Chapter VIII: Part II: I (1)

FINANCIAL INTELLIGENCE

Four years ago--no very long time, even to those who must count it by the ruins and ghosts it has made--the light-hearted wayfarer amid financial pitfalls--_vacuus coram latrone viator_--not more a snob than an antiquary with a wistful regard for survivals need confess himself, spared a glance, as he passed along Throgmorton Avenue, for a big brass plate on the door of the corner building which overlooks the crouched statue and smoky fig-trees of the "Draper's Garden." For him the legend it bore called up a vision, unique amid the alien and masqueradingly Semitic names with which the dreary canyon is plastered, of other and very different days, fiercer perhaps but at least less meanly cruel; of hard knocks given and taken in a selfless quarrel; of blows upon helmet and corselet, thrusts that the buff coat haply turned; of a fight that raged one whole September afternoon through the streets of the "ever faithful city."[2]

"BRYAN LUMSDEN, CALVERT & CO.,
Stock and Share Brokers."

[Footnote 2: Worcester]

A stranger to the ephemeral record of London society--if such a one can be imagined in this day of "open letters" and the ubiquitous lens--who met the genial head of the firm upon the lawn at Cowes, or among his yearlings at Stanmore, at the pigeon butts of Pau and Cannes, or in the thrice-guarded sanctuary of the Turf Club writing-room, or who, as is likelier far, merely passed him in Austin Friars, silk hat cocked rakishly, one hand holding the lapel of his coat and the other laid lightly and characteristically upon the shoulder of some olive-skinned lord of the market, would probably have carried away a totally false impression of the man and of his history. Official text-books--the one, for instance, in which poor Fenella discovered a romance so enthralling, would not greatly have helped him. He would have learned from them that Sir Bryan Lumsden was twelfth baronet of either a very old or a very short-lived dynasty; that he was the son of Denzil Lumsden, of Coffers Castle, Kincardineshire; that he had served his country in the Scots Guards, been an aide-de-camp during the Tirah Campaign (medal and clasps), and had left the service at twenty-five. No less than three residences housed all this greatness: the castle aforesaid, "The Chase," Stanmore, and 369 Mount Street. "Clubs: the Turf, Marlboro, and Royal Yacht. Unmarried." And from the silence concerning the sphere in which three parts of his life were spent, and upon whose harvest, presumably, these glories were supported, he would have conjectured that here was a case common enough in latter-day life: the scion of an old house, bought in to finance by family money and connection, gradually acquiring sufficient zest for the game to justify a predominant interest, and, with position assured, returning blithely to the life of his younger days, while, under the griffin wings that hatch so many a clutch of golden eggs, Calvert, imaginable as a rather vulgar but discreet person, buttoning a black coat high on his chest and redressing the senior partner's ebullience by Apollinaris and bulb-culture at Sutton, watched the processes that, by a law of growth as simple as that which sows the pollen on the wind, make the rich man daily and hourly richer.

They would have been quite wrong. No titled food-adulterer or gutter journalist--no drab figure in all the broadclothed gallery with which Dr. Smiles seeks to fire the imagination of youth--was more literally the architect of his own fortunes. Twelve years ago, when he was an attaché at Vienna, with a long night of ruinous play behind him and a scented but heartless letter under his elbow, Bryan Lumsden had spun a coin to decide whether he should continue the battle elsewhere and under less tangled conditions or pass to the completer simplification which was all his pagan soul conceived of death. He had tossed the double thaler into the air simply, with no consciousness of pose, and since it fell for life, had played the game out that way. Returning to London, he had sent in his papers, paid his debts with what was left of an attenuated property, and asked for "desk-room" in the office of the broker through whom the final transactions were conducted--a dark, secretive man, little susceptible to the appeal of the incongruous or to the glamour of a barren title.

At the end of a year, upon the quarter per cent. margin allowed to those outside the house for business they introduce, he was earning an income in excess of many sworn members of repute, who struggle on from settlement to settlement with the hammer suspended over their heads like a sword of Damocles. In three years he was a member of the house and a partner. Business flowed to him. His gay, casual manners, his cheery voice, melted the senile heart of Mammon. The baffling blue eye, behind which a purpose quick and strong as steel was kept bright, pierced its pompous parade from the outset, and, holding his adversary at a deflated value, he was never tempted to take himself any the more seriously for his success. To the last the moves for which the market watched would be made between a chat with his trainer and a chaffing and recondite conversation over the telephone with the Tower mess. History is always repeating itself in unlooked for fashions. A hundred and sixty years ago the great Marshal Saxe, forming his squadrons for the charge that was to give Lauffeld to the French, ordered aside their black-avised brigadier and picked on a subaltern, careless and rosy, whom he espied laughing in his saddle, to lead the human avalanche. And in the meaner struggle that seems to have displaced war indefinitely, it will still happen that a light heart with a constitutional cheerfulness in taking risks finds all manner of blind forces following headlong at its heels.

His great chance came when he was just over thirty. For two hours of a sunny afternoon, and to the clouding of a fair brow at Ranelagh, a gaunt, hungry-eyed Western American, referred to him in despair by a friend whose time the stranger had daily and pertinaciously returned to waste, sat in his private office. The man's story was a fantastic one. Of a tunnel which he had been excavating under subvention, for years, and timbering furlong by furlong, sometimes more, sometimes less, as the rusty ore with which the mountain teemed assayed well or ill; of a suspicion, dawning on him little by little as he proceeded, that a wild miner's tale of the district--the legend of the lost lode of Troublesome Gulch--might not, after all, be a myth; the sudden discovery of free gold in the rarest and most precious of ores, "running up through the rock, sir, like a fern"; the theft of the samples that would have justified him; the sudden withdrawal of his subvention, and the decision of the railroad to build its connecting line at a lower level and at an easier gradient; the offers that had been made him for his property, in all of which his fevered mind saw only a threat and evidence of conspiracy. The man was no smooth-tongued exploiter: he spoke roughly, uncouthly, chewing to rags the first dry cigar he had ever smoked, in an evident sweat of fear lest somehow or other his secret should be torn from him--straining to be back and on guard again. His eyes blazed as he talked and his hand shook. He had been nursing his dreams on aerated bread and coffee.

