Chapter IX: Part II: I (2)

Fenella bit her lip and suppressed a vulgar inclination to scream. The toboggan seemed to fall headlong--to rebound--to shoot out with the evident intention of either burying itself in the embankment or of leaping it altogether. When its nose was not more than ten yards away she felt the speed suddenly slacken, the toboggan slewed round with a twist that nearly overset it, and, steadying, slipped swiftly and cleanly round a wide curve. Almost before the rapture of the unaccustomed motion had been realized, it came to a stop, for want of snow, in the shadow of the prior's garden.

"How do you like it?" asked cousin Jack, brushing the snow off his sleeve.

"Oh, Jack!"--Fenella pressed her mittened hands together--"it's--it's _glorious_!"

Barbour smiled at her glowing face. "Pooh! You should see the real thing. Ask Lumsden. He did the Kloster in five-fifteen once."

"Is he very good at it?"

"He's good at everything he takes up," said Jack, unreservedly. "How do you like him, Flash? I forgot to ask."

Jack Barbour had heard of this old school nickname from a brother officer who had had a sister at Sharland College and seldom called her by any other.

"M--m--pretty well. Is he really a cousin of--of--ours?"

"Not really, I think. It's a kind of old joke."

"Why is he so much at home here, then, Jack?"

Barbour had evidently found the situation ready made, and had never thought of questioning it.

"I think he and the governor were racing partners once. There are some of his horses here now: I don't mean hunters. Saleratus is his, the big bay. We all hope he's going to win some races next year. Snip Hannaford's going to ride him."

"Is he married, Jack?"

Barbour laughed sarcastically. "Bryan married! No fear! He knows too much."

"_Jack!_"

"Oh! I'm sorry, coz. It wasn't a very pretty speech to a lady. I mean he's a bit spoilt. Shall we go up?"

"No; let us sit here awhile. It's so warm. Why is he spoilt?"

"'Cos he's awful rich."

"Heaps of people are rich."

"Well, then, he's got a good deal to do with theatres, and knows that kind of people. The Dominion really belongs to him. Why, your teeth are chattering, Flash. Are you cold?"

"No. It's nothing. I thought Mr. Dollfus was the manager of the Dominion."

"He is in a way. I don't quite understand these things, but I suppose Bryan puts up the money."

"I see," said Fenella, with the accent of full comprehension. "Jack," she said, after a moment, "do you think it's quite right to have a man like that meeting--proper women?"

Barbour jerked his head. He was a rather nice lad, singularly susceptible to the influence of the moment.

"I suppose it isn't, when one thinks of it. We've thrashed this out before, haven't we, Flash? Same law for both, eh?"

"I think men, and women too, ought to choose what kind of people they're going to know, and be made _stick_ to that sort. I don't like _mixings_. Come, let's go up. Here come some others. Oh, Jack! aren't you glad you're young? I _hate_ men after twenty-five."

* * * * *

The sport was over, together with the short-lived day, before she stood in the same place with the older man. Servants carrying tea-baskets and kettles had made their way up the slope. Lanterns twinkled in the pergola, and gay chat floated down to them. She had kept out of his way all the afternoon without difficulty. It was not until she had made the tantalizingly short descent with one man after another, and finally, amid much vain dissuasion and subsequent applause, headforemost by herself on Jack's steel clipper, that he came to her side and asked her, without a trace of the manner she resented, to take the last run with him. It was growing dark, and meaning glances were not wanting, but she had consented without any hesitation. She felt the glances, but she felt also a strange elation and a consciousness of strength that made her a very different creature to the nervous tongue-tied little girl of the night before. She did not quite know why, but, as she stood, a little breathless from her upward climb, with the first flakes of the new fall melting on her glowing cheek, life, even shadowed life such as was hers, seemed something intensely interesting, and something that, given courage, might be mastered as easily as the sport she was essaying now. He was the first to speak when they reached the sheltered gloom below.

"Don't you think our explanation's about due?"

He saw her smile. "I'm not a bit anxious for it now, Sir Bryan."

"I can believe that. You've even seemed to me to be keeping out of its way, or out of mine, which comes to the same thing, all the afternoon."

"It's not really worth worrying over. When you've given it there won't be much gained."

"You mean calling you--your name. It was your own idea to wait, you know."

"You can call me it now without any conditions. Jack has told me we're kind of cousins."

"Is that all he's told you?"

"A little more."

"Oh! Enough to make you hesitate about a certain step you had thought of taking?"

"Enough to make me think I'd better take it in some other place."

"Don't take it anywhere else"--earnestly.

She was startled at his intensity, and looked uneasily up the hill.

"Cousin Fenella, does history bore you?"

"It must be a very short lesson, please."

"A few minutes is enough. Years ago, then, cousin, in certain parts of Italy, when a bride was starting her new life, besides the usual stuff about pin-money, settlements, etcetera, the marriage contract contained another clause that seems to our insular minds intensely shocking. You'd never guess what it provided for."

"If it's shocking, I'd best not try."

His mouth twitched. "Baldly, then, one friend--neither more nor less. A third partner in the terrestrial paradise. Seems rather a scandalous person, doesn't he?"

"I think so."

Lumsden lit a cigar. "And yet"--_puff! puff!_--"the more one thinks of him the more reasonable he becomes. Men were so busy in those days, cousin. Fighting, don't you know--treaty making--in prison for indefinite periods. Don't you see with how much easier mind the soldier or diplomatic or captive husband must have laid his head on his lonely pillow for knowing there was a stout arm, ready blade, keen wit at home, authorized to keep marauders off. Do you wonder why I'm telling you all this?"

