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BEDOUIN LOVE

ARTHUR WEIGALL

                              BEDOUIN LOVE

                                   BY
                             ARTHUR WEIGALL
            _Author of “Madeline of the Desert,” “The Dweller
                          in the Desert,” etc._

                                NEW YORK
                         GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

                            COPYRIGHT, 1922,
                       BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

                             BEDOUIN LOVE. I

                 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

    CHAPTER                               PAGE

        I CHOLERA                            9

       II THE CONVALESCENT                  23

      III MONIMÉ                            35

       IV BEDOUIN LOVE                      46

        V THE SQUIRE OF EVERSFIELD          58

       VI SETTLING DOWN                     73

      VII THE GAME OF SURVIVAL              87

     VIII MARRIAGE                         103

       IX IN THE WOODS                     117

        X THE END OF THE TETHER            133

       XI THE DEPARTURE                    148

      XII THE ESCAPE                       160

     XIII FREEDOM                          178

      XIV THE ISLAND OF FORGETFULNESS      195

       XV WOMAN REGNANT                    206

      XVI THE RETURN                       224

     XVII THE CATASTROPHE                  240

    XVIII DESTINY                          251

      XIX LOVE IN THE WILDERNESS           264

       XX THE ARM OF THE LAW               276

      XXI THE LAST KICK                    289

     XXII THE SHADOW OF DEATH              304

BEDOUIN LOVE

Chapter I: CHOLERA

James Champernowne Tundering-West, or, as for the time being he preferred
to be called, Jim Easton, sat himself down on the camp-bedstead in the
middle of the one habitable room of a derelict rest-house, built on the
edge of the desert some distance behind the houses of the native town of
Kôm-es-Sultân. All day long he had been feeling an uneasiness of body;
and now, when the incinerating June sun was sinking towards the glaring
mirror of the Nile, this vague disquiet developed into a very tangible
malady.

He knew precisely what was the matter with him, and his dark, angry
eyes rolled around the dirty pink-washed room, as would those of a
criminal around the place of execution. Yesterday he had arrived in
from the desert, tired out by a four-days’ journey on camel-back across
the furnace of rocks and sand which separated the gold-mines, where he
had been working, from the nearest bend of the Nile. There had been an
outbreak of cholera at the camp; and, being the only white man then
remaining at the works, which were in process of being shut down for the
summer, he had been obliged to stay at his post until, as he supposed,
the epidemic had been stamped out. Then, with a handful of natives he had
set out for the Nile Valley; but on the journey his personal servant had
contracted the dreaded sickness, and the man had died pitifully in his
arms, in the stifling shadow of a wayside rock.

The little town of Kôm-es-Sultân was a mere jumble of mud-brick houses
surrounding a whitewashed mosque; and so great was the summer heat that
one might have expected the whole place suddenly to burst into flames
and utterly to be consumed. No Europeans lived there, with the exception
of a nondescript Greek, who kept a grocery store and lent money to the
indigent natives at outrageous interest; but at the village of El Aish,
on the other side of the Nile, there was a small sugar-factory, in charge
of an amplitudinous and bearded Welshman named Morgan, who, presumably,
was now at his post, since, but a few minutes ago, the siren announcing
the end of the day’s work had sounded across the water. Although six
hundred miles above Cairo, Kôm-es-Sultân was not so isolated as its
primitive appearance suggested; for it was no more than five miles
distant from a railway-station, where, once a day, the roasting little
narrow-gauge train halted in its long journey down to Luxor.

Jim cursed his suddenly active conscience that it had not permitted him
to take this train as it passed in the morning, for already then he had
realized the probability that calamity was upon him; but he had been
constrained to remain where he was, alone in the ramshackle and parboiled
rest-house outside the town, for fear of spreading the sickness, and
he had determined to wait until an answer came from the Public Health
official at Luxor, to whom he had sent a telegram stating that his party
was infected, and that he was keeping the men together until instructions
were received. He seldom did the correct thing; but on this occasion,
when lives were at stake, he had felt that for once the freedom of the
individual had to be subordinated to the interests of the community,
repugnant though such a thought was to his independent nature.

A dismal sort of place, he thought to himself, in which to fight for
one’s life! There were two doors in the room, one bolted and barred since
the Lord knows when, the other creaking on its hinges as the scorching
wind fluttered up against it through the outer hall. A window near the
floor, with cracked, cobwebbed panes of glass, stood half open, and a
towel hung loosely from a nail in the outside shutter to another in the
inside woodwork. In the morning it had served to keep out the early sun;
but now the last rays struck through the cracks of the opposite doorway
in dusty shafts.

He had told his Egyptian overseer that he was tired, and that he did
not wish to be disturbed again until the morning; and he bade him keep
the men in the camp amongst the rocks a few hundred yards back in the
desert, and prevent them from entering the town. But in thus desiring to
be alone he had not been prompted merely by his regard for the safety of
others: he had followed also that primitive instinct which his wandering,
self-reliant manner of life had nurtured in him, that instinct which
leads a man to hide himself from, rather than to seek, his fellows when
illness is upon him. Like a sick animal he had slunk into this desolate
place of shelter; and he now prepared himself for the battle with a sense
almost of relief that he was unobserved.

He went across to the door and bolted it; then to the window, and pulled
the shutters to: but the bolt was broken and the woodwork, eaten by
white-ants, was falling to pieces. He took from his medicine-box a large
flask of brandy, a bottle of carbolic, a little phial of chlorodyne,
and a thermometer. There was a tin jug in the corner of the room, full
of water; and into this he emptied the carbolic, shaking it viciously
thereafter. Then he saturated the towel with the liquid, and replaced it
across the window.

As the first spasms attacked him and left him again, he gulped down a
stiff dose of brandy, stripped off most of his clothes, and rolled them
up in a bundle in the corner of the room; uncorked the chlorodyne, and
lay down on his mattress. His heart was beating fast, and for a while
he was shaken with fear. All his life he had smiled at death as at a
friend, and, like Marcus Aurelius, had called it but “a resting from
the vibrations of sensation and the swayings of desire, a stop upon the
rambling of thought, and a release from all the drudgery of the body.”
Yet now, when he was to do battle with it, he was afraid.

He endeavoured to laugh, and as it were mentally to snap his fingers;
and presently, perhaps under the influence of the brandy, he got up from
the bed and fetched from the outer room his guitar, which had been his
solace on many a trying occasion. Some years ago, in South Africa, he had
set to a lilting tune the lines of Procter in praise of Death; and now,
sitting on the edge of the bed, a wild haggard figure with sallow face
and black hair tumbling over his forehead, he twanged the strings and
sang the crazy words with a sort of desperation.

    King Death was a rare old fellow;
      He sat where no sun could shine,
    And he lifted his hand so yellow,
      And poured out his coal-black wine
      Hurrah, for the coal-black wine!

    There came to him many a maiden
      Whose eyes had forgot to shine,
    And widows with grief o’erladen,
      For draught of his coal-black wine.
      Hurrah, for the coal-black wine!

The heat of the room was abominable, and he mopped his forehead with his
handkerchief, and groaned aloud. Then, returning to his song, he skipped
a verse and proceeded.

    All came to the rare old fellow,
      Who laughed till his eyes dropped brine,
    And he gave them his hand so yellow,
      And pledged them in Death’s black wine.
      Hurrah, for the coal-black wine!

The sun set and the stars came out. At length, overcome with sickness, he
thrust the guitar aside, and staggered across the room; and presently,
when he was somewhat recovered, he groped for a candle, lit it, stuck it
in an empty bottle, and lay down again with a gasp of pain.

Now the battle began in earnest, and he made no further attempt to
laugh. Taut and racked, he stared up at the dim, cobwebbed ceiling, and
swore that no man should come near him so long as there was danger of
infection. He was, perhaps, a little pig-headed on this point; but such
was his nature. “Live, and let live” had ever been his motto; and now he
was putting into practice the second half of that maxim.

The thought occurred to him that he ought to write a will, or some
general instructions, in case the “rare old fellow” were triumphant;
but, on consideration, he abandoned the idea for the good reason that he
had neither property worth mentioning to leave, nor relations to whom he
would care to address his last message. Moreover, in his momentary relief
from pain, he felt extraordinarily disinclined to bother himself.

He had an uncle—Stephen—who was in possession of a little estate at
Eversfield, a small English village in the neighbourhood of Oxford, where
the Tundering-Wests had lived for many generations; but he had not seen
much of this correct and conventional personage during his childhood, and
nothing at all for the last ten years, since he had been a grown man and
a wanderer. This uncle had two sons, his cousins: one of them, Mark by
name, was, he believed, in India; the other, called James like himself,
lived at home. They were his sole relations, he being an only child, and
his father and mother having died two or three years ago, leaving him a
few hundred pounds, which he had quickly lost.

There was nobody who would care very much if he pegged out, and in this
thought there was a sort of gloomy comfort. Moreover, he was known by his
few friends in Egypt and elsewhere as Jim Easton; for, many years ago,
at a time when he was reduced to utter penury, he had thought it best to
hide his identity, lest interfering persons should communicate with his
relations. In the name of Jim Easton he had wandered from place to place,
and in that name he had obtained this job at the gold mines; and if now
he were to die, the fate of James Tundering-West would remain a matter of
speculation. That was as it should be: ever since he left England he had
been a bird of passage, and is it not a rarity to see a dead bird? Nobody
knows where they all die, or how: with few exceptions, they seem, as it
were, to fade away; and thus he, too, would disappear.

He rolled his eyes around his prison, and clapped his hand with pathetic
drama to his burning forehead. “Wretched bird!” he muttered, addressing
himself. “It was in you to soar to the heights, to go rushing up to the
sun and the planets, with strong, driving wings. But the winds were
always contrary, or the attractions of the lower air were too alluring;
and now you are sunk to the earth, and may be you will never make that
great assault upon the stars of which you had always dreamed.”

He dismissed these useless ruminations. He was not going to die: life and
the lure of the unattained were still before him.

Another and another spasm smote him, tore him asunder, and left him
shaking upon the bed. With a trembling hand he mixed the brandy and
chlorodyne, making little attempts to measure the dose. The candle
spluttered on the floor near by, and strange insects buzzed around it,
singed themselves, and fell kicking on their backs.

He opened his eyes and watched them as he lay on his side, his knees
drawn up, and his hands gripping the edge of the bed. Their agonies, no
doubt, were as great as his, but, being small, they did not matter. He,
too, as Englishmen go, was not large; and it was very apparent that he
did not much matter. He was of the lean and medium-sized variety of the
race, and was of the swarthy type which is often to be found in the far
south-west of England, where his family had had its origin. Some people
might have termed him picturesque: others might have said, and most
certainly just now would have said, that he looked a bit mad.

At length he slept for a few minutes; but his dreams were hideous, and
full of faces, which came close to him, growing bigger and bigger,
until, with strange and melancholy grimaces, they receded once more into
infinite distance. Somebody grey, ponderous, and very fearful, counted
endless numbers, now slowly and portentously, now with such increasing
rapidity that his brain reeled.

In this manner the seemingly endless night passed on: a few moments of
sleep, a disjointed procession of horrible fantasies, convulsions of
pain, staggerings across the room, fallings back on the bed, brandy, and
exhausted sleep again. But all the while he knew that he was growing
weaker.

Presently the candle went out, and the darkness closed over his agony.
The thought came to him that soon he would no longer have the power to
dose himself, and with it came that human desire for aid which no animal
instinct of segregation can wholly stifle in a heart weary with pain. It
was now long past midnight, and from this time till sunrise he fought a
terrible double battle, on the one hand with Death, on the other with
Self. It would not be impossible, he knew, to crawl from the room into
the silent desert outside, and a cry for help would possibly be heard by
his men.

But what would happen? They would go into the town, doubtless carrying
the infection with them, and would engage a boat in which they would row
across the Nile to fetch Morgan, who had the reputation of being somewhat
of a doctor. But Morgan had a wife and child in Wales, who were dependent
on him: only last autumn that hairy giant had told him all about them as
they sat drinking warm lager in the dusty garden by the river, one hot
night, just before the mining party had set out for the distant works.

Thus, when at long last the sun rose and glared into the room, above and
below the fluttering towel, he was still alone.

At nine o’clock, as the day’s heat and the onslaught of the flies began
again to be intolerable, he gave up hope. Until that hour he had fought
his fight with decency; but now convulsion on convulsion had dragged
the strength out of him, and he was no longer able to crawl back on to
the bedstead. The last drops of brandy in a tumbler by his side, he lay
limply on the floor; and where he lay, there the spasms racked him,
and there he fainted. With the hope for life went also the desire, and
each time that he came to himself he prayed to God for the mercy of
unconsciousness. The dying words of Anne Boleyn, which he had read years
ago, recurred again and again to his mind: “O Death, rocke me aslepe;
bringe me on quiet rest.” He kept saying them over to himself, not with
his lips, for they were parched, but somewhere deep down in the nightmare
of his wandering brain.

Presently a gust of blistering wind flicked the towel from its nail
in the window, and with that the creaking shutter slammed back on its
hinges, and the sun streamed full on to the white figure on the floor.
Jim opened his eyes, bloodshot and wild, and stared out on to the rocks
and sandy drifts. A few sparrows were hopping about languidly in the
shade of a ruinous wall, their beaks open as though they were panting
for breath. The sky was leaden, for the glare of the sun seemed to have
sucked out the colour from all things, even from the yellow sand, which
now had the neutral hue of Egyptian dust.

