'I beg your pardon,' said the intruder clumsily; 'I had expected to find you alone. I have driven over with these little odds and ends in the way of medical comforts for the boy.'

He stood confused, and laid his burden on the table which stood in the centre of the room.

'Didn't you guess,' laughed the little mother from the couch on which she lay, 'that Miss Hampton would be here before you?'

'No,' said Paul. 'If I had guessed, I should not have intruded. You'll take these things for the little fellow, won't you?'

'You're not going yet, Mr. Armstrong?' said the lady on the couch. 'You and Miss Hampton will have a nice little ride back together.'

'I should not dream,' said Paul, 'of intruding on Miss Hampton, and I must go back at once.'

He had no business in front of him, but he dreaded himself, and he was afraid of a tete-a-tete with the plain little woman with the brown eyes.

'But,' said mamma, lifting her head from the arm of the sofa, and casting upon him the look of ingenue archness which was almost her sole fortune on the boards, 'Miss Hampton's horse has cast a shoe, and the shoeing-smith is miles away. Did you ride or drive, Mr. Armstrong? I'm sure you couldn't have ridden with all those nice things you've been so kind to bring me. You must have driven, and you must drive Miss Hampton home again. Isn't it kind of her to have come over to see me from such a distance 'Just look and see: I'm actually smothered in wine and grapes and jelly and flowers. And wasn't it kind of you, too, Mr. Armstrong, to think of me just at the same moment! And wasn't it kind of Miss Hampton's horse to cast a shoe so that you would be obliged to go back together, whether you meant it or no?'

Miss Hampton was bending over the boy, and her face was hidden; but one blushing cheek gave warranty for the rest, and it was evident to Paul that she was as embarrassed as himself. She spoke icily: 'Mr. Armstrong was not aware that I was coming here. I must go at once. I have no doubt the landlord will be able to find me another driver.'

'Now, why on earth,'asked the little actress from her sofa, 'should two people who know each other as well as you do take two carriages to drive along the self-same road? Now, when you come to think of it, isn't that absurd! And such a chance for a spoon, too, all along that quiet road!'

'Good-afternoon, dear,' said Miss Hampton, setting down the child, and offering an Arctic kiss to the reclining lady; 'I must go.'

With that she swept from the room with an air of dignity and confusion, and Paul shook hands with the invalid and followed her.



CHAPTER XXVI

There are just as many different ways of falling in love as there are characters and temperaments, and even the same man—unless he be a fellow of no originality—will not fall in love twice in the same fashion. As to the wisdom or righteousness or the mere everyday question of plain honour involved in the permission which Paul Armstrong gave himself to fall in love at all, under the conditions in which he stood, there seemed room for no illusion. He should by this time have been something of a man of the world, and might reasonably be supposed to be acting with his eyes open to consequences. He had his compunctions by the hundred, his hoverings by the way, and turnings back from it. But many delicate signs which would have been invisible to him had he been less interested persuaded him that love lay ready for him, and after all the follies of his slaveries here and there, he persuaded himself that if he could but accept it, it was of a kind to atone for all that had gone before. And why, he asked himself, if this were true, should he stand for ever in loneliness? It was in him to be constant if only truth were met with truth. He could have been faithful to Claudia. He could have been faithful to Annette. He could have been faithful to Gertrude. And though no man whose sense of the humour of life does not leave him wholly blind to the comedy of his own existence could fail to see the bitter jest that lay here against himself, he urged the point seriously. He had been true in each case until faith had grown into blind folly, and bare respect for an old idol had become impossible. The one crime of his life had been acted against himself. He had believed Annette, and in the mere feebleness of acquiescence he had hung a weight about his neck which he was doomed to carry as long as her life should last.

And now, had he the right to redress the wrong he had inflicted upon himself? Feeble always, always a drifter, a good deal of a coward in his way of shrinking from avoidable pain, but never deliberately cruel or selfish. And now, was he to do a deliberately cruel and selfish thing? Or was as much mischief as might well be done wrought already?

For months had gone by, and the drifting policy had brought him plainly to the question, Was this quiet, sweet little girl in love with him? No blame to her if it were so. He had signalled her from the first for attention and companionship, and she knew nothing of his history. She had no guess as to the fatal bond which held him. Every day he knew her better. Her mind and heart opened out before him like twin flowers, full of purity and sweet odour.

She was courage incarnate, and her hatred of cruelty was a passion. A hulking blackguard of a teamster was cruelly flogging an overladen horse one day, and Madge, at the risk of her life, was in amongst the traffic of the street in a flash, and stood between the beast and his dumb victim voiceless and pale with rage, her little figure at its height and her eyes blazing. Paul's chance presence and the neighbourhood of a policeman were probably answerable for the peaceful solution of this episode, for the girl had snatched the whip from the bully's hand, and he was in an attitude which threatened violence when Paul intervened.

'My dear child!' said Paul in a tone of remonstrance as he conducted her from the scene.

'Oh,' she broke in, with her little teeth clenched, 'I couldn't bear it!'

He saw the folly of reproof and held his tongue, and when they came in sight of the theatre she ran indoors and escaped him.

He had fallen into a habit of walking home with her when the night's work was over, and saying good-bye to her at the door of her lodgings. This fact made her mightily unpopular with the ladies of the company, who saw no reason why she should be thus distinguished, and the snubs she took disposed him to be more attentive to her.

They drifted closer, but no confidences were exchanged between them.

The company made for Australia, and there were six days of travel aboard a well-found steamer, and this gave more than ample time for the position to solidify. There were long promenades on deck by moonlight and starlight, and the two found a perch in the bows out of the way of all observation and regard, and there exchanged all manner of confidences. The girl's simple life unrolled itself—its hopes, its ambitions! its home affections. She talked of her reading, of her music, of all the little intimacies of home-life. Before the brief voyage was over he seemed, to his own apprehension, to know his companion more completely than he had ever known man or woman, and he was hourly more and more in love with her. He was feather-headed and irresponsible enough to be happy in the circumstances for hours at a time, but when he was alone, and his heart was no longer flattered by the worship she so innocently offered, the skeleton he carried about with him came out of its cupboard and seemed to mop and mow before him in derision. He was bound hand and foot to his fate, and the bonds were not to be severed There was Annette in far-away London and Paris dragging out a miserable and ignominious life, which was likely to last as long as his own, and he could see no hope of freedom. With every passing day he felt more clearly that he was bent upon an inexcusable wrong, and yet, so strangely fashioned is the conscience of a man who is without the power of will, all his self-reproaches did but add to the tenderness and fervour of his desire.

The steamer reached its destination late upon a Saturday, and Sunday was a holiday. Paul and Madge spent the day together, wandering on a long stretch of sandy coast which lay between the port and the bright green waters of the sea; and all the time there was a growing sense of inevitability in his mind. He knew that he was going to ask for happiness, and that he was prepared to pay his self-respect and manhood for it. The talk was of trifles in the morning until they strolled home to luncheon; it was of trifles again in the afternoon until they strolled home to dinner, and it was of trifles still when they set out in the yellow sunset to saunter once more in a scene which had already grown strangely memorable and familiar. There were no sunset clouds, but the pageant of the dying day had a sort of sullen and pathetic beauty. The blazing sun dropped behind the far-off sea-line, and a great band of saffron rimmed the whole horizon, fading into palest green as it spread upward, and this in turn melted into a blue which at the zenith looked unfathomable. A full moon, which had until now been invisible, looked down from the very centre of the sky. There was none of the lingering twilight of more temperate climates. The change from broad daylight, in which every outline and detail of the landscape was accented strongly, to the dim, mystic and diffused radiance of the moon and stars was like an episode in a transformation-scene at the theatre. A mere ten minutes had sufficed to change the whole character and sentiment of the scene. It was like walking out of one world into another, and a rude chorus of voices, accompanied by the sounds of a banjo and a concertina, came from some body of merrymakers beyond a distant island in the bay. It moved away farther and farther into the distance until the harshness was softened to an almost spiritual melody, and after awhile it reached the ear only at uncertain intervals.

They came to a place at which they had rested in the afternoon. Some high tide of long ago had deposited here a great wreath of wrack, a hundred yards inland, and piled up in places to a height of some twelve feet. There were scores of cushiony resting-places here like great luxurious arm-chairs, and the wrack when disturbed by a touch gave out dry and stinging odours of sea-salt and iodine.

Paul, with a mere motion of the hand to his companion, threw himself into one of the hollows, and she took a seat at a little distance from him. He lay, the brim of his hat sheltering his eyes from the moonlight, and stared at the spangled vault above him, where the stars seemed to hang from threads of gold and silver as if they were upheld by an actual tangible roof. He knew that his hour had come, but he obeyed the impulse which controlled him with an infinite self-accusation.

'Madge,' he said, rolling over where he lay and stretching out his hand towards her. It fell upon her own, and she made no motion to evade him. It was the first caress he had ever offered her, and her tacit acceptance of it hurried him into passion. 'Madge,' he said again; 'dear little Madge!'

She glanced at him for an instant only, and in the moonlight her eyes glinted with sudden tears.

'I have no right,' he said, 'to speak to you like this. I have had no right to claim your companionship as I have done since we first began to know each other.'

