Arrived, she greeted Richard curtly, and without apology for delay accepted the contents of the first dish offered to her by the waiting men-servants, ate as though determinedly and putting a force upon herself, and—that which was unusual with her before sundown—drank wine. And, watching her, involuntarily Richard's thought traveled back to a certain luncheon party at Brockhurst, graced by the presence of genial, puzzle-headed Lord Fallowfeild and members of his numerous family, when Helen had swept in, even as now, had been self-absorbed, even as now. Of the drive to Newlands, all in the sad November afternoon, following on that luncheon, he also thought, of communications made by Helen during that drive, and of the long course of event and action directly or indirectly consequent on those communications. He thought of the fog, too, enveloping and almost choking him, when in the early morning driven by furies, still virgin in body as in heart, he had ridden out into a blank and sightless world hoping the chill of it would allay the fever in his blood,—and of the fog again, in the afternoon, from out which the branches of the great trees, like famine-stricken arms in tattered draperies, seemed to pluck evilly at the carriage, as he walked the smoking horses up and down the Newlands' drive, waiting for Helen to rejoin him. And now, somehow, that fog seemed to come up between him and the well-furnished breakfast-table, between him and the radiant expanse of the vivacious, capricious, half-classic, half-modern, mercantile city outstretched there, teeming, breeding, fermenting, in the fecundating heat of the noonday sun. The chill of the fog struck cold into his vitals now, giving him the strangest physical sensation. Richard straightened himself in his chair, passed his hands across his eyes impatiently. Brockhurst, and all the old life of it, was a subject of which he forbade himself remembrance. He had divorced himself from all that, cut himself adrift from it long ago. By an act of will, he tried to put it out of his mind now. But the fog remained—an actual clouding of his physical vision, blurring all he looked upon. It was horribly uncomfortable. He wished he was alone. Then he might have slipped down from his chair and, according to his poor capacity of locomotion, sought relief in movement.

Meanwhile, silently, mechanically, Helen de Vallorbes continued her breakfast. And as she so continued, in addition to his singular physical sensations of blurred vision and clinging chill, he became aware of a growing embarrassment and constraint between himself and his companion. So far, his and her intercourse had been easy and spontaneous, because superficial. Since that first interview on the terrace a tacit agreement had existed to avoid the personal note. Now, for cause unknown, that intercourse threatened entering upon a new phase. It was as though the concentration, the tension, which he observed in her, and of which he was sensible in himself, must of necessity eventuate in some unbosoming, some act—almost involuntary—of self-revelation. This unaccustomed silence and restraint seemed to Richard charged with consequences which, in his present condition of defective volition, he was powerless to prevent. And this displeased him, mastery of surrounding influences being very dear to him.

At last, coffee having been served, the men-servants withdrew to the house, but the constraint was not thereby lessened. Helen sat upright, her chin resting upon the back of her left hand, her eyes, under their drooping lids, looking out with a veiled fierceness upon the fair and glittering prospect. Richard saw her face in profile. The black mantilla draped her shoulders and bust with a certain austerity of effect. It was evident that—by something—she had been stirred to the extinction of her habitual vivacity and desire to shine. And Richard, for all his coolness of head and rather cynical maturity of outlook, had a restless suspicion of going forth—even as on that foggy morning at Brockhurst—into a blank and sightless world, full of hazardous possibility, where the safe way was difficult of discovery and where masked dangers might lurk. Solicitous to dissipate his discomfort he spoke a little at random.

"You must forgive me for being such an abominably bad host," he said courteously. "I am not quite the thing this morning, somehow. I had a little go of fever last night. My brain is like so much pulp."

Helen dropped her hand upon the table as though putting a term to an importunate train of thought.

"I have always understood the villa to be remarkably free from malaria," she remarked abstractedly.

"So it is. I quite believe that. The servants certainly keep well enough. But so, unfortunately, is not the port."

Helen turned her head. A vertical line was observable between her arched eyebrows.

"The port?" she repeated.

Richard swallowed his black coffee. Perhaps it might steady him and clear his head. The numbness of his faculties and senses alike exasperated him, filling him with a persuasion he would say precisely those things wisdom would counsel to leave unsaid.

"Yes—you know I generally go down and sleep on board the yacht."

There was a momentary pause. Madame de Vallorbes' lips parted in a soundless exclamation. Then she pushed back the modest folds of the mantilla, leaving her neck free. The action of her hands was very graceful as she did this, and she looked fixedly at Richard Calmady.

"I did not know that," she said slowly. Then added, as though reasoning out her own thought:—"And Naples harbour is admittedly one of the most pestilential holes on the face of the earth. Are you not tempting providence in the matter of disease, Richard? Are you not rather wantonly indiscreet?"

"On the contrary," he answered, and something of mockery touched his expression, "I see it quite otherwise. I have been congratulating myself on the praiseworthy abundance of my discretion."

And the words were no sooner out of his mouth than Richard cursed himself for a bungler, and a slightly vulgar one at that. But upon his hearer those same words worked a remarkable change. Her gloom, her abstraction, departed, leaving only a pretty pensiveness. She smiled with chastened sweetness upon Richard Calmady—a smile nicely attuned to the semi-religious simplicity of her dress.

"Ah! perhaps we are both a trifle out of sorts this morning!" she said. "I, too, have had my little turn of sickness—sickness of heart. And that seems unfair, since I rose in the best disposition of spirit. Quite early I went to confession."

"Confession?" Richard repeated. "I did not know your submission to the Church carried you to such practical lengths."

"Evidently we are each fated to make small discoveries regarding the habits of the other, to-day," she rejoined. "Possibly confession is to me just what those nights spent on board the yacht, lying in that malodorous harbour, are to you!"

Helen's smile broadened to a dainty naughtiness, infinitely provoking. But pensiveness speedily supervened. She folded her hands upon the edge of the table and looked down at them meditatively.

"I relieved my conscience. Not that there was much to relieve it of, thank heaven! We have lived austerely enough most of us, this winter in France. Only it becomes a matter of moral, personal cleanliness, after a time, all that—exaggerated, but very comfortable. Just as one takes one's bath twice daily, not that it is necessary but that it is a luxury of physical purity and self-respect, so one comes to go to confession. That is a luxury of moral purification. It is as a bath to the soul, ministering to the perfection of its cleanliness and health."

She looked up at Richard smiling, that same dainty naughtiness very present.

"You observe I am eminently candid. I tell you exactly how my religion affects me. I can only reach high-thinking through acts which are external and concrete. In short, I am a born sacramentalist."

And Richard listened, interested and entertained. Yet, since that strange blurring of fog still confused his vision and his judgment, vaguely suspicious that he missed the main intent of her speech. Suspicious as one who, listening to the clever patter of a conjurer, detects in it the effort to distract attention from some difficult feat of legerdemain, until that feat has passed from attempt merely into accomplished fact.

"And, indirectly, that is where my heart-sickness comes in," she continued, with a return to something of her former abstraction and gloom. "I was coming away, coming back here—and I was very happy. It is not often one can say that. And then—pouf—-like that," she brought her hands smartly together, "the charming bubble burst! For, upon the very church steps, I met a man whom I have every cause to hate."

As she spoke, the fog seemed to draw away, burnt up by the great, flaming sun-god there. Richard's brain grew clear—clearer, indeed, than in perfect health—and his still face grew more still than was, even to it, quite natural.

"Well?" he asked, almost harshly.

And Helen, whose faith in her own diplomacy had momentarily suffered eclipse, rejoiced. For the tone of his voice betrayed not disgust, but anxiety. It stirred her as a foretaste of victory. And victory had become a maddening necessity to her. Destournelle had forced her hand. His natural infirmity of purpose relieved her of the fear he could work her any great mischief. Yet his ingenuity, inspired by wounded vanity, might prove beyond her calculations. It is not always safe to forecast the future by experience of the past in relation to such a being as Destournelle! Therefore it became of supreme importance, before that gentleman had time further to obtrude himself, to bind Richard Calmady by some speech, some act, from which there was no going back. And more than just that. The sight of her ex-lover, though she now loathed him—possibly just because she so loathed him—provoked passion in her. It was as though only in a new intrigue could she rid herself of the remembrance of the old intrigue which was now so detestable to her. She craved to do him that deepest, most ultimate, despite. And passion cried out in her. The sight of him, though she loathed him, had made her utterly weary of chastity. All of which emotions—but held as hounds in a leash, ready to be slipped when the psychological moment arrived, and by no means to be slipped until the arrival of it—dictated the tenor of her next speech.

"Well," she answered, with an air of half-angry sincerity altogether convincing, "I really don't know that I am particularly proud of the episode. I know I was careless, that I laid myself open to the invidious comment, which is usually the reward of all disinterested action. One learns to accept it as a matter of course. And you see Paul Destournelle——"

"Oh, Destournelle!" Richard exclaimed.

"You have read him?"

"Every one has read him."

"And what do you think of him?"

"That his technique is as amazingly clever as his thought is amazingly rotten."

"I know—I know," she said eagerly. "And that is just what induced me to do all I could for him. If one could cut the canker away, give him backbone and decency, while retaining that wonderful technique, one would have a second and a greater Theophile Gautier."

Richard was looking full at her. His face had more colour, more animation, than usual.

"If—yes—if," he returned. "But that same if bulks mighty big to my mind."

"I know," she repeated. "Yet it seemed to me worth the attempt. And then, you understand,—who better?—that if one's own affairs are not conspicuously happy, one has all the more longing the affairs of others should be crowned with success. And this winter specially, among the sordid miseries, disgraces, deprivations, of the siege, one was liable to take refuge in an over-exalted altruism. It was difficult in so mad a world not to indulge in personal eccentricity—to the neglect of due worship of the great goddess Conventionality. With death in visible form at every street corner, one's sense of humour, let alone one's higher faculties, rebelled against the futility of such worship. So many detestable sights and sounds were perpetually presented to one—not to mention broth of abominable things daily for dinner—that one turned, with thanksgiving, to beautiful form in art, to perfectly felicitous words and phrases. The meaning of them mattered but little just then. They freed one from the tyranny of more or less disgusting fact. They satisfied eye and ear. One asked nothing more just then—luckily, you will say, since the animal Destournelle has very surely nothing more to give."

