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+Project Gutenberg's Villa Rubein and Other Stories, by John Galsworthy
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost
+no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use
+it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
+eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Villa Rubein and Other Stories
+
+Author: John Galsworthy
+
+Release Date: June 14, 2006 [EBook #2639]
+Last Updated: February 18, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VILLA RUBEIN AND OTHER STORIES
+***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+cover_villa (68K)
+
+
+
+title_villa (36K)
+
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+frontis_villa (61K)
+
+
+
+VILLA RUBEIN AND OTHER STORIES
+
+
+By John Galsworthy
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+
+VILLA RUBEIN I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII
+XVIII XIX XX XXI XXII XXIII XXIV XXV XXVI XXVII XXVIII XXIX
+
+
+A MAN OF DEVON I II III IV V VI VII VIII
+
+A KNIGHT I II III IV V VI VII VIII
+
+SALVATION OF A FORSYTE I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII
+
+THE SILENCE I II III IV V VI
+
+
+
+
+
+VILLA RUBEIN
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+Writing not long ago to my oldest literary friend, I expressed in a
+moment of heedless sentiment the wish that we might have again one of
+our talks of long-past days, over the purposes and methods of our art.
+And my friend, wiser than I, as he has always been, replied with this
+doubting phrase “Could we recapture the zest of that old time?”
+
+I would not like to believe that our faith in the value of imaginative
+art has diminished, that we think it less worth while to struggle for
+glimpses of truth and for the words which may pass them on to other
+eyes; or that we can no longer discern the star we tried to follow; but
+I do fear, with him, that half a lifetime of endeavour has dulled the
+exuberance which kept one up till morning discussing the ways and means
+of aesthetic achievement. We have discovered, perhaps with a certain
+finality, that by no talk can a writer add a cubit to his stature, or
+change the temperament which moulds and colours the vision of life he
+sets before the few who will pause to look at it. And so—the rest is
+silence, and what of work we may still do will be done in that dogged
+muteness which is the lot of advancing years.
+
+Other times, other men and modes, but not other truth. Truth, though
+essentially relative, like Einstein's theory, will never lose its
+ever-new and unique quality-perfect proportion; for Truth, to the human
+consciousness at least, is but that vitally just relation of part to
+whole which is the very condition of life itself. And the task before
+the imaginative writer, whether at the end of the last century or all
+these aeons later, is the presentation of a vision which to eye and ear
+and mind has the implicit proportions of Truth.
+
+I confess to have always looked for a certain flavour in the writings of
+others, and craved it for my own, believing that all true vision is so
+coloured by the temperament of the seer, as to have not only the just
+proportions but the essential novelty of a living thing for, after all,
+no two living things are alike. A work of fiction should carry the hall
+mark of its author as surely as a Goya, a Daumier, a Velasquez, and a
+Mathew Maris, should be the unmistakable creations of those masters.
+This is not to speak of tricks and manners which lend themselves to that
+facile elf, the caricaturist, but of a certain individual way of seeing
+and feeling. A young poet once said of another and more popular poet:
+“Oh! yes, but be cuts no ice.” And, when one came to think of it, he did
+not; a certain flabbiness of spirit, a lack of temperament, an absence,
+perhaps, of the ironic, or passionate, view, insubstantiated his work;
+it had no edge—just a felicity which passed for distinction with the
+crowd.
+
+Let me not be understood to imply that a novel should be a sort of
+sandwich, in which the author's mood or philosophy is the slice of ham.
+One's demand is for a far more subtle impregnation of flavour; just
+that, for instance, which makes De Maupassant a more poignant and
+fascinating writer than his master Flaubert, Dickens and Thackeray more
+living and permanent than George Eliot or Trollope. It once fell to
+my lot to be the preliminary critic of a book on painting, designed to
+prove that the artist's sole function was the impersonal elucidation of
+the truths of nature. I was regretfully compelled to observe that there
+were no such things as the truths of Nature, for the purposes of art,
+apart from the individual vision of the artist. Seer and thing seen,
+inextricably involved one with the other, form the texture of any
+masterpiece; and I, at least, demand therefrom a distinct impression
+of temperament. I never saw, in the flesh, either De Maupassant or
+Tchekov—those masters of such different methods entirely devoid of
+didacticism—but their work leaves on me a strangely potent sense of
+personality. Such subtle intermingling of seer with thing seen is the
+outcome only of long and intricate brooding, a process not too favoured
+by modern life, yet without which we achieve little but a fluent chaos
+of clever insignificant impressions, a kind of glorified journalism,
+holding much the same relation to the deeply-impregnated work of
+Turgenev, Hardy, and Conrad, as a film bears to a play.
+
+Speaking for myself, with the immodesty required of one who hazards
+an introduction to his own work, I was writing fiction for five years
+before I could master even its primary technique, much less achieve that
+union of seer with thing seen, which perhaps begins to show itself a
+little in this volume—binding up the scanty harvests of 1899, 1900, and
+1901—especially in the tales: “A Knight,” and “Salvation of a Forsyte.”
+Men, women, trees, and works of fiction—very tiny are the seeds from
+which they spring. I used really to see the “Knight”—in 1896, was
+it?—sitting in the “Place” in front of the Casino at Monte Carlo; and
+because his dried-up elegance, his burnt straw hat, quiet courtesy of
+attitude, and big dog, used to fascinate and intrigue me, I began to
+imagine his life so as to answer my own questions and to satisfy, I
+suppose, the mood I was in. I never spoke to him, I never saw him again.
+His real story, no doubt, was as different from that which I wove around
+his figure as night from day.
+
+As for Swithin, wild horses will not drag from me confession of where
+and when I first saw the prototype which became enlarged to his bulky
+stature. I owe Swithin much, for he first released the satirist in me,
+and is, moreover, the only one of my characters whom I killed before I
+gave him life, for it is in “The Man of Property” that Swithin Forsyte
+more memorably lives.
+
+Ranging beyond this volume, I cannot recollect writing the first words
+of “The Island Pharisees”—but it would be about August, 1901. Like all
+the stories in “Villa Rubein,” and, indeed, most of my tales, the book
+originated in the curiosity, philosophic reflections, and unphilosophic
+emotions roused in me by some single figure in real life. In this case
+it was Ferrand, whose real name, of course, was not Ferrand, and who
+died in some “sacred institution” many years ago of a consumption
+brought on by the conditions of his wandering life. If not “a beloved,”
+he was a true vagabond, and I first met him in the Champs Elysees, just
+as in “The Pigeon” he describes his meeting with Wellwyn. Though drawn
+very much from life, he did not in the end turn out very like the
+Ferrand of real life—the figures of fiction soon diverge from their
+prototypes.
+
+The first draft of “The Island Pharisees” was buried in a drawer; when
+retrieved the other day, after nineteen years, it disclosed a picaresque
+string of anecdotes told by Ferrand in the first person. These
+two-thirds of a book were laid to rest by Edward Garnett's dictum that
+its author was not sufficiently within Ferrand's skin; and, struggling
+heavily with laziness and pride, he started afresh in the skin of
+Shelton. Three times be wrote that novel, and then it was long in
+finding the eye of Sydney Pawling, who accepted it for Heinemann's in
+1904. That was a period of ferment and transition with me, a kind of
+long awakening to the home truths of social existence and national
+character. The liquor bubbled too furiously for clear bottling. And
+the book, after all, became but an introduction to all those following
+novels which depict—somewhat satirically—the various sections of English
+“Society” with a more or less capital “S.”
+
+Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one's work, it is
+interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the
+emotional and critical sides of his nature, first one, then the other,
+getting the upper hand, and too seldom fusing till the result has the
+mellowness of full achievement. One can even tell the nature of one's
+readers, by their preference for the work which reveals more of this
+side than of that. My early work was certainly more emotional than
+critical. But from 1901 came nine years when the critical was, in the
+main, holding sway. From 1910 to 1918 the emotional again struggled for
+the upper hand; and from that time on there seems to have been something
+of a “dead beat.” So the conflict goes, by what mysterious tides
+promoted, I know not.
+
+An author must ever wish to discover a hapless member of the Public who,
+never yet having read a word of his writing, would submit to the ordeal
+of reading him right through from beginning to end. Probably the effect
+could only be judged through an autopsy, but in the remote case of
+survival, it would interest one so profoundly to see the differences,
+if any, produced in that reader's character or outlook over life. This,
+however, is a consummation which will remain devoutly to be wished, for
+there is a limit to human complaisance. One will never know the exact
+measure of one's infecting power; or whether, indeed, one is not just a
+long soporific.
+
+A writer they say, should not favouritize among his creations; but
+then a writer should not do so many things that he does. This writer,
+certainly, confesses to having favourites, and of his novels so far be
+likes best: The Forsyte Series; “The Country House”; “Fraternity”; “The
+Dark Flower”; and “Five Tales”; believing these to be the works which
+most fully achieve fusion of seer with thing seen, most subtly disclose
+the individuality of their author, and best reveal such of truth as has
+been vouchsafed to him. JOHN GALSWORTHY.
+
+
+
+
+
+TO MY SISTER BLANCHE LILIAN SAUTER
+
+
+
+
+
+VILLA RUBEIN
+
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+Walking along the river wall at Botzen, Edmund Dawney said to Alois
+Harz: “Would you care to know the family at that pink house, Villa
+Rubein?”
+
+Harz answered with a smile:
+
+“Perhaps.”
+
+“Come with me then this afternoon.”
+
+They had stopped before an old house with a blind, deserted look, that
+stood by itself on the wall; Harz pushed the door open.
+
+“Come in, you don't want breakfast yet. I'm going to paint the river
+to-day.”
+
+He ran up the bare broad stairs, and Dawney followed leisurely, his
+thumbs hooked in the armholes of his waistcoat, and his head thrown
+back.
+
+In the attic which filled the whole top story, Harz had pulled a canvas
+to the window. He was a young man of middle height, square shouldered,
+active, with an angular face, high cheek-bones, and a strong, sharp
+chin. His eyes were piercing and steel-blue, his eyebrows very flexible,
+nose long and thin with a high bridge; and his dark, unparted hair
+fitted him like a cap. His clothes looked as if he never gave them a
+second thought.
+
+This room, which served for studio, bedroom, and sitting-room, was bare
+and dusty. Below the window the river in spring flood rushed down the
+valley, a stream, of molten bronze. Harz dodged before the canvas like a
+fencer finding his distance; Dawney took his seat on a packingcase.
+
+“The snows have gone with a rush this year,” he drawled. “The Talfer
+comes down brown, the Eisack comes down blue; they flow into the Etsch
+and make it green; a parable of the Spring for you, my painter.”
+
+Harz mixed his colours.
+
+“I've no time for parables,” he said, “no time for anything. If I could
+be guaranteed to live to ninety-nine, like Titian—he had a chance. Look
+at that poor fellow who was killed the other day! All that struggle, and
+then—just at the turn!”
+
+He spoke English with a foreign accent; his voice was rather harsh, but
+his smile very kindly.
+
+Dawney lit a cigarette.
+
+“You painters,” he said, “are better off than most of us. You can strike
+out your own line. Now if I choose to treat a case out of the ordinary
+way and the patient dies, I'm ruined.”
+
+“My dear Doctor—if I don't paint what the public likes, I starve; all
+the same I'm going to paint in my own way; in the end I shall come out
+on top.”
+
+“It pays to work in the groove, my friend, until you've made your name;
+after that—do what you like, they'll lick your boots all the same.”
+
+“Ah, you don't love your work.”
+
+Dawney answered slowly: “Never so happy as when my hands are full. But I
+want to make money, to get known, to have a good time, good cigars, good
+wine. I hate discomfort. No, my boy, I must work it on the usual lines;
+I don't like it, but I must lump it. One starts in life with some notion
+of the ideal—it's gone by the board with me. I've got to shove along
+until I've made my name, and then, my little man—then—”
+
+“Then you'll be soft!”
+
+“You pay dearly for that first period!”
+
+“Take my chance of that; there's no other way.”
+
+“Make one!”
+
+“Humph!”
+
+Harz poised his brush, as though it were a spear:
+
+“A man must do the best in him. If he has to suffer—let him!”
+
+Dawney stretched his large soft body; a calculating look had come into
+his eyes.
+
+“You're a tough little man!” he said.
+
+“I've had to be tough.”
+
+Dawney rose; tobacco smoke was wreathed round his unruffled hair.
+
+“Touching Villa Rubein,” he said, “shall I call for you? It's a mixed
+household, English mostly—very decent people.”
+
+“No, thank you. I shall be painting all day. Haven't time to know the
+sort of people who expect one to change one's clothes.”
+
+“As you like; ta-to!” And, puffing out his chest, Dawney vanished
+through a blanket looped across the doorway.
+
+Harz set a pot of coffee on a spirit-lamp, and cut himself some bread.
+Through the window the freshness of the morning came; the scent of sap
+and blossom and young leaves; the scent of earth, and the mountains
+freed from winter; the new flights and songs of birds; all the odorous,
+enchanted, restless Spring.
+
+There suddenly appeared through the doorway a white rough-haired terrier
+dog, black-marked about the face, with shaggy tan eyebrows. He sniffed
+at Harz, showed the whites round his eyes, and uttered a sharp bark. A
+young voice called:
+
+“Scruff! Thou naughty dog!” Light footsteps were heard on the stairs;
+from the distance a thin, high voice called:
+
+“Greta! You mustn't go up there!”
+
+A little girl of twelve, with long fair hair under a wide-brimmed hat,
+slipped in.
+
+Her blue eyes opened wide, her face flushed up. That face was not
+regular; its cheek-bones were rather prominent, the nose was flattish;
+there was about it an air, innocent, reflecting, quizzical, shy.
+
+“Oh!” she said.
+
+Harz smiled: “Good-morning! This your dog?”
+
+She did not answer, but looked at him with soft bewilderment; then
+running to the dog seized him by the collar.
+
+“Scr-ruff! Thou naughty dog—the baddest dog!” The ends of her hair fell
+about him; she looked up at Harz, who said:
+
+“Not at all! Let me give him some bread.”
+
+“Oh no! You must not—I will beat him—and tell him he is bad; then he
+shall not do such things again. Now he is sulky; he looks so always when
+he is sulky. Is this your home?”
+
+“For the present; I am a visitor.”
+
+“But I think you are of this country, because you speak like it.”
+
+“Certainly, I am a Tyroler.”
+
+“I have to talk English this morning, but I do not like it very
+much—because, also I am half Austrian, and I like it best; but my
+sister, Christian, is all English. Here is Miss Naylor; she shall be
+very angry with me.”
+
+And pointing to the entrance with a rosy-tipped forefinger, she again
+looked ruefully at Harz.
+
+There came into the room with a walk like the hopping of a bird an
+elderly, small lady, in a grey serge dress, with narrow bands of
+claret-coloured velveteen; a large gold cross dangled from a steel chain
+on her chest; she nervously twisted her hands, clad in black kid gloves,
+rather white about the seams.
+
+Her hair was prematurely grey; her quick eyes brown; her mouth twisted
+at one corner; she held her face, kind-looking, but long and narrow,
+rather to one side, and wore on it a look of apology. Her quick
+sentences sounded as if she kept them on strings, and wanted to draw
+them back as soon as she had let them forth.
+
+“Greta, how can, you do such things? I don't know what your father would
+say! I am sure I don't know how to—so extraordinary—”
+
+“Please!” said Harz.
+
+“You must come at once—so very sorry—so awkward!” They were standing
+in a ring: Harz with his eyebrows working up and down; the little lady
+fidgeting her parasol; Greta, flushed and pouting, her eyes all dewy,
+twisting an end of fair hair round her finger.
+
+“Oh, look!” The coffee had boiled over. Little brown streams trickled
+spluttering from the pan; the dog, with ears laid back and tail tucked
+in, went scurrying round the room. A feeling of fellowship fell on them
+at once.
+
+“Along the wall is our favourite walk, and Scruff—so awkward, so
+unfortunate—we did not think any one lived here—the shutters are
+cracked, the paint is peeling off so dreadfully. Have you been long in
+Botzen? Two months? Fancy! You are not English? You are Tyrolese?
+But you speak English so well—there for seven years? Really? So
+fortunate!—It is Greta's day for English.”
+
+Miss Naylor's eyes darted bewildered glances at the roof where the
+crossing of the beams made such deep shadows; at the litter of brushes,
+tools, knives, and colours on a table made out of packing-cases; at the
+big window, innocent of glass, and flush with the floor, whence dangled
+a bit of rusty chain—relic of the time when the place had been a
+store-loft; her eyes were hastily averted from an unfinished figure of
+the nude.
+
+Greta, with feet crossed, sat on a coloured blanket, dabbling her finger
+in a little pool of coffee, and gazing up at Harz. And he thought: 'I
+should like to paint her like that. “A forget-me-not.”
+
+He took out his chalks to make a sketch of her.
+
+“Shall you show me?” cried out Greta, scrambling to her feet.
+
+“'Will,' Greta—'will'. how often must I tell you? I think we should be
+going—it is very late—your father—so very kind of you, but I think
+we should be going. Scruff!” Miss Naylor gave the floor two taps. The
+terrier backed into a plaster cast which came down on his tail, and sent
+him flying through the doorway. Greta followed swiftly, crying:
+
+“Ach! poor Scrufee!”
+
+Miss Naylor crossed the room; bowing, she murmured an apology, and also
+disappeared.
+
+Harz was left alone, his guests were gone; the little girl with the
+fair hair and the eyes like forget-me-nots, the little lady with kindly
+gestures and bird-like walk, the terrier. He looked round him; the room
+seemed very empty. Gnawing his moustache, he muttered at the fallen
+cast.
+
+Then taking up his brush, stood before his picture, smiling and
+frowning. Soon he had forgotten it all in his work.
+
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+It was early morning four days later, and Harz was loitering homewards.
+The shadows of the clouds passing across the vines were vanishing over
+the jumbled roofs and green-topped spires of the town. A strong sweet
+wind was blowing from the mountains, there was a stir in the branches
+of the trees, and flakes of the late blossom were drifting down. Amongst
+the soft green pods of a kind of poplar chafers buzzed, and numbers of
+their little brown bodies were strewn on the path.
+
+He passed a bench where a girl sat sketching. A puff of wind whirled her
+drawing to the ground; Harz ran to pick it up. She took it from him with
+a bow; but, as he turned away, she tore the sketch across.
+
+“Ah!” he said; “why did you do that?”
+
+This girl, who stood with a bit of the torn sketch in either hand, was
+slight and straight; and her face earnest and serene. She gazed at Harz
+with large, clear, greenish eyes; her lips and chin were defiant, her
+forehead tranquil.
+
+“I don't like it.”
+
+“Will you let me look at it? I am a painter.”
+
+“It isn't worth looking at, but—if you wish—”
+
+He put the two halves of the sketch together.
+
+“You see!” she said at last; “I told you.”
+
+Harz did not answer, still looking at the sketch. The girl frowned.
+
+Harz asked her suddenly:
+
+“Why do you paint?”
+
+She coloured, and said:
+
+“Show me what is wrong.”
+
+“I cannot show you what is wrong, there is nothing wrong—but why do you
+paint?”
+
+“I don't understand.”
+
+Harz shrugged his shoulders.
+
+“You've no business to do that,” said the girl in a hurt voice; “I want
+to know.”
+
+“Your heart is not in it,” said Harz.
+
+She looked at him, startled; her eyes had grown thoughtful.
+
+“I suppose that is it. There are so many other things—”
+
+“There should be nothing else,” said Harz.
+
+She broke in: “I don't want always to be thinking of myself. Suppose—”
+
+“Ah! When you begin supposing!”
+
+The girl confronted him; she had torn the sketch again.
+
+“You mean that if it does not matter enough, one had better not do it at
+all. I don't know if you are right—I think you are.”
+
+There was the sound of a nervous cough, and Harz saw behind him his
+three visitors—Miss Naylor offering him her hand; Greta, flushed, with
+a bunch of wild flowers, staring intently in his face; and the terrier,
+sniffing at his trousers.
+
+Miss Naylor broke an awkward silence.
+
+“We wondered if you would still be here, Christian. I am sorry to
+interrupt you—I was not aware that you knew Mr. Herr—”
+
+“Harz is my name—we were just talking”
+
+“About my sketch. Oh, Greta, you do tickle! Will you come and have
+breakfast with us to-day, Herr Harz? It's our turn, you know.”
+
+Harz, glancing at his dusty clothes, excused himself.
+
+But Greta in a pleading voice said: “Oh! do come! Scruff likes you. It
+is so dull when there is nobody for breakfast but ourselves.”
+
+Miss Naylor's mouth began to twist. Harz hurriedly broke in:
+
+“Thank you. I will come with pleasure; you don't mind my being dirty?”
+
+“Oh no! we do not mind; then we shall none of us wash, and afterwards I
+shall show you my rabbits.”
+
+Miss Naylor, moving from foot to foot, like a bird on its perch,
+exclaimed:
+
+“I hope you won't regret it, not a very good meal—the girls are so
+impulsive—such informal invitation; we shall be very glad.”
+
+But Greta pulled softly at her sister's sleeve, and Christian, gathering
+her things, led the way.
+
+Harz followed in amazement; nothing of this kind had come into his life
+before. He kept shyly glancing at the girls; and, noting the speculative
+innocence in Greta's eyes, he smiled. They soon came to two great
+poplar-trees, which stood, like sentinels, one on either side of an
+unweeded gravel walk leading through lilac bushes to a house painted
+dull pink, with green-shuttered windows, and a roof of greenish slate.
+Over the door in faded crimson letters were written the words, “Villa
+Rubein.”
+
+“That is to the stables,” said Greta, pointing down a path, where some
+pigeons were sunning themselves on a wall. “Uncle Nic keeps his
+horses there: Countess and Cuckoo—his horses begin with C, because
+of Chris—they are quite beautiful. He says he could drive them
+to Kingdom-Come and they would not turn their hair. Bow, and say
+'Good-morning' to our house!”
+
+Harz bowed.
+
+“Father said all strangers should, and I think it brings good luck.”
+From the doorstep she looked round at Harz, then ran into the house.
+
+A broad, thick-set man, with stiff, brushed-up hair, a short, brown,
+bushy beard parted at the chin, a fresh complexion, and blue glasses
+across a thick nose, came out, and called in a bluff voice:
+
+“Ha! my good dears, kiss me quick—prrt! How goes it then this morning? A
+good walk, hein?” The sound of many loud rapid kisses followed.
+
+“Ha, Fraulein, good!” He became aware of Harz's figure standing in the
+doorway: “Und der Herr?”
+
+Miss Naylor hurriedly explained.
+
+“Good! An artist! Kommen Sie herein, I am delight. You will breakfast? I
+too—yes, yes, my dears—I too breakfast with you this morning. I have the
+hunter's appetite.”
+
+Harz, looking at him keenly, perceived him to be of middle height and
+age, stout, dressed in a loose holland jacket, a very white, starched
+shirt, and blue silk sash; that he looked particularly clean, had an air
+of belonging to Society, and exhaled a really fine aroma of excellent
+cigars and the best hairdresser's essences.
+
+The room they entered was long and rather bare; there was a huge map on
+the wall, and below it a pair of globes on crooked supports, resembling
+two inflated frogs erect on their hind legs. In one corner was a cottage
+piano, close to a writing-table heaped with books and papers; this nook,
+sacred to Christian, was foreign to the rest of the room, which was
+arranged with supernatural neatness. A table was laid for breakfast, and
+the sun-warmed air came in through French windows.
+
+The meal went merrily; Herr Paul von Morawitz was never in such spirits
+as at table. Words streamed from him. Conversing with Harz, he talked
+of Art as who should say: “One does not claim to be a connoisseur—pas si
+bete—still, one has a little knowledge, que diable!” He recommended
+him a man in the town who sold cigars that were “not so very bad.” He
+consumed porridge, ate an omelette; and bending across to Greta gave her
+a sounding kiss, muttering: “Kiss me quick!”—an expression he had picked
+up in a London music-hall, long ago, and considered chic. He asked his
+daughters' plans, and held out porridge to the terrier, who refused it
+with a sniff.
+
+“Well,” he said suddenly, looking at Miss Naylor, “here is a gentleman
+who has not even heard our names!”
+
+The little lady began her introductions in a breathless voice.
+
+“Good!” Herr Paul said, puffing out his lips: “Now we know each other!”
+and, brushing up the ends of his moustaches, he carried off Harz into
+another room, decorated with pipe-racks, prints of dancing-girls,
+spittoons, easy-chairs well-seasoned by cigar smoke, French novels, and
+newspapers.
+
+The household at Villa Rubein was indeed of a mixed and curious nature.
+Cut on both floors by corridors, the Villa was divided into four
+divisions; each of which had its separate inhabitants, an arrangement
+which had come about in the following way:
+
+When old Nicholas Treffry died, his estate, on the boundary of
+Cornwall, had been sold and divided up among his three surviving
+children—Nicholas, who was much the eldest, a partner in the well-known
+firm of Forsyte and Treffry, teamen, of the Strand; Constance, married
+to a man called Decie; and Margaret, at her father's death engaged to
+the curate of the parish, John Devorell, who shortly afterwards became
+its rector. By his marriage with Margaret Treffry the rector had one
+child called Christian. Soon after this he came into some property, and
+died, leaving it unfettered to his widow. Three years went by, and when
+the child was six years old, Mrs. Devorell, still young and pretty, came
+to live in London with her brother Nicholas. It was there that she met
+Paul von Morawitz—the last of an old Czech family, who had lived for
+many hundred years on their estates near Budweiss. Paul had been left an
+orphan at the age of ten, and without a solitary ancestral acre. Instead
+of acres, he inherited the faith that nothing was too good for a von
+Morawitz. In later years his savoir faire enabled him to laugh at faith,
+but it stayed quietly with him all the same. The absence of acres was of
+no great consequence, for through his mother, the daughter of a banker
+in Vienna, he came into a well-nursed fortune. It befitted a von
+Morawitz that he should go into the Cavalry, but, unshaped for
+soldiering, he soon left the Service; some said he had a difference with
+his Colonel over the quality of food provided during some manoeuvres;
+others that he had retired because his chargers did not fit his legs,
+which were, indeed, rather round.
+
+He had an admirable appetite for pleasure; a man-about-town's life
+suited him. He went his genial, unreflecting, costly way in Vienna,
+Paris, London. He loved exclusively those towns, and boasted that he
+was as much at home in one as in another. He combined exuberant vitality
+with fastidiousness of palate, and devoted both to the acquisition of a
+special taste in women, weeds, and wines; above all he was blessed with
+a remarkable digestion. He was thirty when he met Mrs. Devorell; and she
+married him because he was so very different from anybody she had ever
+seen. People more dissimilar were never mated. To Paul—accustomed to
+stage doors—freshness, serene tranquillity, and obvious purity were the
+baits; he had run through more than half his fortune, too, and the fact
+that she had money was possibly not overlooked. Be that as it may, he
+was fond of her; his heart was soft, he developed a domestic side.
+
+Greta was born to them after a year of marriage. The instinct of the
+“freeman” was, however, not dead in Paul; he became a gambler. He lost
+the remainder of his fortune without being greatly disturbed. When
+he began to lose his wife's fortune too things naturally became more
+difficult. Not too much remained when Nicholas Treffry stepped in,
+and caused his sister to settle what was left on her daughters, after
+providing a life-interest for herself and Paul. Losing his supplies, the
+good man had given up his cards. But the instinct of the “freeman”
+was still living in his breast; he took to drink. He was never grossly
+drunk, and rarely very sober. His wife sorrowed over this new passion;
+her health, already much enfeebled, soon broke down. The doctors sent
+her to the Tyrol. She seemed to benefit by this, and settled down at
+Botzen. The following year, when Greta was just ten, she died. It was a
+shock to Paul. He gave up excessive drinking; became a constant smoker,
+and lent full rein to his natural domesticity. He was fond of both the
+girls, but did not at all understand them; Greta, his own daughter, was
+his favourite. Villa Rubein remained their home; it was cheap and roomy.
+Money, since Paul became housekeeper to himself, was scarce.
+
+About this time Mrs. Decie, his wife's sister, whose husband had died
+in the East, returned to England; Paul invited her to come and live with
+them. She had her own rooms, her own servant; the arrangement suited
+Paul—it was economically sound, and there was some one always there to
+take care of the girls. In truth he began to feel the instinct of the
+“freeman” rising again within him; it was pleasant to run over to Vienna
+now and then; to play piquet at a Club in Gries, of which he was the
+shining light; in a word, to go “on the tiles” a little. One could not
+always mourn—even if a woman were an angel; moreover, his digestion was
+as good as ever.
+
+The fourth quarter of this Villa was occupied by Nicholas Treffry, whose
+annual sojourn out of England perpetually surprised himself. Between him
+and his young niece, Christian, there existed, however, a rare sympathy;
+one of those affections between the young and old, which, mysteriously
+born like everything in life, seems the only end and aim to both, till
+another feeling comes into the younger heart.
+
+Since a long and dangerous illness, he had been ordered to avoid the
+English winter, and at the commencement of each spring he would appear
+at Botzen, driving his own horses by easy stages from the Italian
+Riviera, where he spent the coldest months. He always stayed till June
+before going back to his London Club, and during all that time he let no
+day pass without growling at foreigners, their habits, food, drink, and
+raiment, with a kind of big dog's growling that did nobody any harm. The
+illness had broken him very much; he was seventy, but looked more. He
+had a servant, a Luganese, named Dominique, devoted to him. Nicholas
+Treffry had found him overworked in an hotel, and had engaged him with
+the caution: “Look—here, Dominique! I swear!” To which Dominique, dark
+of feature, saturnine and ironical, had only replied: “Tres biens,
+M'sieur!”
+
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+Harz and his host sat in leather chairs; Herr Paul's square back was
+wedged into a cushion, his round legs crossed. Both were smoking, and
+they eyed each other furtively, as men of different stamp do when first
+thrown together. The young artist found his host extremely new and
+disconcerting; in his presence he felt both shy and awkward. Herr Paul,
+on the other hand, very much at ease, was thinking indolently:
+
+'Good-looking young fellow—comes of the people, I expect, not at all the
+manner of the world; wonder what he talks about.'
+
+Presently noticing that Harz was looking at a photograph, he said: “Ah!
+yes! that was a woman! They are not to be found in these days. She could
+dance, the little Coralie! Did you ever see such arms? Confess that she
+is beautiful, hein?”
+
+“She has individuality,” said Harz. “A fine type!”
+
+Herr Paul blew out a cloud of smoke.
+
+“Yes,” he murmured, “she was fine all over!” He had dropped his
+eyeglasses, and his full brown eyes, with little crow's-feet at the
+corners, wandered from his visitor to his cigar.
+
+'He'd be like a Satyr if he wasn't too clean,' thought Harz. 'Put vine
+leaves in his hair, paint him asleep, with his hands crossed, so!'
+
+“When I am told a person has individuality,” Herr Paul was saying in a
+rich and husky voice, “I generally expect boots that bulge, an umbrella
+of improper colour; I expect a creature of 'bad form' as they say in
+England; who will shave some days and some days will not shave; who
+sometimes smells of India-rubber, and sometimes does not smell, which is
+discouraging!”
+
+“You do not approve of individuality?” said Harz shortly.
+
+“Not if it means doing, and thinking, as those who know better do not
+do, or think.”
+
+“And who are those who know better?”
+
+“Ah! my dear, you are asking me a riddle? Well, then—Society, men of
+birth, men of recognised position, men above eccentricity, in a word, of
+reputation.”
+
+Harz looked at him fixedly. “Men who haven't the courage of their own
+ideas, not even the courage to smell of India-rubber; men who have no
+desires, and so can spend all their time making themselves flat!”
+
+Herr Paul drew out a red silk handkerchief and wiped his beard. “I
+assure you, my dear,” he said, “it is easier to be flat; it is more
+respectable to be flat. Himmel! why not, then, be flat?”
+
+“Like any common fellow?”
+
+“Certes; like any common fellow—like me, par exemple!” Herr Paul waved
+his hand. When he exercised unusual tact, he always made use of a French
+expression.
+
+Harz flushed. Herr Paul followed up his victory. “Come, come!” he said.
+“Pass me my men of repute! que diable! we are not anarchists.”
+
+“Are you sure?” said Harz.
+
+Herr Paul twisted his moustache. “I beg your pardon,” he said slowly.
+But at this moment the door was opened; a rumbling voice remarked:
+“Morning, Paul. Who's your visitor?” Harz saw a tall, bulky figure in
+the doorway.
+
+“Come in,” called out Herr Paul. “Let me present to you a new
+acquaintance, an artist: Herr Harz—Mr. Nicholas Treffry. Psumm bumm! All
+this introducing is dry work.” And going to the sideboard he poured out
+three glasses of a light, foaming beer.
+
+Mr. Treffry waved it from him: “Not for me,” he said: “Wish I could!
+They won't let me look at it.” And walking over, to the window with
+a heavy tread, which trembled like his voice, he sat down. There was
+something in his gait like the movements of an elephant's hind legs. He
+was very tall (it was said, with the customary exaggeration of family
+tradition, that there never had been a male Treffry under six feet in
+height), but now he stooped, and had grown stout. There was something at
+once vast and unobtrusive about his personality.
+
+He wore a loose brown velvet jacket, and waistcoat, cut to show a soft
+frilled shirt and narrow black ribbon tie; a thin gold chain was looped
+round his neck and fastened to his fob. His heavy cheeks had folds
+in them like those in a bloodhound's face. He wore big, drooping,
+yellow-grey moustaches, which he had a habit of sucking, and a goatee
+beard. He had long loose ears that might almost have been said to gap.
+On his head there was a soft black hat, large in the brim and low in
+the crown. His grey eyes, heavy-lidded, twinkled under their bushy brows
+with a queer, kind cynicism. As a young man he had sown many a wild
+oat; but he had also worked and made money in business; he had, in fact,
+burned the candle at both ends; but he had never been unready to do
+his fellows a good turn. He had a passion for driving, and his reckless
+method of pursuing this art had caused him to be nicknamed: “The
+notorious Treffry.”
+
+Once, when he was driving tandem down a hill with a loose rein, the
+friend beside him had said: “For all the good you're doing with those
+reins, Treffry, you might as well throw them on the horses' necks.”
+
+“Just so,” Treffry had answered. At the bottom of the hill they had gone
+over a wall into a potato patch. Treffry had broken several ribs; his
+friend had gone unharmed.
+
+He was a great sufferer now, but, constitutionally averse to being
+pitied, he had a disconcerting way of humming, and this, together with
+the shake in his voice, and his frequent use of peculiar phrases, made
+the understanding of his speech depend at times on intuition rather than
+intelligence.
+
+The clock began to strike eleven. Harz muttered an excuse, shook hands
+with his host, and bowing to his new acquaintance, went away. He caught
+a glimpse of Greta's face against the window, and waved his hand to her.
+In the road he came on Dawney, who was turning in between the poplars,
+with thumbs as usual hooked in the armholes of his waistcoat.
+
+“Hallo!” the latter said.
+
+“Doctor!” Harz answered slyly; “the Fates outwitted me, it seems.”
+
+“Serve you right,” said Dawney, “for your confounded egoism! Wait here
+till I come out, I shan't be many minutes.”
+
+But Harz went on his way. A cart drawn by cream-coloured oxen was
+passing slowly towards the bridge. In front of the brushwood piled on
+it two peasant girls were sitting with their feet on a mat of grass—the
+picture of contentment.
+
+“I'm wasting my time!” he thought. “I've done next to nothing in two
+months. Better get back to London! That girl will never make a painter!”
+She would never make a painter, but there was something in her that he
+could not dismiss so rapidly. She was not exactly beautiful, but she was
+sympathetic. The brow was pleasing, with dark-brown hair softly turned
+back, and eyes so straight and shining. The two sisters were very
+different! The little one was innocent, yet mysterious; the elder seemed
+as clear as crystal!
+
+He had entered the town, where the arcaded streets exuded their peculiar
+pungent smell of cows and leather, wood-smoke, wine-casks, and drains.
+The sound of rapid wheels over the stones made him turn his head. A
+carriage drawn by red-roan horses was passing at a great pace. People
+stared at it, standing still, and looking alarmed. It swung from side
+to side and vanished round a corner. Harz saw Mr. Nicholas Treffry in
+a long, whitish dust-coat; his Italian servant, perched behind, was
+holding to the seat-rail, with a nervous grin on his dark face.
+
+'Certainly,' Harz thought, 'there's no getting away from these people
+this morning—they are everywhere.'
+
+In his studio he began to sort his sketches, wash his brushes, and drag
+out things he had accumulated during his two months' stay. He even began
+to fold his blanket door. But suddenly he stopped. Those two girls!
+Why not try? What a picture! The two heads, the sky, and leaves!
+Begin to-morrow! Against that window—no, better at the Villa! Call the
+picture—Spring...!
+
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The wind, stirring among trees and bushes, flung the young leaves
+skywards. The trembling of their silver linings was like the joyful
+flutter of a heart at good news. It was one of those Spring mornings
+when everything seems full of a sweet restlessness—soft clouds chasing
+fast across the sky; soft scents floating forth and dying; the notes of
+birds, now shrill and sweet, now hushed in silences; all nature striving
+for something, nothing at peace.
+
+Villa Rubein withstood the influence of the day, and wore its usual
+look of rest and isolation. Harz sent in his card, and asked to see “der
+Herr.” The servant, a grey-eyed, clever-looking Swiss with no hair on
+his face, came back saying:
+
+“Der Herr, mein Herr, is in the Garden gone.” Harz followed him.
+
+Herr Paul, a small white flannel cap on his head, gloves on his hands,
+and glasses on his nose, was watering a rosebush, and humming the
+serenade from Faust.
+
+This aspect of the house was very different from the other. The sun fell
+on it, and over a veranda creepers clung and scrambled in long scrolls.
+There was a lawn, with freshly mown grass; flower-beds were laid out,
+and at the end of an avenue of young acacias stood an arbour covered
+with wisteria.
+
+In the east, mountain peaks—fingers of snow—glittered above the mist. A
+grave simplicity lay on that scene, on the roofs and spires, the valleys
+and the dreamy hillsides, with their yellow scars and purple bloom, and
+white cascades, like tails of grey horses swishing in the wind.
+
+Herr Paul held out his hand: “What can we do for you?” he said.
+
+“I have to beg a favour,” replied Harz. “I wish to paint your daughters.
+I will bring the canvas here—they shall have no trouble. I would paint
+them in the garden when they have nothing else to do.”
+
+Herr Paul looked at him dubiously—ever since the previous day he had
+been thinking: 'Queer bird, that painter—thinks himself the devil of
+a swell! Looks a determined fellow too!' Now—staring in the painter's
+face—it seemed to him, on the whole, best if some one else refused this
+permission.
+
+“With all the pleasure, my dear sir,” he said. “Come, let us ask these
+two young ladies!” and putting down his hose, he led the way towards the
+arbour, thinking: 'You'll be disappointed, my young conqueror, or I'm
+mistaken.'
+
+Miss Naylor and the girls were sitting in the shade, reading La
+Fontaine's fables. Greta, with one eye on her governess, was stealthily
+cutting a pig out of orange peel.
+
+“Ah! my dear dears!” began Herr Paul, who in the presence of Miss
+Naylor always paraded his English. “Here is our friend, who has a very
+flattering request to make; he would paint you, yes—both together,
+alfresco, in the air, in the sunshine, with the birds, the little
+birds!”
+
+Greta, gazing at Harz, gushed deep pink, and furtively showed him her
+pig.
+
+Christian said: “Paint us? Oh no!”
+
+She saw Harz looking at her, and added, slowly: “If you really wish it,
+I suppose we could!” then dropped her eyes.
+
+“Ah!” said Herr Paul raising his brows till his glasses fell from
+his nose: “And what says Gretchen? Does she want to be handed up to
+posterities a little peacock along with the other little birds?”
+
+Greta, who had continued staring at the painter, said:
+“Of—course—I—want—to—be.”
+
+“Prrt!” said Herr Paul, looking at Miss Naylor. The little lady indeed
+opened her mouth wide, but all that came forth was a tiny squeak, as
+sometimes happens when one is anxious to say something, and has not
+arranged beforehand what it shall be.
+
+The affair seemed ended; Harz heaved a sigh of satisfaction. But Herr
+Paul had still a card to play.
+
+“There is your Aunt,” he said; “there are things to be considered—one
+must certainly inquire—so, we shall see.” Kissing Greta loudly on both
+cheeks, he went towards the house.
+
+“What makes you want to paint us?” Christian asked, as soon as he was
+gone.
+
+“I think it very wrong,” Miss Naylor blurted out.
+
+“Why?” said Harz, frowning.
+
+“Greta is so young—there are lessons—it is such a waste of time!”
+
+His eyebrows twitched: “Ah! You think so!”
+
+“I don't see why it is a waste of time,” said Christian quietly; “there
+are lots of hours when we sit here and do nothing.”
+
+“And it is very dull,” put in Greta, with a pout.
+
+“You are rude, Greta,” said Miss Naylor in a little rage, pursing her
+lips, and taking up her knitting.
+
+“I think it seems always rude to speak the truth,” said Greta. Miss
+Naylor looked at her in that concentrated manner with which she was in
+the habit of expressing displeasure.
+
+But at this moment a servant came, and said that Mrs. Decie would be
+glad to see Herr Harz. The painter made them a stiff bow, and followed
+the servant to the house. Miss Naylor and the two girls watched his
+progress with apprehensive eyes; it was clear that he had been offended.
+
+Crossing the veranda, and passing through an open window hung with silk
+curtains, Hart entered a cool dark room. This was Mrs. Decie's sanctum,
+where she conducted correspondence, received her visitors, read the
+latest literature, and sometimes, when she had bad headaches, lay for
+hours on the sofa, with a fan, and her eyes closed. There was a scent of
+sandalwood, a suggestion of the East, a kind of mystery, in here, as
+if things like chairs and tables were not really what they seemed, but
+something much less commonplace.
+
+The visitor looked twice, to be quite sure of anything; there were many
+plants, bead curtains, and a deal of silverwork and china.
+
+Mrs. Decie came forward in the slightly rustling silk which—whether in
+or out of fashion—always accompanied her. A tall woman, over fifty, she
+moved as if she had been tied together at the knees. Her face was long,
+with broad brows, from which her sandy-grey hair was severely waved
+back; she had pale eyes, and a perpetual, pale, enigmatic smile.
+Her complexion had been ruined by long residence in India, and might
+unkindly have been called fawn-coloured. She came close to Harz, keeping
+her eyes on his, with her head bent slightly forward.
+
+“We are so pleased to know you,” she said, speaking in a voice which had
+lost all ring. “It is charming to find some one in these parts who
+can help us to remember that there is such a thing as Art. We had Mr.
+C—-here last autumn, such a charming fellow. He was so interested in
+the native customs and dresses. You are a subject painter, too, I think?
+Won't you sit down?”
+
+She went on for some time, introducing painters' names, asking
+questions, skating round the edge of what was personal. And the young
+man stood before her with a curious little smile fixed on his lips. 'She
+wants to know whether I'm worth powder and shot,' he thought.
+
+“You wish to paint my nieces?” Mrs. Decie said at last, leaning back on
+her settee.
+
+“I wish to have that honour,” Harz answered with a bow.
+
+“And what sort of picture did you think of?”
+
+“That,” said Harz, “is in the future. I couldn't tell you.” And he
+thought: 'Will she ask me if I get my tints in Paris, like the woman
+Tramper told me of?'
+
+The perpetual pale smile on Mrs. Decie's face seemed to invite his
+confidence, yet to warn him that his words would be sucked in somewhere
+behind those broad fine brows, and carefully sorted. Mrs. Decie, indeed,
+was thinking: 'Interesting young man, regular Bohemian—no harm in that
+at his age; something Napoleonic in his face; probably has no dress
+clothes. Yes, should like to see more of him!' She had a fine eye for
+points of celebrity; his name was unfamiliar, would probably have been
+scouted by that famous artist Mr. C—-, but she felt her instinct urging
+her on to know him. She was, to do her justice, one of those “lion”
+finders who seek the animal for pleasure, not for the glory it
+brings them; she had the courage of her instincts—lion-entities were
+indispensable to her, but she trusted to divination to secure them;
+nobody could foist a “lion” on her.
+
+“It will be very nice. You will stay and have some lunch? The
+arrangements here are rather odd. Such a mixed household—but there is
+always lunch at two o'clock for any one who likes, and we all dine at
+seven. You would have your sittings in the afternoons, perhaps? I should
+so like to see your sketches. You are using the old house on the wall
+for studio; that is so original of you!”
+
+Harz would not stay to lunch, but asked if he might begin work that
+afternoon; he left a little suffocated by the sandalwood and sympathy of
+this sphinx-like woman.
+
+Walking home along the river wall, with the singing of the larks and
+thrushes, the rush of waters, the humming of the chafers in his ears, he
+felt that he would make something fine of this subject. Before his eyes
+the faces of the two girls continually started up, framed by the sky,
+with young leaves guttering against their cheeks.
+
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+Three days had passed since Harz began his picture, when early in the
+morning, Greta came from Villa Rubein along the river dyke and sat down
+on a bench from which the old house on the wall was visible. She had not
+been there long before Harz came out.
+
+“I did not knock,” said Greta, “because you would not have heard, and it
+is so early, so I have been waiting for you a quarter of an hour.”
+
+Selecting a rosebud, from some flowers in her hand, she handed it to
+him. “That is my first rosebud this year,” she said; “it is for you
+because you are painting me. To-day I am thirteen, Herr Harz; there is
+not to be a sitting, because it is my birthday; but, instead, we are all
+going to Meran to see the play of Andreas Hofer. You are to come too,
+please; I am here to tell you, and the others shall be here directly.”
+
+Harz bowed: “And who are the others?”
+
+“Christian, and Dr. Edmund, Miss Naylor, and Cousin Teresa. Her husband
+is ill, so she is sad, but to-day she is going to forget that. It is not
+good to be always sad, is it, Herr Harz?”
+
+He laughed: “You could not be.”
+
+Greta answered gravely: “Oh yes, I could. I too am often sad. You are
+making fun. You are not to make fun to-day, because it is my birthday.
+Do you think growing up is nice, Herr Harz?”
+
+“No, Fraulein Greta, it is better to have all the time before you.”
+
+They walked on side by side.
+
+“I think,” said Greta, “you are very much afraid of losing time. Chris
+says that time is nothing.”
+
+“Time is everything,” responded Harz.
+
+“She says that time is nothing, and thought is everything,” Greta
+murmured, rubbing a rose against her cheek, “but I think you cannot have
+a thought unless you have the time to think it in. There are the others!
+Look!”
+
+A cluster of sunshades on the bridge glowed for a moment and was lost in
+shadow.
+
+“Come,” said Harz, “let's join them!”
+
+At Meran, under Schloss Tirol, people were streaming across the meadows
+into the open theatre. Here were tall fellows in mountain dress, with
+leather breeches, bare knees, and hats with eagles' feathers; here were
+fruit-sellers, burghers and their wives, mountebanks, actors, and every
+kind of visitor. The audience, packed into an enclosure of high boards,
+sweltered under the burning sun. Cousin Teresa, tall and thin, with
+hard, red cheeks, shaded her pleasant eyes with her hand.
+
+The play began. It depicted the rising in the Tyrol of 1809: the village
+life, dances and yodelling; murmurings and exhortations, the warning
+beat of drums; then the gathering, with flintlocks, pitchforks, knives;
+the battle and victory; the homecoming, and festival. Then the second
+gathering, the roar of cannon; betrayal, capture, death. The impassive
+figure of the patriot Andreas Hofer always in front, black-bearded,
+leathern-girdled, under the blue sky, against a screen of mountains.
+
+Harz and Christian sat behind the others. He seemed so intent on the
+play that she did not speak, but watched his face, rigid with a kind of
+cold excitement; he seemed to be transported by the life passing before
+them. Something of his feeling seized on her; when the play was over she
+too was trembling. In pushing their way out they became separated from
+the others.
+
+“There's a short cut to the station here,” said Christian; “let's go
+this way.”
+
+The path rose a little; a narrow stream crept alongside the meadow, and
+the hedge was spangled with wild roses. Christian kept glancing shyly
+at the painter. Since their meeting on the river wall her thoughts had
+never been at rest. This stranger, with his keen face, insistent eyes,
+and ceaseless energy, had roused a strange feeling in her; his words had
+put shape to something in her not yet expressed. She stood aside at a
+stile to make way for some peasant boys, dusty and rough-haired, who
+sang and whistled as they went by.
+
+“I was like those boys once,” said Harz.
+
+Christian turned to him quickly. “Ah! that was why you felt the play, so
+much.”
+
+“It's my country up there. I was born amongst the mountains. I looked
+after the cows, and slept in hay-cocks, and cut the trees in winter.
+They used to call me a 'black sheep,' a 'loafer' in my village.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Ah! why? I worked as hard as any of them. But I wanted to get away. Do
+you think I could have stayed there all my life?”
+
+Christian's eyes grew eager.
+
+“If people don't understand what it is you want to do, they always call
+you a loafer!” muttered Harz.
+
+“But you did what you meant to do in spite of them,” Christian said.
+
+For herself it was so hard to finish or decide. When in the old days
+she told Greta stories, the latter, whose instinct was always for the
+definite, would say: “And what came at the end, Chris? Do finish it
+this morning!” but Christian never could. Her thoughts were deep, vague,
+dreamy, invaded by both sides of every question. Whatever she did, her
+needlework, her verse-making, her painting, all had its charm; but
+it was not always what it was intended for at the beginning. Nicholas
+Treffry had once said of her: “When Chris starts out to make a hat, it
+may turn out an altar-cloth, but you may bet it won't be a hat.” It was
+her instinct to look for what things meant; and this took more than all
+her time. She knew herself better than most girls of nineteen, but it
+was her reason that had informed her, not her feelings. In her
+sheltered life, her heart had never been ruffled except by rare fits of
+passion—“tantrums” old Nicholas Treffry dubbed them—at what seemed to
+her mean or unjust.
+
+“If I were a man,” she said, “and going to be great, I should have
+wanted to begin at the very bottom as you did.”
+
+“Yes,” said Harz quickly, “one should be able to feel everything.”
+
+She did not notice how simply he assumed that he was going to be great.
+He went on, a smile twisting his mouth unpleasantly beneath its dark
+moustache—“Not many people think like you! It's a crime not to have been
+born a gentleman.”
+
+“That's a sneer,” said Christian; “I didn't think you would have
+sneered!”
+
+“It is true. What is the use of pretending that it isn't?”
+
+“It may be true, but it is finer not to say it!”
+
+“By Heavens!” said Harz, striking one hand into the other, “if more
+truth were spoken there would not be so many shams.”
+
+Christian looked down at him from her seat on the stile.
+
+“You are right all the same, Fraulein Christian,” he added suddenly;
+“that's a very little business. Work is what matters, and trying to see
+the beauty in the world.”
+
+Christian's face changed. She understood, well enough, this craving
+after beauty. Slipping down from the stile, she drew a slow deep breath.
+
+“Yes!” she said. Neither spoke for some time, then Harz said shyly:
+
+“If you and Fraulein Greta would ever like to come and see my studio, I
+should be so happy. I would try and clean it up for you!”
+
+“I should like to come. I could learn something. I want to learn.”
+
+They were both silent till the path joined the road.
+
+“We must be in front of the others; it's nice to be in front—let's
+dawdle. I forgot—you never dawdle, Herr Harz.”
+
+“After a big fit of work, I can dawdle against any one; then I get
+another fit of work—it's like appetite.”
+
+“I'm always dawdling,” answered Christian.
+
+By the roadside a peasant woman screwed up her sun-dried face, saying in
+a low voice: “Please, gracious lady, help me to lift this basket!”
+
+Christian stooped, but before she could raise it, Harz hoisted it up on
+his back.
+
+“All right,” he nodded; “this good lady doesn't mind.”
+
+The woman, looking very much ashamed, walked along by Christian; she
+kept rubbing her brown hands together, and saying; “Gracious lady, I
+would not have wished. It is heavy, but I would not have wished.”
+
+“I'm sure he'd rather carry it,” said Christian.
+
+They had not gone far along the road, however, before the others passed
+them in a carriage, and at the strange sight Miss Naylor could be seen
+pursing her lips; Cousin Teresa nodding pleasantly; a smile on Dawney's
+face; and beside him Greta, very demure. Harz began to laugh.
+
+“What are you laughing at?” asked Christian.
+
+“You English are so funny. You mustn't do this here, you mustn't do that
+there, it's like sitting in a field of nettles. If I were to walk with
+you without my coat, that little lady would fall off her seat.” His
+laugh infected Christian; they reached the station feeling that they
+knew each other better.
+
+The sun had dipped behind the mountains when the little train steamed
+down the valley. All were subdued, and Greta, with a nodding head, slept
+fitfully. Christian, in her corner, was looking out of the window, and
+Harz kept studying her profile.
+
+He tried to see her eyes. He had remarked indeed that, whatever their
+expression, the brows, arched and rather wide apart, gave them a
+peculiar look of understanding. He thought of his picture. There was
+nothing in her face to seize on, it was too sympathetic, too much like
+light. Yet her chin was firm, almost obstinate.
+
+The train stopped with a jerk; she looked round at him. It was as though
+she had said: “You are my friend.”
+
+At Villa Rubein, Herr Paul had killed the fatted calf for Greta's Fest.
+When the whole party were assembled, he alone remained standing; and
+waving his arm above the cloth, cried: “My dears! Your happiness! There
+are good things here—Come!” And with a sly look, the air of a conjurer
+producing rabbits, he whipped the cover off the soup tureen:
+
+“Soup-turtle, fat, green fat!” He smacked his lips.
+
+No servants were allowed, because, as Greta said to Harz:
+
+“It is that we are to be glad this evening.”
+
+Geniality radiated from Herr Paul's countenance, mellow as a bowl of
+wine. He toasted everybody, exhorting them to pleasure.
+
+Harz passed a cracker secretly behind Greta's head, and Miss Naylor,
+moved by a mysterious impulse, pulled it with a sort of gleeful horror;
+it exploded, and Greta sprang off her chair. Scruff, seeing this,
+appeared suddenly on the sideboard with his forelegs in a plate of soup;
+without moving them, he turned his head, and appeared to accuse
+the company of his false position. It was the signal for shrieks of
+laughter. Scruff made no attempt to free his forelegs; but sniffed the
+soup, and finding that nothing happened, began to lap it.
+
+“Take him out! Oh! take him out!” wailed Greta, “he shall be ill!”
+
+“Allons! Mon cher!” cried Herr Paul, “c'est magnifique, mais, vous
+savez, ce nest guere la guerre!” Scruff, with a wild spring, leaped past
+him to the ground.
+
+“Ah!” cried Miss Naylor, “the carpet!” Fresh moans of mirth shook the
+table; for having tasted the wine of laughter, all wanted as much more
+as they could get. When Scruff and his traces were effaced, Herr Paul
+took a ladle in his hand.
+
+“I have a toast,” he said, waving it for silence; “a toast we will
+drink all together from our hearts; the toast of my little daughter, who
+to-day has thirteen years become; and there is also in our hearts,”
+he continued, putting down the ladle and suddenly becoming grave, “the
+thought of one who is not today with us to see this joyful occasion; to
+her, too, in this our happiness we turn our hearts and glasses because
+it is her joy that we should yet be joyful. I drink to my little
+daughter; may God her shadow bless!”
+
+All stood up, clinking their glasses, and drank: then, in the hush that
+followed, Greta, according to custom, began to sing a German carol; at
+the end of the fourth line she stopped, abashed.
+
+Heir Paul blew his nose loudly, and, taking up a cap that had fallen
+from a cracker, put it on.
+
+Every one followed his example, Miss Naylor attaining the distinction
+of a pair of donkey's ears, which she wore, after another glass of wine,
+with an air of sacrificing to the public good.
+
+At the end of supper came the moment for the offering of gifts. Herr
+Paul had tied a handkerchief over Greta's eyes, and one by one they
+brought her presents. Greta, under forfeit of a kiss, was bound to
+tell the giver by the feel of the gift. Her swift, supple little hands
+explored noiselessly; and in every case she guessed right.
+
+Dawney's present, a kitten, made a scene by clawing at her hair.
+
+“That is Dr. Edmund's,” she cried at once. Christian saw that Harz had
+disappeared, but suddenly he came back breathless, and took his place at
+the end of the rank of givers.
+
+Advancing on tiptoe, he put his present into Greta's hands. It was a
+small bronze copy of a Donatello statue.
+
+“Oh, Herr Harz!” cried Greta; “I saw it in the studio that day. It stood
+on the table, and it is lovely.”
+
+Mrs. Decie, thrusting her pale eyes close to it, murmured: “Charming!”
+
+Mr. Treffry took it in his fingers.
+
+“Rum little toad! Cost a pot of money, I expect!” He eyed Harz
+doubtfully.
+
+They went into the next room now, and Herr Paul, taking Greta's bandage,
+transferred it to his own eyes.
+
+“Take care—take care, all!” he cried; “I am a devil of a catcher,” and,
+feeling the air cautiously, he moved forward like a bear about to hug.
+He caught no one. Christian and Greta whisked under his arms and left
+him grasping at the air. Mrs. Decie slipped past with astonishing
+agility. Mr. Treffry, smoking his cigar, and barricaded in a corner,
+jeered: “Bravo, Paul! The active beggar! Can't he run! Go it, Greta!”
+
+At last Herr Paul caught Cousin Teresa, who, fattened against the wall,
+lost her head, and stood uttering tiny shrieks.
+
+Suddenly Mrs. Decie started playing The Blue Danube. Herr Paul dropped
+the handkerchief, twisted his moustache up fiercely, glared round the
+room, and seizing Greta by the waist, began dancing furiously, bobbing
+up and down like a cork in lumpy water. Cousin Teresa followed suit with
+Miss Naylor, both very solemn, and dancing quite different steps. Harz,
+went up to Christian.
+
+“I can't dance,” he said, “that is, I have only danced once, but—if you
+would try with me!”
+
+She put her hand on his arm, and they began. She danced, light as a
+feather, eyes shining, feet flying, her body bent a little forward. It
+was not a great success at first, but as soon as the time had got
+into Harz's feet, they went swinging on when all the rest had stopped.
+Sometimes one couple or another slipped through the window to dance on
+the veranda, and came whirling in again. The lamplight glowed on the
+girls' white dresses; on Herr Paul's perspiring face. He constituted in
+himself a perfect orgy, and when the music stopped flung himself, full
+length, on the sofa gasping out:
+
+“My God! But, my God!”
+
+Suddenly Christian felt Harz cling to her arm.
+
+Glowing and panting she looked at him.
+
+“Giddy!” he murmured: “I dance so badly; but I'll soon learn.”
+
+Greta clapped her hands: “Every evening we will dance, every evening we
+will dance.”
+
+Harz looked at Christian; the colour had deepened in her face.
+
+“I'll show you how they dance in my village, feet upon the ceiling!” And
+running to Dawney, he said:
+
+“Hold me here! Lift me—so! Now, on—two,” he tried to swing his feet
+above his head, but, with an “Ouch!” from Dawney, they collapsed, and
+sat abruptly on the floor. This untimely event brought the evening to an
+end. Dawney left, escorting Cousin Teresa, and Harz strode home humming
+The Blue Danube, still feeling Christian's waist against his arm.
+
+In their room the two girls sat long at the window to cool themselves
+before undressing.
+
+“Ah!” sighed Greta, “this is the happiest birthday I have had.”
+
+Cristian too thought: 'I have never been so happy in my life as I have
+been to-day. I should like every day to be like this!' And she leant out
+into the night, to let the air cool her cheeks.
+
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+“Chris!” said Greta some days after this, “Miss Naylor danced last
+evening; I think she shall have a headache to-day. There is my French
+and my history this morning.”
+
+“Well, I can take them.”
+
+“That is nice; then we can talk. I am sorry about the headache. I shall
+give her some of my Eau de Cologne.”
+
+Miss Naylor's headaches after dancing were things on which to calculate.
+The girls carried their books into the arbour; it was a showery day, and
+they had to run for shelter through the raindrops and sunlight.
+
+“The French first, Chris!” Greta liked her French, in which she was
+not far inferior to Christian; the lesson therefore proceeded in an
+admirable fashion. After one hour exactly by her watch (Mr. Treffry's
+birthday present loved and admired at least once every hour) Greta rose.
+
+“Chris, I have not fed my rabbits.”
+
+“Be quick! there's not much time for history.”
+
+Greta vanished. Christian watched the bright water dripping from the
+roof; her lips were parted in a smile. She was thinking of something
+Harz had said the night before. A discussion having been started as to
+whether average opinion did, or did not, safeguard Society, Harz, after
+sitting silent, had burst out: “I think one man in earnest is better
+than twenty half-hearted men who follow tamely; in the end he does
+Society most good.”
+
+Dawney had answered: “If you had your way there would be no Society.”
+
+“I hate Society because it lives upon the weak.”
+
+“Bah!” Herr Paul chimed in; “the weak goes to the wall; that is as
+certain as that you and I are here.”
+
+“Let them fall against the wall,” cried Harz; “don't push them
+there....”
+
+Greta reappeared, walking pensively in the rain.
+
+“Bino,” she said, sighing, “has eaten too much. I remember now, I did
+feed them before. Must we do the history, Chris?”
+
+“Of course!”
+
+Greta opened her book, and put a finger in the page. “Herr Harz is very
+kind to me,” she said. “Yesterday he brought a bird which had come
+into his studio with a hurt wing; he brought it very gently in his
+handkerchief—he is very kind, the bird was not even frightened of him.
+You did not know about that, Chris?”
+
+Chris flushed a little, and said in a hurt voice
+
+“I don't see what it has to—do with me.”
+
+“No,” assented Greta.
+
+Christian's colour deepened. “Go on with your history, Greta.”
+
+“Only,” pursued Greta, “that he always tells you all about things,
+Chris.”
+
+“He doesn't! How can you say that!”
+
+“I think he does, and it is because you do not make him angry. It is
+very easy to make him angry; you have only to think differently, and he
+shall be angry at once.”
+
+“You are a little cat!” said Christian; “it isn't true, at all. He hates
+shams, and can't bear meanness; and it is mean to cover up dislikes and
+pretend that you agree with people.”
+
+“Papa says that he thinks too much about himself.”
+
+“Father!” began Christian hotly; biting her lips she stopped, and turned
+her wrathful eyes on Greta.
+
+“You do not always show your dislikes, Chris.”
+
+“I? What has that to do with it? Because one is a coward that doesn't
+make it any better, does it?”
+
+“I think that he has a great many dislikes,” murmured Greta.
+
+“I wish you would attend to your own faults, and not pry into other
+people's,” and pushing the book aside, Christian gazed in front of her.
+
+Some minutes passed, then Greta leaning over, rubbed a cheek against her
+shoulder.
+
+“I am very sorry, Chris—I only wanted to be talking. Shall I read some
+history?”
+
+“Yes,” said Christian coldly.
+
+“Are you angry with me, Chris?”
+
+There was no answer. The lingering raindrops pattered down on the roof.
+Greta pulled at her sister's sleeve.
+
+“Look, Chris!” she said. “There is Herr Harz!”
+
+Christian looked up, dropped her eyes again, and said: “Will you go on
+with the history, Greta?”
+
+Greta sighed.
+
+“Yes, I will—but, oh! Chris, there is the luncheon gong!” and she meekly
+closed the book.
+
+During the following weeks there was a “sitting” nearly every afternoon.
+Miss Naylor usually attended them; the little lady was, to a certain
+extent, carried past objection. She had begun to take an interest in the
+picture, and to watch the process out of the corner of her eye; in the
+depths of her dear mind, however, she never quite got used to the vanity
+and waste of time; her lips would move and her knitting-needles click in
+suppressed remonstrances.
+
+What Harz did fast he did best; if he had leisure he “saw too much,”
+loving his work so passionately that he could never tell exactly when
+to stop. He hated to lay things aside, always thinking: “I can get it
+better.” Greta was finished, but with Christian, try as he would, he was
+not satisfied; from day to day her face seemed to him to change, as if
+her soul were growing.
+
+There were things too in her eyes that he could neither read nor
+reproduce.
+
+Dawney would often stroll out to them after his daily visit, and lying
+on the grass, his arms crossed behind his head, and a big cigar between
+his lips, would gently banter everybody. Tea came at five o'clock, and
+then Mrs. Decie appeared armed with a magazine or novel, for she was
+proud of her literary knowledge. The sitting was suspended; Harz, with
+a cigarette, would move between the table and the picture, drinking his
+tea, putting a touch in here and there; he never sat down till it was
+all over for the day. During these “rests” there was talk, usually
+ending in discussion. Mrs. Decie was happiest in conversations of a
+literary order, making frequent use of such expressions as: “After all,
+it produces an illusion—does anything else matter?” “Rather a poseur,
+is he not?” “A question, that, of temperament,” or “A matter of the
+definition of words”; and other charming generalities, which sound
+well, and seem to go far, and are pleasingly irrefutable. Sometimes
+the discussion turned on Art—on points of colour or technique; whether
+realism was quite justified; and should we be pre-Raphaelites? When
+these discussions started, Christian's eyes would grow bigger and
+clearer, with a sort of shining reasonableness; as though they were
+trying to see into the depths. And Harz would stare at them. But the
+look in those eyes eluded him, as if they had no more meaning than Mrs.
+Decie's, which, with their pale, watchful smile, always seemed saying:
+“Come, let us take a little intellectual exercise.”
+
+Greta, pulling Scruff's ears, would gaze up at the speakers; when the
+talk was over, she always shook herself. But if no one came to the
+“sittings,” there would sometimes be very earnest, quick talk, sometimes
+long silences.
+
+One day Christian said: “What is your religion?”
+
+Harz finished the touch he was putting on the canvas, before he
+answered: “Roman Catholic, I suppose; I was baptised in that Church.”
+
+“I didn't mean that. Do you believe in a future life?”
+
+“Christian,” murmured Greta, who was plaiting blades of grass, “shall
+always want to know what people think about a future life; that is so
+funny!”
+
+“How can I tell?” said Harz; “I've never really thought of it—never had
+the time.”
+
+“How can you help thinking?” Christian said: “I have to—it seems to me
+so awful that we might come to an end.”
+
+She closed her book, and it slipped off her lap. She went on: “There
+must be a future life, we're so incomplete. What's the good of your
+work, for instance? What's the use of developing if you have to stop?”
+
+“I don't know,” answered Harz. “I don't much care. All I know is, I've
+got to work.”
+
+“But why?”
+
+“For happiness—the real happiness is fighting—the rest is nothing. If
+you have finished a thing, does it ever satisfy you? You look forward to
+the next thing at once; to wait is wretched!”
+
+Christian clasped her hands behind her neck; sunlight flickered through
+the leaves on to the bosom of her dress.
+
+“Ah! Stay like that!” cried Harz.
+
+She let her eyes rest on his face, swinging her foot a little.
+
+“You work because you must; but that's not enough. Why do you feel you
+must? I want to know what's behind. When I was travelling with Aunt
+Constance the winter before last we often talked—I've heard her discuss
+it with her friends. She says we move in circles till we reach Nirvana.
+But last winter I found I couldn't talk to her; it seemed as if she
+never really meant anything. Then I started reading—Kant and Hegel—”
+
+“Ah!” put in Harz, “if they would teach me to draw better, or to see a
+new colour in a flower, or an expression in a face, I would read them
+all.”
+
+Christian leaned forward: “It must be right to get as near truth as
+possible; every step gained is something. You believe in truth; truth
+is the same as beauty—that was what you said—you try to paint the truth,
+you always see the beauty. But how can we know truth, unless we know
+what is at the root of it?”
+
+“I—think,” murmured Greta, sotto voce, “you see one way—and he sees
+another—because—you are not one person.”
+
+“Of course!” said Christian impatiently, “but why—”
+
+A sound of humming interrupted her.
+
+Nicholas Treffry was coming from the house, holding the Times in one
+hand, and a huge meerschaum pipe in the other.
+
+“Aha!” he said to Harz: “how goes the picture?” and he lowered himself
+into a chair.
+
+“Better to-day, Uncle?” said Christian softly.
+
+Mr. Treffry growled. “Confounded humbugs, doctors!” he said. “Your
+father used to swear by them; why, his doctor killed him—made him drink
+such a lot of stuff!”
+
+“Why then do you have a doctor, Uncle Nic?” asked Greta.
+
+Mr. Treffry looked at her; his eyes twinkled. “I don't know, my dear. If
+they get half a chance, they won't let go of you!”
+
+There had been a gentle breeze all day, but now it had died away; not
+a leaf quivered, not a blade of grass was stirring; from the house were
+heard faint sounds as of some one playing on a pipe. A blackbird came
+hopping down the path.
+
+“When you were a boy, did you go after birds' nests, Uncle Nic?” Greta
+whispered.
+
+“I believe you, Greta.” The blackbird hopped into the shrubbery.
+
+“You frightened him, Uncle Nic! Papa says that at Schloss Konig, where
+he lived when he was young, he would always be after jackdaws' nests.”
+
+“Gammon, Greta. Your father never took a jackdaw's nest, his legs are
+much too round!”
+
+“Are you fond of birds, Uncle Nic?”
+
+“Ask me another, Greta! Well, I s'pose so.”
+
+“Then why did you go bird-nesting? I think it is cruel”
+
+Mr. Treffry coughed behind his paper: “There you have me, Greta,” he
+remarked.
+
+Harz began to gather his brushes: “Thank you,” he said, “that's all I
+can do to-day.”
+
+“Can I look?” Mr. Treffry inquired.
+
+“Certainly!”
+
+Uncle Nic got up slowly, and stood in front of the picture. “When it's
+for sale,” he said at last, “I'll buy it.”
+
+Harz bowed; but for some reason he felt annoyed, as if he had been asked
+to part with something personal.
+
+“I thank you,” he said. A gong sounded.
+
+“You'll stay and have a snack with us?” said Mr. Treffry; “the doctor's
+stopping.” Gathering up his paper, he moved off to the house with
+his hand on Greta's shoulder, the terrier running in front. Harz and
+Christian were left alone. He was scraping his palette, and she was
+sitting with her elbows resting on her knees; between them, a gleam of
+sunlight dyed the path golden. It was evening already; the bushes and
+the flowers, after the day's heat, were breathing out perfume; the birds
+had started their evensong.
+
+“Are you tired of sitting for your portrait, Fraulein Christian?”
+
+Christian shook her head.
+
+“I shall get something into it that everybody does not see—something
+behind the surface, that will last.”
+
+Christian said slowly: “That's like a challenge. You were right when you
+said fighting is happiness—for yourself, but not for me. I'm a coward.
+I hate to hurt people, I like them to like me. If you had to do anything
+that would make them hate you, you would do it all the same, if
+it helped your work; that's fine—it's what I can't do. It's—it's
+everything. Do you like Uncle Nic?”
+
+The young painter looked towards the house, where under the veranda old
+Nicholas Treffry was still in sight; a smile came on his lips.
+
+“If I were the finest painter in the world, he wouldn't think anything
+of me for it, I'm afraid; but if I could show him handfuls of big
+cheques for bad pictures I had painted, he would respect me.”
+
+She smiled, and said: “I love him.”
+
+“Then I shall like him,” Harz answered simply.
+
+She put her hand out, and her fingers met his. “We shall be late,” she
+said, glowing, and catching up her book: “I'm always late!”
+
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+There was one other guest at dinner, a well-groomed person with pale,
+fattish face, dark eyes, and hair thin on the temples, whose clothes had
+a military cut. He looked like a man fond of ease, who had gone out of
+his groove, and collided with life. Herr Paul introduced him as Count
+Mario Sarelli.
+
+Two hanging lamps with crimson shades threw a rosy light over the table,
+where, in the centre stood a silver basket, full of irises. Through the
+open windows the garden was all clusters of black foliage in the dying
+light. Moths fluttered round the lamps; Greta, following them with her
+eyes, gave quite audible sighs of pleasure when they escaped. Both girls
+wore white, and Harz, who sat opposite Christian, kept looking at her,
+and wondering why he had not painted her in that dress.
+
+Mrs. Decie understood the art of dining—the dinner, ordered by Herr
+Paul, was admirable; the servants silent as their shadows; there was
+always a hum of conversation.
+
+Sarelli, who sat on her right hand, seemed to partake of little except
+olives, which he dipped into a glass of sherry. He turned his black,
+solemn eyes silently from face to face, now and then asking the meaning
+of an English word. After a discussion on modern Rome, it was debated
+whether or no a criminal could be told by the expression of his face.
+
+“Crime,” said Mrs. Decie, passing her hand across her brow—“crime is but
+the hallmark of strong individuality.”
+
+Miss Naylor, gushing rather pink, stammered: “A great crime must show
+itself—a murder. Why, of course!”
+
+“If that were so,” said Dawney, “we should only have to look about us—no
+more detectives.”
+
+Miss Naylor rejoined with slight severity: “I cannot conceive that such
+a thing can pass the human face by, leaving no impression!”
+
+Harz said abruptly: “There are worse things than murder.”
+
+“Ah! par exemple!” said Sarelli.
+
+There was a slight stir all round the table.
+
+“Verry good,” cried out Herr Paul, “a vot' sante, cher.”
+
+Miss Naylor shivered, as if some one had put a penny down her back; and
+Mrs. Decie, leaning towards Harz, smiled like one who has made a pet
+dog do a trick. Christian alone was motionless, looking thoughtfully at
+Harz.
+
+“I saw a man tried for murder once,” he said, “a murder for revenge;
+I watched the judge, and I thought all the time: 'I'd rather be that
+murderer than you; I've never seen a meaner face; you crawl through
+life; you're not a criminal, simply because you haven't the courage.'”
+
+In the dubious silence following the painter's speech, Mr. Treffry could
+distinctly be heard humming. Then Sarelli said: “What do you say to
+anarchists, who are not men, but savage beasts, whom I would tear to
+pieces!”
+
+“As to that,” Harz answered defiantly, “it maybe wise to hang them, but
+then there are so many other men that it would be wise to hang.”
+
+“How can we tell what they went through; what their lives were?”
+murmured Christian.
+
+Miss Naylor, who had been rolling a pellet of bread, concealed it
+hastily. “They are—always given a chance to—repent—I believe,” she said.
+
+“For what they are about to receive,” drawled Dawney.
+
+Mrs. Decie signalled with her fan: “We are trying to express the
+inexpressible—shall we go into the garden?”
+
+All rose; Harz stood by the window, and in passing, Christian looked at
+him.
+
+He sat down again with a sudden sense of loss. There was no white
+figure opposite now. Raising his eyes he met Sarelli's. The Italian was
+regarding him with a curious stare.
+
+Herr Paul began retailing apiece of scandal he had heard that afternoon.
+
+“Shocking affair!” he said; “I could never have believed it of her!
+B—-is quite beside himself. Yesterday there was a row, it seems!”
+
+“There has been one every day for months,” muttered Dawney.
+
+“But to leave without a word, and go no one knows where! B—-is 'viveur'
+no doubt, mais, mon Dieu, que voulez vous? She was always a poor, pale
+thing. Why! when my—-” he flourished his cigar; “I was not always—-what
+I should have been—-one lives in a world of flesh and blood—-we are not
+all angels—-que diable! But this is a very vulgar business. She goes
+off; leaves everything—-without a word; and B—-is very fond of her.
+These things are not done!” the starched bosom of his shirt seemed
+swollen by indignation.
+
+Mr. Treffry, with a heavy hand on the table, eyed him sideways. Dawney
+said slowly:
+
+“B—-is a beast; I'm sorry for the poor woman; but what can she do
+alone?”
+
+“There is, no doubt, a man,” put in Sarelli.
+
+Herr Paul muttered: “Who knows?”
+
+“What is B—-going to do?” said Dawney.
+
+“Ah!” said Herr Paul. “He is fond of her. He is a chap of resolution,
+he will get her back. He told me: 'Well, you know, I shall follow
+her wherever she goes till she comes back.' He will do it, he is a
+determined chap; he will follow her wherever she goes.”
+
+Mr. Treffry drank his wine off at a gulp, and sucked his moustache in
+sharply.
+
+“She was a fool to marry him,” said Dawney; “they haven't a point in
+common; she hates him like poison, and she's the better of the two. But
+it doesn't pay a woman to run off like that. B—-had better hurry up,
+though. What do you think, sir?” he said to Mr. Treffry.
+
+“Eh?” said Mr. Treffry; “how should I know? Ask Paul there, he's one of
+your moral men, or Count Sarelli.”
+
+The latter said impassively: “If I cared for her I should very likely
+kill her—if not—” he shrugged his shoulders.
+
+Harz, who was watching, was reminded of his other words at dinner, “wild
+beasts whom I would tear to pieces.” He looked with interest at this
+quiet man who said these extremely ferocious things, and thought: 'I
+should like to paint that fellow.'
+
+Herr Paul twirled his wine-glass in his fingers. “There are family
+ties,” he said, “there is society, there is decency; a wife should be
+with her husband. B—-will do quite right. He must go after her; she will
+not perhaps come back at first; he will follow her; she will begin to
+think, 'I am helpless—I am ridiculous!' A woman is soon beaten. They
+will return. She is once more with her husband—Society will forgive, it
+will be all right.”
+
+“By Jove, Paul,” growled Mr. Treffry, “wonderful power of argument!”
+
+“A wife is a wife,” pursued Herr Paul; “a man has a right to her
+society.”
+
+“What do you say to that, sir?” asked Dawney.
+
+Mr. Treffry tugged at his beard: “Make a woman live with you, if she
+don't want to? I call it low.”
+
+“But, my dear,” exclaimed Herr Paul, “how should you know? You have not
+been married.”
+
+“No, thank the Lord!” Mr. Treffry replied.
+
+“But looking at the question broadly, sir,” said Dawney; “if a husband
+always lets his wife do as she likes, how would the thing work out? What
+becomes of the marriage tie?”
+
+“The marriage tie,” growled Mr. Treffry, “is the biggest thing there is!
+But, by Jove, Doctor, I'm a Dutchman if hunting women ever helped the
+marriage tie!”
+
+“I am not thinking of myself,” Herr Paul cried out, “I think of the
+community. There are rights.”
+
+“A decent community never yet asked a man to tread on his self-respect.
+If I get my fingers skinned over my marriage, which I undertake at my
+own risk, what's the community to do with it? D'you think I'm going to
+whine to it to put the plaster on? As to rights, it'd be a deuced sight
+better for us all if there wasn't such a fuss about 'em. Leave that to
+women! I don't give a tinker's damn for men who talk about their rights
+in such matters.”
+
+Sarelli rose. “But your honour,” he said, “there is your honour!”
+
+Mr. Treffry stared at him.
+
+“Honour! If huntin' women's your idea of honour, well—it isn't mine.”
+
+“Then you'd forgive her, sir, whatever happened,” Dawney said.
+
+“Forgiveness is another thing. I leave that to your sanctimonious
+beggars. But, hunt a woman! Hang it, sir, I'm not a cad!” and bringing
+his hand down with a rattle, he added: “This is a subject that don't
+bear talking of.”
+
+Sarelli fell back in his seat, twirling his moustaches fiercely. Harz,
+who had risen, looked at Christian's empty place.
+
+'If I were married!' he thought suddenly.
+
+Herr Paul, with a somewhat vinous glare, still muttered, “But your duty
+to the family!”
+
+Harz slipped through the window. The moon was like a wonderful white
+lantern in the purple sky; there was but a smoulder of stars. Beneath
+the softness of the air was the iciness of the snow; it made him want to
+run and leap. A sleepy beetle dropped on its back; he turned it over and
+watched it scurry across the grass.
+
+Someone was playing Schumann's Kinderscenen. Harz stood still to listen.
+The notes came twining, weaving round his thoughts; the whole night
+seemed full of girlish voices, of hopes and fancies, soaring away
+to mountain heights—invisible, yet present. Between the stems of the
+acacia-trees he could see the flicker of white dresses, where Christian
+and Greta were walking arm in arm. He went towards them; the blood
+flushed up in his face, he felt almost surfeited by some sweet emotion.
+Then, in sudden horror, he stood still. He was in love! With nothing
+done with everything before him! He was going to bow down to a face! The
+flicker of the dresses was no longer visible. He would not be fettered,
+he would stamp it out! He turned away; but with each step, something
+seemed to jab at his heart.
+
+Round the corner of the house, in the shadow of the wall, Dominique, the
+Luganese, in embroidered slippers, was smoking a long cherry-wood pipe,
+leaning against a tree—Mephistopheles in evening clothes. Harz went up
+to him.
+
+“Lend me a pencil, Dominique.”
+
+“Bien, M'sieu.”
+
+Resting a card against the tree Harz wrote to Mrs. Decie: “Forgive me, I
+am obliged to go away. In a few days I shall hope to return, and finish
+the picture of your nieces.”
+
+He sent Dominique for his hat. During the man's absence he was on the
+point of tearing up the card and going back into the house.
+
+When the Luganese returned he thrust the card into his hand, and walked
+out between the tall poplars, waiting, like ragged ghosts, silver with
+moonlight.
+
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Harz walked away along the road. A dog was howling. The sound seemed too
+appropriate. He put his fingers to his ears, but the lugubrious noise
+passed those barriers, and made its way into his heart. Was there
+nothing that would put an end to this emotion? It was no better in the
+old house on the wall; he spent the night tramping up and down.
+
+Just before daybreak he slipped out with a knapsack, taking the road
+towards Meran.
+
+He had not quite passed through Gries when he overtook a man walking in
+the middle of the road and leaving a trail of cigar smoke behind him.
+
+“Ah! my friend,” the smoker said, “you walk early; are you going my
+way?”
+
+It was Count Sarelli. The raw light had imparted a grey tinge to his
+pale face, the growth of his beard showed black already beneath the
+skin; his thumbs were hooked in the pockets of a closely buttoned coat,
+he gesticulated with his fingers.
+
+“You are making a journey?” he said, nodding at the knapsack. “You are
+early—I am late; our friend has admirable kummel—I have drunk too much.
+You have not been to bed, I think? If there is no sleep in one's bed it
+is no good going to look for it. You find that? It is better to drink
+kummel...! Pardon! You are doing the right thing: get away! Get away as
+fast as possible! Don't wait, and let it catch you!”
+
+Harz stared at him amazed.
+
+“Pardon!” Sarelli said again, raising his hat, “that girl—the white
+girl—I saw. You do well to get away!” he swayed a little as he walked.
+“That old fellow—what is his name-Trrreffr-ry! What ideas of honour!”
+He mumbled: “Honour is an abstraction! If a man is not true to an
+abstraction, he is a low type; but wait a minute!”
+
+He put his hand to his side as though in pain.
+
+The hedges were brightening with a faint pinky glow; there was no sound
+on the long, deserted road, but that of their footsteps; suddenly a
+bird commenced to chirp, another answered—the world seemed full of these
+little voices.
+
+Sarelli stopped.
+
+“That white girl,” he said, speaking with rapidity. “Yes! You do well!
+get away! Don't let it catch you! I waited, it caught me—what happened?
+Everything horrible—and now—kummel!” Laughing a thick laugh, he gave a
+twirl to his moustache, and swaggered on.
+
+“I was a fine fellow—nothing too big for Mario Sarelli; the regiment
+looked to me. Then she came—with her eyes and her white dress, always
+white, like this one; the little mole on her chin, her hands for ever
+moving—their touch as warm as sunbeams. Then, no longer Sarelli this,
+and that! The little house close to the ramparts! Two arms, two eyes,
+and nothing here,” he tapped his breast, “but flames that made ashes
+quickly—in her, like this ash—!” he flicked the white flake off his
+cigar. “It's droll! You agree, hein? Some day I shall go back and kill
+her. In the meantime—kummel!”
+
+He stopped at a house close to the road, and stood still, his teeth
+bared in a grin.
+
+“But I bore you,” he said. His cigar, flung down, sputtered forth its
+sparks on the road in front of Harz. “I live here—good-morning! You are
+a man for work—your honour is your Art! I know, and you are young! The
+man who loves flesh better than his honour is a low type—I am a low
+type. I! Mario Sarelli, a low type! I love flesh better than my honour!”
+
+He remained swaying at the gate with the grin fixed on his face; then
+staggered up the steps, and banged the door. But before Harz had walked
+on, he again appeared, beckoning, in the doorway. Obeying an impulse,
+Harz went in.
+
+“We will make a night of it,” said Sarelli; “wine, brandy, kummel? I am
+virtuous—kummel it must be for me!”
+
+He sat down at a piano, and began to touch the keys. Harz poured out
+some wine. Sarelli nodded.
+
+“You begin with that? Allegro—piu—presto!
+
+“Wine—brandy—kummel!” he quickened the time of the tune: “it is not too
+long a passage, and this”—he took his hands off the keys—“comes after.”
+
+Harz smiled.
+
+“Some men do not kill themselves,” he said.
+
+Sarelli, who was bending and swaying to the music of a tarantella, broke
+off, and letting his eyes rest on the painter, began playing Schumann's
+Kinderscenen. Harz leaped to his feet.
+
+“Stop that!” he cried.
+
+“It pricks you?” said Sarelli suavely; “what do you think of this?” he
+played again, crouching over the piano, and making the notes sound like
+the crying of a wounded animal.
+
+“For me!” he said, swinging round, and rising.
+
+“Your health! And so you don't believe in suicide, but in murder? The
+custom is the other way; but you don't believe in customs? Customs
+are only for Society?” He drank a glass of kummel. “You do not love
+Society?”
+
+Harz looked at him intently; he did not want to quarrel.
+
+“I am not too fond of other people's thoughts,” he said at last; “I
+prefer to think my own.
+
+“And is Society never right? That poor Society!”
+
+“Society! What is Society—a few men in good coats? What has it done for
+me?”
+
+Sarelli bit the end off a cigar.
+
+“Ah!” he said; “now we are coming to it. It is good to be an artist, a
+fine bantam of an artist; where other men have their dis-ci-pline, he
+has his, what shall we say—his mound of roses?”
+
+The painter started to his feet.
+
+“Yes,” said Sarelli, with a hiccough, “you are a fine fellow!”
+
+“And you are drunk!” cried Harz.
+
+“A little drunk—not much, not enough to matter!”
+
+Harz broke into laughter. It was crazy to stay there listening to this
+mad fellow. What had brought him in? He moved towards the door.
+
+“Ah!” said Sarelli, “but it is no good going to bed—let us talk. I have
+a lot to say—it is pleasant to talk to anarchists at times.”
+
+Full daylight was already coming through the chinks of the shutters.
+
+“You are all anarchists, you painters, you writing fellows. You live by
+playing ball with facts. Images—nothing solid—hein? You're all for new
+things too, to tickle your nerves. No discipline! True anarchists, every
+one of you!”
+
+Harz poured out another glass of wine and drank it off. The man's
+feverish excitement was catching.
+
+“Only fools,” he replied, “take things for granted. As for discipline,
+what do you aristocrats, or bourgeois know of discipline? Have you ever
+been hungry? Have you ever had your soul down on its back?”
+
+“Soul on its back? That is good!”
+
+“A man's no use,” cried Harz, “if he's always thinking of what others
+think; he must stand on his own legs.”
+
+“He must not then consider other people?”
+
+“Not from cowardice anyway.”
+
+Sarelli drank.
+
+“What would you do,” he said, striking his chest, “if you had a
+devil-here? Would you go to bed?”
+
+A sort of pity seized on Harz. He wanted to say something that would be
+consoling but could find no words; and suddenly he felt disgusted. What
+link was there between him and this man; between his love and this man's
+love?
+
+“Harz!” muttered Sarelli; “Harz means 'tar,' hein? Your family is not an
+old one?”
+
+Harz glared, and said: “My father is a peasant.”
+
+Sarelli lifted the kummel bottle and emptied it into his glass, with a
+steady hand.
+
+“You're honest—and we both have devils. I forgot; I brought you in to
+see a picture!”
+
+He threw wide the shutters; the windows were already open, and a rush of
+air came in.
+
+“Ah!” he said, sniffing, “smells of the earth, nicht wahr, Herr Artist?
+You should know—it belongs to your father.... Come, here's my picture; a
+Correggio! What do you think of it?”
+
+“It is a copy.”
+
+“You think?”
+
+“I know.”
+
+“Then you have given me the lie, Signor,” and drawing out his
+handkerchief Sarelli flicked it in the painter's face.
+
+Harz turned white.
+
+“Duelling is a good custom!” said Sarelli. “I shall have the honour to
+teach you just this one, unless you are afraid. Here are pistols—this
+room is twenty feet across at least, twenty feet is no bad distance.”
+
+And pulling out a drawer he took two pistols from a case, and put them
+on the table.
+
+“The light is good—but perhaps you are afraid.”
+
+“Give me one!” shouted the infuriated painter; “and go to the devil for
+a fool.”
+
+“One moment!” Sarelli murmured: “I will load them, they are more useful
+loaded.”
+
+Harz leaned out of the window; his head was in a whirl. 'What on earth
+is happening?' he thought. 'He's mad—or I am! Confound him! I'm not
+going to be killed!' He turned and went towards the table. Sarelli's
+head was sunk on his arms, he was asleep. Harz methodically took up the
+pistols, and put them back into the drawer. A sound made him turn his
+head; there stood a tall, strong young woman in a loose gown caught
+together on her chest. Her grey eyes glanced from the painter to the
+bottles, from the bottles to the pistol-case. A simple reasoning, which
+struck Harz as comic.
+
+“It is often like this,” she said in the country patois; “der Herr must
+not be frightened.”
+
+Lifting the motionless Sarelli as if he were a baby, she laid him on a
+couch.
+
+“Ah!” she said, sitting down and resting her elbow on the table; “he
+will not wake!”
+
+Harz bowed to her; her patient figure, in spite of its youth and
+strength, seemed to him pathetic. Taking up his knapsack, he went out.
+
+The smoke of cottages rose straight; wisps of mist were wandering about
+the valley, and the songs of birds dropping like blessings. All over the
+grass the spiders had spun a sea of threads that bent and quivered to
+the pressure of the air, like fairy tight-ropes.
+
+All that day he tramped.
+
+Blacksmiths, tall stout men with knotted muscles, sleepy eyes, and great
+fair beards, came out of their forges to stretch and wipe their brows,
+and stare at him.
+
+Teams of white oxen, waiting to be harnessed, lashed their tails against
+their flanks, moving their heads slowly from side to side in the heat.
+Old women at chalet doors blinked and knitted.
+
+The white houses, with gaping caves of storage under the roofs, the red
+church spire, the clinking of hammers in the forges, the slow stamping
+of oxen-all spoke of sleepy toil, without ideas or ambition. Harz knew
+it all too well; like the earth's odour, it belonged to him, as Sarelli
+had said.
+
+Towards sunset coming to a copse of larches, he sat down to rest. It was
+very still, but for the tinkle of cowbells, and, from somewhere in the
+distance, the sound of dropping logs.
+
+Two barefooted little boys came from the wood, marching earnestly along,
+and looking at Harz as if he were a monster. Once past him, they began
+to run.
+
+'At their age,' he thought, 'I should have done the same.' A hundred
+memories rushed into his mind.
+
+He looked down at the village straggling below—white houses with
+russet tiles and crowns of smoke, vineyards where the young leaves were
+beginning to unfold, the red-capped spire, a thread of bubbling stream,
+an old stone cross. He had been fourteen years struggling up from all
+this; and now just as he had breathing space, and the time to give
+himself wholly to his work—this weakness was upon him! Better, a
+thousand times, to give her up!
+
+In a house or two lights began to wink; the scent of wood smoke reached
+him, the distant chimes of bells, the burring of a stream.
+
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+Next day his one thought was to get back to work. He arrived at the
+studio in the afternoon, and, laying in provisions, barricaded the lower
+door. For three days he did not go out; on the fourth day he went to
+Villa Rubein....
+
+Schloss Runkelstein—grey, blind, strengthless—still keeps the valley.
+The windows which once, like eyes, watched men and horses creeping
+through the snow, braved the splutter of guns and the gleam of torches,
+are now holes for the birds to nest in. Tangled creepers have spread
+to the very summits of the walls. In the keep, instead of grim men in
+armour, there is a wooden board recording the history of the castle and
+instructing visitors on the subject of refreshments. Only at night, when
+the cold moon blanches everything, the castle stands like the grim ghost
+of its old self, high above the river.
+
+After a long morning's sitting the girls had started forth with Harz and
+Dawney to spend the afternoon at the ruin; Miss Naylor, kept at home by
+headache, watched them depart with words of caution against sunstroke,
+stinging nettles, and strange dogs.
+
+Since the painter's return Christian and he had hardly spoken to each
+other. Below the battlement on which they sat, in a railed gallery with
+little tables, Dawney and Greta were playing dominoes, two soldiers
+drinking beer, and at the top of a flight of stairs the Custodian's
+wife sewing at a garment. Christian said suddenly: “I thought we were
+friends.”
+
+“Well, Fraulein Christian, aren't we?”
+
+“You went away without a word; friends don't do that.”
+
+Harz bit his lips.
+
+“I don't think you care,” she went on with a sort of desperate haste,
+“whether you hurt people or not. You have been here all this time
+without even going to see your father and mother.”
+
+“Do you think they would want to see me?”
+
+Christian looked up.
+
+“It's all been so soft for you,” he said bitterly; “you don't
+understand.”
+
+He turned his head away, and then burst out: “I'm proud to come straight
+from the soil—I wouldn't have it otherwise; but they are of 'the
+people,' everything is narrow with them—they only understand what they
+can see and touch.”
+
+“I'm sorry I spoke like that,” said Christian softly; “you've never told
+me about yourself.”
+
+There was something just a little cruel in the way the painter looked
+at her, then seeming to feel compunction, he said quickly: “I always
+hated—the peasant life—I wanted to get away into the world; I had a
+feeling in here—I wanted—I don't know what I wanted! I did run away at
+last to a house-painter at Meran. The priest wrote me a letter from my
+father—they threw me off; that's all.”
+
+Christian's eyes were very bright, her lips moved, like the lips of a
+child listening to a story.
+
+“Go on,” she said.
+
+“I stayed at Meran two years, till I'd learnt all I could there, then a
+brother of my mother's helped me to get to Vienna; I was lucky enough
+to find work with a man who used to decorate churches. We went about the
+country together. Once when he was ill I painted the roof of a church
+entirely by myself; I lay on my back on the scaffold boards all day for
+a week—I was proud of that roof.” He paused.
+
+“When did you begin painting pictures?”
+
+“A friend asked me why I didn't try for the Academie. That started me
+going to the night schools; I worked every minute—I had to get my living
+as well, of course, so I worked at night.
+
+“Then when the examination came, I thought I could do nothing—it was
+just as if I had never had a brush or pencil in my hand. But the second
+day a professor in passing me said, 'Good! Quite good!' That gave me
+courage. I was sure I had failed though; but I was second out of sixty.”
+
+Christian nodded.
+
+“To work in the schools after that I had to give up my business, of
+course. There was only one teacher who ever taught me anything; the
+others all seemed fools. This man would come and rub out what you'd done
+with his sleeve. I used to cry with rage—but I told him I could only
+learn from him, and he was so astonished that he got me into his class.”
+
+“But how did you live without money?” asked Christian.
+
+His face burned with a dark flush. “I don't know how I lived; you must
+have been through these things to know, you would never understand.”
+
+“But I want to understand, please.”
+
+“What do you want me to tell you? How I went twice a week to eat free
+dinners! How I took charity! How I was hungry! There was a rich cousin
+of my mother's—I used to go to him. I didn't like it. But if you're
+starving in the winter.”
+
+Christian put out her hand.
+
+“I used to borrow apronsful of coals from other students who were as
+poor—but I never went to the rich students.”
+
+The flush had died out of his face.
+
+“That sort of thing makes you hate the world! You work till you stagger;
+you're cold and hungry; you see rich people in their carriages, wrapped
+in furs, and all the time you want to do something great. You pray for
+a chance, any chance; nothing comes to the poor! It makes you hate the
+world.”
+
+Christian's eyes filled with tears. He went on:
+
+“But I wasn't the only one in that condition; we used to meet. Garin,
+a Russian with a brown beard and patches of cheek showing through, and
+yellow teeth, who always looked hungry. Paunitz, who came from sympathy!
+He had fat cheeks and little eyes, and a big gold chain—the swine! And
+little Misek. It was in his room we met, with the paper peeling off the
+walls, and two doors with cracks in them, so that there was always a
+draught. We used to sit on his bed, and pull the dirty blankets over us
+for warmth; and smoke—tobacco was the last thing we ever went without.
+Over the bed was a Virgin and Child—Misek was a very devout Catholic;
+but one day when he had had no dinner and a dealer had kept his picture
+without paying him, he took the image and threw it on the floor before
+our eyes; it broke, and he trampled on the bits. Lendorf was another,
+a heavy fellow who was always puffing out his white cheeks and smiting
+himself, and saying: 'Cursed society!' And Schonborn, an aristocrat who
+had quarrelled with his family. He was the poorest of us all; but only
+he and I would ever have dared to do anything—they all knew that!”
+
+Christian listened with awe. “Do you mean?” she said, “do you mean, that
+you—?”
+
+“You see! you're afraid of me at once. It's impossible even for you to
+understand. It only makes you afraid. A hungry man living on charity,
+sick with rage and shame, is a wolf even to you!”
+
+Christian looked straight into his eyes.
+
+“That's not true. If I can't understand, I can feel. Would you be the
+same now if it were to come again?”
+
+“Yes, it drives me mad even now to think of people fatted with
+prosperity, sneering and holding up their hands at poor devils who have
+suffered ten times more than the most those soft animals could bear. I'm
+older; I've lived—I know things can't be put right by violence—nothing
+will put things right, but that doesn't stop my feeling.”
+
+“Did you do anything? You must tell me all now.”
+
+“We talked—we were always talking.”
+
+“No, tell me everything!”
+
+Unconsciously she claimed, and he seemed unconsciously to admit her
+right to this knowledge.
+
+“There's not much to tell. One day we began talking in low voices—Garin
+began it; he had been in some affair in Russia. We took an oath; after
+that we never raised our voices. We had a plan. It was all new to me,
+and I hated the whole thing—but I was always hungry, or sick from taking
+charity, and I would have done anything. They knew that; they used to
+look at me and Schonborn; we knew that no one else had any courage. He
+and I were great friends, but we never talked of that; we tried to keep
+our minds away from the thought of it. If we had a good day and were not
+so hungry, it seemed unnatural; but when the day had not been good—then
+it seemed natural enough. I wasn't afraid, but I used to wake up in
+the night; I hated the oath we had taken, I hated every one of those
+fellows; the thing was not what I was made for, it wasn't my work, it
+wasn't my nature, it was forced on me—I hated it, but sometimes I was
+like a madman.”
+
+“Yes, yes,” she murmured.
+
+“All this time I was working at the Academie, and learning all I
+could.... One evening that we met, Paunitz was not there. Misek was
+telling us how the thing had been arranged. Schonborn and I looked at
+each other—it was warm—perhaps we were not hungry—it was springtime,
+too, and in the Spring it's different. There is something.”
+
+Christian nodded.
+
+“While we were talking there came a knock at the door. Lendorf put his
+eye to the keyhole, and made a sign. The police were there. Nobody said
+anything, but Misek crawled under the bed; we all followed; and the
+knocking grew louder and louder. In the wall at the back of the bed
+was a little door into an empty cellar. We crept through. There was
+a trap-door behind some cases, where they used to roll barrels in. We
+crawled through that into the back street. We went different ways.”
+
+He paused, and Christian gasped.
+
+“I thought I would get my money, but there was a policeman before my
+door. They had us finely. It was Paunitz; if I met him even now I should
+wring his neck. I swore I wouldn't be caught, but I had no idea where to
+go. Then I thought of a little Italian barber who used to shave me
+when I had money for a shave; I knew he would help. He belonged to some
+Italian Society; he often talked to me, under his breath, of course. I
+went to him. He was shaving himself before going to a ball. I told him
+what had happened; it was funny to see him put his back against the
+door. He was very frightened, understanding this sort of thing better
+than I did—for I was only twenty then. He shaved my head and moustache
+and put me on a fair wig. Then he brought me macaroni, and some meat, to
+eat. He gave me a big fair moustache, and a cap, and hid the moustache
+in the lining. He brought me a cloak of his own, and four gulden. All
+the time he was extremely frightened, and kept listening, and saying:
+'Eat!'
+
+“When I had done, he just said: 'Go away, I refuse to know anything more
+of you.'
+
+“I thanked him and went out. I walked about all that night; for I
+couldn't think of anything to do or anywhere to go. In the morning I
+slept on a seat in one of the squares. Then I thought I would go to the
+Gallerien; and I spent the whole day looking at the pictures. When the
+Galleries were shut I was very tired, so I went into a cafe, and had
+some beer. When I came out I sat on the same seat in the Square. I meant
+to wait till dark and then walk out of the city and take the train at
+some little station, but while I was sitting there I went to sleep. A
+policeman woke me. He had my wig in his hand.
+
+“'Why do you wear a wig?' he said.
+
+“I answered: 'Because I am bald.'
+
+“'No,' he said, 'you're not bald, you've been shaved. I can feel the
+hair coming.'
+
+“He put his finger on my head. I felt reckless and laughed.
+
+“'Ah!' he said, 'you'll come with me and explain all this; your nose and
+eyes are looked for.'
+
+“I went with him quietly to the police-station....”
+
+Harz seemed carried away by his story. His quick dark face worked, his
+steel-grey eyes stared as though he were again passing through all these
+long-past emotions.
+
+The hot sun struck down; Christian drew herself together, sitting with
+her hands clasped round her knees.
+
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+“I didn't care by then what came of it. I didn't even think what I was
+going to say. He led me down a passage to a room with bars across the
+windows and long seats, and maps on the walls. We sat and waited.
+He kept his eye on me all the time; and I saw no hope. Presently the
+Inspector came. 'Bring him in here,' he said; I remember feeling I could
+kill him for ordering me about! We went into the next room. It had a
+large clock, a writing-table, and a window, without bars, looking on a
+courtyard. Long policemen's coats and caps were hanging from some pegs.
+The Inspector told me to take off my cap. I took it off, wig and all. He
+asked me who I was, but I refused to answer. Just then there was a loud
+sound of voices in the room we had come from. The Inspector told the
+policeman to look after me, and went to see what it was. I could hear
+him talking. He called out: 'Come here, Becker!' I stood very quiet, and
+Becker went towards the door. I heard the Inspector say: 'Go and find
+Schwartz, I will see after this fellow.' The policeman went, and the
+Inspector stood with his back to me in the half-open door, and began
+again to talk to the man in the other room. Once or twice he looked
+round at me, but I stood quiet all the time. They began to disagree,
+and their voices got angry. The Inspector moved a little into the
+other room. 'Now!' I thought, and slipped off my cloak. I hooked off
+a policeman's coat and cap, and put them on. My heart beat till I felt
+sick. I went on tiptoe to the window. There was no one outside, but at
+the entrance a man was holding some horses. I opened the window a little
+and held my breath. I heard the Inspector say: 'I will report you for
+impertinence!' and slipped through the window. The coat came down nearly
+to my heels, and the cap over my eyes. I walked up to the man with the
+horses, and said: 'Good-evening.' One of the horses had begun to kick,
+and he only grunted at me. I got into a passing tram; it was five
+minutes to the West Bahnhof; I got out there. There was a train
+starting; they were shouting 'Einsteigen!' I ran. The collector tried to
+stop me. I shouted: 'Business—important!' He let me by. I jumped into a
+carriage. The train started.”
+
+He paused, and Christian heaved a sigh.
+
+Harz went on, twisting a twig of ivy in his hands: “There was another
+man in the carriage reading a paper. Presently I said to him, 'Where do
+we stop first?' 'St. Polten.' Then I knew it was the Munich express—St.
+Polten, Amstetten, Linz, and Salzburg—four stops before the frontier.
+The man put down his paper and looked at me; he had a big fair moustache
+and rather shabby clothes. His looking at me disturbed me, for I thought
+every minute he would say: 'You're no policeman!' And suddenly it came
+into my mind that if they looked for me in this train, it would be as a
+policeman!—they would know, of course, at the station that a policeman
+had run past at the last minute. I wanted to get rid of the coat
+and cap, but the man was there, and I didn't like to move out of the
+carriage for other people to notice. So I sat on. We came to St. Polten
+at last. The man in my carriage took his bag, got out, and left his
+paper on the seat. We started again; I breathed at last, and as soon as
+I could took the cap and coat and threw them out into the darkness. I
+thought: 'I shall get across the frontier now.' I took my own cap out
+and found the moustache Luigi gave me; rubbed my clothes as clean as
+possible; stuck on the moustache, and with some little ends of chalk
+in my pocket made my eyebrows light; then drew some lines in my face to
+make it older, and pulled my cap well down above my wig. I did it pretty
+well—I was quite like the man who had got out. I sat in his corner, took
+up his newspaper, and waited for Amstetten. It seemed a tremendous
+time before we got there. From behind my paper I could see five or six
+policemen on the platform, one quite close. He opened the door, looked
+at me, and walked through the carriage into the corridor. I took some
+tobacco and rolled up a cigarette, but it shook, Harz lifted the ivy
+twig, like this. In a minute the conductor and two more policemen came.
+'He was here,' said the conductor, 'with this gentleman.' One of them
+looked at me, and asked: 'Have you seen a policeman travelling on
+this train?' 'Yes,' I said. 'Where?' 'He got out at St. Polten.' The
+policeman asked the conductor: 'Did you see him get out there?' The
+conductor shook his head. I said: 'He got out as the train was moving.'
+'Ah!' said the policeman, 'what was he like?' 'Rather short, and no
+moustache. Why?' 'Did you notice anything unusual?' 'No,' I said, 'only
+that he wore coloured trousers. What's the matter?' One policeman said
+to the other: 'That's our man! Send a telegram to St. Polten; he has
+more than an hour's start.' He asked me where I was going. I told him:
+'Linz.' 'Ah!' he said, 'you'll have to give evidence; your name and
+address please?' 'Josef Reinhardt, 17 Donau Strasse.' He wrote it down.
+The conductor said: 'We are late, can we start?' They shut the door. I
+heard them say to the conductor: 'Search again at Linz, and report to
+the Inspector there.' They hurried on to the platform, and we started.
+At first I thought I would get out as soon as the train had left the
+station. Then, that I should be too far from the frontier; better to go
+on to Linz and take my chance there. I sat still and tried not to think.
+
+“After a long time, we began to run more slowly. I put my head out and
+could see in the distance a ring of lights hanging in the blackness. I
+loosened the carriage door and waited for the train to run slower still;
+I didn't mean to go into Linz like a rat into a trap. At last I could
+wait no longer; I opened the door, jumped and fell into some bushes.
+I was not much hurt, but bruised, and the breath knocked out of me. As
+soon as I could, I crawled out. It was very dark. I felt heavy and sore,
+and for some time went stumbling in and out amongst trees. Presently I
+came to a clear space; on one side I could see the town's shape drawn in
+lighted lamps, and on the other a dark mass, which I think was forest;
+in the distance too was a thin chain of lights. I thought: 'They must
+be the lights of a bridge.' Just then the moon came out, and I could see
+the river shining below. It was cold and damp, and I walked quickly.
+At last I came out on a road, past houses and barking dogs, down to the
+river bank; there I sat against a shed and went to sleep. I woke very
+stiff. It was darker than before; the moon was gone. I could just see
+the river. I stumbled on, to get through the town before dawn. It was
+all black shapes-houses and sheds, and the smell of the river, the smell
+of rotting hay, apples, tar, mud, fish; and here and there on a wharf a
+lantern. I stumbled over casks and ropes and boxes; I saw I should never
+get clear—the dawn had begun already on the other side. Some men came
+from a house behind me. I bent, and crept behind some barrels. They
+passed along the wharf; they seemed to drop into the river. I heard one
+of them say: 'Passau before night.' I stood up and saw they had walked
+on board a steamer which was lying head up-stream, with some barges in
+tow. There was a plank laid to the steamer, and a lantern at the other
+end. I could hear the fellows moving below deck, getting up steam. I ran
+across the plank and crept to the end of the steamer. I meant to go with
+them to Passau! The rope which towed the barges was nearly taut; and I
+knew if I could get on to the barges I should be safe. I climbed down
+on this rope and crawled along. I was desperate, I knew they'd soon be
+coming up, and it was getting light. I thought I should fall into the
+water several times, but I got to the barge at last. It was laden with
+straw. There was nobody on board. I was hungry and thirsty—I looked for
+something to eat; there was nothing but the ashes of a fire and a man's
+coat. I crept into the straw. Soon a boat brought men, one for each
+barge, and there were sounds of steam. As soon as we began moving
+through the water, I fell asleep. When I woke we were creeping through
+a heavy mist. I made a little hole in the straw and saw the bargeman. He
+was sitting by a fire at the barge's edge, so that the sparks and smoke
+blew away over the water. He ate and drank with both hands, and funny
+enough he looked in the mist, like a big bird flapping its wings; there
+was a good smell of coffee, and I sneezed. How the fellow started! But
+presently he took a pitchfork and prodded the straw. Then I stood up.
+I couldn't help laughing, he was so surprised—a huge, dark man, with
+a great black beard. I pointed to the fire and said 'Give me some,
+brother!' He pulled me out of the straw; I was so stiff, I couldn't
+move. I sat by the fire, and ate black bread and turnips, and drank
+coffee; while he stood by, watching me and muttering. I couldn't
+understand him well—he spoke a dialect from Hungary. He asked me: How
+I got there—who I was—where I was from? I looked up in his face, and he
+looked down at me, sucking his pipe. He was a big man, he lived alone
+on the river, and I was tired of telling lies, so I told him the whole
+thing. When I had done he just grunted. I can see him now standing over
+me, with the mist hanging in his beard, and his great naked arms. He
+drew me some water, and I washed and showed him my wig and moustache,
+and threw them overboard. All that day we lay out on the barge in the
+mist, with our feet to the fire, smoking; now and then he would spit
+into the ashes and mutter into his beard. I shall never forget that day.
+The steamer was like a monster with fiery nostrils, and the other barges
+were dumb creatures with eyes, where the fires were; we couldn't see the
+bank, but now and then a bluff and high trees, or a castle, showed in
+the mist. If I had only had paint and canvas that day!” He sighed.
+
+“It was early Spring, and the river was in flood; they were going to
+Regensburg to unload there, take fresh cargo, and back to Linz. As soon
+as the mist began to clear, the bargeman hid me in the straw. At Passau
+was the frontier; they lay there for the night, but nothing happened,
+and I slept in the straw. The next day I lay out on the barge deck;
+there was no mist, but I was free—the sun shone gold on the straw and
+the green sacking; the water seemed to dance, and I laughed—I laughed
+all the time, and the barge man laughed with me. A fine fellow he was!
+At Regensburg I helped them to unload; for more than a week we worked;
+they nicknamed me baldhead, and when it was all over I gave the money
+I earned for the unloading to the big bargeman. We kissed each other at
+parting. I had still three of the gulden that Luigi gave me, and I went
+to a house-painter and got work with him. For six months I stayed there
+to save money; then I wrote to my mother's cousin in Vienna, and told
+him I was going to London. He gave me an introduction to some friends
+there. I went to Hamburg, and from there to London in a cargo steamer,
+and I've never been back till now.”
+
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+After a minute's silence Christian said in a startled voice: “They could
+arrest you then!”
+
+Harz laughed.
+
+“If they knew; but it's seven years ago.”
+
+“Why did you come here, when it's so dangerous?”
+
+“I had been working too hard, I wanted to see my country—after seven
+years, and when it's forbidden! But I'm ready to go back now.” He looked
+down at her, frowning.
+
+“Had you a hard time in London, too?”
+
+“Harder, at first—I couldn't speak the language. In my profession it's
+hard work to get recognised, it's hard work to make a living. There are
+too many whose interest it is to keep you down—I shan't forget them.”
+
+“But every one is not like that?”
+
+“No; there are fine fellows, too. I shan't forget them either. I can
+sell my pictures now; I'm no longer weak, and I promise you I shan't
+forget. If in the future I have power, and I shall have power—I shan't
+forget.”
+
+A shower of fine gravel came rattling on the wall. Dawney was standing
+below them with an amused expression on his upturned face.
+
+“Are you going to stay there all night?” he asked. “Greta and I have
+bored each other.”
+
+“We're coming,” called Christian hastily.
+
+On the way back neither spoke a word, but when they reached the Villa,
+Harz took her hand, and said: “Fraulein Christian, I can't do any more
+with your picture. I shan't touch it again after this.”
+
+She made no answer, but they looked at each other, and both seemed to
+ask, to entreat, something more; then her eyes fell. He dropped her
+hand, and saying, “Good-night,” ran after Dawney.
+
+In the corridor, Dominique, carrying a dish of fruit, met the sisters;
+he informed them that Miss Naylor had retired to bed; that Herr Paul
+would not be home to dinner; his master was dining in his room; dinner
+would be served for Mrs. Decie and the two young ladies in a quarter
+of an hour: “And the fish is good to-night; little trouts! try them,
+Signorina!” He moved on quickly, softly, like a cat, the tails of his
+dress-coat flapping, and the heels of his white socks gleaming.
+
+Christian ran upstairs. She flew about her room, feeling that if she
+once stood still it would all crystallise in hard painful thought, which
+motion alone kept away. She washed, changed her dress and shoes, and ran
+down to her uncle's room. Mr. Treffry had just finished dinner, pushed
+the little table back, and was sitting in his chair, with his glasses
+on his nose, reading the Tines. Christian touched his forehead with her
+lips.
+
+“Glad to see you, Chris. Your stepfather's out to dinner, and I can't
+stand your aunt when she's in one of her talking moods—bit of a humbug,
+Chris, between ourselves; eh, isn't she?” His eyes twinkled.
+
+Christian smiled. There was a curious happy restlessness in her that
+would not let her keep still.
+
+“Picture finished?” Mr. Treffry asked suddenly, taking up the paper with
+a crackle. “Don't go and fall in love with the painter, Chris.”
+
+Christian was still enough now.
+
+'Why not?' she thought. 'What should you know about him? Isn't he good
+enough for me?' A gong sounded.
+
+“There's your dinner,” Mr. Treffry remarked.
+
+With sudden contrition she bent and kissed him.
+
+But when she had left the room Mr. Treffry put down the Times and stared
+at the door, humming to himself, and thoughtfully fingering his chin.
+
+Christian could not eat; she sat, indifferent to the hoverings of
+Dominique, tormented by uneasy fear and longings. She answered Mrs.
+Decie at random. Greta kept stealing looks at her from under her lashes.
+
+“Decided characters are charming, don't you think so, Christian?” Mrs.
+Decie said, thrusting her chin a little forward, and modelling the
+words. “That is why I like Mr. Harz so much; such an immense advantage
+for a man to know his mind. You have only to look at that young man to
+see that he knows what he wants, and means to have it.”
+
+Christian pushed her plate away. Greta, flushing, said abruptly: “Doctor
+Edmund is not a decided character, I think. This afternoon he said:
+'Shall I have some beer-yes, I shall—no, I shall not'. then he ordered
+the beer, so, when it came, he gave it to the soldiers.”
+
+Mrs. Decie turned her enigmatic smile from one girl to the other.
+
+When dinner was over they went into her room. Greta stole at once to
+the piano, where her long hair fell almost to the keys; silently she sat
+there fingering the notes, smiling to herself, and looking at her aunt,
+who was reading Pater's essays. Christian too had taken up a book, but
+soon put it down—of several pages she had not understood a word. She
+went into the garden and wandered about the lawn, clasping her hands
+behind her head. The air was heavy; very distant thunder trembled among
+the mountains, flashes of summer lightning played over the trees; and
+two great moths were hovering about a rosebush. Christian watched
+their soft uncertain rushes. Going to the little summer-house she flung
+herself down on a seat, and pressed her hands to her heart.
+
+There was a strange and sudden aching there. Was he going from her? If
+so, what would be left? How little and how narrow seemed the outlook of
+her life—with the world waiting for her, the world of beauty, effort,
+self-sacrifice, fidelity! It was as though a flash of that summer
+lightning had fled by, singeing her, taking from her all powers of
+flight, burning off her wings, as off one of those pale hovering moths.
+Tears started up, and trickled down her face. 'Blind!' she thought; 'how
+could I have been so blind?'
+
+Some one came down the path.
+
+“Who's there?” she cried.
+
+Harz stood in the doorway.
+
+“Why did you come out?” he said. “Ah! why did you come out?” He caught
+her hand; Christian tried to draw it from him, and to turn her eyes
+away, but she could not. He flung himself down on his knees, and cried:
+“I love you!”
+
+In a rapture of soft terror Christian bent her forehead down to his
+hand.
+
+“What are you doing?” she heard him say. “Is it possible that you love
+me?” and she felt his kisses on her hair.
+
+“My sweet! it will be so hard for you; you are so little, so little, and
+so weak.” Clasping his hand closer to her face, she murmured: “I don't
+care.”
+
+There was a long, soft silence, that seemed to last for ever. Suddenly
+she threw her arms round his neck and kissed him.
+
+“Whatever comes!” she whispered, and gathering her dress, escaped from
+him into the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+Christian woke next morning with a smile. In her attitudes, her voice,
+her eyes, there was a happy and sweet seriousness, as if she were
+hugging some holy thought. After breakfast she took a book and sat in
+the open window, whence she could see the poplar-trees guarding the
+entrance. There was a breeze; the roses close by kept nodding to her;
+the cathedral bells were in full chime; bees hummed above the lavender;
+and in the sky soft clouds were floating like huge, white birds.
+
+The sounds of Miss Naylor's staccato dictation travelled across the
+room, and Greta's sighs as she took it down, one eye on her paper, one
+eye on Scruff, who lay with a black ear flapped across his paw, and his
+tan eyebrows quivering. He was in disgrace, for Dominique, coming on him
+unawares, had seen him “say his prayers” before a pudding, and take the
+pudding for reward.
+
+Christian put her book down gently, and slipped through the window.
+Harz was coming in from the road. “I am all yours!” she whispered. His
+fingers closed on hers, and he went into the house.
+
+She slipped back, took up her book, and waited. It seemed long before he
+came out, but when he did he waved her back, and hurried on; she had a
+glimpse of his face, white to the lips. Feeling faint and sick, she flew
+to her stepfather's room.
+
+Herr Paul was standing in a corner with the utterly disturbed appearance
+of an easy-going man, visited by the unexpected. His fine shirt-front
+was crumpled as if his breast had heaved too suddenly under strong
+emotion; his smoked eyeglasses dangled down his back; his fingers were
+embedded in his beard. He was fixing his eye on a spot in the floor as
+though he expected it to explode and blow them to fragments. In another
+corner Mrs. Decie, with half-closed eyes, was running her finger-tips
+across her brow.
+
+“What have you said to him?” cried Christian.
+
+Herr Paul regarded her with glassy eyes.
+
+“Mein Gott!” he said. “Your aunt and I!”
+
+“What have you said to him?” repeated Christian.
+
+“The impudence! An anarchist! A beggar!”
+
+“Paul!” murmured Mrs. Decie.
+
+“The outlaw! The fellow!” Herr Paul began to stride about the room.
+
+Quivering from head to foot, Christian cried: “How dared you?” and ran
+from the room, pushing aside Miss Naylor and Greta, who stood blanched
+and frightened in the doorway.
+
+Herr Paul stopped in his tramp, and, still with his eyes fixed on the
+floor, growled:
+
+“A fine thing-hein? What's coming? Will you please tell me? An
+anarchist—a beggar!”
+
+“Paul!” murmured Mrs. Decie.
+
+“Paul! Paul! And you!” he pointed to Miss Naylor—“Two women with
+eyes!—hein!”
+
+“There is nothing to be gained by violence,” Mrs. Decie murmured,
+passing her handkerchief across her lips. Miss Naylor, whose thin brown
+cheeks had flushed, advanced towards him.
+
+“I hope you do not—” she said; “I am sure there was nothing that I could
+have prevented—I should be glad if that were understood.” And, turning
+with some dignity, the little lady went away, closing the door behind
+her.
+
+“You hear!” Herr Paul said, violently sarcastic: “nothing she could have
+prevented! Enfin! Will you please tell me what I am to do?”
+
+“Men of the world”—whose philosophy is a creature of circumstance and
+accepted things—find any deviation from the path of their convictions
+dangerous, shocking, and an intolerable bore. Herr Paul had spent
+his life laughing at convictions; the matter had but to touch him
+personally, and the tap of laughter was turned off. That any one to whom
+he was the lawful guardian should marry other than a well-groomed man,
+properly endowed with goods, properly selected, was beyond expression
+horrid. From his point of view he had great excuse for horror; and he
+was naturally unable to judge whether he had excuse for horror from
+other points of view. His amazement had in it a spice of the pathetic;
+he was like a child in the presence of a thing that he absolutely could
+not understand. The interview had left him with a sense of insecurity
+which he felt to be particularly unfair.
+
+The door was again opened, and Greta flew in, her cheeks flushed, her
+hair floating behind her, and tears streaming down her cheeks.
+
+“Papa!” she cried, “you have been cruel to Chris. The door is locked;
+I can hear her crying—why have you been cruel?” Without waiting to be
+answered, she flew out again.
+
+Herr Paul seized his hair with both his hands: “Good! Very good! My own
+child, please! What next then?”
+
+Mrs. Decie rose from her chair languidly. “My head is very bad,” she
+said, shading her eyes and speaking in low tones: “It is no use making
+a fuss—nothing can come of this—he has not a penny. Christian will have
+nothing till you die, which will not be for a long time yet, if you can
+but avoid an apoplectic fit!”
+
+At these last words Herr Paul gave a start of real disgust. “Hum!” he
+muttered; it was as if the world were bent on being brutal to him. Mrs.
+Decie continued:
+
+“If I know anything of this young man, he will not come here again,
+after the words you have spoken. As for Christian—you had better talk to
+Nicholas. I am going to lie down.”
+
+Herr Paul nervously fingered the shirt-collar round his stout, short
+neck.
+
+“Nicholas! Certainly—a good idea. Quelle diable d'afaire!”
+
+'French!' thought Mrs. Decie; 'we shall soon have peace. Poor
+Christian! I'm sorry! After all, these things are a matter of time and
+opportunity.' This consoled her a good deal.
+
+But for Christian the hours were a long nightmare of grief and shame,
+fear and anger. Would he forgive? Would he be true to her? Or would he
+go away without a word? Since yesterday it was as if she had stepped
+into another world, and lost it again. In place of that new feeling,
+intoxicating as wine, what was coming? What bitter; dreadful ending?
+
+A rude entrance this into the life of facts, and primitive emotions!
+
+She let Greta into her room after a time, for the child had begun
+sobbing; but she would not talk, and sat hour after hour at the window
+with the air fanning her face, and the pain in her eyes turned to the
+sky and trees. After one or two attempts at consolation, Greta sank on
+the floor, and remained there, humbly gazing at her sister in a silence
+only broken when Christian cleared her throat of tears, and by the song
+of birds in the garden. In the afternoon she slipped away and did not
+come back again.
+
+After his interview with Mr. Treffry, Herr Paul took a bath, perfumed
+himself with precision, and caused it to be clearly understood that,
+under circumstances such as these, a man's house was not suited for a
+pig to live in. He shortly afterwards went out to the Kurbaus, and had
+not returned by dinner-time.
+
+Christian came down for dinner. There were crimson spots in her cheeks,
+dark circles round her eyes; she behaved, however, as though nothing
+had happened. Miss Naylor, affected by the kindness of her heart and the
+shock her system had sustained, rolled a number of bread pills, looking
+at each as it came, with an air of surprise, and concealing it with
+difficulty. Mr. Treffry was coughing, and when he talked his voice
+seemed to rumble even more than usual. Greta was dumb, trying to catch
+Christian's eye; Mrs. Decie alone seemed at ease. After dinner Mr.
+Treffry went off to his room, leaning heavily on Christian's shoulder.
+As he sank into his chair, he said to her:
+
+“Pull yourself together, my dear!” Christian did not answer him.
+
+Outside his room Greta caught her by the sleeve.
+
+“Look!” she whispered, thrusting a piece of paper into Christian's hand.
+“It is to me from Dr. Edmund, but you must read it.”
+
+Christian opened the note, which ran as follows:
+
+“MY PHILOSOPHER AND FRIEND,—I received your note, and went to our
+friend's studio; he was not in, but half an hour ago I stumbled on
+him in the Platz. He is not quite himself; has had a touch of the
+sun—nothing serious: I took him to my hotel, where he is in bed. If he
+will stay there he will be all right in a day or two. In any case he
+shall not elude my clutches for the present.
+
+“My warm respects to Mistress Christian.—Yours in friendship and
+philosophy,
+
+“EDMUND DAWNEY.”
+
+Christian read and re-read this note, then turned to Greta.
+
+“What did you say to Dr. Dawney?”
+
+Greta took back the piece of paper, and replied: “I said:
+
+“'DEAR DR. EDMUND,—We are anxious about Herr Harz. We think he is
+perhaps not very well to-day. We (I and Christian) should like to know.
+You can tell us. Please shall you? GRETA.'
+
+“That is what I said.”
+
+Christian dropped her eyes. “What made you write?”
+
+Greta gazed at her mournfully: “I thought—O Chris! come into the garden.
+I am so hot, and it is so dull without you!”
+
+Christian bent her head forward and rubbed her cheek against Greta's,
+then without another word ran upstairs and locked herself into her room.
+The child stood listening; hearing the key turn in the lock, she sank
+down on the bottom step and took Scruff in her arms.
+
+Half an hour later Miss Naylor, carrying a candle, found her there fast
+asleep, with her head resting on the terrier's back, and tear stains on
+her cheeks....
+
+Mrs. Decie presently came out, also carrying a candle, and went to her
+brother's room. She stood before his chair, with folded hands.
+
+“Nicholas, what is to be done?”
+
+Mr. Treffry was pouring whisky into a glass.
+
+“Damn it, Con!” he answered; “how should I know?”
+
+“There's something in Christian that makes interference dangerous. I
+know very well that I've no influence with her at all.”
+
+“You're right there, Con,” Mr. Treffry replied.
+
+Mrs. Decie's pale eyes, fastened on his face, forced him to look up.
+
+“I wish you would leave off drinking whisky and attend to me. Paul is an
+element—”
+
+“Paul,” Mr. Treffry growled, “is an ass!”
+
+“Paul,” pursued Mrs. Decie, “is an element of danger in the situation;
+any ill-timed opposition of his might drive her to I don't know what.
+Christian is gentle, she is 'sympathetic' as they say; but thwart her,
+and she is as obstinate as....
+
+“You or I! Leave her alone!”
+
+“I understand her character, but I confess that I am at a loss what to
+do.”
+
+“Do nothing!” He drank again.
+
+Mrs. Decie took up the candle.
+
+“Men!” she said with a mysterious intonation; shrugging her shoulders,
+she walked out.
+
+Mr. Treffry put down his glass.
+
+'Understand?' he thought; 'no, you don't, and I don't. Who understands
+a young girl? Vapourings, dreams, moonshine I.... What does she see
+in this painter fellow? I wonder!' He breathed heavily. 'By heavens! I
+wouldn't have had this happen for a hundred thousand pounds!'
+
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+For many hours after Dawney had taken him to his hotel, Harz was
+prostrate with stunning pains in the head and neck. He had been all
+day without food, exposed to burning sun, suffering violent emotion.
+Movement of any sort caused him such agony that he could only lie
+in stupor, counting the spots dancing before, his eyes. Dawney did
+everything for him, and Harz resented in a listless way the intent
+scrutiny of the doctor's calm, black eyes.
+
+Towards the end of the second day he was able to get up; Dawney found
+him sitting on the bed in shirt and trousers.
+
+“My son,” he said, “you had better tell me what the trouble is—it will
+do your stubborn carcase good.”
+
+“I must go back to work,” said Harz.
+
+“Work!” said Dawney deliberately: “you couldn't, if you tried.”
+
+“I must.”
+
+“My dear fellow, you couldn't tell one colour from another.”
+
+“I must be doing something; I can't sit here and think.”
+
+Dawney hooked his thumbs into his waistcoat: “You won't see the sun for
+three days yet, if I can help it.”
+
+Harz got up.
+
+“I'm going to my studio to-morrow,” he said. “I promise not to go out.
+I must be where I can see my work. If I can't paint, I can draw; I can
+feel my brushes, move my things about. I shall go mad if I do nothing.”
+
+Dawney took his arm, and walked him up and down.
+
+“I'll let you go,” he said, “but give me a chance! It's as much to me
+to put you straight as it is to you to paint a decent picture. Now go to
+bed; I'll have a carriage for you to-morrow morning.”
+
+Harz sat down on the bed again, and for a long time stayed without
+moving, his eyes fixed on the floor. The sight of him, so desperate and
+miserable, hurt the young doctor.
+
+“Can you get to bed by yourself?” he asked at last.
+
+Harz nodded.
+
+“Then, good-night, old chap!” and Dawney left the room.
+
+He took his hat and turned towards the Villa. Between the poplars he
+stopped to think. The farther trees were fret-worked black against the
+lingering gold of the sunset; a huge moth, attracted by the tip of his
+cigar, came fluttering in his face. The music of a concertina rose and
+fell, like the sighing of some disillusioned spirit. Dawney stood for
+several minutes staring at the house.
+
+He was shown to Mrs. Decie's room. She was holding a magazine before her
+eyes, and received him with as much relief as philosophy permitted.
+
+“You are the very person I wanted to see,” she said.
+
+He noticed that the magazine she held was uncut.
+
+“You are a young man,” pursued Mrs. Decie, “but as my doctor I have a
+right to your discretion.”
+
+Dawney smiled; the features of his broad, clean-shaven face looked
+ridiculously small on such occasions, but his eyes retained their air of
+calculation.
+
+“That is so,” he answered.
+
+“It is about this unfortunate affair. I understand that Mr. Harz is with
+you. I want you to use your influence to dissuade him from attempting to
+see my niece.”
+
+“Influence!” said Dawney; “you know Harz!”
+
+Mrs. Decie's voice hardened.
+
+“Everybody,” she said, “has his weak points. This young man is open to
+approach from at least two quarters—his pride is one, his work an other.
+I am seldom wrong in gauging character; these are his vital spots, and
+they are of the essence of this matter. I'm sorry for him, of course—but
+at his age, and living a man's life, these things—” Her smile was extra
+pale. “I wish you could give me something for my head. It's foolish to
+worry. Nerves of course! But I can't help it! You know my opinion, Dr.
+Dawney. That young man will go far if he remains unfettered; he will
+make a name. You will be doing him a great service if you could show
+him the affair as it really is—a drag on him, and quite unworthy of his
+pride! Do help me! You are just the man to do it!”
+
+Dawney threw up his head as if to shake off this impeachment; the curve
+of his chin thus displayed was imposing in its fulness; altogether he
+was imposing, having an air of capability.
+
+She struck him, indeed, as really scared; it was as if her mask of smile
+had become awry, and failed to cover her emotion; and he was puzzled,
+thinking, 'I wouldn't have believed she had it in her....' “It's not an
+easy business,” he said; “I'll think it over.”
+
+“Thank you!” murmured Mrs. Decie. “You are most kind.”
+
+Passing the schoolroom, he looked in through the open door. Christian
+was sitting there. The sight of her face shocked him, it was so white,
+so resolutely dumb. A book lay on her knees; she was not reading, but
+staring before her. He thought suddenly: 'Poor thing! If I don't say
+something to her, I shall be a brute!'
+
+“Miss Devorell,” he said: “You can reckon on him.”
+
+Christian tried to speak, but her lips trembled so that nothing came
+forth.
+
+“Good-night,” said Dawney, and walked out....
+
+Three days later Harz was sitting in the window of his studio. It was
+the first day he had found it possible to work, and now, tired out,
+he stared through the dusk at the slowly lengthening shadows of the
+rafters. A solitary mosquito hummed, and two house sparrows, who had
+built beneath the roof, chirruped sleepily. Swallows darted by the
+window, dipping their blue wings towards the quiet water; a hush had
+stolen over everything. He fell asleep.
+
+He woke, with a dim impression of some near presence. In the pale
+glimmer from innumerable stars, the room was full of shadowy shapes. He
+lit his lantern. The flame darted forth, bickered, then slowly lit up
+the great room.
+
+“Who's there?”
+
+A rustling seemed to answer. He peered about, went to the doorway, and
+drew the curtain. A woman's cloaked figure shrank against the wall. Her
+face was buried in her hands; her arms, from which the cloak fell back,
+were alone visible.
+
+“Christian?”
+
+She ran past him, and when he had put the lantern down, was standing at
+the window. She turned quickly to him. “Take me away from here! Let me
+come with you!”
+
+“Do you mean it?”
+
+“You said you wouldn't give me up!”
+
+“You know what you are doing?”
+
+She made a motion of assent.
+
+“But you don't grasp what this means. Things to bear that you know
+nothing of—hunger perhaps! Think, even hunger! And your people won't
+forgive—you'll lose everything.”
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“I must choose—it's one thing or the other. I can't give you up! I
+should be afraid!”
+
+“But, dear; how can you come with me? We can't be married here.”
+
+“I am giving my life to you.”
+
+“You are too good for me,” said Harz. “The life you're going into—may be
+dark, like that!” he pointed to the window.
+
+A sound of footsteps broke the hush. They could see a figure on the path
+below. It stopped, seemed to consider, vanished. They heard the sounds
+of groping hands, of a creaking door, of uncertain feet on the stairs.
+
+Harz seized her hand.
+
+“Quick!” he whispered; “behind this canvas!”
+
+Christian was trembling violently. She drew her hood across her face.
+The heavy breathing and ejaculations of the visitor were now plainly
+audible.
+
+“He's there! Quick! Hide!”
+
+She shook her head.
+
+With a thrill at his heart, Harz kissed her, then walked towards the
+entrance. The curtain was pulled aside.
+
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+It was Herr Paul, holding a cigar in one hand, his hat in the other, and
+breathing hard.
+
+“Pardon!” he said huskily, “your stairs are steep, and dark! mais en,
+fin! nous voila! I have ventured to come for a talk.” His glance fell on
+the cloaked figure in the shadow.
+
+“Pardon! A thousand pardons! I had no idea! I beg you to forgive this
+indiscretion! I may take it you resign pretensions then? You have a
+lady here—I have nothing more to say; I only beg a million pardons for
+intruding. A thousand times forgive me! Good-night!”
+
+He bowed and turned to go. Christian stepped forward, and let the hood
+fall from her head.
+
+“It's I!”
+
+Herr Paul pirouetted.
+
+“Good God!” he stammered, dropping cigar and hat. “Good God!”
+
+The lantern flared suddenly, revealing his crimson, shaking cheeks.
+
+“You came here, at night! You, the daughter of my wife!” His eyes
+wandered with a dull glare round the room.
+
+“Take care!” cried Harz: “If you say a word against her—-”
+
+The two men stared at each other's eyes. And without warning, the
+lantern flickered and went out. Christian drew the cloak round her
+again. Herr Paul's voice broke the silence; he had recovered his
+self-possession.
+
+“Ah! ah!” he said: “Darkness! Tant mieux! The right thing for what we
+have to say. Since we do not esteem each other, it is well not to see
+too much.”
+
+“Just so,” said Harz.
+
+Christian had come close to them. Her pale face and great shining eyes
+could just be seen through the gloom.
+
+Herr Paul waved his arm; the gesture was impressive, annihilating.
+
+“This is a matter, I believe, between two men,” he said, addressing
+Harz. “Let us come to the point. I will do you the credit to suppose
+that you have a marriage in view. You know, perhaps, that Miss Devorell
+has no money till I die?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“And I am passably young! You have money, then?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“In that case, you would propose to live on air?”
+
+“No, to work; it has been done before.”
+
+“It is calculated to increase hunger! You are prepared to take Miss
+Devorell, a young lady accustomed to luxury, into places like—this!” he
+peered about him, “into places that smell of paint, into the milieu of
+'the people,' into the society of Bohemians—who knows? of anarchists,
+perhaps?”
+
+Harz clenched his hands: “I will answer no more questions.”
+
+“In that event, we reach the ultimatum,” said Herr Paul. “Listen, Herr
+Outlaw! If you have not left the country by noon to-morrow, you shall be
+introduced to the police!”
+
+Christian uttered a cry. For a minute in the gloom the only sound heard
+was the short, hard breathing of the two men.
+
+Suddenly Harz cried: “You coward, I defy you!”
+
+“Coward!” Herr Paul repeated. “That is indeed the last word. Look to
+yourself, my friend!”
+
+Stooping and fumbling on the floor, he picked up his hat. Christian had
+already vanished; the sound of her hurrying footsteps was distinctly
+audible at the top of the dark stairs. Herr Paul stood still a minute.
+
+“Look to yourself, my dear friend!” he said in a thick voice, groping
+for the wall. Planting his hat askew on his head, he began slowly to
+descend the stairs.
+
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+Nicholas Treffry sat reading the paper in his room by the light of a
+lamp with a green shade; on his sound foot the terrier Scruff was asleep
+and snoring lightly—the dog habitually came down when Greta was in
+bed, and remained till Mr. Treffry, always the latest member of the
+household, retired to rest.
+
+Through the long window a little river of light shone out on the veranda
+tiles, and, flowing past, cut the garden in two.
+
+There was the sound of hurried footsteps, a rustling of draperies;
+Christian, running through the window, stood before him.
+
+Mr. Treffry dropped his paper, such a fury of passion and alarm shone in
+the girl's eyes.
+
+“Chris! What is it?”
+
+“Hateful!”
+
+“Chris!”
+
+“Oh! Uncle! He's insulted, threatened! And I love his little finger more
+than all the world!”
+
+Her passionate voice trembled, her eyes were shining.
+
+Mr. Treffry's profound discomfort found vent in the gruff words: “Sit
+down!”
+
+“I'll never speak to Father again! Oh! Uncle! I love him!”
+
+Quiet in the extremity of his disturbance, Mr. Treffry leaned forward in
+his chair, rested his big hands on its arms, and stared at her.
+
+Chris! Here was a woman he did not know! His lips moved under the heavy
+droop of his moustache. The girl's face had suddenly grown white. She
+sank down on her knees, and laid her cheek against his hand. He felt it
+wet; and a lump rose in his throat. Drawing his hand away, he stared at
+it, and wiped it with his sleeve.
+
+“Don't cry!” he said.
+
+She seized it again and clung to it; that clutch seemed to fill him with
+sudden rage.
+
+“What's the matter? How the devil can I do anything if you don't tell
+me?”
+
+She looked up at him. The distress of the last days, the passion and
+fear of the last hour, the tide of that new life of the spirit and the
+flesh, stirring within her, flowed out in a stream of words.
+
+When she had finished, there was so dead a silence that the fluttering
+of a moth round the lamp could be heard plainly.
+
+Mr. Treffry raised himself, crossed the room, and touched the bell.
+“Tell the groom,” he said to Dominique, “to put the horses to, and have
+'em round at once; bring my old boots; we drive all night....”
+
+His bent figure looked huge, body and legs outlined by light, head and
+shoulders towering into shadow. “He shall have a run for his money!”
+he said. His eyes stared down sombrely at his niece. “It's more than he
+deserves!—it's more than you deserve, Chris. Sit down there and write to
+him; tell him to put himself entirely in my hands.” He turned his back
+on her, and went into his bedroom.
+
+Christian rose, and sat down at the writing-table. A whisper startled
+her. It came from Dominique, who was holding out a pair of boots.
+
+“M'mselle Chris, what is this?—to run about all night?” But Christian
+did not answer.
+
+“M'mselle Chris, are you ill?” Then seeing her face, he slipped away
+again.
+
+She finished her letter and went out to the carriage. Mr. Treffry was
+seated under the hood.
+
+“Shan't want you,” he called out to the groom, “Get up, Dominique.”
+
+Christian thrust her letter into his hand. “Give him that,” she said,
+clinging to his arm with sudden terror. “Oh! Uncle! do take care!”
+
+“Chris, if I do this for you—” They looked wistfully at one another.
+Then, shaking his head, Mr. Treffry gathered up the reins.
+
+“Don't fret, my dear, don't fret! Whoa, mare!”
+
+The carriage with a jerk plunged forward into darkness, curved with a
+crunch of wheels, and vanished, swinging between the black tree-pillars
+at the entrance....
+
+Christian stood, straining to catch the failing sound of the hoofs.
+
+Down the passage came a flutter of white garments; soft limbs were
+twined about her, some ends of hair fell on her face.
+
+“What is it, Chris? Where have you been? Where is Uncle Nic going? Tell
+me!”
+
+Christian tore herself away. “I don't know,” she cried, “I know
+nothing!”
+
+Greta stroked her face. “Poor Chris!” she murmured. Her bare feet
+gleamed, her hair shone gold against her nightdress. “Come to bed, poor
+Chris!”
+
+Christian laughed. “You little white moth! Feel how hot I am! You'll
+burn your wings!”
+
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+Harz had lain down, fully dressed. He was no longer angry, but felt that
+he would rather die than yield. Presently he heard footsteps coming up
+the stairs.
+
+“M'sieu!”
+
+It was the voice of Dominique, whose face, illumined by a match, wore an
+expression of ironical disgust.
+
+“My master,” he said, “makes you his compliments; he says there is no
+time to waste. You are to please come and drive with him!”
+
+“Your master is very kind. Tell him I'm in bed.”
+
+“Ah, M'sieu,” said Dominique, grimacing, “I must not go back with such
+an answer. If you would not come, I was to give you this.”
+
+Harz broke the seal and read Christian's letter.
+
+“I will come,” he said.
+
+A clock was striking as they went out through the gate. From within the
+dark cave of the phaeton hood Mr. Treffry said gruffly: “Come along,
+sir!”
+
+Harz flung his knapsack in, and followed.
+
+His companion's figure swayed, the whiplash slid softly along the flank
+of the off horse, and, as the carriage rattled forward, Mr. Treffry
+called out, as if by afterthought: “Hallo, Dominique!” Dominque's voice,
+shaken and ironical, answered from behind: “M'v'la, M'sieu!”
+
+In the long street of silent houses, men sitting in the lighted cafes
+turned with glasses at their lips to stare after the carriage. The
+narrow river of the sky spread suddenly to a vast, limpid ocean
+tremulous with stars. They had turned into the road for Italy.
+
+Mr. Treffry took a pull at his horses. “Whoa, mare! Dogged does it!” and
+the near horse, throwing up her head, whinnied; a fleck of foam drifted
+into Harz's face.
+
+The painter had come on impulse; because Christian had told him to, not
+of his own free will. He was angry with himself, wounded in self-esteem,
+for having allowed any one to render him this service. The smooth swift
+movement through velvet blackness splashed on either hand with the
+flying lamp-light; the strong sweet air blowing in his face-air that
+had kissed the tops of mountains and stolen their spirit; the snort and
+snuffle of the horses, and crisp rattling of their hoofs—all this soon
+roused in him another feeling. He looked at Mr. Treffry's profile, with
+its tufted chin; at the grey road adventuring in darkness; at the purple
+mass of mountains piled above it. All seemed utterly unreal.
+
+As if suddenly aware that he had a neighbour, Mr. Treffry turned his
+head. “We shall do better than this presently,” he said, “bit of a slope
+coming. Haven't had 'em out for three days. Whoa-mare! Steady!”
+
+“Why are you taking this trouble for me?” asked Harz.
+
+“I'm an old chap, Mr. Harz, and an old chap may do a stupid thing once
+in a while!”
+
+“You are very good,” said Harz, “but I want no favours.”
+
+Mr. Treffry stared at him.
+
+“Just so,” he said drily, “but you see there's my niece to be thought
+of. Look here! We're not at the frontier yet, Mr. Harz, by forty miles;
+it's long odds we don't get there—so, don't spoil sport!” He pointed to
+the left.
+
+Harz caught the glint of steel. They were already crossing the railway.
+The sigh of the telegraph wires fluttered above them.
+
+“Hear 'em,” said Mr. Treffry, “but if we get away up the mountains,
+we'll do yet!” They had begun to rise, the speed slackened. Mr. Treffry
+rummaged out a flask.
+
+“Not bad stuff, Mr. Harz—try it. You won't? Mother's milk! Fine night,
+eh?” Below them the valley was lit by webs of milky mist like the
+glimmer of dew on grass.
+
+These two men sitting side by side—unlike in face, age, stature,
+thought, and life—began to feel drawn towards each other, as if, in the
+rolling of the wheels, the snorting of the horses, the huge dark space,
+the huge uncertainty, they had found something they could enjoy in
+common. The steam from the horses' flanks and nostrils enveloped them
+with an odour as of glue.
+
+“You smoke, Mr. Harz?”
+
+Harz took the proffered weed, and lighted it from the glowing tip of
+Mr. Treffry's cigar, by light of which his head and hat looked like some
+giant mushroom. Suddenly the wheels jolted on a rubble of loose stones;
+the carriage was swung sideways. The scared horses, straining asunder,
+leaped forward, and sped downwards, in the darkness.
+
+Past rocks, trees, dwellings, past a lighted house that gleamed and
+vanished. With a clink and clatter, a flirt of dust and pebbles, and the
+side lamps throwing out a frisky orange blink, the carriage dashed down,
+sinking and rising like a boat crossing billows. The world seemed to
+rock and sway; to dance up, and be flung flat again. Only the stars
+stood still.
+
+Mr. Treffry, putting on the brake, muttered apologetically: “A little
+out o'hand!”
+
+Suddenly with a headlong dive, the carriage swayed as if it would fly
+in pieces, slithered along, and with a jerk steadied itself. Harz lifted
+his voice in a shout of pure excitement. Mr. Treffry let out a short
+shaky howl, and from behind there rose a wail. But the hill was over
+and the startled horses were cantering with a free, smooth motion. Mr.
+Treffry and Harz looked at each other.
+
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+Mr. Treffry said with a sort of laugh: “Near go, eh? You drive? No?
+That's a pity! Broken most of my bones at the game—nothing like it!”
+Each felt a kind of admiration for the other that he had not felt
+before. Presently Mr. Treffry began: “Look here, Mr. Harz, my niece is
+a slip of a thing, with all a young girl's notions! What have you got to
+give her, eh? Yourself? That's surely not enough; mind this—six months
+after marriage we all turn out much the same—a selfish lot! Not to
+mention this anarchist affair!
+
+“You're not of her blood, nor of her way of life, nor anything—it's
+taking chances—and—” his hand came down on the young man's knee, “I'm
+fond of her, you see.”
+
+“If you were in my place,” said Harz, “would you give her up?”
+
+Mr. Treffry groaned. “Lord knows!”
+
+“Men have made themselves before now. For those who don't believe in
+failure, there's no such thing. Suppose she does suffer a little? Will
+it do her any harm? Fair weather love is no good.”
+
+Mr. Treffry sighed.
+
+“Brave words, sir! You'll pardon me if I'm too old to understand 'em
+when they're used about my niece.”
+
+He pulled the horses up, and peered into the darkness. “We're going
+through this bit quietly; if they lose track of us here so much the
+better. Dominique! put out the lamps. Soho, my beauties!” The horses
+paced forward at a walk the muffled beat of their hoofs in the dust
+hardly broke the hush. Mr. Treffry pointed to the left: “It'll be
+another thirty-five miles to the frontier.”
+
+They passed the whitewashed houses, and village church with its sentinel
+cypress-trees. A frog was croaking in a runlet; there was a faint spicy
+scent of lemons. But nothing stirred.
+
+It was wood now on either side, the high pines, breathing their
+fragrance out into the darkness, and, like ghosts amongst them, the
+silver stems of birch-trees.
+
+Mr. Treffry said gruffly: “You won't give her up? Her happiness means a
+lot to me.”
+
+“To you!” said Harz: “to him! And I am nothing! Do you think I don't
+care for her happiness? Is it a crime for me to love her?”
+
+“Almost, Mr. Harz—considering....”
+
+“Considering that I've no money! Always money!”
+
+To this sneer Mr. Treffry made no answer, clucking to his horses.
+
+“My niece was born and bred a lady,” he said at last. “I ask you plainly
+What position have you got to give her?”
+
+“If she marries me,” said Harz, “she comes into my world. You think that
+I'm a common....”
+
+Mr. Treffry shook his head: “Answer my question, young man.”
+
+But the painter did not answer it, and silence fell.
+
+A light breeze had sprung up; the whispering in the trees, the rolling
+of the wheels in this night progress, the pine-drugged air, sent Harz
+to sleep. When he woke it was to the same tune, varied by Mr. Treffry's
+uneasy snoring; the reins were hanging loose, and, peering out, he saw
+Dominique shuffling along at the horses' heads. He joined him, and,
+one on each side, they plodded up and up. A haze had begun to bathe
+the trees, the stars burnt dim, the air was colder. Mr. Treffry woke
+coughing. It was like some long nightmare, this interminable experience
+of muffled sounds and shapes, of perpetual motion, conceived, and
+carried out in darkness. But suddenly the day broke. Heralded by the
+snuffle of the horses, light began glimmering over a chaos of lines and
+shadows, pale as mother-o'-pearl. The stars faded, and in a smouldering
+zigzag the dawn fled along the mountain tops, flinging out little isles
+of cloud. From a lake, curled in a hollow like a patch of smoke, came
+the cry of a water-bird. A cuckoo started a soft mocking; and close to
+the carriage a lark flew up. Beasts and men alike stood still, drinking
+in the air--sweet with snows and dew, and vibrating faintly with the
+running of the water and the rustling of the leaves.
+
+The night had played sad tricks with Mr. Nicholas Treffry; his hat was
+grey with dust; his cheeks brownish-purple, there were heavy pouches
+beneath his eyes, which stared painfully.
+
+“We'll call a halt,” he said, “and give the gees their grub, poor
+things. Can you find some water, Mr. Harz? There's a rubber bucket in
+behind.
+
+“Can't get about myself this morning; make that lazy fellow of mine stir
+his stumps.”
+
+Harz saw that he had drawn off one of his boots, and stretched the foot
+out on a cushion.
+
+“You're not fit to go farther,” he said; “you're ill.”
+
+“Ill!” replied Mr. Treffry; “not a bit of it!”
+
+Harz looked at him, then catching up the bucket, made off in search of
+water. When he came back the horses were feeding from an india-rubber
+trough slung to the pole; they stretched their heads towards the bucket,
+pushing aside each other's noses.
+
+The flame in the east had died, but the tops of the larches were bathed
+in a gentle radiance; and the peaks ahead were like amber. Everywhere
+were threads of water, threads of snow, and little threads of dewy
+green, glistening like gossamer.
+
+Mr. Treffry called out: “Give me your arm, Mr. Harz; I'd like to shake
+the reefs out of me. When one comes to stand over at the knees, it's no
+such easy matter, eh?” He groaned as he put his foot down, and gripped
+the young man's shoulder as in a vise. Presently he lowered himself on
+to a stone.
+
+“'All over now!' as Chris would say when she was little; nasty temper
+she had too—kick and scream on the floor! Never lasted long though....
+'Kiss her! take her up! show her the pictures!' Amazing fond of pictures
+Chris was!” He looked dubiously at Harz; then took a long pull at his
+flask. “What would the doctor say? Whisky at four in the morning! Well!
+Thank the Lord Doctors aren't always with us.” Sitting on the stone,
+with one hand pressed against his side, and the other tilting up the
+flask, he was grey from head to foot.
+
+Harz had dropped on to another stone. He, too, was worn out by the
+excitement and fatigue, coming so soon after his illness. His head was
+whirling, and the next thing he remembered was a tree walking at him,
+turning round, yellow from the roots up; everything seemed yellow, even
+his own feet. Somebody opposite to him was jumping up and down, a grey
+bear—with a hat—Mr. Treffry! He cried: “Ha-alloo!” And the figure seemed
+to fall and disappear....
+
+When Harz came to himself a hand was pouring liquor into his mouth, and
+a wet cloth was muffled round his brows; a noise of humming and hoofs
+seemed familiar. Mr. Treffry loomed up alongside, smoking a cigar; he
+was muttering: “A low trick, Paul—bit of my mind!” Then, as if a curtain
+had been snatched aside, the vision before Harz cleared again. The
+carriage was winding between uneven, black-eaved houses, past doorways
+from which goats and cows were coming out, with bells on their
+necks. Black-eyed boys, and here and there a drowsy man with a long,
+cherry-stemmed pipe between his teeth, stood aside to stare.
+
+Mr. Treffry seemed to have taken a new lease of strength; like an angry
+old dog, he stared from side to side. “My bone!” he seemed to say:
+“let's see who's going to touch it!”
+
+The last house vanished, glowing in the early sunshine, and the carriage
+with its trail of dust became entombed once more in the gloom of tall
+trees, along a road that cleft a wilderness of mossgrown rocks, and dewy
+stems, through which the sun had not yet driven paths.
+
+Dominique came round to them, bearing appearance of one who has seen
+better days, and a pot of coffee brewed on a spirit lamp. Breakfast—he
+said—was served!
+
+The ears of the horses were twitching with fatigue. Mr. Treffry said
+sadly: “If I can see this through, you can. Get on, my beauties!”
+
+As soon as the sun struck through the trees, Mr. Treffry's strength
+ebbed again. He seemed to suffer greatly; but did not complain. They had
+reached the pass at last, and the unchecked sunlight was streaming down
+with a blinding glare.
+
+“Jump up!” Mr. Treffry cried out. “We'll make a finish of it!” and he
+gave the reins a jerk. The horses flung up their heads, and the bleak
+pass with its circling crown of jagged peaks soon slipped away.
+
+Between the houses on the very top, they passed at a slow trot; and soon
+began slanting down the other side. Mr. Treffry brought them to a halt
+where a mule track joined the road.
+
+“That's all I can do for you; you'd better leave me here,” he said.
+“Keep this track down to the river—go south—you'll be in Italy in a
+couple of hours. Get rail at Feltre. Money? Yes? Well!” He held out his
+hand; Harz gripped it.
+
+“Give her up, eh?”
+
+Harz shook his head.
+
+“No? Then it's 'pull devil, pull baker,' between us. Good-bye, and good
+luck to you!” And mustering his strength for a last attempt at dignity,
+Mr. Treffry gathered up the reins.
+
+Harz watched his figure huddled again beneath the hood. The carriage
+moved slowly away.
+
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+At Villa Rubein people went about, avoiding each other as if detected
+in conspiracy. Miss Naylor, who for an inscrutable reason had put on
+her best frock, a purple, relieved at the chest with bird's-eye blue,
+conveyed an impression of trying to count a chicken which ran about
+too fast. When Greta asked what she had lost she was heard to mutter:
+“Mr.—Needlecase.”
+
+Christian, with big circles round her eyes, sat silent at her little
+table. She had had no sleep. Herr Paul coming into the room about noon
+gave her a furtive look and went out again; after this he went to his
+bedroom, took off all his clothes, flung them passionately one by one
+into a footbath, and got into bed.
+
+“I might be a criminal!” he muttered to himself, while the buttons of
+his garments rattled on the bath.
+
+“Am I her father? Have I authority? Do I know the world? Bssss! I might
+be a frog!”
+
+Mrs. Decie, having caused herself to be announced, found him smoking a
+cigar, and counting the flies on the ceiling.
+
+“If you have really done this, Paul,” she said in a restrained voice,
+“you have done a very unkind thing, and what is worse, you have made us
+all ridiculous. But perhaps you have not done it?”
+
+“I have done it,” cried Herr Paul, staring dreadfully: “I have done it,
+I tell you, I have done it—”
+
+“Very well, you have done it—and why, pray? What conceivable good was
+there in it? I suppose you know that Nicholas has driven him to the
+frontier? Nicholas is probably more dead than alive by this time; you
+know his state of health.”
+
+Herr Paul's fingers ploughed up his beard.
+
+“Nicholas is mad—and the girl is mad! Leave me alone! I will not be made
+angry; do you understand? I will not be worried—I am not fit for it.”
+His prominent brown eyes stared round the room, as if looking for a way
+of escape.
+
+“If I may prophesy, you will be worried a good deal,” said Mrs. Decie
+coldly, “before you have finished with this affair.”
+
+The anxious, uncertain glance which Herr Paul gave her at these words
+roused an unwilling feeling of compunction in her.
+
+“You are not made for the outraged father of the family,” she said. “You
+had better give up the attitude, Paul; it does not suit you.”
+
+Herr Paul groaned.
+
+“I suppose it is not your fault,” she added.
+
+Just then the door was opened, and Fritz, with an air of saying the
+right thing, announced:
+
+“A gentleman of the police to see you, sir.”
+
+Herr Paul bounded.
+
+“Keep him out!” he cried.
+
+Mrs. Decie, covering her lips, disappeared with a rustling of silk; in
+her place stood a stiff man in blue....
+
+Thus the morning dragged itself away without any one being able to
+settle to anything, except Herr Paul, who was settled in bed. As was
+fitting in a house that had lost its soul, meals were neglected, even by
+the dog.
+
+About three o'clock a telegram came for Christian, containing these
+words: “All right; self returns to-morrow. Treffry.” After reading it
+she put on her hat and went out, followed closely by Greta, who, when
+she thought that she would not be sent away, ran up from behind and
+pulled her by the sleeve.
+
+“Let me come, Chris—I shall not talk.”
+
+The two girls walked on together. When they had gone some distance
+Christian said:
+
+“I'm going to get his pictures, and take charge of them!”
+
+“Oh!” said Greta timidly.
+
+“If you are afraid,” said Christian, “you had better go back home.”
+
+“I am not afraid, Chris,” said Greta meekly.
+
+Neither girl spoke again till they had taken the path along the wall.
+Over the tops of the vines the heat was dancing.
+
+“The sun-fairies are on the vines!” murmured Greta to herself.
+
+At the old house they stopped, and Christian, breathing quickly, pushed
+the door; it was immovable.
+
+“Look!” said Greta, “they have screwed it!” She pointed out three screws
+with a rosy-tipped forefinger.
+
+Christian stamped her foot.
+
+“We mustn't stand here,” she said; “let's sit on that bench and think.”
+
+“Yes,” murmured Greta, “let us think.” Dangling an end of hair, she
+regarded Christian with her wide blue eyes.
+
+“I can't make any plan,” Christian cried at last, “while you stare at me
+like that.”
+
+“I was thinking,” said Greta humbly, “if they have screwed it up,
+perhaps we shall screw it down again; there is the big screw-driver of
+Fritz.”
+
+“It would take a long time; people are always passing.”
+
+“People do not pass in the evening,” murmured Greta, “because the gate
+at our end is always shut.”
+
+Christian rose.
+
+“We will come this evening, just before the gate is shut.”
+
+“But, Chris, how shall we get back again?”
+
+“I don't know; I mean to have the pictures.”
+
+“It is not a high gate,” murmured Greta.
+
+After dinner the girls went to their room, Greta bearing with her the
+big screw-driver of Fritz. At dusk they slipped downstairs and out.
+
+They arrived at the old house, and stood, listening, in the shadow of
+the doorway. The only sounds were those of distant barking dogs, and of
+the bugles at the barracks.
+
+“Quick!” whispered Christian; and Greta, with all the strength of her
+small hands, began to turn the screws. It was some time before
+they yielded; the third was very obstinate, till Christian took the
+screw-driver and passionately gave the screw a starting twist.
+
+“It is like a pig—that one,” said Greta, rubbing her wrists mournfully.
+
+The opened door revealed the gloom of the dank rooms and twisting
+staircase, then fell to behind them with a clatter.
+
+Greta gave a little scream, and caught her sister's dress.
+
+“It is dark,” she gasped; “O Chris! it is dark!”
+
+Christian groped for the bottom stair, and Greta felt her arm shaking.
+
+“Suppose there is a man to keep guard! O Chris! suppose there are bats!”
+
+“You are a baby!” Christian answered in a trembling voice. “You had
+better go home!”
+
+Greta choked a little in the dark.
+
+“I am—not—going home, but I'm afraid of bats. O Chris! aren't you
+afraid?”
+
+“Yes,” said Christian, “but I'm going to have the pictures.”
+
+Her cheeks were burning; she was trembling all over. Having found the
+bottom step she began to mount with Greta clinging to her skirts.
+
+The haze above inspired a little courage in the child, who, of all
+things, hated darkness. The blanket across the doorway of the loft had
+been taken down, there was nothing to veil the empty room.
+
+“Nobody here, you see,” said Christian.
+
+“No-o,” whispered Greta, running to the window, and clinging to the
+wall, like one of the bats she dreaded.
+
+“But they have been here!” cried Christian angrily. “They have broken
+this.” She pointed to the fragments of a plaster cast that had been
+thrown down.
+
+Out of the corner she began to pull the canvases set in rough, wooden
+frames, dragging them with all her strength.
+
+“Help me!” she cried; “it will be dark directly.”
+
+They collected a heap of sketches and three large pictures, piling them
+before the window, and peering at them in the failing light.
+
+Greta said ruefully:
+
+“O Chris! they are heavy ones; we shall never carry them, and the gate
+is shut now!”
+
+Christian took a pointed knife from the table.
+
+“I shall cut them out of the frames,” she said. “Listen! What's that?”
+
+It was the sound of whistling, which stopped beneath the window. The
+girls, clasping each other's hands, dropped on their knees.
+
+“Hallo!” cried a voice.
+
+Greta crept to the window, and, placing her face level with the floor,
+peered over.
+
+“It is only Dr. Edmund; he doesn't know, then,” she whispered; “I
+shall call him; he is going away!” cried Christian catching her
+sister's—“Don't!” cried Christian catching her sister's dress.
+
+“He would help us,” Greta said reproachfully, “and it would not be so
+dark if he were here.”
+
+Christian's cheeks were burning.
+
+“I don't choose,” she said, and began handling the pictures, feeling
+their edges with her knife.
+
+“Chris! Suppose anybody came?”
+
+“The door is screwed,” Christian answered absently.
+
+“O Chris! We screwed it unscrewed; anybody who wishes shall come!”
+
+Christian, leaning her chin in her hands, gazed at her thoughtfully.
+
+“It will take a long time to cut these pictures out carefully; or,
+perhaps I can get them out without cutting. You must screw me up and go
+home. In the morning you must come early, when the gate is open, unscrew
+me again, and help carry the pictures.”
+
+Greta did not answer at once. At last she shook her head violently.
+
+“I am afraid,” she gasped.
+
+“We can't both stay here all night,” said Christian; “if any one comes
+to our room there will be nobody to answer. We can't lift these pictures
+over the gate. One of us must go back; you can climb over the gate—there
+is nothing to be afraid of.”
+
+Greta pressed her hands together.
+
+“Do you want the pictures badly, Chris?”
+
+Christian nodded.
+
+“Very badly?”
+
+“Yes—yes—yes!”
+
+Greta remained sitting where she was, shivering violently, as a little
+animal shivers when it scents danger. At last she rose.
+
+“I am going,” she said in a despairing voice. At the doorway she turned.
+
+“If Miss Naylor shall ask me where you are, Chris, I shall be telling
+her a story.”
+
+Christian started.
+
+“I forgot that—O Greta, I am sorry! I will go instead.”
+
+Greta took another step—a quick one.
+
+“I shall die if I stay here alone,” she said; “I can tell her that you
+are in bed; you must go to bed here, Chris, so it shall be true after
+all.”
+
+Christian threw her arms about her.
+
+“I am so sorry, darling; I wish I could go instead. But if you have to
+tell a lie, I would tell a straight one.”
+
+“Would you?” said Greta doubtfully.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“I think,” said Greta to herself, beginning to descend the stairs, “I
+think I will tell it in my way.” She shuddered and went on groping in
+the darkness.
+
+Christian listened for the sound of the screws. It came slowly,
+threatening her with danger and solitude.
+
+Sinking on her knees she began to work at freeing the canvas of a
+picture. Her heart throbbed distressfully; at the stir of wind-breath
+or any distant note of clamour she stopped, and held her breathing. No
+sounds came near. She toiled on, trying only to think that she was at
+the very spot where last night his arms had been round her. How long ago
+it seemed! She was full of vague terror, overmastered by the darkness,
+dreadfully alone. The new glow of resolution seemed suddenly to have
+died down in her heart, and left her cold.
+
+She would never be fit to be his wife, if at the first test her courage
+failed! She set her teeth; and suddenly she felt a kind of exultation,
+as if she too were entering into life, were knowing something within
+herself that she had never known before. Her fingers hurt, and the pain
+even gave pleasure; her cheeks were burning; her breath came fast. They
+could not stop her now! This feverish task in darkness was her baptism
+into life. She finished; and rolling the pictures very carefully, tied
+them with cord. She had done something for him! Nobody could take that
+from her! She had a part of him! This night had made him hers! They
+might do their worst! She lay down on his mattress and soon fell
+asleep....
+
+She was awakened by Scruff's tongue against her face. Greta was standing
+by her side.
+
+“Wake up, Chris! The gate is open!”
+
+In the cold early light the child seemed to glow with warmth and colour;
+her eyes were dancing.
+
+“I am not afraid now; Scruff and I sat up all night, to catch the
+morning—I—think it was fun; and O Chris!” she ended with a rueful gleam
+in her eyes, “I told it.”
+
+Christian hugged her.
+
+“Come—quick! There is nobody about. Are those the pictures?”
+
+Each supporting an end, the girls carried the bundle downstairs, and set
+out with their corpse-like burden along the wall-path between the river
+and the vines.
+
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+Hidden by the shade of rose-bushes Greta lay stretched at length, cheek
+on arm, sleeping the sleep of the unrighteous. Through the flowers the
+sun flicked her parted lips with kisses, and spilled the withered petals
+on her. In a denser islet of shade, Scruff lay snapping at a fly. His
+head lolled drowsily in the middle of a snap, and snapped in the middle
+of a loll.
+
+At three o'clock Miss Naylor too came out, carrying a basket and pair
+of scissors. Lifting her skirts to avoid the lakes of water left by the
+garden hose, she stopped in front of a rose-bush, and began to snip off
+the shrivelled flowers. The little lady's silvered head and thin, brown
+face sustained the shower of sunlight unprotected, and had a gentle
+dignity in their freedom.
+
+Presently, as the scissors flittered in and out of the leaves, she,
+began talking to herself.
+
+“If girls were more like what they used to be, this would not have
+happened. Perhaps we don't understand; it's very easy to forget.”
+Burying her nose and lips in a rose, she sniffed. “Poor dear girl! It's
+such a pity his father is—a—”
+
+“A farmer,” said a sleepy voice behind the rosebush.
+
+Miss Naylor leaped. “Greta! How you startled me! A farmer—that is—an—an
+agriculturalist!”
+
+“A farmer with vineyards—he told us, and he is not ashamed. Why is it a
+pity, Miss Naylor?”
+
+Miss Naylor's lips looked very thin.
+
+“For many reasons, of which you know nothing.”
+
+“That is what you always say,” pursued the sleepy voice; “and that is
+why, when I am to be married, there shall also be a pity.”
+
+“Greta!” Miss Naylor cried, “it is not proper for a girl of your age to
+talk like that.”
+
+“Why?” said Greta. “Because it is the truth?”
+
+Miss Naylor made no reply to this, but vexedly cut off a sound rose,
+which she hastily picked up and regarded with contrition. Greta spoke
+again:
+
+“Chris said: 'I have got the pictures, I shall tell her'. but I shall
+tell you instead, because it was I that told the story.”
+
+Miss Naylor stared, wrinkling her nose, and holding the scissors wide
+apart....
+
+“Last night,” said Greta slowly, “I and Chris went to his studio and
+took his pictures, and so, because the gate was shut, I came back to
+tell it; and when you asked me where Chris was, I told it; because she
+was in the studio all night, and I and Scruff sat up all night, and in
+the morning we brought the pictures, and hid them under our beds, and
+that is why—we—are—so—sleepy.”
+
+Over the rose-bush Miss Naylor peered down at her; and though she was
+obliged to stand on tiptoe this did not altogether destroy her dignity.
+
+“I am surprised at you, Greta; I am surprised at Christian, more
+surprised at Christian. The world seems upside down.”
+
+Greta, a sunbeam entangled in her hair, regarded her with inscrutable,
+innocent eyes.
+
+“When you were a girl, I think you would be sure to be in love,” she
+murmured drowsily.
+
+Miss Naylor, flushing deeply, snipped off a particularly healthy bud.
+
+“And so, because you are not married, I think—”
+
+The scissors hissed.
+
+Greta nestled down again. “I think it is wicked to cut off all the good
+buds,” she said, and shut her eyes.
+
+Miss Naylor continued to peer across the rosebush; but her thin face,
+close to the glistening leaves, had become oddly soft, pink, and
+girlish. At a deeper breath from Greta, the little lady put down her
+basket, and began to pace the lawn, followed dubiously by Scruff. It was
+thus that Christian came on them.
+
+Miss Naylor slipped her arm into the girl's and though she made no
+sound, her lips kept opening and shutting, like the beak of a bird
+contemplating a worm.
+
+Christian spoke first:
+
+“Miss Naylor, I want to tell you please—”
+
+“Oh, my dear! I know; Greta has been in the confessional before you.”
+She gave the girl's arm a squeeze. “Isn't it a lovely day? Did you ever
+see 'Five Fingers' look so beautiful?” And she pointed to the great
+peaks of the Funffingerspitze glittering in the sun like giant crystals.
+
+“I like them better with clouds about them.”
+
+“Well,” agreed Miss Naylor nervously, “they certainly are nicer with
+clouds about them. They look almost hot and greasy, don't they.... My
+dear!” she went on, giving Christian's arm a dozen little squeezes, “we
+all of us—that is, we all of us—”
+
+Christian turned her eyes away.
+
+“My dear,” Miss Naylor tried again, “I am far—that is, I mean, to all of
+us at some time or another—and then you see—well—it is hard!”
+
+Christian kissed the gloved hand resting on her arm. Miss Naylor bobbed
+her head; a tear trickled off her nose.
+
+“Do let us wind your skein of woof!” she said with resounding gaiety.
+
+Some half-hour later Mrs. Decie called Christian to her room.
+
+“My dear!” she said; “come here a minute; I have a message for you.”
+
+Christian went with an odd, set look about her mouth.
+
+Her aunt was sitting, back to the light, tapping a bowl of goldfish with
+the tip of a polished finger-nail; the room was very cool. She held a
+letter out. “Your uncle is not coming back tonight.”
+
+Christian took the letter. It was curtly worded, in a thin, toppling
+hand:
+
+“DEAR CON—Can't get back to-night. Sending Dominique for things. Tell
+Christian to come over with him for night if possible.—Yr. aff. brother,
+NICLS. TREFFRY.”
+
+“Dominique has a carriage here,” said Mrs. Decie. “You will have nice
+time to catch the train. Give my love to your uncle. You must take
+Barbi with you, I insist on that.” She rose from her chair and held
+Christian's hand: “My dear! You look very tired—very! Almost ill. I
+don't like to see you look like that. Come!” She thrust her pale lips
+forward, and kissed the girl's paler cheek.
+
+Then as Christian left the room she sank back in her chair, with
+creases in her forehead, and began languidly to cut a magazine. 'Poor
+Christian!' she thought, 'how hardly she does take it! I am sorry
+for her; but perhaps it's just as well, as things are turning out.
+Psychologically it is interesting!'
+
+Christian found her things packed, and the two servants waiting. In a
+few minutes they were driving to the station. She made Dominique take
+the seat opposite.
+
+“Well?” she asked him.
+
+Dominique's eyebrows twitched, he smiled deprecatingly.
+
+“M'mselle, Mr. Treffry told me to hold my tongue.”
+
+“But you can tell me, Dominique; Barbi can't understand.”
+
+“To you, then, M'mselle,” said Dominique, as one who accepts his fate;
+“to you, then, who will doubtless forget all that I shall tell you—my
+master is not well; he has terrible pain here; he has a cough; he is not
+well at all; not well at all.”
+
+A feeling of dismay seized on the girl.
+
+“We were a caravan for all that night,” Dominique resumed. “In the
+morning by noon we ceased to be a caravan; Signor Harz took a mule path;
+he will be in Italy—certainly in Italy. As for us, we stayed at San
+Martino, and my master went to bed. It was time; I had much trouble with
+his clothes, his legs were swollen. In the afternoon came a signor
+of police, on horseback, red and hot; I persuaded him that we were at
+Paneveggio, but as we were not, he came back angry—Mon Die! as angry
+as a cat. It was not good to meet him—when he was with my master I was
+outside. There was much noise. I do not know what passed, but at
+last the signor came out through the door, and went away in a hurry.”
+Dominique's features were fixed in a sardonic grin; he rubbed the palm
+of one hand with the finger of the other. “Mr. Treffry made me give
+him whisky afterwards, and he had no money to pay the bill—that I know
+because I paid it. Well, M'mselle, to-day he would be dressed and very
+slowly we came as far as Auer; there he could do no more, so went to
+bed. He is not well at all.”
+
+Christian was overwhelmed by forebodings; the rest of the journey was
+made in silence, except when Barbi, a country girl, filled with the
+delirium of railway travel, sighed: “Ach! gnadige Fraulein!” looking at
+Christian with pleasant eyes.
+
+At once, on arriving at the little hostel, Christian went to see her
+uncle. His room was darkened, and smelt of beeswax.
+
+“Ah! Chris,” he said, “glad to see you.”
+
+In a blue flannel gown, with a rug over his feet, he was lying on a
+couch lengthened artificially by chairs; the arm he reached out issued
+many inches from its sleeve, and showed the corded veins of the wrist.
+Christian, settling his pillows, looked anxiously into his eyes.
+
+“I'm not quite the thing, Chris,” said Mr. Treffry. “Somehow, not quite
+the thing. I'll come back with you to-morrow.”
+
+“Let me send for Dr. Dawney, Uncle?”
+
+“No—no! Plenty of him when I get home. Very good young fellow, as
+doctors go, but I can't stand his puddin's—slops and puddin's, and all
+that trumpery medicine on the top. Send me Dominique, my dear—I'll put
+myself to rights a bit!” He fingered his unshaven cheek, and clutched
+the gown together on his chest. “Got this from the landlord. When you
+come back we'll have a little talk!”
+
+He was asleep when she came into the room an hour later. Watching his
+uneasy breathing, she wondered what it was that he was going to say.
+
+He looked ill! And suddenly she realised that her thoughts were not of
+him.... When she was little he would take her on his back; he had built
+cocked hats for her and paper boats; had taught her to ride; slid
+her between his knees; given her things without number; and taken his
+payment in kisses. And now he was ill, and she was not thinking of him!
+He had been all that was most dear to her, yet before her eyes would
+only come the vision of another.
+
+Mr. Treffry woke suddenly. “Not been asleep, have I? The beds here are
+infernal hard.”
+
+“Uncle Nic, won't you give me news of him?”
+
+Mr. Treffry looked at her, and Christian could not bear that look.
+
+“He's safe into Italy; they aren't very keen after him, it's so long
+ago; I squared 'em pretty easily. Now, look here, Chris!”
+
+Christian came close; he took her hand.
+
+“I'd like to see you pull yourself together. 'Tisn't so much the
+position; 'tisn't so much the money; because after all there's always
+mine—” Christian shook her head. “But,” he went on with shaky emphasis,
+“there's the difference of blood, and that's a serious thing; and
+there's this anarch—this political affair; and there's the sort of
+life, an' that's a serious thing; but—what I'm coming to is this,
+Chris—there's the man!”
+
+Christian drew away her hand. Mr. Treffry went on:
+
+“Ah! yes. I'm an old chap and fond of you, but I must speak out what
+I think. He's got pluck, he's strong, he's in earnest; but he's got a
+damned hot temper, he's an egotist, and—he's not the man for you. If
+you marry him, as sure as I lie here, you'll be sorry for it. You're not
+your father's child for nothing; nice fellow as ever lived, but soft as
+butter. If you take this chap, it'll be like mixing earth and ironstone,
+and they don't blend!” He dropped his head back on the pillows, and
+stretching out his hand, repeated wistfully: “Take my word for it, my
+dear, he's not the man for you.”
+
+Christian, staring at the wall beyond, said quietly: “I can't take any
+one's word for that.”
+
+“Ah!” muttered Mr. Treffry, “you're obstinate enough, but obstinacy
+isn't strength.
+
+“You'll give up everything to him, you'll lick his shoes; and you'll
+never play anything but second fiddle in his life. He'll always be first
+with himself, he and his work, or whatever he calls painting pictures;
+and some day you'll find that out. You won't like it, and I don't like
+it for you, Chris, and that's flat.”
+
+He wiped his brow where the perspiration stood in beads.
+
+Christian said: “You don't understand; you don't believe in him; you
+don't see! If I do come after his work—if I do give him everything, and
+he can't give all back—I don't care! He'll give what he can; I don't
+want any more. If you're afraid of the life for me, uncle, if you think
+it'll be too hard—”
+
+Mr. Treffry bowed his head. “I do, Chris.”
+
+“Well, then, I hate to be wrapped in cotton wool; I want to breathe. If
+I come to grief, it's my own affair; nobody need mind.”
+
+Mr. Treffry's fingers sought his beard. “Ah! yes. Just so!”
+
+Christian sank on her knees.
+
+“Oh! Uncle! I'm a selfish beast!”
+
+Mr. Treffry laid his hand against her cheek. “I think I could do with a
+nap,” he said.
+
+Swallowing a lump in her throat, she stole out of the room.
+
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+By a stroke of Fate Mr. Treffry's return to Villa Rubein befell at the
+psychological moment when Herr Paul, in a suit of rather too bright
+blue, was starting for Vienna.
+
+As soon as he saw the carriage appear between the poplars he became as
+pensive as a boy caught in the act of stealing cherries. Pitching his
+hatbox to Fritz, he recovered himself, however, in time to whistle while
+Mr. Treffry was being assisted into the house. Having forgotten his
+anger, he was only anxious now to smooth out its after effects; in the
+glances he cast at Christian and his brother-in-law there was a kind of
+shamed entreaty which seemed to say: “For goodness' sake, don't worry me
+about that business again! Nothing's come of it, you see!”
+
+He came forward: “Ah! Mon cher! So you return; I put off my departure,
+then. Vienna must wait for me—that poor Vienna!”
+
+But noticing the extreme feebleness of Mr. Treffry's advance, he
+exclaimed with genuine concern:
+
+“What is it? You're ill? My God!” After disappearing for five minutes,
+he came back with a whitish liquid in a glass.
+
+“There!” he said, “good for the gout—for a cough—for everything!”
+
+Mr. Treffry sniffed, drained the glass, and sucked his moustache.
+
+“Ah!” he said. “No doubt! But it's uncommonly like gin, Paul.” Then
+turning to Christian, he said: “Shake hands, you two!”
+
+Christian looked from one to the other, and at last held out her hand
+to Herr Paul, who brushed it with his moustache, gazing after her as she
+left the room with a queer expression.
+
+“My dear!” he began, “you support her in this execrable matter? You
+forget my position, you make me ridiculous. I have been obliged to go to
+bed in my own house, absolutely to go to bed, because I was in danger of
+becoming funny.”
+
+“Look here, Paul!” Mr. Treffry said gruffly, “if any one's to bully
+Chris, it's I.”
+
+“In that case,” returned Herr Paul sarcastically, “I will go to Vienna.”
+
+“You may go to the devil!” said Mr. Treffry; “and I'll tell you what—in
+my opinion it was low to set the police on that young chap; a low, dirty
+trick.”
+
+Herr Paul divided his beard carefully in two, took his seat on the very
+edge of an arm-chair, and placing his hands on his parted knees, said:
+
+“I have regretted it since—mais, que diable! He called me a coward—it is
+very hot weather!—there were drinks at the Kurhaus—I am her guardian—the
+affair is a very beastly one—there were more drinks—I was a little
+enfin!” He shrugged his shoulders. “Adieu, my dear; I shall be some time
+in Vienna; I need rest!” He rose and went to the door; then he turned,
+and waved his cigar. “Adieu! Be good; get well! I will buy you some
+cigars up there.” And going out, he shut the door on any possibility of
+answer.
+
+Mr. Treffry lay back amongst his cushions. The clock ticked; pigeons
+cooed on the veranda; a door opened in the distance, and for a moment a
+treble voice was heard. Mr. Treffry's head drooped forward; across his
+face, gloomy and rugged, fell a thin line of sunlight.
+
+The clock suddenly stopped ticking, and outside, in mysterious accord,
+the pigeons rose with a great fluttering of wings, and flew off'. Mr.
+Treffry made a startled, heavy movement. He tried to get on to his feet
+and reach the bell, but could not, and sat on the side of the couch
+with drops of sweat rolling off his forehead, and his hands clawing his
+chest. There was no sound at all throughout the house. He looked about
+him, and tried to call, but again could not. He tried once more to reach
+the bell, and, failing, sat still, with a thought that made him cold.
+
+“I'm done for,” he muttered. “By George! I believe I'm done for this
+time!” A voice behind him said:
+
+“Can we have a look at you, sir?”
+
+“Ah! Doctor, bear a hand, there's a good fellow.”
+
+Dawney propped him against the cushions, and loosened his shirt.
+Receiving no answer to his questions, he stepped alarmed towards the
+bell. Mr. Treffry stopped him with a sign.
+
+“Let's hear what you make of me,” he said.
+
+When Dawney had examined him, he asked:
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Well,” answered Dawney slowly, “there's trouble, of course.”
+
+Mr. Treffry broke out with a husky whisper: “Out with it, Doctor; don't
+humbug me.”
+
+Dawney bent down, and took his wrist.
+
+“I don't know how you've got into this state, sir,” he said with the
+brusqueness of emotion. “You're in a bad way. It's the old trouble; and
+you know what that means as well as I. All I can tell you is, I'm going
+to have a big fight with it. It shan't be my fault, there's my hand on
+that.”
+
+Mr. Treffry lay with his eyes fixed on the ceiling; at last he said:
+
+“I want to live.”
+
+“Yes—yes.”
+
+“I feel better now; don't make a fuss about it. It'll be very awkward if
+I die just now. Patch me up, for the sake of my niece.”
+
+Dawney nodded. “One minute, there are a few things I want,” and he went
+out.
+
+A moment later Greta stole in on tiptoe. She bent over till her hair
+touched Mr. Treffry's face.
+
+“Uncle Nic!” she whispered. He opened his eyes.
+
+“Hallo, Greta!”
+
+“I have come to bring you my love, Uncle Nic, and to say good-bye. Papa
+says that I and Scruff and Miss Naylor are going to Vienna with him;
+we have had to pack in half an hour; in five minutes we are going to
+Vienna, and it is my first visit there, Uncle Nic.”
+
+“To Vienna!” Mr. Treffry repeated slowly. “Don't have a guide, Greta;
+they're humbugs.”
+
+“No, Uncle Nic,” said Greta solemnly.
+
+“Draw the curtains, old girl, let's have a look at you. Why, you're as
+smart as ninepence!”
+
+“Yes,” said Greta with a sigh, touching the buttons of her cape,
+“because I am going to Vienna; but I am sorry to leave you, Uncle Nic.”
+
+“Are you, Greta?”
+
+“But you will have Chris, and you are fonder of Chris than of me, Uncle
+Nic.”
+
+“I've known her longer.”
+
+“Perhaps when you've known me as long as Chris, you shall be as fond of
+me.”
+
+“When I've known you as long—may be.”
+
+“While I am gone, Uncle Nic, you are to get well, you are not very well,
+you know.”
+
+“What put that into your head?”
+
+“If you were well you would be smoking a cigar—it is just three o'clock.
+This kiss is for myself, this is for Scruff, and this is for Miss
+Naylor.”
+
+She stood upright again; a tremulous, joyful gravity was in her eyes and
+on her lips.
+
+“Good-bye, my dear; take care of yourselves; and don't you have a guide,
+they're humbugs.”
+
+“No, Uncle Nic. There is the carriage! To Vienna, Uncle Nic!” The dead
+gold of her hair gleamed in the doorway. Mr. Treffry raised himself upon
+his elbow.
+
+“Give us one more, for luck!”
+
+Greta ran back.
+
+“I love you very much!” she said, and kissing him, backed slowly, then,
+turning, flew out like a bird.
+
+Mr. Treffry fixed his eyes on the shut door.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+After many days of hot, still weather, the wind had come, and whirled
+the dust along the parched roads. The leaves were all astir, like tiny
+wings. Round Villa Rubein the pigeons cooed uneasily, all the other
+birds were silent. Late in the afternoon Christian came out on the
+veranda, reading a letter:
+
+“DEAR CHRIS,—We are here now six days, and it is a very large place with
+many churches. In the first place then we have been to a great many, but
+the nicest of them is not St. Stephan's Kirche, it is another, but I do
+not remember the name. Papa is out nearly all the night; he says he is
+resting here, so he is not able to come to the churches with us, but I
+do not think he rests very much. The day before yesterday we, that is,
+Papa, I, and Miss Naylor, went to an exhibition of pictures. It was
+quite beautiful and interesting (Miss Naylor says it is not right to say
+'quite' beautiful, but I do not know what other word could mean
+'quite' except the word 'quite,' because it is not exceedingly and not
+extremely). And O Chris! there was one picture painted by him; it was
+about a ship without masts—Miss Naylor says it is a barge, but I do not
+know what a barge is—on fire, and, floating down a river in a fog.
+I think it is extremely beautiful. Miss Naylor says it is very
+impressionistick—what is that? and Papa said 'Puh!' but he did not know
+it was painted by Herr Harz, so I did not tell him.
+
+“There has also been staying at our hotel that Count Sarelli who came
+one evening to dinner at our house, but he is gone away now. He sat all
+day in the winter garden reading, and at night he went out with Papa.
+Miss Naylor says he is unhappy, but I think he does not take enough
+exercise; and O Chris! one day he said to me, 'That is your sister,
+Mademoiselle, that young lady in the white dress? Does she always wear
+white dresses?' and I said to him: 'It is not always a white dress; in
+the picture, it is green, because the picture is called 'Spring.' But
+I did not tell him the colours of all your dresses because he looked so
+tired. Then he said to me: 'She is very charming.' So I tell you this,
+Chris, because I think you shall like to know. Scruff' has a sore toe;
+it is because he has eaten too much meat.
+
+“It is not nice without you, Chris, and Miss Naylor says I am improving
+my mind here, but I do not think it shall improve very much, because
+at night I like it always best, when the shops are lighted and the
+carriages are driving past; then I am wanting to dance. The first night
+Papa said he would take me to the theatre, but yesterday he said it was
+not good for me; perhaps to-morrow he shall think it good for me again.
+
+“Yesterday we have been in the Prater, and saw many people, and some
+that Papa knew; and then came the most interesting part of all, sitting
+under the trees in the rain for two hours because we could not get a
+carriage (very exciting).
+
+“There is one young lady here, only she is not any longer very young,
+who knew Papa when he was a boy. I like her very much; she shall soon
+know me quite to the bottom and is very kind.
+
+“The ill husband of Cousin Teresa who went with us to Meran and lost her
+umbrella and Dr. Edmund was so sorry about it, has been very much worse,
+so she is not here but in Baden. I wrote to her but have no news, so I
+do not know whether he is still living or not, at any rate he can't get
+well again so soon (and I don't think he ever shall). I think as the
+weather is very warm you and Uncle Nic are sitting much out of doors. I
+am sending presents to you all in a wooden box and screwed very firm,
+so you shall have to use again the big screw-driver of Fritz. For Aunt
+Constance, photographs; for Uncle Nic, a green bird on a stand with a
+hole in the back of the bird to put his ashes in; it is a good green and
+not expensif please tell him, because he does not like expensif presents
+(Miss Naylor says the bird has an inquiring eye—it is a parrat); for
+you, a little brooch of turquoise because I like them best; for Dr.
+Edmund a machine to weigh medicines in because he said he could not get
+a good one in Botzen; this is a very good one, the shopman told me so,
+and is the most expensif of all the presents—so that is all my money,
+except two gulden. If Papa shall give me some more, I shall buy for
+Miss Naylor a parasol, because it is useful and the handle of hers is
+'wobbley' (that is one of Dr. Edmund's words and I like it).
+
+“Good-bye for this time. Greta sends you her kiss.
+
+“P. S.—Miss Naylor has read all this letter (except about the parasol)
+and there are several things she did not want me to put, so I have
+copied it without the things, but at the last I have kept that copy
+myself, so that is why this is smudgy and several words are not spelt
+well, but all the things are here.”
+
+Christian read, smiling, but to finish it was like dropping a talisman,
+and her face clouded. A sudden draught blew her hair about, and from
+within, Mr. Treffry's cough mingled with the soughing of the wind;
+the sky was fast blackening. She went indoors, took a pen and began to
+write:
+
+“MY FRIEND,—Why haven't you written to me? It is so, long to wait. Uncle
+says you are in Italy—it is dreadful not to know for certain. I feel you
+would have written if you could; and I can't help thinking of all the
+things that may have happened. I am unhappy. Uncle Nic is ill; he will
+not confess it, that is his way; but he is very ill. Though perhaps you
+will never see this, I must write down all my thoughts. Sometimes I feel
+that I am brutal to be always thinking about you, scheming how to be
+with you again, when he is lying there so ill. How good he has always
+been to me; it is terrible that love should pull one apart so. Surely
+love should be beautiful, and peaceful, instead of filling me with
+bitter, wicked thoughts. I love you—and I love him; I feel as if I were
+torn in two. Why should it be so? Why should the beginning of one life
+mean the ending of another, one love the destruction of another? I
+don't understand. The same spirit makes me love you and him, the same
+sympathy, the same trust—yet it sometimes seems as if I were a criminal
+in loving you. You know what he thinks—he is too honest not to have
+shown you. He has talked to me; he likes you in a way, but you are a
+foreigner—he says-your life is not my life. 'He is not the man for you!'
+Those were his words. And now he doesn't talk to me, but when I am in
+the room he looks at me—that's worse—a thousand times; when he talks it
+rouses me to fight—when it's his eyes only, I'm a coward at once; I feel
+I would do anything, anything, only not to hurt him. Why can't he see?
+Is it because he's old and we are young? He may consent, but he will
+never, never see; it will always hurt him.
+
+“I want to tell you everything; I have had worse thoughts than
+these—sometimes I have thought that I should never have the courage to
+face the struggle which you have to face. Then I feel quite broken; it
+is like something giving way in me. Then I think of you, and it is over;
+but it has been there, and I am ashamed—I told you I was a coward. It's
+like the feeling one would have going out into a storm on a dark night,
+away from a warm fire—only of the spirit not the body—which makes it
+worse. I had to tell you this; you mustn't think of it again, I mean to
+fight it away and forget that it has ever been there. But Uncle
+Nic—what am I to do? I hate myself because I am young, and he is old and
+weak—sometimes I seem even to hate him. I have all sorts of thoughts,
+and always at the end of them, like a dark hole at the end of a passage,
+the thought that I ought to give you up. Ought I? Tell me. I want
+to know, I want to do what is right; I still want to do that, though
+sometimes I think I am all made of evil.
+
+“Do you remember once when we were talking, you said: 'Nature always
+has an answer for every question; you cannot get an answer from laws,
+conventions, theories, words, only from Nature.' What do you say to me
+now; do you tell me it is Nature to come to you in spite of everything,
+and so, that it must be right? I think you would; but can it be Nature
+to do something which will hurt terribly one whom I love and who loves
+me? If it is—Nature is cruel. Is that one of the 'lessons of life'.
+Is that what Aunt Constance means when she says: 'If life were not
+a paradox, we could not get on at all'. I am beginning to see that
+everything has its dark side; I never believed that before.
+
+“Uncle Nic dreads the life for me; he doesn't understand (how should
+he?—he has always had money) how life can be tolerable without money—it
+is horrible that the accident of money should make such difference in
+our lives. I am sometimes afraid myself, and I can't outface that
+fear in him; he sees the shadow of his fear in me—his eyes seem to see
+everything that is in me now; the eyes of old people are the saddest
+things in the world. I am writing like a wretched coward, but you will
+never see this letter I suppose, and so it doesn't matter; but if you
+do, and I pray that you may—well, if I am only worth taking at my best,
+I am not worth taking at all. I want you to know the worst of me—you,
+and no one else.
+
+“With Uncle Nic it is not as with my stepfather; his opposition only
+makes me angry, mad, ready to do anything, but with Uncle Nic I feel so
+bruised—so sore. He said: 'It is not so much the money, because there
+is always mine.' I could never do a thing he cannot bear, and take his
+money, and you would never let me. One knows very little of anything in
+the world till trouble comes. You know how it is with flowers and trees;
+in the early spring they look so quiet and self-contained; then all in
+a moment they change—I think it must be like that with the heart. I used
+to think I knew a great deal, understood why and how things came about;
+I thought self-possession and reason so easy; now I know nothing. And
+nothing in the world matters but to see you and hide away from that look
+in Uncle Nic's eyes. Three months ago I did not know you, now I write
+like this. Whatever I look at, I try to see as you would see; I feel,
+now you are away even more than when you were with me, what your
+thoughts would be, how you would feel about this or that. Some things
+you have said seem always in my mind like lights—”
+
+A slanting drift of rain was striking the veranda tiles with a cold,
+ceaseless hissing. Christian shut the window, and went into her uncle's
+room.
+
+He was lying with closed eyes, growling at Dominique, who moved about
+noiselessly, putting the room ready for the night. When he had finished,
+and with a compassionate bow had left the room, Mr. Treffry opened his
+eyes, and said:
+
+“This is beastly stuff of the doctor's, Chris, it puts my monkey up;
+I can't help swearing after I've taken it; it's as beastly as a vulgar
+woman's laugh, and I don't know anything beastlier than that!”
+
+“I have a letter from Greta, Uncle Nic; shall I read it?”
+
+He nodded, and Christian read the letter, leaving out the mention of
+Harz, and for some undefined reason the part about Sarelli.
+
+“Ay!” said Mr. Treffry with a feeble laugh, “Greta and her money! Send
+her some more, Chris. Wish I were a youngster again; that's a beast of
+a proverb about a dog and his day. I'd like to go fishing again in the
+West Country! A fine time we had when we were youngsters. You don't
+get such times these days. 'Twasn't often the fishing-smacks went out
+without us. We'd watch their lights from our bedroom window; when they
+were swung aboard we were out and down to the quay before you could
+say 'knife.' They always waited for us; but your Uncle Dan was the
+favourite, he was the chap for luck. When I get on my legs, we might
+go down there, you and I? For a bit, just to see? What d'you say, old
+girl?”
+
+Their eyes met.
+
+“I'd like to look at the smack lights going to sea on a dark night; pity
+you're such a duffer in a boat—we might go out with them. Do you a power
+of good! You're not looking the thing, my dear.”
+
+His voice died wistfully, and his glance, sweeping her face, rested on
+her hands, which held and twisted Greta's letter. After a minute or two
+of silence he boomed out again with sudden energy:
+
+“Your aunt'll want to come and sit with me, after dinner; don't let
+her, Chris, I can't stand it. Tell her I'm asleep—the doctor'll be here
+directly; ask him to make up some humbug for you—it's his business.”
+
+He was seized by a violent fit of pain which seemed to stab his breath
+away, and when it was over signed that he would be left alone. Christian
+went back to her letter in the other room, and had written these words,
+when the gong summoned her to dinner:
+
+“I'm like a leaf in the wind, I put out my hand to one thing, and it's
+seized and twisted and flung aside. I want you—I want you; if I could
+see you I think I should know what to do—”
+
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+The rain drove with increasing fury. The night was very black. Nicholas
+Treffry slept heavily. By the side of his bed the night-lamp cast on to
+the opposite wall a bright disc festooned by the hanging shadow of the
+ceiling. Christian was leaning over him. For the moment he filled all
+her heart, lying there, so helpless. Fearful of waking him she slipped
+into the sitting-room. Outside the window stood a man with his face
+pressed to the pane. Her heart thumped; she went up and unlatched the
+window. It was Harz, with the rain dripping off him. He let fall his hat
+and cape.
+
+“You!” she said, touching his sleeve. “You! You!”
+
+He was sodden with wet, his face drawn and tired; a dark growth of beard
+covered his cheeks and chin.
+
+“Where is your uncle?” he said; “I want to see him.”
+
+She put her hand up to his lips, but he caught it and covered it with
+kisses.
+
+“He's asleep—ill—speak gently!”
+
+“I came to him first,” he muttered.
+
+Christian lit the lamp; and he looked at her hungrily without a word.
+
+“It's not possible to go on like this; I came to tell your uncle so.
+He is a man. As for the other, I want to have nothing to do with him! I
+came back on foot across the mountains. It's not possible to go on like
+this, Christian.”
+
+She handed him her letter. He held it to the light, clearing his brow
+of raindrops. When he had read to the last word he gave it her back, and
+whispered: “Come!”
+
+Her lips moved, but she did not speak.
+
+“While this goes on I can't work; I can do nothing. I can't—I won't
+bargain with my work; if it's to be that, we had better end it. What
+are we waiting for? Sooner or later we must come to this. I'm sorry that
+he's ill, God knows! But that changes nothing. To wait is tying me hand
+and foot—it's making me afraid! Fear kills! It will kill you! It kills
+work, and I must work, I can't waste time—I won't! I will sooner give
+you up.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “I love you! I want you!
+Look in my eyes and see if you dare hold back!”
+
+Christian stood with the grip of his strong hands on her shoulders,
+without a movement or sign. Her face was very white. And suddenly he
+began to kiss that pale, still face, to kiss its eyes and lips, to kiss
+it from its chin up to its hair; and it stayed pale, as a white flower,
+beneath those kisses—as a white flower, whose stalk the fingers bend
+back a little.
+
+There was a sound of knocking on the wall; Mr. Treffry called feebly.
+Christian broke away from Harz.
+
+“To-morrow!” he whispered, and picking up his hat and cloak, went out
+again into the rain.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+It was not till morning that Christian fell into a troubled sleep.
+She dreamed that a voice was calling her, and she was filled with a
+helpless, dumb dream terror.
+
+When she woke the light was streaming in; it was Sunday, and the
+cathedral bells were chiming. Her first thought was of Harz. One step,
+one moment of courage! Why had she not told her uncle? If he had only
+asked! But why—why should she tell him? When it was over and she was
+gone, he would see that all was for the best.
+
+Her eyes fell on Greta's empty bed. She sprang up, and bending over,
+kissed the pillow. 'She will mind at first; but she's so young! Nobody
+will really miss me, except Uncle Nic!' She stood along while in the
+window without moving. When she was dressed she called out to her maid:
+
+“Bring me some milk, Barbi; I'm going to church.”
+
+“Ach! gnadiges Fraulein, will you no breakfast have?”
+
+“No thank you, Barbi.”
+
+“Liebes Fraulein, what a beautiful morning after the rain it has become!
+How cool! It is for you good—for the colour in your cheeks; now they
+will bloom again!” and Barbi stroked her own well-coloured cheeks.
+
+Dominique, sunning himself outside with a cloth across his arm, bowed as
+she passed, and smiled affectionately:
+
+“He is better this morning, M'mselle. We march—we are getting on. Good
+news will put the heart into you.”
+
+Christian thought: 'How sweet every one is to-day!'
+
+Even the Villa seemed to greet her, with the sun aslant on it; and the
+trees, trembling and weeping golden tears. At the cathedral she was
+early for the service, but here and there were figures on their knees;
+the faint, sickly odour of long-burnt incense clung in the air; a priest
+moved silently at the far end. She knelt, and when at last she rose the
+service had begun. With the sound of the intoning a sense of peace came
+to her—the peace of resolution. For good or bad she felt that she had
+faced her fate.
+
+She went out with a look of quiet serenity and walked home along the
+dyke. Close to Harz's studio she sat down. Now—it was her own; all that
+had belonged to him, that had ever had a part in him.
+
+An old beggar, who had been watching her, came gently from behind.
+“Gracious lady!” he said, peering at her eyes, “this is the lucky day
+for you. I have lost my luck.”
+
+Christian opened her purse, there was only one coin in it, a gold piece;
+the beggar's eyes sparkled.
+
+She thought suddenly: 'It's no longer mine; I must begin to be careful,'
+but she felt ashamed when she looked at the old man.
+
+“I am sorry,” she said; “yesterday I would have given you this, but—but
+now it's already given.”
+
+He seemed so old and poor—what could she give him? She unhooked a little
+silver brooch at her throat. “You will get something for that,” she
+said; “it's better than nothing. I am very sorry you are so old and
+poor.”
+
+The beggar crossed himself. “Gracious lady,” he muttered, “may you never
+want!”
+
+Christian hurried on; the rustling of leaves soon carried the words
+away. She did not feel inclined to go in, and crossing the bridge began
+to climb the hill. There was a gentle breeze, drifting the clouds across
+the sun; lizards darted out over the walls, looked at her, and whisked
+away.
+
+The sunshine, dappling through the tops of trees, gashed down on a
+torrent. The earth smelt sweet, the vineyards round the white farms
+glistened; everything seemed to leap and dance with sap and life; it was
+a moment of Spring in midsummer. Christian walked on, wondering at her
+own happiness.
+
+'Am I heartless?' she thought. 'I am going to leave him—I am going into
+life; I shall have to fight now, there'll be no looking back.'
+
+The path broke away and wound down to the level of the torrent; on the
+other side it rose again, and was lost among trees. The woods were dank;
+she hastened home.
+
+In her room she began to pack, sorting and tearing up old letters. 'Only
+one thing matters,' she thought; 'singleness of heart; to see your way,
+and keep to it with all your might.'
+
+She looked up and saw Barbi standing before her with towels in her
+hands, and a scared face.
+
+“Are you going a journey, gnadiges Fraulein?”
+
+“I am going away to be married, Barbi,” said Christian at last; “don't
+speak of it to any one, please.”
+
+Barbi leant a little forward with the towels clasped to the blue cotton
+bosom of her dress.
+
+“No, no! I will not speak. But, dear Fraulein, that is a big matter;
+have you well thought?”
+
+“Thought, Barbi? Have I not!”
+
+“But, dear Fraulein, will you be rich?”
+
+“No! I shall be as poor as you.”
+
+“Ach! dear God! that is terrible. Katrina, my sister, she is married;
+she tells me all her life; she tells me it is very hard, and but for the
+money in her stocking it would be harder. Dear Fraulein, think again!
+And is he good? Sometimes they are not good.”
+
+“He is good,” said Christian, rising; “it is all settled!” and she
+kissed Barbi on the cheek.
+
+“You are crying, liebes Fraulein! Think yet again, perhaps it is not
+quite all settled; it is not possible that a maiden should not a way out
+leave?”
+
+Christian smiled. “I don't do things that way, Barbi.”
+
+Barbi hung the towels on the horse, and crossed herself.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+Mr. Treffry's gaze was fixed on a tortoise-shell butterfly fluttering
+round the ceiling. The insect seemed to fascinate him, as things which
+move quickly always fascinate the helpless. Christian came softly in.
+
+“Couldn't stay in bed, Chris,” he called out with an air of guilt. “The
+heat was something awful. The doctor piped off in a huff, just because
+o' this.” He motioned towards a jug of claret-cup and a pipe on the
+table by his elbow. “I was only looking at 'em.”
+
+Christian, sitting down beside him, took up a fan.
+
+“If I could get out of this heat—” he said, and closed his eyes.
+
+'I must tell him,' she thought; 'I can't slink away.'
+
+“Pour me out some of that stuff, Chris.”
+
+She reached for the jug. Yes! She must tell him! Her heart sank.
+
+Mr. Treffry took a lengthy draught. “Broken my promise; don't
+matter—won't hurt any one but me.” He took up the pipe and pressed
+tobacco into it. “I've been lying here with this pain going right
+through me, and never a smoke! D'you tell me anything the parsons say
+can do me half the good of this pipe?” He leaned back, steeped in a
+luxury of satisfaction. He went on, pursuing a private train of thought:
+“Things have changed a lot since my young days. When I was a youngster,
+a young fellow had to look out for peck and perch—he put the future in
+his pocket. He did well or not, according as he had stuff in him.
+Now he's not content with that, it seems—trades on his own opinion of
+himself; thinks he is what he says he's going to be.”
+
+“You are unjust,” said Christian.
+
+Mr. Treffry grunted. “Ah, well! I like to know where I am. If I lend
+money to a man, I like to know whether he's going to pay it back; I may
+not care whether he does or not, but I like to know. The same with other
+things. I don't care what a man has—though, mind you, Chris, it's not
+a bad rule that measures men by the balance at their banks; but when it
+comes to marriage, there's a very simple rule, What's not enough for one
+is not enough for two. You can't talk black white, or bread into your
+mouth. I don't care to speak about myself, as you know, Chris, but
+I tell you this—when I came to London I wanted to marry—I hadn't any
+money, and I had to want. When I had the money—but that's neither here
+nor there!” He frowned, fingering his pipe.
+
+“I didn't ask her, Chris; I didn't think it the square thing; it seems
+that's out of fashion!”
+
+Christian's cheeks were burning.
+
+“I think a lot while I lie here,” Mr. Treffry went on; “nothing much
+else to do. What I ask myself is this: What do you know about what's
+best for you? What do you know of life? Take it or leave it, life's
+not all you think; it's give and get all the way, a fair start is
+everything.”
+
+Christian thought: 'Will he never see?'
+
+Mr. Treffry went on:
+
+“I get better every day, but I can't last for ever. It's not pleasant to
+lie here and know that when I'm gone there'll be no one to keep a hand
+on the check string!”
+
+“Don't talk like that, dear!” Christian murmured.
+
+“It's no use blinking facts, Chris. I've lived a long time in the world;
+I've seen things pretty well as they are; and now there's not much left
+for me to think about but you.”
+
+“But, Uncle, if you loved him, as I do, you couldn't tell me to be
+afraid! It's cowardly and mean to be afraid. You must have forgotten!”
+
+Mr. Treffry closed his eyes.
+
+“Yes,” he said; “I'm old.”
+
+The fan had dropped into Christian's lap; it rested on her white frock
+like a large crimson leaf; her eyes were fixed on it.
+
+Mr. Treffry looked at her. “Have you heard from him?” he asked with
+sudden intuition.
+
+“Last night, in that room, when you thought I was talking to Dominique—”
+
+The pipe fell from his hand.
+
+“What!” he stammered: “Back?”
+
+Christian, without looking up, said:
+
+“Yes, he's back; he wants me—I must go to him, Uncle.”
+
+There was a long silence.
+
+“You must go to him?” he repeated.
+
+She longed to fling herself down at his knees, but he was so still, that
+to move seemed impossible; she remained silent, with folded hands.
+
+Mr. Treffry spoke:
+
+“You'll let me know—before—you—go. Goodnight!”
+
+Christian stole out into the passage. A bead curtain rustled in the
+draught; voices reached her.
+
+“My honour is involved, or I would give the case up.”
+
+“He is very trying, poor Nicholas! He always had that peculiar quality
+of opposition; it has brought him to grief a hundred times. There is
+opposition in our blood; my family all have it. My eldest brother died
+of it; with my poor sister, who was as gentle as a lamb, it took the
+form of doing the right thing in the wrong place. It is a matter of
+temperament, you see. You must have patience.”
+
+“Patience,” repeated Dawney's voice, “is one thing; patience where there
+is responsibility is another. I've not had a wink of sleep these last
+two nights.”
+
+There was a faint, shrill swish of silk.
+
+“Is he so very ill?”
+
+Christian held her breath. The answer came at last.
+
+“Has he made his will? With this trouble in the side again, I tell you
+plainly, Mrs. Decie, there's little or no chance.”
+
+Christian put her hands up to her ears, and ran out into the air. What
+was she about to do, then—to leave him dying!
+
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+On the following day Harz was summoned to the Villa. Mr. Treffry had
+just risen, and was garbed in a dressing-suit, old and worn, which had a
+certain air of magnificence. His seamed cheeks were newly shaved.
+
+“I hope I see you well,” he said majestically.
+
+Thinking of the drive and their last parting, Harz felt sorry and
+ashamed. Suddenly Christian came into the room; she stood for a moment
+looking at him; then sat down.
+
+“Chris!” said Mr. Treffry reproachfully. She shook her head, and did not
+move; mournful and intent, her eyes seemed full of secret knowledge.
+
+Mr. Treffry spoke:
+
+“I've no right to blame you, Mr. Harz, and Chris tells me you came
+to see me first, which is what I would have expected of you; but you
+shouldn't have come back.”
+
+“I came back, sir, because I found I was obliged. I must speak out.”
+
+“I ask nothing better,” Mr. Treffry replied.
+
+Harz looked again at Christian; but she made no sign, sitting with her
+chin resting on her hands.
+
+“I have come for her,” he said; “I can make my living—enough for both of
+us. But I can't wait.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+Harz made no answer.
+
+Mr. Treffry boomed out again: “Why? Isn't she worth waiting for? Isn't
+she worth serving for?”
+
+“I can't expect you to understand me,” the painter said. “My art is my
+life to me. Do you suppose that if it wasn't I should ever have left my
+village; or gone through all that I've gone through, to get as far even
+as I am? You tell me to wait. If my thoughts and my will aren't free,
+how can I work? I shan't be worth my salt. You tell me to go back to
+England—knowing she is here, amongst you who hate me, a thousand miles
+away. I shall know that there's a death fight going on in her and
+outside her against me—you think that I can go on working under these
+conditions. Others may be able, I am not. That's the plain truth. If I
+loved her less—”
+
+There was a silence, then Mr. Treffry said:
+
+“It isn't fair to come here and ask what you're asking. You don't know
+what's in the future for you, you don't know that you can keep a wife.
+It isn't pleasant, either, to think you can't hold up your head in your
+own country.”
+
+Harz turned white.
+
+“Ah! you bring that up again!” he broke out. “Seven years ago I was a
+boy and starving; if you had been in my place you would have done what I
+did. My country is as much to me as your country is to you. I've been
+an exile seven years, I suppose I shall always be I've had punishment
+enough; but if you think I am a rascal, I'll go and give myself up.” He
+turned on his heel.
+
+“Stop! I beg your pardon! I never meant to hurt you. It isn't easy for
+me to eat my words,” Mr. Treffry said wistfully, “let that count for
+something.” He held out his hand.
+
+Harz came quickly back and took it. Christian's gaze was never for a
+moment withdrawn; she seemed trying to store up the sight of him within
+her. The light darting through the half-closed shutters gave her eyes
+a strange, bright intensity, and shone in the folds of her white dress
+like the sheen of birds' wings.
+
+Mr. Treffry glanced uneasily about him. “God knows I don't want anything
+but her happiness,” he said. “What is it to me if you'd murdered your
+mother? It's her I'm thinking of.”
+
+“How can you tell what is happiness to her? You have your own ideas of
+happiness—not hers, not mine. You can't dare to stop us, sir!”
+
+“Dare?” said Mr. Treffry. “Her father gave her over to me when she was
+a mite of a little thing; I've known her all her life. I've—I've loved
+her—and you come here with your 'dare'.” His hand dragged at his beard,
+and shook as though palsied.
+
+A look of terror came into Christian's face.
+
+“All right, Chris! I don't ask for quarter, and I don't give it!”
+
+Harz made a gesture of despair.
+
+“I've acted squarely by you, sir,” Mr. Treffry went on, “I ask the same
+of you. I ask you to wait, and come like an honest man, when you can
+say, 'I see my way—here's this and that for her.' What makes this art
+you talk of different from any other call in life? It doesn't alter
+facts, or give you what other men have no right to expect. It doesn't
+put grit into you, or keep your hands clean, or prove that two and two
+make five.”
+
+Harz answered bitterly:
+
+“You know as much of art as I know of money. If we live a thousand years
+we shall never understand each other. I am doing what I feel is best for
+both of us.”
+
+Mr. Treffry took hold of the painter's sleeve.
+
+“I make you an offer,” he said. “Your word not to see or write to her
+for a year! Then, position or not, money or no money, if she'll have
+you, I'll make it right for you.”
+
+“I could not take your money.”
+
+A kind of despair seemed suddenly to seize on Mr. Nicholas Treffry. He
+rose, and stood towering over them.
+
+“All my life—” he said; but something seemed to click deep down in his
+throat, and he sank back in his seat.
+
+“Go!” whispered Christian, “go!” But Mr. Treffry found his voice again:
+“It's for the child to say. Well, Chris!”
+
+Christian did not speak.
+
+It was Harz who broke the silence. He pointed to Mr. Treffry.
+
+“You know I can't tell you to come with—that, there. Why did you send
+for me?” And, turning, he went out.
+
+Christian sank on her knees, burying her face in her hands. Mr. Treffry
+pressed his handkerchief with a stealthy movement to his mouth. It was
+dyed crimson with the price of his victory.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+A telegram had summoned Herr Paul from Vienna. He had started forthwith,
+leaving several unpaid accounts to a more joyful opportunity, amongst
+them a chemist's bill, for a wonderful quack medicine of which he
+brought six bottles.
+
+He came from Mr. Treffry's room with tears rolling down his cheeks,
+saying:
+
+“Poor Nicholas! Poor Nicholas! Il n'a pas de chance!”
+
+It was difficult to find any one to listen; the women were scared and
+silent, waiting for the orders that were now and then whispered through
+the door. Herr Paul could not bear this silence, and talked to his
+servant for half an hour, till Fritz also vanished to fetch something
+from the town. Then in despair Herr Paul went to his room.
+
+It was hard not to be allowed to help—it was hard to wait! When the
+heart was suffering, it was frightful! He turned and, looking furtively
+about him, lighted a cigar. Yes, it came to every one—at some time or
+other; and what was it, that death they talked of? Was it any worse than
+life? That frightful jumble people made for themselves! Poor Nicholas!
+After all, it was he that had the luck!
+
+His eyes filled with tears, and drawing a penknife from his pocket,
+he began to stab it into the stuffing of his chair. Scruff, who sat
+watching the chink of light under the door, turned his head, blinked at
+him, and began feebly tapping with a claw.
+
+It was intolerable, this uncertainty—to be near, and yet so far, was not
+endurable!
+
+Herr Paul stepped across the room. The dog, following, threw his
+black-marked muzzle upwards with a gruff noise, and went back to the
+door. His master was holding in his hand a bottle of champagne.
+
+Poor Nicholas! He had chosen it. Herr Paul drained a glass.
+
+Poor Nicholas! The prince of fellows, and of what use was one? They kept
+him away from Nicholas!
+
+Herr Paul's eyes fell on the terrier. “Ach! my dear,” he said, “you and
+I, we alone are kept away!”
+
+He drained a second glass.
+
+What was it? This life! Froth-like that! He tossed off a third glass.
+Forget! If one could not help, it was better to forget!
+
+He put on his hat. Yes. There was no room for him there! He was not
+wanted!
+
+He finished the bottle, and went out into the passage. Scruff ran and
+lay down at Mr. Treffry's door. Herr Paul looked at him. “Ach!” he said,
+tapping his chest, “ungrateful hound!” And opening the front door he
+went out on tiptoe....
+
+Late that afternoon Greta stole hatless through the lilac bushes; she
+looked tired after her night journey, and sat idly on a chair in the
+speckled shadow of a lime-tree.
+
+'It is not like home,' she thought; 'I am unhappy. Even the birds are
+silent, but perhaps that is because it is so hot. I have never been
+sad like this—for it is not fancy that I am sad this time, as it is
+sometimes. It is in my heart like the sound the wind makes through a
+wood, it feels quite empty in my heart. If it is always like this to be
+unhappy, then I am sorry for all the unhappy things in the world; I am
+sorrier than I ever was before.'
+
+A shadow fell on the grass, she raised her eyes, and saw Dawney.
+
+“Dr. Edmund!” she whispered.
+
+Dawney turned to her; a heavy furrow showed between his brows. His eyes,
+always rather close together, stared painfully.
+
+“Dr. Edmund,” Greta whispered, “is it true?”
+
+He took her hand, and spread his own palm over it.
+
+“Perhaps,” he said; “perhaps not. We must hope.”
+
+Greta looked up, awed.
+
+“They say he is dying.”
+
+“We have sent for the best man in Vienna.”
+
+Greta shook her head.
+
+“But you are clever, Dr. Edmund; and you are afraid.”
+
+“He is brave,” said Dawney; “we must all be brave, you know. You too!”
+
+“Brave?” repeated Greta; “what is it to be brave? If it is not to cry
+and make a fuss—that I can do. But if it is not to be sad in here,” she
+touched her breast, “that I cannot do, and it shall not be any good for
+me to try.”
+
+“To be brave is to hope; don't give up hope, dear.”
+
+“No,” said Greta, tracing the pattern of the sunlight on her skirt. “But
+I think that when we hope, we are not brave, because we are expecting
+something for ourselves. Chris says that hope is prayer, and if it is
+prayer, then all the time we are hoping, we are asking for something,
+and it is not brave to ask for things.”
+
+A smile curved Dawney's mouth.
+
+“Go on, Philosopher!” he said. “Be brave in your own way, it will be
+just as good as anybody else's.”
+
+“What are you going to do to be brave, Dr. Edmund?”
+
+“I? Fight! If only we had five years off his life!”
+
+Greta watched him as he walked away.
+
+“I shall never be brave,” she mourned; “I shall always be wanting to be
+happy.” And, kneeling down, she began to disentangle a fly, imprisoned
+in a cobweb. A plant of hemlock had sprung up in the long grass by her
+feet. Greta thought, dismayed: 'There are weeds!'
+
+It seemed but another sign of the death of joy.
+
+'But it's very beautiful,' she thought, 'the blossoms are like stars. I
+am not going to pull it up. I will leave it; perhaps it will spread all
+through the garden; and if it does I do not care, for now things are not
+like they used to be and I do not, think they ever shall be again.'
+
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+The days went by; those long, hot days, when the heat haze swims
+up about ten of the forenoon, and, as the sun sinks level with the
+mountains, melts into golden ether which sets the world quivering with
+sparkles.
+
+At the lighting of the stars those sparkles die, vanishing one by one
+off the hillsides; evening comes flying down the valleys, and life rests
+under her cool wings. The night falls; and the hundred little voices of
+the night arise.
+
+It was near grape-gathering, and in the heat the fight for Nicholas
+Treffry's life went on, day in, day out, with gleams of hope and moments
+of despair. Doctors came, but after the first he refused to see them.
+
+“No,” he said to Dawney—“throwing away money. If I pull through it won't
+be because of them.”
+
+For days together he would allow no one but Dawney, Dominique, and the
+paid nurse in the room.
+
+“I can stand it better,” he said to Christian, “when I don't see any of
+you; keep away, old girl, and let me get on with it!”
+
+To have been able to help would have eased the tension of her nerves,
+and the aching of her heart. At his own request they had moved his bed
+into a corner so that he might face the wall. There he would lie for
+hours together, not speaking a word, except to ask for drink.
+
+Sometimes Christian crept in unnoticed, and sat watching, with her arms
+tightly folded across her breast. At night, after Greta was asleep,
+she would toss from side to side, muttering feverish prayers. She spent
+hours at her little table in the schoolroom, writing letters to Harz
+that were never sent. Once she wrote these words: “I am the most wicked
+of all creatures—I have even wished that he may die!” A few minutes
+afterwards Miss Naylor found her with her head buried on her arms.
+Christian sprang up; tears were streaming down her cheeks. “Don't touch
+me!” she cried, and rushed away. Later, she stole into her uncle's
+room, and sank down on the floor beside the bed. She sat there silently,
+unnoticed all the evening. When night came she could hardly be persuaded
+to leave the room.
+
+One day Mr. Treffry expressed a wish to see Herr Paul; it was a long
+while before the latter could summon courage to go in.
+
+“There's a few dozen of the Gordon sherry at my Chambers, in London,
+Paul,” Mr. Treffry said; “I'd be glad to think you had 'em. And my man,
+Dominique, I've made him all right in my will, but keep your eye on him;
+he's a good sort for a foreigner, and no chicken, but sooner or later,
+the women'll get hold of him. That's all I had to say. Send Chris to
+me.”
+
+Herr Paul stood by the bedside speechless. Suddenly he blurted out.
+
+“Ah! my dear! Courage! We are all mortal. You will get well!” All the
+morning he walked about quite inconsolable. “It was frightful to see
+him, you know, frightful! An iron man could not have borne it.”
+
+When Christian came to him, Mr. Treffry raised himself and looked at her
+a long while.
+
+His wistful face was like an accusation. But that very afternoon the
+news came from the sickroom that he was better, having had no pain for
+several hours.
+
+Every one went about with smiles lurking in their eyes, and ready to
+break forth at a word. In the kitchen Barbi burst out crying, and,
+forgetting to toss the pan, spoiled a Kaiser-Schmarn she was making.
+Dominique was observed draining a glass of Chianti, and solemnly casting
+forth the last drops in libation. An order was given for tea to be
+taken out under the acacias, where it was always cool; it was felt that
+something in the nature of high festival was being held. Even Herr Paul
+was present; but Christian did not come. Nobody spoke of illness; to
+mention it might break the spell.
+
+Miss Naylor, who had gone into the house, came back, saying:
+
+“There is a strange man standing over there by the corner of the house.”
+
+“Really!” asked Mrs. Decie; “what does he want?”
+
+Miss Naylor reddened. “I did not ask him. I—don't—know—whether he is
+quite respectable. His coat is buttoned very close, and he—doesn't
+seem—to have a—collar.”
+
+“Go and see what he wants, dear child,” Mrs. Decie said to Greta.
+
+“I don't know—I really do not know—” began Miss Naylor; “he has
+very—high—boots,” but Greta was already on her way, with hands clasped
+behind her, and demure eyes taking in the stranger's figure.
+
+“Please?” she said, when she was close to him.
+
+The stranger took his cap off with a jerk.
+
+“This house has no bells,” he said in a nasal voice; “it has a tendency
+to discourage one.”
+
+“Yes,” said Greta gravely, “there is a bell, but it does not ring now,
+because my uncle is so ill.”
+
+“I am very sorry to hear that. I don't know the people here, but I am
+very sorry to hear that.
+
+“I would be glad to speak a few words to your sister, if it is your
+sister that I want.”
+
+And the stranger's face grew very red.
+
+“Is it,” said Greta, “that you are a friend of Herr Harz? If you are a
+friend of his, you will please come and have some tea, and while you are
+having tea I will look for Chris.”
+
+Perspiration bedewed the stranger's forehead.
+
+“Tea? Excuse me! I don't drink tea.”
+
+“There is also coffee,” Greta said.
+
+The stranger's progress towards the arbour was so slow that Greta
+arrived considerably before him.
+
+“It is a friend of Herr Harz,” she whispered; “he will drink coffee. I
+am going to find Chris.”
+
+“Greta!” gasped Miss Naylor.
+
+Mrs. Decie put up her hand.
+
+“Ah!” she said, “if it is so, we must be very nice to him for
+Christian's sake.”
+
+Miss Naylor's face grew soft.
+
+“Ah, yes!” she said; “of course.”
+
+“Bah!” muttered Herr Paul, “that recommences.'
+
+“Paul!” murmured Mrs. Decie, “you lack the elements of wisdom.”
+
+Herr Paul glared at the approaching stranger.
+
+Mrs. Decie had risen, and smilingly held out her hand.
+
+“We are so glad to know you; you are an artist too, perhaps? I take
+a great interest in art, and especially in that school which Mr. Harz
+represents.”
+
+The stranger smiled.
+
+“He is the genuine article, ma'am,” he said. “He represents no school,
+he is one of that kind whose corpses make schools.”
+
+“Ah!” murmured Mrs. Decie, “you are an American. That is so nice. Do sit
+down! My niece will soon be here.”
+
+Greta came running back.
+
+“Will you come, please?” she said. “Chris is ready.”
+
+Gulping down his coffee, the stranger included them all in a single bow,
+and followed her.
+
+“Ach!” said Herr Paul, “garcon tres chic, celui-la!”
+
+Christian was standing by her little table. The stranger began.
+
+“I am sending Mr. Harz's things to England; there are some pictures
+here. He would be glad to have them.”
+
+A flood of crimson swept over her face.
+
+“I am sending them to London,” the stranger repeated; “perhaps you could
+give them to me to-day.”
+
+“They are ready; my sister will show you.”
+
+Her eyes seemed to dart into his soul, and try to drag something from
+it. The words rushed from her lips:
+
+“Is there any message for me?”
+
+The stranger regarded her curiously.
+
+“No,” he stammered, “no! I guess not. He is well.... I wish....” He
+stopped; her white face seemed to flash scorn, despair, and entreaty on
+him all at once. And turning, she left him standing there.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+When Christian went that evening to her uncle's room he was sitting up
+in bed, and at once began to talk. “Chris,” he said, “I can't stand this
+dying by inches. I'm going to try what a journey'll do for me. I want
+to get back to the old country. The doctor's promised. There's a shot
+in the locker yet! I believe in that young chap; he's stuck to me like
+a man.... It'll be your birthday, on Tuesday, old girl, and you'll be
+twenty. Seventeen years since your father died. You've been a lot to
+me.... A parson came here today. That's a bad sign. Thought it his duty!
+Very civil of him! I wouldn't see him, though. If there's anything
+in what they tell you, I'm not going to sneak in at this time o' day.
+There's one thing that's rather badly on my mind. I took advantage of
+Mr. Harz with this damned pitifulness of mine. You've a right to look at
+me as I've seen you sometimes when you thought I was asleep. If I hadn't
+been ill he'd never have left you. I don't blame you, Chris—not I! You
+love me? I know that, my dear. But one's alone when it comes to the
+run-in. Don't cry! Our minds aren't Sunday-school books; you're finding
+it out, that's all!” He sighed and turned away.
+
+The noise of sun-blinds being raised vibrated through the house. A
+feeling of terror seized on the girl; he lay so still, and yet the
+drawing of each breath was a fight. If she could only suffer in his
+place! She went close, and bent over him.
+
+“It's air we want, both you and I!” he muttered. Christian beckoned to
+the nurse, and stole out through the window.
+
+A regiment was passing in the road; she stood half-hidden amongst the
+lilac bushes watching. The poplar leaves drooped lifeless and almost
+black above her head, the dust raised by the soldiers' feet hung in
+the air; it seemed as if in all the world no freshness and no life were
+stirring. The tramp of feet died away. Suddenly within arm's length of
+her a man appeared, his stick shouldered like a sword. He raised his
+hat.
+
+“Good-evening! You do not remember me? Sarelli. Pardon! You looked like
+a ghost standing there. How badly those fellows marched! We hang, you
+see, on the skirts of our profession and criticise; it is all we are fit
+for.” His black eyes, restless and malevolent like a swan's, seemed to
+stab her face. “A fine evening! Too hot. The storm is wanted; you feel
+that? It is weary waiting for the storm; but after the storm, my dear
+young lady, comes peace.” He smiled, gently, this time, and baring his
+head again, was lost to view in the shadow of the trees.
+
+His figure had seemed to Christian like the sudden vision of a
+threatening, hidden force. She thrust out her hands, as though to keep
+it off.
+
+No use; it was within her, nothing could keep it away! She went to Mrs.
+Decie's room, where her aunt and Miss Naylor were conversing in low
+tones. To hear their voices brought back the touch of this world of
+everyday which had no part or lot in the terrifying powers within her.
+
+Dawney slept at the Villa now. In the dead of night he was awakened by
+a light flashed in his eyes. Christian was standing there, her face pale
+and wild with terror, her hair falling in dark masses on her shoulders.
+
+“Save him! Save him!” she cried. “Quick! The bleeding!”
+
+He saw her muffle her face in her white sleeves, and seizing the candle,
+leaped out of bed and rushed away.
+
+The internal haemorrhage had come again, and Nicholas Treffry wavered
+between life and death. When it had ceased, he sank into a sort of
+stupor. About six o'clock he came back to consciousness; watching his
+eyes, they could see a mental struggle taking place within him. At last
+he singled Christian out from the others by a sign.
+
+“I'm beat, Chris,” he whispered. “Let him know, I want to see him.”
+
+His voice grew a little stronger. “I thought that I could see it
+through—but here's the end.” He lifted his hand ever so little, and let
+it fall again. When told a little later that a telegram had been sent to
+Harz his eyes expressed satisfaction.
+
+Herr Paul came down in ignorance of the night's events. He stopped in
+front of the barometer and tapped it, remarking to Miss Naylor: “The
+glass has gone downstairs; we shall have cool weather—it will still go
+well with him!”
+
+When, with her brown face twisted by pity and concern, she told him that
+it was a question of hours, Herr Paul turned first purple, then
+pale, and sitting down, trembled violently. “I cannot believe it,” he
+exclaimed almost angrily. “Yesterday he was so well! I cannot believe
+it! Poor Nicholas! Yesterday he spoke to me!” Taking Miss Naylor's hand,
+he clutched it in his own. “Ah!” he cried, letting it go suddenly, and
+striking at his forehead, “it is too terrible; only yesterday he spoke
+to me of sherry. Is there nobody, then, who can do good?”
+
+“There is only God,” replied Miss Naylor softly.
+
+“God?” said Herr Paul in a scared voice.
+
+“We—can—all—pray to Him,” Miss Naylor murmured; little spots of colour
+came into her cheeks. “I am going to do it now.”
+
+Herr Paul raised her hand and kissed it.
+
+“Are you?” he said; “good! I too.” He passed through his study door,
+closed it carefully behind him, then for some unknown reason set his
+back against it. Ugh! Death! It came to all! Some day it would come to
+him. It might come tomorrow! One must pray!
+
+The day dragged to its end. In the sky clouds had mustered, and,
+crowding close on one another, clung round the sun, soft, thick,
+greywhite, like the feathers on a pigeon's breast. Towards evening
+faint tremblings were felt at intervals, as from the shock of immensely
+distant earthquakes.
+
+Nobody went to bed that night, but in the morning the report was the
+same: “Unconscious—a question of hours.” Once only did he recover
+consciousness, and then asked for Harz. A telegram had come from him,
+he was on the way. Towards seven of the evening the long-expected
+storm broke in a sky like ink. Into the valleys and over the crests of
+mountains it seemed as though an unseen hand were spilling goblets
+of pale wine, darting a sword-blade zigzag over trees, roofs, spires,
+peaks, into the very firmament, which answered every thrust with
+great bursts of groaning. Just beyond the veranda Greta saw a glowworm
+shining, as it might be a tiny bead of the fallen lightning. Soon the
+rain covered everything. Sometimes a jet of light brought the hilltops,
+towering, dark, and hard, over the house, to disappear again behind the
+raindrops and shaken leaves. Each breath drawn by the storm was like the
+clash of a thousand cymbals; and in his room Mr. Treffry lay unconscious
+of its fury.
+
+Greta had crept in unobserved; and sat curled in a corner, with Scruff
+in her arms, rocking slightly to and fro. When Christian passed, she
+caught her skirt, and whispered: “It is your birthday, Chris!”
+
+Mr. Treffry stirred.
+
+“What's that? Thunder?—it's cooler. Where am I? Chris!”
+
+Dawney signed for her to take his place.
+
+“Chris!” Mr. Treffry said. “It's near now.” She bent across him, and her
+tears fell on his forehead.
+
+“Forgive!” she whispered; “love me!”
+
+He raised his finger, and touched her cheek.
+
+For an hour or more he did not speak, though once or twice he moaned,
+and faintly tightened his pressure on her fingers. The storm had died
+away, but very far off the thunder was still muttering.
+
+His eyes opened once more, rested on her, and passed beyond, into that
+abyss dividing youth from age, conviction from conviction, life from
+death.
+
+At the foot of the bed Dawney stood covering his face; behind him
+Dominique knelt with hands held upwards; the sound of Greta's breathing,
+soft in sleep, rose and fell in the stillness.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+One afternoon in March, more than three years after Mr. Treffry's death,
+Christian was sitting at the window of a studio in St. John's Wood.
+The sky was covered with soft, high clouds, through which shone little
+gleams of blue. Now and then a bright shower fell, sprinkling the trees,
+where every twig was curling upwards as if waiting for the gift of its
+new leaves. And it seemed to her that the boughs thickened and budded
+under her very eyes; a great concourse of sparrows had gathered on those
+boughs, and kept raising a shrill chatter. Over at the far side of the
+room Harz was working at a picture.
+
+On Christian's face was the quiet smile of one who knows that she
+has only to turn her eyes to see what she wishes to see; of one whose
+possessions are safe under her hand. She looked at Harz with that
+possessive smile. But as into the brain of one turning in his bed grim
+fancies will suddenly leap up out of warm nothingness, so there leaped
+into her mind the memory of that long ago dawn, when he had found her
+kneeling by Mr. Treffry's body. She seemed to see again the dead face,
+so gravely quiet, and furrowless. She seemed to see her lover and
+herself setting forth silently along the river wall where they had
+first met; sitting down, still silent, beneath the poplar-tree where the
+little bodies of the chafers had lain strewn in the Spring. To see the
+trees changing from black to grey, from grey to green, and in the dark
+sky long white lines of cloud, lighting to the south like birds; and,
+very far away, rosy peaks watching the awakening of the earth. And now
+once again, after all that time, she felt her spirit shrink away from
+his; as it had shrunk in that hour, when she had seemed hateful to
+herself. She remembered the words she had spoken: “I have no heart left.
+You've torn it in two between you. Love is all self—I wanted him to
+die.” She remembered too the raindrops on the vines like a million tiny
+lamps, and the throstle that began singing. Then, as dreams die out into
+warm nothingness, recollection vanished, and the smile came back to her
+lips.
+
+She took out a letter.
+
+“....O Chris! We are really coming; I seem to be always telling it to
+myself, and I have told Scruff many times, but he does not care, because
+he is getting old. Miss Naylor says we shall arrive for breakfast, and
+that we shall be hungry, but perhaps she will not be very hungry, if it
+is rough. Papa said to me: 'Je serai inconsolable, mais inconsolable!'
+But I think he will not be, because he is going to Vienna. When we are
+come, there will be nobody at Villa Rubein; Aunt Constance has gone a
+fortnight ago to Florence. There is a young man at her hotel; she says
+he will be one of the greatest playwriters in England, and she sent me a
+play of his to read; it was only a little about love, I did not like it
+very much.... O Chris! I think I shall cry when I see you. As I am quite
+grown up, Miss Naylor is not to come back with me; sometimes she is sad,
+but she will be glad to see you, Chris. She seems always sadder when it
+is Spring. Today I walked along the wall; the little green balls of wool
+are growing on the poplars already, and I saw one chafer; it will not be
+long before the cherry blossom comes; and I felt so funny, sad and happy
+together, and once I thought that I had wings and could fly away up the
+valley to Meran—but I had none, so I sat on the bench where we sat the
+day we took the pictures, and I thought and thought; there was nothing
+came to me in my thoughts, but all was sweet and a little noisy, and
+rather sad; it was like the buzzing of the chafer, in my head; and now I
+feel so tired and all my blood is running up and down me. I do not mind,
+because I know it is the Spring.
+
+“Dominique came to see us the other day; he is very well, and is half
+the proprietor of the Adler Hotel, at Meran; he is not at all different,
+and he asked about you and about Alois—do you know, Chris, to myself I
+call him Herr Harz, but when I have seen him this time I shall call him
+Alois in my heart also.
+
+“I have a letter from Dr. Edmund; he is in London, so perhaps you have
+seen him, only he has a great many patients and some that he has 'hopes
+of killing soon'. especially one old lady, because she is always wanting
+him to do things for her, and he is never saying 'No,' so he does not
+like her. He says that he is getting old. When I have finished this
+letter I am going to write and tell him that perhaps he shall see me
+soon, and then I think he will be very sad. Now that the Spring is come
+there are more flowers to take to Uncle Nic's grave, and every day, when
+I am gone, Barbi is to take them so that he shall not miss you, Chris,
+because all the flowers I put there are for you.
+
+“I am buying some toys without paint on for my niece.
+
+“O Chris! this will be the first baby that I have known.
+
+“I am only to stay three weeks with you, but I think when I am once
+there I shall be staying longer. I send a kiss for my niece, and to Herr
+Harz, my love—that is the last time I shall call him Herr Harz; and to
+you, Chris, all the joy that is in my heart.—Your loving
+
+“GRETA.”
+
+Christian rose, and, turning very softly, stood, leaning her elbows on
+the back of a high seat, looking at her husband.
+
+In her eyes there was a slow, clear, faintly smiling, yet yearning look,
+as though this strenuous figure bent on its task were seen for a moment
+as something apart, and not all the world to her.
+
+“Tired?” asked Harz, putting his lips to her hand.
+
+“No, it's only—what Greta says about the Spring; it makes one want more
+than one has got.”
+
+Slipping her hand away, she went back to the window. Harz stood, looking
+after her; then, taking up his palette, again began painting.
+
+In the world, outside, the high soft clouds flew by; the trees seemed
+thickening and budding.
+
+And Christian thought:
+
+'Can we never have quite enough?'
+
+December 1890.
+
+
+
+
+
+TO MY FATHER
+
+
+
+
+
+A MAN OF DEVON
+
+
+
+
+
+I “MOOR, 20th July.
+
+.... It is quiet here, sleepy, rather—a farm is never quiet; the sea,
+too, is only a quarter of a mile away, and when it's windy, the sound
+of it travels up the combe; for distraction, you must go four miles to
+Brixham or five to Kingswear, and you won't find much then. The farm
+lies in a sheltered spot, scooped, so to speak, high up the combe
+side—behind is a rise of fields, and beyond, a sweep of down. You have
+the feeling of being able to see quite far, which is misleading, as
+you soon find out if you walk. It is true Devon country-hills, hollows,
+hedge-banks, lanes dipping down into the earth or going up like the
+sides of houses, coppices, cornfields, and little streams wherever
+there's a place for one; but the downs along the cliff, all gorse and
+ferns, are wild. The combe ends in a sandy cove with black rock on one
+side, pinkish cliffs away to the headland on the other, and a coastguard
+station. Just now, with the harvest coming on, everything looks its
+richest, the apples ripening, the trees almost too green. It's very
+hot, still weather; the country and the sea seem to sleep in the sun.
+In front of the farm are half-a-dozen pines that look as if they had
+stepped out of another land, but all round the back is orchard as lush,
+and gnarled, and orthodox as any one could wish. The house, a long,
+white building with three levels of roof, and splashes of brown all over
+it, looks as if it might be growing down into the earth. It was freshly
+thatched two years ago—and that's all the newness there is about it;
+they say the front door, oak, with iron knobs, is three hundred years
+old at least. You can touch the ceilings with your hand. The windows
+certainly might be larger—a heavenly old place, though, with a flavour
+of apples, smoke, sweetbriar, bacon, honeysuckle, and age, all over it.
+
+The owner is a man called John Ford, about seventy, and seventeen stone
+in weight—very big, on long legs, with a grey, stubbly beard, grey,
+watery eyes, short neck and purplish complexion; he is asthmatic, and
+has a very courteous, autocratic manner. His clothes are made of Harris
+tweed—except on Sundays, when he puts on black—a seal ring, and a thick
+gold cable chain. There's nothing mean or small about John Ford; I
+suspect him of a warm heart, but he doesn't let you know much about him.
+He's a north-country man by birth, and has been out in New Zealand all
+his life. This little Devonshire farm is all he has now. He had a large
+“station” in the North Island, and was much looked up to, kept
+open house, did everything, as one would guess, in a narrow-minded,
+large-handed way. He came to grief suddenly; I don't quite know how. I
+believe his only son lost money on the turf, and then, unable to face
+his father, shot himself; if you had seen John Ford, you could imagine
+that. His wife died, too, that year. He paid up to the last penny, and
+came home, to live on this farm. He told me the other night that he had
+only one relation in the world, his granddaughter, who lives here with
+him. Pasiance Voisey—old spelling for Patience, but they pronounce,
+it Pash-yence—is sitting out here with me at this moment on a sort of
+rustic loggia that opens into the orchard. Her sleeves are rolled up,
+and she's stripping currants, ready for black currant tea. Now and then
+she rests her elbows on the table, eats a berry, pouts her lips, and,
+begins again. She has a round, little face; a long, slender body; cheeks
+like poppies; a bushy mass of black-brown hair, and dark-brown, almost
+black, eyes; her nose is snub; her lips quick, red, rather full; all her
+motions quick and soft. She loves bright colours. She's rather like a
+little cat; sometimes she seems all sympathy, then in a moment as hard
+as tortoise-shell. She's all impulse; yet she doesn't like to show her
+feelings; I sometimes wonder whether she has any. She plays the violin.
+
+It's queer to see these two together, queer and rather sad. The old man
+has a fierce tenderness for her that strikes into the very roots of
+him. I see him torn between it, and his cold north-country horror of his
+feelings; his life with her is an unconscious torture to him. She's a
+restless, chafing thing, demure enough one moment, then flashing out
+into mocking speeches or hard little laughs. Yet she's fond of him in
+her fashion; I saw her kiss him once when he was asleep. She obeys him
+generally—in a way as if she couldn't breathe while she was doing it.
+She's had a queer sort of education—history, geography, elementary
+mathematics, and nothing else; never been to school; had a few lessons
+on the violin, but has taught herself most of what she knows. She is
+well up in the lore of birds, flowers, and insects; has three cats, who
+follow her about; and is full of pranks. The other day she called out to
+me, “I've something for you. Hold out your hand and shut your eyes!”
+It was a large, black slug! She's the child of the old fellow's only
+daughter, who was sent home for schooling at Torquay, and made a runaway
+match with one Richard Voisey, a yeoman farmer, whom she met in the
+hunting-field. John Ford was furious—his ancestors, it appears, used to
+lead ruffians on the Cumberland side of the Border—he looked on “Squire”
+Rick Voisey as a cut below him. He was called “Squire,” as far as I can
+make out, because he used to play cards every evening with a parson in
+the neighbourhood who went by the name of “Devil” Hawkins. Not that the
+Voisey stock is to be despised. They have had this farm since it was
+granted to one Richard Voysey by copy dated 8th September, 13 Henry
+VIII. Mrs. Hopgood, the wife of the bailiff—a dear, quaint, serene old
+soul with cheeks like a rosy, withered apple, and an unbounded love of
+Pasiance—showed me the very document.
+
+“I kape it,” she said. “Mr. Ford be tu proud—but other folks be proud
+tu. 'Tis a pra-aper old fam'ly: all the women is Margery, Pasiance,
+or Mary; all the men's Richards an' Johns an' Rogers; old as they
+apple-trees.”
+
+Rick Voisey was a rackety, hunting fellow, and “dipped” the old farm
+up to its thatched roof. John Ford took his revenge by buying up the
+mortgages, foreclosing, and commanding his daughter and Voisey to go
+on living here rent free; this they dutifully did until they were both
+killed in a dog-cart accident, eight years ago. Old Ford's financial
+smash came a year later, and since then he's lived here with Pasiance.
+I fancy it's the cross in her blood that makes her so restless, and
+irresponsible: if she had been all a native she'd have been happy enough
+here, or all a stranger like John Ford himself, but the two strains
+struggling for mastery seem to give her no rest. You'll think this a
+far-fetched theory, but I believe it to be the true one. She'll stand
+with lips pressed together, her arms folded tight across her narrow
+chest, staring as if she could see beyond the things round her; then
+something catches her attention, her eyes will grow laughing, soft, or
+scornful all in a minute! She's eighteen, perfectly fearless in a
+boat, but you can't get her to mount a horse—a sore subject with her
+grandfather, who spends most of his day on a lean, half-bred pony, that
+carries him like a feather, for all his weight.
+
+They put me up here as a favour to Dan Treffry; there's an arrangement
+of L. s. d. with Mrs. Hopgood in the background. They aren't at all well
+off; this is the largest farm about, but it doesn't bring them in
+much. To look at John Ford, it seems incredible he should be short of
+money—he's too large.
+
+We have family prayers at eight, then, breakfast—after that freedom for
+writing or anything else till supper and evening prayers. At midday one
+forages for oneself. On Sundays, two miles to church twice, or you
+get into John Ford's black books.... Dan Treffry himself is staying at
+Kingswear. He says he's made his pile; it suits him down here—like a
+sleep after years of being too wide-awake; he had a rough time in New
+Zealand, until that mine made his fortune. You'd hardly remember him;
+he reminds me of his uncle, old Nicholas Treffry; the same slow way of
+speaking, with a hesitation, and a trick of repeating your name with
+everything he says; left-handed too, and the same slow twinkle in his
+eyes. He has a dark, short beard, and red-brown cheeks; is a little bald
+on the temples, and a bit grey, but hard as iron. He rides over nearly
+every day, attended by a black spaniel with a wonderful nose and a
+horror of petticoats. He has told me lots of good stories of John Ford
+in the early squatter's times; his feats with horses live to this day;
+and he was through the Maori wars; as Dan says, “a man after Uncle Nic's
+own heart.”
+
+They are very good friends, and respect each other; Dan has a great
+admiration for the old man, but the attraction is Pasiance. He talks
+very little when she's in the room, but looks at her in a sidelong,
+wistful sort of way. Pasiance's conduct to him would be cruel in any one
+else, but in her, one takes it with a pinch of salt. Dan goes off, but
+turns up again as quiet and dogged as you please.
+
+Last night, for instance, we were sitting in the loggia after supper.
+Pasiance was fingering the strings of her violin, and suddenly Dan (a
+bold thing for him) asked her to play.
+
+“What!” she said, “before men? No, thank you!”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“Because I hate them.”
+
+Down came John Ford's hand on the wicker table: “You forget yourself! Go
+to bed!”
+
+She gave Dan a look, and went; we could hear her playing in her bedroom;
+it sounded like a dance of spirits; and just when one thought she had
+finished, out it would break again like a burst of laughter. Presently,
+John Ford begged our pardons ceremoniously, and stumped off indoors. The
+violin ceased; we heard his voice growling at her; down he came
+again. Just as he was settled in his chair there was a soft swish, and
+something dark came falling through the apple boughs. The violin! You
+should have seen his face! Dan would have picked the violin up, but the
+old man stopped him. Later, from my bedroom window, I saw John Ford come
+out and stand looking at the violin. He raised his foot as if to stamp
+on it. At last he picked it up, wiped it carefully, and took it in....
