Chapter III: Part 3

She's found out somehow that Ruddington was at the Towers all through the last week of her visit. She's quite vicious about my running away. According to her first three pages, I "must get married some day," and Lord Ruddington has been, so to speak, restored to the county by Divine Providence for the express purpose of taking pity on my old-maidhood. To scamper off to Sainte Veronique is, therefore, to fly in Providence's face. Yet, according to Alice's fourth page, my flight to France looks "far more pointed" than if I'd stolidly stuck at home.

If a mere logical triumph were worth a single drop of ink, I might twit Alice with the inconsistency. If it's true that the calculating coyness of my maiden flight has already put it into His Highness's head that I am one of the candidates, I might fairly claim Alice's praise instead of her blame.

I shouldn't care so much if Alice weren't so insistently practical. She positively wants me to race back next week; and she says she can even manage Hugh, so that he'll bring her with him, and do his bird-slaughtering at Traxelby instead of at Maxfield. No doubt she is confident that, by October the 2d, the bag will be twenty pheasants, a dozen partridges, and one Lord.

I wonder what Alice would say if I wrote straight off and told her that Lord Ruddington, to my certain knowledge, has already disposed of his charms elsewhere? I wish I could tell her. It would be such hollow, tiresome work arguing with her on every ground save the solid fact.

_Monday night_.

The Lamb in Wolf's Clothing gave me a bad twenty-four hours on the boat and in Dieppe; but he has certainly done a power of good to Susan. She hasn't got over her surprise at my not giving her a lecture and a mighty scolding; and she's brimming over with silent gratitude.

Ruddington's letter is irritating, but, in a sense, rather nice. I didn't ask Susan to show it to me. I thought it would keep very well till to-morrow. But Susan has laid it inside my blotting-case. Rather graceful of her--unless she's afraid that a personal delivery of it would remind me of Mr. John Lamb, and wake up a dormant volcano! Here is the letter:--

RUDDINGTON TOWERS,

Saturday, September 8, 1906.

MY DEAR SUSAN,--I may begin this way, may I not?

Your letter this morning has brought me unspeakable relief and happiness. When Thursday's and Friday's posts were blank, I hardly restrained myself from waylaying you at Traxelby.

As it's utterly beyond me to thank you enough for your letter, I'll try a little grumbling instead. Is it not rather cruel to say that I must not write more than once a week? Once a week for a month means only four letters in all. Sha'n't we be almost as much strangers when you come back as when you went away?

When you come back! The words make my blood, run faster. They're like the refrain of a song. When you come back! They're the music I shall march by, and live my life by, till you come.

I enter into all you say about giving you a quiet month to think and to decide. I understand, and I admire it. And yet it's almost more than I can stand. To know where you are, to have the power to join you in a few hours, and yet to be forced to serve a month's imprisonment in England, is well-nigh too much for flesh and blood. As I laid down your letter this morning, I realized that by riding hard across Ruddington Heath I could have caught you for a moment at the station. But I set your sovereign command before my eyes ... and stayed at home! Ought you not to be very nice to me for being so good and obedient? For example, don't I deserve a long letter on Tuesday?

Till you come back, and for ever,
RUDDINGTON.

P.S.--Do not be angry with me for what I am going to say. Although I put it in a postscript, it is uppermost in my thoughts.

Pray don't think I'm about to try and coax you out of your month's reflection. Long and hard though I shall find it, I say. Have the month by all means. But is it necessary that you should pass the month in your present conditions?

It tortures me to know that while I will live this month in comfort and leisure, you will often find it difficult even to snatch the time for one weekly letter. Now that I know that no one else has won you, take my word for it, dearest, that no one else ever shall! Susan is going to be _my_ Susan, even if I've to take her by storm.

What follows? This. From the moment of reading your letter, I promoted myself to be your protector to our lives' end. How then can I tolerate you remaining for another hour in a servile position for which you were never born--into which some hateful freak of Fate has thrust you, and out of which it is the greatest honour of my life to rescue you? It maddens me that, perhaps at this very moment, you are being ordered about, and made to fetch and carry for somebody who isn't fit to lace your shoes.

Reading this, you can easily be angry. But bear with me. There are so many ways in which a thing like this could be arranged without unseemliness. And, surely, nothing can be more unfitting than that you should be distracted from so solemn a decision by a fussy pressure of petty tasks. I entreat you to give me the great happiness of setting you free.

R.

His gentle Lordship does not condescend to state whether, in the event of Susan being "set free," he will forthwith send me, carriage paid, a new maid as fanciable and wholesome as Susan, with feet that move about, like Susan's, as quietly as two mice. But, of course, as I'm merely "somebody not fit to lace Susan's shoes," I don't count.

To-morrow there'll be the worry of sending off an answer. What will he say when he sees Susan's own handwriting? And how shall we explain the first letter being in mine? I suppose Susan had better make a clean breast of it. I expect his infatuation is proof even against Susan's blots and pot-hooks.

Now for bed.

_Mardi; midi moins quart_.

I have drunk coffee, with a big bright soup-spoon, out of a little white bowl with pink rosebuds inside and out. Also, I have eaten four _croissants_ and a shameful quantity of Normandy butter. This was at eight o'clock. Since then I have followed the beck all the way to the sea; have bathed; have climbed the cliff; and have been to the post-office for stamps. Through the window I can see Georgette placing a blinding cut-glass decanter of fresh-drawn, foamy cider, full in the sun, on my table in the orchard. As Susan would say, "a feeling came over me" where the beck runs past the poplars. I couldn't help stamping my heel on the ground and saying, "It is true that I am back in Normandy."

