It was, indeed, a dramatic moment when the gloom of Macias's cell was first broken by the glimmer of the hand-lamp, which revealed to the vast expectant audience the form of Elvira standing on the threshold, searching the darkness with her shaded eyes; and in the great love scene which followed the first sharp impression was steadily deepened word by word and gesture after gesture by the genius of the actress. Elvira finds Macias in a mood of calm and even joyful waiting for the morrow. His honour is satisfied; death and battle are before him, and the proud Castilian is almost at peace. The vision of Elvira's pale beauty and his quick intuition of the dangers she has run in forcing her way to him produce a sudden revulsion of feeling towards her, a flood of passionate reconciliation; he is at her feet once more; he feels that she is true, that she is his. She, in a frenzy of fear, cannot succeed for all her efforts in dimming his ecstasy of joy or in awakening him to the necessity of flight, and at last he even resents her terror for him, her entreaties that he will forget her and escape.

'Great heaven!' he says, turning from her in despair, 'it was not love, it was only pity that brought her here.' Then, broken down by the awful pressure of the situation, her love resists his no longer, but rather she sees in the full expression of her own heart the only chance of reconciling him to life, and of persuading him to take thought for his own safety.

'Elvira. See, Macias! these tears—each one is yours, is wept for you! Oh, if to soften that proud will of yours this hapless woman must needs open all her weak heart to you, if she must needs tell you that she lives only in your life and dies in your death, her lip will brace itself even to that pitiful confession! Ah me! these poor cheeks have been so blanched with weeping, they have no blushes left.'

To her this supreme avowal is the only means of making him believe her report of his danger, and turn towards flight; but in him it produces a joy which banishes all thought of personal risk, and makes separation from her worse than death. When she bids him fly, he replies by one word, 'Come!' and not till she has promised to guide him to the city gates and to follow him later on his journey will he move a step towards freedom. And then, when her dear hand is about to open to him the door of his prison, it is too late. Fernan and his assassins are at hand, the stairs are surrounded, and escape is cut off. Again, in these last moments, when the locked door still holds between them and the death awaiting them, her mood is one of agonised terror, not for herself, but for him; while he, exalted far above all fear, supports and calms her.

'Macias. Think no more of the world which has destroyed us! We owe it nothing—nothing! Come, the bonds which linked us to it are for ever broken! Death is at the door; we are already dead! Come, and make death beautiful: tell me you love, love, love me to the end!'

Then, putting her from him, he goes out to meet his enemies. There is a clamour outside, and he returns wounded to death, pursued by Fernan and his men. He falls, and Elvira defends him from her husband with a look and gesture so terrible that he and the murderers fall back before her as though she were some ghastly avenging spirit. Then, bending over him, she snatches the dagger from the grasp of the dying man, saying to him, with a voice into which Isabel Bretherton threw a wealth of pitiful tenderness, 'There is but one way left, beloved. Your wife that should have been, that is, saves herself and you—so!'

And in the dead silence that followed, her last murmur rose upon the air as the armed men, carrying torches, crowded round her. 'See, Macias, the torches—how they shine! Bring more—bring more—and light—our marriage festival!'

* * * * *

'Eustace! Eustace! there, now they have let her go! Poor child, poor child! how is she to stand this night after night? Eustace, do you hear? Let us go into her now—quick, before she is quite surrounded. I don't want to stay, but I must just see her, and so must Paul. Ah, Mr. Wallace is gone already, but he described to me how to find her. This way!'

And Madame de Chateauvieux, brushing the tears from her eyes with one hand, took Kendal's arm with the other, and hurried him along the narrow passages leading to the door on to the stage, M. de Chateauvieux following them, his keen French face glistening with a quiet but intense satisfaction.

As for Kendal, every sense in him was covetously striving to hold and fix the experiences of the last half-hour. The white muffled figure standing in the turret door, the faint lamp light streaming on the bent head and upraised arm—those tones of self-forgetful passion, drawn straight, as it were, from the pure heart of love—the splendid energy of that last defiance of fate and circumstance—the low vibrations of her dying words—the power of the actress and the personality of the woman,—all these different impressions were holding wild war within him as he hastened on, with Marie clinging to his arm. And beyond the little stage-door the air seemed to be even more heavily charged with excitement than that of the theatre. For, as Kendal emerged with his sister, his attention was perforce attracted by the little crowd of persons already assembled round the figure of Isabel Bretherton, and, as his eye travelled over them, he realised with a fresh start the full compass of the change which had taken place. To all the more eminent persons in that group Miss Bretherton had been six months before an ignorant and provincial beauty, good enough to create a social craze, and nothing more. Their presence round her at this moment, their homage, the emotion visible everywhere, proved that all was different, that she had passed the barrier which once existed between her and the world which knows and thinks, and had been drawn within that circle of individualities which, however undefined, is still the vital circle of any time or society, for it is the circle which represents, more or less brilliantly and efficiently, the intellectual life of a generation.

Only one thing was unchanged—the sweetness and spontaneity of that rich womanly nature. She gave a little cry as she saw Madame de Chateauvieux enter. She came running forward, and threw her arms round the elder woman and kissed her; it was almost the greeting of a daughter to a mother. And then, still holding Madame de Chateauvieux with one hand, she held out the other to Paul, asking him how much fault he had to find, and when she was to take her scolding; and every gesture had a glow of youth and joy in it, of which the contagion was irresistible. She had thrown off the white head-dress she had worn during the last act, and her delicately-tinted head and neck rose from the splendid wedding-gown of gold-embroidered satin—vision of flowerlike and aerial beauty.

Fast as the talk flowed about her, Kendal noticed that every one seemed to be, first of all, conscious of her neighbourhood, of her dress rustling past, of her voice in all its different shades of gaiety or quick emotion.

'Oh, Mr. Kendal,' she said, turning to him again after their first greeting—was it the magnetism of his gaze which had recalled hers?—'if you only knew what your sister has been to me! How much I owe to her and to you! It was kind of you to come to-night. I should have been so disappointed if you hadn't!'

Then she came closer to him, and said archly, almost in his ear,

'Have you forgiven me?'