This, then, was the end!—and he could shut up his life as a book that
has been read. At the age of nineteen he had abandoned the humdrum but
respectable City career towards which he was being headed by his father,
and, having nigh broken the parental heart, had gone out to Korea as
handyman to a gold-mining company. He had dreamed of riches; his mind had
been full of the thought of gold and its power. He had imagined himself
buying a kingdom for his own, as it were.

Two years later, utterly disillusioned, he had taken ship to California,
and had earned his living in many capacities, until chance had carried
him to the Aroe Islands in the pearl trade, and later to the diamond
mines of South Africa. Incidentally, he had become, after three or four
years, something of an expert in estimating the value of diamonds, and
had made a few hundred pounds by barter; but with this sum in the bank
he had failed to resist the vagrancy of his nature and the enticement of
his dreams, and had returned to Europe to wander through Italy, France,
and Spain: not altogether in idleness, for being addicted to scribbling
his thoughts in rhyme, and twisting and turning his speculations into the
various shapes of recognized verse, he had filled many notebooks with
jottings and impressions which he believed to be more or less worthless.

Then he had inherited his father’s small savings, and had been induced by
a persuasive friend to invest them in an expedition to Ceylon in search
of a mythical field of moonstones. Returning in absolute poverty, owning
nothing but his guitar and the threadbare clothes in which he stood,
he had landed at Port Said, and so had taken reluctant service in this
somewhat precarious gold-mining company at a salary which had now placed
a small sum to his credit on the company’s books.

A roaming, dreaming, sun-baked, Bedouin life!—and this ending of it in
a stifling, tumbledown rest-house seemed to be the most natural wind-up
of the whole business. Often he had enjoyed himself; he had played with
romance; he had had his great moments; but at times he had suffered under
a sense of utter loneliness, and these last months at the mines in the
desert had been a miserable exile, only relieved by those silent hours
in his tent at night, when he had endeavoured to put into written words
the tremendous thoughts of his teeming brain. And now death and oblivion
appeared to him as something very eagerly to be desired—a great sleep,
where the horrible sun and the flies could not reach him, and an eternal
relief from all this agony, all this messiness.

He fumbled for the last of the brandy, knocked the glass over and smashed
it. The liquid ran along the floor to his face, and he put out his dry
tongue and licked up a little. Then, as though remembering his manners,
he rolled away from it, and shut his eyes.

When consciousness came again to him somebody was knocking at the outer
door in the hall beyond. A few minutes later there was a shuffling step,
and a rap upon the inner door.

“Sir, are you awake?” It was the voice of his Egyptian overseer.

Jim raised himself on his elbows, thereby disturbing the crowd of
crawling flies which had settled upon his face and body, and slowly
turned his head in the direction of the speaker. “Go away, you idiot!” he
husked. “I’ve got cholera. I’m dying.”

“What you say?” came the voice from the other side. “I cannot hear you.”

“I’ve got cholera,” he repeated, with an effort which seemed to be
bursting his heart. Then, with another purpose: “I’m nearly well now ...
all right in an hour ... keep away!”

The footsteps shuffled off hurriedly, then stopped. “I go fetch Meester
Morgan: he is here this mornin’. I seen him comin’ ’cross the river,” the
man called out; and the footsteps passed out of hearing.

Another convulsion: but this time there was no power of resistance
remaining, and long before the spasm ceased he had fainted. The next
thing of which he was aware was that the heavy footstep of Morgan was
coming towards the house. That frightened rat of an overseer had fetched
him, then, and the gigantic fool was going to take the risk! What use
was he now? There was easy Death already almost in possession: not the
laughing, rare old fellow of his song, but beautiful desirable Rest.

He was powerless to stop the man. His voice failed to rise above a
whisper when he attempted to call out a warning. Suddenly his eye lighted
on the jug of carbolic a yard away. At least he could lessen the danger.
Slowly, and with infinite pain, he wormed himself over the floor, until
his limp arm touched the jug, and his fingers closed over the mouth.
A feeble pull, and the jug tottered; another, and it fell over with a
clatter, and the strong disinfectant ran in a stream around him, under
him, through his hair, through his scanty clothes, and away across the
room.

The handle of the door rattled. “Are you there, Easton? Let me in!—I know
how to doctor you.” Another rattle. “Let me in, or I’ll come round by the
window.”

But Jim did not answer. He lay still and deathlike as the hulking figure
of Morgan scrambled into the room through the window, and knelt down
by his side on the wet floor. The place reeked of carbolic: everything
was saturated with it. Morgan stepped through it to the door, and pulled
back the bolts. Then, slipping and sliding, he dragged the half-naked,
dishevelled body by the armpits into the outer room, and, propping it up
against his knees, felt for the pulse in the nerveless wrist.

The morning sun poured in through the broken-down verandah, glistening on
the damp hair of the exhausted sufferer, and gleaming upon the bearded,
sweating face of the good Samaritan.

Jim opened his eyes, and his cracked lips moved. “Don’t be a damned
fool,” he whispered. “Don’t take such a risk ... every man for
himself....” His head fell forward once more, and his eyes closed.

“Oh, rot!” said Morgan. “You brave little chap!—I think you’ve got a
chance, please God.”

Chapter II: THE CONVALESCENT

A native doctor belonging to the Ministry of Public Health arrived at
Kôm-es-Sultân during the afternoon, having travelled up from Luxor
in response to the telegram reporting the infection; and to his care
the patient was handed over by Morgan, who had refused to budge until
proper arrangements could be made. When, a few days later, the sick
man was able to be moved, he was conveyed down to Luxor in a small
river-steamer belonging to the sugar factory; and, after ten days in
the local hospital, where, in spite of the great heat, he was very
tolerably comfortable, he was able to go north in the sleeping-car which,
on certain nights during the summer weeks, was attached to the Cairo
express, for the benefit of perspiring English officers coming down from
the Sudan, and weary officials whose work had called them out into these
sun-scorched districts of Upper Egypt.

The doctor in Cairo advised him to move down to the sea as soon as
possible; and thus, one early evening at the end of June, as the glare
of the day was giving place to the long shadows of sunset, Jim found
himself driving through the streets of Alexandria towards the little
Hotel des Beaux-Esprits which stands at the edge of the Mediterranean,
not far outside the city, and which had been recommended to him as the
inexpensive resort of artists and men of letters.

He leant back in the carriage luxuriously, and drank the cool air into
his lungs with a satisfaction which those alone may understand who have
known what it is to make this journey out of the inferno of an Upper
Egyptian summer into the comparatively temperate climate of the sea
coast. The streets of Alexandria are much like those of an Italian or
southern French city; and as he looked about him at the pleasant shops
and the crowds of pedestrians, for the most part European or Levantine,
he felt as though he had recovered from some sort of tortured madness,
and had suddenly come back to the comprehension and the relish of
intelligent life.

For the present there was nothing to mar his happiness. The greater
part of a year’s salary lay awaiting him in the bank, for in the desert
there had been no means of spending money, and his losses had equalled
his winnings at those daily games of cards which had at length become so
tedious. The mines would remain idle in any event until the temperature
began to fall, in September; and thus for the two months of his summer
leave he could take his ease, and could postpone for some weeks yet his
decision as to whether he would return to that fiery exile, or would fare
forth again upon his nomadic travels.

His recent experiences had been a severe shock to him, and for the time
being, at any rate, he felt that he never wished to see the desert again.
But perhaps when a few weeks of this cool sea air had set him on his
feet once more, the thought of his return to the mines would have lost
its terror.

At the hotel he was received by the fat and motherly proprietress, who,
having diffidently asked for and enthusiastically received a week’s
payment in advance, led him to an airy room overlooking the sea, and left
him with many assurances that he would here speedily recover from the
indefinite stomachic disturbances which he told her had recently laid him
low.

On his way through Cairo he had purchased quite a respectable suit of
white linen, and so soon as he was alone he set about the happy business
of arraying himself as a civilized personage. Although much exhausted by
his journey he was eager to go down and sit at one of the little tables
overlooking the sea, there to drink his _bouillon_, and to make himself
acquainted with his fellow guests; and he paid very little regard to
the shaking of his knees and the apparent swaying of the floor when a
struggle with his unruly hair had taxed his strength. Prudence suggested
that he should remain in his room and rest; but, having been in exile
so long, he could not resist the desire to be downstairs, enjoying
the coolness of the evening, looking at people and talking to them,
or listening to the music provided by the mandolines and guitars of a
company of Italians who, presumably, earned their living by going the
round of the smaller hotels, and the strains of whose romantic songs now
came to him, mingled with the gentle surge of the waves.

Presently, therefore, he issued from his room, and, making for the
stairs, found himself walking behind a young woman similarly purposed.
He had not spoken to a female of any kind for nearly a year, and this
fact may have accounted for the quite surprising impression her back
view made upon him. It seemed to him that she had a wonderful pair of
shoulders, startling black hair, and an excellent figure excellently
garbed. He hoped devoutly that she was pretty; but, as she turned to
glance at him, he saw that her face was perhaps more interesting than
actually beautiful. It was like an ancient Egyptian bas-relief—an Isis or
a Hathor. It was sufficiently strange, indeed, with the high cheek-bones,
the raven-black hair, and the wise, smiling mouth, to arouse his
curiosity, and her dark-fringed grey eyes seemed frankly to invite his
admiration.

At the foot of the stairs, when he was close behind her, he suddenly felt
giddy again, and swayed towards her; at which she stared at him in cold
surprise.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, clutching at the banister, and wondering
why the light had become so dim.

A moment later he pitched forward, grabbed at the hand she instantly held
out to him, and knew no more.

When he recovered consciousness he was lying upon the bed in his own
room, and this black-haired woman whom he had seen upon the stairs was
leaning over him—like a mother, he thought—dabbing his forehead with
water.

“That’s better,” he heard her say. “You’ll be all right now.”

He sat up, at once fully aware of his situation. “I’m awfully sorry,” he
exclaimed. “Did I faint?”

“Yes,” was the answer. “I caught you as you fell.”

Jim swore under his breath. “I’ve been ill,” he said. “I didn’t realize I
was so weak. Did I make an awful ass of myself?”

“No,” she smiled, “you did it quite gracefully; and there was nobody
about; they were all at dinner.”

“Who brought me up here?” he asked.

“I and the two native servants,” she laughed, and her laughter was
pleasant to hear. “Are you in the habit of fainting?”

“I’ve never fainted before in my life,” said Jim, warmly, “until I had
this go of cholera.”

“Cholera?” she ejaculated. “You’ve had _cholera_? How long ago?”

“Oh, I’m not infectious,” he smiled. “It was quite a while ago.” He gave
her the facts with weary brevity: it was a picture that he wished to
banish from the gallery of his memory.

“But, my dear friend,” she said, “when you’ve just come out of the jaws
of death like that, you must take things easy. You ought to be in bed,
toying with a spoonful of jelly and a grape. What’s your name?”

“Jim,” he answered. “What’s yours?”

“That is of no consequence,” she replied, smiling at him, as he thought
to himself, like a heathen idol.

He was silent for a few moments. He was not quite sure whether it
would not now be as well to kill Mr. Easton and resuscitate Mr.
Tundering-West, for at the moment he was anxious to forget entirely
his Bedouin life and his exile at the mines, and he was no longer a
disreputable beggar.

“I’ll call you ‘Sister,’” he said at length. “That’s what the patients at
the hospital call the nurse, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid I’m not much of a nurse,” she replied. “I’ve torn your collar
in getting it open, and I’ve dripped water all down your coat.”

“I bumped into you when I fell, didn’t I?” he asked, trying to recollect
what had happened.

“Yes,” she answered. “I thought you were drunk.”

“Thanks awfully,” he said.

“Have you any friends to look after you?” she enquired presently.

“No, nobody, Sister,” he replied. “Have you?”

She shook her head. “I hardly know anybody, either. I’m a painter. I’ve
just come over from Italy to do some work.” She fetched a towel from the
washing-stand. “Now, hold your head up, and let me dry your neck.”

“I suppose you don’t happen to have a brandy and soda about you?” he
asked, when she had tidied him up. He was feeling very fairly well again,
but sorely in need of a stimulant.

“I’ll go and get you one,” she replied; and before he could make any
polite protest she had left the room.

He got up at once from the bed, went with shaking legs to the
dressing-table and stared at himself in the glass. “Good Lord!” he
muttered. “I look like an organ-grinder after a night out.” He combed
his damp hair back from his forehead, and sat himself down on the
sofa near the open window, a shaded candle by his side. The night was
soothingly windless and quiet, and a wonderful full moon was rising clear
of the haze above the sea; and so extraordinary was it to him to feel the
air about him temperate and kind that presently a mood of great content
descended upon him, and, after his startling experience, he was no longer
restless to join the company downstairs.

In a short time his nurse returned, bringing him the brandy-and-soda; and
when this had been swallowed he began to think the world a very pleasant
place.

She fetched two pillows from the bed, and in motherly fashion placed them
behind his head; then, sitting down on a small armchair which stood near
the sofa, she asked him whether he intended to stay long in Alexandria.

“I have no plans,” he told her. “As long as I’ve got any money in the
bank I never do have any. When the money’s spent, then I shall begin to
think what to do next. I’m just one of the Bedouin of life.”

“I am a wanderer, too,” she said. And therewith they began to talk to one
another as only wanderers can talk. There were many places in France and
Italy known to them both, and it appeared that they had been in Ceylon
at the same time, she in Colombo, and he up-country in search of his
moonstones.