"To frighten me, perhaps."

"Pshaw! I know better than that. Come! put prejudice aside. Remember, too, that his name was probably the worst thing about him. Some poor relative, unrewarded soldier, I always imagine him--generally a cousin, by the way. Still wondering?"

No answer.

"Cousin Fenella, listen to me! Under ordinary conditions, for a girl like yourself to dance on the stage would be to risk more unhappiness and humiliation and treachery than you'd believe if I told you. There's one place in which a word from me can secure you your peace of mind. That's the Dominion. Don't turn away from luck."

"You mean that I--that you----"

"That the mere hint, in quarters where it's most wanted, that you're a _protégée_ of mine will rid you once for all of unwelcome attentions."

Fenella considered. "In fact, in order to keep my peace of mind, I must lose my reputation."

"Do you care very much what the world says? Do you have to--still?"

The last word was pitched so low that she hardly caught it. But, whisper as it was, it decided her.

"No. I don't care. Not--_that_." She snapped her fingers.

"That's right," said the sporting baronet encouragingly. "It's a bargain then? Dominion or nothing?"

"Yes."

"I'm writing Joe to-night. Shall I tell him we go into training after Christmas?"

"Yes."

He put his hands in his pockets and puffed his cigar to a glow.

"Quite ready to fight the world, ain't you, cousin?"

"The _world_."

"----but not me, eh? Oh! I keep my word. I'm Cicispeo."

"_Who?_"

"The man who's history I've just been telling you."

"Why are you taking all this trouble then?"

"Good! I like a 'facer' sometimes. Well, it's because I admire pluck. Because I saw you swim a mile out at Palèze. Oh! I often watched you. Because you took a header down that slide just now. What'll you be at next. Shall we go back to the house or will you go up with me and face the Wills-Pechell eye? It's celebrated, I warn you--got enough pluck left for that?"

And as she climbed the brushwood path--her hand in this new friend's--Fenella, all her elation gone, was wondering how much share after all her will had had in the choice just made, and whether this dazzling dream-vista of success and applause, out of which, as earnest of her right to all it promised, a rush of warm-scented air seemed to meet her through the snow-filled dusk, were not really a decree of fate, hostile and inexorable to her heart's desire as death would have seemed three months ago--peace, salty suffocation on the dark, lonely, foreign beach, clasped in her lover's arms.

And Lumsden, quite possibly, was measuring the moral distance between the cad who shoots a pheasant on the ground and the sportsman who flushes it and gives it a fly for its life. Or for better sport--which is it?--and to take a surer aim.

VI

THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT

Among the minor penalties with which fate, presumably solicitous for a true balance, hampers excellence in this world, not alone the acquired excellence, which, being achieved in its teeth, explicably earns its maleficence, but even the natural advantages which were its own unsolicited gift, one, we think, has escaped the attention it deserves. We refer to a certain isolation and lack of touch with their immediate _entourage_ which those who are marked for the world's prizes never quite succeed in overcoming, however modestly they wear or anticipate their honors. They are interesting, and for a correct view a certain distance, respectful, (though not necessarily so to them), is judged advisable. Society opens its ranks to receive them, but never quite closes on them again. None who have studied the lives of the giants but will have noticed how rarely a friendship disinterestedly worthy of them came their way, and is not the fatality of beauty, encountering the spoiler where the friend was imagined, a proverb? Fenella had not lived her new life a month before she was aware of a subtle atmosphere which was not treachery and which could not, without begging the question, have been called disrespect, but which partook a little of both. One does not feel a thing less keenly for being unable to exactly define it. Instincts are given women to be acted on, not to be explored. Its manifestations as yet had been only vaguely disquieting. Among the men it was apparent rather as a half jocular reservation of judgment--a determination, in view of possible developments, not to be committed to any one view of her character now, and, above all, never to be in the position of having more knowing brothers administer a rebuke to worldly wisdom. And among the women it took the shape of a coldness in meeting her advances which contrasted puzzlingly with the outspoken admiration that invited them. Poor, warm-hearted, ignorant Fenella! experiencing for the first time the full benefits of the benefit of the doubt.

It might be inevitable, or it might not, that, as day followed day of a visit so rapidly losing its charm, the broad-shouldered figure of the sporting baronet should begin to stand out more and more sympathetically against this background of veiled disrespect and thwarting reserve. It is true that the openness of his first advances had been the thing nearest approaching insult that she could remember, but, such as it was, it was forgiven now and, womanlike, the fault, frankly owned, brought him nearer. More womanlike still, perhaps, she liked him the better because he had been a witness to the old lost love of the summer. He at least saw her in no half light. She did not care greatly if he believed the worst--took a perverse joy, indeed, in believing it was possible he did. She was on her way now to a life where such things were no handicap, to which, indeed, she half suspected they were sometimes the initiation. She was content the knowledge of her own integrity should remain--a secret satisfaction to herself--content to feel it as a dancer of the fervid south, beneath her languorous draperies, may feel the chill of the dagger that she carries thrust through her garter.

