The Man Who Won



  BY

  MRS. BAILLIE REYNOLDS
  (G. M. ROBINS)

  AUTHOR OF
  "PHOEBE IN FETTERS," "THE DREAM AND THE MAN," ETC.



  "Let a man contend to the uttermost
  For his life's set prize, be it what it may."
                                  --ROBERT BROWNING,



  LONDON
  HUTCHINSON & CO.
  PATERNOSTER ROW
  1905




  _Printed by Cowan & Co., Limited, Perth._




  To
  M. ADELINE HUGHES
  UNTIRING SYMPATHISER
  TENDER CRITIC
  DEAR FRIEND




  CONTENTS


  CHAP.

  I  LUTWYCHE'S
  II  MILLIE
  III  THE RIVALS
  IV  THE GUARDIANSHIP OF CAROL MAYNE
  V  A BOER BURYING
  VI  THE FLINGING OF THE GAGE
  VII  IN THE GARRET
  VIII  THE RESCUE
  IX  THE SCANDALISING OF SLABBERT'S POORT
  X  FRANSDALE
  XI  MELICENT'S COUSINS
  XII  THE JARRING ELEMENT
  XIII  LANCE BURMESTER IS CONSCIOUS OF A PERSONALITY
  XIV  THE BREAKING-IN OF MELICENT
  XV  A CLEVESHIRE TEA-PARTY
  XVI  BREAKING BOUNDS
  XVII  A CRISIS AT THE VICARAGE
  XVIII  A NEW HOME
  XIX  AN UNMARKED FESTIVAL
  XX  CAPTAIN BROOKE
  XXI  MIRAGE
  XXII  RECOGNITION
  XXIII  REBELLION
  XXIV  UNREST
  XXV  THE WAY OUT
  XXVI  THE END OF THE FIRST ROUND
  XXVII  THREE MONTHS' TRUCE
  XXVIII  THE GATES OF SPRING ARE OPENED
  XXIX  THE FRIENDSHIP GROWS
  XXX  TREACHERY
  XXXI  REPUDIATION
  XXXII  THE FRANSDALE SPORTS
  XXXIII  CALUMNY
  XXXIV  THE DISCOMFITURE OF OTIS
  XXXV  CONFESSION
  XXXVI  WHAT CHANCED UPON THE MOORS
  XXXVII  THE HOUSE IS BUILT




THE MAN WHO WON



CHAPTER I

LUTWYCHE'S

  "Handsome, were you?  'Tis more than they held,
    More than they said.  I was ware, and watched.
  I was the scapegrace, this rat belled
    The cat, this fool got his whiskers scratched."
                                      --ROBERT BROWNING.


The talk had waxed political, and the audience was frankly bored.
The man who had been haranguing his mates was hurt at the somewhat
too obvious lack of appreciation which his truly democratic
sentiments received.

"Ef yer could quit twinin' yerself araound that thar' post a spell,
an' listen to a bit o' horse-sense"--he broke off angrily.

"It's usually hoarse when you take the floor, Amurrica," was the
surly reply; "but it's blasted little sense I've ever heard come
outer your head."

"Ef you was to listen, it 'ud make a powerful deal o' difference to
what you heard," snapped Amurrica, whose eloquence was his chief
vanity.

"I ain't good at listening," indifferently replied the blond and
bearded giant, who was "twinin' hisself araound the post," "onless a
man's talkin'; an' that's a fact."

There was a giggle of appreciation among the half-dozen men and
youths collected at the gate of the farm enclosure.

"No good, Amurrica; chuck it!  Bert'll git there every time," said
someone cheerfully.

Amurrica snorted.

"Talkin', indeed!  Why, you low-downers in this all-fired continent
of Africa, you don' know what talkin' means!"

"Usually means lyin' over in America, don't it?" said Bert casually.

His eyes were fixed on vacancy as he spoke; the chatter of the group
around him was nothing but a weariness, like the buzzing of flies.
His mind was fixed upon what was going on in the low frame house,
with the corrugated iron roof, that stood within the enclosure.  He
was experiencing something more like anxiety than he had ever felt
before in all his four-and-twenty years.

It was oppressively hot.  For miles and miles, the pitiless sun lit
up the endless veldt, which undulated all around the little township:
wild, yet with a dreadful sameness in it.

"As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be," seemed
written upon the face of the desert; yet here and there its dignity
was scarred, its monotony interfered with, by the ugliness and
meanness of human habitation.  The beginnings of civilisation,
without simplicity as they were without harmony, jarred every sense.
The places seemed to be devoid of self-respect or privacy; to
consist, in fact, entirely of back premises.  Rows of dingy linen
flapped upon lines, on ground where the grass was irregularly worn
away here and there by the treading of feet.  Collections of old meat
tins, old kettles, old shoes, heaped upon kitchen refuse, burdened
the stale air with miasma.  A wretched-looking, lean-to building bore
a huge board with the flaunting inscription:

  MOUNT PLEASANT BOARDING-HOUSE FOR
  GENTLEMEN


The gentlemen who boarded there were mostly assembled to-night at the
gate of "Lutwyche's."

A little farther away the Vierkleur Hotel fluttered its flag in the
heavy air, and rang at night to the coarse laughter and oaths of a
set of idlers, attracted to what had been a purely agricultural
district by the finding of diamonds.

Lutwyche's lay silent, sweltering in the heat.  Round the stoep of
the farm-house hungry poultry were congregated; to-day they were
being neglected, and they were wisely determined not to suffer in
silence.

It was a critical moment in history.  All Europe was waiting to know
what President Kruger was going to do.  It was the period which
preceded the sending of his historical ultimatum.  The town for days
had been buzzing with rumours of war, and Amurrica had spoken great
things in the saloon of the Vierkleur.  But local interests are
strong, and it was not of British supremacy that the men were
thinking now.

The sun was going down.  They had all, as Amurrica said, quit work,
and they were assembled by the barbed wire fence to gather news of
the Englishman who lay dying under the corrugated iron roof of
Lutwyche's.

Even the quarrelling was listless.  It could be seen that Bert's
heart was not in it.  Where the heart of the huge young Boer was was
matter of pretty common knowledge, though there was not a man in the
settlement who would have dared to tell him so, except Amurrica, who
had his own reasons for not indulging in the perilous amusement.

Presently the door of the silent house opened, and a Kaffir girl came
out, with a dirty rug in her hand, from which she proceeded to shake
clouds of stifling acrid dust.

"Here, Minnie, Topsy, Hattie, whoever you are, how's the boss--eh?"
called one of the loungers.

The girl showed all her teeth in an apparently endless grin.

"You young gentlemen carled to inquire?" she cried, in high
appreciation of the family importance.  "You brought yo'
visitin'-cards--eh?"

"Shut it," said Bert savagely.  "How is Mr. Lutwyche?"

"He don' seem not just the right thing to-day, sir, with missus's
compulments," grinned the girl, wildly elated by her momentary
distinction.

To her intense delight, this last sally caused a giggle among the
loafers.  She edged nearer to the barbed wire fencing, to prolong
this truly delightful conversation; and for a minute or two, idiotic
questions and answers pattered across the farm boundary, while Bert's
brow grew blacker and blacker.

Suddenly a silence, instant and deep, fell on the gathering.  The
Kaffir girl scuttled behind a shed with noiseless celerity.  From the
door of the farm issued two people--Tante Wilma, the Englishman's
Boer wife, and striding beside her corpulent bulk, the slim,
energetic figure of Carol Mayne, the English mission priest in charge
of the station.  Tante Wilma wore her most repulsive expression, her
sandy eyebrows lowering over her cunning little eyes.  Ten years ago
she had been a handsome woman, in a redundant style; but six children
and an invalid husband had reduced her form to shapelessness and her
temper to rags and tatters.

She hated the English cleric, and could not bear that he should come
and see her husband.  The Boer Predikant would have sat and
sympathised with her over his coffee for a couple of hours after his
professional visit to the sick man.  Carol Mayne never seemed to have
an adequate idea of the importance of this woman, who owned half
Slabbert's Poort, and had married her English overseer, a widower
with a little girl of his own.

She was evidently accompanying the young man from the house much
against her will.  About half way across the yard, becoming perhaps
aware of the audience at the gate, the clergyman halted, just out of
earshot.  He seemed earnestly recommending some particular course of
conduct to Mrs. Lutwyche, who stood sullenly before him, hostility in
every line of her coarse face.

The group of men at the gate dropped away silently, singly or in
pairs, avoiding the parson; and Bert was left alone, his sullen scowl
fixed upon the house, as though willing it to render up the face he
had stood there for hours longing to see.

After a while, Mr. Mayne, having finished his colloquy with Tante
Wilma, lifted his hat with that unconscious English University manner
which had piqued her in her husband, but which now she hated as only
the ignorant can hate the thing that they can never understand.  The
young Englishman's parting salutation, delivered so entirely as a
matter of course, belonged to an order of things which, had she been
able, Tante Wilma would have destroyed, ravaged, trampled under her
gross feet.

She stood glowering upon him as he made straight for the gate by
which Bert still lounged.  And she was pleased to note that the young
man made no effort to open it for his passage.

"Good evening, Mestaer!" said Mr. Mayne, as he reached the gate.
"How's the world treating you?"

"I'm ---- if I care how it treats me," was the engaging response.

The smile that passed over Mayne's face was particularly humorous and
winning.

"Don't care came to a bad end," he said, "and that's what I
particularly hope won't happen to you.  Are you going my way?"

"No; I'm staying here, if you're so mighty curious to know my plans,"
was the answer, given with a discourtesy so studied that to notice it
would be to allow the speaker to fancy that he had "scored."

The rudeness must, of course, have been obvious to the priest, but he
disregarded it entirely.  A smile again flickered over his face, as
of one who holds a trump card.  "Well, then, good-night!" he said
briskly, opening the gate at once, and passing through it with an air
of having no time to waste.

Bert cast another look at the silent house.  Nobody was in sight but
the big Boer woman slouching back to the doorway.  He lowered the
point of his rapier, so to speak.

"Say--how's he goin' on?" he asked.

Mr. Mayne at once dropped his appearance of hurry, and closed the
gate slowly.

"Well," he said, "he's just lingering.  It may last two or three
weeks yet.  God help him!"

Bert beat his clenched fist softly on the top bar of the gate.

"Look here!" he burst out, as if the words were torn from him, "they
let you go in and out--you can tell--you oughter know.  Is she givin'
that girl hell?"

"I think things are going on much as they have done this last six
months," said Mayne, speaking reluctantly.

"But what'll it be when he's gone?  I ask you that?  What kind of a
life's she goin' to lead then?"

Mayne hesitated.  "I don't know," he said at length, with a touch of
reserve.

"You know how the she-devil hates her," hissed Bert.  "She won't keep
her, never fear.  She'll chuck her out to any of these blanked scum
around the town, and then say the girl's disgraced her, and she'll
have no more to do with her!  I know Tante Wilma!"

Mayne looked keenly and kindly at the excited speaker.  He was sorry
for him, from the bottom of his heart; but what to say he did not
know, without betraying confidence.

"I think you see things in too black a light," he said at last.
"Mrs. Lutwyche is not without a sense of duty, though we know she is
not good-tempered.  And Millie is not friendless, nor incapable of
taking her own part."

Bert lifted his leonine head, and pointed with a gesture of his hand
towards the house.

"He told me, with his blanky British pride, that he'd sooner see her
in her coffin than married to a man with an ounce of Boer blood in
him--him that let a Boer woman marry him," he growled.  "He knows my
mother was English; I told him.  I'd take care of her."

Mr. Mayne was able to follow the trend of the jerky, disconnected
sentences.

"Millie's young yet to think of marriage," he said.

"She'll have to think about something worse, before he's cold in his
grave, or I'm much mistaken," said Bert, scowling.

The clergyman pondered.

"Do you want me to speak to her father for you?" he presently asked,
point-blank.

Bert hesitated; he grew red, then pale.

"Don't like to be beholden to me, do you?" said Mayne cheerfully.
"Well, I sympathise with you.  But you and I are just walking round
the question, you know, Mestaer.  The whole point is, what does
Millie say?  Will she have you?"

The colour again rushed over the crestfallen face of Bert.  "Gals
like that don' know what they want," he grunted.

"Then it would be very wrong to push her into a life-long contract."

"She don' know what's good for her," repeated Bert.  "She'd oughter
be arranged for; that's the way to do it.  She'd not repent it if she
married me."

"Well, look here; I'll make a bargain.  If Millie comes to me and
says she's willing to marry you, I'll speak to Mr. Lutwyche; but you
know quite as well as I do, he would never hear of it against her
will."

Hereupon Bert damned first British pride, then his own Boer ancestry,
then Tante Wilma, who had caused her husband to contemn all Boers for
her sake.

"Swear-words won't help your cause, be sure of that," observed Mayne
drily.  "English girls aren't going to be won that way."

"Think I'd say words like that to her?"

"More than probably.  Well, good-night!  I'm due at the Mission; not
coming, are you?"

"No," breathed Bert, and said no more; for his eyes were fixed upon a
little shadowy figure, moving under the shadow of the stoep.

Mayne saw it too, and walked quietly away.




CHAPTER II

MILLIE

  "The world was right when it called you thin."
                                  --ROBERT BROWNING.


The sun had dropped, as the red billiard ball slips into the pocket,
suddenly behind the heaving mass of veldt.  Darkness was advancing
with tropical, seven-leagued stride, and all things were grey.

The pale figure detached itself from the shadows, and resolved itself
into the advancing form of a frail, undeveloped girl of fifteen or
sixteen.  A strange eye would have been lost in wonder, at the first
glance, as to what Bert Mestaer could see here, on which to fix his
turbulent affections.

His lady-love was skinny, hollow-chested, stooping and round-backed;
her arms were almost like sticks.

She wore a soiled calico gown, too long behind for its length in
front.  Her pale-coloured hair was drawn off her white face, and
plaited into an untidy pig tail which hung down her back.  Certain
small wisps of it escaped in front, and made what looked in the dim
light like the rudiments of a nimbus about her head.  She was drawn
down on one side by the weight of the heavy, clanking, copper bucket
which she carried.

The well was right across the yard, quite near the gate where Bert
stood, and his large person was very visible; but the girl came on
with no sign that she saw him; and, reaching the well, hooked her
bucket on the chain, and let it down, with a stony, expressionless
countenance.

Bert leaned over the gate; the expression of his face had altered
completely.

"Millie," he said, below his breath, "Millie!"

She gave him a listless glance, from weary, heavy-lidded, dark-blue
eyes.

"Oh, good evening!" she said curtly.

He unlatched the gate, came through, and took the windlass out of her
hand.

"Thought you promised not to come inside," she remarked.

"Only jest ter wind up this"--perhaps the thought of Mayne and the
swear-words flitted across his mind, for he pulled up short, and
merely finished lamely with--"this 'ere bucket."

"What's an ear-bucket?" asked Miss Lutwyche, with cold contempt.

He winced like a child from a cane, but made no retort, merely
setting all his finely developed muscles a-play, as he raised the
gleaming bucket from the depths.  When it was at the top, he paused.

"How's he to-night, Millie?"

"Mean my father?"

"Yes, Mr. Lutwyche."

"Oh, same's usual."

Bert's chest heaved with the burden of all he wished to say, and dare
not.  Some instinct, deep down in him, warned him not to speak to the
girl of her father's fast-approaching end.  And yet--he thought of
all that Mayne had said!  Now was his chance, if ever, to declare his
passion.  He wondered whether Mayne, or anybody else, knew how
distant were the terms between him and Millie, what an impregnable
barrier she stood behind, how far he was from being on such a footing
as might be supposed to immediately precede a proposal of marriage.
His tongue clave to the roof of his mouth, and he felt the sweat
break out upon him.

The girl moved, leaned over to detach the bucket from the hook.  He
started, and reaching quickly forward, brought it down upon the side
of the well where he stood.

"I'm goin' to carry it indoors for you," he said sheepishly.

She turned, without a word of thanks, and began to walk back to the
house.

He strode beside her, in the gathering gloom, his whole being aching
with the desire to comfort her.

"Millie," he said at last, "if--if she does anythin' to yer--if she
gets too bad, or lays hands upon yer, you jest come to me, or send
for me, won't yer?"

The girl let fall a laugh of such quiet scorn that he felt openly
sneered at.

"D'you think I'm afraid of her, then?" she asked.

"No," he said warmly; "you've got the pluck of the--" he checked and
almost choked--"the pluck of a dozen.  But she's stronger than you."

"Is she?" said Millie drily.

He pondered on that answer.

There spoke the careless insolence of the Briton.  He admired it,
while he writhed under it; but he understood why it made Tante Wilma
want to scratch her eyes out.

They had reached the stoep.  Nobody was about.  He set down the
bucket and faced her squarely.

"Millie," he almost gasped, "look here!  Give me a word!  You know
I'd----"

She broke in.  "I got no time to talk.  I must take this water
inside.  Good-night!"

His choler rose.  "A chap may do what he will for you, and you can't
even throw him a word!"

Her languid expression changed; the dark blue eyes flashed wide awake
in the twilight.

"I didn't understand you wanted to be paid for carrying the pail!"

"Oh, _damn_ you!" cried Bert, hurt beyond endurance; and he flung
away in rage that was not far from tears.

It seemed that the moment he was gone, the girl forgot him utterly.
She turned away and went inside the _sitkamer_ without a backward
glance.

The _sitkamer_ was full of her father's half-Boer children: two great
boys of eight and nine years old, and three or four younger fry.
They were rolling about on the floor, playing, fighting and cuffing.
Millie took no more notice of them than if they had been mice or
black-beetles.  She filled the kettle from her pail, and set it to
boil, and then, going to a cupboard, got a fresh egg, which she
proceeded to whisk up in a tumbler, with delicate care.

Tante Wilma rolled into the room, sat down by the stove, took the
coffee-pot off the rack, and poured herself out a cupful, which she
proceeded liberally to "lace" with something stronger.  She sat
sipping it, looking furtively at her step-daughter as she moved, her
small face grimly set, noiselessly to and fro.  It is very rarely
indeed that a Boer woman takes to drink.  When she does, she becomes
a creature to be avoided.

When her arrangements were complete, Millie took the tray and went
out of the room, followed by malevolent glances.

"White rat!" growled Xante Wilma, in the Taal.

The children started a kind of chorus:

  "White rat!  White rat!
  Ours is the corn that makes you fat!"


"Not much longer then," muttered the half-tipsy Vrouw.  "Another week
or two will see the end of it now; and then--out she goes!  Aha!
She'll wish before long that she had kept a civil tongue in her head.
As sure as I'm a living woman, one thrashing I'll give her before she
goes!  Oh, there's a long account I've got against her--it wants
paying, that it does!  Much we've had to bear from him, but most from
her that encouraged him from a baby to defy me.  But I'll take it out
on her, once he's gone, the little insolent, English devil!"




CHAPTER III

THE RIVALS

  "But as if he loved you!  No, not he.
  Nor anyone else in the world, 'tis plain;
  Who ever heard that another, free
  As I, young, prosperous, sound and sane,
  Poured life out, proffered it--'Half a glance
  Of those eyes of yours, and I drop the glass!'"
                                --ROBERT BROWNING.


Bert Mestaer flung open the door of his farm kitchen, and strode in.

All was clean and quiet.  His supper, covered up in a saucepan, had
been left on the stove.  Anna, his Boer housekeeper, had long since
retired to her heavy slumbers.

The eye of the master roved round the kitchen that night, like one
who saw it for the first time.  He gazed upon the ceiling, and noted
that it needed fresh lime-wash.  He contemplated the shining rows of
plates on the dresser, as though taking a new pride in his
possessions; and then, moving forward, he pushed open a door at the
opposite side of the room, and found himself in darkness and
coolness.  He struck a light, held it to a candle on the table, and
his critical glance travelled round the parlour which had been his
mother's pride.

There was a piano; he had a dim memory of her sitting there, playing
to him, the hymns that had charmed her own English childhood--

  "Once in Royal David's city--"

the sound of the tune floated across the brain which for so long had
heard no such strains.  He saw himself, a boy with yellow curls, in
which she had delighted, lifting his piercing childish treble at her
bidding.  What would she not have given for the English Mission which
had come to Slabbert's Poort since her death, and the ministrations
of Carol Mayne!  Bert had not entered a church now, for years.  As he
stood by her silent piano, he was invaded by a vague feeling that he
could hardly expect a neglected God to take his part.

The room contained an old bureau and comfortable chairs.  There were
good engravings on the walls.  The carpet was still serviceable, and
there were clean curtains in the windows.  From the wall before him
smiled down his mother's frank, good-humoured face--the face of Alice
Brooke--a brave girl, who had earned her living among strangers in a
strange land, until the rich Boer farmer had persuaded her to be his
wife.  Beside her, the broad-bearded, benevolent face of her devoted
husband, a Boer of the best type.

Bert folded his arms, and gazed at them both, with a heart full of
curious longings, rebellions and regrets.  Mrs. Mestaer had died when
he was eight years old.  Her death was the result of an accident--a
runaway horse had cut short the happy life on that out-of-the-way
farm; and people said that Mestaer had never rallied from the shock.
He became an old man in a few short months.  He turned a deaf ear to
those who urged him to take some expansive Boer lady to look after
him and his motherless boy, and he died of pneumonia when Bert was
seventeen, seeming only too glad of the chance to be gone.

Bert did not remember feeling much grief when he was told of his
father's death.  He had been chiefly conscious of the excitement of
leaving school and coming home to take possession of his property,
and ruffle it in the streets of Slabbert's Poort.

Just at that time had come the diamond-finding craze, which changed
the little rural hamlet into a haunt of needy adventurers, gamblers
and sharpers, Slabbert's Poort was to be the new Kimberley.  The
usual influx of rabble followed; the usual mad period of wild
speculation.  To let off big portions of his land to speculators had
seemed to young Mestaer far more "sporting" than to continue stolidly
to farm the precious acres.  He chummed in with the prospectors, who
were only too ready to flatter a young fellow with money in his
pockets.  The result was that his proper business languished; and now
it was universally allowed that the diamond-bearing capacities of the
locality had been absurdly over estimated.

Bert had fallen into ways which would have wrung his mother's heart,
when, for good or ill, the white face of Millie crossed his horizon,
to remain as a fixed star in his heavens.

To-night he was beginning to realise all that it might have meant for
him if his mother had lived.  She was English; she would have
understood and befriended Millie; she would have told him the things
that English girls demand of their lovers, and have devised ways in
which the acquaintance might be encouraged.

There was not, as it happened, a solitary English-woman in the place.
Mayne, at the Mission, was a bachelor, so could not be used as a
chaperon.  Millie had never seen the interior of Bert's house in her
life.  He felt sure that if she could see the rooms made comfortable
by his English mother, it must to her seem preferable to her own
miserable quarters.  She only saw him slouching about the streets, in
the unkempt condition affected by his pals; she took him, he felt
sure, for other than he was, or than he felt himself capable of
becoming for her sake.

Remorsefully he remembered that Millie had seen him drunk.  He had
not cared at the time--the thing was growing far too fashionable to
be looked upon as a disgrace in the little place which had been so
pastoral--but love was teaching him strange things, and now he felt
as though he were looking upon the sordid episode of drunkenness
through Millie's tired, contemptuous eyes.

What would he not have given to be able to make her understand that,
if she would be kind to him, he would be what she chose--to be able
to show her the clean, peaceful farm, known throughout the district
as High Farm, owing to its being the only house for miles which was
built English fashion on two floors--and tell her that, if she would
be mistress there, he would use all his vast strength to work as
never man worked before, and keep her like a lady?

But how to get at her?  He felt that any written expression of his
desires would be ludicrously inadequate.  At one time he thought of
begging Mayne to speak for him; but his pride jibbed too violently at
the notion of having to confess that he lacked courage to speak.  His
heart was heavy as lead.  Four times since his last strikingly
unsatisfactory interview he had hung over the gate in vain.  Each
evening it was Kattie the Kaffir girl who had been sent to draw the
water; and he was too proud to send a message by her.

But on the fourth night he had yielded to unbearable longing, and
entrusted the grinning damsel with a note for Millie--a folded scrap
of paper, on which he had written:


"Do let me have a word.  I'm so blamed sorry I said that to you.
"BERT."


He had some self-questionings as to whether "blamed" might be looked
upon as a swear-word; but he decided that it must be harmless.

"If you don't say that, dashed if I know what you could say," he
reflected irritably.

His heart beat insufferably as he watched the girl stagger across the
yard, the pail in one hand, the little note in the other.

Strange thrills crept through his nerves, his breath seemed to
trouble him as he drew it If Millie herself should come in answer,
what should he say to her?  He was all unprepared.

A shadowy figure was stealing towards him stealthily in the gathering
gloom.  It was slim--it moved quietly.  He grew crimson in the dark.
An unmistakable Kaffir chuckle broke on his ear: it was only Kattie
back again.  She handed him a piece of paper and ran away in an
instant He struck a match and looked eagerly at what he held: it was
just his own message, crumpled up and returned without comment.

He had been enraged, but not daunted for long.  It was highly
possible that Tante Wilma had got hold of the message, and that
Millie had never seen it.  The thing now was to invent some new plan
of campaign--some scheme by which the plenty and good plenishing of
his home might burst upon the vision of the girl.

To-night he set down the kerosene lamp upon the table, which had a
serge cover of a good shade of blue.  He surveyed the
well-upholstered sofa, with silk cushions of the same blue.  He
tried, with doubled fist, the springs of the deep easy-chair.  He
stared at the tall glass vases and glazed pots, and dimly recalled
the fact that in his mother's lifetime these had been wont to hold
flowers.  A girl would like, perhaps, to see flowers in a room.  He
believed there were some in the yard; but he paid no attention to
them, and never gathered any.  A deep sigh escaped him at the thought
of his inability to cope with the situation in general.

He strolled back with his lamp into the tiled kitchen.

Should he consult Amurrica?  The Yankee was the only one of all the
set for whom he entertained anything but a profound and steady
contempt.  And Amurrica was, he knew, untrustworthy.  He had a secret
fear--which brought the blood to his head when he considered it--that
Amurrica himself was "on to Millie."  It was possible that the
Lutwyches might consider an American more akin to themselves than the
son of a Boer.  Even as he turned the delicate subject over and over
in his thoughts, there came a tap at his door, and a long whistle,
which told him that the man who occupied his thoughts stood upon his
threshold.

He went and opened, standing aside as the visitor sauntered in, and
manifesting no curiosity as to the reason of so late a call.
Amurrica shut the door carefully behind him, and walked to the clean
hearth.  His face was of the hatchet variety, not handsome, but keen,
with that eagle keenness which is the hall-mark of a certain type of
American.  The humour in his half-closed hazel eyes atoned for their
lack of size; the composure of his manner hid his real thoughts from
sight.  Bert had never before considered him formidable, but to-night
he was conscious of a foreboding as he mechanically produced the
whisky-jar from a corner cupboard, and pushed it across the table.
Amurrica sat down.

His eye roved around restless until it lighted upon the spittoon in
the corner by the hearth.  He made his shot with precision, and then,
laying his pipe on the table, began to pour whisky into a tumbler.

"'S come at last," he observed.

"What?" asked Bert, slouching in his chair, his listless eyes on the
fading red glimmer between the bars of the stove.

Amurrica shifted slightly in his seat, so as to face his host
squarely.  He took a pull at his whisky before replying casually:

"Lutwyche is cuttin' the stick."

There was silence.  Bert knew he was being watched; felt
instinctively that the time had come.  With no other word spoken, he
knew that they were rivals; that it would be perhaps a question of
which man was prepared to give most to the Boer step-mother for the
attainment of what he desired.  He must feign indifference; for aught
he knew, Amurrica might have his shooting-iron in his pocket.

He had no personal fear of him; his fears were all for Millie.  His
love was teaching him stratagem.

His eyelids did not flicker, he did not even remove his pipe from his
mouth.  Amurrica's eyes were boring him like gimlets, but he puffed
calmly on, his thoughts racing each other over the well-known ground.
What was he to do?

"Who told you?" he presently vouchsafed.

"Met Boka, galloping for the doctor like the very devil."

Boka was one of Lutwyche's Kaffirs.

Bert asked no question, manifested no curiosity; but the other was
full of news, and intent upon imparting it.

"Said the gal had made him sleep in the kitchen nights, for a week
past, 'n case she needed to call him up.  To-night, down she come
with a face like chalk, and told him to ride like hell: said he
judged by the looks of her the ole man was gone already."

Again there was a silence, while both smoked.  Bert presently
spoke--two words:

"Mayne there?"

"Mayne?  Not that I know of."  A surprised inflection in the voice.

"Then I think," said Mestaer, slowly rising to his full height, and
knocking his pipe against the chimney, to dislodge the dottle--"I
think I'd better go an' send him."

"What's the blank good of that?" cried Amurrica, in a choice outburst
of astonished profanity.

"Parson's the right man when it comes to dyin', ain't he?" said Bert
tranquilly.  "An' you done right to come an' tell me, Amurrica, for
I'm the man who's concerned in this.  I thank you.  Put yourself
outside o' that whisky, an' I'll make so free as to turn you out."

He was moving quietly about the room as he spoke, opening drawers,
and Amurrica saw him slip a revolver into his pocket.

The Yankee sat for a minute with a frozen face, digesting his plans.
Then he stood up, and his features relaxed towards a smile.

"Well, here's luck!" he said, draining his glass.

"Thanks!" said Bert

He approached the table, and took the empty glass, as though to carry
it away; but as he moved, it slipped through his fingers, and fell in
shivers upon the floor.  Amurrica's nostrils twitched: was it an
accident?  Bert said "Damn!" quite naturally, and kicked the
fragments with his foot.  A second time his visitor decided, upon
reflection, not to quarrel; and they left the house together.




CHAPTER IV

THE GUARDIANSHIP OF CAROL MAYNE

  "These mothers are too dreadful!"
            --ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.


Millie sat before the cold hearth in the stale, stuffy _sitkamer_,
which always smelt of dirty dish-cloths and unwashed humanity.  Her
lips were pressed tightly together, her face was white as wax.  In
its repose, one could see signs of the inner strength, the unnameable
charm which had captivated Bert and Amurrica, beyond question the two
cleverest men of the place.  No young Boer would have looked twice at
her.

Her father was dead.  The doctor had come and gone, and told the
orphan what she knew before.  The death had been quiet and painless,
only Millie there.  But now, the Boer widow was beside the corpse,
noisily weeping and wailing, and the girl was shut out.

It was perhaps a fortunate thing for Arnold Lutwyche that his
inherent vacillation of character had been joined to a feebleness of
constitution which released him, at the age of forty-two, from the
burden of the flesh.  He had passed beyond reach of the Boer woman's
tongue, and of the complications presented by those lumpish Boer
children who bore his name.  His difficulties were over; but what of
his child?

His first wife--his own love, and Millie's mother--had been the
earthly stay of the weak soul.  Everyone had always called him weak;
but he had had the wisdom to love the strong, the fortune to be loved
by her again.  While she lived, his own lack of stamina had hardly
been apparent to him.  He had never quite lost his sense of having a
grudge against God since her death.

What he had been through since!  From the moment when the handsome,
courteous Englishman, with the dark-blue eyes, presented himself in
answer to an advertisement from the buxom Boer heiress for a
competent man to manage her farm, his misery had increased, his bonds
had tightened.  But it was over at last.  He had slipped through
Tante Wilma's coarse fingers, and gone flying home to her, his love,
his stronghold.

Their child was left behind.

She had apparently no tears for him.  The look on her tense features
was more triumphant than grieving.

A smart tap on the door aroused her.  She looked up in languid
surprise.  The old Dutch clock pointed to three o'clock in the
morning.  With a resigned shrug, she lifted her aching limbs, dragged
herself to the door, and opened it.  Mr. Mayne stood outside, and
stepped in without speaking, closely followed by Bert Mestaer.
Millie drew back, a look of anything but welcome on her expressive
face.

"Go back!" said she to the young farmer.  "I don't want you round
here, nor any of your lot."

"I--I came to see if I couldn't help, Millie." stammered he humbly.

In dialogue with the girl he seemed always to become a different
creature.  To-night there was some apparent difficulty in
articulating, as his eyes rested on the untamed fire of the glance,
and the droop of the small, exhausted frame.

"Let him come in and rest a minute, Miss Lutwyche," said Mr. Mayne
gently.  "He came all the way to the Mission to let me know."

"How'd he hear, I should like to know?" she demanded.

"Amurrica told me," stammered Bert, staring at the ground.

She gave a short laugh.

"Trust him to know other folks' business," she sneered.  "He's the
old woman's candidate, he is."

"Candidate?  What for, Millie?" asked Mayne anxiously.

She had turned away, and Bert had fastened the door.  She sank on a
chair, leaning an arm on the table, the slenderness of her wrist, as
it lay there, making a dumb appeal to all the manliness in Bert.

"For taking me off her hands," she said, with perfect calmness.  "I'm
on offer, didn't you know?  Either o' you two in the running?
Amurrica's given her ten quid on account; you'd better bet on his
chances, unless you can go higher."

"That's not the way to talk," said Mayne sternly.  "What do you mean
by it?  You are far too young to think of marriage."

"Who said I was thinkin' about marriage?" she flashed back.  "Am I
the old woman?  Am I to answer for her dirty bargains?"

"Then tell us what you mean," said Mayne.  "Is it true that Otis
wants to marry you?"

Otis was Amurrica's patronymic.

"I don' know," said Millie casually.  "I only know he's pretty thick
with the old woman; an' she doesn't mean to let me go for nothing;
all of you can bet on that."

"But why talk this nonsense?" urged Mayne reprovingly.  "Mrs.
Lutwyche couldn't dispose of you against your will, even if you were
a Kaffir."

Milly laughed--one clear, liquid note.

"No, of course she can't," said she.  "That's where the joke comes
in.  Think I'd go along o' that sort o' scum?"

She indicated poor Bert with a slight wave of that fragile wrist.

"Then what are you goin' to do, Millie?" burst out the young man in
anguish.  "If she turns you out, where're you goin'--eh?"

"What's it matter to you?" asked Millie sullenly.

"'S the only thing that does matter to me!" cried Bert desperately.
"Look here!"  He flung his hat on the table, and stepped in front of
her with a sudden manliness which filled Mayne with admiration.  "You
don' know the sort of home I've got to offer you, Millie.  I'm a rich
man, as things go round here.  I'd give yer pretty well anything you
set your heart on.  I'd take care of yer--yer shouldn't set them bits
of hands to no rough work.  I love you, Millie, and well you know it.
Let the parson here marry us, an I'll--I'll do anything you want!"

He knelt down by the table as he concluded his appeal, and made a
snatch for her hand; but it was sharply withdrawn.  He laid his arms
down on the rough wood, and hid his face in them, shaken through and
through by the intensity of his feelings.  Mayne turned away, and
walked to the far end of the kitchen.  But he heard the girl's short
laugh of scorn.

"Tastes differ," she said icily.  "I'm an English girl, and if the
worst comes to the worst, there's the well in the courtyard.  That's
better than a drinkin' Boer."

"Millie," said Mayne, in wrath, "I am ashamed of you!  Is that the
way to answer an honest man, who offers you all he has to give?  I am
as English as you are, and I beg to say no Englishwoman I ever knew
offered insult as a return for honour done her.  If you can't feel
affection for Bert, surely you could tell him so civilly."

The girl's fragile form quivered with dry sobs; she sprang to her
feet.

"Mr. Mestaer, I can't and don't return your affection," she gasped.
"I'm brought pretty low, but I've got my pride!  I'm thinkin' just
now more about funerals than about weddin's, though a black frock for
me'll be as hard to fi-f-find as a white one would, I'm thinkin'!"

"There!" cried Bert to Mayne, in hot indignation.  "You made her cry
now.  Millie, my dear, now don't you give it a thought.  I didn't
know it 'ud vex you! ... Millie!"

But she had staggered blindly down the room, not seeing her way for
the streaming tears so long so unnaturally restrained; and as Bert
stood hesitating, torn between his pity, his anger, his passion--the
door of the kitchen opened slowly, and the new-made widow appeared on
the threshold, truly awful in her _déshabille_.

"A clever girl, I'll warrant!" she cried, in high glee.  "Her father
not cold yet, and two young men in the kitchen at four o'clock in the
morning!  Well, what offers, gentlemen?  Either of you ready to take
her off my hands?"

"I am," burst in Bert at once, before Mayne could speak.  "Fifty
pounds down and a demi-john of the best whisky in Slabbert's Poort,
and I'll make her my wife to-morrow."

"Millie!" screamed the virago to the girl, who had reached the ladder
leading to her little room above.  "Here's a husband for you, my
girl!  Get your bundle and pack!  Off with you!  Out of my house!
We're all respectable here!  Take your English lady-wife, Mr. Bert
Mestaer."

Mr. Mayne stepped forwards.

"Perhaps you would be so kind as to listen to me for a moment, Mrs.
Lutwyche," he said distinctly.  "Your late husband made a will, and
left it in my hands.  In it I am appointed his daughter's sole
guardian, until she reaches the age of twenty-one.  The arrangements
for her future rest with me, and have nothing whatever to do with
you.  If she remains with you for a week or two, until her affairs
are settled, you will be paid a fixed sum daily, out of Mr.
Lutwyche's small estate, as long as you keep her.  But you have
absolutely no control whatever over her marriage."

Vrouw Lutwyche gave a positive howl of fury.  Her face grew
purple--almost black; her eyes protruded, her rage was hideous and
ungovernable.  For so long had she waited for this moment--this
coming time when she should have Millie helpless at her mercy--she
simply could not realise that all was taken out of her hands.

Millie's tears had ceased.  In surprise at what Mr. Mayne was saying,
she had halted on her way up the ladder, the drops wet on her cheeks.
Now she slowly came back to the ground, and stood with a set smile,
showing her row of short, pearl-white teeth, as she gloated over the
spectacle of the Boer woman's degradation.  He had been weak, that
father who had left her; he had disappointed her over and over again;
but after all, there had been something in him which Vrouw Lutwyche
could not reach.  In death he had outwitted her.

Mayne's very soul sickened.  He had seen much that revolted him in
this wild land of beginnings--of that measure of civilisation which
sometimes seems so strongly to plead the fact that utter savagery
would be better.  But he thought he had never seen anything more
awful than the enmity of this girl's face--the hatred, the callous
contempt, which showed how often the young eyes had looked upon like
scenes.

"If she is left here, she will go mad," he thought; and again he
earnestly wished that poor Lutwyche could have held on just another
fortnight, until the arrival of certain letters from England.  He was
at his wits' end.  There was not a house anywhere near to which he
dare take Millie.  He was in sole charge of the Mission, and in that
evil place, to take her there, would be to blast her character.  He
thought of a good-natured old Boer widow woman who lived about a mile
away, and stepping up to Millie, he suggested in an undertone, that
she should go there.

"You cannot remain here," he urged.

Her refusal was prompt and resolute.

"Leave him alone in the house with her?  Never!" she said doggedly.
"You don't know what she might do.  I'm not afraid of her.  She
daren't touch me, and she can't go up my ladder.  She's roaring drunk
now, but she'll be dead drunk presently, and then she's harmless.  If
you come round in the morning, I shall be able to talk to you; she'll
take hours to sleep this off.  I wish you'd go now, and take away
that Bert.  I've got no use for him."




CHAPTER V

A BOER BURYING

  "--Within some glass, dimmed by our breath,
  Our hearts discern wild images of Death,
  Shadows and shoals that edge Eternity."
                        --DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.


The sunrise flashed into their eyes, as the farm-house door closed
upon the two men.  They went together through the yard, and out at
the gate where Bert had so often watched in vain for Millie.  Their
steps echoed with an unfamiliar ring upon the hard, caked earth at
this unwonted hour of stark, raw dawn.  The sight of the well gave
Bert a twinge as he passed it.

"Even that 'ud be better than a drinkin' Boer," he muttered, under
his breath.

Before they had gone much farther, he grappled with the new fear that
was clutching at his heart.

"I say," he growled, stopping and planting himself before Mr. Mayne,
who of necessity stopped also; "what did you mean by what you said up
there about letters from England?  She--she hasn't got friends in
England, has she?"

"It is very doubtful," said Mayne hesitatingly.  "Look here,
Mestaer!" he added abruptly.  "My hand was forced just now.  You were
not supposed to hear what I said.  Can I trust you not to repeat it?"

"Repeat it!  Who'd I repeat it to?"

"Otis; or any of your lot."

"My lot!  That's her cry too.  Has she learnt it from you?  Do you
lump me in with Amurrica's crew of thievin' idlers?  ---- them all
for a set of ----"

Mayne's hand went up with the slight gesture which always stopped
Bert's swearing.

"Mestaer," he said, "after what we have just seen, you will drop your
fancy for Millie, won't you?  There are girls who will play with a
man's love to the very brink of the end; but if a girl has any sort
of feeling for a man, she will turn to him in her trouble.  Millie
doesn't care for you--you must see that, don't you?"

Bert looked as though he had been suddenly turned into a graven
image.  Meeting the squareness of his jaw, the metallic glint of his
hard grey eye, Mayne was conscious anew of the dreadful strength of
undisciplined human nature, and the imperious quality of its desires.
One is sometimes apt to wonder what twenty centuries of Christianity
have done for Europe.  The answer to the question stares you in the
face the moment you step outside the circle in which Christianity has
insensibly moulded public opinion.

"If she don't want me, she don't want no other man," said the giant
doggedly; "and look how young she is.  I've got patience; I can wait.
But if she's going to be taken off to England--"

He broke off, and began to walk on.

"If she is going away to England?" repeated Mayne, trudging beside
him.

"Why, then, I don't know as how I can."

Mayne thought rapidly for a minute.

"You're not reasonable," he said.  "You own that Millie's too young
to be married; but you wouldn't have her stay in Vrouw Lutwyche's
clutches, would you?"

"The worse they treat her, the more likely she is to come to me,"
said Bert calmly.

"Or to Otis."

"Chuck it!" burst out Bert hoarsely.  "Chuck it, I tell you."  He
shook with all the inward feelings which he could not explain.  How
could he say that it scorched him with sheer physical heat and shame,
to hear Amurrica even suggested as a mate for Millie?  "He'd poison
her soul," he groaned; and Mayne felt an acute inward sympathy with
him.

"Mestaer," he said kindly.  "It seems very doubtful whether any of
the English relations of Millie's mother will be willing--or if
willing, able to receive her.  Her father has left in my hands a
little sum of money--very small, but enough to pay her passage home.
It appears that the family of the first Mrs. Lutwyche all disapproved
of her marriage.  They are poor proud people, and as he has had no
communication with them since her death, I do not even know whether
his letter will reach them.  If however they do write, and if they
offer to have the girl home, on any terms, you have the sense to see
that she most certainly ought to go."

"Perhaps she won't go.  Who's goin' to make her?"

"I am her guardian," said Mayne, very quietly.

"If you try an' make her do anything she don't wanter, I'll choke you
with my own hands," said Bert earnestly.

The priest was unable to help smiling.

"Mestaer, if you had lived in other days, you would have been a
devout lover," he said.  "As it is, you are a bit of a barbarian, are
you not?"

"A drinkin' Boer; that's it, if you want to do any classifying,"
retorted the young man, with exceeding bitterness; and with no
parting salutation, he flung off, turned the corner leading to the
High Farm, and marched away, leaving Mayne to pursue the road to the
Mission alone.

The news he had heard was working like some stimulating drug in the
young farmer's brain.  The fatal word "England" lit up the future in
one long, awful glare, as of an endless avenue along which he seemed
to see himself moving--alone.  Surely there was something that a
strong man could do to chain a girl's affections!  What charm can
lead a spirit captive?  Bert knew well enough, though he never said
so to himself in set terms, not being by way of analysing his
emotions--he knew that it was Millie's self, her love, her soul, her
inmost being, that he longed for.  If he could make her long for him
as he longed for her!  He thought of the cold, white face and little
delicate, sneering mouth till he was half mad.

The only plan of campaign which suggested itself was the simple one
of being always on hand.  He felt pretty sure, in his own mind, that
the girl's stepmother would try to get even with her somehow.  Her
prey was to be snatched out of her hands; it would be odd if she made
no attempt to revenge herself.  The girl knew no fear; she had
successfully cowed and defied the bullying woman for years.  But
Bert, with Boer intuitions in his blood, felt that she was less
secure than she thought herself.  It was truly British to despise an
adversary; but it was a British mistake, sometimes.  The kind of hate
that Tante Wilma felt was hate that would improve with keeping.

Accordingly, Bert passed the next day or two in mounting guard in the
immediate neighbourhood.  There were various outbuildings which made
it easy to hang about unseen, and he went to his post before Otis and
the others were about.

On the first day, life at the farm went on much as usual.  As Millie
had foreseen, Tante Wilma was not visible.  Various Boer ladies of
her acquaintance came to condole, and discuss the purchase of widow's
mourning.  Mayne came and saw Millie, and gave her the money to
supply her own black dress, which she sat up all night to make.
There was no need for Bert to wait about when once he had seen the
light of the candle in the little square patch of glass in the
corrugated iron roof that lighted Millie's garret.  In that fastness
she was safe--safe among the coffins.[1]


[1] In remote Boer districts, a coffin or two is frequently kept in
the loft, ready for emergencies.  Apples and fruit for winter use are
sometimes stored in these weird receptacles.


Amurrica came not near the farm all that day.  Perhaps it had leaked
out that the Vrouw was not in a fit state for the conduct of
negotiations.

The next day the vigilant lover patiently returned to his post, and
waited until dark.  Millie was all right, so far, for a Boer woman
had been all day long plying her needle at the farm, and the pallid,
unwholesome little man who fulfilled the profitable duties of
undertaker to the community had been shuffling in and out all day.
Moreover, the girl herself had appeared in the yard, and been
occupied there for more than an hour in hanging out wet linen,
unconscious that she was watched from behind the thick hedge of
prickly pear which enclosed the orchard, with its haze of peach
blossom.  Bert made no sign of his presence.  He had determined now
upon his role, and adhered to it with characteristic persistency.
His plan was to bide his time, and come on the scene when Millie
needed a champion.  Her extremity was to be his opportunity.

About nine o'clock, Amurrica stepped briskly up to the stoep, and was
admitted by Millie herself.  The sentinel, much excited, stood by,
every muscle tense, in view of emergencies.  At the end of about
three minutes, the square of candle-light appeared in the roof,
gladdening the lover's heart.  Millie had retired to her stronghold,
out of reach of importunity.  He determined to stand his ground,
however, until the departure of Otis.  The sound of raised voices was
soon heard.  No doubt Amurrica was demanding the return of his "ten
quid," and demanding it of course in vain.  It must have come in very
handy for the purchase of the funeral garb and bake-meats.  He did
not stay very long.  The invisible Bert studied his countenance as he
emerged, but as was usual with him, there was not much to be learnt
from it.  It was non-committal.  Bert, as he strolled home, fell to
imagining what his next move was likely to be.

During the whole of the third day, four women were ceaselessly at
work upon the solid feast which was to conclude the obsequies of
Arnold Lutwyche, in a manner befitting the importance and position of
his widow.  The kitchen was a scene of bustle, excitement, constant
coming and going.  Bert wondered how Millie stood it.  Tante Wilma,
the centre of attraction, kept meritoriously sober during all this
exciting period, and Bert knew that the girl was safe, at least from
physical violence, while all these people were about.

Next day, the funeral took place.  It happened to be the first Boer
funeral that Carol Mayne had ever seen; and he found himself
unprepared for it.  From early dawn the cape carts and slow waggons
kept coming in from all the country-side.  He did not at first divine
that all these people were come solely to attend the funeral.  The
Pieters family, to which Tante Wilma belonged, was the leading clan
of the district; and before noon at least two hundred were assembled,
some of them having come distances of thirty or forty miles for the
sake of being present.

When he arrived at Lutwyche's, the ceremony of viewing the corpse was
in active process.  Just to the left of the stoep, before you entered
the _sitkamer_, was a small room, the function of which seemed
indeterminate.  Here, in one of the coffins which had for so long
borne Millie company in her loft, lay the dead Englishman, his face
still uncovered.  By his side, as master of the ceremonies, stood the
widow's senior male cousin, Cornells Pieters, a typical Boer, with a
reputation for beating his wife.  His fluent Taal was not very
comprehensible to Mayne; but a sick disgust came over him at the way
in which he was, as it were, acting showman--stroking back the dead
man's hair, pushing or poking his hands or cheeks with great stumpy
fingers, and encouraging the never-ending stream of gazers to handle
the corpse and finger the linen.  A great laugh would go up if some
young woman or child made outcry at the unexpected coldness of
contact.  Mayne's thoughts flew to Millie, and he wondered how she
would bear this.  But he could not see her anywhere.  The widow,
surrounded by her children, and evidently deriving moral support from
a black-bordered pocket-handkerchief, sat in the _sitkamer_ receiving
condolences.  But Millie was invisible.

Mayne was on delicate ground here.  The dead man had expressly
stipulated that he should be laid to rest with the words of his own
liturgy, and the services of the English priest; but the Boer
Predikant was in evidence, and Carol, who was quick to learn, and was
beginning to understand local etiquette, stepped up to him, and asked
him to say a prayer, when--the ghoulish corpse-inspection over at
last--the coffin was screwed down, borne in, and triumphantly placed
upon the family dining-table.

The Predikant, gratified, though hardly placated, took full advantage
of his opportunities.  He talked to the Almighty about himself, the
Pieters family and the Boer nation, for three quarters of an hour;
while Tante Wilma's noisy, snuffling sobs filled the place.

After this Mayne stepped forward, and read the first part of the
burial service.  Then the coffin was raised and borne solemnly out,
and down the fields beyond the Kaffir huts, to where a stone wall
enclosed the little family burying-ground.

Melicent Lutwyche, standing by the open grave, saw the procession
coming, and the sight of Mayne's figure, bareheaded and white-robed,
shook her fortitude for the first time.  Her eyes began to burn with
unshed tears.  All these days, all these sleepless nights, her heart
had never ceased to repeat: "I am glad!  I am glad!  He is safe
now--free!  Out of her clutches for ever!"  But now a new and
desolating thought supervened--suggested somehow by the liturgy's
majestic words--the thought of his immense distance from herself.
Heaven had formed no part of her conception of his release from
captivity; now the anthem of Resurrection smote her with inarticulate
pain.  What had she, with a heart full of black hatred, to do with
Resurrection?  The white flowers in her hands shook; she was
shivering from head to foot on the verge of a breakdown.

Then, foremost among the great throng of following people, she saw
Amurrica's hatchet profile, and her thoughts, just painfully striving
to take wing, sank back to the black, bad earth she knew.  Warfare
was still her portion.  Amurrica and Bert Mestaer should never see
her weep.  She turned, moved a little, and stood exactly at the
grave's head.  The light was behind her, and to Bert she seemed like
an austere angel, waiting to bestow the dead in some still sanctuary,
where vulgar hands and tongues could reach him no longer.  As the
earth and stones fell pattering on the coffin, her white blooms
fluttered down with them.  The set intensity of her small white face
fairly terrified her new guardian.

The service over, people cheered up, and hurried back to the farm to
eat and drink before setting out upon their long return journeys.
Mayne made Bert a signal to wait behind.

"Mestaer," he said, "I have to ride to Leitersdorp and get this will
proved.  I can't get back inside three days.  I am setting off at
once, and I expect to find a letter from England waiting for me at
Mr. Crick's office, so that, when I come back, I shall know better
what to do with Millie.  Can I trust you while I am gone?"

He looked searchingly at the young man's face.

Bert grinned.  "To punch Amurrica's head?  Oh, yes!"

"Exactly!  Or your own, if you should feel that you deserve it."

Bert shrugged.  He was in a hurry.  He hardly paused to realise what
the three days' absence of the guardian might mean.  His memory was
centred upon the strained expression of Millie's little face, and he
knew, by the faculty of divination which possessed him where she was
concerned, that she was near the end of her powers of endurance.  He
had premonition that before long she must collapse.  It seemed like a
duel between him and her.  When she gave in he would be glad, but he
must be there.  This was just now all that mattered--that he should
be near her when the steel springs of her will relaxed.

He hurried away with an abstracted air the moment Mayne had finished
speaking; and Mayne, with a sigh, wondered whether he had done right
to tell him of his departure--whether he did right to go.  Until the
will was proved, he felt uncertain of being able to maintain his
authority against Vrouw Lutwyche and her ignorant kinsfolk; he felt
that a weight would be off his mind when he was safely back again.
There was an Anglican sisterhood at Leitersdorp, and he wished to
inquire whether the girl might be placed there for a time should
circumstances render it necessary.  But his guardianship was a real
puzzle, and it was seriously complicated by the passion of Bert
Mestaer.




CHAPTER VI

THE FLINGING OF THE GAGE

  "What god, then, bade those two stand forth and strive?"
                                      --C. S. CALVERLEY.


All the world of Slabbert's Poort was enclosed within the walls of
"Lutwyche's."  The funeral feast waxed noisier and noisier; there
were the elements of discord trembling in the cup.  Boer _v._ Briton
was soon to be the order of the day, and the present company was
largely composed of disappointed men--those who had come to clutch
diamonds, and had found none.  Their sense that the times were out of
joint had been growing by degrees, in proportion as their prospects
waned; and the war rumours were fanning it into flame.  Visions of
plunder danced before their eyes.  They would have torn treasure from
the bowels of the earth; if this was denied them, there was many a
rich homestead for the sacking, much plunder scattered here and there
over the wide land.  This was what war meant to most of them.  A few
were English, but the great majority were Africanders.  Amurrica was
the only man of ability among them.  He meant to throw in his lot
with the winning side, "anyway"; but he had for days past been making
highly inflammatory speeches, from the Boer point of view, in the
saloon of the Vierkleur.