After lunch, there'll be my letter to Alice. I sha'n't say anything about Ruddington, except that she mustn't go on being a tease. Then there'll be Susan's letter to the Lord of Burleigh. It would be inhuman to make him wait for it any longer.

Georgette has just brought out a melon. Its minutes are numbered. I haven't felt so hungry for ages.

I wonder what Mr. Lamb is doing, and what yarn he has spun at Amelia Road? Poor Gibson, too! If I were Susan, I think I'd send him just a Sainte Veronique post-card.

_Deo gratias!_ "_C'est servi!_"

_Tuesday night_.

I am like a bird in a net.

After lunch, Susan came to me and begged pardon for asking if I "hadn't forgotten the post."

"No," I answered, "it doesn't go out for five hours. By the way, Susan, what are you going to say to Lord Ruddington?"

Her face fell.

"Please, Miss," she said, "I was thinking ... perhaps you would write the letter for me."

"No, Susan," I replied promptly, "I can't do that. If talking it over will help you, I'm willing. I don't mind even scribbling something out in pencil. But I can't write it. Surely it's bad enough that he's had one letter in my handwriting. I wouldn't have had it happen for the world. Besides, you'll have to write the letters yourself before long, so why not face it at once? We shall need to think out some way of explaining to him why the other handwriting was different."

While I was speaking, Susan was becoming more and more agitated; and when I ceased, she didn't answer.

"Come, Susan," I said kindly.

She began to weep.

"Oh, Miss!" she sobbed, "on Friday I told you a lie. I told you that I didn't copy it out in my own writing because I didn't think----"

She stopped.

"Well?" I said, after I had waited long enough.

"I thought, Miss," sobbed Susan, "I thought ... I was afraid, if he saw my writing, he might give me up. And what you'd wrote looked so beautiful and ladylike, Miss, that----"

She couldn't go on.

"Susan," I said, "you've acted very wrongly. You've done wrong to me, and you've deceived Lord Ruddington. Worse still, you've done wrong to yourself. If he really cared for you, he wouldn't have been turned away by bad writing. But he won't admire deceit. You've taken the first step on the wrong path, and you don't know what will be the end."

I am getting to be a practised preacher. Since last Thursday, I've laid down more of the moral law than in all the rest of my life. Susan heard me in meekness.

"I know it was wicked," she said; "but oh, Miss, do please, _please_ write the letter to-day! It won't be many times more."

"If I do it one time more, I expect I shall have to do it fifty."

Susan looked mysterious.

"No, Miss," she said with assurance, "not fifty."

"Why not?" I asked. And, after some pressing, Susan confessed that she has snatched five hours from sleep since Friday for the express purpose of conforming her penmanship to the pattern of mine. She showed me some specimens, and I was astonished at the advance she had made.

"Well, Susan," I said at last, "I don't like it at all, and I'm very angry with you. But if there's any prospect of your going on improving like this in your writing, perhaps it will be as well for me to write your next two or three letters. Then I sha'n't need to be brought into the affair, so far as Lord Ruddington is concerned, at all."

Susan's gratitude was touching.

"I'll never forget how good you've been to me, Miss," she said, choking down a sob.

"Find Georgette," I said. "While she's clearing the table, bring down my writing-case. We'll do it under the trees."

Susan danced off with a skittishness that surprised me. When she came back, I asked her what she had decided to say.

"I was thinking, Miss," she said, "we might say how nice it would have been if he'd galloped over the Heath to the station. And don't you think, Miss, he would like to hear how we thought he was Mr. Lamb?"

"Never a word to him about Mr. Lamb as long as you live, Susan," I said peremptorily. "As for the Heath, it would have been very wrong of him. But how are you going to answer his postscript--this long bit at the end, all about your leaving me at once?"

"Leaving _you_, Miss?" asked Susan, mystified.

"Yes," I said, looking at her. "Don't you see? Lord Ruddington wants you to leave me at once."

Her face flushed with such genuine trouble that I forgave Susan everything, and took her back to my heart.

"Oh, no, Miss!" she cried. "I didn't understand he meant that. I wouldn't ever do that."

What Susan had taken the postscript to mean I have no notion. Nor do I know yet whether, in the near future, I shall be expected to give Susan and her spouse a suite of rooms at Traxelby, or whether she will offer me a housekeeper's place at the Towers. It is plain that she does not entertain the idea of our being parted.

I said:

"Lord Ruddington doesn't like to think that you are ... well, in any sense a servant. To put it plainly, he wants to find you money, so that you can begin to lead a lady's life at once. It does him credit. But, Susan, of course you can't take money from him. Have you saved anything?"

Susan says she has saved thirty pounds. And nothing could be sounder than the quickness and firmness with which she decided that cash transactions with Lord Ruddington just now are unthinkable. Nor can anything be more indisputable than her unweakened devotion to myself.

"You can go upstairs and practise handwriting," I told her. "Come down in about half an hour, and I shall have some sort of a letter ready."

