"Yet he knew me for a heretic then!" thought Meynell. "I never made any secret of my opinions."

All the same, as he walked on, he forced himself to acknowledge to the full the radical change in the situation. Acts of war suspend the normal order; and no combatant has any right to complain.

Then a moment's weariness seized him of the whole train of thought to which his days and nights were now committed, and he turned with eagerness to look at the streets of Markborough, full of a market-day crowd, and of "the great mundane movement." Farmers and labourers were walking up and down; oxen and sheep in the temporary pens of the market-place were waiting for purchasers; there was a Socialist lecturer in one corner, and a Suffragist lady on a wagon in another. The late August sun shone upon the ruddy faces and broad backs of men to whom certainly it did not seem to be of great importance whether the Athanasian Creed were omitted from the devotions of Christian people or no. There was a great deal of chaffering going on; a little courting, and some cheating. Meynell recognized some of his parishioners, spoke to a farmer or two, exchanged greeting with a sub-agent of the miners' union, and gave some advice to a lad of his choir who had turned against the pits and come to "hire" himself at Markborough.

It was plain to him, however, after a little, that although he might wish to forget himself among the crowd, the crowd was on the contrary rather sharply aware of the Rector of Upcote. He perceived as he moved slowly up the street that he was in fact a marked man. Looks followed him; and the men he knew greeted him with a difference.

A little beyond the market-place he turned down a narrow street leading to the mother church of the town—an older foundation even than the Cathedral. Knocking at the door in the wall, he was admitted to an old rectory house, adjacent to the church, and in its low-ceiled dining-room he found six of the already famous "eighteen" assembled, among them the two other clergy who with himself had been singled out for the first testing prosecution. A joint letter was being drawn up for the press.

Meynell was greeted with rejoicing—a quiet rejoicing, as of men occupied with grave matters, that precluded any ebullience of talk. With Meynell's appearance, the meeting became more formal, and it was proposed to put the Vicar of the ancient church under whose shadow they were gathered, into the chair. The old man, Treherne by name, had been a double-first in days when double-firsts were everything, and in a class-list not much more modern than Mr. Gladstone's. He was a gentle, scholarly person, silent and timid in ordinary life, and his adhesion to the "eighteen" had been an astonishment to friends and foes. But he was not to be inveigled into the "chair" on any occasion, least of all in his own dining-room.

"I should keep you here all night, and you would get nothing done," he said with a smiling wave of the hand. "Besides—excludat jurgia finis!—let there be an age-limit in all things! Put Meynell in. It is he that has brought us all into this business."

So, for some hours or more, Meynell and the six grappled with the letter that was to convey the challenge of the revolted congregations to the general public through the Times. It was not an easy matter, and some small jealousies and frictions lifted their heads that had been wholly lost sight of in the white-hot feeling of the inauguration meeting.

Yet on the whole the seven men gathered in this room were not unworthy to lead the "forlorn hope" they had long determined on. Darwen—young, handsome, Spiritual, a Third Classic, and a Chancellor's medallist; Waller, his Oxford friend, a man of the same type, both representing the recent flowing back of intellectual forces into the Church which for nearly half a century had abandoned her; Petitot, Swiss by origin, small, black-eyed, irrepressible, with a great popularity among the hosiery operatives of whom his parish was mainly composed; Derrick, the Socialist, of humble origin and starved education, yet possessed Of a natural sway over men, given him by a pair of marvellous blue eyes, a character of transparent simplicity, a tragic honesty and the bitter-sweet gift of the orator; Chesham, a man who had left the army for the Church, had been grappling for ten years with a large parish of secularist artisans, and was now preaching Modernism with a Franciscan fervour and success; and Rollin, who owned a slashing literary style, was a passionate Liberal in all fields, had done excellent work in the clearing and cleaning of slums, with much loud and unnecessary talk by the way, and wrote occasionally for the Daily Watchman. Chesham and Darwen were Meynell's co-defendants in the suit brought by the Bishop.

Rollin alone seemed out of place in this gathering of men, drawing tense breath under a new and almost unbearable responsibility. He was so in love with the sensational, notoriety side of the business, so eager to pull wires, and square editors, so frankly exultant in the "big row" coming on, that Meynell, with the Bishop's face still in his mind, could presently hardly endure him. He felt as Renan toward Gavroche. Was it worth while to go through so much that Rollin might cut a figure, and talk at large about "modern thought?"

However Darwen and Waller, Derrick also, were just as determined as Meynell to keep down the frothy self-advertising element in the campaign to the minimum that human nature seems unable to do without. So that Rollin found himself gradually brought into line, being not a bad fellow, but only a common one; and he abandoned with much inward chagrin the project of a flaming "interview" for the Daily Watchman on the following day.

And indeed, as this handful of men settled down to the consideration of the agenda for a large conference to be held in Markborough the following week, there might have been discerned in six of them, at least, a temper that glorified both them and their enterprise; a temper of seriousness, courage, unalterable conviction, with such delicacy of feeling as befits men whose own brethren and familiar companions have become their foes. They were all pastors in the true sense, and every man of them knew that in a few months he would probably have lost his benefice and his prospects. Only Treherne was married, and only he and Rollin had private means.

Meynell was clearly their leader. Where the hopefulness of the others was intermittent his was constant; his knowledge of the English situation generally, as well as of the lie of forces in the Markborough district, was greater than theirs; and his ability as a writer made him their natural exponent. It was he who drew up the greater part of their "encyclical" for the press; and by the time the meeting was over he had so heightened in them the sense of mission, so cheered them with the vision of a wide response from the mind of England, that all lesser thoughts were sunk, and they parted in quietness and courage.

Meynell left the outskirts of Markborough by the Maudeley road, meaning to walk to Upcote by Forked Pond and Maudeley Park.

It was now nearly a fortnight since he had seen Mary Elsmere, and for the first time, almost, in these days of storm and stress could the mind make room for some sore brooding on the fact. He had dined at Maudeley, making time with infinite difficulty; Mrs. Elsmere and her daughter were not there. He had asked Mrs. Flaxman to tea at the Rectory, and had suggested that she should bring her sister and her niece. Mr. and Mrs. Flaxman appeared—without companions. Once or twice he had caught sight of Mary Elsmere's figure in the distance of Miss Puttenham's garden. Yet he had not ventured to intrude upon the two friends. It had seemed to him by then it must be her will to avoid him, and he respected it.

As to other misgivings and anxieties, they were many. As Meynell entered the Maudeley lane, with the woods of Sandford Abbey on his left, and the little trout-stream flashing and looping through the water meadows on his right, his mind was often occupied by a conversation between himself and Stephen Barron which had taken place the night before. Meynell could not but think of it remorsefully.

"And I can explain nothing—to make it easier for the poor old fellow—nothing! He thinks if we had allowed the engagement, it would all have come right—he would have got a hold upon her, and been able to shape her. Oh, my dear boy—my dear boy! Yet, when the time comes, Stephen shall have any chance, any help, I can give him—unless indeed she has settled her destiny for herself by then, without any reference to us. And Stephen shall know—what there is to know!"

As to Hester herself, she seemed to have been keeping the Fox-Wilton household in perpetual fear. She went about in her mocking, mysterious way, denying that she knew anything about Sir Philip Meryon, or had any dealings with him. Yet it was shrewdly suspected that letters had passed between them, and Hester's proceedings were so quick-silverish and incalculable that it was impossible to keep a constant watch upon her. In the wilderness of Maudeley Park, which lay directly between the two houses, they might quite well have met—they probably had met. Meynell noticed and rebuked in himself a kind of settled pessimism as to Hester's conduct and future. "Do what you will," it seemed to say—"do all you can—but that life has in it the ferments of tragedy."

Had they at least been doing all they could? he asked himself anxiously, vowing that no public campaign must or should distract him from a private trust much older than it, and no less sacred. In the midst of the turmoil of these weeks he had been corresponding on Lady Fox-Wilton's behalf with a lady in Paris to whom a girl of Hester's age and kind might be safely committed for the perfecting of her French and music. It had been necessary to warn the lady that in the case of such a pensionnaire as Hester the male sex might give trouble; and Hester had not yet signified her gracious consent to go.

But she would go—she must go—and either he or Alice Puttenham would take her over and install her. Good heavens, if one had only Edith Fox-Wilton to depend on in these troubles!

As for Philip Meryon, he was, of course, now and always, a man of vicious habits and no scruples. He seemed to be staying at Sandford with the usual crew of flashy, disreputable people, and to allow Hester to run any risks with regard to him would be simply criminal. Yet with so inefficient a watch-dog as Lady Fox-Wilton, who could guarantee anything? Alice, of course, thought of nothing else than Hester, night and day. But it was part of the pathos of the situation that she had so little influence on the child's thoughts and deeds.

