Chapter III

Two days later we were talking of the divine afflatus, and the relation of great work to character, when Lorraine demanded my opinion as to the analogy between thought and conversation.

"Speech was given us to hide our thoughts," I said, quoting Tallyrand without in the least agreeing with him.

"I fancied you would say that," he replied, and opened his note-book to refer to some jottings which had evidently been recently made, and which supplied, strangely enough, another impromptu and bizarre patch to the unconventional whole so recklessly commenced by my sister Sarah.

I append the jottings shown me by their writer as a problem for unravelment. They began:--

"Charming because she is perplexing, or perplexing because she is charming? It is impossible to say. At anyrate, the external pencillings are pretty. Her manner at times betrays pre-disposition to enmity, for the flippant pose is merely a disguise. Is it enmity, or is it reserve? One must take into account the larger reticence of larger natures in serious matters. A woman who can be good reading to the clown must fail to attract the scholar. Yet me she keeps on the bare threshold of comprehension. Is it because there is a barn at the back, or a palace? Most people open up their drawing-rooms at once, and parade their bric-a-brac. Is she given to this want of hospitality in speech, this loitering in the open air, or am I alone treated as a burglar--an intruder, who longs to drag the arras from her sanctum door?"

The next page rambled on in this fashion:--

"There is an initial stage of some characters which is purely parabolic, though every phase of the stage has its analogy in the actual. The difficulty is the tracing of corroborations. With so much promise one looks for some fulfilment, but she contrives to make out of the very postponement of promise a larger reiteration of it. She permits no shadow of negation that might disappoint, no growth of hope that might encourage. Her talk is so well conventionalised to suit the tonic and dominant of social exigence that one must avoid the vulgarian error of striving after a literal transcription of it."

A day later had been scrawled, with a dash of irritation in the caligraphy, a third note:--

"Of dispositions like hers that are worthy analysis, it is expedient to restrain the lesser deduction in order to gain the full breadth of the greater; one must look through the eyelashes at the substantial flesh and blood perfections to achieve the infinite spiritual possibilities deduced by the instinctive calculus.... Spiritual possibilities! Am I mad to seek for them in a woman-creature with the appetite of a schoolboy and an avowed _penchant_ for periwinkles?"

"That last clause," Lorraine said as I came to it, "is merely an ebullition of annoyance. I mean to proceed with my analysis more cool-headedly. The subject is interesting."

"Yes, proceed with it; but I won't warrant the coolness."

"What do you bet?" smiled he thoughtfully.

"My dear fellow, I don't bet on certainties."

Just then the advent of visitors interrupted the discussion, and a whole fortnight passed without my seeing either the poet or my sister.

I had begun to relegate the patchwork romance to the store-cupboard of memory, when into my room rushed Sarah with almost juvenile impetuosity.

"Look at this! Did you ever hear anything so crazed?" She threw a scrap of paper on the table. It was addressed to Clair, and I read it aloud:--

DEAR LADY,--You loathe poets. I therefore desire to adopt
another calling. Cab-driving might suit me, but I fear I am
lacking in the necessary command of language to ensure success.
I could sweep a crossing with neatness and precision, and can
pick periwinkles with unrivalled velocity. To this end I have
been practising daily with a darning-needle and a stop-watch.
Have you any objection to entering the lists against me, the
winner of course claiming whatever guerdon he or she may desire?

The note was in Lorraine's handwriting, and affixed to it was a copy of Clair's answer:--

DEAR MR LORRAINE,--Your poetic gifts will, I fear, militate
against advance as a crossing sweeper. The occupation admits of
no impressionism, and requires uniform scrupulosity. With regard
to the tournament, I accept your challenge, provided, of course,
there is a competent umpire.

"What do you think of that?" questioned my sister with concern.

"I think, my good Sarah, it is the oddest piece of work you ever set your hand to, and that you have let us both in for substantial damages in the form of wedding presents."

"The Soul of Me."

"'The wrong was mine!' he cried. 'I left my dove'
(He flung him down upon the clay),
'And now I find her flown--ah, well away!'"

After long sauntering in the Antipodes, I was naturally anxious to hear of him--of his inner life particularly--for his fame as a worldling had skirted the globe. The north wind had trumpeted of it; the south had whispered poetically, if insidiously; the east had contradicted the poetry and accentuated the venom, and western zephyrs had harmonised the whole with a dulcet cadence of admiration and pity. In his profession, however, public opinion was unanimous in proclaiming him pre-eminent. The signature of Wallace Wray--"Woll" we called him--at the corner of a canvas lured the artist mind to praise and thanksgiving; it did more, it loosed some sluggish thousands from speculative coffers--coffers that, prompt enough to gape at safe investment, could stand in the face of the divine afflatus, hermetically sealed. He had reached the peak on Parnassus where criticism drops crippled and diagnosis wrings its hands; his dexterity of brush had become a species of sleight-of-hand, backgrounded by the mysterious tissue of philosophy, science, and emotion, which, commonly called genius, defies ken or comparison.

