Ewen Hooper rose from his table in great distress of mind.

"But, my dear Connie—you are my ward—and I am your guardian! How can I let you give me money?"

"It's my own money," said Connie firmly. "You know it is. Father wrote to you to say I might spend it now, as I liked—all there was, except the capital of my two thousand a year, which I mayn't spend—till I am twenty-five. This has nothing to do with that. I'm quite free—and so are you. Do you think"—she drew herself up indignantly—"that you're going to make me happy—by turning me out, and all—all of you going to rack and ruin—when I've got that silly money lying in the bank? I won't have it! I don't want to go and live in the Cowley Road! I won't go and live in the Cowley Road! You promised father and mother to look after me, Uncle Ewen, and it isn't looking after me—"

"You can't reproach me on that score as much as I do myself!" said Ewen Hooper, with emotion. "There's something in that I admit—there's something in that."

He began to pace the room. Presently, pausing beside Connie, he plunged into an agitated and incoherent account of the situation—of the efforts he had made to get even some temporary help—and of the failure of all of them. It was the confession of a weak and defeated man; and as made by a man of his age to a girl of Connie's, it was extremely painful. Nora hid her eyes again, and Connie got paler and paler.

At last she went up to him, holding out again appealing hands.

"Please don't tell me any more! It's all right. I just love you, Uncle Ewen—and—and Nora! I want to help! It makes me happy. Oh, why won't you let me!"

He wavered.

"You dear child!" There was a silence. Then he resumed—as though feeling his way—

"It occurs to me that I might consult Sorell. If he thought it right—if we could protect you from loss—!"

Connie sprang at him and kissed him in delight.

"Of course!—that'll do splendidly! Mr. Sorell will see, at once, it's the right thing for me, and my happiness. I can't be turned out—I really can't! So it's settled. Yes—it's settled!—or it will be directly—and nobody need bother any more—need they? But—there's one condition."

Ewen Hooper looked at her in silence.

"That you—you and Nora—go to Borne this Christmas time, this very Christmas, Uncle Ewen! I think I put in enough—and I can give you such a lot of letters!"

She laughed joyously, though she was very near crying.

"I have never been able to go to Home—Or Athens—never!" he said, in a low voice, as he sat down again at his table. All the thwarted hopes, all the sordid cares of years were in the quiet words.

"Well, now you're going!" said Connie shyly. "Oh, that would be ripping! You'll promise me that—you must, please!"

Silence again. She approached Nora, timidly.

"Nora!"

Nora rose. Her face was stained with tears.

"It's all wrong," she said heavily—"it's all wrong. But—I give in. What I said was a lie. There is nothing else in the world that we could possibly do."

And she rushed out of the room without another word. Connie looked wistfully after her. Nora's pain in receiving had stirred in her the shame-faced distress in giving that lives in generous souls. "Why should I have more than they?"

She stole out after Nora. Ewen Hooper was left staring at the letter from his bankers, and trying to collect his thoughts. Connie's voice was still in his ears. It had all the sweetness of his dead sister's.

* * * * *

Connie was reading in her room before dinner. She had shut herself up there, feeling rather battered by the emotions of the afternoon, when she heard a knock that she knew was Nora's.

"Come in!"

Nora appeared. She had had her storm of weeping in private and got over it. She was now quite composed, but the depression, the humiliation even, expressed in her whole bearing dismayed Connie afresh.

Nora took a seat on the other side of the fire. Connie eyed her uneasily.

"Are you ever going to forgive me, Nora?" she said, at last.

Nora shrugged her shoulders.

"You couldn't help it. I see that."

"Thank you," said Connie meekly.

"But what I can't forgive is that you never said a word—"

"To you? That you might undo it all? Nora, you really are an absurd person!" Connie sprang up, and came to kneel by the fire, so that she might attack her cousin at close quarters. "We're told it's 'more blessed to give than to receive.' Not when you're on the premises, Nora! I really don't think you need make me feel such an outcast! I say—how many nights have you been awake lately?"

Nora's lip quivered a little.

"That doesn't matter," she said shortly.

"Yes, but it does matter! You promised to be my friend—and—you have been treating me abominably!" said Connie, with flashing eyes.

Nora feebly defended herself, but was soon reduced to accept a pair of arms thrown round her, and a soft shoulder on which to rest an aching head.

"I'm no good," she said desparingly. "I give up—everything."

"That's all right!" Connie's tone was extremely cheerful. "Which means, I hope, that you'll give up that absurd copying in the Bodleian. You get about twopence halfpenny for it, and it'll cost you your first-class. How are you going to get a First I should like to know, with your head full of bills, and no sleep at nights?"

Nora flushed fiercely.

"I want to earn my living—I mean to earn my living! And how do you know—after all"—she held Connie at arm's length—"that Mr. Scroll's going to approve of what you've done? And father won't accept, unless he does."

Connie laughed.

"Mr. Sorell will do—exactly what pleases me. Mr. Sorell"—she began to search for a cigarette—"Mr. Sorell is an angel."

A silence. Connie looked up, rather surprised.

"Don't you agree?"

"Yes," said Nora in an odd voice.

Connie observed her. A flickering light began to play in the brown eyes.

"H'm. Have you been doing some Greek already?—stealing a march on me?"

"I had a lesson last week."

"Had you? The first I've heard of it!" Connie fluttered up and down the room in her white dressing-gown, occasionally breaking into a dance-step, as though to work off a superfluity of spirits.

Finally she stopped in front of Nora, looking her up and down.

"I dare you to hide anything again from me, Nora!"

Nora sat up.

"There is nothing to hide," she said stiffly.

Connie laughed aloud; and Nora suddenly sprang from her chair, and ran out of the room.

Connie was left panting a little. Life in Medburn House seemed certainly to be running faster than of old!

"I never gave him leave to fall in love with Nora!" she thought, with an unmistakable pang of common, ordinary jealousy. She had been so long accustomed to take her property in Sorell for granted!—and the summer months had brought her into such intimate contact with him. "And he never made love to me for one moment!—nor I to him. I don't believe he's made love to Nora—I'm sure he hasn't—yet. But why didn't he tell me of that Greek lesson?"

She stood before the glass, pulling down her hair, so that it fell all about her.

"I seem to be rather cut out for fairy-godmothering!" she said pensively to the image in the glass. "But there's a good deal to do for the post!—one must admit there's a good deal to do—Nora's got to be fixed up—and all the money business. And then—then!"

She clasped her hands behind her head. Her eyelids fell, and through her slight figure there ran a throb of yearning—of tender yet despairing passion.

"If I could only mend things there, I might be some use. I don't want him to marry me—but just—just—"

Then her hands fell. She shook her head angrily. "You humbug!—you humbug! For whom are you posing now?"



CHAPTER XVII

Falloden had just finished a solitary luncheon in the little dining-room of the Boar's Hill cottage. There was a garden door in the room, and lighting a cigarette, he passed out through it to the terrace outside. A landscape lay before him, which has often been compared to that of the Val d'Arno seen from Fiesole, and has indeed some common points with that incomparable mingling of man's best with the best of mountain and river. It was the last week of October, and the autumn was still warm and windless, as though there were no shrieking November to come. Oxford, the beautiful city, with its domes and spires, lay in the hollow beneath the spectator, wreathed in thin mists of sunlit amethyst. Behind that ridge in the middle distance ran the river and the Nuneham woods; beyond rose the long blue line of the Chilterns. In front of the cottage the ground sank through copse and field to the river level, the hedge lines all held by sentinel trees, to which the advancing autumn had given that significance the indiscriminate summer green denies. The gravely rounded elms with their golden caps, the scarlet of the beeches, the pale lemon-yellow of the nearly naked limes, the splendid blacks of yew and fir—they were all there, mingled in the autumn cup of misty sunshine like melting jewels. And among them, the enchanted city shone, fair and insubstantial, from the depth below; as it were, the spiritual word and voice of all the scene.

Falloden paced up and down the terrace, smoking and thinking. That was Otto's open window. But Radowitz had not yet appeared that morning, and the ex-scout, who acted butler and valet to the two men, had brought word that he would come down in the afternoon, but was not to be disturbed till then.

"What lunacy made me do it?" thought Falloden, standing still at the end of the terrace which fronted the view.

He and Radowitz had been nearly three weeks together. Had he been of the slightest service or consolation to Radowitz during that time? He doubted it. That incalculable impulse which had made him propose himself as Otto's companion for the winter still persisted indeed. He was haunted still by a sense of being "under command"—directed—by a force which could not be repelled. Ill at ease, unhappy, as he was, and conscious of being quite ineffective, whether as nurse or companion, unless Radowitz proposed to "throw up," he knew that he himself should hold on; though why, he could scarcely have explained.

But the divergences between them were great; the possibilities of friction many. Falloden was astonished to find that he disliked Otto's little fopperies and eccentricities quite as much as he had ever done in college days; his finicky dress, his foreign ways in eating, his tendency to boast about his music, his country, and his forebears, on his good days, balanced by a brooding irritability on his bad days. And he was conscious that his own ways and customs were no less teasing to Radowitz; his Tory habits of thought, his British contempt for vague sentimentalisms and heroics, for all that panache means to the Frenchman, or "glory" to the Slav.