But two half-hours passed in vain attempts to produce an epistle proper to Susan's temperament and intellect. I've realized this afternoon that I can never write a play. I tried hard to think and feel as Susan must think and feel; but I could only think and feel on my own account. At the end of an hour and a half, the best I had been able to achieve was this:--

SAINTE VERONIQUE,
_Tuesday_.

Yes. You may call me "Dear Susan." But you must not say "My," until it is true.

You say it was good of you not to ride over the Heath to the station. If you had done it, I should have been grieved.

We had a smooth crossing from Newhaven, and we stayed till Monday morning in Dieppe. I like Sainte Veronique, and do not want to spend my month anywhere else.

I am not angry with you for saying what you do about setting me free. How could I be anything but grateful for an offer that is so kindly meant and so delicately made?

To ease you of your kind fears on my account, let me tell you that I have always been happy with Miss Langley; and that, during this month, I shall have little work and plenty of leisure.

I look forward to receiving another letter from you on Monday.

SUSAN BRIGGS.

"It's beautiful, Miss!" said Susan dejectedly, after she had perused my effort. And she sat looking up into the sky, the picture of disappointment and indecision. I went to the rescue.

"Say what's in your mind, Susan. There's a 'but,' isn't there? It's beautiful, but ... what?"

"I was thinking," confessed Susan blushfully, "that it isn't..."

"Isn't what?"

"It isn't ... very loving."

"Loving?" I said. "What do you mean? Why, here you are, spending a month deciding whether you can try to care for Lord Ruddington or not. It isn't time yet to be 'loving.'"

"No," persisted Susan. "But I mean, Miss, won't he be disappointed?"

"You can't help that. You might as well say that he's disappointed because you don't pack your box and go straight off to Ruddington Towers."

Susan was unconvinced.

"What did you say yourself, Susan, last week? Didn't you say that it wouldn't be good for him to throw yourself at his head?"

When Susan first used it, the expression had irritated me; but it came in handily. Susan, however, thought otherwise. A spirit of revolt entered her soul, and I perceived the beginnings of her new pout.

"Do as you like, Susan, of course," I said. "It's your affair, not mine. But don't go and make another muddle as you did with Mr. John Lamb."

It went home. Indeed, I'm not sure that Mr. John Lamb wasn't, so to speak, a wolf with a silver lining. The merest whisper of his soft and innocent name is enough to scare Susan into the extreme of docility.

"Oh, no, Miss!" she said hurriedly. "The letter's beautiful. But don't you think...?"

"What?"

"Don't you think, Miss, it would be nice to ask for his photograph and a lock of his hair?"

While I was fighting down an impulse to laugh outright, it struck me that the photograph was rather a happy thought. With his photograph to study, I should at least be spared panicky announcements and "dreadful feelings" whenever Susan saw a strange Englishman at Sainte Veronique. Besides, I had no little curiosity to see what this mad Lord Ruddington might be like.

"A lock of hair is ridiculous," I said. "You must have been reading some trashy novelette. But a photograph's different. I'm glad you've thought of it. After all, Susan, you mightn't care to marry even Lord Ruddington if you found he was dreadfully ugly. Give me back the letter, and I'll add a postscript."

I wrote:--

P.S.--I feel that I haven't written you much of a letter; but there is so little to lay hold of. As I said before, you have seen me, but I have never seen you.

Will you not send me your photograph? When it comes, perhaps I shall remember that I have seen you, after all.

Where was it that you saw me?

Taking a little more liberty than was her wont, Susan peeped shyly over my shoulder while I wrote. As I put down the pen, she heaved a deep sigh of unaffected satisfaction.

"It's lovely, Miss!" she said fervently. "That's just what I must have meant--that part about wondering where he saw me--only I couldn't explain it. And it's put so short and ladylike."

"Don't say 'ladylike,' Susan," I said. "Give me an envelope."

I wrote out Lord Ruddington's name and address in the style of handwriting I had used throughout the letter. It was my own writing; but a little bigger, inkier, and slower than usual.

"You see, Susan," I explained, "I'm meeting you halfway. By the time he's had a letter or two from me written like this, you ought to be able to do something pretty near it yourself. Now go upstairs and bring down those French stamps. They're in my green bag."

While Susan was upstairs I took the letter out of the envelope and glanced through it once more. When I got as far as "I have always been happy with Miss Langley," the oddity struck me irresistibly. It was quite too comically reminiscent of the letters which girls used to write, under the governess's eye and at the governess's dictation, protesting their ideal happiness at school.

There was just time. I picked up the pen and wrote sideways along the margin of the letter:--

I suppose you think my mistress calls me "Briggs."

When Susan arrived with the stamps, the letter was back in its envelope, the flap was gummed down, and I was blinking peacefully at the sunlight on the sea.

_Wednesday, noon_.

I suppose it's true that every country gets the Government it deserves. But the maxim, like nearly all the maxims I've ever heard, is a heartless one.

Without doubt, France just now has got the Government which France deserves, as a whole. But the whole is made up of parts; and, unless my travels have misled me, there must be thousands of parts of France like Sainte Veronique. I have seen a dozen myself--rural communities, working hard and living decently, with the slated spire of their hoary parish church looking down upon them, as it looked down ages ago on their direct ancestors who first drained the valleys and set vines upon the hillsides. Here live and toil the men, and, more remarkable still, here live and toil and suffer the women, whose hard earnings are the war-chest of France when the professional politicians of Paris wantonly thrust the nation into some vainglorious adventure. Here was made and saved the treasure with which the invader was bought out when his armies were everywhere masters of French soil. And here are bred the supplies of sound human stuff--the healthy bodies, the healthy souls--to redress the awful balance of the towns, and to save France from becoming a ruin amid stinging weeds and insolent poppies.