He felt very much at ease with her, coming soon, indeed, to regard her
as a potential confidant of his dreams. Her enigmatic face was curiously
attractive to him, particularly so, in fact, just now, with the screen of
the candle casting a soft shadow upon it, so that the grey eyes seemed to
be looking at him through a veil. He began to wonder, indeed, why it was
that at first sight he had not regarded her as beautiful.

For half an hour or more they talked quietly but eagerly together, while
the moon rose over the sea until its pale light penetrated into the room,
and blanched the heavy shadows.

“Well, I’m very glad I fainted,” he said, lightly, observing that she was
about to take her departure.

“So am I,” she answered, smiling at him as though all the secrets of all
the world were in her wise keeping.

“Tell me, Sister,” he asked. “Are you all alone in the world?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think it’s quite correct to be sitting in a strange man’s room?”

“Perfectly.”

“Tramp!” he said.

“Vagrant!” she replied.

She rose, and stood awhile gazing out of the open window—a mysterious
figure, looking like old gold in the light of the reading-lamp, set
against the sheen of the moon.

“It’s a wonderful night,” he remarked. “You have no idea what it means to
me to feel cool and comfortable. The desert up-country is the very devil
in summer.”

“Yes,” she replied, turning to him, “one can understand why Cleopatra and
her Ptolemy ancestors left the old cities of the south, and built their
palaces here beside the sea.”

He smiled, knowingly. “If she had lived up there in Thebes where the old
Pharaohs sweated, there wouldn’t have been any affair with Antony. She
would have been too busy taking cold baths and whisking the flies away.
But down here—why, the sound of the sea in the night would have been
enough by itself to do the trick.”

She looked at him curiously. “To me,” she said, “the sound of the sea on
a summer night is the most tragic and the most beautiful thing in the
world. If I ever gave up wandering and came to rest, it would be in a
little white villa somewhere on the shores of the Mediterranean.”

“No, for my part, I want to go north just now,” he rejoined. “I’m tired
of the east and the south: I’ve got a longing for England.”

“It won’t last,” she smiled. “You don’t fit in with England, somehow.”

“Oh, I’m a typical Devon man,” he declared, recalling, with a sudden
feeling of pride, the original home of his family, previous to their
migration into Oxfordshire.

She looked at him with a smile. “That accounts for it,” she said. “The
men of Devon so often have the wandering spirit.” She held out her hand.
“I must go now. Good night!—I’ll come and see how you are in the morning.
My room is next to yours, if you want anything.”

“Good night, Sister!” he answered. “I’m most awfully obliged to you.
You’ve done me a power of good.”

She smiled at him with the calm, mysterious expression of the old gods
and goddesses carved upon the temple walls, and went out of the room;
and thereafter he lay back on his pillows, musing on her attractive
personality, and wondering who she was. He was still wondering when, some
minutes later, the native servant entered with a tray upon which there
was a cup of soup, some jelly, and a bunch of grapes.

“Madam she say you to drink it _all_ the soup,” said the man, “but only
eat three grapes, only _three_, she say, sir, please.”

“Very well,” Jim answered, feeling rather pleased thus to receive orders
from her.

That night he slept soundly, and awoke refreshed and almost vigorous.
After breakfast in bed he got up, and he had been dressed for some time
when his self-constituted nurse came to him.

“Oh, I’m glad you’re up,” she said, giving his hand an honest shake. “I’m
going to take you out on the verandah downstairs. It’s beautifully cool
there.”

Jim was delighted. She looked so very nice this morning, he thought, in
her pretty summer dress and wide-brimmed hat; and her smile was radiant.
He held an impression from the night before that she was a creature of
mystery, a woman out of a legend; and it was quite a relief to him to
find that now in the daylight she was a normal being.

As they descended the stairs she put her hand under his elbow to aid him,
and, though the assistance was quite unnecessary, it pleased him so much
that he was conscious of an inclination to play the invalid with closer
similitude than actuality warranted. Nobody had ever looked after him
since he was a child, and, as in the case of all men who believe they
detest feminine aid, the experience was surprisingly gratifying.

On the verandah they sat together in two basket chairs, and presently
she so directed their conversation that he found himself talking to her
as though she were his oldest friend. He told her tales of the desert,
described his life at the mines, and tried to explain the dread he felt
at the thought of returning to them. There was no complaint in his words:
he was something of a fatalist, and, being obliged to earn his bread and
butter, he supposed his lot to be no worse than that of hosts of other
men. After all, anything was better than sitting on an office stool.

She listened to him, encouraging him to talk; and the morning was gone
before he suddenly became conscious that she and not he had played the
part of listener.

“Good lord!” he exclaimed. “How I must be boring you! There goes the bell
for _déjeuner_. Why didn’t you stop me?”

“I was interested,” she replied, turning her head aside. “You have shown
me a part of life I knew nothing about. My own wanderings have been so
much more sophisticated, so much more ordinary.” She looked round at him
quickly. “By the way, I am leaving you to-morrow. I have to go to Cairo
for a week or so.”

Jim’s face fell. “Oh damn!” he said. His disappointment was intense.
“Why should you go to Cairo?” he asked gloomily. “It’s a beastly, hot,
unhealthy place at this time of year.”

“I shan’t be gone long,” she answered. “I just have to paint one picture.
And when I come back I shall expect to find you strong and well once
more. Then we can do all sorts of wonderful things together.” She paused,
looking at him intently. “That is something for us to look forward to,”
she added, as though she were talking to herself.

Chapter III: MONIMÉ

Jim felt the absence of his new friend keenly. She had left for Cairo
quietly and unobtrusively, just driving away from the little hotel with a
wave of her hand to him, following a few words of good advice as to his
diet and behaviour. He had asked her where she was going to stay, hinting
that he would like to write to her; but she had evaded a definite reply,
saying merely that she was going to the house of some friends. A woman is
a figure behind a veil. It is her nature to elude, it is her happiness
to have something to conceal; and man, more direct, often finds in her
reticence upon some unimportant matter a cause of deep mystification.

“I don’t even know your name,” he had almost wailed, and she had
answered, gravely, “Jemima Smith,” as though she expected him to believe
it. The hotel register, which he thereupon consulted, contained but three
pertinent words: “Mdlle. Smith, Londres,” written in the hand of the
French proprietress, and that fat personage laughed good-naturedly and
shrugged her shoulders when he questioned the accuracy of the entry.

The first days seemed dull without her; but soon the brilliance of the
Alexandrian summer took hold of his mind, and dressed his thoughts in
bright colours. His strength returned to him rapidly, and within the
week he was once more a normal being, able to sprawl upon the beach
in the mornings in the shade of the rocks, staring out over the azure
seas, and able, in the cool of the late afternoons, to go to the Casino
to listen to the orchestra and watch the cosmopolitan crowd taking its
twilight promenade.

And then, one evening, just before dinner, as he sat himself down in a
basket chair outside the long windows of his bedroom, high above the
surge of the breakers, he glanced into the room next door, which led
out on to the same balcony, and there stood his friend, unpacking a
dressing-case upon a table before her.

She saw him at the same moment, and at once came forward, but Jim in his
enthusiasm was half-way into her room when their hands met.

“Oh, I _am_ glad to see you!” he exclaimed, working her arm up and down
as though it were a pump-handle. “It’s just like seeing an old friend
again.”

She smiled serenely. “Well, we’ve had a week to think each other over,”
she said. She turned to her dressing-case and produced a small parcel.
“Here, I’ve brought you something from Cairo.”

It was only a box of cigarettes of a brand he had happened to mention in
commendation; but the gift, and her words, set his brain in a whirl, and
for some minutes he talked the wildest nonsense to her. He was flattered
that she had turned her thoughts to him while she was in Cairo; and now,
standing in her bedroom, he was possessed by a feeling of intimacy with
her. He wanted to put his arm round her, or place his hand upon her
shoulder, or kiss her fingers, or pull her hat off, or lift her from the
ground, or something of that kind. Yet he felt at the same time a kind
of dread lest he should offend her. He was perhaps a little bewildered
in her presence, for, in some indefinable way, she represented an aspect
of femininity which he had only known in imagination. There was nothing
of the coquette about her: there was a great deal of royalty. He was
inclined, indeed, to wait upon her favours, to accept her _largesse_,
rather than to ply her with pretty speeches and attentions; but he was by
no means certain that this was the correct method of pleasing her, and
he stood now before her, running his hands through his hair and talking
excitedly.

Presently, however, she told him to go downstairs and to wait there for
her until she was ready to dine with him. He would readily have waited
all night for her, had she bid him; and when, after nearly an hour, she
joined him, dressed in a soft and seductive evening garment, he led her
to their table on the terrace under the stars like a bridegroom at the
first stage of his honeymoon.

In all the world there is no conjunction of time and place more seemly
for romance than that of a night in June beside the Alexandrian surf. The
terrace whereon their table was set was built out upon a head of rocks
against the base of which the rolling waves of the Mediterranean surged
unseen in the darkness below, as they had surged in the days when Antony
lay dreaming here in the arms of Cleopatra. The whitewashed walls of the
little hotel, with the green-shuttered windows and open doorway throwing
forth a warm illumination, differed in appearance but little from those
of a Greek villa of that far-off age; and the stately palms around the
building seemed in their dignity conscious of their descent from the
palms of the Courts of the Pharaohs.

Across the bay the lights of the city were reflected in the water, and
overhead the stars scintillated like a million diamonds spread upon blue
velvet. The night was warm and breathless, and the shaded candles upon
the table burnt with a steady flame, throwing a rosy glow upon the intent
faces of the two who sat here alone, the other guests having finished
their meal and gone to the far side of the hotel, where the guitars and
mandolines were thrumming.

Their conversation wandered from subject to subject: it was as though
they were feeling their way with one another, each eagerly attempting
to discover the thoughts of the other, each anxious that no fundamental
disagreement should be revealed, and relieved as point after point of
accord was found. To Jim it seemed as though the gates of his heart
were being slowly rolled back, and as though the strange, wise face, so
close to his own, were peering into the sanctuary of his soul, demanding
admittance and possession.

“Good Lord!” he exclaimed at length. “This is too ridiculous! Here am I
falling in love with a woman whose very name I don’t know.”

She smiled serenely at him, as though his words were the most natural in
the world. “Why not call me Monimé?” she said. “Some people call me that.
Do you know the story of Monimé?”

Jim shook his head.

“She was a Grecian girl who lived in the city of Miletus on the banks
of Mæander, the wandering river of Phrygia, and there she might have
lived all her life, and might have married and had six children; but
Mithridates, King of Pontus, saw her one day and fell in love with her
and somehow managed to make her believe she loved him, too.”

The mandolines in the distance were playing the haunting melody
“Sorrento,” and the soft refrain, blending with the sound of the sea,
formed a dreamy accompaniment to the story.

“He carried her away and gave her a golden diadem, and made her his
queen; but the legions of Rome came and defeated Mithridates, and he sent
his eunuch, Bacchides, to her, here in Alexandria, where she had fled,
bidding her kill herself, as he was about to do, rather than endure the
disgrace of her adopted dynasty. She did not want to die, but, like an
obedient wife, she took the diadem from her head, and tried to strangle
herself by fastening the silken cords around her throat.”

“I remember now,” said Jim. “It is one of the stories from Plutarch. Go
on.”

“The cords broke, and thereupon she uttered that famous, bitter cry: ‘O
wretched diadem, unable to help me even in this little matter!’ And she
threw it from her, and ordered Bacchides to kill her with his sword....”

She paused and stared with fixed gaze across the bay to the lights of
Ras-el-Tîn, and those of the houses which stood where once Cleopatra’s
palace of the Lochias had towered above the sea.

The native waiter had removed the débris of their meal from the table,
and the candles had been extinguished. Her hands rested upon the arms of
her chair, and there was that in her attitude which in the dim light of
the waning moon, now rising over the sea, suggested a Pharaonic statue.

“She died just over there across the water,” she said at length. “Poor
Monimé....”

Jim put his hand upon hers. Very slowly she turned to him, looked him in
the eyes steadily, looked down at his hand, and then again looked into
his face.

“Monimé,” he whispered, and presently, receiving no response, he added,
“What are you thinking about?”

“The River Mæander,” she answered. “Our word ‘meander’ is derived from
that name, because of the river’s wanderings. I was thinking how I have
meandered through life, and now....”

“I have no diadem to offer you,” he said fervently; “but all that I have
is yours to-night. I know nothing about you: I don’t know where you come
from; I don’t know your name. I know only that you have come to me out
of my dreams. It’s as though you were not real at all—just part of this
Alexandrian night; and I want to hold you close to me, so that you shall
not fade away from me.”

She did not answer, and presently he asked her if she had nothing to say
to him.

“No,” she replied, “there is nothing to be said, Jim. This thing has come
to us so quickly: it may pass away again so soon. It is better to say
little.”

There came into his mind those lines of Shelley

    One word is too often profaned
      For me to profane it....

Yet he must needs utter that word, though the past and the future rise up
to belittle it.

“I love you,” he whispered. “Monimé, I love you.”

“Men have said that to me before,” she answered, “and there was one man
whom I believed.... We built the house of our life upon that foundation,
but it fell to ruins all the same. Soon he ceased to tell me that he
loved me.”

“You are a married woman then?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Tell me who you are,” he begged.

She shook her head. “No,” she replied. “I have no name. I have left him.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because we disliked one another. It seemed to me altogether wrong that a
man and a woman totally out of sympathy with one another should continue
to live together. So I made my exit. I live by selling my pictures.”

“Were there any children?” he asked.

“No,” she answered. “If there had been, I suppose I should have remained
with him. Like flowers, they hide many a sepulchre.”