The festivities were well begun when Bert Mestaer walked in.  He was
not popular now.  Most of those present were jealous of his
possessions, and of his great physical strength.  They thought him
reserved, and nobody ever forgot that his mother was English.  It was
not considered certain which side he would take in the forthcoming
struggle.

He was greeted with a clamour of welcome which held an underlying
sneer.  He took no notice; he was not quarrelling to-day.  His
courage and strength were facts too universally accepted for him to
care to prove them.  His grey eyes went like lightning about the
room, till he discerned Millie, a large apron pinned over her black
dress, staggering under the pile of plates which she was carrying to
the wash-house.  He pressed forward at once, as if nobody else had
been present, took the girl's burden from her; and they went out of
the room together, followed by laughter and jeers.

They reached the sink, already piled with unwashed dishes.  Bert
deposited those which he carried, looked around, spied a
broken-backed chair, and brought it to the girl.

"Sit down!" he said.

Millie began to roll up her sleeves.  "I got to wash these," she said.

"Sit down, I tell you," said Bert, in a low voice.  He stood between
her and her work.  "Can't I see that you're just fit to drop in your
tracks?  Sit down!  If there's washing-up to be done, where's the
nigger girl?"

Millie did not sit down.  She stood her ground: but she did a thing
she had never done before--lifted her heavy lids, and looked up right
into her lover's eyes.  A wash of delicate carmine dyed her thin
cheek-bones.  "It keeps me out of the room--away from those swine,"
she said, with a note almost of appeal in her voice.

Bert felt his inmost being surge up wildly, as his whole heart went
forth to her, in answer to her first confidence: the only word she
had ever spoken which seemed to distinguish between him and "those
swine."  All that was best in him arose, and strove to meet and
honour the favour she had shown.

"That's all right," he said, in tones of easy friendship.  "You sit
down an' tell me what to do.  I'm on to this job."

In a second his coat was off and his sleeves rolled up.  He had
flashed a look round, spied a boiling kettle on a vilely-smelling
paraffin stove, and filled the greasy washbowl.  Millie subsided upon
the chair with a resignation which, had he known her better, would
have alarmed him.  As things were, it filled him with a wild
enthusiasm.  But he determined to walk warily.  His face glowed with
enjoyment as he proceeded with his menial task.  He buckled down to
work in good earnest, methodically scraping the broken food off the
dishes into the dog-trough set by for the purpose, and handling the
crockery with skill which surprised the girl, who, sunk back in the
chair, watched him without a word.

But he was human.  After a while, it seemed to him that his strenuous
efforts merited encouragement.  He ventured greatly.

"Millie, if these Britishers write and ask you to come to them, shall
you go?"

The girl started, as if his voice had roused her from stupor.

"What business is it o' yours?" she asked.

"I told you that the night your father died," said Bert, quite simply.

"Well, if you want to know, I shall go, whether they want me or
whether they don't, so it won't make any difference to you," she
replied coldly.

He bit back the oath that leapt to his lips.

"You've made up your mind to that?" he said; his voice was audibly
unsteady.

"Think I'd stay here, with all the world to choose from?" said she
scornfully.  "Not if Slabbert's Poort was paved with diamonds!  No,
indeed; I do know enough to know that all the world's not like this.
I'm going to see what it is like."

Bert had completed the washing-up and rinsed his big hands in clean
water.  He stood wiping them on the roller-towel, looking down upon
her, so sudden a dilation in his heart and throat that for a space he
was unable to articulate.  He had forgotten the party in the room
beyond as though it never existed.

"Millie, let me take yer!  Marry me, Millie, and let's cut an' run
together.  Oh ... you don' know how good I could be to yer!  Millie,
little woman!"

"Drop it, Bert Mestaer!  I can't stand it," gasped the girl, dragging
herself to her feet.  "You're always the same, if ever I trust myself
with you for a minute alone.  Why can't you hold your tongue?"

"Hold my tongue, an' lose you?  Why, what d'you s'pose I got ter live
for?" he cried out, stung through and through by the idea of his own
impotence, his utter failure to arouse one spark of feeling in the
girl.

He was shaking from head to foot.  It seemed so enraging, so absurd,
that he, whose great strength could compel this frail creature to
anything, absolutely dare not touch her--was reduced to stammering,
humiliated silence, by her unconcealed disdain.  It always came to
this between them.  He stood, fighting his feeling, facing the blank
wall of her indifference, when there was a sudden increase of sound
from the scene of the revels--a door opened, a furious voice
bellowed: "Millie!"

It was enough; he was by her side again at once.  Snatching the pile
of spoons and forks, he put them into her apron, picking up a pyramid
of plates himself, and they went back to the supper-room.

They were received with a babel of derisive remarks, the pith of
which seemed to be that Millie had been away with one young man, when
she was going to be married to another.

"Come along, Millie!" said the deep, guttural voice of Oom Pieters,
rumbling in his hairy throat; "we're only waiting for you, to drink
your health."

Since the irruption of diamond-seekers into the pastoral district,
the temperate Boer habits had sadly altered.  Peach brandy was on the
table in generous quantity, and many of the more old-fashioned sort,
following a bad fashion, had partaken, and not being used to such
things, were not perfectly under their own control.

Amurrica was seated on Tante Wilma's right, leaning back in his
tilted chair, and sending out smoke rings from a mouth which wore a
gratified smile.

"Goin' to marry Otis," was bandied from lip to lip.  "He's bought a
share in the Vierkleur from Maarten Brandt, and he says, when
Millie's a bit fatter she'll do fine in the bar.  Goin' to sit up
together to-night."

This in allusion to the old Boer custom which decrees that an engaged
couple shall ratify their troth by sitting up all night together, and
burning candles.

"Sh!  Hold your tongue," said Millie, in a low voice to Bert, who was
about to explode.  "They're all drunk; what's the good of noticing?"

"They're all goin' to clear out o' this before I'm much older,"
growled Bert, shaking with fury.

He broke off; for, to his amazement, Amurrica had risen, and was
calling for silence.

As the man stood up, his long, sinewy frame, with a subtle twist in
the carriage, outlined against the dark, smoky background, swaying
slightly on his feet, as a result of his potations--the humorous
curve on his thin lips which fascinated women and made Bert hate
him--he would have made a study for the brush of Franz Hals.  One
thing which the Boers admired about him, was his mastery of the Taal.
The man was a born linguist; he chose that language now.

He said he had the happiness to announce that he was the accepted
suitor of Miss Lutwyche, and the marriage was to take place the
following day.  "Their esteemed Predikant"--then present, and
somewhat blear-eyed--"had promised to unite them, in view of which
festivity, he invited them all to a supper at the Vierkleur Hotel
to-morrow.  It had been suggested that the English minister, Mayne,
had been left guardian of Miss Lutwyche.  But this was to be set
aside.  If it were so, he had doubtless obtained such power by
exerting undue influence over the dying man's conscience, and for his
own sinister reasons.  Vrouw Lutwyche was going to law about it.  But
in any case, possession was nine points of the law, and when he was
the husband of Miss Millie he didn't quite know where the Britisher
was coming in; not into his house, he was almighty sure about that."

There was a deep silence all the time he was speaking.  Bert Mestaer
stood up motionless, just opposite, behind the row of seated guests,
and Millie stood quite near him.  He was both hungry and thirsty, and
he had, immediately upon entering, helped himself to coffee from a
big pot on a side-table.  He stood holding the untasted drink in his
hand while he listened to the unfolding of Amurrica's plot.  The
moment he had finished, before he had time to sit down, Bert flung
the hot contents of his cup full in the orator's face.

Amurrica was for the moment blinded by this unexpected shot.  The
coffee streamed down him, into the bosom of his shirt, and all over
his clothes; and the words he used were not pretty.

There was a general stampede; but before the noise began--before the
men took up the shout for a fight--even before Amurrica began to
swear--Bert's ear had caught a sound that was to him like the bugle
to a war-horse; the short, musical sound of Millie's applauding laugh.

He turned to her.

"Good-night!" he said.  "We'll soon settle the question of his
sitting up to-night or getting married to-morrow; and Mayne'll be
back the day after.  But listen to what I say; keep out of Tante
Wilma's way to-night."

She gave her usual contemptuous answer: "I'm not afraid."

"No," he said; "but I am."

It was in his heart to plead for something to hearten him for the
fray, if it were only a hand-shake; but he forebore.  She should not
be able to say again that he claimed a price for serving her.

He strode out radiantly to the battle.  He was perfectly sober, and
had a white heat of passion to inspire him.  Amurrica, though usually
a formidable adversary, had eaten heavily, and drunk too much.  When
they had taken away his revolver, he was an easy prey.  Bert's object
was to put him out of the running for the next few days, but not to
injure him seriously.  He went into the thing scientifically, and it
was a sorry-looking object which was finally carried off the field by
its backers; while the two great Lutwyche boys, who had been eager
spectators of the fray, ran back home as fast as they could, to tell
their mother what had chanced.

The victor was pleased, but gory.  It was imperative that he should
go to his own place and change.  Amurrica was settled for the
present, he had warned Millie, and felt that he might now give
himself an hour or two off duty without anxiety.  All the way home he
was wondering to himself how Amurrica had known that Mayne was going
away.

Anna, who had not been bidden to the revels at Lutwyche's, was in an
evil temper, and said she had provided no supper.  Hadn't he had his
bellyful down there, where all the swine were swilling?  Bert turned
upon her, with the flame in his eye, the gall on his tongue, which
everybody feared.  She would wish, a week hence, he told her, when
she found herself bundled out to get her own living, that she had
kept a civil tongue in her head.  Then he went and washed himself
elaborately clean, and put on a clean shirt--an English superstition
which he had inherited from his mother, with other vain observances
which filled Anna with contempt.  He had neither eaten nor drunk
since morning, and he knew that, if he was to mount guard at
Lutwyche's till late at night, he must fortify himself.  As he sat at
table, the door open, devouring cold meat and bread, he saw something
move behind the fence.  He watched steadfastly until the thing rose
more fully into view, revealed itself as the tow head and flushed
face of one of the small Lutwyches, beckoned him furtively, and
disappeared again.

Bert got up and went out.  He looked down over the fence, and said
"Hullo!"  His heart meanwhile misgave him.

The child, grinning up at him, said she had a message from sister
Millie, and she was to give it to him his very own self.  The message
was: "Would he meet Millie at the sign-post corner at nine o'clock
that evening?"  She was to take back word.

"What's she want to do there?" asked Bert suspiciously.

"She wouldn't say; but I expect she wants to run away.  Mother she's
promised her a hiding."

"Then you'll go to your mother with the tale."

"No fear; I'm on Millie's side."

Bert thought a while carefully.

"All right!" he said, after a minute.  "Tell her I'll be there."

"Certain sure?"

"That's me."  The tow head nodded and disappeared.




CHAPTER VII

IN THE GARRET

  "I met a lady in the meads,
    Full beautiful, a fairy's child;
  Her hair was long, her foot was light,
    And her eyes were wild."
                                    --JOHN KEATS.


Bert stood where he was, rooted in deep thought, watching the child
as she ran away.  He did not believe that what she said was true.
Millie might very probably plot to escape, but she would never send
him word to bear her company.  Besides, he knew that she did not
intend to run away until she heard the result of her father's message
to her English relatives.  He wondered that anybody should think such
a device could impose upon him.  It was a hoax, and its obvious
object was to get him out of the way.  What devilry was Tante Wilma
plotting?

He laughed a little; they thought him easily deceived.

A moment's reflection convinced him that the child's message was part
of a preconceived arrangement with Amurrica.  But he felt sure that,
after his handling of the subject, the prospective bridegroom would
be unable to take his part in anything that night.  He looked at the
clock, which pointed to seven, and made up his mind that he would
resume his sentry duty at Lutwyche's about eight.  Anticipating a
long wait, he thrust a sandwich into his pocket and a flask of
spirits, and sallied forth to stroll down the town, and hear what was
being said of the fight and the funeral.

The main street was thronged with people.  For a minute it made him a
little anxious.  If the town meant to take up the feud, and back
Otis, things might be a trifle strained, though there were some of
the men on whom he thought he could rely as backers.

But he soon saw that there was a deeper preoccupation on the faces of
the burghers.  The fight, which in calmer times would have filled
men's mouths for a week, was forgotten.  The flag floating over the
Post Office showed him that the weekly mail was in; and knowing the
political tension, he guessed that there was news.  He dashed into
the Vierkleur.  It was a babel of tongues.  Men were fighting for
possession of the newspapers; those who had letters or journals from
Pretoria were being besieged in corners.  For the moment, the
remembrance of Millie faded from Bert's mind, as he mingled with the
throng, and gathered first of all the main fact, that the British
Government had ordered the immediate despatch of troops, both from
England and India, to back up the demand for the Outland Franchise.
Debate was keen as to whether the British Government would really
fight.

The madness of conflict rose in Bert's blood as in that of all the
men there.  They shouted, argued, wrangled, drank, swore.  At
whatever cost, Bert felt he must get at the main facts of the
position, and he listened while one of the men, perched on the bar,
read aloud leading articles from English and Boer journals, and the
talk hummed and buzzed more busily than ever.

He was recalled from his absorption by a touch on his shoulder.
Cornelis Pieters, the field-cornet, stood by, regarding him with no
friendly glance.

"Lucky for you the Commandos are to be called out; nobody will have
time to set the law on you," he growled.  "Otis is goin' to die."

"We're all going to die--some day," said Bert placidly.

"He's goin' on ahead," said Pieters surlily.

"I'm not taking any," returned Bert, unmoved.  "I had the cooking of
him, and I know what I done to him.  He won't be gettin' married just
yet a while; but he's all right."

"If Tante Wilma takes my advice, she'll give that girl a taste of the
stick," rumbled Pieters.  "A taller dip 'ud make as good a wife as
her, to my way o' thinkin'; an' when a man that could stomach her
comes along, you must needs knock him out o' time.  It wasn't your
affair.  There'll be a reckoning, I can tell you."

"Hope so," retorted Bert.  "Couldn't live in this township, if you
didn't believe the right 'ud come up some day.  So long!"

"Where are you off to?"

"To see as Tante Wilma don't lay a finger on the gal."

"From what I heard, before I came away, I shouldn't be surprised if
you was too late," said Pieters, grinning in his face.

* * * * * * * *

It was quite dark when he arrived at the gate of Lutwyche's.

He was panting with the speed he had used, and the sweat ran down
him.  He was blaming himself bitterly because in the excitement of
the war news he had lost sight of his purpose; and it was more than
half-past eight.  To his untold joy and relief, the first thing he
saw was the light glimmering through Millie's square of ground glass
in the loft.  His heart leapt, and the strain of his muscles relaxed.
He halted outside the gate, wiped his brow, and listened with all his
might.  All was quiet.  But there was one unusual thing.  Lights were
burning in the _sitkamer_, a most rare phenomenon in a pastoral Boer
district, where everybody rises and goes to bed with the sun.  This
looked as though it were still planned that the sitting-up should
take place that night.  He carefully unfastened the hurdle gate and
went into the yard.  By degrees he drew nearer the house.  Half-way
across, a sound made itself audible--the thudding of a hammer against
wood.  It went on with monotonous regularity, but his fears sprang up
anew at the sound.  What were they doing?

He walked right up to the stoep, raised himself to a level with the
window-sill, and through a gap between the edge of the blind and the
window frame, could see right into the _sitkamer_.  What were they
doing?

Tante Wilma, like some unclean beast, stood balancing herself
unsteadily against the table, her face purple, her eyes wild, a
sjambok in her hand.  The children were all clustered round the foot
of the ladder leading to the loft, and the eldest boy was standing
upon it, aiming clumsy, childish blows with a big hammer at the
trapdoor above his head.

Ha!  Then he was just in time, and only just!  Lord!  When the bolt
gave way, they should find someone they did not look for, in the loft
above!

The blood surged to Bert's head--he set his teeth.  With stealthy
tread he crept to the barn, found a ladder--his late vigils about the
farm had taught him where most things were kept--and setting it
against the low house wall, he lightly ascended to the roof.

The window was slightly open--secured by means of an iron bar with
holes in it.  It was not wide enough to enable him to see in.  The
blows continued upon the trap below, showing that the besiegers had
not yet forced an entrance.  The noise drowned the sound of his
voice, and he ventured to call gently: "Millie!  Millie!"

There was no answer.  He called again, a little louder.

All was silent in the garret; he could not hear the least rustling.
The idea that she was not there, after all, but hiding away somewhere
in safety, made his heart dance.  Suppose she really had run away,
and was waiting for him at the cross-roads?  It was most unlikely,
but it was not impossible; one never could be sure of girls.
Meantime, he must ascertain before that bolt gave.  Putting in his
hand, he lifted the window as high as it would go--high enough to
enable him to put his head under it.  The loft extended a good way,
though only just in the centre, under the pitch of the roof, was it
high enough to stand upright in.  It was a pitiful sleeping-chamber
for a girl.

The little camp bed was smooth and empty.  He could not see Millie
anywhere.  A candle stood upon a deal chest, guttering in the
draught, showing the void space and the neatness of the dreary
lodging.

She was actually gone, then?  He drew a deep breath....

Something had caught his eye--a red, wet mess on the bare boards,
close to the trap-door.  All round this was a series of smears, and
another blotch, almost a pool ... and some big drops, dotted along
the floor into the darkness, under the low part of the roof, where
the coffins and the fruit were stored.

Bert became a tiger.  One wrench of his iron wrists brought the
skylight off its hinges, and without noise he swung himself down into
the garret.  Stooping, he assured himself that the iron bolt of the
trap-door would stand a good deal more of such battering as it was
now enduring before it gave way.  Then he seized the candle, and
crept along the trail of the blood-stains.

He soon found her; and at first he thought that she was dead.  She
was lying prone upon the ground, her head sunk sideways, all dabbled
in blood.  One arm lay so curiously twisted that he guessed it to be
broken.  Bending over her, he heard her breathe; and then, raising
her as tenderly as he could, found with mingled fury and relief that
all the bleeding came from her lacerated shoulders.  She had been
inhumanly thrashed.  Her clothes were literally torn off her back.

With indomitable pride she had crept up here to die alone.

It did not take Bert an instant to consider what he should do.  He
snatched a sheet from the bed, wrapped it round and round the raw,
bleeding back, then possessed himself of the dark woollen coverlet,
and rolled the slight, unresisting form therein.  Lifting her as
easily as one might a child, he carried her to the skylight, managed,
with the help of a broken chair, to get her and himself through it,
and in a moment was descending the ladder, clasping all the happiness
the world held for him in his arms, his whole heart one white flame
of pity and indignation.




CHAPTER VIII

THE RESCUE

  "She took me to her elfin grot,
    And there she gazed and sighéd deep,
  And there I shut her sad, wild eyes--
    So kissed to sleep.

  "... And I awoke, and found me here,
    On the cold hillside."
                                --JOHN KEATS.


Rapid transit through the night air, and the pain of her open wounds,
brought back consciousness to Millie.

She was light and small, but for all that, she was some weight to
carry far; and when she began to writhe and twist in his hold, Bert
was obliged to call a halt.  He sat down, after a few ineffectual
attempts to soothe her, on a hummock of ground by the roadside,
cradling her as easily as he could upon his knees.

"What's happened?  What's happened?" she began to stammer, evidently
not quite knowing what she said.  "It's dark! it's dark!  Light the
candle, one of you! ... O-o-oh!"

It was a long-drawn wail of agony.

Bert was very white.  His heart was hammering, but the heat and wild
rage of the past half-hour had passed away, and now he was all
gathered into himself like a coiled spring.  Everything, he believed,
hung upon his ability to make the most of this chance, this hour that
he had snatched for himself.  The awkward self-consciousness which
held him, as a rule, tongue-tied before her, was clean gone; only the
concentrated force of his will remained.

Drawing his flask from his pocket, he poured out some raw spirit
shakily, his left arm supporting the girl's head in the crook of the
elbow.  He administered a mouthful.  She gasped, and refused more;
but she had swallowed it.  He waited a moment, with outward
composure, and then said quietly:

"Millie, d'you know me?"

She started, and began to struggle in his hold.

"It's Bert," he said steadily; and to his unfeigned and stupefying
astonishment, her struggles ceased.

"I thought--'twas Otis," she whispered, so low that he could hardly
hear.

"Well, it's not," he murmured, trembling; "it's me.  Listen!  You've
been cruel knocked about--d'you hear?"

"Yes; the--old--woman--"

"I know, my girl, I know!  I got up through the roof, an' fetched you
away.  You're safe now; there's only me.  D'you understand?"

There came an almost incredible whisper: "They said you'd gone away
... to the cross-roads..."

One short laugh of triumph escaped him.

"No fear," he murmured consolingly.  "I was on hand.  I'm going to
take you to my place, and get you fixed up, and fetch the doctor to
you.  But look here, Millie, it'll make folks talk.  Jus' say you'll
marry me, an' that'll set things right.  That'll give a reason why I
should be looking after you."

He paused, his ear almost at her lips, straining for her reply.

"I'm goin' to die," she whispered at last.  He barely heard.

"Well, till you die, can't I look after you, Millie?"

"If you like," murmured Millie indifferently, as she lapsed again
into stupor.

William the Conqueror, crowned king of England, after desperate and
apparently foolhardy invasion, felt perhaps much the same emotions as
coursed through Bert Mestaer, sitting there in the dark, by the
wayside, the half-dead form of a half-grown girl upon his knees.

He raised his eyes to the star-gleam above them, and emotions
hitherto unknown laid hands upon him, thrilling his nerve-centres
with a triumph that was almost agony.  A long minute elapsed before
he could collect himself enough to rise and continue his journey.  No
amount of guardians, no letters from England, he told himself, could
take her from him now.

Yesterday he had practically no hopes, only a dogged determination
not to give in.  To-night he was master of the world.

* * * * * * * *

Anna was not a good-tempered woman, but neither was she an inhuman
one.  She was very angry at being aroused by Bert out of her first
sleep; but she detected something unusual in his manner.

"I got something to show you downstairs in the parlour," he said,
"an' when you've seen it, I don't much fancy you'll want to go to bed
again."

So she lumbered down the stairs, and into the little parlour which
had been Mrs. Mestaer's pride; and on the ample sofa, among the
blood-stained linen, lay what she took to be the corpse of Millie
Lutwyche.

"You got to help me make her swallow some brandy," he said, "and then
you got to do what you can for her while I gallop for Dr. Fraser; but
don't you meddle with that arm, because it's dislocated."

"Vrouw Lutwyche's carving?" asked Anna, with venom.

"That's it," returned Bert, pouring the brandy.

"Drunken sow!  I hope you see now, Hubert, where it is the drink
leads to."

"I see!  I'm going to swear off drink for ever now."

"She's past brandy," said Anna, hanging over the prostrate girl.

"Nonsense!" said Bert shortly; and he managed to make her swallow a
table-spoonful.  "Anna," he said, "you shall have a silk gown on my
wedding-day."

"If you're going to marry a willow-shaving, may the day never dawn,"
said Anna tartly.

But she handled the misused girl tenderly enough, for hers was a
maternal heart, though soured by spinsterhood; and Bert, when he saw
her set about it, turned away with haste to the stable.

Before setting out on his long ride, he came back to warn Anna not to
admit anybody on any pretext while he was away; and arranged that
when he returned with the doctor he would give a certain number of
signal taps upon the window.

Then, springing to the saddle, he dashed away through the night, his
wild heart drumming to the music of the flying hoofs, and his
imaginings soaring to the purple velvet dome of heaven.




CHAPTER IX

THE SCANDALISING OF SLABBERT'S POORT

                        "Priests
  Should study passion; how else cure mankind,
  Who come for help in passionate extremes?"
                  --ROBERT BROWNING (Caponsacchi).


When Carol Mayne got back to the Mission on the afternoon of the
second day after this, he was told that Oom Pieters and the Boer
Predikant were waiting to see him.

The news they brought fairly staggered him.

Bert Mestaer had, during the night after the funeral, forced an
entrance into Lutwyche's and abducted Millie.  That he had done this
by force was evident from the blood-stained floor of her garret and
the evidences of a struggle, the bedding being torn and scattered
about.  He had taken her to his own house, and kept her there, in
defiance of all Christian laws, to the crying scandal of the whole
community.  Oom Pieters had been insulted when he went to
remonstrate; and the Predikant, who, at his urgent entreaty, had gone
to warn the headstrong girl of the penalties of living in sin, had
been literally, not metaphorically, kicked off the premises by the
lawless ravisher.  Putting things together, they would have been
inclined to fear that the girl had actually been made away with, but
for the assurance of Anna to the contrary.  They thought that heavy
drinking must be the cause of Bert's outrageous behaviour, since he
had picked a quarrel with Otis earlier in the evening, and so
mishandled him that he had been unable to appear in public since.

Horrible as the news was, Mayne, knowing the violence of Bert's
passion, his fear that Millie was to be taken away, and his
intemperate habits, felt it possible that a great part of what he
heard might be true.  His disappointment was keen.  He had looked for
better things from Mestaer, whom he liked better than anyone else in
Slabbert's Poort; and the behaviour now attributed to him was that of
a wild beast.  He hurried off without rest or refreshment to the High
Farm; and all the way he was trying to piece the story together--to
think how the lover who had always been so tongue-tied and
shamefaced, could possibly have proceeded to such lengths; and the
more he reflected, the more he felt sure that he had heard a
perverted version of what had really happened.

But when he neared the white house, with its pleasant green shutters,
his fears became acute; for the owner was leaning over the little
garden gate, and one glance at his face showed that he was inflamed
with triumph.  He had evidently been gathering flowers; his hands
were full of them; the fact impressed the new-comer much as though he
had seen a lion sitting down to tea in a lady's drawing-room.

Bert was dressed with scrupulous care; his linen was fresh.  He
looked ten years older; had graduated from boy to man in two days.
There was a steady blaze in his eyes; his mouth wore a defiant curve.
The exaltation and triumph of his aspect affected Mayne strongly.
But no look of guilt or remorse crossed his handsome face at sight of
the approaching guardian.

"Hallo!" he frankly cried; "come in!  Things have hummed since you
went away."

Mayne stiffened in fierce wrath.

"Mestaer," he said, keeping himself calm with difficulty, "tell me
that this I have heard of you is a slander--tell me that Millie
Lutwyche is not here!"

Bert's eyes flamed.

"Millie Lutwyche is here," he cried, "and what's more, she'll stay
here.  Didn't you leave it to me to see she wasn't murdered?  Well, I
managed it, but only just."

Mayne came in through the gate and walked into the house.

"I've heard one side of the story," he said.  "It's only fair that I
should hear yours."

Bert followed him in.  His style was abrupt but convincing.  He told
how Amurrica and Tante Wilma had tried to steal a march on Mayne, and
how the Predikant had been willing to aid and abet.  He told how he
had foiled this plan, how he had been sent a message to decoy him out
of the way, how he had gone down to the farm, but too late to prevent
violence.  He told how he had brought Millie home, and at once called
in Dr. Fraser, who could corroborate all he said.  He spoke without
eagerness, and with an underlying confidence in his voice which
showed how sure he felt of his position.

"If ever a man earned a woman fair, I done it," he remarked simply.
"She's better to-day; but Dr. Fraser was a bit afraid of collapse at
first.  Anna's nursed her.  I've not been near, except just to pass
the time of day.  I done the square thing, as I told you all along I
meant to; an' we'll come to church an' get married, soon as she's up
and dressed."

Mayne slowly shook his head.

"Mestaer," he said, "I have done you an injustice, I freely own it.
I believe all you tell me.  You have done better than I thought you
would; now it remains for you to do better than you yourself believe
that you can.  You must let Millie go."

Bert flung himself into a chair, and pulling out a tobacco-pouch,
began to fill his pipe.  He gave an insolent laugh.

"We're engaged; you can't alter that."

"Under the terms of her father's will, Millie cannot marry under the
age of twenty-one without my consent She is going to England."

Bert looked earnestly at him.

"Look here!  I've played the game so far," he said.  "Don't you push
me; you'd better not.  Hands off Millie; she's going to marry me."

"Perhaps she may, when she is grown up, if you have the courage and
constancy to wait for her; but not now."

"Now, by ----!"  His oath made Carol wince.

He sat for a minute in complete silence and close thought; then he
rose.

"I should like to see Millie, if she is awake," he said, very quietly.

Bert looked at him piercingly.  Had there been one shade of arrogance
in his tone, or had he seemed to suggest that he doubted Bert's
assent, there might have been open war.  But he gave no handle; and
the master of the house, after a very brief hesitation, rose and
tapped at the parlour door.

Anna peeped out, and admitted them, with an anxious glance from one
face to the other.  Mayne walked in, and Bert followed him, with his
bunch of flowers in his hand.

The waxen-white Millie lay with her flaxen hair loose upon the
pillows.  Her eyes were wide open, and flashed restlessly.  Her whole
mien otherwise was so still that one would have hardly thought her
living.  A look of expectancy kindled for a moment upon her face when
she saw Mayne, but it soon died down.

He went over and sat down by her, with the naturalness of manner
which frequent visits to sick-chambers give to the priest.  Bert felt
a pang of envy; he himself was so completely a fish out of water.

"I am grieved indeed to hear of the way you have been treated," said
Mayne gently.  "Poor girl!  I wish you had gone away to Leitersdorp
as I suggested."

"So do I," said Millie, under her breath.

"You thought yourself so secure," he went on regretfully, looking at
her bandaged arm.

"Well, I'm paying for it," said the girl distinctly, "and got to go
on doing that all the rest of my life, so I hear."

"Oh, I hope not!  You will be all right in a few weeks," he assured
her hopefully.

"Ah!" said she, "but he's got to be paid, you see, for what he did."
She raised her uninjured arm and pointed to Bert, who turned scarlet
as he stood awkwardly dandling his flowers.  "Men don't help you for
nothing; I've found out that much," she said, with biting intention.

"I am sure you do Mestaer injustice," said Mayne quietly.  "No
Englishman could possibly ask anything in return for the privilege of
helping a woman."

"He says," said Millie, "that I promised to marry him the night he
brought me here.  I don't remember; but if I did, I got to do it, I
s'pose."

"Certainly not!" was the emphatic reply.  "Get rid of that idea.  No
man worthy of the name could hold you to a promise made under such
circumstances.  Besides, you are not free to marry for the next five
years.  Don't you want to go to England?"

The living blood flooded the white face with lovely colour; the eyes
flashed fire.

"May I?  Could I?" she gasped, half raising herself among her
pillows, her face transformed with an energy, a desire for life, most
strikingly at variance with her lethargy of a few minutes before.
"Have they written?  Do they want me?"

He drew a letter from his coat-pocket.  "They have written, and they
do want you," he said.

She sat quite up, unsupported.  "Read it!  Read it!"

Bert stood still as a stone, while Mayne unfolded a sheet of paper,
written in a small, niggling, but cultivated hand, and read:


"FRANSDALE VICARAGE, CLEVESHIRE.

"Dear Sir,--I am in receipt of your letter, and note that my
brother-in-law, Arnold Lutwyche, is dying, and leaving my niece,
Melicent, only daughter of my late sister, wholly unprovided for.  I
also note that you consider her Boer step-mother is not a fit person
to have the charge of her, and is likely to treat her ill.

"Under these circumstances, my duty seems clear, and my wife and I
have no hesitation in directing you to send my niece to England by
the earliest available boat, and we will give her a home for the
present.

"At the same time, I must acquaint you with the fact that our means
are small, and we have seven children of our own, so that Melicent
will be under the necessity of making herself useful.

"Please send her by the cheapest line of boats, and notify me of her
arrival.  I fear that I shall not be able to come to London to meet
her, but if she is fifteen or sixteen years old, she should be able
to make her way to us as far as the railway will bring her--that is
to say, to Birdmore Junction, where she shall be met.

"I note that my brother's estate will be sufficient to meet her
travelling expenses, so conclude that no advance from me is necessary.

"With thanks to you for the trouble you take in the matter, and
remembrances to Mr. Lutwyche, should this letter find him still
alive.--I am, very faithfully yours,

"EDMUND CHETWYND-COOPER."


This letter had chilled Mayne by its formal coldness.  No love was
sent to the orphan, no message of welcome.  But the frigidity of the
style made apparently no difference to Millie.  The great fact was
there.  Her way to England lay open, her destination fixed.  Of all
safe shelters, a remote English vicarage should have satisfied her
guardian.  But somehow, to Carol, the idea of Miss Lutwyche in such a
situation, was not convincing.  He could not see her in the part, as
actors say.

No such doubts troubled her.  For the very first time since Mayne had
known her, her face beamed and sparkled with joy.

"I can be ready to travel soon," she cried.  "In a fortnight--in ten
days--ask the doctor!"

Bert made three strides across the room, hurling with violence the
flowers he carried into the English grate.

"So you'll break your word," he began, and choked

Melicent turned her head towards him languidly.

"Bert Mestaer," said she, "have I ever once, since you knew me, said
one word to make you think I liked you?"

He fought with himself for composure to enable him to bring out the
monosyllable, "No."

"Then what d'you wanter marry me for?" she asked calmly.

"You know," he cried, terribly, wildly, in his frantic emotion.  "You
know I love you--you know I don't care for anything else, but just to
have you!  Where'd you be now, if it wasn't for me?  Tell me that!  I
wish to God I'd never seen you!  I'll--I'll kill you with my own
hands before I'll let you go now!  I'll do worse--I'll..."

He stopped himself suddenly, meeting the steady contempt of Mayne's
eyes.

There was a moment of awful silence, broken only by two dry, tearing
sobs from the furious lover; then Millie, who had turned chalk-white
once more, fell back among her pillows with an impatient motion of
the hand.

"Oh, get away; you make me sick," she said.

Before Bert could speak or move, Mayne went up to him, took him by
the arm, and led him out of the room.  Then, handing him his hat, he
drew him as passively out of the house.

Neither spoke till they had walked half a mile.  Mayne was half in
fear that Bert, in his rage, might set upon him bodily, and
congratulated himself, not for the first time in his missionary
career, upon the possession of thews and sinews.  But no ebullition
came.  Bert's face had gone grey, and he looked worn and shrunken in
the strong sunlight.

At last, smitten by the despair in his altered manner, the elder man
ventured to speak.

"Mestaer, you must come and put up at my place till Miss Lutwyche is
well enough to travel.  You did the best you could for her--you did
well; but the strain is too great, and it must cease.  I shall wire
for one of the Sisters from Leitersdorp to come and help Anna to
nurse her.  As to you, you have to fight and win a man's hardest
battle; and I'll give you a bit of advice--"

"Go to h-- with your advice!"

"I'm not far away now, to judge by the sulphur in the atmosphere,"
retorted Mayne drily, and said no more.

They walked on until they came to the little Mission, and turned in
to the sparsely-furnished living-room, with its crucifix and Albrecht
Dürer _fac-similes_, and the Da Vinci Virgin on the rude mantel.

Bert walked across the room, planted both elbows on the shelf, and
stared with blank eyes at the ineffable smile of the pictured face.
Suddenly he wheeled round.

"Well, what's your blasted advice?" he said rudely.  "A black-coated
prig that doesn't know what it means to be..."

"Tempted," suggested Mayne drily.  But he pushed a chair for his
discourteous guest, and got down the tobacco-jar.  "No man can fight
the flesh and win, if he's living in idleness," he said reflectively,
standing before the hearth and filling his pipe.  "But there's
another consideration.  Do you realise that we are on the brink of
war?"

"Kruger, perhaps."

"Steyn, too.  You heard the news the other day?  All the men ordered
out on commando.  What does that mean?  The Orange Free State is
going in against England."

"Well, they can fight their own blank battles without my help."

"That's rubbish, Mestaer.  You'll have to fight on one side or the
other.  Now is the time to show yourself an Englishman.  England
wants men.  They think at home that this war is to be a walk over.
You and I know better.  Go and enlist.  There's a career for you."

"I'll be d--d if I do."

"That's a condition that seems to me far more likely to supervene if
you don't," was the temperate reply.

Bert laid down his miserable head upon his arms.

"You don't see, and I can't explain," he said haltingly, "that it's
not a thing--not a question of what you call the flesh.  If there's
such a thing as spirit anywhere in me, I've put it all in my love for
her.  If you take her away, I shall go to the devil."

"If I take her away!  My dear chap, you cannot seriously mean to
pretend that you think Millie wants to marry you?"

Sulky silence.

"I know you better than to believe you would be cad enough to marry
her against her will.  Were you to do so, I fail to see in what
respect you would be any better than Otis."

No reply.

Mayne stood up, searching his book-shelves for the "Divina Commedia."

"Bert, did you ever hear of Dante?"

"No.  Nobody as lives hereabouts, is he?"

Mayne did not smile.

"I'll tell you something of him--how all his life he lived for the
memory of a dead woman--a woman of whom he knew even less than you
know of Millie, and lived in hope, and cleanly, for her sake.  Now,
Millie is not dead.  You are but a boy, and she a girl.  Five or six
or seven years hence, if you make a career for yourself what is to
prevent you from trying again?  By that time she would at least
realise the enduring nature of your love; whereas now, neither you
nor I nor she could say that it will last.  It is just a boy's hot
flame."

Bert stamped.

"You don't believe me capable of it," he stormed.  "You just think
that if you can get her out of my way now, that'll be the end of it
all.  You don't think I've the manhood or the pluck to stick to the
thing through years of absence--"

He broke off, staring at the kindled face of the priest, who had
risen, and stood facing him.

"That's just where you make your mistake, Bert," said his friend
earnestly.  "I do believe you capable of the best.  Listen!  When I
came first to Slabbert's Poort, I found you a loafer.  You were idle
and good-for-nothing and intemperate.  Now you have shown me what you
are capable of.  Your love for Millie has made you a different man.
You have fought for her, saved her, respected her! ... I rather wish
you had heard tell of one Caponsacchi; but never mind.  It's better
to do knightly deeds than to read about 'em.  Anyhow, you have set
your foot on the road to become a true gentleman; why turn back now?
Hubert Mestaer"--his voice took on the deep note it sometimes had in
the pulpit--"by the memory of your mother, I ask you, why turn back
now?"




CHAPTER X

FRANSDALE

  "Ankle-deep in English grass I leaped,
  And clapped my hands, and called all very fair."
                --ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.


It was mid-October.  St.  Luke's summer brooded over the solitary
acres of heather, which crowned the hills that flung encradling arms
about Fransdale.

The golden bracken was turning brown, but the heather still carried
its glory of purple.  The woodlands were forsaking their devotion to
pure green, and rioted in every hue of red and yellow, and the light
air sang and hummed about the uplands of the glorious land.  All the
summer had been fine; the becks had sunk to musical murmurings; one
might walk from Tod's Trush to the Three Howes, across country,
without getting bogged.

In a stable-yard surrounded by grey stone out-buildings stood the
Reverend Edmund Chetwynd-Cooper, harnessing his horse to the
dog-cart.  Near him a big, loose-limbed, clumsy girl, who had
evidently outgrown her strength, stood listlessly watching him
through half-shut eyes.

"How old is Cousin Melicent?" she asked, in a voice which always
sounded fretful.

"I have told you I believe her to be about sixteen."

"Nearly as old as I am.  I wonder whether we shall like her?"

"I hope you understood what I said at dinner-time.  There is to be no
intimacy until we have decided that Melicent is a fit companion for
you.  No intimacy, mind."

His voice was even and quiet, low-pitched and cultivated.  He was a
handsome, dark man, with regular features, and a cold, blue eye;
clean shaven but for a straight line of black whisker down each
cheek, which made him look vaguely out of date.

His daughter looked at him with a sidelong glance.

"All right, father," she said, in a kind of formula, adding, in an
injured tone: "I should have thought you might take one of us to meet
her."

"I do not know what luggage there may be."

Mr. Cooper would not have said, "I don't know," for the world; and
the fact was typical of his extreme correctness.

"Where is your mother?" he asked, when the last strap was adjusted.
"I promised her a lift as far as the Mill.  Go, Madeline, and tell
her I am ready."

The girl slouched away, with a bored expression; and the parson,
having fetched the dust-rug and whip, walked the mare out of the yard
and up to the door of the square, uncompromising grey stone Vicarage.

Nothing could have been finer than the prospect.  The church and
Vicarage stood near the head of the Dale, close to the bolder,
wilder, more heathery part, and looked down on the valleyland, the
trout stream and rich meadows below.  The minutes ticked on, while
the vicar waited.  Presently Madeline emerged.

"Mother says she won't be long."

"Will you tell her please, that I positively must start in five
minutes."

The girl disappeared.  The five minutes elapsed; three more passed.
The vicar got into the trap.  Madeline once more appeared.

"Mother thinks, before she starts, she had better give Bee a dose of
her tonic."

"Then tell her I am off without her.  The train will not wait, even
for your mother."

He was just going out of the gate, when a window-sash was raised, and
a voice cried:

"Aidmund!  Aidmund!"

He checked the horse.

"Well?  Come if you are ready," he said, quite temperately, his voice
showing no annoyance.

"Oh, no, I can't do that; but I thought it would be so capital if you
could get me one or two things in Birdmore?  I shan't be very long
writing them down."

"You should have thought of that before."

"My darling boy, think how busy I have been all this morning,
preparing--"

The rest was lost, for the vicar had driven away.  His cold eyes were
quite gentle, but he did draw in his breath sharply once; at the
thought, perhaps, of this helpmeet of his, in this remote village,
where nothing ever interrupted her simple routine of
duties--incapable of being ready for a drive at three o'clock in the
afternoon.

The old mare had to step out.  Mrs. Cooper had succeeded in making
her husband ten minutes late; and nine miles of very bad road lay
between him and the Junction.  The train which was to bring his niece
was just coming to a standstill in the little wayside station, as the
old mare, conscious of having been hustled, trotted into the
station-yard.

The vicar hastened through the booking-office, out upon the asphalte
platform, whereon a small, slender girl in black stood lonely beside
some solid-looking packing-cases and one modest trunk.  She wore her
left arm in a sling.  He came slowly forward, with a resolute smile
of greeting on his face.

"Are you Melicent?"

She raised her eyes searchingly to his face.  "Yes, I am."

"You are not at all like your mother," he said, scanning the pale
face.

"No; father did not think me like her."

"You have managed your journey well?"

"Oh, yes, thank you, it was all quite easy."

"How did you manage last night in London?"

"I went home with some people who were kind to me on the voyage; Mr.
and Mrs. Helston."

"I expected a taller niece," he said kindly.

"I am small for my age, I know."

His anxious gaze was fixed upon the packing-cases.  There were three
of them, and their bulk suggested weight.

"Do those cases belong to you?" he asked.

"Yes; my father's books and valuables.  He left them all to me, and
my guardian insisted that Mrs. Lutwyche should give them up."

"Well, I don't quite know how they are going to be conveyed up the
Dale," he said, in perplexity.

"Oh, that's all right," said Millie, with _sang-froid_.  "Mr. Dow is
going to take them in his waggon."

"Mr. Dow!" ejaculated the vicar, in a tone compounded of equal parts
of astonishment and displeasure.

A big Cleveshire Dalesman, of the more prosperous type--handsome,
well-dressed, a striking figure in his riding breeches and gaiters,
now approached, lifting his cap from his fair hair, his eyes
twinkling with a kind of enjoyment which he peculiarly relished.

"Your niece and me has been getting acquainted," he said, in his
unrenderable soft-vowelled Dale speech.  "Makin' friends, as you may
say."  It sounded more like: "Mäakin' freänds, as you mäay säa."  But
the phonetic rendering of dialect is a weariness, and will not here
be attempted.  "Fair enjoyin' werselves we've been, ever since
leavin' York Station.  I'm goin' to take her goods up t' Dale for
her, since I expect you've only t' old mare an't' cart with you, Mr.
Cooper."

Mr. Cooper could barely acknowledge the kindness, for angry
mortification.  He was a Southerner, planted down among people whom
he disliked, because he did not in the least understand them.  His
idea of the peasant's correct attitude was a servile obedience to the
parson, and that kind of gratitude which is rightly said to consist
of a lively sense of favours to come.  The sturdy independence, and
I'm-as-good-as-you indifference of the North Country, was a positive
offence to him, his only armour against it being a crust of ever
increasing cold dignity and aloofness, which the Dalesmen saw, and
chuckled over.  His wife, who had come among them, ready with the
ministrations which she understood--with condescending smiles,
ill-made soup, old clothes and patronage--found no market for these
commodities.  A premature exhibition of them had produced such a
condition of feeling, that now, as she came down the road, full of
amiable intentions, the village became a desert, everyone slipping
within doors and disappearing, sooner than encounter her.

Moreover, the Dale was full of nonconformity; and the attitude of the
vicar towards dissent was that of silent, rigid dislike--of his wife,
that kind of shocked horror with which some people talk of "the
heathen."

So the Chetwynd-Coopers dwelt as aliens in their Northern parish,
attributing their failure solely to causes exterior to themselves,
and resolutely setting the advantages of fine moorland air, and the
low price of provisions, against the vague depression which their
isolation naturally caused.

But, among all the thorns in the vicar's dignified flesh, Farmer Dow,
of Crow Gate Farm, the leading Dissenter in the Dale, was the
sharpest.  Poor Millie could not have made a more unfortunate entry
upon the scenes, than under his auspices.  The ice in the vicar's
voice, as he declined his kindness, was obvious to the bystanders.
But Dow was not to be denied.  He had promised Millie that her goods
should be taken up, and taken up they should be, that very night.
She had taught him more about South Africa in half-an-hour than the
newspapers had taught him in half a year.  She was coming to tea with
his mother, at Crow Gate, and going to keep him posted in the war
news.  He owed it to her to see after her baggage, after such
entertainment.  He helped her into the trap with such _empressement_
that the onlookers were deeply moved; and the vicar's heart was hot
within him as he drove away.  His niece was, as he had feared,
hopelessly Colonial.

But it was not the vicar's habit to speak in anger.  Experience had
given him a power of self-control which would have kindled the
admiration of his parishioners, had they guessed what manner of man
lay hidden under the dry, precise manner.

He waited until he had himself well in hand, and then commenced
conversation--not upon the burning topic.

"I am sorry to see that you have hurt your arm."

Millie, whose eyes were fixed in deep, increasing interest on the
country they were passing through, looked up.

"It was the old woman," she said.  "I thought Mr. Mayne might have
told you.  She sjambokked me pretty nearly to death, and threw me
down and dislocated my arm."

The clear, soft voice, evenly cadenced, giving out this astonishing
information, raised fresh tumult in the vicar's bosom.

"Do you mean your step-mother?" he asked, in horror.

"Yes.  Mr. Mayne had to go to Leitersdorp to get the will proved.  He
was away three days, and she made up her mind to take it out on me."

"To take what out?"

"She was mad because father made him my guardian.  She wanted to sell
me to a Yankee; he'd given her ten pounds on account.  So Mr. Mayne
told her it was a case of hands off, because it was his show.  So she
got the children to catch and hold me, and they managed to tie me up;
and she just went on until she was tired," said Millie unemotionally.

The vicar had no words.  Uppermost in his mind was deep, abiding
thankfulness that he had brought none of his daughters with him to
meet this astounding young person.  What would his wife say to this?
Such people, they knew, existed in the pages of those sensational
novels which cannot be too severely condemned by the well-regulated;
but that his own sister's child should have been strung up and
thrashed! ... The current of hot sympathy in him must have found vent
in indignant words; but it was invaded by another thought.  The
carefully guarded propriety of his own children must suffer no
contact with naked facts of life like this; and such was the feeling
that spoke first.

"I must ask you not to mention this.  I should say, I must order you
not to tell your cousins, or Miss Lathom, their governess, how you
came by your injuries.  To your aunt, in private, it may be alluded
to, but I cannot have so scandalous a thing generally known."

Millie looked up swiftly.

"I can keep a thing dark, if I am given the tip," she said, with
amusement that sounded a little contemptuous.

He was conscious of great annoyance.

"I give no tips.  I merely say that this must not be mentioned," he
said frigidly.  "We will refer to it later.  And now to touch upon
another matter.  In England the--ah--fusion of classes to which you
have probably been accustomed is not desirable.  The vicar's niece
cannot, with propriety, be on terms of equality with a farmer like
Dow."

"Oh," said Millie, "why not?"

"We are socially Mr. Dow's superiors, and we must not let him forget
his place, as these Dalesmen are most apt to do."

"I should have thought," said Millie reflectively, "that they would
never be likely to forget their place, so long as we were sure of
ours."

The vicar again felt uncomfortable.  His wife and he were
well-born--people of just enough consequence to be eager that nobody
should forget it; undeniably belonging to the county set, but much
ignored by that set, as being poor and desperately dull.

"You see, at home we shouldn't have been socially superior to Mr.
Dow," said Millie.

"You have much to learn here," returned her uncle; and as he spoke,
he was inly deciding that the girl was impossible.




CHAPTER XI

MELICENT'S COUSINS

"Girls' heads are not like jam-pots, which, if you do not fill them
will remain empty; a filling there will be, of some kind."--JULIANA
HORATIA EWING.


They had been crawling for some time slowly up a steep lane with
hedges; now suddenly they emerged at the top, and a long sigh of
wonder escaped Millie as she saw the moorland spread before her in
all its untamed splendour.  Great headlands, facing northwards,
jutted forth into the heather, as into a purple sea; and on the brink
of one of these the travellers found themselves, overlooking a vast
stretch of wild country.  The descent down which they must go was
almost a precipice.  Something in the keen racing air, the height,
the freedom, the glory of it all, took Melicent by the throat England
was like this--like this!  Sunlight, colour, the adorable odour of
peat and bracken, drawn out by the sun, the blue mysteries of
distance ... it came about her like compelling arms.  Solitude,
silence, spacious calm--here were elements that appealed to the depth
of her being.  Reserved as she was, she had nearly cried aloud to her
unknown uncle for sympathy in her sudden rush of feeling for the land
of her forefathers.  He had checked the mare to a walk, and was
coaxing her downhill with caution and skill.

"Our roads are not much to boast of hereabouts," he said at last, as
the cart slewed itself over a lump in the road, designed to prevent
heavy rainfall from washing out the roadway on the violent slope.
"But I daresay you are not much better off in Africa."

"Not much to boast of!  They are glorious!" breathed Millie,
insensible of jolting in her admiration.  "We have nothing like this
in Africa!"

"A few miles further on, I can show you a road, compared with which,
this might be a billiard-table," he said cheerfully.

Millie became aware that he referred to surface and gradients, and
not to landscape.

"Oh, I see," she replied lamely.  "I was thinking of--of the heather."

"You will see plenty of that," was the composed answer.  "It begins
to grow all over the road, at no great distance from here."

Conversation did not seem easy.  Millie was at no time talkative, and
they fell silent, and so remained while they traversed several miles
of open moor, crossed a desolate ridge, and presently found
themselves dipping again into a lane with hedges, in all their autumn
glory of ripe blackberries, fluffy travellers' joy, coral honeysuckle
berries and wayfaring tree.

"Now we are in Fransdale," said Mr. Cooper.

They were labouring along, in narrow, sandy, toilsome windings, when
the hoot of a motor, up somewhere over their heads, made Mr. Cooper
start.  He was leading the mare, and proceeded to drag her as far as
he possibly could to the side of the lane--half-way up the hedge, in
fact.  The next moment the car came in sight, tearing downhill at a
speed which was evidently calculated upon the certainty of clear
roads.  It began to bray loudly, as though, in response to the
warning, the vicar could cause his dog-cart to vanish into thin air.
Millie surveyed it with interest, and as it whizzed by, within an
inch of their off-wheel, she caught sight of a young, handsome, bored
face, and that of an older man beside it.  They raised their hats as
they swept by, having most narrowly missed smashing the cart to
fragments: but the vicar seemed quite pleased, and not at all annoyed.

"Sir Joseph Burmester and his son--our big land-owners hereabouts,"
he explained.

"Oh!" said his niece; adding, after reflection: "Are they our social
equals?"

For some reason, the question annoyed the vicar; he relapsed into
silence.

Mrs. Cooper prided herself upon keeping all her Southern customs up
here in the North.  When Melicent came downstairs to tea, she saw
none of that wonderful pastry without which no Cleveshire tea-table
is complete.  Her five girl-cousins and their governess were
assembled to be introduced to their new relative.  They stared at her
with a passive and stony indifference.  Madeline was seventeen,
Gwendolen sixteen, Theodora fifteen, Barbara fourteen, and Beatrice
twelve.  Even Beatrice was quite as tall as Melicent; and the elder
girls were vast, the two eldest nearing five-foot-ten, after the
fashion of the modern girl, and not in the least as yet knowing how
to manage their swelling proportions.  In their outgrown, scanty
frocks, and big, thick legs, they looked rather like men in a farce,
dressed up to represent little girls.  Two or three of them were
handsome, but they all struck Millie as singularly expressionless.
Their faces were like masks.

Mrs. Chetwynd-Cooper's hair was pale flaxen, and being brushed away
very tightly from the face, gave the impression of her having no hair
at all.  The odd look of being out of date, achieved in her husband's
case by side-whiskers, was bestowed upon her by long earrings.  The
couple looked like the Papa and Mamma of a virtuous family, in a very
early Victorian story-book.

Mrs. Cooper sat down to table with a determined cheerfulness which
Melicent soon learned was her characteristic.  It somehow succeeded
in producing deep depression in others.  At least, nobody spoke; and
the girl found herself with her attention fixed, with a fatal
fascination, upon her aunt's smile and her aunt's earrings, and
longing for something to divert her eye.