"Then why, in the name of common sense, are we living together?"

He could really give no answer but the answer of "necessity"—of a spiritual need—issuing from a strange tangle of circumstance. The helpless form, the upturned face of his dying father, seemed to make the centre of it, and those faint last words, so sharply, and, as it were, dynamically connected with the hateful memory of Otto's fall and cry in the Marmion Quad, and the hateful ever-present fact of his maimed life. Constance too—his scene with her on the river bank—her letter, breaking with him—and then the soft, mysterious change in her—and that passionate, involuntary promise in her eyes and voice, as they stood together in her aunts' garden—all these various elements, bitter and sweet, were mingled in the influence which was shaping his own life. He wanted to forgive himself; and he wanted Constance to forgive him, whether she married him or no. A kind of sublimated egotism, he said to himself, after all!

But Otto? What had really made him consent to take up daily life with the man to whom he owed his disaster? Falloden seemed occasionally to be on the track of an explanation, which would then vanish and evade him. He was conscious, however, that here also, Constance Bledlow was somehow concerned; and, perhaps, the Pole's mystical religion. He asked himself, indeed, as Constance had already done, whether some presentiment of doom, together with the Christian doctrines of forgiveness and vicarious suffering, were not at the root of it? There had been certain symptoms apparent during Otto's last weeks at Penfold known only to the old vicar, to himself and Sorell. The doctors were not convinced yet of the presence of phthisis; but from various signs, Falloden was inclined to think that the boy believed himself sentenced to the same death which had carried off his mother. Was there then a kind of calculated charity in his act also—but aiming in his case at an eternal reward?

"He wants to please God—and comfort Constance—by forgiving me. I want to please her—and relieve myself, by doing something to make up to him. He has the best of it! But we are neither of us disinterested."

* * * * *

The manservant came out with a cup of coffee.

"How is he!" said Falloden, as he took it, glancing up at a still curtained window.

The man hesitated.

"Well, I don't know, sir, I'm sure. He saw the doctor this morning, and told me afterwards not to disturb him till three o'clock. But he rang just now, and said I was to tell you that two ladies were coming to tea."

"Did he mention their names?"

"Not as I'm aware of, sir."

Falloden pondered a moment.

"Tell Mr. Radowitz, when he rings again, that I have gone down to the college ground for some football, and I shan't be back till after six. You're sure he doesn't want to see me?"

"No, sir, I think not. He told me to leave the blind down, and not to come in again till he rang."

Falloden put on flannels, and ran down the field paths towards Oxford and the Marmion ground, which lay on the hither side of the river. Here he took hard exercise for a couple of hours, walking on afterwards to his club in the High Street, where he kept a change of clothes. He found some old Marmion friends there, including Robertson and Meyrick, who asked him eagerly after Radowitz.

"Better come and see," said Falloden. "Give you a bread and cheese luncheon any day."

They got no more out of him. But his reticence made them visibly uneasy, and they both declared their intention of coming up the following day. In both men there was a certain indefinable change which Falloden soon perceived. Both seemed, at times, to be dragging a weight too heavy for their youth. At other times, they were just like other men of their age; but Falloden, who knew them well, realised that they were both hag-ridden by remorse for what had happened in the summer. And indeed the attitude of a large part of the college towards them, and towards Falloden, when at rare intervals he showed himself there, could hardly have been colder or more hostile. The "bloods" were broken up; the dons had set their faces steadily against any form of ragging; and the story of the maimed hand, of the wrecking of Radowitz's career, together with sinister rumours as to his general health, had spread through Oxford, magnifying as they went. Falloden met it all with a haughty silence; and was but seldom seen in his old haunts.

And presently it had become known, to the stupefaction of those who were aware of the earlier facts, that victim and tormentor, the injured and the offender, were living together in the Boar's Hill cottage where Radowitz was finishing the composition required for his second musical examination, and Falloden—having lost his father, his money and his prospects—was reading for a prize fellowship to be given by Merton in December.

* * * * *

It was already moonlight when Falloden began to climb the long hill again, which leads up from Folly Bridge to the height on which stood the cottage. But the autumn sunset was not long over, and in the mingled light all the rich colours of the fading woodland seemed to be suspended in, or fused with, the evening air. Forms and distances, hedges, trees, moving figures, and distant buildings were marvellously though dimly glorified; and above the golds and reds and purples of the misty earth, shone broad and large—an Achilles shield in heaven—the autumn moon, with one bright star beside it.

Suddenly, out of the twilight, Falloden became aware of a pony-carriage descending the hill, and two ladies in it. His blood leapt. He recognised Constance Bledlow, and he supposed the other lady was Mrs. Mulholland.

Constance on her side knew in a moment from the bearing of his head and shoulders who was the tall man approaching them. She spoke hurriedly to Mrs. Mulholland.

"Do you mind if I stop and speak to Mr. Falloden?"

Mrs. Mulholland shrugged her shoulders—

"Do as you like, my dear. Only don't expect me to be very forthcoming!"

Constance stopped the carriage, and bent forward.

"Mr. Falloden!"

He came up to her. Connie introduced him to Mrs. Mulholland, who bowed coldly.

"We have just been to see Otto Radowitz," said Constance. "We found him—very sadly, to-day." Her hesitating voice, with the note of wistful appeal in it, affected him strangely.

"Yes, it has been a bad day. I haven't seen him at all."

"He gave us tea, and talked a great deal. He was rather excited; but he looked wretched. And why has he turned against his doctor?"

"Has he turned against his doctor?" Falloden's tone was one of surprise. "I thought he liked him."

"He said he was a croaker, and he wasn't going to let himself be depressed by anybody—doctor or no."

Falloden was silent. Mrs. Mulholland interposed.

"Perhaps you would like to walk a little way with Mr. Falloden? I can manage the pony."

Constance descended. Falloden turned back with her towards Oxford. The pony-carriage followed at some distance behind.

Then Falloden talked freely. The presence of the light figure beside him, in its dark dress and close-fitting cap, seemed to thaw the chill of life. He began rapidly to pour out his own anxieties, his own sense of failure.

"I am the last man in the world who ought to be looking after him; I know that as well as anybody," he said, with emphasis. "But what's to be done? Sorell can't get away from college. And Radowitz knows very few men intimately. Neither Meyrick nor Robertson would be any better than I."

"Oh, not so good—not nearly so good!" exclaimed Constance eagerly. "You don't know! He counts on you."

Falloden shook his head.

"Then he counts on a broken reed. I irritate and annoy him a hundred times a day."

"Oh, no, no—he does count on you," repeated Connie in her soft, determined voice. "If you give up, he will be much—much worse off!" Then she added after a moment—"Don't give up! I—I ask you!"

"Then I shall stay."

They moved on a few steps in silence, till Connie said eagerly—

"Have you any news from Paris?"

"Yes; we wrote in the nick of time. The whole thing was just being given up for lack of funds. Now I have told him he may spend what he pleases, so long as he does the thing."

"Please—mayn't I help?"

"Thank you. It's my affair."

"It'll be very, very expensive."

"I shall manage it."

"It would be kinder"—her voice shook a little—"if I might help."

He considered it—then said doubtfully:

"Suppose you provide the records?—the things it plays? I don't know anything about music—and I have been racking my brains to think of somebody in Paris who could look after that part of it."

Constance exclaimed. Why, she had several friends in Paris, in the very thick of the musical world there! She had herself had lessons all one winter in Paris at the Conservatoire from a dear old fellow—a Pole—a pupil of Chopin in his youth, and in touch with the whole Polish colony in Paris, which was steeped in music.

"He made love to me a little"—she said, laughing—"I'm sure he'd do anything for us. I'll write at once! And there is somebody at the Embassy—why, of course, I can set all kinds of people to work!"

And her feet began to dance along the road beside him.

"We must get some Polish music"—she went on—"there's that marvellous young pianist they rave about in Paris—Paderewski. I'm sure he'd help! Otto has often talked to me about him. We must have lots of Chopin—and Liszt—though of course he wasn't a Pole!—And Polish national songs!—Otto was only telling me to-day how Chopin loved them—how he and Liszt used to go about the villages and farms and note them down. Oh, we'll have a wonderful collection!"

Her eyes shone in her small, flushed face. They walked on fast, talking and dreaming, till there was Folly Bridge in front of them, and the beginnings of Oxford. Falloden pulled up sharply.

"I must run back to him. Will you come again?"

She held out her hand. The moonlight, shining on his powerful face and curly hair, stirred in her a sudden, acute sense of delight.

"Oh yes—we'll come again. But don't leave him!—don't, please, think of it! He trusts you—he leans on you."

"It is kind of you to believe it. But I am no use!"

He put her back into the carriage, bowed formally, and was gone, running up the hill at an athlete's pace.