He had been a singular youth, the solitary output of one of Nature's quaintest moulds, and from what I learnt, the singularity had become pronounced rather than mellowed by the glaze of time. Yet, as I remembered him--it was five years since we had met--he was an excellent fellow, a mass of incongruity, courageous, sensitive--morbidly so--modest, with a humility deduced from keen self-knowledge, a generous companion and a witty, dispensing the fine flavour of his humour through a countenance as nearly classical as individuality of expression would permit.

This countenance now showed its presentment on the Academy walls. It was this portrait, done by his own hand, which roused my admiration and awoke a greed for more of him. Around me, the wagging of gossip tongues fanned the air, and scraps, hints, fragments of scandal were wafted to my ears as I stood amazed to salute his art in the superb masterpiece of portraiture.

From the confused babble I was straining to sift a grain of truth. It seemed that Wallace Wray had been outraging the feelings of his admirers, had dealt them a slap in the face as cleanly, or rather as dirtily, as a realistic brush could deal it. In the nick of time, Spry, a brother of the craft and the very sieve I needed, jostled at my elbow.

"Splendid likeness--the best he has ever done, eh? He calls it 'The Body of Me.' Ha! ha! The Corporation of H---- commissioned, it, and luckily he got it finished before he took leave of his senses."

"Senses!" I echoed, stupidly. "What is wrong? What has he been saying, doing?"

"More antics! Haven't you seen 'The Soul of Me,' there, in the next room?"

And Spry, scarcely waiting for dissent, led off, inviting me, by backward twists of the head, to follow his pioneering.

The crowd was too great for conversation, but it was easy to know from the congested state of the room in a particular spot where Wray's work must be hung. When patience was nearly exhausted we reached it. Comments and criticisms were freely bandied aloud.

"Decidedly morbid," spake a sightseer in disgust.

"Hideous! I wouldn't own such a picture for worlds," confided one woman to another.

"It is astounding," an art critic remarked to his companion, whose face I knew. "What power, what genius, yet----"

"Genius is a loganstone," said the other, shaking his head. "It rocks and rocks, but a stalk of asphodel may shift it from its centre."

"For 'asphodel' translate 'woman,'" the critic replied, "and you solve the riddle."

At this moment a gap opened; it was sufficiently wide to reveal the subject without the frame of the picture.

On a slab of wood in semi-darkness lay a drowned woman. The rays from a lamp, held aloft by a bargee or coal-heaver, flickered down on the green-grey features that had already lost the expression which accompanies the first beatitude of death. Some outcast, as the worn finery proved; young in years, we knew by the modelling of her throat; aged in worldliness, by the hard set of her features, the sparse strands of faded hair that might once have glittered. The folds of the frayed gown hung lank, heavy with dark drops of liquid mud which oozed and fell slowly to the ground, already a morass of wharf drippings that reflected pallidly the meagre gleams of the uplifted lamp. The magnificent anatomy of a beautiful arm, a shapely bosom--bared, it seemed, in an effort to reanimate--showed that this was no plebeian waif driven by stress of poverty over the water's edge. On the elbow was grim evidence of Wray's realistic mood--a bruise, wide and purple, and higher up, the dull indenture of a water-rat's tooth.

"Well," said Spry, watching my mute amazement, "he has left no part of his gruesome task undone; he has gloated in it--look!--even to the snipping of the linen."

A definite jag on the front of the shift--the place which is usually inscribed with the name of the owner--was carefully insisted on. It was the highest light in the picture, and seemed to emphasise a piteous degradation and still more piteous consciousness thereof.

"Wray turned moralist?" a bystander sneered.

"We may find sermons in stones, but we don't want 'em on canvas," bounced another, a "port-wine-flavoured" personage, who ogled for applause with the confidence of the self-crowned wag.

I eyed him with swelling spleen, and shot a dart at Spry which was intended to ricochet.

"Wasn't it Flaubert who said that, in the hands of an artist, a disembowelled ox would make as fine a subject as any other?"

"I don't know," returned Spry, "but, anyway, about this work there are ugly tales afloat. It is too true--unpleasantly, unnecessarily true."

