Chapter V: Part II: The Discord (2)

He turned to leave the gallery, but as he did so he paused suddenly. Far down, at the other end, something was slowly coming toward him. The gallery was very long and ill-lighted by the narrow, infrequent windows, and he could not distinguish whom it was. He stood, however, involuntarily waiting for it to approach him. But how slowly it came, as one groping or one walking in a dream! Then, as it gradually neared him, he saw that it was a woman, dimly outlined, but still unmistakably a woman. He spoke, but there was no answer, nothing but the echo of his voice through the gallery. Someone trying to play a practical joke upon him! Perhaps it was Weir: it would be just like her. He walked forward quickly, but before he had taken a dozen steps the advancing figure came opposite one of the windows, and the moonlight fell about it. Dartmouth started back and caught his breath as if someone had struck him. For a moment his pulses stood still, and sense seemed suspended. Then he walked quickly forward and stood in front of her.

"Sionèd!" he said, in a low voice which thrilled through the room. "Sionèd!" He put out his hand and took hers. It was ice-cold, and its contact chilled him to the bone; but his clasp grew closer and his eyes gazed into hers with passionate longing.

"I am dead," she said. "I am dead, and I am so cold." She drew closer and peered up into his face. "I have found you at last," she went on, "but I wandered so far. There was no nook or corner of Eternity in which I did not search. But although we went together, we were hurled to the opposite poles of space before our spiritual eyes had met, and an unseen hand directed us ever apart. I was alone, alone, in a great, gray, boundless land, with but the memory of those brief moments of happiness to set at bay the shrieking host of regrets and remorse and repentance which crowded about me. I floated on and on and on for millions and millions of miles; but of you, my one thought on earth, my one thought in Eternity, I could find no trace, not even the whisper of your voice in passing. I tossed myself upon a hurrying wind and let it carry me whither it would. It gathered strength and haste as it flew, and whirled me out into the night, nowhere, everywhere. And then it slackened--and moaned--and then, with one great sob, it died, and once more I was alone in space and an awful silence. And then a voice came from out the void and said to me, 'Go down; he is there;' and I knew that he meant to Earth, and for a moment I rebelled. To go back to that terrible--But on Earth there had been nothing so desolate as this--and if you were there! So I came--and I have found you at last."

She put her arms about him and drew him down onto the low window-seat. He shivered at her touch, but felt no impulse to resist her will, and she pressed his head down upon her cold breast. Then, suddenly, all things changed; the gallery, the moonlight, the white-robed, ice-cold woman faded from sense. The storm was no longer in his ears nor were the waves at his feet. He was standing in a dusky Eastern room, familiar and dear to him. Tapestries of rich stuffs were about him, and the skins of wild animals beneath his feet. Beyond, the twilight stole through a window, but did not reach where he stood. And in his close embrace was the woman he loved, with the stamp on her face of suffering, of desperate resolution, and of conscious, welcomed weakness. And in his face was the regret for wasted years and possibilities, and a present, passionate gladness; _that_ he could see in the mirror of the eyes over which the lids were slowly falling.... And the woman wore a clinging, shining yellow gown, and a blaze of jewels in her hair. What was said he hardly knew. It was enough to feel that a suddenly-born, passionate joy was making his pulses leap and his head reel; to know that heaven had come to him in this soft, quiet Southern night.

* * * * *

VII.

Dartmouth opened his eyes and looked about him. The storm had died, the waves were at rest, and he was alone. He let his head fall back against the frame of the window, and his eyes closed once more. What a dream!--so vivid!--so realistic! Was it not his actual life? Could he take up the threads of another? He felt ten years older; and, retreating down the dim, remote corridors of his brain, were trooping memories of a long, regretted, troubled, eventful past. In a moment they had vanished like ghosts and left no trace; he could recall none of them. He opened his eyes again and looked down the gallery, and gradually his perceptions grasped its familiar lines, and he was himself once more. He rose to his feet and put his hand to his head. That woman whom he had taken for the ghost of one dead and gone had been Weir, of course. She had arisen in her sleep and attired herself like the grandmother whose living portrait she was; she had piled up her hair and caught her white gown up under her bosom; and, in the shadows and mystery of night, small wonder that she had looked as if the canvas in the gallery below had yielded her up! But what had her words meant?--her words, and that dream?--but no--they were not what he wanted. There had been something else--what was it? He felt as if a mist had newly arisen to cloud his faculties. There had been something else which had made him not quite himself as he had stood there with his arms about the woman who had been Weir, and yet not Weir. Above the pain and joy and passion which had shaken him, there had been an unmistakable perception of--an attribute--a quality--of another sort--of a power, of which he, Harold Dartmouth, had never been conscious--of--of--ah, yes! of the power to pour out at the feet of that woman, in richest verse, the love she had awakened, and make them both immortal. What were the words? They had been written legibly in his brain; he remembered now. He had seen and read them--yes, at last, at last! "Her face! her form!" No! no! not that again. Oh, why would they not come? They had been there, the words; the sense must be there, the inspiration, the battling for voice and victory. They were ready to pour through his speech in a flood of song, but that iron hand forced them back--down, down, setting blood and brain on fire. Ah! what was that? Far off, at the end of some long gallery, there was a sweet, dying strain of music, and there were words--gathering in volume; they were rolling on; they were coming; they were thundering through his brain in a mighty chorus! There! he had grasped them--No! that iron hand had grasped them--and was hurling them back. In another moment it would have forced them down into their cell and turned the key! He must catch and hold one of them! Yes, he had it! Oh! victory!--"Her eyes, her hair."

