no waste of time!' We fell to. First he came carefully and made strange feints, learned at King Louis's Court, to try my temper. But I had had these tricks of my cousin Secord, and I returned his sport upon him. Then he came swiftly, and forced me back upon the garden wall. I gave to him foot by foot, for he was uncommon swift and dexterous. He pinched me sorely once under the knee, and I returned him one upon the wrist, which sent a devilish fire into his eyes. At that his play became so delicate and confusing that I felt I should go dizzy if it stayed; so I tried the one great trick cousin Secord taught me, making to run him through, as a last effort. The thing went wrong, but checking off my blunder he blundered too,--out of sheer wonder, perhaps, at my bungling,--and I disarmed him. So droll was it that I laughed outright, and he, as quick in humour as in temper, stood hand on hip, and presently came to a smile. With that my cousin Secord cried: 'The king! the king!' I got me up quickly--"

Here Gaston, who had in a kind of dream acted the whole scene, swayed with faintness, and Cluny caught him, saving him from a fall. Cluny's colour was all gone. Lady Dargan had sat dazed, and Sir William's face was anxious, puzzled.

A few hours later Sir William was alone with Gaston, who was recovered and cool.

"Gaston," he said, "I really do not understand this faculty of memory, or whatever it is. Have you any idea how you come by it?"

"Have we any idea how life comes and goes, sir?"

"I confess not. I confess not, really."

"Well, I'm in the dark about it too; but I sometimes fancy that I'm mixed up with that other Gaston."

"It sounds fantastic."

"It is fantastic. Now, here is this manuscript, and here is a letter I wrote this morning. Put them together."

Sir William did so.

"The handwriting is singularly like."

"Well," continued Gaston, smiling whimsically, "suppose that I am Sir Gaston Belward, Baronet, who is thought to lie in the church yonder, the title is mine, isn't it?"

Sir William smiled also.

"The evidence is scarce enough to establish succession."

"But there would be no succession. A previous holder of the title isn't dead: ergo, the present holder, has no right."

Gaston had shaded his eyes with his hand, and he was watching Sir William's face closely, out of curiosity chiefly. Sir William regarded the thing with hesitating humour.

"Well, well, suppose so. The property was in the hands of a younger branch of the family then. There was no entail, as now."

"Wasn't there?!" said Gaston enigmatically.

He was thinking of some phrases in a manuscript which he had found in this box.

"Perhaps where these papers came from there are others," he added.

Sir William lifted his eyebrows ironically. "I hardly think so."

Gaston laughed, not wishing him to take the thing at all seriously. He continued airily:

"It would be amusing if the property went with the title after all, wouldn't it, sir?"

Sir William got to his feet and said testily: "That should never be while I lived!"

"Of course not, sir."

Sir William saw the bull, and laughed, heartily for him.

They bade each other good-night.

"I'll have a look in the solicitor's office all the same," said Gaston to himself.

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X. HE COMES TO "THE WAKING OF THE FIRE"

A few days afterwards Gaston joined a small party at Peppingham. Without any accent life was made easy for him. He was alone much, and yet, to himself, he seemed to have enough of company.

The situation did not impose itself conspicuously. Delia gave him no especial reason to be vain. She had not an exceeding wit, but she had charm, and her talk was interesting to Gaston, who had come, for the first time, into somewhat intimate relations with an English girl. He was struck with her conventional delicacy and honour on one side, and the limitation of her ideas on the other. But with it all she had some slight touch of temperament which lifted her from the usual level. And just now her sprightliness was more marked than it had ever been.

Her great hour seemed come to her. She knew that there had been talk among the elders, and what was meant by Gaston's visit. Still, they were not much alone together. Gaston saw her mostly with others. Even a woman with a tender strain for a man knows what will serve for her ascendancy: the graciousness of her disposition, the occasional flash of her mother's temper, and her sense of being superior to a situation--the gift of every well-bred English girl.

Cluny Vosse was also at the house, and his devotion was divided between Delia and Gaston. Cluny was a great favourite, and Agatha Gasgoyne, who had a wild sense of humour, egged him on with her sister, which gave Delia enough to do. At last Cluny, in a burst of confidence, declared that he meant to propose to Delia. Agatha then became serious, and said that Delia was at least four years older than himself, that he was just her--Agatha's--age, and that the other match would be very unsuitable. This put Cluny on Delia's defence, and he praised her youth, and hinted at his own elderliness. He had lived, he had seen It (Cluny called the world and all therein "It"), he was aged; he was in the large eye of experience; he had outlived the vices and the virtues of his time, which, told in his own naive staccato phrases, made Agatha hug herself. She advised him to go and ask Mr. Belward's advice; begged him not to act until he had done so. And Cluny, who was blind as a bat when a woman mocked him, went to Gaston and said:

"See, old chap,--I know you don't mind my calling you that--I've come for advice. Agatha said I'd better. A fellow comes to a time when he says, 'Here, I want a shop of my own,' doesn't he? He's seen It, he's had It all colours, he's ready for family duties, and the rest. That's so, isn't it?"

Gaston choked back a laugh, and, purposely putting himself on the wrong scent, said:

"And does Agatha agree?"

"Agatha? Come, Belward, that youngster! Agatha's only in on a sisterly- brotherly basis. Now, see I've got a little load of L s. d., and I'm to get more, especially if Uncle Dick keeps on thinking I am artless. Well, why shouldn't I marry?"

"No reason against it, if husband and father in you yearn for bibs and petticoats."

"I say, Belward, don't laugh!"

"I never was more serious. Who is the girl?"

"She looks up to you as I do-of course that's natural; and if it comes off, no one'll have a jollier corner chez nous. It's Delia."

"Delia? Delia who?"

"Why, Delia Gasgoyne. I haven't done the thing quite regular, I know. I ought to have gone to her people first; but they know all about me, and so does Delia, and I'm on the spot, and it wouldn't look well to be taking advantage of that with her father and mother-they'd feel bound to be hospitable. So I've just gone on my own tack, and I've come to Agatha and you. Agatha said to ask you if I'd better speak to Delia now."

"My dear Cluny, are you very much in love?"

"That sounds religious, doesn't it--a kind of Nonconformist business? I think she's the very finest. A fellow'd hold himself up, 'd be a deuce of a swell--and, hang it all, I hate breakfasting alone!"

"Yes, yes, Cluny; but what about a pew in church, with regular attendance, and a justice of the peace, and little Cluny Vosses on the carpet?"

Cluny's face went crimson.

"I say, Belward, I've seen It all, of course; I know It backwards, and I'm not squeamish, but that sounds--flippant-that, with her."

Gaston reached out and caught the boy's shoulder. "Don't do it, Cluny. Spare yourself. It couldn't come off. Agatha knows that, I fancy. She is a little sportsman. I might let you go and speak; but I think my chances are better than yours, Cluny. Hadn't you better let me try first? Then, if I fail, your chances are still the same, eh?"

Cluny gasped. His warm face went pale, then shot to purple, and finally settled into a grey ruddiness. "Belward," he said at last, "I didn't know; upon my soul, I didn't know, or I'd have cut off my head first."

"My dear Cluny, you shall have your chance; but let me go first, I'm older."

"Belward, don't take me for a fool. Why, my trying what you go to do is like--is like--"

Cluny's similes failed to come.

"Like a fox and a deer on the same trail?"

"I don't understand that. Like a yeomanry steeplechase to Sandown--is that it? Belward, I'm sorry. Playing it so low on a chap you like!"

"Don't say a word, Cluny; and, believe me, you haven't yet seen all of It. There's plenty of time. When you really have had It, you will learn to say of a woman, not that she's the very finest, and that you hate breakfasting alone, but something that'll turn your hair white, or keep you looking forty when you're sixty."

That evening Gaston dressed with unusual care. When he entered the drawing-room, he looked as handsome as a man need in this world. His illness had refined his features and form, and touched off his cheerfulness with a fine melancholy. Delia glowed as she saw the admiring glances sent his way, but burned with anger when she also saw that he was to take in Lady Gravesend to dinner; for Lady Gravesend had spoken slightingly of Gaston--had, indeed, referred to his "nigger blood!" And now her mother had sent her in to dinner on his arm, she affable, too affable by a great deal. Had she heard the dry and subtle suggestion of Gaston's talk, she would, however, have justified her mother.

About half past nine Delia was in the doorway, talking to one of the guests, who, at the call of some one else, suddenly left her. She heard a voice behind her. "Will you not sing?"

She thrilled, and turned to say: "What shall I sing, Mr. Belward?"

"The song I taught you the other day--'The Waking of the Fire.'"

"But I've never sung it before anybody."

"Do I not count?--But, there, that's unfair! Believe me, you sing it very well."

She lifted her eyes to his:

"You do not pay compliments, and I believe you. Your 'very well' means much. If you say so, I will do my best."

"I say so. You are amenable. Is that your mood to-night?" He smiled brightly.

Her eyes flashed with a sweet malice.

"I am not at all sure. It depends on how your command to sing is justified."

"You cannot help but sing well."

"Why?"

"Because I will help you--make you."

This startled her ever so little. Was there some fibre of cruelty in him, some evil in this influence he had over her? She shrank, and yet again she said that she would rather have his cruelty than another man's tenderness, so long as she knew that she had his-- She paused, and did not say the word. She met his eyes steadily--their concentration dazed her--then she said almost coldly, her voice sounding far away:

"How, make me?"

"How fine, how proud!" he said to himself, then added:

"I meant 'make' in the helpful sense. I know the song: I've heard it sung, I've sung it; I've taught you; my mind will act on yours, and you will sing it well."

"Won't you sing it yourself? Do, please."

"No; to-night I wish to hear you."

"Why?"

"I will tell you later. Can you play the accompaniment? If not, I--"

"Oh, will you? I could sing it then, I think. You played it so beautifully the other day--with all those strange chords."

He smiled.

"It is one of the few things that I can play. I always had a taste for music; and up in one of the forts there was an old melodeon, so I hammered away for years. I had to learn difficult things at the start, or none at all, or else those I improvised; and that's how I can play one or two of Beethoven's symphonies pretty well, and this song, and a few others, and go a cropper with a waltz. Will you come?"

They moved to the piano. No one at first noticed them. When he sat down, he said:

"You remember the words?"

"Yes, I learned them by heart."

"Good!"

He gently struck the chords. His gentleness had, however, a firmness, a deep persuasiveness, which drew every face like a call. A few chords waving, as it were, over the piano, and then he whispered:

"Now."

"Please go on for a minute longer," she begged.

"My throat feels dry all at once."

"Face away from the rest, towards me," he said gently.

She did so. His voice took a note softly, and held it. Presently her voice as softly joined it, his stopped, and hers went on:

"In the lodge of the Mother of Men, In the land of Desire, Are the embers of fire, Are the ashes of those who return, Who return to the world: Who flame at the breath Of the Mockers of Death. O Sweet, we will voyage again To the camp of Love's fire, Nevermore to return!"

"How am I doing?!" she said at the end of this verse. She really did not know--her voice seemed an endless distance away. But she felt the stillness in the drawing-room.

"Well," he said. "Now for the other. Don't be afraid; let your voice, let yourself, go."

"I can't let myself go."

"Yes, you can: just swim with the music."

She did swim with it. Never before had Peppingham drawing-room heard a song like this; never before, never after, did any of Delia Gasgoyne's friends hear her sing as she did that night. And Lady Gravesend whispered for a week afterwards that Delia Gasgoyne sang a wild love song in the most abandoned way with that colonial Belward. Really a song of the most violent sentiment!

There had been witchery in it all. For Gaston lifted the girl on the waves of his music, and did what he pleased with her, as she sang:

"O love, by the light of thine eye We will fare oversea, We will be As the silver-winged herons that rest By the shallows, The shallows of sapphire stone; No more shall we wander alone. As the foam to the shore Is my spirit to thine; And God's serfs as they fly,-- The Mockers of Death They will breathe on the embers of fire: We shall live by that breath,-- Sweet, thy heart to my heart, As we journey afar, No more, nevermore, to return!"

When the song was ended there was silence, then an eager murmur, and requests for more; but Gaston, still lengthening the close of the accompaniment, said quietly:

"No more. I wanted to hear you sing that song only."