Even an atheist statesman, if he's as truly a statesman as he's truly an atheist, ought to know that, in striking at the village churches, he is striking at the heart of French rural life; and that, in wounding French rural life in a vital spot, he will be severing arteries where Bismarck and Von Moltke only lanced small veins.

This morning has made me so sad. The sweet little white convent is shut up, the garden is full of nettles, two of the chapel windows are broken, the nuns are in England, and the lawyers have grown fat on the pickings. At the church, the statue of St. Veronica, over the west door, has a broken arm--snapped off on the day of the inventory. Meanwhile the weeks are drifting by; and, for all the old cure knows, he will be saying Mass in a barn before the winter is half over.

I mean to say, now and again, what France's million officials, from the President of their so free Republic down to the Saint Veronique postman, daren't say publicly and aloud in this land of liberty. I mean to say: "God save France!"

_Thursday afternoon_.

I wish Master Ruddie's photograph would come.

This morning, about eleven, a young Englishman suddenly walked in with a knapsack. The funny thing was that he didn't come by the road. He marched here straight from the beach, as if he'd just been thrown up by Jonah's whale.

He was a nice boy, and quite all right. Not another Mr. John Lamb. It seems he's tramping a hundred miles along the coast by the cliff-paths and the sands. He was dying to talk to me at lunch. Indeed, he looked even hungrier and thirstier for human companionship than for his omelette and roast chicken and cider, which is saying a very great deal. Now that it's too late, I'm sorry I didn't let him talk.

All the time he was here, Susan was nearly as silly as she was on the boat. She got it into her head that, as Ruddington wrote here on Saturday (thinking we were coming straight through), he must have been upset when Tuesday morning came without a letter; and that therefore the pretty boy with the knapsack was certainly he.

I was obliged to be very sharp with her. Heaven send the photograph soon! Because I will admit to this diary, when Susan has "a feeling" I can't help catching the complaint.

_Before dinner_.

It's just come. The photograph and a letter as well.

He says the photograph was only taken yesterday morning. It's a local thing, not retouched: so I suppose we can depend on it as a faithful likeness. If so, I must say I like him tremendously.

Susan is disappointed that he has no moustache. He looks like a young and fresh version of some handsome and benevolent Judge or Cardinal. He isn't the least bit flabby or silly-looking, as I expected. He has a scholar's head, but he's evidently a man of energy as well as of thought. I should say he has a tremendous will of his own. He doesn't look the sort to have fallen over ears in love with a china shepherdess like Susan at first sight. But there's the fact. And, although the stupid girl can't see it, and "never thought he would be like that, Miss," I don't know many women that wouldn't feel it a compliment to have him in love with them, either at the first sight, or the second, or the fiftieth. He looks handsome without being dandified, and brainy without being dry.

His letter this time is less old-fashioned and more easy. He says:--

MA CHERE SUZANNE,--You have commanded me not to say "My dear Susan," and behold! I obey.

I'm sorry to say it: but my dear Susan--I mean ma chere Suzanne--has a hard heart. Her letter to tell me that she's landed safe in Normandy without being shipwrecked or run over by a motor-car, only reached me this (Wednesday) morning: and, if I hadn't ridden into Derlingham and fished it up out of the post-office, I shouldn't have got it till to-morrow. If Suzanne were kind, she would have sent one line on Sunday.

It is an enormous relief to know that you are not hard-worked or unhappy. When I saw Miss Langley with you (once outside Traxelby Church, and twice in the street), I thought she seemed rather nice--though, to tell the truth, I didn't waste time looking at Miss Langley, when I could spend it looking at Suzanne.

Now about this horrible photograph. I've always hated photography and always shall. But your commands must be obeyed. So I went into the "studio" of the Derlingham "artist." The "artist" was a pasty-faced youth in a velvet coat with Byronic curls that must take hours every night. He wanted to do his worst, and to turn out something elaborate that wouldn't be ready for a week: but I gave him a maximum of three hours, and he has handed me the enclosed.

I expect a long answer to this, telling me all your doings, by return of post. And I shall be the most injured man in all England if Suzanne's own photograph is not enclosed with her long letter. More than ever, I am your RUDDINGTON.

"I like this letter, Susan," I said, putting it down again on the table.

"Yes, Miss," said Susan, without enthusiasm. And, after a pause, she added, "But don't you think, Miss, it begins rather funny?"

"No," I answered. "I think the beginning is rather neat. You've forgotten. In our last letter we told him he might call you Dear Susan, but he mustn't call you My. So, instead of calling you 'My,' he says he's going to call you 'Ma.'"

"Is that it?" asked Susan, pouting. "Well, I don't think I like it. That's what my uncle Bob used to call my aunt Martha."

"Your uncle Bob?" I echoed, stupefied.

"Yes, Miss. He called my aunt 'Ma,' and she called him 'Pa.' I don't like it, Miss. It sounds common."

