Chapter II: Part I: I (1)

MORGENGABE

Like the sudden, restless motion of a sleeper, a wave, marking the tide's height, broke out of the slumberous heart of the sea, and laid its crest low along the beach. Fenella, who had been swimming to shore, rose in the foam, like that other woman in the morning of the world, and began to walk slowly, wringing the salt water from her hair, toward the bleached bathing hut that stood, by itself, under a shoulder of the dunes. The backwash of the wave swirled past her bare ankles as she walked. Beyond the strip of beach that it had covered with weed and spume, the sand was hot and loose as ashes to the soles of her feet. The noontide sun seemed to rob the earth at once of motion, of sound, of color. It grizzled the long sharp grass with which the sand hills were sparsely covered, quenched the red roofs of the little cream-walled fishing village, and turned the watered lawn, which lay at the foot of the flaunting summer hotel quarter of a mile inland, to a level smudge of dark green. All sound was stilled--all movement in suspense--all beauty, even, deferred. At such an hour, the supreme of the sun's possession of the earth, none can stand, alone and without shelter in its untempered light, and not realize that he is intercepting an elemental force as relentless as it is impersonal. Upon these barren, ragged edges of the earth, where the land casts its detritus upon the sea, and the sea casts it back, transformed, upon the land, it is felt to be what it truly is--a power that blights as well as fosters--death no less than life. All that has its roots firmly fastened in the soil--that has a purpose unfulfilled--fruit to bear--pollen to sow, feels the impulse--spreads, aspires, swells, and scatters. All that is weak or ephemeral--whose purposes are frustrated or whose uses past, turns from that light and fervor--withers--bows its head--wilts at the fiery challenge. To it the sun is a torch--the earth an oven--noontide the crisis of its agony.

* * * * *

At the door of the gray bathing-hut the girl turned, and, bracing herself, with her arms against her wet sides, to which her dark tight bathing-dress clung sleek and shapely as its pelt to a seal, stood for a moment looking out to sea. Her bosom rose and fell quickly, but without any distress; her heart beat high with the sense, so rare to women until of late, of physical powers put to the test. A mile out, the fishing-boat to which she had swum--whose very bulwarks she had touched--seemed to hang like some torpid bat--its claws hooked onto the line where sea and sky met. She caught her breath at sight of the distance she had ventured: nothing in her life, she felt, had been pleasanter than this--to stand with the sun on her shoulders, the warm sand over her toes, and to measure with a glance the cold, treacherous and trackless space which, stroke by stroke, she had overcome.

Suddenly, and as though she remembered, she turned and looked inland. High up on the dunes to her left a little black shadow spotted the gray, reed-streaked expanse. Fenella waved one brown arm toward it, and throwing back the wet hair from her forehead, peered anxiously under her hand for some signal in reply. Apparently it came, for her face changed. Something that had been almost austerity went out of it and was replaced by a look so full of tender concern that the long-lashed eyes and sensitive mouth seemed to brim over with it. A moment later, and amid a charming confusion which draped the pegs and benches of the hut, she was humming a waltz tune softly as she dressed. The happy, interrupted melody filled the hot silence like the song of a honey-seeking bee.

The blot upon the dunes was cast by a white sketching umbrella, lined with green, whose long handle, spiked and jointed, was driven deep into the loose soil. Near it, but somewhat away from the shadow, which the southward roll of the earth was carrying farther and farther from his shoulders, a man was sitting. He sat, with knees drawn up and with his hands clasped across them, staring out upon the colorless ocean, over which a slight haze was beginning to drift. A gaunt, large-framed man, but with a physical economy in which fat had no place. The skin upon the strong hands and lean neck was brown and loose, as though years of exposure to a sun, fiercer and more persistent than that to which he heedlessly bared his head now, had tanned it for all time. His hair, thick, crisp, and grizzling at the temples, was cropped close over a shapely head. A short beard, clipped to a point, left the shape of the chin an open question, but his moustache was brushed away, gallantly enough, from the upper lip, and showed all the lines of a repressed and unhappy mouth. The prisoner, his dungeon once accepted, sets himself to carve the record of his chagrins upon its walls; no less surely will a soul, misunderstood and checked in its purposes, grave the tale of its disappointments upon the prison-house of the flesh. On the face that confronted the ocean now, infinite sadness, infinite distaste were written plain.

He was oddly dressed, after a _bizarre_ fashion which complexity, eager, we must suppose, for such simplifications as are within its reach, occasionally affects. A coarse canvas smock, open at the throat, such as fishermen wear, and dyed the color of their sails; corduroy trousers of brown velvet, coarse gray knitted socks, that fell in careless folds round his ankles and over the low iron-shod shoes. Under all this uncouth parade one divined rather than saw fine linen.

Suddenly that view of the ocean in which was so little present help was blotted out. From behind him two hands, cool and a little clammy from prolonged immersion in salt water, were covering his eyes. Yet for a while he did not move; possibly he felt the eclipse a grateful one. It was not until the girl who had stolen upon him so silently shook him gently and whispered in his ear that he took the hands from his eyes, and, still without turning, laid them against his lips.