He rose.

"I am so very hot," she said.

"Come into the hall."

They passed into the long corridor, and walked up and down, for a time in silence.

"You felt that music?!" he asked at last.

"As I never felt music before," she replied.

"Do you know why I asked you to sing it?"

"How should I know?"

"To see how far you could go with it."

"How far did I go?"

"As far as I expected."

"It was satisfactory?"

"Perfectly."

"But why--experiment--on me?"

"That I might see if you were not, after all, as much a barbarian as I."

"Am I?"

"No. That was myself singing as well as you. You did not enjoy it altogether, did you?"

"In a way, yes. But--shall I be honest? I felt, too, as if, somehow, it wasn't quite right; so much--what shall I call it?"

"So much of old Adam and the Garden? Sit down here for a moment, will you?"

She trembled a little, and sat.

"I want to speak plainly and honestly to you," he said, looking earnestly at her. "You know my history--about my wife who died in Labrador, and all the rest?"

"Yes, they have told me."

"Well, I have nothing to hide, I think; nothing more that you ought to know: though I've been a scamp one way and another."

"'That I ought to know'?!" she repeated.

"Yes: for when a man asks a woman to be his wife, he should be prepared to open the cupboard of skeletons." She was silent; her heart was beating so hard that it hurt her.

"I am going to ask you to be my wife, Delia."

She was silent, and sat motionless, her hands clasped in her lap.

He went on

"I don't know that you will be wise to accept me, but if you will take the risk--"

"Oh, Gaston, Gaston!" she said, and her hands fluttered towards his.

An hour later, he said to her, as they parted for the night:

"I hope, with all my heart, that you will never repent of it, Delia."

"You can make me not repent of it. It rests with you, Gaston; indeed, indeed, all with you."

"Poor girl!" he said, unconsciously, as he entered his room. He could not have told why he said it. "Why will you always sit up for me, Brillon?!" he asked a moment afterwards.

Jacques saw that something had occurred. "I have nothing else to do, sir," he replied. "Brillon," Gaston added presently, "we're in a devil of a scrape now."

"What shall we do, monsieur?"

"Did we ever turn tail?"

"Yes, from a prairie fire."

"Not always. I've ridden through."

"Alors, it's one chance in ten thousand!"

"There's a woman to be thought of--Jacques."

"There was that other time."

"Well, then?"

Presently Jacques said: "Who is she, monsieur?"

Gaston did not answer. He was thinking hard. Jacques said no more. The next morning early the guests knew who the woman was, and by noon Jacques also.

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XI. HE MAKES A GALLANT CONQUEST

Gaston let himself drift. The game of love and marriage is exciting, the girl was affectionate and admiring, the world was genial, and all things came his way. Towards the end of the hunting season Captain Maudsley had an accident. It would prevent him riding to hounds again, and at his suggestion, backed by Lord Dunfolly and Lord Dargan, Gaston became Master of the Hounds. His grandfather and great-grandfather had been Master of the Hounds before him. Hunting was a keen enjoyment--one outlet for wild life in him--and at the last meet of the year he rode in Captain Maudsley's place. They had a good run, and the taste of it remained with Gaston for many a day; he thought of it sometimes as he rode in the Park now every morning--with Delia and her mother.

Jacques and his broncho came no more, or if they did it was at unseasonable hours, and then to be often reprimanded (and twice arrested) for furious riding. Gaston had a bad moment when he told Jacques that he need not come with him again. He did it casually, but, cool as he was, a cold sweat came on his cheek. He had to take a little brandy to steady himself--yet he had looked into menacing rifle-barrels more than once without a tremor. It was clear, on the face of it, that Delia and her mother should be his companions in the Park, and not this grave little half-breed; but, somehow, it got on his nerves. He hesitated for days before he could cast the die against Jacques. It had been the one open bond of the old life; yet the man was but a servant, and to be treated as such, and was, indeed, except on rarest occasions. If Delia had known that Gaston balanced the matter between her and Jacques, her indignation might perhaps have sent matters to a crisis. But Gaston did the only possible thing; and the weeks drifted on.

Happy? It was inexplicable even to himself that at times, when he left Delia, he said unconsciously: "Well, it's a pity!"

But she was happy in her way. His dark, mysterious face with its background of abstraction, his unusual life, distinguished presence, and the fact that people of great note sought his conversation, all strengthened the bonds, and deepened her imagination; and imagination is at the root of much that passes for love. Gaston was approached at Lord Dargan's house by the Premier himself. It was suggested that he should stand for a constituency in the Conservative interest. Lord Faramond, himself picturesque, acute, with a keen knowledge of character and a taste for originality, saw material for a useful supporter--fearless, independent, with a gift for saying ironical things, and some primitive and fundamental principles well digested.

Gaston, smiling, said that he would only be a buffalo fretting on a chain.

Lord Faramond replied:

"And why the chain?" He followed this up by saying: "It is but a case of playing lion-tamer down there. Have one little gift all your own, know when to impose it, and you have the pleasure of feeling that your fingers move a great machine, the greatest in the world--yes the very greatest. There is Little Grapnel just vacant: the faithful Glynn is gone. Come: if you will, I'll send my secretary to-morrow morning-eh?"

"You are not afraid of the buffalo, sir?"

Lord Faramond's fingers touched his arm, drummed it "My greatest need-- one to roar as gently as the sucking-dove."

"But what if I, not knowing the rules of the game, should think myself on the corner of the veldt or in an Indian's tepee, and hit out?"

"You do not carry derringers?"

He smiled. "No; but--"

He glanced down at his arms.

"Well, well; that will come one day, perhaps!" Lord Faramond paused, abstracted, then added: "But not through you. Good-bye, then, good-bye. Little Grapnel in ten days!"

And it was so. Little Grapnel was Conservative. It was mostly a matter of nomination, and in two weeks Gaston, in a kind of dream, went down to Westminster, lunched with Lord Faramond, and was introduced to the House. The Ladies Gallery was full, for the matter was in all the papers, and a pretty sensation had been worked up one way and another.

That night, after dinner, Gaston rose to make his maiden speech on a bill dealing with an imminent social question. He was not an amateur. Time upon time he had addressed gatherings in the North, and had once stood at the bar of the Canadian Commons to plead the cause of the half-breeds. He was pale, but firm, and looked striking. His eyes went slowly round the House, and he began in a low, clear, deliberate voice, which got attention at once. The first sentence was, however, a surprise to every one, and not the least to his own party, excepting Lord Faramond. He disclaimed detailed and accurate knowledge of the subject. He said this with an honesty which took away the breath of the House. In a quiet, easy tone he then referred to what had been previously said in the debate.

The first thing he did was to crumble away with a regretful kind of superiority the arguments of two Conservative speakers, to the sudden amusement of the Opposition, who presently cheered him. He looked up as though a little surprised, waited patiently, and went on. The iconoclasm proceeded. He had one or two fixed ideas in his mind, simple principles on social questions of which he had spoken to his leader, and he never wavered from the sight of them, though he had yet to state them. The Premier sat, head cocked, with an ironical smile at the cheering, but he was wondering whether, after all, his man was sure; whether he could stand this fire, and reverse his engine quite as he intended. One of the previous speakers was furious, came over and appealed to Lord Faramond, who merely said, "Wait."

Gaston kept on. The flippant amusement of the Opposition continued. Something, however, in his grim steadiness began to impress his own party as the other, while from more than one quarter of the House there came a murmur of sympathy. His courage, his stone-cold strength, the disdain which was coming into his voice, impressed them, apart from his argument or its bearing on the previous debate. Lord Faramond heard the occasional murmurs of approval and smiled. Then there came a striking silence, for Gaston paused. He looked towards the Ladies Gallery. As if in a dream--for his brain was working with clear, painful power--he saw, not Delia nor her mother, nor Lady Dargan, but Alice Wingfield! He had a sting, a rush in his blood. He felt that none had an interest in him such as she: shamed, sorrowful, denied the compensating comfort which his brother's love might give her. Her face, looking through the barriers, pale, glowing, anxious, almost weird, seemed set to the bars of a cage.

Gaston turned upon the House, and flashed a glance towards Lord Faramond, who, turned round on the Treasury Bench, was looking up at him. He began slowly to pit against his former startling admissions the testimony of his few principles, and to buttress them on every side with apposite observations, naive, pungent. Presently there came a poignant edge to his trailing tones. After giving the subject new points of view, showing him to have studied Whitechapel as well as Kicking Horse Pass, he contended that no social problem could be solved by a bill so crudely radical, so impractical.

He was saying: "In the history of the British Parliament--" when some angry member cried out, "Who coached you?"

Gaston's quick eye found the man.

"Once," he answered instantly, "one honourable gentleman asked that of another in King Charles's Parliament, and the reply then is mine now-- 'You, sir!'"

"How?!" returned the puzzled member.

Gaston smiled:

"The nakedness of the honourable gentleman's mind!"

The game was in his hands. Lord Faramond twisted a shoulder with satisfaction, tossed a whimsical look down the line of the Treasury Bench, and from that Bench came unusual applause.

"Where the devil did he get it?!" queried a Minister.

"Out on the buffalo-trail," replied Lord Faramond. "Good fellow!"

In the Ladies Gallery, Delia clasped her mother's hand with delight; in the Strangers Gallery, a man said softly, "Not so bad, Cadet."

Alice Wingfield's face had a light of aching pleasure. "Gaston, Gaston!" she said, in a whisper heard only by the woman sitting next to her, who though a stranger gave a murmur of sympathy.

Gaston made his last effort in a comparison of the state of the English people now and before she became Cromwell's Commonwealth, and then incisively traced the social development onwards. It was the work of a man with a dramatic nature and a mathematical turn. He put the time, the manners, the movements, the men, as in a picture.

Presently he grew scornful. His words came hotly, like whip-lashes. He rose to force and power, though his voice was never loud, rather concentrated, resonant. It dropped suddenly to a tone of persuasiveness and conciliation, and declaring that the bill would be merely vicious where it meant to be virtuous, ended with the question:

"Shall we burn the house to roast the pig?"

"That sounds American," said the member for Burton-Halsey, "but he hasn't an accent. Pig is vulgar though--vulgar."

"Make it Lamb--make it Lamb!" urged his neighbour.

Meanwhile both sides applauded. Maiden speeches like this were not common. Lord Faramond turned round to him. Another member made way and Gaston leaned towards the Premier, who nodded and smiled. "Most excellent buffalo!" he said.

"One day we will chain you--to the Treasury Bench."

Gaston smiled.

"You are thought prudent, sir!"

"Ah! an enemy hath said this."

Gaston looked towards the Ladies Gallery. Delia's eyes were on him; Alice was gone.

A half-hour later he stood in the lobby, waiting for Mrs. Gasgoyne, Lady Dargan, and Delia to come. He had had congratulations in the House; he was having them now. Presently some one touched him on the arm.

"Not so bad, Cadet."

Gaston turned and saw his uncle. They shook hands. "You've a gift that way," Ian Belward continued, "but to what good? Bless you, the pot on the crackling thorns! Don't you find it all pretty hollow?"

Gaston was feeling reaction from the nervous work. "It is exciting."

"Yes, but you'll never have it again as to-night. The place reeks with smugness, vanity, and drudgery. It's only the swells--Derby, Gladstone, and the few--who get any real sport out of it. I can show you much more amusing things."

"For instance?"

"'Hast thou forgotten me?' You hungered for Paris and Art and the joyous life. Well, I'm ready. I want you. Paris, too, is waiting, and a good cuisine in a cheery menage. Sup with me at the Garrick, and I'll tell you. Come along. Quis separabit?"

"I have to wait for Mrs. Gasgoyne--and Delia."

"Delia! Delia! Goddess of proprieties, has it come to that!"

He saw a sudden glitter in Gaston's eyes, and changed his tone.

"Well, an' a man will he will, and he must be wished good-luck. So, good-luck to you! I'm sorry, though, for that cuisine in Paris, and the grand picnic at Fontainebleau, and Moban and Cerise. But it can't be helped."

He eyed Gaston curiously. Gaston was not in the least deceived. His uncle added presently, "But you will have supper with me just the same?"