Lumsden kept his visitor by him--wired to Ranelagh--telephoned to various quarters. That night in a private room at the Carlton the company was (unofficially) formed. Within a week from their issue "Gulches" were the sensation of the market. They started well at parity, dropped to fifteen shillings and twelve and a half on an attack of nerves and a truculent attitude on the part of the railroad; recovered, rose to thirty, soared to forty, to four, to six pounds. Fresh shares were issued; the public, almost kept out of the first issue, responded greedily, and the opportunity was seized to unload more of the old debentures than certain cool heads approved. It might be another Camp Bird; it might be the most colossal swindle since Kaffir days; in either case, its proportions inspired respect. There was a shuffle on the financial checker-board. West Hampstead moved to Mayfair, Porchester Gate to Park Lane, and was, so to speak, _crowned_ there, with power to move either way for the future, in a bull or bear direction, capturing meaner uncrowned pieces _en route_. Stanwood went back to Sleepy Cat Mountain with the light of victory in his eye.

Before the snow had melted round the feet of the burros which were bringing down his six-dollar quartz to the smelter he was a ruined man. It was everybody's fault and nobody's fault. The necessary delays had not been discounted; holders were pressed in other directions; finally a discovery that Lumsden, to fill an order for a thousand shares, was buying outside and privately at three-fifteen, stampeded the market. The collapse was complete enough to become a joke. Clerks asked one another: "Will you take it in half-crowns or in Gulch debentures?"

In the summer Lumsden went out to the States. He found Stanwood, a baffled but not a beaten man, and his son, a strong silent lad with steady eyes, "batching" in a log shanty with an earthen roof. Tin kettles and saucepans were hung on pegs all around the outside walls. Behind the hut, among whortle bushes, an ice-cold spring bubbled out of the ground, and all manner of wild mountain flowers--rabbit-ears, puccoons, and thimble-berries--grew to the threshold. They were seven thousand feet above sea-level; all around was space and silence--an air like sparkling wine: his feet, as he ascended the track, crushed sweet harsh odors out of the barren earth.

In long but not aimless rambles over the boulder-strewn slopes; in elk hunts up in the timber reserve; in naked male talk by the cedar fire under the star-bewildered dome of night, the two men grew to learn, to esteem, and to trust one another. There was cheering news, even before Lumsden returned East, for the worn woman who was keeping an Omaha boarding-house for brawling Swedish clerks. He travelled slowly, by way of Denver, New York, Washington, and Paris, seeing a good many people in business hours, and, it must be admitted, amusing himself pretty strenuously out of them. He was back in London by October, and the rest is financial history. People said: "Oh! but what about the original shareholders?" Yet it was amazing how few ever came forward. Lumsden and Lumsden's friends seemed to have gobbled them all up.

There is only one thing more which, in this place, it becomes necessary to record of Bryan Lumsden. Once a month or so, sometimes oftener, sometimes less, at the busiest hour of the afternoon, a big closed motor-car made its way, with many grunts and turns, to the big corner building in Throgmorton Avenue. Sir Bryan would issue from the swing doors, throwing instructions over his shoulder as he passed through the office, sometimes would even dictate a letter to the clerk at his elbow, with one foot on the step of the coupé. After a single word to the chauffeur, which the man acknowledged by touching his peaked cap, he would fling himself back against the cushions of the limousine and busy himself with a pile of papers which he had brought under his arm. Occasionally, at some stoppage or temporary eclipse of light, he would look up from them. It was noticeable then that his face had lost its pleasant quality, was even hard and cruel.

The car rolled on, slowly and softly, through the congested city streets, noisily insistent amid heavy van traffic in Clerkenwell, quickened its speed as it turned into Bloomsbury's drab squares. Presently Regents Park flashed green or ghostly gray outside the windows; long brown garden walls and shabby stucco of St. John's Wood reeled past; the car breasted the hill to Frognal, along a steep avenue of widely spaced, fantastic red-brick houses, set amid shrubs and old timber, and with an occasional glimpse, in lichened roof or clustered chimneys, of an older suburb.

It stopped outside a low wide house which overlooked the heath and was separated from the road by a clipped hedge. Generally, warned by the tumult of the car's approach, the door would fly open before he could reach it from the garden gate; if not, he pulled the wrought iron bell-handle. If the summons remained unanswered beyond a few seconds, he felt impatiently in his pocket for a key and admitted himself. Inside, he looked round the low, wide hall, with the hard air of proprietorship which a man keeps for the place that is his house but not his home. He summoned the laggard servants, spoke sharply to them (in French), pushed open the door of the drawing-room, and waited, biting his moustache restlessly, and looking out of the window over the wide heath. A novel, face downward, or a wisp of embroidery generally decorated the cushions of the window seat.

Presently the door would open behind his back, and a soft rustle of silk and chink of jewelled ornaments cease of a sudden as a woman stood at gaze, watching the broad back or clear profile, silhouetted against the diamond panes of the bow window. With the same undisguised air of ownership, unutterably hideous now when a human creature endured it, Lumsden turned and looked--looked at a slave whom his money had bought and of whom he had tired.