She was quite silent; but under his light caress he felt her hand tremble, and she glanced at him once more and looked away again.

'I have not had a happy life,' he went on, 'but that ought to dispose me to do what I can to keep unhappiness out of the lives of other people. If I tell you that I am very conscious of having deceived you, of having left you in the dark about myself in respect to things you have a right to know, what shall you say to me? What will you think of me?'

Again she turned to look at him, and this time her glance rested on him, but still she made no answer.

Paul withdrew his hand, sat upright, and began mechanically to charge his pipe and to smoke.

'I met an utterly worthless woman many years ago,' he began, after a long pause, 'and I threw my life away upon her. We were married, and she is still alive. She is likely to live for many years to come; and, indeed, there is no probability of escape from her. It is not likely that she and I will ever see each other any more; but I am legally bound to her so long as she shall live. I ought to have told you this months ago.'

He rose and began to pace up and down the sands before her. He looked up at her from time to time, and her eyes followed him as he moved. Not a sound escaped her lips, but her fast-flowing tears glittered on her cheeks like rain.

'I should have told you,' he cried, writhing between self-accusation and self-excuse, 'but I had not the courage to put an end to a time which has been so lull of sweetness, so full of a mad kind of hope which I should never have admitted to my heart I know,' he went on, pausing desperately before her, 'what must be in your mind. I know that you are asking how I dared to draw you on to such a friendship as ours has been through an acted lie, and how I have dared at last to tell the truth I have postponed so long. You have a right to be wounded; you have a right to be angry. You will do yourself the merest justice if you teach yourself to despise and hate me; and if you tell me to go away at once and darken your life no further, I will do it But let me say just this one thing: whatever my cowardly silence may seem to prove, I have never had a thought of you that has not been full of the profoundest respect and reverence. You know now the truth about me, and you know that in spite of it I have made love to you for months past. I can't tell what a high-minded and pure-hearted woman may feel in such a case. I can't guess if such a woman could find it in her nature to accept the lifelong worship and affection of a man who is circumstanced as I am, if she could find the courage and self-sacrifice to join her destinies with a broken life like mine. Oh, if it were possible!' he cried, 'and oh, if it were possible that I could nourish such a hope in fancy, and not know in my inmost heart that only a scoundrel could be guilty of it! There, Madge, it is all said now. It had to be said, but I shall never forgive myself for having said it.'

The accusations he brought against himself were just as real as the passion and despair which urged him on.

The Solitary, in his smoke-clouded mountain eyrie, surveyed all this, as he had surveyed the varied experiences of life which had passed before it in clear vision through his mind, and still the passion and despair and the self-accusing, self-excusing thoughts were as real to him as they had been at the moment he recalled. He accepted that reality as a proof, scarcely needed, of the already established shallowness of his own nature—a brawling stream always ready to rave round any little impediment in its path; a mere miniature of the torrent, with no resolute strength or purpose in it, but full of a fussy vivacity and self-importance which he could most heartily and bitterly despise. All his life long the same futile story repeated: the same headlong impetuosity, the same want of steadfast force, the same absence of control. And yet, even in the depth of self-reproach, he could not deny to himself some hint of purpose which had an honest meaning in his mind, and, looking back, he saw that he had found an entrance to a purer and better life than he had known before. Had he been worthy of the trust he asked for, he would have blamed himself less for asking. Tears were hot and harsh in his throat as the scene unrolled itself before him.

Paul Armstrong—the Paul Armstrong of those irrevocable bygone years—was striking up and down the sand, and the girl was still weeping without a sound, when the Exile's thought flew back to them. It was as if a curtain had descended for an instant only, and had risen again to reveal the same actors in the same scene.

'I had better leave you now, Madge,' said Paul, half maddened by the sight of the uncomplaining grief he had awakened. 'I will watch you home as soon as you care to go, but I won't intrude upon you any longer.'

The slight figure rose from its seat upon the wrack, and stood before him with downcast and averted head, but he could still see the tears falling like diamond-drops in the clear moonlight. He turned irresolutely away, but he had made only a single step before he was vividly back again with an impulsive and imploring hand upon her shoulder.

'Tell me,' he said, 'that you forgive me. Tell me that you will be able to think of me when I am gone with something—some feeling that will not be all contempt. You won't always despise me, will you, Madge?'

'I shall never despise you,' she answered, in a voice she could barely control; 'I shall always remember this time.'

'And you don't hate me for having spoken?'

She looked up at him with a strange smile, which was so tender and so full of pity that he caught his breath at the sight of it.

'No,' she said, 'I shall never hate you. I must be as truthful as you have been. I must tell you that I had heard something of what you have told me before we left New Zealand. I didn't know if it were true, and I did not even wish to ask.'

He stood still with that unconscious hand upon her shoulder, and his heart gave a leap as he asked:

'You knew I loved you, Madge—you knew I loved you?'

'I was quite sure of that,'she answered 'I have believed it for a long time.'

'Madge,' he said, 'are you strong enough—are you brave enough—can you put such faith in me? Can you believe that I will lay a life's unfailing devotion at your feet—that the very fact that there can be no legal tie between us will make me always all the truer to you? I swear to you that if you trust yourself to me, my whole life shall be one act of gratitude for your faith and courage, and that no act or word of mine shall ever cause you to regret the compact.'

Her tears had ceased to fall, and when she next looked at him her face was grave, and looked in the moonlight as pale as snow.

'If I were alone,' she answered, 'you should have my answer now, but I have others to consider.'

'Oh, who,' he cried, 'can come between us?'

'Let us go home,' she answered simply and bravely. 'I must have time to think. Please say no more to me to-night.' She moved away, and Paul, taking his place beside her, walked in silence 'There is no one,' she said, when they had traversed a hundred yards or more, 'who has a right to dictate what my life shall be; but I have never done anything without my mother's knowledge and consent, and I never shall.'

Paul had passed from despair almost to certainty, but this chilled him suddenly.

'Ah,' he said, with a gasping breath, 'is there any mother in the world who would consent to such a scheme?'

'You must write to me,' she answered, 'such a letter as I can send to her. I will write, too, and I will ask her not to answer until she has seen us both.'

'That rings a death-knell,' said Paul 'I have no hope of consent in such a case.'

'I can't tell,' she answered simply, 'but there is no other way.'

'And yet you love me, Madge?' said Paul. She made no answer, and he drew nearer to her, and put an arm about her shoulder. 'You love me, little Madge?' he urged her.

She gave a sigh of acquiescence, a half-breathed 'Yes.'

'And you could deny your own heart and mine? You could let me go away alone, and live alone yourself, with an empty heartache?'

Her answer came, like an echo of a former tone, just the same half-breathed token of assent. There was a quiet resolution in it, for all it was so softly spoken, which bound him to silence for a time.

There was more strength of resolution, more power and purpose, expressed thus simply than he had ever been conscious of himself, and he recognised that fact quite clearly.

They walked from this time forth in silence, until at the outskirts of the town they reached the small and retired hotel at which the girl had taken lodgings, and there they parted formally enough.

'You will write?' she asked, holding out her hand to him in token of dismissal.

'I will write,' he answered, taking her hand, and bowing over it.

There were some Sabbath loiterers in the street, and it was necessary that the two should part undemonstratively.

Paul, as he walked to his own more pretentious hostel, recognised the fact that for good or evil he had shot his bolt There was nothing at that hour of which he was more certain than that his present destiny and the destiny of Madge lay in the hands of a woman he had never seen, and he did not even attempt to disguise from himself the overwhelming probability against an affirmative answer to his hopes. He was very miserably certain that he had no right to hope, and that accusing conscience of his which never permitted him to stray without rebuke, and yet had never been worth a farthing to him in his whole career, worried him without ceasing. But he knew enough of himself already to have learned that the fault of character which had wrecked him was half made up of reluctance to add pain to pain. It is not always the wholly selfish wrongdoer who is answerable for the greater sorrows of life. It is assuredly not he who suffers in his own person; but, worse than that, the tender-hearted, conscience-worried man of feeble will is always afraid of causing a slight grief by retracing a mistaken step, and so goes on inevitably to the creation of troubles which appal him when he comes to contemplate them in after-hours. And to have a full theoretical knowledge of this fact enforced by years of experience is to be gifted with no safeguard. 'To be weak'—there is no wiser saying among the utterances of the wise—'to be weak is to be miserable.' To be a fool and to know it is the extreme of misery, and this extreme does not fall to the lot of those who are extremest in folly.

What Paul wrote that night is barely worth chronicling, and may be fairly constructed by anyone who has so far pursued his story. But the Exile, sitting over the embers of the fire at which he had cooked his coarse mid-day meal, threw himself backward on the trodden grass, and, groping behind the flap of the tent, dragged his brown canvas bag towards him, and having made a search among its contents, found a heap of stained, crumpled and disordered papers, one of which he smoothed out upon his knee and read. It had been given to him in that first unspeakably tranquil and happy year which Madge and he had spent together in Europe. It was the first blotted draft of the letter to her mother with which she had accompanied his own, and it ran thus:

'My darling Mother,

'I am putting this into a separate envelope, and on the envelope I am writing to ask you to read Mr. Armstrong's letter to me before you read my own. He has explained everything there, and now I must make my appeal to you. I have promised that I will do nothing without your consent, and I am not very hopeful that I shall secure it. You know that I am not light-minded, or in the habit of saying what I do not mean, and I shall only tell you this: I love him with my whole heart and mind, and if you decide that we are to part I shall accept your decision, but I shall never know a happy day again. Paul is not only a great man but a good one.'