Gaston consented, and at this point the ladies appeared. He had a thrill of pleasure at hearing their praises, but, somehow, of all the fresh experiences he had had in England, this, the weightiest, left him least elated. He had now had it all: the reaction was begun, and he knew it.

"Well, Ian Belward, what mischief are you at now?!" said Mrs. Gasgoyne.

"A picture merely, and to offer homage. How have you tamed our lion, and how sweetly does he roar! I feed him at my Club to-night."

"Ian Belward, you are never so wicked as when you ought most to be decent.--I wish I knew your place in this picture," she added brusquely.

"Merely a little corner at their fireside." He nodded towards Delia and Gaston.

"The man has sense, and Delia is my daughter!"

"Precisely why I wish a place in their affections."

"Why don't you marry one of the women you have--spoiled, and spend the rest of your time in living yourself down? You are getting old."

"For their own sakes, I don't. Put that to my credit. I'll have but one mistress only as the sand gets low. I've been true to her."

"You, true to anything!"

"The world has said so."

"Nonsense! You couldn't be."

"Visit my new picture in three months--my biggest thing. You will say my mistress fares well at my hands."

"Mere talk. I have seen your mistress, and before every picture I have thought of those women! A thing cannot be good at your price: so don't talk that sentimental stuff to me."

"Be original; you said that to me thirty years ago."

"I remember perfectly: that did not require much sense."

"No; you tossed it off, as it were. Yet I'd have made you a good husband. You are the most interesting woman I've ever met."

"The compliment is not remarkable. Now, Ian Belward, don't try to say clever things. And remember that I will have no mischief-making."

"At thy command--"

"Oh, cease acting, and take Sophie to her carriage." Two hours later, Delia Gasgoyne sat in her bedroom wondering at Gaston's abstraction during the drive home. Yet she had a proud elation at his success, and a happy tear came to her eye.

Meanwhile Gaston was supping with his uncle. Ian was in excellent spirits: brilliant, caustic, genial, suggestive. After a little while Gaston rose to the temper of his host. Already the scene in the Commons was fading from him, and when Ian proposed Paris immediately, he did not demur. The season was nearly over,

Ian said; very well, why remain? His attendance at the House? Well, it would soon be up for the session. Besides, the most effective thing he could do was to disappear for the time. Be unexpected--that was the key to notoriety. Delia Gasgoyne? Well, as Gaston had said, they were to meet in the Mediterranean in September; meanwhile a brief separation would be good for both. Last of all--he did not wish to press it--but there was a promise!

Gaston answered quietly, at last: "I will redeem the promise."

"When?"

"Within thirty-six hours."

"That is, you will be at my studio in Paris within thirty-six hours from now?"

"That is it."

"Good! I shall start at eight to-morrow morning. You will bring your horse, Cadet?"

"Yes, and Brillon."

"He isn't necessary." Ian's brow clouded slightly.

"Absolutely necessary."

"A fantastic little beggar. You can get a better valet in France. Why have one at all?"

"I shall not decline from Brillon on a Parisian valet. Besides, he comes as my camarade."

"Goth! Goth! My friend the valet! Cadet, you're a wonderful fellow, but you'll never fit in quite."

"I don't wish to fit in; things must fit me." Ian smiled to himself.

"He has tasted it all--it's not quite satisfying--revolution next! What a smash-up there'll be! The romantic, the barbaric overlaps. Well, I shall get my picture out of it, and the estate too."

Gaston toyed with his wine-glass, and was deep in thought. Strange to say, he was seeing two pictures. The tomb of Sir Gaston in the little church at Ridley: A gipsy's van on the crest of a common, and a girl standing in the doorway.

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THE TRESPASSER

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 3.

XII. HE STANDS BETWEEN TWO WORLDS XIII. HE JOURNEYS AFAR XIV. IN WHICH THE PAST IS REPEATED XV. WHEREIN IS SEEN THE OLD ADAM AND THE GARDEN XVI. WHEREIN LOVE SNOWS NO LAW SAVE THE MAN'S XVII. THE MAN AND THE WOMAN FACE THE INTOLERABLE XVIII. "RETURN, O SHULAMITE!"

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XII. HE STANDS BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

The next morning he went down to the family solicitor's office. He had done so, off and on, for weeks. He spent the time in looking through old family papers, fishing out ancient documents, partly out of curiosity, partly from an unaccountable presentiment. He had been there about an hour this morning when a clerk brought him a small box, which, he said, had been found inside another box belonging to the Belward-Staplings, a distant branch of the family. These had asked for certain ancient papers lately, and a search had been made, with this result. The little box was not locked, and the key was in it. How the accident occurred was not difficult to imagine. Generations ago there had probably been a conference of the two branches of the family, and the clerk had inadvertently locked the one box within the other. This particular box of the Belward-Staplings was not needed again. Gaston felt that here was something. These hours spent among old papers had given him strange sensations, had, on the one hand, shown him his heritage; but had also filled him with the spirit of that by-gone time. He had grown further away from the present. He had played his part as in a drama: his real life was in the distant past and out in the land of the heathen.

Now he took out a bundle of papers with broken seals, and wound with a faded tape. He turned the rich important parchments over in his hands. He saw his own name on the outside of one: "Sir Gaston Robert Belward." And there was added: "Bart." He laughed. Well, why not complete the reproduction? He was an M. P.--why not a, Baronet? He knew how it was done. There were a hundred ways. Throw himself into the arbitration question between Canada and the United States: spend ten thousand pounds of--his grandfather's--money on the Party? His reply to himself was cynical: the game was not worth the candle. What had he got out of it all? Money? Yes: and he enjoyed that--the power that it gave-- thoroughly. The rest? He knew that it did not strike as deep as it ought: the family tradition, the social scheme--the girl.

"What a brute I am!" he said. "I'm never wholly of it. I either want to do as they did when George Villiers had his innings, or play the gipsy as I did so many years."

The gipsy! As he held the papers in his hand he thought as he had done last night, of the gipsy-van on Ridley Common, and of--how well he remembered her name!--of Andree.

He suddenly threw his head back, and laughed. "Well, well, but it is droll! Last night, an English gentleman, an honourable member with the Treasury Bench in view; this morning an adventurer, a Romany. I itch for change. And why? Why? I have it all, yet I could pitch it away this moment for a wild night on the slope, or a nigger hunt on the Rivas. Chateau-Leoville, Goulet, and Havanas at a bob?--Jove, I thirst for a swig of raw Bourbon and the bite of a penny Mexican! Games, Gaston, games! Why the devil did little Joe worry at being made 'move on'? I've got 'move on' in every pore: I'm the Wandering Jew. Oh, a gentleman born am I! But the Romany sweats from every inch of you, Gaston Belward! What was it that sailor on the Cyprian said of the other? 'For every hair of him was rope-yarn, and every drop of blood Stockholm tar!'"

He opened a paper. Immediately he was interested. Another; then, quickly, two more; and at last, getting to his feet with an exclamation, he held a document to the light, and read it through carefully. He was alone in the room. He calmly folded it up, put it in his pocket, placed the rest of the papers back, locked the box, and passing into the next room, gave it to the clerk. Then he went out, a curious smile on his face. He stopped presently on the pavement.

"But it wouldn't hold good, I fancy, after all these years. Yet Law is a queer business. Anyhow, I've got it."

An hour later he called on Mrs. Gasgoyne and Delia. Mrs. Gasgoyne was not at home. After a little while, Gaston, having listened to some extracts from the newspapers upon his "brilliant, powerful, caustic speech, infinite in promise of an important career," quietly told her that he was starting for Paris, and asked when they expected to go abroad in their yacht. Delia turned pale, and could not answer for a moment. Then she became very still, and as quietly answered that they expected to get away by the middle of August. He would join them? Yes, certainly, at Marseilles, or perhaps, Gibraltar. Her manner, so well-controlled, though her features seemed to shrink all at once, if it did not deceive him, gave him the wish to say an affectionate thing. He took her hand and said it. She thanked him, then suddenly dropped her fingers on his shoulder, and murmured with infinite gentleness and pride:

"You will miss me; you ought to!"

He drew the hand down.

"I could not forget you, Delia," he said.

Her eyes came up quickly, and she looked steadily, wonderingly at him.

"Was it necessary to say that?"

She was hurt--inexpressibly,--and she shrank. He saw that she misunderstood him; but he also saw that, on the face of it, the phrase was not complimentary. His reply was deeply kind, effective. There was a pause--and the great moment for them both passed. Something ought to have happened. It did not. If she had had that touch of abandon shown when she sang "The Waking of the Fire," Gaston might, even at this moment, have broken his promise to his uncle; but, somehow, he knew himself slipping away from her. With the tenderness he felt, he still knew that he was acting; imitating, reproducing other, better, moments with her. He felt the disrespect to her, but it could not be helped--it could not be helped.

He said that he would call and say good-bye to her and Mrs. Gasgoyne at four o'clock. Then he left. He went to his chambers, gave Jacques instructions, did some writing, and returned at four. Mrs. Gasgoyne had not come back. She had telegraphed that she would not be in for lunch. There was nothing remarkable in Gaston's and Delia's farewell. She thought he looked worn, and ought to have change, showing in every word that she trusted him, and was anxious that he should be, as she put it gaily, "comfy." She was composed. The cleverest men are blind in the matter of a woman's affections; and Gaston was only a mere man, after all. He thought that she had gone about as far in the way of feeling as she could go.

Nevertheless, in his hansom, he frowned, and said: "I oughtn't to go. But I'm choking here. I can't play the game an hour longer without a change. I'll come back all right. I'll meet her in the Mediterranean after my kick-up, and it'll be all O. K. Jacques and I will ride down through Spain to Gibraltar, and meet the Kismet there. I shall have got rid of this restlessness then, and I'll be glad enough to settle down, pose for throne and constitution, cultivate the olive branch, and have family prayers."

At eight o'clock he appeared at Ridley Court, and bade his grandfather and grandmother good-bye. They were full of pride, and showed their affection in indirect ways--Sir William most by offering his opinion on the Bill and quoting Gaston frequently; Lady Belward, by saying that next year she would certainly go up to town--she had not done so for five years! They both agreed that a scamper on the Continent would now be good for him. At nine o'clock he passed the rectory, on his way, strange to note, to the church. There was one light burning, but it was not in the study nor in Alice's window. He supposed they had not returned. He paused and thought. If anything happened, she should know. But what should happen? He shook his head. He moved on to the church. The doors were unlocked. He went in, drew out a little pocket-lantern, lit it, and walked up the aisle.

"A sentimental business this: I don't know why I do it," he thought.

He stopped at the tomb of Sir Gaston Belward, put his hand on it, and stood looking at it.

"I wonder if there is anything in it?!" he said aloud: "if he does influence me? if we've got anything to do with each other? What he did I seem to know somehow, more or less. A little dwarf up in my brain drops the nuts down now and then. Well, Sir Gaston Belward, what is going to be the end of all this? If we can reach across the centuries, why, good-night and goodbye to you. Good-bye."

He turned and went down the aisle. At the door a voice, a whispering voice, floated to him: "Good-bye."

He stopped short and listened. All was still. He walked up the aisle, and listened again.-Nothing! He stood before the tomb, looking at it curiously. He was pale, but collected. He raised the light above his head, and looked towards the altar.--Nothing! Then he went to the door again, and paused.--Nothing!

Outside he said

"I'd stake my life I heard it!"

A few minutes afterwards, a girl rose up from behind the organ in the chancel, and felt her way outside. It was Alice Wingfield, who had gone to the church to pray. It was her good-bye which had floated down to Gaston.

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XIII. HE JOURNEYS AFAR

Politicians gossiped. Where was the new member? His friends could not tell, further than that he had gone abroad. Lord Faramond did not know, but fetched out his lower lip knowingly.

"The fellow has instinct for the game," he said. Sketches, portraits were in the daily and weekly journals, and one hardy journalist even gave an interview--which had never occurred. But Gaston remained a picturesque nine-days' figure, and then Parliament rose for the year.

Meanwhile he was in Paris, and every morning early he could be seen with Jacques riding up the Champs Elysee and out to the Bois de Boulogne. Every afternoon at three he sat for "Monmouth" or the "King of Ys" with his horse in his uncle's garden.