Poor, lonely woman! In Alice's sudden friendship for Mary Elsmere, her junior by some twelve years, the Rector, with an infinite pity, read the confession of a need that had become at last intolerable. For these seventeen years he had never known her make an intimate friend, and to see her now with this charming, responsive girl was to realize what the long hunger for affection must have been. Yet even now, how impossible to satisfy it, as other women could satisfy it! What ghosts and shadows about the path of friendship!

"A dim and perilous way," his mind went sounding back along the intricacies of Alice Puttenham's story. The old problems arose in connection with it—problems now of ethics, now of expediency. And interfused with them a sense of dull amazement and yet of intolerable repetition—in this difficulty which had risen with regard to Hester. The owner of Sandford—and Hester! When he had first seen them together, it had seemed a thing so sinister that his mind had refused to take it seriously. A sharp word to her, a word of warning to her natural guardians—and surely all was mended. Philip never stayed more than three weeks in the old house; he would very soon be gone, and Hester's fancy would turn to something else.

But that the passing shock should become anything more! There rose before Meynell's imagination a vision of the two by the river, not in the actual brightness of the August afternoon, but bathed, as it were, in angry storm-light; behind them, darkness, covering "old, unhappy, far-off things." From that tragical gloom it seemed as though their young figures had but just emerged, unnaturally clear; and yet the trailing clouds were already threatening the wild beauty of the girl.

He blamed himself for lack of foresight. It should have been utterly impossible for those two to meet! Meryon generally appeared at Sandford three times a year, for various sporting purposes. Hester might easily have been sent away during these descents. But the fact was she had grown up so rapidly—yesterday a mischievous child, to-day a woman in her first bloom—that they had all been taken by surprise. Besides, who could have imagined any communication whatever between the Fox-Wilton household and the riotous party at Sandford Abbey?

As to the girl herself, Meynell was always conscious of being engaged in some long struggle to save and protect his ward against her will. There were circumstances connected with Hester that should have stirred in the few people who knew them a special softness of heart in regard to her. But it was not easy to feel it. The Rector had helped two women to watch over her upbringing; he had brought her to her first communion, and tried hard, and quite in vain, to instil into her the wholesome mysticisms of the Christian faith; and the more efforts he made, the more sharply was he aware of the hard, egotistical core of the girl's nature, of Hester's fatal difference from other girls.

And yet, as he thought of her with sadness and perplexity, there came across him the memory of Mrs. Elsmere's sudden movement toward Hester; how she had drawn the child to her and kissed her—she, so unearthly and so spiritual, whose very aspect showed her the bondswoman of Christ.

The remembrance rebuked him, and he fell into fresh plans about the child. She must be sent away at once!—and if there were really any sign of entanglement he must himself go to Sandford and beard Philip in his den. There was knowledge in his possession that might be used to frighten the fellow. He thought of his cousin with loathing and contempt.

But—to do him justice—Meryon knew nothing of those facts that gave such an intolerable significance to any contact whatever between his besmirched life and that of Hester Fox-Wilton.

Meryon knew nothing—and Stephen knew nothing—nor the child herself. Meynell shared his knowledge with only two other persons—no!—three. Was that woman, that troublesome, excitable woman, whose knowledge had been for years the terror of three lives—was she alive still? Ralph Fox-Wilton had originally made it well worth her while to go to the States. That was in the days when he was prepared to pay anything. Then for years she had received an allowance, which, however, Meynell believed had stopped sometime before Sir Ralph's death. Meynell remembered that the stopping of it had caused some friction between Ralph and his wife. Lady Fox-Wilton had wished it continued. But Ralph had obstinately refused to pay any more. Nothing had been heard of her, apparently, for a long while. But she had still a son and grand-children living in Upcote village.

* * * * *

Meynell opened the gate leading into the Forked Pond enclosure. The pond had been made by the damming of part of the trout stream at the point where it entered the Maudeley estate, and the diversion of the rest to a new channel. The narrow strip of land between the pond and the new channel made a little waterlocked kingdom of its own for the cottage, which had been originally a fishing hut, built in an Izaak Walton-ish mood by one of the owners of Maudeley. But the public footpath through the park ran along the farther side of the pond, and the doings of the inhabitants of the cottage, thick though the leafage was, could sometimes be observed from it.

Involuntarily Meynell's footsteps lingered as the little thatched house became visible, its windows set wide to the sounds and scents of the September day. There was conveyed to him a sense of its warm loneliness in the summer nights, of the stars glimmering upon it through the trees, of the owls crying round it. And within—in one of those upper rooms—those soft deep eyes, at rest in sleep?—or looking out, perhaps, into the breathing glooms of the wood?—the sweet face propped on the slender hand.

He felt certain that the inner life of such a personality as Mary Elsmere was rich and passionate. Sometimes, in these lonely hours, did she think of the man who had told her so much of himself on that, to him, memorable walk? Meynell looked back upon the intimate and autobiographical talk into which he had been led, with some wonder and a hot cheek. He had confessed himself partly to Elsmere's daughter, on a hint of sympathy, as to one entitled to such a confidence, so to speak, by inheritance, should she desire it; but still more—he owned it—to a delightful woman. It was the first time in Meynell's strenuous life, filled to the brim with intellectual and speculative effort on the one hand, and with the care of his parish on the other, that he had been conscious of any such feeling as now possessed him. In his first manhood it had been impossible for him to marry, because he had his brothers to educate. And when they were safely out in the world the Rector, absorbed in the curing of sick bodies and the saving of sick souls, could not dream of spending the money thus set free on a household for himself.

He had had his temptations of the flesh, his gusts of inclination, like other men. But he had fought them down victoriously, for conscience sake; and it was long now since anything of the sort had assailed him.

He paused a moment among the trees, just before the cottage passed out of sight. The sun was sinking in a golden haze, the first prophecy of autumnal mists. Broad lights lay here and there upon the water, to be lost again in depths of shadow, wherein woods of dream gave back the woods that stooped to them from the shore. Everything was so still he could hear the fish rising, the run of a squirrel along a branch, the passage of a coot through the water.

The very profoundity of nature's peace suddenly showed him to himself. A man engaged in a struggle beyond his power!—committed to one of those tasks that rend and fever the human spirit even while they ennoble it! He had talked boldly to Stephen and the Bishop of "war"—"inevitable" and "necessary war." At the same time there was no one who would suffer from war more than he. The mere daily practice of Christianity, as a man's life-work, is a daily training in sensitiveness, involves a daily refining of the nerves. When a man so trained, so refined, takes up the public tasks of leadership and organization, in this noisy, hard-hitting world, his nature is set at enmity with itself. Meynell did not yet know whether the mystic in him would allow the fighter in him to play his part.

If the memory of Fenton's cold, unrecognizing eyes and rigid mouth, as they passed each other in the silence of the Cathedral, had power to cause so deep a stab of pain, how was he to brace himself in the future to what must come?—the alienation of friend after friend, the condemnation of the good, the tumult, the poisoned feeling, the abuse, public and private.

Only by the help of that Power behind the veil of things, perceived by the mind of faith! "Thou, Thou art being and breath!—Thine is this truth, which, like a living hand, bridles and commands me. Grind my life as corn in Thy mill!—but forsake me not! Nay, Thou wilt not, Thou canst not forsake me!"

No hope for a man attempting such an enterprise as Meynell's but in this simplicity, this passion of self-surrender. Without it no adventure in the spiritual fight has ever touched and fired the heart of man. Meynell was sternly and simply aware of it.

But how is this temper, this passion, kindled?

The answer flashed. Everywhere the divine ultimate Power mediates itself through the earthly elements and forces, speaks through small, childish things, incarnates itself in lover, wife, or friend—flashing its mystic fire through the web of human relations. It seemed to Meynell, as he stood in the evening stillness by the pond, hidden from sight by the light brushwood round him, that, absorbed as he had been from his youth in the symbolism and passion of the religious life, as other men are absorbed in art or science, he had never really understood one of these great words by which he imagined himself to live—Love, or Endurance, or Sacrifice, or Joy—because he had never known the most sacred, the most intimate, things of human life out of which they grow.

And there uprose in him a sudden yearning—a sudden flame of desire—for the revealing love of wife and child. As it thrilled through him, he seemed to be looking down into the eyes—so frank, so human—of Mary Elsmere.

Then while he watched, lost in feeling, yet instinctively listening for any movement in the wood, there was a flicker of white among the trees opposite. A girl, book in hand, came down to the water's edge, and paused there a little, watching the glow of sunset on the water. Meynell retreated farther into the wood; but he was still able to see her. Presently she sat down, propping herself against a tree, and began to read.