+
+My room is next to hers. I kept hearing her laugh, a noise too as if she
+were dragging things about the room. Then I fell asleep, but woke with
+a start, and went to the window for a breath of fresh air. Such a black,
+breathless night! Nothing to be seen but the twisted, blacker branches;
+not the faintest stir of leaves, no sound but muffled grunting from the
+cowhouse, and now and then a faint sigh. I had the queerest feeling
+of unrest and fear, the last thing to expect on such a night. There is
+something here that's disturbing; a sort of suppressed struggle. I've
+never in my life seen anything so irresponsible as this girl, or so
+uncompromising as the old man; I keep thinking of the way he wiped that
+violin. It's just as if a spark would set everything in a blaze. There's
+a menace of tragedy—or—perhaps it's only the heat, and too much of
+Mother Hopgood's crame....
+
+
+
+
+
+II “Tuesday.
+
+.... I've made a new acquaintance. I was lying in the orchard, and
+presently, not seeing me, he came along—a man of middle height, with
+a singularly good balance, and no lumber—rather old blue clothes, a
+flannel shirt, a dull red necktie, brown shoes, a cap with a leather
+peak pushed up on the forehead. Face long and narrow, bronzed with a
+kind of pale burnt-in brownness; a good forehead. A brown moustache,
+beard rather pointed, blackening about the cheeks; his chin not visible,
+but from the beard's growth must be big; mouth I should judge sensuous.
+Nose straight and blunt; eyes grey, with an upward look, not exactly
+frank, because defiant; two parallel furrows down each cheek, one
+from the inner corner of the eye, one from the nostril; age perhaps
+thirty-five. About the face, attitude, movements, something immensely
+vital, adaptable, daring, and unprincipled.
+
+He stood in front of the loggia, biting his fingers, a kind of
+nineteenth-century buccaneer, and I wondered what he was doing in this
+galley. They say you can tell a man of Kent or a Somersetshire man;
+certainly you can tell a Yorkshire man, and this fellow could only have
+been a man of Devon, one of the two main types found in this county. He
+whistled; and out came Pasiance in a geranium-coloured dress, looking
+like some tall poppy—you know the slight droop of a poppy's head, and
+the way the wind sways its stem.... She is a human poppy, her fuzzy
+dark hair is like a poppy's lustreless black heart, she has a poppy's
+tantalising attraction and repulsion, something fatal, or rather
+fateful. She came walking up to my new friend, then caught sight of me,
+and stopped dead.
+
+“That,” she said to me, “is Zachary Pearse. This,” she said to him, “is
+our lodger.” She said it with a wonderful soft malice. She wanted to
+scratch me, and she scratched. Half an hour later I was in the yard,
+when up came this fellow Pearse.
+
+“Glad to know you,” he said, looking thoughtfully at the pigs.
+
+“You're a writer, aren't you?”
+
+“A sort of one,” I said.
+
+“If by any chance,” he said suddenly, “you're looking for a job, I could
+put something in your way. Walk down to the beach with me, and I'll tell
+you; my boat's at anchor, smartest little craft in these parts.”
+
+It was very hot, and I had no desire whatever to go down to the beach—I
+went, all the same. We had not gone far when John Ford and Dan Treffry
+came into the lane. Our friend seemed a little disconcerted, but soon
+recovered himself. We met in the middle of the lane, where there was
+hardly room to pass. John Ford, who looked very haughty, put on his
+pince-nez and stared at Pearse.
+
+“Good-day!” said Pearse; “fine weather! I've been up to ask Pasiance
+to come for a sail. Wednesday we thought, weather permitting; this
+gentleman's coming. Perhaps you'll come too, Mr. Treffry. You've never
+seen my place. I'll give you lunch, and show you my father. He's worth a
+couple of hours' sail any day.” It was said in such an odd way that
+one couldn't resent his impudence. John Ford was seized with a fit of
+wheezing, and seemed on the eve of an explosion; he glanced at me, and
+checked himself.
+
+“You're very good,” he said icily; “my granddaughter has other things
+to do. You, gentlemen, will please yourselves”; and, with a very slight
+bow, he went stumping on to the house. Dan looked at me, and I looked at
+him.
+
+“You'll come?” said Pearse, rather wistfully. Dan stammered: “Thank you,
+Mr. Pearse; I'm a better man on a horse than in a boat, but—thank you.”
+Cornered in this way, he's a shy, soft-hearted being. Pearse smiled his
+thanks. “Wednesday, then, at ten o'clock; you shan't regret it.”
+
+“Pertinacious beggar!” I heard Dan mutter in his beard; and found myself
+marching down the lane again by Pearse's side. I asked him what he was
+good enough to mean by saying I was coming, without having asked me. He
+answered, unabashed:
+
+“You see, I'm not friends with the old man; but I knew he'd not be
+impolite to you, so I took the liberty.”
+
+He has certainly a knack of turning one's anger to curiosity. We were
+down in the combe now; the tide was running out, and the sand all
+little, wet, shining ridges. About a quarter of a mile out lay a cutter,
+with her tan sail half down, swinging to the swell. The sunlight was
+making the pink cliffs glow in the most wonderful way; and shifting
+in bright patches over the sea like moving shoals of goldfish. Pearse
+perched himself on his dinghy, and looked out under his hand. He seemed
+lost in admiration.
+
+“If we could only net some of those spangles,” he said, “an' make gold
+of 'em! No more work then.”
+
+“It's a big job I've got on,” he said presently; “I'll tell you about it
+on Wednesday. I want a journalist.”
+
+“But I don't write for the papers,” I said; “I do other sort of work. My
+game is archaeology.”
+
+“It doesn't matter,” he said, “the more imagination the better. It'd be
+a thundering good thing for you.”
+
+His assurance was amazing, but it was past supper-time, and hunger
+getting the better of my curiosity, I bade him good-night. When I looked
+back, he was still there, on the edge of his boat, gazing at the sea. A
+queer sort of bird altogether, but attractive somehow.
+
+Nobody mentioned him that evening; but once old Ford, after staring
+a long time at Pasiance, muttered a propos of nothing, “Undutiful
+children!” She was softer than usual; listening quietly to our talk,
+and smiling when spoken to. At bedtime she went up to her grand-father,
+without waiting for the usual command, “Come and kiss me, child.”
+
+Dan did not stay to supper, and he has not been here since. This morning
+I asked Mother Hopgood who Zachary Pearse was. She's a true Devonian;
+if there's anything she hates, it is to be committed to a definite
+statement. She ambled round her answer, and at last told me that he
+was “son of old Cap'en Jan Pearse to Black Mill. 'Tes an old family to
+Dartymouth an' Plymouth,” she went on in a communicative outburst. “They
+du say Francis Drake tuke five o' they Pearses with 'en to fight
+the Spaniards. At least that's what I've heard Mr. Zachary zay; but
+Ha-apgood can tell yu.” Poor Hopgood, the amount of information she
+saddles him with in the course of the day! Having given me thus to
+understand that she had run dry, she at once went on:
+
+“Cap'en Jan Pearse made a dale of ventures. He's old now—they du say
+nigh an 'undred. Ha-apgood can tell yu.”
+
+“But the son, Mrs. Hopgood?”
+
+Her eyes twinkled with sudden shrewdness: She hugged herself placidly.
+
+“An' what would yu take for dinner to-day? There's duck; or yu might
+like 'toad in the hole,' with an apple tart; or then, there's—Well!
+we'll see what we can du like.” And off she went, without waiting for my
+answer.
+
+To-morrow is Wednesday. I shan't be sorry to get another look at this
+fellow Pearse....
+
+
+
+
+
+III “Friday, 29th July.
+
+.... Why do you ask me so many questions, and egg me on to write about
+these people instead of minding my business? If you really want to hear,
+I'll tell you of Wednesday's doings.
+
+It was a splendid morning; and Dan turned up, to my surprise—though I
+might have known that when he says a thing, he does it. John Ford came
+out to shake hands with him, then, remembering why he had come, breathed
+loudly, said nothing, and went in again. Nothing was to be seen of
+Pasiance, and we went down to the beach together.
+
+“I don't like this fellow Pearse, George,” Dan said to me on the way; “I
+was fool enough to say I'd go, and so I must, but what's he after? Not
+the man to do things without a reason, mind you.”
+
+I remarked that we should soon know.
+
+“I'm not so sure—queer beggar; I never look at him without thinking of a
+pirate.”
+
+The cutter lay in the cove as if she had never moved. There too was
+Zachary Pearse seated on the edge of his dinghy.
+
+“A five-knot breeze,” he said, “I'll run you down in a couple of hours.”
+He made no inquiry about Pasiance, but put us into his cockleshell and
+pulled for the cutter. A lantern-Jawed fellow, named Prawle, with
+a spiky, prominent beard, long, clean-shaven upper lip, and tanned
+complexion—a regular hard-weather bird—received us.
+
+The cutter was beautifully clean; built for a Brixham trawler, she still
+had her number—DH 113—uneffaced. We dived into a sort of cabin, airy,
+but dark, fitted with two bunks and a small table, on which stood some
+bottles of stout; there were lockers, too, and pegs for clothes. Prawle,
+who showed us round, seemed very proud of a steam contrivance for
+hoisting sails. It was some minutes before we came on deck again; and
+there, in the dinghy, being pulled towards the cutter, sat Pasiance.
+
+“If I'd known this,” stammered Dan, getting red, “I wouldn't have come.”
+She had outwitted us, and there was nothing to be done.
+
+It was a very pleasant sail. The breeze was light from the south-east,
+the sun warm, the air soft. Presently Pasiance began singing:
+
+“Columbus is dead and laid in his grave, Oh! heigh-ho! and laid in his
+grave; Over his head the apple-trees wave Oh! heigh-ho! the apple-trees
+wave....
+
+“The apples are ripe and ready to fall, Oh! heigh-ho! and ready to
+fall; There came an old woman and gathered them all, Oh! heigh-ho! and
+gathered them all....
+
+“The apples are gathered, and laid on the shelf, Oh! heigh-ho! and laid
+on the shelf; If you want any more, you must sing for yourself, Oh!
+heigh-ho! and sing for yourself.”
+
+Her small, high voice came to us in trills and spurts, as the wind let
+it, like the singing of a skylark lost in the sky. Pearse went up to her
+and whispered something. I caught a glimpse of her face like a startled
+wild creature's; shrinking, tossing her hair, laughing, all in the same
+breath. She wouldn't sing again, but crouched in the bows with her chin
+on her hands, and the sun falling on one cheek, round, velvety, red as a
+peach....
+
+We passed Dartmouth, and half an hour later put into a little wooded
+bay. On a low reddish cliff was a house hedged round by pine-trees. A
+bit of broken jetty ran out from the bottom of the cliff. We hooked on
+to this, and landed. An ancient, fish-like man came slouching down and
+took charge of the cutter. Pearse led us towards the house, Pasiance
+following mortally shy all of a sudden.
+
+The house had a dark, overhanging thatch of the rush reeds that grow
+in the marshes hereabouts; I remember nothing else remarkable. It was
+neither old, nor new; neither beautiful, nor exactly ugly; neither
+clean, nor entirely squalid; it perched there with all its windows over
+the sea, turning its back contemptuously on the land.
+
+Seated in a kind of porch, beside an immense telescope, was a very
+old man in a panama hat, with a rattan cane. His pure-white beard and
+moustache, and almost black eyebrows, gave a very singular, piercing
+look to his little, restless, dark-grey eyes; all over his mahogany
+cheeks and neck was a network of fine wrinkles. He sat quite upright, in
+the full sun, hardly blinking.
+
+“Dad!” said Zachary, “this is Pasiance Voisey.” The old man turned his
+eyes on her and muttered, “How do you do, ma'am?” then took no further
+notice. And Pasiance, who seemed to resent this, soon slipped away and
+went wandering about amongst the pines. An old woman brought some plates
+and bottles and laid them casually on a table; and we sat round the
+figure of old Captain Pearse without a word, as if we were all under a
+spell.
+
+Before lunch there was a little scene between Zachary Pearse and Dan,
+as to which of them should summon Pasiance. It ended in both going, and
+coming back without her. She did not want any lunch, would stay where
+she was amongst the pines.
+
+For lunch we had chops, wood-pigeons, mushrooms, and mulberry preserve,
+and drank wonderful Madeira out of common wine-glasses. I asked the old
+man where he got it; he gave me a queer look, and answered with a little
+bow:
+
+“Stood me in tu shillin' the bottle, an' the country got nothing out of
+it, sir. In the early Thirties; tu shillin' the bottle; there's no such
+wine nowadays and,” he added, looking at Zachary, “no such men.”
+
+Zachary smiled and said: “You did nothing so big, dad, as what I'm
+after, now!”
+
+The old man's eyes had a sort of disdain in them.
+
+“You're going far, then, in the Pied Witch, Zack?”
+
+“I am,” said Zachary.
+
+“And where might yu be goin' in that old trampin' smut factory?”
+
+“Morocco.”
+
+“Heu!” said the old man, “there's nothing there; I know that coast, as
+I know the back o' my hand.” He stretched out a hand covered with veins
+and hair.
+
+Zachary began suddenly to pour out a flood of words:
+
+“Below Mogador—a fellow there—friend of mine—two years ago now.
+Concessions—trade-gunpowder—cruisers—feuds—money— chiefs—Gatling
+guns—Sultan—rifles—rebellion—gold.” He detailed a reckless, sordid, bold
+scheme, which, on the pivot of a trading venture, was intended to spin a
+whole wheel of political convulsions.
+
+“They'll never let you get there,” said old Pearse.
+
+“Won't they?” returned Zachary. “Oh yes, they will, an' when I leave,
+there'll be another dynasty, and I'll be a rich man.”
+
+“Yu'll never leave,” answered the old man.
+
+Zachary took out a sheet of paper covered with figures. He had
+worked the whole thing out. So much—equipment, so much—trade, so
+much—concessions, so much—emergencies. “My last mag!” he ended, “a
+thousand short; the ship's ready, and if I'm not there within a month my
+chance is as good as gone.”
+
+This was the pith of his confidences—an appeal for money, and we all
+looked as men will when that crops up.
+
+“Mad!” muttered the old man, looking at the sea.
+
+“No,” said Zachary. That one word was more eloquent than all the rest of
+his words put together. This fellow is no visionary. His scheme may be
+daring, and unprincipled, but—he knows very well what he's about.
+
+“Well!” said old Pearse, “you shall have five 'undred of my money, if
+it's only to learn what yu're made of. Wheel me in!” Zachary wheeled him
+into the house, but soon came back.
+
+“The old man's cheque for five hundred pounds!” he said, holding it
+up. “Mr. Treffry, give me another, and you shall have a third of the
+profits.”
+
+I expected Dan to give a point-blank refusal. But he only asked:
+
+“Would that clear you for starting?”
+
+“With that,” said Zachary, “I can get to sea in a fortnight.”
+
+“Good!” Dan said slowly. “Give me a written promise! To sea in fourteen
+days and my fair share on the five hundred pounds—no more—no less.”
+
+Again I thought Pearse would have jumped at this, but he leaned his chin
+on his hand, and looked at Dan, and Dan looked at him. While they were
+staring at each other like this, Pasiance came up with a kitten.
+
+“See!” she said, “isn't it a darling?” The kitten crawled and clawed
+its way up behind her neck. I saw both men's eyes as they looked at
+Pasiance, and suddenly understood what they were at. The kitten rubbed
+itself against Pasiance's cheek, overbalanced, and fell, clawing, down
+her dress. She caught it up and walked away. Some one, I don't know
+which of us, sighed, and Pearse cried “Done!”
+
+The bargain had been driven.
+
+“Good-bye, Mr. Pearse,” said Dan; “I guess that's all I'm wanted for.
+I'll find my pony waiting in the village. George, you'll see Pasiance
+home?”
+
+We heard the hoofs of his pony galloping down the road; Pearse suddenly
+excused himself, and disappeared.
+
+This venture of his may sound romantic and absurd, but it's
+matter-of-fact enough. He's after L. s. d.! Shades of Drake, Raleigh,
+Hawkins, Oxenham! The worm of suspicion gnaws at the rose of romance.
+What if those fellows, too, were only after L. s. d....?
+
+I strolled into the pine-wood. The earth there was covered like a bee's
+body with black and gold stripes; there was the blue sea below, and
+white, sleepy clouds, and bumble-bees booming above the heather; it
+was all softness, a summer's day in Devon. Suddenly I came on Pearse
+standing at the edge of the cliff with Pasiance sitting in a little
+hollow below, looking up at him. I heard him say:
+
+“Pasiance—Pasiance!” The sound of his voice, and the sight of her soft,
+wondering face made me furious. What business has she with love, at her
+age? What business have they with each other?
+
+He told me presently that she had started off for home, and drove me to
+the ferry, behind an old grey pony. On the way he came back to his offer
+of the other day.
+
+“Come with me,” he said. “It doesn't do to neglect the Press; you can
+see the possibilities. It's one of the few countries left. If I once
+get this business started you don't know where it's going to stop. You'd
+have free passage everywhere, and whatever you like in reason.”
+
+I answered as rudely as I could—but by no means as rudely as I
+wanted—that his scheme was mad. As a matter of fact, it's much too sane
+for me; for, whatever the body of a scheme, its soul is the fibre of the
+schemer.
+
+“Think of it,” he urged, as if he could see into me. “You can make what
+you like of it. Press paragraphs, of course. But that's mechanical; why,
+even I could do it, if I had time. As for the rest, you'll be as free—as
+free as a man.”
+
+There, in five words of one syllable, is the kernel of this fellow
+Pearse—“As free as a man!” No rule, no law, not even the mysterious
+shackles that bind men to their own self-respects! “As free as a man!”
+No ideals; no principles; no fixed star for his worship; no coil he
+can't slide out of! But the fellow has the tenacity of one of the old
+Devon mastiffs, too. He wouldn't take “No” for an answer.
+
+“Think of it,” he said; “any day will do—I've got a fortnight.... Look!
+there she is!” I thought that he meant Pasiance; but it was an old
+steamer, sluggish and black in the blazing sun of mid-stream, with a
+yellow-and-white funnel, and no sign of life on her decks.
+
+“That's her—the Pied Witch! Do her twelve knots; you wouldn't think it!
+Well! good-evening! You'd better come. A word to me at any time. I'm
+going aboard now.”
+
+As I was being ferried across I saw him lolling in the stern-sheets of a
+little boat, the sun crowning his straw hat with glory.
+
+I came on Pasiance, about a mile up the road, sitting in the hedge.
+We walked on together between the banks—Devonshire banks, as high
+as houses, thick with ivy and ferns, bramble and hazel boughs, and
+honeysuckle.
+
+“Do you believe in a God?” she said suddenly.
+
+“Grandfather's God is simply awful. When I'm playing the fiddle, I can
+feel God; but grandfather's is such a stuffy God—you know what I mean:
+the sea, the wind, the trees, colours too—they make one feel. But I
+don't believe that life was meant to 'be good' in. Isn't there anything
+better than being good? When I'm 'good,' I simply feel wicked.” She
+reached up, caught a flower from the hedge, and slowly tore its petals.
+
+“What would you do,” she muttered, “if you wanted a thing, but were
+afraid of it? But I suppose you're never afraid!” she added, mocking
+me. I admitted that I was sometimes afraid, and often afraid of being
+afraid.
+
+“That's nice! I'm not afraid of illness, nor of grandfather, nor of his
+God; but—I want to be free. If you want a thing badly, you're afraid
+about it.”
+
+I thought of Zachary Pearse's words, “free as a man.”
+
+“Why are you looking at me like that?” she said.
+
+I stammered: “What do you mean by freedom?”
+
+“Do you know what I shall do to-night?” she answered. “Get out of my
+window by the apple-tree, and go to the woods, and play!”
+
+We were going down a steep lane, along the side of a wood, where there's
+always a smell of sappy leaves, and the breath of the cows that come
+close to the hedge to get the shade.
+
+There was a cottage in the bottom, and a small boy sat outside playing
+with a heap of dust.
+
+“Hallo, Johnny!” said Pasiance. “Hold your leg out and show this man
+your bad place!” The small boy undid a bandage round his bare and dirty
+little leg, and proudly revealed a sore.
+
+“Isn't it nasty?” cried Pasiance ruefully, tying up the bandage again;
+“poor little feller! Johnny, see what I've brought you!” She produced
+from her pocket a stick of chocolate, the semblance of a soldier made of
+sealing-wax and worsted, and a crooked sixpence.
+
+It was a new glimpse of her. All the way home she was telling me the
+story of little Johnny's family; when she came to his mother's death,
+she burst out: “A beastly shame, wasn't it, and they're so poor; it
+might just as well have been somebody else. I like poor people, but I
+hate rich ones—stuck-up beasts.”
+
+Mrs. Hopgood was looking over the gate, with her cap on one side, and
+one of Pasiance's cats rubbing itself against her skirts. At the sight
+of us she hugged herself.
+
+“Where's grandfather?” asked Pasiance. The old lady shook her head.
+
+“Is it a row?” Mrs. Hopgood wriggled, and wriggled, and out came:
+
+“Did you get yure tay, my pretty? No? Well, that's a pity; yu'll be
+falin' low-like.”
+
+Pasiance tossed her head, snatched up the cat, and ran indoors. I
+remained staring at Mrs. Hopgood.
+
+“Dear-dear,” she clucked, “poor lamb. So to spake it's—” and she blurted
+out suddenly, “chuckin' full of wra-ath, he is. Well, there!”
+
+My courage failed that evening. I spent it at the coastguard station,
+where they gave me bread and cheese and some awful cider. I passed the
+kitchen as I came back. A fire was still burning there, and two figures,
+misty in the darkness, flitted about with stealthy laughter like spirits
+afraid of being detected in a carnal-meal. They were Pasiance and Mrs.
+Hopgood; and so charming was the smell of eggs and bacon, and they had
+such an air of tender enjoyment of this dark revel, that I stifled many
+pangs, as I crept hungry up to bed.
+
+In the middle of the night I woke and heard what I thought was
+screaming; then it sounded like wind in trees, then like the distant
+shaking of a tambourine, with the high singing of a human voice.
+Suddenly it stopped—two long notes came wailing out like sobs—then utter
+stillness; and though I listened for an hour or more there was no other
+sound ....
+
+
+
+
+
+IV “4th August.
+
+.... For three days after I wrote last, nothing at all happened here.
+I spent the mornings on the cliff reading, and watching the sun-sparks
+raining on the sea. It's grand up there with the gorse all round, the
+gulls basking on the rocks, the partridges calling in the corn, and
+now and then a young hawk overhead. The afternoons I spent out in the
+orchard. The usual routine goes on at the farm all the time—cow-milking,
+bread-baking, John Ford riding in and out, Pasiance in her garden
+stripping lavender, talking to the farm hands; and the smell of clover,
+and cows and hay; the sound of hens and pigs and pigeons, the soft drawl
+of voices, the dull thud of the farm carts; and day by day the apples
+getting redder. Then, last Monday, Pasiance was away from sunrise
+till sunset—nobody saw her go—nobody knew where she had gone. It was a
+wonderful, strange day, a sky of silver-grey and blue, with a drift of
+wind-clouds, all the trees sighing a little, the sea heaving in a long,
+low swell, the animals restless, the birds silent, except the gulls with
+their old man's laughter and kitten's mewing.
+
+A something wild was in the air; it seemed to sweep across the downs and
+combe, into the very house, like a passionate tune that comes drifting
+to your ears when you're sleepy. But who would have thought the absence
+of that girl for a few hours could have wrought such havoc! We were like
+uneasy spirits; Mrs. Hopgood's apple cheeks seemed positively to wither
+before one's eyes. I came across a dairymaid and farm hand discussing
+it stolidly with very downcast faces. Even Hopgood, a hard-bitten fellow
+with immense shoulders, forgot his imperturbability so far as to harness
+his horse, and depart on what he assured me was “just a wild-guse
+chaace.” It was long before John Ford gave signs of noticing that
+anything was wrong, but late in the afternoon I found him sitting with
+his hands on his knees, staring straight before him. He rose heavily
+when he saw me, and stalked out. In the evening, as I was starting for
+the coastguard station to ask for help to search the cliff, Pasiance
+appeared, walking as if she could hardly drag one leg after the other.
+Her cheeks were crimson; she was biting her lips to keep tears of sheer
+fatigue out of her eyes. She passed me in the doorway without a word.
+The anxiety he had gone through seemed to forbid the old man from
+speaking. He just came forward, took her face in his hands, gave it a
+great kiss, and walked away. Pasiance dropped on the floor in the dark
+passage, and buried her face on her arms. “Leave me alone!” was all
+she would say. After a bit she dragged herself upstairs. Presently Mrs.
+Hopgood came to me.
+
+“Not a word out of her—an' not a bite will she ate, an' I had a pie all
+ready—scrumptious. The good Lord knows the truth—she asked for brandy;
+have you any brandy, sir? Ha-apgood'e don't drink it, an' Mister Ford 'e
+don't allaow for anything but caowslip wine.”
+
+I had whisky.
+
+The good soul seized the flask, and went off hugging it. She returned it
+to me half empty.
+
+“Lapped it like a kitten laps milk. I misdaoubt it's straong, poor
+lamb, it lusened 'er tongue praaperly. 'I've a-done it,' she says to me,
+'Mums-I've a-done it,' an' she laughed like a mad thing; and then, sir,
+she cried, an' kissed me, an' pusshed me thru the door. Gude Lard! What
+is 't she's a-done...?”
+
+It rained all the next day and the day after. About five o'clock
+yesterday the rain ceased; I started off to Kingswear on Hopgood's
+nag to see Dan Treffry. Every tree, bramble, and fern in the lanes was
+dripping water; and every bird singing from the bottom of his heart.
+I thought of Pasiance all the time. Her absence that day was still a
+mystery; one never ceased asking oneself what she had done. There are
+people who never grow up—they have no right to do things. Actions have
+consequences—and children have no business with consequences.
+
+Dan was out. I had supper at the hotel, and rode slowly home. In the
+twilight stretches of the road, where I could touch either bank of
+the lane with my whip, I thought of nothing but Pasiance and her
+grandfather; there was something in the half light suited to wonder and
+uncertainty. It had fallen dark before I rode into the straw-yard. Two
+young bullocks snuffled at me, a sleepy hen got up and ran off with a
+tremendous shrieking. I stabled the horse, and walked round to the
+back. It was pitch black under the apple-trees, and the windows were all
+darkened. I stood there a little, everything smelled so delicious after
+the rain; suddenly I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was being
+watched. Have you ever felt like that on a dark night? I called out at
+last: “Is any one there?” Not a sound! I walked to the gate-nothing! The
+trees still dripped with tiny, soft, hissing sounds, but that was all. I
+slipped round to the front, went in, barricaded the door, and groped up
+to bed. But I couldn't sleep. I lay awake a long while; dozed at last,
+and woke with a jump. A stealthy murmur of smothered voices was going
+on quite close somewhere. It stopped. A minute passed; suddenly came the
+soft thud as of something falling. I sprang out of bed and rushed to
+the window. Nothing—but in the distance something that sounded like
+footsteps. An owl hooted; then clear as crystal, but quite low, I heard
+Pasiance singing in her room:
+
+“The apples are ripe and ready to fall. Oh! heigh-ho! and ready to
+fall.”
+
+I ran to her door and knocked.
+
+“What is it?” she cried.
+
+“Is anything the matter?”
+
+“Matter?”
+
+“Is anything the matter?”
+
+“Ha-ha-ha-ha! Good-night!” then quite low, I heard her catch her breath,
+hard, sharply. No other answer, no other sound.
+
+I went to bed and lay awake for hours....
+
+This evening Dan came; during supper he handed Pasiance a roll of music;
+he had got it in Torquay. The shopman, he said, had told him that it was
+a “corker.”
+
+It was Bach's “Chaconne.” You should have seen her eyes shine, her
+fingers actually tremble while she turned over the pages. Seems odd to
+think of her worshipping at the shrine of Bach as odd as to think of a
+wild colt running of its free will into the shafts; but that's just it
+with her you can never tell. “Heavenly!” she kept saying.
+
+John Ford put down his knife and fork.
+
+“Heathenish stuff!” he muttered, and suddenly thundered out, “Pasiance!”
+
+She looked up with a start, threw the music from her, and resumed her
+place.
+
+During evening prayers, which follow every night immediately on food,
+her face was a study of mutiny. She went to bed early. It was rather
+late when we broke up—for once old Ford had been talking of his
+squatter's life. As we came out, Dan held up his hand. A dog was
+barking. “It's Lass,” he said. “She'll wake Pasiance.”
+
+The spaniel yelped furiously. Dan ran out to stop her. He was soon back.
+
+“Somebody's been in the orchard, and gone off down to the cove.” He ran
+on down the path. I, too, ran, horribly uneasy. In front, through the
+darkness, came the spaniel's bark; the lights of the coastguard station
+faintly showed. I was first on the beach; the dog came to me at once,
+her tail almost in her mouth from apology. There was the sound of oars
+working in rowlocks; nothing visible but the feathery edges of the
+waves. Dan said behind, “No use! He's gone.” His voice sounded hoarse,
+like that of a man choking with passion.
+
+“George,” he stammered, “it's that blackguard. I wish I'd put a bullet
+in him.” Suddenly a light burned up in the darkness on the sea, seemed
+to swing gently, and vanished. Without another word we went back up the
+hill. John Ford stood at the gate motionless, indifferent—nothing had
+dawned on him as yet. I whispered to Dan, “Let it alone!”
+
+“No,” he said, “I'm going to show you.” He struck a match, and slowly
+hunted the footsteps in the wet grass of the orchard. “Look—here!”
+
+He stopped under Pasiance's window and swayed the match over the ground.
+Clear as daylight were the marks of some one who had jumped or fallen.
+Dan held the match over his head.
+
+“And look there!” he said. The bough of an apple-tree below the window
+was broken. He blew the match out.
+
+I could see the whites of his eyes, like an angry animal's.
+
+“Drop it, Dan!” I said.
+
+He turned on his heel suddenly, and stammered out, “You're right.”
+
+But he had turned into John Ford's arms.
+
+The old man stood there like some great force, darker than the darkness,
+staring up at the window, as though stupefied. We had not a word to
+say. He seemed unconscious of our presence. He turned round, and left us
+standing there.
+
+“Follow him!” said Dan. “Follow him—by God! it's not safe.”
+
+We followed. Bending, and treading heavily, he went upstairs. He struck
+a blow on Pasiance's door. “Let me in!” he said. I drew Dan into my
+bedroom. The key was slowly turned, her door was flung open, and there
+she stood in her dressing-gown, a candle in her hand, her face crimson,
+and oh! so young, with its short, crisp hair and round cheeks. The old
+man—like a giant in front of her—raised his hands, and laid them on her
+shoulders.
+
+“What's this? You—you've had a man in your room?”
+
+Her eyes did not drop.
+
+“Yes,” she said. Dan gave a groan.
+
+“Who?”
+
+“Zachary Pearse,” she answered in a voice like a bell.
+
+He gave her one awful shake, dropped his hands, then raised them as
+though to strike her. She looked him in the eyes; his hands dropped, and
+he too groaned. As far as I could see, her face never moved.
+
+“I'm married to him,” she said, “d' you hear? Married to him. Go out of
+my room!” She dropped the candle on the floor at his feet, and slammed
+the door in his face. The old man stood for a minute as though stunned,
+then groped his way downstairs.
+
+“Dan,” I said, “is it true?”
+
+“Ah!” he answered, “it's true; didn't you hear her?”
+
+I was glad I couldn't see his face.
+
+“That ends it,” he said at last; “there's the old man to think of.”
+
+“What will he do?”
+
+“Go to the fellow this very night.” He seemed to have no doubt. Trust
+one man of action to know another.
+
+I muttered something about being an outsider—wondered if there was
+anything I could do to help.
+
+“Well,” he said slowly, “I don't know that I'm anything but an outsider
+now; but I'll go along with him, if he'll have me.”
+
+He went downstairs. A few minutes later they rode out from the
+straw-yard. I watched them past the line of hayricks, into the blacker
+shadows of the pines, then the tramp of hoofs began to fail in the
+darkness, and at last died away.
+
+I've been sitting here in my bedroom writing to you ever since, till my
+candle's almost gone. I keep thinking what the end of it is to be; and
+reproaching myself for doing nothing. And yet, what could I have done?
+I'm sorry for her—sorrier than I can say. The night is so quiet—I
+haven't heard a sound; is she asleep, awake, crying, triumphant?
+
+It's four o'clock; I've been asleep.
+
+They're back. Dan is lying on my bed. I'll try and tell you his story as
+near as I can, in his own words.
+
+“We rode,” he said, “round the upper way, keeping out of the lanes,
+and got to Kingswear by half-past eleven. The horse-ferry had stopped
+running, and we had a job to find any one to put us over. We hired the
+fellow to wait for us, and took a carriage at the 'Castle.' Before we
+got to Black Mill it was nearly one, pitch-dark. With the breeze from
+the southeast, I made out he should have been in an hour or more. The
+old man had never spoken to me once: and before we got there I had begun
+to hope we shouldn't find the fellow after all. We made the driver pull
+up in the road, and walked round and round, trying to find the door.
+Then some one cried, 'Who are you?'
+
+“'John Ford.'
+
+“'What do you want?' It was old Pearse.
+
+“'To see Zachary Pearse.'
+
+“The long window out of the porch where we sat the other day was open,
+and in we went. There was a door at the end of the room, and a light
+coming through. John Ford went towards it; I stayed out in the dark.
+
+“'Who's that with you?'
+
+“'Mr. Treffry.'
+
+“'Let him come in!' I went in. The old fellow was in bed, quite still on
+his pillows, a candle by his side; to look at him you'd think nothing of
+him but his eyes were alive. It was queer being there with those two old
+men!”
+
+Dan paused, seemed to listen, then went on doggedly.
+
+“'Sit down, gentleman,' said old Pearse. 'What may you want to see my
+son for?' John Ford begged his pardon, he had something to say, he said,
+that wouldn't wait.
+
+“They were very polite to one another,” muttered Dan ....
+
+“'Will you leave your message with me?' said Pearse.
+
+“'What I have to say to your son is private.'
+
+“'I'm his father.'
+
+“'I'm my girl's grandfather; and her only stand-by.'
+
+“'Ah!' muttered old Pearse, 'Rick Voisey's daughter?'
+
+“'I mean to see your son.'
+
+“Old Pearse smiled. Queer smile he's got, sort of sneering sweet.
+
+“'You can never tell where Zack may be,' he said. 'You think I want to
+shield him. You're wrong; Zack can take care of himself.'
+
+“'Your son's here!' said John Ford. 'I know.' Old Pearse gave us a very
+queer look.
+
+“'You come into my house like thieves in the night,' he said, 'and give
+me the lie, do you?'
+
+“'Your son came to my child's room like a thief in the night; it's for
+that I want to see him,' and then,” said Dan, “there was a long silence.
+At last Pearse said:
+
+“'I don't understand; has he played the blackguard?'
+
+“John Ford answered, 'He's married her, or, before God, I'd kill him.'
+
+“Old Pearse seemed to think this over, never moving on his pillows. 'You
+don't know Zack,' he said; 'I'm sorry for you, and I'm sorry for Rick
+Voisey's daughter; but you don't know Zack.'
+
+“'Sorry!' groaned out John Ford; 'he's stolen my child, and I'll punish
+him.'
+
+“'Punish!' cried old Pearse, 'we don't take punishment, not in my
+family.'
+
+“'Captain Jan Pearse, as sure as I stand here, you and your breed will
+get your punishment of God.' Old Pearse smiled.
+
+“'Mr. John Ford, that's as may be; but sure as I lie here we won't take
+it of you. You can't punish unless you make to feel, and that you can't
+du.'”
+
+And that is truth!
+
+Dan went on again:
+
+“'You won't tell me where your son is!' but old Pearse never blinked.
+
+“'I won't,' he said, 'and now you may get out. I lie here an old man
+alone, with no use to my legs, night on night, an' the house open; any
+rapscallion could get in; d' ye think I'm afraid of you?'
+
+“We were beat; and walked out without a word. But that old man; I've
+thought of him a lot—ninety-two, and lying there. Whatever he's been,
+and they tell you rum things of him, whatever his son may be, he's a
+man. It's not what he said, nor that there was anything to be afraid
+of just then, but somehow it's the idea of the old chap lying there. I
+don't ever wish to see a better plucked one....”
+
+We sat silent after that; out of doors the light began to stir among the
+leaves. There were all kinds of rustling sounds, as if the world were
+turning over in bed.
+
+Suddenly Dan said:
+
+“He's cheated me. I paid him to clear out and leave her alone. D' you
+think she's asleep?” He's made no appeal for sympathy, he'd take pity
+for an insult; but he feels it badly.
+
+“I'm tired as a cat,” he said at last, and went to sleep on my bed.
+
+It's broad daylight now; I too am tired as a cat....
+
+
+
+
+
+V “Saturday, 6th August.
+
+.... I take up my tale where I left off yesterday.... Dan and I started
+as soon as we could get Mrs. Hopgood to give us coffee. The old lady was
+more tentative, more undecided, more pouncing, than I had ever seen
+her. She was manifestly uneasy: Ha-apgood—who “don't slape” don't he,
+if snores are any criterion—had called out in the night, “Hark to th'
+'arses' 'oofs!” Had we heard them? And where might we be going then?
+'Twas very earrly to start, an' no breakfast. Haapgood had said it was
+goin' to shaowerr. Miss Pasiance was not to 'er violin yet, an' Mister
+Ford 'e kept 'is room. Was it?—would there be—? “Well, an' therr's an
+'arvest bug; 'tis some earrly for they!” Wonderful how she pounces on
+all such creatures, when I can't even see them. She pressed it absently
+between finger and thumb, and began manoeuvring round another way. Long
+before she had reached her point, we had gulped down our coffee, and
+departed. But as we rode out she came at a run, holding her skirts
+high with either hand, raised her old eyes bright and anxious in their
+setting of fine wrinkles, and said:
+
+“'Tidden sorrow for her?”
+
+A shrug of the shoulders was all the answer she got. We rode by the
+lanes; through sloping farmyards, all mud and pigs, and dirty straw, and
+farmers with clean-shaven upper lips and whiskers under the chin; past
+fields of corn, where larks were singing. Up or down, we didn't draw
+rein till we came to Dan's hotel.
+
+There was the river gleaming before us under a rainbow mist that
+hallowed every shape. There seemed affinity between the earth and the
+sky. I've never seen that particular soft unity out of Devon. And every
+ship, however black or modern, on those pale waters, had the look of a
+dream ship. The tall green woods, the red earth, the white houses, were
+all melted into one opal haze. It was raining, but the sun was shining
+behind. Gulls swooped by us—ghosts of the old greedy wanderers of the
+sea.
+
+We had told our two boatmen to pull us out to the Pied Witch! They
+started with great resolution, then rested on their oars.
+
+“The Pied Witch, zurr?” asked one politely; “an' which may her be?”
+
+That's the West countryman all over! Never say you “nay,” never lose
+an opportunity, never own he doesn't know, or can't do
+anything—independence, amiability, and an eye to the main chance. We
+mentioned Pearse's name.
+
+“Capt'n Zach'ry Pearse!” They exchanged a look half-amused,
+half-admiring.
+
+“The Zunflaower, yu mane. That's her. Zunflaower, ahoy!” As we mounted
+the steamer's black side I heard one say:
+
+“Pied Witch! A pra-aper name that—a dandy name for her!” They laughed as
+they made fast.
+
+The mate of the Sunflower, or Pied Witch, or whatever she was called,
+met us—a tall young fellow in his shirtsleeves, tanned to the roots of
+his hair, with sinewy, tattooed arms, and grey eyes, charred round the
+rims from staring at weather.
+
+“The skipper is on board,” he said. “We're rather busy, as you see. Get
+on with that, you sea-cooks,” he bawled at two fellows who were doing
+nothing. All over the ship, men were hauling, splicing, and stowing
+cargo.
+
+“To-day's Friday: we're off on Wednesday with any luck. Will you come
+this way?” He led us down the companion to a dark hole which he called
+the saloon. “Names? What! are you Mr. Treffry? Then we're partners!” A
+schoolboy's glee came on his face.
+
+“Look here!” he said; “I can show you something,” and he unlocked the
+door of a cabin. There appeared to be nothing in it but a huge piece of
+tarpaulin, which depended, bulging, from the topmost bunk. He pulled it
+up. The lower bunk had been removed, and in its place was the ugly body
+of a dismounted Gatling gun.
+
+“Got six of them,” he whispered, with unholy mystery, through which his
+native frankness gaped out. “Worth their weight in gold out there
+just now, the skipper says. Got a heap of rifles, too, and lots of
+ammunition. He's given me a share. This is better than the P. and
+O., and playing deck cricket with the passengers. I'd made up my mind
+already to chuck that, and go in for plantin' sugar, when I ran across
+the skipper. Wonderful chap, the skipper! I'll go and tell him. He's
+been out all night; only came aboard at four bells; having a nap now,
+but he won't mind that for you.”
+
+Off he went. I wondered what there was in Zachary Pearse to attract a
+youngster of this sort; one of the customary twelve children of some
+country parson, no doubt-burning to shoot a few niggers, and for ever
+frank and youthful.
+
+He came back with his hands full of bottles.
+
+“What'll you drink? The skipper'll be here in a jiffy. Excuse my goin'
+on deck. We're so busy.”
+
+And in five minutes Zachary Pearse did come. He made no attempt to shake
+hands, for which I respected him. His face looked worn, and more defiant
+than usual.
+
+“Well, gentlemen?” he said.
+
+“We've come to ask what you're going to do?” said Dan.
+
+“I don't know,” answered Pearse, “that that's any of your business.”
+
+Dan's little eyes were like the eyes of an angry pig.
+
+“You've got five hundred pounds of mine,” he said; “why do you think I
+gave it you?”
+
+Zachary bit his fingers.
+
+“That's no concern of mine,” he said. “I sail on Wednesday. Your money's
+safe.”
+
+“Do you know what I think of you?” said Dan.
+
+“No, and you'd better not tell me!” Then, with one of his peculiar
+changes, he smiled: “As you like, though.”
+
+Dan's face grew very dark. “Give me a plain answer,” he said: “What are
+you going to do about her?”
+
+Zachary looked up at him from under his brows.
+
+“Nothing.”
+
+“Are you cur enough to deny that you've married her?”
+
+Zachary looked at him coolly. “Not at all,” he said.
+
+“What in God's name did you do it for?”
+
+“You've no monopoly in the post of husband, Mr. Treffry.”
+
+“To put a child in that position! Haven't you the heart of a man? What
+d' ye come sneaking in at night for? By Gad! Don't you know you've done
+a beastly thing?”
+
+Zachary's face darkened, he clenched his fists. Then he seemed to shut
+his anger into himself.
+
+“You wanted me to leave her to you,” he sneered. “I gave her my promise
+that I'd take her out there, and we'd have gone off on Wednesday quietly
+enough, if you hadn't come and nosed the whole thing out with your
+infernal dog. The fat's in the fire! There's no reason why I should take
+her now. I'll come back to her a rich man, or not at all.”
+
+“And in the meantime?” I slipped in.
+
+He turned to me, in an ingratiating way.
+
+“I would have taken her to save the fuss—I really would—it's not my
+fault the thing's come out. I'm on a risky job. To have her with me
+might ruin the whole thing; it would affect my nerve. It isn't safe for
+her.”
+
+“And what's her position to be,” I said, “while you're away? Do you
+think she'd have married you if she'd known you were going to leave her
+like this? You ought to give up this business.
+
+“You stole her. Her life's in your hands; she's only a child!”
+
+A quiver passed over his face; it showed that he was suffering.
+
+“Give it up!” I urged.
+
+“My last farthing's in it,” he sighed; “the chance of a lifetime.”
+
+He looked at me doubtfully, appealingly, as if for the first time in his
+life he had been given a glimpse of that dilemma of consequences
+which his nature never recognises. I thought he was going to give in.
+Suddenly, to my horror, Dan growled, “Play the man!”
+
+Pearse turned his head. “I don't want your advice anyway,” he said;
+“I'll not be dictated to.”
+
+“To your last day,” said Dan, “you shall answer to me for the way you
+treat her.”
+
+Zachary smiled.
+
+“Do you see that fly?” he said. “Wel—I care for you as little as this,”
+and he flicked the fly off his white trousers. “Good-morning...!”
+
+The noble mariners who manned our boat pulled lustily for the shore, but
+we had hardly shoved off' when a storm of rain burst over the ship, and
+she seemed to vanish, leaving a picture on my eyes of the mate waving
+his cap above the rail, with his tanned young face bent down at us,
+smiling, keen, and friendly.
+
+.... We reached the shore drenched, angry with ourselves, and with each
+other; I started sulkily for home.
+
+As I rode past an orchard, an apple, loosened by the rainstorm, came
+down with a thud.
+
+“The apples were ripe and ready to fall, Oh! heigh-ho! and ready to
+fall.”
+
+I made up my mind to pack, and go away. But there's a strangeness,
+a sort of haunting fascination in it all. To you, who don't know the
+people, it may only seem a piece of rather sordid folly. But it isn't
+the good, the obvious, the useful that puts a spell on us in life. It's
+the bizarre, the dimly seen, the mysterious for good or evil.
+
+The sun was out again when I rode up to the farm; its yellow thatch
+shone through the trees as if sheltering a store of gladness and good
+news. John Ford himself opened the door to me.
+
+He began with an apology, which made me feel more than ever an intruder;
+then he said:
+
+“I have not spoken to my granddaughter—I waited to see Dan Treffry.”
+
+He was stern and sad-eyed, like a man with a great weight of grief on
+his shoulders. He looked as if he had not slept; his dress was out of
+order, he had not taken his clothes off, I think. He isn't a man whom
+you can pity. I felt I had taken a liberty in knowing of the matter at
+all. When I told him where we had been, he said:
+
+“It was good of you to take this trouble. That you should have had to!
+But since such things have come to pass—” He made a gesture full of
+horror. He gave one the impression of a man whose pride was struggling
+against a mortal hurt. Presently he asked:
+
+“You saw him, you say? He admitted this marriage? Did he give an
+explanation?”
+
+I tried to make Pearse's point of view clear. Before this old man, with
+his inflexible will and sense of duty, I felt as if I held a brief for
+Zachary, and must try to do him justice.
+
+“Let me understand,” he said at last. “He stole her, you say, to make
+sure; and deserts her within a fortnight.”
+
+“He says he meant to take her—”
+
+“Do you believe that?”
+
+Before I could answer, I saw Pasiance standing at the window. How long
+she had been there I don't know.
+
+“Is it true that he is going to leave me behind?” she cried out.
+
+I could only nod.
+
+“Did you hear him your own self?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+She stamped her foot.
+
+“But he promised! He promised!”
+
+John Ford went towards her.
+
+“Don't touch me, grandfather! I hate every one! Let him do what he
+likes, I don't care.”
+
+John Ford's face turned quite grey.
+
+“Pasiance,” he said, “did you want to leave me so much?”
+
+She looked straight at us, and said sharply:
+
+“What's the good of telling stories. I can't help its hurting you.”
+
+“What did you think you would find away from here?”
+
+She laughed.
+
+“Find? I don't know—nothing; I wouldn't be stifled anyway. Now I suppose
+you'll shut me up because I'm a weak girl, not strong like men!”
+
+“Silence!” said John Ford; “I will make him take you.”
+
+“You shan't!” she cried; “I won't let you. He's free to do as he likes.
+He's free—I tell you all, everybody—free!”
+
+She ran through the window, and vanished.
+
+John Ford made a movement as if the bottom had dropped out of his world.
+I left him there.
+
+I went to the kitchen, where Hopgood was sitting at the table, eating
+bread and cheese. He got up on seeing me, and very kindly brought me
+some cold bacon and a pint of ale.
+
+“I thart I shude be seeing yu, zurr,” he said between his bites;
+“Therr's no thart to 'atin' 'bout the 'ouse to-day. The old wumman's
+puzzivantin' over Miss Pasiance. Young girls are skeery critters”—he
+brushed his sleeve over his broad, hard jaws, and filled a pipe
+“specially when it's in the blood of 'em. Squire Rick Voisey werr a
+dandy; an' Mistress Voisey—well, she werr a nice lady tu, but”—rolling
+the stem of his pipe from corner to corner of his mouth—“she werr a
+pra-aper vixen.”
+
+Hopgood's a good fellow, and I believe as soft as he looks hard, but
+he's not quite the sort with whom one chooses to talk over a matter like
+this. I went upstairs, and began to pack, but after a bit dropped it for
+a book, and somehow or other fell asleep.
+
+I woke, and looked at my watch; it was five o'clock. I had been asleep
+four hours. A single sunbeam was slanting across from one of my windows
+to the other, and there was the cool sound of milk dropping into pails;
+then, all at once, a stir as of alarm, and heavy footsteps.
+
+I opened my door. Hopgood and a coast-guardsman were carrying Pasiance
+slowly up the stairs. She lay in their arms without moving, her face
+whiter than her dress, a scratch across the forehead, and two or three
+drops there of dried blood. Her hands were clasped, and she slowly
+crooked and stiffened out her fingers. When they turned with her at the
+stair top, she opened her lips, and gasped, “All right, don't put me
+down. I can bear it.” They passed, and, with a half-smile in her eyes,
+she said something to me that I couldn't catch; the door was shut, and
+the excited whispering began again below. I waited for the men to come
+out, and caught hold of Hopgood. He wiped the sweat off his forehead.
+
+“Poor young thing!” he said. “She fell—down the cliffs—'tis her
+back—coastguard saw her 'twerr they fetched her in. The Lord 'elp her
+mebbe she's not broken up much! An' Mister Ford don't know! I'm gwine
+for the doctor.”
+
+There was an hour or more to wait before he came; a young fellow; almost
+a boy. He looked very grave, when he came out of her room.
+
+“The old woman there fond of her? nurse her well...? Fond as a
+dog!—good! Don't know—can't tell for certain! Afraid it's the spine,
+must have another opinion! What a plucky girl! Tell Mr. Ford to have
+the best man he can get in Torquay—there's C—-. I'll be round the first
+thing in the morning. Keep her dead quiet. I've left a sleeping draught;
+she'll have fever tonight.”
+
+John Ford came in at last. Poor old man! What it must have cost him not
+to go to her for fear of the excitement! How many times in the next
+few hours didn't I hear him come to the bottom of the stairs; his heavy
+wheezing, and sighing; and the forlorn tread of his feet going back!
+About eleven, just as I was going to bed, Mrs. Hopgood came to my door.
+
+“Will yu come, sir,” she said; “she's asking for yu. Naowt I can zay but
+what she will see yu; zeems crazy, don't it?” A tear trickled down
+the old lady's cheek. “Du 'ee come; 'twill du 'err 'arm mebbe, but I
+dunno—she'll fret else.”
+
+I slipped into the room. Lying back on her pillows, she was breathing
+quickly with half-closed eyes. There was nothing to show that she had
+wanted me, or even knew that I was there. The wick of the candle, set
+by the bedside, had been snuffed too short, and gave but a faint light;
+both window and door stood open, still there was no draught, and the
+feeble little flame burned quite still, casting a faint yellow stain
+on the ceiling like the refection from a buttercup held beneath a chin.
+These ceilings are far too low! Across the wide, squat window the apple
+branches fell in black stripes which never stirred. It was too dark to
+see things clearly. At the foot of the bed was a chest, and there Mrs.
+Hopgood had sat down, moving her lips as if in speech. Mingled with the
+half-musty smell of age; there were other scents, of mignonette, apples,
+and some sweet-smelling soap. The floor had no carpet, and there was not
+one single dark object except the violin, hanging from a nail over the
+bed. A little, round clock ticked solemnly.
+
+“Why won't you give me that stuff, Mums?” Pasiance said in a faint,
+sharp voice. “I want to sleep.”
+
+“Have you much pain?” I asked.
+
+“Of course I have; it's everywhere.”
+
+She turned her face towards me.
+
+“You thought I did it on purpose, but you're wrong. If I had, I'd have
+done it better than this. I wouldn't have this brutal pain.” She put her
+fingers over her eyes. “It's horrible to complain! Only it's so bad! But
+I won't again—promise.”
+
+She took the sleeping draught gratefully, making a face, like a child
+after a powder.
+
+“How long do you think it'll be before I can play again? Oh! I
+forgot—there are other things to think about.” She held out her hand to
+me. “Look at my ring. Married—isn't it funny? Ha, ha! Nobody will
+ever understand—that's funny too! Poor Gran! You see, there wasn't any
+reason—only me. That's the only reason I'm telling you now; Mums is
+there—but she doesn't count; why don't you count, Mums?”
+
+The fever was fighting against the draught; she had tossed the clothes
+back from her throat, and now and then raised one thin arm a little, as
+if it eased her; her eyes had grown large, and innocent like a child's;
+the candle, too, had flared, and was burning clearly.
+
+“Nobody is to tell him—nobody at all; promise...! If I hadn't slipped,
+it would have been different. What would have happened then? You can't
+tell; and I can't—that's funny! Do you think I loved him? Nobody marries
+without love, do they? Not quite without love, I mean. But you see I
+wanted to be free, he said he'd take me; and now he's left me after all!
+I won't be left, I can't! When I came to the cliff—that bit where the
+ivy grows right down—there was just the sea there, underneath; so I
+thought I would throw myself over and it would be all quiet; and I
+climbed on a ledge, it looked easier from there, but it was so high, I
+wanted to get back; and then my foot slipped; and now it's all pain. You
+can't think much, when you're in pain.”
+
+From her eyes I saw that she was dropping off.
+
+“Nobody can take you away from-yourself. He's not to be told—not even—I
+don't—want you—to go away, because—” But her eyes closed, and she
+dropped off to sleep.
+
+They don't seem to know this morning whether she is better or worse....
+
+
+
+
+
+VI “Tuesday, 9th August.
+
+.... It seems more like three weeks than three days since I wrote.
+The time passes slowly in a sickhouse...! The doctors were here this
+morning, they give her forty hours. Not a word of complaint has passed
+her lips since she knew. To see her you would hardly think her ill; her
+cheeks have not had time to waste or lose their colour. There is not
+much pain, but a slow, creeping numbness.... It was John Ford's wish
+that she should be told. She just turned her head to the wall and
+sighed; then to poor old Mrs. Hopgood, who was crying her heart out:
+“Don't cry, Mums, I don't care.”
+
+When they had gone, she asked for her violin. She made them hold it for
+her, and drew the bow across the strings; but the notes that came out
+were so trembling and uncertain that she dropped the bow and broke into
+a passion of sobbing. Since then, no complaint or moan of any kind....
+
+But to go back. On Sunday, the day after I wrote, as I was coming from a
+walk, I met a little boy making mournful sounds on a tin whistle.
+
+“Coom ahn!” he said, “the Miss wahnts t' zee yu.”
+
+I went to her room. In the morning she had seemed better, but now looked
+utterly exhausted. She had a letter in her hand.
+
+“It's this,” she said. “I don't seem to understand it. He wants me to
+do something—but I can't think, and my eyes feel funny. Read it to me,
+please.”
+
+The letter was from Zachary. I read it to her in a low voice, for Mrs.
+Hopgood was in the room, her eyes always fixed on Pasiance above her
+knitting. When I'd finished, she made me read it again, and yet again.
+At first she seemed pleased, almost excited, then came a weary, scornful
+look, and before I'd finished the third time she was asleep. It was a
+remarkable letter, that seemed to bring the man right before one's eyes.
+I slipped it under her fingers on the bed-clothes, and went out. Fancy
+took me to the cliff where she had fallen. I found the point of rock
+where the cascade of ivy flows down the cliff; the ledge on which she
+had climbed was a little to my right—a mad place. It showed plainly
+what wild emotions must have been driving her! Behind was a half-cut
+cornfield with a fringe of poppies, and swarms of harvest insects
+creeping and flying; in the uncut corn a landrail kept up a continual
+charring. The sky was blue to the very horizon, and the sea wonderful,
+under that black wild cliff stained here and there with red. Over the
+dips and hollows of the fields great white clouds hung low down above
+the land. There are no brassy, east-coast skies here; but always
+sleepy, soft-shaped clouds, full of subtle stir and change. Passages of
+Zachary's Pearse's letter kept rising to my lips. After all he's the man
+that his native place, and life, and blood have made him. It is useless
+to expect idealists where the air is soft and things good to look on
+(the idealist grows where he must create beauty or comfort for himself);
+useless to expect a man of law and order, in one whose fathers have
+stared at the sea day and night for a thousand years—the sea, full of
+its promises of unknown things, never quite the same, a slave to its own
+impulses. Man is an imitative animal....
+
+“Life's hard enough,” he wrote, “without tying yourself down. Don't
+think too hardly of me! Shall I make you happier by taking you into
+danger? If I succeed you'll be a rich woman; but I shall fail if you're
+with me. To look at you makes me soft. At sea a man dreams of all the
+good things on land, he'll dream of the heather, and honey—you're
+like that; and he'll dream of the apple-trees, and the grass of the
+orchards—you're like that; sometimes he only lies on his back and
+wishes—and you're like that, most of all like that....”
+
+When I was reading those words I remember a strange, soft, half-scornful
+look came over Pasiance's face; and once she said, “But that's all
+nonsense, isn't it...?”
+
+Then followed a long passage about what he would gain if he succeeded,
+about all that he was risking, the impossibility of failure, if he kept
+his wits about him. “It's only a matter of two months or so,” he went
+on; “stay where you are, dear, or go to my Dad. He'll be glad to have
+you. There's my mother's room. There's no one to say 'No' to your fiddle
+there; you can play it by the sea; and on dark nights you'll have the
+stars dancing to you over the water as thick as bees. I've looked at
+them often, thinking of you....”
+
+Pasiance had whispered to me, “Don't read that bit,” and afterwards
+I left it out.... Then the sensuous side of him shows up: “When I've
+brought this off, there's the whole world before us. There are places
+I can take you to. There's one I know, not too warm and not too cold,
+where you can sit all day in the shade and watch the creepers, and the
+cocoa-palms, still as still; nothing to do or care about; all the fruits
+you can think of; no noise but the parrots and the streams, and a splash
+when a nigger dives into a water-hole. Pasiance, we'll go there! With
+an eighty-ton craft there's no sea we couldn't know. The world's a fine
+place for those who go out to take it; there's lots of unknown stuff'
+in it yet. I'll fill your lap, my pretty, so full of treasures that you
+shan't know yourself. A man wasn't meant to sit at home....”
+
+Throughout this letter—for all its real passion—one could feel how
+the man was holding to his purpose—the rather sordid purpose of this
+venture. He's unconscious of it; for he is in love with her; but he must
+be furthering his own ends. He is vital—horribly vital! I wonder less
+now that she should have yielded.
+
+What visions hasn't he dangled before her. There was physical
+attraction, too—I haven't forgotten the look I saw on her face at Black
+Mill. But when all's said and done, she married him, because she's
+Pasiance Voisey, who does things and wants “to get back.” And she lies
+there dying; not he nor any other man will ever take her away. It's
+pitiful to think of him tingling with passion, writing that letter to
+this doomed girl in that dark hole of a saloon. “I've wanted money,” he
+wrote, “ever since I was a little chap sitting in the fields among the
+cows.... I want it for you now, and I mean to have it. I've studied the
+thing two years; I know what I know....
+
+“The moment this is in the post I leave for London. There are a hundred
+things to look after still; I can't trust myself within reach of you
+again till the anchor's weighed. When I re-christened her the Pied
+Witch, I thought of you—you witch to me....”
+
+There followed a solemn entreaty to her to be on the path leading to the
+cove at seven o'clock on Wednesday evening (that is, to-morrow) when
+he would come ashore and bid her good-bye. It was signed, “Your loving
+husband, Zachary Pearse....”
+
+I lay at the edge of that cornfield a long time; it was very peaceful.
+The church bells had begun to ring. The long shadows came stealing out
+from the sheaves; woodpigeons rose one by one, and flapped off to roost;
+the western sky was streaked with red, and all the downs and combe
+bathed in the last sunlight. Perfect harvest weather; but oppressively
+still, the stillness of suspense....
+
+Life at the farm goes on as usual. We have morning and evening prayers.
+John Ford reads them fiercely, as though he were on the eve of a revolt
+against his God. Morning and evening he visits her, comes out wheezing
+heavily, and goes to his own room; I believe, to pray. Since this
+morning I haven't dared meet him. He is a strong old man—but this will
+break him up....
+
+
+
+
+
+VII “KINGSWEAR, Saturday, 13th August.
+
+.... It's over—I leave here to-morrow, and go abroad.
+
+A quiet afternoon—not a breath up in the churchyard! I was there quite
+half an hour before they came. Some red cows had strayed into the
+adjoining orchard, and were rubbing their heads against the railing.
+While I stood there an old woman came and drove them away; afterwards,
+she stooped and picked up the apples that had fallen before their time.
+
+“The apples are ripe and ready to fall, Oh! heigh-ho! and ready to
+fall; There came an old woman and gathered them all, Oh! heigh-ho! and
+gathered them all.”
+
+.... They brought Pasiance very simply—no hideous funeral trappings,
+thank God—the farm hands carried her, and there was no one there but
+John Ford, the Hopgoods, myself, and that young doctor. They read the
+service over her grave. I can hear John Ford's “Amen!” now. When it was
+over he walked away bareheaded in the sun, without a word. I went up
+there again this evening, and wandered amongst the tombstones. “Richard
+Voisey,” “John, the son of Richard and Constance Voisey,” “Margery
+Voisey,” so many generations of them in that corner; then “Richard
+Voisey and Agnes his wife,” and next to it that new mound on which
+a sparrow was strutting and the shadows of the apple-trees already
+hovering.
+
+I will tell you the little left to tell....
+
+On Wednesday afternoon she asked for me again.
+
+“It's only till seven,” she whispered. “He's certain to come then.
+But if I—were to die first—then tell him—I'm sorry for him. They keep
+saying: 'Don't talk—don't talk!' Isn't it stupid? As if I should have
+any other chance! There'll be no more talking after to-night! Make
+everybody come, please—I want to see them all. When you're dying you're
+freer than any other time—nobody wants you to do things, nobody cares
+what you say.... He promised me I should do what I liked if I married
+him—I never believed that really—but now I can do what I like; and say
+all the things I want to.” She lay back silent; she could not after all
+speak the inmost thoughts that are in each of us, so sacred that they
+melt away at the approach of words.
+
+I shall remember her like that—with the gleam of a smile in her
+half-closed eyes, her red lips parted—such a quaint look of mockery,
+pleasure, regret, on her little round, upturned face; the room white,
+and fresh with flowers, the breeze guttering the apple-leaves against
+the window. In the night they had unhooked the violin and taken it away;
+she had not missed it.... When Dan came, I gave up my place to him. He
+took her hand gently in his great paw, without speaking.
+
+“How small my hand looks there,” she said, “too small.” Dan put it
+softly back on the bedclothes and wiped his forehead. Pasiance cried in
+a sharp whisper: “Is it so hot in here? I didn't know.” Dan bent down,
+put his lips to her fingers and left the room.
+
+The afternoon was long, the longest I've ever spent. Sometimes she
+seemed to sleep, sometimes whispered to herself about her mother, her
+grandfather, the garden, or her cats—all sorts of inconsequent, trivial,
+even ludicrous memories seemed to throng her mind—never once, I think,
+did she speak of Zachary, but, now and then, she asked the time.... Each
+hour she grew visibly weaker. John Ford sat by her without moving,
+his heavy breathing was often the only sound; sometimes she rubbed her
+fingers on his hand, without speaking. It was a summary of their lives
+together. Once he prayed aloud for her in a hoarse voice; then her
+pitiful, impatient eyes signed to me.
+
+“Quick,” she whispered, “I want him; it's all so—cold.”
+
+I went out and ran down the path towards the cove.
+
+Leaning on a gate stood Zachary, an hour before his time; dressed in the
+same old blue clothes and leather-peaked cap as on the day when I saw
+him first. He knew nothing of what had happened. But at a quarter of the
+truth, I'm sure he divined the whole, though he would not admit it to
+himself. He kept saying, “It can't be. She'll be well in a few days—a
+sprain! D' you think the sea-voyage.... Is she strong enough to be moved
+now at once?”
+
+It was painful to see his face, so twisted by the struggle between his
+instinct and his vitality. The sweat poured down his forehead. He turned
+round as we walked up the path, and pointed out to sea. There was his
+steamer. “I could get her on board in no time. Impossible! What is it,
+then? Spine? Good God! The doctors.... Sometimes they'll do wonders!” It
+was pitiful to see his efforts to blind himself to the reality.
+
+“It can't be, she's too young. We're walking very slow.” I told him she
+was dying.
+
+For a second I thought he was going to run away. Then he jerked up his
+head, and rushed on towards the house. At the foot of the staircase he
+gripped me by the shoulder.
+
+“It's not true!” he said; “she'll get better now I'm here. I'll stay.
+Let everything go. I'll stay.”
+
+“Now's the time,” I said, “to show you loved her. Pull yourself
+together, man!” He shook all over.
+
+“Yes!” was all he answered. We went into her room. It seemed impossible
+she was going to die; the colour was bright in her cheeks, her lips
+trembling and pouted as if she had just been kissed, her eyes gleaming,
+her hair so dark and crisp, her face so young....
+
+Half an hour later I stole to the open door of her room. She was still
+and white as the sheets of her bed. John Ford stood at the foot; and,
+bowed to the level of the pillows, his head on his clenched fists, sat
+Zachary. It was utterly quiet. The guttering of the leaves had ceased.
+When things have come to a crisis, how little one feels—no fear, no
+pity, no sorrow, rather the sense, as when a play is over, of anxiety to
+get away!
+
+Suddenly Zachary rose, brushed past me without seeing, and ran
+downstairs.
+
+Some hours later I went out on the path leading to the cove. It was
+pitch-black; the riding light of the Pied Witch was still there, looking
+no bigger than a firefly. Then from in front I heard sobbing—a man's
+sobs; no sound is quite so dreadful. Zachary Pearse got up out of the
+bank not ten paces off.
+
+I had no heart to go after him, and sat down in the hedge. There was
+something subtly akin to her in the fresh darkness of the young night;
+the soft bank, the scent of honeysuckle, the touch of the ferns and
+brambles. Death comes to all of us, and when it's over it's over; but
+this blind business—of those left behind!
+
+A little later the ship whistled twice; her starboard light gleamed
+faintly—and that was all....
+
+
+
+
+
+VIII “TORQUAY, 30th October.
+
+.... Do you remember the letters I wrote you from Moor Farm nearly three
+years ago? To-day I rode over there. I stopped at Brixham on the way for
+lunch, and walked down to the quay. There had been a shower—but the sun
+was out again, shining on the sea, the brown-red sails, and the rampart
+of slate roofs.
+
+A trawler was lying there, which had evidently been in a collision. The
+spiky-bearded, thin-lipped fellow in torn blue jersey and sea-boots who
+was superintending the repairs, said to me a little proudly:
+
+“Bane in collision, zurr; like to zee over her?” Then suddenly screwing
+up his little blue eyes, he added:
+
+“Why, I remembers yu. Steered yu along o' the young lady in this yer
+very craft.”
+
+It was Prawle, Zachary Pearse's henchman.
+
+“Yes,” he went on, “that's the cutter.”
+
+“And Captain Pearse?”
+
+He leant his back against the quay, and spat. “He was a pra-aper man; I
+never zane none like 'en.”
+
+“Did you do any good out there?”
+
+Prawle gave me a sharp glance.
+
+“Gude? No, t'was arrm we done, vrom ztart to finish—had trouble all the
+time. What a man cude du, the skipper did. When yu caan't du right, zome
+calls it 'Providence'. 'Tis all my eye an' Betty Martin! What I zay es,
+'tis these times, there's such a dale o' folk, a dale of puzzivantin'
+fellers; the world's to small.”
+
+With these words there flashed across me a vision of Drake crushed
+into our modern life by the shrinkage of the world; Drake caught in the
+meshes of red tape, electric wires, and all the lofty appliances of our
+civilization. Does a type survive its age; live on into times that
+have no room for it? The blood is there—and sometimes there's a
+throw-back.... All fancy! Eh?
+
+“So,” I said, “you failed?”
+
+Prawle wriggled.
+
+“I wudden' goo for to zay that, zurr—'tis an ugly word. Da-am!” he
+added, staring at his boots, “'twas thru me tu. We were along among the
+haythen, and I mus' nades goo for to break me leg. The capt'n he wudden'
+lave me. 'One Devon man,' he says to me, 'don' lave anotherr.' We werr
+six days where we shuld ha' been tu; when we got back to the ship a
+cruiser had got her for gun-runnin'.”
+
+“And what has become of Captain Pearse?”
+
+Prawle answered, “Zurr, I belave 'e went to China, 'tis onsartin.”
+
+“He's not dead?”
+
+Prawle looked at me with a kind of uneasy anger.
+
+“Yu cudden' kell 'en! 'Tis true, mun 'll die zome day. But therr's not a
+one that'll show better zport than Capt'n Zach'ry Pearse.”
+
+I believe that; he will be hard to kill. The vision of him comes up,
+with his perfect balance, defiant eyes, and sweetish smile; the way the
+hair of his beard crisped a little, and got blacker on the cheeks; the
+sort of desperate feeling he gave, that one would never get the better
+of him, that he would never get the better of himself.
+
+I took leave of Prawle and half a crown. Before I was off the quay I
+heard him saying to a lady, “Bane in collision, marm! Like to zee over
+her?”
+
+After lunch I rode on to Moor. The old place looked much the same; but
+the apple-trees were stripped of fruit, and their leaves beginning to go
+yellow and fall. One of Pasiance's cats passed me in the orchard hunting
+a bird, still with a ribbon round its neck. John Ford showed me all his
+latest improvements, but never by word or sign alluded to the past. He
+inquired after Dan, back in New Zealand now, without much interest; his
+stubbly beard and hair have whitened; he has grown very stout, and I
+noticed that his legs are not well under control; he often stops to lean
+on his stick. He was very ill last winter; and sometimes, they say, will
+go straight off to sleep in the middle of a sentence.
+
+I managed to get a few minutes with the Hopgoods. We talked of Pasiance
+sitting in the kitchen under a row of plates, with that clinging smell
+of wood-smoke, bacon, and age bringing up memories, as nothing but
+scents can. The dear old lady's hair, drawn so nicely down her forehead
+on each side from the centre of her cap, has a few thin silver lines;
+and her face is a thought more wrinkled. The tears still come into her
+eyes when she talks of her “lamb.”
+
+Of Zachary I heard nothing, but she told me of old Pearse's death.
+
+“Therr they found 'en, zo to spake, dead—in th' sun; but Ha-apgood can
+tell yu,” and Hopgood, ever rolling his pipe, muttered something, and
+smiled his wooden smile.
+
+He came to see me off from the straw-yard. “'Tis like death to the
+varrm, zurr,” he said, putting all the play of his vast shoulders into
+the buckling of my girths. “Mister Ford—well! And not one of th' old
+stock to take it when 'e's garn.... Ah! it werr cruel; my old woman's
+never been hersel' since. Tell 'ee what 'tis—don't du t' think to much.”
+
+I went out of my way to pass the churchyard. There were flowers, quite
+fresh, chrysanthemums, and asters; above them the white stone, already
+stained:
+
+“PASIANCE
+
+“WIFE OF ZACHARY PEARSE
+
+“'The Lord hath given, and the Lord hath taken away.'”
+
+
+The red cows were there too; the sky full of great white clouds, some
+birds whistling a little mournfully, and in the air the scent of fallen
+leaves....
+
+May, 1900.
+
+
+
+
+
+TO MY MOTHER
+
+
+
+
+
+A KNIGHT
+
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+At Monte Carlo, in the spring of the year 189-, I used to notice an old
+fellow in a grey suit and sunburnt straw hat with a black ribbon. Every
+morning at eleven o'clock, he would come down to the Place, followed
+by a brindled German boarhound, walk once or twice round it, and seat
+himself on a bench facing the casino. There he would remain in the sun,
+with his straw hat tilted forward, his thin legs apart, his brown hands
+crossed between them, and the dog's nose resting on his knee. After an
+hour or more he would get up, and, stooping a little from the waist,
+walk slowly round the Place and return up hill. Just before three,
+he would come down again in the same clothes and go into the casino,
+leaving the dog outside.
+
+One afternoon, moved by curiosity, I followed him. He passed through the
+hall without looking at the gambling-rooms, and went into the concert.
+It became my habit after that to watch for him. When he sat in the Place
+I could see him from the window of my room. The chief puzzle to me was
+the matter of his nationality.
+
+His lean, short face had a skin so burnt that it looked like leather;
+his jaw was long and prominent, his chin pointed, and he had hollows
+in his cheeks. There were wrinkles across his forehead; his eyes were
+brown; and little white moustaches were brushed up from the corners of
+his lips. The back of his head bulged out above the lines of his lean
+neck and high, sharp shoulders; his grey hair was cropped quite close.
+In the Marseilles buffet, on the journey out, I had met an Englishman,
+almost his counterpart in features—but somehow very different! This old
+fellow had nothing of the other's alert, autocratic self-sufficiency.
+He was quiet and undemonstrative, without looking, as it were, insulated
+against shocks and foreign substances. He was certainly no Frenchman.
+His eyes, indeed, were brown, but hazel-brown, and gentle—not the
+red-brown sensual eye of the Frenchman. An American? But was ever an
+American so passive? A German? His moustache was certainly brushed up,
+but in a modest, almost pathetic way, not in the least Teutonic. Nothing
+seemed to fit him. I gave him up, and named him “the Cosmopolitan.”
+
+Leaving at the end of April, I forgot him altogether. In the same month,
+however, of the following year I was again at Monte Carlo, and going one
+day to the concert found myself seated next this same old fellow. The
+orchestra was playing Meyerbeer's “Prophete,” and my neighbour was
+asleep, snoring softly. He was dressed in the same grey suit, with the
+same straw hat (or one exactly like it) on his knees, and his hands
+crossed above it. Sleep had not disfigured him—his little white
+moustache was still brushed up, his lips closed; a very good and gentle
+expression hovered on his face. A curved mark showed on his right
+temple, the scar of a cut on the side of his neck, and his left hand was
+covered by an old glove, the little finger of which was empty. He woke
+up when the march was over and brisked up his moustache.
+
+The next thing on the programme was a little thing by Poise from Le joli
+Gilles, played by Mons. Corsanego on the violin. Happening to glance at
+my old neighbour, I saw a tear caught in the hollow of his cheek, and
+another just leaving the corner of his eye; there was a faint smile on
+his lips. Then came an interval; and while orchestra and audience were
+resting, I asked him if he were fond of music. He looked up without
+distrust, bowed, and answered in a thin, gentle voice: “Certainly. I
+know nothing about it, play no instrument, could never sing a note; but
+fond of it! Who would not be?” His English was correct enough, but with
+an emphasis not quite American nor quite foreign. I ventured to remark
+that he did not care for Meyerbeer. He smiled.
+
+“Ah!” he said, “I was asleep? Too bad of me. He is a little noisy—I know
+so little about music. There is Bach, for instance. Would you believe
+it, he gives me no pleasure? A great misfortune to be no musician!” He
+shook his head.
+
+I murmured, “Bach is too elevating for you perhaps.”
+
+“To me,” he answered, “any music I like is elevating. People say some
+music has a bad effect on them. I never found any music that gave me a
+bad thought—no—no—quite the opposite; only sometimes, as you see, I go
+to sleep. But what a lovely instrument the violin!” A faint flush came
+on his parched cheeks. “The human soul that has left the body. A curious
+thing, distant bugles at night have given me the same feeling.” The
+orchestra was now coming back, and, folding his hands, my neighbour
+turned his eyes towards them. When the concert was over we came out
+together. Waiting at the entrance was his dog.
+
+“You have a beautiful dog!”
+
+“Ah! yes, Freda, mia cara, da su mano!” The dog squatted on her
+haunches, and lifted her paw in the vague, bored way of big dogs when
+requested to perform civilities. She was a lovely creature—the purest
+brindle, without a speck of white, and free from the unbalanced look of
+most dogs of her breed.
+
+“Basta! basta!” He turned to me apologetically. “We have agreed to speak
+Italian; in that way I keep up the language; astonishing the number of
+things that dog will understand!” I was about to take my leave, when he
+asked if I would walk a little way with him—“If you are free, that is.”
+We went up the street with Freda on the far side of her master.
+
+“Do you never 'play' here?” I asked him.
+
+“Play? No. It must be very interesting; most exciting, but as a matter
+of fact, I can't afford it. If one has very little, one is too nervous.”
+
+He had stopped in front of a small hairdresser's shop. “I live here,” he
+said, raising his hat again. “Au revoir!—unless I can offer you a glass
+of tea. It's all ready. Come! I've brought you out of your way; give me
+the pleasure!”
+
+I have never met a man so free from all self-consciousness, and yet so
+delicate and diffident the combination is a rare one. We went up a steep
+staircase to a room on the second floor. My companion threw the shutters
+open, setting all the flies buzzing. The top of a plane-tree was on
+a level with the window, and all its little brown balls were dancing,
+quite close, in the wind. As he had promised, an urn was hissing on a
+table; there was also a small brown teapot, some sugar, slices of lemon,
+and glasses. A bed, washstand, cupboard, tin trunk, two chairs, and a
+small rug were all the furniture. Above the bed a sword in a leather
+sheath was suspended from two nails. The photograph of a girl stood on
+the closed stove. My host went to the cupboard and produced a bottle,
+a glass, and a second spoon. When the cork was drawn, the scent of rum
+escaped into the air. He sniffed at it and dropped a teaspoonful into
+both glasses.
+
+“This is a trick I learned from the Russians after Plevna; they had my
+little finger, so I deserved something in exchange.” He looked round;
+his eyes, his whole face, seemed to twinkle. “I assure you it was worth
+it—makes all the difference. Try!” He poured off the tea.
+
+“Had you a sympathy with the Turks?”
+
+“The weaker side—” He paused abruptly, then added: “But it was not
+that.” Over his face innumerable crow's-feet had suddenly appeared, his
+eyes twitched; he went on hurriedly, “I had to find something to do just
+then—it was necessary.” He stared into his glass; and it was some time
+before I ventured to ask if he had seen much fighting.
+
+“Yes,” he replied gravely, “nearly twenty years altogether; I was one of
+Garibaldi's Mille in '60.”
+
+“Surely you are not Italian?”
+
+He leaned forward with his hands on his knees. “I was in Genoa at that
+time learning banking; Garibaldi was a wonderful man! One could not help
+it.” He spoke quite simply. “You might say it was like seeing a little
+man stand up to a ring of great hulking fellows; I went, just as you
+would have gone, if you'd been there. I was not long with them—our war
+began; I had to go back home.” He said this as if there had been but one
+war since the world began. “In '60,” he mused, “till '65. Just think of
+it! The poor country. Why, in my State, South Carolina—I was through it
+all—nobody could be spared there—we were one to three.”
+
+“I suppose you have a love of fighting?”
+
+“H'm!” he said, as if considering the idea for the first time.
+“Sometimes I fought for a living, and sometimes—because I was obliged;
+one must try to be a gentleman. But won't you have some more?”
+
+I refused more tea and took my leave, carrying away with me a picture
+of the old fellow looking down from the top of the steep staircase,
+one hand pressed to his back, the other twisting up those little white
+moustaches, and murmuring, “Take care, my dear sir, there's a step there
+at the corner.”
+
+“To be a gentleman!” I repeated in the street, causing an old French
+lady to drop her parasol, so that for about two minutes we stood bowing
+and smiling to each other, then separated full of the best feeling.
+
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+A week later I found myself again seated next him at a concert. In the
+meantime I had seen him now and then, but only in passing. He seemed
+depressed. The corners of his lips were tightened, his tanned cheeks had
+a greyish tinge, his eyes were restless; and, between two numbers of
+the programme, he murmured, tapping his fingers on his hat, “Do you ever
+have bad days? Yes? Not pleasant, are they?”
+
+Then something occurred from which all that I have to tell you followed.
+There came into the concert-hall the heroine of one of those romances,
+crimes, follies, or irregularities, call it what you will, which had
+just attracted the “world's” stare. She passed us with her partner, and
+sat down in a chair a few rows to our right. She kept turning her head
+round, and at every turn I caught the gleam of her uneasy eyes. Some one
+behind us said: “The brazen baggage!”
+
+My companion turned full round, and glared at whoever it was who had
+spoken. The change in him was quite remarkable. His lips were drawn back
+from his teeth; he frowned; the scar on his temple had reddened.
+
+“Ah!” he said to me. “The hue and cry! Contemptible! How I hate it! But
+you wouldn't understand—!” he broke off, and slowly regained his usual
+air of self-obliteration; he even seemed ashamed, and began trying to
+brush his moustaches higher than ever, as if aware that his heat had
+robbed them of neatness.
+
+“I'm not myself, when I speak of such matters,” he said suddenly; and
+began reading his programme, holding it upside down. A minute later,
+however, he said in a peculiar voice: “There are people to be found who
+object to vivisecting animals; but the vivisection of a woman, who minds
+that? Will you tell me it's right, that because of some tragedy like
+this—believe me, it is always a tragedy—we should hunt down a woman?
+That her fellow-women should make an outcast of her? That we, who are
+men, should make a prey of her? If I thought that....” Again he broke
+off, staring very hard in front of him. “It is we who make them what
+they are; and even if that is not so—why! if I thought there was a
+woman in the world I could not take my hat off to—I—I—couldn't sleep at
+night.” He got up from his seat, put on his old straw hat with trembling
+fingers, and, without a glance back, went out, stumbling over the
+chair-legs.
+
+I sat there, horribly disturbed; the words, “One must try to be a
+gentleman!” haunting me. When I came out, he was standing by the
+entrance with one hand on his hip and the other on his dog. In that
+attitude of waiting he was such a patient figure; the sun glared down
+and showed the threadbare nature of his clothes and the thinness of
+his brown hands, with their long fingers and nails yellow from tobacco.
+Seeing me he came up the steps again, and raised his hat.
+
+“I am glad to have caught you; please forget all that.” I asked if he
+would do me the honour of dining at my hotel.
+
+“Dine?” he repeated with the sort of smile a child gives if you offer
+him a box of soldiers; “with the greatest pleasure. I seldom dine out,
+but I think I can muster up a coat. Yes—yes—and at what time shall I
+come? At half-past seven, and your hotel is—? Good! I shall be there.
+Freda, mia cara, you will be alone this evening. You do not smoke
+caporal, I fear. I find it fairly good; though it has too much bite.” He
+walked off with Freda, puffing at his thin roll of caporal.
+
+Once or twice he stopped, as if bewildered or beset by some sudden
+doubt or memory; and every time he stopped, Freda licked his hand. They
+disappeared round the corner of the street, and I went to my hotel to
+see about dinner. On the way I met Jules le Ferrier, and asked him to
+come too.
+
+“My faith, yes!” he said, with the rosy pessimism characteristic of the
+French editor. “Man must dine!”
+
+At half-past six we assembled. My “Cosmopolitan” was in an old
+frock-coat braided round the edges, buttoned high and tight, defining
+more than ever the sharp lines of his shoulders and the slight kink of
+his back; he had brought with him, too, a dark-peaked cap of military
+shape, which he had evidently selected as more fitting to the coat than
+a straw hat. He smelled slightly of some herb.
+
+We sat down to dinner, and did not rise for two hours. He was a charming
+guest, praised everything he ate—not with commonplaces, but in words
+that made you feel it had given him real pleasure. At first, whenever
+Jules made one of his caustic remarks, he looked quite pained, but
+suddenly seemed to make up his mind that it was bark, not bite; and then
+at each of them he would turn to me and say, “Aha! that's good—isn't
+it?” With every glass of wine he became more gentle and more genial,
+sitting very upright, and tightly buttoned-in; while the little white
+wings of his moustache seemed about to leave him for a better world.
+
+In spite of the most leading questions, however, we could not get him to
+talk about himself, for even Jules, most cynical of men, had recognised
+that he was a hero of romance. He would answer gently and precisely, and
+then sit twisting his moustaches, perfectly unconscious that we wanted
+more. Presently, as the wine went a little to his head, his thin, high
+voice grew thinner, his cheeks became flushed, his eyes brighter; at the
+end of dinner he said: “I hope I have not been noisy.”
+
+We assured him that he had not been noisy enough. “You're laughing at
+me,” he answered. “Surely I've been talking all the time!”
+
+“Mon Dieu!” said Jules, “we have been looking for some fables of your
+wars; but nothing—nothing, not enough to feed a frog!”
+
+The old fellow looked troubled.
+
+“To be sure!” he mused. “Let me think! there is that about Colhoun
+at Gettysburg; and there's the story of Garibaldi and the Miller.” He
+plunged into a tale, not at all about himself, which would have been
+extremely dull, but for the conviction in his eyes, and the way he
+stopped and commented. “So you see,” he ended, “that's the sort of
+man Garibaldi was! I could tell you another tale of him.” Catching an
+introspective look in Jules's eye, however, I proposed taking our cigars
+over to the cafe opposite.
+
+“Delightful!” the old fellow said: “We shall have a band and the fresh
+air, and clear consciences for our cigars. I cannot like this smoking in
+a room where there are ladies dining.”
+
+He walked out in front of us, smoking with an air of great enjoyment.
+Jules, glowing above his candid shirt and waistcoat, whispered to me,
+“Mon cher Georges, how he is good!” then sighed, and added darkly: “The
+poor man!”
+
+We sat down at a little table. Close by, the branches of a plane-tree
+rustled faintly; their leaves hung lifeless, speckled like the breasts
+of birds, or black against the sky; then, caught by the breeze,
+fluttered suddenly.
+
+The old fellow sat, with head thrown back, a smile on his face, coming
+now and then out of his enchanted dreams to drink coffee, answer our
+questions, or hum the tune that the band was playing. The ash of his
+cigar grew very long. One of those bizarre figures in Oriental garb,
+who, night after night, offer their doubtful wares at a great price,
+appeared in the white glare of a lamp, looked with a furtive smile at
+his face, and glided back, discomfited by its unconsciousness. It was
+a night for dreams! A faint, half-eastern scent in the air, of black
+tobacco and spice; few people as yet at the little tables, the waiters
+leisurely, the band soft! What was he dreaming of, that old fellow,
+whose cigar-ash grew so long? Of youth, of his battles, of those things
+that must be done by those who try to be gentlemen; perhaps only of his
+dinner; anyway of something gilded in vague fashion as the light was
+gilding the branches of the plane-tree.
+
+Jules pulled my sleeve: “He sleeps.” He had smilingly dropped off; the
+cigar-ash—that feathery tower of his dreams—had broken and fallen on his
+sleeve. He awoke, and fell to dusting it.
+
+The little tables round us began to fill. One of the bandsmen played a
+czardas on the czymbal. Two young Frenchmen, talking loudly, sat down at
+the adjoining table. They were discussing the lady who had been at the
+concert that afternoon.
+
+“It's a bet,” said one of them, “but there's the present man. I take
+three weeks, that's enough 'elle est declassee; ce n'est que le premier
+pas—'”
+
+My old friend's cigar fell on the table. “Monsieur,” he stammered, “you
+speak of a lady so, in a public place?”
+
+The young man stared at him. “Who is this person?” he said to his
+companion.
+
+My guest took up Jules's glove that lay on the table; before either
+of us could raise a finger, he had swung it in the speaker's face.
+“Enough!” he said, and, dropping the glove, walked away.
+
+We all jumped to our feet. I left Jules and hurried after him. His face
+was grim, his eyes those of a creature who has been struck on a raw
+place. He made a movement of his fingers which said plainly. “Leave me,
+if you please!”
+
+I went back to the cafe. The two young men had disappeared, so had
+Jules, but everything else was going on just as before; the bandsman
+still twanging out his czardas; the waiters serving drinks; the
+orientals trying to sell their carpets. I paid the bill, sought out the
+manager, and apologised. He shrugged his shoulders, smiled and said:
+“An eccentric, your friend, nicht wahr?” Could he tell me where M. Le
+Ferrier was? He could not. I left to look for Jules; could not find him,
+and returned to my hotel disgusted. I was sorry for my old guest, but
+vexed with him too; what business had he to carry his Quixotism to such
+an unpleasant length? I tried to read. Eleven o'clock struck; the casino
+disgorged a stream of people; the Place seemed fuller of life than ever;
+then slowly it grew empty and quite dark. The whim seized me to go out.
+It was a still night, very warm, very black. On one of the seats a
+man and woman sat embraced, on another a girl was sobbing, on a
+third—strange sight—a priest dozed. I became aware of some one at my
+side; it was my old guest.
+
+“If you are not too tired,” he said, “can you give me ten minutes?”
+
+“Certainly; will you come in?”
+
+“No, no; let us go down to the Terrace. I shan't keep you long.”
+
+He did not speak again till we reached a seat above the pigeon-shooting
+grounds; there, in a darkness denser for the string of lights still
+burning in the town, we sat down.
+
+“I owe you an apology,” he said; “first in the afternoon, then again
+this evening—your guest—your friend's glove! I have behaved as no
+gentleman should.” He was leaning forward with his hands on the handle
+of a stick. His voice sounded broken and disturbed.
+
+“Oh!” I muttered. “It's nothing!”'
+
+“You are very good,” he sighed; “but I feel that I must explain. I
+consider I owe this to you, but I must tell you I should not have the
+courage if it were not for another reason. You see I have no friend.” He
+looked at me with an uncertain smile. I bowed, and a minute or two later
+he began....
+
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+“You will excuse me if I go back rather far. It was in '74, when I had
+been ill with Cuban fever. To keep me alive they had put me on board a
+ship at Santiago, and at the end of the voyage I found myself in London.
+I had very little money; I knew nobody. I tell you, sir, there are times
+when it's hard for a fighting man to get anything to do. People would
+say to me: 'Afraid we've nothing for a man like you in our business.' I
+tried people of all sorts; but it was true—I had been fighting here and
+there since '60, I wasn't fit for anything—” He shook his head. “In the
+South, before the war, they had a saying, I remember, about a dog and a
+soldier having the same value. But all this has nothing to do with what
+I have to tell you.” He sighed again and went on, moistening his lips:
+“I was walking along the Strand one day, very disheartened, when I heard
+my name called. It's a queer thing, that, in a strange street. By the
+way,” he put in with dry ceremony, “you don't know my name, I think: it
+is Brune—Roger Brune. At first I did not recognise the person who called
+me. He had just got off an omnibus—a square-shouldered man with heavy
+moustaches, and round spectacles. But when he shook my hand I knew
+him at once. He was a man called Dalton, who was taken prisoner at
+Gettysburg; one of you Englishmen who came to fight with us—a major in
+the regiment where I was captain. We were comrades during two campaigns.
+If I had been his brother he couldn't have seemed more pleased to see
+me. He took me into a bar for the sake of old times. The drink went to
+my head, and by the time we reached Trafalgar Square I was quite unable
+to walk. He made me sit down on a bench. I was in fact—drunk. It's
+disgraceful to be drunk, but there was some excuse. Now I tell you, sir”
+(all through his story he was always making use of that expression, it
+seemed to infuse fresh spirit into him, to help his memory in obscure
+places, to give him the mastery of his emotions; it was like the piece
+of paper a nervous man holds in his hand to help him through a speech),
+“there never was a man with a finer soul than my friend Dalton. He was
+not clever, though he had read much; and sometimes perhaps he was too
+fond of talking. But he was a gentleman; he listened to me as if I had
+been a child; he was not ashamed of me—and it takes a gentleman not to
+be ashamed of a drunken man in the streets of London; God knows what
+things I said to him while we were sitting there! He took me to his home
+and put me to bed himself; for I was down again with fever.” He stopped,
+turned slightly from me, and put his hand up to his brow. “Well, then
+it was, sir, that I first saw her. I am not a poet and I cannot tell you
+what she seemed to me. I was delirious, but I always knew when she was
+there. I had dreams of sunshine and cornfields, of dancing waves at sea,
+young trees—never the same dreams, never anything for long together; and
+when I had my senses I was afraid to say so for fear she would go away.
+She'd be in the corner of the room, with her hair hanging about her
+neck, a bright gold colour; she never worked and never read, but sat and
+talked to herself in a whisper, or looked at me for a long time together
+out of her blue eyes, a little frown between them, and her upper lip
+closed firm on her lower lip, where she had an uneven tooth. When her
+father came, she'd jump up and hang on to his neck until he groaned,
+then run away, but presently come stealing back on tiptoe. I used to
+listen for her footsteps on the stairs, then the knock, the door flung
+back or opened quietly—you never could tell which; and her voice, with a
+little lisp, 'Are you better today, Mr. Brune? What funny things you say
+when you're delirious! Father says you've been in heaps of battles!”'
+
+He got up, paced restlessly to and fro, and sat down again. “I remember
+every word as if it were yesterday, all the things she said, and did;
+I've had a long time to think them over, you see. Well, I must tell you,
+the first morning that I was able to get up, I missed her. Dalton
+came in her place, and I asked him where she was. 'My dear fellow,'
+he answered, 'I've sent Eilie away to her old nurse's inn down on the
+river; she's better there at this time of year.' We looked at each
+other, and I saw that he had sent her away because he didn't trust me. I
+was hurt by this. Illness spoils one. He was right, he was quite right,
+for all he knew about me was that I could fight and had got drunk; but
+I am very quick-tempered. I made up my mind at once to leave him. But
+I was too weak—he had to put me to bed again. The very next morning he
+came and proposed that I should go into partnership with him. He kept a
+fencing-school and pistol-gallery. It seemed like the finger of God; and
+perhaps it was—who knows?” He fell into a reverie, and taking out his
+caporal, rolled himself a cigarette; having lighted it, he went on
+suddenly: “There, in the room above the school, we used to sit in the
+evenings, one on each side of the grate. The room was on the second
+floor, I remember, with two windows, and a view of nothing but the
+houses opposite. The furniture was covered up with chintz. The things on
+the bookshelf were never disturbed, they were Eilie's—half-broken cases
+with butterflies, a dead frog in a bottle, a horse-shoe covered with
+tinfoil, some shells too, and a cardboard box with three speckled eggs
+in it, and these words written on the lid: 'Missel-thrush from Lucy's
+tree—second family, only one blown.'” He smoked fiercely, with puffs
+that were like sharp sighs.
+
+“Dalton was wrapped up in her. He was never tired of talking to me about
+her, and I was never tired of hearing. We had a number of pupils; but
+in the evening when we sat there, smoking—our talk would sooner or
+later—come round to her. Her bedroom opened out of that sitting—room;
+he took me in once and showed me a narrow little room the width of a
+passage, fresh and white, with a photograph of her mother above the bed,
+and an empty basket for a dog or cat.” He broke off with a vexed air,
+and resumed sternly, as if trying to bind himself to the narration of
+his more important facts: “She was then fifteen—her mother had been dead
+twelve years—a beautiful, face, her mother's; it had been her death that
+sent Dalton to fight with us. Well, sir, one day in August, very hot
+weather, he proposed a run into the country, and who should meet us
+on the platform when we arrived but Eilie, in a blue sun-bonnet and
+frock--flax blue, her favourite colour. I was angry with Dalton for not
+telling me that we should see her; my clothes were not quite—my hair
+wanted cutting. It was black then, sir,” he added, tracing a pattern in
+the darkness with his stick. “She had a little donkey-cart; she drove,
+and, while we walked one on each side, she kept looking at me from under
+her sunbonnet. I must tell you that she never laughed—her eyes danced,
+her cheeks would go pink, and her hair shake about on her neck, but
+she never laughed. Her old nurse, Lucy, a very broad, good woman, had
+married the proprietor of the inn in the village there. I have never
+seen anything like that inn: sweetbriar up to the roof! And the scent—I
+am very susceptible to scents!” His head drooped, and the cigarette fell
+from his hand. A train passing beneath sent up a shower of sparks. He
+started, and went on: “We had our lunch in the parlour—I remember that
+room very well, for I spent the happiest days of my life afterwards in
+that inn.... We went into a meadow after lunch, and my friend Dalton
+fell asleep. A wonderful thing happened then. Eilie whispered to me,
+'Let's have a jolly time.' She took me for the most glorious walk. The
+river was close by. A lovely stream, your river Thames, so calm and
+broad; it is like the spirit of your people. I was bewitched; I forgot
+my friend, I thought of nothing but how to keep her to myself. It was
+such a day! There are days that are the devil's, but that was truly one
+of God's. She took me to a little pond under an elm-tree, and we dragged
+it, we two, an hour, for a kind of tiny red worm to feed some creature
+that she had. We found them in the mud, and while she was bending over,
+the curls got in her eyes. If you could have seen her then, I think,
+sir, you would have said she was like the first sight of spring....
+We had tea afterwards, all together, in the long grass under some
+fruit-trees. If I had the knack of words, there are things that I
+could say.” He bent, as though in deference to those unspoken memories.
+“Twilight came on while we were sitting there. A wonderful thing is
+twilight in the country! It became time for us to go. There was an
+avenue of trees close by—like a church with a window at the end, where
+golden light came through. I walked up and down it with her. 'Will you
+come again?' she whispered, and suddenly she lifted up her face to be
+kissed. I kissed her as if she were a little child. And when we said
+good-bye, her eyes were looking at me across her father's shoulder,
+with surprise and sorrow in them. 'Why do you go away?' they seemed to
+say.... But I must tell you,” he went on hurriedly, “of a thing that
+happened before we had gone a hundred yards. We were smoking our pipes,
+and I, thinking of her—when out she sprang from the hedge and stood in
+front of us. Dalton cried out, 'What are you here for again, you mad
+girl?' She rushed up to him and hugged him; but when she looked at me,
+her face was quite different—careless, defiant, as one might say—it hurt
+me. I couldn't understand it, and what one doesn't understand frightens
+one.”
+
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+“Time went on. There was no swordsman, or pistol-shot like me in London,
+they said. We had as many pupils as we liked—it was the only part of my
+life when I have been able to save money. I had no chance to spend it.
+We gave lessons all day, and in the evening were too tired to go out.
+That year I had the misfortune to lose my dear mother. I became a rich
+man—yes, sir, at that time I must have had not less than six hundred a
+year.
+
+“It was a long time before I saw Eilie again. She went abroad to Dresden
+with her father's sister to learn French and German. It was in the
+autumn of 1875 when she came back to us. She was seventeen then—a
+beautiful young creature.” He paused, as if to gather his forces for
+description, and went on.
+
+“Tall, as a young tree, with eyes like the sky. I would not say she was
+perfect, but her imperfections were beautiful to me. What is it makes
+you love—ah! sir, that is very hidden and mysterious. She had never lost
+the trick of closing her lips tightly when she remembered her uneven
+tooth. You may say that was vanity, but in a young girl—and which of us
+is not vain, eh? 'Old men and maidens, young men and children!'
+
+“As I said, she came back to London to her little room, and in the
+evenings was always ready with our tea. You mustn't suppose she
+was housewifely; there is something in me that never admired
+housewifeliness—a fine quality, no doubt, still—” He sighed.
+
+“No,” he resumed, “Eilie was not like that, for she was never quite the
+same two days together. I told you her eyes were like the sky—that was
+true of all of her. In one thing, however, at that time, she always
+seemed the same—in love for her father. For me! I don't know what I
+should have expected; but my presence seemed to have the effect of
+making her dumb; I would catch her looking at me with a frown, and then,
+as if to make up to her own nature—and a more loving nature never came
+into this world, that I shall maintain to my dying day—she would go to
+her father and kiss him. When I talked with him she pretended not to
+notice, but I could see her face grow cold and stubborn. I am not quick;
+and it was a long time before I understood that she was jealous, she
+wanted him all to herself. I've often wondered how she could be his
+daughter, for he was the very soul of justice and a slow man too—and she
+was as quick as a bird. For a long time after I saw her dislike of me, I
+refused to believe it—if one does not want to believe a thing there are
+always reasons why it should not seem true, at least so it is with me,
+and I suppose with all selfish men.
+
+“I spent evening after evening there, when, if I had not thought only of
+myself, I should have kept away. But one day I could no longer be blind.
+
+“It was a Sunday in February. I always had an invitation on Sundays
+to dine with them in the middle of the day. There was no one in the
+sitting-room; but the door of Eilie's bedroom was open. I heard her
+voice: 'That man, always that man!' It was enough for me, I went down
+again without coming in, and walked about all day.
+
+“For three weeks I kept away. To the school of course I came as usual,
+but not upstairs. I don't know what I told Dalton—it did not signify
+what you told him, he always had a theory of his own, and was persuaded
+of its truth—a very single-minded man, sir.
+
+“But now I come to the most wonderful days of my life. It was an early
+spring that year. I had fallen away already from my resolution, and used
+to slink up—seldom, it's true—and spend the evening with them as before.
+One afternoon I came up to the sitting-room; the light was failing—it
+was warm, and the windows were open. In the air was that feeling which
+comes to you once a year, in the spring, no matter where you may be, in
+a crowded street, or alone in a forest; only once—a feeling like—but I
+cannot describe it.
+
+“Eilie was sitting there. If you don't know, sir, I can't tell you
+what it means to be near the woman one loves. She was leaning on the
+windowsill, staring down into the street. It was as though she might
+be looking out for some one. I stood, hardly breathing. She turned
+her head, and saw me. Her eyes were strange. They seemed to ask me a
+question. But I couldn't have spoken for the world. I can't tell
+you what I felt—I dared not speak, or think, or hope. I have been in
+nineteen battles—several times in positions of some danger, when the
+lifting of a finger perhaps meant death; but I have never felt what
+I was feeling at that moment. I knew something was coming; and I was
+paralysed with terror lest it should not come!” He drew a long breath.
+
+“The servant came in with a light and broke the spell. All that night
+I lay awake and thought of how she had looked at me, with the colour
+coming slowly up in her cheeks—
+
+“It was three days before I plucked up courage to go again; and then I
+felt her eyes on me at once—she was making a 'cat's cradle' with a bit
+of string, but I could see them stealing up from her hands to my face.
+And she went wandering about the room, fingering at everything. When her
+father called out: 'What's the matter with you, Elie?' she stared at
+him like a child caught doing wrong. I looked straight at her then, she
+tried to look at me, but she couldn't; and a minute later she went out
+of the room. God knows what sort of nonsense I talked—I was too happy.
+
+“Then began our love. I can't tell you of that time. Often and often
+Dalton said to me: 'What's come to the child? Nothing I can do pleases
+her.' All the love she had given him was now for me; but he was too
+simple and straight to see what was going on. How many times haven't I
+felt criminal towards him! But when you're happy, with the tide in your
+favour, you become a coward at once....”
+
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+“Well, sir,” he went on, “we were married on her eighteenth birthday. It
+was a long time before Dalton became aware of our love. But one day he
+said to me with a very grave look:
+
+“'Eilie has told me, Brune; I forbid it. She's too young, and you're—too
+old!' I was then forty-five, my hair as black and thick as a rook's
+feathers, and I was strong and active. I answered him: 'We shall be
+married within a month!' We parted in anger. It was a May night, and
+I walked out far into the country. There's no remedy for anger, or,
+indeed, for anything, so fine as walking. Once I stopped—it was on a
+common, without a house or light, and the stars shining like jewels. I
+was hot from walking, I could feel the blood boiling in my veins—I said
+to myself 'Old, are you?' And I laughed like a fool. It was the thought
+of losing her—I wished to believe myself angry, but really I was afraid;
+fear and anger in me are very much the same. A friend of mine, a bit of
+a poet, sir, once called them 'the two black wings of self.' And so
+they are, so they are...! The next morning I went to Dalton again, and
+somehow I made him yield. I'm not a philosopher, but it has often seemed
+to me that no benefit can come to us in this life without an equal loss
+somewhere, but does that stop us? No, sir, not often....
+
+“We were married on the 30th of June 1876, in the parish church.
+The only people present were Dalton, Lucy, and Lucy's husband—a big,
+red-faced fellow, with blue eyes and a golden beard parted in two. It
+had been arranged that we should spend the honeymoon down at their inn
+on the river. My wife, Dalton and I, went to a restaurant for lunch.
+She was dressed in grey, the colour of a pigeon's feathers.” He paused,
+leaning forward over the crutch handle of his stick; trying to conjure
+up, no doubt, that long-ago image of his young bride in her dress “the
+colour of a pigeon's feathers,” with her blue eyes and yellow hair, the
+little frown between her brows, the firmly shut red lips, opening to
+speak the words, “For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in
+sickness and in health.”
+
+“At that time, sir,” he went on suddenly, “I was a bit of a dandy. I
+wore, I remember, a blue frock-coat, with white trousers, and a grey top
+hat. Even now I should always prefer to be well dressed....
+
+“We had an excellent lunch, and drank Veuve Clicquot, a wine that you
+cannot get in these days! Dalton came with us to the railway station. I
+can't bear partings; and yet, they must come.
+
+“That evening we walked out in the cool under the aspen-trees. What
+should I remember in all my life if not that night—the young bullocks
+snuffling in the gateways—the campion flowers all lighted up along the
+hedges—the moon with a halo-bats, too, in and out among the stems, and
+the shadows of the cottages as black and soft as that sea down there.
+For a long time we stood on the river-bank beneath a lime-tree. The
+scent of the lime flowers! A man can only endure about half his joy;
+about half his sorrow. Lucy and her husband,” he went on, presently,
+“his name was Frank Tor—a man like an old Viking, who ate nothing but
+milk, bread, and fruit—were very good to us! It was like Paradise in
+that inn—though the commissariat, I am bound to say, was limited. The
+sweetbriar grew round our bedroom windows; when the breeze blew the
+leaves across the opening—it was like a bath of perfume. Eilie grew as
+brown as a gipsy while we were there. I don't think any man could have
+loved her more than I did. But there were times when my heart stood
+still; it didn't seem as if she understood how much I loved her.
+One day, I remember, she coaxed me to take her camping. We drifted
+down-stream all the afternoon, and in the evening pulled into the reeds
+under the willow-boughs and lit a fire for her to cook by—though, as a
+matter of fact, our provisions were cooked already—but you know how it
+is; all the romance was in having a real fire. 'We won't pretend,'
+she kept saying. While we were eating our supper a hare came to our
+clearing—a big fellow—how surprised he looked! 'The tall hare,' Eilie
+called him. After that we sat by the ashes and watched the shadows, till
+at last she roamed away from me. The time went very slowly; I got up to
+look for her. It was past sundown. I called and called. It was a long
+time before I found her—and she was like a wild thing, hot and flushed,
+her pretty frock torn, her hands and face scratched, her hair down, like
+some beautiful creature of the woods. If one loves, a little thing will
+scare one. I didn't think she had noticed my fright; but when we got
+back to the boat she threw her arms round my neck, and said, 'I won't
+ever leave you again!'
+
+“Once in the night I woke—a water-hen was crying, and in the moonlight
+a kingfisher flew across. The wonder on the river—the wonder of the
+moon and trees, the soft bright mist, the stillness! It was like another
+world, peaceful, enchanted, far holier than ours. It seemed like a
+vision of the thoughts that come to one—how seldom! and go if one tries
+to grasp them. Magic—poetry-sacred!” He was silent a minute, then went
+on in a wistful voice: “I looked at her, sleeping like a child, with her
+hair loose, and her lips apart, and I thought: 'God do so to me, if
+ever I bring her pain!' How was I to understand her? the mystery
+and innocence of her soul! The river has had all my light and all my
+darkness, the happiest days, and the hours when I've despaired; and I
+like to think of it, for, you know, in time bitter memories fade, only
+the good remain.... Yet the good have their own pain, a different kind
+of aching, for we shall never get them back. Sir,” he said, turning to
+me with a faint smile, “it's no use crying over spilt milk.... In the
+neighbourhood of Lucy's inn, the Rose and Maybush—Can you imagine a
+prettier name? I have been all over the world, and nowhere found names
+so pretty as in the English country. There, too, every blade of grass;
+and flower, has a kind of pride about it; knows it will be cared for;
+and all the roads, trees, and cottages, seem to be certain that they
+will live for ever.... But I was going to tell you: Half a mile from the
+inn was a quiet old house which we used to call the 'Convent'—though I
+believe it was a farm. We spent many afternoons there, trespassing in
+the orchard—Eilie was fond of trespassing; if there were a long way
+round across somebody else's property, she would always take it. We
+spent our last afternoon in that orchard, lying in the long grass. I was
+reading Childe Harold for the first time—a wonderful, a memorable poem!
+I was at that passage—the bull-fight—you remember:
+
+“'Thrice sounds the clarion; lo! the signal falls, The din expands, and
+expectation mute'
+
+—“when suddenly Eilie said: 'Suppose I were to leave off loving you?' It
+was as if some one had struck me in the face. I jumped up, and tried to
+take her in my arms, but she slipped away; then she turned, and began
+laughing softly. I laughed too. I don't know why....”
+
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+“We went back to London the next day; we lived quite close to the
+school, and about five days a week Dalton came to dine with us. He would
+have come every day, if he had not been the sort of man who refuses to
+consult his own pleasure. We had more pupils than ever. In my leisure I
+taught my wife to fence. I have never seen any one so lithe and quick;
+or so beautiful as she looked in her fencing dress, with embroidered
+shoes.
+
+“I was completely happy. When a man has obtained his desire he becomes
+careless and self-satisfied; I was watchful, however, for I knew that
+I was naturally a selfish man. I studied to arrange my time and save my
+money, to give her as much pleasure as I could. What she loved best in
+the world just then was riding. I bought a horse for her, and in the
+evenings of the spring and summer we rode together; but when it was too
+dark to go out late, she would ride alone, great distances, sometimes
+spend the whole day in the saddle, and come back so tired she could
+hardly walk upstairs—I can't say that I liked that. It made me nervous,
+she was so headlong—but I didn't think it right to interfere with her.
+I had a good deal of anxiety about money, for though I worked hard and
+made more than ever, there never seemed enough. I was anxious to save—I
+hoped, of course—but we had no child, and this was a trouble to me. She
+grew more beautiful than ever, and I think was happy. Has it ever struck
+you that each one of us lives on the edge of a volcano? There is, I
+imagine, no one who has not some affection or interest so strong that he
+counts the rest for nothing, beside it. No doubt a man may live his life
+through without discovering that. But some of us—! I am not complaining;
+what is—is.” He pulled the cap lower over his eyes, and clutched his
+hands firmly on the top of his stick. He was like a man who rushes his
+horse at some hopeless fence, unwilling to give himself time, for fear
+of craning at the last moment. “In the spring of '78, a new pupil came
+to me, a young man of twenty-one who was destined for the army. I took
+a fancy to him, and did my best to turn him into a good swordsman; but
+there was a kind of perverse recklessness in him; for a few minutes
+one would make a great impression, then he would grow utterly careless.
+'Francis,' I would say, 'if I were you I should be ashamed.' 'Mr.
+Brune,' he would answer, 'why should I be ashamed? I didn't make
+myself.' God knows, I wish to do him justice, he had a heart—one day he
+drove up in a cab, and brought in his poor dog, who had been run over,
+and was dying: For half an hour he shut himself up with its body, we
+could hear him sobbing like a child; he came out with his eyes all red,
+and cried: 'I know where to find the brute who drove over him,' and
+off he rushed. He had beautiful Italian eyes; a slight figure, not very
+tall; dark hair, a little dark moustache; and his lips were always a
+trifle parted—it was that, and his walk, and the way he drooped his
+eyelids, which gave him a peculiar, soft, proud look. I used to tell him
+that he'd never make a soldier! 'Oh!' he'd answer, 'that'll be all
+right when the time comes! He believed in a kind of luck that was to
+do everything for him, when the time came. One day he came in as I was
+giving Eilie her lesson. This was the first time they saw each other.
+After that he came more often, and sometimes stayed to dinner with us.
+I won't deny, sir, that I was glad to welcome him; I thought it good for
+Eilie. Can there be anything more odious,” he burst out, “than such a
+self-complacent blindness? There are people who say, 'Poor man, he had
+such faith!' Faith, sir! Conceit! I was a fool—in this world one pays
+for folly....
+
+“The summer came; and one Saturday in early June, Eilie, I, and
+Francis—I won't tell you his other name—went riding. The night had been
+wet; there was no dust, and presently the sun came out—a glorious day!
+We rode a long way. About seven o'clock we started back-slowly, for it
+was still hot, and there was all the cool of night before us. It was
+nine o'clock when we came to Richmond Park. A grand place, Richmond
+Park; and in that half-light wonderful, the deer moving so softly, you
+might have thought they were spirits. We were silent too—great trees
+have that effect on me....
+
+“Who can say when changes come? Like a shift of the wind, the old
+passes, the new is on you. I am telling you now of a change like that.
+Without a sign of warning, Eilie put her horse into a gallop. 'What are
+you doing?' I shouted. She looked back with a smile, then he dashed past
+me too. A hornet might have stung them both: they galloped over fallen
+trees, under low hanging branches, up hill and down. I had to watch that
+madness! My horse was not so fast. I rode like a demon; but fell far
+behind. I am not a man who takes things quietly. When I came up with
+them at last, I could not speak for rage. They were riding side by side,
+the reins on the horses' necks, looking in each other's faces. 'You
+should take care,' I said. 'Care!' she cried; 'life is not all taking
+care!' My anger left me. I dropped behind, as grooms ride behind their
+mistresses... Jealousy! No torture is so ceaseless or so black.... In
+those minutes a hundred things came up in me—a hundred memories, true,
+untrue, what do I know? My soul was poisoned. I tried to reason with
+myself. It was absurd to think such things! It was unmanly.... Even
+if it were true, one should try to be a gentleman! But I found myself
+laughing; yes, sir, laughing at that word.” He spoke faster, as if
+pouring his heart out not to a live listener, but to the night. “I could
+not sleep that night. To lie near her with those thoughts in my brain
+was impossible! I made an excuse, and sat up with some papers. The
+hardest thing in life is to see a thing coming and be able to do nothing
+to prevent it. What could I do? Have you noticed how people may become
+utter strangers without a word? It only needs a thought.... The very
+next day she said: 'I want to go to Lucy's.' 'Alone?' 'Yes.' I had made
+up my mind by then that she must do just as she wished. Perhaps I acted
+wrongly; I do not know what one ought to do in such a case; but before
+she went I said to her: 'Eilie, what is it?' 'I don't know,' she
+answered; and I kissed her—that was all.... A month passed; I wrote to
+her nearly every day, and I had short letters from her, telling me very
+little of herself. Dalton was a torture to me, for I could not tell him;
+he had a conviction that she was going to become a mother. 'Ah, Brune!'
+he said, 'my poor wife was just like that.' Life, sir, is a somewhat
+ironical affair...! He—I find it hard to speak his name—came to the
+school two or three times a week. I used to think I saw a change, a
+purpose growing up through his recklessness; there seemed a violence in
+him as if he chafed against my blade. I had a kind of joy in feeling I
+had the mastery, and could toss the iron out of his hand any minute
+like a straw. I was ashamed, and yet I gloried in it. Jealousy is a low
+thing, sir—a low, base thing! When he asked me where my wife was, I told
+him; I was too proud to hide it. Soon after that he came no more to the
+school.
+
+“One morning, when I could bear it no longer, I wrote, and said I was
+coming down. I would not force myself on her, but I asked her to meet me
+in the orchard of the old house we called the Convent. I asked her to
+be there at four o'clock. It has always been my belief that a man must
+neither beg anything of a woman, nor force anything from her. Women
+are generous—they will give you what they can. I sealed my letter, and
+posted it myself. All the way down I kept on saying to myself, 'She must
+come—surely she will come!'”
+
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+“I was in high spirits, but the next moment trembled like a man with
+ague. I reached the orchard before my time. She was not there. You know
+what it is like to wait? I stood still and listened; I went to the point
+whence I could see farthest; I said to myself, 'A watched pot never
+boils; if I don't look for her she will come.' I walked up and down with
+my eyes on the ground. The sickness of it! A hundred times I took out my
+watch.... Perhaps it was fast, perhaps hers was slow—I can't tell you a
+thousandth part of my hopes and fears. There was a spring of water, in
+one corner. I sat beside it, and thought of the last time I had been
+there—and something seemed to burst in me. It was five o'clock before I
+lost all hope; there comes a time when you're glad that hope is dead, it
+means rest. 'That's over,' you say, 'now I can act.' But what was I to
+do? I lay down with my face to the ground; when one's in trouble, it's
+the only thing that helps—something to press against and cling to that
+can't give way. I lay there for two hours, knowing all the time that
+I should play the coward. At seven o'clock I left the orchard and went
+towards the inn; I had broken my word, but I felt happy.... I should see
+her—and, sir, nothing—nothing seemed to matter beside that. Tor was in
+the garden snipping at his roses. He came up, and I could see that he
+couldn't look me in the face. 'Where's my wife?' I said. He answered,
+'Let's get Lucy.' I ran indoors. Lucy met me with two letters; the
+first—my own—unopened; and the second, this:
+
+“'I have left you. You were good to me, but now—it is no use.
+
+“EILIE.'”
+
+“She told me that a boy had brought a letter for my wife the day before,
+from a young gentleman in a boat. When Lucy delivered it she asked,
+'Who is he, Miss Eilie? What will Mr. Brune say?' My wife looked at her
+angrily, but gave her no answer—and all that day she never spoke. In the
+evening she was gone, leaving this note on the bed.... Lucy cried as if
+her heart would break. I took her by the shoulders and put her from the
+room; I couldn't bear the noise. I sat down and tried to think. While
+I was sitting there Tor came in with a letter. It was written on the
+notepaper of an inn twelve miles up the river: these were the words.
+
+“'Eilie is mine. I am ready to meet you where you like.'”
+
+He went on with a painful evenness of speech. “When I read those words,
+I had only one thought—to reach them; I ran down to the river, and chose
+out the lightest boat. Just as I was starting, Tor came running. 'You
+dropped this letter, sir,' he said. 'Two pair of arms are better than
+one.' He came into the boat. I took the sculls and I pulled out into the
+stream. I pulled like a madman; and that great man, with his bare
+arms crossed, was like a huge, tawny bull sitting there opposite me.
+Presently he took my place, and I took the rudder lines. I could see
+his chest, covered with hair, heaving up and down, it gave me a sort of
+comfort—it meant that we were getting nearer. Then it grew dark, there
+was no moon, I could barely see the bank; there's something in the dark
+which drives one into oneself. People tell you there comes a moment when
+your nature is decided—'saved' or 'lost' as they call it—for good or
+evil. That is not true, your self is always with you, and cannot be
+altered; but, sir, I believe that in a time of agony one finds out what
+are the things one can do, and what are those one cannot. You get to
+know yourself, that's all. And so it was with me. Every thought and
+memory and passion was so clear and strong! I wanted to kill him. I
+wanted to kill myself. But her—no! We are taught that we possess our
+wives, body and soul, we are brought up in that faith, we are commanded
+to believe it—but when I was face to face with it, those words had no
+meaning; that belief, those commands, they were without meaning to me,
+they were—vile. Oh yes, I wanted to find comfort in them, I wanted to
+hold on to them—but I couldn't. You may force a body; how can you force
+a soul? No, no—cowardly! But I wanted to—I wanted to kill him and force
+her to come back to me! And then, suddenly, I felt as if I were pressing
+right on the most secret nerve of my heart. I seemed to see her face,
+white and quivering, as if I'd stamped my heel on it. They say this
+world is ruled by force; it may be true—I know I have a weak spot in
+me.... I couldn't bear it. At last I Jumped to my feet and shouted out,
+'Turn the boat round!' Tor looked up at me as if I had gone mad. And I
+had gone mad. I seized the boat-hook and threatened him; I called him
+fearful names. 'Sir,' he said, 'I don't take such names from any one!'
+'You'll take them from me,' I shouted; 'turn the boat round, you idiot,
+you hound, you fish!...' I have a terrible temper, a perfect curse to
+me. He seemed amazed, even frightened; he sat down again suddenly and
+pulled the boat round. I fell on the seat, and hid my face. I believe
+the moon came up; there must have been a mist too, for I was cold as
+death. In this life, sir, we cannot hide our faces—but by degrees the
+pain of wounds grows less. Some will have it that such blows are mortal;
+it is not so. Time is merciful.
+
+“In the early morning I went back to London. I had fever on me—and was
+delirious. I dare say I should have killed myself if I had not been
+so used to weapons—they and I were too old friends, I suppose—I can't
+explain. It was a long while before I was up and about. Dalton nursed
+me through it; his great heavy moustache had grown quite white. We never
+mentioned her; what was the good? There were things to settle of course,
+the lawyer—this was unspeakably distasteful to me. I told him it was
+to be as she wished, but the fellow would come to me, with his—there,
+I don't want to be unkind. I wished him to say it was my fault, but he
+said—I remember his smile now—he said, that was impossible, would be
+seen through, talked of collusion—I don't understand these things, and
+what's more, I can't bear them, they are—dirty.
+
+“Two years later, when I had come back to London, after the
+Russo-Turkish war, I received a letter from her. I have it here.” He
+took an old, yellow sheet of paper out of a leathern pocketbook, spread
+it in his fingers, and sat staring at it. For some minutes he did not
+speak.
+
+“In the autumn of that same year she died in childbirth. He had deserted
+her. Fortunately for him, he was killed on the Indian frontier, that
+very year. If she had lived she would have been thirty-two next June;
+not a great age.... I know I am what they call a crank; doctors will
+tell you that you can't be cured of a bad illness, and be the same man
+again. If you are bent, to force yourself straight must leave you weak
+in another place. I must and will think well of women—everything done,
+and everything said against them is a stone on her dead body. Could you
+sit, and listen to it?” As though driven by his own question, he rose,
+and paced up and down. He came back to the seat at last.
+
+“That, sir, is the reason of my behaviour this afternoon, and again this
+evening. You have been so kind, I wanted!—wanted to tell you. She had a
+little daughter—Lucy has her now. My friend Dalton is dead; there would
+have been no difficulty about money, but, I am sorry to say, that he was
+swindled—disgracefully. It fell to me to administer his affairs—he never
+knew it, but he died penniless; he had trusted some wretched fellows—had
+an idea they would make his fortune. As I very soon found, they had
+ruined him. It was impossible to let Lucy—such a dear woman—bear that
+burden. I have tried to make provision; but, you see,” he took hold of
+my sleeve, “I, too, have not been fortunate; in fact, it's difficult
+to save a great deal out of L 190 a year; but the capital is perfectly
+safe—and I get L 47, 10s. a quarter, paid on the nail. I have often been
+tempted to reinvest at a greater rate of interest, but I've never dared.
+Anyway, there are no debts—I've been obliged to make a rule not to buy
+what I couldn't pay for on the spot.... Now I am really plaguing you—but
+I wanted to tell you—in case--anything should happen to me.” He seemed
+to take a sudden scare, stiffened, twisted his moustache, and muttering,
+“Your great kindness! Shall never forget!” turned hurriedly away.
+
+He vanished; his footsteps, and the tap of his stick grew fainter and
+fainter. They died out. He was gone. Suddenly I got up and hastened
+after him. I soon stopped—what was there to say?
+
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+The following day I was obliged to go to Nice, and did not return till
+midnight. The porter told me that Jules le Ferrier had been to see me.
+The next morning, while I was still in bed, the door was opened, and
+Jules appeared. His face was very pale; and the moment he stood still
+drops of perspiration began coursing down his cheeks.
+
+“Georges!” he said, “he is dead. There, there! How stupid you look! My
+man is packing. I have half an hour before the train; my evidence shall
+come from Italy. I have done my part, the rest is for you. Why did you
+have that dinner? The Don Quixote! The idiot! The poor man! Don't move!
+Have you a cigar? Listen! When you followed him, I followed the other
+two. My infernal curiosity! Can you conceive a greater folly? How fast
+they walked, those two! feeling their cheeks, as if he had struck them
+both, you know; it was funny. They soon saw me, for their eyes were all
+round about their heads; they had the mark of a glove on their cheeks.”
+The colour began to come back, into Jules's face; he gesticulated
+with his cigar and became more and more dramatic. “They waited for me.
+'Tiens!' said one, 'this gentleman was with him. My friend's name is M.
+Le Baron de—-. The man who struck him was an odd-looking person; kindly
+inform me whether it is possible for my friend to meet him?' Eh!”
+commented Jules, “he was offensive! Was it for me to give our dignity
+away? 'Perfectly, monsieur!' I answered. 'In that case,' he said,
+'please give me his name and address.... I could not remember his name,
+and as for the address, I never knew it...! I reflected. 'That,' I said,
+'I am unable to do, for special reasons.' 'Aha!' he said, 'reasons that
+will prevent our fighting him, I suppose? 'On the contrary,' I said. 'I
+will convey your request to him; I may mention that I have heard he is
+the best swordsman and pistol-shot in Europe. Good-night!' I wished to
+give them something to dream of, you understand.... Patience, my dear!
+Patience! I was, coming to you, but I thought I would let them sleep
+on it—there was plenty of time! But yesterday morning I came into the
+Place, and there he was on the bench, with a big dog. I declare to you
+he blushed like a young girl. 'Sir,' he said, 'I was hoping to meet
+you; last evening I made a great disturbance. I took an unpardonable
+liberty'—and he put in my hand an envelope. My friend, what do you
+suppose it contained—a pair of gloves! Senor Don Punctilioso, hein? He
+was the devil, this friend of yours; he fascinated me with his gentle
+eyes and his white moustachettes, his humility, his flames—poor man...!
+I told him I had been asked to take him a challenge. 'If anything comes
+of it,' I said, 'make use of me!' 'Is that so?' he said. 'I am most
+grateful for your kind offer. Let me see—it is so long since I fought
+a duel. The sooner it's over the better. Could you arrange to-morrow
+morning? Weapons? Yes; let them choose.' You see, my friend, there was
+no hanging back here; nous voila en train.”
+
+Jules took out his watch. “I have sixteen minutes. It is lucky for you
+that you were away yesterday, or you would be in my shoes now. I fixed
+the place, right hand of the road to Roquebrune, just by the railway
+cutting, and the time—five-thirty of the morning. It was arranged that I
+should call for him. Disgusting hour; I have not been up so early since
+I fought Jacques Tirbaut in '85. At five o'clock I found him ready and
+drinking tea with rum in it—singular man! he made me have some too,
+brrr! He was shaved, and dressed in that old frock-coat. His great dog
+jumped into the carriage, but he bade her get out, took her paws on his
+shoulders, and whispered in her ear some Italian words; a charm, hein!
+and back she went, the tail between the legs. We drove slowly, so as not
+to shake his arm. He was more gay than I. All the way he talked to me of
+you: how kind you were! how good you had been to him! 'You do not speak
+of yourself!' I said. 'Have you no friends, nothing to say? Sometimes an
+accident will happen!' 'Oh!' he answered, 'there is no danger; but if
+by any chance—well, there is a letter in my pocket.' 'And if you should
+kill him?' I said. 'But I shall not,' he answered slyly: 'do you think I
+am going to fire at him? No, no; he is too young.' 'But,' I said, 'I—'I
+am not going to stand that!' 'Yes,' he replied, 'I owe him a shot; but
+there is no danger—not the least danger.' We had arrived; already they
+were there. Ah bah! You know the preliminaries, the politeness—this
+duelling, you know, it is absurd, after all. We placed them at twenty
+paces. It is not a bad place. There are pine-trees round, and rocks; at
+that hour it was cool and grey as a church. I handed him the pistol. How
+can I describe him to you, standing there, smoothing the barrel with his
+fingers! 'What a beautiful thing a good pistol!' he said. 'Only a fool
+or a madman throws away his life,' I said. 'Certainly,' he replied,
+'certainly; but there is no danger,' and he regarded me, raising his
+moustachette.
+
+“There they stood then, back to back, with the mouths of their pistols
+to the sky. 'Un!' I cried, 'deux! tirez!' They turned, I saw the smoke
+of his shot go straight up like a prayer; his pistol dropped. I ran to
+him. He looked surprised, put out his hand, and fell into my arms. He
+was dead. Those fools came running up. 'What is it?' cried one. I made
+him a bow. 'As you see,' I said; 'you have made a pretty shot. My friend
+fired in the air. Messieurs, you had better breakfast in Italy.' We
+carried him to the carriage, and covered him with a rug; the others
+drove for the frontier. I brought him to his room. Here is his letter.”
+Jules stopped; tears were running down his face. “He is dead; I have
+closed his eyes. Look here, you know, we are all of us cads—it is the
+rule; but this—this, perhaps, was the exception.” And without another
+word he rushed away....
+
+Outside the old fellow's lodging a dismounted cocher was standing
+disconsolate in the sun. “How was I to know they were going to fight
+a duel?” he burst out on seeing me. “He had white hair—I call you to
+witness he had white hair. This is bad for me: they will ravish my
+licence. Aha! you will see—this is bad for me!” I gave him the slip and
+found my way upstairs. The old fellow was alone, lying on the bed, his
+feet covered with a rug as if he might feel cold; his eyes were closed,
+but in this sleep of death, he still had that air of faint surprise. At
+full length, watching the bed intently, Freda lay, as she lay nightly
+when he was really asleep. The shutters were half open; the room still
+smelt slightly of rum. I stood for a long time looking at the face:
+the little white fans of moustache brushed upwards even in death, the
+hollows in his cheeks, the quiet of his figure; he was like some old
+knight.... The dog broke the spell. She sat up, and resting her paws on
+the bed, licked his face. I went downstairs—I couldn't bear to hear her
+howl. This was his letter to me, written in a pointed handwriting:
+
+“MY DEAR SIR,—Should you read this, I shall be gone. I am ashamed to
+trouble you—a man should surely manage so as not to give trouble; and
+yet I believe you will not consider me importunate. If, then, you will
+pick up the pieces of an old fellow, I ask you to have my sword, the
+letter enclosed in this, and the photograph that stands on the stove
+buried with me. My will and the acknowledgments of my property are
+between the leaves of the Byron in my tin chest; they should go to Lucy
+Tor—address thereon. Perhaps you will do me the honour to retain for
+yourself any of my books that may give you pleasure. In the Pilgrim's
+Progress you will find some excellent recipes for Turkish coffee,
+Italian and Spanish dishes, and washing wounds. The landlady's daughter
+speaks Italian, and she would, I know, like to have Freda; the poor dog
+will miss me. I have read of old Indian warriors taking their horses
+and dogs with them to the happy hunting-grounds. Freda would come—noble
+animals are dogs! She eats once a day—a good large meal—and requires
+much salt. If you have animals of your own, sir, don't forget—all
+animals require salt. I have no debts, thank God! The money in my
+pockets would bury me decently—not that there is any danger. And I am
+ashamed to weary you with details—the least a man can do is not to make
+a fuss—and yet he must be found ready.—Sir, with profound gratitude,
+your servant,
+
+“ROGER BRUNE.”
+
+Everything was as he had said. The photograph on the stove was that of
+a young girl of nineteen or twenty, dressed in an old-fashioned style,
+with hair gathered backward in a knot. The eyes gazed at you with a
+little frown, the lips were tightly closed; the expression of the face
+was eager, quick, wilful, and, above all, young.
+
+The tin trunk was scented with dry fragments of some herb, the history
+of which in that trunk man knoweth not.... There were a few clothes, but
+very few, all older than those he usually wore. Besides the Byron and
+Pilgrim's Progress were Scott's Quentin Durward, Captain Marryat's
+Midshipman Easy, a pocket Testament, and a long and frightfully stiff
+book on the art of fortifying towns, much thumbed, and bearing date
+1863. By far the most interesting thing I found, however, was a diary,
+kept down to the preceding Christmas. It was a pathetic document, full
+of calculations of the price of meals; resolutions to be careful over
+this or that; doubts whether he must not give up smoking; sentences of
+fear that Freda had not enough to eat. It appeared that he had tried to
+live on ninety pounds a year, and send the other hundred pounds home to
+Lucy for the child; in this struggle he was always failing, having to
+send less than the amount--the entries showed that this was a nightmare
+to him. The last words, written on Christmas Day, were these “What is
+the use of writing this, since it records nothing but failure!”
+
+The landlady's daughter and myself were at the funeral. The same
+afternoon I went into the concert-room, where I had spoken to him first.
+When I came out Freda was lying at the entrance, looking into the faces
+of every one that passed, and sniffing idly at their heels. Close by the
+landlady's daughter hovered, a biscuit in her hand, and a puzzled, sorry
+look on her face.
+
+September 1900.
+
+
+
+
+
+TO MY BROTHER HUBERT GALSWORTHY
+
+
+
+
+
+SALVATION OF A FORSYTE
+
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+Swithin Forsyte lay in bed. The corners of his mouth under his white
+moustache drooped towards his double chin. He panted:
+
+“My doctor says I'm in a bad way, James.”
+
+His twin-brother placed his hand behind his ear. “I can't hear you.
+They tell me I ought to take a cure. There's always a cure wanted for
+something. Emily had a cure.”
+
+Swithin replied: “You mumble so. I hear my man, Adolph. I trained
+him.... You ought to have an ear-trumpet. You're getting very shaky,
+James.”
+
+There was silence; then James Forsyte, as if galvanised, remarked: “I
+s'pose you've made your will. I s'pose you've left your money to the
+family; you've nobody else to leave it to. There was Danson died the
+other day, and left his money to a hospital.”
+
+The hairs of Swithin's white moustache bristled. “My fool of a doctor
+told me to make my will,” he said, “I hate a fellow who tells you to
+make your will. My appetite's good; I ate a partridge last night. I'm
+all the better for eating. He told me to leave off champagne! I eat a
+good breakfast. I'm not eighty. You're the same age, James. You look
+very shaky.”
+
+James Forsyte said: “You ought to have another opinion. Have Blank; he's
+the first man now. I had him for Emily; cost me two hundred guineas.
+He sent her to Homburg; that's the first place now. The Prince was
+there—everybody goes there.”
+
+Swithin Forsyte answered: “I don't get any sleep at night, now I can't
+get out; and I've bought a new carriage—gave a pot of money for it. D'
+you ever have bronchitis? They tell me champagne's dangerous; it's my
+belief I couldn't take a better thing.”
+
+James Forsyte rose.
+
+“You ought to have another opinion. Emily sent her love; she would have
+come in, but she had to go to Niagara. Everybody goes there; it's the
+place now. Rachel goes every morning: she overdoes it—she'll be laid up
+one of these days. There's a fancy ball there to-night; the Duke gives
+the prizes.”
+
+Swithin Forsyte said angrily: “I can't get things properly cooked here;
+at the club I get spinach decently done.” The bed-clothes jerked at the
+tremor of his legs.
+
+James Forsyte replied: “You must have done well with Tintos; you must
+have made a lot of money by them. Your ground-rents must be falling
+in, too. You must have any amount you don't know what to do with.” He
+mouthed the words, as if his lips were watering.
+
+Swithin Forsyte glared. “Money!” he said; “my doctor's bill's enormous.”
+
+James Forsyte stretched out a cold, damp hand “Goodbye! You ought to
+have another opinion. I can't keep the horses waiting: they're a new
+pair—stood me in three hundred. You ought to take care of yourself. I
+shall speak to Blank about you. You ought to have him—everybody says
+he's the first man. Good-bye!”
+
+Swithin Forsyte continued to stare at the ceiling. He thought: 'A
+poor thing, James! a selfish beggar! Must be worth a couple of hundred
+thousand!' He wheezed, meditating on life....
+
+He was ill and lonely. For many years he had been lonely, and for two
+years ill; but as he had smoked his first cigar, so he would live his
+life-stoutly, to its predestined end. Every day he was driven to the
+club; sitting forward on the spring cushions of a single brougham, his
+hands on his knees, swaying a little, strangely solemn. He ascended
+the steps into that marble hall—the folds of his chin wedged into the
+aperture of his collar—walking squarely with a stick. Later he would
+dine, eating majestically, and savouring his food, behind a bottle of
+champagne set in an ice-pail—his waistcoat defended by a napkin, his
+eyes rolling a little or glued in a stare on the waiter. Never did he
+suffer his head or back to droop, for it was not distinguished so to do.
+
+Because he was old and deaf, he spoke to no one; and no one spoke to
+him. The club gossip, an Irishman, said to each newcomer: “Old Forsyte!
+Look at 'um! Must ha' had something in his life to sour 'um!” But
+Swithin had had nothing in his life to sour him.
+
+For many days now he had lain in bed in a room exuding silver, crimson,
+and electric light, smelling of opopanax and of cigars. The curtains
+were drawn, the firelight gleamed; on a table by his bed were a jug of
+barley-water and the Times. He made an attempt to read, failed, and fell
+again to thinking. His face with its square chin, looked like a block
+of pale leather bedded in the pillow. It was lonely! A woman in the
+room would have made all the difference! Why had he never married? He
+breathed hard, staring froglike at the ceiling; a memory had come into
+his mind. It was a long time ago—forty odd years—but it seemed like
+yesterday....
+
+It happened when he was thirty-eight, for the first and only time in his
+life travelling on the Continent, with his twin-brother James and a man
+named Traquair. On the way from Germany to Venice, he had found himself
+at the Hotel Goldene Alp at Salzburg. It was late August, and weather
+for the gods: sunshine on the walls and the shadows of the vine-leaves,
+and at night, the moonlight, and again on the walls the shadows of the
+vine-leaves. Averse to the suggestions of other people, Swithin had
+refused to visit the Citadel; he had spent the day alone in the window
+of his bedroom, smoking a succession of cigars, and disparaging the
+appearance of the passers-by. After dinner he was driven by boredom into
+the streets. His chest puffed out like a pigeon's, and with something of
+a pigeon's cold and inquiring eye, he strutted, annoyed at the frequency
+of uniforms, which seemed to him both needless and offensive. His spleen
+rose at this crowd of foreigners, who spoke an unintelligible language,
+wore hair on their faces, and smoked bad tobacco. 'A queer lot!' he
+thought. The sound of music from a cafe attracted him; he walked in,
+vaguely moved by a wish for the distinction of adventure, without the
+trouble which adventure usually brought with it; spurred too, perhaps,
+by an after-dinner demon. The cafe was the bier-halle of the 'Fifties,
+with a door at either end, and lighted by a large wooden lantern. On a
+small dais three musicians were fiddling. Solitary men, or groups,
+sat at some dozen tables, and the waiters hurried about replenishing
+glasses; the air was thick with smoke. Swithin sat down. “Wine!” he said
+sternly. The astonished waiter brought him wine. Swithin pointed to a
+beer glass on the table. “Here!” he said, with the same ferocity. The
+waiter poured out the wine. 'Ah!' thought Swithin, 'they can understand
+if they like.' A group of officers close by were laughing; Swithin
+stared at them uneasily. A hollow cough sounded almost in his ear. To
+his left a man sat reading, with his elbows on the corners of a journal,
+and his gaunt shoulders raised almost to his eyes. He had a thin, long
+nose, broadening suddenly at the nostrils; a black-brown beard, spread
+in a savage fan over his chest; what was visible of the face was the
+colour of old parchment. A strange, wild, haughty-looking creature!
+Swithin observed his clothes with some displeasure—they were the clothes
+of a journalist or strolling actor. And yet he was impressed. This was
+singular. How could he be impressed by a fellow in such clothes! The man
+reached out a hand, covered with black hairs, and took up a tumbler that
+contained a dark-coloured fluid. 'Brandy!' thought Swithin. The crash of
+a falling chair startled him—his neighbour had risen. He was of immense
+height, and very thin; his great beard seemed to splash away from his
+mouth; he was glaring at the group of officers, and speaking. Swithin
+made out two words: “Hunde! Deutsche Hunde!” 'Hounds! Dutch hounds!'
+he thought: 'Rather strong!' One of the officers had jumped up, and now
+drew his sword. The tall man swung his chair up, and brought it down
+with a thud. Everybody round started up and closed on him. The tall man
+cried out, “To me, Magyars!”
+
+Swithin grinned. The tall man fighting such odds excited his unwilling
+admiration; he had a momentary impulse to go to his assistance. 'Only
+get a broken nose!' he thought, and looked for a safe corner. But at
+that moment a thrown lemon struck him on the jaw. He jumped out of his
+chair and rushed at the officers. The Hungarian, swinging his chair,
+threw him a look of gratitude—Swithin glowed with momentary admiration
+of himself. A sword blade grazed his—arm; he felt a sudden dislike of
+the Hungarian. 'This is too much,' he thought, and, catching up a chair,
+flung it at the wooden lantern. There was a crash—faces and swords
+vanished. He struck a match, and by the light of it bolted for the door.
+A second later he was in the street.
+
+
+
+
+
+II A voice said in English, “God bless you, brother!”
+
+Swithin looked round, and saw the tall Hungarian holding out his hand.
+He took it, thinking, 'What a fool I've been!' There was something in
+the Hungarian's gesture which said, “You are worthy of me!”
+
+It was annoying, but rather impressive. The man seemed even taller than
+before; there was a cut on his cheek, the blood from which was trickling
+down his beard. “You English!” he said. “I saw you stone Haynau—I saw
+you cheer Kossuth. The free blood of your people cries out to us.” He
+looked at Swithin. “You are a big man, you have a big soul—and strong,
+how you flung them down! Ha!” Swithin had an impulse to take to his
+heels. “My name,” said the Hungarian, “is Boleskey. You are my friend.”
+His English was good.
+
+'Bulsh-kai-ee, Burlsh-kai-ee,' thought Swithin; 'what a devil of a
+name!' “Mine,” he said sulkily, “is Forsyte.”
+
+The Hungarian repeated it.
+
+“You've had a nasty jab on the cheek,” said Swithin; the sight of the
+matted beard was making him feel sick. The Hungarian put his fingers
+to his cheek, brought them away wet, stared at them, then with an
+indifferent air gathered a wisp of his beard and crammed it against the
+cut.
+
+“Ugh!” said Swithin. “Here! Take my handkerchief!”
+
+The Hungarian bowed. “Thank you!” he said; “I couldn't think of it!
+Thank you a thousand times!”
+
+“Take it!” growled Swithin; it seemed to him suddenly of the first
+importance. He thrust the handkerchief into the Hungarian's hand, and
+felt a pain in his arm. 'There!' he thought, 'I've strained a muscle.'
+
+The Hungarian kept muttering, regardless of passers-by, “Swine! How you
+threw them over! Two or three cracked heads, anyway—the cowardly swine!”
+
+“Look here!” said Swithin suddenly; “which is my way to the Goldene
+Alp?”
+
+The Hungarian replied, “But you are coming with me, for a glass of
+wine?”
+
+Swithin looked at the ground. 'Not if I know it!' he thought.
+
+“Ah!” said the Hungarian with dignity, “you do not wish for my
+friendship!”
+
+'Touchy beggar!' thought Swithin. “Of course,” he stammered, “if you put
+it in that way—”
+
+The Hungarian bowed, murmuring, “Forgive me!”
+
+They had not gone a dozen steps before a youth, with a beardless face
+and hollow cheeks, accosted them. “For the love of Christ, gentlemen,”
+he said, “help me!”
+
+“Are you a German?” asked Boleskey.
+
+“Yes,” said the youth.
+
+“Then you may rot!”
+
+“Master, look here!” Tearing open his coat, the youth displayed his
+skin, and a leather belt drawn tight round it. Again Swithin felt that
+desire to take to his heels. He was filled with horrid forebodings—a
+sense of perpending intimacy with things such as no gentleman had
+dealings with.
+
+The Hungarian crossed himself. “Brother,” he said to the youth, “come
+you in!”
+
+Swithin looked at them askance, and followed. By a dim light they groped
+their way up some stairs into a large room, into which the moon was
+shining through a window bulging over the street. A lamp burned low;
+there was a smell of spirits and tobacco, with a faint, peculiar scent,
+as of rose leaves. In one corner stood a czymbal, in another a great
+pile of newspapers. On the wall hung some old-fashioned pistols, and a
+rosary of yellow beads. Everything was tidily arranged, but dusty. Near
+an open fireplace was a table with the remains of a meal. The ceiling,
+floor, and walls were all of dark wood. In spite of the strange
+disharmony, the room had a sort of refinement. The Hungarian took
+a bottle out of a cupboard and, filling some glasses, handed one to
+Swithin. Swithin put it gingerly to his nose. 'You never know your luck!
+Come!' he thought, tilting it slowly into his mouth. It was thick, too
+sweet, but of a fine flavour.
+
+“Brothers!” said the Hungarian, refilling, “your healths!”
+
+The youth tossed off his wine. And Swithin this time did the same; he
+pitied this poor devil of a youth now. “Come round to-morrow!” he said,
+“I'll give you a shirt or two.” When the youth was gone, however, he
+remembered with relief that he had not given his address.
+
+'Better so,' he reflected. 'A humbug, no doubt.'
+
+“What was that you said to him?” he asked of the Hungarian.
+
+“I said,” answered Boleskey, “'You have eaten and drunk; and now you are
+my enemy!'”
+
+“Quite right!” said Swithin, “quite right! A beggar is every man's
+enemy.”
+
+“You do not understand,” the Hungarian replied politely. “While he was
+a beggar—I, too, have had to beg” (Swithin thought, 'Good God! this is
+awful!'., “but now that he is no longer hungry, what is he but a German?
+No Austrian dog soils my floors!”
+
+His nostrils, as it seemed to Swithin, had distended in an unpleasant
+fashion; and a wholly unnecessary raucousness invaded his voice. “I
+am an exile—all of my blood are exiles. Those Godless dogs!” Swithin
+hurriedly assented.
+
+As he spoke, a face peeped in at the door.
+
+“Rozsi!” said the Hungarian. A young girl came in. She was rather short,
+with a deliciously round figure and a thick plait of hair. She smiled,
+and showed her even teeth; her little, bright, wide-set grey eyes
+glanced from one man to the other. Her face was round, too, high in the
+cheekbones, the colour of wild roses, with brows that had a twist-up at
+the corners. With a gesture of alarm, she put her hand to her cheek, and
+called, “Margit!” An older girl appeared, taller, with fine shoulders,
+large eyes, a pretty mouth, and what Swithin described to himself
+afterwards as a “pudding” nose. Both girls, with little cooing sounds,
+began attending to their father's face.
+
+Swithin turned his back to them. His arm pained him.
+
+'This is what comes of interfering,' he thought sulkily; 'I might have
+had my neck broken!' Suddenly a soft palm was placed in his, two eyes,
+half-fascinated, half-shy, looked at him; then a voice called, “Rozsi!”
+the door was slammed, he was alone again with the Hungarian, harassed by
+a sense of soft disturbance.
+
+“Your daughter's name is Rosy?” he said; “we have it in England—from
+rose, a flower.”
+
+“Rozsi (Rozgi),” the Hungarian replied; “your English is a hard tongue,
+harder than French, German, or Czechish, harder than Russian, or
+Roumanian—I know no more.”
+
+“What?” said Swithin, “six languages?” Privately he thought, 'He knows
+how to lie, anyway.'
+
+“If you lived in a country like mine,” muttered the Hungarian, “with all
+men's hands against you! A free people—dying—but not dead!”
+
+Swithin could not imagine what he was talking of. This man's face, with
+its linen bandage, gloomy eyes, and great black wisps of beard, his
+fierce mutterings, and hollow cough, were all most unpleasant. He seemed
+to be suffering from some kind of mental dog-bite. His emotion indeed
+appeared so indecent, so uncontrolled and open, that its obvious
+sincerity produced a sort of awe in Swithin. It was like being forced
+to look into a furnace. Boleskey stopped roaming up and down. “You
+think it's over?” he said; “I tell you, in the breast of each one of us
+Magyars there is a hell. What is sweeter than life? What is more sacred
+than each breath we draw? Ah! my country!” These words were uttered so
+slowly, with such intense mournfulness, that Swithin's jaw relaxed; he
+converted the movement to a yawn.
+
+“Tell me,” said Boleskey, “what would you do if the French conquered
+you?”
+
+Swithin smiled. Then suddenly, as though something had hurt him, he
+grunted, “The 'Froggies'. Let 'em try!”
+
+“Drink!” said Boleskey—“there is nothing like it”; he filled Swithin's
+glass. “I will tell you my story.”
+
+Swithin rose hurriedly. “It's late,” he said. “This is good stuff,
+though; have you much of it?”
+
+“It is the last bottle.”
+
+“What?” said Swithin; “and you gave it to a beggar?”
+
+“My name is Boleskey—Stefan,” the Hungarian said, raising his head; “of
+the Komorn Boleskeys.” The simplicity of this phrase—as who shall say:
+What need of further description?—made an impression on Swithin; he
+stopped to listen. Boleskey's story went on and on. “There were many
+abuses,” boomed his deep voice, “much wrong done—much cowardice. I could
+see clouds gathering—rolling over our plains. The Austrian wished to
+strangle the breath of our mouths—to take from us the shadow of our
+liberty—the shadow—all we had. Two years ago—the year of '48, when every
+man and boy answered the great voice—brother, a dog's life!—to use a pen
+when all of your blood are fighting, but it was decreed for me! My son
+was killed; my brothers taken—and myself was thrown out like a dog—I
+had written out my heart, I had written out all the blood that was in
+my body!” He seemed to tower, a gaunt shadow of a man, with gloomy,
+flickering eyes staring at the wall.
+
+Swithin rose, and stammered, “Much obliged—very interesting.” Boleskey
+made no effort to detain him, but continued staring at the wall.
+“Good-night!” said Swithin, and stamped heavily downstairs.
+
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+When at last Swithin reached the Goldene Alp, he found his brother and
+friend standing uneasily at the door. Traquair, a prematurely dried-up
+man, with whiskers and a Scotch accent, remarked, “Ye're airly, man!”
+Swithin growled something unintelligible, and swung up to bed. He
+discovered a slight cut on his arm. He was in a savage temper—the
+elements had conspired to show him things he did not want to see; yet
+now and then a memory of Rozsi, of her soft palm in his, a sense of
+having been stroked and flattered, came over him. During breakfast next
+morning his brother and Traquair announced their intention of moving on.
+James Forsyte, indeed, remarked that it was no place for a “collector,”
+since all the “old” shops were in the hands of Jews or very grasping
+persons—he had discovered this at once. Swithin pushed his cup aside.
+“You may do what you like,” he said, “I'm staying here.”
+
+James Forsyte replied, tumbling over his own words: “Why! what do
+you want to stay here for? There's nothing for you to do here—there's
+nothing to see here, unless you go up the Citadel, an' you won't do
+that.”
+
+Swithin growled, “Who says so?” Having gratified his perversity, he felt
+in a better temper. He had slung his arm in a silk sash, and accounted
+for it by saying he had slipped. Later he went out and walked on to the
+bridge. In the brilliant sunshine spires were glistening against the
+pearly background of the hills; the town had a clean, joyous air.
+Swithin glanced at the Citadel and thought, 'Looks a strong place!
+Shouldn't wonder if it were impregnable!' And this for some occult
+reason gave him pleasure. It occurred to him suddenly to go and look for
+the Hungarian's house.
+
+About noon, after a hunt of two hours, he was gazing about him blankly,
+pale with heat, but more obstinate than ever, when a voice above him
+called, “Mister!” He looked up and saw Rozsi. She was leaning her round
+chin on her round hand, gazing down at him with her deepset, clever
+eyes. When Swithin removed his hat, she clapped her hands. Again he
+had the sense of being admired, caressed. With a careless air, that sat
+grotesquely on his tall square person, he walked up to the door; both
+girls stood in the passage. Swithin felt a confused desire to speak in
+some foreign tongue. “Maam'selles,” he began, “er—bong jour-er, your
+father—pare, comment?”
+
+“We also speak English,” said the elder girl; “will you come in,
+please?”
+
+Swithin swallowed a misgiving, and entered. The room had a worn
+appearance by daylight, as if it had always been the nest of tragic or
+vivid lives. He sat down, and his eyes said: “I am a stranger, but
+don't try to get the better of me, please—that is impossible.” The
+girls looked at him in silence. Rozsi wore a rather short skirt of black
+stuff, a white shirt, and across her shoulders an embroidered yoke; her
+sister was dressed in dark green, with a coral necklace; both girls had
+their hair in plaits. After a minute Rozsi touched the sleeve of his
+hurt arm.
+
+“It's nothing!” muttered Swithin.
+
+“Father fought with a chair, but you had no chair,” she said in a
+wondering voice.
+
+He doubled the fist of his sound arm and struck a blow at space. To his
+amazement she began to laugh. Nettled at this, he put his hand beneath
+the heavy table and lifted it. Rozsi clapped her hands. “Ah I now I
+see—how strong you are!” She made him a curtsey and whisked round to the
+window. He found the quick intelligence of her eyes confusing; sometimes
+they seemed to look beyond him at something invisible—this, too,
+confused him. From Margit he learned that they had been two years in
+England, where their father had made his living by teaching languages;
+they had now been a year in Salzburg.
+
+“We wait,” suddenly said Rozsi; and Margit, with a solemn face,
+repeated, “We wait.”
+
+Swithin's eyes swelled a little with his desire to see what they were
+waiting for. How queer they were, with their eyes that gazed beyond him!
+He looked at their figures. 'She would pay for dressing,' he thought,
+and he tried to imagine Rozsi in a skirt with proper flounces, a thin
+waist, and hair drawn back over her ears. She would pay for dressing,
+with that supple figure, fluffy hair, and little hands! And instantly
+his own hands, face, and clothes disturbed him. He got up, examined
+the pistols on the wall, and felt resentment at the faded, dusty room.
+'Smells like a pot-house!' he thought. He sat down again close to Rozsi.
+
+“Do you love to dance?” she asked; “to dance is to live. First you
+hear the music—how your feet itch! It is wonderful! You begin slow,
+quick—quicker; you fly—you know nothing—your feet are in the air. It is
+wonderful!”
+
+A slow flush had mounted into Swithin's face.
+
+“Ah!” continued Rozsi, her eyes fixed on him, “when I am dancing—out
+there I see the plains—your feet go one—two—three—quick, quick, quick,
+quicker—you fly.”
+
+She stretched herself, a shiver seemed to pass all down her. “Margit!
+dance!” and, to Swithin's consternation, the two girls—their hands on
+each other's shoulders—began shuffling their feet and swaying to and
+fro. Their heads were thrown back, their eyes half-closed; suddenly the
+step quickened, they swung to one side, then to the other, and began
+whirling round in front of him. The sudden fragrance of rose leaves
+enveloped him. Round they flew again. While they were still dancing,
+Boleskey came into the room. He caught Swithin by both hands.
+
+“Brother, welcome! Ah! your arm is hurt! I do not forget.” His yellow
+face and deep-set eyes expressed a dignified gratitude. “Let me
+introduce to you my friend Baron Kasteliz.”
+
+Swithin bowed to a man with a small forehead, who had appeared softly,
+and stood with his gloved hands touching his waist. Swithin conceived
+a sudden aversion for this catlike man. About Boleskey there was that
+which made contempt impossible—the sense of comradeship begotten in the
+fight; the man's height; something lofty and savage in his face; and
+an obscure instinct that it would not pay to show distaste; but this
+Kasteliz, with his neat jaw, low brow, and velvety, volcanic look,
+excited his proper English animosity. “Your friends are mine,” murmured
+Kasteliz. He spoke with suavity, and hissed his s's. A long, vibrating
+twang quavered through the room. Swithin turned and saw Rozsi sitting
+at the czymbal; the notes rang under the little hammers in her hands,
+incessant, metallic, rising and falling with that strange melody.
+Kasteliz had fixed his glowing eyes on her; Boleskey, nodding his head,
+was staring at the floor; Margit, with a pale face, stood like a statue.
+
+'What can they see in it?' thought Swithin; 'it's not a tune.' He
+took up his hat. Rozsi saw him and stopped; her lips had parted with a
+faintly dismayed expression. His sense of personal injury diminished;
+he even felt a little sorry for her. She jumped up from her seat and
+twirled round with a pout. An inspiration seized on Swithin. “Come and
+dine with me,” he said to Boleskey, “to-morrow—the Goldene Alp—bring
+your friend.” He felt the eyes of the whole room on him—the Hungarian's
+fine eyes; Margit's wide glance; the narrow, hot gaze of Kasteliz;
+and lastly—Rozsi's. A glow of satisfaction ran down his spine. When he
+emerged into the street he thought gloomily, 'Now I've done it!' And not
+for some paces did he look round; then, with a forced smile, turned and
+removed his hat to the faces at the window.
+
+Notwithstanding this moment of gloom, however, he was in an exalted
+state all day, and at dinner kept looking at his brother and Traquair
+enigmatically. 'What do they know of life?' he thought; 'they might be
+here a year and get no farther.' He made jokes, and pinned the menu to
+the waiter's coat-tails. “I like this place,” he said, “I shall spend
+three weeks here.” James, whose lips were on the point of taking in a
+plum, looked at him uneasily.
+
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+On the day of the dinner Swithin suffered a good deal. He reflected
+gloomily on Boleskey's clothes. He had fixed an early hour—there would
+be fewer people to see them. When the time approached he attired himself
+with a certain neat splendour, and though his arm was still sore, left
+off the sling....
+
+Nearly three hours afterwards he left the Goldene Alp between his
+guests. It was sunset, and along the riverbank the houses stood out,
+unsoftened by the dusk; the streets were full of people hurrying home.
+Swithin had a hazy vision of empty bottles, of the ground before his
+feet, and the accessibility of all the world. Dim recollections of
+the good things he had said, of his brother and Traquair seated in the
+background eating ordinary meals with inquiring, acid visages, caused
+perpetual smiles to break out on his face, and he steered himself
+stubbornly, to prove that he was a better man than either of his
+guests. He knew, vaguely, that he was going somewhere with an object;
+Rozsi's face kept dancing before him, like a promise. Once or twice he
+gave Kasteliz a glassy stare. Towards Boleskey, on the other hand, he
+felt quite warm, and recalled with admiration the way he had set his
+glass down empty, time after time. 'I like to see him take his liquor,'
+he thought; 'the fellow's a gentleman, after all.' Boleskey strode on,
+savagely inattentive to everything; and Kasteliz had become more like
+a cat than ever. It was nearly dark when they reached a narrow street
+close to the cathedral. They stopped at a door held open by an old
+woman. The change from the fresh air to a heated corridor, the noise
+of the door closed behind him, the old woman's anxious glances, sobered
+Swithin.
+
+“I tell her,” said Boleskey, “that I reply for you as for my son.”
+
+Swithin was angry. What business had this man to reply for him!
+
+They passed into a large room, crowded with men and women; Swithin
+noticed that they all looked at him. He stared at them in turn—they
+seemed of all classes, some in black coats or silk dresses, others in
+the clothes of work-people; one man, a cobbler, still wore his leather
+apron, as if he had rushed there straight from his work. Laying his hand
+on Swithin's arm, Boleskey evidently began explaining who he was; hands
+were extended, people beyond reach bowed to him. Swithin acknowledged
+the greetings with a stiff motion of his head; then seeing other
+people dropping into seats, he, too, sat down. Some one whispered his
+name—Margit and Rozsi were just behind him.
+
+“Welcome!” said Margit; but Swithin was looking at Rozsi. Her face was
+so alive and quivering! 'What's the excitement all about?' he thought.
+'How pretty she looks!' She blushed, drew in her hands with a quick
+tense movement, and gazed again beyond him into the room. 'What is it?'
+thought Swithin; he had a longing to lean back and kiss her lips. He
+tried angrily to see what she was seeing in those faces turned all one
+way.
+
+Boleskey rose to speak. No one moved; not a sound could be heard but the
+tone of his deep voice. On and on he went, fierce and solemn, and with
+the rise of his voice, all those faces--fair or swarthy—seemed to be
+glowing with one and the same feeling. Swithin felt the white heat in
+those faces—it was not decent! In that whole speech he only understood
+the one word—“Magyar” which came again and again. He almost dozed off at
+last. The twang of a czymbal woke him. 'What?' he thought, 'more of that
+infernal music!' Margit, leaning over him, whispered: “Listen! Racoczy!
+It is forbidden!” Swithin saw that Rozsi was no longer in her seat;
+it was she who was striking those forbidden notes. He looked
+round—everywhere the same unmoving faces, the same entrancement,
+and fierce stillness. The music sounded muffled, as if it, too, were
+bursting its heart in silence. Swithin felt within him a touch of panic.
+Was this a den of tigers? The way these people listened, the ferocity of
+their stillness, was frightful...! He gripped his chair and broke into
+a perspiration; was there no chance to get away? 'When it stops,' he
+thought, 'there'll be a rush!' But there was only a greater silence. It
+flashed across him that any hostile person coming in then would be torn
+to pieces. A woman sobbed. The whole thing was beyond words unpleasant.
+He rose, and edged his way furtively towards the doorway. There was a
+cry of “Police!” The whole crowd came pressing after him. Swithin would
+soon have been out, but a little behind he caught sight of Rozsi swept
+off her feet. Her frightened eyes angered him. 'She doesn't deserve it,'
+he thought sulkily; 'letting all this loose!' and forced his way back to
+her. She clung to him, and a fever went stealing through his veins; he
+butted forward at the crowd, holding her tight. When they were outside
+he let her go.
+
+“I was afraid,” she said.
+
+“Afraid!” muttered Swithin; “I should think so.” No longer touching her,
+he felt his grievance revive.
+
+“But you are so strong,” she murmured.
+
+“This is no place for you,” growled Swithin, “I'm going to see you
+home.”
+
+“Oh!” cried Rozsi; “but papa and—Margit!”
+
+“That's their look-out!” and he hurried her away.
+
+She slid her hand under his arm; the soft curves of her form brushed
+him gently, each touch only augmented his ill-humour. He burned with a
+perverse rage, as if all the passions in him were simmering and ready to
+boil over; it was as if a poison were trying to work its way out of him,
+through the layers of his stolid flesh. He maintained a dogged silence;
+Rozsi, too, said nothing, but when they reached the door, she drew her
+hand away.
+
+“You are angry!” she said.
+
+“Angry,” muttered Swithin; “no! How d'you make that out?” He had a
+torturing desire to kiss her.
+
+“Yes, you are angry,” she repeated; “I wait here for papa and Margit.”
+
+Swithin also waited, wedged against the wall. Once or twice, for his
+sight was sharp, he saw her steal a look at him, a beseeching look, and
+hardened his heart with a kind of pleasure. After five minutes Boleskey,
+Margit, and Kasteliz appeared. Seeing Rozsi they broke into exclamations
+of relief, and Kasteliz, with a glance at Swithin, put his lips to her
+hand. Rozsi's look said, “Wouldn't you like to do that?” Swithin turned
+short on his heel, and walked away.
+
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+All night he hardly slept, suffering from fever, for the first time in
+his life. Once he jumped out of bed, lighted a candle, and going to
+the glass, scrutinised himself long and anxiously. After this he fell
+asleep, but had frightful dreams. His first thought when he woke was,
+'My liver's out of order!' and, thrusting his head into cold water, he
+dressed hastily and went out. He soon left the house behind. Dew covered
+everything; blackbirds whistled in the bushes; the air was fresh and
+sweet. He had not been up so early since he was a boy. Why was he
+walking through a damp wood at this hour of the morning? Something
+intolerable and unfamiliar must have sent him out. No fellow in
+his senses would do such a thing! He came to a dead stop, and began
+unsteadily to walk back. Regaining the hotel, he went to bed again,
+and dreamed that in some wild country he was living in a room full of
+insects, where a housemaid—Rozsi—holding a broom, looked at him with
+mournful eyes. There seemed an unexplained need for immediate departure;
+he begged her to forward his things; and shake them out carefully before
+she put them into the trunk. He understood that the charge for sending
+would be twenty-two shillings, thought it a great deal, and had the
+horrors of indecision. “No,” he muttered, “pack, and take them myself.”
+The housemaid turned suddenly into a lean creature; and he awoke with a
+sore feeling in his heart.
+
+His eye fell on his wet boots. The whole thing was scaring, and jumping
+up, he began to throw his clothes into his trunks. It was twelve o'clock
+before he went down, and found his brother and Traquair still at the
+table arranging an itinerary; he surprised them by saying that he too
+was coming; and without further explanation set to work to eat. James
+had heard that there were salt-mines in the neighbourhood—his proposal
+was to start, and halt an hour or so on the road for their inspection;
+he said: “Everybody'll ask you if you've seen the salt-mines: I
+shouldn't like to say I hadn't seen the salt-mines. What's the good,
+they'd say, of your going there if you haven't seen the salt-mines?” He
+wondered, too, if they need fee the second waiter—an idle chap!
+
+A discussion followed; but Swithin ate on glumly, conscious that his
+mind was set on larger affairs. Suddenly on the far side of the street
+Rozsi and her sister passed, with little baskets on their arms. He
+started up, and at that moment Rozsi looked round—her face was the
+incarnation of enticement, the chin tilted, the lower lip thrust a
+little forward, her round neck curving back over her shoulder. Swithin
+muttered, “Make your own arrangements—leave me out!” and hurried from
+the room, leaving James beside himself with interest and alarm.
+
+When he reached the street, however, the girls had disappeared. He
+hailed a carriage. “Drive!” he called to the man, with a flourish of his
+stick, and as soon as the wheels had begun to clatter on the stones he
+leaned back, looking sharply to right and left. He soon had to give
+up thought of finding them, but made the coachman turn round and round
+again. All day he drove about, far into the country, and kept urging
+the driver to use greater speed. He was in a strange state of hurry and
+elation. Finally, he dined at a little country inn; and this gave the
+measure of his disturbance—the dinner was atrocious.
+
+Returning late in the evening he found a note written by Traquair.
+“Are you in your senses, man?” it asked; “we have no more time to waste
+idling about here. If you want to rejoin us, come on to Danielli's
+Hotel, Venice.” Swithin chuckled when he read it, and feeling
+frightfully tired, went to bed and slept like a log.
+
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Three weeks later he was still in Salzburg, no longer at the Goldene
+Alp, but in rooms over a shop near the Boleskeys'. He had spent a small
+fortune in the purchase of flowers. Margit would croon over them, but
+Rozsi, with a sober “Many tanks!” as if they were her right, would look
+long at herself in the glass, and pin one into her hair. Swithin ceased
+to wonder; he ceased to wonder at anything they did. One evening he
+found Boleskey deep in conversation with a pale, dishevelled-looking
+person.
+
+“Our friend Mr. Forsyte—Count D....,” said Boleskey.
+
+Swithin experienced a faint, unavoidable emotion; but looking at the
+Count's trousers, he thought: 'Doesn't look much like one!' And with an
+ironic bow to the silent girls, he turned, and took his hat. But when he
+had reached the bottom of the dark stairs he heard footsteps. Rozsi came
+running down, looked out at the door, and put her hands up to her breast
+as if disappointed; suddenly with a quick glance round she saw him.
+Swithin caught her arm. She slipped away, and her face seemed to bubble
+with defiance or laughter; she ran up three steps, stopped, looked at
+him across her shoulder, and fled on up the stairs. Swithin went out
+bewildered and annoyed.
+
+'What was she going to say to me?' he kept thinking. During these three
+weeks he had asked himself all sorts of questions: whether he were being
+made a fool of; whether she were in love with him; what he was doing
+there, and sometimes at night, with all his candles burning as if he
+wanted light, the breeze blowing on him through the window, his cigar,
+half-smoked, in his hand, he sat, an hour or more, staring at the wall.
+'Enough of this!' he thought every morning. Twice he packed fully—once
+he ordered his travelling carriage, but countermanded it the following
+day. What definitely he hoped, intended, resolved, he could not have
+said. He was always thinking of Rozsi, he could not read the riddle in
+her face—she held him in a vice, notwithstanding that everything
+about her threatened the very fetishes of his existence. And Boleskey!
+Whenever he looked at him he thought, 'If he were only clean?' and
+mechanically fingered his own well-tied cravatte. To talk with the
+fellow, too, was like being forced to look at things which had no place
+in the light of day. Freedom, equality, self-sacrifice!
+
+'Why can't he settle down at some business,' he thought, 'instead of all
+this talk?' Boleskey's sudden diffidences, self-depreciation, fits of
+despair, irritated him. “Morbid beggar!” he would mutter; “thank God
+I haven't a thin skin.” And proud too! Extraordinary! An impecunious
+fellow like that! One evening, moreover, Boleskey had returned home
+drunk. Swithin had hustled him away into his bedroom, helped him to
+undress, and stayed until he was asleep. 'Too much of a good thing!'
+he thought, 'before his own daughters, too!' It was after this that he
+ordered his travelling carriage. The other occasion on which he packed
+was one evening, when not only Boleskey, but Rozsi herself had picked
+chicken bones with her fingers.
+
+Often in the mornings he would go to the Mirabell Garden to smoke his
+cigar; there, in stolid contemplation of the statues—rows of half-heroic
+men carrying off half-distressful females—he would spend an hour
+pleasantly, his hat tilted to keep the sun off his nose. The day after
+Rozsi had fled from him on the stairs, he came there as usual. It was a
+morning of blue sky and sunlight glowing on the old prim garden, on its
+yew-trees, and serio-comic statues, and walls covered with apricots and
+plums. When Swithin approached his usual seat, who should be sitting
+there but Rozsi—“Good-morning,” he stammered; “you knew this was my seat
+then?”
+
+Rozsi looked at the ground. “Yes,” she answered.
+
+Swithin felt bewildered. “Do you know,” he said, “you treat me very
+funnily?”
+
+To his surprise Rozsi put her little soft hand down and touched his;
+then, without a word, sprang up and rushed away. It took him a minute to
+recover. There were people present; he did not like to run, but overtook
+her on the bridge, and slipped her hand beneath his arm.
+
+“You shouldn't have done that,” he said; “you shouldn't have run away
+from me, you know.”
+
+Rozsi laughed. Swithin withdrew his arm; a desire to shake her seized
+him. He walked some way before he said, “Will you have the goodness to
+tell me what you came to that seat for?”
+
+Rozsi flashed a look at him. “To-morrow is the fete,” she answered.
+
+Swithin muttered, “Is that all?”
+
+“If you do not take us, we cannot go.”
+
+“Suppose I refuse,” he said sullenly, “there are plenty of others.”
+
+Rozsi bent her head, scurrying along. “No,” she murmured, “if you do not
+go—I do not wish.”
+
+Swithin drew her hand back within his arm. How round and soft it was!
+He tried to see her face. When she was nearly home he said goodbye, not
+wishing, for some dark reason, to be seen with her. He watched till she
+had disappeared; then slowly retraced his steps to the Mirabell Garden.
+When he came to where she had been sitting, he slowly lighted his cigar,
+and for a long time after it was smoked out remained there in the silent
+presence of the statues.
+
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+A crowd of people wandered round the booths, and Swithin found himself
+obliged to give the girls his arms. 'Like a little Cockney clerk!' he
+thought. His indignation passed unnoticed; they talked, they laughed,
+each sight and sound in all the hurly-burly seemed to go straight into
+their hearts. He eyed them ironically—their eager voices, and little
+coos of sympathy seemed to him vulgar. In the thick of the crowd he
+slipped his arm out of Margit's, but, just as he thought that he was
+free, the unwelcome hand slid up again. He tried again, but again Margit
+reappeared, serene, and full of pleasant humour; and his failure this
+time appeared to him in a comic light. But when Rozsi leaned across him,
+the glow of her round cheek, her curving lip, the inscrutable grey gleam
+of her eyes, sent a thrill of longing through him. He was obliged to
+stand by while they parleyed with a gipsy, whose matted locks and skinny
+hands inspired him with a not unwarranted disgust. “Folly!” he muttered,
+as Rozsi held out her palm. The old woman mumbled, and shot a malignant
+look at him. Rozsi drew back her hand, and crossed herself. 'Folly!'
+Swithin thought again; and seizing the girls' arms, he hurried them
+away.
+
+“What did the old hag say?” he asked.
+
+Rozsi shook her head.
+
+“You don't mean that you believe?”
+
+Her eyes were full of tears. “The gipsies are wise,” she murmured.
+
+“Come, what did she tell you?”
+
+This time Rozsi looked hurriedly round, and slipped away into the crowd.
+After a hunt they found her, and Swithin, who was scared, growled: “You
+shouldn't do such things—it's not respectable.”
+
+On higher ground, in the centre of a clear space, a military band was
+playing. For the privilege of entering this charmed circle Swithin paid
+three kronen, choosing naturally the best seats. He ordered wine, too,
+watching Rozsi out of the corner of his eye as he poured it out. The
+protecting tenderness of yesterday was all lost in this medley. It was
+every man for himself, after all! The colour had deepened again in her
+cheeks, she laughed, pouting her lips. Suddenly she put her glass aside.
+“Thank you, very much,” she said, “it is enough!”
+
+Margit, whose pretty mouth was all smiles, cried, “Lieber Gott! is it
+not good-life?” It was not a question Swithin could undertake to answer.
+The band began to play a waltz. “Now they will dance. Lieber Gott! and
+are the lights not wonderful?” Lamps were flickering beneath the trees
+like a swarm of fireflies. There was a hum as from a gigantic beehive.
+Passers-by lifted their faces, then vanished into the crowd; Rozsi stood
+gazing at them spellbound, as if their very going and coming were a
+delight.
+
+The space was soon full of whirling couples. Rozsi's head began to beat
+time. “O Margit!” she whispered.
+
+Swithin's face had assumed a solemn, uneasy expression. A man raising
+his hat, offered his arm to Margit. She glanced back across her shoulder
+to reassure Swithin. “It is a friend,” she said.
+
+Swithin looked at Rozsi—her eyes were bright, her lips tremulous. He
+slipped his hand along the table and touched her fingers. Then she
+flashed a look at him—appeal, reproach, tenderness, all were expressed
+in it. Was she expecting him to dance? Did she want to mix with the
+rift-raff there; wish him to make an exhibition of himself in this
+hurly-burly? A voice said, “Good-evening!” Before them stood Kasteliz,
+in a dark coat tightly buttoned at the waist.
+
+“You are not dancing, Rozsi Kozsanony?” (Miss Rozsi). “Let me, then,
+have the pleasure.” He held out his arm. Swithin stared in front of
+him. In the very act of going she gave him a look that said as plain as
+words: “Will you not?” But for answer he turned his eyes away, and when
+he looked again she was gone. He paid the score and made his way into
+the crowd. But as he went she danced by close to him, all flushed and
+panting. She hung back as if to stop him, and he caught the glistening
+of tears. Then he lost sight of her again. To be deserted the first
+minute he was alone with her, and for that jackanapes with the small
+head and the volcanic glances! It was too much! And suddenly it occurred
+to him that she was alone with Kasteliz—alone at night, and far from
+home. 'Well,' he thought, 'what do I care?' and shouldered his way on
+through the crowd. It served him right for mixing with such people here.
+He left the fair, but the further he went, the more he nursed his rage,
+the more heinous seemed her offence, the sharper grew his jealousy. “A
+beggarly baron!” was his thought.
+
+A figure came alongside—it was Boleskey. One look showed Swithin his
+condition. Drunk again! This was the last straw!
+
+Unfortunately Boleskey had recognised him. He seemed violently excited.
+“Where—where are my daughters?” he began.
+
+Swithin brushed past, but Boleskey caught his arm. “Listen—brother!” he
+said; “news of my country! After to-morrow....”
+
+“Keep it to yourself!” growled Swithin, wrenching his arm free. He went
+straight to his lodgings, and, lying on the hard sofa of his unlighted
+sitting-room, gave himself up to bitter thoughts. But in spite of all
+his anger, Rozsi's supply-moving figure, with its pouting lips, and
+roguish appealing eyes, still haunted him.
+
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Next morning there was not a carriage to be had, and Swithin was
+compelled to put off his departure till the morrow. The day was grey and
+misty; he wandered about with the strained, inquiring look of a lost dog
+in his eyes.
+
+Late in the afternoon he went back to his lodgings. In a corner of
+the sitting-room stood Rozsi. The thrill of triumph, the sense of
+appeasement, the emotion, that seized on him, crept through to his lips
+in a faint smile. Rozsi made no sound, her face was hidden by her hands.
+And this silence of hers weighed on Swithin. She was forcing him to
+break it. What was behind her hands? His own face was visible! Why
+didn't she speak? Why was she here? Alone? That was not right surely.
+
+Suddenly Rozsi dropped her hands; her flushed face was quivering—it
+seemed as though a word, a sign, even, might bring a burst of tears.
+
+He walked over to the window. 'I must give her time!' he thought; then
+seized by unreasoning terror at this silence, spun round, and caught
+her by the arms. Rozsi held back from him, swayed forward and buried her
+face on his breast....
+
+Half an hour later Swithin was pacing up and down his room. The scent of
+rose leaves had not yet died away. A glove lay on the floor; he picked
+it up, and for a long time stood weighing it in his hand. All sorts of
+confused thoughts and feelings haunted him. It was the purest and least
+selfish moment of his life, this moment after she had yielded. But that
+pure gratitude at her fiery, simple abnegation did not last; it was
+followed by a petty sense of triumph, and by uneasiness. He was still
+weighing the little glove in his hand, when he had another visitor. It
+was Kasteliz.
+
+“What can I do for you?” Swithin asked ironically.
+
+The Hungarian seemed suffering from excitement. Why had Swithin left
+his charges the night before? What excuse had he to make? What sort of
+conduct did he call this?
+
+Swithin, very like a bull-dog at that moment, answered: What business
+was it of his?
+
+The business of a gentleman! What right had the Englishman to pursue a
+young girl?
+
+“Pursue?” said Swithin; “you've been spying, then?”
+
+“Spying—I—Kasteliz—Maurus Johann—an insult!”
+
+“Insult!” sneered Swithin; “d'you mean to tell me you weren't in the
+street just now?”
+
+Kasteliz answered with a hiss, “If you do not leave the city I will make
+you, with my sword—do you understand?”
+
+“And if you do not leave my room I will throw you out of the window!”
+
+For some minutes Kasteliz spoke in pure Hungarian while Swithin waited,
+with a forced smile and a fixed look in his eye. He did not understand
+Hungarian.
+
+“If you are still in the city to-morrow evening,” said Kasteliz at last
+in English, “I will spit you in the street.”
+
+Swithin turned to the window and watched his visitor's retiring back
+with a queer mixture of amusement, stubbornness, and anxiety. 'Well,' he
+thought, 'I suppose he'll run me through!' The thought was unpleasant;
+and it kept recurring, but it only served to harden his determination.
+His head was busy with plans for seeing Rozsi; his blood on fire with
+the kisses she had given him.
+
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+Swithin was long in deciding to go forth next day. He had made up his
+mind not to go to Rozsi till five o'clock. 'Mustn't make myself too
+cheap,' he thought. It was a little past that hour when he at last
+sallied out, and with a beating heart walked towards Boleskey's. He
+looked up at the window, more than half expecting to see Rozsi there;
+but she was not, and he noticed with faint surprise that the window was
+not open; the plants, too, outside, looked singularly arid. He knocked.
+No one came. He beat a fierce tattoo. At last the door was opened by
+a man with a reddish beard, and one of those sardonic faces only to be
+seen on shoemakers of Teutonic origin.
+
+“What do you want, making all this noise?” he asked in German.
+
+Swithin pointed up the stairs. The man grinned, and shook his head.
+
+“I want to go up,” said Swithin.
+
+The cobbler shrugged his shoulders, and Swithin rushed upstairs. The
+rooms were empty. The furniture remained, but all signs of life were
+gone. One of his own bouquets, faded, stood in a glass; the ashes of
+a fire were barely cold; little scraps of paper strewed the hearth;
+already the room smelt musty. He went into the bedrooms, and with a
+feeling of stupefaction stood staring at the girls' beds, side by side
+against the wall. A bit of ribbon caught his eye; he picked it up
+and put it in his pocket—it was a piece of evidence that she had once
+existed. By the mirror some pins were dropped about; a little powder had
+been spilled. He looked at his own disquiet face and thought, 'I've been
+cheated!'
+
+The shoemaker's voice aroused him. “Tausend Teufel! Eilen Sie, nur! Zeit
+is Geld! Kann nich' Langer warten!” Slowly he descended.
+
+“Where have they gone?” asked Swithin painfully. “A pound for every
+English word you speak. A pound!” and he made an O with his fingers.
+
+The corners of the shoemaker's lips curled. “Geld! Mf! Eilen Sie, nur!”
+
+But in Swithin a sullen anger had begun to burn. “If you don't tell me,”
+he said, “it'll be the worse for you.”
+
+“Sind ein komischer Kerl!” remarked the shoemaker. “Hier ist meine
+Frau!”
+
+A battered-looking woman came hurrying down the passage, calling out in
+German, “Don't let him go!”
+
+With a snarling sound the shoemaker turned his back, and shambled off.
+
+The woman furtively thrust a letter into Swithin's hand, and furtively
+waited.
+
+The letter was from Rozsi.
+
+“Forgive me”—it ran—“that I leave you and do not say goodbye. To-day our
+father had the call from our dear Father-town so long awaited. In two
+hours we are ready. I pray to the Virgin to keep you ever safe, and that
+you do not quite forget me.—Your unforgetting good friend, ROZSI.”
+
+When Swithin read it his first sensation was that of a man sinking in a
+bog; then his obstinacy stiffened. 'I won't be done,' he thought. Taking
+out a sovereign he tried to make the woman comprehend that she could
+earn it, by telling him where they had gone. He got her finally to write
+the words out in his pocket-book, gave her the sovereign, and hurried
+to the Goldene Alp, where there was a waiter who spoke English. The
+translation given him was this:
+
+“At three o'clock they start in a carriage on the road to Linz—they have
+bad horses—the Herr also rides a white horse.”
+
+Swithin at once hailed a carriage and started at full gallop on the road
+to Linz. Outside the Mirabell Garden he caught sight of Kasteliz and
+grinned at him. 'I've sold him anyway,' he thought; 'for all their talk,
+they're no good, these foreigners!'
+
+His spirits rose, but soon fell again. What chance had he of catching
+them? They had three hours' start! Still, the roads were heavy from the
+rain of the last two nights—they had luggage and bad horses; his own
+were good, his driver bribed—he might overtake them by ten o'clock! But
+did he want to? What a fool he had been not to bring his luggage; he
+would then have had a respectable position. What a brute he would look
+without a change of shirt, or anything to shave with! He saw himself
+with horror, all bristly, and in soiled linen. People would think him
+mad. 'I've given myself away,' flashed across him, 'what the devil can
+I say to them?' and he stared sullenly at the driver's back. He
+read Rozsi's letter again; it had a scent of her. And in the growing
+darkness, jolted by the swinging of the carriage, he suffered tortures
+from his prudence, tortures from his passion.
+
+It grew colder and dark. He turned the collar of his coat up to his
+ears. He had visions of Piccadilly. This wild-goose chase appeared
+suddenly a dangerous, unfathomable business. Lights, fellowship,
+security! 'Never again!' he brooded; 'why won't they let me alone?'
+But it was not clear whether by 'they' he meant the conventions, the
+Boleskeys, his passions, or those haunting memories of Rozsi. If he had
+only had a bag with him! What was he going to say? What was he going
+to get by this? He received no answer to these questions. The darkness
+itself was less obscure than his sensations. From time to time he took
+out his watch. At each village the driver made inquiries. It was past
+ten when he stopped the carriage with a jerk. The stars were bright as
+steel, and by the side of the road a reedy lake showed in the moonlight.
+Swithin shivered. A man on a horse had halted in the centre of the road.
+“Drive on!” called Swithin, with a stolid face. It turned out to be
+Boleskey, who, on a gaunt white horse, looked like some winged creature.
+He stood where he could bar the progress of the carriage, holding out a
+pistol.
+
+'Theatrical beggar!' thought Swithin, with a nervous smile. He made no
+sign of recognition. Slowly Boleskey brought his lean horse up to the
+carriage. When he saw who was within he showed astonishment and joy.
+
+“You?” he cried, slapping his hand on his attenuated thigh, and leaning
+over till his beard touched Swithin. “You have come? You followed us?”
+
+“It seems so,” Swithin grunted out.
+
+“You throw in your lot with us. Is it possible? You—you are a
+knight-errant then!”
+
+“Good God!” said Swithin. Boleskey, flogging his dejected steed,
+cantered forward in the moonlight. He came back, bringing an old cloak,
+which he insisted on wrapping round Swithin's shoulders. He handed him,
+too, a capacious flask.
+
+“How cold you look!” he said. “Wonderful! Wonderful! you English!” His
+grateful eyes never left Swithin for a moment. They had come up to the
+heels of the other carriage now, but Swithin, hunched in the cloak, did
+not try to see what was in front of him. To the bottom of his soul he
+resented the Hungarian's gratitude. He remarked at last, with wasted
+irony:
+
+“You're in a hurry, it seems!”
+
+“If we had wings,” Boleskey answered, “we would use them.”
+
+“Wings!” muttered Swithin thickly; “legs are good enough for me.”
+
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+Arrived at the inn where they were to pass the night, Swithin waited,
+hoping to get into the house without a “scene,” but when at last he
+alighted the girls were in the doorway, and Margit greeted him with an
+admiring murmur, in which, however, he seemed to detect irony. Rozsi,
+pale and tremulous, with a half-scared look, gave him her hand, and,
+quickly withdrawing it, shrank behind her sister. When they had gone up
+to their room Swithin sought Boleskey. His spirits had risen remarkably.
+“Tell the landlord to get us supper,” he said; “we'll crack a bottle to
+our luck.” He hurried on the landlord's preparations. The window of the
+room faced a wood, so near that he could almost touch the trees. The
+scent from the pines blew in on him. He turned away from that scented
+darkness, and began to draw the corks of winebottles. The sound seemed
+to conjure up Boleskey. He came in, splashed all over, smelling slightly
+of stables; soon after, Margit appeared, fresh and serene, but Rozsi did
+not come.
+
+“Where is your sister?” Swithin said. Rozsi, it seemed, was tired. “It
+will do her good to eat,” said Swithin. And Boleskey, murmuring, “She
+must drink to our country,” went out to summon her, Margit followed him,
+while Swithin cut up a chicken. They came back without her. She had “a
+megrim of the spirit.”
+
+Swithin's face fell. “Look here!” he said, “I'll go and try. Don't wait
+for me.”
+
+“Yes,” answered Boleskey, sinking mournfully into a chair; “try,
+brother, try--by all means, try.”
+
+Swithin walked down the corridor with an odd, sweet, sinking sensation
+in his chest; and tapped on Rozsi's door. In a minute, she peeped forth,
+with her hair loose, and wondering eyes.
+
+“Rozsi,” he stammered, “what makes you afraid of me, now?”
+
+She stared at him, but did not answer.
+
+“Why won't you come?”
+
+Still she did not speak, but suddenly stretched out to him her bare arm.
+Swithin pressed his face to it. With a shiver, she whispered above him,
+“I will come,” and gently shut the door.
+
+Swithin stealthily retraced his steps, and paused a minute outside the
+sitting-room to regain his self-control.
+
+The sight of Boleskey with a bottle in his hand steadied him.
+
+“She is coming,” he said. And very soon she did come, her thick hair
+roughly twisted in a plait.
+
+Swithin sat between the girls; but did not talk, for he was really
+hungry. Boleskey too was silent, plunged in gloom; Rozsi was dumb;
+Margit alone chattered.
+
+“You will come to our Father-town? We shall have things to show you.
+Rozsi, what things we will show him!” Rozsi, with a little appealing
+movement of her hands, repeated, “What things we will show you!” She
+seemed suddenly to find her voice, and with glowing cheeks, mouths full,
+and eyes bright as squirrels', they chattered reminiscences of the “dear
+Father-town,” of “dear friends,” of the “dear home.”
+
+'A poor place!' Swithin could not help thinking. This enthusiasm seemed
+to him common; but he was careful to assume a look of interest, feeding
+on the glances flashed at him from Rozsi's restless eyes.
+
+As the wine waned Boleskey grew more and more gloomy, but now and then
+a sort of gleaming flicker passed over his face. He rose to his feet at
+last.
+
+“Let us not forget,” he said, “that we go perhaps to ruin, to death; in
+the face of all this we go, because our country needs—in this there is
+no credit, neither to me nor to you, my daughters; but for this noble
+Englishman, what shall we say? Give thanks to God for a great heart. He
+comes—not for country, not for fame, not for money, but to help the weak
+and the oppressed. Let us drink, then, to him; let us drink again and
+again to heroic Forsyte!” In the midst of the dead silence, Swithin
+caught the look of suppliant mockery in Rozsi's eyes. He glanced at the
+Hungarian. Was he laughing at him? But Boleskey, after drinking up his
+wine, had sunk again into his seat; and there suddenly, to the surprise
+of all, he began to snore. Margit rose and, bending over him like a
+mother, murmured: “He is tired—it is the ride!” She raised him in her
+strong arms, and leaning on her shoulder Boleskey staggered from the
+room. Swithin and Rozsi were left alone. He slid his hand towards her
+hand that lay so close, on the rough table-cloth. It seemed to await
+his touch. Something gave way in him, and words came welling up; for the
+moment he forgot himself, forgot everything but that he was near her.
+Her head dropped on his shoulder, he breathed the perfume of her hair.
+“Good-night!” she whispered, and the whisper was like a kiss; yet before
+he could stop her she was gone. Her footsteps died away in the passage,
+but Swithin sat gazing intently at a single bright drop of spilt wine
+quivering on the table's edge. In that moment she, in her helplessness
+and emotion, was all in all to him—his life nothing; all the real
+things—his conventions, convictions, training, and himself—all seemed
+remote, behind a mist of passion and strange chivalry. Carefully with
+a bit of bread he soaked up the bright drop; and suddenly he thought:
+'This is tremendous!' For a long time he stood there in the window,
+close to the dark pine-trees.
+
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+In the early morning he awoke, full of the discomfort of this strange
+place and the medley of his dreams. Lying, with his nose peeping over
+the quilt, he was visited by a horrible suspicion. When he could bear it
+no longer, he started up in bed. What if it were all a plot to get him
+to marry her? The thought was treacherous, and inspired in him a faint
+disgust. Still, she might be ignorant of it! But was she so innocent?
+What innocent girl would have come to his room like that? What innocent
+girl? Her father, who pretended to be caring only for his country? It
+was not probable that any man was such a fool; it was all part of the
+game--a scheming rascal! Kasteliz, too—his threats! They intended him
+to marry her! And the horrid idea was strengthened by his reverence for
+marriage. It was the proper, the respectable condition; he was genuinely
+afraid of this other sort of liaison—it was somehow too primitive! And
+yet the thought of that marriage made his blood run cold. Considering
+that she had already yielded, it would be all the more monstrous! With
+the cold, fatal clearness of the morning light he now for the first time
+saw his position in its full bearings. And, like a fish pulled out of
+water, he gasped at what was disclosed. Sullen resentment against this
+attempt to force him settled deep into his soul.
+
+He seated himself on the bed, holding his head in his hands, solemnly
+thinking out what such marriage meant. In the first place it meant
+ridicule, in the next place ridicule, in the last place ridicule. She
+would eat chicken bones with her fingers—those fingers his lips still
+burned to kiss. She would dance wildly with other men. She would talk of
+her “dear Father-town,” and all the time her eyes would look beyond him,
+some where or other into some d—d place he knew nothing of. He sprang up
+and paced the room, and for a moment thought he would go mad.
+
+They meant him to marry her! Even she—she meant him to marry her! Her
+tantalising inscrutability; her sudden little tendernesses; her quick
+laughter; her swift, burning kisses; even the movements of her hands;
+her tears—all were evidence against her. Not one of these things that
+Nature made her do counted on her side, but how they fanned his longing,
+his desire, and distress! He went to the glass and tried to part his
+hair with his fingers, but being rather fine, it fell into lank streaks.
+There was no comfort to be got from it. He drew his muddy boots on.
+Suddenly he thought: 'If I could see her alone, I could arrive at some
+arrangement!' Then, with a sense of stupefaction, he made the discovery
+that no arrangement could possibly be made that would not be dangerous,
+even desperate. He seized his hat, and, like a rabbit that has been
+fired at, bolted from the room. He plodded along amongst the damp woods
+with his head down, and resentment and dismay in his heart. But, as the
+sun rose, and the air grew sweet with pine scent, he slowly regained a
+sort of equability. After all, she had already yielded; it was not as
+if...! And the tramp of his own footsteps lulled him into feeling that
+it would all come right.
+
+'Look at the thing practically,' he thought. The faster he walked the
+firmer became his conviction that he could still see it through. He took
+out his watch—it was past seven—he began to hasten back. In the yard of
+the inn his driver was harnessing the horses; Swithin went up to him.
+
+“Who told you to put them in?” he asked.
+
+The driver answered, “Der Herr.”
+
+Swithin turned away. 'In ten minutes,' he thought, 'I shall be in
+that carriage again, with this going on in my head! Driving away from
+England, from all I'm used to--driving to--what?' Could he face it? Could
+he face all that he had been through that morning; face it day after
+day, night after night? Looking up, he saw Rozsi at her open window
+gazing down at him; never had she looked sweeter, more roguish. An
+inexplicable terror seized on him; he ran across the yard and jumped
+into his carriage. “To Salzburg!” he cried; “drive on!” And rattling out
+of the yard without a look behind, he flung a sovereign at the hostler.
+Flying back along the road faster even than he had come, with pale face,
+and eyes blank and staring like a pug-dog's, Swithin spoke no single
+word; nor, till he had reached the door of his lodgings, did he suffer
+the driver to draw rein.
+
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+Towards evening, five days later, Swithin, yellow and travel-worn, was
+ferried in a gondola to Danielli's Hotel. His brother, who was on the
+steps, looked at him with an apprehensive curiosity.
+
+“Why, it's you!” he mumbled. “So you've got here safe?”
+
+“Safe?” growled Swithin.
+
+James replied, “I thought you wouldn't leave your friends!” Then, with a
+jerk of suspicion, “You haven't brought your friends?”
+
+“What friends?” growled Swithin.
+
+James changed the subject. “You don't look the thing,” he said.
+
+“Really!” muttered Swithin; “what's that to you?”
+
+He appeared at dinner that night, but fell asleep over his coffee.
+Neither Traquair nor James asked him any further question, nor did they
+allude to Salzburg; and during the four days which concluded the stay
+in Venice Swithin went about with his head up, but his eyes half-closed
+like a dazed man. Only after they had taken ship at Genoa did he show
+signs of any healthy interest in life, when, finding that a man on board
+was perpetually strumming, he locked the piano up and pitched the key
+into the sea.
+
+That winter in London he behaved much as usual, but fits of moroseness
+would seize on him, during which he was not pleasant to approach.
+
+One evening when he was walking with a friend in Piccadilly, a girl
+coming from a side-street accosted him in German. Swithin, after staring
+at her in silence for some seconds, handed her a five-pound note, to the
+great amazement of his friend; nor could he himself have explained the
+meaning of this freak of generosity.
+
+Of Rozsi he never heard again....
+
+This, then, was the substance of what he remembered as he lay ill in
+bed. Stretching out his hand he pressed the bell. His valet appeared,
+crossing the room like a cat; a Swede, who had been with Swithin many
+years; a little man with a dried face and fierce moustache, morbidly
+sharp nerves, and a queer devotion to his master.
+
+Swithin made a feeble gesture. “Adolf,” he said, “I'm very bad.”
+
+“Yes, sir!”
+
+“Why do you stand there like a cow?” asked Swithin; “can't you see I'm
+very bad?”
+
+“Yes, sir!” The valet's face twitched as though it masked the dance of
+obscure emotions.
+
+“I shall feel better after dinner. What time is it?”
+
+“Five o'clock.”
+
+“I thought it was more. The afternoons are very long.”
+
+“Yes, sir!” Swithin sighed, as though he had expected the consolation of
+denial.
+
+“Very likely I shall have a nap. Bring up hot water at half-past six and
+shave me before dinner.”
+
+The valet moved towards the door. Swithin raised himself.
+
+“What did Mr. James say to you?”
+
+“He said you ought to have another doctor; two doctors, he said, better
+than one. He said, also, he would look in again on his way 'home.'”
+
+Swithin grunted, “Umph! What else did he say?”
+
+“He said you didn't take care of yourself.”
+
+Swithin glared.
+
+“Has anybody else been to see me?”
+
+The valet turned away his eyes. “Mrs. Thomas Forsyte came last Monday
+fortnight.”
+
+“How long have I been ill?”
+
+“Five weeks on Saturday.”
+
+“Do you think I'm very bad?”
+
+Adolf's face was covered suddenly with crow's-feet. “You have no
+business to ask me question like that! I am not paid, sir, to answer
+question like that.”
+
+Swithin said faintly: “You're a peppery fool! Open a bottle of
+champagne!”
+
+Adolf took a bottle of champagne—from a cupboard and held nippers to it.
+He fixed his eyes on Swithin. “The doctor said—”
+
+“Open the bottle!”
+
+“It is not—”
+
+“Open the bottle—or I give you warning.”
+
+Adolf removed the cork. He wiped a glass elaborately, filled it, and
+bore it scrupulously to the bedside. Suddenly twirling his moustaches,
+he wrung his hands, and burst out: “It is poison.”
+
+Swithin grinned faintly. “You foreign fool!” he said. “Get out!”
+
+The valet vanished.
+
+'He forgot himself!' thought Swithin. Slowly he raised the glass, slowly
+put it back, and sank gasping on his pillows. Almost at once he fell
+asleep.
+
+He dreamed that he was at his club, sitting after dinner in the crowded
+smoking-room, with its bright walls and trefoils of light. It was there
+that he sat every evening, patient, solemn, lonely, and sometimes fell
+asleep, his square, pale old face nodding to one side. He dreamed that
+he was gazing at the picture over the fireplace, of an old statesman
+with a high collar, supremely finished face, and sceptical eyebrows—the
+picture, smooth, and reticent as sealing-wax, of one who seemed for ever
+exhaling the narrow wisdom of final judgments. All round him, his fellow
+members were chattering. Only he himself, the old sick member, was
+silent. If fellows only knew what it was like to sit by yourself and
+feel ill all the time! What they were saying he had heard a hundred
+times. They were talking of investments, of cigars, horses, actresses,
+machinery. What was that? A foreign patent for cleaning boilers? There
+was no such thing; boilers couldn't be cleaned, any fool knew that! If
+an Englishman couldn't clean a boiler, no foreigner could clean one.
+He appealed to the old statesman's eyes. But for once those eyes seemed
+hesitating, blurred, wanting in finality. They vanished. In their place
+were Rozsi's little deep-set eyes, with their wide and far-off look; and
+as he gazed they seemed to grow bright as steel, and to speak to him.
+Slowly the whole face grew to be there, floating on the dark background
+of the picture; it was pink, aloof, unfathomable, enticing, with its
+fluffy hair and quick lips, just as he had last seen it. “Are you
+looking for something?” she seemed to say: “I could show you.”
+
+“I have everything safe enough,” answered Swithin, and in his sleep he
+groaned.
+
+He felt the touch of fingers on his forehead. 'I'm dreaming,' he thought
+in his dream.
+
+She had vanished; and far away, from behind the picture, came a sound of
+footsteps.
+
+Aloud, in his sleep, Swithin muttered: “I've missed it.”
+
+Again he heard the rustling of those light footsteps, and close in his
+ear a sound, like a sob. He awoke; the sob was his own. Great drops of
+perspiration stood on his forehead. 'What is it?' he thought; 'what have
+I lost?' Slowly his mind travelled over his investments; he could not
+think of any single one that was unsafe. What was it, then, that he had
+lost? Struggling on his pillows, he clutched the wine-glass. His lips
+touched the wine. 'This isn't the “Heidseck”!' he thought angrily, and
+before the reality of that displeasure all the dim vision passed away.
+But as he bent to drink, something snapped, and, with a sigh, Swithin
+Forsyte died above the bubbles....
+
+When James Forsyte came in again on his way home, the valet, trembling
+took his hat and stick.
+
+“How's your master?”
+
+“My master is dead, sir!”
+
+“Dead! He can't be! I left him safe an hour ago.”
+
+On the bed Swithin's body was doubled like a sack; his hand still
+grasped the glass.
+
+James Forsyte paused. “Swithin!” he said, and with his hand to his ear
+he waited for an answer; but none came, and slowly in the glass a last
+bubble rose and burst.
+
+December 1900.
+
+
+
+
+
+To MY SISTER MABEL EDITH REYNOLDS
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SILENCE
+
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+In a car of the Naples express a mining expert was diving into a bag for
+papers. The strong sunlight showed the fine wrinkles on his brown
+face and the shabbiness of his short, rough beard. A newspaper cutting
+slipped from his fingers; he picked it up, thinking: 'How the dickens
+did that get in here?' It was from a colonial print of three years back;
+and he sat staring, as if in that forlorn slip of yellow paper he had
+encountered some ghost from his past.
+
+These were the words he read: “We hope that the setback to civilisation,
+the check to commerce and development, in this promising centre of our
+colony may be but temporary; and that capital may again come to the
+rescue. Where one man was successful, others should surely not fail? We
+are convinced that it only needs....” And the last words: “For what can
+be sadder than to see the forest spreading its lengthening shadows, like
+symbols of defeat, over the untenanted dwellings of men; and where was
+once the merry chatter of human voices, to pass by in the silence....”
+
+On an afternoon, thirteen years before, he had been in the city of
+London, at one of those emporiums where mining experts perch, before
+fresh flights, like sea-gulls on some favourite rock. A clerk said to
+him: “Mr. Scorrier, they are asking for you downstairs—Mr. Hemmings of
+the New Colliery Company.”
+
+Scorrier took up the speaking tube. “Is that you, Mr. Scorrier? I hope
+you are very well, sir, I am—Hemmings—I am—coming up.”
+
+In two minutes he appeared, Christopher Hemmings, secretary of the
+New Colliery Company, known in the City—behind his back—as
+“Down-by-the-starn” Hemmings. He grasped Scorrier's hand—the gesture
+was deferential, yet distinguished. Too handsome, too capable,
+too important, his figure, the cut of his iron-grey beard, and his
+intrusively fine eyes, conveyed a continual courteous invitation to
+inspect their infallibilities. He stood, like a City “Atlas,” with
+his legs apart, his coat-tails gathered in his hands, a whole globe of
+financial matters deftly balanced on his nose. “Look at me!” he seemed
+to say. “It's heavy, but how easily I carry it. Not the man to let it
+down, Sir!”
+
+“I hope I see you well, Mr. Scorrier,” he began. “I have come round
+about our mine. There is a question of a fresh field being opened
+up—between ourselves, not before it's wanted. I find it difficult to get
+my Board to take a comprehensive view. In short, the question is: Are
+you prepared to go out for us, and report on it? The fees will be all
+right.” His left eye closed. “Things have been very—er—dicky; we are
+going to change our superintendent. I have got little Pippin—you know
+little Pippin?”
+
+Scorrier murmured, with a feeling of vague resentment: “Oh yes. He's not
+a mining man!”
+
+Hemmings replied: “We think that he will do.” 'Do you?' thought
+Scorrier; 'that's good of you!'
+
+He had not altogether shaken off a worship he had felt for Pippin—“King”
+Pippin he was always called, when they had been boys at the Camborne
+Grammar-school. “King” Pippin! the boy with the bright colour, very
+bright hair, bright, subtle, elusive eyes, broad shoulders, little stoop
+in the neck, and a way of moving it quickly like a bird; the boy who
+was always at the top of everything, and held his head as if looking
+for something further to be the top of. He remembered how one day “King”
+Pippin had said to him in his soft way, “Young Scorrie, I'll do your
+sums for you”; and in answer to his dubious, “Is that all right?” had
+replied, “Of course—I don't want you to get behind that beast Blake,
+he's not a Cornishman” (the beast Blake was an Irishman not yet twelve).
+He remembered, too, an occasion when “King” Pippin with two other boys
+fought six louts and got a licking, and how Pippin sat for half an hour
+afterwards, all bloody, his head in his hands, rocking to and fro, and
+weeping tears of mortification; and how the next day he had sneaked
+off by himself, and, attacking the same gang, got frightfully mauled a
+second time.
+
+Thinking of these things he answered curtly: “When shall I start?”
+
+“Down-by-the-starn” Hemmings replied with a sort of fearful
+sprightliness: “There's a good fellow! I will send instructions; so glad
+to see you well.” Conferring on Scorrier a look—fine to the verge
+of vulgarity—he withdrew. Scorrier remained, seated; heavy with
+insignificance and vague oppression, as if he had drunk a tumbler of
+sweet port.
+
+A week later, in company with Pippin, he was on board a liner.
+
+The “King” Pippin of his school-days was now a man of forty-four. He
+awakened in Scorrier the uncertain wonder with which men look backward
+at their uncomplicated teens; and staggering up and down the decks in
+the long Atlantic roll, he would steal glances at his companion, as if
+he expected to find out from them something about himself. Pippin had
+still “King” Pippin's bright, fine hair, and dazzling streaks in his
+short beard; he had still a bright colour and suave voice, and what
+there were of wrinkles suggested only subtleties of humour and ironic
+sympathy. From the first, and apparently without negotiation, he had
+his seat at the captain's table, to which on the second day Scorrier too
+found himself translated, and had to sit, as he expressed it ruefully,
+“among the big-wigs.”
+
+During the voyage only one incident impressed itself on Scorrier's
+memory, and that for a disconcerting reason. In the forecastle were the
+usual complement of emigrants. One evening, leaning across the rail to
+watch them, he felt a touch on his arm; and, looking round, saw Pippin's
+face and beard quivering in the lamplight. “Poor people!” he said. The
+idea flashed on Scorrier that he was like some fine wire sound-recording
+instrument.
+
+'Suppose he were to snap!' he thought. Impelled to justify this fancy,
+he blurted out: “You're a nervous chap. The way you look at those poor
+devils!”
+
+Pippin hustled him along the deck. “Come, come, you took me off my
+guard,” he murmured, with a sly, gentle smile, “that's not fair.”
+
+He found it a continual source of wonder that Pippin, at his age, should
+cut himself adrift from the associations and security of London life to
+begin a new career in a new country with dubious prospect of success.
+'I always heard he was doing well all round,' he thought; 'thinks he'll
+better himself, perhaps. He's a true Cornishman.'
+
+The morning of arrival at the mines was grey and cheerless; a cloud of
+smoke, beaten down by drizzle, clung above the forest; the wooden houses
+straggled dismally in the unkempt semblance of a street, against a
+background of endless, silent woods. An air of blank discouragement
+brooded over everything; cranes jutted idly over empty trucks; the long
+jetty oozed black slime; miners with listless faces stood in the rain;
+dogs fought under their very legs. On the way to the hotel they met no
+one busy or serene except a Chinee who was polishing a dish-cover.
+
+The late superintendent, a cowed man, regaled them at lunch with his
+forebodings; his attitude toward the situation was like the food, which
+was greasy and uninspiring. Alone together once more, the two newcomers
+eyed each other sadly.
+
+“Oh dear!” sighed Pippin. “We must change all this, Scorrier; it will
+never do to go back beaten. I shall not go back beaten; you will have
+to carry me on my shield;” and slyly: “Too heavy, eh? Poor fellow!” Then
+for a long time he was silent, moving his lips as if adding up the cost.
+Suddenly he sighed, and grasping Scorrier's arm, said: “Dull, aren't I?
+What will you do? Put me in your report, 'New Superintendent—sad, dull
+dog—not a word to throw at a cat!'” And as if the new task were too much
+for him, he sank back in thought. The last words he said to Scorrier
+that night were: “Very silent here. It's hard to believe one's here for
+life. But I feel I am. Mustn't be a coward, though!” and brushing his
+forehead, as though to clear from it a cobweb of faint thoughts, he
+hurried off.
+
+Scorrier stayed on the veranda smoking. The rain had ceased, a few stars
+were burning dimly; even above the squalor of the township the scent of
+the forests, the interminable forests, brooded. There sprang into his
+mind the memory of a picture from one of his children's fairy books—the
+picture of a little bearded man on tiptoe, with poised head and a great
+sword, slashing at the castle of a giant. It reminded him of Pippin. And
+suddenly, even to Scorrier—whose existence was one long encounter with
+strange places—the unseen presence of those woods, their heavy, healthy
+scent, the little sounds, like squeaks from tiny toys, issuing out of
+the gloomy silence, seemed intolerable, to be shunned, from the mere
+instinct of self-preservation. He thought of the evening he had spent
+in the bosom of “Down-by-the-starn” Hemmings' family, receiving his
+last instructions—the security of that suburban villa, its discouraging
+gentility; the superior acidity of the Miss Hemmings; the noble names
+of large contractors, of company promoters, of a peer, dragged with the
+lightness of gun-carriages across the conversation; the autocracy of
+Hemmings, rasped up here and there, by some domestic contradiction. It
+was all so nice and safe—as if the whole thing had been fastened to
+an anchor sunk beneath the pink cabbages of the drawing-room carpet!
+Hemmings, seeing him off the premises, had said with secrecy: “Little
+Pippin will have a good thing. We shall make his salary L——. He'll be a
+great man--quite a king. Ha-ha!”
+
+Scorrier shook the ashes from his pipe. 'Salary!' he thought, straining
+his ears; 'I wouldn't take the place for five thousand pounds a year.
+And yet it's a fine country,' and with ironic violence he repeated, 'a
+dashed fine country!'
+
+Ten days later, having finished his report on the new mine, he stood on
+the jetty waiting to go abroad the steamer for home.
+
+“God bless you!” said Pippin. “Tell them they needn't be afraid; and
+sometimes when you're at home think of me, eh?”
+
+Scorrier, scrambling on board, had a confused memory of tears in his
+eyes, and a convulsive handshake.
+
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+It was eight years before the wheels of life carried Scorrier back to
+that disenchanted spot, and this time not on the business of the New
+Colliery Company. He went for another company with a mine some thirty
+miles away. Before starting, however, he visited Hemmings. The secretary
+was surrounded by pigeon-holes and finer than ever; Scorrier blinked in
+the full radiance of his courtesy. A little man with eyebrows full of
+questions, and a grizzled beard, was seated in an arm-chair by the fire.
+
+“You know Mr. Booker,” said Hemmings—“one of my directors. This is Mr.
+Scorrier, sir—who went out for us.”
+
+These sentences were murmured in a way suggestive of their uncommon
+value. The director uncrossed his legs, and bowed. Scorrier also bowed,
+and Hemmings, leaning back, slowly developed the full resources of his
+waistcoat.
+
+“So you are going out again, Scorrier, for the other side? I tell Mr.
+Scorrier, sir, that he is going out for the enemy. Don't find them a
+mine as good as you found us, there's a good man.”
+
+The little director asked explosively: “See our last dividend? Twenty
+per cent; eh, what?”
+
+Hemmings moved a finger, as if reproving his director. “I will not
+disguise from you,” he murmured, “that there is friction between us
+and—the enemy; you know our position too well—just a little too well,
+eh? 'A nod's as good as a wink.'”
+
+His diplomatic eyes flattered Scorrier, who passed a hand over his
+brow—and said: “Of course.”
+
+“Pippin doesn't hit it off with them. Between ourselves, he's a leetle
+too big for his boots. You know what it is when a man in his position
+gets a sudden rise!”
+
+Scorrier caught himself searching on the floor for a sight of Hemmings'
+boots; he raised his eyes guiltily. The secretary continued: “We don't
+hear from him quite as often as we should like, in fact.”
+
+To his own surprise Scorrier murmured: “It's a silent place!”
+
+The secretary smiled. “Very good! Mr. Scorrier says, sir, it's a silent
+place; ha-ha! I call that very good!” But suddenly a secret irritation
+seemed to bubble in him; he burst forth almost violently: “He's no
+business to let it affect him; now, has he? I put it to you, Mr.
+Scorrier, I put it to you, sir!”
+
+But Scorrier made no reply, and soon after took his leave: he had been
+asked to convey a friendly hint to Pippin that more frequent letters
+would be welcomed. Standing in the shadow of the Royal Exchange, waiting
+to thread his way across, he thought: 'So you must have noise, must
+you—you've got some here, and to spare....'
+
+On his arrival in the new world he wired to Pippin asking if he might
+stay with him on the way up country, and received the answer: “Be sure
+and come.”
+
+A week later he arrived (there was now a railway) and found Pippin
+waiting for him in a phaeton. Scorrier would not have known the place
+again; there was a glitter over everything, as if some one had touched
+it with a wand. The tracks had given place to roads, running firm,
+straight, and black between the trees under brilliant sunshine; the
+wooden houses were all painted; out in the gleaming harbour amongst the
+green of islands lay three steamers, each with a fleet of busy boats;
+and here and there a tiny yacht floated, like a sea-bird on the water.
+Pippin drove his long-tailed horses furiously; his eyes brimmed with
+subtle kindness, as if according Scorrier a continual welcome. During
+the two days of his stay Scorrier never lost that sense of glamour. He
+had every opportunity for observing the grip Pippin had over everything.
+The wooden doors and walls of his bungalow kept out no sounds. He
+listened to interviews between his host and all kinds and conditions of
+men. The voices of the visitors would rise at first—angry, discontented,
+matter-of-fact, with nasal twang, or guttural drawl; then would come
+the soft patter of the superintendent's feet crossing and recrossing the
+room. Then a pause, the sound of hard breathing, and quick questions—the
+visitor's voice again, again the patter, and Pippin's ingratiating
+but decisive murmurs. Presently out would come the visitor with an
+expression on his face which Scorrier soon began to know by heart, a
+kind of pleased, puzzled, helpless look, which seemed to say, “I've been
+done, I know—I'll give it to myself when I'm round the corner.”
+
+Pippin was full of wistful questions about “home.” He wanted to talk
+of music, pictures, plays, of how London looked, what new streets there
+were, and, above all, whether Scorrier had been lately in the West
+Country. He talked of getting leave next winter, asked whether Scorrier
+thought they would “put up with him at home”; then, with the agitation
+which had alarmed Scorrier before, he added: “Ah! but I'm not fit for
+home now. One gets spoiled; it's big and silent here. What should I go
+back to? I don't seem to realise.”
+
+Scorrier thought of Hemmings. “'Tis a bit cramped there, certainly,” he
+muttered.
+
+Pippin went on as if divining his thoughts. “I suppose our friend
+Hemmings would call me foolish; he's above the little weaknesses of
+imagination, eh? Yes; it's silent here. Sometimes in the evening I would
+give my head for somebody to talk to—Hemmings would never give his head
+for anything, I think. But all the same, I couldn't face them at home.
+Spoiled!” And slyly he murmured: “What would the Board say if they could
+hear that?”
+
+Scorrier blurted out: “To tell you the truth, they complain a little of
+not hearing from you.”
+
+Pippin put out a hand, as if to push something away. “Let them try the
+life here!” he broke out; “it's like sitting on a live volcano—what with
+our friends, 'the enemy,' over there; the men; the American competition.
+I keep it going, Scorrier, but at what a cost—at what a cost!”
+
+“But surely—letters?”
+
+Pippin only answered: “I try—I try!”
+
+Scorrier felt with remorse and wonder that he had spoken the truth. The
+following day he left for his inspection, and while in the camp of “the
+enemy” much was the talk he heard of Pippin.
+
+“Why!” said his host, the superintendent, a little man with a face
+somewhat like an owl's, “d'you know the name they've given him down in
+the capital—'the King'—good, eh? He's made them 'sit up' all along this
+coast. I like him well enough—good—hearted man, shocking nervous; but
+my people down there can't stand him at any price. Sir, he runs this
+colony. You'd think butter wouldn't melt in that mouth of his; but he
+always gets his way; that's what riles 'em so; that and the success he's
+making of his mine. It puzzles me; you'd think he'd only be too glad
+of a quiet life, a man with his nerves. But no, he's never happy unless
+he's fighting, something where he's got a chance to score a victory.
+I won't say he likes it, but, by Jove, it seems he's got to do it.
+Now that's funny! I'll tell you one thing, though shouldn't be a bit
+surprised if he broke down some day; and I'll tell you another,”
+he added darkly, “he's sailing very near the wind, with those large
+contracts that he makes. I wouldn't care to take his risks. Just let
+them have a strike, or something that shuts them down for a spell—and
+mark my words, sir—it'll be all up with them. But,” he concluded
+confidentially, “I wish I had his hold on the men; it's a great thing
+in this country. Not like home, where you can go round a corner and get
+another gang. You have to make the best you can out of the lot you have;
+you won't get another man for love or money without you ship him a few
+hundred miles.” And with a frown he waved his arm over the forests to
+indicate the barrenness of the land.
+
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+Scorrier finished his inspection and went on a shooting trip into the
+forest. His host met him on his return. “Just look at this!” he said,
+holding out a telegram. “Awful, isn't it?” His face expressed a profound
+commiseration, almost ludicrously mixed with the ashamed contentment
+that men experience at the misfortunes of an enemy.
+
+The telegram, dated the day before, ran thus “Frightful explosion New
+Colliery this morning, great loss of life feared.”
+
+Scorrier had the bewildered thought: 'Pippin will want me now.'
+
+He took leave of his host, who called after him: “You'd better wait for
+a steamer! It's a beastly drive!”
+
+Scorrier shook his head. All night, jolting along a rough track cut
+through the forest, he thought of Pippin. The other miseries of this
+calamity at present left him cold; he barely thought of the smothered
+men; but Pippin's struggle, his lonely struggle with this hydra-headed
+monster, touched him very nearly. He fell asleep and dreamed of watching
+Pippin slowly strangled by a snake; the agonised, kindly, ironic face
+peeping out between two gleaming coils was so horribly real, that he
+awoke. It was the moment before dawn: pitch-black branches barred the
+sky; with every jolt of the wheels the gleams from the lamps danced,
+fantastic and intrusive, round ferns and tree-stems, into the cold heart
+of the forest. For an hour or more Scorrier tried to feign sleep, and
+hide from the stillness, and overmastering gloom of these great woods.
+Then softly a whisper of noises stole forth, a stir of light, and the
+whole slow radiance of the morning glory. But it brought no warmth; and
+Scorrier wrapped himself closer in his cloak, feeling as though old age
+had touched him.
+
+Close on noon he reached the township. Glamour seemed still to hover
+over it. He drove on to the mine. The winding-engine was turning,
+the pulley at the top of the head-gear whizzing round; nothing looked
+unusual. 'Some mistake!' he thought. He drove to the mine buildings,
+alighted, and climbed to the shaft head. Instead of the usual rumbling
+of the trolleys, the rattle of coal discharged over the screens, there
+was silence. Close by, Pippin himself was standing, smirched with dirt.
+The cage, coming swift and silent from below, shot open its doors with a
+sharp rattle. Scorrier bent forward to look. There lay a dead man, with
+a smile on his face.
+
+“How many?” he whispered.
+
+Pippin answered: “Eighty-four brought up—forty-seven still below,” and
+entered the man's name in a pocket-book.
+
+An older man was taken out next; he too was smiling—there had been
+vouchsafed to him, it seemed, a taste of more than earthly joy. The
+sight of those strange smiles affected Scorrier more than all the
+anguish or despair he had seen scored on the faces of other dead men. He
+asked an old miner how long Pippin had been at work.
+
+“Thirty hours. Yesterday he wer' below; we had to nigh carry mun up at
+last. He's for goin' down again, but the chaps won't lower mun;” the old
+man gave a sigh. “I'm waiting for my boy to come up, I am.”
+
+Scorrier waited too—there was fascination about those dead, smiling
+faces. The rescuing of these men who would never again breathe went on
+and on. Scorrier grew sleepy in the sun. The old miner woke him, saying:
+“Rummy stuff this here chokedamp; see, they all dies drunk!” The very
+next to be brought up was the chief engineer. Scorrier had known him
+quite well, one of those Scotsmen who are born at the age of forty
+and remain so all their lives. His face—the only one that wore no
+smile—seemed grieving that duty had deprived it of that last luxury.
+With wide eyes and drawn lips he had died protesting.
+
+Late in the afternoon the old miner touched Scorrier's arm, and said:
+“There he is—there's my boy!” And he departed slowly, wheeling the body
+on a trolley.
+
+As the sun set, the gang below came up. No further search was possible
+till the fumes had cleared. Scorrier heard one man say: “There's some
+we'll never get; they've had sure burial.”
+
+Another answered him: “'Tis a gude enough bag for me!” They passed him,
+the whites of their eyes gleaming out of faces black as ink.
+
+Pippin drove him home at a furious pace, not uttering a single word. As
+they turned into the main street, a young woman starting out before the
+horses obliged Pippin to pull up. The glance he bent on Scorrier was
+ludicrously prescient of suffering. The woman asked for her husband.
+Several times they were stopped thus by women asking for their husbands
+or sons. “This is what I have to go through,” Pippin whispered.
+
+When they had eaten, he said to Scorrier: “It was kind of you to come
+and stand by me! They take me for a god, poor creature that I am. But
+shall I ever get the men down again? Their nerve's shaken. I wish I were
+one of those poor lads, to die with a smile like that!”
+
+Scorrier felt the futility of his presence. On Pippin alone must be the
+heat and burden. Would he stand under it, or would the whole thing come
+crashing to the ground? He urged him again and again to rest, but Pippin
+only gave him one of his queer smiles. “You don't know how strong I am!”
+he said.
+
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+He himself slept heavily; and, waking at dawn, went down. Pippin was
+still at his desk; his pen had dropped; he was asleep. The ink was wet;
+Scorrier's eye caught the opening words:
+
+“GENTLEMEN,—Since this happened I have not slept....”
+
+He stole away again with a sense of indignation that no one could be
+dragged in to share that fight. The London Board-room rose before his
+mind. He imagined the portentous gravity of Hemmings; his face and
+voice and manner conveying the impression that he alone could save
+the situation; the six directors, all men of commonsense and certainly
+humane, seated behind large turret-shaped inkpots; the concern and
+irritation in their voices, asking how it could have happened; their
+comments: “An awful thing!” “I suppose Pippin is doing the best he can!”
+“Wire him on no account to leave the mine idle!” “Poor devils!” “A
+fund? Of course, what ought we to give?” He had a strong conviction that
+nothing of all this would disturb the commonsense with which they would
+go home and eat their mutton. A good thing too; the less it was taken
+to heart the better! But Scorrier felt angry. The fight was so unfair!
+A fellow all nerves—with not a soul to help him! Well, it was his own
+lookout! He had chosen to centre it all in himself, to make himself its
+very soul. If he gave way now, the ship must go down! By a thin thread,
+Scorrier's hero-worship still held. 'Man against nature,' he thought,
+'I back the man.' The struggle in which he was so powerless to give
+aid, became intensely personal to him, as if he had engaged his own good
+faith therein.
+
+The next day they went down again to the pit-head; and Scorrier himself
+descended. The fumes had almost cleared, but there were some places
+which would never be reached. At the end of the day all but four bodies
+had been recovered. “In the day o' judgment,” a miner said, “they
+four'll come out of here.” Those unclaimed bodies haunted Scorrier. He
+came on sentences of writing, where men waiting to be suffocated had
+written down their feelings. In one place, the hour, the word “Sleepy,”
+and a signature. In another, “A. F.—done for.” When he came up at last
+Pippin was still waiting, pocket-book in hand; they again departed at a
+furious pace.
+
+Two days later Scorrier, visiting the shaft, found its neighbourhood
+deserted—not a living thing of any sort was there except one Chinaman
+poking his stick into the rubbish. Pippin was away down the coast
+engaging an engineer; and on his return, Scorrier had not the heart to
+tell him of the desertion. He was spared the effort, for Pippin said:
+“Don't be afraid—you've got bad news? The men have gone on strike.”
+
+Scorrier sighed. “Lock, stock, and barrel”
+
+“I thought so—see what I have here!” He put before Scorrier a telegram:
+
+“At all costs keep working—fatal to stop—manage this somehow.—HEMMINGS.”
+
+Breathing quickly, he added: “As if I didn't know! 'Manage this
+somehow'—a little hard!”
+
+“What's to be done?” asked Scorrier.
+
+“You see I am commanded!” Pippin answered bitterly. “And they're quite
+right; we must keep working—our contracts! Now I'm down—not a soul will
+spare me!”
+
+The miners' meeting was held the following day on the outskirts of the
+town. Pippin had cleared the place to make a public recreation-ground—a
+sort of feather in the company's cap; it was now to be the spot whereon
+should be decided the question of the company's life or death.
+
+The sky to the west was crossed by a single line of cloud like a bar of
+beaten gold; tree shadows crept towards the groups of men; the evening
+savour, that strong fragrance of the forest, sweetened the air. The
+miners stood all round amongst the burnt tree-stumps, cowed and sullen.
+They looked incapable of movement or expression. It was this dumb
+paralysis that frightened Scorrier. He watched Pippin speaking from his
+phaeton, the butt of all those sullen, restless eyes. Would he last
+out? Would the wires hold? It was like the finish of a race. He caught
+a baffled look on Pippin's face, as if he despaired of piercing that
+terrible paralysis. The men's eyes had begun to wander. 'He's lost his
+hold,' thought Scorrier; 'it's all up!'
+
+A miner close beside him muttered: “Look out!”
+
+Pippin was leaning forward, his voice had risen, the words fell like a
+whiplash on the faces of the crowd: “You shan't throw me over; do you
+think I'll give up all I've done for you? I'll make you the first power
+in the colony! Are you turning tail at the first shot? You're a set of
+cowards, my lads!”
+
+Each man round Scorrier was listening with a different motion of the
+hands—one rubbed them, one clenched them, another moved his closed fist,
+as if stabbing some one in the back. A grisly-bearded, beetle-browed,
+twinkling-eyed old Cornishman muttered: “A'hm not troublin' about that.”
+It seemed almost as if Pippin's object was to get the men to kill him;
+they had gathered closer, crouching for a rush. Suddenly Pippin's voice
+dropped to a whisper: “I'm disgraced Men, are you going back on me?”
+
+The old miner next Scorrier called out suddenly: “Anny that's Cornishmen
+here to stand by the superintendent?” A group drew together, and with
+murmurs and gesticulation the meeting broke up.
+
+In the evening a deputation came to visit Pippin; and all night long
+their voices and the superintendent's footsteps could be heard. In the
+morning, Pippin went early to the mine. Before supper the deputation
+came again; and again Scorrier had to listen hour after hour to the
+sound of voices and footsteps till he fell asleep. Just before dawn he
+was awakened by a light. Pippin stood at his bedside. “The men go down
+to-morrow,” he said: “What did I tell you? Carry me home on my shield,
+eh?”
+
+In a week the mine was in full work.
+
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+Two years later, Scorrier heard once more of Pippin. A note from
+Hemmings reached him asking if he could make it convenient to attend
+their Board meeting the following Thursday. He arrived rather before the
+appointed time. The secretary received him, and, in answer to inquiry,
+said: “Thank you, we are doing well—between ourselves, we are doing very
+well.”
+
+“And Pippin?”
+
+The secretary frowned. “Ah, Pippin! We asked you to come on his account.
+Pippin is giving us a lot of trouble. We have not had a single line
+from him for just two years!” He spoke with such a sense of personal
+grievance that Scorrier felt quite sorry for him. “Not a single line,”
+said Hemmings, “since that explosion—you were there at the time, I
+remember! It makes it very awkward; I call it personal to me.”
+
+“But how—” Scorrier began.
+
+“We get—telegrams. He writes to no one, not even to his family. And why?
+Just tell me why? We hear of him; he's a great nob out there. Nothing's
+done in the colony without his finger being in the pie. He turned out
+the last Government because they wouldn't grant us an extension for our
+railway—shows he can't be a fool. Besides, look at our balance-sheet!”
+
+It turned out that the question on which Scorrier's opinion was desired
+was, whether Hemmings should be sent out to see what was the matter
+with the superintendent. During the discussion which ensued, he was an
+unwilling listener to strictures on Pippin's silence. “The explosion,”
+he muttered at last, “a very trying time!”
+
+Mr. Booker pounced on him. “A very trying time! So it was—to all of us.
+But what excuse is that—now, Mr. Scorrier, what excuse is that?”
+
+Scorrier was obliged to admit that it was none.
+
+“Business is business—eh, what?”
+
+Scorrier, gazing round that neat Board-room, nodded. A deaf director,
+who had not spoken for some months, said with sudden fierceness: “It's
+disgraceful!” He was obviously letting off the fume of long-unuttered
+disapprovals. One perfectly neat, benevolent old fellow, however,
+who had kept his hat on, and had a single vice—that of coming to the
+Board-room with a brown paper parcel tied up with string—murmured: “We
+must make all allowances,” and started an anecdote about his youth. He
+was gently called to order by his secretary. Scorrier was asked for
+his opinion. He looked at Hemmings. “My importance is concerned,” was
+written all over the secretary's face. Moved by an impulse of loyalty to
+Pippin, Scorrier answered, as if it were all settled: “Well, let me know
+when you are starting, Hemmings—I should like the trip myself.”
+
+As he was going out, the chairman, old Jolyon Forsyte, with a grave,
+twinkling look at Hemmings, took him aside. “Glad to hear you say that
+about going too, Mr. Scorrier; we must be careful—Pippin's such a good
+fellow, and so sensitive; and our friend there—a bit heavy in the hand,
+um?”
+
+Scorrier did in fact go out with Hemmings. The secretary was sea-sick,
+and his prostration, dignified but noisy, remained a memory for ever;
+it was sonorous and fine—the prostration of superiority; and the way in
+which he spoke of it, taking casual acquaintances into the caves of his
+experience, was truly interesting.
+
+Pippin came down to the capital to escort them, provided for their
+comforts as if they had been royalty, and had a special train to take
+them to the mines.
+
+He was a little stouter, brighter of colour, greyer of beard, more
+nervous perhaps in voice and breathing. His manner to Hemmings was full
+of flattering courtesy; but his sly, ironical glances played on the
+secretary's armour like a fountain on a hippopotamus. To Scorrier,
+however, he could not show enough affection:
+
+The first evening, when Hemmings had gone to his room, he jumped up
+like a boy out of school. “So I'm going to get a wigging,” he said;
+“I suppose I deserve it; but if you knew—if you only knew...! Out here
+they've nicknamed me 'the King'—they say I rule the colony. It's myself
+that I can't rule”; and with a sudden burst of passion such as Scorrier
+had never seen in him: “Why did they send this man here? What can he
+know about the things that I've been through?” In a moment he calmed
+down again. “There! this is very stupid; worrying you like this!” and
+with a long, kind look into Scorrier's face, he hustled him off to bed.
+
+Pippin did not break out again, though fire seemed to smoulder behind
+the bars of his courteous irony. Intuition of danger had evidently
+smitten Hemmings, for he made no allusion to the object of his
+visit. There were moments when Scorrier's common-sense sided with
+Hemmings—these were moments when the secretary was not present.
+
+'After all,' he told himself, 'it's a little thing to ask—one letter a
+month. I never heard of such a case.' It was wonderful indeed how they
+stood it! It showed how much they valued Pippin! What was the matter
+with him? What was the nature of his trouble? One glimpse Scorrier had
+when even Hemmings, as he phrased it, received “quite a turn.” It was
+during a drive back from the most outlying of the company's trial mines,
+eight miles through the forest. The track led through a belt of trees
+blackened by a forest fire. Pippin was driving. The secretary seated
+beside him wore an expression of faint alarm, such as Pippin's driving
+was warranted to evoke from almost any face. The sky had darkened
+strangely, but pale streaks of light, coming from one knew not where,
+filtered through the trees. No breath was stirring; the wheels and
+horses' hoofs made no sound on the deep fern mould. All around, the
+burnt tree-trunks, leafless and jagged, rose like withered giants, the
+passages between them were black, the sky black, and black the silence.
+No one spoke, and literally the only sound was Pippin's breathing. What
+was it that was so terrifying? Scorrier had a feeling of entombment;
+that nobody could help him; the feeling of being face to face with
+Nature; a sensation as if all the comfort and security of words and
+rules had dropped away from him. And-nothing happened. They reached home
+and dined.
+
+During dinner he had again that old remembrance of a little man chopping
+at a castle with his sword. It came at a moment when Pippin had raised
+his hand with the carving-knife grasped in it to answer some remark of
+Hemmings' about the future of the company. The optimism in his uplifted
+chin, the strenuous energy in his whispering voice, gave Scorrier a more
+vivid glimpse of Pippin's nature than he had perhaps ever had before.
+This new country, where nothing but himself could help a man—that was
+the castle! No wonder Pippin was impatient of control, no wonder he was
+out of hand, no wonder he was silent—chopping away at that! And suddenly
+he thought: 'Yes, and all the time one knows, Nature must beat him in
+the end!'
+
+That very evening Hemmings delivered himself of his reproof. He had sat
+unusually silent; Scorrier, indeed, had thought him a little drunk, so
+portentous was his gravity; suddenly, however he rose. It was hard on a
+man, he said, in his position, with a Board (he spoke as of a family
+of small children), to be kept so short of information. He was actually
+compelled to use his imagination to answer the shareholders' questions.
+This was painful and humiliating; he had never heard of any secretary
+having to use his imagination! He went further—it was insulting! He had
+grown grey in the service of the company. Mr. Scorrier would bear him
+out when he said he had a position to maintain—his name in the City was
+a high one; and, by George! he was going to keep it a high one; he would
+allow nobody to drag it in the dust—that ought clearly to be understood.
+His directors felt they were being treated like children; however that
+might be, it was absurd to suppose that he (Hemmings) could be treated
+like a child...! The secretary paused; his eyes seemed to bully the
+room.
+
+“If there were no London office,” murmured Pippin, “the shareholders
+would get the same dividends.”
+
+Hemmings gasped. “Come!” he said, “this is monstrous!”
+
+“What help did I get from London when I first came here? What help have
+I ever had?”
+
+Hemmings swayed, recovered, and with a forced smile replied that, if
+this were true, he had been standing on his head for years; he did not
+believe the attitude possible for such a length of time; personally he
+would have thought that he too had had a little something to say to the
+company's position, but no matter...! His irony was crushing.... It
+was possible that Mr. Pippin hoped to reverse the existing laws of the
+universe with regard to limited companies; he would merely say that
+he must not begin with a company of which he (Hemmings) happened to be
+secretary. Mr. Scorrier had hinted at excuses; for his part, with the
+best intentions in the world, he had great difficulty in seeing them. He
+would go further—he did not see them! The explosion...! Pippin shrank
+so visibly that Hemmings seemed troubled by a suspicion that he had gone
+too far.
+
+“We know,” he said, “that it was trying for you....”
+
+“Trying!” “burst out Pippin.
+
+“No one can say,” Hemmings resumed soothingly, “that we have not dealt
+liberally.” Pippin made a motion of the head. “We think we have a good
+superintendent; I go further, an excellent superintendent. What I say
+is: Let's be pleasant! I am not making an unreasonable request!” He
+ended on a fitting note of jocularity; and, as if by consent, all three
+withdrew, each to his own room, without another word.
+
+In the course of the next day Pippin said to Scorrier: “It seems I have
+been very wicked. I must try to do better”; and with a touch of bitter
+humour, “They are kind enough to think me a good superintendent, you
+see! After that I must try hard.”
+
+Scorrier broke in: “No man could have done so much for them;” and,
+carried away by an impulse to put things absolutely straight, went on
+“But, after all, a letter now and then—what does it amount to?”
+
+Pippin besieged him with a subtle glance. “You too?” he said—“I must
+indeed have been a wicked man!” and turned away.
+
+Scorrier felt as if he had been guilty of brutality; sorry for Pippin,
+angry with himself; angry with Pippin, sorry for himself. He earnestly
+desired to see the back of Hemmings. The secretary gratified the wish
+a few days later, departing by steamer with ponderous expressions of
+regard and the assurance of his goodwill.
+
+Pippin gave vent to no outburst of relief, maintaining a courteous
+silence, making only one allusion to his late guest, in answer to a
+remark of Scorrier:
+
+“Ah! don't tempt me! mustn't speak behind his back.”
+
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+A month passed, and Scorrier still—remained Pippin's guest. As each
+mail-day approached he experienced a queer suppressed excitement. On one
+of these occasions Pippin had withdrawn to his room; and when Scorrier
+went to fetch him to dinner he found him with his head leaning on his
+hands, amid a perfect fitter of torn paper. He looked up at Scorrier.
+
+“I can't do it,” he said, “I feel such a hypocrite; I can't put myself
+into leading-strings again. Why should I ask these people, when I've
+settled everything already? If it were a vital matter they wouldn't want
+to hear—they'd simply wire, 'Manage this somehow!'”
+
+Scorrier said nothing, but thought privately 'This is a mad business!'
+What was a letter? Why make a fuss about a letter? The approach of
+mail-day seemed like a nightmare to the superintendent; he became
+feverishly nervous like a man under a spell; and, when the mail had
+gone, behaved like a respited criminal. And this had been going on two
+years! Ever since that explosion. Why, it was monomania!
+
+One day, a month after Hemmings' departure, Pippin rose early from
+dinner; his face was flushed, he had been drinking wine. “I won't be
+beaten this time,” he said, as he passed Scorrier. The latter could hear
+him writing in the next room, and looked in presently to say that he was
+going for a walk. Pippin gave him a kindly nod.
+
+It was a cool, still evening: innumerable stars swarmed in clusters
+over the forests, forming bright hieroglyphics in the middle heavens,
+showering over the dark harbour into the sea. Scorrier walked slowly. A
+weight seemed lifted from his mind, so entangled had he become in that
+uncanny silence. At last Pippin had broken through the spell. To get
+that, letter sent would be the laying of a phantom, the rehabilitation
+of commonsense. Now that this silence was in the throes of being broken,
+he felt curiously tender towards Pippin, without the hero-worship of old
+days, but with a queer protective feeling. After all, he was different
+from other men. In spite of his feverish, tenacious energy, in spite of
+his ironic humour, there was something of the woman in him! And as for
+this silence, this horror of control—all geniuses had “bees in their
+bonnets,” and Pippin was a genius in his way!
+
+He looked back at the town. Brilliantly lighted it had a thriving
+air--difficult to believe of the place he remembered ten years back; the
+sounds of drinking, gambling, laughter, and dancing floated to his ears.
+'Quite a city!' he thought.
+
+With this queer elation on him he walked slowly back along the street,
+forgetting that he was simply an oldish mining expert, with a look of
+shabbiness, such as clings to men who are always travelling, as if their
+“nap” were for ever being rubbed off. And he thought of Pippin, creator
+of this glory.
+
+He had passed the boundaries of the town, and had entered the forest. A
+feeling of discouragement instantly beset him. The scents and silence,
+after the festive cries and odours of the town, were undefinably
+oppressive. Notwithstanding, he walked a long time, saying to himself
+that he would give the letter every chance. At last, when he thought
+that Pippin must have finished, he went back to the house.
+
+Pippin had finished. His forehead rested on the table, his arms hung at
+his sides; he was stone-dead! His face wore a smile, and by his side lay
+an empty laudanum bottle.
+
+The letter, closely, beautifully written, lay before him. It was a fine
+document, clear, masterly, detailed, nothing slurred, nothing concealed,
+nothing omitted; a complete review of the company's position; it ended
+with the words: “Your humble servant, RICHARD PIPPIN.”
+
+Scorrier took possession of it. He dimly understood that with those last
+words a wire had snapped. The border-line had been overpassed; the point
+reached where that sense of proportion, which alone makes life possible,
+is lost. He was certain that at the moment of his death Pippin could
+have discussed bimetallism, or any intellectual problem, except the one
+problem of his own heart; that, for some mysterious reason, had been
+too much for him. His death had been the work of a moment of supreme
+revolt—a single instant of madness on a single subject! He found on the
+blotting-paper, scrawled across the impress of the signature, “Can't
+stand it!” The completion of that letter had been to him a struggle
+ungraspable by Scorrier. Slavery? Defeat? A violation of Nature? The
+death of justice? It were better not to think of it! Pippin could have
+told—but he would never speak again. Nature, at whom, unaided, he had
+dealt so many blows, had taken her revenge...!
+
+In the night Scorrier stole down, and, with an ashamed face, cut off a
+lock of the fine grey hair. 'His daughter might like it!' he thought....
+
+He waited till Pippin was buried, then, with the letter in his pocket,
+started for England.
+
+He arrived at Liverpool on a Thursday morning, and travelling to town,
+drove straight to the office of the company. The Board were sitting.
+Pippin's successor was already being interviewed. He passed out as
+Scorrier came in, a middle-aged man with a large, red beard, and a foxy,
+compromising face. He also was a Cornishman. Scorrier wished him luck
+with a very heavy heart.
+
+As an unsentimental man, who had a proper horror of emotion, whose
+living depended on his good sense, to look back on that interview with
+the Board was painful. It had excited in him a rage of which he was now
+heartily ashamed. Old Jolyon Forsyte, the chairman, was not there for
+once, guessing perhaps that the Board's view of this death would be too
+small for him; and little Mr. Booker sat in his place. Every one had
+risen, shaken hands with Scorrier, and expressed themselves indebted for
+his coming. Scorrier placed Pippin's letter on the table, and
+gravely the secretary read out to his Board the last words of their
+superintendent. When he had finished, a director said, “That's not the
+letter of a madman!” Another answered: “Mad as a hatter; nobody but a
+madman would have thrown up such a post.” Scorrier suddenly withdrew. He
+heard Hemmings calling after him. “Aren't you well, Mr. Scorrier? aren't
+you well, sir?”
+
+He shouted back: “Quite sane, I thank you....”
+
+The Naples “express” rolled round the outskirts of the town. Vesuvius
+shone in the sun, uncrowned by smoke. But even as Scorrier looked, a
+white puff went soaring up. It was the footnote to his memories.
+
+February 1901. February 1901.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Villa Rubein and Other Stories, by John
+Galsworthy
+
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+
+Project Gutenberg's Villa Rubein and Other Stories, by John Galsworthy
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Villa Rubein and Other Stories
+
+Author: John Galsworthy
+
+Release Date: June 14, 2006 [EBook #2639]
+Last Updated: February 18, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VILLA RUBEIN AND OTHER STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="cover_villa (68K)" src="images/cover_villa.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="title_villa (36K)" src="images/title_villa.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="frontis_villa (61K)" src="images/frontis_villa.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      VILLA RUBEIN AND OTHER STORIES
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By John Galsworthy
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br /><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> <big><b>VILLA RUBEIN</b></big> </a><br />
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> I </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> II </a><br />
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> III </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_4_0008"> IV </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> V </a><br />
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> VI </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> VII
+        </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> VIII </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_4_0013"> IX </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> X </a><br />
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0015"> XI </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0016"> XII
+        </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> XIII </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_4_0018"> XIV </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> XV </a><br />
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> XVI </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> XVII
+        </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0022"> XVIII </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_4_0023"> XIX </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0024"> XX </a><br />
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0025"> XXI </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0026"> XXII
+        </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0027"> XXIII </a><br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_4_0028"> XXIV </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_4_0029"> XXV </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0030"> XXVI </a><br />
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0031"> XXVII </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0032">
+        XXVIII </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0033"> XXIX </a><br /><br /> <br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_4_0035"> <big><b>A MAN OF DEVON</b></big> </a><br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_4_0036"> I </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0037"> II </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br />
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0038"> III </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0039"> IV
+        </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0040"> V </a><br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_4_0041"> VI </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_4_0042"> VII </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0043"> VIII </a>
+        <br /><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0045"> <big><b>A KNIGHT</b></big> </a><br />
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0046"> I </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0047"> II </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br />
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0048"> III </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0049"> IV
+        </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0050"> V </a><br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_4_0051"> VI </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_4_0052"> VII </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0053"> VIII </a>
+        <br /><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0055"> <big><b>SALVATION OF A FORSYTE</b></big>
+        </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0056"> I </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0057">
+        II </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0058"> III </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br />
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0059"> IV </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0060"> V </a><br />
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0061"> VI </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_4_0062"> VII </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0063"> VIII </a><br />
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0064"> IX </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_4_0065"> X </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0066"> XI </a><br />
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0067"> XII </a> <br /><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0069">
+        <big><b>THE SILENCE</b></big> </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0070"> I </a><br />
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0071"> II </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_4_0072"> III </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0073"> IV </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br />
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0074"> V </a><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0075"> VI </a><br />
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      VILLA RUBEIN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PREF" id="link2H_PREF">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PREFACE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Writing not long ago to my oldest literary friend, I expressed in a moment
+      of heedless sentiment the wish that we might have again one of our talks
+      of long-past days, over the purposes and methods of our art. And my
+      friend, wiser than I, as he has always been, replied with this doubting
+      phrase &ldquo;Could we recapture the zest of that old time?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I would not like to believe that our faith in the value of imaginative art
+      has diminished, that we think it less worth while to struggle for glimpses
+      of truth and for the words which may pass them on to other eyes; or that
+      we can no longer discern the star we tried to follow; but I do fear, with
+      him, that half a lifetime of endeavour has dulled the exuberance which
+      kept one up till morning discussing the ways and means of aesthetic
+      achievement. We have discovered, perhaps with a certain finality, that by
+      no talk can a writer add a cubit to his stature, or change the temperament
+      which moulds and colours the vision of life he sets before the few who
+      will pause to look at it. And so&mdash;the rest is silence, and what of
+      work we may still do will be done in that dogged muteness which is the lot
+      of advancing years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Other times, other men and modes, but not other truth. Truth, though
+      essentially relative, like Einstein's theory, will never lose its ever-new
+      and unique quality-perfect proportion; for Truth, to the human
+      consciousness at least, is but that vitally just relation of part to whole
+      which is the very condition of life itself. And the task before the
+      imaginative writer, whether at the end of the last century or all these
+      aeons later, is the presentation of a vision which to eye and ear and mind
+      has the implicit proportions of Truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I confess to have always looked for a certain flavour in the writings of
+      others, and craved it for my own, believing that all true vision is so
+      coloured by the temperament of the seer, as to have not only the just
+      proportions but the essential novelty of a living thing for, after all, no
+      two living things are alike. A work of fiction should carry the hall mark
+      of its author as surely as a Goya, a Daumier, a Velasquez, and a Mathew
+      Maris, should be the unmistakable creations of those masters. This is not
+      to speak of tricks and manners which lend themselves to that facile elf,
+      the caricaturist, but of a certain individual way of seeing and feeling. A
+      young poet once said of another and more popular poet: &ldquo;Oh! yes, but be
+      cuts no ice.&rdquo; And, when one came to think of it, he did not; a certain
+      flabbiness of spirit, a lack of temperament, an absence, perhaps, of the
+      ironic, or passionate, view, insubstantiated his work; it had no edge&mdash;just
+      a felicity which passed for distinction with the crowd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let me not be understood to imply that a novel should be a sort of
+      sandwich, in which the author's mood or philosophy is the slice of ham.
