Chapter VII: The Idyl Concludes

They fleeted the days delightfully, as men did in the golden world. They rode together on the rolling moors, they drove through the Devonshire lanes, they strolled through combe and copse, they climbed the tors, they fished the leys, they swam in the sea, and when it was cloudy and cold, and the wind wailed about the house like a woman in pain, they listened to the comedy which Herbert wrote in those dreary days when the ladies drove off to distant houses for lunch or tennis or croquet. For they had not quite hidden their retreat or detached themselves from their kind.

“There’s always scandal within a four-mile radius,” as Miss Regan put it. “Is there on earth a greater piece of philanthropy than to give your neighbors food for gossip? Man cannot live by bread alone.” Matthew asked her in concern if his and Herbert’s visits were causing any talk.

“My dear Mr. Matthew,” she replied, scornfully, “even an actress cannot escape scandal, especially if she goes into society. And truly society is so corrupt, I have often wondered that actresses’ mothers allow them to go into it!”

During one of these absences of the feminine element, when Herbert went over to the house to put the last touches to the painted costume, grumbling at the boredom of such finicking work, Matthew gladly relieved him of the brush, and worked up the whole portrait, while Herbert lay smoking and thinking out the comedy.

Partly out of bravado, partly to enjoy the series of lovely views of dark-green sea and broken crags and nestling villages, the cousins invariably arrived by the cliff-path, seeing the blackberries get riper every day. Sometimes they found the ladies sitting reading on the top of the cliff, which was furzy, with a road-side border of hemlock and dandelions and blue orchids, amid which their dainty parasols showed from afar like gigantic tropical flowers. Then while Matthew drowsed in the light of the sun and of Eleanor, inhaling the odors of bracken and thyme, lazily watching the white surf break far below, the brown trawlers glide across the horizon, the swallows swarm on the beach, and the wild ducks over the sea, Herbert and Olive would rattle away by the hour, often in verbal duels. Matthew Strang thought he had never tasted such pure intellectual joy. Art was often on the tapis; they classified the skies--to-day a Constable, and yesterday a Turner, and to-morrow a Corot. Herbert expounded glibly to the rapt Eleanor the Continental ideas, descanting on Manet and Monet. Nature lay all around them like a model to illustrate these theories, and Eleanor discovered all sorts of shadows and subtle effects she had never noticed before, all with the naïve joy of a child lighting on pretty treasures. She cried out that Art taught people to see Nature. And the Impressionists were right. Look over there! You couldn’t tell whether it was a pool or a pile of fish. And the colors of things changed incessantly! Matthew would sometimes put in a word when appealed to by her, but never when the subject was music, concerning which he was as ignorant as the rest of the party was learned. Once Herbert maintained that the musician was better off than the painter, because his work remained, while pictures perished, destroyed by the aniline and bitumen in their own colors. “Even Mona Lisa’s smile will fade,” he said. “The artist lingers a little longer on the stage than the actor. Pictures are but paltry things at best, and few artists have brains or any large outlook upon life. They’re a petty, quarrelsome clan.” Matthew did not deny it.

Olive cited sculpture as a more durable art than the musician’s, which only lived when performed. Mrs. Wyndwood was convinced that the joy of Art must be to the artist; she said she was fast acquiring a keen interest in the subjective side of Art, and feeling a growing desire to be an artist herself. The Spiritual was all very well, but it needed to be expressed through the Beautiful.

Olive playfully suggested an expedition to the Latin Quarter; Mrs. Wyndwood accepted it seriously and eagerly; she returned to the idea again and again, both in public and in private. Why should they not go to Paris for the winter, and Olive take up sculpture again, and initiate her into the divine mysteries? To judge by the Strangs, artists must be delightful creatures to live among, and sculpture seemed easier and simpler than painting. Olive continued to play with the project. Herbert sneered at the idea of Miss Regan’s return to the plaster of Paris. Literature was, after all, the only art, he said. It contained everything--music of words, painting of scenery, passion of drama. He almost converted Mrs. Wyndwood. She quoted ecstatically, “_L’univers a été fait pour aboutir à un beau livre_.” But a word from Matthew restored the balance.

They talked of life, too, of fate, free-will, and knowledge absolute, like Milton’s archangels. Herbert, as Lucifer, steadfastly took the lowest views of human nature; now and then Olive’s eye, twinkling with fun, met his as if in a secret understanding that Mrs. Wyndwood must be shocked at all hazards. He fought for the doctrine that sin was a human invention. “Let people have their fling. They exaggerate their powers of sinning. They think they can draw on a boundless internal reservoir of wickedness. As a matter of fact, their powers are singularly limited. They have too much original goodness. For my part, alas! I have found few opportunities of sinning.”

“And have you never found opportunities for remorse?” Mrs. Wyndwood asked, scathingly.

“Alas! often, I tell you. Remorse for the sins I couldn’t do. The remorse of your religious person is too often like the snivelling repentance of the condemned criminal. That murderer felt a truer remorse who was unexpectedly reprieved after indulging in an indigestible breakfast.”