Her presence, the grace of her bending neck, informed the silence of the woods with life and charm. Meynell watched her a few moments in a trance of pleasure. But memory broke in upon the trance and scattered all his pleasure. What reasonable hope of winning the daughter of that quiet, indomitable woman, who, at their first meeting, had shown him with such icy gentleness the gulf between himself and them?

And yet between himself and Mary he knew that there was no gulf. Spiritually she was her father's child, and not her mother's.

But to suppose that she would consent to bring back into her mother's life the same tragic conflict, in new form, which had already rent and seared it, was madness. He read his dismissal in her quiet avoidance of him ever since she had been a witness of her mother's manner toward him.

No. Such a daughter would never inflict a second sorrow, of the same kind, on such a mother. Meynell bowed his head, and went slowly away. It was as though he left youth and all delightfulness behind him, in the deepening dusk of the woods.

* * * * *

While Meynell was passing through the woods of Forked Pond a very different scene, vitally connected with the Rector and his fortunes, was passing a mile away, in a workman's cottage at Upcote Minor.

Barron had spent an agitated day. After his interview with the Bishop, in which he was rather angrily conscious that his devotion and his zeal were not rewarded with as much gratitude or as complete a confidence on the Bishop's part as he might have claimed, he called on Canon France.

To him he talked long and emphatically on the situation, on the excessive caution of the Bishop, who had entirely refused to inhibit any one of the eighteen, at present, lest there should be popular commotions; on the measures that he and his friends were taking, and on the strong feeling that he believed to be rising against the Modernists. It was evident that he was discontented with the Bishop, and believed himself the only saviour of the situation.

Canon France watched him, sunk deep in his armchair, the plump fingers of one hand playing with certain charter rolls of the fourteenth century, with their seals attached, which lay in a tray beside him. He had just brought them over from the Cathedral Library, and was longing to be at work on them. Barron's conversation did not interest him in the least, and he even grudged him his second cup of tea. But he did not show his impatience. He prophesied a speedy end to a ridiculous movement; wondered what on earth would happen to some of the men, who had nothing but their livings, and finally said, with a humorous eye, and no malicious intention:

"The Romanists have always an easy way of settling these things. They find a scandal or invent one. But Meynell, I suppose, is immaculate."

Barron shook his head.

"Meynell's life is absolutely correct, outwardly," he said slowly. "Of course the Upcote people whom he has led away think him a saint."

"Ah, well," said the Canon, smiling, "no hope then—that way. I rejoice, of course, for Meynell's sake. But the goodness of the unbeliever is becoming a great puzzle to mankind."

"Apparent goodness," said Barron hotly.

The Canon smiled again. He wished—and this time more intensely—that Barron would go, and let him get to his charters.

And in a few minutes Barron did take his departure. As he walked to the inn to find his carriage he pondered the problem of the virtuous unbeliever. A certain Bampton lecture by a well-known and learned Bishop recurred to him, which most frankly and drastically connected "Unbelief" with "Sin." Yet somehow the view was not borne out, as in the interests of a sound theology it should have been, by experience.

After all, he reached Upcote in good time before dinner, and remembering that he had to inflict a well-deserved lecture on the children who had been caught injuring trees and stealing wood in his plantations, he dismissed the carriage and made his way, before going home, to the cottage, which stood just outside the village, on the way from Maudeley to the Rectory and the church.

He knocked peremptorily. But no one came. He knocked again, chafing at the delay. But still no one came, and after going round the cottage, tapping at one of the windows, and getting no response, he was just going away, in the belief that the cottage was empty, when there was a rattling sound at the front door. It opened, and an old woman stood in the doorway.

"You've made a pretty noise," she said grimly, "but there's no one in but me."

"I am Mr. Barron," said her visitor, sharply. "And I want to see John Broad. My keepers have been complaining to me about his children's behaviour in the woods."

The woman before him shook her head irritably.

"What's the good of asking me? I only came off the cars here last night."

"You're a lodger, I suppose?" said Barron, eyeing her suspiciously. He did not allow his tenants to take in lodgers.

And the more he examined her the stranger did her aspect seem. She was evidently a woman of seventy or upward, and it struck him that she looked haggard and ill. Her grayish-white hair hung untidily about a thin, bony face; the eyes, hollow and wavering, infected the spectator with their own distress; yet the distress was so angry that it rather repelled than appealed. Her dress was quite out of keeping with the labourer's cottage in which she stood. It was a shabby blue silk, fashionably cut, and set off by numerous lockets and bangles.

She smiled scornfully at Barron's questions.

"A lodger? Well, I daresay I am. I'm John's mother."

"His mother?" said Barron, astonished. "I didn't know he had a mother alive." But as he spoke some vague recollection of Theresa's talk in the morning came back upon him.

The strange person in the doorway looked at him oddly.

"Well, I daresay you didn't. There's a many as would say the same. I've been away this eighteen year, come October."

Barron, as she spoke, was struck with her accent, and recalled her mention of "the cars."

"Why, you've been in the States," he said.

"That's it—eighteen year." Then suddenly, pressing her hand to her forehead, she said angrily: "I don't know what you mean. What do you come bothering me for? I don't know who you are—and I don't know nothing about your trees. Come in and sit down. John'll be in directly."

She held the door open, and Barron, impelled by a sudden curiosity, stepped in. He thought the woman was half-witted; but her silk dress, and her jewellery, above all her sudden appearance on the scene as the mother of a man whom he had always supposed to be alone in the world, with three motherless, neglected children, puzzled him.

So as one accustomed to keep a sharp eye on the morals and affairs of his cottage tenants, he began to question her about herself. She had thrown herself confusedly on a chair, and sat with her head thrown back, and her eyes half closed—as though in pain. The replies he got from her were short and grudging, but he made out from them that she had married a second time in the States, that she had only recently written to her son, who for some years had supposed her dead, and had now come home to him, having no other relation left in the World.

He soon convinced himself that she was not normally sane. That she had no idea as to his own identity was not surprising, for she had left Upcote for the States years before his succession to the White House estate. But her memory in all directions was confused, and her strange talk made him suspect drugs. She had also, it seemed, the usual grievances of the unsound mind, and believed herself to be injured and assailed by persons to whom she darkly alluded.

As they sat talking, footsteps were heard in the road outside. Mrs. Sabin—so she gave her name—at once hurried to the door and looked out. The movement betrayed her excited, restless state—the state of one just returned to a scene once familiar and trying, with a clouded brain, to recover old threads and clues.

Barron heard a low cry from her, and looked round.

"What's the matter?"

He saw her bent forward and pointing, her wrinkled face expressing a wild astonishment.

"That's her!—that's my Miss Alice!"

Barron, following her gesture, perceived through the half-open door two figures standing in the road on the farther side of a bit of village green. Meynell, who had just emerged from Maudeley Park upon the highroad, had met Alice Puttenham on her way to pay an evening visit to the Elsmeres, and had stopped to ask a question about some village affairs. Miss Puttenham's face was turned toward John Broad's cottage; the Rector had his back to it. They were absorbed in what they were talking about, and had of course no idea that they were watched.

"Why do you say my Miss Alice?" Barron inquired in astonishment.

Mrs. Sabin gave a low laugh. And at the moment, Meynell turned so that the level light now flooding the village street shone full upon him. Mrs. Sabin tottered back from the door, with another stifled cry, and sank into her chair. Her eyes seemed to be starting out of her head. "But—but they told me he was dead. He'll have married her then?"

She raised herself, peering eagerly at her companion.

"Married whom?" said Barron, utterly mystified, but affected himself, involuntarily, by the excitement of his strange companion.

"Why—Miss Alice!" she said gasping.

"Why should he marry her?"

Mrs. Sabin tried to control herself. "I'm not to talk about that—I know I'm not. But they give me my money for fifteen year—and then they stopped giving it—three year ago. I suppose they thought I'd never be back here again. But John's my flesh and blood, all the same. I made Mr. Sabin write for me to Sir Ralph. But there came a lawyer's letter and fifty pounds—and that was to be the last, they said. So when Mr. Sabin died, I said I'd come over and see for myself. But I'm ill—you see—and John's a fool—and I must find some one as 'ull tell me what to do. If you're a gentleman living here"—she peered into his face—"perhaps you'll tell me? Lady Fox-Wilton's left comfortable, I know. Why shouldn't she do what's handsome? Perhaps you'll give me a word of advice, sir? But you mustn't tell!—not a word to anybody. Perhaps they'll be for putting me in prison?"

She put her finger to her mouth; and then once more she bent forward, passionately scrutinizing the two people in the distance. Barron had grown white.

"If you want my advice you must try and tell me plainly what all this means," he said, sternly.

She looked at him—with a mad expression flickering between doubt and desire.

"Then you must shut the door, sir," she said at last. Yet as he moved to do so, she bent forward once more to look intently at the couple outside.

"And what did they tell me that lie for?" she repeated, in a tone half perplexed, half resentful. Then she turned peremptorily to Barron.