Ian Belward might have lived in a fashionable part; he preferred the Latin Quarter, with incursions into the other at fancy. Gaston lived for three days in the Boulevard Haussman, and then took apartments, neither expensive nor fashionable, in a quiet street. He was surrounded by students and artists, a few great men and a host of small men: Collarossi's school here and Delacluse's there: models flitting in and out of the studios in his court-yard, who stared at him as he rode, and sought to gossip with Jacques--accomplished without great difficulty.

Jacques was transformed. A cheerful hue grew on his face. He had been an exile, he was now at home. His French tongue ran, now with words in the patois of Normandy, now of Brittany; and all with the accent of French Canada, an accent undisturbed by the changes and growths of France. He gossiped, but no word escaped him which threw any light on his master's history.

Soon, in the Latin Quarter, they were as notable as they had been at Ridley Court or in London. On the Champs Elysee side people stared at the two: chiefly because of Gaston's splendid mount and Jacques's strange broncho. But they felt that they were at home. Gaston's French was not perfect, but it was enough for his needs. He got a taste of that freedom which he had handed over to the dungeons of convention two years before. He breathed. Everything interested him so much that the life he had led in England seemed very distant.

He wrote to Delia, of course. His letters were brief, most interesting, not tenderly intimate, and not daily. From the first they puzzled her a little, and continued to do so; but because her mother said, "What an impossible man!" she said, "Perfectly possible! Of course he is not like other men; he is a genius."

And the days went on.

Gaston little loved the purlieus of the Place de l'Opera. One evening at a club in the Boulevard Malesherbes bored him. It was merely Anglo- American enjoyment, dashed with French drama. The Bois was more to his taste, for he could stretch his horse's legs; but every day he could be found before some simple cafe in Montparnasse, sipping vermouth, and watching the gay, light life about him. He sat up with delight to see an artist and his "Madame" returning from a journey in the country, seated upon sheaves of corn, quite unregarded by the world; doing as they listed with unabashed simplicity. He dined often at the little Hotel St. Malo near the Gare Montparnasse, where the excellent landlord played the host, father, critic, patron, comrade--often benefactor--to his bons enfants. He drank vin ordinaire, smoked caporal cigarettes, made friends, and was in all as a savage--or a much-travelled English gentleman.

His uncle Ian had introduced him here as at other places of the kind, and, whatever his ulterior object was, had an artist's pleasure at seeing a layman enjoy the doings of Paris art life. Himself lived more luxuriously. In an avenue not far from the Luxembourg he had a small hotel with a fine old-fashioned garden behind it, and here distinguished artists, musicians, actors, and actresses came at times.

The evening of Gaston's arrival he took him to a cafe and dined him, and afterwards to the Boullier--there, merely that he might see; but this place had nothing more than a passing interest for him. His mind had the poetry of a free, simple--even wild-life, but he had no instinct for vice in the name of amusement. But the later hours spent in the garden under the stars, the cheerful hum of the boulevards coming to them distantly, stung his veins like good wine. They sat and talked, with no word of England in it at all, Jacques near, listening.

Ian Belward was at his best: genial, entertaining, with the art of the man of no principles, no convictions, and a keen sense of life's sublime incongruities. Even Jacques, whose sense of humour had grown by long association with Gaston, enjoyed the piquant conversation. The next evening the same. About ten o'clock a few men dropped in: a sculptor, artists, and Meyerbeer, an American newspaper correspondent--who, however, was not known as such to Gaston.

This evening Ian determined to make Gaston talk. To deepen a man's love for a thing, get him to talk of it to the eager listener--he passes from the narrator to the advocate unconsciously. Gaston was not to talk of England, but of the North, of Canada, of Mexico, the Lotos Isles. He did so picturesquely, yet simply too, in imperfect but sufficient French. But as he told of one striking incident in the Rockies, he heard Jacques make a quick expression of dissent. He smiled. He had made some mistake in detail. Now, Jacques had been in his young days in Quebec the village story-teller; one who, by inheritance or competency, becomes semi- officially a raconteur for the parish; filling in winter evenings, nourishing summer afternoons, with tales, weird, childlike, daring.

Now Gaston turned and said to Jacques:

"Well, Brillon, I've forgotten, as you see; tell them how it was."

Two hours later when Jacques retired on some errand, amid ripe applause, Ian said:

"You've got an artist there, Cadet: that description of the fight with the loop garoo was as good as a thing from Victor Hugo. Hugo must have heard just such yarns, and spun them on the pattern. Upon my soul, it's excellent stuff. You've lived, you two."

Another night Ian Belward gave a dinner, at which were present an actress, a singer of some repute, the American journalist, and others. Something that was said sent Gaston's mind to the House of Commons. Presently he saw himself in a ridiculous picture: a buffalo dragging the Treasury Bench about the Chamber; as one conjures things in an absurd dream. He laughed outright, at a moment when Mademoiselle Cerise was telling of a remarkable effect she produced one night in "Fedora," unpremeditated, inspired; and Mademoiselle Cerise, with smiling lips and eyes like daggers, called him a bear. This brought him to him self, and he swam with the enjoyment. He did enjoy it, but not as his uncle wished and hoped. Gaston did not respond eagerly to the charms of Mademoiselle Cerise and Madame Juliette.

Was Delia, then, so strong in the barbarian's mind? He could not think so, but Gaston had not shown yet, either for model, for daughter of joy, or for the mademoiselles of the stage any disposition to an amour or a misalliance; and either would be interesting and sufficient! Models went in and out of Ian's studio and the studios of others, and Gaston chatted with them at times; and once he felt the bare arm and bare breast of a girl as she sat for a nymph, and said in an interested way that her flesh was as firm and fine as a Tongan's. He even disputed with his uncle on the tints of her skin, on seeing him paint it in, showing a fine eye for colour. But there was nothing more; he was impressed, observant, interested--that was all. His uncle began to wonder if the Englishman was, after all, deeper in the grain than the savage. He contented himself with the belief that the most vigorous natures are the most difficult to rouse. Mademoiselle Cerise sang, with chic and abandon very fascinating to his own sensuous nature, a song with a charming air and sentiment. It was after a night at the opera when they had seen her in "Lucia," and the contrast, as she sang in his garden, softly lighted, showed her at the most attractive angles. She drifted from a sparkling chanson to the delicate pathos of a song of De Musset's.

Gaston responded to the artist; but to the woman--no. He had seen a new life, even in its abandon, polite, fresh. It amused him, but he could still turn to the remembrance of Delia without blushing, for he had come to this in the spirit of the idler, not the libertine. Mademoiselle Cerise said to Ian at last:

"Enfin, is the man stone? As handsome as a leopard, too! But, it is no matter."

She made another effort to interest him, however. It galled her that he did not fall at her feet as others had done. Even Ian had come there in his day, but she knew him too well. She had said to him at the time: "You, monsieur? No, thank you. A week, a month, and then the brute in you would out. You make a woman fond, and then--a mat for your feet, and your wicked smile, and savage English words to drive her to the vitriol or the Seine. Et puis, dear monsieur, accept my good friendship; nothing more. I will sing to you, dance to you, even pray for you--we poor sinners do that sometimes, and go on sinning; but, again, nothing more."

Ian admired her all the more for her refusal of him, and they had been good friends. He had told her of his nephew's coming, had hinted at his fortune, at his primitive soul, at the unconventional strain in him, even at marriage. She could not read his purpose, but she knew there was something, and answering him with a yes, had waited. Had Gaston have come to her feet she would probably have got at the truth somehow, and have worked in his favour--the joy vice takes to side with virtue, at times--when it is at no personal sacrifice. But Gaston was superior in a grand way. He was simple, courteous, interested only. This stung her, and she would bring him to his knees, if she could. This night she had rung all the changes, and had done no more than get his frank applause. She became petulant in an airy, exacting way. She asked him about his horse. This interested him. She wanted to see it. To-morrow? No, no, now. Perhaps to-morrow she would not care to; there was no joy in deliberate pleasure. Now--now--now! He laughed. Well then, now, as she wished!

Jacques was called. She said to him:

"Come here, little comrade." Jacques came. "Look at me," she added. She fixed her eyes on him, and smiled. She was in the soft flare of the lights.

"Well," she said after a moment, "what do you think of me?"

Jacques was confused. "Madame is beautiful."

"The eyes?!" she urged.

"I have been to Gaspe, and west to Esquimault, and in England, but I have never seen such as those," he said. Race and primitive man spoke there.

She laughed. "Come closer, little man."

He did so. She suddenly rose, dropped her hands on his shoulders, and kissed his cheek.

"Now bring the horse, and I will kiss him too."

Did she think she could rouse Gaston by kissing his servant? Yet it did not disgust him. He knew it was a bit of acting, and it was well done. Besides, Jacques Brillon was not a mere servant, and he, too, had done well. She sat back and laughed lightly when Jacques was gone. Then she said: "The honest fellow!" and hummed an air:

"'The pretty coquette Well she needs to be wise, Though she strike to the heart By a glance of her eyes.

"'For the daintiest bird Is the sport of the storm, And the rose fadeth most When the bosom is warm.'"

In twenty minutes the gate of the garden opened, and Jacques appeared with Saracen. The horse's black skin glistened in the lights, and he tossed his head and champed his bit. Gaston rose. Mademoiselle Cerise sprang to her feet and ran forward. Jacques put out his hand to stop her, and Gaston caught her shoulder. "He's wicked with strangers," Gaston said. "Chat!" she rejoined, stepped quickly to the horse's head and, laughing, put out her hand to stroke him. Jacques caught the beast's nose, and stopped a lunge of the great white teeth.

"Enough, madame, he will kill you!"

"Yet I am beautiful--is it not so?"

"The poor beast is ver' blind."

"A pretty compliment," she rejoined, yet angry at the beast.

Gaston came, took the animal's head in his hands, and whispered. Saracen became tranquil. Gaston beckoned to Mademoiselle Cerise. She came. He took her hand in his and put it at the horse's lips. The horse whinnied angrily at first, but permitted a caress from the actress's fingers.

"He does not make friends easily," said Gaston. "Nor does his master."

Her eyes lifted to his, the lids drooping suggestively. "But when the pact is made--!"

"Till death us do part?"

"Death or ruin."

"Death is better."

"That depends!"

"Ah! I understand," she said.

"On--the woman?"

"Yes."

Then he became silent. "Mount the horse," she urged.

Gaston sprang at one bound upon the horse's bare back. Saracen reared and wheeled.

"Splendid!" she said; then, presently: "Take me up with you."

He looked doubting for a moment, then whispered to the horse.

"Come quickly," he said.

She came to the side of the horse. He stooped, caught her by the waist, and lifted her up. Saracen reared, but Gaston had him down in a moment.

Ian Belward suddenly called out:

"For God's sake, keep that pose for five minutes--only five!" He caught up some canvas. "Hold candles near them," he said to the others. They did so. With great swiftness he sketched in the strange picture. It looked weird, almost savage: Gaston's large form, his legs loose at the horse's side, the woman in her white drapery clinging to him.

In a little time the artist said:

"There; that will do. Ten such sittings and my 'King of Ys' will have its day with the world. I'd give two fortunes for the chance of it."

The woman's heart had beat fast with Gaston's arm around her. He felt the thrill of the situation. Man, woman, and horse were as of a piece.

But Cerise knew, when Gaston let her to the ground again, that she had not conquered.

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XIV. IN WHICH THE PAST IS REPEATED

Next morning Gaston was visited by Meyerbeer the American journalist, of whose profession he was still ignorant. He saw him only as a man of raw vigour of opinion, crude manners, and heavy temperament. He had not been friendly to him at night, and he was surprised at the morning visit. The hour was such that Gaston must ask him to breakfast. The two were soon at the table of the Hotel St. Malo. Meyerbeer sniffed the air when he saw the place. The linen was ordinary, the rooms small; but all--he did not take this into account--irreproachably clean. The walls were covered with pictures; some taken for unpaid debts, gifts from students since risen to fame or gone into the outer darkness,--to young artists' eyes, the sordid moneymaking world,--and had there been lost; from a great artist or two who remembered the days of his youth and the good host who had seen many little colonies of artists come and go.