Her uncle's depression was a very real and well-defined thing that
evening.  There was something about his new niece which he found
himself disliking with quite unchristian vehemence.  He had confided
to his wife that extreme care would be necessary, and that the
new-comer must by no means be let loose among their own children.
Mrs. Cooper could not share his depression.  She had the boundless
self-confidence of an entirely stupid woman.  She had made her own
girls models of all that girls should be.  No slang was ever heard in
the Vicarage; no loud voices; no unruly expression of opinion.  Why
should she not be equally successful with this raw material,
doubtless sent by Providence to her good guidance?

Melicent sat watching her five munching cousins, and thought they
were something like cows.  Their eyes were vacant, their appetites
steady.  She was just wondering whether all talking at meals was
forbidden, when Gwendolen, who sat next her, tossed back her long
hair, and asked:

"How did you hurt your arm?"

Melicent's voice was soft, but singularly clear.  It had a carrying
quality.

"Uncle Edmund says I am not to tell you," she replied.

Mr. Cooper was all the more angry, because he felt sure that his
niece could and would have skated ably over this thin ice had he not
repudiated all wish to "keep things dark."  She had done exactly what
he told her to do, and he wanted to box her ears.

"Give us news of your Cochin China hen, Gwendolen," he broke in.
"Has she been laying away again?"

"Yes, in the hedge," said his daughter, giving her reply in lifeless
tone and fewest words; and silence fell again.

"Oh, by the way, I have a pleasant surprise for Melicent," said Mrs.
Cooper suddenly, her countenance wreathed in smiles.  She always
spoke as though coaxing a very young child, who needed encouragement
and reassurance; and her niece resented it as actively as did the
villagers.  "What do you think arrived for you this morning,
Melicent?  Theo, darling, if you look on mother's desk, you will find
a letter for Cousin Melicent.  I suppose the mail travels faster than
the boat you came in, Melicent."

Theo brought a letter and handed it to her cousin, who took it with
composure.

"I wonder whom that comes from?" said Mrs. Cooper archly.

"It's from Hubert Mestaer."

"And who is that?" pursued the lady, delighted that everybody's
attention was so skilfully diverted from the broken arm.

"He is one of the men who wanted to marry me," said Millie clearly.

In the deadly pause that followed, she caught a glance, hastily
passing under lowered lids, between Miss Lathom and her two elder
pupils.

But the valiant Mrs. Cooper was equal even to this occasion.

"When dear Melicent has been with us a little longer, she will know
that we do not talk of such things," she cooed, blushing as coyly as
the heroine in a novel by Charles Reade.

The blush was not to be seen reflected on the stolid countenances of
her daughters.  They chewed on.

"What things?" asked Millie, bewildered.

"Our offers of--marriage," said her aunt, bringing out the bold word
with a gulp.  "You are a little young, darling, to be thinking of
marriage for a great many years, are you not?"

"Yes; that is what I told them," replied Millie simply, fixing
surprised eyes upon the lady's embarrassment.

The vicar cleared his throat.

"Perhaps you had better give that letter to your aunt, Melicent, and
let her judge whether it is a fit one for you to receive."

Melicent removed her look of surprise from one end of the table to
another.

"I think it would be playing it very low down on Bert to let anybody
see his letter," she said, with decision.

"My girls show me all their letters," said her aunt, still smiling
and coaxing.

"I beg your pardon if it sounds rude," replied her niece, "but I
shall not show you mine."

The vicar rose from table with decision.

"We will discuss this at another time," he said.  "Melicent will, of
course, conform to the rules of the house while she is with us.  For
what we have received, etc.  A word, Miss Lathom, please."  Then, as
the girls filed past, he said low in the governess's ear: "On no
account is she to be left alone with her cousins for a moment."

The girls filed soberly out, led the way upstairs, through a
swing-door, along a passage, into a shabby old room with deep
window-seats, an aged rocking-horse, shelves of story books and
disabled toys, an ink-stained, battered table, a high fire-guard, and
all the usual accessories of the nursery turned schoolroom.

They fastened the swing-door behind them as they went through,
carefully closing the door of the school-room also; and then all, as
it were, exhaling a gasp of relief, turned to their cousin again with
transfigured faces.

"Now we can talk!  Now we can be ourselves!  Now we can have some
fun!" they cried, surrounding her.

The masks were dropped, the real girls appeared, tossing back their
hair, stretching their limbs, assuming every possible attitude of
comfort and inelegance.  They all talked at once, crowding round; and
the transition was so abrupt and so complete as to bewilder her.

"One moment," said Gwendolen, who was the handsomest, and seemed to
take the lead, rather than the petulant and anæmic-looking Madeline.
"Be cautious, girls! we may very likely be raided this evening; she's
sure to poke her nose in after Melicent.  Put out the things.  Did
you hoist the weight, Babs?"

"Yes, I did," said Barbara.

"That's all right.  If you hear the weight fall in the passage,
that's mother," said Madeline, explaining to Melicent: "You see, it
gives us a minute to reform in."

They all went to a cupboard, pulled out work, thimbles, and so on,
arranged them on the table, chairs in place; then threw themselves on
the floor, in the various attitudes which their weak, overgrown
spines demanded, with pillows wedged under them.

"Now for peace and happiness," said Gwen.  "Oh, it was grand to hear
you stand up to them, my dear!  But it's no good, you know; you will
have to knuckle under.  They've got nothing else to do but bully us;
and after all, it's not much they can do, you know.  It's as easy as
possible to circumvent them."

"Oh, hold your tongue, Gwen! don't chatter so," said Madeline
crossly.  "Give Melicent a chance.  Go on, Melicent, tell us all
about it.  How was your arm hurt?"

Melicent looked surprised.  "I told you I promised Uncle Edmund not
to say," she replied.

"Oh, gammon! we absolve you from that," laughed Theo, slipping a warm
arm about her cousin's neck.

"But I can't absolve myself, you see," said Millie soberly.

"Do you mean to say you won't tell us?"

"I never break my word."

Gwendolen laughed.

"We're five against one, and the youngest is as big as you," she
said, half in fun, half menacing.

Millie smiled her own little smile of disdain.

"I'm more than a match for the lot of you," she said coolly.  "I
shall say just what I think to you, as I did to Aunt Minna.  And it's
this.  I hate underhand ways."

Miss Lathom, who was seemingly poring over the correction of some
exercises, grew uncomfortably red.

"We're not underhand," said Gwen hotly.  "'Tommy'"--indicating her
preceptress with a wave of the hand--"knows all about our goings on."

"Tommy" looked up nervously.

"When you have lived here a little while, Miss Lutwyche," she said,
"you will see that the poor girls must have some indulgences.  Their
mother expects impossibilities."

"Well, why do they stand it?" asked Millie.

"We don't stand it," returned Maddie.  "But you had better all shut
up, girls; perhaps Melicent's a tell-tale."

"If you had any sense, you'd see that I've just proved that I'm not,"
remarked Melicent.

"How have you proved it?"

"If I keep my word to Uncle Edmund, of course I shall keep my word to
you.  I promise not to tell tales; and, when I promise, you can go
away and bet on it."

The universal squeal of merriment at her funny phrase restored
harmony.

"Of course," said Gwen, "I see that it's best to be straightforward;
but we're not allowed to be.  We simply have to make our own
pleasures, unknown to them.  We should never read a book, nor get a
letter, nor meet a soul, nor do anything but get up, have meals, do
lessons, go to bed.  Mother won't let us read a book she hasn't read
first; and as she never opens a book herself from year's end to
year's end, there is an end of that.  We mustn't have a letter unless
she sees it; so of course we have to have our letters sent, addressed
to Tommy, to Bensdale Post Office; and then there's the adventure of
walking over to fetch them.  You mayn't go out without saying where
you've been, nor spend a halfpenny without telling her what you
bought.  She must really expect us to cheat, you know; and so we do."

"Maddie's going on for eighteen, and Gwen only a year younger,"
chimed in Theo, "and they're not supposed even to know what a young
man is, let alone think about one.  Gwen's awfully gone on
Freshfield, who is Sir Joseph Burmester's agent.  Well, if it was
guessed, I don't know what would happen, for you see Freshfield is
not our social equal--"

"My dears," broke in Miss Lathom, who was on thorns, "I think all
this is very imprudent.  Let your cousin wait a while, and see how
she likes her aunt's system."

"I shall dislike it very much," said Melicent; "but I shall say so.
Why don't you speak out?"

"Because we're dead sick of rows," said Maddie sulkily.  "There were
nothing but rows till Tommy came.  No governess would stay; they
simply couldn't stand mother.  Then at last Tommy turned up, and we
saw what a decent old sort she was, so we thought out our plans, and
now we do get our fun somehow, and as long as we hold our tongues at
meals, it's all right."

"Well, I'm very sorry for you," said Millie, "but I think it would be
much simpler to say what you mean.  The strongest always wins.  If
you stuck together, they would have to give in."

The girls laughed sardonically.  "You don't know mother," they said.

"Well, we shall soon see," said Barbie, who was the silent one of the
five.  "Let Millie try her way, and see what happens."

Millie laughed.  "I certainly shan't try yours," she said.

"But you won't side against us with mother?" suddenly said Gwen.

"Rather not.  That isn't my way."

"Are you never afraid of anybody?" asked Theo earnestly.

"Of course not; what can people do?" contemptuously asked the girl
who had been sjambokked.

Theo cuddled up against this new champion as if the sense of strength
were pleasant to her.

"Show us your love-letter, won't you, darling?" she said persuasively.

"Certainly not," replied Millie at once.

"Then I won't show you my notes from Freshfield," said Gwen.

"Of course not.  It's mean to show men's letters."

"We shouldn't do such a thing, except just among ourselves," replied
Maddie indignantly; "and we hoped you'd be one of us, though goodness
knows there's more than enough of us already."

"Look here," said Gwen eagerly, "we know you must be the real kind of
natural girl--not the sort like mother believes in, Ethel May in the
Daisy Chain, you know--we know you are not that sort, or you would
not be having lovers to write to you all the way from Africa.  You do
like pretty clothes, and dancing, and young men--"

"No, I don't," said Millie, in her decided way.  "I've had enough of
young men to last me a good while.  I want to see no more young men
for years to come.  I only want one thing really badly"--she looked
almost pleadingly at Tommy's red, snub-nosed countenance, as if her
sole hope lay there--"I want to learn!" cried out the girl who was to
corrupt the Vicarage household.

"To learn!"  The words were echoed in six different tones.

"Not _lessons_?" asked Babs incredulously.

"Everything," replied Millie, resting her pointed chin on her small
hand.  "I want to know things, and understand them, and find out how
to earn my living; to do something ... or make something ... I don't
know what, as yet.  I want to get a grip on the world, and watch for
my place there, and take it!"

There was complete silence for quite a long time.  At last--

"You talk as if you were a boy," said Gwen.  "What can girls do?"

"Everybody can do what they must do," quietly replied Millie.  "I've
got to earn my living, and so have you, I suppose."

"Earn our living!  Mother would have a fit!" cried Maddie.

"But Uncle Edmund said in his letter that he was poor," said Millie,
puzzled.  "What should you do if he died?"

"Get married, if we could," laughed Theo.  "Willie and Georgie say
we're such frights, we never shall.  But we think Gwen is
good-looking, and you see she's got a lover already; and she says
when she's married she'll see after all of us--take us out of this
hateful old Dale, and go to live at Brighton or London or some place
where we could make friends.  Nobody will make friends here, because
mother's such an old stick-in-the-mud--"

The filial sentiment died away, for there was the sound of a soft
thud.

"The weight, girls!  Mother!" whispered Bee; and in a moment, with a
dexterity born of long practice, the whole flock of lounging girls
had arisen, slipped into place, and were busily stitching when Mrs.
Cooper, with her smile, her long neck, and her earrings, peeped
archly round the door.

"Making friends?" said she, beaming.

"Yes, Mrs. Cooper," said Tommy, looking up.

The governess was feeling decidedly uncomfortable.  She had
repeatedly warned her pupils, during the preceding days, to hold
aloof at first from the new-comer, until they had decided whether she
could be taken into confidence.  But Millie's love-letter, and still
more, her calm refusal to show it, had sent the barriers down with a
rush, and the girls had not been able to think of prudence with such
a keen new interest in their blank lives.  Tommy's heart was full of
apprehension.  She was afraid of this girl who wanted to learn.  She
knew that she had nothing to teach her.

Melicent had not moved a muscle when the general rush was made.  She
sat still in the window-seat, upright and solitary.

"Dear Melicent must join our happy little sewing circle," said Mrs.
Cooper, beaming round.  "No idle hands at the Vicarage, as you see,
darling."

"I cannot use my arm very well yet," said Melicent.

"Oh, we give you one evening's grace," responded the lady playfully.
"Have you been taught to work?"

"No."

"Oh, how sad!  Why, Miss Lathom, we have a task before us!  Can you
not use a needle at all?"

"Oh, yes.  I can make and mend my clothes, and so on.  But I had to
teach myself."

There was a silence.  "You don't mean that you made the suit you have
on?"

"Yes."

"Oh," said Mrs. Cooper.  The wind was taken out of her sails.  "Why,
you are quite a _genius_!  We shall have to take _lessons_.  But now,
I came to ask you to come with me, and I will show you your room, and
we will have a little talk."

Millie rose obediently, and followed her aunt from the room; as they
went, the masks dropped, the girls lifted their heads and looked at
each other with intense interest.

"She's going to make her show the letter."




CHAPTER XII

THE JARRING ELEMENT

"She was one of that numerous class of females, whose society can
raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the
world who could like them well enough to marry them."--JANE AUSTEN.


The first idea suggested by Mrs. Cooper to the mind of the beholder
was almost inevitably the above.  How could any man ever have liked
her well enough to marry her?

Mr. Chetwynd-Cooper was among those unfortunates who are sent into
the world without a sense of humour.  He thus fell a victim to the
same error of judgment which poor well-meaning King George the Third
had committed before him: that of mistaking a dull, pretentious prig
for a really good woman.  Perhaps no queen in history, of whatever
moral character, ever made a greater fiasco as the bringer-up of a
large family than did Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.  But in this
respect Mrs. Cooper vied with her, and for the same reason.  Each was
so secure in her own belief in herself as possessed of all the
domestic virtues, that to her the possibility of making a mistake
never presented itself.

Such women are beyond the reach of argument.  Mrs. Cooper had
decided, quite early in life--on what grounds is not known--that to
be such a woman as she was, ought to be the goal of all female
endeavour.  Hence, nothing could shake the complacency of her own
content.  She never tired of the pose of the perfect wife and mother,
the parochial guardian angel; and this, although her nursery had been
the epitome of untidiness and mismanagement, and her husband was
obliged to keep her accounts, and in other ways to step into the
breach continually to supply her glaring deficiencies.  Neither was
she discomposed by the fact that all her own children had found her
out at an early age.  If her husband ever broke through his habitual
reserve, and remonstrated with her, she met him with the patient
smile of the saint who is misunderstood.

Very soon after marriage he had found out the iron hand beneath her
velvet glove.  He had discovered that his own influence was nil, that
argument could not move her, that opposition merely stiffened her
smiling obstinacy.  He had sunk into that life which is the most
terrible form of solitude: complete isolation from those nearest to
him.  The worst of it was that, though he had no effect upon his
wife, she had a gradual and insidious effect upon him.  Continual
contact with a dwarfed intelligence was causing inevitable
deterioration, of which he was not aware.

Had the dalesmen known his daily martyrdom, he might have gained
them; but his pride and his loyalty pushed him back behind barred
doors.  And what nobody yet had ever divined, this new niece of his
knew before she had been twenty-four hours under his roof.

It made him hate her.  The first time her grave, tranquil eyes rested
upon her aunt, he felt that she understood and despised her.  Then
that same limpid gaze--direct, keen, pure--travelled to him, the man
who was the life-companion of such a woman.  He could feel her
thought probing him, wondering at him, pitying him.  He had not at
first thought her like his sister, the dead Melicent to whom he had
been sincerely attached.  But when he encountered that wonderful
glance, he saw the likeness so strongly that he afterwards never
forgot it--was never able to look at the younger Melicent without
thinking of her more beautiful, radiant mother, who had followed the
man she loved into the wilderness.

But the very likeness embittered him.  He had always nursed a grudge
against his wilful sister--a half-contemptuous grudge, as against one
who had stepped outside the pale of conventions held so sacred by his
own wife.  Was her young daughter to come from the wilds to sit in
judgment upon this exemplary pair, who found the straitest paths of
domestic dulness wide enough for them to walk in?  He almost wished
that Melicent would do something that should justify him in his
dislike of her.

He was brooding over it alone in his study, where he wrote with much
care his cold, dry, unreal sermons, when his wife's head appeared
round the door, with her usual coy smile.

"_Quite_ unsuccessful, my darling boy," she said.  "She defies me
openly; and yet I flatter myself I was _most_ diplomatic."

Like many essentially cold-hearted people, Mrs. Cooper was prodigal
of endearing epithets.  Her husband, on principle, never used any.

"A direct command would, I imagine, have met the case better than
diplomacy," he said, in his cold, collected tones.  "What did she
say?  Was she rude?"

"Well, not exactly.  She said it would be a breach of confidence to
show her letter, but that she would see that the young man wrote no
more.  She also said that she insists upon her right to correspond
with her guardian without the letters being overlooked.  Rather a
_shocking_ way to talk to me, wasn't it?  But we must be very
forgiving at first, I see that, and make very big _allowances_ for
the poor darling!  The guardian himself seems to be quite young, and
unmarried.  Why did not poor Arnold appoint you guardian?  As it is,
she evidently thinks we have no authority."

He sat, with a mind oddly divided between dislike for the girl who
defied him, and a sneaking satisfaction that Minna had been routed
for once--by his sister's child!

"However," said his wife, secure as ever in her own infallibility,
"we shall manage her all right in the end.  The example of our girls
will be _invaluable_.  It is best to put the matter aside for the
present, and let her settle down."

"Will she settle down, do you think?" asked the vicar.

There was a tolerant, complacent smile.  "My darling boy, I have
trained five, and why not a sixth?"

The vicar did not contradict her; he merely asked:

"Did she tell you what her letter contained?"

"She said she had not opened it yet, which I fear must have been
a--a--_tarradidle_"--Mrs. Cooper went, through certain evolutions of
lips and eyes, intended as a mute apology for her use of a word so
shocking--"but she said she felt sure it was only to say that, if she
is not happy here, the writer had a home waiting for her."

"Preposterous nonsense!  She is a child, and the man probably a
savage," said the vicar, with some bitterness.  "Picture Maddie or
Gwen receiving a note of the kind!"

But when Millie did open Bert's letter, the contents were of a wholly
different nature from what she had expected.

It merely contained a brief announcement of the fact that he had
enlisted in that regiment of scouts which later was known to fame as
Lacy's Lions.

In the schoolroom, the knowledge that Melicent had stood firm
communicated an electrical excitement to the atmosphere.  The idea of
possible revolt opened prospects of which nobody had as yet dared to
think.  Unconsciously to themselves, her cousins already regarded her
as a strike-leader--a Moses who should lead them out of the house of
bondage.

And yet no creature could have been less anxious for revolt than this
girl.  Her one desire was to fall upon knowledge and devour it.  She
was ready to become the slave of anyone who would teach her.

But one day in the schoolroom was enough to quench hope from that
quarter.  The education bestowed on her by her father had been
partial; but what she knew, she knew thoroughly.  Her Latin and
arithmetic and Euclid were all good; her knowledge of geography and
English history made Tommy feel quite faint.  Of French and German
she was wholly ignorant, and could not pick out the notes on the
piano.

But in all respects she knew enough to know that Tommy knew nothing.
All the morning the governess was experiencing the annoyance which
Mr. Cooper had known, feeling the clear eyes upon her full of
judgment.

The leading point in the education of Mr. Cooper's girls was that
they should have no judgment.  They were always to be content to
accept what they were told.  When they came in contact with actual
life, their only standard would be that such and such a thing was
according to, or differed from, what they were used to.

"I am a great believer in the power of habit," the vicar was wont to
say.  Poor soul!  Habit had moulded him with a vengeance; he might be
excused for thinking highly of its powers over the human intelligence.

Melicent was a problem to her cousins.  They were fascinated by her,
as the weak must always be by the strong; but they resented her
aloofness.  And they were simply bewildered by her tastes.

Tommy was--_sub rosâ_, of course--reading aloud to them a thrilling
serial from the _Daily Looking-glass_.  It was called "Phyllis and
the Duke," and was a story of the pure love of that gallant nobleman,
the Duke of Mendip, for his sister's governess, the lovely Phyllis de
Forester; of the machinations of his envious cousin, Captain the
Honourable Percy Blagdon; and of how Phyllis turned out to be the
unacknowledged daughter of an Earl, and the true owner of the
Honourable Percy's estates.  They had reached a thrilling chapter, in
which the trembling young governess went to interview a clairvoyante,
in a mystic kind of house in St. John's Wood, to ascertain what had
become of her chivalrous lover.  Tommy was uneasy when the story took
this turn.  She did not like the sound of a mysterious house in St.
John's Wood, and began to reflect, with resentment, that nowadays you
could not trust even the _feuilleton_ of a halfpenny journal to be
wholly inoffensive.  But the writer was perfectly equal to the
occasion, and knew his public to a nicety--or might we say, to a
nastiness?  The clairvoyante turned out to be Phyllis's deeply
injured mamma, a young lady who would on no account have gone without
the indispensable marriage ceremony; and the gentleman who exploited
her, and "ran" the mysterious house, was her own brother, Phyllis's
uncle, who long had sought his beloved niece in vain.

"I can't think why you don't like it," sighed Gwen, whose eyes were
kindled, her cheeks aglow.

"It is so unreal and so silly," said her cousin calmly.  "People
don't go on like that.  I like a story that makes you forget that
it's not true."

"Such as what?" they asked her.

After reflection--"Such as 'Silas Marner,'" she said.

They had never heard of "Silas Marner."

The glorious autumn weather continued, and two or three days after
Millie's arrival they took her for a long walk, out of the Dale,
along Radlem Rigg, to look at the curious old prehistoric relic
locally known as Tod's Trush.

The loveliness of her surroundings was again borne in upon Millie.
The same up-soaring of spirit which she had experienced when her
uncle drove her from the station once more exhilarated her.  She
could not analyse what it was that she found so different here from
the land of her birth.  She came from a country of clear air and vast
spaces, of solitude and immeasurable distance.  These dales were
small in comparison with the endless rippling veldt she knew.  But
here there confronted her an element which she was quick to feel,
though as yet too young to define--the element of mystery.

Strange it is that a few atmospheric effects should have power to
lift the soul into new realms, into the brooding heart of a tender,
tinted secret, which haunts the uplands and the valleys of
Cleveshire, making a promised land of every peak that emerges,
suggestive, from its golden, shimmering veil.  The primal truth which
underlay the power of the Veiled Isis was here; but in the North the
magic is stronger, because to its mystery it adds the crowning note
of austerity.

There is a loneliness which is the result, not of distance, but of
inaccessibility.  The dwellers in two valleys, perhaps five miles
apart, divided by a high mountain, a dangerous pass, are separated
far more thoroughly than those who dwell with fifty miles of plain
between them, which the train will traverse in an hour.  These dales
give the impression of something remote, inviolable--something stern
and shy, yet with a heart of glowing colour, of infinite tenderness,
for those who can understand.

The Trush itself, when they reached it, was an old barrow, or
tumulus, the earth covering of which had been entirely removed
centuries ago.  It was a square kist of stones, the top of which had
fallen in.  The coffin, or coffins, which it must once have
contained, had vanished so long ago that a persistent local tradition
maintained that there had never been any; but that the little house
had been the abode of a being of supernatural origin, called Tod,
concerning whom antiquarians cudgelled their brains in vain.  Two
upright slabs still stood like the jambs of a tiny doorway, with a
lintel across; the whole surrounded by a circular wreath of large
stones, which probably defined the original size of the mound.

To Melicent, who had never seen anything of the kind before, the
vacant and lonely sepulchre was fraught with great pathos.  Her
thoughts took wing, and wandered to the times when human hands had
erected this monument, and wondered whether it then stood in such
unbroken solitude as it did now.

They had brought cakes with them, and a bottle of milk, and they all
sat down among the heather and harebells, and refreshed themselves,
while Tommy read a fresh instalment of "Phyllis and the Duke."




CHAPTER XIII

LANCE BURMESTER IS CONSCIOUS OF A PERSONALITY

  "Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
  Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."
                                        --FLETCHER.


Nothing compelled Melicent to listen, so she sat on Tod's Trush, just
over his pathetic little doorway, her arms round her knees, her eyes
fixed, full of the forward-reaching, time-devouring dreams of youth,
upon the lovely lines of the land, ridge beyond ridge, dying into
grape-bloom haze upon the faint horizon.

She was not unhappy.  Her isolation hardly distressed her; she was
accustomed to being an alien among unsympathetic people.  She was,
however, considering what she should do.  She actively disliked her
aunt, was repelled by her uncle, mentally herded her cousins and
their governess together as so many silly triflers, not particularly
honest.  But all this she could bear, if only she might learn to fit
herself for her future; and this, it appeared, was impossible.

If only it had not been so!  For here she felt that she could live
and work.  Soul and body were being laved in pure air--renewed and
vivified.  The terrible sense of antagonism to all her surroundings
which she had always felt in Africa was gone.  There she had been
craving, craving all the time for she knew not what; her cry had been
that of Paracelsus--"I go to find my soul!"  It seemed to her that
she had found it, or would find it, in the stern keeping of this
rugged land, where the only thing that was out of harmony was the
attitude of her own kindred.

Just opposite to her, among the broken ground which rose from the
main valley, forming a ridge parallel to that on which she sat, was a
little house, embowered in fruit trees.

An ampylopsis creeper on the grey stone wall gave a touch of vivid
scarlet; a great purple Jackmanii clematis smothered the porch.

"There," thought Melicent, "I could wish to be.  There I could live
and learn things, and the days would never seem too long."

She studied the little remote place, trying to see whether any road
led to it, and admiring the way in which it stood, as if lifting its
face to the kisses of the southern and western sun.

Lost in reverie, she had not heard the approach of anyone, and was
surprised when a dog jumped through the heather near her, on the side
of the Trush farthest from where her cousins were seated.  A whirring
of strong brown wings arose from their covert, and a grouse family
shot up, with indignant "_Cock-cocks_," wheeling in the blue air.
Three guns cracked, and in a moment the five Vicarage girls were on
their feet.

As three sportsmen appeared, Gwen made one bound to where Millie sat,
her face aflame.

"It's Freshfield," she gasped in her ear, "and young Mr. Burmester,
and somebody I don't know.  Oh, I wish he was alone!  He won't dare
to speak to us.  Look at his nice curly dark hair!  Isn't he
scrumptious?"

The young agent, with an expression of acute discomfort, had raised
his hat to the phalanx of great girls.  Mr. Burmester was looking
bewildered at the sudden appearance of what looked like a
boarding-school out for a walk emerging from the heather.  He also
pulled off his cap, and said, in the deprecating tones of a very
young man:

"Oh, I say!  I'm afraid we startled you."  With which he made as
though to pass on.

Millie had not moved from her seat on the Trush; it was not her way
to be startled.  She had taken off her hat, and sat there bare-headed
in the sunset, her heart full of quiet, like Wordsworth's nun--too
steeped in Nature's calm to notice this intrusion.

The third member of the shooting party had paused to examine the lock
of his gun.  He was a short, rather thick-set man, with very blue,
clear eyes, which redeemed his face from the common-place--which saw
beauty in all Nature, and seemed to exact truth from men.  When he
raised these eyes from the gun, he saw Millie seated there on the
Trush, and he gave a glad laugh, not at all surprised, but full of
satisfaction.

"Hallo, Melicent!  There you are!" he cried out heartily.

Melicent bounded up, looked around, pushed away Gwen, who stood
before her, and leaping into the heather, flew to her friend.  She
gave a little cry of gladness.

"Mr. Helston!  How did you get here?  Is Mrs. Helston here too?"

"She's not actually here in sight, but she's not far off," he
replied, putting his arm round her.  "You'll see her very soon.  You
must present me to your cousins.  Lance, I've found a friend."

Lancelot Burmester, in secret terror of what he called "flappers,"
came up awkwardly.  He was a clever-looking fellow, fair, with an
incisive profile, a pale face and pince-nez.  He advanced from one
side, as Tommy, anxious and heated, hurried up on the other.

"Miss Lutwyche and I are old friends," said Mr. Helston pleasantly.
"We made the voyage from Africa together.  Have I the pleasure of
speaking to Mrs. Cooper?"

Tommy, blushing, disclaimed the honour, explained her identity, and
shook hands with young Burmester.  Freshfield, meanwhile, slipped
round to Gwen behind the backs of the party.

"I know something of Mayne, Miss Lutwyche's guardian," said Mr.
Helston in explanation; "and at his request my wife and I undertook
the serious task of keeping this young person in order for the
voyage."  He did not add that he had himself paid the difference
between first and second-class fare for her.  "After her being so
cruelly mishandled," he said, "you may imagine she needed care.  She
was not really fit to travel, but she was so eager to be off."  He
smiled down at her.  "I think she looks a little different," he
concluded quite fondly, "from what she did when we first took her in
hand."

"But you have not said yet how you got here?" urged Millie, who was
holding, in both hers, the hand that hung over her shoulder.

"Why, the very day you left us I ran up against Burmester in Pall
Mall, and he said, 'Come down for a week's shooting,' and when we
realised that Ilberston is, as it were, next door to Fransdale, you
may imagine that we were doubly minded to come.  Well, here we are!
And how do you like England?"

"If by England you mean Fransdale," said Millie, "I like it in a way
that can't be put in words."

"Oh, yes, it can be put in words; the thing's been done.  You should
read the works of one William Wordsworth," struck in Lance Burmester.

Millie raised her eyes to his face> and apparently liked what she
found there.

"Should I?  I will," she said thoughtfully.

"What have you done to your arm?" asked the young man kindly.

"My dear chap," said Harry Helston, "what this scrap of a child has
been through would have broken the spirit of anybody else.  Her brute
of a Boer stepmother--"

Millie turned to him quickly.

"Please, Mr. Helston, my uncle does not wish it known," she said,
with sedate dignity.

"What?  Oh, very well, pussie!" replied her friend, gazing round at
the eager faces of the governess and the girls; "I'll say no more,
then.  Mustn't get you into trouble.  What are you up to with my gun?
Want to shoot a bird--eh?"

"Oh, do let me," she begged; "I've not had a chance for so long!  My
arm is well enough for me to be able to take a sight.  Do let me try!"

"Come this way.  Freshfield says there are any amount of birds just
over this ridge," said Burmester eagerly.  "I should like to see you
shoot."

Melicent possessed herself of the gun, and went forward, laughing and
sparkling.  The others followed as if spellbound.  Nobody had an eye
for Freshfield and Gwen, who came slowly behind, making the most of
their moment.  Very soon, up went the whir of brown wings again.
Millie stopped, took aim with what seemed to be great deliberation;
there was a breathless pause; a bird fell; everyone was laughing and
congratulating the sportswoman.  Lance Burmester presented her with
her prize, and added another to make a brace.  She was urged to come
on, and repeat her exploit, but Tommy was growing nervous, and
interfered.

"The vicar might not like it--they must be getting home."

Melicent went, quite happily, having received the assurance that her
friends were at hand, and would look her up before long.  She was
unprepared for the torrent of reproaches and abuse which streamed
forth upon her head as soon as they were out of sight of the shooting
party.

"You mean little cat!"  "You're a regular sneak!"  "We know now, it's
you yourself that want to keep it dark!"  "Why couldn't you hold your
tongue!"  "Father said _you_ were not to mention it, he never said a
word about other people."

Their meaning began to dawn upon her at last.

"You mean my not allowing Mr. Helston to tell how I broke my arm?
Well, of all the people I ever met, you have the most low-down
notions of honour!" she cried indignantly.  "You are just like my
half-brothers and sisters!  I always thought English people were
straight, that it was only Boers that were such skunks!"

Tommy interfered, and reproved Millie for using bad language; and a
more congenial topic was soon found, in the delights of having met
and spoken to, not only Freshfield, but Mr. Burmester himself.

"Maddie wants him for her young man," explained Theo; "only we didn't
see how the thing was to be begun, because, you see, we never get any
chance to speak to him.  Father and mother did go to dine with Sir
Joseph once, but mother doesn't like Lady Burmester.  She is
dreadfully High Church, she thinks everybody ought to go to the
Communion service every Sunday, and we only have it once a month, so
on the other Sundays Lady Burmester drives all the way to Ilberston.
Mother thinks it so impertinent of Lady Burmester to think she can
possibly know better than a clergyman's wife.  She said she wouldn't
go there again; but I don't think they've been asked.  You know
really, mother doesn't know anything at all about it.  I asked her
why it was wrong to have that service every week, because we are
supposed to believe in the Catholic Church, and all other Catholics
seem to; so she said it was most improper for a young girl to argue
about such things, as her father was sure to know best I said: 'If he
knows, won't he explain to me?' and she said: 'You must wait till you
are a great deal older.'"

"To-morrow is the first Sunday in the month," chimed in Maddie, "so
they will all be there.  What did you think of Lancelot Burmester's
looks?  Do tell us all about the Helstons.  You were lucky to make
friends with them, I daresay they will ask you to stay.  Mother
doesn't like us to go and stay away, for fear of our hearing naughty
words.  She doesn't think anybody is so well brought up as we are!
If she could only hear some of the stories Willie and Georgie bring
home from school!"

They all laughed at this.

"The real reason is, we have no clothes to go in, and she can't
afford to buy us any," grumbled Theo, who was perhaps the handsomest
of the girls, and the cleverest too.

"I daresay you could make your own if you tried," said Melicent.
"I'd help.  I think you ought to make your own clothes."

In the interest suddenly created by this new idea, nobody noticed
that during the whole of the walk home Gwen, the talkative, never
said a word.

* * * * * * * *

"George, what an epidemic of girls!" groaned Lance, as soon as Tommy
and her brood were out of sight.  "Those poor Coopers!  As if their
own great, ugly five were not enough, but they must take on another
to make the half-dozen!"

"It is an act of true kindness," replied Helston.  "For a man with
five daughters of his own to make room for another, shows him to be
extremely conscientious."

"The little cousin," critically said Lance, "has something fetching
about her.  Nothing to look at, but one is conscious of a
personality."

"I never look at her," said Millie's friend, "but those lines occur
to my mind--

  "The good stars met in your horoscope
  Made you of spirit, fire and dew."


"I don't know about the dew; she's a skinny little wisp," was the
uncivil comment.

"Wait till she grows up," said Millie's champion.  "You would wonder
there was anything left of her if you knew what she has come through.
But I gave her my word, so I mustn't tell you; and after all," he
added, musing, "I don't wonder that the vicar doesn't want the tale
to get about; it's not a pretty story, and I daresay would do the
child no good in a narrow-minded, provincial circle."

"I can't think how she will get on with those Coopers," remarked
Burmester.  "Did you ever see such raw material?  And you heard what
my mater said at lunch?  They are such hide-bound, pragmatical--no
doing anything with them.  The vicar quietly goes his way, listening
to nobody's wishes--thinks himself infallible.  The pater has given
him up as a bad job; says you might as well have a cabbage at the
Vicarage!  Hall, of Ilberston, is such a good chap!  He might give
this Southerner many a hint.  But the Coopers won't have a word to
say to him, because he has a weekly Eucharist, and makes the
schoolchildren attend."

Helston listened with sinkings of the heart.  This did not sound like
a household in which Melicent would be happy.  But report is often
one-sided.  He determined to judge for himself.




CHAPTER XIV

THE BREAKING-IN OF MELICENT

          "I could not hide
  My quickening inner life from those at watch.
  They saw a light at a window now and then,
  They had not set there: who had set it there?
  My father's sister started when she caught
  My soul agaze in my eyes.  She could not say
  I had no business with a sort of soul,
  But plainly she objected."
                      --ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.


The following day Sir Joseph and Lady Burmester, with their guests,
duly attended the ugly little church in Fransdale.

There had been a church there since the dawnings of English history.
But, as the Reformed Church lost her grip upon the strong, narrow
minds of the Dalesmen, it had been allowed to fall in ruins.  Then
had come the disastrous "churchwarden" restoration, which had
abolished all landmarks.  A stumpy little box-like structure now
stood among the ancient graves, in a velvet-smooth meadow
overshadowed by the frowning hills which closed round the head of the
Dale.

Mrs. Cooper had been duly informed by Tommy of the meeting with the
gentlemen from the Grange, and of the fact that one of them seemed to
be a great friend of Melicent's.  There was no valid reason why this
news should displease her; but it did.  She was vexed that her
insignificant niece should have so many friends.  The passion of
jealousy was smouldering deep down in her heart, among other dormant
forces of which she was unaware.  Like many parents, while constantly
assuring herself and her children that looks were nothing, she
nevertheless expected the girls to be admired and sought out.  When
first she saw Millie, she had experienced relief at the thought that
such a thin, pale shrimp of a girl could never prove a rival to her
own.  That she should be thrust forth to the notice of the
Burmesters, so early in her sojourn at Fransdale, was most
displeasing; she told herself that it must give the poor child a
totally false idea of her own importance.

However, forewarned is forearmed.  She was ready after service with
the sweetest smiles of the amiable aunt, to be presented to the
Helstons, and thank them suitably for their care of "poor darling
Melicent."

Mrs. Helston was a picturesque woman, a brunette, with hair
prematurely grey, which set off the tints of her bright complexion.
She wore a wide hat with strings, and her smile captivated the hearts
of the five staring Miss Coopers.

Lady Burmester was not a tactful person.  She did not like the
Coopers, whom she thought pompous and prosy.  She proceeded to ask
Mrs. Cooper to come to lunch the following day, and to bring her
niece with her.  She did not include any of the vicar's daughters in
her invitation.

Mrs. Cooper smiled, and gushed, and seemed so delighted with the
invitation, that her ladyship was conscious of a slight shock when
she found that she was refusing it.  It was early days yet, and would
be unsettling for dear Melicent, who must get a little more used to
English ways before she could bring her out.  She knew dear Lady
Burmester would understand.  She suggested instead, that the two
ladies from the Grange should come to tea at the Vicarage one
afternoon; suppose they were to say Wednesday?

In a bewildered way Lady Burmester submitted to this unlooked-for
dictation, and, taken by surprise, obediently said Wednesday; but as
they were driving home, she suddenly turned to her friend and asked:

"Why wouldn't that perverse woman lunch with me, I wonder?"

Brenda Helston laughed her good, sincere laugh.

"My dear!  You invited her niece, not her daughter!"

"O-o-oh!  So that was where the shoe pinched," said her ladyship,
surprised.

"You should always make allowances for human nature," commented
Brenda.  "It would not be human for a woman with all those daughters
not to be touchy at seeing them passed over.  We must propitiate her
on Wednesday.  I want to get Melicent to myself--to find out what she
is thinking and feeling.  I shall not be able to say half that I wish
to, at the Vicarage."

"I daresay that supplies a second reason for her aunt's refusal!"
said her friend, amused.  "You and Mr. Helston have a very high
opinion of that funny little white-faced girl, have you not?"

"Very!" said Brenda emphatically.  "I never saw any creature so
famished for the little tendernesses of life, so responsive to
kindness, so eager to improve herself.  Had you seen her when she
first came on board--sullen, _farouche_, always on the defensive ...
and how she melted and sweetened, and blossomed forth!  Harry and I
positively love her.  We always, as you know, longed for a daughter.
We have written to Carol Mayne, telling him that we will give her a
home if she is not happy with her own people.  He was doubtful; he
thought the uncle's letter cold-blooded.  But really, as I asked him,
how could you expect enthusiasm on the part of a man with all those
daughters, at the prospect of having another thrust upon him?  I told
Carol at the time, I liked the writer for being guarded; he could not
know what she was."

"Does he strike you," asked Lady Burmester, "as being the kind of man
to find out?"

Mrs. Helston hesitated.

"I fear not; he struck me as a dense kind of man.  I heard Harry ask
him, after service, whether this church were on the site of the old
one--whether any of the old material had been built in; and he
replied that he did not know, and had never inquired.  I am afraid
that will settle him, in Harry's estimation!"  They both laughed
gaily.  "Harry looked," said his wife, "much as he might have done,
had the vicar said that he did not know who his mother was, and had
never inquired."

"There is a difference between him and Mr. Hall," observed Lady
Burmester.

"Yes; was he not interesting yesterday?  I shall not soon forget that
wonderful church on the verge of the precipice.  One feels that one
knows the true meaning of sermons in stones when you have heard him
talk of Ilberston.  He knows every stone in his church, and every
heart in his parish."

* * * * * * * *

It was on Monday that Alfred Dow, riding down the Dale, came, as he
passed the inn, upon Millie as she stood in the road with her
cousins, waiting for Tommy, who had gone into the Post Office.

He promptly dismounted, and Melicent, her face brightening, proceeded
to shake hands cordially, the girls looking on, divided between
horror and interest.  This was in the sight of the sun; for the inn,
and the cluster of cottages known as Church Houses, composed the only
nucleus the village could be said to possess; and everyone was
looking on.

Upon this scene the vicar came, emerging from a vexatious interview
with a stiff-necked churchwarden; and he was not pleased.

His manner, as he greeted his nonconforming parishioner, was
congealed.  His voice, with its inward stillness, frightened his
daughters.

"Now, Mr. Cooper, I want you to let all your young ladies come up to
tea with my mother at Crow Gate."  He called it, in local speech,
Crow Yat.  "Let 'em come an' see t' ponies an' t' foal an' t' calves,
an' taste mother's damson gin, for we've a drop left yet.  Let this
lady bring 'em, if she'll be so kind.  Let's see"--he raised his cap
and scratched his curly poll.  "To-day's Monday.  Suppose we said
Thursday.  An' we'll hear more o' they Boers," he added
mischieviously, to Millie.

"If Mrs. Dow is kind enough to second your invitation, perhaps she
would write direct to Mrs. Cooper," said the vicar, still more gelid.
"I cannot say what her plans are for this week."

Dow turned slightly away, looked down at Millie, and deliberately
shut one eye.  Yet she could see that he was angry too.

"Oh--well; mother's not a grand letter-writer," he said cheerfully,
"but I'll tell her your wishes.  Good day, passon!"

"Good day, Mr. Dow!"

The vicar walked back with Miss Lathom and the six girls.

"You will, please," said he to the governess, "when you have occasion
to enter a shop, take Melicent with you.  I thought I had told you
that she is never to be left with her cousins.  She is wholly
untrustworthy.  After ten years in this parish I have more or less
succeeded in showing these people that their free and easy ways are
not for me; and now I am to come and find my niece and daughters
unchaperoned in the public street, laughing and joking with a
dissenting farmer!  I will not have it!"

Tommy was abject.  She trembled before him; but when he sent for
Millie into the study, it was a different thing.  He asked her what
excuse she had for her behaviour.  She asked in wonder:

"What behaviour?"

He explained the enormity of her conduct, adding that he was under
the impression that he had told her, on the day of her arrival, that
in England, social distinctions must be observed.

"Do you mean that you may not even speak to anyone who is not your
social equal?"

"Certainly I mean it!  When Mr. Dow greeted you to-day, you should
have merely bowed, and turned to speak to one of your cousins; then
he would have been obliged to pass on."

"In Africa," said his niece, "we should think that contemptible."

"As you know, that is just the point.  We are not in Africa, but in
England, where a social code exists."

"And as long as I am with you, must I behave so--pretending not to
see people who have been kind to me?"

"As long as you live with me, you will do as I tell you."

"Whether I think it right or not?"

"Certainly; you have no right to set your judgment against mine."

"Thank you for explaining that to me.  I am afraid I shall not be
able to stay with you," she said simply.

"That is a foolish, as well as a rude speech, Melicent."

"I beg your pardon; I am sorry I am foolish, and I did not mean to be
rude.  Is that all you wanted to say to me?"

"Nonsensical impertinence!" said the vicar.  "Where could you go, I
wonder, if I declined to keep you?"

"To Mr. and Mrs. Helston," she replied unhesitatingly.  "They have
told Mr. Mayne that they would like to have me."

"Well, upon my word!"  The vicar was well-nigh jolted out of his
composure.  He pulled himself together only by a strong effort.
"Leave the room," he said.  "Apologise, and leave the room."

"What am I to apologise for?"

"For gross impertinence."

After a minute's pause.

"I have not been impertinent," she said, "and I shall not apologise.
I think you in the wrong."

She walked out of the room, leaving an angry man behind her.

* * * * * * * *

The vicar's quiet insolence had aroused Alfred Dow, as it roused all
his parishioners, to a feeling of active hostility.  He felt a desire
to get the better of him, if he could.

He sent a man next day with a note from Mrs. Dow to Mrs. Cooper--a
note which the old lady had written with many protests, telling her
son he was "nobbut a giddy fool" to be asking such a thing of her.
Why should she make her best cheese-cakes for "them loompin' lasses
o' passon's?"--when madam treated all dissenters as the dirt beneath
her feet?

Mrs. Cooper was very undecided as to what answer she should return,
when the unwelcome note arrived.  On the one hand, she detested the
Dows, and did not like to be indebted to them.  They had never
invited her girls before; she felt that this invitation was really on
Melicent's account.  Furthermore, Melicent was in disgrace, and did
not deserve a treat.  On the other hand, she knew that her five, who
were never asked out, longed to go.  It would be a sign to the whole
village of a splendid condescension, did she allow it.  Also, the
fact of their being engaged to go to Crow Yat, would furnish an
excuse, should Lady Burmester arrive on Wednesday, as seemed likely,
with more invitations to Melicent.  The vicar was for refusing; but
he was disregarded.  Melicent must be taught the difference between
condescending to drink tea with one's inferiors and addressing them,
when you met them, as equals.

The girls were wild with delight when they heard they were to go.
They all walked to Bensdale Post Office that afternoon, and Gwen
posted a letter.

Lady Burmester and Mrs. Helston duly came to tea at the Vicarage on
Wednesday, and were received by Mrs. Cooper in the gaunt
drawing-room--where she gave them what the girls were wont to call
"pretence tea," as opposed to a solid, dining-room table
arrangement--in elegant seclusion.

Her flow of amiable small-talk was so unceasing, that they had been
there some twenty minutes before Lady Burmester, warned by recent
error, could get in a request to see "your girls and Miss Lutwyche."

It was another quarter of an hour before Maddie, Gwen and Melicent
appeared.  Mrs. Cooper presented her girls to her ladyship, with the
air of one showing off a promising baby; and Mrs. Helston drew
Melicent to the window, to try and get a word unheard.

"Melicent, I have news for you," she said--"news which I think you
will be glad to hear.  We are not leaving Fransdale when we leave the
Grange.  Sir Joseph has let to us, furnished, for a month, the
sweetest cottage you ever saw."

Melicent's eyes glowed

"Then I can come and see you," she began; but, checking herself,
sighed.  "That is, if Aunt Minna lets me.  But she is so curious.
She treats me like a prisoner.  I am never allowed to go out alone.
Are all English girls like that?  Do you know, it does irritate me
so."

"A lovely view from this window, isn't it?" said the suave voice of
Aunt Minna, just behind.  "Melicent, darling, go and fetch that
curious photo of Slabbert's Poort to show Lady Burmester."

Melicent, with one glance at her friend, went off as desired.  Mrs.
Cooper beamed upon her visitor, and spoke confidentially.

"I am very hopeful of Melicent--very," she affirmed, as though
someone had just expressed a contrary opinion.  "Her faults may be
turned into virtues, I feel sure.  Her obstinacy will develop into
firmness, when she has learned to obey."

Mindful of her desire to conciliate, Mrs. Helston smiled, as she said:

"I feel sure you realise how hard it must be for a girl who has been
the mainstay of a delicate father for years, to bear restraint."

"We know, don't we," cooed Mrs. Cooper, with her little eyes almost
shut, "that obedience is the foundation-stone of all training."

"Melicent's training seems to me to have risen far above the
foundations of character," said Mrs. Helston, unable to help speaking
with some warmth.

"Have you girls of your own, Mrs. Helston?" with an intonation of
condescending pity.  Then, playfully: "Ah, well; it makes all the
difference, you know."

Melicent reappeared at this moment, and Mrs. Helston telegraphed to
Lady Burmester: "Hopeless!  Let's go."

Her ladyship rose and discharged the arrow in her quiver.

"I come with an invitation from Sir Joseph, which I must deliver,"
she said.  "We are all going to Clairvaulx Priory Ruins on Monday, as
Mr. and Mrs. Helston leave us the following day.  Sir Joseph hopes to
see yourself, the vicar, your three elder girls and Miss Lutwyche.
We will send the waggonette and pair for you at half-past ten, unless
it is wet."

Mrs. Cooper began to reply, with beaming smiles.

"What an enchanting idea!  What a pity that Monday should be the
beginning of the week, when it was specially important that nothing
should interfere with lessons!  Had it been another day, later on--a
picnic was the most delightful of expeditions.  But her girls were at
an age when she must be very firm, and she was afraid--"

But at this point the vicar walked in, and on the invitation being
conveyed to him, accepted it at once and unreservedly, for them all.
He accompanied the ladies to their carriage, saw them drive away, and
returned to the drawing-room where his wife awaited him by the
tea-table.

"Really, Aidmund," she began; but he cut in.

"It is most short-sighted policy on your part, Minna, to affront Lady
Burmester."

"But, my darling boy, the discipline of the schoolroom--"

"I believe to be excellent, but it must give way sometimes," replied
her darling boy.  "It is of primary importance that we should be on
good terms with the Grange.  You had your way about the Dow
invitation.  Let me have mine about this."

"Well, at any rate," said his wife, after a pause, "I have taught her
ladyship not to invite my niece and exclude my daughters!  A little
firmness, dear Aidmund, as I often tell you, works wonders!"




CHAPTER XV

A CLEVESHIRE TEA-PARTY

"And how came Miss Matilda not to marry him?" asked I.

"Oh, I don't know.  She was willing enough, I think; but you know,
Cousin Thomas would not have been enough of a gentleman for the
rector and Miss Jenkyns."

"Well!  But they were not to marry him," said I impatiently.

"No; but they did not like Miss Matty to marry below her rank.  You
know, she was the rector's daughter, and somehow they are related to
Sir Peter Arley; Miss Jenkyns thought a deal of that."

"Poor Miss Mattie!" said I.

                            --CRANFORD (Mrs. Gaskell).


The plentiful experiments, by various nations of late, in the
difficult science of government by a democracy, have left some of us
strongly of opinion that the ideal form of rule would be the
despotism of the angel.

Failing the angel, however, one is reluctantly forced to the
conclusion that despotism of any other kind is the very ... well,
exactly the other thing.

The despotism of Mrs. Cooper was growing hard for Melicent to bear.

It was curious to watch the infatuated complacency with which she
daily presided over that tableful of turbulent young lives, of whose
springs of action she knew, and wished to know, nothing.

What she exacted was submission: nothing more.  She did not desire to
convince her children's understandings; only to hinder them from
giving expression to their thoughts.  As they sat in empty silence
around her, while she prattled of trivialities, she congratulated
herself on their docility.  Like the Roman conquerors of old--"she
made a solitude, and called it peace."

Miss Lathom had had the wit to see, within a week of her first
arrival, the kind of service which was required of her.  It was not
asked that she should approve Mrs. Cooper's judgment; merely that she
should not question it.  So long as she kept the girls at lessons for
the required number of hours, it did not matter how little they
learned.

She had adapted herself to circumstances in order to find a _modus
vivendi_; for she was poor and ignorant, and would have found it
difficult to obtain another post.  But sometimes she was frightened,
of late, at the heat of the fires which she had kindled.

The animal side of these big, country-bred, well-fed girls was
strongly developed, and cried for a vent.  Their starved minds gave
them no contrast, no resources.  They were without the influences of
dancing, drilling, tennis, cycling--without the stimulus of sheer
hard brain-work, the thrilling interests of school-life and
girl-friendships.  There was nothing to stem the flood of their
growing consciousness of sex.  Gwen especially, vigorous and
full-blooded, had arrived at a dangerous crisis.

Meanwhile, Melicent was beginning to find life empty and depressing.

From the moment of the arrival of Mrs. Dow's invitation, her cousins
discussed Lance Burmester, Alfred Dow, and young Freshfield, from
morning to night, except for those monosyllabic portions of time
which they spent under their parents' eye.  They talked of the way
these young men walked, the colour of their eyes, the shape of their
collars, the sound of their voices, their little manners and
expressions.  They meant no harm.  They only needed an outlet for
that natural craving for romance, which their mother thought proper
to ignore.

Melicent laboured hard to find a field for her own superfluous
energy.  On the first morning after her arrival, she had risen early,
made her bed, aired her room, borrowed the housemaid's brush, swept
and dusted.

Her aunt did not, for two or three days, discover what she was doing.
But when she did, she was scandalised.  What would the servants
think?  Millie showed herself inclined to esteem but lightly the
possible amazement of the two clumsy girls who formed the Vicarage
staff.  But her domestic efforts were straitly forbidden.

On the following morning, awake as usual, and roaming into the
schoolroom while the household slumbered, she marked her uncle in the
kitchen garden at work, patient and lonely, filling up the hours that
must elapse before he could get his breakfast.  She went and offered
her vacant moments.  He replied that her aunt would not like it.  She
was urgent, and he, wavering, presently allowed her to help him dig
potatoes.  They did not talk, but she worked with nimble capacity;
and when she appeared again next morning, he surprised in himself a
sneaking feeling of gladness.