"Shut the door!"

* * * * *

Half an hour later Barron emerged into the road, from the cottage. He walked like a man bewildered. All that was evil in him rejoiced; all that was good sorrowed. He felt that God had arisen, and scattered his enemies; he also felt a genuine horror and awe in the presence of human frailty.

All night long he lay awake, pondering how to deal with the story which had been told him; how to clear up its confusions and implications; to find some firm foothold in the mad medley of the woman's talk—some reasonable scheme of time and place. Much of what she had told him had been frankly incoherent; and to press her had only made confusion worse. He was tolerably certain that she was suffering from some obscure brain trouble. The effort of talking to him had clearly exhausted her; but he had not been able to refrain from making her talk. At the end of the half hour he had advised her—in some alarm at her ghastly look—to see a doctor. But the suggestion had made her angry, and he had let it drop.

In the morning news was brought to him from Broad's cottage that John Broad's mother, Mrs. Richard Sabin, who had arrived from America only forty-eight hours before, had died suddenly in the night. The bursting of an unsuspected aneurism in the brain was, according to the doctor called in, the cause of death.



BOOK II



HESTER

"Light as the flying seed-balls is their play The silly maids!"

"Who see in mould the rose unfold, The soul through blood and tears."



CHAPTER VII

"I cannot get this skirt to hang as Lady Edith's did," said Sarah Fox-Wilton discontentedly.

"Spend twenty guineas on it, my dear, as Lady Edith did on hers, and it'll be all right," said a mocking voice.

Sarah frowned. She went on pinning and adjusting a serge skirt in the making, which hung on the dummy before her. "Oh, we all know what you would like to spend on your dress, Hester!" she said angrily, but indistinctly, as her mouth was full of pins.

"Because really nice frocks are not to be had any other way," said Hester coolly. "You pay for them—and you get them. But as for supposing you can copy Lady Edith's frocks for nothing, why, of course you can't, and you don't!"

"If I had ever so much money," said Sarah severely, "I shouldn't think it right to spend what Lady Edith does on her dress."

"Oh, wouldn't you!" said Hester with a laugh and a yawn. "Just give me the chance—that's all!" Then she turned her head—"Lulu!—you mustn't eat any more toffy!"—and she flung out a mischievous hand and captured a box that was lying on the table, before a girl, who was sitting near it with a book, could abstract from it another square of toffy.

"Give it me!" said Lulu, springing up, and making for her assailant. Hester laughingly resisted, and they wrestled for the box a little, till Hester suddenly let it go.

"Take it then—and good luck to you! I wouldn't spoil my teeth and my complexion as you do—not for tons of sweets. Hullo!"—the speaker sprang up—"the rain's over, and it's quite a decent evening. I shall go out for a run and take Roddy."

"Then I shall have to come too," said Sarah, getting up from her knees, and pulling down her sleeves. "I don't want to at all, but mamma says you are not to go out alone."

Hester flushed. "Do you think I can't escape you all—if I want to? Of course I can. What geese you are! None of you will ever prevent me from doing what I want to do. It really would save such a lot of time and trouble if you would get that into your heads."

"Where do you mean to go?" said Sarah stolidly, without taking any notice of her remark. "Because if you'll go to the village, I can get some binding I want."

"I have no intention whatever of going out for your convenience, thank you!" said Hester, laughing angrily. "I am going into the garden, and you can come or not as you please." She opened the French window as she spoke and stepped out.

"Has mamma heard from that Paris woman yet?" asked Lulu, looking after Hester, who was now standing on the lawn playing with a terrier-puppy she had lately brought home as a gift from a neighbouring farmer—much to Lady Fox-Wilton's annoyance. Hester had an absurd way of making friends with the most unsuitable people, and they generally gave her things.

"The Rector expected to hear to-day."

"I don't believe she'll go," said Lulu, beginning again on the toffy. She was a heavily made girl of twenty, with sleepy eyes and a dull complexion. She took little exercise, was inordinately fond of sweet things, helped her mother a little in the housekeeping, and was intimately acquainted with all the gossip of the village. So was Sarah; but her tongue was sharper than Lulu's, and her brain quicker. She was therefore the unpopular sister; while for Lulu her acquaintances felt rather a contemptuous indulgence. Sarah had had various love affairs, which had come to nothing, and was regarded as "disappointed" in the village. Lulu was not interested in young men, and had never yet been observed to take any trouble to capture one. So long as she was allowed sufficient sixpenny novels to read, and enough sweet things to eat, she was good-humoured enough, and could do kind things on occasion for her friends. Sarah was rarely known to do kind things; but as her woman friends were much more afraid of her than of Lulu, she was in general treated with much more consideration.

Still it could not be said that Lady Fox-Wilton was to be regarded as blessed in either of her two elder daughters. And her sons were quite frankly a trouble to her. The eldest, Sarah's junior by a year and a half, had just left Oxford suddenly and ignominiously, without a degree, and was for the most part loafing at home. The youngest, a boy of fifteen, was supposed to be delicate, and had been removed from school by his mother on that account. He too was at home, and a tutor who lodged in the village was understood to be preparing him for the Civil Service. He was a pettish and spiteful lad, and between him and Hester existed perpetual feud.

But indeed Hester was at war with each member of the family in turn; sometimes with all of them together. And it had been so from her earliest childhood. They all felt instinctively that she despised them and the slow, lethargic temperament which was in most of them an inheritance from a father cast in one of the typical moulds of British Philistinism. There was some insurmountable difference between her and them. In the first place, her beauty set her apart from the rest; and, beside her, Sarah's sharp profile, and round apple-red cheeks, or Lulu's clumsiness, made, as both girls were secretly aware, an even worse impression than they need have made. And in the next, there were in her strains of romantic, egotistic ability to which nothing in them corresponded. She could play, she could draw—brilliantly, spontaneously—up to a certain point, when neither Sarah nor Lulu could stumble through a "piece," or produce anything capable of giving the smallest satisfaction to their drawing-master. She could chatter, on occasion, so that a room full of people instinctively listened. And she had read voraciously, especially poetry, where they were content with picture-papers and the mildest of novels. Hester brought nothing to perfection; but there could be no question that in every aspect of life she was constantly making, in comparison with her family, a dashing or dazzling effect all the more striking because of the unattractive milieu out of which it sprang.

The presence of Lady Fox-Wilton, in particular, was needed to show these contrasts at their sharpest.

As Hester still raced about the lawn, with the dog, that lady came round the corner of the house, with a shawl over her head, and beckoned to the girl at play. Hester carelessly looked round.

"What do you want, mamma!"

"Come here. I want to speak to you."

Hester ran across the lawn in wide curves, playing with the dog, and arrived laughing and breathless beside the newcomer. Edith Fox-Wilton was a small, withered woman, in a widow's cap, who more than looked her age, which was not far from fifty. She had been pretty in youth, and her blue eyes were still appealing, especially when she smiled. But she did not smile often, and she had the expression of one perpetually protesting against all the agencies—this-worldly or other-worldly—which had the control of her existence. Her weak fretfulness depressed all the vitalities near her; only Hester resisted.

At the moment, however, her look was not so much fretful as excited. Her thin cheeks were much redder than usual; she constantly looked round as though expecting or dreading some interruption; and in a hand which shook she held a just opened letter.

"What is the matter, mamma?" asked Hester, a sharp challenging note in her gay voice. "You look as though something had happened."

"Nothing has happened," said Lady Fox-Wilton hastily. "And I wish you wouldn't romp with the puppy in that way, Hester. He's always doing some damage to the flowers. I'm going out, and I wished to give you a message from the Rector."

"Is that from Uncle Richard?" said Hester, glancing carelessly at the letter.

Lady Fox-Wilton crushed it in her hand.

"I told you it was. Why do you ask unnecessary questions? The Rector has heard from the lady in Paris and he wants you to go as soon as possible. Either he or Aunt Alice will take you over. We have had the best possible recommendations. You will enjoy it very much. They can get you the best lessons in Paris, they say. They know everybody."

"H'm—" said Hester, reflectively. Then she looked at the speaker. "Do you know, mamma, that I happen to be eighteen this week?"

"Don't be silly, Hester! Of course I know!"

"Well, you see, it's rather important. Am I or am I not obliged to do what you and Mr. Meynell want me to do? I believe I'm not obliged. Anyway, I don't quite see how you're going to make me do it, if I don't want to."

"You can behave like a naughty, troublesome girl, without any proper feeling, of course!—if you choose," said Lady Fox-Wilton warmly. "But I trust you will do nothing of the kind. We are your guardians till you are twenty-one; and you ought to be guided by us."