“It was brave of you to go,” he said.

“I felt it to be a woman’s right,” she declared, spreading her hands in
a gesture of conviction. “Since then I have been a wanderer. I’ve had
some hours of happiness, some of loneliness, but always there has been
my independence to cheer me, and the knowledge that I have been faithful
to my sex, and have not misled others by the usual shams and pretences of
the disillusioned wife.”

“And what about the future?” he asked.

“My dear,” she smiled, “the future is a veil of fog that only lifts
for the passage of a soul. When I am about to die I will tell you of
my future. But now, while I am in the midst of life, only the present
counts.”

For some time they talked; but at length when the little band of
musicians, whose songs had formed a distant accompaniment to their
thoughts, had gone their way, and the sound of the sea alone traversed
the silence, she suggested that he should bring down his guitar and play
to her.

“The proprietress tells me she has heard you playing in your room,” she
smiled. “She described it as _très agréable mais un peu mélancolique_.”

Jim was not very willing to comply, for he had been termed a howling
jackal at the mines, and, indeed, he had once been obliged to black a
man’s eye for throwing something at him. He had no wish to fight anybody
to-night.

His companion, however, was so insistent that he was obliged to fetch
the instrument and to sing to her. The darkness aided him in overcoming
a feeling of shyness, and presently he passed into a mood which was
conducive to song. He sang at first in quiet tones, and his fingers
struck so lightly upon the strings that sometimes the rich chords were
lost in the murmur of the surf. From sad old negro melodies he passed
to curious chanties of the sea, and thence to the wistful music of
the Italian peasants; and as he sang his diffidence left him, and soon
his fine voice was strong enough to be heard in the hotel, so that
the proprietress and some of her guests came tip-toeing out and stood
listening near the open door, the light from the passage illuminating
their motionless figures and casting their black shadows across the
gravel and on to the encircling palms.

“Listen,” said Jim, at length. “I’ll sing you some verses I made up when
I was in Ceylon.”

It was a song which told of a silent, enchanted city built by ancient
kings upon the shores of an uncharted sea, where there were pavilions of
white marble whose pinnacles shot up to the stars, seeming to touch the
Milky Way, and whose domes were so lofty that at moonrise their silver
orbs were still tinged with the gold of the sunset. It told how here,
upon a bed of crystal, there slept a woman whose hair was as dark as the
wrath of heaven, whose breast was as white as the snowclad mountain-tops,
and whose lips were as red as sin; and how, upon a hot, still night there
came a lost mariner to these shores, who passed up through the deserted
streets of the city, and ascended a thousand stairs to the crystal couch,
and kissed the mouth of the sleeper....

When he had ended the song there was a moment of silence before Monimé
turned to him. “Do you mean to tell me,” she exclaimed, “that you have to
earn your living at the mines when you can write verses like that?”

“Oh, it’s only doggerel,” he laughed, “and I cribbed most of the music
from things I’d heard.”

“Have you got the poem written down?” she asked.

“No, I’ve lost my only copy,” he answered. “I stuffed it into a hole
in the woodwork of my berth on a certain tramp steamer, to keep the
cockroaches from coming out. I never could get used to cockroaches.”

“Jim,” she said, taking his hands in hers, “you are wasting your life.”

“I am living for the first time to-night,” he replied.

It was midnight when at length they ascended the stairs to their rooms,
but there was on his part a mere pretence of bidding good-night at their
doors. He knew well enough that presently he would attempt to renew their
wonderful romance upon the balcony which connected their two rooms; but
for the moment the serene inscrutability of her face baffled him. She
neither made advance towards him, nor retreat from him. She seemed,
mentally, to be standing her ground, undisturbed, unmoved. The wisdom of
the ages was in her eyes, and the smile of precognition was on her lips.

In love, man is so simple, woman so wise. Man blunders along, taking
his chance as to whether he shall find favour or give offence; woman
alone knows when the great moment has come, that moment when the time
and the place and the person are plaited into the perfect pattern. Some
women betray that knowledge in their agitation; some are made shy by
the revelation; some, again, have the imperturbable confidence of their
intuition, and these last alone are the celestials, the daughters of
Aphrodite, the children of Isis and Hathor.

In his room Jim sat for awhile upon the side of his bed, trying to fathom
the unfathomable meaning of her expression. His brain was full of her—her
hair black as the Egyptian darkness, her eyes grey as the twilight,
and her flesh like the alabaster of the Mokattam Hills. There was such
modesty, such reserve in her bearing, and yet with these qualities there
went a kind of confidence, a self-assurance, which he could not define.
In her presence he became aware of the shortcomings of his own sex,
rather than of his mastery; yet at the same time he was conscious of an
overwhelming intensification of his manhood.

At last, a cigarette as his excuse, he stepped out on to the balcony, and
for some moments stood looking out to sea. When he took courage to turn
towards her window he found that though the light in the room was still
burning, the shutters were closed; and thus he remained, staring at the
green woodwork for what seemed an interminable time.

He was about to go back disconsolately to his room when the light was
extinguished, and the shutters were quietly pushed open. Who shall say
whether she knew that Jim was standing in silence upon the balcony, or
whether, being prepared for her bed, she now merely opened the windows
that the cool of the night might bring her refreshing sleep? Woman is
wise: she knows if the hour be meet.

Chapter IV: BEDOUIN LOVE

Jim awoke next morning with the feeling that he had come back to earth
from heaven. The events of the night before seemed to belong to a world
of enchantment, and had no relation to the keen, practical sunlight which
now struck into his room through the open windows, nor to the cool sea
breeze which waved the curtains to and fro, nor yet to the vivid blue sea
and the clean-cut rocks which came into sight as he sat up in bed.

“In the next room,” he mused to himself, “sleeps a woman who in the
darkness was to me the gateway of my dreams, but who in this bright
sunlight will be again only a capable, pretty creature and an amusing
companion. Night, after all, is woman’s kingdom, and in it she is
mistress of all the magic arts of enchantment, she becomes greater than
herself; but day belongs to man. How, then, shall I greet her?—for my
very soul seemed surrendered to her a few hours ago, yet now I find
myself still master of my destiny.”

Like an artist who steps back to view his picture, or like a poet who
measures up his dream, he allowed his mind to take stock of his emotions.
When her head had been thrown back upon the pillows, and the white column
of her throat could be seen in the dim light of the moon against the
black confusion of her hair, it had seemed to him that the marks of the
chisel of the Divine Artist were impressed upon the alabaster of her
flesh. It was as though, gazing down at her beauty, his eyes had been
opened and he had beheld the handicraft of Paradise.

And when, in his ardour, he had had the feeling of not knowing what next
to do nor what words to utter, her silencing loveliness had baffled him,
so it seemed, because her body was stamped with the seal of the Infinite
and fashioned in the likeness of God. True, she was but imperfect woman;
yet the art of the Lord of Arts had created her, and, by the magic of the
night, he had found her rich in the inimitable craftsmanship of heaven.

He had seen the glory of heaven in her eyes. He had heard the voice of
all the ages in her voice. In the touch of her lips there had been the
rapture of the spheres, and the gods of the firmament had seemed to ride
out upon the tide of her breath.

But was it she whom he had wanted when he held her pinioned in his arms?
He could not say. It seemed more reasonable to suppose that through her
he was looking towards the splendour which his soul sought. She was but
the necromancy by which he had carried earth up to heaven; she was the
magic by which he had brought heaven down to the earth. She had been the
door of his dreams, the portal of the sky; and through her he had made
his incursion into the kingdom beyond the stars.

“It was only an illusion,” he said, as he stood at the window,
invigorated by the breeze. “We are actually almost strangers. I don’t
know anything about her, and she knows little of me. It was the magic of
the night employed by scheming Nature for her one unchanging purpose; and
all that happened in the darkness will be forgotten in the sunlight. We
shall meet as friends.”

To some extent he was right, for when at mid-morning she came down to the
blazing beach and seated herself by his side in the shade of the rocks,
she greeted him quietly and serenely, with neither embarrassment nor
familiarity.

“Are you going to bathe this morning?” he asked her, and on her replying
in the affirmative, he told her that he thought he was well enough to do
so, too. At this she showed some concern, but he reminded her that the
water, at any rate near the shore, was warm to the touch and was hardly
likely to do him harm.

The little sandy bay, flanked by rocks which projected into the sea, was
the site of a number of bathing huts and tents used by the Europeans who
lived in the surrounding villas and bungalows. The breakers rolled in
upon this golden crescent, continuously driven forward by the prevalent
north-west wind; but at one side a barrier of low, shelving rocks formed
a small lagoon where the water was peaceful, and one might look down to
the bottom, ten or twelve feet below the surface, and see the brilliant
shells and seaweeds almost as clearly as though they were in the open
air. So strong was the summer sunlight that every object and every plant
at the bottom cast its shadow sharply upon the sparkling bed; and the
passage of little wandering fishes was marked by corresponding shadows
which moved over the fairyland below.

It was not long before Jim and Monimé were swimming side by side across
this small lagoon to the encircling wall of rocks, and soon they had
clambered on to them and had seated themselves where the surf rushed
towards them from the open azure sea on the one side, drenching them with
cool spray, and on the other side the low cliffs and rocks, surmounted by
the clustered palms, were reflected in the still water. Here they sunned
themselves and talked; and from time to time, when the heat became too
great, they dived down together with open eyes into the cool, brilliant
depths, gliding amongst the coloured sea-plants, grimacing at one another
as they scrambled for some conspicuous pebble or shell, and rising again
to the surface in a cloud of bubbles.

It was a joyous, exhilarating, agile occupation, far removed from the
enchantments of the darkness; and the glitter of sun and sea effectually
diminished the lure of the night’s witchery.

“You know,” said Jim, suddenly looking at his companion, as they lay
basking upon the spray-splashed rocks, “I can hardly believe last night
was anything but a dream.”

“Let us pretend that it was,” she answered. She pointed down into the
translucent water. “Life is like that,” she said. “We dive down into
those wonderful depths when the glare of actuality is too great, and we
see all the pretty shells down there; and then we have to come up to the
surface again, or we should drown.”

“I see,” he replied; “I was just a passing fancy of yours.”

She answered him gravely. “Women in that respect are not so different to
men. Judge me by yourself.”

“Oh, but there’s a world of difference,” he said, chilled by her words.
“I am simply a vagabond, a wandering Bedouin, here to-day and over the
hills and far away to-morrow.”

“I am also a wanderer,” she smiled. “We are both free beings who have
broken away from the beaten path. We both earn our living, and claim our
independence.”

“Yet the difference is this,” he reminded her, “that the world will shrug
its shoulders at my actions, but will condemn yours.”

She made an impatient gesture. “Oh, that threadbare truism!” she said.
“I have turned my back on the world, and I don’t care what it thinks.
I act according to my principles, and in this sort of thing the first
principle is very simple. If a woman is a thoughtful, responsible being,
earning her own living, and able to lead her own life without being in
the slightest degree dependent on the man of her choice, or on any other
living soul, she is entitled to respond to the call of nature at that
precious and rare moment when her heart tells her to do so. There should
be no such thing as a different law for the man and for the woman: there
should only be a different law for the self-supporting and the dependent.
The sin is when a woman is a parasite.”

With that she took a header into the water, and he watched her gliding
amidst the swaying tendrils of the sea-plants, like a sinuous mermaiden.

When she rose to the surface once more he dived in, and swam over to her,
his face emerging but a few inches from hers. “Do you love me?” he asked,
smiling amongst the bubbles.

“No, I hate you,” she replied, striking out towards the shore.

“Why?” he called after her.

“Because you haven’t the sense to leave well alone,” she said, and
thereat she dived once more, nor came to the surface again until she had
reached shallow water.

At luncheon she met him with an ambiguous smile upon her lips; but
finding that he was not eating his food with much appetite, she at once
became motherly and solicitous, refused to allow him to eat the salad,
offered to cut up the meat for him, and directed the waiter to bring some
toast in place of the over-fresh roll which he was about to break. At the
conclusion of the meal she ordered him to take a siesta in his room, and
in this he was glad enough to obey her, for he was certainly tired.

When he woke up, an hour or so later, and presently went out on to the
balcony, he saw her standing in her room, contemplating her painting
materials.

“May I come in?” he asked.

She nodded. “Have you had a good sleep?” she inquired. “Sit down and talk
to me. I have a feeling of loneliness this afternoon. I’m not in a mood
to paint; yet I suppose I must, or I shall run short of money.”

He went to her side and put his hands upon her shoulders, drawing her to
him; but she pushed him away from her, with averted face.

“I said ‘sit down,’” she repeated.

Jim was abashed. “You’re very difficult,” he told her. “I think that
under the circumstances I’d better go. I don’t know where I am with you.”

“You haven’t tried to find out,” she answered. “You’re quite capable of
understanding me: I should never have let you come into my life at all if
I had not been certain that you had it in you to understand.”

“Tact is not my strong point,” he said. “I’m just a man.”

“Nonsense!” she replied. “Don’t belittle yourself.”

He was puzzled. “Why, what’s wrong with men?”

“Their refusal to study women,” she answered.

She was not in a communicative mood, and would not be drawn into
argument. He was left, thus, with a disconcerting sense of frustration,
bordering on annoyance. It seemed evident to him that yesterday, by some
secret conjunction of the planets, so to speak, their destinies had met
together in one sentient hour of sympathy; but that now they had sprung
apart once more, and he knew not what stars in their courses would bring
back to him the ripe and mystic moment.

