He confided now in us, walking dejectedly with us in his "grounds."

"They'd destroy me," he said, "if they could. How they can take pleasure in it, Simpson! It's incredible, incomprehensible."

We said it was, but it wasn't in the least. We knew the pleasure, the indestructible pleasure, he gave us; we knew the irresistible temptation that he offered. As for destroying him, we knew that they wouldn't have destroyed him for the world. He was their one bright opportunity. What would they have done without their Wrackham?

He kept on at it. He said there had been moments this last year when, absurd as it might seem, he had wondered whether after all he hadn't failed. That was the worst of an incessant persecution; it hypnotized you into disbelief, not as to your power (he rubbed that in), but as to your success, the permanence of the impression you had made. I remember trying to console him, telling him that he was all right. He'd got his public, his enormous public.

There were consolations we might have offered him. We might have told him that he had succeeded; we might have told him that, if he wanted a monument, he'd only got to look around him. After all, he'd made a business of it that enabled him to build a Tudor mansion with bathrooms everywhere and keep two motor-cars. We could have reminded him that there wasn't one of the things he'd got with it—no, not one bathroom—that he would have sacrificed, that he was capable of sacrificing; that he'd warmed himself jolly well all over and all the time before the fire of life, and that his cucumbers alone must have been a joy to him. And of course we might have told him that he couldn't have it both ways; that you cannot have bathrooms and motor-cars and cucumber-frames (not to the extent he had them) and the incorruptible and stainless glory. But that wouldn't have consoled him; for he wanted it both ways. Fellows like Wrackham always do. He wasn't really happy, as a really great man might have been, with his cucumbers and things.

He kept on saying it was easy enough to destroy a Great Name. Did they know, did anybody know, what it cost to build one?

I said to myself that possibly Antigone might know. All I said to him was, "Look here, we're agreed they can't do anything. When a man has once captured and charmed the great Heart of the Public, he's safe—in his lifetime, anyway."

Then he burst out. "His lifetime? Do you suppose he cares about his lifetime? It's the life beyond life—the life beyond life."

It was in fact, d'you see, the "Life and Letters." He was thinking about it then.

He went on. "They have it all their own way. He can't retort; he can't explain; he can't justify himself. It's only when he's dead they'll let him speak."

"Well, I mean to. That'll show 'em," he said; "that'll show 'em."

"He's thinking of it, Simpson; he's thinking of it," Burton said to me that evening.

He smiled. He didn't know what his thinking of it was going to mean—for him.

IV

He had been thinking of it for some considerable time. That pilgrimage was my last—it'll be two years ago this autumn—and it was in the spring of last year he died.

He was happy in his death. It saved him from the thing he dreaded above everything, certainty of the ultimate extinction. It has not come yet. We are feeling still the long reverberation of his vogue. We miss him still in the gleam, the jest gone forever from the papers. There is no doubt but that his death staved off the ultimate extinction. It revived the public interest in him. It jogged the feeble pulse of his once vast circulation. It brought the familiar portrait back again into the papers, between the long, long columns. And there was more laurel and a larger crowd at Brookwood than on the day when we first met him in the churchyard at Chenies.

And then we said there had been stuff in him. We talked (in the papers) of his "output." He had been, after all, a prodigious, a gigantic worker. He appealed to our profoundest national instincts, to our British admiration of sound business, of the self-made, successful man. He might not have done anything for posterity, but he had provided magnificently for his child and widow.

So we appraised him. Then on the top of it all the crash came, the tremendous crash that left his child and widow almost penniless. He hadn't provided for them at all. He had provided for nothing but his own advertisement. He had been living, not only beyond his income, but beyond, miles beyond, his capital, beyond even the perennial power that was the source of it. And he had been afraid, poor fellow! to retrench, to reduce by one cucumber-frame the items of the huge advertisement; why, it would have been as good as putting up the shop windows—his publishers would instantly have paid him less.

His widow explained tearfully how it all was, and how wise and foreseeing he had been; what a thoroughly sound man of business. And really we thought the dear lady wouldn't be left so very badly off. We calculated that Burton would marry Antigone, and that the simple, self-denying woman could live in modest comfort on the mere proceeds of the inevitable sale. Then we heard that the Tudor mansion, the "Grounds," the very cucumber-frames, were sunk in a mortgage; and the sale of his "effects," the motor-cars and furniture, the books and the busts, paid his creditors in full, but it left a bare pittance for his child and widow.

They had come up to town in that exalted state with which courageous women face adversity. In her excitement Antigone tried hard to break off her engagement to Grevill Burton. She was going to do typewriting, she was going to be somebody's secretary, she was going to do a thousand things; but she was not going to hang herself like a horrid millstone round his neck and sink him. She had got it into her head, poor girl, that Wrackham had killed himself, ruined himself by his efforts to provide for his child and widow. They had been the millstones round his neck. She even talked openly now about the "pot-boilers" they had compelled Papa to write; by which she gave us to understand that he had been made for better things. It would have broken your heart to hear her.

Her mother, ravaged and reddened by grief, met us day after day (we were doing all we could for her) with her indestructible, luminous smile. She could be tearful still on provocation, through the smile, but there was something about her curiously casual and calm, something that hinted almost complacently at a little mystery somewhere, as if she had up her sleeve resources that we were not allowing for. But we caught the gist of it, that we, affectionate and well-meaning, but thoroughly unbusiness-like young men, were not to worry. Her evident conviction was that he had foreseen, he had provided for them.

"Lord only knows," I said to Burton, "what the dear soul imagines will turn up."

Then one day she sent for me; for me, mind you, not Burton. There was something that she and her daughter, desired to consult me about. I went off at once to the dreadful little lodgings in the Fulham Road where they had taken refuge. I found Antigone looking, if anything, more golden and more splendid, more divinely remote and irrelevant against the dingy background. Her mother was sitting very upright at the head and she at the side of the table that almost filled the room. They called me to the chair set for me facing Antigone. Throughout the interview I was exposed, miserably, to the clear candor of her gaze.

Her mother, with the simplicity which was her charming quality, came straight to the point. It seemed that Wrackham had thought better of us, of Burton and me, than he had ever let us know. He had named us his literary executors. Of course, his widow expounded, with the option of refusal. Her smile took for granted that we would not refuse.

What did I say? Well, I said that I couldn't speak for Burton, but for my own part I—I said I was honored (for Antigone was looking at me with those eyes) and of course I shouldn't think of refusing, and I didn't imagine Burton would either. You see I'd no idea what it meant. I supposed we were only in for the last piteous turning out of the dead man's drawers, the sorting and sifting of the rubbish heap. We were to decide what was worthy of him and what was not.

There couldn't, I supposed, be much of it. He had been hard pressed. He had always published up to the extreme limit of his production.

I had forgotten all about the "Life and Letters." They had been only a fantastic possibility, a thing our profane imagination played with; and under the serious, chastening influences of his death it had ceased to play.

And now they were telling me that this thing was a fact. The letters were, at any rate. They had raked them all in, to the last postcard (he hadn't written any to us), and there only remained the Life. It wasn't a perfectly accomplished fact; it would need editing, filling out, and completing from where he had left it off. He had not named his editor, his biographer, in writing—at least, they could find no note of it among his papers—but he had expressed a wish, a wish that they felt they could not disregard. He had expressed it the night before he died to Antigone, who was with him.

"Did he not, dearest?"

I heard Antigone say, "Yes, Mamma." She was not looking at me then.

There was a perfectly awful silence. And then Antigone did look at me, and she smiled faintly.

"It isn't you," she said.

No, it was not I. I wasn't in it. It was Grevill Burton.

I ought to tell you it wasn't an open secret any longer that Burton was editing the "Life and Letters of Ford Lankester," with a Critical Introduction. The announcement had appeared in the papers a day or two before Wrackham's death. He had had his eye on Burton. He may have wavered between him and another, he may have doubted whether Burton was after all good enough; but that honor, falling to Burton at that moment, clinched it. There was prestige, there was the thing he wanted. Burton was his man.

There wouldn't, Mrs. Wrackham said, be so very much editing to do. He had worked hard in the years before his death. He had gathered in all the material, and there were considerable fragments—whole blocks of reminiscences, which could be left, which should be left as they stood (her manner implied that they were monuments). What they wanted, of course, was something more than editing. Anybody could have done that. There was the Life to be completed in the later years, the years in which Mr. Burton had known him more intimately than any of his friends. Above all, what was necessary, what had been made so necessary, was a Critical Introduction, the summing up, the giving of him to the world as he really was.