But that day, Mrs. Cooper discovered the new pursuit; and it was
stopped.

Millie, however, was not to be defeated.  She next turned her
attention to her cousin's dress; and, finding some stuff which had
been lying in the house for months, cut out and made up blouses for
Maddie and Gwen.  This last matutinal pursuit found more favour; and
henceforth the girl's fingers were fully occupied, though her mind
continued to crave.

It was in wild spirits that the party started for Crow Yat, which was
a fine old house, standing much lower down the Dale, and for a
wonder, built of red brick, and not grey stone.  It had been the
shooting-lodge and toy of a baronet of George II.'s time, who had
tired of it, and sold it to Alfred Dow's ancestor.

There was a drawing-room with four fine doorways, the pediments
enriched with Adam's mouldings; and here the stiff-necked, proud old
dame received the Vicarage troop with evident desire to show that she
considered herself fully as good as they, if not better.

Alfred, a really first-rate specimen of his class, in that riding
dress which is the natural garb of the well-to-do Dalesman--who does
not drive on his unspeakable roads unless obliged--atoned for his
mother's lack of cordiality by the sincerity of his welcome.

He led them through the garden, gathering late roses and dahlias with
a lavish hand; then in among the deep lush orchard grass, filling
their hands with delicious apples.  He sent a boy up the meadow to
gather mushrooms for them to take home; but on Melicent's vehemently
expressed wish, laughingly allowed them to do it for themselves.

Then, at the clanging of a great bell, they came back to the house,
where, in the elegant, panelled dining-parlour, sat Mrs. Dow,
presiding over a real Cleveshire tea--jam tarts, cheese-cakes,
currant sandwiches, cartwheels, turnovers--pastry in all its forms;
ham that must be tasted to be thoroughly appreciated, cut in wafer
slices; heather honey in the comb; peaches, great, luscious, Victoria
plums, black Hamburg grapes, the despair of Sir Joseph's head
gardener, who every year saw "they Dows" take the prize over his head
at the annual show.

Had Melicent been a little older, she would have been amused at the
keenness of the old lady's scrutiny--her suspicious glances from one
to the other in search of charms which should explain her son's
sudden interest in the Vicarage lasses, an idea fully as repugnant to
her as it could have been to the outraged Mrs. Cooper.

To look at the fine young man, with his good physique, excellent
morals and clean ancestry, was to make one wonder what better fate
would be likely to await one of these ordinary, ill-educated girls,
samples of thousands of their kind scattered over the land.  And, had
the vicar's niece read "Cranford," she might have thought of the
silent tragedy of Thomas Holbrook and little Miss Matty.

It was a satisfaction to Mrs. Dow that Alfred took more notice of
Melicent than of any of the Miss Coopers.  She took her for about the
same age as the vicar's youngest; such a child could not be dangerous.

All tea-time young Dow was trying to draw her out, a task which was
never easy; but every time he coaxed her out of a statement about
Boers and their ways, he roared with appreciation of her crisp,
incisive style.

Tea was half over when a horse was heard to clatter into the
stable-yard.  Melicent, who happened to be seated exactly opposite
Gwen, saw her face suddenly suffused with an overwhelming, unbecoming
blush.  A minute later, a shadow darkened the window, and a voice
called in greeting.  It was Freshfield.

Of course he was invited in to tea, and he expressed himself greatly
surprised at the company he found.  Gwen had managed to seat herself
near one end of the table, an empty chair beside her; to which the
agent gravitated naturally.

The conversation flagged, somehow.  The rules under which they lived
made the girls tongue-tied when in company.  Madeline, at nearly
eighteen, had no glimmering of the necessity that is laid upon the
well-bred to set others at their ease.  They were all gauche and
heavy, and ate largely.

Tea over, a move was made to the fold-yard to see the beasts; and
this done, someone suggested hide-and-seek.  Miss Lathom demurred at
this; she was uneasy at Freshfield's coming, though she had been
privy to his being apprised of their whereabouts.  She said with some
decision that she was quite sure the vicar would not like it.

"Well, then, look here, Tommy," said Mr. Freshfield, with engaging
familiarity, "the vicar must jolly well not be told.  See?  I hear
from all those girls what a trump you are."

Under this pressure, Tommy yielded.  But to the surprise of all,
Millie declined it altogether.

"If you are sure Uncle Edmund would not like it, I shall not do it,"
she said simply.  "I am always doing what he doesn't like
unintentionally, but I won't do it on purpose."

She quietly went indoors to old Mrs. Dow, whose dignity and good
sense had attracted her.  This was a nature she could understand, a
woman who thought no household work beneath her.  Mrs. Dow,
flattered, offered to show her the dairy.  She had made no doubt that
so small and pale a thing was town-bred, and was soon filled with
astonishment at the knowledge and capacity displayed by the girl.
Alfred, coming in, found them discussing the rival methods of African
and English farms with much vigour.  He came to ask Millie to go and
look at some new plantations which, just now, were his particular
delight.  But as soon as they were out of hearing, he turned to her
as if seizing a chance, and said:

"Should you be angry if I ask whether there's anything between your
cousin and young Freshfield?"

"I'm not angry," said Millie; "but I know nothing about it.  I can't
tell you anything."

He took off his cap to run his fingers through his curls, which was a
habit Millie had seen her cousins mimic.

"I had a mind to ask you to warn her; think she'd take it?" he asked.
"Warn her that he's not in earnest; he's just playing.  She's raw and
doesn't see over-many young men.  But I know for a fact that he's
engaged to a girl with a bit o' money."

"Then why does he flirt with Gwen?"

"From something he let drop--something I heard him say--I think he
has a bit of a grudge against the vicar.  Thinks vicar looks down on
him.  Would like to put a spoke in his wheel."

Melicent made a small sound of dismay.  "What a cad!" she said.

"That's what I think."

"It shows my uncle to have been right in holding a low opinion of
him," was the contemptuous verdict.

"Eh, but you hit straight!" he returned, in admiration.  "Only, if
he'd been better treated the cur wouldn't bite."

They had no chance to say more, for two of the girls, all shyness now
wholly cast aside, came charging down the path, and with shrieks
warned them to make a dash for home.

Melicent was left in great discomfort.  She had knowledge which she
could not tell what to do with.  She felt, rather than knew, that to
warn Gwen would be worse than futile; especially now, when her
refusal to play hide-and-seek had irritated all the girls against
her, as well as Tommy, whose conscience was sore, and who
consequently was for once downright ill-tempered.

Melicent had a dreary walk home.  She would have been utterly
discouraged but for the fact that she was to see the Helstons again
on Monday; and some chance there must be that day for her to tell her
friends all that was in her heart.

Life at the Vicarage was too aimless.  She had one hundred pounds of
her very own, and she was determined somehow to make this yield her
two years' good schooling.




CHAPTER XVI

THE BREAKING OF BOUNDS

  "And I, so young then, was not sullen.  Soon
  I used to get up early, just to sit
  And watch the morning quicken in the grey,
  And hear the silence open like a flower,
  Leaf after leaf--and stroke with listless hand
  The woodbine through the window."
                --ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.


Melicent's little bedroom was her sole refuge; and this her aunt, in
her petty tyranny, denied her as often as she could.  It was her
theory that solitude was bad for girls.  She liked them to be always
herded together, under the eye of Tommy or one of their parents.
Melicent must work, write, read, in the constant babble and racket of
the schoolroom.  The first time she found her niece curled up in the
window-seat of her own room with a book, she swooped upon her with
her sweetest smile, to see what the volume was.  On discovering it to
be "Alison's History of Europe," she shifted her attack from the
reading to the spot where it took place.  It was a draughty window;
dear Melicent had better go into the warm schoolroom.

Melicent felt her tongue tingle to resent this aimless autocracy.
The window of her little room was dear to her.  It overlooked the
grey stable-yard, with the glowing copper of autumn beeches, the
dazzling gold of birches, peeping over the further wall, flanked by
black Scotch firs, whose trunks seemed to glow red-hot when the sun
was in the west; and behind them lay the long purple ridge--Weary
Ridge--that fenced Fransdale away from the world on the eastern side.

The window was quite close to one inner corner of the quadrangle
formed by the house and outbuildings.  At right angles to it was the
warm, dry, stone barn, on the upper floor of which the old mare's
fodder was stored.  There was a door, the upper half of which had a
wooden shutter, on a level with Melicent's casement; and running up
to this, one of those exterior flights of stone steps, so common in
Cleveshire stable-yards.

Melicent felt sure that it would not be difficult, if there were
something to hold by, to swing herself out of the window, upon the
rectangular slab of stone, which was only a little to the left.  In
this way she could get out, if ever her longing for a solitary ramble
overcame her.  The gate of the yard was locked at night, but she knew
were the key hung; and at times her longing to be free and away on
the magical moors was like a voice calling, or a force drawing her.

There were only four windows overlooking the stable-yard; one was on
the landing, one was her own, and the remaining two belonged to the
boys' room, which was of course, during term, untenanted.

On Thursday night, her head full of what Mr. Dow had said about Gwen,
she found herself unable to sleep, and actually carried out her plan.
There was a staple, securely fixed in the wall, just by her window.
To this she firmly attached a bit of rope's end with a loop.  Sitting
on the sill, and jumping lightly to the left, she alighted on the
verge of the stone slab, and, holding firmly to her rope, swung
herself round, got her balance, and stood safely.  It was easy to
slip round the two dark sides of the yard and open the gate.  When it
was shut behind her, and she stood under the wall, in the grass of
the church meadow, she felt herself swallowed up in the immensity of
the night.

For an hour she wandered in the little wood, and sat by the side of
the tributary beck, rushing noisily over its stony bed to join the
trout stream below.  Then, no longer restless, she quietly returned,
accomplished, not without difficulty, her re-entry, and creeping into
bed, was instantly asleep.

It so happened that she mentioned her exploit in the course of the
following day to her cousins.  They were all cross and out of sorts,
their mother having forbidden a walk to Bensdale that day--Bensdale,
where there awaited them an instalment of a new serial--Phyllis and
the Duke having been duly united by an archbishop in the bonds of
matrimony, amid a blaze of splendour and a pageant of ancestral halls.

"We might just as well live in a prison," grumbled Maddie.

"Prisons are not so easy to get out of," replied Melicent: "If you
dislike it so, why don't you run away, and decline to come back
unless they make terms?"

"Run away!" they all cried; and Gwen added, with a sneer: "Why don't
you try, if it's so easy?"

Melicent answered in all good faith:

"Because I don't want to seem ungrateful.  I know it was good of
Uncle Edmund to ask me here.  Only, you see, I don't fit, and I never
shall, because I don't want to be the kind of person that Aunt Minna
wants to make me.  So I shall not stay; but I don't want to run away
in the night, as though they ill-treated me."

The girls clamoured to know how she would set about running away, if
it came to that; and she simply told them that she had been out the
night before, and explained how she managed it.  They listened with
deep interest.

"Shall you tell them you went?" they asked.

"No; not unless I am asked.  I don't think myself bound to account to
them for every minute of my time."

"Yet you played the Pharisee yesterday, and would not join our game."

"I think that's different.  To do what we were specially told not to
do, in front of other people, is publicly to shame Uncle Edmund and
Aunt Minna.  Now my going for a breath of air was quite private;
there was nobody to be scandalised."

"Well," observed Babs, "if you had been seen, half the village would
have been scandalised."

"That's true," said Melicent thoughtfully.  "I think I had better not
do it any more; but it was very tempting, just to try."

On the following day, Gwen had neuralgia, and was in great pain.

"It's her bed," said Maddie, "it's in such a draught; and mine's no
better.  Mother says it's all right if we keep the window shut, but
we can't sleep with the window shut, so we always get up and open it,
after she has been in.  I wonder we're not both blown away!  I tell
you what, Millie, I wish you'd let her sleep in your bed just for one
night, to get rid of it.  We don't want to tell mother, or she'll
keep her indoors, and perhaps stop her from going to Clairvaulx on
Monday."

"Why, of course I will!"

"Yes; but remember, we mustn't change till after mother has been
round last thing."

"All right; Gwen had better slip in when the coast's clear," said
Melicent unsuspiciously.

The change was duly effected, without detection, and next morning
there was no doubt that Gwen's neuralgia was cured.

It was Sunday morning--a warm, sunny, October day, and the golden
light streamed into the Vicarage breakfast-room.  The girls were all
assembled, waiting for breakfast, with newly brushed hair and clean
frocks.  All looked healthy, cheerful and glad.  But the vicar's
face, as he walked in, was in sharp contrast to the gay morning.
More than the customary hush descended on his entrance.

"Melicent," he said, greeting nobody, "oblige me by taking your
breakfast into the study.  Eat it there, and wait till I come."

Melicent stood up, staring in surprise.  "Why do you say this?  What
have I done?"

"What you have done cannot be so much as alluded to before your young
cousins.  Leave the room at once."

Melicent drew herself up.  She looked round at all the furtively
dropped eyes--at Gwen's cheeks, oddly suffused with sudden
scarlet--then at her uncle.

"I have done nothing to deserve to be so spoken to," said she.  "When
you find out the truth, I hope you will apologise to me."

"We wish to hear nothing from you, Melicent.  Go in silence."

Tommy behind the tea-tray, and her pupils seated round, were
well-nigh paralysed with terror.  What had been found out?  Were they
implicated?  Would Melicent obey?

She took up her cup and plate, tossed back her hair, and walked out,
white and speechless.  The vicar shut the door, sat down in the dire
silence, and began his breakfast.  They all chewed their way through
chunks of pork-pie in unbroken gloom.

When his daughters had filed away to learn their collects, their
father betook himself to his study and the culprit.

Melicent had finished her breakfast, and stood by the window.  He sat
down at his table, and fixed his eyes upon her.

"Well," said he, "I suppose, before condemning you, it is only right
to ask you what you have to say."

"I don't know what you mean," said Melicent.  "I have nothing to say.
I am waiting for you to explain why you treat me in this manner."

"Unfortunately," he said, "all is known.  You will hardly deny that
you got out of the window of your bedroom, when I happened to see you
do it."

"I do not deny that I did," she returned quietly.

"Perhaps you will tell me why you did so?"

"It was partly that I wanted to see whether I could, and partly that
I was restless.  I am used to be out of doors a great deal more than
Aunt Minna likes me to be."

"When I tell you, Melicent, that I know what happened last night, you
should see how much worse you are making things by quibbling like
this."

"Last night!  But--"

"We are speaking of last night."

"I am not.  The only time I got out of the window was on Thursday
night."

"Do you seriously mean to tell me that you did not get out of the
window last night?"

"Certainly!  I did not."

He sat staring; and in the pause that followed, enlightenment came to
Melicent, and she wondered at her own blindness.  Gwen had asked to
sleep in her room, in order to get out of the window!

That being so, she could not clear herself without incriminating her
cousin; and in a flash she saw that if she said Gwen and she had
changed beds the previous night, the others would all deny it.  Her
mind, travelling with the speed that comes in moments of crisis,
discerned the strength of the case against her.  Even Tommy did not
know of last night's escapade.  Both she and Mrs. Cooper could say
with confidence that all the girls were in their own beds at
half-past ten on Saturday night.  She wondered at herself for being
deceived by the flimsy pretext of the toothache, when she thought how
unlikely the story would sound.

The girls must deny everything.  They had no other course.  They had
to go on living at home, and such a thing, if known, would make life
impossible, and turn their prison into a veritable dungeon keep.

She, on the contrary, had no intention of remaining where she was.
Her uncle had already a bad opinion of her.  To allow it to grow
worse seemed the only course in the dilemma so suddenly developed.

After long thought, her uncle spoke, in a gentler tone than he had
ever used to her.

"Confession, Melicent," he said, "is the only possible way to lessen
my extreme displeasure.  Last night, or to be more correct, at two
o'clock this morning, I heard a casement flapping in the wind.  I got
up, believing it to be the landing window, and left my room without a
light, to shut it.  I found it closed, and was on the point of
pushing it open, to look out, and see whence the noise came, when a
movement in the yard below caught my eye.  Two people were seated,
side by side, upon the stone steps near your window, the window of
which was no doubt causing the disturbance.  One was a man, the other
was my niece.  I saw that the man had his arm round your waist.  His
face I could not distinguish, but in the light of recent events, I
consider myself justified in supposing it to have been Alfred Dow."

The girl's short, indignant laugh, naturally increased her uncle's
idea of her shamelessness.

"I saw you"--he went on--"I saw you escort him to the gate, shut and
lock it after him, return and scramble in, by means of a piece of
rope, into your bedroom.  I stood there, broad awake, and saw all
this.  After hearing my story, will you persist in your denial?"

"No," she said, after a minute's thought; "I do not persist in it."

"You admit," he said, with righteous indignation blazing under the
even surface of his voice, "that you did all this?"

"No," said the girl; "I do not admit it.  If you saw it, there is no
question of my denying it or admitting it Either the thing is
certain, or you have made a great mistake."

"Why not confess openly, Melicent?"

"I have nothing to confess."

"This is mere quibbling," he said, still temperately.  "But what you
have said I consider tantamount to a confession.  One thing, and one
alone, you can do to lessen your guilt.  Give me the name of the man
who has violated my home, insulted my office and degraded my niece."

She was silent

"You will not?"

"I cannot."

"You mean you will not."

"I mean that I cannot."

He almost wished that she were a boy, and could be caned.

"I believe you to be wilful and undisciplined," he said, almost
appealingly, "but I am most anxious not to judge you too harshly,
Melicent, for I know what your bringing up has been.  I will not make
too much of what I hope and pray may have been merely a wild,
rebellious prank.  If you will tell me frankly what you did, and the
man's name--"

"I can't do either."

"Then, Melicent, most unwillingly, I must require of you that you
remain in the schoolroom while we are at church.  Think things over,
and by the time we return, God grant you may be of a better mind.
Come with me, please."

Melicent followed him without a word.




CHAPTER XVII

A CRISIS AT THE VICARAGE

  "She said sometimes: 'Aurora, have you done
  Your task this morning?  Have you read that book?
  And are you ready for the crochet here?'
  As if she said: 'I know there's something wrong;
  I know I have not ground you down enough
  To flatten and bake you to a wholesome crust
  For household uses and proprieties.'"
                      --ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.


The schoolroom was empty.  Tommy and her brood were preparing to go
to church.  The vicar laid a little book upon the table and addressed
a few sincere words to the girl.  Narrow he was, prejudiced be might
be; but a man who, however mistaken, is quite sincere, has always
some power.  Melicent felt that, had she been to blame, she might
have repented at his bidding.

It was not expected that the party from the Grange would be at
Fransdale Church that day.  Mrs. Cooper was inly disconcerted when
she saw that they were there.  She found their inquiries after
Melicent, when service was over, difficult to parry.

"A little _disagreement_?" she murmured, smiling, meaningly, and
speaking as though taking Mrs. Helston into special
confidence--always her manner when she was not telling the
truth--"just a little question of discipline between dear Melicent
and her uncle.  We must hope for the best; but it needs much patience
and kindness to eradicate the results of such training."

Mrs. Helston, though furious, realised that no indignation on her
part would help Melicent's cause.  She longed to ask questions, but
knew she had no right to interfere in the matter at all.  Mrs.
Cooper, smiling and chattering, got away with adroitness on which she
prided herself, with no questions asked as to whether Melicent would
be allowed to go to the picnic next day.

Meanwhile Tommy and her pupils were in a terrible panic.  They dared
not guess what had been found out.  Gwen, on considering the matter,
could not believe it possible that it could be her last night's
escapade, because, if her father had by some mysterious means seen
anything, she felt sure that he would have taken the culprit in the
act.  By no means a student of character, she forgot that he never
took action in the heat of the moment.  They all crept home from
church with shaken nerves, fully expecting that the storm would burst
on their return.  But nothing happened.  Whatever Melicent's offence,
she had certainly not incriminated them.

They were all so burdened by guilty consciences that, had it been
their custom to be natural before their parents, anybody could have
seen that something was wrong.  However there was nothing unusual, at
the Vicarage, in embarrassed, sulky silence, or monosyllabic answers:
so all passed off without disturbance, and they were free to stare at
one another in the seclusion of the schoolroom, from which the
captive was now removed, and ask what could possibly be "up."

Mr. and Mrs. Cooper were meanwhile at a loss.  It was certain that
they could not keep their niece among their own children, but what
other course was feasible?  They could not afford to support her at
school.  She was too young to be turned out to get her own living,
not to mention the probability of her disgracing herself and them,
wherever they placed her.

Her aunt went in during the afternoon, and tried her blandishments,
but was confronted with a steady, cold assertion that the girl had
nothing to say.

That night, Melicent slept in another room, with a screwed-down
window and a locked door; and in the solitude she broke down utterly,
and wept pitifully for her dead father.  She yearned for the presence
of somebody she knew--somebody that believed in her; she even
thought, with a gust of something like tenderness, of Bert Mestaer
himself.

But in the morning, when her aunt brought her breakfast, she was
self-contained and proud as ever.  She heard the waggonette from the
Grange drive up to the door, in dazzling sunshine.  From her window
she saw it pass out of the gate, after a twenty minute's delay caused
by Mrs. Cooper's not being ready--saw Maddie, Gwen and Theo, in the
new blouses she had made and hats which she had trimmed.

They had not been long gone before the key turned in the lock and
Tommy crept in.  She looked flurried and eager.

"Oh, my dear," she gasped, "at last I have a moment!  Do tell me what
has occurred!"

Melicent laid down her book and looked up, "Has Uncle Edmund not told
you anything?"

"Not anything!"

"Then of course I can't."

"Really, Melicent, you are an impracticable girl!  How can we help
you if we don't know the scrape you're in?"

"You can't help me."

"Oh, very well!" huffily.  "I came to let you out, and say that of
course Babs and Bee and I should not tell, and you might just as well
come and sit in the schoolroom with us."

"You are very kind, Miss Lathom, but I shall stay here.  I don't
cheat."

"I can guess what it is," observed Tommy, with an air of penetration.
"Your uncle has found out that you got out of window!"

There was no reply.

"I thought so!" said Tommy triumphantly.  "I was sure of it!  That
would be just the thing to make him angry.  But I must say, I think
they're punishing you too severely, considering you were shut up all
yesterday.  However, cheer up, my dear!  These things blow over, you
know."

"You're very kind," said Melicent wearily, "but I think you'd better
go away.  I feel sure they told you not to come and talk to me,
didn't they?"

Tommy grew red.

"You're an ungrateful little cat," she said.  "I come here trying to
be kind to you, and I daresay you'll go and tell tales of me!"

"You ought to know by now that I don't tell tales," said Melicent;
"but as I can hardly ever speak the truth here without telling tales,
the only thing I can do is to hold my tongue."

Miss Lathom flounced out of the room in a rage.

Meanwhile, the Vicarage party met with a very cool reception when
they arrived at Clairvaulx.

Lady Burmester clearly showed her displeasure.

"Surely you are too hard upon a girlish fault," she said stiffly.
"If Melicent was in punishment all yesterday, you might have relented
to-day, when you knew how anxious we all are to have her."

"If you knew the gravity of my niece's fault," said the vicar, in his
most distant manner, "you would, I believe, think differently.  She
has proved herself altogether an unfit companion for innocent girls,
and must, I fear, be sent to some institution where the moral sense
may be developed by constant supervision."

"Good Lord!" said Sir Joseph.

The six elders were standing together, the girls having strayed off
in company with Lancelot and Mr. Freshfield.

Mrs. Helston's cheeks were crimson.

"Will you think we ask too much if we beg to be told what she has
done?" she inquired, in a voice that shook.

"Our claim to know is a strong one," put in her husband, "as, if Mr.
Mayne consents, we should like to undertake the child's education,
and give her a home.  We hoped that, as you have plenty of daughters,
and we have none, you would perhaps spare her to us, who have grown
attached to her.  But we ought to be in a position to know what
tendencies in her to guard against."

"I presume," said the vicar, "that you would rather that we did not
speak before Sir Joseph and Lady Burmester."

Her ladyship laid her hand on her husband's arm, and led him away
across the grass.

"If I were a girl," she said, "the very sight of Mrs. Cooper would
make me wicked.  She makes my flesh creep.  I wish somebody would
take out her ear-rings."

"You are an ungenerous, ill-regulated woman," said Sir Joseph
placidly.  "I daresay they've had a sweet time of it, trying to break
in Harry's precious African filly.  He hints at her having had a past
already.  I expect she's a bit of a fire-brand in a peaceful
parsonage."

The four others strolled in an opposite direction.  The vicar, with
real reluctance, and with brevity, described what he had seen
Melicent do.

"I do not believe it!" cried Brenda Helston hotly.

"Brenda!" cried her husband, while Mrs. Cooper grew pink, and
trembled visibly.

"It was one of the maids masquerading," went on Brenda, unheeding.
"The very idea of Melicent doing such a thing is outrageous!  One of
the maids used her window to get out by!  I daresay she sleeps
soundly."

The vicar had had his moment in which to collect himself.

"Unfortunately," he said, "my niece does not deny it."




CHAPTER XVIII

A NEW HOME

  "----Many, I believe there are,
  Who live a life of virtuous decency,
  Men who can hear the Decalogue, and feel
  No self-reproach; who of the moral law
  Established in the land where they abide
  Are strict observers; and not negligent
  In acts of love to those with whom they dwell,
  Their kindred and the children of their blood.
  Praise be to such, and to their slumbers, peace!
  --But of the poor man ask, the abject poor;
  Go and demand of him, if there be here,
  In this cold abstinence from evil deeds;
  And these inevitable charities,
  Wherewith to satisfy the human soul."
                                        --WORDSWORTH.


It was getting dusk--too dusk to see to read the "History of Europe";
and Melicent, who had scarcely slept all night, stretched herself
upon her bed and fell asleep.  The flash of a light in her eyes awoke
her, and starting up, she saw her uncle come in with a lamp, followed
by Mr. and Mrs. Helston.

She gave a low, thrilling cry, like that of a babe who sees its
mother.  She had not expected this.  The vicar had never seen her
look as she did when running to her friends' arms.  He set down the
lamp and left them together.

It was long, however, before they could persuade her to tell them
anything.  They were obliged to make her clearly understand the
serious nature of the charge against her.  They showed how essential
it was to remove such a stigma.  They guessed at once that she was
shielding someone; and after much urgent entreaty, she was induced to
tell them all, and leave the upshot to their discretion.

"I am sure," she said, when she had related the whole story, "that it
would not be the least use to tell them the truth; for two reasons.
First, they would think the bare idea of Gwen's behaving like that
simply ridiculous.  Aunt Minna thinks they are all babies, and talks
to them as if they could hardly understand what she says; and they
mimic her afterwards.  Second, because all the girls would deny it.
It would be my word against Maddie and Gwen.  Which do you think they
would take?"

"There would be somebody else," observed Harry Helston firmly.
"Young Freshfield.  I know Sir Joseph has been dissatisfied lately,
and he will have about settled his hash if any of this gets about.
The thing is--how to trap him?  There will be no more chance for Gwen
to use that window, I take it?"

"He would still go on writing to her at Bensdale under cover to
Tommy, I expect--but oh, you must not say anything about it!  You
don't know how awful it would be!  Tommy would be sent away; they
would lead the most weary life--wear chains on their ankles, I should
think."

"But, dear," said Brenda gently, "what is to happen if this is
allowed to go on?  Gwen does not know what she is doing.  Suppose she
came to harm, what should we feel, who had never warned them of her
danger?  Now I think of it, I noticed little things between her and
that man once or twice to-day.  But she is so unformed, and--to
me--so unattractive, that I never thought of such a thing."

"She's rather a handsome girl," said her husband.

And now Melicent exhausted her eloquence to implore them not to say
anything.

"You see, it will only make them worse," she said.  "If they were
trusted, they would be all right; if they were given credit for good
sense and good feeling, they would be quite different.  But they are
treated like fools, who would be knaves if they were allowed their
own way, and it just makes them treacherous--they must have an
outlet!  It's only for adventure and frolic that Gwen did it--it's
the only thing they have to think about--they're not allowed to read
or think, or do anything but just vegetate; how can such a life
content them?  And now, if this is known, they will be all the more
shut in and tied up, and crushed down, and I shouldn't wonder if it
drove them to do something really wrong."

This view of the subject constituted a real difficulty.  Revelation
would merely tighten the prison-bars, and would so increase the very
evil it was intended to remove.  A more perplexing problem had never
been offered to the Helstons.

They put it resolutely away from them for a time, in order to tell
Melicent about their own plans for her future.  They told her that
they hoped to receive, in about a fortnight's time, Carol Mayne's
formal permission to take charge of her for the present.

They had some private means, but did not consider themselves rich
enough to justify them in adopting her entirely.  In all respects,
they thought it would be doing her a truer kindness to educate her
with a view to making her independent.  Harry Helston, artist and
dreamer by temperament, was architect by profession.  He had spent so
much time in travelling the world, and absorbing the idea of all the
masterpieces of his great profession, that his fortune was by no
means made.  It was perhaps a drawback to him professionally, that of
him it might be said as of a certain statesman who "thought in
continents," that he, Harry Helston, "thought in cathedrals."  The
ornamental suburban residence, with its nurseries chopped away in
chunks to make the external elevation picturesque, was his pet
abomination.  He would do no work, where cheapness was to be the
marring key-note.  Simplicity and the best craftsmanship were his
mottoes.  His work lay in London, where he and his wife, after their
travels, were about to take a flat.  But he was also now determined
to fulfil his youthful ambitions, and build for himself the house of
his dreams in Fransdale itself.

Sir Joseph, who was a byword in the district for his stern refusal to
sell or lease land for building purposes, had relented in his case;
and the home of his imagination was to arise in a level meadow
half-way down the Dale--a pleasure house for holiday hours--a final
refuge for old age.

For the austere mystery of the North had made him as completely a
captive as was Melicent herself.

The girl could hardly believe that she was to visit every year, in
the company of those she loved best, the Dale which had gripped her
fancy so powerfully.  The Helstons were to rent, until their own
house should be built, the tiny cottage upon which Melicent had
looked down, when she sat upon Tod's Trush.  The darkness of her
misery was all changed into pure joy by the time her friends took
leave.

Before Mr. Helston lay the formidable necessity of seeing Mr. Cooper.
He was fairly perplexed.  Should he speak, or not?  He found himself
wondering what advice Mr. Hall, of Ilberston, would be likely to
give.  But there was no time for reflection.  He left his wife still
with Melicent, and found himself in the study without having made up
his mind as to his duty.  His intention flickered to and fro like a
candle in the wind.  Was he shirking truth because it was
disagreeable?  Or was he contemplating an unwarrantable interference
into another man's affairs?  Was he justified in giving information
which would result in deeper mismanagement of those unaccountable
beings, young girls?  Or if he stood aloof, was he guilty of
Cain-like indifference to his brother's peril?

He sat down in more discomfort than he ever remembered to have
suffered before.  His indignation that Melicent should suffer under
any kind of stigma made another powerful factor in his desires; and
he did not know for how much he ought to let it weigh.  As he looked
at Mr. Cooper's cold, dark face, he was conscious of a desire to
demand that, as it had been publicly announced that Melicent was in
disgrace, so it should be publicly known that she was cleared.  But
he felt pretty sure of the difficulty there would be in establishing
the truth.  He saw a distinct likeness between the vicar and his
niece; he had seen the same hard glint in Melicent's eye when she was
on the defensive.  The Coopers gave him the idea of being always on
the defensive--on the watch to parry and frustrate any attempts upon
their confidence or their intimacy.

"I shall be glad to hear that you have elicited any information that
may tend to Melicent's rehabilitation," said the vicar, in tones
wholly devoid of expectancy.

Helston found himself speaking without having in the least determined
what he meant to say.

"Melicent has told us what she knows," he said.  "We think it clears
her.  But we respect her motive for silence, and are inclined to
think that no good end could be served by telling you what she told
us."

The vicar looked stony.  "But I think I must ask to hear it," he said.

"It was told us in confidence.  Melicent is--is content to feel that
we know it.  I--I am not sure that I am entitled to let it go
further."

The cold, blue eye still fixed him.

"You convey to me the idea that Melicent is shielding someone else.
Is this so?"

Helston twirled his soft hat idly in his hands, and looked at the
ground.

"I do not feel at liberty to say," he said at length.

"If that be so, the person shielded must be a member of my
household," said the vicar, in a voice which sounded to Helston like
the crackling of ice in a hard frost.  "I suppose you can scarcely be
venturing to insinuate that it was one of my daughters?"

"I insinuate nothing; I do not know who it was.  It was not Melicent."

"Far be it from me," said Mr. Cooper, after reflection, "to traduce
or speak ill of my sister's child; but if she has resorted to the
desperate expedient of trying to fasten blame upon one of my poor
girls, I must reluctantly lower still further my opinion of her.  I
fear you and Mrs. Helston are altogether deceived in her."

"We are willing to take the risk," said Helston immediately, "and to
relieve you of the charge of her to-morrow, if you are willing."  His
eyes twinkled as he added: "We have no daughters to be contaminated."

"Had it not been so, I could not in honour have allowed you to
undertake the charge of her.  I am quite frank with you.  I tell you
plainly that I will in no case keep her among my own girls; and I do
not know how to meet the cost of maintaining her elsewhere.  If you,
knowing what you know, are willing to take her, my feelings can but
be those of gratitude and relief."

"Then we may consider it settled!" cried Helston, rising.

Perhaps his haste betrayed how he was yearning to get away, for a
look of suspicion crossed the vicar's face.

"Do you not think I have a right to ask you to be more explicit?" he
said.

His visitor looked down, and it was after an interval that he slowly
said:

"You have a right.  I ask you to waive it.  What I have heard rests
wholly upon Melicent's word, which, I understand, you do not trust."

The vicar could not say that he did.

"You would not take her word against that of your own children?"

"Certainly not!"

"That is natural enough; but it convinces me that there is no more to
be said."

The vicar looked down, thinking deeply.  Then abruptly, and perhaps
with the deliberate idea of taking the other by surprise, he demanded:

"She would not tell you the name of the man?"

"There is no man in the world to whom she would accord a clandestine
meeting."

"Perhaps you forget that I was an eye-witness, Mr. Helston."

"Would you swear in a court of law that the girl whom you saw was
Melicent?"

The vicar hesitated.

"Why," asked Helston, "did you not at once enter her room, and
convince yourself?"

"I never act in haste; besides, there is no doubt.  She wore
Melicent's hat--a kind of broad, flat cap which she wears in the
garden; and she entered her room!  Mr. Helston, I fear I must ask you
to be explicit.  You have said too much, or not enough.  What is it
you suggest?"

"I suggest nothing, for I know nothing, except the fact, of which I
am sure, that the girl you saw was not Melicent.  Had you gone to her
room, and confronted her then and there, you would have known more
than I do at this moment."

"I think you are bound to tell me what my niece has told you," said
the vicar; and a new uneasiness was in his voice.

"No; I am not bound to, and I have no wish to.  But there is a
further question, as to whether I ought to.  I--I can't speak without
inflicting great pain, which I am very loath to do.  But I can't get
away from the feeling that perhaps I ought not to allow you to go on
in ignorance of the true state of affairs.  Perhaps I have said
enough to put you on your guard.  Let us leave it so."

"No;" the answer came at once and firmly.  "We cannot leave it so.
You must tell me the tale which my niece has poured into your ears,
in simple justice to me and mine.  If Melicent has slandered her
cousins, she should be punished."

"Equally, if they have allowed her to suffer for them, they should be
punished," said Helston, stung at last.  "May I ask if you have made
any sort of inquiry among them?"

"Decidedly not.  I have not allowed them even to know the way this
misguided girl has behaved."

Helston hardly knew whether most to pity or be enraged at such
blindness.  He turned away and walked to the window.  The girls were
just passing through the garden on their way from feeding their
rabbits.  They all glanced in a furtive way at the study windows, and
Gwendolen met his eyes fully.  She averted her face in confusion, and
hurried on.  The visitor turned abruptly to the vicar and took leave.
He could not trust himself to say another word.  Mr. Cooper
accompanied him to the hall door, and they found themselves suddenly
face to face with Gwen, coming in.

Her father, in a marked way, encircled her with his arm, as if to
show his confidence.  The girl was trembling, scarlet, deeply moved.
She turned upon Helston.

"Then she held her tongue?" she gulped out.  "She has not split, even
now?"

Helston's face lit up.

"Does that touch you, Miss Cooper?" he asked kindly.

"It does.  I'm most things that are bad, but I simply can't be such a
sneak as this.  Father!  It was I, not Melicent, whom you saw in the
yard!  And you may thrash me, or starve me, or do what you like with
me, but I will never tell you the name of the man who was with me!
Oh, Melicent isn't the only person in this house with any sense of
honour!  She's--she's--taught me a lesson!  You tell her from me, Mr.
Helston, that if I'm ever any good in this world, it'll be all owing
to her."

The vicar had not said one word.  He stood where he was, the arm
which his daughter had shaken off rigid against his side.  His face
grew bloodless, his expression a marvellous exhibition of
self-control.

It seemed to Helston kindest to say good-bye and leave the house
hurriedly.  His admiration for Gwendolen was great; after what
Melicent had told him, he could partly guess the effort it needed to
make her confession--a confession which must expose not only her own
wrong-doing, but the whole working of a long system of deceit; for
the matter could now hardly be allowed to rest where it stood.

Contact with Melicent's honesty and courage had stimulated this girl
to show herself honest and courageous.  He felt very hopeful of her
future, though he himself winced at the ordeal now before her.




CHAPTER XIX

AN UNMARKED FESTIVAL

  "Day of days!  Unmarked it rose,
    In whose hours we were to meet;
  And forgotten passed.  Who knows,
    Was earth cold, or sunny, sweet,
    At the coming of your feet?"
                              --MRS. MEYNELL.


As her visitor departed, Brenda Helston turned from the door and let
herself sink into an easy-chair by the fire with a gratified laugh.

Five years had not changed her, except that her soft, abundant hair
was whiter.  No wrinkles marred her smooth pink cheeks, her eyes were
still bright, though her forty-fifth birthday stared her in the face.

The room in which she sat--the drawing-room of her flat in Collis
Square--was an unusual room.  Harry Helston strongly held the theory
that Londoners must live inside their walls.  The pictures which hung
on these were all originals and all good.  A line of bookshelves
encircled the room like a dado, the top forming a shelf for the
reception of rare bits of pottery, brass, _cloisonné_ and curios.  In
one corner the line of books was broken for the admission of a large
secretaire.  With this exception, and that of a roomy writing-table
near the fire, the room contained no furniture but chairs of every
variety of comfort, and small solid tables, holding no ornaments, but
convenient for the reception of cups, books or papers.  There were
flowers in every place where they could be put without risk of being
knocked over.

The visitor who had just left the room had gone unwillingly, but
gladdened by a cordial invitation to return later.  His hostess
thought of him with pleasure and satisfaction.  He was immensely
improved by his term of foreign service, and it was gratifying that
his first visit on reaching London should have been to her.  She had
always liked Lance Burmester; and the fact of his having proved
himself so emphatically all that a Special Correspondent ought to
be--of his having chosen to have a profession, and to work hard at
it, being, as he was, the eldest son of a wealthy man--had by no
means lessened her good opinion.

She rang the bell, gave some orders to the maid who answered it, and
was still in reverie--perhaps building castles in the air--when her
husband came in, chuckling.

He held an evening paper in his hand.

"Brenda, here's something that will amuse you," he said, stooping to
kiss her affectionately.

She looked up eagerly.

"I have news for you, Harry!  Guess who has been here to-day!"

"I'll guess afterwards, but first I must read you this.  It's about
Melicent.  Won't she be furious?  She did think she had dodged the
halfpenny interviewer."  He unfolded his copy of the _Hauberk_ and
read aloud:


"'THE LADY ARCHITECT

"'The decision of Miss Lutwyche, three years ago, to complete her
course of architectural training by acquiring a practical knowledge
of building, caused a considerable flutter of the dove-cotes at the
Polytechnic when she applied personally to be enrolled.  There was no
rule, however, by which she could be excluded, and she has been ever
since, the only lady among six hundred male students.

"'Having completed her course, she is now taking steps to set up for
herself, and is to begin by superintending the erection of two
labourers cottages from her own designs, upon the Cleveshire estates
of Sir Joseph Burmester.  Miss Lutwyche has an intimate knowledge of
the tastes and requirements of the natives of the district in
question, and it is understood that she is strongly of opinion that
the question of the housing of the poor will ultimately be
successfully tackled by women and not by men.

"'Simplicity, durability and convenience are the keynotes of her
work.  It is known that she had much to do with the erection of the
wonderful house which her adopted father, Mr. Helston, F.R.I.B.A.,
has just completed in Fransdale, which has been described as the most
imaginative specimen of domestic architecture produced by an
Englishman during the last three hundred years.  It has been
seriously suggested that the house in question may revolutionise the
idea of the English country house, and that the day of gables,
barge-boards, rough-casting and timbering is over.'"


They looked at each other in mischievous amusement.

"She _will_ be angry," said Brenda; and, after a moment's silence,
burst out laughing.

"Think I'd better not show it?"

"Oh, you must let her see it; because, if you don't, someone else
will--inevitably."

Helston leaned back in his chair, with reminiscent eyes fixed on the
glowing fire.

"You and I were right, Brenda, when we believed her to be above the
average: she ought to go far."

"Never for a moment have I doubted it," his wife answered.  "She has
power!  Her smallness, her silence, her strength--it is a wonderful
combination.  Many a time I have thanked God for her."

"I fancy," said Harry reflectively, "that Mrs. Cooper to this day
believes that we shall repent, and that it was Melicent who corrupted
her entire household, girls, maids, governess, all in the space of
two or three weeks."

"If she does, the vicar knows better," returned his wife, "and is
glad enough for Gwen and Theo to come to us whenever they can."

"I believe we made one mistake," thoughtfully pursued the man.  "I
have often wished that I had not complied with the vicar's written
request that the Burmesters should be told nothing.  I don't want
them to think there is anything to conceal, as far as Millie is
concerned.  You see, Mayne doesn't like the circumstances of her
leaving Africa talked about, and Cooper doesn't like the
circumstances of her leaving the Vicarage talked about.  At this
rate, it seems to me that she may become a Woman with a Past, if we
don't take care."

"Oh, pooh," said Brenda; "don't make a fuss about nothing.  Everybody
knows what the Coopers are."

As she spoke, a gay voice, a dog's bark, a scuffle, was heard
without; and the girl they both loved whisked in, waving a roll of
vellum in her hand.

"Behold," said she, "the result of my labours!  A certificate about
the size of an ordinary table-cloth, signed by about a dozen men whom
nobody ever heard of.  If that doesn't convince people of my
competency nothing ever will!"

She tossed the document in Brenda's lap, and sat down on the
fender-stool, a little out of breath.

She had not changed greatly since her early teens; but she had
improved.  She was still small, though not too small; still pale, but
with the clear, rose pallor of a Malmaison carnation.  Her soft, fair
hair was becomingly arranged, her movements graceful, her manner
decidedly good.

"It's going to snow," cried she.  "March is going out like a lion!
Pater, I hope the wind won't nip our crocuses."

"A Cleveshire crocus laughs at frost," said Helston.  "But will a
Cleveshire maiden laugh at an impertinent newspaper paragraph?"

"Paragraph!  You don't tell me!  Where?  After all my trouble!"  She
stopped short, indignant, her cheeks suddenly rose-colour.  "Well, I
don't care," she concluded defiantly.  "Ne'er a reporter of them all
shall flout me out of my humour."

"Shall I read it?"

"Certainly!"

Helston did so, not without relish.  When he had done, the girl made
a sound of disdain.

"Charming!" she said.  "But what does it matter?  Does anybody whose
opinion I value form that opinion upon the _Hauberk_?"

"If you will start doing what nobody has done before,--"

"Well, somebody must start," said Melicent composedly, "or nobody
would ever get anywhere.  After all, these things matter so little.
People very soon forget; and one is not nearly so important as one
believes."

"Your common-sense and self-possession are getting quite odious,
miss," said Brenda languidly.

Melicent was thoughtful.

"Very likely it is true what they say--that a business woman has got
to sacrifice something.  But I always was practical, you know."

"So little do we know ourselves," gasped Helston.

"Why?  Am I not practical?"

"Dreamer, idealist, dweller in Utopia, believer in the Fourth
dimension and in the sum of the really important things that nobody
can classify--go to!" said he gravely.  "Tell that to the reporters,
but not to the unfortunate pater who had to hold you in when
designing a house!  'Bridling the Tweed with a curb o' stane' would
have just been an interval for light refreshment."

Melicent, her arms about her knees, laughed blithely.

"For sheer power of vituperation, you are hard to beat," she said.
"Well, mater, what have you been doing all day?"

"When you have done railing at each other, you shall hear.  I have
news of a really exciting character, but I shall not tell it until
there is a suitable demand."

Melicent whirled round and clutched her.

"What has happened?  Speak instantly!  Something nice?  Something to
take out the taste of that par.?"

"I have heard news and received a visitor: who but Lance Burmester?"

She had no reason to complain of lack of interest in her hearers.
They rained questions upon her.

"He is in town for one night only," said she.  "Goes down to
Ilbersdale to-morrow; so I implored him to come back and dine.  He
demurred, on the ground that he had two friends with him, whom he
could not desert One is a Captain Brooke, a friend picked up in
Africa.  The other is--guess, Melicent!"

There was a peculiar intonation in her voice.

Melicent looked up quickly, and met a mischievous look; and suddenly
colour flooded the girl's face.  Quite unexpectedly to herself, she
did what she was never wont to do--she blushed; and she felt as
though the blush covered her like a garment to the very feet.

The sensation made her furious.  Why should she blush?  At the memory
of a period of her life now so incredibly remote that it seemed like
a previous incarnation?  She sometimes felt, in the infrequent
moments when she recalled her amatory experiences, as though she had
merely dreamed the savagery, the bestiality, of her African days; as
though she had first awakened to life when her uncle drove her out
upon the high heathery Nab that overlooked the moorlands.

Brenda's hint evoked a rushing stream of unpleasant, importunate
memories.  Was it possible that Bert had bridged the five years'
silence?  That he was still in pursuit--still claiming the promise
made in a half-delirious moment?

Her inmost being sickened.  It could not be!  Not now, on the very
threshold of her career--now that she had grown used to happiness and
love and England.  Disgust was so acute that she grew actually faint.

With a craving for air she sprang from her low seat by the fire,
stood up, drew a long breath, flung back her head.  What useless
panic!  She was free: no promise could be said to bind her!  Why
should she fear?

The shock, the overwhelming spasm of apprehension, passed away so
quickly that the Helstons had barely time to wonder what was amiss
when she took calmly on her lips the name that haunted her.

"Do you really mean that it is Bert Mestaer?"

Brenda laughed.

"Bert Mestaer!  What a notion!  You would hardly expect Mr. Burmester
to make friends with him!  Oh, no; it is someone whom you will really
like to see--surely you can guess!"

"Mr. Mayne?"

"Of course!"

The relief, the reaction, were extraordinary.  Melicent's head swam.
With more demonstration of feeling than was usual to her, she clapped
her hands.

"Oh, that is good!  I am pleased!  What a pity he did not get back in
time for my twenty-first birthday last spring!  I wonder whether he
will think that I have changed!"

"Your wonder will be speedily set at rest.  As it appeared that Lance
was inseparable from his friends, and that this was his only night, I
told him to bring them both back to dinner at eight.  I sent
Elizabeth for fish and cream, and I wish you would go into the
dining-room on your way upstairs, and see that the flowers on the
table are all right."

"Well!" cried Melicent, and heaved a sigh.  "Things are happening
to-night in the bosom of this peaceful family.  Pater, just put away
that odious newspaper in the table drawer, so that nobody can see it.
To think of Mr. Mayne being in England!  Why didn't he write and say
he was coming?"

"I fancy he only quite suddenly found that he could get away.  You
see, all his plans are changed.  He is to be Bishop of Pretoria."

"Bishop!  Oh, lucky Pretoria!"

Melicent paused again, her eyes full of memories.  She saw an open
grave, a long black procession of uncouth people winding down the
rough fields, past the Kaffir huts--the sun blazing down on Carol
Mayne's sharp-cut, ascetic face.

"_I am the Resurrection and the Life.  He that believeth on Me,
though he were dead, yet shall he live._"

The thought of what her heart had been then, torn with hatred, racked
with grief, savage, sullen, lonely, arose in sharp contrast with the
thought of all that had been since, all that she had come to
understand, believe and hope, in these full years of growth that lay
between.

Moved by a rare impulse, she stooped and tenderly kissed Brenda's
forehead, before going to inspect the flowers upon the dinner-table.




CHAPTER XX

CAPTAIN BROOKE

  "What man would risk the danger twice,
    Nor quake from head to heel?
  Whom would not one such test suffice?"
                            --A. C. SWINBURNE.


Not Melicent herself looked forward to the moment of meeting with
more eagerness than did the Bishop elect of Pretoria.  He had been
through many anxieties during his first months of guardianship; and
his gratitude to the Helstons was immense.  It was most natural that
he should look forward with interest to a sight of the girl he had
saved.

She was not present in the drawing-room when the three men arrived,
but the cordiality of the Helstons' reception was delightful.  Lance
was grateful to them for including his friend, a big, silent man, who
had been with much difficulty persuaded to come.  Brenda assured him
that six was a far better number than five, and made him welcome with
sincerity which could not fail to please.

"But he wouldn't have come at all; he would have held out
obstinately," said Lance gaily, "but for one thing, one mysterious
reason, which will transpire later.  You needn't blush, Brooke."

"Haven't the least intention of it; don't play the fool, Burmester.
I suppose it was natural for an outsider to feel that he was
intruding on a party of friends who were meeting after long
separation."

"Just as well for you to become acquainted now, for you'll be sure to
meet at Fransdale," said Lance easily.  "I suppose you are going up
for Easter, Mrs. Helston, and I am taking Brooke and the Bishop to
Ilbersdale."

As he spoke, the door opened, and all three men turned to watch
Melicent as she came in.

She had rather more colour than usual, and her expression was
strangely arresting.  Her evening gown was white, and trailed over
the soft carpet with a delicate rustling.  She walked straight up to
Carol Mayne, her eyes shining, her two hands outstretched: and he
caught them in his, meeting her glance with the piercing, deep-set
eyes she remembered so well of old.

"Well!" he cried.  "So this is you!  How thankful I ought to be that
my responsibilities are over!  Ah, well, I don't think I should have
known you, if I had met you in the street, but I am beginning to
recognise the eyes, the brow!  The smile is new.  I never saw that in
Africa; did I, Miss Lutwyche?"

She looked up gravely, but with a certain kindled enthusiasm, far
more impressive than a girl's laughter.

"_Miss Lutwyche!_" she said reproachfully.  "I shall not allow that.
As for you, you are not a bit changed.  I should know you
anywhere--Bond Street, or darkest Africa."

"What about me, Miss Lutwyche?" cried Lance pleadingly.

"You have improved," she said, with an air of critical appraisement.
"You are not nearly so--lady-like as you used to be."

They all laughed.

"Are you still a crack shot, as you used to be?" he cried.

"I shoot every autumn.  I have improved," she replied demurely.

When Captain Brooke had been presented, they all sat down, and the
talk hung fire a little.

"It is too big," said Melicent, with a little sigh.  "There is so
much to say, we don't know where to begin.  Mr. Mayne, I know, is
thinking of me with my hair in a pig-tail, and a calico frock,
slouching across the yard with a copper bucket; and Mr. Burmester is
thinking of a time when I was locked up in disgrace in the Vicarage
schoolroom, and not allowed to go to a picnic; and Captain Brooke is
thinking how disagreeable it is of people to have reminiscences he
cannot share."

Captain Brooke smiled a little.

"I am thinking that it is hard to fancy you in a calico dress with a
copper bucket," he said.

Melicent was suddenly grave.

"People who have always lived in England don't realise," she said
absently.  "We dwell in a kind of Garden of Eden here, and nobody
appreciates it.  They should go to some place such as I was brought
up in, and learn what thorns and briars lie outside the garden gates."

"I saw a good deal of it during the campaign," the soldier answered.
"A good deal of outer darkness, I mean."

"Does England seem good after it?" she asked.

"Exactly what you say.  Like the Garden of Eden."

At the moment dinner was announced, and they went into the
dining-room.

"I suppose," said Melicent, who was seated next Mr. Mayne, "that it
is of no use to ask you after old acquaintance?  It is so long since
you left Slabbert's Poort?"

"Well," he answered, "I have kept up with one or two of the folks
there.  But the general scatter, when the war broke out, made great
changes, though, as you know, the place was never in the line of
march.  Marten Brandt still owns the Vierkleur."

"I often meant to ask you in my letters what became of Otis?"

"The great Amurrica?  It is reported that he made himself notorious
in the Boer Irish brigade, but later on--after the capture of
Kroonstadt--he turned up on the British side, got a commission in a
scallywag corps, how I know not, and is quite a great person now."

"Not sure he ain't a colonel; I knocked up against the beast," said
Lance.  "Remember hearing about Gouverneur J. Otis, eh Brooke?
Remember the story of Sal's Drift and the stampede of the gun mules?"

The two men laughed, as at a common memory.

"Worst of him was, the brute was so witty," said Lance.  "I believe
all our officers knew he was not to be trusted, but they made no end
of a fuss with him.  Daresay he'll be turning up in England soon, in
some swell house that's been lent as a convalescent home, and flirt
with all the titled girls as bold as you please."

"Let's see; he was the chap who got his head punched by Millie's Boer
champion, wasn't he?" asked Mr. Helston.