Dartmouth thrust out his hands as if fighting with a physical enemy, and he looked as if he had been through the agonies of death. The conflict in his brain had suddenly ceased, but his physical strength was exhausted. He turned and walked uncertainly to his room; then he collected his scattered wits sufficiently to drop some laudanum and take it, that he might ward off, if possible, the attack of physical and spiritual prostration which had been the result of a former experience of a similar kind. Then, dressed as he was, he flung himself on the bed and slept.

VIII.

When Dartmouth awoke the next day, the sun was streaming across the bed and Jones's anxious face was bending over him.

"Oh, Mr. 'Arold," exclaimed Jones, "you've got it again."

Dartmouth laughed aloud. "One would think I had delirium tremens," he said.

He put his hand over his eyes, and struggled with the desire to have the room darkened. The melancholy had fastened itself upon him, and he knew that for three or four days he was to be the victim of one of his unhappiest moods. The laudanum had lulled his brain and prevented violent reaction after its prolonged tension; but his spirits were at zero, and his instinct was to shut out the light and succumb to his enemy without resistance. If he had been anywhere but at Rhyd-Alwyn he would not have thought twice about it; but if he shut himself up in his room, not only would Weir be frightened and unhappy, but it was probable that Sir Iltyd would question the desirability of a son-in-law who was given to prolonged and uncontrollable attacks of the blues. He dressed and went down-stairs, but Weir was nowhere to be found, and after a search through the various rooms and corners of the castle which she was in the habit of frequenting, he met her maid and was informed that Miss Penrhyn was not well and would not come down-stairs before dinner. The news was very unwelcome to Dartmouth. Weir at least would have been a distraction. Now he must get through a dismal day, and fight his enemy by himself. To make matters worse, it was raining, and he could not go out and ride or hunt. He went into Sir Iltyd's library and talked to him for the rest of the morning. Sir Iltyd was not exciting, at his best, and to-day he had a bad cold; so after lunch Dartmouth went up to his tower and resigned himself to his own company. He sat down before the fire, and taking his head between his hands allowed the blue devils to triumph. He felt dull as well as depressed; but for a time he made an attempt to solve the problem of the phenomenon to which he had been twice subjected. That it was a phenomenon he did not see any reason to doubt. If he had spent his life in a vain attempt to write poetry and an unceasing wish for the necessary inspiration, there would be nothing remarkable in his mind yielding suddenly to the impetus of accumulated pressure, wrenching itself free of the will's control, and dashing off on a wild excursion of its own. But he had never voluntarily taken a pen in his hand to make verse, nor had he even felt the desire to possess the gift, except as a part of general ambition. He may have acknowledged the regret that he could not immortalize himself by writing a great poem, but the regret was the offspring of personal ambition, not of yearning poetical instinct. But the most extraordinary phase of the matter was that such a tempest could take place in a brain as well regulated as his own. He was eminently a practical man, and a good deal of a thinker. He had never been given to flights of imagination, and even in his attacks of melancholy, although his will might be somewhat enfeebled, his brain could always work clearly and cleverly. The lethargy which had occasionally got the best of him had invariably been due to violent nervous shock or strain, and was as natural as excessive bodily languor after violent physical effort. Why, then, should his brain twice have acted as if he had sown it with eccentric weeds all his life, instead of planting it with the choicest seeds he could obtain, and watering and cultivating them with a patience and an interest which had been untiring?