Did I think they had better approach Mr. Burton direct, or would I do that for them? Would I sound him on the subject?

I said cheerfully that I would sound him. If Burton couldn't undertake it (I had to prepare them for this possibility), no doubt we should find somebody who could.

But Antigone met this suggestion with a clear "No." It wasn't to be done at all unless Mr. Burton did it. And her mother gave a little cry. It was inconceivable that it should not be done. Mr. Burton must. He would. He would see the necessity, the importance of it.

Of course I saw it. And I saw that my position and Burton's was more desperate than I had imagined. I couldn't help but see the immense importance of the "Life and Letters." They were bound, even at this time of day, to "fetch" a considerable sum, and the dear lady might be pardoned if she were incidentally looking to them as a means of subsistence. They were evidently what she had had up her sleeve. Her delicacy left the financial side of the question almost untouched; but in our brief discussion of the details, from her little wistful tone in suggesting that if Mr. Burton could undertake it at once and get it done soon, if they could in fact launch it on the top of the returning tide—from the very way that she left me to finish her phrases for her I gathered that they regarded the "Life and Letters" as Wrackham's justification in more ways than one. They proved that he had not left them unprovided for.

Well, I sounded Burton. He stared at me aghast. I was relieved to find that he was not going to be sentimental about it. He refused flatly.

"I can't do him and Lankester," he said.

I saw his point. He would have to keep himself clean for him. I said of course he couldn't, but I didn't know how he was going to make it straight with Antigone.

"I shan't have to make it straight with Antigone," he said. "She'll see it. She always has seen."

V

That was just exactly what I doubted.

I was wrong. She always had seen. And it was because she saw and loathed herself for seeing that she insisted on Burton's doing this thing. It was part of her expiation, her devotion, her long sacrificial act. She was dragging Burton into it partly, I believe, because he had seen too, more clearly, more profanely, more terribly than she.

Oh, and there was more in it than that. I got it all from Burton. He had been immensely plucky about it. He didn't leave it to me to get him out of it. He had gone to her himself, so certain was he that he could make it straight with her.

And he hadn't made it straight at all. It had been more awful, he said, than I could imagine. She hadn't seen his point. She had refused to see it, absolutely (I had been right there, anyhow).

He had said, in order to be decent, that he was too busy; he was pledged to Lankester and couldn't possibly do the two together. And she had seen all that. She said of course it was a pity that he couldn't do it now, while people were ready for her father, willing, she said, to listen; but if it couldn't be done at once, why, it couldn't. After all, they could afford to wait. He, she said superbly, could afford it. She ignored in her fine manner the material side of the "Life and Letters," its absolute importance to their poor finances, the fact that if he could afford to wait, they couldn't. I don't think that view of it ever entered into her head. The great thing, she said, was that it should be done.

And then he had to tell her that he couldn't do it. He couldn't do it at all. "That part of it, Simpson," he said, "was horrible. I felt as if I were butchering her—butchering a lamb."

But I gathered that he had been pretty firm so far, until she broke down and cried. For she did, poor bleeding lamb, all in a minute. She abandoned her superb attitude and her high ground and put it altogether on another footing. Her father hadn't been the happy, satisfied, facilely successful person he was supposed to be. People had been cruel to him; they had never understood; they didn't realize that his work didn't represent him. Of course she knew (she seems to have handled this part of it with a bold sincerity) what he, Burton, thought about it; but he did realize that. He knew it didn't do him anything like justice. He knew what lay behind it, behind everything that he had written. It was wonderful, Burton said, how she did that, how she made the vague phrase open up a vast hinterland of intention, the unexplored and unexploited spirit of him. He knew, Burton knew, how he had felt about it, how he had felt about his fame. It hadn't been the thing he really wanted. He had never had that. And oh, she wanted him to have it. It was the only thing she wanted, the only thing she really cared about, the only thing she had ever asked of Burton.

He told me frankly that she didn't seem quite sane about it. He understood it, of course. She was broken up by the long strain of her devotion, by his death and by the crash afterward, by the unbearable pathos of him, of his futility, and of the menacing oblivion. You could see that Antigone had parted with her sense of values and distinctions, that she had lost her bearings; she was a creature that drifted blindly on a boundless sea of compassion. She saw her father die the ultimate death. She pleaded passionately with Burton to hold back the shadow; to light a lamp for him; to prolong, if it were only for a little while, his memory; to give him, out of his own young radiance and vitality, the life beyond life that he had desired.

Even then, so he says, he had held out, but more feebly. He said he thought somebody else ought to do it, somebody who knew her father better. And she said that nobody could do it, nobody did know him; there was nobody's name that would give the value to the thing that Burton's would. That was handsome of her, Burton said. And he seems to have taken refuge from this dangerous praise in a modesty that was absurd, and that he knew to be absurd in a man who had got Lankester's "Life" on his hands. And Antigone saw through it; she saw through it at once. But she didn't see it all; he hadn't the heart to let her see his real reason, that he couldn't do them both. He couldn't do Wrackham after Lankester, nor yet, for Lankester's sake, before. And he couldn't, for his own sake, do him at any time. It would make him too ridiculous.

And in the absence of his real reason he seems to have been singularly ineffective. He just sat there saying anything that came into his head except the one thing. He rather shirked this part of it; at any rate, he wasn't keen about telling me what he'd said, except that he'd tried to change the subject. I rather suspected him of the extreme error of making love to Antigone in order to keep her off it.

Finally she made a bargain with him. She said that if he did it she would marry him whenever he liked (she had considered their engagement broken off, though he hadn't). But (there Antigone was adamant) if he didn't, if he cared so little about pleasing her, she wouldn't marry him at all.

Then he said of course he did care; he would do anything to please her, and if she was going to take a mean advantage and to put it that way——

And of course she interrupted him and said he didn't see her point; she wasn't putting it that way; she wasn't going to take any advantage, mean or otherwise; it was a question of a supreme, a sacred obligation. How could she marry a man who disregarded, who was capable of disregarding, her father's dying wish? And that she stuck to.

I can't tell you now whether she was merely testing him, or whether she was determined, in pure filial piety, to carry the thing through, and saw, knowing her hold on him, that this was the way and the only way, or whether she actually did believe that for him, too, the obligation was sacred and supreme. Anyhow she stuck to it. Poor Burton said he didn't think it was quite fair of her to work in that way, but that, rather than lose her, rather than lose Antigone, he had given in.

VI

He had taken the papers—the documents—home with him; and that he might know the worst, the whole awful extent of what he was in for, he began overhauling them at once.

I went to see him late one evening and found him at it. He had been all through them once, he said, and he was going through them again. I asked him what they were like. He said nothing.

"Worse than you thought?" I asked.

Far worse. Worse than anything I could imagine. It was inconceivable, he said, what they were like. I said I supposed they were like him. I gathered from his silence that it was inconceivable what he was. That Wrackham should have no conception of where he really stood was conceivable; we knew he was like that, heaps of people were, and you didn't think a bit the worse of them; you could present a quite respectable "Life" of them with "Letters" by simply suppressing a few salient details and softening the egoism all round. But what Burton supposed he was going to do with Wrackham, short of destroying him! You couldn't soften him, you couldn't tone him down; he wore thin in the process and vanished under your touch.

But oh, he was immense! The reminiscences were the best. Burton showed us some of them. This was one:

"It was the savage aspects of Nature that appealed to me. One of my earliest recollections is of a thunderstorm among the mountains. My nursery looked out upon the mountainside where the storm broke. My mother has told me that I cried till I made the nurse carry me to the window, and that I literally leaped in her arms for joy. I laughed at the lightning and clapped my hands at the thunder. The Genius of the Storm was my brother. I could not have been more than eleven months old."

And there was another bit that Burton said was even better.

"I have been a fighter all my life. I have had many enemies. What man who has ever done anything worth doing has not had them? But our accounts are separate, and I am willing to leave the ultimate reckoning to time." There were lots of things like that. Burton said it was like that cloak he used to wear. It would have been so noble if only he had been a little bigger.

And there was an entry in his diary that I think beat everything he'd ever done. "May 3, 1905. Lankester died. Finished the last chapter of 'A Son of Thunder.' Ave Frater, atque vale."

I thought there was a fine audacity about it, but Burton said there wasn't. Audacity implied a consciousness of danger, and Wrackham had none. Burton was in despair.

"Come," I said, "there must be something in the Letters."

No, the Letters were all about himself, and there wasn't anything in him. You couldn't conceive the futility, the fatuity, the vanity—it was a disease with him.

