"All?"

"All, except the sunshine, bathing everything, soaking you through and through."

"But there is not always sunshine? It must be sometimes night?" argues Lessie, a little peevishly.

"There are deep violet nights, full of great white stars," Lynette answers. "There are storms of dust and rain, lightning and thunder, such as are only read of here.... There are plots, conspiracies, raids, robberies, murders, slumps and losses, plagues and massacres. There are rebellions of white men, and native risings. There have been wars; there is war to-day, and there will be war again in the days that are yet to come!"

She has almost forgotten the little woman beside her, staring at her with big, brown, rather animal eyes. Now she turns to her with her rare and lovely smile:

"The war that is going on now began at the little village-town where I was a Convent schoolgirl. We were shut for months within the lines. But, of course, you have read the newspaper accounts of the Siege of Gueldersdorp? I am only telling you what you know!"

Lessie laughs, and the laugh has the hard, unpleasant, mirthless little tinkle of a toy dog's collar-bell, or bits of crushed ice rattled in a champagne-glass.

"What I have good reason to know!"

Her podgy, jewelled hands are clenching and unclenching in her heliotrope chiffon lap; there is a well-defined scowl between the black arched eyebrows, and the murky light of battle gleams in the eyes that no longer languish between their bistred eyelids as she scans the pure pale face under the sweep of her heavily blackened lashes. She would almost give the ruby buttons out of her ears to see it wince and quiver, and crimson into angry blushes. And yet Lessie is rather amiable than otherwise in her attitude towards other women. True, she has never before met one who had the insolence to pity her to her face.

"So quite too interesting!" she says, with an exaggerated affectation of amiability, and in high, fashionable accents, "you having been at Gueldersdorp through the Siege and all. Were you ever—I suppose you must have been sometimes—shot at with a gun?"

The faintest quiver of a smile comes over the lovely face her grudging eyes are trying to find a flaw in.

"Often when I have been crossing the veld between the town and the Hospital, the Mauser bullets have hummed past like bees, or raised little spurts of dust close by my feet where they had hit the ground. And once a shell burst close to us, and a splinter knocked off my hat and tore a corner of her veil——"

"Weren't you in a petrified fright?" demands Lessie.

"I was with her!"

"Who was she?"

A swift change of sudden, quickening, poignant emotion passes over the still face. A sudden swelling of the white throat, a rising mist in the golden eyes, suggests to Lessie that she has been fortunate enough to touch upon a painful subject, and that possibly this presumptuous young woman who has pitied a Viscountess may be going to cry! But Lynette drives back the tears.

"She was the Reverend Mother, the Mother-Superior of the Convent where I lived at Gueldersdorp."

"Where is she now?"

"She is with God."

"With——"

Lessie is oddly nonplussed by the calm, direct answer. People who talk in that strangely familiar way of—of subjects that properly belong to parsons are rare in her world. She hastens to put her next question.

"Was yours the only Convent in Gueldersdorp where young ladies were taught?"

"It is the only Convent there."

"Did you know—among the pupils—a young person by the name of Mildare?"

There is such concentrated essence of spite in Lessie's utterance of the name, that Lynette winces a little, and the faint, sweet colour rises in her cheeks.

"I—know her, certainly; as far as one can be said to know oneself. My unmarried name was Mildare."

"You—don't say so! Lord, how funny!"

The seagulls fishing in the shallows beyond the foam-line, rise up affrighted by the shrill peal of triumphant laughter with which Lessie makes her discovery.

"Ha, ha, ha! Talk of a situation!... On the boards I've never seen one to touch it!" She jumps from the boulder, with more bounce than dignity, dropping the red umbrella and the jewelled card-case, and, extending in one pudgy ringed hand a highly-glazed and coroneted card, "Permit me to introduce myself," she says through set teeth, smiling rancorously. "My professional name, as I have had the honour and pleasure of explaining to you, is Lessie Lavigne, but in private"—the dignity of the speaker's tone is marred by its extreme huffiness—"in private I am Lady Beauvayse."

As Lynette looks in the painted, angry, piquante face she is more than ever conscious of that feeling of antagonism. Then her eyes, turning from it, encounter the cherub rosily sleeping on embroidered pillows, and a rush of blood colours her to the hair. His child—his child by the dancer—this dimpled creature she has clasped and kissed! The icy, tinkling giggle of the mother breaks in upon the thought.

"Of all the queer situations I ever struck, I do call this the queerest! Me, meeting you like this, and both of us getting quite pally! All over Baby, too!... Lord! isn't it enough to make you die? Don't mind me being a bit hysterical!" Lady Beauvayse dabs her tearful eyes with a cobwebby square of laced cambric. "It'll be over in a sec. And then, Miss Mildare—I beg pardon—Mrs. Saxham—you and me will have it out!"

"I am afraid I must be going." Lynette rises, and stands beside Lessie, looking down in painful hesitation at the blinking, reddened eyelids and the working mouth. "I have guests waiting for me at the Plas. And would it not be wise of you to go home and lie down?"

The words, for some obscure reason or other, convey an intolerable sting. Lessie jumps in her buckled Louis Quinze shoes, wheels, and confronts her newly-discovered enemy with glaring eyes.

"Go home ... lie down!" she shrieks, so shrilly that the sleeping cherub awakens, and adds her frightened roars to the clamour that scares the gulls. "If I had lain down and gone to my long home eighteen months ago, when you were cooped up in Gueldersdorp with my husband, it would have suited you both down to the ground!" She turns, with a stamp of her imperious little foot, upon the scared nurse, who is vainly endeavouring to still Baby. "Take her away! Carry her out of hearing! Do what you're told, you silly fool!" she orders. "And you"—she wheels again upon Lynette, her wistarias nodding, her chains and bangles clanking—"why do you stand there, like a white deer in a park—like an image cut out of ivory? Don't you understand that I, the woman you've pitied—my God! pitied, for singing and dancing on the public stage 'with so few clothes on'"—she savagely mimics the manner and tone—"I am the lawful wife of the man you tried to trap—the Right Honourable John Basil Edward Tobart!" The painted lips sneer savagely. "Beautiful Beau, who never went back on a man, or told the truth to a woman!—that's his character, and it pretty well sizes him up!"

