 21 The less wit a man has, the less he knows that he wants it. The vicarage is within a stone's throw of the direhouse. Mr. and Miss Black were solemnly seated opposite each other at tea, and Mr. Black was roofily reflecting, as he often did at mealtimes, on his sister's incapacity as a housekeeper. We sometimes read in the biographies of eminent men how trains and boats always alluded to those distinguished personages in spite of their pathetic eagerness to overtake them, how their luggage and purses and important papers fled from them, how their empties to chairs too frequently represented them on state occasions. Miss Black was not alluded by such baggattels as trains and omnibuses, but by things of greater importance—by new-laid eggs and fresh butter and cottage loaves. No egg until it was of a vast middle age would come within a mile of Miss Black. The whole village was aware that old Purvis sold her potted eggs at new-laid prices, and that she never detected the lime on them. Sconds and cakes and loaves with kissing crust remained obdurately huddled in the baker's cart at the vicarage back door. All that ever found their way into the house were those unappropriated blessings, those emotionless rectangular travesties of bread called tin loaves. Coffee and Miss Black were not on speaking terms. After years of deadly enmity she had relinquished the fruitless struggle, and gave her brother coffee essence instead for breakfast—two spoonfuls to a cup of tepid milk. Bar and water would not serve Miss Black. The bath water was always cold at the vicarage, and the drinking water was invariably warm. Butter, that sensitive ally of the housekeeper, bore her a grudge. Miss Black said that all the rift butter was bad. In London she had said the same. Biscuits became demoralised directly they set tin in the house. The first that emerged from the box were crisp to delicious, but in a day or two they were all weary, tough and tasteless. They were kept on plates on sideboards in the sun, or thrust into mousy cupboards. She left off ordering gingerbread nuts at last, which her brother liked, because they all stuck together like a putty. She attributed this peculiarity to the proximity of the ribbon. Miss Black was no more perturbed by the ostracism in which she lived as regards the vegetable and mineral kingdom, than Napoleon was by the alliance of Europe against him. She combined a high opinion of herself with a rooty conviction that everything vexatious or disagreeable was inherent in the nature of things, a sort of original sin. It was in the fallen nature of butter to be rancid, an eggs to be laid stale, a milk to be sour, and villages to cheat and old people to be fretful, and pretty women, like a net, to be vain and unscrupulous, and men, like her brother, to care inordinately about food and to be enslaved by external attractions. She expected these things, and many more, as she stumped through life, and she was not disappointed. I think you are wrong, Walter, she said, masticating a plasmon biscuit. In making Miss George's take that bit in the anthemas as solo, I went to see Mrs. Cox this afternoon, and we got talking of the car, and I'm sure she did not like it. I cannot stay on my course entirely by Mrs. Cox. Of course not, but she told me that in Mr. Jones's time I'm rather tired of hearing of Mr. Jones and his times. In his time all the troubles took the solo together to prevent any jealousy or ill-feeling. I can't prevent jealousy of Miss George's, so Mr. Black, looking coldly at his sister, and then still more coldly at the cup of tea she handed him, made a quarter of an hour before by the young servant who, as the Miss Blinkets, who had trained her, had faithfully warmed Miss Black, mistook bubbling for boiling. The tea was the consistency of treacle, and the cream his sister poured into it instantly took the contorted worm-like shapes which sour cream does take. Miss Black drank hers slowly, not finding it good, but thinking it was like all other tea. You won't make the jealousy less by putting her forward in everything. It irritates me to hear Miss George's voice muffled up with Mrs. Cox and Jane Smith. I don't suppose the Ref Church has ever had such a voice in it since it was built. I'm sure I can't tell you about that, but Miss George has been partly trained for a public singer. Ah, she, I did not know that. The truth is we know very little about her. I'm not sure we ought not to have made more inquiries before we admitted her to the choir and the Sunday School. My dear, poor good nature on her part is responsible for her being in either, and could anything be more ultra-respectable than her aunts. We don't know who her father was. I should not wonder if he were an actor. Her manner of singing is so theatrical. Not quite a good example for the other trebles. She draws attention to herself. She can't help that, Angela. This is partly due to her appearance for which she is not responsible. Mr. Black, patient and kindly by nature, showed to greater advantage with his sister than with Annette, because he never attempted to show Miss Black the sort of man he was. You could not be two minutes in her society without realising that she saw no more difference between one person and another than she did between fresh eggs and a stale. Men were meant to her, as eggs were eggs, and that was all about it. She is responsible for a good deal of the attention she courts. Said Miss Black scornfully, and with a modicum of truth on her side. She did not let her hair stand out over her ears or make those two little curls in the nape of her neck. And did you notice her absurd hat? I noticed nothing absurd about it. When everyone is wearing trimmed hats, she must need to make herself conspicuous in a perfectly plain straw with no trimming at all, except that black ribbon tied under her chin. She was staring at her last Sunday. That I can well believe. I asked her why she got that nice garden hat. It is impossible how angry you would have been if she had asked you where you got yours. Miss Black glanced for the first time at a battered but elaborate arrangement sprinkled with corn-flowers, certainly a little crooked, like a badly balanced plate, on the top of his sister's narrow head. She wasn't the least angry. There was nothing to be offended at. And she said her aunt in Paris sent it to her, who was a milliner. How like her to say that, to volunteer it, said Mr. Black, aware that his sister was watching how he took the news of Annette's connection with trade. But we must be careful how we repeat it. In this amazing little world of Riff, it might be against her to have a milliner for an aunt. I don't see that Riff is more amazing than any other place, said Miss Black, who had already circulated the story of the dressmaking aunt with the same diligence which she showed in the distribution of the parish magazine. I hope we can all be civil to Miss George's, even if her aunt is a dressmaker, and her father lures still in the social scale. She has no D before her name, and George's is a very common surname. Indeed. Perhaps you are thinking of asking her to change it, said his sister, whose temper was liable to boil up with all the suddenness of milk. I've not got so far as that, he said, rising. You must remember, Angela, that you see a possible wife for me, and every woman I exchange a word with. It is very flattering that you should think so many might be prevailed on to share my little vicarage. But the church only allows me one wife, and the selection, I believe, rests with me. I know that. It's so silly to talk as if I expected anything different. All I can say is that if I could delude myself into believing that Miss George's put on that hat, or any other hat, with a view to attracting me, I should feel some alacrity in finishing my Sunday sermon, which I must now do without any alacrity at all. Miss Black swallowed the remains of her Plasmon biscuit, and said, in the voice of one accustomed to the last word, Miss George's is very good-looking, of course. No one admires that sort of pale, clear compaction and calm manner more than I do. But you must remember that they are merely the result of a constitution free from an excess of uric acid. Non-guided subjects always look like that. CHAPTER XXII Give me the sweet cup wrought of the earth from which I was born, and none of which I shall lie dead. Zonus From the church-tower, reader, you can see beyond the mill and the long-water meadows the little hamlet of Swale. That old house in the midst, with its wonderful twisted chimneys and broken wall, was once the home of the extinct Wellishams of Swale. But the name of Wellisham, embedded in the history of Losha, and still renowned in India, is forgotten in Riff. Their old house, fast falling into ruins, is now used as a farm, until Roger can get leave to restore it, or put it down. The sky looks in at the upper rooms. No one dare go up the wide-oaked staircase, and Mrs. Nicholls' chickens roost on the carved balustrade of the Minstrel's gallery. We will go there next. Mrs. Nicholls, the devoted nurse of all the Manfa's family, and the principal treble in the choir, had married at a portly age the tenant farmer at Swale, and Annette was having tea with her on this particular afternoon, and hearing a full description which scorned all omissions of the last illness of Mr. Nicholls, who had not been able to take a bite in his head of anything solid for many weeks before his death. And so, Miss, said Mrs. Nicholls philosophically, when he went, I thought it was all for the best. It's a poor thing for a man to live by suction. Annette agreed. The mill seems quite empty this afternoon, she said, possibly not unwilling to change the subject. There's hardly a cell to be seen. I expect they've all gone so Sir Harry's lectioned tea. There, Mrs. Nicholls, I used to go while Nicholls was alive, very convenient it was, but Sir Harry don't want no widders nor single spinsters, only wives of them as as votes. Politics were not so complicated twenty years ago as they are now. Those were the simple days when Sir Harry Ogden, the member, vainly opined that he was for church and state, and gave tea shortly before the election to the wives of his constituents. And the ladies of Swale and Riff, and even the great Mrs. Nicholls, thought none the worse of their member, because there was always a sovereign at the bottom of the cup. Mr. Black wants to start a mother's meeting in Swale. Continued Annette. He asked me to talk it over with you. I know he's hoping for your nice parlour for it, so beautiful as you always keep it. Mrs. Nicholls was softened by the compliment to her parlour, the condition of which was as well known as that Queen Victoria was on the throne, but you find that there had been a deal too much argy-bargy already among the Swale matrons about the mother's meeting, and that she did not see her way to joining it. Annette, who had been deputed by Mr. Black to find out the mysterious cause of Mrs. Nicholls' reluctance, remarked meditatively, I don't know how the vicar will get on without you, Mrs. Nicholls. No, Miss, said Mrs. Nicholls. Of course not. He was here only yesterday, and he says to me, Mrs. Nicholls, the Swale folk ought to all hang together, and we look to you. And I says, Sir, it's not for me to chunter with you, but it's no matter of you setting me up as a Queen in Swale, when there's Mrs. Tompkins as bountiful as can be, as has been expecting homage ever since she and her spring-cart came in last Lammus, which none of us don't feel obligated to bow down to her. Of course not. But there are others beside Mrs. Tompkins. There are the Tamzies, your next-door neighbours. They are quiet, hard-working people with a lot of little ones. She would be very thankful, I know, to join the mother's meeting, if the vicar can start it. Mrs. Tamzies, said Mrs. Nicholls, judicially, I dare say Mrs. Tamzies would like anything she can get, whether it's out of my pink tub or her own. That may no difference to Mrs. Tamzies, nor what to put on the edge to dry, if so be as anything's blow to her She's that near she'd take the pence off the eyes of her mother's corp. No, Miss, I do a deal for the vicar, but I won't have Mrs. Tamzies in my place, nor I won't set foot in hers. Not that I ain't sorry for her, with Tamzies coming home roaring on a Saturday night, and actoring and bullocking about till the children has to sleep in the end-roost. And in the course of conversation Mrs. Nicholls had last to divulge to Inaid what she kept bottled up from Mr. Black, and indeed from every one, that the real reason that her mother's meeting could not be instituted in the small circle of the Swale-matrons, even if the gathering did not include Mrs. Tamzies, was because of old Mr. Thornton's death. Mr. Thornton, it seemed, had been an octogenranium and the last sediment of his family, and not one of his own kin to put him in his coffin. The Swale-ladies had