When I had recovered enough gravity, I tried, for the twentieth time, to give Susan a rudimentary lesson in French. She endured my efforts with deference; but, underneath, I could see that her rustic British prejudice against France and all things French is unshaken. I honestly believe that, in Susan's opinion, to have set foot in France at all is a slight lapse from propriety, and a loss of the finest bloom from the soft cheek of one's maiden virtue. In France, the silly creature won't even touch beef, just because of some stupid tale of Gibson's about a roast horse. She firmly believes that out-and-out Frenchmen eat bullfrogs toasted whole on a fork; and that the French language is a ludicrous disability imposed on the natives by a strictly Protestant Deity as a just punishment for being papists and foreigners. Susan doesn't intend to lower herself by learning French any more than by learning to stammer, or to swear.

"What about your photograph, Susan?" I inquired, changing the subject. "You see he wants one. Did you happen to bring one with you?"

"No, Miss. It's two years since I had it took."

"Taken. Not took. Then what are you going to do?"

"I don't know, Miss."

"You ought to oblige him," I said. "Don't be so limp. Look at the trouble he took to get you his own portrait the very same day. I'm almost sure there's a photographer at Grandpont. Madame will know. It's only three miles. We'll go in the morning."

"Oh no, Miss!" gasped Susan, fluttering suddenly into liveliness. "Not in France, Miss!"

"Why not in France?"

"I shouldn't like to be photographed in France, Miss," said Susan decidedly. For a moment I almost felt as if I had proposed mixed bathing to the rector's virgin aunt. To be photographed in France sounded a degree or two worse than going to church _decolletee_. But a moment later I felt impatient and annoyed.

"Very well, Susan," I said shortly. "You may be sure I don't want to drag myself to Grandpont. Do whatever you please."

As usual, she became immediately and amply and sincerely penitent.

"It was very kind of you, Miss," she said humbly. "You're always too good to me. But I feel I couldn't go and be photographed in France."

"Then don't go and be photographed in France," I said, still ruffled. "So far as I'm concerned, it's settled and done with. Now I want to read the newspaper."

I could see with half an eye that there were uncountable things which Susan was yearning to talk over; but I was nearly at the end of my good-nature. With the little that remained, I tried to let Susan down gently. I picked up Lord Ruddington's photograph again and said:

"At any rate, you can't find much fault with his looks."

"No, Miss," responded Susan tepidly, "but I did think he would have a moustache."

_Friday, sunrise_.

An apple-branch has tapped at my window, and a lark is singing eagerly in the near sky.

This shall be a good day--as rosy as the apple's cheeks, as blithe as the lark's song. I hereby register a vow against Ruddington and all his words and works. We needn't send him his answer till to-morrow. So, to-day, Susan sha'n't mention him and I won't even think of him.

Somebody's left a clean, new, cheap copy of _Les Chouans_ here. How I shall love reading it again. Except while I'm bathing and eating and sleeping, I mean to sit and read it on the cliffs all day.

_After breakfast_.

After all, Susan is awfully sweet. One can't stand aloof from her long.

While she was downstairs before breakfast allowing Georgette to practise on her in broken English, I went into her room to find a pair of scissors. As usual, it was as neat and nice as if it hadn't been slept in. But the thing that struck me was a leather photograph-frame on the mantelpiece.

I recognized the frame. It was a double one, which I had given Susan because I hated the colour. In the left-hand compartment Susan had placed the newly arrived photograph of Lord Ruddington. And facing him, on the right hand, was----Me!

It was that thing I got done last Easter. Until this morning, I'd forgotten that Susan had pleaded for a copy and that I had let her have one for her album. Suddenly to catch sight of myself beaming affectionately across the hinges of the frame at an equally affectionate-looking Lord Ruddington, was certainly a shock. But that Susan should have brought me all the way from England and have stuck me on her mantelpiece was another proof, though none was needed, of her genuine devotion.

I took the frame down and held it open in my hands. It was too comical. Ruddington and I are placed in ovals, like the August Young Personages in a Royal Wedding Supplement to an illustrated paper; and we are looking at one another with the most absurd happy-couple air imaginable. "Though I say it as shouldn't," we make an amazingly pretty pair. If Alice could see it, she would begin to cry.

I think I sha'n't tell Susan that I've seen it.

_Noon_.

I haven't read much of the _Chouans_. After my bathe, I kept Susan with me on the cliff. The grass was green, the sky was blue, and the sea was both. It was lovely to loll on the flowers and to listen to the sea--its deep speech at the cliff's foot, its soft murmurs in the sunlit distance.

Susan thinks Ruddington ought to tell her more about himself, and his conditions of life, both at the Towers and in town. I think she's right. Now that she's getting used to her good fortune, her talk has suddenly improved. She's dropping that raw and childish way of hers, and some of the things she said were quite sensible. If she goes on improving like this, she ought to be tolerably presentable at the month's end. No doubt it will take years to fill the gaping breaches in her knowledge; and her mind can never, from its very nature, expand enough to make her an all-round companion for such a man as Ruddington seems to be. But I take it that a grain or two of common-sense will be found mixed with his infatuation; and, if so, he will be prepared for a good deal of disenchantment. As for Susan, she'll always be pretty, and restful, and docile, and sweet: which means that if he is losing some things he is gaining others.

Alas, poor Gibson! I'm afraid his dreams are standing a poor chance of coming true. It's selfish of me not to have sent him a prudent line. I'll do it to-day. I'll tell him simply that all's well with Susan; and perhaps he will guess that all's up with himself.

_Eight o'clock_.