Either one of two things might happen then: She might be peevish, perverse, and bitter, answering his perfunctory questions as shortly, with many shrugs of her shoulders and deprecatory motions of her bare arms; striving with all the advantage her native tongue, the language of cruel inflection and bitter meanings, could give her, to plant her own chagrins, like poisoned arrows, in his breast. Or else, abandoning herself upon his shoulder in an attitude for which everything about her--her dress, the very fashion of her hair--seemed calculated, she would force him to a seat, fling her arms around his neck, recall old tendernesses, never forgetting to mingle her kisses with complaints of her servants--so insolent; her tradesmen--so pressing; the view over the heath--so _triste_ in winter. Her eyes would be dilated, their pupils at a point. Looking down, Lumsden could see little black dots all over the large white arms. He bore kisses and reproaches with exactly the same stoicism, still waiting, still keeping his eyes upon the door.

Suddenly their expression changed. There would be a shrill chatter of women in the hall--every one in this house seemed to speak and scold in French--cries of "_Prenez garde! M. Cyrille!_" "_Une marche de plus!_" "_Voilà!_"--a child's voice asking for "papa! papa!" Led by a French bonne, though he appeared full five years old, and struggling in her grasp, a little boy would enter the room with eager precipitancy. He walked sturdily but somehow clumsily too, holding his free arm out before him and tossing the fair curls from his forehead with a curious baffled gesture. Reaching Lumsden's knee or outstretched hand, he would give a shrill, glad cry, break once for all from the woman who had guided him, and next moment be clasped and gathered into his father's long powerful arms.

Fate has a fine unseemliness, now and then, in her dispensations. It was in a house leased for the service of shame, among brazen foreign women whose hard black eyes belied the respect of their voices, that Lumsden was forced from time to time to plumb the depth of tenderness that lurked in his own heart. He loved his little son as he loved nothing else in the world. And the boy was stone blind from birth.

II

TWO TELEGRAMS

Sir Bryan sat in his study at Mount Street one dark Saturday afternoon late in December, sucking happily upon a calcined briar, but with a watchful eye on the clock, for it was nearly time he began to dress. He was by now a man of thirty-seven or thirty-eight, with a beautiful but rather battered face, strikingly like certain portraits of Marshal Blucher. He had heavy shoulders, straight legs, and lean flanks. His enemies and men who boxed with him said his arms were disproportionate even to his height. His hair was fair and longer than most men wear it to-day: it was thinning over his forehead, and his wavy moustache was streaked with gray. There are people, like buildings, who, for all their size and show, we suspect of being hurriedly and cheaply put together. The paucity or poverty of material shows somewhere: in a mouth that doesn't quite shut, in ears that protrude--hair badly planted on the scalp. No better description of Lumsden could be ventured than that he seemed to have been built slowly and with a good deal of thought. He was expensive in grain, like the pipe he was smoking or the tie he was wearing.

He had been golfing all the afternoon, and was dressed, with happy slouchiness, in a brown flannel suit and a limp shirt-collar. His soft white waistcoat was a little soiled and lacked a button. The room he sat in was clear and light, but simply furnished, a refuge in fact from other splendors. _Estampes galantes_ of Fragonard and the younger Morean decorated its walls sparsely. There was only one photograph, of a woman, which stood by itself in a narrow gilt frame on a side table. It was a large modern chiaroscuro affair. One noted frail emergent shoulders, a head turned aside, delicate lines of neck and chin, and a cloud of hair.

A dark, discreet man-servant knocked and showed his face in the doorway.

"Gentleman to see you, sir."

"Who is it, Becket?"

"Mr. Dollfus, sir."

"Oh! show him up!" But with the precipitancy of his race Mr. Dollfus had shown himself up, and entered hard upon the man's heels.

The baronet hailed him after his cheery wont.

"Hello, Dolly! Another five minutes and I'd have been shaving. Sit down and make yourself a whiskey and soda. Cigars are over there. How are the girls kicking?"

"They're kicking too much," said Mr. Dollfus; "on the stage and off too."

"Rotten notices the _Motor Girl_ got," said Lumsden, reaching for a crumpled paper.

"That's all right," answered Dollfus with easy confidence. "We'll pull it rount. Got a new College Song from America. Came too late to put in. With a chorus, my boy, a chorus! 'Cher want to hear it?"

"Go ahead!"

"Back oar--back roar--back waller--back nigger and bantabaloo."

"Sounds useful."

"Eh! ah! Cantcher hear it on the organs? And--I say, Lumpsden?"

"What is it?"

"Remember a little girl we saw at La Palèze in the summer?"

Lumsden's face altered ever so little.

"Can't say I do very clearly. We saw so many."

"Went rount wit' a kind of fisherman. Artist feller. Eh? ah? Danced, too. Remember now?"

"Oh yes! I do, now. You were professional on the subject of her legs."

"That's the one. Well, she's come to me, my boy."

"Come to you? What the deuce for?"

"What do they all come for?" the Jew asked with sub-acidity. "Money. A lead. A 'shance.'"

"And what did you say, Dolly? Took her on your knee--played uncle--told her that if she was good to her mother you might give her a place in the back row some day if you thought of it."

Dollfus looked at him keenly for a moment. He had a theory that Lumsden remembered the girl better than he pretended; that he had, in fact, spoken to her at La Palèze and been rebuffed.

"Yer on the wrong track, Lumpsden," he said; "she's quite respectable. Madame de Rudder brought her--voman that useter teach the princesses. She's vell connected, too."

"What's her name?"