They sat down to the table, which was soon filled with students and artists. Then Meyerbeer began to see, not only an interesting thing, but "copy." He was, in fact, preparing a certain article which, as he said to himself, would "make 'em sit up" in London and New York. He had found out Gaston's history, had read his speech in the Commons, had seen paragraphs speculating as to where he was; and now he, Salem Meyerbeer, would tell them what the wild fellow was doing. The Bullier, the cafes in the Latin Quarter, apartments in a humble street, dining for one- franc-fifty, supping with actresses, posing for the King of Ys with that actress in his arms--all excellent in their way. But now there was needed an entanglement, intrigue, amour, and then America should shriek at his picture of one of the British aristocracy, and a gentleman of the Commons, "on the loose," as he put it.

He would head it:

"ARISTOCRAT, POLITICIAN, LIBERTINE!"

Then, under that he would put:

"CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN, OR THE LEOPARD HIS SPOTS?" Jer. xi. 23.

The morality of such a thing? Morality only had to do with ruining a girl's name, or robbery. How did it concern this?

So Mr. Meyerbeer kept his ears open. Presently one of the students said to Bagshot, a young artist: "How does the dompteuse come on?"

"Well, I think it's chic enough. She's magnificent. The colour of her skin against the lions was splendid to-day: a regular rich gold with a sweet stain of red like a leaf of maize in September. There's never been such a Una. I've got my chance; and if I don't pull it off,

'Wrap me up in my tarpaulin jacket, And say a poor buffer lies low!'"

"Get the jacket ready," put in a young Frenchman, sneering.

The Englishman's jaw hardened, but he replied coolly

"What do you know about it?"

"I know enough. The Comte Ploare visits her."

"How the devil does that concern my painting her?" There was iron in Bagshot's voice.

"Who says you are painting her?"

The insult was conspicuous. Gaston quickly interposed. His clear strong voice rang down the table: "Will you let me come and see your canvas some day soon, Mr. Bagshot? I remember your picture 'A Passion in the Desert,' at the Academy this year. A fine thing: the leopard was free and strong. As an Englishman, I am proud to meet you."

The young Frenchman stared. The quarrel had passed to a new and unexpected quarter. Gaston's large, solid body, strong face, and penetrating eyes were not to be sneered out of sight. The Frenchman, an envious, disappointed artist, had had in his mind a bloodless duel, to give a fillip to an unacquired fame. He had, however, been drinking. He flung an insolent glance to meet Gaston's steady look, and said:

"The cock crows of his dunghill!"

Gaston looked at the landlord, then got up calmly and walked down the table. The Frenchman, expecting he knew not what, sprang to his feet, snatching up a knife; but Gaston was on him like a hawk, pinioning his arms and lifting him off the ground, binding his legs too, all so tight that the Frenchman squealed for breath.

"Monsieur," said Gaston to the landlord, "from the door or the window?"

The landlord was pale. It was in some respects a quarrel of races. For, French and English at the tables had got up and were eyeing each other. As to the immediate outcome of the quarrel, there could be no doubt. The English and Americans could break the others to pieces; but neither wished that. The landlord decided the matter:

"Drop him from this window."

He pushed a shutter back, and Gaston dropped the fellow on the hard pavement--a matter of five feet. The Frenchman got up raging, and made for the door; but this time he was met by the landlord, who gave him his hat, and bade him come no more. There was applause from both English and French. The journalist chuckled--another column!

Gaston had acted with coolness and common-sense; and when he sat down and began talking of the Englishman's picture again as if nothing had happened, the others followed, and the meal went on cheerfully.

Presently another young English painter entered, and listened to the conversation, which Gaston brought back to Una and the lions. It was his way to force things to his liking, if possible; and he wanted to hear about the woman--why, he did not ask himself. The new arrival, Fancourt by name, kept looking at him quizzically. Gaston presently said that he would visit the menagerie and see this famous dompteuse that afternoon.

"She's a brick," said Bagshot. "I was in debt, a year behind with my Pelletier here, and it took all I got for 'A Passion in the Desert' to square up. I'd nothing to go on with. I spent my last sou in visiting the menagerie. There I got an idea. I went to her, told her how I was fixed, and begged her to give me a chance. By Jingo! she brought the water to my eyes. Some think she's a bit of a devil; but she can be a devil of a saint, that's all I've got to say."

"Zoug-Zoug's responsible for the devil," said Fancourt to Bagshot.

"Shut up, Fan," rejoined Bagshot, hurriedly, and then whispered to him quickly.

Fancourt sent self-conscious glances down the table towards Gaston; and then a young American, newly come to Paris, said:

"Who's Zoug-Zoug, and what's Zoug-Zoug?"

"It's milk for babes, youngster," answered Bagshot quickly, and changed the conversation.

Gaston saw something strange in the little incident; but he presently forgot it for many a day, and then remembered it for many a day, when the wheel had spun through a wild arc.

When they rose from the table, Meyerbeer went to Bagshot, and said:

"Say, who's Zoug-Zoug, anyway?!" Bagshot coolly replied:

"I'm acting for another paper. What price?"

"Fifty dollars," in a low voice, eagerly. Bagshot meditated.

"H'm, fifty dollars! Two hundred and fifty francs, or thereabouts. Beggarly!"

"A hundred, then."

Bagshot got to his feet, lighting a cigarette.

"Want to have a pretty story against a woman, and to smutch a man, do you? Well, I'm hard up; I don't mind gossip among ourselves; but sell the stuff to you--I'll see you damned first!"

This was said sufficiently loud; and after that, Meyerbeer could not ask Fancourt, so he departed with Gaston, who courteously dismissed him, to his astonishment and regret, for he had determined to visit the menagerie with his quarry.

Gaston went to his apartments, and cheerily summoned Jacques.

"Now, little man, for a holiday! The menagerie: lions, leopards, and a grand dompteuse; and afterwards dinner with me at the Cafe Blanche. I want a blow-out of lions and that sort. I'd like to be a lion-tamer myself for a month, or as long as might be."

He caught Jacques by the shoulders--he had not done so since that memorable day at Ridley Court. "See, Jacques, we'll do this every year. Six months in England, and three months on the Continent,--in your France, if you like,--and three months in the out-of-the-wayest place, where there'll be big game. Hidalgos for six months, Goths for the rest."

A half-hour later they were in the menagerie. They sat near the doors where the performers entered. For a long time they watched the performance with delight, clapping and calling bravo like boys. Presently the famous dompteuse entered,--Mademoiselle Victorine,--passing just below Gaston. He looked down, interested, at the supple, lithe creature making for the cages of lions in the amphitheatre. The figure struck him as familiar. Presently the girl turned, throwing a glance round the theatre. He caught the dash of the dark, piercing eyes, the luminous look, the face unpainted--in its own natural colour: neither hot health nor paleness, but a thing to bear the light of day. "Andree the gipsy!" he exclaimed in a low tone.

In less than two years this! Here was fame. A wanderer, an Ishmael then, her handful of household goods and her father in the grasp of the Law: to-day, Mademoiselle Victorine, queen of animal-tamers! And her name associated with the Comte Ploare!

With the Comte Ploare? Had it come to that? He remembered the look in her face when he bade her good-bye. Impossible! Then, immediately he laughed.

Why impossible? And why should he bother his head about it? People of this sort: Mademoiselle Cerise, Madame Juliette, Mademoiselle Victorine-- what were they to him, or to themselves?

There flashed through his brain three pictures: when he stood by the bedside of the old dying Esquimaux in Labrador, and took a girl's hand in his; when among the flowers at Peppingham he heard Delia say: "Oh, Gaston! Gaston!" and Alice's face at midnight in the moonlit window at Ridley Court.

How strange this figure--spangled, gaudy, standing among her lions-- seemed by these. To think of her, his veins thumping thus, was an insult to all three: to Delia, one unpardonable. And yet he could not take his eyes off her. Her performance was splendid. He was interested, speculative. She certainly had flown high; for, again, why should not a dompteuse be a decent woman? And here were money, fame of a kind, and an occupation that sent his blood bounding. A dompteur! He had tamed moose, and young mountain lions, and a catamount, and had had mad hours with pumas and arctic bears; and he could understand how even he might easily pass from M.P. to dompteur. It was not intellectual, but it was power of a kind; and it was decent, and healthy, and infinitely better than playing the Jew in business, or keeping a tavern, or "shaving" notes, and all that. Truly, the woman was to be admired, for she was earning an honest living; and no doubt they lied when they named her with Count Ploare. He kept coming back to that--Count Ploare! Why could they not leave these women alone? Did they think none of them virtuous? He would stake his life that Andree--he would call her that--was as straight as the sun.

"What do you think of her, Jacques?!" he said suddenly.

"It is grand. Mon Dieu, she is wonderful--and a face all fire!"

Presently she came out of the cage, followed by two great lions. She walked round the ring, a hand on the head of each: one growling, the other purring against her, with a ponderous kind of affection. She talked to them as they went, giving occasionally a deep purring sound like their own. Her talk never ceased. She looked at the audience, but only as in a dream. Her mind was all with the animals. There was something splendid in it: she, herself, was a noble animal; and she seemed entirely in place where she was. The lions were fond of her, and she of them; but the first part of her performance had shown that they could be capricious. A lion's love is but a lion's love after all--and hers likewise, no doubt! The three seemed as one in their beauty, the woman superbly superior. Meyerbeer, in a far corner, was still on the trail of his sensation. He thought that he might get an article out of it--with the help of Count Ploare and Zoug-Zoug. Who was Zoug-Zoug? He exulted in her picturesqueness, and he determined to lie in wait. He thought it a pity that Comte Ploare was not an Englishman or an American; but it couldn't be helped. Yes, she was, as he said to himself, "a stunner." Meanwhile he watched Gaston, noted his intense interest.

Presently the girl stopped beside the cage. A chariot was brought out, and the two lions were harnessed to it. Then she called out another larger lion, which came unwillingly at first. She spoke sharply, and then struck him. He growled, but came on. Then she spoke softly to him, and made that peculiar purr, soft and rich. Now he responded, walked round her, coming closer, till his body made a half-circle about her, and his head was at her knees. She dropped her hand on it. Great applause rang through the building. This play had been quite accidental. But there lay one secret of the girl's success. She was original; she depended greatly on the power of the moment for her best effects, and they came at unexpected times.

It was at this instant that, glancing round the theatre in acknowledgment of the applause, her eyes rested mechanically on Gaston's box. There was generally some one important in that box: from a foreign prince to a young gentleman whose proudest moment was to take off his hat in the Bois to the queen of a lawless court. She had tired of being introduced to princes. What could it mean to her? And for the young bloods, whose greatest regret was that they could not send forth a daughter of joy into the Champs Elysee in her carriage, she had ever sent them about their business. She had no corner of pardon for them. She kissed her lions, she hugged the lion's cub that rode back and forth with her to the menagerie day by day--her companion in her modest apartments; but sell one of these kisses to a young gentleman of Paris, whose ambition was to master all the vices, and then let the vices master him!--she had not come to that, though, as she said in some bitter moments, she had come far.

Count Ploare--there was nothing in that. A blase man of the world, who had found it all not worth the bothering about, neither code nor people-- he saw in this rich impetuous nature a new range of emotions, a brief return to the time when he tasted an open strong life in Algiers, in Tahiti. And he would laugh at the world by marrying her--yes, actually marrying her, the dompteuse! Accident had let him render her a service, not unimportant, once at Versailles, and he had been so courteous and considerate afterwards, that she had let him see her occasionally, but never yet alone. He soon saw that an amour was impossible. At last he spoke of marriage. She shook her head. She ought to have been grateful, but she was not. Why should she be? She did not know why he wished to marry her; but, whatever the reason, he was selfish. Well, she would be selfish. She did not care for him. If she married him, it would be because she was selfish: because of position, ease; for protection in this shameless Paris; and for a home, she who had been a wanderer since her birth.

It was mere bargaining. But at last her free, independent nature revolted. No: she had had enough of the chain, and the loveless hand of man, for three months that were burned into her brain--no more! If ever she loved--all; but not the right for Count Ploare to demand the affection she gave her lions freely.