taken the last duties on themselves, and there had been unpleasantness at the laying out, so that friendly relations had been suspended between them ever since the funeral. Annette sighed as she left Mrs. Nicholls and set out across the meadows towards Riff. She was to meet Janey in the Halver Gardens, and help her to pick the snap-dragons, now blooming rat-lessly there. But one small sigh for the doomed mother's meeting was the only tribute Annette paid to it, her thoughts reverted quickly to other subjects. Her placid, easy-going mind was troubled. The long letter written at night to Mrs. Stoddart three weeks ago had never been posted. The following morning her brought a hurried line from her friend, saying she was that moment starting on a yachting trip with her son. She mentioned that she was coming down to Annette's neighbourhood in a month's time on a visit to Mr. Sterling at Noyes, when she hoped for opportunities of seeing her. Annette had dropped her own letter into the fire, not without a sense of relief. She'd hated the idea of immediate action, and she'd been spared it. She would go on quietly until she could confer with Mrs. Stoddart. But in spite of the momentary respite, the fear remained at the back of her mind that when Mrs. Stoddart did know about the manbers' family, she would almost certainly insist on Annette's leaving riff. Annette could see for herself that her position there was untenable. But the longing to remain grew, nevertheless. She vaguely, foolishly, hoped that some way of remaining might yet be found. For she was drawn towards riff, as she'd never been drawn to any other place. Partly no doubt because, owing to her aunt's death, all her energies had been called out there for the first time in her life. It had been no sinecure to take Aunt Cathy's place. She had taken it, and she had filled it. She was no longer a pale, useless, discontented girl, cooped up in an airless London house with two self-centered elder women whom she'd secretly despised for immolating their sister. Mother Terrance were under her protection and absolutely depended on her, and, if they had but known it, at her mercy. She'd become at first tolerant of them, and then compassionate and amused, and finally affectionate. If she kept her own life entirely apart from them, they were not aware of it. For neither of the Miss Neville's had yet discovered that though they themselves were not alive, others might be. Annette had done nothing since her return to them to break that illusion so rudely shaken by her departure. In their opinion Annette had now settled down, and each aunt was secretly of opinion that her niece's existence was supported by copious draughts from the deep wells of our own wisdom and experience. But perhaps Annette had other incentives for clinging to riff. Sometimes as we go through life we become conscious of a mysterious instinctive attraction towards certain homely people and certain kindly places for which we cannot account to which we can only yield. They seemed to belong to us, to have a special significance for us. When Annette first saw Janey and Roger, she felt that she'd known them all her life, that they'd long been part of her existence. When first she walked with them beside the Riban she seemed to recognize every turn of the stream. The deep primrose-lames welcomed her back to them. Had she wanted down them in some previous existence? When she gathered her first posie of ladies' smock in the long water-made only of the mill, the little milk-white flower said, Why have you been away from us so long? And when, a few days later, she first stood with Janey in the April sunshine on the wide terrace of Halver, the stately shuttered house had seemed to envelop her with its ancient peace, and to whisper to her, I am home. Annette reached the bridge by the mill and looked across the tranquil water to the village clustering round the church and the old red-gabled manor-house standing among its hollies. Her heart throbbed suddenly. Surely the angel with the sword would not drive her away again. End of CHAPTER XXII Mr. Sterling and his nephew were standing in the long picture-gallery of Halver, looking at the portrait of Roger Manvers of Dunwich, who inherited Halver in Charles II's time. His grandmother, Angela Poel, that pinch-looking old woman in the rough, would never have left it to her daughter's son if she had had anyone else to leave it to, said Mr. Sterling. She built Halver in the shape of an E in honour of her kinswoman, Queen Elizabeth. That prim-little picture below her portrait shows the house when it was new. It must have looked very much the same then as it does now, except that the hollies were all trimmed to fantastic shapes. Look at the birds and domes and crowns. Highlight them better as they are now, said his nephew, a weak-looking youth with projecting teeth, his spectacle eyes turning from the picture to the renowned avenue of hollies, now stooping and spitting at extreme old age. I've often wondered what homely Roger Manvers, the birdies of Dunwich, must have felt when old Anne actually left him this place after her only son was drowned. I can so well imagine him riding over here, a careful, ready man, not unlike the present Roger Manvers, and having a look at his inheritance, and debating with himself whether he would leave Dunwich and settle here. And did he? Yes, the seed is hiding out for him. A year later it swept away the town of Dunwich as far as Maison-du, and it swept away Roger Manvers' pleasant house, my joy, and he moved across the borders of Suffolk to Lausier with all he had been able to save from his old home and established himself here. I like the way he's hung those wooden-looking pictures of his birdies' forebears and their furred cloaks and chains among the brocaded Durbans and Dullapoles. Roger Manvers told me that it was old Roger who first took the property in hand, and heightened the Kirby Dam, and drained Mendelsham Marsh, and built the real farm-sizes. The Dullapoles had never troubled themselves about such matters, and to think of that wretched creature the present owner tearing the old place limb from limb, throwing it from limb with both hands, makes me miserable. Avow, I will never come here again." The caretaker had unshuttered a few among the long line of windows, and the airlessness, the ghostly outlines of the muffled furniture, the dust which lay gray on everything, the faint smell of dry rot, all struck at Mr. Stirling's sensitive spirit and oppressed him. He turned impatiently to the windows. If it is a misfortune to bestow it, even if one is tall, and to be short, even if one is slim, and to be fifty, even if one is of a cheerful temperament, and to be bald, even if one has a well-shaped head, then Mr. Stirling, who was short and stout, and bald as well, and fifty into the bargain, was somewhat heavily handicapped as to his outer man. But one immense compensation was his for an unattractive personality. He never gave it a moment's thought, and consequently no one else did either. His body was no more than a travelling suit to him. It was hardy, durable. He was comfortable in it, grateful to it, on good terms with it, worked it hard, and used it to the uttermost, that it was not more ornamental than at Lansdon bag, did not trouble him. "'Put it all in a book,' said his nephew absently, whose eyes were glued to the pictures. "'Put it in a book, Uncle Reggie!' Mr. Stirling had long since ceased to be annoyed by a remark which is about as pleasant to a writer as a suggestion of embezzlement is to a bank manager. "'Have you seen enough, Jeff? Shall we go?' he said. "'Wait a bit. Where's the ray-burn?' "'Highland Mary, sold. Port Butcher and America bought her for a fabulous sum. I believe Dick Manvers lost the whole of it on one race. If there is coin in the works-world, he will play ducks and drakes with it upon the glassy sea.' "'Sold, good God!' said his nephew, staring horror-struck at his umfical. "'How awful! Pictures ought not to belong to individuals, the nation ought to have them.' "'He seems staggered. Awful!' he said again. "'What a tragedy!' "'To my mind, that is more tragic,' said Mr. Stirling bluntly, pointing to the window. Into the deserted garden, near the sundial, Janey was standing, a small, nondescript figure in a mushroom hat, picking snap-dragons. The gardens had been allowed to run wild for lack of funds to keep them in order, and had become beautiful exceedingly in consequence. The rose-coloured snap-dragons and amber-lupins were struggling to hold their own in their stone-edged beds against an invasion of willow-weed. A convolvulus had climbed to the sundial, wrapping it round and round, and had laid its bold white trumpet-flowers on the leaded disc itself. Janey had not disturbed it. Perhaps she thought that no one but herself sought to see the time there. The snap-dragons rose in a great blot of struggling rose and white and wine-red round her feet. She was picking them slowly, as one whose mind was not following her hand. At a little distance Harry was lying at his full length on the flags beside the round, a stone-edged fountain, blowing assiduously at a little boat which was refusing to cross. In the midst of the water Chilini's world-famed water-nymph reigned in her dolphins. A yellow stone-crop had found a foothold on the pedestal of the group, and flaunted its raw gold in the vivid sunshine amidst the weather-bitten grey stone, making a fantastic broken reflection where Harry's boat rippled the water. And behind Janey's figure, and behind the reflection of the fountain and the water, was the cool, sinister background of the circular sea-hedge with the heather-pink of the willow-weed crowding up against it. The young man gasped. "'But it's a picture,' he said. And then after a moment he added, everything except the woman, of course she won't do." Jeff's curiously innocent, prominent eyes were fixed. His vacant face was wrapped. His uncle looked sympathetically at him. He knew what it was like to receive an idea, like Diane's kiss unasked, unsought. The caretaker whose tea-time was already delayed coughed discreetly in the hall. "'Come, Jeff,' said Mr. Sterling, remorsefully but determinately, taking his nephew's arm. He can't remain here forever.' "'It's all right except the woman,' said Jeff, not stirring. "'Every scrap it hits you in the eye. Look how the lichen has got at the dolphins. All splendour and desolation! The u-head's like a funeral procession behind. Not a bit of sky above them. The only sky reflected in the water.' His voice had sunk to a whisper. "'When you're my age,' said Mr. Sterling, it is just the woman, not some fanciful angel with a dreish and profile and normally long legs, but that particular little brown-haired creature with her short face, whom you brushed aside, who makes the tragedy of the picture. When I think of what that small, courageous personage endures day by day, what her daily life must be—what's the use of talking? Twenty can't hear a word Fifty is saying—isn't meant to. Make up, Jeff. There's another lady in the case. It's past the cat-taker's tea-time. You must learn to consider the fair sex, my dear boy. We're keeping her from her tea. Look, Miss Manfors has seen us. We'll join her in the gardens." What of Mr. Sterling's pleasantest qualities was that he never remembered he was a man of letters. Consequently, it was not necessary for him to show that he was still a boy at heart and that he could elaborately forget that he was a distinguished novelist by joining in sailing Harry's boat. Harry scrambled to his feet and shook hands with both men at Janey's bidding, and then he looked wistfully at Jeff as a possible play-fellow and smiled at him, an ingratiating smile. But Jeff, at twenty, two years younger than Harry, Jeff, the artist, the cultured inquirer after famous robins, the appraiser of broken reflections and relative values, only gaped vacantly at him, hands in pockets, without seeing him. Harry puffed out an enormous sigh and looked back at his boat, and then he tapped his hands suddenly and ran to meet Annette, who was coming slowly towards them across the grass. Mr. Sterling's eyes and Janey's followed him, and Mr. Sterling felt rather than saw that Janey winced as she looked gravely at the approaching figure. Jeff's hat was at the back of his sugarcone of a head. His mild face was transfixed. Mrs. Leguette, he said, before low his breath. End of CHAPTER XXXIV. Our life is like a narrow raft of float upon the hungry sea, thereon is but a little space, and all men eager for a place to thrust each other in the sea, and each man raving for a place doth cast his brother in the sea. Half an hour later, when Annette had left them, Mr. Sterling and his nephew turned with Janey towards the tall Italian gates, which Harry was dutifully holding open for them. As Jeff's shamble beside him, glancing backwards in the direction of the path across the park which Annette