In speaking, Helen pushed her chair back, turning it sideways to the table. Her speech was alive with varied and telling inflections. Her smallest gesture had in it something descriptive and eloquent.

"And so I fell to encouraging the animal," she continued, almost plaintively, yet with a note of veiled laughter in her voice. "Reversing the order of Circe—Naples inclines one to classic illustration, sometimes a little hackneyed—by the way, speaking of Naples, look at the glory of it all just now, Richard!—I tried to turn, not men to swine, but swine to men. And I failed, of course. The gods know best. They never attempt metamorphosis on the ascending scale! I let Destournelle come to see me frequently. The world advised itself to talk. But, being rather bitterly secure of myself, I disregarded that. If one is aware that one's heart was finally and long ago disposed of, one ceases to think seriously of that side of things. You must know all that well enough—witness the sea-born furnishings of my bedroom up-stairs!"

For half a minute she paused. Richard made no comment.

"Hard words break no bones," she added lightly. "And so, to show how much I despised all such censorious cackle, I allowed Destournelle to travel south with me when I left Paris."

"You pushed neglect of the worship of conventionality rather far," Richard said.

Helen rose to her feet. Excitement gained on her, as always during one of her delightful improvisations, her talented viva voce improvements on dry-as-dust fact. She laughed softly, biting her lip. More than one hound had been slipped by now. They made good running. She stood by Richard Calmady, looking down at him, covering him, so to speak, with her eyes. The black mantilla no longer veiled her bright head. It had fallen to the ground, and lay a dark blot upon the mellow fairness of the tesselated pavement. White-robed, statuesque—yet not with the severe grace of marble, but with that softer, more humanly seductive grace of some figure of cunningly tinted ivory—she appeared, just then, to gather up in herself all the poetry, the intense and vivid light, the victorious vitality, of the clear, burning, southern noon.

"Ah, well, conventionality proved perfectly competent to avenge herself!" she exclaimed. "The animal Destournelle took the average, the banal view, as might have been anticipated. He had the insane presumption to suppose it was himself, not his art, in which I was interested. I explained his error, and departed. I recovered my equanimity. That took time. I felt soiled, degraded. And then to-day I meet him again, unashamed, actually claiming recognition. I repeated my explanation with uncompromising lucidity——"

Richard moved restlessly in his chair, looking up almost sharply at her.

"Waste of breath," he said. "No explanation is lucid if the hearer is unwilling to accept it."

And then the two cousins, as though they had reached unexpectedly some parting of the ways, calling for instant decision in respect of the future direction of their journey, gazed upon one another strangely—each half defiant of the other, each diligent to hide his own and read the other's thought, each sensible of a crisis, each at once hurried and arrested by suspicion of impending catastrophe, unless this way be chosen that declined—though it seemed, in good truth, not in their keeping, but in that of blind chance only that both selection and rejection actually resided. And, in this strait, neither habit of society, fine sword-play of diplomacy and tact, availed to help them. For suddenly they had outpaced all that, and brought up amongst ancient and secular springs of action and emotion before which civilisation is powerless and the ready tongue of fashion dumb.

But even while he so gazed, in fateful suspense and indecision, the fog came up again, chilling Richard Calmady's blood, oppressing his brain as with an uprising of foul miasma, blurring his vision, so that Helen's fair, downward-gazing face was distorted, rendered illusive and vague. And, along with this, distressing restlessness took him, compelling him to seek relief in change of posture and of place. He could not stop to reckon with how that which he proposed to do might strike an onlooker. His immediate sensations filled his whole horizon. Silently he slipped down from his chair, stood a moment, supporting himself with one hand on the edge of the table, and then moved forward to that side of the pavilion which gave upon the garden. Here the sunshine was hot upon the pavement, and upon the outer half of each pale, slender column. Richard leant his shoulder against one of these, grateful for the genial heat.

Since her first and somewhat inauspicious meeting with him in childhood, Helen had never, close at hand, seen Richard Calmady walk thus far. She stared, fascinated by that cruel spectacle. For the instant transformation of the apparently tall, and conspicuously well-favoured, courtly gentleman, just now sitting at table with her, into the shuffling, long-armed, dwarfed and crippled creature was, at first utterly incredible, then portentous, then, by virtue of its very monstrosity, absorbing and, to her, adorable, whetting appetite as veritable famine might. Chastity became to her more than ever absurd, a culpable waste of her own loveliness, of sensation, of emotion, a sin against those vernal influences working in this generous nature surrounding her and working in her own blood. All the primitive instinct of her womanhood called aloud in her that she must wed—must wed. And the strident voice of the great, painted city coming up to her, urgent, incessant, carried the same message, as did the radiant sea, whose white lips kissed the indented coast-line as though pale and hungry with love. While the man before her, by his very abnormality and a certain secretness inevitable in that, heightened her passion. He was to her of all living men most desirable, so that she must win him and hold him, must see and know.

In a few steps, light as those of the little, rose-crowned dancer of long ago, she followed him across the shining floor. There was a point of north in the wind, adding exhilaration to the firm sunshine as ice to rare wine. The scent of narcissus, magnolia, and lemon blossom was everywhere. The cypresses yielded an aromatic, myrrh-like sweetness. The uprising waters of the fountain, set in the central alley, swerved southward, falling in a jeweled rain. Helen, in her spotless raiment, came close and Richard Calmady turned to her. But his eyes no longer questioned hers. They were as windows opening back on to empty space, seeing all, yet telling nothing. His face had become still again and inscrutable, lightened only by that flickering, mocking smile. It seemed as though the psychological moment were passed and social sense, ordinary fashions of civilised intercourse, had not only come back but come to stay.

"I think we will omit Destournelle from our talk in future," he said. "As a subject of conversation I find he disagrees with me, notwithstanding his felicity of style and his admirable technique. I will give orders which, I hope, may help to protect you from annoyance in future. In this delightful land, by wise exercise of just a little bribery and corruption, it is still possible to make the unwelcome alien prefer to seek health and entertainment elsewhere. Now, will you like to go back to the house?"

The approach to the pavilion from the lower level of the garden was by a carefully graded slope of Roman brick, set edgewise. At regular intervals of about eighteen inches this was crossed—on the principle of a gang-plank—by raised marble treads. Without waiting for his cousin's reply, Richard started slowly down the slope. At the best of times this descent for him demanded caution. Now his vision was again so queerly blurred that he miscalculated the distance between the two lowest treads, slipped and stumbled, lunging forward. Quick as a cat, Madame de Vallorbes was behind him, her right hand grasping his right elbow, her left hand under his left armpit.

"Ah! Dickie, Dickie, don't fall!" she cried, a sudden terror in her voice.

Her muscles hardened like steel. It needed all her strength to support him, for he was heavy, his body inert as that of one fainting. For a moment his head rested against her bosom; and her breath came short, sighing against his neck and cheek.

By sheer force of will Richard recovered his footing, disengaging himself from her support, shuffling aside from her.

"A thousand thanks, Helen," he said.

Then he looked full at her, and she—untender though she was—perceived that the perspective of space on which, as windows might, his eyes seemed to open back, was not empty. It was peopled, crowded—even as those steep, teeming byways of Naples—by undying, unforgetable misery, humiliation, revolt.

"Yes, it is rather unpardonable to be—as I am—isn't it?" he said. Adding hastily, yet with a certain courteous dignity:—"I am ashamed to trouble you, to ask you—of all people—to run messages for me—but would you go on to the house——"

"Dickie, why may not I help you?" she interrupted.

"Ah!" he said, "the answer to that lies away back in the beginning of things. Even unlucky devils, such as myself, are not without a certain respect for that which is fitting, for seemliness and etiquette. Send one of my men please. I shall be very grateful to you—thanks."

And Helen de Vallorbes, her passion baulked and therefore more than ever at white heat, swept up the paved alley, amid the sweet scents of the garden, beneath the jeweled rain of the fountain, that point of north in the wind dallying with her as in laughing challenge, making her the more mad to have her way with Richard Calmady, yet knowing that of the two—he and she—he was the stronger as yet.



CHAPTER VIII

IN WHICH HELEN DE VALLORBES LEARNS HER RIVAL'S NAME

"I hear Morabita sings, in Ernani, at the San Carlo on Friday night. Do you care to go, Helen?"

The question, though asked casually, had, to the listener, the effect of falling with a splash, as of a stone into a well, awakening unexpected echoes, disturbing, rather harshly, the constrained silence which had reigned during the earlier part of dinner.

All the long, hot afternoon, Madame de Vallorbes had been alone—Richard invisible, shut persistently away in those rooms of the entresol into which, as yet, she had never succeeded in penetrating. Richard had not proposed to her to do so. And it was part of that praiseworthy discretion which she had agreed with herself to practise—in her character of scrupulously unexacting guest—only to accept invitations, never to issue them. How her cousin might occupy himself, whom even he might receive, during the time spent in those rooms, she did not know. And it was idle to inquire. Neither of her servants, though skilful enough, as a rule, in the acquisition of information, could, in this case, acquire any. And so it came about that during those many still bright hours, following on her rather agitated parting with Richard at midday, while she paced the noble rooms of the first floor—once more taking note of their costly furnishings and fine pictures, meeting her own restless image again and again in their many mirrors—and later, near sundown, when she walked the dry, brown pathways of the ilex and cypress grove, the wildest suspicions of his possible doings assailed her. For she was constrained to admit that, though she had spent a full week now under his roof, it was but the veriest fringe, after all, of the young man's habits and thought with which she was actually acquainted. And this not only desperately intrigued her curiosity, but the apartness, behind which he entrenched himself and his doings, was as a slight put upon her and consequent source of sharp mortification. So to-day she ranged all permitted spaces of the villa and its grounds softly, yet lithe, watchful, fierce as a she-panther—her ears strained to hear, her eyes to see, driven the while by jealousy of that nameless rival, to remembrance of whom all the whole place was dedicated, and by baffled passion, as with whips.