His wife gave him a warning glance.  Young Burmester was present, and
he knew nothing of the girl's vicissitudes, nor was it desirable that
he should.  Besides, there was a stranger among them.  She could see,
by the way he instantly began to speak, that Mayne was as desirous as
she to turn the subject; but Lance had caught the word.

"Hallo, Miss Lutwyche! had you begun breaking heads and hearts, even
before you came over?" he asked gaily, across the table.

"Boers don't trouble about hearts," said the girl, with composure.
"We were a pastoral people, and never did anything interesting.  It
is you from whom we expect tales of prowess.  Did you never escape in
a goods train, or scale a prison wall, or--"

"As to that," said Lance, "I've a magnificent yarn, all ready for
telling, only this beggar"--indicating his friend, who sat next to
him and opposite Millie--"tried, before he would come here to-night,
to get me to promise not to tell."

Melicent had wholly succeeded in turning away the subject.  The
silent captain reddened, looked morose, and was heard to murmur that
Burmester was a rotter.

"I hope you were not so rash as to make the promise in question?"
cried Brenda.

"Well, do you know, as far as to-night goes, I'm afraid I did!" owned
Lance.

"You did," said Brooke distinctly.

"But the fact of it is," said Lance lightly, "that he saved my life.
Ever heard it said that if you save a man's life, he's sure to do you
a bad turn?  Look out for me, Brooke."

"I'll look out for myself," was the unamiable reply.

"But it's only if you save from drowning that the proverb applies,"
said the host.

"Well, this was drowning.  River suddenly rose while the column was
crossing; and the last men got washed away.  But this is spoiling my
yarn.  I'll keep it for when Brooke isn't about."

"I told you I should spoil sport if I came," said Brooke grimly.

Melicent looked at him with some amusement

He was a fair man, severely tanned by exposure.  He was clean-shaven,
and the salient feature of his face was his large, finely-cut, strong
yet delicate mouth: a mouth which lifted his otherwise rough-hewn
face up to a different level, and made it full of possibilities.
With such a mouth a man might be a poet, a soldier, a statesman; but
whatever he was, that he would thoroughly be.  He was also shy, to an
extent that was amusing in such a Hercules.  When he spoke, he
muttered: and he hardly ever raised his eyes.

The gentlemen did not linger over their wine.  Mayne was anxious to
talk to Melicent of her future, and Lancelot was astonished at
himself for the anxiety he felt to return to the drawing-room.  He
remembered a day when he had seen a slip of a girl seated on Tod's
Trush, and how he had said to Helston: "One is conscious of a
personality."  He was vividly conscious of it now.  It was the
"indefinable something" that Melicent possessed.  She never spoke
much, but always gave the fascinating impression of vast reserves
behind, of a boundless store from which she could give more, and
always more.

He was vexed with Mrs. Helston for engaging him at some length in
talk, which she did advisedly, to allow Carol to talk to the girl.

It was with interest and satisfaction that Mayne listened to her, and
found out how soon she hoped to be self-supporting, and how close
were the ties that bound her to her friends.  There seemed no cloud
upon her horizon; life, which had begun so stormily seemed, like many
a rainy English morn, to be breaking out into a cloudless sky.

"But there is one thing I want to ask you about," said Melicent
presently.  "I have one wrinkle among my rose-leaves.  It is only a
little thing, yet at times I fear it I have a constant dread that ...
you know who ... may turn up.  I expect it is very silly of me.  Men
soon forget these things; and in so long a time, he is sure to have
forgotten.  But I have wished to see you, to make sure.  I didn't
like to write about it.  I can't help a dreadful kind of feeling
rushing over me at times, that he..." she looked round.  Nobody was
in hearing but Captain Brooke, idly turning over music on the piano;
she dropped her voice--"that Bert Mestaer--may still think he has a
claim on me."

There was a silence, which the chat of the group by the fire did not
seem to break.  Captain Brooke earnestly studied the song he was
reading.

"That idea--the idea that Mestaer might still think of you--would not
be pleasant to you?" asked Mayne.

"Pleasant?" the word was a gasp.  "But you see the life that is mine
now," she said tremulously.  "You remember the house of bondage--the
darkness and shadow of death."

"Bert Mestaer wanted to loose your bonds."

"Oh, no!  Only to bind me to another master!"

"I think you wrong him there, Melicent."

She turned towards him, put out one hand, and laid it on his.

"It was you who saved me; you delivered my soul from the snare of the
hunter," she said.  "If Mestaer let me go, you were the only man that
could have persuaded him.  You know it; we need not discuss it.  What
I want you to tell me is, whether you have seen or heard anything of
him; whether he is alive or dead."

"He was certainly alive when I left Africa.  He did splendidly during
the war.  I believe he is considered the finest scout in the British
army.  I feel sure I may take it upon myself to say, on his behalf,
that he will never make himself obnoxious to you.  You need be in no
fear of him."

"He has forgotten all that nonsense about me?"

"I don't exactly know what you mean by nonsense, Millie.  If you mean
his love for you, I don't think I can truly say that he has
forgotten."

She made a little sound of dismay.

"But he is in process of forgetting--he must be!" she cried.
"Anyhow, he doesn't expect me to start off to Africa to keep the
promise he says I made?"

"Nothing could be farther from his thoughts, I assure you."

"Well, that is what I wanted to be sure of!  Now I shall breathe
freely again.  I will confess to you now, that I had a terrible
moment this evening.  Mater said Mr. Burmester had come home, and
laughed and asked me to guess who was with him!  I leaped to the
conclusion that it was Bert Mestaer, and I suddenly found myself in
the grip of a blind terror.  I thought I should faint, all the horror
of that dreadful time came back so clearly.  I don't think I could
have faced him...."

But Lance was no longer to be held back.  He broke away from his
captors, and came towards Millie, calling for a song.  Captain
Brooke, who still stood forlorn and rigid by the piano, leaning his
chin on his hand, was roughly pushed away.  Melicent sat down without
shyness, and sang two or three ballads in a voice that--like
herself--was small and flexible and very distinctive.  The last thing
she sang was that wonderful little piece of inspiration,

  "The night has a thousand eyes."


Captain Brooke was turning over for her.

"That's very true," he said,

  "'The mind has a thousand eyes,
  The heart but one,'"

he repeated thoughtfully.

"Yes," she answered; "yet many people seem content with the one!  I
suppose all women used to be!  Think what an awful fate, to look on
life merely as a matter of sentiment!  The thousand eyes are better,
don't you think so?"

"I never tried," he answered simply.

The reply struck her as remarkable, but she had no time to reflect
upon it, for Lance again struck in:

"Seems to me wonderful, with a profession of your own, that you
should find time to learn to sing so beautifully," he said.

"The singing is my recreation," she replied, "the other my serious
work."

"Ah!" cried Lance, "and that reminds me of old Brooke's business and
the reason why he came here to-night!  Do you know, Miss Lutwyche,
Brooke wants to build a house, and he's been reading a paragraph in
the _Hauberk_ about a lady architect."

Melicent grew pink, and looked down.

"Captain Brooke won't want to give his work to such a complete
novice," she said demurely.  "Now that he has seen me, he will want
to retire gracefully from his intention, and you put him in a cruel
dilemma by mentioning it."

"I like trying experiments," said the Captain, with more animation
than he had yet displayed.

Everyone was now crowding with interest around the music-stool where
Melicent sat.

"What and where would your house be, Captain Brooke?" asked Helston.

"It would be in my--my--the place my people come from," he replied.
"It's in Wiltshire."

"Wiltshire!  That's a variable county; on Salisbury Plain?"

"No; it's a pretty village.  Clunbury, they call it."

"What kind of house do you think of building?"

"I should leave that entirely to Miss Lutwyche."

"I say, Melicent, here's your chance!" cried Helston mischievously.
"You'll be able to send another paragraph to the _Hauberk_?"

"How dare you?" she cried, threatening him in mock rage.  "Oh ... but
this is wonderful!  Are you serious, Captain Brooke?"

"Quite.  I have bought the land.  Only about twenty acres.  I should
like your advice about the actual site of the house."

"Well, Millie, if you give satisfaction over this, your career is
made," cried Brenda.

"But what kind of house do you want?" cried the girl.  "You must tell
me that!"

"No; that's what I shall pay you to tell me," said Millie's client
calmly.  He smiled for the first time, as he added: "You have the
thousand eyes."

"Well!" said Melicent, "the agitations of this day have been quite
too much for me!"

"Do your people live at Clunbury?" asked Helston of the Captain.

"Oh, no; not now.  They sold their last acre in my grandfather's
time.  A churchyard full of their graves is all that is left.  It is,
however, a part of their land that I have bought back."

"That is the kind of thing I would like to do myself," said Carol
Mayne.

"Now, Miss Lutwyche, is the house rising before your mind's eye?"
cried Lance, pleased at the intense interest created by the scheme.

"Not yet," said Melicent; but her eyes were dreamy.  "What kind of
people were your forbears?" she asked the Captain.

"Merely yeomanry," he answered, "and wholly Philistine; people with
one eye."

"And do you want the house to resemble them in tone?" she asked,
smiling at his allusion.

"No.  I want it to be the typical house that is in your mind; the
house you would live in, if you could choose."

She laughed.

"Take care!  You don't know how lordly my ideas may be!  You will
have to bring them down to the level of estimates."

"Do you want the thing put in hand at once?" asked Helston.

"Yes, I do.  I should like Miss Lutwyche to come down and look at the
site before I go to Ilbersdale for Easter."

"Well, Millie, you must make up your mind!  Do you accept the order?"
cried Carol Mayne.

"I should like to come down and look at the site before I finally say
Yes," said she.  "And ask Captain Brooke all manner of questions."

"That will suit me well," he replied gravely.  "To-day is Monday.
Shall we say Thursday?"




CHAPTER XXI

MIRAGE

  "He who has seen a city in the skies
  Knows he may never cool his tired eyes
  At the fair waters of that Paradise.

  But the one moment when he thought his feet
  Would enter that dream-city, was so sweet
  That he can bear the noonday and its heat."
                                  --ALICE HERBERT.


The sky was clear and starry; the night was swept by the strong,
clean current of the March wind, as the three men stepped out into
Collis Square.

"How shall we get back?" asked Burmester, lighting his cigar.
"Train, tube or bus?"

"I shall walk," said Brooke, with brevity.

They were standing just beneath a street lamp, whose strong light,
falling on his face, showed it haggard and strained.  Burmester did
not observe it.

"You don't catch me!" he cried jovially, flinging away his light.
"Come on, Bishop--leave that maniac to his own devices.  Here's a
hansom, the very thing."

The jingling cab pulled up at his signal, and he sprang in.  "Rhodes
Hotel!"

"All right, Burmester, I'm walking a bit with Brooke," said Mayne.

"The deuce you are!  Nice trick to play on me!" cried Lance, as he
was bowled away.

"Why can't you go with him, and leave me to myself?" growled Brooke,
lighting a pipe with a hand that shook.

"Because I want your society, though it seems the desire is not
mutual."

There was no reply.  They tramped eastwards in silence, past the
Marble Arch, down Park Lane into Grosvenor Square, and on into
Berkeley Square, where suddenly Brooke said:

"I wish you would go."

"You're not playing fair," quietly replied Mayne.  "Conspirators
ought to share confidences."

"Confide away then."

"All right, I will.  I am as pleased as I feel sure you must be,
though you don't show it, at the result of your idea."

"Pleased!" echoed Brooke.  "Pleased! ... Great Heaven!  Pleased, are
you?  But then, you see, I am not you.  Bishop, I know every line of
her face, every tone of her voice, though I never heard but one in
the old days!  I know her as a man knows the land where he was born;
and she could sit looking full at me across the table, and not know
she had ever seen me! ... Man!  How have I come through it?"

"Excellently.  I don't understand you.  Surely it is what you were
hoping for, planning for--complete non-recognition?  What would have
happened if she had known you?  You heard what she said to me about
you?"

"Every word;" his voice sank to a despairing whisper.

"She is at least consistent," said Mayne.

An inarticulate murmur of assent.

"I don't think the non-recognition wonderful," went on Mayne.  "You
see, she never thought about you, or even looked at you attentively
in old days.  And think what you were like then!  Not only the outer
man has changed.  Remember that I myself, when first I saw you
without your beard, and without your slouch, and without your
oaths--in your uniform, drilled into a self-respecting Englishman--I
did not know you."

"But you did, as soon as I said: 'Don't you remember me?'"

"Exactly; because you did say so.  But you have not said so to Miss
Lutwyche; and don't you see that your very failure to do so would
banish the idea of your possible identity from her mind?  You come
before her with looks, words, manners, your very nationality--all
changed!  An English landed proprietor!  Doubtless she knows nothing
of the great diamond find on the High Farm, nor of the fortune you
have realised.  The idea that you should adopt such a method of
gaining access to her, would never strike her, it would not seem
characteristic of her preconceived idea of you."

"I don't know how I got through," said the Captain brokenly.  "When
she came in, looking like an angel from God ... and passed me by and
went up to you!  By George, Mayne, she was right!  It was you who
saved her!  But for you--"

"She was wrong; it was you," said Mayne.  "She will probably never
know the fight you made; women don't understand these things, and it
is as well they don't.  Things go like that in the world."

"She's beautiful, Mayne; don't you think so?"

Mayne laughed.

"I don't think her at all angelic," he replied, "but I will own that
she seems to me less unlovable than I used to think her in Africa.
Don't punch my head! ... Burmester admired her, I thought."

"Yes, confound him!"

"But you have made a splendid opening.  The idea of the house was a
masterly one.  It gives you endless opportunities and a common
interest.  Only remember, you must keep yourself well in hand.  As I
warned you, the game is a dangerous one.  One false move may cost you
all."

"The worst is over now," returned the Captain.  "The awfulness of
feeling that she's everything to me, I a nightmare to her!  I can
still hardly believe she didn't know me."

"Everything was in your favour.  She was full of my return, and of
relief that it was I, not you.  The silent Captain Brooke was a
negligible quantity."

"She never looked at me squarely but once.  That was in the middle of
dinner.  My heart nearly stopped.  I had to lower my eyes lest they
should say things.  Ah, well; you're a good sort, and no mistake.
I'm glad we've talked it out, though I was a sulky brute at first."

"H'm!  Yes; Melicent might think the change in you not so deep if she
had heard your way with me this evening," said his friend drily.
"The old Bert is still there, in spite of all the polish."

Bert laughed as he strode on, with his long, swinging step.  He made
a fine tribute to the creative powers of Sergeant What's-his-name.
There had been good material to work upon, and the right kind of
training; and the result was something like a miracle.

In the old days, Mayne had realised that this man was something out
of the common: but even he had not been prepared for his persistence,
nor for his wonderful _flair_ for knowing the right men, reading the
right books, doing the right thing.  During all these five years, no
week had passed without the exchange of letters between those two.
Mayne had sent up books, had cheered and inspired his pupil, had
never let him feel that nobody cared.  Bert had bent all the powers
of his strong mind and still stronger will towards the attainment of
his one idea.  His life had been a life of monastic purity, of iron
self-control, of self-denial and constant effort.  It was hard for
the priest to believe that such a wonderful thing could fail of its
reward.  But he had been troubled at what Melicent said that evening.
He almost made up his mind that he would tell her something of what
her influence had meant to Bert.  But his final decision was for
complete inaction in this most delicate matter.  Bert must fight his
own battle, and win his own victory.  The time had come for his
friend to stand aside.

Far into the night Mayne was considering the case.  He, with his
unusual insight into souls, had found a certain egotism and hardness
in Melicent.  The hardness was inherent--it had always been there;
and her present life of independence and success was likely to foster
it.  Did she know, at that moment, that a man was in London who had
spent five laborious years in fitting himself for her conquest, as a
nation may equip itself for a great campaign--and who was bent solely
upon that quest--he felt pretty certain that her only impulse would
be to escape from him, to guard her own freedom, to determine
resolutely never to be enslaved.

Would the constancy and persistence of the man be a match for the
hardness and self-will of the woman?

He thought Bert might stand a better chance of winning, were it not
for the bitter memories which were bound up in the girl's mind with
him.  That she should long remain in ignorance of his identity was
inconceivable: and when she recognised him--what then?

Bert was his own spiritual son; his desire for his success was
intense.  But now that he had seen Melicent, he was full of doubts.
Carefully as Bert had educated himself, the gulf between them was
still wide.

He could do nothing but pray.




CHAPTER XXII

RECOGNITION

  "Go from me.  Yet I feel that I shall stand
  Henceforward in thy shadow.  Nevermore
  Alone upon the threshold of my door
  Of individual life, I shall command
  The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
  Serenely in the sunshine as before."
                --SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE.


It had been arranged that the fledgling architect should be
accompanied by Mr. Helston, and have the benefit of his knowledge and
experience when she went down to look at Captain Brooke's estate at
Clunbury.  But fate decreed otherwise.  On Thursday morning Mr.
Helston was in bed with a high temperature and sore throat.  A
railway journey on a raw, gusty day in early spring was out of the
question for him; and Melicent was obliged to go alone.

Brenda suggested something about her being unchaperoned, which was
met by the young lady with unspeakable scorn.

"Better throw up my profession at once, if Mrs. Grundy is to have a
say in my business arrangements," she remarked; and caught her train
at Paddington with professional composure.

She alighted at a small station on a branch line, which was the
nearest point to the village; and as she stepped from the
compartment, Captain Brooke approached, in a suit of country tweeds,
gaiters and knickerbockers.  In such guise he reminded her of her
beloved Dalesmen, and the idea gave kindness to her smile of greeting.

As he approached, she noted that he looked pale under his tan, and
seemed not perfectly ready to speak at once.

"So Mr. Helston was unable," he brought out, after manifest
hesitation.

The girl looked surprised.

"I am so sorry!  He is in bed with a severe chill.  I bring you his
apologies.  But if you think he is indispensable--" she added, as an
afterthought, puzzled by the disturbance visible in his face.

"Oh! by no means.  It is good of you to come alone," he said
hurriedly.  "This way, please; I have only a hired trap at present,
and am putting up at the inn near here, which is two miles from the
village.  I've ordered lunch, but it won't be much good, I'm afraid;
these English country inns are astonishingly bad."

"Please don't apologise," she said.  "I am used to roughing it, and I
like it."

He smiled, as he tucked her into the dog-cart, and remarked, as he
climbed to his seat beside her.

"Collis Square didn't seem very rough to me."

"Ah!  But you haven't seen me at work.  I can lay bricks, mix mortar,
point walls--it's delicious."

He laughed.  "I feel sure you could do anything you tried," he said.

They drove on briskly, through a lane whose hedges were beginning to
show bronze buds upon their blackness.  The sky, after some
boisterous sleet storms, was washed a clear, pure blue.  A faint
golden haze of willow catkins brooded over the adjacent brown copses,
and the wet sparkles on the bare boughs threw back the sunbeams.
Here and there the lazy reek from a cottage chimney hung pearly
against the indigo fir woods--a typical English April, and a typical
English landscape.

"Do you like this country?" he asked abruptly, and his tone seemed to
imply that he thought anybody must.

She made a conventional answer that it was very pretty.

"Perhaps you don't care for scenery?" he inquired anxiously.

She turned to him laughing.

"Oh," she said, "scenery is my particular fad.  But this is too tame
for me.  You should see my Cleveshire moors and dales!"

His silence, in some inscrutable way, conveyed to her the idea of
extreme mortification.

"Do you mean," he presently asked, "that you wouldn't care to live in
this part of England?"

"I shouldn't choose it," she replied carelessly.  "But then, I have
no links with it.  I quite appreciate your reason for choosing it."

"You do?"

"Undoubtedly.  Your ancestry drew their living from this soil; they
ate the corn it grew, the cattle it fed.  In a real sense, you are
part of this little bit of little England.  There must be something
in you that is in mysterious sympathy with it."

"That's how I feel," he replied, as though gratified to be so
interpreted by her.  "But I admire the country for itself too; it
seems a great pleasure-ground--a sort of park laid out by God
Almighty."

"I like more mystery, more wildness."

"I've had enough wildness," he answered very determinedly.  "I like
this because of its cultivation and fertility and order."

"I'd like to show you Fransdale," she said, smiling.

"I hope you will," he replied.  "I'm going to Ilbersdale, you know."
He reflected for some minutes, then said: "Should you advise me not
to decide on this till I've seen the other?"

"What!" cried Millie, "when you've bought your land, and found your
ancestors and all!  I never heard of such a thing."

"I might put up a shooting-box on the moors," he said reflectively.

"You must be very rich," commented the girl, in wonder.

"I suppose I am.  I did a big deal in land out there," he replied.

Privately she thought he had more money than wits; but perhaps he
would make none the worse client for that.

They reached the inn, and he ushered her into the quaint, low
parlour, with the usual stuffed birds, coloured almanacks and corner
cupboard.

During the interval before the appearance of the roast fowl and
boiled ham, she unrolled the drawings she had brought, spread them on
a table in the window, and described them to him.  The sun streamed
in at the lattice, gilding her hair where it curled over and about
the edges of her wide, flat, dark-blue cap as she sat absorbed in her
plans and ideas.  Her companion drank in the details of her dainty
presence--from her fine skin to her firm, little hands, from her
natty, embroidered collar to the strong, laced boots appearing below
her short blue serge skirt.  He was considering whether he found her
more adorable in the lamplight in her white gown, or in the sunshine,
in her workmanlike, country suit Suddenly he was conscious that he
had failed to answer a question, and that a severe, surprised little
face was being lifted to his.

Their glances met; he had a moment's awful apprehension.  It seemed
to him that she had caught him unawares without his mask.  He had no
notion what was the question she had asked, and he floundered
desperately.

"You were saying--I am such a thundering ass--my mind had gone off.
I was thinking that you can see the Lone Ash, where I want to
build--from this window--there.  That hill to the left--"

The inn maid-servant, bringing in the lunch, saved him.

But his moment of confusion, so much greater than the occasion seemed
to warrant, had jarred the smooth, impersonal nature of Miss
Lutwyche's opinion of him.  There had been so remarkable a
look--almost of consternation--in the man's eyes as he faced her.
She had been at some pains to expound the main principle of the
Lee-Simmons system of drainage for isolated houses, which was her
special fancy, and which she was most anxious to have him adopt; and
it was certainly annoying to find that she had been speaking to deaf
ears.  But his curious expression when she had looked at him!  He had
seemed like one suddenly caught in the act--taken red-handed.  What
could the thought be which had absorbed his attention, and reddened
his brown cheek?

She was so kind as to repeat her information while they sat at lunch
together, and had no cause this time to complain of lack of
attention.  But his momentary lapse had occasioned in her a subtle
change of mental attitude.  She was, without knowing why, suddenly on
her guard--all at once concerned with this man, about whom before she
had not thought at all.

Of course she did not say this to herself.  Like all deep-seated
motions of the mind, it was spontaneous, unrealised.  But it was
there; and the man encountered it, felt it with his alarming
sensitiveness where she was concerned; and by degrees there arose up
within him a profound uneasiness, which made the simplest sentence an
effort.

Melicent soon settled, in her positive way, what was wrong.  She
thought the Captain, being rich and eligible, was nervous of being
_tête-à-tête_ with his youthful lady architect.  She spoke with
elaborate ease and unconcern, determined to show him there was
nothing to fear; but he seemed each moment more self-conscious.

There was, nevertheless, no doubt that he was interested--not only in
the speaker, but in what she was saying.  By the time lunch was over,
he had practically decided upon the Lee-Simmons idea, and was eager
to transport his architect to the scene of her enterprise at once.
He went outside to the little rough plot of green before the inn to
find the ostler; and urged by an impulse of such curiosity as she
seldom felt, Melicent went to the window to watch him.

A few village children were at play upon the green; and one little
girl, probably inspired by parents who hoped for some advantage from
the rich man who was going to make his home among them, shyly
approached him as he stood.

He had put his hands behind him, and forgotten himself in staring at
the hill crowned by the Lone Ash, where he meant his fairy palace to
arise.  The little fair girl advanced diffidently, shyly holding out
a big round bouquet of primroses, tightly tied together.  He turned,
looking down at her, half-amused; and Melicent thought that the big,
fine man and the blushing child with her flowers, illumined by the
crude spring sunshine, looked like the coloured supplement to a
Christmas Number.

The Captain accepted the flowers, felt in his pocket for a penny, and
turned back towards the inn door, with the intention of presenting
the floral tribute to Miss Lutwyche.

Now, what was there in that action--what sudden thrill of memory--of
recognition--of pain, like a sharp blow on a raw spot--darted to the
brain of the girl who watched in the window?

She had seen a man come into a room once, with a bunch of flowers in
his awkward, unaccustomed hand; she had heard the slapping thud with
which they had been hurled into the grate.

"_So you'll break your word!_"

It seemed to her that the words were spoken aloud, now, at this
moment, in the room.  And a blinding light illuminated her.  She
knew, as completely as a moment before she had ignored, that Captain
Brooke was none other than Bert Mestaer.

Waves of cold and heat, sudden dizziness clutched her.  He was coming
in--in a moment he would be there--she could not face him.

Terror prevented unconsciousness.  Catching at the furniture, she
staggered across the room to the inner room leading to the kitchen.

"Take me upstairs--a bedroom--I must lie down!" she gasped; and as
the maid-servant, scared by her white face, rushed forward and
encircled her with a strong arm, she gasped: "Don't say anything to
Captain Brooke ... please.  I shall be ... better directly."

The girl half supported, half dragged her up the narrow stair.

"Dear miss, what shall I do?  Burnt feathers?  Key down your back?"
cried she distractedly.

"Is there--cold water?  Yes, that's all.  Go away please.  Go!  Come
back in ten minutes.  Leave me alone now."

Melicent turned the key in the door, and sank upon the scanty
feathers of the rocky bed.  For several minutes her one overpowering,
paralysing sensation was fear.  She could not think at all.

She lay prone, while the surging currents of her nerves slowly
settled themselves and adjusted their balance.  Her sense of outward
things came back to her by degrees.  The fine cold air flowed through
the little casement with the sunshine.  Wheels crunched upon the
gravel below; a dog barked; someone spoke; in the distance a cow
lowed.  The world went on as usual, lapt in afternoon, rural peace.
But from her skies the sun had dropped.  The nightmare that had
pursued her for years was now beside her in bodily shape, dogging her
steps.  Mestaer had come back.

How came it that she had not known?  She answered herself bitterly
that it was because she had trusted Carol Mayne, and he had allowed
her to be deceived.  Not for one moment did she now doubt Captain
Brooke's identity.  The marvel was that she had not detected him at
once.

This had been the first time of her looking at him, he being
unconscious of the fact of her observation; and in that moment he had
betrayed himself, she could not have told how.

And now in what a net was she caught!  The thought of the man's
persistency turned her cold.  She was committed to his acquaintance,
involved in a business transaction with him--he was going to
Ilbersdale.  Even in Fransdale she should not be safe from him!  And
Carol Mayne had connived at this betrayal!

It did not take her long to form a decision on one point; namely,
that her only hope lay in going on as if nothing had happened.

Surely she was capable of that!  She, the self-contained,
self-reliant professional woman!

Reaction had set in.  Passionate anger, active defiance succeeded
fear.  It was quite simple, after all.  She had stolen a march upon
the conspirators and surprised their plans.  It was the best thing
that could have happened.  She knew now what to guard against--could
avoid intimacy and repel advances.

Springing from the bed, she dashed water into the basin, bathed her
hot forehead, and was once more her own mistress, all her spirit, all
her force, summoned up to defend her liberty.

She peeped from the window.  Captain Brooke stood waiting by the trap
below.  His attitude betrayed a subdued impatience.  Undoubtedly he
was much changed--completely altered from the man she had known.
There was real excuse for her non-recognition.  But that he should
have imagined that such an incognito could be sustained!  No wonder
he had betrayed nervousness that morning when he faced the idea of a
day alone with her!

Well, they were equals now!  He knew, and she knew.  If she could
prevent his knowing that she knew, all would be well.

She snatched up her gloves, and ran lightly downstairs, not allowing
herself time to pause, but passing straight out into the sunshine to
meet him.




CHAPTER XXIII

REBELLION

      "----You knew not me
  Master of your joys and fears;
  Held my hands that held the key
  Of the treasure of your years,
  Of the fountain of your tears.

  For you knew not it was I,
  And I knew not it was you.
  We have learnt, as days went by.
  But a flower struck root and grew
  Underground, and no one knew."
                          --MRS. MEYNELL.


"I'm afraid I've kept you waiting," she said a little breathlessly,
as she sprang into the cart.

"Oh, that's nothing, to a fellow who is always waiting," was his calm
reply.

"Always waiting!  What for?" cried Melicent, wonder overleaping
discretion.

"For the future, I suppose," he answered, after a short hesitation.
Adding, as though suddenly conscious of being eccentric: "You
know--that endless chivying of De Wet got on one's nerves."

"I can quite believe it," said Melicent cheerfully.  "But now,
to-morrow has come, as I used to say when I was a small child.
You've made your pile--you're an English landed proprietor.  You're
not waiting any longer."

"Oh, yes, I am.  There's one thing I haven't got yet," he said, a
slow, curious smile curving his fine mouth.

He did not look at her as he spoke, which fact was her salvation.
She could rule her voice, but not the rebel blood that waved live
banners in her cheeks.

"Obviously," she returned lightly, "there must be a mistress for Lone
Ash when it is built.  Is this what you're waiting for?"

Her own daring dazzled her.  It was a thing that he could not
possibly conceive her saying had she had any notion of who he was.

"Yes," he answered quietly, "that's what I'm waiting for."

"And that's just what you'll never get by waiting!" she cried gaily.

He turned sharply upon her.  "How do you know?  What do you mean?" he
asked, amazed.

"If you want a wife, you must go in search of one," she answered
mischievously.  "They don't drop into people's mouths."

"Well, that's what I will do," was his tranquil answer; "but one
thing at a time, you know."

"One thing at a time," she echoed, lightly; and as she spoke, he
checked his horse at the gate of a field.

"Here begins my property," he said, "and my idea is to have the drive
entrance-gate here, and the house over yonder, just below the brow,
screened from the road by those trees.  The ground falls away to the
south and west, you will notice, but the Lone Ash hill would keep off
the wind.  I want to know what you would think."

He had alighted, opened the gate, and led the horse and cart through.
Now he proceeded, striding over the grass, and Melicent, her arms
round her knees, forgot nervousness and bravado alike in her
professional enthusiasm.  They passed a large cluster of barns.

"The house was here," he said.  "The man who bought it found it too
far gone to repair, and knocked it down, leaving the outer shell for
barn walls.  Not much of a place, you see.  I don't know why they put
it here, except for the well.  But there shouldn't be any difficulty
about getting water.  I sank a shaft up yonder, where I am going to
show you, and we struck good water at thirty feet."

She found herself chatting to him about subsoils and surface water in
a wholly professional manner.

When he reached the place where he proposed to build, she found
herself unable to suggest an improvement.  It was an ideal site--near
the village, yet secluded, sheltered, but not shut in--overlooking a
bit of broken ground which gave quite a prospect; and a regular trap
for sunbeams.  There was little she could suggest by way of
alteration; she grasped the main features of his thought with instant
appreciation.  They sat down side by side upon the trunk of a felled
elm; she brought out her sketch-book, and drew suggestions.  By
degrees a house shaped itself to her mind's eye--a house full of
pleasant detail.

The south front was to face a terrace; the drawing-room to be at the
western end, with two sunset avenues, converging upon the large
door-window.  One was to focus the dying sun in winter, one in
summer.  Both were to be grass walks, cypress-bordered, and they were
to lead to a rectangular fish-pond, set with lilies, and reached by
shelving steps.  Beyond the fish-pond, a warm brick wall, with deeply
alcoved seats.

The cypress-edged grass walks were her special fancy.

"But don't have them unless you like," she earnestly advised.  "Some
people think them sad."

He would have had hop-poles at her recommendation, but he managed to
appear genuinely convinced.

Then, in fancy, his architect wandered back to the house--to the
hall, with its two-branched staircase, and the windows in the gallery
above.

"This house will be plain grey stone," she said, "and its roof will
be of tiles, to prevent the effect being too cold.  We shall try to
pick up tiles that are already weathered, so that it may not look too
new.  I will not introduce anything that is a deliberate imitation of
what was old, such as timbering, barge-boards, or painted woodwork.
You shall have no grotesques; you must not yearn for a letter-box
shaped like the Ace of Spades, as they have in Hampstead, nor for
garrets with the window set at the end of a tunnel, as one sees in
all the new toy suburbs.  Our gables will be few; our roof shall not
be cut to pieces.  All our lines shall be simple, and our
chimney-stacks things of beauty."

Her face was rapt as she sat looking at the bare ground where in
fancy she saw her creation taking shape.  Captain Brooke, sitting at
her side, let himself go for a brief moment, gazing his fill upon the
face that was always graven on his heart.  It did not take her long
to become conscious of the scrutiny of his steady eyes.  The moment
that he saw she had come out of her dream, he rose, and walked away
to the excavations his workmen had made, returning with lumps of marl
and chalky soil in his hands, and quietly making a remark about
foundations.

As they plunged into the discussion of builders, estimates,
contracts, etc., she realised that she was full of reluctant
admiration for him.  How well he bore himself!  How completely he was
master of his feelings!  She felt, she knew, that he was entirely to
be trusted.  His speech was correct, his bearing dignified; nobody
would now take him for anything but an English gentleman.  Five years
had wrought all this in him.  How persistently he must have striven;
how hard he must have worked!

And all this, she must conclude, had been done for her--for one whose
heart was wholly untouched by any answering feeling--to whom the mere
thought of him was pain and humiliation--who asked nothing better
than never to see him again.

As the thought of her present position flooded her again, she felt so
strong an impulse of resentment that for a long moment she was
inclined to throw down her plans, rise and denounce him--repudiate
his claims, break the chain that seemed to hold her, leave him where
he stood, and flee from him for ever.  How could she go on like this,
now that she knew?  Did not every moment that passed leave her more
deeply committed to the incredible situation?

Never did she remember before to have been the victim of indecision.
Now she, the self-poised, self-sufficient Miss Lutwyche, was swayed
to and fro like a reed in the grip of opposing passions.  Terror drew
her one way, pride and ambition another.  Under all, the mainspring
of all, though she knew it not, the desire to defy Bert, to pay him
back in his own coin, to seize his masquerade and turn it into a
weapon for her own use, to punish him withal.

And all the while the rollicking April wind sang in the tree-tops,
the sun moved westward, the light grew mellow, till the lump of earth
in the captain's hand gleamed like a lump of gold.  And his architect
walked to and fro beside him; paused here, moved on again upon a new
impulse; measured out the dimensions of things with her long
builder's tape, and caused the owner to stick little white bits of
wood, marked with weird symbols, into the ground at certain
intervals.  So they stood and talked, each ignorant of the storms
that swept the other.

The surface of the girl's manner--easy, impersonal, remote--was never
once impressed by the tremendous undercurrent that lay below the
man's cool utterances.  She was thinking: "After all, this is quite
easy.  I could keep it up for ever."

He was telling himself--"This sort of thing can't go on.  Could I
bear another day like this?"

Suddenly, it was over.  She looked at her watch and announced that
she must catch the 5.10.  For a moment the thought that the strain he
had been feeling so acutely was to be forthwith relaxed, gave him so
sharp a sense of loss that he could not immediately speak.  When he
did, it was to beg her to come back first to tea at the inn.  She
firmly declined this.  The inn, to her, was horror-haunted.  The
ghost of her past had risen there to dog the footsteps which she had
believed were free.  She replied that she would have an hour at the
junction in which to get tea, and must not stop now.

They returned to the dog-cart, and drove back, in so brooding a
silence on his part, that she dashed into small talk, lest he should
be contemplating some rash words.  As they drove past the inn, she
averted her eyes that she might not see the green, or recall what had
stood there.  The vision of poor Bert, with his bashful, uncertain
smile, his ridiculous flowers, his hesitating advance, rose before
her, creating sheer nausea.  Once more she was lying in the parlour
at High Farm, once more she felt the agony of her wounds, the scars
of which must to this day be hidden from her dressmaker.  The crimson
of shame suffused her.  Oh, if he could but have kept away!  Usually
she managed to forget all this--to forget that she was branded,
physically and morally, by the searing flames of degradation.  He was
the living reminder of all she hated and rejected.

She fell silent, unable to continue her babble; and Bert was silent
too.  But as they neared the railway, and he found moments running
short, he made a spasmodic effort at conversation.

"You were brought up in Africa, were you not?" he asked, as casually
as he could.  He might as well have held a match to gunpowder.

She turned upon him with a deadly quietude.

"Never speak to me of it," she said, almost between her teeth.  "I
have forgotten it all.  Every memory, of place or people, revolts me.
There is nothing that ever happened there, and nobody I ever knew
there, except Mr. Mayne, that inspires me with any feeling but
horror."

They were turning into the station yard.  He made no reply to her
words until he had brought the pony to a standstill; then, turning
fully to her, he said, very simply:

"I beg your pardon."

Something in his dignity shamed her.  He helped her down in silence,
collected her odds and ends, felt under the seat, and brought out the
fatal bunch of primroses, which he carried to the platform.

As they stood waiting, she said, hurriedly and nervously:

"I am sorry, Captain Brooke.  I didn't mean to speak so horridly
about Africa.  I hope I didn't hurt your feelings."

"My mistake," he returned good-humouredly.  "We're such slight
acquaintances, I expect it was pretty cool cheek of me to ask you a
personal question.  I'm afraid there are a good many holes in my
manners."

No man could have shouldered the blame more naturally.  The train
came in.  He found her a carriage, and handed in her things to her;
then shyly offered the flowers.

"A little village kid gave me these," he said; and she thought, as he
spoke, how fine a head and shoulders he had, framed in the square of
the open window.  "I thought you might like to take them to town with
you."

She just managed to say, with a vague smile, "Thank you."  Then the
train started, he had raised his hat, stepped back, and she was in
solitude.  For full five minutes she sat motionless, crouched
together, her two hands gripping the seat, her eyes fixed on the
unoffending primroses, whose delicate, mysterious fragrance stole
towards her on the evening air.

At last, with a strangled cry, she sprang to her feet, seized them,
hurled them with all her force through the window; and then, sinking
back into her corner, burst into wild, ungovernable tears.




CHAPTER XXIV

UNREST

  "Let me alone!  Why must you claim me?  I
  Am woman--do you tell me I must lie
  All passive in Fate's arms until I die?

  I must not care for Art, nor crave to be
  A force in this fair world--'tis not for me
  To live my own life.  Was I made for thee?

  No!  I am rebel!  Through life's open gate
  I pass alone, and free; you come too late!
  Or is't too soon?  I know not; let us wait."


Carol Mayne passed all that day in a state of feverish anxiety.  In
the evening he suggested to Lance that they should go round to Collis
Square.  It was late, but it was their only chance to call upon Mrs.
Helston before leaving town.  They arrived about half-past eight, and
found Brenda in the drawing-room, and with her Theo Cooper, who was a
frequent visitor.

It was now twelve months since this young lady had defied parental
authority and gone on the stage.

She was conspicuously unfitted for such a life, being pretty in a
showy way, forward and giddy.  But her parents' very natural
opposition did not weigh at all with her.  They had so often objected
to what was wholesome, reasonable, and harmless, that their opinion
had no weight with any of their children.  With their habitual
reserve, they suppressed entirely their deeper reasons for objection,
and the only one they ostensibly urged was: "What will people say?"
To a girl whose one hope was to be notorious, this was no deterrent.

The affair of Gwendolen and young Freshfield had produced a curious
effect in the Vicarage family.  The strenuous efforts of Mr. and Mrs.
Cooper to hush it up had been successful as regards their neighbours;
but this success had been dearly purchased at home at the cost of
lowering their children's estimate of them.  These merciless critics
had now discovered that whatever they did would be condoned, sooner
than let the world suspect a family breach, or a family scandal.
Mrs. Cooper's own theory of her perfection, and of her success as a
wife, mother, and leader of conduct in the village, must be preserved
at any sacrifice of truth.

Gwendolen and Madeline were despatched to school, the governess was
dismissed, and all went on as usual.  But from that moment each child
took his or her own line.

George, the eldest, whose sulky protest against taking orders had
been wholly ignored by his father, ran into debt at Oxford, failed to
take his degree, and finally bolted to America, whence he wrote for
funds at frequent intervals.

Willie, the next boy, who had some ability, after various letters and
conversations which left the vicar enraged, humiliated, well-nigh
heart-broken, had gone to reside with an agnostic community in East
London.  He was just the man they wanted--his intellect exactly of
the calibre which quickly assimilates specious argument, and
reproduces it in an attractive form; and the Fraternity of Man paid
him one hundred pounds per annum to teach men brotherhood, while
denying meanwhile the one great antecedent fact of common Fatherhood.

Gwendolen, on leaving school, found herself unable to live at home,
and had gone to teach English in a Russian family at St. Petersburg.
Madeline remained at the Vicarage, nominally as governess to Barbara
and Beatrice; she was the weakest of the five, and the most deeply
influenced by her mother.

Theo would have been a very pretty girl, with a little good taste to
guide her.  But, coming up from the lonely spot where her life had
been spent, she, with quick receptive capacity, imbibed notions of
dress and _coiffure_ from the girls in the omnibuses in which she
travelled.  She wore, as Melicent once remarked, a quantity of cheap
clothes, extravagantly put on.

A bright-coloured silk blouse, low in the neck, beads, artificial
flowers, a becoming hat, but too large--atrocious boots and a reek of
scent--these must have convinced anybody of the good ground Theo's
parents had for thinking her unsuited to go about London
independently.  Without conscious intent, her whole appearance laid
her open to the chance of being mistaken for quite other than she
was; and she had all the vain-glorious self-confidence of a very
young, very ignorant girl.  If she came off scatheless, it would be
because her type is so plentiful, and by no means because of her
discretion.

Carol Mayne, when presented to this young lady, as one of Melicent's
Fransdale cousins, was guilty of the rudeness of staring.  He could
not believe that he had heard correctly, as he contemplated the lithe
figure, the lounging attitude, the lumpy hair, the cigarette.

"Not--one of the Vicarage cousins?" he asked, in amazement.

Theo was delighted as she saw him visibly trying to adjust her with
his preconceived notion of the strictly brought up Miss Coopers.

"My father being a priest doesn't make me a priestess!" she cried.
Her voice was a little too loud at all times.  "That's where the
English make their big mistake.  My mother thinks she has every bit
as much right to go round lecturing the parishioners as my father
has; but that's just tommy-rot, you know.  We're always telling her
she hasn't any official status.  You're not married, are you, Mr.
Mayne?"

"There isn't any room in the colonies for the English provincial
vicarage life," he replied good-humouredly, mentally contrasting this
flower of modern girlhood with his late ward, and trying to realise
that this young lady's parents had thought her contaminated by
Melicent's companionship.

"Are you living in town?" he asked.

"Yes; I'm on the boards," said Theo, leaning forward to toss her
cigarette stump into the fire.  "Keen on the theatre?" she asked
casually.

Carol looked at Burmester, who was enjoying his friend's
consternation.  The Cooper girls were the young man's horror and
annoyance.

At this moment the door was pushed open, and Melicent came quietly in.

She had been told who was there, and was on guard.

She knew why Mayne had come.  He wanted to know how his conspiracy
was progressing.  Very well; he would get nothing out of her.

Lance hurried to her.  "So you've been to look at old Brooke's
ancestral acres?"

"Yes."  She sat down after greeting the company.  Her tone was
colourless.

"Dear," said Brenda, "I hope you've had some food; I told them to
keep it hot."

"Oh, yes, thanks.  How's Pater getting on?"

"He's very anxious to hear what you've done."

"Oh, I don't know that I've done very much."

"You look tired."

"I am.  Such a horrid journey.  I wish Pater could have come."

"Why, was Captain Brooke not cordial?" asked Brenda, in surprise.

"Oh, quite, thanks.  Only I don't know that I shall undertake the
commission after all; it's such a big thing."

"Millie!"  Brenda almost gasped, for this speech was wholly out of
character with the habitual utterances of Miss Lutwyche, among whose
failings diffidence could not be reckoned.

"Well, you'll never get on," said Theo earnestly.  "Hitch your waggon
to a star, my dear.  You might live to be fifty, and never get such
another chance."

"That's very true," said Melicent, with curious emphasis.

Then she remembered Mayne's presence, and could have bitten out her
tongue.

"What do you think of Brooke, eh, Miss Lutwyche?" asked Lance, eager
to have his friend approved.

"Well, I thought him rather--what shall I say--capricious, unstable,"
she said, and was met with a simultaneous protest from both men.

"You couldn't say that of Brooke!"

"Oh, you both know him, of course, and I don't," said she composedly.
"But I thought him a little undecided.  Seemed quite ready, at a
moment's whim, to throw up his idea of building in Wiltshire, and try
another county, after he had bought the land."

"If he is like that, it would be better not to undertake his work, I
should think," said Brenda, in tones of disappointment.

"But, Mrs. Helston, I assure you he's not like that!" cried Mayne,
with warmth.  "And he's rich enough to build two houses if he wants
them."

"He seemed to like the ideas I suggested," said Melicent, leaning
back restfully in a corner of the sofa.  "I daresay I shall get on
all right.  I'm a bit tired to-night, but I feel better already for
the comforts of home.  I know how it is that men often come home of
an evening as cross as two sticks.  How goes the world with you,
Theo?" she went on, as Brenda left the room to see if her husband
wanted anything.

"Oh, not so bad!  Bates"--her agent--"thinks he knows of a crib for
me.  Gertie Gordon's got it; but she's too stumpy, and they're going
to sack her; and it lies between Lillie Billington and me.  I'm going
to see Freeman to-morrow."

"Freeman?  Then it's musical light comedy?  I thought that wasn't
your line."

"My dear, when you're a beginner, you take what you can get," said
Theo coolly.

"That's the worst of it, I should think.  Is it a good part?"

"Ra-ther!  Principal boy!"

"Principal boy!"  Melicent thought of the Vicarage at Fransdale.  But
her attention was diverted by the gentlemen rising to go.  Evidently
Theo meant to stay, and her presence prevented either of them from
carrying out the design with which they had come.

Lance's manner, as he spoke of their early meeting again, was so
significant, so obviously fraught with admiration, that the girl
could not mistake it.  As she stood by him, near the door, while he
took his leave, an idea darted into the back of her mind.

Bert would be powerless to pursue her if she were married to someone
else.

It was very different from the career she had planned.  She wanted to
build up a future, not to resign herself to a level, monotonous
domesticity.  But under the pressure of her present scare, the bare
notion of any way of escape was welcome.

Carol departed with a distinct sense of disappointment.  He hardly
knew what he had hoped.  But the impression he took away with him was
that Bert had wholly failed to please or interest Millie.  Not for a
moment did he guess that the secret was out.  Under such
circumstances, with the state of feeling which she had so lately
confessed to him, he would not have thought her self-possession
possible.

Slowly Melicent walked back to her seat by the fire, where Theo had
lighted another cigarette.  On her homeward journey she had had time
to decide upon her plan of action.  She was not going to say a word
of her discovery to anybody.

Her first impulse had been vehemently to reproach Carol Mayne for
treachery; but reflection had showed that she could not do this
without Bert being made aware that she knew him.  To tell the
Helstons would be to subject herself to the continual fret of knowing
herself observed.  They might even urge her to tell Bert that she
knew; or counsel her to give up this building scheme, to which her
ambition turned with fierce longing.  She felt sure, in spite of her
diffident words, that she could design and build at Lone Ash a house
which should make her reputation.  To do this in peace, she must keep
her own counsel.  After all, this was nobody's affair but her own.
If Bert had come for her, as seemed fatally obvious, it all rested
with him and with her.  Single-handed he had engaged on the contest,
and single-handed she would fight him.  There seemed something a
little cowardly in calling in the Helstons to her rescue.  She did
not mean to marry him.  Well!  He would soon find that out.  There
were plenty of girls in England for a man of property to woo
successfully--Theo, for instance.

She leaned forward.

"Theo!" she said abruptly, "you've got to mind what you're about.
There was a girl at school with me who went on the stage, and she did
what you are doing--signed an agreement as principal boy--and she
found she had done for herself.  Ever after, she had only boys' parts
offered her.  'Oh,' said they, 'you can't object, you have done it
before.'  She left the stage in consequence.  Of course, for all I
know, you may prefer being boy, but I thought I would just warn you
what to expect."

"Awfully good of you," said Theo.  She smoked in silence for a
minute, then broke out: "Anyway, I'm not going another tour with
Tarver's Company.  After that Minnie Leslie's husband turning up, as
I told you, at Crewe, when she was in rooms with--"

"'Tsha!'"  It was a little soft sound of disgust that Millie was
prone to make.  "Look here, Theo, if you really are going on with
this kind of life, your only way to keep clean is to turn your back
on all that kind of thing.  Don't be mixed up in it--don't talk about
it."

"It's the agent that counts," said Theo evasively.  "Bates is a right
good sort, and he isn't going to see me let in, you bet I was pretty
careful what agent I went to.  I know the ropes, though you think me
a country bumpkin.  I can't help knowing that Batey's going to give
me every lift he can."

"Why?" asked Milicent bluntly.

"Because he thinks there's money in me."

This was unanswerable.




CHAPTER XXV

THE WAY OUT

  "Can it be right to give what I can give?"
                  --SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE.


The mild spring weather made strolling in the garden pleasant, even
in the keen air of Fransdale.  Carol Mayne strolled accordingly, in
company with Mr. Hall of Ilberston, and forgot manifold
preoccupations in the pleasure of his company.

The last fortnight had been a curious and trying period in his life.
He had become a mere bystander, where he had previously been a
confidant.  He was in the position of the trainer who has coached his
man and sent him into the ring, and now has no more that he can do
but to watch the conflict.  Bert had stepped down into the arena, and
had ever since ignored Carol to the point of rudeness.  He had
refused interviews, shirked even looks; had borne in total silence
the daily rebuffs inflicted by Melicent--the continual pin-pricks of
indifference under which he smarted.

Carol would have liked to hold the sponge between these preliminary
rounds, but this was denied him.  Perhaps, when some knock-out blow
was dealt, his champion would have need of him.  Just now, he was
nowhere in the scheme of things.

But so deeply had he grown attached to this man that there was an
unexpected degree of suffering entailed by the sight of his pain.
Day by day his eye detected more and more of the old Bert surging up
baffled, dogged, passionate, under the fine bearing of Captain
Brooke.  He remembered so well how things had gone in the old
days--how long the big man would endure, and then suddenly, the oath
that showed him goaded past bearing, the brief rage, the wild
repentance.  Twice he had seen Melicent--as he believed,
unconsciously--bring things to this point, and Bert only save himself
by immediate departure.  But not a word of complaint, or of any kind
of feeling, was to be got out of him afterwards.  The thing seemed
too deep, too momentous for comment to be possible.  A kind of terror
grew in Mayne as the days went by.  What would happen if Bert were
ultimately foiled?  He could not foresee it, even dimly.  He looked
at the slip of a girl who swayed the man's wild blood, and tried to
choke back his secret fear that tragedy might be the outcome of it
all.

For Bert had encountered a rival on the very threshold of his
enterprise; and the rival was the man whose life he had saved, at
risk of his own, because he knew that through him he could get the
introduction to Millie which he craved.

That Lance should admire Melicent was in itself no bad thing.  It was
no doubt well that Bert should not find himself alone in the field.
But as the days went by, it was clear to Carol, who thought of
nothing else, and watched all that went on, that Millie was, by her
own conduct, whether of set purpose or no, leading Lance on to be
serious, where at first he had merely been making holiday.

For Lance she broke through the crystal armour of "stand-offishness"
which she usually wore.  She talked to him; as a rule, she listened
only to men, saying little.  But she gave to Lance looks, smiles, and
low tones.

To Bert her manner was quite friendly, even cordial, as from an
unknown artist to her first patron.  But of good fellowship there was
not a trace.  So clever was she that in all this fortnight Carol had
not been able to determine whether it was by accident or design that
she had never for one minute been _tête-à-tête_ with Captain Brooke.
Had he known the girl as thoroughly as he knew the man, the
underlying strain must have been visible to him as it was to two who
loved and understood her--Brenda Helston and Mr. Hall.  Brenda
thought she knew its cause--that it was the result of the sudden
fulfilling of the girl's hopes, the terror lest her first great
effort should end in failure, and her professional prospects be
injured by her having undertaken what was beyond her powers.

This was in a measure true.  But not the whole truth.  Melicent's
real preoccupation lay deeper; it was more complicated.  How could
she build Bert's house, and keep clear of Bert himself?

If she meant to have nothing to do with him, as she vehemently did,
was it honest, was it wise, was it even sensible, to go on with the
building?

But pride was at present a far stronger factor with Millie than
self-sacrifice.  At the first suggestion that she should design a
really big thing, her ambitions had flown skyward.  In spite of her
secret knowledge, she knew that she meant to go on.

"That's a fine fellow, that friend of yours, Captain Brooke," said
Mr. Hall musingly to Carol, as they paused to look at the first game
of tennis that season, now in progress on the Helston's court at Glen
Royd.

"Yes; he's an unusual person," said Mayne.  "He says odd things at
times.  Last night, up at Ilbersdale, we got talking in the
smoking-room about the different things men mean when they speak of
love.  Most of the things said had the materialistic tendency which I
find to be characteristic of English thought to-day.  Then suddenly
Brooke, who seldom argues, came out with his opinion.  He said that
the difference between passion and love was comparable to the
difference between fact and truth.  They asked him to define the
difference between fact and truth, and he answered without a moment's
hesitation that he thought that was obvious; fact is temporal and
truth eternal.  How does that strike you?"