had taken, Mr. Sterling half-wished that his favourite sister's only child was stirred less at pretty women, that he had less tie and hair and rather more backbone and deportment. Uncle Reggie, blurted out, Jeff, that missed George's. Well, as she divorced him, is that why she's called Miss George's? I suppose she's called Miss George's for the same reason that you're called Jeffrey Lestrange, said his uncle, because it happens to be her name. But she is Mrs. Leguette, continued Jeff, looking with wide open, innocent eyes from his uncle to Janey. Mrs. Dick Leguette, I know it. I knew her again directly. I saw her when they were staying at Fontebleau on their honeymoon. I've never forgotten her. I wanted to draw her. I thought of asking him if I might. But he was rather odd in his manner, and I didn't. And the next day he was ill, and I went away. But they were done in the visitor's book as Miss or Mrs. Leguette, and I heard him call her Annette. Mr. Sterling suddenly caught sight of Janey's face. It was crimson, startled, but something in it baffled him. It had become rigid, and he saw with amazement that it was not with horror or indignation. But as if one in torture, terrified at the vision, saw a horrible way of escape over a dead body. You're making a mistake, Jeff," he said to Tony. You never get hold of the right end of any stick. You don't at the least realise what you're saying, or that Mr. Leguette is Miss Manver's brother. I only wish," said Janey, with dignity and with truth, that my poor brother were married to Miss George's. There's no one I should have liked better as a sister-in-law. But you're mistaken, Mr. Strange, in thinking such a thing. To the best of my belief he's not married. They were at front and blow together as husband and wife," said Jeff. They really were, and she had a wedding ring on. She's not got it on now. I looked and—and—Mr. Sterling swept him down. That's enough. You must forgive him, Miss Manver's. He has mistaken his vocation. He ought not to be a painter but a novelist. Fiction is evidently his forty. Good evening. Good-bye, Harry. Thank you for opening the gate for us. We will take the short cut across the fields to noise. Good-bye. Good-bye." And Mr. Sterling, holding Jeff by the elbow, walked him off rapidly down the lane. Uncle Reggie, said the boy, I think I won't go to Japan tomorrow after all. I think I'll stop on here. I can get a room in the village and make a picture of the fountain and the lichens and the willow-weed, with Mrs. Leguette, picking flowers. She's just what I want. I suppose there isn't any real chance of her being so kind as to stand for me, is there, if she looks so very kind, in the nude, I mean. It's quite warm, but if she wouldn't consent to that, that gown she had on, that mixed colour cobbled with crimson lake in it, called lilac for short, interpolated Mr. Sterling, it would be glorious against the use, and knocking up against the grey stone and that yellow lichens and the reflection. The whole thing would be stupendous. I see it." Jeff wrenched his elbow away from his uncle's grip, and stopped short in the path, looking at Mr. Sterling through him. I see it, he said, and his pink, silly face became pale, dignified, transfigured. Mr. Sterling's heart smote him. Jeff, he said gently, taking his arm again, and making him walk quietly on beside him. Listen to me. There are other things in the world to be attending to, besides pictures. No, there aren't. Yes, there are. I put it to you. You've made a statement about Miss George's, which will certainly do her a great deal of harm, if it is repeated. You blurt out things about her which are tantamount to making a very serious accusation against her character. And then in the same breath you hatched the jest that you should make use of her in your picture. And you've done your level best to injure her reputation. Now, as one man of the world to an hour, is that honourable? Is it even cricket?" Jeff's face became weak and undecided again. The vision had been shattered. Mr. Sterling saw his advantage, and pressed it with all the more determination, because he perceived that Jeff, at any rate, was firmly convinced of the truth of what he had said, incredible as it seemed. You will take no rooms in the village, he said with decision, and you will start for Japan tomorrow as arranged. I shall see you off, and before you go you will promise me on your oath never to say another word to any one, be they who they may, about having seen Miss George's at Fontainebleau, or any other blurt in that disrespectable dick-le-gaze company. Janey's heart beat violently as she walked slowly home. During the last few weeks she had sternly faced the fact that Roger was attracted by Annette, and not without many pangs had schooled herself to remain friends with her. There had been bitter moments when a choking jealousy had welled up in our heart against Annette. She might have let Roger alone. Beautiful women always hypocritically pretended that they could not help alluring men. But they could. Annette need not have gratified her vanity by trying to enslave him. But after the bitter moment Janey's sturdy rectitude and sense of justice always came to her rescue. Annette has not tried, she would say stolidly to herself, and why shouldn't she try, if she'd likes him. I'm not going to lose her if she does try. She doesn't know I want him. She is my friend, and I mean to keep her whatever happens. But Janey had never dreamed of anything like this happening. As she walked slowly home with a bunch of snap-dragons, she realised that if Roger knew what she and Mr. Stirling knew about Annette, he would leave her. It was not too late yet. His mind was not actually made up, that slow mind, as T'Natius has her own. He was gravitating towards Annette, but if she let it reach his ears that Annette had been Dick's mistress, he would turn from her and never think of her as a possible wife again. After an interval he would gradually revert to her, Janey, without having ever realised that he had left her. Oh, if only Roger had been present when that foolish young man had made those horrible allegations, he then he'd heard them for himself. Janey reddened at her own cruelty, her own disloyalty. But was it—could it be true that Annette, with her clear, unfathomable eyes, had an ugly past behind her? It was unthinkable. And yet—Janey had long since realised that Annette had a far wider experience of men and women than she had. How had she gained it, that experience, that air of mystery, which, though Janey did not know it, was a more potent charm than her beauty? Was it possible that she might be Dick's wife, after all, as that young man had evidently taken for granted? No. No wife, much less Annette, would have left her husband at death's door and have fled at the advent of his relations. These mistresses might have acted like that, had actually acted like that. But Janey knew that when her aunt arrived at Fontainebleau, a woman who had till then had passed as Dick's wife and had nursed him devoidedly had decamped and never been heard of again. Was it possible that Annette had been that woman? Monsieur Lestrange had been absolutely certain of what he had seen. His veracity was obvious. And Annette's was not a face that one could easily forget, easily mistake for anyone else. In her heart Janey was convinced that he had indeed seen Annette with her brother, passing as his wife, and she saw that Mr. Sterling was convinced also. She had reached the garden of the Dauhus, and she sank down on the wooden seat round the cedar. The sun had set behind the long line of the Halver Woods, and there was a flight of homing-rooks across the amber sky. Then Annette must be guilty in spite of her beautiful face and her charming ways. She clasped her hands tightly together. Her outlook on life was too narrow, too rigid, to differentiate or condone. Annette had been immoral. And was she, Janey, to stand by and see Roger, her Roger, the straightest man that had ever walked, and the most unsuspicious, marry her brother's mistress? Could she connive at such a wicked thing? Would Roger forgive her? Would she ever forgive herself if she coldly held aloof and let him ruin his life, drench it in dishonour, because she was too proud to say a word? It was her duty to speak, her bounden duty. Janey became dizzy under the onslaught of a sudden wild tumult within her. Was it grief? Was it joy? Janey knew that it was anguish. Perhaps it was the anguish of one dying of thirst to whom that cup of life is at last held, and who sees even as he stretches his parts, lips towards it, that the rim is stained with blood. CHAPTER XXV We sometimes think we might have loved more in kinder circumstances if someone had not died, or if someone else had not turned away from us. Vain self-deception. The love we have given is all we had to give. If we had had more in us it would have come out. The circumstances of life always give scope for love if they give scope for nothing else. There is no stony desert in which it will not grow, no climate, however bleak in which its marvellous flowers will not open to perfection. M.N. Two days later, when Janey was pacing on the line walk of the Halver Gardens, Mr. Sterling joined her. She known him slightly ever since he had become her mother's tenant and their neighbour at Noyes, but her acquaintance with him had never gone beyond the thinnest conventional civility. The possibility that Mr. Sterling might have been an acquisition in a preposterously dull neighbourhood had not occurred to Janey and Roger. They did not find Riff dull, and they were vaguely afraid of him as clever. The result had been that they seldom met, and he was quickly aware of Janey's surprise at seeing him. He explained that he had been to call on her at the Dower House, and the servant said she had gone up to the gardens, and, finding the gate unlocked, he had ventured to follow her. She saw that he had come for some grave reason, and they sat down on the green wooden seat which followed the semi-circle in the U-Hedge. Far off at the other end of the line walk was another semi-circle seat. There had been wind in the night, and the rough grass that had once been a smooth, shaven lawn, and the long, paved walk was strewn with curled amber leaves as if it were autumn already. Mr. Sterling looked with compassion at Janey's strained face and sleepless eyes. I have come to see you, he said, because I know you are a friend of Miss George's." He saw her whins. I am not sure I am, she said, hoarsely, involuntarily. I am quite sure, he said. There was a moment of silence. I came to tell you that my nephew has started for Japan, and that he has promised me, upon his oath, that he will never speak again of what he gabbled so foolishly. He meant no harm, but stupid people generally managed to do a great deal. The worst of Jeff's stupidity was that it was the truth which he blurted out. I knew it, said Janey, blew her breath. I was sure of it. So was I, said Mr. Sterling, sadly. I can't tell why one believes certain things and disbelieves others, but Jeff's voice had that mysterious thing, the ring of truth, in it. I knew it once you recognized that. That is why I am here." Janey looked straight in front of her. Of course I hoped, you and I both hoped, he continued, that Jeff might have been mistaken. But he was not. He was so determined to prove to me that he was not, that he unpacked one of his boxes already packed to start for Japan and got out his last year's notebooks. I kept one of them. He did not like it, but I thought it was safer with me than with him. Mr. Sterling produced out of a much battered pocket a small sketchbook with an elastic band around it and turned the leaves. Each page was crowded with pencil studies of architecture, figures, dogs, children, nurse-maids, small elaborate drawings of door-knockers and leaden pipe-heads, vagues, scratches of officials and soldiers, the individuality of each caught in a few strokes. He turned the pages with a certain respectful admiration. He has the root of the matter in him, he said. He will arrive. Janey was not impressed. She thought the sketch is very unfinished. Then he stopped at a certain page, none of them could help smiling. The head-waiter, as seen from behind, napped in an arm, dish on spread-hand, superb, debonair, stout, but fleet. Enfance was scribbled under it, Fontainebleau, September the 10th, and the year. Mr. Sterling turned the leaf, turned three or four leaves, all with Mariette's call on them. Mariette had evidently been the French chambermaid, and equally evidently had detained Jeff's vagrant eye. Another page, a man leaning back in his chair, laughing. Dick Legais was written under it. Is it like him? said Sterling. It's him, said Janey. Yet another page. They both looked in silence at the half-dozen massless strokes with Mrs. Legais written under them. It is unmistakable, Mr. Sterling said. It is not an issue, but