+      One's demand is for a far more subtle impregnation of flavour; just that,
+      for instance, which makes De Maupassant a more poignant and fascinating
+      writer than his master Flaubert, Dickens and Thackeray more living and
+      permanent than George Eliot or Trollope. It once fell to my lot to be the
+      preliminary critic of a book on painting, designed to prove that the
+      artist's sole function was the impersonal elucidation of the truths of
+      nature. I was regretfully compelled to observe that there were no such
+      things as the truths of Nature, for the purposes of art, apart from the
+      individual vision of the artist. Seer and thing seen, inextricably
+      involved one with the other, form the texture of any masterpiece; and I,
+      at least, demand therefrom a distinct impression of temperament. I never
+      saw, in the flesh, either De Maupassant or Tchekov&mdash;those masters of
+      such different methods entirely devoid of didacticism&mdash;but their work
+      leaves on me a strangely potent sense of personality. Such subtle
+      intermingling of seer with thing seen is the outcome only of long and
+      intricate brooding, a process not too favoured by modern life, yet without
+      which we achieve little but a fluent chaos of clever insignificant
+      impressions, a kind of glorified journalism, holding much the same
+      relation to the deeply-impregnated work of Turgenev, Hardy, and Conrad, as
+      a film bears to a play.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Speaking for myself, with the immodesty required of one who hazards an
+      introduction to his own work, I was writing fiction for five years before
+      I could master even its primary technique, much less achieve that union of
+      seer with thing seen, which perhaps begins to show itself a little in this
+      volume&mdash;binding up the scanty harvests of 1899, 1900, and 1901&mdash;especially
+      in the tales: &ldquo;A Knight,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Salvation of a Forsyte.&rdquo; Men, women, trees,
+      and works of fiction&mdash;very tiny are the seeds from which they spring.
+      I used really to see the &ldquo;Knight&rdquo;&mdash;in 1896, was it?&mdash;sitting in
+      the &ldquo;Place&rdquo; in front of the Casino at Monte Carlo; and because his
+      dried-up elegance, his burnt straw hat, quiet courtesy of attitude, and
+      big dog, used to fascinate and intrigue me, I began to imagine his life so
+      as to answer my own questions and to satisfy, I suppose, the mood I was
+      in. I never spoke to him, I never saw him again. His real story, no doubt,
+      was as different from that which I wove around his figure as night from
+      day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for Swithin, wild horses will not drag from me confession of where and
+      when I first saw the prototype which became enlarged to his bulky stature.
+      I owe Swithin much, for he first released the satirist in me, and is,
+      moreover, the only one of my characters whom I killed before I gave him
+      life, for it is in &ldquo;The Man of Property&rdquo; that Swithin Forsyte more
+      memorably lives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ranging beyond this volume, I cannot recollect writing the first words of
+      &ldquo;The Island Pharisees&rdquo;&mdash;but it would be about August, 1901. Like all
+      the stories in &ldquo;Villa Rubein,&rdquo; and, indeed, most of my tales, the book
+      originated in the curiosity, philosophic reflections, and unphilosophic
+      emotions roused in me by some single figure in real life. In this case it
+      was Ferrand, whose real name, of course, was not Ferrand, and who died in
+      some &ldquo;sacred institution&rdquo; many years ago of a consumption brought on by
+      the conditions of his wandering life. If not &ldquo;a beloved,&rdquo; he was a true
+      vagabond, and I first met him in the Champs Elysees, just as in &ldquo;The
+      Pigeon&rdquo; he describes his meeting with Wellwyn. Though drawn very much from
+      life, he did not in the end turn out very like the Ferrand of real life&mdash;the
+      figures of fiction soon diverge from their prototypes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first draft of &ldquo;The Island Pharisees&rdquo; was buried in a drawer; when
+      retrieved the other day, after nineteen years, it disclosed a picaresque
+      string of anecdotes told by Ferrand in the first person. These two-thirds
+      of a book were laid to rest by Edward Garnett's dictum that its author was
+      not sufficiently within Ferrand's skin; and, struggling heavily with
+      laziness and pride, he started afresh in the skin of Shelton. Three times
+      be wrote that novel, and then it was long in finding the eye of Sydney
+      Pawling, who accepted it for Heinemann's in 1904. That was a period of
+      ferment and transition with me, a kind of long awakening to the home
+      truths of social existence and national character. The liquor bubbled too
+      furiously for clear bottling. And the book, after all, became but an
+      introduction to all those following novels which depict&mdash;somewhat
+      satirically&mdash;the various sections of English &ldquo;Society&rdquo; with a more or
+      less capital &ldquo;S.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one's work, it is
+      interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the
+      emotional and critical sides of his nature, first one, then the other,
+      getting the upper hand, and too seldom fusing till the result has the
+      mellowness of full achievement. One can even tell the nature of one's
+      readers, by their preference for the work which reveals more of this side
+      than of that. My early work was certainly more emotional than critical.
+      But from 1901 came nine years when the critical was, in the main, holding
+      sway. From 1910 to 1918 the emotional again struggled for the upper hand;
+      and from that time on there seems to have been something of a &ldquo;dead beat.&rdquo;
+       So the conflict goes, by what mysterious tides promoted, I know not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An author must ever wish to discover a hapless member of the Public who,
+      never yet having read a word of his writing, would submit to the ordeal of
+      reading him right through from beginning to end. Probably the effect could
+      only be judged through an autopsy, but in the remote case of survival, it
+      would interest one so profoundly to see the differences, if any, produced
+      in that reader's character or outlook over life. This, however, is a
+      consummation which will remain devoutly to be wished, for there is a limit
+      to human complaisance. One will never know the exact measure of one's
+      infecting power; or whether, indeed, one is not just a long soporific.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A writer they say, should not favouritize among his creations; but then a
+      writer should not do so many things that he does. This writer, certainly,
+      confesses to having favourites, and of his novels so far be likes best:
+      The Forsyte Series; &ldquo;The Country House&rdquo;; &ldquo;Fraternity&rdquo;; &ldquo;The Dark Flower&rdquo;;
+      and &ldquo;Five Tales&rdquo;; believing these to be the works which most fully achieve
+      fusion of seer with thing seen, most subtly disclose the individuality of
+      their author, and best reveal such of truth as has been vouchsafed to him.
+      JOHN GALSWORTHY.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      TO
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      MY SISTER BLANCHE LILIAN SAUTER
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VILLA RUBEIN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Walking along the river wall at Botzen, Edmund Dawney said to Alois Harz:
+      &ldquo;Would you care to know the family at that pink house, Villa Rubein?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz answered with a smile:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come with me then this afternoon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They had stopped before an old house with a blind, deserted look, that
+      stood by itself on the wall; Harz pushed the door open.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come in, you don't want breakfast yet. I'm going to paint the river
+      to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He ran up the bare broad stairs, and Dawney followed leisurely, his thumbs
+      hooked in the armholes of his waistcoat, and his head thrown back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the attic which filled the whole top story, Harz had pulled a canvas to
+      the window. He was a young man of middle height, square shouldered,
+      active, with an angular face, high cheek-bones, and a strong, sharp chin.
+      His eyes were piercing and steel-blue, his eyebrows very flexible, nose
+      long and thin with a high bridge; and his dark, unparted hair fitted him
+      like a cap. His clothes looked as if he never gave them a second thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This room, which served for studio, bedroom, and sitting-room, was bare
+      and dusty. Below the window the river in spring flood rushed down the
+      valley, a stream, of molten bronze. Harz dodged before the canvas like a
+      fencer finding his distance; Dawney took his seat on a packingcase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The snows have gone with a rush this year,&rdquo; he drawled. &ldquo;The Talfer comes
+      down brown, the Eisack comes down blue; they flow into the Etsch and make
+      it green; a parable of the Spring for you, my painter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz mixed his colours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've no time for parables,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;no time for anything. If I could be
+      guaranteed to live to ninety-nine, like Titian&mdash;he had a chance. Look
+      at that poor fellow who was killed the other day! All that struggle, and
+      then&mdash;just at the turn!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke English with a foreign accent; his voice was rather harsh, but
+      his smile very kindly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dawney lit a cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You painters,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;are better off than most of us. You can strike
+      out your own line. Now if I choose to treat a case out of the ordinary way
+      and the patient dies, I'm ruined.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Doctor&mdash;if I don't paint what the public likes, I starve;
+      all the same I'm going to paint in my own way; in the end I shall come out
+      on top.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It pays to work in the groove, my friend, until you've made your name;
+      after that&mdash;do what you like, they'll lick your boots all the same.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, you don't love your work.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dawney answered slowly: &ldquo;Never so happy as when my hands are full. But I
+      want to make money, to get known, to have a good time, good cigars, good
+      wine. I hate discomfort. No, my boy, I must work it on the usual lines; I
+      don't like it, but I must lump it. One starts in life with some notion of
+      the ideal&mdash;it's gone by the board with me. I've got to shove along
+      until I've made my name, and then, my little man&mdash;then&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you'll be soft!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You pay dearly for that first period!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take my chance of that; there's no other way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Make one!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Humph!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz poised his brush, as though it were a spear:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man must do the best in him. If he has to suffer&mdash;let him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dawney stretched his large soft body; a calculating look had come into his
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're a tough little man!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've had to be tough.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dawney rose; tobacco smoke was wreathed round his unruffled hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Touching Villa Rubein,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;shall I call for you? It's a mixed
+      household, English mostly&mdash;very decent people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, thank you. I shall be painting all day. Haven't time to know the sort
+      of people who expect one to change one's clothes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As you like; ta-to!&rdquo; And, puffing out his chest, Dawney vanished through
+      a blanket looped across the doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz set a pot of coffee on a spirit-lamp, and cut himself some bread.
+      Through the window the freshness of the morning came; the scent of sap and
+      blossom and young leaves; the scent of earth, and the mountains freed from
+      winter; the new flights and songs of birds; all the odorous, enchanted,
+      restless Spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There suddenly appeared through the doorway a white rough-haired terrier
+      dog, black-marked about the face, with shaggy tan eyebrows. He sniffed at
+      Harz, showed the whites round his eyes, and uttered a sharp bark. A young
+      voice called:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Scruff! Thou naughty dog!&rdquo; Light footsteps were heard on the stairs; from
+      the distance a thin, high voice called:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Greta! You mustn't go up there!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A little girl of twelve, with long fair hair under a wide-brimmed hat,
+      slipped in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her blue eyes opened wide, her face flushed up. That face was not regular;
+      its cheek-bones were rather prominent, the nose was flattish; there was
+      about it an air, innocent, reflecting, quizzical, shy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz smiled: &ldquo;Good-morning! This your dog?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not answer, but looked at him with soft bewilderment; then running
+      to the dog seized him by the collar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Scr-ruff! Thou naughty dog&mdash;the baddest dog!&rdquo; The ends of her hair
+      fell about him; she looked up at Harz, who said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all! Let me give him some bread.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh no! You must not&mdash;I will beat him&mdash;and tell him he is bad;
+      then he shall not do such things again. Now he is sulky; he looks so
+      always when he is sulky. Is this your home?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For the present; I am a visitor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I think you are of this country, because you speak like it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly, I am a Tyroler.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have to talk English this morning, but I do not like it very much&mdash;because,
+      also I am half Austrian, and I like it best; but my sister, Christian, is
+      all English. Here is Miss Naylor; she shall be very angry with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And pointing to the entrance with a rosy-tipped forefinger, she again
+      looked ruefully at Harz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There came into the room with a walk like the hopping of a bird an
+      elderly, small lady, in a grey serge dress, with narrow bands of
+      claret-coloured velveteen; a large gold cross dangled from a steel chain
+      on her chest; she nervously twisted her hands, clad in black kid gloves,
+      rather white about the seams.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her hair was prematurely grey; her quick eyes brown; her mouth twisted at
+      one corner; she held her face, kind-looking, but long and narrow, rather
+      to one side, and wore on it a look of apology. Her quick sentences sounded
+      as if she kept them on strings, and wanted to draw them back as soon as
+      she had let them forth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Greta, how can, you do such things? I don't know what your father would
+      say! I am sure I don't know how to&mdash;so extraordinary&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please!&rdquo; said Harz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must come at once&mdash;so very sorry&mdash;so awkward!&rdquo; They were
+      standing in a ring: Harz with his eyebrows working up and down; the little
+      lady fidgeting her parasol; Greta, flushed and pouting, her eyes all dewy,
+      twisting an end of fair hair round her finger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, look!&rdquo; The coffee had boiled over. Little brown streams trickled
+      spluttering from the pan; the dog, with ears laid back and tail tucked in,
+      went scurrying round the room. A feeling of fellowship fell on them at
+      once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Along the wall is our favourite walk, and Scruff&mdash;so awkward, so
+      unfortunate&mdash;we did not think any one lived here&mdash;the shutters
+      are cracked, the paint is peeling off so dreadfully. Have you been long in
+      Botzen? Two months? Fancy! You are not English? You are Tyrolese? But you
+      speak English so well&mdash;there for seven years? Really? So fortunate!&mdash;It
+      is Greta's day for English.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Naylor's eyes darted bewildered glances at the roof where the
+      crossing of the beams made such deep shadows; at the litter of brushes,
+      tools, knives, and colours on a table made out of packing-cases; at the
+      big window, innocent of glass, and flush with the floor, whence dangled a
+      bit of rusty chain&mdash;relic of the time when the place had been a
+      store-loft; her eyes were hastily averted from an unfinished figure of the
+      nude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta, with feet crossed, sat on a coloured blanket, dabbling her finger
+      in a little pool of coffee, and gazing up at Harz. And he thought: 'I
+      should like to paint her like that. &ldquo;A forget-me-not.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took out his chalks to make a sketch of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall you show me?&rdquo; cried out Greta, scrambling to her feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Will,' Greta&mdash;'will'. how often must I tell you? I think we should
+      be going&mdash;it is very late&mdash;your father&mdash;so very kind of
+      you, but I think we should be going. Scruff!&rdquo; Miss Naylor gave the floor
+      two taps. The terrier backed into a plaster cast which came down on his
+      tail, and sent him flying through the doorway. Greta followed swiftly,
+      crying:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ach! poor Scrufee!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Naylor crossed the room; bowing, she murmured an apology, and also
+      disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz was left alone, his guests were gone; the little girl with the fair
+      hair and the eyes like forget-me-nots, the little lady with kindly
+      gestures and bird-like walk, the terrier. He looked round him; the room
+      seemed very empty. Gnawing his moustache, he muttered at the fallen cast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then taking up his brush, stood before his picture, smiling and frowning.
+      Soon he had forgotten it all in his work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was early morning four days later, and Harz was loitering homewards.
+      The shadows of the clouds passing across the vines were vanishing over the
+      jumbled roofs and green-topped spires of the town. A strong sweet wind was
+      blowing from the mountains, there was a stir in the branches of the trees,
+      and flakes of the late blossom were drifting down. Amongst the soft green
+      pods of a kind of poplar chafers buzzed, and numbers of their little brown
+      bodies were strewn on the path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He passed a bench where a girl sat sketching. A puff of wind whirled her
+      drawing to the ground; Harz ran to pick it up. She took it from him with a
+      bow; but, as he turned away, she tore the sketch across.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;why did you do that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This girl, who stood with a bit of the torn sketch in either hand, was
+      slight and straight; and her face earnest and serene. She gazed at Harz
+      with large, clear, greenish eyes; her lips and chin were defiant, her
+      forehead tranquil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't like it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you let me look at it? I am a painter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't worth looking at, but&mdash;if you wish&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put the two halves of the sketch together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see!&rdquo; she said at last; &ldquo;I told you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz did not answer, still looking at the sketch. The girl frowned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz asked her suddenly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why do you paint?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She coloured, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Show me what is wrong.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot show you what is wrong, there is nothing wrong&mdash;but why do
+      you paint?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz shrugged his shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've no business to do that,&rdquo; said the girl in a hurt voice; &ldquo;I want to
+      know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your heart is not in it,&rdquo; said Harz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him, startled; her eyes had grown thoughtful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose that is it. There are so many other things&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There should be nothing else,&rdquo; said Harz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She broke in: &ldquo;I don't want always to be thinking of myself. Suppose&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! When you begin supposing!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl confronted him; she had torn the sketch again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean that if it does not matter enough, one had better not do it at
+      all. I don't know if you are right&mdash;I think you are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was the sound of a nervous cough, and Harz saw behind him his three
+      visitors&mdash;Miss Naylor offering him her hand; Greta, flushed, with a
+      bunch of wild flowers, staring intently in his face; and the terrier,
+      sniffing at his trousers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Naylor broke an awkward silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We wondered if you would still be here, Christian. I am sorry to
+      interrupt you&mdash;I was not aware that you knew Mr. Herr&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Harz is my name&mdash;we were just talking&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About my sketch. Oh, Greta, you do tickle! Will you come and have
+      breakfast with us to-day, Herr Harz? It's our turn, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz, glancing at his dusty clothes, excused himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Greta in a pleading voice said: &ldquo;Oh! do come! Scruff likes you. It is
+      so dull when there is nobody for breakfast but ourselves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Naylor's mouth began to twist. Harz hurriedly broke in:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you. I will come with pleasure; you don't mind my being dirty?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh no! we do not mind; then we shall none of us wash, and afterwards I
+      shall show you my rabbits.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Naylor, moving from foot to foot, like a bird on its perch,
+      exclaimed:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope you won't regret it, not a very good meal&mdash;the girls are so
+      impulsive&mdash;such informal invitation; we shall be very glad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Greta pulled softly at her sister's sleeve, and Christian, gathering
+      her things, led the way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz followed in amazement; nothing of this kind had come into his life
+      before. He kept shyly glancing at the girls; and, noting the speculative
+      innocence in Greta's eyes, he smiled. They soon came to two great
+      poplar-trees, which stood, like sentinels, one on either side of an
+      unweeded gravel walk leading through lilac bushes to a house painted dull
+      pink, with green-shuttered windows, and a roof of greenish slate. Over the
+      door in faded crimson letters were written the words, &ldquo;Villa Rubein.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is to the stables,&rdquo; said Greta, pointing down a path, where some
+      pigeons were sunning themselves on a wall. &ldquo;Uncle Nic keeps his horses
+      there: Countess and Cuckoo&mdash;his horses begin with C, because of Chris&mdash;they
+      are quite beautiful. He says he could drive them to Kingdom-Come and they
+      would not turn their hair. Bow, and say 'Good-morning' to our house!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz bowed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Father said all strangers should, and I think it brings good luck.&rdquo; From
+      the doorstep she looked round at Harz, then ran into the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A broad, thick-set man, with stiff, brushed-up hair, a short, brown, bushy
+      beard parted at the chin, a fresh complexion, and blue glasses across a
+      thick nose, came out, and called in a bluff voice:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha! my good dears, kiss me quick&mdash;prrt! How goes it then this
+      morning? A good walk, hein?&rdquo; The sound of many loud rapid kisses followed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha, Fraulein, good!&rdquo; He became aware of Harz's figure standing in the
+      doorway: &ldquo;Und der Herr?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Naylor hurriedly explained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good! An artist! Kommen Sie herein, I am delight. You will breakfast? I
+      too&mdash;yes, yes, my dears&mdash;I too breakfast with you this morning.
+      I have the hunter's appetite.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz, looking at him keenly, perceived him to be of middle height and age,
+      stout, dressed in a loose holland jacket, a very white, starched shirt,
+      and blue silk sash; that he looked particularly clean, had an air of
+      belonging to Society, and exhaled a really fine aroma of excellent cigars
+      and the best hairdresser's essences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room they entered was long and rather bare; there was a huge map on
+      the wall, and below it a pair of globes on crooked supports, resembling
+      two inflated frogs erect on their hind legs. In one corner was a cottage
+      piano, close to a writing-table heaped with books and papers; this nook,
+      sacred to Christian, was foreign to the rest of the room, which was
+      arranged with supernatural neatness. A table was laid for breakfast, and
+      the sun-warmed air came in through French windows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The meal went merrily; Herr Paul von Morawitz was never in such spirits as
+      at table. Words streamed from him. Conversing with Harz, he talked of Art
+      as who should say: &ldquo;One does not claim to be a connoisseur&mdash;pas si
+      bete&mdash;still, one has a little knowledge, que diable!&rdquo; He recommended
+      him a man in the town who sold cigars that were &ldquo;not so very bad.&rdquo; He
+      consumed porridge, ate an omelette; and bending across to Greta gave her a
+      sounding kiss, muttering: &ldquo;Kiss me quick!&rdquo;&mdash;an expression he had
+      picked up in a London music-hall, long ago, and considered chic. He asked
+      his daughters' plans, and held out porridge to the terrier, who refused it
+      with a sniff.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said suddenly, looking at Miss Naylor, &ldquo;here is a gentleman who
+      has not even heard our names!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The little lady began her introductions in a breathless voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; Herr Paul said, puffing out his lips: &ldquo;Now we know each other!&rdquo;
+       and, brushing up the ends of his moustaches, he carried off Harz into
+      another room, decorated with pipe-racks, prints of dancing-girls,
+      spittoons, easy-chairs well-seasoned by cigar smoke, French novels, and
+      newspapers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The household at Villa Rubein was indeed of a mixed and curious nature.
+      Cut on both floors by corridors, the Villa was divided into four
+      divisions; each of which had its separate inhabitants, an arrangement
+      which had come about in the following way:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When old Nicholas Treffry died, his estate, on the boundary of Cornwall,
+      had been sold and divided up among his three surviving children&mdash;Nicholas,
+      who was much the eldest, a partner in the well-known firm of Forsyte and
+      Treffry, teamen, of the Strand; Constance, married to a man called Decie;
+      and Margaret, at her father's death engaged to the curate of the parish,
+      John Devorell, who shortly afterwards became its rector. By his marriage
+      with Margaret Treffry the rector had one child called Christian. Soon
+      after this he came into some property, and died, leaving it unfettered to
+      his widow. Three years went by, and when the child was six years old, Mrs.
+      Devorell, still young and pretty, came to live in London with her brother
+      Nicholas. It was there that she met Paul von Morawitz&mdash;the last of an
+      old Czech family, who had lived for many hundred years on their estates
+      near Budweiss. Paul had been left an orphan at the age of ten, and without
+      a solitary ancestral acre. Instead of acres, he inherited the faith that
+      nothing was too good for a von Morawitz. In later years his savoir faire
+      enabled him to laugh at faith, but it stayed quietly with him all the
+      same. The absence of acres was of no great consequence, for through his
+      mother, the daughter of a banker in Vienna, he came into a well-nursed
+      fortune. It befitted a von Morawitz that he should go into the Cavalry,
+      but, unshaped for soldiering, he soon left the Service; some said he had a
+      difference with his Colonel over the quality of food provided during some
+      manoeuvres; others that he had retired because his chargers did not fit
+      his legs, which were, indeed, rather round.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had an admirable appetite for pleasure; a man-about-town's life suited
+      him. He went his genial, unreflecting, costly way in Vienna, Paris,
+      London. He loved exclusively those towns, and boasted that he was as much
+      at home in one as in another. He combined exuberant vitality with
+      fastidiousness of palate, and devoted both to the acquisition of a special
+      taste in women, weeds, and wines; above all he was blessed with a
+      remarkable digestion. He was thirty when he met Mrs. Devorell; and she
+      married him because he was so very different from anybody she had ever
+      seen. People more dissimilar were never mated. To Paul&mdash;accustomed to
+      stage doors&mdash;freshness, serene tranquillity, and obvious purity were
+      the baits; he had run through more than half his fortune, too, and the
+      fact that she had money was possibly not overlooked. Be that as it may, he
+      was fond of her; his heart was soft, he developed a domestic side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta was born to them after a year of marriage. The instinct of the
+      &ldquo;freeman&rdquo; was, however, not dead in Paul; he became a gambler. He lost the
+      remainder of his fortune without being greatly disturbed. When he began to
+      lose his wife's fortune too things naturally became more difficult. Not
+      too much remained when Nicholas Treffry stepped in, and caused his sister
+      to settle what was left on her daughters, after providing a life-interest
+      for herself and Paul. Losing his supplies, the good man had given up his
+      cards. But the instinct of the &ldquo;freeman&rdquo; was still living in his breast;
+      he took to drink. He was never grossly drunk, and rarely very sober. His
+      wife sorrowed over this new passion; her health, already much enfeebled,
+      soon broke down. The doctors sent her to the Tyrol. She seemed to benefit
+      by this, and settled down at Botzen. The following year, when Greta was
+      just ten, she died. It was a shock to Paul. He gave up excessive drinking;
+      became a constant smoker, and lent full rein to his natural domesticity.
+      He was fond of both the girls, but did not at all understand them; Greta,
+      his own daughter, was his favourite. Villa Rubein remained their home; it
+      was cheap and roomy. Money, since Paul became housekeeper to himself, was
+      scarce.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About this time Mrs. Decie, his wife's sister, whose husband had died in
+      the East, returned to England; Paul invited her to come and live with
+      them. She had her own rooms, her own servant; the arrangement suited Paul&mdash;it
+      was economically sound, and there was some one always there to take care
+      of the girls. In truth he began to feel the instinct of the &ldquo;freeman&rdquo;
+       rising again within him; it was pleasant to run over to Vienna now and
+      then; to play piquet at a Club in Gries, of which he was the shining
+      light; in a word, to go &ldquo;on the tiles&rdquo; a little. One could not always
+      mourn&mdash;even if a woman were an angel; moreover, his digestion was as
+      good as ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fourth quarter of this Villa was occupied by Nicholas Treffry, whose
+      annual sojourn out of England perpetually surprised himself. Between him
+      and his young niece, Christian, there existed, however, a rare sympathy;
+      one of those affections between the young and old, which, mysteriously
+      born like everything in life, seems the only end and aim to both, till
+      another feeling comes into the younger heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since a long and dangerous illness, he had been ordered to avoid the
+      English winter, and at the commencement of each spring he would appear at
+      Botzen, driving his own horses by easy stages from the Italian Riviera,
+      where he spent the coldest months. He always stayed till June before going
+      back to his London Club, and during all that time he let no day pass
+      without growling at foreigners, their habits, food, drink, and raiment,
+      with a kind of big dog's growling that did nobody any harm. The illness
+      had broken him very much; he was seventy, but looked more. He had a
+      servant, a Luganese, named Dominique, devoted to him. Nicholas Treffry had
+      found him overworked in an hotel, and had engaged him with the caution:
+      &ldquo;Look&mdash;here, Dominique! I swear!&rdquo; To which Dominique, dark of
+      feature, saturnine and ironical, had only replied: &ldquo;Tres biens, M'sieur!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Harz and his host sat in leather chairs; Herr Paul's square back was
+      wedged into a cushion, his round legs crossed. Both were smoking, and they
+      eyed each other furtively, as men of different stamp do when first thrown
+      together. The young artist found his host extremely new and disconcerting;
+      in his presence he felt both shy and awkward. Herr Paul, on the other
+      hand, very much at ease, was thinking indolently:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Good-looking young fellow&mdash;comes of the people, I expect, not at all
+      the manner of the world; wonder what he talks about.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently noticing that Harz was looking at a photograph, he said: &ldquo;Ah!
+      yes! that was a woman! They are not to be found in these days. She could
+      dance, the little Coralie! Did you ever see such arms? Confess that she is
+      beautiful, hein?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has individuality,&rdquo; said Harz. &ldquo;A fine type!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul blew out a cloud of smoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he murmured, &ldquo;she was fine all over!&rdquo; He had dropped his
+      eyeglasses, and his full brown eyes, with little crow's-feet at the
+      corners, wandered from his visitor to his cigar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'He'd be like a Satyr if he wasn't too clean,' thought Harz. 'Put vine
+      leaves in his hair, paint him asleep, with his hands crossed, so!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I am told a person has individuality,&rdquo; Herr Paul was saying in a
+      rich and husky voice, &ldquo;I generally expect boots that bulge, an umbrella of
+      improper colour; I expect a creature of 'bad form' as they say in England;
+      who will shave some days and some days will not shave; who sometimes
+      smells of India-rubber, and sometimes does not smell, which is
+      discouraging!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do not approve of individuality?&rdquo; said Harz shortly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not if it means doing, and thinking, as those who know better do not do,
+      or think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And who are those who know better?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! my dear, you are asking me a riddle? Well, then&mdash;Society, men of
+      birth, men of recognised position, men above eccentricity, in a word, of
+      reputation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz looked at him fixedly. &ldquo;Men who haven't the courage of their own
+      ideas, not even the courage to smell of India-rubber; men who have no
+      desires, and so can spend all their time making themselves flat!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul drew out a red silk handkerchief and wiped his beard. &ldquo;I assure
+      you, my dear,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;it is easier to be flat; it is more respectable
+      to be flat. Himmel! why not, then, be flat?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like any common fellow?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certes; like any common fellow&mdash;like me, par exemple!&rdquo; Herr Paul
+      waved his hand. When he exercised unusual tact, he always made use of a
+      French expression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz flushed. Herr Paul followed up his victory. &ldquo;Come, come!&rdquo; he said.
+      &ldquo;Pass me my men of repute! que diable! we are not anarchists.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you sure?&rdquo; said Harz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul twisted his moustache. &ldquo;I beg your pardon,&rdquo; he said slowly. But
+      at this moment the door was opened; a rumbling voice remarked: &ldquo;Morning,
+      Paul. Who's your visitor?&rdquo; Harz saw a tall, bulky figure in the doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come in,&rdquo; called out Herr Paul. &ldquo;Let me present to you a new
+      acquaintance, an artist: Herr Harz&mdash;Mr. Nicholas Treffry. Psumm bumm!
+      All this introducing is dry work.&rdquo; And going to the sideboard he poured
+      out three glasses of a light, foaming beer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry waved it from him: &ldquo;Not for me,&rdquo; he said: &ldquo;Wish I could! They
+      won't let me look at it.&rdquo; And walking over, to the window with a heavy
+      tread, which trembled like his voice, he sat down. There was something in
+      his gait like the movements of an elephant's hind legs. He was very tall
+      (it was said, with the customary exaggeration of family tradition, that
+      there never had been a male Treffry under six feet in height), but now he
+      stooped, and had grown stout. There was something at once vast and
+      unobtrusive about his personality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He wore a loose brown velvet jacket, and waistcoat, cut to show a soft
+      frilled shirt and narrow black ribbon tie; a thin gold chain was looped
+      round his neck and fastened to his fob. His heavy cheeks had folds in them
+      like those in a bloodhound's face. He wore big, drooping, yellow-grey
+      moustaches, which he had a habit of sucking, and a goatee beard. He had
+      long loose ears that might almost have been said to gap. On his head there
+      was a soft black hat, large in the brim and low in the crown. His grey
+      eyes, heavy-lidded, twinkled under their bushy brows with a queer, kind
+      cynicism. As a young man he had sown many a wild oat; but he had also
+      worked and made money in business; he had, in fact, burned the candle at
+      both ends; but he had never been unready to do his fellows a good turn. He
+      had a passion for driving, and his reckless method of pursuing this art
+      had caused him to be nicknamed: &ldquo;The notorious Treffry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Once, when he was driving tandem down a hill with a loose rein, the friend
+      beside him had said: &ldquo;For all the good you're doing with those reins,
+      Treffry, you might as well throw them on the horses' necks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just so,&rdquo; Treffry had answered. At the bottom of the hill they had gone
+      over a wall into a potato patch. Treffry had broken several ribs; his
+      friend had gone unharmed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a great sufferer now, but, constitutionally averse to being pitied,
+      he had a disconcerting way of humming, and this, together with the shake
+      in his voice, and his frequent use of peculiar phrases, made the
+      understanding of his speech depend at times on intuition rather than
+      intelligence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The clock began to strike eleven. Harz muttered an excuse, shook hands
+      with his host, and bowing to his new acquaintance, went away. He caught a
+      glimpse of Greta's face against the window, and waved his hand to her. In
+      the road he came on Dawney, who was turning in between the poplars, with
+      thumbs as usual hooked in the armholes of his waistcoat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hallo!&rdquo; the latter said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Doctor!&rdquo; Harz answered slyly; &ldquo;the Fates outwitted me, it seems.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Serve you right,&rdquo; said Dawney, &ldquo;for your confounded egoism! Wait here
+      till I come out, I shan't be many minutes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Harz went on his way. A cart drawn by cream-coloured oxen was passing
+      slowly towards the bridge. In front of the brushwood piled on it two
+      peasant girls were sitting with their feet on a mat of grass&mdash;the
+      picture of contentment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm wasting my time!&rdquo; he thought. &ldquo;I've done next to nothing in two
+      months. Better get back to London! That girl will never make a painter!&rdquo;
+       She would never make a painter, but there was something in her that he
+      could not dismiss so rapidly. She was not exactly beautiful, but she was
+      sympathetic. The brow was pleasing, with dark-brown hair softly turned
+      back, and eyes so straight and shining. The two sisters were very
+      different! The little one was innocent, yet mysterious; the elder seemed
+      as clear as crystal!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had entered the town, where the arcaded streets exuded their peculiar
+      pungent smell of cows and leather, wood-smoke, wine-casks, and drains. The
+      sound of rapid wheels over the stones made him turn his head. A carriage
+      drawn by red-roan horses was passing at a great pace. People stared at it,
+      standing still, and looking alarmed. It swung from side to side and
+      vanished round a corner. Harz saw Mr. Nicholas Treffry in a long, whitish
+      dust-coat; his Italian servant, perched behind, was holding to the
+      seat-rail, with a nervous grin on his dark face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Certainly,' Harz thought, 'there's no getting away from these people this
+      morning&mdash;they are everywhere.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his studio he began to sort his sketches, wash his brushes, and drag
+      out things he had accumulated during his two months' stay. He even began
+      to fold his blanket door. But suddenly he stopped. Those two girls! Why
+      not try? What a picture! The two heads, the sky, and leaves! Begin
+      to-morrow! Against that window&mdash;no, better at the Villa! Call the
+      picture&mdash;Spring...!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The wind, stirring among trees and bushes, flung the young leaves
+      skywards. The trembling of their silver linings was like the joyful
+      flutter of a heart at good news. It was one of those Spring mornings when
+      everything seems full of a sweet restlessness&mdash;soft clouds chasing
+      fast across the sky; soft scents floating forth and dying; the notes of
+      birds, now shrill and sweet, now hushed in silences; all nature striving
+      for something, nothing at peace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Villa Rubein withstood the influence of the day, and wore its usual look
+      of rest and isolation. Harz sent in his card, and asked to see &ldquo;der Herr.&rdquo;
+       The servant, a grey-eyed, clever-looking Swiss with no hair on his face,
+      came back saying:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Der Herr, mein Herr, is in the Garden gone.&rdquo; Harz followed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul, a small white flannel cap on his head, gloves on his hands, and
+      glasses on his nose, was watering a rosebush, and humming the serenade
+      from Faust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This aspect of the house was very different from the other. The sun fell
+      on it, and over a veranda creepers clung and scrambled in long scrolls.
+      There was a lawn, with freshly mown grass; flower-beds were laid out, and
+      at the end of an avenue of young acacias stood an arbour covered with
+      wisteria.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the east, mountain peaks&mdash;fingers of snow&mdash;glittered above
+      the mist. A grave simplicity lay on that scene, on the roofs and spires,
+      the valleys and the dreamy hillsides, with their yellow scars and purple
+      bloom, and white cascades, like tails of grey horses swishing in the wind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul held out his hand: &ldquo;What can we do for you?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have to beg a favour,&rdquo; replied Harz. &ldquo;I wish to paint your daughters. I
+      will bring the canvas here&mdash;they shall have no trouble. I would paint
+      them in the garden when they have nothing else to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul looked at him dubiously&mdash;ever since the previous day he had
+      been thinking: 'Queer bird, that painter&mdash;thinks himself the devil of
+      a swell! Looks a determined fellow too!' Now&mdash;staring in the
+      painter's face&mdash;it seemed to him, on the whole, best if some one else
+      refused this permission.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With all the pleasure, my dear sir,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Come, let us ask these two
+      young ladies!&rdquo; and putting down his hose, he led the way towards the
+      arbour, thinking: 'You'll be disappointed, my young conqueror, or I'm
+      mistaken.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Naylor and the girls were sitting in the shade, reading La Fontaine's
+      fables. Greta, with one eye on her governess, was stealthily cutting a pig
+      out of orange peel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! my dear dears!&rdquo; began Herr Paul, who in the presence of Miss Naylor
+      always paraded his English. &ldquo;Here is our friend, who has a very flattering
+      request to make; he would paint you, yes&mdash;both together, alfresco, in
+      the air, in the sunshine, with the birds, the little birds!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta, gazing at Harz, gushed deep pink, and furtively showed him her pig.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian said: &ldquo;Paint us? Oh no!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She saw Harz looking at her, and added, slowly: &ldquo;If you really wish it, I
+      suppose we could!&rdquo; then dropped her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said Herr Paul raising his brows till his glasses fell from his
+      nose: &ldquo;And what says Gretchen? Does she want to be handed up to
+      posterities a little peacock along with the other little birds?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta, who had continued staring at the painter, said: &ldquo;Of&mdash;course&mdash;I&mdash;want&mdash;to&mdash;be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Prrt!&rdquo; said Herr Paul, looking at Miss Naylor. The little lady indeed
+      opened her mouth wide, but all that came forth was a tiny squeak, as
+      sometimes happens when one is anxious to say something, and has not
+      arranged beforehand what it shall be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The affair seemed ended; Harz heaved a sigh of satisfaction. But Herr Paul
+      had still a card to play.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is your Aunt,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;there are things to be considered&mdash;one
+      must certainly inquire&mdash;so, we shall see.&rdquo; Kissing Greta loudly on
+      both cheeks, he went towards the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What makes you want to paint us?&rdquo; Christian asked, as soon as he was
+      gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think it very wrong,&rdquo; Miss Naylor blurted out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo; said Harz, frowning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Greta is so young&mdash;there are lessons&mdash;it is such a waste of
+      time!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His eyebrows twitched: &ldquo;Ah! You think so!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't see why it is a waste of time,&rdquo; said Christian quietly; &ldquo;there
+      are lots of hours when we sit here and do nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And it is very dull,&rdquo; put in Greta, with a pout.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are rude, Greta,&rdquo; said Miss Naylor in a little rage, pursing her
+      lips, and taking up her knitting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think it seems always rude to speak the truth,&rdquo; said Greta. Miss Naylor
+      looked at her in that concentrated manner with which she was in the habit
+      of expressing displeasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But at this moment a servant came, and said that Mrs. Decie would be glad
+      to see Herr Harz. The painter made them a stiff bow, and followed the
+      servant to the house. Miss Naylor and the two girls watched his progress
+      with apprehensive eyes; it was clear that he had been offended.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Crossing the veranda, and passing through an open window hung with silk
+      curtains, Hart entered a cool dark room. This was Mrs. Decie's sanctum,
+      where she conducted correspondence, received her visitors, read the latest
+      literature, and sometimes, when she had bad headaches, lay for hours on
+      the sofa, with a fan, and her eyes closed. There was a scent of
+      sandalwood, a suggestion of the East, a kind of mystery, in here, as if
+      things like chairs and tables were not really what they seemed, but
+      something much less commonplace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The visitor looked twice, to be quite sure of anything; there were many
+      plants, bead curtains, and a deal of silverwork and china.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Decie came forward in the slightly rustling silk which&mdash;whether
+      in or out of fashion&mdash;always accompanied her. A tall woman, over
+      fifty, she moved as if she had been tied together at the knees. Her face
+      was long, with broad brows, from which her sandy-grey hair was severely
+      waved back; she had pale eyes, and a perpetual, pale, enigmatic smile. Her
+      complexion had been ruined by long residence in India, and might unkindly
+      have been called fawn-coloured. She came close to Harz, keeping her eyes
+      on his, with her head bent slightly forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are so pleased to know you,&rdquo; she said, speaking in a voice which had
+      lost all ring. &ldquo;It is charming to find some one in these parts who can
+      help us to remember that there is such a thing as Art. We had Mr. C&mdash;-here
+      last autumn, such a charming fellow. He was so interested in the native
+      customs and dresses. You are a subject painter, too, I think? Won't you
+      sit down?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She went on for some time, introducing painters' names, asking questions,
+      skating round the edge of what was personal. And the young man stood
+      before her with a curious little smile fixed on his lips. 'She wants to
+      know whether I'm worth powder and shot,' he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You wish to paint my nieces?&rdquo; Mrs. Decie said at last, leaning back on
+      her settee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish to have that honour,&rdquo; Harz answered with a bow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what sort of picture did you think of?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That,&rdquo; said Harz, &ldquo;is in the future. I couldn't tell you.&rdquo; And he
+      thought: 'Will she ask me if I get my tints in Paris, like the woman
+      Tramper told me of?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The perpetual pale smile on Mrs. Decie's face seemed to invite his
+      confidence, yet to warn him that his words would be sucked in somewhere
+      behind those broad fine brows, and carefully sorted. Mrs. Decie, indeed,
+      was thinking: 'Interesting young man, regular Bohemian&mdash;no harm in
+      that at his age; something Napoleonic in his face; probably has no dress
+      clothes. Yes, should like to see more of him!' She had a fine eye for
+      points of celebrity; his name was unfamiliar, would probably have been
+      scouted by that famous artist Mr. C&mdash;-, but she felt her instinct
+      urging her on to know him. She was, to do her justice, one of those &ldquo;lion&rdquo;
+       finders who seek the animal for pleasure, not for the glory it brings
+      them; she had the courage of her instincts&mdash;lion-entities were
+      indispensable to her, but she trusted to divination to secure them; nobody
+      could foist a &ldquo;lion&rdquo; on her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will be very nice. You will stay and have some lunch? The arrangements
+      here are rather odd. Such a mixed household&mdash;but there is always
+      lunch at two o'clock for any one who likes, and we all dine at seven. You
+      would have your sittings in the afternoons, perhaps? I should so like to
+      see your sketches. You are using the old house on the wall for studio;
+      that is so original of you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz would not stay to lunch, but asked if he might begin work that
+      afternoon; he left a little suffocated by the sandalwood and sympathy of
+      this sphinx-like woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Walking home along the river wall, with the singing of the larks and
+      thrushes, the rush of waters, the humming of the chafers in his ears, he
+      felt that he would make something fine of this subject. Before his eyes
+      the faces of the two girls continually started up, framed by the sky, with
+      young leaves guttering against their cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Three days had passed since Harz began his picture, when early in the
+      morning, Greta came from Villa Rubein along the river dyke and sat down on
+      a bench from which the old house on the wall was visible. She had not been
+      there long before Harz came out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did not knock,&rdquo; said Greta, &ldquo;because you would not have heard, and it
+      is so early, so I have been waiting for you a quarter of an hour.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Selecting a rosebud, from some flowers in her hand, she handed it to him.
+      &ldquo;That is my first rosebud this year,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;it is for you because you
+      are painting me. To-day I am thirteen, Herr Harz; there is not to be a
+      sitting, because it is my birthday; but, instead, we are all going to
+      Meran to see the play of Andreas Hofer. You are to come too, please; I am
+      here to tell you, and the others shall be here directly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz bowed: &ldquo;And who are the others?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Christian, and Dr. Edmund, Miss Naylor, and Cousin Teresa. Her husband is
+      ill, so she is sad, but to-day she is going to forget that. It is not good
+      to be always sad, is it, Herr Harz?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed: &ldquo;You could not be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta answered gravely: &ldquo;Oh yes, I could. I too am often sad. You are
+      making fun. You are not to make fun to-day, because it is my birthday. Do
+      you think growing up is nice, Herr Harz?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Fraulein Greta, it is better to have all the time before you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They walked on side by side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said Greta, &ldquo;you are very much afraid of losing time. Chris
+      says that time is nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Time is everything,&rdquo; responded Harz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She says that time is nothing, and thought is everything,&rdquo; Greta
+      murmured, rubbing a rose against her cheek, &ldquo;but I think you cannot have a
+      thought unless you have the time to think it in. There are the others!
+      Look!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A cluster of sunshades on the bridge glowed for a moment and was lost in
+      shadow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come,&rdquo; said Harz, &ldquo;let's join them!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At Meran, under Schloss Tirol, people were streaming across the meadows
+      into the open theatre. Here were tall fellows in mountain dress, with
+      leather breeches, bare knees, and hats with eagles' feathers; here were
+      fruit-sellers, burghers and their wives, mountebanks, actors, and every
+      kind of visitor. The audience, packed into an enclosure of high boards,
+      sweltered under the burning sun. Cousin Teresa, tall and thin, with hard,
+      red cheeks, shaded her pleasant eyes with her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The play began. It depicted the rising in the Tyrol of 1809: the village
+      life, dances and yodelling; murmurings and exhortations, the warning beat
+      of drums; then the gathering, with flintlocks, pitchforks, knives; the
+      battle and victory; the homecoming, and festival. Then the second
+      gathering, the roar of cannon; betrayal, capture, death. The impassive
+      figure of the patriot Andreas Hofer always in front, black-bearded,
+      leathern-girdled, under the blue sky, against a screen of mountains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz and Christian sat behind the others. He seemed so intent on the play
+      that she did not speak, but watched his face, rigid with a kind of cold
+      excitement; he seemed to be transported by the life passing before them.
+      Something of his feeling seized on her; when the play was over she too was
+      trembling. In pushing their way out they became separated from the others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's a short cut to the station here,&rdquo; said Christian; &ldquo;let's go this
+      way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The path rose a little; a narrow stream crept alongside the meadow, and
+      the hedge was spangled with wild roses. Christian kept glancing shyly at
+      the painter. Since their meeting on the river wall her thoughts had never
+      been at rest. This stranger, with his keen face, insistent eyes, and
+      ceaseless energy, had roused a strange feeling in her; his words had put
+      shape to something in her not yet expressed. She stood aside at a stile to
+      make way for some peasant boys, dusty and rough-haired, who sang and
+      whistled as they went by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was like those boys once,&rdquo; said Harz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian turned to him quickly. &ldquo;Ah! that was why you felt the play, so
+      much.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's my country up there. I was born amongst the mountains. I looked
+      after the cows, and slept in hay-cocks, and cut the trees in winter. They
+      used to call me a 'black sheep,' a 'loafer' in my village.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! why? I worked as hard as any of them. But I wanted to get away. Do
+      you think I could have stayed there all my life?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian's eyes grew eager.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If people don't understand what it is you want to do, they always call
+      you a loafer!&rdquo; muttered Harz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you did what you meant to do in spite of them,&rdquo; Christian said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For herself it was so hard to finish or decide. When in the old days she
+      told Greta stories, the latter, whose instinct was always for the
+      definite, would say: &ldquo;And what came at the end, Chris? Do finish it this
+      morning!&rdquo; but Christian never could. Her thoughts were deep, vague,
+      dreamy, invaded by both sides of every question. Whatever she did, her
+      needlework, her verse-making, her painting, all had its charm; but it was
+      not always what it was intended for at the beginning. Nicholas Treffry had
+      once said of her: &ldquo;When Chris starts out to make a hat, it may turn out an
+      altar-cloth, but you may bet it won't be a hat.&rdquo; It was her instinct to
+      look for what things meant; and this took more than all her time. She knew
+      herself better than most girls of nineteen, but it was her reason that had
+      informed her, not her feelings. In her sheltered life, her heart had never
+      been ruffled except by rare fits of passion&mdash;&ldquo;tantrums&rdquo; old Nicholas
+      Treffry dubbed them&mdash;at what seemed to her mean or unjust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I were a man,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and going to be great, I should have wanted
+      to begin at the very bottom as you did.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Harz quickly, &ldquo;one should be able to feel everything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not notice how simply he assumed that he was going to be great. He
+      went on, a smile twisting his mouth unpleasantly beneath its dark
+      moustache&mdash;&ldquo;Not many people think like you! It's a crime not to have
+      been born a gentleman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's a sneer,&rdquo; said Christian; &ldquo;I didn't think you would have sneered!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is true. What is the use of pretending that it isn't?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It may be true, but it is finer not to say it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By Heavens!&rdquo; said Harz, striking one hand into the other, &ldquo;if more truth
+      were spoken there would not be so many shams.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian looked down at him from her seat on the stile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are right all the same, Fraulein Christian,&rdquo; he added suddenly;
+      &ldquo;that's a very little business. Work is what matters, and trying to see
+      the beauty in the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian's face changed. She understood, well enough, this craving after
+      beauty. Slipping down from the stile, she drew a slow deep breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes!&rdquo; she said. Neither spoke for some time, then Harz said shyly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you and Fraulein Greta would ever like to come and see my studio, I
+      should be so happy. I would try and clean it up for you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should like to come. I could learn something. I want to learn.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They were both silent till the path joined the road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We must be in front of the others; it's nice to be in front&mdash;let's
+      dawdle. I forgot&mdash;you never dawdle, Herr Harz.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After a big fit of work, I can dawdle against any one; then I get another
+      fit of work&mdash;it's like appetite.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm always dawdling,&rdquo; answered Christian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the roadside a peasant woman screwed up her sun-dried face, saying in a
+      low voice: &ldquo;Please, gracious lady, help me to lift this basket!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian stooped, but before she could raise it, Harz hoisted it up on
+      his back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; he nodded; &ldquo;this good lady doesn't mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman, looking very much ashamed, walked along by Christian; she kept
+      rubbing her brown hands together, and saying; &ldquo;Gracious lady, I would not
+      have wished. It is heavy, but I would not have wished.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sure he'd rather carry it,&rdquo; said Christian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They had not gone far along the road, however, before the others passed
+      them in a carriage, and at the strange sight Miss Naylor could be seen
+      pursing her lips; Cousin Teresa nodding pleasantly; a smile on Dawney's
+      face; and beside him Greta, very demure. Harz began to laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you laughing at?&rdquo; asked Christian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You English are so funny. You mustn't do this here, you mustn't do that
+      there, it's like sitting in a field of nettles. If I were to walk with you
+      without my coat, that little lady would fall off her seat.&rdquo; His laugh
+      infected Christian; they reached the station feeling that they knew each
+      other better.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sun had dipped behind the mountains when the little train steamed down
+      the valley. All were subdued, and Greta, with a nodding head, slept
+      fitfully. Christian, in her corner, was looking out of the window, and
+      Harz kept studying her profile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He tried to see her eyes. He had remarked indeed that, whatever their
+      expression, the brows, arched and rather wide apart, gave them a peculiar
+      look of understanding. He thought of his picture. There was nothing in her
+      face to seize on, it was too sympathetic, too much like light. Yet her
+      chin was firm, almost obstinate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The train stopped with a jerk; she looked round at him. It was as though
+      she had said: &ldquo;You are my friend.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At Villa Rubein, Herr Paul had killed the fatted calf for Greta's Fest.
+      When the whole party were assembled, he alone remained standing; and
+      waving his arm above the cloth, cried: &ldquo;My dears! Your happiness! There
+      are good things here&mdash;Come!&rdquo; And with a sly look, the air of a
+      conjurer producing rabbits, he whipped the cover off the soup tureen:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Soup-turtle, fat, green fat!&rdquo; He smacked his lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No servants were allowed, because, as Greta said to Harz:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is that we are to be glad this evening.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Geniality radiated from Herr Paul's countenance, mellow as a bowl of wine.
+      He toasted everybody, exhorting them to pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz passed a cracker secretly behind Greta's head, and Miss Naylor, moved
+      by a mysterious impulse, pulled it with a sort of gleeful horror; it
+      exploded, and Greta sprang off her chair. Scruff, seeing this, appeared
+      suddenly on the sideboard with his forelegs in a plate of soup; without
+      moving them, he turned his head, and appeared to accuse the company of his
+      false position. It was the signal for shrieks of laughter. Scruff made no
+      attempt to free his forelegs; but sniffed the soup, and finding that
+      nothing happened, began to lap it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take him out! Oh! take him out!&rdquo; wailed Greta, &ldquo;he shall be ill!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Allons! Mon cher!&rdquo; cried Herr Paul, &ldquo;c'est magnifique, mais, vous savez,
+      ce nest guere la guerre!&rdquo; Scruff, with a wild spring, leaped past him to
+      the ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; cried Miss Naylor, &ldquo;the carpet!&rdquo; Fresh moans of mirth shook the
+      table; for having tasted the wine of laughter, all wanted as much more as
+      they could get. When Scruff and his traces were effaced, Herr Paul took a
+      ladle in his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a toast,&rdquo; he said, waving it for silence; &ldquo;a toast we will drink
+      all together from our hearts; the toast of my little daughter, who to-day
+      has thirteen years become; and there is also in our hearts,&rdquo; he continued,
+      putting down the ladle and suddenly becoming grave, &ldquo;the thought of one
+      who is not today with us to see this joyful occasion; to her, too, in this
+      our happiness we turn our hearts and glasses because it is her joy that we
+      should yet be joyful. I drink to my little daughter; may God her shadow
+      bless!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All stood up, clinking their glasses, and drank: then, in the hush that
+      followed, Greta, according to custom, began to sing a German carol; at the
+      end of the fourth line she stopped, abashed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heir Paul blew his nose loudly, and, taking up a cap that had fallen from
+      a cracker, put it on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every one followed his example, Miss Naylor attaining the distinction of a
+      pair of donkey's ears, which she wore, after another glass of wine, with
+      an air of sacrificing to the public good.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the end of supper came the moment for the offering of gifts. Herr Paul
+      had tied a handkerchief over Greta's eyes, and one by one they brought her
+      presents. Greta, under forfeit of a kiss, was bound to tell the giver by
+      the feel of the gift. Her swift, supple little hands explored noiselessly;
+      and in every case she guessed right.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dawney's present, a kitten, made a scene by clawing at her hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is Dr. Edmund's,&rdquo; she cried at once. Christian saw that Harz had
+      disappeared, but suddenly he came back breathless, and took his place at
+      the end of the rank of givers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Advancing on tiptoe, he put his present into Greta's hands. It was a small
+      bronze copy of a Donatello statue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Herr Harz!&rdquo; cried Greta; &ldquo;I saw it in the studio that day. It stood
+      on the table, and it is lovely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Decie, thrusting her pale eyes close to it, murmured: &ldquo;Charming!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry took it in his fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rum little toad! Cost a pot of money, I expect!&rdquo; He eyed Harz doubtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They went into the next room now, and Herr Paul, taking Greta's bandage,
+      transferred it to his own eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take care&mdash;take care, all!&rdquo; he cried; &ldquo;I am a devil of a catcher,&rdquo;
+       and, feeling the air cautiously, he moved forward like a bear about to
+      hug. He caught no one. Christian and Greta whisked under his arms and left
+      him grasping at the air. Mrs. Decie slipped past with astonishing agility.
+      Mr. Treffry, smoking his cigar, and barricaded in a corner, jeered:
+      &ldquo;Bravo, Paul! The active beggar! Can't he run! Go it, Greta!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At last Herr Paul caught Cousin Teresa, who, fattened against the wall,
+      lost her head, and stood uttering tiny shrieks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Mrs. Decie started playing The Blue Danube. Herr Paul dropped the
+      handkerchief, twisted his moustache up fiercely, glared round the room,
+      and seizing Greta by the waist, began dancing furiously, bobbing up and
+      down like a cork in lumpy water. Cousin Teresa followed suit with Miss
+      Naylor, both very solemn, and dancing quite different steps. Harz, went up
+      to Christian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't dance,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that is, I have only danced once, but&mdash;if
+      you would try with me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She put her hand on his arm, and they began. She danced, light as a
+      feather, eyes shining, feet flying, her body bent a little forward. It was
+      not a great success at first, but as soon as the time had got into Harz's
+      feet, they went swinging on when all the rest had stopped. Sometimes one
+      couple or another slipped through the window to dance on the veranda, and
+      came whirling in again. The lamplight glowed on the girls' white dresses;
+      on Herr Paul's perspiring face. He constituted in himself a perfect orgy,
+      and when the music stopped flung himself, full length, on the sofa gasping
+      out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My God! But, my God!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Christian felt Harz cling to her arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glowing and panting she looked at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Giddy!&rdquo; he murmured: &ldquo;I dance so badly; but I'll soon learn.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta clapped her hands: &ldquo;Every evening we will dance, every evening we
+      will dance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz looked at Christian; the colour had deepened in her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll show you how they dance in my village, feet upon the ceiling!&rdquo; And
+      running to Dawney, he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hold me here! Lift me&mdash;so! Now, on&mdash;two,&rdquo; he tried to swing his
+      feet above his head, but, with an &ldquo;Ouch!&rdquo; from Dawney, they collapsed, and
+      sat abruptly on the floor. This untimely event brought the evening to an
+      end. Dawney left, escorting Cousin Teresa, and Harz strode home humming
+      The Blue Danube, still feeling Christian's waist against his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In their room the two girls sat long at the window to cool themselves
+      before undressing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; sighed Greta, &ldquo;this is the happiest birthday I have had.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Cristian too thought: 'I have never been so happy in my life as I have
+      been to-day. I should like every day to be like this!' And she leant out
+      into the night, to let the air cool her cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Chris!&rdquo; said Greta some days after this, &ldquo;Miss Naylor danced last
+      evening; I think she shall have a headache to-day. There is my French and
+      my history this morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I can take them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is nice; then we can talk. I am sorry about the headache. I shall
+      give her some of my Eau de Cologne.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Naylor's headaches after dancing were things on which to calculate.
+      The girls carried their books into the arbour; it was a showery day, and
+      they had to run for shelter through the raindrops and sunlight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The French first, Chris!&rdquo; Greta liked her French, in which she was not
+      far inferior to Christian; the lesson therefore proceeded in an admirable
+      fashion. After one hour exactly by her watch (Mr. Treffry's birthday
+      present loved and admired at least once every hour) Greta rose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Chris, I have not fed my rabbits.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be quick! there's not much time for history.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta vanished. Christian watched the bright water dripping from the roof;
+      her lips were parted in a smile. She was thinking of something Harz had
+      said the night before. A discussion having been started as to whether
+      average opinion did, or did not, safeguard Society, Harz, after sitting
+      silent, had burst out: &ldquo;I think one man in earnest is better than twenty
+      half-hearted men who follow tamely; in the end he does Society most good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dawney had answered: &ldquo;If you had your way there would be no Society.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hate Society because it lives upon the weak.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bah!&rdquo; Herr Paul chimed in; &ldquo;the weak goes to the wall; that is as certain
+      as that you and I are here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let them fall against the wall,&rdquo; cried Harz; &ldquo;don't push them there....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta reappeared, walking pensively in the rain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bino,&rdquo; she said, sighing, &ldquo;has eaten too much. I remember now, I did feed
+      them before. Must we do the history, Chris?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta opened her book, and put a finger in the page. &ldquo;Herr Harz is very
+      kind to me,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Yesterday he brought a bird which had come into
+      his studio with a hurt wing; he brought it very gently in his handkerchief&mdash;he
+      is very kind, the bird was not even frightened of him. You did not know
+      about that, Chris?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris flushed a little, and said in a hurt voice
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't see what it has to&mdash;do with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; assented Greta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian's colour deepened. &ldquo;Go on with your history, Greta.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only,&rdquo; pursued Greta, &ldquo;that he always tells you all about things, Chris.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He doesn't! How can you say that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think he does, and it is because you do not make him angry. It is very
+      easy to make him angry; you have only to think differently, and he shall
+      be angry at once.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a little cat!&rdquo; said Christian; &ldquo;it isn't true, at all. He hates
+      shams, and can't bear meanness; and it is mean to cover up dislikes and
+      pretend that you agree with people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Papa says that he thinks too much about himself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Father!&rdquo; began Christian hotly; biting her lips she stopped, and turned
+      her wrathful eyes on Greta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do not always show your dislikes, Chris.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I? What has that to do with it? Because one is a coward that doesn't make
+      it any better, does it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think that he has a great many dislikes,&rdquo; murmured Greta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish you would attend to your own faults, and not pry into other
+      people's,&rdquo; and pushing the book aside, Christian gazed in front of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some minutes passed, then Greta leaning over, rubbed a cheek against her
+      shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am very sorry, Chris&mdash;I only wanted to be talking. Shall I read
+      some history?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Christian coldly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you angry with me, Chris?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no answer. The lingering raindrops pattered down on the roof.
+      Greta pulled at her sister's sleeve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look, Chris!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;There is Herr Harz!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian looked up, dropped her eyes again, and said: &ldquo;Will you go on
+      with the history, Greta?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta sighed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I will&mdash;but, oh! Chris, there is the luncheon gong!&rdquo; and she
+      meekly closed the book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the following weeks there was a &ldquo;sitting&rdquo; nearly every afternoon.
+      Miss Naylor usually attended them; the little lady was, to a certain
+      extent, carried past objection. She had begun to take an interest in the
+      picture, and to watch the process out of the corner of her eye; in the
+      depths of her dear mind, however, she never quite got used to the vanity
+      and waste of time; her lips would move and her knitting-needles click in
+      suppressed remonstrances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What Harz did fast he did best; if he had leisure he &ldquo;saw too much,&rdquo;
+       loving his work so passionately that he could never tell exactly when to
+      stop. He hated to lay things aside, always thinking: &ldquo;I can get it
+      better.&rdquo; Greta was finished, but with Christian, try as he would, he was
+      not satisfied; from day to day her face seemed to him to change, as if her
+      soul were growing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were things too in her eyes that he could neither read nor
+      reproduce.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dawney would often stroll out to them after his daily visit, and lying on
+      the grass, his arms crossed behind his head, and a big cigar between his
+      lips, would gently banter everybody. Tea came at five o'clock, and then
+      Mrs. Decie appeared armed with a magazine or novel, for she was proud of
+      her literary knowledge. The sitting was suspended; Harz, with a cigarette,
+      would move between the table and the picture, drinking his tea, putting a
+      touch in here and there; he never sat down till it was all over for the
+      day. During these &ldquo;rests&rdquo; there was talk, usually ending in discussion.
+      Mrs. Decie was happiest in conversations of a literary order, making
+      frequent use of such expressions as: &ldquo;After all, it produces an illusion&mdash;does
+      anything else matter?&rdquo; &ldquo;Rather a poseur, is he not?&rdquo; &ldquo;A question, that, of
+      temperament,&rdquo; or &ldquo;A matter of the definition of words&rdquo;; and other charming
+      generalities, which sound well, and seem to go far, and are pleasingly
+      irrefutable. Sometimes the discussion turned on Art&mdash;on points of
+      colour or technique; whether realism was quite justified; and should we be
+      pre-Raphaelites? When these discussions started, Christian's eyes would
+      grow bigger and clearer, with a sort of shining reasonableness; as though
+      they were trying to see into the depths. And Harz would stare at them. But
+      the look in those eyes eluded him, as if they had no more meaning than
+      Mrs. Decie's, which, with their pale, watchful smile, always seemed
+      saying: &ldquo;Come, let us take a little intellectual exercise.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta, pulling Scruff's ears, would gaze up at the speakers; when the talk
+      was over, she always shook herself. But if no one came to the &ldquo;sittings,&rdquo;
+       there would sometimes be very earnest, quick talk, sometimes long
+      silences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day Christian said: &ldquo;What is your religion?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz finished the touch he was putting on the canvas, before he answered:
+      &ldquo;Roman Catholic, I suppose; I was baptised in that Church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't mean that. Do you believe in a future life?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Christian,&rdquo; murmured Greta, who was plaiting blades of grass, &ldquo;shall
+      always want to know what people think about a future life; that is so
+      funny!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can I tell?&rdquo; said Harz; &ldquo;I've never really thought of it&mdash;never
+      had the time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can you help thinking?&rdquo; Christian said: &ldquo;I have to&mdash;it seems to
+      me so awful that we might come to an end.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She closed her book, and it slipped off her lap. She went on: &ldquo;There must
+      be a future life, we're so incomplete. What's the good of your work, for
+      instance? What's the use of developing if you have to stop?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; answered Harz. &ldquo;I don't much care. All I know is, I've got
+      to work.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For happiness&mdash;the real happiness is fighting&mdash;the rest is
+      nothing. If you have finished a thing, does it ever satisfy you? You look
+      forward to the next thing at once; to wait is wretched!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian clasped her hands behind her neck; sunlight flickered through
+      the leaves on to the bosom of her dress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! Stay like that!&rdquo; cried Harz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She let her eyes rest on his face, swinging her foot a little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You work because you must; but that's not enough. Why do you feel you
+      must? I want to know what's behind. When I was travelling with Aunt
+      Constance the winter before last we often talked&mdash;I've heard her
+      discuss it with her friends. She says we move in circles till we reach
+      Nirvana. But last winter I found I couldn't talk to her; it seemed as if
+      she never really meant anything. Then I started reading&mdash;Kant and
+      Hegel&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; put in Harz, &ldquo;if they would teach me to draw better, or to see a new
+      colour in a flower, or an expression in a face, I would read them all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian leaned forward: &ldquo;It must be right to get as near truth as
+      possible; every step gained is something. You believe in truth; truth is
+      the same as beauty&mdash;that was what you said&mdash;you try to paint the
+      truth, you always see the beauty. But how can we know truth, unless we
+      know what is at the root of it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;think,&rdquo; murmured Greta, sotto voce, &ldquo;you see one way&mdash;and he
+      sees another&mdash;because&mdash;you are not one person.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course!&rdquo; said Christian impatiently, &ldquo;but why&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A sound of humming interrupted her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nicholas Treffry was coming from the house, holding the Times in one hand,
+      and a huge meerschaum pipe in the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aha!&rdquo; he said to Harz: &ldquo;how goes the picture?&rdquo; and he lowered himself
+      into a chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better to-day, Uncle?&rdquo; said Christian softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry growled. &ldquo;Confounded humbugs, doctors!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Your father
+      used to swear by them; why, his doctor killed him&mdash;made him drink
+      such a lot of stuff!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why then do you have a doctor, Uncle Nic?&rdquo; asked Greta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry looked at her; his eyes twinkled. &ldquo;I don't know, my dear. If
+      they get half a chance, they won't let go of you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There had been a gentle breeze all day, but now it had died away; not a
+      leaf quivered, not a blade of grass was stirring; from the house were
+      heard faint sounds as of some one playing on a pipe. A blackbird came
+      hopping down the path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When you were a boy, did you go after birds' nests, Uncle Nic?&rdquo; Greta
+      whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe you, Greta.&rdquo; The blackbird hopped into the shrubbery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You frightened him, Uncle Nic! Papa says that at Schloss Konig, where he
+      lived when he was young, he would always be after jackdaws' nests.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gammon, Greta. Your father never took a jackdaw's nest, his legs are much
+      too round!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you fond of birds, Uncle Nic?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ask me another, Greta! Well, I s'pose so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why did you go bird-nesting? I think it is cruel&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry coughed behind his paper: &ldquo;There you have me, Greta,&rdquo; he
+      remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz began to gather his brushes: &ldquo;Thank you,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that's all I can
+      do to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can I look?&rdquo; Mr. Treffry inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Uncle Nic got up slowly, and stood in front of the picture. &ldquo;When it's for
+      sale,&rdquo; he said at last, &ldquo;I'll buy it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz bowed; but for some reason he felt annoyed, as if he had been asked
+      to part with something personal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thank you,&rdquo; he said. A gong sounded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll stay and have a snack with us?&rdquo; said Mr. Treffry; &ldquo;the doctor's
+      stopping.&rdquo; Gathering up his paper, he moved off to the house with his hand
+      on Greta's shoulder, the terrier running in front. Harz and Christian were
+      left alone. He was scraping his palette, and she was sitting with her
+      elbows resting on her knees; between them, a gleam of sunlight dyed the
+      path golden. It was evening already; the bushes and the flowers, after the
+      day's heat, were breathing out perfume; the birds had started their
+      evensong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you tired of sitting for your portrait, Fraulein Christian?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall get something into it that everybody does not see&mdash;something
+      behind the surface, that will last.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian said slowly: &ldquo;That's like a challenge. You were right when you
+      said fighting is happiness&mdash;for yourself, but not for me. I'm a
+      coward. I hate to hurt people, I like them to like me. If you had to do
+      anything that would make them hate you, you would do it all the same, if
+      it helped your work; that's fine&mdash;it's what I can't do. It's&mdash;it's
+      everything. Do you like Uncle Nic?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young painter looked towards the house, where under the veranda old
+      Nicholas Treffry was still in sight; a smile came on his lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I were the finest painter in the world, he wouldn't think anything of
+      me for it, I'm afraid; but if I could show him handfuls of big cheques for
+      bad pictures I had painted, he would respect me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled, and said: &ldquo;I love him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I shall like him,&rdquo; Harz answered simply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She put her hand out, and her fingers met his. &ldquo;We shall be late,&rdquo; she
+      said, glowing, and catching up her book: &ldquo;I'm always late!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      There was one other guest at dinner, a well-groomed person with pale,
+      fattish face, dark eyes, and hair thin on the temples, whose clothes had a
+      military cut. He looked like a man fond of ease, who had gone out of his
+      groove, and collided with life. Herr Paul introduced him as Count Mario
+      Sarelli.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two hanging lamps with crimson shades threw a rosy light over the table,
+      where, in the centre stood a silver basket, full of irises. Through the
+      open windows the garden was all clusters of black foliage in the dying
+      light. Moths fluttered round the lamps; Greta, following them with her
+      eyes, gave quite audible sighs of pleasure when they escaped. Both girls
+      wore white, and Harz, who sat opposite Christian, kept looking at her, and
+      wondering why he had not painted her in that dress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Decie understood the art of dining&mdash;the dinner, ordered by Herr
+      Paul, was admirable; the servants silent as their shadows; there was
+      always a hum of conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sarelli, who sat on her right hand, seemed to partake of little except
+      olives, which he dipped into a glass of sherry. He turned his black,
+      solemn eyes silently from face to face, now and then asking the meaning of
+      an English word. After a discussion on modern Rome, it was debated whether
+      or no a criminal could be told by the expression of his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Crime,&rdquo; said Mrs. Decie, passing her hand across her brow&mdash;&ldquo;crime is
+      but the hallmark of strong individuality.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Naylor, gushing rather pink, stammered: &ldquo;A great crime must show
+      itself&mdash;a murder. Why, of course!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If that were so,&rdquo; said Dawney, &ldquo;we should only have to look about us&mdash;no
+      more detectives.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Naylor rejoined with slight severity: &ldquo;I cannot conceive that such a
+      thing can pass the human face by, leaving no impression!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz said abruptly: &ldquo;There are worse things than murder.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! par exemple!&rdquo; said Sarelli.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a slight stir all round the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Verry good,&rdquo; cried out Herr Paul, &ldquo;a vot' sante, cher.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Naylor shivered, as if some one had put a penny down her back; and
+      Mrs. Decie, leaning towards Harz, smiled like one who has made a pet dog
+      do a trick. Christian alone was motionless, looking thoughtfully at Harz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw a man tried for murder once,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;a murder for revenge; I
+      watched the judge, and I thought all the time: 'I'd rather be that
+      murderer than you; I've never seen a meaner face; you crawl through life;
+      you're not a criminal, simply because you haven't the courage.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the dubious silence following the painter's speech, Mr. Treffry could
+      distinctly be heard humming. Then Sarelli said: &ldquo;What do you say to
+      anarchists, who are not men, but savage beasts, whom I would tear to
+      pieces!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As to that,&rdquo; Harz answered defiantly, &ldquo;it maybe wise to hang them, but
+      then there are so many other men that it would be wise to hang.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can we tell what they went through; what their lives were?&rdquo; murmured
+      Christian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Naylor, who had been rolling a pellet of bread, concealed it hastily.
+      &ldquo;They are&mdash;always given a chance to&mdash;repent&mdash;I believe,&rdquo;
+       she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For what they are about to receive,&rdquo; drawled Dawney.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Decie signalled with her fan: &ldquo;We are trying to express the
+      inexpressible&mdash;shall we go into the garden?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All rose; Harz stood by the window, and in passing, Christian looked at
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat down again with a sudden sense of loss. There was no white figure
+      opposite now. Raising his eyes he met Sarelli's. The Italian was regarding
+      him with a curious stare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul began retailing apiece of scandal he had heard that afternoon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shocking affair!&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I could never have believed it of her! B&mdash;-is
+      quite beside himself. Yesterday there was a row, it seems!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There has been one every day for months,&rdquo; muttered Dawney.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But to leave without a word, and go no one knows where! B&mdash;-is
+      'viveur' no doubt, mais, mon Dieu, que voulez vous? She was always a poor,
+      pale thing. Why! when my&mdash;-&rdquo; he flourished his cigar; &ldquo;I was not
+      always&mdash;-what I should have been&mdash;-one lives in a world of flesh
+      and blood&mdash;-we are not all angels&mdash;-que diable! But this is a
+      very vulgar business. She goes off; leaves everything&mdash;-without a
+      word; and B&mdash;-is very fond of her. These things are not done!&rdquo; the
+      starched bosom of his shirt seemed swollen by indignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry, with a heavy hand on the table, eyed him sideways. Dawney
+      said slowly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;B&mdash;-is a beast; I'm sorry for the poor woman; but what can she do
+      alone?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is, no doubt, a man,&rdquo; put in Sarelli.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul muttered: &ldquo;Who knows?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is B&mdash;-going to do?&rdquo; said Dawney.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said Herr Paul. &ldquo;He is fond of her. He is a chap of resolution, he
+      will get her back. He told me: 'Well, you know, I shall follow her
+      wherever she goes till she comes back.' He will do it, he is a determined
+      chap; he will follow her wherever she goes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry drank his wine off at a gulp, and sucked his moustache in
+      sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She was a fool to marry him,&rdquo; said Dawney; &ldquo;they haven't a point in
+      common; she hates him like poison, and she's the better of the two. But it
+      doesn't pay a woman to run off like that. B&mdash;-had better hurry up,
+      though. What do you think, sir?&rdquo; he said to Mr. Treffry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eh?&rdquo; said Mr. Treffry; &ldquo;how should I know? Ask Paul there, he's one of
+      your moral men, or Count Sarelli.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The latter said impassively: &ldquo;If I cared for her I should very likely kill
+      her&mdash;if not&mdash;&rdquo; he shrugged his shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz, who was watching, was reminded of his other words at dinner, &ldquo;wild
+      beasts whom I would tear to pieces.&rdquo; He looked with interest at this quiet
+      man who said these extremely ferocious things, and thought: 'I should like
+      to paint that fellow.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul twirled his wine-glass in his fingers. &ldquo;There are family ties,&rdquo;
+       he said, &ldquo;there is society, there is decency; a wife should be with her
+      husband. B&mdash;-will do quite right. He must go after her; she will not
+      perhaps come back at first; he will follow her; she will begin to think,
+      'I am helpless&mdash;I am ridiculous!' A woman is soon beaten. They will
+      return. She is once more with her husband&mdash;Society will forgive, it
+      will be all right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By Jove, Paul,&rdquo; growled Mr. Treffry, &ldquo;wonderful power of argument!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A wife is a wife,&rdquo; pursued Herr Paul; &ldquo;a man has a right to her society.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you say to that, sir?&rdquo; asked Dawney.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry tugged at his beard: &ldquo;Make a woman live with you, if she don't
+      want to? I call it low.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, my dear,&rdquo; exclaimed Herr Paul, &ldquo;how should you know? You have not
+      been married.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, thank the Lord!&rdquo; Mr. Treffry replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But looking at the question broadly, sir,&rdquo; said Dawney; &ldquo;if a husband
+      always lets his wife do as she likes, how would the thing work out? What
+      becomes of the marriage tie?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The marriage tie,&rdquo; growled Mr. Treffry, &ldquo;is the biggest thing there is!
+      But, by Jove, Doctor, I'm a Dutchman if hunting women ever helped the
+      marriage tie!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not thinking of myself,&rdquo; Herr Paul cried out, &ldquo;I think of the
+      community. There are rights.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A decent community never yet asked a man to tread on his self-respect. If
+      I get my fingers skinned over my marriage, which I undertake at my own
+      risk, what's the community to do with it? D'you think I'm going to whine
+      to it to put the plaster on? As to rights, it'd be a deuced sight better
+      for us all if there wasn't such a fuss about 'em. Leave that to women! I
+      don't give a tinker's damn for men who talk about their rights in such
+      matters.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sarelli rose. &ldquo;But your honour,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;there is your honour!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry stared at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Honour! If huntin' women's your idea of honour, well&mdash;it isn't
+      mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you'd forgive her, sir, whatever happened,&rdquo; Dawney said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forgiveness is another thing. I leave that to your sanctimonious beggars.
+      But, hunt a woman! Hang it, sir, I'm not a cad!&rdquo; and bringing his hand
+      down with a rattle, he added: &ldquo;This is a subject that don't bear talking
+      of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sarelli fell back in his seat, twirling his moustaches fiercely. Harz, who
+      had risen, looked at Christian's empty place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'If I were married!' he thought suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul, with a somewhat vinous glare, still muttered, &ldquo;But your duty to
+      the family!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz slipped through the window. The moon was like a wonderful white
+      lantern in the purple sky; there was but a smoulder of stars. Beneath the
+      softness of the air was the iciness of the snow; it made him want to run
+      and leap. A sleepy beetle dropped on its back; he turned it over and
+      watched it scurry across the grass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Someone was playing Schumann's Kinderscenen. Harz stood still to listen.
+      The notes came twining, weaving round his thoughts; the whole night seemed
+      full of girlish voices, of hopes and fancies, soaring away to mountain
+      heights&mdash;invisible, yet present. Between the stems of the
+      acacia-trees he could see the flicker of white dresses, where Christian
+      and Greta were walking arm in arm. He went towards them; the blood flushed
+      up in his face, he felt almost surfeited by some sweet emotion. Then, in
+      sudden horror, he stood still. He was in love! With nothing done with
+      everything before him! He was going to bow down to a face! The flicker of
+      the dresses was no longer visible. He would not be fettered, he would
+      stamp it out! He turned away; but with each step, something seemed to jab
+      at his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Round the corner of the house, in the shadow of the wall, Dominique, the
+      Luganese, in embroidered slippers, was smoking a long cherry-wood pipe,
+      leaning against a tree&mdash;Mephistopheles in evening clothes. Harz went
+      up to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lend me a pencil, Dominique.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bien, M'sieu.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Resting a card against the tree Harz wrote to Mrs. Decie: &ldquo;Forgive me, I
+      am obliged to go away. In a few days I shall hope to return, and finish
+      the picture of your nieces.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sent Dominique for his hat. During the man's absence he was on the
+      point of tearing up the card and going back into the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the Luganese returned he thrust the card into his hand, and walked
+      out between the tall poplars, waiting, like ragged ghosts, silver with
+      moonlight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Harz walked away along the road. A dog was howling. The sound seemed too
+      appropriate. He put his fingers to his ears, but the lugubrious noise
+      passed those barriers, and made its way into his heart. Was there nothing
+      that would put an end to this emotion? It was no better in the old house
+      on the wall; he spent the night tramping up and down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just before daybreak he slipped out with a knapsack, taking the road
+      towards Meran.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had not quite passed through Gries when he overtook a man walking in
+      the middle of the road and leaving a trail of cigar smoke behind him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! my friend,&rdquo; the smoker said, &ldquo;you walk early; are you going my way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Count Sarelli. The raw light had imparted a grey tinge to his pale
+      face, the growth of his beard showed black already beneath the skin; his
+      thumbs were hooked in the pockets of a closely buttoned coat, he
+      gesticulated with his fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are making a journey?&rdquo; he said, nodding at the knapsack. &ldquo;You are
+      early&mdash;I am late; our friend has admirable kummel&mdash;I have drunk
+      too much. You have not been to bed, I think? If there is no sleep in one's
+      bed it is no good going to look for it. You find that? It is better to
+      drink kummel...! Pardon! You are doing the right thing: get away! Get away
+      as fast as possible! Don't wait, and let it catch you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz stared at him amazed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon!&rdquo; Sarelli said again, raising his hat, &ldquo;that girl&mdash;the white
+      girl&mdash;I saw. You do well to get away!&rdquo; he swayed a little as he
+      walked. &ldquo;That old fellow&mdash;what is his name-Trrreffr-ry! What ideas of
+      honour!&rdquo; He mumbled: &ldquo;Honour is an abstraction! If a man is not true to an
+      abstraction, he is a low type; but wait a minute!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put his hand to his side as though in pain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The hedges were brightening with a faint pinky glow; there was no sound on
+      the long, deserted road, but that of their footsteps; suddenly a bird
+      commenced to chirp, another answered&mdash;the world seemed full of these
+      little voices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sarelli stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That white girl,&rdquo; he said, speaking with rapidity. &ldquo;Yes! You do well! get
+      away! Don't let it catch you! I waited, it caught me&mdash;what happened?
+      Everything horrible&mdash;and now&mdash;kummel!&rdquo; Laughing a thick laugh,
+      he gave a twirl to his moustache, and swaggered on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was a fine fellow&mdash;nothing too big for Mario Sarelli; the regiment
+      looked to me. Then she came&mdash;with her eyes and her white dress,
+      always white, like this one; the little mole on her chin, her hands for
+      ever moving&mdash;their touch as warm as sunbeams. Then, no longer Sarelli
+      this, and that! The little house close to the ramparts! Two arms, two
+      eyes, and nothing here,&rdquo; he tapped his breast, &ldquo;but flames that made ashes
+      quickly&mdash;in her, like this ash&mdash;!&rdquo; he flicked the white flake
+      off his cigar. &ldquo;It's droll! You agree, hein? Some day I shall go back and
+      kill her. In the meantime&mdash;kummel!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped at a house close to the road, and stood still, his teeth bared
+      in a grin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I bore you,&rdquo; he said. His cigar, flung down, sputtered forth its
+      sparks on the road in front of Harz. &ldquo;I live here&mdash;good-morning! You
+      are a man for work&mdash;your honour is your Art! I know, and you are
+      young! The man who loves flesh better than his honour is a low type&mdash;I
+      am a low type. I! Mario Sarelli, a low type! I love flesh better than my
+      honour!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He remained swaying at the gate with the grin fixed on his face; then
+      staggered up the steps, and banged the door. But before Harz had walked
+      on, he again appeared, beckoning, in the doorway. Obeying an impulse, Harz
+      went in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will make a night of it,&rdquo; said Sarelli; &ldquo;wine, brandy, kummel? I am
+      virtuous&mdash;kummel it must be for me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat down at a piano, and began to touch the keys. Harz poured out some
+      wine. Sarelli nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You begin with that? Allegro&mdash;piu&mdash;presto!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wine&mdash;brandy&mdash;kummel!&rdquo; he quickened the time of the tune: &ldquo;it
+      is not too long a passage, and this&rdquo;&mdash;he took his hands off the keys&mdash;&ldquo;comes
+      after.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some men do not kill themselves,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sarelli, who was bending and swaying to the music of a tarantella, broke
+      off, and letting his eyes rest on the painter, began playing Schumann's
+      Kinderscenen. Harz leaped to his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stop that!&rdquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It pricks you?&rdquo; said Sarelli suavely; &ldquo;what do you think of this?&rdquo; he
+      played again, crouching over the piano, and making the notes sound like
+      the crying of a wounded animal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For me!&rdquo; he said, swinging round, and rising.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your health! And so you don't believe in suicide, but in murder? The
+      custom is the other way; but you don't believe in customs? Customs are
+      only for Society?&rdquo; He drank a glass of kummel. &ldquo;You do not love Society?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz looked at him intently; he did not want to quarrel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not too fond of other people's thoughts,&rdquo; he said at last; &ldquo;I prefer
+      to think my own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And is Society never right? That poor Society!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Society! What is Society&mdash;a few men in good coats? What has it done
+      for me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sarelli bit the end off a cigar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;now we are coming to it. It is good to be an artist, a
+      fine bantam of an artist; where other men have their dis-ci-pline, he has
+      his, what shall we say&mdash;his mound of roses?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The painter started to his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Sarelli, with a hiccough, &ldquo;you are a fine fellow!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you are drunk!&rdquo; cried Harz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A little drunk&mdash;not much, not enough to matter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz broke into laughter. It was crazy to stay there listening to this mad
+      fellow. What had brought him in? He moved towards the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said Sarelli, &ldquo;but it is no good going to bed&mdash;let us talk. I
+      have a lot to say&mdash;it is pleasant to talk to anarchists at times.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Full daylight was already coming through the chinks of the shutters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are all anarchists, you painters, you writing fellows. You live by
+      playing ball with facts. Images&mdash;nothing solid&mdash;hein? You're all
+      for new things too, to tickle your nerves. No discipline! True anarchists,
+      every one of you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz poured out another glass of wine and drank it off. The man's feverish
+      excitement was catching.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only fools,&rdquo; he replied, &ldquo;take things for granted. As for discipline,
+      what do you aristocrats, or bourgeois know of discipline? Have you ever
+      been hungry? Have you ever had your soul down on its back?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Soul on its back? That is good!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man's no use,&rdquo; cried Harz, &ldquo;if he's always thinking of what others
+      think; he must stand on his own legs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He must not then consider other people?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not from cowardice anyway.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sarelli drank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What would you do,&rdquo; he said, striking his chest, &ldquo;if you had a
+      devil-here? Would you go to bed?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A sort of pity seized on Harz. He wanted to say something that would be
+      consoling but could find no words; and suddenly he felt disgusted. What
+      link was there between him and this man; between his love and this man's
+      love?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Harz!&rdquo; muttered Sarelli; &ldquo;Harz means 'tar,' hein? Your family is not an
+      old one?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz glared, and said: &ldquo;My father is a peasant.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sarelli lifted the kummel bottle and emptied it into his glass, with a
+      steady hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're honest&mdash;and we both have devils. I forgot; I brought you in
+      to see a picture!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He threw wide the shutters; the windows were already open, and a rush of
+      air came in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; he said, sniffing, &ldquo;smells of the earth, nicht wahr, Herr Artist?
+      You should know&mdash;it belongs to your father.... Come, here's my
+      picture; a Correggio! What do you think of it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a copy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you have given me the lie, Signor,&rdquo; and drawing out his handkerchief
+      Sarelli flicked it in the painter's face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz turned white.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Duelling is a good custom!&rdquo; said Sarelli. &ldquo;I shall have the honour to
+      teach you just this one, unless you are afraid. Here are pistols&mdash;this
+      room is twenty feet across at least, twenty feet is no bad distance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And pulling out a drawer he took two pistols from a case, and put them on
+      the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The light is good&mdash;but perhaps you are afraid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give me one!&rdquo; shouted the infuriated painter; &ldquo;and go to the devil for a
+      fool.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One moment!&rdquo; Sarelli murmured: &ldquo;I will load them, they are more useful
+      loaded.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz leaned out of the window; his head was in a whirl. 'What on earth is
+      happening?' he thought. 'He's mad&mdash;or I am! Confound him! I'm not
+      going to be killed!' He turned and went towards the table. Sarelli's head
+      was sunk on his arms, he was asleep. Harz methodically took up the
+      pistols, and put them back into the drawer. A sound made him turn his
+      head; there stood a tall, strong young woman in a loose gown caught
+      together on her chest. Her grey eyes glanced from the painter to the
+      bottles, from the bottles to the pistol-case. A simple reasoning, which
+      struck Harz as comic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is often like this,&rdquo; she said in the country patois; &ldquo;der Herr must
+      not be frightened.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lifting the motionless Sarelli as if he were a baby, she laid him on a
+      couch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; she said, sitting down and resting her elbow on the table; &ldquo;he will
+      not wake!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz bowed to her; her patient figure, in spite of its youth and strength,
+      seemed to him pathetic. Taking up his knapsack, he went out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The smoke of cottages rose straight; wisps of mist were wandering about
+      the valley, and the songs of birds dropping like blessings. All over the
+      grass the spiders had spun a sea of threads that bent and quivered to the
+      pressure of the air, like fairy tight-ropes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All that day he tramped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Blacksmiths, tall stout men with knotted muscles, sleepy eyes, and great
+      fair beards, came out of their forges to stretch and wipe their brows, and
+      stare at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Teams of white oxen, waiting to be harnessed, lashed their tails against
+      their flanks, moving their heads slowly from side to side in the heat. Old
+      women at chalet doors blinked and knitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The white houses, with gaping caves of storage under the roofs, the red
+      church spire, the clinking of hammers in the forges, the slow stamping of
+      oxen-all spoke of sleepy toil, without ideas or ambition. Harz knew it all
+      too well; like the earth's odour, it belonged to him, as Sarelli had said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Towards sunset coming to a copse of larches, he sat down to rest. It was
+      very still, but for the tinkle of cowbells, and, from somewhere in the
+      distance, the sound of dropping logs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two barefooted little boys came from the wood, marching earnestly along,
+      and looking at Harz as if he were a monster. Once past him, they began to
+      run.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'At their age,' he thought, 'I should have done the same.' A hundred
+      memories rushed into his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked down at the village straggling below&mdash;white houses with
+      russet tiles and crowns of smoke, vineyards where the young leaves were
+      beginning to unfold, the red-capped spire, a thread of bubbling stream, an
+      old stone cross. He had been fourteen years struggling up from all this;
+      and now just as he had breathing space, and the time to give himself
+      wholly to his work&mdash;this weakness was upon him! Better, a thousand
+      times, to give her up!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a house or two lights began to wink; the scent of wood smoke reached
+      him, the distant chimes of bells, the burring of a stream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Next day his one thought was to get back to work. He arrived at the studio
+      in the afternoon, and, laying in provisions, barricaded the lower door.
+      For three days he did not go out; on the fourth day he went to Villa
+      Rubein....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Schloss Runkelstein&mdash;grey, blind, strengthless&mdash;still keeps the
+      valley. The windows which once, like eyes, watched men and horses creeping
+      through the snow, braved the splutter of guns and the gleam of torches,
+      are now holes for the birds to nest in. Tangled creepers have spread to
+      the very summits of the walls. In the keep, instead of grim men in armour,
+      there is a wooden board recording the history of the castle and
+      instructing visitors on the subject of refreshments. Only at night, when
+      the cold moon blanches everything, the castle stands like the grim ghost
+      of its old self, high above the river.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a long morning's sitting the girls had started forth with Harz and
+      Dawney to spend the afternoon at the ruin; Miss Naylor, kept at home by
+      headache, watched them depart with words of caution against sunstroke,
+      stinging nettles, and strange dogs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since the painter's return Christian and he had hardly spoken to each
+      other. Below the battlement on which they sat, in a railed gallery with
+      little tables, Dawney and Greta were playing dominoes, two soldiers
+      drinking beer, and at the top of a flight of stairs the Custodian's wife
+      sewing at a garment. Christian said suddenly: &ldquo;I thought we were friends.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Fraulein Christian, aren't we?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You went away without a word; friends don't do that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz bit his lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think you care,&rdquo; she went on with a sort of desperate haste,
+      &ldquo;whether you hurt people or not. You have been here all this time without
+      even going to see your father and mother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think they would want to see me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian looked up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all been so soft for you,&rdquo; he said bitterly; &ldquo;you don't understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned his head away, and then burst out: &ldquo;I'm proud to come straight
+      from the soil&mdash;I wouldn't have it otherwise; but they are of 'the
+      people,' everything is narrow with them&mdash;they only understand what
+      they can see and touch.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sorry I spoke like that,&rdquo; said Christian softly; &ldquo;you've never told
+      me about yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something just a little cruel in the way the painter looked at
+      her, then seeming to feel compunction, he said quickly: &ldquo;I always hated&mdash;the
+      peasant life&mdash;I wanted to get away into the world; I had a feeling in
+      here&mdash;I wanted&mdash;I don't know what I wanted! I did run away at
+      last to a house-painter at Meran. The priest wrote me a letter from my
+      father&mdash;they threw me off; that's all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian's eyes were very bright, her lips moved, like the lips of a
+      child listening to a story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go on,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I stayed at Meran two years, till I'd learnt all I could there, then a
+      brother of my mother's helped me to get to Vienna; I was lucky enough to
+      find work with a man who used to decorate churches. We went about the
+      country together. Once when he was ill I painted the roof of a church
+      entirely by myself; I lay on my back on the scaffold boards all day for a
+      week&mdash;I was proud of that roof.&rdquo; He paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When did you begin painting pictures?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A friend asked me why I didn't try for the Academie. That started me
+      going to the night schools; I worked every minute&mdash;I had to get my
+      living as well, of course, so I worked at night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then when the examination came, I thought I could do nothing&mdash;it was
+      just as if I had never had a brush or pencil in my hand. But the second
+      day a professor in passing me said, 'Good! Quite good!' That gave me
+      courage. I was sure I had failed though; but I was second out of sixty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To work in the schools after that I had to give up my business, of
+      course. There was only one teacher who ever taught me anything; the others
+      all seemed fools. This man would come and rub out what you'd done with his
+      sleeve. I used to cry with rage&mdash;but I told him I could only learn
+      from him, and he was so astonished that he got me into his class.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how did you live without money?&rdquo; asked Christian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His face burned with a dark flush. &ldquo;I don't know how I lived; you must
+      have been through these things to know, you would never understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I want to understand, please.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you want me to tell you? How I went twice a week to eat free
+      dinners! How I took charity! How I was hungry! There was a rich cousin of
+      my mother's&mdash;I used to go to him. I didn't like it. But if you're
+      starving in the winter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian put out her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I used to borrow apronsful of coals from other students who were as poor&mdash;but
+      I never went to the rich students.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The flush had died out of his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That sort of thing makes you hate the world! You work till you stagger;
+      you're cold and hungry; you see rich people in their carriages, wrapped in
+      furs, and all the time you want to do something great. You pray for a
+      chance, any chance; nothing comes to the poor! It makes you hate the
+      world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian's eyes filled with tears. He went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I wasn't the only one in that condition; we used to meet. Garin, a
+      Russian with a brown beard and patches of cheek showing through, and
+      yellow teeth, who always looked hungry. Paunitz, who came from sympathy!
+      He had fat cheeks and little eyes, and a big gold chain&mdash;the swine!
+      And little Misek. It was in his room we met, with the paper peeling off
+      the walls, and two doors with cracks in them, so that there was always a
+      draught. We used to sit on his bed, and pull the dirty blankets over us
+      for warmth; and smoke&mdash;tobacco was the last thing we ever went
+      without. Over the bed was a Virgin and Child&mdash;Misek was a very devout
+      Catholic; but one day when he had had no dinner and a dealer had kept his
+      picture without paying him, he took the image and threw it on the floor
+      before our eyes; it broke, and he trampled on the bits. Lendorf was
+      another, a heavy fellow who was always puffing out his white cheeks and
+      smiting himself, and saying: 'Cursed society!' And Schonborn, an
+      aristocrat who had quarrelled with his family. He was the poorest of us
+      all; but only he and I would ever have dared to do anything&mdash;they all
+      knew that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian listened with awe. &ldquo;Do you mean?&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;do you mean, that
+      you&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see! you're afraid of me at once. It's impossible even for you to
+      understand. It only makes you afraid. A hungry man living on charity, sick
+      with rage and shame, is a wolf even to you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian looked straight into his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's not true. If I can't understand, I can feel. Would you be the same
+      now if it were to come again?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, it drives me mad even now to think of people fatted with prosperity,
+      sneering and holding up their hands at poor devils who have suffered ten
+      times more than the most those soft animals could bear. I'm older; I've
+      lived&mdash;I know things can't be put right by violence&mdash;nothing
+      will put things right, but that doesn't stop my feeling.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you do anything? You must tell me all now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We talked&mdash;we were always talking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, tell me everything!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Unconsciously she claimed, and he seemed unconsciously to admit her right
+      to this knowledge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's not much to tell. One day we began talking in low voices&mdash;Garin
+      began it; he had been in some affair in Russia. We took an oath; after
+      that we never raised our voices. We had a plan. It was all new to me, and
+      I hated the whole thing&mdash;but I was always hungry, or sick from taking
+      charity, and I would have done anything. They knew that; they used to look
+      at me and Schonborn; we knew that no one else had any courage. He and I
+      were great friends, but we never talked of that; we tried to keep our
+      minds away from the thought of it. If we had a good day and were not so
+      hungry, it seemed unnatural; but when the day had not been good&mdash;then
+      it seemed natural enough. I wasn't afraid, but I used to wake up in the
+      night; I hated the oath we had taken, I hated every one of those fellows;
+      the thing was not what I was made for, it wasn't my work, it wasn't my
+      nature, it was forced on me&mdash;I hated it, but sometimes I was like a
+      madman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, yes,&rdquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All this time I was working at the Academie, and learning all I could....
+      One evening that we met, Paunitz was not there. Misek was telling us how
+      the thing had been arranged. Schonborn and I looked at each other&mdash;it
+      was warm&mdash;perhaps we were not hungry&mdash;it was springtime, too,
+      and in the Spring it's different. There is something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;While we were talking there came a knock at the door. Lendorf put his eye
+      to the keyhole, and made a sign. The police were there. Nobody said
+      anything, but Misek crawled under the bed; we all followed; and the
+      knocking grew louder and louder. In the wall at the back of the bed was a
+      little door into an empty cellar. We crept through. There was a trap-door
+      behind some cases, where they used to roll barrels in. We crawled through
+      that into the back street. We went different ways.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused, and Christian gasped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought I would get my money, but there was a policeman before my door.
+      They had us finely. It was Paunitz; if I met him even now I should wring
+      his neck. I swore I wouldn't be caught, but I had no idea where to go.
+      Then I thought of a little Italian barber who used to shave me when I had
+      money for a shave; I knew he would help. He belonged to some Italian
+      Society; he often talked to me, under his breath, of course. I went to
+      him. He was shaving himself before going to a ball. I told him what had
+      happened; it was funny to see him put his back against the door. He was
+      very frightened, understanding this sort of thing better than I did&mdash;for
+      I was only twenty then. He shaved my head and moustache and put me on a
+      fair wig. Then he brought me macaroni, and some meat, to eat. He gave me a
+      big fair moustache, and a cap, and hid the moustache in the lining. He
+      brought me a cloak of his own, and four gulden. All the time he was
+      extremely frightened, and kept listening, and saying: 'Eat!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I had done, he just said: 'Go away, I refuse to know anything more
+      of you.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thanked him and went out. I walked about all that night; for I couldn't
+      think of anything to do or anywhere to go. In the morning I slept on a
+      seat in one of the squares. Then I thought I would go to the Gallerien;
+      and I spent the whole day looking at the pictures. When the Galleries were
+      shut I was very tired, so I went into a cafe, and had some beer. When I
+      came out I sat on the same seat in the Square. I meant to wait till dark
+      and then walk out of the city and take the train at some little station,
+      but while I was sitting there I went to sleep. A policeman woke me. He had
+      my wig in his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Why do you wear a wig?' he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I answered: 'Because I am bald.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'No,' he said, 'you're not bald, you've been shaved. I can feel the hair
+      coming.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He put his finger on my head. I felt reckless and laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Ah!' he said, 'you'll come with me and explain all this; your nose and
+      eyes are looked for.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I went with him quietly to the police-station....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz seemed carried away by his story. His quick dark face worked, his
+      steel-grey eyes stared as though he were again passing through all these
+      long-past emotions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The hot sun struck down; Christian drew herself together, sitting with her
+      hands clasped round her knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      X
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't care by then what came of it. I didn't even think what I was
+      going to say. He led me down a passage to a room with bars across the
+      windows and long seats, and maps on the walls. We sat and waited. He kept
+      his eye on me all the time; and I saw no hope. Presently the Inspector
+      came. 'Bring him in here,' he said; I remember feeling I could kill him
+      for ordering me about! We went into the next room. It had a large clock, a
+      writing-table, and a window, without bars, looking on a courtyard. Long
+      policemen's coats and caps were hanging from some pegs. The Inspector told
+      me to take off my cap. I took it off, wig and all. He asked me who I was,
+      but I refused to answer. Just then there was a loud sound of voices in the
+      room we had come from. The Inspector told the policeman to look after me,
+      and went to see what it was. I could hear him talking. He called out:
+      'Come here, Becker!' I stood very quiet, and Becker went towards the door.
+      I heard the Inspector say: 'Go and find Schwartz, I will see after this
+      fellow.' The policeman went, and the Inspector stood with his back to me
+      in the half-open door, and began again to talk to the man in the other
+      room. Once or twice he looked round at me, but I stood quiet all the time.
+      They began to disagree, and their voices got angry. The Inspector moved a
+      little into the other room. 'Now!' I thought, and slipped off my cloak. I
+      hooked off a policeman's coat and cap, and put them on. My heart beat till
+      I felt sick. I went on tiptoe to the window. There was no one outside, but
+      at the entrance a man was holding some horses. I opened the window a
+      little and held my breath. I heard the Inspector say: 'I will report you
+      for impertinence!' and slipped through the window. The coat came down
+      nearly to my heels, and the cap over my eyes. I walked up to the man with
+      the horses, and said: 'Good-evening.' One of the horses had begun to kick,
+      and he only grunted at me. I got into a passing tram; it was five minutes
+      to the West Bahnhof; I got out there. There was a train starting; they
+      were shouting 'Einsteigen!' I ran. The collector tried to stop me. I
+      shouted: 'Business&mdash;important!' He let me by. I jumped into a
+      carriage. The train started.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused, and Christian heaved a sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz went on, twisting a twig of ivy in his hands: &ldquo;There was another man
+      in the carriage reading a paper. Presently I said to him, 'Where do we
+      stop first?' 'St. Polten.' Then I knew it was the Munich express&mdash;St.
+      Polten, Amstetten, Linz, and Salzburg&mdash;four stops before the
+      frontier. The man put down his paper and looked at me; he had a big fair
+      moustache and rather shabby clothes. His looking at me disturbed me, for I
+      thought every minute he would say: 'You're no policeman!' And suddenly it
+      came into my mind that if they looked for me in this train, it would be as
+      a policeman!&mdash;they would know, of course, at the station that a
+      policeman had run past at the last minute. I wanted to get rid of the coat
+      and cap, but the man was there, and I didn't like to move out of the
+      carriage for other people to notice. So I sat on. We came to St. Polten at
+      last. The man in my carriage took his bag, got out, and left his paper on
+      the seat. We started again; I breathed at last, and as soon as I could
+      took the cap and coat and threw them out into the darkness. I thought: 'I
+      shall get across the frontier now.' I took my own cap out and found the
+      moustache Luigi gave me; rubbed my clothes as clean as possible; stuck on
+      the moustache, and with some little ends of chalk in my pocket made my
+      eyebrows light; then drew some lines in my face to make it older, and
+      pulled my cap well down above my wig. I did it pretty well&mdash;I was
+      quite like the man who had got out. I sat in his corner, took up his
+      newspaper, and waited for Amstetten. It seemed a tremendous time before we
+      got there. From behind my paper I could see five or six policemen on the
+      platform, one quite close. He opened the door, looked at me, and walked
+      through the carriage into the corridor. I took some tobacco and rolled up
+      a cigarette, but it shook, Harz lifted the ivy twig, like this. In a
+      minute the conductor and two more policemen came. 'He was here,' said the
+      conductor, 'with this gentleman.' One of them looked at me, and asked:
+      'Have you seen a policeman travelling on this train?' 'Yes,' I said.
+      'Where?' 'He got out at St. Polten.' The policeman asked the conductor:
+      'Did you see him get out there?' The conductor shook his head. I said: 'He
+      got out as the train was moving.' 'Ah!' said the policeman, 'what was he
+      like?' 'Rather short, and no moustache. Why?' 'Did you notice anything
+      unusual?' 'No,' I said, 'only that he wore coloured trousers. What's the
+      matter?' One policeman said to the other: 'That's our man! Send a telegram
+      to St. Polten; he has more than an hour's start.' He asked me where I was
+      going. I told him: 'Linz.' 'Ah!' he said, 'you'll have to give evidence;
+      your name and address please?' 'Josef Reinhardt, 17 Donau Strasse.' He
+      wrote it down. The conductor said: 'We are late, can we start?' They shut
+      the door. I heard them say to the conductor: 'Search again at Linz, and
+      report to the Inspector there.' They hurried on to the platform, and we
+      started. At first I thought I would get out as soon as the train had left
+      the station. Then, that I should be too far from the frontier; better to
+      go on to Linz and take my chance there. I sat still and tried not to
+      think.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After a long time, we began to run more slowly. I put my head out and
+      could see in the distance a ring of lights hanging in the blackness. I
+      loosened the carriage door and waited for the train to run slower still; I
+      didn't mean to go into Linz like a rat into a trap. At last I could wait
+      no longer; I opened the door, jumped and fell into some bushes. I was not
+      much hurt, but bruised, and the breath knocked out of me. As soon as I
+      could, I crawled out. It was very dark. I felt heavy and sore, and for
+      some time went stumbling in and out amongst trees. Presently I came to a
+      clear space; on one side I could see the town's shape drawn in lighted
+      lamps, and on the other a dark mass, which I think was forest; in the
+      distance too was a thin chain of lights. I thought: 'They must be the
+      lights of a bridge.' Just then the moon came out, and I could see the
+      river shining below. It was cold and damp, and I walked quickly. At last I
+      came out on a road, past houses and barking dogs, down to the river bank;
+      there I sat against a shed and went to sleep. I woke very stiff. It was
+      darker than before; the moon was gone. I could just see the river. I
+      stumbled on, to get through the town before dawn. It was all black
+      shapes-houses and sheds, and the smell of the river, the smell of rotting
+      hay, apples, tar, mud, fish; and here and there on a wharf a lantern. I
+      stumbled over casks and ropes and boxes; I saw I should never get clear&mdash;the
+      dawn had begun already on the other side. Some men came from a house
+      behind me. I bent, and crept behind some barrels. They passed along the
+      wharf; they seemed to drop into the river. I heard one of them say:
+      'Passau before night.' I stood up and saw they had walked on board a
+      steamer which was lying head up-stream, with some barges in tow. There was
+      a plank laid to the steamer, and a lantern at the other end. I could hear
+      the fellows moving below deck, getting up steam. I ran across the plank
+      and crept to the end of the steamer. I meant to go with them to Passau!
+      The rope which towed the barges was nearly taut; and I knew if I could get
+      on to the barges I should be safe. I climbed down on this rope and crawled
+      along. I was desperate, I knew they'd soon be coming up, and it was
+      getting light. I thought I should fall into the water several times, but I
+      got to the barge at last. It was laden with straw. There was nobody on
+      board. I was hungry and thirsty&mdash;I looked for something to eat; there
+      was nothing but the ashes of a fire and a man's coat. I crept into the
+      straw. Soon a boat brought men, one for each barge, and there were sounds
+      of steam. As soon as we began moving through the water, I fell asleep.
+      When I woke we were creeping through a heavy mist. I made a little hole in
+      the straw and saw the bargeman. He was sitting by a fire at the barge's
+      edge, so that the sparks and smoke blew away over the water. He ate and
+      drank with both hands, and funny enough he looked in the mist, like a big
+      bird flapping its wings; there was a good smell of coffee, and I sneezed.
+      How the fellow started! But presently he took a pitchfork and prodded the
+      straw. Then I stood up. I couldn't help laughing, he was so surprised&mdash;a
+      huge, dark man, with a great black beard. I pointed to the fire and said
+      'Give me some, brother!' He pulled me out of the straw; I was so stiff, I
+      couldn't move. I sat by the fire, and ate black bread and turnips, and
+      drank coffee; while he stood by, watching me and muttering. I couldn't
+      understand him well&mdash;he spoke a dialect from Hungary. He asked me:
+      How I got there&mdash;who I was&mdash;where I was from? I looked up in his
+      face, and he looked down at me, sucking his pipe. He was a big man, he
+      lived alone on the river, and I was tired of telling lies, so I told him
+      the whole thing. When I had done he just grunted. I can see him now
+      standing over me, with the mist hanging in his beard, and his great naked
+      arms. He drew me some water, and I washed and showed him my wig and
+      moustache, and threw them overboard. All that day we lay out on the barge
+      in the mist, with our feet to the fire, smoking; now and then he would
+      spit into the ashes and mutter into his beard. I shall never forget that
+      day. The steamer was like a monster with fiery nostrils, and the other
+      barges were dumb creatures with eyes, where the fires were; we couldn't
+      see the bank, but now and then a bluff and high trees, or a castle, showed
+      in the mist. If I had only had paint and canvas that day!&rdquo; He sighed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was early Spring, and the river was in flood; they were going to
+      Regensburg to unload there, take fresh cargo, and back to Linz. As soon as
+      the mist began to clear, the bargeman hid me in the straw. At Passau was
+      the frontier; they lay there for the night, but nothing happened, and I
+      slept in the straw. The next day I lay out on the barge deck; there was no
+      mist, but I was free&mdash;the sun shone gold on the straw and the green
+      sacking; the water seemed to dance, and I laughed&mdash;I laughed all the
+      time, and the barge man laughed with me. A fine fellow he was! At
+      Regensburg I helped them to unload; for more than a week we worked; they
+      nicknamed me baldhead, and when it was all over I gave the money I earned
+      for the unloading to the big bargeman. We kissed each other at parting. I
+      had still three of the gulden that Luigi gave me, and I went to a
+      house-painter and got work with him. For six months I stayed there to save
+      money; then I wrote to my mother's cousin in Vienna, and told him I was
+      going to London. He gave me an introduction to some friends there. I went
+      to Hamburg, and from there to London in a cargo steamer, and I've never
+      been back till now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0015" id="link2H_4_0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      After a minute's silence Christian said in a startled voice: &ldquo;They could
+      arrest you then!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If they knew; but it's seven years ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did you come here, when it's so dangerous?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had been working too hard, I wanted to see my country&mdash;after seven
+      years, and when it's forbidden! But I'm ready to go back now.&rdquo; He looked
+      down at her, frowning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Had you a hard time in London, too?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Harder, at first&mdash;I couldn't speak the language. In my profession
+      it's hard work to get recognised, it's hard work to make a living. There
+      are too many whose interest it is to keep you down&mdash;I shan't forget
+      them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But every one is not like that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; there are fine fellows, too. I shan't forget them either. I can sell
+      my pictures now; I'm no longer weak, and I promise you I shan't forget. If
+      in the future I have power, and I shall have power&mdash;I shan't forget.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A shower of fine gravel came rattling on the wall. Dawney was standing
+      below them with an amused expression on his upturned face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you going to stay there all night?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;Greta and I have bored
+      each other.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We're coming,&rdquo; called Christian hastily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the way back neither spoke a word, but when they reached the Villa,
+      Harz took her hand, and said: &ldquo;Fraulein Christian, I can't do any more
+      with your picture. I shan't touch it again after this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made no answer, but they looked at each other, and both seemed to ask,
+      to entreat, something more; then her eyes fell. He dropped her hand, and
+      saying, &ldquo;Good-night,&rdquo; ran after Dawney.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the corridor, Dominique, carrying a dish of fruit, met the sisters; he
+      informed them that Miss Naylor had retired to bed; that Herr Paul would
+      not be home to dinner; his master was dining in his room; dinner would be
+      served for Mrs. Decie and the two young ladies in a quarter of an hour:
+      &ldquo;And the fish is good to-night; little trouts! try them, Signorina!&rdquo; He
+      moved on quickly, softly, like a cat, the tails of his dress-coat
+      flapping, and the heels of his white socks gleaming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian ran upstairs. She flew about her room, feeling that if she once
+      stood still it would all crystallise in hard painful thought, which motion
+      alone kept away. She washed, changed her dress and shoes, and ran down to
+      her uncle's room. Mr. Treffry had just finished dinner, pushed the little
+      table back, and was sitting in his chair, with his glasses on his nose,
+      reading the Tines. Christian touched his forehead with her lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Glad to see you, Chris. Your stepfather's out to dinner, and I can't
+      stand your aunt when she's in one of her talking moods&mdash;bit of a
+      humbug, Chris, between ourselves; eh, isn't she?&rdquo; His eyes twinkled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian smiled. There was a curious happy restlessness in her that would
+      not let her keep still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Picture finished?&rdquo; Mr. Treffry asked suddenly, taking up the paper with a
+      crackle. &ldquo;Don't go and fall in love with the painter, Chris.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian was still enough now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Why not?' she thought. 'What should you know about him? Isn't he good
+      enough for me?' A gong sounded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's your dinner,&rdquo; Mr. Treffry remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With sudden contrition she bent and kissed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when she had left the room Mr. Treffry put down the Times and stared
+      at the door, humming to himself, and thoughtfully fingering his chin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian could not eat; she sat, indifferent to the hoverings of
+      Dominique, tormented by uneasy fear and longings. She answered Mrs. Decie
+      at random. Greta kept stealing looks at her from under her lashes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Decided characters are charming, don't you think so, Christian?&rdquo; Mrs.
+      Decie said, thrusting her chin a little forward, and modelling the words.
+      &ldquo;That is why I like Mr. Harz so much; such an immense advantage for a man
+      to know his mind. You have only to look at that young man to see that he
+      knows what he wants, and means to have it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian pushed her plate away. Greta, flushing, said abruptly: &ldquo;Doctor
+      Edmund is not a decided character, I think. This afternoon he said: 'Shall
+      I have some beer-yes, I shall&mdash;no, I shall not'. then he ordered the
+      beer, so, when it came, he gave it to the soldiers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Decie turned her enigmatic smile from one girl to the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When dinner was over they went into her room. Greta stole at once to the
+      piano, where her long hair fell almost to the keys; silently she sat there
+      fingering the notes, smiling to herself, and looking at her aunt, who was
+      reading Pater's essays. Christian too had taken up a book, but soon put it
+      down&mdash;of several pages she had not understood a word. She went into
+      the garden and wandered about the lawn, clasping her hands behind her
+      head. The air was heavy; very distant thunder trembled among the
+      mountains, flashes of summer lightning played over the trees; and two
+      great moths were hovering about a rosebush. Christian watched their soft
+      uncertain rushes. Going to the little summer-house she flung herself down
+      on a seat, and pressed her hands to her heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a strange and sudden aching there. Was he going from her? If so,
+      what would be left? How little and how narrow seemed the outlook of her
+      life&mdash;with the world waiting for her, the world of beauty, effort,
+      self-sacrifice, fidelity! It was as though a flash of that summer
+      lightning had fled by, singeing her, taking from her all powers of flight,
+      burning off her wings, as off one of those pale hovering moths. Tears
+      started up, and trickled down her face. 'Blind!' she thought; 'how could I
+      have been so blind?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some one came down the path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who's there?&rdquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz stood in the doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did you come out?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Ah! why did you come out?&rdquo; He caught her
+      hand; Christian tried to draw it from him, and to turn her eyes away, but
+      she could not. He flung himself down on his knees, and cried: &ldquo;I love
+      you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In a rapture of soft terror Christian bent her forehead down to his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you doing?&rdquo; she heard him say. &ldquo;Is it possible that you love
+      me?&rdquo; and she felt his kisses on her hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My sweet! it will be so hard for you; you are so little, so little, and
+      so weak.&rdquo; Clasping his hand closer to her face, she murmured: &ldquo;I don't
+      care.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a long, soft silence, that seemed to last for ever. Suddenly she
+      threw her arms round his neck and kissed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whatever comes!&rdquo; she whispered, and gathering her dress, escaped from him
+      into the darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0016" id="link2H_4_0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Christian woke next morning with a smile. In her attitudes, her voice, her
+      eyes, there was a happy and sweet seriousness, as if she were hugging some
+      holy thought. After breakfast she took a book and sat in the open window,
+      whence she could see the poplar-trees guarding the entrance. There was a
+      breeze; the roses close by kept nodding to her; the cathedral bells were
+      in full chime; bees hummed above the lavender; and in the sky soft clouds
+      were floating like huge, white birds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sounds of Miss Naylor's staccato dictation travelled across the room,
+      and Greta's sighs as she took it down, one eye on her paper, one eye on
+      Scruff, who lay with a black ear flapped across his paw, and his tan
+      eyebrows quivering. He was in disgrace, for Dominique, coming on him
+      unawares, had seen him &ldquo;say his prayers&rdquo; before a pudding, and take the
+      pudding for reward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian put her book down gently, and slipped through the window. Harz
+      was coming in from the road. &ldquo;I am all yours!&rdquo; she whispered. His fingers
+      closed on hers, and he went into the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She slipped back, took up her book, and waited. It seemed long before he
+      came out, but when he did he waved her back, and hurried on; she had a
+      glimpse of his face, white to the lips. Feeling faint and sick, she flew
+      to her stepfather's room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul was standing in a corner with the utterly disturbed appearance
+      of an easy-going man, visited by the unexpected. His fine shirt-front was
+      crumpled as if his breast had heaved too suddenly under strong emotion;
+      his smoked eyeglasses dangled down his back; his fingers were embedded in
+      his beard. He was fixing his eye on a spot in the floor as though he
+      expected it to explode and blow them to fragments. In another corner Mrs.
+      Decie, with half-closed eyes, was running her finger-tips across her brow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have you said to him?&rdquo; cried Christian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul regarded her with glassy eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mein Gott!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Your aunt and I!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have you said to him?&rdquo; repeated Christian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The impudence! An anarchist! A beggar!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Paul!&rdquo; murmured Mrs. Decie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The outlaw! The fellow!&rdquo; Herr Paul began to stride about the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Quivering from head to foot, Christian cried: &ldquo;How dared you?&rdquo; and ran
+      from the room, pushing aside Miss Naylor and Greta, who stood blanched and
+      frightened in the doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul stopped in his tramp, and, still with his eyes fixed on the
+      floor, growled:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A fine thing-hein? What's coming? Will you please tell me? An anarchist&mdash;a
+      beggar!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Paul!&rdquo; murmured Mrs. Decie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Paul! Paul! And you!&rdquo; he pointed to Miss Naylor&mdash;&ldquo;Two women with
+      eyes!&mdash;hein!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is nothing to be gained by violence,&rdquo; Mrs. Decie murmured, passing
+      her handkerchief across her lips. Miss Naylor, whose thin brown cheeks had
+      flushed, advanced towards him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope you do not&mdash;&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;I am sure there was nothing that I
+      could have prevented&mdash;I should be glad if that were understood.&rdquo; And,
+      turning with some dignity, the little lady went away, closing the door
+      behind her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You hear!&rdquo; Herr Paul said, violently sarcastic: &ldquo;nothing she could have
+      prevented! Enfin! Will you please tell me what I am to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Men of the world&rdquo;&mdash;whose philosophy is a creature of circumstance
+      and accepted things&mdash;find any deviation from the path of their
+      convictions dangerous, shocking, and an intolerable bore. Herr Paul had
+      spent his life laughing at convictions; the matter had but to touch him
+      personally, and the tap of laughter was turned off. That any one to whom
+      he was the lawful guardian should marry other than a well-groomed man,
+      properly endowed with goods, properly selected, was beyond expression
+      horrid. From his point of view he had great excuse for horror; and he was
+      naturally unable to judge whether he had excuse for horror from other
+      points of view. His amazement had in it a spice of the pathetic; he was
+      like a child in the presence of a thing that he absolutely could not
+      understand. The interview had left him with a sense of insecurity which he
+      felt to be particularly unfair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The door was again opened, and Greta flew in, her cheeks flushed, her hair
+      floating behind her, and tears streaming down her cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Papa!&rdquo; she cried, &ldquo;you have been cruel to Chris. The door is locked; I
+      can hear her crying&mdash;why have you been cruel?&rdquo; Without waiting to be
+      answered, she flew out again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul seized his hair with both his hands: &ldquo;Good! Very good! My own
+      child, please! What next then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Decie rose from her chair languidly. &ldquo;My head is very bad,&rdquo; she said,
+      shading her eyes and speaking in low tones: &ldquo;It is no use making a fuss&mdash;nothing
+      can come of this&mdash;he has not a penny. Christian will have nothing
+      till you die, which will not be for a long time yet, if you can but avoid
+      an apoplectic fit!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At these last words Herr Paul gave a start of real disgust. &ldquo;Hum!&rdquo; he
+      muttered; it was as if the world were bent on being brutal to him. Mrs.
+      Decie continued:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I know anything of this young man, he will not come here again, after
+      the words you have spoken. As for Christian&mdash;you had better talk to
+      Nicholas. I am going to lie down.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul nervously fingered the shirt-collar round his stout, short neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nicholas! Certainly&mdash;a good idea. Quelle diable d'afaire!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      'French!' thought Mrs. Decie; 'we shall soon have peace. Poor Christian!
+      I'm sorry! After all, these things are a matter of time and opportunity.'
+      This consoled her a good deal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But for Christian the hours were a long nightmare of grief and shame, fear
+      and anger. Would he forgive? Would he be true to her? Or would he go away
+      without a word? Since yesterday it was as if she had stepped into another
+      world, and lost it again. In place of that new feeling, intoxicating as
+      wine, what was coming? What bitter; dreadful ending?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A rude entrance this into the life of facts, and primitive emotions!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She let Greta into her room after a time, for the child had begun sobbing;
+      but she would not talk, and sat hour after hour at the window with the air
+      fanning her face, and the pain in her eyes turned to the sky and trees.
+      After one or two attempts at consolation, Greta sank on the floor, and
+      remained there, humbly gazing at her sister in a silence only broken when
+      Christian cleared her throat of tears, and by the song of birds in the
+      garden. In the afternoon she slipped away and did not come back again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After his interview with Mr. Treffry, Herr Paul took a bath, perfumed
+      himself with precision, and caused it to be clearly understood that, under
+      circumstances such as these, a man's house was not suited for a pig to
+      live in. He shortly afterwards went out to the Kurbaus, and had not
+      returned by dinner-time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian came down for dinner. There were crimson spots in her cheeks,
+      dark circles round her eyes; she behaved, however, as though nothing had
+      happened. Miss Naylor, affected by the kindness of her heart and the shock
+      her system had sustained, rolled a number of bread pills, looking at each
+      as it came, with an air of surprise, and concealing it with difficulty.
+      Mr. Treffry was coughing, and when he talked his voice seemed to rumble
+      even more than usual. Greta was dumb, trying to catch Christian's eye;
+      Mrs. Decie alone seemed at ease. After dinner Mr. Treffry went off to his
+      room, leaning heavily on Christian's shoulder. As he sank into his chair,
+      he said to her:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pull yourself together, my dear!&rdquo; Christian did not answer him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Outside his room Greta caught her by the sleeve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look!&rdquo; she whispered, thrusting a piece of paper into Christian's hand.
+      &ldquo;It is to me from Dr. Edmund, but you must read it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian opened the note, which ran as follows:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;MY PHILOSOPHER AND FRIEND,&mdash;I received your note, and went to our
+      friend's studio; he was not in, but half an hour ago I stumbled on him in
+      the Platz. He is not quite himself; has had a touch of the sun&mdash;nothing
+      serious: I took him to my hotel, where he is in bed. If he will stay there
+      he will be all right in a day or two. In any case he shall not elude my
+      clutches for the present.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My warm respects to Mistress Christian.&mdash;Yours in friendship and
+      philosophy,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;EDMUND DAWNEY.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian read and re-read this note, then turned to Greta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did you say to Dr. Dawney?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta took back the piece of paper, and replied: &ldquo;I said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'DEAR DR. EDMUND,&mdash;We are anxious about Herr Harz. We think he is
+      perhaps not very well to-day. We (I and Christian) should like to know.
+      You can tell us. Please shall you? GRETA.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is what I said.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian dropped her eyes. &ldquo;What made you write?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta gazed at her mournfully: &ldquo;I thought&mdash;O Chris! come into the
+      garden. I am so hot, and it is so dull without you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian bent her head forward and rubbed her cheek against Greta's, then
+      without another word ran upstairs and locked herself into her room. The
+      child stood listening; hearing the key turn in the lock, she sank down on
+      the bottom step and took Scruff in her arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Half an hour later Miss Naylor, carrying a candle, found her there fast
+      asleep, with her head resting on the terrier's back, and tear stains on
+      her cheeks....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Decie presently came out, also carrying a candle, and went to her
+      brother's room. She stood before his chair, with folded hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nicholas, what is to be done?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry was pouring whisky into a glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damn it, Con!&rdquo; he answered; &ldquo;how should I know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's something in Christian that makes interference dangerous. I know
+      very well that I've no influence with her at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're right there, Con,&rdquo; Mr. Treffry replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Decie's pale eyes, fastened on his face, forced him to look up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish you would leave off drinking whisky and attend to me. Paul is an
+      element&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Paul,&rdquo; Mr. Treffry growled, &ldquo;is an ass!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Paul,&rdquo; pursued Mrs. Decie, &ldquo;is an element of danger in the situation; any
+      ill-timed opposition of his might drive her to I don't know what.
+      Christian is gentle, she is 'sympathetic' as they say; but thwart her, and
+      she is as obstinate as....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You or I! Leave her alone!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I understand her character, but I confess that I am at a loss what to
+      do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do nothing!&rdquo; He drank again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Decie took up the candle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Men!&rdquo; she said with a mysterious intonation; shrugging her shoulders, she
+      walked out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry put down his glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Understand?' he thought; 'no, you don't, and I don't. Who understands a
+      young girl? Vapourings, dreams, moonshine I.... What does she see in this
+      painter fellow? I wonder!' He breathed heavily. 'By heavens! I wouldn't
+      have had this happen for a hundred thousand pounds!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0017" id="link2H_4_0017">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For many hours after Dawney had taken him to his hotel, Harz was prostrate
+      with stunning pains in the head and neck. He had been all day without
+      food, exposed to burning sun, suffering violent emotion. Movement of any
+      sort caused him such agony that he could only lie in stupor, counting the
+      spots dancing before, his eyes. Dawney did everything for him, and Harz
+      resented in a listless way the intent scrutiny of the doctor's calm, black
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Towards the end of the second day he was able to get up; Dawney found him
+      sitting on the bed in shirt and trousers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My son,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you had better tell me what the trouble is&mdash;it
+      will do your stubborn carcase good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must go back to work,&rdquo; said Harz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Work!&rdquo; said Dawney deliberately: &ldquo;you couldn't, if you tried.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear fellow, you couldn't tell one colour from another.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must be doing something; I can't sit here and think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dawney hooked his thumbs into his waistcoat: &ldquo;You won't see the sun for
+      three days yet, if I can help it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz got up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going to my studio to-morrow,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I promise not to go out. I
+      must be where I can see my work. If I can't paint, I can draw; I can feel
+      my brushes, move my things about. I shall go mad if I do nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dawney took his arm, and walked him up and down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll let you go,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but give me a chance! It's as much to me to
+      put you straight as it is to you to paint a decent picture. Now go to bed;
+      I'll have a carriage for you to-morrow morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz sat down on the bed again, and for a long time stayed without moving,
+      his eyes fixed on the floor. The sight of him, so desperate and miserable,
+      hurt the young doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can you get to bed by yourself?&rdquo; he asked at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, good-night, old chap!&rdquo; and Dawney left the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took his hat and turned towards the Villa. Between the poplars he
+      stopped to think. The farther trees were fret-worked black against the
+      lingering gold of the sunset; a huge moth, attracted by the tip of his
+      cigar, came fluttering in his face. The music of a concertina rose and
+      fell, like the sighing of some disillusioned spirit. Dawney stood for
+      several minutes staring at the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was shown to Mrs. Decie's room. She was holding a magazine before her
+      eyes, and received him with as much relief as philosophy permitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are the very person I wanted to see,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He noticed that the magazine she held was uncut.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a young man,&rdquo; pursued Mrs. Decie, &ldquo;but as my doctor I have a
+      right to your discretion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dawney smiled; the features of his broad, clean-shaven face looked
+      ridiculously small on such occasions, but his eyes retained their air of
+      calculation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is so,&rdquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is about this unfortunate affair. I understand that Mr. Harz is with
+      you. I want you to use your influence to dissuade him from attempting to
+      see my niece.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Influence!&rdquo; said Dawney; &ldquo;you know Harz!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Decie's voice hardened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everybody,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;has his weak points. This young man is open to
+      approach from at least two quarters&mdash;his pride is one, his work an
+      other. I am seldom wrong in gauging character; these are his vital spots,
+      and they are of the essence of this matter. I'm sorry for him, of course&mdash;but
+      at his age, and living a man's life, these things&mdash;&rdquo; Her smile was
+      extra pale. &ldquo;I wish you could give me something for my head. It's foolish
+      to worry. Nerves of course! But I can't help it! You know my opinion, Dr.
+      Dawney. That young man will go far if he remains unfettered; he will make
+      a name. You will be doing him a great service if you could show him the
+      affair as it really is&mdash;a drag on him, and quite unworthy of his
+      pride! Do help me! You are just the man to do it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dawney threw up his head as if to shake off this impeachment; the curve of
+      his chin thus displayed was imposing in its fulness; altogether he was
+      imposing, having an air of capability.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She struck him, indeed, as really scared; it was as if her mask of smile
+      had become awry, and failed to cover her emotion; and he was puzzled,
+      thinking, 'I wouldn't have believed she had it in her....' &ldquo;It's not an
+      easy business,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I'll think it over.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you!&rdquo; murmured Mrs. Decie. &ldquo;You are most kind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Passing the schoolroom, he looked in through the open door. Christian was
+      sitting there. The sight of her face shocked him, it was so white, so
+      resolutely dumb. A book lay on her knees; she was not reading, but staring
+      before her. He thought suddenly: 'Poor thing! If I don't say something to
+      her, I shall be a brute!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Devorell,&rdquo; he said: &ldquo;You can reckon on him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian tried to speak, but her lips trembled so that nothing came
+      forth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-night,&rdquo; said Dawney, and walked out....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Three days later Harz was sitting in the window of his studio. It was the
+      first day he had found it possible to work, and now, tired out, he stared
+      through the dusk at the slowly lengthening shadows of the rafters. A
+      solitary mosquito hummed, and two house sparrows, who had built beneath
+      the roof, chirruped sleepily. Swallows darted by the window, dipping their
+      blue wings towards the quiet water; a hush had stolen over everything. He
+      fell asleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He woke, with a dim impression of some near presence. In the pale glimmer
+      from innumerable stars, the room was full of shadowy shapes. He lit his
+      lantern. The flame darted forth, bickered, then slowly lit up the great
+      room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who's there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A rustling seemed to answer. He peered about, went to the doorway, and
+      drew the curtain. A woman's cloaked figure shrank against the wall. Her
+      face was buried in her hands; her arms, from which the cloak fell back,
+      were alone visible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Christian?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She ran past him, and when he had put the lantern down, was standing at
+      the window. She turned quickly to him. &ldquo;Take me away from here! Let me
+      come with you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You said you wouldn't give me up!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know what you are doing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made a motion of assent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you don't grasp what this means. Things to bear that you know nothing
+      of&mdash;hunger perhaps! Think, even hunger! And your people won't forgive&mdash;you'll
+      lose everything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must choose&mdash;it's one thing or the other. I can't give you up! I
+      should be afraid!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, dear; how can you come with me? We can't be married here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am giving my life to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are too good for me,&rdquo; said Harz. &ldquo;The life you're going into&mdash;may
+      be dark, like that!&rdquo; he pointed to the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A sound of footsteps broke the hush. They could see a figure on the path
+      below. It stopped, seemed to consider, vanished. They heard the sounds of
+      groping hands, of a creaking door, of uncertain feet on the stairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz seized her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quick!&rdquo; he whispered; &ldquo;behind this canvas!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian was trembling violently. She drew her hood across her face. The
+      heavy breathing and ejaculations of the visitor were now plainly audible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's there! Quick! Hide!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a thrill at his heart, Harz kissed her, then walked towards the
+      entrance. The curtain was pulled aside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0018" id="link2H_4_0018">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was Herr Paul, holding a cigar in one hand, his hat in the other, and
+      breathing hard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon!&rdquo; he said huskily, &ldquo;your stairs are steep, and dark! mais en, fin!
+      nous voila! I have ventured to come for a talk.&rdquo; His glance fell on the
+      cloaked figure in the shadow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon! A thousand pardons! I had no idea! I beg you to forgive this
+      indiscretion! I may take it you resign pretensions then? You have a lady
+      here&mdash;I have nothing more to say; I only beg a million pardons for
+      intruding. A thousand times forgive me! Good-night!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He bowed and turned to go. Christian stepped forward, and let the hood
+      fall from her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's I!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul pirouetted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good God!&rdquo; he stammered, dropping cigar and hat. &ldquo;Good God!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The lantern flared suddenly, revealing his crimson, shaking cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You came here, at night! You, the daughter of my wife!&rdquo; His eyes wandered
+      with a dull glare round the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take care!&rdquo; cried Harz: &ldquo;If you say a word against her&mdash;-&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two men stared at each other's eyes. And without warning, the lantern
+      flickered and went out. Christian drew the cloak round her again. Herr
+      Paul's voice broke the silence; he had recovered his self-possession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! ah!&rdquo; he said: &ldquo;Darkness! Tant mieux! The right thing for what we have
+      to say. Since we do not esteem each other, it is well not to see too
+      much.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just so,&rdquo; said Harz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian had come close to them. Her pale face and great shining eyes
+      could just be seen through the gloom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul waved his arm; the gesture was impressive, annihilating.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is a matter, I believe, between two men,&rdquo; he said, addressing Harz.
+      &ldquo;Let us come to the point. I will do you the credit to suppose that you
+      have a marriage in view. You know, perhaps, that Miss Devorell has no
+      money till I die?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I am passably young! You have money, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In that case, you would propose to live on air?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, to work; it has been done before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is calculated to increase hunger! You are prepared to take Miss
+      Devorell, a young lady accustomed to luxury, into places like&mdash;this!&rdquo;
+       he peered about him, &ldquo;into places that smell of paint, into the milieu of
+      'the people,' into the society of Bohemians&mdash;who knows? of
+      anarchists, perhaps?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz clenched his hands: &ldquo;I will answer no more questions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In that event, we reach the ultimatum,&rdquo; said Herr Paul. &ldquo;Listen, Herr
+      Outlaw! If you have not left the country by noon to-morrow, you shall be
+      introduced to the police!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian uttered a cry. For a minute in the gloom the only sound heard
+      was the short, hard breathing of the two men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Harz cried: &ldquo;You coward, I defy you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Coward!&rdquo; Herr Paul repeated. &ldquo;That is indeed the last word. Look to
+      yourself, my friend!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stooping and fumbling on the floor, he picked up his hat. Christian had
+      already vanished; the sound of her hurrying footsteps was distinctly
+      audible at the top of the dark stairs. Herr Paul stood still a minute.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look to yourself, my dear friend!&rdquo; he said in a thick voice, groping for
+      the wall. Planting his hat askew on his head, he began slowly to descend
+      the stairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0019" id="link2H_4_0019">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Nicholas Treffry sat reading the paper in his room by the light of a lamp
+      with a green shade; on his sound foot the terrier Scruff was asleep and
+      snoring lightly&mdash;the dog habitually came down when Greta was in bed,
+      and remained till Mr. Treffry, always the latest member of the household,
+      retired to rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through the long window a little river of light shone out on the veranda
+      tiles, and, flowing past, cut the garden in two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was the sound of hurried footsteps, a rustling of draperies;
+      Christian, running through the window, stood before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry dropped his paper, such a fury of passion and alarm shone in
+      the girl's eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Chris! What is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hateful!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Chris!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! Uncle! He's insulted, threatened! And I love his little finger more
+      than all the world!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her passionate voice trembled, her eyes were shining.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry's profound discomfort found vent in the gruff words: &ldquo;Sit
+      down!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll never speak to Father again! Oh! Uncle! I love him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Quiet in the extremity of his disturbance, Mr. Treffry leaned forward in
+      his chair, rested his big hands on its arms, and stared at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris! Here was a woman he did not know! His lips moved under the heavy
+      droop of his moustache. The girl's face had suddenly grown white. She sank
+      down on her knees, and laid her cheek against his hand. He felt it wet;
+      and a lump rose in his throat. Drawing his hand away, he stared at it, and
+      wiped it with his sleeve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't cry!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She seized it again and clung to it; that clutch seemed to fill him with
+      sudden rage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the matter? How the devil can I do anything if you don't tell me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked up at him. The distress of the last days, the passion and fear
+      of the last hour, the tide of that new life of the spirit and the flesh,
+      stirring within her, flowed out in a stream of words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she had finished, there was so dead a silence that the fluttering of
+      a moth round the lamp could be heard plainly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry raised himself, crossed the room, and touched the bell. &ldquo;Tell
+      the groom,&rdquo; he said to Dominique, &ldquo;to put the horses to, and have 'em
+      round at once; bring my old boots; we drive all night....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His bent figure looked huge, body and legs outlined by light, head and
+      shoulders towering into shadow. &ldquo;He shall have a run for his money!&rdquo; he
+      said. His eyes stared down sombrely at his niece. &ldquo;It's more than he
+      deserves!&mdash;it's more than you deserve, Chris. Sit down there and
+      write to him; tell him to put himself entirely in my hands.&rdquo; He turned his
+      back on her, and went into his bedroom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian rose, and sat down at the writing-table. A whisper startled her.
+      It came from Dominique, who was holding out a pair of boots.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;M'mselle Chris, what is this?&mdash;to run about all night?&rdquo; But
+      Christian did not answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;M'mselle Chris, are you ill?&rdquo; Then seeing her face, he slipped away
+      again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She finished her letter and went out to the carriage. Mr. Treffry was
+      seated under the hood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shan't want you,&rdquo; he called out to the groom, &ldquo;Get up, Dominique.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian thrust her letter into his hand. &ldquo;Give him that,&rdquo; she said,
+      clinging to his arm with sudden terror. &ldquo;Oh! Uncle! do take care!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Chris, if I do this for you&mdash;&rdquo; They looked wistfully at one another.
+      Then, shaking his head, Mr. Treffry gathered up the reins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't fret, my dear, don't fret! Whoa, mare!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The carriage with a jerk plunged forward into darkness, curved with a
+      crunch of wheels, and vanished, swinging between the black tree-pillars at
+      the entrance....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian stood, straining to catch the failing sound of the hoofs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Down the passage came a flutter of white garments; soft limbs were twined
+      about her, some ends of hair fell on her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it, Chris? Where have you been? Where is Uncle Nic going? Tell
+      me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian tore herself away. &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; she cried, &ldquo;I know nothing!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta stroked her face. &ldquo;Poor Chris!&rdquo; she murmured. Her bare feet gleamed,
+      her hair shone gold against her nightdress. &ldquo;Come to bed, poor Chris!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian laughed. &ldquo;You little white moth! Feel how hot I am! You'll burn
+      your wings!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0020" id="link2H_4_0020">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XVI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Harz had lain down, fully dressed. He was no longer angry, but felt that
+      he would rather die than yield. Presently he heard footsteps coming up the
+      stairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;M'sieu!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the voice of Dominique, whose face, illumined by a match, wore an
+      expression of ironical disgust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My master,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;makes you his compliments; he says there is no time
+      to waste. You are to please come and drive with him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your master is very kind. Tell him I'm in bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, M'sieu,&rdquo; said Dominique, grimacing, &ldquo;I must not go back with such an
+      answer. If you would not come, I was to give you this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz broke the seal and read Christian's letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will come,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A clock was striking as they went out through the gate. From within the
+      dark cave of the phaeton hood Mr. Treffry said gruffly: &ldquo;Come along, sir!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz flung his knapsack in, and followed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His companion's figure swayed, the whiplash slid softly along the flank of
+      the off horse, and, as the carriage rattled forward, Mr. Treffry called
+      out, as if by afterthought: &ldquo;Hallo, Dominique!&rdquo; Dominque's voice, shaken
+      and ironical, answered from behind: &ldquo;M'v'la, M'sieu!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the long street of silent houses, men sitting in the lighted cafes
+      turned with glasses at their lips to stare after the carriage. The narrow
+      river of the sky spread suddenly to a vast, limpid ocean tremulous with
+      stars. They had turned into the road for Italy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry took a pull at his horses. &ldquo;Whoa, mare! Dogged does it!&rdquo; and
+      the near horse, throwing up her head, whinnied; a fleck of foam drifted
+      into Harz's face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The painter had come on impulse; because Christian had told him to, not of
+      his own free will. He was angry with himself, wounded in self-esteem, for
+      having allowed any one to render him this service. The smooth swift
+      movement through velvet blackness splashed on either hand with the flying
+      lamp-light; the strong sweet air blowing in his face-air that had kissed
+      the tops of mountains and stolen their spirit; the snort and snuffle of
+      the horses, and crisp rattling of their hoofs&mdash;all this soon roused
+      in him another feeling. He looked at Mr. Treffry's profile, with its
+      tufted chin; at the grey road adventuring in darkness; at the purple mass
+      of mountains piled above it. All seemed utterly unreal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As if suddenly aware that he had a neighbour, Mr. Treffry turned his head.
+      &ldquo;We shall do better than this presently,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;bit of a slope coming.
+      Haven't had 'em out for three days. Whoa-mare! Steady!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why are you taking this trouble for me?&rdquo; asked Harz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm an old chap, Mr. Harz, and an old chap may do a stupid thing once in
+      a while!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are very good,&rdquo; said Harz, &ldquo;but I want no favours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry stared at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just so,&rdquo; he said drily, &ldquo;but you see there's my niece to be thought of.
+      Look here! We're not at the frontier yet, Mr. Harz, by forty miles; it's
+      long odds we don't get there&mdash;so, don't spoil sport!&rdquo; He pointed to
+      the left.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz caught the glint of steel. They were already crossing the railway.
+      The sigh of the telegraph wires fluttered above them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hear 'em,&rdquo; said Mr. Treffry, &ldquo;but if we get away up the mountains, we'll
+      do yet!&rdquo; They had begun to rise, the speed slackened. Mr. Treffry rummaged
+      out a flask.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not bad stuff, Mr. Harz&mdash;try it. You won't? Mother's milk! Fine
+      night, eh?&rdquo; Below them the valley was lit by webs of milky mist like the
+      glimmer of dew on grass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These two men sitting side by side&mdash;unlike in face, age, stature,
+      thought, and life&mdash;began to feel drawn towards each other, as if, in
+      the rolling of the wheels, the snorting of the horses, the huge dark
+      space, the huge uncertainty, they had found something they could enjoy in
+      common. The steam from the horses' flanks and nostrils enveloped them with
+      an odour as of glue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You smoke, Mr. Harz?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz took the proffered weed, and lighted it from the glowing tip of Mr.
+      Treffry's cigar, by light of which his head and hat looked like some giant
+      mushroom. Suddenly the wheels jolted on a rubble of loose stones; the
+      carriage was swung sideways. The scared horses, straining asunder, leaped
+      forward, and sped downwards, in the darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Past rocks, trees, dwellings, past a lighted house that gleamed and
+      vanished. With a clink and clatter, a flirt of dust and pebbles, and the
+      side lamps throwing out a frisky orange blink, the carriage dashed down,
+      sinking and rising like a boat crossing billows. The world seemed to rock
+      and sway; to dance up, and be flung flat again. Only the stars stood
+      still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry, putting on the brake, muttered apologetically: &ldquo;A little out
+      o'hand!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly with a headlong dive, the carriage swayed as if it would fly in
+      pieces, slithered along, and with a jerk steadied itself. Harz lifted his
+      voice in a shout of pure excitement. Mr. Treffry let out a short shaky
+      howl, and from behind there rose a wail. But the hill was over and the
+      startled horses were cantering with a free, smooth motion. Mr. Treffry and
+      Harz looked at each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry said with a sort of laugh: &ldquo;Near go, eh? You drive? No? That's
+      a pity! Broken most of my bones at the game&mdash;nothing like it!&rdquo; Each
+      felt a kind of admiration for the other that he had not felt before.
+      Presently Mr. Treffry began: &ldquo;Look here, Mr. Harz, my niece is a slip of a
+      thing, with all a young girl's notions! What have you got to give her, eh?
+      Yourself? That's surely not enough; mind this&mdash;six months after
+      marriage we all turn out much the same&mdash;a selfish lot! Not to mention
+      this anarchist affair!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're not of her blood, nor of her way of life, nor anything&mdash;it's
+      taking chances&mdash;and&mdash;&rdquo; his hand came down on the young man's
+      knee, &ldquo;I'm fond of her, you see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you were in my place,&rdquo; said Harz, &ldquo;would you give her up?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry groaned. &ldquo;Lord knows!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Men have made themselves before now. For those who don't believe in
+      failure, there's no such thing. Suppose she does suffer a little? Will it
+      do her any harm? Fair weather love is no good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry sighed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Brave words, sir! You'll pardon me if I'm too old to understand 'em when
+      they're used about my niece.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He pulled the horses up, and peered into the darkness. &ldquo;We're going
+      through this bit quietly; if they lose track of us here so much the
+      better. Dominique! put out the lamps. Soho, my beauties!&rdquo; The horses paced
+      forward at a walk the muffled beat of their hoofs in the dust hardly broke
+      the hush. Mr. Treffry pointed to the left: &ldquo;It'll be another thirty-five
+      miles to the frontier.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They passed the whitewashed houses, and village church with its sentinel
+      cypress-trees. A frog was croaking in a runlet; there was a faint spicy
+      scent of lemons. But nothing stirred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was wood now on either side, the high pines, breathing their fragrance
+      out into the darkness, and, like ghosts amongst them, the silver stems of
+      birch-trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry said gruffly: &ldquo;You won't give her up? Her happiness means a
+      lot to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To you!&rdquo; said Harz: &ldquo;to him! And I am nothing! Do you think I don't care
+      for her happiness? Is it a crime for me to love her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Almost, Mr. Harz&mdash;considering....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Considering that I've no money! Always money!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To this sneer Mr. Treffry made no answer, clucking to his horses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My niece was born and bred a lady,&rdquo; he said at last. &ldquo;I ask you plainly
+      What position have you got to give her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If she marries me,&rdquo; said Harz, &ldquo;she comes into my world. You think that
+      I'm a common....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry shook his head: &ldquo;Answer my question, young man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But the painter did not answer it, and silence fell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A light breeze had sprung up; the whispering in the trees, the rolling of
+      the wheels in this night progress, the pine-drugged air, sent Harz to
+      sleep. When he woke it was to the same tune, varied by Mr. Treffry's
+      uneasy snoring; the reins were hanging loose, and, peering out, he saw
+      Dominique shuffling along at the horses' heads. He joined him, and, one on
+      each side, they plodded up and up. A haze had begun to bathe the trees,
+      the stars burnt dim, the air was colder. Mr. Treffry woke coughing. It was
+      like some long nightmare, this interminable experience of muffled sounds
+      and shapes, of perpetual motion, conceived, and carried out in darkness.
+      But suddenly the day broke. Heralded by the snuffle of the horses, light
+      began glimmering over a chaos of lines and shadows, pale as
+      mother-o'-pearl. The stars faded, and in a smouldering zigzag the dawn
+      fled along the mountain tops, flinging out little isles of cloud. From a
+      lake, curled in a hollow like a patch of smoke, came the cry of a
+      water-bird. A cuckoo started a soft mocking; and close to the carriage a
+      lark flew up. Beasts and men alike stood still, drinking in the air&mdash;sweet
+      with snows and dew, and vibrating faintly with the running of the water
+      and the rustling of the leaves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The night had played sad tricks with Mr. Nicholas Treffry; his hat was
+      grey with dust; his cheeks brownish-purple, there were heavy pouches
+      beneath his eyes, which stared painfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'll call a halt,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and give the gees their grub, poor things.
+      Can you find some water, Mr. Harz? There's a rubber bucket in behind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can't get about myself this morning; make that lazy fellow of mine stir
+      his stumps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz saw that he had drawn off one of his boots, and stretched the foot
+      out on a cushion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're not fit to go farther,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;you're ill.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ill!&rdquo; replied Mr. Treffry; &ldquo;not a bit of it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz looked at him, then catching up the bucket, made off in search of
+      water. When he came back the horses were feeding from an india-rubber
+      trough slung to the pole; they stretched their heads towards the bucket,
+      pushing aside each other's noses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The flame in the east had died, but the tops of the larches were bathed in
+      a gentle radiance; and the peaks ahead were like amber. Everywhere were
+      threads of water, threads of snow, and little threads of dewy green,
+      glistening like gossamer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry called out: &ldquo;Give me your arm, Mr. Harz; I'd like to shake the
+      reefs out of me. When one comes to stand over at the knees, it's no such
+      easy matter, eh?&rdquo; He groaned as he put his foot down, and gripped the
+      young man's shoulder as in a vise. Presently he lowered himself on to a
+      stone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'All over now!' as Chris would say when she was little; nasty temper she
+      had too&mdash;kick and scream on the floor! Never lasted long though....
+      'Kiss her! take her up! show her the pictures!' Amazing fond of pictures
+      Chris was!&rdquo; He looked dubiously at Harz; then took a long pull at his
+      flask. &ldquo;What would the doctor say? Whisky at four in the morning! Well!
+      Thank the Lord Doctors aren't always with us.&rdquo; Sitting on the stone, with
+      one hand pressed against his side, and the other tilting up the flask, he
+      was grey from head to foot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz had dropped on to another stone. He, too, was worn out by the
+      excitement and fatigue, coming so soon after his illness. His head was
+      whirling, and the next thing he remembered was a tree walking at him,
+      turning round, yellow from the roots up; everything seemed yellow, even
+      his own feet. Somebody opposite to him was jumping up and down, a grey
+      bear&mdash;with a hat&mdash;Mr. Treffry! He cried: &ldquo;Ha-alloo!&rdquo; And the
+      figure seemed to fall and disappear....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Harz came to himself a hand was pouring liquor into his mouth, and a
+      wet cloth was muffled round his brows; a noise of humming and hoofs seemed
+      familiar. Mr. Treffry loomed up alongside, smoking a cigar; he was
+      muttering: &ldquo;A low trick, Paul&mdash;bit of my mind!&rdquo; Then, as if a curtain
+      had been snatched aside, the vision before Harz cleared again. The
+      carriage was winding between uneven, black-eaved houses, past doorways
+      from which goats and cows were coming out, with bells on their necks.
+      Black-eyed boys, and here and there a drowsy man with a long,
+      cherry-stemmed pipe between his teeth, stood aside to stare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry seemed to have taken a new lease of strength; like an angry
+      old dog, he stared from side to side. &ldquo;My bone!&rdquo; he seemed to say: &ldquo;let's
+      see who's going to touch it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The last house vanished, glowing in the early sunshine, and the carriage
+      with its trail of dust became entombed once more in the gloom of tall
+      trees, along a road that cleft a wilderness of mossgrown rocks, and dewy
+      stems, through which the sun had not yet driven paths.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dominique came round to them, bearing appearance of one who has seen
+      better days, and a pot of coffee brewed on a spirit lamp. Breakfast&mdash;he
+      said&mdash;was served!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ears of the horses were twitching with fatigue. Mr. Treffry said
+      sadly: &ldquo;If I can see this through, you can. Get on, my beauties!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As soon as the sun struck through the trees, Mr. Treffry's strength ebbed
+      again. He seemed to suffer greatly; but did not complain. They had reached
+      the pass at last, and the unchecked sunlight was streaming down with a
+      blinding glare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jump up!&rdquo; Mr. Treffry cried out. &ldquo;We'll make a finish of it!&rdquo; and he gave
+      the reins a jerk. The horses flung up their heads, and the bleak pass with
+      its circling crown of jagged peaks soon slipped away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Between the houses on the very top, they passed at a slow trot; and soon
+      began slanting down the other side. Mr. Treffry brought them to a halt
+      where a mule track joined the road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's all I can do for you; you'd better leave me here,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Keep
+      this track down to the river&mdash;go south&mdash;you'll be in Italy in a
+      couple of hours. Get rail at Feltre. Money? Yes? Well!&rdquo; He held out his
+      hand; Harz gripped it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give her up, eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No? Then it's 'pull devil, pull baker,' between us. Good-bye, and good
+      luck to you!&rdquo; And mustering his strength for a last attempt at dignity,
+      Mr. Treffry gathered up the reins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz watched his figure huddled again beneath the hood. The carriage moved
+      slowly away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0022" id="link2H_4_0022">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XVIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      At Villa Rubein people went about, avoiding each other as if detected in
+      conspiracy. Miss Naylor, who for an inscrutable reason had put on her best
+      frock, a purple, relieved at the chest with bird's-eye blue, conveyed an
+      impression of trying to count a chicken which ran about too fast. When
+      Greta asked what she had lost she was heard to mutter: &ldquo;Mr.&mdash;Needlecase.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian, with big circles round her eyes, sat silent at her little
+      table. She had had no sleep. Herr Paul coming into the room about noon
+      gave her a furtive look and went out again; after this he went to his
+      bedroom, took off all his clothes, flung them passionately one by one into
+      a footbath, and got into bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I might be a criminal!&rdquo; he muttered to himself, while the buttons of his
+      garments rattled on the bath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I her father? Have I authority? Do I know the world? Bssss! I might be
+      a frog!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Decie, having caused herself to be announced, found him smoking a
+      cigar, and counting the flies on the ceiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you have really done this, Paul,&rdquo; she said in a restrained voice, &ldquo;you
+      have done a very unkind thing, and what is worse, you have made us all
+      ridiculous. But perhaps you have not done it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have done it,&rdquo; cried Herr Paul, staring dreadfully: &ldquo;I have done it, I
+      tell you, I have done it&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well, you have done it&mdash;and why, pray? What conceivable good
+      was there in it? I suppose you know that Nicholas has driven him to the
+      frontier? Nicholas is probably more dead than alive by this time; you know
+      his state of health.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul's fingers ploughed up his beard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nicholas is mad&mdash;and the girl is mad! Leave me alone! I will not be
+      made angry; do you understand? I will not be worried&mdash;I am not fit
+      for it.&rdquo; His prominent brown eyes stared round the room, as if looking for
+      a way of escape.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I may prophesy, you will be worried a good deal,&rdquo; said Mrs. Decie
+      coldly, &ldquo;before you have finished with this affair.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The anxious, uncertain glance which Herr Paul gave her at these words
+      roused an unwilling feeling of compunction in her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are not made for the outraged father of the family,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You
+      had better give up the attitude, Paul; it does not suit you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul groaned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose it is not your fault,&rdquo; she added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just then the door was opened, and Fritz, with an air of saying the right
+      thing, announced:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A gentleman of the police to see you, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul bounded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Keep him out!&rdquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Decie, covering her lips, disappeared with a rustling of silk; in her
+      place stood a stiff man in blue....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus the morning dragged itself away without any one being able to settle
+      to anything, except Herr Paul, who was settled in bed. As was fitting in a
+      house that had lost its soul, meals were neglected, even by the dog.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About three o'clock a telegram came for Christian, containing these words:
+      &ldquo;All right; self returns to-morrow. Treffry.&rdquo; After reading it she put on
+      her hat and went out, followed closely by Greta, who, when she thought
+      that she would not be sent away, ran up from behind and pulled her by the
+      sleeve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me come, Chris&mdash;I shall not talk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two girls walked on together. When they had gone some distance
+      Christian said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going to get his pictures, and take charge of them!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; said Greta timidly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you are afraid,&rdquo; said Christian, &ldquo;you had better go back home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not afraid, Chris,&rdquo; said Greta meekly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Neither girl spoke again till they had taken the path along the wall. Over
+      the tops of the vines the heat was dancing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The sun-fairies are on the vines!&rdquo; murmured Greta to herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the old house they stopped, and Christian, breathing quickly, pushed
+      the door; it was immovable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look!&rdquo; said Greta, &ldquo;they have screwed it!&rdquo; She pointed out three screws
+      with a rosy-tipped forefinger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian stamped her foot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We mustn't stand here,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;let's sit on that bench and think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; murmured Greta, &ldquo;let us think.&rdquo; Dangling an end of hair, she
+      regarded Christian with her wide blue eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't make any plan,&rdquo; Christian cried at last, &ldquo;while you stare at me
+      like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was thinking,&rdquo; said Greta humbly, &ldquo;if they have screwed it up, perhaps
+      we shall screw it down again; there is the big screw-driver of Fritz.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would take a long time; people are always passing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;People do not pass in the evening,&rdquo; murmured Greta, &ldquo;because the gate at
+      our end is always shut.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian rose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will come this evening, just before the gate is shut.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Chris, how shall we get back again?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know; I mean to have the pictures.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not a high gate,&rdquo; murmured Greta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After dinner the girls went to their room, Greta bearing with her the big
+      screw-driver of Fritz. At dusk they slipped downstairs and out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They arrived at the old house, and stood, listening, in the shadow of the
+      doorway. The only sounds were those of distant barking dogs, and of the
+      bugles at the barracks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quick!&rdquo; whispered Christian; and Greta, with all the strength of her
+      small hands, began to turn the screws. It was some time before they
+      yielded; the third was very obstinate, till Christian took the
+      screw-driver and passionately gave the screw a starting twist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is like a pig&mdash;that one,&rdquo; said Greta, rubbing her wrists
+      mournfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The opened door revealed the gloom of the dank rooms and twisting
+      staircase, then fell to behind them with a clatter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta gave a little scream, and caught her sister's dress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is dark,&rdquo; she gasped; &ldquo;O Chris! it is dark!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian groped for the bottom stair, and Greta felt her arm shaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose there is a man to keep guard! O Chris! suppose there are bats!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a baby!&rdquo; Christian answered in a trembling voice. &ldquo;You had better
+      go home!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta choked a little in the dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am&mdash;not&mdash;going home, but I'm afraid of bats. O Chris! aren't
+      you afraid?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Christian, &ldquo;but I'm going to have the pictures.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her cheeks were burning; she was trembling all over. Having found the
+      bottom step she began to mount with Greta clinging to her skirts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The haze above inspired a little courage in the child, who, of all things,
+      hated darkness. The blanket across the doorway of the loft had been taken
+      down, there was nothing to veil the empty room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nobody here, you see,&rdquo; said Christian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No-o,&rdquo; whispered Greta, running to the window, and clinging to the wall,
+      like one of the bats she dreaded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But they have been here!&rdquo; cried Christian angrily. &ldquo;They have broken
+      this.&rdquo; She pointed to the fragments of a plaster cast that had been thrown
+      down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Out of the corner she began to pull the canvases set in rough, wooden
+      frames, dragging them with all her strength.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Help me!&rdquo; she cried; &ldquo;it will be dark directly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They collected a heap of sketches and three large pictures, piling them
+      before the window, and peering at them in the failing light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta said ruefully:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O Chris! they are heavy ones; we shall never carry them, and the gate is
+      shut now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian took a pointed knife from the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall cut them out of the frames,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Listen! What's that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the sound of whistling, which stopped beneath the window. The
+      girls, clasping each other's hands, dropped on their knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hallo!&rdquo; cried a voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta crept to the window, and, placing her face level with the floor,
+      peered over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is only Dr. Edmund; he doesn't know, then,&rdquo; she whispered; &ldquo;I shall
+      call him; he is going away!&rdquo; cried Christian catching her sister's&mdash;&ldquo;Don't!&rdquo;
+       cried Christian catching her sister's dress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He would help us,&rdquo; Greta said reproachfully, &ldquo;and it would not be so dark
+      if he were here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian's cheeks were burning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't choose,&rdquo; she said, and began handling the pictures, feeling their
+      edges with her knife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Chris! Suppose anybody came?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The door is screwed,&rdquo; Christian answered absently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O Chris! We screwed it unscrewed; anybody who wishes shall come!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian, leaning her chin in her hands, gazed at her thoughtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will take a long time to cut these pictures out carefully; or, perhaps
+      I can get them out without cutting. You must screw me up and go home. In
+      the morning you must come early, when the gate is open, unscrew me again,
+      and help carry the pictures.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta did not answer at once. At last she shook her head violently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am afraid,&rdquo; she gasped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We can't both stay here all night,&rdquo; said Christian; &ldquo;if any one comes to
+      our room there will be nobody to answer. We can't lift these pictures over
+      the gate. One of us must go back; you can climb over the gate&mdash;there
+      is nothing to be afraid of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta pressed her hands together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you want the pictures badly, Chris?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very badly?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;yes&mdash;yes!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta remained sitting where she was, shivering violently, as a little
+      animal shivers when it scents danger. At last she rose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going,&rdquo; she said in a despairing voice. At the doorway she turned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If Miss Naylor shall ask me where you are, Chris, I shall be telling her
+      a story.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian started.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I forgot that&mdash;O Greta, I am sorry! I will go instead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta took another step&mdash;a quick one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall die if I stay here alone,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;I can tell her that you are
+      in bed; you must go to bed here, Chris, so it shall be true after all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian threw her arms about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am so sorry, darling; I wish I could go instead. But if you have to
+      tell a lie, I would tell a straight one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you?&rdquo; said Greta doubtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said Greta to herself, beginning to descend the stairs, &ldquo;I
+      think I will tell it in my way.&rdquo; She shuddered and went on groping in the
+      darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian listened for the sound of the screws. It came slowly,
+      threatening her with danger and solitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sinking on her knees she began to work at freeing the canvas of a picture.
+      Her heart throbbed distressfully; at the stir of wind-breath or any
+      distant note of clamour she stopped, and held her breathing. No sounds
+      came near. She toiled on, trying only to think that she was at the very
+      spot where last night his arms had been round her. How long ago it seemed!
+      She was full of vague terror, overmastered by the darkness, dreadfully
+      alone. The new glow of resolution seemed suddenly to have died down in her
+      heart, and left her cold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She would never be fit to be his wife, if at the first test her courage
+      failed! She set her teeth; and suddenly she felt a kind of exultation, as
+      if she too were entering into life, were knowing something within herself
+      that she had never known before. Her fingers hurt, and the pain even gave
+      pleasure; her cheeks were burning; her breath came fast. They could not
+      stop her now! This feverish task in darkness was her baptism into life.
+      She finished; and rolling the pictures very carefully, tied them with
+      cord. She had done something for him! Nobody could take that from her! She
+      had a part of him! This night had made him hers! They might do their
+      worst! She lay down on his mattress and soon fell asleep....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was awakened by Scruff's tongue against her face. Greta was standing
+      by her side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wake up, Chris! The gate is open!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the cold early light the child seemed to glow with warmth and colour;
+      her eyes were dancing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not afraid now; Scruff and I sat up all night, to catch the morning&mdash;I&mdash;think
+      it was fun; and O Chris!&rdquo; she ended with a rueful gleam in her eyes, &ldquo;I
+      told it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian hugged her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come&mdash;quick! There is nobody about. Are those the pictures?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Each supporting an end, the girls carried the bundle downstairs, and set
+      out with their corpse-like burden along the wall-path between the river
+      and the vines.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0023" id="link2H_4_0023">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Hidden by the shade of rose-bushes Greta lay stretched at length, cheek on
+      arm, sleeping the sleep of the unrighteous. Through the flowers the sun
+      flicked her parted lips with kisses, and spilled the withered petals on
+      her. In a denser islet of shade, Scruff lay snapping at a fly. His head
+      lolled drowsily in the middle of a snap, and snapped in the middle of a
+      loll.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At three o'clock Miss Naylor too came out, carrying a basket and pair of
+      scissors. Lifting her skirts to avoid the lakes of water left by the
+      garden hose, she stopped in front of a rose-bush, and began to snip off
+      the shrivelled flowers. The little lady's silvered head and thin, brown
+      face sustained the shower of sunlight unprotected, and had a gentle
+      dignity in their freedom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently, as the scissors flittered in and out of the leaves, she, began
+      talking to herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If girls were more like what they used to be, this would not have
+      happened. Perhaps we don't understand; it's very easy to forget.&rdquo; Burying
+      her nose and lips in a rose, she sniffed. &ldquo;Poor dear girl! It's such a
+      pity his father is&mdash;a&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A farmer,&rdquo; said a sleepy voice behind the rosebush.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Naylor leaped. &ldquo;Greta! How you startled me! A farmer&mdash;that is&mdash;an&mdash;an
+      agriculturalist!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A farmer with vineyards&mdash;he told us, and he is not ashamed. Why is
+      it a pity, Miss Naylor?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Naylor's lips looked very thin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For many reasons, of which you know nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is what you always say,&rdquo; pursued the sleepy voice; &ldquo;and that is why,
+      when I am to be married, there shall also be a pity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Greta!&rdquo; Miss Naylor cried, &ldquo;it is not proper for a girl of your age to
+      talk like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo; said Greta. &ldquo;Because it is the truth?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Naylor made no reply to this, but vexedly cut off a sound rose, which
+      she hastily picked up and regarded with contrition. Greta spoke again:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Chris said: 'I have got the pictures, I shall tell her'. but I shall tell
+      you instead, because it was I that told the story.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Naylor stared, wrinkling her nose, and holding the scissors wide
+      apart....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Last night,&rdquo; said Greta slowly, &ldquo;I and Chris went to his studio and took
+      his pictures, and so, because the gate was shut, I came back to tell it;
+      and when you asked me where Chris was, I told it; because she was in the
+      studio all night, and I and Scruff sat up all night, and in the morning we
+      brought the pictures, and hid them under our beds, and that is why&mdash;we&mdash;are&mdash;so&mdash;sleepy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Over the rose-bush Miss Naylor peered down at her; and though she was
+      obliged to stand on tiptoe this did not altogether destroy her dignity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am surprised at you, Greta; I am surprised at Christian, more surprised
+      at Christian. The world seems upside down.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta, a sunbeam entangled in her hair, regarded her with inscrutable,
+      innocent eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When you were a girl, I think you would be sure to be in love,&rdquo; she
+      murmured drowsily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Naylor, flushing deeply, snipped off a particularly healthy bud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so, because you are not married, I think&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The scissors hissed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta nestled down again. &ldquo;I think it is wicked to cut off all the good
+      buds,&rdquo; she said, and shut her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Naylor continued to peer across the rosebush; but her thin face,
+      close to the glistening leaves, had become oddly soft, pink, and girlish.
+      At a deeper breath from Greta, the little lady put down her basket, and
+      began to pace the lawn, followed dubiously by Scruff. It was thus that
+      Christian came on them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Naylor slipped her arm into the girl's and though she made no sound,
+      her lips kept opening and shutting, like the beak of a bird contemplating
+      a worm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian spoke first:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Naylor, I want to tell you please&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, my dear! I know; Greta has been in the confessional before you.&rdquo; She
+      gave the girl's arm a squeeze. &ldquo;Isn't it a lovely day? Did you ever see
+      'Five Fingers' look so beautiful?&rdquo; And she pointed to the great peaks of
+      the Funffingerspitze glittering in the sun like giant crystals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like them better with clouds about them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; agreed Miss Naylor nervously, &ldquo;they certainly are nicer with
+      clouds about them. They look almost hot and greasy, don't they.... My
+      dear!&rdquo; she went on, giving Christian's arm a dozen little squeezes, &ldquo;we
+      all of us&mdash;that is, we all of us&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian turned her eyes away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear,&rdquo; Miss Naylor tried again, &ldquo;I am far&mdash;that is, I mean, to
+      all of us at some time or another&mdash;and then you see&mdash;well&mdash;it
+      is hard!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian kissed the gloved hand resting on her arm. Miss Naylor bobbed
+      her head; a tear trickled off her nose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do let us wind your skein of woof!&rdquo; she said with resounding gaiety.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some half-hour later Mrs. Decie called Christian to her room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear!&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;come here a minute; I have a message for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian went with an odd, set look about her mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her aunt was sitting, back to the light, tapping a bowl of goldfish with
+      the tip of a polished finger-nail; the room was very cool. She held a
+      letter out. &ldquo;Your uncle is not coming back tonight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian took the letter. It was curtly worded, in a thin, toppling hand:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;DEAR CON&mdash;Can't get back to-night. Sending Dominique for things.
+      Tell Christian to come over with him for night if possible.&mdash;Yr. aff.
+      brother, NICLS. TREFFRY.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dominique has a carriage here,&rdquo; said Mrs. Decie. &ldquo;You will have nice time
+      to catch the train. Give my love to your uncle. You must take Barbi with
+      you, I insist on that.&rdquo; She rose from her chair and held Christian's hand:
+      &ldquo;My dear! You look very tired&mdash;very! Almost ill. I don't like to see
+      you look like that. Come!&rdquo; She thrust her pale lips forward, and kissed
+      the girl's paler cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then as Christian left the room she sank back in her chair, with creases
+      in her forehead, and began languidly to cut a magazine. 'Poor Christian!'
+      she thought, 'how hardly she does take it! I am sorry for her; but perhaps
+      it's just as well, as things are turning out. Psychologically it is
+      interesting!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian found her things packed, and the two servants waiting. In a few
+      minutes they were driving to the station. She made Dominique take the seat
+      opposite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; she asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dominique's eyebrows twitched, he smiled deprecatingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;M'mselle, Mr. Treffry told me to hold my tongue.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you can tell me, Dominique; Barbi can't understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To you, then, M'mselle,&rdquo; said Dominique, as one who accepts his fate; &ldquo;to
+      you, then, who will doubtless forget all that I shall tell you&mdash;my
+      master is not well; he has terrible pain here; he has a cough; he is not
+      well at all; not well at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A feeling of dismay seized on the girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We were a caravan for all that night,&rdquo; Dominique resumed. &ldquo;In the morning
+      by noon we ceased to be a caravan; Signor Harz took a mule path; he will
+      be in Italy&mdash;certainly in Italy. As for us, we stayed at San Martino,
+      and my master went to bed. It was time; I had much trouble with his
+      clothes, his legs were swollen. In the afternoon came a signor of police,
+      on horseback, red and hot; I persuaded him that we were at Paneveggio, but
+      as we were not, he came back angry&mdash;Mon Die! as angry as a cat. It
+      was not good to meet him&mdash;when he was with my master I was outside.
+      There was much noise. I do not know what passed, but at last the signor
+      came out through the door, and went away in a hurry.&rdquo; Dominique's features
+      were fixed in a sardonic grin; he rubbed the palm of one hand with the
+      finger of the other. &ldquo;Mr. Treffry made me give him whisky afterwards, and
+      he had no money to pay the bill&mdash;that I know because I paid it. Well,
+      M'mselle, to-day he would be dressed and very slowly we came as far as
+      Auer; there he could do no more, so went to bed. He is not well at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian was overwhelmed by forebodings; the rest of the journey was made
+      in silence, except when Barbi, a country girl, filled with the delirium of
+      railway travel, sighed: &ldquo;Ach! gnadige Fraulein!&rdquo; looking at Christian with
+      pleasant eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At once, on arriving at the little hostel, Christian went to see her
+      uncle. His room was darkened, and smelt of beeswax.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! Chris,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;glad to see you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In a blue flannel gown, with a rug over his feet, he was lying on a couch
+      lengthened artificially by chairs; the arm he reached out issued many
+      inches from its sleeve, and showed the corded veins of the wrist.
+      Christian, settling his pillows, looked anxiously into his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not quite the thing, Chris,&rdquo; said Mr. Treffry. &ldquo;Somehow, not quite
+      the thing. I'll come back with you to-morrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me send for Dr. Dawney, Uncle?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;no! Plenty of him when I get home. Very good young fellow, as
+      doctors go, but I can't stand his puddin's&mdash;slops and puddin's, and
+      all that trumpery medicine on the top. Send me Dominique, my dear&mdash;I'll
+      put myself to rights a bit!&rdquo; He fingered his unshaven cheek, and clutched
+      the gown together on his chest. &ldquo;Got this from the landlord. When you come
+      back we'll have a little talk!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was asleep when she came into the room an hour later. Watching his
+      uneasy breathing, she wondered what it was that he was going to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked ill! And suddenly she realised that her thoughts were not of
+      him.... When she was little he would take her on his back; he had built
+      cocked hats for her and paper boats; had taught her to ride; slid her
+      between his knees; given her things without number; and taken his payment
+      in kisses. And now he was ill, and she was not thinking of him! He had
+      been all that was most dear to her, yet before her eyes would only come
+      the vision of another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry woke suddenly. &ldquo;Not been asleep, have I? The beds here are
+      infernal hard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Uncle Nic, won't you give me news of him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry looked at her, and Christian could not bear that look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's safe into Italy; they aren't very keen after him, it's so long ago;
+      I squared 'em pretty easily. Now, look here, Chris!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian came close; he took her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd like to see you pull yourself together. 'Tisn't so much the position;
+      'tisn't so much the money; because after all there's always mine&mdash;&rdquo;
+       Christian shook her head. &ldquo;But,&rdquo; he went on with shaky emphasis, &ldquo;there's
+      the difference of blood, and that's a serious thing; and there's this
+      anarch&mdash;this political affair; and there's the sort of life, an'
+      that's a serious thing; but&mdash;what I'm coming to is this, Chris&mdash;there's
+      the man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian drew away her hand. Mr. Treffry went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! yes. I'm an old chap and fond of you, but I must speak out what I
+      think. He's got pluck, he's strong, he's in earnest; but he's got a damned
+      hot temper, he's an egotist, and&mdash;he's not the man for you. If you
+      marry him, as sure as I lie here, you'll be sorry for it. You're not your
+      father's child for nothing; nice fellow as ever lived, but soft as butter.
+      If you take this chap, it'll be like mixing earth and ironstone, and they
+      don't blend!&rdquo; He dropped his head back on the pillows, and stretching out
+      his hand, repeated wistfully: &ldquo;Take my word for it, my dear, he's not the
+      man for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian, staring at the wall beyond, said quietly: &ldquo;I can't take any
+      one's word for that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; muttered Mr. Treffry, &ldquo;you're obstinate enough, but obstinacy isn't
+      strength.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll give up everything to him, you'll lick his shoes; and you'll never
+      play anything but second fiddle in his life. He'll always be first with
+      himself, he and his work, or whatever he calls painting pictures; and some
+      day you'll find that out. You won't like it, and I don't like it for you,
+      Chris, and that's flat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He wiped his brow where the perspiration stood in beads.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian said: &ldquo;You don't understand; you don't believe in him; you don't
+      see! If I do come after his work&mdash;if I do give him everything, and he
+      can't give all back&mdash;I don't care! He'll give what he can; I don't
+      want any more. If you're afraid of the life for me, uncle, if you think
+      it'll be too hard&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry bowed his head. &ldquo;I do, Chris.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, I hate to be wrapped in cotton wool; I want to breathe. If I
+      come to grief, it's my own affair; nobody need mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry's fingers sought his beard. &ldquo;Ah! yes. Just so!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian sank on her knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! Uncle! I'm a selfish beast!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry laid his hand against her cheek. &ldquo;I think I could do with a
+      nap,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Swallowing a lump in her throat, she stole out of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0024" id="link2H_4_0024">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      By a stroke of Fate Mr. Treffry's return to Villa Rubein befell at the
+      psychological moment when Herr Paul, in a suit of rather too bright blue,
+      was starting for Vienna.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As soon as he saw the carriage appear between the poplars he became as
+      pensive as a boy caught in the act of stealing cherries. Pitching his
+      hatbox to Fritz, he recovered himself, however, in time to whistle while
+      Mr. Treffry was being assisted into the house. Having forgotten his anger,
+      he was only anxious now to smooth out its after effects; in the glances he
+      cast at Christian and his brother-in-law there was a kind of shamed
+      entreaty which seemed to say: &ldquo;For goodness' sake, don't worry me about
+      that business again! Nothing's come of it, you see!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He came forward: &ldquo;Ah! Mon cher! So you return; I put off my departure,
+      then. Vienna must wait for me&mdash;that poor Vienna!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But noticing the extreme feebleness of Mr. Treffry's advance, he exclaimed
+      with genuine concern:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it? You're ill? My God!&rdquo; After disappearing for five minutes, he
+      came back with a whitish liquid in a glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;good for the gout&mdash;for a cough&mdash;for
+      everything!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry sniffed, drained the glass, and sucked his moustache.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;No doubt! But it's uncommonly like gin, Paul.&rdquo; Then
+      turning to Christian, he said: &ldquo;Shake hands, you two!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian looked from one to the other, and at last held out her hand to
+      Herr Paul, who brushed it with his moustache, gazing after her as she left
+      the room with a queer expression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear!&rdquo; he began, &ldquo;you support her in this execrable matter? You forget
+      my position, you make me ridiculous. I have been obliged to go to bed in
+      my own house, absolutely to go to bed, because I was in danger of becoming
+      funny.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here, Paul!&rdquo; Mr. Treffry said gruffly, &ldquo;if any one's to bully Chris,
+      it's I.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In that case,&rdquo; returned Herr Paul sarcastically, &ldquo;I will go to Vienna.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You may go to the devil!&rdquo; said Mr. Treffry; &ldquo;and I'll tell you what&mdash;in
+      my opinion it was low to set the police on that young chap; a low, dirty
+      trick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul divided his beard carefully in two, took his seat on the very
+      edge of an arm-chair, and placing his hands on his parted knees, said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have regretted it since&mdash;mais, que diable! He called me a coward&mdash;it
+      is very hot weather!&mdash;there were drinks at the Kurhaus&mdash;I am her
+      guardian&mdash;the affair is a very beastly one&mdash;there were more
+      drinks&mdash;I was a little enfin!&rdquo; He shrugged his shoulders. &ldquo;Adieu, my
+      dear; I shall be some time in Vienna; I need rest!&rdquo; He rose and went to
+      the door; then he turned, and waved his cigar. &ldquo;Adieu! Be good; get well!
+      I will buy you some cigars up there.&rdquo; And going out, he shut the door on
+      any possibility of answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry lay back amongst his cushions. The clock ticked; pigeons cooed
+      on the veranda; a door opened in the distance, and for a moment a treble
+      voice was heard. Mr. Treffry's head drooped forward; across his face,
+      gloomy and rugged, fell a thin line of sunlight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The clock suddenly stopped ticking, and outside, in mysterious accord, the
+      pigeons rose with a great fluttering of wings, and flew off'. Mr. Treffry
+      made a startled, heavy movement. He tried to get on to his feet and reach
+      the bell, but could not, and sat on the side of the couch with drops of
+      sweat rolling off his forehead, and his hands clawing his chest. There was
+      no sound at all throughout the house. He looked about him, and tried to
+      call, but again could not. He tried once more to reach the bell, and,
+      failing, sat still, with a thought that made him cold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm done for,&rdquo; he muttered. &ldquo;By George! I believe I'm done for this
+      time!&rdquo; A voice behind him said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can we have a look at you, sir?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! Doctor, bear a hand, there's a good fellow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dawney propped him against the cushions, and loosened his shirt. Receiving
+      no answer to his questions, he stepped alarmed towards the bell. Mr.
+      Treffry stopped him with a sign.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let's hear what you make of me,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Dawney had examined him, he asked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; answered Dawney slowly, &ldquo;there's trouble, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry broke out with a husky whisper: &ldquo;Out with it, Doctor; don't
+      humbug me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dawney bent down, and took his wrist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know how you've got into this state, sir,&rdquo; he said with the
+      brusqueness of emotion. &ldquo;You're in a bad way. It's the old trouble; and
+      you know what that means as well as I. All I can tell you is, I'm going to
+      have a big fight with it. It shan't be my fault, there's my hand on that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry lay with his eyes fixed on the ceiling; at last he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to live.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel better now; don't make a fuss about it. It'll be very awkward if I
+      die just now. Patch me up, for the sake of my niece.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dawney nodded. &ldquo;One minute, there are a few things I want,&rdquo; and he went
+      out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A moment later Greta stole in on tiptoe. She bent over till her hair
+      touched Mr. Treffry's face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Uncle Nic!&rdquo; she whispered. He opened his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hallo, Greta!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have come to bring you my love, Uncle Nic, and to say good-bye. Papa
+      says that I and Scruff and Miss Naylor are going to Vienna with him; we
+      have had to pack in half an hour; in five minutes we are going to Vienna,
+      and it is my first visit there, Uncle Nic.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To Vienna!&rdquo; Mr. Treffry repeated slowly. &ldquo;Don't have a guide, Greta;
+      they're humbugs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Uncle Nic,&rdquo; said Greta solemnly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Draw the curtains, old girl, let's have a look at you. Why, you're as
+      smart as ninepence!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Greta with a sigh, touching the buttons of her cape, &ldquo;because
+      I am going to Vienna; but I am sorry to leave you, Uncle Nic.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you, Greta?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you will have Chris, and you are fonder of Chris than of me, Uncle
+      Nic.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've known her longer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps when you've known me as long as Chris, you shall be as fond of
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I've known you as long&mdash;may be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;While I am gone, Uncle Nic, you are to get well, you are not very well,
+      you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What put that into your head?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you were well you would be smoking a cigar&mdash;it is just three
+      o'clock. This kiss is for myself, this is for Scruff, and this is for Miss
+      Naylor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood upright again; a tremulous, joyful gravity was in her eyes and
+      on her lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-bye, my dear; take care of yourselves; and don't you have a guide,
+      they're humbugs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Uncle Nic. There is the carriage! To Vienna, Uncle Nic!&rdquo; The dead
+      gold of her hair gleamed in the doorway. Mr. Treffry raised himself upon
+      his elbow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give us one more, for luck!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta ran back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I love you very much!&rdquo; she said, and kissing him, backed slowly, then,
+      turning, flew out like a bird.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry fixed his eyes on the shut door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0025" id="link2H_4_0025">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      After many days of hot, still weather, the wind had come, and whirled the
+      dust along the parched roads. The leaves were all astir, like tiny wings.
+      Round Villa Rubein the pigeons cooed uneasily, all the other birds were
+      silent. Late in the afternoon Christian came out on the veranda, reading a
+      letter:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;DEAR CHRIS,&mdash;We are here now six days, and it is a very large place
+      with many churches. In the first place then we have been to a great many,
+      but the nicest of them is not St. Stephan's Kirche, it is another, but I
+      do not remember the name. Papa is out nearly all the night; he says he is
+      resting here, so he is not able to come to the churches with us, but I do
+      not think he rests very much. The day before yesterday we, that is, Papa,
+      I, and Miss Naylor, went to an exhibition of pictures. It was quite
+      beautiful and interesting (Miss Naylor says it is not right to say 'quite'
+      beautiful, but I do not know what other word could mean 'quite' except the
+      word 'quite,' because it is not exceedingly and not extremely). And O
+      Chris! there was one picture painted by him; it was about a ship without
+      masts&mdash;Miss Naylor says it is a barge, but I do not know what a barge
+      is&mdash;on fire, and, floating down a river in a fog. I think it is
+      extremely beautiful. Miss Naylor says it is very impressionistick&mdash;what
+      is that? and Papa said 'Puh!' but he did not know it was painted by Herr
+      Harz, so I did not tell him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There has also been staying at our hotel that Count Sarelli who came one
+      evening to dinner at our house, but he is gone away now. He sat all day in
+      the winter garden reading, and at night he went out with Papa. Miss Naylor
+      says he is unhappy, but I think he does not take enough exercise; and O
+      Chris! one day he said to me, 'That is your sister, Mademoiselle, that
+      young lady in the white dress? Does she always wear white dresses?' and I
+      said to him: 'It is not always a white dress; in the picture, it is green,
+      because the picture is called 'Spring.' But I did not tell him the colours
+      of all your dresses because he looked so tired. Then he said to me: 'She
+      is very charming.' So I tell you this, Chris, because I think you shall
+      like to know. Scruff' has a sore toe; it is because he has eaten too much
+      meat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not nice without you, Chris, and Miss Naylor says I am improving my
+      mind here, but I do not think it shall improve very much, because at night
+      I like it always best, when the shops are lighted and the carriages are
+      driving past; then I am wanting to dance. The first night Papa said he
+      would take me to the theatre, but yesterday he said it was not good for
+      me; perhaps to-morrow he shall think it good for me again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yesterday we have been in the Prater, and saw many people, and some that
+      Papa knew; and then came the most interesting part of all, sitting under
+      the trees in the rain for two hours because we could not get a carriage
+      (very exciting).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is one young lady here, only she is not any longer very young, who
+      knew Papa when he was a boy. I like her very much; she shall soon know me
+      quite to the bottom and is very kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The ill husband of Cousin Teresa who went with us to Meran and lost her
+      umbrella and Dr. Edmund was so sorry about it, has been very much worse,
+      so she is not here but in Baden. I wrote to her but have no news, so I do
+      not know whether he is still living or not, at any rate he can't get well
+      again so soon (and I don't think he ever shall). I think as the weather is
+      very warm you and Uncle Nic are sitting much out of doors. I am sending
+      presents to you all in a wooden box and screwed very firm, so you shall
+      have to use again the big screw-driver of Fritz. For Aunt Constance,
+      photographs; for Uncle Nic, a green bird on a stand with a hole in the
+      back of the bird to put his ashes in; it is a good green and not expensif
+      please tell him, because he does not like expensif presents (Miss Naylor
+      says the bird has an inquiring eye&mdash;it is a parrat); for you, a
+      little brooch of turquoise because I like them best; for Dr. Edmund a
+      machine to weigh medicines in because he said he could not get a good one
+      in Botzen; this is a very good one, the shopman told me so, and is the
+      most expensif of all the presents&mdash;so that is all my money, except
+      two gulden. If Papa shall give me some more, I shall buy for Miss Naylor a
+      parasol, because it is useful and the handle of hers is 'wobbley' (that is
+      one of Dr. Edmund's words and I like it).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-bye for this time. Greta sends you her kiss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;P. S.&mdash;Miss Naylor has read all this letter (except about the
+      parasol) and there are several things she did not want me to put, so I
+      have copied it without the things, but at the last I have kept that copy
+      myself, so that is why this is smudgy and several words are not spelt
+      well, but all the things are here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian read, smiling, but to finish it was like dropping a talisman,
+      and her face clouded. A sudden draught blew her hair about, and from
+      within, Mr. Treffry's cough mingled with the soughing of the wind; the sky
+      was fast blackening. She went indoors, took a pen and began to write:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;MY FRIEND,&mdash;Why haven't you written to me? It is so, long to wait.
+      Uncle says you are in Italy&mdash;it is dreadful not to know for certain.
+      I feel you would have written if you could; and I can't help thinking of
+      all the things that may have happened. I am unhappy. Uncle Nic is ill; he
+      will not confess it, that is his way; but he is very ill. Though perhaps
+      you will never see this, I must write down all my thoughts. Sometimes I
+      feel that I am brutal to be always thinking about you, scheming how to be
+      with you again, when he is lying there so ill. How good he has always been
+      to me; it is terrible that love should pull one apart so. Surely love
+      should be beautiful, and peaceful, instead of filling me with bitter,
+      wicked thoughts. I love you&mdash;and I love him; I feel as if I were torn
+      in two. Why should it be so? Why should the beginning of one life mean the
+      ending of another, one love the destruction of another? I don't
+      understand. The same spirit makes me love you and him, the same sympathy,
+      the same trust&mdash;yet it sometimes seems as if I were a criminal in
+      loving you. You know what he thinks&mdash;he is too honest not to have
+      shown you. He has talked to me; he likes you in a way, but you are a
+      foreigner&mdash;he says-your life is not my life. 'He is not the man for
+      you!' Those were his words. And now he doesn't talk to me, but when I am
+      in the room he looks at me&mdash;that's worse&mdash;a thousand times; when
+      he talks it rouses me to fight&mdash;when it's his eyes only, I'm a coward
+      at once; I feel I would do anything, anything, only not to hurt him. Why
+      can't he see? Is it because he's old and we are young? He may consent, but
+      he will never, never see; it will always hurt him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to tell you everything; I have had worse thoughts than these&mdash;sometimes
+      I have thought that I should never have the courage to face the struggle
+      which you have to face. Then I feel quite broken; it is like something
+      giving way in me. Then I think of you, and it is over; but it has been
+      there, and I am ashamed&mdash;I told you I was a coward. It's like the
+      feeling one would have going out into a storm on a dark night, away from a
+      warm fire&mdash;only of the spirit not the body&mdash;which makes it
+      worse. I had to tell you this; you mustn't think of it again, I mean to
+      fight it away and forget that it has ever been there. But Uncle Nic&mdash;what
+      am I to do? I hate myself because I am young, and he is old and weak&mdash;sometimes
+      I seem even to hate him. I have all sorts of thoughts, and always at the
+      end of them, like a dark hole at the end of a passage, the thought that I
+      ought to give you up. Ought I? Tell me. I want to know, I want to do what
+      is right; I still want to do that, though sometimes I think I am all made
+      of evil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you remember once when we were talking, you said: 'Nature always has
+      an answer for every question; you cannot get an answer from laws,
+      conventions, theories, words, only from Nature.' What do you say to me
+      now; do you tell me it is Nature to come to you in spite of everything,
+      and so, that it must be right? I think you would; but can it be Nature to
+      do something which will hurt terribly one whom I love and who loves me? If
+      it is&mdash;Nature is cruel. Is that one of the 'lessons of life'. Is that
+      what Aunt Constance means when she says: 'If life were not a paradox, we
+      could not get on at all'. I am beginning to see that everything has its
+      dark side; I never believed that before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Uncle Nic dreads the life for me; he doesn't understand (how should he?&mdash;he
+      has always had money) how life can be tolerable without money&mdash;it is
+      horrible that the accident of money should make such difference in our
+      lives. I am sometimes afraid myself, and I can't outface that fear in him;
+      he sees the shadow of his fear in me&mdash;his eyes seem to see everything
+      that is in me now; the eyes of old people are the saddest things in the
+      world. I am writing like a wretched coward, but you will never see this
+      letter I suppose, and so it doesn't matter; but if you do, and I pray that
+      you may&mdash;well, if I am only worth taking at my best, I am not worth
+      taking at all. I want you to know the worst of me&mdash;you, and no one
+      else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With Uncle Nic it is not as with my stepfather; his opposition only makes
+      me angry, mad, ready to do anything, but with Uncle Nic I feel so bruised&mdash;so
+      sore. He said: 'It is not so much the money, because there is always
+      mine.' I could never do a thing he cannot bear, and take his money, and
+      you would never let me. One knows very little of anything in the world
+      till trouble comes. You know how it is with flowers and trees; in the
+      early spring they look so quiet and self-contained; then all in a moment
+      they change&mdash;I think it must be like that with the heart. I used to
+      think I knew a great deal, understood why and how things came about; I
+      thought self-possession and reason so easy; now I know nothing. And
+      nothing in the world matters but to see you and hide away from that look
+      in Uncle Nic's eyes. Three months ago I did not know you, now I write like
+      this. Whatever I look at, I try to see as you would see; I feel, now you
+      are away even more than when you were with me, what your thoughts would
+      be, how you would feel about this or that. Some things you have said seem
+      always in my mind like lights&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A slanting drift of rain was striking the veranda tiles with a cold,
+      ceaseless hissing. Christian shut the window, and went into her uncle's
+      room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was lying with closed eyes, growling at Dominique, who moved about
+      noiselessly, putting the room ready for the night. When he had finished,
+      and with a compassionate bow had left the room, Mr. Treffry opened his
+      eyes, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is beastly stuff of the doctor's, Chris, it puts my monkey up; I
+      can't help swearing after I've taken it; it's as beastly as a vulgar
+      woman's laugh, and I don't know anything beastlier than that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a letter from Greta, Uncle Nic; shall I read it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded, and Christian read the letter, leaving out the mention of Harz,
+      and for some undefined reason the part about Sarelli.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay!&rdquo; said Mr. Treffry with a feeble laugh, &ldquo;Greta and her money! Send her
+      some more, Chris. Wish I were a youngster again; that's a beast of a
+      proverb about a dog and his day. I'd like to go fishing again in the West
+      Country! A fine time we had when we were youngsters. You don't get such
+      times these days. 'Twasn't often the fishing-smacks went out without us.
+      We'd watch their lights from our bedroom window; when they were swung
+      aboard we were out and down to the quay before you could say 'knife.' They
+      always waited for us; but your Uncle Dan was the favourite, he was the
+      chap for luck. When I get on my legs, we might go down there, you and I?
+      For a bit, just to see? What d'you say, old girl?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Their eyes met.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd like to look at the smack lights going to sea on a dark night; pity
+      you're such a duffer in a boat&mdash;we might go out with them. Do you a
+      power of good! You're not looking the thing, my dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice died wistfully, and his glance, sweeping her face, rested on her
+      hands, which held and twisted Greta's letter. After a minute or two of
+      silence he boomed out again with sudden energy:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your aunt'll want to come and sit with me, after dinner; don't let her,
+      Chris, I can't stand it. Tell her I'm asleep&mdash;the doctor'll be here
+      directly; ask him to make up some humbug for you&mdash;it's his business.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was seized by a violent fit of pain which seemed to stab his breath
+      away, and when it was over signed that he would be left alone. Christian
+      went back to her letter in the other room, and had written these words,
+      when the gong summoned her to dinner:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm like a leaf in the wind, I put out my hand to one thing, and it's
+      seized and twisted and flung aside. I want you&mdash;I want you; if I
+      could see you I think I should know what to do&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0026" id="link2H_4_0026">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The rain drove with increasing fury. The night was very black. Nicholas
+      Treffry slept heavily. By the side of his bed the night-lamp cast on to
+      the opposite wall a bright disc festooned by the hanging shadow of the
+      ceiling. Christian was leaning over him. For the moment he filled all her
+      heart, lying there, so helpless. Fearful of waking him she slipped into
+      the sitting-room. Outside the window stood a man with his face pressed to
+      the pane. Her heart thumped; she went up and unlatched the window. It was
+      Harz, with the rain dripping off him. He let fall his hat and cape.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You!&rdquo; she said, touching his sleeve. &ldquo;You! You!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was sodden with wet, his face drawn and tired; a dark growth of beard
+      covered his cheeks and chin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is your uncle?&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I want to see him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She put her hand up to his lips, but he caught it and covered it with
+      kisses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's asleep&mdash;ill&mdash;speak gently!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I came to him first,&rdquo; he muttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian lit the lamp; and he looked at her hungrily without a word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's not possible to go on like this; I came to tell your uncle so. He is
+      a man. As for the other, I want to have nothing to do with him! I came
+      back on foot across the mountains. It's not possible to go on like this,
+      Christian.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She handed him her letter. He held it to the light, clearing his brow of
+      raindrops. When he had read to the last word he gave it her back, and
+      whispered: &ldquo;Come!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her lips moved, but she did not speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;While this goes on I can't work; I can do nothing. I can't&mdash;I won't
+      bargain with my work; if it's to be that, we had better end it. What are
+      we waiting for? Sooner or later we must come to this. I'm sorry that he's
+      ill, God knows! But that changes nothing. To wait is tying me hand and
+      foot&mdash;it's making me afraid! Fear kills! It will kill you! It kills
+      work, and I must work, I can't waste time&mdash;I won't! I will sooner
+      give you up.&rdquo; He put his hands on her shoulders. &ldquo;I love you! I want you!
+      Look in my eyes and see if you dare hold back!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian stood with the grip of his strong hands on her shoulders,
+      without a movement or sign. Her face was very white. And suddenly he began
+      to kiss that pale, still face, to kiss its eyes and lips, to kiss it from
+      its chin up to its hair; and it stayed pale, as a white flower, beneath
+      those kisses&mdash;as a white flower, whose stalk the fingers bend back a
+      little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a sound of knocking on the wall; Mr. Treffry called feebly.
+      Christian broke away from Harz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To-morrow!&rdquo; he whispered, and picking up his hat and cloak, went out
+      again into the rain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0027" id="link2H_4_0027">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was not till morning that Christian fell into a troubled sleep. She
+      dreamed that a voice was calling her, and she was filled with a helpless,
+      dumb dream terror.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she woke the light was streaming in; it was Sunday, and the cathedral
+      bells were chiming. Her first thought was of Harz. One step, one moment of
+      courage! Why had she not told her uncle? If he had only asked! But why&mdash;why
+      should she tell him? When it was over and she was gone, he would see that
+      all was for the best.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes fell on Greta's empty bed. She sprang up, and bending over,
+      kissed the pillow. 'She will mind at first; but she's so young! Nobody
+      will really miss me, except Uncle Nic!' She stood along while in the
+      window without moving. When she was dressed she called out to her maid:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bring me some milk, Barbi; I'm going to church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ach! gnadiges Fraulein, will you no breakfast have?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No thank you, Barbi.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Liebes Fraulein, what a beautiful morning after the rain it has become!
+      How cool! It is for you good&mdash;for the colour in your cheeks; now they
+      will bloom again!&rdquo; and Barbi stroked her own well-coloured cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dominique, sunning himself outside with a cloth across his arm, bowed as
+      she passed, and smiled affectionately:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is better this morning, M'mselle. We march&mdash;we are getting on.
+      Good news will put the heart into you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian thought: 'How sweet every one is to-day!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even the Villa seemed to greet her, with the sun aslant on it; and the
+      trees, trembling and weeping golden tears. At the cathedral she was early
+      for the service, but here and there were figures on their knees; the
+      faint, sickly odour of long-burnt incense clung in the air; a priest moved
+      silently at the far end. She knelt, and when at last she rose the service
+      had begun. With the sound of the intoning a sense of peace came to her&mdash;the
+      peace of resolution. For good or bad she felt that she had faced her fate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She went out with a look of quiet serenity and walked home along the dyke.
+      Close to Harz's studio she sat down. Now&mdash;it was her own; all that
+      had belonged to him, that had ever had a part in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An old beggar, who had been watching her, came gently from behind.
+      &ldquo;Gracious lady!&rdquo; he said, peering at her eyes, &ldquo;this is the lucky day for
+      you. I have lost my luck.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian opened her purse, there was only one coin in it, a gold piece;
+      the beggar's eyes sparkled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She thought suddenly: 'It's no longer mine; I must begin to be careful,'
+      but she felt ashamed when she looked at the old man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sorry,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;yesterday I would have given you this, but&mdash;but
+      now it's already given.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He seemed so old and poor&mdash;what could she give him? She unhooked a
+      little silver brooch at her throat. &ldquo;You will get something for that,&rdquo; she
+      said; &ldquo;it's better than nothing. I am very sorry you are so old and poor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The beggar crossed himself. &ldquo;Gracious lady,&rdquo; he muttered, &ldquo;may you never
+      want!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian hurried on; the rustling of leaves soon carried the words away.
+      She did not feel inclined to go in, and crossing the bridge began to climb
+      the hill. There was a gentle breeze, drifting the clouds across the sun;
+      lizards darted out over the walls, looked at her, and whisked away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sunshine, dappling through the tops of trees, gashed down on a
+      torrent. The earth smelt sweet, the vineyards round the white farms
+      glistened; everything seemed to leap and dance with sap and life; it was a
+      moment of Spring in midsummer. Christian walked on, wondering at her own
+      happiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Am I heartless?' she thought. 'I am going to leave him&mdash;I am going
+      into life; I shall have to fight now, there'll be no looking back.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The path broke away and wound down to the level of the torrent; on the
+      other side it rose again, and was lost among trees. The woods were dank;
+      she hastened home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In her room she began to pack, sorting and tearing up old letters. 'Only
+      one thing matters,' she thought; 'singleness of heart; to see your way,
+      and keep to it with all your might.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked up and saw Barbi standing before her with towels in her hands,
+      and a scared face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you going a journey, gnadiges Fraulein?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going away to be married, Barbi,&rdquo; said Christian at last; &ldquo;don't
+      speak of it to any one, please.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Barbi leant a little forward with the towels clasped to the blue cotton
+      bosom of her dress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no! I will not speak. But, dear Fraulein, that is a big matter; have
+      you well thought?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thought, Barbi? Have I not!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, dear Fraulein, will you be rich?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No! I shall be as poor as you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ach! dear God! that is terrible. Katrina, my sister, she is married; she
+      tells me all her life; she tells me it is very hard, and but for the money
+      in her stocking it would be harder. Dear Fraulein, think again! And is he
+      good? Sometimes they are not good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is good,&rdquo; said Christian, rising; &ldquo;it is all settled!&rdquo; and she kissed
+      Barbi on the cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are crying, liebes Fraulein! Think yet again, perhaps it is not quite
+      all settled; it is not possible that a maiden should not a way out leave?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian smiled. &ldquo;I don't do things that way, Barbi.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Barbi hung the towels on the horse, and crossed herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0028" id="link2H_4_0028">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry's gaze was fixed on a tortoise-shell butterfly fluttering
+      round the ceiling. The insect seemed to fascinate him, as things which
+      move quickly always fascinate the helpless. Christian came softly in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Couldn't stay in bed, Chris,&rdquo; he called out with an air of guilt. &ldquo;The
+      heat was something awful. The doctor piped off in a huff, just because o'
+      this.&rdquo; He motioned towards a jug of claret-cup and a pipe on the table by
+      his elbow. &ldquo;I was only looking at 'em.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian, sitting down beside him, took up a fan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I could get out of this heat&mdash;&rdquo; he said, and closed his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'I must tell him,' she thought; 'I can't slink away.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pour me out some of that stuff, Chris.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She reached for the jug. Yes! She must tell him! Her heart sank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry took a lengthy draught. &ldquo;Broken my promise; don't matter&mdash;won't
+      hurt any one but me.&rdquo; He took up the pipe and pressed tobacco into it.
+      &ldquo;I've been lying here with this pain going right through me, and never a
+      smoke! D'you tell me anything the parsons say can do me half the good of
+      this pipe?&rdquo; He leaned back, steeped in a luxury of satisfaction. He went
+      on, pursuing a private train of thought: &ldquo;Things have changed a lot since
+      my young days. When I was a youngster, a young fellow had to look out for
+      peck and perch&mdash;he put the future in his pocket. He did well or not,
+      according as he had stuff in him. Now he's not content with that, it seems&mdash;trades
+      on his own opinion of himself; thinks he is what he says he's going to
+      be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are unjust,&rdquo; said Christian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry grunted. &ldquo;Ah, well! I like to know where I am. If I lend money
+      to a man, I like to know whether he's going to pay it back; I may not care
+      whether he does or not, but I like to know. The same with other things. I
+      don't care what a man has&mdash;though, mind you, Chris, it's not a bad
+      rule that measures men by the balance at their banks; but when it comes to
+      marriage, there's a very simple rule, What's not enough for one is not
+      enough for two. You can't talk black white, or bread into your mouth. I
+      don't care to speak about myself, as you know, Chris, but I tell you this&mdash;when
+      I came to London I wanted to marry&mdash;I hadn't any money, and I had to
+      want. When I had the money&mdash;but that's neither here nor there!&rdquo; He
+      frowned, fingering his pipe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't ask her, Chris; I didn't think it the square thing; it seems
+      that's out of fashion!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian's cheeks were burning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think a lot while I lie here,&rdquo; Mr. Treffry went on; &ldquo;nothing much else
+      to do. What I ask myself is this: What do you know about what's best for
+      you? What do you know of life? Take it or leave it, life's not all you
+      think; it's give and get all the way, a fair start is everything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian thought: 'Will he never see?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I get better every day, but I can't last for ever. It's not pleasant to
+      lie here and know that when I'm gone there'll be no one to keep a hand on
+      the check string!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't talk like that, dear!&rdquo; Christian murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's no use blinking facts, Chris. I've lived a long time in the world;
+      I've seen things pretty well as they are; and now there's not much left
+      for me to think about but you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Uncle, if you loved him, as I do, you couldn't tell me to be afraid!
+      It's cowardly and mean to be afraid. You must have forgotten!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry closed his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I'm old.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The fan had dropped into Christian's lap; it rested on her white frock
+      like a large crimson leaf; her eyes were fixed on it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry looked at her. &ldquo;Have you heard from him?&rdquo; he asked with sudden
+      intuition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Last night, in that room, when you thought I was talking to Dominique&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The pipe fell from his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What!&rdquo; he stammered: &ldquo;Back?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian, without looking up, said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, he's back; he wants me&mdash;I must go to him, Uncle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a long silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must go to him?&rdquo; he repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She longed to fling herself down at his knees, but he was so still, that
+      to move seemed impossible; she remained silent, with folded hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry spoke:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll let me know&mdash;before&mdash;you&mdash;go. Goodnight!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian stole out into the passage. A bead curtain rustled in the
+      draught; voices reached her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My honour is involved, or I would give the case up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is very trying, poor Nicholas! He always had that peculiar quality of
+      opposition; it has brought him to grief a hundred times. There is
+      opposition in our blood; my family all have it. My eldest brother died of
+      it; with my poor sister, who was as gentle as a lamb, it took the form of
+      doing the right thing in the wrong place. It is a matter of temperament,
+      you see. You must have patience.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Patience,&rdquo; repeated Dawney's voice, &ldquo;is one thing; patience where there
+      is responsibility is another. I've not had a wink of sleep these last two
+      nights.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a faint, shrill swish of silk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is he so very ill?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian held her breath. The answer came at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has he made his will? With this trouble in the side again, I tell you
+      plainly, Mrs. Decie, there's little or no chance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian put her hands up to her ears, and ran out into the air. What was
+      she about to do, then&mdash;to leave him dying!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0029" id="link2H_4_0029">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      On the following day Harz was summoned to the Villa. Mr. Treffry had just
+      risen, and was garbed in a dressing-suit, old and worn, which had a
+      certain air of magnificence. His seamed cheeks were newly shaved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope I see you well,&rdquo; he said majestically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thinking of the drive and their last parting, Harz felt sorry and ashamed.
+      Suddenly Christian came into the room; she stood for a moment looking at
+      him; then sat down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Chris!&rdquo; said Mr. Treffry reproachfully. She shook her head, and did not
+      move; mournful and intent, her eyes seemed full of secret knowledge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry spoke:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've no right to blame you, Mr. Harz, and Chris tells me you came to see
+      me first, which is what I would have expected of you; but you shouldn't
+      have come back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I came back, sir, because I found I was obliged. I must speak out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ask nothing better,&rdquo; Mr. Treffry replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz looked again at Christian; but she made no sign, sitting with her
+      chin resting on her hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have come for her,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I can make my living&mdash;enough for
+      both of us. But I can't wait.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz made no answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry boomed out again: &ldquo;Why? Isn't she worth waiting for? Isn't she
+      worth serving for?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't expect you to understand me,&rdquo; the painter said. &ldquo;My art is my
+      life to me. Do you suppose that if it wasn't I should ever have left my
+      village; or gone through all that I've gone through, to get as far even as
+      I am? You tell me to wait. If my thoughts and my will aren't free, how can
+      I work? I shan't be worth my salt. You tell me to go back to England&mdash;knowing
+      she is here, amongst you who hate me, a thousand miles away. I shall know
+      that there's a death fight going on in her and outside her against me&mdash;you
+      think that I can go on working under these conditions. Others may be able,
+      I am not. That's the plain truth. If I loved her less&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a silence, then Mr. Treffry said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't fair to come here and ask what you're asking. You don't know
+      what's in the future for you, you don't know that you can keep a wife. It
+      isn't pleasant, either, to think you can't hold up your head in your own
+      country.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz turned white.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! you bring that up again!&rdquo; he broke out. &ldquo;Seven years ago I was a boy
+      and starving; if you had been in my place you would have done what I did.
+      My country is as much to me as your country is to you. I've been an exile
+      seven years, I suppose I shall always be I've had punishment enough; but
+      if you think I am a rascal, I'll go and give myself up.&rdquo; He turned on his
+      heel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stop! I beg your pardon! I never meant to hurt you. It isn't easy for me
+      to eat my words,&rdquo; Mr. Treffry said wistfully, &ldquo;let that count for
+      something.&rdquo; He held out his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz came quickly back and took it. Christian's gaze was never for a
+      moment withdrawn; she seemed trying to store up the sight of him within
+      her. The light darting through the half-closed shutters gave her eyes a
+      strange, bright intensity, and shone in the folds of her white dress like
+      the sheen of birds' wings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry glanced uneasily about him. &ldquo;God knows I don't want anything
+      but her happiness,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;What is it to me if you'd murdered your
+      mother? It's her I'm thinking of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can you tell what is happiness to her? You have your own ideas of
+      happiness&mdash;not hers, not mine. You can't dare to stop us, sir!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dare?&rdquo; said Mr. Treffry. &ldquo;Her father gave her over to me when she was a
+      mite of a little thing; I've known her all her life. I've&mdash;I've loved
+      her&mdash;and you come here with your 'dare'.&rdquo; His hand dragged at his
+      beard, and shook as though palsied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A look of terror came into Christian's face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right, Chris! I don't ask for quarter, and I don't give it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz made a gesture of despair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've acted squarely by you, sir,&rdquo; Mr. Treffry went on, &ldquo;I ask the same of
+      you. I ask you to wait, and come like an honest man, when you can say, 'I
+      see my way&mdash;here's this and that for her.' What makes this art you
+      talk of different from any other call in life? It doesn't alter facts, or
+      give you what other men have no right to expect. It doesn't put grit into
+      you, or keep your hands clean, or prove that two and two make five.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harz answered bitterly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know as much of art as I know of money. If we live a thousand years
+      we shall never understand each other. I am doing what I feel is best for
+      both of us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry took hold of the painter's sleeve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I make you an offer,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Your word not to see or write to her for
+      a year! Then, position or not, money or no money, if she'll have you, I'll
+      make it right for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could not take your money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A kind of despair seemed suddenly to seize on Mr. Nicholas Treffry. He
+      rose, and stood towering over them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All my life&mdash;&rdquo; he said; but something seemed to click deep down in
+      his throat, and he sank back in his seat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go!&rdquo; whispered Christian, &ldquo;go!&rdquo; But Mr. Treffry found his voice again:
+      &ldquo;It's for the child to say. Well, Chris!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian did not speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Harz who broke the silence. He pointed to Mr. Treffry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know I can't tell you to come with&mdash;that, there. Why did you
+      send for me?&rdquo; And, turning, he went out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian sank on her knees, burying her face in her hands. Mr. Treffry
+      pressed his handkerchief with a stealthy movement to his mouth. It was
+      dyed crimson with the price of his victory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0030" id="link2H_4_0030">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXVI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A telegram had summoned Herr Paul from Vienna. He had started forthwith,
+      leaving several unpaid accounts to a more joyful opportunity, amongst them
+      a chemist's bill, for a wonderful quack medicine of which he brought six
+      bottles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came from Mr. Treffry's room with tears rolling down his cheeks,
+      saying:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor Nicholas! Poor Nicholas! Il n'a pas de chance!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was difficult to find any one to listen; the women were scared and
+      silent, waiting for the orders that were now and then whispered through
+      the door. Herr Paul could not bear this silence, and talked to his servant
+      for half an hour, till Fritz also vanished to fetch something from the
+      town. Then in despair Herr Paul went to his room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was hard not to be allowed to help&mdash;it was hard to wait! When the
+      heart was suffering, it was frightful! He turned and, looking furtively
+      about him, lighted a cigar. Yes, it came to every one&mdash;at some time
+      or other; and what was it, that death they talked of? Was it any worse
+      than life? That frightful jumble people made for themselves! Poor
+      Nicholas! After all, it was he that had the luck!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His eyes filled with tears, and drawing a penknife from his pocket, he
+      began to stab it into the stuffing of his chair. Scruff, who sat watching
+      the chink of light under the door, turned his head, blinked at him, and
+      began feebly tapping with a claw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was intolerable, this uncertainty&mdash;to be near, and yet so far, was
+      not endurable!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul stepped across the room. The dog, following, threw his
+      black-marked muzzle upwards with a gruff noise, and went back to the door.
+      His master was holding in his hand a bottle of champagne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor Nicholas! He had chosen it. Herr Paul drained a glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor Nicholas! The prince of fellows, and of what use was one? They kept
+      him away from Nicholas!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul's eyes fell on the terrier. &ldquo;Ach! my dear,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you and I,
+      we alone are kept away!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He drained a second glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was it? This life! Froth-like that! He tossed off a third glass.
+      Forget! If one could not help, it was better to forget!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He put on his hat. Yes. There was no room for him there! He was not
+      wanted!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He finished the bottle, and went out into the passage. Scruff ran and lay
+      down at Mr. Treffry's door. Herr Paul looked at him. &ldquo;Ach!&rdquo; he said,
+      tapping his chest, &ldquo;ungrateful hound!&rdquo; And opening the front door he went
+      out on tiptoe....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late that afternoon Greta stole hatless through the lilac bushes; she
+      looked tired after her night journey, and sat idly on a chair in the
+      speckled shadow of a lime-tree.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'It is not like home,' she thought; 'I am unhappy. Even the birds are
+      silent, but perhaps that is because it is so hot. I have never been sad
+      like this&mdash;for it is not fancy that I am sad this time, as it is
+      sometimes. It is in my heart like the sound the wind makes through a wood,
+      it feels quite empty in my heart. If it is always like this to be unhappy,
+      then I am sorry for all the unhappy things in the world; I am sorrier than
+      I ever was before.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A shadow fell on the grass, she raised her eyes, and saw Dawney.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dr. Edmund!&rdquo; she whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dawney turned to her; a heavy furrow showed between his brows. His eyes,
+      always rather close together, stared painfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dr. Edmund,&rdquo; Greta whispered, &ldquo;is it true?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took her hand, and spread his own palm over it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;perhaps not. We must hope.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta looked up, awed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They say he is dying.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have sent for the best man in Vienna.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you are clever, Dr. Edmund; and you are afraid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is brave,&rdquo; said Dawney; &ldquo;we must all be brave, you know. You too!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Brave?&rdquo; repeated Greta; &ldquo;what is it to be brave? If it is not to cry and
+      make a fuss&mdash;that I can do. But if it is not to be sad in here,&rdquo; she
+      touched her breast, &ldquo;that I cannot do, and it shall not be any good for me
+      to try.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To be brave is to hope; don't give up hope, dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Greta, tracing the pattern of the sunlight on her skirt. &ldquo;But I
+      think that when we hope, we are not brave, because we are expecting
+      something for ourselves. Chris says that hope is prayer, and if it is
+      prayer, then all the time we are hoping, we are asking for something, and
+      it is not brave to ask for things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A smile curved Dawney's mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go on, Philosopher!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Be brave in your own way, it will be just
+      as good as anybody else's.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you going to do to be brave, Dr. Edmund?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I? Fight! If only we had five years off his life!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta watched him as he walked away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall never be brave,&rdquo; she mourned; &ldquo;I shall always be wanting to be
+      happy.&rdquo; And, kneeling down, she began to disentangle a fly, imprisoned in
+      a cobweb. A plant of hemlock had sprung up in the long grass by her feet.
+      Greta thought, dismayed: 'There are weeds!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed but another sign of the death of joy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'But it's very beautiful,' she thought, 'the blossoms are like stars. I am
+      not going to pull it up. I will leave it; perhaps it will spread all
+      through the garden; and if it does I do not care, for now things are not
+      like they used to be and I do not, think they ever shall be again.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0031" id="link2H_4_0031">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The days went by; those long, hot days, when the heat haze swims up about
+      ten of the forenoon, and, as the sun sinks level with the mountains, melts
+      into golden ether which sets the world quivering with sparkles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the lighting of the stars those sparkles die, vanishing one by one off
+      the hillsides; evening comes flying down the valleys, and life rests under
+      her cool wings. The night falls; and the hundred little voices of the
+      night arise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was near grape-gathering, and in the heat the fight for Nicholas
+      Treffry's life went on, day in, day out, with gleams of hope and moments
+      of despair. Doctors came, but after the first he refused to see them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said to Dawney&mdash;&ldquo;throwing away money. If I pull through it
+      won't be because of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For days together he would allow no one but Dawney, Dominique, and the
+      paid nurse in the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can stand it better,&rdquo; he said to Christian, &ldquo;when I don't see any of
+      you; keep away, old girl, and let me get on with it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To have been able to help would have eased the tension of her nerves, and
+      the aching of her heart. At his own request they had moved his bed into a
+      corner so that he might face the wall. There he would lie for hours
+      together, not speaking a word, except to ask for drink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes Christian crept in unnoticed, and sat watching, with her arms
+      tightly folded across her breast. At night, after Greta was asleep, she
+      would toss from side to side, muttering feverish prayers. She spent hours
+      at her little table in the schoolroom, writing letters to Harz that were
+      never sent. Once she wrote these words: &ldquo;I am the most wicked of all
+      creatures&mdash;I have even wished that he may die!&rdquo; A few minutes
+      afterwards Miss Naylor found her with her head buried on her arms.
+      Christian sprang up; tears were streaming down her cheeks. &ldquo;Don't touch
+      me!&rdquo; she cried, and rushed away. Later, she stole into her uncle's room,
+      and sank down on the floor beside the bed. She sat there silently,
+      unnoticed all the evening. When night came she could hardly be persuaded
+      to leave the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day Mr. Treffry expressed a wish to see Herr Paul; it was a long while
+      before the latter could summon courage to go in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's a few dozen of the Gordon sherry at my Chambers, in London,
+      Paul,&rdquo; Mr. Treffry said; &ldquo;I'd be glad to think you had 'em. And my man,
+      Dominique, I've made him all right in my will, but keep your eye on him;
+      he's a good sort for a foreigner, and no chicken, but sooner or later, the
+      women'll get hold of him. That's all I had to say. Send Chris to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul stood by the bedside speechless. Suddenly he blurted out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! my dear! Courage! We are all mortal. You will get well!&rdquo; All the
+      morning he walked about quite inconsolable. &ldquo;It was frightful to see him,
+      you know, frightful! An iron man could not have borne it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When Christian came to him, Mr. Treffry raised himself and looked at her a
+      long while.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His wistful face was like an accusation. But that very afternoon the news
+      came from the sickroom that he was better, having had no pain for several
+      hours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every one went about with smiles lurking in their eyes, and ready to break
+      forth at a word. In the kitchen Barbi burst out crying, and, forgetting to
+      toss the pan, spoiled a Kaiser-Schmarn she was making. Dominique was
+      observed draining a glass of Chianti, and solemnly casting forth the last
+      drops in libation. An order was given for tea to be taken out under the
+      acacias, where it was always cool; it was felt that something in the
+      nature of high festival was being held. Even Herr Paul was present; but
+      Christian did not come. Nobody spoke of illness; to mention it might break
+      the spell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Naylor, who had gone into the house, came back, saying:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a strange man standing over there by the corner of the house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really!&rdquo; asked Mrs. Decie; &ldquo;what does he want?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Naylor reddened. &ldquo;I did not ask him. I&mdash;don't&mdash;know&mdash;whether
+      he is quite respectable. His coat is buttoned very close, and he&mdash;doesn't
+      seem&mdash;to have a&mdash;collar.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go and see what he wants, dear child,&rdquo; Mrs. Decie said to Greta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know&mdash;I really do not know&mdash;&rdquo; began Miss Naylor; &ldquo;he
+      has very&mdash;high&mdash;boots,&rdquo; but Greta was already on her way, with
+      hands clasped behind her, and demure eyes taking in the stranger's figure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please?&rdquo; she said, when she was close to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger took his cap off with a jerk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This house has no bells,&rdquo; he said in a nasal voice; &ldquo;it has a tendency to
+      discourage one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Greta gravely, &ldquo;there is a bell, but it does not ring now,
+      because my uncle is so ill.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am very sorry to hear that. I don't know the people here, but I am very
+      sorry to hear that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would be glad to speak a few words to your sister, if it is your sister
+      that I want.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And the stranger's face grew very red.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it,&rdquo; said Greta, &ldquo;that you are a friend of Herr Harz? If you are a
+      friend of his, you will please come and have some tea, and while you are
+      having tea I will look for Chris.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Perspiration bedewed the stranger's forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tea? Excuse me! I don't drink tea.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is also coffee,&rdquo; Greta said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger's progress towards the arbour was so slow that Greta arrived
+      considerably before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a friend of Herr Harz,&rdquo; she whispered; &ldquo;he will drink coffee. I am
+      going to find Chris.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Greta!&rdquo; gasped Miss Naylor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Decie put up her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;if it is so, we must be very nice to him for Christian's
+      sake.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Naylor's face grew soft.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, yes!&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bah!&rdquo; muttered Herr Paul, &ldquo;that recommences.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Paul!&rdquo; murmured Mrs. Decie, &ldquo;you lack the elements of wisdom.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul glared at the approaching stranger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Decie had risen, and smilingly held out her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are so glad to know you; you are an artist too, perhaps? I take a
+      great interest in art, and especially in that school which Mr. Harz
+      represents.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is the genuine article, ma'am,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;He represents no school, he
+      is one of that kind whose corpses make schools.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; murmured Mrs. Decie, &ldquo;you are an American. That is so nice. Do sit
+      down! My niece will soon be here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta came running back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you come, please?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Chris is ready.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gulping down his coffee, the stranger included them all in a single bow,
+      and followed her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ach!&rdquo; said Herr Paul, &ldquo;garcon tres chic, celui-la!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian was standing by her little table. The stranger began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sending Mr. Harz's things to England; there are some pictures here.
+      He would be glad to have them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A flood of crimson swept over her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sending them to London,&rdquo; the stranger repeated; &ldquo;perhaps you could
+      give them to me to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are ready; my sister will show you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes seemed to dart into his soul, and try to drag something from it.
+      The words rushed from her lips:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there any message for me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger regarded her curiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he stammered, &ldquo;no! I guess not. He is well.... I wish....&rdquo; He
+      stopped; her white face seemed to flash scorn, despair, and entreaty on
+      him all at once. And turning, she left him standing there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0032" id="link2H_4_0032">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXVIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When Christian went that evening to her uncle's room he was sitting up in
+      bed, and at once began to talk. &ldquo;Chris,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I can't stand this
+      dying by inches. I'm going to try what a journey'll do for me. I want to
+      get back to the old country. The doctor's promised. There's a shot in the
+      locker yet! I believe in that young chap; he's stuck to me like a man....
+      It'll be your birthday, on Tuesday, old girl, and you'll be twenty.
+      Seventeen years since your father died. You've been a lot to me.... A
+      parson came here today. That's a bad sign. Thought it his duty! Very civil
+      of him! I wouldn't see him, though. If there's anything in what they tell
+      you, I'm not going to sneak in at this time o' day. There's one thing
+      that's rather badly on my mind. I took advantage of Mr. Harz with this
+      damned pitifulness of mine. You've a right to look at me as I've seen you
+      sometimes when you thought I was asleep. If I hadn't been ill he'd never
+      have left you. I don't blame you, Chris&mdash;not I! You love me? I know
+      that, my dear. But one's alone when it comes to the run-in. Don't cry! Our
+      minds aren't Sunday-school books; you're finding it out, that's all!&rdquo; He
+      sighed and turned away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The noise of sun-blinds being raised vibrated through the house. A feeling
+      of terror seized on the girl; he lay so still, and yet the drawing of each
+      breath was a fight. If she could only suffer in his place! She went close,
+      and bent over him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's air we want, both you and I!&rdquo; he muttered. Christian beckoned to the
+      nurse, and stole out through the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A regiment was passing in the road; she stood half-hidden amongst the
+      lilac bushes watching. The poplar leaves drooped lifeless and almost black
+      above her head, the dust raised by the soldiers' feet hung in the air; it
+      seemed as if in all the world no freshness and no life were stirring. The
+      tramp of feet died away. Suddenly within arm's length of her a man
+      appeared, his stick shouldered like a sword. He raised his hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-evening! You do not remember me? Sarelli. Pardon! You looked like a
+      ghost standing there. How badly those fellows marched! We hang, you see,
+      on the skirts of our profession and criticise; it is all we are fit for.&rdquo;
+       His black eyes, restless and malevolent like a swan's, seemed to stab her
+      face. &ldquo;A fine evening! Too hot. The storm is wanted; you feel that? It is
+      weary waiting for the storm; but after the storm, my dear young lady,
+      comes peace.&rdquo; He smiled, gently, this time, and baring his head again, was
+      lost to view in the shadow of the trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His figure had seemed to Christian like the sudden vision of a
+      threatening, hidden force. She thrust out her hands, as though to keep it
+      off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No use; it was within her, nothing could keep it away! She went to Mrs.
+      Decie's room, where her aunt and Miss Naylor were conversing in low tones.
+      To hear their voices brought back the touch of this world of everyday
+      which had no part or lot in the terrifying powers within her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dawney slept at the Villa now. In the dead of night he was awakened by a
+      light flashed in his eyes. Christian was standing there, her face pale and
+      wild with terror, her hair falling in dark masses on her shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Save him! Save him!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;Quick! The bleeding!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He saw her muffle her face in her white sleeves, and seizing the candle,
+      leaped out of bed and rushed away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The internal haemorrhage had come again, and Nicholas Treffry wavered
+      between life and death. When it had ceased, he sank into a sort of stupor.
+      About six o'clock he came back to consciousness; watching his eyes, they
+      could see a mental struggle taking place within him. At last he singled
+      Christian out from the others by a sign.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm beat, Chris,&rdquo; he whispered. &ldquo;Let him know, I want to see him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice grew a little stronger. &ldquo;I thought that I could see it through&mdash;but
+      here's the end.&rdquo; He lifted his hand ever so little, and let it fall again.
+      When told a little later that a telegram had been sent to Harz his eyes
+      expressed satisfaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul came down in ignorance of the night's events. He stopped in
+      front of the barometer and tapped it, remarking to Miss Naylor: &ldquo;The glass
+      has gone downstairs; we shall have cool weather&mdash;it will still go
+      well with him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When, with her brown face twisted by pity and concern, she told him that
+      it was a question of hours, Herr Paul turned first purple, then pale, and
+      sitting down, trembled violently. &ldquo;I cannot believe it,&rdquo; he exclaimed
+      almost angrily. &ldquo;Yesterday he was so well! I cannot believe it! Poor
+      Nicholas! Yesterday he spoke to me!&rdquo; Taking Miss Naylor's hand, he
+      clutched it in his own. &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; he cried, letting it go suddenly, and
+      striking at his forehead, &ldquo;it is too terrible; only yesterday he spoke to
+      me of sherry. Is there nobody, then, who can do good?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is only God,&rdquo; replied Miss Naylor softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God?&rdquo; said Herr Paul in a scared voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We&mdash;can&mdash;all&mdash;pray to Him,&rdquo; Miss Naylor murmured; little
+      spots of colour came into her cheeks. &ldquo;I am going to do it now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Herr Paul raised her hand and kissed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you?&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;good! I too.&rdquo; He passed through his study door,
+      closed it carefully behind him, then for some unknown reason set his back
+      against it. Ugh! Death! It came to all! Some day it would come to him. It
+      might come tomorrow! One must pray!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The day dragged to its end. In the sky clouds had mustered, and, crowding
+      close on one another, clung round the sun, soft, thick, greywhite, like
+      the feathers on a pigeon's breast. Towards evening faint tremblings were
+      felt at intervals, as from the shock of immensely distant earthquakes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nobody went to bed that night, but in the morning the report was the same:
+      &ldquo;Unconscious&mdash;a question of hours.&rdquo; Once only did he recover
+      consciousness, and then asked for Harz. A telegram had come from him, he
+      was on the way. Towards seven of the evening the long-expected storm broke
+      in a sky like ink. Into the valleys and over the crests of mountains it
+      seemed as though an unseen hand were spilling goblets of pale wine,
+      darting a sword-blade zigzag over trees, roofs, spires, peaks, into the
+      very firmament, which answered every thrust with great bursts of groaning.
+      Just beyond the veranda Greta saw a glowworm shining, as it might be a
+      tiny bead of the fallen lightning. Soon the rain covered everything.
+      Sometimes a jet of light brought the hilltops, towering, dark, and hard,
+      over the house, to disappear again behind the raindrops and shaken leaves.
+      Each breath drawn by the storm was like the clash of a thousand cymbals;
+      and in his room Mr. Treffry lay unconscious of its fury.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Greta had crept in unobserved; and sat curled in a corner, with Scruff in
+      her arms, rocking slightly to and fro. When Christian passed, she caught
+      her skirt, and whispered: &ldquo;It is your birthday, Chris!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Treffry stirred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's that? Thunder?&mdash;it's cooler. Where am I? Chris!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dawney signed for her to take his place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Chris!&rdquo; Mr. Treffry said. &ldquo;It's near now.&rdquo; She bent across him, and her
+      tears fell on his forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forgive!&rdquo; she whispered; &ldquo;love me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He raised his finger, and touched her cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For an hour or more he did not speak, though once or twice he moaned, and
+      faintly tightened his pressure on her fingers. The storm had died away,
+      but very far off the thunder was still muttering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His eyes opened once more, rested on her, and passed beyond, into that
+      abyss dividing youth from age, conviction from conviction, life from
+      death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the foot of the bed Dawney stood covering his face; behind him
+      Dominique knelt with hands held upwards; the sound of Greta's breathing,
+      soft in sleep, rose and fell in the stillness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0033" id="link2H_4_0033">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXIX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One afternoon in March, more than three years after Mr. Treffry's death,
+      Christian was sitting at the window of a studio in St. John's Wood. The
+      sky was covered with soft, high clouds, through which shone little gleams
+      of blue. Now and then a bright shower fell, sprinkling the trees, where
+      every twig was curling upwards as if waiting for the gift of its new
+      leaves. And it seemed to her that the boughs thickened and budded under
+      her very eyes; a great concourse of sparrows had gathered on those boughs,
+      and kept raising a shrill chatter. Over at the far side of the room Harz
+      was working at a picture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On Christian's face was the quiet smile of one who knows that she has only
+      to turn her eyes to see what she wishes to see; of one whose possessions
+      are safe under her hand. She looked at Harz with that possessive smile.
+      But as into the brain of one turning in his bed grim fancies will suddenly
+      leap up out of warm nothingness, so there leaped into her mind the memory
+      of that long ago dawn, when he had found her kneeling by Mr. Treffry's
+      body. She seemed to see again the dead face, so gravely quiet, and
+      furrowless. She seemed to see her lover and herself setting forth silently
+      along the river wall where they had first met; sitting down, still silent,
+      beneath the poplar-tree where the little bodies of the chafers had lain
+      strewn in the Spring. To see the trees changing from black to grey, from
+      grey to green, and in the dark sky long white lines of cloud, lighting to
+      the south like birds; and, very far away, rosy peaks watching the
+      awakening of the earth. And now once again, after all that time, she felt
+      her spirit shrink away from his; as it had shrunk in that hour, when she
+      had seemed hateful to herself. She remembered the words she had spoken: &ldquo;I
+      have no heart left. You've torn it in two between you. Love is all self&mdash;I
+      wanted him to die.&rdquo; She remembered too the raindrops on the vines like a
+      million tiny lamps, and the throstle that began singing. Then, as dreams
+      die out into warm nothingness, recollection vanished, and the smile came
+      back to her lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She took out a letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;....O Chris! We are really coming; I seem to be always telling it to
+      myself, and I have told Scruff many times, but he does not care, because
+      he is getting old. Miss Naylor says we shall arrive for breakfast, and
+      that we shall be hungry, but perhaps she will not be very hungry, if it is
+      rough. Papa said to me: 'Je serai inconsolable, mais inconsolable!' But I
+      think he will not be, because he is going to Vienna. When we are come,
+      there will be nobody at Villa Rubein; Aunt Constance has gone a fortnight
+      ago to Florence. There is a young man at her hotel; she says he will be
+      one of the greatest playwriters in England, and she sent me a play of his
+      to read; it was only a little about love, I did not like it very much....
+      O Chris! I think I shall cry when I see you. As I am quite grown up, Miss
+      Naylor is not to come back with me; sometimes she is sad, but she will be
+      glad to see you, Chris. She seems always sadder when it is Spring. Today I
+      walked along the wall; the little green balls of wool are growing on the
+      poplars already, and I saw one chafer; it will not be long before the
+      cherry blossom comes; and I felt so funny, sad and happy together, and
+      once I thought that I had wings and could fly away up the valley to Meran&mdash;but
+      I had none, so I sat on the bench where we sat the day we took the
+      pictures, and I thought and thought; there was nothing came to me in my
+      thoughts, but all was sweet and a little noisy, and rather sad; it was
+      like the buzzing of the chafer, in my head; and now I feel so tired and
+      all my blood is running up and down me. I do not mind, because I know it
+      is the Spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dominique came to see us the other day; he is very well, and is half the
+      proprietor of the Adler Hotel, at Meran; he is not at all different, and
+      he asked about you and about Alois&mdash;do you know, Chris, to myself I
+      call him Herr Harz, but when I have seen him this time I shall call him
+      Alois in my heart also.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a letter from Dr. Edmund; he is in London, so perhaps you have
+      seen him, only he has a great many patients and some that he has 'hopes of
+      killing soon'. especially one old lady, because she is always wanting him
+      to do things for her, and he is never saying 'No,' so he does not like
+      her. He says that he is getting old. When I have finished this letter I am
+      going to write and tell him that perhaps he shall see me soon, and then I
+      think he will be very sad. Now that the Spring is come there are more
+      flowers to take to Uncle Nic's grave, and every day, when I am gone, Barbi
+      is to take them so that he shall not miss you, Chris, because all the
+      flowers I put there are for you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am buying some toys without paint on for my niece.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O Chris! this will be the first baby that I have known.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am only to stay three weeks with you, but I think when I am once there
+      I shall be staying longer. I send a kiss for my niece, and to Herr Harz,
+      my love&mdash;that is the last time I shall call him Herr Harz; and to
+      you, Chris, all the joy that is in my heart.&mdash;Your loving
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;GRETA.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Christian rose, and, turning very softly, stood, leaning her elbows on the
+      back of a high seat, looking at her husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In her eyes there was a slow, clear, faintly smiling, yet yearning look,
+      as though this strenuous figure bent on its task were seen for a moment as
+      something apart, and not all the world to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tired?&rdquo; asked Harz, putting his lips to her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, it's only&mdash;what Greta says about the Spring; it makes one want
+      more than one has got.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Slipping her hand away, she went back to the window. Harz stood, looking
+      after her; then, taking up his palette, again began painting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the world, outside, the high soft clouds flew by; the trees seemed
+      thickening and budding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Christian thought:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Can we never have quite enough?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      December 1890.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0034" id="link2H_4_0034">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      TO
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      MY FATHER
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0035" id="link2H_4_0035">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      A MAN OF DEVON
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0036" id="link2H_4_0036">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      &ldquo;MOOR, 20th July.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      .... It is quiet here, sleepy, rather&mdash;a farm is never quiet; the
+      sea, too, is only a quarter of a mile away, and when it's windy, the sound
+      of it travels up the combe; for distraction, you must go four miles to
+      Brixham or five to Kingswear, and you won't find much then. The farm lies
+      in a sheltered spot, scooped, so to speak, high up the combe side&mdash;behind
+      is a rise of fields, and beyond, a sweep of down. You have the feeling of
+      being able to see quite far, which is misleading, as you soon find out if
+      you walk. It is true Devon country-hills, hollows, hedge-banks, lanes
+      dipping down into the earth or going up like the sides of houses,
+      coppices, cornfields, and little streams wherever there's a place for one;
+      but the downs along the cliff, all gorse and ferns, are wild. The combe
+      ends in a sandy cove with black rock on one side, pinkish cliffs away to
+      the headland on the other, and a coastguard station. Just now, with the
+      harvest coming on, everything looks its richest, the apples ripening, the
+      trees almost too green. It's very hot, still weather; the country and the
+      sea seem to sleep in the sun. In front of the farm are half-a-dozen pines
+      that look as if they had stepped out of another land, but all round the
+      back is orchard as lush, and gnarled, and orthodox as any one could wish.
+      The house, a long, white building with three levels of roof, and splashes
+      of brown all over it, looks as if it might be growing down into the earth.
+      It was freshly thatched two years ago&mdash;and that's all the newness
+      there is about it; they say the front door, oak, with iron knobs, is three
+      hundred years old at least. You can touch the ceilings with your hand. The
+      windows certainly might be larger&mdash;a heavenly old place, though, with
+      a flavour of apples, smoke, sweetbriar, bacon, honeysuckle, and age, all
+      over it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The owner is a man called John Ford, about seventy, and seventeen stone in
+      weight&mdash;very big, on long legs, with a grey, stubbly beard, grey,
+      watery eyes, short neck and purplish complexion; he is asthmatic, and has
+      a very courteous, autocratic manner. His clothes are made of Harris tweed&mdash;except
+      on Sundays, when he puts on black&mdash;a seal ring, and a thick gold
+      cable chain. There's nothing mean or small about John Ford; I suspect him
+      of a warm heart, but he doesn't let you know much about him. He's a
+      north-country man by birth, and has been out in New Zealand all his life.
+      This little Devonshire farm is all he has now. He had a large &ldquo;station&rdquo; in
+      the North Island, and was much looked up to, kept open house, did
+      everything, as one would guess, in a narrow-minded, large-handed way. He
+      came to grief suddenly; I don't quite know how. I believe his only son
+      lost money on the turf, and then, unable to face his father, shot himself;
+      if you had seen John Ford, you could imagine that. His wife died, too,
+      that year. He paid up to the last penny, and came home, to live on this
+      farm. He told me the other night that he had only one relation in the
+      world, his granddaughter, who lives here with him. Pasiance Voisey&mdash;old
+      spelling for Patience, but they pronounce, it Pash-yence&mdash;is sitting
+      out here with me at this moment on a sort of rustic loggia that opens into
+      the orchard. Her sleeves are rolled up, and she's stripping currants,
+      ready for black currant tea. Now and then she rests her elbows on the
+      table, eats a berry, pouts her lips, and, begins again. She has a round,
+      little face; a long, slender body; cheeks like poppies; a bushy mass of
+      black-brown hair, and dark-brown, almost black, eyes; her nose is snub;
+      her lips quick, red, rather full; all her motions quick and soft. She
+      loves bright colours. She's rather like a little cat; sometimes she seems
+      all sympathy, then in a moment as hard as tortoise-shell. She's all
+      impulse; yet she doesn't like to show her feelings; I sometimes wonder
+      whether she has any. She plays the violin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It's queer to see these two together, queer and rather sad. The old man
+      has a fierce tenderness for her that strikes into the very roots of him. I
+      see him torn between it, and his cold north-country horror of his
+      feelings; his life with her is an unconscious torture to him. She's a
+      restless, chafing thing, demure enough one moment, then flashing out into
+      mocking speeches or hard little laughs. Yet she's fond of him in her
+      fashion; I saw her kiss him once when he was asleep. She obeys him
+      generally&mdash;in a way as if she couldn't breathe while she was doing
+      it. She's had a queer sort of education&mdash;history, geography,
+      elementary mathematics, and nothing else; never been to school; had a few
+      lessons on the violin, but has taught herself most of what she knows. She
+      is well up in the lore of birds, flowers, and insects; has three cats, who
+      follow her about; and is full of pranks. The other day she called out to
+      me, &ldquo;I've something for you. Hold out your hand and shut your eyes!&rdquo; It
+      was a large, black slug! She's the child of the old fellow's only
+      daughter, who was sent home for schooling at Torquay, and made a runaway
+      match with one Richard Voisey, a yeoman farmer, whom she met in the
+      hunting-field. John Ford was furious&mdash;his ancestors, it appears, used
+      to lead ruffians on the Cumberland side of the Border&mdash;he looked on
+      &ldquo;Squire&rdquo; Rick Voisey as a cut below him. He was called &ldquo;Squire,&rdquo; as far as
+      I can make out, because he used to play cards every evening with a parson
+      in the neighbourhood who went by the name of &ldquo;Devil&rdquo; Hawkins. Not that the
+      Voisey stock is to be despised. They have had this farm since it was
+      granted to one Richard Voysey by copy dated 8th September, 13 Henry VIII.
+      Mrs. Hopgood, the wife of the bailiff&mdash;a dear, quaint, serene old
+      soul with cheeks like a rosy, withered apple, and an unbounded love of
+      Pasiance&mdash;showed me the very document.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I kape it,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Mr. Ford be tu proud&mdash;but other folks be
+      proud tu. 'Tis a pra-aper old fam'ly: all the women is Margery, Pasiance,
+      or Mary; all the men's Richards an' Johns an' Rogers; old as they
+      apple-trees.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rick Voisey was a rackety, hunting fellow, and &ldquo;dipped&rdquo; the old farm up to
+      its thatched roof. John Ford took his revenge by buying up the mortgages,
+      foreclosing, and commanding his daughter and Voisey to go on living here
+      rent free; this they dutifully did until they were both killed in a
+      dog-cart accident, eight years ago. Old Ford's financial smash came a year
+      later, and since then he's lived here with Pasiance. I fancy it's the
+      cross in her blood that makes her so restless, and irresponsible: if she
+      had been all a native she'd have been happy enough here, or all a stranger
+      like John Ford himself, but the two strains struggling for mastery seem to
+      give her no rest. You'll think this a far-fetched theory, but I believe it
+      to be the true one. She'll stand with lips pressed together, her arms
+      folded tight across her narrow chest, staring as if she could see beyond
+      the things round her; then something catches her attention, her eyes will
+      grow laughing, soft, or scornful all in a minute! She's eighteen,
+      perfectly fearless in a boat, but you can't get her to mount a horse&mdash;a
+      sore subject with her grandfather, who spends most of his day on a lean,
+      half-bred pony, that carries him like a feather, for all his weight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They put me up here as a favour to Dan Treffry; there's an arrangement of
+      L. s. d. with Mrs. Hopgood in the background. They aren't at all well off;
+      this is the largest farm about, but it doesn't bring them in much. To look
+      at John Ford, it seems incredible he should be short of money&mdash;he's
+      too large.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have family prayers at eight, then, breakfast&mdash;after that freedom
+      for writing or anything else till supper and evening prayers. At midday
+      one forages for oneself. On Sundays, two miles to church twice, or you get
+      into John Ford's black books.... Dan Treffry himself is staying at
+      Kingswear. He says he's made his pile; it suits him down here&mdash;like a
+      sleep after years of being too wide-awake; he had a rough time in New
+      Zealand, until that mine made his fortune. You'd hardly remember him; he
+      reminds me of his uncle, old Nicholas Treffry; the same slow way of
+      speaking, with a hesitation, and a trick of repeating your name with
+      everything he says; left-handed too, and the same slow twinkle in his
+      eyes. He has a dark, short beard, and red-brown cheeks; is a little bald
+      on the temples, and a bit grey, but hard as iron. He rides over nearly
+      every day, attended by a black spaniel with a wonderful nose and a horror
+      of petticoats. He has told me lots of good stories of John Ford in the
+      early squatter's times; his feats with horses live to this day; and he was
+      through the Maori wars; as Dan says, &ldquo;a man after Uncle Nic's own heart.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They are very good friends, and respect each other; Dan has a great
+      admiration for the old man, but the attraction is Pasiance. He talks very
+      little when she's in the room, but looks at her in a sidelong, wistful
+      sort of way. Pasiance's conduct to him would be cruel in any one else, but
+      in her, one takes it with a pinch of salt. Dan goes off, but turns up
+      again as quiet and dogged as you please.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Last night, for instance, we were sitting in the loggia after supper.
+      Pasiance was fingering the strings of her violin, and suddenly Dan (a bold
+      thing for him) asked her to play.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What!&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;before men? No, thank you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I hate them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Down came John Ford's hand on the wicker table: &ldquo;You forget yourself! Go
+      to bed!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She gave Dan a look, and went; we could hear her playing in her bedroom;
+      it sounded like a dance of spirits; and just when one thought she had
+      finished, out it would break again like a burst of laughter. Presently,
+      John Ford begged our pardons ceremoniously, and stumped off indoors. The
+      violin ceased; we heard his voice growling at her; down he came again.