He might well have turned. For Fenella, one would think, would be always worth another look. She was quite beautiful, with the precision of color and texture that makes beauty for the artist, and sometimes, be it said, obscures it for the general. She was pale, but not from any retrenchment of the vital flame which burned, clear and ardent, in her gaze--glowed in the red of her moist and tremulous mouth. Her eyes were set full and a little far apart, and fringed with lashes that were of an almost even length and thickness on the upper and lower lids. Her face, broad at the temples and cheek bones, sloped to her chin with a slight concavity of the cheeks, in which a sort of impalpable dusk, that was not shadow, for no light killed it--nor bloom, for her tint was colorless as a lily, and which was probably caused by the minute and separately invisible down of the skin, seemed immanent. Her hair, fine, abundant, and nearer black than brown, grew low and made all manner of pretty encroachments upon the fair face. There was a peak of it in the centre of her forehead, and two little tufts waved near the temples which no mode of hairdressing had ever managed to successfully include. Her neck was slight and childish--her breasts scarcely formed, but her hips were already arched, of the true heroic mould of woman, and the young torso soared from them with the grace and strength of a dryad. Beyond all, face and figure possessed the precious and indefinable quality of romance. Fenella upon the Barrière du Trône in the livid light of a February morning--long, damp curls in which a little powder lingers drooping upon her slender shoulders: Fenella in _côte-hardie_ and wimple, gazing over moat and bittern-haunted moorland from an embrasured château window of Touraine: Fenella in robe of fine-fringed linen, her black hair crisped into spiral ringlets, couched between the hooves of some winged monster of Babylon or Tharshish, with the flame of banquet or sacrifice red upon her colorless cheek. All these were imaginable.

She sank gracefully upon her knees in the yielding sand, and, putting her hand across the man's shoulder, laid her cheek to his. The spontaneity of the action and its tacit acceptance by her lover--for he neither moved nor checked his reverie on its account--were eloquent of self-surrender, and a witness also to the truth of the observation that, in affairs of the heart, there is one who proffers love and one who endures it. But she was over-young and over-fair to know the chill of the unrequited kiss already.

"Are you still worrying, Paul?" she asked after a while, "still vexed and disturbed? You needn't answer. Your forehead was all gathers and tucks just now when I came behind you: I could feel every wrinkle. Tell me, this minute," with playful peremptoriness; "was he anxious about his young lady?"

"A little," her lover answered. "It's natural, isn't it?"

"But, dear, I swim so strongly," she pleaded. "There's no current when the tide's at flood. And, oh! Paul, it was such _fun_. I swam out to that fishing-boat you can _just--barely--see_. Look!" and she turned the listless head with her hand; "it's over there. I can tell you the exact number: _B759 Boulogne_. That shows I'm not fibbing, doesn't it, Mister Ingram. I hung onto the side and called out, '_Woilà!_' Have you ever noticed you can't say 'V' when your mouth's full of saltiness? And the man was so scared. He crossed himself twice, poor old soul, and his pipe nearly fell into the sea. Can't you imagine what he'll say when he gets home '_Cette Anglaise!--quelle effrontée!--quelle conduite!_' Now, who says I can't speak French?--Oh! Paul; why aren't you a swimmer?"

"It wasn't quite such fun watching you," said Ingram; "the sea's such a big thing. Why, your head looked no bigger than a pin's out on all that water. Things happen so easily, too."

The girl felt him shiver, and tightened her hold on his shoulder.

"And you've such an imagination to plague you; haven't you, Paul? Oh dear! Well--here's the pin sticking into you again: here's the head back, safe and sound, light and empty as ever. Isn't it hard luck for you?" And she laid it on his shoulder.

"Would you rather I didn't swim out so far again, Paul?" she asked presently, in a softened voice.

"Why should I break your spirit?" the man argued, more reasonably, perhaps, than he intended.

"Oh, but it isn't worth it if it worries you," his sweetheart said earnestly. "Nothing's worth that, when you have so much to bear besides. I've had my foolish way and now I promise you I'll paddle with you, dear old muff, in two feet of water all the rest of the holidays."

Ingram turned to her now. "Nelly, I don't want to disappoint you, but--but, there won't be any 'rest of the holidays' for us this summer."

She looked into his face; her own alarmed and pleading.

"You're not going, Paul? Oh, you promised to stay on until we all went back together."

"I know, I know," he answered, with an impatience that was none the less real because it was the expression of his reluctance to give pain. Silken bonds strain at times.

"Something has happened then, since last night? What is it, dear?"

"I had a letter this morning. It had been waiting at the '_Arrêt_.'"

"A letter at last! Oh! Paul--Why didn't you tell me? Is it good news?"

"Only a straw; but then, I'm a drowning man."

"Tell me! Tell me!" the girl insisted.

"It's from Prentice; the man you saw in Soho the night before we came away. He's taken my MSS. to Althea Rees."

"You mean the woman who writes those queer books where every one talks alike."

"What does it matter? The talk's all good. Anyhow, she's 'struck.' Some one's actually struck at last. She's going to try and make her own publishers do something. But she says she must see me first, and Prentice thinks she's only passing through London."

Fenella's face clouded and was so far from expressing enthusiasm that her lover looked at her rather ruefully.

"You don't seem very glad, Nelly."

Nelly kept her eyes averted. She had already taken her head from his shoulder.

"I shouldn't care to publish anything," she declared slowly. "Not--that way."

As though he had been waiting for her words, Paul Ingram sprang to his feet. All his impatience and dissatisfaction seemed to boil over. He began to pace the dunes like a caged animal, kicking the sand from his feet and tugging fiercely at the grizzling beard that was a daily reproach to his lack of achievement.