"Fenella Barbour."

Sir Bryan started a little at the name, and his sudden movement did not escape the Dominion manager.

"I say, Lumpsden," he went on casually; "aintcher a relation of the Lady Lulford that died this year?"

"A little. Why do you ask?"

"That's who she is, my boy. They were talking about all being together at Christmas."

"Who were talking?"

"Voman she called her cousin Leslie, that came wit' 'em too. At their country house. The name's gone outer my head."

Sir Bryan yawned, stretched himself, and gave a meaning look at the clock.

"Sorry I can't keep you any longer, Dolly. I'm dining out. What is it exactly you want?"

"Vell, I believe the girl's a find, Lumpsden. And natcherally I can't do anything at the Dominion--wit'out--wit'out----You understand?"

"I understand. You've seen her dance, I suppose? Is it any good? You know how much of this humbug there's been lately. Is hers something quite special?"

"Quite," said Mr. Dollfus, briefly. He seemed to weigh his opinion once more. "Oh quite!" he said again.

"You see a furore, in fact?"

"Maybe a riot," said Joe.

The financial support smiled. "You've made it such a family matter, Joe, that you won't mind my telling you I don't particularly want riots about relations of mine."

The manager shrugged his shoulders, but did not revise his opinion. Lumsden held out his hand.

"I'll telephone you to-morrow, and fix a night after Christmas when we can talk this over. Meantime, of course, you'll be discreet. Ta-ta, Dolly. I like your song."

An hour later he re-entered the room and flung a fur coat and crush hat on a lounge. He was dressed for dinner, was polishing his nails and appeared thoughtful. Sitting down before a big knee-hole desk, that was tucked away in a corner underneath a telephone, he switched on a light, drew a letter-pad toward him and wrote:

"DEAR LESLIE:

"May I usurp your sex's privilege and change my mind about
coming to Freres Lulford for Christmas. I was going to Ponty's,
as you know, but somehow, this year, don't feel keyed up to the
light-hearted crowd they get together at Capelant. I want somewhere
to hide my unrevered head until the Spirit of Christmas is gone out
of the land, and I should like a look at Saleratus. The alternative
is to go to Scotland and turn myself into a sort of Dana Gibson
picture of the sorrows of the rich. You know the sort of thing:
'Where Get-there Lumsden really got to.'

"To tell you the truth, dear Leslie, I should never have refused
your invitation if you hadn't frightened me with our mysterious
newly discovered relative. Even, now, when I've decided to take the
risk, I'll feel nervous. You say 'brilliant.' Suppose it turns out
to be some dreadful little artist or writer person who'll want to
paint me, or use me as 'a type.'..."

When he had got so far he re-read the letter, tore it up, and wrote out two telegrams. One was addressed to Lady Pontardawe, Capelant, Flintshire, and its contents are no affair of ours. The other said--

"Changed my mind. Motoring down, if fine, Wednesday."

His tickled sense of expectancy supported him through a dull dinner--possessed him, in fact, to the extent of making him rather a _distrait_ companion. Once he laughed out unaccountably. Expectation was as rare with him as regret. He probably regarded them as equivalent weaknesses, but there was no doubt which was the pleasanter to indulge. Not quite a satyr, he was still less a saint. Men who knew him well, contented themselves by saying that Bryan "stayed it well," and the secret of his power to last was probably that, for him, the life that began when he was called in the morning ended when he switched the light off from above his pillow. He was not an imaginative man, but if he had been, his morning bath might justly have been conceived by him as a wide cool river, reflecting a gray morning sky, that flowed between him and all follies and fevers of the night. He took no heed what phantoms waved to him from the other shore, nor what urgency and significance might be in their gestures.

He got back before twelve, changed his coat for a wadded Indian silk smoking-jacket, and finished a long black cigar before he turned in. He felt tranquil, and, for reasons possibly connected with his telegram to Wales, even virtuous. Lulford, with its cloister terrace, its gray walled fruit-gardens beneath the "Prior's oriel," and its lilied carp-wood, girt with bastion and towers of clipped yew, had always been a favorite house with him, far beyond the wind-tortured barrack in Scotland that was the cradle of his own grim race, and which all his money could not make bloom afresh. The glamour of his youth still invested it. He had spent many a long holiday there, the while his mother, widowed but no ways desolate, was seeking her own distractions at Wiesbaden or Lausanne, and to the end of his school days (not particularly pleasant ones, for he had been in an unfashionable house and perpetually short of pocket-money) whatever sentiment of eclogue or pastoral survived the drudgery of construe, always had for its stage and background the remembered pleasantness of Lulford. Wonderful, not how little had survived, but how much!

And to-night something else haunted it, something that was real, that rather appealed to imagination than was evoked by it. Youth, flushed, timorously daring, beckoned and eluded him down those alleys and groves. (Eternal illusion, making your own summer wherever your feet choose to pass!) He was of the age when a man is looking for the heralds of middle life, and his _empressement_ struck him as one rather ominous sign. The growing simplification of life was another. The match-makers were giving Bryan up at last. He remembered a time when it would not have been so easy to sneak away for two weeks in the hunting season.

Dollfus had, after all, not been so far astray in his surmise. There had been an encounter at La Palèze--one of those secrets which the most transparent of women never seem to feel the need of telling. She had not appeared frightened nor very much surprised--had let him walk by her side across the dunes and through the pine woods, even chatted a little, lightly. But then neither had she made any attempt to keep the appointment he had so subtly forced upon her for the morrow. He had never seen her alone again.