It indeed appeared to be inhumanly horrible--a vulture swoop of the brush--and, much as I appreciated Wray as a friend and worshipped him as a disciple, I was forced to recognise a want of reserve, some lack of sentiment in the handling--say, rather, over-handling--of so repellant a subject. His aim seemed to lie in choking sentiment--suffocating it in loathliness and disgust. There was a violence of passion that suggested the manner of Prudhon--suggested it, but, giant-like, overshadowed it with the brawny vigour of modern actuality.

I turned from the picture to the crowd, blinked dazedly to find myself again facing daylight and colour, and stretched myself awake as far as environing shoulders would allow. Looking away from this squalid scene, I became suddenly aware of an unusual amount of paint and gilding on the walls--an art tawdriness that had not before obtruded itself. My taste for the reproduction of veined marble and glossy parquet, for pretty pussies and portraits of gentlefolk was exhausted. I made for the turnstiles, and nodded to Spry to get quit of him.

"I'm off," I said, curtly, "to look up Wray and offer my congratulations."

* * * * *

Green Park, bedecked in spring raiment, seemed to me at that moment a welcome oasis of verdure in the midst of the swirl of Piccadilly; it offered no impediment to the bubbling flood of conjecture that Wray's strange _chef d'oeuvre_ had let loose.

So far as I knew him--and our friendship, though spasmodic by reason of my wanderings, had existed since our teens--he was the last man to sneak voluntarily into the shadowy niches of life; his nature clung to radiance and his sentiment revolted at the opacity of pessimism. Why, then, this sudden hectic of the sensational? Why, indeed, unless the genius, the loganstone, as suggested by the fellow in the exhibition, had rocked till it tilted?

In the midst of my mental tussle, while twisting the pros and cons in favour of lunacy, and walking with bent head and irresponsible stride, I fell foul of an obstacle. It was Lawrence Vane, the poet, who, being well known to me, chose this mode of salute.

"Your _moutons_ are causing you trouble," he laughed. "Debts?--love affairs?"

"I have neither," I replied, without a vestige of humour.

He was a breezy fellow, good tempered and sound, but at the moment he was out of place. Despite my abruptness he wheeled round and kept pace with me.

"You were totting up your virtues then?" he pursued.

"I can do that on my fingers. It was Wray's vagaries that puzzled me. I am on my way to him."

His cheery mood vanished.

"Don't go near him," he burst out. "He is a beast; I loathe him."

"He is my friend." (This with an accent on the last word.)

"I expected that. They were my friends once, but I never go there now."

"They?" I inquired. I had forgotten the report of Wray's marriage, five years before. It had taken place in Rome on the eve of my departure from England.

"He and his wife. You met her? No? She was the sweetest girl that ever stept."

"Was?" I exclaimed. "Is she dead?"

"Dead to us, to society, to happiness. She left her husband within the year."

"Poor fellow!"

It was well to have met Lawrence before going to Wray's studio--awkward situations might have ensued. I delved for more of the domestic history.

"She was the prey of mischief-makers--there were so many who envied her. People whispered cruelly of her mysterious elfish beauty, and women coveted her golden hair; for nothing women resent so much as Nature's own coronation of sovereignty. She was only eighteen, and believed in him--worse luck for her. Afterwards she became jealous and tried the spur. It makes some beasts go and some stand stock still. He gibbed. Rash people--men--quoted Byron, told her that constancy was woman's greatest vice; others--women--bragged of the equality of man and woman, hinted at levelling down when you can't level up."

"He had cared for her?"

"It was a love match. But you can't plant figs in the midst of thistles. He was easygoing, hated a smart, so there was no uprooting, and the fig tree perished!"

There were tears in Lawrence's eyes, but he began whistling a music hall air in affectation of nonchalance.

"Well," I said, extending a hand as we neared Buckingham Gate, "it is miserably sad, but thanks for instructing me. I shall be saved unlucky allusions."

"You mean to see him?" he asked, dejectedly.

"Certainly."

With a wry sneer of dissatisfaction he bade me good-bye, and I continued my way to the studio.

Lawrence Vane's view struck me as narrow and one-sided. He ignored the fact that Wray was one of the most courted men in London, that in England and America his genius drew to him followers, patrons, friends of all ranks, and that, as a natural consequence, there were warm corners in women's hearts for this spoilt child of fortune. With the world beckoning, the fair sex flinging petals from the rose gardens of love and admiration, he had needed more than human dexterity to pick his way through the scented labyrinths that were continually twining around his feet.

I found him in, and he greeted me with his rare smile. In an instant I observed that he was no longer the same Wray, whose presentiment he himself had painted for the Corporation of H----, no longer the harum-scarum painter I had known five years ago; it seemed as though he had thrown all the buoyancy of colour and tissue--the veritable body of him--on the canvas, and had left merely a shadow of the original to walk the earth.