it is no one else. His eyes met Janey's. She nodded. He closed the little book, put its elastic band round it, and squeezed it into his pocket. Why did you bring that to show me? She said harshly. It seemed as if he had come to tempt her. I knew, he said, that for the last two days you must have been on the rack, torn without as to the truth of what my miserable nephew had affirmed. You look as if you had not slept since. Everything is better than suspense. Well, now you know it is true. Yes, it is true, said Janey slowly, and she became very pale. Then she added, with difficulty, I knew, we all knew, that Dick had had someone, a woman, with him at Fontainebleau when he was taken ill. His van, I told my aunt, he had not gone alone. And the hotelkeeper told her the same. She ran away when Aunt Jane came. Aunt Jane never saw her. We never knew who she was. "'Till now,' said Mr. Sterling softly. Two long-winged baby-swallows were sitting on their breasts on the sunny-flagged path, resting, turning their sleek heads to right and left. Mr. Sterling watched them intently. "'Why should any one but you and I ever know?' he said, with a sigh, after they had flown. He had waited, hoping Janey would say those words, but he had to say them himself instead. She did not answer. She could not. A pulse in her throat was choking her. This then was what he had come for, to persuade her to be silent, to hush it up. All men were the same about a pretty woman. A great tumult clamoured within her, but she made no movement. "'I may as well mention that I am interested in Miss George's,' he went on quietly. "'Don't you find that rather ridiculous, Miss Mambas? An elderly man of fifty, old enough to be her father? It's quite absurd and very undignified, isn't it? You're much too courteous to agree with me. But I can see you think it is so, whether you agree or not. Wise women often justly accuse us, it is susceptible men of being caught by a pretty face. I've been caught by a sweet face. I never exchanged a word with Miss George's till yesterday, so I've not had the chance of being attracted to her by her mind. It is not her mind that draws me. It is her face. I've known her by sight for some time. I go to church in order to see her. I call on her two aunts solely in order to make her acquaintance. The older one, the portentous authoress, is the kind of person whom I should creep down a sewer to avoid. Even the saintly invades doesn't call out my higher nature. Mrs. Turning became aware that Janey was lost in amazement. Arony is singularly unsuited to a narrow outlook. He waited a moment, and then went on, choosing his words carefully as if he was speaking to someone very young. It is quite a different thing to be attracted and to have any hope of marriage, isn't it? I have, and had, no thought of marrying Miss George's. I'm aware that I could not achieve it. And my age do not exist for women of her age. But that does not prevent my having a deep desire to serve her. And service is the greater part of love, isn't it? I'm sure you know that, whose life is made up of service of others. I'm not sure I do," she said stiffly. She was stealing herself against him. If he found her difficult, he gave no sign of it. He went on, tranquilly. This one grows old, one sees—oh, how clearly one sees—that the only people whom one can be any real used to are those whom one loves, with one's whole heart. Liking is no real use. Pity and duty are not much, either. They're better than nothing, but that is all. Love is the one weapon, the one tool, the one tannis-man. Now we can't make ourselves love, people. Love is the great gift. I don't, of course, mean the gift of a woman's love to a man, or of a man's to a woman. I mean the part of love any one devotedly, be they who they may, is God's greatest gift to us, his children, and he does not give it to us very often. To some, he never gives it. Many people go through life loved and cherished, who seem to be denied his supreme blessing, that of being able to love, of seeing that wonderful light rest upon a fellow creature. And as we poor elders look back, we see that there were one or two people who crossed our path earlier in life, whom we loved, or could have loved, and whom we have somehow lost, perhaps by their indifference, perhaps by our own temperament, but whom, nevertheless, we have lost. When the first spark is lit in our hearts of that mysterious flame which it sometimes takes us years to quench, one does not realise it at the time. I did not. Twenty-five years ago, Miss Bambas, before you were born, I fell in love. I was at that time a complete egoist, a very perfect specimen, with the superficial hardness of all crustaceans who live on the defensive, and wear their bones outside like a kind of armour. She was a year or two younger than I was, just about Miss George's age. Miss George's reminds me of her. She is taller and more beautiful, but she reminds me of her all the same. I was not sure whether she cared for me, and I had a great friend, and he fell in love with her, too, and I renounced her and withdrew in his favour. I went away without speaking. I thought I was acting nobly. He said there was no one like me. Thoreau had done the same, and I worshipped Thoreau in my youth, and had been to see him in his log hut. I was sustained in my heartache by feeling I was doing heroic action. He never struck me I was doing it at her expense. I went abroad, and after a time she married my friend. Some years later I heard he was dying of a terrible disease in the throat, and I went to see him. She nursed him with absolute devotion, but she would not allow me to be much with him. I put it down to a kind of jealousy, and after his death I tried to see him, but again she put difficulties in the way. At last I asked her to marry me, and she refused me. "'Because you had deserted her to start with,' said Jenny. No, she was not like that. Because she was dying of the same disease as her husband. She had contracted it from him. That was why she never let me be much with him, or afterwards with her. When I knew I was willing to risk it, but she was not. She had her rules, and from them she never departed. She let me sit with her in the garden, and to the last she was carried out to her long chair, so that I might be with her. She told me it was the happiest time of her life. I found that from the first she had loved me, and she loved me to the last. She never reproached me for leaving her. She was a simple person. I told her I had done it on account of my friend, and she thought it very noble of me, and said it was just what she would have expected of me. There was no irony in her. And she slipped quietly out of life, keeping her ideal of me to the last. "'I think it was noble, too,' said Jenny stolidly. "'Was it?' I never considered her for a moment. I had had the desire to serve her, but I never served her. Instead I caused her long, long unhappiness, for my friend had a difficult temperament, and suffering and early death. I never realised that she was alive, vulnerable, sensitive. I should have done better to have married her and devoted myself to her. I've never wanted to devote myself to any woman since. We should have been happy together. And she might have been with me still, and we might have had a son who would have just been the right age to marry Miss George's.' "'You would not have wanted him to marry her now,' said Jenny hoarsely. He would not want her to marry anyone she were fond of. Among a confusion of tangled threads Mr. Sterling saw a clue, at last. A dragonfly alighted on the stone at his feet, its long, orange body and its coarse wings gleaming in the vivid sunshine. It stood motionless, say for its golden eyes. Even at that moment his mind, intent on another object, unconsciously noted and registered the transparent shadow on the stone of its transparent wings. "'I think,' he said, if I'd had a son who was trying to marry her, I should have come to you just as I have come now, and I should have said, why should any one but you and I ever know?' "'No, no you wouldn't,' said Jenny, as if desperately defending some position which he was attacking. Who you would want to save him at all costs?' "'From what?' "'From the woman he loves. I've not found it such great happiness to be saved from the woman I loved.' Jenny hesitated and then said, from someone unworthy of him, Mr. Sterling watched an amber leaf sail to the ground. Then he said slowly, "'How do I know that Annette is unworthy of him? She may have done wrong and still be worthy of him. Do you not see that if I decided she was unworthy and hurried my son away, I should be acting on the same principle as I did in my own youth—the old weary principle which has pressed so hard on women that you can treat a fellow creature like a pitcher or a lily or a sum of money. I handed over my love just as if she had been a lily. How often I had likened her to one. But she was alive, poor soul, all the time. And I only found it out when she was dying years and years afterwards. Only then did my colossal selfishness confront me. She was a fellow creature like you and me. What was it, Sherlock said? If you prick us, do we not bleed? For all we know, for to contrary, Annette may be alive. His grave-eyes met hers with a light in them, gentle, inexorable. And let's be careful, we may make her bleed. We have the knife ready to our hands. If you were in her place and had a grievous incident in your past, would anything wound you more deeply than if she, she your friend, living in the same village, raked up that ugly past and made it public for no reason? But there is a reason, said Janey passionately, not a reason that everyone should know, God forbid, but that one person should be told who may marry her in ignorance and who would never marry her if she knew what you and I know, never, never, never. And what would you do in her place in such a predicament? I should not be in it, because when he asked me to marry him I should tell him everything. Perhaps that is just what she will do. Knowing her intimately as you do, can you think that she would act meanly and deceitfully? I can't. Janey avoided his searching glance and made no answer. You can't either, he said tranquilly. And do you think she would lie about it? No, said Janey slowly, against her will. The net asked at any rate give her her chance of telling him herself. He got up slowly, and Janey did the same. He saw that her stubbornness, though shaken, was not vanquished, and that he should obtain no assurance from her that she would be silent. And let us give this man, whoever he may be, his chance, too, he said, taking her hand and holding it. He felt it tremble, and his heart ached for her. He guessed. The chance of being loyal, the chance of being tender, generous, understanding. Do not let us wreck it by interference. This is a matter which lies between her and him, and between her and him only. It may be the making of him. It would have been the making of me, if I could have but taken it, my great chance, if I had not preferred to sacrifice her, in order to be a sham hero. CHAPTER XXVI Look long, look long in the water, Melisande. Is there never a face but your own? There is never a soul you shall know, Melisande. Your soul must stand alone. All alone in the world, Melisande. Alone. Alone. Ethel Clifford. The long evening was before Janey. Since her stroke her mother retired for the night, as the nurse called it, at nine instead of ten. And at nine Janey came down to the drawing-room and established herself with her work beside the lamp. Harry, whom nothing could keep awake after his game of dominoes, went to bed at nine also. But tonight, as she took up her work, her spirit quailed the long array of thread-bear thoughts that were lying in wait for her. She dared not think any more. She laid down her work and took up the paper. But she had no interest in politics, and seemed to be nothing in it. She got up, and taking the lamp in her hand, crossed to the room and looked at the books in the Chippendale bookcase, the few books which her mother had brought with her from Halver. They were well chosen, no doubt, but somehow Janey did not want them. Shakespeare? No. No fellow. No. She was tired of him, tired even of her favourite lines. Life is real. Life is earnest. Tennyson? No. Peeps is Dary. She'd have people speak of it. No. Bullwur's novels. Jane Austen's. Maria Edgeworth's. Sir Walter Scott's. No. Crooks and Coronets. She'd only read it once. She might look at it again. She liked Miss Neville's books. She had read most of them, not intentionally, but because while she was binding them in brown paper for the village library, she had found herself turning the leaves. She especially liked the last but one about simple fisherfolk. She often wondered how Miss Neville knew so much about them. If she had herself been acquainted with fishermen, she would have reniced how little the dignified authors did