Ill at ease among abstractions, his mind turned with relief to the case in point. Condensed slightly, his reflections ran something after this fashion:

"I wonder what Leslie's game is. Of course she's stark mad, but it's funny the others making a mystery about it too. Are they just giving a hard-worked little relation a holiday, or do they mean to take her up and bring her out next year. If they do, I'll wager she marries a title or is ruined inside the year. I know what I'm talking about. All my sweethearts do well. Things ain't like what they used to be. There's a sight too much young blood about, and the cubs will be in everywhere. A girl that can play 'em can land 'em. Good lord! Look at Bewdley! look at the Colfax good boy! With the Nampore rubies round her blasted neck! This one's clever, but I don't think she's that kind. But if she isn't, what the devil was she doing at Palèze? Funny, Dollfus coming to me! And I believe I'd rather see her on the stage after all, as long as it's decent. What did he mean by 'a riot'?"

He got up, yawned, and threw his cigar butt into the fire. As he did so his reflection confronted him, a little flattered by the red-shaded globe. He pushed his face closer.

"Not much youth there, old man!" he said, referring to the eyes; "but how many of the young 'uns will be where you are in fifteen years' time? Money! Money! Gad! I can't spend it if I try."

He frowned at the fire and turned impatiently away. "I'm a fool," he said. "None of 'em live up to their faces. Besides, you can never corner that market. A lot is not knowing when to pull out, and idleness and over-feeding, and seeing too many new faces. Heigho! I wonder what Stanwood will be doing in the spring."

He yawned again, and, an hour later, was fast asleep.

III

IN THE FIRELIGHT

Snow had been drifting again, softly, thickly, and persistently, since dawn. The angles of the window sills were filled with it, every square and diamond in the leaded gallery windows was rimmed with the crystalline fur. The coats of the deer in the home park glowed a rich rusty red against its intense and sparkling purity; half of every trunk and branch at the edge of the wood was erased by it like a crayon drawing by the india rubber of some impatient drawing-room master. Fenella had spent the short winter afternoon roaming through galleries and chambers of state, or watching the flakes that tumbled giddily from the shrouded sky turn blue and green and red as they passed the painted blazons in the great oriel window--coats fessed and barrelled and ermined, of Alfords, and Corbets, and Danseys, and Maddocks, whose hale and temperate blood ran in her own veins.

She was alone for the first time in the home of her forefathers. Her uncle was away in the old capital of Powysland on some political business or another; her cousins had driven down to the church an hour ago, in a governess-cart heaped with ropes and garlands of holly and fir. There were wreaths and crosses, too, for the woman who was spending her first Christmas beneath the frozen earth, and Fenella had shrunk from sharing the pious duty in which her heart could have so little part. She was glad to be alone, and to muse undisturbed in the ghostly protracted twilight. After the tempest of her grief something of weakness and passivity lingered still; her heart felt the languor of convalescence. Her movements were slower, her poises more consciously graceful; with the restlessness of childhood the last of its angles had gone. So imperative is nature, that she can make even a broken heart subsidiary to her purpose. She had prayed to die, and was three pounds heavier.

When the twilight glimmer in the long gallery was too ghostly to be borne she descended to the dining-hall. Under its hooded fireplace the roaring grate was heaped with blocks of ligneous coal almost as large as boulders. Freres Lulford is in that borderland 'twixt the old England and the new where, for a ten-mile walk, one may make choice between coal-shafts and rolling mills, or ancient timbered hamlets and the "forest fleece" of Wenlock Edge. She called Perseus, the house-dog, to her, an eerie, feathery creature with a mouth like a shark, and, holding his head in her lap with one hand, rested her round cheek, dusky red from the fire into which she gazed, upon the other. The flames, as they rose and fell, tossed a distorted shadow of her head and shoulders, now low along the faded Persian carpets that covered the polished oak boards, now high up on the diapered wall, across helmet and cuirass, fringed silken banner, or antlered head, until, reaching the straddled legs or flowered petticoat of some high-hung ancestor, it sank again to the carpeted floor. She was dressed in a high-waisted frock of some soft white material, with short sleeves that left most of her arms bare, and with a high net collar kept pointed to the ears with little whalebones, after a senseless momentary fashion that forced her to carry her chin in the air. It was a very pretty chin, however; and wherefore does fashion change at all if not to call attention, through successive exaggerations, to the varied prettinesses of woman.

Was she beginning to taste content again? Was she even resigned? She could not tell. A broken heart is such a relative term, one so justly discredited by those who have not the patience or the knowledge to follow its deadly sequelae that, except as the loosest of illustration, it is grown to be a useless one as well. But without flattering her own constancy in the least, Fenella could well perceive that, but for a providence so despised at the time, it might have gone very hard with her. Never, she owned it humbly and thankfully, could power to endure so timely have followed the blow, ministering angels the draining of the chalice. The worth or tenacity of a love that death or something else violently disrupts is not to be measured in an instant. At first, while the soul is nothing save a shocked protesting mass of severed nerve and impulse, all comfort is welcome, no matter whence it comes. It is not until the pain has abated that a perverse relish for it becomes possible, and that its ameliorations can seem a treachery done to love. So she had judged her own once, with the indignation of youth for wise restraining laws that will let no passion, by taking thought, grow beyond a certain stature. She was wiser now as well as humbler--could bless the diversion even for the poor perished love's sake. It had saved her from the meaner vexations that, for the woman, follow the breaking of an engagement, the unwelcome sympathy and the meaning glance, the loneliness of the long empty hours, and the perpetual challenge to memory of familiar scenes and faces. New skies, as the poet sings, may not change the heart, but this much is certain--nowhere is disappointment borne so hardly as among those who have been witness to the illusion. She went from her lover's arms discredited, soiled even, but, at least, to those who were ignorant of her history, and could not compare her with the Fenella of old. Meantime, her sorrow lurked somewhere, to wake, she felt instinctively, the day another man should ask her for love.