"That way! that way!" he repeated. "But isn't even 'that way' better than no way at all? I tell you, Nelly, I'm discouraged, aghast, at this conspiracy to keep a man bottled up and away from the people for whom his message is intended. I haven't written like all these clever--clever people; after a morning's motoring, and an afternoon 'over the stubble,' isn't that the expression?--three hours every day, while the man is laying out the broadcloth and fine linen for a dinner at eight. What I did was done with as much sweat and strain as that shrimper uses down there, who's getting ready to push his net through the sand as soon as the tide turns. And when the work is done, between me and my public a soulless, brainless agency uprears itself that weighs the result by exactly the same standards as it would weigh a tooth-paste or a patent collar stud or a parlor game--as a 'quick seller.'"

He would have said more, but Fenella was at his side, trying to reach his lips with the only comfort the poor child had.

"Oh! Paul," she cried; "be patient just a little longer. Publish how you can! I wasn't blaming you, dear. I only meant that--that working as you do, it was only a question of time and you'd succeed without any one's help. I don't feel uneasy or impatient about you."

Ingram sat down again, a little ashamed of his outburst, but his face was still bitter.

"Just so," said he. "And it's precisely your limitless, superhuman patience that's doing more than anything else to kill me by inches. It would be a relief if you'd lose it sometimes, curse me--reproach me for the failure I am. After all, how do you know all these duffers aren't right? They're wonderfully unanimous."

Fenella sat silent for a few minutes, not resenting his words, but racking her brain for some comforting parallel that would ring true and not be repulsed.

"Do you remember, Paul," she said at last, "the story we read together at Christmas about Holman Hunt? How he got so sick of the unsold pictures hanging in his studio that he turned them all with their faces to the wall? And yet one of those pictures was the 'Light of the World.'"

But Ingram, even if he had an equal reverence for the work in question, which I should doubt, was not an easy man to console. He brushed the poor little crumb of comfort impatiently aside.

"There's no comparison at all," he declared. "A picture painted is a picture painted. A glance can take it in, and a glance recover for the artist all the inspiration and joy in his work that filled him when he painted it. But what inspiration is there in a bundle of dog-eared manuscript, that comes back to you with the persistence of a cur you've saved from drowning? Besides, every artist worth the name has his following, however small, who help him--flatter him perhaps--anyhow, keep him sane. There's no unwritten law against showing a canvas. But the unpublished author--the un-acted play writer--is shunned like a man with the plague. Oh! don't I know it?"

Fenella gave a weary little sigh. Amid all this glorified space, just to be alive seemed to her simple soul a thing to be deeply and reverently thankful for. Her own blood was racing and tingling in her veins, with the reaction from her long swim. She wanted to run, to sing; above all, she wanted to dance. As for books, her own idea of a book was a very concrete one, indeed. She knew that whole rooms were filled with them, bookstalls littered by them, libraries building everywhere to catch the overflow. She was familiar, for reasons that will appear in their course, with the reading-room at the British Museum. She had confronted that overwhelming fact. And yet, one book could mean so much to this man that, for its sake, the holiday she had so joyously planned had gone to pieces. The truth must be told. She had to draw a rather big draft upon her love and loyalty.

"When are you going?" she asked, in a little flat voice.

"I ought to have caught the mid-day boat from Boulogne," the man answered, with a briskness that sounded ungratefully in her ears. "But it's too late for that to-day. There's another at six or seven. They stop the Paris train for you here if you signal."

"Don't go till to-morrow, Paul," she urged patiently. "There's the eclipse to-night, you know, and you promised we should watch it together. Then we can talk things over quietly. I want--oh, I want _so_ to help you! I have a sort of foolish plan in my own head, but I'm afraid you'll laugh at it.... And there's poor mummy, struggling over the sand with our luncheon. Run and help her, dear."

II

SHADOWS BEFORE

Mrs. Barbour was a comely, wholesome-looking body upon the descending slope of fifty. Her face, like her daughter's, was of the _teint mât_, and her homely English figure had what a flippant mind has described as a "middle-aged spread" in its proportions. Her large oval brooch, a cunning device in hair, proclaimed to these skilled in rebus that without a cross there was no prospect of a crown, and a black bonnet of low church tendencies, trimmed with little jet-tipped tentacles that quivered and danced when she moved her head, honorably crowned her abundant silver locks. She had declined Ingram's proffered aid with a tenacity often to be noticed in those who have given hard service all their lives, and as she drooped with weary finality upon the sand, various parcels, string-bags, and small baskets were distributed to right and left.

"Oh dear," she gasped breathlessly; "those dreadful, dreadful dunes."

"Have they tired you very much, mummy?" the girl asked concernedly, as she unfastened the lavender bonnet-strings.

"The sand is so loose to-day with the great 'eat--_heat_." Mrs. Barbour added the corrected version with almost lightning rapidity. One of her peculiarities, which it is sufficient to have indicated once, was a constant snatch at evasive aspirates. They can scarcely be said to have really dropped; she caught them before they fell.

"No, Nelly," the good lady went on, while Ingram unravelled the mysteries of the string-bag, and gathered driftwood for the fire. "Here we are in France, where you've always wanted to be; but, another year, if I'm consulted, Bognor or Westgate for me, my dear. Two hours' comfortable travelling"--Mrs. Barbour ticked off the advantages of home travel on her fingers one by one, and unconsciously quoted some railway placard she had seen--"no Channel crossing, no customs, and the sea at your door. And even when you've come all this way, no amusement, unless you call a horrid Casino amusing, where grown men, and women who ought to be sent home to finish dressing, make donkeys of themselves over little lead horses."