Olive laughed heartily. “That must go into the comedy.”

It had become their stock phrase. Then remembering her part in the comedy was to score off Herbert, she capped his anecdote of the condemned criminal by another about the politeness of a Frenchman, who, ascending the scaffold, said to his neighbor in the tumbril, “_Après vous_.”

Eleanor raised the talk to a more elevated plane, insisting on the value of remorse, and of suffering generally. “I would not recall one of my sufferings,” said she, with her simple earnestness. “If I didn’t suffer I shouldn’t think I had grown.” And her eyes instinctively sought Matthew’s, and he thought she was reminding him of the educative efficacy of his own sufferings as well, and again Herbert’s philosophy jarred.

And whatever she was saying or doing she always fell naturally into some attitude that enchanted his eye by its unaffected grace; always wore an expression whose sweetness and candor softened him in worship. Her beauty--to a painter’s soul the miracle of miracles--she wore with a royal unconsciousness; he could not understand it. She was so simple, just like a human being. He saw her, not in her society drapings, but in all moods and weathers, and she bore the test. On fishing days they would draw up the boat in the centre of the nearest ley, where perch and “rudd” abounded, the former avid of the gentles, the latter only less eager for the paste, but demanding an iota of skill when hooked. Olive would take no hand in this mild sport; she had given up hunting and fishing, she said, when she rose in the ethical scale. Challenged as to her readiness to eat meat and fish, she failed to see the relevancy of the criticism. The reason she wouldn’t kill other creatures was not that it gave them pain, but that it gave her pain; to eat them, on the contrary, gave her pleasure. Mrs. Wyndwood, however, though not callous enough to impale her own worms, was persuaded by Matthew to take a rod, and beguiled numbers of perch, and admitted to a thrill of savage joy each time she hauled up a leaping flash of silver. She was glad, though, she said, that the poor little fishes had horny membranes for gills, so that the hook should not hurt them; when it passed through the eye, she trusted that the cornea was insensitive, too.

“But how would you feel,” Olive once remonstrated, “if, sitting at dinner, just after swallowing a mouthful of mayonnaise, and in the middle of a remark to your neighbor about the Rhine or the Pre-Raphaelites, you were suddenly to find yourself rising towards the ceiling, at the end of a rope fixed by a hook to your upper lip, and arriving slowly but surely, despite your kicking and writhing, into a stratum of air totally devoid of oxygen?”

Herbert Strang thought one would feel like a fish out of water, but Matthew Strang eluded the point by drawing a pike across the track. The bait of a captured roach had fetched the monster, whose struggles interested even Olive, while Eleanor was wrought up to a wild enthusiasm for Matthew’s prowess, and regretted that in Scotland she had always refused to go to see the grouse-shooting.

“I hear they are doing badly this year,” Olive observed.

“Oh no, Olive,” cried Mrs. Wyndwood. “Didn’t we hear at the Archdeacon’s yesterday that they were making excellent bags?”

“I meant the birds,” said Olive, dryly.

“Bother the birds! I should love to be a sportsman,” cried Eleanor, exultantly landing her eleventh perch. They trooped like children to the dinner-bell. “I can see how fascinating it must be. To actually _feel_ the struggle for existence; it brings you back to the primitive. You touch reality; you remember you’re an animal.”

“Lunch always reminds me sufficiently of that,” said Olive.

“No,” Eleanor argued. “The napery and the flowers come between us and the facts. How glorious it would be to be primitive!” Between Art and Sport--with that charming impressionability of hers--she had drifted as far from the spiritualities of Dolkovitch as, under the Russian’s influence, from the Socialism of Gerard Brode.

Herbert, whose skill with the rod was not remarkable, diverged into an account of his stay in a Servian fishing-village which was entirely primitive, “so primitive,” he said, laughing, “that the wives do most of the work.” He sketched the place with admirable literary touches. “Sheepskin is their only wear,” he wound up. “In the winter they wear the wool outside. In the summer they take off their skins and--no, not sit in their bones, as Miss Regan is about to remark--but wear the wool inside.”

Matthew was thus led on to relate juvenile sporting experiences on the shores of the Bay of Fundy, and finally his one encounter with a bear in the Cobequid forest, which put the seal on Mrs. Wyndwood’s new-born ardor for sport. This tame picking-up of perch palled; they must go mackerel-fishing, she insisted. And so Matthew Strang arranged with a fisherman to go out to sea in his boat next day. But the sea ran high, and to the undisguised relief of Herbert, who felt himself rather cut out by his cousin in these unliterary expeditions, Primitiva arrived the first thing in the morning with a note from Mrs. Wyndwood, saying she had forgotten the lawn-meet at Colonel Chesham’s to inaugurate the season of the local pack, and she would ride over to that in the hope of catching sight of a bit of the hunt. There was a postscript from Olive, saying: “And, of course, I must go to chaperon her among all those men.” Nevertheless, they went out in the boat late that same afternoon, when the ocean was calm again and quivering in the sun. Their course lay along a track of diamonds which seemed to dance off the water like a million elves of light. By the time they returned, the path of diamonds had changed to one of red gold. Delicious was the ripping sound of the living boat tearing the water, as it dipped gently from side to side, its white sail bellying gracefully. The sunset was strange: one dull red narrow bar crowned by a ball of molten gold radiating four hazy spokes like mill-sails. The ball gradually sank in the sea. In the south the white sickle of the moon grew yellower and yellower; in the east fleecy strips of cloud reflected the dying day. The colors of the cliffs still stood out vivid. The moment was poetic; the air was charged with amorous electricity. The talk drifted into love and marriage.