The manager of the menagerie had tried for her affections, had offered a price for her friendship; and failing, had become as good a friend as such a man could be. She even visited his wife occasionally, and gave gifts to his children; and the mother trusted her and told her her trials. And so the thing went on, and the people talked.

As we said, she turned her eyes to Gaston's box. Instantly they became riveted, and then a deep flush swept slowly up her face and burned into her splendid hair. Meyerbeer was watching through his opera-glasses. He gave an exclamation of delight:

"By the holy smoke, here's something!" he said aloud.

For an instant Gaston and the girl looked at each other intently. He made a slight sign of recognition with his hand, and then she turned away, gone a little pale now. She stood looking at her lions, as if trying to recollect herself. The lion at her feet helped her. He had a change of temper, and, possibly fretting under inaction, growled. At once she summoned him to get into the chariot. He hesitated, but did so. She put the reins in his paws and took her place behind. Then a robe of purple and ermine was thrown over her shoulders by an attendant; she gave a sharp command, and the lions came round the ring, to wild applause. Even a Parisian audience had never seen anything like this. It was amusing too; for the coachman-lion was evidently disgusted with his task, and growled in a helpless kind of way.

As they passed Gaston's box, they were very near. The girl threw one swift glance; but her face was well controlled now. She heard, however, a whispered word come to her:

"Andree!"

A few moments afterwards she retired, and the performance was in other and less remarkable hands. Presently the manager himself came, and said that Mademoiselle Victorine would be glad to see Monsieur Belward if he so wished. Gaston left Jacques, and went.

Meyerbeer noticed the move, and determined to see the meeting if possible. There was something in it, he was sure. He would invent an excuse, and make his way behind.

Gaston and the manager were in the latter's rooms waiting for Victorine. Presently a messenger came, saying that Monsieur Belward would find Mademoiselle in her dressing-room. Thither Gaston went, accompanied by the manager, who, however, left him at the door, nodding good-naturedly to Victorine, and inwardly praying that here was no danger to his business, for Victorine was a source of great profit. Yet he had failed himself, and all others had failed in winning her--why should this man succeed, if that was his purpose?

There was present an elderly, dark-featured Frenchwoman, who was always with Victorine, vigilant, protective, loving her as her own daughter.

"Monsieur!" said Andree, a warm colour in her cheek. Gaston shook her hand cordially, and laughed. "Mademoiselle--Andree?"

He looked inquiringly. "Yes, to you," she said.

"You have it all your own way now--isn't it so?" "With the lions, yes. Please sit down. This is my dear keeper," she said, touching the woman's shoulder. Then, to the woman: "Annette, you have heard me speak of this gentleman?"

The woman nodded, and modestly touched Gaston's outstretched hand.

"Monsieur was kind once to my dear Mademoiselle," she said.

Gaston cheerily smiled:

"Nothing, nothing, upon my word!" Presently he continued:

"Your father, what of him?" She sighed and shivered a little.

"He died in Auvergne three months after you saw him."

"And you?" He waved a hand towards the menagerie.

"It is a long story," she answered, not meeting his eyes. "I hated the Romany life. I became an artist's model; sickened of that,"--her voice went quickly here, "joined a travelling menagerie, and became what I am. That in brief."

"You have done well," he said admiringly, his face glowing.

"I am a successful dompteuse," she replied.

She then asked him who was his companion in the box. He told her. She insisted on sending for Jacques. Meanwhile they talked of her profession, of the animals. She grew eloquent. Jacques arrived, and suddenly remembered Andree--stammered, was put at his ease, and dropped into talk with Annette. Gaston fell into reminiscences of wild game, and talked intelligently, acutely of her work. He must wait, she said, until the performance closed, and then she would show him the animals as a happy family. Thus a half-hour went by.

Meanwhile, Meyerbeer had asked the manager to take him to Mademoiselle; but was told that Victorine never gave information to journalists, and would not be interviewed. Besides, she had a visitor. Yes, Meyerbeer knew it--Mr. Gaston Belward; but that did not matter. The manager thought it did matter. Then, with an idea of the future, Meyerbeer asked to be shown the menagerie thoroughly--he would write it up for England and America.

And so it happened that there were two sets of people inspecting the menagerie after the performance. Andree let a dozen of the animals out-- lions, leopards, a tiger, and a bear,--and they gambolled round her playfully, sometimes quarrelling with each other, but brought up smartly by her voice and a little whip, which she always carried--the only sign of professional life about her, though there was ever a dagger hid in her dress. For the rest, she looked a splendid gipsy.

Gaston suddenly asked if he might visit her. At the moment she was playing with the young tiger. She paused, was silent, preoccupied. The tiger, feeling neglected, caught her hand with its paw, tearing the skin. Gaston whipped out his handkerchief, and stanched the blood. She wrapped the handkerchief quickly round her hand, and then, recovering herself, ordered the animals back into their cages. They trotted away, and the attendant locked them up. Meanwhile Jacques had picked up and handed to Gaston a letter, dropped when he drew out his handkerchief. It was one received two days before from Delia Gasgoyne. He had a pang of confusion, and hastily put it into his pocket.

Up to this time there had been no confusion in his mind. He was going back to do his duty; to marry the girl, union with whom would be an honour; to take his place in his kingdom. He had had no minute's doubt of that. It was necessary, and it should be done. The girl? Did he not admire her, honour her, care for her? Why, then, this confusion?

Andree said to him that he might come the next morning for breakfast. She said it just as the manager and Meyerbeer passed her. Meyerbeer heard it, and saw the look in the faces of both: in hers, bewildered, warm, penetrating; in Gaston's, eager, glowing, bold, with a distant kind of trouble.

Here was a thickening plot for Paul Pry. He hugged himself. But who was Zoug-Zoug? If he could but get at that! He asked the manager, who said he did not know. He asked a dozen men that evening, but none knew. He would ask Ian Belward. What a fool not to have thought of him at first. He knew all the gossip of Paris, and was always communicative--but was he, after all? He remembered now that the painter had a way of talking at discretion: he had never got any really good material from him. But he would try him in this.

So, as Gaston and Jacques travelled down the Boulevard Montparnasse, Meyerbeer was not far behind. The journalist found Ian Belward at home, in a cynical indolent mood.

"Wherefore Meyerbeer?!" he said, as he motioned the other to a chair, and pushed over vermouth and cigarettes.

"To ask a question."

"One question? Come, that's penance. Aren't you lying as usual?"

"No; one only. I've got the rest of it."

"Got the rest of it, eh? Nasty mess you've got, whatever it is, I'll be bound. What a nice mob you press fellows are--wholesale scavengers!"

"That's all right. This vermouth is good enough. Well, will you answer my question?"

"Possibly, if it's not personal. But Lord knows where your insolence may run! You may ask if I'll introduce you to a decent London club!"

Meyerbeer flushed at last.

"You're rubbing it in," he said angrily.

He did wish to be introduced to a good London club. "The question isn't personal, I guess. It's this: Who's Zoug-Zoug?"

Smoke had come trailing out of Belward's nose, his head thrown back, his eyes on the ceiling. It stopped, and came out of his mouth on one long, straight whiff. Then the painter brought his head to a natural position slowly, and looking with a furtive nonchalance at Meyerbeer, said:

"Who is what?"

"Who's Zoug-Zoug?"

"That is your one solitary question, is it?"

"That's it."

"Very well. Now, I'll be scavenger. What is the story? Who is the woman--for you've got a woman in it, that's certain?"

"Will you tell me, then, whether you know Zoug-Zoug?"

"Yes."

"The woman is Mademoiselle Victorine, the dompteuse."

"Ah, I've not seen her yet. She burst upon Paris while I was away. Now, straight: no lies: who are the others?"

Meyerbeer hesitated; for, of course, he did not wish to speak of Gaston at this stage in the game. But he said:

"Count Ploare--and Zoug-Zoug."

"Why don't you tell me the truth?"

"I do. Now, who is Zoug-Zoug?"

"Find out."

"You said you'd tell me."

"No. I said I'd tell you if I knew Zoug-Zoug. I do."

"That's all you'll tell me?"

"That's all. And see, scavenger, take my advice and let Zoug-Zoug alone. He's a man of influence; and he's possessed of a devil. He'll make you sorry, if you meddle with him!"

He rose, and Meyerbeer did the same, saying: "You'd better tell me."

"Now, don't bother me. Drink your vermouth, take that bundle of cigarettes, and hunt Zoug-Zoug else where. If you find him, let me know. Good-bye."

Meyerbeer went out furious. The treatment had been too heroic.

"I'll give a sweet savour to your family name," he said with an oath, as he shook his fist at the closed door. Ian Belward sat back and looked at the ceiling reflectively.

"H'm!" he said at last. "What the devil does this mean? Not Andree, surely not Andree! Yet I wasn't called Zoug-Zoug before that. It was Bagshot's insolent inspiration at Auvergne. Well, well!"

He got up, drew over a portfolio of sketches, took out two or three, put them in a row against a divan, sat down, and looked at them half quizzically.

"It was rough on you, Andree; but you were hard to please, and I am constant to but one. Yet, begad, you had solid virtues; and I wish, for your sake, I had been a different kind of fellow. Well, well, we'll meet again some time, and then we'll be good friends, no doubt."

He turned away from the sketches and picked up some illustrated newspapers. In one was a portrait. He looked at it, then at the sketches again and again.

"There's a resemblance," he said. "But no, it's not possible. Andree- Mademoiselle Victorine! That would be amusing. I'd go to-morrow and see, if I weren't off to Fontainebleau. But there's no hurry: when I come back will do."

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XV. WHEREIN IS SEEN THE OLD ADAM AND THE GARDEN

At Ridley Court and Peppingham all was serene to the eye. Letters had come to the Court at least once every two weeks from Gaston, and the minds of the Baronet and his wife were at ease. They even went so far as to hope that he would influence his uncle; for it was clear to them both that whatever Gaston's faults were, they were agreeably different from Ian's. His fame and promise were sweet to their nostrils. Indeed, the young man had brought the wife and husband nearer than they had been since Robert vanished over-sea. Each had blamed the other in an indefinite, secret way; but here was Robert's son, on whom they could lavish--as they did--their affection, long since forfeited by Ian. Finally, one day, after a little burst of thanksgiving, on getting an excellent letter from Gaston, telling of his simple, amusing life in Paris, Sir William sent him one thousand pounds, begging him to buy a small yacht, or to do what he pleased with it.

"A very remarkable man, my dear," Sir William said, as he enclosed the cheque. "Excellent wisdom--excellent!"

"Who could have guessed that he knew so much about the poor and the East End, and all those social facts and figures?!" Lady Belward answered complacently.

"An unusual mind, with a singular taste for history, and yet a deep observation of the present. I don't know when and how he does it. I really do not know."

"It is nice to think that Lord Faramond approves of him."

"Most noticeable. And we have not been a Parliamentary family since the first Charles's time. And then it was a Gaston. Singular--quite singular! Coincidences of looks and character. Nature plays strange games. Reproduction--reproduction!"

"The Pall Mall Gazette says that he may soon reach the Treasury Bench."

Sir William was abstracted. He was thinking of that afternoon in Gaston's bedroom, when his grandson had acted, before Lady Dargan and Cluny Vosse, Sir Gaston's scene with Buckingham.

"Really, most mysterious, most unaccountable. But it's one of the virtues of having a descent. When it is most needed, it counts, it counts."

"Against the half-breed mother!" Lady Belward added.

"Quite so, against the--was it Cree or Blackfoot? I've heard him speak of both, but which is in him I do not remember."

"It is very painful; but, poor fellow, it is not his fault, and we ought to be content."

"Indeed, it gives him great originality. Our old families need refreshing now and then."

"Ah, yes, I said so to Mrs. Gasgoyne the other day, and she replied that the refreshment might prove intoxicating. Reine was always rude."

Truth is, Mrs. Gasgoyne was not quite satisfied. That very day she said to her husband:

"You men always stand by each other; but I know you, and you know that I know."

"'Thou knowest the secrets of our hearts'; well, then, you know how we love you. So, be merciful."

"Nonsense, Warren! I tell you he oughtn't to have gone when he did. He has the wild man in him, and I am not satisfied."