"There's very good music there in the afternoon," Paul hazarded, who was shaving a stick into kindling after the fashion of the Western plains.

"Music--yes; but nothing really tuneful. Do you remember the Elite Pierrots at Westgate, Nelly, last year, with the blue masks. That dark-haired one, my dear, who used to sigh for the silvery moon and cough so terribly in the intervals. Don't tell me he wasn't some one in disguise. No! I hold to what I've said. The French don't understand amusement."

The fire was lit, the kettle boiled, and luncheon eaten amid such conversation as a garrulous old woman and two very preoccupied people could contrive. Nelly was particularly silent, and had lost, besides, what her mother was pleased to term her "sand appetite." The talk ranged hither and thither listlessly. Paul's inability to swim, so strange in a man who had girdled the earth, was discussed in all its bearings till it could be borne no longer; the lurid history of Simone, Mrs. Barbour's strapping, smiling bonne, unmarried and unmoral, was matter for another half-hour. Followed various excursions into the obvious, and a list of "discoveries" made that morning. Mrs. Barbour collected facts like shells, and made some very pretty castles with them, too, at times.

"... and Nelly, I believe I know who the two gentlemen are that you had your adventure with yesterday."

Ingram raised his head at the two odious words very much as a horse would do if you were to explode two fog signals under his nose in succession; quickly enough, indeed, to intercept a warning and reproachful glance that the girl sent her mother. Mrs. Barbour clapped both hands playfully over her mouth. "Oh! now I _have_ done it!" she exclaimed. Her eyes snapped with, perhaps, a shade more of malice than a kind-hearted old lady's should ever hold. Without being a scheming or a worldly woman, she resented a little, in her heart, the monopoly which this man had established over her child; a man so alien to her in thought, so sparing of speech, so remote from her ideal, which, diffuse enough in all truth, would perhaps have found it nearest realization just now in some florid, high-spirited lad, who would have brought her his socks to darn and his troubles to soothe of an evening, been "company," in a word, to the talkative, commonplace old woman. As far as she was concerned, Ingram swallowed his disappointments, and she rather suspected him of darning his own socks.

Fenella considered her mother for some time, though not as a resource to evade her lover's eye.

"What a rummy way you have of putting things, mother!" she said at last. "My 'adventure' with 'two gentlemen'!"

Paul's face was blank, like the page of a diary awaiting confidences.

Feeling herself at bay, Mrs. Barbour grew flustered and tearful.

"Well, well!" she exclaimed, waving her hands helplessly in the air. "I'm sure I'm sorry, Nelly, since you choose to make such a mystery of it. But what there is in it to make you both look as grave as judges, I can't see. I'm sure that, as your mother, I'd be the first to be offended if there was anything disrespectful."

An awkward silence followed her words, which Ingram was the first to break.

"I think, perhaps, you'd best tell now, Nelly," he said quietly.

The girl blushed and covered her eyes for a moment with her hands.

"It's so--so _foolish_," she said, clenching them with an impatient movement. "Oh, well, if I must, I must.... It was yesterday morning while you were both at breakfast. I ran down, you know, to catch the tide. After I had come out--oh, well, there wasn't a soul in sight--I thought they would all be at breakfast at the _Grande Falaise_; I was chilly, too, and there was a kind of tune in the sea. So, after I'd taken off my wet bathing-suit, I threw on my kimono and began to practise the last dance Madame de Rudder has been teaching me--you know the one, mother, where she won't let me use my feet as much as I want--out on the sand where it was hard. And then, like a little fool I am, I forgot everything, until I heard some one clapping hands and saying, 'Bravo!'--and I looked up--and there were two men on the dunes, smoking cigars--I suppose they were coming from the golf links to the hotel, and I don't know how long they'd been watching me, and--and," with sudden passion, "I just _hate_ you, Paul, for dragging it out of me when I didn't want to tell."

And Fenella, already overwrought, hid her head in her mother's capacious lap and had her cry out.

Mrs. Barbour stroked the dark head gently, but like the wise old mother bird she was, made no attempt to check the burst of tears.

"Such a dancing girl she is," she murmured complacently, "and she does hate to have it talked about so. Do you know, Mr. Ingram, I only discovered it myself by accident, after it had been going on months and months. Do you remember, dearie, that awful day, the first time I was up after influenza, that Druce got the spot on her nose that the doctor said was erysipelas, and Twyford scalded her arm and hand making a poultice? It's the only time, I do believe, Nelly, I've ever spoken to you crossly."

A muffled voice, "You were _horrid_, mummy."

"Well, there, I really was, Mr. Ingram. I pushed the child out of the way and said, 'If you can't help, don't hinder. Run upstairs and play with the other ornaments!' I didn't think any more about it, with all that trouble on my hands, till about half an hour afterward, when down comes Miss Rigby with her face white--you know what a coward she is, Nelly--and in her dressing-gown, at nearly twelve! 'Do come up, Mrs. Barbour,' she says, 'I believe Rock has gone mad in the box-room and is dashing himself against the wall.' Oh dear! I ran upstairs with the poker, and what do you think it was, Mr. Ingram. My own crazy child, dancing and waving her arms about. Such a picture of fun as she looked!"

A hand was laid suddenly on her mouth, and a face, very flushed and penitent in its tumbled dark hair, emerged from between the parental knees.