Nor did superstition fail to add its word of ill-omen at this juncture. A carrion crow, long-legged, heavy of beak, alighting on the clustered curls of the marble bust of Homer, startled her with vociferous croakings. A long, narrow, many-jointed, blue-black, evil-looking beetle crawled from among the rusty, fibrous, cypress roots across her path. A funeral procession, priest and acolytes, with lighted tapers, sitting within the glass-sided hearse at head and foot of the flower-strewn coffin, wound slowly along the dusty, white road—bordered by queer growth of prickly-pear and ragged, stunted palm-trees—far below. She crossed herself, turning hurriedly away. Yet, for an instant, Death, triumphant, hideous, inevitable, and all the spiritual terror and physical disgust of it, grinned at her, its fleshless face, as it seemed, close against her own. And alongside Death—by some malign association of ideas and ugly antic of profanity—she saw the bel tete de Jesu of M. Paul Destournelle as she had seen it this morning, he looking back, hat in hand, as he plunged down the break-neck, Neapolitan side-street, with that impish, bleating, goatlike laugh.

By the time the dinner-hour drew near she found her outlook in radical need of reconstruction, and to that end bade Zelie dress her in the crocus-yellow brocade, reserved for some emergency such as the present. It was a gown, surely, to restore self-confidence and induce self-respect! Fashioned fancifully, according to a picturesque, seventeenth-century, Venetian model, the full sleeves and the long-waisted bodice of it—this cut low, generously displaying her shoulders and swell of her bosom—were draped with superb guipure de Flandres a brides frisees and strings of seed pearls. All trace of ascetic simplicity had very certainly departed. Helen was resplendent—strings of seed pearls twisted in her honey-coloured hair, a clear red in her cheeks and hard brilliance in her eyes, bred of eager jealous excitement. She had, indeed, reached a stage of feeling in which the sight of Richard Calmady, the fact of his presence, worked upon her to the extent of dangerous emotion. And now this statement of his, and the question following it, caused the flame of the inward fires tormenting her to leap high.

"Ah! Morabita!" she exclaimed. "What an age it is since I have heard her sing, or thought about her! How is her voice lasting, Richard?"

"I really don't know," he answered, "and that is why I am rather curious to hear her. There was literally nothing but a voice in her case—no dramatic sense, nothing in the way of intelligence to fall back on. On that account it interested me to watch her. She and her voice had no essential relation to one another. Her talent was stuck into her, as you might stick a pin into a cushion. She produced glorious effects without a notion how she produced them, and gave expression—and perfectly just expression—to emotions she had never dreamed of. At the best of times singers are a feeble folk intellectually, but, of all singers I have known, she was mentally the very feeblest."

"No, perhaps she was not very wise," Helen put in, but quite mildly, quite kindly.

"And so if the voice went, everything went. And that made one reflect agreeably upon the remarkably haphazard methods employed by that which we politely call Almighty God in His construction of our unhappy selves. Design?—There's not a trace of design in the whole show. Bodies, souls, gifts, superfluities, deficiencies, just pitched together anyhow. The most bungling of human artists would blush to turn out such work."

Richard spoke rapidly. He had refused course after course. And now the food on his plate remained untasted. Seen in the soft light of the shaded candles his face had a strange look of distraction upon it, as though he too was restless with an intimate, deep-seated restlessness. His skin was less colourless than usual, his manner less colourless also. And this conferred a certain youthfulness on him, making him seem nearer—so Helen thought—to the boy she had known at Brockhurst, than to the man, whom lately, she had been so signally conscious that she failed to know.

"No, I hope Morabita's voice remains to her," he continued. "Her absolute nullity minus it is disagreeable to think of. And much as I relish collecting telling examples of the fatuity of the Creator—she, voiceless, would offer a supreme one—I would spare her that, poor dear. For she was really rather charming to me at one time."

"So it was commonly reported," Helen remarked.

"Was it?" Richard said absently.

Though as a rule conspicuously abstemious, he had drunk rather freely to-night, and that with an odd haste of thirst. Now he touched his champagne tumbler, intimating to Bates, the house-steward—sometime the Brockhurst under butler—that it should be refilled.

"I can't have seen Morabita for nearly three years," he went on. "And my last recollections of her are unfortunate. She had sent me a box, in Vienna it was I think, for the Traviata. She was fat then, or rather, fatter. Stage furniture leaves something to desire in the way of solidity. In the death scene the middle of the bed collapsed. Her swan-song ceased abruptly. Her head and heels were in the air, and the very largest rest of her upon the floor, bed and bedclothes standing out in a frill all around. It was a sight discouraging to sentiment. I judged it kinder not to go to supper with her after the performance that night."

Richard paused, again drained his glass.

"I beg your pardon," he said, "what atrocious nonsense I am talking!"

"I think I rather enjoy it," Madame de Vallorbes answered. She looked at the young man sideways, from under her delicate eyelids. He was perfectly sober—of that there was no question. Yet he was less inaccessible, somehow, than usual. She inclined to experiment.—"Only I am sorry for Morabita in more ways than one, poor wretch. But then perhaps I am just a little sorry for all those women whom you reject, Richard."

"The women whom I reject?" he said harshly.

"Yes, whom you reject," Helen repeated.—Then she busied herself with a small black fig, splitting it deftly open, disclosing the purple, and rose, and clear living greens of the flesh and innumerable seeds of it, colours rich as those of a tropic sky at sunset.—"And there are so many of those women it seems to me! I am coming to have a quite pathetic fellowship for them." She buried her white teeth in the softness of the fig.—"Not without reason, perhaps. It is idle to deny that you are a pastmaster in the ungentle art of rejection. What have you to say in self-defense, Dickie?"

"That talking nonsense appears to be highly infectious—and that it is a disagreeably oppressive evening."

Helen de Vallorbes smiled upon him, glanced quickly over her shoulder to assure herself the servants were no longer present—then spoke, leaning across the corner of the table towards him, while her eyes searched his with a certain daring provocation.

"Yes, I admit I have finished my fig. Dinner is over. And it is my place to disappear according to custom."—She laid her rosy finger-tips together, her elbows resting on the table. "But I am disinclined to disappear. I have a number of things to say. Take that question of going to the opera, for instance. Half Naples will be there, and I know more than half Naples, and more than half Naples knows me. I do not crave to run incontinently into the arms of any of de Vallorbes' many relations. They were not conspicuously kind to me when I was here as a girl and stood very much in need of kindness. So the question of going to the San Carlo, you see, requires reflection. And then,"—her tone softened to a most persuasive gentleness,—"then, the evenings are a trifle long when one is alone and has nothing very satisfactory to think about. And I have been worried to-day, detestably worried."—She looked down at her finger-tips. Her expression became almost sombre. "In any case I shall not plague you very much longer, Richard," she said rather grandly. "I have determined to remove myself bag and baggage. It is best, more dignified to do so. Reluctantly I own that. Here have I no abiding city. I wish I had, perhaps, but I haven't. Therefore it is useless, and worse than useless, to play at having one. One must just face the truth."

She looked full at the young man, smiling at him, as though somehow forgiving him a slight, an unkindness, a neglect.

"And so, just because to you it all matters so uncommonly little, let us talk rather longer this evening."

She rose.

"I'll go on into the long drawing-room," she said. "The windows were still open there when I came in to dinner. The room will be pleasantly cool. You will come?"

And she moved away quietly, thoughtfully, opened the high double-doors, left them open, and that without once looking back. Yet her hearing was strained to catch the smallest sound above that which accompanied her, namely, the rustling of her dress. Then a queer shiver ran all down her spine and she set her teeth, for she perceived that halting, shuffling footsteps had begun to follow those light and graceful footsteps of her own.

"Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute," she said to herself. "I have no fear for the rest."

Yet, crossing the near half of the great room, she sank down on a sofa, thankful there was no farther to go. In the last few minutes she had put forth more will-power, felt more deeply, than she had supposed. Her knees gave under her. It was a relief to sit down.

The many candles in the cut-glass chandeliers, hanging from along the centre of the painted ceiling, were lighted, filling the length and breadth of the room with a bland, diffused radiance. It touched picture and statue, tall mirror, rich curtain, polished woodwork of chair and table, gleaming ebony and ivory cabinet. It touched Helen de Vallorbes' bright head and the strings of pearls twisted in her hair, her white neck, the swell of her bosom, and all that delicate wonder of needlework—the Flanders' lace—trimming her bodice. It lay on her lap, too, as she leaned back in the corner of the sofa, her hands pressed down on either side her thighs—lay there bringing the pattern of her brocaded dress into high relief. This was a design of pomegranates—leaves, flowers, and fruit—and of trailing, peacock feathers, a couple of shades lighter than the crocus-yellow ground. The light took the over-threads and stayed in them.

The window stood wide open on to the balcony, the elaborately wrought-ironwork of which—scroll and vase, plunging dolphin and rampant sea-horse—detached itself from the opaque background of the night. And in at the window came luscious scents from the garden below, a chime of falling water, the music, faint and distant, in rising and falling cadence of a marching military band. In at it also, and rising superior to all these in imperativeness and purpose, came the voice of Naples itself—no longer that of a city of toil and commerce, but that of a city of pleasure, a city of licence, until such time as the dawn should once again break, and the sun arise, driving back man and beast alike to labour, the one from merry sinning, the other from hard-earned sleep. And once again, but in clearer, more urgent, accents, the voice of the city repeated its message to Helen de Vallorbes, calling aloud to her to do even as it was doing, namely, to wed—to wed. And, hearing it, understanding that message, for a little space shame took her, in face both of its and her own shamelessness, so that she closed her eyes, unable for the moment to look at Richard Calmady as he crossed the great room in that bland and yet generous light. But, almost immediately, his voice, cold and measured in tone, there close beside her, claimed her attention.