"What do you want--me to play the spy?"

"Warren, you're a fool! What do I want? I want the first of September to come quickly, that we may have him with us. With Delia he must go straight. She influences him, he admires her--which is better than mere love. Away from her just now, who can tell what mad adventure--! You see, he has had the curb so long!"

But in a day or two there came a letter-unusually long for Gaston-- to Mrs. Gasgoyne herself. It was simple, descriptive, with a dash of epigram. It acknowledged that he had felt the curb, and wanted a touch of the unconventional. It spoke of Ian Belward in a dry phrase, and it asked for the date of the yacht's arrival at Gibraltar.

"Warren, the man is still sensible," she said. "This letter is honest. He is much a heathen at heart, but I believe he hasn't given Delia cause to blush--and that's a good deal! Dear me, I am fond of the fellow-- he is so clever. But clever men are trying."

As for Delia, like every sensible English girl, she enjoyed herself in the time of youth, drinking in delightedly the interest attaching to Gaston's betrothed. His letters had been regular, kind yet not emotionally affectionate, interesting, uncommon. He had a knack of saying as much in one page as most people did in five. Her imagination was not great, but he stimulated it. If he wrote a pungent line on Daudet or Whistler, on Montaigne or Fielding, she was stimulated to know them. One day he sent her Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which he had picked up in New York on his way to England. This startled her. She had never heard of Whitman. To her he seemed coarse, incomprehensible, ungentlemanly. She could not understand how Gaston could say beautiful things about Montaigne and about Whitman too. She had no conception how he had in him the strain of that first Sir Gaston Belward, and was also the son of a half-heathen.

He interested her all the more. Her letters were hardly so fascinating to him. She was beautifully correct, but she could not make a sentence breathe. He was grateful, but nothing stirred in him. He could live without her--that he knew regretfully. But he did his part with sincere intention.

That was up to the day when he saw Andree as Mademoiselle Victorine. Then came a swift change. Day after day he visited her, always in the presence of Annette. Soon they dined often together, still in Annette's presence, and the severity of that rule was never relaxed.

Count Ploare came no more; he had received his dismissal. Occasionally Gaston visited the menagerie, but generally after the performance, when Victorine had a half-hour's or an hour's romp with her animals. This was a pleasant time to Gaston. The wild life in him responded.

These were hours when the girl was quite naive and natural, when she spent herself in ripe enjoyment--almost child-like, healthy. At other times there was an indefinable something which Gaston had not noticed in England. But then he had only seen her once. She, too, saw something in him unnoticed before. It was on his tongue a hundred times to tell her that that something was Delia Gasgoyne. He did not. Perhaps because it seemed so grotesque, perhaps because it was easier to drift. Besides, as he said to himself, he would soon go to join the yacht at Gibraltar, and all this would be over-over. All this? All what? A gipsy, a dompteuse --what was she to him? She interested him, he liked her, and she liked him, but there had been nothing more between them. Near as he was to her now, he very often saw her in his mind's eye as she passed over Ridley Common, looking towards him, her eyes shaded by her hand.

She, too, had continually said to herself that this man could be nothing to her--nothing, never! Yet, why not? Count Ploare had offered her his hand. But she knew what had been in Count Ploare's mind. Gaston Belward was different--he had befriended her father. She had not singular scruples regarding men, for she despised most of them. She was not a Mademoiselle Cerise, nor a Madame Juliette, though they were higher on the plane of art than she; or so the world put it. She had not known a man who had not, one time or another, shown himself common or insulting. But since the first moment she had seen Gaston, he had treated her as a lady.

A lady? She had seen enough to smile at that. She knew that she hadn't it in her veins, that she was very much an actress, except in this man's company, when she was mostly natural--as natural as one can be who has a painful secret. They had talked together--for how many hours? She knew exactly. And he had never descended to that which--she felt instinctively--he would not have shown to the ladies of his English world. She knew what ladies were. In her first few weeks in Paris, her fame mounting, she had lunched with some distinguished people, who entertained her as they would have done one of her lions, if that were possible. She understood. She had a proud, passionate nature; she rebelled at this. Invitations were declined at first on pink note-paper with gaudy flowers in a corner, afterwards on cream-laid vellum, when she saw what the great folk did.

And so the days went on, he telling her of his life from his boyhood up --all but the one thing! But that one thing she came to know, partly by instinct, partly by something he accidentally dropped, partly from something Jacques once said to him. Well, what did it matter to her? He would go back; she would remain. It didn't matter.--Yet, why should she lie to herself? It did matter. And why should she care about that girl in England? She was not supposed to know. The other had everything in her favour; what had Andree the gipsy girl, or Mademoiselle Victorine, the dompteuse?

One Sunday evening, after dining together, she asked him to take her to see Saracen. It was a long-standing promise. She had never seen him riding; for their hours did not coincide until the late afternoon or evening. Taking Annette, they went to his new apartments. He had furnished a large studio as a sitting-room, not luxuriantly but pleasantly. It opened into a pretty little garden, with a few plants and trees. They sat there while Jacques went for the horse. Next door a number of students were singing a song of the boulevards. It was followed by one in a woman's voice, sweet and clear and passionate, pitifully reckless. It was, as if in pure contradiction, the opposite of the other--simple, pathetic. At first there were laughing interruptions from the students; but the girl kept on, and soon silence prevailed, save for the voice:

"And when the wine is dry upon the lip, And when the flower is broken by the hand, And when I see the white sails of thy ship Fly on, and leave me there upon the sand: Think you that I shall weep? Nay, I shall smile: The wine is drunk, the flower it is gone, One weeps not when the days no more beguile, How shall the tear-drops gather in a stone?"

When it was ended, Andree, who had listened intently, drew herself up with a little shudder. She sat long, looking into the garden, the cub playing at her feet. Gaston did not disturb her. He got refreshments and put them on the table, rolled a cigarette, and regarded the scene. Her knee was drawn up slightly in her hands, her hat was off, her rich brown hair fell loosely about her head, framing it, her dark eyes glowed under her bent brows. The lion's cub crawled up on the divan, and thrust its nose under an arm. Its head clung to her waist. Who was she? thought Gaston. Delilah, Cleopatra--who? She was lost in thought. She remained so until the garden door opened, and Jacques entered with Saracen.

She looked. Suddenly she came to her feet with a cry of delight, and ran out towards the horse. There was something essentially child-like in her, something also painfully wild-an animal, and a philosopher, and twenty-three.

Jacques put out his hand as he had done with Mademoiselle Cerise.

"No, no; he is savage."

"Nonsense!" she rejoined, and came closer.

Gaston watched, interested. He guessed what she would do.

"A horse!" she added. "Why, you have seen my lions! Leave him free: stand away from him."

Her words were peremptory, and Jacques obeyed. The horse stood alone, a hoof pawing the ground. Presently it sprang away, then half-turned towards the girl, and stood still. She kept talking to him and calling softly, making a coaxing, animal-like sound, as she always did with her lions.

She stepped forward a little and paused. The horse suddenly turned straight towards her, came over slowly, and, with arched neck, dropped his head on her shoulder. She felt the folds of his neck and kissed him. He followed her about the garden like a dog. She brought him to Gaston, locked up, and said with a teasing look, "I have conquered him: he is mine!"

Gaston looked her in her eyes. "He is yours."

"And you?"

"He is mine." His look burned into her soul-how deep, how joyful!

She turned away, her face going suddenly pale. She kept the horse for some time, but at last gave him up again to Jacques. Gaston stepped from the doorway into the garden and met her. It was now dusk. Annette was inside. They walked together in silence for a time. Presently she drew close to him. He felt his veins bounding. Her hand slid into his arm, and, dark as it was, he could see her eyes lifting to his, shining, profound. They had reached the end of the garden, and now turned to come back again.

Suddenly he said, his eyes holding hers: "The horse is yours--and mine."

She stood still; but he could see her bosom heaving hard. She threw up her head with a sound half sob, half laugh. . . .

"You are mad!" she said a moment afterwards, as she lifted her head from his breast.

He laughed softly, catching her cheek to his. "Why be sane? It was to be."

"The gipsy and the gentleman?"

"Gipsies all!"

"And the end of it?"

"Do you not love me, Andree?" She caught her hands over her eyes.

"I do not know what it is--only that it is madness! I see, oh, I see a hundred things."

Her hot eyes were on space. "What do you see?!" he urged. She gave a sudden cry:

"I see you at my feet--dead."

"Better than you at mine, Andree."

"Let us go," she said hurriedly.

"Wait," he whispered.

They talked for a little time. Then they entered the studio. Annette was asleep in her chair. Andree waked her, and they bade Gaston good- night.

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XVI. WHEREIN LOVE KNOWS NO LAW SAVE THE MAN'S WILL

In another week it was announced that Mademoiselle Victorine would take a month's holiday; to the sorrow of her chief, and to the delight of Mr. Meyerbeer, who had not yet discovered his man, though he had a pretty scandal well-nigh brewed.

Count Ploare was no more, Gaston Belward was. Zoug-Zoug was in the country at Fontainebleau, working at his picture. He had left on the morning after Gaston discovered Andree. He had written, asking his nephew to come for some final sittings. Possibly, he said, Mademoiselle Cerise and others would be down for a Sunday. Gaston had not gone, had briefly declined. His uncle shrugged his shoulders, and went on with other work. It would end in his having to go to Paris and finish the picture there, he said. Perhaps the youth was getting into mischief? So much the better. He took no newspapers.--What did an artist need of them? He did not even read the notices sent by a press-cutting agency. He had a model with him. She amused him for the time, but it was unsatisfactory working on "The King of Ys" from photographs. He loathed it, and gave it up.

One evening Gaston and Andree met at the Gare Montparnasse. Jacques was gone on, but Annette was there. Meyerbeer was there also, at a safe distance. He saw Gaston purchase tickets, arrange his baggage, and enter the train. He passed the compartment, looking in. Besides the three, there was a priest and a young soldier.

Gaston saw him, and guessed what brought him there. He had an impulse to get out and shake him as would Andree's cub a puppy. But the train moved off. Meyerbeer found Gaston's porter. A franc did the business.

"Douarnenez, for Audierne, Brittany," was the legend written in Meyerbeer's note-book. And after that: "Journey twenty hours--change at Rennes, Redon, and Quimpere."

"Too far. I've enough for now," said Meyerbeer, chuckling, as he walked away. "But I'd give five hundred dollars to know who Zoug-Zoug is. I'll make another try."

So he held his sensation back for a while yet. Of the colony at the Hotel St. Malo, not one of the three who knew would tell him. Bagshot had sworn the others to secrecy.

Jacques had gone on with the horses. He was to rent a house, or get rooms at a hotel. He did very well. The horses were stalled at the Hotel de France. He had rented an old chateau perched upon a hill, with steps approaching, steps flanking; near it strange narrow alleys, leading where one cared not to search; a garden of pears and figs, and grapes, and innumerable flowers and an arbour; a pavilion, all windows, over an entranceway, with a shrine in it--a be-starred shrine below it; bare floors, simple furniture, primitiveness at every turn.

Gaston and Andree came, of choice, with a courier in a racketing old diligence from Douarnenez, and they laughed with delight, tired as they were, at the new quarters. It must be a gipsy kind of existence at the most.

There were rooms for Jacques and Annette, who at once set to work with the help of a little Breton maid. Jacques had not ordered a dinner at the hotel, but had got in fresh fish, lobsters, chickens, eggs, and other necessaries; and all was ready for a meal which could be got in an hour.

Jacques had now his hour of happiness. He knew not of these morals-- they were beyond him; but after a cheerful dinner in the pavilion, with an omelette made by Andree herself, Annette went to her room and cried herself to sleep. She was civilised, poor soul, and here they were a stone's throw from the cure and the church! Gaston and Andree, refreshed, travelled down the long steps to the village, over the place, along the quay, to the lighthouse and the beach, through crowds of sardine fishers and simple hard-tongued Bretons. Cheerful, buoyant at dinner, there now came upon the girl an intense quiet and fatigue. She stood and looked long at the sea. Gaston tried to rouse her.