"I'm a silly"--_sniff_--"fool"--_sniff_--said Fenella. "Paul, gimme my hank."

Ingram passed the handkerchief across the smouldering blaze. The girl looked at him as she blew her nose. He seemed absorbed, not angry, but _queer_, she thought. She had never seen his face look so wan and tired. He seemed to avoid her eyes.

"Aren't you well, Paul?" she asked at last.

Ingram seemed to shiver and then rouse himself. "I'm all right," he said; "but I think I'll go back to the chalêt. I've got letters to write. Isn't the sun grown pale? And I guess I've either caught cold or some one's walking backward and forward over my grave."

They went home together, for the women would not be left behind, taking the longer way in order to avoid the sand-hills. Along the loose, tiring beach--dried sea waifs crackling underfoot, by the _douane_ with its toy battery and lounging sentry; up a narrow path that was half by-street and half flight of steps, near whose summit a Christ flung his saving arms wide over a yellow _affiche_ of the _Courses_ at Wimereux, and into a straggling village of low-browed houses, cream, pink, light-blue, and strong as castles, through whose doorways leather-faced crones and tow-headed children swarmed and tumbled. They were nearing the inn of the _Toison d'Or_, where the new road to the hotel turns out of the village, slowly, for Mrs. Barbour climbed with difficulty and rejected assistance, when two men in tweed jackets, flat-capped and flannel-trousered, swung round the corner. At their backs two shaggy town urchins straggled along, each with an arsenal of clubs and cleeks peeping over his shoulder. The two men raised their caps and bowed slightly, but certainly not in response to any recognition that any of the party accorded them. Fenella blushed and hung her head.

Paul turned sharply on his heel. "Are those the cads who stared at you?" he asked, in a voice which he took no pains to render inaudible.

Nelly caught his arm before she answered. "Hush, dear! Yes. You're not to be foolish," she added.

Her mother, glad of a respite, stopped and looked after them, too. She held it a legitimate source of pride that she had always had an eye for a fine man.

"Those _are_ the two, then," she said triumphantly, with an air of sagacity justified. "Then, my dear, I can tell you who they are. The short, dark one is Mr. Dreyfus--no, Dollfus--who manages the 'Dominion' in London, and the big, handsome one with the loose hair under his cap at the back is Sir Bryan Lumsden, the millionaire, and a _frightful_ reputation, my dear. Mrs. Lesueur told me all about him this morning when she came in to borrow Simone for ironing."

Meantime, the two men whom they had passed turned likewise, but only to whistle up their caddies, who, with an avidity for the "_p'tit sou_" which would seem to be sucked in with the maternal milk in French Flanders, were holding out claw-like hands to the family party and more especially to Ingram, who had already acquired an unfortunate reputation in this respect.

"What d'you make of it, Dolly?" the big man asked. "Husband?"

The Jew shook his head decisively. "No, no, my boy! She's not a marrit woman. Relations, more likely. Eh?--ah?"

"Or lovers, likelier still. It's highly respectable, anyway. They've got the old lady to come along. That looks as if he were French."

"I'd like to meet the liddle girl, alone," said Dollfus, fervently.

"Some dark night?--eh, Dolly!" remarked Sir Bryan, beginning to whip the Dominion director's stout calves and thighs with the handle of the putter he was carrying. "You're such a devil--such a devil, Dolly."

Mr. Dollfus raised a corrective hand.

"Don't mithtake my meaning, Lumpsden," he said, getting out of the sportive baronet's long reach as quickly as was consistent with dignity. "I only wanter tell her she's got a forchune in her feet and legth if she'd go in training. I oughter know something about legth, oughtn't I, old fellow. Becoth it's my bizzyness, ain't it, Lumpsden?"

"Tell the lunatic in the red shirt instead," the baronet suggested, derisively. "She's bored, anyway. See her bat her eyelid when we bowed? Oh yes, she did, Dolly. Just one little flicker--but I caught it. Hullo! there's Grogan and old Moon at the tenth hole."

And, this being a world where the incredible is always happening, it is possible that Bryan Lumsden didn't think of Fenella again that day.

III

AN ECLIPSE

Ingram took her down to the beach again that night, as he had promised, through a sparse, pungent pine wood that by day and night seemed to keep something of the peace of the primeval world in its coniferous shade, and across a trackless little wilderness of sand-hills, scooped and tortured by the earthquake storms of winter into strange, unnatural contours, over which the moon to-night spread a carpet so white, so deceptively level, that often they could only be guessed by the abrupt rise or fall of the ground beneath one's feet. Rabbits popped in and out of the earth, the sharp reeds that bind the sand barriers together bit spitefully at the girl's tender ankles, and withered branches, catching in her silk skirt, snapped dryly as her lover helped her through the hedges with which the dunes are ribbed.

Although the night was cool, she was wearing the thin dress she had put on for dinner. Over his shoulder Ingram had slung a soldier's cloak of blue-gray cloth, long and wide, that was to cover them in to-night as it had often covered them before. Fenella was already familiar with its every fold--knew exactly when the rough backing of the clasp would chafe her delicate cheek, could recall at any moment the peculiar fragrance of cigar smoke with which the heavy frieze was impregnated, and some other smell, stranger still, sweet, foreign and spicy, that she could not define, but which, evanescent as it was--the very ghost of an odor--clung obstinately to her skin and dress, and which she loved to lie awake at night and feel exhaled from her thick hair like some secret earnest of joy upon the morrow.