He was kind and helpful too, not with the troublesome insistence of a man anxious to make amends for a former mistake, but as though, the ground having been cleared once for all of false conceptions, misunderstanding was no longer likely between them. Mourning and seclusion, she discovered, were comparative terms among country neighbors, and amid the men with whom the house intermittently abounded he showed both a finer creature and a finer gentleman. Once, in the billiard-room, when Warrener the full-blooded hinted that her cheeks lacked roses, and made as if to pour out whiskey for her, Lumsden took the decanter from his hand without a word, and put it back on the wooden ledge that ran round the room. She had come on a message to him from Leslie.

"I'd send one of the maids, Flash, when it's as late as this," he said, simply, as soon as they were in the corridor.

He had adopted Jack's favorite nickname for her when they were alone once and for all, but it was noticeable he never used it in the hearing of a third person. The thing had no importance, but it is a type of the assumptions she was finding it so difficult to resist.

It was he who, after all, taught her to ride. Jack Barbour, to do him justice, was prepared to redeem an old promise so soon as, to use his own words, "the bone was gone out of the ground," but frost followed the snow and held for days after tobogganing had been voted flat, stale and unprofitable. It wasn't Bryan's way to wait. He had more tan and straw laid down over the path, bordered with evergreens, that led from the stable-yard to poor Lady Lulford's steam laundry, and along which the horses were exercised every day. Fenella's heart fluttered and there was no lack in her cheeks of the roses whose absence Warrener deplored as, dressed in a borrowed habit of Leslie's that pinched her unconfined waist sorely, and with her hair in a pigtail again, she put her foot in her master's looped hand. Maids and stable-boys were peeping round the outbuildings.

He flicked the gray mare with his whip, and for more than an hour, letting the rope he held run out to its full length, pulled the animal backward and forward in a kind of "eight" figure. He threw away his cigar, and his voice rang out crisp and decisive as on a barrack square.

"Straight between his ears! Now look down. Can you see the feet? That's right! Now, then, press down in the stirrup as her fore-leg goes out, then lift. _Hup! hup!_ Oh, fine! Coz! you're a fraud. You've learnt before."

"Have I really done so very well?" she asked, when the lesson was over and they were on their way to the stables. She looked up in his face; her own tingling with pleasure at his appreciation.

"I've never seen 'em trot so well the first time." He looked her over critically. "I suppose it's all balance. When we're back in town, I'll mount you and show you lots of things. We'll have a turn in Richmond Park."

She caught her breath at the last two words, as at a positive physical pang. This must be the future, she supposed. Stray ends of pleasure, caught at and let go, an uneasy sense of something missing that could have woven them all into happiness, and now and then, when the nerve was touched, just such a spasm of pain as made her wince now. Lumsden did not notice her. He was looking at a large bay horse with a bandaged ankle that a stableman was leading across the paved yard.

"How's his hock this morning, Collett?"

Collett touched his cap twice. "Walks a bit lame still, I fancy, Sir Bryan."

"What does Brodribb say about him?"

"Well, ye know what Mr. Brodribb be, Sir Bryan. 'E wunt 'ave the harse slung. 'Get the condition right fust,' 'e says."

"Lift up his cloths."

Lumsden rubbed his hand over the lean-barrelled flank and regarded the animal gloomily.

"Bit hide-bound still. Still cooking his food, Collett?"

"Yes, Sir Bryan."

"Feed him on corn a day or two, and let him have the boiled water warm. I'll come down this afternoon and have another look at him. Well, Flash, what do you think of him? Pretty horse, isn't he?"

"He's rather--_thin_, isn't he, Sir Bryan?"

"Thin?" Bryan looked down banteringly at his little cockney friend in her borrowed riding-habit. "That's a race-horse. That's Saleratus."

* * * * *

On New Year's Eve the Lulford party dined at Chubley, Lady Wills-Pechell's new but much photographed and be-paragraphed castle high up on Spurlock Edge. Despite the roaring log fire, there was quite a baronial rawness in the air of the dining-room, and most of the women came to dinner with lace shawls or spangled Egyptian scarves over their bare shoulders. Toward the end of dinner Lady Wills-Pechell leaned from her chair for a whispered conversation with her right-hand neighbor.

"Miss Barbour," she said. "Oh! I beg your pardon, Leslie; I meant your cousin."

Fenella, who was genuinely absorbed in the technicalities of Snip Hannaford, turned to meet her hostess's unconvincing smile.

"Miss Barbour, a little bird has been very busy lately twittering that you dance. Aren't we to be shown anything before you go back to town?"

"There are too many little birds in S--shire," Bill Arkcoll remarked in a penetrating undertone. "Pity the cold hasn't killed some of them."

Fenella reddened and turned pale by turns.

"Oh, I can't!" she said quickly. She flashed a quick appeal across the table for her cousin's sympathy, but Leslie kept her eyes on her plate. Leslie's manner had been strange lately.

"Oh, but you _must_--you really must! Talents oughtn't to be hid. Ought they, Lord Lulford?"

The bearded widower, who had been engaged in demolishing the private reputation of a Liberal leader, turned from the horrified face of the great lady he had taken in to dinner.

"What is it?"

"We're asking your niece to dance here some night before she goes back. She thinks it wouldn't be quite--quite, you know----"

Lulford tugged at his thick beard. "I don't know why you shouldn't, Fenella. We're almost a family party."

"Don't worry the child," Lady Warrener put in, noticing her distress. She had forgotten much that was American, but not the tradition that kindness and consideration are budding womanhood's due.

"Be a sport, Flash," said Jack Barbour, cheerily but unhelpfully.