(The reader had faced this blow so often that he was ready for it, but he had no guard against it, and it struck home so heavily that he groaned aloud.)

'I know now, partly from what I have lately learned from other people, partly from what he told me last night, but mainly from the letter you have read, the story of his life, and I know how profoundly unhappy it has been. I want to comfort and sustain him, and I am not afraid to face all the difficulties which lie before me. I can hear a clear call to duty, and I am sure that his love and mine will strengthen me to do it. You have never known me to be frivolous or foolish in my thoughts about such things as these, and until we can all three meet together, you must have patience with me. It would be wrong and cruel on my side to throw everything upon you, and I shall not ask you to make yourself responsible for what you may think my wrong-doing. There are a hundred thousand things in my heart which I cannot say, and amongst them all there is the dreadful fear that I may have lost your respect. But you ought to know the truth, and the whole truth. I have not lost my own, and I cannot believe that I shall ever have the right to be ashamed.'

There was much more than this. There were half-articulate expressions of affection and fear of an agony of regret for a possible severance. And through it all there beamed like a star, steadfast and unobscured in tempest, the loyal heart, the uncountable soul which, in whatsoever error, knows love and fealty as its only guides.



CHAPTER XXVII

By far the greater part of the theoretical wisdom of the world comes to us in the shape of legacies bequeathed by fools. A fool is not a person without knowledge or understanding—that is an ignoramus. The true fool—the only fool worthy of a wise man's contemplation—is the man who knows and understands, and habitually refrains from acting according to knowledge and understanding. It is the record of the follies of such people which has built up the world's wisdom. From that record we have learned amongst many other things that the fool of understanding has one eternal refuge from himself which he seeks with a full knowledge of the fact that the shelter it affords is illusory, and that the path by which it leads him can only conduct him to greater dangers than those from which he is striving to escape. It is too late to go back now, quoth the fool; the business must be gone through to the end. Thus if this brief diagnosis be of any value, the root of folly is to be found in the decay of will. Few men had reason to hold this belief more firmly than Paul Armstrong, and yet even now, when whatever was best in his own nature was more seriously engaged than it had ever been before, he went on to the consummation of a most undoubted and most cruel wrong, on the poor pretence that every stage he passed towards it made the passage of the next stage inevitable.

If ever it had seemed clear to him that it was too late to retire it seemed clearer now, and indeed he had so involved himself that it became to him alike and equally criminal to retreat or to advance. But by-and-by a solace for his miseries brought a solution of perplexity. Since he had taken so tremendous a responsibility upon himself, since there was now no escape from it without an act of brutality at the mere thought of which his heart revolted, there grew up within him such a resolve and such a sense of protective tenderness as had been hitherto impossible for him. Poor little Madge was to be victimized, but the via dolorosa which she would tread unendingly should at least be strewn with flowers, and the victim herself should be beautifully garlanded. His life should be one act of worship in return for her self-sacrifice. His devotion should offer such a challenge to the censure of the world that all reproach should shrink away ashamed. There never had been so complete an atonement as he would offer.

The nauseous pill of self-reproach was so thickly sugared and gilded by this inspiration that in a while he was not only able to take it without making wry faces, but with an actual sense of relish and self-approval. This was naturally a good deal dashed by the coming interview with Madge's mother, about whose unknown personality there began to cluster some self-contradictory ideas. That lady would be a most unnatural mother if she rejected the proposal he had to lay before her, and a most unnatural mother if she accepted it. In his reflections, according to his mood, he saw either horn of this dilemma so clearly that the other vanished from his mind, but it always assumed its proper reality again, and made its companion altogether visionary.

When at last the fatal hour for the interview arrived, he went to the rendezvous in a pitiable state of hope and fear. He had always his whole life through carried all his eggs in one basket, and had been incapable of undertaking more than one emotional enterprise at a time. To lose Madge now would be to lose everything, and his former experiences of the healing powers of time—which were possibly numerous and striking enough—were of no value to him. Obeying the directions he had received, he chartered a cab, and after a half-hour's tumultuous journey found himself alighting before a pretty villa in Prahran, with a well-ordered garden in front of it full of English shrubs and flowers, amidst which were interspersed a number of sub-tropic plants and trees. He was shown with no delay into a shaded room, where he had some difficulty in making out the figure of a gray-haired lady who sat in an arm-chair to receive him, and who did not rise at his entrance. Madge was standing near her, and as the dazzling effect of the bright sunshine of the streets passed from his eyes he saw the sign of many tears in the two faces before him.

There was an embarrassing silence, which lasted for a full half-minute, and Paul stood there conscious of the mother's scrutiny, and feeling like a criminal in the dock. The girl herself was the first who found courage and self-control to speak.

'Mother dear,' she said in an uncertain voice, 'this is Mr. Armstrong.'

The elder lady nodded, and with a slight gesture of the hand motioned the visitor to a chair. Paul obeyed the gesture, and waited in silence.

'You will understand,' the lady of the house began, 'how wretchedly sorry I am to see you.' Paul bowed an assent to this, and could but acknowledge that the unpromising exordium was natural. 'My daughter has never had a secret from me in her life until within the last few months. She has written of you in her letters from time to time, but never led me to fancy that you were making love to her. I believe you are a married man, Mr. Armstrong?'

'I am married,' Paul responded in a voice so strangled and unlike his own that it positively startled him.

'I cannot help knowing,' said Mrs. Hampton, 'that I have made a very serious mistake in giving way to my daughter's desire to go upon the stage. But I trusted her so completely that I had no fear at all of what has happened. You must know, Mr. Armstrong, that you have misbehaved yourself most cruelly.'

'I have said so to myself a thousand times,' said Paul, 'and I have no defence to offer now.'

'You have done a wicked and a cruel thing,'pursued the mother. 'You have brought my daughter into opposition with me for the first time in her life, and you have filled her head with ideas which can only lead to suffering and disgrace.'

'Forgive me, Mrs. Hampton,' Paul said. 'I have acted precipitously and wrongly, and I am much to blame; but I have never striven for an instant to confuse Miss Hampton's mind. If I have won her love, I have done it half unconsciously, and it began in friendship and esteem. I ought, I know now, to have told her of that miserable tie which binds me; but at first I did not think it necessary to speak a word about that. A man would have to be a rare coxcomb,' he went on, 'to think it needful that he should make public proclamation of a fact like that. My life has been ruined for years past, and I did not care to talk about it I did not dream of harm until harm was done.'

'I can only say, Mr. Armstrong,'the mother answered, 'that there can be no discussion about this matter, and that I rely upon my daughter to do justice to herself. She will learn in a little while to know that you have done her a very serious wrong, and that will help her to live her trouble down.'

'Madam,' cried Paul, rising to his feet, and speaking with an impassioned swiftness, 'I beseech you to listen to me for one minute only; if I try to justify myself in some small degree, you will understand my purpose. At an age when life is opening for most men I had tied myself to a hopeless burden. I found myself shut out from every chance of happiness; such a thing as home I dared not even dream of. The law can afford me no relief from the snare into which I have fallen; I am excluded from everything that makes life bright to other men. My experiences of woman's friendship have not been happy, and I had come to the belief that I was condemned to go through life without companionship. I met your daughter; we found that our minds came together in whatever was best in both of us. I declare that I never spoke one word of love to her until the night on which she made me promise to write the letter which she sent to you. I must not—dare not—speak of scruples on your side. They are no scruples; they are stern and cruel facts which can only be surmounted by great courage. But they have been surmounted by others, and we believe—Madge and I both believe—that we have the courage and the constancy to face them. Madge tells me that without your consent our case is hopeless. I know how unlikely it is that it should be given; but if it should be given—if by any chance you should be brought to change your present mind—I promise you by everything that men hold sacred that I will honour and treasure her and cherish her as my true wife in the sight of God and men, and that the tie on my side will be not less binding, but beyond measure more sacred because her claim appeals only to honour and manhood, and is not enforced by law. I plead for myself, Mrs. Hampton, and you will tell me with perfect justice that you are not called upon in the remotest degree to consult my wishes or to sympathize with any grief I may have brought upon myself. But there is another side to the question, and your daughter will tell you if I am right in thinking it a million times stronger than my own. You have known her and have loved her tenderly all her life. I have known her for little more than half a year; but I am sure of this: her affections are not lightly engaged or easily cast away.'

She had raised her hand against him more than once as if to interrupt him, but he had not checked the impetuous torrent of his speech until he had poured out all he had to say. Now, with a forlorn outward gesture of the hands, and a lax dropping of them to either side, he stood awaiting judgment.

Madge broke silence for the second time.

'There is no need for Mr. Armstrong to stay longer now. You and I must talk together, mother; and I will write to him to-night.'