The studio, a temporary one, was on the ground floor. It looked out on the bustle and swarm of the Buckingham Palace Road, where the roar of traffic was accompanied by wafts of martial music from the adjacent parade ground. It made a bizarre accompaniment to our reunion.

I strained his hand, shook it more than once as an assurance. I wished to convey to him that I was not ignorant, nor curious--in fact, that I believed in him. My allegiance was unshaken by Lawrence Vane's history. I gave him the faith of friendship, which is a closer grained quality than the faith of love.

We stood among his pictures and gossiped of art, praising H's brush-work, wondering at R's anatomy, arguing L's historical accuracy, and talking of everything warily--on the brink, as it were, of a plunge, like timid girls at a river, dipping now a finger, a foot, an arm, in the chilly depths, and wavering. When at last we were seated he took a header.

"You've seen my portrait?"

"At the Academy? Just come from it."

"You think I've flattered myself?" he said, with his head on one side, his eyes asking more than the question.

"It would not have done you justice three years ago," I evaded.

"Good! I wished the husk to be a thing of beauty. You think it a work that will live?"

"Assuredly, or the Corporation of H----would not have unbuttoned to it. It keeps its heart well within the limits of its waistcoat."

"And the other--the kernel?"

I looked at him and arched an interrogative eyebrow.

"The other picture? 'The Soul of Me?'"

"Of course I've seen it. It's magnificent work, Woll, but I don't like it."

"Crude realism, eh?" he said, leaning sideways and bending a palette knife backwards and forwards on the back of his chair.

"More," I said--"exaggeration."

He paled. I thought it was in offence at my critical presumption.

"There was none," he averred. "You shall see the original sketch," and he paced to an easel that stood, covered with a cloth, in a distant corner. He unveiled it.

"Ugh!" My cry was inevitable. I resisted the impulse to shroud my eyes, but my teeth clenched on words.

It was the same picture with a terrible difference. Vivid, almost glaring, in the black gloom and silence, the woman's form represented a combination of all the debasement and degradation of the world. Evil spirits seemed to mock and writhe and gibber in the sludge of the foreground; the iridescent atmosphere hung with noisome miasmic dews, even the face of the bargee glowed like a fiend in the glare of his lamp, held viciously aloft to reveal in its completeness the whole squalid history of spiritual failure.

"Who was she?" I whispered at last--it was a sight to shackle the tongue--and his answer hissed back like the sound of searing iron on sweating flesh:--

"It was my _wife_."

Heaven forgive me, I shrank from him. The man who could thus portray accurately, unmercifully, this tale of hideous defilement--the victim his wife, however sinning--must be himself either morally debased or partially insane.

He saw the gesture, and moved away to the foot of the model throne and waited.

I could think of nothing but the ghastly achievement, could stand only with bulged eyes staring at it, a dry, dusty flavour parching my tongue. At last I broke from the horrible fascination--a fascination that almost prompted me to snatch his knife and rip the canvas from end to end.

I flung down the cloth.

"Sit there," he almost commanded, and pointed to an arm-chair at some distance from him.

"You may shun me. It is what I wanted--deserved. To that end I confessed it, 'The Soul of Me.'"

Then on a sudden his meaning dawned.

"The body," he went on, "was painted before I learnt what colour the soul was. I will tell you."

"No, no!" I remonstrated, perceiving the tension of his set jaws. "It will pain you, and do no good."

"Pain?" he said. "There is no pain that eats into the heart like silence. The knowledge of guilt hidden corrodes like an acid. It must have been that which taught the Catholic Church the value of confession."

"Possibly," I said, moving from my distant chair to his side, and grasping his hand. "But remember I am not a priest; I am only, and always, a friend."

"I know, I know," he said, hurriedly, staring out across the room at the humming, busy road. "My confession is not to you. All that humanity can do the priests have done. You stare? Yes, I've turned myself inside out for them; but all their altar flowers cannot scent a foul soul, nor can their sanctuary lights illumine its crooked corners. I'm no historian, but I've heard of cases where private penance, remorse, and religious absolution have totally failed to wipe clean the hearts of intellectual men--they of the world, sinners, needing absolution of the world. Such men, who live in the open, and trumpet their triumphs there, need, too, to howl their confessions from the housetop, carve their contrition, like the wisdom of Asoka, on the immemorial rocks as an outcry to the generations."

He started up, and began to stride about the room. His face was full of passionate grief, and his wandering eyes passed beyond me as though watching a sunset.