'Forgiven you? For what?'

'For laying hands on Elvira, after all. You must have thought me a rash and headstrong person when you heard of it. Oh, I worked so hard at her, and all with the dread of you in my mind!'

This perfect friendly openness, this bright camaraderie of hers, were so hard to meet!

'You have played Elvira,' he said, 'as I never thought it would be played by anybody; and I was blind from first to last. I hoped you had forgotten that piece of pedantry on my part.'

'One does not forget the turning-points of one's life,' she answered with a sudden gravity.

Kendal had been keeping an iron grip upon himself during the past hours, but, as she said this, standing close beside him, it seemed to him impossible that his self-restraint should hold much longer. Those wonderful eyes of hers were full upon him; there was emotion in them,—evidently the Nuneham scene was in her mind, as it was in his,—and a great friendliness, even gratitude, seemed to look out through them. But it was as though his doom were written in the very candour and openness of her gaze, and he rushed desperately into speech again, hardly knowing what he was saying.

'It gives me half pain, half pleasure, that you should speak of it so. I have never ceased to hate myself for that day. But you have travelled far indeed since the White Lady—I never knew any one do so much in so short a time!'

She smiled—did her lip quiver? Evidently his praise was very pleasant to her, and there must have been something strange and stirring to her feeling in the intensity and intimacy of his tone. Her bright look caught his again, and he believed for one wild moment that the eyelids sank and fluttered. He lost all consciousness of the crowd; his whole soul seemed concentrated on that one instant. Surely she must feel it, or love is indeed impotent!

But no,—it was all a delusion! she moved away from him, and the estranging present rushed in again between them.

'It has been M. de Chateauvieux's doing, almost all of it,' she said eagerly, with a change of voice, 'and your sister's. Will you come and see me some time and talk about some of the Paris people? Oh, I am wanted! But first you must be introduced to Macias. Wasn't he good? It was such an excellent choice of Mr. Wallace's. There he is,-and there is his wife, that pretty little dark woman.'

Kendal followed her mechanically, and presently found himself talking nothings to Mr. Harting, who, gorgeous in his Spanish dress, was receiving the congratulations which poured in upon him with a pleasant mixture of good manners and natural elation. A little farther on he stumbled upon Forbes and the Stuarts, Mrs. Stuart as sparkling and fresh as ever, a suggestive contrast in her American crispness and prettiness to the high-bred distinction of Madame de Chateauvieux, who was standing near her.

'Well, my dear fellow,' said Forbes, catching hold of him, 'how is that critical demon of yours? Is he scotched yet?'

'He is almost at his last gasp,' said Kendal, with a ghostly smile, and a reckless impulse to talk which seemed to him his salvation. 'He was never as vicious a creature as you thought him, and Miss Bretherton has had no difficulty in slaying him. But that hall was a masterpiece, Forbes! How have your pictures got on with all this?'

'I haven't touched a brush since I came back from Switzerland, except to make sketches for this thing. Oh, it's been a terrible business! Mr. Worrall's hair has turned gray over the expenses of it; however, she and I would have our way, and it's all right—the play will run for twelve months, if she chooses, easily.'

Near by were the Worralls, looking a little sulky, as Kendal fancied, in the midst of this great inrush of the London world, which was sweeping their niece from them into a position of superiority and independence they were not at all prepared to see her take up; Nothing, indeed, could be prettier than her manner to them whenever she came across them, but it was evident that she was no longer an automaton to be moved at their will and pleasure, but a woman and an artist, mistress of herself and of her fate. Kendal fell into conversation on the subject with Mrs. Stuart, who was as communicative and amusing as usual, and who chattered away to him till he suddenly saw Miss Bretherton signalling to him with her arm in that of his sister.

'Do you know, Mr. Kendal,' she said as he went up to her, 'you must really take Madame de Chateauvieux away out of this noise and crowd? It is all very well for her to preach to me. Take her to your rooms and get her some food. How I wish I could entertain you here; but with this crowd it is impossible.'

'Isabel, my dear Isabel,' cried Madame de Chateauvieux, holding her, 'can't you slip away too, and leave Mr. Wallace to do the honours? There will be nothing left of you to-morrow.'

'Yes, directly, directly! only I feel as if sleep were a thing that did not exist for me. But you must certainly go. Take her, Mr. Kendal; doesn't she look a wreck? I will tell M. de Chateauvieux and send him after you.'

She took Marie's shawl from Kendal's arm and put it tenderly round her; then she smiled down into her eyes, said a low 'good-night, best and kindest of friends!' and the brother and sister hurried away, Kendal dropping the hand which had been cordially stretched out to himself.

'Do you mind, Eustace?' said Madame de Chateauvieux, as they walked across the stage. 'I ought to go, and the party ought to break up. But it is a shame to carry you off from so many friends.'

'Mind? Why, I have ordered supper for you in my rooms, and it is just midnight. I hope these people will have the sense to go soon. Now then, for a cab.'

They alighted at the gate of the Temple, and, as they walked across the quadrangle under a sky still heavy with storm-clouds, Madame de Chateauvieux said to her brother with a sigh: 'Well, it has been a great event. I never remember anything more exciting, or more successful. But there is one thing, I think, that would make me happier than a hundred Elviras, and that is to see Isabel Bretherton the wife of a man she loved!' Then a smile broke over her face as she looked at her brother.

'Do you know, Eustace, I quite made up my mind from those first letters of yours in May, in spite of your denials, that you were very deeply taken with her? I remember quite seriously discussing the pros and cons of it with myself.'

The words were said so lightly, they betrayed so clearly the speaker's conviction that she had made a foolish mistake, that they stung Kendal to the quick. How could Marie have known? Had not his letters for the last three months been misleading enough to deceive the sharpest eyes? And yet he felt unreasonably that she ought to have known—there was a blind clamour in him against the bluntness of her sisterly perception.

His silence was so prolonged that Madame de Chateauvieux was startled by it. She slipped her hand into his arm. 'Eustace!' Still no answer. 'Have I said anything to annoy you—Eustace? Won't you let your old sister have her dreams?'