"I couldn't have believed it, Simpson, if I hadn't seen him empty himself."

"But the hinterland?" I said. "How about the hinterland? That was what you were to have opened up."

"There wasn't any hinterland. He's opened himself up. You can see all there was of him. It's lamentable, Simpson, lamentable."

I said it seemed to me to be supremely funny. And he said I wouldn't think it funny if I were responsible for it.

"But you aren't," I said. "You must drop it. You can't be mixed up with that. The thing's absurd."

"Absurd? Absurdity isn't in it. It's infernal, Simpson, what this business will mean to me."

"Look here," I said. "This is all rot. You can't go on with it."

He groaned. "I must go on with it. If I don't——"

"Antigone will hang herself?"

"No. She won't hang herself. She'll chuck me. That's how she has me, it's how I'm fixed. Can you conceive a beastlier position?"

I said I couldn't, and that if a girl of mine put me in it, by heaven, I'd chuck her.

He smiled. "You can't chuck Antigone," he said.

I said Antigone's attitude was what I didn't understand. It was inconceivable she didn't know what the things were like. "What do you suppose she really thinks of them?"

That was it. She had never committed herself to an opinion. "You know," he said, "she never did."

"But," I argued, "you told me yourself she said they'd represent him. And they do, don't they?"

"Represent him?" He grinned in his agony. "I should think they did."

"But," I persisted, because he seemed to me to be shirking the issue, "it was her idea, wasn't it? that they'd justify him, give him his chance to speak, to put himself straight with us?"

"She seems," he said meditatively, "to have taken that for granted."

"Taken it for granted? Skittles!" I said. "She must have seen they were impossible. I'm convinced, Burton, that she's seen it all along; she's merely testing you to see how you'd behave, how far you'd go for her. You needn't worry. You've gone far enough. She'll let you off."

"No," he said, "she's not testing me. I'd have seen through her if it had been that. It's deadly serious. It's a sacred madness with her. She'll never let me off. She'll never let herself off. I've told you a hundred times it's expiation. We can't get round that."

"She must be mad, indeed," I said, "not to see."

"See? See?" he cried. "It's my belief, Simpson, that she hasn't seen. She's been hiding her dear little head in the sand."

"How do you mean?"

"I mean," he said, "she hasn't looked. She's been afraid to."

"Hasn't looked?"

"Hasn't read the damned things. She doesn't know how they expose him."

"Then, my dear fellow," I said, "you've got to tell her."

"Tell her?" he cried. "If I told her she would go and hang herself. No. I'm not to tell her. I'm not to tell anybody. She's got an idea that he's pretty well exposed himself, and, don't you see, I'm to wrap him up."

"Wrap him up——"

"Wrap him up, so that she can't see, so that nobody can see. That's what I'm here for—to edit him, Simpson, edit him out of all recognition. She hasn't put it to herself that way, but that's what she means. I'm to do my best for him. She's left it to me with boundless trust in my—my constructive imagination. Do you see?"

I did. There was no doubt that he had hit it.

"This thing" (he brought his fist down on it), "when I've finished with it, won't be Wrackham: it'll be all me."

"That's to say you'll be identified with him?"

"Identified—crucified—scarified with him. You don't suppose they'd spare me? I shall be every bit as—as impossible as he is."

"You can see all that, and yet you're going through with it?"

"I can see all that, and yet I'm going through with it."

"And they say," I remarked gently, "that the days of chivalry are dead."

"Oh, rot," he said. "It's simply that—she's worth it."

Well, he was at it for weeks. He says he never worked at anything as he worked at his Charles Wrackham. I don't know what he made of him, he wouldn't let me see. There was no need, he said, to anticipate damnation.

In the meantime, while it pended, publishers, with a dreadful eagerness, were approaching him from every side. For Wrackham (what was left of him) was still a valuable property, and Burton's name, known as it was, had sent him up considerably, so that you can see what they might have done with him. There had been a lot of correspondence, owing to the incredible competition, for, as this was the last of him, there was nothing to be said against the open market; still, it was considered that his own publishers, if they "rose" properly, should have the first claim. The sum, if you'll believe me, of five thousand had been mentioned. It was indecently large, but Burton said he meant to screw them up to it. He didn't mind how high he screwed them; he wasn't going to touch a penny of it. That was his attitude. You see the poor fellow couldn't get it out of his head that he was doing something unclean.

It was in a fair way of being made public; but as yet, beyond an obscure paragraph in the Publishers' Circular, nothing had appeared about it in print. It remained an open secret.

Then Furnival got hold of it.

Whether it was simply his diabolic humor, or whether he had a subtler and profounder motive (he says himself he was entirely serious; he meant to make Burton drop it); anyhow, he put a paragraph in his paper, in several papers, announcing that Grevill Burton was engaged simultaneously on the "Life and Letters of Ford Lankester" and the "Personal Reminiscences" of Mr. Wrackham.

Furnival did nothing more than that. He left the juxtaposition to speak for itself, and his paragraph was to all appearances most innocent and decorous. But it revived the old irresistible comedy of Charles Wrackham; it let loose the young demons of the press. They were funnier about him than ever (as funny, that is, as decency allowed), having held themselves in so long over the obituary notices.

And Furnival (there I think his fine motive was apparent) took care to bring their ribald remarks under Burton's notice. Furny's idea evidently was to point out to Burton that his position was untenable, that it was not fitting that the same man should deal with Mr. Wrackham and with Ford Lankester. He had to keep himself clean for him. If he didn't see it he must be made to see.

He did see it. It didn't need Furnival to make him. He came to me one evening and told me that it was impossible. He had given it up.

"Thank God," I said.

He smiled grimly. "God doesn't come into it," he said. "It's Lankester I've given up."

"You haven't!" I said.

He said he had.

He was very cool and calm about it, but I saw in his face the marks of secret agitation. He had given Lankester up, but not without a struggle. I didn't suppose he was wriggling out of the other thing, he said. He couldn't touch Lankester after Wrackham. It was impossible for the same man to do them both. It wouldn't be fair to Lankester or his widow. He had made himself unclean.

I assured him that he hadn't, that his motive purged him utterly, that the only people who really mattered were all in the secret; they knew that it was Antigone who had let him in for Wrackham; they wouldn't take him and his Wrackham seriously; and he might be sure that Ford Lankester would absolve him. It was high comedy after Lankester's own heart, and so on. But nothing I said could move him. He stuck to it that the people in the secret, the people I said mattered, didn't matter in the least, that his duty was to the big outside public for whom Lives were written, who knew no secrets and allowed for no motives; and when I urged on him, as a final consideration, that he'd be all right with them, they wouldn't understand the difference between Charles Wrackham and Ford Lankester, he cried out that that was what he meant. It was his business to make them understand. And how could they if he identified himself with Wrackham? It was almost as if he identified Lankester——

Then I said that, if that was the way he looked at it, his duty was clear. He must give Wrackham up.

"Give up Antigone, you mean," he said.

He couldn't.

VII

Of course it was not to be thought of that he should give up his Lankester, and the first thing to be done was to muzzle Furnival's young men. I went to Furny the next day and told him plainly that his joke had gone too far, that he knew what Burton was and that it wasn't a bit of good trying to force his hand.

And then that evening I went on to Antigone.

She said I was just in time; and when I asked her "for what?" she said—to give them my advice about her father's "Memoirs."

I told her that was precisely what I'd come for; and she asked if Grevill had sent me.

I said no, he hadn't. I'd come for myself.

"Because," she said, "he's sent them back."

I stared at her. For one moment I thought that he had done the only sane thing he could do, that he had made my horrible task unnecessary.

She explained. "He wants Mamma and me to go over them again and see if there aren't some things we'd better leave out."

"Oh," I said, "is that all?"

I must have struck her as looking rather queer, for she said, "All? Why, whatever did you think it was?"

With a desperate courage I dashed into it there where I saw my opening.

"I thought he'd given it up."

"Given it up?"

Her dismay showed me what I had yet to go through. But I staved it off a bit. I tried half-measures.

"Well, yes," I said, "you see, he's frightfully driven with his Lankester book."

"But—we said—we wouldn't have him driven for the world. Papa can wait. He has waited."

I ignored it and the tragic implication.

"You see," I said, "Lankester's book's awfully important. It means no end to him. If he makes the fine thing of it we think he will, it'll place him. What's more, it'll place Lankester. He's still—as far as the big outside public is concerned—waiting to be placed."

"He mustn't wait," she said. "It's all right. Grevill knows. We told him he was to do Lankester first."

I groaned. "It doesn't matter," I said, "which he does first."