I thought of the loganstone, and of the frail woman, the stalk of asphodel, who had unhinged it. The great painter, sensitive ever to colour and beauty and flattery and happiness, to pin-pricks and to sneers, had dropped in pieces before a real strain--sin for which he held himself responsible, remorse that found no outlet wide enough for his great transcendent heart.

Presently he stood still before his picture, threw back the curtain, and surveyed it with folded arms.

"She was pure," he muttered, half to himself; "sweet, sweet as new milk from warm udders in cowslip time, and I--I brought her to my cobwebbed life without so much as a preliminary sweep of the broom. She thought me like herself, and I dared not undeceive her; but others--curse them!--they taught her. She was pure as milk, I said--ay, for milk absorbs poison quicker than things less pure. She breathed the taint from the loathly atmosphere of my world--of the world that had been mine.... But I loved her ... would have won her back--cringed to her. She spurned me, spited me through herself, evaded me, till"--a shuddering horror stifled his voice--"till, by chance, I came on _that_."

I followed him to the easel, and placed an affectionate arm on his shoulder.

"Well, old man, you must clear out of this. Come along with me back to the Bush, and drop this nightmare."

"Drop it?" he flouted; "why, the world reeks of it!"

"Not now. You say that even the priests absolve you."

"Cheap contrition! cheap absolution! how one cuddles them at first--at first! But in time we feel our canker--it grows under the clean Church wrappings--in time we learn that where our sanctuary is, there, alone, can our penance be. Hence this picture. It accompanies the portrait, a gift to the nation. You can't think what a going down on the marrow bones it was--down on the stones for every rascal to gaze and prod at, an attitude for eternity."

"You'll come to Australia?" I repeated, adhering obstinately to my matter-of-fact bent.

"As you please. I feel clean enough for your company now, for I have committed suicide--not vulgarly, by murdering myself, but suicide spiritually. I have given up the ghost by working out the pitch through the point of my brush, and the carcass is yours to bury where or how you will."

In a Cornfield (Dialogue).

(_The field is divided by a stile and a hedge from some
pastures._)

HE (_bent double in the act of gathering poppies_). And what would you vote about?

SHE (_with hand extended to receive them_). Oh, anything--everything!

HE. And the candidate who paid most compliments would get most votes, eh?

SHE. It would depend on how he paid them.

HE (_looking up and laughing_). Then it's the quality, and not the quantity, which tells?

SHE. Nothing would "tell," as you call it, if we did not approve his principles.

HE. Not even the offer of a new bonnet?

SHE. That would be bribery and corruption!

HE. But some _bonbonnieres_ at Christmas time?

SHE. Oh, everyone accepts them.

HE. Then the vote would depend on the excellence of the confectioner?

SHE. Do not chaff on serious subjects.

HE. I was never more serious in my life!

SHE (_pouting_). Then you are horribly rude and unkind! Don't pick any more poppies; the bunch is too large already.

HE. Let me take it for you.

SHE (_with warmth_). I don't want you to do anything for me. It is time you learnt that woman can be independent if she choose.

HE (_with a merry twinkle in his eye_). You will permit me to carry your sunshade?

SHE (_simmering_). No; I don't want services from people who laugh at one.

HE (_drawing his moustache carefully over his lips_). I am not laughing.

SHE. Then you ought to be. There is no excuse for a man arguing seriously against woman's emancipation.

HE. I thought you wished me to be serious.

SHE (_tossing her head_). You know very well what I wish.

(_They reach the stile._)

HE. Let me help you over.

SHE. I don't need any help. Women can climb stiles as well as men.

HE (_turning away_).Of course.

SHE (_amazed because he does not insist_). I wish you hadn't come. I wouldn't have asked you to pick poppies for me if----

HE (_interrupting_). I came as your escort--nothing more.

SHE. I don't require any escort. You can go home by the road.

(_His face falls. The roads are hot and dusty, and the fields
green and fragrant. Besides this, he has curved his spine flower
gathering for two hours in the hope of gratifying her._)

HE. You will not send me off like this? Lilla, darling, don't let us quarrel about trifles.

SHE. Woman's independence is not a trifle.

HE (_laughing_). Of course not.

(_The laugh is fatal._)

SHE (_indignantly_). Good-bye!

HE. What do you mean? I am coming with you.

SHE. Never!

He (_looking at her askance_). Lilla!

SHE. I mean it.

HE. And your decision----

SHE. Is irrevocable!

(_Her foot is on the step of the stile. Her right hand holds the
poppies and supports the open sunshade which rests on her
shoulder. She turns her back on him._)

HE (_in a huff_). Oh, very well.