They played with the subject, skimming it gracefully, touching it with subtle lights, flashed and withdrawn, shooting out audacities with ingenuous impersonality, all four the while tingling with self-consciousness from crown to sole.

Herbert said that to a woman love is a complete romance, to a man a collection of short stories. Olive maintained that the reverse was true. “Oh, if man knew woman!” she cried. “And you who pretend to write comedies!”

Mrs. Wyndwood admitted that Byron was right about love being all in all to a woman. “Nine-tenths of unmarried women,” she said, looking at Herbert, “have never had a proposal.”

“Nine-tenths of married women more likely,” Olive flashed back.

In Matthew’s opinion marriage was a failure. Mrs. Wyndwood sadly acquiesced. They sought the remedy.

“Marriage may be a failure, but not friendship,” Olive pronounced.

Now it was Matthew’s eyes that Eleanor’s sought, and his involuntarily met hers. There was exaltation in this secret glance, and mutual reassurance.

“Unless,” pursued Olive, “the friendship is contracted between persons of different sex.”

Mrs. Wyndwood’s eyes drooped; then opened full again to note how Matthew took the addendum. The friends perceived themselves reddening in simultaneous confession that Olive was not so very wrong; an indefinable expression, half abashment, half radiance, flickered over Eleanor’s features; her glance, swift, probing, challenging, dazzled him; his whole frame trembled at the thought that this heavenly creature could love him. Then he grew chill again, for she cried, as in the highest spirits:

“Oh, look at the sun! How comic!”

It had, indeed, become a clown’s face, swollen and bulbous and crossed with red bars.

The talk went on to Woman’s Rights, and Matthew mentioned that he had an indirect relation to the subject, because a girl he used to know in childhood had become Linda Verder’s secretary.

“Is she pretty?” Mrs. Wyndwood asked.

“I don’t know; I’ve never seen her.”

“But you said you used to know her.”

“Oh! you mean Ruth Hailey. She used to be pretty, but my brother tells me she’s gone off.”

“Haven’t you seen her yourself?”

“Oh! not for years.”

“I sent Mrs. Verder a subscription some few years ago,” said Mrs. Wyndwood, “but I have ceased to believe in Woman’s Rights.”

“Woman’s Rights are a husband and children,” said Herbert, with his eye fixed on Olive.

“It is a mistake for the movement to be led by women,” pursued Mrs. Wyndwood.

“Oh, was that why you resigned when Lord Boscombe left the Council?” asked Olive, innocently.

Eleanor looked annoyed. “You mean, Mrs. Wyndwood,” Matthew hastened to say, “that they lay themselves open to the imputation of being soured spinsters.”

“Precisely,” she replied. “Besides, they are crying for the moon.”

“Or the man in it,” muttered Olive.

“No; that’s ungenerous to your sisters,” said Eleanor.

“Why demand generosity?” Olive retorted. “We are all in the same trade.” And she smiled audaciously at Herbert. “Even Mrs. Verder didn’t take up with this movement till she lost her husband, and I’ll wager this Ruth Bailey is an old maid.”

“Ruth Hailey,” corrected Matthew, flushing painfully, he scarcely knew why, perhaps from sympathy with the aspersed friend of his childhood. “She _is_ unmarried, but I am quite sure it must be from her own choice, for she is very pretty.”

“You said she wasn’t,” said Mrs. Wyndwood, quickly.

He laughed confusedly. “I was thinking of the girl.”

The subject dropped.

Ere they got in the wind freshened and Matthew was busy with the sheet. And now a proposition was broached which promised to bring a new sensation into their comparatively sequestered existence. Light-hearted discussions as to what they would do in the event of capsizing through Matthew’s mishandling of the sail led to estimates of the distance they could swim in their clothes. Mrs. Wyndwood could not swim at all, and complained of the abrupt shelving of the beach, which gave her only a few feet of splashing room, while Olive was sailing gloriously off in search of the horizon. Herbert said that, like the man who was asked if he could play the violin, he didn’t know if he could swim in his clothes, because he had never tried, and, besides, he had his comedy in his pocket, which was heavy enough to drag down a theatre. Olive said she didn’t see that it made any difference whether a lady swam in her clothes or not, especially if she was in evening dress. She claimed that the cap and gown worn in the water were as heavy as men’s boating flannels.

The upshot of the discussion was that Miss Regan challenged Mr. Matthew Strang to a race in clothes, which, she insisted, must be new. “You don’t go out getting capsized in old clothes,” she contended. “Boots you needn’t have, nor a coat; people always have time to throw them off--in books. I shall be clothed in a new yachting costume, superficially, of course, to counteract your sheddings from above.”