But still it seemed impossible for him to speak. He could only lay his hand over hers with a brotherly clasp. By this time they were at the foot of the stairs, and he led the way up, Madame de Chateauvieux following in a tumult of anxious conjecture. When they reached his rooms he put her carefully into a chair by the fire, made her take some sandwiches, and set the kettle to boil in his handy bachelor way, that he might make her some tea, and all the time he talked about various nothings, till at last Marie, unable to put up with it any longer, caught his hand as he was bending over the fire.

'Eustace,' she exclaimed, 'be kind to me, and don't perplex me like this.—Oh, my poor old boy, are you in love with Isabel Bretherton?'

'He drew himself to his full height on the rug, and gazed steadily into the fire, the lines of his mobile face settling into repose.

'Yes,' he said, as though to himself; 'I love her. I believe I have loved her from the first moment.'

Madame de Chateauvieux was tremblingly silent, her thoughts travelling back over the past with lightning rapidity. Could she remember one word, one look of Isabel Bretherton's, of which her memory might serve to throw the smallest ray of light on this darkness in which Eustace seemed to be standing? No, not one. Gratitude, friendship, esteem—all these had been there abundantly, but nothing else, not one of those many signs by which one woman betrays her love to another! She rose and put her arm round her brother's neck. They had been so much to one another for nearly forty years; he had never wanted anything as a child or youth that she had not tried to get for him. How strange, how intolerable, that this toy, this boon, was beyond her getting!

Her mute sympathy and her deep distress touched him, while, at the same time, they seemed to quench the last spark of hope in him. Had he counted upon hearing something from her whenever he should break silence which would lighten the veil over the future? It must have been so, otherwise why this sense of fresh disaster?

'Dear Marie,' he said to her, kissing her brow as she stood beside him, 'you must be as good to me as you can. I shall probably be a good deal out of London for the present, and my books are a wonderful help. After all, life is not all summed up in one desire, however strong. Other things are real to me—I am thankful to say. I shall live it down.'

'But why despair so soon?' she cried, rebelling against this heavy acquiescence of his and her own sense of hopelessness. 'You are a man any woman might love. Why should she not pass from the mere friendly intellectual relation to another? Don't go away from London. Stay and see as much of her as you can.'

Kendal shook his head. 'I used to dream,' he said huskily, 'of a time when failure should have come, when she would want some one to step in and shield her. Sometimes I thought of her protected in my arms against the world. But now!'

She felt the truth of his unspoken argument—of all that his tone implied. In the minds of both the same image gathered shape and distinctness. Isabel Bretherton in the halo of her great success, in all the intensity of her new life, seemed to her and to him to stand afar off, divided by an impassable gulf from this simple, human craving, which was crying to her, unheard and hopeless, across the darkness.



CHAPTER VIII

A month after the first performance of Elvira Kendal returned to town on a frosty December afternoon from the Surrey lodgings on which he had now established a permanent hold. He mounted to his room, found his letters lying ready for him, and on the top of them a telegram, which, as his man-servant informed him, had arrived about an hour before. He took it up carelessly, opened it, and bent over it with a start of anxiety. It was from his brother-in-law. 'Marie is very ill. Doctors much alarmed. Can you come to-night?' He put it down in stupefaction. Marie ill! the doctors alarmed! Good heavens! could he catch that evening train? He looked at his watch, decided that there was time, and plunged, with his servant's help, into all the necessary preparations. An hour and a half later he was speeding along through the clear cold moonlight to Dover, realising for the first time, as he leant back alone in his compartment, the full meaning of the news which had hurried him off. All his tender affection for his sister, and all his stifling sense of something unlucky and untoward in his own life, which had been so strong in him during the past two months, combined to rouse in him the blackest fears, the most hopeless despondency. Marie dead,—what would the world hold for him! Books, thought, ideas—were they enough? Could a man live by them if all else were gone? For the first time Kendal felt a doubt which seemed to shake his nature to its depths.

During the journey his thoughts dwelt in a dull sore way upon the past. He saw Marie in her childhood, in her youth, in her rich maturity. He remembered her in the schoolroom spending all her spare time over contrivances of one kind or another for his amusement. He had a vision of her going out with their mother on the night of her first ball, and pitying him for being left behind. He saw her tender face bending over the death-bed of their father, and through a hundred incidents and memories—all beautiful, all intertwined with that lovely self-forgetfulness which was characteristic of her, his mind travelled down to an evening scarcely a month before, when her affection had once more stood, a frail warm barrier, between him and the full bitterness of a great renunciation. Oh Marie, Marie!

It was still dark when he reached Paris, and the gray winter light was only just dawning when he stopped at the door of his brother-in-law's house in one of the new streets near the Champs Elysees. M. de Chateauvieux was standing on the stairs, his smoothly-shaven, clear-cut face drawn and haggard, and a stoop in his broad shoulders which Kendal had never noticed before. Kendal sprang up the steps and wrung his hand. M. de Chateauvieux shook his head almost with a groan, in answer to the brother's inquiry of eye and lip, and led the way upstairs into the forsaken salon, which looked as empty and comfortless as though its mistress had been gone from it years instead of days. Arrived there, the two men standing opposite to each other in the streak of dull light made by the hasty withdrawal of a curtain, Paul said, speaking in a whisper, with dry lips:

'There is no hope—the pain is gone; you would think she was better, but the doctors say she will just lie there as she is lying now till—till—the end.'

Kendal staggered over to a chair and tried to realise what he had heard, but it was impossible, although his journey had seemed to him one long preparation for the worst. 'What is it—how did it happen?' he asked.

'Internal chill. She was only taken ill the day before yesterday, and the pain was frightful till yesterday afternoon; then it subsided, and I thought she was better—she herself was so cheerful and so thankful for the relief—but when the two doctors came in again, it was to tell me that the disappearance of the pain meant only the worst—meant that nothing more can be done—she may go at any moment.'

There was a silence. M. de Chateauvieux walked up and down with the noiseless step which even a few hours of sickness develop in the watcher, till he came and stood before his brother-in-law, saying in the same painful whisper, 'You must have some food, then I will tell her you are here.'