She slid her hand into the man's as they descended the slippery, needle-carpeted path, and turned up a face to him in the darkness of the wood that was contrite and humble as a reproved child's. She had been a bad child, in fact; had failed in sympathy--had told him in her passion that she hated him. Hated--him! When they had found the fire, still smouldering, and had blown it into a blaze, she crept silently within his arms, under the folds of the cloak, and, laying her head upon his breast, watched the flames, creeping like fern-fronds through the gnarled roots and sodden bleached faggots that Paul had heaped upon it. She began to suck her thumb too: always with Fenella the sign of a chastened spirit. The moon, serenely unconscious of the earth shadow that was creeping upon her, made a path of crinkled glory across the waters, straight toward them, and, like foam at the foot of a silver cascade, the phosphorescent surf tumbled, soft and luminous, along the shore.

"Are you warm enough?" Ingram asked presently, feeling a tremor, perhaps, in the yielding figure that rested in his arms.

Fenella nodded her head, but she might more truly have told him that she was cold and sick. For her the night was full of voices that threatened her happiness. The ripple of the cold wind along dry grass at her back, the soft thud and effervescence of the surf against the sand, were all so many whispers telling her that her lover was going--going to some other woman who could help him, and away from the weak arms that only clung and hindered. She had no confidence in herself--no belief in her own power to hold him a moment, once his will should feel an alien attraction. The very profuseness of the poor child's passion, its abandonment of one uninvaded reserve after another, had been proof of this inward unrest. Let no mistake be made. Fenella was a good girl, who could by no possibility become other than a good woman: nevertheless it is as true as it is, perhaps, disquieting that she might have remained at the same time happier and more maidenly in contact with an affection less worthy and less spiritual than that which she had encountered. For, so long as the attraction of sex for sex, beneath all modern refinements and sophistications, remains endowed with anything of the purpose for which nature instituted it--so long as its repulsions are a definite distance, to be annihilated toward a definite end, so long, if one party to the vital bargain hangs unduly back, must the other press unduly forward.

She was silent so long that Ingram put out his hand, and, touching her cheek, found it wet.

"You're crying!" he exclaimed sharply.

"I'm n-not," Fenella protested unevenly, and even as she spoke the great drops splashed down on his hand.

"Nelly, look up! Do you love me as much as you say?"

"Oh, my heart!--my heart!" she sobbed, covering his mouth with kisses, salt as the sea. And while she kissed him he was making a mental note that women were unduly robust on the emotional side.

"If you do," said he, "you'll stop crying--at once."

He spoke so sternly that the girl clenched her hands and struggled and fought with her sorrow.

"That's better," he said, when, by dint of swallowing her tears, she was, outwardly at least, a little calmer. "I'm sorry if I spoke harshly just now," he went on; "but everybody has a last straw. A woman crying seems to be mine. It--it strains my heart."

"Do you think _I_ like it any better?" his sweetheart asked, desperately.

"I suppose," he hazarded, with a shyness that was almost grotesque, "it's because I'm going to-morrow."

"Oh yes, dear, yes," the girl told him, eagerly seeking relief in words since tears were forbidden her. "Oh, Paul! how I shall miss you! You don't know what it's meant to me to have you living in the same house--to even know you were sleeping near me. Darling, do you know I've sometimes wished you _snored_ so I might hear you at night. Don't stop me, love!" she went on, buttoning and unbuttoning his coat with nervous fingers. "Let me confess my full shamelessness. I've even helped Simone do your room sometimes in the morning. You're not shocked--are you? Oh! you _are_," she cried piteously, drawing away from his arm. "You think me unmaidenly. But I can't _help_ it, love; I can't _help_ it. Don't you see? You are you. It's different to all the rest of the world."

Ingram's chest rose and fell unevenly beneath her cheek. She could not but perceive his distress.

"Listen, Nelly," he said huskily. "Don't cry again; but--but perhaps it's a good thing for you I am going away for a while. Things are so unsettled, and it may help you--get you used, supposing the worst happens, to the _idea_. There's so much in custom--in habit."

"Paul!" she cried once, and grew rigid in his arms. It was a death-cry, and he flinched. Who has struck at life and not drawn the blade away quicker because the first blow went home.

"Nelly, I'm not young."

"I don't care if you were sixty--seventy." Fenella was not crying now, but fighting for her love like the brave little girl she was.

"I'm a man without home, or country, or friends."

"I'm not a baby. I'll go with you wherever you like. We'll make them for ourselves, together."

"And I'm deadly poor."

"I'll lend you money, Paul. How much do you want? I've seventy pounds in the Post-Office."

I think if I had been Ingram and had only one more kiss to give, I would have given it her for this; but I am trying to tell the truth; and the truth is that these futile interruptions to his hateful task harassed and angered him. It is so much easier to confess to sin than to failure.

"Nelly! don't interrupt me! Let me say what I have to. I'm telling you that at thirty-seven, an age when most men have home and wife and children and see their way clear to the end, I haven't taken the first step upon a road that is haunted by tragedy and littered with the bones of those who have fallen by the way."

"I'll wait for you," said poor Fenella, but no longer with the same energy. What a gorgon head has common-sense to turn hearts of flesh to stone!