"That which you said at dinner rather distresses me, Helen."

Then, shame or no shame, Madame de Vallorbes, of necessity, opened her eyes. And, so doing, it needed all her self-control to repress a cry. She forced her open hands down very hard on the mattress of the sofa. For Richard leaned his back against the jamb of the open window, and she saw his face and all his poor figure in profile. His left hand hung straight at his side, the tips of his fingers only just not touching the floor. And again, as at midday the spectacle of his deformity worked upon her strangely.

"What of all that which I said at dinner distresses you?" she asked gently, with sudden solicitude.

"You showed me that I have been a wretchedly negligent host."—In speaking, the young man turned his head and looked at her, paused a moment, almost startled by her resplendent aspect. Then he looked down at his own stunted and defective limbs. His expression became very grim. He raised his shoulders just perceptibly. "I reproach myself with having allowed you to be so much alone. It must have been awfully dull for you."

"It was a little dull," Helen said, still gently.

"I ought to have begged you to ask some of the people you know in Naples to come here. It was stupid of me not to think of it. I need not have seen them, neither need they have seen me."

He looked at her steadily again, as though trying to fix her image in his memory.

"Yes, it was stupid of me," he repeated absently. "But I have got into churlish, bachelor habits—that can hardly be helped, living alone, or on board ship, as I do—and I have pretty well forgotten how to provide adequately for the entertainment of a guest."

"Oh! I have had that which I wanted, that which I came for," Helen answered, very charmingly,—"had it in part, at all events. Though I could have put up with just a little more of it, Dickie, perhaps."

"I warned you, if you remember, that opportunities of amusement—as that word is generally understood—would be limited."

"Amusement?" she exclaimed, with an almost tragic inflection of contempt.

"Oh yes!" he said, "amusement is not to be despised. I'd give all I am worth, half my time, to be amused—but that again, like hospitality, is rather a lost art with me. You remember, I warned you life at the villa in these days was not precisely hilarious."

Helen clapped her hands together.

"Ah! you are wilfully obtuse, you are wilfully, cruelly pigheaded!" she cried. "Pardon me, dear Richard, but your attitude is enough to exasperate a saint. And I am no saint as yet. I am still human—radically, for my own peace of mind lamentably, human. I am only too capable of being grieved, humiliated, hurt. But there, it is folly to say such things to you! You are hopelessly insensible to all that. So I take refuge in quoting your own words of this morning against you—that no explanation is lucid if the hearer refuses to accept it."

"I am dull, no doubt, but honestly I fail to see how that remark of mine can be held to apply in the present case."

"It applies quite desolatingly well!" Helen declared, with spirit. Then her manner softened into a seductiveness of forgiveness once again.—"And so, dear Richard, I am glad that I had already determined to leave here to-morrow. It would have been a little too wretched to arrive at that determination after this conversation. You must go alone to hear your old flame, Morabita, sing. Only, if her voice is still as sympathetic as of old, if it moves you from your present insensibility, you may read remembrance of some aspects of my visit into the witchery of it if you like. It may occur to you what those aspects really meant."

Helen smiled upon him, leaning a little forward. Her eyes shone, as though looking out through unshed tears.

"It's not exactly flattering to one's vanity to be compelled to depute to another woman the making of such things clear. But it is too evident I waste my time in attempting to make them clear myself. No explanation is lucid, et caetera——"

Helen shook back her head with an extraordinary charm of half-defiant, half-tearful laughter. She was playing a game, her whole intelligence bent on the playing of it skilfully. Yet she was genuinely touched. She was swayed by her very real emotion. She spoke from her heart, though every word, every passing action, subserved her ultimate purpose in regard to Richard Calmady.

"And, after all, one must retain some remnant of self-respect with which to cover the nakedness of one's—— Oh yes! decidedly, Morabita's voice had best do the rest."

Richard had moved from his station in the window. He stood at the far end of the sofa, resting his hands on the gilded and carven arm of it. Now the ungainliness of his deformity was hidden, and his height was greater than that of his companion, obliging her to look up at him.

"I gave you my word, Helen," he said, "I have no notion what you are driving at."

"Driving at, driving at?" she cried. "Why, the self-evident truth that you are forcing me rather brutally to pay the full price of my weakness in coming here, in permitting myself the indulgence of seeing you again. You told me directly I arrived, with rather cynical frankness, that I had not changed. That is quite true. What I was at Brockhurst, four years ago, what I then felt, that I am and that I feel still. Oh! you have nothing to reproach yourself with in defect of plain speaking, or excess of amiable subterfuge! You hit out very straight from the shoulder! Directly I arrived you also told me how you had devoted this place—with which, after all, I am not wholly unconnected—to the cult, to the ideal worship, of a woman whom you loved."

"So I have devoted it," Richard said.

"And yet I was weak enough to remain!"

The young man's face relaxed, but its expression remained enigmatic.

"And why not?" he asked.

"Because, in remaining, I have laid myself open to misconstruction, to all manner of pains and penalties, not easy to be endured, to the odious certainty of appearing contemptible in your estimation as well as in my own."

Helen patted her pretty foot upon the floor in a small frenzy of irritation.

"How can I hope to escape, since even the precious being whom you affect to worship you keep sternly at arm's length, that is among the other pleasing things you confided to me immediately on my arrival—lest, seen at close quarters, she should fall below your requirements and so you should suffer disillusion. Ah! you are frightfully cold-blooded, repulsively inhuman. Whether you judge others by yourself, reckoning them equally devoid of natural feeling, or whether you find a vindictive relish in rejecting the friendship and affection so lavishly offered you——"

"Is it offered lavishly? That comes as news to me," he put in.

"Ah! but it is. And I leave you to picture the pleasing entertainment afforded the offerer in seeing you ignore the offering, or, worse still, take it, examine it, and throw it aside like a dirty rag! In one case you underline your rejection almost to the point of insult."

"This is very instructive. I am learning a whole lot about myself," Richard said coolly.

"But look," Madame de Vallorbes cried, "do you not prefer exposing yourself to the probability of serious illness rather than remain under the same roof with me? The inference hits one in the face. To you the pestilential exhalations, the unspeakable abominations, of Naples harbour appear less dangerous than my near neighbourhood."

"You put it more strongly than I should," he answered, smiling. "Yet, from a certain standpoint, that may very well be true."

For an instant Helen hesitated. Her intelligence, for all its alertness, was strained exactly to appraise the value of his words, neither over, nor under, rating it. And her eyes searched his with a certain boldness and imperiousness of gaze. Richard, meanwhile, folding his arms upon the carven and gilt frame of the sofa, looked back at her, smiling still, at once ironically and very sadly. Then swift assurance came to her of the brazen card she had best play. But, playing it, she was constrained to avert her eyes and set her glance pensively upon the light-visited surface of her crocus-yellow, silken lap.

"I will do my best possible to accept your nightly journeys as a compliment in disguise, then," she said, quite softly. "For truly, when I come to think of it, were she, herself, here—she, the woman you so religiously admire that you take elaborate pains to avoid having anything on earth to do with her—were she herself here you could hardly take more extensive measures to secure yourself against risk of disappointment, hardly exercise a greater rage of caution!"

"Perhaps that's just it. Perhaps you have arrived at it all at last. Perhaps she is here," he said.

And he turned away, steadying himself with one hand against the jamb of the window, and shuffled out slowly, laboriously, onto the balcony into the night.

For a quite perceptible length of time Helen de Vallorbes continued to contemplate the light-visited surface of her crocus-yellow, silken lap. She followed the lines of the rich pattern—pomegranate, fruit and blossom, trailing peacock's feather. For by such mechanical employment alone could she keep the immensity of her excitement and of her triumph in check. To shout aloud, to dance, to run wildly to and fro, would have been only too possible to her just then. All that for which she had schemed, had ruled herself discreetly, had ridden a waiting race, had been hers, in fact, from the first—the prize adjudged before ever she left the starting-post. She held this man in the hollow of her hand, and that by no result of cunning artifice, but by right divine of beauty and wit and the manifold seductions of her richly-endowed personality. And, thinking of that, she clenched her dainty fists, opened them again, and again clenched them, upon the yielding mattress of the sofa, given over to an ecstasy of physical enjoyment, weaving even as, with clawed and padded paws, her prototype the she-panther might. Slowly she raised her downcast eyes and looked after Richard Calmady, his figure a blackness, as of vacancy, against the elaborate wrought-ironwork of the balcony. And so doing, an adorable sensation moved her, at once of hungry tenderness and of fear—fear of something unknown, in a way fundamental, incalculable, the like of which she had never experienced before. Ah! indeed, of all her many loves, here was the crown and climax! Yet, in the midst of her very vital rapture, she could still find time for remembrance of the little, crescent-shaped scar upon her temple, and for remembrance of Katherine Calmady, who had, unwittingly, fixed that blemish upon her and had also more than once frustrated her designs. This time frustration was not possible. She was about to revenge the infliction of that little scar! And, at the same time the intellectual part of her was agreeably intrigued, trying to disentangle the why and wherefore of Richard's late action and utterances. While self-love was gratified to the highest height of its ambition by the knowledge that not only in his heart had she long reigned, but that he had dedicated time and wealth and refined ingenuity to the idea of her, to her worship, to the making of this, her former dwelling-place, into a temple for her honour, a splendid witness to her victorious charm, a shrine not unfitting to contain the idol of his imagination.

For a little space she rested in all this, savouring the sweetness of it as some odour of costly sacrifice. For whatever her sins and lapses, Helen de Vallorbes had the fine aesthetic appreciations, as well as the inevitable animality, of the great courtesan. The artist was at least as present in her as the whore. And it was not, therefore, until realisation of her present felicity was complete, until it had soaked into her, so to speak, to the extent of a delicious familiarity, that she was disposed to seek change of posture or of place. Then, at last, softly, languidly, for indeed she was somewhat spent by the manifold emotions of the day, she rose and followed Richard into the starless, low-lying night. Her first words were very simple, yet to herself charged with far-reaching meaning—as a little key may give access to a treasure-chest containing riches of fabulous worth.