+      Just as he was settled in his chair there was a soft swish, and something
+      dark came falling through the apple boughs. The violin! You should have
+      seen his face! Dan would have picked the violin up, but the old man
+      stopped him. Later, from my bedroom window, I saw John Ford come out and
+      stand looking at the violin. He raised his foot as if to stamp on it. At
+      last he picked it up, wiped it carefully, and took it in....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My room is next to hers. I kept hearing her laugh, a noise too as if she
+      were dragging things about the room. Then I fell asleep, but woke with a
+      start, and went to the window for a breath of fresh air. Such a black,
+      breathless night! Nothing to be seen but the twisted, blacker branches;
+      not the faintest stir of leaves, no sound but muffled grunting from the
+      cowhouse, and now and then a faint sigh. I had the queerest feeling of
+      unrest and fear, the last thing to expect on such a night. There is
+      something here that's disturbing; a sort of suppressed struggle. I've
+      never in my life seen anything so irresponsible as this girl, or so
+      uncompromising as the old man; I keep thinking of the way he wiped that
+      violin. It's just as if a spark would set everything in a blaze. There's a
+      menace of tragedy&mdash;or&mdash;perhaps it's only the heat, and too much
+      of Mother Hopgood's crame....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0037" id="link2H_4_0037">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      &ldquo;Tuesday.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      .... I've made a new acquaintance. I was lying in the orchard, and
+      presently, not seeing me, he came along&mdash;a man of middle height, with
+      a singularly good balance, and no lumber&mdash;rather old blue clothes, a
+      flannel shirt, a dull red necktie, brown shoes, a cap with a leather peak
+      pushed up on the forehead. Face long and narrow, bronzed with a kind of
+      pale burnt-in brownness; a good forehead. A brown moustache, beard rather
+      pointed, blackening about the cheeks; his chin not visible, but from the
+      beard's growth must be big; mouth I should judge sensuous. Nose straight
+      and blunt; eyes grey, with an upward look, not exactly frank, because
+      defiant; two parallel furrows down each cheek, one from the inner corner
+      of the eye, one from the nostril; age perhaps thirty-five. About the face,
+      attitude, movements, something immensely vital, adaptable, daring, and
+      unprincipled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood in front of the loggia, biting his fingers, a kind of
+      nineteenth-century buccaneer, and I wondered what he was doing in this
+      galley. They say you can tell a man of Kent or a Somersetshire man;
+      certainly you can tell a Yorkshire man, and this fellow could only have
+      been a man of Devon, one of the two main types found in this county. He
+      whistled; and out came Pasiance in a geranium-coloured dress, looking like
+      some tall poppy&mdash;you know the slight droop of a poppy's head, and the
+      way the wind sways its stem.... She is a human poppy, her fuzzy dark hair
+      is like a poppy's lustreless black heart, she has a poppy's tantalising
+      attraction and repulsion, something fatal, or rather fateful. She came
+      walking up to my new friend, then caught sight of me, and stopped dead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That,&rdquo; she said to me, &ldquo;is Zachary Pearse. This,&rdquo; she said to him, &ldquo;is
+      our lodger.&rdquo; She said it with a wonderful soft malice. She wanted to
+      scratch me, and she scratched. Half an hour later I was in the yard, when
+      up came this fellow Pearse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Glad to know you,&rdquo; he said, looking thoughtfully at the pigs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're a writer, aren't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A sort of one,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If by any chance,&rdquo; he said suddenly, &ldquo;you're looking for a job, I could
+      put something in your way. Walk down to the beach with me, and I'll tell
+      you; my boat's at anchor, smartest little craft in these parts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was very hot, and I had no desire whatever to go down to the beach&mdash;I
+      went, all the same. We had not gone far when John Ford and Dan Treffry
+      came into the lane. Our friend seemed a little disconcerted, but soon
+      recovered himself. We met in the middle of the lane, where there was
+      hardly room to pass. John Ford, who looked very haughty, put on his
+      pince-nez and stared at Pearse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-day!&rdquo; said Pearse; &ldquo;fine weather! I've been up to ask Pasiance to
+      come for a sail. Wednesday we thought, weather permitting; this
+      gentleman's coming. Perhaps you'll come too, Mr. Treffry. You've never
+      seen my place. I'll give you lunch, and show you my father. He's worth a
+      couple of hours' sail any day.&rdquo; It was said in such an odd way that one
+      couldn't resent his impudence. John Ford was seized with a fit of
+      wheezing, and seemed on the eve of an explosion; he glanced at me, and
+      checked himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're very good,&rdquo; he said icily; &ldquo;my granddaughter has other things to
+      do. You, gentlemen, will please yourselves&rdquo;; and, with a very slight bow,
+      he went stumping on to the house. Dan looked at me, and I looked at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll come?&rdquo; said Pearse, rather wistfully. Dan stammered: &ldquo;Thank you,
+      Mr. Pearse; I'm a better man on a horse than in a boat, but&mdash;thank
+      you.&rdquo; Cornered in this way, he's a shy, soft-hearted being. Pearse smiled
+      his thanks. &ldquo;Wednesday, then, at ten o'clock; you shan't regret it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pertinacious beggar!&rdquo; I heard Dan mutter in his beard; and found myself
+      marching down the lane again by Pearse's side. I asked him what he was
+      good enough to mean by saying I was coming, without having asked me. He
+      answered, unabashed:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see, I'm not friends with the old man; but I knew he'd not be
+      impolite to you, so I took the liberty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He has certainly a knack of turning one's anger to curiosity. We were down
+      in the combe now; the tide was running out, and the sand all little, wet,
+      shining ridges. About a quarter of a mile out lay a cutter, with her tan
+      sail half down, swinging to the swell. The sunlight was making the pink
+      cliffs glow in the most wonderful way; and shifting in bright patches over
+      the sea like moving shoals of goldfish. Pearse perched himself on his
+      dinghy, and looked out under his hand. He seemed lost in admiration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If we could only net some of those spangles,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;an' make gold of
+      'em! No more work then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a big job I've got on,&rdquo; he said presently; &ldquo;I'll tell you about it
+      on Wednesday. I want a journalist.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I don't write for the papers,&rdquo; I said; &ldquo;I do other sort of work. My
+      game is archaeology.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It doesn't matter,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;the more imagination the better. It'd be a
+      thundering good thing for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His assurance was amazing, but it was past supper-time, and hunger getting
+      the better of my curiosity, I bade him good-night. When I looked back, he
+      was still there, on the edge of his boat, gazing at the sea. A queer sort
+      of bird altogether, but attractive somehow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nobody mentioned him that evening; but once old Ford, after staring a long
+      time at Pasiance, muttered a propos of nothing, &ldquo;Undutiful children!&rdquo; She
+      was softer than usual; listening quietly to our talk, and smiling when
+      spoken to. At bedtime she went up to her grand-father, without waiting for
+      the usual command, &ldquo;Come and kiss me, child.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dan did not stay to supper, and he has not been here since. This morning I
+      asked Mother Hopgood who Zachary Pearse was. She's a true Devonian; if
+      there's anything she hates, it is to be committed to a definite statement.
+      She ambled round her answer, and at last told me that he was &ldquo;son of old
+      Cap'en Jan Pearse to Black Mill. 'Tes an old family to Dartymouth an'
+      Plymouth,&rdquo; she went on in a communicative outburst. &ldquo;They du say Francis
+      Drake tuke five o' they Pearses with 'en to fight the Spaniards. At least
+      that's what I've heard Mr. Zachary zay; but Ha-apgood can tell yu.&rdquo; Poor
+      Hopgood, the amount of information she saddles him with in the course of
+      the day! Having given me thus to understand that she had run dry, she at
+      once went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cap'en Jan Pearse made a dale of ventures. He's old now&mdash;they du say
+      nigh an 'undred. Ha-apgood can tell yu.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the son, Mrs. Hopgood?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes twinkled with sudden shrewdness: She hugged herself placidly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An' what would yu take for dinner to-day? There's duck; or yu might like
+      'toad in the hole,' with an apple tart; or then, there's&mdash;Well! we'll
+      see what we can du like.&rdquo; And off she went, without waiting for my answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To-morrow is Wednesday. I shan't be sorry to get another look at this
+      fellow Pearse....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0038" id="link2H_4_0038">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      &ldquo;Friday, 29th July.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      .... Why do you ask me so many questions, and egg me on to write about
+      these people instead of minding my business? If you really want to hear,
+      I'll tell you of Wednesday's doings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a splendid morning; and Dan turned up, to my surprise&mdash;though
+      I might have known that when he says a thing, he does it. John Ford came
+      out to shake hands with him, then, remembering why he had come, breathed
+      loudly, said nothing, and went in again. Nothing was to be seen of
+      Pasiance, and we went down to the beach together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't like this fellow Pearse, George,&rdquo; Dan said to me on the way; &ldquo;I
+      was fool enough to say I'd go, and so I must, but what's he after? Not the
+      man to do things without a reason, mind you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I remarked that we should soon know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not so sure&mdash;queer beggar; I never look at him without thinking
+      of a pirate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The cutter lay in the cove as if she had never moved. There too was
+      Zachary Pearse seated on the edge of his dinghy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A five-knot breeze,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I'll run you down in a couple of hours.&rdquo;
+       He made no inquiry about Pasiance, but put us into his cockleshell and
+      pulled for the cutter. A lantern-Jawed fellow, named Prawle, with a spiky,
+      prominent beard, long, clean-shaven upper lip, and tanned complexion&mdash;a
+      regular hard-weather bird&mdash;received us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cutter was beautifully clean; built for a Brixham trawler, she still
+      had her number&mdash;DH 113&mdash;uneffaced. We dived into a sort of
+      cabin, airy, but dark, fitted with two bunks and a small table, on which
+      stood some bottles of stout; there were lockers, too, and pegs for
+      clothes. Prawle, who showed us round, seemed very proud of a steam
+      contrivance for hoisting sails. It was some minutes before we came on deck
+      again; and there, in the dinghy, being pulled towards the cutter, sat
+      Pasiance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I'd known this,&rdquo; stammered Dan, getting red, &ldquo;I wouldn't have come.&rdquo;
+       She had outwitted us, and there was nothing to be done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a very pleasant sail. The breeze was light from the south-east, the
+      sun warm, the air soft. Presently Pasiance began singing:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Columbus is dead and laid in his grave, Oh! heigh-ho! and laid in his
+      grave; Over his head the apple-trees wave Oh! heigh-ho! the apple-trees
+      wave....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The apples are ripe and ready to fall, Oh! heigh-ho! and ready to fall;
+      There came an old woman and gathered them all, Oh! heigh-ho! and gathered
+      them all....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The apples are gathered, and laid on the shelf, Oh! heigh-ho! and laid on
+      the shelf; If you want any more, you must sing for yourself, Oh! heigh-ho!
+      and sing for yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her small, high voice came to us in trills and spurts, as the wind let it,
+      like the singing of a skylark lost in the sky. Pearse went up to her and
+      whispered something. I caught a glimpse of her face like a startled wild
+      creature's; shrinking, tossing her hair, laughing, all in the same breath.
+      She wouldn't sing again, but crouched in the bows with her chin on her
+      hands, and the sun falling on one cheek, round, velvety, red as a
+      peach....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We passed Dartmouth, and half an hour later put into a little wooded bay.
+      On a low reddish cliff was a house hedged round by pine-trees. A bit of
+      broken jetty ran out from the bottom of the cliff. We hooked on to this,
+      and landed. An ancient, fish-like man came slouching down and took charge
+      of the cutter. Pearse led us towards the house, Pasiance following
+      mortally shy all of a sudden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The house had a dark, overhanging thatch of the rush reeds that grow in
+      the marshes hereabouts; I remember nothing else remarkable. It was neither
+      old, nor new; neither beautiful, nor exactly ugly; neither clean, nor
+      entirely squalid; it perched there with all its windows over the sea,
+      turning its back contemptuously on the land.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Seated in a kind of porch, beside an immense telescope, was a very old man
+      in a panama hat, with a rattan cane. His pure-white beard and moustache,
+      and almost black eyebrows, gave a very singular, piercing look to his
+      little, restless, dark-grey eyes; all over his mahogany cheeks and neck
+      was a network of fine wrinkles. He sat quite upright, in the full sun,
+      hardly blinking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dad!&rdquo; said Zachary, &ldquo;this is Pasiance Voisey.&rdquo; The old man turned his
+      eyes on her and muttered, &ldquo;How do you do, ma'am?&rdquo; then took no further
+      notice. And Pasiance, who seemed to resent this, soon slipped away and
+      went wandering about amongst the pines. An old woman brought some plates
+      and bottles and laid them casually on a table; and we sat round the figure
+      of old Captain Pearse without a word, as if we were all under a spell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before lunch there was a little scene between Zachary Pearse and Dan, as
+      to which of them should summon Pasiance. It ended in both going, and
+      coming back without her. She did not want any lunch, would stay where she
+      was amongst the pines.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For lunch we had chops, wood-pigeons, mushrooms, and mulberry preserve,
+      and drank wonderful Madeira out of common wine-glasses. I asked the old
+      man where he got it; he gave me a queer look, and answered with a little
+      bow:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stood me in tu shillin' the bottle, an' the country got nothing out of
+      it, sir. In the early Thirties; tu shillin' the bottle; there's no such
+      wine nowadays and,&rdquo; he added, looking at Zachary, &ldquo;no such men.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Zachary smiled and said: &ldquo;You did nothing so big, dad, as what I'm after,
+      now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man's eyes had a sort of disdain in them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're going far, then, in the Pied Witch, Zack?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am,&rdquo; said Zachary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And where might yu be goin' in that old trampin' smut factory?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Morocco.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heu!&rdquo; said the old man, &ldquo;there's nothing there; I know that coast, as I
+      know the back o' my hand.&rdquo; He stretched out a hand covered with veins and
+      hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Zachary began suddenly to pour out a flood of words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Below Mogador&mdash;a fellow there&mdash;friend of mine&mdash;two years
+      ago now. Concessions&mdash;trade-gunpowder&mdash;cruisers&mdash;feuds&mdash;money&mdash;
+      chiefs&mdash;Gatling guns&mdash;Sultan&mdash;rifles&mdash;rebellion&mdash;gold.&rdquo;
+       He detailed a reckless, sordid, bold scheme, which, on the pivot of a
+      trading venture, was intended to spin a whole wheel of political
+      convulsions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They'll never let you get there,&rdquo; said old Pearse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Won't they?&rdquo; returned Zachary. &ldquo;Oh yes, they will, an' when I leave,
+      there'll be another dynasty, and I'll be a rich man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yu'll never leave,&rdquo; answered the old man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Zachary took out a sheet of paper covered with figures. He had worked the
+      whole thing out. So much&mdash;equipment, so much&mdash;trade, so much&mdash;concessions,
+      so much&mdash;emergencies. &ldquo;My last mag!&rdquo; he ended, &ldquo;a thousand short; the
+      ship's ready, and if I'm not there within a month my chance is as good as
+      gone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the pith of his confidences&mdash;an appeal for money, and we all
+      looked as men will when that crops up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mad!&rdquo; muttered the old man, looking at the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Zachary. That one word was more eloquent than all the rest of
+      his words put together. This fellow is no visionary. His scheme may be
+      daring, and unprincipled, but&mdash;he knows very well what he's about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well!&rdquo; said old Pearse, &ldquo;you shall have five 'undred of my money, if it's
+      only to learn what yu're made of. Wheel me in!&rdquo; Zachary wheeled him into
+      the house, but soon came back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The old man's cheque for five hundred pounds!&rdquo; he said, holding it up.
+      &ldquo;Mr. Treffry, give me another, and you shall have a third of the profits.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I expected Dan to give a point-blank refusal. But he only asked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would that clear you for starting?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With that,&rdquo; said Zachary, &ldquo;I can get to sea in a fortnight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; Dan said slowly. &ldquo;Give me a written promise! To sea in fourteen
+      days and my fair share on the five hundred pounds&mdash;no more&mdash;no
+      less.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again I thought Pearse would have jumped at this, but he leaned his chin
+      on his hand, and looked at Dan, and Dan looked at him. While they were
+      staring at each other like this, Pasiance came up with a kitten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;See!&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;isn't it a darling?&rdquo; The kitten crawled and clawed its
+      way up behind her neck. I saw both men's eyes as they looked at Pasiance,
+      and suddenly understood what they were at. The kitten rubbed itself
+      against Pasiance's cheek, overbalanced, and fell, clawing, down her dress.
+      She caught it up and walked away. Some one, I don't know which of us,
+      sighed, and Pearse cried &ldquo;Done!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bargain had been driven.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-bye, Mr. Pearse,&rdquo; said Dan; &ldquo;I guess that's all I'm wanted for. I'll
+      find my pony waiting in the village. George, you'll see Pasiance home?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We heard the hoofs of his pony galloping down the road; Pearse suddenly
+      excused himself, and disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This venture of his may sound romantic and absurd, but it's matter-of-fact
+      enough. He's after L. s. d.! Shades of Drake, Raleigh, Hawkins, Oxenham!
+      The worm of suspicion gnaws at the rose of romance. What if those fellows,
+      too, were only after L. s. d....?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I strolled into the pine-wood. The earth there was covered like a bee's
+      body with black and gold stripes; there was the blue sea below, and white,
+      sleepy clouds, and bumble-bees booming above the heather; it was all
+      softness, a summer's day in Devon. Suddenly I came on Pearse standing at
+      the edge of the cliff with Pasiance sitting in a little hollow below,
+      looking up at him. I heard him say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pasiance&mdash;Pasiance!&rdquo; The sound of his voice, and the sight of her
+      soft, wondering face made me furious. What business has she with love, at
+      her age? What business have they with each other?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He told me presently that she had started off for home, and drove me to
+      the ferry, behind an old grey pony. On the way he came back to his offer
+      of the other day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come with me,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It doesn't do to neglect the Press; you can see
+      the possibilities. It's one of the few countries left. If I once get this
+      business started you don't know where it's going to stop. You'd have free
+      passage everywhere, and whatever you like in reason.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I answered as rudely as I could&mdash;but by no means as rudely as I
+      wanted&mdash;that his scheme was mad. As a matter of fact, it's much too
+      sane for me; for, whatever the body of a scheme, its soul is the fibre of
+      the schemer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Think of it,&rdquo; he urged, as if he could see into me. &ldquo;You can make what
+      you like of it. Press paragraphs, of course. But that's mechanical; why,
+      even I could do it, if I had time. As for the rest, you'll be as free&mdash;as
+      free as a man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There, in five words of one syllable, is the kernel of this fellow Pearse&mdash;&ldquo;As
+      free as a man!&rdquo; No rule, no law, not even the mysterious shackles that
+      bind men to their own self-respects! &ldquo;As free as a man!&rdquo; No ideals; no
+      principles; no fixed star for his worship; no coil he can't slide out of!
+      But the fellow has the tenacity of one of the old Devon mastiffs, too. He
+      wouldn't take &ldquo;No&rdquo; for an answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Think of it,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;any day will do&mdash;I've got a fortnight....
+      Look! there she is!&rdquo; I thought that he meant Pasiance; but it was an old
+      steamer, sluggish and black in the blazing sun of mid-stream, with a
+      yellow-and-white funnel, and no sign of life on her decks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's her&mdash;the Pied Witch! Do her twelve knots; you wouldn't think
+      it! Well! good-evening! You'd better come. A word to me at any time. I'm
+      going aboard now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As I was being ferried across I saw him lolling in the stern-sheets of a
+      little boat, the sun crowning his straw hat with glory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I came on Pasiance, about a mile up the road, sitting in the hedge. We
+      walked on together between the banks&mdash;Devonshire banks, as high as
+      houses, thick with ivy and ferns, bramble and hazel boughs, and
+      honeysuckle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you believe in a God?&rdquo; she said suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Grandfather's God is simply awful. When I'm playing the fiddle, I can
+      feel God; but grandfather's is such a stuffy God&mdash;you know what I
+      mean: the sea, the wind, the trees, colours too&mdash;they make one feel.
+      But I don't believe that life was meant to 'be good' in. Isn't there
+      anything better than being good? When I'm 'good,' I simply feel wicked.&rdquo;
+       She reached up, caught a flower from the hedge, and slowly tore its
+      petals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What would you do,&rdquo; she muttered, &ldquo;if you wanted a thing, but were afraid
+      of it? But I suppose you're never afraid!&rdquo; she added, mocking me. I
+      admitted that I was sometimes afraid, and often afraid of being afraid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's nice! I'm not afraid of illness, nor of grandfather, nor of his
+      God; but&mdash;I want to be free. If you want a thing badly, you're afraid
+      about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought of Zachary Pearse's words, &ldquo;free as a man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why are you looking at me like that?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I stammered: &ldquo;What do you mean by freedom?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know what I shall do to-night?&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;Get out of my
+      window by the apple-tree, and go to the woods, and play!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We were going down a steep lane, along the side of a wood, where there's
+      always a smell of sappy leaves, and the breath of the cows that come close
+      to the hedge to get the shade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a cottage in the bottom, and a small boy sat outside playing
+      with a heap of dust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hallo, Johnny!&rdquo; said Pasiance. &ldquo;Hold your leg out and show this man your
+      bad place!&rdquo; The small boy undid a bandage round his bare and dirty little
+      leg, and proudly revealed a sore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn't it nasty?&rdquo; cried Pasiance ruefully, tying up the bandage again;
+      &ldquo;poor little feller! Johnny, see what I've brought you!&rdquo; She produced from
+      her pocket a stick of chocolate, the semblance of a soldier made of
+      sealing-wax and worsted, and a crooked sixpence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a new glimpse of her. All the way home she was telling me the story
+      of little Johnny's family; when she came to his mother's death, she burst
+      out: &ldquo;A beastly shame, wasn't it, and they're so poor; it might just as
+      well have been somebody else. I like poor people, but I hate rich ones&mdash;stuck-up
+      beasts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Hopgood was looking over the gate, with her cap on one side, and one
+      of Pasiance's cats rubbing itself against her skirts. At the sight of us
+      she hugged herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where's grandfather?&rdquo; asked Pasiance. The old lady shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it a row?&rdquo; Mrs. Hopgood wriggled, and wriggled, and out came:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you get yure tay, my pretty? No? Well, that's a pity; yu'll be falin'
+      low-like.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pasiance tossed her head, snatched up the cat, and ran indoors. I remained
+      staring at Mrs. Hopgood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear-dear,&rdquo; she clucked, &ldquo;poor lamb. So to spake it's&mdash;&rdquo; and she
+      blurted out suddenly, &ldquo;chuckin' full of wra-ath, he is. Well, there!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      My courage failed that evening. I spent it at the coastguard station,
+      where they gave me bread and cheese and some awful cider. I passed the
+      kitchen as I came back. A fire was still burning there, and two figures,
+      misty in the darkness, flitted about with stealthy laughter like spirits
+      afraid of being detected in a carnal-meal. They were Pasiance and Mrs.
+      Hopgood; and so charming was the smell of eggs and bacon, and they had
+      such an air of tender enjoyment of this dark revel, that I stifled many
+      pangs, as I crept hungry up to bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the middle of the night I woke and heard what I thought was screaming;
+      then it sounded like wind in trees, then like the distant shaking of a
+      tambourine, with the high singing of a human voice. Suddenly it stopped&mdash;two
+      long notes came wailing out like sobs&mdash;then utter stillness; and
+      though I listened for an hour or more there was no other sound ....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0039" id="link2H_4_0039">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      &ldquo;4th August.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      .... For three days after I wrote last, nothing at all happened here. I
+      spent the mornings on the cliff reading, and watching the sun-sparks
+      raining on the sea. It's grand up there with the gorse all round, the
+      gulls basking on the rocks, the partridges calling in the corn, and now
+      and then a young hawk overhead. The afternoons I spent out in the orchard.
+      The usual routine goes on at the farm all the time&mdash;cow-milking,
+      bread-baking, John Ford riding in and out, Pasiance in her garden
+      stripping lavender, talking to the farm hands; and the smell of clover,
+      and cows and hay; the sound of hens and pigs and pigeons, the soft drawl
+      of voices, the dull thud of the farm carts; and day by day the apples
+      getting redder. Then, last Monday, Pasiance was away from sunrise till
+      sunset&mdash;nobody saw her go&mdash;nobody knew where she had gone. It
+      was a wonderful, strange day, a sky of silver-grey and blue, with a drift
+      of wind-clouds, all the trees sighing a little, the sea heaving in a long,
+      low swell, the animals restless, the birds silent, except the gulls with
+      their old man's laughter and kitten's mewing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A something wild was in the air; it seemed to sweep across the downs and
+      combe, into the very house, like a passionate tune that comes drifting to
+      your ears when you're sleepy. But who would have thought the absence of
+      that girl for a few hours could have wrought such havoc! We were like
+      uneasy spirits; Mrs. Hopgood's apple cheeks seemed positively to wither
+      before one's eyes. I came across a dairymaid and farm hand discussing it
+      stolidly with very downcast faces. Even Hopgood, a hard-bitten fellow with
+      immense shoulders, forgot his imperturbability so far as to harness his
+      horse, and depart on what he assured me was &ldquo;just a wild-guse chaace.&rdquo; It
+      was long before John Ford gave signs of noticing that anything was wrong,
+      but late in the afternoon I found him sitting with his hands on his knees,
+      staring straight before him. He rose heavily when he saw me, and stalked
+      out. In the evening, as I was starting for the coastguard station to ask
+      for help to search the cliff, Pasiance appeared, walking as if she could
+      hardly drag one leg after the other. Her cheeks were crimson; she was
+      biting her lips to keep tears of sheer fatigue out of her eyes. She passed
+      me in the doorway without a word. The anxiety he had gone through seemed
+      to forbid the old man from speaking. He just came forward, took her face
+      in his hands, gave it a great kiss, and walked away. Pasiance dropped on
+      the floor in the dark passage, and buried her face on her arms. &ldquo;Leave me
+      alone!&rdquo; was all she would say. After a bit she dragged herself upstairs.
+      Presently Mrs. Hopgood came to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a word out of her&mdash;an' not a bite will she ate, an' I had a pie
+      all ready&mdash;scrumptious. The good Lord knows the truth&mdash;she asked
+      for brandy; have you any brandy, sir? Ha-apgood'e don't drink it, an'
+      Mister Ford 'e don't allaow for anything but caowslip wine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I had whisky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The good soul seized the flask, and went off hugging it. She returned it
+      to me half empty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lapped it like a kitten laps milk. I misdaoubt it's straong, poor lamb,
+      it lusened 'er tongue praaperly. 'I've a-done it,' she says to me,
+      'Mums-I've a-done it,' an' she laughed like a mad thing; and then, sir,
+      she cried, an' kissed me, an' pusshed me thru the door. Gude Lard! What is
+      't she's a-done...?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It rained all the next day and the day after. About five o'clock yesterday
+      the rain ceased; I started off to Kingswear on Hopgood's nag to see Dan
+      Treffry. Every tree, bramble, and fern in the lanes was dripping water;
+      and every bird singing from the bottom of his heart. I thought of Pasiance
+      all the time. Her absence that day was still a mystery; one never ceased
+      asking oneself what she had done. There are people who never grow up&mdash;they
+      have no right to do things. Actions have consequences&mdash;and children
+      have no business with consequences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dan was out. I had supper at the hotel, and rode slowly home. In the
+      twilight stretches of the road, where I could touch either bank of the
+      lane with my whip, I thought of nothing but Pasiance and her grandfather;
+      there was something in the half light suited to wonder and uncertainty. It
+      had fallen dark before I rode into the straw-yard. Two young bullocks
+      snuffled at me, a sleepy hen got up and ran off with a tremendous
+      shrieking. I stabled the horse, and walked round to the back. It was pitch
+      black under the apple-trees, and the windows were all darkened. I stood
+      there a little, everything smelled so delicious after the rain; suddenly I
+      had the uncomfortable feeling that I was being watched. Have you ever felt
+      like that on a dark night? I called out at last: &ldquo;Is any one there?&rdquo; Not a
+      sound! I walked to the gate-nothing! The trees still dripped with tiny,
+      soft, hissing sounds, but that was all. I slipped round to the front, went
+      in, barricaded the door, and groped up to bed. But I couldn't sleep. I lay
+      awake a long while; dozed at last, and woke with a jump. A stealthy murmur
+      of smothered voices was going on quite close somewhere. It stopped. A
+      minute passed; suddenly came the soft thud as of something falling. I
+      sprang out of bed and rushed to the window. Nothing&mdash;but in the
+      distance something that sounded like footsteps. An owl hooted; then clear
+      as crystal, but quite low, I heard Pasiance singing in her room:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The apples are ripe and ready to fall. Oh! heigh-ho! and ready to fall.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I ran to her door and knocked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is anything the matter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Matter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is anything the matter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha-ha-ha-ha! Good-night!&rdquo; then quite low, I heard her catch her breath,
+      hard, sharply. No other answer, no other sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went to bed and lay awake for hours....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This evening Dan came; during supper he handed Pasiance a roll of music;
+      he had got it in Torquay. The shopman, he said, had told him that it was a
+      &ldquo;corker.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Bach's &ldquo;Chaconne.&rdquo; You should have seen her eyes shine, her fingers
+      actually tremble while she turned over the pages. Seems odd to think of
+      her worshipping at the shrine of Bach as odd as to think of a wild colt
+      running of its free will into the shafts; but that's just it with her you
+      can never tell. &ldquo;Heavenly!&rdquo; she kept saying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      John Ford put down his knife and fork.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heathenish stuff!&rdquo; he muttered, and suddenly thundered out, &ldquo;Pasiance!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked up with a start, threw the music from her, and resumed her
+      place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During evening prayers, which follow every night immediately on food, her
+      face was a study of mutiny. She went to bed early. It was rather late when
+      we broke up&mdash;for once old Ford had been talking of his squatter's
+      life. As we came out, Dan held up his hand. A dog was barking. &ldquo;It's
+      Lass,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;She'll wake Pasiance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The spaniel yelped furiously. Dan ran out to stop her. He was soon back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Somebody's been in the orchard, and gone off down to the cove.&rdquo; He ran on
+      down the path. I, too, ran, horribly uneasy. In front, through the
+      darkness, came the spaniel's bark; the lights of the coastguard station
+      faintly showed. I was first on the beach; the dog came to me at once, her
+      tail almost in her mouth from apology. There was the sound of oars working
+      in rowlocks; nothing visible but the feathery edges of the waves. Dan said
+      behind, &ldquo;No use! He's gone.&rdquo; His voice sounded hoarse, like that of a man
+      choking with passion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;George,&rdquo; he stammered, &ldquo;it's that blackguard. I wish I'd put a bullet in
+      him.&rdquo; Suddenly a light burned up in the darkness on the sea, seemed to
+      swing gently, and vanished. Without another word we went back up the hill.
+      John Ford stood at the gate motionless, indifferent&mdash;nothing had
+      dawned on him as yet. I whispered to Dan, &ldquo;Let it alone!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I'm going to show you.&rdquo; He struck a match, and slowly
+      hunted the footsteps in the wet grass of the orchard. &ldquo;Look&mdash;here!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped under Pasiance's window and swayed the match over the ground.
+      Clear as daylight were the marks of some one who had jumped or fallen. Dan
+      held the match over his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And look there!&rdquo; he said. The bough of an apple-tree below the window was
+      broken. He blew the match out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could see the whites of his eyes, like an angry animal's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Drop it, Dan!&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned on his heel suddenly, and stammered out, &ldquo;You're right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he had turned into John Ford's arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man stood there like some great force, darker than the darkness,
+      staring up at the window, as though stupefied. We had not a word to say.
+      He seemed unconscious of our presence. He turned round, and left us
+      standing there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Follow him!&rdquo; said Dan. &ldquo;Follow him&mdash;by God! it's not safe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We followed. Bending, and treading heavily, he went upstairs. He struck a
+      blow on Pasiance's door. &ldquo;Let me in!&rdquo; he said. I drew Dan into my bedroom.
+      The key was slowly turned, her door was flung open, and there she stood in
+      her dressing-gown, a candle in her hand, her face crimson, and oh! so
+      young, with its short, crisp hair and round cheeks. The old man&mdash;like
+      a giant in front of her&mdash;raised his hands, and laid them on her
+      shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's this? You&mdash;you've had a man in your room?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes did not drop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said. Dan gave a groan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Zachary Pearse,&rdquo; she answered in a voice like a bell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gave her one awful shake, dropped his hands, then raised them as though
+      to strike her. She looked him in the eyes; his hands dropped, and he too
+      groaned. As far as I could see, her face never moved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm married to him,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;d' you hear? Married to him. Go out of my
+      room!&rdquo; She dropped the candle on the floor at his feet, and slammed the
+      door in his face. The old man stood for a minute as though stunned, then
+      groped his way downstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dan,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;is it true?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; he answered, &ldquo;it's true; didn't you hear her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was glad I couldn't see his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That ends it,&rdquo; he said at last; &ldquo;there's the old man to think of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What will he do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go to the fellow this very night.&rdquo; He seemed to have no doubt. Trust one
+      man of action to know another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I muttered something about being an outsider&mdash;wondered if there was
+      anything I could do to help.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said slowly, &ldquo;I don't know that I'm anything but an outsider
+      now; but I'll go along with him, if he'll have me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He went downstairs. A few minutes later they rode out from the straw-yard.
+      I watched them past the line of hayricks, into the blacker shadows of the
+      pines, then the tramp of hoofs began to fail in the darkness, and at last
+      died away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I've been sitting here in my bedroom writing to you ever since, till my
+      candle's almost gone. I keep thinking what the end of it is to be; and
+      reproaching myself for doing nothing. And yet, what could I have done? I'm
+      sorry for her&mdash;sorrier than I can say. The night is so quiet&mdash;I
+      haven't heard a sound; is she asleep, awake, crying, triumphant?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It's four o'clock; I've been asleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They're back. Dan is lying on my bed. I'll try and tell you his story as
+      near as I can, in his own words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We rode,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;round the upper way, keeping out of the lanes, and
+      got to Kingswear by half-past eleven. The horse-ferry had stopped running,
+      and we had a job to find any one to put us over. We hired the fellow to
+      wait for us, and took a carriage at the 'Castle.' Before we got to Black
+      Mill it was nearly one, pitch-dark. With the breeze from the southeast, I
+      made out he should have been in an hour or more. The old man had never
+      spoken to me once: and before we got there I had begun to hope we
+      shouldn't find the fellow after all. We made the driver pull up in the
+      road, and walked round and round, trying to find the door. Then some one
+      cried, 'Who are you?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'John Ford.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'What do you want?' It was old Pearse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'To see Zachary Pearse.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The long window out of the porch where we sat the other day was open, and
+      in we went. There was a door at the end of the room, and a light coming
+      through. John Ford went towards it; I stayed out in the dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Who's that with you?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Mr. Treffry.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Let him come in!' I went in. The old fellow was in bed, quite still on
+      his pillows, a candle by his side; to look at him you'd think nothing of
+      him but his eyes were alive. It was queer being there with those two old
+      men!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dan paused, seemed to listen, then went on doggedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Sit down, gentleman,' said old Pearse. 'What may you want to see my son
+      for?' John Ford begged his pardon, he had something to say, he said, that
+      wouldn't wait.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They were very polite to one another,&rdquo; muttered Dan ....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Will you leave your message with me?' said Pearse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'What I have to say to your son is private.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'I'm his father.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'I'm my girl's grandfather; and her only stand-by.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Ah!' muttered old Pearse, 'Rick Voisey's daughter?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'I mean to see your son.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Old Pearse smiled. Queer smile he's got, sort of sneering sweet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'You can never tell where Zack may be,' he said. 'You think I want to
+      shield him. You're wrong; Zack can take care of himself.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Your son's here!' said John Ford. 'I know.' Old Pearse gave us a very
+      queer look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'You come into my house like thieves in the night,' he said, 'and give me
+      the lie, do you?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Your son came to my child's room like a thief in the night; it's for
+      that I want to see him,' and then,&rdquo; said Dan, &ldquo;there was a long silence.
+      At last Pearse said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'I don't understand; has he played the blackguard?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;John Ford answered, 'He's married her, or, before God, I'd kill him.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Old Pearse seemed to think this over, never moving on his pillows. 'You
+      don't know Zack,' he said; 'I'm sorry for you, and I'm sorry for Rick
+      Voisey's daughter; but you don't know Zack.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Sorry!' groaned out John Ford; 'he's stolen my child, and I'll punish
+      him.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Punish!' cried old Pearse, 'we don't take punishment, not in my family.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Captain Jan Pearse, as sure as I stand here, you and your breed will get
+      your punishment of God.' Old Pearse smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Mr. John Ford, that's as may be; but sure as I lie here we won't take it
+      of you. You can't punish unless you make to feel, and that you can't du.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And that is truth!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dan went on again:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'You won't tell me where your son is!' but old Pearse never blinked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'I won't,' he said, 'and now you may get out. I lie here an old man
+      alone, with no use to my legs, night on night, an' the house open; any
+      rapscallion could get in; d' ye think I'm afraid of you?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We were beat; and walked out without a word. But that old man; I've
+      thought of him a lot&mdash;ninety-two, and lying there. Whatever he's
+      been, and they tell you rum things of him, whatever his son may be, he's a
+      man. It's not what he said, nor that there was anything to be afraid of
+      just then, but somehow it's the idea of the old chap lying there. I don't
+      ever wish to see a better plucked one....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We sat silent after that; out of doors the light began to stir among the
+      leaves. There were all kinds of rustling sounds, as if the world were
+      turning over in bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Dan said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's cheated me. I paid him to clear out and leave her alone. D' you
+      think she's asleep?&rdquo; He's made no appeal for sympathy, he'd take pity for
+      an insult; but he feels it badly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm tired as a cat,&rdquo; he said at last, and went to sleep on my bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It's broad daylight now; I too am tired as a cat....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0040" id="link2H_4_0040">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      &ldquo;Saturday, 6th August.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      .... I take up my tale where I left off yesterday.... Dan and I started as
+      soon as we could get Mrs. Hopgood to give us coffee. The old lady was more
+      tentative, more undecided, more pouncing, than I had ever seen her. She
+      was manifestly uneasy: Ha-apgood&mdash;who &ldquo;don't slape&rdquo; don't he, if
+      snores are any criterion&mdash;had called out in the night, &ldquo;Hark to th'
+      'arses' 'oofs!&rdquo; Had we heard them? And where might we be going then? 'Twas
+      very earrly to start, an' no breakfast. Haapgood had said it was goin' to
+      shaowerr. Miss Pasiance was not to 'er violin yet, an' Mister Ford 'e kept
+      'is room. Was it?&mdash;would there be&mdash;? &ldquo;Well, an' therr's an
+      'arvest bug; 'tis some earrly for they!&rdquo; Wonderful how she pounces on all
+      such creatures, when I can't even see them. She pressed it absently
+      between finger and thumb, and began manoeuvring round another way. Long
+      before she had reached her point, we had gulped down our coffee, and
+      departed. But as we rode out she came at a run, holding her skirts high
+      with either hand, raised her old eyes bright and anxious in their setting
+      of fine wrinkles, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Tidden sorrow for her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A shrug of the shoulders was all the answer she got. We rode by the lanes;
+      through sloping farmyards, all mud and pigs, and dirty straw, and farmers
+      with clean-shaven upper lips and whiskers under the chin; past fields of
+      corn, where larks were singing. Up or down, we didn't draw rein till we
+      came to Dan's hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was the river gleaming before us under a rainbow mist that hallowed
+      every shape. There seemed affinity between the earth and the sky. I've
+      never seen that particular soft unity out of Devon. And every ship,
+      however black or modern, on those pale waters, had the look of a dream
+      ship. The tall green woods, the red earth, the white houses, were all
+      melted into one opal haze. It was raining, but the sun was shining behind.
+      Gulls swooped by us&mdash;ghosts of the old greedy wanderers of the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had told our two boatmen to pull us out to the Pied Witch! They started
+      with great resolution, then rested on their oars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Pied Witch, zurr?&rdquo; asked one politely; &ldquo;an' which may her be?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That's the West countryman all over! Never say you &ldquo;nay,&rdquo; never lose an
+      opportunity, never own he doesn't know, or can't do anything&mdash;independence,
+      amiability, and an eye to the main chance. We mentioned Pearse's name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Capt'n Zach'ry Pearse!&rdquo; They exchanged a look half-amused, half-admiring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Zunflaower, yu mane. That's her. Zunflaower, ahoy!&rdquo; As we mounted the
+      steamer's black side I heard one say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pied Witch! A pra-aper name that&mdash;a dandy name for her!&rdquo; They
+      laughed as they made fast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mate of the Sunflower, or Pied Witch, or whatever she was called, met
+      us&mdash;a tall young fellow in his shirtsleeves, tanned to the roots of
+      his hair, with sinewy, tattooed arms, and grey eyes, charred round the
+      rims from staring at weather.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The skipper is on board,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;We're rather busy, as you see. Get on
+      with that, you sea-cooks,&rdquo; he bawled at two fellows who were doing
+      nothing. All over the ship, men were hauling, splicing, and stowing cargo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To-day's Friday: we're off on Wednesday with any luck. Will you come this
+      way?&rdquo; He led us down the companion to a dark hole which he called the
+      saloon. &ldquo;Names? What! are you Mr. Treffry? Then we're partners!&rdquo; A
+      schoolboy's glee came on his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here!&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I can show you something,&rdquo; and he unlocked the door
+      of a cabin. There appeared to be nothing in it but a huge piece of
+      tarpaulin, which depended, bulging, from the topmost bunk. He pulled it
+      up. The lower bunk had been removed, and in its place was the ugly body of
+      a dismounted Gatling gun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Got six of them,&rdquo; he whispered, with unholy mystery, through which his
+      native frankness gaped out. &ldquo;Worth their weight in gold out there just
+      now, the skipper says. Got a heap of rifles, too, and lots of ammunition.
+      He's given me a share. This is better than the P. and O., and playing deck
+      cricket with the passengers. I'd made up my mind already to chuck that,
+      and go in for plantin' sugar, when I ran across the skipper. Wonderful
+      chap, the skipper! I'll go and tell him. He's been out all night; only
+      came aboard at four bells; having a nap now, but he won't mind that for
+      you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Off he went. I wondered what there was in Zachary Pearse to attract a
+      youngster of this sort; one of the customary twelve children of some
+      country parson, no doubt-burning to shoot a few niggers, and for ever
+      frank and youthful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came back with his hands full of bottles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What'll you drink? The skipper'll be here in a jiffy. Excuse my goin' on
+      deck. We're so busy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And in five minutes Zachary Pearse did come. He made no attempt to shake
+      hands, for which I respected him. His face looked worn, and more defiant
+      than usual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, gentlemen?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We've come to ask what you're going to do?&rdquo; said Dan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; answered Pearse, &ldquo;that that's any of your business.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dan's little eyes were like the eyes of an angry pig.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've got five hundred pounds of mine,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;why do you think I
+      gave it you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Zachary bit his fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's no concern of mine,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I sail on Wednesday. Your money's
+      safe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know what I think of you?&rdquo; said Dan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, and you'd better not tell me!&rdquo; Then, with one of his peculiar
+      changes, he smiled: &ldquo;As you like, though.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dan's face grew very dark. &ldquo;Give me a plain answer,&rdquo; he said: &ldquo;What are
+      you going to do about her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Zachary looked up at him from under his brows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you cur enough to deny that you've married her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Zachary looked at him coolly. &ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What in God's name did you do it for?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've no monopoly in the post of husband, Mr. Treffry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To put a child in that position! Haven't you the heart of a man? What d'
+      ye come sneaking in at night for? By Gad! Don't you know you've done a
+      beastly thing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Zachary's face darkened, he clenched his fists. Then he seemed to shut his
+      anger into himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You wanted me to leave her to you,&rdquo; he sneered. &ldquo;I gave her my promise
+      that I'd take her out there, and we'd have gone off on Wednesday quietly
+      enough, if you hadn't come and nosed the whole thing out with your
+      infernal dog. The fat's in the fire! There's no reason why I should take
+      her now. I'll come back to her a rich man, or not at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And in the meantime?&rdquo; I slipped in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned to me, in an ingratiating way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would have taken her to save the fuss&mdash;I really would&mdash;it's
+      not my fault the thing's come out. I'm on a risky job. To have her with me
+      might ruin the whole thing; it would affect my nerve. It isn't safe for
+      her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what's her position to be,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;while you're away? Do you think
+      she'd have married you if she'd known you were going to leave her like
+      this? You ought to give up this business.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You stole her. Her life's in your hands; she's only a child!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A quiver passed over his face; it showed that he was suffering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give it up!&rdquo; I urged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My last farthing's in it,&rdquo; he sighed; &ldquo;the chance of a lifetime.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at me doubtfully, appealingly, as if for the first time in his
+      life he had been given a glimpse of that dilemma of consequences which his
+      nature never recognises. I thought he was going to give in. Suddenly, to
+      my horror, Dan growled, &ldquo;Play the man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pearse turned his head. &ldquo;I don't want your advice anyway,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I'll
+      not be dictated to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To your last day,&rdquo; said Dan, &ldquo;you shall answer to me for the way you
+      treat her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Zachary smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you see that fly?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Wel&mdash;I care for you as little as
+      this,&rdquo; and he flicked the fly off his white trousers. &ldquo;Good-morning...!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The noble mariners who manned our boat pulled lustily for the shore, but
+      we had hardly shoved off' when a storm of rain burst over the ship, and
+      she seemed to vanish, leaving a picture on my eyes of the mate waving his
+      cap above the rail, with his tanned young face bent down at us, smiling,
+      keen, and friendly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      .... We reached the shore drenched, angry with ourselves, and with each
+      other; I started sulkily for home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I rode past an orchard, an apple, loosened by the rainstorm, came down
+      with a thud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The apples were ripe and ready to fall, Oh! heigh-ho! and ready to fall.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I made up my mind to pack, and go away. But there's a strangeness, a sort
+      of haunting fascination in it all. To you, who don't know the people, it
+      may only seem a piece of rather sordid folly. But it isn't the good, the
+      obvious, the useful that puts a spell on us in life. It's the bizarre, the
+      dimly seen, the mysterious for good or evil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sun was out again when I rode up to the farm; its yellow thatch shone
+      through the trees as if sheltering a store of gladness and good news. John
+      Ford himself opened the door to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began with an apology, which made me feel more than ever an intruder;
+      then he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have not spoken to my granddaughter&mdash;I waited to see Dan Treffry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was stern and sad-eyed, like a man with a great weight of grief on his
+      shoulders. He looked as if he had not slept; his dress was out of order,
+      he had not taken his clothes off, I think. He isn't a man whom you can
+      pity. I felt I had taken a liberty in knowing of the matter at all. When I
+      told him where we had been, he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was good of you to take this trouble. That you should have had to! But
+      since such things have come to pass&mdash;&rdquo; He made a gesture full of
+      horror. He gave one the impression of a man whose pride was struggling
+      against a mortal hurt. Presently he asked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You saw him, you say? He admitted this marriage? Did he give an
+      explanation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I tried to make Pearse's point of view clear. Before this old man, with
+      his inflexible will and sense of duty, I felt as if I held a brief for
+      Zachary, and must try to do him justice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me understand,&rdquo; he said at last. &ldquo;He stole her, you say, to make
+      sure; and deserts her within a fortnight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He says he meant to take her&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you believe that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Before I could answer, I saw Pasiance standing at the window. How long she
+      had been there I don't know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it true that he is going to leave me behind?&rdquo; she cried out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could only nod.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you hear him your own self?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stamped her foot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But he promised! He promised!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      John Ford went towards her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't touch me, grandfather! I hate every one! Let him do what he likes,
+      I don't care.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      John Ford's face turned quite grey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pasiance,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;did you want to leave me so much?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked straight at us, and said sharply:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the good of telling stories. I can't help its hurting you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did you think you would find away from here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Find? I don't know&mdash;nothing; I wouldn't be stifled anyway. Now I
+      suppose you'll shut me up because I'm a weak girl, not strong like men!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Silence!&rdquo; said John Ford; &ldquo;I will make him take you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You shan't!&rdquo; she cried; &ldquo;I won't let you. He's free to do as he likes.
+      He's free&mdash;I tell you all, everybody&mdash;free!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She ran through the window, and vanished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      John Ford made a movement as if the bottom had dropped out of his world. I
+      left him there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went to the kitchen, where Hopgood was sitting at the table, eating
+      bread and cheese. He got up on seeing me, and very kindly brought me some
+      cold bacon and a pint of ale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thart I shude be seeing yu, zurr,&rdquo; he said between his bites; &ldquo;Therr's
+      no thart to 'atin' 'bout the 'ouse to-day. The old wumman's puzzivantin'
+      over Miss Pasiance. Young girls are skeery critters&rdquo;&mdash;he brushed his
+      sleeve over his broad, hard jaws, and filled a pipe &ldquo;specially when it's
+      in the blood of 'em. Squire Rick Voisey werr a dandy; an' Mistress Voisey&mdash;well,
+      she werr a nice lady tu, but&rdquo;&mdash;rolling the stem of his pipe from
+      corner to corner of his mouth&mdash;&ldquo;she werr a pra-aper vixen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hopgood's a good fellow, and I believe as soft as he looks hard, but he's
+      not quite the sort with whom one chooses to talk over a matter like this.
+      I went upstairs, and began to pack, but after a bit dropped it for a book,
+      and somehow or other fell asleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I woke, and looked at my watch; it was five o'clock. I had been asleep
+      four hours. A single sunbeam was slanting across from one of my windows to
+      the other, and there was the cool sound of milk dropping into pails; then,
+      all at once, a stir as of alarm, and heavy footsteps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I opened my door. Hopgood and a coast-guardsman were carrying Pasiance
+      slowly up the stairs. She lay in their arms without moving, her face
+      whiter than her dress, a scratch across the forehead, and two or three
+      drops there of dried blood. Her hands were clasped, and she slowly crooked
+      and stiffened out her fingers. When they turned with her at the stair top,
+      she opened her lips, and gasped, &ldquo;All right, don't put me down. I can bear
+      it.&rdquo; They passed, and, with a half-smile in her eyes, she said something
+      to me that I couldn't catch; the door was shut, and the excited whispering
+      began again below. I waited for the men to come out, and caught hold of
+      Hopgood. He wiped the sweat off his forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor young thing!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;She fell&mdash;down the cliffs&mdash;'tis
+      her back&mdash;coastguard saw her 'twerr they fetched her in. The Lord
+      'elp her mebbe she's not broken up much! An' Mister Ford don't know! I'm
+      gwine for the doctor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was an hour or more to wait before he came; a young fellow; almost a
+      boy. He looked very grave, when he came out of her room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The old woman there fond of her? nurse her well...? Fond as a dog!&mdash;good!
+      Don't know&mdash;can't tell for certain! Afraid it's the spine, must have
+      another opinion! What a plucky girl! Tell Mr. Ford to have the best man he
+      can get in Torquay&mdash;there's C&mdash;-. I'll be round the first thing
+      in the morning. Keep her dead quiet. I've left a sleeping draught; she'll
+      have fever tonight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      John Ford came in at last. Poor old man! What it must have cost him not to
+      go to her for fear of the excitement! How many times in the next few hours
+      didn't I hear him come to the bottom of the stairs; his heavy wheezing,
+      and sighing; and the forlorn tread of his feet going back! About eleven,
+      just as I was going to bed, Mrs. Hopgood came to my door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will yu come, sir,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;she's asking for yu. Naowt I can zay but
+      what she will see yu; zeems crazy, don't it?&rdquo; A tear trickled down the old
+      lady's cheek. &ldquo;Du 'ee come; 'twill du 'err 'arm mebbe, but I dunno&mdash;she'll
+      fret else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I slipped into the room. Lying back on her pillows, she was breathing
+      quickly with half-closed eyes. There was nothing to show that she had
+      wanted me, or even knew that I was there. The wick of the candle, set by
+      the bedside, had been snuffed too short, and gave but a faint light; both
+      window and door stood open, still there was no draught, and the feeble
+      little flame burned quite still, casting a faint yellow stain on the
+      ceiling like the refection from a buttercup held beneath a chin. These
+      ceilings are far too low! Across the wide, squat window the apple branches
+      fell in black stripes which never stirred. It was too dark to see things
+      clearly. At the foot of the bed was a chest, and there Mrs. Hopgood had
+      sat down, moving her lips as if in speech. Mingled with the half-musty
+      smell of age; there were other scents, of mignonette, apples, and some
+      sweet-smelling soap. The floor had no carpet, and there was not one single
+      dark object except the violin, hanging from a nail over the bed. A little,
+      round clock ticked solemnly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why won't you give me that stuff, Mums?&rdquo; Pasiance said in a faint, sharp
+      voice. &ldquo;I want to sleep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you much pain?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course I have; it's everywhere.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned her face towards me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You thought I did it on purpose, but you're wrong. If I had, I'd have
+      done it better than this. I wouldn't have this brutal pain.&rdquo; She put her
+      fingers over her eyes. &ldquo;It's horrible to complain! Only it's so bad! But I
+      won't again&mdash;promise.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She took the sleeping draught gratefully, making a face, like a child
+      after a powder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How long do you think it'll be before I can play again? Oh! I forgot&mdash;there
+      are other things to think about.&rdquo; She held out her hand to me. &ldquo;Look at my
+      ring. Married&mdash;isn't it funny? Ha, ha! Nobody will ever understand&mdash;that's
+      funny too! Poor Gran! You see, there wasn't any reason&mdash;only me.
+      That's the only reason I'm telling you now; Mums is there&mdash;but she
+      doesn't count; why don't you count, Mums?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The fever was fighting against the draught; she had tossed the clothes
+      back from her throat, and now and then raised one thin arm a little, as if
+      it eased her; her eyes had grown large, and innocent like a child's; the
+      candle, too, had flared, and was burning clearly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nobody is to tell him&mdash;nobody at all; promise...! If I hadn't
+      slipped, it would have been different. What would have happened then? You
+      can't tell; and I can't&mdash;that's funny! Do you think I loved him?
+      Nobody marries without love, do they? Not quite without love, I mean. But
+      you see I wanted to be free, he said he'd take me; and now he's left me
+      after all! I won't be left, I can't! When I came to the cliff&mdash;that
+      bit where the ivy grows right down&mdash;there was just the sea there,
+      underneath; so I thought I would throw myself over and it would be all
+      quiet; and I climbed on a ledge, it looked easier from there, but it was
+      so high, I wanted to get back; and then my foot slipped; and now it's all
+      pain. You can't think much, when you're in pain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      From her eyes I saw that she was dropping off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nobody can take you away from-yourself. He's not to be told&mdash;not
+      even&mdash;I don't&mdash;want you&mdash;to go away, because&mdash;&rdquo; But
+      her eyes closed, and she dropped off to sleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They don't seem to know this morning whether she is better or worse....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0041" id="link2H_4_0041">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      &ldquo;Tuesday, 9th August.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      .... It seems more like three weeks than three days since I wrote. The
+      time passes slowly in a sickhouse...! The doctors were here this morning,
+      they give her forty hours. Not a word of complaint has passed her lips
+      since she knew. To see her you would hardly think her ill; her cheeks have
+      not had time to waste or lose their colour. There is not much pain, but a
+      slow, creeping numbness.... It was John Ford's wish that she should be
+      told. She just turned her head to the wall and sighed; then to poor old
+      Mrs. Hopgood, who was crying her heart out: &ldquo;Don't cry, Mums, I don't
+      care.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When they had gone, she asked for her violin. She made them hold it for
+      her, and drew the bow across the strings; but the notes that came out were
+      so trembling and uncertain that she dropped the bow and broke into a
+      passion of sobbing. Since then, no complaint or moan of any kind....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But to go back. On Sunday, the day after I wrote, as I was coming from a
+      walk, I met a little boy making mournful sounds on a tin whistle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Coom ahn!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;the Miss wahnts t' zee yu.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I went to her room. In the morning she had seemed better, but now looked
+      utterly exhausted. She had a letter in her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's this,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I don't seem to understand it. He wants me to do
+      something&mdash;but I can't think, and my eyes feel funny. Read it to me,
+      please.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The letter was from Zachary. I read it to her in a low voice, for Mrs.
+      Hopgood was in the room, her eyes always fixed on Pasiance above her
+      knitting. When I'd finished, she made me read it again, and yet again. At
+      first she seemed pleased, almost excited, then came a weary, scornful
+      look, and before I'd finished the third time she was asleep. It was a
+      remarkable letter, that seemed to bring the man right before one's eyes. I
+      slipped it under her fingers on the bed-clothes, and went out. Fancy took
+      me to the cliff where she had fallen. I found the point of rock where the
+      cascade of ivy flows down the cliff; the ledge on which she had climbed
+      was a little to my right&mdash;a mad place. It showed plainly what wild
+      emotions must have been driving her! Behind was a half-cut cornfield with
+      a fringe of poppies, and swarms of harvest insects creeping and flying; in
+      the uncut corn a landrail kept up a continual charring. The sky was blue
+      to the very horizon, and the sea wonderful, under that black wild cliff
+      stained here and there with red. Over the dips and hollows of the fields
+      great white clouds hung low down above the land. There are no brassy,
+      east-coast skies here; but always sleepy, soft-shaped clouds, full of
+      subtle stir and change. Passages of Zachary's Pearse's letter kept rising
+      to my lips. After all he's the man that his native place, and life, and
+      blood have made him. It is useless to expect idealists where the air is
+      soft and things good to look on (the idealist grows where he must create
+      beauty or comfort for himself); useless to expect a man of law and order,
+      in one whose fathers have stared at the sea day and night for a thousand
+      years&mdash;the sea, full of its promises of unknown things, never quite
+      the same, a slave to its own impulses. Man is an imitative animal....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Life's hard enough,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;without tying yourself down. Don't think
+      too hardly of me! Shall I make you happier by taking you into danger? If I
+      succeed you'll be a rich woman; but I shall fail if you're with me. To
+      look at you makes me soft. At sea a man dreams of all the good things on
+      land, he'll dream of the heather, and honey&mdash;you're like that; and
+      he'll dream of the apple-trees, and the grass of the orchards&mdash;you're
+      like that; sometimes he only lies on his back and wishes&mdash;and you're
+      like that, most of all like that....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When I was reading those words I remember a strange, soft, half-scornful
+      look came over Pasiance's face; and once she said, &ldquo;But that's all
+      nonsense, isn't it...?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then followed a long passage about what he would gain if he succeeded,
+      about all that he was risking, the impossibility of failure, if he kept
+      his wits about him. &ldquo;It's only a matter of two months or so,&rdquo; he went on;
+      &ldquo;stay where you are, dear, or go to my Dad. He'll be glad to have you.
+      There's my mother's room. There's no one to say 'No' to your fiddle there;
+      you can play it by the sea; and on dark nights you'll have the stars
+      dancing to you over the water as thick as bees. I've looked at them often,
+      thinking of you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pasiance had whispered to me, &ldquo;Don't read that bit,&rdquo; and afterwards I left
+      it out.... Then the sensuous side of him shows up: &ldquo;When I've brought this
+      off, there's the whole world before us. There are places I can take you
+      to. There's one I know, not too warm and not too cold, where you can sit
+      all day in the shade and watch the creepers, and the cocoa-palms, still as
+      still; nothing to do or care about; all the fruits you can think of; no
+      noise but the parrots and the streams, and a splash when a nigger dives
+      into a water-hole. Pasiance, we'll go there! With an eighty-ton craft
+      there's no sea we couldn't know. The world's a fine place for those who go
+      out to take it; there's lots of unknown stuff' in it yet. I'll fill your
+      lap, my pretty, so full of treasures that you shan't know yourself. A man
+      wasn't meant to sit at home....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Throughout this letter&mdash;for all its real passion&mdash;one could feel
+      how the man was holding to his purpose&mdash;the rather sordid purpose of
+      this venture. He's unconscious of it; for he is in love with her; but he
+      must be furthering his own ends. He is vital&mdash;horribly vital! I
+      wonder less now that she should have yielded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What visions hasn't he dangled before her. There was physical attraction,
+      too&mdash;I haven't forgotten the look I saw on her face at Black Mill.
+      But when all's said and done, she married him, because she's Pasiance
+      Voisey, who does things and wants &ldquo;to get back.&rdquo; And she lies there dying;
+      not he nor any other man will ever take her away. It's pitiful to think of
+      him tingling with passion, writing that letter to this doomed girl in that
+      dark hole of a saloon. &ldquo;I've wanted money,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;ever since I was a
+      little chap sitting in the fields among the cows.... I want it for you
+      now, and I mean to have it. I've studied the thing two years; I know what
+      I know....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The moment this is in the post I leave for London. There are a hundred
+      things to look after still; I can't trust myself within reach of you again
+      till the anchor's weighed. When I re-christened her the Pied Witch, I
+      thought of you&mdash;you witch to me....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There followed a solemn entreaty to her to be on the path leading to the
+      cove at seven o'clock on Wednesday evening (that is, to-morrow) when he
+      would come ashore and bid her good-bye. It was signed, &ldquo;Your loving
+      husband, Zachary Pearse....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I lay at the edge of that cornfield a long time; it was very peaceful. The
+      church bells had begun to ring. The long shadows came stealing out from
+      the sheaves; woodpigeons rose one by one, and flapped off to roost; the
+      western sky was streaked with red, and all the downs and combe bathed in
+      the last sunlight. Perfect harvest weather; but oppressively still, the
+      stillness of suspense....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Life at the farm goes on as usual. We have morning and evening prayers.
+      John Ford reads them fiercely, as though he were on the eve of a revolt
+      against his God. Morning and evening he visits her, comes out wheezing
+      heavily, and goes to his own room; I believe, to pray. Since this morning
+      I haven't dared meet him. He is a strong old man&mdash;but this will break
+      him up....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0042" id="link2H_4_0042">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      &ldquo;KINGSWEAR, Saturday, 13th August.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      .... It's over&mdash;I leave here to-morrow, and go abroad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A quiet afternoon&mdash;not a breath up in the churchyard! I was there
+      quite half an hour before they came. Some red cows had strayed into the
+      adjoining orchard, and were rubbing their heads against the railing. While
+      I stood there an old woman came and drove them away; afterwards, she
+      stooped and picked up the apples that had fallen before their time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The apples are ripe and ready to fall, Oh! heigh-ho! and ready to fall;
+      There came an old woman and gathered them all, Oh! heigh-ho! and gathered
+      them all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      .... They brought Pasiance very simply&mdash;no hideous funeral trappings,
+      thank God&mdash;the farm hands carried her, and there was no one there but
+      John Ford, the Hopgoods, myself, and that young doctor. They read the
+      service over her grave. I can hear John Ford's &ldquo;Amen!&rdquo; now. When it was
+      over he walked away bareheaded in the sun, without a word. I went up there
+      again this evening, and wandered amongst the tombstones. &ldquo;Richard Voisey,&rdquo;
+       &ldquo;John, the son of Richard and Constance Voisey,&rdquo; &ldquo;Margery Voisey,&rdquo; so many
+      generations of them in that corner; then &ldquo;Richard Voisey and Agnes his
+      wife,&rdquo; and next to it that new mound on which a sparrow was strutting and
+      the shadows of the apple-trees already hovering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I will tell you the little left to tell....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On Wednesday afternoon she asked for me again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's only till seven,&rdquo; she whispered. &ldquo;He's certain to come then. But if
+      I&mdash;were to die first&mdash;then tell him&mdash;I'm sorry for him.
+      They keep saying: 'Don't talk&mdash;don't talk!' Isn't it stupid? As if I
+      should have any other chance! There'll be no more talking after to-night!
+      Make everybody come, please&mdash;I want to see them all. When you're
+      dying you're freer than any other time&mdash;nobody wants you to do
+      things, nobody cares what you say.... He promised me I should do what I
+      liked if I married him&mdash;I never believed that really&mdash;but now I
+      can do what I like; and say all the things I want to.&rdquo; She lay back
+      silent; she could not after all speak the inmost thoughts that are in each
+      of us, so sacred that they melt away at the approach of words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shall remember her like that&mdash;with the gleam of a smile in her
+      half-closed eyes, her red lips parted&mdash;such a quaint look of mockery,
+      pleasure, regret, on her little round, upturned face; the room white, and
+      fresh with flowers, the breeze guttering the apple-leaves against the
+      window. In the night they had unhooked the violin and taken it away; she
+      had not missed it.... When Dan came, I gave up my place to him. He took
+      her hand gently in his great paw, without speaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How small my hand looks there,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;too small.&rdquo; Dan put it softly
+      back on the bedclothes and wiped his forehead. Pasiance cried in a sharp
+      whisper: &ldquo;Is it so hot in here? I didn't know.&rdquo; Dan bent down, put his
+      lips to her fingers and left the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The afternoon was long, the longest I've ever spent. Sometimes she seemed
+      to sleep, sometimes whispered to herself about her mother, her
+      grandfather, the garden, or her cats&mdash;all sorts of inconsequent,
+      trivial, even ludicrous memories seemed to throng her mind&mdash;never
+      once, I think, did she speak of Zachary, but, now and then, she asked the
+      time.... Each hour she grew visibly weaker. John Ford sat by her without
+      moving, his heavy breathing was often the only sound; sometimes she rubbed
+      her fingers on his hand, without speaking. It was a summary of their lives
+      together. Once he prayed aloud for her in a hoarse voice; then her
+      pitiful, impatient eyes signed to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quick,&rdquo; she whispered, &ldquo;I want him; it's all so&mdash;cold.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I went out and ran down the path towards the cove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leaning on a gate stood Zachary, an hour before his time; dressed in the
+      same old blue clothes and leather-peaked cap as on the day when I saw him
+      first. He knew nothing of what had happened. But at a quarter of the
+      truth, I'm sure he divined the whole, though he would not admit it to
+      himself. He kept saying, &ldquo;It can't be. She'll be well in a few days&mdash;a
+      sprain! D' you think the sea-voyage.... Is she strong enough to be moved
+      now at once?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was painful to see his face, so twisted by the struggle between his
+      instinct and his vitality. The sweat poured down his forehead. He turned
+      round as we walked up the path, and pointed out to sea. There was his
+      steamer. &ldquo;I could get her on board in no time. Impossible! What is it,
+      then? Spine? Good God! The doctors.... Sometimes they'll do wonders!&rdquo; It
+      was pitiful to see his efforts to blind himself to the reality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It can't be, she's too young. We're walking very slow.&rdquo; I told him she
+      was dying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a second I thought he was going to run away. Then he jerked up his
+      head, and rushed on towards the house. At the foot of the staircase he
+      gripped me by the shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's not true!&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;she'll get better now I'm here. I'll stay. Let
+      everything go. I'll stay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now's the time,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;to show you loved her. Pull yourself together,
+      man!&rdquo; He shook all over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes!&rdquo; was all he answered. We went into her room. It seemed impossible
+      she was going to die; the colour was bright in her cheeks, her lips
+      trembling and pouted as if she had just been kissed, her eyes gleaming,
+      her hair so dark and crisp, her face so young....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Half an hour later I stole to the open door of her room. She was still and
+      white as the sheets of her bed. John Ford stood at the foot; and, bowed to
+      the level of the pillows, his head on his clenched fists, sat Zachary. It
+      was utterly quiet. The guttering of the leaves had ceased. When things
+      have come to a crisis, how little one feels&mdash;no fear, no pity, no
+      sorrow, rather the sense, as when a play is over, of anxiety to get away!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Zachary rose, brushed past me without seeing, and ran downstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some hours later I went out on the path leading to the cove. It was
+      pitch-black; the riding light of the Pied Witch was still there, looking
+      no bigger than a firefly. Then from in front I heard sobbing&mdash;a man's
+      sobs; no sound is quite so dreadful. Zachary Pearse got up out of the bank
+      not ten paces off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had no heart to go after him, and sat down in the hedge. There was
+      something subtly akin to her in the fresh darkness of the young night; the
+      soft bank, the scent of honeysuckle, the touch of the ferns and brambles.
+      Death comes to all of us, and when it's over it's over; but this blind
+      business&mdash;of those left behind!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A little later the ship whistled twice; her starboard light gleamed
+      faintly&mdash;and that was all....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0043" id="link2H_4_0043">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      &ldquo;TORQUAY, 30th October.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      .... Do you remember the letters I wrote you from Moor Farm nearly three
+      years ago? To-day I rode over there. I stopped at Brixham on the way for
+      lunch, and walked down to the quay. There had been a shower&mdash;but the
+      sun was out again, shining on the sea, the brown-red sails, and the
+      rampart of slate roofs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A trawler was lying there, which had evidently been in a collision. The
+      spiky-bearded, thin-lipped fellow in torn blue jersey and sea-boots who
+      was superintending the repairs, said to me a little proudly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bane in collision, zurr; like to zee over her?&rdquo; Then suddenly screwing up
+      his little blue eyes, he added:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, I remembers yu. Steered yu along o' the young lady in this yer very
+      craft.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Prawle, Zachary Pearse's henchman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;that's the cutter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And Captain Pearse?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He leant his back against the quay, and spat. &ldquo;He was a pra-aper man; I
+      never zane none like 'en.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you do any good out there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prawle gave me a sharp glance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gude? No, t'was arrm we done, vrom ztart to finish&mdash;had trouble all
+      the time. What a man cude du, the skipper did. When yu caan't du right,
+      zome calls it 'Providence'. 'Tis all my eye an' Betty Martin! What I zay
+      es, 'tis these times, there's such a dale o' folk, a dale of puzzivantin'
+      fellers; the world's to small.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With these words there flashed across me a vision of Drake crushed into
+      our modern life by the shrinkage of the world; Drake caught in the meshes
+      of red tape, electric wires, and all the lofty appliances of our
+      civilization. Does a type survive its age; live on into times that have no
+      room for it? The blood is there&mdash;and sometimes there's a
+      throw-back.... All fancy! Eh?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;you failed?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prawle wriggled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wudden' goo for to zay that, zurr&mdash;'tis an ugly word. Da-am!&rdquo; he
+      added, staring at his boots, &ldquo;'twas thru me tu. We were along among the
+      haythen, and I mus' nades goo for to break me leg. The capt'n he wudden'
+      lave me. 'One Devon man,' he says to me, 'don' lave anotherr.' We werr six
+      days where we shuld ha' been tu; when we got back to the ship a cruiser
+      had got her for gun-runnin'.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what has become of Captain Pearse?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prawle answered, &ldquo;Zurr, I belave 'e went to China, 'tis onsartin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's not dead?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prawle looked at me with a kind of uneasy anger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yu cudden' kell 'en! 'Tis true, mun 'll die zome day. But therr's not a
+      one that'll show better zport than Capt'n Zach'ry Pearse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I believe that; he will be hard to kill. The vision of him comes up, with
+      his perfect balance, defiant eyes, and sweetish smile; the way the hair of
+      his beard crisped a little, and got blacker on the cheeks; the sort of
+      desperate feeling he gave, that one would never get the better of him,
+      that he would never get the better of himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I took leave of Prawle and half a crown. Before I was off the quay I heard
+      him saying to a lady, &ldquo;Bane in collision, marm! Like to zee over her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After lunch I rode on to Moor. The old place looked much the same; but the
+      apple-trees were stripped of fruit, and their leaves beginning to go
+      yellow and fall. One of Pasiance's cats passed me in the orchard hunting a
+      bird, still with a ribbon round its neck. John Ford showed me all his
+      latest improvements, but never by word or sign alluded to the past. He
+      inquired after Dan, back in New Zealand now, without much interest; his
+      stubbly beard and hair have whitened; he has grown very stout, and I
+      noticed that his legs are not well under control; he often stops to lean
+      on his stick. He was very ill last winter; and sometimes, they say, will
+      go straight off to sleep in the middle of a sentence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I managed to get a few minutes with the Hopgoods. We talked of Pasiance
+      sitting in the kitchen under a row of plates, with that clinging smell of
+      wood-smoke, bacon, and age bringing up memories, as nothing but scents
+      can. The dear old lady's hair, drawn so nicely down her forehead on each
+      side from the centre of her cap, has a few thin silver lines; and her face
+      is a thought more wrinkled. The tears still come into her eyes when she
+      talks of her &ldquo;lamb.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Of Zachary I heard nothing, but she told me of old Pearse's death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Therr they found 'en, zo to spake, dead&mdash;in th' sun; but Ha-apgood
+      can tell yu,&rdquo; and Hopgood, ever rolling his pipe, muttered something, and
+      smiled his wooden smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came to see me off from the straw-yard. &ldquo;'Tis like death to the varrm,
+      zurr,&rdquo; he said, putting all the play of his vast shoulders into the
+      buckling of my girths. &ldquo;Mister Ford&mdash;well! And not one of th' old
+      stock to take it when 'e's garn.... Ah! it werr cruel; my old woman's
+      never been hersel' since. Tell 'ee what 'tis&mdash;don't du t' think to
+      much.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I went out of my way to pass the churchyard. There were flowers, quite
+      fresh, chrysanthemums, and asters; above them the white stone, already
+      stained:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;PASIANCE
+
+        &ldquo;WIFE OF ZACHARY PEARSE
+
+        &ldquo;'The Lord hath given, and the Lord hath taken away.'&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The red cows were there too; the sky full of great white clouds, some
+      birds whistling a little mournfully, and in the air the scent of fallen
+      leaves....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      May, 1900.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0044" id="link2H_4_0044">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      TO MY MOTHER
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0045" id="link2H_4_0045">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      A KNIGHT
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0046" id="link2H_4_0046">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      At Monte Carlo, in the spring of the year 189-, I used to notice an old
+      fellow in a grey suit and sunburnt straw hat with a black ribbon. Every
+      morning at eleven o'clock, he would come down to the Place, followed by a
+      brindled German boarhound, walk once or twice round it, and seat himself
+      on a bench facing the casino. There he would remain in the sun, with his
+      straw hat tilted forward, his thin legs apart, his brown hands crossed
+      between them, and the dog's nose resting on his knee. After an hour or
+      more he would get up, and, stooping a little from the waist, walk slowly
+      round the Place and return up hill. Just before three, he would come down
+      again in the same clothes and go into the casino, leaving the dog outside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One afternoon, moved by curiosity, I followed him. He passed through the
+      hall without looking at the gambling-rooms, and went into the concert. It
+      became my habit after that to watch for him. When he sat in the Place I
+      could see him from the window of my room. The chief puzzle to me was the
+      matter of his nationality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His lean, short face had a skin so burnt that it looked like leather; his
+      jaw was long and prominent, his chin pointed, and he had hollows in his
+      cheeks. There were wrinkles across his forehead; his eyes were brown; and
+      little white moustaches were brushed up from the corners of his lips. The
+      back of his head bulged out above the lines of his lean neck and high,
+      sharp shoulders; his grey hair was cropped quite close. In the Marseilles
+      buffet, on the journey out, I had met an Englishman, almost his
+      counterpart in features&mdash;but somehow very different! This old fellow
+      had nothing of the other's alert, autocratic self-sufficiency. He was
+      quiet and undemonstrative, without looking, as it were, insulated against
+      shocks and foreign substances. He was certainly no Frenchman. His eyes,
+      indeed, were brown, but hazel-brown, and gentle&mdash;not the red-brown
+      sensual eye of the Frenchman. An American? But was ever an American so
+      passive? A German? His moustache was certainly brushed up, but in a
+      modest, almost pathetic way, not in the least Teutonic. Nothing seemed to
+      fit him. I gave him up, and named him &ldquo;the Cosmopolitan.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Leaving at the end of April, I forgot him altogether. In the same month,
+      however, of the following year I was again at Monte Carlo, and going one
+      day to the concert found myself seated next this same old fellow. The
+      orchestra was playing Meyerbeer's &ldquo;Prophete,&rdquo; and my neighbour was asleep,
+      snoring softly. He was dressed in the same grey suit, with the same straw
+      hat (or one exactly like it) on his knees, and his hands crossed above it.
+      Sleep had not disfigured him&mdash;his little white moustache was still
+      brushed up, his lips closed; a very good and gentle expression hovered on
+      his face. A curved mark showed on his right temple, the scar of a cut on
+      the side of his neck, and his left hand was covered by an old glove, the
+      little finger of which was empty. He woke up when the march was over and
+      brisked up his moustache.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next thing on the programme was a little thing by Poise from Le joli
+      Gilles, played by Mons. Corsanego on the violin. Happening to glance at my
+      old neighbour, I saw a tear caught in the hollow of his cheek, and another
+      just leaving the corner of his eye; there was a faint smile on his lips.
+      Then came an interval; and while orchestra and audience were resting, I
+      asked him if he were fond of music. He looked up without distrust, bowed,
+      and answered in a thin, gentle voice: &ldquo;Certainly. I know nothing about it,
+      play no instrument, could never sing a note; but fond of it! Who would not
+      be?&rdquo; His English was correct enough, but with an emphasis not quite
+      American nor quite foreign. I ventured to remark that he did not care for
+      Meyerbeer. He smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I was asleep? Too bad of me. He is a little noisy&mdash;I
+      know so little about music. There is Bach, for instance. Would you believe
+      it, he gives me no pleasure? A great misfortune to be no musician!&rdquo; He
+      shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I murmured, &ldquo;Bach is too elevating for you perhaps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To me,&rdquo; he answered, &ldquo;any music I like is elevating. People say some
+      music has a bad effect on them. I never found any music that gave me a bad
+      thought&mdash;no&mdash;no&mdash;quite the opposite; only sometimes, as you
+      see, I go to sleep. But what a lovely instrument the violin!&rdquo; A faint
+      flush came on his parched cheeks. &ldquo;The human soul that has left the body.
+      A curious thing, distant bugles at night have given me the same feeling.&rdquo;
+       The orchestra was now coming back, and, folding his hands, my neighbour
+      turned his eyes towards them. When the concert was over we came out
+      together. Waiting at the entrance was his dog.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have a beautiful dog!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! yes, Freda, mia cara, da su mano!&rdquo; The dog squatted on her haunches,
+      and lifted her paw in the vague, bored way of big dogs when requested to
+      perform civilities. She was a lovely creature&mdash;the purest brindle,
+      without a speck of white, and free from the unbalanced look of most dogs
+      of her breed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Basta! basta!&rdquo; He turned to me apologetically. &ldquo;We have agreed to speak
+      Italian; in that way I keep up the language; astonishing the number of
+      things that dog will understand!&rdquo; I was about to take my leave, when he
+      asked if I would walk a little way with him&mdash;&ldquo;If you are free, that
+      is.&rdquo; We went up the street with Freda on the far side of her master.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you never 'play' here?&rdquo; I asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Play? No. It must be very interesting; most exciting, but as a matter of
+      fact, I can't afford it. If one has very little, one is too nervous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had stopped in front of a small hairdresser's shop. &ldquo;I live here,&rdquo; he
+      said, raising his hat again. &ldquo;Au revoir!&mdash;unless I can offer you a
+      glass of tea. It's all ready. Come! I've brought you out of your way; give
+      me the pleasure!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I have never met a man so free from all self-consciousness, and yet so
+      delicate and diffident the combination is a rare one. We went up a steep
+      staircase to a room on the second floor. My companion threw the shutters
+      open, setting all the flies buzzing. The top of a plane-tree was on a
+      level with the window, and all its little brown balls were dancing, quite
+      close, in the wind. As he had promised, an urn was hissing on a table;
+      there was also a small brown teapot, some sugar, slices of lemon, and
+      glasses. A bed, washstand, cupboard, tin trunk, two chairs, and a small
+      rug were all the furniture. Above the bed a sword in a leather sheath was
+      suspended from two nails. The photograph of a girl stood on the closed
+      stove. My host went to the cupboard and produced a bottle, a glass, and a
+      second spoon. When the cork was drawn, the scent of rum escaped into the
+      air. He sniffed at it and dropped a teaspoonful into both glasses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is a trick I learned from the Russians after Plevna; they had my
+      little finger, so I deserved something in exchange.&rdquo; He looked round; his
+      eyes, his whole face, seemed to twinkle. &ldquo;I assure you it was worth it&mdash;makes
+      all the difference. Try!&rdquo; He poured off the tea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Had you a sympathy with the Turks?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The weaker side&mdash;&rdquo; He paused abruptly, then added: &ldquo;But it was not
+      that.&rdquo; Over his face innumerable crow's-feet had suddenly appeared, his
+      eyes twitched; he went on hurriedly, &ldquo;I had to find something to do just
+      then&mdash;it was necessary.&rdquo; He stared into his glass; and it was some
+      time before I ventured to ask if he had seen much fighting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he replied gravely, &ldquo;nearly twenty years altogether; I was one of
+      Garibaldi's Mille in '60.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely you are not Italian?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He leaned forward with his hands on his knees. &ldquo;I was in Genoa at that
+      time learning banking; Garibaldi was a wonderful man! One could not help
+      it.&rdquo; He spoke quite simply. &ldquo;You might say it was like seeing a little man
+      stand up to a ring of great hulking fellows; I went, just as you would
+      have gone, if you'd been there. I was not long with them&mdash;our war
+      began; I had to go back home.&rdquo; He said this as if there had been but one
+      war since the world began. &ldquo;In '60,&rdquo; he mused, &ldquo;till '65. Just think of
+      it! The poor country. Why, in my State, South Carolina&mdash;I was through
+      it all&mdash;nobody could be spared there&mdash;we were one to three.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you have a love of fighting?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;H'm!&rdquo; he said, as if considering the idea for the first time. &ldquo;Sometimes
+      I fought for a living, and sometimes&mdash;because I was obliged; one must
+      try to be a gentleman. But won't you have some more?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I refused more tea and took my leave, carrying away with me a picture of
+      the old fellow looking down from the top of the steep staircase, one hand
+      pressed to his back, the other twisting up those little white moustaches,
+      and murmuring, &ldquo;Take care, my dear sir, there's a step there at the
+      corner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To be a gentleman!&rdquo; I repeated in the street, causing an old French lady
+      to drop her parasol, so that for about two minutes we stood bowing and
+      smiling to each other, then separated full of the best feeling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0047" id="link2H_4_0047">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A week later I found myself again seated next him at a concert. In the
+      meantime I had seen him now and then, but only in passing. He seemed
+      depressed. The corners of his lips were tightened, his tanned cheeks had a
+      greyish tinge, his eyes were restless; and, between two numbers of the
+      programme, he murmured, tapping his fingers on his hat, &ldquo;Do you ever have
+      bad days? Yes? Not pleasant, are they?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then something occurred from which all that I have to tell you followed.
+      There came into the concert-hall the heroine of one of those romances,
+      crimes, follies, or irregularities, call it what you will, which had just
+      attracted the &ldquo;world's&rdquo; stare. She passed us with her partner, and sat
+      down in a chair a few rows to our right. She kept turning her head round,
+      and at every turn I caught the gleam of her uneasy eyes. Some one behind
+      us said: &ldquo;The brazen baggage!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      My companion turned full round, and glared at whoever it was who had
+      spoken. The change in him was quite remarkable. His lips were drawn back
+      from his teeth; he frowned; the scar on his temple had reddened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; he said to me. &ldquo;The hue and cry! Contemptible! How I hate it! But
+      you wouldn't understand&mdash;!&rdquo; he broke off, and slowly regained his
+      usual air of self-obliteration; he even seemed ashamed, and began trying
+      to brush his moustaches higher than ever, as if aware that his heat had
+      robbed them of neatness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not myself, when I speak of such matters,&rdquo; he said suddenly; and
+      began reading his programme, holding it upside down. A minute later,
+      however, he said in a peculiar voice: &ldquo;There are people to be found who
+      object to vivisecting animals; but the vivisection of a woman, who minds
+      that? Will you tell me it's right, that because of some tragedy like this&mdash;believe
+      me, it is always a tragedy&mdash;we should hunt down a woman? That her
+      fellow-women should make an outcast of her? That we, who are men, should
+      make a prey of her? If I thought that....&rdquo; Again he broke off, staring
+      very hard in front of him. &ldquo;It is we who make them what they are; and even
+      if that is not so&mdash;why! if I thought there was a woman in the world I
+      could not take my hat off to&mdash;I&mdash;I&mdash;couldn't sleep at
+      night.&rdquo; He got up from his seat, put on his old straw hat with trembling
+      fingers, and, without a glance back, went out, stumbling over the
+      chair-legs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat there, horribly disturbed; the words, &ldquo;One must try to be a
+      gentleman!&rdquo; haunting me. When I came out, he was standing by the entrance
+      with one hand on his hip and the other on his dog. In that attitude of
+      waiting he was such a patient figure; the sun glared down and showed the
+      threadbare nature of his clothes and the thinness of his brown hands, with
+      their long fingers and nails yellow from tobacco. Seeing me he came up the
+      steps again, and raised his hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am glad to have caught you; please forget all that.&rdquo; I asked if he
+      would do me the honour of dining at my hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dine?&rdquo; he repeated with the sort of smile a child gives if you offer him
+      a box of soldiers; &ldquo;with the greatest pleasure. I seldom dine out, but I
+      think I can muster up a coat. Yes&mdash;yes&mdash;and at what time shall I
+      come? At half-past seven, and your hotel is&mdash;? Good! I shall be
+      there. Freda, mia cara, you will be alone this evening. You do not smoke
+      caporal, I fear. I find it fairly good; though it has too much bite.&rdquo; He
+      walked off with Freda, puffing at his thin roll of caporal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once or twice he stopped, as if bewildered or beset by some sudden doubt
+      or memory; and every time he stopped, Freda licked his hand. They
+      disappeared round the corner of the street, and I went to my hotel to see
+      about dinner. On the way I met Jules le Ferrier, and asked him to come
+      too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My faith, yes!&rdquo; he said, with the rosy pessimism characteristic of the
+      French editor. &ldquo;Man must dine!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At half-past six we assembled. My &ldquo;Cosmopolitan&rdquo; was in an old frock-coat
+      braided round the edges, buttoned high and tight, defining more than ever
+      the sharp lines of his shoulders and the slight kink of his back; he had
+      brought with him, too, a dark-peaked cap of military shape, which he had
+      evidently selected as more fitting to the coat than a straw hat. He
+      smelled slightly of some herb.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We sat down to dinner, and did not rise for two hours. He was a charming
+      guest, praised everything he ate&mdash;not with commonplaces, but in words
+      that made you feel it had given him real pleasure. At first, whenever
+      Jules made one of his caustic remarks, he looked quite pained, but
+      suddenly seemed to make up his mind that it was bark, not bite; and then
+      at each of them he would turn to me and say, &ldquo;Aha! that's good&mdash;isn't
+      it?&rdquo; With every glass of wine he became more gentle and more genial,
+      sitting very upright, and tightly buttoned-in; while the little white
+      wings of his moustache seemed about to leave him for a better world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In spite of the most leading questions, however, we could not get him to
+      talk about himself, for even Jules, most cynical of men, had recognised
+      that he was a hero of romance. He would answer gently and precisely, and
+      then sit twisting his moustaches, perfectly unconscious that we wanted
+      more. Presently, as the wine went a little to his head, his thin, high
+      voice grew thinner, his cheeks became flushed, his eyes brighter; at the
+      end of dinner he said: &ldquo;I hope I have not been noisy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We assured him that he had not been noisy enough. &ldquo;You're laughing at me,&rdquo;
+       he answered. &ldquo;Surely I've been talking all the time!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mon Dieu!&rdquo; said Jules, &ldquo;we have been looking for some fables of your
+      wars; but nothing&mdash;nothing, not enough to feed a frog!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old fellow looked troubled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To be sure!&rdquo; he mused. &ldquo;Let me think! there is that about Colhoun at
+      Gettysburg; and there's the story of Garibaldi and the Miller.&rdquo; He plunged
+      into a tale, not at all about himself, which would have been extremely
+      dull, but for the conviction in his eyes, and the way he stopped and
+      commented. &ldquo;So you see,&rdquo; he ended, &ldquo;that's the sort of man Garibaldi was!
+      I could tell you another tale of him.&rdquo; Catching an introspective look in
+      Jules's eye, however, I proposed taking our cigars over to the cafe
+      opposite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Delightful!&rdquo; the old fellow said: &ldquo;We shall have a band and the fresh
+      air, and clear consciences for our cigars. I cannot like this smoking in a
+      room where there are ladies dining.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked out in front of us, smoking with an air of great enjoyment.
+      Jules, glowing above his candid shirt and waistcoat, whispered to me, &ldquo;Mon
+      cher Georges, how he is good!&rdquo; then sighed, and added darkly: &ldquo;The poor
+      man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We sat down at a little table. Close by, the branches of a plane-tree
+      rustled faintly; their leaves hung lifeless, speckled like the breasts of
+      birds, or black against the sky; then, caught by the breeze, fluttered
+      suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old fellow sat, with head thrown back, a smile on his face, coming now
+      and then out of his enchanted dreams to drink coffee, answer our
+      questions, or hum the tune that the band was playing. The ash of his cigar
+      grew very long. One of those bizarre figures in Oriental garb, who, night
+      after night, offer their doubtful wares at a great price, appeared in the
+      white glare of a lamp, looked with a furtive smile at his face, and glided
+      back, discomfited by its unconsciousness. It was a night for dreams! A
+      faint, half-eastern scent in the air, of black tobacco and spice; few
+      people as yet at the little tables, the waiters leisurely, the band soft!
+      What was he dreaming of, that old fellow, whose cigar-ash grew so long? Of
+      youth, of his battles, of those things that must be done by those who try
+      to be gentlemen; perhaps only of his dinner; anyway of something gilded in
+      vague fashion as the light was gilding the branches of the plane-tree.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jules pulled my sleeve: &ldquo;He sleeps.&rdquo; He had smilingly dropped off; the
+      cigar-ash&mdash;that feathery tower of his dreams&mdash;had broken and
+      fallen on his sleeve. He awoke, and fell to dusting it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little tables round us began to fill. One of the bandsmen played a
+      czardas on the czymbal. Two young Frenchmen, talking loudly, sat down at
+      the adjoining table. They were discussing the lady who had been at the
+      concert that afternoon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a bet,&rdquo; said one of them, &ldquo;but there's the present man. I take three
+      weeks, that's enough 'elle est declassee; ce n'est que le premier pas&mdash;'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      My old friend's cigar fell on the table. &ldquo;Monsieur,&rdquo; he stammered, &ldquo;you
+      speak of a lady so, in a public place?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man stared at him. &ldquo;Who is this person?&rdquo; he said to his
+      companion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My guest took up Jules's glove that lay on the table; before either of us
+      could raise a finger, he had swung it in the speaker's face. &ldquo;Enough!&rdquo; he
+      said, and, dropping the glove, walked away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We all jumped to our feet. I left Jules and hurried after him. His face
+      was grim, his eyes those of a creature who has been struck on a raw place.
+      He made a movement of his fingers which said plainly. &ldquo;Leave me, if you
+      please!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I went back to the cafe. The two young men had disappeared, so had Jules,
+      but everything else was going on just as before; the bandsman still
+      twanging out his czardas; the waiters serving drinks; the orientals trying
+      to sell their carpets. I paid the bill, sought out the manager, and
+      apologised. He shrugged his shoulders, smiled and said: &ldquo;An eccentric,
+      your friend, nicht wahr?&rdquo; Could he tell me where M. Le Ferrier was? He
+      could not. I left to look for Jules; could not find him, and returned to
+      my hotel disgusted. I was sorry for my old guest, but vexed with him too;
+      what business had he to carry his Quixotism to such an unpleasant length?
+      I tried to read. Eleven o'clock struck; the casino disgorged a stream of
+      people; the Place seemed fuller of life than ever; then slowly it grew
+      empty and quite dark. The whim seized me to go out. It was a still night,
+      very warm, very black. On one of the seats a man and woman sat embraced,
+      on another a girl was sobbing, on a third&mdash;strange sight&mdash;a
+      priest dozed. I became aware of some one at my side; it was my old guest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you are not too tired,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;can you give me ten minutes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly; will you come in?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no; let us go down to the Terrace. I shan't keep you long.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not speak again till we reached a seat above the pigeon-shooting
+      grounds; there, in a darkness denser for the string of lights still
+      burning in the town, we sat down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I owe you an apology,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;first in the afternoon, then again this
+      evening&mdash;your guest&mdash;your friend's glove! I have behaved as no
+      gentleman should.&rdquo; He was leaning forward with his hands on the handle of
+      a stick. His voice sounded broken and disturbed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; I muttered. &ldquo;It's nothing!&rdquo;'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are very good,&rdquo; he sighed; &ldquo;but I feel that I must explain. I
+      consider I owe this to you, but I must tell you I should not have the
+      courage if it were not for another reason. You see I have no friend.&rdquo; He
+      looked at me with an uncertain smile. I bowed, and a minute or two later
+      he began....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0048" id="link2H_4_0048">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will excuse me if I go back rather far. It was in '74, when I had
+      been ill with Cuban fever. To keep me alive they had put me on board a
+      ship at Santiago, and at the end of the voyage I found myself in London. I
+      had very little money; I knew nobody. I tell you, sir, there are times
+      when it's hard for a fighting man to get anything to do. People would say
+      to me: 'Afraid we've nothing for a man like you in our business.' I tried
+      people of all sorts; but it was true&mdash;I had been fighting here and
+      there since '60, I wasn't fit for anything&mdash;&rdquo; He shook his head. &ldquo;In
+      the South, before the war, they had a saying, I remember, about a dog and
+      a soldier having the same value. But all this has nothing to do with what
+      I have to tell you.&rdquo; He sighed again and went on, moistening his lips: &ldquo;I
+      was walking along the Strand one day, very disheartened, when I heard my
+      name called. It's a queer thing, that, in a strange street. By the way,&rdquo;
+       he put in with dry ceremony, &ldquo;you don't know my name, I think: it is Brune&mdash;Roger
+      Brune. At first I did not recognise the person who called me. He had just
+      got off an omnibus&mdash;a square-shouldered man with heavy moustaches,
+      and round spectacles. But when he shook my hand I knew him at once. He was
+      a man called Dalton, who was taken prisoner at Gettysburg; one of you
+      Englishmen who came to fight with us&mdash;a major in the regiment where I
+      was captain. We were comrades during two campaigns. If I had been his
+      brother he couldn't have seemed more pleased to see me. He took me into a
+      bar for the sake of old times. The drink went to my head, and by the time
+      we reached Trafalgar Square I was quite unable to walk. He made me sit
+      down on a bench. I was in fact&mdash;drunk. It's disgraceful to be drunk,
+      but there was some excuse. Now I tell you, sir&rdquo; (all through his story he
+      was always making use of that expression, it seemed to infuse fresh spirit
+      into him, to help his memory in obscure places, to give him the mastery of
+      his emotions; it was like the piece of paper a nervous man holds in his
+      hand to help him through a speech), &ldquo;there never was a man with a finer
+      soul than my friend Dalton. He was not clever, though he had read much;
+      and sometimes perhaps he was too fond of talking. But he was a gentleman;
+      he listened to me as if I had been a child; he was not ashamed of me&mdash;and
+      it takes a gentleman not to be ashamed of a drunken man in the streets of
+      London; God knows what things I said to him while we were sitting there!
+      He took me to his home and put me to bed himself; for I was down again
+      with fever.&rdquo; He stopped, turned slightly from me, and put his hand up to
+      his brow. &ldquo;Well, then it was, sir, that I first saw her. I am not a poet
+      and I cannot tell you what she seemed to me. I was delirious, but I always
+      knew when she was there. I had dreams of sunshine and cornfields, of
+      dancing waves at sea, young trees&mdash;never the same dreams, never
+      anything for long together; and when I had my senses I was afraid to say
+      so for fear she would go away. She'd be in the corner of the room, with
+      her hair hanging about her neck, a bright gold colour; she never worked
+      and never read, but sat and talked to herself in a whisper, or looked at
+      me for a long time together out of her blue eyes, a little frown between
+      them, and her upper lip closed firm on her lower lip, where she had an
+      uneven tooth. When her father came, she'd jump up and hang on to his neck
+      until he groaned, then run away, but presently come stealing back on
+      tiptoe. I used to listen for her footsteps on the stairs, then the knock,
+      the door flung back or opened quietly&mdash;you never could tell which;
+      and her voice, with a little lisp, 'Are you better today, Mr. Brune? What
+      funny things you say when you're delirious! Father says you've been in
+      heaps of battles!&rdquo;'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up, paced restlessly to and fro, and sat down again. &ldquo;I remember
+      every word as if it were yesterday, all the things she said, and did; I've
+      had a long time to think them over, you see. Well, I must tell you, the
+      first morning that I was able to get up, I missed her. Dalton came in her
+      place, and I asked him where she was. 'My dear fellow,' he answered, 'I've
+      sent Eilie away to her old nurse's inn down on the river; she's better
+      there at this time of year.' We looked at each other, and I saw that he
+      had sent her away because he didn't trust me. I was hurt by this. Illness
+      spoils one. He was right, he was quite right, for all he knew about me was
+      that I could fight and had got drunk; but I am very quick-tempered. I made
+      up my mind at once to leave him. But I was too weak&mdash;he had to put me
+      to bed again. The very next morning he came and proposed that I should go
+      into partnership with him. He kept a fencing-school and pistol-gallery. It
+      seemed like the finger of God; and perhaps it was&mdash;who knows?&rdquo; He
+      fell into a reverie, and taking out his caporal, rolled himself a
+      cigarette; having lighted it, he went on suddenly: &ldquo;There, in the room
+      above the school, we used to sit in the evenings, one on each side of the
+      grate. The room was on the second floor, I remember, with two windows, and
+      a view of nothing but the houses opposite. The furniture was covered up
+      with chintz. The things on the bookshelf were never disturbed, they were
+      Eilie's&mdash;half-broken cases with butterflies, a dead frog in a bottle,
+      a horse-shoe covered with tinfoil, some shells too, and a cardboard box
+      with three speckled eggs in it, and these words written on the lid:
+      'Missel-thrush from Lucy's tree&mdash;second family, only one blown.'&rdquo; He
+      smoked fiercely, with puffs that were like sharp sighs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dalton was wrapped up in her. He was never tired of talking to me about
+      her, and I was never tired of hearing. We had a number of pupils; but in
+      the evening when we sat there, smoking&mdash;our talk would sooner or
+      later&mdash;come round to her. Her bedroom opened out of that sitting&mdash;room;
+      he took me in once and showed me a narrow little room the width of a
+      passage, fresh and white, with a photograph of her mother above the bed,
+      and an empty basket for a dog or cat.&rdquo; He broke off with a vexed air, and
+      resumed sternly, as if trying to bind himself to the narration of his more
+      important facts: &ldquo;She was then fifteen&mdash;her mother had been dead
+      twelve years&mdash;a beautiful, face, her mother's; it had been her death
+      that sent Dalton to fight with us. Well, sir, one day in August, very hot
+      weather, he proposed a run into the country, and who should meet us on the
+      platform when we arrived but Eilie, in a blue sun-bonnet and frock&mdash;flax
+      blue, her favourite colour. I was angry with Dalton for not telling me
+      that we should see her; my clothes were not quite&mdash;my hair wanted
+      cutting. It was black then, sir,&rdquo; he added, tracing a pattern in the
+      darkness with his stick. &ldquo;She had a little donkey-cart; she drove, and,
+      while we walked one on each side, she kept looking at me from under her
+      sunbonnet. I must tell you that she never laughed&mdash;her eyes danced,
+      her cheeks would go pink, and her hair shake about on her neck, but she
+      never laughed. Her old nurse, Lucy, a very broad, good woman, had married
+      the proprietor of the inn in the village there. I have never seen anything
+      like that inn: sweetbriar up to the roof! And the scent&mdash;I am very
+      susceptible to scents!&rdquo; His head drooped, and the cigarette fell from his
+      hand. A train passing beneath sent up a shower of sparks. He started, and
+      went on: &ldquo;We had our lunch in the parlour&mdash;I remember that room very
+      well, for I spent the happiest days of my life afterwards in that inn....
+      We went into a meadow after lunch, and my friend Dalton fell asleep. A
+      wonderful thing happened then. Eilie whispered to me, 'Let's have a jolly
+      time.' She took me for the most glorious walk. The river was close by. A
+      lovely stream, your river Thames, so calm and broad; it is like the spirit
+      of your people. I was bewitched; I forgot my friend, I thought of nothing
+      but how to keep her to myself. It was such a day! There are days that are
+      the devil's, but that was truly one of God's. She took me to a little pond
+      under an elm-tree, and we dragged it, we two, an hour, for a kind of tiny
+      red worm to feed some creature that she had. We found them in the mud, and
+      while she was bending over, the curls got in her eyes. If you could have
+      seen her then, I think, sir, you would have said she was like the first
+      sight of spring.... We had tea afterwards, all together, in the long grass
+      under some fruit-trees. If I had the knack of words, there are things that
+      I could say.&rdquo; He bent, as though in deference to those unspoken memories.
+      &ldquo;Twilight came on while we were sitting there. A wonderful thing is
+      twilight in the country! It became time for us to go. There was an avenue
+      of trees close by&mdash;like a church with a window at the end, where
+      golden light came through. I walked up and down it with her. 'Will you
+      come again?' she whispered, and suddenly she lifted up her face to be
+      kissed. I kissed her as if she were a little child. And when we said
+      good-bye, her eyes were looking at me across her father's shoulder, with
+      surprise and sorrow in them. 'Why do you go away?' they seemed to say....
+      But I must tell you,&rdquo; he went on hurriedly, &ldquo;of a thing that happened
+      before we had gone a hundred yards. We were smoking our pipes, and I,
+      thinking of her&mdash;when out she sprang from the hedge and stood in
+      front of us. Dalton cried out, 'What are you here for again, you mad
+      girl?' She rushed up to him and hugged him; but when she looked at me, her
+      face was quite different&mdash;careless, defiant, as one might say&mdash;it
+      hurt me. I couldn't understand it, and what one doesn't understand
+      frightens one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0049" id="link2H_4_0049">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Time went on. There was no swordsman, or pistol-shot like me in London,
+      they said. We had as many pupils as we liked&mdash;it was the only part of
+      my life when I have been able to save money. I had no chance to spend it.
+      We gave lessons all day, and in the evening were too tired to go out. That
+      year I had the misfortune to lose my dear mother. I became a rich man&mdash;yes,
+      sir, at that time I must have had not less than six hundred a year.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was a long time before I saw Eilie again. She went abroad to Dresden
+      with her father's sister to learn French and German. It was in the autumn
+      of 1875 when she came back to us. She was seventeen then&mdash;a beautiful
+      young creature.&rdquo; He paused, as if to gather his forces for description,
+      and went on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tall, as a young tree, with eyes like the sky. I would not say she was
+      perfect, but her imperfections were beautiful to me. What is it makes you
+      love&mdash;ah! sir, that is very hidden and mysterious. She had never lost
+      the trick of closing her lips tightly when she remembered her uneven
+      tooth. You may say that was vanity, but in a young girl&mdash;and which of
+      us is not vain, eh? 'Old men and maidens, young men and children!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As I said, she came back to London to her little room, and in the
+      evenings was always ready with our tea. You mustn't suppose she was
+      housewifely; there is something in me that never admired housewifeliness&mdash;a
+      fine quality, no doubt, still&mdash;&rdquo; He sighed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he resumed, &ldquo;Eilie was not like that, for she was never quite the
+      same two days together. I told you her eyes were like the sky&mdash;that
+      was true of all of her. In one thing, however, at that time, she always
+      seemed the same&mdash;in love for her father. For me! I don't know what I
+      should have expected; but my presence seemed to have the effect of making
+      her dumb; I would catch her looking at me with a frown, and then, as if to
+      make up to her own nature&mdash;and a more loving nature never came into
+      this world, that I shall maintain to my dying day&mdash;she would go to
+      her father and kiss him. When I talked with him she pretended not to
+      notice, but I could see her face grow cold and stubborn. I am not quick;
+      and it was a long time before I understood that she was jealous, she
+      wanted him all to herself. I've often wondered how she could be his
+      daughter, for he was the very soul of justice and a slow man too&mdash;and
+      she was as quick as a bird. For a long time after I saw her dislike of me,
+      I refused to believe it&mdash;if one does not want to believe a thing
+      there are always reasons why it should not seem true, at least so it is
+      with me, and I suppose with all selfish men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I spent evening after evening there, when, if I had not thought only of
+      myself, I should have kept away. But one day I could no longer be blind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was a Sunday in February. I always had an invitation on Sundays to
+      dine with them in the middle of the day. There was no one in the
+      sitting-room; but the door of Eilie's bedroom was open. I heard her voice:
+      'That man, always that man!' It was enough for me, I went down again
+      without coming in, and walked about all day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For three weeks I kept away. To the school of course I came as usual, but
+      not upstairs. I don't know what I told Dalton&mdash;it did not signify
+      what you told him, he always had a theory of his own, and was persuaded of
+      its truth&mdash;a very single-minded man, sir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But now I come to the most wonderful days of my life. It was an early
+      spring that year. I had fallen away already from my resolution, and used
+      to slink up&mdash;seldom, it's true&mdash;and spend the evening with them
+      as before. One afternoon I came up to the sitting-room; the light was
+      failing&mdash;it was warm, and the windows were open. In the air was that
+      feeling which comes to you once a year, in the spring, no matter where you
+      may be, in a crowded street, or alone in a forest; only once&mdash;a
+      feeling like&mdash;but I cannot describe it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eilie was sitting there. If you don't know, sir, I can't tell you what it
+      means to be near the woman one loves. She was leaning on the windowsill,
+      staring down into the street. It was as though she might be looking out
+      for some one. I stood, hardly breathing. She turned her head, and saw me.
+      Her eyes were strange. They seemed to ask me a question. But I couldn't
+      have spoken for the world. I can't tell you what I felt&mdash;I dared not
+      speak, or think, or hope. I have been in nineteen battles&mdash;several
+      times in positions of some danger, when the lifting of a finger perhaps
+      meant death; but I have never felt what I was feeling at that moment. I
+      knew something was coming; and I was paralysed with terror lest it should
+      not come!&rdquo; He drew a long breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The servant came in with a light and broke the spell. All that night I
+      lay awake and thought of how she had looked at me, with the colour coming
+      slowly up in her cheeks&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was three days before I plucked up courage to go again; and then I
+      felt her eyes on me at once&mdash;she was making a 'cat's cradle' with a
+      bit of string, but I could see them stealing up from her hands to my face.
+      And she went wandering about the room, fingering at everything. When her
+      father called out: 'What's the matter with you, Elie?' she stared at him
+      like a child caught doing wrong. I looked straight at her then, she tried
+      to look at me, but she couldn't; and a minute later she went out of the
+      room. God knows what sort of nonsense I talked&mdash;I was too happy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then began our love. I can't tell you of that time. Often and often
+      Dalton said to me: 'What's come to the child? Nothing I can do pleases
+      her.' All the love she had given him was now for me; but he was too simple
+      and straight to see what was going on. How many times haven't I felt
+      criminal towards him! But when you're happy, with the tide in your favour,
+      you become a coward at once....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0050" id="link2H_4_0050">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, sir,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;we were married on her eighteenth birthday. It
+      was a long time before Dalton became aware of our love. But one day he
+      said to me with a very grave look:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Eilie has told me, Brune; I forbid it. She's too young, and you're&mdash;too
+      old!' I was then forty-five, my hair as black and thick as a rook's
+      feathers, and I was strong and active. I answered him: 'We shall be
+      married within a month!' We parted in anger. It was a May night, and I
+      walked out far into the country. There's no remedy for anger, or, indeed,
+      for anything, so fine as walking. Once I stopped&mdash;it was on a common,
+      without a house or light, and the stars shining like jewels. I was hot
+      from walking, I could feel the blood boiling in my veins&mdash;I said to
+      myself 'Old, are you?' And I laughed like a fool. It was the thought of
+      losing her&mdash;I wished to believe myself angry, but really I was
+      afraid; fear and anger in me are very much the same. A friend of mine, a
+      bit of a poet, sir, once called them 'the two black wings of self.' And so
+      they are, so they are...! The next morning I went to Dalton again, and
+      somehow I made him yield. I'm not a philosopher, but it has often seemed
+      to me that no benefit can come to us in this life without an equal loss
+      somewhere, but does that stop us? No, sir, not often....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We were married on the 30th of June 1876, in the parish church. The only
+      people present were Dalton, Lucy, and Lucy's husband&mdash;a big,
+      red-faced fellow, with blue eyes and a golden beard parted in two. It had
+      been arranged that we should spend the honeymoon down at their inn on the
+      river. My wife, Dalton and I, went to a restaurant for lunch. She was
+      dressed in grey, the colour of a pigeon's feathers.&rdquo; He paused, leaning
+      forward over the crutch handle of his stick; trying to conjure up, no
+      doubt, that long-ago image of his young bride in her dress &ldquo;the colour of
+      a pigeon's feathers,&rdquo; with her blue eyes and yellow hair, the little frown
+      between her brows, the firmly shut red lips, opening to speak the words,
+      &ldquo;For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in
+      health.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At that time, sir,&rdquo; he went on suddenly, &ldquo;I was a bit of a dandy. I wore,
+      I remember, a blue frock-coat, with white trousers, and a grey top hat.
+      Even now I should always prefer to be well dressed....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We had an excellent lunch, and drank Veuve Clicquot, a wine that you
+      cannot get in these days! Dalton came with us to the railway station. I
+      can't bear partings; and yet, they must come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That evening we walked out in the cool under the aspen-trees. What should
+      I remember in all my life if not that night&mdash;the young bullocks
+      snuffling in the gateways&mdash;the campion flowers all lighted up along
+      the hedges&mdash;the moon with a halo-bats, too, in and out among the
+      stems, and the shadows of the cottages as black and soft as that sea down
+      there. For a long time we stood on the river-bank beneath a lime-tree. The
+      scent of the lime flowers! A man can only endure about half his joy; about
+      half his sorrow. Lucy and her husband,&rdquo; he went on, presently, &ldquo;his name
+      was Frank Tor&mdash;a man like an old Viking, who ate nothing but milk,
+      bread, and fruit&mdash;were very good to us! It was like Paradise in that
+      inn&mdash;though the commissariat, I am bound to say, was limited. The
+      sweetbriar grew round our bedroom windows; when the breeze blew the leaves
+      across the opening&mdash;it was like a bath of perfume. Eilie grew as
+      brown as a gipsy while we were there. I don't think any man could have
+      loved her more than I did. But there were times when my heart stood still;
+      it didn't seem as if she understood how much I loved her. One day, I
+      remember, she coaxed me to take her camping. We drifted down-stream all
+      the afternoon, and in the evening pulled into the reeds under the
+      willow-boughs and lit a fire for her to cook by&mdash;though, as a matter
+      of fact, our provisions were cooked already&mdash;but you know how it is;
+      all the romance was in having a real fire. 'We won't pretend,' she kept
+      saying. While we were eating our supper a hare came to our clearing&mdash;a
+      big fellow&mdash;how surprised he looked! 'The tall hare,' Eilie called
+      him. After that we sat by the ashes and watched the shadows, till at last
+      she roamed away from me. The time went very slowly; I got up to look for
+      her. It was past sundown. I called and called. It was a long time before I
+      found her&mdash;and she was like a wild thing, hot and flushed, her pretty
+      frock torn, her hands and face scratched, her hair down, like some
+      beautiful creature of the woods. If one loves, a little thing will scare
+      one. I didn't think she had noticed my fright; but when we got back to the
+      boat she threw her arms round my neck, and said, 'I won't ever leave you
+      again!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Once in the night I woke&mdash;a water-hen was crying, and in the
+      moonlight a kingfisher flew across. The wonder on the river&mdash;the
+      wonder of the moon and trees, the soft bright mist, the stillness! It was
+      like another world, peaceful, enchanted, far holier than ours. It seemed
+      like a vision of the thoughts that come to one&mdash;how seldom! and go if
+      one tries to grasp them. Magic&mdash;poetry-sacred!&rdquo; He was silent a
+      minute, then went on in a wistful voice: &ldquo;I looked at her, sleeping like a
+      child, with her hair loose, and her lips apart, and I thought: 'God do so
+      to me, if ever I bring her pain!' How was I to understand her? the mystery
+      and innocence of her soul! The river has had all my light and all my
+      darkness, the happiest days, and the hours when I've despaired; and I like
+      to think of it, for, you know, in time bitter memories fade, only the good
+      remain.... Yet the good have their own pain, a different kind of aching,
+      for we shall never get them back. Sir,&rdquo; he said, turning to me with a
+      faint smile, &ldquo;it's no use crying over spilt milk.... In the neighbourhood
+      of Lucy's inn, the Rose and Maybush&mdash;Can you imagine a prettier name?
+      I have been all over the world, and nowhere found names so pretty as in
+      the English country. There, too, every blade of grass; and flower, has a
+      kind of pride about it; knows it will be cared for; and all the roads,
+      trees, and cottages, seem to be certain that they will live for ever....
+      But I was going to tell you: Half a mile from the inn was a quiet old
+      house which we used to call the 'Convent'&mdash;though I believe it was a
+      farm. We spent many afternoons there, trespassing in the orchard&mdash;Eilie
+      was fond of trespassing; if there were a long way round across somebody
+      else's property, she would always take it. We spent our last afternoon in
+      that orchard, lying in the long grass. I was reading Childe Harold for the
+      first time&mdash;a wonderful, a memorable poem! I was at that passage&mdash;the
+      bull-fight&mdash;you remember:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;'Thrice sounds the clarion; lo! the signal falls,
+       The din expands, and expectation mute'
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;&ldquo;when suddenly Eilie said: 'Suppose I were to leave off loving
+      you?' It was as if some one had struck me in the face. I jumped up, and
+      tried to take her in my arms, but she slipped away; then she turned, and
+      began laughing softly. I laughed too. I don't know why....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0051" id="link2H_4_0051">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We went back to London the next day; we lived quite close to the school,
+      and about five days a week Dalton came to dine with us. He would have come
+      every day, if he had not been the sort of man who refuses to consult his
+      own pleasure. We had more pupils than ever. In my leisure I taught my wife
+      to fence. I have never seen any one so lithe and quick; or so beautiful as
+      she looked in her fencing dress, with embroidered shoes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was completely happy. When a man has obtained his desire he becomes
+      careless and self-satisfied; I was watchful, however, for I knew that I
+      was naturally a selfish man. I studied to arrange my time and save my
+      money, to give her as much pleasure as I could. What she loved best in the
+      world just then was riding. I bought a horse for her, and in the evenings
+      of the spring and summer we rode together; but when it was too dark to go
+      out late, she would ride alone, great distances, sometimes spend the whole
+      day in the saddle, and come back so tired she could hardly walk upstairs&mdash;I
+      can't say that I liked that. It made me nervous, she was so headlong&mdash;but
+      I didn't think it right to interfere with her. I had a good deal of
+      anxiety about money, for though I worked hard and made more than ever,
+      there never seemed enough. I was anxious to save&mdash;I hoped, of course&mdash;but
+      we had no child, and this was a trouble to me. She grew more beautiful
+      than ever, and I think was happy. Has it ever struck you that each one of
+      us lives on the edge of a volcano? There is, I imagine, no one who has not
+      some affection or interest so strong that he counts the rest for nothing,
+      beside it. No doubt a man may live his life through without discovering
+      that. But some of us&mdash;! I am not complaining; what is&mdash;is.&rdquo; He
+      pulled the cap lower over his eyes, and clutched his hands firmly on the
+      top of his stick. He was like a man who rushes his horse at some hopeless
+      fence, unwilling to give himself time, for fear of craning at the last
+      moment. &ldquo;In the spring of '78, a new pupil came to me, a young man of
+      twenty-one who was destined for the army. I took a fancy to him, and did
+      my best to turn him into a good swordsman; but there was a kind of
+      perverse recklessness in him; for a few minutes one would make a great
+      impression, then he would grow utterly careless. 'Francis,' I would say,
+      'if I were you I should be ashamed.' 'Mr. Brune,' he would answer, 'why
+      should I be ashamed? I didn't make myself.' God knows, I wish to do him
+      justice, he had a heart&mdash;one day he drove up in a cab, and brought in
+      his poor dog, who had been run over, and was dying: For half an hour he
+      shut himself up with its body, we could hear him sobbing like a child; he
+      came out with his eyes all red, and cried: 'I know where to find the brute
+      who drove over him,' and off he rushed. He had beautiful Italian eyes; a
+      slight figure, not very tall; dark hair, a little dark moustache; and his
+      lips were always a trifle parted&mdash;it was that, and his walk, and the
+      way he drooped his eyelids, which gave him a peculiar, soft, proud look. I
+      used to tell him that he'd never make a soldier! 'Oh!' he'd answer,
+      'that'll be all right when the time comes! He believed in a kind of luck
+      that was to do everything for him, when the time came. One day he came in
+      as I was giving Eilie her lesson. This was the first time they saw each
+      other. After that he came more often, and sometimes stayed to dinner with
+      us. I won't deny, sir, that I was glad to welcome him; I thought it good
+      for Eilie. Can there be anything more odious,&rdquo; he burst out, &ldquo;than such a
+      self-complacent blindness? There are people who say, 'Poor man, he had
+      such faith!' Faith, sir! Conceit! I was a fool&mdash;in this world one
+      pays for folly....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The summer came; and one Saturday in early June, Eilie, I, and Francis&mdash;I
+      won't tell you his other name&mdash;went riding. The night had been wet;
+      there was no dust, and presently the sun came out&mdash;a glorious day! We
+      rode a long way. About seven o'clock we started back-slowly, for it was
+      still hot, and there was all the cool of night before us. It was nine
+      o'clock when we came to Richmond Park. A grand place, Richmond Park; and
+      in that half-light wonderful, the deer moving so softly, you might have
+      thought they were spirits. We were silent too&mdash;great trees have that
+      effect on me....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who can say when changes come? Like a shift of the wind, the old passes,
+      the new is on you. I am telling you now of a change like that. Without a
+      sign of warning, Eilie put her horse into a gallop. 'What are you doing?'
+      I shouted. She looked back with a smile, then he dashed past me too. A
+      hornet might have stung them both: they galloped over fallen trees, under
+      low hanging branches, up hill and down. I had to watch that madness! My
+      horse was not so fast. I rode like a demon; but fell far behind. I am not
+      a man who takes things quietly. When I came up with them at last, I could
+      not speak for rage. They were riding side by side, the reins on the
+      horses' necks, looking in each other's faces. 'You should take care,' I
+      said. 'Care!' she cried; 'life is not all taking care!' My anger left me.
+      I dropped behind, as grooms ride behind their mistresses... Jealousy! No
+      torture is so ceaseless or so black.... In those minutes a hundred things
+      came up in me&mdash;a hundred memories, true, untrue, what do I know? My
+      soul was poisoned. I tried to reason with myself. It was absurd to think
+      such things! It was unmanly.... Even if it were true, one should try to be
+      a gentleman! But I found myself laughing; yes, sir, laughing at that
+      word.&rdquo; He spoke faster, as if pouring his heart out not to a live
+      listener, but to the night. &ldquo;I could not sleep that night. To lie near her
+      with those thoughts in my brain was impossible! I made an excuse, and sat
+      up with some papers. The hardest thing in life is to see a thing coming
+      and be able to do nothing to prevent it. What could I do? Have you noticed
+      how people may become utter strangers without a word? It only needs a
+      thought.... The very next day she said: 'I want to go to Lucy's.' 'Alone?'
+      'Yes.' I had made up my mind by then that she must do just as she wished.
+      Perhaps I acted wrongly; I do not know what one ought to do in such a
+      case; but before she went I said to her: 'Eilie, what is it?' 'I don't
+      know,' she answered; and I kissed her&mdash;that was all.... A month
+      passed; I wrote to her nearly every day, and I had short letters from her,
+      telling me very little of herself. Dalton was a torture to me, for I could
+      not tell him; he had a conviction that she was going to become a mother.
+      'Ah, Brune!' he said, 'my poor wife was just like that.' Life, sir, is a
+      somewhat ironical affair...! He&mdash;I find it hard to speak his name&mdash;came
+      to the school two or three times a week. I used to think I saw a change, a
+      purpose growing up through his recklessness; there seemed a violence in
+      him as if he chafed against my blade. I had a kind of joy in feeling I had
+      the mastery, and could toss the iron out of his hand any minute like a
+      straw. I was ashamed, and yet I gloried in it. Jealousy is a low thing,
+      sir&mdash;a low, base thing! When he asked me where my wife was, I told
+      him; I was too proud to hide it. Soon after that he came no more to the
+      school.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One morning, when I could bear it no longer, I wrote, and said I was
+      coming down. I would not force myself on her, but I asked her to meet me
+      in the orchard of the old house we called the Convent. I asked her to be
+      there at four o'clock. It has always been my belief that a man must
+      neither beg anything of a woman, nor force anything from her. Women are
+      generous&mdash;they will give you what they can. I sealed my letter, and
+      posted it myself. All the way down I kept on saying to myself, 'She must
+      come&mdash;surely she will come!'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0052" id="link2H_4_0052">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was in high spirits, but the next moment trembled like a man with ague.
+      I reached the orchard before my time. She was not there. You know what it
+      is like to wait? I stood still and listened; I went to the point whence I
+      could see farthest; I said to myself, 'A watched pot never boils; if I
+      don't look for her she will come.' I walked up and down with my eyes on
+      the ground. The sickness of it! A hundred times I took out my watch....
+      Perhaps it was fast, perhaps hers was slow&mdash;I can't tell you a
+      thousandth part of my hopes and fears. There was a spring of water, in one
+      corner. I sat beside it, and thought of the last time I had been there&mdash;and
+      something seemed to burst in me. It was five o'clock before I lost all
+      hope; there comes a time when you're glad that hope is dead, it means
+      rest. 'That's over,' you say, 'now I can act.' But what was I to do? I lay
+      down with my face to the ground; when one's in trouble, it's the only
+      thing that helps&mdash;something to press against and cling to that can't
+      give way. I lay there for two hours, knowing all the time that I should
+      play the coward. At seven o'clock I left the orchard and went towards the
+      inn; I had broken my word, but I felt happy.... I should see her&mdash;and,
+      sir, nothing&mdash;nothing seemed to matter beside that. Tor was in the
+      garden snipping at his roses. He came up, and I could see that he couldn't
+      look me in the face. 'Where's my wife?' I said. He answered, 'Let's get
+      Lucy.' I ran indoors. Lucy met me with two letters; the first&mdash;my own&mdash;unopened;
+      and the second, this:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'I have left you. You were good to me, but now&mdash;it is no use.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;EILIE.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She told me that a boy had brought a letter for my wife the day before,
+      from a young gentleman in a boat. When Lucy delivered it she asked, 'Who
+      is he, Miss Eilie? What will Mr. Brune say?' My wife looked at her
+      angrily, but gave her no answer&mdash;and all that day she never spoke. In
+      the evening she was gone, leaving this note on the bed.... Lucy cried as
+      if her heart would break. I took her by the shoulders and put her from the
+      room; I couldn't bear the noise. I sat down and tried to think. While I
+      was sitting there Tor came in with a letter. It was written on the
+      notepaper of an inn twelve miles up the river: these were the words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Eilie is mine. I am ready to meet you where you like.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He went on with a painful evenness of speech. &ldquo;When I read those words, I
+      had only one thought&mdash;to reach them; I ran down to the river, and
+      chose out the lightest boat. Just as I was starting, Tor came running.
+      'You dropped this letter, sir,' he said. 'Two pair of arms are better than
+      one.' He came into the boat. I took the sculls and I pulled out into the
+      stream. I pulled like a madman; and that great man, with his bare arms
+      crossed, was like a huge, tawny bull sitting there opposite me. Presently
+      he took my place, and I took the rudder lines. I could see his chest,
+      covered with hair, heaving up and down, it gave me a sort of comfort&mdash;it
+      meant that we were getting nearer. Then it grew dark, there was no moon, I
+      could barely see the bank; there's something in the dark which drives one
+      into oneself. People tell you there comes a moment when your nature is
+      decided&mdash;'saved' or 'lost' as they call it&mdash;for good or evil.
+      That is not true, your self is always with you, and cannot be altered;
+      but, sir, I believe that in a time of agony one finds out what are the
+      things one can do, and what are those one cannot. You get to know
+      yourself, that's all. And so it was with me. Every thought and memory and
+      passion was so clear and strong! I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kill
+      myself. But her&mdash;no! We are taught that we possess our wives, body
+      and soul, we are brought up in that faith, we are commanded to believe it&mdash;but
+      when I was face to face with it, those words had no meaning; that belief,
+      those commands, they were without meaning to me, they were&mdash;vile. Oh
+      yes, I wanted to find comfort in them, I wanted to hold on to them&mdash;but
+      I couldn't. You may force a body; how can you force a soul? No, no&mdash;cowardly!
+      But I wanted to&mdash;I wanted to kill him and force her to come back to
+      me! And then, suddenly, I felt as if I were pressing right on the most
+      secret nerve of my heart. I seemed to see her face, white and quivering,
+      as if I'd stamped my heel on it. They say this world is ruled by force; it
+      may be true&mdash;I know I have a weak spot in me.... I couldn't bear it.
+      At last I Jumped to my feet and shouted out, 'Turn the boat round!' Tor
+      looked up at me as if I had gone mad. And I had gone mad. I seized the
+      boat-hook and threatened him; I called him fearful names. 'Sir,' he said,
+      'I don't take such names from any one!' 'You'll take them from me,' I
+      shouted; 'turn the boat round, you idiot, you hound, you fish!...' I have
+      a terrible temper, a perfect curse to me. He seemed amazed, even
+      frightened; he sat down again suddenly and pulled the boat round. I fell
+      on the seat, and hid my face. I believe the moon came up; there must have
+      been a mist too, for I was cold as death. In this life, sir, we cannot
+      hide our faces&mdash;but by degrees the pain of wounds grows less. Some
+      will have it that such blows are mortal; it is not so. Time is merciful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the early morning I went back to London. I had fever on me&mdash;and
+      was delirious. I dare say I should have killed myself if I had not been so
+      used to weapons&mdash;they and I were too old friends, I suppose&mdash;I
+      can't explain. It was a long while before I was up and about. Dalton
+      nursed me through it; his great heavy moustache had grown quite white. We
+      never mentioned her; what was the good? There were things to settle of
+      course, the lawyer&mdash;this was unspeakably distasteful to me. I told
+      him it was to be as she wished, but the fellow would come to me, with his&mdash;there,
+      I don't want to be unkind. I wished him to say it was my fault, but he
+      said&mdash;I remember his smile now&mdash;he said, that was impossible,
+      would be seen through, talked of collusion&mdash;I don't understand these
+      things, and what's more, I can't bear them, they are&mdash;dirty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Two years later, when I had come back to London, after the Russo-Turkish
+      war, I received a letter from her. I have it here.&rdquo; He took an old, yellow
+      sheet of paper out of a leathern pocketbook, spread it in his fingers, and
+      sat staring at it. For some minutes he did not speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the autumn of that same year she died in childbirth. He had deserted
+      her. Fortunately for him, he was killed on the Indian frontier, that very
+      year. If she had lived she would have been thirty-two next June; not a
+      great age.... I know I am what they call a crank; doctors will tell you
+      that you can't be cured of a bad illness, and be the same man again. If
+      you are bent, to force yourself straight must leave you weak in another
+      place. I must and will think well of women&mdash;everything done, and
+      everything said against them is a stone on her dead body. Could you sit,
+      and listen to it?&rdquo; As though driven by his own question, he rose, and
+      paced up and down. He came back to the seat at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That, sir, is the reason of my behaviour this afternoon, and again this
+      evening. You have been so kind, I wanted!&mdash;wanted to tell you. She
+      had a little daughter&mdash;Lucy has her now. My friend Dalton is dead;
+      there would have been no difficulty about money, but, I am sorry to say,
+      that he was swindled&mdash;disgracefully. It fell to me to administer his
+      affairs&mdash;he never knew it, but he died penniless; he had trusted some
+      wretched fellows&mdash;had an idea they would make his fortune. As I very
+      soon found, they had ruined him. It was impossible to let Lucy&mdash;such
+      a dear woman&mdash;bear that burden. I have tried to make provision; but,
+      you see,&rdquo; he took hold of my sleeve, &ldquo;I, too, have not been fortunate; in
+      fact, it's difficult to save a great deal out of L 190 a year; but the
+      capital is perfectly safe&mdash;and I get L 47, 10s. a quarter, paid on
+      the nail. I have often been tempted to reinvest at a greater rate of
+      interest, but I've never dared. Anyway, there are no debts&mdash;I've been
+      obliged to make a rule not to buy what I couldn't pay for on the spot....
+      Now I am really plaguing you&mdash;but I wanted to tell you&mdash;in
+      case&mdash;anything should happen to me.&rdquo; He seemed to take a sudden scare,
+      stiffened, twisted his moustache, and muttering, &ldquo;Your great kindness!
+      Shall never forget!&rdquo; turned hurriedly away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He vanished; his footsteps, and the tap of his stick grew fainter and
+      fainter. They died out. He was gone. Suddenly I got up and hastened after
+      him. I soon stopped&mdash;what was there to say?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0053" id="link2H_4_0053">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The following day I was obliged to go to Nice, and did not return till
+      midnight. The porter told me that Jules le Ferrier had been to see me. The
+      next morning, while I was still in bed, the door was opened, and Jules
+      appeared. His face was very pale; and the moment he stood still drops of
+      perspiration began coursing down his cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Georges!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;he is dead. There, there! How stupid you look! My man
+      is packing. I have half an hour before the train; my evidence shall come
+      from Italy. I have done my part, the rest is for you. Why did you have
+      that dinner? The Don Quixote! The idiot! The poor man! Don't move! Have
+      you a cigar? Listen! When you followed him, I followed the other two. My
+      infernal curiosity! Can you conceive a greater folly? How fast they
+      walked, those two! feeling their cheeks, as if he had struck them both,
+      you know; it was funny. They soon saw me, for their eyes were all round
+      about their heads; they had the mark of a glove on their cheeks.&rdquo; The
+      colour began to come back, into Jules's face; he gesticulated with his
+      cigar and became more and more dramatic. &ldquo;They waited for me. 'Tiens!'
+      said one, 'this gentleman was with him. My friend's name is M. Le Baron de&mdash;-.
+      The man who struck him was an odd-looking person; kindly inform me whether
+      it is possible for my friend to meet him?' Eh!&rdquo; commented Jules, &ldquo;he was
+      offensive! Was it for me to give our dignity away? 'Perfectly, monsieur!'
+      I answered. 'In that case,' he said, 'please give me his name and address.... I could not remember his name, and as for the address, I never
+      knew it...! I reflected. 'That,' I said, 'I am unable to do, for special
+      reasons.' 'Aha!' he said, 'reasons that will prevent our fighting him, I
+      suppose? 'On the contrary,' I said. 'I will convey your request to him; I
+      may mention that I have heard he is the best swordsman and pistol-shot in
+      Europe. Good-night!' I wished to give them something to dream of, you
+      understand.... Patience, my dear! Patience! I was, coming to you, but I
+      thought I would let them sleep on it&mdash;there was plenty of time! But
+      yesterday morning I came into the Place, and there he was on the bench,
+      with a big dog. I declare to you he blushed like a young girl. 'Sir,' he
+      said, 'I was hoping to meet you; last evening I made a great disturbance.
+      I took an unpardonable liberty'&mdash;and he put in my hand an envelope.
+      My friend, what do you suppose it contained&mdash;a pair of gloves! Senor
+      Don Punctilioso, hein? He was the devil, this friend of yours; he
+      fascinated me with his gentle eyes and his white moustachettes, his
+      humility, his flames&mdash;poor man...! I told him I had been asked to
+      take him a challenge. 'If anything comes of it,' I said, 'make use of me!'
+      'Is that so?' he said. 'I am most grateful for your kind offer. Let me see&mdash;it
+      is so long since I fought a duel. The sooner it's over the better. Could
+      you arrange to-morrow morning? Weapons? Yes; let them choose.' You see, my
+      friend, there was no hanging back here; nous voila en train.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Jules took out his watch. &ldquo;I have sixteen minutes. It is lucky for you
+      that you were away yesterday, or you would be in my shoes now. I fixed the
+      place, right hand of the road to Roquebrune, just by the railway cutting,
+      and the time&mdash;five-thirty of the morning. It was arranged that I
+      should call for him. Disgusting hour; I have not been up so early since I
+      fought Jacques Tirbaut in '85. At five o'clock I found him ready and
+      drinking tea with rum in it&mdash;singular man! he made me have some too,
+      brrr! He was shaved, and dressed in that old frock-coat. His great dog
+      jumped into the carriage, but he bade her get out, took her paws on his
+      shoulders, and whispered in her ear some Italian words; a charm, hein! and
+      back she went, the tail between the legs. We drove slowly, so as not to
+      shake his arm. He was more gay than I. All the way he talked to me of you:
+      how kind you were! how good you had been to him! 'You do not speak of
+      yourself!' I said. 'Have you no friends, nothing to say? Sometimes an
+      accident will happen!' 'Oh!' he answered, 'there is no danger; but if by
+      any chance&mdash;well, there is a letter in my pocket.' 'And if you should
+      kill him?' I said. 'But I shall not,' he answered slyly: 'do you think I
+      am going to fire at him? No, no; he is too young.' 'But,' I said, 'I&mdash;'I
+      am not going to stand that!' 'Yes,' he replied, 'I owe him a shot; but
+      there is no danger&mdash;not the least danger.' We had arrived; already
+      they were there. Ah bah! You know the preliminaries, the politeness&mdash;this
+      duelling, you know, it is absurd, after all. We placed them at twenty
+      paces. It is not a bad place. There are pine-trees round, and rocks; at
+      that hour it was cool and grey as a church. I handed him the pistol. How
+      can I describe him to you, standing there, smoothing the barrel with his
+      fingers! 'What a beautiful thing a good pistol!' he said. 'Only a fool or
+      a madman throws away his life,' I said. 'Certainly,' he replied,
+      'certainly; but there is no danger,' and he regarded me, raising his
+      moustachette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There they stood then, back to back, with the mouths of their pistols to
+      the sky. 'Un!' I cried, 'deux! tirez!' They turned, I saw the smoke of his
+      shot go straight up like a prayer; his pistol dropped. I ran to him. He
+      looked surprised, put out his hand, and fell into my arms. He was dead.
+      Those fools came running up. 'What is it?' cried one. I made him a bow.
+      'As you see,' I said; 'you have made a pretty shot. My friend fired in the
+      air. Messieurs, you had better breakfast in Italy.' We carried him to the
+      carriage, and covered him with a rug; the others drove for the frontier. I
+      brought him to his room. Here is his letter.&rdquo; Jules stopped; tears were
+      running down his face. &ldquo;He is dead; I have closed his eyes. Look here, you
+      know, we are all of us cads&mdash;it is the rule; but this&mdash;this,
+      perhaps, was the exception.&rdquo; And without another word he rushed away....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Outside the old fellow's lodging a dismounted cocher was standing
+      disconsolate in the sun. &ldquo;How was I to know they were going to fight a
+      duel?&rdquo; he burst out on seeing me. &ldquo;He had white hair&mdash;I call you to
+      witness he had white hair. This is bad for me: they will ravish my
+      licence. Aha! you will see&mdash;this is bad for me!&rdquo; I gave him the slip
+      and found my way upstairs. The old fellow was alone, lying on the bed, his
+      feet covered with a rug as if he might feel cold; his eyes were closed,
+      but in this sleep of death, he still had that air of faint surprise. At
+      full length, watching the bed intently, Freda lay, as she lay nightly when
+      he was really asleep. The shutters were half open; the room still smelt
+      slightly of rum. I stood for a long time looking at the face: the little
+      white fans of moustache brushed upwards even in death, the hollows in his
+      cheeks, the quiet of his figure; he was like some old knight.... The dog
+      broke the spell. She sat up, and resting her paws on the bed, licked his
+      face. I went downstairs&mdash;I couldn't bear to hear her howl. This was
+      his letter to me, written in a pointed handwriting:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;MY DEAR SIR,&mdash;Should you read this, I shall be gone. I am ashamed to
+      trouble you&mdash;a man should surely manage so as not to give trouble;
+      and yet I believe you will not consider me importunate. If, then, you will
+      pick up the pieces of an old fellow, I ask you to have my sword, the
+      letter enclosed in this, and the photograph that stands on the stove
+      buried with me. My will and the acknowledgments of my property are between
+      the leaves of the Byron in my tin chest; they should go to Lucy Tor&mdash;address
+      thereon. Perhaps you will do me the honour to retain for yourself any of
+      my books that may give you pleasure. In the Pilgrim's Progress you will
+      find some excellent recipes for Turkish coffee, Italian and Spanish
+      dishes, and washing wounds. The landlady's daughter speaks Italian, and
+      she would, I know, like to have Freda; the poor dog will miss me. I have
+      read of old Indian warriors taking their horses and dogs with them to the
+      happy hunting-grounds. Freda would come&mdash;noble animals are dogs! She
+      eats once a day&mdash;a good large meal&mdash;and requires much salt. If
+      you have animals of your own, sir, don't forget&mdash;all animals require
+      salt. I have no debts, thank God! The money in my pockets would bury me
+      decently&mdash;not that there is any danger. And I am ashamed to weary you
+      with details&mdash;the least a man can do is not to make a fuss&mdash;and
+      yet he must be found ready.&mdash;Sir, with profound gratitude, your
+      servant,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;ROGER BRUNE.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Everything was as he had said. The photograph on the stove was that of a
+      young girl of nineteen or twenty, dressed in an old-fashioned style, with
+      hair gathered backward in a knot. The eyes gazed at you with a little
+      frown, the lips were tightly closed; the expression of the face was eager,
+      quick, wilful, and, above all, young.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tin trunk was scented with dry fragments of some herb, the history of
+      which in that trunk man knoweth not.... There were a few clothes, but very
+      few, all older than those he usually wore. Besides the Byron and Pilgrim's
+      Progress were Scott's Quentin Durward, Captain Marryat's Midshipman Easy,
+      a pocket Testament, and a long and frightfully stiff book on the art of
+      fortifying towns, much thumbed, and bearing date 1863. By far the most
+      interesting thing I found, however, was a diary, kept down to the
+      preceding Christmas. It was a pathetic document, full of calculations of
+      the price of meals; resolutions to be careful over this or that; doubts
+      whether he must not give up smoking; sentences of fear that Freda had not
+      enough to eat. It appeared that he had tried to live on ninety pounds a
+      year, and send the other hundred pounds home to Lucy for the child; in
+      this struggle he was always failing, having to send less than the
+      amount&mdash;the entries showed that this was a nightmare to him. The last
+      words, written on Christmas Day, were these &ldquo;What is the use of writing
+      this, since it records nothing but failure!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The landlady's daughter and myself were at the funeral. The same afternoon
+      I went into the concert-room, where I had spoken to him first. When I came
+      out Freda was lying at the entrance, looking into the faces of every one
+      that passed, and sniffing idly at their heels. Close by the landlady's
+      daughter hovered, a biscuit in her hand, and a puzzled, sorry look on her
+      face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      September 1900.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0054" id="link2H_4_0054">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      TO
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      MY BROTHER HUBERT GALSWORTHY
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0055" id="link2H_4_0055">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      SALVATION OF A FORSYTE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0056" id="link2H_4_0056">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Swithin Forsyte lay in bed. The corners of his mouth under his white
+      moustache drooped towards his double chin. He panted:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My doctor says I'm in a bad way, James.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His twin-brother placed his hand behind his ear. &ldquo;I can't hear you. They
+      tell me I ought to take a cure. There's always a cure wanted for
+      something. Emily had a cure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin replied: &ldquo;You mumble so. I hear my man, Adolph. I trained him....
+      You ought to have an ear-trumpet. You're getting very shaky, James.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was silence; then James Forsyte, as if galvanised, remarked: &ldquo;I
+      s'pose you've made your will. I s'pose you've left your money to the
+      family; you've nobody else to leave it to. There was Danson died the other
+      day, and left his money to a hospital.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The hairs of Swithin's white moustache bristled. &ldquo;My fool of a doctor told
+      me to make my will,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I hate a fellow who tells you to make your
+      will. My appetite's good; I ate a partridge last night. I'm all the better
+      for eating. He told me to leave off champagne! I eat a good breakfast. I'm
+      not eighty. You're the same age, James. You look very shaky.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      James Forsyte said: &ldquo;You ought to have another opinion. Have Blank; he's
+      the first man now. I had him for Emily; cost me two hundred guineas. He
+      sent her to Homburg; that's the first place now. The Prince was there&mdash;everybody
+      goes there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin Forsyte answered: &ldquo;I don't get any sleep at night, now I can't get
+      out; and I've bought a new carriage&mdash;gave a pot of money for it. D'
+      you ever have bronchitis? They tell me champagne's dangerous; it's my
+      belief I couldn't take a better thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      James Forsyte rose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ought to have another opinion. Emily sent her love; she would have
+      come in, but she had to go to Niagara. Everybody goes there; it's the
+      place now. Rachel goes every morning: she overdoes it&mdash;she'll be laid
+      up one of these days. There's a fancy ball there to-night; the Duke gives
+      the prizes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin Forsyte said angrily: &ldquo;I can't get things properly cooked here; at
+      the club I get spinach decently done.&rdquo; The bed-clothes jerked at the
+      tremor of his legs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      James Forsyte replied: &ldquo;You must have done well with Tintos; you must have
+      made a lot of money by them. Your ground-rents must be falling in, too.
+      You must have any amount you don't know what to do with.&rdquo; He mouthed the
+      words, as if his lips were watering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin Forsyte glared. &ldquo;Money!&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;my doctor's bill's enormous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      James Forsyte stretched out a cold, damp hand &ldquo;Goodbye! You ought to have
+      another opinion. I can't keep the horses waiting: they're a new pair&mdash;stood
+      me in three hundred. You ought to take care of yourself. I shall speak to
+      Blank about you. You ought to have him&mdash;everybody says he's the first
+      man. Good-bye!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin Forsyte continued to stare at the ceiling. He thought: 'A poor
+      thing, James! a selfish beggar! Must be worth a couple of hundred
+      thousand!' He wheezed, meditating on life....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was ill and lonely. For many years he had been lonely, and for two
+      years ill; but as he had smoked his first cigar, so he would live his
+      life-stoutly, to its predestined end. Every day he was driven to the club;
+      sitting forward on the spring cushions of a single brougham, his hands on
+      his knees, swaying a little, strangely solemn. He ascended the steps into
+      that marble hall&mdash;the folds of his chin wedged into the aperture of
+      his collar&mdash;walking squarely with a stick. Later he would dine,
+      eating majestically, and savouring his food, behind a bottle of champagne
+      set in an ice-pail&mdash;his waistcoat defended by a napkin, his eyes
+      rolling a little or glued in a stare on the waiter. Never did he suffer
+      his head or back to droop, for it was not distinguished so to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Because he was old and deaf, he spoke to no one; and no one spoke to him.
+      The club gossip, an Irishman, said to each newcomer: &ldquo;Old Forsyte! Look at
+      'um! Must ha' had something in his life to sour 'um!&rdquo; But Swithin had had
+      nothing in his life to sour him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For many days now he had lain in bed in a room exuding silver, crimson,
+      and electric light, smelling of opopanax and of cigars. The curtains were
+      drawn, the firelight gleamed; on a table by his bed were a jug of
+      barley-water and the Times. He made an attempt to read, failed, and fell
+      again to thinking. His face with its square chin, looked like a block of
+      pale leather bedded in the pillow. It was lonely! A woman in the room
+      would have made all the difference! Why had he never married? He breathed
+      hard, staring froglike at the ceiling; a memory had come into his mind. It
+      was a long time ago&mdash;forty odd years&mdash;but it seemed like
+      yesterday....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It happened when he was thirty-eight, for the first and only time in his
+      life travelling on the Continent, with his twin-brother James and a man
+      named Traquair. On the way from Germany to Venice, he had found himself at
+      the Hotel Goldene Alp at Salzburg. It was late August, and weather for the
+      gods: sunshine on the walls and the shadows of the vine-leaves, and at
+      night, the moonlight, and again on the walls the shadows of the
+      vine-leaves. Averse to the suggestions of other people, Swithin had
+      refused to visit the Citadel; he had spent the day alone in the window of
+      his bedroom, smoking a succession of cigars, and disparaging the
+      appearance of the passers-by. After dinner he was driven by boredom into
+      the streets. His chest puffed out like a pigeon's, and with something of a
+      pigeon's cold and inquiring eye, he strutted, annoyed at the frequency of
+      uniforms, which seemed to him both needless and offensive. His spleen rose
+      at this crowd of foreigners, who spoke an unintelligible language, wore
+      hair on their faces, and smoked bad tobacco. 'A queer lot!' he thought.
+      The sound of music from a cafe attracted him; he walked in, vaguely moved
+      by a wish for the distinction of adventure, without the trouble which
+      adventure usually brought with it; spurred too, perhaps, by an
+      after-dinner demon. The cafe was the bier-halle of the 'Fifties, with a
+      door at either end, and lighted by a large wooden lantern. On a small dais
+      three musicians were fiddling. Solitary men, or groups, sat at some dozen
+      tables, and the waiters hurried about replenishing glasses; the air was
+      thick with smoke. Swithin sat down. &ldquo;Wine!&rdquo; he said sternly. The
+      astonished waiter brought him wine. Swithin pointed to a beer glass on the
+      table. &ldquo;Here!&rdquo; he said, with the same ferocity. The waiter poured out the
+      wine. 'Ah!' thought Swithin, 'they can understand if they like.' A group
+      of officers close by were laughing; Swithin stared at them uneasily. A
+      hollow cough sounded almost in his ear. To his left a man sat reading,
+      with his elbows on the corners of a journal, and his gaunt shoulders
+      raised almost to his eyes. He had a thin, long nose, broadening suddenly
+      at the nostrils; a black-brown beard, spread in a savage fan over his
+      chest; what was visible of the face was the colour of old parchment. A
+      strange, wild, haughty-looking creature! Swithin observed his clothes with
+      some displeasure&mdash;they were the clothes of a journalist or strolling
+      actor. And yet he was impressed. This was singular. How could he be
+      impressed by a fellow in such clothes! The man reached out a hand, covered
+      with black hairs, and took up a tumbler that contained a dark-coloured
+      fluid. 'Brandy!' thought Swithin. The crash of a falling chair startled
+      him&mdash;his neighbour had risen. He was of immense height, and very
+      thin; his great beard seemed to splash away from his mouth; he was glaring
+      at the group of officers, and speaking. Swithin made out two words:
+      &ldquo;Hunde! Deutsche Hunde!&rdquo; 'Hounds! Dutch hounds!' he thought: 'Rather
+      strong!' One of the officers had jumped up, and now drew his sword. The
+      tall man swung his chair up, and brought it down with a thud. Everybody
+      round started up and closed on him. The tall man cried out, &ldquo;To me,
+      Magyars!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin grinned. The tall man fighting such odds excited his unwilling
+      admiration; he had a momentary impulse to go to his assistance. 'Only get
+      a broken nose!' he thought, and looked for a safe corner. But at that
+      moment a thrown lemon struck him on the jaw. He jumped out of his chair
+      and rushed at the officers. The Hungarian, swinging his chair, threw him a
+      look of gratitude&mdash;Swithin glowed with momentary admiration of
+      himself. A sword blade grazed his&mdash;arm; he felt a sudden dislike of
+      the Hungarian. 'This is too much,' he thought, and, catching up a chair,
+      flung it at the wooden lantern. There was a crash&mdash;faces and swords
+      vanished. He struck a match, and by the light of it bolted for the door. A
+      second later he was in the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0057" id="link2H_4_0057">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      A voice said in English, &ldquo;God bless you, brother!&rdquo;
+     </h3>
+    <p>
+      Swithin looked round, and saw the tall Hungarian holding out his hand. He
+      took it, thinking, 'What a fool I've been!' There was something in the
+      Hungarian's gesture which said, &ldquo;You are worthy of me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was annoying, but rather impressive. The man seemed even taller than
+      before; there was a cut on his cheek, the blood from which was trickling
+      down his beard. &ldquo;You English!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I saw you stone Haynau&mdash;I
+      saw you cheer Kossuth. The free blood of your people cries out to us.&rdquo; He
+      looked at Swithin. &ldquo;You are a big man, you have a big soul&mdash;and
+      strong, how you flung them down! Ha!&rdquo; Swithin had an impulse to take to
+      his heels. &ldquo;My name,&rdquo; said the Hungarian, &ldquo;is Boleskey. You are my
+      friend.&rdquo; His English was good.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Bulsh-kai-ee, Burlsh-kai-ee,' thought Swithin; 'what a devil of a name!'
+      &ldquo;Mine,&rdquo; he said sulkily, &ldquo;is Forsyte.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Hungarian repeated it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've had a nasty jab on the cheek,&rdquo; said Swithin; the sight of the
+      matted beard was making him feel sick. The Hungarian put his fingers to
+      his cheek, brought them away wet, stared at them, then with an indifferent
+      air gathered a wisp of his beard and crammed it against the cut.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ugh!&rdquo; said Swithin. &ldquo;Here! Take my handkerchief!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Hungarian bowed. &ldquo;Thank you!&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I couldn't think of it! Thank
+      you a thousand times!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take it!&rdquo; growled Swithin; it seemed to him suddenly of the first
+      importance. He thrust the handkerchief into the Hungarian's hand, and felt
+      a pain in his arm. 'There!' he thought, 'I've strained a muscle.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Hungarian kept muttering, regardless of passers-by, &ldquo;Swine! How you
+      threw them over! Two or three cracked heads, anyway&mdash;the cowardly
+      swine!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here!&rdquo; said Swithin suddenly; &ldquo;which is my way to the Goldene Alp?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Hungarian replied, &ldquo;But you are coming with me, for a glass of wine?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin looked at the ground. 'Not if I know it!' he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said the Hungarian with dignity, &ldquo;you do not wish for my
+      friendship!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      'Touchy beggar!' thought Swithin. &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; he stammered, &ldquo;if you put
+      it in that way&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Hungarian bowed, murmuring, &ldquo;Forgive me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They had not gone a dozen steps before a youth, with a beardless face and
+      hollow cheeks, accosted them. &ldquo;For the love of Christ, gentlemen,&rdquo; he
+      said, &ldquo;help me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you a German?&rdquo; asked Boleskey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the youth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you may rot!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Master, look here!&rdquo; Tearing open his coat, the youth displayed his skin,
+      and a leather belt drawn tight round it. Again Swithin felt that desire to
+      take to his heels. He was filled with horrid forebodings&mdash;a sense of
+      perpending intimacy with things such as no gentleman had dealings with.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Hungarian crossed himself. &ldquo;Brother,&rdquo; he said to the youth, &ldquo;come you
+      in!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin looked at them askance, and followed. By a dim light they groped
+      their way up some stairs into a large room, into which the moon was
+      shining through a window bulging over the street. A lamp burned low; there
+      was a smell of spirits and tobacco, with a faint, peculiar scent, as of
+      rose leaves. In one corner stood a czymbal, in another a great pile of
+      newspapers. On the wall hung some old-fashioned pistols, and a rosary of
+      yellow beads. Everything was tidily arranged, but dusty. Near an open
+      fireplace was a table with the remains of a meal. The ceiling, floor, and
+      walls were all of dark wood. In spite of the strange disharmony, the room
+      had a sort of refinement. The Hungarian took a bottle out of a cupboard
+      and, filling some glasses, handed one to Swithin. Swithin put it gingerly
+      to his nose. 'You never know your luck! Come!' he thought, tilting it
+      slowly into his mouth. It was thick, too sweet, but of a fine flavour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Brothers!&rdquo; said the Hungarian, refilling, &ldquo;your healths!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The youth tossed off his wine. And Swithin this time did the same; he
+      pitied this poor devil of a youth now. &ldquo;Come round to-morrow!&rdquo; he said,
+      &ldquo;I'll give you a shirt or two.&rdquo; When the youth was gone, however, he
+      remembered with relief that he had not given his address.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Better so,' he reflected. 'A humbug, no doubt.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was that you said to him?&rdquo; he asked of the Hungarian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I said,&rdquo; answered Boleskey, &ldquo;'You have eaten and drunk; and now you are
+      my enemy!'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite right!&rdquo; said Swithin, &ldquo;quite right! A beggar is every man's enemy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do not understand,&rdquo; the Hungarian replied politely. &ldquo;While he was a
+      beggar&mdash;I, too, have had to beg&rdquo; (Swithin thought, 'Good God! this is
+      awful!'., &ldquo;but now that he is no longer hungry, what is he but a German?
+      No Austrian dog soils my floors!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His nostrils, as it seemed to Swithin, had distended in an unpleasant
+      fashion; and a wholly unnecessary raucousness invaded his voice. &ldquo;I am an
+      exile&mdash;all of my blood are exiles. Those Godless dogs!&rdquo; Swithin
+      hurriedly assented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he spoke, a face peeped in at the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rozsi!&rdquo; said the Hungarian. A young girl came in. She was rather short,
+      with a deliciously round figure and a thick plait of hair. She smiled, and
+      showed her even teeth; her little, bright, wide-set grey eyes glanced from
+      one man to the other. Her face was round, too, high in the cheekbones, the
+      colour of wild roses, with brows that had a twist-up at the corners. With
+      a gesture of alarm, she put her hand to her cheek, and called, &ldquo;Margit!&rdquo;
+       An older girl appeared, taller, with fine shoulders, large eyes, a pretty
+      mouth, and what Swithin described to himself afterwards as a &ldquo;pudding&rdquo;
+       nose. Both girls, with little cooing sounds, began attending to their
+      father's face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin turned his back to them. His arm pained him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'This is what comes of interfering,' he thought sulkily; 'I might have had
+      my neck broken!' Suddenly a soft palm was placed in his, two eyes,
+      half-fascinated, half-shy, looked at him; then a voice called, &ldquo;Rozsi!&rdquo;
+       the door was slammed, he was alone again with the Hungarian, harassed by a
+      sense of soft disturbance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your daughter's name is Rosy?&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;we have it in England&mdash;from
+      rose, a flower.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rozsi (Rozgi),&rdquo; the Hungarian replied; &ldquo;your English is a hard tongue,
+      harder than French, German, or Czechish, harder than Russian, or Roumanian&mdash;I
+      know no more.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo; said Swithin, &ldquo;six languages?&rdquo; Privately he thought, 'He knows how
+      to lie, anyway.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you lived in a country like mine,&rdquo; muttered the Hungarian, &ldquo;with all
+      men's hands against you! A free people&mdash;dying&mdash;but not dead!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin could not imagine what he was talking of. This man's face, with
+      its linen bandage, gloomy eyes, and great black wisps of beard, his fierce
+      mutterings, and hollow cough, were all most unpleasant. He seemed to be
+      suffering from some kind of mental dog-bite. His emotion indeed appeared
+      so indecent, so uncontrolled and open, that its obvious sincerity produced
+      a sort of awe in Swithin. It was like being forced to look into a furnace.
+      Boleskey stopped roaming up and down. &ldquo;You think it's over?&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I
+      tell you, in the breast of each one of us Magyars there is a hell. What is
+      sweeter than life? What is more sacred than each breath we draw? Ah! my
+      country!&rdquo; These words were uttered so slowly, with such intense
+      mournfulness, that Swithin's jaw relaxed; he converted the movement to a
+      yawn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me,&rdquo; said Boleskey, &ldquo;what would you do if the French conquered you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin smiled. Then suddenly, as though something had hurt him, he
+      grunted, &ldquo;The 'Froggies'. Let 'em try!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Drink!&rdquo; said Boleskey&mdash;&ldquo;there is nothing like it&rdquo;; he filled
+      Swithin's glass. &ldquo;I will tell you my story.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin rose hurriedly. &ldquo;It's late,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;This is good stuff, though;
+      have you much of it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the last bottle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo; said Swithin; &ldquo;and you gave it to a beggar?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My name is Boleskey&mdash;Stefan,&rdquo; the Hungarian said, raising his head;
+      &ldquo;of the Komorn Boleskeys.&rdquo; The simplicity of this phrase&mdash;as who
+      shall say: What need of further description?&mdash;made an impression on
+      Swithin; he stopped to listen. Boleskey's story went on and on. &ldquo;There
+      were many abuses,&rdquo; boomed his deep voice, &ldquo;much wrong done&mdash;much
+      cowardice. I could see clouds gathering&mdash;rolling over our plains. The
+      Austrian wished to strangle the breath of our mouths&mdash;to take from us
+      the shadow of our liberty&mdash;the shadow&mdash;all we had. Two years ago&mdash;the
+      year of '48, when every man and boy answered the great voice&mdash;brother,
+      a dog's life!&mdash;to use a pen when all of your blood are fighting, but
+      it was decreed for me! My son was killed; my brothers taken&mdash;and
+      myself was thrown out like a dog&mdash;I had written out my heart, I had
+      written out all the blood that was in my body!&rdquo; He seemed to tower, a
+      gaunt shadow of a man, with gloomy, flickering eyes staring at the wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin rose, and stammered, &ldquo;Much obliged&mdash;very interesting.&rdquo;
+       Boleskey made no effort to detain him, but continued staring at the wall.
+      &ldquo;Good-night!&rdquo; said Swithin, and stamped heavily downstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0058" id="link2H_4_0058">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When at last Swithin reached the Goldene Alp, he found his brother and
+      friend standing uneasily at the door. Traquair, a prematurely dried-up
+      man, with whiskers and a Scotch accent, remarked, &ldquo;Ye're airly, man!&rdquo;
+       Swithin growled something unintelligible, and swung up to bed. He
+      discovered a slight cut on his arm. He was in a savage temper&mdash;the
+      elements had conspired to show him things he did not want to see; yet now
+      and then a memory of Rozsi, of her soft palm in his, a sense of having
+      been stroked and flattered, came over him. During breakfast next morning
+      his brother and Traquair announced their intention of moving on. James
+      Forsyte, indeed, remarked that it was no place for a &ldquo;collector,&rdquo; since
+      all the &ldquo;old&rdquo; shops were in the hands of Jews or very grasping persons&mdash;he
+      had discovered this at once. Swithin pushed his cup aside. &ldquo;You may do
+      what you like,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I'm staying here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      James Forsyte replied, tumbling over his own words: &ldquo;Why! what do you want
+      to stay here for? There's nothing for you to do here&mdash;there's nothing
+      to see here, unless you go up the Citadel, an' you won't do that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin growled, &ldquo;Who says so?&rdquo; Having gratified his perversity, he felt
+      in a better temper. He had slung his arm in a silk sash, and accounted for
+      it by saying he had slipped. Later he went out and walked on to the
+      bridge. In the brilliant sunshine spires were glistening against the
+      pearly background of the hills; the town had a clean, joyous air. Swithin
+      glanced at the Citadel and thought, 'Looks a strong place! Shouldn't
+      wonder if it were impregnable!' And this for some occult reason gave him
+      pleasure. It occurred to him suddenly to go and look for the Hungarian's
+      house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About noon, after a hunt of two hours, he was gazing about him blankly,
+      pale with heat, but more obstinate than ever, when a voice above him
+      called, &ldquo;Mister!&rdquo; He looked up and saw Rozsi. She was leaning her round
+      chin on her round hand, gazing down at him with her deepset, clever eyes.
+      When Swithin removed his hat, she clapped her hands. Again he had the
+      sense of being admired, caressed. With a careless air, that sat
+      grotesquely on his tall square person, he walked up to the door; both
+      girls stood in the passage. Swithin felt a confused desire to speak in
+      some foreign tongue. &ldquo;Maam'selles,&rdquo; he began, &ldquo;er&mdash;bong jour-er, your
+      father&mdash;pare, comment?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We also speak English,&rdquo; said the elder girl; &ldquo;will you come in, please?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin swallowed a misgiving, and entered. The room had a worn appearance
+      by daylight, as if it had always been the nest of tragic or vivid lives.
+      He sat down, and his eyes said: &ldquo;I am a stranger, but don't try to get the
+      better of me, please&mdash;that is impossible.&rdquo; The girls looked at him in
+      silence. Rozsi wore a rather short skirt of black stuff, a white shirt,
+      and across her shoulders an embroidered yoke; her sister was dressed in
+      dark green, with a coral necklace; both girls had their hair in plaits.
+      After a minute Rozsi touched the sleeve of his hurt arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's nothing!&rdquo; muttered Swithin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Father fought with a chair, but you had no chair,&rdquo; she said in a
+      wondering voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He doubled the fist of his sound arm and struck a blow at space. To his
+      amazement she began to laugh. Nettled at this, he put his hand beneath the
+      heavy table and lifted it. Rozsi clapped her hands. &ldquo;Ah I now I see&mdash;how
+      strong you are!&rdquo; She made him a curtsey and whisked round to the window.
+      He found the quick intelligence of her eyes confusing; sometimes they
+      seemed to look beyond him at something invisible&mdash;this, too, confused
+      him. From Margit he learned that they had been two years in England, where
+      their father had made his living by teaching languages; they had now been
+      a year in Salzburg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We wait,&rdquo; suddenly said Rozsi; and Margit, with a solemn face, repeated,
+      &ldquo;We wait.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin's eyes swelled a little with his desire to see what they were
+      waiting for. How queer they were, with their eyes that gazed beyond him!
+      He looked at their figures. 'She would pay for dressing,' he thought, and
+      he tried to imagine Rozsi in a skirt with proper flounces, a thin waist,
+      and hair drawn back over her ears. She would pay for dressing, with that
+      supple figure, fluffy hair, and little hands! And instantly his own hands,
+      face, and clothes disturbed him. He got up, examined the pistols on the
+      wall, and felt resentment at the faded, dusty room. 'Smells like a
+      pot-house!' he thought. He sat down again close to Rozsi.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you love to dance?&rdquo; she asked; &ldquo;to dance is to live. First you hear
+      the music&mdash;how your feet itch! It is wonderful! You begin slow, quick&mdash;quicker;
+      you fly&mdash;you know nothing&mdash;your feet are in the air. It is
+      wonderful!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A slow flush had mounted into Swithin's face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; continued Rozsi, her eyes fixed on him, &ldquo;when I am dancing&mdash;out
+      there I see the plains&mdash;your feet go one&mdash;two&mdash;three&mdash;quick,
+      quick, quick, quicker&mdash;you fly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stretched herself, a shiver seemed to pass all down her. &ldquo;Margit!
+      dance!&rdquo; and, to Swithin's consternation, the two girls&mdash;their hands
+      on each other's shoulders&mdash;began shuffling their feet and swaying to
+      and fro. Their heads were thrown back, their eyes half-closed; suddenly
+      the step quickened, they swung to one side, then to the other, and began
+      whirling round in front of him. The sudden fragrance of rose leaves
+      enveloped him. Round they flew again. While they were still dancing,
+      Boleskey came into the room. He caught Swithin by both hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Brother, welcome! Ah! your arm is hurt! I do not forget.&rdquo; His yellow face
+      and deep-set eyes expressed a dignified gratitude. &ldquo;Let me introduce to
+      you my friend Baron Kasteliz.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin bowed to a man with a small forehead, who had appeared softly, and
+      stood with his gloved hands touching his waist. Swithin conceived a sudden
+      aversion for this catlike man. About Boleskey there was that which made
+      contempt impossible&mdash;the sense of comradeship begotten in the fight;
+      the man's height; something lofty and savage in his face; and an obscure
+      instinct that it would not pay to show distaste; but this Kasteliz, with
+      his neat jaw, low brow, and velvety, volcanic look, excited his proper
+      English animosity. &ldquo;Your friends are mine,&rdquo; murmured Kasteliz. He spoke
+      with suavity, and hissed his s's. A long, vibrating twang quavered through
+      the room. Swithin turned and saw Rozsi sitting at the czymbal; the notes
+      rang under the little hammers in her hands, incessant, metallic, rising
+      and falling with that strange melody. Kasteliz had fixed his glowing eyes
+      on her; Boleskey, nodding his head, was staring at the floor; Margit, with
+      a pale face, stood like a statue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'What can they see in it?' thought Swithin; 'it's not a tune.' He took up
+      his hat. Rozsi saw him and stopped; her lips had parted with a faintly
+      dismayed expression. His sense of personal injury diminished; he even felt
+      a little sorry for her. She jumped up from her seat and twirled round with
+      a pout. An inspiration seized on Swithin. &ldquo;Come and dine with me,&rdquo; he said
+      to Boleskey, &ldquo;to-morrow&mdash;the Goldene Alp&mdash;bring your friend.&rdquo; He
+      felt the eyes of the whole room on him&mdash;the Hungarian's fine eyes;
+      Margit's wide glance; the narrow, hot gaze of Kasteliz; and lastly&mdash;Rozsi's.
+      A glow of satisfaction ran down his spine. When he emerged into the street
+      he thought gloomily, 'Now I've done it!' And not for some paces did he
+      look round; then, with a forced smile, turned and removed his hat to the
+      faces at the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Notwithstanding this moment of gloom, however, he was in an exalted state
+      all day, and at dinner kept looking at his brother and Traquair
+      enigmatically. 'What do they know of life?' he thought; 'they might be
+      here a year and get no farther.' He made jokes, and pinned the menu to the
+      waiter's coat-tails. &ldquo;I like this place,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I shall spend three
+      weeks here.&rdquo; James, whose lips were on the point of taking in a plum,
+      looked at him uneasily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0059" id="link2H_4_0059">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      On the day of the dinner Swithin suffered a good deal. He reflected
+      gloomily on Boleskey's clothes. He had fixed an early hour&mdash;there
+      would be fewer people to see them. When the time approached he attired
+      himself with a certain neat splendour, and though his arm was still sore,
+      left off the sling....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nearly three hours afterwards he left the Goldene Alp between his guests.
+      It was sunset, and along the riverbank the houses stood out, unsoftened by
+      the dusk; the streets were full of people hurrying home. Swithin had a
+      hazy vision of empty bottles, of the ground before his feet, and the
+      accessibility of all the world. Dim recollections of the good things he
+      had said, of his brother and Traquair seated in the background eating
+      ordinary meals with inquiring, acid visages, caused perpetual smiles to
+      break out on his face, and he steered himself stubbornly, to prove that he
+      was a better man than either of his guests. He knew, vaguely, that he was
+      going somewhere with an object; Rozsi's face kept dancing before him, like
+      a promise. Once or twice he gave Kasteliz a glassy stare. Towards
+      Boleskey, on the other hand, he felt quite warm, and recalled with
+      admiration the way he had set his glass down empty, time after time. 'I
+      like to see him take his liquor,' he thought; 'the fellow's a gentleman,
+      after all.' Boleskey strode on, savagely inattentive to everything; and
+      Kasteliz had become more like a cat than ever. It was nearly dark when
+      they reached a narrow street close to the cathedral. They stopped at a
+      door held open by an old woman. The change from the fresh air to a heated
+      corridor, the noise of the door closed behind him, the old woman's anxious
+      glances, sobered Swithin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tell her,&rdquo; said Boleskey, &ldquo;that I reply for you as for my son.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin was angry. What business had this man to reply for him!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They passed into a large room, crowded with men and women; Swithin noticed
+      that they all looked at him. He stared at them in turn&mdash;they seemed
+      of all classes, some in black coats or silk dresses, others in the clothes
+      of work-people; one man, a cobbler, still wore his leather apron, as if he
+      had rushed there straight from his work. Laying his hand on Swithin's arm,
+      Boleskey evidently began explaining who he was; hands were extended,
+      people beyond reach bowed to him. Swithin acknowledged the greetings with
+      a stiff motion of his head; then seeing other people dropping into seats,
+      he, too, sat down. Some one whispered his name&mdash;Margit and Rozsi were
+      just behind him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Welcome!&rdquo; said Margit; but Swithin was looking at Rozsi. Her face was so
+      alive and quivering! 'What's the excitement all about?' he thought. 'How
+      pretty she looks!' She blushed, drew in her hands with a quick tense
+      movement, and gazed again beyond him into the room. 'What is it?' thought
+      Swithin; he had a longing to lean back and kiss her lips. He tried angrily
+      to see what she was seeing in those faces turned all one way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Boleskey rose to speak. No one moved; not a sound could be heard but the
+      tone of his deep voice. On and on he went, fierce and solemn, and with the
+      rise of his voice, all those faces&mdash;fair or swarthy&mdash;seemed to be
+      glowing with one and the same feeling. Swithin felt the white heat in
+      those faces&mdash;it was not decent! In that whole speech he only
+      understood the one word&mdash;&ldquo;Magyar&rdquo; which came again and again. He
+      almost dozed off at last. The twang of a czymbal woke him. 'What?' he
+      thought, 'more of that infernal music!' Margit, leaning over him,
+      whispered: &ldquo;Listen! Racoczy! It is forbidden!&rdquo; Swithin saw that Rozsi was
+      no longer in her seat; it was she who was striking those forbidden notes.
+      He looked round&mdash;everywhere the same unmoving faces, the same
+      entrancement, and fierce stillness. The music sounded muffled, as if it,
+      too, were bursting its heart in silence. Swithin felt within him a touch
+      of panic. Was this a den of tigers? The way these people listened, the
+      ferocity of their stillness, was frightful...! He gripped his chair and
+      broke into a perspiration; was there no chance to get away? 'When it
+      stops,' he thought, 'there'll be a rush!' But there was only a greater
+      silence. It flashed across him that any hostile person coming in then
+      would be torn to pieces. A woman sobbed. The whole thing was beyond words
+      unpleasant. He rose, and edged his way furtively towards the doorway.
+      There was a cry of &ldquo;Police!&rdquo; The whole crowd came pressing after him.
+      Swithin would soon have been out, but a little behind he caught sight of
+      Rozsi swept off her feet. Her frightened eyes angered him. 'She doesn't
+      deserve it,' he thought sulkily; 'letting all this loose!' and forced his
+      way back to her. She clung to him, and a fever went stealing through his
+      veins; he butted forward at the crowd, holding her tight. When they were
+      outside he let her go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was afraid,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Afraid!&rdquo; muttered Swithin; &ldquo;I should think so.&rdquo; No longer touching her,
+      he felt his grievance revive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you are so strong,&rdquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is no place for you,&rdquo; growled Swithin, &ldquo;I'm going to see you home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; cried Rozsi; &ldquo;but papa and&mdash;Margit!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's their look-out!&rdquo; and he hurried her away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She slid her hand under his arm; the soft curves of her form brushed him
+      gently, each touch only augmented his ill-humour. He burned with a
+      perverse rage, as if all the passions in him were simmering and ready to
+      boil over; it was as if a poison were trying to work its way out of him,
+      through the layers of his stolid flesh. He maintained a dogged silence;
+      Rozsi, too, said nothing, but when they reached the door, she drew her
+      hand away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are angry!&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Angry,&rdquo; muttered Swithin; &ldquo;no! How d'you make that out?&rdquo; He had a
+      torturing desire to kiss her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you are angry,&rdquo; she repeated; &ldquo;I wait here for papa and Margit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin also waited, wedged against the wall. Once or twice, for his sight
+      was sharp, he saw her steal a look at him, a beseeching look, and hardened
+      his heart with a kind of pleasure. After five minutes Boleskey, Margit,
+      and Kasteliz appeared. Seeing Rozsi they broke into exclamations of
+      relief, and Kasteliz, with a glance at Swithin, put his lips to her hand.
+      Rozsi's look said, &ldquo;Wouldn't you like to do that?&rdquo; Swithin turned short on
+      his heel, and walked away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0060" id="link2H_4_0060">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      All night he hardly slept, suffering from fever, for the first time in his
+      life. Once he jumped out of bed, lighted a candle, and going to the glass,
+      scrutinised himself long and anxiously. After this he fell asleep, but had
+      frightful dreams. His first thought when he woke was, 'My liver's out of
+      order!' and, thrusting his head into cold water, he dressed hastily and
+      went out. He soon left the house behind. Dew covered everything;
+      blackbirds whistled in the bushes; the air was fresh and sweet. He had not
+      been up so early since he was a boy. Why was he walking through a damp
+      wood at this hour of the morning? Something intolerable and unfamiliar
+      must have sent him out. No fellow in his senses would do such a thing! He
+      came to a dead stop, and began unsteadily to walk back. Regaining the
+      hotel, he went to bed again, and dreamed that in some wild country he was
+      living in a room full of insects, where a housemaid&mdash;Rozsi&mdash;holding
+      a broom, looked at him with mournful eyes. There seemed an unexplained
+      need for immediate departure; he begged her to forward his things; and
+      shake them out carefully before she put them into the trunk. He understood
+      that the charge for sending would be twenty-two shillings, thought it a
+      great deal, and had the horrors of indecision. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he muttered, &ldquo;pack,
+      and take them myself.&rdquo; The housemaid turned suddenly into a lean creature;
+      and he awoke with a sore feeling in his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His eye fell on his wet boots. The whole thing was scaring, and jumping
+      up, he began to throw his clothes into his trunks. It was twelve o'clock
+      before he went down, and found his brother and Traquair still at the table
+      arranging an itinerary; he surprised them by saying that he too was
+      coming; and without further explanation set to work to eat. James had
+      heard that there were salt-mines in the neighbourhood&mdash;his proposal
+      was to start, and halt an hour or so on the road for their inspection; he
+      said: &ldquo;Everybody'll ask you if you've seen the salt-mines: I shouldn't
+      like to say I hadn't seen the salt-mines. What's the good, they'd say, of
+      your going there if you haven't seen the salt-mines?&rdquo; He wondered, too, if
+      they need fee the second waiter&mdash;an idle chap!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A discussion followed; but Swithin ate on glumly, conscious that his mind
+      was set on larger affairs. Suddenly on the far side of the street Rozsi
+      and her sister passed, with little baskets on their arms. He started up,
+      and at that moment Rozsi looked round&mdash;her face was the incarnation
+      of enticement, the chin tilted, the lower lip thrust a little forward, her
+      round neck curving back over her shoulder. Swithin muttered, &ldquo;Make your
+      own arrangements&mdash;leave me out!&rdquo; and hurried from the room, leaving
+      James beside himself with interest and alarm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he reached the street, however, the girls had disappeared. He hailed
+      a carriage. &ldquo;Drive!&rdquo; he called to the man, with a flourish of his stick,
+      and as soon as the wheels had begun to clatter on the stones he leaned
+      back, looking sharply to right and left. He soon had to give up thought of
+      finding them, but made the coachman turn round and round again. All day he
+      drove about, far into the country, and kept urging the driver to use
+      greater speed. He was in a strange state of hurry and elation. Finally, he
+      dined at a little country inn; and this gave the measure of his
+      disturbance&mdash;the dinner was atrocious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Returning late in the evening he found a note written by Traquair. &ldquo;Are
+      you in your senses, man?&rdquo; it asked; &ldquo;we have no more time to waste idling
+      about here. If you want to rejoin us, come on to Danielli's Hotel,
+      Venice.&rdquo; Swithin chuckled when he read it, and feeling frightfully tired,
+      went to bed and slept like a log.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0061" id="link2H_4_0061">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Three weeks later he was still in Salzburg, no longer at the Goldene Alp,
+      but in rooms over a shop near the Boleskeys'. He had spent a small fortune
+      in the purchase of flowers. Margit would croon over them, but Rozsi, with
+      a sober &ldquo;Many tanks!&rdquo; as if they were her right, would look long at
+      herself in the glass, and pin one into her hair. Swithin ceased to wonder;
+      he ceased to wonder at anything they did. One evening he found Boleskey
+      deep in conversation with a pale, dishevelled-looking person.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our friend Mr. Forsyte&mdash;Count D....,&rdquo; said Boleskey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin experienced a faint, unavoidable emotion; but looking at the
+      Count's trousers, he thought: 'Doesn't look much like one!' And with an
+      ironic bow to the silent girls, he turned, and took his hat. But when he
+      had reached the bottom of the dark stairs he heard footsteps. Rozsi came
+      running down, looked out at the door, and put her hands up to her breast
+      as if disappointed; suddenly with a quick glance round she saw him.
+      Swithin caught her arm. She slipped away, and her face seemed to bubble
+      with defiance or laughter; she ran up three steps, stopped, looked at him
+      across her shoulder, and fled on up the stairs. Swithin went out
+      bewildered and annoyed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'What was she going to say to me?' he kept thinking. During these three
+      weeks he had asked himself all sorts of questions: whether he were being
+      made a fool of; whether she were in love with him; what he was doing
+      there, and sometimes at night, with all his candles burning as if he
+      wanted light, the breeze blowing on him through the window, his cigar,
+      half-smoked, in his hand, he sat, an hour or more, staring at the wall.
+      'Enough of this!' he thought every morning. Twice he packed fully&mdash;once
+      he ordered his travelling carriage, but countermanded it the following
+      day. What definitely he hoped, intended, resolved, he could not have said.
+      He was always thinking of Rozsi, he could not read the riddle in her face&mdash;she
+      held him in a vice, notwithstanding that everything about her threatened
+      the very fetishes of his existence. And Boleskey! Whenever he looked at
+      him he thought, 'If he were only clean?' and mechanically fingered his own
+      well-tied cravatte. To talk with the fellow, too, was like being forced to
+      look at things which had no place in the light of day. Freedom, equality,
+      self-sacrifice!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Why can't he settle down at some business,' he thought, 'instead of all
+      this talk?' Boleskey's sudden diffidences, self-depreciation, fits of
+      despair, irritated him. &ldquo;Morbid beggar!&rdquo; he would mutter; &ldquo;thank God I
+      haven't a thin skin.&rdquo; And proud too! Extraordinary! An impecunious fellow
+      like that! One evening, moreover, Boleskey had returned home drunk.
+      Swithin had hustled him away into his bedroom, helped him to undress, and
+      stayed until he was asleep. 'Too much of a good thing!' he thought,
+      'before his own daughters, too!' It was after this that he ordered his
+      travelling carriage. The other occasion on which he packed was one
+      evening, when not only Boleskey, but Rozsi herself had picked chicken
+      bones with her fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Often in the mornings he would go to the Mirabell Garden to smoke his
+      cigar; there, in stolid contemplation of the statues&mdash;rows of
+      half-heroic men carrying off half-distressful females&mdash;he would spend
+      an hour pleasantly, his hat tilted to keep the sun off his nose. The day
+      after Rozsi had fled from him on the stairs, he came there as usual. It
+      was a morning of blue sky and sunlight glowing on the old prim garden, on
+      its yew-trees, and serio-comic statues, and walls covered with apricots
+      and plums. When Swithin approached his usual seat, who should be sitting
+      there but Rozsi&mdash;&ldquo;Good-morning,&rdquo; he stammered; &ldquo;you knew this was my
+      seat then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rozsi looked at the ground. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin felt bewildered. &ldquo;Do you know,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you treat me very
+      funnily?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To his surprise Rozsi put her little soft hand down and touched his; then,
+      without a word, sprang up and rushed away. It took him a minute to
+      recover. There were people present; he did not like to run, but overtook
+      her on the bridge, and slipped her hand beneath his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You shouldn't have done that,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;you shouldn't have run away from
+      me, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rozsi laughed. Swithin withdrew his arm; a desire to shake her seized him.
+      He walked some way before he said, &ldquo;Will you have the goodness to tell me
+      what you came to that seat for?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rozsi flashed a look at him. &ldquo;To-morrow is the fete,&rdquo; she answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin muttered, &ldquo;Is that all?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you do not take us, we cannot go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose I refuse,&rdquo; he said sullenly, &ldquo;there are plenty of others.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rozsi bent her head, scurrying along. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she murmured, &ldquo;if you do not
+      go&mdash;I do not wish.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin drew her hand back within his arm. How round and soft it was! He
+      tried to see her face. When she was nearly home he said goodbye, not
+      wishing, for some dark reason, to be seen with her. He watched till she
+      had disappeared; then slowly retraced his steps to the Mirabell Garden.
+      When he came to where she had been sitting, he slowly lighted his cigar,
+      and for a long time after it was smoked out remained there in the silent
+      presence of the statues.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0062" id="link2H_4_0062">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A crowd of people wandered round the booths, and Swithin found himself
+      obliged to give the girls his arms. 'Like a little Cockney clerk!' he
+      thought. His indignation passed unnoticed; they talked, they laughed, each
+      sight and sound in all the hurly-burly seemed to go straight into their
+      hearts. He eyed them ironically&mdash;their eager voices, and little coos
+      of sympathy seemed to him vulgar. In the thick of the crowd he slipped his
+      arm out of Margit's, but, just as he thought that he was free, the
+      unwelcome hand slid up again. He tried again, but again Margit reappeared,
+      serene, and full of pleasant humour; and his failure this time appeared to
+      him in a comic light. But when Rozsi leaned across him, the glow of her
+      round cheek, her curving lip, the inscrutable grey gleam of her eyes, sent
+      a thrill of longing through him. He was obliged to stand by while they
+      parleyed with a gipsy, whose matted locks and skinny hands inspired him
+      with a not unwarranted disgust. &ldquo;Folly!&rdquo; he muttered, as Rozsi held out
+      her palm. The old woman mumbled, and shot a malignant look at him. Rozsi
+      drew back her hand, and crossed herself. 'Folly!' Swithin thought again;
+      and seizing the girls' arms, he hurried them away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did the old hag say?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rozsi shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't mean that you believe?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes were full of tears. &ldquo;The gipsies are wise,&rdquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, what did she tell you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This time Rozsi looked hurriedly round, and slipped away into the crowd.
+      After a hunt they found her, and Swithin, who was scared, growled: &ldquo;You
+      shouldn't do such things&mdash;it's not respectable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On higher ground, in the centre of a clear space, a military band was
+      playing. For the privilege of entering this charmed circle Swithin paid
+      three kronen, choosing naturally the best seats. He ordered wine, too,
+      watching Rozsi out of the corner of his eye as he poured it out. The
+      protecting tenderness of yesterday was all lost in this medley. It was
+      every man for himself, after all! The colour had deepened again in her
+      cheeks, she laughed, pouting her lips. Suddenly she put her glass aside.
+      &ldquo;Thank you, very much,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;it is enough!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Margit, whose pretty mouth was all smiles, cried, &ldquo;Lieber Gott! is it not
+      good-life?&rdquo; It was not a question Swithin could undertake to answer. The
+      band began to play a waltz. &ldquo;Now they will dance. Lieber Gott! and are the
+      lights not wonderful?&rdquo; Lamps were flickering beneath the trees like a
+      swarm of fireflies. There was a hum as from a gigantic beehive. Passers-by
+      lifted their faces, then vanished into the crowd; Rozsi stood gazing at
+      them spellbound, as if their very going and coming were a delight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The space was soon full of whirling couples. Rozsi's head began to beat
+      time. &ldquo;O Margit!&rdquo; she whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin's face had assumed a solemn, uneasy expression. A man raising his
+      hat, offered his arm to Margit. She glanced back across her shoulder to
+      reassure Swithin. &ldquo;It is a friend,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin looked at Rozsi&mdash;her eyes were bright, her lips tremulous. He
+      slipped his hand along the table and touched her fingers. Then she flashed
+      a look at him&mdash;appeal, reproach, tenderness, all were expressed in
+      it. Was she expecting him to dance? Did she want to mix with the rift-raff
+      there; wish him to make an exhibition of himself in this hurly-burly? A
+      voice said, &ldquo;Good-evening!&rdquo; Before them stood Kasteliz, in a dark coat
+      tightly buttoned at the waist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are not dancing, Rozsi Kozsanony?&rdquo; (Miss Rozsi). &ldquo;Let me, then, have
+      the pleasure.&rdquo; He held out his arm. Swithin stared in front of him. In the
+      very act of going she gave him a look that said as plain as words: &ldquo;Will
+      you not?&rdquo; But for answer he turned his eyes away, and when he looked again
+      she was gone. He paid the score and made his way into the crowd. But as he
+      went she danced by close to him, all flushed and panting. She hung back as
+      if to stop him, and he caught the glistening of tears. Then he lost sight
+      of her again. To be deserted the first minute he was alone with her, and
+      for that jackanapes with the small head and the volcanic glances! It was
+      too much! And suddenly it occurred to him that she was alone with Kasteliz&mdash;alone
+      at night, and far from home. 'Well,' he thought, 'what do I care?' and
+      shouldered his way on through the crowd. It served him right for mixing
+      with such people here. He left the fair, but the further he went, the more
+      he nursed his rage, the more heinous seemed her offence, the sharper grew
+      his jealousy. &ldquo;A beggarly baron!&rdquo; was his thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A figure came alongside&mdash;it was Boleskey. One look showed Swithin his
+      condition. Drunk again! This was the last straw!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unfortunately Boleskey had recognised him. He seemed violently excited.
+      &ldquo;Where&mdash;where are my daughters?&rdquo; he began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin brushed past, but Boleskey caught his arm. &ldquo;Listen&mdash;brother!&rdquo;
+       he said; &ldquo;news of my country! After to-morrow....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Keep it to yourself!&rdquo; growled Swithin, wrenching his arm free. He went
+      straight to his lodgings, and, lying on the hard sofa of his unlighted
+      sitting-room, gave himself up to bitter thoughts. But in spite of all his
+      anger, Rozsi's supply-moving figure, with its pouting lips, and roguish
+      appealing eyes, still haunted him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0063" id="link2H_4_0063">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Next morning there was not a carriage to be had, and Swithin was compelled
+      to put off his departure till the morrow. The day was grey and misty; he
+      wandered about with the strained, inquiring look of a lost dog in his
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late in the afternoon he went back to his lodgings. In a corner of the
+      sitting-room stood Rozsi. The thrill of triumph, the sense of appeasement,
+      the emotion, that seized on him, crept through to his lips in a faint
+      smile. Rozsi made no sound, her face was hidden by her hands. And this
+      silence of hers weighed on Swithin. She was forcing him to break it. What
+      was behind her hands? His own face was visible! Why didn't she speak? Why
+      was she here? Alone? That was not right surely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Rozsi dropped her hands; her flushed face was quivering&mdash;it
+      seemed as though a word, a sign, even, might bring a burst of tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked over to the window. 'I must give her time!' he thought; then
+      seized by unreasoning terror at this silence, spun round, and caught her
+      by the arms. Rozsi held back from him, swayed forward and buried her face
+      on his breast....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Half an hour later Swithin was pacing up and down his room. The scent of
+      rose leaves had not yet died away. A glove lay on the floor; he picked it
+      up, and for a long time stood weighing it in his hand. All sorts of
+      confused thoughts and feelings haunted him. It was the purest and least
+      selfish moment of his life, this moment after she had yielded. But that
+      pure gratitude at her fiery, simple abnegation did not last; it was
+      followed by a petty sense of triumph, and by uneasiness. He was still
+      weighing the little glove in his hand, when he had another visitor. It was
+      Kasteliz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What can I do for you?&rdquo; Swithin asked ironically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Hungarian seemed suffering from excitement. Why had Swithin left his
+      charges the night before? What excuse had he to make? What sort of conduct
+      did he call this?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin, very like a bull-dog at that moment, answered: What business was
+      it of his?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The business of a gentleman! What right had the Englishman to pursue a
+      young girl?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pursue?&rdquo; said Swithin; &ldquo;you've been spying, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Spying&mdash;I&mdash;Kasteliz&mdash;Maurus Johann&mdash;an insult!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Insult!&rdquo; sneered Swithin; &ldquo;d'you mean to tell me you weren't in the
+      street just now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kasteliz answered with a hiss, &ldquo;If you do not leave the city I will make
+      you, with my sword&mdash;do you understand?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And if you do not leave my room I will throw you out of the window!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For some minutes Kasteliz spoke in pure Hungarian while Swithin waited,
+      with a forced smile and a fixed look in his eye. He did not understand
+      Hungarian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you are still in the city to-morrow evening,&rdquo; said Kasteliz at last in
+      English, &ldquo;I will spit you in the street.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin turned to the window and watched his visitor's retiring back with
+      a queer mixture of amusement, stubbornness, and anxiety. 'Well,' he
+      thought, 'I suppose he'll run me through!' The thought was unpleasant; and
+      it kept recurring, but it only served to harden his determination. His
+      head was busy with plans for seeing Rozsi; his blood on fire with the
+      kisses she had given him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0064" id="link2H_4_0064">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Swithin was long in deciding to go forth next day. He had made up his mind
+      not to go to Rozsi till five o'clock. 'Mustn't make myself too cheap,' he
+      thought. It was a little past that hour when he at last sallied out, and
+      with a beating heart walked towards Boleskey's. He looked up at the
+      window, more than half expecting to see Rozsi there; but she was not, and
+      he noticed with faint surprise that the window was not open; the plants,
+      too, outside, looked singularly arid. He knocked. No one came. He beat a
+      fierce tattoo. At last the door was opened by a man with a reddish beard,
+      and one of those sardonic faces only to be seen on shoemakers of Teutonic
+      origin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you want, making all this noise?&rdquo; he asked in German.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin pointed up the stairs. The man grinned, and shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to go up,&rdquo; said Swithin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cobbler shrugged his shoulders, and Swithin rushed upstairs. The rooms
+      were empty. The furniture remained, but all signs of life were gone. One
+      of his own bouquets, faded, stood in a glass; the ashes of a fire were
+      barely cold; little scraps of paper strewed the hearth; already the room
+      smelt musty. He went into the bedrooms, and with a feeling of stupefaction
+      stood staring at the girls' beds, side by side against the wall. A bit of
+      ribbon caught his eye; he picked it up and put it in his pocket&mdash;it
+      was a piece of evidence that she had once existed. By the mirror some pins
+      were dropped about; a little powder had been spilled. He looked at his own
+      disquiet face and thought, 'I've been cheated!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shoemaker's voice aroused him. &ldquo;Tausend Teufel! Eilen Sie, nur! Zeit
+      is Geld! Kann nich' Langer warten!&rdquo; Slowly he descended.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where have they gone?&rdquo; asked Swithin painfully. &ldquo;A pound for every
+      English word you speak. A pound!&rdquo; and he made an O with his fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The corners of the shoemaker's lips curled. &ldquo;Geld! Mf! Eilen Sie, nur!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But in Swithin a sullen anger had begun to burn. &ldquo;If you don't tell me,&rdquo;
+       he said, &ldquo;it'll be the worse for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sind ein komischer Kerl!&rdquo; remarked the shoemaker. &ldquo;Hier ist meine Frau!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A battered-looking woman came hurrying down the passage, calling out in
+      German, &ldquo;Don't let him go!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With a snarling sound the shoemaker turned his back, and shambled off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman furtively thrust a letter into Swithin's hand, and furtively
+      waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The letter was from Rozsi.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forgive me&rdquo;&mdash;it ran&mdash;&ldquo;that I leave you and do not say goodbye.
+      To-day our father had the call from our dear Father-town so long awaited.
+      In two hours we are ready. I pray to the Virgin to keep you ever safe, and
+      that you do not quite forget me.&mdash;Your unforgetting good friend,
+      ROZSI.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When Swithin read it his first sensation was that of a man sinking in a
+      bog; then his obstinacy stiffened. 'I won't be done,' he thought. Taking
+      out a sovereign he tried to make the woman comprehend that she could earn
+      it, by telling him where they had gone. He got her finally to write the
+      words out in his pocket-book, gave her the sovereign, and hurried to the
+      Goldene Alp, where there was a waiter who spoke English. The translation
+      given him was this:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At three o'clock they start in a carriage on the road to Linz&mdash;they
+      have bad horses&mdash;the Herr also rides a white horse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin at once hailed a carriage and started at full gallop on the road
+      to Linz. Outside the Mirabell Garden he caught sight of Kasteliz and
+      grinned at him. 'I've sold him anyway,' he thought; 'for all their talk,
+      they're no good, these foreigners!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His spirits rose, but soon fell again. What chance had he of catching
+      them? They had three hours' start! Still, the roads were heavy from the
+      rain of the last two nights&mdash;they had luggage and bad horses; his own
+      were good, his driver bribed&mdash;he might overtake them by ten o'clock!
+      But did he want to? What a fool he had been not to bring his luggage; he
+      would then have had a respectable position. What a brute he would look
+      without a change of shirt, or anything to shave with! He saw himself with
+      horror, all bristly, and in soiled linen. People would think him mad.
+      'I've given myself away,' flashed across him, 'what the devil can I say to
+      them?' and he stared sullenly at the driver's back. He read Rozsi's letter
+      again; it had a scent of her. And in the growing darkness, jolted by the
+      swinging of the carriage, he suffered tortures from his prudence, tortures
+      from his passion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It grew colder and dark. He turned the collar of his coat up to his ears.
+      He had visions of Piccadilly. This wild-goose chase appeared suddenly a
+      dangerous, unfathomable business. Lights, fellowship, security! 'Never
+      again!' he brooded; 'why won't they let me alone?' But it was not clear
+      whether by 'they' he meant the conventions, the Boleskeys, his passions,
+      or those haunting memories of Rozsi. If he had only had a bag with him!
+      What was he going to say? What was he going to get by this? He received no
+      answer to these questions. The darkness itself was less obscure than his
+      sensations. From time to time he took out his watch. At each village the
+      driver made inquiries. It was past ten when he stopped the carriage with a
+      jerk. The stars were bright as steel, and by the side of the road a reedy
+      lake showed in the moonlight. Swithin shivered. A man on a horse had
+      halted in the centre of the road. &ldquo;Drive on!&rdquo; called Swithin, with a
+      stolid face. It turned out to be Boleskey, who, on a gaunt white horse,
+      looked like some winged creature. He stood where he could bar the progress
+      of the carriage, holding out a pistol.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Theatrical beggar!' thought Swithin, with a nervous smile. He made no
+      sign of recognition. Slowly Boleskey brought his lean horse up to the
+      carriage. When he saw who was within he showed astonishment and joy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You?&rdquo; he cried, slapping his hand on his attenuated thigh, and leaning
+      over till his beard touched Swithin. &ldquo;You have come? You followed us?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems so,&rdquo; Swithin grunted out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You throw in your lot with us. Is it possible? You&mdash;you are a
+      knight-errant then!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good God!&rdquo; said Swithin. Boleskey, flogging his dejected steed, cantered
+      forward in the moonlight. He came back, bringing an old cloak, which he
+      insisted on wrapping round Swithin's shoulders. He handed him, too, a
+      capacious flask.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How cold you look!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Wonderful! Wonderful! you English!&rdquo; His
+      grateful eyes never left Swithin for a moment. They had come up to the
+      heels of the other carriage now, but Swithin, hunched in the cloak, did
+      not try to see what was in front of him. To the bottom of his soul he
+      resented the Hungarian's gratitude. He remarked at last, with wasted
+      irony:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're in a hurry, it seems!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If we had wings,&rdquo; Boleskey answered, &ldquo;we would use them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wings!&rdquo; muttered Swithin thickly; &ldquo;legs are good enough for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0065" id="link2H_4_0065">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      X
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Arrived at the inn where they were to pass the night, Swithin waited,
+      hoping to get into the house without a &ldquo;scene,&rdquo; but when at last he
+      alighted the girls were in the doorway, and Margit greeted him with an
+      admiring murmur, in which, however, he seemed to detect irony. Rozsi, pale
+      and tremulous, with a half-scared look, gave him her hand, and, quickly
+      withdrawing it, shrank behind her sister. When they had gone up to their
+      room Swithin sought Boleskey. His spirits had risen remarkably. &ldquo;Tell the
+      landlord to get us supper,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;we'll crack a bottle to our luck.&rdquo;
+       He hurried on the landlord's preparations. The window of the room faced a
+      wood, so near that he could almost touch the trees. The scent from the
+      pines blew in on him. He turned away from that scented darkness, and began
+      to draw the corks of winebottles. The sound seemed to conjure up Boleskey.
+      He came in, splashed all over, smelling slightly of stables; soon after,
+      Margit appeared, fresh and serene, but Rozsi did not come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is your sister?&rdquo; Swithin said. Rozsi, it seemed, was tired. &ldquo;It
+      will do her good to eat,&rdquo; said Swithin. And Boleskey, murmuring, &ldquo;She must
+      drink to our country,&rdquo; went out to summon her, Margit followed him, while
+      Swithin cut up a chicken. They came back without her. She had &ldquo;a megrim of
+      the spirit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin's face fell. &ldquo;Look here!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I'll go and try. Don't wait
+      for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; answered Boleskey, sinking mournfully into a chair; &ldquo;try, brother,
+      try&mdash;by all means, try.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin walked down the corridor with an odd, sweet, sinking sensation in
+      his chest; and tapped on Rozsi's door. In a minute, she peeped forth, with
+      her hair loose, and wondering eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rozsi,&rdquo; he stammered, &ldquo;what makes you afraid of me, now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stared at him, but did not answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why won't you come?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Still she did not speak, but suddenly stretched out to him her bare arm.
+      Swithin pressed his face to it. With a shiver, she whispered above him, &ldquo;I
+      will come,&rdquo; and gently shut the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin stealthily retraced his steps, and paused a minute outside the
+      sitting-room to regain his self-control.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sight of Boleskey with a bottle in his hand steadied him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is coming,&rdquo; he said. And very soon she did come, her thick hair
+      roughly twisted in a plait.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin sat between the girls; but did not talk, for he was really hungry.
+      Boleskey too was silent, plunged in gloom; Rozsi was dumb; Margit alone
+      chattered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will come to our Father-town? We shall have things to show you.
+      Rozsi, what things we will show him!&rdquo; Rozsi, with a little appealing
+      movement of her hands, repeated, &ldquo;What things we will show you!&rdquo; She
+      seemed suddenly to find her voice, and with glowing cheeks, mouths full,
+      and eyes bright as squirrels', they chattered reminiscences of the &ldquo;dear
+      Father-town,&rdquo; of &ldquo;dear friends,&rdquo; of the &ldquo;dear home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      'A poor place!' Swithin could not help thinking. This enthusiasm seemed to
+      him common; but he was careful to assume a look of interest, feeding on
+      the glances flashed at him from Rozsi's restless eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the wine waned Boleskey grew more and more gloomy, but now and then a
+      sort of gleaming flicker passed over his face. He rose to his feet at
+      last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us not forget,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that we go perhaps to ruin, to death; in
+      the face of all this we go, because our country needs&mdash;in this there
+      is no credit, neither to me nor to you, my daughters; but for this noble
+      Englishman, what shall we say? Give thanks to God for a great heart. He
+      comes&mdash;not for country, not for fame, not for money, but to help the
+      weak and the oppressed. Let us drink, then, to him; let us drink again and
+      again to heroic Forsyte!&rdquo; In the midst of the dead silence, Swithin caught
+      the look of suppliant mockery in Rozsi's eyes. He glanced at the
+      Hungarian. Was he laughing at him? But Boleskey, after drinking up his
+      wine, had sunk again into his seat; and there suddenly, to the surprise of
+      all, he began to snore. Margit rose and, bending over him like a mother,
+      murmured: &ldquo;He is tired&mdash;it is the ride!&rdquo; She raised him in her strong
+      arms, and leaning on her shoulder Boleskey staggered from the room.
+      Swithin and Rozsi were left alone. He slid his hand towards her hand that
+      lay so close, on the rough table-cloth. It seemed to await his touch.
+      Something gave way in him, and words came welling up; for the moment he
+      forgot himself, forgot everything but that he was near her. Her head
+      dropped on his shoulder, he breathed the perfume of her hair.
+      &ldquo;Good-night!&rdquo; she whispered, and the whisper was like a kiss; yet before
+      he could stop her she was gone. Her footsteps died away in the passage,
+      but Swithin sat gazing intently at a single bright drop of spilt wine
+      quivering on the table's edge. In that moment she, in her helplessness and
+      emotion, was all in all to him&mdash;his life nothing; all the real things&mdash;his
+      conventions, convictions, training, and himself&mdash;all seemed remote,
+      behind a mist of passion and strange chivalry. Carefully with a bit of
+      bread he soaked up the bright drop; and suddenly he thought: 'This is
+      tremendous!' For a long time he stood there in the window, close to the
+      dark pine-trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0066" id="link2H_4_0066">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In the early morning he awoke, full of the discomfort of this strange
+      place and the medley of his dreams. Lying, with his nose peeping over the
+      quilt, he was visited by a horrible suspicion. When he could bear it no
+      longer, he started up in bed. What if it were all a plot to get him to
+      marry her? The thought was treacherous, and inspired in him a faint
+      disgust. Still, she might be ignorant of it! But was she so innocent? What
+      innocent girl would have come to his room like that? What innocent girl?
+      Her father, who pretended to be caring only for his country? It was not
+      probable that any man was such a fool; it was all part of the game&mdash;a
+      scheming rascal! Kasteliz, too&mdash;his threats! They intended him to
+      marry her! And the horrid idea was strengthened by his reverence for
+      marriage. It was the proper, the respectable condition; he was genuinely
+      afraid of this other sort of liaison&mdash;it was somehow too primitive!
+      And yet the thought of that marriage made his blood run cold. Considering
+      that she had already yielded, it would be all the more monstrous! With the
+      cold, fatal clearness of the morning light he now for the first time saw
+      his position in its full bearings. And, like a fish pulled out of water,
+      he gasped at what was disclosed. Sullen resentment against this attempt to
+      force him settled deep into his soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He seated himself on the bed, holding his head in his hands, solemnly
+      thinking out what such marriage meant. In the first place it meant
+      ridicule, in the next place ridicule, in the last place ridicule. She
+      would eat chicken bones with her fingers&mdash;those fingers his lips
+      still burned to kiss. She would dance wildly with other men. She would
+      talk of her &ldquo;dear Father-town,&rdquo; and all the time her eyes would look
+      beyond him, some where or other into some d&mdash;d place he knew nothing
+      of. He sprang up and paced the room, and for a moment thought he would go
+      mad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They meant him to marry her! Even she&mdash;she meant him to marry her!
+      Her tantalising inscrutability; her sudden little tendernesses; her quick
+      laughter; her swift, burning kisses; even the movements of her hands; her
+      tears&mdash;all were evidence against her. Not one of these things that
+      Nature made her do counted on her side, but how they fanned his longing,
+      his desire, and distress! He went to the glass and tried to part his hair
+      with his fingers, but being rather fine, it fell into lank streaks. There
+      was no comfort to be got from it. He drew his muddy boots on. Suddenly he
+      thought: 'If I could see her alone, I could arrive at some arrangement!'
+      Then, with a sense of stupefaction, he made the discovery that no
+      arrangement could possibly be made that would not be dangerous, even
+      desperate. He seized his hat, and, like a rabbit that has been fired at,
+      bolted from the room. He plodded along amongst the damp woods with his
+      head down, and resentment and dismay in his heart. But, as the sun rose,
+      and the air grew sweet with pine scent, he slowly regained a sort of
+      equability. After all, she had already yielded; it was not as if...! And
+      the tramp of his own footsteps lulled him into feeling that it would all
+      come right.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Look at the thing practically,' he thought. The faster he walked the
+      firmer became his conviction that he could still see it through. He took
+      out his watch&mdash;it was past seven&mdash;he began to hasten back. In
+      the yard of the inn his driver was harnessing the horses; Swithin went up
+      to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who told you to put them in?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The driver answered, &ldquo;Der Herr.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin turned away. 'In ten minutes,' he thought, 'I shall be in that
+      carriage again, with this going on in my head! Driving away from England,
+      from all I'm used to&mdash;driving to&mdash;what?' Could he face it? Could he face all
+      that he had been through that morning; face it day after day, night after
+      night? Looking up, he saw Rozsi at her open window gazing down at him;
+      never had she looked sweeter, more roguish. An inexplicable terror seized
+      on him; he ran across the yard and jumped into his carriage. &ldquo;To
+      Salzburg!&rdquo; he cried; &ldquo;drive on!&rdquo; And rattling out of the yard without a
+      look behind, he flung a sovereign at the hostler. Flying back along the
+      road faster even than he had come, with pale face, and eyes blank and
+      staring like a pug-dog's, Swithin spoke no single word; nor, till he had
+      reached the door of his lodgings, did he suffer the driver to draw rein.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0067" id="link2H_4_0067">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Towards evening, five days later, Swithin, yellow and travel-worn, was
+      ferried in a gondola to Danielli's Hotel. His brother, who was on the
+      steps, looked at him with an apprehensive curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, it's you!&rdquo; he mumbled. &ldquo;So you've got here safe?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Safe?&rdquo; growled Swithin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      James replied, &ldquo;I thought you wouldn't leave your friends!&rdquo; Then, with a
+      jerk of suspicion, &ldquo;You haven't brought your friends?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What friends?&rdquo; growled Swithin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      James changed the subject. &ldquo;You don't look the thing,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really!&rdquo; muttered Swithin; &ldquo;what's that to you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He appeared at dinner that night, but fell asleep over his coffee. Neither
+      Traquair nor James asked him any further question, nor did they allude to
+      Salzburg; and during the four days which concluded the stay in Venice
+      Swithin went about with his head up, but his eyes half-closed like a dazed
+      man. Only after they had taken ship at Genoa did he show signs of any
+      healthy interest in life, when, finding that a man on board was
+      perpetually strumming, he locked the piano up and pitched the key into the
+      sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That winter in London he behaved much as usual, but fits of moroseness
+      would seize on him, during which he was not pleasant to approach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One evening when he was walking with a friend in Piccadilly, a girl coming
+      from a side-street accosted him in German. Swithin, after staring at her
+      in silence for some seconds, handed her a five-pound note, to the great
+      amazement of his friend; nor could he himself have explained the meaning
+      of this freak of generosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of Rozsi he never heard again....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This, then, was the substance of what he remembered as he lay ill in bed.
+      Stretching out his hand he pressed the bell. His valet appeared, crossing
+      the room like a cat; a Swede, who had been with Swithin many years; a
+      little man with a dried face and fierce moustache, morbidly sharp nerves,
+      and a queer devotion to his master.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin made a feeble gesture. &ldquo;Adolf,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I'm very bad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why do you stand there like a cow?&rdquo; asked Swithin; &ldquo;can't you see I'm
+      very bad?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir!&rdquo; The valet's face twitched as though it masked the dance of
+      obscure emotions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall feel better after dinner. What time is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Five o'clock.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought it was more. The afternoons are very long.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir!&rdquo; Swithin sighed, as though he had expected the consolation of
+      denial.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very likely I shall have a nap. Bring up hot water at half-past six and
+      shave me before dinner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The valet moved towards the door. Swithin raised himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did Mr. James say to you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He said you ought to have another doctor; two doctors, he said, better
+      than one. He said, also, he would look in again on his way 'home.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin grunted, &ldquo;Umph! What else did he say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He said you didn't take care of yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin glared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has anybody else been to see me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The valet turned away his eyes. &ldquo;Mrs. Thomas Forsyte came last Monday
+      fortnight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How long have I been ill?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Five weeks on Saturday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think I'm very bad?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Adolf's face was covered suddenly with crow's-feet. &ldquo;You have no business
+      to ask me question like that! I am not paid, sir, to answer question like
+      that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin said faintly: &ldquo;You're a peppery fool! Open a bottle of champagne!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Adolf took a bottle of champagne&mdash;from a cupboard and held nippers to
+      it. He fixed his eyes on Swithin. &ldquo;The doctor said&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Open the bottle!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Open the bottle&mdash;or I give you warning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Adolf removed the cork. He wiped a glass elaborately, filled it, and bore
+      it scrupulously to the bedside. Suddenly twirling his moustaches, he wrung
+      his hands, and burst out: &ldquo;It is poison.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swithin grinned faintly. &ldquo;You foreign fool!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Get out!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The valet vanished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'He forgot himself!' thought Swithin. Slowly he raised the glass, slowly
+      put it back, and sank gasping on his pillows. Almost at once he fell
+      asleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He dreamed that he was at his club, sitting after dinner in the crowded
+      smoking-room, with its bright walls and trefoils of light. It was there
+      that he sat every evening, patient, solemn, lonely, and sometimes fell
+      asleep, his square, pale old face nodding to one side. He dreamed that he
+      was gazing at the picture over the fireplace, of an old statesman with a
+      high collar, supremely finished face, and sceptical eyebrows&mdash;the
+      picture, smooth, and reticent as sealing-wax, of one who seemed for ever
+      exhaling the narrow wisdom of final judgments. All round him, his fellow
+      members were chattering. Only he himself, the old sick member, was silent.
+      If fellows only knew what it was like to sit by yourself and feel ill all
+      the time! What they were saying he had heard a hundred times. They were
+      talking of investments, of cigars, horses, actresses, machinery. What was
+      that? A foreign patent for cleaning boilers? There was no such thing;
+      boilers couldn't be cleaned, any fool knew that! If an Englishman couldn't
+      clean a boiler, no foreigner could clean one. He appealed to the old
+      statesman's eyes. But for once those eyes seemed hesitating, blurred,
+      wanting in finality. They vanished. In their place were Rozsi's little
+      deep-set eyes, with their wide and far-off look; and as he gazed they
+      seemed to grow bright as steel, and to speak to him. Slowly the whole face
+      grew to be there, floating on the dark background of the picture; it was
+      pink, aloof, unfathomable, enticing, with its fluffy hair and quick lips,
+      just as he had last seen it. &ldquo;Are you looking for something?&rdquo; she seemed
+      to say: &ldquo;I could show you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have everything safe enough,&rdquo; answered Swithin, and in his sleep he
+      groaned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt the touch of fingers on his forehead. 'I'm dreaming,' he thought
+      in his dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had vanished; and far away, from behind the picture, came a sound of
+      footsteps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Aloud, in his sleep, Swithin muttered: &ldquo;I've missed it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again he heard the rustling of those light footsteps, and close in his ear
+      a sound, like a sob. He awoke; the sob was his own. Great drops of
+      perspiration stood on his forehead. 'What is it?' he thought; 'what have I
+      lost?' Slowly his mind travelled over his investments; he could not think
+      of any single one that was unsafe. What was it, then, that he had lost?
+      Struggling on his pillows, he clutched the wine-glass. His lips touched
+      the wine. 'This isn't the &ldquo;Heidseck&rdquo;!' he thought angrily, and before the
+      reality of that displeasure all the dim vision passed away. But as he bent
+      to drink, something snapped, and, with a sigh, Swithin Forsyte died above
+      the bubbles....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When James Forsyte came in again on his way home, the valet, trembling
+      took his hat and stick.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How's your master?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My master is dead, sir!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dead! He can't be! I left him safe an hour ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On the bed Swithin's body was doubled like a sack; his hand still grasped
+      the glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      James Forsyte paused. &ldquo;Swithin!&rdquo; he said, and with his hand to his ear he
+      waited for an answer; but none came, and slowly in the glass a last bubble
+      rose and burst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      December 1900.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0068" id="link2H_4_0068">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      To
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      MY SISTER MABEL EDITH REYNOLDS
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0069" id="link2H_4_0069">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE SILENCE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0070" id="link2H_4_0070">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In a car of the Naples express a mining expert was diving into a bag for
+      papers. The strong sunlight showed the fine wrinkles on his brown face and
+      the shabbiness of his short, rough beard. A newspaper cutting slipped from
+      his fingers; he picked it up, thinking: 'How the dickens did that get in
+      here?' It was from a colonial print of three years back; and he sat
+      staring, as if in that forlorn slip of yellow paper he had encountered
+      some ghost from his past.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These were the words he read: &ldquo;We hope that the setback to civilisation,
+      the check to commerce and development, in this promising centre of our
+      colony may be but temporary; and that capital may again come to the
+      rescue. Where one man was successful, others should surely not fail? We
+      are convinced that it only needs....&rdquo; And the last words: &ldquo;For what can be
+      sadder than to see the forest spreading its lengthening shadows, like
+      symbols of defeat, over the untenanted dwellings of men; and where was
+      once the merry chatter of human voices, to pass by in the silence....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On an afternoon, thirteen years before, he had been in the city of London,
+      at one of those emporiums where mining experts perch, before fresh
+      flights, like sea-gulls on some favourite rock. A clerk said to him: &ldquo;Mr.
+      Scorrier, they are asking for you downstairs&mdash;Mr. Hemmings of the New
+      Colliery Company.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scorrier took up the speaking tube. &ldquo;Is that you, Mr. Scorrier? I hope you
+      are very well, sir, I am&mdash;Hemmings&mdash;I am&mdash;coming up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In two minutes he appeared, Christopher Hemmings, secretary of the New
+      Colliery Company, known in the City&mdash;behind his back&mdash;as
+      &ldquo;Down-by-the-starn&rdquo; Hemmings. He grasped Scorrier's hand&mdash;the gesture
+      was deferential, yet distinguished. Too handsome, too capable, too
+      important, his figure, the cut of his iron-grey beard, and his intrusively
+      fine eyes, conveyed a continual courteous invitation to inspect their
+      infallibilities. He stood, like a City &ldquo;Atlas,&rdquo; with his legs apart, his
+      coat-tails gathered in his hands, a whole globe of financial matters
+      deftly balanced on his nose. &ldquo;Look at me!&rdquo; he seemed to say. &ldquo;It's heavy,
+      but how easily I carry it. Not the man to let it down, Sir!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope I see you well, Mr. Scorrier,&rdquo; he began. &ldquo;I have come round about
+      our mine. There is a question of a fresh field being opened up&mdash;between
+      ourselves, not before it's wanted. I find it difficult to get my Board to
+      take a comprehensive view. In short, the question is: Are you prepared to
+      go out for us, and report on it? The fees will be all right.&rdquo; His left eye
+      closed. &ldquo;Things have been very&mdash;er&mdash;dicky; we are going to
+      change our superintendent. I have got little Pippin&mdash;you know little
+      Pippin?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scorrier murmured, with a feeling of vague resentment: &ldquo;Oh yes. He's not a
+      mining man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hemmings replied: &ldquo;We think that he will do.&rdquo; 'Do you?' thought Scorrier;
+      'that's good of you!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had not altogether shaken off a worship he had felt for Pippin&mdash;&ldquo;King&rdquo;
+       Pippin he was always called, when they had been boys at the Camborne
+      Grammar-school. &ldquo;King&rdquo; Pippin! the boy with the bright colour, very bright
+      hair, bright, subtle, elusive eyes, broad shoulders, little stoop in the
+      neck, and a way of moving it quickly like a bird; the boy who was always
+      at the top of everything, and held his head as if looking for something
+      further to be the top of. He remembered how one day &ldquo;King&rdquo; Pippin had said
+      to him in his soft way, &ldquo;Young Scorrie, I'll do your sums for you&rdquo;; and in
+      answer to his dubious, &ldquo;Is that all right?&rdquo; had replied, &ldquo;Of course&mdash;I
+      don't want you to get behind that beast Blake, he's not a Cornishman&rdquo; (the
+      beast Blake was an Irishman not yet twelve). He remembered, too, an
+      occasion when &ldquo;King&rdquo; Pippin with two other boys fought six louts and got a
+      licking, and how Pippin sat for half an hour afterwards, all bloody, his
+      head in his hands, rocking to and fro, and weeping tears of mortification;
+      and how the next day he had sneaked off by himself, and, attacking the
+      same gang, got frightfully mauled a second time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thinking of these things he answered curtly: &ldquo;When shall I start?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Down-by-the-starn&rdquo; Hemmings replied with a sort of fearful sprightliness:
+      &ldquo;There's a good fellow! I will send instructions; so glad to see you
+      well.&rdquo; Conferring on Scorrier a look&mdash;fine to the verge of vulgarity&mdash;he
+      withdrew. Scorrier remained, seated; heavy with insignificance and vague
+      oppression, as if he had drunk a tumbler of sweet port.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A week later, in company with Pippin, he was on board a liner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The &ldquo;King&rdquo; Pippin of his school-days was now a man of forty-four. He
+      awakened in Scorrier the uncertain wonder with which men look backward at
+      their uncomplicated teens; and staggering up and down the decks in the
+      long Atlantic roll, he would steal glances at his companion, as if he
+      expected to find out from them something about himself. Pippin had still
+      &ldquo;King&rdquo; Pippin's bright, fine hair, and dazzling streaks in his short
+      beard; he had still a bright colour and suave voice, and what there were
+      of wrinkles suggested only subtleties of humour and ironic sympathy. From
+      the first, and apparently without negotiation, he had his seat at the
+      captain's table, to which on the second day Scorrier too found himself
+      translated, and had to sit, as he expressed it ruefully, &ldquo;among the
+      big-wigs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      During the voyage only one incident impressed itself on Scorrier's memory,
+      and that for a disconcerting reason. In the forecastle were the usual
+      complement of emigrants. One evening, leaning across the rail to watch
+      them, he felt a touch on his arm; and, looking round, saw Pippin's face
+      and beard quivering in the lamplight. &ldquo;Poor people!&rdquo; he said. The idea
+      flashed on Scorrier that he was like some fine wire sound-recording
+      instrument.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Suppose he were to snap!' he thought. Impelled to justify this fancy, he
+      blurted out: &ldquo;You're a nervous chap. The way you look at those poor
+      devils!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pippin hustled him along the deck. &ldquo;Come, come, you took me off my guard,&rdquo;
+       he murmured, with a sly, gentle smile, &ldquo;that's not fair.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He found it a continual source of wonder that Pippin, at his age, should
+      cut himself adrift from the associations and security of London life to
+      begin a new career in a new country with dubious prospect of success. 'I
+      always heard he was doing well all round,' he thought; 'thinks he'll
+      better himself, perhaps. He's a true Cornishman.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The morning of arrival at the mines was grey and cheerless; a cloud of
+      smoke, beaten down by drizzle, clung above the forest; the wooden houses
+      straggled dismally in the unkempt semblance of a street, against a
+      background of endless, silent woods. An air of blank discouragement
+      brooded over everything; cranes jutted idly over empty trucks; the long
+      jetty oozed black slime; miners with listless faces stood in the rain;
+      dogs fought under their very legs. On the way to the hotel they met no one
+      busy or serene except a Chinee who was polishing a dish-cover.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The late superintendent, a cowed man, regaled them at lunch with his
+      forebodings; his attitude toward the situation was like the food, which
+      was greasy and uninspiring. Alone together once more, the two newcomers
+      eyed each other sadly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh dear!&rdquo; sighed Pippin. &ldquo;We must change all this, Scorrier; it will
+      never do to go back beaten. I shall not go back beaten; you will have to
+      carry me on my shield;&rdquo; and slyly: &ldquo;Too heavy, eh? Poor fellow!&rdquo; Then for
+      a long time he was silent, moving his lips as if adding up the cost.
+      Suddenly he sighed, and grasping Scorrier's arm, said: &ldquo;Dull, aren't I?
+      What will you do? Put me in your report, 'New Superintendent&mdash;sad,
+      dull dog&mdash;not a word to throw at a cat!'&rdquo; And as if the new task were
+      too much for him, he sank back in thought. The last words he said to
+      Scorrier that night were: &ldquo;Very silent here. It's hard to believe one's
+      here for life. But I feel I am. Mustn't be a coward, though!&rdquo; and brushing
+      his forehead, as though to clear from it a cobweb of faint thoughts, he
+      hurried off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scorrier stayed on the veranda smoking. The rain had ceased, a few stars
+      were burning dimly; even above the squalor of the township the scent of
+      the forests, the interminable forests, brooded. There sprang into his mind
+      the memory of a picture from one of his children's fairy books&mdash;the
+      picture of a little bearded man on tiptoe, with poised head and a great
+      sword, slashing at the castle of a giant. It reminded him of Pippin. And
+      suddenly, even to Scorrier&mdash;whose existence was one long encounter
+      with strange places&mdash;the unseen presence of those woods, their heavy,
+      healthy scent, the little sounds, like squeaks from tiny toys, issuing out
+      of the gloomy silence, seemed intolerable, to be shunned, from the mere
+      instinct of self-preservation. He thought of the evening he had spent in
+      the bosom of &ldquo;Down-by-the-starn&rdquo; Hemmings' family, receiving his last
+      instructions&mdash;the security of that suburban villa, its discouraging
+      gentility; the superior acidity of the Miss Hemmings; the noble names of
+      large contractors, of company promoters, of a peer, dragged with the
+      lightness of gun-carriages across the conversation; the autocracy of
+      Hemmings, rasped up here and there, by some domestic contradiction. It was
+      all so nice and safe&mdash;as if the whole thing had been fastened to an
+      anchor sunk beneath the pink cabbages of the drawing-room carpet!
+      Hemmings, seeing him off the premises, had said with secrecy: &ldquo;Little
+      Pippin will have a good thing. We shall make his salary L&mdash;&mdash;.
+      He'll be a great man&mdash;quite a king. Ha-ha!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scorrier shook the ashes from his pipe. 'Salary!' he thought, straining
+      his ears; 'I wouldn't take the place for five thousand pounds a year. And
+      yet it's a fine country,' and with ironic violence he repeated, 'a dashed
+      fine country!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ten days later, having finished his report on the new mine, he stood on
+      the jetty waiting to go abroad the steamer for home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God bless you!&rdquo; said Pippin. &ldquo;Tell them they needn't be afraid; and
+      sometimes when you're at home think of me, eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scorrier, scrambling on board, had a confused memory of tears in his eyes,
+      and a convulsive handshake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0071" id="link2H_4_0071">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was eight years before the wheels of life carried Scorrier back to that
+      disenchanted spot, and this time not on the business of the New Colliery
+      Company. He went for another company with a mine some thirty miles away.
+      Before starting, however, he visited Hemmings. The secretary was
+      surrounded by pigeon-holes and finer than ever; Scorrier blinked in the
+      full radiance of his courtesy. A little man with eyebrows full of
+      questions, and a grizzled beard, was seated in an arm-chair by the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know Mr. Booker,&rdquo; said Hemmings&mdash;&ldquo;one of my directors. This is
+      Mr. Scorrier, sir&mdash;who went out for us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      These sentences were murmured in a way suggestive of their uncommon value.
+      The director uncrossed his legs, and bowed. Scorrier also bowed, and
+      Hemmings, leaning back, slowly developed the full resources of his
+      waistcoat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So you are going out again, Scorrier, for the other side? I tell Mr.
+      Scorrier, sir, that he is going out for the enemy. Don't find them a mine
+      as good as you found us, there's a good man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The little director asked explosively: &ldquo;See our last dividend? Twenty per
+      cent; eh, what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hemmings moved a finger, as if reproving his director. &ldquo;I will not
+      disguise from you,&rdquo; he murmured, &ldquo;that there is friction between us and&mdash;the
+      enemy; you know our position too well&mdash;just a little too well, eh? 'A
+      nod's as good as a wink.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His diplomatic eyes flattered Scorrier, who passed a hand over his brow&mdash;and
+      said: &ldquo;Of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pippin doesn't hit it off with them. Between ourselves, he's a leetle too
+      big for his boots. You know what it is when a man in his position gets a
+      sudden rise!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scorrier caught himself searching on the floor for a sight of Hemmings'
+      boots; he raised his eyes guiltily. The secretary continued: &ldquo;We don't
+      hear from him quite as often as we should like, in fact.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To his own surprise Scorrier murmured: &ldquo;It's a silent place!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The secretary smiled. &ldquo;Very good! Mr. Scorrier says, sir, it's a silent
+      place; ha-ha! I call that very good!&rdquo; But suddenly a secret irritation
+      seemed to bubble in him; he burst forth almost violently: &ldquo;He's no
+      business to let it affect him; now, has he? I put it to you, Mr. Scorrier,
+      I put it to you, sir!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Scorrier made no reply, and soon after took his leave: he had been
+      asked to convey a friendly hint to Pippin that more frequent letters would
+      be welcomed. Standing in the shadow of the Royal Exchange, waiting to
+      thread his way across, he thought: 'So you must have noise, must you&mdash;you've
+      got some here, and to spare....'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On his arrival in the new world he wired to Pippin asking if he might stay
+      with him on the way up country, and received the answer: &ldquo;Be sure and
+      come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A week later he arrived (there was now a railway) and found Pippin waiting
+      for him in a phaeton. Scorrier would not have known the place again; there
+      was a glitter over everything, as if some one had touched it with a wand.
+      The tracks had given place to roads, running firm, straight, and black
+      between the trees under brilliant sunshine; the wooden houses were all
+      painted; out in the gleaming harbour amongst the green of islands lay
+      three steamers, each with a fleet of busy boats; and here and there a tiny
+      yacht floated, like a sea-bird on the water. Pippin drove his long-tailed
+      horses furiously; his eyes brimmed with subtle kindness, as if according
+      Scorrier a continual welcome. During the two days of his stay Scorrier
+      never lost that sense of glamour. He had every opportunity for observing
+      the grip Pippin had over everything. The wooden doors and walls of his
+      bungalow kept out no sounds. He listened to interviews between his host
+      and all kinds and conditions of men. The voices of the visitors would rise
+      at first&mdash;angry, discontented, matter-of-fact, with nasal twang, or
+      guttural drawl; then would come the soft patter of the superintendent's
+      feet crossing and recrossing the room. Then a pause, the sound of hard
+      breathing, and quick questions&mdash;the visitor's voice again, again the
+      patter, and Pippin's ingratiating but decisive murmurs. Presently out
+      would come the visitor with an expression on his face which Scorrier soon
+      began to know by heart, a kind of pleased, puzzled, helpless look, which
+      seemed to say, &ldquo;I've been done, I know&mdash;I'll give it to myself when
+      I'm round the corner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pippin was full of wistful questions about &ldquo;home.&rdquo; He wanted to talk of
+      music, pictures, plays, of how London looked, what new streets there were,
+      and, above all, whether Scorrier had been lately in the West Country. He
+      talked of getting leave next winter, asked whether Scorrier thought they
+      would &ldquo;put up with him at home&rdquo;; then, with the agitation which had
+      alarmed Scorrier before, he added: &ldquo;Ah! but I'm not fit for home now. One
+      gets spoiled; it's big and silent here. What should I go back to? I don't
+      seem to realise.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scorrier thought of Hemmings. &ldquo;'Tis a bit cramped there, certainly,&rdquo; he
+      muttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pippin went on as if divining his thoughts. &ldquo;I suppose our friend Hemmings
+      would call me foolish; he's above the little weaknesses of imagination,
+      eh? Yes; it's silent here. Sometimes in the evening I would give my head
+      for somebody to talk to&mdash;Hemmings would never give his head for
+      anything, I think. But all the same, I couldn't face them at home.
+      Spoiled!&rdquo; And slyly he murmured: &ldquo;What would the Board say if they could
+      hear that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scorrier blurted out: &ldquo;To tell you the truth, they complain a little of
+      not hearing from you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pippin put out a hand, as if to push something away. &ldquo;Let them try the
+      life here!&rdquo; he broke out; &ldquo;it's like sitting on a live volcano&mdash;what
+      with our friends, 'the enemy,' over there; the men; the American
+      competition. I keep it going, Scorrier, but at what a cost&mdash;at what a
+      cost!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But surely&mdash;letters?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pippin only answered: &ldquo;I try&mdash;I try!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scorrier felt with remorse and wonder that he had spoken the truth. The
+      following day he left for his inspection, and while in the camp of &ldquo;the
+      enemy&rdquo; much was the talk he heard of Pippin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why!&rdquo; said his host, the superintendent, a little man with a face
+      somewhat like an owl's, &ldquo;d'you know the name they've given him down in the
+      capital&mdash;'the King'&mdash;good, eh? He's made them 'sit up' all along
+      this coast. I like him well enough&mdash;good-hearted man, shocking
+      nervous; but my people down there can't stand him at any price. Sir, he
+      runs this colony. You'd think butter wouldn't melt in that mouth of his;
+      but he always gets his way; that's what riles 'em so; that and the success
+      he's making of his mine. It puzzles me; you'd think he'd only be too glad
+      of a quiet life, a man with his nerves. But no, he's never happy unless
+      he's fighting, something where he's got a chance to score a victory. I
+      won't say he likes it, but, by Jove, it seems he's got to do it. Now
+      that's funny! I'll tell you one thing, though shouldn't be a bit surprised
+      if he broke down some day; and I'll tell you another,&rdquo; he added darkly,
+      &ldquo;he's sailing very near the wind, with those large contracts that he
+      makes. I wouldn't care to take his risks. Just let them have a strike, or
+      something that shuts them down for a spell&mdash;and mark my words, sir&mdash;it'll
+      be all up with them. But,&rdquo; he concluded confidentially, &ldquo;I wish I had his
+      hold on the men; it's a great thing in this country. Not like home, where
+      you can go round a corner and get another gang. You have to make the best
+      you can out of the lot you have; you won't get another man for love or
+      money without you ship him a few hundred miles.&rdquo; And with a frown he waved
+      his arm over the forests to indicate the barrenness of the land.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0072" id="link2H_4_0072">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Scorrier finished his inspection and went on a shooting trip into the
+      forest. His host met him on his return. &ldquo;Just look at this!&rdquo; he said,
+      holding out a telegram. &ldquo;Awful, isn't it?&rdquo; His face expressed a profound
+      commiseration, almost ludicrously mixed with the ashamed contentment that
+      men experience at the misfortunes of an enemy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The telegram, dated the day before, ran thus &ldquo;Frightful explosion New
+      Colliery this morning, great loss of life feared.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scorrier had the bewildered thought: 'Pippin will want me now.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took leave of his host, who called after him: &ldquo;You'd better wait for a
+      steamer! It's a beastly drive!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scorrier shook his head. All night, jolting along a rough track cut
+      through the forest, he thought of Pippin. The other miseries of this
+      calamity at present left him cold; he barely thought of the smothered men;
+      but Pippin's struggle, his lonely struggle with this hydra-headed monster,
+      touched him very nearly. He fell asleep and dreamed of watching Pippin
+      slowly strangled by a snake; the agonised, kindly, ironic face peeping out
+      between two gleaming coils was so horribly real, that he awoke. It was the
+      moment before dawn: pitch-black branches barred the sky; with every jolt
+      of the wheels the gleams from the lamps danced, fantastic and intrusive,
+      round ferns and tree-stems, into the cold heart of the forest. For an hour
+      or more Scorrier tried to feign sleep, and hide from the stillness, and
+      overmastering gloom of these great woods. Then softly a whisper of noises
+      stole forth, a stir of light, and the whole slow radiance of the morning
+      glory. But it brought no warmth; and Scorrier wrapped himself closer in
+      his cloak, feeling as though old age had touched him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Close on noon he reached the township. Glamour seemed still to hover over
+      it. He drove on to the mine. The winding-engine was turning, the pulley at
+      the top of the head-gear whizzing round; nothing looked unusual. 'Some
+      mistake!' he thought. He drove to the mine buildings, alighted, and
+      climbed to the shaft head. Instead of the usual rumbling of the trolleys,
+      the rattle of coal discharged over the screens, there was silence. Close
+      by, Pippin himself was standing, smirched with dirt. The cage, coming
+      swift and silent from below, shot open its doors with a sharp rattle.
+      Scorrier bent forward to look. There lay a dead man, with a smile on his
+      face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How many?&rdquo; he whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pippin answered: &ldquo;Eighty-four brought up&mdash;forty-seven still below,&rdquo;
+       and entered the man's name in a pocket-book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An older man was taken out next; he too was smiling&mdash;there had been
+      vouchsafed to him, it seemed, a taste of more than earthly joy. The sight
+      of those strange smiles affected Scorrier more than all the anguish or
+      despair he had seen scored on the faces of other dead men. He asked an old
+      miner how long Pippin had been at work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thirty hours. Yesterday he wer' below; we had to nigh carry mun up at
+      last. He's for goin' down again, but the chaps won't lower mun;&rdquo; the old
+      man gave a sigh. &ldquo;I'm waiting for my boy to come up, I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scorrier waited too&mdash;there was fascination about those dead, smiling
+      faces. The rescuing of these men who would never again breathe went on and
+      on. Scorrier grew sleepy in the sun. The old miner woke him, saying:
+      &ldquo;Rummy stuff this here chokedamp; see, they all dies drunk!&rdquo; The very next
+      to be brought up was the chief engineer. Scorrier had known him quite
+      well, one of those Scotsmen who are born at the age of forty and remain so
+      all their lives. His face&mdash;the only one that wore no smile&mdash;seemed
+      grieving that duty had deprived it of that last luxury. With wide eyes and
+      drawn lips he had died protesting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late in the afternoon the old miner touched Scorrier's arm, and said:
+      &ldquo;There he is&mdash;there's my boy!&rdquo; And he departed slowly, wheeling the
+      body on a trolley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the sun set, the gang below came up. No further search was possible
+      till the fumes had cleared. Scorrier heard one man say: &ldquo;There's some
+      we'll never get; they've had sure burial.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Another answered him: &ldquo;'Tis a gude enough bag for me!&rdquo; They passed him,
+      the whites of their eyes gleaming out of faces black as ink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pippin drove him home at a furious pace, not uttering a single word. As
+      they turned into the main street, a young woman starting out before the
+      horses obliged Pippin to pull up. The glance he bent on Scorrier was
+      ludicrously prescient of suffering. The woman asked for her husband.
+      Several times they were stopped thus by women asking for their husbands or
+      sons. &ldquo;This is what I have to go through,&rdquo; Pippin whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they had eaten, he said to Scorrier: &ldquo;It was kind of you to come and
+      stand by me! They take me for a god, poor creature that I am. But shall I
+      ever get the men down again? Their nerve's shaken. I wish I were one of
+      those poor lads, to die with a smile like that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scorrier felt the futility of his presence. On Pippin alone must be the
+      heat and burden. Would he stand under it, or would the whole thing come
+      crashing to the ground? He urged him again and again to rest, but Pippin
+      only gave him one of his queer smiles. &ldquo;You don't know how strong I am!&rdquo;
+       he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0073" id="link2H_4_0073">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      He himself slept heavily; and, waking at dawn, went down. Pippin was still
+      at his desk; his pen had dropped; he was asleep. The ink was wet;
+      Scorrier's eye caught the opening words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;GENTLEMEN,&mdash;Since this happened I have not slept....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stole away again with a sense of indignation that no one could be
+      dragged in to share that fight. The London Board-room rose before his
+      mind. He imagined the portentous gravity of Hemmings; his face and voice
+      and manner conveying the impression that he alone could save the
+      situation; the six directors, all men of commonsense and certainly humane,
+      seated behind large turret-shaped inkpots; the concern and irritation in
+      their voices, asking how it could have happened; their comments: &ldquo;An awful
+      thing!&rdquo; &ldquo;I suppose Pippin is doing the best he can!&rdquo; &ldquo;Wire him on no
+      account to leave the mine idle!&rdquo; &ldquo;Poor devils!&rdquo; &ldquo;A fund? Of course, what
+      ought we to give?&rdquo; He had a strong conviction that nothing of all this
+      would disturb the commonsense with which they would go home and eat their
+      mutton. A good thing too; the less it was taken to heart the better! But
+      Scorrier felt angry. The fight was so unfair! A fellow all nerves&mdash;with
+      not a soul to help him! Well, it was his own lookout! He had chosen to
+      centre it all in himself, to make himself its very soul. If he gave way
+      now, the ship must go down! By a thin thread, Scorrier's hero-worship
+      still held. 'Man against nature,' he thought, 'I back the man.' The
+      struggle in which he was so powerless to give aid, became intensely
+      personal to him, as if he had engaged his own good faith therein.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next day they went down again to the pit-head; and Scorrier himself
+      descended. The fumes had almost cleared, but there were some places which
+      would never be reached. At the end of the day all but four bodies had been
+      recovered. &ldquo;In the day o' judgment,&rdquo; a miner said, &ldquo;they four'll come out
+      of here.&rdquo; Those unclaimed bodies haunted Scorrier. He came on sentences of
+      writing, where men waiting to be suffocated had written down their
+      feelings. In one place, the hour, the word &ldquo;Sleepy,&rdquo; and a signature. In
+      another, &ldquo;A. F.&mdash;done for.&rdquo; When he came up at last Pippin was still
+      waiting, pocket-book in hand; they again departed at a furious pace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two days later Scorrier, visiting the shaft, found its neighbourhood
+      deserted&mdash;not a living thing of any sort was there except one
+      Chinaman poking his stick into the rubbish. Pippin was away down the coast
+      engaging an engineer; and on his return, Scorrier had not the heart to
+      tell him of the desertion. He was spared the effort, for Pippin said:
+      &ldquo;Don't be afraid&mdash;you've got bad news? The men have gone on strike.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scorrier sighed. &ldquo;Lock, stock, and barrel&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought so&mdash;see what I have here!&rdquo; He put before Scorrier a
+      telegram:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At all costs keep working&mdash;fatal to stop&mdash;manage this somehow.&mdash;HEMMINGS.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Breathing quickly, he added: &ldquo;As if I didn't know! 'Manage this somehow'&mdash;a
+      little hard!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's to be done?&rdquo; asked Scorrier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see I am commanded!&rdquo; Pippin answered bitterly. &ldquo;And they're quite
+      right; we must keep working&mdash;our contracts! Now I'm down&mdash;not a
+      soul will spare me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The miners' meeting was held the following day on the outskirts of the
+      town. Pippin had cleared the place to make a public recreation-ground&mdash;a
+      sort of feather in the company's cap; it was now to be the spot whereon
+      should be decided the question of the company's life or death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sky to the west was crossed by a single line of cloud like a bar of
+      beaten gold; tree shadows crept towards the groups of men; the evening
+      savour, that strong fragrance of the forest, sweetened the air. The miners
+      stood all round amongst the burnt tree-stumps, cowed and sullen. They
+      looked incapable of movement or expression. It was this dumb paralysis
+      that frightened Scorrier. He watched Pippin speaking from his phaeton, the
+      butt of all those sullen, restless eyes. Would he last out? Would the
+      wires hold? It was like the finish of a race. He caught a baffled look on
+      Pippin's face, as if he despaired of piercing that terrible paralysis. The
+      men's eyes had begun to wander. 'He's lost his hold,' thought Scorrier;
+      'it's all up!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A miner close beside him muttered: &ldquo;Look out!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pippin was leaning forward, his voice had risen, the words fell like a
+      whiplash on the faces of the crowd: &ldquo;You shan't throw me over; do you
+      think I'll give up all I've done for you? I'll make you the first power in
+      the colony! Are you turning tail at the first shot? You're a set of
+      cowards, my lads!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Each man round Scorrier was listening with a different motion of the hands&mdash;one
+      rubbed them, one clenched them, another moved his closed fist, as if
+      stabbing some one in the back. A grisly-bearded, beetle-browed,
+      twinkling-eyed old Cornishman muttered: &ldquo;A'hm not troublin' about that.&rdquo;
+       It seemed almost as if Pippin's object was to get the men to kill him;
+      they had gathered closer, crouching for a rush. Suddenly Pippin's voice
+      dropped to a whisper: &ldquo;I'm disgraced Men, are you going back on me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old miner next Scorrier called out suddenly: &ldquo;Anny that's Cornishmen
+      here to stand by the superintendent?&rdquo; A group drew together, and with
+      murmurs and gesticulation the meeting broke up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the evening a deputation came to visit Pippin; and all night long their
+      voices and the superintendent's footsteps could be heard. In the morning,
+      Pippin went early to the mine. Before supper the deputation came again;
+      and again Scorrier had to listen hour after hour to the sound of voices
+      and footsteps till he fell asleep. Just before dawn he was awakened by a
+      light. Pippin stood at his bedside. &ldquo;The men go down to-morrow,&rdquo; he said:
+      &ldquo;What did I tell you? Carry me home on my shield, eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In a week the mine was in full work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0074" id="link2H_4_0074">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Two years later, Scorrier heard once more of Pippin. A note from Hemmings
+      reached him asking if he could make it convenient to attend their Board
+      meeting the following Thursday. He arrived rather before the appointed
+      time. The secretary received him, and, in answer to inquiry, said: &ldquo;Thank
+      you, we are doing well&mdash;between ourselves, we are doing very well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And Pippin?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The secretary frowned. &ldquo;Ah, Pippin! We asked you to come on his account.
+      Pippin is giving us a lot of trouble. We have not had a single line from
+      him for just two years!&rdquo; He spoke with such a sense of personal grievance
+      that Scorrier felt quite sorry for him. &ldquo;Not a single line,&rdquo; said
+      Hemmings, &ldquo;since that explosion&mdash;you were there at the time, I
+      remember! It makes it very awkward; I call it personal to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how&mdash;&rdquo; Scorrier began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We get&mdash;telegrams. He writes to no one, not even to his family. And
+      why? Just tell me why? We hear of him; he's a great nob out there.
+      Nothing's done in the colony without his finger being in the pie. He
+      turned out the last Government because they wouldn't grant us an extension
+      for our railway&mdash;shows he can't be a fool. Besides, look at our
+      balance-sheet!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It turned out that the question on which Scorrier's opinion was desired
+      was, whether Hemmings should be sent out to see what was the matter with
+      the superintendent. During the discussion which ensued, he was an
+      unwilling listener to strictures on Pippin's silence. &ldquo;The explosion,&rdquo; he
+      muttered at last, &ldquo;a very trying time!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Booker pounced on him. &ldquo;A very trying time! So it was&mdash;to all of
+      us. But what excuse is that&mdash;now, Mr. Scorrier, what excuse is that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scorrier was obliged to admit that it was none.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Business is business&mdash;eh, what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scorrier, gazing round that neat Board-room, nodded. A deaf director, who
+      had not spoken for some months, said with sudden fierceness: &ldquo;It's
+      disgraceful!&rdquo; He was obviously letting off the fume of long-unuttered
+      disapprovals. One perfectly neat, benevolent old fellow, however, who had
+      kept his hat on, and had a single vice&mdash;that of coming to the
+      Board-room with a brown paper parcel tied up with string&mdash;murmured:
+      &ldquo;We must make all allowances,&rdquo; and started an anecdote about his youth. He
+      was gently called to order by his secretary. Scorrier was asked for his
+      opinion. He looked at Hemmings. &ldquo;My importance is concerned,&rdquo; was written
+      all over the secretary's face. Moved by an impulse of loyalty to Pippin,
+      Scorrier answered, as if it were all settled: &ldquo;Well, let me know when you
+      are starting, Hemmings&mdash;I should like the trip myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As he was going out, the chairman, old Jolyon Forsyte, with a grave,
+      twinkling look at Hemmings, took him aside. &ldquo;Glad to hear you say that
+      about going too, Mr. Scorrier; we must be careful&mdash;Pippin's such a
+      good fellow, and so sensitive; and our friend there&mdash;a bit heavy in
+      the hand, um?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scorrier did in fact go out with Hemmings. The secretary was sea-sick, and
+      his prostration, dignified but noisy, remained a memory for ever; it was
+      sonorous and fine&mdash;the prostration of superiority; and the way in
+      which he spoke of it, taking casual acquaintances into the caves of his
+      experience, was truly interesting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pippin came down to the capital to escort them, provided for their
+      comforts as if they had been royalty, and had a special train to take them
+      to the mines.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a little stouter, brighter of colour, greyer of beard, more nervous
+      perhaps in voice and breathing. His manner to Hemmings was full of
+      flattering courtesy; but his sly, ironical glances played on the
+      secretary's armour like a fountain on a hippopotamus. To Scorrier,
+      however, he could not show enough affection:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first evening, when Hemmings had gone to his room, he jumped up like a
+      boy out of school. &ldquo;So I'm going to get a wigging,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I suppose I
+      deserve it; but if you knew&mdash;if you only knew...! Out here they've
+      nicknamed me 'the King'&mdash;they say I rule the colony. It's myself that
+      I can't rule&rdquo;; and with a sudden burst of passion such as Scorrier had
+      never seen in him: &ldquo;Why did they send this man here? What can he know
+      about the things that I've been through?&rdquo; In a moment he calmed down
+      again. &ldquo;There! this is very stupid; worrying you like this!&rdquo; and with a
+      long, kind look into Scorrier's face, he hustled him off to bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pippin did not break out again, though fire seemed to smoulder behind the
+      bars of his courteous irony. Intuition of danger had evidently smitten
+      Hemmings, for he made no allusion to the object of his visit. There were
+      moments when Scorrier's common-sense sided with Hemmings&mdash;these were
+      moments when the secretary was not present.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'After all,' he told himself, 'it's a little thing to ask&mdash;one letter
+      a month. I never heard of such a case.' It was wonderful indeed how they
+      stood it! It showed how much they valued Pippin! What was the matter with
+      him? What was the nature of his trouble? One glimpse Scorrier had when
+      even Hemmings, as he phrased it, received &ldquo;quite a turn.&rdquo; It was during a
+      drive back from the most outlying of the company's trial mines, eight
+      miles through the forest. The track led through a belt of trees blackened
+      by a forest fire. Pippin was driving. The secretary seated beside him wore
+      an expression of faint alarm, such as Pippin's driving was warranted to
+      evoke from almost any face. The sky had darkened strangely, but pale
+      streaks of light, coming from one knew not where, filtered through the
+      trees. No breath was stirring; the wheels and horses' hoofs made no sound
+      on the deep fern mould. All around, the burnt tree-trunks, leafless and
+      jagged, rose like withered giants, the passages between them were black,
+      the sky black, and black the silence. No one spoke, and literally the only
+      sound was Pippin's breathing. What was it that was so terrifying? Scorrier
+      had a feeling of entombment; that nobody could help him; the feeling of
+      being face to face with Nature; a sensation as if all the comfort and
+      security of words and rules had dropped away from him. And-nothing
+      happened. They reached home and dined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During dinner he had again that old remembrance of a little man chopping
+      at a castle with his sword. It came at a moment when Pippin had raised his
+      hand with the carving-knife grasped in it to answer some remark of
+      Hemmings' about the future of the company. The optimism in his uplifted
+      chin, the strenuous energy in his whispering voice, gave Scorrier a more
+      vivid glimpse of Pippin's nature than he had perhaps ever had before. This
+      new country, where nothing but himself could help a man&mdash;that was the
+      castle! No wonder Pippin was impatient of control, no wonder he was out of
+      hand, no wonder he was silent&mdash;chopping away at that! And suddenly he
+      thought: 'Yes, and all the time one knows, Nature must beat him in the
+      end!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That very evening Hemmings delivered himself of his reproof. He had sat
+      unusually silent; Scorrier, indeed, had thought him a little drunk, so
+      portentous was his gravity; suddenly, however he rose. It was hard on a
+      man, he said, in his position, with a Board (he spoke as of a family of
+      small children), to be kept so short of information. He was actually
+      compelled to use his imagination to answer the shareholders' questions.
+      This was painful and humiliating; he had never heard of any secretary
+      having to use his imagination! He went further&mdash;it was insulting! He
+      had grown grey in the service of the company. Mr. Scorrier would bear him
+      out when he said he had a position to maintain&mdash;his name in the City
+      was a high one; and, by George! he was going to keep it a high one; he
+      would allow nobody to drag it in the dust&mdash;that ought clearly to be
+      understood. His directors felt they were being treated like children;
+      however that might be, it was absurd to suppose that he (Hemmings) could
+      be treated like a child...! The secretary paused; his eyes seemed to bully
+      the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If there were no London office,&rdquo; murmured Pippin, &ldquo;the shareholders would
+      get the same dividends.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hemmings gasped. &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;this is monstrous!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What help did I get from London when I first came here? What help have I
+      ever had?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hemmings swayed, recovered, and with a forced smile replied that, if this
+      were true, he had been standing on his head for years; he did not believe
+      the attitude possible for such a length of time; personally he would have
+      thought that he too had had a little something to say to the company's
+      position, but no matter...! His irony was crushing.... It was possible
+      that Mr. Pippin hoped to reverse the existing laws of the universe with
+      regard to limited companies; he would merely say that he must not begin
+      with a company of which he (Hemmings) happened to be secretary. Mr.
+      Scorrier had hinted at excuses; for his part, with the best intentions in
+      the world, he had great difficulty in seeing them. He would go further&mdash;he
+      did not see them! The explosion...! Pippin shrank so visibly that Hemmings
+      seemed troubled by a suspicion that he had gone too far.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We know,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that it was trying for you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Trying!&rdquo; &ldquo;burst out Pippin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No one can say,&rdquo; Hemmings resumed soothingly, &ldquo;that we have not dealt
+      liberally.&rdquo; Pippin made a motion of the head. &ldquo;We think we have a good
+      superintendent; I go further, an excellent superintendent. What I say is:
+      Let's be pleasant! I am not making an unreasonable request!&rdquo; He ended on a
+      fitting note of jocularity; and, as if by consent, all three withdrew,
+      each to his own room, without another word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the course of the next day Pippin said to Scorrier: &ldquo;It seems I have
+      been very wicked. I must try to do better&rdquo;; and with a touch of bitter
+      humour, &ldquo;They are kind enough to think me a good superintendent, you see!