Her face was of a striking pallor, except where the salt of tears had scalded it; but she spoke with an entire possession of herself, and Paul wondered at her steadfastness and courage.

'There is one thing more,'he said: 'if you can be brought to sanction this union, sanctify it by coming with us both to Europe. Live with us, and help me to secure Madge's happiness. Your presence there would silence every wicked tongue, and if we made no secret of the truth, but dared the world together, we should find, I know, that it would deal kindly with us.'

He stood for a moment, and, receiving no reply, bowed and walked blindly towards a door which communicated with another room. Madge called to him, 'This way,' and went out into the hall before him.

'Is this to be our last parting, I wonder?' he asked hoarsely.

She shook her head with a weary lifting of the fine arched brows as if to say she could find no answer, and then withdrew without word or sign, leaving him to quit the house unattended.

He fumbled half blindly until he found his hat and cane, and then he had to fumble for the door, for the whole place was heavily shadowed from the blazing sun outside, and his eyesight and his hands were each less serviceable to him than usual. At first the broad sunshine fell upon his eyes like a sudden vivid heat upon a wound, and in his agitation and half-blindness he found himself walking away from the quarter of the city to which he had meant to direct his steps. Correcting this error in a minute or two, he turned and made for his hotel with a mind so shaken and vacant that he seemed to have no thoughts at all. A man who has been passionately in love three times before he has begun to verge upon middle age may easily be thought too inflammable a subject to be deserving of much pity, but a man may be keenly in sympathy with himself without enlisting the sympathy of other people, and Paul was here as always heroically and tragically in earnest. Without seeking apologies for him too far afield, there is a kind of nature which burns intensely within itself, and will break out into violence of smoke and flame with the intrusion of any new emotional material, just as there is a nature not more intense which will burn equably and clearly whatever new supply of fuel may be heaped upon it.

There is no need to dwell upon the time of waiting, the miserable loiterings in bedroom, corridor and entrance-hall, the aimless perusal of newspapers which conveyed no meaning to the mind, the taking up and laying down of petty occupations, and all the other signs and tokens of suspense. Time and the hour wear out the roughest day, and as Paul lingered over the dessert of a barely tasted dinner, a note reached him in Madge's handwriting. It contained these words only:

'There is no change. I dare not hope, and I dare not despair. I may have news for you to-morrow, but what it may be I must not guess.

'M.'

This was cold comfort, but he had not expected more, and he strolled away in sheer vacuity of heart and thought to the principal theatre of the city, where just then a bright comic opera was running. The lights, the gay music, the brilliantly-dressed crowd upon the stage, made no impression on his mind, and his saturnine and gloomy face was in such contrast to the loud hilarity of the audience that he felt himself a blot upon the house, and at the first fall of the curtain withdrew into the streets, where he wandered listlessly until midnight He was fatigued, and slept heavily for some hours, but he was awake again long before the household was astir, and suffered all the weariness and chagrin which assailed the unoccupied mind in hours of suspense and doubt. Another brief note reached him by the first post.

'Mother has spoken a great deal to-night of my brother George, who, as you know, is already in London. I do not know what to think of this, and I can scarcely dare to fancy what I should so much like to believe. I shall not write again until I have something definite to tell you, but whether we ever meet again or no, you shall see my whole heart for once. I love you, and I know that I shall always love you. Is it unwomanly—is it too bold to tell you this so soon? Will you think that I am too easily persuaded about myself? I hope not. But whatever happens, even if I never see you or hear your voice again, I shall not change or forget anything that has happened in all this beautiful and dreadful time.

'All yours, and always yours,

'Madge.'

This had been brought to him as he sat dressed in his bedroom, wondering if any message would reach him, and he had locked his door to be alone with Fate before he had broken the seal of the wax, which bore a dove with an olive-branch, and the motto Esperez. He read the tender message with its proclamation of unshakable fidelity thrice over, and then rising, began to pace up and down the room. A cry of self-accusation rose to his lips.

'My God!' he asked himself, 'what have I done? What have I done?'

There was no room for doubt in all his mind. There are some truths which manifest themselves so clearly to the heart that they are not to be resisted. He had found fidelity at last after all his foolish researches. It had seemed to him the priceless jewel of the world, and he had been willing to barter all his life for it. It was here at last, and he was so far beggared that he had no price to offer in payment for it which was worth a thousandth part its value. He was bankrupt and had sought to buy this treasure, and must now needs go through life as a swindler. Even if his hopes were granted, what had he to pay? He knew at this moment as clearly as if he had even then been enlightened by the events of later years that there were scores of women who would draw their skirts away in a real disdain of an association of which they were not worthy. And he knew also that if his own hopes failed him he had spoiled the one life in the whole world he would fain have done his best to gladden.

The next pause lasted long. Day after day went by and no message came. It is not more than justice to chronicle the fact that Paul Armstrong did grow for once in his life to feel more for another than for himself, and if he suffered anguish, as he did, it was on Madge's account much rather than his own. The cry her confession had wrung from him was always in his mind: 'What have I done? My God, what have I done?'

These days were a stern discipline, but they came to an end at last. A note reached him at the end of a week in which Mrs. Hampton presented her compliments to Mr. Armstrong, with a request that he would call that afternoon at five o'clock. This, of course, conveyed no certainty to him in either one direction or another, but it awoke an extraordinary tumult in his mind, and he found himself in the neighbourhood of the Prahran villa a full hour before the time appointed. He sauntered in the broiling heat and blinding light until he lost himself repeatedly in strange places and rang at the doors of strange houses to inquire his way back again, quite frenzied by the fear of missing his appointment In effect, he arrived at the instant, and was ushered into the room he had already visited. Mrs. Hampton sat there, looking very pale and stern, he thought, and she rose upon his entrance and offered him her hand. It seemed to him that this cost her a considerable effort, and she resumed her seat without a word. Madge was there also, but she exchanged no greeting with Paul, and did not even meet his glance. The hostess touched a bell upon the table which stood near her, and after a silent pause a trim parlourmaid brought in a tray upon which was set out the materials for afternoon tea. Mrs. Hampton began to busy herself about the tray, and Madge handed a cup of tea to Paul.

'I may tell you, Mr. Armstrong,' said Madge's mother, 'that, if you think it worth while to call it winning, you have won. You have very nearly broken an old woman's heart in doing it, and you may break a girl's heart into the bargain before you have done. But my son George is in London, and I have made up my mind to let Madge go home and join him there. Her sister will go with her and will be her companion on the voyage, and I shall follow so soon as I can dispose of my interests in this country. I am uprooting my household and leaving all my friends; and I am doing it, Mr. Armstrong, for a man of whom I know next to nothing. I am almost certain that I am not acting wisely, and I am not quite sure that I am not acting wickedly. I know out of my own experience of the world that marriage can make a woman miserable if it were blessed by all the parsons living, but you are taking a responsibility a great deal bigger than that of any husband, and I am taking such a responsibility as no mother ought to take. And now, Madge,' she said, 'I want to speak to Mr. Armstrong in private for one minute. Come back when I call you.'

Madge stole obediently away, and when the door had closed behind her, Mrs. Hampton leaned forward and spoke in a half-whisper, with her hand stretched out before the listener like a hovering bird.

'I have my child's promise,' she said, 'and I know that I can trust to it But I must have your undertaking that you will place her safely in her brother's hands, and that you will treat her with as much respect as if she were engaged to be married to you.'

'Madam,' Paul broke out, 'I pledge myself absolutely. I could hold no pledge so sacred.'

'I shall follow,' said Mrs. Hampton, 'within two or three months. My child will have had another half-year in which to know you and to understand your intentions towards her. I have no fear of her; but if you violate your promise in the slightest, you will act like a scoundrel, and I have Madge's undertaking that she will be candid with me. There is no more to be said now until we meet in England. I may tell you just this, Mr. Armstrong: we two have spent every night since I first saw you in each other's arms in tears. I am giving you a proof that I think well of you on very slender grounds. If you are in the least worthy my good opinion, you will think sometimes of what I have just told you.'

He stooped and kissed her hand, and when she drew it away there was a single tear upon it.

'I had rather get the wrench over,' she said, 'and have done with it. It will seem quite natural that I should go home and join my family in London, and I shall explain nothing beyond that.' She rose and opened the door and called her daughter by name. 'It is all over,' she said, when Madge returned. 'I have but one hope, and that is that you may never live to blame your mother's weakness. I should have done for your father what you are doing if there had been any need for it, and I should have done it in the face of all the world. And now I want to be alone a little to—to'—her voice faltered suddenly, and her eyes brimmed with tears—'to say my prayers, and, if I have done wrong, to beg God's forgiveness. Go out into the garden, children, and leave me here.'

So into the wide garden, cooled with the shade of English fruit-trees—peach and pear and plum and apple—the two wandered, far too disturbed by happiness as yet to be content But in Paul's heart a new well of tenderness began to open—a spring of tenderness and yearning which seemed to overflow every cranny of his nature. To pay for this, to scrape up from the bankrupt remnants of life something by way of thanks-offering, to devote himself heart and soul and mind and body to that one aim, to discipline himself to a lofty and unresting ambition for that one aim's sake, to win a fortune, to win a solid renown in which his love should shine reflected and sit enshrined—all this was with him in one confused conglomerate of gratitude and hope and love.