The two ladies drove silently on, and were soon among the movement and traffic of the Oxford streets. Connie's mind was steeped in passionate feeling. Till now Falloden had touched first her senses, then her pity. Now in these painful and despondent attempts of his, to adjust himself to Otto's weakness and irritability, he was stirring sympathies and enthusiasms in her which belonged to that deepest soul in Connie which was just becoming conscious of itself. And all the more, perhaps, because in Falloden's manner towards her there was nothing left of the lover. For the moment at any rate she preferred it so. Life was all doubt, expectation, thrill—its colour heightened, its meanings underlined. And in her complete uncertainty as to what turn it would take, and how the doubt would end, lay the spell—the potent tormenting charm—of the situation.

She was sorry, bitterly sorry for Radowitz—the victim. But she loved Falloden—the offender! It was the perennial injustice of passion, the eternal injustice of human things.

* * * * *

When Falloden was half-way up the hill, he left the road, and took a short cut through fields, by a path which led him to the back of the cottage, where its sitting-room window opened on the garden and the view. As he approached the house, he saw that the sitting-room blinds had not been drawn, and some of the windows were still open. The whole room was brilliantly lit by fire and lamp. Otto was there alone, sitting at the piano, with his back to the approaching spectator and the moonlit night outside. He was playing something with his left hand; Falloden could see him plainly. Suddenly, he saw the boy's figure collapse. He was still sitting, but his face was buried in his arm which was lying on the piano; and through the open window, Falloden heard a sound which, muffled as it was, produced upon him a strange and horrible impression. It was a low cry, or groan—the voice of despair itself.

Falloden stood motionless. All he knew was that he would have given anything in the world to recall the past; to undo the events of that June evening in the Marmion quadrangle.

Then, before Otto could discover his presence, he went noiselessly round the corner of the house, and entered it by the front door. In the hall, he called loudly to the ex-scout, as he went upstairs, so that Radowitz might know he had come back. When he returned, Radowitz was sitting over the fire with sheets of scribbled music-paper on a small table before him. His eyes shone, his cheeks were feverishly bright. He turned with forced gaiety at the sight of Falloden—

"Well, did you meet them on the road?"

"Lady Constance, and her friend? Yes. I had a few words with them. How are you now? What did the doctor say to you?"

"What on earth does it matter!" said Radowitz impatiently. "He is just a fool—a young one—the worst sort—I can put up with the old ones. I know my own case a great deal better than he does."

"Does he want you to stop working?" Falloden stood on the hearth, looking down on the huddled figure in the chair; himself broad and tall and curly-haired, like the divine Odysseus, when Athene had breathed ambrosial youth upon him. But he was pale, and his eyes frowned perpetually under his splendid brows.

"Some nonsense of that sort!" said Radowitz. "Don't let's talk about it."

They went into dinner, and Radowitz sent for champagne.

"That's the only sensible thing the idiot said—that I might have that stuff whenever I liked."

His spirits rose with the wine; and presently Falloden could have thought what he had seen from the dark had been a mere illusion. A review in The Times of a book of Polish memoirs served to let loose a flood of boastful talk, which jarred abominably on the Englishman. Under the Oxford code, to boast in plain language of your ancestors, or your own performances, meant simply that you were an outsider, not sure of your footing. If a man really had ancestors, or more brains than other people, his neighbours saved him the trouble of talking about them. Only the fools and the parvenus trumpeted themselves; a process in any case not worth while, since it defeated its own ends. You might of course be as insolent or arrogant as you pleased; but only an idiot tried to explain why.

In Otto, however, there was the characteristic Slav mingling of quick wits with streaks of childish vanity. He wanted passionately to make this tough Englishman feel what a great country Poland had been and would be again; what great people his ancestors had been; and what a leading part they had played in the national movements. And the more he hit against an answering stubbornness—or coolness—in Falloden, the more he held forth. So that it was an uncomfortable dinner. And again Falloden said to himself—"Why did I do it? I am only in his way. I shall bore and chill him; and I don't seem to be able to help it."

But after dinner, as the night frost grew sharper, and as Otto sat over the fire, piling on the coal, Falloden suddenly went and fetched a warm Scotch plaid of his own. When he offered it, Radowitz received it with surprise, and a little annoyance.

"I am not the least cold—thank you!"

But, presently, he had wrapped it round his knees; and some restraint had broken down in Falloden.

"Isn't there a splendid church in Cracow?" he asked casually, stretching himself, with his pipe, in a long chair on the opposite side of the fire.

"One!—five or six!" cried Otto indignantly. "But I expect you're thinking of Panna Marya. Panna means Lady. I tell you, you English haven't got anything to touch it!"

"What's it like?—what date?" said Falloden, laughing.

"I don't know—I don't know anything about architecture. But it's glorious. It's all colour and stained glass—and magnificent tombs—like the gate of heaven," said the boy with ardour. "It's the church that every Pole loves. Some of my ancestors are buried there. And it's the church where, instead of a clock striking, the hours are given out by a watchman who plays a horn. He plays an old air—ever so old—we call it the 'Heynal,' on the top of one of the towers. The only time I was ever in Cracow I heard a man at a concert—a magnificent player—improvise on it. And it comes into one of Chopin's sonatas."

He began to hum under his breath a sweet wandering melody. And suddenly he sprang up, and ran to the piano. He played the air with his left hand, embroidering it with delicate arabesques and variations, catching a bass here and there with a flying touch, suggesting marvellously what had once been a rich and complete whole. The injured hand, which had that day been very painful, lay helpless in its sling; the other flashed over the piano, while the boy's blue eyes shone beneath his vivid frieze of hair. Falloden, lying back in his chair, noticed the emaciation of the face, the hollow eyes, the contracted shoulders; and as he did so, he thought of the scene in the Magdalen ballroom—the slender girl, wreathed in pearls, and the brilliant foreign youth—dancing, dancing, with all the eyes of the room upon them.

Presently, with a sound of impatience, Radowitz left the piano. He could do nothing that he wanted to do. He stood at the window for some minutes looking out at the autumn moon, with his back to Falloden.

Falloden took up one of the books he was at work on for his fellowship exam. When Radowitz came back to the fire, however, white and shivering, he laid it down again, and once more made conversation. Radowitz was at first unwilling to respond. But he was by nature bavard, and Falloden played him with some skill.

Very soon he was talking fast and brilliantly again, about his artistic life in Paris, his friends at the Conservatoire or in the Quartier Latin; and so back to his childish days in Poland, and the uprising in which the family estates near Warsaw had been forfeited. Falloden found it all very strange. The seething, artistic, revolutionary world which had produced Otto was wholly foreign to him; and this patriotic passion for a dead country seemed to his English common sense a waste of force. But in Otto's eyes Poland was not dead; the White Eagle, torn and blood-stained though she was, would mount the heavens again; and in those dark skies the stars were already rising!

At eleven, Falloden got up—

"I must go and swat. It was awfully jolly, what you've been telling me. I know a lot I didn't know before."

A gleam of pleasure showed in the boy's sunken eyes.

"I expect I'm a bore," he said, with a shrug; "and I'd better go to bed."

Falloden helped him carry up his books and papers. In Otto's room, the windows were wide open, but there was a bright fire, and Bateson, the ex-scout, was waiting to help him undress. Falloden asked some questions about the doctor's orders. Various things were wanted from Oxford. He undertook to get them in the morning.

When he came back to the sitting-room, he stood some time in a brown study. He wondered again whether he had any qualifications at all as a nurse. But he was inclined to think now that Radowitz might be worse off without him; what Constance had said seemed less unreal; and his effort of the evening, as he looked back on it, brought him a certain bitter satisfaction.

* * * * *

The following day, Radowitz came downstairs with the course of the second movement of his symphony clear before him. He worked feverishly all day, now writing, now walking up and down, humming and thinking, now getting but of his piano—a beautiful instrument hired for the winter—all that his maimed state allowed him to get; and passing hour after hour, between an ecstasy of happy creation, and a state of impotent rage with his own helplessness. Towards sunset he was worn out, and with tea beside him which he had been greedily drinking, he was sitting huddled over the fire, when he heard some one ride up to the front door.

In another minute the sitting-room door opened, and a girl's figure in a riding habit appeared.

"May I come in?" said Connie, flushing rather pink.

Otto sprang up, and drew her in. His fatigue disappeared as though by magic. He seemed all gaiety and force.

"Come in! Sit down and have some tea! I was so depressed five minutes ago—I was fit to kill myself. And now you make the room shine—you do come in like a goddess!"

He busied himself excitedly in putting a chair for her, in relighting the spirit kettle, in blowing up the fire.

Constance meanwhile stood in some embarrassment with one hand on the back of a chair—a charming vision in her close fitting habit, and the same black tricorne that she had worn in the Lathom Woods, at Falloden's side.

"I came to bring you a book, Otto, the book we talked of yesterday." She held out a paper-covered volume. "But I mustn't stay."