"Well, of course I can't be engaged to Stephen, if you say I mayn't—because there's Stephen to back you up. But if Queen Victoria could be a queen at eighteen, I don't see why I shouldn't be fit at eighteen to manage my own wretched affairs! Anyway—I—am—not—going to Paris—unless I want to go. So I don't advise you to promise that lady just yet. If she keeps her room empty, you might have to pay for it!"

"Hester, you are really the plague of my life!" cried Lady Fox-Wilton helplessly. "I try to keep you—the Rector tries to keep you—out of mischief that any girl ought to be ashamed—of—and—"

"What mischief?" demanded Hester peremptorily. "Don't run into generalities, mamma."

"You know very well what mischief I mean!"

"I know that you think I shall be running away some day with Sir Philip Meryon!" said the girl, laughing, but with a fierce gleam in her eyes. "I have no intention at present of doing anything of the kind. But if anything could make me do it, it would be the foolish way in which you and the others behave. I don't believe the Rector ever told you to set Sarah and Lulu on to dog me wherever I go!"

"He told me you were not to be allowed to meet that man. You won't promise me not to meet him—and what can we do? You know what the Rector feels. You know that he spent an hour yesterday arguing and pleading with you, when he had been up most of the night preparing papers for this commission. What's the matter with you, Hester? Are you quite in your right senses?"

The girl had clasped her hands behind her back, and stood with one foot forward, "on tiptoe for a flight," her young figure and radiant look expressing the hot will which possessed her. At the mention of Meynell's name she clearly hesitated, a frown crossed her eyes, her lip twitched. Then she said with vehemence:

"Who asked him to spend all that time? Not I. Let him leave me alone. He does not care twopence about me, and it's mere humbug and hypocrisy all his pretending to care."

"And your Aunt Alice—who's always worshipped you? Why, she's just miserable about you!"

"She says exactly what you and Uncle Richard tell her to say—she always has! Well, I don't know about Paris, mamma—I'll think about it. If you and Sarah will just let me be, I'll take Roddy for a stroll, and then after tea I'll tell you what I'll do." And, turning, she beckoned to a fine collie lazily sunning himself on the drawing-room steps, and he sprang up, gambolling about her.

"Promise you won't meet that man!" said Lady Fox-Wilton, in agitation.

"I believe he went up to Scotland to-day," said Hester, laughing. "I haven't the smallest intention of meeting him. Come, Roddy!"

The eyes of the two met—in those of the older woman, impatience, a kind of cold exasperation; in Hester's, defiance. It was a strange look to pass between a mother and daughter. Hester turned away, and then paused:

"Oh, by the way, mamma—where are you going?"

Lady Fox-Wilton hesitated unaccountedly.

"Why do you ask?"

Hester opened her eyes.

"Why shouldn't I? Is it a secret? I wanted you to tell Aunt Alice something if you were going that way."

"Mamma!"

Sarah suddenly emerged from the schoolroom window and ran excitedly across the lawn toward her mother. "Have you heard this extraordinary story about John Broad's mother? Tibbald has just told me."

Tibbald was the butler, and Sarah's special friend and crony.

"What story? I wish you wouldn't allow Tibbald to gossip as you do, Sarah!" said Lady Fox-Wilton angrily. But a close observer might have seen that her bright colour precipitately left her.

"Why, what harm was it?" cried Sarah, wondering. "He told me, because it seems Mrs. Sabin used to be a servant of ours long ago. Do you remember her, mamma?"

Again Lady Fox-Wilton stumbled perceptibly in replying. She turned away, and, with the garden scissors at her waist, she began vaguely to clip off some dead roses from some bushes near her.

"We once had a maid—for a very short time," she said over her shoulder, "who married some one of that name. What about her?"

"Well, she came back from America two days ago. John Broad thought she was dead. He hadn't heard of her for four years. But she turned up on Tuesday—the queerest old woman! She sat there boasting and chattering—in a silk dress with gold bracelets!—they thought she was going to make all their fortunes. But she must just have been off her head, for she died last night in her sleep, and there were only a few shillings on her—not enough to bury her. There's to be an inquest this evening, they say."

"Don't spend all your time chattering in the village, Sarah," said Lady Fox-Wilton severely, as, still with her back toward the girls, she moved away in the direction of the drive. "You'll never get your dress done if you do."

"I say—what's wrong with mamma?" said Hester coolly, looking after her. "I suppose Bertie's been getting into some fresh bother."

Bertie was the elder brother, who was Sarah's special friend in the family. So that she at once resented the remark.

"If she's worrying about anything, she's worrying about you," said Sarah tartly, as she went back to the house. "We all know that."

Hester, with her dog beside her, went strolling leisurely through the village street, past Miss Puttenham's cottage on the one hand and the Rectory gates on the other, making for a footpath that led from the back of the village, through fields and woods, on to the Chase.

As she passed beneath the limes that overhung Miss Puttenham's railings she perceived some distant figures in the garden. Uncle Richard, with mamma and Aunt Alice on either side of him. They were walking up and down in close conversation; or, rather, Uncle Richard seemed to be talking earnestly, addressing now one lady, now the other.

What a confabulation! No doubt all about her own crimes and misdemeanours. What fun to creep into the garden and play the spy. "That's what Sarah would do—but I'm not Sarah." Instead, she turned into the footpath and began to mount toward the borders of the Chase. It was a brilliant September afternoon, and the new grass in the shorn hayfields was vividly green. In front rose the purple hills of the Chase, while to the left, on the far borders of the village, the wheels and chimneys of two collieries stood black against a blaze of sun. But the sharp emphasis of light and colour, which in general would have set her own spirits racing, was for a while lost on Hester. As soon as she was out of sight of the village, or any passers-by, her aspect changed. Once or twice she caught her breath in what was very like a sob; and there were moments when she could only save herself from the disgrace of tears by a wild burst of racing with Roddy. It was evident that her brush with Lady Fox-Wilton had not left her as callous as she seemed.

Presently the path forsook the open fields and entered a plantation of dark and closely woven trees where the track was almost lost in the magnificence of the bracken. Beyond this, a short climb of broken slopes, and Hester was out on the bare heath, with the moorland wind blowing about her.

She sat down on a bank beneath a birch tree, twisted and tortured out of shape by the northwesterly gales that swept the heath in winter. All round her a pink and purple wilderness, with oases of vivid green and swaying grass. Nothing in sight but a keeper's hut, and some grouse butts far away; an ugly red building on the horizon, in the very middle of the heath, the Markborough isolation hospital; and round the edge of the vast undulating plateau in all directions the faint smoke of the colliery chimneys. But the colour of the heath was the marvel. The world seemed stained in crimson, and in every shade and combination of it. Close at hand the reds and pinks were diapered with green and gold as the bilberries and the grasses ran in and out of the heather; but on every side the crimson spread and billowed to the horizon, covering the hollows and hills of the Chase, absorbing all lesser tones into itself. After the rain of the morning, the contours of the heath, the distances of the plain, were unnaturally clear; and as the sunshine, the high air, the freshly moving wind, played upon Hester, her irritation passed away in a sensuous delight.

"Why should I let them worry me? I won't! I am here! I am alive! I am only eighteen! I am going to manage my life for myself—and get out of this coil. Now let me think!"

She slid downward among the heather, her face propped on her hands. Close beneath her eyes was an exquisite tuft of pink bell-heather intergrown with bunchberries. And while a whole vague series of thoughts and memories passed through her mind she was still vividly conscious of the pink bells, the small bright leaves. Sensation in her was exceptionally keen, whether for pleasure or pain. She knew it and had often coolly asked herself whether it meant that she would wear out—life and brain—quicker than other people—burn faster to the socket. So much the better if it did.

What was it she really wanted?—what did she mean to do? Proudly, she refused to admit any other will in the matter. The thought of Meynell, indeed, touched some very sore and bitter chords in her mind, but it did not melt her. She knew very well that she had nothing to blame her guardian for; that year after year from her childhood up she had repelled and resisted him, that her whole relation to him had been one of stubbornness and caprice. Well, there were reasons for it; she was not going to repent or change.

Of late his conduct with regard to Stephen's proposal had stirred in her a kind of rage. It was not that she imagined herself in love with Stephen; but she had chosen to be engaged to him; and that any one should affect to control her in such a matter, should definitely and decidedly cross her will, was intolerable to her wild pride. If Stephen had rebelled with her, she might have fallen fiercely in love with him—for a month. But he had submitted—though it was tolerably plain what it had cost him; and all her careless liking for him, the fruit of years of very poorly requited devotion on his part, seemed to have disappeared in a night.