"You mean he'll be driven anyway?"

It was so far from what I meant that I could only stare at her and at her frightful failure to perceive.

I went at it again, as I thought, with a directness that left nothing to her intelligence. I told her what I meant was that he couldn't do them both.

But she didn't see it. She just looked at me with her terrible innocence.

"You mean it's too much for him?"

And I tried to begin again with no, it wasn't exactly that—but she went on over me.

It wouldn't be too much for him if he didn't go at it so hard. He was giving himself more to do than was necessary. He'd marked so many things for omission; and, of course, the more he left out of "Papa," the more he had to put in of his own.

"And he needn't," she said. "There's such a lot of Papa."

I knew. I scowled miserably at that. How was I going to tell her it was the whole trouble, that there was "such a lot of Papa"?

I said there was; but, on the other hand, he needed such a lot of editing.

She said that was just what they had to think about. Did he?

I remembered Burton's theory, and I put it to her point-blank. Had she read all of him?

She flushed slightly. No, she said, not all. But Mamma had.

"Then" (I skirmished), "you don't really know?"

She parried it with "Mamma knows."

And I thrust. "But," I said, "does your mother really understand?"

I saw her wince.

"Do you mean," she said, "there are things—things in it that had better be kept out?"

"No," I said, "there weren't any 'things' in it——"

"There couldn't be," she said superbly. "Not things we'd want to hide."

I said there weren't. It wasn't "things" at all. I shut my eyes and went at it head downward.

It was, somehow, the whole thing.

"The whole thing?" she said, and I saw that I had hit her hard.

"The whole thing," I said.

She looked scared for a moment. Then she rallied.

"But it's the whole thing we want. He wanted it. I know he did. He wanted to be represented completely or not at all. As he stood. As he stood," she reiterated.

She had given me the word I wanted. I could do it gently now.

"That's it," I said. "These 'Memoirs' won't represent him."

Subtlety, diabolic or divine, was given me. I went at it like a man inspired.

"They won't do him justice. They'll do him harm."

"Harm?" She breathed it with an audible fright.

"Very great harm. They give a wrong impression, an impression of—of——"

I left it to her. It sank in. She pondered it.

"You mean," she said at last, "the things he says about himself?"

"Precisely. The things he says about himself. I doubt if he really intended them all for publication."

"It's not the things he says about himself so much," she said. "We could leave some of them out. It's what Grevill might have said about him."

That was awful; but it helped me; it showed me where to plant the blow that would do for her, poor lamb.

"My dear child," I said (I was very gentle, now that I had come to it, to my butcher's work), "that's what I want you to realize. He'll—he'll say what he can, of course; but he can't say very much. There—there isn't really very much to say."

She took it in silence. She was too much hurt, I thought, to see. I softened it and at the same time made it luminous.

"I mean," I said, "for Grevill to say."

She saw.

"You mean," she said simply, "he isn't great enough?"

I amended it. "For Grevill."

"Grevill," she repeated. I shall never forget how she said it. It was as if her voice reached out and touched him tenderly.

"Lankester is more in his line," I said. "It's a question of temperament, of fitness."

She said she knew that.

"And," I said, "of proportion. If he says what you want him to say about your father, what can he say about Lankester?"

"But if he does Lankester first?"

"Then—if he says what you want him to say—he undoes everything he has done for Lankester. And," I added, "he's done for."

She hadn't seen that aspect of it, for she said: "Grevill is?"

I said he was, of course. I said we all felt that strongly; Grevill felt it himself. It would finish him.

Dear Antigone, I saw her take it. She pressed the sword into her heart. "If—if he did Papa? Is it—is it as bad as all that?"

I said we were afraid it was—for Grevill.

"And is he," she said, "afraid?"

"Not for himself," I said, and she asked me: "For whom, then?" And I said: "For Lankester." I told her that was what I'd meant when I said just now that he couldn't do them both. And, as a matter of fact, he wasn't going to do them both. He had given up one of them.

"Which?" she asked; and I said she might guess which.

But she said nothing. She sat there with her eyes fixed on me and her lips parted slightly. It struck me that she was waiting for me, in her dreadful silence, as if her life hung on what I should say.

"He has given up Lankester," I said.

I heard her breath go through her parted lips in a long sigh, and she looked away from me.

"He cared," she said, "as much as that."

"He cared for you as much," I said. I was a little doubtful as to what she meant. But I know now.

She asked me if I had come to tell her that.

I said I thought it was as well she should realize it. But I'd come to ask her—if she cared for him—to let him off. To—to——

She stopped me with it as I fumbled.

"To give Papa up?"

I said, to give him up as far as Grevill was concerned.

She reminded me that it was to be Grevill or nobody.

Then, I said, it had much better be nobody. If she didn't want to do her father harm.

She did not answer. She was looking steadily at the fire burning in the grate. At last she spoke.

"Mamma," she said, "will never give him up."

I suggested that I had better speak to Mrs. Wrackham.

"No," she said. "Don't. She won't understand." She rose. "I am not going to leave it to Mamma."

She went to the fire and stirred it to a furious flame.

"Grevill will be here," she said, "in half an hour."

She walked across the room—I can see her going now—holding her beautiful head high. She locked the door (I was locked in with Antigone). She went to a writing-table where the "Memoirs" lay spread out in parts; she took them and gathered them into a pile. I was standing by the hearth and she came toward me; I can see her; she was splendid, carrying them in her arms sacrificially. And she laid them on the fire.

It took us half an hour to burn them. We did it in a sort of sacred silence.

When it was all over and I saw her stand there, staring at a bit of Wrackham's handwriting that had resisted to the last the purifying flame, I tried to comfort her.

"Angelette," I said, "don't be unhappy. That was the kindest thing you could do—and the best thing, believe me—to your father's memory."

"I'm afraid," she said, "I wasn't thinking—altogether—of Papa."

I may add that her mother did not understand, and that—when we at last unlocked the door—we had a terrible scene. The dear lady has not yet forgiven Antigone; she detests her son-in-law; and I'm afraid she isn't very fond of me.



THE COSMOPOLITAN

PART I

INLAND

I

Unspeakable, unlikable, worse than all, unsketchable. A woman has no more formidable rival than her idea in the head of an imaginative young man, and Maurice Durant had been rash enough to fall in love with Miss Tancred before sight.

He was rash in everything. When the Colonel asked him down to Coton Manor for a fortnight, he accepted the invitation (with much pleasure) by return, and lay awake half the night with joyous anticipation. He was in the train steaming into the Midlands before he realized that he knew nothing of his host beyond a vague family tradition. He was his (Durant's) godfather; he was a retired Colonel of militia; he had given him (Durant) a hideous silver cup; but this was the first time he had given him an invitation. There was something more, too. Durant had spent the last seven years exploring every country but his own, and he was out of touch with family tradition; but now he thought of it he had—he certainly had—a distinct recollection of hearing his father say that of all his numerous acquaintance that fellow Tancred was quite the most intolerable bore.

He had been a little precipitate. Still, he said to himself, England was England, and if there was any fishing on the Colonel's land, or a decent mount in his stables, he thought he could pull through. Mrs. Tancred was dead; he did not certainly know that there was a Miss Tancred, but if there were he meant to flirt with her, and if the worst came to the worst he could always sketch her (the unsketchable!).

He had had plenty of time for anticipation during the slow journey on the branch line from the junction. The train crawled and burrowed into the wooded heart of the Midlands, passed a village, a hamlet, a few scattered houses, puffed and panted through endless lengths of arable and pasture land, drew up exhausted at the little wayside station of Whithorn-in-Arden, and left him in that prosaic wilderness a prey to the intolerable bore.

As ill-luck would have it, he had arrived at Coton Manor three hours before dinner. At the first sight of his host he had made up his mind that the Colonel would have nothing to say that could possibly keep him going for more than three minutes, yet the Colonel had talked for two hours. Durant had been counting the buttons on the Colonel's waistcoat and the minutes on the drawing-room clock, and wondering when it would be dinnertime. Once or twice he had caught himself looking round the room for some sign or token of Miss Tancred. He believed in her with a blind, unquestioning belief, but beyond a work-basket, a grand piano, and some atrocious water-colors, he could discover no authentic traces of her presence. The room kept its own dull counsel. It was one of those curious provincial interiors that seem somehow to be soulless and sexless in their unfathomable reserve. It was more than comfortable, it was opulent, luxurious; but the divine touch was wanting. It made Durant wonder whether there really was a Miss Tancred, much as you might doubt the existence of a God from the lapses in his creation. Still, he believed in her because there was nothing else to believe in. He had gathered from the Colonel's conversation that there was no fishing on his land, and no animal in his stables but the respectable and passionless pair that brought him from the station.