But the explanation of his attempt to put his unborn poem into words gave him less thought to-day than it had after its first occurrence; there were other phases of last night's experience weirder and more unexplainable still. Paramount, of course, was the vision or dream--which would seem to have been induced by some magnetic property possessed and exerted by Weir. Such things do not occur without cause, and he was not the sort of man to yield himself, physically and mentally, his will and his perceptions, to the unconscious caprice of a somnambulist. And the scene had cut itself so deeply into the tablets of his memory that he found himself forgetting more than once that it was not an actual episode of his past. He wished he could see Weir, and hear her account of her mental experiences of those hours. If her dream should have been a companion to his, then the explanation would suggest itself that the scene might have been a vagary of her brain; that in some way which he did not pretend to explain, she had hypnotized him, and that his brain had received a photographic imprint of what had been in hers. It would then be merely a sort of telepathy. But why should she have dreamed a dream in which they both were so unhappily metamorphosed? and why should it have produced so powerful an impression upon his waking sense? And why, strangest of all, had he, without thought or self-surprise, gone to her, and with his soul stirred to its depths, called her "Sionèd"? True, she had almost disguised herself, and had been the living counterfeit of Sionèd Penrhyn; but that was no reason why he should have called a woman who had belonged to his grandmother's time by her first name. Could Weir, thoroughly imbued with the character she was unconsciously representing, have exercised her hypnotic power from the moment she entered the gallery, and left him without power to think or feel except through her own altered perceptions? He thrust out his foot against the fender, almost overturning it, and, throwing back his head, clasped his hands behind it and scowled at the black ceiling above him. He was a man who liked things explained, and he felt both sullen and angry that he should have had an experience which baffled his powers of analysis and reason. His partial solution gave him no satisfaction, and he had the uncomfortable sense of actual mystery, and a premonition of something more to come. This, however, he was willing to attribute to the depressed condition of his spirits, which threw its gloom over every object, abstract and concrete, and which induced the tendency to exaggerate any strange or unpleasant experience of which he had been the victim. It was useless to try to think of anything else; his brain felt as if it had resolved itself into a kaleidoscope, through which those three scenes shifted eternally. Finally, he fell asleep, and did not awaken until it was time to dress for dinner. Before he left his room, Weir's maid knocked at his door and handed him a note, in which the lady of Rhyd-Alwyn apologized for leaving him to himself for an entire day, and announced that she would not appear at dinner, but would meet him in the drawing-room immediately thereafter. Dartmouth read the note through with a puzzled expression: it was formal and stilted, even for Weir. She was gone when he came to his senses in the gallery the night before. Had she awakened and become conscious of the situation? It was not a pleasant reminiscense for a girl to have, and he felt honestly sorry for her. Then he groaned in spirit at the prospect of an hour's tête-à-tête with Sir Iltyd. He liked Sir Iltyd very much, and thought him possessed of several qualifications valuable in a father-in-law, among them his devotion to his library; but in his present frame of mind he felt that history and politics were topics he would like to relegate out of existence.

He put the best face on the situation he could muster, however, and managed to conceal from Sir Iltyd the fact that his spirits were in other than their normal condition. The old baronet's eyes were not very sharp, particularly when he had a cold, and he was not disposed to notice Harold's pallor and occasional fits of abstraction, so long as one of his favorite topics was under discussion. When Dartmouth found that he had got safely through the dinner, he felt that he had accomplished a feat which would have rejoiced the heart of his grandmother, and he thought that his reward could not come a moment too soon. Accordingly, for the first time since he had been at Rhyd-Alwyn, he declined to sit with Sir Iltyd over the wine, and went at once in search of Weir.

As he opened the door of the drawing-room he found the room in semi-darkness, lighted only by the last rays of the setting sun, which strayed through the window. He went in, but did not see Weir. She was not in her accustomed seat by the fire, and he was about to call her name, when he came to a sudden halt, and for the moment every faculty but one seemed suspended. A woman was standing by the open window looking out over the water. She had not heard him, and had not turned her head. Dartmouth felt a certain languor, as of one who is dreaming, and is half-conscious that he is dreaming, and therefore yields unresistingly to the pranks of his sleeping brain. Was it Weir, or was it the woman who had been a part of his vision last night? She wore a long, shining yellow dress, and her arms and neck were bare. Surely it was the other woman! She turned her head a little, and he saw her face in profile; there was the same stamp of suffering, the same pallor. Weir had never looked like that; before he had known her she had had, sometimes, a little expression of sadness and abstraction which had made her look very picturesque, but which had borne no relationship to suffering or experience. And the scene! the room filled with dying light, the glimpse of water beyond, the very attitude of the woman at the casement--all were strangely and deeply familiar to him, although not the details of the vision of last night. The only things that were wanting were the Eastern hangings to cover the dark wainscotted old walls, and the skins on the black, time-stained floor.