'No, no; I want no food,—any time will do for that. Does she expect me?'

'Yes; you won't wait? Then come.' He led the way across a little anteroom, lifted a curtain, and knocked. The nurse came, there was a little parley, and Paul went in, while Eustace waited outside, conscious of the most strangely trivial things, of the passers-by in the street, of a wrangle between two gamins on the pavement opposite, of the misplacement of certain volumes in the bookcase beside him, till the door opened again, and M. de Chateauvieux drew him in.

He stepped over the threshold, his whole being wrought up to he knew not what solemn pageant of death and parting, and the reality within startled him. The room was flooded with morning light, a frosty December sun was struggling through the fog, the curtains had just been drawn back, and the wintry radiance rested on the polished brass of the bed, on the bright surfaces of wood and glass with which the room was full, on the little tray of tea-things which the nurse held, and on his sister's face of greeting as she lay back smiling among her pillows. There was such a cheerful home peace and brightness in the whole scene—in the crackling wood fire, in the sparkle of the tea-things and the fragrance of the tea, and in the fresh white surroundings of the invalid; it seemed to him incredible that under all this familiar household detail there should be lying in wait that last awful experience of death.

Marie kissed him with grateful affectionate words spoken almost in her usual voice, and then, as he sat beside her holding her hands, she noticed that he looked pale and haggard.

'Has he had some breakfast, Paul? Oh, poor Eustace, after that long journey! Nurse, let him have my cup, there is some tea left; let me see you drink it, dear; it's so pleasant just to look after you once more.'

He drank it mechanically, she watching him with her loving eyes, while she took one hand from him and slipped it into that of her husband as he sat beside her on the bed. Her touch seemed to have meaning in it, for Paul rose presently and went to the far end of the large room; the nurse carried away the tea-things, and the brother and sister were practically alone.

'Dear Eustace,' she began, after a few pathetic moments of silence, in which look and gesture took the place of speech, 'I have so longed to see you. It seemed to me in that awful pain that I must die before I could gather my thoughts together once more, before I could get free enough from my own wretched self to say to my two dear ones all I wished to say. But now it is all gone, and I am so thankful for this moment of peace. I made Dr. de Chavannes tell me the whole truth. Paul and I have always promised one another that there should never be any concealment between us when either of us came to die, and I think I shall have a few hours more with you.'

She was silent a little; the voice had all its usual intonations, but it was low and weak, and it was necessary for her from time to time to gather such strength as might enable her to maintain the calm of her manner. Eustace, in bewildered misery, had hidden his face upon her hands, which were clasped in his, and every now and then she felt the pressure of his lips upon her fingers.

'There are many things I want to say to you,' she went on. 'I will try to remember them in order. Will you stay with Paul a few days—after—? will you always remember to be good to him? I know you will. My poor Paul, oh if I had but given you a child!'

The passion of her low cry thrilled Eustace's heart. He looked up and saw on her face the expression of the hidden yearning of a lifetime. It struck him as something awful and sacred; he could not answer it except by look and touch, and presently she went on after another pause:

'His sister will come to him very likely—his widowed sister. She has a girl he is fond of. After a while he will take pleasure in her.—Then I have thought so much of you and of the future. So often last night I thought I saw you and her, and what you ought to do seemed to grow plain to me. Dear Eustace, don't let anything I say now ever be a burden to you—don't let it fetter you ever—but it is so strong in me you must let me say it all. She is not in love with you, Eustace—at least, I think not. She has never thought of you in that way; but there is everything there which ought to lead to love. You interest her deeply; the thought of you stands to her as the symbol of all she wants to reach; and then she knows what you have been to all those who trusted you. She knows that you are good and true. I want you to try and carry it farther for her sake and yours.' He looked up and would have spoken, but she put her soft hand over his mouth. 'Wait one moment. Those about her are not people to make her happy—at any time if things went wrong—if she broke down—she would be at their mercy. Then her position—you know what difficulties it has—it makes my heart ache sometimes to think of it. She won my love so. I felt like a mother to her. I long to have her here now, but I would not let Paul send; and if I could think of her safe with you—in those true hands of yours. Oh, you will try, darling?' He answered her huskily and brokenly, laying his face to hers on the pillow.

'I would do anything you asked. But she is so likely to love and marry. Probably there is some one—already. How could it not be with her beauty and her fame? Anybody would be proud to marry her, and she has such a quick eager nature.

'There is no one!' said Marie, with deep conviction in the whispered words. 'Her life has been too exciting—too full of one interest. She stayed with me; I got to know her to the bottom. She would not have hidden it. Only say you will make one trial and I should be content.'

And then her innate respect for another's individuality, her shrinking from what might prove to be the tyranny of a dying wish interposed, and she checked herself. 'No, don't promise; I have no right—no one has any right. I can only tell you my feeling—my deep sense that there is hope—that there is nothing against you. Men—good men—are so often over-timid when courage would be best. Be bold, Eustace; respect your own love; do not be too proud to show it—to offer it!' Her voice died away into silence, only Eustace still felt the caressing touch of the thin fingers clasped round his. It seemed to him as if the life still left in her were one pure flame of love, undimmed by any thought of self, undisturbed by any breath of pain. Oh, this victory of the spirit over the flesh, of soul over body, which humanity achieves and renews from day to day and from age to age, in all those nobler and finer personalities upon whom the moral life of the world depends! How it burns its testimony into the heart of the spectator! How it makes him thrill with the apprehension which lies at the root of all religion—the apprehension of an ideal order—the divine suspicion

'That we are greater than we know!'

How it impresses itself upon us as the only miracle which will bear our leaning upon, and stand the strain of human questioning! It was borne in upon Eustace, as he sat bowed beside his dying sister, that through this fragile body and this failing breath the Eternal Mind was speaking, and that in Marie's love the Eternal Love was taking voice. He said so to her brokenly, and her sweet eyes smiled back upon him a divine answer of peace and faith.