Lessie stops, gasping and out of breath, the plump, jewelled hand clutching at her heaving bosom. The theatrical instinct in the daughter of the footlights has led her to work up the scene; but her rage of wounded love and jealousy is genuine enough, though not as real as the innocence in the eyes that meet hers, less poignant than the shame and indignation that drive the blood from those ivory cheeks.

"He married me on the strict QT at the Registrar's at Cookham," goes on Lessie, her painted mouth twisting, "a fortnight before he was ordered out on the Staff. We'd been friends for over a year. There was a child coming, since we're by way of being plain-spoken," says Lessie, picking up the prostrate red umbrella and the jewelled card-case, possibly to conceal a blush; "and he swore he'd never look at another woman, and write by every mail. And so he did at first, and I used to cry over the blooming piffle he put into his letters, and wish I'd been a straighter woman, for his sake. And then the Siege began, and the letters stopped coming, and I cried enough to spoil my voice, little thinking how my husband was playing the giddy bachelor thousands of miles away. And then came the news of the Relief, and despatches, saying that he"—her pretty face is distorted by the wry grimace of genuine anguish—"he was killed! And a month later I got a copy of a rotten Siege newspaper, sent me by I don't know who, and never shall, with a flowery paragraph in it, announcing his lordship's engagement to Miss Something Mildare. Oh! it was merry hell to know how he'd done me—me that worshipped the very ground he trod!... Me that had made a Judy of myself in crape and weepers—widow's weepers for the man that wished me dead!"

Her voice is thick with rage. Her face is convulsed. Her eyes are burning coals. She has never been so nearly a great actress, this meretricious little dancer and comedian, as in this moment when she forgets her art.

"Picture it, you!... Don't you fancy me in 'em? Don't you see me in my bedroom tearing 'em off?" She rends her flimsy cobweb of a handkerchief into tatters and spurns them from her. "So!... so!... that's what I did to 'em!" She snarls with a sudden access of tigerishness. "And if that white face of yours had been within reach of my ten fingers, I'd have ragged it into ribbons like the blooming fallals. Don't dare tell me you'd not have done the same! Perhaps, though, you wouldn't. You're a lady, born and bred," owns Lessie grudgingly, "and I was a jobbing tailor's kid, that worked to keep myself and other folks as a baby imp in Pantomime, while you were being coddled up and kept in cotton-wool!"

She ends with a husky laugh and a shrug of the shoulders. The swollen face with the wet eyes is averted, or Lessie might be roused to fresh resentment by the tenderness of pity that is dawning in Lynette's.

"You have suffered cruelly, Lady Beauvayse; but I was not knowingly or wilfully to blame. Please try to believe it!"

Lessie blows her small nose with a toot of incredulity, and says through an intervening wad of damp lace-edged cambric:

"Go on!"

"I met Lord Beauvayse out at Gueldersdorp." The voice that comes from Lynette's pale lips is singularly level and quiet. "He was very handsome and very brave; he was an officer of the Colonel's Staff. He asked me to marry him, and I—I believed him honourable and true, and I said, 'Yes.' ... That was one Sunday, when we were sitting by the river. On Thursday he was killed, and later—nearly a year after my marriage to Dr. Saxham—I found out the truth."

Lessie shrugs her pretty shoulders, but the face and voice of the speaker have brought conviction. She realises that if she has been injured, her rival has suffered equal wrong.

"You were pretty quick in taking on another man, it strikes me. But that's not my business. You say you found out?" She shows her admirably preserved teeth in a little grin of sardonic contempt—"nearly a year after your marriage. Don't tell me your husband let you go on burning joss-sticks to Beau's angelic memory when he might have made you spit on it by telling you the truth!"

Lynette's lip curls, and she lifts her little head proudly.

"He never once hinted at the truth. Nor was it through him I learned it!"

"Ought to be kept under glass, then," comments Lessie, "as a model husband. Now, my poor——"

Lynette interrupts, with angry emphasis:

"I will not hear Dr. Saxham mentioned in the same breath with Lord Beauvayse!"

"He's dead—let him be!" Beau's widow snarls, her mouth twisting. Yet in the same breath, with another of the mental pirouettes characteristic of her class and type, she adds: "Do you suppose I don't know my own husband? Take him one way with another, you might have sifted the world for liars, and never found the equal of Beau."

She gathers up the red umbrella and the jewelled card-case with reviving briskness, and shakes out her crumpled chiffons in the bright hot sun.

"Me and Baby are leaving to-morrow. I don't suppose we're likely ever to come across you again. Good-bye! I forgive you for pitying me," she says frankly, holding out the plump, over-jewelled hand. "As for the other grudge.... What, are you going to kiss me?... Give Baby another before you go, dear ... and ... forgive him when you can!"



LXXI

Lynette sat still upon the boulder, thinking, long after the red umbrella had departed. While it was yet visible in the white-hot distance, hovering like some gaudy Brobdingnagian butterfly in advance of the white perambulator pushed by the white-clad nurse, the heads of two little shabbyish, youngish people of the unmistakable Cockney tourist type rose over the edge of a pale sand-crest, fringed with wild chamomile and blazing poppies. And the female, a small draggled young woman in a large hat, trimmed with fatigued and dusty peonies, called out excitedly:

"Oh, William, it's 'er—it's 'er!"

"By Cripps, so it is!" came from the male companion of the battered peonies. He advanced with a swagger that was the unconvincing mask of diffidence assumed by an undersized, lean young man, in the chauffeur's doubtful-weather panoply of black waterproof jacket, breeches merging into knee-boots, the whole crowned with a portentous peaked cap, with absurd brass ventilators, and powdered with many thicknesses and shades of dust. His hair was dusty. The very eyelashes of the honest, ugly light eyes, set wide apart in the thin wedge-shaped, tanned face that the absurd cap shaded, were dusty as a miller's; dust lay thick in all the chinks and creases of his leading features, and a large black smudge of oily grime was upon his wide upper lip, impinging upon his nose. Nor was his companion much less dusty, though the checks of a travelling ulster of green and yellow plaid, adorned with huge steel buttons, would have advertised the Kentish Town Ladies' Drapery Establishment whence they emanated, through the medium of a Fleet Street fog.