"Oh, do stay!" he implored her. "Don't bother about Mrs. Grundy. I'm so tired and so bored. Anybody may visit an invalid. Think this is a nursing home, and you're my daily visitor. Falloden's miles away on a drag-hunt. Ah, that's right!" he cried delightedly, as he saw that she had seated herself. "Now you shall have some tea!"

She let him provide her, watching him the while with slightly frowning brows. How ill he looked—how ill! Her heart sank.

"Dear Otto, how are you? You don't seem so well to-day."

"I've been working myself to death. It won't come right—this beastly andante. It's too jerky—it wants liaison. And I can't hear it—I can't hear it!—that's the devilish part of it."

And taking his helpless hand out of the sling in which it had been resting, he struck it bitterly against the arm of his chair. The tears came to Connie's eyes.

"Don't!—you'll hurt yourself. It'll be all right—it'll be all right! You'll hear it in your mind." And bending forward under a sudden impulse, she took the maimed hand in her two hands—so small and soft—and lifting it tenderly she put her lips to it.

He looked at her in amazement.

"You do that—for me?"

"Yes. Because you are a great artist—and a brave man!" she said, gulping. "You are not to despair. Your music is in your soul—your brain. Other people shall play it for you."

He calmed down.

"At least I am not deaf, like Beethoven," he said, trying to please her. "That would have been worse. Do you know, last night Falloden and I had a glorious talk? He was awfully decent. He made me tell him all about Poland and my people. He never scoffed once. He makes me do what the doctor says. And last night—when it was freezing cold—he brought a rug and wrapped it round me. Think of that!"—he looked at her—half-shamefaced, half-laughing—"Falloden!"

Her eyes shone.

"I'm glad!" she said softly. "I'm glad!"

"Yes, but do you know why he's kind—why he's here at all?" he asked her abruptly.

"What's the good of silly questions?" she said hastily. "Take it as it comes."

He laughed.

"He does it—I'm going to say it!—yes, I am—and you are not to be angry—he does it because—simply—he's in love with you!"

Connie flushed again, more deeply, and he, already alarmed by his own boldness, looked at her nervously.

"You are quite wrong." Her tone was quiet, but decided. "He did it, first of all, because of what you did for his father—"

"I did nothing!" interposed Radowitz.

She took no notice.

"And secondly"—her voice shook a little—"because—he was sorry. Now—now—he is doing it"—suddenly her smile flashed out, with its touch of humour—"just simply because he likes it!"

It was a bold assertion. She knew it. But she straightened her slight shoulders, prepared to stick to it.

Radowitz shook his head.

"And what am I doing it for? Do you remember when I said to you I loathed him?"

"No—not him."

"Well, something in him—the chief thing, it seemed to me then. I felt towards him really—as a man might feel towards his murderer—or the murderer of some one else, some innocent, helpless person who had given no offence. Hatred—loathing—abhorrence!—you couldn't put it too strongly. Well then,"—he began poking at the fire, while he went on thinking aloud—"God brought us together in that strange manner. By the way"—he turned to her—"are you a Christian?"

"I—I don't know. I suppose I am."

"I am," he said firmly. "I am a practising Catholic. Catholicism with us Poles is partly religion, partly patriotism—do you understand? I go to confession—I am a communicant. And for some time I couldn't go to Communion at all. I always felt Falloden's hand on my shoulder, as he was pushing me down the stairs; and I wanted to kill him!—just that! You know our Polish blood runs hotter than yours. I didn't want the college to punish him. Not at all. It was my affair. After I saw you in town, it grew worse—it was an obsession. When we first got to Yorkshire, Sorell and I, and I knew that Falloden was only a few miles away, I never could get quit of it—of the thought that some day—somewhere—I should kill him. I never, if I could help it, crossed a certain boundary line that I had made for myself, between our side of the moor, and the side which belonged to the Fallodens. I couldn't be sure of myself if I had come upon him unawares. Oh, of course, he would soon have got the better of me—but there would have been a struggle—I should have attacked him—and I might have had a revolver. So for your sake"—he turned to look at her with his hollow blue eyes—"I kept away. Then, one evening, I quite forgot all about it. I was thinking of the theme for the slow movement in my symphony, and I didn't notice where I was going. I walked on and on over the hill—and at last I heard a man groaning—and there was Sir Arthur by the stream. I saw at once that he was dying. There I sat, alone with him. He asked me not to leave him. He said something about Douglas, 'Poor Douglas!' And when the horrible thing came back—the last time—he just whispered, 'Pray!' and I said our Catholic prayers that our priest had said when my mother died. Then Falloden came—just in time—and instead of wanting to kill him, I waited there, a little way off, and prayed hard for myself and him! Queer, wasn't it? And afterwards—you know—I saw his mother. Then the next day, I confessed to a dear old priest, who was very kind to me, and on the Sunday he gave me Communion. He said God had been very gracious to me; and I saw what he meant. That very week I had a hemorrhage, the first I ever had."

Connie gave a sudden, startled cry. He turned again to smile at her.

"Didn't you know? No, I believe no one knew, but Sorell and the doctors. It was nothing. It's quite healed. But the strange thing was how extraordinarily happy I felt that week. I didn't hate Falloden any more. It was as though a sharp thorn had gone from one's mind. It didn't last long of course, the queer ecstatic feeling. There was always my hand—and I got very low again. But something lasted; and when Falloden said that extraordinary thing—I don't believe he meant to say it at all!—suggesting we should settle together for the winter—I knew that I must do it. It was a kind of miracle—one thing after another—driving us."

His voice dropped. He remained gazing absently into the fire.

"Dear Otto"—said Constance softly—"you have forgiven him?"

He smiled.

"What does that matter? Have you?"

His eager eyes searched her face. She faltered under them.

"He doesn't care whether I have or not."

At that he laughed out.

"Doesn't he? I say, did you ask us both to come—on purpose—that afternoon?—in the garden?"

She was silent.

"It was bold of you!" he said, in the same laughing tone. "But it has answered. Unless, of course, I bore him to death. I talk a lot of nonsense—I can't help it—and he bears it. And he says hard, horrid things, sometimes—and my blood boils—and I bear it. And I expect he wants to break off a hundred times a day—and so do I. Yet here we stay. And it's you"—he raised his head deliberately—"it's you who are really at the bottom of it."

Constance rose trembling from her chair.

"Don't say any more, dear Otto. I didn't mean any harm. I—I was so sorry for you both."

He laughed again softly.

"You've got to marry him!" he said triumphantly. "There!—you may go now. But you'll come again soon. I know you will!"

She seemed to slip, to melt, out of the room. But he had a last vision of flushed cheeks, and half-reproachful eyes.



CHAPTER XVIII

On the day following Constance's visit to the Boar's Hill cottage she wrote to Radowitz:—

"DEAR OTTO,—I am going to ask you not to raise the subject you spoke of yesterday to me again between us. I am afraid I should find my visits a pain instead of a joy, if you did so. And Mrs. Mulholland and I want to come so much—sometimes alone, and sometimes together. We want to be mother and sister as much as we can, and you will let us! We know very well that we are poor painted things compared with real mothers and sisters. Still we should love to do our best—I should—if you'll let me!"

To which Otto replied:—

"DEAR CONSTANCE,—(That's impudence, but you told me!)—I'll hold my tongue—though I warn you I shall only think the more. But you shan't have any cause to punish me by not coming. Good heavens!—if you didn't come!

"The coast is always clear here between two and four. I get my walk in the morning."

Two or three days a week accordingly, Constance, or Mrs. Mulholland, or both took their way to the cottage. They did all that women with soft hearts can do for a sick man. Mrs. Mulholland managed the servants, and enquired into the food. Connie brought books and flowers, and all the Oxford gossip she could collect. Their visit was the brightness of the boy's day, and thanks to them, many efforts were made to soften his calamity. The best musical talent that Oxford could furnish was eager to serve him; and a well-known orchestra was only waiting for the completion of his symphony and the result of his examination to produce the symphony in the hall of Marmion.

Meanwhile Connie very rarely saw Falloden—except in connection either with Otto's health, or with the "Orpheus," as to which Falloden was in constant communication with the inventor, one Auguste Chaumart, living in a garret on the heights of Montmartre; while Constance herself was carrying on an eager correspondence with friends of her own or her parents, in Paris, with regard to the "records" which were to make the repertory of the Orpheus. The automatic piano—or piano-player—which some years later became the pianola, was in those days rapidly developing. The difference between it and the Orpheus lay in the fact that the piano-player required hands and feet of flesh and blood for anything more than a purely mechanical rendering of the music provided by the rolls; while in the Orpheus, expression, accent, interpretation, as given by the best pianists of the day, had been already registered in the cylinders.

On the pianola, or what preceded it—then as now—the player provided his own rendering. But the Orpheus, the precursor also of types that have since been greatly perfected, was played by an electrical mechanism, and the audience was intended to listen to Chopin or Beethoven, to Schumann or Brahms, as interpreted by the famous players of the moment, without any intervening personality.

These things are very familiar to our generation. In the eighties, they were only a vision and a possibility, and Falloden's lavish expenditure was in fact stimulating one of the first inventors.