Then she called faintly, 'Paul!' The distant figure came back; and she laid her head upon her husband's breast, while Eustace was gently drawn away by the nurse. Presently, he found himself mechanically taking food and mechanically listening to the low-voiced talk of the kindly white-capped woman who was attending to him. Every fact, every impression, was misery,—these details so unexpected, so irrevocable, so charged with terrible meaning, which the nurse was pouring out upon him,—that presence in the neighbouring room of which his every nerve was conscious,—and in front of him, like a frowning barrier shutting off the view of the future, the advancing horror of death! Yesterday, at the same time, he had been walking along the sandy Surrey roads, delighting in the last autumn harmonies of colour, and conscious of the dawn of a period of rest after a period of conflict, of the growth within him of a temper of quiet and rational resignation to the conditions of life and of his own individual lot, over the development of which the mere fact of his sister's existence had exercised a strong and steadying influence. Life, he had persuaded himself, was for him more than tolerable, even without love and marriage. The world of thought was warm and hospitable to him; he moved at ease within its friendly familiar limits; and in the world of personal relations, one heart was safely his, the sympathy and trust and tenderness of one human soul would never fail him at his need. And now this last tender bond was to be broken with a rough, incredible suddenness. The woman he loved with passion would never be his; for not even now, fresh from contact with his sister's dying hope, could he raise himself to any flattering vision of the future; and the woman he loved, with that intimate tenacity of affection which is the poetry of kinship, was to be taken from him by this cruel wastefulness of premature death. Could any man be more alone than he would be? And then suddenly a consciousness fell upon him which made him ashamed. In the neighbouring room his ear was caught now and then by an almost imperceptible, murmur of voices. What was his loss, his agony, compared to theirs?

When he softly returned into the room he found Marie lying as though asleep upon, her husband's arm. It seemed to him that since he had left her there had been a change. The face was more drawn, the look of exhaustion more defined. Paul sat beside her, his eyes riveted upon her. He scarcely seemed to notice his brother-in-law's entrance; it was as though he were rapidly losing consciousness of every fact but one; and never had Kendal seen any countenance so grief-stricken, so pinched with longing. But Marie heard the familiar step. She made a faint movement with her hand towards him, and he resumed his old place, his head bowed upon the bed. And so they sat through the morning, hardly moving, interchanging at long intervals a few words—those sad sacred words which well from the heart in the supreme moments of existence—words which, in the case of such natures as Marie de Chateauvieux, represent the intimate truths and fundamental ideas of the life that has gone before. There was nothing to hide, nothing to regret. A few kindly messages, a few womanly commissions, and every now and then a few words to her husband, as simple as the rest, but pregnant with the deepest thoughts and touching the vastest problems of humanity,—this was all. Marie was dying as she had lived—bravely, tenderly, simply.

Presently they roused her to take some nourishment, which she swallowed with difficulty. It gave her a momentary strength. Kendal heard himself called, and looked up. She had opened the hand lying on the bed, and he saw in it a small miniature case, which she moved towards him.

'Take it,' she said—oh, how faintly!—'to her. It is the only memento I can think of. She has been ill, Eustace: did I tell you? I forget. I should have gone—but for this. It is too much for her,—that life. It will break her down. You can save her and cherish her—you will. It seems as if I saw you—together!'

Then her eyes fell and she seemed to sleep—gently wandering now and then, and mentioning in her dying dream names and places which made the reality before them more and more terrible to the two hushed listeners, so different were the associations they called up. Was this white nerveless form, from which mind and breath were gently ebbing away, all that fate had grudgingly left to them, for a few more agonised moments, of the brilliant, high-bred woman who had been but yesterday the centre of an almost European network of friendships and interests! Love, loss, death,—oh, how unalterable is this essential content of life, embroider it and adorn it as we may!

Kendal had been startled by her words about Isabel Bretherton. He had not heard of any illness; it could hardly be serious, for he vaguely remembered that in the newspapers he had tried to read on the journey his eye had caught the familiar advertisement of the Calliope. It must have happened while he was in Surrey. He vaguely speculated about it now and then as he sat watching through the afternoon. But nothing seemed to matter very much to him—nothing but Marie and the slow on-coming of death.

At last when the wintry light was fading, when the lamps were being lit outside, and the bustle of the street seemed to penetrate in little intermittent waves of sound into the deep quiet of the room, Marie Raised herself and, with a fluttering sigh, withdrew her hand softly from her brother, and laid her arm round her husband's neck. He stooped to her—kissed the sweet lips and the face on which the lines of middle age had hardly settled—caught a wild alarm from her utter silence, called the nurse and Kendal, and all was over.



CHAPTER IX

The morning of Marie's funeral was sunny but bitterly cold; it was one of those days when autumn finally passes into winter, and the last memory of the summer warmth vanishes from the air. It had been the saddest, dreariest laying to rest. The widowed sister, of whom Marie had spoken in her last hours, had been unable to come, and the two men had gone through it all alone, helped only by the tearful, impulsive sympathy and the practical energy of the maid who had been with Marie ever since her marriage, and was as yet hardly capable of realising her mistress's death.

It was she who, while they were away, had done her best to throw a little air of comfort over the forsaken salon. She had kindled the fire, watered the plants, and thrown open the windows to the sunshine, finding in her toil and movement some little relief from her own heart-ache and oppression. When Paul came back, and with numb, trembling fingers had stripped himself of his scarf and his great-coat, he stepped over the threshold into the salon, and it seemed to him as though the sunlight and the open windows and the crackling blaze of the fire dealt him a sudden blow. He walked up to the windows, and, shuddering, drew them down and closed the blinds, Felicie watching him anxiously from the landing through the half-open door. Then he had thrown himself into a chair; and Kendal, coming softly upstairs after him, had gently closed the door from the outside, said a kind word to Felicie, and himself slipped noiselessly down again and out into the Champs Elysees. There he had paced up and down for an hour or more under the trees, from which a few frosty leaves were still hanging in the December air.