"Might we speak to you, ma'am?" The dusty young man respectfully touched the dusty peak of the cap with brass ventilators, and, with a shock of surprise, Lynette recognised Saxham's chauffeur.

"Keyse!... It is Keyse!" She looked at him in surprise.

"Keyse, ma'am." He touched the cap again, and made a not ungraceful gesture, indicating the wearer of the weather-beaten peonies and the green-and-yellow ulster, who clung to his thin elbow with a red, hard-working hand. "Me an' my wife, that is. Bein' on a sort of outin', a kind of Beanfeast for Two, we took the notion, being stryngers to South Wyles, of droppin' in 'ere an' tippin' the 'Ow Do." He breathed hard, and rivulets of perspiration began to trickle down from under the preposterous cap, converting the dust that filled the haggard lines of his thin face into mud. "An' payin' our respects." His eye slewed appealingly at his companion, asking as plainly as an eye can, "What price that?" And the glance that shot back from the dusty shadow of the exhausted peonies answered, "Not bad by 'arf—for you!"

Lynette smiled at the little Cockney couple. The surprise that had checked the beating of her heart had passed. It was pleasant to see these faces from Harley Street. She answered:

"I understand. My husband has given you a holiday. Is he well?" She flushed, realising that it was pain to have to ask others for the news of him that he had denied her. "I mean because he has not written.... I have been feeling rather anxious. Was he quite well when you left?"

"'Was he——'? Yes, 'm!" W. Keyse shot out the affirmative with such explosive suddenness that the hand upon his arm must have nipped hard.

"I am so glad!" Lynette turned to the young woman in the ulster, whose face betrayed no guilty knowledge of the pinch. She was small, and pale, and gritty, and her blue eyes had red rims to them from the fatigue of the journey, or some other cause. But they were honest and clear, and not unpretty eyes, looking out from a forest of dusty yellowish fringe, deplorably out of curl. Yet a fringe that had associations for Lynette, reaching a long way from Harley Street, and back to the old days at Gueldersdorp before the Siege.

"Surely I know you? I must have known you at Gueldersdorp." She added as Mrs. Keyse's eyes said "Yes": "You used to be a housemaid at the Convent. How strange that I should not have remembered it until now! And your husband.... I do not remember ever having seen him before he came to us at Harley Street. But his name comes back to me in connection with a letter"—she knitted her brows, chasing the vague, fleeting memory—"a love-letter that was sent to Miss Du Taine inside a chocolate-box, just when school was breaking up. It was you who smuggled the box in!"

"To oblige, bein' begged to by Keyse as a fyvour. 'E didn't know 'is own mind—them d'ys!" explained Mrs. Keyse, sweeping her husband's scorching countenance with a glance of withering scorn.

"Nor did you," retorted W. Keyse, stung to defiance. "Walkin' out with a Dopper you was—if it comes to that." He spun round, mid-ankle deep in sand, to finish. "An' you'd 'ave bin joined by a Dutch dodger and settled down on a Vaal sheep-farm, if the order 'adn't come 'ummin' along the wire from 'Eadquarters that said, 'Jane 'Arris, you're to 'ave this bloke, and no other. Till Death do you part. Everlasting—Amen!'"

There was so strong a flavour of Church about the final sentence that Mrs. Keyse could not keep admiration out of her eyes.

Her own eyes dancing with mirthful amusement, Lynette looked from one to the other of the unexpected visitors, and, tactfully changing the subject of the conversation, hoped that they were enjoying their trip?—a query which so obviously failed to evoke an expression of pleased assent in either of the small, thin, wearied faces that she hastened to add:

"But perhaps this is the very beginning of your holiday? When did you leave London?"

"Yes'dy mornin' at 'arf-past six," said W. Keyse, carefully avoiding her eyes. A spasm contracted the tired face under the dusty peonies. Their wearer put her hand to the collar of the green-and-yellow ulster, and undid a button there.

"'Yesterday morning at half-past six'!" Lynette repeated in wonder.

"An' if the machine I 'ad on 'ire from a pal o' mine—chap what keeps a second-hand shop for 'em in the Portland Road—'adn't 'ad everythink 'appen to 'er wot can 'appen to a three-an'-a-'arf 'orse-power Baby Junot wot 'ad seen 'er best d'ys before automobilin' 'ad cut its front teeth," said W. Keyse, with bitterness, "we would 'ave bin 'ere before! As it is, we've left the car at a little 'Temperance Tavern' in S'rewsbury, kep' by a Methodist widder, 'oo thinks such new-fangled inventions sinful—an' only consented to take charge on account o' the Prophet Elijer a-going up to 'Eaven in a fiery chariot—an' come on 'ere by tryne."

Lynette looked at the man in silence. She even repeated after him, rather dully:

"You came on here—by train?"

"Slow Parliamentary—stoppin' at every 'arf-dozen stytions," explained W. Keyse, "for collectors in velveteens and Scotch caps to ask for tickets, plyse? And but that the porter on the 'Erion Down Platform 'ad see you walkin' on the Links, and my wife knoo your dress and the colour of your 'air 'arf a mile 'orf, we'd 'ave lost precious time in finding you, and giving you the—the message what we've come 'ere to bring!"

"From my husband? From Dr. Saxham?"

W. Keyse shifted from one foot to the other, and coughed an embarrassed cough.

"Not exac'ly from Dr. Saxham."

Lynette looked at W. Keyse, and it seemed to her that the little sallow Cockney face had Fate in it. A sudden terror whitened her to the lips. She cried out in a voice that had lost all its sweetness:

"You have deceived me in saying he was well. Something has happened to him! He is very ill, or——?"

She could not utter the word. Instinctively her eyes went past the stammering man to the woman who hung behind his elbow. And the wearer of the nodding peonies cried out:

"No, no! The Doctor isn't dead—or ill, to call ill!" She turned angrily upon her husband. "See wot a turn you've give 'er," she snapped. "Why couldn't you up and speak out?"

W. Keyse was plainly nonplussed. He took off the giant cap with the brass ventilators, and turned it round and round, looking carefully inside it. But he found no eloquence therein.