"Then he suggested that passion is temporal, and love eternal, just
in the same way?"

"Yes; I have been thinking it out, and there's a deal of truth in it.
One of the men asked him how you were to distinguish between the
temporal thing and the eternal, and he quite simply answered that you
could only tell in the result.  They then said much what was said to
Christ on the subject--that it is not good to marry.  He replied that
we were in the same case with all big things.  We have to take
chances in life.  Nobody can say how anything will turn out until
they try.  He said, in love, as in religion, as in art, as in all big
business undertakings, you don't have to hold an opinion merely, but
to live a life.  They chaffed him tremendously about being a devout
lover, but it had simply no effect at all upon him."

"He must certainly be unusual!  I should like to know more of him.
He might be strong enough to tame my wild bird."

"Your wild bird?"

"I mean your ward, Miss Lutwyche.  She needs a deal of taming.  She
is full of fine qualities, but has no chance to exercise them, all
things being well with her.  She is spoilt, as the only child
proverbially is.  However, as your friend says, we must leave it to
life to teach her various things that she will have to learn."

As he spoke, Carol's eye was following Melicent, who had finished
playing, and was arranging another sett.  She had not once played in
the same sett as Brooke.  Now she put him to play with Theo, against
Sybil Ayres and a curate.  She was sorry for Theo, who had, after
all, not succeeded in obtaining Gertie Gordon's "crib," and was still
"resting" according to the language of her profession--a euphemism
which ought to have delighted Mr. Cooper.

Lancelot had been Melicent's partner, and was at her heels.

"You promised to show me the latest treasure-trove," he said, "and
I've been waiting all the afternoon."

"We found it at Citta della Piève," she said, "and I really do
believe it is valuable.  Pater is wonderful, he has such an eye for
the real thing."

She led the way to a little garden-house which was Harry Helston's
workshop, and lifted a cloth carefully from an object which lay on
the table.

It was the oaken figure of a winged child, with dimpled hands and
feet, and exquisite face.  It had evidently been wrenched from a
frieze or mantel-carving of leaves and flowers.  Great part of the
surface was still coated in grey mould, but the face and throat had
been skilfully cleansed.

"He is treating it with glass paper, and it's slow work," said
Melicent, touching the angel with soft, appreciative fingers.  "It
was broken in two places, but he has mended it perfectly.  When it is
polished, it is going to be the finial of the baluster in the hall."

"Jove, he is clever!" said Lance.  "What a house this is!  One feels
that a mind created it!  Brooke's a lucky chap if he's going to have
such another."

Melicent laughed:

"We shan't exploit Tuscany for him, unless we get a special
commission to do so," she said.  "But he is so rich, he can have what
he chooses."

"How go the plans?"

"He seems to like them very much.  But I have made two alternative
elevations, and he has not yet decided between them.  Pater has
helped me tremendously, of course.  But I'm afraid I'm neglecting
your father's cottages."

"He is very pleased with the drawings, I can tell you.  Who would
have thought you were such a genius?  But do you know, I feel very
proud of myself.  I said so from the first."

"Said what?"

"That you were something wonderful.  Do you remember"--his voice grew
soft--"how you sat up on the Rigg, on Tod's Trush, and we came by,
and you shot a grouse with my gun?"

"Yes; I remember."

"I said afterwards, to Helston, that there was something wonderful
about you, I felt a power in you..."

He broke off mute, like most of his countrymen, in face of an
emotion.  Putting his hands in his pockets, he strolled round the
little room, idly taking up bits of carved wood and stone, tools and
drawings, and laying them down again.  Melicent neither moved nor
spoke.  She stood silent beside the oaken angel.

"It's wonderful," he suddenly began again--"don't you think it's
wonderful, how sometimes one's identity seems to come up against
someone else's, and a response sounds, as if we were two Marconi
instruments, and were in tune with each other.  Have you noticed
that?"

"I know what you mean."

He came nearer and stood beside her.

"The thing goes on a long time, before you're conscious of it; at
least, it did with me.  When I got to London, I didn't realise why I
wanted to go straight and call upon the Helstons, until--until I saw
you come into the room.  Then I knew that all the while I was in
Africa, I had been thinking about you....  Are you angry?" for she
had turned away a little.

"No, I'm not angry.  But ... you know very little of me.  I ... never
thought about you like that."

"No, I daresay not.  But as to knowing--when two people are tuned
together, intimacy comes, one hardly knows how.  This Easter has been
the jolliest time I have ever known.  I feel like the chap in
Locksley Hall, who thought the grass was greener than usual, and the
birds brighter coloured....  This spring is like that to me, because
of you--because of you! ... _Melicent_!"

The girl looked up.  She was of those whom excitement renders pale.
Her cheek was white, but as if a fire shone through the whiteness.
Here was the way definitely open to her, out of the intolerable
strain of the past ten day.  But she was honest.

"I'm going to disappoint you," she said slowly.  "I must.  I don't
feel like that.  I don't believe I ever should.  My enthusiasm seems
to be for things, not people.  I am ambitious and selfish.  I
suppose, to be ambitious is always to be selfish."

His voice was uneven and broken now, as if it fell over rough edges.

"You can only disappoint me by saying that you care for ... some
other fellow ... more than for me."

"I like you better than anybody else," said Melicent simply, raising
her eyes to his agitated face.

She was quite unprepared for the result.

Her hands, her waist, were caught, she was in his arms; before she
was fairly conscious of what he was about, he had kissed the
ineffable, smooth rose whiteness of her cheek.

"I'm content," he whispered.  "You like me better than anybody else!
Oh, you darling!  What is it?  Have I frightened you?  There, I will
be good, I swear I will!  I'm not a brute ... only I lost my head!  I
never thought you would, or could, but now--"

She edged away, sick and trembling.  To her virginal aloofness, the
fact of his embrace clinched the matter.  He had stolen a march on
her.  Unless he were her betrothed, how could she face him again?  He
would become a second incubus, like Bert Mestaer.  Yet still her
honesty fought for liberty.

"You did not let me speak," she cried.  "I mean to say--I like you
better than anybody else, but that is not enough!"

"But it is enough," he cried triumphantly.  "You say yourself that
you are cold--I don't care a shot for that, I want you as you are.
And if you like me best, what more is there?  I'm not as clever as
you, but I can give you money and a title, and I did well in the
campaign....  By the way, I shall be more deeply indebted than ever
to old Brooke!  If it hadn't been for him--!"

The mention of the name was opportune.  It stiffened up the girl's
resolution.

"Oh, yes; he saved your life!  Tell me about it!" she said, with an
idea of gaining time to collect her thoughts, which seemed to be
circling in a kind of whirlpool, nearer and nearer to complete
surrender.

"Would you like to hear?" he cried; and fell to musing for a moment.
"We were crossing the Vaal, you know," he said.  "It's celebrated for
its rapid risings.  The ford was quite easy when the first chaps went
over, and in half an hour it was impassable.  There was a commando
not far behind us, and we knew, if we could get across, they couldn't
follow, so we made a push for it I, as you know, was correspondent,
not combatant; and it so happened that I had been with another column
that morning, and had ridden hard to pick up with Lacy's.  My horse
was completely done.  I was hardly knee-deep when I knew she would be
washed away.  Swimming against that current wasn't possible; I just
grit my teeth and prepared to drown.  But by instinct I worked my
feet out of the stirrups, and we worried on, until the poor beast's
foot rolled on a big stone and she slipped away, with an awful,
human-sounding scream.  There was a big trooper riding just above me.
His eyes had been on my face, and he had ridden all the way, so as to
try and break the force of the water for my mare.  His horse was
magnificent; and, just as I was going under, I found his arm round my
body--Jove, what a grip!  I wonder he didn't crack a rib or two.

"'Strike out with the other hand' he said in my ear; 'strike out for
all you're worth, and I can hold you up.'  And he did!  My head was
mostly under water, but I gave all the support I could, and his horse
got through with us both!  It seemed to me as if it went on for days,
the fighting with the current, the struggle for breath; till all at
once the water gave way under me, as it were, and my legs flopped
down, and he literally hauled me out, holding me with his right arm,
and I just clutching on as I best could.  I faintly heard the
cheering as we came ashore, and half a dozen chaps rushed to catch
me, and then I fainted.  They gave him his commission chiefly for
that, I believe, and jolly well he earned it.  And that was the
beginning of our being chums."

She drew a deep breath.  The long arm of coincidence had not been
kind to Bert Mestaer.  But how could she help that?

For ten days now, she had not known a moment's peace.  Her usual
profound, dreamless sleep had changed to white, wakeful nights of
vague, dreadful apprehension of she knew not what.  This would put a
stop to her nameless fears.  But it had come too suddenly.  She was
not ready.

Lance, however, would have no half measures.  He had not, it is true,
come there that day with the deliberate intention of clinching
matters; but a fine opportunity had presented itself, and he had
risen to the occasion with a success which bewildered and delighted
him.  Melicent's suggestion that he should give her time to think
things over was impetuously scouted.  Life was not long enough for
hesitation, he told her, and his intense confidence did to a certain
degree infect her.  They would be married in the summer, and go to
Greece, Sicily--India, if she liked, to see the architectural
treasures of the world.  Melicent told herself that it would be very
nice indeed.  He was already embarked upon an idea for their own
house, if she chose to build one, when voices were heard, and steps
on the gravel, and Captain Brooke and Theo peeped in.

"Oh, here they are, looking at some wonderful relic of the past!"
cried Theo.  "What a ridiculous, mouldering thing!" gazing with a
laugh at the oaken angel.

Melicent took up the cloth, without a word, to cover her treasure
from further insult.  Captain Brooke arrested her hand.

"Won't you let me look?"

She laid down the cover and moved aside.  The atmosphere thrilled
with a sense of something unusual.  Brooke had no suspicion of the
truth.  He knew Lance, but he thought he also knew Melicent.  The
idea of her taking a husband as a weapon of defence against himself
had not as yet occurred to him.  He looked quickly, searchingly, into
her eyes, to ascertain what the matter was.

The result was curious.  She met his gaze; and there rose up and
revealed itself to him, the feeling always uppermost in her when he
was present, fear.  She did not know that she betrayed it: defiance
of his unspoken question was what she meant to convey.  But he saw
fear; and the result was a flood of light which fairly dazzled him.
He knew that he was recognised, and his heart rose within him.  If
she feared him, it was because she felt him dangerous.  For the first
time since he came to England, he saw a chance, a loop-hole for hope
to enter by.

He let his eyes rest upon the angel lest their radiance should betray
him.  In the thrill of consciousness which his new knowledge--the
knowledge of their mutual secret--gave him, he could hardly keep from
smiling.

"Is this the treasure you found in Italy?" he asked somewhat hoarsely.

"Yes; do you like it?"

"I think it beautiful!  I am learning to know beauty when I see it,
you know."

"Learning to know beauty when you see it, Captain Brooke!  Didn't
know gentlemen had to be taught that, as a rule!" cried Theo,
laughing affectedly.

"You make a great mistake, Miss Cooper," said Lance.  "Beauty
requires a trained eye.  Which do you suppose a ploughman would
rather hang on his cottage wall--a Rembrandt etching, or a
chromo-lithograph of the Royal family on an almanack?"

"Oh, aren't you confusing beauty and art?" said Melicent, finding her
voice again.

Theo, who had never heard of a Rembrandt etching, looked blank.

"Mrs. Helston sent us to fetch you in to tea," she said.  "Come, Mr.
Burmester, we had better let Melicent continue her treatise on
beauty."

"She's well qualified to teach, by precept and example," said Lance,
with tender gallantry, standing aside to let his betrothed and
Captain Brooke pass out.

"Yes," said Theo, when she had procured a minute's delay by stooping
down to disentangle slowly a wisp of her flouncing from a splinter of
wood on the table-leg.  "It's wonderful how well she's turned out,
isn't it?  Does her such credit, poor thing, and the Helstons too.
Mother was obliged to send her away, you know; fortunately Mrs.
Helston had no girls.  She seems to be quite all right now, doesn't
she?  You would never guess what she came from."

Lance was so astonished that for a moment he could not speak.  At
last he said:

"I don't understand.  Are you talking of your cousin, Miss Lutwyche?
I thought her mother was the vicar's sister?"

"So she was; but you see, poor Aunt Melicent married a brute.  It was
a runaway match, of course.  I can't tell you what he did--drank
himself to death, or something of the kind.  I believe my aunt died
of a broken heart It's a wretched story.  But oh, I forgot!  Papa
does not like us to speak of it, on poor Millie's account.  He thinks
it would be so bad for her if such a thing got about, so you must try
and forget what I have said!  I am so heedless!"

She laughed boisterously.  Lance was furious.  He had always disliked
the Cooper girls, this turned his dislike to positive rancour.  He
felt sure that almost the whole of what he heard was mere ill-natured
calumny.  Still, there is no smoke without fire, and his self-esteem
received a jolt.  He was the eldest son of a baronet, and though the
Burmester blood was not blue, it was very respectable.  What would
his parents say to a bride whose antecedents were shady?

His discomposure was momentary.  His eye fell upon the proud,
careless grace of Melicent as she walked along the path before him.
She was giving Captain Brooke a fluent account of the finding of the
oaken angel, which left him no chance to put in a word until they
reached the others.




CHAPTER XXVI

THE END OF THE FIRST ROUND

  "Go, if you will!  Let continents divide us,
  And put the seas between, and sink the ships!
  What space shall sunder us, what darkness hide us,
  What force shall keep apart our meeting lips?"


One of Captain Brooke's first purchases when he came to England was a
motor; and it had since been Carol Mayne's fate to be driven hither
and thither by a driver whose want of skill at first was only
equalled by his recklessness.  Now he had mastered the art, as he
mastered most of the things he cared to try; and it fell out that he
drove Mayne and Burmester home from the Glen Royd tennis-party, the
early spring air being chilly, and the ladies of the party all
preferring Sir Joseph's motor, which was closed.

He took his seat at the wheel, with Mayne beside him and Lance
behind, in the _tonneau_.  They had not gone far before Lance brought
out his secret.  His people had not been told yet, he said, but these
two were his very good friends, and he must make known to them the
great news that he had proposed to Miss Lutwyche that afternoon and
been accepted by her.

To Mayne the thing was like a bomb exploding in a non-combatant
country.  It was utterly unlooked for.  He had seen that something
was afoot, of course--had had vague fears that by the end of the
summer perhaps...

And now it was suddenly all over.  His champion had been knocked out
in the first round.  To such a man as Carol the announcement had all
the effect of a hopeless finality.  Melicent was betrothed; then
Bert's chance was over.  He almost expected to see him reel visibly
under the blow.  Of course the ordinary man is not openly affected by
such things.  We most of us in our time have to listen politely while
somebody cheerfully calls upon us for congratulation upon the
circumstance that is defeating our hopes.  But to Bert this news
meant the loss of all things.  His money, his lands, his education,
all he had and was, existed for Melicent....

The Bishop elect felt himself turning cold.  Visions of possible
tragedy had brushed his eyes with their dark wing that afternoon, and
behold, already the darkness was upon them.  Once before, after
Bert's long patience, at the moment of fruition, Carol had stepped in
and asked him to forego.  He remembered the effect of brute strength
in leash, the impact, almost physical, of this man's will against his
own.  And then he had been able to hold out hope, to say: "Wait, and
try again when you have proved yourself."

But this time it was final!

What would Bert do?  Would his civilisation, his Christianity, even
his manhood, be proof against this stroke of Fate?

It had been better far for him to present himself avowedly to the
girl, to say: "Behold the result of my long effort to be more worthy
of you.  Will you try to learn to love me?"

Mayne had counselled this all along; but Bert had, as usual, taken
his own way.

Mayne's eyes were fixed apprehensively upon the firm hands grasping
the wheel.  He almost expected some explosion, some display of
violent resentment, of ungoverned temper, that should shoot them all
down into the ravine on their left, where the limekiln smoked blue
against the dark moor beyond.

There was not even a change of colour.  Bert continued to look out
keenly along the road, as his manner was when driving.

"Asked Miss Lutwyche to marry you?" he said, in a preoccupied voice.
"What on earth d'you do that for?"

Lance was silent for a moment, in something closely approaching
stupefaction.  Carol stared at Bert, in whose temples he saw a pulse
visibly throbbing; no other sign of discomposure.

"Surely you've seen, Brooke, that I was hard hit in that direction?"
said Lance presently, in a hurt tone.

"Saw you admired her, of course; but so do I," said Bert shortly.
"Had no idea you had made up your mind."

"You must forgive our lack of warmth, Burmester," said Mayne.  "It
seems to me very sudden.  But you know they say, 'Happy's the wooing
that's not long a-doing.'"

"You don't know enough of each other," said Bert, still in that
preoccupied tone, as though his mind was concentrated on the road
before him.

"Well," said Lance, "but what were you saying last night in the
smoking-room?  One has got to take one's chances.  It is true, and it
was that that gave me courage to speak to-day."

Mayne saw the blood slowly overspread Bert's face.  Lance, behind,
could not see the sardonic grin which accompanied the manifestation.

"Well, it seems I've made myself responsible for a big order,"
remarked the _chauffeur_.

"Don't you think she's charming?" said Lance anxiously.  "Charming in
such a very unusual way?  You know, lots of girls are pretty, but you
feel you'd so soon get tired of 'em--run through 'em, so to speak, if
Mayne will pardon the expression.  But with her--" his voice broke
and softened.

Bert put on power, then jammed down the brake, as an opportune cart
came galloping downhill towards them; opportune, because it enabled
him to say "Damn!" with expression, to violently control the rocking
car, and to be occupied with it busily.  When he spoke again, which
was not for several minutes, during which Mayne vainly searched his
own mind for a suitable remark, it was to say:

"What are you going to do about St. Petersburg?"

"Oh!" said Lance, unpleasantly reminded.

It was only a fortnight since he had been rejoicing in the offer,
made to him by his newspaper, of going to Russia under very
favourable conditions.

"Well," he said, after a pause, "that will have to be referred to--"
Bert made his whistle hoot so noisily that the final word was lost.

When they drew up at the door of the Grange, Bert said to Mayne, upon
whom he had not bestowed glance nor sign:

"Mayne, like a good chap, see if there's any post for me before I
send this machine away."

Mayne went in, and sent out the servant with a bundle of
correspondence, of that unclassified kind which the rich man and the
buyer is always burdened withal.  Brooke sat in the car, opening
envelope after envelope; and after a minute, Mayne came slowly down
the steps again and stood near, his eyes soft with sympathy, but no
words on his tongue.

"Ha!" said the Captain at last, as though to himself.  "Yes; that's
what I expected.  Well, I think I shall be off at once, and take my
machine to Wiltshire by road."

After a moment's surprise: "A good idea," said Mayne heartily.

Bert looked at him as if he had never seen him before.

"Oh," he said, "you think so, do you?"  Then turning to Sir Joseph's
_chauffeur_, who waited: "Tell my man to be ready in an hour to take
me to London," he said laconically, getting out of the car as he
spoke.  "I must go and apologise to Lady B."  he remarked, with a
grin, as he passed Mayne.  "See you later, old man.  These are my
builders' estimates, and I must get on with that house of mine."

"But"--Mayne was so mystified that he followed him through the
hall--"but if your architect is--what I mean to suggest is, that she
may not be able to carry out--"

Brooke turned and faced him with clear grey eyes that had the effect
of a locked door.

"She's signed her contract," he said, "and if she don't keep to it,
I'll go to law and make her.  But this is business: women aren't so
unbusiness-like as you seem to suppose.  Forman, where's her
ladyship?"

* * * * * * * *

There is little doubt that her son's engagement would have been
wholly unpleasing to Lady Burmester had it not been for one fact
which, curiously enough, made her look more favourably upon it.  This
was nothing else than the total lack of enthusiasm with which the
Helstons regarded the new idea.

The thing was sudden; on Melicent's side they had noticed no
symptoms.  They thought it rash and ill-considered.  No doubt many
young people made up a match upon equally slender acquaintance; in
fact, one way and another, before Lance went abroad, he and Melicent
had seen a good deal of one another.  Undoubtedly, from the worldly
point of view, it was an excellent match for their girl.  The thing
that distressed them was that they felt sure her heart was not in it.

"But in that case--why?" they asked each other blankly.

They thought they knew her too well to imagine that the social
advantages weighed enough in her eyes to turn the scale.  They were
simply mystified, without a clue.

"Are you sure you are wise, my child?" said Brenda earnestly, when
first discussing it with her adopted daughter.  "You know we have
always spoken out frankly to each other.  Don't let us forego that
habit.  Tell me plainly.  You care for Lance deeply?  He's a charming
fellow, I know, but weak.  Have you realised that he is weak,
Melicent?"

"I don't like strong men," said the girl, with a perceptible shudder.
"There's something brutal about all strength, even moral strength.  I
fear it."

This speech deepened the darkness in which Brenda groped.  She could
not fathom it.

"Of course I understand his feeling for you," she said slowly.  "You
are just the woman for him, and he has penetration to see it--"

"But you won't give me the credit for like penetration?  Why
shouldn't I see it too?  Isn't that kind of thing generally mutual?"

"Well, if you tell me it is so ... but it seems to me so rapid."

"It was unexpected to me," said Melicent thoughtfully.  "I did ask
him to give me time to think.  But he seemed so sure.  You know,
mater, I don't think I should ever smile and cry and bill and coo.
I'm not that kind.  But I know I like Lance better than anybody else.
If I find that we don't get on, I could break it off, you know."

"Lady Burmester would never forgive that."

"Oh, bother Lady Burmester!"

"There!  That's the mood I distrust!" cried Brenda.  "Melicent,
you're behaving like a child!  You will have to consider your
husband's relations, and especially his mother!  This is real life,
remember.  You are not going away to live in an enchanted castle."

"Well, it seems to me that you want me to act as if I were, and doubt
me because I speak sensibly!" cried Melicent, hurt.

Brenda began to see that she had made up her mind.  For the first
time--the very first time since she took this orphan to her
heart--she was conscious of feeling jarred.  She ceased to argue, but
went instead to her own room and wept.

This was early in the day.  Lancelot and his parents came to lunch.

Mr. Helston was quite outspoken.  He said his position briefly was
that he was a man of moderate fortune, with two brothers, both with
large and needy families.  He could not feel justified in leaving
much to his adopted daughter, as he had carefully explained to her
uncle when he first took her.  He had carried out his plan of giving
her a first-rate education and a means of livelihood; and as long as
he or his wife lived, she had a home.  But she was a poor match for a
prospective baronet.

Sir Joseph asked a few questions as to her birth and parentage, which
Mr. Helston answered as fully as he could.  Her father, Arnold
Lutwyche, was a member of a reputable family which had gone to the
West Indies, and there gained, and subsequently lost, a large
fortune.  He had no near relations, being the last of his line, and
had been brought up in a luxury which, after the early death of his
parents, had been found to be wholly unjustified.  He had married Mr.
Chetwynd-Cooper's sister, against the wish of her family, the
opposition being solely on pecuniary grounds.  Melicent had been sent
to England on his death, her mother having predeceased him.

In his brief account of her home-coming, and Mr. Mayne's
guardianship, Helston made no mention whatever of the Boer
half-brothers and sisters, simply because he never thought about
them.  From the day of Melicent's first arrival in England, no word
had come from Tante Wilma.  Melicent herself never seemed to realise
that the Boer woman's children were in any way akin to her.  The
stupor of coldness which had congealed her heart in the old days had
seemingly rendered her incapable of loving anybody.  Even now she
loved but few; and those slowly, and, as it were, with difficulty.
She repudiated her African life so wholly that Helston and his wife
had hardly ever heard her speak of it.

But Brenda was urgent in recommending delay.  She thought Sir Joseph
ought to bring pressure to bear upon his son not to go forward in the
matter at present.  She owned that she was not altogether certain of
Melicent's feelings.  It was then that Lancelot's mother showed cold
surprise.  Naturally she did not find it difficult to believe that
her son's attractions had proved fatal.

"Lancelot himself seems to have no doubts," she said.  "It is
possible he may understand the woman he loves better than you
yourself, Mrs. Helston."

"That is very possible," said Brenda.

"His particular reason for wishing the engagement announced," said
Sir Joseph, "is that his newspaper wishes him to go to St. Petersburg
on a three months' commission.  He would like to be married on his
return, in the summer.  His mother and I have every desire to see him
settled, and he is by no means a boy who has given trouble in the way
of flirtations--I mean, that I feel tolerably sure of his knowing his
own mind; and that being so, I should not feel justified in putting
obstacles in his way."

Brenda was aghast.  She tried to say that her main objection to the
engagement was the insufficient knowledge of each other possessed by
the contracting couple; and that, if they were to be separated during
the whole of their betrothal, and married with little chance of
improving acquaintance, she felt considerable anxiety for their
chances of future happiness.

It ended by Lady Burmester taking up the cudgels definitely on behalf
of Romance.  She naturally felt it most unlikely that, quite apart
from the question of position, any girl could ever possibly repent
marriage with her boy.  She seemed inclined to treat Mrs. Helston's
hesitation as an implied slight upon an exemplary son.

When Brenda found that Melicent herself was against her, she
surrendered.  The arrangement was in truth just what the girl had
wished for.  Her engagement would be merely nominal for the next
three months while Lone Ash was in building.  It would be there, an
impregnable barrier against Hubert Mestaer, and in no sense a drag
upon herself.  The calmness with which she faced the idea of parting
from her lover added the final touch to Mrs. Helston's conviction
that there was something desperately wrong.  She began to think she
must be mistaken in her girl after all.  Was her head really turned
on finding herself the chosen of one of the county eligibles?  It
must be so.  Doubtless the girl herself did not realise it.
Excitement lent a glamour to the situation, and Melicent, like many
another silly maid, mistook the glitter for the rainbow glory of the
wings of the Love-god whom she had never seen.

Not even her husband could understand the full depth of Brenda's
disappointment.  It seemed to her that she would have to learn
Melicent all over again.  She brooded over the subject continually,
searching and searching for a motive for conduct which nobody but
herself found in the least unnatural.




CHAPTER XXVII

THREE MONTHS' TRUCE

  "Red marble shall not ease the heartache..."

  "Why should I rear me halls of rare
  Design, on proud shafts mounting high?
  Why bid my Sabine vale good-bye
  For doubled wealth and care?"
                              --C. S. CALVERLEY.


There was, however, much in Melicent's new position which was
irksome, and to her inexperience, wholly unexpected.  She had not
foreseen that the event would make a stir in the county, and bring
her into a prominence much accented by the fact that she was a
qualified architect, now occupied in building a gentleman's
country-seat.

Sir Joseph's paternal kiss was an infliction which positively scared
her; and the influx of congratulatory visitors still worse.

"Capital, Melicent darling!" was Mrs. Cooper's honeyed sting; "you
are quite a lesson to us all in overcoming unfortunate tendencies!  I
always quote you to anybody who complains to me of children that are
difficult to manage."

Lancelot was out of earshot when this amenity was uttered; but Mr.
Helston heard it, and, being unregenerate, hit back.

"Talking of children that are difficult to manage," he said, "what
news have you of George?"

"A most amusing letter," promptly replied the vicar, who was always
ready, with armour girt on, to defend his own.  "He gives a capital
account of the colonial method of pooling labour for harvesting
purposes.  Had you that custom among the Boers, Millie?"

"I don't know," said Melicent.  "Ask Captain Brooke."

"Brooke's gone back to town," said Helston.  "He went off last night
on his motor.  He is going to take it to Clunbury by road."

"Oh," said Millie, "I wish he had taken me!  Travelling all night
too!  I should have enjoyed it!"

"Oh," cried her aunt, "we must really tell Mr. Burmester this!  You
must remember, Melicent darling, that you are appropriated now.  It
would never do to make Mr. Burmester jealous."

"Really, Aunt Minna," said Melicent disgustedly, "one would think you
were the under-housemaid."

She walked away, with her head in the air, after this unpardonable
speech, and told Lancelot that she could not stand Fransdale now that
she was engaged; they must go back to town at once.

"Well," said Lance, "of course I ought to be back, only I was waiting
till you went.  We'll travel together."

"Captain Brooke's off, I hear."

"Yes; the builders' estimates for that confounded house came in, and
he was off like a shot; thinks of nothing else but his house and his
motor car; hardly took any notice when I told him we were engaged."

"Oh, well," said Melicent vaguely; "one wouldn't expect him to be
interested in that."

"I did.  I do.  He's my friend."

"Ah!  That's why, I expect!  You see, he knows me better than you do."

Until Lance's blank stare faced her she did not realise the thing she
had said.

"I mean," she hastily subjoined, "that he may have heard all about
what a naughty girl I used to be from Mr. Mayne.  You know, they are
great friends."

"Ah," said Lance tenderly, "but Mayne thinks the world of you."

"Does he?" said Melicent, rather wearily.

* * * * * * * *

In the train, on the way to town, she felt happier.  Things were
falling out as she wished.  It was unconsciously that she was acting
with such surpassing selfishness.  She did not tell herself that she
was fencing herself with an engagement in order to be free to gratify
her ambition.  She did not even know that at the back of her mind lay
the treacherous thought that, when Lone Ash was built, Lance might be
thrown over.  But a deeper self-knowledge would have shown her that
this was what she really intended.  Her mind just now was full of
dreams: but they were in stone and mortar.  Visions of corbie-stepped
gables, of oriel windows, of mullions, drip-stones and other
bewitching details, would keep coming in between her and Lance's
scholarly, boyish face opposite.  She and he were at one end of the
carriage, the Helstons, with newspapers ostentatiously spread, at the
other.

Lancelot was a good deal elated and somewhat thrown off his balance
by the great fact of his engagement.  He arrived at the railway
station brimful of the idea of writing to his paper to decline the
St. Petersburg mission.  He was terribly dashed at first by his
_fiancée's_ warm opposition to this idea.

"You can't care for me, if you can coolly face the idea of my being
away till the end of June!" he cried.

"I never pretended to care for you in that emotional kind of way; I'm
not emotional," said Millie, with calmness.  "I care with my mind,
and I like a man to go and do his duty, not to hang round a woman's
apron-string.  Look how soldiers and sailors have to part from the
women they love!  You have your name to make in the world."

"I see your point of view," said the lover wistfully, "but it is a
little hard to go off and leave you so soon.  I'm--I'm very much in
love, you know, darling.  You are the kind of girl men do make fools
of themselves for."

Melicent sighed.  Perhaps she was thinking of a certain cup of coffee
streaming down a man's face and shirt, and the fight that ensued on
that swift insult.

"I tell you honestly, Lance, I'm not in love with you," she said.
"It's no use pretending."

He was silent, giving her only an ardent look--a look that she
resented.

But she told herself, a man is only in love for such a short time.
It is the kind of thing a woman must tolerate and allow until the
brief madness passes.  Now with regard to Bert, she doubted if such
well-recognised rules would hold.  He might easily prove capable of
being in love all his life, which made him inexcusable.  Her fancy
ran off again upon this tack, till she was recalled by hearing Lance
say:

"If you knew how awful it is to think of leaving you.  Words don't
convey the horrible feeling, the craving for you, when you are out of
my sight."

"Perhaps you don't trust me," she said, with a little supercilious
smile.  "Perhaps you think I shall not keep faith if you leave me?"

"Melicent!"  He insisted upon taking her hand, unbuttoning and
removing her glove, kissing the palm and holding it to his cheek.  "I
shan't say another word.  I'm the happiest man on earth.  I shall
look on my exile as the proof of my manhood."

"I am more likely to value you correctly if you go away," said
Melicent, withdrawing her hand when she had borne his caress as long
as she could.  "I shall grow used to the idea of you.  I can't adjust
my horizons at present, with you in the foreground.  It used to be so
empty."

"And you will spend all to-morrow with me, won't you?  We will lunch,
shop, dine together, go to the theatre--we will have one day of
happiness, and then part."

One day of happiness!  The girl looked wistfully at him.

"Lance, will it truly make you very happy to spend the day with me?"

"I wonder you can ask," he said.  He added a string of lovers'
folly--tender names and protestations.

"Well, then, we'll try it!" she cried recklessly.  "I want a day of
happiness too.  You shall take me where you like, and I shall try and
be happy.  I think I am too cold and selfish.  I'll try and let
myself go to-morrow, and enjoy things, and be sweet to you.  You
shall have a memory to carry to Russia with you--the memory of a day
as happy as I can make it."

* * * * * * * *

The day of happiness was a pitiable failure as far as Melicent was
concerned.  She did her best, honestly.  She wore her prettiest
clothes, and tried hard to be really interested in jewellery, and to
persuade herself that driving down Bond Street in a hansom,
purchasing a smart diamond ring, lunching at the Trocadero, and so
on, in company with a good-looking, well-dressed, clever and
agreeable young man, constituted the elements of enjoyment for her.
But it would not do.  She would rather have been wandering alone on
Fransdale Rigg in a storm and a mackintosh; or, better still,
superintending the foundation-laying of the first child of her genius.

After their final leave-taking, and the passionate demonstration on
the part of Lance which she had not been able to evade, she was
almost determining to put an end to the whole thing.  But when he was
gone the tension relaxed at once.  She liked him very well at a
distance.  Perhaps--almost certainly--by the time he returned, she
would find that her affections had progressed in his direction.
Meanwhile, she blindly felt the protection of her engagement to be an
imperious necessity in the present circumstances.

And three days after the sailing of her lover, the idea of her
approaching wedding had grown dim and far; for Captain Brooke came to
Mr. Helston's office to consider the builders' estimates.

Melicent was at her drawing-board when he came in, her fair head bent
over a piece of delicate work.  The meeting was expected on both
sides, and both were thoroughly on guard.  Mr. Helston was present,
and after the usual greetings had passed, the Captain, without pause,
offered Melicent his congratulations on her engagement.

"Mayne seemed afraid that you would throw up your commission and
leave me in the lurch in consequence of more pressing interests," he
said.  "I am glad to find you are more business-like than that."

She smiled.

"I'm afraid Lance knows that he will have to go shares with
architecture in my heart," she said, slightly shrugging her shoulders.

Helston had gone for a moment to the outer office, to carry a paper
to a clerk: the two were alone.

"_What a fool Burmester must be!_" said Brooke hurriedly, under his
breath.

She looked up, angry, amazed; but his eyes were in another direction,
and it was impossible for her to answer him, because Helston
immediately returned.  They plunged into business; and thereafter her
client's manner was wholly natural, quiet and business-like.

In the course of two or three interviews, the raw surfaces of
Melicent's susceptibilities were healed, her apprehensions lulled.

Fired through and through with professional enthusiasm, she gave
herself heart and soul to the difficulties and the fascinations of
her profession.

The glory of it!  To see her Idea taking shape in material that
should endure for ages!  To see dreams and thoughts reduced to
dimensions and proportions and traced upon the bosom of the ground in
foundations that would be still young, years after their designer was
dust!

The circumstances were exceptional.  Her client gave her
_carte-blanche_, and was to the full as enthusiastic as she.  The
spring was a glorious one.  As the fruit trees in the old orchard of
Lone Ash Farm burst into flower, the outline of Melicent's creation
began to rise imperishable, on the hill-side.




CHAPTER XXVIII

THE GATES OF SPRING ARE OPENED

  "For rest of body perfect was the spot,
  All that luxurious nature could desire;
  But stirring to the spirit; who could gaze
  And not feel motions there? ...
            But the gates of Spring
  Are opened; churlish winter hath given leave
  That she should entertain for this one day,
  Perhaps for many genial days to come,
  Her guests, and make them welcome."
                    --WORDSWORTH (The Recluse).


There was a little ceremony when the foundation-stone of Lone Ash was
laid.

Mr. Harland, lord of the manor of Clunbury, had an aged grandmother
living in his house, who actually remembered Captain Brooke's
grandfather, and the departure of the family to South Africa when the
old place was sold up.  This venerable dame, as forming so
interesting a link with the past, was at the Squire's suggestion,
asked to lay the stone; and on the first of May the ceremony was
performed, before quite a concourse of spectators.

It was a fine opportunity for the county to show sympathy with the
eligible owner by being present; and there was many a pretty girl who
would have dearly liked to preside at future gatherings on the same
spot.

For the few with whom he was personally acquainted, the Captain
provided champagne luncheon at the primitive inn, where he still had
his unpretentious quarters.  Melicent had feelings to contend with on
entering that inn once more.

The health of the architect was proposed by Mr. Harland, and
enthusiastically drunk by those present, among whom the slight young
girl, whose talent was undeniable, was an interesting figure.

Mayne was among the guests, observant but aloof.  He was shut out
completely from the confidence of both those who were dear to him.
He could see that the girl was wholly possessed and dominated by her
one absorbing interest.  He imagined that she had accepted Lance
simply because he asked her, and because she was young and
undeveloped, and did not know exactly what she wanted; or because
Lance admired her, and the admiration of the young male will always
for a time influence the warm blood of the young girl.  But Bert he
found more inscrutable.  The man lived within himself to a quite
incredible extent.  But as far as Mayne could see, he was not
unhappy: certainly not in despair.  He seemed to have accepted,
without one kick, the hardest stroke of Destiny.  In such submission,
to one who knew Bert, there was something ominous.

Mayne knew nothing of one electric moment in which Bert had torn from
Melicent's eyes three secrets.  First, that she knew him; second,
that she feared him; third, that she was going to entrench herself
against him.

These things lay unspoken in the man's dogged heart.

In the late afternoon, the Captain turned to his architect, who had
been saying good-bye to the Harland party, and took out his watch.

"You have three quarters of an hour before your fly comes to fetch
you," he said, "and Mayne has taken the Helstons to look at the
church.  I want to show you something, if you would stroll down the
lane with me."

To refuse would have been ridiculous; but as they went, she was
acutely conscious that this was the first time they had been alone
together since the day she had recognised him.

They were walking towards Lone Ash, and the wonderful beauty of the
May evening breathed incense about them as they went.  Orchards
everywhere made the whole earth seem a-bloom.  A glory of distant
gorse blazed on the horizon line.

After a few moments Melicent grew nervous, and felt she must speak.

"Is the first consignment of dressing-stone delivered?" she asked.

"Up at the station," he replied eagerly, as if the question pleased
him.  "We bring some down to-morrow; it ought to be on the ground at
ten o'clock.  I took a look at it to-day, and thought it was up to
sample; but I should like you to see it."

"It's a pity the journey from London is so long," she said
regretfully.

"The very point I want to raise," returned he, with unconcern which
was not overdone.  "I think I need my architect on the spot, and I'm
prepared to pay to have her there.  Ah!" as they turned a corner and
a charming cottage faced them, "this is what I want to show you.  How
do you like it?"

She stopped short, with a certain glow of feature and glint of the
eye, which was characteristic.  As usual, when very pleased, she did
not speak.  He watched her eyes as they dwelt on the rustic English
beauty of the place.

The white smother of cherry-blossom melted against the mellow red
tiles.  By the garden-gate a big Forsythia bush bore a burden of
honey-coloured flowers.  The garden was a tangle of periwinkle,
woodruff, and forget-me-not, with the all-pervading sweetness of
wallflower; and the glowing coral of the ribes nestled against the
tumble-down porch.

"It will be a mass of lilac-bloom in a fortnight," said the girl,
hardly knowing she spoke.

"I want you to come in," Brooke told her.

The door was ajar.  It opened upon a kitchen, beautifully clean and
tidy, evidently for ornament, not use.  Within was a tiny parlour,
with gate-leg table, grandfather's clock and oak dresser.

"This is what I would ask my architect to put up with now and then,
to save her a good deal of going to and fro," said Brooke.  "I have
taken it for three months, to accommodate my visitors, as there is no
room in the inn."

Carried away by the sweetness of the place, she sat down upon the
window-seat.

"This is Arcady!" she said.

He leaned against the print valance of the mantel, looking very large
in the tiny place.

"Do you like it?  Would you like to stay here now and again?"

She turned her little head, its outlines sungilt against the light
without, and looked at him; and she answered like a child, accepting
unconsciously the suggestion of an older person.

"I like it very much.  It would be a great convenience to be able to
stay.  I am so anxious about the house."

"If that is so, you shall wait here and talk to Mrs. Barrett, and ask
her to show you the upstairs rooms, while I go and fetch the Helstons
to look at it.  There will just be time."




CHAPTER XXIX

THE FRIENDSHIP GROWS

  "A whole white world of revival awaits May's whisper a while,
  Abides and exults in the bud as a soft hushed laugh in a smile.
  As a maid's mouth, laughing with love and subdued for the love's
      sake, May
  Shines, and withholds for a little the word she revives to say."
                                            --A. C. SWINBURNE.


For three weeks, Melicent came down to the cottage on Tuesday and
stayed till Friday.  The first twice Brenda had accompanied her; but
Pater grumbled, and the third time she came alone.

She was growing bold.  Brooke's behaviour never varied.  He was
courteous and easy, but never confidential.  He would come down the
lane with his dogs, whistling, and lean over the gate among the
lilacs until Melicent appeared from the cottage door, and they went
on to Lone Ash together.  His first greeting always was:

"How are you?  Good news of Burmester, I hope?"

He was in great social request, and dined out most nights, often
hurrying away from the absorbing spectacle of the rising walls of his
home to lunch with some neighbouring magnate.

During the third week, except for their morning chat together, she
scarcely saw him at all until Friday afternoon.

The week had been wet and cold, and she had been tramping about in a
mackintosh and gaiters; but to-day was brilliantly fine, and she was
lunching _al fresco_, up at the works, being immensely interested in
some fresh boring operations then in progress in connection with her
beloved fish-pond.  She was sitting upon a pile of dry planks, making
a dessert of almonds and raisins, and deep in a book, when she saw
the Captain drive up.  He seldom brought the motor up to the works.
He had his own cart now, and a fast cob; and a trim young groom to
look after them.

He sprang out, came up to where she sat, and began asking eager
questions about the boring.  They talked shop for several minutes, he
sitting among the planks a little below her perch, bare-headed, and
with his gaze upon the long foundation-lines.

Then a short silence fell, while the exhilarating May air sang about
them.  Looking straight before him, he said unconcernedly:

"Came to see if you cared for a drive this afternoon.  It's a jolly
day, and I've got to go to Arnstock.  Care to come?"

She hesitated.  Why not?  She had evicted Mrs. Grundy long ago, and
on what other grounds could she refuse?  Yet something within said,
"Don't," so loudly as to drown the voice of calm reason.

"I think I'd better not.  I'm waiting here to see them begin to lay
the damp course.  Thanks all the same."

He looked at his watch.  Then turned to her with a gleam in his eye.

"They quit work in an hour, so that reason won't do.  Don't you trust
me?"

"I have no notion what you mean," said Melicent, instantly frozen.

"Well," he said, "of course I know you despise conventionalities or
you would not be following your present profession.  When a girl
steps down into the arena and joins the wrestling, one takes it for
granted that she doesn't mind what folks say.  So, if you refuse to
let me take you a drive, I have to conclude that your objection is
personal, don't I?"

"Then you don't consider it possible that I really may not wish to
take a drive this afternoon?"

"Seeing what the weather's been this week, and what it is to-day, and
the way you've been sticking to work, I think it's unlikely," he said
calmly.  He rose.  "Pity you won't come," he added.  "They're
enlarging Arnstock Churchyard, and they've unearthed the head of a
Saxon cross."  Melicent sprang involuntarily to her feet.  He looked
at her steadily.  "Knot-work," he said firmly.  "As clean-cut as if
it had been carved last week.  They have got several bits.  Harland
thinks they may find it all.  That's what I'm going to see."

She laughed a little uneasily.  "I don't believe I can resist that,"
she said.

"Come along then," he replied coolly, picking up her warm coat from
the planks.  "There's Alfred to play propriety, you know."

"I don't believe you've ever been to Arnstock," he said, as they
bowled lightly along the firm high-road.  "You do nothing but stick
to work.  It isn't good for you."

"I have been to tea with the Harlands, and I am going to dine there
next week.  I don't know what more you can suggest in the way of
dissipation.  I'm sorry if I am ridiculous about Lone Ash, but you
must consider the fascination of it.  My first house--my dream!  To
see it taking shape before my eyes!"

She gazed before her with eyes that saw visions, and Hubert looked at
her.

"I feel great scruples about monopolising you so much," he remarked.
"Ought not all your energies just now to be concentrated on your
_trousseau_?"

He was in a position to see the full play of expression in the face
she sought to avert He marked the instinctive repugnance, the effort
at concealment, the cold annoyance.

"Lancelot understands that I must first do what I undertook to do,"
she said stiffly.

"Then I am actually postponing the wedding arrangements?  This is
serious.  My only excuse must be that there was no one who had a
prior claim when you pledged yourself to me."

For just one moment she misunderstood--for one second she was on the
verge of self-betrayal.  It was on her tongue to say: "I never
pledged myself to you!" when she saw the trap laid for her.  Was it
intentional?  Swiftly she flashed a look at him.  No babe could have
been more innocent in expression.

"My private concerns will never be allowed to clash with business
arrangements," she said haughtily.  "What man would postpone, or
throw up good work, just because he was going to be married?"

"Marriage is a mere episode nowadays, isn't it?" he said.  "Just a
holiday experience.  The English fashion of it wouldn't content me."

"Marriage is not a thing you can talk about in the abstract," she
said irritably.  "One marriage is not a bit like another.  You can
choose your own kind, I suppose."

"Can you?" he asked urgently, in the candid tones of one seeking
useful information.

There was a shadow of emphasis on the pronoun.  She made no reply,
and he went on:

"People's circumstances are so different I can imagine that _you_
might face the idea of marriage as a mere interlude, because your
life is so full, and holds so much else of love and fame and what
not.  Now in my case ... will you allow a lonely man the luxury of
talking about himself for five minutes?"

"I am interested," said Melicent, quite politely.

"Well, you see, here am I, alone in the world.  I can hardly remember
my mother.  I never had but one real friend--a man.  I don't think I
can remember a woman speaking one solitary kind word to me until I
turned up in England with money.  Now do you see, that friendless as
I am, without human ties of kith or kin, what seems to you just a
convenient arrangement, is to me the one possibility life offers? ...
I wonder if you have ever thought what it must be to live altogether
without intimacies, as I have done, for thirty years?"

There was a quiet, earnest simplicity in his voice which disarmed
her.  Suddenly she saw him in a new light.  He was no longer the
relentless pursuer, the man who hunted down a girl as his desired
quarry.  He was a lonely, heart-hungry fellow, who had been starving
for kind words, thirsting for feminine sympathy.  Seeing him in the
light of what he had since become, she revolted from the memory of
her own hardness.  She had been the only English girl--the only
creature with whom he felt affinity--in Slabbert's Poort.  Among all
the degradation and savagery of the place, he had stretched out
appealing hands to the one woman who might have understood.  And she
had never given him one kind word!  He said he could not remember one!

Without her own volition she felt her heart assailed with a rush of
pity and tenderness wholly new in her self-centred, balanced
experience.  Without a word of reproach, with an almost bald
simplicity, this man had opened the flood-gates of compassion.  He
had done more; made her ashamed of herself.  She felt her face
suffused with colour--she knew that her eyes swam with tears.  The
brilliant sun, facing them as they drove westward, almost blinded
her.  She felt she must say something; but the effect of his words
had been so unexpected, so overwhelming, that she could not control
her voice at once.  At last, feeling that her lack of response must
seem unkind, she faltered out:

"I--I am so sorry for you.  I never guessed you were so--lonely!"

And to her rage and fury, her eyes over-brimmed and two tears--rare
indeed with her--splashed down upon the rug that covered her knees.

Hubert made some kind of an inarticulate exclamation, and an abrupt
movement, abruptly checked by the consciousness of the neatly
apparelled back of Alfred, the groom, almost touching his own.  He
maintained complete silence for a long minute, then, bending towards
Melicent:

"Were those tears for me?" he asked, very low.

She had hastily found her handkerchief.

"I--I think so.  I can't quite explain; what you said recalled
something else ... and I suppose I'm tired."

"Nevertheless," he replied, still below his breath, "I have had, at
least for a moment, the sympathy of a woman.  I shan't forget that.
I hope you don't think I am in the habit of puling and drivelling
about my lonely lot.  I don't know what impelled me to sentiment, but
I assure you it is all over now.  See, there is Arnstock Church!  We
will have tea at the inn, and then the workmen will be gone home, and
we can have the churchyard to ourselves."

They pulled up at a little low inn, covered with wisteria and
honeysuckle.  As he helped her down, she realised that her fear of
him had suddenly disappeared.

Seated by a little table at an open window over-looking a quaint
garden, she poured out tea for him, and enjoyed home-made bread, and
honey from the row of hives which stood before the hawthorn hedge.

They talked easily and naturally, like two between whom a barrier has
been swept away.  Hubert told her of his search among his mother's
papers, his discovery there of the name of his grandfather's native
village, his coming to England, and his quest of what Lance called
his ancestral acres.

Tea over, they proceeded to the churchyard, and spent a vivid
half-hour with the fragments of the Saxon cross and its knot-work.
Melicent was in a fever of eagerness to discover runes, but there
were none.  However, they found what was almost as good, a series of
grotesques down the sides of the shaft.

The workmen had turned up almost all the pieces, and when Melicent
suggested, in a moment of inspiration, that the Captain should pay
for its restoration and erection in the churchyard, by way of
inaugurating his reign at Clunbury, he took up the idea with avidity.

They drove back almost in silence; but a silence so full for both,
that they hardly realised their lack of words.

At the lilac-decked cottage gate, Hubert jumped out, and as usual
held his hands to help her down.  She had just drawn off her leather
gloves, and there seemed something significant and wonderful in the
warm contact of their bare hands.  The light was not good.  That, or
something else, caused her foot to slip on the high step.

For just one moment she felt an instinctive tightening of his grasp,
and one arm went round her so swiftly that all danger of a fall was
over before recognised.  She was set on the ground ... she felt
dizzy, and almost staggered when released.  For in that arresting
instant, his mouth had been close to her ear, and she thought a
sentence came to her--that he said, so low that she could scarcely
hear:

"_Hadn't you better give in?_"

She had regained her poise, drawn herself away, her eyes shot a
bewildered glance at him in the twilight.  He did not look at her,
but seemed in a tremendous hurry to be off.  He had jumped back into
the cart and was spinning down the lane before she had time to draw
breath, or to ask herself if he had really said what she thought she
heard.

She stood there, listening to the brisk beat of the horse's hoofs on
the dry road, for quite a long time.  Not a twig stirred in a
stillness which seemed almost portentous.  The dampness and fragrance
of earth and growing things rose about her like incense.  In a
thicket not far distant, a nightingale began to bubble and gurgle
into song.

Had he said it?  If so, what did he mean?  To what was she to give
in?  To the influence which that afternoon had softened, and as it
were, dilated her heart?  To the new kindness which she felt for him?

It must be illusion.  Would he have asked a question of the kind and
ridden away without an answer?  Was it an inner voice that had
spoken?  If so, what was the purport?

Anger and self-will awoke.  Her understanding, her emotions, her will
were and should remain in her own keeping.  What was the sensation
she had experienced a moment ago, with his arms about her?  She felt
herself blush scarlet in the darkness.

* * * * * * * *

Next morning she went back to London.




CHAPTER XXX

THE TREACHERY

  "Doubt you if, in some such moment
    As she fixed me, she felt clearly
  Ages past the soul existed,
    Here an age 'tis resting merely,
  And hence fleets again for ages,
    While the true end, sole and single,
  It stops here for, is this love-way,
    With some other soul to mingle?

  "Else it loses what it lived for,
    And eternally must lose it;
  Better ends may be in prospect,
    Deeper blisses (if you choose it);
  But this life's end and this love-bliss
    Have been lost here; doubt you whether
  This she felt, as looking at me,
    Mine and her souls rushed together?"
                          --ROBERT BROWNING.


Melicent only came down to Clunbury for one day the following week;
and Mr. Helston was with her.  The week after, she came for two days,
and brought Brenda.

This was not the result of any scheme of self-defence; it simply
happened in the ordinary course of events.

For she no longer disliked Hubert.  Her mental attitude had changed.

The enlightenment which his simple and sparing speech had brought to
her had been a veritable shock.  She saw herself again as she had
been at the time of his early devotion--the despised Cinderella, the
half-grown slattern, the insolent, self-absorbed little upstart.  Her
own dulness of perception and ingratitude began to show themselves to
her in a strong light.  She marvelled at his constancy, and stood
amazed at his insight.  He had seen her, not as she was, but as she
might be.  It was she who had been blind.

So she thought of him: and yet, at the bottom of her mind, lurked a
mysterious reluctance to go down to Lone Ash again.

She wrote to Lance more affectionately than she had ever done.  She
told him she meant to be less hard, more unselfish, to do her best to
respond to the affection he lavished upon her.

Time was flowing swiftly past her.  In three weeks he would be home!

And it was June.

At last Captain Brooke wrote to say that there was a question in the
builder's mind respecting an additional support at a point where the
thrust of the wall was greater than had been reckoned for.  He added
that the builder and the engineer were quarrelling about the
Lee-Simmons man-holes.  Moreover, the weathered tiles were beginning
to arrive, and there was a question raised as to the condition of
some of them.  There was no doubt that her presence was necessary,
and finally she went down, upon a day that focussed in its heart all
the tender glories of an English summer.

The lilacs were fading now, but pink may and golden laburnum flaunted
in beauty; and Melicent, as she cycled up the lane from the station,
caught the intoxicating fragrance of syringa.

"What a garden this is!  I believe it holds a bit of everything in
the world that smells sweet!" she cried, as she greeted Mrs. Barrett.
"It reminds me of the garden in Solomon's Song.  How this sunshine
does make the spices flow out!"  As she spoke, she gathered a tiny
spray of waxen syringa and a cluster of double pink may, like wee
Banksia roses, and fastened them in her white gown.  "After London,
this is so wonderful!" she sighed.