"We'll persuade her when we've got her in the drawing-room," said Lady Warrener.

"I think," said the chatelaine, "that there's more chance of her being persuaded here. Won't _you_ try, Sir Bryan?" in her sweetest tone.

"It may be a serious matter," said Lumsden, without looking at any one in particular. "Perhaps Miss Barbour's in training."

"Yes," said the lady of the Syringas. "But who's the trainer? That's what we all want to know."

"I've--I've got no clothes."

A smothered laugh, not only from the men.

"My dear child, we've got boxes and boxes of them upstairs--five generations."

There was a crash on a shirt-front, at which every one jumped but Arkcoll. He would have very much liked to see the box belonging to, say, generation three.

"And I've no music. Oh!" moving impatiently, "it's absurd."

Lady Warrener thought she detected a suppressed ambition in the restless movement.

"If you really don't mind, I've got volumes of old dance music over at Captoft. I was going to ask Jack to motor you and Leslie over to-morrow. Couldn't you rummage then?"

Fenella, hard pressed, looked over to Lumsden, as nearly every one had intended she should look. There was the strangest, quizzical expression on his face. It seemed to say:

"Now then! Who said they weren't afraid? First fence, and we're funking already."

"I'll dance," she said abruptly, amid general applause, headed rather shrilly from the top of the table; "but please don't trouble about dresses, Lady Pechell. I'll write to mother to send me my own."

Lumsden came to her side soon after the men entered the drawing-room with such undisguised intention that Lady Warrener, who had been trying to interest her in the dawning intelligence of the miraculous twins, drew away, puzzled and a little shaken in her advocacy.

"Bravo!" Bryan said encouragingly; but the girl did not respond, and he thought he saw a tear roll down one bare arm. Nelly's tears were still larger than ordinary.

"You looked across the table to me just now," he said. "I hope you saw nothing in my face except a wish you should do the best for your own interests."

"It's settled now," said Fenella coldly, after a gulp which she hoped he didn't notice. "Lady Warrener had the _Chaconne_ from _Iphigénie_ and I can do my _Rosetta_ dance to any six-four time. I'll write for the dresses as soon as we get back to Lulford."

Saying which, she got up, grown stately somehow for all her girlish short frock, and crossed the room to where the joyful mother of twins was sitting silently, an expression of diffused and impartial sweetness on her face. She touched her elbow.

"Lady Warrener, won't you go on and tell me some more about your babies? I was really interested?"

The woman looked up, noted the mute appeal in voice and eyes, and, drawing the girl down next her on the couch, took her hand and held it as she chatted.

"Where had I got to? Oh, yes--Bunter said: 'Mother, there's something tickling my red lane.' 'Your red lane, Bunter?' 'Oh, mother,' said Patch, 'he's such a baby. He means his _froat_.' Now wasn't that _sweet_. Miss Barbour? _Fahncy!_ And only three years old, both of them. I'm so proud, I simply _bore_ all my friends. But you love children, don't you, Miss Barbour? How can any one _not_?"

VII

A DRESS REHEARSAL

Her own interests? Not many days had passed before she had a chance to value them anew. The evening of the dance came and went. She was a little surprised at the size of the gathering it called together. There must have been eighty people in the hall, neighbors mostly, jovial, temperately enthusiastic, in after-dinner mood, and with the additional prospect of a first meet to hounds next day after the long frost. She noticed, however, that Bryan seemed to be introducing a good many strangers. She had danced amid a buzz of whispers, exclamations, and frequently a loud "Bravo!" taken up and echoed wherever a white shirt-front glimmered in the darkened hall. None of them knew how well it was done, but every one could appreciate a graceful child in a white satin Watteau dress with a great pointed frill, black sausage curls falling upon her shoulders under a quaint glazed hat, whose bones seemed to be of whalebone, whose feet never were still, and whose face, through all her changing gestures of appeal, hesitancy, curiosity, disdain, cunning, and weariness never altered from the grave set expression with which she faced the first round of applause. Or an odalisque, in a long striped tunic of the thinnest, softest silk and baggy Turkish trousers that sagged in great wide folds over her bare slippered feet, who swayed in time to sleepy _traumerei_ music almost like a top--rousing every now and then with a braying jar of the little cymbals that were fastened on her hands, to straighten and poise and twirl herself anew--sinking on the floor with the last faint chords, a soft limp heap of silk and dishevelled black hair.

Already, as she sat by her bedroom fire in night-dress and wrapper, her hair plaited on each side of her head, and cuddling her knee, she was paying for her brief hour of triumph. She had the indefinable feeling of having "gone too far" that makes one dread the coming day like the face of an enemy. She thought people had looked strangely at her when she returned dressed, collected, and a little paler, to the hall. It was not because here and there she had caught a false note in the tempest of congratulation that overwhelmed her. It seemed set altogether in a key that was strange and new; she could judge, for, after all, it was not the first time she had danced in public. Even the impulse which had made her at the end of her second dance run forward and kiss Lady Warrener (at the piano) seemed to be misunderstood. The gentle peeress, so kind before, had shrunk from her palpably. And yet it was so natural; for she had never danced to music played like that before. How she longed for her public, her real public, obtuse and leather-lunged if you will, but whom a smile can conquer and whose loyalty, once gained, is gained forever!