'No woman,' he said, 'ever showed a greater trust I shall never be worthy of it, but it shall be the one endless study of my life to be less unworthy.'

He took her, unresisting, to his arms. Their lips met for the first time, and two souls seemed to tremble into one.



CHAPTER XXVIII

Paul knew that Madge and he were to have a travelling companion on the voyage, and that the companion was to be Madge's sister, but he did not meet her until he stepped aboard the steamer bound for Tilbury Docks from Adelaide. Her name was Phyllis, but for some reason or no reason her own small world had elected to call her Bill, and to that name only she gave willing answer, unless she were flattered from the memory of short frocks by being addressed as Miss Hampton. She was a child of astonishing beauty, with eyes like stars and the face of a young angel, and people who did not know her received an impression of sanctity and innocence when they beheld her. A complete knowledge of her character revealed her as an incorrigible imp, utterly without a sense of danger under any circumstances her experience had so far led her to encounter, and, apart from that, a compound—a furious compound on either side—of jealousy and affection. It would, perhaps, be more just to say affection and jealousy, for Bill's heart was hot with love for those for whom she cared at all, and her jealousy was but the natural product of her affection. It was not until the boat reached Colombo that Bill condescended to accept a solitary advance from Paul. Until then she resented every minute he spent in her sister's society and every word he addressed to her, but once enlisted she became a sort of lovers' watch-dog, and held all intruders at bay.

The steamer was lying for four-and-twenty hours in the harbour at Colombo, and everybody who was at liberty was delighted to snatch a day ashore. Paul and Madge and Bill made the customary globe-trotter's round They lunched at the hotel at Point de Galles, saw the usual conjurers and snake-charmers, drove to the usual Buddhist temple, dined in town, and went aboard again. Bill, who had hitherto proved an unmitigated nuisance, behaved with a fine discretion throughout the day, and it was only half an hour after her appointed bedtime that she pointedly made Paul aware of her existence. He was lounging in a deck-chair and smoking a cigar when the young lady took a place at his side.

'Look here,' she said, with the boyish off-handedness which belonged to her. 'I want you and me to be friends.'

'Why not?' said Paul. 'I'm agreeable if you are.'

'Have I been good to-day?' the imp asked, laying her head upon his shoulder, and turning up those starlike, unfathomable eyes of hers.

'You have behaved like an angel for temper,' Paul responded, 'and like an elderly diplomatist for discretion.'

'You are satisfied?' said Bill, rolling her golden curls in her Tam-o'-Shanter cap.

'I am not merely satisfied, William,' Paul responded. 'Words fail me to express my gratitude.'

'Don't you begin to chaff me,' said Bill. 'If you do, I shan't make the bargain I was going to.'

'I assure you,' said Paul, 'that I was never more serious in my life. I swear it by the most sacred of man's possessions—gold. This is an English sovereign.'

'For me?' asked Bill, her lambent eyes regarding him as if no thought of greed or bribery could touch the angel's soul which shone through them.

'For you,' said Paul.

'Right oh!' Bill replied, biting at the coin with her milk-white teeth, and then bestowing it in her pocket. 'Now, if you'll promise never to leave Madge alone about one thing, I'll be as good—as good—you can't guess anything as good as I'll be.'

'There's no such thing as a one-sided bargain,' said Paul, 'and you must let me know what you expect from me in answer to this astonishing confession.'

'Don't you chaff me,' said Bill, still rolling her golden head upon his shoulder, and beaming on him with those eyes of innocence. 'I might be having a sweetheart of my own one of these days. Don't you think that's likely?'

'I don't mind betting,' Paul answered, 'that you'll have fifty—'

Bill sat up straight in her deck-chair, clasped her hands with a vivid gesture, and looked skyward with a glance pure as the heavens themselves.

'What a lark!' she breathed—' oh, what a lark! Fifty? Do you think they'd all come together?' she asked with a sudden eagerness, as if her life depended on the answer.

'Say, five at a time,' said Paul—'ten per annum; that will give you five years to deal with them, beginning, we will say, about two years from now.'

'But that's where I want to come in,' said Bill 'I want to begin at once.'

'There is no need to be in a hurry,' Paul answered. 'There is plenty of time before you.'

'Oh yes,' said Bill thoughtfully. 'But, then, you see, I don't want to waste any of it. Now, I just want to tell you what I want you to do for me. I want you to din it into Madge's ears, morning, noon, and night, that it's time that I should do my hair up and wear long frocks.'

'And if I undertake that mission?' Paul asked

'We're friends,' cried Bill, rising and holding out her hand 'You'll see,' she added, 'I can be just as nice as I have been nasty.'

From this time forward the voyage was like a happy dream. Suez and Naples and Gibraltar were full of interest and wonder to the untravelled Madge, and the Mediterranean was smooth as a pond through all the lovely days and nights of the European spring. The Bay of Biscay so far belied its stormy reputation that there was scarcely a heave upon its surface, and at last the shores of England came in sight, sacred and beautiful to the eyes of a girl born and bred in the Colonies. Then came Tilbury, and at Tilbury brother George was waiting to bid his sisters welcome.

Paul was happy and content enough to be in the mood to like anybody and everybody, and an inward suggestion that he was not favourably impressed with brother George presented itself only to be discounted and ignominiously turned out of doors at once. As Tennyson has said, 'It is not true that second thoughts are best, but first and third, which are a riper first.' Brother George was undeniably good-looking after his fashion. He was well set up and a little over the middle height. He was very perfectly groomed, and had very fine, regular, white teeth which he was a little too fond of showing in a rather mechanical smile. His eyes were rather too closely set either for beauty or for character, and his manner was a trifle over-suave.

Bill, who had been promoted after her own desires, fell upon him like an avalanche, and being at first unrecognised in her aspect of grown-up young lady, embarrassed brother George considerably. But there was such a laugh at this as set all four in high spirits, and there were so many questions and answers that the time of waiting for the train passed in a flash.

The quartette lunched together at a restaurant in town, and brother George carried off his sisters to the apartments he had secured for them in the house in which he lodged. But before he went a little episode, which was afterwards renewed in various forms until it grew monotonous, occurred. Brother George naturally played the host at the restaurant, and spread a generous and delicate feast, but on the presentation of the bill was struck through with chagrin at the discovery that he had lost his purse. That he had brought it from home was beyond cavil in his mind, for had he not paid his cab-fare and the other expenses from it? It was an awkward beginning of an acquaintance, as he allowed with an embarrassed smile, but if Mr. Armstrong would be his banker for a day—— Mr. Armstrong was happy enough to be willing to be any man's banker at that moment, and brother George borrowed a ten-pound note with many expressions of regret and obligation. He forgot this little transaction so completely, that it was not so much as mentioned for a year or two; but brother George gave clear proof later on that he was not the man to leave unworked any social patch which at the first stroke of the hoe would yield so promising a little harvest, and first and last quite a handsome income in a small way accrued to brother George at the expense of brother George's sister's lover.

It is not when a man is happy, and the errors of his life have not yet yielded their inevitable crop of suffering, that conscience bestirs itself. Things went smoothly with Paul Armstrong. His plays prospered and yielded rich returns. A volume of verses gave him something more than the reputation of the average minor poet There was no more popular man at his clubs than he, and, if he had cared for it, he might have been something of a social lion. As it was, he met many notable people on terms of intimacy, and reckoned himself as rich in friendships as any man alive; and, when the six months' probation was over, he and Madge went quietly away together to spend in Paris a honeymoon which had not been consecrated by any rite of the Church, and entered upon a wedded life which was not even sanctioned by the registrar. Madge became informally Mrs. Paul Armstrong, and, under that style and title, was introduced to a dozen of Paul's intimates who were in no doubt as to the facts of the case, and to hundreds of other people who accepted the pretence without a thought of inquiry. The whole family lived together—Madge and her mother, Bill and brother George—and things went smoothly for two or three prosperous and happy years. In mere prosperity and happiness there is little to record, but the heart of the Exile in the mountains yearned over that vanished time in a bitter and unavailing regret. How sweet it had been! With how tender a gradation the first passion of delight in possession had softened into friendship, and the calm love of happily wedded people, and the delicious intimate camaraderie which springs of the unbroken companionship of board and bed, and the sharing of every little confidence of life!

The past was obliterated; it was wiped out as cleanly as if it had been written on a slate, and a wet sponge had been passed over it. Practically it was forgotten, but the obliterated record sprang to light again with an unlooked-for, dreadful swiftness.

Bill by this time had developed into Miss Hampton, and was a grown-up young lady in real earnest, with lovers by the dozen. She and Paul were chums, and she had no secrets from him. Her face alone was bright enough to have made sunshine in any house; but it happened one day that Paul, returning from rehearsal, found it blank with astonishment and pain. She had evidently been waiting and listening for him; for at the instant at which his latch-key clicked in the lock, she threw the hall-door open, and, as he entered, closed it silently, almost stealthily, behind him. Then, with her hand upon his shoulder, she led him to his study—the plainly furnished little workshop which looked out on the trim suburban garden. This was the room in which he had spent the richest and most prosperous hours of the only tranquil years he had known, and it was here that he was fated to meet the death-blow to his happiness.