“What waste!” remonstrated Eleanor.

“You who pretend to philanthropy!” mocked Herbert, mimicking her intonation of “You who pretend to write comedies!”

“Waste? To learn to save my life! And don’t you see I shall forthwith give away the spoiled costume to a poor creature who would never otherwise have got it?” And Olive, who was quite serious, fell to elaborating a facetious programme of “The Creamery Regatta.”

The regatta day duly arrived. Two bathing tents were erected on the beach and decorated with flags. It was arranged that the competitors should swim out leisurely together as far as they cared to go, then turn and race for shore. Herbert was chosen referee; he offered to take them out in a boat and then accompany them back, as a precaution, but Olive laughed at him for an old woman. Eleanor, entering enthusiastically into the fun, had ordered a silver cup from London, and was to present it to the winner.

But the day opened badly, with fitful weather; a gray rain, and thunder and lightning. They waited till the afternoon, when the sun burst out in sudden fire, and in a moment the great stretch of gray cloud was shrivelling off all around it like a burned cobweb. The eager combatants dashed into their dressing-tents, and, emerging as lightly clad as was compatible with the conditions, they plunged together into the great sapphire sea. Olive’s yachting costume turned out to be a pair of knickerbockers and a jacket, rather lighter than her ordinary bathing costume, and Matthew had begged off his waistcoat, and was only hampered by a white flannel shirt and trousers. The outward swim was an ecstasy; the water was warm and sparkling with patches of molten silver breaking up into little shining circles and reuniting; it sent a voluptuous thrill to the palms to cleave its buoyant elasticity, and the forward movement of the body was a rapture. Drawing in the balmy air with joyous breaths, Matthew felt an immense gratitude for existence. There was exhilaration in the mere proximity of Olive, with her lively snatches of conversation. Her lovely flushed face and dripping hair went with him like a mermaiden’s. The same thought struck her, for she began to sing jerkily with her beautiful voice snatches of Heine’s ballad:

“Die schönste Jungfrau sitzet
Dort oben wunderbar,
Ihr gold’nes Geschmeide blitzet,
Sie kämmt ihr gold’nes Haar.”

“Yes, but you haven’t got golden hair,” the man laughed, joyously.

Farther and farther they swam into the vast shimmering blue, and ecstasy made the pace brisker than they had meditated.

“Shall we start from here?” he asked, at last.

“No, not yet. I want a long race.”

They swam on. The brown trawling boats loomed plainer in the offing.

“Here?” said Matthew.

“No--a little farther, faint-heart!”

He turned on his back and propelled himself gently, gazing up in luxurious content at the great circle of blue sky, cloud-mottled round its rim. Olive, lying on her side, paddled lazily a little ahead.

“This is delicious!” she called back. “Clothes make no difference. But fancy a clothed Lorelei!” And she began to sing again, with pauses for breath:

“Den Schiffer im kleinen Schiffe
Ergreift es mit wildem Weh;
Er schaut nicht die Felsenriffe,
Er schaut nur hinauf in die Höh’.”

He threw the reply over his head: “You shall lure me no farther.” But she mocked him, elated by the glory of motion, and witched him to follow her till the shore was far.

At last they turned, trod water, Olive cried, “One, two, three,” and they were off.

For some minutes they swam side by side, Olive making the pace, and Matthew finding it no trouble to keep up with it; at last she made a spurt and shot past him with a triumphant taunt; he allowed her to enjoy some seconds of victory, then came up hand-over-hand and forged ahead. He eased off and she overtook him; he spurted and she flagged; he let her come up again and she came up with a sneer. Resolved to damp her frolicsome spirits, he put on a powerful stroke and showed her a clean pair of heels. She made a desperate effort and drew level with him again. The instinct of victory was now aroused in the painter; he fixed his eyes on the shore and settled steadily to the task of reaching it. Very soon Olive was hopelessly in the rear. He still heard her vague cries from afar. At last they died away entirely. He turned his head to measure the interval. Olive was nowhere to be seen.

His heart contracted with a cold sick horror. He raced back with great side strokes, shouting, “Miss Regan, Miss Regan, holloa!” The great sparkling water stretched all around in deadly silent bareness, suddenly become an evil enemy. He hoped desperately she was only swimming under water for speed or to frighten him.

And then in a moment her head popped up to the right, and he saw from the exhausted expression of the face and the spasmodic struggles of the limbs that she had really gone under. In a few strokes he was at her side. She still retained sufficient self-possession not to grab at him; he supported her with one hand, then with the rest of his limbs he struck out stoutly for home, she helping him with feeble movements. After an interval of weakness and humility, she recovered somewhat and smiled faintly.

“So you wouldn’t follow the Lorelei,” she spluttered, reproachfully.

“I am sorry I followed her so far,” he said, ruefully regarding the distant shore.

Olive struggled for breath. “Prosaic man! I waited down there for you, but I gave you up and came to the surface again.” She essayed sturdier kicks.