"Why did I bring a skirt, I arsk, if I'm to do the patter?" He addressed himself in an audible aside to Mrs. Keyse. "You might as well 'ave stopped at 'ome with the nipper," he added, complainingly, "if I ain't to 'ave no better 'elp than this!"

"You mean kindly, I know." Lynette tried to smile in saying it. "There is trouble that you are here to break to me; I understand that very well. Please tell me without delay, plainly what has happened? I am very—strong! I shall not faint—if that is what you are afraid of?"

She caught her breath, for the woman broke out into dry sobbing and cried out wildly:

"Oh, come back to 'im! Come back, if you're a woman! Gawd, Who made 'im, knows as 'ow 'e can't bear no more! Oh! if my 'art's so wrung by what I've seen him suffer, think what he's bore these crooil weeks an' months!"

The peonies rocked in the gale of Emigration Jane's emotion. Her hard-worked hands went out, entreating for him; her dowdy little figure seemed to grow tall, so impressive was the earnestness of her appeal.

"Him and you are toffs, and me and Keyse are common folks.... Flesh and blood's the syme, though, only covered wiv different skins. An' Human Nature's Human Nature, 'owever you fake 'er up an' christen 'er! An' Love must 'ave give an' take of Love, or else Love's got to die! Burn a lamp wivout oil, and see wot 'appens. It goes out!—You're left in the dark!"—Her homely gesture, illustrating the homely analogy, seemed to bring down blackness. Lynette hung speechless upon her fateful lips.

"—Then, like as not, you'll overturn the table gropin'. 'Smashed!' you'll say, 'an' nobody but silly me to blyme! It would 'ave lighted up a 'appy 'ome if I 'adn't been a barmy idiot. It would 'ave showed me the face of my 'usband leanin' to kiss me in our blessed marriage-bed, an' my baby smilin' in its cradle-sleep 'ard by.... Oh!—Oh!"—She choked and clutched her bosom, and her voice rose in the throaty screech of incipient hysteria—"An' I've left my own sweet, unweaned boy to come and say these words to you!... An' the darlin' darlin' fightin' with the bottle they're tryin' to give 'im, and roarin' for 'is mam.... And my breasts as 'ard as stones, an' throbbin'!... Gawd 'elp me!" She panted and fought and choked, striving for speech.

"Keep your hair on!" advised W. Keyse in a hoarse whisper. She turned on him like a tigress, her eyes flaming under her straightened fringe.

"Keep yours! I've come to speak, and speak I mean to—for the sake of the best man Gawd's made for a 'undred years. Bar one, you says, but bar none, says I, an' charnce it! Since the day 'e stood up for you in that Dutch saloon-bar at Gueldersdorp, what is there we don't owe to 'im—you and me, and all the blooming crew of us? And because 'e'll tyke no thanks, 'e gits ingratitude—the dirtiest egg the Devil ever hatched!"

"Cripps!" gasped W. Keyse, awe-stricken by this lofty flight of rhetoric. Ignoring him, she pursued her way.

"You're a beautiful young lydy"—her tone softened from its strenuous pitch—"wot 'ave 'ad a disappyntment, like many of us 'ave at the start. You'd set your 'art on Another One. 'E got killed, an' you married the Doctor—but it's never bin no real marriage. You've ate 'is bread, as the sayin' is, an' give 'im a stone. An' e's beat 'is pore 'art to bloody rags agynst it—d'y after d'y, an' night after night! I seen it, I tell you!" she shrilled—"I seen it wiv me own eyes! You pretty, silly kid! Don't you know wot 'arm you're doing? You crooil byby! do you reckon Gawd gave you the man to torture an' break an' spoil?"

A hand, imperatively clapped over the mouth of Mrs. W. Keyse, stemmed the torrent of her eloquence.

"Dry up! You've said enough," ordered her spouse.

"Do not stop her!" Lynette said, without removing her fascinated eyes from the Pythoness. "Let her tell me everything that she has seen and knows."

"I seen the Doctor—many, many times," the woman went on, as W. Keyse reluctantly ungagged her, "watchin' Keyse and me in our poor 'ome-life together—with the eyes of a starvin' dog lookin' at a bone. You ought to know 'ow starvin' 'urts...." The strenuous voice soared and quivered. "You learned that at Gueldersdorp! Yet you can see your 'usband dyin' of 'unger, an' never put out your 'and! Dyin' for want of a kiss an' a bit o' cuddle—that's the kind o' dyin' I mean—dyin' for what Gawd gives to the very brutes He myde! Seems to you I talk low!... Well, there's nothink lower than Nature, An' She Goes As 'Igh As 'Eaven!" said Emigration Jane.

The wide, sweeping gesture with which the shabby little woman took in land and sea and sky was quite noble and inspiring to witness. And now the tears were running down her face, and her voice lost its raucous shrillness, and became plaintive, and even soft.

"I'm to tell you everythink I've seen, an' know about the Doctor.... I've seen 'im age, age, a bit more every d'y. I've seen 'im waste, waste, with loneliness and trouble—never turnin' bitter on accounts of it—never grudgin' 'elp that 'e could give to man or woman or kid. Late on the night you left 'ome I see 'im come up to your bedroom. 'E switched on the light. 'E forgot the blinds was up. 'E looked round, all 'aggard an' lost an' wild-like, before 'e dropped down cryin' beside the bed."

She sobbed, and dropped on her own knees in the sand among the prickly yellow dwarf roses, weeping quite wildly, and wringing her hands.

"The mornin' found 'im there. Six weeks ago that was; an' every night since then it's bin the syme gyme. Never the blinds left up since that first time, but always light, and his shadow moves about. An' in my bed I wake a-cryin' so, an' don't know which of 'em I'm cryin' for—the lonely shadow or the lonely man——"

She could not go on, and W. Keyse took up the tale.

"She's told you true. Maybe we'd never 'ave come but for the feelin' that things was workin' up to wot the pypers call a Domestic Tragedy. Or at the best the break-up of a 'Ome. That's wot my wife she kep' on stuffin' into me," said W. Keyse. "An'—strewth! when the Doctor sent for me an' pyde me orf ... full wages right on up to the end o' the year, an' the syme to Morris an' the 'ouse'old staff, tellin' us e's goin' on a voyage, I s'ys to 'er, 'It's come!'"