Why shouldn't she be engaged at seventeen—within two months of eighteen, in fact? Heaps of girls were. It was mere tyranny and nonsense. She recalled her interview with Meynell, in which the Rector had roused in her a new and deeper antagonism than any she had yet felt toward his efforts to control her. It was as though he did not altogether believe in his own arguments; as though there were something behind which she could not get at. But if there were something behind, she had a right to know it. She had a right to know the meaning of her father's extraordinary letter to Meynell—the letter attached to his will—in which she had been singled out by name as needing the special tutelage of the Rector. So far as the Rector's guardianship of the other children was concerned, it was almost a nominal thing. Another guardian had been named in the will, Lady Fox-Wilton's elder brother, and practically everything that concerned the other children was settled by him, in concert with the mother. The Rector never interfered, was never indeed consulted, except on purely formal matters of business. But for her—for her only—Uncle Richard—as she always called her guardian—was to be the master—the tyrant!—close at hand. For so Sir Ralph had laid it down, in his testamentary letter—"I commend Hester to your special care. And in any difficulties that may arise in connection with her, I beg for our old friendship's sake that you will give my wife the help and counsel that she will certainly need. She knows it is my wish she should rely entirely upon you."

Why had he written such a letter? Since Sir Ralph's death, two years before, the story of it had got about; and the injustice, as she held, of her position under it had sunk deep into the girl's passionate sense, and made her infinitely more difficult to manage than she had been before. Of course everybody said it was because of her temper; because of the constant friction between her and her father; people believed the hateful things he used sometimes to say about her.

Nor was it only the guardianship—there was the money too! Provision made for all of them by name—and nothing for her! She had made Sarah show her a copy of the will—she knew! Nothing indeed for any of them—the girls at least—till Lady Fox-Wilton's death, or till they married; but nothing for her, under any circumstances.

"Well, why should there be?" Sarah had said. "You know you'll have Aunt Alice's money. She won't leave a penny to us."

All very well! The money didn't matter! But to be singled out and held up to scorn by your own father!

A flood of bitterness surged in the girl's heart. And then they expected her to be a meek and obedient drudge to her mother and her elder sisters; to open her mouth and take what they chose to send her. She might not be engaged to Stephen—for two years at any rate; and yet if she amused herself with any one else she was to be packed off to Paris, to some house of detention or other, under lock and key.

Her cheeks flamed. When had she first come across Philip Meryon? Only the day before that evening when Uncle Richard had found her fishing with him. She knew very well that he was badly spoken of; trust Upcote for gossip and scandal! Well, so was she!—they were outcasts together. Anyway, he was more amusing to walk and talk with than her sisters, or the dreadful young men they sometimes gathered about them. Why shouldn't she walk and talk with him? As if she couldn't protect herself! As if she didn't know a great deal more of the world than her stupid sisters did, who never read a book or thought of anything beyond the tittle-tattle of their few local friends.

But Philip Meryon had read lots of books, and liked those that she liked. He could read French too, as she could. And he had lent her some French books, which she had read eagerly—at night or in the woods—wherever she could be alone and unobserved. Why shouldn't she read them? There was one among them—"Julie de Trecoeur," by Octave Feuillet, that still seemed running, like a great emotion, through her veins. The tragic leap of Julie, as she sets her horse to the cliff and thunders to her death, was always in Hester's mind. It was so that she herself would like to die, spurning submission and patience, and all the humdrum virtues.

She raised herself, and the dog beside her sprang up and barked. The sun was just dropping below a bank of fiery cloud, and a dazzling and garish light lay on the red undulations of the heath. As she stood up she suddenly perceived the figure of a man about a hundred yards off emerging from a gully—a sportsman with his gun over his shoulder. He had apparently just parted from the group with whom he had been shooting, who were disappearing in another direction.

Philip Meryon! Now she remembered! He and two other men had taken the shooting on this side of the Chase. Honestly she had forgotten it; honestly her impression was that he had gone to Scotland. But of course none of her family would ever believe it. They would insist she had simply come out to meet him.

What was she to do? She was in a white serge dress, and with Roddy beside her, on that bare heath, she was an object easily recognized. Indeed, as she hesitated, she heard a call in the distance, and saw that Meryon was waving to her and quickening his pace. Instantly, with a leaping pulse, she turned and fled, Roddy beside her, barking his loudest. She ran along the rough track of the heath, as though some vague wild terror had been breathed into her by the local Pan. She ran fleet and light as air—famous as a runner from her childhood. But the man behind her had once been a fine athlete, and he gained upon her fast. Soon she could hear his laugh behind her, his entreaties to her to stop. She had reached the edge of the heath, where the wood began, and the path ran winding down it, with banks of thick fern on either hand.

If it had not been for the dog she could have slipped under the close-set trees, whence the light had already departed, and lain close among the fern. But with Roddy—no chance! She suddenly turned toward her pursuer, and with her hand on the dog's neck awaited him.

"Caught—caught!—by Jove!" cried Philip Meryon, plunging to her through the fern. "Now what do you deserve—for running away?"

"A gentleman would not have tried to catch me!" she said haughtily, as she faced him, with dilating nostrils.

"Take care!—don't be rude to me—I shall take my revenge!"

As he spoke, Meryon was fairly dazzled, intoxicated by the beauty of the vision before him—this angry wood-nymph, half-vanishing like another Daphne into the deep fern amid which she stood. But at the same time he was puzzled—and checked—by her expression. There was no mere provocation in it, no defiance that covers a yielding mind; but, rather, an energy of will, a concentrated force, that held at bay a man whose will was the mere register of his impulses.

"You forget," said Hester coolly, "that I have Roddy with me." And as she spoke the dog couching at her side poked up his slender nose through the fern and growled. He did not like Sir Philip.

Meryon looked upon her smiling—his hands on his sides. "Do you mean to say that when you ran you did not mean me to follow?"

"On the contrary, if I ran, it was evidently because I wished to get away."

"Then you were very ungrateful and unkind; for I have at this moment in my pocket a book you asked me to get for you. That's what I get for trying to please you."

"I don't remember that I asked you to get anything for me."

"Well, you said you would like to see some of George Sand's novels, which—for me—was just the same. So when I went to London yesterday I managed to borrow it, and there it is." He pointed triumphantly to a yellow-paper-bound volume sticking out of his coat pocket. "Of course you know George Sand is a sort of old Johnnie now; nobody reads her. But that's your affair. Will you have it?" He offered it.

The excitement, the wild flush in the girl's face, had subsided. She looked at the book, and at the man holding it out.

"What is it?" She stooped to read the title—"Mauprat." "What's it about?"

"Some nonsense about a cad tamed by a sentimental young woman." He shrugged his shoulders, "I tried to read it, and couldn't. But they say it's one of her best. If you want it, there it is."

She took it reluctantly, and moved on along the downward path, he following, and the dog beside them.

"Have you read the other book?" he asked her.

"'Julie de Trecoeur?' Yes."

"What did you think of it?"

"It was magnificent!" she said shortly, with a quickened breath. "I shall get some more by that man."

"Well, you'd better be careful!" He laughed. "I've got some others, but I didn't want to recommend them to you. Lady Fox-Wilton wouldn't exactly approve."

"I don't tell mamma what I read." The girl's young voice sounded sharply beside him in the warm autumnal dusk. "But if you lent me anything you oughtn't to lend me I would never speak to you again!"

Meryon gave a low whistle.

"My goodness! I shall have to mind my p's and q's. I don't know that I ought to have lent you 'Julie de Trecoeur' if it comes to that."

"Why not?" Hester turned her great, astonished eyes upon him. "One might as well not read Byron as not read that."

"Hm—I don't suppose you read all Byron."

He threw her an audacious look.

"As much as I want to," she said, indifferently. "Why aren't you in Scotland?"

"Because I had to go to London instead. Beastly nuisance! But there was some business I couldn't get out of."

"Debts?" she said, raising her eyebrows.

The self-possession of this child of eighteen was really amazing. Not a trace in her manner of timidity or tremor. In spite of her flight from him he could not flatter himself that he had made any impression on her nerves. Whereas her beauty and her provocative way were beginning to tell deeply on his own.

"Well, I daresay!" His laugh was as frank as her question. "I'm generally in straits."

"Why don't you do some work, and earn money?" she asked him, frowning.

"Frankly—because I dislike work."

"Then why did you write a play?"

"Because it amused me. But if it had been acted and made money, and I had had to write another, that would have been work; and I should probably have loathed it."

"That I don't believe," she said, shaking her head. "One can always do what succeeds. It's like pouring petrol into the motor."

"So you think I'm only idle because I'm a failure?" he asked her, his tone betraying a certain irritation.

"I wonder why you are idle—and why you are a failure?" she said, turning upon him a pair of considering eyes.

"Take care, Mademoiselle!" he said, gasping a little. "I don't know why you allow yourself these franchises!"

"Because I am interested in you—rather. Why won't the neighbourhood call on you—why do you have disreputable people to stay with you? It is all so foolish!" she said, with childish and yet passionate emphasis. "You needn't do it!"

Meryon had turned rather white.