“You only sank once?” he said.

“Yes; didn’t you hear me calling you to come?”

“I heard sounds, but I thought they were epigrams.”

“Brute! To hit a woman when she’s down. But I shall be better soon.... I hope they can’t see us from shore.”

“Don’t talk! You brought Herbert an opera-glass to see we started fair.”

“Nonsense,” Olive gasped, indignantly.

“I distinctly remember it.”

“How dare you set up your memory against a drowning woman’s?”

He was glad to find her like herself, and not alarmed. Her strokes were getting stronger now, but he still feared for the consequences if she should suddenly lose her nerve. “What did you think of when you sank?” he asked, lightly, to make her think the danger of sinking was over.

“Of Her--” she began, and stopped short. “Of her carryings-on at my funeral, poor Nor. I was regretting I hadn’t made my will and left her my nose.”

This sounded pure nonsense to her companion.

“I think I can go by myself now,” she added, after a long silence. “Thank you so much for the use of your arm.”

“You are quite sure?” he said, anxiously.

“Yes. Of course, you have won.”

He removed his arm, but kept watchfully at her side. And his misgivings were justified, for, after a slow twenty yards, her strokes became so spent and irregular that he came to her assistance again, and she accepted his support with a wan smile.

“It’s this soppy, clogging costume,” she said.

“You had better keep your breath in your lungs,” he said, not in rebuke, but in hortation.

“I’ll inflate myself like an air-balloon,” she replied, humbly. “I am so sorry to be such a nuisance.” And she turned upon her back and paddled feebly in silence.

He did not answer, for his own nerve was giving way. The responsibility weighed more than the burden, though that was heavy enough with the double weight of superadded garments. He had a spasm of sickening apprehension. His own strokes were getting jerkier; what if he should fail to reach that strip of beach on which he dimly descried two agitated figures! And in this tense, terrible moment the figures were blotted out, he saw only the cliffs in the background and the white sea-gulls overhead, and he was a boy again in the Bay of Fundy, swimming in his clothes for dear life. The illusion was momentary, but it left the memory. A sense of the tragic contrast between the ardent Nova-Scotian lad, dreaming of pictures, and the popular London painter, occupied his consciousness, while his limbs moved automatically shoreward. Then he remembered that of the two who had struck out for home on that memorable day the sailor had only put off the day of drowning. And at the thought that ancient dead face swam up again in front of him. Oh, it was horrible to die, to be dragged down out of the sunlight, to leave a world which held Eleanor Wyndwood! What would become of her? She would live to forget him; she would marry; another man would hold her in his arms. Another man! Oh, direful thought, bitterer than death! There was no need for his death ere another man could possess her. She was only his friend; he had not wanted more than her friendship. Oh, ghastly self-delusion! Olive’s sneer at the friendship of the sexes rang in his brain, and that strange intoxicating expression in Eleanor’s face--half abashment, half radiance--dispelled the vision of his father’s. In a moment of delirium his lips touched her warm cheek; it was her weight that was on his arm. What did it matter if they had a gleam of happiness, he and Eleanor, both victims of an unsatisfactory world? Was not the great, shining, mocking, remorseless sea waiting to suck him down, indifferent to the aspirations and agonizings of the long years? And then between his lips and hers the dead stony face swam up again, and he turned on his back to escape it, and found unexpected relief in the more reposeful attitude and in the change of arm involved, for the left, which had supported Olive, had grown numb. When, sufficiently rested, he turned again he saw with a thrill of joy that the shore was perceptibly nearer. There were more than two figures now; he made out Primitiva and the old cook. And Herbert’s arm was round Mrs. Wyndwood’s waist, supporting her. A powerful spurt brought him within clear hearing of Herbert’s hail.

“Shall I come out?”

Olive roused herself. “What for?” she sang out, lustily. “The race is decided.”

“All right,” came the joyous reply. “I was sure Matt could manage it. I wouldn’t spoil his chances of a medal.”

As they came nearer in he cheered them on with sportive ejaculations, and confounded the beach because there wasn’t a single boat within half a mile. When the couple scrambled on shore, shaking themselves like spaniels, Mrs. Wyndwood dragged more heavily on Herbert’s sustaining arm, and he saw that she had fainted. Almost at the same instant, by a curious coincidence, the sun, upon which the clouds had gradually been closing in, again disappeared, and the wail of the wind rang wilder round the cliffs.

There was confusion in the household that afternoon. Mrs. Wyndwood soon revived, but had to be put to bed, and Miss Regan, who was secretly grateful for an excitement that kept her from assuming the invalid herself, sat with her. The men hung about the house, anxious, and receiving frequent reassuring bulletins by the lips of Primitiva. Presently those pretty lips brought them an invitation to stay to seven o’clock dinner, when Mrs. Wyndwood would try to come down to present the cup. They need have no delicacy about the larder, for Colonel Chesham had opportunely sent Mrs. Wyndwood a gift of grouse. They galloped over the cliffs to get themselves into their dress-clothes. Meantime Mrs. Wyndwood had fallen asleep, and at her bedside Olive Regan writhed in a black paroxysm, asking herself why, having once gone down, she had wanted to come up again.