'What is the matter?' he asked—'what has happened? Where is Madge?'

'She is in her own room,' Phyllis answered, her eyes wide with terror, and her pretty Australian roses all vanished from her cheeks. 'Mother and she have locked themselves in together, and Madge is crying her heart out Oh, Paul, Paul,' she cried, clasping her hands, 'what have you done?'

With that she broke into sudden weeping, and Paul stood amazed, with a chill terror, as yet unrecognised, clutching at his heart.

'What have I done?' he echoed—' what have I done, dear?'

'Done!' she flashed at him, drawing her hands away from her streaming eyes, and throwing them passionately apart 'Oh, Paul, we have all loved you so, and honoured you so, and now——'

She cast herself into an arm-chair with a reckless abandonment, and cried bitterly. The chill hand at Paul's heart grew icy, but even yet he did not recognise his fear.

'For mercy's sake, Bill, tell me!'

She flashed to her feet in a second, and looked at him from head to foot with a burning scorn.

'Never call me by that name again,'she said, through her clenched white teeth. 'You ask me what you have done? You have ruined Madge's life and broken her heart, and mine,' she cried, striking her clenched hand upon her breast—'and mine!'

She went raging up and down the room like a lovely fury, her hair disordered, her eyes flashing, and her cheeks new-crimsoned with anger.

'Tell me—tell me,' he besought her, 'what has happened.'

'This has happened,' she answered, with a sudden tense quiet: 'your wife has been here—your wife, an overdressed, painted French trull, so drunk that she could barely stand.'

'Good God!' said Paul. He laid his hand upon a bookshelf, and stood swaying there as if he were about to fall. 'What brought her here?' he gasped.

'You don't deny it?' said the girl, speaking with the same tense quiet as before.

'No, no,' said Paul, 'I don't deny it What brought her here?'

'She came to assert her rights,' said Phyllis, with a biting indignation. 'She came to warn us that she was setting the law in motion, and that she would drag Madge's name—you hear? Madge's name—through the mud of the Divorce Court; and only this morning I loved you, and respected you, and believed in you.'

'I must see Madge,' said Paul.

'You shall not!' she cried, flashing to the door, and setting her back against it.

But the door was opened from without, and Madge was here. Paul opened his arms to her, and she laid her pale face against his breast.

'I have feared it always,' she said, 'and it has come at last. My poor, poor Paul 'how you must have suffered!'

'Your poor, poor Paul,' said Phyllis, in a voice of bitterest disdain, 'is a very fitting object for your pity. My personal recommendation is that your poor Paul should drown himself.'

'You don't understand, dear,' Madge answered her—' you don't understand. Paul has done me no wrong. We did not take you into our confidence, because you were too young; but there has been no disguise among the rest of us. I knew of this before Paul and I resolved to spend our lives together. Mother knew it; George knew it; you know it now, dear. Will it part us, Bill?'

The girl's face changed from angry scorn to pure bewilderment, and then again to pity.

'Come here, Madge,' she cried, opening her arms wide, and speaking with a sobbing voice; 'come here.'

She hugged her sister fiercely, and cried over her.

'I can understand,' she said—'I can understand.' She repeated the words again and again. 'It isn't a pretty thing to have to face; but it's your trouble, darling, and we must stick together. As for me,' she added, with a new outbreak of tears, which a laugh made half hysteric, 'I shall stick like wax.'

Annette's threat was no brutum fulmen, as the society newspapers soon began to show. Paragraphs appeared here and there indicating that the unprosperous matrimonial affairs of a popular playwright would shortly excite the interest of the public; and one day Paul, driving along the Strand, and finding his cab momentarily arrested by a block in the traffic, was frozen to the marrow by the sight of a newspaper placard which by way of sole contents bore the words, 'Who is the real Mrs. Armstrong? Divorce proceedings instituted against a famous playwright.'

At first his thought was: 'Some enemy has done this;' but he knew the journal and most of the influential members of its staff, and he could not guess that he counted an enemy among them. He had dined with the editor a week before at the same club-table, and had found him not less cordial than he had ever been before.

'I suppose the man is justified,' Paul thought when the power of reflection returned to him. 'The whole story is on its way to the public ears, and neither he nor any other man can stop it It's his business to be first in the field with it if he can.'

He turned his cab homeward, for he had no heart to face the people he had meant to meet, and on his way, just to gratify the natural instinct of self-torture, he bought a copy of the journal, and read there that Messrs. Berry and Smythe, the well-known firm of solicitors in Lincoln's Inn, had that day filed a petition for divorce against Mr. Paul Armstrong, the well-known dramatist, and that remarkable revelations were expected.

For these past few years home had seemed Paradise. He had never for any fraction of an instant wavered in his love, and use and wont had helped to set a seal of sanctity upon it With the passage of the months and years, with the growth of many intimate acquaintanceships, and not a few closer and dearer ties about him, home had grown to be as sacred to him as if the union on which it was founded had been blessed by all the priests of all the churches. No purer and more tranquil spirit of affectionate loyalty had breathed in any home in England, and now the balm of his soul was vitriol, and that which had been the bread of life to him was steeped in gall and wormwood. The very honest purpose of his life, his constant and sober pursuit of a worthy fame, recoiled upon him here as if it had been in itself a crime. Not to have striven, to have been content with a dull obscurity of fortune, to have wasted his days in idleness and his nights in foolish revel, would have seemed a happier course to him. And as it was the better part of life which chastised him most cruelly, so it was the best and worthiest affection he had ever known which turned upon him with a cup of poison in its hand and bade him drink it to the dregs. Life and the world are so made that only the most desolate can suffer by themselves. If by any trick of magic he could have borne his chastisement alone, he would have accepted it with something like a scorn of fate.

He had discharged his cab within a hundred yards of home, and had read the stinging paragraph beneath a lamp-post almost at his own doorstep. He entered the house noiselessly, and from Madge's music-room there floated down to him the sound of Chopin's great Funeral March. She played this and some other favourites of her own as few musicians play them, for music had been the one delight of her life, and but for the fleeting theatrical ambition, and for Paul, she might have become famous as an executant He stood in the hall to listen as the alternate wail and triumph filled and thrilled the air, and thinking that she was alone, he strolled silently to his dressing-room, and then in smoking-jacket and slippers went to join her. Except for the glow of the fire the room was in darkness, and a voice which came out of the darkness startled him.

'I had prepared myself to wait for hours,' said the voice; and Ralston emerged from a shadowed corner with an outstretched hand—Ralston, with his big sagacious head, all unexpectedly silver-white, and moustache and beard of snow, but with the same old hand-grip, and the same half-dictatorial, half-affectionate tone. Madge struck a resolving chord, rose, and with a kiss and a whispered 'I know the news,' slipped from the room before he could make an effort to detain her.

'Can we have a light on things?' said Ralston, in that hoarsely musical growl of his. He struck a match as he spoke, and lit the gas, and then marched sturdily to the door and closed it. 'You know me—you, Paul Armstrong,' he said, turning to face the master of the house. 'I have spent a fighting life, but I have never known a downright murderous fit till now. Have you seen this?'

'Yes,' said Paul,' I've seen it.'

The journal Ralston haled from his pocket and held towards him was a fellow to that he had just thrown away in the street.

'The carrion-hunting hound!' cried Ralston; 'I read this, and I came straight here. I knew there was no hiding it from your wife. I say "your wife," and I hold by the word until faith and friendship are as dead as last year's leaves. She had to see it, Armstrong, and it was better that a friend should bring it to her. Now, mind you, we who know her rally round. We may be only two or three, but we are a fighting colony. I am by way of being a cleric, but I don't always cut my linguistic coat to suit my cloth, and my word at this hour is, Damn the bestial ecclesiastical bigotry which seeks to tie the bodies of men and women together when their souls are sundered! Here is a man reported within this last fortnight as having been arrested the day after his marriage at a registrar's office, and as having been since then condemned to penal servitude for life. Is that fact a relief to the woman who was his victim? Not a bit of it Let her contract a new marriage, and the law will indict her for bigamy. She must live in loneliness, or be classed with harlots. Here is a man I know, an outlying parishioner of mine, whose wife is hopelessly and incurably insane. Is there any release from the marriage-bond for him? Not a chance of it. There are a hundred thousand people of this country, men and women, so saturated and demoralized with drink that only an overwhelming Christian pity could bear to touch 'em with a barge-pole—husbands intolerable to wives, wives intolerable to husbands, live corpses with corruption distilling at each pore—and this filthy marriage law, which is the last relic of Christianity's worst barbarism, binds quick and wholesome flesh to stinking death, and bids them fester together in the legal pit. I set one honest man's curse upon that shameless and abominable creed, and I would not take my hand away from my seal though I went to the stake for setting it there.'

He broke into a stormy laugh, and clapped Paul boisterously upon the shoulder.