He himself had been so stunned and bewildered by the loss which had fallen upon him, that, when he found himself alone and out of doors again, he was for a while scarcely able to think consecutively about it. He walked along conscious for some time of nothing but a sort of dumb physical congeniality in the sunshine, in the clear blue and white of the sky, in the cheerful distinctness and sharpness of every outline. And then, little by little, the cheated grief reasserted itself, the numbed senses woke into painful life, and he fell into broken musings on the past, or into a bitter wonder over the precarious tenure by which men hold those good things whereon, so long as they are still their own, they are so quick to rear an edifice of optimist philosophy. A week before, his sister's affection had been to him the one sufficient screen between his own consciousness and the desolate threatening immensities of thought and of existence. The screen had fallen, and the darkness seemed to be rushing in upon him. And still, life had to be lived, work to be got through, duties to be faced. How is it done? he kept vaguely wondering. How is it that men live on to old age and see bond after bond broken, and possession after possession swept away, and still find the years tolerable and the sun pleasant, still cherish in themselves that inexhaustible faith in an ideal something which supplies from century to century the invincible motive power of the race?

Presently—by virtue of long critical and philosophical habit—his mind brought itself to bear more and more steadily upon his own position; he stepped back, as it were, from himself and became his own spectator. The introspective temper was not common with him; his mind was naturally turned outward—towards other people, towards books, towards intellectual interests. But self-study had had its charm for him of late, and, amongst other things, it was now plain to him that up to the moment of his first meeting with Isabel Bretherton his life had been mostly that of an onlooker—a bystander. Society, old and new, men and women of the past and of the present, the speculative achievements of other times and of his own,—these had constituted a sort of vast drama before his eyes, which he had watched and studied with an ever-living curiosity. But his interest in his particular role had been comparatively weak, and in analysing other individualities he had run some risk of losing his own.

Then love came by, and the half-dormant personality within him had been seized upon and roused, little by little, into a glowing, although a repressed and hidden energy. He had learnt in his own person what it means to crave, to thirst, to want. And now, grief had followed and had pinned him more closely than ever to his special little part in the human spectacle. The old loftiness, the old placidity of mood, were gone. He had loved, and lost, and despaired. Beside those great experiences how trivial and evanescent seemed all the interests of the life that went before them! He looked back over his intercourse with Isabel Bretherton, and the points upon which it had turned seemed so remote from him, so insignificant, that for the moment he could hardly realise them. The artistic and aesthetic questions which had seemed to him so vital six months before had faded almost out of view in the fierce neighbourhood of sorrow and passion. His first relation to her had been that of one who knows to one who is ignorant; but that puny link had dropped, and he was going to meet her now, fresh from the presence of death, loving her as a man loves a woman, and claiming from her nothing but pity for his grief, balm for his wound,—the answer of human tenderness to human need.

How strange and sad that she should be still in ignorance of his loss and hers! In the early morning after Marie's death, when he woke up from a few heavy hours of sleep, his mind had been full of her. How was the news to be broken to her? He himself did not feel that he could leave his brother-in-law. There was a strong regard and sympathy between them; and his presence in the house of mourning would undoubtedly be useful to Paul for a while; besides, there were Marie's words—'Will you stay with him a few days—after—?'—which were binding on him. He must write, then; but it was only to be hoped that no newspaper would bring her the news before his letter could reach.

However, as the day wore on, Paul came noiselessly out of the quiet room where the white shrouded form seemed still to spread a tender presence round it, and said to Eustace with dry, piteous lips:

'I have remembered Miss Bretherton; you must go to her to-morrow, after—the funeral'

'I can't bear the thought of leaving you,' said Kendal, laying a brotherly hand on his shoulder, 'Let me write to-day.'

Paul shook his head. 'She has been ill. Any way it will be a great shock; but if you go it will be better.'

Kendal resisted a little more, but it seemed as if Marie's motherly carefulness over the bright creature who had charmed her had passed into Paul. He was saying what Marie would have said, taking thought as she would have taken it for one she loved, and it was settled as he wished.

When his long pacing in the Champs Elysees was over Kendal went back to find Paul busy with his wife's letters and trinkets, turning them over With a look of shivering forlornness, as though the thought of the uncompanioned lifetime to come were already closing upon him like some deadly chill in the air. Beside him lay two miniature cases open; one of them was the case which Eustace had received from his sister's hand on the afternoon before her death, and both of them contained identical portraits of Marie in her first brilliant womanhood.

'Do you remember them?' Paul said in his husky Voice, pointing them out to him. 'They were done when you were at college and she was twenty-three. Your mother had two taken—one for herself and one for your old aunt Marion. Your mother left me hers when she died, and your aunt's copy of it came back to us last year. Tell Miss Bretherton its history. She will prize it. It is the best picture still.'

Kendal made a sign of assent and took the case. Paul rose and stood beside him, mechanically spreading out his hands to the fire.

'To-morrow, as soon as you are gone, I shall go off to Italy. There are some little places in the south near Naples that she was very fond of. I shall stay about there for a while. As soon as I feel I can, I shall come back to the Senate and my work. It is the only thing left me,—she was so keen about it.' His voice sank into a whisper, and a long silence fell upon them. Women in moments of sorrow have the outlet of tears and caresses; men's great refuge is silence; but the silence may be charged with sympathy and the comfort of a shared grief. It was so in this case.

The afternoon light was fading, and Kendal was about to rise and make some necessary preparations for his journey, when Paul detained him, looking up at him with sunken eyes which seemed to carry in them all the history of the two nights just past. 'Will you ever ask her what Marie wished?' The tone was the even and passionless tone of one who for the moment feels none of the ordinary embarrassments of intercourse; Kendal met it with the same directness.

'Some day I shall ask her, or at least I shall let her know; but it will be no use.'

Paul shook his head, but whether in protest or agreement Kendal could hardly tell. Then he went back to his task of sorting the letters, and let the matter drop. It seemed as if he were scarcely capable of taking an interest in it for its own sake, but simply as a wish, a charge of Marie's.

Kendal parted from him in the evening with an aching heart, and was haunted for hours by the memory of the desolate figure returning slowly into the empty house, and by a sharp prevision of all the lonely nights and the uncomforted morrows which lay before the stricken man.