"This is your native Brittany, Andree," he said. She pointed far over the sea:

"Near that light at Penmark I was born."

"Can you speak the Breton language?"

"Far worse than you speak Parisian French."

He laughed. "You are so little like these people!"

She had vanity. That had been part of her life. Her beauty had brought trade when she was a gipsy; she had been the admired of Paris: she was only twenty three. Presently she became restless, and shrank from him. Her eyes had a flitting hunted look. Once they met his with a wild sort of pleading or revolt, he could not tell which, and then were continually turned away.

If either could have known how hard the little dwarf of sense and memory was trying to tell her something.

This new phase stunned him. What did it mean? He touched her hand. It was hot, and withdrew from his. He put his arm around her, and she shivered, cringed. But then she was a woman, he thought. He had met one unlike any he had ever known. He would wait. He would be patient. Would she come--home? She turned passively and took his arm. He talked, but he knew he was talking poorly, and at last he became silent also. But when they came to the steep steps leading to the chateau, he lifted her in his arms, carried her to the house, and left her at their chamber- door.

Then he went to the pavilion to smoke. He had no wish to think-- at least of anything but the girl. It was not a time for retrospect, but to accept a situation. The die had been cast. He had followed what --his nature, his instincts? The consequence?

He heard Andree's voice. He went to her.

The next morning they were in the garden walking about. They had been speaking, but now both were silent. At last he turned again to her.

"Andree, who was the other man?!" he asked quietly, but with a strange troubled look in his eyes.

She shrank away confused, a kind of sickness in her eyes.

"What does it matter?!" she said.

"Of course, of course," he returned in a low, nerveless tone.

They were silent for a long time. Meanwhile, she seemed to beat up a feverish cheerfulness. At last she said:

"Where do we go this afternoon, Gaston?"

"We will see," he replied.

The day passed, another, and another. The same: she shrank from him, was impatient, agitated, unhappy, went out alone. Annette saw, and mourned, entreated, prayed; Jacques was miserable. There was no joyous passion to redeem the situation for which Gaston had risked so much.

They rode, they took excursions in fishing-boats and little sail-boats. Andree entered into these with zest: talked to the sailors, to Jacques, caressed children, and was not indifferent to the notice she attracted in the village; but was obviously distrait. Gaston was patient--and unhappy. So, this was the merchandise for which he had bartered all! But he had a will, he was determined; he had sowed, he would reap his harvest to the useless stubble.

"Do you wish to go back to your work?!" he said quietly, once.

"I have no work," she answered apathetically. He said no more just then.

The days and weeks went by. The situation was impossible, not to be understood. Gaston made his final move. He hoped that perhaps a forced crisis might bring about a change. If it failed--he knew not what! She was sitting in the garden below--he alone in the window, smoking. A bundle of letters and papers, brought by the postman that evening, were beside him. He would not open them yet. He felt that there was trouble in them--he saw phrases, sentences flitting past him. But he would play this other bitter game out first. He let them lie. He heard the bells in the church ringing the village commerce done--it was nine o'clock. The picture of that other garden in Paris came to him: that night when he had first taken this girl into his arms. She sat below talking to Annette and singing a little Breton chanson:

"Parvondt varbondt anan oun, Et die don la lire! Parvondt varbondt anan oun, Et die don la, la!"

He called down to her presently. "Andree!"

"Yes."

"Will you come up for a moment, please?"

"Surely."

She came up, leaving the room door open, and bringing the cub with her.

He called Jacques.

"Take the cub to its quarters, Jacques," he said, quietly.

She seemed about to protest, but sat back and watched him. He shut the door--locked it. Then he came and sat down before her.

"Andree," he said, "this is all impossible."

"What is impossible?"

"You know well. I am not a mere brute. The only thing that can redeem this life is love."

"That is true," she said, coldly. "What then?"

"You do not redeem it. We must part."

She laughed fitfully. "We must--?"

She leaned towards him.

"To-morrow evening you will go back to Paris. To-night we part, however: that is, our relations cease."

"I shall go from here when it pleases me, Gaston!"

His voice came low and stern, but courteous:

"You must go when I tell you. Do you think I am the weaker?"

He could see her colour flying, her fingers lacing and interlacing.

"Aren't you afraid to tell me that?!" she asked.

"Afraid? Of my life--you mean that? That you will be as common as that? No: you will do as I tell you."

He fixed his eyes on hers, and held them. She sat, looking. Presently she tried to take her eyes away. She could not. She shuddered and shrank.

He withdrew his eyes for a moment. "You will go?!" he asked.

"It makes no difference," she answered; then added sharply: "Who are you, to look at me like that, to--!"

She paused.

"I am your friend and your master!"

He rose. "Good-night," he said, at the door, and went out.

He heard the key turn in the lock. He had forgotten his papers and letters. It did not matter. He would read them when she was gone--if she did go. He was far from sure that he had succeeded. He went to bed in another room, and was soon asleep.

He was waked in the very early morning by feeling a face against his, wet, trembling.

"What is it, Andree?!" he asked. Her arms ran round his neck.

"Oh, mon amour! Mon adore! Je t'aime! Je t'aime!"

In the evening of this day she said she knew not how it was, but on that first evening in Audierne there suddenly came to her a strange terrible feeling, which seemed to dry up all the springs of her desire for him. She could not help it. She had fought against it, but it was no use; yet she knew that she could not leave him. After he had told her to go, she had had a bitter struggle: now tears, now anger, and a wish to hate. At last she fell asleep. When she awoke she had changed, she was her old self, as in Paris, when she had first confessed her love. She felt that she must die if she did not go to him. All the first passion returned, the passion that began on the common at Ridley Court. "And now--now," she said, "I know that I cannot live without you."

It seemed so. Her nature was emptying itself. Gaston had got the merchandise for which he had given a price yet to be known.

"You asked me of the other man," she said. "I will tell you."

"Not now," he said. "You loved him?"

"No--ah God, no!" she answered.

An hour after, when she was in her room, he opened the little bundle of correspondence.--A memorandum with money from his bankers. A letter from Delia, and also one from Mrs. Gasgoyne, saying that they expected to meet him at Gibraltar on a certain day, and asking why he had not written; Delia with sorrowful reserve, Mrs. Gasgoyne with impatience. His letters had missed them--he had written on leaving Paris, saying that his plans were indefinite, but he would write them definitely soon. After he came to Audierne it seemed impossible to write. How could he? No, let the American journalist do it. Better so. Better himself in the worst light, with the full penalty, than his own confession--in itself an insult. So it had gone on. He slowly tore up the letters. The next were from his grandfather and grandmother--they did not know yet. He could not read them. A few loving sentences, and then he said:

"What's the good! Better not." He tore them up also. Another--from his uncle. It was brief:

You've made a sweet mess of it, Cadet. It's in all the papers to- day. Meyerbeer telegraphed it to New York and London. I'll probably come down to see you. I want to finish my picture on the site of the old City of Ys, there at Point du Raz. Your girl can pose with you. I'll do all I can to clear the thing up. But a British M.P.--that's a tough pill for Clapham!

Gaston's foot tapped the floor angrily. He scattered the pieces of the letter at his feet. Now for the newspapers. He opened Le Petit Journal, Coil Blas, Galignani, and the New York Tom-Tom, one by one. Yes, it was there, with pictures of himself and Andree. A screaming sensation. Extracts, too, from the English papers by telegram. He read them all unflinchingly. There was one paragraph which he did not understand:

There was a previous friend of the lady, unknown to the public, called Zoug-Zoug.

He remembered that day at the Hotel St. Malo! Well, the bolt was shot: the worst was over. Quid refert? Justify himself?

Certainly, to all but Delia Gasgoyne.

Thousands of men did the same--did it in cold blood, without one honest feeling. He did it, at least under a powerful influence. He could not help but smile now at the thought of how he had filled both sides of the equation. On his father's side, bringing down the mad record from Naseby; on his mother's, true to the heathen, by following his impulses --sacred to primitive man, justified by spear, arrow, and a strong arm. Why sheet home this as a scandal? How did they--the libellers--know but that he had married the girl? Exactly. He would see to that. He would play his game with open sincerity now. He could have wished secrecy for Delia Gasgoyne, and for his grandfather and grandmother,--he was not wilfully brutal,--but otherwise he had no shame at all; he would stand openly for his right. Better one honest passion than a life of deception and miserable compromise. A British M.P.?--He had thrown away his reputation, said the papers. By this? The girl was no man's wife, he was no woman's husband!

Marry her? Yes, he would marry her; she should be his wife. His people? It was a pity. Poor old people--they would fret and worry. He had been selfish, had not thought of them? Well, who could foresee this outrage of journalism? The luck had been dead against him. Did he not know plenty of men in London--he was going to say the Commons, but he was fairer to the Commons than it, as a body, would be to him--who did much worse? These had escaped: the hunters had been after him. What would he do? Take the whip? He got to his feet with an oath. Take the whip? Never--never! He would fight this thing tooth and nail. Had he come to England to let them use him for a sensation only--a sequence of surprises, to end in a tragedy, all for the furtive pleasure of the British breakfast-table? No, by the Eternal! What had the first Gaston done? He had fought--fought Villiers and others, and had held up his head beside his King and Rupert till the hour of Naseby.

When the summer was over he would return to Paris, to London. The journalist--punish him? No; too little--a product of his time. But the British people he would fight, and he would not give up Ridley Court. He could throw the game over when it was all his, but never when it was going dead against him.

That speech in the Commons? He remembered gladly that he had contended for conceptions of social miseries according to surrounding influences of growth and situation. He had not played the hypocrite.

No, not even with Delia. He had acted honestly at the beginning, and afterwards he had done what he could so long as he could. It was inevitable that she must be hurt, even if he had married, not giving her what he had given this dompteuse. After all, was it so terrible? It could not affect her much in the eyes of the world. And her heart? He did not flatter himself. Yet he knew that it would be the thing--the fallen idol--that would grieve her more than thought of the man. He wished that he could have spared her in the circumstances. But it had all come too suddenly: it was impossible. He had spared, he could spare, nobody. There was the whole situation. What now to do?--To remain here while it pleased them, then Paris, then London for his fight.

Three days went round. There were idle hours by the sea, little excursions in a sail-boat to Penmark, and at last to Point du Raz. It was a beautiful day, with a gentle breeze, and the point was glorified. The boat ran in lightly between the steep dark shore and the comb of reef that looked like a host of stealthy pumas crumbling the water. They anchored in the Bay des Trepasses. An hour on shore exploring the caves, and lunching, and then they went back to the boat, accompanied by a Breton sailor, who had acted as guide.

Gaston lay reading,--they were in the shade of the cliff,--while Andree listened to the Breton tell the legends of the coast. At length Gaston's attention was attracted. The old sailor was pointing to the shore, and speaking in bad French.

"Voila, madame, where the City of Ys stood long before the Bretons came. It was a foolish ride."

"I do not know the story. Tell me."

"There are two or three, but mine is the oldest. A flood came--sent by the gods, for the woman was impious. The king must ride with her into the sea and leave her there, himself to come back, and so save the city."

The sailor paused to scan the sea--something had struck him. He shook his head. Gaston was watching Andree from behind his book.

"Well, well," she said, impatiently, "what then? What did he do?"

"The king took up the woman, and rode into the water as far as where you see the great white stone--it has been there ever since. There he had a fight--not with the woman, but in his heart. He turned to the people, and cried: 'Dry be your streets, and as ashes your eyes for your king!' And then he rode on with the woman till they saw him no more--never!" Andree said instantly:

"That was long ago. Now the king would ride back alone."

She did not look at Gaston, but she knew that his eyes were on her. He closed the book, got up, came forward to the sailor, who was again looking out to sea, and said carelessly over his shoulder:

"Men who lived centuries ago would act the same now, if they were here."

Her response seemed quite as careless as his: "How do you know?"

"Perhaps I had an innings then," he answered, smiling whimsically.

She was about to speak again, but the guide suddenly said:

"You must get away. There'll be a change of wind and a bad cross-current soon."

In a few minutes the two were bearing out--none too soon, for those pumas crowded up once or twice within a fathom of their deck, devilish and devouring. But they wore away with a capricious current, and down a tossing sea made for Audierne.

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