"On a voyage! Where?"

"Oh, carn't you guess?" cried the woman on the ground, desperately looking up with tragic eyes out of a swollen, tear-stained face.

A mist came before Lynette's vision, and a sudden tremor shook her like a reed. She swayed as though the ground had heaved beneath her, but she would not fall. She choked back the cry that had risen in her throat. This was the time to act, not the time to weep for him. She knelt an instant by the woman on the ground, put her arms round her, kissed her wet cheek, and then rose up, pale and calm and collected, saying to W. Keyse:

"Take her to the Plas. Ask for Mrs. Pugh, the housekeeper. She is to prepare a room for you; you are to breakfast, and rest all day, and return to London by the night mail. Good-bye! God bless you both! I was going to him to-night at latest.... I am going to him now.... Pray that he is alive when I reach him! But he will be. God is good!"

Her face was transfigured by the new light that shone in it. She was strong, salient, resourceful—no longer the shy willowy girl. She was moving from them with her long swift step, when W. Keyse recovered himself.

"'Old 'ard! Beg pardon, ma'am! but 'ave you the spondulics?" He blushed at her puzzled look, and amended: "'Ave you money enough upon you to pay the railway-fare?"



She lifted a little gold-netted purse attached to her neck-chain.

"Five pounds. My maid is to follow. You know Marie? You will let her travel with you?"

"Righto! But you'll want a wrap, coat or shawl, or somethink. Midnight before you gits in—if you catch this next up-Express.... Watto! Give us 'old o' this 'ere, Missus! You can 'ave mine instead."

"Please, no! I need nothing ... nothing!" She stayed his savage attack on the buttons of Mrs. Keyse's green-and-yellow ulster by holding out her watch. "How much time have I left to catch the up-Express?"

"Eight minutes. By Cripps! you'll 'ave to run for it."

She waved her white hand, and was gone, swiftly as a bird or a deer.

"They've signalled!" W. Keyse announced after a breathless interval, during which the slender flying figure grew smaller upon the straining sight. It vanished, and a thin, nearing screech announced the up-Express. His wife jumped up and clutched him.

"William! Suppose she's lost it!"

"Garn! No fear!" scoffed W. Keyse.

As he scoffed he was full of fear. They heard the clanking stoppage, the shrill whistle of departure. They looked breathlessly towards the green wood that fringed the cliff-base under the Castle head. The iron way ran through the belt of trees. The Express rushed through, broke roaring upon their unimpeded vision, devoured the gleaming line of metals that lay between wood and tunnel, and left them with the taste of cindery steam in their open mouths, and the memory of a white handkerchief waved at a carriage-window by a slender hand.

"It's a'right, old gal!" said W. Keyse, beaming. "Come on up to the 'ouse. I could do wiv a bit o' peck, an' I lay so could you. Lumme!" His triumphant face fell by the fraction of an inch. "What'll she do when she lands in 'ome, wivout a woman to git a cup o' tea for 'er? Or curl 'er 'air, or undo 'er st'yl'yoes an' things?"

"She'll do wot other young wimmen does under sim'lar circumstances," said Mrs. Keyse enigmatically. She added: "If she 'as luck, she'll 'ave a man for' er maid, an' if she 'as sense, she'll reckon the swop a good one!"



LXXII

Until the actual moment of their parting at Euston, Saxham had never fully realised the anguish of the last moment when Lynette's face should pass for ever out of his thirsting sight.

It was going.... He quickened his long strides to keep up with it. He must have called to her, for she came hurriedly to the corridor-window, her sweet cheeks suffused with lovely glowing colour, her sweet eyes shining, her small gloved hand held frankly out. He gripped it, uttered some incoherency—what, he could not remember—was shouted at by a porter with a greasy lamp-truck, cannoned heavily against a man with a basket of papers, awakened with a great pang to the knowledge that she was gone. And the great, bare, dirty, populous glass-hive of Euston, that has been the forcing-house of so many sorrowful partings, held another breaking heart.

In the days that followed he saw his private patients as usual, and operated upon a regular mid-week morning at St. Stephen's, whose senior surgeon had recently resigned. The rest of the time he spent in making his arrangements.

Sanely, logically, methodically, everything had been thought out. Major Wrynche was to be her guardian, co-trustee with Lord Castleclare, and executor of the Will. It left her, simply and unconditionally, everything of which Saxham was possessed. She would live with the Wrynches until she married again. His agents were instructed to find a tenant for the house, and privately a purchaser for the practice. They wrote to him of a client already found. Matters were progressing steadily. Very soon now the desired end.

His table-lamp burned through the nights as he made up his ledgers and settled his accounts. In leisure moments he read in the intolerable book of the Past. Of all its sorrows and failures, its frantic follies and its besotted sins. Memory omitted nothing. Not a blot upon those sordid pages was spared him. It was not possible for an instant to turn away his eyes. His mental clarity was unrelieved by weariness. No shadow dimmed the keen crystal of his brain. He was at tension, like a bowstring that is stretched continually. He realised this, thinking: "Presently I will cut the bow-string, and the bow shall have rest! Even if my once-boasted will-power reasserted itself—even if I rose triumphant for the second time, cured of my vile craving, I do not the less owe my debt to the woman I have married. I promised her that I would die rather than fail her. I failed her! There is no excuse!"



LXXIII

The West End pavements were shining wet. Belated cabs spun homewards with sleepy revellers. Neat motor-broughams slid between the kerbs and rounded corners at unrebuked excess-speeds, winking their blazing head-lights at drowsy policemen muffled in oilskin capes. On all these accustomed things the blue-white arc-lights shone.

The most belated of all the hansom cabs in London stopped at the door of the house in Harley Street as the narrow strip of sky between the grim, drab-faced houses began to be dappled with the leaden grey of dawn. A faint moon reeled northwards, hunted by sable shapes of screaming terror, pale Venus clinging to her tattered robe. The house was all black and silent, a dead face with blinded windows. Did Saxham wake behind them? Or did he sleep, not to wake again?