+      After that I must try hard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scorrier broke in: &ldquo;No man could have done so much for them;&rdquo; and, carried
+      away by an impulse to put things absolutely straight, went on &ldquo;But, after
+      all, a letter now and then&mdash;what does it amount to?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pippin besieged him with a subtle glance. &ldquo;You too?&rdquo; he said&mdash;&ldquo;I must
+      indeed have been a wicked man!&rdquo; and turned away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scorrier felt as if he had been guilty of brutality; sorry for Pippin,
+      angry with himself; angry with Pippin, sorry for himself. He earnestly
+      desired to see the back of Hemmings. The secretary gratified the wish a
+      few days later, departing by steamer with ponderous expressions of regard
+      and the assurance of his goodwill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pippin gave vent to no outburst of relief, maintaining a courteous
+      silence, making only one allusion to his late guest, in answer to a remark
+      of Scorrier:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! don't tempt me! mustn't speak behind his back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0075" id="link2H_4_0075">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A month passed, and Scorrier still&mdash;remained Pippin's guest. As each
+      mail-day approached he experienced a queer suppressed excitement. On one
+      of these occasions Pippin had withdrawn to his room; and when Scorrier
+      went to fetch him to dinner he found him with his head leaning on his
+      hands, amid a perfect fitter of torn paper. He looked up at Scorrier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't do it,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I feel such a hypocrite; I can't put myself
+      into leading-strings again. Why should I ask these people, when I've
+      settled everything already? If it were a vital matter they wouldn't want
+      to hear&mdash;they'd simply wire, 'Manage this somehow!'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scorrier said nothing, but thought privately 'This is a mad business!'
+      What was a letter? Why make a fuss about a letter? The approach of
+      mail-day seemed like a nightmare to the superintendent; he became
+      feverishly nervous like a man under a spell; and, when the mail had gone,
+      behaved like a respited criminal. And this had been going on two years!
+      Ever since that explosion. Why, it was monomania!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day, a month after Hemmings' departure, Pippin rose early from dinner;
+      his face was flushed, he had been drinking wine. &ldquo;I won't be beaten this
+      time,&rdquo; he said, as he passed Scorrier. The latter could hear him writing
+      in the next room, and looked in presently to say that he was going for a
+      walk. Pippin gave him a kindly nod.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a cool, still evening: innumerable stars swarmed in clusters over
+      the forests, forming bright hieroglyphics in the middle heavens, showering
+      over the dark harbour into the sea. Scorrier walked slowly. A weight
+      seemed lifted from his mind, so entangled had he become in that uncanny
+      silence. At last Pippin had broken through the spell. To get that, letter
+      sent would be the laying of a phantom, the rehabilitation of commonsense.
+      Now that this silence was in the throes of being broken, he felt curiously
+      tender towards Pippin, without the hero-worship of old days, but with a
+      queer protective feeling. After all, he was different from other men. In
+      spite of his feverish, tenacious energy, in spite of his ironic humour,
+      there was something of the woman in him! And as for this silence, this
+      horror of control&mdash;all geniuses had &ldquo;bees in their bonnets,&rdquo; and
+      Pippin was a genius in his way!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked back at the town. Brilliantly lighted it had a thriving
+      air&mdash;difficult to believe of the place he remembered ten years back; the
+      sounds of drinking, gambling, laughter, and dancing floated to his ears.
+      'Quite a city!' he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With this queer elation on him he walked slowly back along the street,
+      forgetting that he was simply an oldish mining expert, with a look of
+      shabbiness, such as clings to men who are always travelling, as if their
+      &ldquo;nap&rdquo; were for ever being rubbed off. And he thought of Pippin, creator of
+      this glory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had passed the boundaries of the town, and had entered the forest. A
+      feeling of discouragement instantly beset him. The scents and silence,
+      after the festive cries and odours of the town, were undefinably
+      oppressive. Notwithstanding, he walked a long time, saying to himself that
+      he would give the letter every chance. At last, when he thought that
+      Pippin must have finished, he went back to the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pippin had finished. His forehead rested on the table, his arms hung at
+      his sides; he was stone-dead! His face wore a smile, and by his side lay
+      an empty laudanum bottle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The letter, closely, beautifully written, lay before him. It was a fine
+      document, clear, masterly, detailed, nothing slurred, nothing concealed,
+      nothing omitted; a complete review of the company's position; it ended
+      with the words: &ldquo;Your humble servant, RICHARD PIPPIN.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Scorrier took possession of it. He dimly understood that with those last
+      words a wire had snapped. The border-line had been overpassed; the point
+      reached where that sense of proportion, which alone makes life possible,
+      is lost. He was certain that at the moment of his death Pippin could have
+      discussed bimetallism, or any intellectual problem, except the one problem
+      of his own heart; that, for some mysterious reason, had been too much for
+      him. His death had been the work of a moment of supreme revolt&mdash;a
+      single instant of madness on a single subject! He found on the
+      blotting-paper, scrawled across the impress of the signature, &ldquo;Can't stand
+      it!&rdquo; The completion of that letter had been to him a struggle ungraspable
+      by Scorrier. Slavery? Defeat? A violation of Nature? The death of justice?
+      It were better not to think of it! Pippin could have told&mdash;but he
+      would never speak again. Nature, at whom, unaided, he had dealt so many
+      blows, had taken her revenge...!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the night Scorrier stole down, and, with an ashamed face, cut off a
+      lock of the fine grey hair. 'His daughter might like it!' he thought....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He waited till Pippin was buried, then, with the letter in his pocket,
+      started for England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He arrived at Liverpool on a Thursday morning, and travelling to town,
+      drove straight to the office of the company. The Board were sitting.
+      Pippin's successor was already being interviewed. He passed out as
+      Scorrier came in, a middle-aged man with a large, red beard, and a foxy,
+      compromising face. He also was a Cornishman. Scorrier wished him luck with
+      a very heavy heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As an unsentimental man, who had a proper horror of emotion, whose living
+      depended on his good sense, to look back on that interview with the Board
+      was painful. It had excited in him a rage of which he was now heartily
+      ashamed. Old Jolyon Forsyte, the chairman, was not there for once,
+      guessing perhaps that the Board's view of this death would be too small
+      for him; and little Mr. Booker sat in his place. Every one had risen,
+      shaken hands with Scorrier, and expressed themselves indebted for his
+      coming. Scorrier placed Pippin's letter on the table, and gravely the
+      secretary read out to his Board the last words of their superintendent.
+      When he had finished, a director said, &ldquo;That's not the letter of a
+      madman!&rdquo; Another answered: &ldquo;Mad as a hatter; nobody but a madman would
+      have thrown up such a post.&rdquo; Scorrier suddenly withdrew. He heard Hemmings
+      calling after him. &ldquo;Aren't you well, Mr. Scorrier? aren't you well, sir?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shouted back: &ldquo;Quite sane, I thank you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Naples &ldquo;express&rdquo; rolled round the outskirts of the town. Vesuvius
+      shone in the sun, uncrowned by smoke. But even as Scorrier looked, a white
+      puff went soaring up. It was the footnote to his memories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      February 1901. February 1901.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
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+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #2639 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2639)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Villa Rubein et al, by John Galsworthy
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
+
+
+Title: Villa Rubein et al
+
+Author: John Galsworthy
+
+Release Date: September 24, 2004 [EBook #2639]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VILLA RUBEIN ET AL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+[NOTE:  Spelling conforms to the original: "s's" instead of our "z's";
+and "c's" where we would have "s's"; and "...our" as in colour and
+flavour; many interesting double consonants; etc.]
+
+
+
+
+THE WORKS OF JOHN GALSWORTHY
+
+VILLA RUBEIN
+
+
+
+
+Contents:
+  Villa Rubein
+  A Man of Devon
+  A Knight
+  Salvation of a Forsyte
+  The Silence
+
+
+
+
+VILLA RUBEIN
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+Writing not long ago to my oldest literary friend, I expressed in a
+moment of heedless sentiment the wish that we might have again one of our
+talks of long-past days, over the purposes and methods of our art.  And
+my friend, wiser than I, as he has always been, replied with this
+doubting phrase "Could we recapture the zest of that old time?"
+
+I would not like to believe that our faith in the value of imaginative
+art has diminished, that we think it less worth while to struggle for
+glimpses of truth and for the words which may pass them on to other eyes;
+or that we can no longer discern the star we tried to follow; but I do
+fear, with him, that half a lifetime of endeavour has dulled the
+exuberance which kept one up till morning discussing the ways and means
+of aesthetic achievement.  We have discovered, perhaps with a certain
+finality, that by no talk can a writer add a cubit to his stature, or
+change the temperament which moulds and colours the vision of life he
+sets before the few who will pause to look at it.  And so--the rest is
+silence, and what of work we may still do will be done in that dogged
+muteness which is the lot of advancing years.
+
+Other times, other men and modes, but not other truth.  Truth, though
+essentially relative, like Einstein's theory, will never lose its
+ever-new and unique quality-perfect proportion; for Truth, to the human
+consciousness at least, is but that vitally just relation of part to
+whole which is the very condition of life itself.  And the task before
+the imaginative writer, whether at the end of the last century or all
+these aeons later, is the presentation of a vision which to eye and ear
+and mind has the implicit proportions of Truth.
+
+I confess to have always looked for a certain flavour in the writings of
+others, and craved it for my own, believing that all true vision is so
+coloured by the temperament of the seer, as to have not only the just
+proportions but the essential novelty of a living thing for, after all,
+no two living things are alike.  A work of fiction should carry the hall
+mark of its author as surely as a Goya, a Daumier, a Velasquez, and a
+Mathew Maris, should be the unmistakable creations of those masters. This
+is not to speak of tricks and manners which lend themselves to that
+facile elf, the caricaturist, but of a certain individual way of seeing
+and feeling.  A young poet once said of another and more popular poet:
+"Oh! yes, but be cuts no ice." And, when one came to think of it, he did
+not; a certain flabbiness of spirit, a lack of temperament, an absence,
+perhaps, of the ironic, or passionate, view, insubstantiated his work; it
+had no edge--just a felicity which passed for distinction with the crowd.
+
+Let me not be understood to imply that a novel should be a sort of
+sandwich, in which the author's mood or philosophy is the slice of ham.
+One's demand is for a far more subtle impregnation of flavour; just that,
+for instance, which makes De Maupassant a more poignant and fascinating
+writer than his master Flaubert, Dickens and Thackeray more living and
+permanent than George Eliot or Trollope. It once fell to my lot to be the
+preliminary critic of a book on painting, designed to prove that the
+artist's sole function was the impersonal elucidation of the truths of
+nature.  I was regretfully compelled to observe that there were no such
+things as the truths of Nature, for the purposes of art, apart from the
+individual vision of the artist.  Seer and thing seen, inextricably
+involved one with the other, form the texture of any masterpiece; and I,
+at least, demand therefrom a distinct impression of temperament.  I never
+saw, in the flesh, either De Maupassant or Tchekov--those masters of such
+different methods entirely devoid of didacticism--but their work leaves
+on me a strangely potent sense of personality.  Such subtle intermingling
+of seer with thing seen is the outcome only of long and intricate
+brooding, a process not too favoured by modern life, yet without which we
+achieve little but a fluent chaos of clever insignificant impressions, a
+kind of glorified journalism, holding much the same relation to the
+deeply-impregnated work of Turgenev, Hardy, and Conrad, as a film bears
+to a play.
+
+Speaking for myself, with the immodesty required of one who hazards an
+introduction to his own work, I was writing fiction for five years before
+I could master even its primary technique, much less achieve that union
+of seer with thing seen, which perhaps begins to show itself a little in
+this volume--binding up the scanty harvests of 1899, 1900, and
+1901--especially in the tales: "A Knight," and "Salvation of a Forsyte." 
+Men, women, trees, and works of fiction--very tiny are the seeds from
+which they spring.  I used really to see the "Knight"--in 1896, was
+it?--sitting in the "Place" in front of the Casino at Monte Carlo; and
+because his dried-up elegance, his burnt straw hat, quiet courtesy of
+attitude, and big dog, used to fascinate and intrigue me, I began to
+imagine his life so as to answer my own questions and to satisfy, I
+suppose, the mood I was in. I never spoke to him, I never saw him again. 
+His real story, no doubt, was as different from that which I wove around
+his figure as night from day.
+
+As for Swithin, wild horses will not drag from me confession of where and
+when I first saw the prototype which became enlarged to his bulky
+stature.  I owe Swithin much, for he first released the satirist in me,
+and is, moreover, the only one of my characters whom I killed before I
+gave him life, for it is in "The Man of Property" that Swithin Forsyte
+more memorably lives.
+
+Ranging beyond this volume, I cannot recollect writing the first words of
+"The Island Pharisees"--but it would be about August, 1901. Like all the
+stories in "Villa Rubein," and, indeed, most of my tales, the book
+originated in the curiosity, philosophic reflections, and unphilosophic
+emotions roused in me by some single figure in real life.  In this case
+it was Ferrand, whose real name, of course, was not Ferrand, and who died
+in some "sacred institution" many years ago of a consumption brought on
+by the conditions of his wandering life. If not "a beloved," he was a
+true vagabond, and I first met him in the Champs Elysees, just as in "The
+Pigeon" he describes his meeting with Wellwyn.  Though drawn very much
+from life, he did not in the end turn out very like the Ferrand of real
+life--the, figures of fiction soon diverge from their prototypes.
+
+The first draft of "The Island Pharisees" was buried in a drawer; when
+retrieved the other day, after nineteen years, it disclosed a picaresque
+string of anecdotes told by Ferrand in the first person. These two-thirds
+of a book were laid to rest by Edward Garnett's dictum that its author
+was not sufficiently within Ferrand's skin; and, struggling heavily with
+laziness and pride, he started afresh in the skin of Shelton.  Three
+times be wrote that novel, and then it was long in finding the eye of
+Sydney Pawling, who accepted it for Heinemann's in 1904.  That was a
+period of ferment and transition with me, a kind of long awakening to the
+home truths of social existence and national character.  The liquor
+bubbled too furiously for clear bottling.  And the book, after all,
+became but an introduction to all those following novels which
+depict--somewhat satirically--the various sections of English "Society"
+with a more or less capital "S."
+
+Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one's work, it is
+interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the
+emotional and critical sides of his nature, first one, then the other,
+getting the upper hand, and too seldom fusing till the result has the
+mellowness of full achievement.  One can even tell the nature of one's
+readers, by their preference for the work which reveals more of this side
+than of that.  My early work was certainly more emotional than critical.
+But from 1901 came nine years when the critical was, in the main, holding
+sway.  From 1910 to 1918 the emotional again struggled for the upper
+hand; and from that time on there seems to have been something of a "dead
+beat."  So the conflict goes, by what mysterious tides promoted, I know
+not.
+
+An author must ever wish to discover a hapless member of the Public who,
+never yet having read a word of his writing, would submit to the ordeal
+of reading him right through from beginning to end.  Probably the effect
+could only be judged through an autopsy, but in the remote case of
+survival, it would interest one so profoundly to see the differences, if
+any, produced in that reader's character or outlook over life.  This,
+however, is a consummation which will remain devoutly to be wished, for
+there is a limit to human complaisance. One will never know the exact
+measure of one's infecting power; or whether, indeed, one is not just a
+long soporific.
+
+A writer they say, should not favouritize among his creations; but then a
+writer should not do so many things that he does.  This writer,
+certainly, confesses to having favourites, and of his novels so far be
+likes best: The Forsyte Series; "The Country House"; "Fraternity"; "The
+Dark Flower"; and "Five Tales"; believing these to be the works which
+most fully achieve fusion of seer with thing seen, most subtly disclose
+the individuality of their author, and best reveal such of truth as has
+been vouchsafed to him. JOHN GALSWORTHY.
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+MY SISTER BLANCHE LILIAN SAUTER
+
+
+
+
+VILLA RUBEIN
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+Walking along the river wall at Botzen, Edmund Dawney said to Alois Harz:
+"Would you care to know the family at that pink house, Villa Rubein?"
+
+Harz answered with a smile:
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+"Come with me then this afternoon."
+
+They had stopped before an old house with a blind, deserted look, that
+stood by itself on the wall; Harz pushed the door open.
+
+"Come in, you don't want breakfast yet.  I'm going to paint the river
+to-day."
+
+He ran up the bare broad stairs, and Dawney followed leisurely, his
+thumbs hooked in the armholes of his waistcoat, and his head thrown back.
+
+In the attic which filled the whole top story, Harz had pulled a canvas
+to the window.  He was a young man of middle height, square shouldered,
+active, with an angular face, high cheek-bones, and a strong, sharp chin.
+His eyes were piercing and steel-blue, his eyebrows very flexible, nose
+long and thin with a high bridge; and his dark, unparted hair fitted him
+like a cap.  His clothes looked as if he never gave them a second
+thought.
+
+This room, which served for studio, bedroom, and sitting-room, was bare
+and dusty.  Below the window the river in spring flood rushed down the
+valley, a stream, of molten bronze.  Harz dodged before the canvas like a
+fencer finding his distance; Dawney took his seat on a packingcase.
+
+"The snows have gone with a rush this year," he drawled.  "The Talfer
+comes down brown, the Eisack comes down blue; they flow into the Etsch
+and make it green; a parable of the Spring for you, my painter."
+
+Harz mixed his colours.
+
+"I've no time for parables," he said, "no time for anything.  If I could
+be guaranteed to live to ninety-nine, like Titian--he had a chance. Look
+at that poor fellow who was killed the other day!  All that struggle, and
+then--just at the turn!"
+
+He spoke English with a foreign accent; his voice was rather harsh, but
+his smile very kindly.
+
+Dawney lit a cigarette.
+
+"You painters," he said, "are better off than most of us.  You can strike
+out your own line.  Now if I choose to treat a case out of the ordinary
+way and the patient dies, I'm ruined."
+
+"My dear Doctor--if I don't paint what the public likes, I starve; all
+the same I'm going to paint in my own way; in the end I shall come out on
+top."
+
+"It pays to work in the groove, my friend, until you've made your name;
+after that--do what you like, they'll lick your boots all the same."
+
+"Ah, you don't love your work."
+
+Dawney answered slowly: "Never so happy as when my hands are full. But I
+want to make money, to get known, to have a good time, good cigars, good
+wine.  I hate discomfort.  No, my boy, I must work it on the usual lines;
+I don't like it, but I must lump it.  One starts in life with some notion
+of the ideal--it's gone by the board with me. I've got to shove along
+until I've made my name, and then, my little man--then--"
+
+"Then you'll be soft!"
+
+"You pay dearly for that first period!"
+
+"Take my chance of that; there's no other way."
+
+"Make one!"
+
+"Humph!"
+
+Harz poised his brush, as though it were a spear:
+
+"A man must do the best in him.  If he has to suffer--let him!"
+
+Dawney stretched his large soft body; a calculating look had come into
+his eyes.
+
+"You're a tough little man!" he said.
+
+"I've had to be tough."
+
+Dawney rose; tobacco smoke was wreathed round his unruffled hair.
+
+"Touching Villa Rubein," he said, "shall I call for you?  It's a mixed
+household, English mostly--very decent people."
+
+"No, thank you.  I shall be painting all day.  Haven't time to know the
+sort of people who expect one to change one's clothes."
+
+"As you like; ta-to!"  And, puffing out his chest, Dawney vanished
+through a blanket looped across the doorway.
+
+Harz set a pot of coffee on a spirit-lamp, and cut himself some bread.
+Through the window the freshness of the morning came; the scent of sap
+and blossom and young leaves; the scent of earth, and the mountains freed
+from winter; the new flights and songs of birds; all the odorous,
+enchanted, restless Spring.
+
+There suddenly appeared through the doorway a white rough-haired terrier
+dog, black-marked about the face, with shaggy tan eyebrows. He sniffed at
+Harz, showed the whites round his eyes, and uttered a sharp bark.  A
+young voice called:
+
+"Scruff!  Thou naughty dog!"  Light footsteps were heard on the stairs;
+from the distance a thin, high voice called:
+
+"Greta!  You mustn't go up there!"
+
+A little girl of twelve, with long fair hair under a wide-brimmed hat,
+slipped in.
+
+Her blue eyes opened wide, her face flushed up.  That face was not
+regular; its cheek-bones were rather prominent, the nose was flattish;
+there was about it an air, innocent, reflecting, quizzical, shy.
+
+"Oh!" she said.
+
+Harz smiled: "Good-morning!  This your dog?"
+
+She did not answer, but looked at him with soft bewilderment; then
+running to the dog seized him by the collar.
+
+"Scr-ruff!  Thou naughty dog--the baddest dog!"  The ends of her hair
+fell about him; she looked up at Harz, who said:
+
+"Not at all!  Let me give him some bread."
+
+"Oh no!  You must not--I will beat him--and tell him he is bad; then he
+shall not do such things again.  Now he is sulky; he looks so always when
+he is sulky.  Is this your home?"
+
+"For the present; I am a visitor."
+
+"But I think you are of this country, because you speak like it."
+
+"Certainly, I am a Tyroler."
+
+"I have to talk English this morning, but I do not like it very much
+--because, also I am half Austrian, and I like it best; but my sister,
+Christian, is all English.  Here is Miss Naylor; she shall be very angry
+with me."
+
+And pointing to the entrance with a rosy-tipped forefinger, she again
+looked ruefully at Harz.
+
+There came into the room with a walk like the hopping of a bird an
+elderly, small lady, in a grey serge dress, with narrow bands of
+claret-coloured velveteen; a large gold cross dangled from a steel chain
+on her chest; she nervously twisted her hands, clad in black kid gloves,
+rather white about the seams.
+
+Her hair was prematurely grey; her quick eyes brown; her mouth twisted at
+one corner; she held her face, kind-looking, but long and narrow, rather
+to one side, and wore on it a look of apology.  Her quick sentences
+sounded as if she kept them on strings, and wanted to draw them back as
+soon as she had let them forth.
+
+"Greta, how can, you do such things?  I don't know what your father would
+say!  I am sure I don't know how to--so extraordinary--"
+
+"Please!" said Harz.
+
+"You must come at once--so very sorry--so awkward!"  They were standing
+in a ring: Harz with his eyebrows working up and down; the little lady
+fidgeting her parasol; Greta, flushed and pouting, her eyes all dewy,
+twisting an end of fair hair round her finger.
+
+"Oh, look!"  The coffee had boiled over.  Little brown streams trickled
+spluttering from the pan; the dog, with ears laid back and tail tucked
+in, went scurrying round the room.  A feeling of fellowship fell on them
+at once.
+
+"Along the wall is our favourite walk, and Scruff--so awkward, so
+unfortunate--we did not think any one lived here--the shutters are
+cracked, the paint is peeling off so dreadfully.  Have you been long in
+Botzen?  Two months?  Fancy!  You are not English?  You are Tyrolese?  But
+you speak English so well--there for seven years?  Really?  So
+fortunate!--It is Greta's day for English."
+
+Miss Naylor's eyes darted bewildered glances at the roof where the
+crossing of the beams made such deep shadows; at the litter of brushes,
+tools, knives, and colours on a table made out of packing-cases; at the
+big window, innocent of glass, and flush with the floor, whence dangled a
+bit of rusty chain--relic of the time when the place had been a
+store-loft; her eyes were hastily averted from an unfnished figure of the
+nude.
+
+Greta, with feet crossed, sat on a coloured blanket, dabbling her fnger
+in a little pool of coffee, and gazing up at Harz.  And he thought: 'I
+should like to paint her like that.  "A forget-me-not."'
+
+He took out his chalks to make a sketch of her.
+
+"Shall you show me?" cried out Greta, scrambling to her feet.
+
+"'Will,' Greta--'will'; how often must I tell you?  I think we should be
+going--it is very late--your father--so very kind of you, but I think we
+should be going.  Scruff!"   Miss Naylor gave the floor two taps.  The
+terrier backed into a plaster cast which came down on his tail, and sent
+him flying through the doorway.  Greta followed swiftly, crying:
+
+"Ach! poor Scrufee!"
+
+Miss Naylor crossed the room; bowing, she murmured an apology, and also
+disappeared.
+
+Harz was left alone, his guests were gone; the little girl with the fair
+hair and the eyes like forget-me-nots, the little lady with kindly
+gestures and bird-like walk, the terrier.  He looked round him; the room
+seemed very empty.  Gnawing his moustache, he muttered at the fallen
+cast.
+
+Then taking up his brush, stood before his picture, smiling and frowning.
+Soon he had forgotten it all in his work.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+It was early morning four days later, and Harz was loitering homewards.
+The shadows of the clouds passing across the vines were vanishing over
+the jumbled roofs and green-topped spires of the town. A strong sweet
+wind was blowing from the mountains, there was a stir in the branches of
+the trees, and flakes of the late blossom were drifting down.  Amongst
+the soft green pods of a kind of poplar chafers buzzed, and numbers of
+their little brown bodies were strewn on the path.
+
+He passed a bench where a girl sat sketching.  A puff of wind whirled her
+drawing to the ground; Harz ran to pick it up.  She took it from him with
+a bow; but, as he turned away, she tore the sketch across.
+
+"Ah!" he said; "why did you do that?"
+
+This girl, who stood with a bit of the torn sketch in either hand, was
+slight and straight; and her face earnest and serene.  She gazed at Harz
+with large, clear, greenish eyes; her lips and chin were defiant, her
+forehead tranquil.
+
+"I don't like it."
+
+"Will you let me look at it?  I am a painter."
+
+"It isn't worth looking at, but--if you wish--"
+
+He put the two halves of the sketch together.
+
+"You see!" she said at last; "I told you."
+
+Harz did not answer, still looking at the sketch.  The girl frowned.
+
+Harz asked her suddenly:
+
+"Why do you paint?"
+
+She coloured, and said:
+
+"Show me what is wrong."
+
+"I cannot show you what is wrong, there is nothing wrong--but why do you
+paint?"
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+Harz shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"You've no business to do that," said the girl in a hurt voice; "I want
+to know."
+
+"Your heart is not in it," said Harz.
+
+She looked at him, startled; her eyes had grown thoughtful.
+
+"I suppose that is it.  There are so many other things--"
+
+"There should be nothing else," said Harz.
+
+She broke in: "I don't want always to be thinking of myself. Suppose--"
+
+"Ah!  When you begin supposing!"
+
+The girl confronted him; she had torn the sketch again.
+
+"You mean that if it does not matter enough, one had better not do it at
+all.  I don't know if you are right--I think you are."
+
+There was the sound of a nervous cough, and Harz saw behind him his three
+visitors--Miss Naylor offering him her hand; Greta, flushed, with a bunch
+of wild flowers, staring intently in his face; and the terrier, sniffing
+at his trousers.
+
+Miss Naylor broke an awkward silence.
+
+"We wondered if you would still be here, Christian.  I am sorry to
+interrupt you--I was not aware that you knew Mr. Herr--"
+
+"Harz is my name--we were just talking"
+
+"About my sketch.  Oh, Greta, you do tickle!  Will you come and have
+breakfast with us to-day, Herr Harz?  It's our turn, you know."
+
+Harz, glancing at his dusty clothes, excused himself.
+
+But Greta in a pleading voice said: "Oh! do come!  Scruff likes you. It
+is so dull when there is nobody for breakfast but ourselves."
+
+Miss Naylor's mouth began to twist.  Harz hurriedly broke in:
+
+"Thank you.  I will come with pleasure; you don't mind my being dirty?"
+
+"Oh no! we do not mind; then we shall none of us wash, and afterwards I
+shall show you my rabbits."
+
+Miss Naylor, moving from foot to foot, like a bird on its perch,
+exclaimed:
+
+"I hope you won't regret it, not a very good meal--the girls are so
+impulsive--such informal invitation; we shall be very glad."
+
+But Greta pulled softly at her sister's sleeve, and Christian, gathering
+her things, led the way.
+
+Harz followed in amazement; nothing of this kind had come into his life
+before.  He kept shyly glancing at the girls; and, noting the speculative
+innocence in Greta's eyes, he smiled.  They soon came to two great
+poplar-trees, which stood, like sentinels, one on either side of an
+unweeded gravel walk leading through lilac bushes to a house painted dull
+pink, with green-shuttered windows, and a roof of greenish slate.  Over
+the door in faded crimson letters were written the words, "Villa Rubein."
+
+"That is to the stables," said Greta, pointing down a path, where some
+pigeons were sunning themselves on a wall.  "Uncle Nic keeps his horses
+there: Countess and Cuckoo--his horses begin with C, because of
+Chris--they are quite beautiful.  He says he could drive them to
+Kingdom-Come and they would not turn their hair.  Bow, and say
+'Good-morning' to our house!"
+
+Harz bowed.
+
+"Father said all strangers should, and I think it brings good luck." From
+the doorstep she looked round at Harz, then ran into the house.
+
+A broad, thick-set man, with stiff, brushed-up hair, a short, brown,
+bushy beard parted at the chin, a fresh complexion, and blue glasses
+across a thick nose, came out, and called in a bluff voice:
+
+"Ha! my good dears, kiss me quick--prrt!  How goes it then this morning? 
+A good walk, hein?"  The sound of many loud rapid kisses followed.
+
+"Ha, Fraulein, good!"  He became aware of Harz's figure standing in the
+doorway: "Und der Herr?"
+
+Miss Naylor hurriedly explained.
+
+"Good!  An artist!  Kommen Sie herein, I am delight.  You will breakfast?
+I too--yes, yes, my dears--I too breakfast with you this morning.  I have
+the hunter's appetite."
+
+Harz, looking at him keenly, perceived him to be of middle height and
+age, stout, dressed in a loose holland jacket, a very white, starched
+shirt, and blue silk sash; that he looked particularly clean, had an air
+of belonging to Society, and exhaled a really fine aroma of excellent
+cigars and the best hairdresser's essences.
+
+The room they entered was long and rather bare; there was a huge map on
+the wall, and below it a pair of globes on crooked supports, resembling
+two inflated frogs erect on their hind legs.  In one corner was a cottage
+piano, close to a writing-table heaped with books and papers; this nook,
+sacred to Christian, was foreign to the rest of the room, which was
+arranged with supernatural neatness.  A table was laid for breakfast, and
+the sun-warmed air came in through French windows.
+
+The meal went merrily; Herr Paul von Morawitz was never in such spirits
+as at table.  Words streamed from him.  Conversing with Harz, he talked
+of Art as who should say: "One does not claim to be a connoisseur--pas si
+bete--still, one has a little knowledge, que diable!"  He recommended him
+a man in the town who sold cigars that were "not so very bad."  He
+consumed porridge, ate an omelette; and bending across to Greta gave her
+a sounding kiss, muttering: "Kiss me quick!"--an expression he had picked
+up in a London music-hall, long ago, and considered chic.  He asked his
+daughters' plans, and held out porridge to the terrier, who refused it
+with a sniff.
+
+"Well," he said suddenly, looking at Miss Naylor, "here is a gentleman
+who has not even heard our names!"
+
+The little lady began her introductions in a breathless voice.
+
+"Good!"  Herr Paul said, puffing out his lips: "Now we know each other!"
+and, brushing up the ends of his moustaches, he carried off Harz into
+another room, decorated with pipe-racks, prints of dancing-girls,
+spittoons, easy-chairs well-seasoned by cigar smoke, French novels, and
+newspapers.
+
+The household at Villa Rubein was indeed of a mixed and curious nature.
+Cut on both floors by corridors, the Villa was divided into four
+divisions; each of which had its separate inhabitants, an arrangement
+which had come about in the following way:
+
+When old Nicholas Treffry died, his estate, on the boundary of Cornwall,
+had been sold and divided up among his three surviving
+children--Nicholas, who was much the eldest, a partner in the well-known
+firm of Forsyte and Treffry, teamen, of the Strand; Constance, married to
+a man called Decie; and Margaret, at her father's death engaged to the
+curate of the parish, John Devorell, who shortly afterwards became its
+rector.  By his marriage with Margaret Treffry the rector had one child
+called Christian.  Soon after this he came into some property, and died,
+leaving it unfettered to his widow. Three years went by, and when the
+child was six years old, Mrs. Devorell, still young and pretty, came to
+live in London with her brother Nicholas.  It was there that she met Paul
+von Morawitz--the last of an old Czech family, who had lived for many
+hundred years on their estates near Budweiss.  Paul had been left an
+orphan at the age of ten, and without a solitary ancestral acre.  Instead
+of acres, he inherited the faith that nothing was too good for a von
+Morawitz.  In later years his savoir faire enabled him to laugh at faith,
+but it stayed quietly with him all the same.  The absence of acres was of
+no great consequence, for through his mother, the daughter of a banker in
+Vienna, he came into a well-nursed fortune.  It befitted a von Morawitz
+that he should go into the Cavalry, but, unshaped for soldiering, he soon
+left the Service; some said he had a difference with his Colonel over the
+quality of food provided during some manoeuvres; others that he had
+retired because his chargers did not fit his legs, which were, indeed,
+rather round.
+
+He had an admirable appetite for pleasure; a man-about-town's life suited
+him.  He went his genial, unreflecting, costly way in Vienna, Paris,
+London.  He loved exclusively those towns, and boasted that he was as
+much at home in one as in another.  He combined exuberant vitality with
+fastidiousness of palate, and devoted both to the acquisition of a
+special taste in women, weeds, and wines; above all he was blessed with a
+remarkable digestion.  He was thirty when he met Mrs. Devorell; and she
+married him because he was so very different from anybody she had ever
+seen.  People more dissimilar were never mated.  To Paul--accustomed to
+stage doors--freshness, serene tranquillity, and obvious purity were the
+baits; he had run through more than half his fortune, too, and the fact
+that she had money was possibly not overlooked.  Be that as it may, he
+was fond of her; his heart was soft, he developed a domestic side.
+
+Greta was born to them after a year of marriage.  The instinct of the
+"freeman" was, however, not dead in Paul; he became a gambler.  He lost
+the remainder of his fortune without being greatly disturbed. When he
+began to lose his wife's fortune too things naturally became more
+difficult.  Not too much remained when Nicholas Treffry stepped in, and
+caused his sister to settle what was left on her daughters, after
+providing a life-interest for herself and Paul.  Losing his supplies, the
+good man had given up his cards.  But the instinct of the "freeman" was
+still living in his breast; he took to drink.  He was never grossly
+drunk, and rarely very sober.  His wife sorrowed over this new passion;
+her health, already much enfeebled, soon broke down.  The doctors sent
+her to the Tyrol.  She seemed to benefit by this, and settled down at
+Botzen.  The following year, when Greta was just ten, she died.  It was a
+shock to Paul.  He gave up excessive drinking; became a constant smoker,
+and lent full rein to his natural domesticity.  He was fond of both the
+girls, but did not at all understand them; Greta, his own daughter, was
+his favourite.  Villa Rubein remained their home; it was cheap and roomy.
+Money, since Paul became housekeeper to himself, was scarce.
+
+About this time Mrs. Decie, his wife's sister, whose husband had died in
+the East, returned to England; Paul invited her to come and live with
+them.  She had her own rooms, her own servant; the arrangement suited
+Paul--it was economically sound, and there was some one always there to
+take care of the girls.  In truth he began to feel the instinct of the
+"freeman" rising again within him; it was pleasant to run over to Vienna
+now and then; to play piquet at a Club in Gries, of which he was the
+shining light; in a word, to go "on the tiles" a little.  One could not
+always mourn--even if a woman were an angel; moreover, his digestion was
+as good as ever.
+
+The fourth quarter of this Villa was occupied by Nicholas Treffry, whose
+annual sojourn out of England perpetually surprised himself. Between him
+and his young niece, Christian, there existed, however, a rare sympathy;
+one of those affections between the young and old, which, mysteriously
+born like everything in life, seems the only end and aim to both, till
+another feeling comes into the younger heart.
+
+Since a long and dangerous illness, he had been ordered to avoid the
+English winter, and at the commencement of each spring he would appear at
+Botzen, driving his own horses by easy stages from the Italian Riviera,
+where he spent the coldest months.  He always stayed till June before
+going back to his London Club, and during all that time he let no day
+pass without growling at foreigners, their habits, food, drink, and
+raiment, with a kind of big dog's growling that did nobody any harm.  The
+illness had broken him very much; he was seventy, but looked more.  He
+had a servant, a Luganese, named Dominique, devoted to him.  Nicholas
+Treffry had found him overworked in an hotel, and had engaged him with
+the caution: "Look--here, Dominique!  I swear!"  To which Dominique, dark
+of feature, saturnine and ironical, had only replied: "Tres biens,
+M'sieur!"
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+Harz and his host sat in leather chairs; Herr Paul's square back was
+wedged into a cushion, his round legs crossed.  Both were smoking, and
+they eyed each other furtively, as men of different stamp do when first
+thrown together.  The young artist found his host extremely new and
+disconcerting; in his presence he felt both shy and awkward. Herr Paul,
+on the other hand, very much at ease, was thinking indolently:
+
+'Good-looking young fellow--comes of the people, I expect, not at all the
+manner of the world; wonder what he talks about.'
+
+Presently noticing that Harz was looking at a photograph, he said: "Ah!
+yes! that was a woman!  They are not to be found in these days. She could
+dance, the little Coralie!  Did you ever see such arms?  Confess that she
+is beautiful, hein?"
+
+"She has individuality," said Harz.  "A fine type!"
+
+Herr Paul blew out a cloud of smoke.
+
+"Yes," he murmured, "she was fine all over!"  He had dropped his
+eyeglasses, and his full brown eyes, with little crow's-feet at the
+corners, wandered from his visitor to his cigar.
+
+'He'd be like a Satyr if he wasn't too clean,' thought Harz.  'Put vine
+leaves in his hair, paint him asleep, with his hands crossed, so!'
+
+"When I am told a person has individuality," Herr Paul was saying in a
+rich and husky voice, "I generally expect boots that bulge, an umbrella
+of improper colour; I expect a creature of 'bad form' as they say in
+England; who will shave some days and some days will not shave; who
+sometimes smells of India-rubber, and sometimes does not smell, which is
+discouraging!"
+
+"You do not approve of individuality?" said Harz shortly.
+
+"Not if it means doing, and thinking, as those who know better do not do,
+or think."
+
+"And who are those who know better?"
+
+"Ah! my dear, you are asking me a riddle?  Well, then--Society, men of
+birth, men of recognised position, men above eccentricity, in a word, of
+reputation."
+
+Harz looked at him fixedly.  "Men who haven't the courage of their own
+ideas, not even the courage to smell of India-rubber; men who have no
+desires, and so can spend all their time making themselves flat!"
+
+Herr Paul drew out a red silk handkerchief and wiped his beard.  "I
+assure you, my dear," he said, "it is easier to be flat; it is more
+respectable to be flat.  Himmel! why not, then, be flat?"
+
+"Like any common fellow?"
+
+"Certes; like any common fellow--like me, par exemple!"  Herr Paul waved
+his hand.  When he exercised unusual tact, he always made use of a French
+expression.
+
+Harz flushed.  Herr Paul followed up his victory.  "Come, come!" he said.
+"Pass me my men of repute! que diable! we are not anarchists."
+
+"Are you sure?" said Harz.
+
+Herr Paul twisted his moustache.  "I beg your pardon," he said slowly.
+But at this moment the door was opened; a rumbling voice remarked:
+"Morning, Paul.  Who's your visitor?"  Harz saw a tall, bulky figure in
+the doorway.
+
+"Come in,"' called out Herr Paul.  "Let me present to you a new
+acquaintance, an artist: Herr Harz--Mr. Nicholas Treffry.  Psumm bumm! 
+All this introducing is dry work."  And going to the sideboard he poured
+out three glasses of a light, foaming beer.
+
+Mr. Treffry waved it from him: "Not for me," he said: "Wish I could! 
+They won't let me look at it."  And walking over, to the window with a
+heavy tread, which trembled like his voice, he sat down.  There was
+something in his gait like the movements of an elephant's hind legs. He
+was very tall (it was said, with the customary exaggeration of family
+tradition, that there never had been a male Treffry under six feet in
+height), but now he stooped, and had grown stout.  There was something at
+once vast and unobtrusive about his personality.
+
+He wore a loose brown velvet jacket, and waistcoat, cut to show a soft
+frilled shirt and narrow black ribbon tie; a thin gold chain was looped
+round his neck and fastened to his fob.  His heavy cheeks had folds in
+them like those in a bloodhound's face.  He wore big, drooping,
+yellow-grey moustaches, which he had a habit of sucking, and a goatee
+beard.  He had long loose ears that might almost have been said to gap.
+On his head there was a soft black hat, large in the brim and low in the
+crown.  His grey eyes, heavy-lidded, twinkled under their bushy brows
+with a queer, kind cynicism.  As a young man he had sown many a wild oat;
+but he had also worked and made money in business; he had, in fact,
+burned the candle at both ends; but he had never been unready to do his
+fellows a good turn.  He had a passion for driving, and his reckless
+method of pursuing this art had caused him to be nicknamed: "The
+notorious Treffry."
+
+Once, when he was driving tandem down a hill with a loose rein, the
+friend beside him had said: "For all the good you're doing with those
+reins, Treffry, you might as well throw them on the horses' necks."
+
+"Just so," Treffry had answered.  At the bottom of the hill they had gone
+over a wall into a potato patch.  Treffry had broken several ribs; his
+friend had gone unharmed.
+
+He was a great sufferer now, but, constitutionally averse to being
+pitied, he had a disconcerting way of humming, and this, together with
+the shake in his voice, and his frequent use of peculiar phrases, made
+the understanding of his speech depend at times on intuition rather than
+intelligence.
+
+The clock began to strike eleven.  Harz muttered an excuse, shook hands
+with his host, and bowing to his new acquaintance, went away. He caught a
+glimpse of Greta's face against the window, and waved his hand to her. In
+the road he came on Dawney, who was turning in between the poplars, with
+thumbs as usual hooked in the armholes of his waistcoat.
+
+"Hallo!" the latter said.
+
+"Doctor!" Harz answered slyly; "the Fates outwitted me, it seems."
+
+"Serve you right," said Dawney, "for your confounded egoism!  Wait here
+till I come out, I shan't be many minutes."
+
+But Harz went on his way.  A cart drawn by cream-coloured oxen was
+passing slowly towards the bridge.  In front of the brushwood piled on it
+two peasant girls were sitting with their feet on a mat of grass--the
+picture of contentment.
+
+"I'm wasting my time!" he thought.  "I've done next to nothing in two
+months.  Better get back to London!  That girl will never make a
+painter!"  She would never make a painter, but there was something in her
+that he could not dismiss so rapidly.  She was not exactly beautiful, but
+she was sympathetic.  The brow was pleasing, with dark-brown hair softly
+turned back, and eyes so straight and shining. The two sisters were very
+different!  The little one was innocent, yet mysterious; the elder seemed
+as clear as crystal!
+
+He had entered the town, where the arcaded streets exuded their peculiar
+pungent smell of cows and leather, wood-smoke, wine-casks, and drains.
+The sound of rapid wheels over the stones made him turn his head.  A
+carriage drawn by red-roan horses was passing at a great pace.  People
+stared at it, standing still, and looking alarmed.  It swung from side to
+side and vanished round a corner.  Harz saw Mr. Nicholas Treffry in a
+long, whitish dust-coat; his Italian servant, perched behind, was holding
+to the seat-rail, with a nervous grin on his dark face.
+
+'Certainly,' Harz thought, 'there's no getting away from these people
+this morning--they are everywhere.'
+
+In his studio he began to sort his sketches, wash his brushes, and drag
+out things he had accumulated during his two months' stay.  He even began
+to fold his blanket door.  But suddenly he stopped.  Those two girls!  Why
+not try?  What a picture!  The two heads, the sky, and leaves!  Begin
+to-morrow!  Against that window--no, better at the Villa!  Call the
+picture--Spring...!
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The wind, stirring among trees and bushes, flung the young leaves
+skywards.  The trembling of their silver linings was like the joyful
+flutter of a heart at good news.  It was one of those Spring mornings
+when everything seems full of a sweet restlessness--soft clouds chasing
+fast across the sky; soft scents floating forth and dying; the notes of
+birds, now shrill and sweet, now hushed in silences; all nature striving
+for something, nothing at peace.
+
+Villa Rubein withstood the influence of the day, and wore its usual look
+of rest and isolation.  Harz sent in his card, and asked to see "der
+Herr."  The servant, a grey-eyed, clever-looking Swiss with no hair on
+his face, came back saying:
+
+"Der Herr, mein Herr, is in the Garden gone."  Harz followed him.
+
+Herr Paul, a small white flannel cap on his head, gloves on his hands,
+and glasses on his nose, was watering a rosebush, and humming the
+serenade from Faust.
+
+This aspect of the house was very different from the other.  The sun fell
+on it, and over a veranda creepers clung and scrambled in long scrolls.
+There was a lawn, with freshly mown grass; flower-beds were laid out, and
+at the end of an avenue of young acacias stood an arbour covered with
+wisteria.
+
+In the east, mountain peaks--fingers of snow--glittered above the mist. 
+A grave simplicity lay on that scene, on the roofs and spires, the
+valleys and the dreamy hillsides, with their yellow scars and purple
+bloom, and white cascades, like tails of grey horses swishing in the
+wind.
+
+Herr Paul held out his hand: "What can we do for you?" he said.
+
+"I have to beg a favour," replied Harz.  "I wish to paint your daughters.
+I will bring the canvas here--they shall have no trouble. I would paint
+them in the garden when they have nothing else to do."
+
+Herr Paul looked at him dubiously--ever since the previous day he had
+been thinking: 'Queer bird, that painter--thinks himself the devil of a
+swell!  Looks a determined fellow too!'  Now--staring in the painter's
+face--it seemed to him, on the whole, best if some one else refused this
+permission.
+
+"With all the pleasure, my dear sir," he said.  "Come, let us ask these
+two young ladies!" and putting down his hose, he led the way towards the
+arbour, thinking: 'You'll be disappointed, my young conqueror, or I'm
+mistaken.'
+
+Miss Naylor and the girls were sitting in the shade, reading La
+Fontaine's fables.  Greta, with one eye on her governess, was stealthily
+cutting a pig out of orange peel.
+
+"Ah! my dear dears!" began Herr Paul, who in the presence of Miss Naylor
+always paraded his English.  "Here is our friend, who has a very
+flattering request to make; he would paint you, yes--both together,
+alfresco, in the air, in the sunshine, with the birds, the little birds!"
+
+Greta, gazing at Harz, gushed deep pink, and furtively showed him her
+pig.
+
+Christian said: "Paint us?  Oh no!"
+
+She saw Harz looking at her, and added, slowly: "If you really wish it, I
+suppose we could!" then dropped her eyes.
+
+"Ah!" said Herr Paul raising his brows till his glasses fell from his
+nose: "And what says Gretchen?  Does she want to be handed up to
+posterities a little peacock along with the other little birds?"
+
+Greta, who had continued staring at the painter, said: "Of--course
+--I--want--to--be."
+
+"Prrt!" said Herr Paul, looking at Miss Naylor.  The little lady indeed
+opened her mouth wide, but all that came forth was a tiny squeak, as
+sometimes happens when one is anxious to say something, and has not
+arranged beforehand what it shall be.
+
+The affair seemed ended; Harz heaved a sigh of satisfaction.  But Herr
+Paul had still a card to play.
+
+"There is your Aunt," he said; "there are things to be considered--one
+must certainly inquire--so, we shall see."  Kissing Greta loudly on both
+cheeks, he went towards the house.
+
+"What makes you want to paint us?" Christian asked, as soon as he was
+gone.
+
+"I think it very wrong," Miss Naylor blurted out.
+
+"Why?" said Harz, frowning.
+
+"Greta is so young--there are lessons--it is such a waste of time!"
+
+His eyebrows twitched: "Ah!  You think so!"
+
+"I don't see why it is a waste of time," said Christian quietly; "there
+are lots of hours when we sit here and do nothing."
+
+"And it is very dull," put in Greta, with a pout.
+
+"You are rude, Greta," said Miss Naylor in a little rage, pursing her
+lips, and taking up her knitting.
+
+"I think it seems always rude to speak the truth," said Greta.  Miss
+Naylor looked at her in that concentrated manner with which she was in
+the habit of expressing displeasure.
+
+But at this moment a servant came, and said that Mrs. Decie would be glad
+to see Herr Harz.  The painter made them a stiff bow, and followed the
+servant to the house.  Miss Naylor and the two girls watched his progress
+with apprehensive eyes; it was clear that he had been offended.
+
+Crossing the veranda, and passing through an open window hung with silk
+curtains, Hart entered a cool dark room.  This was Mrs. Decie's sanctum,
+where she conducted correspondence, received her visitors, read the
+latest literature, and sometimes, when she had bad headaches, lay for
+hours on the sofa, with a fan, and her eyes closed.  There was a scent of
+sandalwood, a suggestion of the East, a kind of mystery, in here, as if
+things like chairs and tables were not really what they seemed, but
+something much less commonplace.
+
+The visitor looked twice, to be quite sure of anything; there were many
+plants, bead curtains, and a deal of silverwork and china.
+
+Mrs. Decie came forward in the slightly rustling silk which--whether in
+or out of fashion--always accompanied her.  A tall woman, over fifty, she
+moved as if she had been tied together at the knees.  Her face was long,
+with broad brows, from which her sandy-grey hair was severely waved back;
+she had pale eyes, and a perpetual, pale, enigmatic smile. Her complexion
+had been ruined by long residence in India, and might unkindly have been
+called fawn-coloured.  She came close to Harz, keeping her eyes on his,
+with her head bent slightly forward.
+
+"We are so pleased to know you," she said, speaking in a voice which had
+lost all ring.  "It is charming to find some one in these parts who can
+help us to remember that there is such a thing as Art.  We had Mr.
+C---here last autumn, such a charming fellow.  He was so interested in
+the native customs and dresses.  You are a subject painter, too, I think? 
+Won't you sit down?"
+
+She went on for some time, introducing painters' names, asking questions,
+skating round the edge of what was personal.  And the young man stood
+before her with a curious little smile fixed on his lips.  'She wants to
+know whether I'm worth powder and shot,' he thought.
+
+"You wish to paint my nieces?" Mrs. Decie said at last, leaning back on
+her settee.
+
+"I wish to have that honour," Harz answered with a bow.
+
+"And what sort of picture did you think of?"
+
+"That," said Harz, "is in the future.  I couldn't tell you."  And he
+thought: 'Will she ask me if I get my tints in Paris, like the woman
+Tramper told me of?'
+
+The perpetual pale smile on Mrs. Decie's face seemed to invite his
+confidence, yet to warn him that his words would be sucked in somewhere
+behind those broad fine brows, and carefully sorted.  Mrs. Decie, indeed,
+was thinking: 'Interesting young man, regular Bohemian--no harm in that
+at his age; something Napoleonic in his face; probably has no dress
+clothes.  Yes, should like to see more of him!'  She had a fine eye for
+points of celebrity; his name was unfamiliar, would probably have been
+scouted by that famous artist Mr. C---, but she felt her instinct urging
+her on to know him.  She was, to do her justice, one of those "lion"
+finders who seek the animal for pleasure, not for the glory it brings
+them; she had the courage of her instincts--lion-entities were
+indispensable to her, but she trusted to divination to secure them;
+nobody could foist a "lion" on her.
+
+"It will be very nice.  You will stay and have some lunch?  The
+arrangements here are rather odd.  Such a mixed household--but there is
+always lunch at two o'clock for any one who likes, and we all dine at
+seven.  You would have your sittings in the afternoons, perhaps?  I
+should so like to see your sketches.  You are using the old house on the
+wall for studio; that is so original of you!"
+
+Harz would not stay to lunch, but asked if he might begin work that
+afternoon; he left a little suffocated by the sandalwood and sympathy of
+this sphinx-like woman.
+
+Walking home along the river wall, with the singing of the larks and
+thrushes, the rush of waters, the humming of the chafers in his ears, he
+felt that he would make something fine of this subject.  Before his eyes
+the faces of the two girls continually started up, framed by the sky,
+with young leaves guttering against their cheeks.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+Three days had passed since Harz began his picture, when early in the
+morning, Greta came from Villa Rubein along the river dyke and sat down
+on a bench from which the old house on the wall was visible. She had not
+been there long before Harz came out.
+
+"I did not knock," said Greta, "because you would not have heard, and it
+is so early, so I have been waiting for you a quarter of an hour."
+
+Selecting a rosebud, from some flowers in her hand, she handed it to him.
+"That is my first rosebud this year," she said; "it is for you because
+you are painting me.  To-day I am thirteen, Herr Harz; there is not to be
+a sitting, because it is my birthday; but, instead, we are all going to
+Meran to see the play of Andreas Hofer.  You are to come too, please; I
+am here to tell you, and the others shall be here directly."
+
+Harz bowed: "And who are the others?"
+
+"Christian, and Dr. Edmund, Miss Naylor, and Cousin Teresa.  Her husband
+is ill, so she is sad, but to-day she is going to forget that.  It is not
+good to be always sad, is it, Herr Harz?"
+
+He laughed: "You could not be."
+
+Greta answered gravely: "Oh yes, I could.  I too am often sad.  You are
+making fun.  You are not to make fun to-day, because it is my birthday.
+Do you think growing up is nice, Herr Harz?"
+
+"No, Fraulein Greta, it is better to have all the time before you."
+
+They walked on side by side.
+
+"I think," said Greta, "you are very much afraid of losing time. Chris
+says that time is nothing."
+
+"Time is everything," responded Harz.
+
+"She says that time is nothing, and thought is everything," Greta
+murmured, rubbing a rose against her cheek, "but I think you cannot have
+a thought unless you have the time to think it in.  There are the others!
+Look!"
+
+A cluster of sunshades on the bridge glowed for a moment and was lost in
+shadow.
+
+"Come," said Harz, "let's join them!"
+
+At Meran, under Schloss Tirol, people were streaming across the meadows
+into the open theatre.  Here were tall fellows in mountain dress, with
+leather breeches, bare knees, and hats with eagles' feathers; here were
+fruit-sellers, burghers and their wives, mountebanks, actors, and every
+kind of visitor.  The audience, packed into an enclosure of high boards,
+sweltered under the burning sun. Cousin Teresa, tall and thin, with hard,
+red cheeks, shaded her pleasant eyes with her hand.
+
+The play began.  It depicted the rising in the Tyrol of 1809: the village
+life, dances and yodelling; murmurings and exhortations, the warning beat
+of drums; then the gathering, with flintlocks, pitchforks, knives; the
+battle and victory; the homecoming, and festival.  Then the second
+gathering, the roar of cannon; betrayal, capture, death.  The impassive
+figure of the patriot Andreas Hofer always in front, black-bearded,
+leathern-girdled, under the blue sky, against a screen of mountains.
+
+Harz and Christian sat behind the others.  He seemed so intent on the
+play that she did not speak, but watched his face, rigid with a kind of
+cold excitement; he seemed to be transported by the life passing before
+them.  Something of his feeling seized on her; when the play was over she
+too was trembling.  In pushing their way out they became separated from
+the others.
+
+"There's a short cut to the station here," said Christian; "let's go this
+way."
+
+The path rose a little; a narrow stream crept alongside the meadow, and
+the hedge was spangled with wild roses.  Christian kept glancing shyly at
+the painter.  Since their meeting on the river wall her thoughts had
+never been at rest.  This stranger, with his keen face, insistent eyes,
+and ceaseless energy, had roused a strange feeling in her; his words had
+put shape to something in her not yet expressed. She stood aside at a
+stile to make way for some peasant boys, dusty and rough-haired, who sang
+and whistled as they went by.
+
+"I was like those boys once," said Harz.
+
+Christian turned to him quickly.  "Ah! that was why you felt the play, so
+much."
+
+"It's my country up there.  I was born amongst the mountains.  I looked
+after the cows, and slept in hay-cocks, and cut the trees in winter. They
+used to call me a 'black sheep,' a 'loafer' in my village."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Ah! why?  I worked as hard as any of them.  But I wanted to get away. Do
+you think I could have stayed there all my life?"
+
+Christian's eyes grew eager.
+
+"If people don't understand what it is you want to do, they always call
+you a loafer!" muttered Harz.
+
+"But you did what you meant to do in spite of them," Christian said.
+
+For herself it was so hard to finish or decide.  When in the old days she
+told Greta stories, the latter, whose instinct was always for the
+definite, would say: "And what came at the end, Chris?  Do finish it this
+morning!" but Christian never could.  Her thoughts were deep, vague,
+dreamy, invaded by both sides of every question.  Whatever she did, her
+needlework, her verse-making, her painting, all had its charm; but it was
+not always what it was intended for at the beginning.  Nicholas Treffry
+had once said of her: "When Chris starts out to make a hat, it may turn
+out an altar-cloth, but you may bet it won't be a hat."  It was her
+instinct to look for what things meant; and this took more than all her
+time.  She knew herself better than most girls of nineteen, but it was
+her reason that had informed her, not her feelings.  In her sheltered
+life, her heart had never been ruffled except by rare fits of
+passion--"tantrums" old Nicholas Treffry dubbed them--at what seemed to
+her mean or unjust.
+
+"If I were a man," she said, "and going to be great, I should have wanted
+to begin at the very bottom as you did."
+
+"Yes," said Harz quickly, "one should be able to feel everything."
+
+She did not notice how simply he assumed that he was going to be great.
+He went on, a smile twisting his mouth unpleasantly beneath its dark
+moustache--"Not many people think like you!  It's a crime not to have
+been born a gentleman."
+
+"That's a sneer," said Christian; "I didn't think you would have
+sneered!"
+
+"It is true.  What is the use of pretending that it isn't?"
+
+"It may be true, but it is finer not to say it!"
+
+"By Heavens!" said Harz, striking one hand into the other, "if more truth
+were spoken there would not be so many shams."
+
+Christian looked down at him from her seat on the stile.
+
+"You are right all the same, Fraulein Christian," he added suddenly;
+"that's a very little business.  Work is what matters, and trying to see
+the beauty in the world."
+
+Christian's face changed.  She understood, well enough, this craving
+after beauty.  Slipping down from the stile, she drew a slow deep breath.
+
+"Yes!" she said.  Neither spoke for some time, then Harz said shyly:
+
+"If you and Fraulein Greta would ever like to come and see my studio, I
+should be so happy.  I would try and clean it up for you!"
+
+"I should like to come.  I could learn something.  I want to learn."
+
+They were both silent till the path joined the road.
+
+"We must be in front of the others; it's nice to be in front--let's
+dawdle.  I forgot--you never dawdle, Herr Harz."
+
+"After a big fit of work, I can dawdle against any one; then I get
+another fit of work--it's like appetite."
+
+"I'm always dawdling," answered Christian.
+
+By the roadside a peasant woman screwed up her sun-dried face, saying in
+a low voice: "Please, gracious lady, help me to lift this basket!"
+
+Christian stooped, but before she could raise it, Harz hoisted it up on
+his back.
+
+"All right," he nodded; "this good lady doesn't mind."
+
+The woman, looking very much ashamed, walked along by Christian; she kept
+rubbing her brown hands together, and saying; "Gracious lady, I would not
+have wished.  It is heavy, but I would not have wished."
+
+"I'm sure he'd rather carry it," said Christian.
+
+They had not gone far along the road, however, before the others passed
+them in a carriage, and at the strange sight Miss Naylor could be seen
+pursing her lips; Cousin Teresa nodding pleasantly; a smile on Dawney's
+face; and beside him Greta, very demure.  Harz began to laugh.
+
+"What are you laughing at?" asked Christian.
+
+"You English are so funny.  You mustn't do this here, you mustn't do that
+there, it's like sitting in a field of nettles.  If I were to walk with
+you without my coat, that little lady would fall off her seat."  His
+laugh infected Christian; they reached the station feeling that they knew
+each other better.
+
+The sun had dipped behind the mountains when the little train steamed
+down the valley.  All were subdued, and Greta, with a nodding head, slept
+fitfully.  Christian, in her corner, was looking out of the window, and
+Harz kept studying her profile.
+
+He tried to see her eyes.  He had remarked indeed that, whatever their
+expression, the brows, arched and rather wide apart, gave them a peculiar
+look of understanding.  He thought of his picture.  There was nothing in
+her face to seize on, it was too sympathetic, too much like light.  Yet
+her chin was firm, almost obstinate.
+
+The train stopped with a jerk; she looked round at him.  It was as though
+she had said: "You are my friend."
+
+At Villa Rubein, Herr Paul had killed the fatted calf for Greta's Fest.
+When the whole party were assembled, he alone remained standing; and
+waving his arm above the cloth, cried: "My dears!  Your happiness!  There
+are good things here--Come!"  And with a sly look, the air of a conjurer
+producing rabbits, he whipped the cover off the soup tureen:
+
+"Soup-turtle, fat, green fat!"  He smacked his lips.
+
+No servants were allowed, because, as Greta said to Harz:
+
+"It is that we are to be glad this evening."
+
+Geniality radiated from Herr Paul's countenance, mellow as a bowl of
+wine.  He toasted everybody, exhorting them to pleasure.
+
+Harz passed a cracker secretly behind Greta's head, and Miss Naylor,
+moved by a mysterious impulse, pulled it with a sort of gleeful horror;
+it exploded, and Greta sprang off her chair.  Scruff, seeing this,
+appeared suddenly on the sideboard with his forelegs in a plate of soup;
+without moving them, he turned his head, and appeared to accuse the
+company of his false position.  It was the signal for shrieks of
+laughter.  Scruff made no attempt to free his forelegs; but sniffed the
+soup, and finding that nothing happened, began to lap it.
+
+"Take him out!  Oh! take him out!" wailed Greta, "he shall be ill!"
+
+"Allons!  Mon cher!" cried Herr Paul, "c'est magnifique, mais, vous
+savez, ce nest guere la guerre!"  Scruff, with a wild spring, leaped past
+him to the ground.
+
+"Ah!" cried Miss Naylor, "the carpet!"  Fresh moans of mirth shook the
+table; for having tasted the wine of laughter, all wanted as much more as
+they could get.  When Scruff and his traces were effaced, Herr Paul took
+a ladle in his hand.
+
+"I have a toast," he said, waving it for silence; "a toast we will drink
+all together from our hearts; the toast of my little daughter, who to-day
+has thirteen years become; and there is also in our hearts," he
+continued, putting down the ladle and suddenly becoming grave, "the
+thought of one who is not today with us to see this joyful occasion; to
+her, too, in this our happiness we turn our hearts and glasses because it
+is her joy that we should yet be joyful.  I drink to my little daughter;
+may God her shadow bless!"
+
+All stood up, clinking their glasses, and drank: then, in the hush that
+followed, Greta, according to custom, began to sing a German carol; at
+the end of the fourth line she stopped, abashed.
+
+Heir Paul blew his nose loudly, and, taking up a cap that had fallen from
+a cracker, put it on.
+
+Every one followed his example, Miss Naylor attaining the distinction of
+a pair of donkey's ears, which she wore, after another glass of wine,
+with an air of sacrificing to the public good.
+
+At the end of supper came the moment for the offering of gifts.  Herr
+Paul had tied a handkerchief over Greta's eyes, and one by one they
+brought her presents.  Greta, under forfeit of a kiss, was bound to tell
+the giver by the feel of the gift.  Her swift, supple little hands
+explored noiselessly; and in every case she guessed right.
+
+Dawney's present, a kitten, made a scene by clawing at her hair.
+
+"That is Dr. Edmund's," she cried at once.  Christian saw that Harz had
+disappeared, but suddenly he came back breathless, and took his place at
+the end of the rank of givers.
+
+Advancing on tiptoe, he put his present into Greta's hands.  It was a
+small bronze copy of a Donatello statue.
+
+"Oh, Herr Harz!" cried Greta; "I saw it in the studio that day.  It stood
+on the table, and it is lovely."
+
+Mrs. Decie, thrusting her pale eyes close to it, murmured: "Charming!"
+
+Mr. Treffry took it in his forgers.
+
+"Rum little toad!  Cost a pot of money, I expect!"  He eyed Harz
+doubtfully.
+
+They went into the next room now, and Herr Paul, taking Greta's bandage,
+transferred it to his own eyes.
+
+"Take care--take care, all!" he cried; "I am a devil of a catcher," and,
+feeling the air cautiously, he moved forward like a bear about to hug. 
+He caught no one.  Christian and Greta whisked under his arms and left
+him grasping at the air.  Mrs. Decie slipped past with astonishing
+agility.  Mr. Treffry, smoking his cigar, and barricaded in a corner,
+jeered: "Bravo, Paul!  The active beggar!  Can't he run!  Go it, Greta!"
+
+At last Herr Paul caught Cousin Teresa, who, fattened against the wall,
+lost her head, and stood uttering tiny shrieks.
+
+Suddenly Mrs. Decie started playing The Blue Danube.  Herr Paul dropped
+the handkerchief, twisted his moustache up fiercely, glared round the
+room, and seizing Greta by the waist, began dancing furiously, bobbing up
+and down like a cork in lumpy water.  Cousin Teresa followed suit with
+Miss Naylor, both very solemn, and dancing quite different steps.  Harz,
+went up to Christian.
+
+"I can't dance," he said, "that is, I have only danced once, but--if you
+would try with me!"
+
+She put her hand on his arm, and they began.  She danced, light as a
+feather, eyes shining, feet flying, her body bent a little forward. It
+was not a great success at first, but as soon as the time had got into
+Harz's feet, they went swinging on when all the rest had stopped.
+Sometimes one couple or another slipped through the window to dance on
+the veranda, and came whirling in again.  The lamplight glowed on the
+girls' white dresses; on Herr Paul's perspiring face. He constituted in
+himself a perfect orgy, and when the music stopped flung himself, full
+length, on the sofa gasping out:
+
+"My God!  But, my God!"
+
+Suddenly Christian felt Harz cling to her arm.
+
+Glowing and panting she looked at him.
+
+"Giddy!" he murmured: "I dance so badly; but I'll soon learn."
+
+Greta clapped her hands: "Every evening we will dance, every evening we
+will dance."
+
+Harz looked at Christian; the colour had deepened in her face.
+
+"I'll show you how they dance in my village, feet upon the ceiling!" And
+running to Dawney, he said:
+
+"Hold me here!  Lift me--so!  Now, on--two," he tried to swing his feet
+above his head, but, with an "Ouch!" from Dawney, they collapsed, and sat
+abruptly on the floor.  This untimely event brought the evening to an
+end.  Dawney left, escorting Cousin Teresa, and Harz strode home humming
+The Blue Danube, still feeling Christian's waist against his arm.
+
+In their room the two girls sat long at the window to cool themselves
+before undressing.
+
+"Ah!" sighed Greta, "this is the happiest birthday I have had."
+
+Cristian too thought: 'I have never been so happy in my life as I have
+been to-day.  I should like every day to be like this!'  And she leant
+out into the night, to let the air cool her cheeks.
+
+"Chris!" said Greta some days after this, "Miss Naylor danced last
+evening; I think she shall have a headache to-day.  There is my French
+and my history this morning."
+
+"Well, I can take them."
+
+"That is nice; then we can talk.  I am sorry about the headache.  I shall
+give her some of my Eau de Cologne."
+
+Miss Naylor's headaches after dancing were things on which to calculate.
+The girls carried their books into the arbour; it was a showery day, and
+they had to run for shelter through the raindrops and sunlight.
+
+"The French first, Chris!"  Greta liked her French, in which she was not
+far inferior to Christian; the lesson therefore proceeded in an admirable
+fashion.  After one hour exactly by her watch (Mr. Treffry's birthday
+present loved and admired at least once every hour) Greta rose.
+
+"Chris, I have not fed my rabbits."
+
+"Be quick! there's not much time for history."
+
+Greta vanished.  Christian watched the bright water dripping from the
+roof; her lips were parted in a smile.  She was thinking of something
+Harz had said the night before.  A discussion having been started as to
+whether average opinion did, or did not, safeguard Society, Harz, after
+sitting silent, had burst out: "I think one man in earnest is better than
+twenty half-hearted men who follow tamely; in the end he does Society
+most good."
+
+Dawney had answered: "If you had your way there would be no Society."
+
+"I hate Society because it lives upon the weak."
+
+"Bah!" Herr Paul chimed in; "the weak goes to the wall; that is as
+certain as that you and I are here."
+
+"Let them fall against the wall," cried Harz; "don't push them there...."
+
+Greta reappeared, walking pensively in the rain.
+
+"Bino," she said, sighing, "has eaten too much.  I remember now, I did
+feed them before.  Must we do the history, Chris?"
+
+"Of course!"
+
+Greta opened her book, and put a finger in the page.  "Herr Harz is very
+kind to me," she said.  "Yesterday he brought a bird which had. come into
+his studio with a hurt wing; he brought it very gently in his
+handkerchief--he is very kind, the bird was not even frightened of him. 
+You did not know about that, Chris?"
+
+Chris flushed a little, and said in a hurt voice
+
+"I don't see what it has to--do with me."
+
+"No," assented Greta.
+
+Christian's colour deepened.  "Go on with your history, Greta."
+
+"Only," pursued Greta, "that he always tells you all about things,
+Chris."
+
+"He doesn't!  How can you say that!"
+
+"I think he does, and it is because you do not make him angry.  It is
+very easy to make him angry; you have only to think differently, and he
+shall be angry at once."
+
+"You are a little cat!" said Christian; "it isn't true, at all.  He hates
+shams, and can't bear meanness; and it is mean to cover up dislikes and
+pretend that you agree with people."
+
+"Papa says that he thinks too much about himself."
+
+"Father!" began Christian hotly; biting her lips she stopped, and turned
+her wrathful eyes on Greta.
+
+"You do not always show your dislikes, Chris."
+
+"I?  What has that to do with it?  Because one is a coward that doesn't
+make it any better, does it?"
+
+"I think that he has a great many dislikes," murmured Greta.
+
+"I wish you would attend to your own faults, and not pry into other
+people's," and pushing the book aside, Christian gazed in front of her.
+
+Some minutes passed, then Greta leaning over, rubbed a cheek against her
+shoulder.
+
+"I am very sorry, Chris--I only wanted to be talking.  Shall I read some
+history?"
+
+"Yes," said Christian coldly.
+
+"Are you angry with me, Chris?"
+
+There was no answer.  The lingering raindrops pattered down on the roof.
+Greta pulled at her sister's sleeve.
+
+"Look, Chris!" she said.  "There is Herr Harz!"
+
+Christian looked up, dropped her eyes again, and said: "Will you go on
+with the history, Greta?"
+
+Greta sighed.
+
+"Yes, I will--but, oh!  Chris, there is the luncheon gong!" and she
+meekly closed the book.
+
+During the following weeks there was a "sitting" nearly every afternoon.
+Miss Naylor usually attended them; the little lady was, to a certain
+extent, carried past objection.  She had begun to take an interest in the
+picture, and to watch the process out of the corner of her eye; in the
+depths of her dear mind, however, she never quite got used to the vanity
+and waste of time; her lips would move and her knitting-needles click in
+suppressed remonstrances.
+
+What Harz did fast he did best; if he had leisure he "saw too much,"
+loving his work so passionately that he could never tell exactly when to
+stop.  He hated to lay things aside, always thinking: "I can get it
+better."  Greta was finished, but with Christian, try as he would, he was
+not satisfied; from day to day her face seemed to him to change, as if
+her soul were growing.
+
+There were things too in her eyes that he could neither read nor
+reproduce.
+
+Dawney would often stroll out to them after his daily visit, and lying on
+the grass, his arms crossed behind his head, and a big cigar between his
+lips, would gently banter everybody.  Tea came at five o'clock, and then
+Mrs. Decie appeared armed with a magazine or novel, for she was proud of
+her literary knowledge.  The sitting was suspended; Harz, with a
+cigarette, would move between the table and the picture, drinking his
+tea, putting a touch in here and there; he never sat down till it was all
+over for the day.  During these "rests" there was talk, usually ending in
+discussion.  Mrs. Decie was happiest in conversations of a literary
+order, making frequent use of such expressions as: "After all, it
+produces an illusion--does anything else matter?"  "Rather a poseur, is
+he not?"  "A question, that, of temperament," or "A matter of the
+definition of words"; and other charming generalities, which sound well,
+and seem to go far, and are pleasingly irrefutable.  Sometimes the
+discussion turned on Art--on points of colour or technique; whether
+realism was quite justified; and should we be pre-Raphaelites?  When
+these discussions started, Christian's eyes would grow bigger and
+clearer, with a sort of shining reasonableness; as though they were
+trying to see into the depths.  And Harz would stare at them.  But the
+look in those eyes eluded him, as if they had no more meaning than Mrs.
+Decie's, which, with their pale, watchful smile, always seemed saying:
+"Come, let us take a little intellectual exercise."
+
+Greta, pulling Scruff's ears, would gaze up at the speakers; when the
+talk was over, she always shook herself.  But if no one came to the
+"sittings," there would sometimes be very earnest, quick talk, sometimes
+long silences.
+
+One day Christian said: "What is your religion?"
+
+Harz finished the touch he was putting on the canvas, before he answered:
+"Roman Catholic, I suppose; I was baptised in that Church."
+
+"I didn't mean that.  Do you believe in a future life?"
+
+"Christian," murmured Greta, who was plaiting blades of grass, "shall
+always want to know what people think about a future life; that is so
+funny!"
+
+"How can I tell?" said Harz; "I've never really thought of it--never had
+the time."
+
+"How can you help thinking?" Christian said: "I have to--it seems to me
+so awful that we might come to an end."
+
+She closed her book, and it slipped off her lap.  She went on: "There
+must be a future life, we're so incomplete.  What's the good of your
+work, for instance?  What's the use of developing if you have to stop?"
+
+"I don't know," answered Harz.  "I don't much care.  All I know is, I've
+got to work."
+
+"But why?"
+
+"For happiness--the real happiness is fighting--the rest is nothing. If
+you have finished a thing, does it ever satisfy you?  You look forward to
+the next thing at once; to wait is wretched!"
+
+Christian clasped her hands behind her neck; sunlight flickered through
+the leaves on to the bosom of her dress.
+
+"Ah!  Stay like that!" cried Harz.
+
+She let her eyes rest on his face, swinging her foot a little.
+
+"You work because you must; but that's not enough.  Why do you feel you
+must?  I want to know what's behind.  When I was travelling with Aunt
+Constance the winter before last we often talked--I've heard her discuss
+it with her friends.  She says we move in circles till we reach Nirvana. 
+But last winter I found I couldn't talk to her; it seemed as if she never
+really meant anything.  Then I started reading--Kant and Hegel--"
+
+"Ah!" put in Harz, "if they would teach me to draw better, or to see a
+new colour in a flower, or an expression in a face, I would read them
+all."
+
+Christian leaned forward: "It must be right to get as near truth as
+possible; every step gained is something.  You believe in truth; truth is
+the same as beauty--that was what you said--you try to paint the truth,
+you always see the beauty.  But how can we know truth, unless we know
+what is at the root of it?"
+
+"I--think," murmured Greta, sotto voce, "you see one way--and he sees
+another--because--you are not one person."
+
+"Of course!" said Christian impatiently, "but why--"
+
+A sound of humming interrupted her.
+
+Nicholas Treffry was coming from the house, holding the Times in one
+hand, and a huge meerschaum pipe in the other.
+
+"Aha!" he said to Harz: "how goes the picture?" and he lowered himself
+into a chair.
+
+"Better to-day, Uncle?" said Christian softly.
+
+Mr. Treffry growled.  "Confounded humbugs, doctors!" he said.  "Your
+father used to swear by them; why, his doctor killed him--made him drink
+such a lot of stuff!"
+
+"Why then do you have a doctor, Uncle Nic?" asked Greta.
+
+Mr. Treffry looked at her; his eyes twinkled.  "I don't know, my dear. If
+they get half a chance, they won't let go of you!"
+
+There had been a gentle breeze all day, but now it had died away; not a
+leaf quivered, not a blade of grass was stirring; from the house were
+heard faint sounds as of some one playing on a pipe.  A blackbird came
+hopping down the path.
+
+"When you were a boy, did you go after birds' nests, Uncle Nic?" Greta
+whispered.
+
+"I believe you, Greta."  The blackbird hopped into the shrubbery.
+
+"You frightened him, Uncle Nic!  Papa says that at Schloss Konig, where
+he lived when he was young, he would always be after jackdaws' nests."
+
+"Gammon, Greta.  Your father never took a jackdaw's nest, his legs are
+much too round!"
+
+"Are you fond of birds, Uncle Nic?"
+
+"Ask me another, Greta!  Well, I s'pose so."
+
+"Then why did you go bird-nesting?  I think it is cruel"
+
+Mr. Treffry coughed behind his paper: "There you have me, Greta," he
+remarked.
+
+Harz began to gather his brushes: "Thank you," he said, "that's all I can
+do to-day."
+
+"Can I look?" Mr. Treffry inquired.
+
+"Certainly!"
+
+Uncle Nic got up slowly, and stood in front of the picture.  "When it's
+for sale," he said at last, "I'll buy it."
+
+Harz bowed; but for some reason he felt annoyed, as if he had been asked
+to part with something personal.
+
+"I thank you," he said.  A gong sounded.
+
+"You'll stay and have a snack with us?" said Mr. Treffry; "the doctor's
+stopping."  Gathering up his paper, he moved off to the house with his
+hand on Greta's shoulder, the terrier running in front.  Harz and
+Christian were left alone.  He was scraping his palette, and she was
+sitting with her elbows resting on her knees; between them, a gleam of
+sunlight dyed the path golden.  It was evening already; the bushes and
+the flowers, after the day's heat, were breathing out perfume; the birds
+had started their evensong.
+
+"Are you tired of sitting for your portrait, Fraulein Christian?"
+
+Christian shook her head.
+
+"I shall get something into it that everybody does not see--something
+behind the surface, that will last."
+
+Christian said slowly: "That's like a challenge.  You were right when you
+said fighting is happiness--for yourself, but not for me.  I'm a coward. 
+I hate to hurt people, I like them to like me.  If you had to do anything
+that would make them hate you, you would do it all the same, if it helped
+your work; that's fine--it's what I can't do. It's--it's everything.  Do
+you like Uncle Nic?"
+
+The young painter looked towards the house, where under the veranda old
+Nicholas Treffry was still in sight; a smile came on his lips.
+
+"If I were the finest painter in the world, he wouldn't think anything of
+me for it, I'm afraid; but if I could show him handfuls of big cheques
+for bad pictures I had painted, he would respect me."
+
+She smiled, and said: "I love him."
+
+"Then I shall like him," Harz answered simply.
+
+She put her hand out, and her fingers met his.  "We shall be late," she
+said, glowing, and catching up her book: "I'm always late!"
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+There was one other guest at dinner, a well-groomed person with pale,
+fattish face, dark eyes, and hair thin on the temples, whose clothes had
+a military cut.  He looked like a man fond of ease, who had gone out of
+his groove, and collided with life.  Herr Paul introduced him as Count
+Mario Sarelli.
+
+Two hanging lamps with crimson shades threw a rosy light over the table,
+where, in the centre stood a silver basket, full of irises. Through the
+open windows the garden was all clusters of black foliage in the dying
+light.  Moths fluttered round the lamps; Greta, following them with her
+eyes, gave quite audible sighs of pleasure when they escaped.  Both girls
+wore white, and Harz, who sat opposite Christian, kept looking at her,
+and wondering why he had not painted her in that dress.
+
+Mrs. Decie understood the art of dining--the dinner, ordered by Herr
+Paul, was admirable; the servants silent as their, shadows; there was
+always a hum of conversation.
+
+Sarelli, who sat on her right hand, seemed to partake of little except
+olives, which he dipped into a glass of sherry.  He turned his black,
+solemn eyes silently from face to face, now and then asking the meaning
+of an English word.  After a discussion on modern Rome, it was debated
+whether or no a criminal could be told by the expression of his face.
+
+"Crime," said Mrs. Decie, passing her hand across her brow--"crime is but
+the hallmark of strong individuality."
+
+Miss Naylor, gushing rather pink, stammered: "A great crime must show
+itself--a murder.  Why, of course!"
+
+"If that were so," said Dawney, "we should only have to look about us--no
+more detectives."
+
+Miss Naylor rejoined with slight severity: "I cannot conceive that such a
+thing can pass the human face by, leaving no impression!"
+
+Harz said abruptly: "There are worse things than murder."
+
+"Ah! par exemple!" said Sarelli.
+
+There was a slight stir all round the table.
+
+"Verry good," cried out Herr Paul, "a vot' sante, cher."
+
+Miss Naylor shivered, as if some one had put a penny down her back; and
+Mrs. Decie, leaning towards Harz, smiled like one who has made a pet dog
+do a trick.  Christian alone was motionless, looking thoughtfully at
+Harz.
+
+"I saw a man tried for murder once," he said, "a murder for revenge; I
+watched the judge, and I thought all the time: 'I'd rather be that
+murderer than you; I've never seen a meaner face; you crawl through life;
+you're not a criminal, simply because you haven't the courage.'"
+
+In the dubious silence following the painter's speech, Mr. Treffry could
+distinctly be heard humming.  Then Sarelli said: "What do you say to
+anarchists, who are not men, but savage beasts, whom I would tear to
+pieces!"
+
+"As to that," Harz answered defiantly, "it maybe wise to hang them, but
+then there are so many other men that it would be wise to hang."
+
+"How can we tell what they went through; what their lives were?" murmured
+Christian.
+
+Miss Naylor, who had been rolling a pellet of bread, concealed it
+hastily.  "They are--always given a chance to--repent--I believe," she
+said.
+
+"For what they are about to receive," drawled Dawney.
+
+Mrs. Decie signalled with her fan: "We are trying to express the
+inexpressible--shall we go into the garden?"
+
+All rose; Harz stood by the window, and in passing, Christian looked at
+him.
+
+He sat down again with a sudden sense of loss.  There was no white figure
+opposite now.  Raising his eyes he met Sarelli's.  The Italian was
+regarding him with a curious stare.
+
+Herr Paul began retailing apiece of scandal he had heard that afternoon.
+
+"Shocking affair!" he said; "I could never have believed it of her!
+B---is quite beside himself.  Yesterday there was a row, it seems!"
+
+"There has been one every day for months," muttered Dawney.
+
+"But to leave without a word, and go no one knows where!  B---is 'viveur'
+no doubt, mais, mon Dieu, que voulezvous?  She was always a poor, pale
+thing.  Why! when my---" he flourished his cigar; "I was not
+always---what I should have been---one lives in a world of flesh and
+blood---we are not all angels---que diable!  But this is a very vulgar
+business.  She goes off; leaves everything---without a word; and B---is
+very fond of her. These things are not done!" the starched bosom of his
+shirt seemed swollen by indignation.
+
+Mr. Treffry, with a heavy hand on the table, eyed him sideways. Dawney
+said slowly:
+
+"B---is a beast; I'm sorry for the poor woman; but what can she do
+alone?"
+
+"There is, no doubt, a man," put in Sarelli.
+
+Herr Paul muttered: "Who knows?"
+
+"What is B---going to do?" said Dawney.
+
+"Ah!" said Herr Paul.  "He is fond of her.  He is a chap of resolution,
+he will get her back.  He told me: 'Well, you know, I shall follow her
+wherever she goes till she comes back.'  He will do it, he is a
+determined chap; he will follow her wherever she goes."
+
+Mr. Treffry drank his wine off at a gulp, and sucked his moustache in
+sharply.
+
+"She was a fool to marry him," said Dawney; "they haven't a point in
+common; she hates him like poison, and she's the better of the two. But
+it doesn't pay a woman to run off like that.  B---had better hurry up,
+though.  What do you think, sir?" he said to Mr. Treffry.
+
+"Eh?" said Mr. Treffry; "how should I know?  Ask Paul there, he's one of
+your moral men, or Count Sarelli."
+
+The latter said impassively: "If I cared for her I should very likely
+kill her--if not--" he shrugged his shoulders.
+
+Harz, who was watching, was reminded of his other words at dinner, "wild
+beasts whom I would tear to pieces."  He looked with interest at this
+quiet man who said these extremely ferocious things, and thought: 'I
+should like to paint that fellow.'
+
+Herr Paul twirled his wine-glass in his fingers.  "There are family
+ties," he said, "there is society, there is decency; a wife should be
+with her husband.  B---will do quite right.  He must go after her; she
+will not perhaps come back at first; he will follow her; she will begin
+to think, 'I am helpless--I am ridiculous!'  A woman is soon beaten. 
+They will return.  She is once more with her husband--Society will
+forgive, it will be all right."
+
+"By Jove, Paul," growled Mr. Treffry, "wonderful power of argument!"
+
+"A wife is a wife," pursued Herr Paul; "a man has a right to her
+society."
+
+"What do you say to that, sir?" asked Dawney.
+
+Mr. Treffry tugged at his beard: "Make a woman live with you, if she
+don't want to?  I call it low."
+
+"But, my dear," exclaimed Herr Paul, "how should you know?  You have not
+been married."
+
+"No, thank the Lord!" Mr. Treffry replied.
+
+"But looking at the question broadly, sir," said Dawney; "if a husband
+always lets his wife do as she likes, how would the thing work out?  What
+becomes of the marriage tie?"
+
+"The marriage tie," growled Mr. Treffry, "is the biggest thing there is!
+But, by Jove, Doctor, I'm a Dutchman if hunting women ever helped the
+marriage tie!"
+
+"I am not thinking of myself," Herr Paul cried out, "I think of the
+community.  There are rights."
+
+"A decent community never yet asked a man to tread on his self-respect.
+If I get my fingers skinned over my marriage, which I undertake at my own
+risk, what's the community to do with it?  D'you think I'm going to whine
+to it to put the plaster on?  As to rights, it'd be a deuced sight better
+for us all if there wasn't such a fuss about 'em.  Leave that to women!  I
+don't give a tinker's damn for men who talk about their rights in such
+matters."
+
+Sarelli rose.  "But your honour," he said, "there is your honour!"
+
+Mr. Treffry stared at him.
+
+"Honour!  If huntin' women's your idea of honour, well--it isn't mine."
+
+"Then you'd forgive her, sir, whatever happened," Dawney said.
+
+"Forgiveness is another thing.  I leave that to your sanctimonious
+beggars.  But, hunt a woman!  Hang it, sir, I'm not a cad!" and bringing
+his hand down with a rattle, he added: "This is a subject that don't bear
+talking of."
+
+Sarelli fell back in his seat, twirling his moustaches fiercely. Harz,
+who had risen, looked at Christian's empty place.
+
+'If I were married!' he thought suddenly.
+
+Herr Paul, with a somewhat vinous glare, still muttered, "But your duty
+to the family!"
+
+Harz slipped through the window.  The moon was like a wonderful white
+lantern in the purple sky; there was but a smoulder of stars. Beneath the
+softness of the air was the iciness of the snow; it made him want to run
+and leap.  A sleepy beetle dropped on its back; he turned it over and
+watched it scurry across the grass.
+
+Someone was playing Schumann's Kinderscenen.  Harz stood still to listen.
+The notes came twining, weaving round his thoughts; the whole night
+seemed full of girlish voices, of hopes and fancies, soaring away to
+mountain heights--invisible, yet present.  Between the stems of the
+acacia-trees he could see the flicker of white dresses, where Christian
+and Greta were walking arm in arm.  He went towards them; the blood
+flushed up in his face, he felt almost surfeited by some sweet emotion.
+Then, in sudden horror, he stood still.  He was in love!  With nothing
+done with everything before him!  He was going to bow down to a face!  The
+flicker of the dresses was no longer visible.  He would not be fettered,
+he would stamp it out!  He turned away; but with each step, something
+seemed to jab at his heart.
+
+Round the corner of the house, in the shadow of the wall, Dominique, the
+Luganese, in embroidered slippers, was smoking a long cherry-wood pipe,
+leaning against a tree--Mephistopheles in evening clothes. Harz went up
+to him.
+
+"Lend me a pencil, Dominique."
+
+"Bien, M'sieu."
+
+Resting a card against the tree Harz wrote to Mrs. Decie: "Forgive me, I
+am obliged to go away.  In a few days I shall hope to return, and finish
+the picture of your nieces."
+
+He sent Dominique for his hat.  During the man's absence he was on the
+point of tearing up the card and going back into the house.
+
+When the Luganese returned he thrust the card into his hand, and walked
+out between the tall poplars, waiting, like ragged ghosts, silver with
+moonlight.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Harz walked away along the road.  A dog was howling.  The sound seemed
+too appropriate.  He put his fingers to his ears, but the lugubrious
+noise passed those barriers, and made its way into his heart.  Was there
+nothing that would put an end to this emotion?  It was no better in the
+old house on the wall; he spent the night tramping up and down.
+
+Just before daybreak he slipped out with a knapsack, taking the road
+towards Meran.
+
+He had not quite passed through Gries when he overtook a man walking in
+the middle of the road and leaving a trail of cigar smoke behind him.
+
+"Ah! my friend," the smoker said, "you walk early; are you going my way?"
+
+It was Count Sarelli.  The raw light had imparted a grey tinge to his
+pale face, the growth of his beard showed black already beneath the skin;
+his thumbs were hooked in the pockets of a closely buttoned coat, he
+gesticulated with his fingers.
+
+"You are making a journey?" he said, nodding at the knapsack.  "You are
+early--I am late; our friend has admirable kummel--I have drunk too much. 
+You have not been to bed, I think?  If there is no sleep in one's bed it
+is no good going to look for it.  You find that?  It is better to drink
+kummel...!  Pardon!  You are doing the right thing: get away!  Get away
+as fast as possible!  Don't wait, and let it catch you!"
+
+Harz stared at him amazed.
+
+"Pardon!" Sarelli said again, raising his hat, "that girl--the white
+girl--I saw.  You do well to get away!" he swayed a little as he walked. 
+"That old fellow--what is his name-Trrreffr-ry!  What ideas of honour!" 
+He mumbled: "Honour is an abstraction!  If a man is not true to an
+abstraction, he is a low type; but wait a minute!"
+
+He put his hand to his side as though in pain.
+
+The hedges were brightening with a faint pinky glow; there was no sound
+on the long, deserted road, but that of their footsteps; suddenly a bird
+commenced to chirp, another answered--the world seemed full of these
+little voices.
+
+Sarelli stopped.
+
+"That white girl," he said, speaking with rapidity.  "Yes!  You do well!
+get away!  Don't let it catch you!  I waited, it caught me--what
+happened?  Everything horrible--and now--kummel!"  Laughing a thick
+laugh, he gave a twirl to his moustache, and swaggered on.
+
+"I was a fine fellow--nothing too big for Mario Sarelli; the regiment
+looked to me.  Then she came--with her eyes and her white dress, always
+white, like this one; the little mole on her chin, her hands for ever
+moving--their touch as warm as sunbeams.  Then, no longer Sarelli this,
+and that!  The little house close to the ramparts!  Two arms, two eyes,
+and nothing here," he tapped his breast, "but flames that made ashes
+quickly--in her, like this ash--!" he flicked the white flake off his
+cigar.  "It's droll!  You agree, hein?  Some day I shall go back and kill
+her.  In the meantime--kummel!"
+
+He stopped at a house close to the road, and stood still, his teeth bared
+in a grin.
+
+"But I bore you," he said.  His cigar, flung down, sputtered forth its
+sparks on the road in front of Harz.  "I live here--good-morning!  You are
+a man for work--your honour is your Art!  I know, and you are young!  The
+man who loves flesh better than his honour is a low type--I am a low
+type.  I!  Mario Sarelli, a low type!  I love flesh better than my
+honour!"
+
+He remained swaying at the gate with the grin fixed on his face; then
+staggered up the steps, and banged the door.  But before Harz had walked
+on, he again appeared, beckoning, in the doorway.  Obeying an impulse,
+Harz went in.
+
+"We will make a night of it," said Sarelli; "wine, brandy, kummel?  I am
+virtuous--kummel it must be for me!"
+
+He sat down at a piano, and began to touch the keys.  Harz poured out
+some wine.  Sarelli nodded.
+
+"You begin with that?  Allegro--piu--presto!
+
+"Wine--brandy--kummel!" he quickened the time of the tune: "it is not too
+long a passage, and this"--he took his hands off the keys--"comes after."
+
+Harz smiled.
+
+"Some men do not kill themselves," he said.
+
+Sarelli, who was bending and swaying to the music of a tarantella, broke
+off, and letting his eyes rest on the painter, began playing Schumann's
+Kinderscenen.  Harz leaped to his feet.
+
+"Stop that!" he cried.
+
+"It pricks you?" said Sarelli suavely; "what do you think of this?" he
+played again, crouching over the piano, and making the notes sound like
+the crying of a wounded animal.
+
+"For me!" he said, swinging round, and rising.
+
+"Your health!  And so you don't believe in suicide, but in murder?  The
+custom is the other way; but you don't believe in customs?  Customs are
+only for Society?"  He drank a glass of kummel.  "You do not love
+Society?"
+
+Harz looked at him intently; he did not want to quarrel.
+
+"I am not too fond of other people's thoughts," he said at last; "I
+prefer to think my own.
+
+"And is Society never right?  That poor Society!"
+
+"Society!  What is Society--a few men in good coats?  What has it done
+for me?"
+
+Sarelli bit the end off a cigar.
+
+"Ah!" he said; "now we are coming to it.  It is good to be an artist, a
+fine bantam of an artist; where other men have their dis-ci-pline, he has
+his, what shall we say--his mound of roses?"
+
+The painter started to his feet.
+
+"Yes," said Sarelli, with a hiccough, "you are a fine fellow!"
+
+"And you are drunk!" cried Harz.
+
+"A little drunk--not much, not enough to matter!"
+
+Harz broke into laughter.  It was crazy to stay there listening to this
+mad fellow.  What had brought him in?  He moved towards the door.
+
+"Ah!" said Sarelli, "but it is no good going to bed--let us talk.  I have
+a lot to say--it is pleasant to talk to anarchists at times."
+
+Full daylight was already coming through the chinks of the shutters.
+
+"You are all anarchists, you painters, you writing fellows.  You live by
+playing ball with facts.  Images--nothing solid--hein?  You're all for
+new things too, to tickle your nerves.  No discipline!  True anarchists,
+every one of you!"
+
+Harz poured out another glass of wine and drank it off.  The man's
+feverish excitement was catching.
+
+"Only fools," he replied, "take things for granted.  As for discipline,
+what do you aristocrats, or bourgeois know of discipline?  Have you ever
+been hungry?  Have you ever had your soul down on its back?"
+
+"Soul on its back?  That is good!"
+
+"A man's no use," cried Harz, "if he's always thinking of what others
+think; he must stand on his own legs."
+
+"He must not then consider other people?"
+
+"Not from cowardice anyway."
+
+Sarelli drank.
+
+"What would you do," he said, striking his chest, "if you had a
+devil-here?  Would you go to bed?"
+
+A sort of pity seized on Harz.  He wanted to say something that would be
+consoling but could find no words; and suddenly he felt disgusted. What
+link was there between him and this man; between his love and this man's
+love?
+
+"Harz!" muttered Sarelli; "Harz means 'tar,' hein?  Your family is not an
+old one?"
+
+Harz glared, and said: "My father is a peasant."
+
+Sarelli lifted the kummel bottle and emptied it into his glass, with a
+steady hand.
+
+"You're honest--and we both have devils.  I forgot; I brought you in to
+see a picture!"
+
+He threw wide the shutters; the windows were already open, and a rush of
+air came in.
+
+"Ah!" he said, sniffing, "smells of the earth, nicht wahr, Herr Artist?
+You should know--it belongs to your father....  Come, here's my picture;
+a Correggio!  What do you think of it?"
+
+"It is a copy."
+
+"You think?"
+
+"I know."
+
+"Then you have given me the lie, Signor," and drawing out his
+handkerchief Sarelli flicked it in the painter's face.
+
+Harz turned white.
+
+"Duelling is a good custom!" said Sarelli.  "I shall have the honour to
+teach you just this one, unless you are afraid.  Here are pistols--this
+room is twenty feet across at least, twenty feet is no bad distance."
+
+And pulling out a drawer he took two pistols from a case, and put them on
+the table.
+
+"The light is good--but perhaps you are afraid."
+
+"Give me one!" shouted the infuriated painter; "and go to the devil for a
+fool"
+
+"One moment!" Sarelli murmured: "I will load them, they are more useful
+loaded."
+
+Harz leaned out of the window; his head was in a whirl.  'What on earth
+is happening?' he thought.  'He's mad--or I am!  Confound him!  I'm not
+going to be killed!'  He turned and went towards the table. Sarelli's
+head was sunk on his arms, he was asleep.  Harz methodically took up the
+pistols, and put them back into the drawer. A sound made him turn his
+head; there stood a tall, strong young woman in a loose gown caught
+together on her chest.  Her grey eyes glanced from the painter to the
+bottles, from the bottles to the pistol-case.  A simple reasoning, which
+struck Harz as comic.
+
+"It is often like this," she said in the country patois; "der Herr must
+not be frightened."
+
+Lifting the motionless Sarelli as if he were a baby, she laid him on a
+couch.
+
+"Ah!" she said, sitting down and resting her elbow on the table; "he will
+not wake!"
+
+Harz bowed to her; her patient figure, in spite of its youth and
+strength, seemed to him pathetic.  Taking up his knapsack, he went out.
+
+The smoke of cottages rose straight; wisps of mist were wandering about
+the valley, and the songs of birds dropping like blessings. All over the
+grass the spiders had spun a sea of threads that bent and quivered to the
+pressure of the air, like fairy tight-ropes.
+
+All that day he tramped.
+
+Blacksmiths, tall stout men with knotted muscles, sleepy eyes, and great
+fair beards, came out of their forges to stretch and wipe their brows,
+and stare at him.
+
+Teams of white oxen, waiting to be harnessed, lashed their tails against
+their flanks, moving their heads slowly from side to side in the heat.
+Old women at chalet doors blinked and knitted.
+
+The white houses, with gaping caves of storage under the roofs, the red
+church spire, the clinking of hammers in the forges, the slow stamping of
+oxen-all spoke of sleepy toil, without ideas or ambition. Harz knew it
+all too well; like the earth's odour, it belonged to him, as Sarelli had
+said.
+
+Towards sunset coming to a copse of larches, he sat down to rest.  It was
+very still, but for the tinkle of cowbells, and, from somewhere in the
+distance, the sound of dropping logs.
+
+Two barefooted little boys came from the wood, marching earnestly along,
+and looking at Harz as if he were a monster.  Once past him, they began
+to run.
+
+'At their age,' he thought, 'I should have done the same.'  A hundred
+memories rushed into his mind.
+
+He looked down at the village straggling below--white houses with russet
+tiles and crowns of smoke, vineyards where the young leaves were
+beginning to unfold, the red-capped spire, a thread of bubbling stream,
+an old stone cross.  He had been fourteen years struggling up from all
+this; and now just as he had breathing space, and the time to give
+himself wholly to his work--this weakness was upon him!  Better, a
+thousand times, to give her up!
+
+In a house or two lights began to wink; the scent of wood smoke reached
+him, the distant chimes of bells, the burring of a stream.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+Next day his one thought was to get back to work.  He arrived at the
+studio in the afternoon, and, laying in provisions, barricaded the lower
+door.  For three days he did not go out; on the fourth day he went to
+Villa Rubein....
+
+Schloss Runkelstein--grey, blind, strengthless--still keeps the valley. 
+The windows which once, like eyes, watched men and horses creeping
+through the snow, braved the splutter of guns and the gleam of torches,
+are now holes for the birds to nest in.  Tangled creepers have spread to
+the very summits of the walls.  In the keep, instead of grim men in
+armour, there is a wooden board recording the history of the castle and
+instructing visitors on the subject of refreshments.  Only at night, when
+the cold moon blanches everything, the castle stands like the grim ghost
+of its old self, high above the river.
+
+After a long morning's sitting the girls had started forth with Harz and
+Dawney to spend the afternoon at the ruin; Miss Naylor, kept at home by
+headache, watched them depart with words of caution against sunstroke,
+stinging nettles, and strange dogs.
+
+Since the painter's return Christian and he had hardly spoken to each
+other.  Below the battlement on which they sat, in a railed gallery with
+little tables, Dawney and Greta were playing dominoes, two soldiers
+drinking beer, and at the top of a flight of stairs the Custodian's wife
+sewing at a garment.  Christian said suddenly: "I thought we were
+friends."
+
+"Well, Fraulein Christian, aren't we?"
+
+"You went away without a word; friends don't do that."
+
+Harz bit his lips.
+
+"I don't think you care," she went on with a sort of desperate haste,
+"whether you hurt people or not.  You have been here all this time
+without even going to see your father and mother."
+
+"Do you think they would want to see me?"
+
+Christian looked up.
+
+"It's all been so soft for you," he said bitterly; "you don't
+understand."
+
+He turned his head away, and then burst out: "I'm proud to come straight
+from the soil--I wouldn't have it otherwise; but they are of 'the
+people,' everything is narrow with them--they only understand what they
+can see and touch."
+
+"I'm sorry I spoke like that," said Christian softly; "you've never told
+me about yourself."
+
+There was something just a little cruel in the way the painter looked at
+her, then seeming to feel compunction, he said quickly: "I always
+hated--the peasant life--I wanted to get away into the world; I had a
+feeling in here--I wanted--I don't know what I wanted!  I did run away at
+last to a house-painter at Meran.  The priest wrote me a letter from my
+father--they threw me off; that's all."
+
+Christian's eyes were very bright, her lips moved, like the lips of a
+child listening to a story.
+
+"Go on," she said.
+
+"I stayed at Meran two years, till I'd learnt all I could there, then a
+brother of my mother's helped me to get to Vienna; I was lucky enough to
+find work with a man who used to decorate churches.  We went about the
+country together.  Once when he was ill I painted the roof of a church
+entirely by myself; I lay on my back on the scaffold boards all day for a
+week--I was proud of that roof."  He paused.
+
+"When did you begin painting pictures?"
+
+"A friend asked me why I didn't try for the Academie.  That started me
+going to the night schools; I worked every minute--I had to get my living
+as well, of course, so I worked at night.
+
+"Then when the examination came, I thought I could do nothing--it was
+just as if I had never had a brush or pencil in my hand.  But the second
+day a professor in passing me said, 'Good!  Quite good!'  That gave me
+courage.  I was sure I had failed though; but I was second out of sixty."
+
+Christian nodded.
+
+"To work in the schools after that I had to give up my business, of
+course.  There was only one teacher who ever taught me anything; the
+others all seemed fools.  This man would come and rub out what you'd done
+with his sleeve.  I used to cry with rage--but I told him I could only
+learn from him, and he was so astonished that he got me into his class."
+
+"But how did you live without money?" asked Christian.
+
+His face burned with a dark flush.  "I don't know how I lived; you must
+have been through these things to know, you would never understand."
+
+"But I want to understand, please."
+
+"What do you want me to tell you?  How I went twice a week to eat free
+dinners!  How I took charity!  How I was hungry!  There was a rich cousin
+of my mother's--I used to go to him.  I didn't like it. But if you're
+starving in the winter"
+
+Christian put out her hand.
+
+"I used to borrow apronsful of coals from other students who were as
+poor--but I never went to the rich students."
+
+The flush had died out of his face.
+
+"That sort of thing makes you hate the world!  You work till you stagger;
+you're cold and hungry; you see rich people in their carriages, wrapped
+in furs, and all the time you want to do something great.  You pray for a
+chance, any chance; nothing comes to the poor!  It makes you hate the
+world."
+
+Christian's eyes filled with tears.  He went on:
+
+"But I wasn't the only one in that condition; we used to meet. Garin, a
+Russian with a brown beard and patches of cheek showing through, and
+yellow teeth, who always looked hungry.  Paunitz, who came from sympathy!
+He had fat cheeks and little eyes, and a big gold chain--the swine!  And
+little Misek.  It was in his room we met, with the paper peeling off the
+walls, and two doors with cracks in them, so that there was always a
+draught.  We used to sit on his bed, and pull the dirty blankets over us
+for warmth; and smoke--tobacco was the last thing we ever went without. 
+Over the bed was a Virgin and Child--Misek was a very devout Catholic;
+but one day when he had had no dinner and a dealer had kept his picture
+without paying him, he took the image and threw it on the floor before
+our eyes; it broke, and he trampled on the bits. Lendorf was another, a
+heavy fellow who was always puffing out his white cheeks and smiting
+himself, and saying: 'Cursed society!'  And Schonborn, an aristocrat who
+had quarrelled with his family.  He was the poorest of us all; but only
+he and I would ever have dared to do anything--they all knew that!"
+
+Christian listened with awe.  "Do you mean?" she said, "do you mean, that
+you--?"
+
+"You see! you're afraid of me at once.  It's impossible even for you to
+understand.  It only makes you afraid.  A hungry man living on charity,
+sick with rage and shame, is a wolf even to you!"
+
+Christian looked straight into his eyes.
+
+"That's not true.  If I can't understand, I can feel.  Would you be the
+same now if it were to come again?"
+
+"Yes, it drives me mad even now to think of people fatted with
+prosperity, sneering and holding up their hands at poor devils who have
+suffered ten times more than the most those soft animals could bear.  I'm
+older; I've lived--I know things can't be put right by violence--nothing
+will put things right, but that doesn't stop my feeling."
+
+"Did you do anything?  You must tell me all now."
+
+"We talked--we were always talking."
+
+"No, tell me everything!"
+
+Unconsciously she claimed, and he seemed unconsciously to admit her right
+to this knowledge.
+
+"There's not much to tell.  One day we began talking in low voices
+--Garin began it; he had been in some affair in Russia.  We took an oath;
+after that we never raised our voices.  We had a plan.  It was all new to
+me, and I hated the whole thing--but I was always hungry, or sick from
+taking charity, and I would have done anything.  They knew that; they
+used to look at me and Schonborn; we knew that no one else had any
+courage.  He and I were great friends, but we never talked of that; we
+tried to keep our minds away from the thought of it.  If we had a good
+day and were not so hungry, it seemed unnatural; but when the day had not
+been good--then it seemed natural enough.  I wasn't afraid, but I used to
+wake up in the night; I hated the oath we had taken, I hated every one of
+those fellows; the thing was not what I was made for, it wasn't my work,
+it wasn't my nature, it was forced on me--I hated it, but sometimes I was
+like a madman."
+
+"Yes, yes," she murmured.
+
+"All this time I was working at the Academie, and learning all I
+could....  One evening that we met, Paunitz was not there.  Misek was
+telling us how the thing had been arranged.  Schonborn and I looked at
+each other--it was warm--perhaps we were not hungry--it was springtime,
+too, and in the Spring it's different.  There is something."
+
+Christian nodded.
+
+"While we were talking there came a knock at the door.  Lendorf put his
+eye to the keyhole, and made a sign.  The police were there. Nobody said
+anything, but Misek crawled under the bed; we all followed; and the
+knocking grew louder and louder.  In the wall at the back of the bed was
+a little door into an empty cellar.  We crept through.  There was a
+trap-door behind some cases, where they used to roll barrels in.  We
+crawled through that into the back street.  We went different ways."
+
+He paused, and Christian gasped.
+
+"I thought I would get my money, but there was a policeman before my
+door.  They had us finely.  It was Paunitz; if I met him even now I
+should wring his neck.  I swore I wouldn't be caught, but I had no idea
+where to go.  Then I thought of a little Italian barber who used to shave
+me when I had money for a shave; I knew he would help.  He belonged to
+some Italian Society; he often talked to me, under his breath, of course.
+I went to him.  He was shaving himself before going to a ball.  I told
+him what had happened; it was funny to see him put his back against the
+door.  He was very frightened, understanding this sort of thing better
+than I did--for I was only twenty then.  He shaved my head and moustache
+and put me on a fair wig.  Then he brought me macaroni, and some meat, to
+eat.  He gave me a big fair moustache, and a cap, and hid the moustache
+in the lining. He brought me a cloak of his own, and four gulden.  All
+the time he was extremely frightened, and kept listening, and saying:
+'Eat!'
+
+"When I had done, he just said: 'Go away, I refuse to know anything more
+of you.'
+
+"I thanked him and went out.  I walked about all that night; for I
+couldn't think of anything to do or anywhere to go.  In the morning I
+slept on a seat in one of the squares.  Then I thought I would go to the
+Gallerien; and I spent the whole day looking at the pictures. When the
+Galleries were shut I was very tired, so I went into a cafe, and had some
+beer.  When I came out I sat on the same seat in the Square.  I meant to
+wait till dark and then walk out of the city and take the train at some
+little station, but while I was sitting there I went to sleep.  A
+policeman woke me.  He had my wig in his hand.
+
+"'Why do you wear a wig?' he said.
+
+"I answered: 'Because I am bald.'
+
+"'No,' he said, 'you're not bald, you've been shaved.  I can feel the
+hair coming.'
+
+"He put his finger on my head.  I felt reckless and laughed.
+
+"'Ah!' he said, 'you'll come with me and explain all this; your nose and
+eyes are looked for.'
+
+"I went with him quietly to the police-station...."
+
+Harz seemed carried away by his story.  His quick dark face worked, his
+steel-grey eyes stared as though he were again passing through all these
+long-past emotions.
+
+The hot sun struck down; Christian drew herself together, sitting with
+her hands clasped round her knees.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+"I didn't care by then what came of it.  I didn't even think what I was
+going to say.  He led me down a passage to a room with bars across the
+windows and long seats, and maps on the walls.  We sat and waited.  He
+kept his eye on me all the time; and I saw no hope. Presently the
+Inspector came.  'Bring him in here,' he said; I remember feeling I could
+kill him for ordering me about!  We went into the next room.  It had a
+large clock, a writing-table, and a window, without bars, looking on a
+courtyard.  Long policemen's coats and caps were hanging from some pegs.
+The Inspector told me to take off my cap.  I took it off, wig and all. He
+asked me who I was, but I refused to answer.  Just then there was a loud
+sound of voices in the room we had come from.  The Inspector told the
+policeman to look after me, and went to see what it was.  I could hear
+him talking.  He called out: 'Come here, Becker!'  I stood very quiet,
+and Becker went towards the door.  I heard the Inspector say: 'Go and
+find Schwartz, I will see after this fellow.'  The policeman went, and
+the Inspector stood with his back to me in the half-open door, and began
+again to talk to the man in the other room.  Once or twice he looked
+round at me, but I stood quiet all the time.  They began to disagree, and
+their voices got angry.  The Inspector moved a little into the other
+room.  'Now!' I thought, and slipped off my cloak.  I hooked off a
+policeman's coat and cap, and put them on.  My heart beat till I felt
+sick.  I went on tiptoe to the window.  There was no one outside, but at
+the entrance a man was holding some horses.  I opened the window a little
+and held my breath.  I heard the Inspector say: 'I will report you for
+impertinence!' and slipped through the window.  The coat came down nearly
+to my heels, and the cap over my eyes.  I walked up to the man with the
+horses, and said: 'Good-evening.'  One of the horses had begun to kick,
+and he only grunted at me.  I got into a passing tram; it was five
+minutes to the West Bahnhof; I got out there. There was a train starting;
+they were shouting 'Einsteigen!'  I ran. The collector tried to stop me. 
+I shouted: 'Business--important!' He let me by.  I jumped into a
+carriage.  The train started."
+
+He paused, and Christian heaved a sigh.
+
+Harz went on, twisting a twig of ivy in his hands: "There was another man
+in the carriage reading a paper.  Presently I said to him, 'Where do we
+stop first?'  'St. Polten.'  Then I knew it was the Munich express--St.
+Polten, Amstetten, Linz, and Salzburg--four stops before the frontier. 
+The man put down his paper and looked at me; he had a big fair moustache
+and rather shabby clothes.  His looking at me disturbed me, for I thought
+every minute he would say: 'You're no policeman!'  And suddenly it came
+into my mind that if they looked for me in this train, it would be as a
+policeman!--they would know, of course, at the station that a policeman
+had run past at the last minute. I wanted to get rid of the coat and cap,
+but the man was there, and I didn't like to move out of the carriage for
+other people to notice.  So I sat on.  We came to St. Polten at last. 
+The man in my carriage took his bag, got out, and left his paper on the
+seat. We started again; I breathed at last, and as soon as I could took
+the cap and coat and threw them out into the darkness.  I thought: 'I
+shall get across the frontier now.'  I took my own cap out and found the
+moustache Luigi gave me; rubbed my clothes as clean as possible; stuck on
+the moustache, and with some little ends of chalk in my pocket made my
+eyebrows light; then drew some lines in my face to make it older, and
+pulled my cap well down above my wig.  I did it pretty well--I was quite
+like the man who had got out.  I sat in his corner, took up his
+newspaper, and waited for Amstetten.  It seemed a tremendous time before
+we got there.  From behind my paper I could see five or six policemen on
+the platform, one quite close.  He opened the door, looked at me, and
+walked through the carriage into the corridor.  I took some tobacco and
+rolled up a cigarette, but it shook, Harz lifted the ivy twig, like this. 
+In a minute the conductor and two more policemen came.  'He was here,'
+said the conductor, 'with this gentleman.'  One of them looked at me, and
+asked: 'Have you seen a policeman travelling on this train?'  'Yes,' I
+said.  'Where?'  'He got out at St.  Polten.'  The policeman asked the
+conductor: 'Did you see him get out there?'  The conductor shook his
+head.  I said: 'He got out as the train was moving.'  'Ah!' said the
+policeman, 'what was he like?' 'Rather short, and no moustache. Why?' 
+'Did you notice anything unusual?'  'No,' I said, 'only that he wore
+coloured trousers.  What's the matter?'  One policeman said to the other:
+'That's our man!  Send a telegram to St. Polten; he has more than an
+hour's start.'  He asked me where I was going.  I told him: 'Linz.' 
+'Ah!' he said, 'you'll have to give evidence; your name and address
+please?'  'Josef Reinhardt, 17 Donau Strasse.'  He wrote it down.  The
+conductor said: 'We are late, can we start?'  They shut the door.  I
+heard them say to the conductor: 'Search again at Linz, and report to the
+Inspector there.'  They hurried on to the platform, and we started.  At
+first I thought I would get out as soon as the train had left the
+station.  Then, that I should be too far from the frontier; better to go
+on to Linz and take my chance there.  I sat still and tried not to think.
+
+"After a long time, we began to run more slowly.  I put my head out and
+could see in the distance a ring of lights hanging in the blackness.  I
+loosened the carriage door and waited for the train to run slower still;
+I didn't mean to go into Linz like a rat into a trap.  At last I could
+wait no longer; I opened the door, jumped and fell into some bushes.  I
+was not much hurt, but bruised, and the breath knocked out of me.  As
+soon as I could, I crawled out.  It was very dark.  I felt heavy and
+sore, and for some time went stumbling in and out amongst trees.
+Presently I came to a clear space; on one side I could see the town's
+shape drawn in lighted lamps, and on the other a dark mass, which I think
+was forest; in the distance too was a thin chain of lights.  I thought:
+'They must be the lights of a bridge.'  Just then the moon came out, and
+I could see the river shining below.  It was cold and damp, and I walked
+quickly.  At last I came out on a road, past houses and barking dogs,
+down to the river bank; there I sat against a shed and went to sleep.  I
+woke very stiff.  It was darker than before; the moon was gone.  I could
+just see the river.  I stumbled on, to get through the town before dawn.
+It was all black shapes-houses and sheds, and the smell of the river, the
+smell of rotting hay, apples, tar, mud, fish; and here and there on a
+wharf a lantern.  I stumbled over casks and ropes and boxes; I saw I
+should never get clear--the dawn had begun already on the other side. 
+Some men came from a house behind me.  I bent, and crept behind some
+barrels.  They passed along the wharf; they seemed to drop into the
+river.  I heard one of them say: 'Passau before night.' I stood up and
+saw they had walked on board a steamer which was lying head up-stream,
+with some barges in tow.  There was a plank laid to the steamer, and a
+lantern at the other end.  I could hear the fellows moving below deck,
+getting up steam.  I ran across the plank and crept to the end of the
+steamer.  I meant to go with them to Passau!  The rope which towed the
+barges was nearly taut; and I knew if I could get on to the barges I
+should be safe.  I climbed down on this rope and crawled along.  I was
+desperate, I knew they'd soon be coming up, and it was getting light.  I
+thought I should fall into the water several times, but I got to the
+barge at last.  It was laden with straw.  There was nobody on board.  I
+was hungry and thirsty--I looked for something to eat; there was nothing
+but the ashes of a fire and a man's coat.  I crept into the straw.  Soon
+a boat brought men, one for each barge, and there were sounds of steam.
+As soon as we began moving through the water, I fell asleep.  When I woke
+we were creeping through a heavy mist.  I made a little hole in the straw
+and saw the bargeman.  He was sitting by a fire at the barge's edge, so
+that the sparks and smoke blew away over the water. He ate and drank with
+both hands, and funny enough he looked in the mist, like a big bird
+flapping its wings; there was a good smell of coffee, and I sneezed.  How
+the fellow started!  But presently he took a pitchfork and prodded the
+straw.  Then I stood up.  I couldn't help laughing, he was so
+surprised--a huge, dark man, with a great black beard.  I pointed to the
+fire and said 'Give me some, brother!' He pulled me out of the straw; I
+was so stiff, I couldn't move.  I sat by the fire, and ate black bread
+and turnips, and drank coffee; while he stood by, watching me and
+muttering.  I couldn't understand him well--he spoke a dialect from
+Hungary.  He asked me: How I got there--who I was--where I was from?  I
+looked up in his face, and he looked down at me, sucking his pipe.  He
+was a big man, he lived alone on the river, and I was tired of telling
+lies, so I told him the whole thing.  When I had done he just grunted.  I
+can see him now standing over me, with the mist hanging in his beard, and
+his great naked arms.  He drew me some water, and I washed and showed him
+my wig and moustache, and threw them overboard.  All that day we lay out
+on the barge in the mist, with our feet to the fire, smoking; now and
+then he would spit into the ashes and mutter into his beard.  I shall
+never forget that day.  The steamer was like a monster with fiery
+nostrils, and the other barges were dumb creatures with eyes, where the
+fires were; we couldn't see the bank, but now and then a bluff and high
+trees, or a castle, showed in the mist.  If I had only had paint and
+canvas that day!"  He sighed.
+
+"It was early Spring, and the river was in flood; they were going to
+Regensburg to unload there, take fresh cargo, and back to Linz.  As soon
+as the mist began to clear, the bargeman hid me in the straw. At Passau
+was the frontier; they lay there for the night, but nothing happened, and
+I slept in the straw.  The next day I lay out on the barge deck; there
+was no mist, but I was free--the sun shone gold on the straw and the
+green sacking; the water seemed to dance, and I laughed--I laughed all
+the time, and the barge man laughed with me. A fine fellow he was!  At
+Regensburg I helped them to unload; for more than a week we worked; they
+nicknamed me baldhead, and when it was all over I gave the money I earned
+for the unloading to the big bargeman.  We kissed each other at parting. 
+I had still three of the gulden that Luigi gave me, and I went to a
+house-painter and got work with him.  For six months I stayed there to
+save money; then I wrote to my mother's cousin in Vienna, and told him I
+was going to London. He gave me an introduction to some friends there. I
+went to Hamburg, and from there to London in a cargo steamer, and I've
+never been back till now."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+After a minute's silence Christian said in a startled voice: "They could
+arrest you then!"
+
+Harz laughed.
+
+"If they knew; but it's seven years ago."
+
+"Why did you come here, when it's so dangerous?"
+
+"I had been working too hard, I wanted to see my country--after seven
+years, and when it's forbidden!  But I'm ready to go back now."  He
+looked down at her, frowning.
+
+"Had you a hard time in London, too?"
+
+"Harder, at first--I couldn't speak the language.  In my profession it's
+hard work to get recognised, it's hard work to make a living. There are
+too many whose interest it is to keep you down--I shan't forget them."
+
+"But every one is not like that?"
+
+"No; there are fine fellows, too.  I shan't forget them either.  I can
+sell my pictures now; I'm no longer weak, and I promise you I shan't
+forget.  If in the future I have power, and I shall have power--I shan't
+forget."
+
+A shower of fine gravel came rattling on the wall.  Dawney was standing
+below them with an amused expression on his upturned face.
+
+"Are you going to stay there all night?" he asked.  "Greta and I have
+bored each other."
+
+"We're coming," called Christian hastily.
+
+On the way back neither spoke a word, but when they reached the Villa,
+Harz took her hand, and said: "Fraulein Christian, I can't do any more
+with your picture.  I shan't touch it again after this."
+
+She made no answer, but they looked at each other, and both seemed to
+ask, to entreat, something more; then her eyes fell.  He dropped her
+hand, and saying, "Good-night," ran after Dawney.
+
+In the corridor, Dominique, carrying a dish of fruit, met the sisters; he
+informed them that Miss Naylor had retired to bed; that Herr Paul would
+not be home to dinner; his master was dining in his room; dinner would be
+served for Mrs. Decie and the two young ladies in a quarter of an hour:
+"And the fish is good to-night; little trouts! try them, Signorina!" He
+moved on quickly, softly, like a cat, the tails of his dress-coat
+flapping, and the heels of his white socks gleaming.
+
+Christian ran upstairs.  She flew about her room, feeling that if she
+once stood still it would all crystallise in hard painful thought, which
+motion alone kept away.  She washed, changed her dress and shoes, and ran
+down to her uncle's room.  Mr. Treffry had just finished dinner, pushed
+the little table back, and was sitting in his chair, with his glasses on
+his nose, reading the Tines.  Christian touched his forehead with her
+lips.
+
+"Glad to see you, Chris.  Your stepfather's out to dinner, and I can't
+stand your aunt when she's in one of her talking moods--bit of a humbug,
+Chris, between ourselves; eh, isn't she?" His eyes twinkled.
+
+Christian smiled.  There was a curious happy restlessness in her that
+would not let her keep still.
+
+"Picture finished?" Mr. Treffry asked suddenly, taking up the paper with
+a crackle.  "Don't go and fall in love with the painter, Chris."
+
+Christian was still enough now.
+
+'Why not?' she thought.  'What should you know about him?  Isn't he good
+enough for me?'  A gong sounded.
+
+"There's your dinner," Mr. Treffry remarked.
+
+With sudden contrition she bent and kissed him.
+
+But when she had left the room Mr. Treffry put down the Times and stared
+at the door, humming to himself, and thoughtfully fingering his chin.
+
+Christian could not eat; she sat, indifferent to the hoverings of
+Dominique, tormented by uneasy fear and longings.  She answered Mrs.
+Decie at random.  Greta kept stealing looks at her from under her lashes.
+
+"Decided characters are charming, don't you think so, Christian?" Mrs.
+Decie said, thrusting her chin a little forward, and modelling the words.
+"That is why I like Mr. Harz so much; such an immense advantage for a man
+to know his mind.  You have only to look at that young man to see that he
+knows what he wants, and means to have it."
+
+Christian pushed her plate away.  Greta, flushing, said abruptly: "Doctor
+Edmund is not a decided character, I think.  This afternoon he said:
+'Shall I have some beer-yes, I shall--no, I shall not'; then he ordered
+the beer, so, when it came, he gave it to the soldiers."
+
+Mrs. Decie turned her enigmatic smile from one girl to the other.
+
+When dinner was over they went into her room.  Greta stole at once to the
+piano, where her long hair fell almost to the keys; silently she sat
+there fingering the notes, smiling to herself, and looking at her aunt,
+who was reading Pater's essays.  Christian too had taken up a book, but
+soon put it down--of several pages she had not understood a word. She
+went into the garden and wandered about the lawn, clasping her hands
+behind her head.  The air was heavy; very distant thunder trembled among
+the mountains, flashes of summer lightning played over the trees; and two
+great moths were hovering about a rosebush. Christian watched their soft
+uncertain rushes.  Going to the little summer-house she flung herself
+down on a seat, and pressed her hands to her heart.
+
+There was a strange and sudden aching there.  Was he going from her?  If
+so, what would be left?  How little and how narrow seemed the outlook of
+her life--with the world waiting for her, the world of beauty, effort,
+self-sacrifice, fidelity!  It was as though a flash of that summer
+lightning had fled by, singeing her, taking from her all powers of
+flight, burning off her wings, as off one of those pale hovering moths.
+Tears started up, and trickled down her face. 'Blind!' she thought; 'how
+could I have been so blind?'
+
+Some one came down the path.
+
+"Who's there?" she cried.
+
+Harz stood in the doorway.
+
+"Why did you come out?" he said.  "Ah! why did you come out?"  He caught
+her hand; Christian tried to draw it from him, and to turn her eyes away,
+but she could not.  He flung himself down on his knees, and cried: "I
+love you!"
+
+In a rapture of soft terror Christian bent her forehead down to his hand.
+
+"What are you doing?" she heard him say.  "Is it possible that you love
+me?" and she felt his kisses on her hair.
+
+"My sweet! it will be so hard for you; you are so little, so little, and
+so weak."  Clasping his hand closer to her face, she murmured: "I don't
+care."
+
+There was a long, soft silence, that seemed to last for ever. Suddenly
+she threw her arms round his neck and kissed him.
+
+"Whatever comes!" she whispered, and gathering her dress, escaped from
+him into the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+Christian woke next morning with a smile.  In her attitudes, her voice,
+her eyes, there was a happy and sweet seriousness, as if she were hugging
+some holy thought.  After breakfast she took a book and sat in the open
+window, whence she could see the poplar-trees guarding the entrance.
+There was a breeze; the roses close by kept nodding to her; the cathedral
+bells were in full chime; bees hummed above the lavender; and in the sky
+soft clouds were floating like huge, white birds.
+
+The sounds of Miss Naylor's staccato dictation travelled across the room,
+and Greta's sighs as she took it down, one eye on her paper, one eye on
+Scruff, who lay with a black ear flapped across his paw, and his tan
+eyebrows quivering.  He was in disgrace, for Dominique, coming on him
+unawares, had seen him "say his prayers" before a pudding, and take the
+pudding for reward.
+
+Christian put her book down gently, and slipped through the window. Harz
+was coming in from the road.  "I am all yours!" she whispered. His
+fingers closed on hers, and he went into the house.
+
+She slipped back, took up her book, and waited.  It seemed long before he
+came out, but when he did he waved her back, and hurried on; she had a
+glimpse of his face, white to the lips.  Feeling faint and sick, she flew
+to her stepfather's room.
+
+Herr Paul was standing in a corner with the utterly disturbed appearance
+of an easy-going man, visited by the unexpected.  His fine shirt-front
+was crumpled as if his breast had heaved too suddenly under strong
+emotion; his smoked eyeglasses dangled down his back; his fingers were
+embedded in his beard.  He was fixing his eye on a spot in the floor as
+though he expected it to explode and blow them to fragments.  In another
+corner Mrs. Decie, with half-closed eyes, was running her finger-tips
+across her brow.
+
+"What have you said to him?" cried Christian.
+
+Herr Paul regarded her with glassy eyes.
+
+"Mein Gott!" he said.  "Your aunt and I!"
+
+"What have you said to him?" repeated Christian.
+
+"The impudence!  An anarchist!  A beggar!"
+
+"Paul!" murmured Mrs. Decie.
+
+"The outlaw!  The fellow!"  Herr Paul began to stride about the room.
+
+Quivering from head to foot, Christian cried: "How dared you?" and ran
+from the room, pushing aside Miss Naylor and Greta, who stood blanched
+and frightened in the doorway.
+
+Herr Paul stopped in his tramp, and, still with his eyes fixed on the
+floor, growled:
+
+"A fine thing-hein?  What's coming?  Will you please tell me?  An
+anarchist--a beggar!"
+
+"Paul!" murmured Mrs. Decie.
+
+"Paul!  Paul!  And you!" he pointed to Miss Naylor--"Two women with
+eyes!--hein!"
+
+"There is nothing to be gained by violence," Mrs. Decie murmured, passing
+her handkerchief across her lips.  Miss Naylor, whose thin brown cheeks
+had flushed, advanced towards him.
+
+"I hope you do not--" she said; "I am sure there was nothing that I could
+have prevented--I should be glad if that were understood." And, turning
+with some dignity, the little lady went away, closing the door behind
+her.
+
+"You hear!" Herr Paul said, violently sarcastic: "nothing she could have
+prevented!  Enfin!  Will you please tell me what I am to do?"
+
+"Men of the world"--whose philosophy is a creature of circumstance and
+accepted things--find any deviation from the path of their convictions
+dangerous, shocking, and an intolerable bore.  Herr Paul had spent his
+life laughing at convictions; the matter had but to touch him personally,
+and the tap of laughter was turned off.  That any one to whom he was the
+lawful guardian should marry other than a well-groomed man, properly
+endowed with goods, properly selected, was beyond expression horrid. 
+From his point of view he had great excuse for horror; and he was
+naturally unable to judge whether he had excuse for horror from other
+points of view.  His amazement had in it a spice of the pathetic; he was
+like a child in the presence of a thing that he absolutely could not
+understand.  The interview had left him with a sense of insecurity which
+he felt to be particularly unfair.
+
+The door was again opened, and Greta flew in, her cheeks flushed, her
+hair floating behind her, and tears streaming down her cheeks.
+
+"Papa!" she cried, "you have been cruel to Chris.  The door is locked; I
+can hear her crying--why have you been cruel?"  Without waiting to be
+answered, she flew out again.
+
+Herr Paul seized his hair with both his hands: "Good!  Very good!  My own
+child, please!  What next then?"
+
+Mrs. Decie rose from her chair languidly.  "My head is very bad," she
+said, shading her eyes and speaking in low tones: "It is no use making a
+fuss--nothing can come of this--he has not a penny. Christian will have
+nothing till you die, which will not be for a long time yet, if you can
+but avoid an apoplectic fit!"
+
+At these last words Herr Paul gave a start of real disgust.  "Hum!" he
+muttered; it was as if the world were bent on being brutal to him. Mrs.
+Decie continued:
+
+"If I know anything of this young man, he will not come here again, after
+the words you have spoken.  As for Christian--you had better talk to
+Nicholas.  I am going to lie down."
+
+Herr Paul nervously fingered the shirt-collar round his stout, short
+neck.
+
+"Nicholas!  Certainly--a good idea.  Quelle diable d'afaire!"
+
+'French!' thought Mrs. Decie; 'we shall soon have peace.  Poor Christian!
+I'm sorry!  After all, these things are a matter of time and
+opportunity.'  This consoled her a good deal.
+
+But for Christian the hours were a long nightmare of grief and shame,
+fear and anger.  Would he forgive?  Would he be true to her?  Or would he
+go away without a word?  Since yesterday it was as if she had stepped
+into another world, and lost it again.  In place of that new feeling,
+intoxicating as wine, what was coming?  What bitter; dreadful ending?
+
+A rude entrance this into the life of facts, and primitive emotions!
+
+She let Greta into her room after a time, for the child had begun
+sobbing; but she would not talk, and sat hour after hour at the window
+with the air fanning her face, and the pain in her eyes turned to the sky
+and trees.  After one or two attempts at consolation, Greta sank on the
+floor, and remained there, humbly gazing at her sister in a silence only
+broken when Christian cleared her throat of tears, and by the song of
+birds in the garden.  In the afternoon she slipped away and did not come
+back again.
+
+After his interview with Mr. Treffry, Herr Paul took a bath, perfumed
+himself with precision, and caused it to be clearly understood that,
+under circumstances such as these, a man's house was not suited for a pig
+to live in.  He shortly afterwards went out to the Kurbaus, and had not
+returned by dinner-time.
+
+Christian came down for dinner.  There were crimson spots in her cheeks,
+dark circles round her eyes; she behaved, however, as though nothing had
+happened.  Miss Naylor, affected by the kindness of her heart and the
+shock her system had sustained, rolled a number of bread pills, looking
+at each as it came, with an air of surprise, and concealing it with
+difficulty.  Mr. Treffry was coughing, and when he talked his voice
+seemed to rumble even more than usual.  Greta was dumb, trying to catch
+Christian's eye; Mrs. Decie alone seemed at ease.  After dinner Mr.
+Treffry went off to his room, leaning heavily on Christian's shoulder. As
+he sank into his chair, he said to her:
+
+"Pull yourself together, my dear!" Christian did not answer him.
+
+Outside his room Greta caught her by the sleeve.
+
+"Look!" she whispered, thrusting a piece of paper into Christian's hand.
+"It is to me from Dr. Edmund, but you must read it."
+
+Christian opened the note, which ran as follows:
+
+"MY PHILOSOPHER AND FRIEND,--I received your note, and went to our
+friend's studio; he was not in, but half an hour ago I stumbled on him in
+the Platz.  He is not quite himself; has had a touch of the sun--nothing
+serious: I took him to my hotel, where he is in bed. If he will stay
+there he will be all right in a day or two.  In any case he shall not
+elude my clutches for the present.
+
+"My warm respects to Mistress Christian.--Yours in friendship and
+philosophy, "EDMUND DAWNEY."
+
+Christian read and re-read this note, then turned to Greta.
+
+"What did you say to Dr. Dawney?"
+
+Greta took back the piece of paper, and replied: "I said:
+
+"'DEAR DR. EDMUND,--We are anxious about Herr Harz.  We think he is
+perhaps not very well to-day.  We (I and Christian) should like to know.
+You can tell us.  Please shall you?  GRETA.'
+
+"That is what I said."
+
+Christian dropped her eyes.  "What made you write?"
+
+Greta gazed at her mournfully: "I thought--O Chris! come into the garden. 
+I am so hot, and it is so dull without you!"
+
+Christian bent her head forward and rubbed her cheek against Greta's,
+then without another word ran upstairs and locked herself into her room.
+The child stood listening; hearing the key turn in the lock, she sank
+down on the bottom step and took Scruff in her arms.
+
+Half an hour later Miss Naylor, carrying a candle, found her there fast
+asleep, with her head resting on the terrier's back, and tear stains on
+her cheeks....
+
+Mrs. Decie presently came out, also carrying a candle, and went to her
+brother's room.  She stood before his chair, with folded hands.
+
+"Nicholas, what is to be done?"
+
+Mr. Treffry was pouring whisky into a glass.
+
+"Damn it, Con!" he answered; "how should I know?"
+
+"There's something in Christian that makes interference dangerous.  I
+know very well that I've no influence with her at all."
+
+"You're right there, Con," Mr. Treffry replied.
+
+Mrs. Decie's pale eyes, fastened on his face, forced him to look up.
+
+"I wish you would leave off drinking whisky and attend to me.  Paul is an
+element--"
+
+"Paul," Mr. Treffry growled, "is an ass!"
+
+"Paul," pursued Mrs. Decie, "is an element of danger in the situation;
+any ill-timed opposition of his might drive her to I don't know what.
+Christian is gentle, she is 'sympathetic' as they say; but thwart her,
+and she is as obstinate as....
+
+"You or I!  Leave her alone!"
+
+"I understand her character, but I confess that I am at a loss what to
+do."
+
+"Do nothing!"  He drank again.
+
+Mrs. Decie took up the candle.
+
+"Men!" she said with a mysterious intonation; shrugging her shoulders,
+she walked out.
+
+Mr. Treffry put down his glass.
+
+'Understand?' he thought; 'no, you don't, and I don't.  Who understands a
+young girl?  Vapourings, dreams, moonshine I....  What does she see in
+this painter fellow?  I wonder!'  He breathed heavily.  'By heavens!  I
+wouldn't have had this happen for a hundred thousand pounds!'
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+For many hours after Dawney had taken him to his hotel, Harz was
+prostrate with stunning pains in the head and neck.  He had been all day
+without food, exposed to burning sun, suffering violent emotion. Movement
+of any sort caused him such agony that he could only lie in stupor,
+counting the spots dancing before, his eyes.  Dawney did everything for
+him, and Harz resented in a listless way the intent scrutiny of the
+doctor's calm, black eyes.
+
+Towards the end of the second day he was able to get up; Dawney found him
+sitting on the bed in shirt and trousers.
+
+"My son," he said, "you had better tell me what the trouble is--it will
+do your stubborn carcase good."
+
+"I must go back to work," said Harz.
+
+"Work!" said Dawney deliberately: "you couldn't, if you tried."
+
+"I must."
+
+"My dear fellow, you couldn't tell one colour from another."
+
+"I must be doing something; I can't sit here and think."
+
+Dawney hooked his thumbs into his waistcoat: "You won't see the sun for
+three days yet, if I can help it."
+
+Harz got up.
+
+"I'm going to my studio to-morrow," he said.  "I promise not to go out. I
+must be where I can see my work.  If I can't paint, I can draw; I can
+feel my brushes, move my things about.  I shall go mad if I do nothing."
+
+Dawney took his arm, and walked him up and down.
+
+"I'll let you go," he said, "but give me a chance!  It's as much to me to
+put you straight as it is to you to paint a decent picture. Now go to
+bed; I'll have a carriage for you to-morrow morning."
+
+Harz sat down on the bed again, and for a long time stayed without
+moving, his eyes fixed on the floor.  The sight of him, so desperate and
+miserable, hurt the young doctor.
+
+"Can you get to bed by yourself?" he asked at last.
+
+Harz nodded.
+
+"Then, good-night, old chap!" and Dawney left the room.
+
+He took his hat and turned towards the Villa.  Between the poplars he
+stopped to think.  The farther trees were fret-worked black against the
+lingering gold of the sunset; a huge moth, attracted by the tip of his
+cigar, came fluttering in his face.  The music of a concertina rose and
+fell, like the sighing of some disillusioned spirit.  Dawney stood for
+several minutes staring at the house.
+
+He was shown to Mrs. Decie's room.  She was holding a magazine before her
+eyes, and received him with as much relief as philosophy permitted.
+
+"You are the very person I wanted to see," she said.
+
+He noticed that the magazine she held was uncut.
+
+"You are a young man," pursued Mrs. Decie, "but as my doctor I have a
+right to your discretion."
+
+Dawney smiled; the features of his broad, clean-shaven face looked
+ridiculously small on such occasions, but his eyes retained their air of
+calculation.
+
+"That is so," he answered.
+
+"It is about this unfortunate affair.  I understand that Mr. Harz is with
+you.  I want you to use your influence to dissuade him from attempting to
+see my niece."
+
+"Influence!" said Dawney; "you know Harz!"
+
+Mrs. Decie's voice hardened.
+
+"Everybody," she said, "has his weak points.  This young man is open to
+approach from at least two quarters--his pride is one, his work an other. 
+I am seldom wrong in gauging character; these are his vital spots, and
+they are of the essence of this matter.  I'm sorry for him, of
+course--but at his age, and living a man's life, these things--"  Her
+smile was extra pale.  "I wish you could give me something for my head. 
+It's foolish to worry.  Nerves of course!  But I can't help it!  You know
+my opinion, Dr. Dawney.  That young man will go far if he remains
+unfettered; he will make a name.  You will be doing him a great service
+if you could show him the affair as it really is--a drag on him, and
+quite unworthy of his pride!  Do help me!  You are just the man to do
+it!"
+
+Dawney threw up his head as if to shake off this impeachment; the curve
+of his chin thus displayed was imposing in its fulness; altogether he was
+imposing, having an air of capability.
+
+She struck him, indeed, as really scared; it was as if her mask of smile
+had become awry, and failed to cover her emotion; and he was puzzled,
+thinking, 'I wouldn't have believed she had it in her....' "It's not an
+easy business," he said; "I'll think it over."
+
+"Thank you!" murmured Mrs. Decie.  "You are most kind."
+
+Passing the schoolroom, he looked in through the open door. Christian was
+sitting there.  The sight of her face shocked him, it was so white, so
+resolutely dumb.  A book lay on her knees; she was not reading, but
+staring before her.  He thought suddenly: 'Poor thing!  If I don't say
+something to her, I shall be a brute!'
+
+"Miss Devorell," he said: "You can reckon on him."
+
+Christian tried to speak, but her lips trembled so that nothing came
+forth.
+
+"Good-night," said Dawney, and walked out....
+
+Three days later Harz was sitting in the window of his studio.  It was
+the first day he had found it possible to work, and now, tired out, he
+stared through the dusk at the slowly lengthening shadows of the rafters.
+A solitary mosquito hummed, and two house sparrows, who had built beneath
+the roof, chirruped sleepily.  Swallows darted by the window, dipping
+their blue wings towards the quiet water; a hush had stolen over
+everything.  He fell asleep.
+
+He woke, with a dim impression of some near presence.  In the pale
+glimmer from innumerable stars, the room was full of shadowy shapes. He
+lit his lantern.  The flame darted forth, bickered, then slowly lit up
+the great room.
+
+"Who's there?"
+
+A rustling seemed to answer.  He peered about, went to the doorway, and
+drew the curtain.  A woman's cloaked figure shrank against the wall.  Her
+face was buried in her hands; her arms, from which the cloak fell back,
+were alone visible.
+
+"Christian?"
+
+She ran past him, and when he had put the lantern down, was standing at
+the window.  She turned quickly to him.  "Take me away from here!  Let me
+come with you!"
+
+"Do you mean it?"
+
+"You said you wouldn't give me up!"
+
+"You know what you are doing?"
+
+She made a motion of assent.
+
+"But you don't grasp what this means.  Things to bear that you know
+nothing of--hunger perhaps!  Think, even hunger!  And your people won't
+forgive--you'll lose everything."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"I must choose--it's one thing or the other.  I can't give you up!  I
+should be afraid!"
+
+"But, dear; how can you come with me?  We can't be married here."
+
+"I am giving my life to you."
+
+"You are too good for me," said Harz.  "The life you're going into--may
+be dark, like that!" he pointed to the window.
+
+A sound of footsteps broke the hush.  They could see a figure on the path
+below.  It stopped, seemed to consider, vanished.  They heard the sounds
+of groping hands, of a creaking door, of uncertain feet on the stairs.
+
+Harz seized her hand.
+
+"Quick!" he whispered; "behind this canvas!"
+
+Christian was trembling violently.  She drew her hood across her face.
+The heavy breathing and ejaculations of the visitor were now plainly
+audible.
+
+"He's there!  Quick!  Hide!"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+With a thrill at his heart, Harz kissed her, then walked towards the
+entrance.  The curtain was pulled aside.
+
+It was Herr Paul, holding a cigar in one hand, his hat in the other, and
+breathing hard.
+
+"Pardon!" he said huskily, "your stairs are steep, and dark! mais en,
+fin! nous voila!  I have ventured to come for a talk."  His glance fell
+on the cloaked figure in the shadow.
+
+"Pardon!  A thousand pardons!  I had no idea!  I beg you to forgive this
+indiscretion!  I may take it you resign pretensions then?  You have a
+lady here--I have nothing more to say; I only beg a million pardons for
+intruding.  A thousand times forgive me!  Good-night!"
+
+He bowed and turned to go.  Christian stepped forward, and let the hood
+fall from her head.
+
+"It's I!"
+
+Herr Paul pirouetted.
+
+"Good God!" he stammered, dropping cigar and hat.  "Good God!"
+
+The lantern flared suddenly, revealing his crimson, shaking cheeks.
+
+"You came here, at night!  You, the daughter of my wife!"  His eyes
+wandered with a dull glare round the room.
+
+"Take care!" cried Harz: "If you say a word against her---"
+
+The two men stared at each other's eyes.  And without warning, the
+lantern flickered and went out.  Christian drew the cloak round her
+again.  Herr Paul's voice broke the silence; he had recovered his
+self-possession.
+
+"Ah! ah!" he said: "Darkness!  Tant mieux!  The right thing for what we
+have to say.  Since we do not esteem each other, it is well not to see
+too much."
+
+"Just so," said Harz.
+
+Christian had come close to them.  Her pale face and great shining eyes
+could just be seen through the gloom.
+
+Herr Paul waved his arm; the gesture was impressive, annihilating.
+
+"This is a matter, I believe, between two men," he said, addressing Harz.
+"Let us come to the point.  I will do you the credit to suppose that you
+have a marriage in view.  You know, perhaps, that Miss Devorell has no
+money till I die?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And I am passably young!  You have money, then?"
+
+"No."
+
+"In that case, you would propose to live on air?"
+
+"No, to work; it has been done before."
+
+"It is calculated to increase hunger!  You are prepared to take Miss
+Devorell, a young lady accustomed to luxury, into places like--this!" he
+peered about him, "into places that smell of paint, into the milieu of
+'the people,' into the society of Bohemians--who knows? of anarchists,
+perhaps?"
+
+Harz clenched his hands: "I will answer no more questions."
+
+"In that event, we reach the ultimatum," said Herr Paul.  "Listen, Herr
+Outlaw!  If you have not left the country by noon to-morrow, you shall be
+introduced to the police!"
+
+Christian uttered a cry.  For a minute in the gloom the only sound heard
+was the short, hard breathing of the two men.
+
+Suddenly Harz cried: "You coward, I defy you!"
+
+"Coward!" Herr Paul repeated.  "That is indeed the last word.  Look to
+yourself, my friend!"
+
+Stooping and fumbling on the floor, he picked up his hat.  Christian had
+already vanished; the sound of her hurrying footsteps was distinctly
+audible at the top of the dark stairs.  Herr Paul stood still a minute.
+
+"Look to yourself, my dear friend!" he said in a thick voice, groping for
+the wall.  Planting his hat askew on his head, he began slowly to descend
+the stairs.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+Nicholas Treffry sat reading the paper in his room by the light of a lamp
+with a green shade; on his sound foot the terrier Scruff was asleep and
+snoring lightly--the dog habitually came down when Greta was in bed, and
+remained till Mr. Treffry, always the latest member of the household,
+retired to rest.
+
+Through the long window a little river of light shone out on the veranda
+tiles, and, flowing past, cut the garden in two.
+
+There was the sound of hurried footsteps, a rustling of draperies;
+Christian, running through the window, stood before him.
+
+Mr. Treffry dropped his paper, such a fury of passion and alarm shone in
+the girl's eyes.
+
+"Chris!  What is it?"
+
+"Hateful!"
+
+"Chris!"
+
+"Oh!  Uncle!  He's insulted, threatened!  And I love his little finger
+more than all the, world!"
+
+Her passionate voice trembled, her eyes were shining.
+
+Mr. Treffry's profound discomfort found vent in the gruff words: "Sit
+down!"
+
+"I'll never speak to Father again!  Oh!  Uncle!  I love him!"
+
+Quiet in the extremity of his disturbance, Mr. Treffry leaned forward in
+his chair, rested his big hands on its arms, and stared at her.
+
+Chris!  Here was a woman he did not know!  His lips moved under the heavy
+droop of his moustache.  The girl's face had suddenly grown white.  She
+sank down on her knees, and laid her cheek against his hand.  He felt it
+wet; and a lump rose in his throat.  Drawing his hand away, he stared at
+it, and wiped it with his sleeve.
+
+"Don't cry!" he said.
+
+She seized it again and clung to it; that clutch seemed to fill him with
+sudden rage.
+
+"What's the matter?  How the devil can I do anything if you don't tell
+me?"
+
+She looked up at him.  The distress of the last days, the passion and
+fear of the last hour, the tide of that new life of the spirit and the
+flesh, stirring within her, flowed out in a stream of words.
+
+When she had finished, there was so dead a silence that the fluttering of
+a moth round the lamp could be heard plainly.
+
+Mr. Treffry raised himself, crossed the room, and touched the bell. "Tell
+the groom," he said to Dominique, "to put the horses to, and have 'em
+round at once; bring my old boots; we drive all night...."
+
+His bent figure looked huge, body and legs outlined by light, head and
+shoulders towering into shadow.  "He shall have a run for his money!" he
+said.  His eyes stared down sombrely at his niece.  "It's more than he
+deserves!--it's more than you deserve, Chris.  Sit down there and write
+to him; tell him to put himself entirely in my hands."  He turned his
+back on her, and went into his bedroom.
+
+Christian rose, and sat down at the writing-table.  A whisper startled
+her.  It came from Dominique, who was holding out a pair of boots.
+
+"M'mselle Chris, what is this?--to run about all night?"  But Christian
+did not answer.
+
+"M'mselle Chris, are you ill?"  Then seeing her face, he slipped away
+again.
+
+She finished her letter and went out to the carriage.  Mr. Treffry was
+seated under the hood.
+
+"Shan't want you," he called out to the groom, "Get up, Dominique."
+
+Christian thrust her letter into his hand.  "Give him that," she said,
+clinging to his arm with sudden terror.  "Oh!  Uncle! do take care!"
+
+"Chris, if I do this for you--"  They looked wistfully at one another. 
+Then, shaking his head, Mr. Treffry gathered up the reins.
+
+"Don't fret, my dear, don't fret!  Whoa, mare!"
+
+The carriage with a jerk plunged forward into darkness, curved with a
+crunch of wheels, and vanished, swinging between the black treepillars at
+the entrance....
+
+Christian stood, straining to catch the failing sound of the hoofs.
+
+Down the passage came a flutter of white garments; soft limbs were twined
+about her, some ends of hair fell on her face.
+
+"What is it, Chris?  Where have you been?  Where is Uncle Nic going? 
+Tell me!"
+
+Christian tore herself away.  "I don't know," she cried, "I know
+nothing!"
+
+Greta stroked her face.  "Poor Chris!" she murmured.  Her bare feet
+gleamed, her hair shone gold against her nightdress.  "Come to bed, poor
+Chris!"
+
+Christian laughed.  "You little white moth!  Feel how hot I am!  You'll
+burn your wings!"
+
+Harz had lain down, fully dressed.  He was no longer angry, but felt that
+he would rather die than yield.  Presently he heard footsteps coming up
+the stairs.
+
+"M'sieu!"
+
+It was the voice of Dominique, whose face, illumined by a match, wore an
+expression of ironical disgust.
+
+"My master," he said, "makes you his compliments; he says there is no
+time to waste.  You are to please come and drive with him!"
+
+"Your master is very kind.  Tell him I'm in bed."
+
+"Ah, M'sieu," said Dominique, grimacing, "I must not go back with such an
+answer.  If you would not come, I was to give you this."
+
+Harz broke the seal and read Christian's letter.
+
+"I will come," he said.
+
+A clock was striking as they went out through the gate.  From within the
+dark cave of the phaeton hood Mr. Treffry said gruffly: "Come along,
+sir!"
+
+Harz flung his knapsack in, and followed.
+
+His companion's figure swayed, the whiplash slid softly along the flank
+of the off horse, and, as the carriage rattled forward, Mr. Treffry
+called out, as if by afterthought: "Hallo, Dominique!" Dominque's voice,
+shaken and ironical, answered from behind: "M'v'la, M'sieu!"
+
+In the long street of silent houses, men sitting in the lighted cafes
+turned with glasses at their lips to stare after the carriage.  The
+narrow river of the sky spread suddenly to a vast, limpid ocean tremulous
+with stars.  They had turned into the road for Italy.
+
+Mr. Treffry took a pull at his horses.  "Whoa, mare!  Dogged does it!"
+and the near horse, throwing up her head, whinnied; a fleck of foam
+drifted into Harz's face.
+
+The painter had come on impulse; because Christian had told him to, not
+of his own free will.  He was angry with himself, wounded in self-esteem,
+for having allowed any one to render him this service. The smooth swift
+movement through velvet blackness splashed on either hand with the flying
+lamp-light; the strong sweet air blowing in his face-air that had kissed
+the tops of mountains and stolen their spirit; the snort and snuffle of
+the horses, and crisp rattling of their hoofs--all this soon roused in
+him another feeling.  He looked at Mr. Treffry's profile, with its tufted
+chin; at the grey road adventuring in darkness; at the purple mass of
+mountains piled above it.  All seemed utterly unreal.
+
+As if suddenly aware that he had a neighbour, Mr. Treffry turned his
+head.  "We shall do better than this presently," he said, "bit of a slope
+coming.  Haven't had 'em out for three days.  Whoa-mare!  Steady!"
+
+"Why are you taking this trouble for me?" asked Harz.
+
+"I'm an old chap, Mr. Harz, and an old chap may do a stupid thing once in
+a while!"
+
+"You are very good," said Harz, "but I want no favours."
+
+Mr. Treffry stared at him.
+
+"Just so," he said drily, "but you see there's my niece to be thought of.
+Look here!  We're not at the frontier yet, Mr. Harz, by forty miles; it's
+long odds we don't get there--so, don't spoil sport!"  He pointed to the
+left.
+
+Harz caught the glint of steel.  They were already crossing the railway.
+The sigh of the telegraph wires fluttered above them.
+
+"Hear 'em," said Mr. Treffry, "but if we get away up the mountains, we'll
+do yet!"  They had begun to rise, the speed slackened.  Mr. Treffry
+rummaged out a flask.
+
+"Not bad stuff, Mr. Harz--try it.  You won't?  Mother's milk!  Fine
+night, eh?"  Below them the valley was lit by webs of milky mist like the
+glimmer of dew on grass.
+
+These two men sitting side by side--unlike in face, age, stature,
+thought, and life--began to feel drawn towards each other, as if, in the
+rolling of the wheels, the snorting of the horses, the huge dark space,
+the huge uncertainty, they had found something they could enjoy in
+common.  The, steam from the horses' flanks and nostrils enveloped them
+with an odour as of glue.
+
+"You smoke, Mr. Harz?"
+
+Harz took the proffered weed, and lighted it from the glowing tip of Mr.
+Treffry's cigar, by light of which his head and hat looked like some
+giant mushroom.  Suddenly the wheels jolted on a rubble of loose stones;
+the carriage was swung sideways.  The scared horses, straining asunder,
+leaped forward, and sped downwards, in the darkness.
+
+Past rocks, trees, dwellings, past a lighted house that gleamed and
+vanished.  With a clink and clatter, a flirt of dust and pebbles, and the
+side lamps throwing out a frisky orange blink, the carriage dashed down,
+sinking and rising like a boat crossing billows.  The world seemed to
+rock and sway; to dance up, and be flung flat again. Only the stars stood
+still.
+
+Mr. Treffry, putting on the brake, muttered apologetically: "A little out
+o'hand!"
+
+Suddenly with a headlong dive, the carriage swayed as if it would fly in
+pieces, slithered along, and with a jerk steadied itself.  Harz lifted
+his voice in a shout of pure excitement.  Mr. Treffry let out a short
+shaky howl, and from behind there rose a wail.  But the hill was over and
+the startled horses were cantering with a free, smooth motion.  Mr.
+Treffry and Harz looked at each other.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+Mr. Treffry said with a sort of laugh: "Near go, eh?  You drive?  No?
+That's a pity!  Broken most of my bones at the game--nothing like it!" 
+Each felt a kind of admiration for the other that he had not felt before. 
+Presently Mr. Treffry began: "Look here, Mr. Harz, my niece is a slip of
+a thing, with all a young girl's notions!  What have you got to give her,
+eh?  Yourself?  That's surely not enough; mind this--six months after
+marriage we all turn out much the same--a selfish lot!  Not to mention
+this anarchist affair!
+
+"You're not of her blood, nor of her way of life, nor anything--it's
+taking chances--and--" his hand came down on the young man's knee, "I'm
+fond of her, you see."
+
+"If you were in my place," said Harz, "would you give her up?"
+
+Mr. Treffry groaned.  "Lord knows!"
+
+"Men have made themselves before now.  For those who don't believe in
+failure, there's no such thing.  Suppose she does suffer a little?  Will
+it do her any harm?  Fair weather love is no good."
+
+Mr. Treffry sighed.
+
+"Brave words, sir!  You'll pardon me if I'm too old to understand 'em
+when they're used about my niece."
+
+He pulled the horses up, and peered into the darkness.  "We're going
+through this bit quietly; if they lose track of us here so much the
+better.  Dominique! put out the lamps.  Soho, my beauties!"  The horses
+paced forward at a walk the muffled beat of their hoofs in the dust
+hardly broke the hush.  Mr. Treffry pointed to the left: "It'll be
+another thirty-five miles to the frontier."
+
+They passed the whitewashed houses, and village church with its sentinel
+cypress-trees.  A frog was croaking in a runlet; there was a faint spicy
+scent of lemons.  But nothing stirred.
+
+It was wood now on either side, the high pines, breathing their fragrance
+out into the darkness, and, like ghosts amongst them, the silver stems of
+birch-trees.
+
+Mr. Treffry said gruffly: "You won't give her up?  Her happiness means a
+lot to me."
+
+"To you!" said Harz: "to him!  And I am nothing!  Do you think I don't
+care for her happiness?  Is it a crime for me to love her?"
+
+"Almost, Mr. Harz--considering...."
+
+"Considering that I've no money!  Always money!"
+
+To this sneer Mr. Treffry made no answer, clucking to his horses.
+
+"My niece was born and bred a lady," he said at last.  "I ask you plainly
+What position have you got to give her?"
+
+"If she marries me," said Harz, "she comes into my world.  You think that
+I'm a common...."
+
+Mr. Treffry shook his head: "Answer my question, young man."
+
+But the painter did not answer it, and silence fell.
+
+A light breeze had sprung up; the whispering in the trees, the rolling of
+the wheels in this night progress, the pine-drugged air, sent Harz to
+sleep.  When he woke it was to the same tune, varied by Mr. Treffry's
+uneasy snoring; the reins were hanging loose, and, peering out, he saw
+Dominique shuffling along at the horses' heads. He joined him, and, one
+on each side, they plodded up and up.  A haze had begun to bathe the
+trees, the stars burnt dim, the air was colder.  Mr. Treffry woke
+coughing.  It was like some long nightmare, this interminable experience
+of muffled sounds and shapes, of perpetual motion, conceived, and carried
+out in darkness.  But suddenly the day broke.  Heralded by the snuffle of
+the horses, light began glimmering over a chaos of lines and shadows,
+pale as mother-o'-pearl.  The stars faded, and in a smouldering zigzag
+the dawn fled along the mountain tops, flinging out little isles of
+cloud.  From a lake, curled in a hollow like a patch of smoke, came the
+cry of a water-bird.  A cuckoo started a soft mocking; and close to the
+carriage a lark flew up.  Beasts and men alike stood still, drinking in
+the air-sweet with snows and dew, and vibrating faintly with the running
+of the water and the rustling of the leaves.
+
+The night had played sad tricks with Mr. Nicholas Treffry; his hat was
+grey with dust; his cheeks brownish-purple, there were heavy pouches
+beneath his eyes, which stared painfully.
+
+"We'll call a halt," he said, "and give the gees their grub, poor things.
+Can you find some water, Mr. Harz?  There's a rubber bucket in behind.
+
+"Can't get about myself this morning; make that lazy fellow of mine stir
+his stumps."
+
+Harz saw that he had drawn off one of his boots, and stretched the foot
+out on a cushion.
+
+"You're not fit to go farther," he said; "you're ill."
+
+"Ill!" replied Mr. Treffry; "not a bit of it!"
+
+Harz looked at him, then catching up the bucket, made off in search of
+water.  When he came back the horses were feeding from an india-rubber
+trough slung to the pole; they stretched their heads towards the bucket,
+pushing aside each other's noses.
+
+The flame in the east had died, but the tops of the larches were bathed
+in a gentle radiance; and the peaks ahead were like amber. Everywhere
+were threads of water, threads of snow, and little threads of dewy green,
+glistening like gossamer.
+
+Mr. Treffry called out: "Give me your arm, Mr. Harz; I'd like to shake
+the reefs out of me.  When one comes to stand over at the knees, it's no
+such easy matter, eh?"  He groaned as he put his foot down, and gripped
+the young man's shoulder as in a vise.  Presently he lowered himself on
+to a stone.
+
+"'All over now!' as Chris would say when she was little; nasty temper she
+had too--kick and scream on the floor!  Never lasted long though....
+'Kiss her! take her up! show her the pictures!'  Amazing fond of pictures
+Chris was!"  He looked dubiously at Harz; then took a long pull at his
+flask.  "What would the doctor say?  Whisky at four in the morning!  Well! 
+Thank the Lord Doctors aren't always with us."  Sitting on the stone,
+with one hand pressed against his side, and the other tilting up the
+flask, he was grey from head to foot.
+
+Harz had dropped on to another stone.  He, too, was worn out by the
+excitement and fatigue, coming so soon after his illness.  His head was
+whirling, and the next thing he remembered was a tree walking at him,
+turning round, yellow from the roots up; everything seemed yellow, even
+his own feet.  Somebody opposite to him was jumping up and down, a grey
+bear--with a hat--Mr. Treffry!  He cried: "Ha-alloo!"  And the figure
+seemed to fall and disappear....
+
+When Harz came to himself a hand was pouring liquor into his mouth, and a
+wet cloth was muffled round his brows; a noise of humming and hoofs
+seemed familiar.  Mr. Treffry loomed up alongside, smoking a cigar; he
+was muttering: "A low trick, Paul--bit of my mind!"  Then, as if a
+curtain had been snatched aside, the vision before Harz cleared again.
+The carriage was winding between uneven, black-eaved houses, past
+doorways from which goats and cows were coming out, with bells on their
+necks.  Black-eyed boys, and here and there a drowsy man with a long,
+cherry-stemmed pipe between his teeth, stood aside to stare.
+
+Mr. Treffry seemed to have taken a new lease of strength; like an angry
+old dog, he stared from side to side.  "My bone!" he seemed to say:
+"let's see who's going to touch it!"
+
+The last house vanished, glowing in the early sunshine, and the carriage
+with its trail of dust became entombed once more in the gloom of tall
+trees, along a road that cleft a wilderness of mossgrown rocks, and dewy
+stems, through which the sun had not yet driven paths.
+
+Dominique came round to them, bearing appearance of one who has seen
+better days, and a pot of coffee brewed on a spirit lamp.  Breakfast--he
+said--was served!
+
+The ears of the horses were twitching with fatigue.  Mr. Treffry said
+sadly: "If I can see this through, you can.  Get on, my beauties!"
+
+As soon as the sun struck through the trees, Mr. Treffry's strength ebbed
+again.  He seemed to suffer greatly; but did not complain. They had
+reached the pass at last, and the unchecked sunlight was streaming down
+with a blinding glare.
+
+"Jump up!" Mr. Treffry cried out.  "We'll make a finish of it!" and he
+gave the reins a jerk.  The horses flung up their heads, and the bleak
+pass with its circling crown of jagged peaks soon slipped away.
+
+Between the houses on the very top, they passed at a slow trot; and soon
+began slanting down the other side.  Mr. Treffry brought them to a halt
+where a mule track joined the road.
+
+"That's all I can do for you; you'd better leave me here," he said. "Keep
+this track down to the river--go south--you'll be in Italy in a couple of
+hours.  Get rail at Feltre.  Money?  Yes?  Well!"  He held out his hand;
+Harz gripped it.
+
+"Give her up, eh?"
+
+Harz shook his head.
+
+"No?  Then it's 'pull devil, pull baker,' between us.  Good-bye, and good
+luck to you!"  And mustering his strength for a last attempt at dignity,
+Mr. Treffry gathered up the reins.
+
+Harz watched his figure huddled again beneath the hood.  The carriage
+moved slowly away.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+At Villa Rubein people went about, avoiding each other as if detected in
+conspiracy.  Miss Naylor, who for an inscrutable reason had put on her
+best frock, a purple, relieved at the chest with bird's-eye blue,
+conveyed an impression of trying to count a chicken which ran about too
+fast.  When Greta asked what she had lost she was heard to mutter:
+"Mr.--Needlecase."
+
+Christian, with big circles round her eyes, sat silent at her little
+table.  She had had no sleep.  Herr Paul coming into the room about noon
+gave her a furtive look and went out again; after this he went to his
+bedroom, took off all his clothes, flung them passionately one by one
+into a footbath, and got into bed.
+
+"I might be a criminal!" he muttered to himself, while the buttons of his
+garments rattled on the bath.
+
+"Am I her father?  Have I authority?  Do I know the world?  Bssss!  I
+might be a frog!"
+
+Mrs. Decie, having caused herself to be announced, found him smoking a
+cigar, and counting the flies on the ceiling.
+
+"If you have really done this, Paul," she said in a restrained voice,
+"you have done a very unkind thing, and what is worse, you have made us
+all ridiculous.  But perhaps you have not done it?"
+
+"I have done it," cried Herr Paul, staring dreadfully: "I have done it, I
+tell you, I have done it--"
+
+"Very well, you have done it--and why, pray?  What conceivable good was
+there in it?  I suppose you know that Nicholas has driven him to the
+frontier?  Nicholas is probably more dead than alive by this time; you
+know his state of health."
+
+Herr Paul's fingers ploughed up his beard.
+
+"Nicholas is mad--and the girl is mad!  Leave me alone!  I will not be
+made angry; do you understand?  I will not be worried--I am not fit for
+it."  His prominent brown eyes stared round the room, as if looking for a
+way of escape.
+
+"If I may prophesy, you will be worried a good deal," said Mrs. Decie
+coldly, "before you have finished with this affair."
+
+The anxious, uncertain glance which Herr Paul gave her at these words
+roused an unwilling feeling of compunction in her.
+
+"You are not made for the outraged father of the family," she said. "You
+had better give up the attitude, Paul; it does not suit you."
+
+Herr Paul groaned.
+
+"I suppose it is not your fault," she added.
+
+Just then the door was opened, and Fritz, with an air of saying the right
+thing, announced:
+
+"A gentleman of the police to see you, sir."
+
+Herr Paul bounded.
+
+"Keep him out!" he cried.
+
+Mrs. Decie, covering her lips, disappeared with a rustling of silk; in
+her place stood a stiff man in blue....
+
+Thus the morning dragged itself away without any one being able to settle
+to anything, except Herr Paul, who was settled in bed.  As was fitting in
+a house that had lost its soul, meals were neglected, even by the dog.
+
+About three o'clock a telegram came for Christian, containing these
+words: "All right; self returns to-morrow.  Treffry."  After reading it
+she put on her hat and went out, followed closely by Greta, who, when she
+thought that she would not be sent away, ran up from behind and pulled
+her by the sleeve.
+
+"Let me come, Chris--I shall not talk."
+
+The two girls walked on together.  When they had gone some distance
+Christian said:
+
+"I'm going to get his pictures, and take charge of them!"
+
+"Oh!" said Greta timidly.
+
+"If you are afraid," said Christian, "you had better go back home."
+
+"I am not afraid, Chris," said Greta meekly.
+
+Neither girl spoke again till they had taken the path along the wall.
+Over the tops of the vines the heat was dancing.
+
+"The sun-fairies are on the vines!" murmured Greta to herself.
+
+At the old house they stopped, and Christian, breathing quickly, pushed
+the door; it was immovable.
+
+"Look!" said Greta, "they have screwed it!"  She pointed out three screws
+with a rosy-tipped forefinger.
+
+Christian stamped her foot.
+
+"We mustn't stand here," she said; "let's sit on that bench and think."
+
+"Yes," murmured Greta, "let us think."  Dangling an end of hair, she
+regarded Christian with her wide blue eyes.
+
+"I can't make any plan," Christian cried at last, "while you stare at me
+like that."
+
+"I was thinking," said Greta humbly, "if they have screwed it up, perhaps
+we shall screw it down again; there is the big screw-driver of Fritz."
+
+"It would take a long time; people are always passing."
+
+"People do not pass in the evening," murmured Greta, "because the gate at
+our end is always shut."
+
+Christian rose.
+
+"We will come this evening, just before the gate is shut."
+
+"But, Chris, how shall we get back again?"
+
+"I don't know; I mean to have the pictures."
+
+"It is not a high gate," murmured Greta.
+
+After dinner the girls went to their room, Greta bearing with her the big
+screw-driver of Fritz.  At dusk they slipped downstairs and out.
+
+They arrived at the old house, and stood, listening, in the shadow of the
+doorway.  The only sounds were those of distant barking dogs, and of the
+bugles at the barracks.
+
+"Quick!" whispered Christian; and Greta, with all the strength of her
+small hands, began to turn the screws.  It was some time before they
+yielded; the third was very obstinate, till Christian took the
+screw-driver and passionately gave the screw a starting twist.
+
+"It is like a pig--that one," said Greta, rubbing her wrists mournfully.
+
+The opened door revealed the gloom of the dank rooms and twisting
+staircase, then fell to behind them with a clatter.
+
+Greta gave a little scream, and caught her sister's dress.
+
+"It is dark," she gasped; "O Chris! it is dark!"
+
+Christian groped for the bottom stair, and Greta felt her arm shaking.
+
+"Suppose there is a man to keep guard!  O Chris! suppose there are bats!"
+
+"You are a baby!" Christian answered in a trembling voice.  "You had
+better go home!"
+
+Greta choked a little in the dark.
+
+"I am--not--going home, but I'm afraid of bats.  O Chris! aren't you
+afraid?"
+
+"Yes," said Christian, "but I'm going to have the pictures."
+
+Her cheeks were burning; she was trembling all over.  Having found the
+bottom step she began to mount with Greta clinging to her skirts.
+
+The haze above inspired a little courage in the child, who, of all
+things, hated darkness.  The blanket across the doorway of the loft had
+been taken down, there was nothing to veil the empty room.
+
+"Nobody here, you see," said Christian.
+
+"No-o," whispered Greta, running to the window, and clinging to the wall,
+like one of the bats she dreaded.
+
+"But they have been here!" cried Christian angrily.  "They have broken
+this."  She pointed to the fragments of a plaster cast that had been
+thrown down.
+
+Out of the corner she began to pull the canvases set in rough, wooden
+frames, dragging them with all her strength.
+
+"Help me!" she cried; "it will be dark directly."
+
+They collected a heap of sketches and three large pictures, piling them
+before the window, and peering at them in the failing light.
+
+Greta said ruefully:
+
+"O Chris! they are heavy ones; we shall never carry them, and the gate is
+shut now!"
+
+Christian took a pointed knife from the table.
+
+"I shall cut them out of the frames," she said.  "Listen!  What's that?"
+
+It was the sound of whistling, which stopped beneath the window.  The
+girls, clasping each other's hands, dropped on their knees.
+
+"Hallo!" cried a voice.
+
+Greta crept to the window, and, placing her face level with the floor,
+peered over.
+
+"It is only Dr. Edmund; he doesn't know, then," she whispered; "I shall
+call him; he is going away!" cried Christian catching her sister's 
+--"Don't!" cried Christian catching her sister's dress.
+
+"He would help us," Greta said reproachfully, "and it would not be so
+dark if he were here."
+
+Christian's cheeks were burning.
+
+"I don't choose," she said, and began handling the pictures, feeling
+their edges with her knife.
+
+"Chris!  Suppose anybody came?"
+
+"The door is screwed," Christian answered absently.
+
+"O Chris!  We screwed it unscrewed; anybody who wishes shall come!"
+
+Christian, leaning her chin in her hands, gazed at her thoughtfully.
+
+"It will take a long time to cut these pictures out carefully; or,
+perhaps I can get them out without cutting.  You must screw me up and go
+home.  In the morning you must come early, when the gate is open, unscrew
+me again, and help carry the pictures."
+
+Greta did not answer at once.  At last she shook her head violently.
+
+"I am afraid," she gasped.
+
+"We can't both stay here all night," said Christian; "if any one comes to
+our room there will be nobody to answer.  We can't lift these pictures
+over the gate.  One of us must go back; you can climb over the
+gate--there is nothing to be afraid of"
+
+Greta pressed her hands together.
+
+"Do you want the pictures badly, Chris?"
+
+Christian nodded.
+
+"Very badly?"
+
+"Yes--yes--yes!"
+
+Greta remained sitting where she was, shivering violently, as a little
+animal shivers when it scents danger.  At last she rose.
+
+"I am going," she said in a despairing voice.  At the doorway she turned.
+
+"If Miss Naylor shall ask me where you are, Chris, I shall be telling her
+a story."
+
+Christian started.
+
+"I forgot that--O Greta, I am sorry!  I will go instead."
+
+Greta took another step--a quick one.
+
+"I shall die if I stay here alone," she said; "I can tell her that you
+are in bed; you must go to bed here, Chris, so it shall be true after
+all."
+
+Christian threw her arms about her.
+
+"I am so sorry, darling; I wish I could go instead.  But if you have to
+tell a lie, I would tell a straight one."
+
+"Would you?" said Greta doubtfully.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I think," said Greta to herself, beginning to descend the stairs, "I
+think I will tell it in my way."  She shuddered and went on groping in
+the darkness.
+
+Christian listened for the sound of the screws.  It came slowly,
+threatening her with danger and solitude.
+
+Sinking on her knees she began to work at freeing the canvas of a
+picture.  Her heart throbbed distressfully; at the stir of wind-breath or
+any distant note of clamour she stopped, and held her breathing.  No
+sounds came near.  She toiled on, trying only to think that she was at
+the very spot where last night his arms had been round her.  How long ago
+it seemed!  She was full of vague terror, overmastered by the darkness,
+dreadfully alone.  The new glow of resolution seemed suddenly to have
+died down in her heart, and left her cold.
+
+She would never be fit to be his wife, if at the first test her courage
+failed!  She set her teeth; and suddenly she felt a kind of exultation,
+as if she too were entering into life, were knowing something within
+herself that she had never known before.  Her fingers hurt, and the pain
+even gave pleasure; her cheeks were burning; her breath came fast.  They
+could not stop her now!  This feverish task in darkness was her baptism
+into life.  She finished; and rolling the pictures very carefully, tied
+them with cord.  She had done something for him!  Nobody could take that
+from her!  She had a part of him!  This night had made him hers!  They
+might do their worst!  She lay down on his mattress and soon fell
+asleep....
+
+She was awakened by Scruff's tongue against her face.  Greta was standing
+by her side.
+
+"Wake up, Chris!  The gate is open!"
+
+In the cold early light the child seemed to glow with warmth and colour;
+her eyes were dancing.
+
+"I am not afraid now; Scruff and I sat up all night, to catch the
+morning--I--think it was fun; and O Chris!" she ended with a rueful gleam
+in her eyes, "I told it."
+
+Christian hugged her.
+
+"Come--quick!  There is nobody about.  Are those the pictures?"
+
+Each supporting an end, the girls carried the bundle downstairs, and set
+out with their corpse-like burden along the wall-path between the river
+and the vines.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+Hidden by the shade of rose-bushes Greta lay stretched at length, cheek
+on arm, sleeping the sleep of the unrighteous.  Through the flowers the
+sun flicked her parted lips with kisses, and spilled the withered petals
+on her.  In a denser islet of shade, Scruff lay snapping at a fly.  His
+head lolled drowsily in the middle of a snap, and snapped in the middle
+of a loll.
+
+At three o'clock Miss Naylor too came out, carrying a basket and pair of
+scissors.  Lifting her skirts to avoid the lakes of water left by the
+garden hose, she stopped in front of a rose-bush, and began to snip off
+the shrivelled flowers.  The little lady's silvered head and thin, brown
+face sustained the shower of sunlight unprotected, and had a gentle
+dignity in their freedom.
+
+Presently, as the scissors flittered in and out of the leaves, she, began
+talking to herself.
+
+"If girls were more like what they used to be, this would not have
+happened.  Perhaps we don't understand; it's very easy to forget."
+Burying her nose and lips in a rose, she sniffed.  "Poor dear girl!  It's
+such a pity his father is--a--"
+
+"A farmer," said a sleepy voice behind the rosebush.
+
+Miss Naylor leaped.  "Greta!  How you startled me!  A farmer--that is
+--an--an agriculturalist!"
+
+"A farmer with vineyards--he told us, and he is not ashamed.  Why is it a
+pity, Miss Naylor?"
+
+Miss Naylor's lips looked very thin.
+
+"For many reasons, of which you know nothing."
+
+"That is what you always say," pursued the sleepy voice; "and that is
+why, when I am to be married, there shall also be a pity."
+
+"Greta!" Miss Naylor cried, "it is not proper for a girl of your age to
+talk like that."
+
+"Why?" said Greta.  "Because it is the truth?"
+
+Miss Naylor made no reply to this, but vexedly cut off a sound rose,
+which she hastily picked up and regarded with contrition.  Greta spoke
+again:
+
+"Chris said: 'I have got the pictures, I shall tell her'; but I shall
+tell you instead, because it was I that told the story."
+
+Miss Naylor stared, wrinkling her nose, and holding the scissors wide
+apart....
+
+"Last night," said Greta slowly, "I and Chris went to his studio and took
+his pictures, and so, because the gate was shut, I came back to tell it;
+and when you asked me where Chris was, I told it; because she was in the
+studio all night, and I and Scruff sat up all night, and in the morning
+we brought the pictures, and hid them under our beds, and that is
+why--we--are--so--sleepy."
+
+Over the rose-bush Miss Naylor peered down at her; and though she was
+obliged to stand on tiptoe this did not altogether destroy her dignity.
+
+"I am surprised at you, Greta; I am surprised at Christian, more
+surprised at Christian.  The world seems upside down."
+
+Greta, a sunbeam entangled in her hair, regarded her with inscrutable,
+innocent eyes.
+
+"When you were a girl, I think you would be sure to be in love," she
+murmured drowsily.
+
+Miss Naylor, flushing deeply, snipped off a particularly healthy bud.
+
+"And so, because you are not married, I think--"
+
+The scissors hissed.
+
+Greta nestled down again.  "I think it is wicked to cut off all the good
+buds," she said, and shut her eyes.
+
+Miss Naylor continued to peer across the rosebush; but her thin face,
+close to the glistening leaves, had become oddly soft, pink, and girlish.
+At a deeper breath from Greta, the little lady put down her basket, and
+began to pace the lawn, followed dubiously by Scruff.  It was thus that
+Christian came on them.
+
+Miss Naylor slipped her arm into the girl's and though she made no sound,
+her lips kept opening and shutting, like the beak of a bird contemplating
+a worm.
+
+Christian spoke first:
+
+"Miss Naylor, I want to tell you please--"
+
+"Oh, my dear!  I know; Greta has been in the confessional before you."
+She gave the girl's arm a squeeze.  "Isn't it a lovely day?  Did you ever
+see 'Five Fingers' look so beautiful?"  And she pointed to the great
+peaks of the Funffingerspitze glittering in the sun like giant crystals.
+
+"I like them better with clouds about them."
+
+"Well," agreed Miss Naylor nervously, "they certainly are nicer with
+clouds about them.  They look almost hot and greasy, don't they.... My
+dear!" she went on, giving Christian's arm a dozen little squeezes, "we
+all of us--that is, we all of us--"
+
+Christian turned her eyes away.
+
+"My dear," Miss Naylor tried again, "I am far--that is, I mean, to all of
+us at some time or another--and then you see--well--it is hard!"
+
+Christian kissed the gloved hand resting on her arm.  Miss Naylor bobbed
+her head; a tear trickled off her nose.
+
+"Do let us wind your skein of woof!" she said with resounding gaiety.
+
+Some half-hour later Mrs. Decie called Christian to her room.
+
+"My dear!" she said; "come here a minute; I have a message for you."
+
+Christian went with an odd, set look about her mouth.
+
+Her aunt was sitting, back to the light, tapping a bowl of goldfish with
+the tip of a polished finger-nail; the room was very cool.  She held a
+letter out.  "Your uncle is not coming back tonight."
+
+Christian took the letter.  It was curtly worded, in a thin, toppling
+hand:
+
+"DEAR CON--Can't get back to-night.  Sending Dominique for things. Tell
+Christian to come over with him for night if possible.--Yr. aff. brother, 
+     NICLS. TREFFRY."
+
+"Dominique has a carriage here," said Mrs. Decie.  "You will have nice
+time to catch the train.  Give my love to your uncle.  You must take
+Barbi with you, I insist on that."  She rose from her chair and held
+Christian's hand: "My dear!  You look very tired--very!  Almost ill. I
+don't like to see you look like that.  Come!"  She thrust her pale lips
+forward, and kissed the girl's paler cheek.
+
+Then as Christian left the room she sank back in her chair, with creases
+in her forehead, and began languidly to cut a magazine. 'Poor Christian!'
+she thought, 'how hardly she does take it!  I am sorry for her; but
+perhaps it's just as well, as things are turning out.  Psychologically it
+is interesting!'
+
+Christian found her things packed, and the two servants waiting.  In a
+few minutes they were driving to the station.  She made Dominique take
+the seat opposite.
+
+"Well?" she asked him.
+
+Dominique's eyebrows twitched, he smiled deprecatingly.
+
+"M'mselle, Mr. Treffry told me to hold my tongue."
+
+"But you can tell me, Dominique; Barbi can't understand."
+
+"To you, then, M'mselle," said Dominique, as one who accepts his fate;
+"to you, then, who will doubtless forget all that I shall tell you--my
+master is not well; he has terrible pain here; he has a cough; he is not
+well at all; not well at all."
+
+A feeling of dismay seized on the girl.
+
+"We were a caravan for all that night," Dominique resumed.  "In the
+morning by noon we ceased to be a caravan; Signor Harz took a mule path;
+he will be in Italy--certainly in Italy.  As for us, we stayed at San
+Martino, and my master went to bed.  It was time; I had much trouble with
+his clothes, his legs were swollen.  In the afternoon came a signor of
+police, on horseback, red and hot; I persuaded him that we were at
+Paneveggio, but as we were not, he came back angry--Mon Die! as angry as
+a cat.  It was not good to meet him--when he was with my master I was
+outside.  There was much noise.  I do not know what passed, but at last
+the signor came out through the door, and went away in a hurry." 
+Dominique's features were fixed in a sardonic grin; he rubbed the palm of
+one hand with the finger of the other. "Mr. Treffry made me give him
+whisky afterwards, and he had no money to pay the bill--that I know
+because I paid it.  Well, M'mselle, to-day he would be dressed and very
+slowly we came as far as Auer; there he could do no more, so went to bed. 
+He is not well at all."
+
+Christian was overwhelmed by forebodings; the rest of the journey was
+made in silence, except when Barbi, a country girl, filled with the
+delirium of railway travel, sighed: "Ach! gnadige Fraulein!" looking at
+Christian with pleasant eyes.
+
+At once, on arriving at the little hostel, Christian went to see her
+uncle.  His room was darkened, and smelt of beeswax.
+
+"Ah!  Chris," he said, "glad to see you."
+
+In a blue flannel gown, with a rug over his feet, he was lying on a couch
+lengthened artificially by chairs; the arm he reached out issued many
+inches from its sleeve, and showed the corded veins of the wrist.
+Christian, settling his pillows, looked anxiously into his eyes.
+
+"I'm not quite the thing, Chris," said Mr. Treffry.  "Somehow, not quite
+the thing.  I'll come back with you to-morrow."
+
+"Let me send for Dr. Dawney, Uncle?"
+
+"No--no!  Plenty of him when I get home.  Very good young fellow, as
+doctors go, but I can't stand his puddin's--slops and puddin's, and all
+that trumpery medicine on the top.  Send me Dominique, my dear--I'll put
+myself to rights a bit!"  He fingered his unshaven cheek, and clutched
+the gown together on his chest.  "Got this from the landlord.  When you
+come back we'll have a little talk!"
+
+He was asleep when she came into the room an hour later.  Watching his
+uneasy breathing, she wondered what it was that he was going to say.
+
+He looked ill!  And suddenly she realised that her thoughts were not of
+him....  When she was little he would take her on his back; he had built
+cocked hats for her and paper boats; had taught her to ride; slid her
+between his knees; given her things without number; and taken his payment
+in kisses.  And now he was ill, and she was not thinking of him!  He had
+been all that was most dear to her, yet before her eyes would only come
+the vision of another.
+
+Mr. Treffry woke suddenly.  "Not been asleep, have I?  The beds here are
+infernal hard."
+
+"Uncle Nic, won't you give me news of him?"
+
+Mr. Treffry looked at her, and Christian could not bear that look.
+
+"He's safe into Italy; they aren't very keen after him, it's so long ago;
+I squared 'em pretty easily.  Now, look here, Chris!"
+
+Christian came close; he took her hand.
+
+"I'd like to see you pull yourself together.  'Tisn't so much the
+position; 'tisn't so much the money; because after all there's always
+mine--"  Christian shook her head.  "But," he went on with shaky
+emphasis, "there's the difference of blood, and that's a serious thing;
+and there's this anarch--this political affair; and there's the sort of
+life, an' that's a serious thing; but--what I'm coming to is this,
+Chris--there's the man!"
+
+Christian drew away her hand.  Mr. Treffry went on:
+
+"Ah! yes.  I'm an old chap and fond of you, but I must speak out what I
+think.  He's got pluck, he's strong, he's in earnest; but he's got a
+damned hot temper, he's an egotist, and--he's not the man for you. If you
+marry him, as sure as I lie here, you'll be sorry for it. You're not your
+father's child for nothing; nice fellow as ever lived, but soft as
+butter.  If you take this chap, it'll be like mixing earth and ironstone,
+and they don't blend!"  He dropped his head back on the pillows, and
+stretching out his hand, repeated wistfully: "Take my word for it, my
+dear, he's not the man for you."
+
+Christian, staring at the wall beyond, said quietly: "I can't take any
+one's word for that."
+
+"Ah!" muttered Mr. Treffry, "you're obstinate enough, but obstinacy isn't
+strength.
+
+"You'll give up everything to him, you'll lick his shoes; and you'll
+never play anything but second fiddle in his life.  He'll always be first
+with himself, he and his work, or whatever he calls painting pictures;
+and some day you'll find that out.  You won't like it, and I don't like
+it for you, Chris, and that's flat."
+
+He wiped his brow where the perspiration stood in beads.
+
+Christian said: "You don't understand; you don't believe in him; you
+don't see!  If I do come after his work--if I do give him everything, and
+he can't give all back--I don't care!  He'll give what he can; I don't
+want any more.  If you're afraid of the life for me, uncle, if you think
+it'll be too hard--"
+
+Mr. Treffry bowed his head.  "I do, Chris."
+
+"Well, then, I hate to be wrapped in cotton wool; I want to breathe. If I
+come to grief, it's my own affair; nobody need mind."
+
+Mr. Treffry's fingers sought his beard.  "Ah! yes.  Just so!"
+
+Christian sank on her knees.
+
+"Oh!  Uncle!  I'm a selfish beast!"
+
+Mr. Treffry laid his hand against her cheek.  "I think I could do with a
+nap," he said.
+
+Swallowing a lump in her throat, she stole out of the room.
+
+By a stroke of Fate Mr. Treffry's return to Villa Rubein befell at the
+psychological moment when Herr Paul, in a suit of rather too bright blue,
+was starting for Vienna.
+
+As soon as he saw the carriage appear between the poplars he became as
+pensive as a boy caught in the act of stealing cherries.  Pitching his
+hatbox to Fritz, he recovered himself, however, in time to whistle while
+Mr. Treffry was being assisted into the house.  Having forgotten his
+anger, he was only anxious now to smooth out its after effects; in the
+glances he cast at Christian and his brother-in-law there was a kind of
+shamed entreaty which seemed to say: "For goodness' sake, don't worry me
+about that business again!  Nothing's come of it, you see!"
+
+He came forward: "Ah!  Mon cher!  So you return; I put off my departure,
+then.  Vienna must wait for me--that poor Vienna!"
+
+But noticing the extreme feebleness of Mr. Treffry's advance, he
+exclaimed with genuine concern:
+
+"What is it?  You're ill?  My God!"  After disappearing for five minutes,
+he came back with a whitish liquid in a glass.
+
+"There!" he said, "good for the gout--for a cough--for everything!"
+
+Mr. Treffry sniffed, drained the glass, and sucked his moustache.
+
+"Ah!" he said.  "No doubt!  But it's uncommonly like gin, Paul." Then
+turning to Christian, he said: "Shake hands, you two!"
+
+Christian looked from one to the other, and at last held out her hand to
+Herr Paul, who brushed it with his moustache, gazing after her as she
+left the room with a queer expression.
+
+"My dear!" he began, "you support her in this execrable matter?  You
+forget my position, you make me ridiculous.  I have been obliged to go to
+bed in my own house, absolutely to go to bed, because I was in danger of
+becoming funny."
+
+"Look here, Paul!" Mr. Treffry said gruffly, "if any one's to bully
+Chris, it's I."
+
+"In that case," returned Herr Paul sarcastically, "I will go to Vienna."
+
+"You may go to the devil!" said Mr. Treffry; "and I'll tell you what--in
+my opinion it was low to set the police on that young chap; a low, dirty
+trick."
+
+Herr Paul divided his beard carefully in two, took his seat on the very
+edge of an arm-chair, and placing his hands on his parted knees, said:
+
+"I have regretted it since--mais, que diable!  He called me a coward--it
+is very hot weather!--there were drinks at the Kurhaus--I am her
+guardian--the affair is a very beastly one--there were more drinks--I was
+a little enfin!"  He shrugged his shoulders.  "Adieu, my dear; I shall be
+some time in Vienna; I need rest!"  He rose and went to the door; then he
+turned, and waved his cigar.  "Adieu!  Be good; get well!  I will buy you
+some cigars up there."  And going out, he shut the door on any
+possibility of answer.
+
+Mr. Treffry lay back amongst his cushions.  The clock ticked; pigeons
+cooed on the veranda; a door opened in the distance, and for a moment a
+treble voice was heard.  Mr. Treffry's head drooped forward; across his
+face, gloomy and rugged, fell a thin line of sunlight.
+
+The clock suddenly stopped ticking, and outside, in mysterious accord,
+the pigeons rose with a great fluttering of wings, and flew off'.  Mr.
+Treffry made a startled, heavy movement.  He tried to get on to his feet
+and reach the bell, but could not, and sat on the side of the couch with
+drops of sweat rolling off his forehead, and his hands clawing his chest.
+There was no sound at all throughout the house.  He looked about him, and
+tried to call, but again could not. He tried once more to reach the bell,
+and, failing, sat still, with a thought that made him cold.
+
+"I'm done for," he muttered.  "By George!  I believe I'm done for this
+time!"  A voice behind him said:
+
+"Can we have a look at you, sir?"
+
+"Ah!  Doctor, bear a hand, there's a good fellow."
+
+Dawney propped him against the cushions, and loosened his shirt.
+Receiving no answer to his questions, he stepped alarmed towards the
+bell.  Mr. Treffry stopped him with a sign.
+
+"Let's hear what you make of me," he said.
+
+When Dawney had examined him, he asked:
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Well," answered Dawney slowly, "there's trouble, of course."
+
+Mr. Treffry broke out with a husky whisper: "Out with it, Doctor; don't
+humbug me."
+
+Dawney bent down, and took his wrist.
+
+"I don't know how you've got into this state, sir," he said with the
+brusqueness of emotion.  "You're in a bad way.  It's the old trouble; and
+you know what that means as well as I.  All I can tell you is, I'm going
+to have a big fight with it.  It shan't be my fault, there's my hand on
+that."
+
+Mr. Treffry lay with his eyes fixed on the ceiling; at last he said:
+
+"I want to live."
+
+"Yes--yes."
+
+"I feel better now; don't make a fuss about it.  It'll be very awkward if
+I die just now.  Patch me up, for the sake of my niece."
+
+Dawney nodded.  "One minute, there are a few things I want," and he went
+out.
+
+A moment later Greta stole in on tiptoe.  She bent over till her hair
+touched Mr. Treffry's face.
+
+"Uncle Nic!" she whispered.  He opened his eyes.
+
+"Hallo, Greta!"
+
+"I have come to bring you my love, Uncle Nic, and to say good-bye. Papa
+says that I and Scruff and Miss Naylor are going to Vienna with him; we
+have had to pack in half an hour; in five minutes we are going to Vienna,
+and it is my first visit there, Uncle Nic."
+
+"To Vienna!" Mr. Treffry repeated slowly.  "Don't have a guide, Greta;
+they're humbugs."
+
+"No, Uncle Nic," said Greta solemnly.
+
+"Draw the curtains, old girl, let's have a look at you.  Why, you're as
+smart as ninepence!"
+
+"Yes," said Greta with a sigh, touching the buttons of her cape, "because
+I am going to Vienna; but I am sorry to leave you, Uncle Nic."
+
+"Are you, Greta?"
+
+"But you will have Chris, and you are fonder of Chris than of me, Uncle
+Nic."
+
+"I've known her longer."
+
+"Perhaps when you've known me as long as Chris, you shall be as fond of
+me."
+
+"When I've known you as long--may be."
+
+"While I am gone, Uncle Nic, you are to get well, you are not very well,
+you know."
+
+"What put that into your head?"
+
+"If you were well you would be smoking a cigar--it is just three o'clock. 
+This kiss is for myself, this is for Scruff, and this is for Miss
+Naylor."
+
+She stood upright again; a tremulous, joyful gravity was in her eyes and
+on her lips.
+
+"Good-bye, my dear; take care of yourselves; and don't you have a guide,
+they're humbugs."
+
+"No, Uncle Nic.  There is the carriage!  To Vienna, Uncle Nic!"  The dead
+gold of her hair gleamed in the doorway.  Mr. Treffry raised himself upon
+his elbow.
+
+"Give us one more, for luck!"
+
+Greta ran back.
+
+"I love you very much!" she said, and kissing him, backed slowly, then,
+turning, flew out like a bird.
+
+Mr. Treffry fixed his eyes on the shut door.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+After many days of hot, still weather, the wind had come, and whirled the
+dust along the parched roads.  The leaves were all astir, like tiny
+wings.  Round Villa Rubein the pigeons cooed uneasily, all the other
+birds were silent.  Late in the afternoon Christian came out on the
+veranda, reading a letter:
+
+"DEAR CHRIS,--We are here now six days, and it is a very large place with
+many churches.  In the first place then we have been to a great many, but
+the nicest of them is not St. Stephan's Kirche, it is another, but I do
+not remember the name.  Papa is out nearly all the night; he says he is
+resting here, so he is not able to come to the churches with us, but I do
+not think he rests very much.  The day before yesterday we, that is,
+Papa, I, and Miss Naylor, went to an exhibition of pictures.  It was
+quite beautiful and interesting (Miss Naylor says it is not right to say
+'quite' beautiful, but I do not know what other word could mean 'quite'
+except the word 'quite,' because it is not exceedingly and not
+extremely).  And O Chris! there was one picture painted by him; it was
+about a ship without masts--Miss Naylor says it is a barge, but I do not
+know what a barge is--on fire, and, floating down a river in a fog.  I
+think it is extremely beautiful.  Miss Naylor says it is very
+impressionistick--what is that? and Papa said 'Puh!' but he did not know
+it was painted by Herr Harz, so I did not tell him.
+
+"There has also been staying at our hotel that Count Sarelli who came one
+evening to dinner at our house, but he is gone away now.  He sat all day
+in the winter garden reading, and at night he went out with Papa.  Miss
+Naylor says he is unhappy, but I think he does not take enough exercise;
+and O Chris! one day he said to me, 'That is your sister, Mademoiselle,
+that young lady in the white dress?  Does she always wear white dresses?'
+and I said to him: 'It is not always a white dress; in the picture, it is
+green, because the picture is called "Spring.'  But I did not tell him
+the colours of all your dresses because he looked so tired.  Then he said
+to me: 'She is very charming.'  So I tell you this, Chris, because I
+think you shall like to know.  Scruff' has a sore toe; it is because he
+has eaten too much meat.
+
+"It is not nice without you, Chris, and Miss Naylor says I am improving
+my mind here, but I do not think it shall improve very much, because at
+night I like it always best, when the shops are lighted and the carriages
+are driving past; then I am wanting to dance.  The first night Papa said
+he would take me to the theatre, but yesterday he said it was not good
+for me; perhaps to-morrow he shall think it good for me again.
+
+"Yesterday we have been in the Prater, and saw many people, and some that
+Papa knew; and then came the most interesting part of all, sitting under
+the trees in the rain for two hours because we could not get a carriage
+(very exciting).
+
+"There is one young lady here, only she is not any longer very young, who
+knew Papa when he was a boy.  I like her very much; she shall soon know
+me quite to the bottom and is very kind.
+
+"The ill husband of Cousin Teresa who went with us to Meran and lost her
+umbrella and Dr. Edmund was so sorry about it, has been very much worse,
+so she is not here but in Baden.  I wrote to her but have no news, so I
+do not know whether he is still living or not, at any rate he can't get
+well again so soon (and I don't think he ever shall).  I think as the
+weather is very warm you and Uncle Nic are sitting much out of doors.  I
+am sending presents to you all in a wooden box and screwed very firm, so
+you shall have to use again the big screw-driver of Fritz.  For Aunt
+Constance, photographs; for Uncle Nic, a green bird on a stand with a
+hole in the back of the bird to put his ashes in; it is a good green and
+not expensif please tell him, because he does not like expensif presents
+(Miss Naylor says the bird has an inquiring eye--it is a parrat); for
+you, a little brooch of turquoise because I like them best; for Dr.
+Edmund a machine to weigh medicines in because he said he could not get a
+good one in Botzen; this is a very good one, the shopman told me so, and
+is the most expensif of all the presents--so that is all my money, except
+two gulden.  If Papa shall give me some more, I shall buy for Miss Naylor
+a parasol, because it is useful and the handle of hers is 'wobbley' (that
+is one of Dr. Edmund's words and I like it).
+
+"Good-bye for this time.  Greta sends you her kiss.
+
+"P. S.--Miss Naylor has read all this letter (except about the parasol)
+and there are several things she did not want me to put, so I have copied
+it without the things, but at the last I have kept that copy myself, so
+that is why this is smudgy and several words are not spelt well, but all
+the things are here."
+
+Christian read, smiling, but to finish it was like dropping a talisman,
+and her face clouded.  A sudden draught blew her hair about, and from
+within, Mr. Treffry's cough mingled with the soughing of the wind; the
+sky was fast blackening.  She went indoors, took a pen and began to
+write:
+
+"MY FRIEND,--Why haven't you written to me?  It is so, long to wait.
+Uncle says you are in Italy--it is dreadful not to know for certain. I
+feel you would have written if you could; and I can't help thinking of
+all the things that may have happened.  I am unhappy.  Uncle Nic is ill;
+he will not confess it, that is his way; but he is very ill. Though
+perhaps you will never see this, I must write down all my thoughts.
+Sometimes I feel that I am brutal to be always thinking about you,
+scheming how to be with you again, when he is lying there so ill.  How
+good he has always been to me; it is terrible that love should pull one
+apart so.  Surely love should be beautiful, and peaceful, instead of
+filling me with bitter, wicked thoughts.  I love you--and I love him; I
+feel as if I were torn in two.  Why should it be so?  Why should the
+beginning of one life mean the ending of another, one love the
+destruction of another?  I don't understand. The same spirit makes me
+love you and him, the same sympathy, the same trust--yet it sometimes
+seems as if I were a criminal in loving you.  You know what he thinks--he
+is too honest not to have shown you.  He has talked to me; he likes you
+in a way, but you are a foreigner--he says-your life is not my life.  'He
+is not the man for you!'  Those were his words. And now he doesn't talk
+to me, but when I am in the room he looks at me--that's worse--a thousand
+times; when he talks it rouses me to fight--when it's his eyes only, I'm
+a coward at once; I feel I would do anything, anything, only not to hurt
+him. Why can't he see?  Is it because he's old and we are young?  He may
+consent, but he will never, never see; it will always hurt him.
+
+"I want to tell you everything; I have had worse thoughts than these
+--sometimes I have thought that I should never have the courage to face
+the struggle which you have to face.  Then I feel quite broken; it is
+like something giving way in me.  Then I think of you, and it is over;
+but it has been there, and I am ashamed--I told you I was a coward. It's
+like the feeling one would have going out into a storm on a dark night,
+away from a warm fire--only of the spirit not the body--which makes it
+worse.  I had to tell you this; you mustn't think of it again, I mean to
+fight it away and forget that it has ever been there.  But Uncle
+Nic--what am I to do?  I hate myself because I am young, and he is old
+and weak--sometimes I seem even to hate him.  I have all sorts of
+thoughts, and always at the end of them, like a dark hole at the end of a
+passage, the thought that I ought to give you up.  Ought I?  Tell me.  I
+want to know, I want to do what is right; I still want to do that, though
+sometimes I think I am all made of evil.
+
+"Do you remember once when we were talking, you said: 'Nature always has
+an answer for every question; you cannot get an answer from laws,
+conventions, theories, words, only from Nature.'  What do you say to me
+now; do you tell me it is Nature to come to you in spite of everything,
+and so, that it must be right?  I think you would; but can it be Nature
+to do something which will hurt terribly one whom I love and who loves
+me?  If it is--Nature is cruel.  Is that one of the 'lessons of life'? 
+Is that what Aunt Constance means when she says: 'If life were not a
+paradox, we could not get on at all'?  I am beginning to see that
+everything has its dark side; I never believed that before.
+
+"Uncle Nic dreads the life for me; he doesn't understand (how should
+he?--he has always had money) how life can be tolerable without money--it
+is horrible that the accident of money should make such difference in our
+lives.  I am sometimes afraid myself, and I can't outface that fear in
+him; he sees the shadow of his fear in me--his eyes seem to see
+everything that is in me now; the eyes of old people are the saddest
+things in the world.  I am writing like a wretched coward, but you will
+never see this letter I suppose, and so it doesn't matter; but if you do,
+and I pray that you may--well, if I am only worth taking at my best, I am
+not worth taking at all.  I want you to know the worst of me--you, and no
+one else.
+
+"With Uncle Nic it is not as with my stepfather; his opposition only
+makes me angry, mad, ready to do anything, but with Uncle Nic I feel so
+bruised--so sore.  He said: 'It is not so much the money, because there
+is always mine.'  I could never do a thing he cannot bear, and take his
+money, and you would never let me.  One knows very little of anything in
+the world till trouble comes.  You know how it is with flowers and trees;
+in the early spring they look so quiet and self-contained; then all in a
+moment they change--I think it must be like that with the heart.  I used
+to think I knew a great deal, understood why and how things came about; I
+thought self-possession and reason so easy; now I know nothing.  And
+nothing in the world matters but to see you and hide away from that look
+in Uncle Nic's eyes.  Three months ago I did not know you, now I write
+like this.  Whatever I look at, I try to see as you would see; I feel,
+now you are away even more than when you were with me, what your thoughts
+would be, how you would feel about this or that.  Some things you have
+said seem always in my mind like lights--"
+
+A slanting drift of rain was striking the veranda tiles with a cold,
+ceaseless hissing.  Christian shut the window, and went into her uncle's
+room.
+
+He was lying with closed eyes, growling at Dominique, who moved about
+noiselessly, putting the room ready for the night.  When he had finished,
+and with a compassionate bow had left the room, Mr. Treffry opened his
+eyes, and said:
+
+"This is beastly stuff of the doctor's, Chris, it puts my monkey up; I
+can't help swearing after I've taken it; it's as beastly as a vulgar
+woman's laugh, and I don't know anything beastlier than that!"
+
+"I have a letter from Greta, Uncle Nic; shall I read it?"
+
+He nodded, and Christian read the letter, leaving out the mention of
+Harz, and for some undefined reason the part about Sarelli.
+
+"Ay!" said Mr. Treffry with a feeble laugh, "Greta and her money!  Send
+her some more, Chris.  Wish I were a youngster again; that's a beast of a
+proverb about a dog and his day.  I'd like to go fishing again in the
+West Country!  A fine time we had when we were youngsters.  You don't get
+such times these days.  'Twasn't often the fishing-smacks went out
+without us.  We'd watch their lights from our bedroom window; when they
+were swung aboard we were out and down to the quay before you could say
+'knife.'  They always waited for us; but your Uncle Dan was the
+favourite, he was the chap for luck.  When I get on my legs, we might go
+down there, you and I?  For a bit, just to see?  What d'you say, old
+girl?"
+
+Their eyes met.
+
+"I'd like to look at the smack lights going to sea on a dark night; pity
+you're such a duffer in a boat--we might go out with them.  Do you a
+power of good!  You're not looking the thing, my dear."
+
+His voice died wistfully, and his glance, sweeping her face, rested on
+her hands, which held and twisted Greta's letter.  After a minute or two
+of silence he boomed out again with sudden energy:
+
+"Your aunt'll want to come and sit with me, after dinner; don't let her,
+Chris, I can't stand it.  Tell her I'm asleep--the doctor'll be here
+directly; ask him to make up some humbug for you--it's his business."
+
+He was seized by a violent fit of pain which seemed to stab his breath
+away, and when it was over signed that he would be left alone. Christian
+went back to her letter in the other room, and had written these words,
+when the gong summoned her to dinner:
+
+"I'm like a leaf in the wind, I put out my hand to one thing, and it's
+seized and twisted and flung aside.  I want you--I want you; if I could
+see you I think I should know what to do--"
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+The rain drove with increasing fury.  The night was very black. Nicholas
+Treffry slept heavily.  By the side of his bed the night-lamp cast on to
+the opposite wall a bright disc festooned by the hanging shadow of the
+ceiling.  Christian was leaning over him.  For the moment he filled all
+her heart, lying there, so helpless. Fearful of waking him she slipped
+into the sitting-room.  Outside the window stood a man with his face
+pressed to the pane.  Her heart thumped; she went up and unlatched the
+window.  It was Harz, with the rain dripping off him.  He let fall his
+hat and cape.
+
+"You!" she said, touching his sleeve.  "You!  You!"
+
+He was sodden with wet, his face drawn and tired; a dark growth of beard
+covered his cheeks and chin.
+
+"Where is your uncle?" he said; "I want to see him."
+
+She put her hand up to his lips, but he caught it and covered it with
+kisses.
+
+"He's asleep--ill--speak gently!"
+
+"I came to him first," he muttered.
+
+Christian lit the lamp; and he looked at her hungrily without a word.
+
+"It's not possible to go on like this; I came to tell your uncle so. He
+is a man.  As for the other, I want to have nothing to do with him!  I
+came back on foot across the mountains.  It's not possible to go on like
+this, Christian."
+
+She handed him her letter.  He held it to the light, clearing his brow of
+raindrops.  When he had read to the last word he gave it her back, and
+whispered: "Come!"
+
+Her lips moved, but she did not speak.
+
+"While this goes on I can't work; I can do nothing.  I can't--I won't
+bargain with my work; if it's to be that, we had better end it. What are
+we waiting for?  Sooner or later we must come to this.  I'm sorry that
+he's ill, God knows!  But that changes nothing.  To wait is tying me hand
+and foot--it's making me afraid!  Fear kills!  It will kill you!  It
+kills work, and I must work, I can't waste time--I won't!  I will sooner
+give you up."  He put his hands on her shoulders. "I love you!  I want
+you!  Look in my eyes and see if you dare hold back!"
+
+Christian stood with the grip of his strong hands on her shoulders,
+without a movement or sign.  Her face was very white.  And suddenly he
+began to kiss that pale, still face, to kiss its eyes and lips, to kiss
+it from its chin up to its hair; and it stayed pale, as a white flower,
+beneath those kisses--as a white flower, whose stalk the fingers bend
+back a little.
+
+There was a sound of knocking on the wall; Mr. Treffry called feebly.
+Christian broke away from Harz.
+
+"To-morrow!" he whispered, and picking up his hat and cloak, went out
+again into the rain.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+It was not till morning that Christian fell into a troubled sleep. She
+dreamed that a voice was calling her, and she was filled with a helpless,
+dumb dream terror.
+
+When she woke the light was streaming in; it was Sunday, and the
+cathedral bells were chiming.  Her first thought was of Harz.  One step,
+one moment of courage!  Why had she not told her uncle?  If he had only
+asked!  But why--why should she tell him?  When it was over and she was
+gone, he would see that all was for the best.
+
+Her eyes fell on Greta's empty bed.  She sprang up, and bending over,
+kissed the pillow.  'She will mind at first; but she's so young!  Nobody
+will really miss me, except Uncle Nic!'  She stood along while in the
+window without moving.  When she was dressed she called out to her maid:
+
+"Bring me some milk, Barbi; I'm going to church."
+
+"Ach! gnadiges Fraulein, will you no breakfast have?"
+
+"No thank you, Barbi."
+
+"Liebes Fraulein, what a beautiful morning after the rain it has become!
+How cool!  It is for you good--for the colour in your cheeks; now they
+will bloom again!" and Barbi stroked her own well-coloured cheeks.
+
+Dominique, sunning himself outside with a cloth across his arm, bowed as
+she passed, and smiled affectionately:
+
+"He is better this morning, M'mselle.  We march--we are getting on. Good
+news will put the heart into you."
+
+Christian thought: 'How sweet every one is to-day!'
+
+Even the Villa seemed to greet her, with the sun aslant on it; and the
+trees, trembling and weeping golden tears.  At the cathedral she was
+early for the service, but here and there were figures on their knees;
+the faint, sickly odour of long-burnt incense clung in the air; a priest
+moved silently at the far end.  She knelt, and when at last she rose the
+service had begun.  With the sound of the intoning a sense of peace came
+to her--the peace of resolution.  For good or bad she felt that she had
+faced her fate.
+
+She went out with a look of quiet serenity and walked home along the
+dyke.  Close to Harz's studio she sat down.  Now--it was her own; all
+that had belonged to him, that had ever had a part in him.
+
+An old beggar, who had been watching her, came gently from behind.
+"Gracious lady!" he said, peering at her eyes, "this is the lucky day for
+you.  I have lost my luck."
+
+Christian opened her purse, there was only one coin in it, a gold piece;
+the beggar's eyes sparkled.
+
+She thought suddenly: 'It's no longer mine; I must begin to be careful,'
+but she felt ashamed when she looked at the old man.
+
+"I am sorry," she said; "yesterday I would have given you this, but--but
+now it's already given."
+
+He seemed so old and poor--what could she give him?  She unhooked a
+little silver brooch at her throat.  "You will get something for that,"
+she said; "it's better than nothing.  I am very sorry you are so old and
+poor."
+
+The beggar crossed himself.  "Gracious lady," he muttered, "may you never
+want!"
+
+Christian hurried on; the rustling of leaves soon carried the words away.
+She did not feel inclined to go in, and crossing the bridge began to
+climb the hill.  There was a gentle breeze, drifting the clouds across
+the sun; lizards darted out over the walls, looked at her, and whisked
+away.
+
+The sunshine, dappling through the tops of trees, gashed down on a
+torrent.  The earth smelt sweet, the vineyards round the white farms
+glistened; everything seemed to leap and dance with sap and life; it was
+a moment of Spring in midsummer.  Christian walked on, wondering at her
+own happiness.
+
+'Am I heartless?' she thought.  'I am going to leave him--I am going into
+life; I shall have to fight now, there'll be no looking back.'
+
+The path broke away and wound down to the level of the torrent; on the
+other side it rose again, and was lost among trees.  The woods were dank;
+she hastened home.
+
+In her room she began to pack, sorting and tearing up old letters. 'Only
+one thing matters,' she thought; 'singleness of heart; to see your way,
+and keep to it with all your might.'
+
+She looked up and saw Barbi standing before her with towels in her hands,
+and a scared face.
+
+"Are you going a journey, gnadiges Fraulein?"
+
+"I am going away to be married, Barbi," said Christian at last; "don't
+speak of it to any one, please."
+
+Barbi leant a little forward with the towels clasped to the blue cotton
+bosom of her dress.
+
+"No, no!  I will not speak.  But, dear Fraulein, that is a big matter;
+have you well thought?"
+
+"Thought, Barbi?  Have I not!"
+
+"But, dear Fraulein, will you be rich?"
+
+"No!  I shall be as poor as you."
+
+"Ach! dear God! that is terrible.  Katrina, my sister, she is married;
+she tells me all her life; she tells me it is very hard, and but for the
+money in her stocking it would be harder.  Dear Fraulein, think again!
+And is he good?  Sometimes they are not good."
+
+"He is good," said Christian, rising; "it is all settled!" and she kissed
+Barbi on the cheek.
+
+"You are crying, liebes Fraulein!  Think yet again, perhaps it is not
+quite all settled; it is not possible that a maiden should not a way out
+leave?"
+
+Christian smiled.  "I don't do things that way, Barbi."
+
+Barbi hung the towels on the horse, and crossed herself.
+
+Mr. Treffry's gaze was fixed on a tortoise-shell butterfly fluttering
+round the ceiling.  The insect seemed to fascinate him, as things which
+move quickly always fascinate the helpless.  Christian came softly in.
+
+"Couldn't stay in bed, Chris," he called out with an air of guilt. "The
+heat was something awful.  The doctor piped off in a huff, just because
+o' this."  He motioned towards a jug of claret-cup and a pipe on the
+table by his elbow.  "I was only looking at 'em."
+
+Christian, sitting down beside him, took up a fan.
+
+"If I could get out of this heat--" he said, and closed his eyes.
+
+'I must tell him,' she thought; 'I can't slink away.'
+
+"Pour me out some of that stuff, Chris."
+
+She reached for the jug.  Yes!  She must tell him!  Her heart sank.
+
+Mr. Treffry took a lengthy draught.  "Broken my promise; don't
+matter--won't hurt any one but me."  He took up the pipe and pressed
+tobacco into it.  "I've been lying here with this pain going right
+through me, and never a smoke!  D'you tell me anything the parsons say
+can do me half the good of this pipe?"  He leaned back, steeped in a
+luxury of satisfaction.  He went on, pursuing a private train of thought:
+"Things have changed a lot since my young days.  When I was a youngster,
+a young fellow had to look out for peck and perch--he put the future in
+his pocket.  He did well or not, according as he had stuff in him. Now
+he's not content with that, it seems--trades on his own opinion of
+himself; thinks he is what he says he's going to be."
+
+"You are unjust," said Christian.
+
+Mr. Treffry grunted.  "Ah, well!  I like to know where I am.  If I lend
+money to a man, I like to know whether he's going to pay it back; I may
+not care whether he does or not, but I like to know.  The same with other
+things.  I don't care what a man has--though, mind you, Chris, it's not a
+bad rule that measures men by the balance at their banks; but when it
+comes to marriage, there's a very simple rule, What's not enough for one
+is not enough for two.  You can't talk black white, or bread into your
+mouth.  I don't care to speak about myself, as you know, Chris, but I
+tell you this--when I came to London I wanted to marry--I hadn't any
+money, and I had to want. When I had the money--but that's neither here
+nor there!"  He frowned, fingering his pipe.
+
+"I didn't ask her, Chris; I didn't think it the square thing; it seems
+that's out of fashion!"
+
+Christian's cheeks were burning.
+
+"I think a lot while I lie here," Mr. Treffry went on; "nothing much else
+to do.  What I ask myself is this: What do you know about what's best for
+you?  What do you know of life?  Take it or leave it, life's not all you
+think; it's give and get all the way, a fair start is everything."
+
+Christian thought: 'Will he never see?'
+
+Mr. Treffry went on:
+
+"I get better every day, but I can't last for ever.  It's not pleasant to
+lie here and know that when I'm gone there'll be no one to keep a hand on
+the check string!"
+
+"Don't talk like that, dear!" Christian murmured.
+
+"It's no use blinking facts, Chris.  I've lived a long time in the world;
+I've seen things pretty well as they are; and now there's not much left
+for me to think about but you."
+
+"But, Uncle, if you loved him, as I do, you couldn't tell me to be
+afraid!  It's cowardly and mean to be afraid.  You must have forgotten!"
+
+Mr. Treffry closed his eyes.
+
+"Yes," he said; "I'm old."
+
+The fan had dropped into Christian's lap; it rested on her white frock
+like a large crimson leaf; her eyes were fixed on it.
+
+Mr. Treffry looked at her.  "Have you heard from him?" he asked with
+sudden intuition.
+
+"Last night, in that room, when you thought I was talking to Dominique--"
+
+The pipe fell from his hand.
+
+"What!" he stammered: "Back?"
+
+Christian, without looking up, said:
+
+"Yes, he's back; he wants me--I must go to him, Uncle."
+
+There was a long silence.
+
+"You must go to him?" he repeated.
+
+She longed to fling herself down at his knees, but he was so still, that
+to move seemed impossible; she remained silent, with folded hands.
+
+Mr. Treffry spoke:
+
+"You'll let me know--before--you--go.  Goodnight!"
+
+Christian stole out into the passage.  A bead curtain rustled in the
+draught; voices reached her.
+
+"My honour is involved, or I would give the case up."
+
+"He is very trying, poor Nicholas!  He always had that peculiar quality
+of opposition; it has brought him to grief a hundred times. There is
+opposition in our blood; my family all have it.  My eldest brother died
+of it; with my poor sister, who was as gentle as a lamb, it took the form
+of doing the right thing in the wrong place.  It is a matter of
+temperament, you see.  You must have patience."
+
+"Patience," repeated Dawney's voice, "is one thing; patience where there
+is responsibility is another.  I've not had a wink of sleep these last
+two nights."
+
+There was a faint, shrill swish of silk.
+
+"Is he so very ill?"
+
+Christian held her breath.  The answer came at last.
+
+"Has he made his will?  With this trouble in the side again, I tell you
+plainly, Mrs. Decie, there's little or no chance."
+
+Christian put her hands up to her ears, and ran out into the air. What
+was she about to do, then--to leave him dying!
+
+On the following day Harz was summoned to the Villa.  Mr. Treffry had
+just risen, and was garbed in a dressing-suit, old and worn, which had a
+certain air of magnificence.  His seamed cheeks were newly shaved.
+
+"I hope I see you well," he said majestically.
+
+Thinking of the drive and their last parting, Harz felt sorry and
+ashamed.  Suddenly Christian came into the room; she stood for a moment
+looking at him; then sat down.
+
+"Chris!" said Mr. Treffry reproachfully.  She shook her head, and did not
+move; mournful and intent, her eyes seemed full of secret knowledge.
+
+Mr. Treffry spoke:
+
+"I've no right to blame you, Mr. Harz, and Chris tells me you came to see
+me first, which is what I would have expected of you; but you shouldn't
+have come back."
+
+"I came back, sir, because I found I was obliged.  I must speak out."
+
+"I ask nothing better," Mr. Treffry replied.
+
+Harz looked again at Christian; but she made no sign, sitting with her
+chin resting on her hands.
+
+"I have come for her," he said; "I can make my living--enough for both of
+us.  But I can't wait."
+
+"Why?"
+
+Harz made no answer.
+
+Mr. Treffry boomed out again: "Why?  Isn't she worth waiting for?  Isn't
+she worth serving for?"
+
+"I can't expect you to understand me," the painter said.  "My art is my
+life to me.  Do you suppose that if it wasn't I should ever have left my
+village; or gone through all that I've gone through, to get as far even
+as I am?  You tell me to wait.  If my thoughts and my will aren't free,
+how can I work?  I shan't be worth my salt.  You tell me to go back to
+England--knowing she is here, amongst you who hate me, a thousand miles
+away.  I shall know that there's a death fight going on in her and
+outside her against me--you think that I can go on working under these
+conditions.  Others may be able, I am not.  That's the plain truth. If I
+loved her less--"
+
+There was a silence, then Mr. Treffry said:
+
+"It isn't fair to come here and ask what you're asking.  You don't know
+what's in the future for you, you don't know that you can keep a wife. It
+isn't pleasant, either, to think you can't hold up your head in your own
+country."
+
+Harz turned white.
+
+"Ah! you bring that up again!" he broke out.  "Seven years ago I was a
+boy and starving; if you had been in my place you would have done what I
+did.  My country is as much to me as your country is to you. I've been an
+exile seven years, I suppose I shall always be I've had punishment
+enough; but if you think I am a rascal, I'll go and give myself up."  He
+turned on his heel.
+
+"Stop!  I beg your pardon!  I never meant to hurt you.  It isn't easy for
+me to eat my words," Mr. Treffry said wistfully, "let that count for
+something."  He held out his hand.
+
+Harz came quickly back and took it.  Christian's gaze was never for a
+moment withdrawn; she seemed trying to store up the sight of him within
+her.  The light darting through the half-closed shutters gave her eyes a
+strange, bright intensity, and shone in the folds of her white dress like
+the sheen of birds' wings.
+
+Mr. Treffry glanced uneasily about him.  "God knows I don't want anything
+but her happiness," he said.  "What is it to me if you'd murdered your
+mother?  It's her I'm thinking of."
+
+"How can you tell what is happiness to her?  You have your own ideas of
+happiness--not hers, not mine.  You can't dare to stop us, sir!"
+
+"Dare?" said Mr. Treffry.  "Her father gave her over to me when she was a
+mite of a little thing; I've known her all her life.  I've--I've loved
+her--and you come here with your 'dare'!"  His hand dragged at his beard,
+and shook as though palsied.
+
+A look of terror came into Christian's face.
+
+"All right, Chris!  I don't ask for quarter, and I don't give it!"
+
+Harz made a gesture of despair.
+
+"I've acted squarely by you, sir," Mr. Treffry went on, "I ask the same
+of you.  I ask you to wait, and come like an honest man, when you can
+say, 'I see my way--here's this and that for her.'  What makes this art
+you talk of different from any other call in life?  It doesn't alter
+facts, or give you what other men have no right to expect.  It doesn't
+put grit into you, or keep your hands clean, or prove that two and two
+make five."
+
+Harz answered bitterly:
+
+"You know as much of art as I know of money.  If we live a thousand years
+we shall never understand each other.  I am doing what I feel is best for
+both of us."
+
+Mr. Treffry took hold of the painter's sleeve.
+
+"I make you an offer," he said.  "Your word not to see or write to her
+for a year!  Then, position or not, money or no money, if she'll have
+you, I'll make it right for you."
+
+"I could not take your money."
+
+A kind of despair seemed suddenly to seize on Mr. Nicholas Treffry. He
+rose, and stood towering over them.
+
+"All my life--" he said; but something seemed to click deep down in his
+throat, and he sank back in his seat.
+
+"Go!" whispered Christian, "go!" But Mr. Treffry found his voice again:
+"It's for the child to say.  Well, Chris!"
+
+Christian did not speak.
+
+It was Harz who broke the silence.  He pointed to Mr. Treffry.
+
+"You know I can't tell you to come with--that, there.  Why did you send
+for me?"  And, turning, he went out.
+
+Christian sank on her knees, burying her face in her hands.  Mr. Treffry
+pressed his handkerchief with a stealthy movement to his mouth.  It was
+dyed crimson with the price of his victory.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+A telegram had summoned Herr Paul from Vienna.  He had started forthwith,
+leaving several unpaid accounts to a more joyful opportunity, amongst
+them a chemist's bill, for a wonderful quack medicine of which he brought
+six bottles.
+
+He came from Mr. Treffry's room with tears rolling down his cheeks,
+saying:
+
+"Poor Nicholas!  Poor Nicholas!  Il n'a pas de chance!"
+
+It was difficult to find any one to listen; the women were scared and
+silent, waiting for the orders that were now and then whispered through
+the door.  Herr Paul could not bear this silence, and talked to his
+servant for half an hour, till Fritz also vanished to fetch something
+from the town.  Then in despair Herr Paul went to his room.
+
+It was hard not to be allowed to help--it was hard to wait!  When the
+heart was suffering, it was frightful!  He turned and, looking furtively
+about him, lighted a cigar.  Yes, it came to every one--at some time or
+other; and what was it, that death they talked of?  Was it any worse than
+life?  That frightful jumble people made for themselves!  Poor Nicholas! 
+After all, it was he that had the luck!
+
+His eyes filled with tears, and drawing a penknife from his pocket, he
+began to stab it into the stuffing of his chair.  Scruff, who sat
+watching the chink of light under the door, turned his head, blinked at
+him, and began feebly tapping with a claw.
+
+It was intolerable, this uncertainty--to be near, and yet so far, was not
+endurable!
+
+Herr Paul stepped across the room.  The dog, following, threw his
+black-marked muzzle upwards with a gruff noise, and went back to the
+door.  His master was holding in his hand a bottle of champagne.
+
+Poor Nicholas!  He had chosen it.  Herr Paul drained a glass.
+
+Poor Nicholas!  The prince of fellows, and of what use was one?  They
+kept him away from Nicholas!
+
+Herr Paul's eyes fell on the terrier.  "Ach! my dear," he said, "you and
+I, we alone are kept away!"
+
+He drained a second glass.
+
+What was it?  This life!  Froth-like that!  He tossed off a third glass.
+Forget!  If one could not help, it was better to forget!
+
+He put on his hat.  Yes.  There was no room for him there!  He was not
+wanted!
+
+He finished the bottle, and went out into the passage.  Scruff ran and
+lay down at Mr. Treffry's door.  Herr Paul looked at him.  "Ach!" he
+said, tapping his chest, "ungrateful hound!"  And opening the front door
+he went out on tiptoe....
+
+Late that afternoon Greta stole hatless through the lilac bushes; she
+looked tired after her night journey, and sat idly on a chair in the
+speckled shadow of a lime-tree.
+
+'It is not like home,' she thought; 'I am unhappy.  Even the birds are
+silent, but perhaps that is because it is so hot.  I have never been sad
+like this--for it is not fancy that I am sad this time, as it is
+sometimes.  It is in my heart like the sound the wind makes through a
+wood, it feels quite empty in my heart.  If it is always like this to be
+unhappy, then I am sorry for all the unhappy things in the world; I am
+sorrier than I ever was before.'
+
+A shadow fell on the grass, she raised her eyes, and saw Dawney.
+
+"Dr. Edmund!" she whispered.
+
+Dawney turned to her; a heavy furrow showed between his brows.  His eyes,
+always rather close together, stared painfully.
+
+"Dr. Edmund," Greta whispered, "is it true?"
+
+He took her hand, and spread his own palm over it.
+
+"Perhaps," he said; "perhaps not.  We must hope."
+
+Greta looked up, awed.
+
+"They say he is dying."
+
+"We have sent for the best man in Vienna."
+
+Greta shook her head.
+
+"But you are clever, Dr. Edmund; and you are afraid."
+
+"He is brave," said Dawney; "we must all be brave, you know.  You too!"
+
+"Brave?" repeated Greta; "what is it to be brave?  If it is not to cry
+and make a fuss--that I can do.  But if it is not to be sad in here," she
+touched her breast, "that I cannot do, and it shall not be any good for
+me to try."
+
+"To be brave is to hope; don't give up hope, dear."
+
+"No," said Greta, tracing the pattern of the sunlight on her skirt. "But
+I think that when we hope, we are not brave, because we are expecting
+something for ourselves.  Chris says that hope is prayer, and if it is
+prayer, then all the time we are hoping, we are asking for something, and
+it is not brave to ask for things."
+
+A smile curved Dawney's mouth.
+
+"Go on, Philosopher!" he said.  "Be brave in your own way, it will be
+just as good as anybody else's."
+
+"What are you going to do to be brave, Dr. Edmund?"
+
+"I?  Fight!  If only we had five years off his life!"
+
+Greta watched him as he walked away.
+
+"I shall never be brave," she mourned; "I shall always be wanting to be
+happy."  And, kneeling down, she began to disentangle a fly, imprisoned
+in a cobweb.  A plant of hemlock had sprung up in the long grass by her
+feet.  Greta thought, dismayed: 'There are weeds!'
+
+It seemed but another sign of the death of joy.
+
+'But it's very beautiful,' she thought, 'the blossoms are like stars. I
+am not going to pull it up.  I will leave it; perhaps it will spread all
+through the garden; and if it does I do not care, for now things are not
+like they used to be and I do not, think they ever shall be again.'
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+The days went by; those long, hot days, when the heat haze swims up about
+ten of the forenoon, and, as the sun sinks level with the mountains,
+melts into golden ether which sets the world quivering with sparkles.
+
+At the lighting of the stars those sparkles die, vanishing one by one off
+the hillsides; evening comes flying down the valleys, and life rests
+under her cool wings.  The night falls; and the hundred little voices of
+the night arise.
+
+It was near grape-gathering, and in the heat the fight for Nicholas
+Treffry's life went on, day in, day out, with gleams of hope and moments
+of despair.  Doctors came, but after the first he refused to see them.
+
+"No," he said to Dawney--"throwing away money.  If I pull through it
+won't be because of them."
+
+For days together he would allow no one but Dawney, Dominique, and the
+paid nurse in the room.
+
+"I can stand it better," he said to Christian, "when I don't see any of
+you; keep away, old girl, and let me get on with it!"
+
+To have been able to help would have eased the tension of her nerves, and
+the aching of her heart.  At his own request they had moved his bed into
+a corner so that he might face the wall.  There he would lie for hours
+together, not speaking a word, except to ask for drink.
+
+Sometimes Christian crept in unnoticed, and sat watching, with her arms
+tightly folded across her breast.  At night, after Greta was asleep, she
+would toss from side to side, muttering feverish prayers. She spent hours
+at her little table in the schoolroom, writing letters to Harz that were
+never sent.  Once she wrote these words: "I am the most wicked of all
+creatures--I have even wished that he may die!"  A few minutes afterwards
+Miss Naylor found her with her head buried on her arms. Christian sprang
+up; tears were streaming down her cheeks.  "Don't touch me!" she cried,
+and rushed away.  Later, she stole into her uncle's room, and sank down
+on the floor beside the bed.  She sat there silently, unnoticed all the
+evening.  When night came she could hardly be persuaded to leave the
+room.
+
+One day Mr. Treffry expressed a wish to see Herr Paul; it was a long
+while before the latter could summon courage to go in.
+
+"There's a few dozen of the Gordon sherry at my Chambers, in London,
+Paul," Mr. Treffry said; "I'd be glad to think you had 'em.  And my man,
+Dominique, I've made him all right in my will, but keep your eye on him;
+he's a good sort for a foreigner, and no chicken, but sooner or later,
+the women'll get hold of him.  That's all I had to say. Send Chris to
+me."
+
+Herr Paul stood by the bedside speechless.  Suddenly he blurted out.
+
+"Ah! my dear!  Courage!  We are all mortal.  You will get well!"  All the
+morning he walked about quite inconsolable.  "It was frightful to see
+him, you know, frightful!  An iron man could not have borne it."
+
+When Christian came to him, Mr. Treffry raised himself and looked at her
+a long while.
+
+His wistful face was like an accusation.  But that very afternoon the
+news came from the sickroom that he was better, having had no pain for
+several hours.
+
+Every one went about with smiles lurking in their eyes, and ready to
+break forth at a word.  In the kitchen Barbi burst out crying, and,
+forgetting to toss the pan, spoiled a Kaiser-Schmarn she was making.
+Dominique was observed draining a glass of Chianti, and solemnly casting
+forth the last drops in libation.  An order was given for tea to be taken
+out under the acacias, where it was always cool; it was felt that
+something in the nature of high festival was being held. Even Herr Paul
+was present; but Christian did not come.  Nobody spoke of illness; to
+mention it might break the spell.
+
+Miss Naylor, who had gone into the house, came back, saying:
+
+"There is a strange man standing over there by the corner of the house."
+
+"Really!" asked Mrs. Decie; "what does he want?"
+
+Miss Naylor reddened.  "I did not ask him. I--don't--know--whether he is
+quite respectable.  His coat is buttoned very close, and he--doesn't
+seem--to have a--collar."
+
+"Go and see what he wants, dear child," Mrs. Decie said to Greta.
+
+"I don't know--I really do not know--" began Miss Naylor; "he has
+very--high--boots," but Greta was already on her way, with hands clasped
+behind her, and demure eyes taking in the stranger's figure.
+
+"Please?" she said, when she was close to him.
+
+The stranger took his cap off with a jerk.
+
+"This house has no bells," he said in a nasal voice; "it has a tendency
+to discourage one."
+
+"Yes," said Greta gravely, "there is a bell, but it does not ring now,
+because my uncle is so ill."
+
+"I am very sorry to hear that.  I don't know the people here, but I am
+very sorry to hear that.
+
+"I would be glad to speak a few words to your sister, if it is your
+sister that I want."
+
+And the stranger's face grew very red.
+
+"Is it," said Greta, "that you are a friend of Herr Harz?  If you are a
+friend of his, you will please come and have some tea, and while you are
+having tea I will look for Chris."
+
+Perspiration bedewed the stranger's forehead.
+
+"Tea?  Excuse me!  I don't drink tea."
+
+"There is also coffee," Greta said.
+
+The stranger's progress towards the arbour was so slow that Greta arrived
+considerably before him.
+
+"It is a friend of Herr Harz," she whispered; "he will drink coffee. I am
+going to find Chris."
+
+"Greta!" gasped Miss Naylor.
+
+Mrs. Decie put up her hand.
+
+"Ah!" she said, "if it is so, we must be very nice to him for Christian's
+sake."
+
+Miss Naylor's face grew soft.
+
+"Ah, yes!" she said; "of course."
+
+"Bah!" muttered Herr Paul, "that recommences.'
+
+"Paul!" murmured Mrs. Decie, "you lack the elements of wisdom."
+
+Herr Paul glared at the approaching stranger.
+
+Mrs. Decie had risen, and smilingly held out her hand.
+
+"We are so glad to know you; you are an artist too, perhaps?  I take a
+great interest in art, and especially in that school which Mr. Harz
+represents."
+
+The stranger smiled.
+
+"He is the genuine article, ma'am," he said.  "He represents no school,
+he is one of that kind whose corpses make schools."
+
+"Ah!" murmured Mrs. Decie, "you are an American.  That is so nice. Do sit
+down!  My niece will soon be here."
+
+Greta came running back.
+
+"Will you come, please?" she said.  "Chris is ready."
+
+Gulping down his coffee, the stranger included them all in a single bow,
+and followed her.
+
+"Ach!" said Herr Paul, "garcon tres chic, celui-la!"
+
+Christian was standing by her little table.  The stranger began.
+
+"I am sending Mr. Harz's things to England; there are some pictures here.
+He would be glad to have them."
+
+A flood of crimson swept over her face.
+
+"I am sending them to London," the stranger repeated; "perhaps you could
+give them to me to-day."
+
+"They are ready; my sister will show you."
+
+Her eyes seemed to dart into his soul, and try to drag something from it.
+The words rushed from her lips:
+
+"Is there any message for me?"
+
+The stranger regarded her curiously.
+
+"No," he stammered, "no!  I guess not.  He is well....  I wish...." He
+stopped; her white face seemed to flash scorn, despair, and entreaty on
+him all at once.  And turning, she left him standing there.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+When Christian went that evening to her uncle's room he was sitting up in
+bed, and at once began to talk.  "Chris," he said, "I can't stand this
+dying by inches.  I'm going to try what a journey'll do for me.  I want
+to get back to the old country.  The doctor's promised.  There's a shot
+in the locker yet!  I believe in that young chap; he's stuck to me like a
+man....  It'll be your birthday, on Tuesday, old girl, and you'll be
+twenty.  Seventeen years since your father died.  You've been a lot to
+me....  A parson came here today. That's a bad sign.  Thought it his
+duty!  Very civil of him!  I wouldn't see him, though.  If there's
+anything in what they tell you, I'm not going to sneak in at this time o'
+day.  There's one thing that's rather badly on my mind.  I took advantage
+of Mr. Harz with this damned pitifulness of mine.  You've a right to look
+at me as I've seen you sometimes when you thought I was asleep.  If I
+hadn't been ill he'd never have left you.  I don't blame you, Chris--not
+I!  You love me?  I know that, my dear.  But one's alone when it comes to
+the run-in.  Don't cry!  Our minds aren't Sunday-school books; you're
+finding it out, that's all!"  He sighed and turned away.
+
+The noise of sun-blinds being raised vibrated through the house.  A
+feeling of terror seized on the girl; he lay so still, and yet the
+drawing of each breath was a fight.  If she could only suffer in his
+place!  She went close, and bent over him.
+
+"It's air we want, both you and I!" he muttered.  Christian beckoned to
+the nurse, and stole out through the window.
+
+A regiment was passing in the road; she stood half-hidden amongst the
+lilac bushes watching.  The poplar leaves drooped lifeless and almost
+black above her head, the dust raised by the soldiers' feet hung in the
+air; it seemed as if in all the world no freshness and no life were
+stirring.  The tramp of feet died away.  Suddenly within arm's length of
+her a man appeared, his stick shouldered like a sword.  He raised his
+hat.
+
+"Good-evening!  You do not remember me?  Sarelli.  Pardon!  You looked
+like a ghost standing there.  How badly those fellows marched!  We hang,
+you see, on the skirts of our profession and criticise; it is all we are
+fit for."  His black eyes, restless and malevolent like a swan's, seemed
+to stab her face.  "A fine evening!  Too hot.  The storm is wanted; you
+feel that?  It is weary waiting for the storm; but after the storm, my
+dear young lady, comes peace."  He smiled, gently, this time, and baring
+his head again, was lost to view in the shadow of the trees.
+
+His figure had seemed to Christian like the sudden vision of a
+threatening, hidden force.  She thrust out her hands, as though to keep
+it off.
+
+No use; it was within her, nothing could keep it away!  She went to Mrs.
+Decie's room, where her aunt and Miss Naylor were conversing in low
+tones.  To hear their voices brought back the touch of this world of
+everyday which had no part or lot in the terrifying powers within her.
+
+Dawney slept at the Villa now.  In the dead of night he was awakened by a
+light flashed in his eyes.  Christian was standing there, her face pale
+and wild with terror, her hair falling in dark masses on her shoulders.
+
+"Save him!  Save him!" she cried.  "Quick!  The bleeding!"
+
+He saw her muffle her face in her white sleeves, and seizing the candle,
+leaped out of bed and rushed away.
+
+The internal haemorrhage had come again, and Nicholas Treffry wavered
+between life and death.  When it had ceased, he sank into a sort of
+stupor.  About six o'clock he came back to consciousness; watching his
+eyes, they could see a mental struggle taking place within him. At last
+he singled Christian out from the others by a sign.
+
+"I'm beat, Chris," he whispered.  "Let him know, I want to see him."
+
+His voice grew a little stronger.  "I thought that I could see it
+through--but here's the end."  He lifted his hand ever so little, and let
+it fall again.  When told a little later that a telegram had been sent to
+Harz his eyes expressed satisfaction.
+
+Herr Paul came down in ignorance of the night's events.  He stopped in
+front of the barometer and tapped it, remarking to Miss Naylor: "The
+glass has gone downstairs; we shall have cool weather--it will still go
+well with him!"
+
+When, with her brown face twisted by pity and concern, she told him that
+it was a question of hours, Herr Paul turned first purple, then pale, and
+sitting down, trembled violently.  "I cannot believe it," he exclaimed
+almost angrily.  "Yesterday he was so well!  I cannot believe it!  Poor
+Nicholas!  Yesterday he spoke to me!"  Taking Miss Naylor's hand, he
+clutched it in his own.  "Ah!" he cried, letting it go suddenly, and
+striking at his forehead, "it is too terrible; only yesterday he spoke to
+me of sherry.  Is there nobody, then, who can do good?"
+
+"There is only God," replied Miss Naylor softly.
+
+"God?" said Herr Paul in a scared voice.
+
+"We--can--all--pray to Him," Miss Naylor murmured; little spots of colour
+came into her cheeks.  "I am going to do it now."
+
+Herr Paul raised her hand and kissed it.
+
+"Are you?" he said; "good!  I too."  He passed through his study door,
+closed it carefully behind him, then for some unknown reason set his back
+against it.  Ugh!  Death!  It came to all!  Some day it would come to
+him. It might come tomorrow!  One must pray!
+
+The day dragged to its end.  In the sky clouds had mustered, and,
+crowding close on one another, clung round the sun, soft, thick,
+greywhite, like the feathers on a pigeon's breast.  Towards evening faint
+tremblings were felt at intervals, as from the shock of immensely distant
+earthquakes.
+
+Nobody went to bed that night, but in the morning the report was the
+same: "Unconscious--a question of hours."  Once only did he recover
+consciousness, and then asked for Harz.  A telegram had come from him, he
+was on the way.  Towards seven of the evening the long-expected storm
+broke in a sky like ink.  Into the valleys and over the crests of
+mountains it seemed as though an unseen hand were spilling goblets of
+pale wine, darting a sword-blade zigzag over trees, roofs, spires, peaks,
+into the very firmament, which answered every thrust with great bursts of
+groaning.  Just beyond the veranda Greta saw a glowworm shining, as it
+might be a tiny bead of the fallen lightning.  Soon the rain covered
+everything.  Sometimes a jet of light brought the hilltops, towering,
+dark, and hard, over the house, to disappear again behind the raindrops
+and shaken leaves. Each breath drawn by the storm was like the clash of a
+thousand cymbals; and in his room Mr. Treffry lay unconscious of its
+fury.
+
+Greta had crept in unobserved; and sat curled in a corner, with Scruff in
+her arms, rocking slightly to and fro.  When Christian passed, she caught
+her skirt, and whispered: "It is your birthday, Chris!"
+
+Mr. Treffry stirred.
+
+"What's that?  Thunder?--it's cooler.  Where am I?  Chris!"
+
+Dawney signed for her to take his place.
+
+"Chris!" Mr. Treffry said.  "It's near now."  She bent across him, and
+her tears fell on his forehead.
+
+"Forgive!" she whispered; "love me!"
+
+He raised his finger, and touched her cheek.
+
+For an hour or more he did not speak, though once or twice he moaned, and
+faintly tightened his pressure on her fingers.  The storm had died away,
+but very far off the thunder was still muttering.
+
+His eyes opened once more, rested on her, and passed beyond, into that
+abyss dividing youth from age, conviction from conviction, life from
+death.
+
+At the foot of the bed Dawney stood covering his face; behind him
+Dominique knelt with hands held upwards; the sound of Greta's breathing,
+soft in sleep, rose and fell in the stillness.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+One afternoon in March, more than three years after Mr. Treffry's death,
+Christian was sitting at the window of a studio in St. John's Wood.  The
+sky was covered with soft, high clouds, through which shone little gleams
+of blue.  Now and then a bright shower fell, sprinkling the trees, where
+every twig was curling upwards as if waiting for the gift of its new
+leaves.  And it seemed to her that the boughs thickened and budded under
+her very eyes; a great concourse of sparrows had gathered on those
+boughs, and kept raising a shrill chatter.  Over at the far side of the
+room Harz was working at a picture.
+
+On Christian's face was the quiet smile of one who knows that she has
+only to turn her eyes to see what she wishes to see; of one whose
+possessions are safe under her hand.  She looked at Harz with that
+possessive smile.  But as into the brain of one turning in his bed grim
+fancies will suddenly leap up out of warm nothingness, so there leaped
+into her mind the memory of that long ago dawn, when he had found her
+kneeling by Mr. Treffry's body.  She seemed to see again the dead face,
+so gravely quiet, and furrowless.  She seemed to see her lover and
+herself setting forth silently along the river wall where they had first
+met; sitting down, still silent, beneath the poplar-tree where the little
+bodies of the chafers had lain strewn in the Spring.  To see the trees
+changing from black to grey, from grey to green, and in the dark sky long
+white lines of cloud, lighting to the south like birds; and, very far
+away, rosy peaks watching the awakening of the earth.  And now once
+again, after all that time, she felt her spirit shrink away from his; as
+it had shrunk in that hour, when she had seemed hateful to herself.  She
+remembered the words she had spoken: "I have no heart left.  You've torn
+it in two between you.  Love is all self--I wanted him to die."  She
+remembered too the raindrops on the vines like a million tiny lamps, and
+the throstle that began singing.  Then, as dreams die out into warm
+nothingness, recollection vanished, and the smile came back to her lips.
+
+She took out a letter.
+
+"....O Chris!  We are really coming; I seem to be always telling it to
+myself, and I have told Scruff many times, but he does not care, because
+he is getting old.  Miss Naylor says we shall arrive for breakfast, and
+that we shall be hungry, but perhaps she will not be very hungry, if it
+is rough.  Papa said to me: 'Je serai inconsolable, mais inconsolable!'
+But I think he will not be, because he is going to Vienna.  When we are
+come, there will be nobody at Villa Rubein; Aunt Constance has gone a
+fortnight ago to Florence.  There is a young man at her hotel; she says
+he will be one of the greatest playwriters in England, and she sent me a
+play of his to read; it was only a little about love, I did not like it
+very much....  O Chris!  I think I shall cry when I see you.  As I am
+quite grown up, Miss Naylor is not to come back with me; sometimes she is
+sad, but she will be glad to see you, Chris.  She seems always sadder
+when it is Spring.  Today I walked along the wall; the little green balls
+of wool are growing on the poplars already, and I saw one chafer; it will
+not be long before the cherry blossom comes; and I felt so funny, sad and
+happy together, and once I thought that I had wings and could fly away up
+the valley to Meran--but I had none, so I sat on the bench where we sat
+the day we took the pictures, and I thought and thought; there was
+nothing came to me in my thoughts, but all was sweet and a little noisy,
+and rather sad; it was like the buzzing of the chafer, in my head; and
+now I feel so tired and all my blood is running up and down me.  I do not
+mind, because I know it is the Spring.
+
+"Dominique came to see us the other day; he is very well, and is half the
+proprietor of the Adler Hotel, at Meran; he is not at all different, and
+he asked about you and about Alois--do you know, Chris, to myself I call
+him Herr Harz, but when I have seen him this time I shall call him Alois
+in my heart also.
+
+"I have a letter from Dr. Edmund; he is in London, so perhaps you have
+seen him, only he has a great many patients and some that he has 'hopes
+of killing soon'! especially one old lady, because she is always wanting
+him to do things for her, and he is never saying 'No,' so he does not
+like her.  He says that he is getting old.  When I have finished this
+letter I am going to write and tell him that perhaps he shall see me
+soon, and then I think he will be very sad. Now that the Spring is come
+there are more flowers to take to Uncle Nic's grave, and every day, when
+I am gone, Barbi is to take them so that he shall not miss you, Chris,
+because all the flowers I put there are for you.
+
+"I am buying some toys without paint on for my niece."
+
+"O Chris! this will be the first baby that I have known."
+
+"I am only to stay three weeks with you, but I think when I am once there
+I shall be staying longer.  I send a kiss for my niece, and to Herr Harz,
+my love--that is the last time I shall call him Herr Harz; and to you,
+Chris, all the joy that is in my heart.--Your loving "GRETA."
+
+Christian rose, and, turning very softly, stood, leaning her elbows on
+the back of a high seat, looking at her husband.
+
+In her eyes there was a slow, clear, faintly smiling, yet yearning look,
+as though this strenuous figure bent on its task were seen for a moment
+as something apart, and not all the world to her.
+
+"Tired?" asked Harz, putting his lips to her hand.
+
+"No, it's only--what Greta says about the Spring; it makes one want more
+than one has got."
+
+Slipping her hand away, she went back to the window.  Harz stood, looking
+after her; then, taking up his palette, again began painting.