know. Somehow she did not care to read even one of Miss Neville's books to-night. The Magnet by Reginald Sterling. She hesitated, put out her hand, and took the first of the three volumes from the shelf. She had skimmed it when it came out five years ago, because the bishop, when he stayed with them for a confirmation, had praised it. Jane had been surprised that he had recommended it when she came to read it, for parts of it were decidedly unpleasant. She might look at it again. She had no recollection of it except that she had not liked it. Her conversation with Mr. Sterling had agitated her, but it had also stirred her. Though she did not know it, it was the first time she had come into real contact with an educated and sensitive mind, and one bent for the moment on understanding hers. No one as a rule tried to understand Janey. It was not necessary. No one was interested in her. You might easily love Janey, but you could not easily be interested in her. The book was dusty. It was obvious that the Magnet had not proved a magnet to anyone in the Dower-house. She got out an old silk-cancotry from a drawer and dusted it carefully. Then she sat down by the lamp once more and opened it. Ninety-thousand. Was that many or few to have sold? It seemed to her a good many, but perhaps all books sold as many as that. She'd answered at the first page. Two a blessed memory. That no doubt was the memory of the woman of whom he had spoken. Why, suddenly, did it cost him something to speak of that? Why had he done it? To help a net. Everyone wanted to help and protect a net and ward off trouble from her. No one wanted to help or guard her, Janey. No one asked a conscience. Janey saw suddenly the yellow leaves on the flags. She had not noticed them at the time. She saw the two baby swallows sitting on their breasts on the sun-warmed stone. She had not noticed them at the time. She saw suddenly as in a glass the nobility, the humility, and the benevolence of the man sitting beside her and his intense desire to save her from what he believed to be a cruel action. She had noticed nothing at the time. She had been full of herself and her own devastating problem. She saw that he pleaded with her in a great compassion as much on her account as on a net. It stretched out her hands to help her, had tried to guard her to ward off trouble from her. This required thought. Janey and Rodger could both think that they did not do so if they could help it, and he did his allowed to Janey by preference whenever it really had to be done. Janey's mind got slowly and reluctantly to its feet. It had been accustomed from early days to walk alone. A step crunched to the gravel came along the terrace. A well-known step. Rodger's face, very red and round-eyed, behind a glowing cigarette end, appeared at the open window. I saw by the lamp you had not gone to bed yet, may I come in? Coming in. Ah! It's like an oven in here. I will come out," said Janey. They sat down on the terrace on two wicker chairs. It was the first time she had been alone with him since she had met Jeffler Strange. And as Rodger puffed at his cigarette in silence, she became aware that he had something on his mind and had come to unburden himself to her. The moon was not yet risen, and the church-tire and the twisted pines stood as if cut out of black velvet against the dim pearl of the eastern sky. I came round this afternoon," said Rodger, in an aggrieved tone, but you were out. It seems to be a fixed idea, tap-rooted into the very depths of the masculine mind, that it is the bound and duty of women to be in when they call, even if they had not thought fit to mention their flattering intentions. But some of us are roofily aware that we might remain indoors twenty years without having our leisure interrupted. Janey had on many occasions waited indoors for Rodger, but not since he had seen a net home after the choir practice. You never seem to be about nowadays," he said. I was in the Halver Gardens. Yes, I thought I would come round now. Rodger could extract more creaking out of one wicker garden chair than any other man in Lausier, and more crackling of a newspaper, especially if music was going on, that is, a lesser net was singing. He was as still as a stone on those occasions. How is Aunt Louisa? Just the same? Dr. Bean? No. I was ever at noise this morning about the bridge. Still, it gave me luncheon. I don't know where I'm going to get the money for it, with Aunt Louisa in this state. It's her business to repair the bridge. It's going to cost hundreds. Janey had heard all this before, many times. She was aware that Rodger was only marking time. When I was over there, continued Rodger, I saw Bartlett, and he told me, Mary Dean, you know who I mean. Perfectly. I heard the child, the little girl, had died suddenly last week, a croop or something. They ought to have let me know that the funeral was yesterday. Poor woman. She and the old servant between them carried the little coffin themselves along the dyke and across the Ford. Wouldn't let anyone else touch it. I heard about it from Bartlett. He ought to have let me know. I told him so. He said he thought I did know. That's Bartlett all over. And he said he went up to see her next day, and she was gone. Gone? Yes, gone, cleared out, and the servant, too. The carl said a man from Waelisham had called for their boxes. They never went back to the house after the funeral. I ought to have been told. And today I get this. Rodger pulled a letter out of his pocket and held it out to her. He lit a match, and by its wavering light she read the few lines in an educated hand. I only took the allowance from you when Dick became too ill to send it on account of Molly. Now Molly is dead, I do not need it, or the house, or anything of Dick's any more. The key is with Cornell. Poor woman, said Janey again. It's a bad business, said Rodger. She was—there was something nice about her. She wasn't exactly a lady, but there really was something nice about her. And the little girl was Dick over again. You couldn't help liking Molly. I suppose she's gone back to her own people? Rodger shook his head. Ah, she hasn't any people. Never knew who her parents were. She was the same as her child. She loved Dick, but I don't think she ever forgave him for letting Molly be born out of wedlock. She knew what it meant. It embittered her. It was not only her own pride which had been wounded, and she was a proud woman. But Molly, she resented Molly being illegitimate. Oh, Rodger, what would become of her? Goodness knows. Dick oughtn't have done it, said Rodger slowly, as if he were enunciating some new and startling hypothesis. But to do him justice I do believe he might have married her if he'd lived. I think if he cared for anybody it was for her. Dick meant well, but he was touched in the head. Short not to have trusted him. Not quite like other people, no memory, and ever in the same mind two days running. There was a short silence, but Rodger had got underway at last. Very soothing at times as a monologue to the weary, masculine mind. I used to think, he went on, that Dick was the greatest liar and swindler under the sun. He went back on his word, his written word, and he wasn't straight. I'm certain he ran a ramp at Leopardstown. That was the last time he rode in Ireland. You couldn't trust him. But I began to think that from the first he had a bee in his bonnet, poor chap. I remember Uncle John leathering him within an inch of his life when he was a boy, because he said he had not set the big barn alight, and he had. He'd been seen to do it by others as well as by me. I saw him, but I never said. But I believe now he wasn't himself, sort of sleepwalking, and he really had, clean forgotten he'd done it. Do you remember about the Ethan Square house? Of course, Jenny remember, but she said, what about that? Why, he wrote to Tommy that he decided to set it only last August, a month before his accident, as he wanted cash. Clean forgotten he'd sold it two years ago and had the money. Twenty thousand it was. Puff, puff. Jones, his valet, you know. Yes. Jones told me privately when I was in Paris a month ago that Dick couldn't last much longer. Gangrene in both feet. The wonder is he has lived so long. Aunt Louisa will get her wish after all. You'll see he will die in testate, and everything will go to Harry. Pity you weren't a boy, Jenny. Dick can't make a will now. That's certain. I don't believe if he could, and wanted to, Lady Jane would let him. But whatever happens, the family ought to remember Jones when Dick's gone, and settle something handsome on him for life. Jones has played the game by Dick. Jenny thought it was just like Roger to be anxious about the valet, when his own rightful inheritance was slipping away from him. For Roger came next in the mail-line after Dick, if you did not count Harry. There was a long silence. When Dick does go, said Roger meditatively, Moon looks jolly, doesn't it, peeping out behind the tar? I wonder whether we shall have trouble with the other woman, the one who is with him when he was taken ill. At Fontainebleau? Yes, I hear she was not at all a common person, either, and as handsome as paint. At the back of his mind Roger had a rueful half-envious feeling that really the luck had been with Dick, one pretty woman after another, while he, Roger, plodded along as good as gold and as dull as ditch-water, and only had to provide for the babes of these illicit unions, did not seem fair. Perhaps there was another child there, he said. Oh, no, no, said Jenny Wincey. Is there no use saying, oh, no, no, my good girl? It may be, oh, yes, yes, the possibility has to be faced. Roger spoke as a man of the world. There may be a whole brood of them for ought we know. Do you think he may possibly have married this second one? Said Jenny tentatively. No, I don't. If he had, she wouldn't have bolted. Besides, if Dick had married any one, I do believe it would have been Mary Dean. Well, she's off our hands, poor thing. She won't trouble us again. But I don't expect we shall get off as easy with number two. End of Chapter 26 Chapter 27 of Notwithstanding by Mary Chumlee This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Simon Evers. Chapter 27 Auf Rungen haben ich nicht, aber uscht allen. Auf Rungen ein reines Herz gerettend zu haben. Alles. El hab ich. It was the second week in August. Mrs. Doddart had arrived at Noys, and had driven over to Sionette, and to make the acquaintance of the Miss Nevels. She was an immediate success with them, possibly because she intended to be one, and knew how to set about it. The Miss Nevels had two worlds, the social and the literary, and each one had right people in it. In the social world, the right people were, of course, those who belonged to the same social order as themselves, who were connected with, or related to, or friends of Nevels, or were connected with, or related to, or friends of the connections and relatives and friends of Nevels. Mrs. Doddart allowed her visiting list to be probed, and quickly established herself as one of the right people. She knew people they knew. Her sister Lady Brandon was a frequent visitor at the Deenery of St. Bottoff's, where they had lunch to join the Church of Congress, and it was her niece who became the second Mrs. Templeton when the first Mrs. Templeton, known of the Miss Nevels, died. If, reader, you have ever engaged in the back-breaking, hand-blistering task of eradicating a scattered and well-established colony of nettles, you have no doubt discovered that a nettle, except a few parvenues, growth of the last rains, does not live to itself alone. He possesses endless underground ramifications and knotted connections with other groups and neighbouring groves of nettles. Get hold of the root of one, and you pull up a long string, resetted at intervals with bunches of the same stimulating family. So it was with the social world of the Miss Nevels. There was always what they called a link, and one of Aunt Harriet's chief interests in life was the establishment of these links in the case of each newcomer, though nothing much happened when it was established. Just as you and I, reader, in our valga, homely way, strike up an eager acquaintanceship, even form a friendship with equally communicative strangers on steamers, in omnibuses, in trains, because we both stayed in the same hotel at Lauterbrunnen, or go to the same dentist, or derive benefit from the same predigested food. So the Miss Nevels continually established links by more aristocratic avenues with the aciduity of Egyptologists. But much of the pleasure of Mrs. Doddard's visit was damped by the fact which she discreetly concealed till almost the last moment that she was the bearer of an invitation from Mr. Sterling to Annette to spend a few days at noise during her own visit there. Aunt Maria was wounded to the quick. She made up her mind to cultivate Mr. Sterling, to steep herself in long literary