But Connie also was playing an important part. Both Lord and Lady Risborough had possessed devoted friends in Paris, and Connie had made others of her own among the young folk with whom she had danced and flirted and talked during a happy spring with her parents in the Avenue Marceau. She had set these playfellows of hers to work, and with most brilliant success. Otto's story, as told by her vivacious letters, had gone the round. No woman of twice her age could have told it more adroitly. Otto appeared as the victim of an unfortunate accident in a college frolic; Falloden as the guardian friend; herself, as his lieutenant. It touched the romantic sense, the generous heart of musical Paris. There were many who remembered Otto's father and mother and the musical promise of the bright-haired boy. The Polish colony in Paris, a survival from the tragic days of Poland's exodus under the revolutionary skies of the thirties and the sixties, had been appealed to, and both Polish and French musicians were already in communication with Chaumart, and producing records under his direction. The young Polish marvel of the day—Paderewski—had been drawn in, and his renderings of Chopin's finest work were to provide the bulk of the rolls. Connie's dear old Polish teacher, himself a composer, was at work on a grouping of folk-songs from Poland and Lithuania—the most characteristic utterance of a martyred people.

"They are songs, chere petite," wrote the old man—"of revolt, of exile, and of death. There is no other folk-song like them in the world, just as there is no history in the world like Poland's. Your poor friend knows them all—has known them all from his childhood. They will speak to him of his torn country. He will hear in them the cry of the White Eagle—the White Eagle of Poland—as she soars wounded and bleeding over the southern plains, or sinks dying into the marshes and forests of Lithuania. It is in these songs that we Poles listen to the very heart-beats of our outraged country. Our songs—our music—our poets—our memories:—as a nation that is all we have—except the faith in us that never dies. Hinc surrectura! Yes, she shall rise again, our Poland! Our hope is in God, and in the human heart, the human conscience, that He has made. Comfort your friend. He has lost much, poor boy!—but he has still ears to hear, a brain, an imagination to conceive. Let him work still for music and for Poland—they will some day reward him!"

And as a last contribution, a young French pianist, rising rapidly into fame both as a virtuoso and a composer, was writing specially a series of variations on the lovely theme of the "Heynal"—that traditional horn-song, played every hour in the ears of Cracow, from the tower of Panna Marya—of which Otto had spoken to Falloden.

But all these things were as yet hidden from Otto. Falloden and Constance corresponded about them, in letters that anybody might have read, which had behind them, nevertheless, a secret and growing force of emotion. Even Mrs. Mulholland, who was rapidly endearing herself both to Constance and Radowitz, could only guess at what was going on, and when she did guess, held her tongue. But her relations with Falloden, which at the beginning of his residence in the cottage had been of the coldest, gradually became less strained. To his own astonishment, he found the advice of this brusque elderly woman so important to him that he looked eagerly for her coming, and obeyed her with a docility which amazed himself and her. The advice concerned, of course, merely the small matters of daily life bearing on Otto's health and comfort, and when the business was done, Falloden disappeared.

But strangely amenable, and even humble as he might appear in these affairs to those who remembered his haughty days in college, for both Constance and Mrs. Mulholland quite another fact emerged from their experience of the cottage household during these weeks:—simply this—that whatever other people might do or be, Falloden was steadily, and perhaps unconsciously, becoming master of the situation, the indispensable and protecting power of Otto's life.

How he did it remained obscure. But Mrs. Mulholland at least—out of a rich moral history—guessed that what they saw in the Boar's Hill cottage was simply the working out of the old spiritual paradox—that there is a yielding which is victory, and a surrender which is power. It seemed to her often that Radowitz was living in a constant state of half-subdued excitement, produced by the strange realisation that he and his life had become so important to Falloden that the differences of training and temperament between them, and all the little daily rubs, no longer counted; that he existed, so to speak, that Falloden might—through him—escape the burden of his own remorse. The hard, strong, able man, so much older than himself in character, if not in years, the man who had bullied and despised him, was now becoming his servant, in the sense in which Christ was the "servant" of his brethren. Not with any conscious Christian intention—far from it; but still under a kind of mysterious compulsion. The humblest duties, the most trivial anxieties, where Radowitz was concerned, fell, week by week, increasingly to Falloden's portion. A bad or a good night—appetite or no appetite—a book that Otto liked—a visit that amused him—anything that for the moment contented the starved musical sense in Otto, that brought out his gift, and his joy in it—anything that, for the moment, enabled him to forget and evade his injuries—these became, for Falloden also, the leading events of his own day. He was reading hard for his fellowship, and satisfying various obscure needs by taking as much violent exercise as possible; but there was going on in him, all the time, an intense spiritual ferment, connected with Constance Bledlow on the one side, and Otto Radowitz on the other.

Meanwhile—what was not so evident to this large-hearted observer—Otto was more than willing—he burned—to play his part. All that is mystical and passionate in the soul of a Polish Catholic, had been stirred in him by his accident, his growing premonition of short life, the bitterness of his calamity, the suddenness of his change of heart towards Falloden.

"My future is wrecked. I shall never live to be old. I shall never be a great musician. But I mean to live long enough to make Constance happy! She shall talk of me to her children. And I shall watch over her—perhaps—from another world."

These thoughts, and others like them, floated by day and night through the boy's mind; and he wove them into the symphony he was writing. Tragedy, passion, melody—these have been the Polish heritage in music; they breathe through the Polish peasant songs, as through the genius of a Chopin; they are bound up with the long agony of Polish history, with the melancholy and monotony of the Polish landscape. They spoke again through the beautiful thwarted gift of this boy of twenty, through his foreboding of early death, and through that instinctive exercise of his creative gift, which showed itself not in music alone, but in the shaping of two lives—Falloden's and Connie's.

* * * * *

And Constance too was living and learning, with the intensity that comes of love and pity and compunction. She was dropping all her spoilt-child airs; and the bower-bird adornments, with which she had filled her little room in Medburn House, had been gradually cleared away, to Nora's great annoyance, till it was almost as bare as Nora's own. Amid the misty Oxford streets, and the low-ceiled Oxford rooms, she was played upon by the unseen influences of that "august place," where both the great and the forgotten dead are always at work, shaping the life of the present. In those days Oxford was still praising "famous men and the fathers who begat" her. Their shades still walked her streets. Pusey was not long dead. Newman, the mere ghost of himself, had just preached a tremulous last sermon within her bounds, returning as a kind of spiritual Odysseus for a few passing hours to the place where he had once reigned as the most adored son of Oxford. Thomas Hill Green, with the rugged face, and the deep brown eyes, and the look that made pretence and cowardice ashamed, was dead, leaving a thought and a teaching behind him that his Oxford will not let die. Matthew Arnold had yet some years to live and could occasionally be seen at Balliol or at All Souls; while Christ Church and Balliol still represented the rival centres of that great feud between Liberal and Orthodox which had convulsed the University a generation before.

In Balliol, there sat a chubby-faced, quiet-eyed man, with very white hair, round whom the storms of orthodoxy had once beaten, like the surges on a lighthouse; and at Christ Church and in St. Mary's the beautiful presence and the wonderful gift of Liddon kept the old fires burning in pious hearts.

And now into this old, old place, with its thick soil of dead lives and deeds, there had come a new seed, as to which no one could tell how it would flower. Women students were increasing every term in Oxford. Groups of girl graduates in growing numbers went shyly through the streets, knowing that they had still to justify their presence in this hitherto closed world—made by men for men. There were many hostile eyes upon them, watching for mistakes. But all the generous forces in Oxford were behind them. The ablest men in the University were teaching women how to administer—how to organise. Some lecture-rooms were opening to them; some still entirely declined to admit them. And here and there were persons who had a clear vision of the future to which was trending this new eagerness of women to explore regions hitherto forbidden them in the House of Life.

Connie had no such vision, but she had a boundless curiosity and a thrilling sense of great things stirring in the world. Under Nora's lead she had begun to make friends among the women students, and to find her way into their little bed-sitting-rooms at tea time. They all seemed to her superhumanly clever; and superhumanly modest. She had been brought up indeed by two scholars; but examinations dazzled and appalled her. How they were ever passed, she could not imagine. She looked at the girls who had passed them with awe, quite unconscious the while of the glamour she herself possessed for these untravelled students, as one familiar from her childhood with the sacred places of history—Rome, Athens, Florence, Venice, Sicily. She had seen, she had trodden; and quiet eyes—sometimes spectacled—would flame, while her easy talk ran on.

But all the time there were very critical notions in her, hidden deep down.

"Do they never think about a man?" some voice in her seemed to be asking. "As for me, I am always thinking about a man!" And the colour would flush into her cheeks, as she meekly asked for another cup of tea.

Sometimes she would go with Nora to the Bodleian, and sit patiently beside her while Nora copied Middle-English poetry from an early manuscript, worth a king's ransom. Nora got sevenpence a "folio," of seventy-two words, for her work. Connie thought the pay scandalous for so much learning; but Nora laughed at her, and took far more pleasure in the small cheque she received at the end of term from the University Press than Connie in her quarterly dividends.