Then she had her own private motives for misgiving. Her cousin's manner had been strange for days. Leslie avoided her plainly, but followed her with her eyes. When forced to speak she seemed, not harsh, but confused, shocked, and anxious for escape. Jack had gone back to his regiment in Ireland the day after the dinner, grumbling, and feeling the iron of disinheritance in his soul as only the younger son of a great house can. He would have told her everything. But she must have an explanation from Leslie to-morrow. On no other prospect could she face the night.

The fire was burning low. The little Sheraton clock on the mantelpiece shrilled _two_. She threw off her slippers and wrapper, opened the window, and, drawing a screen across the sinking fire, crept between the smooth linen sheets. But, once in bed, her excitement returned on her. Three o'clock--four o'clock--struck, and she was awake, the pulse of the music still in her relaxed body, listening to the fire shifting in the grate, watching the red dusk turn slowly to black.

Suddenly she heard the handle of the door move, very gently and very steadily. The bed-curtains hid it from view; but she remembered that she had forgotten to lock it, and when it closed again as gently she knew that some one was in the room. But there was something else she had not forgotten. She felt under her pillow and closed her hand upon it. The very day she saw him last her lover had given her a little steel repeating pistol. She remembered his words: "I've never had occasion to use it, Nelly, but I should be giving you a false impression of the world, as I know it, if I didn't tell you there's ten times as much chance you'll have to defend your honor some day as there is I'll ever have to defend my property."

She lay still, her heart beating to suffocation, but she did not quite close her eyes, and the next moment a fear that was never to be named went out of her heart. It was only her cousin Leslie. She recognized her plainly--long and emaciated, with tawny, lifeless hair about her shoulders. She was carrying a night-light in a cone-shaped glass.

Now that fear was gone she had time to be puzzled. Up to a week ago a visit from her cousin at the hour of "combing and confidences" had been a regular affair, but one of the changes noticeable in her attitude had been the abandonment of the nightly habit. It was a great opportunity for the clear understanding on which she meant to insist, but it was very late, she was tired, and, as often happens, felt a sudden disinclination to put her resolution to the test. She decided to simulate sleep. She breathed a little heavier and closed her eyes.

Leslie set down her lamp--she heard it distinctly on the little marble-topped table beside the bed--and bent over her. She felt her cousin's breath on her cheek. The thin, weak hand began to stroke her forehead and hair. Nelly was proof against a good many things, but not against tickling. She laughed and opened her eyes.

Next moment, with a leap as lithe as a panther's, she had jumped out of bed and, gripping her cousin's wrists, bore her backward on to the floor. She was strong as well as active, and upon the thick carpet the struggle was as brief as it was noiseless. Something fell from the older woman's hand. She tossed it back on the bed and, switching on the electric current, flooded the room with light. Leslie picked herself up, crawled to the wall and crouched there, her knees drawn up to her chin, looking at her cousin through her tawny mane, with eyes wide and distraught in her white, quivering face.

Fenella gave one look at the little stiletto on the bed, and covered her face with her hands in a reaction of terror.

"Oh, Leslie! Wicked--wicked woman! What had I done to you? Oh, what a horror! And under your own roof! Oh, you must be mad!"

"Go on!" said Leslie, thickly. "Ring the bell--wake the house! Have me put in a mad-house. Father wouldn't care, nor any one else. He's cursed me and called me a wet blanket heaps of times before people. I'm in every one's way now mother's gone."

Fenella still looked at her incredulously. She was expecting every moment to wake from her nightmare. A thing like this couldn't be real--couldn't be life! Suddenly the wretched woman flung herself at her feet, weeping and kissing them.

"Oh! my darling, don't look at me like that, as though I were some poisonous reptile. Oh, my God! what have I done? Do you think I really meant to harm you? Do you think I'm jealous? But if I am, it's only for your own good name. It's their fault. Of course you're nothing to them; they didn't know you when you were a little baby girl. I only wanted to be sure. And then something said to me that if--that if--Why do you shrink that way? Do you loathe to have me touch you?"

Fenella bent forward and laid her hand across the hysterical woman's mouth.

"Leslie, be quiet this instant, or I won't answer for what I'll do. And throw this over you or you'll get a chill. Now, are you quieter? I'm not going to make a fuss, or even tell a living soul what's happened to-night. But it's on a condition."

"I know what you mean."

"Yes. You must tell me what's being said about me?"

"They say that he--that you----"

"Yes. Go on!"

"That you were Bryan Lumsden's mistress in France, and that he's spending money on bringing you out and paying for your dresses and lessons, and that he----" She hesitated.

"What? Is there more?"

"Yes. That--oh! that he wasn't the first. That when he--found you, you were posing as a model to some French artist."

"What a picturesque past I've got! And have you believed it all?"

Leslie made a despondent and penitent gesture.

"Not now I've seen you. Not now I've told you to your face. But you can't live in a house like Lulford all your life and not hear--things. Well, are you going to loathe me forever?"

Fenella seemed thoughtful. "I don't loathe you," she said, "not more than any one else. Go back to bed now. I'm tired after last night."

"You won't refer to this to-morrow, will you? I shall be hunting all day, but you won't throw it in my face when we meet at night."

"No. Here, take this thing back to where you got it. No, I'm not afraid to let you have it. Yes, I'll kiss you good-night. Oh, Leslie, _go_!" She stamped her bare foot desperately.