"When you grow a little older," he said severely, "you will know better than to believe all the gossip you hear. I choose the friends that suit me—and the life too. My friends are mostly artists and actors—they are quite content to be excluded from Upcote society—so am I. I don't gather you are altogether in love with it yourself."

He looked at her mockingly.

"If it were only Sarah—or mamma," she said doubtfully.

"You mean I suppose that Meynell—your precious guardian—my very amiable cousin—allows himself to make all kinds of impertinent statements about me. Well, you'll understand some day that there's no such bad judge of men as a clergyman. When he's not ignorant he's prejudiced—and when he's not prejudiced he's ignorant."

A sudden remorse swelled in Hester's mind.

"He's not prejudiced!—he's not ignorant! How strange that you and he should be cousins!"

"Well, we do happen to be cousins. And I've no doubt that you would like me to resemble him. Unfortunately I can't accommodate you. If I am to take a relation for a model, I prefer a very different sort of person—the man from whom I inherited Sandford. But Richard, I am sure, never approved of him either."

"Who was he?—I never heard of him." And, with the words, Hester carelessly turned her head to look at a squirrel that had run across the glade and was now peeping at the pair from the first fork of an oak tree.

"My uncle? Well, he was an awfully fine fellow—whatever Meynell may say. If the Abbey wasn't taboo, I could show you a portrait of him there—by a Frenchman—that's a superb thing. He was the best fencer in England—and one of the best shots. He had a beautiful voice—he could write—he could do anything he pleased. Of course he got into scrapes—such men do—and if Richard ever talked to you about him, of course he'd crab him. All the same, if one must be like one's relations—which is, of course, quite unnecessary—I should prefer to take after Neville than after Richard."

"What was his name?"

"Neville—Sir Neville Flood." Hester looked puzzled.

"Well!—if you want the whole genealogical tree, here it is: There was a certain Ralph Flood, my grandfather, an old hunting squire, a regular bad lot! Oh! I can tell you the family history doesn't give me much chance! He came from Lincolnshire originally, having made the county there too hot to hold him, and bought the Abbey, which he meant to restore and never did. He worried his wife into her grave, and she left him three children: Neville, who succeeded his father; and two daughters—Meynell's mother, who was a good deal older than Neville and married Colonel Meynell, as he was then; and my mother, who was much the youngest, and died three years ago. She was Neville's favourite sister, and as he knew Richard didn't want the Abbey, he left it to me. A precious white elephant—not worth a fiver to anybody. I was only thirteen when Neville was drowned—"

"Drowned?"

Meryon explained that Neville Flood had lost his life in a storm on an Irish lough; a queer business, which no one had ever quite got to the bottom of. Many people had talked of suicide. There was no doubt he was in very low spirits just before it happened. He was unhappily married, mainly through his own fault. His wife could certainly have got a divorce from him if she had applied for it. But very soon after she separated from Flood she became a Catholic, and nothing would induce her to divorce him. And against her there was never a breath. It was said of course that he was in love with some one else, and broken-hearted that his wife refused to lend herself to a divorce. But nobody knew anything.

"And, by Jove, I wonder why I'm telling you all these shady tales. You oughtn't to know anything about such things," Meryon broke off suddenly.

Hester's beautiful mouth made a scornful movement.

"I'm not a baby—and I intend to know what's true. I should like to see that picture."

"What—of my Uncle Neville?"

Meryon eyed her curiously, as they strolled on through the arched green of the woodland. Every now and then there were openings through which poured a fiery sun, illuminating Hester's face and form.

"Do you know"—he said at last—"there is an uncommonly queer likeness between you and that picture?"

"Me?" Hester opened her eyes in half-indifferent astonishment. "People say such absurd things. Heaps of people think I am like Uncle Richard—not complimentary, is it? I hope his uncle was better looking. And, anyway, I am no relation of either of them."

"Neville and Richard were often mistaken for one another—though Neville was a deal handsomer than old Richard. However, nobody can account for likenesses. If you come to think of it, we are all descended from a small number of people. But it has often struck me—" He looked at her again attentively. "The setting of the ear—and the upper lip—and the shape of the brow—I shall bring you a photograph of the picture."

"What does it matter!" said Hester impatiently. "Besides, I am going away directly—to Paris."

"To Paris!—why and wherefore?"

"To improve my French—and"—she turned and looked at him in the face, laughing—"to make sure I don't go walks with you!"

He was silent a moment, twisting his lip.

"When do you go?"

"In a week or two—when there's room for me."

He laughed.

"Oh! come then—there's time for a few more talks. Listen—you think I'm such an idle dog. I'm nothing of the sort. I've nearly finished a whole new play. Only—well, I couldn't talk to you about it—it's not a play for jeunes filles. But after all I might read you a few scenes. That wouldn't do any harm. You're so deuced clever!—your opinion would be worth having. I can tell you the managers are all after it! I'm getting letters by every post asking for parts. What do you say? Can you meet me somewhere? I'll choose some of the best bits. Just name your time!"

Her face had kindled, answering to the vivacity—the peremptoriness—in his. Her vanity was flattered at last; and he saw it.

"Send me a word!" he said under his breath. "That little schoolroom maid—is she safe?"

"Quite!" said Hester, also under her breath, and smiling.

"You beautiful creature!" he spoke with low intensity. "You lovely, wild thing!"

"Take care!" Hester sprang away from him as he put out an incautious hand. "Come, Roddy! Goodnight!"

In a flash the gloom of the wood closed upon her, and she was gone.

Meryon walked on laughing to himself, and twisting his black moustache. After some years of bad company and easy conquests, Hester's proud grace, her reckless beauty, her independent, satiric ways had sent a new stimulus through jaded nerves. Had he met her in London on equal terms with other men he knew instinctively that he would have had but small chance with her. It was the circumstances of this quiet country place, where young men of Hester's class were the rarest of apparitions, and where Philip, flying from his creditors and playing the part of a needy Don Juan amid the picturesque dilapidations of the Abbey, was gravelled day after day for lack of occupation—it was these surroundings that had made the flirtation possible. Well, she was a handsome daredevil little minx. It amused him to make love to her, and in spite of his parsonical cousin, he should continue to do so. And that the proceeding annoyed Richard Meynell made it not less, but more, enticing. Parsons, cousins or no, must be kept in their place.

Hester ran home, a new laugh on her lip, and a new red on her cheek. Several persons turned to look at her in the village street, but she took no notice of any one till, just as she was nearing the Cowroast, she saw groups round the door of the little inn, and a stream of men coming out. Among them she perceived the Rector. He no sooner saw her than with an evident start he altered his course and came up to her.

"Where have you been, Hester?"

She chose to be offended by the inquiry, and answered pettishly that for once she had been out by herself without a keeper. He took no notice of her tone, and walked on beside her, his eyes on the ground. Presently she wondered whether he had heard her reply at all, he was so evidently thinking of something else. In her turn she began to ask questions.

"What's happening in the village? Why are those people coming out of the Cowroast?"

"There's been an inquest there."

"On that old woman who was once a servant of ours?"

The Rector looked up quickly.

"Who told you anything about her?"

"Oh, Sarah heard from Tibbald—trust him for gossip! Was she off her head?"

"She died of disease of the brain. They found her dead in her bed."

"Well, why shouldn't she? An excellent way to die! Good night, Uncle Richard—good night! You go too slow for me."

She walked away with a defiant air, intended to show him that he was in her black books. He stood a moment looking after her, compunction and sad affection in his kind eyes.



CHAPTER VIII

Meanwhile, for Catharine Elsmere and Mary these days of early autumn were passing in a profound external quiet which bore but small relation to the mental history of mother and daughter.

The tranquillity indeed of the little water-locked cottage was complete. Mrs. Flaxman at the big house took all the social brunt upon herself. She set no limit to her own calls, or to her readiness to be called upon. The Flaxman dinner and tennis parties were soon an institution in the neighbourhood; and the distinguished persons who gathered at Maudeley for the Flaxman week-ends shed a reflected lustre on Upcote itself. But Rose Flaxman stoutly protected her widowed sister. Mrs. Elsmere was delicate and in need of rest; she was not to be expected to take part in any social junketings, and callers were quite plainly warned off.

For all of which Catharine Elsmere was grateful to a younger sister, grotesquely unlike herself in temperament and character, yet brought steadily closer to her by the mere passage of life. Rose was an artist and an optimist. In her youth she had been an eager and exquisite musician; in her middle life she was a loving and a happy woman, though she too had known a tragic moment in her first youth. Catharine, her elder by some years, still maintained, beneath an exquisite refinement, the strong north-country characteristics of the Westmoreland family to which the sisters belonged. Her father had been an Evangelical scholar and headmaster; the one slip of learning in a rude and primitive race. She had been trained by him; and in spite of her seven years of married life beside a nature so plastic and sensitive as Elsmere's, and of her passionate love for her husband, it was the early influences on her character which had in the end proved the more enduring.