Her cousins were kind and natural, so natural that, after three months, she seemed to have known them all her life. Leslie Barbour was tall, thin and melancholy, mildly mad, and with the good looks that were the only unentailed heritage in the Barbour family marred in her case by ill-health and emaciation. She spoke little, and regarded her new-found cousin with a purblind stare that it took Fenella a long time to get used to, but which she was content now to accept as a tribute of adoring affection. She loved white, waxy flowers with heavy odors, and was psychically inquisitive.

Nelly was rather afraid of her uncle, a _bruyant_ peer with a past of which the late Lady Lulford had been a very small part. He had a fine head and heavy, fleshy face, opulently bearded, that Holbein would have loved to paint, the face of one of the terrible new lords of the English Renaissance who hung the abbots and gobbled up the abbeys. In the country he affected knickerbockers and velvet coats, and was sophisticated rather than intellectual, with a sophistication that he had placed a whole life long at the service of his pleasures. His pursuits being apt to clash with his eldest son's, Basil was at present in Damaraland shooting big game; but Jack Barbour, the younger son, a cheery and casual young lancer, fell unreservedly in love with his pretty cousin, with a fine quality of hopeless adoration in his homage (he has since married money and freckles) that the girl was used to by now, and could deal with competently. The two became great chums. Jack liked to have his well-turned-out little kinswoman for brisk walks across the Park, or for a saunter down Bond Street at the hours of resort. He did not mind how many of his comrades-in-arms caught him in company that did him so much credit. "Where did you find the pretty lady you were with in Burlington Street, Suds?" "Don't be an ass, Bogey," Suds would make reply. "She's a little cousin of ours. I'll introduce you in the spring when we start goin' round again." Fenella, wearing her own sad colors in her heart, looked forward to the promised gaieties almost with dismay. Life had become such a serious thing. She worked hard at her dancing, teaching, and learning while she taught, and making strides that carried her rapidly beyond Mme. de Rudder's power to appreciate justly. On the morning of her interview with Joe Dollfus she thought it well to take her eccentric cousin into her confidence. The look of hopeless adoration only intensified in the vacant, troubled face. Leslie put out her hand and touched the girl's black hair timidly.

"Blame you, child?" she repeated. "Does one blame the butterfly for seeking the sun? Will you forget me, darling, in your success--for I see success written on your brow? Will you be only one other sad memory in my breast--one pearl white head the more along the long rosary of my regrets?" She sighed luxuriously. "I shall recall you best," she decided after a moment's consideration, "when I see a creamy-white rose, half-blown."

Fenella wriggled uneasily. She did not want to be any one else's regret. Brows and breasts, moreover, had a mortuary flavor. Foreheads and chests were much cheerfuller everyday matters. They were at lunch, and she caught her cousin's hand under the table-cloth.

"Don't be gloomy, Les," she pleaded; "you make me feel all _squiggly_ when you talk that way. Of course I sha'n't forget you. I want you to come with me and madame this afternoon."

We know now what Mr. Dollfus thought; but his outward recognition of his opportunity had been temperate, and the three women discussed his attitude rather ruefully over their tea. Leslie looked at the girl's flushed, chagrined face a long while in silence.

"Don't be afraid, Cousin Nelly," she said at last. "It's going to be all right. That man is wild to have you."

Fenella turned on her breathlessly. "Oh, Les! do you mean it? How can you know?"

Leslie narrowed her pale eyes and shook her head slowly.

"Never mind how I know," she said cryptically. "These things aren't withheld from me. They wouldn't be from _you_ if you could empty your mind of _self_ for even a moment."

No reinforcement to hope is really insignificant. Nelly had glowed at the eerie assurance. She was recalling it now, and smiling over poor Les's unearthly manner, when the hairy head under her hand moved convulsively. Perseus uttered a wild, strangling bark. A man was standing on the opposite side of the fireplace, looking at the pretty group of girl and animal--the dog asleep, the girl dreaming.

"Hello!" he said cheerfully.

IV

AN AFFAIR OF OUTPOSTS

He was a big man, and in his long hairy coat he looked a giant. After the first glance the girl's first wild fear vanished. Burglars and murderers don't wear fur coats in business hours, nor hold goggles in their hand. Perseus, too, having given the alarm, had gone over to the stranger, and was sniffing at him in a way that suggested recognition. The unknown slapped his lean flank.

"Hello, Perse! You don't get any fatter, old man."

As he unwound a great woollen scarf from his neck, a fair, pleasant face, rather damp and weather beaten, emerged. She recognized her chatty friend of La Palèze immediately.

"I'm sorry if I startled you," he said, "but they told me Miss Barbour was in the hall, so I walked in. Were they pleasant dreams?"

Even in the red firelight the color on the girl's cheeks deepened perceptibly. "How can I slip past him?" she said to herself and then aloud: "If you don't mind waiting, I'll go and see whether my cousins are back. My uncle is at Shrewsbury."

"Please don't move," the man answered. "I asked. They're all out still. But perhaps I'd better introduce myself. I'm Bryan Lumsden. I think I'm expected."

"Sir Bryan Lumsden," she repeated. "Oh! we thought you'd come this morning. Leslie waited luncheon."

"I burst a tire at Welshpool," Bryan explained. "Often do in snow, you know."

"Shall I ring for tea?"

"Yes, please. And meantime, let's talk." He took off his coat and flung it over a high-railed chair. "Shall we?"