"Richard, is it really true, that which you have told me?"

"What conceivable object could I have in lying?"

"Then why have you delayed?—why wasted the precious days—the precious months and years, if it comes to that?"

"How in honour and decency could I do otherwise—circumstances being such as they are, I being that which I am?"

The two voices were in notable contrast. Both were low, both were penetrated by feeling. But the man's was hoarse and rasping, the woman's smooth and soft as milk.

"Ah! it is the old story!" she said. "Will you never comprehend, Dickie, that what is to you hateful in yourself, may to some one else be the last word of attraction, of seduction, even?"

"God forbid I should ever comprehend that!" he answered. "When I take to glorying in my shame, pluming myself upon my abnormality, then, indeed, I become beyond all example loathsome. The most deplorable moment of my very inglorious career will be precisely that in which I cease to look at myself with dispassionate contempt."

Helen knelt down, resting her beautiful arms upon the dark hand-rail of the balcony, letting her wrists droop over it into the outer dimness. The bland light from the open window dwelt on her kneeling figure and bowed head. But it was as well, perhaps, that the night dropped a veil upon her face.

"And yet so it is," she said. "You may repudiate the idea, but the fact remains. I do not say it would affect all women alike—affect those, for instance, whose conception of love, and of the relation between man and woman, is dependent upon the slightly improper and very tedious marriage service as authorised by the English Church. Let the conventional be conventional still! So much the better if you don't appeal to them—meagre, timid, inadequate, respectable—a generation of fashion-plates with a sixpenny book of etiquette, moral and social, stuck inside them to serve for a soul."

Helen's voice broke in a little spasm of laughter, and her hands began, unconsciously, to open and close, open and close, weaving in soft, outer darkness.

"We may leave them out of the argument.—But there remain the elect, Richard, among whom I dare count myself. And over them, never doubt it, just that which you hate and which appears at first sight to separate you so cruelly from other men, gives you a strange empire. You stimulate, you arrest, you satisfy one's imagination, as does the spectacle of some great drama. You are at once enslaved and emancipated by this thing—to you hateful, to me adorable—beyond all measure of bondage or freedom inflicted upon, or enjoyed by, other men. And in this, just this, lies magnificent compensation if you would but see it. I have always known that—known that if you would put aside your arrogance and pride, and yield yourself a little, it was possible to love you, and give you such joy in loving as one could give to no-one else on earth."

Her voice sweetened yet more. She leaned forward, pressing her bosom against the rough ironwork of the balcony.

"I knew that, from the first hour we met, in the variegated, autumn sunshine, upon the greensward, before the white summer-house overlooking that noble, English, woodland view. I saw you, and so doing I saw mysteries of joy in myself unimagined by me before. It went very hard with me then, Richard. It has gone very hard with me ever since."

Madame de Vallorbes' words died away in a grave and delicate whisper. But she did not turn her head, nor did Richard speak. Only, close there beside her, she heard him breathe, panting short and quick even as a dog pants, while a certain vibration seemed to run along the rough ironwork against which she leaned. And by these signs Helen judged her speech, though unanswered, had not been wholly in vain. From below, the luscious fragrance of the garden, the chime of falling water, and the urgent voice of the painted pleasure-city came up about her. Night had veiled the face of Naples, even as Helen's own. Yet lines of innumerable lights described the suave curve of the bay, climbed the heights of Posilipo, were doubled in the oily waters of the harbour, spread abroad alluring gaiety in the wide piazzas, and shone like watchful and soliciting eyes from out the darkness of narrow street, steep lane, and cutthroat alley. While, above all that, high uplifted against the opacity of the starless sky, a blood-red beacon burned on the summit of Vesuvius, the sombre glow of it reflected upon the underside of the masses of downward-rolling smoke as upon the belly of some slow-crawling, monstrous serpent.

Suddenly Helen spoke once again, and with apparent inconsequence.

"Richard, you must have known she could never satisfy you—why did you try to marry Constance Quayle?"

"To escape."

"From whom—from me?"

"From myself, which is much the same thing as saying from you, I suppose."

"And you could not escape?"

"So it seems."

"But—but, dear Richard," she said plaintively, yet with very winning sweetness, "why, after all, should you want so desperately to escape?"

Richard moved a little farther from her.

"I have already explained that to you, to the point of insult, so you tell me," he said. "Surely it is unnecessary to go over the ground again?"

"You carry your idealism to the verge of slight absurdity," she answered. "Oh! you of altogether too little faith, how should you gauge the full flavour of the fruit till you have set your teeth in it? Better, far better, be a sacramentalist like me and embrace the idea through the act, than refuse the act in dread of imperiling the dominion of the idea. You put the cart before the horse with a vengeance, Dickie! There's such a thing as being so reverently-minded towards your god that he ceases to be the very least profit or use to you."

And again she heard that panting breath beside her. Again laughter bubbled up in her fair throat, and her hands fell to weaving the soft, outer darkness.

"You must perceive that it cannot end here and thus," she said presently.

"Of course not," he answered. Then, after a moment's pause, he added coldly enough:—"I foresaw that, so I gave orders yesterday that the yacht was not to be laid up, but only to coal and provision, and undergo some imperatively necessary repairs. She should be ready for sea by the end of the week."

Helen turned sideways, and the bland light, from the room within, touched her face now as well as her kneeling figure.

"And then, and then?" she demanded, almost violently.

"Then I shall go," Richard replied. "Where, I do not yet know, but as far, anyhow, as the coal in the yacht's bunkers will drive her. Distance is more important than locality just now. And I leave you here at the villa, Helen. Do not regret that you came. I don't."

He too had turned to the light, which revealed his face ravaged and aged by stress of emotion, revealed too the homelessness, as of empty space, resident in his eyes.

"I shall be glad to remember the place pleases and speaks to you. It has been rather a haven of rest to me during these last two years. You would have had it at my death, in any case. You have it a little sooner—that's all."

But Helen held out her arms.

"The villa, the villa," she cried, "what do I want with that! God in heaven, are you utterly devoid of all sensibility, all heart? Or are you afraid—afraid even yet, oh, very chicken-livered lover—that behind the beauty of Naples you may find the filth? It is not so, Dickie. It is not so, I tell you.—Look at me. What would you have more? Surely, for any man, my love is good enough!"

And then hurriedly, with a rustling of silken skirts, hot with anger from head to heel, she sprang to her feet.

Across the room one of the men-servants advanced.

"The carriage is at the door, sir," he said.

And Madame de Vallorbes' voice broke in with a singular lightness and nonchalance:—

"Surely it is rather imprudent to go out again to-night? You told me, at dinner, you were not well, that you had had a touch of fever."

She held out her hand, smiling serenely.

"Be advised," she said—"avoid malaria. I shall see you before I go to-morrow? Yes—an afternoon train, I think. Good-night, we meet at breakfast as usual."

She stepped in at the window, gathered up certain small properties—a gold scent-bottle, one or two books, a blotting-case, as with a view to final packing and departure. Just as she reached the door she heard Richard say curtly:—

"Send the carriage round. I shall not want it to-night."

But even so Helen did not turn back. On the contrary, she ran, light of foot as the little dancer, of long ago, with blush-roses in her hat, through all the suite of rooms to her own sea-blue, sea-green bedchamber, and there, sitting down before the toilet-table, greeted her own radiant image in the glass. Her lips were very red. Her eyes shone like pale stars on a windy night.

"Quick, quick, undress me, Zelie! Put me to bed. I am simply expiring of fatigue," she said.



CHAPTER IX

CONCERNING THAT DAUGHTER OF CUPID AND PSYCHE WHOM MEN CALL VOLUPTAS

The furniture, though otherwise of the customary proportions, had all been dwarfed. This had been achieved in some cases by ingenious design in its construction, in others by the simple process of cutting down, thus reducing table and chair, couch and bureau, in itself of whatever grace of style, dignity of age, or fineness of workmanship, to an equality of uncomely degradation in respect of height. The resultant effect was of false perspective. Nor was this unpleasing effect lessened by the proportions of the room itself. In common with all those of the entresol, it was noticeably low in relation to its length and width, while the stunted vaultings of its darkly-frescoed ceiling produced an impression of heaviness rather than of space. Bookcases, dwarfed as were all the other furnishings, lined the walls to within about two feet of the spring of the said vaulting. Made of red cedar and unpolished, the cornices and uprights of them were carved with arabesques in high relief. An antique, Persian carpet, sombre in colouring and of great value, covered the greater portion of the pale pink and gray mosaic pavement of the floor. Thick, rusty-red, Genoa-velvet curtains were drawn over each low, square window. A fire of logs burned on the open hearth. And this notwithstanding the unaccustomed warmth of the outside air, did but temper the chill atmosphere of the room and serve to draw a faint aroma from the carven cedar wood.

It was here, to his library,—carried down-stairs by his men-servants as a helpless baby-child might be,—that Richard Calmady had come when Helen de Vallorbes departed so blithely to her bedchamber. And it was here he remained, though nearly two hours had elapsed since then, finding sleep impossible.

For the wakefulness and unrest of rapidly breeding illness were upon him. His senses and his will had been in very active conflict. Desire had licked him, as with fiery tongues, driving him onward. Honour, self-contempt in face of temptation to sensual indulgence, an aspiration after somewhat stoic asceticism which had come to influence his action of late, held him back. But now, here and alone, the immediately provoking cause of passion removed, reaction against the strain of all that had very sensibly set in. He felt strangely astray, as though drifting at hazard upon the waters of an unquiet, mist-blinded sea. He was conscious of a deep-seated preoccupation regarding some matter, which he was alike unable to forget or to define. Formless images perplexed his vision. Formless thoughts pursued one another, as with the hurry of rumoured calamity, through his mind. A desolating apprehension of things insufficiently developed, of the inconclusive, the immature, the unattained, of things mutilated, things unfinished, born out of due time and incomplete, oppressed his fancy. Even the events of the last few hours, in which he had played so considerable a part, took on a shadowy semblance, ceased to appeal to him as realities, began to merge themselves in that all-pervading apprehension of defectiveness, of that which is wanting, lopped off, so to speak, and docked. It was to him as though all natural, common-sense relations were in abeyance, as though his own, usually precise, mental processes were divorced from reason and experience, had got out of perspective, in short—even as this low, wide, cedar-scented library, of which the vaulted ceiling seemed to approach unduly close to the mosaic, marble floor, and all its dwarfed furnishings, its squat tables and almost legless chairs, had got out of perspective.