But Connie knew very well by this time that Nora was not wholly absorbed in Middle English. Often, as they emerged from the Bodleian to go home to lunch, they would come across Sorell hurrying along the Broad, his master's gown floating behind him. And he would turn his fine ascetic face towards them, and wave his hand to them from the other side of the street. And Connie would flash a look at Nora,—soft, quick, malicious—of which Nora was well aware.

But Connie rarely said a word. She was handling the situation indeed with great discretion; though with an impetuous will. She herself had withdrawn from the Greek lessons, on the plea that she was attending some English history lectures; that she must really find out who fought the battle of Hastings; and was too lazy to do anything else. Sometimes she would linger in the schoolroom till Sorell arrived, and then he would look at her wistfully, when she prepared to depart, as though to say—"Was this what I bargained for?"

But she always laughed and went. And presently as she crossed the hall again, and heard animated voices in the schoolroom, her brown eyes would show a merry satisfaction.

Meanwhile Nora was growing thinner and handsomer day by day. She was shedding awkwardness without any loss of that subacid sincerity that was her charm. Connie, as much as she dared, took her dressing in hand. She was never allowed to give a thing; but Annette's fingers were quick and clever, and Nora's Spartan garb was sometimes transformed by them under the orders of a coaxing or audacious Constance. The mere lifting of the load of care had let the young plant shoot. So that many persons passing Ewen Hooper's second daughter in the street would turn round now to look at her in surprise. Was that really the stout, podgy schoolgirl, who had already, by virtue of her strong personality, made a certain impression in the university town? People had been vaguely sorry for her; or vaguely thought of her as plain but good. Alice of course was pretty; Nora had the virtues. And now here she was, bursting into good looks more positive than her sister's.

The girl's heart indeed was young at last, for the neighbourhood of Connie was infectious. The fairy-godmothering of that young woman was going finely. It was the secret hope at the centre of her own life which was playing like captured sunshine upon all the persons about her. Her energy was prodigious. Everything to do with money matters had been practically settled between her and Sorell and Uncle Ewen; and settled in Connie's way, expressed no doubt in business form. And now she was insisting firmly on the holiday visit to Rome, in spite of many protests from Uncle Ewen and Nora. It was a promise, she declared. Rome—Rome—was their fate. She wrote endless letters, enquiring for rooms, and announcing their coming to her old friends. Uncle Ewen soon had the startled impression that all Rome was waiting for them, and that they could never live up to it.

Finally, Connie persuaded them to settle on rooms in a well-known small hotel, overlooking the garden-front of the Palazzo Barberini, where she had grown up. She wrote to the innkeeper, Signor B., "a very old friend of mine," who replied that the "amici" of the "distintissima signorina" should be most tenderly looked after. As for the contessas and marchesas who wrote, eagerly promising their "dearest Constance" that they would be kind to her relations, they were many; and when Ewen Hooper said nervously that it was clear he must take out both a frock-coat and dress clothes, Constance laughed and said, "Not at all!—Signer B. will lend you any thing you want,"—a remark which, in the ears of the travellers to be, threw new and unexpected light on the functions of an Italian innkeeper. Meanwhile she piled up guide-books, she gathered maps; and she taught both her uncle and Nora Italian. And so long as she was busied with such matters she seemed the gayest of creatures, and would go singing and laughing about the house.

In another old house in Oxford, too, her coming made delight. She spent many long hours beside the Master of Beaumont's fire, gathering fresh light on the ways of scholarship and scholars. The quarrels of the learned had never hitherto come her way. Her father had never quarrelled with anybody. But the Master—poor great man!—had quarrelled with so many people! He had missed promotions which should have been his; he had made discoveries of which others had got the credit; and he kept a quite amazing stock of hatreds in some pocket of his vast intelligence. Constance would listen at first to the expression of them in an awed silence. Was it possible the world contained such mean and treacherous monsters? And why did it matter so much to a man who knew everything?—who held all the classics and all the Renaissance in the hollow of his hand, to whom "Latin was no more difficile, than to a blackbird 'tis to whistle"? Then, gradually, she began to have the courage to laugh; to try a little soft teasing of her new friend and mentor, who was at once so wonderful and so absurd. And the Master bore it well, could indeed never have too much of her company; while his white-haired sister beamed at the sight of her. She became the child of a childless house, and when Lady Langmoor sent her peremptory invitations to this or that country mansion where she would meet "some charming young men," Connie would reply—"Best thanks, dear Aunt Langmoor—but I am very happy here—and comfortably in love with a gentleman on the sunny side of seventy. Please don't interfere!"

Only with Herbert Pryce was she ever thorny in these days. She could not forgive him that it was not till his appointment at the Conservative Central Office, due to Lord Glaramara's influence, was actually signed and sealed that he proposed to Alice. Till the goods had been delivered, he never finally committed himself. Even Nora had underrated his prudence. But at last one evening he arrived at Medburn House after dinner with the look of one whose mind is magnificently made up. By common consent, the drawing-room was abandoned to him and Alice, and when they emerged, Alice held her head triumphantly, and her lover was all jocosity and self-satisfaction.

"She really is a dear little thing," he said complacently to Connie, when the news had been told and excitement subsided. "We shall do capitally."

"Enfin?" said Connie, with the old laugh in her eyes. "You are quite sure?"

He looked at her uneasily.

"It never does to hurry these things," he said, rather pompously. "I wanted to feel I could give her what she had a right to expect. We owe you a great deal, Lady Constance—or—perhaps now—I may call you Constance?"

Constance winced, and pointedly avoided giving him leave. But for Alice's sake, she held her tongue. The wedding was to be hurried on, and Mrs. Hooper, able for once to buy new frocks with a clear conscience, and possessed of the money to pay for them, was made so happy by the bustle of the trousseau that she fell in love with her prospective son-in-law as the cause of it. Ewen Hooper meanwhile watched him with mildly shrewd eyes, deciding once more in his inner mind that mathematicians were an inferior race.

Not even to Nora—only to Mrs. Mulholland, did Constance ever lift the veil, during these months. She was not long in succumbing to the queer charm of that lovable and shapeless person; and in the little drawing-room in St. Giles, the girl of twenty would spend winter evenings, at the feet of her new friend, passing through various stages of confession; till one night, Mrs. Mulholland lifted the small face, with her own large hand, and looked mockingly into the brown eyes:

"Out with it, my dear! You are in love with Douglas Falloden!"

Connie said nothing. Her little chin did not withdraw itself, nor did her eyes drop. But a film of tears rushed into them.

The truth was that in this dark wintry Oxford, and its neighbouring country, there lurked a magic for Connie which in the high summer pomps it had never possessed. Once or twice, in the distance of a winding street—on some football ground in the Parks—in the gallery of St. Mary's on Sunday, Constance caught sight, herself unseen, of the tall figure and the curly head. Such glimpses made the fever of her young life. They meant far more to passion than her occasional meetings with Falloden at the Boar's Hill cottage. And there were other points of contact. At the end of November, for instance, came the Merton Fellowship. Falloden won it, in a brilliant field; and Connie contrived to know all she wanted to know as to his papers, and his rivals. After the announcement of his success, she trod on air. Finally she allowed herself to send him a little note of congratulation—very short and almost formal. He replied in the same tone.

Two days later, Falloden went over to Paris to see for himself the condition of the Orpheus, and to arrange for its transport to England. He was away for nearly a week, and on his return called at once in Holywell, to report his visit. Nora was with Connie in the drawing-room when he was announced; and a peremptory look forbade her to slip away. She sat listening to the conversation.

Was this really Douglas Falloden—this grave, courteous man—without a trace of the "blood" upon him? He seemed to her years older than he had been in May, and related, for the first time, to the practical every-day world. This absorption too in Otto Radowitz and his affairs—incredible! He and Connie first eagerly discussed certain domestic details of the cottage—the cook, the food, the draughts, the arrangements to be made for Otto's open-air treatment which the doctors were now insisting on—with an anxious minuteness! Nora could hardly keep her face straight in the distance—they were so like a pair of crooning housewives. Then he began on his French visit, sitting sideways on his chair, his elbow on the back of it, and his hand thrust into his curly mass of hair—handsomer, thought Nora, than ever. And there was Connie listening spell-bound in a low chair opposite, her delicate pale profile distinct against the dark panelling of the room, her eyes fixed on him. Nora's perplexed eyes travelled from one to the other.

As to the story of the Orpheus and its inventor, both girls hung upon it. Falloden had tracked Auguste Chaumart to his garret in Montmartre, and had found in him one of those marvellous French workmen, inheritors of the finest technical tradition in the world, who are the true sons of the men who built and furnished and carved Versailles, and thereby revolutionised the minor arts of Europe. A small pinched fellow!—with a sickly wife and children sharing his tiny workshop, and a brain teeming with inventions, of which the electric piano, forerunner of the Welte-Mignons of later days, was but the chief among many. He had spent a fortune upon it, could get no capitalist to believe in it, and no firm to take it up. Then Falloden's astonishing letter and offer of funds, based on Radowitz's report—itself the echo of a couple of letters from Paris—had encouraged the starving dreamer to go on.