I walked alone this afternoon to Berigny. The hamlet was deserted--or, at least, it looked so. The thatched black-and-white barns stood out sturdily in the bright, strong light, and Berigny wore all its old prosperous air. But there wasn't a single body to be seen. I suppose every one was in the fields, or gone to market.

The church was open. I sat in it a few minutes: it was so cool and quiet. If I had felt suddenly tempted to steal an image, or to rob the box of Peter's Pence, there was none to say me nay.

The Berigny churchyard looked sweeter than ever. I like it better than any other I have seen in France, because it is full of natural shrubs and flowers. There are hardly any of those frightful wire crosses and tin immortelles and iron wreaths, as big as cart-wheels, such as you see in dozens everywhere else. And the Berigny churchyard isn't _triste_. As you sit on the warm stone platform of the Calvary, you look down over the orchards to the facing uplands--pastures of green velvet, wildly embroidered with, a million yellow flowers. Even the graves are not melancholy. It doesn't seem any more dreadful that the men and women of Berigny should be fast asleep, like children in the bosom of their mother earth, than that last year's beech-leaves and pine-needles should be lying quietly under the ceaseless murmurs of this year's cool and shady green. Cheerful sounds arise from the valley as you sit and look down. There is blue smoke curling from one or two of the chimneys. Between the surges of light wind you can just hear the voice of the beck as it sings on its way down to Sainte Veronique. No, Berigny churchyard is not melancholy: for in the midst of death you are in life.

There is a strange thing about some of the gravestones which I didn't notice when I was here before. Or, rather, I oughtn't to call them stones. They are woods. Over the humbler tombs stand rude memorials, each consisting of two short, slightly ornamented posts with a short broad plank fastened between. The plank is painted white; and upon it, in black letters, are displayed the name and age and birth-and-death dates of the man or woman asleep below.

At the bottom of each inscription there is an abbreviated formula which puzzled me sorely. It runs: "Un D. P. s. v. p." Not until I had almost given up trying to guess what it might mean, was the riddle solved. Behind the chancel I found a larger and newer grave on which the legend was spelt out at large in full: "Un De Profundis, s'il vous plait."

It filled my eyes so full with sudden tears that the solid world seemed to be wavering and dissolving as I beheld it. And, at the same time, the dim mysterious world beyond seemed suddenly clear and near. It was no longer the wind in the pines that I heard: it was a multitudinous whispering of spirit-voices pleading close to my ear: "If you please!"

I am wondering to-night whether I ever really and truly believed until to-day in the immortality of the soul. I am wondering whether I have ever done more than assent to the doctrine mechanically as a part of my childhood's creed, and as a postulate on which rest many familiar things in our literature and civilization.

Yes and No. In a sense I have believed, in a sense I have not. Until to-day, I have only thought of the disembodied soul in one or other of three different ways. I have thought of the soul as a cold abstraction, a philosopher's name for an antithesis to the body. Again, after I've listened to ghost-tales, I've thought of it ignobly--as a horror, a scary, frightful spook, a foul shape of night swooping horribly across the short sunlit path of our little life to remind us of the immeasurable cold and unending dark beyond. Last of all, after some stately obsequies, I've thought of the soul as living some supernal, Gothic life in a churchly heaven--a heaven where the sky is not a dome, but a pointed roof resounding for ever and ever and ever with Gregorian chants. That is to say, at the best I have imagined the soul clothed in a mediaeval vestment, and living exaltedly, in an incalculable remoteness from to-day's crowded world of living and breathing women and men.

"A De Profundis ... if you please!" I suppose many people would find the "if you please" either ludicrous or irreverent, or both. At one time I might not have found anything in it myself, beyond a charming rustic _naivete_. But this afternoon the truth rushed over me in a flood. The souls of the faithful departed are not thirteenth-century souls: they are not the shivering, pitiable ghosts such as engaged the fancy of savage men ten thousand years ago, or the still weaker brains of the Spiritualists of yesterday: they are not mere fictions of the philosopher, invented for convenience of argument. They live and rejoice and sorrow in an intensity of present being. To-night, I believe in the Communion of Saints. They exist as truly as the little black-haired child exists who stopped me outside Berigny and said "s'il vous plait" when she asked me the time: as truly as Georgette when she says "if you please" and lays the cloth: as truly as Susan when she says "Please, do _please_, Miss," over a letter to Ruddington.

This afternoon, I couldn't say a "De Profundis" for the departed faithful of Berigny because I'm too much of a heathen to have been taught it. But, before Sunday, I mean to buy a _paroissien_ containing all these things, in French and Latin.

When I say my "De Profundis," can it do them any good? I don't know. Millions of people say it can't. But more millions of people say it can. And if I make a mistake, I would rather make it in giving than in withholding: just as it is better to say "Yes" to the beggar who may waste your sixpence on beer, than to say "No" to the beggar who may lie down and die for want of bread.

_Bedtime_.

What an irony!

This is the day when there was to be no Ruddington--the day that was to be as rosy as apples and as blithe as a lark.

As for Ruddington, I have only just finished re-reading his letter, which Susan has put by way of a hint in my writing-case.

As for rosiness and blitheness, I've spent my afternoon and evening like Hervey--I wonder if anybody ever read any more of his book than the title?--in Meditations Among the Tombs. My day has been ghost-wan, tomb-silent.