Could it be that there was no Miss Tancred?

Durant, already veering toward scepticism, had been about to plunge into the depths of bottomless negation when the Colonel rose punctually at the stroke of seven.

"My daughter," he had said, "my daughter will be delighted to make your acquaintance."

And Durant had replied that he would be delighted to make Miss Tancred's.

There was nothing else to be delighted about. He had divined pretty clearly that Miss Tancred's society would be the only entertainment offered to him during his stay, and the most outrageous flirtation would be justifiable in the circumstances; he had seen himself driven to it in sheer desperation and self-defense; he had longed hopelessly, inexpressibly, for the return of the absconding deity; he had looked on Miss Tancred as his hope, his angel, his deliverer. That she had not been at home to receive him seemed a little odd, but on second thoughts he had been glad of it. He would have distrusted any advances on her part as arguing a certain poverty of personal resource. Presumably Miss Tancred could afford a little indifference, a touch of divine disdain. And if indeed she had used absence as an art to stimulate his devotion, she was to be congratulated on her success. His dream had been nourished on this ambrosial uncertainty.

Upstairs in his bedroom mere emotional belief in Miss Tancred had risen to rational conviction. The first aspect of the guest-chamber had inspired him with a joyous credulity. It wooed him with its large and welcoming light, its four walls were golden white and warm, and in all its details he had found unmistakable evidences of design. There was an overruling coquetry in the decorative effects, in the minute little arrangements for his comfort. A finer hand than any housemaid's must have heaped that blue china bowl with roses, laid out that writing-table, and chosen the books in the shelf beside the bed. A woman is known by her books as by her acquaintance, and he had judged of the mind of this maiden, turning over the pages with a thrill of sensuous curiosity. This charming Providence had fitted his mood to perfection with these little classics of the hour, by authors too graceful and urbane to bore a poor mortal with their immortality. Adorable Miss Tancred! He was in love with her before sight, at half-sight.

For at the sound of a punctual gong he had hurried out on to the stairs, a door had opened on some unseen landing, he had heard a woman's step on the flight below; he had listened, he had watched, and as he caught the turn of her head, the rustle and gleam of her gown, some divine and cloudy color, silver or lavender or airy blue, he had been radiantly certain that his vision had passed before him. Down there somewhere it was making itself incarnate in the unknown. He felt already its reviving presence, the mysterious aura of its womanhood.

Hitherto his imagination had been guided by a profound sense of the justice that is in things. Destiny who had brought him to this deceitful place owed him compensation for the fraud, and an apology in person was really no more than his due. What if Miss Tancred were she, the supremely feminine, Destiny herself?

Under the echoing gallery the drawing-room had opened and closed upon her, and he had followed, his nerves tingling with the familiar prophetic thrill.

And this was Miss Tancred?

To begin with, he had never seen a woman more execrably dressed. No doubt it is the first duty of a woman's gown to clothe her, but apparently Miss Tancred's gown had a Puritan conscience, an almost morbid sense of its duty. It more than clothed her, it covered her up as if she had been a guilty secret; there was concealment and disguise in every crease of the awful garment. In its imperishable prudery it refused to define her by ever so innocent a curve; all its folds were implicated in a conspiracy against her sex. The effect, though striking, was obviously unstudied and inevitable, and he argued charitably that Miss Tancred was attired, not after her own mysterious and perverse fancy, but according to some still more mysterious and perverse doom. Happily she seemed unconscious of her appearance, and this unconsciousness had saved her.

For Miss Tancred was plain; and the irritating thing about her plainness was that it, at any rate, was not inevitable. She had had a hair's-breadth escape of being handsome in a somewhat original and eccentric way. And so her plainness was insistent; it would not let you alone, but forced you to look at it, worrying you with perpetual suggestions of the beauty it might have been. Her black hair grew low on the center of her forehead, whence it rose describing a semicircle above each temple; she had a short and salient Roman nose, black eyes, and straight black brows laid like an accent on the jutting eyebones. Her mouth—there might have been hope for her in her mouth, but for its singular unreadiness to smile; there was no hope for her in her sallow skin, the dull droop of her eyelids, her whole insupportable air of secrecy and reserve. A woman has no business to look like that.

There could be no hope for any woman whom Maurice Durant had pronounced unsketchable. He was tolerant with the tolerance of a clever young modern painter, trained to look for beauty (and find it, too) in the most unlikely places. He could find no beauty in Miss Tancred. She was useless for his purposes. Those lips had never learned to flirt, to chatter, to sing, to do anything spontaneous and natural and pleasing.

He shook hands with her in a paralytic manner, battering his brains for a reply to her polite commonplaces. Inwardly he was furious. He felt that he had been duped, tricked, infamously cheated of his legitimate desire; and he hated the woman as if she, poor soul, had been personally responsible.

It had bored him to listen to the Colonel, and he was sure it would bore him still more to talk to Miss Tancred; but for ten minutes he did his best to sustain a miraculous flow of sparkling monologue. If Miss Tancred was going to bore him, at any rate it would not be by her conversation. Some plain women he had known who had overcome plainness by vivacity and charm. Not so Miss Tancred. Being plainer than most she was bound to make a more than ordinary effort, yet she had adopted the ways of a consummately pretty woman who knows that nothing further is required of her. Did she think that he would go on forever battering his brains to create conversation out of nothing, when she clearly intimated that it was not worth her while to help him? Never in his life had he met a woman who inspired him with such invincible repugnance. He found himself talking to her at random like a man in a dream, and so indifferent to her opinion that he was not in the least distressed at his own imbecility; and Miss Tancred, like a lady in a dream, seemed to find his attitude entirely natural; perhaps she had read a similar antagonism in the faces of other men. (As it happened, repugnance was an emotion that Durant had frequently felt before, and certain emphatic lines about his nose and mouth had apparently been drawn there on purpose to express it.) Anyhow, Miss Tancred made no attempt to engage his attention, but turned her dull eyes to the Colonel, as if appealing to him to take the burden of Durant's entertainment on his own shoulders.

This the Colonel was perfectly prepared to do. It was evidently an understood thing that Miss Tancred should sit there, in that depressing attitude, while her father monopolized their guest. Durant hastily classified his host and hostess as the bore active and the bore passive. If Miss Tancred had ever had any interest or property in life she seemed to have made it over to the Colonel, together with a considerable portion of her youth. The Colonel wore his sixty years well out of sight, like an undergarment; you even felt that there might be something slightly indecorous in the suggestion that he wore them at all. He was alive to the finger-tips, alive in every feature of his aristocratic little face. He seemed at first rather uncertain how to take Durant, and looked him up and down as if in search of a convenient button-hole; he smiled innocently on the young man (Durant soon learned to know and dread that smile); nothing could have been more delicate and tentative than his approach. He had been silent for the last few minutes, lying low behind a number of the Nineteenth Century, for if he were a bore he had the dangerous power of masking his deadly qualities in an unreal absorption. At the signal that followed Durant's last desperate remark the Colonel's tongue leaped as from an ambush.

His first conversational maneuver was a feint. He inquired, with a certain affected indifference, what sort of weather Durant had met with on the journey down, and what sort he had left behind him in London; and then he seemed inclined to let the weather drop. But before Durant could get a word in edgeways he had taken it up again and was handling it like a master. Now he was playing with it, hovering round it lightly, with a tantalizing approach and flight; now he had gripped it tight, there was no more wandering from the point than may be seen in the vacillations of a well-behaved barometer; the slender topic seemed to grow under his touch, to take on the proportions of his own enormous egotism; he spoke of last autumn and the next parish as if he were dealing with immensities of time and space. And now the Colonel was merged and lost in his theme; he was whirled along with the stream of things, with moons and meteors, winds and tides, never for an instant compromising his character as a well-behaved barometer.

Never for an instant forgetting that he was a Tancred, with a pedigree dating from the days of feudalism. And after all he looked such a gentle little fellow that Durant could almost have forgiven him. He was so beautifully finished off. You could only say of him that he was fastidious, he had the prejudices of his class. He scorned to make conversation a sordid traffic in ideas. At any rate, Durant felt himself released from all obligation to contribute his share.

He had given it up, and was wondering how on earth they were to get through the evening. Various dreadful possibilities occurred to him; music (Miss Tancred and Beethoven on the grand piano); family prayers; cards; in some places they sat up half the night playing whist, a game that bored him to extinction. Thank heaven, as there were but three of them, it would not be whist. Meanwhile it was past eight and no dinner bell.