But, as Paris receded farther and farther behind him, and the sea drew nearer, and the shores of the country which held Isabel Bretherton, it was but natural that even the grip upon him of this terrible and startling calamity should relax a little, and that he should realise himself as a man seeking the adored woman, his veins still beating with the currents of youth, and the great unguessed future still before him. He had left Marie in the grave, and his life would bear the scar of that loss for ever. But Isabel Bretherton was still among the living, the warm, the beautiful, and every mile brought him nearer to the electric joy of her presence. He took a sad strange pleasure in making the contrast between the one picture and the other as vivid as possible. Death and silence on the one side—oh, how true and how irreparable! But on the other, he forced on his imagination till it drew for him an image of youth and beauty so glowing that it almost charmed the sting out of his grief. The English paper which he succeeded in getting at Calais contained the announcement: 'Miss Bretherton has, we are glad to say, completely recovered from the effects of the fainting fit which so much alarmed the audience at the Calliope last week. She was able to play Elvira as usual last night, and was greeted by a large and sympathetic house.' He read it, and turned the page hastily, as if what the paragraph suggested was wholly distasteful to him. He refused altogether to think of her as weak or suffering; he shrank from his own past misgivings, his own prophecies about her. The world would be a mere dark prison-house if her bright beauty were over-clouded! She was not made for death, and she should stand to him as the image of all that escapes and resists and defies that tyrant of our years, and pain, his instrument and herald.

He reached London in the midst of a rainy fog. The endless black streets stretched before him in the dreary December morning like so many roads into the nether regions; the gas-lamps scattered an unseasonable light through the rain and fog; it was the quintessence of murky, cheerless winter.

He reached his own rooms, and found his man up and waiting for him, and a meal ready. It was but three days since he had been last there, the open telegram was still lying on the table. One of his first acts was to put it hastily out of sight. Over his breakfast he planned his embassy to Miss Bretherton. The best time to find her alone, he imagined, would be about mid-day, and in the interval he would put his books and papers to rights. They lay scattered about—books, proofs, and manuscript. As his orderly hands went to work upon them, he was conscious that he had never been so remote from all that they represented. But his nature was faithful and tenacious, and under the outward sense of detachment there was an inward promise of return. 'I will come back to you,' seemed to be the cry of his thought. 'You shall be my only friends. But first I must see her, and all my heart is hers!'

The morning dragged away, and at half-past eleven he went out, carrying the little case with him. As he stood outside the Bayswater house, in which she had settled for the winter, he realised that he had never yet been under her roof, never yet seen her at home. It was his own fault. She had asked him in her gracious way, on the first night of Elvira, to come and see her. But, instead of doing so, he had buried himself in his Surrey lodging, striving to bring the sober and austere influences of the country to bear upon the feverish indecision of his mood. Perhaps his disappearance and silence had wounded her; after all, he knew that he had some place in her thoughts.

The servant who opened the door demurred to his request to see Miss Bretherton. 'The doctor says, sir, that at home she must keep quiet; she has not seen any visitors just lately.' But Kendal persisted, and his card was taken in, while he waited the result. The servant hurried along the ground-floor passage, knocked at the door at the farther end, went in for a moment, and came out beckoning to him. He obeyed with a beating heart, and she threw open the door for him.

Inside stood Isabel Bretherton, with eager surprise and pleasure in her whole attitude. She had just risen from her chair, and was coming forward; a soft white cashmere shawl hung around her; her dress, of some dark rich stuff, fell with the flowing, stately lines peculiar to it; her face was slightly flushed, and the brilliancy of her colour, of her hair, of her white, outstretched hand, seemed to Kendal to take all the chill and gloom out of the winter air. She held some proof sheets of a new play in her hand, and the rest lay piled beside her on a little table.

'How kind of you, Mr. Kendal,' she said, advancing with her quick impulsive step towards him. 'I thought you had forgotten us, and I have been wanting your advice so badly! I have just been complaining of you a little in a letter to Madame de Chateauvieux! She—'

Then she suddenly stopped, checked and startled by his face. He was always colourless and thin, but the two nights he had just passed through had given him an expression of haggard exhaustion. His black eyes seemed to have lost the keenness which was so remarkable in them, and his prematurely gray hair gave him almost a look of age in spite of the lightness and pliancy of the figure.

He came forward, and took her hand nervously and closely in his own.

'I have come to bring you sad news,' he said gently, and seeking anxiously word by word how he might soften what, after all, could not be softened. 'M. de Chateauvieux sent me to you at once, that you should not hear in any other way. But it must be a shock to you—for you loved her!'

'Oh!' she cried, interrupting him, speaking in short, gasping words, and answering not so much his words as his look. 'She is ill—she is in danger—something has happened?'

'I was summoned on Wednesday,' said Kendal, helpless after all in the grip of the truth which would not be managed or controlled. 'When I got there she had been two days ill, and there was no hope.'

He paused; her eyes of agonised questioning implored him to go on. 'I was with her six hours—after I came she had no pain—it was quite peaceful, and—she died in the evening.'

She had been watching him open-eyed, every vestige of colour fading from cheek and lip; when he stopped, she gave a little cry. He let go her hand, and she sank into a chair near, so white and breathless that he was alarmed.

'Shall I get you water—shall I ring?' he asked after a moment or two, bending over her.

'No,' she whispered with difficulty; 'let me alone—just for a minute.'

He left her side, and stood leaning against the mantelpiece, waiting anxiously. She struggled against the physical oppression which had seized upon her, and fought it down bravely. But he noticed with a pang now that the flush was gone, that she looked fragile and worn, and, as his thought went back for a moment to the Surrey Sunday and her young rounded beauty among the spring green, he could have cried out in useless rebellion against the unyielding physical conditions which press upon and imprison the flame of life.

At last the faintness passed off, and she sat up, her hands clasped round her knees, and the tears running fast over her cheeks. Her grief was like herself—frank, simple, expressive.

'Will you tell me more about it? Oh, I cannot believe it! Why, only last week when I was ill she talked of coming to me! I have just been writing to her—there is my letter. I feel as if I could not bear it; she was like a mother to me in Paris. Oh, if I could have seen her!'