'And now,' he said, with a sudden change of voice and manner, 'that we have got rid of the froth of passion, let me offer you one cup of the sound wine of reason. Fight this business through, Paul Armstrong. Don't give way by half a barleycorn. The story, as it tells against you, will be made known. The truth, as your friends know it, must come out as well. If I had time to read up for the bar, and pass my examinations, I would ask nothing better than to be your counsel. Face the music, Armstrong, and you may help the cause of justice. It is time that this union of quick and dead were done with, and that the ecclesiastic fetish rag which makes its wickedness respectable were burned.'



CHAPTER XXIX

There were the usual legal delays, and public interest in the case would have slumbered had it not been for the newspapers. But a steady-going England, on whose John Bull qualities of reticence and solidity we have been prone to pride ourselves, does occasionally betray a quicker and more curious spirit than it commonly desires to be credited with, and there is no pole to stir it from its hybernating sleep which reaches so far and punches the fat ribs so soundly as the pole of scandal. The press was in one of its occasional Jedburgh justice moods, and was ready to afford impartial trial when it had hanged its victim, and not before.

Paul Armstrong was adjudged a Lothario of the wickeder sort, a purposed betrayer of hearts and destinies. 'If, as the complainant in this melancholy case avers,' or 'If, as the depositions already filed would appear to indicate,' the defendant was an unlimited rascal; and if that were so, he was an unlimited rascal, and there an end. A thousand men file past the bar of official and unofficial justice without much comment They are branded, more or less justly, in accord with their deserts, and having been first ignored, are altogether forgotten. But every here and there, for some scarcely notable peculiarity, a man or woman is fairly hunted down by the moral pack, mangled and branded, as it were, on a noble moral speculation, and left to quiver for the remnant of his lifetime.

In these days Paul Armstrong pondered much and often over the saying of the man who had been his master in the arts of fiction and the drama: 'Men reserve their bitterest repentances for their best actions.' If only he had played the man of the world towards Annette instead of playing the Quixote, how different a position he would have held towards the moral pack! To marry your mistress under no compulsion, but merely in the desire to relieve the last sufferings of a parting soul, to sacrifice a year or two of pulsing ambitions to this act of charity, had not in itself appeared an act of wickedness. Nor had it seemed wholly intolerable from his own point of view that, after a struggle prolonged beyond the needs of decency, he should have run away from the contaminations which belonged inevitably to a life spent in the society of an incurable dipsomaniac. Nor could he as yet blame himself overmuch if he had at last yielded to the claims of that domesticity which offered him involuntary shelter: the invitations of a home of love and confidence; an atmosphere in which no cloud hovered which could not be puffed away in a cloud of tobacco smoke, or shattered into nothing by the clear breath of a single friendly laugh. It was not quite an honest view of the case—no man surveying his own circumstances is ever entirely honest—but to himself the question was convincing, Who would not have hastened from that hell to find this heaven?

Ralston at least stood undauntedly by him, and inveighed with anger against what he proclaimed to be an unnatural law.

'Do you know Constantinople?' he asked one evening as the two sat together.

'Yes,' Paul answered; 'I know it tourist fashion. I stayed a week there once.'

'You remember the tribes of yellow dogs who make night hideous?' Ralston questioned. 'They hunt in packs, and eat any raffle of the streets which may be thrown to 'em. I've seen 'em wolfing cardboard boxes that have been swept out of the drapers' shops in the early morning, the poor hungry devils! They'd fall across any intruder from another parish and crunch him hide and bones. But they never attack one another, and there's no record of one yellow dog who tried to eat another yellow dog who belonged to the same gang. There's a mighty difference between the canine and the human, eh? You're one of our breed, Armstrong—yellow dog of the yellow dog quill-driving tribe—and your comrades haven't the gentlemanly instinct of the Constantinople cur. They get round you and worry you,' he declaimed, rising, and striding about the room, with an occasional double-handed clutch at the lapels of his coat, his one gesture of rage—'they worry you for their twopenny-halfpenny mouthful of lineage, and they'd gnaw their own mothers out of their coffins for the same reward.'

'As bad as that?' asked Paul, with a dreary little laugh.

'As bad as that, sir!' Ralston declared wrathfully, though he too laughed a moment at his own vehemence.

But the fighting Ralston was on fire with his theme, and returned to it often.

'You had a namesake once,' he said, 'who was an Apostle. He talked with a centurion, who told him, "With a great price I obtained this freedom." With a great price! I wonder if it were like the price we pay for what we call the freedom of the press. I fought for that in my own day, fought and suffered, and paid in coin and heart's blood, and I have asked myself since if I am glad or sorry that I won. Are we the better for having bred this vulture crowd?'

The hot heart of the advocate warmed the cold heart of the sufferer from time to time, but neither long nor often. The coals of anger will not burn freely on any honest hearth when the conscience of the owner compels him to turn down the damper every other minute.

The cause in the Law Courts lingered, and the seasons changed Paul's friendships stopped away—not by ones or twos, but in battalions. Poor little Madge could go nowhere, and ceased to wish to go anywhere, to find herself brushing against offended skirts whose owners drew them away from pollution.

'In all my foolish life,' Paul told Ralston, 'I have known one thoroughly good woman.'

'Lucky bargee!' said Ralston. 'Not one man in a million has your chance.'

'One woman,' Paul went on, 'as pure as a daisy, who could surrender her whole life for the sake of love—a creature who never spoke an unkind word or thought an unkind thought of any living sister, or dead one, for that matter.'

He choked. He could go no further for the time.

'I know her,' said Ralston—'I know her.'

'And women,' said Paul, 'who are not worthy to unlace her shoes cold-shoulder her, and look at her with contempt. I dare cry the history of two or three on the housetops.'

'And if you dared—what good?' Ralston asked.

'There is no God,' cried Paul; 'there is no justice in the world.'

'There is a God,' said Ralston, 'and there is very little justice. Who are we that we should cry out for justice? We are here to learn. And look here, Paul Armstrong: the biggest and hardest lesson set us is to learn long views.'

'Long views?' said Paul, staring at him.

'Long views,' Ralston repeated steadily. 'I know what I'm talking about We are learners, and learners in the lowest class. That's nonsense,' he corrected himself, 'and I hate exaggeration, though I am guilty of it a hundred times a day. But we are learners, and, whether our class is high or low makes little difference to the fact that there is much to learn. The man who is the stronger and the better for his trouble is the scholar who goes to the top of the class. Look ahead, man, and ask whether Paul Armstrong is to be a firmer or a flabbier small element in God's great universe for what is now befalling him. Your own action has chosen you to be a sort of martyr in a big cause. We are on the fringe of the sex-fight, so far; but before our children are grown men and women, the battle will be in full swing. We have got to settle this question of the sanctity of marriage. What a certain kind of animal calls "free love" is of the beast and bestial; but a reasoned and loyal love between man and woman is a beautiful and noble thing, and it is not the less beautiful and noble because it has not been sanctified by the payment of seven-and-sixpence to the Inland Revenue. You have a principle to fight for, and you have Madge to fight for. By the God I worship,' he cried, in sudden wrath, 'I would fight for the principle against death itself, and for a woman like Madge I would die at a slow fire.'

'But, Ralston,' Paul besought him—'Ralston, you don't understand. You find animation there; but it is there my weakness lies. Do you think I care for myself?'

'Of course I do,' said Ralston. 'If you hadn't cared for yourself you would never have brought a child like Madge into such an evil as this.'

'That's true enough,' said Paul; 'that's truth itself.'

He laid his elbows on the table, and leaned his head disconsolately upon his hands. His companion shook him by the shoulder in the rough amity which men use with one another.

'Look here, Armstrong: willy-nilly, you're the champion of a great cause, and you have the sweetest woman in the world to fight for. Don't flaunt the flag insolently—in the present temper of the public that will never do—but stand by it all the same. So far as you're concerned, Armstrong, it's a selfish accident that turns you Squire of Dames; but you're in the tourney now, and you've got to behave respectably.'

'If you mean by behaving respectably that I've got to hold by Madge, and live all this down if I can, and do my best to flutter through life on a broken wing, I am with you.'

'I mean that, and more than that,' said Ralston. 'Turn your next play on this theme; turn your next book on it. Never mind the odium of seeming to fight a selfish battle; you're past that now. Your story is that the man mires his feet in the ordinary manner, that he makes a fool of himself in the usual fashion; that the saving woman comes to him pure and clean, and does her healthful, beautiful work for him at such a cost as you know of. Whether her life is tragedy modified or tragedy unalloyed rests with the story-teller; but you're there to champion that innocence.'

'You recoiled from a little tube of manuscript once,' said Paul, 'as if it had held a poisonous explosive. Do you remember? Ralston laughed and nodded. 'If you're bolder now, I'll show you something.'

'I am bolder now,' said Ralston; and Paul, leaving him for a moment, raced upstairs, and, having made a brief search in his study, returned with a big sheaf of type-written matter in his hand.

'There is my case,' he said. 'Old Darco calls it madness to challenge such a truth in such a fashion. Weldon will take the piece and play it. He will produce it anonymously by preference, but as I choose. I choose to have my fling at the world, and to take it without disguise. Tell me when you have read it.'

'I am your man,' cried Ralston, catching at the paper.

'I don't know whether I have done well or ill in doing it,' said Paul. 'I suppose there never was a writer who didn't hawk the secret of his soul about the streets—if he had a secret and a soul.'