(_He commences walking towards the road gate. She half mounts
the stile, looks across the field, then pauses. He, some yards
off, is fumbling with the chain of the gate._)

SHE (_after making another movement towards the field and then shrinking back_). Frank!

(_He does not hear._)

SHE (_louder_). Frank!

HE (_not moving_). Yes.

SHE. Come here.

(_He obeys. She remains seated on the top rung of the stile._)

SHE. Frank!

HE (_by the side of her_). Well?

SHE (_in rather an anxious voice, and pointing across the field_). What's that?

HE. A bull.

SHE. Oh!

HE. Well?

SHE. Frank, are you sure you didn't mean to laugh at me?

HE. Quite sure.

SHE. You apologise?

HE. As much as you like.

SHE. And you'll never oppose woman's independence?

HE. Never!

SHE. Then you may carry my poppies for me.

HE. And come home with you?

SHE. If you promise not to tease.

HE (_leaping over the stile_). I promise.

SHE (_following leisurely and glancing warily across the field_). And, Frank, dear, hadn't you better cover the poppies with your handkerchief----

HE. Why?

SHE. Oh, because--isn't it rather glary in the field? They might fade, you know.

On the Eve of the Regatta.

"'Why dost thou look so pale, my love?'
'I hear the raven, not the dove,
And for the marriage peal, a knell.'"

"A year to-morrow since our wedding day."

He lounged opposite to her in a Canadian canoe, now talking, now soliloquising. Her eyes were closed, the fine pallor of her face, the steely lights of her dusky hair showed contrastingly against cushions of amber silk which propped her head. Grey was the background and green--grey with falling gauzes of twilight, green with luxuriance of leafage in its emerald prime.

They had paddled to Shiplake at set of sun, starting from their house-boat, moored in Henley Reach, to return through the shady backwater, which coiled like a slumberous silver snake through the heart of a mossy lane. Here they lingered under a languishing tree--a very Narcissus pining over its own image in the water, and shedding subtle resinous odours of gum and sap upon the mellow air--determined to enjoy Nature in mood of most infinite peace. Time passed unheeded, and silence, the euphonious silence of dual solitude, was only broken by the casual twang of lute strings, or the sudden enunciation of a half-modelled thought.

"A year to-morrow since our wedding day." His voice thrilled with love and tenderness, its tone caressed her ears, though her eyes remained closed.

"You have been happy, dearest?" he said, leaning forward and clasping one of her warm, white hands.

"Very happy."

"And had all you anticipated?"

"All--more," she breathed, with opening eyelids, "you have been very good, very generous to me."

"Good? Can selfishness be mistaken for goodness? You said you loved fine dresses, it became my pleasure to choose you the finest in the world--you longed for jewels, and it was my pride to search for gems to match your beauty."

"I was very greedy--too greedy. I care less for such things now. Poverty makes one worldly, selfish, mercenary; don't you think so? I was so poor!--the very rustle of silk was music to my ears, and the lustre of precious stones seemed to conjure majesty and beauty in a flash."

"And now you have nothing left to long for?" He bent over her hand and kissed it, and the little canoe, like a fairy cockle, began suddenly to shake and dip in the swell of an unusual tide.

"Nothing, dear," she answered him, while her eye scanned the waves that had so strangely ruffled their nook. "I wonder if some launch is passing to swell the river so?"

"Scarcely; that bend in the creek would save the wash from reaching us."

"But the water is agitated; look! it seems as though a high wind were raking the face of it." She gazed curiously up, and then down the backwater.

The trees were swaying with a soft unheard whisper of wind, and in the deepest shadow companies of gnats were playing hide-and-seek with each other. No sound but the hum of insect life reached them.

"It is strange," she went on, stretching her hand to the quaking water and withdrawing suddenly from the chill touch of it, "very strange; it looks as though the sleeping river had suddenly awoken."

"Dear little pottle of whims"--so he had christened her--"what new romance will she weave?"

"Oh, there is nothing romantic about that. If it were grass, the 'uncut hair of graves,' it would be different."

"Different! Is grass portentous? churchyard grass especially?"

"Every green blade of the earth must be 'churchyard grass' as you call it. It all springs up from life that was." She plucked a tuft from the bank as she spoke, and laid its moist blades in her lap.

"Then where's the omen?

"A silly one--an old Teutonic superstition. They believe that if the second husband of a woman treads the grave of the first, the grass will wave till the corpse awakes from its rest."

At this he chuckled joyously, her voice was so appropriately tragic.

"But here we've no second husbands, and no tombs; only a fanciful little wife who has burst the bonds of the matter of fact."