As if in answer to his thoughts the Colonel turned sharply to his daughter.

"Frida, are you sure that you wrote to Mrs. Fazakerly?"

"Quite sure."

"And are you equally certain that she is coming?"

"Quite certain. Unless she has been taken ill."

"What did you say? Taken ill? Taken ill?"

"I did not say she was taken ill, papa; I said nothing but illness would keep her from coming."

"Ah, a very different thing." He turned to Durant, blushing and bridling in his stiff collar as if the important distinction had been a subtlety of his own.

He curled himself up in his chair, and Durant caught him smiling to himself, a contemplative, almost voluptuous smile; was it at the prospect of another victim?

Who the devil, he wondered, is Mrs. Fazakerly?

II

Mrs. Fazakerly did not keep him wondering long. Already she was tripping into the room with a gleeful and inquisitive assurance. A small person, with a round colorless face and snub features finished off with a certain piquant ugliness. Her eyes seemed to be screwed up by a habit of laughter, and the same cheerful tendency probably accounted for the twisting of her eyebrows. Mrs. Fazakerly must have been forty and a widow. She was dressed with distinction in the half-mourning of a very black silk gown and a very white neck and shoulders. She greeted Miss Tancred affectionately, glanced at Durant with marked approval, and swept the Colonel an exaggerated curtsey, playfully implying that she had met him before that day. It struck Durant that nature had meant Mrs. Fazakerly to be vulgar, and that it spoke well for Mrs. Fazakerly that so far she had frustrated the designs of nature. He rather thought he was going to like Mrs. Fazakerly; she looked as if she would not bore him.

If Mrs. Fazakerly was going to like Durant, as yet her glance merely indicated that she liked the look of him. Durant, as it happened, was almost as plain for a man as Miss Tancred was for a woman; but he was interesting, and he looked it; he was distinguished, and he looked that, too; he was an artist, and he did not look it at all; he cultivated no eccentricities of manner, he indulged in no dreamy fantasies of dress. Other people besides Mrs. Fazakerly had approved of Maurice Durant.

Unfortunately the Colonel's instant monopoly of the lady had the effect of throwing Durant and his hostess on each other's mercy during dinner, a circumstance that seemed greatly to entertain Mrs. Fazakerly. Probably a deep acquaintance with Coton Manor made her feel a delightful incongruity in Durant's appearance there, since, as her gaze so frankly intimated, she found him interesting. He was roused from a fit of more than usual abstraction to find her little gray eyes twinkling at him across the soup. Mrs. Fazakerly, for purposes of humorous observation, used a pince-nez, which invariably leaped from the bridge of her nose in her subsequent excitement. It was leaping now.

"Mr. Durant, Miss Tancred is trying to say something to you."

He turned with a dim, belated courtesy as his hostess repeated for the third time her innocent query, "I hope you like your room?"

He murmured some assent, laying stress on his appreciation of the flowers and the books.

"You must thank Mrs. Fazakerly for those; it was she who put them there."

"Indeed? That was very pretty of Mrs. Fazakerly."

"Mrs. Fazakerly is always doing pretty things. I can't say that I am."

In Miss Tancred's eyes there was none of the expectancy that betrays the fisher of compliments. If she had followed that gentle craft she must have abandoned it long ago; no fish had ever risen to wriggling worm, to phantom minnow or to May-fly, to Miss Tancred's groveling or flirting or flight; no breath of flattery could ever have bubbled in men's eyes—those icy waters where she, poor lady, saw her own face. Durant would have been highly amused if she had angled; as it was, he was disgusted with her. It is the height of bad taste for any woman to run herself down, and the more sincere the depreciation the worse the offense, as implying a certain disregard for your valuable opinion. Apparently it had struck Mrs. Fazakerly in this light, for she shook her head reproachfully at Miss Tancred.

"If Mr. Durant had been staying with me, I should have packed him into the bachelor's bedroom with his Bible and his Shakespeare."

Miss Tancred, accused of graciousness, explained herself away. "I put you on the south side because you've just come from the Mediterranean; I thought you would like the sun."

Why could he not say that it was pretty of Miss Tancred?

The Colonel had pricked up his ears at the illuminating word.

"What sort of weather did you have when you were in Italy?"

It was the first time that he had shown the faintest interest in Durant's travels. He seemed to regard him as a rather limited young man who had come to Coton Manor to get his mind let out an inch or two.

Durant replied that as far as he could remember it was fine when he arrived in Rome two years ago, and it was fine when he left Florence the other day.

The Colonel shrugged his shoulders. "Ah, I don't call that weather. I like a variable barometer. I cannot stand monotony." As he spoke he looked at his daughter. In a less perfect gentleman there would have been significance in the look. As it was, it remained unconscious.

"The Colonel," Mrs. Fazakerly explained, "is studying the meteorology of Wickshire."

It seemed that Mrs. Fazakerly was studying the Colonel, that it was her business to expound and defend him. She had implied, if it were only by the motion of an eyelid, that all they had heard hitherto was by way of prologue; that the Colonel had not yet put forth his full powers. Her effervescent remark was, as it were, the breaking of the champagne bottle, the signal that launched him.

Meteorology apart, the Colonel, like more than one great philosopher, held that science was but another name for ignorance.

"But with meteorology," he maintained, "you are safe. You've got down to the bed-rock of fact, and it's observation all along the line. I've got fifteen little memorandum books packed with observations. Taken by myself. It's the only way to keep clear of fads and theories. Look at the nonsense that's talked in other departments, about microbes, for instance. Fiddlesticks! A microbe's an abstraction, a fad. But take a man like myself, take a man of even ordinary intelligence, who has faced the facts, don't tell me that he hasn't a better working knowledge of the subject than a fellow who calls himself a bacteriologist, or some other absurd name."

Durant remarked meekly that he didn't know, he was sure. But the Colonel remained implacable; his shirt-front dilated with his wrath; it was wonderful how so gentle a voice as the Colonel's contrived to convey so much passion. Meanwhile Miss Tancred sat absorbed in her dinner and let the storm pass over her head. Perhaps she was used to it.

"Fiddlesticks! If you don't know, you ought to know; you should make it your business to know. If I've got cholera I want to be told what'll cure me. I don't care a hang whether I'm killed by a comma bacillus or——"

"A full-stop bacillus," suggested Mrs. Fazakerly.

"The full-stop bacillus for choice—put you sooner out of your agony."

"For shame, Mr. Durant; you encourage him."

"I, Mrs. Fazakerly?"

"Yes, you. It was you who brought the Nineteenth Century into the house, wasn't it? Depend upon it, he's been reading something that he's disagreed with, or that's disagreed with him."

Durant remembered. There were things about bacteriology in that Nineteenth Century, and about hypnotism; the Colonel had apparently seized on them as on fuel for a perishing fire.

Heedless of the frivolous interruption, the little gentleman was working himself into a second intellectual fury.

"Take hypnotism again—there's another abstraction for you——"

Here Mrs. Fazakerly threw up her hands. "My dear Colonel, de grace! If it's an abstraction, why get into a passion about it? Life isn't long enough. You're worrying your brain into fiddlesticks—fiddlestrings I mean, of course. This child doesn't look after you. You ought to have something tied over your head to keep it down; it's like a Jack-in-the-box, a candle blazing away at both ends, a sword wearing out its what's-his-name; it's wearing out your friends, too. We can't live at intellectual high pressure, if you can."

The Colonel softened visibly under the delicious flattery of her appeal; he smiled at her and at Durant; he came down from his heights and made a concession to the popular taste. "Well, then, take influenza——"

"We'd very much rather not take it, if it's all the same to you."

"Take what?"

"Why, the influenza—the bacilli, or whatever they are. Or do the bacilli take you?"

"My dear lady, you don't know what you're talking about. The bacilli theory is—is—is a silly theory."

And Durant actually smiled; for his own brain was softening under the debilitating influence. He would not be surprised at anything he might do himself; he might even sink into that sickly state in which people see puns in everything and everything in puns; it would be the effect of the place.

"Well, it made you very ill last winter, that's all I know."

The wrinkles stopped dancing over the Colonel's face; his shirt-front sank; he was touched with an infinite tenderness and pity for himself.

"Yes. But I had a fit of the real thing. It left me without a particle of muscle—legs mere thread-papers, and no brain——"

"Cherry-tart, Mr. Durant?"