As soon as her cousin was out of the room she locked the door and began to pack her trunks, turning keys and opening drawers as stealthily as a thief in the night. Her teeth chattered and her heart was filled with the wild panic instinct of flight. She only cried once, as she folded the clothes in which she had danced. "They said--his money!" How well she remembered the day they had been made, the whirring and bumping of the machine, her mother's perplexed face over the paper patterns, the very smell of Paul's pipe. "Theatricals," she had told him, and he had not asked a single question. The poor wounded heart ached for home. When her trunks were packed she lay down and watched for the dawn.

The house was astir early. There was shouting from room to room, running hither and thither of ladies' maids and gentlemen's gentlemen, brushing of habits and knocking out of wooden boot-trees. She breakfasted in her room, and sent down word that she was getting up late--that she was over-tired. She had to endure cheerful proposals to come in and pull her out, cries of "Tally-ho!" and "Gone to earth!"--even try to answer them in kind. When they had all ridden away, she got up and dressed herself to her hat and coat and furs, her hands numb and clumsy from haste and agitation. There was a Bradshaw in the library, through whose mazes she ran with a finger in which she could feel the very beat of her disordered pulse, but she could make little or nothing of it. The house seemed to be empty of men-servants, but in the stable yard she ran across one of the helpers. He eyed her strangely and rasped a stubbly chin with a broken finger nail at her question.

"Lunnon train? Noa, miss, baint no Lunnon train through Lulford 'fore two-twenty, an' that doant stop fur to take up nor fur to set down, 'cept ye tellygraff down the line. There's a slow to Wolv'r'ampton at three-thritty, but ye'll have to wait forty minutes f'r yewr connexshuns. Two trunks, ye say, miss? Now, let me think----"

Fenella slid ten shillings in silver into a hand that seemed to be in the way.

"Thank'ee kindly, miss. 'Tis a bad marnen, miss, ye see: bein' a huntin' marnen all oor men be haff th' place. Come twelve o'clock, I'm taken 'nother harse to Wrogwarden Wood m'self, but if ye don't mind the bit of a walk to stash'n, I can harness Marvine to th' bailiff's cart, and tak' yewr trunks to stashun now in a casulty way like, and bid 'em wait till ye come. Thank'ee, miss."

After a wretched pretence of eating a cold lunch, served in the solitude of the morning-room by maid-servants who whispered together outside and even peeped through the crack of the door, Fenella took her muff and dressing-case and set off to walk to the station. Snow lay still in recesses and hollows of the trees beneath the drive, and there were dirty lumps and patches on the slope of the hill where the slide had been made. She breathed freer when a corner of the drive hid the gray walls and turrets of the old priory, and more freely still when she had passed the round white lodge with its one smoking chimney and was out on the public road. Often, upon her summer holidays, passing such a lodge with its escutcheoned pillars and long dove-haunted avenue curving away into a dim and baffling perspective, she had wondered what sort of life was led beyond its swinging gates. Her lip curled at the thought that now she knew.

The road she was walking along was sheltered and lonely, but sunken between high banks. The thawing uplands on either side had drained into it, and she was forced to pick her way very carefully, her heavy skirts held up with one hand and the baize-covered dressing-case, which seemed to grow heavier and which she hated more each moment (it had been one of mummy's ridiculous ideas), knocking against her knees on the other side. She had only gone some few hundred yards when, beyond a turn in the narrow road, she heard the splash of a hard-ridden horse, and clambered up the clayey bank to be out of its way. At sight of her the rider pulled up so hard as almost to bring his steed upon its haunches. She had not time to pull her veil down.

"You of all the world!" exclaimed Lumsden. "What's up, Flash? Playing lady bountiful on the sly?"

"I'm going home."

Bryan whistled softly. He was wearing a black coat with wide skirts, a low-crowned silk hat and the palest of pale blue stocks. His white breeches and boots were covered with mud and his horse's miry flanks heaved like a bellows.

"Going home?" he repeated, in open-mouthed surprise. "What on earth has happened?"

"Please let me go on! I've had bad news from home this morning, that's all."

"That's a fib, Flash. You've been awake again all night. The second time. Oh, fie!"

No remark from Fenella.

"Any one been rude to you?"

The girl shook her head.

"You won't tell me, eh?"

"Sir Bryan, I can't. I've promised----Oh, you've _no right_!"

Lumsden swung himself out of the saddle.

"At any rate, you're not going to walk any further in those thin shoes and sit four hours in a train with wet feet. Come! up you get. The lane gets worse the farther you go."

With sudden docility she put her dressing-case down on the wet grass.

"That's right! Put your foot here. Steady--Greaser! Don't be afraid. He's quite blown; going's far too heavy to-day. Now take the bag in your lap. What's in it, Flash? Diamonds?"

He looked at her quizzically as he laid the reins over his shoulder.

"For two two's I'd come up with you to London. Oh, don't look so frightened. It's only an impulse. I've been fighting impulses every day for the last fortnight. I don't want to worry you," he went on, as the horse began to pick his way downhill with stiff, tired legs; "but you'll have to give some reason for all this. Did you leave any message behind?"

She shook her head.

"Then we'll have to fake a telegram. You simply can't leave like this, and that's all there is about it. Hullo! who's this?"

A small boy in corduroys and with a red badge on his arm was drifting up the lane toward them, examining the hedge-rows first on one side, then on another, in search of diversion. At Lumsden's call he started and adopted a more official gait.

"Come here, boy! Can you take a telegram?"

"Ahve got one," said the leaden-footed herald unfastening his satchel. "Miss Fen--Fen----"

Bryan snatched it from his hand.