An appalling loneliness descended like a cloud upon him, and he was
conscious that she too, was experiencing the same feeling. It was
the lot, he supposed, of all persons who were born with the Bedouin
temperament; and he accepted it with resignation.

At length she conducted him—or did he lead her?—down to the verandah of
the hotel; and now she had her paints with her, and occupied herself in
making some colour-notes of the brilliant sea which stretched before
them, and of the golden rocks and vivid green palms. Jim, meanwhile, read
an English newspaper, some weeks old, which he had chanced upon in the
salon; but from time to time he sat back in his chair and watched her as
she worked, his admiration manifesting itself in his eyes.

“What are you staring at?” she asked him, presently.

“I was admiring the way you handle your paints,” he replied. “You’re a
real artist.”

“The fact that a woman paints,” she remarked, “does not mean that she
is an artist, any more than the fact that she talks means that she is
a thinker. To be an artist requires two things, firstly, that you have
something to express, and, only secondly, that you know technically how
to express it. It is the point of view, the angle of vision, that counts;
and in fact one can say that primarily one must _live_ an art.”

He nodded. He wondered whether the events of the previous night were
but the living of her art; and the thought engendered a kind of mild
bitterness which led him to give her measure for measure. “I know what
you mean so well,” he said, “because I happen to have the talent to put
things into nice metre and rhyme; but it is the subject matter that
really counts, and that’s where I feel my stuff is so flat. Sometimes I
am obliged to seek experience to help me.”

“You must let me see some of these poems,” she said, pursuing the theme
no further.

He shook his head. “They are only doggerel, like the one I sang last
night,” he laughed. “They are as shallow as my heart.”

She resumed her painting and he his reading; but his mind was not
following the movement of his eyes.

He was thinking how little he understood his companion. She was clearly a
woman of strong views, one who had taken her life into her own hands and
was facing the world with reliant courage. In fact, it might be said of
her that she was the sort of woman who would not be turned from what she
knew to be right by any qualms of guilty conscience. He smiled to himself
at the epigram, and again allowed his thoughts to speculate upon her
alluring personality.

He found at length, however, that the matter was beyond him; and
presently he turned to his reading once more.

It was while he was so engaged that suddenly he sat up in his chair,
gazing with amazement at the printed page before him.

“Great Scott!” he whispered, pronouncing the words slowly and
capaciously. There was a crazy look of astonishment upon his face.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, glancing at him, but unable to tell from
the whimsical expression of his mouth and eyes what manner of news had
taken his attention.

He looked at her as though he did not see her. Then he read once more the
words, which seemed to dance before him, and again stared through her
into the distance of his breathless thoughts.

“News that concerns you?” she asked.

He nodded, holding his hand to his forehead.

“Bad news?”

“Yes,” he answered, as though speaking in a dream. “Very bad ...
wonderful!”

She could not help smiling, and her intuition quickly jumped to the
truth. “Somebody has died and left you some money?” she suggested.

He uttered an almost hysterical laugh. “I’m free!” he cried. “Free! I
shall never have to go back to the mines.”

He sprang to his feet, folding the newspaper, and crushing it in his hand.

“Don’t go and faint again,” she said, quietly.

He laughed loudly, and a moment later was hastening into the hotel.
He snatched his hat from a peg in the hall, and hurried out through
the dusty little garden at the front of the building, and so into the
afternoon glare of the main road. Here he hailed a carriage, and, telling
the driver to take him to the Eastern Exchange Telegraph office, sat back
on the jolting seat, and directed his eyes once more to the Agony Column
of the newspaper. The incredible message read thus:

    JAMES CHAMPERNOWNE TUNDERING-WEST, heir to the late Stephen
    Tundering-West, of the Manor, Eversfield, Oxon, is requested to
    communicate with Messrs. Browne & Beadle, 135A, Lincoln’s Inn
    Fields, London.

His uncle was dead, then, and the two sons, his unknown cousins, must
have predeceased him or died with him! He had never for one moment
thought of himself as a possible heir to the little property; and heaven
knows how long it might have been before he would have had knowledge of
his good fortune had he not chanced upon this old newspaper.

Arrived at his destination, he despatched a cablegram to the solicitors,
notifying them that he would come to England by the first possible boat.
Then he drove on to Cook’s office in the heart of the city, which he
reached not long before it closed; and here, after some anxious delay,
he was told that a berth, just returned by its prospective occupant, was
available on a French liner sailing for Marseilles that night at eleven
o’clock. This he secured without hesitation, and so went galloping back
towards the hotel as the sun went down.

In the open road, between the city and the hotel another carriage passed
him in which Monimé was sitting, on her way to dine with some friends, of
whom she had spoken to him. He waved to her, and both she and he called
their drivers to a halt. Then, hastening across to her, he told her
excitedly that he was sailing for England that night.

“You see, I’ve inherited some property,” be explained. “I must go and
claim it at once.”

Her face was inscrutable, but there was no light of happiness in it. “I’m
sorry it has come to an end so soon,” she cried.

“What?” he cried, and it was evident that he was not listening to her.
“You’ve been wonderful to me. We mustn’t lose sight of each other. This
thing has got to go on and on for ever.”

He hardly knew what he was saying. An hour ago she had been almost the
main factor in his existence. Now she was but a fragment of a life he
was setting behind him. It was almost as though she were fading into a
memory before his very eyes. He was, as it were, looking through her at
an amazing picture which was unfolding itself beyond. The yellow walls of
the houses, the sea, the palms, the sunset, were dissolving; and in their
stead he was staring at the green fields of England, at the timbered
walls of an old manor-house last seen when he was a boy, at the grey
stone church amongst the ilex-trees and the moss-covered tombstones.

“I must go on and pack at once,” he said, standing first on one leg and
then on the other. “You’re sure to be back before I leave. You can get
away by ten, can’t you?”

He wrung her hand effusively, and hurried to his carriage, from which,
standing up, he waved his hat wildly to her as they drove off in opposite
directions.

But when the clock struck ten there was no sign of Monimé and a few
minutes later the hotel porter, who was to accompany him to the harbour,
began to urge him to delay his departure no longer. Being somewhat
flurried, he thought to himself that he would write her a farewell letter
from the steamer, and give it to the porter to carry back with him.

But by the time he had found his cabin and seen to his baggage, the siren
was blowing, and the porter in alarm was hurrying down the gangway.

“I’ll write or cable from Marseilles,” he said to himself. “I don’t
suppose she cares a rap about me: the whole thing was due to our romantic
surroundings. But still one would be a fool to lose sight of a real woman
like that.... I wish I knew her name.”

Chapter V: THE SQUIRE OF EVERSFIELD

The art of life is very largely the art of burying bones. That is the
science of mental economy. When a man is confronted with a problem which
he cannot solve; when, so to speak, Fate presents him with a bone which
he cannot crack, sometimes, without intent, he slinks away with it and,
like a dog, buries it, in the undefined hope that at a later date he may
unearth it and find it then more manageable.

Even so, during the sea voyage, Jim unconsciously buried the bewildering
thought of Monimé. He was a careless fellow, very reprehensible, having
no actual harm in him, yet bearing a record pock-marked, so to speak,
with the sins of omission. He was one of the world’s tramps by nature;
and now once more he was out upon the high road, and the lights of the
city wherein he had slept had faded behind him as he wandered onwards
into another sunrise. It is true that he wrote her a long and intense
letter upon the day after his departure, and that he posted this
upon his arrival at Marseilles; but his brain, by then full of other
things, conjured up no clear vision of her, and his heart sent forth no
impassioned message with the written word. He had been deeply stirred by
her, but also he had been baffled; and, as in the case of a dream, he
made no effort to retain the sweetness of the memory.

On the morning of his arrival he called at the office of the solicitors
who had inserted the advertisement, and was not a little startled to find
himself greeted with that kind of obsequiousness which he had supposed to
have vanished from Lincoln’s Inn fifty years ago.

The little pink-and-white man who was the senior partner, and whose name
was Beadle, rubbed his hands together as though he were washing them, and
actually walked backwards for some paces in front of his visitor, bowing
him into a shabby leather chair which stood beside the large, imposing
desk.

“I hope,” he crooned, when Jim had established his identity, “that we may
still have the duty, and pleasure, of serving you, sir, as we have served
your uncle and your grandfather.”

“I hope so,” replied Jim. “I suppose you know all the ins and outs of the
family affairs.”

Mr. Beadle smilingly directed the young man’s attention to a number of
black tin boxes stacked in the corner of the room. “The Tundering-West
documents for the last two hundred years,” he declared, blowing his
breath through his teeth, an action which served him for laughter.

Jim had a vision of legal formalities and lawyers’ rigmaroles—things
which he had always detested; and the passing thought contributed to the
growing dislike he felt for the harmless, but sycophantic, Mr. Beadle.

“Well, first of all,” he said, “tell me what my inheritance consists of,
and what sort of income I’ve got.”

Mr. Beadle explained that the little property comprised some two hundred
acres, most of which were rented; the score of houses and cottages
which constituted the tiny little village; the small but comfortable
manor-house; and twenty thousand pounds of invested capital. This was
better than Jim had expected, and his pleasure was manifest by the broad
smile upon his tanned face.

“You see, you will have quite a comfortable income in a small way,” the
solicitor told him. “I do not think that your duties will embarrass
you. You will find your tenants very respectful and deferential
country-people, who will give you little bother; and your obligations as
landlord will be very easily discharged.”

“They’re a bit behind the times, eh?” suggested Jim.

“Ah, my dear sir,” said Mr. Beadle, “I am thankful to say that there are
still some parts of the English countryside where a gentleman may live in
comfort, and where the people keep their place.”

Jim was astonished by the remark, for he had believed such sentiments to
be entombed in the novels of long ago. “Poor old England!” he murmured.
“We’re a comic race, aren’t we, Mr. Beetle?”

“‘Beadle,’” the little old man corrected him; and “Sorry!” said Jim.

They spoke later of the tragedies which had thus brought the inheritance
out of the direct line, and hereat came the conventional sighs from Mr.
Beadle, as forced as his laughter. Jim was told how his cousin, Mark,
had died in India of pneumonia, and how his uncle and the remaining son,
James, having gone to the Lakes that the old gentleman might recover
his equanimity, were both drowned in a sudden squall while sailing
at a considerable distance from the shore. The bodies were recovered
and brought to Eversfield for burial; and very solemnly the solicitor
produced a photograph of the memorial tablet which had been set up in the
church.

“Some day, I trust a very long time hence, your own mural tablet will
be set up there,” he said, after Jim had handed back the photograph in
silence. “‘Nihil enim semper floret; ætas succedit ætati,’ as the good
Cicero says.”

“Quite so,” said Jim.

“It has all been a terrible blow to me,” sighed Mr. Beadle. “The late Mr.
Tundering-West treated me quite as a personal friend.”

“Did he really?” Jim was going to be rude, but checked himself. He felt
an extraordinary hostility to this well-meaning but servile little
personage. “I shall go down there to-morrow,” he remarked, as he rose
to take his departure, “and I’ll probably have the house thoroughly
renovated before I go into it.”

“I don’t think you will find much that requires alteration,” Mr. Beadle
assured him, his hand raised in a gesture of deprecation. “Hasty changes
are always undesirable; and, when you have grown into the spirit of the
place I think you will find that you have a duty to the past.” He checked
himself, and bowed. “I trust you will not mind an old man giving you
that advice,” he murmured, as they shook hands. He bowed so low that it
appeared to be a complete physical collapse.

On the following day Jim motored to Eversfield in a hired open car. He
could with greater ease have gone by train to Oxford, and could have
driven over in a fly; but he wanted to have the pleasure of spending some
of his new money, and, moreover, a fifty-mile drive through the fair
lands of Berkshire and Oxfordshire in the radiance of a summer’s day
appealed to his imagination. Nor was he disappointed. He acknowledged the
beauties of the land of his birth with whole-hearted pleasure; and his
eyes, weary with long gazing upon leaden skies and burning sands, were
soothed in a manner beyond scope of words by the green fields, the soft
foliage of the trees, and grey skies of a hot, hazy morning. It is true
that the roads were extremely dusty, and that his face and clothes were
soon thickly powdered; but, as the chauffeur had provided him with a pair
of motoring glasses, he was not troubled in this respect.

The little hamlet of Eversfield lay seemingly asleep in its hollow amidst
the richly timbered hills, as, at midday, he drove up to the grey stone
gates of his future home. Here was the narrow village green just as he
had last seen it when he was a boy: on one side of the lane which opened
on to it were these imposing gates; on the other side were the little
church and moss-covered gravestones leaning at all angles, as though the
dead were whispering together deferentially at the entrance of the manor.
Upon the green were the old stocks, and the stump and worn steps of the
ancient cross; and behind them stood the thatched cottages backed by the
stately elms.

“I suppose in years to come,” he thought, “I shall be walking through
these gates to the church on Sundays, followed by the lady of my choice
and half-a-dozen children; and the villagers will nudge one another and
say ‘Here comes Squire and all his little squirrels.’ ... Good Lord!”

The exclamation was due to the sudden feeling that he had walked into a
trap, that he had been caught by immemorial society, and would soon be
forced to conform to its ways; and, as the car passed in at the gates of
the manor, he had, for a moment, a desire to jump out and run for his
life.

A short, straight drive, flanked by clipped box-trees, led to the main
door of the timbered Tudor house; and here the new owner, dusty, and
somewhat untidily dressed, was received by the gardener and his buxom
wife, who had both grown grey in his uncle’s service. The man held his
cap in his hand, and touched his wrinkled forehead with his finger
a number of times, painfully anxious to find favour; while his wife
curtseyed to him at least thrice.