'More of this hereafter,' Ralston said, and bore away the manuscript that night.

There had been little need to spur Paul to courage on this matter. The wiser thing might have been to counsel him to moderation. He had set his back to his corner already.

But just hereabouts a small thing happened which had, as small things will, an undue influence upon his mind. There was loose on Fleet Street at this time an extraordinary devil of a man of genius whose appropriate real name was Wild-blood.

He had dropped that too characteristic patronymic, and had renamed himself, with a touch of mocking cynicism which only those who knew him understood, Wilder. What scholarship was possible for six- or seven-and-twenty was his. That he was more or less crazed with much learning and more drink was generally understood of him. Men of small originality and some memory said of Wilder that he could knock a slang song into Greek iambics in five minutes. His most fervent admirers were, perhaps, poor judges of Greek iambics. Fleet Street may at one time have been familiar with that kind of thing, but is not nowadays. But Wilder's reputation soared on higher voices than those of the journalistic crowd, and he was, beyond dispute, a person of genius—one of those odd distorted bundles of broken nerve who help to establish the theory that fine thinking, a noble vocabulary, deep scholarship, and foolish living are neighbours and hard to separate.

With this very queer fish Paul had established a certain intimacy. The man, as a matter of course, was periodically hard up, and he had come to the stage when it was here five shillings and there half a crown as a charge for the charm of his society with the most casual of acquaintances. He made his breakfast on a salt-spoonful of cayenne and a glass of brandy, and he passed from intellectual godhood to a hiccuping imbecility in a breath. At from four to five in the afternoon he carried his lofty head and a prematurely pimpled countenance into some unwatched obscurity. He habitually emerged from this hiding-place within an hour of midnight, and thence his flight was an owl's.

The social chill which surrounded Paul's household had grown arctic, and Madge, Mrs. Hampton, and Phyllis had all been bundled away to Ostend, in a sunken identity. The house in which the cause of disturbance had so long been unreasonably happy was closed. The servants had been dismissed, and a commissionaire and his wife lived in the basement. Paul had taken lodgings at a Fleet Street hostelry, and thither in the dead of night came Wilder and other night-birds, to the much disturbance of the porter at the grille. It chanced one night that Wilder came with a declaration that he had found his soul's salvation through beer. His stream of life should flow, so he declared, through Burton-on-Trent. He was done with noxious liquids, and proposed to bathe his spirit clear in the vats of Bass and Allsopp. Wilder was-not outside the sphere of reformation, and Guinness would share with the others the credit of his uprising. He drank a tankard or two of each and either as an evidence of good faith, and he left an hour after midnight, more sober than Paul had ever known him at such a time. He had talked a heap of brilliant sense and nonsense, and had borrowed two half crowns. Paul went to bed almost regretting the loss of even this mad companionship, and tossed, half-dozing, on a shifting sea of troubles. Suddenly, when he had lost all consciousness of time and place, there came a thundering summons at his door, and in answer to his startled call there came in a huge policeman in a greatcoat and a helmet, and behind him a quaking waiter with a candle in a glass funnel. The officer appealed to a piece of paper he carried in his hand.

'Paul Armstrong,' he read, with a brogue as wide as the ocean. 'Is that you?'

'That is my name,' said Paul.

'Then ye're wanted,' said the official.

'Wanted? Where?'

'At Bow Street,'the official answered stolidly.

Paul rolled round to consult his watch. It indicated three o'clock within a minute or so.

'What on earth am I wanted at Bow Street for?' he asked in great bewilderment.

'Party of the name of Wilder,' said the officer, referring once more to his paper. 'Says you're his first cousin, and that you'll bail him out.'

'Wilder? First cousin?' His mind was fogged with broken sleep. 'Oh, that fellow! What has he been doing?'

The man in uniform consulted his paper again, and read out:

'Dhrunk and dishortherly.'

'And he had the cheek to send you here and to say that I'm his first cousin?'

'Yes, sorr.'

'Well,' said Paul, with a brief laugh, 'I don't know that I've anything better to do. Wait downstairs whilst I dress, and have a cab ready if you can find one. Give the officer a drink, waiter.'

In a weary fashion he was tickled by this incident; and when he had made a hasty toilette he descended, and was driven to Bow Street, where, after a spell of waiting, he was introduced to his 'first cousin' in a corridor.

'What's all this, Wilder?'he asked.

'It's this, me man,' said Wilder. 'I took a fancy to declaim a favourite little bit of Euripides in Endell Street, and a uniformed ass came along and ran me in. And being penniless as I am——'

'Penniless!' said Paul 'You had five shillings to my certain knowledge.'

'Oh, I had,' said Wilder, 'but I met some poor devil that was harder up than I am—at least, he said so—and I bestowed it on him with my blessing.'

'We know your name, Mr. Armstrong,' said the officer who had the man of genius in his charge, 'and if you'll be surety that the gentleman will be here at ten o'clock this morning, he can go.'

'You want my word for that only?'

'That will be enough, sir.'

'Very well; he shall be here.'

'He shall be here,' said Wilder, 'and the idiot who brought him here shall have a lesson.'

'You take my tip, sir,' said the officer. 'You was pretty fairly full, and you was very noisy, and you cracked on pretty awful. Talk of eloquence,' said the officer, interrupting himself to turn to Paul. 'I've heard a thing or two in my time—it comes here, you know, sir, in the way of business—but I've never met anybody as could hold a candle to this gentleman.'

Wilder smiled, and pulled up a dirty apology for a collar with an air of self-applause.

'But what I want to advise is this, sir,' said the officer genially: 'Say nothing, and it's five bob and costs, and there's an end of it; make a song about it, and it's forty shillings or a month, and it gets into all the papers. For this is a shop, sir, where the more you say the more you pay. And that's the truth about justice in a general way throughout the land, and so you'll find, sir, if you'll take the trouble to look into it. The more you say the more you pay. That's the fruit of thirty years' experience, sir, and you'll find it pretty sound Say nothing, and a little thing blows over. Make a talk about it, and it lasts, as you might say, for ever. The more you say, the more you pay.'

Paul was not greatly inclined to idle superstition as a general thing, but the thrice-repeated saying stuck to him. The fancy came into his mind that he had been aroused thus oddly in the middle of the night on purpose that he might hear it, and have it dinned into his mind by force of repetition. There was no reason under heaven why he should have attended the insolent call of Mr. Wilder, and he had not even been conscious of a kindly impulse towards the man. There was a sort of providential finger laid upon his own sense here. Of course, he denied the belief, but it was active with him none the less. It was so active that he resigned all the preparations he had contemplated for his own defence, and absented himself from London.

During his absence the case of Armstrong against Armstrong was heard in the Divorce Court. A Boanerges of a Queen's Counsel was entrusted with Annette's side of it. He made a speech, and that speech was reported in a hundred journals. Had it been true, the unlucky Paul would have been a comrade for the devil, but there was no defence, and it passed as true. Paul read the speech, and came tearing back express to London in a tumult of rage and resentment. He was a day behind the fair, and could do nothing. The world seemed to ring of him, and he had abandoned all means of redress. He was publicly shunned, and shunned for ever.

So fruitful may be the smallest accident of life that this chance episode with the drunken Wilder and the foolish resolve to which it led seemed to have darkened Paul's skies for good and all. He might have beaten Boanerges on every point save one, and have come out of the fight with but one wound in place of a hundred, and that very far from fatal Now he felt stabbed to death, and seemed to bleed at every pore.

The manager who was under contract with him to produce the comedy the first manuscript of which he had placed in Ralston's hands, called to see him, and advised strongly against production—at all events, for the present The suffering fool was furious, and would listen to no reason.

'I put three thousand pounds behind it,' he cried. 'I give you that as a guarantee. The play is a good play, and the public will listen to it, slander or no slander.'

Playgoers remember the first nightof 'Myra'—the yells, howls, whistles, cat-calls which made the whole three acts a pantomime in dumb show. The moral tiger was awake.

The play ran in spite of all and everything, and ran at the author's cost It came to a sudden end in the middle of a week, when the author's last cheque was returned with an official 'N. S.' marked upon it The lately prosperous dramatist was ruined.

Thus the man and his memories are growing nearer and nearer to each other, and very soon they must meet. There is yet but a year to traverse before the Dreamer and the Dream stand face to lace with actual Fact and Time. It is a year of frustrated hope and barren effort, of surrenders and shames. It is a year of anonymity for one thing, for his name is worse than worthless to him, and he hides it. There is a book yet extant, written in a black gall which is made fluent to the pen by a distillation of wormwood, and this is Paul Armstrong's latest expression of his views of the world, which, if the book were true, one would take as a vast and daily injustice, in which there is no saving grace of any sort whatever. Ralston alone knew in what fiery haste this bitter volume was gathered out of the desert of the writer's soul. It served one purpose, since it provided Madge with at least a staff of silver with which to beat the wolf from the door. The wild beast bayed and threatened, but it never actually crossed the threshold. The discredited man kept himself alive by scraps of anonymous journalism, until a half-chance suggestion of fortune bore him away to the United States as a member of a theatrical company of no great merit, which clung together through desperately failing fortunes for a month or two, and then, dissolving, left him stranded.