"Was I so prosaic?" She stared at the dancing gnats and flicked at them dreamily with her glove. "Ah, perhaps so--in the days when the pinch of penury forced one to be tough and calculating. You could not imagine, Harry, the fret of blue blood in starved veins. To be poor makes one mean, grasping, heartless; once rich, we can become amiable, virtuous, heroic even."

"And poetic, eh?" he said, flushing at the recollection of transformations that his love and his wealth had wrought for Cinderella. "Come, we must not forget the Lowthers' dinner, we're due there now."

With this he paddled out from their retreat, carefully--for the dusk was closing round them--into the open river.

All along the banks a misty vapour, rising from the earth, twisted and wreathed till it wrapped the tow-path in gloom. Deep shadows stretched their quaint deformities fantastically across the wave, mingling deceitfully with black clumps of tall reeds, into which the canoe occasionally glided with a dangerous swish.

The distance from the backwater to the Reach was fortunately short. Coloured lights from the numerous house-boats that were gathered in line to view the morrow's regatta guided them, and from the merry laughter which assailed their ears they learnt the geographical position of Sir Eustace Lowther's floating fairyland, styled ironically "The Raft."

"We're famishing," roared someone from its balcony.

"So are we," came in duet from the canoe.

"Take care of the ice-box," called another voice from the gloom, as a paddle hit some obstacle in the darkness.

"Fiz cooling," explained a guest, appreciatingly. "Your hand?"

Lady Rolleston gave it, and was escorted up the steps to the feasting place.

It was set out with a studied view to polite vagabondage. Deftly manoeuvred forks, two-pronged twigs mounted in silver, and clasp knives with chased and monogrammed handles, garden lanterns in frames of fretted iron, osier baskets bursting with an incongruous burden of river flowers and hot-house fruits, champagne in old Bohemian mugs, ices to be dug from crystal troughs with silver trowels, all these heterodoxies accentuated the bizarrerie which made "The Raft" such an unique and enviable lounging place.

Among the guests were three painters, a peer, a novelist, an actress of note, and one or two women whose beauty was, if not classical, at least effervescent and exhilarating. Merry talk prevailed as a matter of course, and bets were freely exchanged on the prospects of the crews.

"I hope to-morrow won't be a pelting day like last year; it was ghastly," said one of the belles to Sir Henry Rolleston.

"I didn't find it ghastly," he chuckled; "but then I wasn't at Henley. It was my wedding day."

"Lucky is the bridegroom that the rain rains on seems to be your version of the proverb," chirruped his companion.

"We've been lucky enough, sun or no sun," he said, looking across at his wife, whose lovely face wore a decidedly bored expression.

She was being worried by the peer, who, on the "if-you-want-a-thing-well-done-do-it-yourself" principle, was vaunting his own attitude towards the agricultural question.

"I never had such a wretched time," went on the beauty, "we were moored higher up last year, by the island, near where you are now. But it wasn't all the rain, it was poor Kelly's accident--you knew him, Basil Kelly? Drowned, poor fellow, in the dark--canoe washed ashore in the morning."

"Hush," exclaimed Sir Harry, looking across the table and lowering his voice. "I never knew the poor fellow, but my wife did; they were boy and girl chums for years. He was master at the Grammar School near her, and a capital oar."

"That's what I couldn't make out. Did you see what the papers said?"

"The papers were purposely kept from us. It was too deplorable a subject to be mooted on our wedding day."

"Did she ever know?"

"Yes, later, and bore it very well. She was indignant at the suggestion of suicide, but has never alluded to the subject since."

"Harry," called Lady Rolleston from the opposite side, "Sir Eustace wants to know why you moored so far up?"

"Oh," he replied, "partly because I was a bit late and partly because we're best out of the thick of it. I enjoy seeing the start almost as much as the finish."

"We have the Club grounds to go to if we like," explained Lady Rolleston, as they mounted to the balcony where the thrumming of guitars had already commenced.

All the racing visitors were gathered in knots in the blue darkness; companies of performers, niggers, German bands, and banjoists were skimming along from house-boat to house-boat, making music to the guests and indulging in mild badinage with each other. The moon peered out from the heavens through a silvery haze, and one by one the timorous blinking stars grew more audaciously golden as the night became darker.

On "The Raft" most of the company disposed themselves in groups, and boisterously chorused the musical sentiments of a young man who had boarded the boat to recite of love-making on modern methods. Lady Rolleston, exhausted from the fatigue of entertaining the indefatigable agriculturist, sat somewhat apart on a long cane chair. She fanned herself, and from time to time applauded. It was a pleasure to contemplate the boyish zest with which her husband led the roar. Song after song followed, and then came a "breakdown" from a young "Middy," whose spirits were infectious. At last, when the rampage had almost ceased, Harry Rolleston became aware of his wife's silence and exceeding pallor.