“Are you the gardener?—what is your name?” Jim asked briskly, feeling
almost as awkward as the man he addressed, but determined to go through
the ordeal with honour.

“Peter, sir,” said the gardener. “Peter Longarm, sir. I rec’lect you,
sir, when you was no more’n so ’igh, I do.”

“Why, of course,” Jim replied. “I remember you now. You’re the fellow who
told my uncle when I broke the glass of the forcing frame.”

The old man looked sheepish. “I ’ad to do my dooty, sir,” he said. “I ask
your pardon.”

“Duty,” Jim thought to himself. “I’m beginning to know that word. I
wonder what it really means.” He turned to the woman. “Now, please go and
open the doors of all the rooms, and then leave me to walk through the
house by myself.” He wanted to be alone to realize his new possession and
to dream his dream of future ease. Mrs. Longarm eyed him nervously for a
moment before obeying his instructions; she told her husband afterwards,
with tears in her eyes, that she felt as though she were surrendering the
house to a cut-throat foreigner.

As he wandered, presently, from room to room he was at first overpowered
by the feeling that he was intruding upon the privacy of some sort of
family life which he did not understand. His uncle’s wife had been
dead for three or four years, but there were still many traces of her
influence: the drawing-room, for example, was furnished in a style which
called to his mind faded pictures of feminine tea-parties. Here was the
old piano upon which the good lady must have tinkled the songs of which
the music still lay in the cabinet near by—songs such as _My Mother Bids
Me Bind My Hair_, and _Ah, Welladay my Poor Heart_. And here was the
little sewing-table where had doubtless rested the silks and needles
for her embroidery. Perhaps it was she who had chosen the gilt-framed
engravings upon the walls—the depressed picture of “Hagar and Ishmael in
the Wilderness;” a youthful portrait of Alexandra, Princess of Wales;
“Jacob weeping over Joseph’s coat;” the sprightly “Hawking Party,” and
so forth.

Looking around, he experienced a sensation of mingled mirth and awe, and
he hoped that the ghost of his aunt would not haunt him when he laid
sacrilegious and violent hands upon these things, as at first he intended
to do. The chintzes appeared to be of more recent date; but these, too,
would have to go, for, as a pattern, he detested sprays of red roses tied
with blue ribbons.

The dining-room, hall and staircase, being panelled and hung with family
portraits, were impressive in their conveyance of a sense of many
generations; and the hereditary library, if sombre, was interesting.
Jim was very fond of old books, and he stood there for some time taking
the calf-bound volumes from the shelves, and turning over the ancient
pages. But, the morning-room, with its red-covered chairs, its mahogany
sideboard, and its sham Chinese vases, was distressing. Yet here, as in
the drawing-room, there was a chaste and awful solemnity, from which he
shrank, as a conscientious Don Juan might shrink at a lady’s _prie-Dieu_.

The larger bedrooms upstairs, with their mahogany wardrobes and heavy
chests of drawers full of clothes, and cupboards full of boots and hats,
were startling in their association with their late tenants. On a table
beside his uncle’s bed there lay a recent novel, which Jim himself had
also just read: it constituted a gruesome link between the living and
the dead. He glanced about him and through the window, down the drive,
almost expecting to see the apparitions of his relatives stalking up from
the family vault in the churchyard to see what he was about. His uncle
would probably think him a dreadful scallawag, for the old gentleman had
been an accredited pillar of Church and State, with, so the cupboards
testified, a mania for collecting the top hats he had worn on Sundays or
when in town. He had been a model of propriety, and the monumental stone,
the photograph of which he had seen at the solicitors, stated that he had
“nobly upheld the traditions of his race.”

Jim felt depressed, and presently went out into the garden which was
ablaze with flowers; and here, after a late meal of sandwiches, eaten
upon an ornamental stone bench, his spirits revived, for the manor and
its setting formed a very beautiful picture. If only he could get rid of
all those hats and clothes and old photographs!

A sudden idea occurred to him: he would go and find the padre, and tell
him to take these things for the poor of the parish. They must be got rid
of at once, even though every man in the village be obliged to wear a top
hat. They must all be gone before he came here again, or he would never
bring himself to live in the house at all! He hurried down the drive,
asked Peter Longarm at the lodge to point out the vicarage to him, and
thereafter hastened on his errand.

Near the church, however, and at a point where a gap in the trees
revealed a distant view of the dreaming, huddled spires of Oxford,
flanked by the lonely tower of Magdalen College, he met with a
white-bearded clergyman whom he presumed to be the vicar, and at once
accosted him.

“Excuse me,” he said, ingratiatingly, barring his way. “Would you care
to have some old hats?—I mean of course, would your flock like to wear
them?—Top hats, you know, and old boots, too, if you want them.”

The elderly gentleman was annoyed, and, with a curt “No thank you, not
to-day,” proceeded on his way. Jim, however, called after him, coaxingly:
“They are quite good hats really; they only want brushing.”

At this the man of God stopped and turned, looking at Jim’s somewhat
dusty figure with wonderment. “Do I understand that you are selling old
hats?” he asked, endeavouring to speak politely.

Jim rushed feverishly into explanation. “No, I want to get rid of
them,” he gabbled; “I want to get rid of all sorts of things—hats,
coats, trousers, dressing-gowns, shirts, vests, boots, slippers, old
photographs, umbrellas ...” He paused for breath, inwardly laughing.

Very slowly and deliberately the clergyman adjusted his eyeglasses low
down upon his nose, and stared at Jim. “Young man,” he said, “is this a
jest at my expense?”

“Good Lord, no!” Jim answered. “I’m in deadly earnest. I can’t possibly
live in the house with all these things. You _will_ help me, won’t you?
How would it be if you came over to-morrow and cleared them all out, and
then had a meeting or something, and gave them as prizes to the regular
church-goers?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” the clergyman responded,
gently but firmly pushing him aside. “Good-day!”

Jim stared at him as he walked. “You _are_ the vicar, aren’t you?” he
asked.

“No, I’m not,” the other replied somewhat sharply, over his shoulder;
“I’m the President of Magdalen.”

Jim uttered an exclamation of impatience, and hastened on to the Vicarage.

The servant who appeared in response to his knock, was about to ask him
his name, when the vicar, an old man with a clean-shaven, kindly face,
and grey hair, happened to cross the hall.

“Yes, what is it, what is it?” he asked, coming to the door, while the
maid retired.

“Are you the vicar?” Jim asked, beginning more cautiously.

“I am,” the other responded.

“You really are? Well I want to ask you about some old clothes. I....”

The vicar held up his hand. “No, I have none to sell you,” he said
smiling sadly. “I wear mine out.”

Jim laughed aloud. “First I’m thought to be selling them, and now you
think I’m buying them,” he exclaimed. “We certainly are a nation of
shop-keepers.”

The vicar was puzzled. “I don’t understand. What is it you want?”

“I have a lot of hats and old clothes I want to get rid of. I thought you
might like them.”

The clergyman bowed stiffly. “It is very kind of you,” he said frigidly.
“My stipend, I admit, is small, but I am not yet reduced to the
necessity of wearing a stranger’s cast-off clothing.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” Jim hastily explained. “And they’re not mine:
they belonged to my late relatives. I am just coming to live at the
manor, and I thought the poor of the parish would....”

The vicar interrupted him. “I beg your pardon. Are you ...?” He
hesitated, incredulous.

“Yes, I’m the new Tundering-West,” Jim told him.

The other held out his hands. “Well, well!” he cried. “And I thought you
were....” He hesitated.

“The old clothes man,” laughed Jim.

“Oh, very droll!” the vicar smiled, shaking him warmly by the hand. “How
ridiculous of me! Do come in, my dear sir!”

Jim followed him into the drawing-room, and here he found a little
old lady, who was introduced to him as Miss Proudfoote, and a florid,
middle-aged man with a waxed moustache, who looked like a sergeant-major,
and proved to be Dr. Spooner, the local medical man. They had evidently
been lunching at the Vicarage, and were now drinking the post-prandial
concoction which the English believe to be coffee. They both greeted him
with a sort of deference, which however, did not conceal their curiosity.

During the next ten minutes Jim heard a great deal of his “poor dear
uncle” and his unfortunate cousins. The tragedy of their deaths, it
seemed, had cast the profoundest gloom over the village; but it was a
case of “the King is dead; long live the King!” and all three of his new
acquaintances appeared to be anxious to pay him every respect.

Dr. Spooner asked him from what part of England he had just come, and the
news that he had been living abroad and had not visited the land of his
birth for many years caused a sensation. The thought occurred to him that
he ought not to mention Egypt, or any other land which had recently known
him as Jim Easton; for any such revelations might bring discredit upon
him, and he wished to start his life at Eversfield without any handicap.
He therefore spoke only of California, referring to it casually as a
country where he had resided.

Miss Proudfoote turned to the vicar. “Is it not extraordinary,” she said,
“how many of our young men shoulder what Mr. Kipling calls ‘the white
man’s burden’ and go forth to live amongst the heathen?” Her geography
was evidently at fault, but out of consideration for her years and her
sex, no correction was forthcoming. “I suppose,” she proceeded, “you met
with our missionaries out there? It is wonderful what a great work the
Church Missionary Society is doing all over the world.”

The Doctor here had the hardihood to interpose. “Oh, but California is a
part of the United States of America ...” he ventured.

“How foolish of me!—of course,” smiled the old lady. “The Americans are
quite an educated people. I met an American traveller once in Oxford: a
pleasant spoken young man he seemed, so far as I could understand what he
said.”

“Yes,” remarked the vicar, “America can no longer be called ‘the common
sewer of England,’ as it was when I was a boy.”

Jim stared from one to the other in amazement. “But America is the
largest and most progressive part of the Anglo-Saxon race,” he protested.
“They are already ahead of us in many ways.”

Miss Proudfoote was shocked, and she showed it. “It is evident that you
do not know England,” she replied, coldly.

“I mean,” he emphasized, “it always seems to me a fine thought that
England can never die, because she will live again over there; and then
she’ll have another lease of life in Australia; and so on. This England
here may die, but the English will go on for ever and ever, it seems to
me. And wherever their home may be,” he added, laughing, “they’ll always
think it ‘God’s own country,’ and think themselves the chosen people.”

Miss Proudfoote looked anxiously at him, hoping that there was some good
in him. “I trust,” she said, “that it is now your intention to settle
down?”

“Yes,” he replied. “I fancy my wanderings are over.”

“Heaven has placed you in a very responsible position,” she said, gazing
earnestly at him. “I am sure our best wishes will be with you in your
duties.”

“Yes, indeed,” sighed the vicar, whose name, as Jim had just ascertained,
was Glenning. “Are you a married man, may I ask?”

“Oh no,” Jim replied.

Miss Proudfoote patted his arm. “We shall have to find you a wife,” she
smiled.

Jim was aghast, and hastily changed the subject. “Now about the old
clothes,” he began.

Mr. Glenning coloured, slightly. “What an absurd error for me to have
made,” he said. “Now, tell me, what is it you wish me to do?”

“I’m going back to London to-day,” Jim explained, “and I want you, while
I am away, to go through all my uncle’s things, and give away to the poor
everything you think I shall not want. Just use your own judgment.”

“It will be a melancholy duty,” he replied.

“I’m sure it will,” the new Squire answered, “but, I tell you frankly,
anything useless I find here when I return I shall burn.”

The vicar raised his hands; the doctor sniffed; and Miss Proudfoote
looked at the stranger indignantly.

“That is rather hasty, is it not?” she asked, tremulously.

Jim felt awkward. He had made a bad impression, and he knew it. “You
see,” he tried to explain, “my uncle died so suddenly and the place is
littered with his things. All I want to keep is the furniture, and the
silver, and the books, and that sort of thing, but I will see to that
myself.”

Miss Proudfoote turned away suddenly and Jim, to his horror, saw her
raise a handkerchief to her eyes. He could have kicked himself. He wished
the floor would open and engulf him. He looked in despair at the two men.

“You know I haven’t seen my uncle since I was a boy,” he stammered. “I am
a complete stranger.”

“He was our very dear friend,” said Mr. Glenning.

Chapter VI: SETTLING DOWN

While the congregation in the little church at Eversfield was singing
the last hymn of the morning service the October sun passed from
behind an extensive bank of cloud, and its rays shot down through the
plain glass window upon the figure of a young woman, whose sudden and
surprising illumination instantly attracted many pairs of eyes to her.
She looked, and knew it, like a little angel as she stood in this shaft
of brilliance, hymn-book in hand, singing the well-known words in a voice
which enhanced their ancient sweetness; and the vicar, from his place at
the side of the small chancel, fixed his gaze upon her with an expression
of such saintly beatitude upon his face as to be almost idiotic.

Her name was Dorothy Darling; but her mother, who here stood beside her
in the shadow under the wall, called her Dolly, and rightly congratulated
herself upon having chosen for her only baby, twenty-three years ago, a
name of which the diminutive was so appropriate to the now grown woman.

In the sunshine the girl’s soft, fair hair looked like a puff of gold,
and her skin like coral; and the play of light and shade accentuated
the pretty lines of her figure, so that they were by no means lost
under the folds of her smart little frock. Her large, soft eyes were as
innocent as they were blue, and never a glance betrayed the fact that
she was singing for the direct benefit of the new Squire, whose head and
shoulders appeared above the carved wooden walls of the sort of loose-box
which was his family pew.