Falloden reproduced the scene, as described to him by the chief actor in it, when the inventor announced to his family that the thing was accomplished, the mechanism perfect, and how that very night they should hear Chopin's great Fantasia, Op. 49, played by its invisible hands.

The moment came. Wife and children gathered, breathless. Chaumart turned on the current, released the machinery.

"Ecoutez, mes enfants! Ecoutez, Henriette!"

They listened—with ears, with eyes, with every faculty strained to its utmost. And nothing happened!—positively nothing—beyond a few wheezing or creaking sounds. The haggard inventor in despair chased everybody out of the room, and sat looking at the thing, wondering whether to smash it, or kill himself. Then an idea struck him. In feverish haste he took the whole mechanism to pieces again, sitting up all night. And as the morning sun rose, he discovered in the very heart of the creature, to which by now he attributed an uncanny and independent life, the most elementary blunder—a vital connection missed between the power-supplying mechanism and the cylinders containing the records. He set it right; and nearly dead with fatigue and excitement, unlocked his door, and called his family back. Then what triumph! What falling on each other's necks—and what a dejeuner in the Palais Royal—children and all—paid for by the inventor's last napoleon!

All this Falloden told, and told well.

Connie could not restrain her pleasure as he came to the end of his tale. She clapped her hands in delight.

"And when—when will it come!"

"I think Christmas will see it here. I've only told you half—and the lesser half. It's you that have done most—far the most."

And he took out a little note-book, running through the list of visits he had paid to her friends and correspondents in Paris, among whom the rolls were being collected, under Chaumart's direction. The Orpheus already had a large musical library of its own—renderings by some of the finest artists of some of the noblest music. Beethoven, Bach, Liszt, Chopin, Brahms, Schumann—all Otto's favourite things, as far as Connie had been able to discover them, were in the catalogue.

Suddenly, her eyes filled with tears. She put down the note-book, and spoke in a low voice, as though her girlish joy in their common secret had suddenly dropped.

"It must give him some pleasure—it must!" she said, slowly, but as though she asked a question.

Falloden did not reply immediately. He rose from his seat. Nora, under a quick impulse, gathered up a letter she had been writing, and slipped out of the room.

"At least"—he looked away from her, straight out of the window—"I suppose it will please him—that we tried to do something."

"How is he—really?"

He shrugged his shoulders. Connie was standing, looking down, one hand on her chair. The afternoon had darkened; he could see only her white brow, and the wealth of her hair which the small head carried so lightly. Her childishness, her nearness, made his heart beat. Suddenly she lifted her eyes.

"Do you know"—it seemed to him her voice choked a little—"how much—you matter to him? Mrs. Mulholland and I couldn't keep him cheerful while you were away."

He laughed.

"Well, I have only just escaped a catastrophe to-day."

She looked alarmed.

"How?"

"I offended Bateson, and he gave notice!" Connie's "Oh!" was a sound of consternation. Bateson, the ex-scout had become a most efficient and comfortable valet, and Otto depended greatly upon him.

"It's all right," said Falloden quickly. "I grovelled. I ate all the humble-pie I could think of. It was of course impossible to let him go. Otto can't do without him. I seem somehow to have offended his dignity."

"They have so much!" said Connie, laughing, but rather unsteadily.

"One lives and learns." The tone of the words was serious—a little anxious. Then the speaker took up his hat. "But I'm not good at managing touchy people. Good night."

Her hand passed into his. The little fingers were cold; he could not help enclosing them in a warm, clinging grasp. The firelit room, the dark street outside, and the footsteps of the passers-by—they all melted from consciousness. They only saw and heard each other.

In another minute the outer door had closed behind them. Connie was left still in the same attitude, one hand on the chair, her head drooping, her heart in a dream.

Falloden ran through the streets, choosing the by-ways rather than the thoroughfares. The air was frosty, the December sky clear and starlit, above the blue or purple haze, pierced with lights, that filled the lower air; through which the college fronts, the distant spires and domes showed vaguely—as beautiful "suggestions"—"notes"—from which all detail had disappeared. He was soon on Folly Bridge, and hurrying up the hill he pushed straight on over the brow to the Berkshire side, leaving the cottage to his right. Fold after fold of dim wooded country fell away to the south of the ridge; bare branching trees were all about him; a patch of open common in front where bushes of winter-blossoming gorse defied the dusk. It was the English winter at its loveliest—still, patient, expectant—rich in beauties of its own that summer knows nothing of. But Falloden was blind to it. His pulses were full of riot. She had been so near to him—and yet so far away—so sweet, yet so defensive. His whole nature cried out fiercely for her. "I want her!—I want her! And I believe she wants me. She's not afraid of me now—she turns to me. What keeps us apart? Nothing that ought to weigh for a moment against our double happiness!"

He turned and walked stormily homewards. Then as he saw the roof and white walls of the cottage through the trees his mood wavered—and fell. There was a life there which he had injured—a life that now depended on him. He knew that, more intimately than Connie knew it, often as he had denied it to her. And he was more convinced than Otto himself—though never by word or manner had he ever admitted it for a moment—that the boy was doomed—not immediately, but after one of those pitiful struggles which have their lulls and pauses, but tend all the same inevitably to one end.

"And as long as he lives, I shall look after him," he thought, feeling that strange compulsion on him again, and yielding to it with mingled eagerness and despair.

For how could he saddle Connie's life with such a charge—or darken it with such a tragedy?

Impossible! But that was only one of many reasons why he should not take advantage of her through their common pity for Otto. In his own eyes he was a ruined man, and having resolutely refused to live upon his mother, his pride was little more inclined to live upon a wife, common, and generally applauded, though the practice might be. About five thousand pounds had been saved for himself out of the wreck; of which he would certainly spend a thousand, before all was done, on the Orpheus. The rest would just suffice to launch him as a barrister. His mother would provide for the younger children. Her best jewels indeed had been already sold and invested as a dowry for Nelly, who showed signs of engaging herself to a Scotch laird. But Falloden was joint guardian of Trix and Roger, and must keep a watchful eye on them, now that his mother's soft incompetence had been more plainly revealed than ever by her widow-hood. He chafed under the duties imposed, and yet fulfilled them—anxiously and well—to the amazement of his relations.

In addition he had his way to make in the world.

But Constance had only to be a little more seen and known in English society to make the most brilliant match that any scheming chaperon could desire, Falloden was aware through every pulse of her fast developing beauty. And although no great heiress, as heiresses now go, she would ultimately inherit a large amount of scattered money, in addition to what she already possessed. The Langmoors would certainly have her out of Oxford at the earliest possible moment—and small blame to them.

In all this he reasoned as a man of his class and antecedents was likely to reason—only with a bias against himself. To capture Connie, through Otto, before she had had any other chances of marriage, seemed to him a mean and dishonorable thing.

If he had only time—time to make his career!

But there would be no time given him. As soon as her Risborough relations got hold of her, Constance would marry directly.

He went back to the cottage in a sombre mood. Then, as Otto proved to be in the same condition, Falloden had to shake off his own depression as quickly as possible, and spend the evening in amusing and distracting the invalid.

* * * * *

But Fortune, which had no doubt enjoyed the nips she had inflicted on so tempting a victim, was as determined as before to take her own capricious way.

By this time it was the last week of term, and a sharp frost had set in over the Thames Valley. The floods were out north and south of the city, and a bright winter sun shone all day over the glistening ice-plains, and the throng of skaters.

At the beginning of the frost came the news of Otto's success in his musical examination; and at a Convocation, held shortly after it, he put on his gown as Bachelor of Music. The Convocation House was crowded to see him admitted to his degree; and the impression produced, as he made his way through the throng towards the Vice-Chancellor, by the frail, boyish figure, the startling red-gold hair, the black sling, and the haunting eyes, was long remembered in Oxford. Then Sorell claimed him, and hurried him up to London for doctors and consultations since the effort of the examination had left him much exhausted.

Meanwhile the frost held, and all Oxford went skating. Constance performed indifferently, and both Nora and Uncle Ewen were bent upon improving her. But there were plenty of cavaliers to attend her, whenever she appeared, either on Port Meadow or the Magdalen flood water; and her sound youth delighted physically in the exercise, in the play of the brisk air about her face, and the alternations of the bright winter day—from the pale blue of its morning skies, hung behind the snow-sprinkled towers and spires of Oxford, down to the red of sunset, and the rise of those twilight mists which drew the fair city gently back into the bosom of the moonlit dark.

But all the time the passionate sense in her watched and waited. The "mere living" was good—"yet was there better than it!"

And on the second afternoon, out of the distance of Magdalen meadow, a man came flying towards her as it seemed on the wings of the wind. Falloden drew up beside her, hovering on his skates, a splendid vision in the dusk, ease and power in every look and movement.

"Let me take you a run with the wind," he said, holding out his hand. "You shan't come to any harm."