"It's awfully late, we must be off, or we shall face daylight before we know where we are."

Jovial farewells were exchanged, parting bets quoted, then the pair descended into darkness.

The river was now almost deserted; its face like a black mirror giving forth only exaggerated reflections of such illuminations as still glowed along the length of the Reach. These, however, served well to steer by, and they neared their own house-boat with little difficulty. Outside, though the night was sultry, tiny breezes that came and went fanned the skin like the breath of babes. Under the roof, however, not a whiff of air could penetrate, and, within the room, the atmosphere seemed hot and asphyxiating.

Maud Rolleston, as she threw off her gown, complained.

"The air here is stifling, I should like to sleep on deck."

"Impossible," her husband said, "you would have the sun routing you in an hour or two."

"Then we must keep the door open. I don't suppose there are burglars about."

"Burglars? I'd like to catch them--but damp--one can't fight that."

"It is too hot to be damp," she asserted, laying a hand on the frilled pillows of her tiny bunk.

"But dangerous mists rise up from the river," he argued, warningly.

"I am not afraid of mists," she said, and in her long silk bedgown she tripped to the outer door, opened it, and returned to fling herself in abandonment of fatigue upon her tiny couch.

As accompaniment to her slumbers the lapping of the tide against the house-boat steps made a soft, incessant music, while the swishing of reeds by the river bank sighed a sweet response to the whispered endearments of the wind. On the air still floated drowsily the sound of strings from guitars, and the muffled echo of voices that sang in other house-boats farther down the stream. Then by degrees, within the space of an half-hour, came a greater hush--the hush of a sleeping world worn out with laughter and laziness.

* * * * *

And Maud Rolleston, dreaming, grew paler under the moonbeams that peered through the lace shroudings of the narrow window. She sighed sometimes in her sleep, now and again lifting her head upon an elbow, as though to look out on the expanse of water that purled almost silently to its inevitable future. Her eyes were open, expressionless, but tearful. In the crystal seemed a reflection of the water's suddenly ruffled surface which the moon was dappling with points of silver....

By and by she put her feet to the ground, hesitatingly at first, and then gliding through the open door, she stood on an old Moorish prayer-carpet that covered the head of the steps. Two nautilus shells holding their burden of giant mignonette shielded her from the air; but it broke at times fragrantly from the scented forest of blossoms.

With a lily in her hand, backgrounded thus by stars and midnight, she might have represented a virgin saint on a missal, but her arms were bare and extended, and she seemed rather to be a prophetess, a sybil, uttering invocation.

Her lips scarce moved, but they sighed a name, "Basil."

The ruffled waters, at the steps of the boat, swayed and parted. The visage of a dead man looked out from the depths to her. His hair hung lank about his brow, the tide washed it along in passing, as it washed the weeds from the face of the lilies.

"Basil," she murmured.

"You called to me? Or was it but the haunting of a name that once did melt like honey from your lip?"

"I called...."

"Was it the wail of love?--Ah no, perchance it was a sigh--the pitiful sigh of happiness compassionate--happiness regretting sorrow?..."

"It was love alone that cried."

"Searching?"

"And finding not!"

"But why doth love cry here--here by the wet tomb of dead men? what may it find where the waters slide and shift, and the fishes twist, and the reeds tangle?"

"Rest."

"Where satins shimmer not, and gems are few, save those bled from the heart of despair--frozen in flowing...."

"The rarest----"

"Where no song ever swells, and the dirge of the river pleads and pleads for the soul of faith murdered...."

"And saves it."

"Doth love come here to find rest that no earth could give, here, in the cradle of the weeds: to wear jewels, rarer than rubies of the crown, tears of passion, ice-bound and spurned? Doth it come to sing the river's anthem, to wash itself white and holy, and save its soul for ever?"

"It comes."

* * * * *

Close by among the rushes a wood pigeon stirred in its sleep and cooed, and the river at the foot of the house-boat step yawned like a bath of silver, pale and cold. Over the gulf swayed the warm, white body of a dreaming woman. Her arms were flung out, and a soft sob, sweeter than the dove's note, a sob of rest and rapture and realisation broke from her lips.

* * * * *

Far across the fields, the note of the chanticleer rang out; the gulf closed, the porch of the house-boat stood empty, and the moon and the stars paled at what they had seen. Then they hid their heads and wept in the dawn.

Peach Bloom.

"'Twas only a dream--a boy's first passion,
A foolish love, and a mock of bliss."