'You were one of her chief thoughts at the last,' said Kendal, much moved. And he went on to tell her the story of Marie's dying hours, describing that gentle withdrawal from life with a manly tenderness of feeling and a quick memory for all that could soften the impression of it to the listener. And then he brought out the miniature and gave it to her, and she accepted it with a fresh burst of sorrow, putting it to her lips, studying it and weeping over it, with an absolute spontaneity and self-abandonment which was lovely because it was so true.

'Oh, poor M. de Chateauvieux!' she cried after a long pause, looking up to him. 'How will he live without her? He will feel himself so forsaken!'

'Yes,' said Kendal huskily; 'he will be very lonely, but—one must learn to bear it.'

She gazed at him with quick startled sympathy, and all her womanly nature seemed to rise into her upturned face and yearning eyes. It was as though her attention had been specially recalled to him; as though his particular loss and sorrow were brusquely brought home to her. And then she was struck by the strangeness and unexpectedness of such a meeting between them. He had been to her a judge, an authority, an embodied standard. His high-mindedness had won her confidence; his affection for his sister had touched and charmed her. But she had never been conscious of any intimacy with him. Still less had she ever dreamt of sharing a common grief with him, of weeping at his side. And the contrast between her old relation with him and this new solemn experience, rushing in upon her, filled her with emotion. The memory of the Nuneham day woke again in her—of the shock between her nature and his, of her overwhelming sense of the intellectual difference between them, and then of the thrill which his verdict upon Elvira had stirred in her. The relation which she had regarded as a mere intellectual and friendly one, but which had been far more real and important to her than even she herself had ever guessed, seemed to have transformed itself since he had entered the room into something close and personal. His last words had called up in her a sharp impression of the man's inmost nature as it was, beneath the polished scholarly surface. They had appealed to her on the simplest, commonest, human ground; she felt them impulsively as a call from him to her, and her own heart overflowed.

She rose, and went near to him, bending towards him like a spirit of healing, her whole soul in her eyes 'Oh, I am so sorry for you!' she exclaimed, and again the quick tears dropped. 'I know it is no common loss to you. You were so much more to each other than brother and sister often are. It is terrible for you.'

His whole man was stirred by her pity, by the eager expansiveness of her sympathy.

'Say it again!' he murmured, as their eyes met; 'say it again. It is so sweet—from you!'

There was a long pause; she stood as if fascinated, her hands falling slowly beside her. Her gaze wavered till the eyelids fell, and she stood absolutely motionless, the tears still on her cheek. The strange intoxicating force of feeling, set in motion by sorrow and pity, and the unsuspected influence of his love, was sweeping them out into deep waters. She could hardly breathe, but as he watched her all the manhood in him rose, and from the midst of grief put forward an imperious claim to the beloved and beautiful woman before him. He came forward a step, took the cold, unresisting hands, and, bending before her, pressed them to his lips, while her bewildered eyes looked down upon him.

'Your pity is heavenly,' he said brokenly; 'but give me more, give me more! I want your love!'

She gave a little start and cry, and, drawing away her hands from him, sank back on her chair. Her thoughts went flying back to the past—to the stretches of Surrey common, to the Nuneham woods, and all she had ever seen or imagined of his feelings towards her. She had never, never suspected him of loving her. She had sent him her friendly messages from Venice in the simplest good faith; she had joined in his sister's praises of him without a moment's self-consciousness. His approval of her play in Elvira had given her the same frank pleasure that a master's good word gives to a pupil—and all the time he had loved her—loved her! How strange! how incredible!

Kendal followed, bent over her, listened, but no word came. She was, indeed, too bewildered and overwhelmed to speak. The old bitter fear and certainty began to assert itself against the overmastering impulse which had led him on.

'I have startled you—shocked you,' he cried. 'I ought not to have spoken—and at such a time. It was your pity overcame me—your sweet womanly kindness. I have loved you, I think, ever since that first evening after the White Lady. At least, when I look back upon my feeling, I see that it was love from the beginning. After that day at Nuneham I knew that it was love; but I would not acknowledge it; I fought against it. It seemed to me that you would never forget that I had been harsh, that I had behaved rather like an enemy than a friend. But you did forget—you showed me how noble a woman could be, and every day after we parted in July I loved you more. I thought of you all the summer when I was buried in the Country—my days and nights were full of you. Then when your great success came—it was base of me—but all the time while I was sending my congratulations to you through my sister at Venice, I was really feeling that there was no more hope for me, and that some cruel force was carrying you away from me. Then came Elvira—and I seemed to give you up for ever.'

Her hands dropped from her face, and her great hazel eyes were fixed upon him with that intent look he remembered long ago when she had asked him for the 'truth' about herself and her position. But there was no pain in it now; nothing but wonder and a sweet moved questioning.

'Why?' The word was just breathed through her parted lips.

Kendal heard it with a start—the little sound loosed his speech and made him eloquent.

'Why? Because I thought you must inevitably be absorbed, swallowed up by the great new future before you; because my own life looked so gray and dull beside yours. I felt it impossible you should stoop from your height to love me, to yield your bright self to me, to give me heart for heart. So I went away that I might not trouble you. And then'—his voice sank lower still—'came the summons to Paris, and Marie on her death-bed tried to make me hope. And just now your pity drew the heart out of my lips. Let me hear you forgive me.'

Every word had reached its mark. She had realized at last something of the depth, the tenacity, the rich, illimitable promise of the passion which she had roused. The tenderness of Marie seemed to encompass them, and a sacred pathetic sense of death and loss drew them together. Her respect, her reverence, her interest had been yielded long ago; did this troubled yearning within mean something more, something infinitely greater?

She raised herself suddenly, and, as he knelt beside her, he felt her warm breath on his cheek, and a tear dropped on his hands, which her own were blindly and timidly seeking.

'Oh!' she whispered, or rather sobbed, 'I never dreamt of it. I never thought of anything like this. But—do not leave me again. I could not bear it.'

Kendal bowed his head upon the hands nestling in his, and it seemed to him as if life and time were suspended, as if he and she were standing within the 'wind-warm space' of love, while death and sorrow and parting—three grave and tender angels of benediction—kept watch and ward without.

THE END