The alternate purposeless energy and weariful weakness of fever, just as the alternate dry flush and trembling chill of it, distressed him. He had slipped on a smoking-coat, but even the weight of this thin, silk garment seemed oppressive, although, now and again, he felt as though around his middle he wore a belt of ice. Not without considerable exertion he rolled forward a couch—wide, high-backed, legless, mounted upon little wheels—to the vicinity of the fire. He drew himself up on to it and rested among the piled-up cushions. Perhaps, if he waited, exercising patience, sleep might mercifully visit him and deliver him from this intolerable confusion of mind. Deliver him, too, from that hideous apprehension of universal mutilation, of maimed purposes, maimed happenings, of a world peopled by beings maimed as he was himself, but after a more subtle and intimate fashion, a fashion intellectual or moral rather than merely physical, so that they had to him, just now, an added hatefulness of specious lying, since to ordinary seeing they appeared whole, while whole they truly and actually were not.

Sternly he tried to shake himself free of these morbid fancies, to bring his imagination under control and force himself once again to join hands with reality and common sense. And, to this end, he turned his attention to the consideration of practical matters. He dwelt on the details of the coaling and revictualing of his yacht, upon the objective of the voyage upon which he proposed to start a few days hence. He reviewed the letters which must be written and the arrangements which must be made with a view to putting his cousin legally in possession of the villa, the rent of which he proposed still to pay to her husband. This suite of rooms he would retain for his own use. That was necessary, obligatory. Yet, why must he retain it? He did not propose to return and live here at any future time. This episode was over—or rather, had it not simply failed of completion? Was it not, like all the rest, maimed, lopped off ungainly, docked? Then, where came in the obligation to reserve these rooms? He could not remember. Yet he knew that he was compelled to do so, because—because——

And, once again, Richard's power of concentration broke down. Once again his thought eluded him, becoming tangled, fugitive, not to be grasped. While, like swarms of shrill squeaking bats disturbed in the recesses of some age-old cavern by sudden intrusion of voices and of lights, half-formed visions, half-formed ideas, once again, flapped duskily about him, torturing in their multiplicity alike to his senses and his brain. He fought with them, striving to beat them off in a madness of disgust, half suffocated by the fanning of their foul and stifling wings. Then, exhausted by the conflict, he stumbled and fell, while they closed down on him. And he, losing consciousness, slept.

That unconsciousness lasted in point of fact but for a few minutes. Yet to Richard those minutes were as years, as centuries. At length, still heavy with dreamless slumber, he was aware of the stealthy turning of a key in a lock. Little padding foot-falls, soft as those of some strong, yet dainty, cat-creature crossed the carpet. A whisper of silk came along with them, like the murmur of the breeze in an oak grove on a clear, hot, summer noon, or the sibilant ripple of the sea upon spaces of fine-ribbed, yellow sand. And the impression produced upon Richard was delicious, as of one passing from a close room into the open air. Confusion and exhaustion left him. Energy returned. The energy of breeding fever merely, yet to him it appeared that of refreshment, of renewed and abounding health. He was conscious, too, of a will outside himself, acting upon his will—a will self-secure, impregnable, working with triumphant daring towards a single end. It certainly was unmaimed—in its present manifestation in any case. It told, and with assurance, of completion, of attainment. Yielding himself to it, with something of the recklessness a man yields himself to the poison which yet promises relief, Richard opened his eyes.

Before him stood Helen de Vallorbes. In one hand she carried a little lamp. In the other her high-heeled, cloth-of-gold slippers. Her feet were bare. In the haste of the journey, from her bedchamber up-stairs through the great rooms and down the marble stairs, the fronts of the sea-blue, sea-green dressing-gown she wore had flown apart, thus disclosing not only her delicate night-dress, but—since this last was fine to the point of transparency—all the secret loveliness of her body and her limbs. Her shining hair curled low upon her forehead, half concealed her pretty ears, and lay upon her shoulders like a little, golden cape. And, from out this brightness of her hair, the exultant laughter bubbling in her throat, the small lamp carried high in one hand, she looked down at Richard Calmady.

"I waited till the hours grew old and you did not come to me, so I have come to you, Dickie," she said. "Let what will happen to-morrow, this very certainly shall happen to-night—that with you and me Love shall have his own way, speak his own language, be worshipped with the rites, be found in the sacraments, ordained by himself, and to which all nature is, and has been, obedient since life on earth first began!"

Not till the gray of a rain-washed, windy morning had come, and Naples had put off its merry sinning, changing from a city of pleasure to a city of labour and, too often, of callously inflicted pain, did Helen de Vallorbes leave the cedar-scented library. The fire of logs had burnt itself out upon the hearth, and other fires, perhaps, had pretty thoroughly burnt themselves out likewise. Then, with the extinguished lamp in one hand and her high-heeled, cloth-of-gold slippers in the other, she had run swiftly, barefoot, up the cold, marble stairs, through the suite of lofty rooms, her image, in the bleak dimness of the wet morning, given back by their tall mirrors as that of no mortal woman but some fear-driven, hurrying ghost. Carefully closing the door of the bedchamber behind her, she threw her dressing-gown aside and buried herself in the luxurious softness of the unslept-in bed. And she was only just in time. Servants began to move to and fro. The house was awake.



CHAPTER X

THE ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION

Sullenly, persistently, the rain came down. In the harbour the wash was just sufficient to make the raveled fruit-baskets, the shredded vegetables, the crusts and offal thrown out from the galleys, heave and sway upon the oily surface of the water, while screaming gulls dropped greedily upon the floating refuse, and rising, circled over the black, liquid lanes and open spaces between the hulls of the many ships. But it was insufficient to lift the yacht, tied up to the southern quay of the Porto Grande. She lay there inert and in somewhat sorry plight under the steady downpour. For the moment all the winsome devilry of a smart, sea-going craft was dead in her, and she sulked, ashamed through all her eight hundred tons of wood and iron, copper, brass, and steel. For she was coaling, over-deck, and was grimy from stem to stern. While, arrayed in the cast clothes of all Europe, tattered, undersized, gesticulating, the human scum of Naples swarmed up the steep, narrow planks from the inky lighters and in over her side.

"Beastly dirty job this. Shan't get her paint clean under a week!" the first mate grumbled to his companion, the second mate—a dark-haired, dreamy-eyed, West-country lad, but just out of his teens.

The two officers, in dripping oilskins, stood at the gangway checking the tally of coal-baskets as they came on board. Just now there was a pause in the black procession, as an empty lighter sheered off, making room for a full one to come alongside, thus rendering conversation momentarily possible.

"Pity the boss couldn't have stayed on shore till we were through with it and cleaned up a bit," the speaker continued. "Makes the old man no end waxy to have any one on board when the yacht's like she is. I don't blame him. She's as neat and pretty as a white daisy in a green pasture when she's away to sea. And now, poor little soul, she's a regular slut."

"I know I'd 'ave stayed ashore fast enough if I was the boss," the boy said, half wistfully. "That villa of his is like a piece of poetry. I keep on saying over to myself how it looks."

"Oh! it's not so bad for foreign parts," the senior officer replied. "And you're young yet and soft, Penberthy. You'll come of that presently. England's best for houses, town and country, and most other things—women, and fights, and even sunshine, for when you do get sunshine at home there's no spite in it.—Hi! there you ganger," he shouted suddenly, and resentfully, leaning out over the bulwarks, "hurry 'em up a bit, can't you? You don't suppose I mean to stand here till the second anniversary of the Day of Judgment, watching your blithering, chicken-shanked macaronies suck rotten oranges, do you? Start 'em up again. Whatever are you waiting for, man? Start 'em up, I say."

The boy's dreamy eyes, full of unwritten verse, dwelt with a curious indifference upon the broken procession of ascending, black figures. He had but lately joined, and to him both the fine vessel and her owner were invested with a certain romance.

"What was the fancy for calling the yacht the Reprieve?" he asked presently.

"Wait till you've had the chance to take a good look at Sir Richard, and you'll answer your question yourself," the other man answered oracularly. Then he broke out again into sustained invective:—"Hold up there, you little fool of a tight-rope-dancing, bella Napoli gorilla, and don't go dropping good, honest, Welsh steam-coal overboard into your confounded, stinking local sewer! I don't care to see any of your blamed posturings, don't flatter yourself. Hold up you grimacing, great grandson of a lousy she-ape, can't you, and walk straight.—Take him all round Sir Richard Calmady's the best boss I ever sailed with—one of the sternest, but the civilest too.—Shove 'em along, ganger, will you. Shove 'em along, I say.—He's one of the few men I've loved, I'm not ashamed to say it, Mr. Penberthy, and about the only one I ever remember to have feared, in my life."