She sat back, further into the shadow as she hoped, but the vicious flame chose that moment to spurt out--a spurt of peculiar brilliance.

"Now, what can we talk about?" he asked pleasantly, when the footman had gone, carrying the great coat with him.

"The weather?" poor Fenella suggested, with a hollow laugh.

"Or foreign travel, eh? That's even more interesting."

Nelly abandoned her treacherous ambush.

"I couldn't help it," she protested, rubbing the arms of her chair nervously with open palms. "You _would_ talk to me. And it's--it's so hard to be rude."

"----in return, eh?"

"Yes. You know you shouldn't have done it."

"You had your revenge next day, remember!" he said, and stopped abruptly, as another absurdly big footman, who should have been breaking the glebe in Canada, entered with the tea-tray.

"Shall I turn on the light, miss?" the man asked, disposing various silver-covered dishes on the wide hearth.

"No!--oh yes--if you please, Philip. Why do you say 'revenge'?" she asked, when they were alone again. "I'm not a revengeful person."

"We shall see," he said, taking a cup from her hands. "Power's a great temptation."

Under his steady gaze, which never left her face, except to scan her figure, the ministry of the tea-table was a sad ordeal. In the intervals of discharging her duties she called the hound to her and fondled him anew. That hid one arm, anyway.

"I waited for you a whole morning."

"Oh! I don't believe that!" Said without any coquetry.

"It's the simple fact. And I've heard about you since."

"From Leslie? Of course you would."

"No; she only said, unaccountably: 'A cousin,' leaving me to guess whether it was he, she, or it. I'm thinking of Joe Dollfus."

Suddenly he held his hand up. He had fine senses. "I can hear wheels in the snow. You haven't told me your name."

"Fenella."

"Well, Cousin Fenella! Are we going to be friends?"

"Why not?" faintly.

"I shall be discreet, you know, about--_things_ at La Palèze."

The girl's eyes brimmed. Instead of this face, blonde, confident, and animal, another one--lean, spiritualized, with far-seeking, visionary eyes, swam through her tears. "Paul! Paul!" Like any poor maid, beset, at bay in a robber-haunted forest, her heart called to her true love.

"In return, will you keep a secret for me?"

No answer.

"Don't mention Welshpool. I'm supposed to have come straight from London."

"Why should I say anything at all?"

"Oh! one never knows. Give me your hand on it."

What could she do? He was in no hurry to release her, and had hardly dropped it when, chilled and dazed but boisterously light-hearted after their mournful errand, her cousins entered the hall.

V

CICISPEO

The next morning was stirless but bracing. Snow covered the park in soft mounds and waves, with a little black pit round the roots of each tree, as though some hibernating animal were breathing beneath. The laden branches balanced their fairy load daintily, against a sky, low, buff-colored and heavy with the promise of a further fall toward afternoon. The atmosphere was so still that the shouts of children snowballing in the village half a mile beyond the lodge gates, the rattling of antlers round the feeding-trough, reached the terrace, swept and sand-strewn already, where Fenella walked before breakfast, her arms folded under a warm golfing cape that she had found hanging in the hall. In the morning light, austere, temperate and shadowless, a good many of the misgivings that had robbed her of sleep were re-examined and found ludicrously unworthy of the sacrifice. There was no mistake about it. She had had her hour of unreasoning panic--had even meditated excuses that should cover a precipitate homeward flight. But that mood was over now. Women have their own code of bravery in the only warfare they know--their own perception of the ignominy of flight. If they act oftener upon their fears than upon the braver impulse, it is only because, in this warfare, it is their adversary himself who has set the rules and poisoned the weapons, decreeing that the slightest wound as well as the mortal shall be held matter for shame.

"I've heard of you--from Dollfus." What did that mean? What could be said of her yet? Of course, afterward, she was prepared for far worse. She was going on the stage with her eyes remarkably wide open. But that women--girls like herself, living at home, protected and obscure--should be made subject of men's conversation, she felt was an injustice--a treacherous thrust before the battle was joined. What was its motive? To rob her of self-respect before her character could be assailed? To cheapen, degrade her in her own eyes at the outset?

All at once a light dawned upon her--a light that beamed softly through her eyes, that wreathed her lips with the faintest, saddest little smile that ever was near neighbor to tears.

"It's all your fault, darling," she murmured. "It's all through you. You've been and lost me my character, Paul. Oh, my dear, my dear! What a joke! If the beasts only knew you?"

A foot grated upon the sand behind her. She turned and saw Sir Bryan, very fresh and smart and youthful in his tweeds and breeches.

"Good-morning, Miss Barbour. I'm sent to call you into breakfast."

"I never heard the gong."

"You don't hear it from this side." He came nearer and drew in great breaths of the cold, pure air. "Feeding's a bore, isn't it, a morning like this? I like houses where everything's kept hot and you eat any time; don't you?"

"I don't know. I haven't visited very much."

She tried to meet his new impersonal tone with perfunctory brightness; but Bryan knew how a woman looks who hasn't slept.

"You look tired," he said. "I'm afraid I worried you a bit last night."

"I did think you a little--a little----"

"Disrespectful, eh?" Lumsden hazarded. He had that useful sort of tact in conversation which consists in supplying the word that suits one's own purpose best.

"We were such strangers, you see," urged Fenella, with gentle reproof. "That time in France shouldn't have counted at all."

"If it did, the score was on your side," the baronet said quickly. "But I'm content so long as you don't mark it against me."

"Then you hinted people were talking about me," Nelly went on, reddening, but gaining confidence. "It was that worried me. It was so vague."