The hostesses were a little late, but the reunion was gay beyond all precedent. The last trappings of ceremony were thrown off. A Bohemian merriment reigned, regardless of the liveried menial who alone sustained the dignity of the dinner-table. Mrs. Wyndwood, looking a shade paler and more spiritual, but no whit less beautiful than her wont, appeared in a low white satin gown, with the same jewelled butterfly poised at the bosom as on the night when Matthew had met her at the Academy soirée. He fancied some occult significance in the circumstance. Olive was in soft green that harmonized so suavely with her complexion as to give her a less aggressive air than when she wore blue. There was a fragrant tea-rose with a sprig of maiden-hair fern at her throat; and the table was gay with many choice specimens of aster and hydrangea, presents from Primitiva’s father. Outside the roar of the sea and the wail of the wind emphasized the charm and comfort of the interior and the gladness of being alive.

There was a wavering flush on Mrs. Wyndwood’s cheek and a shining moisture in her eye as, before they sat down, she presented Matthew with the cup, which Olive complained had been dashed from her lips. Interrogated as to her sensations, she said she had a horrible feeling of littleness in the midst of the great churn of waters and under the naked sky. It did not seem the same sea she had been bestriding so recklessly and voluptuously. She seemed to herself absolutely unimportant--a mere atom in the blind wash of the waves, a straw they would engulf, drift, or disgorge with equal indifference. It was this thought that suddenly paralyzed her, and made her give up and go under; when she came up, something not herself made her strain every sinew to keep afloat.

“Something not ourselves that makes for life,” said Herbert.

She smiled.

“My last thought was of you,” she said, audaciously. “I determined to send you a message by submarine cable.”

“I had the greatest ado to prevent Primitiva stripping and going out to fetch you in,” he rejoined, laughing.

The incidents of the regatta continued to afford amusement from the _hors d’œuvres_ to the dessert. At the fish Olive sprang up suddenly and rushed to the window. Her exclamation of “The regatta fireworks!” drew them all after her.

Herbert uttered the long-drawn “Oh!” of the spectators of pyrotechnics. It was, indeed, an extraordinary set-piece, this sunset, in affinity with the fitful tempestuous day--a sky steel-blue again, with great broad sulphur-edged clouds of black smoke; on the upper rim of this smoke, white clouds; towards the horizon, over the inhabited hills, a lovely pale-green light, and on the right of that a monstrous sulphur-cloud, its base hidden below the horizon; the shadow of this brilliant cloud darkening to a purple and crimson beauty on the ever-stirring water, and the cloud itself infiltrating its pores more and more with sulphur and deepening momently to old gold; over the green light, patches of bright gold; the left extremity of the sulphur-cloud coming to meet it in spots of smoky red; every little pool of rain or brine on the beach crimsoning and purpling in responsive radiance.

They returned to their fish, but watched from their seats till the beautiful sulphur-cloud faded into a pale bluish blot. Mrs. Wyndwood, observing it all minutely with her recently acquired artistic vision, said she had never realized before how many editions a sunset went through; she wondered how artists arrested it long enough to paint it. Herbert said sunsets were not fixed but faked. He resumed his badinage of Olive for her failure to see her whole life defile pictorially before her; and she apologized for her forgetfulness on the ground that she hadn’t arrived at drowning point. A discussion on memory ensued. Mrs. Wyndwood acknowledged possessing a good verbal memory--especially for poetry. Herbert said that he could only remember ideas, so that he carried away nothing from contemporary literature. Only the Continentals had ideas; the English were a wooden race, “the wooden heads of Old England,” he said, derisively; he was glad of his infusion of French blood, there was no salt in English life--nothing but putrefying Puritanism. Olive said, although she was a Celt, she could remember neither ideas nor words. Herbert asked what was her earliest recollection. After screwing up her forehead in earnest effort she replied, honestly, “I forget,” and he cried “Bull!” Mrs. Wyndwood proffered her own earliest recollection--of gliding in her mother’s arms in a gondola, with a boatman crying _Stali_--and was curious to know Matthew’s. He replied mirthfully that he didn’t remember, and covered his discomposure with champagne. He could not expose to strangers that memory of his mother scolding his father, shrieking, vociferating, offering to throw up the position, threatening to shoot herself. Even Mrs. Wyndwood would never know that--no one would ever really see the scars on his soul. The thought of her, now babbling harmlessly, saner in her insanity than in her sanity, came up like the skeleton at the feast. He put her resolutely outside with the night and the wind that wailed like a woman. But he heard them moaning: “Oh, the pain of the world!”