+
+In the world, outside, the high soft clouds flew by; the trees seemed
+thickening and budding.
+
+And Christian thought:
+
+'Can we never have quite enough?'
+
+December 1890.
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+MY FATHER A MAN OF DEVON I
+
+"MOOR, 20th July.
+
+.......It is quiet here, sleepy, rather--a farm is never quiet; the sea,
+too, is only a quarter of a mile away, and when it's windy, the sound of
+it travels up the combe; for distraction, you must go four miles to
+Brixham or five to Kingswear, and you won't find much then. The farm lies
+in a sheltered spot, scooped, so to speak, high up the combe side--behind
+is a rise of fields, and beyond, a sweep of down. You have the feeling of
+being able to see quite far, which is misleading, as you soon find out if
+you walk.  It is true Devon country-hills, hollows, hedge-banks, lanes
+dipping down into the earth or going up like the sides of houses,
+coppices, cornfields, and little streams wherever there's a place for
+one; but the downs along the cliff, all gorse and ferns, are wild.  The
+combe ends in a sandy cove with black rock on one side, pinkish cliffs
+away to the headland on the other, and a coastguard station.  Just now,
+with the harvest coming on, everything looks its richest, the apples
+ripening, the trees almost too green.  It's very hot, still weather; the
+country and the sea seem to sleep in the sun.  In front of the farm are
+half-a-dozen pines that look as if they had stepped out of another land,
+but all round the back is orchard as lush, and gnarled, and orthodox as
+any one could wish.  The house, a long, white building with three levels
+of roof, and splashes of brown all over it, looks as if it might be
+growing down into the earth.  It was freshly thatched two years ago--and
+that's all the newness there is about it; they say the front door, oak,
+with iron knobs, is three hundred years old at least.  You can touch the
+ceilings with your hand.  The windows certainly might be larger--a
+heavenly old place, though, with a flavour of apples, smoke, sweetbriar,
+bacon, honeysuckle, and age, all over it.
+
+The owner is a man called John Ford, about seventy, and seventeen stone
+in weight--very big, on long legs, with a grey, stubbly beard, grey,
+watery eyes, short neck and purplish complexion; he is asthmatic, and has
+a very courteous, autocratic manner.  His clothes are made of Harris
+tweed--except on Sundays, when he puts on black--a seal ring, and a thick
+gold cable chain.  There's nothing mean or small about John Ford; I
+suspect him of a warm heart, but he doesn't let you know much about him. 
+He's a north-country man by birth, and has been out in New Zealand all
+his life.  This little Devonshire farm is all he has now.  He had a large
+"station" in the North Island, and was much looked up to, kept open
+house, did everything, as one would guess, in a narrow-minded,
+large-handed way.  He came to grief suddenly; I don't quite know how.  I
+believe his only son lost money on the turf, and then, unable to face his
+father, shot himself; if you had seen John Ford, you could imagine that.
+His wife died, too, that year.  He paid up to the last penny, and came
+home, to live on this farm.  He told me the other night that he had only
+one relation in the world, his granddaughter, who lives here with him.
+Pasiance Voisey--old spelling for Patience, but they pronounce, it
+Pash-yence--is sitting out here with me at this moment on a sort of
+rustic loggia that opens into the orchard.  Her sleeves are rolled up,
+and she's stripping currants, ready for black currant tea.  Now and then
+she rests her elbows on the table, eats a berry, pouts her lips, and,
+begins again.  She has a round, little face; a long, slender body; cheeks
+like poppies; a bushy mass of black-brown hair, and dark-brown, almost
+black, eyes; her nose is snub; her lips quick, red, rather full; all her
+motions quick and soft.  She loves bright colours.  She's rather like a
+little cat; sometimes she seems all sympathy, then in a moment as hard as
+tortoise-shell.  She's all impulse; yet she doesn't like to show her
+feelings; I sometimes wonder whether she has any.  She plays the violin.
+
+It's queer to see these two together, queer and rather sad.  The old man
+has a fierce tenderness for her that strikes into the very roots of him.
+I see him torn between it, and his cold north-country horror of his
+feelings; his life with her is an unconscious torture to him. She's a
+restless, chafing thing, demure enough one moment, then flashing out into
+mocking speeches or hard little laughs.  Yet she's fond of him in her
+fashion; I saw her kiss him once when he was asleep.  She obeys him
+generally--in a way as if she couldn't breathe while she was doing it. 
+She's had a queer sort of education--history, geography, elementary
+mathematics, and nothing else; never been to school; had a few lessons on
+the violin, but has taught herself most of what she knows. She is well up
+in the lore of birds, flowers, and insects; has three cats, who follow
+her about; and is full of pranks.  The other day she called out to me,
+"I've something for you.  Hold out your hand and shut your eyes!"  It was
+a large, black slug!  She's the child of the old fellow's only daughter,
+who was sent home for schooling at Torquay, and made a runaway match with
+one Richard Voisey, a yeoman farmer, whom she met in the hunting-field. 
+John Ford was furious--his ancestors, it appears, used to lead ruffians
+on the Cumberland side of the Border--he looked on "Squire" Rick Voisey
+as a cut below him.  He was called "Squire," as far as I can make out,
+because he used to play cards every evening with a parson in the
+neighbourhood who went by the name of "Devil" Hawkins.  Not that the
+Voisey stock is to be despised. They have had this farm since it was
+granted to one Richard Voysey by copy dated 8th September, 13 Henry VIII. 
+Mrs. Hopgood, the wife of the bailiff--a dear, quaint, serene old soul
+with cheeks like a rosy, withered apple, and an unbounded love of
+Pasiance--showed me the very document.
+
+"I kape it," she said.  "Mr. Ford be tu proud--but other folks be proud
+tu.  'Tis a pra-aper old fam'ly: all the women is Margery, Pasiance, or
+Mary; all the men's Richards an' Johns an' Rogers; old as they
+apple-trees."
+
+Rick Voisey was a rackety, hunting fellow, and "dipped" the old farm up
+to its thatched roof.  John Ford took his revenge by buying up the
+mortgages, foreclosing, and commanding his daughter and Voisey to go on
+living here rent free; this they dutifully did until they were both
+killed in a dog-cart accident, eight years ago.  Old Ford's financial
+smash came a year later, and since then he's lived here with Pasiance.  I
+fancy it's the cross in her blood that makes her so restless, and
+irresponsible: if she had been all a native she'd have been happy enough
+here, or all a stranger like John Ford himself, but the two strains
+struggling for mastery seem to give her no rest. You'll think this a
+far-fetched theory, but I believe it to be the true one.  She'll stand
+with lips pressed together, her arms folded tight across her narrow
+chest, staring as if she could see beyond the things round her; then
+something catches her attention, her eyes will grow laughing, soft, or
+scornful all in a minute!  She's eighteen, perfectly fearless in a boat,
+but you can't get her to mount a horse--a sore subject with her
+grandfather, who spends most of his day on a lean, half-bred pony, that
+carries him like a feather, for all his weight.
+
+They put me up here as a favour to Dan Treffry; there's an arrangement of
+L. s. d. with Mrs. Hopgood in the background.  They aren't at all well
+off; this is the largest farm about, but it doesn't bring them in much.
+To look at John Ford, it seems incredible he should be short of
+money--he's too large.
+
+We have family prayers at eight, then, breakfast--after that freedom for
+writing or anything else till supper and evening prayers.  At midday one
+forages for oneself.  On Sundays, two miles to church twice, or you get
+into John Ford's black books....  Dan Treffry himself is staying at
+Kingswear.  He says he's made his pile; it suits him down here--like a
+sleep after years of being too wide-awake; he had a rough time in New
+Zealand, until that mine made his fortune.  You'd hardly remember him; he
+reminds me of his uncle, old Nicholas Treffry; the same slow way of
+speaking, with a hesitation, and a trick of repeating your name with
+everything he says; left-handed too, and the same slow twinkle in his
+eyes.  He has a dark, short beard, and red-brown cheeks; is a little bald
+on the temples, and a bit grey, but hard as iron.  He rides over nearly
+every day, attended by a black spaniel with a wonderful nose and a horror
+of petticoats.  He has told me lots of good stories of John Ford in the
+early squatter's times; his feats with horses live to this day; and he
+was through the Maori wars; as Dan says, "a man after Uncle Nic's own
+heart."
+
+They are very good friends, and respect each other; Dan has a great
+admiration for the old man, but the attraction is Pasiance.  He talks
+very little when she's in the room, but looks at her in a sidelong,
+wistful sort of way.  Pasiance's conduct to him would be cruel in any one
+else, but in her, one takes it with a pinch of salt.  Dan goes off, but
+turns up again as quiet and dogged as you please.
+
+Last night, for instance, we were sitting in the loggia after supper.
+Pasiance was fingering the strings of her violin, and suddenly Dan (a
+bold thing for him) asked her to play.
+
+"What!" she said, "before men?  No, thank you!"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because I hate them."
+
+Down came John Ford's hand on the wicker table: "You forget yourself!  Go
+to bed!"
+
+She gave Dan a look, and went; we could hear her playing in her bedroom;
+it sounded like a dance of spirits; and just when one thought she had
+finished, out it would break again like a burst of laughter.  Presently,
+John Ford begged our pardons ceremoniously, and stumped off indoors.  The
+violin ceased; we heard his voice growling at her; down he came again.
+Just as he was settled in his chair there was a soft swish, and something
+dark came falling through the apple boughs.  The violin!  You should have
+seen his face!  Dan would have picked the violin up, but the old man
+stopped him.  Later, from my bedroom window, I saw John Ford come out and
+stand looking at the violin.  He raised his foot as if to stamp on it. At
+last he picked it up, wiped it carefully, and took it in....
+
+My room is next to hers.  I kept hearing her laugh, a noise too as if she
+were dragging things about the room.  Then I fell asleep, but woke with a
+start, and went to the window for a breath of fresh air. Such a black,
+breathless night!  Nothing to be seen but the twisted, blacker branches;
+not the faintest stir of leaves, no sound but muffled grunting from the
+cowhouse, and now and then a faint sigh.  I had the queerest feeling of
+unrest and fear, the last thing to expect on such a night.  There is
+something here that's disturbing; a sort of suppressed struggle.  I've
+never in my life seen anything so irresponsible as this girl, or so
+uncompromising as the old man; I keep thinking of the way he wiped that
+violin.  It's just as if a spark would set everything in a blaze. There's
+a menace of tragedy--or--perhaps it's only the heat, and too much of
+Mother Hopgood's crame....
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+"Tuesday.
+
+......I've made a new acquaintance.  I was lying in the orchard, and
+presently, not seeing me, he came along--a man of middle height, with a
+singularly good balance, and no lumber--rather old blue clothes, a
+flannel shirt, a dull red necktie, brown shoes, a cap with a leather peak
+pushed up on the forehead.  Face long and narrow, bronzed with a kind of
+pale burnt-in brownness; a good forehead.  A brown moustache, beard
+rather pointed, blackening about the cheeks; his chin not visible, but
+from the beard's growth must be big; mouth I should judge sensuous.  Nose
+straight and blunt; eyes grey, with an upward look, not exactly frank,
+because defiant; two parallel furrows down each cheek, one from the inner
+corner of the eye, one from the nostril; age perhaps thirty-five.  About
+the face, attitude, movements, something immensely vital, adaptable,
+daring, and unprincipled.
+
+He stood in front of the loggia, biting his fingers, a kind of
+nineteenth-century buccaneer, and I wondered what he was doing in this
+galley. They say you can tell a man of Kent or a Somersetshire man;
+certainly you can tell a Yorkshire man, and this fellow could only have
+been a man of Devon, one of the two main types found in this county.  He
+whistled; and out came Pasiance in a geranium-coloured dress, looking
+like some tall poppy--you know the slight droop of a poppy's head, and
+the way the wind sways its stem.... She is a human poppy, her fuzzy dark
+hair is like a poppy's lustreless black heart, she has a poppy's
+tantalising attraction and repulsion, something fatal, or rather fateful.
+She came walking up to my new friend, then caught sight of me, and
+stopped dead.
+
+"That," she said to me, "is Zachary Pearse.  This," she said to him, "is
+our lodger."  She said it with a wonderful soft malice.  She wanted to
+scratch me, and she scratched.  Half an hour later I was in the yard,
+when up came this fellow Pearse.
+
+"Glad to know you," he said, looking thoughtfully at the pigs.
+
+"You're a writer, aren't you?"
+
+"A sort of one," I said.
+
+"If by any chance," he said suddenly, "you're looking for a job, I could
+put something in your way.  Walk down to the beach with me, and I'll tell
+you; my boat's at anchor, smartest little craft in these parts."
+
+It was very hot, and I had no desire whatever to go down to the beach--I
+went, all the same.  We had not gone far when John Ford and Dan Treffry
+came into the lane.  Our friend seemed a little disconcerted, but soon
+recovered himself.  We met in the middle of the lane, where there was
+hardly room to pass.  John Ford, who looked very haughty, put on his
+pince-nez and stared at Pearse.
+
+"Good-day!" said Pearse; "fine weather!  I've been up to ask Pasiance to
+come for a sail.  Wednesday we thought, weather permitting; this
+gentleman's coming.  Perhaps you'll come too, Mr. Treffry.  You've never
+seen my place.  I'll give you lunch, and show you my father. He's worth a
+couple of hours' sail any day."  It was said in such an odd way that one
+couldn't resent his impudence.  John Ford was seized with a fit of
+wheezing, and seemed on the eve of an explosion; he glanced at me, and
+checked himself.
+
+"You're very good," he said icily; "my granddaughter has other things to
+do.  You, gentlemen, will please yourselves"; and, with a very slight
+bow, he went stumping on to the house.  Dan looked at me, and I looked at
+him.
+
+"You'll come?" said Pearse, rather wistfully.  Dan stammered: "Thank you,
+Mr. Pearse; I'm a better man on a horse than in a boat, but--thank you." 
+Cornered in this way, he's a shy, soft-hearted being. Pearse smiled his
+thanks.  "Wednesday, then, at ten o'clock; you shan't regret it."
+
+"Pertinacious beggar!" I heard Dan mutter in his beard; and found myself
+marching down the lane again by Pearse's side.  I asked him what he was
+good enough to mean by saying I was coming, without having asked me.  He
+answered, unabashed:
+
+"You see, I'm not friends with the old man; but I knew he'd not be
+impolite to you, so I took the liberty."
+
+He has certainly a knack of turning one's anger to curiosity.  We were
+down in the combe now; the tide was running out, and the sand all little,
+wet, shining ridges.  About a quarter of a mile out lay a cutter, with
+her tan sail half down, swinging to the swell.  The sunlight was making
+the pink cliffs glow in the most wonderful way; and shifting in bright
+patches over the sea like moving shoals of goldfish.  Pearse perched
+himself on his dinghy, and looked out under his hand.  He seemed lost in
+admiration.
+
+"If we could only net some of those spangles," he said, "an' make gold of
+'em!  No more work then."
+
+"It's a big job I've got on," he said presently; "I'll tell you about it
+on Wednesday. I want a journalist."
+
+"But I don't write for the papers," I said; "I do other sort of work. My
+game is archaeology."
+
+"It doesn't matter," he said, "the more imagination the better.  It'd be
+a thundering good thing for you."
+
+His assurance was amazing, but it was past supper-time, and hunger
+getting the better of my curiosity, I bade him good-night. When I looked
+back, he was still there, on the edge of his boat, gazing at the sea.  A
+queer sort of bird altogether, but attractive somehow.
+
+Nobody mentioned him that evening; but once old Ford, after staring a
+long time at Pasiance, muttered a propos of nothing, "Undutiful
+children!"  She was softer than usual; listening quietly to our talk, and
+smiling when spoken to.  At bedtime she went up to her grand-father,
+without waiting for the usual command, "Come and kiss me, child."
+
+Dan did not stay to supper, and he has not been here since.  This morning
+I asked Mother Hopgood who Zachary Pearse was.  She's a true Devonian; if
+there's anything she hates, it is to be committed to a definite
+statement.  She ambled round her answer, and at last told me that he was
+"son of old Cap'en Jan Pearse to Black Mill.  'Tes an old family to
+Dartymouth an' Plymouth," she went on in a communicative outburst.  "They
+du say Francis Drake tuke five o' they Pearses with 'en to fight the
+Spaniards.  At least that's what I've heard Mr. Zachary zay; but
+Ha-apgood can tell yu."  Poor Hopgood, the amount of information she
+saddles him with in the course of the day!  Having given me thus to
+understand that she had run dry, she at once went on:
+
+"Cap'en Jan Pearse made a dale of ventures.  He's old now--they du say
+nigh an 'undred.  Ha-apgood can tell yu."
+
+"But the son, Mrs. Hopgood?"
+
+Her eyes twinkled with sudden shrewdness: She hugged herself placidly.
+
+"An' what would yu take for dinner to-day?  There's duck; or yu might
+like 'toad in the hole,' with an apple tart; or then, there's--Well!
+we'll see what we can du like."  And off she went, without waiting for my
+answer.
+
+To-morrow is Wednesday.  I shan't be sorry to get another look at this
+fellow Pearse....
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+"Friday, 29th July.
+
+.......Why do you ask me so many questions, and egg me on to write about
+these people instead of minding my business?  If you really want to hear,
+I'll tell you of Wednesday's doings.
+
+It was a splendid morning; and Dan turned up, to my surprise--though I
+might have known that when he says a thing, he does it.  John Ford came
+out to shake hands with him, then, remembering why he had come, breathed
+loudly, said nothing, and went in again.  Nothing was to be seen of
+Pasiance, and we went down to the beach together.
+
+"I don't like this fellow Pearse, George," Dan said to me on the way; "I
+was fool enough to say I'd go, and so I must, but what's he after?  Not
+the man to do things without a reason, mind you."
+
+I remarked that we should soon know.
+
+"I'm not so sure--queer beggar; I never look at him without thinking of a
+pirate."
+
+The cutter lay in the cove as if she had never moved.  There too was
+Zachary Pearse seated on the edge of his dinghy.
+
+"A five-knot breeze," he said, "I'll run you down in a couple of hours."
+He made no inquiry about Pasiance, but put us into his cockleshell and
+pulled for the cutter.  A lantern-Jawed fellow, named Prawle, with a
+spiky, prominent beard, long, clean-shaven upper lip, and tanned
+complexion--a regular hard-weather bird--received us.
+
+The cutter was beautifully clean; built for a Brixham trawler, she still
+had her number--DH 113--uneffaced.  We dived into a sort of cabin, airy,
+but dark, fitted with two bunks and a small table, on which stood some
+bottles of stout; there were lockers, too, and pegs for clothes.  Prawle,
+who showed us round, seemed very proud of a steam contrivance for
+hoisting sails.  It was some minutes before we came on deck again; and
+there, in the dinghy, being pulled towards the cutter, sat Pasiance.
+
+"If I'd known this," stammered Dan, getting red, "I wouldn't have come."
+She had outwitted us, and there was nothing to be done.
+
+It was a very pleasant sail.  The breeze was light from the south-east,
+the sun warm, the air soft.  Presently Pasiance began singing:
+
+"Columbus is dead and laid in his grave, Oh! heigh-ho! and laid in his
+grave; Over his head the apple-trees wave Oh! heigh-ho! the apple-trees
+wave....
+
+"The apples are ripe and ready to fall, Oh! heigh-ho! and ready to fall;
+There came an old woman and gathered them all, Oh! heigh-ho! and gathered
+them all....
+
+"The apples are gathered, and laid on the shelf, Oh! heigh-ho! and laid
+on the shelf; If you want any more, you must sing for yourself, Oh!
+heigh-ho! and sing for yourself."
+
+Her small, high voice came to us in trills and spurts, as the wind let
+it, like the singing of a skylark lost in the sky.  Pearse went up to her
+and whispered something.  I caught a glimpse of her face like a startled
+wild creature's; shrinking, tossing her hair, laughing, all in the same
+breath.  She wouldn't sing again, but crouched in the bows with her chin
+on her hands, and the sun falling on one cheek, round, velvety, red as a
+peach....
+
+We passed Dartmouth, and half an hour later put into a little wooded bay.
+On a low reddish cliff was a house hedged round by pine-trees. A bit of
+broken jetty ran out from the bottom of the cliff.  We hooked on to this,
+and landed.  An ancient, fish-like man came slouching down and took
+charge of the cutter.  Pearse led us towards the house, Pasiance
+following mortally shy all of a sudden.
+
+The house had a dark, overhanging thatch of the rush reeds that grow in
+the marshes hereabouts; I remember nothing else remarkable.  It was
+neither old, nor new; neither beautiful, nor exactly ugly; neither clean,
+nor entirely squalid; it perched there with all its windows over the sea,
+turning its back contemptuously on the land.
+
+Seated in a kind of porch, beside an immense telescope, was a very old
+man in a panama hat, with a rattan cane.  His pure-white beard and
+moustache, and almost black eyebrows, gave a very singular, piercing look
+to his little, restless, dark-grey eyes; all over his mahogany cheeks and
+neck was a network of fine wrinkles.  He sat quite upright, in the full
+sun, hardly blinking.
+
+"Dad!" said Zachary, "this is Pasiance Voisey."  The old man turned his
+eyes on her and muttered, "How do you do, ma'am?" then took no further
+notice.  And Pasiance, who seemed to resent this, soon slipped away and
+went wandering about amongst the pines.  An old woman brought some plates
+and bottles and laid them casually on a table; and we sat round the
+figure of old Captain Pearse without a word, as if we were all under a
+spell.
+
+Before lunch there was a little scene between Zachary Pearse and Dan, as
+to which of them should summon Pasiance.  It ended in both going, and
+coming back without her.  She did not want any lunch, would stay where
+she was amongst the pines.
+
+For lunch we had chops, wood-pigeons, mushrooms, and mulberry preserve,
+and drank wonderful Madeira out of common wine-glasses.  I asked the old
+man where he got it; he gave me a queer look, and answered with a little
+bow:
+
+"Stood me in tu shillin' the bottle, an' the country got nothing out of
+it, sir.  In the early Thirties; tu shillin' the bottle; there's no such
+wine nowadays and," he added, looking at Zachary, "no such men."
+
+Zachary smiled and said: "You did nothing so big, dad, as what I'm after,
+now!"
+
+The old man's eyes had a sort of disdain in them.
+
+"You're going far, then, in the Pied Witch, Zack?"
+
+"I am," said Zachary.
+
+"And where might yu be goin' in that old trampin' smut factory?"
+
+"Morocco."
+
+"Heu!" said the old man, "there's nothing there; I know that coast, as I
+know the back o' my hand."  He stretched out a hand covered with veins
+and hair.
+
+Zachary began suddenly to pour out a flood of words:
+
+"Below Mogador--a fellow there--friend of mine--two years ago now.
+Concessions--trade-gunpowder--cruisers--feuds--money&
+mdash;chiefs--Gatling guns--Sultan--rifles--rebellion--gold."  He
+detailed a reckless, sordid, bold scheme, which, on the pivot of a
+trading venture, was intended to spin a whole wheel of political
+convulsions.
+
+"They'll never let you get there," said old Pearse.
+
+"Won't they?" returned Zachary.  "Oh yes, they will, an' when I leave,
+there'll be another dynasty, and I'll be a rich man."
+
+"Yu'll never leave," answered the old man.
+
+Zachary took out a sheet of paper covered with figures.  He had worked
+the whole thing out.  So much--equipment, so much--trade, so
+much--concessions, so much--emergencies.  "My last mag!" he ended, "a
+thousand short; the ship's ready, and if I'm not there within a month my
+chance is as good as gone."
+
+This was the pith of his confidences--an appeal for money, and we all
+looked as men will when that crops up.
+
+"Mad!"  muttered the old man, looking at the sea.
+
+"No," said Zachary.  That one word was more eloquent than all the rest of
+his words put together.  This fellow is no visionary.  His scheme may be
+daring, and unprincipled, but--he knows very well what he's about.
+
+"Well!" said old Pearse, "you shall have five 'undred of my money, if
+it's only to learn what yu're made of.  Wheel me in!"  Zachary wheeled
+him into the house, but soon came back.
+
+"The old man's cheque for five hundred pounds!" he said, holding it up.
+"Mr. Treffry, give me another, and you shall have a third of the
+profits."
+
+I expected Dan to give a point-blank refusal.  But he only asked:
+
+"Would that clear you for starting?"
+
+"With that," said Zachary, "I can get to sea in a fortnight."
+
+"Good!" Dan said slowly.  "Give me a written promise!  To sea in fourteen
+days and my fair share on the five hundred pounds--no more--no less."
+
+Again I thought Pearse would have jumped at this, but he leaned his chin
+on his hand, and looked at Dan, and Dan looked at him.  While they were
+staring at each other like this, Pasiance came up with a kitten.
+
+"See!" she said, "isn't it a darling?"  The kitten crawled and clawed its
+way up behind her neck.  I saw both men's eyes as they looked at
+Pasiance, and suddenly understood what they were at.  The kitten rubbed
+itself against Pasiance's cheek, overbalanced, and fell, clawing, down
+her dress.  She caught it up and walked away.  Some one, I don't know
+which of us, sighed, and Pearse cried "Done!"
+
+The bargain had been driven.
+
+"Good-bye, Mr. Pearse," said Dan; "I guess that's all I'm wanted for.
+I'll find my pony waiting in the village.  George, you'll see Pasiance
+home?"
+
+We heard the hoofs of his pony galloping down the road; Pearse suddenly
+excused himself, and disappeared.
+
+This venture of his may sound romantic and absurd, but it's
+matter-of-fact enough.  He's after L. s. d.!  Shades of Drake, Raleigh,
+Hawkins, Oxenham!  The worm of suspicion gnaws at the rose of romance.
+What if those fellows, too, were only after L. s. d....?
+
+I strolled into the pine-wood.  The earth there was covered like a bee's
+body with black and gold stripes; there was the blue sea below, and
+white, sleepy clouds, and bumble-bees booming above the heather; it was
+all softness, a summer's day in Devon.  Suddenly I came on Pearse
+standing at the edge of the cliff with Pasiance sitting in a little
+hollow below, looking up at him.  I heard him say:
+
+"Pasiance--Pasiance!" The sound of his voice, and the sight of her soft,
+wondering face made me furious.  What business has she with love, at her
+age?  What business have they with each other?
+
+He told me presently that she had started off for home, and drove me to
+the ferry, behind an old grey pony.  On the way he came back to his offer
+of the other day.
+
+"Come with me," he said.  "It doesn't do to neglect the Press; you can
+see the possibilities.  It's one of the few countries left.  If I once
+get this business started you don't know where it's going to stop.  You'd
+have free passage everywhere, and whatever you like in reason."
+
+I answered as rudely as I could--but by no means as rudely as I
+wanted--that his scheme was mad.  As a matter of fact, it's much too sane
+for me; for, whatever the body of a scheme, its soul is the fibre of the
+schemer.
+
+"Think of it," he urged, as if he could see into me.  "You can make what
+you like of it.  Press paragraphs, of course.  But that's mechanical;
+why, even I could do it, if I had time.  As for the rest, you'll be as
+free--as free as a man."
+
+There, in five words of one syllable, is the kernel of this fellow
+Pearse--"As free as a man!"  No rule, no law, not even the mysterious
+shackles that bind men to their own self-respects!  "As free as a man!" 
+No ideals; no principles; no fixed star for his worship; no coil he can't
+slide out of!  But the fellow has the tenacity of one of the old Devon
+mastiffs, too.  He wouldn't take "No" for an answer.
+
+"Think of it," he said; "any day will do--I've got a fortnight.... Look!
+there she is!"  I thought that he meant Pasiance; but it was an old
+steamer, sluggish and black in the blazing sun of mid-stream, with a
+yellow-and-white funnel, and no sign of life on her decks.
+
+"That's her--the Pied Witch!  Do her twelve knots; you wouldn't think it! 
+Well! good-evening!  You'd better come.  A word to me at any time. I'm
+going aboard now."
+
+As I was being ferried across I saw him lolling in the stern-sheets of a
+little boat, the sun crowning his straw hat with glory.
+
+I came on Pasiance, about a mile up the road, sitting in the hedge. We
+walked on together between the banks--Devonshire banks, as high as
+houses, thick with ivy and ferns, bramble and hazel boughs, and
+honeysuckle.
+
+"Do you believe in a God?" she said suddenly.
+
+"Grandfather's God is simply awful.  When I'm playing the fiddle, I can
+feel God; but grandfather's is such a stuffy God--you know what I mean:
+the sea, the wind, the trees, colours too--they make one feel. But I
+don't believe that life was meant to 'be good' in.  Isn't there anything
+better than being good?  When I'm 'good,' I simply feel wicked." She
+reached up, caught a flower from the hedge, and slowly tore its petals.
+
+"What would you do," she muttered, "if you wanted a thing, but were
+afraid of it?  But I suppose you're never afraid!" she added, mocking me.
+I admitted that I was sometimes afraid, and often afraid of being afraid.
+
+"That's nice!  I'm not afraid of illness, nor of grandfather, nor of his
+God; but--I want to be free.  If you want a thing badly, you're afraid
+about it."
+
+I thought of Zachary Pearse's words, "free as a man."
+
+"Why are you looking at me like that?" she said.
+
+I stammered: "What do you mean by freedom?"
+
+"Do you know what I shall do to-night?" she answered.  "Get out of my
+window by the apple-tree, and go to the woods, and play!"
+
+We were going down a steep lane, along the side of a wood, where there's
+always a smell of sappy leaves, and the breath of the cows that come
+close to the hedge to get the shade.
+
+There was a cottage in the bottom, and a small boy sat outside playing
+with a heap of dust.
+
+"Hallo, Johnny!" said Pasiance.  "Hold your leg out and show this man
+your bad place!"  The small boy undid a bandage round his bare and dirty
+little leg, and proudly revealed a sore.
+
+"Isn't it nasty?" cried Pasiance ruefully, tying up the bandage again;
+"poor little feller!  Johnny, see what I've brought you!"  She produced
+from her pocket a stick of chocolate, the semblance of a soldier made of
+sealing-wax and worsted, and a crooked sixpence.
+
+It was a new glimpse of her.  All the way home she was telling me the
+story of little Johnny's family; when she came to his mother's death, she
+burst out: "A beastly shame, wasn't it, and they're so poor; it might
+just as well have been somebody else.  I like poor people, but I hate
+rich ones--stuck-up beasts."
+
+Mrs. Hopgood was looking over the gate, with her cap on one side, and one
+of Pasiance's cats rubbing itself against her skirts.  At the sight of us
+she hugged herself.
+
+"Where's grandfather?" asked Pasiance.  The old lady shook her head.
+
+"Is it a row?"  Mrs. Hopgood wriggled, and wriggled, and out came:
+
+"Did you get yure tay, my pretty?  No?  Well, that's a pity; yu'll be
+falin' low-like."
+
+Pasiance tossed her head, snatched up the cat, and ran indoors.  I
+remained staring at Mrs. Hopgood.
+
+"Dear-dear," she clucked, "poor lamb.  So to spake it's--" and she
+blurted out suddenly, "chuckin' full of wra-ath, he is.  Well, there!"
+
+My courage failed that evening.  I spent it at the coastguard station,
+where they gave me bread and cheese and some awful cider.  I passed the
+kitchen as I came back.  A fire was still burning there, and two figures,
+misty in the darkness, flitted about with stealthy laughter like spirits
+afraid of being detected in a carnal-meal. They were Pasiance and Mrs.
+Hopgood; and so charming was the smell of eggs and bacon, and they had
+such an air of tender enjoyment of this dark revel, that I stifled many
+pangs, as I crept hungry up to bed.
+
+In the middle of the night I woke and heard what I thought was screaming;
+then it sounded like wind in trees, then like the distant shaking of a
+tambourine, with the high singing of a human voice. Suddenly it
+stopped--two long notes came wailing out like sobs--then utter stillness;
+and though I listened for an hour or more there was no other sound ....
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+"4th August.
+
+......For three days after I wrote last, nothing at all happened here.  I
+spent the mornings on the cliff reading, and watching the sun-sparks
+raining on the sea.  It's grand up there with the gorse all round, the
+gulls basking on the rocks, the partridges calling in the corn, and now
+and then a young hawk overhead.  The afternoons I spent out in the
+orchard.  The usual routine goes on at the farm all the
+time--cow-milking, bread-baking, John Ford riding in and out, Pasiance in
+her garden stripping lavender, talking to the farm hands; and the smell
+of clover, and cows and hay; the sound of hens and pigs and pigeons, the
+soft drawl of voices, the dull thud of the farm carts; and day by day the
+apples getting redder.  Then, last Monday, Pasiance was away from sunrise
+till sunset--nobody saw her go--nobody knew where she had gone.  It was a
+wonderful, strange day, a sky of silver-grey and blue, with a drift of
+wind-clouds, all the trees sighing a little, the sea heaving in a long,
+low swell, the animals restless, the birds silent, except the gulls with
+their old man's laughter and kitten's mewing.
+
+A something wild was in the air; it seemed to sweep across the downs and
+combe, into the very house, like a passionate tune that comes drifting to
+your ears when you're sleepy.  But who would have thought the absence of
+that girl for a few hours could have wrought such havoc!  We were like
+uneasy spirits; Mrs. Hopgood's apple cheeks seemed positively to wither
+before one's eyes.  I came across a dairymaid and farm hand discussing it
+stolidly with very downcast faces.  Even Hopgood, a hard-bitten fellow
+with immense shoulders, forgot his imperturbability so far as to harness
+his horse, and depart on what he assured me was "just a wild-guse
+chaace."  It was long before John Ford gave signs of noticing that
+anything was wrong, but late in the afternoon I found him sitting with
+his hands on his knees, staring straight before him.  He rose heavily
+when he saw me, and stalked out.  In the evening, as I was starting for
+the coastguard station to ask for help to search the cliff, Pasiance
+appeared, walking as if she could hardly drag one leg after the other.
+Her cheeks were crimson; she was biting her lips to keep tears of sheer
+fatigue out of her eyes.  She passed me in the doorway without a word.
+The anxiety he had gone through seemed to forbid the old man from
+speaking.  He just came forward, took her face in his hands, gave it a
+great kiss, and walked away.  Pasiance dropped on the floor in the dark
+passage, and buried her face on her arms. "Leave me alone!" was all she
+would say.  After a bit she dragged herself upstairs.  Presently Mrs.
+Hopgood came to me.
+
+"Not a word out of her--an' not a bite will she ate, an' I had a pie all
+ready--scrumptious.  The good Lord knows the truth--she asked for brandy;
+have you any brandy, sir?  Ha-apgood'e don't drink it, an' Mister Ford 'e
+don't allaow for anything but caowslip wine."
+
+I had whisky.
+
+The good soul seized the flask, and went off hugging it.  She returned it
+to me half empty.
+
+"Lapped it like a kitten laps milk.  I misdaoubt it's straong, poor lamb,
+it lusened 'er tongue praaperly.  'I've a-done it,' she says to me,
+'Mums-I've a-done it,' an' she laughed like a mad thing; and then, sir,
+she cried, an' kissed me, an' pusshed me thru the door. Gude Lard!  What
+is 't she's a-done...?"
+
+It rained all the next day and the day after.  About five o'clock
+yesterday the rain ceased; I started off to Kingswear on Hopgood's nag to
+see Dan Treffry.  Every tree, bramble, and fern in the lanes was dripping
+water; and every bird singing from the bottom of his heart.  I thought of
+Pasiance all the time.  Her absence that day was still a mystery; one
+never ceased asking oneself what she had done. There are people who never
+grow up--they have no right to do things. Actions have consequences--and
+children have no business with consequences.
+
+Dan was out.  I had supper at the hotel, and rode slowly home.  In the
+twilight stretches of the road, where I could touch either bank of the
+lane with my whip, I thought of nothing but Pasiance and her grandfather;
+there was something in the half light suited to wonder and uncertainty.
+It had fallen dark before I rode into the straw-yard.  Two young bullocks
+snuffled at me, a sleepy hen got up and ran off with a tremendous
+shrieking.  I stabled the horse, and walked round to the back.  It was
+pitch black under the apple-trees, and the windows were all darkened.  I
+stood there a little, everything smelled so delicious after the rain;
+suddenly I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was being watched.  Have
+you ever felt like that on a dark night?  I called out at last: "Is any
+one there?"  Not a sound!  I walked to the gate-nothing!  The trees still
+dripped with tiny, soft, hissing sounds, but that was all.  I slipped
+round to the front, went in, barricaded the door, and groped up to bed.
+But I couldn't sleep.  I lay awake a long while; dozed at last, and woke
+with a jump.  A stealthy murmur of smothered voices was going on quite
+close somewhere.  It stopped.  A minute passed; suddenly came the soft
+thud as of something falling.  I sprang out of bed and rushed to the
+window.  Nothing--but in the distance something that sounded like
+footsteps.  An owl hooted; then clear as crystal, but quite low, I heard
+Pasiance singing in her room:
+
+"The apples are ripe and ready to fall. Oh! heigh-ho! and ready to fall."
+
+I ran to her door and knocked.
+
+"What is it?" she cried.
+
+"Is anything the matter?"
+
+"Matter?"
+
+"Is anything the matter?"
+
+"Ha-ha-ha-ha!  Good-night!" then quite low, I heard her catch her breath,
+hard, sharply.  No other answer, no other sound.
+
+I went to bed and lay awake for hours....
+
+This evening Dan came; during supper he handed Pasiance a roll of music;
+he had got it in Torquay.  The shopman, he said, had told him that it was
+a "corker."
+
+It was Bach's "Chaconne."  You should have seen her eyes shine, her
+fingers actually tremble while she turned over the pages.  Seems odd to
+think of her worshipping at the shrine of Bach as odd as to think of a
+wild colt running of its free will into the shafts; but that's just it
+with her you can never tell.  "Heavenly!" she kept saying.
+
+John Ford put down his knife and fork.
+
+"Heathenish stuff!" he muttered, and suddenly thundered out, "Pasiance!"
+
+She looked up with a start, threw the music from her, and resumed her
+place.
+
+During evening prayers, which follow every night immediately on food, her
+face was a study of mutiny.  She went to bed early.  It was rather late
+when we broke up--for once old Ford had been talking of his squatter's
+life.  As we came out, Dan held up his hand.  A dog was barking.  "It's
+Lass," he said.  "She'll wake Pasiance."
+
+The spaniel yelped furiously.  Dan ran out to stop her.  He was soon
+back.
+
+"Somebody's been in the orchard, and gone off down to the cove."  He ran
+on down the path.  I, too, ran, horribly uneasy.  In front, through the
+darkness, came the spaniel's bark; the lights of the coastguard station
+faintly showed.  I was first on the beach; the dog came to me at once,
+her tail almost in her mouth from apology.  There was the sound of oars
+working in rowlocks; nothing visible but the feathery edges of the waves.
+Dan said behind, "No use!  He's gone." His voice sounded hoarse, like
+that of a man choking with passion.
+
+"George," he stammered, "it's that blackguard.  I wish I'd put a bullet
+in him."  Suddenly a light burned up in the darkness on the sea, seemed
+to swing gently, and vanished.  Without another word we went back up the
+hill.  John Ford stood at the gate motionless, indifferent--nothing had
+dawned on him as yet.  I whispered to Dan, "Let it alone!"
+
+"No," he said, "I'm going to show you."  He struck a match, and slowly
+hunted the footsteps in the wet grass of the orchard.  "Look--here!"
+
+He stopped under Pasiance's window and swayed the match over the ground.
+Clear as daylight were the marks of some one who had jumped or fallen.
+Dan held the match over his head.
+
+"And look there!" he said.  The bough of an apple-tree below the window
+was broken.  He blew the match out.
+
+I could see the whites of his eyes, like an angry animal's.
+
+"Drop it, Dan!" I said.
+
+He turned on his heel suddenly, and stammered out, "You're right."
+
+But he had turned into John Ford's arms.
+
+The old man stood there like some great force, darker than the darkness,
+staring up at the window, as though stupefied.  We had not a word to say.
+He seemed unconscious of our presence.  He turned round, and left us
+standing there.
+
+"Follow him!" said Dan.  "Follow him--by God! it's not safe."
+
+We followed.  Bending, and treading heavily, he went upstairs.  He struck
+a blow on Pasiance's door.  "Let me in!" he said.  I drew Dan into my
+bedroom.  The key was slowly turned, her door was flung open, and there
+she stood in her dressing-gown, a candle in her hand, her face crimson,
+and oh! so young, with its short, crisp hair and round cheeks.  The old
+man--like a giant in front of her--raised his hands, and laid them on her
+shoulders.
+
+"What's this?  You--you've had a man in your room?"
+
+Her eyes did not drop.
+
+"Yes," she said.  Dan gave a groan.
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Zachary Pearse," she answered in a voice like a bell.
+
+He gave her one awful shake, dropped his hands, then raised them as
+though to strike her.  She looked him in the eyes; his hands dropped, and
+he too groaned.  As far as I could see, her face never moved.
+
+"I'm married to him," she said, "d' you hear?  Married to him.  Go out of
+my room!"  She dropped the candle on the floor at his feet, and slammed
+the door in his face.  The old man stood for a minute as though stunned,
+then groped his way downstairs.
+
+"Dan," I said, "is it true?"
+
+"Ah!" he answered, "it's true; didn't you hear her?"
+
+I was glad I couldn't see his face.
+
+"That ends it," he said at last; "there's the old man to think of."
+
+"What will he do?"
+
+"Go to the fellow this very night."  He seemed to have no doubt. Trust
+one man of action to know another.
+
+I muttered something about being an outsider--wondered if there was
+anything I could do to help.
+
+"Well," he said slowly, "I don't know that I'm anything but an outsider
+now; but I'll go along with him, if he'll have me."
+
+He went downstairs.  A few minutes later they rode out from the
+straw-yard.  I watched them past the line of hayricks, into the blacker
+shadows of the pines, then the tramp of hoofs began to fail in the
+darkness, and at last died away.
+
+I've been sitting here in my bedroom writing to you ever since, till my
+candle's almost gone.  I keep thinking what the end of it is to be; and
+reproaching myself for doing nothing.  And yet, what could I have done?
+I'm sorry for her--sorrier than I can say.  The night is so quiet--I
+haven't heard a sound; is she asleep, awake, crying, triumphant?
+
+It's four o'clock; I've been asleep.
+
+They're back.  Dan is lying on my bed.  I'll try and tell you his story
+as near as I can, in his own words.
+
+"We rode," he said, "round the upper way, keeping out of the lanes, and
+got to Kingswear by half-past eleven.  The horse-ferry had stopped
+running, and we had a job to find any one to put us over.  We hired the
+fellow to wait for us, and took a carriage at the 'Castle.' Before we got
+to Black Mill it was nearly one, pitch-dark.  With the breeze from the
+southeast, I made out he should have been in an hour or more.  The old
+man had never spoken to me once: and before we got there I had begun to
+hope we shouldn't find the fellow after all.  We made the driver pull up
+in the road, and walked round and round, trying to find the door.  Then
+some one cried, 'Who are you?'
+
+"'John Ford.'
+
+"'What do you want?' It was old Pearse.
+
+"'To see Zachary Pearse.'
+
+"The long window out of the porch where we sat the other day was open,
+and in we went.  There was a door at the end of the room, and a light
+coming through.  John Ford went towards it; I stayed out in the dark.
+
+"'Who's that with you?'
+
+"'Mr. Treffry.'
+
+"'Let him come in!' I went in.  The old fellow was in bed, quite still on
+his pillows, a candle by his side; to look at him you'd think nothing of
+him but his eyes were alive.  It was queer being there with those two old
+men!"
+
+Dan paused, seemed to listen, then went on doggedly.
+
+"'Sit down, gentleman,' said old Pearse.  'What may you want to see my
+son for?'  John Ford begged his pardon, he had something to say, he said,
+that wouldn't wait.
+
+"They were very polite to one another," muttered Dan ....
+
+"'Will you leave your message with me?' said Pearse.
+
+"'What I have to say to your son is private.'
+
+"'I'm his father.'
+
+"'I'm my girl's grandfather; and her only stand-by.'
+
+"'Ah!' muttered old Pearse, 'Rick Voisey's daughter?'
+
+"'I mean to see your son.'
+
+"Old Pearse smiled.  Queer smile he's got, sort of sneering sweet.
+
+"'You can never tell where Zack may be,' he said.  'You think I want to
+shield him.  You're wrong; Zack can take care of himself.'
+
+"'Your son's here!' said John Ford.  'I know.'  Old Pearse gave us a very
+queer look.
+
+"'You come into my house like thieves in the night,' he said, 'and give
+me the lie, do you?'
+
+"'Your son came to my child's room like a thief in the night; it's for
+that I want to see him,' and then," said Dan, "there was a long silence.
+At last Pearse said:
+
+"'I don't understand; has he played the blackguard?'
+
+"John Ford answered, 'He's married her, or, before God, I'd kill him.'
+
+"Old Pearse seemed to think this over, never moving on his pillows. 'You
+don't know Zack,' he said; 'I'm sorry for you, and I'm sorry for Rick
+Voisey's daughter; but you don't know Zack.'
+
+"'Sorry!' groaned out John Ford; 'he's stolen my child, and I'll punish
+him.'
+
+"'Punish!' cried old Pearse, 'we don't take punishment, not in my
+family.'
+
+"'Captain Jan Pearse, as sure as I stand here, you and your breed will
+get your punishment of God.'  Old Pearse smiled.
+
+"'Mr. John Ford, that's as may be; but sure as I lie here we won't take
+it of you.  You can't punish unless you make to feel, and that you can't
+du.'"
+
+And that is truth!
+
+Dan went on again:
+
+"'You won't tell me where your son is!' but old Pearse never blinked.
+
+"'I won't,' he said, 'and now you may get out.  I lie here an old man
+alone, with no use to my legs, night on night, an' the house open; any
+rapscallion could get in; d' ye think I'm afraid of you?'
+
+"We were beat; and walked out without a word.  But that old man; I've
+thought of him a lot--ninety-two, and lying there.  Whatever he's been,
+and they tell you rum things of him, whatever his son may be, he's a man. 
+It's not what he said, nor that there was anything to be afraid of just
+then, but somehow it's the idea of the old chap lying there.  I don't
+ever wish to see a better plucked one...."
+
+We sat silent after that; out of doors the light began to stir among the
+leaves.  There were all kinds of rustling sounds, as if the world were
+turning over in bed.
+
+Suddenly Dan said:
+
+"He's cheated me.  I paid him to clear out and leave her alone. D' you
+think she's asleep?"  He's made no appeal for sympathy, he'd take pity
+for an insult; but he feels it badly.
+
+"I'm tired as a cat," he said at last, and went to sleep on my bed.
+
+It's broad daylight now; I too am tired as a cat....
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+"Saturday, 6th August.
+
+.......I take up my tale where I left off yesterday....  Dan and I
+started as soon as we could get Mrs. Hopgood to give us coffee.  The old
+lady was more tentative, more undecided, more pouncing, than I had ever
+seen her.  She was manifestly uneasy: Ha-apgood--who "don't slape" don't
+he, if snores are any criterion--had called out in the night, "Hark to
+th' 'arses' 'oofs!"  Had we heard them?  And where might we be going
+then?  'Twas very earrly to start, an' no breakfast.  Haapgood had said
+it was goin' to shaowerr.  Miss Pasiance was not to 'er violin yet, an'
+Mister Ford 'e kept 'is room. Was it?--would there be--? "Well, an'
+therr's an 'arvest bug; 'tis some earrly for they!"  Wonderful how she
+pounces on all such creatures, when I can't even see them.  She pressed
+it absently between finger and thumb, and began manoeuvring round another
+way. Long before she had reached her point, we had gulped down our
+coffee, and departed.  But as we rode out she came at a run, holding her
+skirts high with either hand, raised her old eyes bright and anxious in
+their setting of fine wrinkles, and said:
+
+"'Tidden sorrow for her?"
+
+A shrug of the shoulders was all the answer she got.  We rode by the
+lanes; through sloping farmyards, all mud and pigs, and dirty straw, and
+farmers with clean-shaven upper lips and whiskers under the chin; past
+fields of corn, where larks were singing.  Up or down, we didn't draw
+rein till we came to Dan's hotel.
+
+There was the river gleaming before us under a rainbow mist that hallowed
+every shape.  There seemed affinity between the earth and the sky.  I've
+never seen that particular soft unity out of Devon. And every ship,
+however black or modern, on those pale waters, had the look of a dream
+ship.  The tall green woods, the red earth, the white houses, were all
+melted into one opal haze.  It was raining, but the sun was shining
+behind.  Gulls swooped by us--ghosts of the old greedy wanderers of the
+sea.
+
+We had told our two boatmen to pull us out to the Pied Witch!  They
+started with great resolution, then rested on their oars.
+
+"The Pied Witch, zurr?" asked one politely; "an' which may her be?"
+
+That's the West countryman all over!  Never say you "nay," never lose an
+opportunity, never own he doesn't know, or can't do anything
+--independence, amiability, and an eye to the main chance.  We mentioned
+Pearse's name.
+
+"Capt'n Zach'ry Pearse!"  They exchanged a look half-amused,
+half-admiring.
+
+"The Zunflaower, yu mane.  That's her.  Zunflaower, ahoy!"  As we mounted
+the steamer's black side I heard one say:
+
+"Pied Witch!  A pra-aper name that--a dandy name for her!"  They laughed
+as they made fast.
+
+The mate of the Sunflower, or Pied Witch, or whatever she was called, met
+us--a tall young fellow in his shirtsleeves, tanned to the roots of his
+hair, with sinewy, tattooed arms, and grey eyes, charred round the rims
+from staring at weather.
+
+"The skipper is on board," he said.  "We're rather busy, as you see. Get
+on with that, you sea-cooks," he bawled at two fellows who were doing
+nothing.  All over the ship, men were hauling, splicing, and stowing
+cargo.
+
+"To-day's Friday: we're off on Wednesday with any luck.  Will you come
+this way?"  He led us down the companion to a dark hole which he called
+the saloon.  "Names?  What! are you Mr. Treffry?  Then we're partners!" A
+schoolboy's glee came on his face.
+
+"Look here!" he said; "I can show you something," and he unlocked the
+door of a cabin.  There appeared to be nothing in it but a huge piece of
+tarpaulin, which depended, bulging, from the topmost bunk.  He pulled it
+up.  The lower bunk had been removed, and in its place was the ugly body
+of a dismounted Gatling gun.
+
+"Got six of them," he whispered, with unholy mystery, through which his
+native frankness gaped out.  "Worth their weight in gold out there just
+now, the skipper says.  Got a heap of rifles, too, and lots of
+ammunition.  He's given me a share.  This is better than the P. and O.,
+and playing deck cricket with the passengers.  I'd made up my mind
+already to chuck that, and go in for plantin' sugar, when I ran across
+the skipper.  Wonderful chap, the skipper!  I'll go and tell him.  He's
+been out all night; only came aboard at four bells; having a nap now, but
+he won't mind that for you."
+
+Off he went.  I wondered what there was in Zachary Pearse to attract a
+youngster of this sort; one of the customary twelve children of some
+country parson, no doubt-burning to shoot a few niggers, and for ever
+frank and youthful.
+
+He came back with his hands full of bottles.
+
+"What'll you drink?  The skipper'll be here in a jiffy.  Excuse my goin'
+on deck.  We're so busy."
+
+And in five minutes Zachary Pearse did come.  He made no attempt to shake
+hands, for which I respected him.  His face looked worn, and more defiant
+than usual.
+
+"Well, gentlemen?" he said.
+
+"We've come to ask what you're going to do?" said Dan.
+
+"I don't know," answered Pearse, "that that's any of your business."
+
+Dan's little eyes were like the eyes of an angry pig.
+
+"You've got five hundred pounds of mine," he said; "why do you think I
+gave it you?"
+
+Zachary bit his fingers.
+
+"That's no concern of mine," he said.  "I sail on Wednesday.  Your
+money's safe."
+
+"Do you know what I think of you?" said Dan.
+
+"No, and you'd better not tell me!"  Then, with one of his peculiar
+changes, he smiled: "As you like, though."
+
+Dan's face grew very dark.  "Give me a plain answer," he said: "What are
+you going to do about her?"
+
+Zachary looked up at him from under his brows.
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Are you cur enough to deny that you've married her?"
+
+Zachary looked at him coolly.  "Not at all," he said.
+
+"What in God's name did you do it for?"
+
+"You've no monopoly in the post of husband, Mr.  Treffry."
+
+"To put a child in that position!  Haven't you the heart of a man?  What
+d' ye come sneaking in at night for?  By Gad!  Don't you know you've done
+a beastly thing?"
+
+Zachary's face darkened, he clenched his fists.  Then he seemed to shut
+his anger into himself.
+
+"You wanted me to leave her to you," he sneered.  "I gave her my promise
+that I'd take her out there, and we'd have gone off on Wednesday quietly
+enough, if you hadn't come and nosed the whole thing out with your
+infernal dog.  The fat's in the fire!  There's no reason why I should
+take her now.  I'll come back to her a rich man, or not at all."
+
+"And in the meantime?" I slipped in.
+
+He turned to me, in an ingratiating way.
+
+"I would have taken her to save the fuss--I really would--it's not my
+fault the thing's come out.  I'm on a risky job.  To have her with me
+might ruin the whole thing; it would affect my nerve.  It isn't safe for
+her."
+
+"And what's her position to be," I said, "while you're away?  Do you
+think she'd have married you if she'd known you were going to leave her
+like this?  You ought to give up this business.
+
+"You stole her.  Her life's in your hands; she's only a child!"
+
+A quiver passed over his face; it showed that he was suffering.
+
+"Give it up!" I urged.
+
+"My last farthing's in it," he sighed; "the chance of a lifetime."
+
+He looked at me doubtfully, appealingly, as if for the first time in his
+life he had been given a glimpse of that dilemma of consequences which
+his nature never recognises.  I thought he was going to give in.
+Suddenly, to my horror, Dan growled, "Play the man!"
+
+Pearse turned his head.  "I don't want your advice anyway," he said;
+"I'll not be dictated to."
+
+"To your last day," said Dan, "you shall answer to me for the way you
+treat her."
+
+Zachary smiled.
+
+"Do you see that fly?" he said.  "Wel--I care for you as little as this,"
+and he flicked the fly off his white trousers. "Good-morning...!"
+
+The noble mariners who manned our boat pulled lustily for the shore, but
+we had hardly shoved off' when a storm of rain burst over the ship, and
+she seemed to vanish, leaving a picture on my eyes of the mate waving his
+cap above the rail, with his tanned young face bent down at us, smiling,
+keen, and friendly.
+
+...... We reached the shore drenched, angry with ourselves, and with each
+other; I started sulkily for home.
+
+As I rode past an orchard, an apple, loosened by the rainstorm, came down
+with a thud.
+
+"The apples were ripe and ready to fall, Oh! heigh-ho! and ready to
+fall."
+
+I made up my mind to pack, and go away.  But there's a strangeness, a
+sort of haunting fascination in it all.  To you, who don't know the
+people, it may only seem a piece of rather sordid folly.  But it isn't
+the good, the obvious, the useful that puts a spell on us in life.  It's
+the bizarre, the dimly seen, the mysterious for good or evil.
+
+The sun was out again when I rode up to the farm; its yellow thatch shone
+through the trees as if sheltering a store of gladness and good news.
+John Ford himself opened the door to me.
+
+He began with an apology, which made me feel more than ever an intruder;
+then he said:
+
+"I have not spoken to my granddaughter--I waited to see Dan Treffry."
+
+He was stern and sad-eyed, like a man with a great weight of grief on his
+shoulders.  He looked as if he had not slept; his dress was out of order,
+he had not taken his clothes off, I think.  He isn't a man whom you can
+pity.  I felt I had taken a liberty in knowing of the matter at all. When
+I told him where we had been, he said:
+
+"It was good of you to take this trouble.  That you should have had to!
+But since such things have come to pass--" He made a gesture full of
+horror.  He gave one the impression of a man whose pride was struggling
+against a mortal hurt.  Presently he asked:
+
+"You saw him, you say?  He admitted this marriage?  Did he give an
+explanation?"
+
+I tried to make Pearse's point of view clear.  Before this old man, with
+his inflexible will and sense of duty, I felt as if I held a brief for
+Zachary, and must try to do him justice.
+
+"Let me understand," he said at last.  "He stole her, you say, to make
+sure; and deserts her within a fortnight."
+
+"He says he meant to take her--"
+
+"Do you believe that?"
+
+Before I could answer, I saw Pasiance standing at the window.  How long
+she had been there I don't know.
+
+"Is it true that he is going to leave me behind?" she cried out.
+
+I could only nod.
+
+"Did you hear him your own self?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+She stamped her foot.
+
+"But he promised!  He promised!"
+
+John Ford went towards her.
+
+"Don't touch me, grandfather!  I hate every one!  Let him do what he
+likes, I don't care."
+
+John Ford's face turned quite grey.
+
+"Pasiance," he said, "did you want to leave me so much?"
+
+She looked straight at us, and said sharply:
+
+"What's the good of telling stories.  I can't help its hurting you."
+
+"What did you think you would find away from here?"
+
+She laughed.
+
+"Find?  I don't know--nothing; I wouldn't be stifled anyway.  Now I
+suppose you'll shut me up because I'm a weak girl, not strong like men!"
+
+"Silence!" said John Ford; "I will make him take you."
+
+"You shan't!" she cried; "I won't let you.  He's free to do as he likes.
+He's free--I tell you all, everybody--free!"
+
+She ran through the window, and vanished.
+
+John Ford made a movement as if the bottom had dropped out of his world.
+I left him there.
+
+I went to the kitchen, where Hopgood was sitting at the table, eating
+bread and cheese.  He got up on seeing me, and very kindly brought me
+some cold bacon and a pint of ale.
+
+"I thart I shude be seeing yu, zurr," he said between his bites; "Therr's
+no thart to 'atin' 'bout the 'ouse to-day.  The old wumman's puzzivantin'
+over Miss Pasiance.  Young girls are skeery critters"--he brushed his
+sleeve over his broad, hard jaws, and filled a pipe "specially when it's
+in the blood of 'em.  Squire Rick Voisey werr a dandy; an' Mistress
+Voisey--well, she werr a nice lady tu, but"--rolling the stem of his pipe
+from corner to corner of his mouth--"she werr a pra-aper vixen."
+
+Hopgood's a good fellow, and I believe as soft as he looks hard, but he's
+not quite the sort with whom one chooses to talk over a matter like this.
+I went upstairs, and began to pack, but after a bit dropped it for a
+book, and somehow or other fell asleep.
+
+I woke, and looked at my watch; it was five o'clock.  I had been asleep
+four hours.  A single sunbeam was slanting across from one of my windows
+to the other, and there was the cool sound of milk dropping into pails;
+then, all at once, a stir as of alarm, and heavy footsteps.
+
+I opened my door.  Hopgood and a coast-guardsman were carrying Pasiance
+slowly up the stairs.  She lay in their arms without moving, her face
+whiter than her dress, a scratch across the forehead, and two or three
+drops there of dried blood.  Her hands were clasped, and she slowly
+crooked and stiffened out her fingers.  When they turned with her at the
+stair top, she opened her lips, and gasped, "All right, don't put me
+down.  I can bear it."  They passed, and, with a half-smile in her eyes,
+she said something to me that I couldn't catch; the door was shut, and
+the excited whispering began again below.  I waited for the men to come
+out, and caught hold of Hopgood. He wiped the sweat off his forehead.
+
+"Poor young thing!" he said.  "She fell--down the cliffs--'tis her
+back--coastguard saw her 'twerr they fetched her in.  The Lord 'elp her
+mebbe she's not broken up much!  An' Mister Ford don't know!  I'm gwine
+for the doctor."
+
+There was an hour or more to wait before he came; a young fellow; almost
+a boy.  He looked very grave, when he came out of her room.
+
+"The old woman there fond of her? nurse her well...?  Fond as a
+dog!--good!  Don't know--can't tell for certain!  Afraid it's the spine,
+must have another opinion!  What a plucky girl!  Tell Mr. Ford to have
+the best man he can get in Torquay--there's C---.  I'll be round the
+first thing in the morning.  Keep her dead quiet.  I've left a sleeping
+draught; she'll have fever tonight."
+
+John Ford came in at last.  Poor old man!  What it must have cost him not
+to go to her for fear of the excitement!  How many times in the next few
+hours didn't I hear him come to the bottom of the stairs; his heavy
+wheezing, and sighing; and the forlorn tread of his feet going back!
+About eleven, just as I was going to bed, Mrs. Hopgood came to my door.
+
+"Will yu come, sir," she said; "she's asking for yu.  Naowt I can zay but
+what she will see yu; zeems crazy, don't it?"  A tear trickled down the
+old lady's cheek.  "Du 'ee come; 'twill du 'err 'arm mebbe, but I
+dunno--she'll fret else."
+
+I slipped into the room.  Lying back on her pillows, she was breathing
+quickly with half-closed eyes.  There was nothing to show that she had
+wanted me, or even knew that I was there.  The wick of the candle, set by
+the bedside, had been snuffed too short, and gave but a faint light; both
+window and door stood open, still there was no draught, and the feeble
+little flame burned quite still, casting a faint yellow stain on the
+ceiling like the refection from a buttercup held beneath a chin.  These
+ceilings are far too low!  Across the wide, squat window the apple
+branches fell in black stripes which never stirred.  It was too dark to
+see things clearly.  At the foot of the bed was a chest, and there Mrs.
+Hopgood had sat down, moving her lips as if in speech.  Mingled with the
+half-musty smell of age; there were other scents, of mignonette, apples,
+and some sweet-smelling soap.  The floor had no carpet, and there was not
+one single dark object except the violin, hanging from a nail over the
+bed.  A little, round clock ticked solemnly.
+
+"Why won't you give me that stuff, Mums?" Pasiance said in a faint, sharp
+voice.  "I want to sleep."
+
+"Have you much pain?" I asked.
+
+"Of course I have; it's everywhere."
+
+She turned her face towards me.
+
+"You thought I did it on purpose, but you're wrong.  If I had, I'd have
+done it better than this.  I wouldn't have this brutal pain." She put her
+fingers over her eyes.  "It's horrible to complain!  Only it's so bad!
+But I won't again--promise."
+
+She took the sleeping draught gratefully, making a face, like a child
+after a powder.
+
+"How long do you think it'll be before I can play again?  Oh!  I
+forgot--there are other things to think about."  She held out her hand to
+me.  "Look at my ring.  Married--isn't it funny?  Ha, ha!  Nobody will
+ever understand--that's funny too!  Poor Gran!  You see, there wasn't any
+reason--only me.  That's the only reason I'm telling you now; Mums is
+there--but she doesn't count; why don't you count, Mums?"
+
+The fever was fighting against the draught; she had tossed the clothes
+back from her throat, and now and then raised one thin arm a little, as
+if it eased her; her eyes had grown large, and innocent like a child's;
+the candle, too, had flared, and was burning clearly.
+
+"Nobody is to tell him--nobody at all; promise...!  If I hadn't slipped,
+it would have been different.  What would have happened then?  You can't
+tell; and I can't--that's funny!  Do you think I loved him?  Nobody
+marries without love, do they?  Not quite without love, I mean.  But you
+see I wanted to be free, he said he'd take me; and now he's left me after
+all!  I won't be left, I can't!  When I came to the cliff--that bit where
+the ivy grows right down--there was just the sea there, underneath; so I
+thought I would throw myself over and it would be all quiet; and I
+climbed on a ledge, it looked easier from there, but it was so high, I
+wanted to get back; and then my foot slipped; and now it's all pain.  You
+can't think much, when you're in pain."
+
+From her eyes I saw that she was dropping off.
+
+"Nobody can take you away from-yourself.  He's not to be told--not
+even--I don't--want you--to go away, because--"  But her eyes closed, and
+she dropped off to sleep.
+
+They don't seem to know this morning whether she is better or worse....
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+"Tuesday, 9th August.
+
+It seems more like three weeks than three days since I wrote.  The time
+passes slowly in a sickhouse...!  The doctors were here this morning,
+they give her forty hours.  Not a word of complaint has passed her lips
+since she knew.  To see her you would hardly think her ill; her cheeks
+have not had time to waste or lose their colour. There is not much pain,
+but a slow, creeping numbness....  It was John Ford's wish that she
+should be told.  She just turned her head to the wall and sighed; then to
+poor old Mrs. Hopgood, who was crying her heart out: "Don't cry, Mums, I
+don't care."
+
+When they had gone, she asked for her violin.  She made them hold it for
+her, and drew the bow across the strings; but the notes that came out
+were so trembling and uncertain that she dropped the bow and broke into a
+passion of sobbing.  Since then, no complaint or moan of any kind....
+
+But to go back.  On Sunday, the day after I wrote, as I was coming from a
+walk, I met a little boy making mournful sounds on a tin whistle.
+
+"Coom ahn!" he said, "the Miss wahnts t' zee yu."
+
+I went to her room.  In the morning she had seemed better, but now looked
+utterly exhausted.  She had a letter in her hand.
+
+"It's this," she said.  "I don't seem to understand it.  He wants me to
+do something--but I can't think, and my eyes feel funny.  Read it to me,
+please."
+
+The letter was from Zachary.  I read it to her in a low voice, for Mrs.
+Hopgood was in the room, her eyes always fixed on Pasiance above her
+knitting.  When I'd finished, she made me read it again, and yet again.
+At first she seemed pleased, almost excited, then came a weary, scornful
+look, and before I'd finished the third time she was asleep.  It was a
+remarkable letter, that seemed to bring the man right before one's eyes.
+I slipped it under her fingers on the bed-clothes, and went out.  Fancy
+took me to the cliff where she had fallen.  I found the point of rock
+where the cascade of ivy flows down the cliff; the ledge on which she had
+climbed was a little to my right--a mad place.  It showed plainly what
+wild emotions must have been driving her!  Behind was a half-cut
+cornfield with a fringe of poppies, and swarms of harvest insects
+creeping and flying; in the uncut corn a landrail kept up a continual
+charring.  The sky was blue to the very horizon, and the sea wonderful,
+under that black wild cliff stained here and there with red.  Over the
+dips and hollows of the fields great white clouds hung low down above the
+land.  There are no brassy, east-coast skies here; but always sleepy,
+soft-shaped clouds, full of subtle stir and change.  Passages of
+Zachary's Pearse's letter kept rising to my lips.  After all he's the man
+that his native place, and life, and blood have made him.  It is useless
+to expect idealists where the air is soft and things good to look on (the
+idealist grows where he must create beauty or comfort for himself);
+useless to expect a man of law and order, in one whose fathers have
+stared at the sea day and night for a thousand years--the sea, full of
+its promises of unknown things, never quite the same, a slave to its own
+impulses.  Man is an imitative animal....
+
+"Life's hard enough," he wrote, "without tying yourself down.  Don't
+think too hardly of me!  Shall I make you happier by taking you into
+danger?  If I succeed you'll be a rich woman; but I shall fail if you're
+with me.  To look at you makes me soft.  At sea a man dreams of all the
+good things on land, he'll dream of the heather, and honey--you're like
+that; and he'll dream of the apple-trees, and the grass of the
+orchards--you're like that; sometimes he only lies on his back and
+wishes--and you're like that, most of all like that...."
+
+When I was reading those words I remember a strange, soft, half-scornful
+look came over Pasiance's face; and once she said, "But that's all
+nonsense, isn't it...?"
+
+Then followed a long passage about what he would gain if he succeeded,
+about all that he was risking, the impossibility of failure, if he kept
+his wits about him.  "It's only a matter of two months or so," he went
+on; "stay where you are, dear, or go to my Dad.  He'll be glad to have
+you.  There's my mother's room.  There's no one to say 'No' to your
+fiddle there; you can play it by the sea; and on dark nights you'll have
+the stars dancing to you over the water as thick as bees.  I've looked at
+them often, thinking of you...."
+
+Pasiance had whispered to me, "Don't read that bit," and afterwards I
+left it out....  Then the sensuous side of him shows up: "When I've
+brought this off, there's the whole world before us.  There are places I
+can take you to.  There's one I know, not too warm and not too cold,
+where you can sit all day in the shade and watch the creepers, and the
+cocoa-palms, still as still; nothing to do or care about; all the fruits
+you can think of; no noise but the parrots and the streams, and a splash
+when a nigger dives into a water-hole. Pasiance, we'll go there!  With an
+eighty-ton craft there's no sea we couldn't know.  The world's a fine
+place for those who go out to take it; there's lots of unknown stuff' in
+it yet.  I'll fill your lap, my pretty, so full of treasures that you
+shan't know yourself.  A man wasn't meant to sit at home...."
+
+Throughout this letter--for all its real passion--one could feel how the
+man was holding to his purpose--the rather sordid purpose of this
+venture.  He's unconscious of it; for he is in love with her; but he must
+be furthering his own ends.  He is vital--horribly vital!  I wonder less
+now that she should have yielded.
+
+What visions hasn't he dangled before her.  There was physical
+attraction, too--I haven't forgotten the look I saw on her face at Black
+Mill.  But when all's said and done, she married him, because she's
+Pasiance Voisey, who does things and wants "to get back."  And she lies
+there dying; not he nor any other man will ever take her away.  It's
+pitiful to think of him tingling with passion, writing that letter to
+this doomed girl in that dark hole of a saloon.  "I've wanted money," he
+wrote, "ever since I was a little chap sitting in the fields among the
+cows....  I want it for you now, and I mean to have it.  I've studied the
+thing two years; I know what I know....
+
+"The moment this is in the post I leave for London.  There are a hundred
+things to look after still; I can't trust myself within reach of you
+again till the anchor's weighed.  When I re-christened her the Pied
+Witch, I thought of you--you witch to me...."
+
+There followed a solemn entreaty to her to be on the path leading to the
+cove at seven o'clock on Wednesday evening (that is, to-morrow) when he
+would come ashore and bid her good-bye.  It was signed, "Your loving
+husband, Zachary Pearse...."
+
+I lay at the edge of that cornfield a long time; it was very peaceful.
+The church bells had begun to ring.  The long shadows came stealing out
+from the sheaves; woodpigeons rose one by one, and flapped off to roost;
+the western sky was streaked with red, and all the downs and combe bathed
+in the last sunlight.  Perfect harvest weather; but oppressively still,
+the stillness of suspense....
+
+Life at the farm goes on as usual.  We have morning and evening prayers.
+John Ford reads them fiercely, as though he were on the eve of a revolt
+against his God.  Morning and evening he visits her, comes out wheezing
+heavily, and goes to his own room; I believe, to pray.  Since this
+morning I haven't dared meet him.  He is a strong old man--but this will
+break him up....
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+"KINGSWEAR, Saturday, 13th August.
+
+It's over--I leave here to-morrow, and go abroad.
+
+A quiet afternoon--not a breath up in the churchyard!  I was there quite
+half an hour before they came.  Some red cows had strayed into the
+adjoining orchard, and were rubbing their heads against the railing.
+While I stood there an old woman came and drove them away; afterwards,
+she stooped and picked up the apples that had fallen before their time.
+
+"The apples are ripe and ready to fall, Oh! heigh-ho! and ready to fall;
+There came an old woman and gathered them all, Oh! heigh-ho! and gathered
+them all."
+
+......They brought Pasiance very simply--no hideous funeral trappings,
+thank God--the farm hands carried her, and there was no one there but
+John Ford, the Hopgoods, myself, and that young doctor. They read the
+service over her grave.  I can hear John Ford's "Amen!" now.  When it was
+over he walked away bareheaded in the sun, without a word.  I went up
+there again this evening, and wandered amongst the tombstones.  "Richard
+Voisey," "John, the son of Richard and Constance Voisey," "Margery
+Voisey," so many generations of them in that corner; then "Richard Voisey
+and Agnes his wife," and next to it that new mound on which a sparrow was
+strutting and the shadows of the apple-trees already hovering.
+
+I will tell you the little left to tell....
+
+On Wednesday afternoon she asked for me again.
+
+"It's only till seven," she whispered.  "He's certain to come then. But
+if I--were to die first--then tell him--I'm sorry for him. They keep
+saying: 'Don't talk--don't talk!' Isn't it stupid?  As if I should have
+any other chance!  There'll be no more talking after to-night!  Make
+everybody come, please--I want to see them all. When you're dying you're
+freer than any other time--nobody wants you to do things, nobody cares
+what you say....  He promised me I should do what I liked if I married
+him--I never believed that really--but now I can do what I like; and say
+all the things I want to."  She lay back silent; she could not after all
+speak the inmost thoughts that are in each of us, so sacred that they
+melt away at the approach of words.
+
+I shall remember her like that--with the gleam of a smile in her
+half-closed eyes, her red lips parted--such a quaint look of mockery,
+pleasure, regret, on her little round, upturned face; the room white, and
+fresh with flowers, the breeze guttering the apple-leaves against the
+window.  In the night they had unhooked the violin and taken it away; she
+had not missed it....  When Dan came, I gave up my place to him.  He took
+her hand gently in his great paw, without speaking.
+
+"How small my hand looks there," she said, "too small."  Dan put it
+softly back on the bedclothes and wiped his forehead.  Pasiance cried in
+a sharp whisper: "Is it so hot in here?  I didn't know."  Dan bent down,
+put his lips to her fingers and left the room.
+
+The afternoon was long, the longest I've ever spent.  Sometimes she
+seemed to sleep, sometimes whispered to herself about her mother, her
+grandfather, the garden, or her cats--all sorts of inconsequent, trivial,
+even ludicrous memories seemed to throng her mind--never once, I think,
+did she speak of Zachary, but, now and then, she asked the time....  Each
+hour she grew visibly weaker.  John Ford sat by her without moving, his
+heavy breathing was often the only sound; sometimes she rubbed her
+fingers on his hand, without speaking.  It was a summary of their lives
+together.  Once he prayed aloud for her in a hoarse voice; then her
+pitiful, impatient eyes signed to me.
+
+"Quick," she whispered, "I want him; it's all so--cold."
+
+I went out and ran down the path towards the cove.
+
+Leaning on a gate stood Zachary, an hour before his time; dressed in the
+same old blue clothes and leather-peaked cap as on the day when I saw him
+first.  He knew nothing of what had happened.  But at a quarter of the
+truth, I'm sure he divined the whole, though he would not admit it to
+himself.  He kept saying, "It can't be.  She'll be well in a few days--a
+sprain!  D' you think the sea-voyage....  Is she strong enough to be
+moved now at once?"
+
+It was painful to see his face, so twisted by the struggle between his
+instinct and his vitality.  The sweat poured down his forehead. He turned
+round as we walked up the path, and pointed out to sea. There was his
+steamer.  "I could get her on board in no time. Impossible!  What is it,
+then?  Spine?  Good God!  The doctors.... Sometimes they'll do wonders!"
+It was pitiful to see his efforts to blind himself to the reality.
+
+"It can't be, she's too young.  We're walking very slow."  I told him she
+was dying.
+
+For a second I thought he was going to run away.  Then he jerked up his
+head, and rushed on towards the house.  At the foot of the staircase he
+gripped me by the shoulder.
+
+"It's not true!" he said; "she'll get better now I'm here.  I'll stay.
+Let everything go.  I'll stay."
+
+"Now's the time," I said, "to show you loved her.  Pull yourself
+together, man!"  He shook all over.
+
+"Yes!" was all he answered.  We went into her room.  It seemed impossible
+she was going to die; the colour was bright in her cheeks, her lips
+trembling and pouted as if she had just been kissed, her eyes gleaming,
+her hair so dark and crisp, her face so young....
+
+Half an hour later I stole to the open door of her room.  She was still
+and white as the sheets of her bed.  John Ford stood at the foot; and,
+bowed to the level of the pillows, his head on his clenched fists, sat
+Zachary.  It was utterly quiet.  The guttering of the leaves had ceased.
+When things have come to a crisis, how little one feels--no fear, no
+pity, no sorrow, rather the sense, as when a play is over, of anxiety to
+get away!
+
+Suddenly Zachary rose, brushed past me without seeing, and ran
+downstairs.
+
+Some hours later I went out on the path leading to the cove.  It was
+pitch-black; the riding light of the Pied Witch was still there, looking
+no bigger than a firefly.  Then from in front I heard sobbing--a man's
+sobs; no sound is quite so dreadful.  Zachary Pearse got up out of the
+bank not ten paces off.
+
+I had no heart to go after him, and sat down in the hedge.  There was
+something subtly akin to her in the fresh darkness of the young night;
+the soft bank, the scent of honeysuckle, the touch of the ferns and
+brambles.  Death comes to all of us, and when it's over it's over; but
+this blind business--of those left behind!
+
+A little later the ship whistled twice; her starboard light gleamed
+faintly--and that was all....
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+"TORQUAY, 30th October.
+
+....Do you remember the letters I wrote you from Moor Farm nearly three
+years ago?  To-day I rode over there.  I stopped at Brixham on the way
+for lunch, and walked down to the quay.  There had been a shower--but the
+sun was out again, shining on the sea, the brown-red sails, and the
+rampart of slate roofs.
+
+A trawler was lying there, which had evidently been in a collision. The
+spiky-bearded, thin-lipped fellow in torn blue jersey and sea-boots who
+was superintending the repairs, said to me a little proudly:
+
+"Bane in collision, zurr; like to zee over her?"  Then suddenly screwing
+up his little blue eyes, he added:
+
+"Why, I remembers yu.  Steered yu along o' the young lady in this yer
+very craft."
+
+It was Prawle, Zachary Pearse's henchman.
+
+"Yes," he went on, "that's the cutter."
+
+"And Captain Pearse?"
+
+He leant his back against the quay, and spat.  "He was a pra-aper man; I
+never zane none like 'en."
+
+"Did you do any good out there?"
+
+Prawle gave me a sharp glance.
+
+"Gude?  No, t'was arrm we done, vrom ztart to finish--had trouble all the
+time.  What a man cude du, the skipper did.  When yu caan't du right,
+zome calls it 'Providence'!  'Tis all my eye an' Betty Martin!  What I zay
+es, 'tis these times, there's such a dale o' folk, a dale of puzzivantin'
+fellers; the world's to small."
+
+With these words there flashed across me a vision of Drake crushed into
+our modern life by the shrinkage of the world; Drake caught in the meshes
+of red tape, electric wires, and all the lofty appliances of our
+civilization.  Does a type survive its age; live on into times that have
+no room for it?  The blood is there--and sometimes there's a
+throw-back....  All fancy!  Eh?
+
+"So," I said, "you failed?"
+
+Prawle wriggled.
+
+"I wudden' goo for to zay that, zurr--'tis an ugly word.  Da-am!" he
+added, staring at his boots, "'twas thru me tu.  We were along among the
+haythen, and I mus' nades goo for to break me leg.  The capt'n he wudden'
+lave me.  'One Devon man,' he says to me, 'don' lave anotherr.'  We werr
+six days where we shuld ha' been tu; when we got back to the ship a
+cruiser had got her for gun-runnin'."
+
+"And what has become of Captain Pearse?"
+
+Prawle answered, "Zurr, I belave 'e went to China, 'tis onsartin."
+
+"He's not dead?"
+
+Prawle looked at me with a kind of uneasy anger.
+
+"Yu cudden' kell 'en!  'Tis true, mun 'll die zome day.  But therr's not
+a one that'll show better zport than Capt'n Zach'ry Pearse."
+
+I believe that; he will be hard to kill.  The vision of him comes up,
+with his perfect balance, defiant eyes, and sweetish smile; the way the
+hair of his beard crisped a little, and got blacker on the cheeks; the
+sort of desperate feeling he gave, that one would never get the better of
+him, that he would never get the better of himself.
+
+I took leave of Prawle and half a crown.  Before I was off the quay I
+heard him saying to a lady, "Bane in collision, marm!  Like to zee over
+her?"
+
+After lunch I rode on to Moor.  The old place looked much the same; but
+the apple-trees were stripped of fruit, and their leaves beginning to go
+yellow and fall.  One of Pasiance's cats passed me in the orchard hunting
+a bird, still with a ribbon round its neck.  John Ford showed me all his
+latest improvements, but never by word or sign alluded to the past.  He
+inquired after Dan, back in New Zealand now, without much interest; his
+stubbly beard and hair have whitened; he has grown very stout, and I
+noticed that his legs are not well under control; he often stops to lean
+on his stick.  He was very ill last winter; and sometimes, they say, will
+go straight off to sleep in the middle of a sentence.
+
+I managed to get a few minutes with the Hopgoods.  We talked of Pasiance
+sitting in the kitchen under a row of plates, with that clinging smell of
+wood-smoke, bacon, and age bringing up memories, as nothing but scents
+can.  The dear old lady's hair, drawn so nicely down her forehead on each
+side from the centre of her cap, has a few thin silver lines; and her
+face is a thought more wrinkled.  The tears still come into her eyes when
+she talks of her "lamb."
+
+Of Zachary I heard nothing, but she told me of old Pearse's death.
+
+"Therr they found 'en, zo to spake, dead--in th' sun; but Ha-apgood can
+tell yu," and Hopgood, ever rolling his pipe, muttered something, and
+smiled his wooden smile.
+
+He came to see me off from the straw-yard.  "'Tis like death to the
+varrm, zurr," he said, putting all the play of his vast shoulders into
+the buckling of my girths.  "Mister Ford--well!  And not one of th' old
+stock to take it when 'e's garn....  Ah! it werr cruel; my old woman's
+never been hersel' since.  Tell 'ee what 'tis--don't du t' think to
+much."
+
+I went out of my way to pass the churchyard.  There were flowers, quite
+fresh, chrysanthemums, and asters; above them the white stone, already
+stained:
+
+        "PASIANCE
+
+        "WIFE OF ZACHARY PEARSE
+
+        "'The Lord hath given, and the Lord hath taken away.'"
+
+The red cows were there too; the sky full of great white clouds, some
+birds whistling a little mournfully, and in the air the scent of fallen
+leaves....
+
+May, 1900.
+
+
+
+
+A KNIGHT
+
+TO MY MOTHER
+
+
+
+
+A KNIGHT
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+At Monte Carlo, in the spring of the year 189-, I used to notice an old
+fellow in a grey suit and sunburnt straw hat with a black ribbon. Every
+morning at eleven o'clock, he would come down to the Place, followed by a
+brindled German boarhound, walk once or twice round it, and seat himself
+on a bench facing the casino.  There he would remain in the sun, with his
+straw hat tilted forward, his thin legs apart, his brown hands crossed
+between them, and the dog's nose resting on his knee.  After an hour or
+more he would get up, and, stooping a little from the waist, walk slowly
+round the Place and return up hill.  Just before three, he would come
+down again in the same clothes and go into the casino, leaving the dog
+outside.
+
+One afternoon, moved by curiosity, I followed him.  He passed through the
+hall without looking at the gambling-rooms, and went into the concert. It
+became my habit after that to watch for him.  When he sat in the Place I
+could see him from the window of my room.  The chief puzzle to me was the
+matter of his nationality.
+
+His lean, short face had a skin so burnt that it looked like leather; his
+jaw was long and prominent, his chin pointed, and he had hollows in his
+cheeks.  There were wrinkles across his forehead; his eyes were brown;
+and little white moustaches were brushed up from the corners of his lips.
+The back of his head bulged out above the lines of his lean neck and
+high, sharp shoulders; his grey hair was cropped quite close.  In the
+Marseilles buffet, on the journey out, I had met an Englishman, almost
+his counterpart in features--but somehow very different!  This old fellow
+had nothing of the other's alert, autocratic self-sufficiency.  He was
+quiet and undemonstrative, without looking, as it were, insulated against
+shocks and foreign substances.  He was certainly no Frenchman. His eyes,
+indeed, were brown, but hazel-brown, and gentle--not the red-brown
+sensual eye of the Frenchman.  An American?  But was ever an American so
+passive?  A German?  His moustache was certainly brushed up, but in a
+modest, almost pathetic way, not in the least Teutonic.  Nothing seemed
+to fit him.  I gave him up, and named him "the Cosmopolitan."
+
+Leaving at the end of April, I forgot him altogether.  In the same month,
+however, of the following year I was again at Monte Carlo, and going one
+day to the concert found myself seated next this same old fellow.  The
+orchestra was playing Meyerbeer's "Prophete," and my neighbour was
+asleep, snoring softly.  He was dressed in the same grey suit, with the
+same straw hat (or one exactly like it) on his knees, and his hands
+crossed above it.  Sleep had not disfigured him--his little white
+moustache was still brushed up, his lips closed; a very good and gentle
+expression hovered on his face.  A curved mark showed on his right
+temple, the scar of a cut on the side of his neck, and his left hand was
+covered by an old glove, the little forger of which was empty.  He woke
+up when the march was over and brisked up his moustache.
+
+The next thing on the programme was a little thing by Poise from Le joli
+Gilles, played by Mons. Corsanego on the violin.  Happening to glance at
+my old neighbour, I saw a tear caught in the hollow of his cheek, and
+another just leaving the corner of his eye; there was a faint smile on
+his lips.  Then came an interval; and while orchestra and audience were
+resting, I asked him if he were fond of music.  He looked up without
+distrust, bowed, and answered in a thin, gentle voice: "Certainly.  I
+know nothing about it, play no instrument, could never sing a note; but
+fond of it!  Who would not be?"  His English was correct enough, but with
+an emphasis not quite American nor quite foreign.  I ventured to remark
+that he did not care for Meyerbeer.  He smiled.
+
+"Ah!" he said, "I was asleep?  Too bad of me.  He is a little noisy--I
+know so little about music.  There is Bach, for instance.  Would you
+believe it, he gives me no pleasure?  A great misfortune to be no
+musician!"  He shook his head.
+
+I murmured, "Bach is too elevating for you perhaps."
+
+"To me," he answered, "any music I like is elevating.  People say some
+music has a bad effect on them.  I never found any music that gave me a
+bad thought--no--no--quite the opposite; only sometimes, as you see, I go
+to sleep.  But what a lovely instrument the violin!" A faint flush came
+on his parched cheeks.  "The human soul that has left the body.  A
+curious thing, distant bugles at night have given me the same feeling." 
+The orchestra was now coming back, and, folding his hands, my neighbour
+turned his eyes towards them.  When the concert was over we came out
+together.  Waiting at the entrance was his dog.
+
+"You have a beautiful dog!"
+
+"Ah! yes.  Freda.  mia cara, da su mano!"  The dog squatted on her
+haunches, and lifted her paw in the vague, bored way of big dogs when
+requested to perform civilities.  She was a lovely creature--the purest
+brindle, without a speck of white, and free from the unbalanced look of
+most dogs of her breed.
+
+"Basta! basta!"  He turned to me apologetically.  "We have agreed to
+speak Italian; in that way I keep up the language; astonishing the number
+of things that dog will understand!"  I was about to take my leave, when
+he asked if I would walk a little way with him--"If you are free, that
+is."  We went up the street with Freda on the far side of her master.
+
+"Do you never 'play' here?" I asked him.
+
+"Play?  No.  It must be very interesting; most exciting, but as a matter
+of fact, I can't afford it.  If one has very little, one is too nervous."
+
+He had stopped in front of a small hairdresser's shop.  "I live here," he
+said, raising his hat again.  "Au revoir!--unless I can offer you a glass
+of tea.  It's all ready.  Come!  I've brought you out of your way; give
+me the pleasure!"
+
+I have never met a man so free from all self-consciousness, and yet so
+delicate and diffident the combination is a rare one.  We went up a steep
+staircase to a room on the second floor.  My companion threw the shutters
+open, setting all the flies buzzing.  The top of a plane-tree was on a
+level with the window, and all its little brown balls were dancing, quite
+close, in the wind.  As he had promised, an urn was hissing on a table;
+there was also a small brown teapot, some sugar, slices of lemon, and
+glasses.  A bed, washstand, cupboard, tin trunk, two chairs, and a small
+rug were all the furniture.  Above the bed a sword in a leather sheath
+was suspended from two nails.  The photograph of a girl stood on the
+closed stove.  My host went to the cupboard and produced a bottle, a
+glass, and a second spoon.  When the cork was drawn, the scent of rum
+escaped into the air.  He sniffed at it and dropped a teaspoonful into
+both glasses.
+
+"This is a trick I learned from the Russians after Plevna; they had my
+little finger, so I deserved something in exchange."  He looked round;
+his eyes, his whole face, seemed to twinkle.  "I assure you it was worth
+it--makes all the difference.  Try!"  He poured off the tea.
+
+"Had you a sympathy with the Turks?"
+
+"The weaker side--"  He paused abruptly, then added: "But it was not
+that."  Over his face innumerable crow's-feet had suddenly appeared, his
+eyes twitched; he went on hurriedly, "I had to find something to do just
+then--it was necessary."  He stared into his glass; and it was some time
+before I ventured to ask if he had seen much fighting.
+
+"Yes," he replied gravely, "nearly twenty years altogether; I was one of
+Garibaldi's Mille in '60."
+
+"Surely you are not Italian?"
+
+He leaned forward with his hands on his knees.  "I was in Genoa at that
+time learning banking; Garibaldi was a wonderful man!  One could not help
+it."  He spoke quite simply.  "You might say it was like seeing a little
+man stand up to a ring of great hulking fellows; I went, just as you
+would have gone, if you'd been there.  I was not long with them--our war
+began; I had to go back home."  He said this as if there had been but one
+war since the world began.  "In '60," he mused, "till '65.  Just think of
+it!  The poor country.  Why, in my State, South Carolina--I was through
+it all--nobody could be spared there--we were one to three."
+
+"I suppose you have a love of fighting?"
+
+"H'm!" he said, as if considering the idea for the first time. "Sometimes
+I fought for a living, and sometimes--because I was obliged; one must try
+to be a gentleman.  But won't you have some more?"
+
+I refused more tea and took my leave, carrying away with me a picture of
+the old fellow looking down from the top of the steep staircase, one hand
+pressed to his back, the other twisting up those little white moustaches,
+and murmuring, "Take care, my dear sir, there's a step there at the
+corner."
+
+"To be a gentleman!"  I repeated in the street, causing an old French
+lady to drop her parasol, so that for about two minutes we stood bowing
+and smiling to each other, then separated full of the best feeling.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+A week later I found myself again seated next him at a concert.  In the
+meantime I had seen him now and then, but only in passing.  He seemed
+depressed.  The corners of his lips were tightened, his tanned cheeks had
+a greyish tinge, his eyes were restless; and, between two numbers of the
+programme, he murmured, tapping his fingers on his hat, "Do you ever have
+bad days?  Yes?  Not pleasant, are they?"
+
+Then something occurred from which all that I have to tell you followed.
+There came into the concert-hall the heroine of one of those romances,
+crimes, follies, or irregularities, call it what you will, which had just
+attracted the "world's" stare.  She passed us with her partner, and sat
+down in a chair a few rows to our right. She kept turning her head round,
+and at every turn I caught the gleam of her uneasy eyes.  Some one behind
+us said: "The brazen baggage!"
+
+My companion turned full round, and glared at whoever it was who had
+spoken.  The change in him was quite remarkable.  His lips were drawn
+back from his teeth; he frowned; the scar on his temple had reddened.
+
+"Ah!" he said to me.  "The hue and cry!  Contemptible!  How I hate it!
+But you wouldn't understand--!" he broke off, and slowly regained his
+usual air of self-obliteration; he even seemed ashamed, and began trying
+to brush his moustaches higher than ever, as if aware that his heat had
+robbed them of neatness.
+
+"I'm not myself, when I speak of such matters," he said suddenly; and
+began reading his programme, holding it upside down.  A minute later,
+however, he said in a peculiar voice: "There are people to be found who
+object to vivisecting animals; but the vivisection of a woman, who minds
+that?  Will you tell me it's right, that because of some tragedy like
+this--believe me, it is always a tragedy--we should hunt down a woman? 
+That her fellow-women should make an outcast of her?  That we, who are
+men, should make a prey of her?  If I thought that...."  Again he broke
+off, staring very hard in front of him. "It is we who make them what they
+are; and even if that is not so--why! if I thought there was a woman in
+the world I could not take my hat off to--I--I--couldn't sleep at night." 
+He got up from his seat, put on his old straw hat with trembling fingers,
+and, without a glance back, went out, stumbling over the chair-legs.
+
+I sat there, horribly disturbed; the words, "One must try to be a
+gentleman!" haunting me.  When I came out, he was standing by the
+entrance with one hand on his hip and the other on his dog.  In that
+attitude of waiting he was such a patient figure; the sun glared down and
+showed the threadbare nature of his clothes and the thinness of his brown
+hands, with their long forgers and nails yellow from tobacco.  Seeing me
+he came up the steps again, and raised his hat.
+
+"I am glad to have caught you; please forget all that."  I asked if he
+would do me the honour of dining at my hotel.
+
+"Dine?" he repeated with the sort of smile a child gives if you offer him
+a box of soldiers; "with the greatest pleasure.  I seldom dine out, but I
+think I can muster up a coat.  Yes--yes--and at what time shall I come? 
+At half-past seven, and your hotel is--?  Good!  I shall be there. 
+Freda, mia cara, you will be alone this evening. You do not smoke
+caporal, I fear.  I find it fairly good; though it has too much bite." He
+walked off with Freda, puffing at his thin roll of caporal.
+
+Once or twice he stopped, as if bewildered or beset by some sudden doubt
+or memory; and every time he stopped, Freda licked his hand. They
+disappeared round the corner of the street, and I went to my hotel to see
+about dinner.  On the way I met Jules le Ferrier, and asked him to come
+too.
+
+"My faith, yes!" he said, with the rosy pessimism characteristic of the
+French editor.  "Man must dine!"
+
+At half-past six we assembled.  My "Cosmopolitan" was in an old
+frock-coat braided round the edges, buttoned high and tight, defining
+more than ever the sharp lines of his shoulders and the slight kink of
+his back; he had brought with him, too, a dark-peaked cap of military
+shape, which he had evidently selected as more fitting to the coat than a
+straw hat.  He smelled slightly of some herb.
+
+We sat down to dinner, and did not rise for two hours.  He was a charming
+guest, praised everything he ate--not with commonplaces, but in words
+that made you feel it had given him real pleasure.  At first, whenever
+Jules made one of his caustic remarks, he looked quite pained, but
+suddenly seemed to make up his mind that it was bark, not bite; and then
+at each of them he would turn to me and say, "Aha! that's good--isn't
+it?"  With every glass of wine he became more gentle and more genial,
+sitting very upright, and tightly buttoned-in; while the little white
+wings of his moustache seemed about to leave him for a better world.
+
+In spite of the most leading questions, however, we could not get him to
+talk about himself, for even Jules, most cynical of men, had recognised
+that he was a hero of romance.  He would answer gently and precisely, and
+then sit twisting his moustaches, perfectly unconscious that we wanted
+more.  Presently, as the wine went a little to his head, his thin, high
+voice grew thinner, his cheeks became flushed, his eyes brighter; at the
+end of dinner he said: "I hope I have not been noisy."
+
+We assured him that he had not been noisy enough.  "You're laughing at
+me," he answered.  "Surely I've been talking all the time!"
+
+"Mon Dieu!" said Jules, "we have been looking for some fables of your
+wars; but nothing--nothing, not enough to feed a frog!"
+
+The old fellow looked troubled.
+
+"To be sure!" he mused.  "Let me think! there is that about Colhoun at
+Gettysburg; and there's the story of Garibaldi and the Miller." He
+plunged into a tale, not at all about himself, which would have been
+extremely dull, but for the conviction in his eyes, and the way he
+stopped and commented.  "So you see," he ended, "that's the sort of man
+Garibaldi was!  I could tell you another tale of him." Catching an
+introspective look in Jules's eye, however, I proposed taking our cigars
+over to the cafe opposite.
+
+"Delightful!" the old fellow said: "We shall have a band and the fresh
+air, and clear consciences for our cigars.  I cannot like this smoking in
+a room where there are ladies dining."
+
+He walked out in front of us, smoking with an air of great enjoyment.
+Jules, glowing above his candid shirt and waistcoat, whispered to me,
+"Mon cher Georges, how he is good!" then sighed, and added darkly: "The
+poor man!"
+
+We sat down at a little table.  Close by, the branches of a plane-tree
+rustled faintly; their leaves hung lifeless, speckled like the breasts of
+birds, or black against the sky; then, caught by the breeze, fluttered
+suddenly.
+
+The old fellow sat, with head thrown back, a smile on his face, coming
+now and then out of his enchanted dreams to drink coffee, answer our
+questions, or hum the tune that the band was playing.  The ash of his
+cigar grew very long.  One of those bizarre figures in Oriental garb,
+who, night after night, offer their doubtful wares at a great price,
+appeared in the white glare of a lamp, looked with a furtive smile at his
+face, and glided back, discomfited by its unconsciousness.  It was a
+night for dreams!  A faint, half-eastern scent in the air, of black
+tobacco and spice; few people as yet at the little tables, the waiters
+leisurely, the band soft!  What was he dreaming of, that old fellow,
+whose cigar-ash grew so long?  Of youth, of his battles, of those things
+that must be done by those who try to be gentlemen; perhaps only of his
+dinner; anyway of something gilded in vague fashion as the light was
+gilding the branches of the plane-tree.
+
+Jules pulled my sleeve: "He sleeps."  He had smilingly dropped off; the
+cigar-ash--that feathery tower of his dreams--had broken and fallen on
+his sleeve.  He awoke, and fell to dusting it.
+
+The little tables round us began to fill.  One of the bandsmen played a
+czardas on the czymbal.  Two young Frenchmen, talking loudly, sat down at
+the adjoining table.  They were discussing the lady who had been at the
+concert that afternoon.
+
+"It's a bet," said one of them, "but there's the present man.  I take
+three weeks, that's enough 'elle est declassee; ce n'est que le premier
+pas--'"
+
+My old friend's cigar fell on the table.  "Monsieur," he stammered, "you
+speak of a lady so, in a public place?"
+
+The young man stared at him.  "Who is this person?" he said to his
+companion.
+
+My guest took up Jules's glove that lay on the table; before either of us
+could raise a finger, he had swung it in the speaker's face. "Enough!" he
+said, and, dropping the glove, walked away.
+
+We all jumped to our feet.  I left Jules and hurried after him.  His face
+was grim, his eyes those of a creature who has been struck on a raw
+place.  He made a movement of his fingers which said plainly. "Leave me,
+if you please!"
+
+I went back to the cafe.  The two young men had disappeared, so had
+Jules, but everything else was going on just as before; the bandsman
+still twanging out his czardas; the waiters serving drinks; the orientals
+trying to sell their carpets.  I paid the bill, sought out the manager,
+and apologised.  He shrugged his shoulders, smiled and said: "An
+eccentric, your friend, nicht wahr?"  Could he tell me where M. Le
+Ferrier was?  He could not.  I left to look for Jules; could not find
+him, and returned to my hotel disgusted.  I was sorry for my old guest,
+but vexed with him too; what business had he to carry his Quixotism to
+such an unpleasant length?  I tried to read. Eleven o'clock struck; the
+casino disgorged a stream of people; the Place seemed fuller of life than
+ever; then slowly it grew empty and quite dark.  The whim seized me to go
+out.  It was a still night, very warm, very black.  On one of the seats a
+man and woman sat embraced, on another a girl was sobbing, on a
+third--strange sight--a priest dozed.  I became aware of some one at my
+side; it was my old guest.
+
+"If you are not too tired," he said, "can you give me ten minutes?"
+
+"Certainly; will you come in?"
+
+"No, no; let us go down to the Terrace.  I shan't keep you long."
+
+He did not speak again till we reached a seat above the pigeon-shooting
+grounds; there, in a darkness denser for the string of lights still
+burning in the town, we sat down.
+
+"I owe you an apology," he said; "first in the afternoon, then again this
+evening--your guest--your friend's glove!  I have behaved as no gentleman
+should."  He was leaning forward with his hands on the handle of a stick. 
+His voice sounded broken and disturbed.
+
+"Oh!" I muttered.  "It's nothing!"'
+
+"You are very good," he sighed; "but I feel that I must explain.  I
+consider I owe this to you, but I must tell you I should not have the
+courage if it were not for another reason.  You see I have no friend." He
+looked at me with an uncertain smile.  I bowed, and a minute or two later
+he began....
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+"You will excuse me if I go back rather far.  It was in '74, when I had
+been ill with Cuban fever.  To keep me alive they had put me on board a
+ship at Santiago, and at the end of the voyage I found myself in London.
+I had very little money; I knew nobody.  I tell you, sir, there are times
+when it's hard for a fighting man to get anything to do.  People would
+say to me: 'Afraid we've nothing for a man like you in our business.'  I
+tried people of all sorts; but it was true--I had been fighting here and
+there since '60, I wasn't fit for anything--"  He shook his head.  "In
+the South, before the war, they had a saying, I remember, about a dog and
+a soldier having the same value.  But all this has nothing to do with
+what I have to tell you." He sighed again and went on, moistening his
+lips: "I was walking along the Strand one day, very disheartened, when I
+heard my name called.  It's a queer thing, that, in a strange street.  By
+the way," he put in with dry ceremony, "you don't know my name, I think:
+it is Brune--Roger Brune.  At first I did not recognise the person who
+called me.  He had just got off an omnibus--a square-shouldered man with
+heavy moustaches, and round spectacles.  But when he shook my hand I knew
+him at once.  He was a man called Dalton, who was taken prisoner at
+Gettysburg; one of you Englishmen who came to fight with us--a major in
+the regiment where I was captain.  We were comrades during two campaigns. 
+If I had been his brother he couldn't have seemed more pleased to see me. 
+He took me into a bar for the sake of old times.  The drink went to my
+head, and by the time we reached Trafalgar Square I was quite unable to
+walk.  He made me sit down on a bench. I was in fact--drunk.  It's
+disgraceful to be drunk, but there was some excuse.  Now I tell you, sir"
+(all through his story he was always making use of that expression, it
+seemed to infuse fresh spirit into him, to help his memory in obscure
+places, to give him the mastery of his emotions; it was like the piece of
+paper a nervous man holds in his hand to help him through a speech),
+"there never was a man with a finer soul than my friend Dalton.  He was
+not clever, though he had read much; and sometimes perhaps he was too
+fond of talking.  But he was a gentleman; he listened to me as if I had
+been a child; he was not ashamed of me--and it takes a gentleman not to
+be ashamed of a drunken man in the streets of London; God knows what
+things I said to him while we were sitting there!  He took me to his home
+and put me to bed himself; for I was down again with fever."  He stopped,
+turned slightly from me, and put his hand up to his brow.  "Well, then it
+was, sir, that I first saw her.  I am not a poet and I cannot tell you
+what she seemed to me.  I was delirious, but I always knew when she was
+there.  I had dreams of sunshine and cornfields, of dancing waves at sea,
+young trees--never the same dreams, never anything for long together; and
+when I had my senses I was afraid to say so for fear she would go away.
+She'd be in the corner of the room, with her hair hanging about her neck,
+a bright gold colour; she never worked and never read, but sat and talked
+to herself in a whisper, or looked at me for a long time together out of
+her blue eyes, a little frown between them, and her upper lip closed firm
+on her lower lip, where she had an uneven tooth.  When her father came,
+she'd jump up and hang on to his neck until he groaned, then run away,
+but presently come stealing back on tiptoe.  I used to listen for her
+footsteps on the stairs, then the knock, the door flung back or opened
+quietly--you never could tell which; and her voice, with a little lisp,
+'Are you better today, Mr. Brune?  What funny things you say when you're
+delirious!  Father says you've been in heaps of battles!"'
+
+He got up, paced restlessly to and fro, and sat down again.  "I remember
+every word as if it were yesterday, all the things she said, and did;
+I've had a long time to think them over, you see.  Well, I must tell you,
+the first morning that I was able to get up, I missed her.  Dalton came
+in her place, and I asked him where she was.  'My dear fellow,' he
+answered, 'I've sent Eilie away to her old nurse's inn down on the river;
+she's better there at this time of year.'  We looked at each other, and I
+saw that he had sent her away because he didn't trust me.  I was hurt by
+this.  Illness spoils one.  He was right, he was quite right, for all he
+knew about me was that I could fight and had got drunk; but I am very
+quick-tempered.  I made up my mind at once to leave him.  But I was too
+weak--he had to put me to bed again.  The very next morning he came and
+proposed that I should go into partnership with him.  He kept a
+fencing-school and pistol-gallery.  It seemed like the finger of God; and
+perhaps it was--who knows?"  He fell into a reverie, and taking out his
+caporal, rolled himself a cigarette; having lighted it, he went on
+suddenly: "There, in the room above the school, we used to sit in the
+evenings, one on each side of the grate.  The room was on the second
+floor, I remember, with two windows, and a view of nothing but the houses
+opposite.  The furniture was covered up with chintz.  The things on the
+bookshelf were never disturbed, they were Eilie's--half-broken cases with
+butterflies, a dead frog in a bottle, a horse-shoe covered with tinfoil,
+some shells too, and a cardboard box with three speckled eggs in it, and
+these words written on the lid: 'Missel-thrush from Lucy's tree--second
+family, only one blown.'"  He smoked fiercely, with puffs that were like
+sharp sighs.
+
+"Dalton was wrapped up in her.  He was never tired of talking to me about
+her, and I was never tired of hearing.  We had a number of pupils; but in
+the evening when we sat there, smoking--our talk would sooner or
+later--come round to her.  Her bedroom opened out of that sitting--room;
+he took me in once and showed me a narrow little room the width of a
+passage, fresh and white, with a photograph of her mother above the bed,
+and an empty basket for a dog or cat."  He broke off with a vexed air,
+and resumed sternly, as if trying to bind himself to the narration of his
+more important facts: "She was then fifteen--her mother had been dead
+twelve years--a beautiful, face, her mother's; it had been her death that
+sent Dalton to fight with us.  Well, sir, one day in August, very hot
+weather, he proposed a run into the country, and who should meet us on
+the platform when we arrived but Eilie, in a blue sun-bonnet and
+frock-flax blue, her favourite colour.  I was angry with Dalton for not
+telling me that we should see her; my clothes were not quite--my hair
+wanted cutting. It was black then, sir," he added, tracing a pattern in
+the darkness with his stick.  "She had a little donkey-cart; she drove,
+and, while we walked one on each side, she kept looking at me from under
+her sunbonnet.  I must tell you that she never laughed--her eyes danced,
+her cheeks would go pink, and her hair shake about on her neck, but she
+never laughed. Her old nurse, Lucy, a very broad, good woman, had married
+the proprietor of the inn in the village there.  I have never seen
+anything like that inn: sweethriar up to the roof!  And the scent--I am
+very susceptible to scents!"  His head drooped, and the cigarette fell
+from his hand. A train passing beneath sent up a shower of sparks.  He
+started, and went on: "We had our lunch in the parlour--I remember that
+room very well, for I spent the happiest days of my life afterwards in
+that inn....  We went into a meadow after lunch, and my friend Dalton
+fell asleep.  A wonderful thing happened then.  Eilie whispered to me,
+'Let's have a jolly time.' She took me for the most glorious walk.  The
+river was close by. A lovely stream, your river Thames, so calm and
+broad; it is like the spirit of your people.  I was bewitched; I forgot
+my friend, I thought of nothing but how to keep her to myself.  It was
+such a day!  There are days that are the devil's, but that was truly one
+of God's. She took me to a little pond under an elm-tree, and we dragged
+it, we two, an hour, for a kind of tiny red worm to feed some creature
+that she had.  We found them in the mud, and while she was bending over,
+the curls got in her eyes.  If you could have seen her then, I think,
+sir, you would have said she was like the first sight of spring.... We
+had tea afterwards, all together, in the long grass under some
+fruit-trees.  If I had the knack of words, there are things that I could
+say."  He bent, as though in deference to those unspoken memories. 
+"Twilight came on while we were sitting there. A wonderful thing is
+twilight in the country!  It became time for us to go. There was an
+avenue of trees close by--like a church with a window at the end, where
+golden light came through.  I walked up and down it with her.  'Will you
+come again?' she whispered, and suddenly she lifted up her face to be
+kissed. I kissed her as if she were a little child. And when we said
+good-bye, her eyes were looking at me across her father's shoulder, with
+surprise and sorrow in them.  'Why do you go away?' they seemed to
+say....  But I must tell you," he went on hurriedly, "of a thing that
+happened before we had gone a hundred yards. We were smoking our pipes,
+and I, thinking of her--when out she sprang from the hedge and stood in
+front of us.  Dalton cried out, 'What are you here for again, you mad
+girl?'  She rushed up to him and hugged him; but when she looked at me,
+her face was quite different--careless, defiant, as one might say--it
+hurt me.  I couldn't understand it, and what one doesn't understand
+frightens one."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+"Time went on.  There was no swordsman, or pistol-shot like me in London,
+they said.  We had as many pupils as we liked--it was the only part of my
+life when I have been able to save money.  I had no chance to spend it. 
+We gave lessons all day, and in the evening were too tired to go out. 
+That year I had the misfortune to lose my dear mother.  I became a rich
+man--yes, sir, at that time I must have had not less than six hundred a
+year.
+
+"It was a long time before I saw Eilie again.  She went abroad to Dresden
+with her father's sister to learn French and German.  It was in the
+autumn of 1875 when she came back to us.  She was seventeen then--a
+beautiful young creature."  He paused, as if to gather his forces for
+description, and went on.
+
+"Tall, as a young tree, with eyes like the sky.  I would not say she was
+perfect, but her imperfections were beautiful to me.  What is it makes
+you love--ah! sir, that is very hidden and mysterious.  She had never
+lost the trick of closing her lips tightly when she remembered her uneven
+tooth.  You may say that was vanity, but in a young girl--and which of
+us is not vain, eh?  'Old men and maidens, young men and children!'
+
+"As I said, she came back to London to her little room, and in the
+evenings was always ready with our tea.  You mustn't suppose she was
+housewifely; there is something in me that never admired
+housewifeliness--a fine quality, no doubt, still--" He sighed.
+
+"No," he resumed, "Eilie was not like that, for she was never quite the
+same two days together.  I told you her eyes were like the sky--that was
+true of all of her.  In one thing, however, at that time, she always
+seemed the same--in love for her father.  For me!  I don't know what I
+should have expected; but my presence seemed to have the effect of making
+her dumb; I would catch her looking at me with a frown, and then, as if
+to make up to her own nature--and a more loving nature never came into
+this world, that I shall maintain to my dying day--she would go to her
+father and kiss him.  When I talked with him she pretended not to notice,
+but I could see her face grow cold and stubborn.  I am not quick; and it
+was a long time before I understood that she was jealous, she wanted him
+all to herself.  I've often wondered how she could be his daughter, for
+he was the very soul of justice and a slow man too--and she was as quick
+as a bird. For a long time after I saw her dislike of me, I refused to
+believe it--if one does not want to believe a thing there are always
+reasons why it should not seem true, at least so it is with me, and I
+suppose with all selfish men.
+
+"I spent evening after evening there, when, if I had not thought only of
+myself, I should have kept away.  But one day I could no longer be blind.
+
+"It was a Sunday in February.  I always had an invitation on Sundays to
+dine with them in the middle of the day.  There was no one in the
+sitting-room; but the door of Eilie's bedroom was open.  I heard her
+voice: 'That man, always that man!'  It was enough for me, I went down
+again without coming in, and walked about all day.
+
+"For three weeks I kept away.  To the school of course I came as usual,
+but not upstairs.  I don't know what I told Dalton--it did not signify
+what you told him, he always had a theory of his own, and was persuaded
+of its truth--a very single-minded man, sir.
+
+"But now I come to the most wonderful days of my life.  It was an early
+spring that year.  I had fallen away already from my resolution, and used
+to slink up--seldom, it's true--and spend the evening with them as
+before.  One afternoon I came up to the sitting-room; the light was
+failing--it was warm, and the windows were open. In the air was that
+feeling which comes to you once a year, in the spring, no matter where
+you may be, in a crowded street, or alone in a forest; only once--a
+feeling like--but I cannot describe it.
+
+"Eilie was sitting there.  If you don't know, sir, I can't tell you what
+it means to be near the woman one loves.  She was leaning on the
+windowsill, staring down into the street.  It was as though she might be
+looking out for some one.  I stood, hardly breathing.  She turned her
+head, and saw me.  Her eyes were strange.  They seemed to ask me a
+question.  But I couldn't have spoken for the world.  I can't tell you
+what I felt--I dared not speak, or think, or hope.  I have been in
+nineteen battles--several times in positions of some danger, when the
+lifting of a finger perhaps meant death; but I have never felt what I was
+feeling at that moment.  I knew something was coming; and I was paralysed
+with terror lest it should not come!"  He drew a long breath.
+
+"The servant came in with a light and broke the spell.  All that night I
+lay awake and thought of how she had looked at me, with the colour coming
+slowly up in her cheeks--"It was three days before I plucked up courage
+to go again; and then I felt her eyes on me at once--she was making a
+'cat's cradle' with a bit of string, but I could see them stealing up
+from her hands to my face.  And she went wandering about the room,
+fingering at everything. When her father called out: 'What's the matter
+with you, Elie?' she stared at him like a child caught doing wrong.  I
+looked straight at her then, she tried to look at me, but she couldn't;
+and a minute later she went out of the room.  God knows what sort of
+nonsense I talked--I was too happy.
+
+"Then began our love.  I can't tell you of that time.  Often and often
+Dalton said to me: 'What's come to the child?  Nothing I can do pleases
+her.'  All the love she had given him was now for me; but he was too
+simple and straight to see what was going on.  How many times haven't I
+felt criminal towards him!  But when you're happy, with the tide in your
+favour, you become a coward at once...."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+"Well, sir," he went on, "we were married on her eighteenth birthday. It
+was a long time before Dalton became aware of our love.  But one day he
+said to me with a very grave look:
+
+"'Eilie has told me, Brune; I forbid it.  She's too young, and
+you're--too old!' I was then forty-five, my hair as black and thick as a
+rook's feathers, and I was strong and active.  I answered him: 'We shall
+be married within a month!'  We parted in anger.  It was a May night, and
+I walked out far into the country.  There's no remedy for anger, or,
+indeed, for anything, so fine as walking.  Once I stopped--it was on a
+common, without a house or light, and the stars shining like jewels.  I
+was hot from walking, I could feel the blood boiling in my veins--I said
+to myself 'Old, are you?' And I laughed like a fool.  It was the thought
+of losing her--I wished to believe myself angry, but really I was afraid;
+fear and anger in me are very much the same.  A friend of mine, a bit of
+a poet, sir, once called them 'the two black wings of self.'  And so they
+are, so they are...!  The next morning I went to Dalton again, and
+somehow I made him yield.  I'm not a philosopher, but it has often seemed
+to me that no benefit can come to us in this life without an equal loss
+somewhere, but does that stop us?  No, sir, not often....
+
+"We were married on the 30th of June 1876, in the parish church.  The
+only people present were Dalton, Lucy, and Lucy's husband--a big,
+red-faced fellow, with blue eyes and a golden beard parted in two. It had
+been arranged that we should spend the honeymoon down at their inn on the
+river.  My wife, Dalton and I, went to a restaurant for lunch.  She was
+dressed in grey, the colour of a pigeon's feathers." He paused, leaning
+forward over the crutch handle of his stick; trying to conjure up, no
+doubt, that long-ago image of his young bride in her dress "the colour of
+a pigeon's feathers," with her blue eyes and yellow hair, the little
+frown between her brows, the firmly shut red lips, opening to speak the
+words, "For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in
+health."
+
+"At that time, sir," he went on suddenly, "I was a bit of a dandy.  I
+wore, I remember, a blue frock-coat, with white trousers, and a grey top
+hat.  Even now I should always prefer to be well dressed....
+
+"We had an excellent lunch, and drank Veuve Clicquot, a wine that you
+cannot get in these days!  Dalton came with us to the railway station.  I
+can't bear partings; and yet, they must come.
+
+"That evening we walked out in the cool under the aspen-trees.  What
+should I remember in all my life if not that night--the young bullocks
+snuffling in the gateways--the campion flowers all lighted up along the
+hedges--the moon with a halo-bats, too, in and out among the stems, and
+the shadows of the cottages as black and soft as that sea down there. 
+For a long time we stood on the river-bank beneath a lime-tree.  The
+scent of the lime flowers!  A man can only endure about half his joy;
+about half his sorrow.  Lucy and her husband," he went on, presently,
+"his name was Frank Tor--a man like an old Viking, who ate nothing but
+milk, bread, and fruit--were very good to us!  It was like Paradise in
+that inn--though the commissariat, I am bound to say, was limited.  The
+sweethriar grew round our bedroom windows; when the breeze blew the
+leaves across the opening--it was like a bath of perfume.  Eilie grew as
+brown as a gipsy while we were there.  I don't think any man could have
+loved her more than I did. But there were times when my heart stood
+still; it didn't seem as if she understood how much I loved her.  One
+day, I remember, she coaxed me to take her camping.  We drifted
+down-stream all the afternoon, and in the evening pulled into the reeds
+under the willow-boughs and lit a fire for her to cook by--though, as a
+matter of fact, our provisions were cooked already--but you know how it
+is; all the romance was in having a real fire.  'We won't pretend,' she
+kept saying.  While we were eating our supper a hare came to our
+clearing--a big fellow--how surprised he looked!  'The tall hare,' Eilie
+called him.  After that we sat by the ashes and watched the shadows, till
+at last she roamed away from me.  The time went very slowly; I got up to
+look for her.  It was past sundown.  I called and called. It was a long
+time before I found her--and she was like a wild thing, hot and flushed,
+her pretty frock torn, her hands and face scratched, her hair down, like
+some beautiful creature of the woods.  If one loves, a little thing will
+scare one.  I didn't think she had noticed my fright; but when we got
+back to the boat she threw her arms round my neck, and said, 'I won't
+ever leave you again!'
+
+"Once in the night I woke--a water-hen was crying, and in the moonlight a
+kingfisher flew across.  The wonder on the river--the wonder of the moon
+and trees, the soft bright mist, the stillness!  It was like another
+world, peaceful, enchanted, far holier than ours. It seemed like a vision
+of the thoughts that come to one--how seldom! and go if one tries to
+grasp them.  Magic--poetry-sacred!"  He was silent a minute, then went on
+in a wistful voice: "I looked at her, sleeping like a child, with her
+hair loose, and her lips apart, and I thought: 'God do so to me, if ever
+I bring her pain!'  How was I to understand her? the mystery and
+innocence of her soul!  The river has had all my light and all my
+darkness, the happiest days, and the hours when I've despaired; and I
+like to think of it, for, you know, in time bitter memories fade, only
+the good remain....  Yet the good have their own pain, a different kind
+of aching, for we shall never get them back.  Sir," he said, turning to
+me with a faint smile, "it's no use crying over spilt milk....  In the
+neighbourhood of Lucy's inn, the Rose and Maybush--Can you imagine a
+prettier name?  I have been all over the world, and nowhere found names
+so pretty as in the English country.  There, too, every blade of grass;
+and flower, has a kind of pride about it; knows it will be cared for; and
+all the roads, trees, and cottages, seem to be certain that they will
+live for ever....  But I was going to tell you: Half a mile from the inn
+was a quiet old house which we used to call the 'Convent'--though I
+believe it was a farm.  We spent many afternoons there, trespassing in
+the orchard--Eilie was fond of trespassing; if there were a long way
+round across somebody else's property, she would always take it. We spent
+our last afternoon in that orchard, lying in the long grass. I was
+reading Childe Harold for the first time--a wonderful, a memorable poem! 
+I was at that passage--the bull-fight--you remember:
+
+     "'Thrice sounds the clarion; lo! the signal falls,
+       The din expands, and expectation mute'
+
+--"when suddenly Eilie said: 'Suppose I were to leave off loving you?' It
+was as if some one had struck me in the face.  I jumped up, and tried to
+take her in my arms, but she slipped away; then she turned, and began
+laughing softly.  I laughed too.  I don't know why...."
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+"We went back to London the next day; we lived quite close to the school,
+and about five days a week Dalton came to dine with us.  He would have
+come every day, if he had not been the sort of man who refuses to consult
+his own pleasure.  We had more pupils than ever. In my leisure I taught
+my wife to fence.  I have never seen any one so lithe and quick; or so
+beautiful as she looked in her fencing dress, with embroidered shoes.
+
+"I was completely happy.  When a man has obtained his desire he becomes
+careless and self-satisfied; I was watchful, however, for I knew that I
+was naturally a selfish man.  I studied to arrange my time and save my
+money, to give her as much pleasure as I could. What she loved best in
+the world just then was riding.  I bought a horse for her, and in the
+evenings of the spring and summer we rode together; but when it was too
+dark to go out late, she would ride alone, great distances, sometimes
+spend the whole day in the saddle, and come back so tired she could
+hardly walk upstairs--I can't say that I liked that.  It made me nervous,
+she was so headlong--but I didn't think it right to interfere with her. 
+I had a good deal of anxiety about money, for though I worked hard and
+made more than ever, there never seemed enough.  I was anxious to save--I
+hoped, of course--but we had no child, and this was a trouble to me.  She
+grew more beautiful than ever, and I think was happy.  Has it ever struck
+you that each one of us lives on the edge of a volcano?  There is, I
+imagine, no one who has not some affection or interest so strong that he
+counts the rest for nothing, beside it.  No doubt a man may live his life
+through without discovering that.  But some of us--!  I am not
+complaining; what is--is."  He pulled the cap lower over his eyes, and
+clutched his hands firmly on the top of his stick.  He was like a man who
+rushes his horse at some hopeless fence, unwilling to give himself time,
+for fear of craning at the last moment. "In the spring of '78, a new
+pupil came to me, a young man of twenty-one who was destined for the
+army.  I took a fancy to him, and did my best to turn him into a good
+swordsman; but there was a kind of perverse recklessness in him; for a
+few minutes one would make a great impression, then he would grow utterly
+careless.  'Francis,' I would say, 'if I were you I should be ashamed.' 
+'Mr. Brune,' he would answer, 'why should I be ashamed?  I didn't make
+myself.'  God knows, I wish to do him justice, he had a heart--one day he
+drove up in a cab, and brought in his poor dog, who had been run over,
+and was dying: For half an hour he shut himself up with its body, we
+could hear him sobbing like a child; he came out with his eyes all red,
+and cried: 'I know where to find the brute who drove over him,' and off
+he rushed.  He had beautiful Italian eyes; a slight figure, not very
+tall; dark hair, a little dark moustache; and his lips were always a
+trifle parted--it was that, and his walk, and the way he drooped his
+eyelids, which gave him a peculiar, soft, proud look. I used to tell him
+that he'd never make a soldier!  'Oh!' he'd answer, 'that'll be all right
+when the time comes!  He believed in a kind of luck that was to do
+everything for him, when the time came.  One day he came in as I was
+giving Eilie her lesson.  This was the first time they saw each other. 
+After that he came more often, and sometimes stayed to dinner with us.  I
+won't deny, sir, that I was glad to welcome him; I thought it good for
+Eilie.  Can there be anything more odious," he burst out, "than such a
+self-complacent blindness?  There are people who say, 'Poor man, he had
+such faith!'  Faith, sir!  Conceit!  I was a fool--in this world one pays
+for folly....
+
+"The summer came; and one Saturday in early June, Eilie, I, and
+Francis--I won't tell you his other name--went riding.  The night had
+been wet; there was no dust, and presently the sun came out--a glorious
+day!  We rode a long way.  About seven o'clock we started back-slowly,
+for it was still hot, and there was all the cool of night before us.  It
+was nine o'clock when we came to Richmond Park. A grand place, Richmond
+Park; and in that half-light wonderful, the deer moving so softly, you
+might have thought they were spirits.  We were silent too--great trees
+have that effect on me....
+
+"Who can say when changes come?  Like a shift of the wind, the old
+passes, the new is on you.  I am telling you now of a change like that.
+Without a sign of warning, Eilie put her horse into a gallop. 'What are
+you doing?' I shouted.  She looked back with a smile, then he dashed past
+me too.  A hornet might have stung them both: they galloped over fallen
+trees, under low hanging branches, up hill and down.  I had to watch that
+madness!  My horse was not so fast.  I rode like a demon; but fell far
+behind.  I am not a man who takes things quietly.  When I came up with
+them at last, I could not speak for rage.  They were riding side by side,
+the reins on the horses' necks, looking in each other's faces.  'You
+should take care,' I said.  'Care!' she cried; 'life is not all taking
+care!'  My anger left me.  I dropped behind, as grooms ride behind their
+mistresses... Jealousy!  No torture is so ceaseless or so black....  In
+those minutes a hundred things came up in me--a hundred memories, true,
+untrue, what do I know?  My soul was poisoned.  I tried to reason with
+myself.  It was absurd to think such things!  It was unmanly.... Even if
+it were true, one should try to be a gentleman!  But I found myself
+laughing; yes, sir, laughing at that word."  He spoke faster, as if
+pouring his heart out not to a live listener, but to the night. "I could
+not sleep that night.  To lie near her with those thoughts in my brain
+was impossible!  I made an excuse, and sat up with some papers. The
+hardest thing in life is to see a thing coming and be able to do nothing
+to prevent it.  What could I do?  Have you noticed how people may become
+utter strangers without a word?  It only needs a thought....  The very
+next day she said: 'I want to go to Lucy's.' 'Alone?'  'Yes.'  I had made
+up my mind by then that she must do just as she wished.  Perhaps I acted
+wrongly; I do not know what one ought to do in such a case; but before
+she went I said to her: 'Eilie, what is it?'  'I don't know,' she
+answered; and I kissed her--that was all....  A month passed; I wrote to
+her nearly every day, and I had short letters from her, telling me very
+little of herself.  Dalton was a torture to me, for I could not tell him;
+he had a conviction that she was going to become a mother. 'Ah, Brune!'
+he said, 'my poor wife was just like that.'  Life, sir, is a somewhat
+ironical affair...!  He--I find it hard to speak his name--came to the
+school two or three times a week.  I used to think I saw a change, a
+purpose growing up through his recklessness; there seemed a violence in
+him as if he chafed against my blade.  I had a kind of joy in feeling I
+had the mastery, and could toss the iron out of his hand any minute like
+a straw.  I was ashamed, and yet I gloried in it. Jealousy is a low
+thing, sir--a low, base thing!  When he asked me where my wife was, I
+told him; I was too proud to hide it.  Soon after that he came no more to
+the school.
+
+"One morning, when I could bear it no longer, I wrote, and said I was
+coming down.  I would not force myself on her, but I asked her to meet me
+in the orchard of the old house we called the Convent.  I asked her to be
+there at four o'clock.  It has always been my, belief that a man must
+neither beg anything of a woman, nor force anything from her.  Women are
+generous--they will give you what they can.  I sealed my letter, and
+posted it myself.  All the way down I kept on saying to myself, 'She must
+come--surely she will come!'"
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+"I was in high spirits, but the next moment trembled like a man with
+ague.  I reached the orchard before my time.  She was not there.  You
+know what it is like to wait?  I stood still and listened; I went to the
+point whence I could see farthest; I said to myself, 'A watched pot never
+boils; if I don't look for her she will come.'  I walked up and down with
+my eyes on the ground.  The sickness of it!  A hundred times I took out
+my watch.... Perhaps it was fast, perhaps hers was slow--I can't tell you
+a thousandth part of my hopes and fears. There was a spring of water, in
+one corner.  I sat beside it, and thought of the last time I had been
+there--and something seemed to burst in me.  It was five o'clock before I
+lost all hope; there comes a time when you're glad that hope is dead, it
+means rest.  'That's over,' you say, 'now I can act.' But what was I to
+do?  I lay down with my face to the ground; when one's in trouble, it's
+the only thing that helps--something to press against and cling to that
+can't give way.  I lay there for two hours, knowing all the time that I
+should play the coward.  At seven o'clock I left the orchard and went
+towards the inn; I had broken my word, but I felt happy.... I should see
+her--and, sir, nothing--nothing seemed to matter beside that. Tor was in
+the garden snipping at his roses.  He came up, and I could see that he
+couldn't look me in the face. 'Where's my wife?' I said. He answered,
+'Let's get Lucy.'  I ran indoors. Lucy met me with two letters; the
+first--my own--unopened; and the second, this:
+
+"'I have left you.  You were good to me, but now--it is no use.
+          EILIE.'"
+
+"She told me that a boy had brought a letter for my wife the day before,
+from a young gentleman in a boat.  When Lucy delivered it she asked, 'Who
+is he, Miss Eilie?  What will Mr. Brune say?'  My wife looked at her
+angrily, but gave her no answer--and all that day she never spoke. In the
+evening she was gone, leaving this note on the bed....  Lucy cried as if
+her heart would break.  I took her by the shoulders and put her from the
+room; I couldn't bear the noise.  I sat down and tried to think. While I
+was sitting there Tor came in with a letter.  It was written on the
+notepaper of an inn twelve miles up the river: these were the words.
+
+"'Eilie is mine.  I am ready to meet you where you like.'"
+
+He went on with a painful evenness of speech.  "When I read those words,
+I had only one thought--to reach them; I ran down to the river, and chose
+out the lightest boat.  Just as I was starting, Tor came running. 'You
+dropped this letter, sir,' he said.  'Two pair of arms are better than
+one.'  He came into the boat.  I took the sculls and I pulled out into
+the stream.  I pulled like a madman; and that great man, with his bare
+arms crossed, was like a huge, tawny bull sitting there opposite me.
+Presently he took my place, and I took the rudder lines.  I could see his
+chest, covered with hair, heaving up and down, it gave me a sort of
+comfort--it meant that we were getting nearer.  Then it grew dark, there
+was no moon, I could barely see the bank; there's something in the dark
+which drives one into oneself.  People tell you there comes a moment when
+your nature is decided--'saved' or 'lost' as they call it--for good or
+evil.  That is not true, your self is always with you, and cannot be
+altered; but, sir, I believe that in a time of agony one finds out what
+are the things one can do, and what are those one cannot.  You get to
+know yourself, that's all.  And so it was with me. Every thought and
+memory and passion was so clear and strong!  I wanted to kill him.  I
+wanted to kill myself.  But her--no!  We are taught that we possess our
+wives, body and soul, we are brought up in that faith, we are commanded
+to believe it--but when I was face to face with it, those words had no
+meaning; that belief, those commands, they were without meaning to me,
+they were--vile.  Oh yes, I wanted to find comfort in them, I wanted to
+hold on to them--but I couldn't. You may force a body; how can you force
+a soul?  No, no--cowardly!  But I wanted to--I wanted to kill him and
+force her to come back to me!  And then, suddenly, I felt as if I were
+pressing right on the most secret nerve of my heart.  I seemed to see her
+face, white and quivering, as if I'd stamped my heel on it.  They say
+this world is ruled by force; it may be true--I know I have a weak spot
+in me....  I couldn't bear it. At last I Jumped to my feet and shouted
+out, 'Turn the boat round!' Tor looked up at me as if I had gone mad. 
+And I had gone mad.  I seized the boat-hook and threatened him; I called
+him fearful names. 'Sir,' he said, 'I don't take such names from any
+one!'  'You'll take them from me,' I shouted; 'turn the boat round, you
+idiot, you hound, you fish!...' I have a terrible temper, a perfect curse
+to me.  He seemed amazed, even frightened; he sat down again suddenly and
+pulled the boat round.  I fell on the seat, and hid my face.  I believe
+the moon came up; there must have been a mist too, for I was cold as
+death.  In this life, sir, we cannot hide our faces--but by degrees the
+pain of wounds grows less. Some will have it that such blows are mortal;
+it is not so.  Time is merciful.
+
+"In the early morning I went back to London.  I had fever on me--and was
+delirious.  I dare say I should have killed myself if I had not been so
+used to weapons--they and I were too old friends, I suppose--I can't
+explain.  It was a long while before I was up and about. Dalton nursed me
+through it; his great heavy moustache had grown quite white.  We never
+mentioned her; what was the good?  There were things to settle of course,
+the lawyer--this was unspeakably distasteful to me.  I told him it was to
+be as she wished, but the fellow would come to me, with his--there, I
+don't want to be unkind. I wished him to say it was my fault, but he
+said--I remember his smile now--he said, that was impossible, would be
+seen through, talked of collusion--I don't understand these things, and
+what's more, I can't bear them, they are--dirty.
+
+"Two years later, when I had come back to London, after the Russo-Turkish
+war, I received a letter from her.  I have it here."  He took an old,
+yellow sheet of paper out of a leathern pockethook, spread it in his
+fingers, and sat staring at it.  For some minutes he did not speak.
+
+"In the autumn of that same year she died in childbirth.  He had deserted
+her.  Fortunately for him, he was killed on the Indian frontier, that
+very year.  If she had lived she would have been thirty-two next June;
+not a great age....  I know I am what they call a crank; doctors will
+tell you that you can't be cured of a bad illness, and be the same man
+again.  If you are bent, to force yourself straight must leave you weak
+in another place.  I must and will think well of women--everything done,
+and everything said against them is a stone on her dead body. Could you
+sit, and listen to it?"  As though driven by his own question, he rose,
+and paced up and down.  He came back to the seat at last.
+
+"That, sir, is the reason of my behaviour this afternoon, and again this
+evening.  You have been so kind, I wanted!--wanted to tell you. She had a
+little daughter--Lucy has her now.  My friend Dalton is dead; there would
+have been no difficulty about money, but, I am sorry to say, that he was
+swindled--disgracefully.  It fell to me to administer his affairs--he
+never knew it, but he died penniless; he had trusted some wretched
+fellows--had an idea they would make his fortune.  As I very soon found,
+they had ruined him.  It was impossible to let Lucy--such a dear
+woman--bear that burden.  I have tried to make provision; but, you see,"
+he took hold of my sleeve, "I, too, have not been fortunate; in fact,
+it's difficult to save a great deal out of L 190 a year; but the capital
+is perfectly safe--and I get L 47, 10s. a quarter, paid on the nail.  I
+have often been tempted to reinvest at a greater rate of interest, but
+I've never dared.  Anyway, there are no debts--I've been obliged to make
+a rule not to buy what I couldn't pay for on the spot....  Now I am
+really plaguing you--but I wanted to tell you--in case-anything should
+happen to me."  He seemed to take a sudden scare, stiffened, twisted his
+moustache, and muttering, "Your great kindness!  Shall never forget!"
+turned hurriedly away.
+
+He vanished; his footsteps, and the tap of his stick grew fainter and
+fainter.  They died out.  He was gone.  Suddenly I got up and hastened
+after him.  I soon stopped--what was there to say?
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+The following day I was obliged to go to Nice, and did not return till
+midnight.  The porter told me that Jules le Ferrier had been to see me.
+The next morning, while I was still in bed, the door was opened, and
+Jules appeared.  His face was very pale; and the moment he stood still
+drops of perspiration began coursing down his cheeks.
+
+"Georges!" he said, "he is dead.  There, there!  How stupid you look!  My
+man is packing.  I have half an hour before the train; my evidence shall
+come from Italy.  I have done my part, the rest is for you. Why did you
+have that dinner?  The Don Quixote!  The idiot!  The poor man!  Don't
+move!  Have you a cigar?  Listen!  When you followed him, I followed the
+other two.  My infernal curiosity!  Can you conceive a greater folly?  How
+fast they walked, those two! feeling their cheeks, as if he had struck
+them both, you know; it was funny.  They soon saw me, for their eyes were
+all round about their heads; they had the mark of a glove on their
+cheeks."  The colour began to come back, into Jules's face; he
+gesticulated with his cigar and became more and more dramatic.  "They
+waited for me.  'Tiens!' said one, 'this gentleman was with him.  My
+friend's name is M. Le Baron de---. The man who struck him was an
+odd-looking person; kindly inform me whether it is possible for my friend
+to meet him?'  Eh!" commented Jules, "he was offensive!  Was it for me to
+give our dignity away? 'Perfectly, monsieur!'  I answered.  'In that
+case,' he said, 'please give me his name and ad dress....  I could not
+remember his name, and as for the address, I never knew it...!  I
+reflected. 'That,' I said, 'I am unable to do, for special reasons.'
+'Aha!' he said, 'reasons that will prevent our fighting him, I suppose?
+'On the contrary,' I said.  'I will convey your request to him; I may
+mention that I have heard he is the best swordsman and pistol-shot in
+Europe. Good-night!'  I wished to give them something to dream of, you
+understand....  Patience, my dear!  Patience!  I was, coming to you, but
+I thought I would let them sleep on it--there was plenty of time!  But
+yesterday morning I came into the Place, and there he was on the bench,
+with a big dog.  I declare to you he blushed like a young girl. 'Sir,' he
+said, 'I was hoping to meet you; last evening I made a great disturbance. 
+I took an unpardonable liberty'--and he put in my hand an envelope.  My
+friend, what do you suppose it contained--a pair of gloves!  Senor Don
+Punctilioso, hein?  He was the devil, this friend of yours; he fascinated
+me with his gentle eyes and his white moustachettes, his humility, his
+flames--poor man...!  I told him I had been asked to take him a
+challenge.  'If anything comes of it,' I said, 'make use of me!'  'Is
+that so?' he said.  'I am most grateful for your kind offer. Let me
+see--it is so long since I fought a duel.  The sooner it's over the
+better.  Could you arrange to-morrow morning?  Weapons?  Yes; let them
+choose.'  You see, my friend, there was no hanging back here; nous voila
+en train."
+
+Jules took out his watch.  "I have sixteen minutes.  It is lucky for you
+that you were away yesterday, or you would be in my shoes now.  I fixed
+the place, right hand of the road to Roquebrune, just by the railway
+cutting, and the time--five-thirty of the morning.  It was arranged that
+I should call for him.  Disgusting hour; I have not been up so early
+since I fought Jacques Tirbaut in '85.  At five o'clock I found him ready
+and drinking tea with rum in it--singular man! he made me have some too,
+brrr!  He was shaved, and dressed in that old frock-coat.  His great dog
+jumped into the carriage, but he bade her get out, took her paws on his
+shoulders, and whispered in her ear some Italian words; a charm, hein!
+and back she went, the tail between the legs.  We drove slowly, so as not
+to shake his arm. He was more gay than I.  All the way he talked to me of
+you: how kind you were! how good you had been to him!  'You do not speak
+of yourself!' I said.  'Have you no friends, nothing to say?  Sometimes an
+accident will happen!'  'Oh!' he answered, 'there is no danger; but if by
+any chance--well, there is a letter in my pocket.' 'And if you should
+kill him?' I said.  'But I shall not,' he answered slyly: 'do you think I
+am going to fire at him?  No, no; he is too young.' 'But,' I said, 'I--'I
+am not going to stand that!'  'Yes,' he replied, 'I owe him a shot; but
+there is no danger--not the least danger.'  We had arrived; already they
+were there.  Ah bah!  You know the preliminaries, the politeness--this
+duelling, you know, it is absurd, after all.  We placed them at twenty
+paces.  It is not a bad place.  There are pine-trees round, and rocks; at
+that hour it was cool and grey as a church.  I handed him the pistol. 
+How can I describe him to you, standing there, smoothing the barrel with
+his fingers!  'What a beautiful thing a good pistol!' he said.  'Only a
+fool or a madman throws away his life,' I said.  'Certainly,' he replied,
+'certainly; but there is no danger,' and he regarded me, raising his
+moustachette.
+
+"There they stood then, back to back, with the mouths of their pistols to
+the sky.  'Un!' I cried, 'deux! tirez!' They turned, I saw the smoke of
+his shot go straight up like a prayer; his pistol dropped.  I ran to him.
+He looked surprised, put out his hand, and fell into my arms.  He was
+dead.  Those fools came running up.  'What is it?' cried one.  I made him
+a bow.  'As you see,' I said; 'you have made a pretty shot.  My friend
+fired in the air.  Messieurs, you had better breakfast in Italy.'  We
+carried him to the carriage, and covered him with a rug; the others drove
+for the frontier.  I brought him to his room.  Here is his letter." Jules
+stopped; tears were running down his face.  "He is dead; I have closed
+his eyes.  Look here, you know, we are all of us cads--it is the rule;
+but this--this, perhaps, was the exception."  And without another word he
+rushed away....
+
+Outside the old fellow's lodging a dismounted cocher was standing
+disconsolate in the sun. "How was I to know they were going to fight a
+duel?" he burst out on seeing me.  "He had white hair--I call you to
+witness he had white hair.  This is bad for me: they will ravish my
+licence.  Aha! you will see--this is bad for me!"  I gave him the slip
+and found my way upstairs.  The old fellow was alone, lying on the bed,
+his feet covered with a rug as if he might feel cold; his eyes were
+closed, but in this sleep of death, he still had that air of faint
+surprise.  At full length, watching the bed intently, Freda lay, as she
+lay nightly when he was really asleep.  The shutters were half open; the
+room still smelt slightly of rum.  I stood for a long time looking at the
+face: the little white fans of moustache brushed upwards even in death,
+the hollows in his cheeks, the quiet of his figure; he was like some old
+knight....  The dog broke the spell. She sat up, and resting her paws on
+the bed, licked his face.  I went downstairs--I couldn't bear to hear her
+howl.  This was his letter to me, written in a pointed handwriting:
+
+"MY DEAR SIR,--Should you read this, I shall be gone.  I am ashamed to
+trouble you--a man should surely manage so as not to give trouble; and
+yet I believe you will not consider me importunate.  If, then, you will
+pick up the pieces of an old fellow, I ask you to have my sword, the
+letter enclosed in this, and the photograph that stands on the stove
+buried with me.  My will and the acknowledgments of my property are
+between the leaves of the Byron in my tin chest; they should go to Lucy
+Tor--address thereon.  Perhaps you will do me the honour to retain for
+yourself any of my books that may give you pleasure.  In the Pilgrim's
+Progress you will find some excellent recipes for Turkish coffee, Italian
+and Spanish dishes, and washing wounds.  The landlady's daughter speaks
+Italian, and she would, I know, like to have Freda; the poor dog will
+miss me.  I have read of old Indian warriors taking their horses and dogs
+with them to the happy hunting-grounds.  Freda would come--noble animals
+are dogs!  She eats once a day--a good large meal--and requires much
+salt.  If you have animals of your own, sir, don't forget--all animals
+require salt.  I have no debts, thank God!  The money in my pockets would
+bury me decently--not that there is any danger.  And I am ashamed to
+weary you with details--the least a man can do is not to make a fuss--and
+yet he must be found ready.--Sir, with profound gratitude, your servant,
+"ROGER BRUNE."
+
+Everything was as he had said.  The photograph on the stove was that of a
+young girl of nineteen or twenty, dressed in an old-fashioned style, with
+hair gathered backward in a knot.  The eyes gazed at you with a little
+frown, the lips were tightly closed; the expression of the face was
+eager, quick, wilful, and, above all, young.
+
+The tin trunk was scented with dry fragments of some herb, the history of
+which in that trunk man knoweth not....  There were a few clothes, but
+very few, all older than those he usually wore.  Besides the Byron and
+Pilgrim's Progress were Scott's Quentin Durward, Captain Marryat's
+Midshipman Easy, a pocket Testament, and a long and frightfully stiff
+book on the art of fortifying towns, much thumbed, and bearing date 1863.
+By far the most interesting thing I found, however, was a diary, kept
+down to the preceding Christmas.  It was a pathetic document, full of
+calculations of the price of meals; resolutions to be careful over this
+or that; doubts whether he must not give up smoking; sentences of fear
+that Freda had not enough to eat.  It appeared that he had tried to live
+on ninety pounds a year, and send the other hundred pounds home to Lucy
+for the child; in this struggle he was always failing, having to send
+less than the amount-the entries showed that this was a nightmare to him.
+The last words, written on Christmas Day, were these "What is the use of
+writing this, since it records nothing but failure!"
+
+The landlady's daughter and myself were at the funeral.  The same
+afternoon I went into the concert-room, where I had spoken to him first.
+When I came out Freda was lying at the entrance, looking into the faces
+of every one that passed, and sniffing idly at their heels. Close by the
+landlady's daughter hovered, a biscuit in her hand, and a puzzled, sorry
+look on her face.
+
+September 1900.
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+MY BROTHER HUBERT GALSWORTHY
+
+
+
+
+SALVATION OF A FORSYTE
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+Swithin Forsyte lay in bed.  The corners of his mouth under his white
+moustache drooped towards his double chin.  He panted:
+
+"My doctor says I'm in a bad way, James."
+
+His twin-brother placed his hand behind his ear.  "I can't hear you. They
+tell me I ought to take a cure.  There's always a cure wanted for
+something.  Emily had a cure."
+
+Swithin replied: "You mumble so.  I hear my man, Adolph.  I trained
+him....  You ought to have an ear-trumpet.  You're getting very shaky,
+James."
+
+There was silence; then James Forsyte, as if galvanised, remarked: "I
+s'pose you've made your will.  I s'pose you've left your money to the
+family; you've nobody else to leave it to.  There was Danson died the
+other day, and left his money to a hospital"
+
+The hairs of Swithin's white moustache bristled.  "My fool of a doctor
+told me to make my will," he said, "I hate a fellow who tells you to make
+your will.  My appetite's good; I ate a partridge last night.  I'm all
+the better for eating.  He told me to leave off champagne!  I eat a good
+breakfast.  I'm not eighty.  You're the same age, James.  You look very
+shaky."
+
+James Forsyte said: "You ought to have another opinion.  Have Blank; he's
+the first man now.  I had him for Emily; cost me two hundred guineas.  He
+sent her to Homburg; that's the first place now.  The Prince was
+there--everybody goes there."
+
+Swithin Forsyte answered: "I don't get any sleep at night, now I can't
+get out; and I've bought a new carriage--gave a pot of money for it. D'
+you ever have bronchitis?  They tell me champagne's dangerous; it's my
+belief I couldn't take a better thing."
+
+James Forsyte rose.
+
+"You ought to have another opinion.  Emily sent her love; she would have
+come in, but she had to go to Niagara.  Everybody goes there; it's the
+place now.  Rachel goes every morning: she overdoes it--she'll be laid up
+one of these days.  There's a fancy ball there to-night; the Duke gives
+the prizes."
+
+Swithin Forsyte said angrily: "I can't get things properly cooked here;
+at the club I get spinach decently done."  The bed-clothes jerked at the
+tremor of his legs.
+
+James Forsyte replied: "You must have done well with Tintos; you must
+have made a lot of money by them.  Your ground-rents must be falling in,
+too.  You must have any amount you don't know what to do with." He
+mouthed the words, as if his lips were watering.
+
+Swithin Forsyte glared.  "Money!" he said; "my doctor's bill's enormous."
+
+James Forsyte stretched out a cold, damp hand "Goodbye!  You ought to
+have another opinion.  I can't keep the horses waiting: they're a new
+pair--stood me in three hundred.  You ought to take care of yourself. I
+shall speak to Blank about you.  You ought to have him--everybody says
+he's the first man.  Good-bye!"
+
+Swithin Forsyte continued to stare at the ceiling.  He thought: 'A poor
+thing, James! a selfish beggar!  Must be worth a couple of hundred
+thousand!'  He wheezed, meditating on life....
+
+He was ill and lonely.  For many years he had been lonely, and for two
+years ill; but as he had smoked his first cigar, so he would live his
+life-stoutly, to its predestined end.  Every day he was driven to the
+club; sitting forward on the spring cushions of a single brougham, his
+hands on his knees, swaying a little, strangely solemn. He ascended the
+steps into that marble hall--the folds of his chin wedged into the
+aperture of his collar--walking squarely with a stick.  Later he would
+dine, eating majestically, and savouring his food, behind a bottle of
+champagne set in an ice-pail--his waistcoat defended by a napkin, his
+eyes rolling a little or glued in a stare on the waiter.  Never did he
+suffer his head or back to droop, for it was not distinguished so to do.
+
+Because he was old and deaf, he spoke to no one; and no one spoke to him.
+The club gossip, an Irishman, said to each newcomer: "Old Forsyte!  Look
+at 'um!  Must ha' had something in his life to sour 'um!"  But Swithin
+had had nothing in his life to sour him.
+
+For many days now he had lain in bed in a room exuding silver, crimson,
+and electric light, smelling of opopanax and of cigars.  The curtains
+were drawn, the firelight gleamed; on a table by his bed were a jug of
+barley-water and the Times.  He made an attempt to read, failed, and fell
+again to thinking.  His face with its square chin, looked like a block of
+pale leather bedded in the pillow.  It was lonely!  A woman in the room
+would have made all the difference!  Why had he never married?  He
+breathed hard, staring froglike at the ceiling; a memory had come into
+his mind.  It was a long time ago--forty odd years--but it seemed like
+yesterday....
+
+It happened when he was thirty-eight, for the first and only time in his
+life travelling on the Continent, with his twin-brother James and a man
+named Traquair.  On the way from Germany to Venice, he had found himself
+at the Hotel Goldene Alp at Salzburg.  It was late August, and weather
+for the gods: sunshine on the walls and the shadows of the vine-leaves,
+and at night, the moonlight, and again on the walls the shadows of the
+vine-leaves.  Averse to the suggestions of other people, Swithin had
+refused to visit the Citadel; he had spent the day alone in the window of
+his bedroom, smoking a succession of cigars, and disparaging the
+appearance of the passers-by.  After dinner he was driven by boredom into
+the streets.  His chest puffed out like a pigeon's, and with something of
+a pigeon's cold and inquiring eye, he strutted, annoyed at the frequency
+of uniforms, which seemed to him both needless and offensive.  His spleen
+rose at this crowd of foreigners, who spoke an unintelligible language,
+wore hair on their faces, and smoked bad tobacco.  'A queer lot!' he
+thought.  The sound of music from a cafe attracted him; he walked in,
+vaguely moved by a wish for the distinction of adventure, without the
+trouble which adventure usually brought with it; spurred too, perhaps, by
+an after-dinner demon.  The cafe was the bier-halle of the 'Fifties, with
+a door at either end, and lighted by a large wooden lantern.  On a small
+dais three musicians were fiddling. Solitary men, or groups, sat at some
+dozen tables, and the waiters hurried about replenishing glasses; the air
+was thick with smoke. Swithin sat down.  "Wine!" he said sternly.  The
+astonished waiter brought him wine.  Swithin pointed to a beer glass on
+the table. "Here!" he said, with the same ferocity.  The waiter poured
+out the wine.  'Ah!' thought Swithin, 'they can understand if they like.'
+A group of officers close by were laughing; Swithin stared at them
+uneasily.  A hollow cough sounded almost in his ear.  To his left a man
+sat reading, with his elbows on the corners of a journal, and his gaunt
+shoulders raised almost to his eyes.  He had a thin, long nose,
+broadening suddenly at the nostrils; a black-brown beard, spread in a
+savage fan over his chest; what was visible of the face was the colour of
+old parchment.  A strange, wild, haughty-looking creature!  Swithin
+observed his clothes with some displeasure--they were the clothes of a
+journalist or strolling actor.  And yet he was impressed.  This was
+singular.  How could he be impressed by a fellow in such clothes!  The
+man reached out a hand, covered with black hairs, and took up a tumbler
+that contained a dark-coloured fluid. 'Brandy!' thought Swithin.  The
+crash of a falling chair startled him--his neighbour had risen.  He was
+of immense height, and very thin; his great beard seemed to splash away
+from his mouth; he was glaring at the group of officers, and speaking. 
+Swithin made out two words: "Hunde!  Deutsche Hunde!" 'Hounds!  Dutch
+hounds!' he thought: 'Rather strong!'  One of the officers had jumped up,
+and now drew his sword.  The tall man swung his chair up, and brought it
+down with a thud.  Everybody round started up and closed on him.  The
+tall man cried out, "To me, Magyars!"
+
+Swithin grinned.  The tall man fighting such odds excited his unwilling
+admiration; he had a momentary impulse to go to his assistance.  'Only
+get a broken nose!' he thought, and looked for a safe corner.  But at
+that moment a thrown lemon struck him on the jaw.  He jumped out of his
+chair and rushed at the officers.  The Hungarian, swinging his chair,
+threw him a look of gratitude--Swithin glowed with momentary admiration
+of himself.  A sword blade grazed his--arm; he felt a sudden dislike of
+the Hungarian.  'This is too much,' he thought, and, catching up a chair,
+flung it at the wooden lantern.  There was a crash--faces and swords
+vanished.  He struck a match, and by the light of it bolted for the door. 
+A second later he was in the street.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+A voice said in English, "God bless you, brother!"
+
+Swithin looked round, and saw the tall Hungarian holding out his hand. He
+took it, thinking, 'What a fool I've been!'  There was something in the
+Hungarian's gesture which said, "You are worthy of me!"
+
+It was annoying, but rather impressive.  The man seemed even taller than
+before; there was a cut on his cheek, the blood from which was trickling
+down his beard.  "You English!" he said.  "I saw you stone Haynau--I saw
+you cheer Kossuth.  The free blood of your people cries out to us." He
+looked at Swithin.  "You are a big man, you have a big soul--and strong,
+how you flung them down!  Ha!"  Swithin had an impulse to take to his
+heels.  "My name," said the Hungarian, "is Boleskey.  You are my friend." 
+His English was good.
+
+'Bulsh-kai-ee, Burlsh-kai-ee,' thought Swithin; 'what a devil of a name!'
+"Mine," he said sulkily, "is Forsyte."
+
+The Hungarian repeated it.
+
+"You've had a nasty jab on the cheek," said Swithin; the sight of the
+matted beard was making him feel sick.  The Hungarian put his fingers to
+his cheek, brought them away wet, stared at them, then with an
+indifferent air gathered a wisp of his beard and crammed it against the
+cut.
+
+"Ugh!" said Swithin.  "Here!  Take my handkerchief!"
+
+The Hungarian bowed.  "Thank you!" he said; "I couldn't think of it!
+Thank you a thousand times!"
+
+"Take it!" growled Swithin; it seemed to him suddenly of the first
+importance.  He thrust the handkerchief into the Hungarian's hand, and
+felt a pain in his arm.  'There!' he thought, 'I've strained a muscle.'
+
+The Hungarian kept muttering, regardless of passers-by, "Swine!  How you
+threw them over!  Two or three cracked heads, anyway--the cowardly
+swine!"
+
+"Look here!" said Swithin suddenly; "which is my way to the Goldene Alp?"
+
+The Hungarian replied, "But you are coming with me, for a glass of wine?"
+
+Swithin looked at the ground.  'Not if I know it!' he thought.
+
+"Ah!" said the Hungarian with dignity, "you do not wish for my
+friendship!"
+
+'Touchy beggar!' thought Swithin.  "Of course," he stammered, "if you put
+it in that way--"
+
+The Hungarian bowed, murmuring, "Forgive me!"
+
+They had not gone a dozen steps before a youth, with a beardless face and
+hollow cheeks, accosted them.  "For the love of Christ, gentlemen," he
+said, "help me!"
+
+"Are you a German?" asked Boleskey.
+
+"Yes," said the youth.
+
+"Then you may rot!"
+
+"Master, look here!" Tearing open his coat, the youth displayed his skin,
+and a leather belt drawn tight round it.  Again Swithin felt that desire
+to take to his heels.  He was filled with horrid forebodings--a sense of
+perpending intimacy with things such as no gentleman had dealings with.
+
+The Hungarian crossed himself.  "Brother," he said to the youth, "come
+you in!"
+
+Swithin looked at them askance, and followed.  By a dim light they groped
+their way up some stairs into a large room, into which the moon was
+shining through a window bulging over the street.  A lamp burned low;
+there was a smell of spirits and tobacco, with a faint, peculiar scent,
+as of rose leaves.  In one corner stood a czymbal, in another a great
+pile of newspapers.  On the wall hung some old-fashioned pistols, and a
+rosary of yellow beads.  Everything was tidily arranged, but dusty.  Near
+an open fireplace was a table with the remains of a meal.  The ceiling,
+floor, and walls were all of dark wood.  In spite of the strange
+disharmony, the room had a sort of refinement.  The Hungarian took a
+bottle out of a cupboard and, filling some glasses, handed one to
+Swithin.  Swithin put it gingerly to his nose.  'You never know your
+luck!  Come!' he thought, tilting it slowly into his mouth.  It was
+thick, too sweet, but of a fine flavour.
+
+"Brothers!" said the Hungarian, refilling, "your healths!"
+
+The youth tossed off his wine.  And Swithin this time did the same; he
+pitied this poor devil of a youth now.  "Come round to-morrow!" he said,
+"I'll give you a shirt or two."  When the youth was gone, however, he
+remembered with relief that he had not given his address.
+
+'Better so,' he reflected.  'A humbug, no doubt.'
+
+"What was that you said to him?" he asked of the Hungarian.
+
+"I said," answered Boleskey, "'You have eaten and drunk; and now you are
+my enemy!'"
+
+"Quite right!" said Swithin, "quite right!  A beggar is every man's
+enemy."
+
+"You do not understand," the Hungarian replied politely.  "While he was a
+beggar--I, too, have had to beg" (Swithin thought, 'Good God! this is
+awful!'), "but now that he is no longer hungry, what is he but a German? 
+No Austrian dog soils my floors!"
+
+His nostrils, as it seemed to Swithin, had distended in an unpleasant
+fashion; and a wholly unnecessary raucousness invaded his voice.  "I am
+an exile--all of my blood are exiles.  Those Godless dogs!" Swithin
+hurriedly assented.
+
+As he spoke, a face peeped in at the door.
+
+"Rozsi!" said the Hungarian.  A young girl came in.  She was rather
+short, with a deliciously round figure and a thick plait of hair. She
+smiled, and showed her even teeth; her little, bright, wide-set grey eyes
+glanced from one man to the other.  Her face was round, too, high in the
+cheekbones, the colour of wild roses, with brows that had a twist-up at
+the corners.  With a gesture of alarm, she put her hand to her cheek, and
+called, "Margit!"  An older girl appeared, taller, with fine shoulders,
+large eyes, a pretty mouth, and what Swithin described to himself
+afterwards as a "pudding" nose.  Both girls, with little cooing sounds,
+began attending to their father's face.
+
+Swithin turned his back to them.  His arm pained him.
+
+'This is what comes of interfering,' he thought sulkily; 'I might have
+had my neck broken!' Suddenly a soft palm was placed in his, two eyes,
+half-fascinated, half-shy, looked at him; then a voice called, "Rozsi!"
+the door was slammed, he was alone again with the Hungarian, harassed by
+a sense of soft disturbance.
+
+"Your daughter's name is Rosy?" he said; "we have it in England--from
+rose, a flower."
+
+"Rozsi (Rozgi)," the Hungarian replied; "your English is a hard tongue,
+harder than French, German, or Czechish, harder than Russian, or
+Roumanian--I know no more."
+
+"What?" said Swithin, "six languages?"  Privately he thought, 'He knows
+how to lie, anyway.'
+
+"If you lived in a country like mine," muttered the Hungarian, "with all
+men's hands against you!  A free people--dying--but not dead!"
+
+Swithin could not imagine what he was talking of.  This man's face, with
+its linen bandage, gloomy eyes, and great black wisps of beard, his
+fierce mutterings, and hollow cough, were all most unpleasant. He seemed
+to be suffering from some kind of mental dog-bite.  His emotion indeed
+appeared so indecent, so uncontrolled and open, that its obvious
+sincerity produced a sort of awe in Swithin.  It was like being forced to
+look into a furnace.  Boleskey stopped roaming up and down.  "You think
+it's over?" he said; "I tell you, in the breast of each one of us Magyars
+there is a hell.  What is sweeter than life?  What is more sacred than
+each breath we draw?  Ah! my country!" These words were uttered so
+slowly, with such intense mournfulness, that Swithin's jaw relaxed; he
+converted the movement to a yawn.
+
+"Tell me," said Boleskey, "what would you do if the French conquered
+you?"
+
+Swithin smiled.  Then suddenly, as though something had hurt him, he
+grunted, "The 'Froggies'?  Let 'em try!"
+
+"Drink!" said Boleskey--"there is nothing like it"; he filled Swithin's
+glass.  "I will tell you my story."
+
+Swithin rose hurriedly.  "It's late," he said.  "This is good stuff,
+though; have you much of it?"
+
+"It is the last bottle."
+
+"What?" said Swithin; "and you gave it to a beggar?"
+
+"My name is Boleskey--Stefan," the Hungarian said, raising his head; "of
+the Komorn Boleskeys."  The simplicity of this phrase--as who shall say:
+What need of further description?--made an impression on Swithin; he
+stopped to listen.  Boleskey's story went on and on. "There were many
+abuses," boomed his deep voice, "much wrong done--much cowardice.  I
+could see clouds gathering--rolling over our plains. The Austrian wished
+to strangle the breath of our mouths--to take from us the shadow of our
+liberty--the shadow--all we had.  Two years ago--the year of '48, when
+every man and boy answered the great voice--brother, a dog's life!--to
+use a pen when all of your blood are fighting, but it was decreed for me! 
+My son was killed; my brothers taken--and myself was thrown out like a
+dog--I had written out my heart, I had written out all the blood that was
+in my body!" He seemed to tower, a gaunt shadow of a man, with gloomy,
+flickering eyes staring at the wall.
+
+Swithin rose, and stammered, "Much obliged--very interesting." Boleskey
+made no effort to detain him, but continued staring at the wall.
+"Good-night!" said Swithin, and stamped heavily downstairs.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+When at last Swithin reached the Goldene Alp, he found his brother and
+friend standing uneasily at the door.  Traquair, a prematurely dried-up
+man, with whiskers and a Scotch accent, remarked, "Ye're airly, man!"
+Swithin growled something unintelligible, and swung up to bed.  He
+discovered a slight cut on his arm.  He was in a savage temper--the
+elements had conspired to show him things he did not want to see; yet now
+and then a memory of Rozsi, of her soft palm in his, a sense of having
+been stroked and flattered, came over him.  During breakfast next morning
+his brother and Traquair announced their intention of moving on.  James
+Forsyte, indeed, remarked that it was no place for a "collector," since
+all the "old" shops were in the hands of Jews or very grasping
+persons--he had discovered this at once.  Swithin pushed his cup aside. 
+"You may do what you like," he said, "I'm staying here."
+
+James Forsyte replied, tumbling over his own words: "Why! what do you
+want to stay here for?  There's nothing for you to do here--there's
+nothing to see here, unless you go up the Citadel, an' you won't do
+that."
+
+Swithin growled, "Who says so?"  Having gratified his perversity, he felt
+in a better temper.  He had slung his arm in a silk sash, and accounted
+for it by saying he had slipped.  Later he went out and walked on to the
+bridge.  In the brilliant sunshine spires were glistening against the
+pearly background of the hills; the town had a clean, joyous air. Swithin
+glanced at the Citadel and thought, 'Looks a strong place!  Shouldn't
+wonder if it were impregnable!'  And this for some occult reason gave him
+pleasure.  It occurred to him suddenly to go and look for the Hungarian's
+house.
+
+About noon, after a hunt of two hours, he was gazing about him blankly,
+pale with heat, but more obstinate than ever, when a voice above him
+called, "Mister!" He looked up and saw Rozsi.  She was leaning her round
+chin on her round hand, gazing down at him with her deepset, clever eyes.
+When Swithin removed his hat, she clapped her hands.  Again he had the
+sense of being admired, caressed.  With a careless air, that sat
+grotesquely on his tall square person, he walked up to the door; both
+girls stood in the passage.  Swithin felt a confused desire to speak in
+some foreign tongue.  "Maam'selles," he began, "er--bong jour-er, your
+father--pare, comment?"
+
+"We also speak English," said the elder girl; "will you come in, please?"
+
+Swithin swallowed a misgiving, and entered.  The room had a worn
+appearance by daylight, as if it had always been the nest of tragic or
+vivid lives.  He sat down, and his eyes said: "I am a stranger, but don't
+try to get the better of me, please--that is impossible." The girls
+looked at him in silence.  Rozsi wore a rather short skirt of black
+stuff, a white shirt, and across her shoulders an embroidered yoke; her
+sister was dressed in dark green, with a coral necklace; both girls had
+their hair in plaits.  After a minute Rozsi touched the sleeve of his
+hurt arm.
+
+"It's nothing!" muttered Swithin.
+
+"Father fought with a chair, but you had no chair," she said in a
+wondering voice.
+
+He doubled the fist of his sound arm and struck a blow at space.  To his
+amazement she began to laugh.  Nettled at this, he put his hand beneath
+the heavy table and lifted it.  Rozsi clapped her hands.  "Ah I now I
+see--how strong you are!"  She made him a curtsey and whisked round to
+the window.  He found the quick intelligence of her eyes confusing;
+sometimes they seemed to look beyond him at something invisible--this,
+too, confused him.  From Margit he learned that they had been two years
+in England, where their father had made his living by teaching languages;
+they had now been a year in Salzburg.
+
+"We wait," suddenly said.  Rozsi; and Margit, with a solemn face,
+repeated, "We wait."
+
+Swithin's eyes swelled a little with his desire to see what they were
+waiting for.  How queer they were, with their eyes that gazed beyond him!
+He looked at their figures.  'She would pay for dressing,' he thought,
+and he tried to imagine Rozsi in a skirt with proper flounces, a thin
+waist, and hair drawn back over her ears.  She would pay for dressing,
+with that supple figure, fluffy hair, and little hands!  And instantly
+his own hands, face, and clothes disturbed him. He got up, examined the
+pistols on the wall, and felt resentment at the faded, dusty room.
+'Smells like a pot-house!' he thought.  He sat down again close to Rozsi.
+
+"Do you love to dance?" she asked; "to dance is to live.  First you hear
+the music--how your feet itch!  It is wonderful!  You begin slow,
+quick--quicker; you fly--you know nothing--your feet are in the air.  It
+is wonderful!"
+
+A slow flush had mounted into Swithin's face.
+
+"Ah!" continued Rozsi, her eyes fixed on him, "when I am dancing--out
+there I see the plains--your feet go one--two--three--quick, quick,
+quick, quicker--you fly."
+
+She stretched herself, a shiver seemed to pass all down her. "Margit!
+dance!" and, to Swithin's consternation, the two girls--their hands on
+each other's shoulders--began shuffling their feet and swaying to and
+fro.  Their heads were thrown back, their eyes half-closed; suddenly the
+step quickened, they swung to one side, then to the other, and began
+whirling round in front of him.  The sudden fragrance of rose leaves
+enveloped him.  Round they flew again. While they were still dancing,
+Boleskey came into the room.  He caught Swithin by both hands.
+
+"Brother, welcome!  Ah! your arm is hurt!  I do not forget."  His yellow
+face and deep-set eyes expressed a dignified gratitude.  "Let me
+introduce to you my friend Baron Kasteliz."
+
+Swithin bowed to a man with a small forehead, who had appeared softly,
+and stood with his gloved hands touching his waist.  Swithin conceived a
+sudden aversion for this catlike man.  About Boleskey there was that
+which made contempt impossible--the sense of comradeship begotten in the
+fight; the man's height; something lofty and savage in his face; and an
+obscure instinct that it would not pay to show distaste; but this
+Kasteliz, with his neat jaw, low brow, and velvety, volcanic look,
+excited his proper English animosity.  "Your friends are mine," murmured
+Kasteliz.  He spoke with suavity, and hissed his s's.  A long, vibrating
+twang quavered through the room. Swithin turned and saw Rozsi sitting at
+the czymbal; the notes rang under the little hammers in her hands,
+incessant, metallic, rising and falling with that strange melody.
+Kasteliz had fixed his glowing eyes on her; Boleskey, nodding his head,
+was staring at the floor; Margit, with a pale face, stood like a statue.
+
+'What can they see in it?' thought Swithin; 'it's not a tune.'  He took
+up his hat.  Rozsi saw him and stopped; her lips had parted with a
+faintly dismayed expression.  His sense of personal injury diminished; he
+even felt a little sorry for her.  She jumped up from her seat and
+twirled round with a pout.  An inspiration seized on Swithin.  "Come and
+dine with me," he said to Boleskey, "to-morrow--the Goldene Alp--bring
+your friend."  He felt the eyes of the whole room on him--the Hungarian's
+fine eyes; Margit's wide glance; the narrow, hot gaze of Kasteliz; and
+lastly--Rozsi's.  A glow of satisfaction ran down his spine.  When he
+emerged into the street he thought gloomily, 'Now I've done it!' And not
+for some paces did he look round; then, with a forced smile, turned and
+removed his hat to the faces at the window.
+
+Notwithstanding this moment of gloom, however, he was in an exalted state
+all day, and at dinner kept looking at his brother and Traquair
+enigmatically.  'What do they know of life?' he thought; 'they might be
+here a year and get no farther.'  He made jokes, and pinned the menu to
+the waiter's coat-tails.  "I like this place," he said, "I shall spend
+three weeks here."  James, whose lips were on the point of taking in a
+plum, looked at him uneasily.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+On the day of the dinner Swithin suffered a good deal.  He reflected
+gloomily on Boleskey's clothes.  He had fixed an early hour--there would
+be fewer people to see them.  When the time approached he attired himself
+with a certain neat splendour, and though his arm was still sore, left
+off the sling....
+
+Nearly three hours afterwards he left the Goldene Alp between his guests.
+It was sunset, and along the riverbank the houses stood out, unsoftened
+by the dusk; the streets were full of people hurrying home.  Swithin had
+a hazy vision of empty bottles, of the ground before his feet, and the
+accessibility of all the world.  Dim recollections of the good things he
+had said, of his brother and Traquair seated in the background eating
+ordinary meals with inquiring, acid visages, caused perpetual smiles to
+break out on his face, and he steered himself stubbornly, to prove that
+he was a better man than either' of his guests.  He knew, vaguely, that
+he was going somewhere with an object; Rozsi's face kept dancing before
+him, like a promise.  Once or twice he gave Kasteliz a glassy stare.
+Towards Boleskey, on the other hand, he felt quite warm, and recalled
+with admiration the way he had set his glass down empty, time after time.
+'I like to see him take his liquor,' he thought; 'the fellow's a
+gentleman, after all.'  Boleskey strode on, savagely inattentive to
+everything; and Kasteliz had become more like a cat than ever.  It was
+nearly dark when they reached a narrow street close to the cathedral.
+They stopped at a door held open by an old woman.  The change from the
+fresh air to a heated corridor, the noise of the door closed behind him,
+the old woman's anxious glances, sobered Swithin.
+
+"I tell her," said Boleskey, "that I reply for you as for my son."
+
+Swithin was angry.  What business had this man to reply for him!
+
+They passed into a large room, crowded with men all women; Swithin
+noticed that they all looked fit him.  He stared at them in turn--they
+seemed of all classes, some in black coats or silk dresses, others in the
+clothes of work-people; one man, a cobbler, still wore his leather apron,
+as if he had rushed there straight from his work. Laying his hand on
+Swithin's arm, Boleskey evidently began explaining who he was; hands were
+extended, people beyond reach bowed to him. Swithin acknowledged the
+greetings with a stiff motion of his head; then seeing other people
+dropping into seats, he, too, sat down. Some one whispered his
+name--Margit and Rozsi were just behind him.
+
+"Welcome!" said Margit; but Swithin was looking at Rozsi.  Her face was
+so alive and quivering!  'What's the excitement all about?' he thought.
+'How pretty she looks!'  She blushed, drew in her hands with a quick
+tense movement, and gazed again beyond him into the room.  'What is it?'
+thought Swithin; he had a longing to lean back and kiss her lips.  He
+tried angrily to see what she was seeing in those faces turned all one
+way.
+
+Boleskey rose to speak.  No one moved; not a sound could be heard but the
+tone of his deep voice.  On and on he went, fierce and solemn, and with
+the rise of his voice, all those faces-fair or swarthy--seemed to be
+glowing with one and the same feeling.  Swithin felt the white heat in
+those faces--it was not decent!  In that whole speech he only understood
+the one word--"Magyar" which came again and again. He almost dozed off at
+last.  The twang of a czymbal woke him. 'What?' he thought, 'more of that
+infernal music!' Margit, leaning over him, whispered: "Listen!  Racoczy! 
+It is forbidden!" Swithin saw that Rozsi was no longer in her seat; it
+was she who was striking those forbidden notes. He looked
+round--everywhere the same unmoving faces, the same entrancement, and
+fierce stillness.  The music sounded muffled, as if it, too, were
+bursting its heart in silence. Swithin felt within him a touch of panic. 
+Was this a den of tigers?  The way these people listened, the ferocity of
+their stillness, was frightful...!  He gripped his chair and broke into a
+perspiration; was there no chance to get away?  'When it stops,' he
+thought, 'there'll be a rush!'  But there was only a greater silence.  It
+flashed across him that any hostile person coming in then would be torn
+to pieces.  A woman sobbed.  The whole thing was beyond words unpleasant. 
+He rose, and edged his way furtively towards the doorway.  There was a
+cry of "Police!"  The whole crowd came pressing after him.  Swithin would
+soon have been out, but a little behind he caught sight of Rozsi swept
+off her feet.  Her frightened eyes angered him.  'She doesn't deserve
+it,' he thought sulkily; 'letting all this loose!' and forced his way
+back to her.  She clung to him, and a fever went stealing through his
+veins; he butted forward at the crowd, holding her tight.  When they were
+outside he let her go.
+
+"I was afraid," she said.
+
+"Afraid!" muttered Swithin; "I should think so."  No longer touching her,
+he felt his grievance revive.
+
+"But you are so strong," she murmured.
+
+"This is no place for you," growled Swithin, "I'm going to see you home."
+
+"Oh!" cried Rozsi; "but papa and--Margit!"
+
+"That's their look-out!" and he hurried her away.
+
+She slid her hand under his arm; the soft curves of her form brushed him
+gently, each touch only augmented his ill-humour.  He burned with a
+perverse rage, as if all the passions in him were simmering and ready to
+boil over; it was as if a poison were trying to work its way out of him,
+through the layers of his stolid flesh.  He maintained a dogged silence;
+Rozsi, too, said nothing, but when they reached the door, she drew her
+hand away.
+
+"You are angry!" she said.
+
+"Angry," muttered Swithin; "no!  How d'you make that out?"  He had a
+torturing desire to kiss her.
+
+"Yes, you are angry," she repeated; "I wait here for papa and Margit."
+
+Swithin also waited, wedged against the wall.  Once or twice, for his
+sight was sharp, he saw her steal a look at him, a beseeching look, and
+hardened his heart with a kind of pleasure.  After five minutes Boleskey,
+Margit, and Kasteliz appeared.  Seeing Rozsi they broke into exclamations
+of relief, and Kasteliz, with a glance at Swithin, put his lips to her
+hand.  Rozsi's look said, "Wouldn't you like to do that?"  Swithin turned
+short on his heel, and walked away.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+All night he hardly slept, suffering from fever, for the first time in
+his life.  Once he jumped out of bed, lighted a candle, and going to the
+glass, scrutinised himself long and anxiously.  After this he fell
+asleep, but had frightful dreams.  His first thought when he woke was,
+'My liver's out of order!' and, thrusting his head into cold water, he
+dressed hastily and went out.  He soon left the house behind.  Dew
+covered everything; blackbirds whistled in the bushes; the air was fresh
+and sweet.  He had not been up so early since he was a boy.  Why was he
+walking through a damp wood at this hour of the morning?  Something
+intolerable and unfamiliar must have sent him out.  No fellow in his
+senses would do such a thing!  He came to a dead stop, and began
+unsteadily to walk back.  Regaining the hotel, he went to bed again, and
+dreamed that in some wild country he was living in a room full of
+insects, where a housemaid--Rozsi--holding a broom, looked at him with
+mournful eyes.  There seemed an unexplained need for immediate departure;
+he begged her to forward his things; and shake them out carefully before
+she put them into the trunk.  He understood that the charge for sending
+would be twenty-two shillings, thought it a great deal, and had the
+horrors of indecision.  "No," he muttered, "pack, and take them myself." 
+The housemaid turned suddenly into a lean creature; and he awoke with a
+sore feeling in his heart.
+
+His eye fell on his wet boots.  The whole thing was scaring, and jumping
+up, he began to throw his clothes into his trunks.  It was twelve o'clock
+before he went down, and found his brother and Traquair still at the
+table arranging an itinerary; he surprised them by saying that he too was
+coming; and without further explanation set to work to eat.  James had
+heard that there were salt-mines in the neighbourhood--his proposal was
+to start, and halt an hour or so on the road for their inspection; he
+said: "Everybody'll ask you if you've seen the salt-mines: I shouldn't
+like to say I hadn't seen the salt-mines.  What's the good, they'd say,
+of your going there if you haven't seen the salt-mines?"  He wondered,
+too, if they need fee the second waiter--an idle chap!
+
+A discussion followed; but Swithin ate on glumly, conscious that his mind
+was set on larger affairs.  Suddenly on the far side of the street Rozsi
+and her sister passed, with little baskets on their arms.  He started up,
+and at that moment Rozsi looked round--her face was the incarnation of
+enticement, the chin tilted, the lower lip thrust a little forward, her
+round neck curving back over her shoulder.  Swithin muttered, "Make your
+own arrangements--leave me out!" and hurried from the room, leaving James
+beside himself with interest and alarm.
+
+When he reached the street, however, the girls had disappeared.  He
+hailed a carriage.  "Drive!" he called to the man, with a flourish of his
+stick, and as soon as the wheels had begun to clatter on the stones he
+leaned back, looking sharply to right and left.  He soon had to give up
+thought of finding them, but made the coachman turn round and round
+again.  All day he drove about, far into the country, and kept urging the
+driver to use greater speed.  He was in a strange state of hurry and
+elation.  Finally, he dined at a little country inn; and this gave the
+measure of his disturbance--the dinner was atrocious.
+
+Returning late in the evening he found a note written by Traquair. "Are
+you in your senses, man?" it asked; "we have no more time to waste idling
+about here.  If you want to rejoin us, come on to Danielli's Hotel,
+Venice."  Swithin chuckled when he read it, and feeling frightfully
+tired, went to bed and slept like a log.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Three weeks later he was still in Salzburg, no longer at the Goldene Alp,
+but in rooms over a shop near the Boleskeys'.  He had spent a small
+fortune in the purchase of flowers.  Margit would croon over them, but
+Rozsi, with a sober "Many tanks!" as if they were her right, would look
+long at herself in the glass, and pin one into her hair.  Swithin ceased
+to wonder; he ceased to wonder at anything they did.  One evening he
+found Boleskey deep in conversation with a pale, dishevelled-looking
+person.
+
+"Our friend Mr. Forsyte--Count D....," said Boleskey.
+
+Swithin experienced a faint, unavoidable emotion; but looking at the
+Count's trousers, he thought: 'Doesn't look much like one!'  And with an
+ironic bow to the silent girls, he turned, and took his hat.  But when he
+had reached the bottom of the dark stairs he heard footsteps. Rozsi came
+running down, looked out at the door, and put her hands up to her breast
+as if disappointed; suddenly with a quick glance round she saw him.
+Swithin caught her arm.  She slipped away, and her face seemed to bubble
+with defiance or laughter; she ran up three steps, stopped, looked at him
+across her shoulder, and fled on up the stairs.  Swithin went out
+bewildered and annoyed.
+
+'What was she going to say to me?' he kept thinking.  During these three
+weeks he had asked himself all sorts of questions: whether he were being
+made a fool of; whether she were in love with him; what he was doing
+there, and sometimes at night, with all his candles burning as if he
+wanted light, the breeze blowing on him through the window, his cigar,
+half-smoked, in his hand, he sat, an hour or more, staring at the wall.
+'Enough of this!' he thought every morning.  Twice he packed fully--once
+he ordered his travelling carriage, but countermanded it the following
+day.  What definitely he hoped, intended, resolved, he could not have
+said.  He was always thinking of Rozsi, he could not read the riddle in
+her face--she held him in a vice, notwithstanding that everything about
+her threatened the very fetishes of his existence.  And Boleskey! 
+Whenever he looked at him he thought, 'If he were only clean?' and
+mechanically fingered his own well-tied cravatte.  To talk with the
+fellow, too, was like being forced to look at things which had no place
+in the light of day. Freedom, equality, self-sacrifice!
+
+'Why can't he settle down at some business,' he thought, 'instead of all
+this talk?' Boleskey's sudden diffidences, self-depreciation, fits of
+despair, irritated him.  "Morbid beggar!" he would mutter; "thank God I
+haven't a thin skin."  And proud too!  Extraordinary!  An impecunious
+fellow like that!  One evening, moreover, Boleskey had returned home
+drunk.  Swithin had hustled him away into his bedroom, helped him to
+undress, and stayed until he was asleep.  'Too much of a good thing!' he
+thought, 'before his own daughters, too!'  It was after this that he
+ordered his travelling carriage.  The other occasion on which he packed
+was one evening, when not only Boleskey, but Rozsi herself had picked
+chicken bones with her fingers.
+
+Often in the mornings he would go to the Mirabell Garden to smoke his
+cigar; there, in stolid contemplation of the statues--rows of half-heroic
+men carrying off half-distressful females--he would spend an hour
+pleasantly, his hat tilted to keep the sun off his nose. The day after
+Rozsi had fled from him on the stairs, he came there as usual.  It was a
+morning of blue sky and sunlight glowing on the old prim garden, on its
+yew-trees, and serio-comic statues, and walls covered with apricots and
+plums.  When Swithin approached his usual seat, who should be sitting
+there but Rozsi--"Good-morning," he stammered; "you knew this was my
+seat then?"
+
+Rozsi looked at the ground.  "Yes," she answered.
+
+Swithin felt bewildered.  "Do you know," he said, "you treat me very
+funnily?"
+
+To his surprise Rozsi put her little soft hand down and touched his;
+then, without a word, sprang up and rushed away.  It took him a minute to
+recover.  There were people present; he did not like to run, but overtook
+her on the bridge, and slipped her hand beneath his arm.
+
+"You shouldn't have done that," he said; "you shouldn't have run away
+from me, you know."
+
+Rozsi laughed.  Swithin withdrew his arm; a desire to shake her seized
+him.  He walked some way before he said, "Will you have the goodness to
+tell me what you came to that seat for?"
+
+Rozsi flashed a look at him.  "To-morrow is the fete," she answered.
+
+Swithin muttered, "Is that all?"
+
+"If you do not take us, we cannot go."
+
+"Suppose I refuse," he said sullenly, "there are plenty of others."
+
+Rozsi bent her head, scurrying along.  "No," she murmured, "if you do not
+go--I do not wish."
+
+Swithin drew her hand back within his arm.  How round and soft it was!  He
+tried to see her face.  When she was nearly home he said goodbye, not
+wishing, for some dark reason, to be seen with her.  He watched till she
+had disappeared; then slowly retraced his steps to the Mirabell Garden.
+When he came to where she had been sitting, he slowly lighted his cigar,
+and for a long time after it was smoked out remained there in the silent
+presence of the statues.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+A crowd of people wandered round the booths, and Swithin found himself
+obliged to give the girls his arms.  'Like a little Cockney clerk!' he
+thought.  His indignation passed unnoticed; they talked, they laughed,
+each sight and sound in all the hurly-burly seemed to go straight into
+their hearts.  He eyed them ironically--their eager voices, and little
+coos of sympathy seemed to him vulgar.  In the thick of the crowd he
+slipped his arm out of Margit's, but, just as he thought that he was
+free, the unwelcome hand slid up again.  He tried again, but again Margit
+reappeared, serene, and full of pleasant humour; and his failure this
+time appeared to him in a comic light.  But when Rozsi leaned across him,
+the glow of her round cheek, her curving lip, the inscrutable grey gleam
+of her eyes, sent a thrill of longing through him.  He was obliged to
+stand by while they parleyed with a gipsy, whose matted locks and skinny
+hands inspired him with a not unwarranted disgust.  "Folly!" he muttered,
+as Rozsi held out her palm.  The old woman mumbled, and shot a malignant
+look at him.  Rozsi drew back her hand, and crossed herself.  'Folly!'
+Swithin thought again; and seizing the girls' arms, he hurried them away.
+
+"What did the old hag say?" he asked.
+
+Rozsi shook her head.
+
+"You don't mean that you believe?"
+
+Her eyes were full of tears.  "The gipsies are wise," she murmured.
+
+"Come, what did she tell you?"
+
+This time Rozsi looked hurriedly round, and slipped away into the crowd.
+After a hunt they found her, and Swithin, who was scared, growled: "You
+shouldn't do such things--it's not respectable."
+
+On higher ground, in the centre of a clear space, a military band was
+playing.  For the privilege of entering this charmed circle Swithin paid
+three kronen, choosing naturally the best seats.  He ordered wine, too,
+watching Rozsi out of the corner of his eye as he poured it out.  The
+protecting tenderness of yesterday was all lost in this medley.  It was
+every man for himself, after all!  The colour had deepened again in her
+cheeks, she laughed, pouting her lips. Suddenly she put her glass aside.
+"Thank you, very much," she said, "it is enough!"
+
+Margit, whose pretty mouth was all smiles, cried, "Lieber Gott! is it not
+good-life?"  It was not a question Swithin could undertake to answer. The
+band began to play a waltz.  "Now they will dance. Lieber Gott! and are
+the lights not wonderful?"  Lamps were flickering beneath the trees like
+a swarm of fireflies.  There was a hum as from a gigantic beehive.
+Passers-by lifted their faces, then vanished into the crowd; Rozsi stood
+gazing at them spellbound, as if their very going and coming were a
+delight.
+
+The space was soon full of whirling couples.  Rozsi's head began to beat
+time.  "O Margit!" she whispered.
+
+Swithin's face had assumed a solemn, uneasy expression.  A man raising
+his hat, offered his arm to Margit.  She glanced back across her shoulder
+to reassure Swithin.  "It is a friend," she said.
+
+Swithin looked at Rozsi--her eyes were bright, her lips tremulous. He
+slipped his hand along the table and touched her fingers.  Then she
+flashed a look at him--appeal, reproach, tenderness, all were expressed
+in it.  Was she expecting him to dance?  Did she want to mix with the
+rift-raff there; wish him to make an exhibition of himself in this
+hurly-burly?  A voice said, "Good-evening!"  Before them stood Kasteliz,
+in a dark coat tightly buttoned at the waist.
+
+"You are not dancing, Rozsi Kozsanony?" (Miss Rozsi).  "Let me, then,
+have the pleasure."  He held out his arm.  Swithin stared in front of
+him.  In the very act of going she gave him a look that said as plain as
+words: "Will you not?"  But for answer he turned his eyes away, and when
+he looked again she was gone.  He paid the score and made his way into
+the crowd.  But as he went she danced by close to him, all flushed and
+panting.  She hung back as if to stop him, and he caught the glistening
+of tears.  Then he lost sight of her again.  To be deserted the first
+minute he was alone with her, and for that jackanapes with the small head
+and the volcanic glances!  It was too much!  And suddenly it occurred to
+him that she was alone with Kasteliz--alone at night, and far from home. 
+'Well,' he thought, 'what do I care?' and shouldered his way on through
+the crowd.  It served him right for mixing with such people here. He left
+the fair, but the further he went, the more he nursed his rage, the more
+heinous seemed her offence, the sharper grew his jealousy.  "A beggarly
+baron!" was his thought.
+
+A figure came alongside--it was Boleskey.  One look showed Swithin his
+condition.  Drunk again!  This was the last straw!
+
+Unfortunately Boleskey had recognised him.  He seemed violently excited.
+"Where--where are my daughters?" he began.
+
+Swithin brushed past, but Boleskey caught his arm.  "Listen--brother!"
+he said; "news of my country!  After to-morrow...."
+
+"Keep it to yourself!" growled Swithin, wrenching his arm free.  He went
+straight to his lodgings, and, lying on the hard sofa of his unlighted
+sitting-room, gave himself up to bitter thoughts.  But in spite of all
+his anger, Rozsi's supply-moving figure, with its pouting lips, and
+roguish appealing eyes, still haunted him.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Next morning there was not a carriage to be had, and Swithin was
+compelled to put off his departure till the morrow.  The day was grey and
+misty; he wandered about with the strained, inquiring look of a lost dog
+in his eyes.
+
+Late in the afternoon he went back to his lodgings.  In a corner of the
+sitting-room stood Rozsi.  The thrill of triumph, the sense of
+appeasement, the emotion, that seized on him, crept through to his lips
+in a faint smile.  Rozsi made no sound, her face was hidden by her hands.
+And this silence of hers weighed on Swithin.  She was forcing him to
+break it.  What was behind her hands?  His own face was visible!  Why
+didn't she speak?  Why was she here?  Alone?  That was not right surely.
+
+Suddenly Rozsi dropped her hands; her flushed face was quivering--it
+seemed as though a word, a sign, even, might bring a burst of tears.
+
+He walked over to the window.  'I must give her time!' he thought; then
+seized by unreasoning terror at this silence, spun round, and caught her
+by the arms.  Rozsi held back from him, swayed forward and buried her
+face on his breast....
+
+Half an hour later Swithin was pacing up and down his room.  The scent of
+rose leaves had not yet died away.  A glove lay on the floor; he picked
+it up, and for a long time stood weighing it in his hand.  All sorts of
+confused thoughts and feelings haunted him.  It was the purest and least
+selfish moment of his life, this moment after she had yielded.  But that
+pure gratitude at her fiery, simple abnegation did not last; it was
+followed by a petty sense of triumph, and by uneasiness.  He was still
+weighing the little glove in his hand, when he had another visitor.  It
+was Kasteliz.
+
+"What can I do for you?" Swithin asked ironically.
+
+The Hungarian seemed suffering from excitement.  Why had Swithin left his
+charges the night before?  What excuse had he to make?  What sort of
+conduct did he call this?
+
+Swithin, very like a bull-dog at that moment, answered: What business was
+it of his?
+
+The business of a gentleman!  What right had the Englishman to pursue a
+young girl?
+
+"Pursue?" said Swithin; "you've been spying, then?"
+
+"Spying--I--Kasteliz--Maurus Johann--an insult!"
+
+"Insult!" sneered Swithin; "d'you mean to tell me you weren't in the
+street just now?"
+
+Kasteliz answered with a hiss, "If you do not leave the city I will make
+you, with my sword--do you understand?"
+
+"And if you do not leave my room I will throw you out of the window!"
+
+For some minutes Kasteliz spoke in pure Hungarian while Swithin waited,
+with a forced smile and a fixed look in his eye.  He did not understand
+Hungarian.
+
+"If you are still in the city to-morrow evening," said Kasteliz at last
+in English, "I will spit you in the street."
+
+Swithin turned to the window and watched his visitor's retiring back with
+a queer mixture of amusement, stubbornness, and anxiety. 'Well,' he
+thought, 'I suppose he'll run me through!'  The thought was unpleasant;
+and it kept recurring, but it only served to harden his determination.
+His head was busy with plans for seeing Rozsi; his blood on fire with the
+kisses she had given him.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+Swithin was long in deciding to go forth next day.  He had made up his
+mind not to go to Rozsi till five o'clock.  'Mustn't make myself too
+cheap,' he thought.  It was a little past that hour when he at last
+sallied out, and with a beating heart walked towards Boleskey's. He
+looked up at the window, more than half expecting to see Rozsi there; but
+she was not, and he noticed with faint surprise that the window was not
+open; the plants, too, outside, looked singularly arid.  He knocked.  No
+one came.  He beat a fierce tattoo.  At last the door was opened by a man
+with a reddish beard, and one of those sardonic faces only to be seen on
+shoemakers of Teutonic origin.
+
+"What do you want, making all this noise?" he asked in German.
+
+Swithin pointed up the stairs.  The man grinned, and shook his head.
+
+"I want to go up," said Swithin.
+
+The cobbler shrugged his shoulders, and Swithin rushed upstairs.  The
+rooms were empty.  The furniture remained, but all signs of life were
+gone.  One of his own bouquets, faded, stood in a glass; the ashes of a
+fire were barely cold; little scraps of paper strewed the hearth; already
+the room smelt musty.  He went into the bedrooms, and with a feeling of
+stupefaction stood staring at the girls' beds, side by side against the
+wall.  A bit of ribbon caught his eye; he picked it up and put it in his
+pocket--it was a piece of evidence that she had once existed.  By the
+mirror some pins were dropped about; a little powder had been spilled. 
+He looked at his own disquiet face and thought, 'I've been cheated!'
+
+The shoemaker's voice aroused him.  "Tausend Teufel!  Eilen Sie, nur!
+Zeit is Geld!  Kann nich' Langer warten!"  Slowly he descended.
+
+"Where have they gone?" asked Swithin painfully.  "A pound for every
+English word you speak.  A pound!" and he made an O with his fingers.
+
+The corners of the shoemaker's lips curled.  "Geld!  Mf!  Eilen Sie,
+nur!"
+
+But in Swithin a sullen anger had begun to burn.  "If you don't tell me,"
+he said, "it'll be the worse for you."
+
+"Sind ein komischer Kerl!" remarked the shoemaker.  "Hier ist meine
+Frau!"
+
+A battered-looking woman came hurrying down the passage, calling out in
+German, "Don't let him go!"
+
+With a snarling sound the shoemaker turned his back, and shambled off.
+
+The woman furtively thrust a letter into Swithin's hand, and furtively
+waited.
+
+The letter was from Rozsi.
+
+"Forgive me"--it ran--"that I leave you and do not say goodbye. To-day
+our father had the call from our dear Father-town so long awaited. In two
+hours we are ready.  I pray to the Virgin to keep you ever safe, and that
+you do not quite forget me.--Your unforgetting good friend, ROZSI"
+
+When Swithin read it his first sensation was that of a man sinking in a
+bog; then his obstinacy stiffened.  'I won't be done,' he thought. Taking
+out a sovereign he tried to make the woman comprehend that she could earn
+it, by telling him where they had gone.  He got her finally to write the
+words out in his pocket-book, gave her the sovereign, and hurried to the
+Goldene Alp, where there was a waiter who spoke English.  The translation
+given him was this:
+
+"At three o'clock they start in a carriage on the road to Linz--they have
+bad horses--the Herr also rides a white horse."
+
+Swithin at once hailed a carriage and started at full gallop on the road
+to Linz.  Outside the Mirabell Garden he caught sight of Kasteliz and
+grinned at him.  'I've sold him anyway,' he thought; 'for all their talk,
+they're no good, these foreigners!'
+
+His spirits rose, but soon fell again.  What chance had he of catching
+them?  They had three hours' start!  Still, the roads were heavy from the
+rain of the last two nights--they had luggage and bad horses; his own
+were good, his driver bribed--he might overtake them by ten o'clock!  But
+did he want to?  What a fool he had been not to bring his luggage; he
+would then have had a respectable position. What a brute he would look
+without a change of shirt, or anything to shave with!  He saw himself
+with horror, all bristly, and in soiled linen.  People would think him
+mad.  'I've given myself away,' flashed across him, 'what the devil can I
+say to them?' and he stared sullenly at the driver's back. He read
+Rozsi's letter again; it had a scent of her.  And in the growing
+darkness, jolted by the swinging of the carriage, he suffered tortures
+from his prudence, tortures from his passion.
+
+It grew colder and dark.  He turned the collar of his coat up to his
+ears.  He had visions of Piccadilly.  This wild-goose chase appeared
+suddenly a dangerous, unfathomable business.  Lights, fellowship,
+security!  'Never again!' he brooded; 'why won't they let me alone?' But
+it was not clear whether by 'they' he meant the conventions, the
+Boleskeys, his passions, or those haunting memories of Rozsi.  If he had
+only had a bag with him!  What was he going to say?  What was he going to
+get by this?  He received no answer to these questions.  The darkness
+itself was less obscure than his sensations.  From time to time he took
+out his watch.  At each village the driver made inquiries.  It was past
+ten when he stopped the carriage with a jerk. The stars were bright as
+steel, and by the side of the road a reedy lake showed in the moonlight.
+Swithin shivered.  A man on a horse had halted in the centre of the road.
+"Drive on!" called Swithin, with a stolid face.  It turned out to be
+Boleskey, who, on a gaunt white horse, looked like some winged creature.
+He stood where he could bar the progress of the carriage, holding out a
+pistol.
+
+'Theatrical beggar!' thought Swithin, with a nervous smile.  He made no
+sign of recognition.  Slowly Boleskey brought his lean horse up to the
+carriage.  When he saw who was within he showed astonishment and joy.
+
+"You?" he cried, slapping his hand on his attenuated thigh, and leaning
+over till his beard touched Swithin.  "You have come?  You followed us?"
+
+"It seems so," Swithin grunted out.
+
+"You throw in your lot with us.  Is it possible?  You--you are a
+knight-errant then!"
+
+"Good God!" said Swithin.  Boleskey, flogging his dejected steed,
+cantered forward in the moonlight.  He came back, bringing an old cloak,
+which he insisted on wrapping round Swithin's shoulders.  He handed him,
+too, a capacious flask.
+
+"How cold you look!" he said.  "Wonderful!  Wonderful! you English!" His
+grateful eyes never left Swithin for a moment.  They had come up to the
+heels of the other carriage now, but Swithin, hunched in the cloak, did
+not try to see what was in front of him.  To the bottom of his soul he
+resented the Hungarian's gratitude.  He remarked at last, with wasted
+irony:
+
+"You're in a hurry, it seems!"
+
+"If we had wings," Boleskey answered, "we would use them."
+
+"Wings!" muttered Swithin thickly; "legs are good enough for me."
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+Arrived at the inn where they were to pass the night, Swithin waited,
+hoping to get into the house without a "scene," but when at last he
+alighted the girls were in the doorway, and Margit greeted him with an
+admiring murmur, in which, however, he seemed to detect irony. Rozsi,
+pale and tremulous, with a half-scared look, gave him her hand, and,
+quickly withdrawing it, shrank behind her sister.  When they had gone up
+to their room Swithin sought Boleskey.  His spirits had risen remarkably.
+"Tell the landlord to get us supper," he said; "we'll crack a bottle to
+our luck."  He hurried on the landlord's preparations.  The window of
+the, room faced a wood, so near that he could almost touch the trees. The
+scent from the pines blew in on him.  He turned away from that scented
+darkness, and began to draw the corks of winebottles.  The sound seemed
+to conjure up Boleskey. He came in, splashed all over, smelling slightly
+of stables; soon after, Margit appeared, fresh and serene, but Rozsi did
+not come.
+
+"Where is your sister?" Swithin said.  Rozsi, it seemed, was tired. "It
+will do her good to eat," said Swithin.  And Boleskey, murmuring, "She
+must drink to our country," went out to summon her, Margit followed him,
+while Swithin cut up a chicken.  They came back without her.  She had "a
+megrim of the spirit."
+
+Swithin's face fell.  "Look here!" he said, "I'll go and try.  Don't wait
+for me."
+
+"Yes," answered Boleskey, sinking mournfully into a chair; "try, brother,
+try-by all means, try."
+
+Swithin walked down the corridor with an odd, sweet, sinking sensation in
+his chest; and tapped on Rozsi's door.  In a minute, she peeped forth,
+with her hair loose, and wondering eyes.
+
+"Rozsi," he stammered, "what makes you afraid of me, now?"
+
+She stared at him, but did not answer.
+
+"Why won't you come?"
+
+Still she did not speak, but suddenly stretched out to him her bare arm.
+Swithin pressed his face to it.  With a shiver, she whispered above him,
+"I will come," and gently shut the door.
+
+Swithin stealthily retraced his steps, and paused a minute outside the
+sitting-room to regain his self-control.
+
+The sight of Boleskey with a bottle in his hand steadied him.
+
+"She is coming," he said.  And very soon she did come, her thick hair
+roughly twisted in a plait.
+
+Swithin sat between the girls; but did not talk, for he was really
+hungry.  Boleskey too was silent, plunged in gloom; Rozsi was dumb;
+Margit alone chattered.
+
+"You will come to our Father-town?  We shall have things to show you.
+Rozsi, what things we will show him!"  Rozsi, with a little appealing
+movement of her hands, repeated, "What things we will show you!"  She
+seemed suddenly to find her voice, and with glowing cheeks, mouths full,
+and eyes bright as squirrels', they chattered reminiscences of the "dear
+Father-town," of "dear friends," of the "dear home."
+
+'A poor place!' Swithin could not help thinking.  This enthusiasm seemed
+to him common; but he was careful to assume a look of interest, feeding
+on the glances flashed at him from Rozsi's restless eyes.
+
+As the wine waned Boleskey grew more and more gloomy, but now and then a
+sort of gleaming flicker passed over his face.  He rose to his feet at
+last.
+
+"Let us not forget," he said, "that we go perhaps to ruin, to death; in
+the face of all this we go, because our country needs--in this there is
+no credit, neither to me nor to you, my daughters; but for this noble
+Englishman, what shall we say?  Give thanks to God for a great heart.  He
+comes--not for country, not for fame, not for money, but to help the weak
+and the oppressed.  Let us drink, then, to him; let us drink again and
+again to heroic Forsyte!"  In the midst of the dead silence, Swithin
+caught the look of suppliant mockery in Rozsi's eyes.  He glanced at the
+Hungarian.  Was he laughing at him?  But Boleskey, after drinking up his
+wine, had sunk again into his seat; and there suddenly, to the surprise
+of all, he began to snore. Margit rose and, bending over him like a
+mother, murmured: "He is tired--it is the ride!"  She raised him in her
+strong arms, and leaning on her shoulder Boleskey staggered from the
+room.  Swithin and Rozsi were left alone.  He slid his hand towards her
+hand that lay so close, on the rough table-cloth.  It seemed to await his
+touch.  Something gave way in him, and words came welling up; for the
+moment he forgot himself, forgot everything but that he was near her. Her
+head dropped on his shoulder, he breathed the perfume of her hair.
+"Good-night!" she whispered, and the whisper was like a kiss; yet before
+he could stop her she was gone.  Her footsteps died away in the passage,
+but Swithin sat gazing intently at a single bright drop of spilt wine
+quivering on the table's edge.  In that moment she, in her helplessness
+and emotion, was all in all to him--his life nothing; all the real
+things--his conventions, convictions, training, and himself--all seemed
+remote, behind a mist of passion and strange chivalry.  Carefully with a
+bit of bread he soaked up the bright drop; and suddenly he thought: 'This
+is tremendous!'  For a long time he stood there in the window, close to
+the dark pine-trees.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+In the early morning he awoke, full of the discomfort of this strange
+place and the medley of his dreams.  Lying, with his nose peeping over
+the quilt, he was visited by a horrible suspicion.  When he could bear it
+no longer, he started up in bed.  What if it were all a plot to get him
+to marry her?  The thought was treacherous, and inspired in him a faint
+disgust.  Still, she might be ignorant of it!  But was she so innocent?
+What innocent girl would have come to his room like that?  What innocent
+girl?  Her father, who pretended to be caring only for his country?  It
+was not probable that any man was such a fool; it was all part of the
+game-a scheming rascal!  Kasteliz, too--his threats!  They intended him
+to marry her!  And the horrid idea was strengthened by his reverence for
+marriage.  It was the proper, the respectable condition; he was genuinely
+afraid of this other sort of liaison--it was somehow too primitive!  And
+yet the thought of that marriage made his blood run cold. Considering
+that she had already yielded, it would be all the more monstrous!  With
+the cold, fatal clearness of the morning light he now for the first time
+saw his position in its full bearings.  And, like a fish pulled out of
+water, he gasped at what was disclosed.  Sullen resentment against this
+attempt to force him settled deep into his soul.
+
+He seated himself on the bed, holding his head in his hands, solemnly
+thinking out what such marriage meant.  In the first place it meant
+ridicule, in the next place ridicule, in the last place ridicule. She
+would eat chicken bones with her fingers--those fingers his lips still
+burned to kiss.  She would dance wildly with other men.  She would talk
+of her "dear Father-town," and all the time her eyes would look beyond
+him, some where or other into some d--d place he knew nothing of.  He
+sprang up and paced the room, and for a moment thought he would go mad.
+
+They meant him to marry her!  Even she--she meant him to marry her!  Her
+tantalising inscrutability; her sudden little tendernesses; her quick
+laughter; her swift, burning kisses; even the movements of her hands; her
+tears--all were evidence against her.  Not one of these things that
+Nature made her do counted on her side, but how they fanned his longing,
+his desire, and distress!  He went to the glass and tried to part his
+hair with his fingers, but being rather fine, it fell into lank streaks.
+There was no comfort to be got from it. He drew his muddy boots on.
+Suddenly he thought: 'If I could see her alone, I could arrive at some
+arrangement!'  Then, with a sense of stupefaction, he made the discovery
+that no arrangement could possibly be made that would not be dangerous,
+even desperate.  He seized his hat, and, like a rabbit that has been
+fired at, bolted from the room.  He plodded along amongst the damp woods
+with his head down, and resentment and dismay in his heart.  But, as the
+sun rose, and the air grew sweet with pine scent, he slowly regained a
+sort of equability.  After all, she had already yielded; it was not as
+if...!  And the tramp of his own footsteps lulled him into feeling that
+it would all come right.
+
+'Look at the thing practically,' he thought.  The faster he walked the
+firmer became his conviction that he could still see it through. He took
+out his watch--it was past seven--he began to hasten back. In the yard of
+the inn his driver was harnessing the horses; Swithin went up to him.
+
+"Who told you to put them in?" he asked.
+
+The driver answered, "Der Herr."
+
+Swithin turned away.  'In ten minutes,' he thought, 'I shall be in that
+carriage again, with this going on in my head!  Driving away from
+England, from all I'm used to-driving to-what?'  Could he face it?  Could
+he face all that he had been through that morning; face it day after day,
+night after night?  Looking up, he saw Rozsi at her open window gazing
+down at him; never had she looked sweeter, more roguish.  An inexplicable
+terror seized on him; he ran across the yard and jumped into his
+carriage.  "To Salzburg!" he cried; "drive on!"  And rattling out of the
+yard without a look behind, he flung a sovereign at the hostler.  Flying
+back along the road faster even than he had come, with pale face, and
+eyes blank and staring like a pug-dog's, Swithin spoke no single word;
+nor, till he had reached the door of his lodgings, did he suffer the
+driver to draw rein.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+Towards evening, five days later, Swithin, yellow and travel-worn, was
+ferried in a gondola to Danielli's Hotel.  His brother, who was on the
+steps, looked at him with an apprehensive curiosity.
+
+"Why, it's you!" he mumbled.  "So you've got here safe?"
+
+"Safe?" growled Swithin.
+
+James replied, "I thought you wouldn't leave your friends!"  Then, with a
+jerk of suspicion, "You haven't brought your friends?"
+
+"What friends?" growled Swithin.
+
+James changed the subject.  "You don't look the thing," he said.
+
+"Really!" muttered Swithin; "what's that to you?"
+
+He appeared at dinner that night, but fell asleep over his coffee.
+Neither Traquair nor James asked him any further question, nor did they
+allude to Salzburg; and during the four days which concluded the stay in
+Venice Swithin went about with his head up, but his eyes half-closed like
+a dazed man.  Only after they had taken ship at Genoa did he show signs
+of any healthy interest in life, when, finding that a man on board was
+perpetually strumming, he locked the piano up and pitched the key into
+the sea.
+
+That winter in London he behaved much as usual, but fits of moroseness
+would seize on him, during which he was not pleasant to approach.
+
+One evening when he was walking with a friend in Piccadilly, a girl
+coming from a side-street accosted him in German.  Swithin, after staring
+at her in silence for some seconds, handed her a five-pound note, to the
+great amazement of his friend; nor could he himself have explained the
+meaning of this freak of generosity.
+
+Of Rozsi he never heard again....
+
+This, then, was the substance of what he remembered as he lay ill in bed.
+Stretching out his hand he pressed the bell.  His valet appeared,
+crossing the room like a cat; a Swede, who had been with Swithin many
+years; a little man with a dried face and fierce moustache, morbidly
+sharp nerves, and a queer devotion to his master.
+
+Swithin made a feeble gesture.  "Adolf," he said, "I'm very bad."
+
+"Yes, sir!"
+
+"Why do you stand there like a cow?" asked Swithin; "can't you see I'm
+very bad?"
+
+"Yes, sir!"  The valet's face twitched as though it masked the dance of
+obscure emotions.
+
+"I shall feel better after dinner.  What time is it?"
+
+"Five o'clock."
+
+"I thought it was more.  The afternoons are very long."
+
+"Yes, sir!" Swithin sighed, as though he had expected the consolation of
+denial.
+
+"Very likely I shall have a nap.  Bring up hot water at half-past six and
+shave me before dinner."
+
+The valet moved towards the door.  Swithin raised himself.
+
+"What did Mr. James say to you?"
+
+"He said you ought to have another doctor; two doctors, he said, better
+than one.  He said, also, he would look in again on his way 'home.'"
+
+Swithin grunted, "Umph!  What else did he say?"
+
+"He said you didn't take care of yourself."
+
+Swithin glared.
+
+"Has anybody else been to see me?"
+
+The valet turned away his eyes.  "Mrs. Thomas Forsyte came last Monday
+fortnight."
+
+"How long have I been ill?"
+
+"Five weeks on Saturday."
+
+"Do you think I'm very bad?"
+
+Adolf's face was covered suddenly with crow's-feet.  "You have no
+business to ask me question like that!  I am not paid, sir, to answer
+question like that."
+
+Swithin said faintly: "You're a peppery fool!  Open a bottle of
+champagne!"
+
+Adolf took a bottle of champagne--from a cupboard and held nippers to it. 
+He fixed his eyes on Swithin.  "The doctor said--"
+
+"Open the bottle!"
+
+"It is not--"
+
+"Open the bottle--or I give you warning."
+
+Adolf removed the cork.  He wiped a glass elaborately, filled it, and
+bore it scrupulously to the bedside.  Suddenly twirling his moustaches,
+he wrung his hands, and burst out: "It is poison."
+
+Swithin grinned faintly.  "You foreign fool!" he said.  "Get out!"
+
+The valet vanished.
+
+'He forgot himself!' thought Swithin.  Slowly he raised the glass, slowly
+put it back, and sank gasping on his pillows.  Almost at once he fell
+asleep.
+
+He dreamed that he was at his club, sitting after dinner in the crowded
+smoking-room, with its bright walls and trefoils of light. It was there
+that he sat every evening, patient, solemn, lonely, and sometimes fell
+asleep, his square, pale old face nodding to one side. He dreamed that he
+was gazing at the picture over the fireplace, of an old statesman with a
+high collar, supremely finished face, and sceptical eyebrows--the
+picture, smooth, and reticent as sealing-wax, of one who seemed for ever
+exhaling the narrow wisdom of final judgments.  All round him, his fellow
+members were chattering.  Only he himself, the old sick member, was
+silent.  If fellows only knew what it was like to sit by yourself and
+feel ill all the time!  What they were saying he had heard a hundred
+times.  They were talking of investments, of cigars, horses, actresses,
+machinery.  What was that?  A foreign patent for cleaning boilers?  There
+was no such thing; boilers couldn't be cleaned, any fool knew that!  If
+an Englishman couldn't clean a boiler, no foreigner could clean one.  He
+appealed to the old statesman's eyes.  But for once those eyes seemed
+hesitating, blurred, wanting in finality.  They vanished.  In their place
+were Rozsi's little deep-set eyes, with their wide and far-off look; and
+as he gazed they seemed to grow bright as steel, and to speak to him.
+Slowly the whole face grew to be there, floating on the dark background
+of the picture; it was pink, aloof, unfathomable, enticing, with its
+fluffy hair and quick lips, just as he had last seen it.  "Are you
+looking for something?" she seemed to say: "I could show you."
+
+"I have everything safe enough," answered Swithin, and in his sleep he
+groaned.
+
+He felt the touch of fingers on his forehead.  'I'm dreaming,' he thought
+in his dream.
+
+She had vanished; and far away, from behind the picture, came a sound of
+footsteps.
+
+Aloud, in his sleep, Swithin muttered: "I've missed it."
+
+Again he heard the rustling of those light footsteps, and close in his
+ear a sound, like a sob.  He awoke; the sob was his own.  Great drops of
+perspiration stood on his forehead.  'What is it?' he thought; 'what have
+I lost?'  Slowly his mind travelled over his investments; he could not
+think of any single one that was unsafe. What was it, then, that he had
+lost?  Struggling on his pillows, he clutched the wine-glass.  His lips
+touched the wine.  'This isn't the "Heidseck"!' he thought angrily, and
+before the reality of that displeasure all the dim vision passed away.
+But as he bent to drink, something snapped, and, with a sigh, Swithin
+Forsyte died above the bubbles....
+
+When James Forsyte came in again on his way home, the valet, trembling
+took his hat and stick.
+
+"How's your master?"
+
+"My master is dead, sir!"
+
+"Dead!  He can't be!  I left him safe an hour ago."
+
+On the bed Swithin's body was doubled like a sack; his hand still grasped
+the glass.
+
+James Forsyte paused.  "Swithin!" he said, and with his hand to his ear
+he waited for an answer; but none came, and slowly in the glass a last
+bubble rose and burst.
+
+December 1900.
+
+
+
+
+To
+
+MY SISTER MABEL EDITH REYNOLDS
+
+
+
+
+THE SILENCE
+
+I
+
+In a car of the Naples express a mining expert was diving into a bag for
+papers.  The strong sunlight showed the fine wrinkles on his brown face
+and the shabbiness of his short, rough beard.  A newspaper cutting
+slipped from his fingers; he picked it up, thinking: 'How the dickens did
+that get in here?'  It was from a colonial print of three years back; and
+he sat staring, as if in that forlorn slip of yellow paper he had
+encountered some ghost from his past.
+
+These were the words he read: "We hope that the setback to civilisation,
+the check to commerce and development, in this promising centre of our
+colony may be but temporary; and that capital may again come to the
+rescue.  Where one man was successful, others should surely not fail?  We
+are convinced that it only needs...." And the last words: "For what can
+be sadder than to see the forest spreading its lengthening shadows, like
+symbols of defeat, over the untenanted dwellings of men; and where was
+once the merry chatter of human voices, to pass by in the silence...."
+
+On an afternoon, thirteen years before, he had been in the city of
+London, at one of those emporiums where mining experts perch, before
+fresh flights, like sea-gulls on some favourite rock.  A clerk said to
+him: "Mr. Scorrier, they are asking for you downstairs--Mr. Hemmings of
+the New Colliery Company."
+
+Scorrier took up the speaking tube.  "Is that you, Mr. Scorrier?  I hope
+you are very well, sir, I am--Hemmings--I am--coming up."
+
+In two minutes he appeared, Christopher Hemmings, secretary of the New
+Colliery Company, known in the City-behind his back--as
+"Down-by-the-starn" Hemmings.  He grasped Scorrier's hand--the gesture
+was deferential, yet distinguished.  Too handsome, too capable, too
+important, his figure, the cut of his iron-grey beard, and his
+intrusively fine eyes, conveyed a continual courteous invitation to
+inspect their infallibilities.  He stood, like a City "Atlas," with his
+legs apart, his coat-tails gathered in his hands, a whole globe of
+financial matters deftly balanced on his nose.  "Look at me!" he seemed
+to say.  "It's heavy, but how easily I carry it.  Not the man to let it
+down, Sir!"
+
+"I hope I see you well, Mr. Scorrier," he began.  "I have come round
+about our mine.  There is a question of a fresh field being opened
+up--between ourselves, not before it's wanted.  I find it difficult to
+get my Board to take a comprehensive view.  In short, the question is:
+Are you prepared to go out for us, and report on it?  The fees will be
+all right."  His left eye closed.  "Things have been very--er--dicky; we
+are going to change our superintendent.  I have got little Pippin--you
+know little Pippin?"
+
+Scorrier murmured, with a feeling of vague resentment: "Oh yes.  He's not
+a mining man!"
+
+Hemmings replied: "We think that he will do."  'Do you?' thought
+Scorrier; 'that's good of you!'
+
+He had not altogether shaken off a worship he had felt for Pippin
+--"King" Pippin he was always called, when they had been boys at the
+Camborne Grammar-school.  "King" Pippin! the boy with the bright colour,
+very bright hair, bright, subtle, elusive eyes, broad shoulders, little
+stoop in the neck, and a way of moving it quickly like a bird; the boy
+who was always at the top of everything, and held his head as if looking
+for something further to be the top of. He remembered how one day "King"
+Pippin had said to him in his soft way, "Young Scorrie, I'll do your sums
+for you"; and in answer to his dubious, "Is that all right?" had replied,
+"Of course--I don't want you to get behind that beast Blake, he's not a
+Cornishman" (the beast Blake was an Irishman not yet twelve).  He
+remembered, too, an occasion when "King" Pippin with two other boys
+fought six louts and got a licking, and how Pippin sat for half an hour
+afterwards, all bloody, his head in his hands, rocking to and fro, and
+weeping tears of mortification; and how the next day he had sneaked off
+by himself, and, attacking the same gang, got frightfully mauled a second
+time.
+
+Thinking of these things he answered curtly: "When shall I start?"
+
+"Down-by-the-starn" Hemmings replied with a sort of fearful
+sprightliness: "There's a good fellow!  I will send instructions; so glad
+to see you well."  Conferring on Scorrier a look--fine to the verge of
+vulgarity--he withdrew.  Scorrier remained, seated; heavy with
+insignificance and vague oppression, as if he had drunk a tumbler of
+sweet port.
+
+A week later, in company with Pippin, he was on board a liner.
+
+The "King" Pippin of his school-days was now a man of forty-four.  He
+awakened in Scorrier the uncertain wonder with which men look backward at
+their uncomplicated teens; and staggering up and down the decks in the
+long Atlantic roll, he would steal glances at his companion, as if he
+expected to find out from them something about himself.  Pippin had still
+"King" Pippin's bright, fine hair, and dazzling streaks in his short
+beard; he had still a bright colour and suave voice, and what there were
+of wrinkles suggested only subtleties of humour and ironic sympathy. From
+the first, and apparently without negotiation, he had his seat at the
+captain's table, to which on the second day Scorrier too found himself
+translated, and had to sit, as he expressed it ruefully, "among the
+big-wigs."
+
+During the voyage only one incident impressed itself on Scorrier's
+memory, and that for a disconcerting reason.  In the forecastle were the
+usual complement of emigrants.  One evening, leaning across the rail to
+watch them, he felt a touch on his arm; and, looking round, saw Pippin's
+face and beard quivering in the lamplight.  "Poor people!" he said.  The
+idea flashed on Scorrier that he was like some fine wire sound-recording
+instrument.
+
+'Suppose he were to snap!' he thought.  Impelled to justify this fancy,
+he blurted out: "You're a nervous chap.  The way you look at those poor
+devils!"
+
+Pippin hustled him along the deck.  "Come, come, you took me off my
+guard," he murmured, with a sly, gentle smile, "that's not fair."
+
+He found it a continual source of wonder that Pippin, at his age, should
+cut himself adrift from the associations and security of London life to
+begin a new career in a new country with dubious prospect of success.  'I
+always heard he was doing well all round,' he thought; 'thinks he'll
+better himself, perhaps.  He's a true Cornishman.'
+
+The morning of arrival at the mines was grey and cheerless; a cloud of
+smoke, beaten down by drizzle, clung above the forest; the wooden houses
+straggled dismally in the unkempt semblance of a street, against a
+background of endless, silent woods.  An air of blank discouragement
+brooded over everything; cranes jutted idly over empty trucks; the long
+jetty oozed black slime; miners with listless faces stood in the rain;
+dogs fought under their very legs.  On the way to the hotel they met no
+one busy or serene except a Chinee who was polishing a dish-cover.
+
+The late superintendent, a cowed man, regaled them at lunch with his
+forebodings; his attitude toward the situation was like the food, which
+was greasy and uninspiring.  Alone together once more, the two newcomers
+eyed each other sadly.
+
+"Oh dear!" sighed Pippin.  "We must change all this, Scorrier; it will
+never do to go back beaten.  I shall not go back beaten; you will have to
+carry me on my shield;" and slyly: "Too heavy, eh?  Poor fellow!"  Then
+for a long time he was silent, moving his lips as if adding up the cost.
+Suddenly he sighed, and grasping Scorrier's arm, said: "Dull, aren't I?
+What will you do?  Put me in your report, 'New Superintendent--sad, dull
+dog--not a word to throw at a cat!'" And as if the new task were too much
+for him, he sank back in thought.  The last words he said to Scorrier
+that night were: "Very silent here.  It's hard to believe one's here for
+life.  But I feel I am.  Mustn't be a coward, though!" and brushing his
+forehead, as though to clear from it a cobweb of faint thoughts, he
+hurried off.
+
+Scorrier stayed on the veranda smoking.  The rain had ceased, a few stars
+were burning dimly; even above the squalor of the township the scent of
+the forests, the interminable forests, brooded.  There sprang into his
+mind the memory of a picture from one of his children's fairy books--the
+picture of a little bearded man on tiptoe, with poised head and a great
+sword, slashing at the castle of a giant.  It reminded him of Pippin. 
+And suddenly, even to Scorrier--whose existence was one long encounter
+with strange places--the unseen presence of those woods, their heavy,
+healthy scent, the little sounds, like squeaks from tiny toys, issuing
+out of the gloomy silence, seemed intolerable, to be shunned, from the
+mere instinct of self-preservation.  He thought of the evening he had
+spent in the bosom of "Down-by-the-starn" Hemmings' family, receiving his
+last instructions--the security of that suburban villa, its discouraging
+gentility; the superior acidity of the Miss Hemmings; the noble names of
+large contractors, of company promoters, of a peer, dragged with the
+lightness of gun-carriages across the conversation; the autocracy of
+Hemmings, rasped up here and there, by some domestic contradiction.  It
+was all so nice and safe--as if the whole thing had been fastened to an
+anchor sunk beneath the pink cabbages of the drawing-room carpet! 
+Hemmings, seeing him off the premises, had said with secrecy: "Little
+Pippin will have a good thing.  We shall make his salary L----.  He'll be
+a great man-quite a king.  Ha-ha!"
+
+Scorrier shook the ashes from his pipe.  'Salary!' he thought, straining
+his ears; 'I wouldn't take the place for five thousand pounds a year. And
+yet it's a fine country,' and with ironic violence he repeated, 'a dashed
+fine country!'
+
+Ten days later, having finished his report on the new mine, he stood on
+the jetty waiting to go abroad the steamer for home.
+
+"God bless you!" said Pippin.  "Tell them they needn't be afraid; and
+sometimes when you're at home think of me, eh?"
+
+Scorrier, scrambling on board, had a confused memory of tears in his
+eyes, and a convulsive handshake.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+It was eight years before the wheels of life carried Scorrier back to
+that disenchanted spot, and this time not on the business of the New
+Colliery Company.  He went for another company with a mine some thirty
+miles away.  Before starting, however, he visited Hemmings. The secretary
+was surrounded by pigeon-holes and finer than ever; Scorrier blinked in
+the full radiance of his courtesy.  A little man with eyebrows full of
+questions, and a grizzled beard, was seated in an arm-chair by the fire.
+
+"You know Mr. Booker," said Hemmings--"one of my directors.  This is Mr.
+Scorrier, sir--who went out for us."
+
+These sentences were murmured in a way suggestive of their uncommon
+value.  The director uncrossed his legs, and bowed.  Scorrier also bowed,
+and Hemmings, leaning back, slowly developed the full resources of his
+waistcoat.
+
+"So you are going out again, Scorrier, for the other side?  I tell Mr.
+Scorrier, sir, that he is going out for the enemy.  Don't find them a
+mine as good as you found us, there's a good man."
+
+The little director asked explosively: "See our last dividend?  Twenty
+per cent; eh, what?"
+
+Hemmings moved a finger, as if reproving his director.  "I will not
+disguise from you," he murmured, "that there is friction between us
+and--the enemy; you know our position too well--just a little too well,
+eh?  'A nod's as good as a wink.'"
+
+His diplomatic eyes flattered Scorrier, who passed a hand over his
+brow--and said: "Of course."
+
+"Pippin doesn't hit it off with them.  Between ourselves, he's a leetle
+too big for his boots.  You know what it is when a man in his position
+gets a sudden rise!"
+
+Scorrier caught himself searching on the floor for a sight of Hemmings'
+boots; he raised his eyes guiltily.  The secretary continued: "We don't
+hear from him quite as often as we should like, in fact."
+
+To his own surprise Scorrier murmured: "It's a silent place!"
+
+The secretary smiled.  "Very good!  Mr. Scorrier says, sir, it's a silent
+place; ha-ha!  I call that very good!"  But suddenly a secret irritation
+seemed to bubble in him; he burst forth almost violently: "He's no
+business to let it affect him; now, has he?  I put it to you, Mr.
+Scorrier, I put it to you, sir!"
+
+But Scorrier made no reply, and soon after took his leave: he had been
+asked to convey a friendly hint to Pippin that more frequent letters
+would be welcomed.  Standing in the shadow of the Royal Exchange, waiting
+to thread his way across, he thought: 'So you must have noise, must
+you--you've got some here, and to spare....'
+
+On his arrival in the new world he wired to Pippin asking if he might
+stay with him on the way up country, and received the answer: "Be sure
+and come."
+
+A week later he arrived (there was now a railway) and found Pippin
+waiting for him in a phaeton.  Scorrier would not have known the place
+again; there was a glitter over everything, as if some one had touched it
+with a wand.  The tracks had given place to roads, running firm,
+straight, and black between the trees under brilliant sunshine; the
+wooden houses were all painted; out in the gleaming harbour amongst the
+green of islands lay three steamers, each with a fleet of busy boats; and
+here and there a tiny yacht floated, like a sea-bird on the water. Pippin
+drove his long-tailed horses furiously; his eyes brimmed with subtle
+kindness, as if according Scorrier a continual welcome.  During the two
+days of his stay Scorrier never lost that sense of glamour.  He had every
+opportunity for observing the grip Pippin had over everything. The wooden
+doors and walls of his bungalow kept out no sounds.  He listened to
+interviews between his host and all kinds and conditions of men.  The
+voices of the visitors would rise at first--angry, discontented,
+matter-of-fact, with nasal twang, or guttural drawl; then would come the
+soft patter of the superintendent's feet crossing and recrossing the
+room.  Then a pause, the sound of hard breathing, and quick
+questions--the visitor's voice again, again the patter, and Pippin's
+ingratiating but decisive murmurs.  Presently out would come the visitor
+with an expression on his face which Scorrier soon began to know by
+heart, a kind of pleased, puzzled, helpless look, which seemed to say,
+"I've been done, I know--I'll give it to myself when I'm round the
+corner."
+
+Pippin was full of wistful questions about "home."  He wanted to talk of
+music, pictures, plays, of how London looked, what new streets there
+were, and, above all, whether Scorrier had been lately in the West
+Country.  He talked of getting leave next winter, asked whether Scorrier
+thought they would "put up with him at home"; then, with the agitation
+which had alarmed Scorrier before, he added: "Ah! but I'm not fit for
+home now.  One gets spoiled; it's big and silent here. What should I go
+back to?  I don't seem to realise."
+
+Scorrier thought of Hemmings.  "'Tis a bit cramped there, certainly," he
+muttered.
+
+Pippin went on as if divining his thoughts.  "I suppose our friend
+Hemmings would call me foolish; he's above the little weaknesses of
+imagination, eh?  Yes; it's silent here.  Sometimes in the evening I
+would give my head for somebody to talk to--Hemmings would never give his
+head for anything, I think.  But all the same, I couldn't face them at
+home.  Spoiled!"  And slyly he murmured: "What would the Board say if
+they could hear that?"
+
+Scorrier blurted out: "To tell you the truth, they complain a little of
+not hearing from you."
+
+Pippin put out a hand, as if to push something away.  "Let them try the
+life here!" he broke out; "it's like sitting on a live volcano--what
+with our friends, 'the enemy,' over there; the men; the American
+competition.  I keep it going, Scorrier, but at what a cost--at what a
+cost!"
+
+"But surely--letters?"
+
+Pippin only answered: "I try--I try!"
+
+Scorrier felt with remorse and wonder that he had spoken the truth. The
+following day he left for his inspection, and while in the camp of "the
+enemy" much was the talk he heard of Pippin.
+
+"Why!" said his host, the superintendent, a little man with a face
+somewhat like an owl's, "d'you know the name they've given him down in
+the capital--'the King'--good, eh?  He's made them 'sit up' all along
+this coast.  I like him well enough--good--hearted man, shocking nervous;
+but my people down there can't stand him at any price. Sir, he runs this
+colony.  You'd think butter wouldn't melt in that mouth of his; but he
+always gets his way; that's what riles 'em so; that and the success he's
+making of his mine.  It puzzles me; you'd think he'd only be too glad of
+a quiet life, a man with his nerves.  But no, he's never happy unless
+he's fighting, something where he's got a chance to score a victory.  I
+won't say he likes it, but, by Jove, it seems he's got to do it.  Now
+that's funny!  I'll tell you one thing, though shouldn't be a bit
+surprised if he broke down some day; and I'll tell you another," he added
+darkly, "he's sailing very near the wind, with those large contracts that
+he makes. I wouldn't care to take his risks.  Just let them have a
+strike, or something that shuts them down for a spell--and mark my words,
+sir--it'll be all up with them. But," he concluded confidentially, "I
+wish I had his hold on the men; it's a great thing in this country. Not
+like home, where you can go round a corner and get another gang. You have
+to make the best you can out of the lot you have; you won't, get another
+man for love or money without you ship him a few hundred miles."  And
+with a frown he waved his arm over the forests to indicate the barrenness
+of the land.
+
+Scorrier finished his inspection and went on a shooting trip into the
+forest.  His host met him on his return.  "Just look at this!" he said,
+holding out a telegram.  "Awful, isn't it?" His face expressed a profound
+commiseration, almost ludicrously mixed with the ashamed contentment that
+men experience at the misfortunes of an enemy.
+
+The telegram, dated the day before, ran thus "Frightful explosion New
+Colliery this morning, great loss of life feared."
+
+Scorrier had the bewildered thought: 'Pippin will want me now.'
+
+He took leave of his host, who called after him: "You'd better wait for a
+steamer!  It's a beastly drive!"
+
+Scorrier shook his head.  All night, jolting along a rough track cut
+through the forest, he thought of Pippin.  The other miseries of this
+calamity at present left him cold; he barely thought of the smothered
+men; but Pippin's struggle, his lonely struggle with this hydra-headed
+monster, touched him very nearly.  He fell asleep and dreamed of watching
+Pippin slowly strangled by a snake; the agonised, kindly, ironic face
+peeping out between two gleaming coils was so horribly real, that he
+awoke.  It was the moment before dawn: pitch-black branches barred the
+sky; with every jolt of the wheels the gleams from the lamps danced,
+fantastic and intrusive, round ferns and tree-stems, into the cold heart
+of the forest.  For an hour or more Scorrier tried to feign sleep, and
+hide from the stillness, and overmastering gloom of these great woods.
+Then softly a whisper of noises stole forth, a stir of light, and the
+whole slow radiance of the morning glory.  But it brought no warmth; and
+Scorrier wrapped himself closer in his cloak, feeling as though old age
+had touched him.
+
+Close on noon he reached the township.  Glamour seemed still to hover
+over it.  He drove on to the mine.  The winding-engine was turning, the
+pulley at the top of the head-gear whizzing round; nothing looked
+unusual.  'Some mistake!' he thought.  He drove to the mine buildings,
+alighted, and climbed to the shaft head.  Instead of the usual rumbling
+of the trolleys, the rattle of coal discharged over the screens, there
+was silence.  Close by, Pippin himself was standing, smirched with dirt.
+The cage, coming swift and silent from below, shot open its doors with a
+sharp rattle.  Scorrier bent forward to look.  There lay a dead man, with
+a smile on his face.
+
+"How many?" he whispered.
+
+Pippin answered: "Eighty-four brought up--forty-seven still below," and
+entered the man's name in a pocket-book.
+
+An older man was taken out next; he too was smiling--there had been
+vouchsafed to him, it seemed, a taste of more than earthly joy.  The
+sight of those strange smiles affected Scorrier more than all the anguish
+or despair he had seen scored on the faces of other dead men. He asked an
+old miner how long Pippin had been at work.
+
+"Thirty hours.  Yesterday he wer' below; we had to nigh carry mun up at
+last.  He's for goin' down again, but the chaps won't lower mun;" the old
+man gave a sigh.  "I'm waiting for my boy to come up, I am."
+
+Scorrier waited too--there was fascination about those dead, smiling
+faces.  The rescuing of these men who would never again breathe went on
+and on.  Scorrier grew sleepy in the sun.  The old miner woke him,
+saying: "Rummy stuff this here chokedamp; see, they all dies drunk!" The
+very next to be brought up was the chief engineer.  Scorrier had known
+him quite well, one of those Scotsmen who are born at the age of forty
+and remain so all their lives.  His face--the only one that wore no
+smile--seemed grieving that duty had deprived it of that last luxury. 
+With wide eyes and drawn lips he had died protesting.
+
+Late in the afternoon the old miner touched Scorrier's arm, and said:
+"There he is--there's my boy!"  And he departed slowly, wheeling the body
+on a trolley.
+
+As the sun set, the gang below came up.  No further search was possible
+till the fumes had cleared.  Scorrier heard one man say: "There's some
+we'll never get; they've had sure burial"
+
+Another answered him: "'Tis a gude enough bag for me!"  They passed him,
+the whites of their eyes gleaming out of faces black as ink.
+
+Pippin drove him home at a furious pace, not uttering a single word. As
+they turned into the main street, a young woman starting out before the
+horses obliged Pippin to pull up.  The glance he bent on Scorrier was
+ludicrously prescient of suffering.  The woman asked for her husband.
+Several times they were stopped thus by women asking for their husbands
+or sons.  "This is what I have to go through," Pippin whispered.
+
+When they had eaten, he said to Scorrier: "It was kind of you to come and
+stand by me!  They take me for a god, poor creature that I am. But shall
+I ever get the men down again?  Their nerve's shaken.  I wish I were one
+of those poor lads, to die with a smile like that!"
+
+Scorrier felt the futility of his presence.  On Pippin alone must be the
+heat and burden.  Would he stand under it, or would the whole thing come
+crashing to the ground?  He urged him again and again to rest, but Pippin
+only gave him one of his queer smiles.  "You don't know how strong I am!"
+he said.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+He himself slept heavily; and, waking at dawn, went down.  Pippin was
+still at his desk; his pen had dropped; he was asleep.  The ink was wet;
+Scorrier's eye caught the opening words:
+
+"GENTLEMEN,--Since this happened I have not slept...."
+
+He stole away again with a sense of indignation that no one could be
+dragged in to share that fight.  The London Board-room rose before his
+mind.  He imagined the portentous gravity of Hemmings; his face and voice
+and manner conveying the impression that he alone could save the
+situation; the six directors, all men of commonsense and certainly
+humane, seated behind large turret-shaped inkpots; the concern and
+irritation in their voices, asking how it could have happened; their
+comments: "An awful thing!"  "I suppose Pippin is doing the best he can!"
+"Wire him on no account to leave the mine idle!"  "Poor devils!"  "A
+fund?  Of course, what ought we to give?" He had a strong conviction that
+nothing of all this would disturb the commonsense with which they would
+go home and eat their mutton.  A good thing too; the less it was taken to
+heart the better!  But Scorrier felt angry.  The fight was so unfair!  A
+fellow all nerves--with not a soul to help him!  Well, it was his own
+lookout!  He had chosen to centre it all in himself, to make himself its
+very soul. If he gave way now, the ship must go down!  By a thin thread,
+Scorrier's hero-worship still held.  'Man against nature,' he thought, 'I
+back the man.'  The struggle in which he was so powerless to give aid,
+became intensely personal to him, as if he had engaged his own good faith
+therein.
+
+The next day they went down again to the pit-head; and Scorrier himself
+descended.  The fumes had almost cleared, but there were some places
+which would never be reached.  At the end of the day all but four bodies
+had been recovered.  "In the day o' judgment," a miner said, "they
+four'll come out of here."  Those unclaimed bodies haunted Scorrier.  He
+came on sentences of writing, where men waiting to be suffocated had
+written down their feelings.  In one place, the hour, the word "Sleepy,"
+and a signature.  In another, "A. F.--done for."  When he came up at last
+Pippin was still waiting, pocket-book in hand; they again departed at a
+furious pace.
+
+Two days later Scorrier, visiting the shaft, found its neighbourhood
+deserted--not a living thing of any sort was there except one Chinaman
+poking his stick into the rubbish.  Pippin was away down the coast
+engaging an engineer; and on his return, Scorrier had not the heart to
+tell him of the desertion.  He was spared the effort, for Pippin said:
+"Don't be afraid--you've got bad news?  The men have gone on strike."
+
+Scorrier sighed.  "Lock, stock, and barrel"
+
+"I thought so--see what I have here!" He put before Scorrier a telegram:
+
+"At all costs keep working--fatal to stop--manage this somehow.
+--HEMMINGS."
+
+Breathing quickly, he added: "As if I didn't know! 'Manage this
+somehow'--a little hard!"
+
+"What's to be done?" asked Scorrier.
+
+"You see I am commanded!" Pippin answered bitterly.  "And they're quite
+right; we must keep working--our contracts!  Now I'm down--not a soul
+will spare me!"
+
+The miners' meeting was held the following day on the outskirts of the
+town.  Pippin had cleared the place to make a public recreation-ground--a
+sort of feather in the company's cap; it was now to be the spot whereon
+should be decided the question of the company's life or death.
+
+The sky to the west was crossed by a single line of cloud like a bar of
+beaten gold; tree shadows crept towards the groups of men; the evening
+savour, that strong fragrance of the forest, sweetened the air.  The
+miners stood all round amongst the burnt tree-stumps, cowed and sullen.
+They looked incapable of movement or expression.  It was this dumb
+paralysis that frightened Scorrier.  He watched Pippin speaking from his
+phaeton, the butt of all those sullen, restless eyes.  Would he last out?
+Would the wires hold?  It was like the finish of a race.  He caught a
+baffled look on Pippin's face, as if he despaired of piercing that
+terrible paralysis.  The men's eyes had begun to wander.  'He's lost his
+hold,' thought Scorrier; 'it's all up!'
+
+A miner close beside him muttered: "Look out!"
+
+Pippin was leaning forward, his voice had risen, the words fell like a
+whiplash on the faces of the crowd: "You shan't throw me over; do you
+think I'll give up all I've done for you?  I'll make you the first power
+in the colony!  Are you turning tail at the first shot?  You're a set of
+cowards, my lads!"
+
+Each man round Scorrier was listening with a different motion of the
+hands--one rubbed them, one clenched them, another moved his closed fist,
+as if stabbing some one in the back.  A grisly-bearded, beetle-browed,
+twinkling-eyed old Cornishman muttered: "A'hm not troublin' about that." 
+It seemed almost as if Pippin's object was to get the men to kill him;
+they had gathered closer, crouching for a rush. Suddenly Pippin's voice
+dropped to a whisper: "I'm disgraced Men, are you going back on me?"
+
+The old miner next Scorrier called out suddenly: "Anny that's Cornishmen
+here to stand by the superintendent?"  A group drew together, and with
+murmurs and gesticulation the meeting broke up.
+
+In the evening a deputation came to visit Pippin; and all night long
+their voices and the superintendent's footsteps could be heard.  In the
+morning, Pippin went early to the mine.  Before supper the deputation
+came again; and again Scorrier had to listen hour after hour to the sound
+of voices and footsteps till he fell asleep.  Just before dawn he was
+awakened by a light.  Pippin stood at his bedside. "The men go down
+to-morrow," he said: "What did I tell you?  Carry me home on my shield,
+eh?"
+
+In a week the mine was in full work.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+Two years later, Scorrier heard once more of Pippin.  A note from
+Hemmings reached him asking if he could make it convenient to attend
+their Board meeting the following Thursday.  He arrived rather before the
+appointed time.  The secretary received him, and, in answer to inquiry,
+said: "Thank you, we are doing well--between ourselves, we are doing very
+well."
+
+"And Pippin?"
+
+The secretary frowned.  "Ah, Pippin!  We asked you to come on his
+account. Pippin is giving us a lot of trouble.  We have not had a single
+line from him for just two years!"  He spoke with such a sense of
+personal grievance that Scorrier felt quite sorry for him.  "Not a single
+line," said Hemmings, "since that explosion--you were there at the time,
+I remember!  It makes it very awkward; I call it personal to me."
+
+"But how--" Scorrier began.
+
+"We get--telegrams.  He writes to no one, not even to his family. And
+why?  Just tell me why?  We hear of him; he's a great nob out there.
+Nothing's done in the colony without his finger being in the pie.  He
+turned out the last Government because they wouldn't grant us an
+extension for our railway--shows he can't be a fool.  Besides, look at
+our balance-sheet!"
+
+It turned out that the question on which Scorrier's opinion was desired
+was, whether Hemmings should be sent out to see what was the matter with
+the superintendent.  During the discussion which. ensued, he was an
+unwilling listener to strictures on Pippin's silence.  "The explosion,"
+he muttered at last, "a very trying time!"
+
+Mr. Booker pounced on him.  "A very trying time!  So it was--to all of
+us.  But what excuse is that--now, Mr. Scorrier, what excuse is that?"
+
+Scorrier was obliged to admit that it was none.
+
+"Business is business--eh, what?"
+
+Scorrier, gazing round that neat Board-room, nodded.  A deaf director,
+who had not spoken for some months, said with sudden fierceness: "It's
+disgraceful!"  He was obviously letting off the fume of long-unuttered
+disapprovals.  One perfectly neat, benevolent old fellow, however, who
+had kept his hat on, and had a single vice--that of coming to the
+Board-room with a brown paper parcel tied up with string--murmured: "We
+must make all allowances," and started an anecdote about his youth. He
+was gently called to order by his secretary.  Scorrier was asked for his
+opinion.  He looked at Hemmings.  "My importance is concerned," was
+written all over the secretary's face.  Moved by an impulse of loyalty to
+Pippin, Scorrier answered, as if it were all settled: "Well, let me know
+when you are starting, Hemmings--I should like the trip myself."
+
+As he was going out, the chairman, old Jolyon Forsyte, with a grave,
+twinkling look at Hemmings, took him aside.  "Glad to hear you say that
+about going too, Mr. Scorrier; we must be careful--Pippin's such a good
+fellow, and so sensitive; and our friend there--a bit heavy in the hand,
+um?"
+
+Scorrier did in fact go out with Hemmings.  The secretary was sea-sick,
+and his prostration, dignified but noisy, remained a memory for ever; it
+was sonorous and fine--the prostration of superiority; and the way in
+which he spoke of it, taking casual acquaintances into the caves of his
+experience, was truly interesting.
+
+Pippin came down to the capital to escort them, provided for their
+comforts as if they had been royalty, and had a special train to take
+them to the mines.
+
+He was a little stouter, brighter of colour, greyer of beard, more
+nervous perhaps in voice and breathing.  His manner to Hemmings was full
+of flattering courtesy; but his sly, ironical glances played on the
+secretary's armour like a fountain on a hippopotamus.  To Scorrier,
+however, he could not show enough affection:
+
+The first evening, when Hemmings had gone to his room, he jumped up like
+a boy out of school.  "So I'm going to get a wigging," he said; "I
+suppose I deserve it; but if you knew--if you only knew...!  Out here
+they've nicknamed me 'the King'--they say I rule the colony. It's myself
+that I can't rule"; and with a sudden burst of passion such as Scorrier
+had never seen in him: "Why did they send this man here?  What can he know
+about the things that I've been through?"  In a moment he calmed down
+again.  "There! this is very stupid; worrying you like this!" and with a
+long, kind look into Scorrier's face, he hustled him off to bed.
+
+Pippin did not break out again, though fire seemed to smoulder behind the
+bars of his courteous irony.  Intuition of danger had evidently smitten
+Hemmings, for he made no allusion to the object of his visit. There were
+moments when Scorrier's common-sense sided with Hemmings--these were
+moments when the secretary was not present.
+
+'After all,' he told himself, 'it's a little thing to ask--one letter a
+month.  I never heard of such a case.'  It was wonderful indeed how they
+stood it!  It showed how much they valued Pippin!  What was the matter
+with him?  What was the nature of his trouble?  One glimpse Scorrier had
+when even Hemmings, as he phrased it, received "quite a turn."  It was
+during a drive back from the most outlying of the company's trial mines,
+eight miles through the forest.  The track led through a belt of trees
+blackened by a forest fire.  Pippin was driving. The secretary seated
+beside him wore an expression of faint alarm, such as Pippin's driving
+was warranted to evoke from almost any face.  The sky had darkened
+strangely, but pale streaks of light, coming from one knew not where,
+filtered through the trees.  No breath was stirring; the wheels and
+horses' hoofs made no sound on the deep fern mould.  All around, the
+burnt tree-trunks, leafless and jagged, rose like withered giants, the
+passages between them were black, the sky black, and black the silence. 
+No one spoke, and literally the only sound was Pippin's breathing.  What
+was it that was so terrifying?  Scorrier had a feeling of entombment;
+that nobody could help him; the feeling of being face to face with
+Nature; a sensation as if all the comfort and security of words and rules
+had dropped away from him.  And-nothing happened.  They reached home and
+dined.
+
+During dinner he had again that old remembrance of a little man chopping
+at a castle with his sword.  It came at a moment when Pippin had raised
+his hand with the carving-knife grasped in it to answer some remark of
+Hemmings' about the future of the company.  The optimism in his uplifted
+chin, the strenuous energy in his whispering voice, gave Scorrier a more
+vivid glimpse of Pippin's nature than he had perhaps ever had before.
+This new country, where nothing but himself could help a man--that was
+the castle!  No wonder Pippin was impatient of control, no wonder he was
+out of hand, no wonder he was silent--chopping away at that!  And suddenly
+he thought: 'Yes, and all the time one knows, Nature must beat him in the
+end!'
+
+That very evening Hemmings delivered himself of his reproof.  He had sat
+unusually silent; Scorrier, indeed, had thought him a little drunk, so
+portentous was his gravity; suddenly, however he rose.  It was hard on a
+man, he said, in his position, with a Board (he spoke as of a family of
+small children), to be kept so short of information.  He was actually
+compelled to use his imagination to answer the shareholders' questions.