"We were interrupted just then," Lumsden reminded her. "A word or two would have explained, but you wouldn't let me get near you the whole evening."

"Why should I? When women are talked about it's never _well_."

"Oh, isn't it?" said Lumsden. "I'm not a philanthropist, but I assure you I've done my part bravely in holding lots of shaky reputations together."

She raised her head now, and looked him quite proudly in the eyes.

"Thank you. I'm not conscious mine's in bad repair."

It was a different voice and another woman. Lumsden leaned over the parapet and gathered a handful of snow.

"Snow's packing," he said. "We'll have sleighing after lunch. Ever been on a bob-sleigh?"

"No," said Fenella. Maidenly dignity relented a little. It sounded "fun."

Sir Bryan gave a boyish laugh.

"You've missed half your life," said he, making use of one of a collection of phrases he had brought from over the Atlantic. "Look here!" He touched her ever so lightly on the shoulder and pointed across the park. "From the Belvedere down to the 'ha-ha' there's two hundred and fifty yards if you know how. We laid it out years ago, and marked it with stones. It's known all round. Lots of people, probably, will turn up here this afternoon. You'll let me take you down, won't you, Miss Barbour? I say; do I have to go on calling you 'Miss Barbour'?"

"Yes," demurely; "I think it's best."

"For how long?"

She faced him with her hand upon the sash of the long French window. If it was "just flirting," Fenella was "all there."

"Until you've told me truthfully what Mr. Dollfus said."

"I'll do it while we're sleighing. It won't take ten minutes."

* * * * *

The conversation, however, lasted more than ten minutes, and it was one Fenella was never to forget. As Bryan had prophesied, the news that the slide was being banked and made spread rapidly, and a host of people turned up in the afternoon, in country carts with sledges trailing and bumping behind, or in motor-cars, with an occasional pair of skis sticking up in the air. The run had been laid out years ago under Lumsden's own direction, when "crooked run" tobogganing was a newly discovered rapture. More than one future hero of the Kloster or Cresta had taken his first powdery tumble, amid ecstatic laughter from friends and relations, on the snowy slopes of Freres Lulford, and even now, after the sophistication had set in that so quickly reduces any English pastime to a science, with its canting vocabulary and inner circle of the expert, whenever snow fell thickly enough to stop shooting and hunting, two or three days' sleighing in Lulford Park was thought rather "sport" by a society watchfully anxious never to be thrown upon its intellectual resources by any trick of wind or weather.

Game-keepers and gardeners had been at work all the morning, and after lunch people began to arrive. Fenella had met a good many of them before--Lord Warrener, with his fiery whiskered cheeks and grave little Philadelphia wife; Bill Arkcoll, whose gray face, seamed with a million tiny wrinkles, was twisted into a permanent grin round a black-rimmed eyeglass, which he had, moreover, a disconcerting habit in the evening of letting fall with a sudden crash on his shirt front; "Snip" Hannaford, the gentleman jockey, who had sacrificed his chest to the sport of kings; finally Lady Wills-Pechell, alone condescendingly literary on the strength of half a dozen pottering little garden books: "Among my Syringas," "The Chatelaine's Year," "Shadow and Sun on Spurlock Edge." Lady Warrener was of the latest type of trans-Atlantic heiress, devoted to the peerage from the nursery, and "very carefully brought up" by an ambitious and circumspect mother. Her opinions were predigested and all her life nothing really unforeseen had ever happened her, except twins. She adored her husband and babies, thought Bryan's occasional Americanisms vulgar, and her favorite comment was, "_Oh, fahncy!_"

As a class they had for some time ceased to force comparisons upon Fenella; but this afternoon their low, clear voices, frank, unimpressed greetings, absence of anxiety, and general air of being all afloat together upon a stream that might be trusted never to carry them too far out of one another's reach struck pleasantly upon her senses. A great coke stove had been lighted in the Belvedere and the curved stone benches covered with carriage-rugs and cushions. The trampled snow outside was littered with an assortment of bob-sleighs, "Cheshires" and frail steel clipper-sleds. The run started practically at the door, with a nearly sheer fall of twenty feet; ran out a hundred yards into the straight, turned--at first gently, then more sharply--on a heaped embankment around the shoulder of the hill, and finished close to the old carp pond, whose black ramparts and pointed turrets of yew were roofed and spired to-day with a white thatch of snow. From the gardens a sort of rough stairway, made of faggots and bundles of brush-wood, had been made to the top of the hill. A few belated guests were straggling up it, pulling up their sleds to one side through the snow. Round the stove the vocabulary of the sport was being briskly interchanged.

"_Sprawl_ on Battledore, and use your right foot, not your left." "Never got beyond the duffer's handicap myself." "You'll 'yaw' all over, Arkcoll, if you use rakes on the straight." "Hands are best." "No, they're not: 'gouties,' when they get a bit worn, are just as good." "He was killed because he held on, Warrener. Let go and bunch yourself, and you can't be more than bruised even there." "Who's going to start?" "That thing's no good on a snow-run, Barbour."

Jack Barbour was standing on the edge of the descent, a light steel frame with a cushion held against his chest. He put it down and glanced at his pretty cousin.

"Shall we show 'em how?"

Fenella caught her breath, but nodded.

"Oh, Jack, take care of her!" reproachfully, from his sister, while Warrener, in the background, already a little _épris_, expressed an opinion that it was "damned dangerous."

"Dangerous? Down that thing?" cried Barbour scornfully, pushing the nose of what is technically known as a "tin-bottom" over the slope.

"What am I to do?" asked Nelly.

"Just sit still and hang on to my knees. Now, are you ready?"