The miniature church, though dating from the twelfth century, still
retained the features by which it had been transformed and modernized in
the obsequious days of Walpole and the first of the Georges. The pews for
the “gentry” were boxed in, and each was fitted with its door; but the
walls of Jim’s pew were higher than the others and its area bigger. At
the back of the church there were the open seats for the villagers and
persons of vulgar birth; but the woodwork here was not carved, save with
the occasional initials of lads long since passed out of memory.

At the sides of the chancel were set the mural tablets which recorded
the genealogical lustres of dead Tundering-Wests, back to the day when
a certain Captain of Horse had obtained a grant of the manor from the
Commonwealth, in lieu of his devastated estate in Devon, and, with
admirable tact, had married the daughter of the exiled Royalist owner.
Around the whitewashed walls of the small nave large wooden boards were
hung, upon which were painted the arms and quarterings of the successive
Squires and their spouses; and above the chancel arch the royal Georgian
escutcheon was displayed in still vivid colours.

The church, indeed, was a tiny monument to all that glory of caste
which its Divine Founder abhorred, and which the aforesaid Roundhead,
misapprehending the unalterable character of his fellow-countrymen, had
apparently fought in his own day to suppress.

When the hymn was finished, the blessing spoken, and Mr. Glenning gone
into the vestry behind the organ, this traditional distinction between
the classes was emphasized by the behaviour of the little congregation.
Nobody of the meaner sort moved towards the sunlit doorway until Jim,
looking extraordinarily embarrassed, had marched down the aisle and had
passed out into the autumnal scurry of falling leaves, followed closely
by Mrs. and Miss Darling, Mr. Merrivall of Rose Cottage, Dr. and Mrs.
Spooner, and old Miss Proudfoote of the Grange; and, when these were
gone, way had still to be made for young Farmer Hopkins and his wife,
Farmer Cartwright and his idiot son, and the other families of local
standing.

Outside, in the keen October air, Jim paused under the ancient ilex-tree,
and turned to bid good-morning to the Darlings. Dolly had interested and
attracted him during these three months since he took up his residence at
the manor; but he had been so much occupied in settling himself into his
new home that he had not given her all the attention he felt was her due,
now that the shaft of sunlight in the church had revealed her to him in
the palpable charm of her maidenhood.

He greeted her, therefore, with cheery ardour, as though she were a new
discovery, and walked beside her and her mother down the path which wound
between the moss-covered gravestones, and out into the lane under the
rustling elms. A great change had come over him since he had returned
to England: he had become in some ways more normal, and the quiet,
simple life of an English village had, as it were, taken much of the
exotic colour out of his thoughts. In the romantic East he had looked
for romance, but here in the domestic West his mind had turned towards
domesticity. His poetic imagination was temporarily blunted; and whereas
in Alexandria he had responded eagerly to the enchantments of hour and
place, in Eversfield he was readily satisfied with a more rational aspect
of life.

He turned to the mother. “What a little picture your daughter looked,
singing that hymn in the sunlight,” he remarked, with enthusiasm.

Mrs. Darling sighed. Twenty years ago she, too, had been a little
picture; but, so she thought to herself, she had had more character in
her face than Dolly, and less softness. Outwardly her little girl took
after that scamp of a father of hers, whose innocent blue eyes and boyish
face had won him more frequent successes than his continence could handle.

“Yes,” she replied, evasively, “that is Dolly’s favourite hymn.... She
has a nice little voice.”

“Delightful!” said Jim. “I didn’t know hymns could sound so beautiful!”

Dolly looked at him as our great-grandmothers must have looked when they
said, “Fie!”

“Aren’t you a regular church-goer?” she asked, gazing up at him with
childlike eyes.

“Can’t say I am,” he answered, with a quick laugh. “I’m new to all this,
you know. I’ve knocked about all over the world since I left school.
But, I say!—that family pew, and the respectful villagers!—they give me
the hump!”

“Oh, I think it is charming, perfectly charming,” said Mrs. Darling.

“Well,” he replied, “I expect I’ll get used to it. I suppose this sort of
life grows on one: in some ways I’m beginning to have a sort of settled
feeling already.”

They were walking away from the gates of the Manor, which rose opposite
the ivy-covered church, and were approaching the picturesque little
cottage where the Darlings lived. Jim paused, and as he did so Dolly
experienced a sudden sense of disappointment. She had hoped that he
would accompany them to their door, and she had intended then to entice
him through it, and to show him over their pretty rooms and round the
flower-garden and the orchard. Until now they had only occasionally met,
and their exchanges of conversational trivialities had been carried on
in the lane, or at the door of the church, or outside the cottage which
served as the post-office. He seemed to be a difficult man to take
hold of; and during the last few weeks, since her mind had begun to be
so disastrously full of the thought of him, she had felt ridiculously
frustrated in her attempts to develop their friendship. Frustration, of
course, is woman’s destiny, which meets her at every turn; but in youth
it sometimes serves as her incentive.

“Won’t you come in and see our little home?” she asked. “It’s rather a
treasure.”

He shook his head. “I’m afraid I can’t,” he replied. “I promised to go
round my place with the gardener this morning. He’ll be waiting for me
now. But, I say, what about dinner to-night? Won’t you both dine with
me?” He was feeling reckless.

Dolly’s heart leapt, and, in a flash, she had selected the dress she
would put on, and had considered whether she should wear the little
diamond pendant or the sham pearls.

“We shall be delighted,” murmured Mrs. Darling. “Eh, Dolly?”

The girl looked doubtful. “I don’t know that we ought to to-night,” she
answered. “We had half promised to drive over to a sort of sacred concert
affair in Oxford.”

“Oh, don’t disappoint me,” said Jim. “I’ve got the house almost shipshape
now; I’d like you to see it.”

Dolly did not require really to be pressed; and soon the young man was
striding homewards down the lane, wondering why it had taken him three
months to realize that this girl was perfectly adorable; while she, on
her part, was pinching Mrs. Darling’s arm and saying: “Oh, mother dear,
doesn’t he look delightfully _wicked_!”

“Yes, he seems a nice, sardonic fellow,” her mother remarked grimly, as
they entered their house. “Why did you begin by saying we were engaged
to-night? It’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

Dolly smiled. “Oh, I made that up, because I thought you were too prompt
in accepting. He’ll want us all the more if we are stand-offish. Men are
like that.”

Mrs. Darling sniffed. She was a lazy, plump, and rather languid little
woman; and sometimes she grew impatient at her daughter’s ingenious
method of dealing with these sorts of situations. She herself had grown
more direct in her Yea and Nay: perhaps at the age of forty-five she was
a little tired of dissimulation. The world had treated her scurvily;
and, having a settled grievance, she was inclined now to take whatever
pleasant things were to be had for the asking, without any subtle
manœuvering for position.

Her husband had left her when Dolly was five years old, and, so far as
she knew, he was now dead. For several years she had bravely maintained
herself in a tiny Kensington flat by writing social and theatrical
articles for pretentious papers. She had been a purveyor of gossip, a
tattle-monger, a dealer in bibble-babble; and she had carried on her
trade with an increasing inclination to yawn over it, and a growing
consciousness of her daughter’s contempt, until the editors who had
supported her became aware that her heart was not in her work, and five
years ago gave her her _congé_.

Then, with a temporary display of energy, she had followed Dolly’s
cultured advice, and had established a little business off Sloane Square,
which she called “The Purple Shop.” Here she sold purple cushions and
lamp-shades, poppy-heads dipped in purple paint, poetry-books in purple
covers, sketches by Bakst in purple frames, lengths of purple damask, and
so forth. But purple went out of fashion, and her once very considerable
profits sank to the vanishing point. She introduced other colours, and
softer shades of mauve and lilac. She sold a doll which had mauve hair
and naughty black eyes; she took in a stock of bottled new potatoes
tinged with a harmless purple liquid, and presented them to the jaded
world of fashion as _Pommes de terre pourpres de Tyr_; she even sold
brilliant bath-robes for bored bachelors, with coloured soap to match.

A financial crash followed, and, after a few months spent in dodging
her creditors, she heard of this little cottage at Eversfield, and fled
to it with her daughter, leaving no address. She was in receipt of a
small annual allowance from the estate of a deceased brother, and this
she supplemented by writing the monthly fashion article in one of the
journals devoted to the world, the flesh and the devil. She wrote under
the nom-de-plume of “Countess X”; and her material was obtained by a
monthly visit to London and a tour of the leading modistes.

For eighteen months now she had lain low in this nook of the Midlands
where Time stood still, and gradually she had ceased to dread the visit
of the postman, and had begun to take a languid interest in the cottage.
The colour purple no longer set her fat knees knocking together, and
lately she had been able even to look up some of her old friends in
London and to greet them with the sad, brave smile of a wronged woman.

To Dolly, however, the enforced seclusion had been a sore trial, and
there were times when her pretty eyes were red with weeping. She had been
utterly bored by the purposeless existence she was called upon to lead;
but now the arrival of the new Squire at the manor, which had hardly
seen its previous owner during the last year of his life, had aroused
her from her sorrows and had set her heart in a flutter. She liked his
strange, swarthy face and his moody eyes, and thought he looked artistic
and even intellectual; and she liked his obvious embarrassment at the
deference paid to him in this little kingdom which he had inherited.

She spent the afternoon, therefore, in a condition of pleasurable
excitement, stitching at the dress she was going to wear and making
certain alterations to the shape of the neck.

While she plied her needle, Mrs. Darling sat at the low window
overlooking the orchard, and scribbled her monthly article upon a
writing-pad resting on her knee. “Here is a charming little conceit I
chanced upon in Bond Street t’other day,” she wrote. “It is really a
tub-time frock; but its success in the drawing-room is likely to be
immediate. Organdy ruchings of moonlight blue, and a _soupçon_ of jet
cabochons on the corsage. It is named ‘Hopes in turmoil.’” And again,
“I noticed, too, a crisp little _trotteur_ frock, with a nipped-in
waist-line hesitating behind a _moyenage_ girdle of beige velours
delaine. They have called it ‘Cupid’s Teeth.’ Oh, very snappy, I assure
you, my dears!”

She smiled lazily as she wrote, but once she sighed so heavily that her
daughter asked her if anything were amiss.

“No,” she replied. “I was only just wondering whether anybody in their
senses could understand the nonsense I am writing. The editor’s orders
are to make the thing sound French: I should lose my job if I wrote in
plain English.”

“Oh dear,” sighed Dolly, “how tedious all that sort of thing seems! I
wonder that you can bother with it.”

“I’ve got to,” her mother answered, with irritation. “I shan’t be able to
give it up till you are married and off my hands.”

“Yes, so you are always telling me,” said Dolly; and therewith their
silence was renewed.

Night had fallen when they set out for the manor, and the lane was
intensely dark. They were guided, however, by the light in the window
of the lodge at the gates; and from here to their destination they were
accompanied by the gardener, who carried a lantern which flung their
shadows, like great black monsters, across the high box-hedges flanking
the main approach. From the outside the timbered house looked ghostly and
forbidding; and by contrast, the front hall which they entered seemed
wonderfully well-lit, though only lamps and candles and the flames of the
log-fire served for illumination.

Here Jim came to them as they were removing their wraps, and Dolly could
see by the expression on his face that her dress had his hearty approval.
He led them into the library, where his late uncle’s books, arranged upon
the high shelves, and the rather heavy furniture, presented a picture
of solid dignity; and presently they were ushered into the panelled
dining-room, where they sat down at a warmly lit table, under the silent
scrutiny of a gallery of dead Tundering-Wests and that of a gaping
village housemaid who appeared to be more or less moribund.

The food provided by Jim’s thoroughly incompetent cook was not a
success, and when some rather tough mutton chops had followed a dish of
under-boiled cod, which had been preceded by a huge silver tureen of
lukewarm soup, their host felt that some words of apology were due to his
guests.

“You must try to bear with the menu,” he laughed. “This is my cook’s
first situation. She was recommended to me by Mr. Glenning, the vicar, as
a girl who was willing to learn; but it only occurred to me afterwards
that that was not much good when there was nobody to teach her.”

“You must let me give her a few lessons,” said Dolly, at which her mother
stared in astonishment, knowing that her daughter understood about as
much of cooking as a dumb-waiter.

Yet the girl was not conscious of deception, nor was she aware that she
was acting a part, and acting it mainly for her own edification. She
pictured herself just now as a splendid little housewife, and she would
have been gravely insulted if her mother had told her that her dream
was devoid of reality. In her mind she saw herself as the lady of the
manor, quietly, unobtrusively, yet all-wisely, directing its affairs; a
sweet smiling Bunty pulling the strings; a little ray of sunshine in the
great, grey old house; a source of comfort to her lord which he would not
appreciate until she should go away to stay with her mother, whereon he
would write to her telling her that since her departure everything had
gone wrong.

Throughout her life she had played such parts to herself, her rôles
varying according to circumstances. At the Purple Shop she had been the
dreamy little artist, destined for higher things, but forced by cruel
poverty to act as assistant saleswoman to a soulless mother, and to smile
bravely at the world, though her artist’s heart was breaking. When first
she had come to Eversfield and had fallen under the spell of the green
woods, she had had a severe bout of “Merrie England.” She had tripped
through the fields in a sun-bonnet, and had begged her mother to buy
a harpsichord. She had joined a society of ladies in Oxford who were
attempting to revive folk-dancing, and she had footed it nimbly on the
sward while the curate played “Hey-diddle-diddle” to them on his flute.