+This was painful and humiliating; he had never heard of any secretary
+having to use his imagination!  He went further--it was insulting!  He had
+grown grey in the service of the company.  Mr. Scorrier would bear him
+out when he said he had a position to maintain--his name in the City was
+a high one; and, by George! he was going to keep it a high one; he would
+allow nobody to drag it in the dust--that ought clearly to be understood. 
+His directors felt they were being treated like children; however that
+might be, it was absurd to suppose that he (Hemmings) could be treated
+like a child...!  The secretary paused; his eyes seemed to bully the
+room.
+
+"If there were no London office," murmured Pippin, "the shareholders
+would get the same dividends."
+
+Hemmings gasped.  "Come!" he said, "this is monstrous!"
+
+"What help did I get from London when I first came here?  What help have
+I ever had?"
+
+Hemmings swayed, recovered, and with a forced smile replied that, if this
+were true, he had been standing on his head for years; he did not believe
+the attitude possible for such a length of time; personally he would have
+thought that he too had had a little something to say to the company's
+position, but no matter...!  His irony was crushing....  It was possible
+that Mr. Pippin hoped to reverse the existing laws of the universe with
+regard to limited companies; he would merely say that he must not begin
+with a company of which he (Hemmings) happened to be secretary.  Mr.
+Scorrier had hinted at excuses; for his part, with the best intentions in
+the world, he had great difficulty in seeing them.  He would go further
+--he did not see them!  The explosion...!  Pippin shrank so visibly that
+Hemmings seemed troubled by a suspicion that he had gone too far.
+
+"We know," he said, "that it was trying for you...."
+
+"Trying!" "burst out Pippin.
+
+"No one can say," Hemmings resumed soothingly, "that we have not dealt
+liberally."  Pippin made a motion of the head.  "We think we have a good
+superintendent; I go further, an excellent superintendent.  What I say
+is: Let's be pleasant!  I am not making an unreasonable request!"  He
+ended on a fitting note of jocularity; and, as if by consent, all three
+withdrew, each to his own room, without another word.
+
+In the course of the next day Pippin said to Scorrier: "It seems I have
+been very wicked.  I must try to do better"; and with a touch of bitter
+humour, "They are kind enough to think me a good superintendent, you see!
+After that I must try hard."
+
+Scorrier broke in: "No man could have done so much for them;" and,
+carried away by an impulse to put things absolutely straight, went on
+"But, after all, a letter now and then--what does it amount to?"
+
+Pippin besieged him with a subtle glance.  "You too?" he said--"I must
+indeed have been a wicked man!" and turned away.
+
+Scorrier felt as if he had been guilty of brutality; sorry for Pippin,
+angry with himself; angry with Pippin, sorry for himself.  He earnestly
+desired to see the back of Hemmings.  The secretary gratified the wish a
+few days later, departing by steamer with ponderous expressions of regard
+and the assurance of his goodwill.
+
+Pippin gave vent to no outburst of relief, maintaining a courteous
+silence, making only one allusion to his late guest, in answer to a
+remark of Scorrier:
+
+"Ah! don't tempt me! mustn't speak behind his back."
+
+A month passed, and Scorrier still--remained Pippin's guest.  As each
+mail-day approached he experienced a queer suppressed excitement. On one
+of these occasions Pippin had withdrawn to his room; and when Scorrier
+went to fetch him to dinner he found him with his head leaning on his
+hands, amid a perfect fitter of torn paper.  He looked up at Scorrier.
+
+"I can't do it," he said, "I feel such a hypocrite; I can't put myself
+into leading-strings again.  Why should I ask these people, when I've
+settled everything already?  If it were a vital matter they wouldn't want
+to hear--they'd simply wire, 'Manage this somehow!'"
+
+Scorrier said nothing, but thought privately 'This is a mad business!'
+What was a letter?  Why make a fuss about a letter?  The approach of
+mail-day seemed like a nightmare to the superintendent; he became
+feverishly nervous like a man under a spell; and, when the mail had gone,
+behaved like a respited criminal.  And this had been going on two years!
+Ever since that explosion.  Why, it was monomania!
+
+One day, a month after Hemmings' departure, Pippin rose early from
+dinner; his face was flushed, he had been drinking wine.  "I won't be
+beaten this time," he said, as he passed Scorrier.  The latter could hear
+him writing in the next room, and looked in presently to say that he was
+going for a walk.  Pippin gave him a kindly nod.
+
+It was a cool, still evening: innumerable stars swarmed in clusters over
+the forests, forming bright hieroglyphics in the middle heavens,
+showering over the dark harbour into the sea.  Scorrier walked slowly.  A
+weight seemed lifted from his mind, so entangled had he become in that
+uncanny silence.  At last Pippin had broken through the spell.  To get
+that, letter sent would be the laying of a phantom, the rehabilitation of
+commonsense.  Now that this silence was in the throes of being broken, he
+felt curiously tender towards Pippin, without the hero-worship of old
+days, but with a queer protective feeling.  After all, he was different
+from other men.  In spite of his feverish, tenacious energy, in spite of
+his ironic humour, there was something of the woman in him!  And as for
+this silence, this horror of control--all geniuses had "bees in their
+bonnets," and Pippin was a genius in his way!
+
+He looked back at the town.  Brilliantly lighted it had a thriving
+air-difficult to believe of the place he remembered ten years back; the
+sounds of drinking, gambling, laughter, and dancing floated to his ears.
+'Quite a city!' he thought.
+
+With this queer elation on him he walked slowly back along the street,
+forgetting that he was simply an oldish mining expert, with a look of
+shabbiness, such as clings to men who are always travelling, as if their
+"nap" were for ever being rubbed off.  And he thought of Pippin, creator
+of this glory.
+
+He had passed the boundaries of the town, and had entered the forest. A
+feeling of discouragement instantly beset him.  The scents and silence,
+after the festive cries and odours of the town, were undefinably
+oppressive.  Notwithstanding, he walked a long time, saying to himself
+that he would give the letter every chance.  At last, when he thought
+that Pippin must have finished, he went back to the house.
+
+Pippin had finished.  His forehead rested on the table, his arms hung at
+his sides; he was stone-dead!  His face wore a smile, and by his side lay
+an empty laudanum bottle.
+
+The letter, closely, beautifully written, lay before him.  It was a fine
+document, clear, masterly, detailed, nothing slurred, nothing concealed,
+nothing omitted; a complete review of the company's position; it ended
+with the words: "Your humble servant, RICHARD PIPPIN."
+
+Scorrier took possession of it.  He dimly understood that with those last
+words a wire had snapped.  The border-line had been overpassed; the point
+reached where that sense of proportion, which alone makes life possible,
+is lost.  He was certain that at the moment of his death Pippin could
+have discussed bimetallism, or any intellectual problem, except the one
+problem of his own heart; that, for some mysterious reason, had been too
+much for him.  His death had been the work of a moment of supreme
+revolt--a single instant of madness on a single subject!  He found on the
+blotting-paper, scrawled across the impress of the signature, "Can't
+stand it!"  The completion of that letter had been to him a struggle
+ungraspable by Scorrier.  Slavery?  Defeat?  A violation of Nature?  The
+death of justice?  It were better not to think of it!  Pippin could have
+told--but he would never speak again.  Nature, at whom, unaided, he had
+dealt so many blows, had taken her revenge...!
+
+In the night Scorrier stole down, and, with an ashamed face, cut off a
+lock of the fine grey hair.  'His daughter might like it!' he thought....
+
+He waited till Pippin was buried, then, with the letter in his pocket,
+started for England.
+
+He arrived at Liverpool on a Thursday morning, and travelling to town,
+drove straight to the office of the company.  The Board were sitting.
+Pippin's successor was already being interviewed.  He passed out as
+Scorrier came in, a middle-aged man with a large, red beard, and a foxy,
+compromising face.  He also was a Cornishman. Scorrier wished him luck
+with a very heavy heart.
+
+As an unsentimental man, who had a proper horror of emotion, whose living
+depended on his good sense, to look back on that interview with the Board
+was painful.  It had excited in him a rage of which he was now heartily
+ashamed.  Old Jolyon Forsyte, the chairman, was not there for once,
+guessing perhaps that the Board's view of this death would be too small
+for him; and little Mr. Booker sat in his place. Every one had risen,
+shaken hands with Scorrier, and expressed themselves indebted for his
+coming.  Scorrier placed Pippin's letter on the table, and gravely the
+secretary read out to his Board the last words of their superintendent.
+When he had finished, a director said, "That's not the letter of a
+madman!"  Another answered: "Mad as a hatter; nobody but a madman would
+have thrown up such a post." Scorrier suddenly withdrew.  He heard
+Hemmings calling after him. "Aren't you well, Mr. Scorrier? aren't you
+well, sir?"
+
+He shouted back: "Quite sane, I thank you...."
+
+The Naples "express" rolled round the outskirts of the town. Vesuvius
+shone in the sun, uncrowned by smoke.  But even as Scorrier looked, a
+white puff went soaring up.  It was the footnote to his memories.
+
+February 1901. February 1901.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Villa Rubein et al, by John Galsworthy
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diff --git a/old/24092004.2639.zip b/old/24092004.2639.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e06cf91
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/24092004.2639.zip
diff --git a/old/vlrbn10.txt b/old/vlrbn10.txt
new file mode 100644
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@@ -0,0 +1,11922 @@
+Project Gutenberg's Etext Villa Rubein and Others, by Galsworthy
+#7 in our series by John Galsworthy
+#4 in our series of The Forsyte Saga [Just a Short Story]
+
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
+the copyright laws for your country before posting these files!!
+
+Please take a look at the important information in this header.
+We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
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+Title:  Villa Rubein and Other Stories
+Contents:
+Villa Rubein
+A Man of Devon
+A Knight
+Salvation of a Forsyte
+The Silence
+
+Author:  John Galsworthy
+
+March, 2001  [Etext #2639]
+
+
+Project Gutenberg's Etext Villa Rubein and Others, by Galsworthy
+******This file should be named mnprp10.txt or mnprp10.zip******
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+
+
+
+
+THE WORKS OF JOHN GALSWORTHY - VOLUME IV
+
+VILLA RUBEIN AND OTHER STORIES
+
+Contents:
+Villa Rubein
+A Man of Devon
+A Knight
+Salvation of a Forsyte
+The Silence
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+Writing not long ago to my oldest literary friend, I expressed in a
+moment of heedless sentiment the wish that we might have again one of
+our talks of long-past days, over the purposes and methods of our
+art.  And my friend, wiser than I, as he has always been, replied
+with this doubting phrase "Could we recapture the zest of that old
+time?"
+
+I would not like to believe that our faith in the value of
+imaginative art has diminished, that we think it less worth while to
+struggle for glimpses of truth and for the words which may pass them
+on to other eyes; or that we can no longer discern the star we tried
+to follow; but I do fear, with him, that half a lifetime of endeavour
+has dulled the exuberance which kept one up till morning discussing
+the ways and means of aesthetic achievement.  We have discovered,
+perhaps with a certain finality, that by no talk can a writer add a
+cubit to his stature, or change the temperament which moulds and
+colours the vision of life he sets before the few who will pause to
+look at it.  And so--the rest is silence, and what of work we may
+still do will be done in that dogged muteness which is the lot of
+advancing years.
+
+Other times, other men and modes, but not other truth.  Truth, though
+essentially relative, like Einstein's theory, will never lose its
+ever-new and unique quality-perfect proportion; for Truth, to the
+human consciousness at least, is but that vitally just relation of
+part to whole which is the very condition of life itself.  And the
+task before the imaginative writer, whether at the end of the last
+century or all these aeons later, is the presentation of a vision
+which to eye and ear and mind has the implicit proportions of Truth.
+
+I confess to have always looked for a certain flavour in the writings
+of others, and craved it for my own, believing that all true vision
+is so coloured by the temperament of the seer, as to have not only
+the just proportions but the essential novelty of a living thing for,
+after all, no two living things are alike.  A work of fiction should
+carry the hall mark of its author as surely as a Goya, a Daumier, a
+Velasquez, and a Mathew Maris, should be the unmistakable creations
+of those masters.  This is not to speak of tricks and manners which
+lend themselves to that facile elf, the caricaturist, but of a
+certain individual way of seeing and feeling.  A young poet once said
+of another and more popular poet: "Oh! yes, but be cuts no ice.
+"And, when one came to think of it, he did not; a certain flabbiness
+of spirit, a lack of temperament, an absence, perhaps, of the ironic,
+or passionate, view, insubstantiated his work; it had no edge--just a
+felicity which passed for distinction with the crowd.
+
+Let me not be understood to imply that a novel should be a sort of
+sandwich, in which the author's mood or philosophy is the slice of
+ham.  One's demand is for a far more subtle impregnation of flavour;
+just that, for instance, which makes De Maupassant a more poignant
+and fascinating writer than his master Flaubert, Dickens and
+Thackeray more living and permanent than George Eliot or Trollope.
+It once fell to my lot to be the preliminary critic of a book on
+painting, designed to prove that the artist's sole function was the
+impersonal elucidation of the truths of nature.  I was regretfully
+compelled to observe that there were no such things as the truths of
+Nature, for the purposes of art, apart from the individual vision of
+the artist.  Seer and thing seen, inextricably involved one with the
+other, form the texture of any masterpiece; and I, at least, demand
+therefrom a distinct impression of temperament.  I never saw, in the
+flesh, either De Maupassant or Tchekov--those masters of such
+different methods entirely devoid of didacticism--but their work
+leaves on me a strangely potent sense of personality.  Such subtle
+intermingling of seer with thing seen is the outcome only of long and
+intricate brooding, a process not too favoured by modern life, yet
+without which we achieve little but a fluent chaos of clever
+insignificant impressions, a kind of glorified journalism, holding
+much the same relation to the deeply-impregnated work of Turgenev,
+Hardy, and Conrad, as a film bears to a play.
+
+Speaking for myself, with the immodesty required of one who hazards
+an introduction to his own work, I was writing fiction for five years
+before I could master even its primary technique, much less achieve
+that union of seer with thing seen, which perhaps begins to show
+itself a little in this volume--binding up the scanty harvests of
+1899, 1900, and 1901--especially in the tales: "A Knight," and
+"Salvation of a Forsyte."  Men, women, trees, and works of fiction--
+very tiny are the seeds from which they spring.  I used really to see
+the "Knight"--in 1896, was it?--sitting in the "Place" in front of
+the Casino at Monte Carlo ; and because his dried-up elegance, his
+burnt straw hat, quiet courtesy of attitude, and big dog, used to
+fascinate and intrigue me, I began to imagine his life so as to
+answer my own questions and to satisfy, I suppose, the mood I was in.
+I never spoke to him, I never saw him again.  His real story, no
+doubt, was as different from that which I wove around his figure as
+night from day.
+
+As for Swithin, wild horses will not drag from me confession of where
+and when I first saw the prototype which became enlarged to his bulky
+stature.  I owe Swithin much, for he first released the satirist in
+me, and is, moreover, the only one of my characters whom I killed
+before I gave him life, for it is in "The Man of Property" that
+Swithin Forsyte more memorably lives.
+
+Ranging beyond this volume, I cannot recollect writing the first
+words of "The Island Pharisees"--but it would be about August, 1901.
+Like all the stories in "Villa Rubein," and, indeed, most of my
+tales, the book originated in the curiosity, philosophic reflections,
+and unphilosophic emotions roused in me by some single figure in real
+life.  In this case it was Ferrand, whose real name, of course, was
+not Ferrand, and who died in some "sacred institution" many years ago
+of a consumption brought on by the conditions of his wandering life.
+If not "a beloved," he was a true vagabond, and I first met him in
+the Champs Elysees, just as in "The Pigeon" he describes his meeting
+with Wellwyn.  Though drawn very much from life, he did not in the
+end turn out very like the Ferrand of real life--the, figures of
+fiction soon diverge from their prototypes.
+
+The first draft of "The Island Pharisees" was buried in a drawer;
+when retrieved the other day, after nineteen years, it disclosed a
+picaresque string of anecdotes told by Ferrand in the first person.
+These two-thirds of a book were laid to rest by Edward Garnett's
+dictum that its author was not sufficiently within Ferrand's skin;
+and, struggling heavily with laziness and pride, he started afresh in
+the skin of Shelton.  Three times be wrote that novel, and then it
+was long in finding the eye of Sydney Pawling, who accepted it for
+Heinemann's in 1904.  That was a period of ferment and transition
+with me, a kind of long awakening to the home truths of social
+existence and national character.  The liquor bubbled too furiously
+for clear bottling.  And the book, after all, became but an
+introduction to all those following novels which depict--somewhat
+satirically--the various sections of English "Society" with a more or
+less capital "S."
+
+Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one's work, it is
+interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the
+emotional and critical sides of his nature, first one, then the
+other, getting the upper hand, and too seldom fusing till the result
+has the mellowness of full achievement.  One can even tell the nature
+of one's readers, by their preference for the work which reveals more
+of this side than of that.  My early work was certainly more
+emotional than critical.  But from 1901 came nine years when the
+critical was, in the main, holding sway.  From 1910 to 1918 the
+emotional again struggled for the upper hand; and from that time on
+there seems to have been something of a "dead beat."  So the conflict
+goes, by what mysterious tides promoted, I know not.
+
+An author must ever wish to discover a hapless member of the Public
+who, never yet having read a word of his writing, would submit to the
+ordeal of reading him right through from beginning to end.  Probably
+the effect could only be judged through an autopsy, but in the remote
+case of survival, it would interest one so profoundly to see the
+differences, if any, produced in that reader's character or outlook
+over life.  This, however, is a consummation which will remain
+devoutly to be wished, for there is a limit to human complaisance.
+One will never know the exact measure of one's infecting power; or
+whether, indeed, one is not just a long soporific.
+
+A writer they say, should not favouritize among his creations; but
+then a writer should not do so many things that be does.  This
+writer, certainly, confesses to having favourites, and of his novels
+so far be likes best: The Forsyte Series; "The Country House";
+"Fraternity"; "The Dark Flower"; and "Five Tales"; believing these to
+be the works which most fully achieve fusion of seer with thing seen,
+most subtly disclose the individuality of their author, and best
+reveal such of truth as has been vouchsafed to him.
+
+JOHN GALSWORTHY.
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+MY SISTER
+
+BLANCHE LILIAN SAUTER
+
+
+
+
+VILLA RUBEIN
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+Walking along the river wall at Botzen, Edmund Dawney said to Alois
+Harz: "Would you care to know the family at that pink house, Villa
+Rubein?"
+
+Harz answered with a smile:
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+"Come with me then this afternoon."
+
+They had stopped before an old house with a blind, deserted look,
+that stood by itself on the wall; Harz pushed the door open.
+
+"Come in, you don't want breakfast yet.  I'm going to paint the river
+to-day."
+
+He ran up the bare broad stairs, and Dawney followed leisurely, his
+thumbs hooked in the armholes of his waistcoat, and his head thrown
+back.
+
+In the attic which filled the whole top story, Harz had pulled a
+canvas to the window.  He was a young man of middle height, square
+shouldered, active, with an angular face, high cheek-bones, and a
+strong, sharp chin.  His eyes were piercing and steel-blue, his
+eyebrows very flexible, nose long and thin with a high bridge; and
+his dark, unparted hair fitted him like a cap.  His clothes looked as
+if he never gave them a second thought.
+
+This room, which served for studio, bedroom, and sitting-room, was
+bare and dusty.  Below the window the river in spring flood rushed
+down the valley, a stream, of molten bronze.  Harz dodged before the
+canvas like a fencer finding his distance; Dawney took his seat on a
+packingcase.
+
+"The snows have gone with a rush this year," he drawled.  "The Talfer
+comes down brown, the Eisack comes down blue; they flow into the
+Etsch and make it green; a parable of the Spring for you, my
+painter."
+
+Harz mixed his colours.
+
+"I've no time for parables," he said, "no time for anything.  If I
+could be guaranteed to live to ninety-nine, like Titian--he had a
+chance.  Look at that poor fellow who was killed the other day!  All
+that struggle, and then--just at the turn!"
+
+He spoke English with a foreign accent; his voice was rather harsh,
+but his smile very kindly.
+
+Dawney lit a cigarette.
+
+"You painters," he said, "are better off than most of us.  You can
+strike out your own line.  Now if I choose to treat a case out of the
+ordinary way and the patient dies, I'm ruined."
+
+"My dear Doctor--if I don't paint what the public likes, I starve;
+all the same I'm going to paint in my own way; in the end I shall
+come out on top."
+
+"It pays to work in the groove, my friend, until you've made your
+name; after that--do what you like, they'll lick your boots all the
+same."
+
+"Ah, you don't love your work."
+
+Dawney answered slowly: "Never so happy as when my hands are full.
+But I want to make money, to get known, to have a good time, good
+cigars, good wine.  I hate discomfort.  No, my boy, I must work it on
+the usual lines; I don't like it, but I must lump it.  One starts in
+life with some notion of the ideal--it's gone by the board with me.
+I've got to shove along until I've made my name, and then, my little
+man--then--"
+
+"Then you'll be soft!  "You pay dearly for that first period!"
+
+"Take my chance of that; there's no other way."
+
+"Make one!"
+
+"Humph!"
+
+Harz poised his brush, as though it were a spear:
+
+"A man must do the best in him.  If he has to suffer--let him!"
+
+Dawney stretched his large soft body; a calculating look had come
+into his eyes.
+
+"You're a tough little man!" he said.
+
+"I've had to be tough."
+
+Dawney rose; tobacco smoke was wreathed round his unruffled hair.
+
+"Touching Villa Rubein," he said, "shall I call for you?  It's a
+mixed household, English mostly--very decent people."
+
+"No, thank you.  I shall be painting all day.  Haven't time to know
+the sort of people who expect one to change one's clothes."
+
+"As you like; ta-to!"  And, puffing out his chest, Dawney vanished
+through a blanket looped across the doorway.
+
+Harz set a pot of coffee on a spirit-lamp, and cut himself some
+bread.  Through the window the freshness of the morning came; the
+scent of sap and blossom and young leaves; the scent of earth, and
+the mountains freed from winter; the new flights and songs of birds;
+all the odorous, enchanted, restless Spring.
+
+There suddenly appeared through the doorway a white rough-haired
+terrier dog, black-marked about the face, with shaggy tan eyebrows.
+He sniffed at Harz, showed the whites round his eyes, and uttered a
+sharp bark.  A young voice called:
+
+"Scruff! Thou naughty dog!"  Light footsteps were heard on the
+stairs; from the distance a thin, high voice called:
+
+"Greta! You mustn't go up there!"
+
+A little girl of twelve, with long fair hair under a wide-brimmed
+hat, slipped in.
+
+Her blue eyes opened wide, her face flushed up.  That face was not
+regular; its cheek-bones were rather prominent, the nose was
+flattish; there was about it an air, innocent, reflecting, quizzical,
+shy.
+
+"Oh!" she said.
+
+Harz smiled: "Good-morning!  This your dog?"
+
+She did not answer, but looked at him with soft bewilderment; then
+running to the dog seized him by the collar.
+
+"Scr-ruff! Thou naughty dog-the baddest dog!"  The ends of her hair
+fell about him; she looked up at Harz, who said:
+
+"Not at all!  Let me give him some bread."
+
+"Oh no! You must not--I will beat him--and tell him he is bad; then
+he shall not do such things again.  Now he is sulky; he looks so
+always when he is sulky.  Is this your home?"
+
+"For the present; I am a visitor."
+
+"But I think you are of this country, because you speak like it."
+
+"Certainly, I am a Tyroler."
+
+"I have to talk English this morning, but I do not like it very much-
+-because, also I am half Austrian, and I like it best; but my sister,
+Christian, is all English.  Here is Miss Naylor; she shall be very
+angry with me."
+
+And pointing to the entrance with a rosy-tipped forefinger, she again
+looked ruefully at Harz.
+
+There came into the room with a walk like the hopping of a bird an
+elderly, small lady, in a grey serge dress, with narrow bands of
+claret-coloured velveteen; a large gold cross dangled from a steel
+chain on her chest; she nervously twisted her hands, clad in black
+kid gloves, rather white about the seams.
+
+Her hair was prematurely grey; her quick eyes brown; her mouth
+twisted at one corner; she held her face, kind-looking, but long and
+narrow, rather to one side, and wore on it a look of apology.  Her
+quick sentences sounded as if she kept them on strings, and wanted to
+draw them back as soon as she had let them forth.
+
+"Greta, how can, you do such things?  I don't know what your father
+would say!  I am sure I don't know how to--so extraordinary--"
+
+"Please!" said Harz.
+
+"You must come at once--so very sorry--so awkward!"  They were
+standing in a ring: Harz with his eyebrows working up and down; the
+little lady fidgeting her parasol; Greta, flushed and pouting, her
+eyes all dewy, twisting an end of fair hair round her finger.
+
+"Oh, look!"  The coffee had boiled over.  Little brown streams
+trickled spluttering from the pan; the dog, with ears laid back and
+tail tucked in, went scurrying round the room.  A feeling of
+fellowship fell on them at once.
+
+"Along the wall is our favourite walk, and Scruff--so awkward, so
+unfortunate--we did not think any one lived here--the shutters are
+cracked, the paint is peeling off so dreadfully.  Have you been long
+in Botzen?  Two months?  Fancy!  You are not English?  You are
+Tyrolese?  But you speak English so well--there for seven years?
+Really?  So fortunate!--It is Greta's day for English."
+
+Miss Naylor's eyes darted bewildered glances at the roof where the
+crossing of the beams made such deep shadows; at the litter of
+brushes, tools, knives, and colours on a table made out of packing-
+cases; at the big window, innocent of glass, and flush with the
+floor, whence dangled a bit of rusty chain--relic of the time when
+the place had been a store-loft; her eyes were hastily averted from
+an unfnished figure of the nude.
+
+Greta, with feet crossed, sat on a coloured blanket, dabbling her
+fnger in a little pool of coffee, and gazing up at Harz.  And he
+thought: 'I should like to paint her like that.  "A forget-me-not."'
+
+He took out his chalks to make a sketch of her.
+
+"Shall you show me?" cried out Greta, scrambling to her feet.
+
+"'Will,' Greta--'will'; how often must I tell you?  I think we should
+be going--it is very late--your father--so very kind of you, but I
+think we should be going.  Scruff!"   Miss Naylor gave the floor two
+taps.  The terrier backed into a plaster cast which came down on his
+tail, and sent him flying through the doorway.  Greta followed
+swiftly, crying:
+
+"Ach! poor Scrufee!"
+
+Miss Naylor crossed the room; bowing, she murmured an apology, and
+also disappeared.
+
+Harz was left alone, his guests were gone; the little girl with the
+fair hair and the eyes like forget-me-nots, the little lady with
+kindly gestures and bird-like walk, the terrier.  He looked round
+him; the room seemed very empty.  Gnawing his moustache, he muttered
+at the fallen cast.
+
+Then taking up his brush, stood before his picture, smiling and
+frowning.  Soon he had forgotten it all in his work.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+It was early morning four days later, and Harz was loitering
+homewards.  The shadows of the clouds passing across the vines were
+vanishing over the jumbled roofs and green-topped spires of the town.
+A strong sweet wind was blowing from the mountains, there was a stir
+in the branches of the trees, and flakes of the late blossom were
+drifting down.  Amongst the soft green pods of a kind of poplar
+chafers buzzed, and numbers of their little brown bodies were strewn
+on the path.
+
+He passed a bench where a girl sat sketching.  A puff of wind whirled
+her drawing to the ground; Harz ran to pick it up.  She took it from
+him with a bow; but, as he turned away, she tore the sketch across.
+
+"Ah!" he said; "why did you do that?"
+
+This girl, who stood with a bit of the torn sketch in either hand,
+was slight and straight; and her face earnest and serene.  She gazed
+at Harz with large, clear, greenish eyes; her lips and chin were
+defiant, her forehead tranquil.
+
+"I don't like it."
+
+"Will you let me look at it?  I am a painter."
+
+"It isn't worth looking at, but--if you wish--"
+
+He put the two halves of the sketch together.
+
+"You see!" she said at last; "I told you."
+
+Harz did not answer, still looking at the sketch.  The girl frowned.
+
+Harz asked her suddenly:
+
+"Why do you paint?"
+
+She coloured, and said:
+
+"Show me what is wrong."
+
+"I cannot show you what is wrong, there is nothing wrong--but why do
+you paint?"
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+Harz shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"You've no business to do that," said the girl in a hurt voice; "I
+want to know."
+
+"Your heart is not in it," said Harz.
+
+She looked at him, startled; her eyes had grown thoughtful.
+
+"I suppose that is it.  There are so many other things--"
+
+"There should be nothing else," said Harz.
+
+She broke in: "I don't want always to be thinking of myself.
+Suppose--"
+
+"Ah! When you begin supposing!"
+
+The girl confronted him; she had torn the sketch again.
+
+"You mean that if it does not matter enough, one had better not do it
+at all.  I don't know if you are right--I think you are."
+
+There was the sound of a nervous cough, and Harz saw behind him his
+three visitors--Miss Naylor offering him her hand; Greta, flushed,
+with a bunch of wild flowers, staring intently in his face; and the
+terrier, sniffing at his trousers.
+
+Miss Naylor broke an awkward silence.
+
+"We wondered if you would still be here, Christian.  I am sorry to
+interrupt you--I was not aware that you knew Mr.Herr--"
+
+"Harz is my name--we were just talking"
+
+"About my sketch.  Oh, Greta, you do tickle!  Will you come and have
+breakfast with us to-day, Herr Harz?  It's our turn, you know."
+
+Harz, glancing at his dusty clothes, excused himself.
+
+But Greta in a pleading voice said: "Oh! do come!  Scruff likes you.
+It is so dull when there is nobody for breakfast but ourselves."
+
+Miss Naylor's mouth began to twist.  Harz hurriedly broke in:
+
+"Thank you.  I will come with pleasure; you don't mind my being
+dirty?"
+
+"Oh no! we do not mind; then we shall none of us wash, and afterwards
+I shall show you my rabbits."
+
+Miss Naylor, moving from foot to foot, like a bird on its perch,
+exclaimed:
+
+"I hope you won't regret it, not a very good meal--the girls are so
+impulsive--such informal invitation; we shall be very glad."
+
+But Greta pulled softly at her sister's sleeve, and Christian,
+gathering her things, led the way.
+
+Harz followed in amazement; nothing of this kind had come into his
+life before.  He kept shyly glancing at the girls; and, noting the
+speculative innocence in Greta's eyes, he smiled.  They soon came to
+two great poplar-trees, which stood, like sentinels, one on either
+side of an unweeded gravel walk leading through lilac bushes to a
+house painted dull pink, with green-shuttered windows, and a roof of
+greenish slate.  Over the door in faded crimson letters were written
+the words, "Villa Rubein."
+
+"That is to the stables," said Greta, pointing down a path, where
+some pigeons were sunning themselves on a wall.  "Uncle Nic keeps his
+horses there: Countess and Cuckoo--his horses begin with C, because
+of Chris--they are quite beautiful.  He says he could drive them to
+Kingdom-Come and they would not turn their hair.  Bow, and say 'Good-
+morning' to our house!"
+
+Harz bowed.
+
+"Father said all strangers should, and I think it brings good luck."
+>From the doorstep she looked round at Harz, then ran into the house.
+
+A broad, thick-set man, with stiff, brushed-up hair, a short, brown,
+bushy beard parted at the chin, a fresh complexion, and blue glasses
+across a thick nose, came out, and called in a bluff voice:
+
+"Ha! my good dears, kiss me quick--prrt!  How goes it then this
+morning?  A good walk, hein?"  The sound of many loud rapid kisses
+followed.
+
+"Ha, Fraulein, good!"  He became aware of Harz's figure standing in
+the doorway: "Und der Herr?"
+
+Miss Naylor hurriedly explained.
+
+"Good!  An artist!  Kommen Sie herein, I am delight.  You will
+breakfast?  I too--yes, yes, my dears--I too breakfast with you this
+morning.  I have the hunter's appetite."
+
+Harz, looking at him keenly, perceived him to be of middle height and
+age, stout, dressed in a loose holland jacket, a very white, starched
+shirt, and blue silk sash; that he looked particularly clean, had an
+air of belonging to Society, and exhaled a really fine aroma of
+excellent cigars and the best hairdresser's essences.
+
+The room they entered was long and rather bare; there was a huge map
+on the wall, and below it a pair of globes on crooked supports,
+resembling two inflated frogs erect on their hind legs.  In one
+corner was a cottage piano, close to a writing-table heaped with
+books and papers; this nook, sacred to Christian, was foreign to the
+rest of the room, which was arranged with supernatural neatness.  A
+table was laid for breakfast, and the sun-warmed air came in through
+French windows.
+
+The meal went merrily; Herr Paul von Morawitz was never in such
+spirits as at table.  Words streamed from him.  Conversing with Harz,
+he talked of Art as who should say: "One does not claim to be a
+connoisseur--pas si bete--still, one has a little knowledge, que
+diable!"  He recommended him a man in the town who sold cigars that
+were "not so very bad."  He consumed porridge, ate an omelette; and
+bending across to Greta gave her a sounding kiss, muttering: "Kiss me
+quick!"--an expression he had picked up in a London music-hall, long
+ago, and considered chic.  He asked his daughters' plans, and held
+out porridge to the terrier, who refused it with a sniff.
+
+"Well," he said suddenly, looking at Miss Naylor, "here is a
+gentleman who has not even heard our names!"
+
+The little lady began her introductions in a breathless voice.
+
+"Good!"  Herr Paul said, puffing out his lips: "Now we know each
+other!" and, brushing up the ends of his moustaches, he carried off
+Harz into another room, decorated with pipe-racks, prints of dancing-
+girls, spittoons, easy-chairs well-seasoned by cigar smoke, French
+novels, and newspapers.
+
+The household at Villa Rubein was indeed of a mixed and curious
+nature.  Cut on both floors by corridors, the Villa was divided into
+four divisions; each of which had its separate inhabitants, an
+arrangement which had come about in the following way:
+
+When old Nicholas Treffry died, his estate, on the boundary of
+Cornwall, had been sold and divided up among his three surviving
+children--Nicholas, who was much the eldest, a partner in the well-
+known firm of Forsyte and Treffry, teamen, of the Strand; Constance,
+married to a man called Decie; and Margaret, at her father's death
+engaged to the curate of the parish, John Devorell, who shortly
+afterwards became its rector.  By his marriage with Margaret Treffry
+the rector had one child called Christian.  Soon after this he came
+into some property, and died, leaving it unfettered to his widow.
+Three years went by, and when the child was six years old, Mrs.
+Devorell, still young and pretty, came to live in London with her
+brother Nicholas.  It was there that she met Paul von Morawitz--the
+last of an old Czech family, who had lived for many hundred years on
+their estates near Budweiss.  Paul had been left an orphan at the age
+of ten, and without a solitary ancestral acre.  Instead of acres, he
+inherited the faith that nothing was too good for a von Morawitz.  In
+later years his savoir faire enabled him to laugh at faith, but it
+stayed quietly with him all the same.  The absence of acres was of no
+great consequence, for through his mother, the daughter of a banker
+in Vienna, he came into a well-nursed fortune.  It befitted a von
+Morawitz that he should go into the Cavalry, but, unshaped for
+soldiering, he soon left the Service; some said he had a difference
+with his Colonel over the quality of food provided during some
+manoeuvres; others that he had retired because his chargers did not
+fit his legs, which were, indeed, rather round.
+
+He had an admirable appetite for pleasure; a man-about-town's life
+suited him.  He went his genial, unreflecting, costly way in Vienna,
+Paris, London.  He loved exclusively those towns, and boasted that he
+was as much at home in one as in another.  He combined exuberant
+vitality with fastidiousness of palate, and devoted both to the
+acquisition of a special taste in women, weeds, and wines; above all
+he was blessed with a remarkable digestion.  He was thirty when he
+met Mrs. Devorell; and she married him because he was so very
+different from anybody she had ever seen.  People more dissimilar
+were never mated.  To Paul--accustomed to stage doors--freshness,
+serene tranquillity, and obvious purity were the baits; he had run
+through more than half his fortune, too, and the fact that she had
+money was possibly not overlooked.  Be that as it may, he was fond of
+her; his heart was soft, he developed a domestic side.
+
+Greta was born to them after a year of marriage.  The instinct of the
+"freeman" was, however, not dead in Paul; he became a gambler.  He
+lost the remainder of his fortune without being greatly disturbed.
+When he began to lose his wife's fortune too things naturally became
+more difficult.  Not too much remained when Nicholas Treffry stepped
+in, and caused his sister to settle what was left on her daughters,
+after providing a life-interest for herself and Paul.  Losing his
+supplies, the good man had given up his cards.  But the instinct of
+the "freeman" was still living in his breast; he took to drink.  He
+was never grossly drunk, and rarely very sober.  His wife sorrowed
+over this new passion; her health, already much enfeebled, soon broke
+down.  The doctors sent her to the Tyrol.  She seemed to benefit by
+this, and settled down at Botzen.  The following year, when Greta was
+just ten, she died.  It was a shock to Paul.  He gave up excessive
+drinking; became a constant smoker, and lent full rein to his natural
+domesticity.  He was fond of both the girls, but did not at all
+understand them; Greta, his own daughter, was his favourite.  Villa
+Rubein remained their home; it was cheap and roomy.  Money, since
+Paul became housekeeper to himself, was scarce.
+
+About this time Mrs. Decie, his wife's sister, whose husband had died
+in the East, returned to England; Paul invited her to come and live
+with them.  She had her own rooms, her own servant; the arrangement
+suited Paul--it was economically sound, and there was some one always
+there to take care of the girls.  In truth he began to feel the
+instinct of the "freeman" rising again within him; it was pleasant to
+run over to Vienna now and then; to play piquet at a Club in Gries,
+of which he was the shining light; in a word, to go "on the tiles" a
+little.  One could not always mourn--even if a woman were an angel;
+moreover, his digestion was as good as ever.
+
+The fourth quarter of this Villa was occupied by Nicholas Treffry,
+whose annual sojourn out of England perpetually surprised himself.
+Between him and his young niece, Christian, there existed, however, a
+rare sympathy; one of those affections between the young and old,
+which, mysteriously born like everything in life, seems the only end
+and aim to both, till another feeling comes into the younger heart.
+
+Since a long and dangerous illness, he had been ordered to avoid the
+English winter, and at the commencement of each spring he would
+appear at Botzen, driving his own horses by easy stages from the
+Italian Riviera, where he spent the coldest months.  He always stayed
+till June before going back to his London Club, and during all that
+time he let no day pass without growling at foreigners, their habits,
+food, drink, and raiment, with a kind of big dog's growling that did
+nobody any harm.  The illness had broken him very much; he was
+seventy, but looked more.  He had a servant, a Luganese, named
+Dominique, devoted to him.  Nicholas Treffry had found him overworked
+in an hotel, and had engaged him with the caution: "Look--here,
+Dominique! I swear!"  To which Dominique, dark of feature, saturnine
+and ironical, had only replied: "Tres biens, M'sieur!"
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+Harz and his host sat in leather chairs; Herr Paul's square back was
+wedged into a cushion, his round legs crossed.  Both were smoking,
+and they eyed each other furtively, as men of different stamp do when
+first thrown together.  The young artist found his host extremely new
+and disconcerting; in his presence he felt both shy and awkward.
+Herr Paul, on the other hand, very much at ease, was thinking
+indolently:
+
+'Good-looking young fellow--comes of the people, I expect, not at all
+the manner of the world; wonder what he talks about.'
+
+Presently noticing that Harz was looking at a photograph, he said:
+"Ah! yes! that was a woman!  They are not to be found in these days.
+She could dance, the little Coralie!  Did you ever see such arms?
+Confess that she is beautiful, hein?"
+
+"She has individuality," said Harz.  "A fine type!"
+
+Herr Paul blew out a cloud of smoke.
+
+"Yes," he murmured, "she was fine all over!"  He had dropped his
+eyeglasses, and his full brown eyes, with little crow's-feet at the
+corners, wandered from his visitor to his cigar.
+
+'He'd be like a Satyr if he wasn't too clean,' thought Harz.  'Put
+vine leaves in his hair, paint him asleep, with his hands crossed,
+so!'
+
+"When I am told a person has individuality," Herr Paul was saying in
+a rich and husky voice, "I generally expect boots that bulge, an
+umbrella of improper colour; I expect a creature of 'bad form' as
+they say in England; who will shave some days and some days will not
+shave; who sometimes smells of India-rubber, and sometimes does not
+smell, which is discouraging!"
+
+"You do not approve of individuality?" said Harz shortly.
+
+"Not if it means doing, and thinking, as those who know better do not
+do, or think."
+
+"And who are those who know better?"
+
+"Ah! my dear, you are asking me a riddle?  Well, then--Society, men
+of birth, men of recognised position, men above eccentricity, in a
+word, of reputation."
+
+Harz looked at him fixedly.  "Men who haven't the courage of their
+own ideas, not even the courage to smell of India-rubber; men who
+have no desires, and so can spend all their time making themselves
+flat!"
+
+Herr Paul drew out a red silk handkerchief and wiped his beard.  "I
+assure you, my dear," he said, "it is easier to be flat; it is more
+respectable to be flat.  Himmel! why not, then, be flat?"
+
+"Like any common fellow?"
+
+"Certes; like any common fellow--like me, par exemple!"  Herr Paul
+waved his hand.  When he exercised unusual tact, he always made use
+of a French expression.
+
+Harz flushed.  Herr Paul followed up his victory.  "Come, come!" he
+said.  "Pass me my men of repute! que diable! we are not anarchists."
+
+"Are you sure?" said Harz.
+
+Herr Paul twisted his moustache.  "I beg your pardon," he said
+slowly.  But at this moment the door was opened; a rumbling voice
+remarked: "Morning, Paul.  Who's your visitor?"  Harz saw a tall,
+bulky figure in the doorway.
+
+"Come in,"' called out Herr Paul.  "Let me present to you a new
+acquaintance, an artist: Herr Harz--Mr. Nicholas Treffry.  Psumm
+bumm! All this introducing is dry work."  And going to the sideboard
+he poured out three glasses of a light, foaming beer.
+
+Mr. Treffry waved it from him: "Not for me," he said: "Wish I could!
+They won't let me look at it."  And walking over, to the window with
+a heavy tread, which trembled like his voice, he sat down.  There was
+something in his gait like the movements of an elephant's hind legs.
+He was very tall (it was said, with the customary exaggeration of
+family tradition, that there never had been a male Treffry under six
+feet in height), but now he stooped, and had grown stout.  There was
+something at once vast and unobtrusive about his personality.
+
+He wore a loose brown velvet jacket, and waistcoat, cut to show a
+soft frilled shirt and narrow black ribbon tie; a thin gold chain was
+looped round his neck and fastened to his fob.  His heavy cheeks had
+folds in them like those in a bloodhound's face.  He wore big,
+drooping, yellow-grey moustaches, which he had a habit of sucking,
+and a goatee beard.  He had long loose ears that might almost have
+been said to gap.  On his head there was a soft black hat, large in
+the brim and low in the crown.  His grey eyes, heavy-lidded, twinkled
+under their bushy brows with a queer, kind cynicism.  As a young man
+he had sown many a wild oat; but he had also worked and made money in
+business; he had, in fact, burned the candle at both ends; but he had
+never been unready to do his fellows a good turn.  He had a passion
+for driving, and his reckless method of pursuing this art had caused
+him to be nicknamed: "The notorious Treffry."
+
+Once, when he was driving tandem down a hill with a loose rein, the
+friend beside him had said: "For all the good you're doing with those
+reins, Treffry, you might as well throw them on the horses' necks."
+
+"Just so," Treffry had answered.  At the bottom of the hill they had
+gone over a wall into a potato patch.  Treffry had broken several
+ribs; his friend had gone unharmed.
+
+He was a great sufferer now, but, constitutionally averse to being
+pitied, he had a disconcerting way of humming, and this, together
+with the shake in his voice, and his frequent use of peculiar
+phrases, made the understanding of his speech depend at times on
+intuition rather than intelligence.
+
+The clock began to strike eleven.  Harz muttered an excuse, shook
+hands with his host, and bowing to his new acquaintance, went away.
+He caught a glimpse of Greta's face against the window, and waved his
+hand to her.  In the road he came on Dawney, who was turning in
+between the poplars, with thumbs as usual hooked in the armholes of
+his waistcoat.
+
+"Hallo!" the latter said.
+
+"Doctor!" Harz answered slyly; "the Fates outwitted me, it seems."
+
+"Serve you right," said Dawney, "for your confounded egoism! Wait
+here till I come out, I shan't be many minutes."
+
+But Harz went on his way.  A cart drawn by cream-coloured oxen was
+passing slowly towards the bridge.  In front of the brushwood piled
+on it two peasant girls were sitting with their feet on a mat of
+grass--the picture of contentment.
+
+"I'm wasting my time!" he thought.  "I've done next to nothing in two
+months.  Better get back to London!  That girl will never make a
+painter!"  She would never make a painter, but there was something in
+her that he could not dismiss so rapidly.  She was not exactly
+beautiful, but she was sympathetic.  The brow was pleasing, with
+dark-brown hair softly turned back, and eyes so straight and shining.
+The two sisters were very different!  The little one was innocent,
+yet mysterious; the elder seemed as clear as crystal!
+
+He had entered the town, where the arcaded streets exuded their
+peculiar pungent smell of cows and leather, wood-smoke, wine-casks,
+and drains.  The sound of rapid wheels over the stones made him turn
+his head.  A carriage drawn by red-roan horses was passing at a great
+pace.  People stared at it, standing still, and looking alarmed.  It
+swung from side to side and vanished round a corner.  Harz saw Mr.
+Nicholas Treffry in a long, whitish dust-coat; his Italian servant,
+perched behind, was holding to the seat-rail, with a nervous grin on
+his dark face.
+
+'Certainly,' Harz thought, 'there's no getting away from these people
+this morning--they are everywhere.'
+
+In his studio he began to sort his sketches, wash his brushes, and
+drag out things he had accumulated during his two months' stay.  He
+even began to fold his blanket door.  But suddenly he stopped.  Those
+two girls!  Why not try?  What a picture!  The two heads, the sky,
+and leaves!  Begin to-morrow!  Against that window--no, better at the
+Villa!  Call the picture--Spring...!
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The wind, stirring among trees and bushes, flung the young leaves
+skywards.  The trembling of their silver linings was like the joyful
+flutter of a heart at good news.  It was one of those Spring mornings
+when everything seems full of a sweet restlessness--soft clouds
+chasing fast across the sky; soft scents floating forth and dying;
+the notes of birds, now shrill and sweet, now hushed in silences; all
+nature striving for something, nothing at peace.
+
+Villa Rubein withstood the influence of the day, and wore its usual
+look of rest and isolation.  Harz sent in his card, and asked to see
+"der Herr."  The servant, a grey-eyed, clever-looking Swiss with no
+hair on his face, came back saying:
+
+"Der Herr, mein Herr, is in the Garden gone."  Harz followed him.
+
+Herr Paul, a small white flannel cap on his head, gloves on his
+hands, and glasses on his nose, was watering a rosebush, and humming
+the serenade from Faust.
+
+This aspect of the house was very different from the other.  The sun
+fell on it, and over a veranda creepers clung and scrambled in long
+scrolls.  There was a lawn, with freshly mown grass; flower-beds were
+laid out, and at the end of an avenue of young acacias stood an
+arbour covered with wisteria.
+
+In the east, mountain peaks--fingers of snow--glittered above the
+mist.  A grave simplicity lay on that scene, on the roofs and spires,
+the valleys and the dreamy hillsides, with their yellow scars and
+purple bloom, and white cascades, like tails of grey horses swishing
+in the wind.
+
+Herr Paul held out his hand: "What can we do for you?" he said.
+
+"I have to beg a favour," replied Harz.  "I wish to paint your
+daughters.  I will bring the canvas here--they shall have no trouble.
+I would paint them in the garden when they have nothing else to do."
+
+Herr Paul looked at him dubiously--ever since the previous day he had
+been thinking: 'Queer bird, that painter--thinks himself the devil of
+a swell!  Looks a determined fellow too!'  Now--staring in the
+painter's face--it seemed to him, on the whole, best if some one else
+refused this permission.
+
+"With all the pleasure, my dear sir," he said.  "Come, let us ask
+these two young ladies!" and putting down his hose, he led the way
+towards the arbour, thinking: 'You'll be disappointed, my young
+conqueror, or I'm mistaken.'
+
+Miss Naylor and the girls were sitting in the shade, reading La
+Fontaine's fables.  Greta, with one eye on her governess, was
+stealthily cutting a pig out of orange peel.
+
+"Ah! my dear dears!" began Herr Paul, who in the presence of Miss
+Naylor always paraded his English.  "Here is our friend, who has a
+very flattering request to make; he would paint you, yes--both
+together, alfresco, in the air, in the sunshine, with the birds, the
+little birds!"
+
+Greta, gazing at Harz, gushed deep pink, and furtively showed him her
+pig.
+
+Christian said: "Paint us?  Oh no!"
+
+She saw Harz looking at her, and added, slowly: "If you really wish
+it, I suppose we could!" then dropped her eyes.
+
+"Ah!" said Herr Paul raising his brows till his glasses fell from his
+nose: "And what says Gretchen?  Does she want to be handed up to
+posterities a little peacock along with the other little birds?"
+
+Greta, who had continued staring at the painter, said: "Of--course--
+I--want--to--be."
+
+"Prrt!" said Herr Paul, looking at Miss Naylor.  The little lady
+indeed opened her mouth wide, but all that came forth was a tiny
+squeak, as sometimes happens when one is anxious to say something,
+and has not arranged beforehand what it shall be.
+
+The affair seemed ended; Harz heaved a sigh of satisfaction.  But
+Herr Paul had still a card to play.
+
+"There is your Aunt," he said; "there are things to be considered--
+one must certainly inquire--so, we shall see."  Kissing Greta loudly
+on both cheeks, he went towards the house.
+
+"What makes you want to paint us?" Christian asked, as soon as he was
+gone.
+
+"I think it very wrong," Miss Naylor blurted out.
+
+"Why?" said Harz, frowning.
+
+"Greta is so young--there are lessons--it is such a waste of time!"
+
+His eyebrows twitched: "Ah! You think so!"
+
+"I don't see why it is a waste of time," said Christian quietly;
+"there are lots of hours when we sit here and do nothing."
+
+"And it is very dull," put in Greta, with a pout.
+
+"You are rude, Greta," said Miss Naylor in a little rage, pursing her
+lips, and taking up her knitting.
+
+"I think it seems always rude to speak the truth," said Greta.  Miss
+Naylor looked at her in that concentrated manner with which she was
+in the habit of expressing displeasure.
+
+But at this moment a servant came, and said that Mrs. Decie would be
+glad to see Herr Harz.  The painter made them a stiff bow, and
+followed the servant to the house.  Miss Naylor and the two girls
+watched his progress with apprehensive eyes; it was clear that he had
+been offended.
+
+Crossing the veranda, and passing through an open window hung with
+silk curtains, Hart entered a cool dark room.  This was Mrs. Decie's
+sanctum, where she conducted correspondence, received her visitors,
+read the latest literature, and sometimes, when she had bad
+headaches, lay for hours on the sofa, with a fan, and her eyes
+closed.  There was a scent of sandalwood, a suggestion of the East, a
+kind of mystery, in here, as if things like chairs and tables were
+not really what they seemed, but something much less commonplace.
+
+The visitor looked twice, to be quite sure of anything; there were
+many plants, bead curtains, and a deal of silverwork and china.
+
+Mrs. Decie came forward in the slightly rustling silk which--whether
+in or out of fashion--always accompanied her.  A tall woman, over
+fifty, she moved as if she had been tied together at the knees.  Her
+face was long, with broad brows, from which her sandy-grey hair was
+severely waved back; she had pale eyes, and a perpetual, pale,
+enigmatic smile.  Her complexion had been ruined by long residence in
+India, and might unkindly have been called fawn-coloured.  She came
+close to Harz, keeping her eyes on his, with her head bent slightly
+forward.
+
+"We are so pleased to know you," she said, speaking in a voice which
+had lost all ring.  "It is charming to find some one in these parts
+who can help us to remember that there is such a thing as Art.  We
+had Mr. C--- here last autumn, such a charming fellow.  He was so
+interested in the native customs and dresses.  You are a subject
+painter, too, I think?  Won't you sit down?"
+
+She went on for some time, introducing painters' names, asking
+questions, skating round the edge of what was personal.  And the
+young man stood before her with a curious little smile fixed on his
+lips.  'She wants to know whether I'm worth powder and shot,' he
+thought.
+
+"You wish to paint my nieces?" Mrs. Decie said at last, leaning back
+on her settee.
+
+"I wish to have that honour," Harz answered with a bow.
+
+"And what sort of picture did you think of?"
+
+"That," said Harz, "is in the future.  I couldn't tell you."  And he
+thought: 'Will she ask me if I get my tints in Paris, like the woman
+Tramper told me of?'
+
+The perpetual pale smile on Mrs. Decie's face seemed to invite his
+confidence, yet to warn him that his words would be sucked in
+somewhere behind those broad fine brows, and carefully sorted.  Mrs.
+Decie, indeed, was thinking: 'Interesting young man, regular
+Bohemian--no harm in that at his age; something Napoleonic in his
+face; probably has no dress clothes.  Yes, should like to see more of
+him!'  She had a fine eye for points of celebrity; his name was
+unfamiliar, would probably have been scouted by that famous artist
+Mr. C---, but she felt her instinct urging her on to know him.  She
+was, to do her justice, one of those "lion" finders who seek the
+animal for pleasure, not for the glory it brings them; she had the
+courage of her instincts--lion-entities were indispensable to her,
+but she trusted to divination to secure them; nobody could foist a
+"lion" on her.
+
+"It will be very nice.  You will stay and have some lunch?  The
+arrangements here are rather odd.  Such a mixed household--but there
+is always lunch at two o'clock for any one who likes, and we all dine
+at seven.  You would have your sittings in the afternoons, perhaps?
+I should so like to see your sketches.  You are using the old house
+on the wall for studio; that is so original of you!"
+
+Harz would not stay to lunch, but asked if he might begin work that
+afternoon; he left a little suffocated by the sandalwood and sympathy
+of this sphinx-like woman.
+
+Walking home along the river wall, with the singing of the larks and
+thrushes, the rush of waters, the humming of the chafers in his ears,
+he felt that he would make something fine of this subject.  Before
+his eyes the faces of the two girls continually started up, framed by
+the sky, with young leaves guttering against their cheeks.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+Three days had passed since Harz began his picture, when early in the
+morning, Greta came from Villa Rubein along the river dyke and sat
+down on a bench from which the old house on the wall was visible.
+She had not been there long before Harz came out.
+
+"I did not knock," said Greta, "because you would not have heard, and
+it is so early, so I have been waiting for you a quarter of an hour."
+
+Selecting a rosebud, from some flowers in her hand, she handed it to
+him.  "That is my first rosebud this year," she said; "it is for you
+because you are painting me.  To-day I am thirteen, Herr Harz; there
+is not to be a sitting, because it is my birthday; but, instead, we
+are all going to Meran to see the play of Andreas Hofer.  You are to
+come too, please; I am here to tell you, and the others shall be here
+directly."
+
+Harz bowed: "And who are the others?"
+
+"Christian, and Dr. Edmund, Miss Naylor, and Cousin Teresa.  Her
+husband is ill, so she is sad, but to-day she is going to forget
+that.  It is not good to be always sad, is it, Herr Harz?"
+
+He laughed: "You could not be."
+
+Greta answered gravely: "Oh yes, I could.  I too am often sad.  You
+are making fun.  You are not to make fun to-day, because it is my
+birthday.  Do you think growing up is nice, Herr Harz ?"
+
+"No, Fraulein Greta, it is better to have all the time before you."
+
+They walked on side by side.
+
+"I think," said Greta, "you are very much afraid of losing time.
+Chris says that time is nothing."
+
+"Time is everything," responded Harz.
+
+"She says that time is nothing, and thought is everything," Greta
+murmured, rubbing a rose against her cheek, "but I think you cannot
+have a thought unless you have the time to think it in.  There are
+the others!  Look!"
+
+A cluster of sunshades on the bridge glowed for a moment and was lost
+in shadow.
+
+"Come," said Harz, "let's join them!"
+
+At Meran, under Schloss Tirol, people were streaming across the
+meadows into the open theatre.  Here were tall fellows in mountain
+dress, with leather breeches, bare knees, and hats with eagles'
+feathers; here were fruit-sellers, burghers and their wives,
+mountebanks, actors, and every kind of visitor.  The audience, packed
+into an enclosure of high boards, sweltered under the burning sun.
+Cousin Teresa, tall and thin, with hard, red cheeks, shaded her
+pleasant eyes with her hand.
+
+The play began.  It depicted the rising in the Tyrol of 1809: the
+village life, dances and yodelling; murmurings and exhortations, the
+warning beat of drums; then the gathering, with flintlocks,
+pitchforks, knives; the battle and victory; the homecoming, and
+festival.  Then the second gathering, the roar of cannon; betrayal,
+capture, death.  The impassive figure of the patriot Andreas Hofer
+always in front, black-bearded, leathern-girdled, under the blue sky,
+against a screen of mountains.
+
+Harz and Christian sat behind the others.  He seemed so intent on the
+play that she did not speak, but watched his face, rigid with a kind
+of cold excitement; he seemed to be transported by the life passing
+before them.  Something of his feeling seized on her; when the play
+was over she too was trembling.  In pushing their way out they became
+separated from the others.
+
+"There's a short cut to the station here," said Christian; "let's go
+this way."
+
+The path rose a little; a narrow stream crept alongside the meadow,
+and the hedge was spangled with wild roses.  Christian kept glancing
+shyly at the painter.  Since their meeting on the river wall her
+thoughts had never been at rest.  This stranger, with his keen face,
+insistent eyes, and ceaseless energy, had roused a strange feeling in
+her; his words had put shape to something in her not yet expressed.
+She stood aside at a stile to make way for some peasant boys, dusty
+and rough-haired, who sang and whistled as they went by.
+
+"I was like those boys once," said Harz.
+
+Christian turned to him quickly.  "Ah! that was why you felt the
+play, so much."
+
+"It's my country up there.  I was born amongst the mountains.  I
+looked after the cows, and slept in hay-cocks, and cut the trees in
+winter.  They used to call me a 'black sheep,' a 'loafer' in my
+village."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Ah! why?  I worked as hard as any of them.  But I wanted to get
+away.  Do you think I could have stayed there all my life?"
+
+Christian's eyes grew eager.
+
+"If people don't understand what it is you want to do, they always
+call you a loafer!" muttered Harz.
+
+"But you did what you meant to do in spite of them," Christian said.
+
+For herself it was so hard to finish or decide.  When in the old days
+she told Greta stories, the latter, whose instinct was always for the
+definite, would say: "And what came at the end, Chris?  Do finish it
+this morning!" but Christian never could.  Her thoughts were deep,
+vague, dreamy, invaded by both sides of every question.  Whatever she
+did, her needlework, her verse-making, her painting, all had its
+charm; but it was not always what it was intended for at the
+beginning.  Nicholas Treffry had once said of her: "When Chris starts
+out to make a hat, it may turn out an altar-cloth, but you may bet it
+won't be a hat."  It was her instinct to look for what things meant;
+and this took more than all her time.  She knew herself better than
+most girls of nineteen, but it was her reason that had informed her,
+not her feelings.  In her sheltered life, her heart had never been
+ruffled except by rare fits of passion--"tantrums" old Nicholas
+Treffry dubbed them--at what seemed to her mean or unjust.
+
+"If I were a man," she said, "and going to be great, I should have
+wanted to begin at the very bottom as you did."
+
+"Yes," said Harz quickly, "one should be able to feel everything."
+
+She did not notice how simply he assumed that he was going to be
+great.  He went on, a smile twisting his mouth unpleasantly beneath
+its dark moustache
+
+"Not many people think like you! It's a crime not to have been born a
+gentleman."
+
+"That's a sneer," said Christian; "I didn't think you would have
+sneered!"
+
+"It is true.  What is the use of pretending that it isn't?"
+
+"It may be true, but it is finer not to say it!"
+
+"By Heavens!" said Harz, striking one hand into the other, "if more
+truth were spoken there would not be so many shams."
+
+Christian looked down at him from her seat on the stile.
+
+"You are right all the same, Fraulein Christian," he added suddenly;
+"that's a very little business.  Work is what matters, and trying to
+see the beauty in the world."
+
+Christian's face changed.  She understood, well enough, this craving
+after beauty.  Slipping down from the stile, she drew a slow deep
+breath.
+
+"Yes!" she said.  Neither spoke for some time, then Harz said shyly:
+
+"If you and Fraulein Greta would ever like to come and see my studio,
+I should be so happy.  I would try and clean it up for you!"
+
+"I should like to come.  I could learn something.  I want to learn."
+
+They were both silent till the path joined the road.
+
+"We must be in front of the others; it's nice to be in front--let's
+dawdle.  I forgot--you never dawdle, Herr Harz."
+
+"After a big fit of work, I can dawdle against any one; then I get
+another fit of work--it's like appetite."
+
+"I'm always dawdling," answered Christian.
+
+By the roadside a peasant woman screwed up her sun-dried face, saying
+in a low voice: "Please, gracious lady, help me to lift this basket!"
+
+Christian stooped, but before she could raise it, Harz hoisted it up
+on his back.
+
+"All right," he nodded; "this good lady doesn't mind."
+
+The woman, looking very much ashamed, walked along by Christian; she
+kept rubbing her brown hands together, and saying; "Gracious lady, I
+would not have wished.  It is heavy, but I would not have wished."
+
+"I'm sure he'd rather carry it," said Christian.
+
+They had not gone far along the road, however, before the others
+passed them in a carriage, and at the strange sight Miss Naylor could
+be seen pursing her lips; Cousin Teresa nodding pleasantly; a smile
+on Dawney's face; and beside him Greta, very demure.  Harz began to
+laugh.
+
+"What are you laughing at?" asked Christian.
+
+"You English are so funny.  You mustn't do this here, you mustn't do
+that there, it's like sitting in a field of nettles.  If I were to
+walk with you without my coat, that little lady would fall off her
+seat."  His laugh infected Christian; they reached the station
+feeling that they knew each other better.
+
+The sun had dipped behind the mountains when the little train steamed
+down the valley.  All were subdued, and Greta, with a nodding head,
+slept fitfully.  Christian, in her corner, was looking out of the
+window, and Harz kept studying her profile.
+
+He tried to see her eyes.  He had remarked indeed that, whatever
+their expression, the brows, arched and rather wide apart, gave them
+a peculiar look of understanding.  He thought of his picture.  There
+was nothing in her face to seize on, it was too sympathetic, too much
+like light.  Yet her chin was firm, almost obstinate.
+
+The train stopped with a jerk; she looked round at him.  It was as
+though she had said: "You are my friend."
+
+At Villa Rubein, Herr Paul had killed the fatted calf for Greta's
+Fest.  When the whole party were assembled, he alone remained
+standing; and waving his arm above the cloth, cried: "My dears! Your
+happiness!  There are good things here--Come!"  And with a sly look,
+the air of a conjurer producing rabbits, he whipped the cover off the
+soup tureen:
+
+"Soup-turtle, fat, green fat!"  He smacked his lips.
+
+No servants were allowed, because, as Greta said to Harz:
+
+"It is that we are to be glad this evening."
+
+Geniality radiated from Herr Paul's countenance, mellow as a bowl of
+wine.  He toasted everybody, exhorting them to pleasure.
+
+Harz passed a cracker secretly behind Greta's head, and Miss Naylor,
+moved by a mysterious impulse, pulled it with a sort of gleeful
+horror; it exploded, and Greta sprang off her chair.  Scruff, seeing
+this, appeared suddenly on the sideboard with his forelegs in a plate
+of soup; without moving them, he turned his head, and appeared to
+accuse the company of his false position.  It was the signal for
+shrieks of laughter.  Scruff made no attempt to free his forelegs;
+but sniffed the soup, and finding that nothing happened, began to lap
+it.
+
+"Take him out! Oh! take him out!" wailed Greta, "he shall be ill!"
+
+"Allons! Mon cher!" cried Herr Paul, "c'est magnifique, mais, vous
+savez, ce nest guere la guerre!"  Scruff, with a wild spring, leaped
+past him to the ground.
+
+"Ah!" cried Miss Naylor, "the carpet!"  Fresh moans of mirth shook
+the table; for having tasted the wine of laughter, all wanted as much
+more as they could get.  When Scruff and his traces were effaced,
+Herr Paul took a ladle in his hand.
+
+"I have a toast," he said, waving it for silence; "a toast we will
+drink all together from our hearts; the toast of my little daughter,
+who to-day has thirteen years become; and there is also in our
+hearts," he continued, putting down the ladle and suddenly becoming
+grave, "the thought of one who is not today with us to see this
+joyful occasion; to her, too, in this our happiness we turn our
+hearts and glasses because it is her joy that we should yet be
+joyful.  I drink to my little daughter; may God her shadow bless!"
+
+All stood up, clinking their glasses, and drank: then, in the hush
+that followed, Greta, according to custom, began to sing a German
+carol; at the end of the fourth line she stopped, abashed.
+
+Heir Paul blew his nose loudly, and, taking up a cap that had fallen
+from a cracker, put it on.
+
+Every one followed his example, Miss Naylor attaining the distinction
+of a pair of donkey's ears, which she wore, after another glass of
+wine, with an air of sacrificing to the public good.
+
+At the end of supper came the moment for the offering of gifts.  Herr
+Paul had tied a handkerchief over Greta's eyes, and one by one they
+brought her presents.  Greta, under forfeit of a kiss, was bound to
+tell the giver by the feel of the gift.  Her swift, supple little
+hands explored noiselessly; and in every case she guessed right.
+
+Dawney's present, a kitten, made a scene by clawing at her hair.
+
+"That is Dr. Edmund's," she cried at once.  Christian saw that Harz
+had disappeared, but suddenly he came back breathless, and took his
+place at the end of the rank of givers.
+
+Advancing on tiptoe, he put his present into Greta's hands.  It was a
+small bronze copy of a Donatello statue.
+
+"Oh, Herr Harz!" cried Greta; "I saw it in the studio that day.  It
+stood on the table, and it is lovely."
+
+Mrs. Decie, thrusting her pale eyes close to it, murmured:
+"Charming!"
+
+Mr. Treffry took it in his forgers.
+
+"Rum little toad!  Cost a pot of money, I expect!"  He eyed Harz
+doubtfully.
+
+They went into the next room now, and Herr Paul, taking Greta's
+bandage, transferred it to his own eyes.
+
+"Take care--take care, all!" he cried; "I am a devil of a catcher,"
+and, feeling the air cautiously, he moved forward like a bear about
+to hug.  He caught no one.  Christian and Greta whisked under his
+arms and left him grasping at the air.  Mrs. Decie slipped past with
+astonishing agility.  Mr. Treffry, smoking his cigar, and barricaded
+in a corner, jeered: "Bravo, Paul!  The active beggar!  Can't he run!
+Go it, Greta!"
+
+At last Herr Paul caught Cousin Teresa, who, fattened against the
+wall, lost her head, and stood uttering tiny shrieks.
+
+Suddenly Mrs. Decie started playing The Blue Danube.  Herr Paul
+dropped the handkerchief, twisted his moustache up fiercely, glared
+round the room, and seizing Greta by the waist, began dancing
+furiously, bobbing up and down like a cork in lumpy water.  Cousin
+Teresa followed suit with Miss Naylor, both very solemn, and dancing
+quite different steps.  Harz, went up to Christian.
+
+"I can't dance," he said, "that is, I have only danced once, but--if
+you would try with me!"
+
+She put her hand on his arm, and they began.  She danced, light as a
+feather, eyes shining, feet flying, her body bent a little forward.
+It was not a great success at first, but as soon as the time had got
+into Harz's feet, they went swinging on when all the rest had
+stopped.  Sometimes one couple or another slipped through the window
+to dance on the veranda, and came whirling in again.  The lamplight
+glowed on the girls' white dresses; on Herr Paul's perspiring face.
+He constituted in himself a perfect orgy, and when the music stopped
+flung himself, full length, on the sofa gasping out:
+
+"My God!  But, my God!"
+
+Suddenly Christian felt Harz cling to her arm.
+
+Glowing and panting she looked at him.
+
+"Giddy!" he murmured: "I dance so badly; but I'll soon learn."
+
+Greta clapped her hands: "Every evening we will dance, every evening
+we will dance."
+
+Harz looked at Christian; the colour had deepened in her face.
+
+"I'll show you how they dance in my village, feet upon the ceiling!"
+And running to Dawney, he said:
+
+"Hold me here!  Lift me--so!  Now, on--two," he tried to swing his
+feet above his head, but, with an "Ouch!" from Dawney, they
+collapsed, and sat abruptly on the floor.  This untimely event
+brought the evening to an end.  Dawney left, escorting Cousin Teresa,
+and Harz strode home humming The Blue Danube, still feeling
+Christian's waist against his arm.
+
+In their room the two girls sat long at the window to cool themselves
+before undressing.
+
+"Ah!" sighed Greta, "this is the happiest birthday I have had."
+
+Cristian too thought: 'I have never been so happy in my life as I
+have been to-day.  I should like every day to be like this!'  And she
+leant out into the night, to let the air cool her cheeks.
+
+"Chris!" said Greta some days after this, "Miss Naylor danced last
+evening; I think she shall have a headache to-day.  There is my
+French and my history this morning."
+
+"Well, I can take them."
+
+"That is nice; then we can talk.  I am sorry about the headache.  I
+shall give her some of my Eau de Cologne."
+
+Miss Naylor's headaches after dancing were things on which to
+calculate.  The girls carried their books into the arbour; it was a
+showery day, and they had to run for shelter through the raindrops
+and sunlight.
+
+"The French first, Chris!"  Greta liked her French, in which she was
+not far inferior to Christian; the lesson therefore proceeded in an
+admirable fashion.  After one hour exactly by her watch
+(Mr. Treffry's birthday present loved and admired at least once every
+hour) Greta rose.
+
+"Chris, I have not fed my rabbits."
+
+"Be quick! there's not much time for history."
+
+Greta vanished.  Christian watched the bright water dripping from the
+roof; her lips were parted in a smile.  She was thinking of something
+Harz had said the night before.  A discussion having been started as
+to whether average opinion did, or did not, safeguard Society, Harz,
+after sitting silent, had burst out: "I think one man in earnest is
+better than twenty half-hearted men who follow tamely; in the end he
+does Society most good."
+
+Dawney had answered: "If you had your way there would be no Society."
+
+"I hate Society because it lives upon the weak."
+
+"Bah!" Herr Paul chimed in; "the weak goes to the wall; that is as
+certain as that you and I are here."
+
+"Let them fall against the wall," cried Harz; "don't push them
+there...."
+
+Greta reappeared, walking pensively in the rain.
+
+"Bino," she said, sighing, "has eaten too much.  I remember now, I
+did feed them before.  Must we do the history, Chris?"
+
+"Of course!"
+
+Greta opened her book, and put a finger in the page.  "Herr Harz is
+very kind to me," she said.  "Yesterday he brought a bird which had.
+come into his studio with a hurt wing; he brought it very gently in
+his handkerchief--he is very kind, the bird was not even frightened
+of him.  You did not know about that, Chris?"
+
+Chris flushed a little, and said in a hurt voice
+
+"I don't see what it has to--do with me."
+
+"No," assented Greta.
+
+Christian's colour deepened.  "Go on with your history, Greta."
+
+"Only," pursued Greta, "that he always tells you all about things,
+Chris."
+
+"He doesn't! How can you say that!"
+
+"I think he does, and it is because you do not make him angry.  It is
+very easy to make him angry; you have only to think differently, and
+he shall be angry at once."
+
+"You are a little cat!" said Christian; "it isn't true, at all.  He
+hates shams, and can't bear meanness; and it is mean to cover up
+dislikes and pretend that you agree with people."
+
+"Papa says that he thinks too much about himself."
+
+"Father!" began Christian hotly; biting her lips she stopped, and
+turned her wrathful eyes on Greta.
+
+"You do not always show your dislikes, Chris."
+
+"I?  What has that to do with it?  Because one is a coward that
+doesn't make it any better, does it?"
+
+"I think that he has a great many dislikes," murmured Greta.
+
+"I wish you would attend to your own faults, and not pry into other
+people's," and pushing the book aside, Christian gazed in front of
+her.
+
+Some minutes passed, then Greta leaning over, rubbed a cheek against
+her shoulder.
+
+"I am very sorry, Chris--I only wanted to be talking.  Shall I read
+some history?"
+
+"Yes," said Christian coldly.
+
+"Are you angry with me, Chris?"
+
+There was no answer.  The lingering raindrops pattered down on the
+roof.  Greta pulled at her sister's sleeve.
+
+"Look, Chris!" she said.  "There is Herr Harz!"
+
+Christian looked up, dropped her eyes again, and said: "Will you go
+on with the history, Greta?"
+
+Greta sighed.
+
+"Yes, I will--but, oh! Chris, there is the luncheon gong!" and she
+meekly closed the book.
+
+During the following weeks there was a "sitting" nearly every
+afternoon.  Miss Naylor usually attended them; the little lady was,
+to a certain extent, carried past objection.  She had begun to take
+an interest in the picture, and to watch the process out of the
+corner of her eye; in the depths of her dear mind, however, she never
+quite got used to the vanity and waste of time; her lips would move
+and her knitting-needles click in suppressed remonstrances.
+
+What Harz did fast he did best; if he had leisure he "saw too much,"
+loving his work so passionately that he could never tell exactly when
+to stop.  He hated to lay things aside, always thinking: "I can get
+it better."  Greta was finished, but with Christian, try as he would,
+he was not satisfied; from day to day her face seemed to him to
+change, as if her soul were growing.
+
+There were things too in her eyes that he could neither read nor
+reproduce.
+
+Dawney would often stroll out to them after his daily visit, and
+lying on the grass, his arms crossed behind his head, and a big cigar
+between his lips, would gently banter everybody.  Tea came at five
+o'clock, and then Mrs. Decie appeared armed with a magazine or novel,
+for she was proud of her literary knowledge.  The sitting was
+suspended; Harz, with a cigarette, would move between the table and
+the picture, drinking his tea, putting a touch in here and there; he
+never sat down till it was all over for the day.  During these
+"rests" there was talk, usually ending in discussion.  Mrs. Decie was
+happiest in conversations of a literary order, making frequent use of
+such expressions as: "After all, it produces an illusion--does
+anything else matter?"  "Rather a poseur, is he not?"  "A question,
+that, of temperament," or "A matter of the definition of words"; and
+other charming generalities, which sound well, and seem to go far,
+and are pleasingly irrefutable.  Sometimes the discussion turned on
+Art--on points of colour or technique; whether realism was quite
+justified; and should we be pre-Raphaelites?  When these discussions
+started, Christian's eyes would grow bigger and clearer, with a sort
+of shining reasonableness; as though they were trying to see into the
+depths.  And Harz would stare at them.  But the look in those eyes
+eluded him, as if they had no more meaning than Mrs. Decie's, which,
+with their pale, watchful smile, always seemed saying: "Come, let us
+take a little intellectual exercise."
+
+Greta, pulling Scruff's ears, would gaze up at the speakers; when the
+talk was over, she always shook herself.  But if no one came to the
+"sittings," there would sometimes be very earnest, quick talk,
+sometimes long silences.
+
+One day Christian said: "What is your religion?"
+
+Harz finished the touch he was putting on the canvas, before he
+answered: "Roman Catholic, I suppose; I was baptised in that Church."
+
+"I didn't mean that.  Do you believe in a future life?"
+
+"Christian," murmured Greta, who was plaiting blades of grass, "shall
+always want to know what people think about a future life; that is so
+funny!"
+
+"How can I tell?" said Harz; "I've never really thought of it--never
+had the time."
+
+"How can you help thinking?" Christian said: "I have to--it seems to
+me so awful that we might come to an end."
+
+She closed her book, and it slipped off her lap.  She went on: "There
+must be a future life, we're so incomplete.  What's the good of your
+work, for instance?  What's the use of developing if you have to
+stop?"
+
+"I don't know," answered Harz.  "I don't much care.  All I know is,
+I've got to work."
+
+"But why?"
+
+"For happiness--the real happiness is fighting--the rest is nothing.
+If you have finished a thing, does it ever satisfy you?  You look
+forward to the next thing at once; to wait is wretched!"
+
+Christian clasped her hands behind her neck; sunlight flickered
+through the leaves on to the bosom of her dress.
+
+"Ah! Stay like that!" cried Harz.
+
+She let her eyes rest on his face, swinging her foot a little.
+
+"You work because you must; but that's not enough.  Why do you feel
+you must?  I want to know what's behind.  When I was travelling with
+Aunt Constance the winter before last we often talked--I've heard her
+discuss it with her friends.  She says we move in circles till we
+reach Nirvana.  But last winter I found I couldn't talk to her; it
+seemed as if she never really meant anything.  Then I started
+reading--Kant and Hegel--"
+
+"Ah!" put in Harz, "if they would teach me to draw better, or to see
+a new colour in a flower, or an expression in a face, I would read
+them all."
+
+Christian leaned forward: "It must be right to get as near truth as
+possible; every step gained is something.  You believe in truth;
+truth is the same as beauty--that was what you said--you try to paint
+the truth, you always see the beauty.  But how can we know truth,
+unless we know what is at the root of it?"
+
+"I--think," murmured Greta, sotto voce, "you see one way--and he sees
+another--because--you are not one person."
+
+"Of course!" said Christian impatiently, "but why--"
+
+A sound of humming interrupted her.
+
+Nicholas Treffry was coming from the house, holding the Times in one
+hand, and a huge meerschaum pipe in the other.
+
+"Aha!" he said to Harz: "how goes the picture?" and he lowered
+himself into a chair.
+
+"Better to-day, Uncle?" said Christian softly.
+
+Mr. Treffry growled.  "Confounded humbugs, doctors!" he said.  "Your
+father used to swear by them; why, his doctor killed him--made him
+drink such a lot of stuff!"
+
+"Why then do you have a doctor, Uncle Nic?" asked Greta.
+
+Mr. Treffry looked at her; his eyes twinkled.  "I don't know, my
+dear.  If they get half a chance, they won't let go of you!"
+
+There had been a gentle breeze all day, but now it had died away; not
+a leaf quivered, not a blade of grass was stirring; from the house
+were heard faint sounds as of some one playing on a pipe.  A
+blackbird came hopping down the path.
+
+"When you were a boy, did you go after birds' nests, Uncle Nic?"
+Greta whispered.
+
+"I believe you, Greta."  The blackbird hopped into the shrubbery.
+
+"You frightened him, Uncle Nic!  Papa says that at Schloss Konig,
+where he lived when he was young, he would always be after jackdaws'
+nests."
+
+"Gammon, Greta.  Your father never took a jackdaw's nest, his legs
+are much too round!"
+
+"Are you fond of birds, Uncle Nic?"
+
+"Ask me another, Greta!  Well, I s'pose so."
+
+"Then why did you go bird-nesting?  I think it is cruel"
+
+Mr. Treffry coughed behind his paper: "There you have me, Greta," he
+remarked.
+
+Harz began to gather his brushes: "Thank you," he said, "that's all I
+can do to-day."
+
+"Can I look?" Mr. Treffry inquired.
+
+"Certainly!"
+
+Uncle Nic got up slowly, and stood in front of the picture.  "When
+it's for sale," he said at last, "I'll buy it."
+
+Harz bowed; but for some reason he felt annoyed, as if he had been
+asked to part with something personal.
+
+"I thank you," he said.  A gong sounded.
+
+"You'll stay and have a snack with us?" said Mr. Treffry; "the
+doctor's stopping."  Gathering up his paper, he moved off to the
+house with his hand on Greta's shoulder, the terrier running in
+front.  Harz and Christian were left alone.  He was scraping his
+palette, and she was sitting with her elbows resting on her knees;
+between them, a gleam of sunlight dyed the path golden.  It was
+evening already; the bushes and the flowers, after the day's heat,
+were breathing out perfume; the birds had started their evensong.
+
+"Are you tired of sitting for your portrait, Fraulein Christian?"
+
+Christian shook her head.
+
+"I shall get something into it that everybody does not see--something
+behind the surface, that will last."
+
+Christian said slowly: "That's like a challenge.  You were right when
+you said fighting is happiness--for yourself, but not for me.  I'm a
+coward.  I hate to hurt people, I like them to like me.  If you had
+to do anything that would make them hate you, you would do it all the
+same, if it helped your work; that's fine--it's what I can't do.
+It's--it's everything.  Do you like Uncle Nic?"
+
+The young painter looked towards the house, where under the veranda
+old Nicholas Treffry was still in sight; a smile came on his lips.
+
+"If I were the finest painter in the world, he wouldn't think
+anything of me for it, I'm afraid; but if I could show him handfuls
+of big cheques for bad pictures I had painted, he would respect me."
+
+She smiled, and said: "I love him."
+
+"Then I shall like him," Harz answered simply.
+
+She put her hand out, and her fingers met his.  "We shall be late,"
+she said, glowing, and catching up her book: "I'm always late!"
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+There was one other guest at dinner, a well-groomed person with pale,
+fattish face, dark eyes, and hair thin on the temples, whose clothes
+had a military cut.  He looked like a man fond of ease, who had gone
+out of his groove, and collided with life.  Herr Paul introduced him
+as Count Mario Sarelli.
+
+Two hanging lamps with crimson shades threw a rosy light over the
+table, where, in the centre stood a silver basket, full of irises.
+Through the open windows the garden was all clusters of black foliage
+in the dying light.  Moths fluttered round the lamps; Greta,
+following them with her eyes, gave quite audible sighs of pleasure
+when they escaped.  Both girls wore white, and Harz, who sat opposite
+Christian, kept looking at her, and wondering why he had not painted
+her in that dress.
+
+Mrs. Decie understood the art of dining--the dinner, ordered by Herr
+Paul, was admirable; the servants silent as their, shadows; there was
+always a hum of conversation.
+
+Sarelli, who sat on her right hand, seemed to partake of little
+except olives, which he dipped into a glass of sherry.  He turned his
+black, solemn eyes silently from face to face, now and then asking
+the meaning of an English word.  After a discussion on modern Rome,
+it was debated whether or no a criminal could be told by the
+expression of his face.
+
+"Crime," said Mrs. Decie, passing her hand across her brow--"crime is
+but the hallmark of strong individuality."
+
+Miss Naylor, gushing rather pink, stammered: "A great crime must show
+itself--a murder.  Why, of course!"
+
+"If that were so," said Dawney, "we should only have to look about
+us--no more detectives."
+
+Miss Naylor rejoined with slight severity: "I cannot conceive that
+such a thing can pass the human face by, leaving no impression!"
+
+Harz said abruptly: "There are worse things than murder."
+
+"Ah! par exemple!" said Sarelli.
+
+There was a slight stir all round the table.
+
+"Verry good," cried out Herr Paul, "a vot' sante, cher."
+
+Miss Naylor shivered, as if some one had put a penny down her back;
+and Mrs. Decie, leaning towards Harz, smiled like one who has made a
+pet dog do a trick.  Christian alone was motionless, looking
+thoughtfully at Harz.
+
+"I saw a man tried for murder once," he said, "a murder for revenge;
+I watched the judge, and I thought all the time: 'I'd rather be that
+murderer than you; I've never seen a meaner face; you crawl through
+life; you're not a criminal, simply because you haven't the
+courage.'"
+
+In the dubious silence following the painter's speech, Mr. Treffry
+could distinctly be heard humming.  Then Sarelli said: "What do you
+say to anarchists, who are not men, but savage beasts, whom I would
+tear to pieces!"
+
+"As to that," Harz answered defiantly, "it maybe wise to hang them,
+but then there are so many other men that it would be wise to hang."
+
+"How can we tell what they went through; what their lives were?"
+murmured Christian.
+
+Miss Naylor, who had been rolling a pellet of bread, concealed it
+hastily.  "They are--always given a chance to--repent--I believe,"
+she said.
+
+"For what they are about to receive," drawled Dawney.
+
+Mrs. Decie signalled with her fan: "We are trying to express the
+inexpressible--shall we go into the garden?"
+
+All rose; Harz stood by the window, and in passing, Christian looked
+at him.
+
+He sat down again with a sudden sense of loss.  There was no white
+figure opposite now.  Raising his eyes he met Sarelli's.  The Italian
+was regarding him with a curious stare.
+
+Herr Paul began retailing apiece of scandal he had heard that
+afternoon.
+
+"Shocking affair!" he said; "I could never have believed it of her!
+B--- is quite beside himself.  Yesterday there was a row, it seems!"
+
+"There has been one every day for months," muttered Dawney.
+
+"But to leave without a word, and go no one knows where!  B--- is
+'viveur' no doubt, mais, mon Dieu, que voulezvous?  She was always a
+poor, pale thing.  Why!, when my---" he flourished his cigar; "I was
+not always---what I should have been---one lives in a world of flesh
+and blood---we are not all angels---que diable!  But this is a very
+vulgar business.  She goes off; leaves everything---without a word;
+and B---is very fond of her.  These things are not done!" the
+starched bosom of his shirt seemed swollen by indignation.
+
+Mr. Treffry, with a heavy hand on the table, eyed him sideways.
+Dawney said slowly:
+
+"B--- is a beast; I'm sorry for the poor woman; but what can she do
+alone?"
+
+"There is, no doubt, a man," put in Sarelli.
+
+Herr Paul muttered: "Who knows?"
+
+"What is B--- going to do?" said Dawney.
+
+"Ah!" said Herr Paul.  "He is fond of her.  He is a chap of
+resolution, he will get her back.  He told me: 'Well, you know, I
+shall follow her wherever she goes till she comes back.'  He will do
+it, he is a determined chap; he will follow her wherever she goes."
+
+Mr. Treffry drank his wine off at a gulp, and sucked his moustache in
+sharply.
+
+"She was a fool to marry him," said Dawney; "they haven't a point in
+common; she hates him like poison, and she's the better of the two.
+But it doesn't pay a woman to run off like that.  B--- had better
+hurry up, though.  What do you think, sir?" he said to Mr. Treffry.
+
+"Eh?" said Mr. Treffry; "how should I know?  Ask Paul there, he's one
+of your moral men, or Count Sarelli."
+
+The latter said impassively: "If I cared for her I should very likely
+kill her--if not--" he shrugged his shoulders.
+
+Harz, who was watching, was reminded of his other words at dinner,
+"wild beasts whom I would tear to pieces."  He looked with interest
+at this quiet man who said these extremely ferocious things, and
+thought: 'I should like to paint that fellow.'
+
+Herr Paul twirled his wine-glass in his fingers.  "There are family
+ties," he said, "there is society, there is decency; a wife should be
+with her husband.  B--- will do quite right.  He must go after her;
+she will not perhaps come back at first; he will follow her; she will
+begin to think, 'I am helpless--I am ridiculous!'  A woman is soon
+beaten.  They will return.  She is once more with her husband--
+Society will forgive, it will be all right."
+
+"By Jove, Paul," growled Mr. Treffry, "wonderful power of argument!"
+
+"A wife is a wife," pursued Herr Paul; "a man has a right to her
+society."
+
+"What do you say to that, sir?" asked Dawney.
+
+Mr. Treffry tugged at his beard: "Make a woman live with you, if she
+don't want to?  I call it low."
+
+"But, my dear," exclaimed Herr Paul, "how should you know?  You have
+not been married."
+
+"No, thank the Lord!" Mr. Treffry replied.
+
+"But looking at the question broadly, sir," said Dawney; "if a
+husband always lets his wife do as she likes, how would the thing
+work out?  What becomes of the marriage tie?"
+
+"The marriage tie," growled Mr. Treffry, "is the biggest thing there
+is!  But, by Jove, Doctor, I'm a Dutchman if hunting women ever
+helped the marriage tie!"
+
+"I am not thinking of myself," Herr Paul cried out, "I think of the
+community.  There are rights."
+
+"A decent community never yet asked a man to tread on his self-
+respect.  If I get my fingers skinned over my marriage, which I
+undertake at my own risk, what's the community to do with it?  D'you
+think I'm going to whine to it to put the plaster on?  As to rights,
+it'd be a deuced sight better for us all if there wasn't such a fuss
+about 'em.  Leave that to women!  I don't give a tinker's damn for
+men who talk about their rights in such matters."
+
+Sarelli rose.  "But your honour," he said, "there is your honour!"
+
+Mr. Treffry stared at him.
+
+"Honour!  If huntin' women's your idea of honour, well--it isn't
+mine."
+
+"Then you'd forgive her, sir, whatever happened," Dawney said.
+
+"Forgiveness is another thing.  I leave that to your sanctimonious
+beggars.  But, hunt a woman!  Hang it, sir, I'm not a cad!" and
+bringing his hand down with a rattle, he added: "This is a subject
+that don't bear talking of."
+
+Sarelli fell back in his seat, twirling his moustaches fiercely.
+Harz, who had risen, looked at Christian's empty place.
+
+'If I were married!' he thought suddenly.
+
+Herr Paul, with a somewhat vinous glare, still muttered, "But your
+duty to the family!"
+
+Harz slipped through the window.  The moon was like a wonderful white
+lantern in the purple sky; there was but a smoulder of stars.
+Beneath the softness of the air was the iciness of the snow; it made
+him want to run and leap.  A sleepy beetle dropped on its back; he
+turned it over and watched it scurry across the grass.
+
+Someone was playing Schumann's Kinderscenen.  Harz stood still to
+listen.  The notes came twining, weaving round his thoughts; the
+whole night seemed full of girlish voices, of hopes and fancies,
+soaring away to mountain heights--invisible, yet present.  Between
+the stems of the acacia-trees he could see the flicker of white
+dresses, where Christian and Greta were walking arm in arm.  He went
+towards them; the blood flushed up in his face, he felt almost
+surfeited by some sweet emotion.  Then, in sudden horror, he stood
+still.  He was in love!  With nothing done with everything before
+him!  He was going to bow down to a face!  The flicker of the dresses
+was no longer visible.  He would not be fettered, he would stamp it
+out!  He turned away; but with each step, something seemed to jab at
+his heart.
+
+Round the corner of the house, in the shadow of the wall, Dominique,
+the Luganese, in embroidered slippers, was smoking a long cherry-wood
+pipe, leaning against a tree--Mephistopheles in evening clothes.
+Harz went up to him.
+
+"Lend me a pencil, Dominique."
+
+"Bien, M'sieu."
+
+Resting a card against the tree Harz wrote to Mrs. Decie: "Forgive
+me, I am obliged to go away.  In a few days I shall hope to return,
+and finish the picture of your nieces."
+
+He sent Dominique for his hat.  During the man's absence he was on
+the point of tearing up the card and going back into the house.
+
+When the Luganese returned he thrust the card into his hand, and
+walked out between the tall poplars, waiting, like ragged ghosts,
+silver with moonlight.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Harz walked away along the road.  A dog was howling.  The sound
+seemed too appropriate.  He put his fingers to his ears, but the
+lugubrious noise passed those barriers, and made its way into his
+heart.  Was there nothing that would put an end to this emotion?  It
+was no better in the old house on the wall; he spent the night
+tramping up and down.
+
+Just before daybreak he slipped out with a knapsack, taking the road
+towards Meran.
+
+He had not quite passed through Gries when he overtook a man walking
+in the middle of the road and leaving a trail of cigar smoke behind
+him.
+
+"Ah! my friend," the smoker said, "you walk early; are you going my
+way?"
+
+It was Count Sarelli.  The raw light had imparted a grey tinge to his
+pale face, the growth of his beard showed black already beneath the
+skin; his thumbs were hooked in the pockets of a closely buttoned
+coat, he gesticulated with his fingers.
+
+"You are making a journey?" he said, nodding at the knapsack.  "You
+are early--I am late; our friend has admirable kummel--I have drunk
+too much.  You have not been to bed, I think?  If there is no sleep
+in one's bed it is no good going to look for it.  You find that?  It
+is better to drink kummel...!  Pardon!  You are doing the right
+thing: get away!  Get away as fast as possible!  Don't wait, and let
+it catch you!"
+
+Harz stared at him amazed.
+
+"Pardon!" Sarelli said again, raising his hat, "that girl--the white
+girl--I saw.  You do well to get away!" he swayed a little as he
+walked.  "That old fellow--what is his name-Trrreffr-ry!  What ideas
+of honour!"  He mumbled: "Honour is an abstraction!  If a man is not
+true to an abstraction, he is a low type; but wait a minute!"
+
+He put his hand to his side as though in pain.
+
+The hedges were brightening with a faint pinky glow; there was no
+sound on the long, deserted road, but that of their footsteps;
+suddenly a bird commenced to chirp, another answered--the world
+seemed full of these little voices.
+
+Sarelli stopped.
+
+"That white girl," he said, speaking with rapidity.  "Yes! You do
+well! get away!  Don't let it catch you!  I waited, it caught me--
+what happened?  Everything horrible--and now--kummel!"  Laughing a
+thick laugh, he gave a twirl to his moustache, and swaggered on.
+
+"I was a fine fellow--nothing too big for Mario Sarelli; the regiment
+looked to me.  Then she came--with her eyes and her white dress,
+always white, like this one; the little mole on her chin, her hands
+for ever moving--their touch as warm as sunbeams.  Then, no longer
+Sarelli this, and that!  The little house close to the ramparts!  Two
+arms, two eyes, and nothing here," he tapped his breast, "but flames
+that made ashes quickly--in her, like this ash--!" he flicked the
+white flake off his cigar.  "It's droll!  You agree, hein?  Some day
+I shall go back and kill her.  In the meantime--kummel!"
+
+He stopped at a house close to the road, and stood still, his teeth
+bared in a grin.
+
+"But I bore you," he said.  His cigar, flung down, sputtered forth
+its sparks on the road in front of Harz.  "I live here--good-morning!
+You are a man for work--your honour is your Art!  I know, and you are
+young!  The man who loves flesh better than his honour is a low type-
+-I am a low type.  I! Mario Sarelli, a low type! I love flesh better
+than my honour!"
+
+He remained swaying at the gate with the grin fixed on his face; then
+staggered up the steps, and banged the door.  But before Harz had
+walked on, he again appeared, beckoning, in the doorway.  Obeying an
+impulse, Harz went in.
+
+"We will make a night of it," said SareIIi; "wine, brandy, kummel?  I
+am virtuous--kummel it must be for me!"
+
+He sat down at a piano, and began to touch the keys.  Harz poured out
+some wine.  Sarelli nodded.
+
+"You begin with that?  Allegro--piu--presto!
+
+Wine--brandy--kummel!" he quickened the time of the tune: "it is not
+too long a passage, and this"--he took his hands off the keys--"comes
+after."
+
+Harz smiled.
+
+"Some men do not kill themselves," he said.
+
+Sarelli, who was bending and swaying to the music of a tarantella,
+broke off, and letting his eyes rest on the painter, began playing
+Schumann's Kinderscenen.  Harz leaped to his feet.
+
+"Stop that!" he cried.
+
+"It pricks you?" said Sarelli suavely; "what do you think of this?"
+he played again, crouching over the piano, and making the notes sound
+like the crying of a wounded animal.
+
+"For me!" he said, swinging round, and rising.
+
+"Your health!  And so you don't believe in suicide, but in murder?
+The custom is the other way; but you don't believe in customs?
+Customs are only for Society?"  He drank a glass of kummel.  "You do
+not love Society?"
+
+Harz looked at him intently; he did not want to quarrel.
+
+"I am not too fond of other people's thoughts," he said at last; "I
+prefer to think my own.
+
+"And is Society never right?  That poor Society!"
+
+"Society!  What is Society--a few men in good coats?  What has it
+done for me?"
+
+Sarelli bit the end off a cigar.
+
+"Ah!" he said; "now we are coming to it.  It is good to be an artist,
+a fine bantam of an artist; where other men have their dis-ci-pline,
+he has his, what shall we say--his mound of roses?"
+
+The painter started to his feet.
+
+"Yes," said Sarelli, with a hiccough, "you are a fine fellow!"
+
+"And you are drunk!" cried Harz.
+
+"A little drunk--not much, not enough to matter!"
+
+Harz broke into laughter.  It was crazy to stay there listening to
+this mad fellow.  What had brought him in?  He moved towards the
+door.
+
+"Ah!" said Sarelli, "but it is no good going to bed--let us talk.  I
+have a lot to say--it is pleasant to talk to anarchists at times."
+
+Full daylight was already coming through the chinks of the shutters.
+
+"You are all anarchists, you painters, you writing fellows.  You live
+by playing ball with facts.  Images--nothing solid- hein?  You're all
+for new things too, to tickle your nerves.  No discipline!  True
+anarchists, every one of you!"
+
+Harz poured out another glass of wine and drank it off.  The man's
+feverish excitement was catching.
+
+"Only fools," he replied, "take things for granted.  As for
+discipline, what do you aristocrats, or bourgeois know of discipline?
+Have you ever been hungry?  Have you ever had your soul down on its
+back?"
+
+"Soul on its back?  That is good!"
+
+"A man's no use," cried Harz, "if he's always thinking of what others
+think; he must stand on his own legs."
+
+"He must not then consider other people?"
+
+"Not from cowardice anyway."
+
+Sarelli drank.
+
+"What would you do," he said, striking his chest, "if you had a
+devil-here?  Would you go to bed?"
+
+A sort of pity seized on Harz.  He wanted to say something that would
+be consoling but could find no words; and suddenly he felt disgusted.
+What link was there between him and this man; between his love and
+this man's love?
+
+"Harz!" muttered Sarelli; "Harz means 'tar,' hein?  Your family is
+not an old one?"
+
+Harz glared, and said: "My father is a peasant."
+
+Sarelli lifted the kummel bottle and emptied it into his glass, with
+a steady hand.
+
+"You're honest--and we both have devils.  I forgot; I brought you in
+to see a picture!"
+
+He threw wide the shutters; the windows were already open, and a rush
+of air came in.
+
+"Ah!" he said, sniffing, "smells of the earth, nicht wahr, Herr
+Artist?  You should know--it belongs to your father....  Come, here's
+my picture; a Correggio!  What do you think of it?"
+
+"It is a copy."
+
+"You think?"
+
+"I know."
+
+"Then you have given me the lie, Signor," and drawing out his
+handkerchief SareIIi flicked it in the painter's face.
+
+Harz turned white.
+
+"Duelling is a good custom!" said Sarelli.  "I shall have the honour
+to teach you just this one, unless you are afraid.  Here are pistols-
+-this room is twenty feet across at least, twenty feet is no bad
+distance."
+
+And pulling out a drawer he took two pistols from a case, and put
+them on the table.
+
+"The light is good--but perhaps you are afraid."
+
+"Give me one!" shouted the infuriated painter; "and go to the devil
+for a fool"
+
+"One moment!" Sarelli murmured: "I will load them, they are more
+useful loaded."
+
+Harz leaned out of the window; his head was in a whirl.  'What on
+earth is happening?' he thought.  'He's mad--or I am!  Confound him!
+I'm not going to be killed!'  He turned and went towards the table.
+Sarelli's head was sunk on his arms, he was asleep.  Harz
+methodically took up the pistols, and put them back into the drawer.
+A sound made him turn his head; there stood a tall, strong young
+woman in a loose gown caught together on her chest.  Her grey eyes
+glanced from the painter to the bottles, from the bottles to the
+pistol-case.  A simple reasoning, which struck Harz as comic.
+
+"It is often like this," she said in the country patois; "der Herr
+must not be frightened."
+
+Lifting the motionless Sarelli as if he were a baby, she laid him on
+a couch.
+
+"Ah!" she said, sitting down and resting her elbow on the table; "he
+will not wake!"
+
+Harz bowed to her; her patient figure, in spite of its youth and
+strength, seemed to him pathetic.  Taking up his knapsack, he went
+out.
+
+The smoke of cottages rose straight; wisps of mist were wandering
+about the valley, and the songs of birds dropping like blessings.
+All over the grass the spiders had spun a sea of threads that bent
+and quivered to the pressure of the air, like fairy tight-ropes.
+
+All that day he tramped.
+
+Blacksmiths, tall stout men with knotted muscles, sleepy eyes, and
+great fair beards, came out of their forges to stretch and wipe their
+brows, and stare at him.
+
+Teams of white oxen, waiting to be harnessed, lashed their tails
+against their flanks, moving their heads slowly from side to side in
+the heat.  Old women at chalet doors blinked and knitted.
+
+The white houses, with gaping caves of storage under the roofs, the
+red church spire, the clinking of hammers in the forges, the slow
+stamping of oxen-all spoke of sleepy toil, without ideas or ambition.
+Harz knew it all too well; like the earth's odour, it belonged to
+him, as Sarelli had said.
+
+Towards sunset coming to a copse of larches, he sat down to rest.  It
+was very still, but for the tinkle of cowbells, and, from somewhere
+in the distance, the sound of dropping logs.
+
+Two barefooted little boys came from the wood, marching earnestly
+along, and looking at Harz as if he were a monster.  Once past him,
+they began to run.
+
+'At their age,' he thought, 'I should have done the same.'  A hundred
+memories rushed into his mind.
+
+He looked down at the village straggling below--white houses with
+russet tiles and crowns of smoke, vineyards where the young leaves
+were beginning to unfold, the red-capped spire, a thread of bubbling
+stream, an old stone cross.  He had been fourteen years struggling up
+from all this; and now just as he had breathing space, and the time
+to give himself wholly to his work--this weakness was upon him!
+Better, a thousand times, to give her up!
+
+In a house or two lights began to wink; the scent of wood smoke
+reached him, the distant chimes of bells, the burring of a stream.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+Next day his one thought was to get back to work.  He arrived at the
+studio in the afternoon, and, laying in provisions, barricaded the
+lower door.  For three days he did not go out; on the fourth day he
+went to Villa Rubein....
+
+Schloss Runkelstein--grey, blind, strengthless--still keeps the
+valley.  The windows which once, like eyes, watched men and horses
+creeping through the snow, braved the splutter of guns and the gleam
+of torches, are now holes for the birds to nest in.  Tangled creepers
+have spread to the very summits of the walls.  In the keep, instead
+of grim men in armour, there is a wooden board recording the history
+of the castle and instructing visitors on the subject of
+refreshments.  Only at night, when the cold moon blanches everything,
+the castle stands like the grim ghost of its old self, high above the
+river.
+
+After a long morning's sitting the girls had started forth with Harz
+and Dawney to spend the afternoon at the ruin; Miss Naylor, kept at
+home by headache, watched them depart with words of caution against
+sunstroke, stinging nettles, and strange dogs.
+
+Since the painter's return Christian and he had hardly spoken to each
+other.  Below the battlement on which they sat, in a railed gallery
+with little tables, Dawney and Greta were playing dominoes, two
+soldiers drinking beer, and at the top of a flight of stairs the
+Custodian's wife sewing at a garment.  Christian said suddenly: "I
+thought we were friends."
+
+"Well, Fraulein Christian, aren't we?"
+
+"You went away without a word; friends don't do that."
+
+Harz bit his lips.
+
+"I don't think you care," she went on with a sort of desperate haste,
+"whether you hurt people or not.  You have been here all this time
+without even going to see your father and mother."
+
+"Do you think they would want to see me?"
+
+Christian looked up.
+
+"It's all been so soft for you," he said bitterly; "you don't
+understand."
+
+He turned his head away, and then burst out: "I'm proud to come
+straight from the soil--I wouldn't have it otherwise; but they are of
+'the people,' everything is narrow with them--they only understand
+what they can see and touch."
+
+"I'm sorry I spoke like that," said Christian softly; "you've never
+told me about yourself."
+
+There was something just a little cruel in the way the painter looked
+at her, then seeming to feel compunction, he said quickly: "I always
+hated--the peasant life--I wanted to get away into the world; I had a
+feeling in here--I wanted--I don't know what I wanted!  I did run
+away at last to a house-painter at Meran.  The priest wrote me a
+letter from my father--they threw me off; that's all."
+
+Christian's eyes were very bright, her lips moved, like the lips of a
+child listening to a story.
+
+"Go on," she said.
+
+"I stayed at Meran two years, till I'd learnt all I could there, then
+a brother of my mother's helped me to get to Vienna; I was lucky
+enough to find work with a man who used to decorate churches.  We
+went about the country together.  Once when he was ill I painted the
+roof of a church entirely by myself; I lay on my back on the scaffold
+boards all day for a week--I was proud of that roof."  He paused.
+
+"When did you begin painting pictures?"
+
+"A friend asked me why I didn't try for the Academie.  That started
+me going to the night schools; I worked every minute--I had to get my
+living as well, of course, so I worked at night.
+
+Then when the examination came, I thought I could do nothing--it was
+just as if I had never had a brush or pencil in my hand.  But the
+second day a professor in passing me said, 'Good! Quite good!'  That
+gave me courage.  I was sure I had failed though; but I was second
+out of sixty."
+
+Christian nodded.
+
+"To work in the schools after that I had to give up my business, of
+course.  There was only one teacher who ever taught me anything; the
+others all seemed fools.  This man would come and rub out what you'd
+done with his sleeve.  I used to cry with rage--but I told him I
+could only learn from him, and he was so astonished that he got me
+into his class."
+
+"But how did you live without money?" asked Christian.
+
+His face burned with a dark flush.  "I don't know how I lived; you
+must have been through these things to know, you would never
+understand."
+
+"But I want to understand, please."
+
+"What do you want me to tell you?  How I went twice a week to eat
+free dinners!  How I took charity!  How I was hungry!  There was a
+rich cousin of my mother's--I used to go to him.  I didn't like it.
+But if you're starving in the winter"
+
+Christian put out her hand.
+
+"I used to borrow apronsful of coals from other students who were as
+poor--but I never went to the rich students."
+
+The flush had died out of his face.
+
+"That sort of thing makes you hate the world!  You work till you
+stagger; you're cold and hungry; you see rich people in their
+carriages, wrapped in furs, and all the time you want to do something
+great.  You pray for a chance, any chance; nothing comes to the poor!
+It makes you hate the world."
+
+Christian's eyes filled with tears.  He went on:
+
+"But I wasn't the only one in that condition; we used to meet.
+Garin, a Russian with a brown beard and patches of cheek showing
+through, and yellow teeth, who always looked hungry.  Paunitz, who
+came from sympathy!  He had fat cheeks and little eyes, and a big
+gold chain--the swine! And little Misek.  It was in his room we met,
+with the paper peeling off the walls, and two doors with cracks in
+them, so that there was always a draught.  We used to sit on his bed,
+and pull the dirty blankets over us for warmth; and smoke--tobacco
+was the last thing we ever went without.  Over the bed was a Virgin
+and Child--Misek was a very devout Catholic; but one day when he had
+had no dinner and a dealer had kept his picture without paying him,
+he took the image and threw it on the floor before our eyes; it
+broke, and he trampled on the bits.  Lendorf was another, a heavy
+fellow who was always puffing out his white cheeks and smiting
+himself, and saying: 'Cursed society!'  And Schonborn, an aristocrat
+who had quarrelled with his family.  He was the poorest of us all;
+but only he and I would ever have dared to do anything--they all knew
+that!"
+
+Christian listened with awe.  "Do you mean?" she said, "do you mean,
+that you--?"
+
+"You see! you're afraid of me at once.  It's impossible even for you
+to understand.  It only makes you afraid.  A hungry man living on
+charity, sick with rage and shame, is a wolf even to you!"
+
+Christian looked straight into his eyes.
+
+"That's not true.  If I can't understand, I can feel.  Would you be
+the same now if it were to come again?"
+
+"Yes, it drives me mad even now to think of people fatted with
+prosperity, sneering and holding up their hands at poor devils who
+have suffered ten times more than the most those soft animals could
+bear.  I'm older; I've lived--I know things can't be put right by
+violence--nothing will put things right, but that doesn't stop my
+feeling."
+
+"Did you do anything?  You must tell me all now."
+
+"We talked--we were always talking."
+
+"No, tell me everything!"
+
+Unconsciously she claimed, and he seemed unconsciously to admit her
+right to this knowledge.
+
+"There's not much to tell.  One day we began talking in low voices--
+Garin began it; he had been in some affair in Russia.  We took an
+oath; after that we never raised our voices.  We had a plan.  It was
+all new to me, and I hated the whole thing--but I was always hungry,
+or sick from taking charity, and I would have done anything.  They
+knew that; they used to look at me and Schonborn; we knew that no one
+else had any courage.  He and I were great friends, but we never
+talked of that; we tried to keep our minds away from the thought of
+it.  If we had a good day and were not so hungry, it seemed
+unnatural; but when the day had not been good--then it seemed natural
+enough.  I wasn't afraid, but I used to wake up in the night; I hated
+the oath we had taken, I hated every one of those fellows; the thing
+was not what I was made for, it wasn't my work, it wasn't my nature,
+it was forced on me--I hated it, but sometimes I was like a madman."
+
+"Yes, yes," she murmured.
+
+"All this time I was working at the Academie, and learning all I
+could....  One evening that we met, Paunitz was not there.  Misek was
+telling us how the thing had been arranged.  Schonborn and I looked
+at each other--it was warm--perhaps we were not hungry--it was
+springtime, too, and in the Spring it's different.  There is
+something."
+
+Christian nodded.
+
+"While we were talking there came a knock at the door.  Lendorf put
+his eye to the keyhole, and made a sign.  The police were there.
+Nobody said anything, but Misek crawled under the bed; we all
+followed; and the knocking grew louder and louder.  In the wall at
+the back of the bed was a little door into an empty cellar.  We crept
+through.  There was a trap-door behind some cases, where they used to
+roll barrels in.  We crawled through that into the back street.  We
+went different ways."
+
+He paused, and Christian gasped.
+
+"I thought I would get my money, but there was a policeman before my
+door.  They had us finely.  It was Paunitz; if I met him even now I
+should wring his neck.  I swore I wouldn't be caught, but I had no
+idea where to go.  Then I thought of a little Italian barber who used
+to shave me when I had money for a shave; I knew he would help.  He
+belonged to some Italian Society; he often talked to me, under his
+breath, of course.  I went to him.  He was shaving himself before
+going to a ball.  I told him what had happened; it was funny to see
+him put his back against the door.  He was very frightened,
+understanding this sort of thing better than I did--for I was only
+twenty then.  He shaved my head and moustache and put me on a fair
+wig.  Then he brought me macaroni, and some meat, to eat.  He gave me
+a big fair moustache, and a cap, and hid the moustache in the lining.
+He brought me a cloak of his own, and four gulden.  All the time he
+was extremely frightened, and kept listening, and saying: 'Eat!'
+
+"When I had done, he just said: 'Go away, I refuse to know anything
+more of you.'
+
+"I thanked him and went out.  I walked about all that night; for I
+couldn't think of anything to do or anywhere to go.  In the morning I
+slept on a seat in one of the squares.  Then I thought I would go to
+the Gallerien; and I spent the whole day looking at the pictures.
+When the Galleries were shut I was very tired, so I went into a cafe,
+and had some beer.  When I came out I sat on the same seat in the
+Square.  I meant to wait till dark and then walk out of the city and
+take the train at some little station, but while I was sitting there
+I went to sleep.  A policeman woke me.  He had my wig in his hand.
+
+"'Why do you wear a wig?' he said.
+
+"I answered: 'Because I am bald.'
+
+"'No,' he said, 'you're not bald, you've been shaved.  I can feel the
+hair coming.'
+
+"He put his finger on my head.  I felt reckless and laughed.
+
+"'Ah!' he said, 'you'll come with me and explain all this; your nose
+and eyes are looked for.'
+
+"I went with him quietly to the police-station...."
+
+Harz seemed carried away by his story.  His quick dark face worked,
+his steel-grey eyes stared as though he were again passing through
+all these long-past emotions.
+
+The hot sun struck down; Christian drew herself together, sitting
+with her hands clasped round her knees.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+"I didn't care by then what came of it.  I didn't even think what I
+was going to say.  He led me down a passage to a room with bars
+across the windows and long seats, and maps on the walls.  We sat and
+waited.  He kept his eye on me all the time; and I saw no hope.
+Presently the Inspector came.  'Bring him in here,' he said; I
+remember feeling I could kill him for ordering me about!  We went
+into the next room.  It had a large clock, a writing-table, and a
+window, without bars, looking on a courtyard.  Long policemen's coats
+and caps were hanging from some pegs.  The Inspector told me to take
+off my cap.  I took it off, wig and all.  He asked me who I was, but
+I refused to answer.  Just then there was a loud sound of voices in
+the room we had come from.  The Inspector told the policeman to look
+after me, and went to see what it was.  I could hear him talking.  He
+called out: 'Come here, Becker!'  I stood very quiet, and Becker went
+towards the door.  I heard the Inspector say: 'Go and find Schwartz,
+I will see after this fellow.'  The policeman went, and the Inspector
+stood with his back to me in the half-open door, and began again to
+talk to the man in the other room.  Once or twice he looked round at
+me, but I stood quiet all the time.  They began to disagree, and
+their voices got angry.  The Inspector moved a little into the other
+room.  'Now!' I thought, and slipped off my cloak.  I hooked off a
+policeman's coat and cap, and put them on.  My heart beat till I felt
+sick.  I went on tiptoe to the window.  There was no one outside, but
+at the entrance a man was holding some horses.  I opened the window a
+little and held my breath.  I heard the Inspector say: 'I will report
+you for impertinence!' and slipped through the window.  The coat came
+down nearly to my heels, and the cap over my eyes.  I walked up to
+the man with the horses, and said: 'Good-evening.'  One of the horses
+had begun to kick, and he only grunted at me.  I got into a passing
+tram; it was five minutes to the West Bahnhof; I got out there.
+There was a train starting; they were shouting 'Einsteigen!'  I ran.
+The collector tried to stop me.  I shouted: 'Business--important!'
+He let me by.  I jumped into a carriage.  The train started."
+
+He paused, and Christian heaved a sigh.
+
+Harz went on, twisting a twig of ivy in his hands: "There was another
+man in the carriage reading a paper.  Presently I said to him, 'Where
+do we stop first?'  'St. Polten.'  Then I knew it was the Munich
+express--St. Polten, Amstetten, Linz, and Salzburg--four stops before
+the frontier.  The man put down his paper and looked at me; he had a
+big fair moustache and rather shabby clothes.  His looking at me
+disturbed me, for I thought every minute he would say: 'You're no
+policeman!'  And suddenly it came into my mind that if they looked
+for me in this train, it would be as a policeman!--they would know,
+of course, at the station that a policeman had run past at the last
+minute.  I wanted to get rid of the coat and cap, but the man was
+there, and I didn't like to move out of the carriage for other people
+to notice.  So I sat on.  We came to St. Polten at last.  The man in
+my carriage took his bag, got out, and left his paper on the seat.
+We started again; I breathed at last, and as soon as I could took the
+cap and coat and threw them out into the darkness.  I thought: 'I
+shall get across the frontier now.'  I took my own cap out and found
+the moustache Luigi gave me; rubbed my clothes as clean as possible;
+stuck on the moustache, and with some little ends of chalk in my
+pocket made my eyebrows light; then drew some lines in my face to
+make it older, and pulled my cap well down above my wig.  I did it
+pretty well--I was quite like the man who had got out.  I sat in his
+corner, took up his newspaper, and waited for Amstetten.  It seemed a
+tremendous time before we got there.  From behind my paper I could
+see five or six policemen on the platform, one quite close.  He
+opened the door, looked at me, and walked through the carriage into
+the corridor.  I took some tobacco and rolled up a cigarette, but it
+shook, "Harz lifted the ivy twig, "like this.  In a minute the
+conductor and two more policemen came.  'He was here,' said the
+conductor, 'with this gentleman.'  One of them looked at me, and
+asked: 'Have you seen a policeman travelling on this train?'  'Yes,'
+I said.  'Where?'  'He got out at St.  Polten.'  The policeman asked
+the conductor: 'Did you see him get out there?'  The conductor shook
+his head.  I said: 'He got out as the train was moving.'  'Ah!' said
+the policeman, 'what was he like?'  'Rather short, and no moustache.
+Why?'  ' Did you notice anything unusual?'  'No,' I said, 'only that
+he wore coloured trousers.  What's the matter?'  One policeman said
+to the other: 'That's our man!  Send a telegram to St. Polten; he has
+more than an hour's start.'  He asked me where I was going.  I told
+him: 'Linz.'  'Ah!' he said, 'you'll have to give evidence; your name
+and address please?'  'Josef Reinhardt, 17 Donau Strasse.'  He wrote
+it down.  The conductor said: 'We are late, can we start?'  They shut
+the door.  I heard them say to the conductor: 'Search again at Linz,
+and report to the Inspector there.'  They hurried on to the platform,
+and we started.  At first I thought I would get out as soon as the
+train had left the station.  Then, that I should be too far from the
+frontier; better to go on to Linz and take my chance there.  I sat
+still and tried not to think.
+
+After a long time, we began to run more slowly.  I put my head out
+and could see in the distance a ring of lights hanging in the
+blackness.  I loosened the carriage door and waited for the train to
+run slower still; I didn't mean to go into Linz like a rat into a
+trap.  At last I could wait no longer; I opened the door, jumped and
+fell into some bushes.  I was not much hurt, but bruised, and the
+breath knocked out of me.  As soon as I could, I crawled out.  It was
+very dark.  I felt heavy and sore, and for some time went stumbling
+in and out amongst trees.  Presently I came to a clear space; on one
+side I could see the town's shape drawn in lighted lamps, and on the
+other a dark mass, which I think was forest; in the distance too was
+a thin chain of lights.  I thought: 'They must be the lights of a
+bridge.'  Just then the moon came out, and I could see the river
+shining below.  It was cold and damp, and I walked quickly.  At last
+I came out on a road, past houses and barking dogs, down to the river
+bank; there I sat against a shed and went to sleep.  I woke very
+stiff.  It was darker than before; the moon was gone.  I could just
+see the river.  I stumbled on, to get through the town before dawn.
+It was all black shapes-houses and sheds, and the smell of the river,
+the smell of rotting hay, apples, tar, mud, fish; and here and there
+on a wharf a lantern.  I stumbled over casks and ropes and boxes; I
+saw I should never get clear--the dawn had begun already on the other
+side.  Some men came from a house behind me.  I bent, and crept
+behind some barrels.  They passed along the wharf; they seemed to
+drop into the river.  I heard one of them say: 'Passau before night.'
+I stood up and saw they had walked on board a steamer which was lying
+head up-stream, with some barges in tow.  There was a plank laid to
+the steamer, and a lantern at the other end.  I could hear the
+fellows moving below deck, getting up steam.  I ran across the plank
+and crept to the end of the steamer.  I meant to go with them to
+Passau!  The rope which towed the barges was nearly taut; and I knew
+if I could get on to the barges I should be safe.  I climbed down on
+this rope and crawled along.  I was desperate, I knew they'd soon be
+coming up, and it was getting light.  I thought I should fall into
+the water several times, but I got to the barge at last.  It was
+laden with straw.  There was nobody on board.  I was hungry and
+thirsty--I looked for something to eat; there was nothing but the
+ashes of a fire and a man's coat.  I crept into the straw.  Soon a
+boat brought men, one for each barge, and there were sounds of steam.
+As soon as we began moving through the water, I fell asleep.  When I
+woke we were creeping through a heavy mist.  I made a little hole in
+the straw and saw the bargeman.  He was sitting by a fire at the
+barge's edge, so that the sparks and smoke blew away over the water.
+He ate and drank with both hands, and funny enough he looked in the
+mist, like a big bird flapping its wings; there was a good smell of
+coffee, and I sneezed.  How the fellow started!  But presently he
+took a pitchfork and prodded the straw.  Then I stood up.  I couldn't
+help laughing, he was so surprised--a huge, dark man, with a great
+black beard.  I pointed to the fire and said 'Give me some, brother!'
+He pulled me out of the straw; I was so stiff, I couldn't move.  I
+sat by the fire, and ate black bread and turnips, and drank coffee;
+while he stood by, watching me and muttering.  I couldn't understand
+him well--he spoke a dialect from Hungary.  He asked me: How I got
+there--who I was--where I was from?  I looked up in his face, and he
+looked down at me, sucking his pipe.  He was a big man, he lived
+alone on the river, and I was tired of telling lies, so I told him
+the whole thing.  When I had done he just grunted.  I can see him now
+standing over me, with the mist hanging in his beard, and his great
+naked arms.  He drew me some water, and I washed and showed him my
+wig and moustache, and threw them overboard.  All that day we lay out
+on the barge in the mist, with our feet to the fire, smoking; now and
+then he would spit into the ashes and mutter into his beard.  I shall
+never forget that day.  The steamer was like a monster with fiery
+nostrils, and the other barges were dumb creatures with eyes, where
+the fires were; we couldn't see the bank, but now and then a bluff
+and high trees, or a castle, showed in the mist.  If I had only had
+paint and canvas that day!"  He sighed.
+
+"It was early Spring, and the river was in flood; they were going to
+Regensburg to unload there, take fresh cargo, and back to Linz.  As
+soon as the mist began to clear, the bargeman hid me in the straw.
+At Passau was the frontier; they lay there for the night, but nothing
+happened, and I slept in the straw.  The next day I lay out on the
+barge deck; there was no mist, but I was free--the sun shone gold on
+the straw and the green sacking; the water seemed to dance, and I
+laughed--I laughed all the time, and the barge man laughed with me.
+A fine fellow he was!  At Regensburg I helped them to unload; for
+more than a week we worked; they nicknamed me baldhead, and when it
+was all over I gave the money I earned for the unloading to the big
+bargeman.  We kissed each other at parting.  I had still three of the
+gulden that Luigi gave me, and I went to a house-painter and got work
+with him.  For six months I stayed there to save money; then I wrote
+to my mother's cousin in Vienna, and told him I was going to London.
+He gave me an introduction to some friends there.  I went to Hamburg,
+and from there to London in a cargo steamer, and I've never been back
+till now."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+After a minute's silence Christian said in a startled voice: "They
+could arrest you then!"
+
+Harz laughed.
+
+"If they knew; but it's seven years ago."
+
+"Why did you come here, when it's so dangerous?"
+
+"I had been working too hard, I wanted to see my country--after seven
+years, and when it's forbidden!  But I'm ready to go back now."  He
+looked down at her, frowning.
+
+"Had you a hard time in London, too?"
+
+"Harder, at first--I couldn't speak the language.  In my profession
+it's hard work to get recognised, it's hard work to make a living.
+There are too many whose interest it is to keep you down--I shan't
+forget them."
+
+"But every one is not like that?"
+
+"No; there are fine fellows, too.  I shan't forget them either.  I
+can sell my pictures now; I'm no longer weak, and I promise you I
+shan't forget.  If in the future I have power, and I shall have
+power--I shan't forget."
+
+A shower of fine gravel came rattling on the wall.  Dawney was
+standing below them with an amused expression on his upturned face.
+
+"Are you going to stay there all night?" he asked.  "Greta and I have
+bored each other."
+
+"We're coming," called Christian hastily.
+
+On the way back neither spoke a word, but when they reached the
+Villa, Harz took her hand, and said: "Fraulein Christian, I can't do
+any more with your picture.  I shan't touch it again after this."
+
+She made no answer, but they looked at each other, and both seemed to
+ask, to entreat, something more; then her eyes fell.  He dropped her
+hand, and saying, "Good-night," ran after Dawney.
+
+In the corridor, Dominique, carrying a dish of fruit, met the
+sisters; he informed them that Miss Naylor had retired to bed; that
+Herr Paul would not be home to dinner; his master was dining in his
+room; dinner would be served for Mrs. Decie and the two young ladies
+in a quarter of an hour: "And the fish is good to-night; little
+trouts! try them, Signorina!" He moved on quickly, softly, like a
+cat, the tails of his dress-coat flapping, and the heels of his white
+socks gleaming.
+
+Christian ran upstairs.  She flew about her room, feeling that if she
+once stood still it would all crystallise in hard painful thought,
+which motion alone kept away.  She washed, changed her dress and
+shoes, and ran down to her uncle's room.  Mr. Treffry had just
+finished dinner, pushed the little table back, and was sitting in his
+chair, with his glasses on his nose, reading the Tines.  Christian
+touched his forehead with her lips.
+
+"Glad to see you, Chris.  Your stepfather's out to dinner, and I
+can't stand your aunt when she's in one of her talking moods--bit of
+a humbug, Chris, between ourselves; eh, isn't she?" His eyes
+twinkled.
+
+Christian smiled.  There was a curious happy restlessness in her that
+would not let her keep still.
+
+"Picture finished?" Mr. Treffry asked suddenly, taking up the paper
+with a crackle.  "Don't go and fall in love with the painter, Chris."
+
+Christian was still enough now.
+
+'Why not?' she thought.  'What should you know about him?  Isn't he
+good enough for me?'  A gong sounded.
+
+"There's your dinner," Mr. Treffry remarked.
+
+With sudden contrition she bent and kissed him.
+
+But when she had left the room Mr. Treffry put down the Times and
+stared at the door, humming to himself, and thoughtfully fingering
+his chin.
+
+Christian could not eat; she sat, indifferent to the hoverings of
+Dominique, tormented by uneasy fear and longings.  She answered Mrs.
+Decie at random.  Greta kept stealing looks at her from under her
+lashes.
+
+"Decided characters are charming, don't you think so, Christian?"
+Mrs. Decie said, thrusting her chin a little forward, and modelling
+the words.  "That is why I like Mr. Harz so much; such an immense
+advantage for a man to know his mind.  You have only to look at that
+young man to see that he knows what he wants, and means to have it."
+
+Christian pushed her plate away.  Greta, flushing, said abruptly:
+"Doctor Edmund is not a decided character, I think.  This afternoon
+he said: 'Shall I have some beer-yes, I shall--no, I shall not'; then
+he ordered the beer, so, when it came, he gave it to the soldiers."
+
+Mrs. Decie turned her enigmatic smile from one girl to the other.
+
+When dinner was over they went into her room.  Greta stole at once to
+the piano, where her long hair fell almost to the keys; silently she
+sat there fingering the notes, smiling to herself, and looking at her
+aunt, who was reading Pater's essays.  Christian too had taken up a
+book, but soon put it down--of several pages she had not understood a
+word.  She went into the garden and wandered about the lawn, clasping
+her hands behind her head.  The air was heavy; very distant thunder
+trembled among the mountains, flashes of summer lightning played over
+the trees; and two great moths were hovering about a rosebush.
+Christian watched their soft uncertain rushes.  Going to the little
+summer-house she flung herself down on a seat, and pressed her hands
+to her heart.
+
+There was a strange and sudden aching there.  Was he going from her?
+If so, what would be left?  How little and how narrow seemed the
+outlook of her life--with the world waiting for her, the world of
+beauty, effort, self-sacrifice, fidelity!  It was as though a flash
+of that summer lightning had fled by, singeing her, taking from her
+all powers of flight, burning off her wings, as off one of those pale
+hovering moths.  Tears started up, and trickled down her face.
+'Blind!' she thought; 'how could I have been so blind?'
+
+Some one came down the path.
+
+"Who's there?" she cried.
+
+Harz stood in the doorway.
+
+"Why did you come out?" he said.  "Ah! why did you come out?"  He
+caught her hand; Christian tried to draw it from him, and to turn her
+eyes away, but she could not.  He flung himself down on his knees,
+and cried: "I love you!"
+
+In a rapture of soft terror Christian bent her forehead down to his
+hand.
+
+"What are you doing?" she heard him say.  "Is it possible that you
+love me?" and she felt his kisses on her hair.
+
+"My sweet! it will be so hard for you; you are so little, so little,
+and so weak."  Clasping his hand closer to her face, she murmured: "I
+don't care."
+
+There was a long, soft silence, that seemed to last for ever.
+Suddenly she threw her arms round his neck and kissed him.
+
+"Whatever comes!" she whispered, and gathering her dress, escaped
+from him into the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+Christian woke next morning with a smile.  In her attitudes, her
+voice, her eyes, there was a happy and sweet seriousness, as if she
+were hugging some holy thought.  After breakfast she took a book and
+sat in the open window, whence she could see the poplar-trees
+guarding the entrance.  There was a breeze; the roses close by kept
+nodding to her; the cathedral bells were in full chime; bees hummed
+above the lavender; and in the sky soft clouds were floating like
+huge, white birds.
+
+The sounds of Miss Naylor's staccato dictation travelled across the
+room, and Greta's sighs as she took it down, one eye on her paper,
+one eye on Scruff, who lay with a black ear flapped across his paw,
+and his tan eyebrows quivering.  He was in disgrace, for Dominique,
+coming on him unawares, had seen him "say his prayers" before a
+pudding, and take the pudding for reward.
+
+Christian put her book down gently, and slipped through the window.
+Harz was coming in from the road.  "I am all yours!" she whispered.
+His fingers closed on hers, and he went into the house.
+
+She slipped back, took up her book, and waited.  It seemed long
+before he came out, but when he did he waved her back, and hurried
+on; she had a glimpse of his face, white to the lips.  Feeling faint
+and sick, she flew to her stepfather's room.
+
+Herr Paul was standing in a corner with the utterly disturbed
+appearance of an easy-going man, visited by the unexpected.  His fine
+shirt-front was crumpled as if his breast had heaved too suddenly
+under strong emotion; his smoked eyeglasses dangled down his back;
+his fingers were embedded in his beard.  He was fixing his eye on a
+spot in the floor as though he expected it to explode and blow them
+to fragments.  In another corner Mrs. Decie, with half-closed eyes,
+was running her finger-tips across her brow.
+
+"What have you said to him?" cried Christian.
+
+Herr Paul regarded her with glassy eyes.
+
+"Mein Gott!" he said.  "Your aunt and I!"
+
+"What have you said to him?" repeated Christian.
+
+"The impudence!  An anarchist!.  A beggar!"
+
+"Paul!" murmured Mrs. Decie.
+
+"The outlaw!  The fellow!"  Herr Paul began to stride about the room.
+
+Quivering from head to foot, Christian cried: "How dared you?" and
+ran from the room, pushing aside Miss Naylor and Greta, who stood
+blanched and frightened in the doorway.
+
+Herr Paul stopped in his tramp, and, still with his eyes fixed on the
+floor, growled:
+
+"A fine thing-hein?  What's coming?  Will you please tell me?  An
+anarchist--a beggar!"
+
+"Paul!" murmured Mrs. Decie.
+
+"Paul!  Paul!  And you!" he pointed to Miss Naylor--"Two women with
+eyes!--hein!"
+
+"There is nothing to be gained by violence," Mrs. Decie murmured,
+passing her handkerchief across her lips.  Miss Naylor, whose thin
+brown cheeks had flushed, advanced towards him.
+
+"I hope you do not--"she said; "I am sure there was nothing that I
+could have prevented--I should be glad if that were understood."
+And, turning with some dignity, the little lady went away, closing
+the door behind her.
+
+"You hear!" Herr Paul said, violently sarcastic: "nothing she could
+have prevented!  Enfin,! Will you please tell me what I am to do?"
+
+"Men of the world"--whose philosophy is a creature of circumstance
+and accepted things--find any deviation from the path of their
+convictions dangerous, shocking, and an intolerable bore.  Herr Paul
+had spent his life laughing at convictions; the matter had but to
+touch him personally, and the tap of laughter was turned off.  That
+any one to whom he was the lawful guardian should marry other than a
+well-groomed man, properly endowed with goods, properly selected, was
+beyond expression horrid.  From his point of view he had great excuse
+for horror; and he was naturally unable to judge whether he had
+excuse for horror from other points of view.  His amazement had in it
+a spice of the pathetic; he was like a child in the presence of a
+thing that he absolutely could not understand.  The interview had
+left him with a sense of insecurity which he felt to be particularly
+unfair.
+
+The door was again opened, and Greta flew in, her cheeks flushed, her
+hair floating behind her, and tears streaming down her cheeks.
+
+"Papa!" she cried, "you have been cruel to Chris.  The door is
+locked; I can hear her crying--why have you been cruel?"  Without
+waiting to be answered, she flew out again.
+
+Herr Paul seized his hair with both his hands: "Good!  Very good!  My
+own child, please!  What next then?"
+
+Mrs. Decie rose from her chair languidly.  "My head is very bad," she
+said, shading her eyes and speaking in low tones: "It is no use
+making a fuss--nothing can come of this--he has not a penny.
+Christian will have nothing till you die, which will not be for a
+long time yet, if you can but avoid an apoplectic fit!"
+
+At these last words Herr Paul gave a start of real disgust.  "Hum!"
+he muttered; it was as if the world were bent on being brutal to him.
+Mrs. Decie continued:
+
+"If I know anything of this young man, he will not come here again,
+after the words you have spoken.  As for Christian--you had better
+talk to Nicholas.  I am going to lie down."
+
+Herr Paul nervously fingered the shirt-collar round his stout, short
+neck.
+
+"Nicholas!  Certainly--a good idea.  Quelle diable d'afaire!"
+
+'French!' thought Mrs. Decie; 'we shall soon have peace.  Poor
+Christian!  I'm sorry!  After all, these things are a matter of time
+and opportunity.'  This consoled her a good deal.
+
+But for Christian the hours were a long nightmare of grief and shame,
+fear and anger.  Would he forgive?  Would he be true to her?  Or
+would he go away without a word?  Since yesterday it was as if she
+had stepped into another world, and lost it again.  In place of that
+new feeling, intoxicating as wine, what was coming?  What bitter;
+dreadful ending?
+
+A rude entrance this into the life of facts, and primitive emotions!
+
+She let Greta into her room after a time, for the child had begun
+sobbing; but she would not talk, and sat hour after hour at the
+window with the air fanning her face, and the pain in her eyes turned
+to the sky and trees.  After one or two attempts at consolation,
+Greta sank on the floor, and remained there, humbly gazing at her
+sister in a silence only broken when Christian cleared her throat of
+tears, and by the song of birds in the garden.  In the afternoon she
+slipped away and did not come back again.
+
+After his interview with Mr. Treffry, Herr Paul took a bath, perfumed
+himself with precision, and caused it to be clearly understood that,
+under circumstances such as these, a man's house was not suited for a
+pig to live in.  He shortly afterwards went out to the Kurbaus, and
+had not returned by dinner-time.
+
+Christian came down for dinner.  There were crimson spots in her
+cheeks, dark circles round her eyes; she behaved, however, as though
+nothing had happened.  Miss Naylor, affected by the kindness of her
+heart and the shock her system had sustained, rolled a number of
+bread pills, looking at each as it came, with an air of surprise, and
+concealing it with difficulty.  Mr. Treffry was coughing, and when he
+talked his voice seemed to rumble even more than usual.  Greta was
+dumb, trying to catch Christian's eye; Mrs. Decie alone seemed at
+ease.  After dinner Mr. Treffry went off to his room, leaning heavily
+on Christian's shoulder.  As he sank into his chair, he said to her:
+
+"Pull yourself together, my dear!" Christian did not answer him.
+
+Outside his room Greta caught her by the sleeve.
+
+"Look!" she whispered, thrusting a piece of paper into Christian's
+hand.  "It is to me from Dr. Edmund, but you must read it."
+
+Christian opened the note, which ran as follows:
+
+
+"MY PHILOSOPHER AND FRIEND,--I received your note, and went to our
+friend's studio; he was not in, but half an hour ago I stumbled on
+him in the Platz.  He is not quite himself; has had a touch of the
+sun--nothing serious: I took him to my hotel, where he is in bed.  If
+he will stay there he will be all right in a day or two.  In any case
+he shall not elude my clutches for the present.
+
+"My warm respects to Mistress Christian.--Yours in friendship and
+philosophy,
+
+EDMUND DAWNEY."
+
+
+Christian read and re-read this note, then turned to Greta.
+
+"What did you say to Dr. Dawney?"
+
+Greta took back the piece of paper, and replied: " I said:
+
+"'DEAR DR. EDMUND,--We are anxious about Herr Harz.  We think he is
+perhaps not very well to-day.  We (I and Christian) should like to
+know.  You can tell us.  Please shall you?  GRETA.'
+
+"That is what I said."
+
+Christian dropped her eyes.  "What made you write?"
+
+Greta gazed at her mournfully: "I thought--O Chris! come into the
+garden.  I am so hot, and it is so dull without you!"
+
+Christian bent her head forward and rubbed her cheek against Greta's,
+then without another word ran upstairs and locked herself into her
+room.  The child stood listening; hearing the key turn in the lock,
+she sank down on the bottom step and took Scruff in her arms.
+
+Half an hour later Miss Naylor, carrying a candle, found her there
+fast asleep, with her head resting on the terrier's back, and tear
+stains on her cheeks....
+
+Mrs. Decie presently came out, also carrying a candle, and went to
+her brother's room.  She stood before his chair, with folded hands.
+
+"Nicholas, what is to be done?"
+
+Mr. Treffry was pouring whisky into a glass.
+
+"Damn it, Con!" he answered; "how should I know?"
+
+"There's something in Christian that makes interference dangerous.  I
+know very well that I've no influence with her at all."
+
+"You're right there, Con," Mr. Treffry replied.
+
+Mrs. Decie's pale eyes, fastened on his face, forced him to look up.
+
+"I wish you would leave off drinking whisky and attend to me.  Paul
+is an element--"
+
+"Paul," Mr. Treffry growled, "is an ass!"
+
+"Paul," pursued Mrs. Decie, "is an element of danger in the
+situation; any ill-timed opposition of his might drive her to I don't
+know what.  Christian is gentle, she is 'sympathetic' as they say;
+but thwart her, and she is as obstinate as....
+
+"You or I!  Leave her alone!"
+
+"I understand her character, but I confess that I am at a loss what
+to do."
+
+"Do nothing!"  He drank again.
+
+Mrs. Decie took up the candle.
+
+"Men!" she said with a mysterious intonation; shrugging her
+shoulders, she walked out.
+
+Mr. Treffry put down his glass.
+
+'Understand?' he thought; 'no, you don't, and I don't.  Who
+understands a young girl?  Vapourings, dreams, moonshine I....  What
+does she see in this painter fellow?  I wonder!'  He breathed
+heavily.  'By heavens! I wouldn't have had this happen for a hundred
+thousand pounds!'
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+For many hours after Dawney had taken him to his hotel, Harz was
+prostrate with stunning pains in the head and neck.  He had been all
+day without food, exposed to burning sun, suffering violent emotion.
+Movement of any sort caused him such agony that he could only lie in
+stupor, counting the spots dancing before, his eyes.  Dawney did
+everything for him, and Harz resented in a listless way the intent
+scrutiny of the doctor's calm, black eyes.
+
+Towards the end of the second day he was able to get up; Dawney found
+him sitting on the bed in shirt and trousers.
+
+"My son," he said, "you had better tell me what the trouble is--it
+will do your stubborn carcase good."
+
+"I must go back to work," said Harz.
+
+"Work!" said Dawney deliberately: "you couldn't, if you tried."
+
+"I must."
+
+"My dear fellow, you couldn't tell one colour from another."
+
+"I must be doing something; I can't sit here and think."
+
+Dawney hooked his thumbs into his waistcoat: "You won't see the sun
+for three days yet, if I can help it."
+
+Harz got up.
+
+"I'm going to my studio to-morrow," he said.  "I promise not to go
+out.  I must be where I can see my work.  If I can't paint, I can
+draw; I can feel my brushes, move my things about.  I shall go mad if
+I do nothing."
+
+Dawney took his arm, and walked him up and down.
+
+"I'll let you go," he said, "but give me a chance!  It's as much to
+me to put you straight as it is to you to paint a decent picture.
+Now go to bed; I'll have a carriage for you to-morrow morning."
+
+Harz sat down on the bed again, and for a long time stayed without
+moving, his eyes fixed on the floor.  The sight of him, so desperate
+and miserable, hurt the young doctor.
+
+"Can you get to bed by yourself?" he asked at last.
+
+Harz nodded.
+
+"Then, good-night, old chap!" and Dawney left the room.
+
+He took his hat and turned towards the Villa.  Between the poplars he
+stopped to think.  The farther trees were fret-worked black against
+the lingering gold of the sunset; a huge moth, attracted by the tip
+of his cigar, came fluttering in his face.  The music of a concertina
+rose and fell, like the sighing of some disillusioned spirit.  Dawney
+stood for several minutes staring at the house.
+
+He was shown to Mrs. Decie's room.  She was holding a magazine before
+her eyes, and received him with as much relief as philosophy
+permitted.
+
+"You are the very person I wanted to see," she said.
+
+He noticed that the magazine she held was uncut.
+
+"You are a young man," pursued Mrs. Decie, "but as my doctor I have a
+right to your discretion."
+
+Dawney smiled; the features of his broad, clean-shaven face looked
+ridiculously small on such occasions, but his eyes retained their air
+of calculation.
+
+"That is so," he answered.
+
+"It is about this unfortunate affair.  I understand that Mr. Harz is
+with you.  I want you to use your influence to dissuade him from
+attempting to see my niece."
+
+"Influence!" said Dawney; "you know Harz!"
+
+Mrs. Decie's voice hardened.
+
+"Everybody," she said, "has his weak points.  This young man is open
+to approach from at least two quarters--his pride is one, his work an
+other.  I am seldom wrong in gauging character; these are his vital
+spots, and they are of the essence of this matter.  I'm sorry for
+him, of course--but at his age, and living a man's life, these
+things--"  Her smile was extra pale.  "I wish you could give me
+something for my head.  It's foolish to worry.  Nerves of course!
+But I can't help it!  You know my opinion, Dr. Dawney.  That young
+man will go far if he remains unfettered; he will make a name.  You
+will be doing him a great service if you could show him the affair as
+it really is--a drag on him, and quite unworthy of his pride!  Do
+help me!  You are just the man to do it!"
+
+Dawney threw up his head as if to shake off this impeachment; the
+curve of his chin thus displayed was imposing in its fulness;
+altogether he was imposing, having an air of capability.
+
+She struck him, indeed, as really scared; it was as if her mask of
+smile had become awry, and failed to cover her emotion; and he was
+puzzled, thinking, 'I wouldn't have believed she had it in her....'
+"It's not an easy business," he said; "I'll think it over."
+
+"Thank you!" murmured Mrs. Decie.  "You are most kind."
+
+Passing the schoolroom, he looked in through the open door.
+Christian was sitting there.  The sight of her face shocked him, it
+was so white, so resolutely dumb.  A book lay on her knees; she was
+not reading, but staring before her.  He thought suddenly: 'Poor
+thing!  If I don't say something to her, I shall be a brute!'
+
+"Miss Devorell," he said: "You can reckon on him."
+
+Christian tried to speak, but her lips trembled so that nothing came
+forth.
+
+"Good-night," said Dawney, and walked out....
+
+Three days later Harz was sitting in the window of his studio.  It
+was the first day he had found it possible to work, and now, tired
+out, he stared through the dusk at the slowly lengthening shadows of
+the rafters.  A solitary mosquito hummed, and two house sparrows, who
+had built beneath the roof, chirruped sleepily.  Swallows darted by
+the window, dipping their blue wings towards the quiet water; a hush
+had stolen over everything.  He fell asleep.
+
+He woke, with a dim impression of some near presence.  In the pale
+glimmer from innumerable stars, the room was full of shadowy shapes.
+He lit his lantern.  The flame darted forth, bickered, then slowly
+lit up the great room.
+
+"Who's there?"
+
+A rustling seemed to answer.  He peered about, went to the doorway,
+and drew the curtain.  A woman's cloaked figure shrank against the
+wall.  Her face was buried in her hands; her arms, from which the
+cloak fell back, were alone visible.
+
+"Christian?"
+
+She ran past him, and when he had put the lantern down, was standing
+at the window.  She turned quickly to him.  "Take me away from here!
+Let me come with you!"
+
+"Do you mean it?"
+
+"You said you wouldn't give me up!"
+
+"You know what you are doing?"
+
+She made a motion of assent.
+
+"But you don't grasp what this means.  Things to bear that you know
+nothing of--hunger perhaps!  Think, even hunger!  And your people
+won't forgive--you'll lose everything."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"I must choose--it's one thing or the other.  I can't give you up!
+I should be afraid!"
+
+"But, dear; how can you come with me?  We can't be married here."
+
+"I am giving my life to you."
+
+"You are too good for me," said Harz.  "The life you're going into--
+may be dark, like that!" he pointed to the window.
+
+A sound of footsteps broke the hush.  They could see a figure on the
+path below.  It stopped, seemed to consider, vanished.  They heard
+the sounds of groping hands, of a creaking door, of uncertain feet on
+the stairs.
+
+Harz seized her hand.
+
+"Quick!" he whispered; "behind this canvas!"
+
+Christian was trembling violently.  She drew her hood across her
+face.  The heavy breathing and ejaculations of the visitor were now
+plainly audible.
+
+"He's there!  Quick!  Hide!"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+With a thrill at his heart, Harz kissed her, then walked towards the
+entrance.  The curtain was pulled aside.
+
+It was Herr Paul, holding a cigar in one hand, his hat in the other,
+and breathing hard.
+
+"Pardon!" he said huskily, "your stairs are steep, and dark! mais en,
+fin! nous voila!  I have ventured to come for a talk."  His glance
+fell on the cloaked figure in the shadow.
+
+"Pardon! A thousand pardons!  I had no idea!  I beg you to forgive
+this indiscretion!  I may take it you resign pretensions then?  You
+have a lady here--I have nothing more to say; I only beg a million
+pardons for intruding.  A thousand times forgive me!  Good-night!"
+
+He bowed and turned to go.  Christian stepped forward, and let the
+hood fall from her head.
+
+"It's I!"
+
+Herr Paul pirouetted.
+
+"Good God!" he stammered, dropping cigar and hat.  "Good God!"
+
+The lantern flared suddenly, revealing his crimson, shaking cheeks.
+
+"You came here, at night!  You, the daughter of my wife!"  His eyes
+wandered with a dull glare round the room.
+
+"Take care!" cried Harz: "If you say a word against her---"
+
+The two men stared at each other's eyes.  And without warning, the
+lantern flickered and went out.  Christian drew the cloak round her
+again.  Herr Paul's voice broke the silence; he had recovered his
+self-possession.
+
+"Ah! ah!" he said: "Darkness! Tant mieux!  The right thing for what
+we have to say.  Since we do not esteem each other, it is well not to
+see too much."
+
+"Just so," said Harz.
+
+Christian had come close to them.  Her pale face and great shining
+eyes could just be seen through the gloom.
+
+Herr Paul waved his arm; the gesture was impressive, annihilating.
+
+"This is a matter, I believe, between two men," he said, addressing
+Harz.  "Let us come to the point.  I will do you the credit to
+suppose that you have a marriage in view.  You know, perhaps, that
+Miss Devorell has no money till I die?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And I am passably young! You have money, then?"
+
+"No."
+
+"In that case, you would propose to live on air?"
+
+"No, to work; it has been done before."
+
+"It is calculated to increase hunger!  You are prepared to take Miss
+Devorell, a young lady accustomed to luxury, into places like--this!"
+he peered about him, "into places that smell of paint, into the
+milieu of 'the people,' into the society of Bohemians--who knows? of
+anarchists, perhaps?"
+
+Harz clenched his hands: "I will answer no more questions."
+
+"In that event, we reach the ultimatum," said Herr Paul.  "Listen,
+Herr Outlaw!  If you have not left the country by noon to-morrow, you
+shall be introduced to the police!"
+
+Christian uttered a cry.  For a minute in the gloom the only sound
+heard was the short, hard breathing of the two men.
+
+Suddenly Harz cried: "You coward, I defy you!"
+
+"Coward!" Herr Paul repeated.  "That is indeed the last word.  Look
+to yourself, my friend!"
+
+Stooping and fumbling on the floor, he picked up his hat.  Christian
+had already vanished; the sound of her hurrying footsteps was
+distinctly audible at the top of the dark stairs.  Herr Paul stood
+still a minute.
+
+"Look to yourself, my dear friend!" he said in a thick voice, groping
+for the wall.  Planting his hat askew on his head, he began slowly to
+descend the stairs.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+Nicholas Treffry sat reading the paper in his room by the light of a
+lamp with a green shade; on his sound foot the terrier Scruff was
+asleep and snoring lightly--the dog habitually came down when Greta
+was in bed, and remained till Mr. Treffry, always the latest member
+of the household, retired to rest.
+
+Through the long window a little river of light shone out on the
+veranda tiles, and, flowing past, cut the garden in two.
+
+There was the sound of hurried footsteps, a rustling of draperies;
+Christian, running through the window, stood before him.
+
+Mr. Treffry dropped his paper, such a fury of passion and alarm shone
+in the girl's eyes.
+
+"Chris! What is it?"
+
+"Hateful!"
+
+"Chris!"
+
+"Oh! Uncle!  He's insulted, threatened!  And I love his little finger
+more than all the, world!"
+
+Her passionate voice trembled, her eyes were shining.
+
+Mr. Treffry's profound discomfort found vent in the gruff words: "Sit
+down!"
+
+"I'll never speak to Father again!  Oh! Uncle! I love him!"
+
+Quiet in the extremity of his disturbance, Mr. Treffry leaned forward
+in his chair, rested his big hands on its arms, and stared at her.
+
+Chris!  Here was a woman he did not know!  His lips moved under the
+heavy droop of his moustache.  The girl's face had suddenly grown
+white.  She sank down on her knees, and laid her cheek against his
+hand.  He felt it wet; and a lump rose in his throat.  Drawing his
+hand away, he stared at it, and wiped it with his sleeve.
+
+"Don't cry!" he said.
+
+She seized it again and clung to it; that clutch seemed to fill him
+with sudden rage.
+
+"What's the matter?  How the devil can I do anything if you don't
+tell me?"
+
+She looked up at him.  The distress of the last days, the passion and
+fear of the last hour, the tide of that new life of the spirit and
+the flesh, stirring within her, flowed out in a stream of words.
+
+When she had finished, there was so dead a silence that the
+fluttering of a moth round the lamp could be heard plainly.
+
+Mr. Treffry raised himself, crossed the room, and touched the bell.
+"Tell the groom," he said to Dominique, "to put the horses to, and
+have 'em round at once; bring my old boots; we drive all night...."
+
+His bent figure looked huge, body and legs outlined by light, head
+and shoulders towering into shadow.  "He shall have a run for his
+money!" he said.  His eyes stared down sombrely at his niece.  "It's
+more than he deserves!--it's more than you deserve, Chris.  Sit down
+there and write to him; tell him to put himself entirely in my
+hands."  He turned his back on her, and went into his bedroom.
+
+Christian rose, and sat down at the writing-table.  A whisper
+startled her.  It came from Dominique, who was holding out a pair of
+boots.
+
+"M'mselle Chris, what is this?--to run about all night?"  But
+Christian did not answer.
+
+"M'mselle Chris, are you ill?"  Then seeing her face, he slipped away
+again.
+
+She finished her letter and went out to the carriage.  Mr. Treffry
+was seated under the hood.
+
+"Shan't want you," he called out to the groom, "Get up, Dominique."
+
+Christian thrust her letter into his hand.  "Give him that," she
+said, clinging to his arm with sudden terror.  "Oh! Uncle! do take
+care!"
+
+"Chris, if I do this for you--"  They looked wistfully at one
+another.  Then, shaking his head, Mr. Treffry gathered up the reins.
+
+"Don't fret, my dear, don't fret!  Whoa, mare!"
+
+The carriage with a jerk plunged forward into darkness, curved with a
+crunch of wheels, and vanished, swinging between the black
+treepillars at the entrance....
+
+Christian stood, straining to catch the failing sound of the hoofs.
+
+Down the passage came a flutter of white garments; soft limbs were
+twined about her, some ends of hair fell on her face.
+
+"What is it, Chris?  Where have you been?  Where is Uncle Nic going?
+Tell me!"
+
+Christian tore herself away.  "I don't know," she cried, "I know
+nothing!"
+
+Greta stroked her face.  "Poor Chris!" she murmured.  Her bare feet
+gleamed, her hair shone gold against her nightdress.  "Come to bed,
+poor Chris!"
+
+Christian laughed.  "You little white moth!  Feel how hot I am!
+You'll burn your wings!"
+
+Harz had lain down, fully dressed.  He was no longer angry, but felt
+that he would rather die than yield.  Presently he heard footsteps
+coming up the stairs.
+
+"M'sieu!"
+
+It was the voice of Dominique, whose face, illumined by a match, wore
+an expression of ironical disgust.
+
+"My master," he said, "makes you his compliments; he says there is no
+time to waste.  You are to please come and drive with him!"
+
+"Your master is very kind.  Tell him I'm in bed."
+
+"Ah, M'sieu," said Dominique, grimacing, "I must not go back with
+such an answer.  If you would not come, I was to give you this."
+
+Harz broke the seal and read Christian's letter.
+
+"I will come," he said.
+
+A clock was striking as they went out through the gate.  From within
+the dark cave of the phaeton hood Mr. Treffry said gruffly: "Come
+along, sir!"
+
+Harz flung his knapsack in, and followed.
+
+His companion's figure swayed, the whiplash slid softly along the
+flank of the off horse, and, as the carriage rattled forward, Mr.
+Treffry called out, as if by afterthought: "Hallo, Dominique!"
+Dominque's voice, shaken and ironical, answered from behind: "M'
+v'la, M'sieu!"
+
+In the long street of silent houses, men sitting in the lighted cafes
+turned with glasses at their lips to stare after the carriage.  The
+narrow river of the sky spread suddenly to a vast, limpid ocean
+tremulous with stars.  They had turned into the road for Italy.
+
+Mr. Treffry took a pull at his horses.  "Whoa, mare! Dogged does it!"
+and the near horse, throwing up her head, whinnied; a fleck of foam
+drifted into Harz's face.
+
+The painter had come on impulse; because Christian had told him to,
+not of his own free will.  He was angry with himself, wounded in
+self-esteem, for having allowed any one to render him this service.
+The smooth swift movement through velvet blackness splashed on either
+hand with the flying lamp-light; the strong sweet air blowing in his
+face-air that had kissed the tops of mountains and stolen their
+spirit; the snort and snuffle of the horses, and crisp rattling of
+their hoofs--all this soon roused in him another feeling.  He looked
+at Mr. Treffry's profile, with its tufted chin; at the grey road
+adventuring in darkness; at the purple mass of mountains piled above
+it.  All seemed utterly unreal.
+
+As if suddenly aware that he had a neighbour, Mr. Treffry turned his
+head.  "We shall do better than this presently," he said, "bit of a
+slope coming.  Haven't had 'em out for three days.  Whoa-mare!
+Steady!"
+
+"Why are you taking this trouble for me?" asked Harz.
+
+"I'm an old chap, Mr. Harz, and an old chap may do a stupid thing
+once in a while!"
+
+"You are very good," said Harz, "but I want no favours."
+
+Mr. Treffry stared at him.
+
+"Just so," he said drily, "but you see there's my niece to be thought
+of.  Look here!  We're not at the frontier yet, Mr. Harz, by forty
+miles; it's long odds we don't get there--so, don't spoil sport!"  He
+pointed to the left.
+
+Harz caught the glint of steel.  They were already crossing the
+railway.  The sigh of the telegraph wires fluttered above them.
+
+"Hear 'em," said Mr. Treffry, "but if we get away up the mountains,
+we'll do yet!"  They had begun to rise, the speed slackened.  Mr.
+Treffry rummaged out a flask.
+
+"Not bad stuff, Mr. Harz--try it.  You won't?  Mother's milk!  Fine
+night, eh?"  Below them the valley was lit by webs of milky mist like
+the glimmer of dew on grass.
+
+These two men sitting side by side--unlike in face, age, stature,
+thought, and life--began to feel drawn towards each other, as if, in
+the rolling of the wheels, the snorting of the horses, the huge dark
+space, the huge uncertainty, they had found something they could
+enjoy in common.  The, steam from the horses' flanks and nostrils
+enveloped them with an odour as of glue.
+
+"You smoke, Mr. Harz?"
+
+Harz took the proffered weed, and lighted it from the glowing tip of
+Mr. Treffry's cigar, by light of which his head and hat looked like
+some giant mushroom.  Suddenly the wheels jolted on a rubble of loose
+stones; the carriage was swung sideways.  The scared horses,
+straining asunder, leaped forward, and sped downwards, in the
+darkness.
+
+Past rocks, trees, dwellings, past a lighted house that gleamed and
+vanished.  With a clink and clatter, a flirt of dust and pebbles, and
+the side lamps throwing out a frisky orange blink, the carriage
+dashed down, sinking and rising like a boat crossing billows.  The
+world seemed to rock and sway; to dance up, and be flung flat again.
+Only the stars stood still.
+
+Mr. Treffry, putting on the brake, muttered apologetically: "A little
+out o'hand!"
+
+Suddenly with a headlong dive, the carriage swayed as if it would fly
+in pieces, slithered along, and with a jerk steadied itself.  Harz
+lifted his voice in a shout of pure excitement.  Mr. Treffry let out
+a short shaky howl, and from behind there rose a wail.  But the hill
+was over and the startled horses were cantering with a free, smooth
+motion.  Mr. Treffry and Harz looked at each other.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+Mr. Treffry said with a sort of laugh: "Near go, eh?  You drive?  No?
+That's a pity!  Broken most of my bones at the game--nothing like
+it!"  Each felt a kind of admiration for the other that he had not
+felt before.  Presently Mr. Treffry began: "Look here, Mr. Harz, my
+niece is a slip of a thing, with all a young girl's notions!  What
+have you got to give her, eh?  Yourself?  That's surely not enough;
+mind this--six months after marriage we all turn out much the same--a
+selfish lot!  Not to mention this anarchist affair!
+
+You're not of her blood, nor of her way of life, nor anything--it's
+taking chances--and--" his hand came down on the young man's knee,
+"I'm fond of her, you see."
+
+"If you were in my place," said Harz, "would you give her up?"
+
+Mr. Treffry groaned.  "Lord knows!"
+
+"Men have made themselves before now.  For those who don't believe in
+failure, there's no such thing.  Suppose she does suffer a little?
+Will it do her any harm?  Fair weather love is no good."
+
+Mr. Treffry sighed.
+
+"Brave words, sir!  You'll pardon me if I'm too old to understand 'em
+when they're used about my niece."
+
+He pulled the horses up, and peered into the darkness.  "We're going
+through this bit quietly; if they lose track of us here so much the
+better.  Dominique! put out the lamps.  Soho, my beauties!"  The
+horses paced forward at a walk the muffled beat of their hoofs in the
+dust hardly broke the hush.  Mr. Treffry pointed to the left: "It'll
+be another thirty-five miles to the frontier."
+
+They passed the whitewashed houses, and village church with its
+sentinel cypress-trees.  A frog was croaking in a runlet; there was a
+faint spicy scent of lemons.  But nothing stirred.
+
+It was wood now on either side, the high pines, breathing their
+fragrance out into the darkness, and, like ghosts amongst them, the
+silver stems of birch-trees.
+
+Mr. Treffry said gruffly: "You won't give her up?  Her happiness
+means a lot to me."
+
+"To you!" said Harz: "to him!  And I am nothing!  Do you think I
+don't care for her happiness?  Is it a crime for me to love her?"
+
+"Almost, Mr. Harz--considering...."
+
+"Considering that I've no money!  Always money!"
+
+To this sneer Mr. Treffry made no answer, clucking to his horses.
+
+"My niece was born and bred a lady," he said at last.  "I ask you
+plainly What position have you got to give her?"
+
+"If she marries me," said Harz, "she comes into my world.  You think
+that I'm a common...."
+
+Mr. Treffry shook his head: "Answer my question, young man."
+
+But the painter did not answer it, and silence fell.
+
+A light breeze had sprung up; the whispering in the trees, the
+rolling of the wheels in this night progress, the pine-drugged air,
+sent Harz to sleep.  When he woke it was to the same tune, varied by
+Mr. Treffry's uneasy snoring; the reins were hanging loose, and,
+peering out, he saw Dominique shuffling along at the horses' heads.
+He joined him, and, one on each side, they plodded up and up.  A haze
+had begun to bathe the trees, the stars burnt dim, the air was
+colder.  Mr. Treffry woke coughing.  It was like some long nightmare,
+this interminable experience of muffled sounds and shapes, of
+perpetual motion, conceived, and carried out in darkness.  But
+suddenly the day broke.  Heralded by the snuffle of the horses, light
+began glimmering over a chaos of lines and shadows, pale as mother-
+o'-pearl.  The stars faded, and in a smouldering zigzag the dawn fled
+along the mountain tops, flinging out little isles of cloud.  From a
+lake, curled in a hollow like a patch of smoke, came the cry of a
+water-bird.  A cuckoo started a soft mocking; and close to the
+carriage a lark flew up.  Beasts and men alike stood still, drinking
+in the air-sweet with snows and dew, and vibrating faintly with the
+running of the water and the rustling of the leaves.
+
+The night had played sad tricks with Mr. Nicholas Treffry; his hat
+was grey with dust; his cheeks brownish-purple, there were heavy
+pouches beneath his eyes, which stared painfully.
+
+"We'll call a halt," he said, "and give the gees their grub, poor
+things.  Can you find some water, Mr. Harz?  There's a rubber bucket
+in behind.
+
+Can't get about myself this morning; make that lazy fellow of mine
+stir his stumps."
+
+Harz saw that he had drawn off one of his boots, and stretched the
+foot out on a cushion.
+
+"You're not fit to go farther," he said; "you're ill."
+
+"Ill!" replied Mr. Treffry; "not a bit of it!"
+
+Harz looked at him, then catching up the bucket, made off in search
+of water.  When he came back the horses were feeding from an india-
+rubber trough slung to the pole; they stretched their heads towards
+the bucket, pushing aside each other's noses.
+
+The flame in the east had died, but the tops of the larches were
+bathed in a gentle radiance; and the peaks ahead were like amber.
+Everywhere were threads of water, threads of snow, and little threads
+of dewy green, glistening like gossamer.
+
+Mr. Treffry called out: "Give me your arm, Mr. Harz; I'd like to
+shake the reefs out of me.  When one comes to stand over at the
+knees, it's no such easy matter, eh?"  He groaned as he put his foot
+down, and gripped the young man's shoulder as in a vise.  Presently
+he lowered himself on to a stone.
+
+"'All over now!' as Chris would say when she was little; nasty temper
+she had too--kick and scream on the floor!  Never lasted long
+though....  'Kiss her! take her up! show her the pictures!'  Amazing
+fond of pictures Chris was!"  He looked dubiously at Harz; then took
+a long pull at his flask.  "What would the doctor say?  Whisky at
+four in the morning!  Well!  Thank the Lord Doctors aren't always
+with us."  Sitting on the stone, with one hand pressed against his
+side, and the other tilting up the flask, he was grey from head to
+foot.
+
+Harz had dropped on to another stone.  He, too, was worn out by the
+excitement and fatigue, coming so soon after his illness.  His head
+was whirling, and the next thing he remembered was a tree walking at
+him, turning round, yellow from the roots up; everything seemed
+yellow, even his own feet.  Somebody opposite to him was jumping up
+and down, a grey bear--with a hat--Mr. Treffry!  He cried: "Ha-
+alloo!"  And the figure seemed to fall and disappear....
+
+When Harz came to himself a hand was pouring liquor into his mouth,
+and a wet cloth was muffled round his brows; a noise of humming and
+hoofs seemed familiar.  Mr. Treffry loomed up alongside, smoking a
+cigar; he was muttering: "A low trick, Paul--bit of my mind!"  Then,
+as if a curtain had been snatched aside, the vision before Harz
+cleared again.  The carriage was winding between uneven, black-eaved
+houses, past doorways from which goats and cows were coming out, with
+bells on their necks.  Black-eyed boys, and here and there a drowsy
+man with a long, cherry-stemmed pipe betwen his teeth, stood aside to
+stare.
+
+Mr. Treffry seemed to have taken a new lease of strength; like an
+angry old dog, he stared from side to side.  "My bone!" he seemed to
+say: "let's see who's going to touch it!"
+
+The last house vanished, glowing in the early sunshine, and the
+carriage with its trail of dust became entombed once more in the
+gloom of tall trees, along a road that cleft a wilderness of
+mossgrown rocks, and dewy stems, through which the sun had not yet
+driven paths.
+
+Dominique came round to them, bearing appearance of one who has seen
+better days, and a pot of coffee brewed on a spirit lamp.  Breakfast
+--he said--was served!
+
+The ears of the horses were twitching with fatigue.  Mr. Treffry said
+sadly: "If I can see this through, you can.  Get on, my beauties!"
+
+As soon as the sun struck through the trees, Mr. Treffry's strength
+ebbed again.  He seemed to suffer greatly; but did not complain.
+They had reached the pass at last, and the unchecked sunlight was
+streaming down with a blinding glare.
+
+"Jump up!" Mr. Treffry cried out.  "We'll make a finish of it!" and
+he gave the reins a jerk.  The horses flung up their heads, and the
+bleak pass with its circling crown of jagged peaks soon slipped away.
+
+Between the houses on the very top, they passed at a slow trot; and
+soon began slanting down the other side.  Mr. Treffry brought them to
+a halt where a mule track joined the road.
+
+"That's all I can do for you; you'd better leave me here," he said.
+"Keep this track down to the river--go south--you'll be in Italy in a
+couple of hours.  Get rail at Feltre.  Money?  Yes?  Well!"  He held
+out his hand; Harz gripped it.
+
+"Give her up, eh?"
+
+Harz shook his head.
+
+"No?  Then it's 'pull devil, pull baker,' between us.  Good-bye, and
+good luck to you!"  And mustering his strength for a last attempt at
+dignity, Mr. Treffry gathered up the reins.
+
+Harz watched his figure huddled again beneath the hood.  The carriage
+moved slowly away.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+At Villa Rubein people went about, avoiding each other as if detected
+in conspiracy.  Miss Naylor, who for an inscrutable reason had put on
+her best frock, a purple, relieved at the chest with bird's-eye blue,
+conveyed an impression of trying to count a chicken which ran about
+too fast.  When Greta asked what she had lost she was heard to
+mutter: "Mr.--Needlecase.
+
+Christian, with big circles round her eyes, sat silent at her little
+table.  She had had no sleep.  Herr Paul coming into the room about
+noon gave her a furtive look and went out again; after this he went
+to his bedroom, took off all his clothes, flung them passionately one
+by one into a footbath, and got into bed.
+
+"I might be a criminal!" he muttered to himself, while the buttons of
+his garments rattled on the bath.
+
+"Am I her father?  Have I authority?  Do I know the world?  Bssss!  I
+might be a frog!"
+
+Mrs. Decie, having caused herself to be announced, found him smoking
+a cigar, and counting the flies on the ceiling.
+
+"If you have really done this, Paul," she said in a restrained voice,
+"you have done a very unkind thing, and what is worse, you have made
+us all ridiculous.  But perhaps you have not done it?"
+
+"I have done it," cried Herr Paul, staring dreadfully: "I have done
+it, I tell you, I have done it--"
+
+"Very well, you have done it--and why, pray?  What conceivable good
+was there in it?  I suppose you know that Nicholas has driven him to
+the frontier?  Nicholas is probably more dead than alive by this
+time; you know his state of health."
+
+Herr Paul's fingers ploughed up his beard.
+
+"Nicholas is mad--and the girl is mad!  Leave me alone!  I will not
+be made angry; do you understand?  I will not be worried--I am not
+fit for it."  His prominent brown eyes stared round the room, as if
+looking for a way of escape.
+
+"If I may prophesy, you will be worried a good deal," said Mrs. Decie
+coldly, "before you have finished with this affair."
+
+The anxious, uncertain glance which Herr Paul gave her at these words
+roused an unwilling feeling of compunction in her.
+
+"You are not made for the outraged father of the family," she said.
+"You had better give up the attitude, Paul; it does not suit you."
+
+Herr Paul groaned.
+
+"I suppose it is not your fault," she added.
+
+Just then the door was opened, and Fritz, with an air of saying the
+right thing, announced:
+
+"A gentleman of the police to see you, sir."
+
+Herr Paul bounded.
+
+"Keep him out!" he cried.
+
+Mrs. Decie, covering her lips, disappeared with a rustling of silk;
+in her place stood a stiff man in blue....
+
+Thus the morning dragged itself away without any one being able to
+settle to anything, except Herr Paul, who was settled in bed.  As was
+fitting in a house that had lost its soul, meals were neglected, even
+by the dog.
+
+About three o'clock a telegram came for Christian, containing these
+words: "All right; self returns to-morrow.  Treffry."  After reading
+it she put on her hat and went out, followed closely by Greta, who,
+when she thought that she would not be sent away, ran up from behind
+and pulled her by the sleeve.
+
+"Let me come, Chris--I shall not talk."
+
+The two girls walked on together.  When they had gone some distance
+Christian said:
+
+"I'm going to get his pictures, and take charge of them!"
+
+"Oh!" said Greta timidly.
+
+"If you are afraid," said Christian, "you had better go back home."
+
+"I am not afraid, Chris," said Greta meekly.
+
+Neither girl spoke again till they had taken the path along the wall.
+Over the tops of the vines the heat was dancing.
+
+"The sun-fairies are on the vines!" murmured Greta to herself.
+
+At the old house they stopped, and Christian, breathing quickly,
+pushed the door; it was immovable.
+
+"Look!" said Greta, "they have screwed it!"  She pointed out three
+screws with a rosy-tipped forefinger.
+
+Christian stamped her foot.
+
+"We mustn't stand here," she said; "let's sit on that bench and
+think."
+
+"Yes," murmured Greta, "let us think."  Dangling an end of hair, she
+regarded Christian with her wide blue eyes.
+
+"I can't make any plan," Christian cried at last, "while you stare at
+me like that."
+
+"I was thinking," said Greta humbly, "if they have screwed it up,
+perhaps we shall screw it down again; there is the big screw-driver
+of Fritz."
+
+"It would take a long time; people are always passing."
+
+"People do not pass in the evening," murmured Greta, "because the
+gate at our end is always shut."
+
+Christian rose.
+
+"We will come this evening, just before the gate is shut."
+
+"But, Chris, how shall we get back again?"
+
+"I don't know; I mean to have the pictures."
+
+"It is not a high gate," murmured Greta.
+
+After dinner the girls went to their room, Greta bearing with her the
+big screw-driver of Fritz.  At dusk they slipped downstairs and out.
+
+They arrived at the old house, and stood, listening, in the shadow of
+the doorway.  The only sounds were those of distant barking dogs, and
+of the bugles at the barracks.
+
+"Quick!" whispered Christian; and Greta, with all the strength of her
+small hands, began to turn the screws.  It was some time before they
+yielded; the third was very obstinate, till Christian took the screw-
+driver and passionately gave the screw a starting twist.
+
+"It is like a pig--that one," said Greta, rubbing her wrists
+mournfully.
+
+The opened door revealed the gloom of the dank rooms and twisting
+staircase, then fell to behind them with a clatter.
+
+Greta gave a little scream, and caught her sister's dress.
+
+"It is dark," she gasped; "O Chris! it is dark!"
+
+Christian groped for the bottom stair, and Greta felt her arm
+shaking.
+
+"Suppose there is a man to keep guard!  O Chris! suppose there are
+bats!"
+
+"You are a baby!" Christian answered in a trembling voice.  "You had
+better go home!"
+
+Greta choked a little in the dark.
+
+"I am--not--going home, but I'm afraid of bats.  O Chris! aren't you
+afraid?"
+
+"Yes," said Christian, "but I'm going to have the pictures."
+
+Her cheeks were burning; she was trembling all over.  Having found
+the bottom step she began to mount with Greta clinging to her skirts.
+
+The haze above inspired a little courage in the child, who, of all
+things, hated darkness.  The blanket across the doorway of the loft
+had been taken down, there was nothing to veil the empty room.
+
+"Nobody here, you see," said Christian.
+
+"No-o," whispered Greta, running to the window, and clinging to the
+wall, like one of the bats she dreaded.
+
+"But they have been here!" cried Christian angrily.  "They have
+broken this."  She pointed to the fragments of a plaster cast that
+had been thrown down.
+
+Out of the corner she began to pull the canvases set in rough, wooden
+frames, dragging them with all her strength.
+
+"Help me!" she cried; "it will be dark directly."
+
+They collected a heap of sketches and three large pictures, piling
+them before the window, and peering at them in the failing light.
+
+Greta said ruefully:
+
+"O Chris! they are heavy ones; we shall never carry them, and the
+gate is shut now!"
+
+Christian took a pointed knife from the table.
+
+"I shall cut them out of the frames," she said.  "Listen!  What's
+that?"
+
+It was the sound of whistling, which stopped beneath the window.  The
+girls, clasping each other's hands, dropped on their knees.
+
+"Hallo!" cried a voice.
+
+Greta crept to the window, and, placing her face level with the
+floor, peered over.
+
+"It is only Dr. Edmund; he doesn't know, then," she whispered; "I
+shall call him; he is going away!" cried Christian catching her
+sister's
+
+"Don't!" cried Christian catching her sister's dress.
+
+"He would help us," Greta said reproachfully, "and it would not be so
+dark if he were here."
+
+Christian's cheeks were burning.
+
+"I don't choose," she said, and began handling the pictures, feeling
+their edges with her knife.
+
+"Chris!  Suppose anybody came?"
+
+"The door is screwed," Christian answered absently.
+
+"O Chris!  We screwed it unscrewed; anybody who wishes shall come!"
+
+Christian, leaning her chin in her hands, gazed at her thoughtfully.
+
+"It will take a long time to cut these pictures out carefully; or,
+perhaps I can get them out without cutting.  You must screw me up and
+go home.  In the morning you must come early, when the gate is open,
+unscrew me again, and help carry the pictures."
+
+Greta did not answer at once.  At last she shook her head violently.
+
+"I am afraid," she gasped.
+
+"We can't both stay here all night," said Christian; "if any one
+comes to our room there will be nobody to answer.  We can't lift
+these pictures over the gate.  One of us must go back; you can climb
+over the gate--there is nothing to be afraid of"
+
+Greta pressed her hands together.
+
+"Do you want the pictures badly, Chris?"
+
+Christian nodded.
+
+"Very badly?"
+
+"Yes--yes--yes!"
+
+Greta remained sitting where she was, shivering violently, as a
+little animal shivers when it scents danger.  At last she rose.
+
+"I am going," she said in a despairing voice.  At the doorway she
+turned.
+
+"If Miss Naylor shall ask me where you are, Chris, I shall be telling
+her a story."
+
+Christian started.
+
+"I forgot that -O Greta, I am sorry! I will go instead."
+
+Greta took another step--a quick one.
+
+"I shall die if I stay here alone," she said; "I can tell her that
+you are in bed; you must go to bed here, Chris, so it shall be true
+after all."
+
+Christian threw her arms about her.
+
+"I am so sorry, darling; I wish I could go instead.  But if you have
+to tell a lie, I would tell a straight one."
+
+"Would you?" said Greta doubtfully.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I think," said Greta to herself, beginning to descend the stairs, "I
+think I will tell it in my way."  She shuddered and went on groping
+in the darkness.
+
+Christian listened for the sound of the screws.  It came slowly,
+threatening her with danger and solitude.
+
+Sinking on her knees she began to work at freeing the canvas of a
+picture.  Her heart throbbed distressfully; at the stir of wind-
+breath or any distant note of clamour she stopped, and held her
+breathing.  No sounds came near.  She toiled on, trying only to think
+that she was at the very spot where last night his arms had been
+round her.  How long ago it seemed!  She was full of vague terror,
+overmastered by the darkness, dreadfully alone.  The new glow of
+resolution seemed suddenly to have died down in her heart, and left
+her cold.
+
+She would never be fit to be his wife, if at the first test her
+courage failed! She set her teeth; and suddenly she felt a kind of
+exultation, as if she too were entering into life, were knowing
+something within herself that she had never known before.  Her
+fingers hurt, and the pain even gave pleasure; her cheeks were
+burning; her breath came fast.  They could not stop her now!  This
+feverish task in darkness was her baptism into life.  She finished;
+and rolling the pictures very carefully, tied them with cord.  She
+had done something for him!  Nobody could take that from her!  She
+had a part of him!  This night had made him hers!  They might do
+their worst!  She lay down on his mattress and soon fell asleep....
+
+She was awakened by Scruff's tongue against her face.  Greta was
+standing by her side.
+
+"Wake up, Chris!  The gate is open!"
+
+In the cold early light the child seemed to glow with warmth and
+colour; her eyes were dancing.
+
+"I am not afraid now; Scruff and I sat up all night, to catch the
+morning--I--think it was fun; and O Chris!" she ended with a rueful
+gleam in her eyes, "I told it."
+
+Christian hugged her.
+
+"Come--quick! There is nobody about.  Are those the pictures?"
+
+Each supporting an end, the girls carried the bundle downstairs, and
+set out with their corpse-like burden along the wall-path between the
+river and the vines.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+Hidden by the shade of rose-bushes Greta lay stretched at length,
+cheek on arm, sleeping the sleep of the unrighteous.  Through the
+flowers the sun flicked her parted lips with kisses, and spilled the
+withered petals on her.  In a denser islet of shade, Scruff lay
+snapping at a fly.  His head lolled drowsily in the middle of a snap,
+and snapped in the middle of a loll.
+
+At three o'clock Miss Naylor too came out, carrying a basket and pair
+of scissors.  Lifting her skirts to avoid the lakes of water left by
+the garden hose, she stopped in front of a rose-bush, and began to
+snip off the shrivelled flowers.  The little lady's silvered head and
+thin, brown face sustained the shower of sunlight unprotected, and
+had a gentle dignity in their freedom.
+
+Presently, as the scissors flittered in and out of the leaves, she,
+began talking to herself.
+
+"If girls were more like what they used to be, this would not have
+happened.  Perhaps we don't understand; it's very easy to forget."
+Burying her nose and lips in a rose, she sniffed.  "Poor dear girl!
+It's such a pity his father is--a--"
+
+"A farmer," said a sleepy voice behind the rosebush.
+
+Miss Naylor leaped.  "Greta! How you startled me!  A farmer--that is-
+-an--an agriculturalist!"
+
+"A farmer with vineyards--he told us, and he is not ashamed.  Why is
+it a pity, Miss Naylor?"
+
+Miss Naylor's lips looked very thin.
+
+"For many reasons, of which you know nothing."
+
+"That is what you always say," pursued the sleepy voice; "and that is
+why, when I am to be married, there shall also be a pity."
+
+"Greta!" Miss Naylor cried, "it is not proper for a girl of your age
+to talk like that."
+
+"Why?" said Greta.  "Because it is the truth?"
+
+Miss Naylor made no reply to this, but vexedly cut off a sound rose,
+which she hastily picked up and regarded with contrition.  Greta
+spoke again:
+
+"Chris said: 'I have got the pictures, I shall tell her'; but I shall
+tell you instead, because it was I that told the story."
+
+Miss Naylor stared, wrinkling her nose, and holding the scissors wide
+apart....
+
+"Last night," said Greta slowly, "I and Chris went to his studio and
+took his pictures, and so, because the gate was shut, I came back to
+tell it; and when you asked me where Chris was, I told it; because
+she was in the studio all night, and I and Scruff sat up all night,
+and in the morning we brought the pictures, and hid them under our
+beds, and that is why--we--are--so--sleepy."
+
+Over the rose-bush Miss Naylor peered down at her; and though she was
+obliged to stand on tiptoe this did not altogether destroy her
+dignity.
+
+"I am surprised at you, Greta; I am surprised at Christian, more
+surprised at Christian.  The world seems upside down."
+
+Greta, a sunbeam entangled in her hair, regarded her with
+inscrutable, innocent eyes.
+
+"When you were a girl, I think you would be sure to be in love," she
+murmured drowsily.
+
+Miss Naylor, flushing deeply, snipped off a particularly healthy bud.
+
+"And so, because you are not married, I think--"
+
+The scissors hissed.
+
+Greta nestled down again.  "I think it is wicked to cut off all the
+good buds," she said, and shut her eyes.
+
+Miss Naylor continued to peer across the rosebush; but her thin face,
+close to the glistening leaves, had become oddly soft, pink, and
+girlish.  At a deeper breath from Greta, the little lady put down her
+basket, and began to pace the lawn, followed dubiously by Scruff.  It
+was thus that Christian came on them.
+
+Miss Naylor slipped her arm into the girl's and though she made no
+sound, her lips kept opening and shutting, like the beak of a bird
+contemplating a worm.
+
+Christian spoke first:
+
+"Miss Naylor, I want to tell you please--"
+
+"Oh, my dear!  I know; Greta has been in the confessional before
+you."  She gave the girl's arm a squeeze.  "Isn't it a lovely day?
+Did you ever see 'Five Fingers' look so beautiful?"  And she pointed
+to the great peaks of the Funffingerspitze glittering in the sun like
+giant crystals.
+
+"I like them better with clouds about them."
+
+"Well," agreed Miss Naylor nervously, "they certainly are nicer with
+clouds about them.  They look almost hot and greasy, don't they....
+My dear!" she went on, giving Christian's arm a dozen little
+squeezes, "we all of us--that is, we all of us--"
+
+Christian turned her eyes away.
+
+"My dear," Miss Naylor tried again, "I am far--that is, I mean, to
+all of us at some time or another--and then you see--well--it is
+hard!"
+
+Christian kissed the gloved hand resting on her arm.  Miss Naylor
+bobbed her head; a tear trickled off her nose.
+
+"Do let us wind your skein of woof!" she said with resounding gaiety.
+
+Some half-hour later Mrs. Decie called Christian to her room.
+
+"My dear!" she said; "come here a minute; I have a message for you."
+
+Christian went with an odd, set look about her mouth.
+
+Her aunt was sitting, back to the light, tapping a bowl of goldfish
+with the tip of a polished finger-nail; the room was very cool.  She
+held a letter out.  "Your uncle is not coming back tonight."
+
+Christian took the letter.  It was curtly worded, in a thin, toppling
+hand:
+
+"DEAR CON--Can't get back to-night.  Sending Dominique for things.
+Tell Christian to come over with him for night if possible.--Yr.
+aff. brother,       NICLS. TREFFRY."
+
+"Dominique has a carriage here," said Mrs. Decie.  "You will have
+nice time to catch the train.  Give my love to your uncle.  You must
+take Barbi with you, I insist on that."  She rose from her chair and
+held Christian's hand: "My dear!  You look very tired--very!  Almost
+ill.  I don't like to see you look like that.  Come!"  She thrust her
+pale lips forward, and kissed the girl's paler cheek.
+
+Then as Christian left the room she sank back in her chair, with
+creases in her forehead, and began languidly to cut a magazine.
+'Poor Christian!' she thought, 'how hardly she does take it! I am
+sorry for her; but perhaps it's just as well, as things are turning
+out.  Psychologically it is interesting!'
+
+Christian found her things packed, and the two servants waiting.  In
+a few minutes they were driving to the station.  She made Dominique
+take the seat opposite.
+
+"Well?" she asked him.
+
+Dominique's eyebrows twitched, he smiled deprecatingly.
+
+"M'mselle, Mr. Treffry told me to hold my tongue."
+
+"But you can tell me, Dominique; Barbi can't understand."
+
+"To you, then, M'mselle," said Dominique, as one who accepts his
+fate; "to you, then, who will doubtless forget all that I shall tell
+you--my master is not well; he has terrible pain here; he has a
+cough; he is not well at all; not well at all."
+
+A feeling of dismay seized on the girl.
+
+"We were a caravan for all that night," Dominique resumed.  "In the
+morning by noon we ceased to be a caravan; Signor Harz took a mule
+path; he will be in Italy--certainly in Italy.  As for us, we stayed
+at San Martino, and my master went to bed.  It was time; I had much
+trouble with his clothes, his legs were swollen.  In the afternoon
+came a signor of police, on horseback, red and hot; I persuaded him
+that we were at Paneveggio, but as we were not, he came back angry--
+Mon Die! as angry as a cat.  It was not good to meet him--when he was
+with my master I was outside.  There was much noise.  I do not know
+what passed, but at last the signor came out through the door, and
+went away in a hurry."  Dominique's features were fixed in a sardonic
+grin; he rubbed the palm of one hand with the finger of the other.
+"Mr. Treffry made me give him whisky afterwards, and he had no money
+to pay the bill--that I know because I paid it.  Well, M'mselle, to-
+day he would be dressed and very slowly we came as far as Auer; there
+he could do no more, so went to bed.  He is not well at all."
+
+Christian was overwhelmed by forebodings; the rest of the journey was
+made in silence, except when Barbi, a country girl, filled with the
+delirium of railway travel, sighed: "Ach! gnadige Friiulein!" looking
+at Christian with pleasant eyes.
+
+At once, on arriving at the little hostel, Christian went to see her
+uncle.  His room was darkened, and smelt of beeswax.
+
+"Ah! Chris," he said, "glad to see you."
+
+In a blue flannel gown, with a rug over his feet, he was lying on a
+couch lengthened artificially by chairs; the arm he reached out
+issued many inches from its sleeve, and showed the corded veins of
+the wrist.  Christian, settling his pillows, looked anxiously into
+his eyes.
+
+"I'm not quite the thing, Chris," said Mr. Treffry.  "Somehow, not
+quite the thing.  I'll come back with you to-morrow."
+
+"Let me send for Dr. Dawney, Uncle?"
+
+"No--no!  Plenty of him when I get home.  Very good young fellow, as
+doctors go, but I can't stand his puddin's--slops and puddin's, and
+all that trumpery medicine on the top.  Send me Dominique, my dear--
+I'll put myself to rights a bit!"  He fingered his unshaven cheek,
+and clutched the gown together on his chest.  "Got this from the
+landlord.  When you come back we'll have a little talk!"
+
+He was asleep when she came into the room an hour later.  Watching
+his uneasy breathing, she wondered what it was that he was going to
+say.
+
+He looked ill!  And suddenly she realised that her thoughts were not
+of him....  When she was little he would take her on his back; he had
+built cocked hats for her and paper boats; had taught her to ride;
+slid her between his knees; given her things without number; and
+taken his payment in kisses.  And now he was ill, and she was not
+thinking of him!  He had been all that was most dear to her, yet
+before her eyes would only come the vision of another.
+
+Mr. Treffry woke suddenly.  "Not been asleep, have I?  The beds here
+are infernal hard."
+
+"Uncle Nic, won't you give me news of him?"
+
+Mr. Treffry looked at her, and Christian could not bear that look.
+
+"He's safe into Italy; they aren't very keen after him, it's so long
+ago; I squared 'em pretty easily.  Now, look here, Chris!"
+
+Christian came close; he took her hand.
+
+"I'd like to see you pull yourself together.  'Tisn't so much the
+position; 'tisn't so much the money; because after all there's always
+mine--"  Christian shook her head.  "But," he went on with shaky
+emphasis, "there's the difference of blood, and that's a serious
+thing; and there's this anarch--this political affair; and there's
+the sort of life, an' that's a serious thing; but--what I'm coming to
+is this, Chris--there's the man!"
+
+Christian drew away her hand.  Mr. Treffry went on:
+
+"Ah! yes.  I'm an old chap and fond of you, but I must speak out what
+I think.  He's got pluck, he's strong, he's in earnest; but he's got
+a damned hot temper, he's an egotist, and--he's not the man for you.
+If you marry him, as sure as I lie here, you'll be sorry for it.
+You're not your father's child for nothing; nice fellow as ever
+lived, but soft as butter.  If you take this chap, it'll be like
+mixing earth and ironstone, and they don't blend!"  He dropped his
+head back on the pillows, and stretching out his hand, repeated
+wistfully: "Take my word for it, my dear, he's not the man for you."
+
+Christian, staring at the wall beyond, said quietly: "I can't take
+any one's word for that."
+
+"Ah!" muttered Mr. Treffry, "you're obstinate enough, but obstinacy
+isn't strength.
+
+You'll give up everything to him, you'll lick his shoes; and you'll
+never play anything but second fiddle in his life.  He'll always be
+first with himself, he and his work, or whatever he calls painting
+pictures; and some day you'll find that out.  You won't like it, and
+I don't like it for you, Chris, and that's flat."
+
+He wiped his brow where the perspiration stood in beads.
+
+Christian said: "You don't understand; you don't believe in him; you
+don't see!  If I do come after his work--if I do give him everything,
+and he can't give all back--I don't care!  He'll give what he can; I
+don't want any more.  If you're afraid of the life for me, uncle, if
+you think it'll be too hard--"
+
+Mr. Treffry bowed his head.  "I do, Chris."
+
+"Well, then, I hate to be wrapped in cotton wool; I want to breathe.
+If I come to grief, it's my own affair; nobody need mind."
+
+Mr. Treffry's fngers sought his beard.  "Ah! yes.  Just so!"
+
+Christian sank on her knees.
+
+"Oh! Uncle! I'm a selfish beast!"
+
+Mr. Treffry laid his hand against her cheek.  "I think I could do
+with a nap," he said.
+
+Swallowing a lump in her throat, she stole out of the room.
+
+By a stroke of Fate Mr. Treffry's return to Villa Rubein befell at
+the psychological moment when Herr Paul, in a suit of rather too
+bright blue, was starting for Vienna.
+
+As soon as he saw the carriage appear between the poplars he became
+as pensive as a boy caught in the act of stealing cherries.  Pitching
+his hatbox to Fritz, he recovered himself, however, in time to
+whistle while Mr. Treffry was being assisted into the house.  Having
+forgotten his anger, he was only anxious now to smooth out its after
+effects; in the glances he cast at Christian and his brother-in-law
+there was a kind of shamed entreaty which seemed to say: "For
+goodness' sake, don't worry me about that business again! Nothing's
+come of it, you see!"
+
+He came forward: "Ah! Mon cher!  So you return; I put off my
+departure, then.  Vienna must wait for me--that poor Vienna!"
+
+But noticing the extreme feebleness of Mr. Treffry's advance, he
+exclaimed with genuine concern:
+
+"What is it?  You're ill?  My God!"  After disappearing for five
+minutes, he came back with a whitish liquid in a glass.
+
+"There!" he said, "good for the gout--for a cough--for everything!"
+
+Mr. Treffry sniffed, drained the glass, and sucked his moustache.
+
+"Ah!" he said.  "No doubt!  But it's uncommonly like gin, Paul."
+Then turning to Christian, he said: "Shake hands, you two!"
+
+Christian looked from one to the other, and at last held out her hand
+to Herr Paul, who brushed it with his moustache, gazing after her as
+she left the room with a queer expression.
+
+"My dear!" he began, "you support her in this execrable matter?  You
+forget my position, you make me ridiculous.  I have been obliged to
+go to bed in my own house, absolutely to go to bed, because I was in
+danger of becoming funny."
+
+"Look here, Paul!" Mr. Treffry said gruffly, "if any one's to bully
+Chris, it's I."
+
+"In that case," returned Herr Paul sarcastically, "I will go to
+Vienna."
+
+"You may go to the devil!" said Mr. Treffry; "and I'll tell you what-
+-in my opinion it was low to set the police on that young chap; a
+low, dirty trick."
+
+Herr Paul divided his beard carefully in two, took his seat on the
+very edge of an arm-chair, and placing his hands on his parted knees,
+said:
+
+"I have regretted it since--mais, que diable!  He called me a coward-
+-it is very hot weather!--there were drinks at the Kurhaus--I am her
+guardian--the affair is a very beastly one--there were more drinks--I
+was a little enfin!"  He shrugged his shoulders.  "Adieu, my dear; I
+shall be some time in Vienna; I need rest!"  He rose and went to the
+door; then he turned, and waved his cigar.  "Adieu! Be good; get
+well!  I will buy you some cigars up there."  And going out, he shut
+the door on any possibility of answer.
+
+Mr. Treffry lay back amongst his cushions.  The clock ticked; pigeons
+cooed on the veranda; a door opened in the distance, and for a moment
+a treble voice was heard.  Mr. Treffry's head drooped forward; across
+his face, gloomy and rugged, fell a thin line of sunlight.
+
+The clock suddenly stopped ticking, and outside, in mysterious
+accord, the pigeons rose with a great fluttering of wings, and flew
+off'.  Mr. Treffry made a startled, heavy movement.  He tried to get
+on to his feet and reach the bell, but could not, and sat on the side
+of the couch with drops of sweat rolling off his forehead, and his
+hands clawing his chest.  There was no sound at all throughout the
+house.  He looked about him, and tried to call, but again could not.
+He tried once more to reach the bell, and, failing, sat still, with a
+thought that made him cold.
+
+"I'm done for," he muttered.  "By George! I believe I'm done for this
+time!"  A voice behind him said:
+
+"Can we have a look at you, sir?"
+
+"Ah! Doctor, bear a hand, there's a good fellow."
+
+Dawney propped him against the cushions, and loosened his shirt.
+Receiving no answer to his questions, he stepped alarmed towards the
+bell.  Mr. Treffry stopped him with a sign.
+
+"Let's hear what you make of me," he said.
+
+When Dawney had examined him, he asked:
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Well," answered Dawney slowly, "there's trouble, of course."
+
+Mr. Treffry broke out with a husky whisper: "Out with it, Doctor;
+don't humbug me."
+
+Dawney bent down, and took his wrist.
+
+"I don't know how you've got into this state, sir," he said with the
+brusqueness of emotion.  "You're in a bad way.  It's the old trouble;
+and you know what that means as well as I.  All I can tell you is,
+I'm going to have a big fight with it.  It shan't be my fault,
+there's my hand on that."
+
+Mr. Treffry lay with his eyes fixed on the ceiling; at last he said:
+
+"I want to live."
+
+"Yes--yes."
+
+"I feel better now; don't make a fuss about it.  It'll be very
+awkward if I die just now.  Patch me up, for the sake of my niece."
+
+Dawney nodded.  "One minute, there are a few things I want," and he
+went out.
+
+A moment later Greta stole in on tiptoe.  She bent over till her hair
+touched Mr. Treffry's face.
+
+"Uncle Nic!" she whispered.  He opened his eyes.
+
+"Hallo, Greta!"
+
+"I have come to bring you my love, Uncle Nic, and to say good-bye.
+Papa says that I and Scruff and Miss Naylor are going to Vienna with
+him; we have had to pack in half an hour; in five minutes we are
+going to Vienna, and it is my first visit there, Uncle Nic."
+
+"To Vienna!" Mr. Treffry repeated slowly.  "Don't have a guide,
+Greta; they're humbugs."
+
+"No, Uncle Nic," said Greta solemnly.
+
+"Draw the curtains, old girl, let's have a look at you.  Why, you're
+as smart as ninepence!"
+
+"Yes," said Greta with a sigh, touching the buttons of her cape,
+"because I am going to Vienna; but I am sorry to leave you, Uncle
+Nic."
+
+"Are you, Greta?"
+
+"But you will have Chris, and you are fonder of Chris than of me,
+Uncle Nic."
+
+"I've known her longer."
+
+"Perhaps when you've known me as long as Chris, you shall be as fond
+of me."
+
+"When I've known you as long--may be."
+
+"While I am gone, Uncle Nic, you are to get well, you are not very
+well, you know."
+
+"What put that into your head?"
+
+"If you were well you would be smoking a cigar--it is just three
+o'clock.  This kiss is for myself, this is for Scruff, and this is
+for Miss Naylor."
+
+She stood upright again; a tremulous, joyful gravity was in her eyes
+and on her lips.
+
+"Good-bye, my dear; take care of yourselves; and don't you have a
+guide, they're humbugs."
+
+"No, Uncle Nic.  There is the carriage!  To Vienna, Uncle Nic!"  The
+dead gold of her hair gleamed in the doorway.  Mr. Treffry raised
+himself upon his elbow.
+
+"Give us one more, for luck!"
+
+Greta ran back.
+
+"I love you very much!" she said, and kissing him, backed slowly,
+then, turning, flew out like a bird.
+
+Mr. Treffry fixed his eyes on the shut door.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+After many days of hot, still weather, the wind had come, and whirled
+the dust along the parched roads.  The leaves were all astir, like
+tiny wings.  Round Villa Rubein the pigeons cooed uneasily, all the
+other birds were silent.  Late in the afternoon Christian came out on
+the veranda, reading a letter:
+
+"DEAR CHRIS,--We are here now six days, and it is a very large place
+with many churches.  In the first place then we have been to a great
+many, but the nicest of them is not St. Stephan's Kirche, it is
+another, but I do not remember the name.  Papa is out nearly all the
+night; he says he is resting here, so he is not able to come to the
+churches with us, but I do not think he rests very much.  The day
+before yesterday we, that is, Papa, I, and Miss Naylor, went to an
+exhibition of pictures.  It was quite beautiful and interesting (Miss
+Naylor says it is not right to say 'quite' beautiful, but I do not
+know what other word could mean 'quite' except the word 'quite,'
+because it is not exceedingly and not extremely.  And O Chris! there
+was one picture painted by him; it was about a ship without masts--
+Miss Naylor says it is a barge, but I do not know what a barge is--on
+fire, and, floating down a river in a fog.  I think it is extremely
+beautiful.  Miss Naylor says it is very impressionistick--what is
+that?  and Papa said 'Puh!' but he did not know it was painted by
+Herr Harz, so I did not tell him.
+
+"There has also been staying at our hotel that Count Sarelli who came
+one evening to dinner at our house, but he is gone away now.  He sat
+all day in the winter garden reading, and at night he went out with
+Papa.  Miss Naylor says he is unhappy, but I think he does not take
+enough exercise; and O Chris! one day he said to me, 'That is your
+sister, Mademoiselle, that young lady in the white dress?  Does she
+always wear white dresses?' and I said to him: 'It is not always a
+white dress; in the picture, it is green, because the picture is
+called "Spring.'"  But I did not tell him the colours of all your
+dresses because he looked so tired.  Then he said to me: 'She is very
+charming.'  So I tell you this, Chris, because I think you shall like
+to know.  Scruff' has a sore toe; it is because he has eaten too much
+meat.
+
+"It is not nice without you, Chris, and Miss Naylor says I am
+improving my mind here, but I do not think it shall improve very
+much, because at night I like it always best, when the shops are
+lighted and the carriages are driving past; then I am wanting to
+dance.  The first night Papa said he would take me to the theatre,
+but yesterday he said it was not good for me; perhaps to-morrow he
+shall think it good for me again.
+
+"Yesterday we have been in the Prater, and saw many people, and some
+that Papa knew; and then came the most interesting part of all,
+sitting under the trees in the rain for two hours because we could
+not get a carriage (very exciting).
+
+"There is one young lady here, only she is not any longer very young,
+who knew Papa when he was a boy.  I like her very much; she shall
+soon know me quite to the bottom and is very kind.
+
+"The ill husband of Cousin Teresa who went with us to Meran and lost
+her umbrella and Dr. Edmund was so sorry about it, has been very much
+worse, so she is not here but in Baden.  I wrote to her but have no
+news, so I do not know whether he is still living or not, at any rate
+he can't get well again so soon (and I don't think he ever shall).  I
+think as the weather is very warm you and Uncle Nic are sitting much
+out of doors.  I am sending presents to you all in a wooden box and
+screwed very firm, so you shall have to use again the big screw-
+driver of Fritz.  For Aunt Constance, photographs; for Uncle Nic, a
+green bird on a stand with a hole in the back of the bird to put his
+ashes in; it is a good green and not expensif please tell him,
+because he does not like expensif presents (Miss Naylor says the bird
+has an inquiring eye--it is a parrat); for you, a little brooch of
+turquoise because I like them best; for Dr. Edmund a machine to weigh
+medicines in because he said he could not get a good one in Botzen;
+this is a very good one, the shopman told me so, and is the most
+expensif of all the presents--so that is all my money, except two
+gulden.  If Papa shall give me some more, I shall buy for Miss Naylor
+a parasol, because it is useful and the handle of hers is 'wobbley'
+(that is one of Dr. Edmund's words and I like it).
+
+"Good-bye for this time.  Greta sends you her kiss.
+
+"PS.--Miss Naylor has read all this letter (except about the parasol)
+and there are several things she did not want me to put, so I have
+copied it without the things, but at the last I have kept that copy
+myself, so that is why this is smudgy and several words are not spelt
+well, but all the things are here."
+
+Christian read, smiling, but to finish it was like dropping a
+talisman, and her face clouded.  A sudden draught blew her hair
+about, and from within, Mr. Treffry's cough mingled with the soughing
+of the wind; the sky was fast blackening.  She went indoors, took a
+pen and began to write:
+
+
+"MY FRIEND,--Why haven't you written to me?  It is so, long to wait.
+Uncle says you are in Italy--it is dreadful not to know for certain.
+I feel you would have written if you could; and I can't help thinking
+of all the things that may have happened.  I am unhappy.  Uncle Nic
+is ill; he will not confess it, that is his way; but he is very ill.
+Though perhaps you will never see this, I must write down all my
+thoughts.  Sometimes I feel that I am brutal to be always thinking
+about you, scheming how to be with you again, when he is lying there
+so ill.  How good he has always been to me; it is terrible that love
+should pull one apart so.  Surely love should be beautiful, and
+peaceful, instead of filling me with bitter, wicked thoughts.  I love
+you--and I love him; I feel as if I were torn in two.  Why should it
+be so?  Why should the beginning of one life mean the ending of
+another, one love the destruction of another?  I don't understand.
+The same spirit makes me love you and him, the same sympathy, the
+same trust--yet it sometimes seems as if I were a criminal in loving
+you.  You know what he thinks--he is too honest not to have shown
+you.  He has talked to me; he likes you in a way, but you are a
+foreigner--he says-your life is not my life.  'He is not the man for
+you!'  Those were his words.  And now he doesn't talk to me, but when
+I am in the room he looks at me--that's worse--a thousand times; when
+he talks it rouses me to fight--when it's his eyes only, I'm a coward
+at once; I feel I would do anything, anything, only not to hurt him.
+Why can't he see?  Is it because he's old and we are young?  He may
+consent, but he will never, never see; it will always hurt him.
+
+"I want to tell you everything; I have had worse thoughts than these-
+-sometimes I have thought that I should never have the courage to
+face the struggle which you have to face.  Then I feel quite broken;
+it is like something giving way in me.  Then I think of you, and it
+is over; but it has been there, and I am ashamed--I told you I was a
+coward.  It's like the feeling one would have going out into a storm
+on a dark night, away from a warm fire--only of the spirit not the
+body--which makes it worse.  I had to tell you this; you mustn't
+think of it again, I mean to fight it away and forget that it has
+ever been there.  But Uncle Nic--what am I to do?  I hate myself
+because I am young, and he is old and weak--sometimes I seem even to
+hate him.  I have all sorts of thoughts, and always at the end of
+them, like a dark hole at the end of a passage, the thought that I
+ought to give you up.  Ought I?  Tell me.  I want to know, I want to
+do what is right; I still want to do that, though sometimes I think I
+am all made of evil.
+
+"Do you remember once when we were talking, you said: 'Nature always
+has an answer for every question; you cannot get an answer from laws,
+conventions, theories, words, only from Nature.'  What do you say to
+me now; do you tell me it is Nature to come to you in spite of
+everything, and so, that it must be right?  I think you would; but
+can it be Nature to do something which will hurt terribly one whom I
+love and who loves me?  If it is--Nature is cruel.  Is that one of
+the 'lessons of life'?  Is that what Aunt Constance means when she
+says: 'If life were not a paradox, we could not get on at all'?  I am
+beginning to see that everything has its dark side; I never believed
+that before.
+
+"Uncle Nic dreads the life for me; he doesn't understand (how should
+he?--he has always had money) how life can be tolerable without money
+--it is horrible that the accident of money should make such
+difference in our lives.  I am sometimes afraid myself, and I can't
+outface that fear in him; he sees the shadow of his fear in me--his
+eyes seem to see everything that is in me now; the eyes of old people
+are the saddest things in the world.  I am writing like a wretched
+coward, but you will never see this letter I suppose, and so it
+doesn't matter; but if you do, and I pray that you may--well, if I am
+only worth taking at my best, I am not worth taking at all.  I want
+you to know the worst of me--you, and no one else.
+
+"With Uncle Nic it is not as with my stepfather; his opposition only
+makes me angry, mad, ready to do anything, but with Uncle Nic I feel
+so bruised--so sore.  He said: 'It is not so much the money, because
+there is always mine.'  I could never do a thing he cannot bear, and
+take his money, and you would never let me.  One knows very little of
+anything in the world till trouble comes.  You know how it is with
+flowers and trees; in the early spring they look so quiet and self-
+contained; then all in a moment they change--I think it must be like
+that with the heart.  I used to think I knew a great deal, understood
+why and how things came about; I thought self-possession and reason
+so easy; now I know nothing.  And nothing in the world matters but to
+see you and hide away from that look in Uncle Nic's eyes.  Three
+months ago I did not know you, now I write like this.  Whatever I
+look at, I try to see as you would see; I feel, now you are away even
+more than when you were with me, what your thoughts would be, how you
+would feel about this or that.  Some things you have said seem always
+in my mind like lights--"
+
+A slanting drift of rain was striking the veranda tiles with a cold,
+ceaseless hissing.  Christian shut the window, and went into her
+uncle's room.
+
+He was lying with closed eyes, growling at Dominique, who moved about
+noiselessly, putting the room ready for the night.  When he had
+finished, and with a compassionate bow had left the room, Mr. Treffry
+opened his eyes, and said:
+
+"This is beastly stuff of the doctor's, Chris, it puts my monkey up;
+I can't help swearing after I've taken it; it's as beastly as a
+vulgar woman's laugh, and I don't know anything beastlier than that!"
+
+"I have a letter from Greta, Uncle Nic; shall I read it?"
+
+He nodded, and Christian read the letter, leaving out the mention of
+Harz, and for some undefined reason the part about Sarelli.
+
+"Ay!" said Mr. Treffry with a feeble laugh, "Greta and her money!
+Send her some more, Chris.  Wish I were a youngster again; that's a
+beast of a proverb about a dog and his day.  I'd like to go fishing
+again in the West Country!  A fine time we had when we were
+youngsters.  You don't get such times these days.  'Twasn't often the
+fishing-smacks went out without us.  We'd watch their lights from our
+bedroom window; when they were swung aboard we were out and down to
+the quay before you could say 'knife.'  They always waited for us;
+but your Uncle Dan was the favourite, he was the chap for luck.  When
+I get on my legs, we might go down there, you and I?  For a bit, just
+to see?  What d'you say, old girl?"
+
+Their eyes met.
+
+"I'd like to look at the smack lights going to sea on a dark night;
+pity you're such a duffer in a boat--we might go out with them.  Do
+you a power of good!  You're not looking the thing, my dear."
+
+His voice died wistfully, and his glance, sweeping her face, rested
+on her hands, which held and twisted Greta's letter.  After a minute
+or two of silence he boomed out again with sudden energy:
+
+"Your aunt'll want to come and sit with me, after dinner; don't let
+her, Chris, I can't stand it.  Tell her I'm asleep--the doctor'll be
+here directly; ask him to make up some humbug for you--it's his
+business."
+
+He was seized by a violent fit of pain which seemed to stab his
+breath away, and when it was over signed that he would be left alone.
+Christian went back to her letter in the other room, and had written
+these words, when the gong summoned her to dinner:
+
+'I'm like a leaf in the wind, I put out my hand to one thing, and
+it's seized and twisted and flung aside.  I want you--I want you; if
+I could see you I think I should know what to do--"
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+The rain drove with increasing fury.  The night was very black.
+Nicholas Treffry slept heavily.  By the side of his bed the night-
+lamp cast on to the opposite wall a bright disc festooned by the
+hanging shadow of the ceiling.  Christian was leaning over him.  For
+the moment he filled all her heart, lying there, so helpless. Fearful
+of waking him she slipped into the sitting-room.  Outside the window
+stood a man with his face pressed to the pane.  Her heart thumped;
+she went up and unlatched the window.  It was Harz, with the rain
+dripping off him.  He let fall his hat and cape.
+
+"You!" she said, touching his sleeve.  "You!  You!"
+
+He was sodden with wet, his face drawn and tired; a dark growth of
+beard covered his cheeks and chin.
+
+"Where is your uncle?" he said; "I want to see him."
+
+She put her hand up to his lips, but he caught it and covered it with
+kisses.
+
+"He's asleep--ill--speak gently!"
+
+"I came to him first," he muttered.
+
+Christian lit the lamp; and he looked at her hungrily without a word.
+
+"It's not possible to go on like this; I came to tell your uncle so.
+He is a man.  As for the other, I want to have nothing to do with
+him!  I came back on foot across the mountains.  It's not possible to
+go on like this, Christian."
+
+She handed him her letter.  He held it to the light, clearing his
+brow of raindrops.  When he had read to the last word he gave it her
+back, and whispered: "Come!"
+
+Her lips moved, but she did not speak.
+
+"While this goes on I can't work; I can do nothing.  I can't--I won't
+bargain with my work; if it's to be that, we had better end it.  What
+are we waiting for?  Sooner or later we must come to this.  I'm sorry
+that he's ill, God knows!  But that changes nothing.  To wait is
+tying me hand and foot--it's making me afraid!  Fear kills!  It will
+kill you!  It kills work, and I must work, I can't waste time--I
+won't!  I will sooner give you up."  He put his hands on her
+shoulders.  "I love you!  I want you!  Look in my eyes and see if you
+dare hold back!"
+
+Christian stood with the grip of his strong hands on her shoulders,
+without a movement or sign.  Her face was very white.  And suddenly
+he began to kiss that pale, still face, to kiss its eyes and lips, to
+kiss it from its chin up to its hair; and it stayed pale, as a white
+flower, beneath those kisses--as a white flower, whose stalk the
+fingers bend back a little.
+
+There was a sound of knocking on the wall; Mr. Treffry called feebly.
+Christian broke away from Harz.
+
+"To-morrow!" he whispered, and picking up his hat and cloak, went out
+again into the rain.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+It was not till morning that Christian fell into a troubled sleep.
+She dreamed that a voice was calling her, and she was filled with a
+helpless, dumb dream terror.
+
+When she woke the light was streaming in; it was Sunday, and the
+cathedral bells were chiming.  Her first thought was of Harz.  One
+step, one moment of courage!  Why had she not told her uncle?  If he
+had only asked!  But why--why should she tell him?  When it was over
+and she was gone, he would see that all was for the best.
+
+Her eyes fell on Greta's empty bed.  She sprang up, and bending over,
+kissed the pillow.  'She will mind at first; but she's so young!
+Nobody will really miss me, except Uncle Nic!'  She stood along while
+in the window without moving.  When she was dressed she called out to
+her maid:
+
+"Bring me some milk, Barbi; I'm going to church."
+
+"Ach! gnadiges Frdulein, will you no breakfast have?"
+
+"No thank you, Barbi."
+
+"Liebes Fraulein, what a beautiful morning after the rain it has
+become!  How cool!  It is for you good--for the colour in your
+cheeks; now they will bloom again!" and Barbi stroked her own well-
+coloured cheeks.
+
+Dominique, sunning himself outside with a cloth across his arm, bowed
+as she passed, and smiled affectionately:
+
+"He is better this morning, M'mselle.  We march--we are getting on.
+Good news will put the heart into you."
+
+Christian thought: 'How sweet every one is to-day!'
+
+Even the Villa seemed to greet her, with the sun aslant on it; and
+the trees, trembling and weeping golden tears.  At the cathedral she
+was early for the service, but here and there were figures on their
+knees; the faint, sickly odour of long-burnt incense clung in the
+air; a priest moved silently at the far end.  She knelt, and when at
+last she rose the service had begun.  With the sound of the intoning
+a sense of peace came to her--the peace of resolution.  For good or
+bad she felt that she had faced her fate.
+
+She went out with a look of quiet serenity and walked home along the
+dyke.  Close to Harz's studio she sat down.  Now--it was her own; all
+that had belonged to him, that had ever had a part in him.
+
+An old beggar, who had been watching her, came gently from behind.
+"Gracious lady!" he said, peering at her eyes, "this is the lucky day
+for you.  I have lost my luck."
+
+Christian opened her purse, there was only one coin in it, a gold
+piece; the beggar's eyes sparkled.
+
+She thought suddenly: 'It's no longer mine; I must begin to be
+careful,' but she felt ashamed when she looked at the old man.
+
+"I am sorry," she said; "yesterday I would have given you this, but--
+but now it's already given."
+
+He seemed so old and poor--what could she give him?  She unhooked a
+little silver brooch at her throat.  "You will get something for
+that," she said; "it's better than nothing.  I am very sorry you are
+so old and poor."
+
+The beggar crossed himself.  "Gracious lady," he muttered, "may you
+never want!"
+
+Christian hurried on; the rustling of leaves soon carried the words
+away.  She did not feel inclined to go in, and crossing the bridge
+began to climb the hill.  There was a gentle breeze, drifting the
+clouds across the sun; lizards darted out over the walls, looked at
+her, and whisked away.
+
+The sunshine, dappling through the tops of trees, gashed down on a
+torrent.  The earth smelt sweet, the vineyards round the white farms
+glistened; everything seemed to leap and dance with sap and life; it
+was a moment of Spring in midsummer.  Christian walked on, wondering
+at her own happiness.
+
+'Am I heartless?' she thought.  'I am going to leave him--I am going
+into life; I shall have to fight now, there'll be no looking back.'
+
+The path broke away and wound down to the level of the torrent; on
+the other side it rose again, and was lost among trees.  The woods
+were dank; she hastened home.
+
+In her room she began to pack, sorting and tearing up old letters.
+'Only one thing matters,' she thought; 'singleness of heart; to see
+your way, and keep to it with all your might.'
+
+She looked up and saw Barbi standing before her with towels in her
+hands, and a scared face.
+
+"Are you going a journey, gnadiges Fraulein?"
+
+"I am going away to be married, Barbi," said Christian at last;
+"don't speak of it to any one, please."
+
+Barbi leant a little forward with the towels clasped to the blue
+cotton bosom of her dress.
+
+"No, no!  I will not speak.  But, dear Fraulein, that is a big
+matter; have you well thought?"
+
+"Thought, Barbi?  Have I not!"
+
+"But, dear FrauIein, will you be rich?"
+
+"No! I shall be as poor as you."
+
+"Ach! dear God! that is terrible.  Katrina, my sister, she is
+married; she tells me all her life; she tells me it is very hard, and
+but for the money in her stocking it would be harder.  Dear Fraulein,
+think again!  And is he good?  Sometimes they are not good."
+
+"He is good," said Christian, rising; "it is all settled!" and she
+kissed Barbi on the cheek.
+
+"You are crying, liebes Fraulein!  Think yet again, perhaps it is not
+quite all settled; it is not possible that a maiden should not a way
+out leave?"
+
+Christian smiled.  "I don't do things that way, Barbi."
+
+Barbi hung the towels on the horse, and crossed herself.
+
+Mr. Treffry's gaze was fixed on a tortoise-shell butterfly fluttering
+round the ceiling.  The insect seemed to fascinate him, as things
+which move quickly always fascinate the helpless.  Christian came
+softly in.
+
+"Couldn't stay in bed, Chris," he called out with an air of guilt.
+"The heat was something awful.  The doctor piped off in a huff, just
+because o' this."  He motioned towards a jug of claret-cup and a pipe
+on the table by his elbow.  "I was only looking at 'em."
+
+Christian, sitting down beside him, took up a fan.
+
+"If I could get out of this heat--" he said, and closed his eyes.
+
+'I must tell him,' she thought; 'I can't slink away.'
+
+"Pour me out some of that stuff, Chris."
+
+She reached for the jug.  Yes! She must tell him! Her heart sank.
+
+Mr. Treffry took a lengthy draught.  "Broken my promise; don't
+matter--won't hurt any one but me."  He took up the pipe and pressed
+tobacco into it.  "I've been lying here with this pain going right
+through me, and never a smoke!  D'you tell me anything the parsons
+say can do me half the good of this pipe?"  He leaned back, steeped
+in a luxury of satisfaction.  He went on, pursuing a private train of
+thought: "Things have changed a lot since my young days.  When I was
+a youngster, a young fellow had to look out for peck and perch--he
+put the future in his pocket.  He did well or not, according as he
+had stuff in him.  Now he's not content with that, it seems--trades
+on his own opinion of himself; thinks he is what he says he's going
+to be."
+
+"You are unjust," said Christian.
+
+Mr. Treffry grunted.  "Ah, well! I like to know where I am.  If I
+lend money to a man, I like to know whether he's going to pay it
+back; I may not care whether he does or not, but I like to know.  The
+same with other things.  I don't care what a man has--though, mind
+you, Chris, it's not a bad rule that measures men by the balance at
+their banks; but when it comes to marriage, there's a very simple
+rule, What's not enough for one is not enough for two.  You can't
+talk black white, or bread into your mouth.  I don't care to speak
+about myself, as you know, Chris, but I tell you this--when I came to
+London I wanted to marry--I hadn't any money, and I had to want.
+When I had the money--but that's neither here nor there!"  He
+frowned, fingering his pipe.
+
+"I didn't ask her, Chris; I didn't think it the square thing; it
+seems that's out of fashion!"
+
+Christian's cheeks were burning.
+
+"I think a lot while I lie here," Mr. Treffry went on; "nothing much
+else to do.  What I ask myself is this: What do you know about what's
+best for you?  What do you know of life?  Take it or leave it, life's
+not all you think; it's give and get all the way, a fair start is
+everything."
+
+Christian thought: 'Will he never see?'
+
+Mr. Treffry went on:
+
+"I get better every day, but I can't last for ever.  It's not
+pleasant to lie here and know that when I'm gone there'll be no one
+to keep a hand on the check string!"
+
+"Don't talk like that, dear!" Christian murmured.
+
+"It's no use blinking facts, Chris.  I've lived a long time in the
+world; I've seen things pretty well as they are; and now there's not
+much left for me to think about but you."
+
+"But, Uncle, if you loved him, as I do, you couldn't tell me to be
+afraid!  It's cowardly and mean to be afraid.  You must have
+forgotten!"
+
+Mr. Treffry closed his eyes.
+
+"Yes," he said; "I'm old."
+
+The fan had dropped into Christian's lap; it rested on her white
+frock like a large crimson leaf; her eyes were fixed on it.
+
+Mr. Treffry looked at her.  "Have you heard from him?" he asked with
+sudden intuition.
+
+"Last night, in that room, when you thought I was talking to
+Dominique--"
+
+The pipe fell from his hand.
+
+"What!" he stammered: "Back?"
+
+Christian, without looking up, said:
+
+"Yes, he's back; he wants me--I must go to him, Uncle."
+
+There was a long silence.
+
+"You must go to him?" he repeated.
+
+She longed to fling herself down at his knees, but he was so still,
+that to move seemed impossible; she remained silent, with folded
+hands.
+
+Mr. Treffry spoke:
+
+"You'll let me know--before--you--go.  Goodnight!"
+
+Christian stole out into the passage.  A bead curtain rustled in the
+draught; voices reached her.
+
+"My honour is involved, or I would give the case up."
+
+"He is very trying, poor Nicholas!  He always had that peculiar
+quality of opposition; it has brought him to grief a hundred times.
+There is opposition in our blood; my family all have it.  My eldest
+brother died of it; with my poor sister, who was as gentle as a lamb,
+it took the form of doing the right thing in the wrong place.  It is
+a matter of temperament, you see.  You must have patience."
+
+"Patience," repeated Dawney's voice, "is one thing; patience where
+there is responsibility is another.  I've not had a wink of sleep
+these last two nights."
+
+There was a faint, shrill swish of silk.
+
+"Is he so very ill?"
+
+Christian held her breath.  The answer came at last.
+
+"Has he made his will?  With this trouble in the side again, I tell
+you plainly, Mrs. Decie, there's little or no chance."
+
+Christian put her hands up to her ears, and ran out into the air.
+What was she about to do, then--to leave him dying!
+
+On the following day Harz was summoned to the Villa.  Mr. Treffry had
+just risen, and was garbed in a dressing-suit, old and worn, which
+had a certain air of magnificence.  His seamed cheeks were newly
+shaved.
+
+"I hope I see you well," he said majestically.
+
+Thinking of the drive and their last parting, Harz felt sorry and
+ashamed.  Suddenly Christian came into the room; she stood for a
+moment looking at him; then sat down.
+
+"Chris!" said Mr. Treffry reproachfully.  She shook her head, and did
+not move; mournful and intent, her eyes seemed full of secret
+knowledge.
+
+Mr. Treffry spoke:
+
+"I've no right to blame you, Mr. Harz, and Chris tells me you came to
+see me first, which is what I would have expected of you; but you
+shouldn't have come back."
+
+"I came back, sir, because I found I was obliged.  I must speak out."
+
+"I ask nothing better," Mr. Treffry replied.
+
+Harz looked again at Christian; but she made no sign, sitting with
+her chin resting on her hands.
+
+"I have come for her," he said; "I can make my living--enough for
+both of us.  But I can't wait."
+
+"Why?"
+
+Harz made no answer.
+
+Mr. Treffry boomed out again: " Why?  Isn't she worth waiting for?
+Isn't she worth serving for?"
+
+"I can't expect you to understand me," the painter said.  "My art is
+my life to me.  Do you suppose that if it wasn't I should ever have
+left my village; or gone through all that I've gone through, to get
+as far even as I am?  You tell me to wait.  If my thoughts and my
+will aren't free, how can I work?  I shan't be worth my salt.  You
+tell me to go back to England--knowing she is here, amongst you who
+hate me, a thousand miles away.  I shall know that there's a death
+fight going on in her and outside her against me--you think that I
+can go on working under these conditions.  Others may be able, I am
+not.  That's the plain truth.  If I loved her less--"
+
+There was a silence, then Mr. Treffry said:
+
+"It isn't fair to come here and ask what you're asking.  You don't
+know what's in the future for you, you don't know that you can keep a
+wife.  It isn't pleasant, either, to think you can't hold up your
+head in your own country."
+
+Harz turned white.
+
+"Ah! you bring that up again!" he broke out.  "Seven years ago I was
+a boy and starving; if you had been in my place you would have done
+what I did.  My country is as much to me as your country is to you.
+I've been an exile seven years, I suppose I shall always be I've had
+punishment enough; but if you think I am a rascal, I'll go and give
+myself up."  He turned on his heel.
+
+"Stop!  I beg your pardon!  I never meant to hurt you.  It isn't easy
+for me to eat my words," Mr. Treffry said wistfully, "let that count
+for something."  He held out his hand.
+
+Harz came quickly back and took it.  Christian's gaze was never for a
+moment withdrawn; she seemed trying to store up the sight of him
+within her.  The light darting through the half-closed shutters gave
+her eyes a strange, bright intensity, and shone in the folds of her
+white dress like the sheen of birds' wings.
+
+Mr. Treffry glanced uneasily about him.  "God knows I don't want
+anything but her happiness," he said.  "What is it to me if you'd
+murdered your mother?  It's her I'm thinking of."
+
+"How can you tell what is happiness to her?  You have your own ideas
+of happiness--not hers, not mine.  You can't dare to stop us, sir!"
+
+"Dare?" said Mr. Treffry.  "Her father gave her over to me when she
+was a mite of a little thing; I've known her all her life.  I've--
+I've loved her--and you come here with your 'dare'!  " His hand
+dragged at his beard, and shook as though palsied.
+
+A look of terror came into Christian's face.
+
+"All right, Chris! I don't ask for quarter, and I don't give it!"
+
+Harz made a gesture of despair.
+
+"I've acted squarely by you, sir," Mr. Treffry went on, "I ask the
+same of you.  I ask you to wait, and come like an honest man, when
+you can say, 'I see my way--here's this and that for her.'  What
+makes this art you talk of different from any other call in life?  It
+doesn't alter facts, or give you what other men have no right to
+expect.  It doesn't put grit into you, or keep your hands clean, or
+prove that two and two make five."
+
+Harz answered bitterly:
+
+"You know as much of art as I know of money.  If we live a thousand
+years we shall never understand each other.  I am doing what I feel
+is best for both of us."
+
+Mr. Treffry took hold of the painter's sleeve.
+
+"I make you an offer," he said.  "Your word not to see or write to
+her for a year!  Then, position or not, money or no money, if she'll
+have you, I'll make it right for you."
+
+"I could not take your money."
+
+A kind of despair seemed suddenly to seize on Mr. Nicholas Treffry.
+He rose, and stood towering over them.
+
+"All my life--" he said; but something seemed to click deep down in
+his throat, and he sank back in his seat.
+
+"Go!" whispered Christian, "go!" But Mr. Treffry found his voice
+again: "It's for the child to say.  Well, Chris!"
+
+Christian did not speak.
+
+It was Harz who broke the silence.  He pointed to Mr. Treffry.
+
+"You know I can't tell you to come with--that, there.  Why did you
+send for me?"  And, turning, he went out.
+
+Christian sank on her knees, burying her face in her hands.  Mr.
+Treffry pressed his handkerchief with a stealthy movement to his
+mouth.  It was dyed crimson with the price of his victory.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+A telegram had summoned Herr Paul from Vienna.  He had started
+forthwith, leaving several unpaid accounts to a more joyful
+opportunity, amongst them a chemist's bill, for a wonderful quack
+medicine of which he brought six bottles.
+
+He came from Mr. Treffry's room with tears rolling down his cheeks,
+saying:
+
+"Poor Nicholas!  Poor Nicholas!  Il n'a pas de chance!"
+
+It was difficult to find any one to listen; the women were scared and
+silent, waiting for the orders that were now and then whispered
+through the door.  Herr Paul could not bear this silence, and talked
+to his servant for half an hour, till Fritz also vanished to fetch
+something from the town.  Then in despair Herr Paul went to his room.
+
+It was hard not to be allowed to help--it was hard to wait!  When the
+heart was suffering, it was frightful!  He turned and, looking
+furtively about him, lighted a cigar.  Yes, it came to every one--at
+some time or other; and what was it, that death they talked of?  Was
+it any worse than life?  That frightful jumble people made for
+themselves!  Poor Nicholas!  After all, it was he that had the luck!
+
+His eyes filled with tears, and drawing a penknife from his pocket,
+he began to stab it into the stuffing of his chair.  Scruff, who sat
+watching the chink of light under the door, turned his head, blinked
+at him, and began feebly tapping with a claw.
+
+It was intolerable, this uncertainty--to be near, and yet so far, was
+not endurable!
+
+Herr Paul stepped across the room.  The dog, following, threw his
+black-marked muzzle upwards with a gruff noise, and went back to the
+door.  His master was holding in his hand a bottle of champagne.
+
+Poor Nicholas!  He had chosen it.  Herr Paul drained a glass.
+
+Poor Nicholas!  The prince of fellows, and of what use was one?  They
+kept him away from Nicholas!
+
+Herr Paul's eyes fell on the terrier.  "Ach! my dear," he said, "you
+and I, we alone are kept away!"
+
+He drained a second glass.
+
+What was it?  This life!  Froth-like that! He tossed off a third
+glass.  Forget!  If one could not help, it was better to forget!
+
+He put on his hat.  Yes.  There was no room for him there!  He was
+not wanted!
+
+He finished the bottle, and went out into the passage.  Scruff ran
+and lay down at Mr. Treffry's door.  Herr Paul looked at him.  "Ach!"
+he said, tapping his chest, "ungrateful hound!"  And opening the
+front door he went out on tiptoe....
+
+Late that afternoon Greta stole hatless through the lilac bushes; she
+looked tired after her night journey, and sat idly on a chair in the
+speckled shadow of a lime-tree.
+
+'It is not like home,' she thought; 'I am unhappy.  Even the birds
+are silent, but perhaps that is because it is so hot.  I have never
+been sad like this--for it is not fancy that I am sad this time, as
+it is sometimes.  It is in my heart like the sound the wind makes
+through a wood, it feels quite empty in my heart.  If it is always
+like this to be unhappy, then I am sorry for all the unhappy things
+in the world; I am sorrier than I ever was before.'
+
+A shadow fell on the grass, she raised her eyes, and saw Dawney.
+
+"Dr. Edmund!" she whispered.
+
+Dawney turned to her; a heavy furrow showed between his brows.  His
+eyes, always rather close together, stared painfully.
+
+"Dr. Edmund," Greta whispered, "is it true?"
+
+He took her hand, and spread his own palm over it.
+
+"Perhaps," he said; "perhaps not.  We must hope."
+
+Greta looked up, awed.
+
+"They say he is dying."
+
+"We have sent for the best man in Vienna."
+
+Greta shook her head.
+
+"But you are clever, Dr. Edmund; and you are afraid."
+
+"He is brave," said Dawney; "we must all be brave, you know.  You
+too!"
+
+"Brave?" repeated Greta; "what is it to be brave?  If it is not to
+cry and make a fuss--that I can do.  But if it is not to be sad in
+here," she touched her breast, "that I cannot do, and it shall not be
+any good for me to try."
+
+"To be brave is to hope; don't give up hope, dear."
+
+"No," said Greta, tracing the pattern of the sunlight on her skirt.
+"But I think that when we hope, we are not brave, because we are
+expecting something for ourselves.  Chris says that hope is prayer,
+and if it is prayer, then all the time we are hoping, we are asking
+for something, and it is not brave to ask for things."
+
+A smile curved Dawney's mouth.
+
+"Go on, Philosopher!" he said.  "Be brave in your own way, it will be
+just as good as anybody else's."
+
+"What are you going to do to be brave, Dr. Edmund?"
+
+"I?  Fight!  If only we had five years off his life!"
+
+Greta watched him as he walked away.
+
+"I shall never be brave," she mourned; "I shall always be wanting to
+be happy."  And, kneeling down, she began to disentangle a fly,
+imprisoned in a cobweb.  A plant of hemlock had sprung up in the long
+grass by her feet.  Greta thought, dismayed: 'There are weeds!'
+
+It seemed but another sign of the death of joy.
+
+'But it's very beautiful,' she thought, 'the blossoms are like stars.
+I am not going to pull it up.  I will leave it; perhaps it will
+spread all through the garden; and if it does I do not care, for now
+things are not like they used to be and I do not, think they ever
+shall be again.'
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+The days went by; those long, hot days, when the heat haze swims up
+about ten of the forenoon, and, as the sun sinks level with the
+mountains, melts into golden ether which sets the world quivering
+with sparkles.
+
+At the lighting of the stars those sparkles die, vanishing one by one
+off the hillsides; evening comes flying down the valleys, and life
+rests under her cool wings.  The night falls; and the hundred little
+voices of the night arise.
+
+It was near grape-gathering, and in the heat the fight for Nicholas
+Treffry's life went on, day in, day out, with gleams of hope and
+moments of despair.  Doctors came, but after the first he refused to
+see them.
+
+"No," he said to Dawney-- "throwing away money.  If I pull through it
+won't be because of them."
+
+For days together he would allow no one but Dawney, Dominique, and
+the paid nurse in the room.
+
+"I can stand it better," he said to Christian, "when I don't see any
+of you; keep away, old girl, and let me get on with it!"
+
+To have been able to help would have eased the tension of her nerves,
+and the aching of her heart.  At his own request they had moved his
+bed into a corner so that he might face the wall.  There he would lie
+for hours together, not speaking a word, except to ask for drink.
+
+Sometimes Christian crept in unnoticed, and sat watching, with her
+arms tightly folded across her breast.  At night, after Greta was
+asleep, she would toss from side to side, muttering feverish prayers.
+She spent hours at her little table in the schoolroom, writing
+letters to Harz that were never sent.  Once she wrote these words: "I
+am the most wicked of all creatures--I have even wished that he may
+die!"  A few minutes afterwards Miss Naylor found her with her head
+buried on her arms.  Christian sprang up; tears were streaming down
+her cheeks.  "Don't touch me!" she cried, and rushed away.  Later,
+she stole into her uncle's room, and sank down on the floor beside
+the bed.  She sat there silently, unnoticed all the evening.  When
+night came she could hardly be persuaded to leave the room.
+
+One day Mr. Treffry expressed a wish to see Herr Paul; it was a long
+while before the latter could summon courage to go in.
+
+"There's a few dozen of the Gordon sherry at my Chambers, in London,
+Paul," Mr. Treffry said; "I'd be glad to think you had 'em.  And my
+man, Dominique, I've made him all right in my will, but keep your eye
+on him; he's a good sort for a foreigner, and no chicken, but sooner
+or later, the women'll get hold of him.  That's all I had to say.
+Send Chris to me."
+
+Herr Paul stood by the bedside speechless.  Suddenly he blurted out.
+
+"Ah! my dear!  Courage!  We are all mortal.  You will get well!"  All
+the morning he walked about quite inconsolable.  "It was frightful to
+see him, you know, frightful!  An iron man could not have borne it."
+
+When Christian came to him, Mr. Treffry raised himself and looked at
+her a long while.
+
+His wistful face was like an accusation.  But that very afternoon the
+news came from the sickroom that he was better, having had no pain
+for several hours.
+
+Every one went about with smiles lurking in their eyes, and ready to
+break forth at a word.  In the kitchen Barbi burst out crying, and,
+forgetting to toss the pan, spoiled a Kaiser-Schmarn she was making.
+Dominique was observed draining a glass of Chianti, and solemnly
+casting forth the last drops in libation.  An order was given for tea
+to be taken out under the acacias, where it was always cool; it was
+felt that something in the nature of high festival was being held.
+Even Herr Paul was present; but Christian did not come.  Nobody spoke
+of illness; to mention it might break the spell.
+
+Miss Naylor, who had gone into the house, came back, saying:
+
+"There is a strange man standing over there by the corner of the
+house."
+
+"Really!" asked Mrs. Decie; "what does he want?"
+
+Miss Naylor reddened.  "I did not ask him.  I--don't--know--whether
+he is quite respectable.  His coat is buttoned very close, and he--
+doesn't seem--to have a--collar."
+
+"Go and see what he wants, dear child," Mrs. Decie said to Greta.
+
+"I don't know--I really do not know--" began Miss Naylor; "he has
+very--high--boots," but Greta was already on her way, with hands
+clasped behind her, and demure eyes taking in the stranger's figure.
+
+"Please?" she said, when she was close to him.
+
+The stranger took his cap off with a jerk.
+
+"This house has no bells," he said in a nasal voice; "it has a
+tendency to discourage one."
+
+"Yes," said Greta gravely, "there is a bell, but it does not ring
+now, because my uncle is so ill."
+
+"I am very sorry to hear that.  I don't know the people here, but I
+am very sorry to hear that.
+
+I would be glad to speak a few words to your sister, if it is your
+sister that I want."
+
+And the stranger's face grew very red.
+
+"Is it," said Greta, "that you are a friend of Herr Harz?  If you are
+a friend of his, you will please come and have some tea, and while
+you are having tea I will look for Chris."
+
+Perspiration bedewed the stranger's forehead.
+
+"Tea?  Excuse me!  I don't drink tea."
+
+"There is also coffee," Greta said.
+
+The stranger's progress towards the arbour was so slow that Greta
+arrived considerably before him.
+
+"It is a friend of Herr Harz," she whispered; "he will drink coffee.
+I am going to find Chris."
+
+"Greta!" gasped Miss Naylor.
+
+Mrs. Decie put up her hand.
+
+"Ah!" she said, "if it is so, we must be very nice to him for
+Christian's sake."
+
+Miss Naylor's face grew soft.      -
+
+"Ah, yes!" she said; "of course."
+
+"Bah!" muttered Herr Paul, "that recommences.'
+
+"Paul!" murmured Mrs. Decie, "you lack the elements of wisdom."
+
+Herr Paul glared at the approaching stranger.
+
+Mrs. Decie had risen, and smilingly held out her hand.
+
+"We are so glad to know you; you are an artist too, perhaps?  I take
+a great interest in art, and especially in that school which Mr. Harz
+represents."
+
+The stranger smiled.
+
+"He is the genuine article, ma'am," he said.  "He represents no
+school, he is one of that kind whose corpses make schools."
+
+"Ah!" murmured Mrs. Decie, "you are an American.  That is so nice.
+Do sit down!  My niece will soon be here."
+
+Greta came running back.
+
+"Will you come, please?" she said.  "Chris is ready."
+
+Gulping down his coffee, the stranger included them all in a single
+bow, and followed her.
+
+"Ach!" said Herr Paul, "garcon tres chic, celui-la!"
+
+Christian was standing by her little table.  The stranger began.
+
+"I am sending Mr. Harz's things to England; there are some pictures
+here.  He would be glad to have them."
+
+A flood of crimson swept over her face.
+
+"I am sending them to London," the stranger repeated; "perhaps you
+could give them to me to-day."
+
+"They are ready; my sister will show you."
+
+Her eyes seemed to dart into his soul, and try to drag something from
+it.  The words rushed from her lips
+
+"Is there any message for me?"
+
+The stranger regarded her curiously.
+
+"No," he stammered, "no! I guess not.  He is well....  I wish...." He
+stopped; her white face seemed to flash scorn, despair, and entreaty
+on him all at once.  And turning, she left him standing there.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+When Christian went that evening to her uncle's room he was sitting
+up in bed, and at once began to talk.  "Chris," he said, "I can't
+stand this dying by inches.  I'm going to try what a journey'll do
+for me.  I want to get back to the old country.  The doctor's
+promised.  There's a shot in the locker yet!  I believe in that young
+chap; he's stuck to me like a man....  It'll be your birthday, on
+Tuesday, old girl, and you'll be twenty.  Seventeen years since your
+father died.  You've been a lot to me....  A parson came here today.
+That's a bad sign.  Thought it his duty!  Very civil of him!
+I wouldn't see him, though.  If there's anything in what they tell
+you, I'm not going to sneak in at this time o' day.  There's one
+thing that's rather badly on my mind.  I took advantage of Mr. Harz
+with this damned pitifulness of mine.  You've a right to look at me
+as I've seen you sometimes when you thought I was asleep.  If I
+hadn't been ill he'd never have left you.  I don't blame you, Chris--
+not I!  You love me?  I know that, my dear.  But one's alone when it
+comes to the run-in.  Don't cry!  Our minds aren't Sunday-school
+books; you're finding it out, that's all!"  He sighed and turned
+away.
+
+The noise of sun-blinds being raised vibrated through the house.  A
+feeling of terror seized on the girl; he lay so still, and yet the
+drawing of each breath was a fight.  If she could only suffer in his
+place!  She went close, and bent over him.
+
+"It's air we want, both you and I!" he muttered.  Christian beckoned
+to the nurse, and stole out through the window.
+
+A regiment was passing in the road; she stood half-hidden amongst the
+lilac bushes watching.  The poplar leaves drooped lifeless and almost
+black above her head, the dust raised by the soldiers' feet hung in
+the air; it seemed as if in all the world no freshness and no life
+were stirring.  The tramp of feet died away.  Suddenly within arm's
+length of her a man appeared, his stick shouldered like a sword.  He
+raised his hat.
+
+"Good-evening!  You do not remember me?  Sarelli.  Pardon! You looked
+like a ghost standing there.  How badly those fellows marched!  We
+hang, you see, on the skirts of our profession and criticise; it is
+all we are fit for."  His black eyes, restless and malevolent like a
+swan's, seemed to stab her face.  "A fine evening!  Too hot.  The
+storm is wanted; you feel that?  It is weary waiting for the storm;
+but after the storm, my dear young lady, comes peace."  He smiled,
+gently, this time, and baring his head again, was lost to view in the
+shadow of the trees.
+
+His figure had seemed to Christian like the sudden vision of a
+threatening, hidden force.  She thrust out her hands, as though to
+keep it off.
+
+No use; it was within her, nothing could keep it away!  She went to
+Mrs. Decie's room, where her aunt and Miss Naylor were conversing in
+low tones.  To hear their voices brought back the touch of this world
+of everyday which had no part or lot in the terrifying powers within
+her.
+
+Dawney slept at the Villa now.  In the dead of night he was awakened
+by a light flashed in his eyes.  Christian was standing there, her
+face pale and wild with terror, her hair falling in dark masses on
+her shoulders.
+
+"Save him!  Save him!" she cried.  "Quick! The bleeding!"
+
+He saw her muffle her face in her white sleeves, and seizing the
+candle, leaped out of bed and rushed away.
+
+The internal haemorrhage had come again, and Nicholas Treffry wavered
+between life and death.  When it had ceased, he sank into a sort of
+stupor.  About six o'clock he came back to consciousness; watching
+his eyes, they could see a mental struggle taking place within him.
+At last he singled Christian out from the others by a sign.
+
+"I'm beat, Chris," he whispered.  "Let him know, I want to see him."
+
+His voice grew a little stronger.  "I thought that I could see it
+through--but here's the end."  He lifted his hand ever so little, and
+let it fall again.  When told a little later that a telegram had been
+sent to Harz his eyes expressed satisfaction.
+
+Herr Paul came down in ignorance of the night's events.  He stopped
+in front of the barometer and tapped it, remarking to Miss Naylor:
+"The glass has gone downstairs; we shall have cool weather--it will
+still go well with him!"
+
+When, with her brown face twisted by pity and concern, she told him
+that it was a question of hours, Herr Paul turned first purple, then
+pale, and sitting down, trembled violently.  "I cannot believe it,"
+he exclaimed almost angrily.  "Yesterday he was so well!  I cannot
+believe it!  Poor Nicholas!  Yesterday he spoke to me!"  Taking Miss
+Naylor's hand, he clutched it in his own.  "Ah!" he cried, letting it
+go suddenly, and striking at his forehead, "it is too terrible; only
+yesterday he spoke to me of sherry.  Is there nobody, then, who can
+do good?"
+
+"There is only God," replied Miss Naylor softly.
+
+"God?" said Herr Paul in a scared voice.
+
+"We--can--all--pray to Him," Miss Naylor murmured; little spots of
+colour came into her cheeks.  "I am going to do it now."
+
+Herr Paul raised her hand and kissed it.
+
+"Are you?" he said; "good! I too."  He passed through his study door,
+closed it carefully behind him, then for some unknown reason set his
+back against it.  Ugh! Death! It came to all! Some day it would come
+to him.  It might come tomorrow!  One must pray!
+
+The day dragged to its end.  In the sky clouds had mustered, and,
+crowding close on one another, clung round the sun, soft, thick,
+greywhite, like the feathers on a pigeon's breast.  Towards evening
+faint tremblings were felt at intervals, as from the shock of
+immensely distant earthquakes.
+
+Nobody went to bed that night, but in the morning the report was the
+same: "Unconscious--a question of hours."  Once only did he recover
+consciousness, and then asked for Harz.  A telegram had come from
+him, he was on the way.  Towards seven of the evening the long-
+expected storm broke in a sky like ink.  Into the valleys and over
+the crests of mountains it seemed as though an unseen hand were
+spilling goblets of pale wine, darting a sword-blade zigzag over
+trees, roofs, spires, peaks, into the very firmament, which answered
+every thrust with great bursts of groaning.  Just beyond the veranda
+Greta saw a glowworm shining, as it might be a tiny bead of the
+fallen lightning.  Soon the rain covered everything.  Sometimes a jet
+of light brought the hilltops, towering, dark, and hard, over the
+house, to disappear again behind the raindrops and shaken leaves.
+Each breath drawn by the storm was like the clash of a thousand
+cymbals; and in his room Mr. Treffry lay unconscious of its fury.
+
+Greta had crept in unobserved; and sat curled in a corner, with
+Scruff in her arms, rocking slightly to and fro.  When Christian
+passed, she caught her skirt, and whispered: "It is your birthday,
+Chris!"
+
+Mr. Treffry stirred.
+
+"What's that?  Thunder?--it's cooler.  Where am I?  Chris!"
+
+Dawney signed for her to take his place.
+
+"Chris!" Mr. Treffry said.  "It's near now."  She bent across him,
+and her tears fell on his forehead.
+
+"Forgive!" she whispered; "love me!"
+
+He raised his finger, and touched her cheek.
+
+For an hour or more he did not speak, though once or twice he moaned,
+and faintly tightened his pressure on her fingers.  The storm had
+died away, but very far off the thunder was still muttering.
+
+His eyes opened once more, rested on her, and passed beyond, into
+that abyss dividing youth from age, conviction from conviction, life
+from death.
+
+At the foot of the bed Dawney stood covering his face; behind him
+Dominique knelt with hands held upwards; the sound of Greta's
+breathing, soft in sleep, rose and fell in the stillness.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+One afternoon in March, more than three years after Mr. Treffry's
+death, Christian was sitting at the window of a studio in St. John's
+Wood.  The sky was covered with soft, high clouds, through which
+shone little gleams of blue.  Now and then a bright shower fell,
+sprinkling the trees, where every twig was curling upwards as if
+waiting for the gift of its new leaves.  And it seemed to her that
+the boughs thickened and budded under her very eyes; a great
+concourse of sparrows had gathered on those boughs, and kept raising
+a shrill chatter.  Over at the far side of the room Harz was working
+at a picture.
+
+On Christian's face was the quiet smile of one who knows that she has
+only to turn her eyes to see what she wishes to see; of one whose
+possessions are safe under her hand.  She looked at Harz with that
+possessive smile.  But as into the brain of one turning in his bed
+grim fancies will suddenly leap up out of warm nothingness, so there
+leaped into her mind the memory of that long ago dawn, when he had
+found her kneeling by Mr. Treffry's body.  She seemed to see again
+the dead face, so gravely quiet, and furrowless.  She seemed to see
+her lover and herself setting forth silently along the river wall
+where they had first met; sitting down, still silent, beneath the
+poplar-tree where the little bodies of the chafers had lain strewn in
+the Spring.  To see the trees changing from black to grey, from grey
+to green, and in the dark sky long white lines of cloud, lighting to
+the south like birds; and, very far away, rosy peaks watching the
+awakening of the earth.  And now once again, after all that time,
+she felt her spirit shrink away from his; as it had shrunk in that
+hour, when she had seemed hateful to herself.  She remembered the
+words she had spoken: "I have no heart left.  You've torn it in two
+between you.  Love is all self--I wanted him to die."  She remembered
+too the raindrops on the vines like a million tiny lamps, and the
+throstle that began singing.  Then, as dreams die out into warm
+nothingness, recollection vanished, and the smile came back to her
+lips.
+
+She took out a letter.