No. It has been as full of colour and of sound as could be. But the colours have been the grand and solemn hues of autumn, and the sounds have been majestical as organs and trumpets. To-day I have not been gay. But I have been happy. And I can't name any day at Sainte Veronique that I repent of less than this.

_Saturday morning_.

This is the answer I have written for Susan to send by the early post:--

DEAR LORD RUDDINGTON,--I am so sorry that you were anxious about me. But you must not forget the bargain. And the bargain does not allow of long replies "by return." Indeed, in writing this morning, I am breaking my own rule. When this is posted, I shall have received and answered two letters in one week.

Do not think me grudging or cold-blooded in standing fast to our arrangement. If letters are too frequent they will be short and scrappy, and thus they will fail of their object. For example, nothing could be more devoted and kind than your two notes this week; but they tell me so little about yourself, and hardly anything at all about your daily life, your thoughts, your work, your interests. At present I know no more about you than all Traxelby knew before you came to the Towers.

It is true there is the photograph, which I like very much--though you don't in the least resemble the picture my mind had formed! You were good to take all that trouble in Derlingham so as to get it done so quickly.

Unfortunately, I have no photograph of myself here, and there is no artist, not even a pasty-faced one, in Sainte Veronique. But why should you want my portrait if you have seen me three times?

I sha'n't expect an answer from you "by return;" but I _shall_ expect your next week's letter to tell me more about yourself and your life.

Yours sincerely,
SUSAN BRIGGS.

Susan thinks my letter is beautiful, as usual. Or, if she doesn't think so, she says she does. But to know that she needn't be photographed in France has lifted such a weight off her spirits that she is prepared to be delighted with everything. After the first shock and the second explanation, she went up into heaven at finding that it was "proper" to say "Dear Lord Ruddington." Perhaps she expected me to begin the letter by calling him "Pa!"

It's all very amusing. But I must keep a watch on myself lest I take it too prankishly. After the future Lady Ruddington had graciously signified her approval of my reply to her noble owner, she went upstairs for her hat, and, while she was away, a madcap impulse got the better of me, just as it did on Tuesday. I picked up the pen and wrote along the margin:--

I was amused about those Byronic curls. But what do _you_ know about them taking hours to do at night?

Now that it's too late, and Susan is on her way to the post-office, I do wish I hadn't said it. For half a dozen reasons, it was a mad thing to do.

His portrait is still facing mine in the leather frame. I took a peep at it just now when I came upstairs for this diary. And we've still got the same sort of a "Good-morning, Dear," honeymoon expression. I positively blushed, and put it down again as if it had been red hot.

I must see that Susan plods away at her handwriting--or, rather, at mine! It's plain now that Ruddington is in love with Susan, and that he means to marry her. Also, it's plain that Susan means to marry Lord Ruddington, whether she succeeds in falling in love with him or not. Up to the present no great harm is done, but I must wriggle out of the affair somehow before his letters become intimate and affectionate.

Poor, poor Gibson! I've written him a line, and shall post it myself.

_Sunday, noon_.

For the sake of his peace of mind, let us hope that Ruddington is Low Church. If he isn't, Susan will soon be on his nerves. There's precious little kneeling down and standing up at the Sainte Veronique parish Mass; but this morning I had to prod or pluck at Susan half a dozen times. When we came out she made wistful comparisons with Traxelby, and declared that she did so miss "a nice service."

Perhaps Ruddington is neither Low nor High. He says that one of the times when he saw Susan was in church. But Traxelby isn't his parish: so he must have been hunting Susan, not saving his soul.

I've given up wrestling with the _Chouans_. I'd forgotten the early part was so dry. Besides, it's nicer to potter about, and think and dream, not to mention that novel-reading is wicked on a Sunday.

_Monday morning_.

Susan has been difficult again. I'm sorry for her.

Last night she suddenly developed the liveliest interest in dress. In the past she hasn't been a girl to care excessively about it. That's why she has always looked so nice. But, last night, she said:

"I've been thinking, Miss, what ought I to wear the first time I go to see him?"

"You mean, Susan," I answered, "what ought you to wear the first time he comes to see _you_."

"Yes, Miss," said Susan absently. "I was thinking it would be nice if I had one of those cherry-coloured zephyrs, with elbow sleeves and a white sash."

I smiled.

"Do you think you can depend on yourself not to blush, Susan," I asked, "when he looks at you and speaks to you?"

"Oh no, Miss, I can't," answered Susan in a panic. "I shall be sitting, all the time, wanting the ground to open and swallow me."

"Then I don't think you should go in for anything cherry-coloured," I suggested. And I tried to go on with _Les Chouans_.

"Perhaps blue alpaca would be better, Miss," broke out Susan again, after long reflection. "Blue alpaca, made plain, with a little train. I could wear that lace collar you gave me, Miss, and have my hair done more on the top of my head."

"You'd look very nice, I'm sure, Susan," I replied. "But, if I were you, I shouldn't do anything of the kind. I suppose it will be at the Grange that you'll see him first. Some arrangement will have to be made. If so, it ought to please him best to see you as he saw you at Traxelby church."

I went on again with _Les Chouans_. Or, to be strictly truthful, I fixed my eyes again on the page.

"I beg your pardon, Miss," Susan began humbly, after five minutes of quiet; "but shall we be married in Traxelby church?"