Lynette tried her latchkey. The unchained door swung backwards. She passed into the house silently, a tall, slender shape. A light was shining under the consulting-room door. Her heart leaped to greet it. She kissed her hand to it, and turned, moving noiselessly, and put up the chain of the hall-door. She felt for the switch of the electric light, and snapped it on.

She was jarred and aching and weary with her journey; but it was a very fair woman whom she saw reflected in the hall-mirror as she unpinned her hat and tossed it upon the hall-table, and passed on to the consulting-room door—a woman whose face was strange to herself, with that new fire, and decision, and strength of purpose in it; a woman with glowing roses of colour in her cheeks, and eager, shining eyes.

All through the long hours of the journey she had pictured him, her husband, bending over his work, sleeping in his chair, or in his bed. Yet behind these pictures was another image that started through their lines and colours dreadfully, persistently, and the image was that of a dead man. She thrust it from her for the hundredth time, as the door-handle yielded to her touch. She went into the room. Saxham was not there.

The lamp shed its circle of light upon the consulting-room writing-table. The armchair stood aside, as though hastily pushed back.... Signs of his recent presence were visible. The fireplace was heaped high with the ashes of burned papers; the acrid smell of their burning hung still on the close air.

She glanced back at the table. All its drawers stood open. Ledgers and case-books stood on it, neatly arrayed. A thick packet, heavily sealed, was addressed in Saxham's small, firm handwriting to Major Bingham Wrynche, Plas Bendigaid, Herion, South Wales. There were other letters in an orderly pile.

She glanced at the uppermost. It bore her own name. She took it and kissed it, and put it in her breast. There was an enclosure, heavy, and of oval shape. She wondered what it might be? As she did so, she looked at the letter hers had covered, and read what was written on the cover in the small, firm hand:

"'To the Coroner.' ... Merciful God!..."

The cry broke from her without her knowledge. The room rang with it as she turned and ran. With the nightmare-feeling of running up dream-stairs, of feeling nothing tangible under her footsteps, with the dreadful certainty that of all those crowding pictures of him seen through the long hours in the racing Express, only the one that she had not dared to look at was the real, true picture of Saxham now.

Higher, higher, in a series of swift rushes, she mounted like the dream-woman in her dream. From solid cubes of darkness to grey landing-glimmers. To the third-story bedroom that had never been done up. In the company of Little Miss Muffet, the Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds, and Georgy Porgy, would he be lying, cold and ghastly, with a wound across his throat?

But the room was unoccupied; the bed had not been slept in. Pale dawn peeping in at the corners of the scanty blinds assured her of that. Where might she find him? Where seek him?

Fool! said a voice within her; there is but one answer to such a question! Where has he gone night after night? Coward, you knew, and yet avoided!... What threshold has he crossed when the world was sleeping round him? By whose vacant pillow has his broken heart sought vain relief in tears?

She passed downstairs, gliding noiselessly over the thick carpets, and went into the room it had been his pleasure to furnish and decorate as his wife's boudoir. Its seashell pinkness was merged in darkness, faintly striped by the grey dawn-glimmer, but the door of the bedroom that opened from it was ajar. Light edged the heavy fold of the portiere curtain and made a pool upon the carpet. She held her breath as she stole to the door, and, trembling, looked in. He was there, kneeling by the bed. His heavily-shouldered black figure made a blotch upon the dainty white and azure draperies; his arms were outflung upon the silken counterpane.

A rush of thanks sprang from her full heart to Heaven as she heard the heavy sighing breaths that proved him living yet.

She would have gone to him and touched him then, but the sound of his voice took courage from her, and drew her strength away. He spoke, lifting his face to the ivory Crucifix that hung upon the wall above the bed-head. It was a voice of groanings rather than the quiet voice with which she was familiar. She comprehended that a soul in mortal anguish was speaking aloud to God.

"I cannot live!" groaned Saxham. "I am weary, body and spirit. What I have borne I have borne in the hope of laying my burden down. Everything is ready! I have cleared the way; my loins are girded for departure. All I asked was to lie down in the earth and wake again no more. All I asked—and what happens? My dead faith quickens again in me. I must bow my neck once more to the yoke of the Inconceivable! I must perforce believe in Thee again! I hear the voice of the pale thorn-crowned Victim, saying, 'I am Thy God who lived and suffered and died for thee! Live on, then, and suffer also, and pass to the Life Eternal when thine hour comes!' O God!—my God! have I not earned deliverance? Have I not borne anguish enough?"

His fierce, upbraiding voice died out in inarticulate mutterings. His head fell forwards upon his arms. Presently he lifted it, and cried out, as if replying to some unseen speaker:

"If a self-sought death entails eternal torment, am I not in hell here upon earth? How else, when to live is to hold her in bondage, knowing that she longs and pines to be free? And yet, to go out into the dark and leave her! never again to see her! never more to feel the light of her eyes flow into me! Never to hear her voice—to be of my own deed separate from her throughout Eternity—that were of all the Judgments that are Thine to scourge with the most terrible that Thou couldst lay upon my soul!"

A sob tore him. He moaned out brokenly:

"Give me a sign, if Thou art indeed merciful! Show me that there is relenting in Thee! Grant me the hope, at least, that my great renunciation may open a gate by which, after cycles of expiatory suffering, I may at last pass through to where she dwells in Thy Brightness. Give me to see her face with a smile on it—to touch her hand—after all—after all! The lips I have never kissed, may they not be mine, O God—mine one day in Heaven? If Thou art Love, there should be love there."

She glided over the deep carpet, stretched out a timid hand, and touched his shoulder. He lifted his great square head, and slowly looked round. The black hair, mingled with white, clung damp to the broad forehead. His eyes were bloodshot, strained, and haggard, and wild. Sorrow was charted deep upon the haggard features. Amazement struck them into folly as he started up, stammering out her name, and clutching for support at the brass rail that was at the foot of the bed.

"Lynette! You.... It is you?..." He shook, staring at her with dilated eyes.

"Owen, you are ill. You speak and look so strangely. It is me—really me!" she said, trying to speak calmly through the tumult of her heart.

"I am not ill. How is it that you are here?"