With a sudden effort of will he threw off the sense of mystery which had again taken possession of him, and walked forward quickly. As Weir heard him, she turned her head and met his eyes, and although a closer look at her face startled him afresh, his brain was his own again, and he was determined that it should remain so. He might yield to supernatural impressions when unprepared, but not when both brain and will were defiantly on the alert. That she was not only unaccountably altered, but that she shrank from him, was evident; and he was determined to hear her version of last night's adventure without delay. He believed that she would unconsciously say something which would throw a flood of light on the whole matter.

"Where did you get that dress?" he said, abruptly.

She started sharply, and the color flew to the roots of her hair, then, receding, left her paler than before. "Why do you ask me that?" she demanded, with unconcealed, almost terrified suspicion in her tones.

"Because," he said, looking straight into her eyes, "I had a peculiar dream last night, in which you wore a dress exactly like this. It is rather a remarkable coincidence that you should put it on to-night."

"Harold!" she cried, springing forward and catching his arm convulsively in both her hands, "what has happened? What is it? And how can you talk so calmly when to me it seems--"

He put his arm around her. "Seems what?" he said, soothingly. "Did _you_ have a dream, too?"

"Yes," she said, her face turning a shade paler, "I had a dream."

"And in it you wore this dress?"

"Yes."

"Tell me your dream."

"No!" she exclaimed, "I cannot."

Dartmouth put his hand under her chin and pushed her head back against his shoulder, upturning her face. "You must tell me," he said, quietly; "every word of it! I am not asking you out of curiosity, but because the dream I had was too remarkable to be without meaning. I cannot reach that meaning unassisted; but with your help I believe I can. So tell me at once."

"Oh, Harold!" she cried, throwing her arms suddenly about him and clinging to him, "I have no one else to speak to but you: I cannot tell my father; he would not understand. No girl ever felt so horribly alone as I have felt to-day. If it had not been for you I believe I should have killed myself; but you are everything to me, only--_how_ can I tell you?"

He tightened his arms about her and kissed her.

"Don't kiss me," she exclaimed sharply, trying to free herself.

"Why not?" he demanded, in surprise. "Why should I not kiss you?"

She let her head drop again to his shoulder. "True," she said; "why should you not? It is only that I forget that I am not the woman I dreamed I was; and for her--it was wrong to kiss you."

"Weir, tell me your dream at once. It is for your good as well as mine that I insist. You will be miserable and terrified until you take someone into your confidence. I believe I can explain your dream, as well as give you the comfort of talking it over with you."

She slipped suddenly out of his arms and walked quickly to the end of the room and back, pausing within a few feet of him. The room was growing dark, and he could distinguish little of her beyond the tall outline of her form and the unnatural brilliancy of her eyes, but he respected her wish and remained where he was.

"Very well," she said, rapidly. "I will tell you. I went to sleep without much terror, for I had told my maid to sleep in my dressing-room. But I suppose the storm and the story I had told you had unsettled my nerves, for I soon began to dream a horrid dream. I thought I was dead once more. I could feel the horrible chill and pain, the close-packed ice about me. I was dead, but yet there was a spirit within me. I could feel it whispering to itself, although it had not as yet spread its fire through me and awakened me into life. It whispered that it was tired, and disheartened, and disappointed, and wanted rest; that it had been on a long, fruitless journey, and was so weary that it would not take up the burden of life again just yet. But its rest could not be long; there was someone it must find, and before he had gone again to that boundless land, whose haunting spirits were impalpable as flecks of mist. And then it moaned and wept, and seemed to live over its past, and I went back with it, or I was one with it--I cannot define. It recalled many scenes, but only one made an impression on my memory; I can recall no other." She paused abruptly, but Dartmouth made no comment; he stood motionless in breathless expectancy. She put her hand to her head, and after a moment continued haltingly:

"I--oh--I hardly know how to tell it. I seemed to be standing with you in a room more familiar to me than any room in this castle; a room full of tapestries and skins and cushions and couches; a room which if I had seen it in a picture I should have recognized as Oriental, although I have never seen an Oriental room. I have always had an indescribable longing to see Constantinople, and it seemed to me in that dream as if I had but to walk to the window and look down upon it--as if I had looked down upon it many times and loved its beauty. But although I was with you, and your arms were about me, we were not as we are now--as we were before the dream: we had suffered all that a man and a woman can suffer who love and are held apart. And you looked as you do now, yet utterly different. You looked years older, and you were dressed so strangely. I do not know how I looked, but I know how I felt. I felt that I had made up my mind to commit a deadly sin, and that I gloried in it. I had suffered because to love you was a sin; but I only loved you the more for that reason. Then you slowly drew me further into the room and pressed me more closely in your arms and kissed me again, and then--I--oh--I do not know--it is all so vague I don't know what it meant--but it seemed as if the very foundations of my life were being swept away. And yet--oh, I cannot explain! I do not know, myself." And she would have thrown herself headlong on the sofa had not Dartmouth sprang forward and caught her.

"There, never mind," he said, quickly. "Let that go. It is of no consequence. A dream like that must necessarily end in a climax of incoherence and excitement."

He drew her down on the sofa, and for a moment said nothing further. He had to acknowledge that she had deepened the mystery, and given no key. A silence fell, and neither moved. Suddenly she raised her head. "What was your dream?" she demanded.

"The same. I don't pretend to explain it. And I shall not insult your understanding by inventing weak excuses. If it means anything we will give the problem no rest until we have solved it. If we cannot solve it, then we are justified in coming to the conclusion that there is nothing in it. But I believe we shall get to the bottom of it yet."

"Perhaps," she said, wearily; "I do not know. I only feel that I shall never be myself again, but must go through life with that woman's burden of sin and suffering weighing me down." She paused a moment, and then continued: "In that dream I wore a dress like this, and that is the reason I put it on to-night. I was getting some things in Paris before I left, and I bought it thinking you would like it; I had heard you say that yellow was your favorite color. When my maid opened the door of my wardrobe to-night to take out a dress, and I saw this hanging there, it gave me such a shock that I caught at a chair to keep from falling. And then I felt irresistibly impelled to put it on. I felt as if it were a shroud, vivid in color as it is; but it had an uncanny fascination for me, and I experienced a morbid delight in feeling both spirit and flesh revolt, and yet compelling them to do my will. I never knew that it was in me to feel so, but I suppose I am utterly demoralized by so realistically living over again that awful experience of my childhood. If it happened again I should either be carried back to the vault for good and all, or end my days in the topmost tower of the castle, with a keeper, and the storms and sea-gulls for sole companions."

She sat up in a moment, and putting her hand on his shoulder, looked him full in the face for the first time. "It seems to me that I know you now," she said, "and that I never knew you before. When I first saw you to-night I shrank from you: why, I hardly know, except that the personality of that woman had woven itself so strongly into mine that for the moment I felt I had no right to love you. But I have never loved you as I do to-night, because that dream, however little else I may have to thank it for, did for me this at least: it seemed to give me a glimpse into every nook and corner of your character; I feel now that my understanding of your strange nature is absolute. I had seen only one side of it before, and had made but instinctive guesses at the rest; but as I stood with you in that dream, I had, graven on my memory, the knowledge of every side and phase of your character as you had revealed it to me many times; and that memory abides with me. I remember no details, but that makes no difference; if I were one with you I could not know you better." She slipped her arms about his neck and pressed her face close to his. "You have one of your attacks of melancholy to-night," she murmured. "You tried to conceal it, and the effort made you appear cold. It was the first thing I thought of when I turned and saw you, in spite of all I felt myself. And although you had described those attacks before, the description had conveyed little to me; that your moods were different from other people's blues had hardly occurred to me, we had been so happy. But now I understand. I pay for the knowledge with a high price; but that is life, I suppose."

IX.

Two Days later Dartmouth received a despatch from the steward of his estates in the north of England announcing that there was serious trouble among his tenantry, and that his interests demanded he should be on the scene at once. The despatch was brought to his room, and he went directly down to the hall, where he had left Weir, and told her he must leave her for a few days. She had been standing by the fire-place warming her foot on the fender, but she sat suddenly down on a chair as he explained to her the nature of the telegram. "Harold," she said, "if you go you will never come back."

"My dear girl," he said, "that speech is unworthy of you. You are not the sort of woman to believe in such nonsense as presentiments."

"Presentiments may be supernatural," she said, "but not more so than the experience we have had. So long as you are with me I feel comparatively untroubled, but if you go I know that something will happen."