Meanwhile, if the scene to seaward was cheerless, that to landward offered but small improvement. For the murk of low-brooding cloud and falling rain blotted out the Castel S. Elmo, and the Capo di Monte and Pizzafalcone heights. Even the Castello del'Ovo down on the shore line, comparatively near at hand, loomed up but a denser mass of indigo-gray amid the all obtaining grayness. The tall multi-coloured, many-shuttered houses fronting the quays—restaurants, cafes, money-changers' bureaux, ships' chandlers, and slopshops—looked tawdry and degraded as a clown's painted face seen by daylight. Thick, malodorous vapours arose from the squalid streets, lying back on the level, and from the crowded shipping of the port. These hung in the stagnant air, about the forest of masts and the funnels of steamers. And the noise of the place was as that of Bedlam let loose.—The long-drawn, chattering rush of the coal pitched from the baskets down the echoing, iron shoots. The grate and scream of saws cutting through blocks of stone and marble. The grind of heavy wheels upon the broken, irregular flags. The struggling clatter of hoofs, lashing of whips, squeal of mules, savage voices raised in cries and imprecations. The clank and roar of machinery. The repeated bellowing of a great liner, blowing off steam as she took up her berth in the outer harbour. The shattering rattle of the chains of a steam crane, when the monster iron-arm swung round seeking or depositing its burden and the crank ran out in harsh anger, as it seemed, and defiance. And through all this, as under-current, the confused clamour of the ever-shifting, ever-present crowd, and the small, steady drip of the rain. Squalid, sordid, brutal even, the coarse actualities of her trade and her poverty alike disclosed, her fictions and her foulness uncondoned by reconciling sunshine, Naples had declined from radiant goddess to common drab.

It was in this character that Richard Calmady, driving yesterday, and for the first time, through the streets at noon, had been fated to see his so fondly-idealised city. It was in this character that he apprehended it again to-day, waiting in his deck-cabin until cessation of the rain and on-coming of the friendly dusk should render it not wholly odious to sit out on deck. The hours lagged, and even this bright and usually spotless apartment—with its shining, white walls, its dark, blue leather and polished, mahogany fittings—the coal dust penetrated. It rimmed the edge of the books neatly ranged on the racks. It smirched the charts laid out on the square locker-table below. It drifted in at the cabin windows, along with the babel of sound and the all-pervading stench of the port. This was, in itself, sufficiently distasteful, sufficiently depressing. And to Richard, just now, the disgust of it came with the heightened sensibility of physical illness, and as accompaniment to an immense private shame and immense self-condemnation, a conviction of outlawry and a desolation passing speech. He looked for comfort, for promise of restoration, and found none, in things material or things intellectual, in others or in himself. For his mind, always prone to apprehend by images rather than by words, and to advance by analogy rather than by argument, discovered, in surrounding aspects and surrounding circumstance, a rather hideously apt parable and illustration of its present state. Just as this seemingly fair city was proven, on intimate acquaintance, repulsive beyond the worst he had ever feared and earnestly refused to know of it, so a certain fair woman, upon whom, since boyhood, his best, most chivalrous, most unselfish, affections had centred, was proven—herself, moreover, flagrantly contributing to that proving—vile beyond all that rumor, heard and passionately denied by him, had ever ventured to whisper concerning her. Nor was the misery of this revelation lessened by the knowledge that his own part in it all had been very base. He had sinned before. He would sin again probably. Richard had long ceased to regard these matters from a strictly puritanic standpoint. But this particular sinning was different to any that had gone before, or which could come after it. For it partook—so at least, it now appeared to him—of the nature of sacrilege, since he had sinned against his ideal, degrading that to gross uses which he had agreed with himself to hold sacred, defiling it and, thereby, very horribly defiling himself.

And this disgrace of their relation, his own and hers, the inherent abomination of it all and its inherent falsity, had been forced home on him with a certain violence of directness just in the common course of daily happenings. For among the letters, brought to him along with his first breakfast, yesterday, after that night of secret licence, had been three of serious import. One was from Lady Calmady, and that he put aside with a certain anger, calling himself unwilling, knowing himself unfit, to read it. Another he tore open. The handwriting was unknown to him. He began reading it in bewilderment. Then he understood.

"MONSIEUR,"—it ran,—"You are in process of exterminating me. But, since I have reason to believe that no sufficient opportunity has been afforded you of realising the enormity of your conduct, I rally the profoundness of nobility which I discover within me—I calm myself. I go further, I explain. Living in retirement, you may not have learned that I am in Naples. I followed your cousin here—Madame de Vallorbes. My connection with her represents the supreme passion of my passionate youth. At once a frenzy and an anodyne, I have found in it the inspiration of my genius in its later development. This work must not be put a stop to. It is too majestic, it is weighted with too serious consequences to the whole of thinking France, of thinking Europe. A less experienced woman cannot satisfy the extravagance of my desires, the demands of my all-consuming imagination. The reverence with which a person, such as yourself, must regard commanding talent, the concessions he must be willing to make to its necessities, are without limit. This I cannot doubt that you will admit. The corollary is obvious. Either, monsieur, you will immediately invite me to reside with you at your villa—thereby securing for yourself daily intercourse with a nature of distinguished merit—or you will restore Madame de Vallorbes to me without hesitation or delay. Her devotion to me is absolute. How could it fail to be so, since I have lavished upon her the treasures of my extraordinary personality? But a fear of insular prejudice on your part withholds her at this moment from full expression of that devotion. She suffers as well as myself. It will be your privilege to put a term to this suffering by requesting me to join her, or by restoring her to me. To do otherwise will be to prolong the eclipse of my genius, and thereby outrage the conscience of civilised humanity which breathlessly awaits the next utterance of its chosen poet. If you require the consolation of feminine society, marry—it would be very simple—some white-souled, English miss. But restore to me, to whom her presence is indispensable, this woman of regal passions. I shall present myself at your house to-day to receive your answer in person. The result of a refusal on your part to receive me will be attended by calamitous consequences to yourself.—Accept, monsieur, the expression of my highest consideration,

"PAUL AUGUSTE DESTOURNELLE."

For the moment Richard saw red, mad with rage at the insolence of the writer. And then came the question, was it true, this which the letter implied? Had Helen, indeed, lied to him? And, notwithstanding its insane vanity, did this precious epistle give a more veracious account of her relation to the young poet than that which she had herself volunteered? He tried to put the thought from him. Who was he—to-day of all days—to be nice about the conduct of another? Who was he to sit in judgment? So he turned to his correspondence again, taking another letter, at random, from the pile. And then, looking at the superscription, he turned somewhat sick.

"MON CHER,"—wrote M. de Vallorbes,—"My steward informs me that he has just received your draft for a quarter's rent of the villa. I thank you a thousand times for your admirable punctuality. Decidedly you are of those with whom it is a consolation to do business. Need I assure you that the advent of this money is far from inopportune, since a grateful country, while showering distinctions upon me with one hand, with the other picks my pocket. I find it not a little expensive this famous military service! But then, ever since I can remember, I have found all that afforded me the slightest, active pleasure equally that! And this sport of war, I promise you, is the most excellent sport in which I have as yet participated. It satisfies the primitive instincts more thoroughly than even your English fox-hunting. A battue of Communards is obviously superior to a battue of pheasants. To the dignity of killing one's fellow-men is added the satisfaction of ridding oneself of vermin. It becomes a matter of sanitation and self-respect. And this, indirectly, recalls to me, that report declares my wife to be with you at Naples. Mon cher je vous en fais cadeau. With you, at least, I know that my honour is safe. You may even instil into her mind some faint conception of the rudiments of morality. To be frank with you, she needs that. A couple of months ago she did me the honour to elope—temporarily, of course—with M. Paul Destournelle. You may have glanced, one day, at his crapulous verses. I suppose honour demanded that I should pursue the guilty pair and account for one, if not both, of them. But I was too busily engaged with my little Communards. We set these gentry up against a wall and dispose of them in batches. I have had a good deal of this, but, as I say, it has not yet become monotonous. Traits of individual character lend it vivacity. And then, putting aside the exigencies of my profession, I do not know that anything is to be gained by inviting public scandal. You have an English proverb to the effect that one should wash one's dirty linen at home. This I have tried to do, as you cannot but be aware, all along. If one has had the misfortune to marry Messalina, one learns to be philosophic. A few lovers more or less, in that connection, what, after all, does it matter? Indeed, I begin to derive ironical consolation from the fact of their multiplicity. The existence of one would have constituted a reflection upon my charms. But a matter of ten, fifteen, twenty, ceases to be in any degree personal to myself. Only I object to Destournelle. He is too young, too rococco. He represents a descent in the scale. I prefer des hommes mures, generals, ministers, princes. The devil knows we have had our share of such! Your generosity to her has saved us from Jews so far, and from nouveaux riches, by relieving the business of commercial aspects. Give her some salutary advice, therefore, mon cher, and if she becomes inconvenient forward her to Paris. I forgive to seventy-times-seven, being still proud enough to struggle after an appearance of social and conjugal decency. Enfin it is a relief to have unburdened myself for once, and you have been the good genius of my unfortunate menage, for which heaven reward you.—Yours, in true cousinly regard and supreme reliance on your discretion,

"LUIGI ANGELO FRANCESCO DE VALLORBES."

That this, in any case, had a stamp of sincerity upon it, Richard could not doubt. It must be admitted that he had long ceased to accept Madame de Vallorbes' estimate of her husband with unqualified belief. But, be that as it might, whether he were a consummate, or merely an average, profligate, one thing was certain that this man trusted him—Richard Calmady,—and that he—Richard Calmady—had very vilely betrayed that trust. He stared at the letter, and certain sentences in it seemed to sear him, even as the branding-iron used on a felon might. This was a new shame, different to, and greater than, any his deformity had ever induced in him, even as evil done is different to, and greater than, evil suffered. Morality may be relative only and conventional. Honour, for all persons of a certain standing and breeding, remains absolute. And it was precisely of his own honour that he had deprived himself. Not only in body, but in character, he was henceforth monstrous. For a while Richard had remained very still, looking at this thing into which he had made himself as though it were external and physically visible to him.

Then, suddenly, he had reached out his hand for his mother's letter. A decision of great moment was impending. He would know what she had to say before finally making that decision. He wondered bitterly, grimly, whether her words would plunge him yet deeper in this abyss of self-hatred and self-contempt.