"Yes, you'll wait for me! Spend your youth waiting for me; your middle age--waiting. We'll save every cent; spend hours figuring out on just how much or how little life for two can be supported. Hundreds of people are doing that to-day who, thirty years ago, would have been setting out, full of hope and confidence, to make money. That's a by-product of industrial development. And, if we're lucky, just about the time your own daughters should be telling you their love affairs, you'll come to me and we'll crawl away together to some cottage in Cornwall, where I'll cultivate vegetables a little, rheumatically, and at night you'll sit opposite me by the kitchen fire--we'll call it our 'ingle-nook'--and listen to an old man babbling of his wrongs between spoonfuls of bread and milk, with enlightening criticisms upon the fools who succeeded where he was too clever not to fail.

"You'll think it strange, I suppose," he went on, no more interrupted now by her sobs than by the sough of the sea; "strange that I should wait until now, just when I've heard I'm to have the chance I've been whining for, to realize what a phantom I've committed myself to following. But it's not as strange as it looks. As long as there's some petty practical obstacle in the way, mercifully or unmercifully everything else is obscured by it. It's like a hill, hiding the desert you'll have to cross when you've climbed to the top. Oh, Nelly! look at the moon!"

Little by little, as the man talked and the woman paid in tears and heartscald for the reckless passion of her first love, the portent they had come out to watch was passing over their heads. At first it was but a spot--a little nibble at the silver rim of the great dead, shining orb; then a stain, that grew and spread, as though the moon were soaking up the blackness of the sky; last it took shape and form of the world's circumference, and for once man might watch his earth as, maybe, from some happier but still speculative planet his earth is watched, and idly conjecture at what precise spot upon that smooth segmental shadow any mountain or plain, roaring city or dark tumbling ocean that he has mapped and named, might lie. Two thousand years ago--a day as men have learned to count time--this man and woman, who had come out to watch the moon's eclipse for mere diversion, for an effect of light and shade, and who, in the multiplied perplexities of their own artificial life had even forgotten to watch it at all, would have been lying, prone upon their faces, wailing--praying until the ominous shadow had passed, while in the fire before them some victim of flock and herd smoked propitiation to the threatening heavens. And out of all the straining and striving toward knowledge of those two thousand years--out of all the Promethean struggle wherein learning, hot to unlearn, can but lop off one visionary beak or claw to find itself clutched more cruelly in another, not enough wisdom reached them now to comfort one simple, trustful heart, or to teach an intellect that had roamed the earth to its own undoing, the primal art of all--how to rear a roof and feed a hearth for the loving creature that clung at his breast.

* * * * *

No! Nelly wouldn't look at the moon. She left his arms and sat apart, bolt upright; her lithe body quivering with resolution.

"Paul Ingram," she said incisively, "I've listened patiently to you and you'll have to listen to me. You've been prophesying woe and misery, and now it's my turn. Shall _I_ tell _you_ what's really going to happen?"

Hope is like measles. No one is too young or too foolish to catch it from. In spite of himself the man's face brightened.

"Well, what's going to happen?"

"As soon as we get home I'm going to have Mme. de Rudder to tea, just our two selves, nice and comfy, and when she's lapped up her cream and I've stroked her down a little, I'm going to say, 'Now, Madame! For the last two years you've been buttering me up, to my face and behind my back, and showing me round, and if you've meant half you said' (and I think she does, Paul, though she's such an old pussy), 'there ought to be a living for me somewhere.' And then--oh, Paul!--I'll work and I'll work and I'll w-o-r-k-work. I'm not sure whether I'll see you"--with an adorable look askance--"perhaps once a week, if you're good. And, at the end of the year, I'll bring you a nice, newly signed contract at--oh! well, _pounds_ a week, 'cos I've got a _head_, which you'll never have, poor dear. And then--don't stop me please--we'll get married, and have a little flat of our own or turn ma's lodgers out, and you'll write your mis-e-ra-ble, _mis-e-ra-ble_ books all day," she took his head in her hands and shook it gently from side to side; "and at night you'll call for me and I'll go home with you, sir, in my own dear little taxicab, all warm and cosy from dancing--and, dear, you shall never have another money trouble or even hear the word mentioned as long as you live. Now, what does he think of that?"

She looked closely at her lover's face and suddenly shrank away, with a little cry, at what she saw there.

"Think of it?" Paul repeated, his nostrils quivering. "I'll soon tell you what I think of it. That if I didn't know your words were a mere childish fancy--if I really thought you were going to dance on the stage in London or Paris or New York or any city I've been in, I believe, Nelly"--he paused a moment--"yes, I believe I could bear to take you up in my arms, now, as you are, and carry you down to that sea and hold you under until you were dead."

Fenella moaned and covered her face with her hands. Then she jumped up. Paul caught at her silken skirt, a momentary cold fear at his heart.

"Nelly, stop! I know I shouldn't have said that."

She disengaged herself with a swift turn. "Let me go!" she cried angrily. "I'm not the sort of person that commits suicide. You can drown me afterward if you like. I'm going to dance first."

"To dance?" Ingram repeated, thunderstruck. "Out here? Sit down at once! Sit down," he pleaded in a changed voice. "Be a good child."

"I'm not a child," she cried rebelliously; "that's the mistake you're making. And I won't be forever checked and scolded by you, Paul. I will have some comfort. Oh, I knew you'd laugh and storm. I'm only a silly little thing that dances and that you pet when she's good"; her eyes flamed at him. "But it means as much to me as your books and long words do to you."