"You look pale, miss.  The fresh air'll set you up.  The Captain was
round this morning to know if you'd come.  He seemed that
disappointed not to find you.  I expect now he'll think you're not
coming down till to-morrow."

"Is he up at Lone Ash now, do you think?"

"I believe he will be, miss.  Tommy, have you heard the Captain drive
back, down the lane?"

No, Tommy had not; he was sure the Cap'n had not returned.

"I'll have a glass of milk now, please, Mrs. Barrett, and then go up
and find him," said Melicent.

"There's been a gentleman had your rooms this week-end," said Mrs.
Barrett, as she provided refreshment.  "Mr. Mayne, a clergyman.  They
do say he's to be made a bishop.  He was fine and took up with the
building, and as friendly as ever I see.  I'm sure we oughter be
grateful to the Lord for sending of the Captain down here.  A godsend
to this village he be.  There's Carter down the lane, talked of
drowning hisself, he did; wife and three childer, no work to be had,
nowhere to live if he got it.  Now he's to have head gardener's
place, and Captain's going to build him a cottage, four rooms and a
kitchen!  He just goes about, does the Captain, and finds out truth
about everybody.  Nobody's going to get over him, not they!  Keeps
his eyes skinned, and no mistake about it.  Been into the bar of the
Hearty Welcome night after night since he's been staying there, and
found out all he wants to know about they chaps.  He's got the
whip-hand of the lot by now; knows twice as much about 'em as what
vicar does; and it's my belief, he'll be the best served master in
this county."

Melicent drank her milk absently.  She wished, yet dreaded to see
Hubert again.  Her novel mood of self-abasement craved humiliation.
Since realising how unlovable her conduct had been, she was invaded
by unreasonable desires to let him know that she was really not such
a beast as she seemed.  A wish to tell him that she knew who he was,
and would like to be friends, assailed her like a temptation, though
she knew that such confidences would be the very height and apex of
folly.

There was nothing for it, she firmly told herself, as she put on her
shady hat and mounted her bicycle, but to remain upon business terms.

It gave her a little shock of joy, as she neared the gate leading to
the Captain's property, to see the grey walls high enough to be
clearly discerned from the road.

She rode noiselessly over the pasture, dismounted at the hill,
wheeled her bicycle forward among the trees, and propped it against
the trunk of a big beech.

The workmen were gone.  She could see Hubert sitting there, on the
pile of planks where she had sat last month.  How long ago that
seemed!  How far she had travelled since their drive together!

He did not appear to be doing anything but meditating.  His arms
rested on his knees, his hands hung down between; he was looking at
the ground.  Melicent was taken with a sudden conviction that it
would be wise to turn and run before he saw her.  She combated the
feeling with indignation.  She remembered how loath she had been to
go that drive.  And how glad she now was that she went!  It had made
so vast a difference to her, she felt something as Gareth felt when
he unhorsed the dread Black Knight, and found the rosy child within.

Why not go forward?

The alternative no longer remained: he looked up and saw her.

She came towards him from among the trees, in her white gown, wearing
a look he had never seen upon her face before in life, though he had
dreamed of it now and then.  Her eyes seemed to have grown larger,
darker, softer.  Her face was of that warm rose whiteness which
relieves itself so vividly and strangely against a white dress.

He stood up; but absorbed in the picture she made, he did not advance
to greet her.

"I thought you had not come," he said; and even to say so much was an
effort.

"I had things to do."  She smiled.  "Some of that shopping you
reminded me of the other day!  I came by the later train."

He recollected himself.

"I hope you have good news of Burmester," he said mechanically.

"The best," answered Melicent quietly.  "He will be home in less than
three weeks."

He had been staring at the grass, but on that he raised his eyes.

"And when shall you be--married?"

"The day is not fixed; only that it will be at Fransdale."  There was
a pause, and to fill it she said: "I hear Mr. Mayne has been here."

"Yes; I suppose you are going to his consecration next week?"

"Oh, yes; he sent us tickets.  Do you know how long he stays in
England?  He ought to wait for my wedding."

"So I told him," said Captain Brooke slowly, balancing a long
screw-driver with which he was playing across one finger of his left
hand.

"What did he say?"

"Oh!--well, he said several things; but he didn't mean me to repeat
them, so don't ask me, please."

She gave an odd, excited laugh.  "I don't ask; I order you to tell
me."

He gazed upon her, so absorbed in his thoughts about her, that the
subject in hand faded out of sight.  She could not meet his look.
Tossing her head, she turned a little away.

"So you won't tell me?"

"Tell you what?"

"What he said."

"What who said?"

"Captain Brooke, what is the matter with you?  We were talking of Mr.
Mayne.  We had better leave off if you are not attending, and go and
look at those tiles."

"The more serious matter is the water," he said, shaking off his
preoccupation and sensibly relieved by the change of subject.

He led the way from where they stood to a pit four feet deep, with a
stand-pipe projecting from the newly-turned soil.  Kneeling down on
the edge, he bent over, and turned on the union tap, which had been
fixed for connection with a rubber hose.  The girl gave a mortified
exclamation:

"Why, it's dry!"

He acquiesced.

"That's where Shepherd's rage against the Lee-Simmons engineer comes
in, and why he wants to wipe up the floor with him.  The supply was
all right the first two days, dribbled for two more; then stopped.
The engineer says it is simply that Shepherd's men have fixed the
thing so carelessly that the pipe's blocked down below.  I think I'll
get the jointed rod and probe it."

"Oh, my fish-pond, I thought I had secured you!" said Melicent sadly.

"You shall have it, if there's water in Wiltshire," he began; then
stopping dead--"I mean, the thing must be made to act somehow.  By
the way, there's Alfred with the cart.  I'll send him back for the
rod; he can bring it in a few minutes."

"Lend me your wrench, then, and I'll get the tap right off," said the
girl.

He handed her the tool she asked for, and went off across the field
to give his directions.

She jumped down into the muddy pit, and set herself to unscrew the
tap.  It was not very easy, but she managed it at last; and then,
with the thing in her hand, remained in her crouching attitude,
examining it to see if there was any obstruction.

There was a sound like a deep sigh--a rush like heavy rain--a jet of
yellow water flew from the pipe, hit the opposite side of the pit
with great violence, and before she knew what had happened, she was
over her ankles in water.  In a calmer moment, she would have scaled
the miry sides of the pit, regardless of appearances; but she was not
calm, and she lost her head.  The unexpected nature of the thing
scared her--she had the idea that if once she let the pit fill, they
would be unable to stop the flow; and so, with a spring, she flung
herself upon the pipe, clasping her two hands rigidly about it, and
stanching the most part of the rush.  But the strength of the pulsing
water was great, her footing slimy, her purchase feeble.  Raising her
voice, regardless of all but the emergency, she cried aloud:

"_Bert!  Bert!  Bert!_  Quick!"

He had only just dismissed Alfred on his errand, and was hurrying
back, when that sound smote his ear.  He broke into a laugh of pure
joy as he heard it, but he ran with all his might.

The moment he got to the brink of the pit, he saw what was happening;
and he, too, lost his head.  Instead of calling to her to let go, and
holding down his hands to draw her up, at the expense of a drenching,
he forthwith sprang down, placed himself beside her, and locked his
hands over hers.

The fact of his doing this bereft her of all power of speech.

She was totally unconscious of having called him by name; she did not
know the reason of his kindled, glowing look.  Neither, for a few
long-drawn seconds, considered what was to be done.  They simply
stood there, so acutely conscious of each other that nothing else in
all the universe seemed real.

She was the first to recall her scattered wits.

"Oh, this is too ridiculous," she said faintly.  "We can't hold on!
We can't hold on!"

"Just long enough for Alfred to get back," he whispered.  "He can't
be ten minutes.  He can have the thing ready to screw on, and save
you a deluge--"

"Nonsense!" she uttered feebly.  "We can't hold on here for ten
minutes!  We can't, simply."

"I wish we could hold on for ever," he jerked out, his voice sunk to
a note that made her quail.

The force in his hands seemed to be communicating itself to her.  She
was dominated, absorbed, had forgotten everything but him.  He never
spoke, but she became aware that he wished her to look at him.  She
tore away her gaze from the sight of their gripped hands, raised her
head, searched his face with pleading eyes.

Their looks met and mingled.

A dull beat was hammering through her senses.  Was it his heart or
hers, or the pulse of Time itself?

Their faces drew nearer, nearer to each other.

Something was going to happen--something that should explain all life
and blaze the answer to every secret ... that was the thought she had
as their lips met.

Was it he who bent to her, or was the impulse that drew them mutual?

The blinding sweetness of that kiss was unmarred by any thought of
treachery.  The world and Lance with it, had simply gone out in the
ecstasy of the light that flooded her.

* * * * * * * *

It was over.  The world that had stood at gaze like Joshua's moon on
Ajalon, swung on once more her dance among the stars.

Melicent stood there, in the fair June evening, at the side of the
man who had kissed her.  The wind came softly over meadows deep in
buttercups, and bent the white lacy sprays of delicate wild parsley
which fringed them.  High in the blue sky the lark stormed heaven's
gate with song.

"Let me go!" she cried, with a stifled sob.  "I must go!  Don't you
see that I must?"

It was a moment before he replied; but when he did, his voice was
perfectly composed and cool.

"As soon as you feel the pressure of my hands relax, slip yours
downwards," he said.

A moment later she was free.

"There!  Oh, why couldn't you do that before?" she cried
passionately, as she made a frantic onslaught upon the crumbling side
of the pit.

She was up and away in a minute, her white frock soaked, her feet
caked in pale yellow mud.  She ran across the grass, never stopping
to look behind, and met the bewildered Alfred just at the edge of the
plantation.

"Hurry to the Captain," she gasped.  "The water has started to run
and he can't stop it.  I must go home and change!"

Her throat was so dry she could hardly speak.  In feverish, stumbling
haste she mounted her bicycle, and rode down the bumpy grass slope at
a dangerous pace.  Mercifully the gate into the lane stood wide, and
she was through it and back at the cottage in a couple of minutes.

Alfred found his master up to the knees in what looked like weak tea
with cream in it.  Between them they managed to re-fix the tap,
connect the long hose, and set the liquid flowing into Melicent's
fish-pond.

Emerging from the pit, the Captain looked at his legs--he was wearing
a cool, summer suit of light grey flannel.

"The wash-tub, Alfred, is the place for me," he said resignedly.

"Yessir!" said Alfred, who had prudently removed his own smart
leg-wear before venturing to the rescue.

"Joseph was better off than I am, Alfred.  His pit was dry--there was
no water in it."

"Yessir!  Miss Lutwyche, she was drenched, sir."

"I hope she won't take cold," said the Captain, with polite
solicitude; "but fortunately the day is warm.  Get on your boots,
Alfred.  I'll let this thing run all night, and perhaps there'll be
something to show for it in the morning.  There must have been
something in the pipe, and the force of the water dislodged it, I
suppose."

Melicent, lying upon her bed with hidden face, heard the cart go past
the cottage.  The beat of the hoofs was not interrupted; they passed
by without stopping; and the tension of her strained nerves relaxed.




CHAPTER XXXI

THE REPUDIATION

  "Escape me?
  Never--
  Beloved!
  While I am I and you are you,
  So long as the world contains us both,
  Me the loving and you the loth,
  While the one eludes must the other pursue."
                              --ROBERT BROWNING.


The delicate veil of sapphire which June calls night was drawn across
the splendour of the sky; and it was like the device of a beauty who
wears a transparent gauze to enhance the glitter of her diamonds.

In the north still lingered a supernal glow, the hint of the day that
has no night.

The fragrance of unseen cottage gardens was all about Hubert as he
walked slowly up the lane from the inn.  There was no moon.  The
glimmer of starshine made mysterious radiance, yet left a soft,
velvet dusk, without the clean-cut lights and shades of moonlight.

He had bathed, changed, dined.  Now he was coming to ascertain the
result of his daring experiment.  Had he succeeded, as he hoped, in
showing Melicent her own heart?

He had no remorse.  The thing was necessary; it had to be done.
Could he stand by and see a proud girl wreck three lives?

It was very dark among the lilacs by the cottage gate.  Peering
through the thick boughs, he started; for there was no lamplight,
either in the parlour or the room above it.  And he believed that she
had fled from him.

This gave a jolt to the pleasing elation of his spirits.  Walking on
the grass, he approached the open door without noise.  Then he halted.

The casements of the parlour were wide open to the summer night.  On
the window-sill lay a girl's abased head, the fair hair just touched
by the star-glimmer, the face hidden in her arms.

She lay very still, and was apparently not weeping.  He went up to
her, resisting with firmness his great desire to lay his hand upon
her hair.  For the first time in years he spoke the name that stood
for all his ambitions.

"Millie," he said softly.

She sat up quickly.  He hardly knew what expression he had expected
to see; but the indignation of her eyes was a surprise.

"Oh, I wonder how you dare come near me!" she cried.

"I won't come near you.  I'll stay outside here," he said hastily,
with a bewildered sense of having lost the thread of the situation.

"You certainly won't come in at my invitation."

"No, of course," he said meekly, his head fairly spinning with
wonder; "but I thought you would see I had to come and beg your
pardon."

She stood up, withdrawing herself into the room, as if she meant to
escape.

"There are things that are unpardonable," she said coldly.

He contemplated this idea.  "Do you mean that you never can forgive
me?"

"Perhaps I mean that I never can forgive myself," she said chokingly.
"You--you have humbled my pride to the dust.  Lance ... trusts me,
and I have ... How am I to face him?"

"Then you mean to stick to that--to go on with your engagement--to
marry Lancelot--in spite of what happened to-day?" he asked hastily.

She stood up straight in a long, loose, pale-coloured gown, half
lost, half seen in the faint light.  The glint of the stars swam in
her eyes.

"May I ask what else you expected?"

He was at a loss.  Ready enough had he been to console her, to tell
her that Fate was too strong for her, to urge her to correct her
mistake before it was too late.  Her present attitude stunned him,
and bereft him of words.  The dashing of the high hopes with which he
had come bred in him a sudden sense of being wronged.

"Millie," he expostulated, "do you know what you said--up there when
the water rushed out upon you?  You called out: '_Bert!  Bert!_'"

There was silence.  He saw her start.

"Did I say that?" she said slowly.  "Then it is I who have betrayed
myself, and you--are not so much to blame as I thought.  I can
believe that it excited you a little to find that I knew you, and
made you think of old times."  She hesitated, seeming at a loss what
to say or do; her embarrassment was obvious, her distress manifest.
Then, with sudden determination, she came near the window again.  "If
that is true, I suppose I must forgive you," she said stiffly, "and
we must both forget a mad moment."

He could hardly believe his ears.  "Is that all you have to say?" he
demanded harshly.

"The less we either of us say the better, surely, concerning such an
affair."

The man drew in his breath sharply.  "After all that has come and
gone?" he panted.

"Captain Brooke, for a moment this afternoon I allowed myself and you
to forget that I am engaged to your friend.  I must remind you of it
now."

"I wish to God that I had let him drown in the drift!" he flung out.
"Or that I had drowned myself--!"

"I don't wish to be hard or unkind, but I cannot listen to you.  I am
going to close the window."

He inserted his shoulder, so that she could not close it.  The
expression of his eyes was such that she dare not face him.

"Answer me one question," he commanded brusquely.  There was a growl
in his voice that she knew of old as a storm-signal.  "I have a right
to ask it, and you ought to answer--you _shall_ answer!  When I
kissed you to-day ... _was it against your will?_"

Her expression made him feel as if he had slashed her across the
face.  Had she accepted defeat in that moment--said anything to
appease the man's mounting wrath--he might have kept his head.  But
pain or insult had never the effect of softening Melicent, but only
of stiffening her.  His taunt stung her to real anger, and, in the
midst of her stifled consciousness that she was fighting a losing
battle, she clutched at her indignation as at a blade with which she
might wound.  She had moved towards the door with the intention of
escape, but now she returned to the window.

"You think you have the right to ask me that?" she said, with the
same ruthless arrogance that she might have used to him in Africa.
"You say that to me--you, who hope to turn into something that people
may take for an English gentleman! ... You did that this afternoon to
get a hold over me!  I know your threat!  You needn't say it!  You
mean that, if I don't tell Lance, you will! ... And you suppose I
care if you do, or what you do, or anything about you...!"

Before she had got so far, Bert had flung his leg over the sill and
vaulted lightly into the room.  He came quite close to her, but spoke
quietly, under his breath, with an air of desperately holding himself
in.

"All right!" he said.  "You say you don't care, do you?  Well, then,
if you say so, I say you lie!  You lie, do you hear me?"

"You had better go away before you grow unpardonable," said the girl
coldly.

"I'll go when I've said what I'm going to say, and not before.  I'm
going to tell you the cold truth here and now.  The Brooke farce is
played out, we know each other, and you shall hear what I have to
say!  _You--kissed--me_ to-day!--great God! do you suppose I don't
_know_ that you did?--and you did it because--"

Slight things decide momentous issues.  Even then an appeal, the
smallest sign of surrender on the girl's part, would have brought him
crouching to her feet.  But she flung back her head, and looked him
in the eyes to show how little she feared him; and she laughed.

That let loose the tempest.  All in a moment he broke off his husky,
difficult words.  All in a moment he had her by the waist, crushing
her to him as if holding her against an army.  There was no love in
the fierce hold, only the determination that she should hear the
cruel words that he spoke into her ear:

"Because you love me!  Because you love me!  Because you're
mine--mine--mine!"

She disdained to struggle, as she disdained to plead.  She made no
effort to fling him off.  Her silent, passive contempt brought him to
himself in a flash.

The girl who, that golden afternoon had yielded to his spell, had
weakened, had been as it were his to take, now lay like a lifeless
thing in his ungentle hold.  He realised what he had done.

When he let her go, she did, by an effort, stand alone.  Her laugh of
scorn was quenched.  She lifted one hand to hide the quivering of her
mouth, but did not move at once, perhaps because she feared to fall.
He turned away from the still, silent, accusing figure with a kind of
roar of helpless strength, of baffled will.

"The same, the same as ever," he said.  "The woman's way!  To make me
feel a great, rough brute, when all the time it's you that are cruel.
Yes!  As cruel as a fiend."

To and fro he paced, to and fro upon the floor; then, with sense of
defeat in overwhelming bitterness, got to his knees at her feet.

He knew that his fatal moment of uncontrolled temper had undone all
that the past weeks had gained so painfully and slowly.  Beneath his
shame was an undercurrent of conviction that he was right and she
wrong.  But what was right or justice in face of Melicent's
inflexibility?

"I'm sorry.  I'm a brute.  But it's your fault.  You know what you
can do with me," he said chokingly.

"Get up!" said her exhausted voice.  "Get up, do!  Go away.  You see
you are ... impossible.  I thought you had improved, but you see it's
all ... just as bad as ever."

"Millie!"

"Don't touch me."

"You know I am not such a hound as to think I have any hold ... or to
use it, if I had?"

"What does it matter to me?"  She moved: he held a fold of her gown.
"Are you going to detain me?" she asked.  "Because if so, I shall
call Mrs. Barrett.  This is not love--oh, no, nor anything like it;
it's simply your fixed determination to have your own way.  I've
always known it, all these years--that you were not beaten, that you
meant to try again.  Not for love of me, but simply because to
conquer me is your fixed idea.  And this afternoon you thought you
had succeeded.  Well, you haven't, that's all."

He got to his feet, utterly humbled, reduced to abject pleading:

"Millie, see me again!  Don't let it end here!  I've lost my head,
and don't know what I am saying.  Give me a chance to talk things
out--"

"Never, never, never!" she shuddered, making for the door.  There she
turned upon him.  "You are a savage!  If you knew how I hate
savagery!  You are a Boer!  If you knew how I hate the Boers!  I'll
marry a man who knows how to treat a woman, not one whose
civilisation is only skin-deep."  He took two maddened strides
towards her.  "Has that hurt you?  Very well, then, you can kill me,
you know.  I wonder you don't."

He passed a hand over his hair like one pushing a veil from his eyes.

"I can tell you why I don't," he said, in tones that rapped out sharp
as a rapier thrust.  "It's because you're not worth it."

Almost before he had spoken, he had turned about, sprung from the
window, and disappeared.  The starshine glimmered in the silent room
where a moment ago had been such storm and stress.

Melicent stood alone, in possession of the field.  The suddenness of
the withdrawal of the besieging forces took her breath.  The Parthian
shot, fired in the moment of flight, reached her heart and quivered
there.

She gave a strangled low cry, as if physically hurt.

At last, it seemed, the long struggle was over.  Not because Bert
realised that she was out of reach, but because suddenly he had awoke
from his dream to find her not worth fighting for.

She told herself that, whatever the means, the thing was done, and
finally done now.  There would be no more vehement assaults for her
to dread.

Yet something unpleasantly like remorse was gnawing at her heart.
She knew she had said things she did not mean; in the heat of battle
she had caught up every missile....

Well, now it was over.  Silence and solitude were profound.  The air
which had vibrated to Bert's rage and Bert's repentance was so still
that the nightingale's song sounded too loud in her ears.

"All over!" she said aloud; and the words sounded strange and
horrible.

"All over!" She crept upstairs to a sleepless night; but this of late
had been no rare thing with her.

* * * * * * * *

In the early morning she went away to London, choosing a route to the
station which should not take her past the inn.

And for weeks the grey walls of Lone Ash rose higher in their
dignified beauty, unseen by the eyes of her for whom they were being
raised, and whose genius had called them into being.




CHAPTER XXXII

THE FRANSDALE SPORTS

  "Embrace me then, ye hills, and close me in;
  Now in the dear and open day I feel
  Your guardianship; I take it to my heart;
  'Tis like the solemn shelter of the night."
                        --WORDSWORTH (The Recluse).


The wedding-day was fixed, and Melicent lived in an atmosphere of
wedding presents and dressmakers.

Since her _fiancé's_ return she had altered noticeably, both in
appearance and manner.  She was paler than usual, large-eyed and
languid; and she had grown strangely gentle and yielding.  She
deferred to Lancelot in everything; and since two people cannot
possibly continue to kneel at each other's feet, and as Melicent
persistently adopted the lowly posture formerly monopolised by her
lover, he had, as a result, grown the least bit dictatorial.

Theoretically, of course, the change pleased him; but as a matter of
fact, he had found his lady-love more interesting when she was remote
and prickly.  Her new meekness was purely passive; it did not make
her more demonstrative.  She submitted to be caressed, but it was
always obvious that it was mere submission.

Brenda was very unhappy about her.  She was sure that she was
suffering mentally.  She knew she did not sleep.  However, girls just
before marriage are often restless and unsettled, and there was
nothing which she could definitely take notice of.

At the end of July the Fransdale Sports took place, an annual event
of the highest local importance.  They were held in a meadow near the
head of the Dale, not far below the Vicarage.  The meadow sloped
violently, but the fact was accepted by the natives as part of an
inexorable law of Nature.  All fields sloped; you might as well
quarrel with the grass for being green.

From early morning the little heathery tracks leading down from the
Riggs were black with a crawling line of folks, descending Indian
file by devious ways to the scene of action.  Traps of all kinds,
crowded with passengers, began to arrive, and to distribute
themselves in all the neighbouring stable-yards, which were soon
filled to overflowing.

Streams of fine plough-horses, yearlings, hunters and little fluffy
foals, moved slowly along various radii to the centre.  On the
ground, the chief farmers' wives were preparing a "ham tea" of vast
proportions in a large tent.

As the day wore on, the whole scene was alive with colour.  Exhibits
of butter, eggs, vegetables and fruit, were being solemnly appraised
by business-like judges.  There was a cackle of fowls, a cooing of
doves, the outraged cries of lordly rams tethered to stakes and with
coloured ribbons round their horns.

And the band!  One of the visitors remarked that it was worth coming
far, if only to see that band!

The musicians sat upon boards in the large hay-cart in which they had
been conveyed to the festal scene, and from which the horses had been
removed.  Their broad and solid backs, in every hue of
weather-stained fustian, formed a study for the eye of the humorously
inclined.

Then, of course, there were cocoa-nut shies and gingerbread stalls,
and a wheel of fortune.  For this one day in the year the austere
solitude of the moorland was broken through, and Fransdale was
actually noisy and crowded.

Among the throng, which grew thicker as the day wore into afternoon,
was a sprinkling of gentry, conspicuous among whom were the
Burmesters.  Sir Joseph took a genuine interest in all the exhibits,
and gave many valuable prizes.  There was naturally great interest
among all the natives over Lancelot's engagement.  Melicent was a
most popular person, and glances of affectionate admiration followed
her to-day.

She wore a white lace gown, with La France roses, and her white
sunshade was lined with rose colour.  Brenda thought she had never
seen her look so pretty, nor so sad.

"The Ayres' party are here," said Lance, strolling up to where his
mother stood, with Mrs. Helston and Melicent, watching the first
heats of a race run off.  "They've brought their tame crowd of
convalescents with them."

"Did you know," said Lady Burmester, "that the Ayres' offered their
house for a Convalescent Home for wounded officers?  That will arouse
enthusiasm, won't it, Lance?  The people will cheer, if they know
there are African heroes about."

"They exhausted their enthusiasm when Lance came home," smiled
Brenda.  "What a pity Captain Brooke is not here, then we should have
all the African contingent."

"Oh," said Lance, "I forgot to tell you, Mrs. Helston, I have at last
persuaded the obstinate old beggar to leave his beloved house to
build itself for a few weeks, and to come up here for a bit of rest."

"Oh, well done!" said Brenda, with animation.  "I should have been so
sorry for him not to have been at the wedding."

"He won't promise that, even now.  You know, I wanted him to be best
man.  He says weddings are not at all in his line.  But when we get
him here, perhaps you and Melicent can persuade him."

"He ought to be here pretty soon," said Lady Burmester.  "He's coming
in his motor, by road all the way, I believe, and he promised to try
and arrive in time for the sports.  I told him they were a sight he
ought not to miss."

Melicent was possessed by a most remarkable sensation, as if she were
drowning.  Fortunately, for a few minutes nobody noticed her; and
just as the waters were about to close over her head, they began to
recede again, and she drew a deep breath and made a vehement effort
to collect her thoughts.

But it was not possible.  He was coming.  Why, why, in wonder's name,
had he changed his plainly expressed intention of keeping away?

She felt sure something must have happened to cause him to reconsider
his decision.  Had he come to the conclusion that it was right that
Lance should know their story--hers and his?  Had he resolved to tell
it?

If so, they must have another tussle, he and she; for somehow she
felt sure that he would do nothing without giving her fair warning.

Every nerve in her quivered at the thought of seeing him.  The few
short words in which he had expressed his newly-born contempt said
themselves over and over in her mind continually.  How would he look?
What should she say?  What would happen?

"They're judging the foals.  Such funny little rats!  Come and see
them run round," said Lance's voice, close to her.

She looked up at him almost pitifully, as if searching his face for
visible assurance of love.  He was not looking at her, nor thinking
much of her apparently.  His visit to Russia had been a pleasant
experience for a clever young fellow--he had had his fill of flattery
and attention from the English _coterie_ at St. Petersburg.  He was
very fond of Millie, but the idea did cross his mind now and then
that she hardly seemed conscious enough of the really fine match she
was making.  To-day, his attention was by no means hers.  It was all
concentrated upon the live stock.

She crossed the grass at his side, and stood by the rope enclosure,
among the friendly faces of the Dalesmen.  There was Alfred Dow,
still unmarried, handsome as ever, if more solid; by his side,
talking to him, the demure figure of her cousin Barbara.  So even the
Vicarage was beginning to march with the times!  There was the farmer
who was reckoned the best judge of horse-flesh in the horse-loving
shire, and who might have served as a model for the typical John
Bull, as he stood in his gaiters and beaver hat, watching the paces
of the candidates.  Melicent was watching them too, with real
interest, when it seemed to her as though a touch were laid on her
heart.  Without raising her eyes, she knew who had drawn near.  She
shivered as she turned, and saw the Captain waiting to be greeted.

She said, "How do you do," without daring to meet his eyes; yet she
longed to know how they stood, and on what terms this man was once
again at her side.

  "O, come ye in peace or come ye in war,
  Or to dance at my bridal, thou young Lochinvar?"


As once before, at Lone Ash, she became sensible that he wished her
to look at him.  She knew he must read the signs of confusion on her
face.  The news of his coming had been too recent for her to have
recovered from it.  But she could not lift her eyes.  Lance's
cheerful greetings more than covered her silence; he was sincerely
glad to see his friend.  After a minute's chat, however, he was
called away.  He was much in request that day, and had to go off with
his father and judge rams, deputing Melicent to "show Brooke round."

Alone with Hubert, her courage turned to water.  For a long minute
they two stood there, unnoticed in the crowd, holding their breath,
dizzy, overwhelmed by the mere fact of each other's presence.

He spoke at last.  "You're not looking at all well," he said.

To which she naturally replied in a hurry:

"Oh, I am particularly well, thanks, only a little tired to-day."

"How do you think I look?" he asked quietly.

She dared not refuse the challenge.  Her eyes, when she lifted them,
held a piteous appeal.

But it was relief of which she was sensible as she met his gaze.  It
was kind and gentle.  He looked ill; so ill that she wondered that
Lance had not cried out upon him.  He was like a man who has passed
through some shattering experience, she thought.  There were dark
marks below his eyes, he had lost flesh, and he was pale, though so
tanned that this was not obvious.  But in his face was no shadow of
the contempt she had feared to see, and had winced from the thought
of.

In her relief she smiled up at him wistfully, as a child smiles at
his mother, to make sure she is no longer displeased.  When he smiled
in answer, it was like sunshine breaking out over a cloudy landscape.
It brought all her heart to her lips, it made her inclined to say:

"Oh, I must tell you my doubts and fears, and how I have tortured
myself since last I saw you!"

The words were trembling on her tongue.  In blind terror of
self-betrayal, she said the first safe thing that came into her head;
an inquiry after the progress at Lone Ash.

"They are roofing it," he said.  "The roof goes on this week."

She coloured with pleasure.

"Oh, do tell me what the effect is!  Do tell me how it looks from the
road below the gate!"

"It is beautiful!" he answered quietly.  "It grips me afresh every
time I see it.  Mayne, too, admires it immensely.  Did you know I
have had Mayne staying with me for the past month?"

"No, indeed; but I am glad to hear it," she cried.  "He was so
interested in the house; and then, he is quite an authority on
gardens, isn't he?  You must have found him a great help."

"Yes," said Hubert absently.  "That's very true; he has been a great
help."

She sent a sidelong glance at him, and noted afresh the marked change
in his expression.  There was a look upon the mouth that went to her
heart in an indescribable way.  It made her long to beg his pardon
for the things she had said to him that night.  The indefensibility
of her own conduct throughout smote upon her in quite a new way.
Never before in all her life had she felt the salutary self-reproach
which now reddened her cheek, tied her tongue, and seemed to leave
her helpless before him.

"Oh," she thought, "if he knew how much stronger he is when he looks
like that than when he is in one of those awful rages."

He was speaking, and she collected herself with a tremendous effort
to listen.

"The effect of those middle windows, with the transoms, which we had
such doubt about, is awfully good, to my thinking.  It only needs one
thing."

"One thing?"

"Which I must consult you about.  I have come here on purpose to talk
of it I feel, perhaps, as if my presence here may--to you--want a
little explaining.  I have come because I thought I ought to.  When
can you give me a few minutes?"

It was true then: there had, as she guessed, been a specific reason
for his appearance.  Strangely enough, she had never thought that it
would be anything in connection with Lone Ash.  Yet what more natural?

She looked alarmed.  "Is it important?"

"Very."

"You had better come over to Glen Royd to-morrow morning.  I do hope
it's not--any mistake I've made?"

He hesitated.

"Well, I'm afraid that's just what it is.  But I don't think it's
irretrievable."

She was filled with consternation.

"Oh, don't tell me it's structural!  We managed that thrust of the
wall on the north so splendidly with the buttress."

"It's nothing structural," said Hubert.

They had moved away, talking together, from the foals' enclosure, and
were crossing the grass slowly, not knowing whither they went.  Sybil
Ayres approached them, with two or three gentlemen, some of her
military convalescents.  She bowed to Melicent, whom she cordially
disliked, and was passing on, when one of her companions cried:

"Why, surely that must be Miss Lutwyche!  How d'ye do?  Didn't expect
to see me here, did you?"

And Melicent was looking into the humorous, relentless hatchet face
of Amurrica.  His eye wandered over her, noting every detail of her
appearance and costume; from her to her companion; and Melicent, with
her faculties sharpened by the emergency, saw with delight that he
did not recognise Bert.  Her expression did not change.

"I am afraid you are mistaken," she said politely.  "I do not think
we are acquainted."

"I'm making no mistakes.  My name's Otis.  'Amurrica' they used to
call me in Slabbert's Poort, as I've been explainin' to these ladies.
You're Millie Lutwyche, ain't you?"

"I am.  I remember, there was someone of your name in the place.  But
I do not remember that we were ever acquainted.  I did not know any
of the diamond miners."

"I'm a diamond major now," cried Amurrica, with an unpleasant laugh.
"Look here, Miss Lutwyche, we shall be obliged to refresh your memory
a little.  D'you remember your father's funeral?  I was there."

"The whole town was there," said Millie, with indifference.  Then,
with an air of stopping the conversation, she said to Miss Ayres:
"Have you been in the tents?  Is it worth while taking Captain Brooke
to see the fruit?"

Then, receiving a dubious answer, she inclined her head in
leave-taking, and walked away.

As soon as they were out of earshot, she looked up at Hubert with an
altered expression--a look of comradeship--her late nervousness
chased away.

"You see!  He didn't know you a bit!" she cried.

"Not a bit," he answered.  "Just as big a beast as ever!  But do you
mind my saying I think it was unwise to cut him?  You've made him
savage, and he may be rude."

"Let him," said Millie contemptuously.  "It is quite true that I
never knew him.  You know, I never would speak to him.  How could he
be rude?"

"He might say things about you--to other people."

"Well, he can't say anything I'm ashamed of," said Millie coolly.

"You always did despise your enemies."

"Well, I haven't got any enemies now," was the careless answer.

"God grant it!" he replied, thinking of things said to him by Mrs.
Cooper and her daughters one day when he went to tennis at the
Vicarage.




CHAPTER XXXIII

CALUMNY

  I?  What I answered?  As I live
  I never fancied such a thing
  As answer possible to give.
                              --COUNT GISMOND.


Lancelot, returning from what he called distinguishing between the
rams and the he-goats, was intercepted by Sybil Ayres.

"Oh, Mr. Burmester, it is so interesting!  Here is a gentleman who
knows all about Miss Lutwyche!  Not only that, but what do you think?
Her brother is his servant!"

Lance stared blankly.

"Some mistake, Miss Ayres," he said pleasantly.  "Miss Lutwyche has
no brother."

"Well, if I'm tellin' lies, you can easily prove it, you know," said
Amurrica jocosely.  "The young lady's got a short memory, but I
daresay it can be refreshed."

"Do let me introduce Major Otis," said Sybil.  "He is so interested
to meet Miss Lutwyche's _fiancé_."

Otis took Lance by the hand, and shook it impressively.

"I'm proud to meet a man of generosity and insight--I say, of
generosity and insight," said he solemnly.  "Insight to see that the
gal's real grit, in spite of her family; and generosity to overlook
the things in her past that are better not talked about."

"Look here!" said Lance, in a fury.  "I don't know whether this is
the latest variety of American humour, but whatever it is, it's
deuced bad form, and you'll find you had better keep your head shut
in England.  Kindly choose some other subject of conversation than
Miss Lutwyche, unless you want me to punch your head."

"You could easily do that," said Otis pensively.  "I'm in quite the
early stages of my convalescence.  However, there's no need.  Of
course I withdraw all I said.  Naturally, I thought you must know all
about--well, well!  Keep your hair on!  Sorry I spoke.  Can't say
more than that, can I?  Only this one thing I must say.  My boy,
Arnie Lutwyche, has lived in hopes of finding his sister when he got
to England.  Are you goin' to prevent his speakin' to her?"

"There's some absurd error," said Lance, in a rage.  "I tell you Miss
Lutwyche has no brothers.  I also warn you, Major Otis, that there
are libel laws in England."

He raised his hat and hurried off, afraid to trust himself.

Just as he departed, Madeline and Theo, who had been for a long time
hanging around, in hopes of being introduced to some officers,
ventured to come up, and found themselves welcomed by Miss Ayres with
quite unwonted cordiality.

"Oh, do come here!  Miss Lutwyche is your cousin, isn't she?" she
cried.  "You must be introduced to an old friend of hers!"

The girls listened spellbound to the piquant story of the presence in
England of a Boer boy who was Millie's brother.  "A regular, sulky
Boer," giggled Sybil, "who only speaks very broken English."

They looked at each other.

"Why," said Madeline, "then I expect the Major could tell us all
about Millie before she came to England--what we have always wanted
to know--how she got her arm broken, and so on."

"I can tell you that, certainly.  She broke her arm scrambling out
through a skylight to meet her lover, when her stepmother had locked
her in."

"That we can easily believe," cried Theo.  "Father sent her away from
the Vicarage for that very same thing--getting out of her bedroom
window at night!  And then she tried to fix the blame on Gwen."

Sybil Ayres listened with eyes starting from her head.

"Do you suppose Mr. Burmester knows all this?" she cried.

"If he don't, he oughter," said Otis, whose English was apt to fray,
as it were, when he grew familiar or confidential.  "The person that
told him would be doin' him a kindness.  Look here!  I ought to know
something about that gal, since I was engaged to marry her, with her
mother's consent."

"To marry her!  She was only sixteen!" cried Theo.

"We were short of gals in Slabbert's Poort," said Amurrica, with that
irresistible dry grin which always fascinated people.  "But the day
her father was buried, Mestaer, the feller she was carryin' on with,
picked a quarrel with me, fought me, pounded me into a jelly, and
carried off my gal that night."

Madeline grew very red.  The seriousness of this accusation was more
than she had contemplated.  After all, Melicent was a Cooper!

"You must mean he tried to carry her off," she said faintly.

Major Otis took out the cigar he was smoking--one of General Ayres'
best--and touched her sleeve lightly with one finger.

"Cousin of yours?"  He looked round at Sybil with raised eyebrows.
"Better not.  This pretty young English lady don't know the sorter
thing her cousin came out of."

"Having gone so far, you ought to speak out, I think," said Madeline.

He shook his head, and looked sympathetic.

"This young lady is going to be married, I hear--to make what's
called a good match?"

They all assented.

"Well then, why spoil her chances?"  He shrugged his shoulders and
replaced his cigar.

"Why, there are the Burmesters to think of," cried Sybil Ayres
indignantly.  "And the Helstons, whom she has deceived all these
years."

"That's so," said Amurrica slowly.  "That's so, certainly."

"You had better tell us what you know; we are her cousins," said Theo.

"Well, what I'm tellin' you now, I'm prepared to swear to, before any
magistrate in this county," he replied, as if reluctantly.  "It's
simply this.  Mestaer carried off Millie Lutwyche to his house and
kept her there.  After some days he deserted her, went off and
enlisted--and the chaplain chipped in, and sent her home to her
friends.  Arnie Lutwyche will tell you all whether that's true or
not, and you must decide whether Burmester ought to be told."

Madeline and Theo stood looking at one another.

"And she pretended to be so honest, and so disgusted with us for
doing things on the quiet!" gasped Madeline at last.  "Father ought
to be told.  Go, Theo, tell him to come at once and hear what Major
Otis has to say."

Meanwhile Lance, in white heat, made his way to where his party were
standing.

"Melicent," he said, "do you know there's a brute of a chap called
Otis here to-day--a fellow that was notorious in Africa for all kinds
of rascality--telling everybody that he knows you, and has got a
brother of yours over here with him as his servant.  What does he
mean by such cheek?"

Melicent turned quickly to him.  "What does he say?  He has one of
the Lutwyche boys here?"

"The Lutwyche boys?  Who are they?" cried Lance, in stupefaction.

"Why, Tante Wilma's children," said Millie disgustedly; "my
half-brothers and sisters."

There was a silence.  Lady Burmester turned a look of blank
astonishment upon Mrs. Helston.

"Do I understand that Lance will have a family of half Boer
brothers-in-law?" she said.

"But I thought you knew my father married a Boer woman after my
mother died.  I thought everyone knew it," said Millie.  "Surely Mr.
Mayne told you; he knows all about it.  It was he who got me away
from Tante Wilma after my father died."

Lance cleared his throat.

"Perhaps," he said, "before I again encounter Major Otis, it will be
as well for you to give me further family information."

"It would have been better had it been given before," echoed his
mother, very stiffly.

Melicent dared not look at Bert.  She held up her little head proudly.

"I was under the impression that everyone knew," she said.  "Pater
and Mater certainly do, and I assumed they had told you long ago.
Please believe that I have never had the least intention of sailing
under false colours."

There flashed across Lancelot's mind a memory of a chance word spoken
by Harry Helston the first time he saw Melicent upon Tod's Trush:
"_It's not a pretty story, and I daresay would do the poor child no
good in a narrow, provincial circle?_"

There were passages in Millie's life of which he knew nothing, but of
which, apparently, the odious Otis knew much.  It was a rankling
thought.

Captain Brooke broke the silence.

"There is one consolation," he observed coolly.  "Otis is such a
wholesale liar, he'll soon get found out.  It might be doing him a
kindness if I gave him a hint to keep himself in the background.  I
know enough about him to make General Ayres regret his hospitality.
Whatever you do, keep clear of him, Lady Burmester.  If I may count
myself enough your friend to give you a hint, avoid being introduced
to the fellow.  He's not fit to mix with ladies."

"Really, Captain Brooke?  I am extremely obliged," said Lady
Burmester gratefully.

"Keep clear of the Ayres party, mother," said Lance.  "Brooke's
right, he's a beast.  Come, Melicent, I am going to start the sports
now."

He spoke irritably, and Melicent silently walked away with him,
conscious of a burning, fiery resentment against him, his mother,
herself, and Fate generally.

Her pride was cruelly wounded, and her conscience reiterated, "Serve
you right!"  She knew that had she really loved Lancelot she would
have known no peace until she had told him all about Hubert.  She
ought to have done so.  Now some kind of explanation was unavoidable.
It was impossible but that Lance should return to the subject.  She
now felt certain that Otis would tell everybody who would listen some
garbled version of her flight from her stepmother's house.  Vaguely
she began to realise how far it was in his power to injure her; and
she knew that, had Lance been in possession of the actual facts, he
would have had no power to injure her at all.  She had left her lover
in the position of being unable to contradict effectively anything
that might be said.

The figure she must cut was not a dignified one.  If she broke off
the engagement, it could but seem that she did so because she was
found out, and dreaded further revelations.  If she confessed to
Lance, he must feel that she did so only because concealment was no
longer practicable, to say nothing of the suspicions which she must
arouse by the mere fact of not having spoken before.  She saw that,
whatever she did, she must lower herself, perhaps fatally, in the
eyes of her lover.  She positively shrank from the abyss before her.
She could not see how she could avoid public humiliation, and what
was worse, she must sink in the eyes of the Helstons too.  They had
loved, shielded, trusted her.  She had wilfully gone her own way,
keeping from them all that most nearly concerned her, locking her
heart, hiding it away from them....

It was human nature that, at the moment, Lance's regard should seem
to her more precious than ever before.  No woman is ready to resign
her lover because she has ceased to be pleasing in his sight.

She stood by his side, watching, with eyes that swam in tears, the
great raw-boned Dalesmen slouching round the sloping, bumpy course
with limbs all abroad, yet keeping up a pace that was undeniable, as
they completed lap after lap of the walking race, which was the great
event of the day, a professional champion from another county being
entered for it.

Outwardly she maintained her pride and spirit.  She smiled and
chatted to Lance so naturally that he began to forget his uneasiness.

"Curious," he observed to her presently, "that I never heard of your
father's children."

"Vrouw Lutwyche cast me off," said Millie.  "She repudiated me.  I
never expected to hear of her again.  They are well-to-do; there
seemed no reason why they should trouble themselves; they only wanted
to be rid of me."

"Still, they are your father's children."

"Oh," she said, in her hardest voice, "I suppose so; but nobody could
think it.  They are all Boer, through and through.  I could not love
them.  I am a cold person, as you know.  I should have told you of
them, if I had not made quite sure you knew."

He did not reply for a moment; when he did, what he said startled her.

"It at least shows how far we have been from perfect confidence."

She looked at him astonished, taken aback.  He was studying the race
card.

The invitations to the wedding were actually written.  It seemed to
Melicent that her marriage was as final a thing as the fact that
autumn follows summer.  She was frightened, shaken.

"Surely," she faltered, "perfect confidence is a thing that comes by
degrees?"

"I think it ought to come before marriage, don't you?" said Lance.

She felt as if he had opened an oubliette at her feet.  How could she
tell him what ought to be told?  But evidently she must either do
that or lose him.  She firmly believed that, in his wholesome,
out-of-doors life, were no dark corners concealed from her.

However far she was from passion, she liked Lance dearly.  The idea
of his contempt was extremely painful.

All her life she had prided herself upon her honesty!

And her attempt to assert her independence of spirit had led her into
this _impasse_!




CHAPTER XXXIV

THE DISCOMFITURE OF OTIS

  "We build with strength the deep tower-wall
    That shall be shattered thus and thus.
  And fair and great are court and hall;
    But how fair--this is not for us,
  Who know the lack that lurks in all.

                    "... the years
  Interpret everything aright,
    And crown with weeds our pride of towers,
  And warm our marble through with sun,
    And break our pavements through with flowers,
  With an Amen when all is done."
                                  --MRS. MEYNELL.


Sybil Ayres, who was animated by a very lively desire to pay out
Lancelot for being about to marry someone else, manœuvred
repeatedly to approach the Burmester party, and fling her fire-brand
into their midst.  But in some unaccountable way they seemed to elude
her.  After a time she appealed to Captain Brooke, who happened to be
passing by.

"Captain Brooke, do persuade Miss Lutwyche to come this way!  Her
brother is here, and wants to see her."

"What, one of the Boer boys?  He had better go and call upon her
to-morrow at Glen Royd, I should think.  This is a public sort of
meeting-place; and as you see, she is leaving the ground now with
Lady Burmester's party."

"It looks just as if Miss Lutwyche was avoiding him," tittered Miss
Ayres.

"It is Major Otis whom they are all avoiding, by my advice," said the
Captain gravely.

"Because he knows all about Miss Lutwyche's African life?  That looks
as if there were something to be ashamed of, doesn't it?" said the
girl impertinently.

"Not on that account, but because--you will pardon my speaking so of
the General's guest--with my consent, no woman of my acquaintance
should speak to such a man."

"Captain Brooke!"

"I will say the same to Otis himself, if you wish.  He has no
business in any gentleman's house, and he knows it.  Whatever he told
me, I should be sure was a lie, merely because Otis said it."

"But--but--" stammered Sybil, crimson, "the vicar says that all Major
Otis tells him is borne out by his own knowledge, only the real facts
were kept from him by Mr. Mayne.  The Major says he is prepared to
swear before any magistrate that all he says is true."

"Then he has actually presumed to make charges against Miss
Lutwyche?" asked the Captain, his eyes like blue fire.  "You can tell
him from me that wilful perjury's a serious matter in England."

"Oh, Captain Brooke, do you really think that what he says about Miss
Lutwyche is untrue?  Because the vicar is gone to lay the matter
before Sir Joseph.  He felt it his duty.  Major Otis says Miss
Lutwyche, if asked, can't, and won't deny it."

"Deny what?" asked Brooke, in a tone that, as Sybil afterwards
declared, sent cold shivers down her back.

"If--if it's true, Miss Lutwyche ought not--  But I couldn't possibly
tell you!"

"Yet you could listen," he broke in.  "You could stand by while that
coward dared to mishandle the name of a girl you have known for
years!  You could believe his vile accusations!  Well, now, he has
chosen to do this thing in public, and I'll make him regret it to the
last day he lives.  I'll just trouble Major Otis to repeat his lies
to me!  Excuse plain speaking.  But I know this man, and you don't."

The Burmester party, including the vicar and the Helstons, were just
driving away as he strode with his long, firm stride, across the
field to where the Major stood, a cluster of eager listeners around
him.  His hand rested on the shoulder of a big, slouching boy,
swarthy, with high cheek-bones and little black eyes, who seemed
about as unlike what one would imagine Melicent's brother as anything
could be.

"This boy can tell you it's all true," he was saying, "and so could
Mestaer, if he hadn't got shot as a spy later on, in the campaign."

"I knew Mestaer," said the Captain, in a carrying voice.  "Perhaps
the fact may serve as an introduction between us, Major.  Now you
tell me, straight out, the truth about him and Miss Lutwyche, just as
you have been telling these friends of ours, will you?"

Eager faces, wearing expressions of various kinds, pressed nearer as
Otis, wholly unsuspicious, repeated his version of Millie's flight
from her father's house.

Alfred Dow was close to Bert; Mrs. Cooper and her daughters not far
off.

The Captain listened with perfect calmness.  When it was done, he
said quietly: "That all?"

"That's all; and if I were Burmester, I'd think it enough," he said,
laughing brutally.

"Well," said Bert, "then my turn comes.  You have had no scruple in
saying this abominable thing out before ladies, which alone might
have opened their eyes as to the kind of refuse you are; so I have no
scruple in telling you, before ladies, that you lie.  You lie, sir,
as a Boer traitor might be expected to do.  Yes, grin!  Show them all
the false teeth you wear in place of those Mestaer knocked down your
throat on the day you laid your plans against Miss Lutwyche!  Hold
your tongue!  You've had your innings this afternoon; now I'm going
to have mine!  You lied again when you said Mestaer was shot.  He is
alive, as you probably know.  What you don't know is that he is in
England.  The Bishop of Pretoria is in England too.  Both these
witnesses can prove the untruth of your story, as you know; and I
both can and will produce them--not here, but in open court, unless
you confess yourself a malicious liar, and offer a public apology.
If you don't withdraw every word you have said against Miss Lutwyche
this afternoon, you shall pay such swingeing damages as shall exhaust
the last of the loot you stole when you were in the Boer Irish
Brigade, before the taking of Kroonstadt.  Ha, you see, I know!"

He had spoken without a pause.  The white intensity of his rage had
carried him along, and the silent sympathy of the excited audience
seemed to make itself felt.  Amurrica had several times tried to
break in, but in vain.  But now he uttered a howl of rage, and
fuming, turned to those about him.

"He thinks to frighten me!  He thinks he can--  By the----  Who are
you, sir?  Who are you to take up the cudgels for this young lady?"

"I have the privilege to be a friend of Miss Lutwyche," said Hubert,
raising his hat as he spoke with a quiet grace which gave the effect
of saluting her name.  "I also know the Orange Colony like the palm
of my hand.  There's not a man in that colony that would believe you
on your oath.  If I allowed this gathering to disperse without
knowing you for the scoundrel you are, I should be failing in my duty
to this country.  Ladies and gentlemen, you have heard the slander
uttered by this renegade.  I shall now tell you the truth, in as few
words as possible.  Miss Lutwyche was left an orphan at the age of
sixteen, in a Boer village which a year or two before had got filled
with sweepings from other parts of Africa, come there in search of
diamonds.  This man, who had long cast eyes on her, paid her
stepmother a sum of money to hand her over to him on her father's
death.  But Mr. Mayne, the chaplain, had been left her guardian,
which interfered with their design.  Mayne had to go away on urgent
business connected with the will.  In his absence it was plotted that
Otis should go through a form of marriage with the girl at the hands
of the Boer Predikant.  But, as they knew the indomitable spirit of
Miss Lutwyche, the Boer woman thrashed her within an inch of her life
to reduce her to a proper state of submission.  In escaping from her
torturers, she fell down a ladder, and dislocated her arm.  That
seems to have frightened them somewhat, for they let her creep away
to her garret to die.  Mestaer, who had been asked by Mayne to keep
watch, went to the house, found her lying in a pool of blood, and
carried her to his home.  Where else could he have taken her?  He put
her in charge of his housekeeper, fetched a doctor at once, and
mounted guard until Mayne's return, when he went off to the war.
Now, you ask that boy there, whether this is true or no.  Here, boy!
did your mother sjambok your sister?"

All eyes were turned upon the uncouth lad.  He lifted his eyes to his
questioner with a very curious look; he did not seem to notice Otis,
who still kept a heavy hand on his shoulder.

"Yes, she did," he replied sulkily.

"Was it done at Otis's suggestion?"

Here the boy shook off the Major's touch, and stood up.

"Yes; to make her go quiet; only mother was drunk, and she done too
much."

There was a kind of growl all round among the listening Dalesmen.
Otis grew green, and clenched his fist.

"You shall pay for this!" he muttered to the boy.

"Had Otis paid your mother to arrange the matter?" went on Bert
relentlessly.

"Yes."

"And this is the cur," said Hubert, between his teeth, "who has dared
to slander a young innocent girl before you all this day."

Otis was literally foaming at the mouth.  His mortification was
choking him.

"I said what was true!" he screamed.  "Mestaer did carry her off!  I
said no more!  She was in his house!  That's all I said."

"Yes, and that's what you'll go to hell for saying!" shouted Dow,
cracking a formidable whip he held, and stamping with excitement.
"It isn't a sjambok, Captain, but let me lay it round him once or
twice!  Let me just give him the feel of it!  Do now!"

Bert waved him back.