"Open it, please," said Fenella in the ghost of a voice.

"By George!" said the baronet, looking up, "this is Providence. This lets us all out."

"Read it, please."

"_Lady Anne very ill. Asks for you. Think you had better come. Wire._"

"I don't think that's good news at all."

"Well, it suits us, doesn't it?" with a quick look at the troubled, indignant face. "You mustn't feel things too much, you know. Fancy Anne Caslon dying in her bed at last! 'Tattering Annie' they used to call her in the West Meath. Fate! fate! there's nothing else. Here, boy," he said, putting his hand in his breeches pocket, "take this, and cut away to the station and tell 'em to stop the two-twenty. Shocked at me, ain't you?" he said, as the boy trotted off after a backward gape at the strange couple.

"I think it's horrid to talk about fate as if it was meant to do our little odd lying jobs for us. I'm very much upset at the news."

"No, but isn't it true--I mean my meeting you this way? Confess, now. You were on your way back to town wounded and indignant, with a firm resolve never to see any one you'd met at Lulford again, weren't you?"

"Yes, I think so."

"But you're not now?"

"I don't know. I must have time to think."

He seemed quite satisfied with the answer, being used possibly to oblique affirmations from women.

A culvert and signal-box appeared suddenly above the hedge to their right.

"You'd better get down here. There's a foot-path at the side of the main road." He flushed deeply as he held her in his arms. Another checked impulse, no doubt.

In the waiting-room they sat, one on each side of a sullen fire in a black stove. He smoked a cigar, and steam rose from the drenched skirts of his coat.

"I'm going to Biarritz almost immediately," he said; "but Dollfus knows what to do. Call on him as soon as you possibly can. I don't see myself there's much more training wanted, but you must be fitted in somewhere, and that takes time."

He might have added that it takes money too--some one's money--but it was not the moment to enlarge on this. Fenella listened to his advice respectfully and gave him her address when he asked for it. She liked him no better, but, at the point they had reached, she felt it necessary, for her own satisfaction, that she should take the least complicated view of his helpfulness that was possible. To take a great deal and to give a little is a prerogative that the nicest of women think it no shame to use. She bought her own ticket, but let him order foot-warmers and even literature--_The Tattler_, _Photo Bits_, and a novel by Charles Garvice, to be brought her at Wolverhampton. He was back at her side as the train, chafing fussily at the check to its course, began to move out of the little country station.

"Don't worry over whatever's happened you down there," he said at the last, jerking back his head at the hospitable mansion she had just left. "They're a dull crowd. We'll meet a very different lot later on. Good-bye! Keep fit and don't grizzle. I'll wire your mother that you're on your way."

He stood gazing after the tail of the train as the gray distance sucked it in to a point.

"You were a pretty wench, Bill," he heard a voice say behind him in the porters' room. The homely comment jarred him, but it also readjusted a view that had been inclining dangerously toward the romantic. Is there, I often wonder, some inbred memory of old disaster that makes Englishmen afraid of romance? Bryan, as he plodded homeward on his stiff hunter, almost laughed to remember that he had suddenly sickened of the chase, sickened of everything, and ridden back eight muddy miles on a beaten horse to see this girl, and--who knows?--perhaps to ask her to be his wife--if she had insisted upon it.

* * * * *

Shawled and pillowed at Wolverhampton by the guard's care, and quite tired out, Fenella slept, as warm as a dormouse under the snow, nearly all the way to Euston. A new ring from the clanging permanent way, more metallic, more menacing, as the train, sighting its goal afar off, made up its schedule time, roused her from a dream--ah! how deadly sweet of sun-steeped dunes, of outspread skies and seas, her poor little "land of lost content." The carriage pitched and rocked, lights twinkled together behind the bare trees, suburban pavements, and broadways blazing in blue-white light flashed past the windows. She put out her head against the cold, gritty rush of wind, and looked toward a red glare in the sky. Somewhere in that man-made wilderness of stone and brick, from whose smouldering discontents reddened smoke seemed to be ascending to heaven, he lived and moved and had his being who but now, in the lilied meadows of her dream, had held her against his breast and kissed away the desolate ache at her heart. Back to him, and he could not hinder--straight, straight as a homing-bird she was flying. With every moment that passed the distance that sundered them was being annihilated. Intense unreasoning joys! triumph almost lyrical of spirit over matter! God's crowning mercy in affliction!--manna from Heaven, and portion of the outcast!

VIII

LADY ANNE'S DEPOSITION

We wonder if it has ever happened to any of our readers--being a common human experience, it probably has--on the very morrow of some change which they had assayed, light-heartedly, experimentally, and with all provision made for honorable retreat in case of failure, to find the retreat, as it were, cut off, the old life put out of their reach once and for all, and success in the new becomes the condition not of a pleasanter manner of existence, but of very existence itself.

We know that Fenella's independence of the career she had chosen was never as complete as appearances seemed to warrant. Even if it had been so, hers was not the temperament to discover comfort in any such ignoble security. She had the bright confidence of her youth. Eager for the contest, she was not afraid of any of the rules. And if the comfortable thought that, after all, the worst that could happen her would be a return to domestic conditions with her one ambition quenched, visited her at all in despondent moods, it was rather owing to Madame de Rudder's insistence upon the fact, as the great strategic advantage in a campaign which about this time that lady began to conduct with Mr. Joseph Dollfus--a campaign carried on so pertinaciously and with such utter disregard for the Dominion manager's feelings, that he often wondered whether any inkling of the secret clause, the Lumsden clause, of the treaty could have reached her. If it hadn't, her bluff was a masterpiece.