She stopped, not because she was ashamed, but because her mouth was inconveniently full of the pins which she was pulling from a rather elaborate "_chevelure_." She shook her head with the usual transforming result, kicked off her shoes, and, bending down, began to unfasten her long silk stockings under her skirt. Paul turned away his head, and perhaps it was as well she did not see the disgust in the averted face.

"Sing something," she commanded, throwing the long silk stockings on the sand and stretching her bare toes.

"I don't know anything," doggedly.

"Oh yes, you do! Sing the Algerian recruit song."

"It's too sad for you in your present mood of exaltation."

Fenella did not seem to resent the withering tone. She had drawn a little away from the fire and was looking upward, her hands clasped behind her neck and under her hair.

"Just to get a note," she said, dreamily.

Without quite knowing why, and in the teeth of his own shy distaste, Ingram began to sing. He had a fine baritone voice, to be exact where exactness is not called for, full of strength and feeling, that was none the less tuneful because it had only been trained to the tramp of gaitered feet along the blinding white _chaussées_ of French Africa. The song rose and fell, haunting and melodious--

"_Me voilà engagé
Pour l'amour d'une blond--e_...."

The fire was between them, throwing all the beach into shadow, and, sung thus, squatted upon the sand, and his feet to the dying embers, with the old song so many memories crowded upon the man's own brain--so many visions peopled the lurid shadows around him--that he had arrived nearly at its end before he thought of regarding the swaying, tossing figure beyond with any degree of attention. But, when he did, the last words died away in his throat. This is not the place to describe Fenella Barbour's dancing. Many pens have done it justice. It has been described and overdescribed--ignorantly arraigned and disingenuously defended. Tyros of the press, anxious to win their spurs, and with a store of purple phrases to squander, have attempted, through a maze of adjectives and synonyms, to convey or reawaken its charm. She burst on the world in a time when such things were already grown a weariness to the plain man; yet never, I believe, was any success due more to the frank and spontaneous tribute of the people who sit in cheap seats to a wonderful thing wonderfully done, and less to the kid-gloved applause of stalled and jaded eclecticism in search of new sensation. And the key to it all, I believe--though mine is only one opinion among many--was to be sought in the mechanical precision with which, through all the changes and postures of arms and body above the hips, unstable and sensuous as vapor, the feet below the swirling skirts beat--beat out the measure of the dance unerringly and incisively as the percussion of a drummer's sticks upon the sheepskin. It was this that, for the man in the street at least, lifted her art out of trickery and imposture and veiled indelicacy into some region where his own criticism felt itself at home. "A clog-dancer with sophistications," she has been called; but at least it was upon honest toes and heels that Fenella danced into popular favor.

And all this the man by the fire watched with a sinking heart. Not altogether unmoved. He could not, being flesh and blood, remember that the girl dancing before him had just left his arms, and at the close of her transport would fling herself, breathless and glowing, into them again, eager for his approval, and spending upon his lips the aftermath of her excitement, without many a desire and emotion of his youth awaking and clamoring for its deferred due. But his desires had grizzled with his beard: he had analyzed the emotions and discarded them. Where the passions are concerned intellect is never impartial. It must be either oil or water--foster or extinguish. And he had chosen once for all the harder way. He was full of shyness, constraint, and the panic instinct of flight: shocked yet arrested, like some hermit of the Libyan desert watching the phantoms of his old life at Rome or Alexandria beckon him from his cave. Not only was the old dispensation void. He could imagine no ground upon which it could be renewed. His authority had been one of those gentle tyrannies of heart over heart, that are valid only so long as they are unquestioned. Having claimed her liberty, though it was but for an hour--resumed the possession of herself though it was only to dazzle his eyes--Fenella became to him from that moment a new woman, to be wooed and won afresh; and, being a wistful far more than a lustful man, in the very measure that the delayed revelation of her beauty penetrated his senses, he shrank further and further from its recapture.

It must have been a strange sight, had any been there to see it. The dying fire; the shadowed moon; the man with his head bent above his knees; and the barefooted girl, with fluttering skirts and dishevelled hair, singing and dancing on the sand before his averted face.

IV

TO INTRODUCE PAUL INGRAM

Exactly why it should be I who sit down to write of the loves and errors of Paul Ingram, his descent into hell and resurrection therefrom, is a thing that is not quite clear to me now, but which will not become clearer the more I try to justify it. It is certainly not because I was at one crisis of his life the instrument to save him, since I know how very careless Fate can be in the choice of her instruments. I am not his oldest friend, nor should I care to say--his dearest. We have done a good deal of work together--shared a good deal of opprobrium. I still bear upon my forehead the mark made by a stone that was meant for a better man, on the wild night when the Home Defence League roughs broke up our meeting at Silvertown. Yet, and notwithstanding, I am by no means sure, should the inevitable happen in my own lifetime, whether, of all the disciples who pass from the oration at the graveside to the whispers over the funeral baked meats, mine will be the pen chosen to write the life--mine the fingers authorized to untie the letters--of Paul Ingram, novelist, dreamer, and reformer.

A good deal of what I have written I was witness to myself; a good deal more I learnt from Ingram during what, with so many cleaner and pleasanter ways of leaving the world, we all hope will be his last illness of the kind; and a not considerable part has been told me by his wife, for whom it is notorious that I entertain an affection as hopeless as it is happily engrossing. Even so, when all is admitted, each part assigned to its proper source of inspiration, I am aware a good deal will remain unaccounted for. This I have no alternative but to leave to the sagacity of my readers. Even to their discretion--a little.