He lifted a hand to his strained and smarting eyes and moved it to and fro before them. He was staring at her still, but with pupils that were less dilated, and the veins upon his broad forehead were no longer purple now.

"Have I talked nonsense? I had dozed, and you startled me coming upon me.... Why have you?..." He strove to speak and look as usual. "Has anything happened, that you have come back?"

She pressed her hands together, wrestling for collected thought and clear, explicit utterance, though the room rocked about her, and the floor seemed to rise and fall beneath her feet.

"Something happened. I have come back from Wales to tell you that I ... I cannot live upon your friendship any longer! I—I must have more, or I shall die!"

He knew all. She had met the man whose look and breath and touch had revealed to her her own misery. Chained to her harsh yoke-fellow; denied Love's bread and wine of life! He looked at her, and answered coldly:

"You shall not die. You shall be free! If you had waited until to-morrow——"

"It is already day," she told him, and, as though to confirm her, a neighbouring steeple-clock clanged twice. He moved uneasily as his eyes fell on the disordered coverlet, half dragged from the bed and trailing on the floor. They shunned hers as he said, a dark flush rising through his haggard pallor:

"I beg your pardon for the intrusion here. But you were away.... I could not sleep, and the house was lonely.... Is your maid with you? Surely you are not alone?"

She bent her head with a faint smile.

"Quite alone. I did not wish for a companion."

"It was not wise——" he began, and took a step door-wards. "I will call one of the servants," he added, and was going, when he remembered, and stopped, saying hoarsely:

"I forgot. They are gone. I have sent them all away!"

She looked at him in silence. He continued:

"I have paid and dismissed them. You will think it curious—you will know the reason later—I have written to you to explain."

"I found upon your table a letter addressed to me," she said. He started, knitting his black brows.

"You have not read it?" he asked, breathing quickly.

"Not yet." She touched her bosom, where the letter lay. "I have it here."

"Please do not open it! Give me back the letter!" He stretched out his hand to take it, and breathed more freely when she drew it out and gave it to him. And a sweet wild pang shot through him; the paper was so warm and fragrant from the nest where it had lain so short a time. But he mastered the emotion and tore open the envelope. He took from it the enclosure, wrapped in folds of tissue-paper, and put it in her hand, saying, as he thrust the letter in his coat-pocket:

"There is something that by right is yours."

"Mine?..." She unrolled the tissue-paper, and the brilliants that were set about the miniature sent spurts of white and green and rosy fire between the slender, ivory-hued fingers that turned it about. She gave a little gasping cry of recognition:

"It is—me! How could you have managed——?" Then, as the sweet grey eyes of fair dead Lucy smiled up into her own: "I do not know how I am sure of it," she said, with a catching in her breath, "but this must be my mother!"

Saxham bent his head in answer to her look. His eyes bade her question no further. She faltered:

"May I not know how it came into your hands?"

"Through the death," Saxham answered, "of an evil man. You know his name. He probably robbed your father of that miniature with other things; but I can only surmise this. I cannot positively say."

"You speak of my father." Her face was quivering, her eyes entreated. "Tell me what you know of him, and of"—she kissed the miniature, and held it to her cheek—"of my mother?"

"Your father," said Saxham, "was an officer and a gentleman. The surname that you exchanged for mine, poor child! was really his. His Christian name is engraved there"—he pointed to the inner rim of the band of brilliants —"with that of the lady who was your mother. She was beautiful; she was tender and devoted; she loved your father well enough to give up every social aim and every worldly advantage for his sake. She died loving him. He died—I should not wonder if he died of sorrow for her loss. For hearts can break, though the Faculty deny it!"

He swung about to leave the room. She was murmuring over her new-found treasure.

"'Lucy to Richard' ... 'Richard' ..." she repeated. A wave of roseate colour broke over her with the memory of the hand that had touched and the voice that had spoken to her in her Heaven-sent vision of the previous morning, when the Beloved had come back from Paradise to lay a charge upon her child.

"My father knew the Mother?" It was not a question, it was a statement of the fact. Saxham wondered at the assured tone, as he told her:

"It is true. They had been friends—in the world they both gave up afterwards—the man for the love that is of earth, the woman for the love of Heaven."

"She never told me then, but she must have known who I was from the beginning," Lynette ventured. "She gave me the surname of Mildare because it belonged to me! Do not you think so too?"

Saxham made no answer. He swung about to leave the room. She slipped the miniature into her bosom, where his letter had lain, and asked:

"Where are you going?"

He answered, with his eyes avoiding hers:

"You have been travelling all night; you must be tired and hungry. Go to bed and try to rest, while I forage for you downstairs. You shall not suffer for lack of attendance. I am quite a good cook, as you shall find presently. When you have eaten you must sleep, and then we will talk of your returning home to your friends."

"Are not you my chief friend?" she asked. "Is not this my home?"

He avoided her look, replying awkwardly:

"Hardly, when there are no servants to wait upon you!"

"May I not know why you sent them away?"

He said, his haggard profile turned to her, a muscle of his pale cheek twitching:

"I am going away myself: that is the reason why. All debts are paid. I have completed all the arrangements, entailing the minimum of annoyance upon you."

"May I not come with you upon your voyage?"

His eyes were still averted as his grey lips answered:

"No! I am going where you cannot come!"

"Owen, tell me where you are going?"

Her tone of entreaty knocked at the door of his barred heart. He winced palpably. "Excuse me," he said, and took another step towards the door. She stopped him with:

"You are not excused from answering my question!"

"I am going, first to get you some breakfast," said Saxham curtly, "and then to find a woman to attend upon you here."

"I need no breakfast, thanks! I want no attendant!"

"You must have someone," said Saxham brusquely.

"I must have your answer," she said in a tone quite new to him. "What is your secret purpose? What are you hiding from me in that closed hand?"

He moved his left hand slightly, undoing the fingers and giving a glimpse of the empty palm.

"Not that hand. The other!" She pointed to the clenched right. How tall she had grown, and how womanly! "Love has done this!" was his aching thought. She seemed a princess of faery, fresh from a bath of magic waters. Her very gait was changed, her every gesture seemed new. Purpose and decision and quiet self-control breathed from her; her voice had tones in it unheard of him before. Her eyes were radiant as he had never yet seen them, golden stars, centred and rimmed with night, shining in a pale glory that was her face....