Later she had gone through the nymph-and-fairy phase, and, in the depth
of the woods, had let her hair down so that it looked in the sunlight,
she supposed, like woven gold. She had danced her way barefooted from
tree to tree, sipping the dew from the dog-roses, and singing snatches of
strange, wild songs about the “little people,” and talking to the birds;
and when Farmer Cartwright had caught her at it, she had looked at him,
she believed, like a startled fawn.

But now, since the new Squire, with his background of rich lands and
ancient tenure, had come into her life, she had played the little
helpmate, the goodwife in her dairy, the mistress in her kitchen with
whole-hearted enthusiasm. She thought of beginning to collect a book of
Simples, in which there would be much mention of Marjoram, Rosemary, Rue
and Thyme; soveraign Balsames for Woundes, and Cordiall Tinctures for
ye Collicke; receipts for the making of Quince-Wine, or Syllabubs of
Apricocks; and so forth. Phrases such as “The little mistress of the big
house,” “My lady in her pleasaunce,” or “—in her herbal garden,” had been
drifting through her head for some time past; and hence her offer to set
Jim’s cuisine to rights fell naturally from her lips.

Nor was this the only show of interest she displayed in his domestic
affairs. After the meal was finished and they were sitting around the
fire in the library, she asked Jim to show her the drawing-room, which
was not yet in use; and when he was about to lead her to it she made
peremptory signs to her mother to refrain from accompanying them.

As she tiptoed down the passage and across the hall at Jim’s side,
she laid her hand upon his proffered arm, and he was surprised at the
lightness of the touch of her fingers. He did not, perhaps, compare it
actually to thistledown, which, at the moment, was the description her
own mind was fondly giving it; but her painstaking effort to defeat the
Newtonian law resulted, as she desired, in an increased consciousness on
his part that she was a very fairy-like creature.

The drawing-room was in darkness, and as they entered it she uttered a
little squeak of nervousness which went, as it was intended, straight to
his manly heart. He put his disengaged hand on her fingers and felt their
response: they seemed to be seeking his protection, and his senses were
thrilled at the contact. He could have kissed her as she stood.

“Wait a minute,” he said, “I’ll light the candles.”

“No, don’t,” she answered. “It looks so ghostly and wonderful.”

She crept forward into the room, into which only the reflected light
from the hall penetrated, and presently she came to a stand upon the
hearth-rug. He followed her, and stood close at her side; one might have
harkened to both their hearts beating. Then, boldly, he put his arm in
hers and took hold of her hand. It was trembling.

“Why,” he said, in surprise, “you’re shaking with fright.”

“No, it isn’t fright,” she stammered....

The voice of worldly wisdom whispered to him: “Look out!—this is getting
precious close to the danger zone”; and, with a saner impulse, he removed
his hand from hers, struck a match, and lit the candle.

“Oh, now you’ve spoilt it!” she exclaimed, not without irritation, and
then added quickly: “The ghosts have vanished.”

He held the candle up, and told her to look round the room; but as she
did so his own eyes were fixed upon her averted face, and had she turned
she would have realized at once that her triumph was nigh.

Chapter VII: THE GAME OF SURVIVAL

Upon the following afternoon the vicar came to call at the manor. Jim
had handed over to him as the oldest friend of the late Squire all his
uncle’s letters, diaries, and other papers, and had asked him to look
through them; and, the task being accomplished, he was now bringing them
back, carefully docketed and tied up in a large parcel.

As he entered the house there came to his venerable ears the sounds of
singing and the twanging of strings.

“Dear me, what is that?” he asked the maid, pausing in the hall.

“Oh, it’s only the master a-playing of ’is banjo,” the girl explained,
smiling at the vicar, who had been her friend since her earliest
childhood. “’E often gets took like that, sir. Cook says it’s ’is furrin
blood.”

“But he has no foreign blood,” Mr. Glenning told her.

“’E looks a furrin gentleman,” she replied, “and ’is ways....” She
paused, remembering her manners.

The vicar was shown into the drawing-room, and here he found the Squire
seated upon the arm of the sofa, his guitar across his knees.

“Hullo, padre!” said Jim. “Excuse the music.” He was somewhat abashed
at thus being taken unawares, for he had little idea that his singing
was anything but an infernal noise, intended by Nature to be a vent to
the feelings. And these feelings, just now, were of a somewhat violent
character, for, though he was not yet aware of his plight, he was in love.

In the early part of the afternoon he had gone for a wandering walk in
the woods adjoining the manor, in order to escape a sense of depression
which had descended upon him. “It must be this old house,” he had said
to himself, “with its weight of years. It feels like a trap in which
I’ve been caught, a trap laid by the forefathers to catch the children
and teach them their manners.” And therewith he had rushed out into the
sunshine.

Mr. Glenning smiled indulgently. “I shall have to make use of your voice
in church,” he said.

“Oh, no, you don’t!” Jim laughed, pretending to edge away. “Your choir is
bad enough as it is.”

The vicar was hurt, and Jim hastened to obliterate his thoughtless
words by remarking that he had, not long since, come in from a tour of
exploration in the woods, and had found them very pleasant.

“Yes,” his visitor replied, “they have grown up nicely. In the Civil
War all the trees were felled by Cromwell’s men during the siege of
Oxford; but one of your ancestors replanted the devastated area after the
Restoration, and the place now looks, I dare say, just as it did before
that unfortunate quarrel.”

The thought did not please Jim. Even the woods, then, which that
afternoon seemed to him to be a place of escape from the pall of history,
were but a part of the chain of ancient circumstances which bound the
whole estate. Even in their depths he would not be out of hearing of
the voice of his forefathers, which told him that they had sowed for
posterity and that he must do likewise.

He dismissed the irksome reflection by asking the vicar the nature of the
parcel which he had deposited on the table.

Mr. Glenning explained that it contained his uncle’s letters, and
therewith he unfastened the string, ceremoniously, and revealed a bundle
of small packets. “I have been through all these, except this one
package,” he said, holding up a small parcel, “and I certainly think they
are worth keeping, for they display your uncle’s noble character in a
variety of ways.”

“He seems to have been a fine old fellow,” Jim remarked.

“He was, indeed,” replied the vicar. “He represented all the best in our
English life.” And therewith he enlarged upon the dead man’s virtues,
while Jim listened attentively, feeling that the words were intended as
an admonition to himself.

At length Mr. Glenning turned to the unopened package. “I have been much
exercised in my mind,” he said, “as to what to do in regard to this one
packet. It is marked, as you see, ‘To be destroyed at my death.’ Of
course, the words do not actually state that the contents are not to be
read; but I thought it would be best to consult you first.”

“Thanks,” replied Jim. “I’ll have a look at it some time.”

He opened the drawer in the bureau, and bundled the letters into it,
while the vicar watched him, feeling that he was sadly lacking in
reverence, and not a little disappointed, perhaps, that the young man had
not invited him to deal with the unopened packet.

Later, when Jim was alone once more, he took this mysterious packet from
the drawer, and, seating himself upon the sofa beside the fire, cut the
string.

The nature of the contents was at once apparent: they were the relics of
an affair of the heart, and a glance at the signature of two or three of
the letters revealed the fact that the writer was not Jim’s aunt. “Ah,”
said he, with satisfaction, “then the old paragon was human, like all the
rest of us.”

A perusal of the badly-written pages, however, dispelled the atmosphere
of romance which the first short messages of twenty years ago had
promised. The story began well enough, so far as he could gather.
The lady, whose name was Emily, had evidently lost her heart to her
middle-aged lover, and was delighted with the little house he had
provided for her in a London suburb. Two or three years later she became
a mother, but the child had died, and there was a pathetic document
recording her grief. In more recent years the intrigue had developed into
an established union; and Emily, now grown complacent, and probably fat,
became a secondary spouse and mistress of the old gentleman’s alternative
home. The tale ended, however, with Emily’s marriage, two years ago, at
the age of forty, to a young city clerk; and the only romantic features
of the close of his uncle’s double life was the fact that he had
preserved a little handkerchief of hers and a dead rose.

“Well, Emily,” said Jim, aloud, “I wish you luck, wherever you are”; and
with that he gently thrust the relics into the flames.

For some time he lay back upon the sofa in the firelight, his arms
behind his head, and thought over the story which had been revealed. It
seemed, then, that the Eleventh Commandment, “Thou shalt not be found
out,” was the essential of respectable life. A man could do what he
liked, provided that his delinquencies were hidden from his neighbours.
Was this sheer hypocrisy?—or was there some principle behind the code?
Did not Plato once say: “Every man should exert himself never to appear
to any one to be of base metal?” He had read the quotation somewhere.
Ought a man’s epitaph, then, to be: “He lived nobly, in that he kept up
appearances”?—or would it be better frankly to write: “He tried to walk
delicately, but the old Adam tripped him up?”

What would the vicar, what would Miss Proudfoote, have said had either of
them known of this double life? Where would then have been the beautiful
example of a goodly life which his uncle had left behind him as an
inspiration to the whole neighbourhood? Was it not better that the secret
was kept?

He found no answer to the questions which he thus put to himself; and
all that was apparent to him was that decent society was based not upon
the truth, but upon the hiding of the truth, and that the more lofty
the pretence the more high-principled would be the community. “Truly,”
he muttered, “we Anglo-Saxons are called hypocrites; but it is our
hypocrisy that keeps us clean!” And with that he returned to his guitar.

A few days later he took Dolly for a walk across the fields. It was an
autumnal afternoon, and although the sun shone down from a cloudless sky,
there was a chilly haze over the land, which presaged the coming of the
first frosts.

“I don’t know how I’m going to stand an English winter,” he said to her,
as they sat to rest upon a stile, under an oak from which the leaves
were falling. “Just look at the branches up there. They are nearly bare
already.” He shuddered.

She looked at him almost reproachfully. “Oh, I’m sorry to hear you say
that,” she replied. “I love the winter. I am a child of the North, you
know. To me the grey skies and the bare trees have a sort of meaning
I can’t quite explain. They are so ... so English. Think of the long,
dark evenings, when you sit over the hearth, and the firelight jumps and
dances about the walls. Think how cosy one feels when one is tucked up in
bed.”

He glanced down at her, and she smiled up at him with innocent eyes.

“Think of the snow on the ground,” she went on, “and the robins hopping
about. You should just see me scampering over the snow in my big country
boots, and sliding down the lane. Oh, it’s lovely!”

“I shouldn’t think my house is very warm,” he mused.

“It could be made awfully cosy, I’m sure,” she said. “You must have big
log fires; and if I were you I’d buy some screens to put behind the
sofas and armchairs around the fire, so that you can have little lamp-lit
corners where you can sit as warm as a toast.”

“Yes, that’s a good idea,” he answered.

“Have you got a woolly waistcoat?” she asked, and when he replied in the
negative she told him that she would knit one for him at once. “I love
knitting,” she said; and at the moment she believed that she did.

As they walked on she enlarged upon the delights of winter; and such
pleasant pictures did she draw that Jim began to think the coming
experience might hold unexpected happiness for him. She managed, somehow,
to introduce herself into all the scenes which she sketched, now as a
smiling little figure, vibrating with healthy life in the open air, now
purring like a warm, sleepy kitten before the fire indoors.

“From what I saw the other night,” she told him, “you seem to have
an excellent hot-water supply. You’ll be able to have beautiful hot
baths.... I simply love lying in a boiling bath before I go to bed, don’t
you?”

“I can’t say I do,” he laughed. “It makes the sheets feel so cold.”

“Oh, but you must have them warmed, with a hot-bottle or something,” she
explained. “When it’s very, very cold I sometimes creep into bed with
mother, and we cuddle up and warm each other.”

Again he glanced down at her quickly, wondering.... But her eyes were
those of a child.

Presently their path led them through a gate into a field in which a few
cows were grazing; and on seeing them Dolly hesitated.

“You’ll think me awfully silly,” she faltered, swallowing nervously, “but
I’m rather frightened of cows.”

He smiled down at her. “Take my arm,” he said; and without waiting for
her to do so, he linked his own arm in hers and laid his hand over her
fingers.

She looked anxiously at a mild-eyed, motherly cow which, weighed down
by her full udder, moved towards them slowly. “Oh dear,” she whispered,
“d’you think that cow is a bull?”

She tugged at his arm, hurrying him forward; and thereat he closed his
hand more tightly over hers and drew her close to him. He had always
regarded himself as a man of the world, and his intellect had ever poked
fun at his sentiments. Yet now, in a situation so blatantly commonplace
that he might have been expected to be totally unmoved by it, he was
intrigued like a novice. Protecting a maiden from the cows!—it was the
A.B.C. of the bumpkin’s lovelore; and yet that vulgar old lady, Nature,
had once more effectually employed her hackneyed device to his undoing,
and here was he rejoicing in his protective strength, thrilled by the
beating heart of a frightened girl, as all his ancestors for hundreds of
thousands of years had been thrilled before him in the heydays of their
adolescence and in the morning of life.

The amiable cow breathed heavily at them from a discreet distance, and
then, suddenly hilarious, lowered her head, kicked out her hind legs,
and gambolled beside them for a few yards.

“Oh, oh!” cried Dolly, grabbing at Jim’s coat with her disengaged hand.
“I’m sure he’s going to toss us! Oh, do let’s run!”

Jim halted, and held out his hand to the matronly beast. At that moment
the jeering sprite which sits in the brain of every Anglo-Saxon, pointing
with the finger of mockery at his heroics, was pushed from its throne;
and for a brief spell the bravado of primitive, gasconading man—the young
Adam cock-a-hoop—was dominant. Jim stepped forward, dragging Dolly with
him, and hit the astonished cow sharply across her flank with his hand,
whereat she went off at her best speed across the turf.