"Most decidedly not," I answered, so emphatically that Susan positively jumped. "I haven't the ghost of a notion where in the world you'll be married. But it mustn't be Traxelby. Lord Ruddington will propose some suitable arrangement, and I shall see that it is satisfactory. Besides, all this can be talked over later on. It will be time enough to choose where you'll be married to Lord Ruddington when you've made up your mind whether you're going to marry him at all."

The bride began to pout.

I decided swiftly that it was high time to bring matters to a head. Traxelby church, indeed!

As likely as not, Susan would expect me to be a bridesmaid, with Uncle Bob giving her away, and Aunt Martha calling him "Pa." So I shut up the _Chouans_ with a snap and put the question straight.

"Tell me, Susan. Have you made up your mind? If you've settled it that you mean to marry Lord Ruddington, we shall know where we are."

The pout vanished, and she hung her head. At last she answered:

"Yes, Miss. I mean, I'm not sure yet, Miss. But I'm sure that I shall be sure before long."

"Sure that you'll marry him?"

"Yes, Miss. I mean ... I think I shall."

I could get no more out of her, and in the end I turned surlier and snappier than I care to remember. Susan went to bed looking miserable.

This morning my conscience woke up as early as I did. Earlier: for it was wide awake while I was still half asleep, and I groped out into consciousness with a sense of recent meanness and unkindness to Susan. The more I woke, the clearlier I saw how natural it was of Susan, who knows no French and can speak with nobody here save me, to want to talk frocks.

When she came in at seven o'clock to open the curtains, I said in my friendliest tone:

"Well, Susan, I suppose you've decided to be married in white, with orange-blossoms and a veil?"

To my consternation she remained at the window, and did not turn round. Then she plunged for the door into her own room, and as she seized the handle, I heard a sob.

I jumped up and followed her to the threshold.

"Come, come, Susan!" I said. "You mustn't have such a thin skin. I never meant to hurt your feelings."

"You haven't, Miss," sobbed Susan, standing near me, but not showing her face. "It isn't you, Miss. But I can't bear it!"

"You can't bear what?"

"All of it, Miss. None of it. I woke up and thought about it in the night. It's dreadful!"

I couldn't guess what Susan couldn't bear, or what it was that was dreadful, and it didn't seem wise to press her. So I said nothing.

"You'll take cold, Miss," she cried, when she cast her first glance at me. And she bundled me back into bed.

I told her that she needn't have her breakfast with Georgette, and that she ought to drink chocolate instead of coffee.

"You'd better have a quiet day," I added. "This matter is getting on your brain. Give it a rest. That was one reason why I wanted you to wait a whole month. There's no need to brood over it day and night. The month has still three weeks to run."

She dried her eyes and was ever so grateful. But I am puzzled. Last night she seemed (as she has seemed all along) to take it as a matter of course that she will marry Ruddington. Her attitude has been that of a pretty, honest, modest, prosaic girl with an eye on the main chance. To find her suddenly all sensibility is a surprise.

Probably it isn't sensibility. It's nerves. Too much coffee: not enough sleep. Too much of her own thoughts: not enough human fellowship at a time when she sorely needs it.

Yet I can't overlook that she was disappointed with his photograph. It may well be that, in her better moments, my sweet Susan shrinks from marrying when she cannot love. Or is it that she is cowed by the difficulties of so huge a change in her rank and station? She shall have an easy day.

_Tuesday_, 10.15 _a.m._

The Lord Ruddington would be speaking no more than the truth if he always signed himself Susan's Most Obedient Servant. He has been as prompt with his pen-and-ink _Selbstbildniss_ as he was with the pasty-faced artist's photograph. He says:

MA SUZANNE,--It is Monday morning. When I have finished this, I shall have written you once this week; once last week (the Wednesday), and once the week before (on the Saturday). Yet I am scolded for breaking the rules. You must send me an exceptionally kind letter to soothe my wounded feelings.

It was unpardonably careless of me not to forward full particulars and references when I first applied for the post of Protector to Suzanne. But I have to-day filled up a form and am enclosing it with this. References are kindly permitted to the Derlingham photographer and to Mrs. Juggins, the housekeeper at Ruddington Towers.

I have taken conscientious pains to fill up the form correctly. For instance, I squandered a whole penny this morning weighing myself on an automatic machine at Derlingham station. To be precise, I have squandered tuppence; because the first machine which I bribed refused to weigh me, and insisted on presenting me with a bar of chocolate cream instead.

The news that you can't send me your portrait is desolating. It is another reason why you must be extra kind.

All your letters are precious. But I like the little bits you write up the sides best. Why can't I have a letter made up of little side-bits only?

RUDDINGTON.

The "enclosed form" is a formidable-looking sheet of blue foolscap divided into columns for questions and answers. It reads:

S. B. No. 999.

1. Names (Christian Henry Reginald Westerton
and Surname), with Assheleigh, Ninth Baron
Title or Titles, if any. Ruddington.

2. Address or Addresses. Ruddington Towers,
Sussex; Assheleigh House,
St. Michael's Square, S.W.;
Ballymore Castle, County
Kerry.

3. Age. 23 171/365 years.

4. Has applicant He has heard so.
had whooping-cough?

5. Or Measles? One.
If so, how many?

6. Weight. 10 st. 8 lb. (Includes 2.1739
oz. of letters from Suzanne,
in left-side breast-pocket
at time of weighing.)