"If it wasn't for his health," he said, "I would be inclined to let
you do as you liked with him.  But he's ill, Dow, and he mustn't be
touched.  But if there's a soul present will let him inside his doors
after this, I shall be surprised.  You're a discredited traitor," he
said fiercely to the livid Otis.  "How you got your commission is one
of the many mysteries of the late campaign.  Having come through so
far, you might have had the common decency to lie low and keep your
poisonous tongue quiet!"

Otis appealed, gasping in his rage, to General Ayres; but the General
turned his back upon him.

"We took our convalescents on trust," he said coldly.  "That trust
the War Office has betrayed.  I will send your luggage to any address
you like to give me."

"But look here--is this justice, bare justice?  His word against
mine, that's all you've got, except for this lying little Boer--"

"We all know and respect Captain Brooke," said the General, bowing to
Hubert.  "I may add, we all know and admire Miss Lutwyche."  He
raised his hat, as Hubert had done.  "Gentlemen, may I venture to
suggest--three cheers for Miss Lutwyche?"

The field rang again.  The hurrahs rolled away across the Dale, and
Brenda remarked, as they drove silently."

"That must have been a close race!  Hark, how they are cheering the
winner!"

* * * * * * * *

"You rat--you little viper!" hissed Amurrica, as he hastened, with
Arnie at his side, to get the dog-cart from the farm where it was put
up, and drive away from the scene of his disgrace, "why in thunder
did you give me away like that?"

It was a long time before the sullen answer came:

"Always was afraid of him."

"Afraid of me?"

"No fear," said Arnie, with a laugh.  "Not much.  But I always have
been feared of Bert Mestaer."

"What?"  Otis gave a kind of jump into the air.  "Mestaer?  That?
Mestaer coming the county gentleman?  And I never knew it!  You
little devil, why didn't you tell me?"

"Thought you'd know him."

Otis stood still in the dusty lane.  He went from red to pale, and
almost to purple again.

"If he thinks he's done with me, he makes a mistake, that's all," he
growled; and he snarled like a wild beast.




CHAPTER XXXV

CONFESSION

  "Well, I have played and lost.  But that is best.
    Where was my right to win and keep such glory?
  Now I will let the book of living rest.
    Closed is my story."
                                    --ALICE HERBERT.


Hubert's motor traversed the distance from the sports to Ilbersdale
at a rate so far beyond the police limit as to make limits seem
ridiculous.

On his way he encountered Mr. Cooper, pushing his bicycle up hill.
The seething excitement which had gripped him that afternoon had not
yet expended itself; and he pulled up.

"Good evening, Vicar.  Just a word!  I hope you have not been to the
Burmesters with any of those awful lies about your niece that Otis
was getting off his chest in that field?"

The vicar assumed his most stony aspect.  His cold eye said
eloquently, "Beware!"  Aloud his reply was: "I fear I do not
understand you, Captain Brooke."

"Sorry; it's my slang makes me difficult to follow.  I drop into it
when I'm excited.  You see, I happen to know all about Otis, and I've
just been enlightening the bystanders a bit.  There isn't enough of
him left to make a War Office clerk!  They've hissed him off the
ground, General Ayres has washed his hands of him, and I've given him
twelve hours to choose between a libel action and a written apology."

"It is a--surely--a somewhat extraordinary proceeding on your part to
talk of libel actions on behalf of a young lady who has her own
relatives to protect her," said the vicar, fastening, in the whirl of
his mind, upon a breach of conventionalities which he might
legitimately resent.

"Her own relatives didn't seem to me to be doing much protecting this
afternoon," observed Bert drily.  "However, Mrs. Cooper and your
daughters will be able to tell you all about it.  They saw the brute
knocked out of time."

The vicar began to be anxious to get home.

"I fancy you are under a misapprehension," he said.  "I have just
been to Ilbersdale to correct a misunderstanding.  I own I was
disturbed this afternoon to find that Mr. and Mrs. Helston had
allowed the engagement between Mr. Burmester and my niece to take
place, without informing the bridegroom's relatives of the serious
family disabilities of the bride.  I was anxious to assure Lady
Burmester that, had the affair rested with me, I should have been
quite frank; but that I naturally imagined that Miss Lutwyche's
adopted parents had supplied all the facts."

"That was very thoughtful of you.  But if you were, as you say, in
possession of the facts, how is it that you did not contradict the
horrible misstatements made by Otis up at the field?"

The vicar grew still more stony.

"I have never been made acquainted with the exact truth concerning my
niece's injuries at the time of her father's death."

"Injuries?" echoed Bert.  "Injuries, indeed!  But I've seen her
righted.  She was the darling of the Dale before; she'll be its idol
now!  Did you hear them cheering her?"

The vicar stood amazed.  "Cheering my niece?"

Hubert laughed mischievously.

"And who may you be, to have the intimate knowledge which I lack
concerning this young lady?" inquired the vicar.

"Hubert Brooke, late Captain in Lacy's Brigade," laughed Bert, as he
drove away.

Mr. Cooper pursued his road, in much wrath and discomfiture.  His
reception at Ilbersdale had affronted him, his encounter with Bert
bewildered him.  He remounted the bicycle which he was pushing at the
time of his meeting, and rode home with what speed he might.

By the Vicarage gate two men were awaiting him--Otis and the
unattractive Boer boy.  Evidently they meant to speak with him.

Otis approached with the easy confidence and winning smile that he
could assume at will.  He begged pardon for troubling, but he had
unthinkingly mixed himself up in what looked to him like a local
scandal of formidable dimensions, and he had come to the vicar for
advice.  Mr. Cooper's anger was not altogether proof against the
insidious appeal.  He was used to being ignored and left out of
things, and, to one whose own idea of his own importance, both
socially and parochially, was enormous, the way this man approached
him was a salve to a wound always more or less smarting.

After a short parley, understanding that Otis had material facts to
communicate, he invited him in.

Mrs. Cooper and her daughters were at tea; and there was a flutter of
consternation among them for they had seen the exit of Otis from the
Fransdale sports.  Mrs. Cooper became unspeakably coy, blushing like
a girl, and dismissing her brood, with their tea half done, on the
flimsiest of pretexts.

"This is not surprisin', Mrs. Cooper," said Otis sadly.  "I was a
stranger up there, and nobody knew me.  It was my word against that
of a bad and dangerous man, who is sailin' among you all under false
colours.  These young ladies heard him givin' me the lie up there.
In justice, I should like to have them hear what I want to tell you
now.  You may have heard Mr. Mayne or Miss Lutwyche talk of the man
Mestaer?"

"Yes, yes," gasped Madeline, at the door.  "She had one letter from
him after she got here--you remember, mother, the letter she would
not show you.  She said he wanted to marry her!"

"She wouldn't show you his letter?" slowly said Otis, standing by the
table, and turning his hat round in his hand as if on the point of
taking leave.  "Has she ever told you that he goes now under the name
of Brooke?"

"What's that you say?" sharply asked the vicar.

"He's well disguised," replied Otis.  "He bluffed me, I own it.  But
Arnie here, he knew him from the first; didn't you, boy?"

Arnold looked at the three tall, full-blown girls, blushed admiringly
and assented.

Surprise deprived them all of speech.

"Now, I'm told," said Otis, "that this fine Captain Brooke is
buildin' himself a house, and that Miss Lutwyche is his--architect."
He gave a little chuckle, "Excuse me: I really got to laff," he
drawled humorously.  "The idea of him an' his architect is a bit too
thick--eh?"

"Miss Lutwyche is duly qualified," began the vicar, in his stateliest
manner.

"Do I doubt it?  No, sir!  But I hear she has been stayin' down in
the shires with him pretty near all summer, gettin' this house ready
while her lover's in Russia.  Now, I couldn't help just wonderin'--we
really couldn't help it, Arnie and me--whether young Burmester knows
that Brooke's her old lover."

"Why, do you think _she_ knows?" cried Theo excitedly.

Otis bent on her the sliest, most waggish look, and slowly closed one
eye.

"Dear young ladies, you live in Arcadia," he said.  "You remind me of
three hedge-roses; an' you're doubtless as simple as you're sweet.
But your cousin, Miss Lutwyche, she wasn't born yesterday, you know.
She knows a thing or two, you may take my word for that."

The vicar was silent, struggling with mortification.  That day he had
broken through his lifelong rule to do nothing hurriedly.  He had
gone straight from hearing Otis's revelations to be first with Lady
Burmester.  He felt sure that what was said must ultimately come to
her ears.  He thought his duty was plain.

But if he had only waited!  If he had only gone to Millie, armed with
this fact!  If he could have charged her with knowing who Bert was,
and concealing her knowledge, how differently things might have gone!

He looked at his wife, who seemed to be still blushing.  She rose
from table.

"As you say, Mr. Otis," said she, with archness which was unutterably
comic upon her middle-aged, substantial personality, "my dear girls
are very unsophisticated.  They have been carefully brought up, as
English girls usually are.  I will leave you to discuss this serious
matter with Mr. Cooper, and take them away.  Come, my darlings."

* * * * * * * *

Meanwhile Bert drove straight to the Grange, inquired for Lance, and
found him alone in the smoking-room, sunk in profound gloom and a
large arm-chair.

"Burmester," he said abruptly, "I've come to talk to you--to tell you
something that will perhaps sever our friendship for ever.
Confession is good, they say; but I funk mine."  He sank down in the
opposite chair, drawing out his cigar-case.  "I funk it; make it as
easy as you can, old man."

Lance was not smoking.  He lifted a haggard young face from the
depths of his chair.

"Sorry," he said nervously, "but fact is, I'm feeling a bit
off--preoccupied.  I must own I'm not in a sympathetic mood."

"It's about that--same thing.  My confession touches the spot," said
Hubert.

"What are you talking about?"

"You are upset because you find scandal busy with the name of ...
your ... the girl you love.  And because you feel she hasn't been
open with you.  You don't doubt her, but you feel there are things
you should have known, which she has kept back.  Is that so?"

"That's precisely it," said Lance hurriedly.  "I oughtn't to talk to
you about it--about her.  But there must be some kind of
understanding between me and her if--if things are to go on.  I feel
a brute, to talk like this, but I am all abroad, so to speak.  We
have had a very unpleasant scene here.  Old Cooper turned up, and
said there were wild rumours flying about, on the authority of those
who claimed to have known her in Africa, to the effect that she,
Melicent, had got out of her bedroom window and gone with a man
called Mestaer, and that she had been in his house three or four
weeks.  He said he came to Melicent for an authoritative
contradiction.  He wished to be able to refute the story; thought he
had a right to ask for the exact facts."

He leaned forward, running his hands up through his hair.

Hubert sat very still.  "And what did she say?"

"... Said it was true."

There was a pause.  "Not as if she meant it?" asked Hubert
tentatively.

"She was very angry.  She looked splendid.  She said that it was at
her uncle's own request that she had kept silence--that when she
first came to England she was anxious to tell him everything, but was
forbidden to mention the subject.  If we wanted to know the truth we
could write to the Bishop: he knew.  Then she got up and took her
leave, and went off with the Helstons.  Of course I know this is a
cock-and-bull story; but I feel ... I ought to have been told."

"Yes," agreed his friend, "you ought to have been told."

"One thing I do wish," said Lance, clenching his fists, "that I had
that man Mestaer here to strangle."

"Well, if all our wishes could be as easily granted," said Hubert.
"I'm Mestaer."

Lance bounded from his seat, then sank back, as red as fire.

"Is this a time for your rotting?"

"No rotting here.  I told you it would mean the breaking of our
friendship very likely.  I am Hubert Mestaer.  I took the name of
Brooke because it was English, and my mother's, and I wished to live
in England and be English.  May I go on, or are you too angry to hear
me?"

Lance rose to his feet again.  He stared blankly for a minute or two,
then his eyes suddenly blazed.

"You're Mestaer!  Good God!  _Then you're the man that knows!_  You
can tell me ... what happened that night!"

"Yes; I can tell you: and I will.  Mayne knows, she knows, I know.
Nobody else."

A shiver ran through Lancelot; he seemed on the brink of a hundred
questions; he choked them back.

"Speak, can't you?" he said.

Hubert spoke.  He told his story from the beginning, making
Melicent's attitude towards himself throughout quite clear.  He did
not dwell on his own feelings, but made it no secret that he had come
to England solely in the hope of being able to obtain her regard.

Lancelot listened to it all, as to information respecting some girl
whom he had never known.

"That she should have undergone all this, and never told me a word!"

"I can see where her difficulty came in," said Bert "Before she
engaged herself to you, she had guessed who I am.  That altered
everything.  If you can see what I mean, it turned the past into the
present.  She could not speak to you of Mestaer without adding that
he was here, in England, under another name.  That would have been
giving me away--"

"Why couldn't she warn you that she should speak?"

"She never confessed to me that she knew.  She tried to avoid
intimacy."

"You ought to have told me yourself!" cried Lance.

"Well, until she engaged herself to you, it was certainly no concern
of yours," said Hubert bluntly.  "Do you suppose that what you are
feeling now is anything like as bad as what I felt about you, when I
heard you had carried off the only thing that made life worth living
to me?"

Lance paced the room restlessly.

"Is that still the same?" he cried.  "Do you still care about her?"

"It's chronic," said Bert calmly.  "There's only one woman in my
world.  She might have Boer relations on every bush for aught I
should care.  Nothing she could do, nothing anybody could say of her,
would make any difference to me."

"But--then--when she's my wife?" stammered Lance.

"When she's--your wife I shall never see her any more," said Bert
quietly.  "It wouldn't be safe."

"Safe?  No!  But am I safe now?" cried the young man bitterly.  "I
don't understand.  What is the situation at this moment between you
and her?"

Bert folded his arms tight, hunching himself together as if to keep
control over his temper.

"That's a question, surely, that you must ask her to answer," he
said, in a colourless voice.

Lance uttered an exclamation of rage.

"You ought to know without asking," went on Hubert presently.  "Does
she love you?  Surely you must know that,  If she does ... I'm out of
it, you see."

Lancelot paused in his pacing.  He leaned against the window-frame
staring out Hubert had touched the weak spot.  He knew that he had
persuaded Millie into the engagement, had ever since continued to
assure her that she was happy, or that, if not, she certainly would
be.  He knew that, were he sure of her love, distrust would be
impossible to him.  He was not sure.  He did distrust her.  He was
madly, wildly jealous of Hubert.  Crossing to where he sat, he seized
his shoulder, shaking him violently.

"When she promised to marry me, did she know who you are?"

"Yes."

"Then it's all right!  It must be!  She said she liked me better than
anybody else."

"If she said so, it was true."

"She's--she's not like most girls, you see.  She's a cold nature--"

"Is she?"

Hubert closed his eyes, thinking of the lips that had clung to his,
the eyes that had looked into his, the hands that had trembled
beneath his, as they stood together in the chalky pit He got up
suddenly: he had had about as much as he could stand.

At the moment a footman entered, with a note on a salver.

"From her," said Lance, very white, as the man left the room.

"Breaking it off," said Hubert, relighting his cold cigar with a
shaking hand.

Lance read it

"Just so.  She declines to give any kind of explanation of the
statements made by Mr. Cooper.  She prefers to consider the
engagement at an end."  He stood silent a moment, the note crumpled
in his hand.  "I'll go to her," he said unsteadily.  "I've simply got
to have it out with her!  When she hears that I know--that you have
told me"--he was half-way to the door.  Then he stopped, as if
choked.  "When I think that I have never known all this!  When I
think that I have been shut out from her confidence, and that
you--you--have known all the time!  When I think that I've been away
in Russia and you two, with this common memory between you, have been
together!  Day after day!  Over that confounded house-building!  I
feel that I have good ground to consider myself hardly used."

Hubert turned slowly round.  He was so white that Lance considered
him attentively.

"Why have you told me now?" he cried.  "Why?"

"Only because it couldn't be helped," returned Hubert, in a hard
voice.

"And, but for this scoundrel turning up, she would have married me
without a word!  Brooke, I can't stand it!  No man could!  She's
right, it had better be broken off."

"Steady on!" said Bert, getting out his words with difficulty.
"Listen a moment!  She may be offering you your freedom because she
believes you desire it.  She is--very proud.  She may think this
miserable tittle-tattle has shaken your faith in her, and she offers
you your way out.  What you have to discover, or so it seems to me,
is _the cost to herself_.  Does she want to be free?"  He took out
his handkerchief and wiped his forehead.  "Everyone round here will
say you have treated her badly if it's broken off now.  That doesn't
matter if it isn't true.  But make sure--make sure, for God's sake!"

Lance stared at him.

"You're a queer chap.  You must want the engagement to be off--that
would give you your chance.  Yet you send me to her!"

Bert shrugged his shoulders.

"Well," he said, with a half laugh, "I've discovered to-day that I've
been mistaken all these years.  Ever since I was four-and-twenty I
have believed that most of everything on this earth I desired--her.
Now I find there is something that I desire more--her happiness.  If
you're the man to make her happy, in God's name go and do it."




CHAPTER XXXVI

WHAT CHANCED UPON THE MOORS

  "What can I give thee back, O liberal
  And princely giver, who hast brought the gold
  And purple of thine heart, unstained, untold,
  And laid them on the outside of the wall
  For such as I to take or leave withal?"
                    --SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE.


Lancelot had gone to Glen Royd.

Bert found that he could not stay indoors.  He wandered out, through
the gardens, into the long carriage drive which ran upon the side of
the ravine, among the pines, with a sheer ascent on one hand, and a
sheer dip on the other, down to where the trout stream rushed over
its noisy bed.

He paced along the road, dark beneath the over-arching trees, till he
came to the lodge and gate at the end of the wood.  There was no sign
of Lance returning, so he walked on, and bending to the left, came,
after a climb, out upon the highroad to Fransdale.  Nobody was about.
He sat down upon a grassy hummock, watching the pretty horned sheep
cropping the short grass about him in the fragrant evening.  He was
so still that the sheep grazed nearer and nearer.

He was thinking that man is strangely in the grip of circumstance.

Since that night of parting at Clunbury, he had been through deep
waters.  Carol, who had been so long excluded, was summoned at last.
The final knock-out had been too serious for the champion to bear
alone.

He had laid all the circumstances before the Bishop, and told him
that he would follow his advice as to the course now to be
pursued--whether he should let things go on, or make one more effort
to show Melicent what he believed to be the truth, to induce her to
break her engagement.

In the light of what he now heard--namely, that Melicent had almost
at once recognised Bert--Mayne had little difficulty in falling in
with Bert's opinion as to her reason for engaging herself to Lance.
His disapproval of the said proceeding was so grave that he felt, and
said, that he really thought it would be better for Bert to have
nothing more to do with her.

"Incredible selfishness and duplicity," he mercilessly called it at
first, till warned by Bert's rising anger that strictures upon
Melicent would merely have the effect of drying up the flow of
confidence.

"I began the duplicity," said Bert doggedly.  "I don't see what she
could do but follow suit."

"Does that excuse your further duplicity," came the answering thrust,
"in proceeding to make love to her while Lance was in Russia?"

"I'm hanged if I see what the d--"  A sudden pause.  "I quite fail to
see what other course I could have taken.  They were to be married
when he came back.  I had got to show her before then that the thing
couldn't be done.  And I succeeded, within a hair's-breadth.  If it
hadn't been for my d--!  Beg pardon! if it hadn't been for
my--unfortunate temper, I should have succeeded."

"From what you tell me," the Bishop opined, "it really seems as if
she does like you best, but as if her pride would not allow her to
give way.  The question is--Has your violence destroyed your chance
finally?  I think you ought to find out."

"You do?--you do?  You think I might have another try?"

"Well, are you to be trusted to keep yourself in check?  You know of
old that when you lose your temper you have no chance at all with
Millie, because she never loses hers."

Hubert grinned.  "She did the other night, though."

"Do you think she said things that she will be ashamed of when she
thinks them over?"

"Yes, I do."

"Then I think that should give you a hold of a new kind over her.  If
you can only manage to put her in the wrong, old man, and be
magnanimous and forgive her--see?"

Bert's admiration was open and glowing.

"You have a genius!  You ought to marry, Bishop--you ought really."

"My advice is," finally said the mentor, "that you go at once to
Fransdale, and see how the land lies.  See what frame of mind Millie
is in.  If she is scornful and gay, and wrapped up in Lance and her
marriage, your course will be more difficult.  If she shows you, by
word or look, that she thinks she behaved ill, or wounded you, or
desires your good opinion, then to my thinking you have a chance that
you ought to take.  You have now been disciplined by failure; you
should have learnt something; and Melicent also must be wiser.  For
if she has any feeling at all--which, as you know, I always took
leave to doubt--she must have suffered keenly during these last few
months."

It was with the ring of this advice in his ears that Bert had hurled
himself and his motor through England, and arrived at Fransdale,
where in his rage he had vowed never to set foot more.

At the first sight of Melicent he believed that he had done right to
come.

And behold, an hour later, all things were changed; the chance
appearance of Otis had, as it were, altered the entire situation.
Bert was no longer suppliant, but defender of Melicent's name against
all comers--even against the man she was to marry.

It seemed to him that, whether she ever came to care for himself or
no, she must break with Lance; for, knowing her as he did, he was
sure that now she must feel that, if the engagement went on, full
confession of all that had passed was imperative; and that seemed
impossible.

Suspense grew and mounted in him till he felt desperate; yet still he
sat there, with a kind of charmed stillness, while the quiet-coloured
end of evening slowly merged in twilight.

It was growing dark when at last he saw figures moving along the path
that led up on the other side of the ridge from Glen Royd--two
figures, indistinct at first in the dusk, then clearer.  It was
Lancelot and Melicent walking together.  Bert felt dizzy.

Then he had lost!  They were reconciled!  They moved slowly along,
and he saw that Lance was pushing her bicycle.

He rose and obliterated himself hastily behind a craggy boulder.

They both turned into the road leading to the carriage drive of the
Grange, which was also a short cut to the lower parts of Fransdale.
They passed in complete silence, and he watched them along the white
track of road until they were lost in the shadows of the wood.

A light glimmered out in the lodge window.  It was the only sign of
human life within his ken.

Lance must be bringing her back to dine, and intending to cycle home
with her afterwards.  He lit a match and looked at his watch.  A
quarter to eight.  He could not meet them.  He realised that he must
have time.

He had done what he believed to be right--told the truth, as far as
he thought it permissible, to wipe away from his conscience the stain
of his treachery to Lance.  And the result was that they were
reconciled, and he was left in outer darkness.  He knew that he had
not expected it.

His misery was too great for him to reflect at present.  He could not
tell what he should do.  He plunged down the hill-side with no
thought at first but to walk, to get away, to move fast, to fight
down some overwhelming bitterness of darkness which was clutching him.

At the bottom of the valley by the mill he turned and hastened up
stream by the fishing-path among the thick trees.  Careless of his
direction, he walked on until he was at the head of Ilbersdale, and
had emerged from the woods upon the open, broken moor that lay at the
feet of Fransdale.  There he lifted up his eyes, and saw far above
him, perched upon the very verge of the precipice, the lights of
Ilberston Church and Vicarage.

He thought of Mr. Hall.  It occurred to him to wonder whether this
man, whose personality had impressed him, as it impressed most
people, would have help or counsel for him.  Anyhow, to breast that
hill was something to attempt--something that chimed in with his mood
just then.

It was choir practice night, and the church door being open, the
sound of the sweet Cleveshire voices floated out over the uplands,
and made articulate the beauty of the night.

Hubert pushed his way hurriedly, yet not fast, because heedlessly,
over the broken ground, with which he was not familiar.  There were
short cuts, but in the dusk he did not find them.  Several times he
was brought up short by hollow ravines or boggy ground, and it was
long before he struck the road that leads up to the steep verge.

He had been walking for nearly two hours when at last he found
himself at the top.  The full moon was up, and was flooding the moors
with silver.  The prospect was grand.  On the horizon line the Three
Howes stood up black against the radiance--the prehistoric
burial-place of forgotten chiefs.  At his back the white crosses that
mark the resting-places of the Dalesmen glimmered among the neatly
shorn grass of the churchyard.

He sat upon the low wall, gazing out over the silent waste.  The
church was in darkness now, and closed; the village beyond showed but
few lights.  The lamp over the Vicarage door beamed steadily upon the
night, and showed a lady's bicycle leaning against the Vicarage
garden wall.  Surely the little brown basket on the handle-bars was
familiar to him?  Surely he had seen that same machine leaning
against the trees of the plantation at Lone Ash?

He sprang from his seat and went up close.  It was Melicent's
bicycle.  Then she herself was within!  She had not gone to dine with
the Burmesters; she had come straight up here to Mr. Hall.  A wave of
excitement passed over Hubert.  Should he go in, and let the priest
hear both sides of the question?  What had happened--what had passed
between her and Lance?  If he had not played the coward, and run
away, he would have known by now.  As he hesitated, the Vicarage door
opened.  He saw Mr. Hall stand in the light, with the girl beside
him.  For the second time that night he drew back and hid himself.

"Don't ride the steep bit to-night," he heard Mr. Hall say, as he lit
her lamp.

"I know every inch of the way; it's really quite safe," was the
characteristic response.

"I shall feel more comfortable if you promise me.  It is late for you
to be returning alone, but I cannot come with you; I must go on to
poor old Martha Hirst."

Millie's little laugh sounded sad.  "You needn't be nervous about me
on these moors at night."

"I don't think I need, or I would not let you go; but the moon is
glorious.  Good-night, and God bless you!"

She mounted, and rode swiftly away, past the church, along the little
level bit of road that came before the steep dip over the
mountain-side.  The brief dialogue had decided Bert.  Mr. Hall was
not at leisure, and Millie was riding home late, alone.  His place
was to follow her.  He had ascertained that there was a footpath
which was far shorter than the windings she must go down with her
cycle.  If she were going to walk the steep bit, he thought he could
overtake her when she dismounted to walk up the next ascent.

At the lower end of the steep hill, if you followed the road, you
came to a stone bridge; and here the Ilba flowed more silently, and
deep pools harboured many a fat trout.  Trees arched over the road,
growing by the water-side; and under them were inky shadows.

Melicent's lamp gleamed brightly, but not bright enough to show the
wire fastened across the road.  She was riding fast, with the impetus
of the long hill just negotiated, and she checked herself with
difficulty as the figure of a man detached itself from the shadow,
waving his arms and crying, "Stop!  Danger!  You'll fall!"

"What is the matter?" she cried, putting on her brakes and just
managing to alight "You!"--she stopped short, recognising Amurrica.

"We were gettin' ready for someone else," said Amurrica drily.  "This
is an unexpected pleasure.  Are you ridin' alone?"

"You see that I am."

"Our friend's gone home another way then, seemin'ly.  But as you're
here, let's make the most of it.  Give us a kiss, little Millie."

"Don't be a cad, Amurrica!" said Millie, with a most unlooked-for
gentleness.  "I don't know why you stopped me, but I am glad you did,
for there are things I want to say to you.  Is my brother here?"

"Yes," said Arnie, slouching out from the gloom.

"Amurrica," said Millie earnestly, "first of everything, I want to
beg your pardon.  You were very cruel to me in the old days, but I
have been shown to-day that it was my fault.  I was hard and
insolent.  If I had been a different kind of girl, perhaps you'd not
have wanted to injure me?"

Amurrica stood staring.  Was this Millie?  "What yer givin' us?" he
growled.

"I want to say I am sorry," said the girl steadily.  "I was hard and
insolent to you again to-day.  I provoked you to try and do me harm.
But I--didn't know you had Arnie with you.  I--I remember Arnie when
he was a dear little curly-headed baby.  I never was good to him.  I
was always--disagreeable.  Arnie, I--am--so--sorry!  I want to
say--forgive me!"

Her voice broke.  She turned her head away and drew out a
handkerchief.  Amurrica was stricken dumb.  That Millie could humble
herself--that Millie could cry--these incidents had seemed to him
utterly out of the range of the things that happen.  He had nothing
to say.  Arnie giggled awkwardly.

"Amurrica," said Millie earnestly, laying a hand on his sleeve, "you
would have been a better man if you had known better women.  I am one
that helped to make you worse, because I never appealed to the good
in you.  There was only one of us who did the right thing all
through; and that was Bert.  He saved me then, and to-day he has
saved me again.  He has done more for me this day than I could ever
tell anybody.  Oh, Amurrica, we ought to be so ashamed of
ourselves--you and I!"

Amurrica, during this remarkable interview, had been like one bereft
of his usual faculties.

"Well, I'm d--d!" he said at last.  "What kind of palaver's this?
Mestaer's playin' his own hand, same as I am--him an' his bloomin'
millions!  Thought I didn't know him!  Thought he was safe, did he?
Bless his kind heart, he'll find out that I'm goin' to get even with
him--if not one way, then another!"

A thought went like lightning through Millie's brain.

"Are you waiting here for him?"

They did not answer.

"What makes you think he will come this way?"

"He went up there," said Arnie.

"Up there?  Up that hill?  He's not there now; I've just come from
there."

"Hist!" said Otis.

They all heard a footstep, clear in the night stillness, swinging
down the hill at a steady run.

"If it is he, Amurrica, now is your time to make it up," urged
Millie, and her heart began to beat faster, and sweet, wild thoughts
surged up within her at the thought that she was hearkening her
lover's approaching feet.

"I'll make it up, no fear!" was the muttered reply, as Otis, who was
standing behind her, gripped her firmly by both elbows, pinioning her
in his strong hold, and backing into the deepest shadow on the
farther side of the bridge, under the trees.  "Hold her!" he gasped
to Arnie; "hold tight, we've only a minute!"

The inky darkness, rendered blacker by contrast with the white wash
of moonlight on the road in front, held the struggling group
invisible.  Had Millie had an inkling of her captor's plan she would
have screamed, but intent upon her peace-making desires, she still
wished to try gentle methods.  Before she realised his intentions,
Otis had rammed a handkerchief forcibly against her mouth, and
swiftly wound the feather boa she wore round and round her head,
forming a most excellent impromptu gag.  He was reckless now, and
cared only for his revenge, consequences had faded out of sight.
Millie, sensible in a flash of her own helplessness and Bert's
danger, fought with all her strength.

The light, firm steps came on fast.  They were round the corner.
Hubert hastened in the moon's full radiance to the darkness where the
trap lay for him.  Just before he reached the fatal spot, a sound
came to the trained ear of the scout--a muffled, indeterminate sound,
which was not running water, nor the sound of feet upon a hard road.

Full in the light he stood, a brave target for a bullet; and even as
he paused, before he had drawn a breath, there was the report of a
revolver, a cry of some kind, a sound of scuffling, a splashing as of
someone wading in water; and silence.

He stood bewildered.  The idea that somebody had tried to shoot him
never suggested itself.  He thought it must be poachers, though the
report did not sound like a rifle shot, and there were no woods quite
near.  He at once started to run on and see what had happened; and at
once tripped and fell, caught by the unseen wire.

Having fallen with some impetus, he came to the ground heavily; and
regained his feet with quite a new impression of some danger
imminent, though still he never dreamed that the entanglement had
been set for him.  His heart flew to Melicent.  What of her?  She
must but a moment ago have passed the spot.  His first action was to
pull out matches and strike a light.  Holding the wax vesta low, he
moved slowly forward; and there, on the right hand, in the deep
shadow, a motionless form lay upon the ground.  A little farther on,
a bicycle stood against the wall.  Stooping over the girl he saw that
his fears were true.  It was Melicent who lay there; and beside her,
among the grass, he stumbled upon a hard object, which proved to be a
revolver.  He pocketed this, and stretching out his arms to
her--"Millie!" he cried despairingly.  He thought at first that she
was lying on her face; and experienced a shock of a quite peculiar
kind of horror, on finding her head wrapped about with choking
feathers.  He snatched her into his arms, raising her from the
ground; as he did so, a second revolver slipped from her left hand,
where she had grasped it, apparently by the muzzle.  In the dark he
could see nothing; and there overswept him that maddening sense of
helplessness which is the worst thing a man can feel.  He bore her
out from the fatal shadow into the moonlight, laid her upon the thymy
turf, and with trembling fingers cut away the brutal gag from her
drawn face.  Then he saw wet blood upon his sleeve, glistening in the
light.

Was she dead?  That was the one question.  He satisfied himself that
she breathed, that her heart beat.  Whether the shot had entered her
head or her body, he could not say.  She was very still; was she
dying there, under his eyes, passive, unconscious of his presence--of
all the things there were to say, which must for ever rest unsaid?
... His head was whirling.  Millie gagged!  Millie shot!  By whom,
and for what conceivable reason?

The bleeding came from the left arm, which was cruelly mangled, the
flesh below the elbow being actually singed by the shot.  The pistol
must have gone off while actually in her hand.  Mechanically he began
to slit away the white silk sleeve with his pocket-knife, while he
wondered dully what he should do, how best help her.  If she were
going to die, there were just two things for him; to kill the man
that killed her, and then to blow out his own brains.  He thought she
was growing cold....

What could he do?  To leave her was impossible; and they were far
from help.  To carry her to Ilbersdale Grange, or to carry her back
up the hill to the Vicarage, seemed equally impracticable.  As he
turned the question over in his mind, he heard a sound--a rustling,
quite near.  Turning his head, he looked straight into the eyes of
Arnie Lutwyche, who, dripping, had emerged from the river under the
bridge, and was creeping towards him on hands and knees.

Quick as thought, Bert pulled out a revolver and covered him.  The
boy at once knelt up, raising his hands.  His face wore a look of
terror.

"Is she dead?" he whispered.

"So," said Bert, through his teeth; "what do you know of this
butchery?"

"It was Otis.  He was out after you.  She fought with him, and got
hold of the pistol," panted Arnie, in his unaccustomed English.

"I don't believe a word you say.  If Otis meant murder he wouldn't
have brought a witness along."

"There were two pistols," said Arnie, gulping down a sob.  "Did you
find the one I threw down?"

"Yes--what of it?"

"There were to be two shots.  I was to swear you fired first, and he
only in self-defence.  Let me get you some water, and tell me where
to run for a doctor."

There was sense in this proposition, and after a moment's rapid
thought, Bert availed himself of it.  There was practically no doubt
that Otis was off; he wasted no time in questioning or upbraiding the
boy.  Tearing a leaf from his pocket-book, he scrawled a note to
Helston, telling him what had happened, and asking him to bring a
conveyance of some kind at once, and to send Arnie on for the doctor.
Meanwhile Arnie had brought his straw hat full of water, and the
moment he received his instructions, set off running fast along the
road.

Bert was alone again with the girl.

There was a huge lump rising upon one side of her forehead--he
guessed it to be the result of a silencing blow from a brutal fist.
Possibly it was merely the effect of her fall to the ground.  This it
was, he hoped, which was rendering her unconscious.  He felt about
carefully among the long hair, and could find no trace that a bullet
had struck her head, nor was there any mark upon the white silk
blouse she wore.  He bathed her forehead with her own little
handkerchief; he knew where to look for it, in her sleeve; he knew
every little habit which was hers.  For so long he had been garnering
up his deep knowledge of her--for this?  It was all to be in vain?
The thing was so preposterous that he laughed.

This white brow, over which he passed the cold water, was his
treasure-house.  That it could be empty was a thing manifestly
impossible.

Everything was quiet about them in the glorious night A little wind
shivered among the trees that overhung the bridge.  He pulled off his
coat, tucking it carefully about her.  As he did so, she opened her
eyes, looking fully at him.

Almost immediately she took in the whole situation, and spoke.

"You're safe," she said contentedly.

She was always wonderful; but this was the crowning point of all the
sensations she had ever given him.  Through the wild exultation that
filled him, he, as usual, thought first of her.  For her sake he must
be very calm.

"Oh, I'm all right," he said, in scorn of any idea of danger to
himself.  "But what about you?"

She smiled, a smile that lit up all her face and danced in her eyes.
Directly he saw it, he knew she could have no vital hurt.  The imp of
mischief was in it.

"Bert, I've done it," she said.

"Done what?" he asked uncertainly.

"Moved the mountain."

He began to think she was wandering.

"Have you really?" he asked, absorbed in the play of her dimples in
the moonlight, and realising that there were possibilities in her
smile that he had by no means fully appreciated hitherto, connoisseur
though he believed himself to be.

"I think I know what happened," she said.  "I wrestled for the
revolver, and it went off.  I believe it shot me!  I saw you come
running, and stop short in the road, and I couldn't scream because he
had gagged me....  Is that what happened?"

"Yes--exactly."

"Well, then," in tones of exultation--"well, then, Captain Mestaer
Brooke, I have saved your life!"

"At what cost, Millie?  At what cost?"

"Did you think about the cost when you saved mine?"

"Ah, that was such a different thing!"

"Why was it a different thing?"

"You know!  Because I loved you."

She closed the eyes into which he would persistently gaze.

"Well," she said, "now that we are quits, now that you too have a
burden of gratitude to carry about, I feel ever so much happier, or
at least I should, only--Hubert, you don't know how fearfully my arm
hurts!"

"I know it must!  I can do so little for it until help comes!  I
daren't leave you here alone--"

"Oh, no; don't!"

"What is the very nearest house?"

"A mile away at least.  Don't go!  I'll lie here till someone finds
us."

"You need not do that.  Arnie has taken a note to Glen Royd."

"Arnie?  Oh, I am glad of that."  She closed her eyes and panted.

"Will you let me try carrying you a little way?  Every step would
bring us nearer to relief.  If it shakes you, I could put you down.
May I try?"

"I am heavier than I was in Africa."

"I am stronger than I was in Africa--tough as leather."

"Oh, you always were strong!  But never mind.  We're quits now!  You
can't stand there any more, saying: 'Just look how you treat the man
that saved your life!'"

"Millie!  When have I ever said so?"

"You did--you did--you did!  You have never left off saying it for
one single minute for the last five years."

He broke into a laugh that was a little tremulous.  "Millie, what do
you mean?"

"Oh, you know what I mean.  That has always been the trouble, hasn't
it?  You have always known what I meant.  You knew, that day the
water spouted out.  I didn't.  It seemed so impertinent of you to
know more about me than I knew myself.  But now ... I think it may be
rather restful ... to think you know the worst of me!  You know it
all, you see ... even about the scars on my back."

He made some kind of incoherent exclamation.  He had always meant to
succeed; but now that this amazing success was his, he could not
believe in it.  A wild idea came to him that his bliss, like the
dread sword of Damocles, was poised above his head by a hair; that in
an instant it might fall, and irretrievable ruin would result.  He
was too exalted to try to think out how it had come about that this
girl was his at last.  She was injured--he could not say how deeply;
she was in pain, and he was distracted with anxiety.  He was unable
to grasp the idea of happiness.  Afterwards, when he looked back upon
it, he believed that the underlying idea of his mood was that of
greatness.  All triviality seemed to be washed away from life, and he
trod the paths of a vast experience as the Greeks trod the tragic
stage, raised up on cothurns.  It was best, he saw, that joy should
come thus sublimated by grief.  If it was to be transient, he should
still have had it.  He had lived indeed; he had seen the Vision of
the Grail.  Life was a sacrament henceforward.

"Oh, I am so thirsty!" gasped Melicent

He suddenly remembered that he carried in his pocket the flask that
he used when travelling.  There was still a little wine and water
left in it, and he poured it out.  Seating himself beside her, he
carefully drew her up, propping her weight against him, and held the
cup to her lips.

When she had drunk, they sat on so, in silence.

"Mr. Hall has been telling me how it has all been my fault," she
said, after a pause.  "He has told me how vain and selfish I am, and
how I take all and give nothing.  Poor Lance!  I never gave him
anything, Bert--not even a kiss.  I did give you one, didn't I?"

"Yes, thank God!"

To his amazement, she begun to bubble and murmur with laughter.

"But Mr. Hall didn't know I was going to meet my chance!  Oh, Bert,
it's so wonderful!  I don't think you quite realise that Otis meant
to kill you!  He did, really!  Don't you want to thank me for saving
your life so nicely?  Do thank me, just to make it seem real!"

The chest that pillowed her head heaved mightily.  He forced an
answer, but the effort broke him down.

"How could I thank you for saving mine ... if it was at the expense
of yours?"  He bent down his cheek upon her hair, and sobbed
helplessly.

"I'm not dead, Bert, dear," she whispered.

"No; but you're in awful pain.  Do you think I don't know?  I can see
you are chatting on like this, just to make me think you're not
suffering!  I can't bear it, Millie--I can't indeed!  I am going to
carry you a little way.  Put your other arm round my neck; I'll raise
you as slowly as I can.  There!  Did that shake you?  I'll walk a few
steps, and if the discomfort's too great, you must tell me."

It seemed to him that, as he moved along, his soul ran the gamut of
all human emotion.  Death and Life brushed sable and silver wings
over him as he trod, and the glowing rose of Love warmed and lighted
all things like the white heat of a furnace.  Clear before him lay
the picture of the former time when this very thing had happened.
His memory of his feelings on that occasion was tinged with pity and
contempt.  What had he then known, or understood, of Love or Life?

Now at last he knew the value of both.  The rapture and the
insecurity swayed him to and fro like the motion of a pendulum.  He
had the gravest apprehensions about Melicent's injuries.  The
shattered arm was the same that had been dislocated five years
before.  He feared serious complications.

"Millie, Millie," he murmured, "is it very bad?"

Her face was pressed against his neck; he could hear her gasping
breath.  She gave a little moan, as if to intimate that she heard,
but could not answer.  After a minute, she began to whisper, as
though to herself:

"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow, I will fear no
evil....  I will fear no evil, for thou art with me....  Bert! ... Is
the fish-pond full?"

He followed the rapid transition of her mind.

"Quite full, and the water as clear as glass.  The lilies are planted
already."

He had kept on a steady, slow pace for some time, and was feeling
rather done, when she whispered, begging him to stop a little.  He
chose a lump of heathery turf, and sat down with her upon his knees,
cradling her as comfortably as he could.  So he had sat in Africa!

"Oh, that is good!  That is rest!" she sighed; and after a
pause--"Bert, you know I love you, don't you?"

Her eyes were wide open, searching his face.  For a moment he forgot
his devouring anxieties, and was sensible only of the rapture.

"Yes, I know," he answered solemnly, returning her deep gaze.

"I loved you that day, of course; but truly, Bert, I didn't know it.
I thought I did right to send you away.  Oh, what a beast I was to
you that night!  I thought if I stood firm that once, it would be
over, and you would let me go.  But you never did.  Bert, if I am
going to die--"

He clashed in harshly, in furious repudiation of the idea.  "To die,
you little fool?  You're not going to die!"

She laughed weakly.  "Oh, Bert!  You'll never improve, will you?"

"I can't," he brought out, with anguish.  "I can't say pretty names.
You're--so much more to me than dear.  You're ... life itself!--my
life!  How can you be going to die?"

"Well, I feel ... most strange: as if I were coming away out of my
body.  I feel as if I could float.  I want--you know--'to swim in
lucid shallows, just eluding water-lily leaves.' ... The lilies are
planted already.  I keep wishing to be there, in the house; don't
you?"

He could not follow this.  "What house?" he asked her gently.

"Lone Ash.  I should like to die there."

"You shall live there, Millie, please God!"

The words were a passionate appeal.  Stooping, he gathered her to
him, drawing her close, close against his heart, and laid his lips on
hers.  She answered his kiss, and then he felt her limbs relax.  A
blessed unconsciousness had come to relieve her pain.

Far along the road he heard the distant beat, beat, of approaching
horse's feet.

* * * * * * * *

The serious accident to Miss Lutwyche gave Brenda the best reason in
the world for cancelling wedding invitations.




CHAPTER XXXVII

THE HOUSE IS BUILT

  "To which my soul made answer readily:
    Trust me, in bliss I shall abide
  In this great mansion, that is built for me,
    So royal-rich and wide.

  "... An English home--grey twilight poured
    On dewy pastures, dewy trees,
  Softer than sleep--all things in order stored,
    A haunt of ancient peace."
                                          --TENNYSON.


Gwendolen Cooper sat with her parents in the drawing-room of
Fransdale Vicarage on an afternoon in late October.  She had come
home for a holiday, and also to condole with her parents over the
family troubles.

Theo had gone to Australia, as Principal Boy, with a Pantomime
company.  Barbara, the fourth girl, the quietest and most reserved of
the family, had, on her twenty-first birthday, announced her
intention of marrying Alfred Dow.

It was this second calamity which the Vicarage found overwhelming.  A
certain gloss might be artistically cast over the doings of Theo in
Australia.  Barbara's doings in Fransdale must be proclaimed upon the
house-top; and should she persist in her intention, the vicar felt
that nothing remained for him but to exchange livings and depart from
the scene of his humiliation.

To be openly defied and set at naught by the smallest and most silent
of his daughters, was a blow he had not anticipated; as indeed he had
wholly failed to anticipate in the smallest degree any of his
children's undutifulness.  His jet-black hair was silvering fast, his
mien colder and more severe than ever.

Mrs. Cooper was growing very stout, and already somewhat infirm.
Recent events had chafed the surface of her smiling cheerfulness a
little.  Her company smile was now wont to come off at times.  But
her own belief in her own exemplary rectitude was as unshaken as ever.

"We have nothing to reproach ourselves with, and that is such a
comfort," she remarked to her newly arrived daughter.  "It was our
duty to offer poor dear Melicent a home, and we did so.  In the space
of three weeks she corrupted the entire family; and we still feel the
effects of her deceit.  Had it not been for her, Alfred Dow would
never have forgotten his place in the way he has persistently done of
late years.  But really, if one's religious beliefs were not too firm
to be shaken, it would put them to the test, to think that, after
being publicly exposed in the way she was here, in Fransdale this
summer, she is now to marry a millionaire."

"Well," observed Gwendolen drily, "I understand that Captain Brooke
knows the worst of her, so I suppose that is all right."

"But think of his past life, my dear--the son of a poor ignorant Boer
farmer--another Alfred Dow, only worse!  And, with his money, his
wife and he will be in the county set, while we, in consequence of
Barbara's conduct, will have to hide our heads in disgrace."

"I don't see any disgrace in marrying Alfred Dow," bluntly observed
Madeline, who was also present.

"With our position and family connections--"

"That does seem such tommy-rot, mother.  We couldn't all five have
married Lance Burmester, even if he had wanted to marry one of us,
which, of course, he never did.  And he's the only man we were
allowed to think about as a _parti_.  Except for Gwendolen's affair
with Freshfield--"

"Oblige me by not slandering your sister," cut in the vicar.

"Tommy-rot again, father," calmly said Gwendolen, who laughed.  "You
know, mother knows, I know, how near we were then to a scandal of the
most serious kind.  I wonder how many girls in the world would have
held their tongue about that as Millie has, after the way we girls
let her in!  What liars she thought us!  I say, let Barbara marry a
good man if she likes, and live the life she likes.  I would have
married Alfred Dow like a shot if he had asked me.  Far better than
slaving away as I do, teaching other people's children."

The vicar, in wrath, said something about the dignity of teaching.

"Yes; if you have brains or education," retorted Gwendolen coolly.
"I have neither.  I am only fit to be a farmer's wife."

"Your mother had no more," began the vicar, in his most weighty tones.

"Please let's leave mother out of the discussion," hastily said
Gwendolen, rising and going to the window.  "I might say something I
should be sorry for.  Here comes Bee."

Beatrice came in hastily.

"I met Sybil Ayres," said she, "and heard quite a lot of things.
Sybil and the General went to London last week, and they called on
the Helstons, and got all the news.  First of all, Melicent is to be
married in London, next week, very, very quietly.  The Bishop of
Pretoria is staying in England just to perform the ceremony, and
sails the next day.  They are going for a few weeks' honeymoon, and
then into rooms at Clunbury, to superintend the finishing of their
house.  Melicent is not strong yet.  They are quite sure now that the
arm need not be amputated, but she will never have quite the proper
use of it.  No bridesmaids or anything at the wedding, because of
Lance Burmester's feelings."

"Well," said Madeline, "I'm hanged if I'd marry a millionaire and
have no bridesmaids!"

"And what do you think?  They've had a letter from Major Otis, from
the United States, saying he's sorry."

"What!" cried the vicar.

"Yes; Mr. Helston told the General more about it all than has ever
been allowed to leak out.  The General has had such an enthusiastic
admiration for Captain Brooke, ever since the Fransdale sports, so I
suppose they knew he would be interested....  It appears that, after
what happened that day at the sports, Melicent thought it right to
break her engagement.  They say she had known in her heart for a long
time that it was a mistake, but did not like to say so, but I suppose
after what had been said about her family, and so on, she thought if
she did not break it off, the Burmesters would, so she wrote to
Lance, and then, feeling very low in her mind, she went off to
confess her sins to Mr. Hall."

Madeline giggled.

"Fancy confessing one's sins to you, father!" she said.  "Our only
idea in old days used to be to hide ours, wasn't it?"

Her father ignored the impertinence.  "Proceed, Beatrice," he said.

"Well, Major Otis and the boy were lying in wait for Captain Brooke
by the Ilba Bridge; and Millie saw them, and as far as I could
gather, she spoke to Otis, and asked him to reform; and then she
suddenly got to know that they were waiting for the Captain, and they
gagged her to prevent her crying out, and she fought like a demon,
and the pistol went off and shot her right along the arm, from below
the elbow right up to the shoulder--she had hold of the muzzle, you
see--and then Otis was scared and bolted.  But Arnie Lutwyche went
and got help.  And they wouldn't have Otis searched for....  They let
him go, and as you know, tried to say it was a poaching affair, only
everybody knew better.  And now he has written this letter, saying
that ever since, the things Millie said that night have been ringing
in his head, and he's going to have a try to run straight."

"Beatrice, your slang!" said her father hopelessly.

"Well, I'm quoting the dear Major.  I did like that man!  Just my
style, down to the ground!  I think I'll go to the States and look
him up.  Twice as amusing as Captain Brooke!  He's a regular
stuck-pig!  How hard we all tried to fascinate him!  You might as
well have tried to fascinate one of the Three Howes!  He'll bore poor
Millie to death, but he seems free with his money.  He is doing a lot
for that hideous Boer Lutwyche boy."

"How they must all have laughed in their sleeves next morning at you,
mother, when you solemnly went up to Glen Royd with your mysterious
secret about Captain Brooke!"

Mrs. Cooper grew very pink.  The remembrance was among her least
happy reminiscences.

"Beatrice darling, ring for tea," she murmured.

"Sybil saw him, when she was up in town," pursued Beatrice, as she
obeyed.

"Saw whom?"

"Captain Brooke.  She saw him and Melicent together.  She said you
would hardly have known him, he seemed so gay and lively.  She said
she had never thought Melicent pretty before."

"Sybil wasn't likely to think so, as long as Melicent was engaged to
Lance," remarked Madeline caustically.

The maid brought in tea.

"Ingleby's been down to town and brought up a letter," said she.
"Its for Miss Barbie."

"For Barbie?"  Gwendolen snatched it.  "It's from Millie," she said.
"I'll go and call her."

Barbara presently came in.  Her eyelids were rimmed with pink, for
she had done a good deal of weeping lately.  But her aspect was
determined.  Gwendolen was only just home, and she feared more
brow-beating, but was evidently prepared to face it.  In expression
and colouring, she was not unlike Melicent on a larger scale.

"A letter for you, Babs," said her elder sister kindly.

Barbara looked surprised; she had no correspondents.  She opened her
letter, and Gwendolen read it aloud over her shoulder.


"MY DEAR BARBARA,--I am writing to tell you that Hubert and I have
just heard from Mr. Dow of his engagement to you.  He says that Uncle
Edmund and Aunt Minna are not pleased, which we are sorry to hear, as
we both think Mr. Dow a man in a thousand.  We hope that any
difficulties may soon be overcome.  Mr. Dow has been having long
talks with Mr. Hall, and I believe the religious barrier can be
removed.  He loves you deeply, I feel sure, and that is the great
thing.  As long as you know he loves you, you can be content to bear
things.

"We want you to accept this cheque for £500 as our wedding present,
and as soon as Lone Ash is ready, you must both come and stay with us.

"Hubert is as fond of Fransdale as I am, and we shall always be there
some part of the year, so we shall see a good deal of each other in
the future, I hope.

"Hubert wants Uncle Edmund to know that he wishes to give a sum of
£500 to each of you girls on her wedding, as a small acknowledgment
of his goodness in offering to take charge of me when I was left
alone.--I remain, your affectionate cousin,

"MELICENT LUTWYCHE."


Gwendolen rose from her seat as the letter was concluded.

"Well," she said, "I always knew Millie was worth the lot of us.  I
shouldn't wonder if she asks you to Lone Ash, girls, and gives you a
good time.  She doesn't bear malice, as I should in her place.  We
were brought up on scruples, not principles.  We were urged to a
certain course of conduct, not because it was right, but because it
was the proper thing.  Conventions were to us instead of
Commandments.  Here is Barbara, wanting to do a thing which at worst
is only a social blunder, and she is treated as if she wanted her
neighbour's husband.  I'm on your side, Babs; you may count on me."

The vicar and his wife found themselves, as usual, in a minority of
two.

* * * * * * * *

Two or three years after these events, the Bishop of Pretoria told
the outlines of the story of Hubert and Melicent to a lady for whom
he had a great respect.

When he had finished, she asked, in dissatisfied tones, whether the
marriage had turned out a happy one?

He replied that it was completely happy; almost ideally so.

"You ask as though the story had not pleased you," he added, in tones
of disappointment.

She shrugged her shoulders.

"To tell you the truth, it does not.  I can never give my unqualified
approval to any story in which it was the man who won."

"You forget," he corrected her, "or perhaps I should say, you fail to
grasp the essential point Hubert could never have won Melicent, had
it not been that first of all Melicent won him.  Love is like that
spiritual life to which it is so closely akin; who conquers there,
does so by virtue of being himself defeated."



THE END