Her eyes and her happy flush betrayed her. She put her hand in his, and away they flew, up the course of the Cherwell, through the flooded meadows. It seemed the very motion of gods; the world fell away. Then, coming back, they saw Magdalen Tower, all silver and ebony under the rising moon, and the noble arch of the bridge. The world was all transmuted. Connie's only hold on the kind, common earth seemed to lie in this strong hand to which she clung; and yet in that touch, that hold, lay the magic that was making life anew.

But soon the wind had risen gustily, and was beating in her face, catching at her breath.

"This is too cold for you!" said Falloden abruptly; and wheeling round, he had soon guided her into a more sheltered place, and there, easily gliding up and down, soul and sense fused in one delight, they passed one of those hours for which there is no measure in our dull human time. They would not think of the past; they shrank from imagining the future. There were shadows and ghosts behind them, and ahead of them; but the sheer present mastered them.

Before they parted, Falloden told his companion that the Orpheus would arrive from Paris the following day with a trio of French workmen to set it up. The electric installation was already in place. Everything would be ready by the evening. The instrument was to be placed behind a screen in the built-out room, once a studio, which Falloden had turned into a library. Otto rarely or never went there. The room looked north, and he, whose well-being hung upon sunshine, disliked it. But there was no other place for the Orpheus in the little cottage, and Falloden who had been getting new and thick curtains for the windows, improving the fire-place, and adding some armchairs, was eagerly hopeful that he could turn it into a comfortable music-room for Otto in the winter evenings, while he—if necessary—read his law elsewhere.

"Will you come for a rehearsal to-morrow?" he asked her. "Otto comes back the day after."

"No, no! I won't hear anything, not a note—till he comes! But is he strong enough?" she added wistfully. Strong enough, she meant, to bear agitation and surprise. But Falloden reported that Sorell knew everything that was intended, and approved. Otto had been very listless and depressed in town; a reaction no doubt from his spurt of work before the musical exam. Sorell thought the pleasure of the gift might rouse him, and gild the return to Oxford.



CHAPTER XIX

"Have some tea, old man, and warm up," said Falloden, on his knees before a fire already magnificent, which he was endeavouring to improve.

"What do you keep such a climate for?" growled Radowitz, as he hung shivering over the grate.

Sorell, who had come with the boy from the station, eyed him anxiously. The bright red patches on the boy's cheeks, and his dry, fevered look, his weakness and his depression, had revived the most sinister fears in the mind of the man who had originally lured him to Oxford, and felt himself horribly responsible for what had happened there. Yet the London doctors on the whole had been reassuring. The slight hemorrhage of the summer had had no successor; there were no further signs of active mischief; and for his general condition it was thought that the nervous shock of his accident, and the obstinate blood-poisoning which had followed it, might sufficiently account. The doctors, however, had pressed hard for sunshine and open-air—the Riviera, Sicily, or Algiers. But the boy had said vehemently that he couldn't and wouldn't go alone, and who could go with him? A question that for the moment stopped the way. Falloden's first bar examination was immediately ahead; Sorell was tied to St. Cyprian's; and every other companion so far proposed had been rejected with irritation.

Unluckily, on this day of his return, the Oxford skies had put on again their characteristic winter gloom. The wonderful fortnight of frost and sun was over; tempests of wind and deluges of rain were drowning it fast in flood and thaw. The wind shrieked round the little cottage, and though it was little more than three o'clock, darkness was coming fast.

Falloden could not keep still. Having made up the fire, he brought in a lamp himself; he drew the curtains, then undrew them again, apparently that he might examine a stretch of the Oxford road just visible through the growing dark; or he wandered in and out of the room, his hands in his pockets whistling. Otto watched him with a vague annoyance. He himself was horribly tired, and Falloden's restlessness got on his nerves.

At last Falloden said abruptly, pausing in front of him—

"You'll have some visitors directly!"

Otto looked up. The gaiety in Falloden's eyes informed him, and at the same time, wounded him.

"Lady Constance?" he said, affecting indifference.

"And Mrs. Mulholland. I believe I see their carriage."

And Falloden, peering into the stormy twilight, opened the garden door and passed out into the rain.

Otto remained motionless, bent over the fire. Sorell was talking with the ex-scout in the dining-room, impressing on him certain medical directions. Radowitz suddenly felt himself singularly forlorn, and deserted. Of course, Falloden and Constance would marry. He always knew it. He would have served to keep them together, and give them opportunities of meeting, when they might have easily drifted entirely apart. He laughed to himself as he thought of Connie's impassioned cry—"I shall never, never, marry him!" Such are the vows of women. She would marry him; and then what would he, Otto, matter to her or to Falloden any longer? He would have been no doubt a useful peg and pretext; but he was not going to intrude on their future bliss. He thought he would go back to Paris. One might as well die there as anywhere.

There were murmurs of talk and laughter in the hall. He sat still, hugging his melancholy. But when the door opened, he rose quickly, instinctively; and, at the sight of the girl coming in so timidly behind Mrs. Mulholland, her eyes searching the half-lit room, and the smile, in them and on her lips, held back till she knew whether her poor friend could bear with smiles, Otto's black hour began to lift. He let himself, at least, be welcomed and petted; and when fresh tea had been brought in, and the room was full of talk, he lay back in his chair, listening, the deep lines in his forehead gradually relaxing. He was better, he declared, a great deal better; in fact there was very little at all the matter with him. His symphony was to be given at the Royal College of Music early in the year. Everybody had been awfully decent about it. And he had begun a nocturne that amused him. As for the doctors, he repeated petulantly that they were all fools—it was only a question of degree. He intended to manage his life as he pleased in spite of them.

Connie sat on a high stool near him while he talked. She seemed to be listening, but he once or twice thought, resentfully, that it was a perfunctory listening. He wondered what else she was thinking about.

The tea was cleared away. And presently the three others had disappeared. Otto and Constance were left alone.

"I have been reading so much about Poland lately," said Constance suddenly. "Oh, Otto, some day you must show me Cracow!"

His face darkened.

"I shall never see Cracow again. I shall never see it with you."

"Why not? Let's dream!"

The smiling tenderness in her eyes angered him. She was treating him like a child; she was so sure he never could—or never would—make love to her!

"I shall never go to Cracow," he said, with energy, "not even with you. I was to have gone—a year from now. It was all arranged. We have relations there—and I have friends there—musicians. The chef d'orchestre—at the Opera House—he was one of my teachers in Paris. Before next year, I was to have written a concerto on some of our Polish songs—there are scores of them that Liszt and Chopin never discovered. Not only love-songs, mind you!—songs of revolution—battle-songs."

His eyes lit up and he began to hum an air—to Polish words—that even as given out in his small tenor voice stirred like a trumpet.

"Fine!" said Constance.

"Ah, but you can't judge—you don't know the words. The words are splendid. It's 'Ujejski's Hymn'—the Galician Hymn of '46." And he fell to intoning.

"Amid the smoke of our homes that burn, From the dust where our brothers lie bleeding— Our cry goes up to Thee, oh God!

"There!—that's something like it."

And he ran on with a breathless translation of the famous dirge for the Galician rebels of '46, in which a devastated land wails like Rachel for her children.

Suddenly a sound rose—a sound reedy and clear, like a beautiful voice in the distance.

"Constance!"

The lad sprang to his feet. Constance laid hold on him.

"Listen, dear Otto—listen a moment!"

She held him fast, and breathing deep, he listened. The very melody he had just been humming rang out, from the same distant point; now pealing through the little house in a rich plenitude of sound, now delicate and plaintive as the chant of nuns in a quiet church, and finally crashing to a defiant and glorious close.

"What is it?" he Said, very pale, looking at her almost threateningly. "What have you been doing!"

"It's our gift—our surprise—dear Otto!"

"Where is it? Let me go."

"No!—sit down, and listen! Let me listen with you. I've not heard it before! Mr. Falloden and I have been preparing it for months. Isn't it wonderful? Oh, dear Otto!—if you only like it!" He sat down trembling, and hand in hand they listened.

The "Fantasia" ran on, dealing with song after song, now simply, now with rich embroidery and caprice.

"Who is it playing?" said Otto, in a whisper.

"It was Paderewski!" said Constance between laughing and crying. "Oh, Otto, everybody's been at work for it!—everybody was so marvellously keen!"

"In Paris?"

"Yes—all your old friends—your teachers—and many others."

She ran through the names. Otto choked. He knew them all, and some of them were among the most illustrious in French music.

But while Connie was speaking, the stream of sound in the distance sank into gentleness, and in the silence a small voice arose, naively, pastorally sweet, like the Shepherd's Song in "Tristan." Otto buried his face in his hands. It was the "Heynal," the watchman's horn-song from the towers of Panna Marya. Once given, a magician caught it, played with it, pursued it, juggled with it, through a series of variations till, finally, a grave and beautiful modulation led back to the noble dirge of the beginning.

"I know who wrote that!—who must have written it!" said Otto, looking up. He named a French name. "I worked with him at the Conservatoire for a year."