He sat down on the arm of her chair and took her hand. "You are low-spirited yet," he said, "and consequently you take a morbid view of everything. That is all. I am beginning to doubt if the dream we had was anything more than the most remarkable dream on record; if it were otherwise, two such wise heads as ours would have discovered the hidden meaning by this time. And, granting that, you must also grant that if anything were going to happen, you could not possibly know it; nor will predicting it bring it about. I will be with you in two days from this hour, and you will only remember how glad you were to get rid of me."

"I hope so," she said. "But--is it absolutely necessary for you to go?"

"Not if you don't mind living on bread and cheese for a year or two. The farms of my ancestral home make a pretty good rent-roll, but if my tenants become the untrammelled communists my steward predicts, we may have to camp out on burnt stubble for some time to come. It is in the hope of inducing them to leave me at least the Hall to take a bride to that I go to interview them at once. I may be too late, but I will do my best."

"You will always joke, I suppose," she said, smiling a little; "but come back to me."

He left Rhyd-Alwyn that evening and arrived at Crumford Hall the next morning. He slept little during the journey. His mood was still upon him, and without consideration for Weir as an incentive it was more difficult to fight it off, indeed, it was almost a luxury to yield to it. Moreover, although it had been easy enough to say he would think no more about his vision and its accompanying incidents, it was not so easy to put the determination into practice, and he found himself spending the night in the vain attempt to untangle the web, and in endeavoring to analyze the subtle, uncomfortable sense of mystery which those events had left behind them. Toward morning he lost all patience with himself, and taking a novel out of his bag fixed his mind deliberately upon it; and as the story was rather stupid, it had the comfortable effect of sending him to sleep.

When he arrived at his place he found that the trouble was less serious than his steward had represented. The year had been unproductive, and his tenants had demanded a lowering of their rents; but neither flames nor imprecations were in order. Dartmouth was inclined to be a just man, and, moreover, he was very much in love, and anxious to get away; consequently, after a two days' examination of the situation in all its bearings, he acceded in great part to their demands and gave his lieutenant orders to hold the reins lightly during the coming year.

On the second night after his arrival he went into his study to write to Weir. He had been so busy heretofore that he had sent her but a couple of lines at different times, scribbled on a leaf of his note book, and he was glad to find the opportunity to write her a letter. He had hoped to return to her instead, but had found several other matters which demanded his attention, and he preferred to look into them at once, otherwise he would be obliged to return later on.

His study was a comfortable little den just off the library, and its four walls had witnessed the worst of his moods and the most roseate of his dreams. In it he had frequently sat up all night talking with his grandmother, and the atmosphere had vibrated with some hot disputes. There was a divan across one end, some bookshelves across the other, and on one side was a desk with a revolving chair before it. Above the desk hung a battle-axe which he had brought from America. Opposite was a heavily curtained window, and near it a door which led into his private apartments. Between was a heavy piece of furniture of Byzantine manufacture. As he entered the little room for the first time since his arrival, he stood for a moment with a retrospective smile in his eyes. He almost fancied he could see his grandmother half-reclining on one end of the divan, with a pillow beneath her elbow, her stately head, with its tower of white hair, thrown imperiously, somewhat superciliously back, as her eyes flashed and her mouth poured forth a torrent of overwhelming argument. "Poor old girl!" he thought; "why do women like that have to die? How she and Weir would have--argued, to put it mildly. I am afraid I should have had to put a continent between them. But I would give a good deal to see her again, all the same."

He shut the door, sat down before his desk, and took a bunch of keys from his pocket. As he did so, his eyes fell upon one of curious workmanship, and he felt a sudden sense of pleasant anticipation. That key opened the Byzantine chest opposite, somewhere in whose cunningly hidden recesses lay, he was convinced, the papers which he had once seen in his grandmother's clenched hands. He did not believe she had destroyed them; she had remarked a few days before her death--which had been sudden and unexpected--that she must soon devote an unpleasant hour to the burning of old letters and papers. She had spoken lightly, but there had been a gleam in her eyes and a tightening of her lips which had suggested the night he had seen her look as if she wished that the papers between her fingers were a human throat. Should he find those papers and pass away a dull evening? There was certainly nothing but the obstinacy of the chest to prevent, and she would forgive him more than that. He had always had a strong curiosity in regard to those papers, but his curiosity so far had been an inactive one; he had never before been alone at the Hall since his grandmother's death. He wheeled about on his chair and looked whimsically at the divan. "Have I your permission, O most fascinating of grandmothers?" he demanded aloud. "No answer. That means I have. So be it."