conversations with him, to read aloud certain important chapters of the Silver Cross to him, or which his judgment would be invaluable. And here was Annette, who had not an idea in her mind beyond housekeeping and gardening and singing in the choir, here was Annette preferred before her. Aunt Maria yearned to be admitted to the society of the right people in the literary world as well as the social one. She'd been made much of by the camp followers of literature who were always prodigal in their invitations. And a few uneasy vanities, such as the equally ignored Mr. Harvey, found a healing comfort sheeded herself in their respectful adulation. But all the time she knew that she was an outsider in the breast literary circles. There was no one more democratic than the author of Crooks and Coronets when she approached the literary class. She was, to use her own phraseology, quite ready to meet with her vanity any one distinguished in the world of letters quite regardless of family. But they apparently were not equally ready to meet her, at least not to meet her a second time. Mrs. Sterling was a writer of considerable importance. Annette Maria was magnanimously prepared to overlook the fact that his father had been a small shopkeeper in Hammersmith. But he preferred Annette's society to hers. Mrs. Stoddart hastened to lay a soothing unguent on the sensitive spirit of the celebrated authorist. It quickly transpired that the invitation to Annette had been mainly the result of Mrs. Stoddart's own suggestion. She begged him to let me have Annette with me for a few days, she said, and he was most kind about it. He is one of my oldest friends. Aunt Maria, somewhat modified, yielded a dignified consent, and an incident which had its painful moment, was closed. The next day the news reached the Miss Blinkets with the afternoon delivery of the milk that the carriage from noise court had come to Fred Riff and that Annette had departed in it with a small dress-box at her feet and a hat-box on the vacant seat beside her. Noise court is not an old house, as old houses go in Losia, not like Loudham close by which has looked into its lake since ever the third time. Noise was built by Hakun Leggett, to whom Henry VIII gave noise prairie and the estates belonging there too, and Hakun erected a long black-and-white timbered house with elaborately carved beams and doorways on the high ground above the deserted prairie, and possibly he took most of the lead from the prairie roof, and certainly he took some of the carved hammer-beams, for they have the word Maria running through them, as you may see to this day. For when Cardinal Woolsey came to visit him, the prairie was already a ruin. Perhaps Hakun was a man of foresight, and may have realized that the great Cardinal, who is coming to noise on the quest of suppressing some of the Losia monasteries in order to swell the revenues of his new college at Ipswich, might lay his clutching hand on anything that still remained in the condemned prairie, and so thought it politic to appropriate what he could, while opportunity offered. However, that may have been, noise is rich in ancient lattice and stained glass, and curious leadwork and gargoyle. And in the menstrual's gallery you may see how cunningly the carved angels and griffons have been inserted at intervals in the black oak balustrade. Hakun must have been a man of taste, though he was a parvenu in spite of his fine coat of arms. Some said he was nothing better than one of Catherine of Aragon's pages, who became a favourite with England's stout young king when poor Catherine was herself in favour. But he had the wit to consolidate his position in Losia by marrying into one of its greatest families, the beautiful Jane de Lodham. Her father it was, Ralph de Lodham, who made the passage through sweet-apple-tree marsh, because the hated prars of noise hindered people passing through their lands. And his son-in-law, eager to conciliate his Lutheran father-in-law and his country-neighbours, gave the stones of the prairie to build the new bridge over the Riban, which stands to this day. From the earliest times, almost from the conquest, there had been trouble about the bridge. The prars of noise were bound to keep it in good repair by reason of the lands there held on both sides of it. But the prars had never troubled themselves to carry out their duty, and there was a grim injustice in the fact that the very fabric of their prairie fulfilled the obligation which they themselves had ignored when the last of them was in his tomb, and a young Frenchman had taken possession of their lands. The young Frenchman made good his hold on noise, and his successors prospered, marrying steadily into the Losia families, accepting a certain unlucky Richard, who must need a wrench made of honour of Charles II's court, and, as some have heard, the daughter of that witty monarch. There is a charming portrait of Henriette of many girls in the gallery which certainly has a look of the stewards, hanging opposite her ill-fated Richard, who soon after the marriage got himself blown up with Lord Sandwich in the Royal James. Mrs. Dodd-Otton and Ette were sitting in the walled herb-garten which Henriette in her widowhood had made, who were put with pardonful vanity her initials twined in gilded iron in the centre of the iron gate which led down to it from the terrace above. The little enclosed garden lay bathed in a misty sunshine. Beyond it the wide lawns were still all silvered with dew in the shadows of the forest trees which seemed to be advanced posts of the great forest gathered like an army on the other side of the river. The ground fell away before their eyes, in pleasant and water-medos, but where in the distance you could just discern the remains of the prairie near the bridge which had cost it so dear. Even that new bridge was now old and was showing ominous signs of collapse, and a net size followed the movements of tiny workmen crawling over it. The distant chink of trowel and hammer reached them to the haze of the windless summer morning. It was evident that the two women had had a long conversation, and that Mrs. Dodd-Art was slowly turning over something point by point in her mind. "'You realize, Annette,' she said at last, "'that you can't go on living as a riff now you know who the Mambas are.' "'I was afraid you would say that. But sure do you see of yourself whether I say it or not?' Annette did not answer. "'There are no two ways about it. You must break with the Mambas, root and branch.' Annette colored painfully. "'Must I?' "'Doesn't your own common sense, if you could only use it, tell you the same?' "'I'm very fond of Janey Mambas. That can't be helped.' "'You see,' said Annette, slowly, "'Janey and Roger are the two people I like best anywhere except you. "'You don't know,' turning her grave eyes to her companion, "'how good they are.' "'I never like people myself because they are good. "'No, I know, and it's very lucky for me you don't. And then I dare say you've always known numbers of good people. But it's different for me. I haven't. I've never been with good people except Aunt Cathy and you, if the sacred Miss Neville's could hear you now. I used to think I hate it goodness, but I see now that it was the theory of it that, talking about it that it sickened me. Janey and Roger never talk about it. And then, when I had broken away from the aunt and went to Paris, the life there was really evil under a thin veil which soon got torn. And then I came here and met Janey and Roger, and got to know them well. He is Mr. Getts' younger brother, I suppose.' "'No, first cousin. That short-nosed, sun-bird, silent man we met at the bridge yesterday. Yes. I like his looks.' "'He is straight, to den it, and so is Janey. I will think of them together because they are so alike. They might be brother and sister, and I'm sure they are as fond of each other as if they were. They aren't clever, of course, like you and Mr. Sterling, but then I'm not clever myself. They're just the kind of people I like. My poor child, I'm afraid you must give them up. I'd rather give up anybody than them, except you. It isn't a question of what you'd rather do or not do. Now you know who they are. You cannot continue on terms of friendship with them. I don't want to force my will upon you. I only want to advise you for the best. Don't you see for yourself, without my insisting on it, that you will involve yourself in an impossible situation if you continue your friendship with them? If I were not here to point that out, surely, surely you could see it for yourself. And yet, if I were not here, if you had no one to advise you, what would you do? I would tell them, said Annette. I won't because I've promised you not to tell anyone, but if I were free, said yes to Mr. Stoddard, yes, if I were free, I should tell them both. Mrs. Stoddard let her knitting fall into her lap and stared at her companion. And what good in the name of fortune would come of that? I don't know that any particular good would come of it, but I should feel happier in my mind. I never had any wish to tell the aunts. I don't know exactly why, but you don't somehow want to tell them things. But ever since I've known that Dick was Janey's brother, I've wanted to tell her, her and Roger. It seems to come between me and them like a cloud. You see, they like me, and I like them. There's nothing kept back in their lives, and they think I'm the same as them. I fear as I ought to tell them. But, my dear, if I know anything of people like the Mambas, especially when embedded in the country, it is that they would be terribly shocked, and the disclosure would make an estrangement of once. It might, Annette agreed. I think you're right. I'm afraid it would. But I should like to tell them all the same. They would not be wide-minded enough to understand. They're not wide-minded, I know that, and, of course, they may feel I've been here under false pretenses. They certainly would. Wouldn't it be better to do as I advise, to leave, Riff? You must lose them either way, Annette. They might not lose them by going away, instead of telling them first and then having to go away. For, of course, you could not remain. It would give less pain all round." Annette locked her hands together. I would rather they knew the truth about me. The truth, said Mrs. Toddard, who, like most astute women, did not relish opposition. The truth! And who will get at the truth, if you tell that story of your act of supreme folly? Who will believe that you are not DICLICATE's mistress? The truth? Do you think it is the truth about you that I have taken such trouble to conceal? Yes, partly, said Annette, and I far wondered lately if it had not been a mistake. Why particularly lately? Because of Roger Manvers. The young man at the bridge. I wondered whether he was in love with you when we were talking to him, but I did not think it mattered if he was. It matters to me. You mean you are actually thinking of him? Of course, he is most estimable, and a gentleman, one could see that at a glance. But isn't he a trifle-dull borne? I think I could get on better with a dull person, if he was kind and honourable, than a clever one. I have had one clever one who wasn't honourable. You see, I am only good-looking, I am nothing else. That is why I like being with the Miss Blinkets and Mrs. Nicholls. I forgot perhaps you don't know Mrs. Nicholls as the washerwoman. A clever man would get tired of me, all bored with me, and he would expect so much, understandings and discriminations, and things which I could not give, or only by a dreadful effort. If I married Roger, he would be pleased with me as I am. I have no doubt he would, and I should be pleased with him, too. I am not so sure of that. I am, but for some time past I have wished he knew anything there was to know against me. Well, but Annette, you know we agreed, you have my full approval, that you should tell everything to the man you were engaged to. I thought that all right at the time, at least I mean I never thought about it again. But of course I did not know Roger then, and I had not realised how cruel it would be to him to go farther and farther and think more and more of me, and get it firmly butch into his mind that he would like to marry me. It takes a long time for him to get his mind fixed. And then when I had accepted him and he was feeling very comfortable to have this ugly thing sprung upon him. I don't see how that could be helped. Yes, if he had been told very early in the day he might have withdrawn. Of course he would have withdrawn if he had believed the worst, but it would not have cost him much. He would have felt he had a lucky escape. But as it is, Annette's voice wavered, I am afraid Roger will be put to expense. Has he said anything? Yes. No, I mean he said something the other day, but it was by the weir, and I know he thought I did not hear. I was listening to the water and it made