After dinner they walked along the shore towards the neighboring village. It blew half a gale now, but the air was not cold and the ladies took only wraps. The quartette looked upon this deserted beach as a private promenade, an appanage of the house. They walked two and two, Matthew and Miss Regan, Herbert and Mrs. Wyndwood. There was only a rim of orange all along the horizon; the rollers thundered on the stones, smashing themselves in flying spray; a fierce undertow kept the waves sandy for half a mile out; there was just light enough to distinguish where the paler green commenced. The darkness grew rapidly as they walked; the last faint reflection of sunset faded on the gray sea. An unusual silence possessed them after the exuberance of the evening. They stopped now and again to shake the little pebbles out of their shoes. All was black when they reached the village. The beach was full of wickerwork crab-pots, and the headless divided forms of skate and dog-fish loomed uncannily from the poles on which they hung. They were the crab-fishers’ bait. Only a stray mongrel represented the village, which already slept. The sea was mournful and gloomy; its pitchy blackness, over which the sky hinged like a half-raised gray lid, was relieved only by its own broken lines of foam, which sometimes rolled in six deep, looking exactly like streaks of phosphorescence on a dark wall, and adding weirdness to the forlorn desolation of the scene. There was no other line of light either on sea or land; the lonesome sea tossed sleeplessly in its agony, howling and crying.

They turned back, interchanging companions. During the walk Mrs. Wyndwood suddenly asked Matthew if his wife knew where he was: he said, “No”; sometimes his brother Billy did; Billy lived with her: his man forwarded all letters from his studio. After a long pause he added that practically he had been separated from his wife for years. Eleanor murmured again, “Poor woman,” and he was too shame-stricken to look her in the face, and to read that the sympathy was for him. They relapsed into silence, and indeed conversation was difficult.

The night had grown wilder, the wind blew more fiercely, drenching their faces with salt spray, whirling them round and round and almost lifting them off their feet. But the clouds were driven off and the star-sprinkled heaven was revealed, majestic.

Near the house Mrs. Wyndwood and Matthew Strang stopped to admire the sublime spectacle, sheltering themselves from the gale in a niche in the cliff; the other two had already gone round the craggy projection which hid the house.

They watched the mad cavalry charge of creaming billows; watched them break, thundering and throwing their spray heavenwards like a continuous play of white fountains all along the line of march. To the right, beyond the village whence they had come, where the cliff jutted out at its lowest level, a ghostly fountain leaped again and again sheer over the top of the cliff with a crashing and splashing that was succeeded by the long-receding moan of the back-drawn wave soughing through the rattling pebbles.

Her face, flushed with the passion of the storm, showed divinely in the dim starlight; beneath her wrap her bosom, panting from the walk in the teeth of the wind, heaved with excitement; the gale had dishevelled her hair. They scarcely spoke; the organ-roll of the sea crashed majestically like the bass in some savage symphony of the winds.

Now at last the moon leaped out, framed in a weird cloud-rack; the moonlight played on her loveliness and made it wonderful.

She moved slightly forward. “The cliff is too damp to lean upon,” she murmured.

Audaciously he slipped a trembling arm against the rock and let her form rest against that. She scarcely seemed conscious of him; she was watching the rampant, seething waters, volleying their white jets skyward with a crash of cannon that outroared the wind; her scarlet lips were parted eagerly; the dreamy light had gone from her eyes; they flashed fire.

“Oh, I could dare to-night!” she cried.

The wind blew her tresses into his face; the perfume of them stung his blood. Her loveliness was maddening him. So close! so close! Oh, to shower mad kisses upon her lips, her eyes, her hair! What did it matter, there on that wild beach alone with the elements! He had been so near death; who would have recked if he had been dead now, tossed in that welter of waters?

The waves broke with a thousand thunders, the white fountains flew at the stars; they seemed alive, exultant, frenzied with the ecstasy of glorious living. Oh, for life--simple, sublime--the keen, tingling, savage life of Vikings and sea-robbers in the days before civilization, in the full-blooded days when men loved and hated fiercely, strenuously, wrenching through rapine and slaughter the women they coveted. Ah, surely he had some of their blood; it ran in his veins like fire; he was of their race, despite his dreamings. He was his father’s son, loving the storm and the battle.

The wind wailed; it was like the cry of his tortured heart, his yearning for happiness. It rose higher and higher. A bat flew between them and the moon. Eleanor nestled to him involuntarily; her face was very near to his. It gleamed seductively; there was no abashment, only alluring loveliness; the fire in her eyes kindled him now not to the secondary life of Art, but to the primary life of realities. Could she not hear his heart beat? Yes, surely the storm of the elements had passed into her blood, too. Her face was ardent, ecstatic. His arm held her tight. Oh, to stake the world on a kiss!

The moon was hidden again; they were alone in the mad, dim night; the complexities of Society were far away. They looked at each other, and through her eyes he seemed to see heaven.

A star fell overhead. It drew her eyes away a moment to watch its fiery curve. He felt the spell was broken. The wind shrieked with an eldritch cry, like the mocking threnody of his thwarted hope. He had a shuddering remembrance of Mad Peggy. And straightway he saw her weird figure dashing round the crag in the darkness--a shawl over her head, and a lovely face, at once radiant and frenzied, gleaming from between its dusky folds. His heart almost stopped, a superstitious thrill froze his hot blood. Never to be happy! Ah, God! never! never! To thirst and thirst, and nothing ever to quench his thirst!