He wrote to Weir, then went over and kneeled on one knee before the chest. It looked outwardly like a high, deep box, and was covered with heavy Smyrna cloth, and ornamented with immense brass handles and lock. Dartmouth fitted the key into a small key-hole hidden in the carving on the side of the lock, and the front of the chest fell outward. He let it down to the floor, then gave his attention to the interior. It was as complicated as the exterior was plain. On one side of the central partition were dozens of little drawers, on the other as many slides and pigeon-holes and alcoves. On every square inch of wood was a delicate tracery, each different, each telling a story. The handles of the drawers, the arcades of the alcoves, the pillars of the pigeon-holes--all were of ivory, and all were carved with the fantastic art of the Mussulman. It was so beautiful and so intricate that for a time Dartmouth forgot the papers. He had seen it before, but it was a work of art which required minute observation and study of its details to be appreciated. After a time, however, he recurred to his quest and took the drawers out, one by one, laying them on the floor. They were very small, and not one of them contained so much as a roseleaf. At the end of each fourth shelf which separated the rows of drawers, was a knob. Dartmouth turned one and the shelf fell from its place. He saw the object. Behind each four rows of drawers was a room. Each of these rooms had the dome ceiling and Byzantine pillars of a mosque, and each represented a different portion of the building--presumably that of St. Sophia. The capitals of the pillars were exquisite, few being duplicated, and the shafts were solid columns of black marble, supported on bases of porphyry. The floor was a network of mosaics, and the walls were a blaze of colored marbles. The altar, which stood in the central room, was of silver, with trappings of gold-embroidered velvet, and paraphernalia of gold. Dartmouth was entranced. He had a keen love of and appreciation for art, but he had never found anything as interesting as this. He congratulated himself upon the prospect of many pleasant hours in its company.

He let it go for the present and pressed his finger against every inch of the walls and floor and ceilings of the mosque, and of the various other apartments. It was a good half-hour's work, and the monotony and non-success induced a certain nervousness. His head ached and his hand trembled a little. When he had finished, and no panel had flown back at his touch, he threw himself down on one hand with an exclamation of impatience, and gazed with a scowl at the noncommittal beauty before him. He cared nothing for its beauty at that moment. What he wanted were the papers, and he was determined to find them. He stood up and examined the top of the chest. There was certainly a space between the visible depths of the interior and the back wall. He rapped loudly, but the wood and the stuff with which it was covered were too thick; there was no answering ring. He recalled the night when he had cynically examined the fragments of the broken cabinet at Rhyd-Alwyn. He felt anything but cynical now; indeed, he was conscious of a restless eagerness and a dogged determination with which curiosity had little to do. He would find those papers if he died in the attempt.

He knelt once more before the chest, and once more pressed his finger along its interior, following regular lines. Then he shook the pillars, and inserted his penknife in each most minute interstice of the carving; he prodded the ribs of the arches, and brought his fist down violently on the separate floors of the mosque. At the end of an hour he sprang to his feet with a smothered oath, and cutting a slit in the cover of the chest with his penknife, tore it off and examined the top and sides as carefully as his strained eyes and trembling hands would allow. He was ashamed of his nervousness, but he was powerless to overcome it. His examination met with no better success, and he suddenly sprang across the room and snatched the battle-axe from the wall. He walked quickly back to the chest. For a moment he hesitated, the thing was so beautiful! But only for a moment. The overmastering desire to feel those papers in his hands had driven out all regard for art. He lifted the axe on high and brought it down on the top of the chest with a blow which made the little room echo. He was a powerful man, and the axe was imbedded to its haft. He worked it out of the tough wood and planted another blow, which widened the rift and made the stout old chest creak like a falling tree. The mutilated wood acted upon Dartmouth like the smell of blood upon a wolf: the spirit of destruction leaped up and blazed within him, a devouring flame, and the blows fell thick and fast. He felt a fierce delight in the havoc he was making, in the rare and exquisite beauty he was ruining beyond hope of redemption. He leaned down, and swinging the axe outward, sent it straight through the arcades and pillars, the mosques and images, shattering them to bits. Then he raised the axe again and brought it down on the seam which joined the back to the top. The blow made but little impression, but a succession of blows produced a wide gap. Harold inserted the axe in the rift, and kneeling on the chest, attempted to force the back wall outward. For a time it resisted his efforts, then it suddenly gave way, and Dartmouth dropped the axe with a cry. From a shelf below the roof a package had sprung outward with the shock, and a small object had fallen with a clatter on the prostrate wall. Dartmouth picked it up in one hand and the papers in the other, his fingers closing over the latter with a joy which thrilled him from head to foot. It was a joy so great that it filled him with a profound peace; the excitement of the past hour suddenly left him. He went over to his desk and sat down before it. With the papers still held firmly in his hand, he opened the locket. There were two pictures within, and as he held them up to the light he was vaguely conscious that he should feel a shock of surprise; but he did not. The pictures were those of Lady Sionèd Penrhyn and--himself! With the same apparent lack of mental prompting as on the night in the gallery when he had addressed Weir with the name of her grandmother, he raised the picture of the woman to his lips and kissed it fondly. Then he laid it down and opened the packet. Within were a thick piece of manuscript and a bundle of letters. He pressed his hand lovingly over the closely written sheets of the manuscript, but laid them down and gave his attention to the letters. They were roughly tied into a bundle with a bit of string. He slipped the string off and glanced at the address of the letter which lay uppermost. The ink, though faded, was legible enough--"Lady Sionèd-ap-Penrhyn, Constantinople." He opened the letter and glanced at the signature. The note was signed with the initials of his grandfather, Lionel Dartmouth. They were peculiarly formed, and were in many of the library books.