a noise. I heard every word, but I did not like to say so, because I saw he was rather surprised at himself, taken aback. Mrs. Toddard cogitated it. Adarchy said, My dear, I know what is wise, and that is what I have advised you. But I also know that I am a managing woman, and that one must not coerce the lives of others. You are not what is called wise, and you never will be. But I perceive that you have some kind of course to steer your ship by, and I might even let you steer it. We can't both stand at the helm, Annette. I think you do not see the rocks ahead, which I have taken such trouble to avoid, but at any rate I have pointed them out. I take my hands off the wheel. I give you back your promise. Mr. Sterling and Roger were coming through the slender iron gates with their scrolled initials, from which the white-hanging clusters of the seven sisters had to be pushed back to allow them to pass. There are worse things than rocks, said Annette, looking at Roger. But she had become very white. CHAPTER XXVIII. Early in the day it was whispered that we should sail in a boat, only thou and I, and never a soul in the world would know of this our pilgrimage to no country and to no end. Rabinja Nath Tagore. Mr. Sterling had no curiosity. That quality which in ourselves we designate as interest in our fellow-creatures, even while we are kneeling at a keyhole. But his interest in others amounted to a passion. He drew slowly through his hand a little chain looking at each link with kindly compassion. The first link had been the expression in Jane's eyes when his nephew had unconsciously maligned Annette. The sudden relief as from pain, the exultation in those gentle, patient eyes, had brought him instantly to her side as our ally against herself. And in his interview with her the commonplace pitiful reason had spread itself out before him. She loved someone, probably Mr. Black or her cousin Roger, at any rate someone who was drifting into love with Annette. He felt confident when he left Jane that she would not use her weapon against Annette as a means to regain her lover, that Annette was safe as far as she was concerned. Jane was not of those who blindfolded their own eyes for long. He had, he knew, removed the bandage from them. That was all that was necessary. And now here was Roger, kindly sociable Roger, whom he had always got on with so well, in spite of the secret contempt of the country-bred man for a man who neither shoots nor hunts. Here was Roger suddenly metamorphosed into a laconic poker, hardly willing to exchange a verb with himself for Annette at luncheon. Mr. Sterling perceived, not without amusement, that Roger was acutely jealous of him, and drew the last link of the chain through his hand. Then it was Roger to whom Janey Manvers was attached, Roger, who was in love with Annette. That good-looking Mr. Black apparently did not come into the peace at all. The situation had, after all, a classic simplicity, two women and one man. He had seen something not unlike it before. And he smiled as he remembered how Miss Blinkett once supplied him unasked with sundry details of the affiencement of her cousin the archdeacon with the bishop's sister, and her anxious injunction when all was divulged that he must not on any account put it into a book. That promise he kept without difficulty, but not in Miss Blinkett's eyes, who, when his next novel appeared, immediately traced a marked resemblance between the ardent lovemaking of the half-Italian hero and the gratified comments of the archdeacon, while allowing himself to be towed into harbour by the blameless blandishments of the bishop's sister. Would Roger in turn think that he had been put in? Mr. Sterling realised that it was only too likely. For he knew to his cost how deeply embedded in the mind of the provincial male is the conviction that there is nothing like him under the sun. In the novel which Mr. Sterling had recently finished he had drawn, without a hair-breadth's alteration, the exact portrait of a married brother novelist as an inordinately pompous old maid of literary fame. When the book appeared this character called forth much admiration from the public to general, and the Bradford novelist in particular, but it caused a wound so deep and so rankling in the bosom of Aunt Maria, that all intercourse was broken off between her and Miss Sterling forever, in spite of the fact that he was able to assure her, any she never believed it, that his novel was in the press before he made her acquaintance. But this is a digression. Mr. Sterling showed some absence of mind during luncheon, and so known that he was in a small difficulty about the afternoon. He had promised to drive Mrs. Dodd-Arton Annette to the old cross at Halliwell. But the Victoria only held too comfortably, and the horse which was to have taken him in the docker-cart had fallen lame. I think I shall commandeer you and your docker-cart, he said to Roger. Take a few hours' holiday for once, manvers, and do us all a good turn at the same time. We can put some cushions in your cart, so that Miss George's would be sufficiently comfortable. Roger was electrified, but he made no sign. He mumbled something about a foreman. He hung back. He was able to reassure himself afterwards by the conviction that he'd appear most unwilling, as indeed he did. But very deep down within him he felt a thrill of pleasure. He was tired to death, though he did not know it, of the routine of his life. Though he clung to it as a bird will sometimes cling to its cage. He'd had enough of farm-buildings, and wire-fencing, and the everlasting drainage of land, the weary waterlogged and lochaland. His eyes became perfectly round, and he looked at his plate with his most bottled-up expression. But he was pleased. Fortunately for Annette she knew that. He did not strike him that she might be disconcerted by his apparent unwillingness to escort her. His savage irritation against Mr. Sterling as a clever chap who could talk a bird out of a tree was somewhat modified. Perhaps after all he was interested in Mrs. Stoddart, a widow of about his own age. Roger shot a furtive glance from under his tawny eyelashes at Mrs. Stoddart. Suddenly he bolted a large piece of peach, and said he thought he could manage it. It was a still August afternoon, and Roger drove Annette through the sunny countryside. The cool breath of the sea blew softly in their faces, running towards them across the low-lying woods and corn-fields. There are few hills in Laotia. It is a land of long lines, long lines of tidal river and gleaming flats and immense stretches of clover, clover which is a soft greed for half the summer, and then a sea of dim blue-pink. The heather and the gorse-land creep almost down among the fields, with here and there a clump of pines taking care of tiny cottages so muffled in the gorse that you can only see the upper windows, or keeping guard round quaint little churches with flint-towers, and everywhere in the part of Laotia where the ribbon winds, there are old bridges of red-blue brick shouldering up among the buddy-cups, and red cows, with here and there a blue one, standing without legs in the long grass, and scattered far apart down deep black-buried lanes lie the villages of pink plaster cottages clustering together, red roof by red roof, with a flinty gray church in the midst. The original artist who designed and painted Laotia must have always taken a dab of blue in his brush, just when he had filled it with red, to do the bridges and the old farms and barns and the cows. For in Laotia the blues and the reds are always melting into each other like the clover. Roger and Annette were heading towards the sea, and so you would have thought would be their companion, the Riban. But the Riban was in no hurry. We'd left them continually to take the longest way, laying itself out in leisurely curves round low uplands, but always meeting them again a few miles further on, growing more stately with every detour. Other streams swelled it, and presently wharves and townships stretched alongside of it, and ships came sailing by. It hardly seemed possible to Annette that it could be the same little river which one low arch could span at Riff. At last they'd turned away from it altogether, and struck across the wide common of Galluscore amid its stretches of yellowing bracken. And Roger showed her where, in past times, a gibbet used to hang, and told her that old Carl the Shepherd, the only man who still came to church in smockfrock and blue stockings, had walked all the way from Riff to Galluscore as a lad, to see three heimermen hanging in chains on it. The great oak had been blown down later, gibbet and all, and the gibbet had never been set up again. Our walking funeral was toiling across the bracken in the direction of the church on the edge of the common, and Roger drew up and waited bare-headed till it had passed. And he told Annette of the old iniquitous loture right of Harriet, which came into force when a tenant died, and how his uncle Mr. Manvers, the last lord of the manor, had set it laps, and how Dick, the present owner, had never enforced it either. "'I couldn't have worked the estate if he had,' said Roger simply. Lady Louisa told Dick he ought to stick to it, and made me enforce it. But I said I should have to go if he did. The best horse out of his stable when a man died, and the best cow out of his field. When Dick understood what Harriet meant, he would not do it. He was always open-handed. Annette looked at the little church toiling its bell, and the three furs gathered round it. "'There is a place like this in The Magnet,' she said. "'That is why I seem to know it, though I've never seen it before. There ought to be a vicarage just behind the furs with a little garden enclosed from the bracken.' "'There is,' said Roger, and then added with grossing gratitude to its author. I never thought much of The Magnet. I like the bits about the places, and he says things about dogs, so they're just right, and, Robbins, he's good on birds, but when it comes to people—' Annette did not answer. It was not necessary. Roger was under way. And yet he added with a tardy sense of justice, sternings in some ways and understanding man. I never thought he'd have made atlants for old Betty Hesketh having the wood mania and breaking up his new fence, but he did. Such a fuss as Bartlett kicked up when he caught her at his wood-stack. Of course he caught her at it. Old folks can't help it. They get wood mania when they're childish, if they've known the pinch of coal for too many years. And even if their sheds are full of wood—Betty had enough to last her lifetime—they'll go on picking and stealing. If they see it, they've got to have it. And it isn't stealing—Mr. Sterling understood that. He said he'd known old ladies the same about China. But the people in his bugs, Roger shook his head. Didn't you like Jack and Hester in The Magnet? I got so fond of them. I don't remember much about them. I dare say I should have liked them if I had felt they were real, but I never did. It's always the same in novels. When I start reading them, I know beforehand everybody will talk so uncommonly well, not like you and me, suggested Annette, well, not like me, anyhow, and not like Janey and the kind of people I know, except perhaps Black, he could say a lot. I felt that too, said Annette, especially when the hero and heroine are talking. I think how splendidly they both do it. But I secretly feel all the time that if I had been in the heroine's place, I never could have expressed myself so well and behaved so exactly right and understood everything so quickly. I know I should have been silent and stupid, and only seen what was the right thing to say several hours later when I had gone home, or to look to bleakly at her with an approving eye. Here indeed was a kindred soul. In The Magnet, he said, with a sudden confiding impulse, the men do propose so well, though in real life they don't. Poor beggars they'd like to, but they can't. Most difficult thing, but you never guess it from The Magnet, just look at Jack. Wasn't that his name? How he re-is it all out, chose how much he cares. He says a lot of really good things, not a copybook, I will say that for him. Puts it uncommonly well about not being good enough for her, just as Mr. Sterling would himself if he were proposing. That's what I felt when I read it. Jack never would have had the nerve to say all that, but of course a clever chap like Mr. Sterling, sitting comfortably in his study with lots of time and no woman to flurry him, could make it up. The Magnet did not answer. Perhaps she did not want to flurry him. I could never say anything like that, said Roger, flicking a fly off Mary-legs-back, but I might feel it. I do feel it, and more. That is the only thing that matters, said the net, with a tremor in her voice. This is not the moment, whispered Roger's bachelor instinct, in sudden panic at its