Mrs. Wyndwood started forward. “Oh, there you are, Olive!”

The figure threw passionate arms round her. “Comfort me, darling; I am engaged.”

* * * * *

For the happier Herbert had spoken. And Olive had listened shyly, humbly, with tears, full of an exquisite uplifting emotion, akin to the exaltation of righteousness, at the thought of giving herself to this man, of living her life with and for the one true soul in the world.

They stood close to the hoary rim of the black welter; dusky figures, wind-rocked and spray-drenched, a little apart from each other, the shining house in the background.

“And when did you begin to think of me--in that way?” she faltered.

“I never thought of you in any other. But that night when Matthew arrived, when you sat nid-nodding in the grandfather’s chair, you maddened me; you were adorable! the contrast was exquisite. To think of you--a wilful little misanthrope--to think of that glorious, wayward creature fading away till she suited the chair. Oh, it was too--”

He broke off. Passion robbed him of words. He moved nearer--she drew back.

“Oh, but will you still”--she hesitated, shy of the word--”love me when I do suit the chair?”

“I shall always see you as you were then.”

She laughed with a half-sob.

“And just then,” she confessed deliciously, fluttering even now like a bird in the net, “I was beginning to get frightened of you. I felt you growing upon me, shadowing the horizon like the roc in the _Arabian Nights_. And the pain of the world was outside--in the great black night--calling to me in my slough of luxury.”

“You witch! Veil those eyes or I shall kiss them.”

She retreated.

“And why were you frightened of me?” he asked, tenderly.

She said, humbly, in little shy jerks: “I felt like in the sea this morning--one little atom, and the whole world against me, and my own weakness most of all.... I had prided myself on my swimming, and here was I being dragged under ... just like other girls ... a victim to the same ridiculous passion.”

“You delightful, candid creature! With me as the object?”

“Don’t be flippant now, Herbert.” How delicious his name sounded; it made amends for the rebuke! “You do understand me. Marriage is a second birth--voluntary, this time. It means accepting the universe, which was thrust upon one unasked.”

“It means making the best of it.”

“Oh, surely it means more. It means passing it on to others. But I surrender. I cannot live without you.”

“Olive!”

He sprang to take her, but she eluded him. “Look! the moon is covered up again.”

“I only want to see your face.”

“Don’t talk like other men, though I have fallen like other girls.”

“No, you are always yourself, Olive--I have dreamed of this moment. I would not have it otherwise--except perhaps with you in the grandfather’s chair and a poke bonnet.”

“Now you are _your_self. This is such a conventional ending to a holiday, we must preserve what originality we can.” She was recovering her spirits.

“A conventional ending! Why, it’s a most romantic incongruous match. It beats the comedy. I shall burn it.”

“No, let’s produce it--it wouldn’t cost much.”

“I am not worthy of you, Olive,” he said, with a quiver in his voice. “I have nothing.”

“Oh! When you have my heart!”

“My queen of girls! But what of your relatives?”

A gleam of fun passed across her wet face. She had her droll look of mischief.

“You are all of them. I was of age long ago--I am awfully old, you know--you take me with your eyes open--”

“I can’t; yours dazzle me.”

“That’ll do for the comedy,” she laughed, gleefully. “Still, if you do want me, there are only you and I to consider.”

“Only we two,” he murmured.

“We two,” she repeated, and her eyes were suffused with tender moisture.

There was a delicious silence. He tried to take her hand. This time she abandoned it to him; a wave of moral emotion lifted her to the stars.

The wind wailed, the black sea crashed white at their feet, its whirling brine blinded their eyes as with salt tears.

“Isn’t it curious?” she said, as they moved back a little, hand in hand.

“What, dearest?”

“That you and I should be made happier by our common perception of the unhappiness of life?”

“Queer girl!” he thought. But he only squeezed her hand.

“The Catechism is right,” she went on, thoughtfully, proceeding to misquote it. “The waves are too strong. It’s no use fighting against your sex or your station. Do your duty in that state of life in which it has pleased God to call you. But I would have that text taught to the rich exclusively, not to the poor. The poor should be encouraged to ascend; the rich should be taught contentment. Else their strength for good is wasted fruitlessly.” And the electric current of love generated by those close-pressed palms flashed to her soul the mission of a life of noble work hand in hand.

Herbert scarcely heard her. The glow of her lovely face, the flashes of feeling that passed over it, the tears that glistened on her eyelashes--these absorbed his senses. Her generalizations were only a vague, exquisite music. He lifted her hand and held it passionately to his lips. She murmured, beseechingly:

“You will never disappoint me, Herbert?”

“My darling!” And he strove to draw her nearer and press his first kiss upon those bewitching lips.

“Oh! there’s a star falling,” she cried, and slipped from his hold, a beautiful Diana, virgin as the white spray and tameless as the night.

She had disappointed Herbert. He was puzzled. But as she disappeared round the cliff in quest of the others, a smile of triumphant content curled round his boyish lips.

“That’s the last touch of piquancy,” he murmured, as he chased her round the crag.