He turned back to the first page. As he did so he was aware of a new sensation, which seemed, however, but a natural evolution in his present mental and spiritual exaltation. It was as if the page were a blank sheet and he were wielding an invisible pen. Although, before he took up the letter, he had had no idea of its contents beyond a formless, general intuition, as soon as he began to read he was clearly aware of every coming word and sentence and sentiment in it. So strong was the impression, that once he involuntarily dropped the note and, picking up a pen, began hastily writing what he knew was on the unread page. But his mind became foggy at once, and he threw down the pen and returned to the letter. Then the sense of authorship and familiarity returned. He read the letters in the order in which they came, which was the order of their writing. Among them were some pages of exquisite verse: and verses and letters alike were the words of a man to a woman whom he loved with all the concentration and intensity of a solitary, turbulent, passionate nature; who knew that in this love lay his and her only happiness; and who would cast aside the orthodoxy of the world as beneath consideration when balanced against the perfecting of two human lives. They reflected the melancholy, ill-regulated nature of the man, but they rang with a tenderness and a passion which were as unmistakable as the genius of the writer; and Harold knew that if the dead poet had never loved another woman he had loved Sionèd Penrhyn. Or had he loved her himself? Or was it Weir? Surely these letters were his. He had written them to that beautiful dark-eyed woman with the jewels about her head. He could read the answers between the lines; he knew them by heart; the passionate words of the unhappy woman who had quickened his genius from its sleep. Ah, how he loved her, his beautiful Weir!--No--Sionèd was her name, Sionèd Penrhyn, and her picture hung in the castle where the storms beat upon the grey Welsh cliffs thousands of miles away....

If he had but met her earlier--he might to-day be one of that brilliant galaxy of poets whose music the whole world honored. Oh! the wasted years of his life, and his half-hearted attempts to give to the world those wonderful children of his brain! He had loved and been jealous of them, those children, and they had multiplied until it had seemed as if they would prove stronger than his will. But he had let them sing for himself alone; he would give the world nothing until one day in that densely peopled land of his brain there should go up a paean of rejoicing that a child, before which their own glory paled, had been born. And above the tumult should rise the sound of such a strain of music as had never been heard out of heaven; and before it the world should sink to its knees....

And it had come to pass at last, this dream. This woman had awakened his nature from its torpor, and with the love had come, leaping, rushing, thundering, a torrent of verse such as had burst from no man's brain in any age.

And to her he owed his future, his fame, and his immortal name. And she would be with him always. She had struggled and resisted and refused him speech, but the terrible strength of her nature had triumphed over dogmas and over the lesser duties she owed to others; of her free will she had sent for him. He would be with her in an hour, and to-morrow they would have left codes and conventions behind them. There was a pang in leaving this beautiful room where his poem had been born, and beneath which lay such a picture as man sees nowhere else on earth. But to that which was to come, what was this? He would write a few lines to the woman who bore his name, and then the time would have come to go. She too was a beautiful and a brilliant woman, but her nature was narrow and cold, and she had never understood him for a moment. There! he had finished, and she would be happier without him. She had her world and her child--that beautiful boy!--But this was no time for pangs. He had chosen his destiny, and a man cannot have all things. It was time to go. Should he take one last glance at the boy laughing in the room beyond? He had but to push the tapestry aside, yes--there--God!