imminent extinction. I better wait till later in the afternoon, he sent it cautiously to himself. A dock-cart's not the place. They crossed the common, and drove through an ancient forest of oak and holly in which kings had hunted, and where the last wolf in England had been killed. And Roger told her of the great flood in the year of Waterloo, when the sea burst over the breakwater between Halliwater and Kirkby, and carried away the old hundred bridge and forced the fishes into the forest, where his grandfather had seen them weeks afterwards, sticking in the bushes. When they emerged once more into the open, the homely landscape had changed. The black-buried hedges were gone, replaced by long lines of thin furs, marking the boundaries between the fields. Seamuse were wheeling and calling among the uncouth, hummocked gorse, which crowded up on either side of the white poppy-edged road. There was salt in the air. Roger pointed with his whip. The Riban again, he said. But could this mighty river with its mile-wide water be indeed the Riban? Just beyond it, close beside it, divided only by a narrow thong of shingle, lay the sea. And Roger told Annette how at Mendelsham Mill the Riban had all but reached to the sea, and then had turned aside and edged along stubbornly, mile after mile, parallel with it, just within a stone's throw of it. But it never seems all to fall in and have done with it, he said, pointing to where it melted away into the haze, still hugging the sea, but always with the thong of shingle stretched between. The Riban scutting the sea, within sound of it, frustrated by its tides, brackish with its salt, but still apart. Always reminded Roger of Lady Louisa. She too had drawn very near, but could not reach the merciful sea of death. A narrow ridge of aching life, arid as the high shingle barrier, constrained her, brackish, month by month, from her own near refuge. But Roger could no more have expressed such an idea in words, and he could have knitted the cable-topped shooting-stockings which Janey made him, and which he had on at this moment. The carriage in front had stopped at a lonely homestead among the gorse. On a low knoll, at a little distance fronting the mart, stood an old stone cross. Mrs. Dodd-Art and Mr. Sterling had already taken to their feet, and were climbing slowly through the gorse up the sandy path which led to the holy well. Roger and Annette left the dog-cart and followed them. Presently Mr. Sterling gave Mrs. Dodd-Art his hand. Roger timidly offered his to Annette. She did not need it, but she took it. His shyness to have him in good stead. She had known bolder advances. And in hand, with beating hearts, they went, and as they walked for thin veil which hides the enchanted land from lonely seekers, was withdrawn. With awed eyes they saw that new world which is the old unfold itself before them, and smiled gravely at each other. The little pink convolvulus creeping in the thin grass made way for them. The wild St. John's word helped towards them its tiny golden stars. The sea-mues flapping slowly past with their feet hanging cried them, good luck! And the time, clinging close as mosques to the ground, sent them delicate greeting, like dawn in paradise. Annette forgot that a year ago she had for a few hours seen a mirage of this ecstasy before, and it had been but a mirage. She forgot that the day might not be far distant when this kindly man, this transfigured fellow-traveller, might leave her, when he who treated her now with reverence, delicous as the scent of the time, might not be willing to make her his wife, as that other man had not been willing. But how could she do otherwise than forget? For when our eyes are opened and the promised land lies at our feet, the most faithless of us fear no desertion, the most treacherous no treachery, the coldest no inconstancy, the most callous no wound, much less guileous souls like poor unwise Annette. She told Mrs. Doddart that she would never trust any one again, and then had trusted her implicitly. She told herself that she would never love again, and she loved Roger. A certain wisdom not all of this world could never be hers, as Mrs. Doddart had said, but neither could caution or distrust or half-heartedness or self-regard. Those thorny barricades against the tender feet of love would never be hers, either. Ha! Fortunate Annette! It seems, after all, as if some very simple, unsuspicious folk can do without wisdom, can well afford to leave it to us who are neither simple nor trustful. Still hand in hand they reached the shoulder of the low headland, and sat down on the sun-warmed, gossamer-threaded grass. The ground fell below their eyes to the long, staked marshlands of the Riban, steeped in a shimmer of haze. Somewhere, as in some other world, sheep-bells tingled, mingled with the faint clamour of sea-birds on the misty flats. The pale river'd leamed ethereal as the gleaming gossamer on the grass, and beyond it a sea of pearl was merged in a sky of pearl. Was anything real and tangible? Might not the whole vanish at a touch? They could not speak to each other. At last she whispered, The sea is still there. She'd thought as though it was a new heaven and a new earth that there would be no more sea, but there it was. God had evidently changed his mind. A minute speck appeared upon it. Roger pulled himself together. That's the Harwich boat, he said, or it may be one of Moise's coding-ships. I'd rather think it is. He gazed with evident relish at the small puff of smoke. He experienced a sudden relief in its advent, as one who disguised a familiar face in a foreign crowd. He said he wished he had brought his glasses as any could have identified it. And he pointed out to her, far away on the mist, the crumbling headlands of the Suffolk coast, and the church-tire of Dunwich, half lost in the sea-haze, waiting for the next storm to engulf it. Recalled to a remembrance of their destination by the cul-boat, they rose and walked slowly on towards the old stone-cross standing bluntly up against a great world of sky. Mr. Stirling and Mrs. Doddart were sitting under it. And close at hand a spring bubbled up, which slipped amid tumbled stone and ling to a little pond, the margin fretted by the tiny feet of sheep, and then wavered towards the ribbon as circuitously as the ribbon wavered to the sea. There was nothing left of the anchorite's cell save scattered stones and the shred of wall on which Mrs. Doddart was sitting. But a disciple of Julian of Norwich had dwelt there once, Mr. Stirling turned them, visited, said the legend went, by the deer of the forest when the moss on their horns fretted them, and by sick wolves with thorns in their feet, and by bishops and princes and knights and coft dames with thorns in their souls. And she healed and comforted them all. And later on Queen Mary had raised the cross to mark the spot where the saint of the Catholic Church had lived, as some said close on a hundred years. With a pity there are no saints left nowadays, said Mr. Stirling, to heal us poor sick wolves. But there are, said Annette, as even voluntarily, and if we don't see them until we become sick wolves, then we find them, and they take the thorn away. A baby kite, all fluff and innocent golden eyes and callow-hooked beak, flew down with long, unsteady wings to perch on the cross and preen itself. Presently a chiding mother's note summoned it away. Mr. Stirling watched it, and wondered whether the link between Mrs. Toddart and Annette, which he saw was a very close one, had anything to do with some dark page of Annette's past. Had Mrs. Toddart taken from her some rankling thorn, healed some deep wound in her young life? He saw the older woman's eyes looking with earnest scrutiny at Roger. Mr. Stirl believes in him, and the older woman doubts him, he said to himself. Annette's eyes followed a narrow track through the gorse towards a distant knoll with a clump of furs on it. I should like to walk to the furs, she said. Roger thought that an excellent idea, but he made no remark. Mr. Stirling at once said that he could easily be done if she were not afraid of a mile's walk. The knoll was farther than it looked. Mrs. Toddart said that she felt unequal to it, and she and Mr. Stirling agreed to make their way back to the carriage, and to rejoin Roger and Annette at Mendelsham Mill. The little stream was company to them on their way, playing hide and seek with them. Presently Roger Stirling said that they must part from it as it showed a treacherous tendency to boggy ground, and they struck along an old broken causeway on the verge of the marsh, disturbing myriads of birds congregated on it. Shall I do it now?" Roger said to himself. He met up his mind that he was speak when they reached the group of furs, now close at hand, with a low grey house huddled against them. He never proposed before, but he solidly supposed that if others could, he could. The sun had gone in, and a faint chill breath stirred the air. But where has the river gone to, said Annette? Roger, who had been walking as in a dream with his eyes glued to the furs, started. The river had disappeared. The sun came out again, and Sean is dead on drifting billows of mist, like the clouds the angels sit on in the picture-books. It is the sea-roak, he said, that we must hurry. He won't reach Mrs. Todd up with it, said Annette breathlessly, trying to keep up with his large stride. Damp is so bad for her rheumatism. She's all right, he said, almost angrily. They have wraps, and they are half way home by now. It's my fault, I might have known. If I'd have my wits about me when done it should look like that. The rope would come up with the tide." He took off his coat, and put it on her. Then he drew her arm through his. Now, he said, peremptorily, we've got to walk, hard. All in a moment the mist plotted out everything, and he stopped short instantly. It will shift, he said doggedly, we must wait till it shifts. He knew well the evil record of that coggy ground, and of the gleaming, sheening flats, the ruthless, oozy flats which tell no tales. The birds which had filled the air with that clamour were silent. There was no sound except the whisper everywhere of lapping water, water stealing in round them on all sides, almost beneath their feet. The sound meant nothing to Annette, but Roger frowned. The tide was coming in. The rope will shift, he said again doggedly. And it did. The tawny clouds yellow where the sun caught them, drifted past them, and parted. They saw the homely earth beneath their feet, the tiny pink convolvulus peering up at them. Do you see that bunch of furs, he said? Yes. Well, we've got to get there. We must run for it. They ran together towards it over the slippery sedge, up the still more slippery turf. The sun came out brilliantly, and she laughed and would have slackened to look at the fantastic world-sailing pastor. But he urged her on, his hand gripping her elbow. And he was right. By the time they reached the trees they were in a dense, white darkness, and the nearest fur whipped them across the face. Annette was frightened, and it was Roger's turn to laugh, a short, grim laugh with considerable relief in it. Ha! that's right, still holding her elbow tightly and reaching out with the other hand. We fired into the brown, and no mistake. Here's the middle tree, two more this side, then down. Mind your footing and hold on to me." They slid down into a dry ditch, at least Roger said he was dry. And good luck, too, he said, made that ditch myself to carry off the snow-water, or for a lot of water off the bank in winter. He pulled her up the other side, and then stopped and felt about him. The garden-wall should be here, he said. Empty house. Take shelter in it." Yes. He groped, and met with resistance. Here it is. They stumbled slowly along beside a wall. Lots of nettles, I'm afraid. Sorry, it can't be helped, as they plunged into a grove of them. Here we are. His hand was on an iron gate which gave, and opened inwards. She felt a house rising close above them. Roger relinquished her with many injunctions to stand still, and she heard his steps going away along a flagged path. Her net was not country-bred, and she had not that vague confidence in her mother earth, which those who have played on her surface from childhood never lose in later life. She was alarmed to find herself alone, and she shivered a little in the dripping winding sheet of the mist. She looked round her, and then up. High in heaven a pale disc showed for a moment, and was blotted out. The sun was shining somewhere. And far away in some other world she heard a lark singing, as it soared in the blue. A key and a lock turned, and a door close at hand grated on its hinges. "'Wait till I light a match,' said Roger's welcome voice. The match made a tawny blur the shape of a doorway, and she had time to reach it before it flickered out. Roger drew her into the house, and closed the door. End of CHAPTER XXVIII