MY DARLING,"—she wrote,—"I am foolishly glad to learn that you are back at Naples. It gives me comfort to know you are even thus much nearer home and in a country where I too have traveled and of which I retain many dear and delightful recollections. You may be surprised, perhaps, to see the unaccustomed address upon my note-paper and may wonder what has made me guilty of deserting my post. Now, since the worst of it is certainly over, I may tell you that my health has failed a good deal of late. Nothing of a really serious nature—you need not be alarmed about me. But I had got into a rather weak and unworthy state, from which it became very desirable I should rouse myself. Selfishness is insidious, but none the less reprehensible because it takes the apparently innocent form of sitting in a chair with one's eyes shut! However, that best of men, John Knott, brought very bracing influences to bear on me, convincing me of sin—in the gentlest way in the world—by means of Honoria St. Quentin. And so I picked myself up, dear Dickie,—picked the whole of myself up, as I hope, always saving and excepting my self-indulgent inertia,—and came away here to Ormiston. At first, I confess, I felt very much like a dog at a fair, or the proverbial mummy at a feast. But they all bore with me in the plenty of their kindness, and, in the last week, I have banished the mummy and trained the scared dog to altogether polite and pretty behaviour. Till I came back to it, I hardly realised how truly I loved this place. How should it be otherwise? I met your father first here after his third term at Eton. I remember he snubbed me roundly. I met him again the year before our marriage. Without vanity I declare that then he snubbed me not one little bit. These things are very far away. But to me, though far away, they are very vivid and very lovely. I see them as you, when you were small, so often pleaded to see a fairy landscape by looking through the large end of the gold and tortoise-shell spy-glass upon my writing-table. All of which may seem to you somewhat childish and trivial, but I grow an old woman and have a fancy for toys and tender make-believes—such as fairy landscapes seen through the big end of a spy-glass. The actual landscape, at times, is a trifle discouragingly rain-washed and cloudy!—-Roger and Mary are here. Their two boys are just gone back to school again. They are fine, courteous, fearless, little fellows. Roger makes a rather superb middle-aged man. He has much of my father—your grandfather's reticence and dignity. Indeed, he might prove slightly alarming, was one not so perfectly sure of him, dear creature. Mary remains, as of old, the most wholesome and helpful of women. Yes, it is good to dwell, for a time, among one's own people. And I cannot but rejoice that my eldest brother has come to an arrangement by which, at his death, your Uncle William will receive a considerable sum of money in lieu of the property. This last will go direct to Roger, and eventually to his boys. If your Uncle William had a son, the whole matter would be different. But I own it would hurt me that in the event of his death there would be no Ormiston at Ormiston after these many generations. In all probability the place would be sold immediately, moreover, for it is an open secret that, through no fault of his own, poor man, William is sadly embarrassed in money matters. And he has other sorrows—of a rather terrible nature, since they are touched with disgrace. But here you will probably detect a point of prejudice, so I had better stop!—I look out upon a gray, northern sea, where 'the white horses fume and fret' under a cold, gray, northern sky. The oaks in the park are just thickening with yellow-green buds. And there, close to my window, perched on a topmost twig, a missel-thrush is singing, facing the wind like a gentleman. You look out upon a purple sea, I suppose, beneath clear skies and over orange trees and palms. I wonder if any brave bird pipes to you as my storm-cock to me? It brings up one's courage to hear his song, so strong and wild and sweet, in the very teeth of the gale too! But now you will have had enough of my news and more than enough. I write to you more freely, you see, than for a long time past, being myself more free of spirit. And therefore I dare add this, in all and every case, my darling, God keep you. And remember, should you weary of wandering, that not only the doors of Brockhurst, but the doors of my heart, stand forever wide open to welcome you home.—Yours always,

K. C."

Reading which gentle, yet in a sense daring, words, Richard's shame took on another complexion, but one by no means calculated to mitigate the burning of it. His treachery towards de Vallorbes became almost vulgar and of small moment beside his cruelty to this superbly magnanimous woman, his mother. For, all these years, determinately and of set purpose, defiant of every better impulse, he had hardened his heart against her. To differ from her, to cherish that which was unsympathetic to her, to put aside every tradition in which she had nurtured him, to love that which she condemned, to condemn that which she loved—and this, if silently, yet unswervingly—had been the ruling purpose of his action. That which had its origin in passionate revolt against his own unhappy disfigurement, had come to be an interest and object in itself. In this quarrel with her—a quarrel, intimate, pre-natal, anterior to consciousness and to volition—he found the justification of his every lapse, his every crookedness of conduct and of thought. Since he could not reach Almighty God, and strike at the eternal First Cause which he held responsible for the inalienable wrong done to him, he would strike, with cold-blooded persistence, at the woman whom Almighty God had permitted to be His instrument in the infliction of that wrong. And to where had that sustained purpose of striking led him? Even—so he judged just now—to the dishonour and desolation of to-day, following upon the sacrilegious licence of last night.

All this Richard saw with the alternately groping, benumbed, mental vision and the glaring, mental nakedness of breeding fever. Small wonder that looking for comfort, for promise of restoration, he found none in things material, in things intellectual, in others, or in himself! He felt outcasted beyond hope of redemption, but not repentant, hardly remorseful even, only aware of all that which had happened, and of his own state. For Lady Calmady's letter was to him little more, as yet, than a placing of facts. To trade upon her magnificent generosity of affection, and seek refuge in those outstretched arms now, with the mark of the branding-iron so sensibly upon him, appeared to him of all contemptible doings the most radically contemptible. Obviously it was impossible to go back. He must go on rather—out of sight, out of mind. Fantastic schemes of disappearing, of losing himself, far away, in remote and nameless places, among the coral islands of the Pacific or the chill majesty of the Antarctic seas, offered themselves to his imagination. The practical difficulties presented by such schemes, their infeasibility, did not trouble him. He would sever all connection with that which had been, with that which had made for good equally with that which had made for evil. By his own voluntary act and choice he would become as a man dead, the disgrace of his malformed body, the closer and more hideous disgrace of his defiled and prostituted soul, surviving in legend merely, as might some ugly, old-time fable useful for the frightening of unruly babies.

And to that end of self-obliteration he instantly applied himself, with outward calm, but with the mental hurry and restlessness of increasing illness. His first duty was to end the whole matter of his relation to Helen,—Helen shorn of her divinity, convicted liar and wanton, yet mistress still for him, as he feared, of mighty enchantments. So he wrote to her very briefly. The note should be given her later in the day. In it he stated that he should have left the villa before this announcement reached her, left it finally and without remotest prospect of return, since he could not doubt that she recognised, as he did, how impossible it had become that he and she should meet again. He added that he would communicate with her shortly as to business arrangements. That done, he summoned Powell, his valet, bidding him pack. He would go down to the yacht at once. He had received information which made it imperative that he should quit Naples immediately.

To be out of all this, rid of it, fairly started on the road of negation of social being, negation of recognised existence, infected him like a madness. But even the most forceful human will must bend to stupidities of detail and of material fact. Unexpected delays had occurred. The yacht was not ready for sea, neither coaled, nor provisioned, nor sound of certain small damages to her machinery. Vanstone, the captain, might mislay his temper, and the first mate expend himself in polysyllabic invective, young Penberthy cease to dream, stewards, engineers, carpenters, cooks, quartermasters, seamen, firemen, do their most willing and urgent best, nevertheless the morning of next day, and even the afternoon of it, still found Richard Calmady seated at the locker-table of the white-walled deck-cabin, his voyage towards self-obliteration not yet begun.

Charts were outspread before him, upon which, at weary intervals, he essayed to trace the course of his coming wanderings. But his brain was dull, he had no power of consecutive thought. That same madness of going was upon him with undiminished power, yet he knew not where he wanted to go, hardly why he wanted to go, only that a blind obsession of going drove him. He was miserably troubled about other matters too—about that same brief letter he had written to Helen before leaving the villa. He was convinced that he had written such a letter, but struggle as he might to remember the contents of it they remained to him a blank. He was haunted by the fear that in that letter he had committed some irremediable folly, had bound himself to some absurdly unworthy course of action. But what it might be escaped and, in escaping, tortured him. And then, this surely was Friday, and Morabita sang at the San Carlo to-night? And surely he had promised to be there, and to meet the famous prima donna and sup with her after the performance, as in former days at Vienna? He had not always been quite kind to her, poor, dear, fat, good-natured, silly soul! He could not fail her now.—And then he went back to a chart of the South Pacific again. Only he could not see it plainly, but saw, instead of it, the great folio of copper-plate engravings lying on the broad window-seat of the eastern bay of the Long Gallery at home. He was sitting there to watch for the race-horses coming back from exercise, Tom Chifney pricking along beside them on his handsome cob. And the long-ago, boyish desperation of longing for wholeness, for freedom, brought a moistness to his eyes, and a lump into his throat. And all the while the coal dust drifted in at each smallest crevice and aperture, and the air was vibrant with rasping, jarring uproar and nauseous with the stale, heavy odours of the city and the port. And steadily, ceaselessly, the descending rain drummed upon the roofing overhead.

At length a stupor took him. His head sunk upon his arms, folded upon those outspread charts, while the noise of all the rude activities surrounding him subtly transformed itself into that of a great orchestra. And above this, superior to, yet nobly supported by it, Morabita's voice rose in the suave and passionate phrases of the glorious cavatina—"Ernani, Ernani, involami, all aborito ampleso."—Yes, her voice was as good as ever! Richard drew a long breath of relief. Here, at least, was something true to itself, and amid so much of change, so much of spoiling, still unspoilt! He raised his head and listened. For something must have happened, something of serious moment. The orchestra, for some unaccountable reason, had suddenly broken down. Yes, it must be the orchestra which disaster had overtaken, for a voice very certainly continued. No, not a voice, but voices—those of Vanstone the captain, and Price the first mate, and old Billy Tinn the boatswain—loud, imperative, violently remonstrant, but swept under and swamped at moments by cries and volleys of foulest, Neapolitan argot from hoarse, Neapolitan throats. And that abruptly silenced orchestra?—Richard came back to himself, came back to actualities of environment and prosaic fact. An infinitely weariful despair seized him. For the sound that had reached so sudden a termination was not that of cunningly-attuned, musical instruments, but the long-drawn, chattering rush of the coal, pitched from the baskets down the echoing, iron shoots.