The voice was Miss Tancred's. It was keen, incisive; it cut the Colonel's sentence like a knife. But if she had meant to kill it the unfilial attempt was foiled.

"No brain at all, Durant." He held up a forefinger, demonstrating on the empty air. "That, mind you, is the test, the mark of true influenza—the ut-ter, absolute collapse of brain power."

"Imbacillity, in short."

Having emitted this feeble spark, Durant's intellect went out altogether. Trusting to his face not to betray him, he inquired gravely if it was long since the Colonel's last attack of influenza.

But he had trusted rather too much to his face. A painful flush spread over it when he found Miss Tancred looking at him with a lucid, penetrating gaze. She had recognized his guilt; it was impossible to tell whether she had measured the provocation.

He, at any rate, had discovered the secret of her silence; it was not stupidity, it was shame. The spectacle of the Colonel's conversational debauches had weaned her forever from the desire of speech. For the rest of the meal he, too, sat silent, building a cairn of cherry-stones at the side of his plate; an appropriate memorial of a young man bored to death at a dinner-table.

III

"Well now," said the Colonel, rousing himself from a brief nirvana of digestion, "I hope that you will not be dull." He said it with the confidence of a man who has just laid before you a pretty convincing sample of his social powers.

Durant started; he was alone with the Colonel and the wine, and had just made the discovery that when the Colonel's face was at rest he was very like an owl.

"To-morrow we'll go exploring together. I should like to take you over my little property."

As a matter of fact, the property was considerable; but Durant noticed that its owner applied the endearing diminutive to every object that appealed specially to his egotism. It was a peculiarity of the Colonel that he was ready to melt with affection over the things that belonged to himself, and was roused almost to ferocity by whatever interested other people.

"I dare say it will be good for you to see some fresh faces and to be put—in touch—in touch with fresh ideas."

You would have said that Durant had been sitting for seven years with his feet on the fender while the Colonel roamed the world.

Durant agreed. He was being hypnotized by the hooked nose and the round hazel eyes with their radiating wrinkles. He had been five hours in Coton Manor, it felt like five years, and the evening had only just begun.

His host stared at him, fidgeted nervously for five minutes, plunged into nirvana again, emerged, and with a shamefaced smile suggested that the ladies would be getting impatient. In the drawing-room his nervousness increased; he went on like a person distracted with an intolerable desire; he sat down and got up again; he pirouetted; he played with ornaments; he wandered uneasily about the room, opening and shutting windows, setting pictures straight, and lighting candles; he was a most uncomfortable little Colonel of militia. And with every movement he revolved nearer and nearer to a certain table. The table stood in the background; Durant recognized it as the kind that opens and discloses the magic circle, the green land of whist. The table had a sweet and sinful fascination for the Colonel.

Durant had just pulled himself together, and determined that he could bear it if they didn't play some infernal game, if they didn't play whist. And now it seemed that whist was what they played, that whist of course was what Mrs. Fazakerly was there for. The Colonel looked from the table to the group, from the group to the table; there was calculation in his eye, an almost sensual anticipation. He seemed to be saying to himself, "One, two, three, four; the perfect number." Durant affected abstraction, and turning to the window gazed out into the dim green landscape. His host's eye followed him; it marked him down as the fourth; it hovered round him, dubious, vacillating, troubled. The Colonel had still some torturing remnants of a conscience; he had read the deep repugnance on the young man's face, and hesitated to sacrifice a guest on his first night. He turned helplessly to Mrs. Fazakerly, who put an end to his struggle.

She touched Durant lightly on the shoulder. "Come," she murmured gently, like a fate that pitied while she compelled. "Come. He wants his little game."

It was as if she had said, "My poor dear sacrificial lamb, he wants his little holocaust. There is no help for it. Let me show you the way to the altar."

"Frida!" It was the Colonel who spoke.

Miss Tancred spread open the table with the air of a high priestess, hieratic and resigned. The Colonel approached it, a lighted candle in each hand. For one moment of time the egotist seemed to be rapt beyond himself; he was serving the great god Whist. Cards were the Colonel's passion; he loved them with delight that was madness, madness that was delight. Cards for cards' sake, the pure passion, the high, immaculate abstraction; no gambling, mind you; no playing for penny points; no pandering to a morbid appetite for excitement. With cards in his hand the Colonel was transformed. He might be wedded to matter of fact, which is the grossest form of materialism; but at the green table he appeared as a devotee of the transcendent, the science of sciences, Whist.

Durant curled his long legs under the table and prepared for a miserable evening, while the Colonel's face beamed on him from between two candles.

"Durant," he said, "you are an acquisition. If it wasn't for you we should have to play with a dummy."

Durant replied mournfully that he was not great at the game, but he thought he was about as good as a dummy.

"Don't you be too sure of that," said Mrs. Fazakerly. "There's a great deal to be said for the dummy. He isn't frivolous, he never revokes, he never loses his little temper, and he plays the game."

"Yes, I think he can show you some very pretty science, Durant." The Colonel's mustache and eyebrows and all the wrinkles on his face were agitated, but he made no sound. The owl was pluming all his little feathers, was fluttering with mysterious mirth. Oh! he took the lady's humor, he could enter into the thing, he could keep the ball going.

"You see," Mrs. Fazakerly explained, "he has an intelligence behind him."

"A dummy inspired by Colonel Tancred would be terrible to encounter," said Durant.

Miss Tancred lifted her eyes from the cards she was shuffling. Again he felt her gaze resting upon him for a moment, the same comprehensive, disconcerting gaze. This time it had something pathetic and appealing in it, as if she implored him to take no further notice of her father's fatuity.

"Confound the old fellow," he said to himself; "why does he make me say these things?"

When they began Durant saw a faint hope of release in his own stupidity, his obvious unfitness for the game. By a studied carelessness, an artful exaggeration of his deficiencies, he courted humiliation, ejection in favor of the dummy. But, as it happened, either his evil destiny had endowed him with her own detestable skill, or else his stupidity was supreme. Trying with might and main to lose, he kept on winning with horrible persistency. He was on the winning side; he was made one with the terrible Miss Tancred; and for the first half hour he found a certain painful interest in watching that impenetrable creature.

Miss Tancred played the game; she played, now with the rhythm and precision of a calculating machine, now with the blind impetus and swoop of some undeviating natural force. It was not will, it was not intelligence; it was something beyond and above them both, infinitely more detached, more monotonous and cold; something independent even of her desire. Durant could see that she had as little love for the game as he had. She played because she always had played, by habit, a second nature that had ousted the first. Her skill was so unerring that for Durant it robbed the game of its last lingering attraction, the divine element of chance. One tinge of consciousness, one touch of fire, and it would have been sheer devilry. As it was he could have been sorry for her, though in her infinite apathy she seemed to be placed beyond his pity and her own. With no movement save in her delicate sallow fingers, she sat there like an incarnate Ennui, the terrible genius of the house.

The Colonel, though losing rapidly, was in high good humor. He displayed a chivalrous forbearance with the weakness of Mrs. Fazakerly, who committed every folly and indiscretion possible to a partner. He bowed when he dealt to her; he bowed when she dealt to him; he bowed when she revoked.

"'To err is human,'" said the Colonel.

"'To forgive, divine,'" said Mrs. Fazakerly, smiling at Durant, as much as to say, "You observe his appropriation of the supreme role?"

And indeed the Colonel bore himself with some consciousness of his metaphysical dignity. He was pleased with everybody, pleased with Durant, pleased with Mrs. Fazakerly, most particularly pleased with Colonel Tancred, late of the Wickshire militia.

And as the game wore on Durant realized the full horror of his position. The gallant Colonel was not going to leave that table till he had won, and he could never win. He frowned on Durant's proposal to change partners; he would accept no easy victory. They were in for a night of it. Durant was in torment, but he sat on, fascinated by the abominable beauty of his own play; he sat with every nerve on edge, listening to the intolerable tick of time.

Ten o'clock. He thought it had been midnight. He passed his hand over his face, as if to feel if it were stiffening in its expression of agony.

And all the time Mrs. Fazakerly kept on raising and dropping her eyeglass. Now and then she gave him a look that plumbed the sources of his suffering. It seemed to recommend her own courageous attitude, to say, "My dear young man, we are being bored to death; you know it, and I know it. But for Goodness' sake, let us die with pleasant faces, since we can but die."