"I'm afraid Joe Dollfus was rather rude to you to-day, dear," Fenella said to her old mistress one afternoon over the teacups. Madame's irruption into the affair upon the strength of an old "understanding" which her pupil could neither remember nor would deny, had, in fact, at last proved too much for Mr. Dollfus's manners.

"Pooh!" said madame, airily. "I'm not hurt. I don't care what the little bounder says. It's rather a good sign, in fact, that he _should_ lose his temper. That type always does when they see you've the whip hand."

"How have we the whip hand?" Fenella never questioned the implied association of interest.

"My dear, because we're not dependent on Joe's say-so for a living. We're not a bankrupt solicitor's daughter with a mother and young sisters to support. We're not poor."

This was about the time that doubts were beginning to assail Fenella.

"Oh, but I am _really_," she persisted, rather ruefully.

"Well, you're not to all appearance, and it's appearances that count. Look at where you live! look at your relations! Oh, I've rubbed that all in; trust me."

Fenella sighed. A home in which strangers gave orders; relations under whose roof she would never be tempted again--for that chapter in her life was closed definitely. She had answered one incoherent, penitent letter, and sent back two more unopened.

"My dear Nellikins," said the kind-hearted dame, "have some more tea and don't look so worried. I know we're rather a sham, but try to _feel_ the part. Be a winner!" She patted the slim hand held out for the teacup. "You do _look_ one so, my dear. Once you admit," she went on, in a voice slightly veiled by buttered toast, "once you admit, even to yourself, that you're not doing a thing for fun and because you like it, the game's up. Because it's this sort of people who are coming to the front everywhere now--in books, and pictures, and music, and the stage--and everything."

"I've always heard that dabblers never did anything!"

"My dear, who said 'dabblers'? And besides"--impatiently--"a lot of that musty, fusty old wisdom wants tearing up and writing over again. How can any one who has to worry do the work that _pays_. Clever! Oh, yes, they may be very clever, but all they succeed in doing with their cleverness is in making the people who matter--the rich, important people--uncomfortable. And they _will--not--be--made--uncomfortable_, my dear. Besides, they never last long. Worry kills them off like the cold kills the flies."

Fenella did not pursue the subject. She felt all the vulgarity of her old mistress, but she felt also an unaccountable sense of protection in her company. Brazen, alert, competent, grasping, utterly disillusioned, mature; with good looks that seem to have settled down for fifteen years' hard service; smartly dressed, opaque of eye, unrestrained of laugh and anecdote with condescending patrons; living in discreet little houses, in discreet little streets off fashionable thoroughfares, with open-work lace blinds at their windows--Berthe, Clarice, Suzanne, Estelle, as the case may be--latterly even, Elizabeth and Kate: polishing nails, crimping hair, ironing out wrinkles, reducing flesh, kneading and anointing the pampered body; teaching dancing, selling fans and lace; "advising" decoration, dabbling in magic, undertaking "confidential" commissions; with a range of service that touches impropriety at one extreme and heroism at the other, and often with a past of their own behind them in which the finer feelings have perished, but not a good heart, the De Rudders of the world play their part in the parasitical life of the rich bravely enough--play it often, too, with a secret hatred and contempt for the class whose follies they fatten on that would be a revelation to the mere reformer.

* * * * *

The trouble began with an interview that poor Lady Anne was "accorded" early in November. The place, a sober "Adams" parlor, distempered in green, furnished in the old oak of commerce, and hung with Romney engravings in black carved wood frames. Between the two gaunt windows a writing-desk, littered with memorandum blocks, supports a large silver inkstand bearing the legend: "To JAS. PEMMER-LLOYD, Esq., M. R. C. S., from a grateful patient." To right, a low couch covered with a white linen cloth and with some mysterious mechanism or other at its head. At its foot, a glass table on rubber wheels, its two tiers loaded with multiform electro-plated apparatus. Carpet obtrusively thick.

"But are you quite sure?" she was saying.

Her companion, a dark, keen-faced man of few words, seems to consider awhile. Conversation in Harley and Weymouth Streets is expensive: even so, it was felt that Pemmer-Lloyd gave short weight.

"Personally," he answered, "I have no doubt whatever. Of course, if you wish, I can arrange a consultation or meet your own doctor. It was quite irregular you're not bringing him."

"Never ride again! Never--ride--again!" Poor Lady Anne kept repeating the dreadful sentence over and over to herself.

"Doctor!" she said aloud. "I have no doctor. Never been ill in my life. And what's the use of paying more money to a lot of men who'll only dot your i's and cross your t's for you? You're the top of the tree, ain't you?"

Pemmer-Lloyd, who was writing at his desk, did not deny the soft impeachment.

"I've written two names," he said, "on the back of your prescription. The apparatus can be obtained at either. The massage should be done in the evening--at your own house, if possible. You will find it a little exhausting at first. Thank you."

Lady Anne laid down two golden coins and a florin near the grateful patient's inkstand, stuffed the prescription into the pocket of her tweed coat, and stumped out to her cab.

"Druce," she said, when the door was opened for her at Suffolk Square, "I shall want you and Twyford to come up and help me pack after lunch. I am going to Market Harborough to-morrow."