For years past she had spent herself in missionary work for the Church, in London; and though for Robert's sake she had maintained for long a slender connection that no one misunderstood with the New Brotherhood, the slow effect of his withdrawal from her life made itself inevitably felt. She stiffened and narrowed intellectually; while for all sinners and sufferers, within the lines of sympathy she gradually traced out for herself, she would have willingly given her body to be burned, so strong was the Franciscan thirst in her for the self-effacement and self-sacrifice that belong to the Christian ideal, carried to intensity.

So long as Mary was a child, her claim upon her mother had to some extent balanced the claims of what many might have thought a devastating and depersonalizing charity. Catharine was a tender though an austere mother; she became and deserved to become the idol of her daughter. But as Mary grew up she was drawn inevitably into her mother's activities; and Catharine, in the blindness of her ascetic faith, might have injured the whole spring of the girl's youth by the tremendous strain thus put upon it by affection on the one hand and pity on the other.

Mercifully, perhaps, for them both, Catharine's nerve and strength suddenly gave way; and with them that abnormal exaltation and clearness of spiritual vision which had carried her through many sorrowing years. She entered upon a barren and darkened path; the Christian joy deserted her, and there were hours and days when little more than the Christian terrors remained. It was her perception of this which roused such a tender and desperate pity in Mary. Her mother's state fell short indeed of religious melancholy; but for a time it came within sight of it. Catharine dreaded to be found herself a castaway; and the memory of Robert's denials of the faith—magnified by her mental state, like trees in mist—had now become an ever-haunting misery which tortured her unspeakably. Her mind was possessed by the parables of judgment—the dividing of the sheep from the goats, the shutting of the door of salvation on those who had refused the heavenly offers, and by all those sayings of the early Church that make "faith" the only passport to eternal safety.

Her saner mind struggled in vain against what was partly a physical penalty for defied physical law. And Mary also, her devoted companion, whose life depended hour by hour on the aspects and changes of her mother, must needs be drawn within the shadow of Catharine's dumb and phantom-ridden pain. The pain itself was dumb, because it concerned the deepest feelings of a sternly reserved woman. But mingled with the pain were other matters—resentments, antagonisms—the expression of which often half consciously relieved it. She rose in rebellion against those sceptical and deadly forces of the modern world which had swept her beloved from the narrow way. She fled them for herself; she feared them for Mary, in whom she had very early divined the working of Robert's aptitudes and powers.

And now—by ill-fortune—a tired and suffering woman had no sooner found refuge and rest in the solitude of Forked Pond than, thanks partly to the Flaxmans' new friendship for Upcote's revolutionary parson, and partly to all the public signs, not to be escaped, of the commotion brewing in the diocese, and in England generally, the same agitations, the same troubles which had destroyed her happiness and peace of mind in the past, came clattering about her again.

Every one talked of them; every one took a passionate concern in them; the newspapers were full of them. The personality of Meynell, or that of the Bishop; the characters and motives of his opponents; the chances of the struggle—and the points on which it turned; even in the little solitary house between the waters Catharine could not escape them. The Bishop, too, was an old friend; before his promotion he had been the incumbent of a London parish in which Catharine had worked. She was no sooner settled at Forked Pond than he came to see her; and what more natural than he should speak of the anxieties weighing upon him to one so able to feel for them?

Then!—the first involuntary signs of Mary's interest in, Mary's sympathy with, the offender! In Catharine's mind a thousand latent terrors sprang at once to life. For a time—some weeks—she had succeeded in checking all developments. Invitations were refused; meetings were avoided. But gradually the situation changed. Points of contact began inevitably to multiply between Mary and the disturber of Christ's peace in Upcote. Mary's growing friendship for Alice Puttenham, her chance encounters with Meynell there, or in the village, or in the Flaxmans' drawing-room, were all distasteful and unwelcome to Catharine Elsmere. At least her Robert had sacrificed himself—had done the honest and honourable thing. But this man—wounding the Church from within—using the opportunities of the Church for the destruction of the Church—who would make excuses for such a combatant?

And the more keenly she became aware of the widening gulf between her thoughts and Mary's—of Mary's involuntary, instinctive sympathy with the enemy—the greater was her alarm.

For the first time in all her strenuous, self-devoted life she would sometimes make much of her physical weakness in these summer days, so as to keep Mary with her, to prevent her from becoming more closely acquainted with Meynell and Meynell's ideas. And in fact this new anxiety interfered with her recovery; she had only to let herself be ill, and ill most genuinely she was.

Mary understood it all, and submitted. Her mother's fears were indeed amply justified! Mary's secret mind was becoming absorbed, from a distance, in Meynell's campaign; Meynell's personality, through all hindrance and difficulty—nay, perhaps, because of them—was gradually seizing upon and mastering her own; and processes of thought that, so long as she and her mother were, so to speak, alone in the world together, were still immature and potential, grew apace. The woods and glades of Maudeley, the village street, the field paths, began to be for her places of magic, whence at any moment might spring flowers of joy known to her alone. To see him pass at a distance, to come across him in a miner's cottage, or in Miss Puttenham's drawing-room—these rare occasions were to her the events of the summer weeks. Nevertheless, when September arrived, she had long since forbidden herself to hope for anything more.

Meanwhile, Rose Flaxman was the only person who ever ventured to feel and show the irritation of the natural woman toward her sister's idiosyncrasies.

"Do for heaven's sake stop her reading these books!" she said impatiently one evening to Mary, when she had taken leave of Catharine, and her niece was strolling back with her toward Maudeley.

"What books?"

"Why, lives of bishops and deans and that kind of thing! I never come but I find a pile of them beside her. It should be made absolutely illegal to write the life of a clergyman! My dear, your mother would be well in a week if we could only stop it and put her on a course of Gaboriau!"

Mary smiled rather sadly.

"They seem to be the only things that interest her now."

"What, the deans? I know. It's intolerable. She went to speak to the postman just now while I was with her, and I looked at the book she had been reading with her mark in it. I should like to have thrown it into the pond! Some tiresome canon or other writing to a friend about Eternal Punishment. What does he know about it? I should like to ask! I declare I hope he may know something more about it some day! There was your mother as white as her ruffles, with dark lines under her eyes. I tell you clerical intimidation should be made a punishable offence. It's just as bad as any other!"

Mary let her run on. She moved silently along the grassy path, her pretty head bent, her hands clasped behind her. And presently her aunt resumed: "And the strange thing is, my dear, saving your presence—that your beloved mother is quite lax in some directions, while she is so strict in others. I never can make her pay the smallest attention to the things I tell her about Philip Meryon, for instance, that Hugh tells me. 'Poor fellow!' she always calls him, as though his abominable ways were like the measles—something you couldn't help. And as for that wild minx Hester!—she has positively taken a fancy to her. It reminds me of what an old priest said to me once in Rome—'Sins, madame!—the only sins that matter are those of the intellect!' There!—send me off—before I say any more inconvenances!"

Mary waved farewell to her vivacious aunt, and walked slowly back to the cottage. She was conscious of inner smart and pain; conscious also for the first time of a critical mind toward the mother whose will had been the law of her life. It was not that she claimed anything for herself; but she claimed justice for a man misread.

"If they could only know each other!"—she found herself saying at last aloud—with an impetuous energy; and then, with a swift return upon herself—"Mother, darling!—mother, who has no one in the world—but me!"

As the words escaped her, she came in sight of the cottage, and saw that her mother was sitting in her usual place beside the water. Catharine's hands were resting on a newspaper they had evidently just put down, and she was gazing absently across the lights and shadows, the limpid blues and browns of the tree-locked pool before her.

Mary came to sit on the grass beside her.

"Have you been reading, dearest?"

But as she spoke she saw, with discomfort, that the newspaper on her mother's knee was the Church Guardian, in which a lively correspondence on the subject of Meynell and the Modernist Movement generally was at the moment proceeding.

"Yes, I have been reading," said Catharine slowly—"and I have been very sad."

"Then I wish you wouldn't read!" cried Mary, kissing her hand. "I should like to burn all the newspapers!"

"What good would that do?" said Catharine, trying to smile. "I have been reading Bishop Craye's letter to the Guardian. Poor Bishop!—what a cruel, cruel position!"

The words were spoken with a subdued but passionate energy, and when Mrs. Elsmere perceived that Mary made no reply, her hand slipped out of her daughter's.

There was silence for a little, broken by Catharine, speaking with the same quiet vehemence:

"I cannot understand how you, Mary, or any one else can defend what this man—Mr. Meynell—is doing. If he cannot agree with the Church, let him leave it. But to stay in it—giving this scandal—and this offence—"