And Durant felt that she was right. He fell into her mood, and passed from it into a sort of delirium. There could be no end to it; his partner's pitiless hands would never have done shuffling the cards. Black and red, red and black, they danced before him; they assumed extravagant attitudes; they became the symbols of tremendous mysteries. His head seemed to grow lighter; he was visited with fantastic impulses like the caprices of an intoxicated person. To turn on the Colonel and ask him what he meant by inflicting this torture on an innocent man, whose only crime had been to trust him too well; to shake the inscrutable Miss Tancred by the hand and tell her that he knew all—all, and that she had his sympathy; to fall on Mrs. Fazakerly's neck and cry like a child, he felt that he was capable of any or all of these things. As it was, his behavior must have been sufficiently ridiculous, since it amused Mrs. Fazakerly so much. The two had reached that topsy-turvy height of anguish that is only expressible by laughter. Theirs had a ring of insanity in it; it sounded monstrous and immoral, like the mirth of victims under the shadow of condign extinction. As for his play, he knew it was the play of a madman. And yet he still won; with Miss Tancred for his partner it was impossible to lose. She sat there unmoved by his wildest aberrations. Once, to be sure, she remarked with a shade of irritation in her voice (by some queer freak of nature her voice was unusually sweet), "Oh, there! We've got that trick again!" Like him, she would have preferred to lose, just to break the maddening monotony of it.

He pitied her. Once, in a lucid interval, he actually heard himself paying her a compliment, much as he would have paid a debt of honor. "Miss Tancred, how magnificently you play!" She answering, "I ought to. I've been doing nothing else since I was ten years old." It was simply horrible. The woman was thirty if she was a day.

Half past eleven. Midnight gathering in the garden outside. The room was reflected on the window-pane from the solid darkness behind it—the candles, the green table, the players—a fantastic, illusive scene, shimmering on the ground of night as on some sinister reality. Mrs. Fazakerly was dashing down her cards at random, and even the Colonel shuffled uneasily in his seat. At twelve he observed that none of them "seemed very happy in whist"; he proposed loo, a game in which, each person playing for his own hand, he could not be compromised by the ruinous folly of his partner.

At loo Miss Tancred, also untrammeled, rose to dizzying heights of play. She hovered over the green table, motionless like an eagle victory. Then she swooped, invincible. One against three she laid about her, slashed, confounded, and defeated the enemy with terrific slaughter. As Durant stammered, idiotic in his desperation, it was "a regular Water-loo."

The Colonel kept it going. He laughed, "Ha-ha! What do you say to a whiskey-and-water-loo? My head's as clear as daylight. I think I could stand another little game if we had some whiskey and water."

A movement of Mrs. Fazakerly's arm swept the pack on to the floor. "Frida," she cried, "take your father and put a mustard plaster on the back of his neck."

Miss Tancred rose. She just raised the black accent of her eyebrows as she surveyed the disenchanted table, the awful disorder of the cards. She looked at Durant and Mrs. Fazakerly with a passionless, interrogatory stare. Then suddenly she seemed to catch the infection of their dreadful mirth. It wrung from her a deeper note. She too laughed, and her laughter was the very voice of Ennui, a cry of bitterness, of unfathomable pain. It rang harsh upon her silence and was not nice to hear.

This unlooked-for outburst had the happy effect of bringing the evening to an end. It seemed to be part of the program that the Colonel should go home with Mrs. Fazakerly to take care of her, and that Miss Tancred should go with them both to take care of the Colonel. They had not far to walk; only through the park and across the road to a little house opposite the lodge gates.

While they were looking for their hats Durant was left for a moment alone with Mrs. Fazakerly. She sank into a seat beside him, unstrung, exhausted; she seemed to be verging on that state of nervous collapse which disposes to untimely confidence.

"I like whist," said Mrs. Fazakerly; "but it must be an awful game to play if you don't like it."

He followed her gaze. It was fixed on Miss Tancred's retreating figure.

"Why on earth does she play if she doesn't like it?"

Mrs. Fazakerly turned on him, suddenly serious.

"She plays because the Colonel likes it—because she is the best girl in the world, Mr. Durant."

He stood reproved.

IV

Three days passed; they brought nothing new; each was a repetition of the other; each merged itself in whist. No relief came from the outside world; the outside world must have found out long ago that it was not worth while driving many miles to call on the Tancreds.

Three days at Coton Manor would have been trying to anyone; to Durant they were intolerable. For limbs that had roamed the world to be tucked up under the Colonel's whist table, for a mind equally vigorous and vagrant to be tied to the apron-strings of the Colonel's intellect, was really a refinement of torture. Thrice Durant had tried to find an exit into the surrounding landscape, and thrice the Colonel had been too quick for him. He hovered perpetually round him; he watched his goings-out and his comings-in; there was no escaping his devilish ingenuity. While Durant was looking for a stick or a hat, he would secure him softly by the arm and lead him out for a stroll. He would say, "My dear Durant, the women are all very well in their way, but it is a luxury to have another man to talk to." He talked to Durant, leaning toward him lover-like, with the awful passion of the bore for his victim.

These strolls extended over several miles, without taking them beyond the bounds of Coton Manor. Durant began to disbelieve in the existence of a world beyond. Coton Manor had swallowed up the county; it seemed to have opened its gates and swallowed him up, too.

He told himself that he had done nothing to deserve his doom. He was not more selfish or more exacting than other men; he was not sensual; he had not made mere physical pleasure his being's end and aim. He had been content with a somewhat negative ideal, the mere avoidance of boredom. He never struggled or argued with it, but whenever and wherever he met it he had simply packed his portmanteau and gone away. This repugnance of his had entailed endless traveling, but Durant was a born traveler. Hitherto his life had been free from any care beyond the trouble of avoiding trouble. But he had been lax in this matter of Coton Manor; he had had reason enough to suppose that the visit would bring him face to face with the thing he feared, and he had rushed into the adventure with open arms. And now, this horror that he had eluded so successfully for seven years he was to know more intimately than his own soul; he was to sound all the depths beyond depths of boredom. He had stayed in dull places before, but their dulness struck him now as naif and entertaining by comparison. Other people lapsed helplessly into dulness; at Coton Manor they cultivated it; they kept it up. What was worse, they took it for granted in other people. It never seemed to occur to Miss Tancred or the Colonel that Maurice Durant could be interesting, that he had done anything worth mentioning. Not that he was sensitive to their opinion, it was simply that this attitude of theirs appealed unpleasantly to his imagination, giving it a cold foretaste of extinction. It was as if his flaming intellectual youth, with all its achievements, had been dropped into the dark, where such things are forgotten. At Coton Manor his claim to distinction rested on the fact that he was the Colonel's godson. The Colonel had appropriated, absorbed him, swallowed him up.

The fact that Durant was lapped in material comfort only intensified his spiritual pangs. The Tancreds were rich, and their wealth was not of to-day or yesterday; they had the dim golden tone, the deep opulence of centuries. And they were generous, they gave him of their best; so that, besides being bored, he had the additional discomfort of feeling himself a bit of a brute. As he lay awake night after night in his luxurious bed he wondered how he ever got there, what on earth had induced him to accept their invitation. He cursed his infernal rashness, his ungovernable optimism; he had spent half his life in jumping at conclusions and at things, and the other half in jumping away from them, however difficult the backward leap. He had jumped at the Colonel's invitation.

To tell the truth, he would have jumped at anybody's at the time.

When he came back from his travels he had found himself a stranger in his own country. In every place he touched he had left new friends most agreeably disconsolate at his departure; he supposed (rashly again) that the old ones would be overjoyed at his return. As it happened, his reception in England was not cold exactly, but temperate, like the climate, and Durant had found both a little trying after the fervors and ardors of the South. The poor fellow had spent his first week at home in hansoms, rushing passionately from one end of London to the other, looking up his various acquaintances. He was disappointed, not to say disgusted, with the result. (Maurice Durant was always disgusted when other people failed to come up to his expectations.) His best friends were out of town, his second best were only too much in it. Many of them had abjured art and taken to stiff collars and conventions. He called on these at their offices. They were all diabolically busy in the morning and insufferably polite in the afternoon; they had flung him a nod or a smile or a "Glad to see you back again, old fellow," and turned from him with a preoccupied air. He remembered them as they were seven years ago, when they were all Bohemians together. They had no manners, good or bad, in those days, those young men; they called you by strange names; they posed you in peculiar attitudes and made abominable caricatures of your noble profile; but they would lend or borrow a five-pound note with equal readiness; they would give you a supper and a shake-down at any time of the night or morning. Now it seemed they thought twice about asking you to dinner, if indeed they thought about it at all. So Durant had been pleasantly surprised at his godfather's genial letter. Why, bless his little heart, the old boy had actually pressed him to stay for a fortnight.