"All that for the other man! Well, let him have it!" thought Saxham, and involuntarily glanced at his clenched right hand.

"Please open it and show me what you have there!" she begged him.

Her tones were full of pleading music. His face hardened grimly to withstand. His muscular fingers closed in a vice-like grip over what he held. But she moved to him with a whisper of soft trailing garments, and took the shut hand in both her own. She bent her exquisite head and kissed it, and Saxham's fingers of iron were no more than wax. Something clicked in his throat as they opened, that was like the turning of a rusty lock. And the little blue phial, with the yellow poison-label, gave up his deadly intention to her eyes. She cried out and snatched it, and flung it away from her. It fell soundlessly on the soft carpet, and rolled under a chair.

"Owen! You would have ... done that!..."

Divine reproach was to her face. He snarled:

"It would have been done by now if you had not come back!"

"I thank our Lord I came!... It is His doing! Once He had sent me knowledge, I could not stay away. For, Owen ... I have made a discovery...."

"Yes." He laughed harshly. "As I knew you would one day! Never was I fool enough to doubt what would come!"

She put both her hands to her lips and kissed them, and held them out to him. He cried:

"What is this? What interlude of folly are you playing? It was your freedom you came to demand. You have not told me who the man you love is. I do not ask—I will not even know! He is your choice; that is enough!"

"He is my choice!" Her bosom heaved to the measure of her quickened breathing. The splendid colour rose over the edge of the lace scarf that was loosely knotted about her sweet throat, and surged to the pure temples, and climbed to the line of the rich red-brown hair.

"You will soon be free to tell the world so. Marry him," said Saxham, "and forget the dreary months dragged out beside the sot! For I who promised you I would never fail you; I who told you so confidently that I was cured of the accursed liquor-crave; I—well, I reckoned without my host——"

His laugh jarred her heartstrings. She cried out hotly:

"You did not deceive me wilfully! You believed what you said!"

"I believed ... and the first snare set for me tripped up my heels," said Saxham. "I paid the penalty of being cocksure. And I had not the common decency to die then and release you. True, there were reasons—they are swept away now!... I sent you to Wales that I might be free of the sight of you, that I might end the sordid comedy and have done. You have come too soon! There's no more to be said than that!"

"There is this to be said."

She came towards him, her tender eyes wooing his. Her lips were parted, her breath came in sighs.

"What you have told me is sorrowful, but not hopeless. You were cured once—you will be cured again! And I will help you—comfort you—suffer with you and pray for you. You shall never be alone, my husband, any more!"

He was melting. His hard blue eyes had the softening gleam of tears. He stretched out his hands and took hers, holding them close. He stooped, and let his burning lips rest on the cool, fragrant flesh, and said tenderly:

"Dear saint, sweet would-be martyr, you shall not sacrifice your long life's happiness to me. Rather than live on sane and sober, to see you famishing beside me for the want of Love, I would die a thousand deaths, Lynette! Try to believe it. You shall be free! You must be free, my child!"

She winced as though he had stabbed her, and cried out:

"Why do you harp continually upon your death? I will not listen to you! If I do not desire to be 'free,' as you term it, what barrier is there between us now?"

He said, amazed:

"What barrier? Do you ask what barrier? Your love—for that other man!"

"There is no other man!" She looked him full in the eyes now, with a lovely colour dyeing her sweet cheeks, and an exquisite quivering wistfulness about her mouth. She moved so near that her fragrant breath fanned warm upon his eyelids. "There is no man but you—there will never be any other man!... Dearest"—her hands were on his shoulders; her bosom rose and fell close to his broad breast—"I have been very slow at learning. But—Owen!—I love you as your wife should love!"

"You cannot!" He stepped back sharply, and her hands fell from him. "You shall not! I am not worthy. I thought so once.... I know better now. Do not deceive yourself. Love cannot be compelled at will, and I have ceased to wish—to desire yours! All I want now is rest and silence and forgetfulness—where alone they may be found!" He drew a breath of weariness.

"If you have ceased to wish for love from me, that is my punishment," she said, very pale. "For without yours I cannot live! God hears me speak the truth!"

"Lynette!..."

He swayed like a tree cut through and falling. She caught his hands, and drew them to her heart.

"I have been blind and deaf and senseless. I am changed, I am altered—I am awake at last! I know how great and precious is the love you have given me.... Do not tell me it is mine no longer! Owen, if you do that, it is I who shall die!"

A sob tore its way through him. His great frame quivered. His mask-like immobility broke up ... was gone. Her own tears falling, she stretched her arms to him; yet while his eyes devoured her, his arms hungered for her, he delayed, knitting his brows. She caught a word or two, whispered brokenly. He asked himself: "Can this be Love?"

"It is Love! Owen, I kissed you one night when I found you sleeping! When will you kiss me back again?"

He cried out wildly upon God, and fell down upon his knees before her. He reached out groping, desperate arms, and snatched her close. His deep, shuddering breaths vibrated through her; her own knees were trembling, her bosom in storm. She swayed like a young palm. Nearer—nearer! he felt her hands about his neck, her tears upon his face....

"Dear love, dearest husband, I have a message for you! Owen, shall I tell you what it is?"

"Tell me, my heart's beloved," said Saxham in a whisper.

Their looks united in azure fire and golden. Their breath mingled, their lips were very near. She felt his strength about her; he drank in her sweetness. The kiss, the supreme boon, was as yet withheld.

She whispered....

"I awakened in the light of the early morning—the morning of the day I came to you. She sat beside me—the Mother, Owen! her dear hand on my heart, her dear eyes waiting for mine. She stooped and kissed me ... it was real ... I felt it! She said: 'Love your husband as I loved Richard! Be to a child of his what I have been to you!'"

His arms wrapped round her, gathered her, enfolded her. His scalding tears wetted her white bosom as she drew the square black head to rest there, and drooped her cheek upon the broad brow. Her rich hair, loosed from its coils, fell in a heavy silken rope upon his shoulder ... their lips met in the nuptial, sacramental kiss....

THE END