+
+"....O Chris!  We are really coming; I seem to be always telling it
+to myself, and I have told Scruff many times, but he does not care,
+because he is getting old.  Miss Naylor says we shall arrive for
+breakfast, and that we shall be hungry, but perhaps she will not be
+very hungry, if it is rough.  Papa said to me: 'Je serai
+inconsolable, mais inconsolable!'  But I think he will not be,
+because he is going to Vienna.  When we are come, there will be
+nobody at Villa Rubein; Aunt Constance has gone a fortnight ago to
+Florence.  There is a young man at her hotel; she says he will be one
+of the greatest playwriters in England, and she sent me a play of his
+to read; it was only a little about love, I did not like it very
+much....  O Chris! I think I shall cry when I see you.  As I am quite
+grown up, Miss Naylor is not to come back with me; sometimes she is
+sad, but she will be glad to see you, Chris.  She seems always sadder
+when it is Spring.  Today I walked along the wall; the little green
+balls of wool are growing on the poplars already, and I saw one
+chafer; it will not be long before the cherry blossom comes; and I
+felt so funny, sad and happy together, and once I thought that I had
+wings and could fly away up the valley to Meran--but I had none, so I
+sat on the bench where we sat the day we took the pictures, and I
+thought and thought; there was nothing came to me in my thoughts, but
+all was sweet and a little noisy, and rather sad; it was like the
+buzzing of the chafer, in my head; and now I feel so tired and all my
+blood is running up and down me.  I do not mind, because I know it is
+the Spring.
+
+"Dominique came to see us the other day; he is very well, and is half
+the proprietor of the Adler Hotel, at Meran; he is not at all
+different, and he asked about you and about Alois--do you know,
+Chris, to myself I call him Herr Harz, but when I have seen him this
+time I shall call him Alois in my heart also.
+
+"I have a letter from Dr. Edmund; he is in London, so perhaps you
+have seen him, only he has a great many patients and some that he has
+'hopes of killing soon'! especially one old lady, because she is
+always wanting him to do things for her, and he is never saying 'No,'
+so he does not like her.  He says that he is getting old.  When I
+have finished this letter I am going to write and tell him that
+perhaps he shall see me soon, and then I think he will be very sad.
+Now that the Spring is come there are more flowers to take to Uncle
+Nic's grave, and every day, when I am gone, Barbi is to take them so
+that he shall not miss you, Chris, because all the flowers I put
+there are for you.
+
+"I am buying some toys without paint on for my niece."
+
+"O Chris! this will be the first baby that I have known."
+
+"I am only to stay three weeks with you, but I think when I am once
+there I shall be staying longer.  I send a kiss for my niece, and to
+Herr Harz, my love--that is the last time I shall call him Herr Harz;
+and to you, Chris, all the joy that is in my heart.--Your loving
+
+"GRETA."
+
+
+Christian rose, and, turning very softly, stood, leaning her elbows
+on the back of a high seat, looking at her husband.
+
+In her eyes there was a slow, clear, faintly smiling, yet yearning
+look, as though this strenuous figure bent on its task were seen for
+a moment as something apart, and not all the world to her.
+
+"Tired?" asked Harz, putting his lips to her hand.
+
+"No, it's only--what Greta says about the Spring; it makes one want
+more than one has got.
+
+Slipping her hand away, she went back to the window.  Harz stood,
+looking after her; then, taking up his palette, again began painting.
+
+In the world, outside, the high soft clouds flew by; the trees seemed
+thickening and budding.
+
+And Christian thought:
+
+'Can we never have quite enough?'
+
+
+December l890.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+MY FATHER
+
+
+
+
+A MAN OF DEVON
+
+
+I
+
+"MOOR, 20th July .
+
+.......It is quiet here, sleepy, rather--a farm is never quiet; the
+sea, too, is only a quarter of a mile away, and when it's windy, the
+sound of it travels up the combe; for distraction, you must go four
+miles to Brixham or five to Kingswear, and you won't find much then.
+The farm lies in a sheltered spot, scooped, so to speak, high up the
+combe side--behind is a rise of fields, and beyond, a sweep of down.
+You have the feeling of being able to see quite far, which is
+misleading, as you soon find out if you walk.  It is true Devon
+country-hills, hollows, hedge-banks, lanes dipping down into the
+earth or going up like the sides of houses, coppices, cornfields, and
+little streams wherever there's a place for one; but the downs along
+the cliff, all gorse and ferns, are wild.  The combe ends in a sandy
+cove with black rock on one side, pinkish cliffs away to the headland
+on the other, and a coastguard station.  Just now, with the harvest
+coming on, everything looks its richest, the apples ripening, the
+trees almost too green.  It's very hot, still weather; the country
+and the sea seem to sleep in the sun.  In front of the farm are half-
+a-dozen pines that look as if they had stepped out of another land,
+but all round the back is orchard as lush, and gnarled, and orthodox
+as any one could wish.  The house, a long, white building with three
+levels of roof, and splashes of brown all over it, looks as if it
+might be growing down into the earth.  It was freshly thatched two
+years ago--and that's all the newness there is about it; they say the
+front door, oak, with iron knobs, is three hundred years old at
+least.  You can touch the ceilings with your hand.  The windows
+certainly might be larger--a heavenly old place, though, with a
+flavour of apples, smoke, sweetbriar, bacon, honeysuckle, and age,
+all over it.
+
+The owner is a man called John Ford, about seventy, and seventeen
+stone in weight--very big, on long legs, with a grey, stubbly beard,
+grey, watery eyes, short neck and purplish complexion; he is
+asthmatic, and has a very courteous, autocratic manner.  His clothes
+are made of Harris tweed--except on Sundays, when he puts on black--a
+seal ring, and a thick gold cable chain.  There's nothing mean or
+small about John Ford; I suspect him of a warm heart, but he doesn't
+let you know much about him.  He's a north-country man by birth, and
+has been out in New Zealand all his life.  This little Devonshire
+farm is all he has now.  He had a large "station" in the North
+Island, and was much looked up to, kept open house, did everything,
+as one would guess, in a narrow-minded, large-handed way.  He came to
+grief suddenly; I don't quite know how.  I believe his only son lost
+money on the turf, and then, unable to face his father, shot himself;
+if you had seen John Ford, you could imagine that.  His wife died,
+too, that year.  He paid up to the last penny, and came home, to live
+on this farm.  He told me the other night that he had only one
+relation in the world, his granddaughter, who lives here with him.
+Pasiance Voisey--old spelling for Patience, but they pronounce, it
+Pash-yence--is sitting out here with me at this moment on a sort of
+rustic loggia that opens into the orchard.  Her sleeves are rolled
+up, and she's stripping currants, ready for black currant tea.  Now
+and then she rests her elbows on the table, eats a berry, pouts her
+lips, and, begins again.  She has a round, little face; a long,
+slender body; cheeks like poppies; a bushy mass of black-brown hair,
+and dark-brown, almost black, eyes; her nose is snub; her lips quick,
+red, rather full; all her motions quick and soft.  She loves bright
+colours.  She's rather like a little cat; sometimes she seems all
+sympathy, then in a moment as hard as tortoise-shell.  She's all
+impulse; yet she doesn't like to show her feelings; I sometimes
+wonder whether she has any.  She plays the violin.
+
+It's queer to see these two together, queer and rather sad.  The old
+man has a fierce tenderness for her that strikes into the very roots
+of him.  I see him torn between it, and his cold north-country horror
+of his feelings; his life with her is an unconscious torture to him.
+She's a restless, chafing thing, demure enough one moment, then
+flashing out into mocking speeches or hard little laughs.  Yet she's
+fond of him in her fashion; I saw her kiss him once when he was
+asleep.  She obeys him generally--in a way as if she couldn't breathe
+while she was doing it.  She's had a queer sort of education--
+history, geography, elementary mathematics, and nothing else; never
+been to school; had a few lessons on the violin, but has taught
+herself most of what she knows.  She is well up in the lore of birds,
+flowers, and insects; has three cats, who follow her about; and is
+full of pranks.  The other day she called out to me, "I've something
+for you.  Hold out your hand and shut your eyes!"  It was a large,
+black slug!  She's the child of the old fellow's only daughter, who
+was sent home for schooling at Torquay, and made a runaway match with
+one Richard Voisey, a yeoman farmer, whom she met in the hunting-
+field.  John Ford was furious--his ancestors, it appears, used to
+lead ruffians on the Cumberland side of the Border--he looked on
+"Squire" Rick Voisey as a cut below him.  He was called "Squire," as
+far as I can make out, because he used to play cards every evening
+with a parson in the neighbourhood who went by the name of "Devil"
+Hawkins.  Not that the Voisey stock is to be despised.  They have had
+this farm since it was granted to one Richard Voysey by copy dated
+8th September, 13 Henry VIII.  Mrs. Hopgood, the wife of the bailiff-
+-a dear, quaint, serene old soul with cheeks like a rosy, withered
+apple, and an unbounded love of Pasiance--showed me the very
+document.
+
+"I kape it," she said.  "Mr. Ford be tu proud--but other folks be
+proud tu.  'Tis a pra-aper old fam'ly: all the women is Margery,
+Pasiance, or Mary; all the men's Richards an' Johns an' Rogers; old
+as they apple-trees."
+
+Rick Voisey was a rackety, hunting fellow, and "dipped" the old farm
+up to its thatched roof.  John Ford took his revenge by buying up the
+mortgages, foreclosing, and commanding his daughter and Voisey to go
+on living here rent free; this they dutifully did until they were
+both killed in a dog-cart accident, eight years ago.  Old Ford's
+financial smash came a year later, and since then he's lived here
+with Pasiance.  I fancy it's the cross in her blood that makes her so
+restless, and irresponsible: if she had been all a native she'd have
+been happy enough here, or all a stranger like John Ford himself, but
+the two strains struggling for mastery seem to give her no rest.
+You'll think this a far-fetched theory, but I believe it to be the
+true one.  She'll stand with lips pressed together, her arms folded
+tight across her narrow chest, staring as if she could see beyond the
+things round her; then something catches her attention, her eyes will
+grow laughing, soft, or scornful all in a minute! She's eighteen,
+perfectly fearless in a boat, but you can't get her to mount a horse-
+-a sore subject with her grandfather, who spends most of his day on a
+lean, half-bred pony, that carries him like a feather, for all his
+weight.
+
+They put me up here as a favour to Dan Treffry; there's an
+arrangement of L. s. d. with Mrs. Hopgood in the background.  They
+aren't at all well off; this is the largest farm about, but it
+doesn't bring them in much.  To look at John Ford, it seems
+incredible he should be short of money--he's too large.
+
+We have family prayers at eight, then, breakfast--after that freedom
+for writing or anything else till supper and evening prayers.  At
+midday one forages for oneself.  On Sundays, two miles to church
+twice, or you get into John Ford's black books....  Dan Treffry
+himself is staying at Kingswear.  He says he's made his pile; it
+suits him down here--like a sleep after years of being too wide-
+awake; he had a rough time in New Zealand, until that mine made his
+fortune.  You'd hardly remember him; he reminds me of his uncle, old
+Nicholas Treffry; the same slow way of speaking, with a hesitation,
+and a trick of repeating your name with everything he says; left-
+handed too, and the same slow twinkle in his eyes.  He has a dark,
+short beard, and red-brown cheeks; is a little bald on the temples,
+and a bit grey, but hard as iron.  He rides over nearly every day,
+attended by a black spaniel with a wonderful nose and a horror of
+petticoats.  He has told me lots of good stories of John Ford in the
+early squatter's times; his feats with horses live to this day; and
+he was through the Maori wars; as Dan says, "a man after Uncle Nic's
+own heart."
+
+They are very good friends, and respect each other; Dan has a great
+admiration for the old man, but the attraction is Pasiance.  He talks
+very little when she's in the room, but looks at her in a sidelong,
+wistful sort of way.  Pasiance's conduct to him would be cruel in any
+one else, but in her, one takes it with a pinch of salt.  Dan goes
+off, but turns up again as quiet and dogged as you please.
+
+Last night, for instance, we were sitting in the loggia after supper.
+Pasiance was fingering the strings of her violin, and suddenly Dan (a
+bold thing for him) asked her to play.
+
+"What!" she said, "before men?  No, thank you!"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because I hate them."
+
+Down came John Ford's hand on the wicker table: "You forget yourself!
+Go to bed!"
+
+She gave Dan a look, and went; we could hear her playing in her
+bedroom; it sounded like a dance of spirits; and just when one
+thought she had finished, out it would break again like a burst of
+laughter.  Presently, John Ford begged our pardons ceremoniously, and
+stumped off indoors.  The violin ceased; we heard his voice growling
+at her; down he came again.  Just as he was settled in his chair
+there was a soft swish, and something dark came falling through the
+apple boughs.  The violin!  You should have seen his face!  Dan would
+have picked the violin up, but the old man stopped him.  Later, from
+my bedroom window, I saw John Ford come out and stand looking at the
+violin.  He raised his foot as if to stamp on it.  At last he picked
+it up, wiped it carefully, and took it in....
+
+My room is next to hers.  I kept hearing her laugh, a noise too as if
+she were dragging things about the room.  Then I fell asleep, but
+woke with a start, and went to the window for a breath of fresh air.
+Such a black, breathless night!  Nothing to be seen but the twisted,
+blacker branches; not the faintest stir of leaves, no sound but
+muffled grunting from the cowhouse, and now and then a faint sigh.  I
+had the queerest feeling of unrest and fear, the last thing to expect
+on such a night.  There is something here that's disturbing; a sort
+of suppressed struggle.  I've never in my life seen anything so
+irresponsible as this girl, or so uncompromising as the old man; I
+keep thinking of the way he wiped that violin.  It's just as if a
+spark would set everything in a blaze.  There's a menace of tragedy--
+or--perhaps it's only the heat, and too much of Mother Hopgood's
+crame....
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+"Tuesday .
+
+......I've made a new acquaintance.  I was lying in the orchard, and
+presently, not seeing me, he came along--a man of middle height, with
+a singularly good balance, and no lumber--rather old blue clothes, a
+flannel shirt, a dull red necktie, brown shoes, a cap with a leather
+peak pushed up on the forehead.  Face long and narrow, bronzed with a
+kind of pale burnt-in brownness; a good forehead.  A brown moustache,
+beard rather pointed, blackening about the cheeks; his chin not
+visible, but from the beard's growth must be big; mouth I should
+judge sensuous.  Nose straight and blunt; eyes grey, with an upward
+look, not exactly frank, because defiant; two parallel furrows down
+each cheek, one from the inner corner of the eye, one from the
+nostril; age perhaps thirty-five.  About the face, attitude,
+movements, something immensely vital, adaptable, daring, and
+unprincipled.
+
+He stood in front of the loggia, biting his fingers, a kind of
+nineteenth-century buccaneer, and I wondered what he was doing in
+this galley. They say you can tell a man of Kent or a Somersetshire
+man; certainly you can tell a Yorkshire man, and this fellow could
+only have been a man of Devon, one of the two main types found in
+this county.  He whistled; and out came Pasiance in a geranium-
+coloured dress, looking like some tall poppy--you know the slight
+droop of a poppy's head, and the way the wind sways its stem.... She
+is a human poppy, her fuzzy dark hair is like a poppy's lustreless
+black heart, she has a poppy's tantalising attraction and repulsion,
+something fatal, or rather fateful.  She came walking up to my new
+friend, then caught sight of me, and stopped dead.
+
+"That," she said to me, "is Zachary Pearse.  This," she said to him,
+"is our lodger."  She said it with a wonderful soft malice.  She
+wanted to scratch me, and she scratched.  Half an hour later I was in
+the yard, when up came this fellow Pearse.
+
+"Glad to know you," he said, looking thoughtfully at the pigs.
+
+"You're a writer, aren't you?"
+
+"A sort of one," I said.
+
+"If by any chance," he said suddenly, "you're looking for a job, I
+could put something in your way.  Walk down to the beach with me, and
+I'll tell you; my boat's at anchor, smartest little craft in these
+parts."
+
+It was very hot, and I had no desire whatever to go down to the
+beach--I went, all the same.  We had not gone far when John Ford and
+Dan Treffry came into the lane.  Our friend seemed a little
+disconcerted, but soon recovered himself.  We met in the middle of
+the lane, where there was hardly room to pass.  John Ford, who looked
+very haughty, put on his pince-nez and stared at Pearse.
+
+"Good-day!" said Pearse; "fine weather!  I've been up to ask Pasiance
+to come for a sail.  Wednesday we thought, weather permitting; this
+gentleman's coming.  Perhaps you'll come too, Mr. Treffry.  You've
+never seen my place.  I'll give you lunch, and show you my father.
+He's worth a couple of hours' sail any day."  It was said in such an
+odd way that one couldn't resent his impudence.  John Ford was seized
+with a fit of wheezing, and seemed on the eve of an explosion; he
+glanced at me, and checked himself.
+
+"You're very good," he said icily; "my granddaughter has other things
+to do.  You, gentlemen, will please yourselves"; and, with a very
+slight bow, he went stumping on to the house.  Dan looked at me, and
+I looked at him.
+
+"You'll come?" said Pearse, rather wistfully.  Dan stammered: "Thank
+you, Mr. Pearse; I'm a better man on a horse than in a boat, but--
+thank you."  Cornered in this way, he's a shy, soft-hearted being.
+Pearse smiled his thanks.  "Wednesday, then, at ten o'clock; you
+shan't regret it."
+
+"Pertinacious beggar!" I heard Dan mutter in his beard; and found
+myself marching down the lane again by Pearse's side.  I asked him
+what he was good enough to mean by saying I was coming, without
+having asked me.  He answered, unabashed:
+
+"You see, I'm not friends with the old man; but I knew he'd not be
+impolite to you, so I took the liberty."
+
+He has certainly a knack of turning one's anger to curiosity.  We
+were down in the combe now; the tide was running out, and the sand
+all little, wet, shining ridges.  About a quarter of a mile out lay a
+cutter, with her tan sail half down, swinging to the swell.  The
+sunlight was making the pink cliffs glow in the most wonderful way;
+and shifting in bright patches over the sea like moving shoals of
+goldfish.  Pearse perched himself on his dinghy, and looked out under
+his hand.  He seemed lost in admiration.
+
+"If we could only net some of those spangles," he said, "an' make
+gold of 'em!  No more work then."
+
+"It's a big job I've got on," he said presently; "I'll tell you about
+it on Wednesday. I want a journalist."
+
+"But I don't write for the papers," I said; "I do other sort of work.
+My game is archaeology."
+
+"It doesn't matter," he said, "the more imagination the better.  It'd
+be a thundering good thing for you."
+
+His assurance was amazing, but it was past supper-time, and hunger
+getting the better of my curiosity, I bade him good-night. When I
+looked back, he was still there, on the edge of his boat, gazing at
+the sea.  A queer sort of bird altogether, but attractive somehow.
+
+Nobody mentioned him that evening; but once old Ford, after staring a
+long time at Pasiance, muttered a propos of nothing, "Undutiful
+children!"  She was softer than usual; listening quietly to our talk,
+and smiling when spoken to.  At bedtime she went up to her grand-
+father, without waiting for the usual command, "Come and kiss me,
+child."
+
+Dan did not stay to supper, and he has not been here since.  This
+morning I asked Mother Hopgood who Zachary Pearse was.  She's a true
+Devonian; if there's anything she hates, it is to be committed to a
+definite statement.  She ambled round her answer, and at last told me
+that he was "son of old Cap'en Jan Pearse to Black Mill.  'Tes an old
+family to Dartymouth an' Plymouth," she went on in a communicative
+outburst.  "They du say Francis Drake tuke five o' they Pearses with
+'en to fight the Spaniards.  At least that's what I've heard Mr.
+Zachary zay; but Ha-apgood can tell yu."  Poor Hopgood, the amount of
+information she saddles him with in the course of the day!  Having
+given me thus to understand that she had run dry, she at once went
+on:
+
+"Cap'en Jan Pearse made a dale of ventures.  He's old now--they du
+say nigh an 'undred.  Ha-apgood can tell yu."
+
+"But the son, Mrs. Hopgood?"
+
+Her eyes twinkled with sudden shrewdness: She hugged herself
+placidly.
+
+"An' what would yu take for dinner to-day?  There's duck; or yu might
+like 'toad in the hole,' with an apple tart; or then, there's--Well!
+we'll see what we can du like."  And off she went, without waiting
+for my answer.
+
+To-morrow is Wednesday.  I shan't be sorry to get another look at
+this fellow Pearse....
+
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+"Friday, 29th July.
+
+.......Why do you ask me so many questions, and egg me on to write
+about these people instead of minding my business?  If you really
+want to hear, I'll tell you of Wednesday's doings.
+
+It was a splendid morning; and Dan turned up, to my surprise--though
+I might have known that when he says a thing, he does it.  John Ford
+came out to shake hands with him, then, remembering why he had come,
+breathed loudly, said nothing, and went in again.  Nothing was to be
+seen of Pasiance, and we went down to the beach together.
+
+"I don't like this fellow Pearse, George," Dan said to me on the way;
+"I was fool enough to say I'd go, and so I must, but what's he after?
+Not the man to do things without a reason, mind you.
+
+I remarked that we should soon know.
+
+"I'm not so sure--queer beggar; I never look at him without thinking
+of a pirate."
+
+The cutter lay in the cove as if she had never moved.  There too was
+Zachary Pearse seated on the edge of his dinghy.
+
+"A five-knot breeze," he said, "I'll run you down in a couple of
+hours."  He made no inquiry about Pasiance, but put us into his
+cockleshell and pulled for the cutter.  A lantern-Jawed fellow, named
+Prawle, with a spiky, prominent beard, long, clean-shaven upper lip,
+and tanned complexion--a regular hard-weather bird--received us.
+
+The cutter was beautifully clean; built for a Brixham trawler, she
+still had her number--DH 113--uneffaced.  We dived into a sort of
+cabin, airy, but dark, fitted with two bunks and a small table, on
+which stood some bottles of stout; there were lockers, too, and pegs
+for clothes.  Prawle, who showed us round, seemed very proud of a
+steam contrivance for hoisting sails.  It was some minutes before we
+came on deck again; and there, in the dinghy, being pulled towards
+the cutter, sat Pasiance.
+
+"If I'd known this," stammered Dan, getting red, "I wouldn't have
+come."  She had outwitted us, and there was nothing to be done.
+
+It was a very pleasant sail.  The breeze was light from the south-
+east, the sun warm, the air soft.  Presently Pasiance began singing:
+
+"Columbus is dead and laid in his grave,
+Oh! heigh-ho! and laid in his grave;
+Over his head the apple-trees wave
+Oh! heigh-ho! the apple-trees wave....
+
+The apples are ripe and ready to fall,
+Oh! heigh-ho! and ready to fall;
+There came an old woman and gathered them all,
+Oh! heigh-ho! and gathered them all....
+
+The apples are gathered, and laid on the shelf,
+Oh! heigh-ho! and laid on the shelf;
+If you want any more, you must sing for yourself,
+Oh! heigh-ho! and sing for yourself."
+
+
+Her small, high voice came to us in trills and spurts, as the wind
+let it, like the singing of a skylark lost in the sky.  Pearse went
+up to her and whispered something.  I caught a glimpse of her face
+like a startled wild creature's; shrinking, tossing her hair,
+laughing, all in the same breath.  She wouldn't sing again, but
+crouched in the bows with her chin on her hands, and the sun
+falling on one cheek, round, velvety, red as a peach....
+
+We passed Dartmouth, and half an hour later put into a little wooded
+bay.  On a low reddish cliff was a house hedged round by pine-trees.
+A bit of broken jetty ran out from the bottom of the cliff.  We
+hooked on to this, and landed.  An ancient, fish-like man came
+slouching down and took charge of the cutter.  Pearse led us towards
+the house, Pasiance following mortally shy all of a sudden.
+
+The house had a dark, overhanging thatch of the rush reeds that grow
+in the marshes hereabouts; I remember nothing else remarkable.  It
+was neither old, nor new; neither beautiful, nor exactly ugly;
+neither clean, nor entirely squalid; it perched there with all its
+windows over the sea, turning its back contemptuously on the land.
+
+Seated in a kind of porch, beside an immense telescope, was a very
+old man in a panama hat, with a rattan cane.  His pure-white beard
+and moustache, and almost black eyebrows, gave a very singular,
+piercing look to his little, restless, dark-grey eyes; all over his
+mahogany cheeks and neck was a network of fine wrinkles.  He sat
+quite upright, in the full sun, hardly blinking.
+
+"Dad!" said Zachary, "this is Pasiance Voisey."  The old man turned
+his eyes on her and muttered, "How do you do, ma'am?" then took no
+further notice.  And Pasiance, who seemed to resent this, soon
+slipped away and went wandering about amongst the pines.  An old
+woman brought some plates and bottles and laid them casually on a
+table; and we sat round the figure of old Captain Pearse without a
+word, as if we were all under a spell.
+
+Before lunch there was a little scene between Zachary Pearse and Dan,
+as to which of them should summon Pasiance.  It ended in both going,
+and coming back without her.  She did not want any lunch, would stay
+where she was amongst the pines.
+
+For lunch we had chops, wood-pigeons, mushrooms, and mulberry
+preserve, and drank wonderful Madeira out of common wine-glasses.  I
+asked the old man where he got it; he gave me a queer look, and
+answered with a little bow:
+
+"Stood me in tu shillin' the bottle, an' the country got nothing out
+of it, sir.  In the early Thirties; tu shillin' the bottle; there's
+no such wine nowadays and," he added, looking at Zachary, "no such
+men."
+
+Zachary smiled and said: "You did nothing so big, dad, as what I'm
+after, now!"
+
+The old man's eyes had a sort of disdain in them.
+
+"You're going far, then, in the Pied Witch, Zack?"
+
+"I am," said Zachary.
+
+"And where might yu be goin' in that old trampin' smut factory?"
+
+"Morocco."
+
+"Heu!" said the old man, "there's nothing there; I know that coast,
+as I know the back o' my hand."  He stretched out a hand covered with
+veins and hair.
+
+Zachary began suddenly to pour out a flood of words:
+
+"Below Mogador--a fellow there--friend of mine--two years ago now.
+Concessions--trade-gunpowder--cruisers--feuds--money--chiefs--Gatling
+guns--Sultan--rifles--rebellion--gold."  He detailed a reckless,
+sordid, bold scheme, which, on the pivot of a trading venture, was
+intended to spin a whole wheel of political convulsions.
+
+"They'll never let you get there," said old Pearse.
+
+"Won't they?" returned Zachary.  "Oh yes, they will, an' when I
+leave, there'll be another dynasty, and I'll be a rich man."
+
+"Yu'll never leave," answered the old man.
+
+Zachary took out a sheet of paper covered with figures.  He had
+worked the whole thing out.  So much--equipment, so much--trade, so
+much--concessions, so much--emergencies.  "My last mag!" he ended, "a
+thousand short; the ship's ready, and if I'm not there within a month
+my chance is as good as gone."
+
+This was the pith of his confidences--an appeal for money, and we all
+looked as men will when that crops up.
+
+"Mad!"  muttered the old man, looking at the sea.
+
+"No," said Zachary.  That one word was more eloquent than all the
+rest of his words put together.  This fellow is no visionary.  His
+scheme may be daring, and unprincipled, but--he knows very well what
+he's about.
+
+"Well!" said old Pearse, "you shall have five 'undred of my money, if
+it's only to learn what yu're made of.  Wheel me in!"  Zachary
+wheeled him into the house, but soon came back.
+
+"The old man's cheque for five hundred pounds!" he said, holding it
+up.  "Mr. Treffry, give me another, and you shall have a third of the
+profits."
+
+I expected Dan to give a point-blank refusal.  But he only asked:
+
+"Would that clear you for starting?"
+
+"With that," said Zachary, "I can get to sea in a fortnight."
+
+"Good!" Dan said slowly.  "Give me a written promise!  To sea in
+fourteen days and my fair share on the five hundred pounds--no more--
+no less."
+
+Again I thought Pearse would have jumped at this, but he leaned his
+chin on his hand, and looked at Dan, and Dan looked at him.  While
+they were staring at each other like this, Pasiance came up with a
+kitten.
+
+"See!" she said, "isn't it a darling?"  The kitten crawled and clawed
+its way up behind her neck.  I saw both men's eyes as they looked at
+Pasiance, and suddenly understood what they were at.  The kitten
+rubbed itself against Pasiance's cheek, overbalanced, and fell,
+clawing, down her dress.  She caught it up and walked away.  Some
+one, I don't know which of us, sighed, and Pearse cried "Done!"
+
+The bargain had been driven.
+
+"Good-bye, Mr. Pearse," said Dan; " I guess that's all I'm wanted
+for.  I'll find my pony waiting in the village.  George, you'll see
+Pasiance home?"
+
+We heard the hoofs of his pony galloping down the road; Pearse
+suddenly excused himself, and disappeared.
+
+This venture of his may sound romantic and absurd, but it's matter-
+of-fact enough.  He's after L. s. d.!  Shades of Drake, Raleigh,
+Hawkins, Oxenham!  The worm of suspicion gnaws at the rose of
+romance.  What if those fellows, too, were only after L. s. d....?
+
+I strolled into the pine-wood.  The earth there was covered like a
+bee's body with black and gold stripes; there was the blue sea below,
+and white, sleepy clouds, and bumble-bees booming above the heather;
+it was all softness, a summer's day in Devon.  Suddenly I came on
+Pearse standing at the edge of the cliff with Pasiance sitting in a
+little hollow below, looking up at him.  I heard him say:
+
+"Pasiance--Pasiance!" The sound of his voice, and the sight of her
+soft, wondering face made me furious.  What business has she with
+love, at her age?  What business have they with each other?
+
+He told me presently that she had started off for home, and drove me
+to the ferry, behind an old grey pony.  On the way he came back to
+his offer of the other day.
+
+"Come with me," he said.  "It doesn't do to neglect the Press; you
+can see the possibilities.  It's one of the few countries left.  If I
+once get this business started you don't know where it's going to
+stop.  You'd have free passage everywhere, and whatever you like in
+reason."
+
+I answered as rudely as I could--but by no means as rudely as I
+wanted--that his scheme was mad.  As a matter of fact, it's much too
+sane for me; for, whatever the body of a scheme, its soul is the
+fibre of the schemer.
+
+"Think of it," he urged, as if he could see into me.  "You can make
+what you like of it.  Press paragraphs, of course.  But that's
+mechanical; why, even I could do it, if I had time.  As for the rest,
+you'll be as free--as free as a man."
+
+There, in five words of one syllable, is the kernel of this fellow
+Pearse--"As free as a man!"  No rule, no law, not even the mysterious
+shackles that bind men to their own self-respects!  "As free as a
+man!"  No ideals; no principles; no fixed star for his worship; no
+coil he can't slide out of!  But the fellow has the tenacity of one
+of the old Devon mastiffs, too.  He wouldn't take "No" for an answer.
+
+"Think of it," he said; "any day will do--I've got a fortnight....
+Look! there she is!  "I thought that he meant Pasiance; but it was an
+old steamer, sluggish and black in the blazing sun of mid-stream,
+with a yellow-and-white funnel, and no sign of life on her decks.
+
+"That's her--the Pied Witcb! Do her twelve knots; you wouldn't think
+it!  Well! good-evening!  You'd better come.  A word to me at any
+time.  I'm going aboard now."
+
+As I was being ferried across I saw him lolling in the stern-sheets
+of a little boat, the sun crowning his straw hat with glory.
+
+I came on Pasiance, about a mile up the road, sitting in the hedge.
+We walked on together between the banks--Devonshire banks, as high as
+houses, thick with ivy and ferns, bramble and hazel boughs, and
+honeysuckle.
+
+"Do you believe in a God?" she said suddenly.
+
+"Grandfather's God is simply awful.  When I'm playing the fiddle, I
+can feel God; but grandfather's is such a stuffy God--you know what I
+mean: the sea, the wind, the trees, colours too--they make one feel.
+But I don't believe that life was meant to 'be good' in.  Isn't there
+anything better than being good?  When I'm 'good,' I simply feel
+wicked."  She reached up, caught a flower from the hedge, and slowly
+tore its petals.
+
+"What would you do," she muttered, "if you wanted a thing, but were
+afraid of it?  But I suppose you're never afraid!" she added, mocking
+me.  I admitted that I was sometimes afraid, and often afraid of
+being afraid.
+
+"That's nice!  I'm not afraid of illness, nor of grandfather, nor of
+his God; but--I want to be free.  If you want a thing badly, you're
+afraid about it."
+
+I thought of Zachary Pearse's words, "free as a man."
+
+"Why are you looking at me like that?" she said.
+
+I stammered: "What do you mean by freedom?"
+
+"Do you know what I shall do to-night?" she answered.  "Get out of my
+window by the apple-tree, and go to the woods, and play!"
+
+We were going down a steep lane, along the side of a wood, where
+there's always a smell of sappy leaves, and the breath of the cows
+that come close to the hedge to get the shade.
+
+There was a cottage in the bottom, and a small boy sat outside
+playing with a heap of dust.
+
+"Hallo, Johnny!" said Pasiance.  "Hold your leg out and show this man
+your bad place!"  The small boy undid a bandage round his bare and
+dirty little leg, and proudly revealed a sore.
+
+"Isn't it nasty?" cried Pasiance ruefully, tying up the bandage
+again; "poor little feller!  Johnny, see what I've brought you!"  She
+produced from her pocket a stick of chocolate, the semblance of a
+soldier made of sealing-wax and worsted, and a crooked sixpence.
+
+It was a new glimpse of her.  All the way home she was telling me the
+story of little Johnny's family; when she came to his mother's death,
+she burst out: "A beastly shame, wasn't it, and they're so poor; it
+might just as well have been somebody else.  I like poor people, but
+I hate rich ones--stuck-up beasts."
+
+Mrs. Hopgood was looking over the gate, with her cap on one side, and
+one of Pasiance's cats rubbing itself against her skirts.  At the
+sight of us she hugged herself.
+
+"Where's grandfather?" asked Pasiance.  The old lady shook her head.
+
+"Is it a row?"  Mrs. Hopgood wriggled, and wriggled, and out came:
+
+"Did you get yure tay, my pretty?  No?  Well, that's a pity; yu'll be
+falin' low-like."
+
+Pasiance tossed her head, snatched up the cat, and ran indoors.  I
+remained staring at Mrs. Hopgood.
+
+"Dear-dear," she clucked," poor lamb.  So to spake it's--" and she
+blurted out suddenly, "chuckin' full of wra-ath, he is.  Well,
+there!"
+
+My courage failed that evening.  I spent it at the coastguard
+station, where they gave me bread and cheese and some awful cider.  I
+passed the kitchen as I came back.  A fire was still burning there,
+and two figures, misty in the darkness, flitted about with stealthy
+laughter like spirits afraid of being detected in a carnal-meal.
+They were Pasiance and Mrs. Hopgood; and so charming was the smell of
+eggs and bacon, and they had such an air of tender enjoyment of this
+dark revel, that I stifled many pangs, as I crept hungry up to bed.
+
+In the middle of the night I woke and heard what I thought was
+screaming; then it sounded like wind in trees, then like the distant
+shaking of a tambourine, with the high singing of a human voice.
+Suddenly it stopped--two long notes came wailing out like sobs--then
+utter stillness; and though I listened for an hour or more there was
+no other sound ....
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+"4th August .
+
+......For three days after I wrote last, nothing at all happened
+here.  I spent the mornings on the cliff reading, and watching the
+sun-sparks raining on the sea.  It's grand up there with the gorse
+all round, the gulls basking on the rocks, the partridges calling in
+the corn, and now and then a young hawk overhead.  The afternoons I
+spent out in the orchard.  The usual routine goes on at the farm all
+the time--cow-milking, bread-baking, John Ford riding in and out,
+Pasiance in her garden stripping lavender, talking to the farm hands;
+and the smell of clover, and cows and hay; the sound of hens and pigs
+and pigeons, the soft drawl of voices, the dull thud of the farm
+carts; and day by day the apples getting redder.  Then, last Monday,
+Pasiance was away from sunrise till sunset--nobody saw her go--nobody
+knew where she had gone.  It was a wonderful, strange day, a sky of
+silver-grey and blue, with a drift of wind-clouds, all the trees
+sighing a little, the sea heaving in a long, low swell, the animals
+restless, the birds silent, except the gulls with their old man's
+laughter and kitten's mewing.
+
+A something wild was in the air; it seemed to sweep across the downs
+and combe, into the very house, like a passionate tune that comes
+drifting to your ears when you're sleepy.  But who would have thought
+the absence of that girl for a few hours could have wrought such
+havoc!  We were like uneasy spirits; Mrs. Hopgood's apple cheeks
+seemed positively to wither before one's eyes.  I came across a
+dairymaid and farm hand discussing it stolidly with very downcast
+faces.  Even Hopgood, a hard-bitten fellow with immense shoulders,
+forgot his imperturbability so far as to harness his horse, and
+depart on what he assured me was "just a wild-guse chaace."  It was
+long before John Ford gave signs of noticing that anything was wrong,
+but late in the afternoon I found him sitting with his hands on his
+knees, staring straight before him.  He rose heavily when he saw me,
+and stalked out.  In the evening, as I was starting for the
+coastguard station to ask for help to search the cliff, Pasiance
+appeared, walking as if she could hardly drag one leg after the
+other.  Her cheeks were crimson; she was biting her lips to keep
+tears of sheer fatigue out of her eyes.  She passed me in the doorway
+without a word.  The anxiety he had gone through seemed to forbid the
+old man from speaking.  He just came forward, took her face in his
+hands, gave it a great kiss, and walked away.  Pasiance dropped on
+the floor in the dark passage, and buried her face on her arms.
+"Leave me alone!" was all she would say.  After a bit she dragged
+herself upstairs.  Presently Mrs. Hopgood came to me.
+
+"Not a word out of her--an' not a bite will she ate, an' I had a pie
+all ready--scrumptious.  The good Lord knows the truth--she asked for
+brandy; have you any brandy, sir?  Ha-apgood'e don't drink it, an'
+Mister Ford 'e don't allaow for anything but caowslip wine."
+
+I had whisky.
+
+The good soul seized the flask, and went off hugging it.  She
+returned it to me half empty.
+
+"Lapped it like a kitten laps milk.  I misdaoubt it's straong, poor
+lamb, it lusened 'er tongue praaperly.  'I've a-done it,' she says to
+me, 'Mums-I've a-done it,' an' she laughed like a mad thing; and
+then, sir, she cried, an' kissed me, an' pusshed me thru the door.
+Gude Lard! What is 't she's a-done...?"
+
+It rained all the next day and the day after.  About five o'clock
+yesterday the rain ceased; I started off to Kingswear on Hopgood's
+nag to see Dan Treffry.  Every tree, bramble, and fern in the lanes
+was dripping water; and every bird singing from the bottom of his
+heart.  I thought of Pasiance all the time.  Her absence that day was
+still a mystery; one never ceased asking oneself what she had done.
+There are people who never grow up--they have no right to do things.
+Actions have consequences--and children have no business with
+consequences.
+
+Dan was out.  I had supper at the hotel, and rode slowly home.  In
+the twilight stretches of the road, where I could touch either bank
+of the lane with my whip, I thought of nothing but Pasiance and her
+grandfather; there was something in the half light suited to wonder
+and uncertainty.  It had fallen dark before I rode into the straw-
+yard.  Two young bullocks snuffled at me, a sleepy hen got up and ran
+off with a tremendous shrieking.  I stabled the horse, and walked
+round to the back.  It was pitch black under the apple-trees, and the
+windows were all darkened.  I stood there a little, everything
+smelled so delicious after the rain; suddenly I had the uncomfortable
+feeling that I was being watched.  Have you ever felt like that on a
+dark night?  I called out at last: "Is any one there?"  Not a sound!
+I walked to the gate-nothing!  The trees still dripped with tiny,
+soft, hissing sounds, but that was all.  I slipped round to the
+front, went in, barricaded the door, and groped up to bed.  But I
+couldn't sleep.  I lay awake a long while; dozed at last, and woke
+with a jump.  A stealthy murmur of smothered voices was going on
+quite close somewhere.  It stopped.  A minute passed; suddenly came
+the soft thud as of something falling.  I sprang out of bed and
+rushed to the window.  Nothing--but in the distance something that
+sounded like footsteps.  An owl hooted; then clear as crystal, but
+quite low, I heard Pasiance singing in her room:
+
+"The apples are ripe and ready to fall.
+Oh! heigh-ho! and ready to fall."
+
+I ran to her door and knocked.
+
+"What is it?" she cried.
+
+"Is anything the matter?"
+
+"Matter?"
+
+"Is anything the matter?"
+
+"Ha-ha-ha-ha!  Good-night!" then quite low, I heard her catch her
+breath, hard, sharply.  No other answer, no other sound.
+
+I went to bed and lay awake for hours....
+
+This evening Dan came; during supper he handed Pasiance a roll of
+music; he had got it in Torquay.  The shopman, he said, had told him
+that it was a "corker."
+
+It was Bach's "Chaconne."  You should have seen her eyes shine, her
+fingers actually tremble while she turned over the pages.  Seems odd
+to think of her worshipping at the shrine of Bach as odd as to think
+of a wild colt running of its free will into the shafts; but that's
+just it with her you can never tell.  "Heavenly!" she kept saying.
+
+John Ford put down his knife and fork.
+
+"Heathenish stuff!" he muttered, and suddenly thundered out,
+"Pasiance!"
+
+She looked up with a start, threw the music from her, and resumed her
+place.
+
+During evening prayers, which follow every night immediately on food,
+her face was a study of mutiny.  She went to bed early.  It was
+rather late when we broke up--for once old Ford had been talking of
+his squatter's life.  As we came out, Dan held up his hand.  A dog
+was barking.  "It's Lass," he said.  "She'll wake Pasiance."
+
+The spaniel yelped furiously.  Dan ran out to stop her.  He was soon
+back.
+
+"Somebody's been in the orchard, and gone off down to the cove."  He
+ran on down the path.  I, too, ran, horribly uneasy.  In front,
+through the darkness, came the spaniel's bark; the lights of the
+coastguard station faintly showed.  I was first on the beach; the dog
+came to me at once, her tail almost in her mouth from apology.  There
+was the sound of oars working in rowlocks; nothing visible but the
+feathery edges of the waves.  Dan said behind, "No use!  He's gone."
+His voice sounded hoarse, like that of a man choking with passion.
+
+"George," he stammered, "it's that blackguard.  I wish I'd put a
+bullet in him."  Suddenly a light burned up in the darkness on the
+sea, seemed to swing gently, and vanished.  Without another word we
+went back up the hill.  John Ford stood at the gate motionless,
+indifferent--nothing had dawned on him as yet.  I whispered to Dan,
+"Let it alone!"
+
+"No," he said, "I'm going to show you."  He struck a match, and
+slowly hunted the footsteps in the wet grass of the orchard.  "Look--
+here!"
+
+He stopped under Pasiance's window and swayed the match over the
+ground.  Clear as daylight were the marks of some one who had jumped
+or fallen.  Dan held the match over his head.
+
+"And look there!" he said.  The bough of an apple-tree below the
+window was broken.  He blew the match out.
+
+I could see the whites of his eyes, like an angry animal's.
+
+"Drop it, Dan!" I said.
+
+He turned on his heel suddenly, and stammered out, "You're right."
+
+But he had turned into John Ford's arms.
+
+The old man stood there like some great force, darker than the
+darkness, staring up at the window, as though stupefied.  We had not
+a word to say.  He seemed unconscious of our presence.  He turned
+round, and left us standing there.
+
+"Follow him!" said Dan.  "Follow him--by God! it's not safe."
+
+We followed.  Bending, and treading heavily, he went upstairs.  He
+struck a blow on Pasiance's door.  "Let me in!" he said.  I drew Dan
+into my bedroom.  The key was slowly turned, her door was flung open,
+and there she stood in her dressing-gown, a candle in her hand, her
+face crimson, and oh! so young, with its short, crisp hair and round
+cheeks.  The old man--like a giant in front of her--raised his hands,
+and laid them on her shoulders.
+
+"What's this?  You--you've had a man in your room?"
+
+Her eyes did not drop.
+
+"Yes," she said.  Dan gave a groan.
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Zachary Pearse," she answered in a voice like a bell.
+
+He gave her one awful shake, dropped his hands, then raised them as
+though to strike her.  She looked him in the eyes; his hands dropped,
+and he too groaned.  As far as I could see, her face never moved.
+
+"I'm married to him," she said, "d' you hear?  Married to him.  Go
+out of my room!"  She dropped the candle on the floor at his feet,
+and slammed the door in his face.  The old man stood for a minute as
+though stunned, then groped his way downstairs.
+
+"Dan," I said, "is it true?"
+
+"Ah!" he answered, "it's true; didn't you hear her?"
+
+I was glad I couldn't see his face.
+
+"That ends it," he said at last; "there's the old man to think of."
+
+"What will he do?"
+
+"Go to the fellow this very night."  He seemed to have no doubt.
+Trust one man of action to know another.
+
+I muttered something about being an outsider--wondered if there was
+anything I could do to help.
+
+"Well," he said slowly, "I don't know that I'm anything but an
+outsider now; but I'll go along with him, if he'll have me."
+
+He went downstairs.  A few minutes later they rode out from the
+straw-yard.  I watched them past the line of hayricks, into the
+blacker shadows of the pines, then the tramp of hoofs began to fail
+in the darkness, and at last died away.
+
+I've been sitting here in my bedroom writing to you ever since, till
+my candle's almost gone.  I keep thinking what the end of it is to
+be; and reproaching myself for doing nothing.  And yet, what could I
+have done?  I'm sorry for her--sorrier than I can say.  The night is
+so quiet--I haven't heard a sound; is she asleep, awake, crying,
+triumphant?
+
+It's four o'clock; I've been asleep.
+
+They're back.  Dan is lying on my bed.  I'll try and tell you his
+story as near as I can, in his own words.
+
+"We rode," he said, "round the upper way, keeping out of the lanes,
+and got to Kingswear by half-past eleven.  The horse-ferry had
+stopped running, and we had a job to find any one to put us over.  We
+hired the fellow to wait for us, and took a carriage at the 'Castle.'
+Before we got to Black Mill it was nearly one, pitch-dark.  With the
+breeze from the southeast, I made out he should have been in an hour
+or more.  The old man had never spoken to me once: and before we got
+there I had begun to hope we shouldn't find the fellow after all.  We
+made the driver pull up in the road, and walked round and round,
+trying to find the door.  Then some one cried, 'Who are you ?'
+
+"'John Ford.'
+
+"'What do you want?' It was old Pearse.
+
+"'To see Zachary Pearse.'
+
+"The long window out of the porch where we sat the other day was
+open, and in we went.  There was a door at the end of the room, and a
+light coming through.  John Ford went towards it; I stayed out in the
+dark.
+
+"'Who's that with you?'
+
+"'Mr. Treffry.'
+
+"'Let him come in!' I went in.  The old fellow was in bed, quite
+still on his pillows, a candle by his side; to look at him you'd
+think nothing of him but his eyes were alive.  It was queer being
+there with those two old men!"
+
+Dan paused, seemed to listen, then went on doggedly.
+
+"'Sit down, gentleman,' said old Pearse.  'What may you want to see
+my son for?'  John Ford begged his pardon, he had something to say,
+he said, that wouldn't wait.
+
+"They were very polite to one another," muttered Dan ....
+
+"'Will you leave your message with me?' said Pearse.
+
+"'What I have to say to your son is private.'
+
+"'I'm his father.'
+
+"'I'm my girl's grandfather; and her only stand-by.'
+
+"'Ah!' muttered old Pearse, 'Rick Voisey's daughter?'
+
+"'I mean to see your son.'
+
+"Old Pearse smiled.  Queer smile he's got, sort of sneering sweet.
+
+"'You can never tell where Zack may be,' he said.  'You think I want
+to shield him.  You're wrong; Zack can take care of himself.'
+
+"'Your son's here!' said John Ford.  'I know.'  Old Pearse gave us a
+very queer look.
+
+"'You come into my house like thieves in the night,' he said, 'and
+give me the lie, do you?'
+
+"'Your son came to my child's room like a thief in the night; it's
+for that I want to see him,' and then," said Dan, "there was a long
+silence.  At last Pearse said:
+
+"'I don't understand; has he played the blackguard?'
+
+"John Ford answered, 'He's married her, or, before God, I'd kill
+him.'
+
+"Old Pearse seemed to think this over, never moving on his pillows.
+'You don't know Zack,' he said; 'I'm sorry for you, and I'm sorry for
+Rick Voisey's daughter; but you don't know Zack.'
+
+'Sorry!' groaned out John Ford; 'he's stolen my child, and I'll
+punish him.'
+
+"'Punish!' cried old Pearse, 'we don't take punishment, not in my
+family.'
+
+"'Captain Jan Pearse, as sure as I stand here, you and your breed
+will get your punishment of God.'  Old Pearse smiled.
+
+"'Mr. John Ford, that's as may be; but sure as I lie here we won't
+take it of you.  You can't punish unless you make to feel, and that
+you can't du.'"
+
+And that is truth!
+
+Dan went on again:
+
+"'You won't tell me where your son is!' but old Pearse never blinked.
+
+"'I won't,' he said, 'and now you may get out.  I lie here an old man
+alone, with no use to my legs, night on night, an' the house open;
+any rapscallion could get in; d' ye think I'm afraid of you?'
+
+"We were beat; and walked out without a word.  But that old man; I've
+thought of him a lot--ninety-two, and lying there.  Whatever he's
+been, and they tell you rum things of him, whatever his son may be,
+he's a man.  It's not what he said, nor that there was anything to be
+afraid of just then, but somehow it's the idea of the old chap lying
+there.  I don't ever wish to see a better plucked one...."
+
+We sat silent after that; out of doors the light began to stir among
+the leaves.  There were all kinds of rustling sounds, as if the world
+were turning over in bed.
+
+Suddenly Dan said:
+
+"He's cheated me.  I paid him to clear out and leave her alone.
+D' you think she's asleep?"  He's made no appeal for sympathy, he'd
+take pity for an insult; but he feels it badly.
+
+"I'm tired as a cat," he said at last, and went to sleep on my bed.
+
+It's broad daylight now; I too am tired as a cat....
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+"Saturday, 6tb August .
+
+.......I take up my tale where I left off yesterday....  Dan and I
+started as soon as we could get Mrs. Hopgood to give us coffee.  The
+old lady was more tentative, more undecided, more pouncing, than I
+had ever seen her.  She was manifestly uneasy: Ha-apgood--who "don't
+slape "don't he, if snores are any criterion--had called out in the
+night, "Hark to th' 'arses' 'oofs!"  Had we heard them?  And where
+might we be going then?  'Twas very earrly to start, an' no
+breakfast.  Haapgood had said it was goin' to shaowerr.  Miss
+Pasiance was not to 'er violin yet, an' Mister Ford 'e kept 'is room.
+Was it?--would there be--?  "Well, an' therr's an 'arvest bug; 'tis
+some earrly for they!"  Wonderful how she pounces on all such
+creatures, when I can't even see them.  She pressed it absently
+between finger and thumb, and began manoeuvring round another way.
+Long before she had reached her point, we had gulped down our coffee,
+and departed.  But as we rode out she came at a run, holding her
+skirts high with either hand, raised her old eyes bright and anxious
+in their setting of fine wrinkles, and said:
+
+"'Tidden sorrow for her?"
+
+A shrug of the shoulders was all the answer she got.  We rode by the
+lanes; through sloping farmyards, all mud and pigs, and dirty straw,
+and farmers with clean-shaven upper lips and whiskers under the chin;
+past fields of corn, where larks were singing.  Up or down, we didn't
+draw rein till we came to Dan's hotel.
+
+There was the river gleaming before us under a rainbow mist that
+hallowed every shape.  There seemed affinity between the earth and
+the sky.  I've never seen that particular soft unity out of Devon.
+And every ship, however black or modern, on those pale waters, had
+the look of a dream ship.  The tall green woods, the red earth, the
+white houses, were all melted into one opal haze.  It was raining,
+but the sun was shining behind.  Gulls swooped by us--ghosts of the
+old greedy wanderers of the sea.
+
+We had told our two boatmen to pull us out to the Pied Witcb!  They
+started with great resolution, then rested on their oars.
+
+"The Pied Witch, zurr?" asked one politely; "an' which may her be?"
+
+That's the West countryman all over!  Never say you "nay," never lose
+an opportunity, never own he doesn't know, or can't do anything--
+independence, amiability, and an eye to the main chance.  We
+mentioned Pearse's name.
+
+"Capt'n Zach'ry Pearse!"  They exchanged a look half-amused, half-
+admiring.
+
+"The Zunflaower, yu mane.  That's her.  Zunflaower, ahoy!"  As we
+mounted the steamer's black side I heard one say:
+
+"Pied Witch!  A pra-aper name that--a dandy name for her!"  They
+laughed as they made fast.
+
+The mate of the Sunflower, or Pied Witcb, or whatever she was called,
+met us--a tall young fellow in his shirtsleeves, tanned to the roots
+of his hair, with sinewy, tattooed arms, and grey eyes, charred round
+the rims from staring at weather.
+
+"The skipper is on board," he said.  "We're rather busy, as you see.
+Get on with that, you sea-cooks," he bawled at two fellows who were
+doing nothing.  All over the ship, men were hauling, splicing, and
+stowing cargo.
+
+"To-day's Friday: we're off on Wednesday with any luck.  Will you
+come this way?"  He led us down the companion to a dark hole which he
+called the saloon.  "Names?  What! are you Mr. Treffry?  Then we're
+partners!"  A schoolboy's glee came on his face.
+
+"Look here!" he said; "I can show you something," and he unlocked the
+door of a cabin.  There appeared to be nothing in it but a huge piece
+of tarpaulin, which depended, bulging, from the topmost bunk.  He
+pulled it up.  The lower bunk had been removed, and in its place was
+the ugly body of a dismounted Gatling gun.
+
+"Got six of them," he whispered, with unholy mystery, through which
+his native frankness gaped out.  "Worth their weight in gold out
+there just now, the skipper says.  Got a heap of rifles, too, and
+lots of ammunition.  He's given me a share.  This is better than the
+P. and O., and playing deck cricket with the passengers.  I'd made up
+my mind already to chuck that, and go in for plantin' sugar, when I
+ran across the skipper.  Wonderful chap, the skipper!  I'll go and
+tell him.  He's been out all night; only came aboard at four bells;
+having a nap now, but he won't mind that for you."
+
+Off he went.  I wondered what there was in Zachary Pearse to attract
+a youngster of this sort; one of the customary twelve children of
+some country parson, no doubt-burning to shoot a few niggers, and for
+ever frank and youthful.
+
+He came back with his hands full of bottles.
+
+"What'll you drink?  The skipper'll be here in a jiffy.  Excuse my
+goin' on deck.  We're so busy."
+
+And in five minutes Zachary Pearse did come.  He made no attempt to
+shake hands, for which I respected him.  His face looked worn, and
+more defiant than usual.
+
+"Well, gentlemen?" he said.
+
+"We've come to ask what you're going to do?" said Dan.
+
+"I don't know," answered Pearse, "that that's any of your business."
+
+Dan's little eyes were like the eyes of an angry pig.
+
+"You've got five hundred pounds of mine," he said; "why do you think
+I gave it you?"
+
+Zachary bit his fingers.
+
+"That's no concern of mine," he said.  "I sail on Wednesday.  Your
+money's safe."
+
+"Do you know what I think of you?" said Dan.
+
+"No, and you'd better not tell me!"  Then, with one of his peculiar
+changes, he smiled: "As you like, though."
+
+Dan's face grew very dark.  "Give me a plain answer," he said: "What
+are you going to do about her?"
+
+Zachary looked up at him from under his brows.
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Are you cur enough to deny that you've married her?"
+
+Zachary looked at him coolly.  "Not at all," he said.
+
+"What in God's name did you do it for?"
+
+"You've no monopoly in the post of husband, Mr.  Treffry."
+
+"To put a child in that positionD!  Haven't you the heart of a man?
+What d' ye come sneaking in at night for?  By Gad!  Don't you know
+you've done a beastly thing?"
+
+Zachary's face darkened, he clenched his fists.  Then he seemed to
+shut his anger into himself.
+
+"You wanted me to leave her to you," he sneered.  "I gave her my
+promise that I'd take her out there, and we'd have gone off on
+Wednesday quietly enough, if you hadn't come and nosed the whole
+thing out with your infernal dog.  The fat's in the fire!  There's no
+reason why I should take her now.  I'll come back to her a rich man,
+or not at all."
+
+"And in the meantime?" I slipped in.
+
+He turned to me, in an ingratiating way.
+
+"I would have taken her to save the fuss--I really would--it's not my
+fault the thing's come out.  I'm on a risky job.  To have her with me
+might ruin the whole thing; it would affect my nerve.  It isn't safe
+for her."
+
+"And what's her position to be," I said, "while you're away?  Do you
+think she'd have married you if she'd known you were going to leave
+her like this?  You ought to give up this business.
+
+You stole her.  Her life's in your hands; she's only a child!"
+
+A quiver passed over his face; it showed that he was suffering.
+
+"Give it up!" I urged.
+
+"My last farthing's in it," he sighed; "the chance of a lifetime."
+
+He looked at me doubtfully, appealingly, as if for the first time in
+his life he had been given a glimpse of that dilemma of consequences
+which his nature never recognises.  I thought he was going to give
+in.  Suddenly, to my horror, Dan growled, "Play the man!"
+
+Pearse turned his head.  "I don't want your advice anyway," he said;
+"I'll not be dictated to."
+
+"To your last day," said Dan, "you shall answer to me for the way you
+treat her."
+
+Zachary smiled.
+
+"Do you see that fly?" he said.  "Wel--I care for you as little as
+this," and he flicked the fly off his white trousers.  "Good-
+morning...!"
+
+The noble mariners who manned our boat pulled lustily for the shore,
+but we had hardly shoved off' when a storm of rain burst over the
+ship, and she seemed to vanish, leaving a picture on my eyes of the
+mate waving his cap above the rail, with his tanned young face bent
+down at us, smiling, keen, and friendly.
+
+...... We reached the shore drenched, angry with ourselves, and with
+each other; I started sulkily for home.
+
+As I rode past an orchard, an apple, loosened by the rainstorm, came
+down with a thud.
+
+"The apples were ripe and ready to fall,
+Oh! heigh-ho! and ready to fall."
+
+I made up my mind to pack, and go away.  But there's a strangeness, a
+sort of haunting fascination in it all.  To you, who don't know the
+people, it may only seem a piece of rather sordid folly.  But it
+isn't the good, the obvious, the useful that puts a spell on us in
+life.  It's the bizarre, the dimly seen, the mysterious for good or
+evil.
+
+The sun was out again when I rode up to the farm; its yellow thatch
+shone through the trees as if sheltering a store of gladness and good
+news.  John Ford himself opened the door to me.
+
+He began with an apology, which made me feel more than ever an
+intruder; then he said:
+
+"I have not spoken to my granddaughter--I waited to see Dan Treffry."
+
+He was stern and sad-eyed, like a man with a great weight of grief on
+his shoulders.  He looked as if he had not slept; his dress was out
+of order, he had not taken his clothes off, I think.  He isn't a man
+whom you can pity.  I felt I had taken a liberty in knowing of the
+matter at all.  When I told him where we had been, he said:
+
+"It was good of you to take this trouble.  That you should have had
+to!  But since such things have come to pass--" He made a gesture
+full of horror.  He gave one the impression of a man whose pride was
+struggling against a mortal hurt.  Presently he asked:
+
+"You saw him, you say?  He admitted this marriage?  Did he give an
+explanation?"
+
+I tried to make Pearse's point of view clear.  Before this old man,
+with his inflexible will and sense of duty, I felt as if I held a
+brief for Zachary, and must try to do him justice.
+
+"Let me understand," he said at last.  "He stole her, you say, to
+make sure; and deserts her within a fortnight."
+
+"He says he meant to take her--"
+
+"Do you believe that?"
+
+Before I could answer, I saw Pasiance standing at the window.  How
+long she had been there I don't know.
+
+"Is it true that he is going to leave me behind?" she cried out.
+
+I could only nod.
+
+"Did you hear him your own self?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+She stamped her foot.
+
+"But he promised! He promised!"
+
+John Ford went towards her.
+
+"Don't touch me, grandfather!  I hate every one!  Let him do what he
+likes, I don't care."
+
+John Ford's face turned quite grey.
+
+"Pasiance," he said, "did you want to leave me so much?"
+
+She looked straight at us, and said sharply:
+
+"What's the good of telling stories.  I can't help its hurting you."
+
+"What did you think you would find away from here?"
+
+She laughed.
+
+"Find?  I don't know--nothing; I wouldn't be stifled anyway.  Now I
+suppose you'll shut me up because I'm a weak girl, not strong like
+men!"
+
+"Silence!" said John Ford; "I will make him take you."
+
+"You shan't!" she cried; "I won't let you.  He's free to do as he
+likes.  He's free--I tell you all, everybody--free!"
+
+She ran through the window, and vanished.
+
+John Ford made a movement as if the bottom had dropped out of his
+world.  I left him there.
+
+I went to the kitchen, where Hopgood was sitting at the table, eating
+bread and cheese.  He got up on seeing me, and very kindly brought me
+some cold bacon and a pint of ale.
+
+"I thart I shude be seeing yu, zurr," he said between his bites;
+"Therr's no thart to 'atin' 'bout the 'ouse to-day.  The old wumman's
+puzzivantin' over Miss Pasiance.  Young girls are skeery critters"--
+he brushed his sleeve over his broad, hard jaws, and filled a pipe
+"specially when it's in the blood of 'em.  Squire Rick Voisey werr a
+dandy; an' Mistress Voisey--well, she werr a nice lady tu, but"--
+rolling the stem of his pipe from corner to corner of his mouth--"she
+werr a pra-aper vixen."
+
+Hopgood's a good fellow, and I believe as soft as he looks hard, but
+he's not quite the sort with whom one chooses to talk over a matter
+like this.  I went upstairs, and began to pack, but after a bit
+dropped it for a book, and somehow or other fell asleep.
+
+I woke, and looked at my watch; it was five o'clock.  I had been
+asleep four hours.  A single sunbeam was slanting across from one of
+my windows to the other, and there was the cool sound of milk
+dropping into pails; then, all at once, a stir as of alarm, and heavy
+footsteps.
+
+I opened my door.  Hopgood and a coast-guardsman were carrying
+Pasiance slowly up the stairs.  She lay in their arms without moving,
+her face whiter than her dress, a scratch across the forehead, and
+two or three drops there of dried blood.  Her hands were clasped, and
+she slowly crooked and stiffened out her fingers.  When they turned
+with her at the stair top, she opened her lips, and gasped, "All
+right, don't put me down.  I can bear it."  They passed, and, with a
+half-smile in her eyes, she said something to me that I couldn't
+catch; the door was shut, and the excited whispering began again
+below.  I waited for the men to come out, and caught hold of Hopgood.
+He wiped the sweat off his forehead.
+
+"Poor young thing!" he said.  "She fell--down the cliffs--'tis her
+back--coastguard saw her 'twerr they fetched her in.  The Lord 'elp
+her mebbe she's not broken up much!  An' Mister Ford don't know!  I'm
+gwine for the doctor."
+
+There was an hour or more to wait before he came; a young fellow;
+almost a boy.  He looked very grave, when he came out of her room.
+
+"The old woman there fond of her?  nurse her well...?  Fond as a
+dog!--good!  Don't know--can't tell for certain!  Afraid it's the
+spine, must have another opinion!  What a plucky girl!  Tell Mr. Ford
+to have the best man he can get in Torquay--there's C---.  I'll be
+round the first thing in the morning.  Keep her dead quiet.  I've
+left a sleeping draught; she'll have fever tonight."
+
+John Ford came in at last.  Poor old man!  What it must have cost him
+not to go to her for fear of the excitement!  How many times in the
+next few hours didn't I hear him come to the bottom of the stairs;
+his heavy wheezing, and sighing; and the forlorn tread of his feet
+going back!  About eleven, just as I was going to bed, Mrs. Hopgood
+came to my door.
+
+"Will yu come, sir," she said; "she's asking for yu.  Naowt I can zay
+but what she will see yu; zeems crazy, don't it?"  A tear trickled
+down the old lady's cheek.  "Du 'ee come; 'twill du 'err 'arm mebbe,
+but I dunno--she'll fret else."
+
+I slipped into the room.  Lying back on her pillows, she was
+breathing quickly with half-closed eyes.  There was nothing to show
+that she had wanted me, or even knew that I was there.  The wick of
+the candle, set by the bedside, had been snuffed too short, and gave
+but a faint light; both window and door stood open, still there was
+no draught, and the feeble little flame burned quite still, casting a
+faint yellow stain on the ceiling like the refection from a buttercup
+held beneath a chin.  These ceilings are far too low!  Across the
+wide, squat window the apple branches fell in black stripes which
+never stirred.  It was too dark to see things clearly.  At the foot
+of the bed was a chest, and there Mrs. Hopgood had sat down, moving
+her lips as if in speech.  Mingled with the half-musty smell of age;
+there were other scents, of mignonette, apples, and some sweet-
+smelling soap.  The floor had no carpet, and there was not one single
+dark object except the violin, hanging from a nail over the bed.  A
+little, round clock ticked solemnly.
+
+"Why won't you give me that stuff, Mums?" Pasiance said in a faint,
+sharp voice.  "I want to sleep."
+
+"Have you much pain?" I asked.
+
+"Of course I have; it's everywhere."
+
+She turned her face towards me.
+
+"You thought I did it on purpose, but you're wrong.  If I had, I'd
+have done it better than this.  I wouldn't have this brutal pain."
+She put her fingers over her eyes.  "It's horrible to complain!  Only
+it's so bad!  But I won't again--promise.
+
+She took the sleeping draught gratefully, making a face, like a child
+after a powder.
+
+"How long do you think it'll be before I can play again?  Oh! I
+forgot--there are other things to think about."  She held out her
+hand to me.  "Look at my ring.  Married--isn't it funny?  Ha, ha!
+Nobody will ever understand--that's funny too!  Poor Gran!  You see,
+there wasn't any reason--only me.  That's the only reason I'm telling
+you now; Mums is there--but she doesn't count; why don't you count,
+Mums?"
+
+The fever was fighting against the draught; she had tossed the
+clothes back from her throat, and now and then raised one thin arm a
+little, as if it eased her; her eyes had grown large, and innocent
+like a child's; the candle, too, had flared, and was burning clearly.
+
+"Nobody is to tell him--nobody at all; promise...!  If I hadn't
+slipped, it would have been different.  What would have happened
+then?  You can't tell; and I can't--that's funny!  Do you think I
+loved him?  Nobody marries without love, do they?  Not quite without
+love, I mean.  But you see I wanted to be free, he said he'd take me;
+and now he's left me after all!  I won't be left, I can't!  When I
+came to the cliff--that bit where the ivy grows right down--there was
+just the sea there, underneath; so I thought I would throw myself
+over and it would be all quiet; and I climbed on a ledge, it looked
+easier from there, but it was so high, I wanted to get back; and then
+my foot slipped; and now it's all pain.  You can't think much, when
+you're in pain."
+
+>From her eyes I saw that she was dropping off.
+
+"Nobody can take you away from-yourself.  He's not to be told--not
+even--I don't--want you--to go away, because--"But her eyes closed,
+and she dropped off to sleep.
+
+They don't seem to know this morning whether she is better or
+worse....
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+"Tuesday, 9th August.
+
+It seems more like three weeks than three days since I wrote.  The
+time passes slowly in a sickhouse...!  The doctors were here this
+morning, they give her forty hours.  Not a word of complaint has
+passed her lips since she knew.  To see her you would hardly think
+her ill; her cheeks have not had time to waste or lose their colour.
+There is not much pain, but a slow, creeping numbness....  It was
+John Ford's wish that she should be told.  She just turned her head
+to the wall and sighed; then to poor old Mrs. Hopgood, who was crying
+her heart out: "Don't cry, Mums, I don't care."
+
+When they had gone, she asked for her violin.  She made them hold it
+for her, and drew the bow across the strings; but the notes that came
+out were so trembling and uncertain that she dropped the bow and
+broke into a passion of sobbing.  Since then, no complaint or moan of
+any kind....
+
+But to go back.  On Sunday, the day after I wrote, as I was coming
+from a walk, I met a little boy making mournful sounds on a tin
+whistle.
+
+"Coom ahn!" he said, "the Miss wahnts t' zee yu."
+
+I went to her room.  In the morning she had seemed better, but now
+looked utterly exhausted.  She had a letter in her hand.
+
+"It's this," she said.  "I don't seem to understand it.  He wants me
+to do something--but I can't think, and my eyes feel funny.  Read it
+to me, please."
+
+The letter was from Zachary.  I read it to her in a low voice, for
+Mrs. Hopgood was in the room, her eyes always fixed on Pasiance above
+her knitting.  When I'd finished, she made me read it again, and yet
+again.  At first she seemed pleased, almost excited, then came a
+weary, scornful look, and before I'd finished the third time she was
+asleep.  It was a remarkable letter, that seemed to bring the man
+right before one's eyes.  I slipped it under her fingers on the bed-
+clothes, and went out.  Fancy took me to the cliff where she had
+fallen.  I found the point of rock where the cascade of ivy flows
+down the cliff; the ledge on which she had climbed was a little to my
+right--a mad place.  It showed plainly what wild emotions must have
+been driving her!  Behind was a half-cut cornfield with a fringe of
+poppies, and swarms of harvest insects creeping and flying; in the
+uncut corn a landrail kept up a continual charring.  The sky was blue
+to the very horizon, and the sea wonderful, under that black wild
+cliff stained here and there with red.  Over the dips and hollows of
+the fields great white clouds hung low down above the land.  There
+are no brassy, east-coast skies here; but always sleepy, soft-shaped
+clouds, full of subtle stir and change.  Passages of Zachary's
+Pearse's letter kept rising to my lips.  After all he's the man that
+his native place, and life, and blood have made him.  It is useless
+to expect idealists where the air is soft and things good to look on
+(the idealist grows where he must create beauty or comfort for
+himself); useless to expect a man of law and order, in one whose
+fathers have stared at the sea day and night for a thousand years--
+the sea, full of its promises of unknown things, never quite the
+same, a slave to its own impulses.  Man is an imitative animal....
+
+"Life's hard enough," he wrote, "without tying yourself down.  Don't
+think too hardly of me!  Shall I make you happier by taking you into
+danger?  If I succeed you'll be a rich woman; but I shall fail if
+you're with me.  To look at you makes me soft.  At sea a man dreams
+of all the good things on land, he'll dream of the heather, and
+honey--you're like that; and he'll dream of the apple-trees, and the
+grass of the orchards--you're like that; sometimes he only lies on
+his back and wishes--and you're like that, most of all like that...."
+
+When I was reading those words I remember a strange, soft, half-
+scornful look came over Pasiance's face; and once she said, "But
+that's all nonsense, isn't it...?"
+
+Then followed a long passage about what he would gain if he
+succeeded, about all that he was risking, the impossibility of
+failure, if he kept his wits about him.  "It's only a matter of two
+months or so," he went on; "stay where you are, dear, or go to my
+Dad.  He'll be glad to have you.  There's my mother's room.  There's
+no one to say 'No' to your fiddle there; you can play it by the sea;
+and on dark nights you'll have the stars dancing to you over the
+water as thick as bees.  I've looked at them often, thinking of
+you...."
+
+Pasiance had whispered to me, "Don't read that bit," and afterwards I
+left it out....  Then the sensuous side of him shows up: "When I've
+brought this off, there's the whole world before us.  There are
+places I can take you to.  There's one I know, not too warm and not
+too cold, where you can sit all day in the shade and watch the
+creepers, and the cocoa-palms, still as still; nothing to do or care
+about; all the fruits you can think of; no noise but the parrots and
+the streams, and a splash when a nigger dives into a water-hole.
+Pasiance, we'll go there!  With an eighty-ton craft there's no sea we
+couldn't know.  The world's a fine place for those who go out to take
+it; there's lots of unknown stuff' in it yet.  I'll fill your lap, my
+pretty, so full of treasures that you shan't know yourself.  A man
+wasn't meant to sit at home...."
+
+Throughout this letter--for all its real passion--one could feel how
+the man was holding to his purpose--the rather sordid purpose of this
+venture.  He's unconscious of it; for he is in love with her; but he
+must be furthering his own ends.  He is vital--horribly vital!  I
+wonder less now that she should have yielded.
+
+What visions hasn't he dangled before her.  There was physical
+attraction, too--I haven't forgotten the look I saw on her face at
+Black Mill.  But when all's said and done, she married him, because
+she's Pasiance Voisey, who does things and wants "to get back."  And
+she lies there dying; not he nor any other man will ever take her
+away.  It's pitiful to think of him tingling with passion, writing
+that letter to this doomed girl in that dark hole of a saloon.  "I've
+wanted money," he wrote, "ever since I was a little chap sitting in
+the fields among the cows....  I want it for you now, and I mean to
+have it.  I've studied the thing two years; I know what I know....
+
+The moment this is in the post I leave for London.  There are a
+hundred things to look after still; I can't trust myself within reach
+of you again till the anchor's weighed.  When I re-christened her the
+Pied Witch, I thought of you--you witch to me...."
+
+There followed a solemn entreaty to her to be on the path leading to
+the cove at seven o'clock on Wednesday evening (that is, to-morrow)
+when he would come ashore and bid her good-bye.  It was signed, "Your
+loving husband, Zachary Pearse...."
+
+I lay at the edge of that cornfield a long time; it was very
+peaceful.  The church bells had begun to ring.  The long shadows came
+stealing out from the sheaves; woodpigeons rose one by one, and
+flapped off to roost; the western sky was streaked with red, and all
+the downs and combe bathed in the last sunlight.  Perfect harvest
+weather; but oppressively still, the stillness of suspense....
+
+Life at the farm goes on as usual.  We have morning and evening
+prayers.  John Ford reads them fiercely, as though he were on the eve
+of a revolt against his God.  Morning and evening he visits her,
+comes out wheezing heavily, and goes to his own room; I believe, to
+pray.  Since this morning I haven't dared meet him.  He is a strong
+old man--but this will break him up....
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+"KINGSWEAR, Saturday, i3tb August.
+
+It's over--I leave here to-morrow, and go abroad.
+
+A quiet afternoon--not a breath up in the churchyard!  I was there
+quite half an hour before they came.  Some red cows had strayed into
+the adjoining orchard, and were rubbing their heads against the
+railing.  While I stood there an old woman came and drove them away;
+afterwards, she stooped and picked up the apples that had fallen
+before their time.
+
+"The apples are ripe and ready to fall,
+Oh! heigh-ho! and ready to fall;
+There came an old woman and gathered them all,
+Oh! heigh-ho! and gathered them all."
+
+......They brought Pasiance very simply--no hideous funeral
+trappings, thank God--the farm hands carried her, and there was no
+one there but John Ford, the Hopgoods, myself, and that young doctor.
+They read the service over her grave.  I can hear John Ford's "Amen!"
+now.  When it was over he walked away bareheaded in the sun, without
+a word.  I went up there again this evening, and wandered amongst the
+tombstones.  "Richard Voisey," "John, the son of Richard and
+Constance Voisey," "Margery Voisey," so many generations of them in
+that corner; then "Richard Voisey and Agnes his wife," and next to it
+that new mound on which a sparrow was strutting and the shadows of
+the apple-trees already hovering.
+
+I will tell you the little left to tell....
+
+On Wednesday afternoon she asked for me again.
+
+"It's only till seven," she whispered.  "He's certain to come then.
+But if I--were to die first--then tell him--I'm sorry for him.  They
+keep saying: 'Don't talk--don't talk!' Isn't it stupid?  As if I
+should have any other chance!  There'll be no more talking after to-
+night!  Make everybody come, please--I want to see them all.  When
+you're dying you're freer than any other time--nobody wants you to do
+things, nobody cares what you say....  He promised me I should do
+what I liked if I married him--I never believed that really--but now
+I can do what I like; and say all the things I want to."  She lay
+back silent; she could not after all speak the inmost thoughts that
+are in each of us, so sacred that they melt away at the approach of
+words.
+
+I shall remember her like that--with the gleam of a smile in her
+half-closed eyes, her red lips parted--such a quaint look of mockery,
+pleasure, regret, on her little round, upturned face; the room white,
+and fresh with flowers, the breeze guttering the apple-leaves against
+the window.  In the night they had unhooked the violin and taken it
+away; she had not missed it....  When Dan came, I gave up my place to
+him.  He took her hand gently in his great paw, without speaking.
+
+"How small my hand looks there," she said, "too small."  Dan put it
+softly back on the bedclothes and wiped his forehead.  Pasiance cried
+in a sharp whisper: "Is it so hot in here?  I didn't know."  Dan bent
+down, put his lips to her fingers and left the room.
+
+The afternoon was long, the longest I've ever spent.  Sometimes she
+seemed to sleep, sometimes whispered to herself about her mother, her
+grandfather, the garden, or her cats--all sorts of inconsequent,
+trivial, even ludicrous memories seemed to throng her mind--never
+once, I think, did she speak of Zachary, but, now and then, she asked
+the time....  Each hour she grew visibly weaker.  John Ford sat by
+her without moving, his heavy breathing was often the only sound;
+sometimes she rubbed her fingers on his hand, without speaking.  It
+was a summary of their lives together.  Once he prayed aloud for her
+in a hoarse voice; then her pitiful, impatient eyes signed to me.
+
+"Quick," she whispered, "I want him; it's all so--cold."
+
+I went out and ran down the path towards the cove.
+
+Leaning on a gate stood Zachary, an hour before his time; dressed in
+the same old blue clothes and leather-peaked cap as on the day when I
+saw him first.  He knew nothing of what had happened.  But at a
+quarter of the truth, I'm sure he divined the whole, though he would
+not admit it to himself.  He kept saying, "It can't be.  She'll be
+well in a few days--a sprain! D' you think the sea-voyage....  Is she
+strong enough to be moved now at once?"
+
+It was painful to see his face, so twisted by the struggle between
+his instinct and his vitality.  The sweat poured down his forehead.
+He turned round as we walked up the path, and pointed out to sea.
+There was his steamer.  "I could get her on board in no time.
+Impossible!  What is it, then?  Spine?  Good God!  The doctors....
+Sometimes they'll do wonders!"  It was pitiful to see his efforts to
+blind himself to the reality.
+
+"It can't be, she's too young.  We're walking very slow."  I told him
+she was dying.
+
+For a second I thought he was going to run away.  Then he jerked up
+his head, and rushed on towards the house.  At the foot of the
+staircase he gripped me by the shoulder.
+
+"It's not true!" he said; "she'll get better now I'm here.  I'll
+stay.  Let everything go.  I'll stay."
+
+"Now's the time," I said, "to show you loved her.  Pull yourself
+together, man!"  He shook all over.
+
+"Yes!" was all he answered.  We went into her room.  It seemed
+impossible she was going to die; the colour was bright in her cheeks,
+her lips trembling and pouted as if she had just been kissed, her
+eyes gleaming, her hair so dark and crisp, her face so young....
+
+Half an hour later I stole to the open door of her room.  She was
+still and white as the sheets of her bed.  John Ford stood at the
+foot; and, bowed to the level of the pillows, his head on his
+clenched fists, sat Zachary.  It was utterly quiet.  The guttering of
+the leaves had ceased.  When things have come to a crisis, how little
+one feels--no fear, no pity, no sorrow, rather the sense, as when a
+play is over, of anxiety to get away!
+
+Suddenly Zachary rose, brushed past me without seeing, and ran
+downstairs.
+
+Some hours later I went out on the path leading to the cove.  It was
+pitch-black; the riding light of the Pied Witch was still there,
+looking no bigger than a firefly.  Then from in front I heard
+sobbing--a man's sobs; no sound is quite so dreadful.  Zachary Pearse
+got up out of the bank not ten paces off.
+
+I had no heart to go after him, and sat down in the hedge.  There was
+something subtly akin to her in the fresh darkness of the young
+night; the soft bank, the scent of honeysuckle, the touch of the
+ferns and brambles.  Death comes to all of us, and when it's over
+it's over; but this blind business--of those left behind
+
+A little later the ship whistled twice; her starboard light gleamed
+faintly--and that was all....
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+"TORQUAY, 30th October .
+
+....Do you remember the letters I wrote you from Moor Farm nearly
+three years ago?  To-day I rode over there.  I stopped at Brixham on
+the way for lunch, and walked down to the quay.  There had been a
+shower--but the sun was out again, shining on the sea, the brown-red
+sails, and the rampart of slate roofs.
+
+A trawler was lying there, which had evidently been in a collision.
+The spiky-bearded, thin-lipped fellow in torn blue jersey and sea-
+boots who was superintending the repairs, said to me a little
+proudly:
+
+"Bane in collision, zurr; like to zee over her?"  Then suddenly
+screwing up his little blue eyes, he added:
+
+"Why, I remembers yu.  Steered yu along o' the young lady in this yer
+very craft."
+
+It was Prawle, Zachary Pearse's henchman.
+
+"Yes," he went on, "that's the cutter."
+
+"And Captain Pearse?"
+
+He leant his back against the quay, and spat.  "He was a pra-aper
+man; I never zane none like 'en."
+
+"Did you do any good out there?"
+
+Prawle gave me a sharp glance.
+
+"Gude?  No, t'was arrm we done, vrom ztart to finish--had trouble all
+the time.  What a man cude du, the skipper did.  When yu caan't du
+right, zome calls it 'Providence'!  'Tis all my eye an' Betty Martin!
+What I zay es, 'tis these times, there's such a dale o' folk, a dale
+of puzzivantin' fellers; the world's to small."
+
+With these words there flashed across me a vision of Drake crushed
+into our modern life by the shrinkage of the world; Drake caught in
+the meshes of red tape, electric wires, and all the lofty appliances
+of our civilization.  Does a type survive its age; live on into times
+that have no room for it?  The blood is there--and sometimes there's
+a throw-back....  All fancy!  Eh?
+
+"So," I said, "you failed?"
+
+Prawle wriggled.
+
+"I wudden' goo for to zay that, zurr--'tis an ugly word.  Da-am!" he
+added, staring at his boots, "'twas thru me tu.  We were along among
+the haythen, and I mus' nades goo for to break me leg.  The capt'n he
+wudden' lave me.  'One Devon man,' he says to me, 'don' lave
+anotherr.'  We werr six days where we shuld ha' been tu; when we got
+back to the ship a cruiser had got her for gun-runnin'."
+
+"And what has become of Captain Pearse?"
+
+Prawle answered, "Zurr, I belave 'e went to China, 'tis onsartin."
+
+"He's not dead?"
+
+Prawle looked at me with a kind of uneasy anger.
+
+"Yu cudden' kell 'en!  'Tis true, mun 'll die zome day.  But therr's
+not a one that'll show better zport than Capt'n Zach'ry Pearse."
+
+I believe that; he will be hard to kill.  The vision of him comes up,
+with his perfect balance, defiant eyes, and sweetish smile; the way
+the hair of his beard crisped a little, and got blacker on the
+cheeks; the sort of desperate feeling he gave, that one would never
+get the better of him, that he would never get the better of himself.
+
+I took leave of Prawle and half a crown.  Before I was off the quay I
+heard him saying to a lady, "Bane in collision, marm!  Like to zee
+over her?"
+
+After lunch I rode on to Moor.  The old place looked much the same;
+but the apple-trees were stripped of fruit, and their leaves
+beginning to go yellow and fall.  One of Pasiance's cats passed me in
+the orchard hunting a bird, still with a ribbon round its neck.  John
+Ford showed me all his latest improvements, but never by word or sign
+alluded to the past.  He inquired after Dan, back in New Zealand now,
+without much interest; his stubbly beard and hair have whitened; he
+has grown very stout, and I noticed that his legs are not well under
+control; he often stops to lean on his stick.  He was very ill last
+winter; and sometimes, they say, will go straight off to sleep in the
+middle of a sentence.
+
+I managed to get a few minutes with the Hopgoods.  We talked of
+Pasiance sitting in the kitchen under a row of plates, with that
+clinging smell of wood-smoke, bacon, and age bringing up memories, as
+nothing but scents can.  The dear old lady's hair, drawn so nicely
+down her forehead on each side from the centre of her cap, has a few
+thin silver lines; and her face is a thought more wrinkled.  The
+tears still come into her eyes when she talks of her "lamb."
+
+Of Zachary I heard nothing, but she told me of old Pearse's death.
+
+"Therr they found 'en, zo to spake, dead--in th' sun; but Ha-apgood
+can tell yu," and Hopgood, ever rolling his pipe, muttered something,
+and smiled his wooden smile.
+
+He came to see me off from the straw-yard.  "'Tis like death to the
+varrm, zurr," he said, putting all the play of his vast shoulders
+into the buckling of my girths.  "Mister Ford--well!  And not one of
+th' old stock to take it when 'e's garn....  Ah! it werr cruel; my
+old woman's never been hersel' since.  Tell 'ee what 'tis--don't du
+t' think to much."
+
+I went out of my way to pass the churchyard.  There were flowers,
+quite fresh, chrysanthemums, and asters; above them the white stone,
+already stained:
+
+        "PASIANCE
+
+        WIFE OF ZACHARY PEARSE
+
+        'The Lord hatb given, and the Lord hatb taken away."'
+
+The red cows were there too; the sky full of great white clouds, some
+birds whistling a little mournfully, and in the air the scent of
+fallen leaves....
+
+May, 1900.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A KNIGHT
+
+
+
+TO
+
+MY MOTHER
+
+
+
+
+A KNIGHT
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+At Monte Carlo, in the spring of the year 189-, I used to notice an
+old fellow in a grey suit and sunburnt straw hat with a black ribbon.
+Every morning at eleven o'clock, he would come down to the Place,
+followed by a brindled German boarhound, walk once or twice round it,
+and seat himself on a bench facing the casino.  There he would remain
+in the sun, with his straw hat tilted forward, his thin legs apart,
+his brown hands crossed between them, and the dog's nose resting on
+his knee.  After an hour or more he would get up, and, stooping a
+little from the waist, walk slowly round the Place and return up
+hill.  Just before three, he would come down again in the same
+clothes and go into the casino, leaving the dog outside.
+
+One afternoon, moved by curiosity, I followed him.  He passed through
+the hall without looking at the gambling-rooms, and went into the
+concert.  It became my habit after that to watch for him.  When he
+sat in the Place I could see him from the window of my room.  The
+chief puzzle to me was the matter of his nationality.
+
+His lean, short face had a skin so burnt that it looked like leather;
+his jaw was long and prominent, his chin pointed, and he had hollows
+in his cheeks.  There were wrinkles across his forehead; his eyes
+were brown; and little white moustaches were brushed up from the
+corners of his lips.  The back of his head bulged out above the lines
+of his lean neck and high, sharp shoulders; his grey hair was cropped
+quite close.  In the Marseilles buffet, on the journey out, I had met
+an Englishman, almost his counterpart in features--but somehow very
+different!  This old fellow had nothing of the other's alert,
+autocratic self-sufficiency.  He was quiet and undemonstrative,
+without looking, as it were, insulated against shocks and foreign
+substances.  He was certainly no Frenchman.  His eyes, indeed, were
+brown, but hazel-brown, and gentle--not the red-brown sensual eye of
+the Frenchman.  An American?  But was ever an American so passive?  A
+German?  His moustache was certainly brushed up, but in a modest,
+almost pathetic way, not in the least Teutonic.  Nothing seemed to
+fit him.  I gave him up, and named him "the Cosmopolitan."
+
+Leaving at the end of April, I forgot him altogether.  In the same
+month, however, of the following year I was again at Monte Carlo, and
+going one day to the concert found myself seated next this same old
+fellow.  The orchestra was playing Meyerbeer's "Prophete," and my
+neighbour was asleep, snoring softly.  He was dressed in the same
+grey suit, with the same straw hat (or one exactly like it) on his
+knees, and his hands crossed above it.  Sleep had not disfigured
+him -his little white moustache was still brushed up, his lips
+closed; a very good and gentle expression hovered on his face.  A
+curved mark showed on his right temple, the scar of a cut on the side
+of his neck, and his left hand was covered by an old glove, the
+little forger of which was empty.  He woke up when the march was over
+and brisked up his moustache.
+
+The next thing on the programme was a little thing by Poise from Le
+joli Gilles, played by Mons. Corsanego on the violin.  Happening to
+glance at my old neighbour, I saw a tear caught in the hollow of his
+cheek, and another just leaving the corner of his eye; there was a
+faint smile on his lips.  Then came an interval; and while orchestra
+and audience were resting, I asked him if he were fond of music.  He
+looked up without distrust, bowed, and answered in a thin, gentle
+voice: "Certainly.  I know nothing about it, play no instrument,
+could never sing a note; but fond of it!  Who would not be?"  His
+English was correct enough, but with an emphasis not quite American
+nor quite foreign.  I ventured to remark that he did not care for
+Meyerbeer.  He smiled.
+
+"Ah!" he said, "I was asleep?  Too bad of me.  He is a little noisy--
+I know so little about music.  There is Bach, for instance.  Would
+you believe it, he gives me no pleasure?  A great misfortune to be no
+musician!"  He shook his head.
+
+I murmured, "Bach is too elevating for you perhaps."
+
+"To me," he answered, "any music I like is elevating.  People say
+some music has a bad effect on them.  I never found any music that
+gave me a bad thought--no--no--quite the opposite; only sometimes, as
+you see, I go to sleep.  But what a lovely instrument the violin!"
+A faint flush came on his parched cheeks.  "The human soul that has
+left the body.  A curious thing, distant bugles at night have given
+me the same feeling."  The orchestra was now coming back, and,
+folding his hands, my neighbour turned his eyes towards them.  When
+the concert was over we came out together.  Waiting at the entrance
+was his dog.
+
+"You have a beautiful dog!"
+
+"Ah! yes.  Freda.  mia cara, da su mano!"  The dog squatted on her
+haunches, and lifted her paw in the vague, bored way of big dogs when
+requested to perform civilities.  She was a lovely creature--the
+purest brindle, without a speck of white, and free from the
+unbalanced look of most dogs of her breed.
+
+"Basta! basta!"  He turned to me apologetically.  "We have agreed to
+speak Italian; in that way I keep up the language; astonishing the
+number of things that dog will understand!"  I was about to take my
+leave, when he asked if I would walk a little way with him--"If you
+are free, that is."  We went up the street with Freda on the far side
+of her master.
+
+"Do you never 'play' here?" I asked him.
+
+"Play?  No.  It must be very interesting; most exciting, but as a
+matter of fact, I can't afford it.  If one has very little, one is
+too nervous."
+
+He had stopped in front of a small hairdresser's shop.  "I live
+here," he said, raising his hat again.  "Au revoir!--unless I can
+offer you a glass of tea.  It's all ready.  Come! I've brought you
+out of your way; give me the pleasure!"
+
+I have never met a man so free from all self-consciousness, and yet
+so delicate and diffident the combination is a rare one.  We went up
+a steep staircase to a room on the second floor.  My companion threw
+the shutters open, setting all the flies buzzing.  The top of a
+plane-tree was on a level with the window, and all its little brown
+balls were dancing, quite close, in the wind.  As he had promised, an
+urn was hissing on a table; there was also a small brown teapot, some
+sugar, slices of lemon, and glasses.  A bed, washstand, cupboard, tin
+trunk, two chairs, and a small rug were all the furniture.  Above the
+bed a sword in a leather sheath was suspended from two nails.  The
+photograph of a girl stood on the closed stove.  My host went to the
+cupboard and produced a bottle, a glass, and a second spoon.  When
+the cork was drawn, the scent of rum escaped into the air.  He
+sniffed at it and dropped a teaspoonful into both glasses.
+
+"This is a trick I learned from the Russians after Plevna; they had
+my little finger, so I deserved something in exchange."  He looked
+round; his eyes, his whole face, seemed to twinkle.  "I assure you it
+was worth it--makes all the difference.  Try!"  He poured off the
+tea.
+
+"Had you a sympathy with the Turks?"
+
+"The weaker side--"  He paused abruptly, then added: "But it was not
+that."  Over his face innumerable crow's-feet had suddenly appeared,
+his eyes twitched; he went on hurriedly, "I had to find something to
+do just then--it was necessary."  He stared into his glass; and it
+was some time before I ventured to ask if he had seen much fighting.
+
+"Yes," he replied gravely, "nearly twenty years altogether; I was one
+of Garibaldi's Mille in '60."
+
+"Surely you are not Italian?"
+
+He leaned forward with his hands on his knees.  "I was in Genoa at
+that time learning banking; Garibaldi was a wonderful man!  One could
+not help it."  He spoke quite simply.  "You might say it was like
+seeing a little man stand up to a ring of great hulking fellows; I
+went, just as you would have gone, if you'd been there.  I was not
+long with them--our war began; I had to go back home."  He said this
+as if there had been but one war since the world began.  "In '60," he
+mused, "till '65.  Just think of it!  The poor country.  Why, in my
+State, South Carolina--I was through it all--nobody could be spared
+there--we were one to three."
+
+"I suppose you have a love of fighting?"
+
+"H'm!" he said, as if considering the idea for the first time.
+"Sometimes I fought for a living, and sometimes--because I was
+obliged; one must try to be a gentleman.  But won't you have some
+more?"
+
+I refused more tea and took my leave, carrying away with me a picture
+of the old fellow looking down from the top of the steep staircase,
+one hand pressed to his back, the other twisting up those little
+white moustaches, and murmuring, "Take care, my dear sir, there's a
+step there at the corner."
+
+"To be a gentleman!"  I repeated in the street, causing an old French
+lady to drop her parasol, so that for about two minutes we stood
+bowing and smiling to each other, then separated full of the best
+feeling.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+A week later I found myself again seated next him at a concert.  In
+the meantime I had seen him now and then, but only in passing.  He
+seemed depressed.  The corners of his lips were tightened, his tanned
+cheeks had a greyish tinge, his eyes were restless; and, between two
+numbers of the programme, he murmured, tapping his fingers on his
+hat, "Do you ever have bad days?  Yes?  Not pleasant, are they?"
+
+Then something occurred from which all that I have to tell you
+followed.  There came into the concert-hall the heroine of one of
+those romances, crimes, follies, or irregularities, call it what you
+will, which had just attracted the "world's" stare.  She passed us
+with her partner, and sat down in a chair a few rows to our right.
+She kept turning her head round, and at every turn I caught the gleam
+of her uneasy eyes.  Some one behind us said: "The brazen baggage!"
+
+My companion turned full round, and glared at whoever it was who had
+spoken.  The change in him was quite remarkable.  His lips were drawn
+back from his teeth; he frowned; the scar on his temple had reddened.
+
+"Ah!" he said to me.  "The hue and cry!  Contemptible!  How I hate
+it!  But you wouldn't understand--! "he broke off, and slowly
+regained his usual air of self-obliteration; he even seemed ashamed,
+and began trying to brush his moustaches higher than ever, as if
+aware that his heat had robbed them of neatness.
+
+"I'm not myself, when I speak of such matters," he said suddenly; and
+began reading his programme, holding it upside down.  A minute later,
+however, he said in a peculiar voice: "There are people to be found
+who object to vivisecting animals; but the vivisection of a woman,
+who minds that?  Will you tell me it's right, that because of some
+tragedy like this--believe me, it is always a tragedy--we should hunt
+down a woman?  That her fellow-women should make an outcast of her?
+That we, who are men, should make a prey of her?  If I thought
+that...."  Again he broke off, staring very hard in front of him.
+"It is we who make them what they are; and even if that is not so--
+why! if I thought there was a woman in the world I could not take my
+hat off to--I--I--couldn't sleep at night."  He got up from his seat,
+put on his old straw hat with trembling fingers, and, without a
+glance back, went out, stumbling over the chair-legs.
+
+I sat there, horribly disturbed; the words, "One must try to be a
+gentleman!" haunting me.  When I came out, he was standing by the
+entrance with one hand on his hip and the other on his dog.  In that
+attitude of waiting he was such a patient figure; the sun glared down
+and showed the threadbare nature of his clothes and the thinness of
+his brown hands, with their long forgers and nails yellow from
+tobacco.  Seeing me he came up the steps again, and raised his hat.
+
+"I am glad to have caught you; please forget all that."  I asked if
+he would do me the honour of dining at my hotel.
+
+"Dine?" he repeated with the sort of smile a child gives if you offer
+him a box of soldiers; "with the greatest pleasure.  I seldom dine
+out, but I think I can muster up a coat.  Yes--yes--and at what time
+shall I come?  At half-past seven, and your hotel is--?  Good! I
+shall be there.  Freda, mia cara, you will be alone this evening.
+You do not smoke caporal, I fear.  I find it fairly good; though it
+has too much bite."  He walked off with Freda, puffing at his thin
+roll of caporal.
+
+Once or twice he stopped, as if bewildered or beset by some sudden
+doubt or memory; and every time he stopped, Freda licked his hand.
+They disappeared round the corner of the street, and I went to my
+hotel to see about dinner.  On the way I met Jules le Ferrier, and
+asked him to come too.
+
+"My faith, yes!" he said, with the rosy pessimism characteristic of
+the French editor.  "Man must dine!"
+
+At half-past six we assembled.  My "Cosmopolitan" was in an old
+frock-coat braided round the edges, buttoned high and tight, defining
+more than ever the sharp lines of his shoulders and the slight kink
+of his back; he had brought with him, too, a dark-peaked cap of
+military shape, which he had evidently selected as more fitting to
+the coat than a straw hat.  He smelled slightly of some herb.
+
+We sat down to dinner, and did not rise for two hours.  He was a
+charming guest, praised everything he ate--not with commonplaces, but
+in words that made you feel it had given him real pleasure.  At
+first, whenever Jules made one of his caustic remarks, he looked
+quite pained, but suddenly seemed to make up his mind that it was
+bark, not bite; and then at each of them he would turn to me and say,
+"Aha! that's good--isn't it?"  With every glass of wine he became
+more gentle and more genial, sitting very upright, and tightly
+buttoned-in; while the little white wings of his moustache seemed
+about to leave him for a better world.
+
+In spite of the most leading questions, however, we could not get him
+to talk about himself, for even Jules, most cynical of men, had
+recognised that he was a hero of romance.  He would answer gently and
+precisely, and then sit twisting his moustaches, perfectly
+unconscious that we wanted more.  Presently, as the wine went a
+little to his head, his thin, high voice grew thinner, his cheeks
+became flushed, his eyes brighter; at the end of dinner he said: "I
+hope I have not been noisy."
+
+We assured him that he had not been noisy enough.  "You're laughing
+at me," he answered.  "Surely I've been talking all the time!"
+
+"Mon Dieu!" said Jules, "we have been looking for some fables of your
+wars; but nothing--nothing, not enough to feed a frog!"
+
+The old fellow looked troubled.
+
+"To be sure!" he mused.  "Let me think! there is that about Colhoun
+at Gettysburg; and there's the story of Garibaldi and the Miller."
+He plunged into a tale, not at all about himself, which would have
+been extremely dull, but for the conviction in his eyes, and the way
+he stopped and commented.  "So you see," he ended, "that's the sort
+of man Garibaldi was!  I could tell you another tale of him."
+Catching an introspective look in Jules's eye, however, I proposed
+taking our cigars over to the cafe opposite.
+
+"Delightful!" the old fellow said: "We shall have a band and the
+fresh air, and clear consciences for our cigars.  I cannot like this
+smoking in a room where there are ladies dining."
+
+He walked out in front of us, smoking with an air of great enjoyment.
+Jules, glowing above his candid shirt and waistcoat, whispered to me,
+"Mon cher Georges, how he is good!" then sighed, and added darkly:
+"The poor man!"
+
+We sat down at a little table.  Close by, the branches of a plane-
+tree rustled faintly; their leaves hung lifeless, speckled like the
+breasts of birds, or black against the sky; then, caught by the
+breeze, fluttered suddenly.
+
+The old fellow sat, with head thrown back, a smile on his face,
+coming now and then out of his enchanted dreams to drink coffee,
+answer our questions, or hum the tune that the band was playing.  The
+ash of his cigar grew very long.  One of those bizarre figures in
+Oriental garb, who, night after night, offer their doubtful wares at
+a great price, appeared in the white glare of a lamp, looked with a
+furtive smile at his face, and glided back, discomfited by its
+unconsciousness.  It was a night for dreams!  A faint, half-eastern
+scent in the air, of black tobacco and spice; few people as yet at
+the little tables, the waiters leisurely, the band soft!  What was he
+dreaming of, that old fellow, whose cigar-ash grew so long?  Of
+youth, of his battles, of those things that must be done by those who
+try to be gentlemen; perhaps only of his dinner; anyway of something
+gilded in vague fashion as the light was gilding the branches of the
+plane-tree.
+
+Jules pulled my sleeve: "He sleeps."  He had smilingly dropped off;
+the cigar-ash--that feathery tower of his dreams--had broken and
+fallen on his sleeve.  He awoke, and fell to dusting it.
+
+The little tables round us began to fill.  One of the bandsmen played
+a czardas on the czymbal.  Two young Frenchmen, talking loudly, sat
+down at the adjoining table.  They were discussing the lady who had
+been at the concert that afternoon.
+
+"It's a bet," said one of them, "but there's the present man.  I take
+three weeks, that's enough elle est declassee; ce n'est que le
+premier pas--'
+
+My old friend's cigar fell on the table.  "Monsieur," he stammered,
+"you speak of a lady so, in a public place?"
+
+The young man stared at him.  "Who is this person?" he said to his
+companion.
+
+My guest took up Jules's glove that lay on the table; before either
+of us could raise a finger, he had swung it in the speaker's face.
+"Enough!" he said, and, dropping the glove, walked away.
+
+We all jumped to our feet.  I left Jules and hurried after him.  His
+face was grim, his eyes those of a creature who has been struck on a
+raw place.  He made a movement of his fingers which said plainly.
+"Leave me, if you please!"
+
+I went back to the cafe.  The two young men had disappeared, so had
+Jules, but everything else was going on just as before; the bandsman
+still twanging out his czardas; the waiters serving drinks; the
+orientals trying to sell their carpets.  I paid the bill, sought out
+the manager, and apologised.  He shrugged his shoulders, smiled and
+said: "An eccentric, your friend, nicht wahr?"  Could he tell me
+where M. Le Ferrier was?  He could not.  I left to look for Jules;
+could not find him, and returned to my hotel disgusted.  I was sorry
+for my old guest, but vexed with him too; what business had he to
+carry his Quixotism to such an unpleasant length?  I tried to read.
+Eleven o'clock struck; the casino disgorged a stream of people; the
+Place seemed fuller of life than ever; then slowly it grew empty and
+quite dark.  The whim seized me to go out.  It was a still night,
+very warm, very black.  On one of the seats a man and woman sat
+embraced, on another a girl was sobbing, on a third--strange sight--a
+priest dozed.  I became aware of some one at my side; it was my old
+guest.
+
+"If you are not too tired," he said, "can you give me ten minutes?"
+
+"Certainly; will you come in?"
+
+"No, no; let us go down to the Terrace.  I shan't keep you long."
+
+He did not speak again till we reached a seat above the pigeon-
+shooting grounds; there, in a darkness denser for the string of
+lights still burning in the town, we sat down.
+
+"I owe you an apology," he said; "first in the afternoon, then again
+this evening--your guest--your friend's glove!  I have behaved as no
+gentleman should."  He was leaning forward with his hands on the
+handle of a stick.  His voice sounded broken and disturbed.
+
+"Oh!" I muttered.  "It's nothing!"'
+
+"You are very good," he sighed; "but I feel that I must explain.  I
+consider I owe this to you, but I must tell you I should not have the
+courage if it were not for another reason.  You see I have no
+friend."  He looked at me with an uncertain smile.  I bowed, and a
+minute or two later he began....
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+"You will excuse me if I go back rather far.  It was in '74, when I
+had been ill with Cuban fever.  To keep me alive they had put me on
+board a ship at Santiago, and at the end of the voyage I found myself
+in London.  I had very little money; I knew nobody.  I tell you, sir,
+there are times when it's hard for a fighting man to get anything to
+do.  People would say to me: 'Afraid we've nothing for a man like you
+in our business.'  I tried people of all sorts; but it was true--I
+had been fighting here and there since '60, I wasn't fit for
+anything--"  He shook his head.  "In the South, before the war, they
+had a saying, I remember, about a dog and a soldier having the same
+value.  But all this has nothing to do with what I have to tell you."
+He sighed again and went on, moistening his lips: "I was walking
+along the Strand one day, very disheartened, when I heard my name
+called.  It's a queer thing, that, in a strange street.  By the way,"
+he put in with dry ceremony, "you don't know my name, I think: it is
+Brune--Roger Brune.  At first I did not recognise the person who
+called me.  He had just got off an omnibus--a square-shouldered man
+with heavy moustaches, and round spectacles.  But when he shook my
+hand I knew him at once.  He was a man called Dalton, who was taken
+prisoner at Gettysburg; one of you Englishmen who came to fight with
+us--a major in the regiment where I was captain.  We were comrades
+during two campaigns.  If I had been his brother he couldn't have
+seemed more pleased to see me.  He took me into a bar for the sake of
+old times.  The drink went to my head, and by the time we reached
+Trafalgar Square I was quite unable to walk.  He made me sit down on
+a bench. I was in fact--drunk.  It's disgraceful to be drunk, but
+there was some excuse.  Now I tell you, sir" (all through his story
+he was always making use of that expression, it seemed to infuse
+fresh spirit into him, to help his memory in obscure places, to give
+him the mastery of his emotions; it was like the piece of paper a
+nervous man holds in his hand to help him through a speech), "there
+never was a man with a finer soul than my friend Dalton.  He was not
+clever, though he had read much; and sometimes perhaps he was too
+fond of talking.  But he was a gentleman; he listened to me as if I
+had been a child; he was not ashamed of me--and it takes a gentleman
+not to be ashamed of a drunken man in the streets of London; God
+knows what things I said to him while we were sitting there!  He took
+me to his home and put me to bed himself; for I was down again with
+fever."  He stopped, turned slightly from me, and put his hand up to
+his brow.  " Well, then it was, sir, that I first saw her.  I am not
+a poet and I cannot tell you what she seemed to me.  I was delirious,
+but I always knew when she was there.  I had dreams of sunshine and
+cornfields, of dancing waves at sea, young trees--never the same
+dreams, never anything for long together; and when I had my senses I
+was afraid to say so for fear she would go away.  She'd be in the
+corner of the room, with her hair hanging about her neck, a bright
+gold colour; she never worked and never read, but sat and talked to
+herself in a whisper, or looked at me for a long time together out of
+her blue eyes, a little frown between them, and her upper lip closed
+firm on her lower lip, where she had an uneven tooth.  When her
+father came, she'd jump up and hang on to his neck until he groaned,
+then run away, but presently come stealing back on tiptoe.  I used to
+listen for her footsteps on the stairs, then the knock, the door
+flung back or opened quietly--you never could tell which; and her
+voice, with a little lisp, 'Are you better today, Mr. Brune?  What
+funny things you say when you're delirious!  Father says you've been
+in heaps of battles!"'
+
+He got up, paced restlessly to and fro, and sat down again.  "I
+remember every word as if it were yesterday, all the things she said,
+and did; I've had a long time to think them over, you see.  Well, I
+must tell you, the first morning that I was able to get up, I missed
+her.  Dalton came in her place, and I asked him where she was.  'My
+dear fellow,' he answered, 'I've sent Eilie away to her old nurse's
+inn down on the river; she's better there at this time of year.'  We
+looked at each other, and I saw that he had sent her away because he
+didn't trust me.  I was hurt by this.  Illness spoils one.  He was
+right, he was quite right, for all he knew about me was that I could
+fight and had got drunk; but I am very quick-tempered.  I made up my
+mind at once to leave him.  But I was too weak--he had to put me to
+bed again.  The very next morning he came and proposed that I should
+go into partnership with him.  He kept a fencing-school and pistol-
+gallery.  It seemed like the finger of God; and perhaps it was--who
+knows?"  He fell into a reverie, and taking out his caporal, rolled
+himself a cigarette; having lighted it, he went on suddenly: "There,
+in the room above the school, we used to sit in the evenings, one on
+each side of the grate.  The room was on the second floor,
+I remember, with two windows, and a view of nothing but the houses
+opposite.  The furniture was covered up with chintz.  The things on
+the bookshelf were never disturbed, they were Eilie's--half-broken
+cases with butterflies, a dead frog in a bottle, a horse-shoe covered
+with tinfoil, some shells too, and a cardboard box with three
+speckled eggs in it, and these words written on the lid: 'Missel-
+thrush from Lucy's tree--second family, only one blown.'"  He smoked
+fiercely, with puffs that were like sharp sighs.
+
+"Dalton was wrapped up in her.  He was never tired of talking to me
+about her, and I was never tired of hearing.  We had a number of
+pupils; but in the evening when we sat there, smoking--our talk would
+sooner or later--come round to her.  Her bedroom opened out of that
+sitting--room; he took me in once and showed me a narrow little room
+the width of a passage, fresh and white, with a photograph of her
+mother above the bed, and an empty basket for a dog or cat."  He
+broke off with a vexed air, and resumed sternly, as if trying to bind
+himself to the narration of his more important facts: "She was then
+fifteen--her mother had been dead twelve years--a beautiful, face,
+her mother's; it had been her death that sent Dalton to fight with
+us.  Well, sir, one day in August, very hot weather, he proposed a
+run into the country, and who should meet us on the platform when we
+arrived but Eilie, in a blue sun-bonnet and frock-flax blue, her
+favourite colour.  I was angry with Dalton for not telling me that we
+should see her; my clothes were not quite--my hair wanted cutting.
+It was black then, sir," he added, tracing a pattern in the darkness
+with his stick.  "She had a little donkey-cart; she drove, and, while
+we walked one on each side, she kept looking at me from under her
+sunbonnet.  I must tell you that she never laughed--her eyes danced,
+her cheeks would go pink, and her hair shake about on her neck, but
+she never laughed. Her old nurse, Lucy, a very broad, good woman, had
+married the proprietor of the inn in the village there.  I have never
+seen anything like that inn: sweetbriar up to the roof!  And the
+scent--I am very susceptible to scents!"  His head drooped, and the
+cigarette fell from his hand. A train passing beneath sent up a
+shower of sparks.  He started, and went on: "We had our lunch in the
+parlour--I remember that room very well, for I spent the happiest
+days of my life afterwards in that inn....  We went into a meadow
+after lunch, and my friend Dalton fell asleep.  A wonderful thing
+happened then.  Eilie whispered to me, 'Let's have a jolly time.'
+She took me for the most glorious walk.  The river was close by.
+A lovely stream, your river Thames, so calm and broad; it is like the
+spirit of your people.  I was bewitched; I forgot my friend, I
+thought of nothing but how to keep her to myself.  It was such a day!
+There are days that are the devil's, but that was truly one of God's.
+She took me to a little pond under an elm-tree, and we dragged it, we
+two, an hour, for a kind of tiny red worm to feed some creature that
+she had.  We found them in the mud, and while she was bending over,
+the curls got in her eyes.  If you could have seen her then, I think,
+sir, you would have said she was like the first sight of spring....
+We had tea afterwards, all together, in the long grass under some
+fruit-trees.  If I had the knack of words, there are things that I
+could say."  He bent, as though in deference to those unspoken
+memories.  "Twilight came on while we were sitting there. A wonderful
+thing is twilight in the country!  It became time for us to go.
+There was an avenue of trees close by--like a church with a window at
+the end, where golden light came through.  I walked up and down it
+with her.  'Will you come again?' she whispered, and suddenly she
+lifted up her face to be kissed. I kissed her as if she were a little
+child.  And when we said good-bye, her eyes were looking at me across
+her father's shoulder, with surprise and sorrow in them.  'Why do you
+go away?' they seemed to say....  But I must tell you," he went on
+hurriedly, "of a thing that happened before we had gone a hundred
+yards.  We were smoking our pipes, and I, thinking of her--when out
+she sprang from the hedge and stood in front of us.  Dalton cried
+out, 'What are you here for again, you mad girl?'  She rushed up to
+him and hugged him; but when she looked at me, her face was quite
+different--careless, defiant, as one might say--it hurt me.  I
+couldn't understand it, and what one doesn't understand frightens
+one.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+"Time went on.  There was no swordsman, or pistol-shot like me in
+London, they said.  We had as many pupils as we liked--it was the
+only part of my life when I have been able to save money.  I had no
+chance to spend it.  We gave lessons all day, and in the evening were
+too tired to go out.  That year I had the misfortune to lose my dear
+mother.  I became a rich man--yes, sir, at that time I must have had
+not less than six hundred a year.
+
+"It was a long time before I saw Eilie again.  She went abroad to
+Dresden with her father's sister to learn French and German.  It was
+in the autumn of 1875 when she came back to us.  She was seventeen
+then--a beautiful young creature."  He paused, as if to gather his
+forces for description, and went on.
+
+"Tall, as a young tree, with eyes like the sky.  I would not say she
+was perfect, but her imperfections were beautiful to me.  What is it
+makes you love--ah! sir, that is very hidden and mysterious.  She had
+never lost the trick of closing her lips tightly when she remembered
+her uneven tooth.  You may say that was vanity, but in a young girl--
+and which of us is not vain, eh?  'Old men and maidens, young men and
+children!'
+
+"As I said, she came back to London to her little room, and in the
+evenings was always ready with our tea.  You mustn't suppose she was
+housewifely; there is something in me that never admired
+housewifeliness--a fine quality, no doubt, still--" He sighed.
+
+"No," he resumed, "Eilie was not like that, for she was never quite
+the same two days together.  I told you her eyes were like the sky--
+that was true of all of her.  In one thing, however, at that time,
+she always seemed the same--in love for her father.  For me!  I don't
+know what I should have expected; but my presence seemed to have the
+effect of making her dumb; I would catch her looking at me with a
+frown, and then, as if to make up to her own nature--and a more
+loving nature never came into this world, that I shall maintain to my
+dying day--she would go to her father and kiss him.  When I talked
+with him she pretended not to notice, but I could see her face grow
+cold and stubborn.  I am not quick; and it was a long time before I
+understood that she was jealous, she wanted him all to herself.  I've
+often wondered how she could be his daughter, for he was the very
+soul of justice and a slow man too--and she was as quick as a bird.
+For a long time after I saw her dislike of me, I refused to believe
+it--if one does not want to believe a thing there are always reasons
+why it should not seem true, at least so it is with me, and I suppose
+with all selfish men.
+
+"I spent evening after evening there, when, if I had not thought only
+of myself, I should have kept away.  But one day I could no longer be
+blind.
+
+"It was a Sunday in February.  I always had an invitation on Sundays
+to dine with them in the middle of the day.  There was no one in the
+sitting-room; but the door of Eilie's bedroom was open.  I heard her
+voice: 'That man, always that man!'  It was enough for me, I went
+down again without coming in, and walked about all day.
+
+"For three weeks I kept away.  To the school of course I came as
+usual, but not upstairs.  I don't know what I told Dalton--it did not
+signify what you told him, he always had a theory of his own, and was
+persuaded of its truth--a very single-minded man, sir.
+
+"But now I come to the most wonderful days of my life.  It was an
+early spring that year.  I had fallen away already from my
+resolution, and used to slink up--seldom, it's true--and spend the
+evening with them as before.  One afternoon I came up to the sitting-
+room; the light was failing--it was warm, and the windows were open.
+In the air was that feeling which comes to you once a year, in the
+spring, no matter where you may be, in a crowded street, or alone in
+a forest; only once--a feeling like--but I cannot describe it.
+
+"Eilie was sitting there.  If you don't know, sir, I can't tell you
+what it means to be near the woman one loves.  She was leaning on the
+windowsill, staring down into the street.  It was as though she might
+be looking out for some one.  I stood, hardly breathing.  She turned
+her head, and saw me.  Her eyes were strange.  They seemed to ask me
+a question.  But I couldn't have spoken for the world.  I can't tell
+you what I felt--I dared not speak, or think, or hope.  I have been
+in nineteen battles--several times in positions of some danger, when
+the lifting of a finger perhaps meant death; but I have never felt
+what I was feeling at that moment.  I knew something was coming; and
+I was paralysed with terror lest it should not come!"  He drew a long
+breath.
+
+"The servant came in with a light and broke the spell.  All that
+night I lay awake and thought of how she had looked at me, with the
+colour coming slowly up in her cheeks
+
+"It was three days before I plucked up courage to go again; and then
+I felt her eyes on me at once--she was making a 'cat's cradle' with a
+bit of string, but I could see them stealing up from her hands to my
+face.  And she went wandering about the room, fingering at
+everything.  When her father called out: 'What's the matter with you,
+Elie?' she stared at him like a child caught doing wrong.  I looked
+straight at her then, she tried to look at me, but she couldn't; and
+a minute later she went out of the room.  God knows what sort of
+nonsense I talked--I was too happy.
+
+"Then began our love.  I can't tell you of that time.  Often and
+often Dalton said to me: 'What's come to the child?  Nothing I can do
+pleases her.'  All the love she had given him was now for me; but he
+was too simple and straight to see what was going on.  How many times
+haven't I felt criminal towards him!  But when you're happy, with the
+tide in your favour, you become a coward at once....
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+"Well, sir," he went on, "we were married on her eighteenth birthday.
+It was a long time before Dalton became aware of our love.  But one
+day he said to me with a very grave look:
+
+"'Eilie has told me, Brune; I forbid it.  She's too young, and
+you're--too old!' I was then forty-five, my hair as black and thick
+as a rook's feathers, and I was strong and active.  I answered him:
+'We shall be married within a month!'  We parted in anger.  It was a
+May night, and I walked out far into the country.  There's no remedy
+for anger, or, indeed, for anything, so fine as walking.  Once I
+stopped--it was on a common, without a house or light, and the stars
+shining like jewels.  I was hot from walking, I could feel the blood
+boiling in my veins--I said to myself 'Old, are you?' And I laughed
+like a fool.  It was the thought of losing her--I wished to believe
+myself angry, but really I was afraid; fear and anger in me are very
+much the same.  A friend of mine, a bit of a poet, sir, once called
+them 'the two black wings of self.'  And so they are, so they are...!
+The next morning I went to Dalton again, and somehow I made him
+yield.  I'm not a philosopher, but it has often seemed to me that no
+benefit can come to us in this life without an equal loss somewhere,
+but does that stop us?  No, sir, not often....
+
+"We were married on the 3oth of June 1876, in the parish church.  The
+only people present were Dalton, Lucy, and Lucy's husband--a big,
+red-faced fellow, with blue eyes and a golden beard parted in two.
+It had been arranged that we should spend the honeymoon down at their
+inn on the river.  My wife, Dalton and I, went to a restaurant for
+lunch.  She was dressed in grey, the colour of a pigeon's feathers."
+He paused, leaning forward over the crutch handle of his stick;
+trying to conjure up, no doubt, that long-ago image of his young
+bride in her dress "the colour of a pigeon's feathers," with her blue
+eyes and yellow hair, the little frown between her brows, the firmly
+shut red lips, opening to speak the words, "For better, for worse,
+for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health."
+
+"At that time, sir," he went on suddenly, "I was a bit of a dandy.  I
+wore, I remember, a blue frock-coat, with white trousers, and a grey
+top hat.  Even now I should always prefer to be well dressed....
+
+"We had an excellent lunch, and drank Veuve Clicquot, a wine that you
+cannot get in these days!  Dalton came with us to the railway
+station.  I can't bear partings; and yet, they must come.
+
+"That evening we walked out in the cool under the aspen-trees.  What
+should I remember in all my life if not that night--the young
+bullocks snuffling in the gateways--the campion flowers all lighted
+up along the hedges--the moon with a halo-bats, too, in and out among
+the stems, and the shadows of the cottages as black and soft as that
+sea down there.  For a long time we stood on the river-bank beneath a
+lime-tree.  The scent of the lime flowers!  A man can only endure
+about half his joy; about half his sorrow.  Lucy and her husband," he
+went on, presently, "his name was Frank Tor--a man like an old
+Viking, who ate nothing but milk, bread, and fruit--were very good to
+us!  It was like Paradise in that inn--though the commissariat, I am
+bound to say, was limited.  The sweetbriar grew round our bedroom
+windows; when the breeze blew the leaves across the opening--it was
+like a bath of perfume.  Eilie grew as brown as a gipsy while we were
+there.  I don't think any man could have loved her more than I did.
+But there were times when my heart stood still; it didn't seem as if
+she understood how much I loved her.  One day, I remember, she coaxed
+me to take her camping.  We drifted down-stream all the afternoon,
+and in the evening pulled into the reeds under the willow-boughs and
+lit a fire for her to cook by--though, as a matter of fact, our
+provisions were cooked already--but you know how it is; all the
+romance was in having a real fire.  'We won't pretend,' she kept
+saying.  While we were eating our supper a hare came to our clearing-
+-a big fellow--how surprised he looked!  'The tall hare,' Eilie
+called him.  After that we sat by the ashes and watched the shadows,
+till at last she roamed away from me.  The time went very slowly; I
+got up to look for her.  It was past sundown.  I called and called.
+It was a long time before I found her--and she was like a wild thing,
+hot and flushed, her pretty frock torn, her hands and face scratched,
+her hair down, like some beautiful creature of the woods.  If one
+loves, a little thing will scare one.  I didn't think she had noticed
+my fright; but when we got back to the boat she threw her arms round
+my neck, and said, 'I won't ever leave you again!'
+
+"Once in the night I woke--a water-hen was crying, and in the
+moonlight a kingfisher flew across.  The wonder on the river--the
+wonder of the moon and trees, the soft bright mist, the stillness! It
+was like another world, peaceful, enchanted, far holier than ours.
+It seemed like a vision of the thoughts that come to one--how seldom!
+and go if one tries to grasp them.  Magic--poetry-sacred!"  He was
+silent a minute, then went on in a wistful voice: "I looked at her,
+sleeping like a child, with her hair loose, and her lips apart, and I
+thought: 'God do so to me, if ever I bring her pain!'  How was I to
+understand her? the mystery and innocence of her soul!  The river has
+had all my light and all my darkness, the happiest days, and the
+hours when I've despaired; and I like to think of it, for, you know,
+in time bitter memories fade, only the good remain....  Yet the good
+have their own pain, a different kind of aching, for we shall never
+get them back.  Sir," he said, turning to me with a faint smile,
+"it's no use crying over spilt milk....  In the neighbourhood of
+Lucy's inn, the Rose and Maybush--Can you imagine a prettier name?  I
+have been all over the world, and nowhere found names so pretty as in
+the English country.  There, too, every blade of grass; and flower,
+has a kind of pride about it; knows it will be cared for; and all the
+roads, trees, and cottages, seem to be certain that they will live
+for ever....  But I was going to tell you: Half a mile from the inn
+was a quiet old house which we used to call the 'Convent'--though I
+believe it was a farm.  We spent many afternoons there, trespassing
+in the orchard--Eilie was fond of trespassing; if there were a long
+way round across somebody else's property, she would always take it.
+We spent our last afternoon in that orchard, lying in the long grass.
+I was reading Childe Harold for the first time--a wonderful, a
+memorable poem!  I was at that passage--the bull-fight--you remember:
+
+"'Thrice sounds the clarion; lo! the signal falls,
+The din expands, and expectation mute'--
+
+when suddenly Eilie said: 'Suppose I were to leave off loving you?'
+It was as if some one had struck me in the face.  I jumped up, and
+tried to take her in my arms, but she slipped away; then she turned,
+and began laughing softly.  I laughed too.  I don't know why....
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+"We went back to London the next day; we lived quite close to the
+school, and about five days a week Dalton came to dine with us.  He
+would have come every day, if he had not been the sort of man who
+refuses to consult his own pleasure.  We had more pupils than ever.
+In my leisure I taught my wife to fence.  I have never seen any one
+so lithe and quick; or so beautiful as she looked in her fencing
+dress, with embroidered shoes.
+
+"I was completely happy.  When a man has obtained his desire he
+becomes careless and self-satisfied; I was watchful, however, for I
+knew that I was naturally a selfish man.  I studied to arrange my
+time and save my money, to give her as much pleasure as I could.
+What she loved best in the world just then was riding.  I bought a
+horse for her, and in the evenings of the spring and summer we rode
+together; but when it was too dark to go out late, she would ride
+alone, great distances, sometimes spend the whole day in the saddle,
+and come back so tired she could hardly walk upstairs--I can't say
+that I liked that.  It made me nervous, she was so headlong--but I
+didn't think it right to interfere with her.  I had a good deal of
+anxiety about money, for though I worked hard and made more than
+ever, there never seemed enough.  I was anxious to save--I hoped, of
+course--but we had no child, and this was a trouble to me.  She grew
+more beautiful than ever, and I think was happy.  Has it ever struck
+you that each one of us lives on the edge of a volcano?  There is, I
+imagine, no one who has not some affection or interest so strong that
+he counts the rest for nothing, beside it.  No doubt a man may live
+his life through without discovering that.  But some of us--!  I am
+not complaining; what is--is."  He pulled the cap lower over his
+eyes, and clutched his hands firmly on the top of his stick.  He was
+like a man who rushes his horse at some hopeless fence, unwilling to
+give himself time, for fear of craning at the last moment.  "In the
+spring of '78, a new pupil came to me, a young man of twenty-one who
+was destined for the army.  I took a fancy to him, and did my best to
+turn him into a good swordsman; but there was a kind of perverse
+recklessness in him; for a few minutes one would make a great
+impression, then he would grow utterly careless.  'Francis,' I would
+say, 'if I were you I should be ashamed.'  'Mr. Brune,' he would
+answer, 'why should I be ashamed?  I didn't make myself.'  God knows,
+I wish to do him justice, he had a heart--one day he drove up in a
+cab, and brought in his poor dog, who had been run over, and was
+dying: For half an hour he shut himself up with its body, we could
+hear him sobbing like a child; he came out with his eyes all red, and
+cried: 'I know where to find the brute who drove over him,' and off
+he rushed.  He had beautiful Italian eyes; a slight figure, not very
+tall; dark hair, a little dark moustache; and his lips were always a
+trifle parted--it was that, and his walk, and the way he drooped his
+eyelids, which gave him a peculiar, soft, proud look.  I used to tell
+him that he'd never make a soldier!  'Oh!' he'd answer, 'that'll be
+all right when the time comes!  He believed in a kind of luck that
+was to do everything for him, when the time came.  One day he came in
+as I was giving Eilie her lesson.  This was the first time they saw
+each other.  After that he came more often, and sometimes stayed to
+dinner with us.  I won't deny, sir, that I was glad to welcome him; I
+thought it good for Eilie.  Can there be anything more odious," he
+burst out, "than such a self-complacent blindness?  There are people
+who say, 'Poor man, he had such faith!'  Faith, sir!  Conceit!  I was
+a fool--in this world one pays for folly....
+
+"The summer came; and one Saturday in early June, Eilie, I, and
+Francis--I won't tell you his other name--went riding.  The night had
+been wet; there was no dust, and presently the sun came out--a
+glorious day!  We rode a long way.  About seven o'clock we started
+back-slowly, for it was still hot, and there was all the cool of
+night before us.  It was nine o'clock when we came to Richmond Park.
+A grand place, Richmond Park; and in that half-light wonderful, the
+deer moving so softly, you might have thought they were spirits.  We
+were silent too--great trees have that effect on me....
+
+"Who can say when changes come?  Like a shift of the wind, the old
+passes, the new is on you.  I am telling you now of a change like
+that.  Without a sign of warning, Eilie put her horse into a gallop.
+'What are you doing?' I shouted.  She looked back with a smile, then
+he dashed past me too.  A hornet might have stung them both: they
+galloped over fallen trees, under low hanging branches, up hill and
+down.  I had to watch that madness!  My horse was not so fast.  I
+rode like a demon; but fell far behind.  I am not a man who takes
+things quietly.  When I came up with them at last, I could not speak
+for rage.  They were riding side by side, the reins on the horses'
+necks, looking in each other's faces.  'You should take care,' I
+said.  'Care!' she cried; 'life is not all taking care!'  My anger
+left me.  I dropped behind, as grooms ride behind their mistresses...
+Jealousy!  No torture is so ceaseless or so black....  In those
+minutes a hundred things came up in me--a hundred memories, true,
+untrue, what do I know?  My soul was poisoned.  I tried to reason
+with myself.  It was absurd to think such things!  It was unmanly....
+Even if it were true, one should try to be a gentleman!  But I found
+myself laughing; yes, sir, laughing at that word."  He spoke faster,
+as if pouring his heart out not to a live listener, but to the night.
+"I could not sleep that night.  To lie near her with those thoughts
+in my brain was impossible!  I made an excuse, and sat up with some
+papers.  The hardest thing in life is to see a thing coming and be
+able to do nothing to prevent it.  What could I do?  Have you noticed
+how people may become utter strangers without a word?  It only needs
+a thought....  The very next day she said: 'I want to go to Lucy's.'
+'Alone?'  'Yes.'  I had made up my mind by then that she must do just
+as she wished.  Perhaps I acted wrongly; I do not know what one ought
+to do in such a case; but before she went I said to her: 'Eilie, what
+is it?'  'I don't know,' she answered; and I kissed her--that was
+all....  A month passed; I wrote to her nearly every day, and I had
+short letters from her, telling me very little of herself.  Dalton
+was a torture to me, for I could not tell him; he had a conviction
+that she was going to become a mother.  'Ah, Brune!' he said, 'my
+poor wife was just like that.'  Life, sir, is a somewhat ironical
+affair...!  He--I find it hard to speak his name--came to the school
+two or three times a week.  I used to think I saw a change, a purpose
+growing up through his recklessness; there seemed a violence in him
+as if he chafed against my blade.  I had a kind of joy in feeling I
+had the mastery, and could toss the iron out of his hand any minute
+like a straw.  I was ashamed, and yet I gloried in it.  Jealousy is a
+low thing, sir--a low, base thing!  When he asked me where my wife
+was, I told him; I was too proud to hide it.  Soon after that he came
+no more to the school.
+
+"One morning, when I could bear it no longer, I wrote, and said I was
+coming down.  I would not force myself on her, but I asked her to
+meet me in the orchard of the old house we called the Convent.  I
+asked her to be there at four o'clock.  It has always been my, belief
+that a man must neither beg anything of a woman, nor force anything
+from her.  Women are generous--they will give you what they can.  I
+sealed my letter, and posted it myself.  All the way down I kept on
+saying to myself, 'She must come--surely she will come!'
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+"I was in high spirits, but the next moment trembled like a man with
+ague.  I reached the orchard before my time.  She was not there.  You
+know what it is like to wait?  I stood still and listened; I went to
+the point whence I could see farthest; I said to myself, 'A watched
+pot never boils; if I don't look for her she will come.'  I walked up
+and down with my eyes on the ground.  The sickness of it!  A hundred
+times I took out my watch.... Perhaps it was fast, perhaps hers was
+slow--I can't tell you a thousandth part of my hopes and fears.
+There was a spring of water, in one corner.  I sat beside it, and
+thought of the last time I had been there--and something seemed to
+burst in me.  It was five o'clock before I lost all hope; there comes
+a time when you're glad that hope is dead, it means rest.  'That's
+over,' you say, 'now I can act.'  But what was I to do?  I lay down
+with my face to the ground; when one's in trouble, it's the only
+thing that helps--something to press against and cling to that can't
+give way.  I lay there for two hours, knowing all the time that I
+should play the coward.  At seven o'clock I left the orchard and went
+towards the inn; I had broken my word, but I felt happy.... I should
+see her--and, sir, nothing--nothing seemed to matter beside that.
+Tor was in the garden snipping at his roses.  He came up, and I could
+see that he couldn't look me in the face.  'Where's my wife?' I said.
+He answered, 'Let's get Lucy.'  I ran indoors.  Lucy met me with two
+letters; the first--my own--unopened; and the second, this:
+
+"'I have left you.  You were good to me, but now--it is no use.
+          EILIE.'"
+
+"She told me that a boy had brought a letter for my wife the day
+before, from a young gentleman in a boat.  When Lucy delivered it she
+asked, 'Who is he, Miss Eilie?  What will Mr. Brune say?'  My wife
+looked at her angrily, but gave her no answer--and all that day she
+never spoke.  In the evening she was gone, leaving this note on the
+bed....  Lucy cried as if her heart would break.  I took her by the
+shoulders and put her from the room; I couldn't bear the noise.  I
+sat down and tried to think.  While I was sitting there Tor came in
+with a letter.  It was written on the notepaper of an inn twelve
+miles up the river: these were the words.
+
+"'Eilie is mine.  I am ready to meet you where you like.'"
+
+He went on with a painful evenness of speech.  "When I read those
+words, I had only one thought--to reach them; I ran down to the
+river, and chose out the lightest boat.  Just as I was starting, Tor
+came running.  'You dropped this letter, sir,' be said.  'Two pair of
+arms are better than one.'  He came into the boat.  I took the sculls
+and I pulled out into the stream.  I pulled like a madman; and that
+great man, with his bare arms crossed, was like a huge, tawny bull
+sitting there opposite me.  Presently he took my place, and I took
+the rudder lines.  I could see his chest, covered with hair, heaving
+up and down, it gave me a sort of comfort--it meant that we were
+getting nearer.  Then it grew dark, there was no moon, I could barely
+see the bank; there's something in the dark which drives one into
+oneself.  People tell you there comes a moment when your nature is
+decided--'saved' or 'lost' as they call it--for good or evil.  That
+is not true, your self is always with you, and cannot be altered;
+but, sir, I believe that in a time of agony one finds out what are
+the things one can do, and what are those one cannot.  You get to
+know yourself, that's all.  And so it was with me.  Every thought and
+memory and passion was so clear and strong!  I wanted to kill him.  I
+wanted to kill myself.  But her--no!  We are taught that we possess
+our wives, body and soul, we are brought up in that faith, we are
+commanded to believe it--but when I was face to face with it, those
+words had no meaning; that belief, those commands, they were without
+meaning to me, they were--vile.  Oh yes, I wanted to find comfort in
+them, I wanted to hold on to them--but I couldn't.  You may force a
+body; how can you force a soul?  No, no--cowardly!  But I wanted to--
+I wanted to kill him and force her to come back to me!  And then,
+suddenly, I felt as if I were pressing right on the most secret nerve
+of my heart.  I seemed to see her face, white and quivering, as if
+I'd stamped my heel on it.  They say this world is ruled by force; it
+may be true--I know I have a weak spot in me....  I couldn't bear it.
+At last I Jumped to my feet and shouted out, 'Turn the boat round!'
+Tor looked up at me as if I had gone mad.  And I had gone mad.  I
+seized the boat-hook and threatened him; I called him fearful names.
+'Sir,' he said, 'I don't take such names from any one!'  'You'll take
+them from me,' I shouted; 'turn the boat round, you idiot, you hound,
+you fish!...'  I have a terrible temper, a perfect curse to me.  He
+seemed amazed, even frightened; he sat down again suddenly and pulled
+the boat round.  I fell on the seat, and hid my face.  I believe the
+moon came up; there must have been a mist too, for I was cold as
+death.  In this life, sir, we cannot hide our faces--but by degrees
+the pain of wounds grows less.  Some will have it that such blows are
+mortal; it is not so.  Time is merciful.
+
+"In the early morning I went back to London.  I had fever on me--and
+was delirious.  I dare say I should have killed myself if I had not
+been so used to weapons--they and I were too old friends, I suppose--
+I can't explain.  It was a long while before I was up and about.
+Dalton nursed me through it; his great heavy moustache had grown
+quite white.  We never mentioned her; what was the good?  There were
+things to settle of course, the lawyer--this was unspeakably
+distasteful to me.  I told him it was to be as she wished, but the
+fellow would come to me, with his--there, I don't want to be unkind.
+I wished him to say it was my fault, but he said--I remember his
+smile now--he said, that was impossible, would be seen through,
+talked of collusion--I don't understand these things, and what's
+more, I can't bear them, they are--dirty.
+
+"Two years later, when I had come back to London, after the Russo-
+Turkish war, I received a letter from her.  I have it here."  He took
+an old, yellow sheet of paper out of a leathern pocketbook, spread it
+in his fingers, and sat staring at it.  For some minutes he did not
+speak.
+
+"In the autumn of that same year she died in childbirth.  He had
+deserted her.  Fortunately for him, he was killed on the Indian
+frontier, that very year.  If she had lived she would have been
+thirty-two next June; not a great age....  I know I am what they call
+a crank; doctors will tell you that you can't be cured of a bad
+illness, and be the same man again.  If you are bent, to force
+yourself straight must leave you weak in another place.  I must and
+will think well of women--everything done, and everything said
+against them is a stone on her dead body.  Could you sit, and listen
+to it?"  As though driven by his own question, he rose, and paced up
+and down.  He came back to the seat at last.
+
+"That, sir, is the reason of my behaviour this afternoon, and again
+this evening.  You have been so kind, I wanted!--wanted to tell you.
+She had a little daughter--Lucy has her now.  My friend Dalton is
+dead; there would have been no difficulty about money, but, I am
+sorry to say, that he was swindled--disgracefully.  It fell to me to
+administer his affairs--he never knew it, but he died penniless; he
+had trusted some wretched fellows--had an idea they would make his
+fortune.  As I very soon found, they had ruined him.  It was
+impossible to let Lucy--such a dear woman--bear that burden.  I have
+tried to make provision; but, you see," he took hold of my sleeve,
+"I, too, have not been fortunate; in fact, it's difficult to save a
+great deal out of L 190 a year; but the capital is perfectly safe--
+and I get L 47, 10s. a quarter, paid on the nail.  I have often been
+tempted to reinvest at a greater rate of interest, but I've never
+dared.  Anyway, there are no debts--I've been obliged to make a rule
+not to buy what I couldn't pay for on the spot....  Now I am really
+plaguing you--but I wanted to tell you--in case-anything should
+happen to me."  He seemed to take a sudden scare, stiffened, twisted
+his moustache, and muttering, "Your great kindness! Shall never
+forget!" turned hurriedly away.
+
+He vanished; his footsteps, and the tap of his stick grew fainter and
+fainter.  They died out.  He was gone.  Suddenly I got up and
+hastened after him.  I soon stopped--what was there to say?
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+The following day I was obliged to go to Nice, and did not return
+till midnight.  The porter told me that Jules le Ferrier had been to
+see me.  The next morning, while I was still in bed, the door was
+opened, and Jules appeared.  His face was very pale; and the moment
+he stood still drops of perspiration began coursing down his cheeks.
+
+"Georges!" he said, "he is dead.  There, there!  How stupid you look!
+My man is packing.  I have half an hour before the train; my evidence
+shall come from Italy.  I have done my part, the rest is for you.
+Why did you have that dinner?  The Don Quixote!  The idiot!  The poor
+man!  Don't move!  Have you a cigar?  Listen!  When you followed him,
+I followed the other two.  My infernal curiosity!  Can you conceive a
+greater folly?  How fast they walked, those two! feeling their
+cheeks, as if he had struck them both, you know; it was funny.  They
+soon saw me, for their eyes were all round about their heads; they
+had the mark of a glove on their cheeks."  The colour began to come
+back, into Jules's face; he gesticulated with his cigar and became
+more and more dramatic.  "They waited for me.  'Tiens!' said one,
+'this gentleman was with him.  My friend's name is M. Le Baron de---.
+The man who struck him was an odd-looking person; kindly inform me
+whether it is possible for my friend to meet him?'  Eh!" commented
+Jules, "he was offensive!  Was it for me to give our dignity away?
+'Perfectly, monsieur!'  I answered.  'In that case,' he said, 'please
+give me his name and ad dress....  I could not remember his name, and
+as for the address, I never knew it...!  I reflected. 'That,' I said,
+'I am unable to do, for special reasons.'  'Aha!' he said, 'reasons
+that will prevent our fighting him, I suppose?  'On the contrary,' I
+said.  'I will convey your request to him; I may mention that I have
+heard he is the best swordsman and pistol-shot in Europe.  Good-
+night!'  I wished to give them something to dream of, you
+understand....  Patience, my dear!  Patience!  I was, coming to you,
+but I thought I would let them sleep on it--there was plenty of time!
+But yesterday morning I came into the Place, and there he was on the
+bench, with a big dog.  I declare to you he blushed like a young
+girl.  'Sir,' he said, 'I was hoping to meet you; last evening I made
+a great disturbance.  I took an unpardonable liberty'--and he put in
+my hand an envelope.  My friend, what do you suppose it contained--a
+pair of gloves!  Senor Don Punctilioso, hein?  He was the devil, this
+friend of yours; he fascinated me with his gentle eyes and his white
+moustachettes, his humility, his flames--poor man...!  I told him I
+had been asked to take him a challenge.  'If anything comes of it,' I
+said, 'make use of me!'  'Is that so?' he said.  'I am most grateful
+for your kind offer.  Let me see--it is so long since I fought a
+duel.  The sooner it's over the better.  Could you arrange to-morrow
+morning?  Weapons?  Yes; let them choose.'  You see, my friend, there
+was no hanging back here; nous voila en train."
+
+Jules took out his watch.  "I have sixteen minutes.  It is lucky for
+you that you were away yesterday, or you would be in my shoes now.  I
+fixed the place, right hand of the road to Roquebrune, just by the
+railway cutting, and the time--five-thirty of the morning.  It was
+arranged that I should call for him.  Disgusting hour; I have not
+been up so early since I fought Jacques Tirbaut in '85.  At five
+o'clock I found him ready and drinking tea with rum in it--singular
+man! he made me have some too, brrr!  He was shaved, and dressed in
+that old frock-coat.  His great dog jumped into the carriage, but he
+bade her get out, took her paws on his shoulders, and whispered in
+her ear some Italian words; a charm, hein! and back she went, the
+tail between the legs.  We drove slowly, so as not to shake his arm.
+He was more gay than I.  All the way he talked to me of you: how kind
+you were! how good you had been to him!  'You do not speak of
+yourself!' I said.  'Have you no friends, nothing to say?  Sometimes
+an accident will happen!'  'Oh!' he answered, 'there is no danger;
+but if by any chance--well, there is a letter in my pocket.'  'And if
+you should kill him?' I said.  'But I shall not,' he answered slyly:
+'do you think I am going to fire at him?  No, no; he is too young.'
+'But,' I said, 'I-- 'I am not going to stand that!'  'Yes,' he
+replied, 'I owe him a shot; but there is no danger--not the least
+danger.'  We had arrived; already they were there.  Ah bah!  You know
+the preliminaries, the politeness--this duelling, you know, it is
+absurd, after all.  We placed them at twenty paces.  It is not a bad
+place.  There are pine-trees round, and rocks; at that hour it was
+cool and grey as a church.  I handed him the pistol.  How can I
+describe him to you, standing there, smoothing the barrel with his
+fingers!  'What a beautiful thing a good pistol!' he said.  'Only a
+fool or a madman throws away his life,' I said.  'Certainly,' he
+replied, 'certainly; but there is no danger,' and he regarded me,
+raising his moustachette.
+
+"There they stood then, back to back, with the mouths of their
+pistols to the sky.  ' Un!' I cried, 'deux! tirez!' They turned, I
+saw the smoke of his shot go straight up like a prayer; his pistol
+dropped.  I ran to him.  He looked surprised, put out his hand, and
+fell into my arms.  He was dead.  Those fools came running up.  'What
+is it?' cried one.  I made him a bow.  'As you see,' I said; 'you
+have made a pretty shot.  My friend fired in the air.  Messieurs, you
+had better breakfast in Italy.'  We carried him to the carriage, and
+covered him with a rug; the others drove for the frontier.  I brought
+him to his room.  Here is his letter."  Jules stopped; tears were
+running down his face.  "He is dead; I have closed his eyes.  Look
+here, you know, we are all of us cads--it is the rule; but this--
+this, perhaps, was the exception."  And without another word he
+rushed away....
+
+Outside the old fellow's lodging a dismounted cocher was standing
+disconsolate in the sun. "How was I to know they were going to fight
+a duel?" he burst out on seeing me.  "He had white hair--I call you
+to witness he had white hair.  This is bad for me: they will ravish
+my licence.  Aha! you will see--this is bad for me!"  I gave him the
+slip and found my way upstairs.  The old fellow was alone, lying on
+the bed, his feet covered with a rug as if he might feel cold; his
+eyes were closed, but in this sleep of death, he still had that air
+of faint surprise.  At full length, watching the bed intently, Freda
+lay, as she lay nightly when he was really asleep.  The shutters were
+half open; the room still smelt slightly of rum.  I stood for a long
+time looking at the face: the little white fans of moustache brushed
+upwards even in death, the hollows in his cheeks, the quiet of his
+figure; he was like some old knight....  The dog broke the spell.
+She sat up, and resting her paws on the bed, licked his face.  I went
+downstairs--I couldn't bear to hear her howl.  This was his letter to
+me, written in a pointed handwriting:
+
+"MY DEAR SIR,--Should you read this, I shall be gone.  I am ashamed
+to trouble you--a man should surely manage so as not to give trouble;
+and yet I believe you will not consider me importunate.  If, then,
+you will pick up the pieces of an old fellow, I ask you to have my
+sword, the letter enclosed in this, and the photograph that stands on
+the stove buried with me.  My will and the acknowledgments of my
+property are between the leaves of the Byron in my tin chest; they
+should go to Lucy Tor--address thereon.  Perhaps you will do me the
+honour to retain for yourself any of my books that may give you
+pleasure.  In the Pilgrim's Progress you will find some excellent
+recipes for Turkish coffee, Italian and Spanish dishes, and washing
+wounds.  The landlady's daughter speaks Italian, and she would, I
+know, like to have Freda; the poor dog will miss me.  I have read of
+old Indian warriors taking their horses and dogs with them to the
+happy hunting-grounds.  Freda would come--noble animals are dogs! She
+eats once a day--a good large meal--and requires much salt.  If you
+have animals of your own, sir, don't forget--all animals require
+salt.  I have no debts, thank God!  The money in my pockets would
+bury me decently--not that there is any danger.  And I am ashamed to
+weary you with details--the least a man can do is not to make a fuss-
+-and yet he must be found ready.--Sir, with profound gratitude, your
+servant,
+
+"ROGER BRUNE."
+
+
+Everything was as he had said.  The photograph on the stove was that
+of a young girl of nineteen or twenty, dressed in an old-fashioned
+style, with hair gathered backward in a knot.  The eyes gazed at you
+with a little frown, the lips were tightly closed; the expression of
+the face was eager, quick, wilful, and, above all, young.
+
+The tin trunk was scented with dry fragments of some herb, the
+history of which in that trunk man knoweth not....  There were a few
+clothes, but very few, all older than those he usually wore.  Besides
+the Byron and Pilgrim's Progress were Scott's Quentin Durward,
+Captain Marryat's Midshipman Easy, a pocket Testament, and a long and
+frightfully stiff book on the art of fortifying towns, much thumbed,
+and bearing date 1863.  By far the most interesting thing I found,
+however, was a diary, kept down to the preceding Christmas.  It was a
+pathetic document, full of calculations of the price of meals;
+resolutions to be careful over this or that; doubts whether he must
+not give up smoking; sentences of fear that Freda had not enough to
+eat.  It appeared that he had tried to live on ninety pounds a year,
+and send the other hundred pounds home to Lucy for the child; in this
+struggle he was always failing, having to send less than the amount-
+the entries showed that this was a nightmare to him.  The last words,
+written on Christmas Day, were these "What is the use of writing
+this, since it records nothing but failure!"
+
+The landlady's daughter and myself were at the funeral.  The same
+afternoon I went into the concert-room, where I had spoken to him
+first.  When I came out Freda was lying at the entrance, looking into
+the faces of every one that passed, and sniffing idly at their heels.
+Close by the landlady's daughter hovered, a biscuit in her hand, and
+a puzzled, sorry look on her face.
+
+September 1900.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+MY BROTHER
+
+HUBERT GALSWORTHY
+
+
+
+
+SALVATION OF A FORSYTE
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+Swithin Forsyte lay in bed.  The corners of his mouth under his white
+moustache drooped towards his double chin.  He panted:
+
+"My doctor says I'm in a bad way, James."
+
+His twin-brother placed his hand behind his ear.  "I can't hear you.
+They tell me I ought to take a cure.  There's always a cure wanted
+for something.  Emily had a cure."
+
+Swithin replied: "You mumble so.  I hear my man, Adolph.  I trained
+him....  You ought to have an ear-trumpet.  You're getting very
+shaky, James."
+
+There was silence; then James Forsyte, as if galvanised, remarked: "I
+s'pose you've made your will.  I s'pose you've left your money to the
+family; you've nobody else to leave it to.  There was Danson died the
+other day, and left his money to a hospital"
+
+The hairs of Swithin's white moustache bristled.  "My fool of a
+doctor told me to make my will," he said, "I hate a fellow who tells
+you to make your will.  My appetite's good; I ate a partridge last
+night.  I'm all the better for eating.  He told me to leave off
+champagne!  I eat a good breakfast.  I'm not eighty.  You're the same
+age, James.  You look very shaky."
+
+James Forsyte said: "You ought to have another opinion.  Have Blank;
+he's the first man now.  I had him for Emily; cost me two hundred
+guineas.  He sent her to Homburg; that's the first place now.  The
+Prince was there--everybody goes there."
+
+Swithin Forsyte answered: "I don't get any sleep at night, now I
+can't get out; and I've bought a new carriage--gave a pot of money
+for it.  D' you ever have bronchitis?  They tell me champagne's
+dangerous; it's my belief I couldn't take a better thing."
+
+James Forsyte rose.
+
+"You ought to have another opinion.  Emily sent her love; she would
+have come in, but she had to go to Niagara.  Everybody goes there;
+it's the place now.  Rachel goes every morning: she overdoes it--
+she'll be laid up one of these days.  There's a fancy ball there to-
+night; the Duke gives the prizes."
+
+Swithin Forsyte said angrily: "I can't get things properly cooked
+here; at the club I get spinach decently done."  The bed-clothes
+jerked at the tremor of his legs.
+
+James Forsyte replied: "You must have done well with Tintos; you must
+have made a lot of money by them.  Your ground-rents must be falling
+in, too.  You must have any amount you don't know what to do with."
+He mouthed the words, as if his lips were watering.
+
+Swithin Forsyte glared.  "Money!" he said; "my doctor's bill's
+enormous."
+
+James Forsyte stretched out a cold, damp hand "Goodbye! You ought to
+have another opinion.  I can't keep the horses waiting: they're a new
+pair--stood me in three hundred.  You ought to take care of yourself.
+I shall speak to Blank about you.  You ought to have him--everybody
+says he's the first man.  Good-bye!"
+
+Swithin Forsyte continued to stare at the ceiling.  He thought: 'A
+poor thing, James! a selfish beggar!  Must be worth a couple of
+hundred thousand!'  He wheezed, meditating on life....
+
+He was ill and lonely.  For many years he had been lonely, and for
+two years ill; but as he had smoked his first cigar, so he would live
+his life-stoutly, to its predestined end.  Every day he was driven to
+the club; sitting forward on the spring cushions of a single
+brougham, his hands on his knees, swaying a little, strangely solemn.
+He ascended the steps into that marble hall--the folds of his chin
+wedged into the aperture of his collar--walking squarely with a
+stick.  Later he would dine, eating majestically, and savouring his
+food, behind a bottle of champagne set in an ice-pail--his waistcoat
+defended by a napkin, his eyes rolling a little or glued in a stare
+on the waiter.  Never did he suffer his head or back to droop, for it
+was not distinguished so to do.
+
+Because he was old and deaf, he spoke to no one; and no one spoke to
+him.  The club gossip, an Irishman, said to each newcomer: "Old
+Forsyte!  Look at 'um!  Must ha' had something in his life to sour
+'um!"  But Swithin had had nothing in his life to sour him.
+
+For many days now he had lain in bed in a room exuding silver,
+crimson, and electric light, smelling of opopanax and of cigars.  The
+curtains were drawn, the firelight gleamed; on a table by his bed
+were a jug of barley-water and the Times.  He made an attempt to
+read, failed, and fell again to thinking.  His face with its square
+chin, looked like a block of pale leather bedded in the pillow.  It
+was lonely!  A woman in the room would have made all the difference!
+Why had he never married?  He breathed hard, staring froglike at the
+ceiling; a memory had come into his mind.  It was a long time ago--
+forty odd years--but it seemed like yesterday....
+
+It happened when he was thirty-eight, for the first and only time in
+his life travelling on the Continent, with his twin-brother James and
+a man named Traquair.  On the way from Germany to Venice, he had
+found himself at the Hotel Goldene Alp at Salzburg.  It was late
+August, and weather for the gods: sunshine on the walls and the
+shadows of the vine-leaves, and at night, the moonlight, and again on
+the walls the shadows of the vine-leaves.  Averse to the suggestions
+of other people, Swithin had refused to visit the Citadel; he had
+spent the day alone in the window of his bedroom, smoking a
+succession of cigars, and disparaging the appearance of the passers-
+by.  After dinner he was driven by boredom into the streets.  His
+chest puffed out like a pigeon's, and with something of a pigeon's
+cold and inquiring eye, he strutted, annoyed at the frequency of
+uniforms, which seemed to him both needless and offensive.  His
+spleen rose at this crowd of foreigners, who spoke an unintelligible
+language, wore hair on their faces, and smoked bad tobacco.  'A queer
+lot!' he thought.  The sound of music from a cafe attracted him; he
+walked in, vaguely moved by a wish for the distinction of adventure,
+without the trouble which adventure usually brought with it; spurred
+too, perhaps, by an after-dinner demon.  The cafe was the bier-halle
+of the 'Fifties, with a door at either end, and lighted by a large
+wooden lantern.  On a small dais three musicians were fiddling.
+Solitary men, or groups, sat at some dozen tables, and the waiters
+hurried about replenishing glasses; the air was thick with smoke.
+Swithin sat down.  "Wine!" he said sternly.  The astonished waiter
+brought him wine.  Swithin pointed to a beer glass on the table.
+"Here!" he said, with the same ferocity.  The waiter poured out the
+wine.  'Ah!' thought Swithin, 'they can understand if they like.'  A
+group of officers close by were laughing; Swithin stared at them
+uneasily.  A hollow cough sounded almost in his ear.  To his left a
+man sat reading, with his elbows on the corners of a journal, and his
+gaunt shoulders raised almost to his eyes.  He had a thin, long nose,
+broadening suddenly at the nostrils; a black-brown beard, spread in a
+savage fan over his chest; what was visible of the face was the
+colour of old parchment.  A strange, wild, haughty-looking creature!
+Swithin observed his clothes with some displeasure--they were the
+clothes of a journalist or strolling actor.  And yet he was
+impressed.  This was singular.  How could he be impressed by a fellow
+in such clothes!  The man reached out a hand, covered with black
+hairs, and took up a tumbler that contained a dark-coloured fluid.
+'Brandy!' thought Swithin.  The crash of a falling chair startled
+him--his neighbour had risen.  He was of immense height, and very
+thin; his great beard seemed to splash away from his mouth; he was
+glaring at the group of officers, and speaking.  Swithin made out two
+words: "Hunde! Deutsche Hunde!" 'Hounds! Dutch hounds!' he thought:
+'Rather strong!'  One of the officers had jumped up, and now drew his
+sword.  The tall man swung his chair up, and brought it down with a
+thud.  Everybody round started up and closed on him.  The tall man
+cried out, "To me, Magyars!"
+
+Swithin grinned.  The tall man fighting such odds excited his
+unwilling admiration; he had a momentary impulse to go to his
+assistance.  'Only get a broken nose!' he thought, and looked for a
+safe corner.  But at that moment a thrown lemon struck him on the
+jaw.  He jumped out of his chair and rushed at the officers.  The
+Hungarian, swinging his chair, threw him a look of gratitude--Swithin
+glowed with momentary admiration of himself.  A sword blade grazed
+his--arm; he felt a sudden dislike of the Hungarian.  'This is too
+much,' he thought, and, catching up a chair, flung it at the wooden
+lantern.  There was a crash--faces and swords vanished.  He struck a
+match, and by the light of it bolted for the door.  A second later he
+was in the street.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+A voice said in English, "God bless you, brother!"
+
+Swithin looked round, and saw the tall Hungarian holding out his
+hand.  He took it, thinking, 'What a fool I've been!'  There was
+something in the Hungarian's gesture which said, "You are worthy of
+me!'
+
+It was annoying, but rather impressive.  The man seemed even taller
+than before; there was a cut on his cheek, the blood from which was
+trickling down his beard.  "You English!" he said.  "I saw you stone
+Haynau--I saw you cheer Kossuth.  The free blood of your people cries
+out to us."  He looked at Swithin.  "You are a big man, you have a
+big soul--and strong, how you flung them down! Ha!"  Swithin had an
+impulse to take to his heels.  "My name," said the Hungarian, "is
+Boleskey.  You are my friend."  His English was good.
+
+'Bulsh-kai-ee, Burlsh-kai-ee,' thought Swithin; 'what a devil of a
+name!'  "Mine," he said sulkily, "is Forsyte."
+
+The Hungarian repeated it.
+
+"You've had a nasty jab on the cheek," said Swithin; the sight of the
+matted beard was making him feel sick.  The Hungarian put his fingers
+to his cheek, brought them away wet, stared at them, then with an
+indifferent air gathered a wisp of his beard and crammed it against
+the cut.
+
+"Ugh!" said Swithin.  "Here! Take my handkerchief!"
+
+The Hungarian bowed.  "Thank you!" he said; "I couldn't think of it!
+Thank you a thousand times!"
+
+"Take it!" growled Swithin; it seemed to him suddenly of the first
+importance.  He thrust the handkerchief into the Hungarian's hand,
+and felt a pain in his arm.  'There!' he thought, 'I've strained a
+muscle.'
+
+The Hungarian kept muttering, regardless of passers-by, "Swine! How
+you threw them over!  Two or three cracked heads, anyway--the
+cowardly swine!"
+
+"Look here!" said Swithin suddenly; "which is my way to the Goldene
+Alp?"
+
+The Hungarian replied, "But you are coming with me, for a glass of
+wine?"
+
+Swithin looked at the ground.  'Not if I know it!' he thought.
+
+"Ah!" said the Hungarian with dignity, "you do not wish for my
+friendship!"
+
+'Touchy beggar!' thought Swithin.  "Of course," he stammered, "if you
+put it in that way--"
+
+The Hungarian bowed, murmuring, "Forgive me!"
+
+They had not gone a dozen steps before a youth, with a beardless face
+and hollow cheeks, accosted them.  "For the love of Christ,
+gentlemen," he said, "help me!"
+
+"Are you a German?" asked Boleskey.
+
+"Yes," said the youth.
+
+"Then you may rot!"
+
+"Master, look here!" Tearing open his coat, the youth displayed his
+skin, and a leather belt drawn tight round it.  Again Swithin felt
+that desire to take to his heels.  He was filled with horrid
+forebodings--a sense of perpending intimacy with things such as no
+gentleman had dealings with.
+
+The Hungarian crossed himself.  "Brother," he said to the youth,
+"come you in!"
+
+Swithin looked at them askance, and followed.  By a dim light they
+groped their way up some stairs into a large room, into which the
+moon was shining through a window bulging over the street.  A lamp
+burned low; there was a smell of spirits and tobacco, with a faint,
+peculiar scent, as of rose leaves.  In one corner stood a czymbal, in
+another a great pile of newspapers.  On the wall hung some old-
+fashioned pistols, and a rosary of yellow beads.  Everything was
+tidily arranged, but dusty.  Near an open fireplace was a table with
+the remains of a meal.  The ceiling, floor, and walls were all of
+dark wood.  In spite of the strange disharmony, the room had a sort
+of refinement.  The Hungarian took a bottle out of a cupboard and,
+filling some glasses, handed one to Swithin.  Swithin put it gingerly
+to his nose.  'You never know your luck! Come!' he thought, tilting
+it slowly into his mouth.  It was thick, too sweet, but of a fine
+flavour.
+
+"Brothers!" said the Hungarian, refilling, "your healths!"
+
+The youth tossed off his wine.  And Swithin this time did the same;
+he pitied this poor devil of a youth now.  "Come round to-morrow!" he
+said, "I'll give you a shirt or two."  When the youth was gone,
+however, he remembered with relief that he had not given his address.
+
+'Better so,' he reflected.  'A humbug, no doubt.'
+
+"What was that you said to him?" he asked of the Hungarian.
+
+"I said," answered BoLeskey, "'You have eaten and drunk; and now you
+are my enemy!'"
+
+"Quite right!" said Swithin, "quite right! A beggar is every man's
+enemy."
+
+"You do not understand," the Hungarian replied politely.  "While he
+was a beggar--I, too, have had to beg" (Swithin thought, 'Good God!
+this is awful!'), "but now that he is no longer hungry, what is he
+but a German?  No Austrian dog soils my floors!"
+
+His nostrils, as it seemed to Swithin, had distended in an unpleasant
+fashion; and a wholly unnecessary raucousness invaded his voice.  "I
+am an exile--all of my blood are exiles.  Those Godless dogs!"
+Swithin hurriedly assented.
+
+As he spoke, a face peeped in at the door.
+
+"Rozsi!" said the Hungarian.  A young girl came in.  She was rather
+short, with a deliciously round figure and a thick plait of hair.
+She smiled, and showed her even teeth; her little, bright, wide-set
+grey eyes glanced from one man to the other.  Her face was round,
+too, high in the cheekbones, the colour of wild roses, with brows
+that had a twist-up at the corners.  With a gesture of alarm, she put
+her hand to her cheek, and called, "Margit!"  An older girl appeared,
+taller, with fine shoulders, large eyes, a pretty mouth, and what
+Swithin described to himself afterwards as a "pudding" nose.  Both
+girls, with little cooing sounds, began attending to their father's
+face.
+
+Swithin turned his back to them.  His arm pained him.
+
+'This is what comes of interfering,' he thought sulkily; 'I might
+have had my neck broken!' Suddenly a soft palm was placed in his, two
+eyes, half-fascinated, half-shy, looked at him; then a voice called,
+"Rozsi!" the door was slammed, he was alone again with the Hungarian,
+harassed by a sense of soft disturbance.
+
+"Your daughter's name is Rosy?" he said; "we have it in England--from
+rose, a flower."
+
+"Rozsi (Rozgi)," the Hungarian replied; "your English is a hard
+tongue, harder than French, German, or Czechish, harder than Russian,
+or Roumanian--I know no more."
+
+"What?" said Swithin, "six languages?"  Privately he thought, 'He
+knows how to lie, anyway.'
+
+"If you lived in a country like mine," muttered the Hungarian, "with
+all men's hands against you!  A free people--dying--but not dead!"
+
+Swithin could not imagine what he was talking of.  This man's face,
+with its linen bandage, gloomy eyes, and great black wisps of beard,
+his fierce mutterings, and hollow cough, were all most unpleasant.
+He seemed to be suffering from some kind of mental dog-bite.  His
+emotion indeed appeared so indecent, so uncontrolled and open, that
+its obvious sincerity produced a sort of awe in Swithin.  It was like
+being forced to look into a furnace.  Boleskey stopped roaming up and
+down.  "You think it's over?" he said; "I tell you, in the breast of
+each one of us Magyars there is a hell.  What is sweeter than life?
+What is more sacred than each breath we draw?  Ah! my country!"
+These words were uttered so slowly, with such intense mournfulness,
+that Swithin's jaw relaxed; he converted the movement to a yawn.
+
+"Tell me," said Boleskey, "what would you do if the French conquered
+you?"
+
+Swithin smiled.  Then suddenly, as though something had hurt him, he
+grunted, "The 'Froggies'?  Let 'em try!"
+
+"Drink!" said Boleskey--"there is nothing like it"; he filled
+Swithin's glass.  "I will tell you my story."
+
+Swithin rose hurriedly.  "It's late," he said.  "This is good stuff,
+though; have you much of it?"
+
+"It is the last bottle."
+
+"What?" said Swithin; "and you gave it to a beggar?"
+
+"My name is Boleskey--Stefan," the Hungarian said, raising his head;
+"of the Komorn Boleskeys."  The simplicity of this phrase--as who
+shall say: What need of further description?--made an impression on
+Swithin; he stopped to listen.  Boleskey's story went on and on.
+"There were many abuses," boomed his deep voice, "much wrong done--
+much cowardice.  I could see clouds gathering--rolling over our
+plains.  The Austrian wished to strangle the breath of our mouths--to
+take from us the shadow of our liberty--the shadow--all we had.  Two
+years ago--the year of '48, when every man and boy answered the great
+voice--brother, a dog's life!--to use a pen when all of your blood
+are fighting, but it was decreed for me!  My son was killed; my
+brothers taken--and myself was thrown out like a dog--I had written
+out my heart, I had written out all the blood that was in my body!"
+He seemed to tower, a gaunt shadow of a man, with gloomy, flickering
+eyes staring at the wall.
+
+Swithin rose, and stammered, "Much obliged--very interesting."
+Boleskey made no effort to detain him, but continued staring at the
+wall.  "Good-night!" said Swithin, and stamped heavily downstairs.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+When at last Swithin reached the Goldene Alp, he found his brother
+and friend standing uneasily at the door.  Traquair, a prematurely
+dried-up man, with whiskers and a Scotch accent, remarked, "Ye're
+airly, man!"  Swithin growled something unintelligible, and swung up
+to bed.  He discovered a slight cut on his arm.  He was in a savage
+temper--the elements had conspired to show him things he did not want
+to see; yet now and then a memory of Rozsi, of her soft palm in his,
+a sense of having been stroked and flattered, came over him.  During
+breakfast next morning his brother and Traquair announced their
+intention of moving on.  James Forsyte, indeed, remarked that it was
+no place for a "collector," since all the "old" shops were in the
+hands of Jews or very grasping persons--he had discovered this at
+once.  Swithin pushed his cup aside.  "You may do what you like," he
+said, "I'm staying here."
+
+James Forsyte replied, tumbling over his own words: "Why! what do you
+want to stay here for?  There's nothing for you to do here--there's
+nothing to see here, unless you go up the Citadel, an' you won't do
+that."
+
+Swithin growled, "Who says so?"  Having gratified his perversity, he
+felt in a better temper.  He had slung his arm in a silk sash, and
+accounted for it by saying he had slipped.  Later he went out and
+walked on to the bridge.  In the brilliant sunshine spires were
+glistening against the pearly background of the hills; the town had a
+clean, joyous air.  Swithin glanced at the Citadel and thought,
+'Looks a strong place! Shouldn't wonder if it were impregnable!'  And
+this for some occult reason gave him pleasure.  It occurred to him
+suddenly to go and look for the Hungarian's house.
+
+About noon, after a hunt of two hours, he was gazing about him
+blankly, pale with heat, but more obstinate than ever, when a voice
+above him called, "Mister!" He looked up and saw Rozsi.  She was
+leaning her round chin on her round hand, gazing down at him with her
+deepset, clever eyes.  When Swithin removed his hat, she clapped her
+hands.  Again he had the sense of being admired, caressed.  With a
+careless air, that sat grotesquely on his tall square person, he
+walked up to the door; both girls stood in the passage.  Swithin felt
+a confused desire to speak in some foreign tongue.  "Maam'selles," he
+began, "er--bong jour-er, your father--pare, comment?"
+
+"We also speak English," said the elder girl; "will you come in,
+please?"
+
+Swithin swallowed a misgiving, and entered.  The room had a worn
+appearance by daylight, as if it had always been the nest of tragic
+or vivid lives.  He sat down, and his eyes said: "I am a stranger,
+but don't try to get the better of me, please--that is impossible."
+The girls looked at him in silence.  Rozsi wore a rather short skirt
+of black stuff, a white shirt, and across her shoulders an
+embroidered yoke; her sister was dressed in dark green, with a coral
+necklace; both girls had their hair in plaits.  After a minute Rozsi
+touched the sleeve of his hurt arm.
+
+"It's nothing!" muttered Swithin.
+
+"Father fought with a chair, but you had no chair," she said in a
+wondering voice.
+
+He doubled the fist of his sound arm and struck a blow at space.  To
+his amazement she began to laugh.  Nettled at this, he put his hand
+beneath the heavy table and lifted it.  Rozsi clapped her hands.  "Ah
+I now I see--how strong you are!"  She made him a curtsey and whisked
+round to the window.  He found the quick intelligence of her eyes
+confusing; sometimes they seemed to look beyond him at something
+invisible--this, too, confused him.  From Margit he learned that they
+had been two years in England, where their father had made his living
+by teaching languages; they had now been a year in Salzburg.
+
+"We wait," suddenly said.  Rozsi; and Margit, with a solemn face,
+repeated, "We wait."
+
+Swithin's eyes swelled a little with his desire to see what they were
+waiting for.  How queer they were, with their eyes that gazed beyond
+him!  He looked at their figures.  'She would pay for dressing,' he
+thought, and he tried to imagine Rozsi in a skirt with proper
+flounces, a thin waist, and hair drawn back over her ears.  She would
+pay for dressing, with that supple figure, fluffy hair, and little
+hands!  And instantly his own hands, face, and clothes disturbed him.
+He got up, examined the pistols on the wall, and felt resentment at
+the faded, dusty room.  'Smells like a pot-house!' he thought.  He
+sat down again close to Rozsi.
+
+"Do you love to dance?" she asked; "to dance is to live.  First you
+hear the music--how your feet itch!  It is wonderful!  You begin
+slow, quick--quicker; you fly--you know nothing--your feet are in the
+air.  It is wonderful!"
+
+A slow flush had mounted into Swithin's face.
+
+"Ah!" continued Rozsi, her eyes fixed on him, "when I am dancing--out
+there I see the plains--your feet go one--two--three--quick, quick,
+quick, quicker--you fly."
+
+She stretched herself, a shiver seemed to pass all down her.
+"Margit! dance!" and, to Swithin's consternation, the two girls--
+their hands on each other's shoulders--began shuffling their feet and
+swaying to and fro.  Their heads were thrown back, their eyes half-
+closed; suddenly the step quickened, they swung to one side, then to
+the other, and began whirling round in front of him.  The sudden
+fragrance of rose leaves enveloped him.  Round they flew again.
+While they were still dancing, Boleskey came into the room.  He
+caught Swithin by both hands.
+
+"Brother, welcome! Ah! your arm is hurt! I do not forget."  His
+yellow face and deep-set eyes expressed a dignified gratitude.  "Let
+me introduce to you my friend Baron Kasteliz."
+
+Swithin bowed to a man with a small forehead, who had appeared
+softly, and stood with his gloved hands touching his waist.  Swithin
+conceived a sudden aversion for this catlike man.  About Boleskey
+there was that which made contempt impossible--the sense of
+comradeship begotten in the fight; the man's height; something lofty
+and savage in his face; and an obscure instinct that it would not pay
+to show distaste; but this Kasteliz, with his neat jaw, low brow, and
+velvety, volcanic look, excited his proper English animosity.  "Your
+friends are mine," murmured Kasteliz.  He spoke with suavity, and
+hissed his s's.  A long, vibrating twang quavered through the room.
+Swithin turned and saw Rozsi sitting at the czymbal; the notes rang
+under the little hammers in her hands, incessant, metallic, rising
+and falling with that strange melody.  Kasteliz had fixed his glowing
+eyes on her; Boleskey, nodding his head, was staring at the floor;
+Margit, with a pale face, stood like a statue.
+
+'What can they see in it?' thought Swithin; 'it's not a tune.'  He
+took up his hat.  Rozsi saw him and stopped; her lips had parted with
+a faintly dismayed expression.  His sense of personal injury
+diminished; he even felt a little sorry for her.  She jumped up from
+her seat and twirled round with a pout.  An inspiration seized on
+Swithin.  "Come and dine with me," he said to Boleskey, "to-morrow--
+the Goldene Alp--bring your friend."  He felt the eyes of the whole
+room on him--the Hungarian's fine eyes; Margit's wide glance; the
+narrow, hot gaze of Kasteliz; and lastly--Rozsi's.  A glow of
+satisfaction ran down his spine.  When he emerged into the street
+he thought gloomily, 'Now I've done it!' And not for some paces did
+he look round; then, with a forced smile, turned and removed his hat
+to the faces at the window.
+
+Notwithstanding this moment of gloom, however, he was in an exalted
+state all day, and at dinner kept looking at his brother and Traquair
+enigmatically.  'What do they know of life?' he thought; 'they might
+be here a year and get no farther.'  He made jokes, and pinned the
+menu to the waiter's coat-tails.  "I like this place," he said, "I
+shall spend three weeks here."  James, whose lips were on the point
+of taking in a plum, looked at him uneasily.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+On the day of the dinner Swithin suffered a good deal.  He reflected
+gloomily on Boleskey's clothes.  He had fixed an early hour--there
+would be fewer people to see them.  When the time approached he
+attired himself with a certain neat splendour, and though his arm was
+still sore, left off the sling....
+
+Nearly three hours afterwards he left the Goldene Alp between his
+guests.  It was sunset, and along the riverbank the houses stood out,
+unsoftened by the dusk; the streets were full of people hurrying
+home.  Swithin had a hazy vision of empty bottles, of the ground
+before his feet, and the accessibility of all the world.  Dim
+recollections of the good things he had said, of his brother and
+Traquair seated in the background eating ordinary meals with
+inquiring, acid visages, caused perpetual smiles to break out on his
+face, and he steered himself stubbornly, to prove that he was a
+better man than either' of his guests.  He knew, vaguely, that he was
+going somewhere with an object; Rozsi's face kept dancing before him,
+like a promise.  Once or twice he gave Kasteliz a glassy stare.
+Towards Boleskey, on the other hand, he felt quite warm, and recalled
+with admiration the way he had set his glass down empty, time after
+time.  'I like to see him take his liquor,' he thought; 'the fellow's
+a gentleman, after all.'  Boleskey strode on, savagely inattentive to
+everything; and Kasteliz had become more like a cat than ever.  It
+was nearly dark when they reached a narrow street close to the
+cathedral.  They stopped at a door held open by an old woman.  The
+change from the fresh air to a heated corridor, the noise of the door
+closed behind him, the old woman's anxious glances, sobered Swithin.
+
+"I tell her," said Boleskey, "that I reply for you as for my son."
+
+Swithin was angry.  What business had this man to reply for him!
+
+They passed into a large room, crowded with men all women; Swithin
+noticed that they all looked fit him.  He stared at them in turn--
+they seemed of all classes, some in black coats or silk dresses,
+others in the clothes of work-people; one man, a cobbler, still wore
+his leather apron, as if he had rushed there straight from his work.
+Laying his hand on Swithin's arm, Boleskey evidently began explaining
+who he was; hands were extended, people beyond reach bowed to him.
+Swithin acknowledged the greetings with a stiff motion of his head;
+then seeing other people dropping into seats, he, too, sat down.
+Some one whispered his name--Margit and Rozsi were just behind him.
+
+"Welcome!" said Margit; but Swithin was looking at Rozsi.  Her face
+was so alive and quivering!  'What's the excitement all about?' he
+thought.  'How pretty she looks!'  She blushed, drew in her hands
+with a quick tense movement, and gazed again beyond him into the
+room.  'What is it?' thought Swithin; he had a longing to lean back
+and kiss her lips.  He tried angrily to see what she was seeing in
+those faces turned all one way.
+
+Boleskey rose to speak.  No one moved; not a sound could be heard but
+the tone of his deep voice.  On and on he went, fierce and solemn,
+and with the rise of his voice, all those faces-fair or swarthy--
+seemed to be glowing with one and the same feeling.  Swithin felt the
+white heat in those faces--it was not decent!  In that whole speech
+he only understood the one word--"Magyar" which came again and again.
+He almost dozed off at last.  The twang of a czymbal woke him.
+'What?' he thought, 'more of that infernal music!' Margit, leaning
+over him, whispered: "Listen! Racoczy! It is forbidden!" Swithin saw
+that Rozsi was no longer in her seat; it was she who was striking
+those forbidden notes.  He looked round--everywhere the same unmoving
+faces, the same entrancement, and fierce stillness.  The music
+sounded muffled, as if it, too, were bursting its heart in silence.
+Swithin felt within him a touch of panic.  Was this a den of tigers?
+The way these people listened, the ferocity of their stillness, was
+frightful...!  He gripped his chair and broke into a perspiration;
+was there no chance to get away?  'When it stops,' he thought,
+'there'll be a rush!'  But there was only a greater silence.  It
+flashed across him that any hostile person coming in then would be
+torn to pieces.  A woman sobbed.  The whole thing was beyond words
+unpleasant.  He rose, and edged his way furtively towards the
+doorway.  There was a cry of "Police!"  The whole crowd came pressing
+after him.  Swithin would soon have been out, but a little behind he
+caught sight of Rozsi swept off her feet.  Her frightened eyes
+angered him.  'She doesn't deserve it,' he thought sulkily; 'letting
+all this loose!' and forced his way back to her.  She clung to him,
+and a fever went stealing through his veins; he butted forward at the
+crowd, holding her tight.  When they were outside he let her go.
+
+"I was afraid," she said.
+
+"Afraid!" muttered Swithin; "I should think so."  No longer touching
+her, he felt his grievance revive.
+
+"But you are so strong," she murmured.
+
+"This is no place for you," growled Swithin, "I'm going to see you
+home."
+
+"Oh!" cried Rozsi; "but papa and--Margit!"
+
+"That's their look-out!" and he hurried her away.
+
+She slid her hand under his arm; the soft curves of her form brushed
+him gently, each touch only augmented his ill-humour.  He burned with
+a perverse rage, as if all the passions in him were simmering and
+ready to boil over; it was as if a poison were trying to work its way
+out of him, through the layers of his stolid flesh.  He maintained a
+dogged silence; Rozsi, too, said nothing, but when they reached the
+door, she drew her hand away.
+
+"You are angry!" she said.
+
+"Angry," muttered Swithin; "no! How d'you make that out?"  He had a
+torturing desire to kiss her.
+
+"Yes, you are angry," she repeated; " I wait here for papa and
+Margit."
+
+Swithin also waited, wedged against the wall.  Once or twice, for his
+sight was sharp, he saw her steal a look at him, a beseeching look,
+and hardened his heart with a kind of pleasure.  After five minutes
+Boleskey, Margit, and Kasteliz appeared.  Seeing Rozsi they broke
+into exclamations of relief, and Kasteliz, with a glance at Swithin,
+put his lips to her hand.  Rozsi's look said, "Wouldn't you like to
+do that?"  Swithin turned short on his heel, and walked away.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+All night he hardly slept, suffering from fever, for the first time
+in his life.  Once he jumped out of bed, lighted a candle, and going
+to the glass, scrutinised himself long and anxiously.  After this he
+fell asleep, but had frightful dreams.  His first thought when he
+woke was, 'My liver's out of order!' and, thrusting his head into
+cold water, he dressed hastily and went out.  He soon left the house
+behind.  Dew covered everything; blackbirds whistled in the bushes;
+the air was fresh and sweet.  He had not been up so early since he
+was a boy.  Why was he walking through a damp wood at this hour of
+the morning?  Something intolerable and unfamiliar must have sent him
+out.  No fellow in his senses would do such a thing!  He came to a
+dead stop, and began unsteadily to walk back.  Regaining the hotel,
+he went to bed again, and dreamed that in some wild country he was
+living in a room full of insects, where a housemaid--Rozsi--holding a
+broom, looked at him with mournful eyes.  There seemed an unexplained
+need for immediate departure; he begged her to forward his things;
+and shake them out carefully before she put them into the trunk.  He
+understood that the charge for sending would be twenty-two shillings,
+thought it a great deal, and had the horrors of indecision.  "No," he
+muttered, "pack, and take them myself."  The housemaid turned
+suddenly into a lean creature; and he awoke with a sore feeling in
+his heart.
+
+His eye fell on his wet boots.  The whole thing was scaring, and
+jumping up, he began to throw his clothes into his trunks.  It was
+twelve o'clock before he went down, and found his brother and
+Traquair still at the table arranging an itinerary; he surprised them
+by saying that he too was coming; and without further explanation set
+to work to eat.  James had heard that there were salt-mines in the
+neighbourhood--his proposal was to start, and halt an hour or so on
+the road for their inspection; he said: "Everybody'll ask you if
+you've seen the salt-mines: I shouldn't like to say I hadn't seen the
+salt-mines.  What's the good, they'd say, of your going there if you
+haven't seen the salt-mines?"  He wondered, too, if they need fee the
+second waiter--an idle chap!
+
+A discussion followed; but Swithin ate on glumly, conscious that his
+mind was set on larger affairs.  Suddenly on the far side of the
+street Rozsi and her sister passed, with little baskets on their
+arms.  He started up, and at that moment Rozsi looked round--her face
+was the incarnation of enticement, the chin tilted, the lower lip
+thrust a little forward, her round neck curving back over her
+shoulder.  Swithin muttered, "Make your own arrangements--leave me
+out!" and hurried from the room, leaving James beside himself with
+interest and alarm.
+
+When he reached the street, however, the girls had disappeared.  He
+hailed a carriage.  "Drive!" he called to the man, with a flourish of
+his stick, and as soon as the wheels had begun to clatter on the
+stones he leaned back, looking sharply to right and left.  He soon
+had to give up thought of finding them, but made the coachman turn
+round and round again.  All day he drove about, far into the country,
+and kept urging the driver to use greater speed.  He was in a strange
+state of hurry and elation.  Finally, he dined at a little country
+inn; and this gave the measure of his disturbance--the dinner was
+atrocious.
+
+Returning late in the evening he found a note written by Traquair.
+"Are you in your senses, man?" it asked; "we have no more time to
+waste idling about here.  If you want to rejoin us, come on to
+Danielli's Hotel, Venice."  Swithin chuckled when he read it, and
+feeling frightfully tired, went to bed and slept like a log.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Three weeks later he was still in Salzburg, no longer at the Goldene
+Alp, but in rooms over a shop near the Boleskeys'.  He had spent a
+small fortune in the purchase of flowers.  Margit would croon over
+them, but Rozsi, with a sober "Many tanks!" as if they were her
+right, would look long at herself in the glass, and pin one into her
+hair.  Swithin ceased to wonder; he ceased to wonder at anything they
+did.  One evening he found Boleskey deep in conversation with a pale,
+dishevelled-looking person.
+
+"Our friend Mr. Forsyte--Count D....," said Boleskey.
+
+Swithin experienced a faint, unavoidable emotion; but looking at the
+Count's trousers, he thought: 'Doesn't look much like one!'  And with
+an ironic bow to the silent girls, he turned, and took his hat.  But
+when he had reached the bottom of the dark stairs he heard footsteps.
+Rozsi came running down, looked out at the door, and put her hands up
+to her breast as if disappointed; suddenly with a quick glance round
+she saw him.  Swithin caught her arm.  She slipped away, and her face
+seemed to bubble with defiance or laughter; she ran up three steps,
+stopped, looked at him across her shoulder, and fled on up the
+stairs.  Swithin went out bewildered and annoyed.
+
+'What was she going to say to me?' he kept thinking.  During these
+three weeks he had asked himself all sorts of questions: whether he
+were being made a fool of; whether she were in love with him; what he
+was doing there, and sometimes at night, with all his candles burning
+as if he wanted light, the breeze blowing on him through the window,
+his cigar, half-smoked, in his hand, he sat, an hour or more, staring
+at the wall.  'Enough of this!' he thought every morning.  Twice he
+packed fully--once he ordered his travelling carriage, but
+countermanded it the following day.  What definitely he hoped,
+intended, resolved, he could not have said.  He was always thinking
+of Rozsi, he could not read the riddle in her face--she held him in a
+vice, notwithstanding that everything about her threatened the very
+fetishes of his existence.  And Boleskey!  Whenever he looked at him
+he thought, 'If he were only clean?' and mechanically fingered his
+own well-tied cravatte.  To talk with the fellow, too, was like being
+forced to look at things which had no place in the light of day.
+Freedom, equality, self-sacrifice!
+
+'Why can't he settle down at some business,' he thought, 'instead of
+all this talk?' Boleskey's sudden diffidences, self-depreciation,
+fits of despair, irritated him.  "Morbid beggar!" he would mutter;
+"thank God I haven't a thin skin."  And proud too!  Extraordinary!
+An impecunious fellow like that!  One evening, moreover, Boleskey had
+returned home drunk.  Swithin had hustled him away into his bedroom,
+helped him to undress, and stayed until he was asleep.  'Too much of
+a good thing!' he thought, 'before his own daughters, too!'  It was
+after this that he ordered his travelling carriage.  The other
+occasion on which he packed was one evening, when not only Boleskey,
+but Rozsi herself had picked chicken bones with her fingers.
+
+Often in the mornings he would go to the Mirabell Garden to smoke his
+cigar; there, in stolid contemplation of the statues--rows of half-
+heroic men carrying off half-distressful females--he would spend an
+hour pleasantly, his hat tilted to keep the sun off his nose.  The
+day after Rozsi had fled from him on the stairs, he came there as
+usual.  It was a morning of blue sky and sunlight glowing on the old
+prim garden, on its yew-trees, and serio-comic statues, and walls
+covered with apricots and plums.  When Swithin approached his usual
+seat, who should be sitting there but Rozsi
+
+"Good-morning," he stammered; "you knew this was my seat then?"
+
+Rozsi looked at the ground.  "Yes," she answered.
+
+Swithin felt bewildered.  "Do you know," he said, "you treat me very
+funnily?"
+
+To his surprise Rozsi put her little soft hand down and touched his;
+then, without a word, sprang up and rushed away.  It took him a
+minute to recover.  There were people present; he did not like to
+run, but overtook her on the bridge, and slipped her hand beneath his
+arm.
+
+"You shouldn't have done that," he said; "you shouldn't have run away
+from me, you know."
+
+Rozsi laughed.  Swithin withdrew his arm; a desire to shake her
+seized him.  He walked some way before he said, "Will you have the
+goodness to tell me what you came to that seat for?"
+
+Rozsi flashed a look at him.  "To-morrow is the fete," she answered.
+
+Swithin muttered, "Is that all?"
+
+"If you do not take us, we cannot go."
+
+"Suppose I refuse," he said sullenly, "there are plenty of others."
+
+Rozsi bent her head, scurrying along.  "No," she murmured, "if you do
+not go--I do not wish."
+
+Swithin drew her hand back within his arm.  How round and soft it
+was!  He tried to see her face.  When she was nearly home he said
+goodbye, not wishing, for some dark reason, to be seen with her.  He
+watched till she had disappeared; then slowly retraced his steps to
+the Mirabell Garden.  When he came to where she had been sitting, he
+slowly lighted his cigar, and for a long time after it was smoked out
+remained there in the silent presence of the statues.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+A crowd of people wandered round the booths, and Swithin found
+himself obliged to give the girls his arms.  'Like a little Cockney
+clerk!' he thought.  His indignation passed unnoticed; they talked,
+they laughed, each sight and sound in all the hurly-burly seemed to
+go straight into their hearts.  He eyed them ironically--their eager
+voices, and little coos of sympathy seemed to him vulgar.  In the
+thick of the crowd he slipped his arm out of Margit's, but, just as
+he thought that he was free, the unwelcome hand slid up again.  He
+tried again, but again Margit reappeared, serene, and full of
+pleasant humour; and his failure this time appeared to him in a comic
+light.  But when Rozsi leaned across him, the glow of her round
+cheek, her curving lip, the inscrutable grey gleam of her eyes, sent
+a thrill of longing through him.  He was obliged to stand by while
+they parleyed with a gipsy, whose matted locks and skinny hands
+inspired him with a not unwarranted disgust.  "Folly!" he muttered,
+as Rozsi held out her palm.  The old woman mumbled, and shot a
+malignant look at him.  Rozsi drew back her hand, and crossed
+herself.  ' Folly!' Swithin thought again; and seizing the girls'
+arms, he hurried them away.
+
+"What did the old hag say?" he asked.
+
+Rozsi shook her head.
+
+"You don't mean that you believe?"
+
+Her eyes were full of tears.  "The gipsies are wise," she murmured.
+
+"Come, what did she tell you?"
+
+This time Rozsi looked hurriedly round, and slipped away into the
+crowd.  After a hunt they found her, and Swithin, who was scared,
+growled: "You shouldn't do such things--it's not respectable."
+
+On higher ground, in the centre of a clear space, a military band was
+playing.  For the privilege of entering this charmed circle Swithin
+paid three kronen, choosing naturally the best seats.  He ordered
+wine, too, watching Rozsi out of the corner of his eye as he poured
+it out.  The protecting tenderness of yesterday was all lost in this
+medley.  It was every man for himself, after all!  The colour had
+deepened again in her cheeks, she laughed, pouting her lips.
+Suddenly she put her glass aside.  "Thank you, very much," she said,
+"it is enough!"
+
+Margit, whose pretty mouth was all smiles, cried, "Lieber Gott! is it
+not good-life?"  It was not a question Swithin could undertake to
+answer.  The band began to play a waltz.  "Now they will dance.
+Lieber Gott! and are the lights not wonderful?"  Lamps were
+flickering beneath the trees like a swarm of fireflies.  There was a
+hum as from a gigantic beehive.  Passers-by lifted their faces, then
+vanished into the crowd; Rozsi stood gazing at them spellbound, as if
+their very going and coming were a delight.
+
+The space was soon full of whirling couples.  Rozsi's head began to
+beat time.  "O Margit!" she whispered.
+
+Swithin's face had assumed a solemn, uneasy expression.  A man
+raising his hat, offered his arm to Margit.  She glanced back across
+her shoulder to reassure Swithin.  "It is a friend," she said.
+
+Swithin looked at Rozsi--her eyes were bright, her lips tremulous.
+He slipped his hand along the table and touched her fingers.  Then
+she flashed a look at him--appeal, reproach, tenderness, all were
+expressed in it.  Was she expecting him to dance?  Did she want to
+mix with the rift-raff there; wish him to make an exhibition of
+himself in this hurly-burly?  A voice said, "Good-evening!"  Before
+them stood Kasteliz, in a dark coat tightly buttoned at the waist.
+
+"You are not dancing, Rozsi Kozsanony?" (Miss Rozsi).  "Let me, then,
+have the pleasure."  He held out his arm.  Swithin stared in front of
+him.  In the very act of going she gave him a look that said as plain
+as words: "Will you not?"  But for answer he turned his eyes away,
+and when he looked again she was gone.  He paid the score and made
+his way into the crowd.  But as he went she danced by close to him,
+all flushed and panting.  She hung back as if to stop him, and he
+caught the glistening of tears.  Then he lost sight of her again.  To
+be deserted the first minute he was alone with her, and for that
+jackanapes with the small head and the volcanic glances!  It was too
+much!  And suddenly it occurred to him that she was alone with
+Kasteliz--alone at night, and far from home.  ' Well,' he thought,
+'what do I care?' and shouldered his way on through the crowd.  It
+served him right for mixing with such people here.  He left the fair,
+but the further he went, the more he nursed his rage, the more
+heinous seemed her offence, the sharper grew his jealousy.  "A
+beggarly baron!" was his thought.
+
+A figure came alongside--it was Boleskey.  One look showed Swithin
+his condition.  Drunk again!  This was the last straw!
+
+Unfortunately Boleskey had recognised him.  He seemed violently
+excited.  "Where--where are my daughters?" he began.
+
+Swithin brushed past, but Boleskey caught his arm.  "Listen--
+brother!" he said; "news of my country!  After to-morrow...."
+
+"Keep it to yourself!" growled Swithin, wrenching his arm free.  He
+went straight to his lodgings, and, lying on the hard sofa of his
+unlighted sitting-room, gave himself up to bitter thoughts.  But in
+spite of all his anger, Rozsi's supply-moving figure, with its
+pouting lips, and roguish appealing eyes, still haunted him.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Next morning there was not a carriage to be had, and Swithin was
+compelled to put off his departure till the morrow.  The day was grey
+and misty; he wandered about with the strained, inquiring look of a
+lost dog in his eyes.
+
+Late in the afternoon he went back to his lodgings.  In a corner of
+the sitting-room stood Rozsi.  The thrill of triumph, the sense of
+appeasement, the emotion, that seized on him, crept through to his
+lips in a faint smile.  Rozsi made no sound, her face was hidden by
+her hands.  And this silence of hers weighed on Swithin.  She was
+forcing him to break it.  What was behind her hands?  His own face
+was visible!  Why didn't she speak?  Why was she here?  Alone?  That
+was not right surely.
+
+Suddenly Rozsi dropped her hands; her flushed face was quivering--it
+seemed as though a word, a sign, even, might bring a burst of tears.
+
+He walked over to the window.  'I must give her time!' he thought;
+then seized by unreasoning terror at this silence, spun round, and
+caught her by the arms.  Rozsi held back from him, swayed forward and
+buried her face on his breast....
+
+Half an hour later Swithin was pacing up and down his room.  The
+scent of rose leaves had not yet died away.  A glove lay on the
+floor; he picked it up, and for a long time stood weighing it in his
+hand.  All sorts of confused thoughts and feelings haunted him.  It
+was the purest and least selfish moment of his life, this moment
+after she had yielded.  But that pure gratitude at her fiery, simple
+abnegation did not last; it was followed by a petty sense of triumph,
+and by uneasiness.  He was still weighing the little glove in his
+hand, when he had another visitor.  It was Kasteliz.
+
+"What can I do for you?" Swithin asked ironically.
+
+The Hungarian seemed suffering from excitement.  Why had Swithin left
+his charges the night before?  What excuse had he to make?  What sort
+of conduct did he call this?
+
+Swithin, very like a bull-dog at that moment, answered: What business
+was it of his?
+
+The business of a gentleman!  What right had the Englishman to pursue
+a young girl?
+
+"Pursue?" said Swithin; "you've been spying, then?"
+
+"Spying--I--Kasteliz--Maurus Johann--an insult!"
+
+"Insult!" sneered Swithin; d'you mean to tell me you weren't in the
+street just now?"
+
+Kasteliz answered with a hiss, "If you do not leave the city I will
+make you, with my sword--do you understand?"
+
+"And if you do not leave my room I will throw you out of the window!"
+
+For some minutes Kasteliz spoke in pure Hungarian while Swithin
+waited, with a forced smile and a fixed look in his eye.  He did not
+understand Hungarian.
+
+"If you are still in the city to-morrow evening," said Kasteliz at
+last in English, " I will spit you in the street."
+
+Swithin turned to the window and watched his visitor's retiring back
+with a queer mixture of amusement, stubbornness, and anxiety.
+'Well,' he thought, 'I suppose he'll run me through!'  The thought
+was unpleasant; and it kept recurring, but it only served to harden
+his determination.  His head was busy with plans for seeing Rozsi;
+his blood on fire with the kisses she had given him.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+Swithin was long in deciding to go forth next day.  He had made up
+his mind not to go to Rozsi till five o'clock.  'Mustn't make myself
+too cheap,' he thought.  It was a little past that hour when he at
+last sallied out, and with a beating heart walked towards Boleskey's.
+He looked up at the window, more than half expecting to see Rozsi
+there; but she was not, and he noticed with faint surprise that the
+window was not open; the plants, too, outside, looked singularly
+arid.  He knocked.  No one came.  He beat a fierce tatto.  At last
+the door was opened by a man with a reddish beard, and one of those
+sardonic faces only to be seen on shoemakers of Teutonic origin.
+
+"What do you want, making all this noise?" he asked in German.
+
+Swithin pointed up the stairs.  The man grinned, and shook his head.
+
+"I want to go up," said Swithin.
+
+The cobbler shrugged his shoulders, and Swithin rushed upstairs.  The
+rooms were empty.  The furniture remained, but all signs of life were
+gone.  One of his own bouquets, faded, stood in a glass; the ashes of
+a fire were barely cold; little scraps of paper strewed the hearth;
+already the room smelt musty.  He went into the bedrooms, and with a
+feeling of stupefaction stood staring at the girls' beds, side by
+side against the wall.  A bit of ribbon caught his eye; he picked it
+up and put it in his pocket--it was a piece of evidence that she had
+once existed.  By the mirror some pins were dropped about; a little
+powder had been spilled.  He looked at his own disquiet face and
+thought, 'I've been cheated!'
+
+The shoemaker's voice aroused him.  "Tausend Teufel!  Eilen Sie, nur!
+Zeit is Geld!  Kann nich' Langer warten!"  Slowly he descended.
+
+"Where have they gone?" asked Swithin painfully.  "A pound for every
+English word you speak.  A pound!" and he made an O with his fingers.
+
+The corners of the shoemaker's lips curled.  "Geld! Mf!  Eilen Sie,
+nur!"
+
+But in Swithin a sullen anger had begun to burn.  "If you don't tell
+me," he said, "it'll be the worse for you."
+
+"Sind ein komischer Kerl!" remarked the shoemaker.  "Hier ist meine
+Frau!"
+
+A battered-looking woman came hurrying down the passage, calling out
+in German, "Don't let him go!"
+
+With a snarling sound the shoemaker turned his back, and shambled
+off.
+
+The woman furtively thrust a letter into Swithin's hand, and
+furtively waited.
+
+The letter was from Rozsi.
+
+"Forgive me"--it ran--"that I leave you and do not say goodbye.  To-
+day our father had the call from our dear Father-town so long
+awaited.  In two hours we are ready.  I pray to the Virgin to keep
+you ever safe, and that you do not quite forget me.--Your
+unforgetting good friend,  ROZSI
+
+When Swithin read it his first sensation was that of a man sinking in
+a bog; then his obstinacy stiffened.  'I won't be done,' he thought.
+Taking out a sovereign he tried to make the woman comprehend that she
+could earn it, by telling him where they had gone.  He got her
+finally to write the words out in his pocket-book, gave her the
+sovereign, and hurried to the Goldene Alp, where there was a waiter
+who spoke English.  The translation given him was this:
+
+"At three o'clock they start in a carriage on the road to Linz--they
+have bad horses--the Herr also rides a white horse."
+
+Swithin at once hailed a carriage and started at full gallop on the
+road to Linz.  Outside the Mirabell Garden he caught sight of
+Kasteliz and grinned at him.  'I've sold him anyway,' he thought;
+'for all their talk, they're no good, these foreigners!'
+
+His spirits rose, but soon fell again.  What chance had he of
+catching them?  They had three hours' start!  Still, the roads were
+heavy from the rain of the last two nights--they had luggage and bad
+horses; his own were good, his driver bribed--he might overtake them
+by ten o'clock! But did he want to?  What a fool he had been not to
+bring his luggage; he would then have had a respectable position.
+What a brute he would look without a change of shirt, or anything to
+shave with!  He saw himself with horror, all bristly, and in soiled
+linen.  People would think him mad.  'I've given myself away,'
+flashed across him, 'what the devil can I say to them?' and he stared
+sullenly at the driver's back.  He read Rozsi's letter again; it had
+a scent of her.  And in the growing darkness, jolted by the swinging
+of the carriage, he suffered tortures from his prudence, tortures
+from his passion.
+
+It grew colder and dark.  He turned the collar of his coat up to his
+ears.  He had visions of Piccadilly.  This wild-goose chase appeared
+suddenly a dangerous, unfathomable business.  Lights, fellowship,
+security!  'Never again!' he brooded; 'why won't they let me alone?'
+But it was not clear whether by 'they' he meant the conventions, the
+Boleskeys, his passions, or those haunting memories of Rozsi.  If he
+had only had a bag with him!  What was he going to say?  What was he
+going to get by this?  He received no answer to these questions.  The
+darkness itself was less obscure than his sensations.  From time to
+time he took out his watch.  At each village the driver made
+inquiries.  It was past ten when he stopped the carriage with a jerk.
+The stars were bright as steel, and by the side of the road a reedy
+lake showed in the moonlight.  Swithin shivered.  A man on a horse
+had halted in the centre of the road.  "Drive on!" called Swithin,
+with a stolid face.  It turned out to be Boleskey, who, on a gaunt
+white horse, looked like some winged creature.  He stood where he
+could bar the progress of the carriage, holding out a pistol.
+
+'Theatrical beggar!' thought Swithin, with a nervous smile.  He made
+no sign of recognition.  Slowly Boleskey brought his lean horse up to
+the carriage.  When he saw who was within he showed astonishment and
+joy.
+
+"You?" he cried, slapping his hand on his attenuated thigh, and
+leaning over till his beard touched Swithin.  "You have come?  You
+followed us?"
+
+"It seems so," Swithin grunted out.
+
+"You throw in your lot with us.  Is it possible?  You--you are a
+knight-errant then!"
+
+"Good God!" said Swithin.  Boleskey, flogging his dejected steed,
+cantered forward in the moonlight.  He came back, bringing an old
+cloak, which he insisted on wrapping round Swithin's shoulders.  He
+handed him, too, a capacious flask.
+
+"How cold you look!" he said.  "Wonderful! Wonderful! you English!"
+His grateful eyes never left Swithin for a moment.  They had come up
+to the heels of the other carriage now, but Swithin, hunched in the
+cloak, did not try to see what was in front of him.  To the bottom of
+his soul he resented the Hungarian's gratitude.  He remarked at last,
+with wasted irony:
+
+"You're in a hurry, it seems!"
+
+"If we had wings," Boleskey answered, "we would use them."
+
+"Wings!" muttered Swithin thickly; "legs are good enough for me."
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+Arrived at the inn where they were to pass the night, Swithin waited,
+hoping to get into the house without a "scene," but when at last he
+alighted the girls were in the doorway, and Margit greeted him with
+an admiring murmur, in which, however, he seemed to detect irony.
+Rozsi, pale and tremulous, with a half-scared look, gave him her
+hand, and, quickly withdrawing it, shrank behind her sister.  When
+they had gone up to their room Swithin sought Boleskey.  His spirits
+had risen remarkably.  "Tell the landlord to get us supper," he said;
+"we'll crack a bottle to our luck."  He hurried on the landlord's
+preparations.  The window of the, room faced a wood, so near that he
+could almost touch the trees.  The scent from the pines blew in on
+him.  He turned away from that scented darkness, and began to draw
+the corks of winebottles.  The sound seemed to conjure up Boleskey.
+He came in, splashed all over, smelling slightly of stables; soon
+after, Margit appeared, fresh and serene, but Rozsi did not come.
+
+"Where is your sister?" Swithin said.  Rozsi, it seemed, was tired.
+"It will do her good to eat," said Swithin.  And Boleskey, murmuring,
+"She must drink to our country," went out to summon her, Margit
+followed him, while Swithin cut up a chicken.  They came back without
+her.  She had "a megrim of the spirit."
+
+Swithin's face fell.  "Look here!" he said, "I'll go and try.  Don't
+wait for me."
+
+"Yes," answered Boleskey, sinking mournfully into a chair; "try,
+brother, try-by all means, try."
+
+Swithin walked down the corridor with an odd, sweet, sinking
+sensation in his chest; and tapped on Rozsi's door.  In a minute, she
+peeped forth, with her hair loose, and wondering eyes.
+
+"Rozsi," he stammered, "what makes you afraid of me, now?"
+
+She stared at him, but did not answer.
+
+"Why won't you come?"
+
+Still she did not speak, but suddenly stretched out to him her bare
+arm.  Swithin pressed his face to it.  With a shiver, she whispered
+above him, "I will come," and gently shut the door.
+
+Swithin stealthily retraced his steps, and paused a minute outside
+the sitting-room to regain his self-control.
+
+The sight of Boleskey with a bottle in his hand steadied him.
+
+"She is coming," he said.  And very soon she did come, her thick hair
+roughly twisted in a plait.
+
+Swithin sat between the girls; but did not talk, for he was really
+hungry.  Boleskey too was silent, plunged in gloom; Rozsi was dumb;
+Margit alone chattered.
+
+"You will come to our Father-town?  We shall have things to show you.
+Rozsi, what things we will show him!"  Rozsi, with a little appealing
+movement of her hands, repeated, "What things we will show you!"  She
+seemed suddenly to find her voice, and with glowing cheeks, mouths
+full, and eyes bright as squirrels', they chattered reminiscences of
+the "dear Father-town," of "dear friends," of the "dear home."
+
+'A poor place!' Swithin could not help thinking.  This enthusiasm
+seemed to him common; but he was careful to assume a look of
+interest, feeding on the glances flashed at him from Rozsi's restless
+eyes.
+
+As the wine waned Boleskey grew more and more gloomy, but now and
+then a sort of gleaming flicker passed over his face.  He rose to his
+feet at last.
+
+"Let us not forget," he said, "that we go perhaps to ruin, to death;
+in the face of all this we go, because our country needs--in this
+there is no credit, neither to me nor to you, my daughters; but for
+this noble Englishman, what shall we say?  Give thanks to God for a
+great heart.  He comes--not for country, not for fame, not for money,
+but to help the weak and the oppressed.  Let us drink, then, to him;
+let us drink again and again to heroic Forsyte!"  In the midst of the
+dead silence, Swithin caught the look of suppliant mockery in Rozsi's
+eyes.  He glanced at the Hungarian.  Was he laughing at him?  But
+Boleskey, after drinking up his wine, had sunk again into his seat;
+and there suddenly, to the surprise of all, he began to snore.
+Margit rose and, bending over him like a mother, murmured: "He is
+tired--it is the ride!"  She raised him in her strong arms, and
+leaning on her shoulder Boleskey staggered from the room.  Swithin
+and Rozsi were left alone.  He slid his hand towards her hand that
+lay so close, on the rough table-cloth.  It seemed to await his
+touch.  Something gave way in him, and words came welling up; for the
+moment he forgot himself, forgot everything but that he was near her.
+Her head dropped on his shoulder, he breathed the perfume of her
+hair.  "Good-night!" she whispered, and the whisper was like a kiss;
+yet before he could stop her she was gone.  Her footsteps died away
+in the passage, but Swithin sat gazing intently at a single bright
+drop of spilt wine quivering on the table's edge.  In that moment
+she, in her helplessness and emotion, was all in all to him--his life
+nothing; all the real things--his conventions, convictions, training,
+and himself--all seemed remote, behind a mist of passion and strange
+chivalry.  Carefully with a bit of bread he soaked up the bright
+drop; and suddenly he thought: 'This is tremendous!'  For a long time
+he stood there in the window, close to the dark pine-trees.
+
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+In the early morning he awoke, full of the discomfort of this strange
+place and the medley of his dreams.  Lying, with his nose peeping
+over the quilt, he was visited by a horrible suspicion.  When he
+could bear it no longer, he started up in bed.  What if it were all a
+plot to get him to marry her?  The thought was treacherous, and
+inspired in him a faint disgust.  Still, she might be ignorant of it!
+But was she so innocent?  What innocent girl would have come to his
+room like that?  What innocent girl?  Her father, who pretended to be
+caring only for his country?  It was not probable that any man was
+such a fool; it was all part of the game-a scheming rascal!
+Kasteliz, too--his threats!  They intended him to marry her!  And the
+horrid idea was strengthened by his reverence for marriage.  It was
+the proper, the respectable condition; he was genuinely afraid of
+this other sort of liaison--it was somehow too primitive!  And yet
+the thought of that marriage made his blood run cold.  Considering
+that she had already yielded, it would be all the more monstrous!
+With the cold, fatal clearness of the morning light he now for the
+first time saw his position in its full bearings.  And, like a fish
+pulled out of water, he gasped at what was disclosed.  Sullen
+resentment against this attempt to force him settled deep into his
+soul.
+
+He seated himself on the bed, holding his head in his hands, solemnly
+thinking out what such marriage meant.  In the first place it meant
+ridicule, in the next place ridicule, in the last place ridicule.
+She would eat chicken bones with her fingers--those fingers his lips
+still burned to kiss.  She would dance wildly with other men.  She
+would talk of her "dear Father-town," and all the time her eyes would
+look beyond him, some where or other into some d--d place he knew
+nothing of.  He sprang up and paced the room, and for a moment
+thought he would go mad.
+
+They meant him to marry her!  Even she--she meant him to marry her!
+Her tantalising inscrutability; her sudden little tendernesses; her
+quick laughter; her swift, burning kisses; even the movements of her
+hands; her tears--all were evidence against her.  Not one of these
+things that Nature made her do counted on her side, but how they
+fanned his longing, his desire, and distress!  He went to the glass
+and tried to part his hair with his fingers, but being rather fine,
+it fell into lank streaks.  There was no comfort to be got from it.
+He drew his muddy boots on.  Suddenly he thought: 'If I could see her
+alone, I could arrive at some arrangement!'  Then, with a sense of
+stupefaction, he made the discovery that no arrangement could
+possibly be made that would not be dangerous, even desperate.  He
+seized his hat, and, like a rabbit that has been fired at, bolted
+from the room.  He plodded along amongst the damp woods with his head
+down, and resentment and dismay in his heart.  But, as the sun rose,
+and the air grew sweet with pine scent, he slowly regained a sort of
+equability.  After all, she had already yielded; it was not as if...!
+And the tramp of his own footsteps lulled him into feeling that it
+would all come right.
+
+'Look at the thing practically,' he thought.  The faster he walked
+the firmer became his conviction that he could still see it through.
+He took out his watch--it was past seven--he began to hasten back.
+In the yard of the inn his driver was harnessing the horses; Swithin
+went up to him.
+
+"Who told you to put them in?" he asked.
+
+The driver answered, "Der Herr."
+
+Swithin turned away.  'In ten minutes,' he thought, 'I shall be in
+that carriage again, with this going on in my head!  Driving away
+from England, from all I'm used to-driving to-what?'  Could he face
+it?  Could he face all that he had been through that morning; face it
+day after day, night after night?  Looking up, he saw Rozsi at her
+open window gazing down at him; never had she looked sweeter, more
+roguish.  An inexplicable terror seized on him; he ran across the
+yard and jumped into his carriage.  "To Salzburg!" he cried; "drive
+on!"  And rattling out of the yard without a look behind, he flung a
+sovereign at the hostler.  Flying back along the road faster even
+than he had come, with pale face, and eyes blank and staring like a
+pug-dog's, Swithin spoke no single word; nor, till he had reached the
+door of his lodgings, did he suffer the driver to draw rein.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+Towards evening, five days later, Swithin, yellow and travel-worn,
+was ferried in a gondola to Danielli's Hotel.  His brother, who was
+on the steps, looked at him with an apprehensive curiosity.
+
+"Why, it's you!" he mumbled.  "So you've got here safe?"
+
+"Safe?" growled Swithin.
+
+James replied, "I thought you wouldn't leave your friends!"  Then,
+with a jerk of suspicion, "You haven't brought your friends?"
+
+"What friends?" growled Swithin.
+
+James changed the subject.  "You don't look the thing," he said.
+
+"Really!" muttered Swithin; "what's that to you?"
+
+He appeared at dinner that night, but fell asleep over his coffee.
+Neither Traquair nor James asked him any further question, nor did
+they allude to Salzburg; and during the four days which concluded the
+stay in Venice Swithin went about with his head up, but his eyes
+half-closed like a dazed man.  Only after they had taken ship at
+Genoa did he show signs of any healthy interest in life, when,
+finding that a man on board was perpetually strumming, he locked the
+piano up and pitched the key into the sea.
+
+That winter in London he behaved much as usual, but fits of
+moroseness would seize on him, during which he was not pleasant to
+approach.
+
+One evening when he was walking with a friend in Piccadilly, a girl
+coming from a side-street accosted him in German.  Swithin, after
+staring at her in silence for some seconds, handed her a five-pound
+note, to the great amazement of his friend; nor could he himself have
+explained the meaning of this freak of generosity.
+
+Of Rozsi he never heard again....
+
+This, then, was the substance of what he remembered as he lay ill in
+bed.  Stretching out his hand he pressed the bell.  His valet
+appeared, crossing the room like a cat; a Swede, who had been with
+Swithin many years; a little man with a dried face and fierce
+moustache, morbidly sharp nerves, and a queer devotion to his master.
+
+Swithin made a feeble gesture.  "Adolf," he said, "I'm very bad."
+
+"Yes, sir!"
+
+"Why do you stand there like a cow?" asked Swithin; "can't you see
+I'm very bad?"
+
+"Yes, sir!"  The valet's face twitched as though it masked the dance
+of obscure emotions.
+
+"I shall feel better after dinner.  What time is it?"
+
+"Five o'clock."
+
+"I thought it was more.  The afternoons are very long."
+
+"Yes, sir!"Swithin sighed, as though he had expected the consolation
+of denial.
+
+"Very likely I shall have a nap.  Bring up hot water at half-past six
+and shave me before dinner."
+
+The valet moved towards the door.  Swithin raised himself.
+
+"What did Mr. James say to you?"
+
+"He said you ought to have another doctor; two doctors, he said,
+better than one.  He said, also, he would look in again on his way
+'home.'"
+
+Swithin grunted, "Umph! What else did he say?"
+
+"He said you didn't take care of yourself."
+
+Swithin glared.
+
+"Has anybody else been to see me?"
+
+The valet turned away his eyes.  "Mrs. Thomas Forsyte came last
+Monday fortnight."
+
+"How long have I been ill?"
+
+"Five weeks on Saturday."
+
+"Do you think I'm very bad?"
+
+Adolf's face was covered suddenly with crow's-feet.  "You have no
+business to ask me question like that!  I am not paid, sir, to answer
+question like that."
+
+Swithin said faintly: "You're a peppery fool!  Open a bottle of
+champagne!"
+
+Adolf took a bottle of champagne--from a cupboard and held nippers to
+it.  He fixed his eyes on Swithin.  "The doctor said--"
+
+"Open the bottle!"
+
+"It is not--"
+
+"Open the bottle--or I give you warning."
+
+Adolf removed the cork.  He wiped a glass elaborately, filled it, and
+bore it scrupulously to the bedside.  Suddenly twirling his
+moustaches, he wrung his hands, and burst out: "It is poison."
+
+Swithin grinned faintly.  "You foreign fool!" he said.  "Get out!"
+
+The valet vanished.
+
+'He forgot himself!' thought Swithin.  Slowly he raised the glass,
+slowly put it back, and sank gasping on his pillows.  Almost at once
+he fell asleep.
+
+He dreamed that he was at his club, sitting after dinner in the
+crowded smoking-room, with its bright walls and trefoils of light.
+It was there that he sat every evening, patient, solemn, lonely, and
+sometimes fell asleep, his square, pale old face nodding to one side.
+He dreamed that he was gazing at the picture over the fireplace, of
+an old statesman with a high collar, supremely finished face, and
+sceptical eyebrows--the picture, smooth, and reticent as sealing-wax,
+of one who seemed for ever exhaling the narrow wisdom of final
+judgments.  All round him, his fellow members were chattering.  Only
+he himself, the old sick member, was silent.  If fellows only knew
+what it was like to sit by yourself and feel ill all the time!  What
+they were saying he had heard a hundred times.  They were talking of
+investments, of cigars, horses, actresses, machinery.  What was that?
+A foreign patent for cleaning boilers?  There was no such thing;
+boilers couldn't be cleaned, any fool knew that!  If an Englishman
+couldn't clean a boiler, no foreigner could clean one.  He appealed
+to the old statesman's eyes.  But for once those eyes seemed
+hesitating, blurred, wanting in finality.  They vanished.  In their
+place were Rozsi's little deep-set eyes, with their wide and far-off
+look; and as he gazed they seemed to grow bright as steel, and to
+speak to him.  Slowly the whole face grew to be there, floating on
+the dark background of the picture; it was pink, aloof, unfathomable,
+enticing, with its fluffy hair and quick lips, just as he had last
+seen it.  "Are you looking for something?" she seemed to say: "I
+could show you."
+
+"I have everything safe enough," answered Swithin, and in his sleep
+he groaned.
+
+He felt the touch of fingers on his forehead.  'I'm dreaming,' he
+thought in his dream.
+
+She had vanished; and far away, from behind the picture, came a sound
+of footsteps.
+
+Aloud, in his sleep, Swithin muttered: "I've missed it."
+
+Again he heard the rustling of those light footsteps, and close in
+his ear a sound, like a sob.  He awoke; the sob was his own.  Great
+drops of perspiration stood on his forehead.  'What is it?' he
+thought; 'what have I lost?'  Slowly his mind travelled over his
+investments; he could not think of any single one that was unsafe.
+What was it, then, that he had lost?  Struggling on his pillows, he
+clutched the wine-glass.  His lips touched the wine.  'This isn't the
+"Heidseck"!' he thought angrily, and before the reality of that
+displeasure all the dim vision passed away.  But as he bent to drink,
+something snapped, and, with a sigh, Swithin Forsyte died above the
+bubbles....
+
+When James Forsyte came in again on his way home, the valet,
+trembling took his hat and stick.
+
+"How's your master?"
+
+"My master is dead, sir!"
+
+"Dead! He can't be!  I left him safe an hour ago.
+
+On the bed Swithin's body was doubled like a sack; his hand still
+grasped the glass.
+
+James Forsyte paused.  "Swithin!" he said, and with his hand to his
+ear he waited for an answer; but none came, and slowly in the glass a
+last bubble rose and burst.
+
+December 1900.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+To
+
+MY SISTER
+
+MABEL EDITH REYNOLDS
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SILENCE
+
+I
+
+In a car of the Naples express a mining expert was diving into a bag
+for papers.  The strong sunlight showed the fine wrinkles on his
+brown face and the shabbiness of his short, rough beard.  A newspaper
+cutting slipped from his fingers; he picked it up, thinking: 'How the
+dickens did that get in here?'  It was from a colonial print of three
+years back; and he sat staring, as if in that forlorn slip of yellow
+paper he had encountered some ghost from his past.
+
+These were the words he read: "We hope that the setback to
+civilisation, the check to commerce and development, in this
+promising centre of our colony may be but temporary; and that capital
+may again come to the rescue.  Where one man was successful, others
+should surely not fail?  We are convinced that it only needs...."
+And the last words: "For what can be sadder than to see the forest
+spreading its lengthening shadows, like symbols of defeat, over the
+untenanted dwellings of men; and where was once the merry chatter of
+human voices, to pass by in the silence...."
+
+On an afternoon, thirteen years before, he had been in the city of
+London, at one of those emporiums where mining experts perch, before
+fresh flights, like sea-gulls on some favourite rock.  A clerk said
+to him: "Mr. Scorrier, they are asking for you downstairs--Mr.
+Hemmings of the New Colliery Company."
+
+Scorrier took up the speaking tube.  "Is that you, Mr. Scorrier?  I
+hope you are very well, sir, I am--Hemmings--I am--coming up."
+
+In two minutes he appeared, Christopher Hemmings, secretary of the
+New Colliery Company, known in the City-behind his back--as "Down-by-
+the-starn" Hemmings.  He grasped Scorrier's hand--the gesture was
+deferential, yet distinguished.  Too handsome, too capable, too
+important, his figure, the cut of his iron-grey beard, and his
+intrusively fine eyes, conveyed a continual courteous invitation to
+inspect their infallibilities.  He stood, like a City "Atlas," with
+his legs apart, his coat-tails gathered in his hands, a whole globe
+of financial matters deftly balanced on his nose.  "Look at me!" he
+seemed to say.  "It's heavy, but how easily I carry it.  Not the man
+to let it down, Sir !"
+
+"I hope I see you well, Mr. Scorrier," he began.  "I have come round
+about our mine.  There is a question of a fresh field being opened
+up--between ourselves, not before it's wanted.  I find it difficult
+to get my Board to take a comprehensive view.  In short, the question
+is: Are you prepared to go out for us, and report on it?  The fees
+will be all right."  His left eye closed.  "Things have been very--
+er--dicky; we are going to change our superintendent.  I have got
+little Pippin--you know little Pippin?"
+
+Scorrier murmured, with a feeling of vague resentment: "Oh yes.  He's
+not a mining man!"
+
+Hemmings replied: "We think that he will do."  'Do you?' thought
+Scorrier; 'that's good of you!'
+
+He had not altogether shaken off a worship he had felt for Pippin--
+"King" Pippin he was always called, when they had been boys at the
+Camborne Grammar-school.  "King" Pippin! the boy with the bright
+colour, very bright hair, bright, subtle, elusive eyes, broad
+shoulders, little stoop in the neck, and a way of moving it quickly
+like a bird; the boy who was always at the top of everything, and
+held his head as if looking for something further to be the top of.
+He remembered how one day "King" Pippin had said to him in his soft
+way, "Young Scorrie, I'll do your sums for you"; and in answer to his
+dubious, "Is that all right?" had replied, "Of course--I don't want
+you to get behind that beast Blake, he's not a Cornishman" (the beast
+Blake was an Irishman not yet twelve).  He remembered, too, an
+occasion when "King" Pippin with two other boys fought six louts and
+got a licking, and how Pippin sat for half an hour afterwards, all
+bloody, his head in his hands, rocking to and fro, and weeping tears
+of mortification; and how the next day he had sneaked off by himself,
+and, attacking the same gang, got frightfully mauled a second time.
+
+Thinking of these things he answered curtly: "When shall I start?"
+
+"Down-by-the-starn" Hemmings replied with a sort of fearful
+sprightliness: "There's a good fellow!  I will send instructions; so
+glad to see you well."  Conferring on Scorrier a look--fine to the
+verge of vulgarity--he withdrew.  Scorrier remained, seated; heavy
+with insignificance and vague oppression, as if he had drunk a
+tumbler of sweet port.
+
+A week later, in company with Pippin, he was on board a liner.
+
+The "King" Pippin of his school-days was now a man of forty-four.  He
+awakened in Scorrier the uncertain wonder with which men look
+backward at their uncomplicated teens; and staggering up and down the
+decks in the long Atlantic roll, he would steal glances at his
+companion, as if he expected to find out from them something about
+himself.  Pippin had still "King" Pippin's bright, fine hair, and
+dazzling streaks in his short beard; he had still a bright colour and
+suave voice, and what there were of wrinkles suggested only
+subtleties of humour and ironic sympathy.  From the first, and
+apparently without negotiation, he had his seat at the captain's
+table, to which on the second day Scorrier too found himself
+translated, and had to sit, as he expressed it ruefully, "among the
+big-wigs."
+
+During the voyage only one incident impressed itself on Scorrier's
+memory, and that for a disconcerting reason.  In the forecastle were
+the usual complement of emigrants.  One evening, leaning across the
+rail to watch them, he felt a touch on his arm; and, looking round,
+saw Pippin's face and beard quivering in the lamplight.  "Poor
+people!" he said.  The idea flashed on Scorrier that he was like some
+fine wire sound-recording instrument.
+
+'Suppose he were to snap!' he thought.  Impelled to justify this
+fancy, he blurted out: "You're a nervous chap.  The way you look at
+those poor devils!"
+
+Pippin hustled him along the deck.  "Come, come, you took me off my
+guard," he murmured, with a sly, gentle smile, "that's not fair."
+
+He found it a continual source of wonder that Pippin, at his age,
+should cut himself adrift from the associations and security of
+London life to begin a new career in a new country with dubious
+prospect of success.  'I always heard he was doing well all round,'
+he thought; 'thinks he'll better himself, perhaps.  He's a true
+Cornishman.'
+
+The morning of arrival at the mines was grey and cheerless; a cloud
+of smoke, beaten down by drizzle, clung above the forest; the wooden
+houses straggled dismally in the unkempt semblance of a street,
+against a background of endless, silent woods.  An air of blank
+discouragement brooded over everything; cranes jutted idly over empty
+trucks; the long jetty oozed black slime; miners with listless faces
+stood in the rain; dogs fought under their very legs.  On the way to
+the hotel they met no one busy or serene except a Chinee who was
+polishing a dish-cover.
+
+The late superintendent, a cowed man, regaled them at lunch with his
+forebodings; his attitude toward the situation was like the food,
+which was greasy and uninspiring.  Alone together once more, the two
+newcomers eyed each other sadly.
+
+"Oh dear!" sighed Pippin.  "We must change all this, Scorrier; it
+will never do to go back beaten.  I shall not go back beaten; you
+will have to carry me on my shield;" and slyly: "Too heavy, eh?  Poor
+fellow!"  Then for a long time he was silent, moving his lips as if
+adding up the cost.  Suddenly he sighed, and grasping Scorrier's arm,
+said: "Dull, aren't I?  What will you do?  Put me in your report,
+'New Superintendent--sad, dull dog--not a word to throw at a cat!'"
+And as if the new task were too much for him, he sank back in
+thought.  The last words he said to Scorrier that night were: "Very
+silent here.  It's hard to believe one's here for life.  But I feel I
+am.  Mustn't be a coward, though!" and brushing his forehead, as
+though to clear from it a cobweb of faint thoughts, he hurried off.
+
+Scorrier stayed on the veranda smoking.  The rain had ceased, a few
+stars were burning dimly; even above the squalor of the township the
+scent of the forests, the interminable forests, brooded.  There
+sprang into his mind the memory of a picture from one of his
+children's fairy books--the picture of a little bearded man on
+tiptoe, with poised head and a great sword, slashing at the castle of
+a giant.  It reminded him of Pippin.  And suddenly, even to Scorrier-
+-whose existence was one long encounter with strange places--the
+unseen presence of those woods, their heavy, healthy scent, the
+little sounds, like squeaks from tiny toys, issuing out of the gloomy
+silence, seemed intolerable, to be shunned, from the mere instinct of
+self-preservation.  He thought of the evening he had spent in the
+bosom of "Down-by-the-starn" Hemmings' family, receiving his last
+instructions--the security of that suburban villa, its discouraging
+gentility; the superior acidity of the Miss Hemmings; the noble names
+of large contractors, of company promoters, of a peer, dragged with
+the lightness of gun-carriages across the conversation; the autocracy
+of Hemmings, rasped up here and there, by some domestic
+contradiction.  It was all so nice and safe--as if the whole thing
+had been fastened to an anchor sunk beneath the pink cabbages of the
+drawing-room carpet!  Hemmings, seeing him off the premises, had said
+with secrecy: "Little Pippin will have a good thing.  We shall make
+his salary L----.  He'll be a great man-quite a king.  Ha-ha!"
+
+Scorrier shook the ashes from his pipe.  'Salary!' he thought,
+straining his ears; 'I wouldn't take the place for five thousand
+pounds a year.  And yet it's a fine country,' and with ironic
+violence he repeated, 'a dashed fine country!'
+
+Ten days later, having finished his report on the new mine, he stood
+on the jetty waiting to go abroad the steamer for home.
+
+"God bless you!" said Pippin.  "Tell them they needn't be afraid; and
+sometimes when you're at home think of me, eh?"
+
+Scorrier, scrambling on board, had a confused memory of tears in his
+eyes, and a convulsive handshake.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+It was eight years before the wheels of life carried Scorrier back to
+that disenchanted spot, and this time not on the business of the New
+Colliery Company.  He went for another company with a mine some
+thirty miles away.  Before starting, however, he visited Hemmings.
+The secretary was surrounded by pigeon-holes and finer than ever;
+Scorrier blinked in the full radiance of his courtesy.  A little man
+with eyebrows full of questions, and a grizzled beard, was seated in
+an arm-chair by the fire.
+
+"You know Mr. Booker," said Hemmings--"one of my directors.  This is
+Mr. Scorrier, sir--who went out for us."
+
+These sentences were murmured in a way suggestive of their uncommon
+value.  The director uncrossed his legs, and bowed.  Scorrier also
+bowed, and Hemmings, leaning back, slowly developed the full
+resources of his waistcoat.
+
+"So you are going out again, Scorrier, for the other side?  I tell
+Mr. Scorrier, sir, that he is going out for the enemy.  Don't find
+them a mine as good as you found us, there's a good man."
+
+The little director asked explosively: "See our last dividend?
+Twenty per cent; eh, what?"
+
+Hemmings moved a finger, as if reproving his director.  "I will not
+disguise from you," he murmured, "that there is friction between us
+and--the enemy; you know our position too well--just a little too
+well, eh?  'A nod's as good as a wink.'"
+
+His diplomatic eyes flattered Scorrier, who passed a hand over his
+brow--and said: "Of course."
+
+"Pippin doesn't hit it off with them.  Between ourselves, he's a
+leetle too big for his boots.  You know what it is when a man in his
+position gets a sudden rise!"
+
+Scorrier caught himself searching on the floor for a sight of
+Hemmings' boots; he raised his eyes guiltily.  The secretary
+continued: "We don't hear from him quite as often as we should like,
+in fact."
+
+To his own surprise Scorrier murmured: "It's a silent place!"
+
+The secretary smiled.  "Very good!  Mr. Scorrier says, sir, it's a
+silent place; ha-ha! I call that very good!"  But suddenly a secret
+irritation seemed to bubble in him; he burst forth almost violently:
+"He's no business to let it affect him; now, has he?  I put it to
+you, Mr. Scorrier, I put it to you, sir!"
+
+But Scorrier made no reply, and soon after took his leave: he had
+been asked to convey a friendly hint to Pippin that more frequent
+letters would be welcomed.  Standing in the shadow of the Royal
+Exchange, waiting to thread his way across, he thought: 'So you must
+have noise, must you--you've got some here, and to spare....'
+
+On his arrival in the new world he wired to Pippin asking if he might
+stay with him on the way up country, and received the answer: "Be
+sure and come."
+
+A week later he arrived (there was now a railway) and found Pippin
+waiting for him in a phaeton.  Scorrier would not have known the
+place again; there was a glitter over everything, as if some one had
+touched it with a wand.  The tracks had given place to roads, running
+firm, straight, and black between the trees under brilliant sunshine;
+the wooden houses were all painted; out in the gleaming harbour
+amongst the green of islands lay three steamers, each with a fleet of
+busy boats; and here and there a tiny yacht floated, like a sea-bird
+on the water.  Pippin drove his long-tailed horses furiously; his
+eyes brimmed with subtle kindness, as if according Scorrier a
+continual welcome.  During the two days of his stay Scorrier never
+lost that sense of glamour.  He had every opportunity for observing
+the grip Pippin had over everything.  The wooden doors and walls of
+his bungalow kept out no sounds.  He listened to interviews between
+his host and all kinds and conditions of men.  The voices of the
+visitors would rise at first--angry, discontented, matter-of-fact,
+with nasal twang, or guttural drawl; then would come the soft patter
+of the superintendent's feet crossing and recrossing the room.  Then
+a pause, the sound of hard breathing, and quick questions--the
+visitor's voice again, again the patter, and Pippin's ingratiating
+but decisive murmurs.  Presently out would come the visitor with an
+expression on his face which Scorrier soon began to know by heart, a
+kind of pleased, puzzled, helpless look, which seemed to say, "I've
+been done, I know--I'll give it to myself when I'm round the corner."
+
+Pippin was full of wistful questions about "home."  He wanted to talk
+of music, pictures, plays, of how London looked, what new streets
+there were, and, above all, whether Scorrier had been lately in the
+West Country.  He talked of getting leave next winter, asked whether
+Scorrier thought they would "put up with him at home"; then, with the
+agitation which had alarmed Scorrier before, he added: "Ah! but I'm
+not fit for home now.  One gets spoiled; it's big and silent here.
+What should I go back to?  I don't seem to realise."
+
+Scorrier thought of Hemmings.  "'Tis a bit cramped there, certainly,"
+he muttered.
+
+Pippin went on as if divining his thoughts.  "I suppose our friend
+Hemmings would call me foolish; he's above the little weaknesses of
+imagination, eh?  Yes; it's silent here.  Sometimes in the evening I
+would give my head for somebody to talk to--Hemmings would never give
+his head for anything, I think.  But all the same, I couldn't face
+them at home.  Spoiled!"  And slyly he murmured: "What would the
+Board say if they could hear that?"
+
+Scorrier blurted out: "To tell you the truth, they complain a little
+of not hearing from you."
+
+Pippin put out a hand, as if to push something away.  "Let them try
+the life here!" he broke out; "it's like sitting on a live volcano--
+what with our friends, 'the enemy,' over there; the men; the American
+competition.  I keep it going, Scorrier, but at what a cost--at what
+a cost!"
+
+"But surely--letters?"
+
+Pippin only answered: " I try--I try!"
+
+Scorrier felt with remorse and wonder that he had spoken the truth.
+The following day he left for his inspection, and while in the camp
+of "the enemy" much was the talk he heard of Pippin.
+
+"Why!" said his host, the superintendent, a little man with a face
+somewhat like an owl's, "d'you know the name they've given him down
+in the capital--'the King'--good, eh?  He's made them 'sit up' all
+along this coast.  I like him well enough--good--hearted man,
+shocking nervous; but my people down there can't stand him at any
+price.  Sir, he runs this colony.  You'd think butter wouldn't melt
+in that mouth of his; but he always gets his way; that's what riles
+'em so; that and the success he's making of his mine.  It puzzles me;
+you'd think he'd only be too glad of a quiet life, a man with his
+nerves.  But no, he's never happy unless he's fighting, something
+where he's got a chance to score a victory.  I won't say he likes it,
+but, by Jove, it seems he's got to do it.  Now that's funny!  I'll
+tell you one thing, though shouldn't be a bit surprised if he broke
+down some day; and I'll tell you another," he added darkly, "he's
+sailing very near the wind, with those large contracts that he makes.
+I wouldn't care to take his risks.  Just let them have a strike, or
+something that shuts them down for a spell--and mark my words, sir--
+it'll be all up with them.  But," he concluded confidentially, "I
+wish I had his hold on the men; it's a great thing in this country.
+Not like home, where you can go round a corner and get another gang.
+You have to make the best you can out of the lot you have; you won't,
+get another man for love or money without you ship him a few hundred
+miles."  And with a frown he waved his arm over the forests to
+indicate the barrenness of the land.
+
+Scorrier finished his inspection and went on a shooting trip into the
+forest.  His host met him on his return.  "Just look at this!" he
+said, holding out a telegram.  "Awful, isn't it?" His face expressed
+a profound commiseration, almost ludicrously mixed with the ashamed
+contentment that men experience at the misfortunes of an enemy.
+
+The telegram, dated the day before, ran thus "Frightful explosion New
+Colliery this morning, great loss of life feared."
+
+Scorrier had the bewildered thought: 'Pippin will want me now.'
+
+He took leave of his host, who called after him: "You'd better wait
+for a steamer!  It's a beastly drive!"
+
+Scorrier shook his head.  All night, jolting along a rough track cut
+through the forest, he thought of Pippin.  The other miseries of this
+calamity at present left him cold; he barely thought of the smothered
+men; but Pippin's struggle, his lonely struggle with this hydra-
+headed monster, touched him very nearly.  He fell asleep and dreamed
+of watching Pippin slowly strangled by a snake; the agonised, kindly,
+ironic face peeping out between two gleaming coils was so horribly
+real, that he awoke.  It was the moment before dawn: pitch-black
+branches barred the sky; with every jolt of the wheels the gleams
+from the lamps danced, fantastic and intrusive, round ferns and tree-
+stems, into the cold heart of the forest.  For an hour or more
+Scorrier tried to feign sleep, and hide from the stillness, and
+overmastering gloom of these great woods.  Then softly a whisper of
+noises stole forth, a stir of light, and the whole slow radiance of
+the morning glory.  But it brought no warmth; and Scorrier wrapped
+himself closer in his cloak, feeling as though old age had touched
+him.
+
+Close on noon he reached the township.  Glamour seemed still to hover
+over it.  He drove on to the mine.  The winding-engine was turning,
+the pulley at the top of the head-gear whizzing round; nothing looked
+unusual.  'Some mistake!' he thought.  He drove to the mine
+buildings, alighted, and climbed to the shaft head.  Instead of the
+usual rumbling of the trolleys, the rattle of coal discharged over
+the screens, there was silence.  Close by, Pippin himself was
+standing, smirched with dirt.  The cage, coming swift and silent from
+below, shot open its doors with a sharp rattle.  Scorrier bent
+forward to look.  There lay a dead man, with a smile on his face.
+
+"How many?" he whispered.
+
+Pippin answered: "Eighty-four brought up--forty-seven still below,"
+and entered the man's name in a pocket-book.
+
+An older man was taken out next; he too was smiling--there had been
+vouchsafed to him, it seemed, a taste of more than earthly joy.  The
+sight of those strange smiles affected Scorrier more than all the
+anguish or despair he had seen scored on the faces of other dead men.
+He asked an old miner how long Pippin had been at work.
+
+"Thirty hours.  Yesterday he wer' below; we had to nigh carry mun up
+at last.  He's for goin' down again, but the chaps won't lower mun;"
+the old man gave a sigh.  "I'm waiting for my boy to come up, I am."
+
+Scorrier waited too--there was fascination about those dead, smiling
+faces.  The rescuing of these men who would never again breathe went
+on and on.  Scorrier grew sleepy in the sun.  The old miner woke him,
+saying: "Rummy stuff this here chokedamp; see, they all dies drunk!"
+The very next to be brought up was the chief engineer.  Scorrier had
+known him quite well, one of those Scotsmen who are born at the age
+of forty and remain so all their lives.  His face--the only one that
+wore no smile--seemed grieving that duty had deprived it of that last
+luxury.  With wide eyes and drawn lips he had died protesting.
+
+Late in the afternoon the old miner touched Scorrier's arm, and said:
+"There he is--there's my boy!"  And he departed slowly, wheeling the
+body on a trolley.
+
+As the sun set, the gang below came up.  No further search was
+possible till the fumes had cleared.  Scorrier heard one man say:
+"There's some we'll never get; they've had sure burial"
+
+Another answered him: "'Tis a gude enough bag for me!"  They passed
+him, the whites of their eyes gleaming out of faces black as ink.
+
+Pippin drove him home at a furious pace, not uttering a single word.
+As they turned into the main street, a young woman starting out
+before the horses obliged Pippin to pull up.  The glance he bent on
+Scorrier was ludicrously prescient of suffering.  The woman asked for
+her husband.  Several times they were stopped thus by women asking
+for their husbands or sons.  "This is what I have to go through,"
+Pippin whispered.
+
+When they had eaten, he said to Scorrier: "It was kind of you to come
+and stand by me!  They take me for a god, poor creature that I am.
+But shall I ever get the men down again?  Their nerve's shaken.  I
+wish I were one of those poor lads, to die with a smile like that!"
+
+Scorrier felt the futility of his presence.  On Pippin alone must be
+the heat and burden.  Would he stand under it, or would the whole
+thing come crashing to the ground?  He urged him again and again to
+rest, but Pippin only gave him one of his queer smiles.  "You don't
+know how strong I am!" he said.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+He himself slept heavily; and, waking at dawn, went down.  Pippin was
+still at his desk; his pen had dropped; he was asleep.  The ink was
+wet; Scorrier's eye caught the opening words:
+
+"GENTLEMEN,--Since this happened I have not slept...."
+
+He stole away again with a sense of indignation that no one could be
+dragged in to share that fight.  The London Board-room rose before
+his mind.  He imagined the portentous gravity of Hemmings; his face
+and voice and manner conveying the impression that he alone could
+save the situation; the six directors, all men of commonsense and
+certainly humane, seated behind large turret-shaped inkpots; the
+concern and irritation in their voices, asking how it could have
+happened; their comments: "An awful thing!"  "I suppose Pippin is
+doing the best he can!"  "Wire him on no account to leave the mine
+idle!"  "Poor devils!"  "A fund?  Of course, what ought we to give?"
+He had a strong conviction that nothing of all this would disturb the
+commonsense with which they would go home and eat their mutton.  A
+good thing too; the less it was taken to heart the better!  But
+Scorrier felt angry.  The fight was so unfair!  A fellow all nerves--
+with not a soul to help him!  Well, it was his own lookout!  He had
+chosen to centre it all in himself, to make himself its very soul.
+If he gave way now, the ship must go down!  By a thin thread,
+Scorrier's hero-worship still held.  'Man against nature,' he
+thought, 'I back the man.'  The struggle in which he was so powerless
+to give aid, became intensely personal to him, as if he had engaged
+his own good faith therein.
+
+The next day they went down again to the pit-head; and Scorrier
+himself descended.  The fumes had almost cleared, but there were some
+places which would never be reached.  At the end of the day all but
+four bodies had been recovered.  "In the day o' judgment," a miner
+said, "they four'll come out of here."  Those unclaimed bodies
+haunted Scorrier.  He came on sentences of writing, where men waiting
+to be suffocated had written down their feelings.  In one place, the
+hour, the word "Sleepy," and a signature.  In another, "A. F.--done
+for."  When he came up at last Pippin was still waiting, pocket-book
+in hand; they again departed at a furious pace.
+
+Two days later Scorrier, visiting the shaft, found its neighbourhood
+deserted--not a living thing of any sort was there except one
+Chinaman poking his stick into the rubbish.  Pippin was away down the
+coast engaging an engineer; and on his return, Scorrier had not the
+heart to tell him of the desertion.  He was spared the effort, for
+Pippin said: "Don't be afraid--you've got bad news?  The men have
+gone on strike."
+
+Scorrier sighed.  "Lock, stock, and barrel"
+
+"I thought so--see what I have here!" He put before Scorrier a
+telegram:
+
+"At all costs keep working--fatal to stop--manage this somehow.--
+HEMMINGS."
+
+Breathing quickly, he added: "As if I didn't know! 'Manage this
+somehow'--a little hard!"
+
+"What's to be done?" asked Scorrier.
+
+"You see I am commanded!" Pippin answered bitterly.  "And they're
+quite right; we must keep working--our contracts!  Now I'm down--not
+a soul will spare me!"
+
+The miners' meeting was held the following day on the outskirts of
+the town.  Pippin had cleared the place to make a public recreation-
+ground--a sort of feather in the company's cap; it was now to be the
+spot whereon should be decided the question of the company's life or
+death.
+
+The sky to the west was crossed by a single line of cloud like a bar
+of beaten gold; tree shadows crept towards the groups of men; the
+evening savour, that strong fragrance of the forest, sweetened the
+air.  The miners stood all round amongst the burnt tree-stumps, cowed
+and sullen.  They looked incapable of movement or expression.  It was
+this dumb paralysis that frightened Scorrier.  He watched Pippin
+speaking from his phaeton, the butt of all those sullen, restless
+eyes.  Would he last out?  Would the wires hold?  It was like the
+finish of a race.  He caught a baffled look on Pippin's face, as if
+he despaired of piercing that terrible paralysis.  The men's eyes had
+begun to wander.  'He's lost his hold,' thought Scorrier; 'it's all
+up!'
+
+A miner close beside him muttered: "Look out!"
+
+Pippin was leaning forward, his voice had risen, the words fell like
+a whiplash on the faces of the crowd: "You shan't throw me over; do
+you think I'll give up all I've done for you?  I'll make you the
+first power in the colony!  Are you turning tail at the first shot?
+You're a set of cowards, my lads!"
+
+Each man round Scorrier was listening with a different motion of the
+hands--one rubbed them, one clenched them, another moved his closed
+fist, as if stabbing some one in the back.  A grisly-bearded, beetle-
+browed, twinkling-eyed old Cornishman muttered: "A'hm not troublin'
+about that."  It seemed almost as if Pippin's object was to get the
+men to kill him; they had gathered closer, crouching for a rush.
+Suddenly Pippin's voice dropped to a whisper: "I'm disgraced
+Men, are you going back on me?"
+
+The old miner next Scorrier called out suddenly: "Anny that's
+Cornishmen here to stand by the superintendent?"  A group drew
+together, and with murmurs and gesticulation the meeting broke up.
+
+In the evening a deputation came to visit Pippin; and all night long
+their voices and the superintendent's footsteps could be heard.  In
+the morning, Pippin went early to the mine.  Before supper the
+deputation came again; and again Scorrier had to listen hour after
+hour to the sound of voices and footsteps till he fell asleep.  Just
+before dawn he was awakened by a light.  Pippin stood at his bedside.
+"The men go down to-morrow," he said: "What did I tell you?  Carry me
+home on my shield, eh?"
+
+In a week the mine was in full work.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+Two years later, Scorrier heard once more of Pippin.  A note from
+Hemmings reached him asking if he could make it convenient to attend
+their Board meeting the following Thursday.  He arrived rather before
+the appointed time.  The secretary received him, and, in answer to
+inquiry, said: "Thank you, we are doing well--between ourselves, we
+are doing very well."
+
+"And Pippin?"
+
+The secretary frowned.  "Ah, Pippin! We asked you to come on his
+account.  Pippin is giving us a lot of trouble.  We have not had a
+single line from him for just two years!"  He spoke with such a sense
+of personal grievance that Scorrier felt quite sorry for him.  "Not a
+single line," said Hemmings, "since that explosion--you were there at
+the time, I remember!  It makes it very awkward; I call it personal
+to me."
+
+"But how--" Scorrier began.
+
+"We get--telegrams.  He writes to no one, not even to his family.
+And why?  Just tell me why?  We hear of him; he's a great nob out
+there.  Nothing's done in the colony without his finger being in the
+pie.  He turned out the last Government because they wouldn't grant
+us an extension for our railway--shows he can't be a fool.  Besides,
+look at our balance-sheet!"
+
+It turned out that the question on which Scorrier's opinion was
+desired was, whether Hemmings should be sent out to see what was the
+matter with the superintendent.  During the discussion which.
+ensued, he was an unwilling listener to strictures on Pippin's
+silence.  "The explosion," he muttered at last, "a very trying time!"
+
+Mr. Booker pounced on him.  "A very trying time!  So it was--to all
+of us.  But what excuse is that--now, Mr. Scorrier, what excuse is
+that?"
+
+Scorrier was obliged to admit that it was none.
+
+"Business is business--eh, what?"
+
+Scorrier, gazing round that neat Board-room, nodded.  A deaf
+director, who had not spoken for some months, said with sudden
+fierceness: "It's disgraceful!"  He was obviously letting off the
+fume of long-unuttered disapprovals.  One perfectly neat, benevolent
+old fellow, however, who had kept his hat on, and had a single vice--
+that of coming to the Board-room with a brown paper parcel tied up
+with string--murmured: "We must make all allowances," and started an
+anecdote about his youth.  He was gently called to order by his
+secretary.  Scorrier was asked for his opinion.  He looked at
+Hemmings.  "My importance is concerned," was written all over the
+secretary's face.  Moved by an impulse of loyalty to Pippin, Scorrier
+answered, as if it were all settled: " Well, let me know when you are
+starting, Hemmings--I should like the trip myself."
+
+As he was going out, the chairman, old Jolyon Forsyte, with a grave,
+twinkling look at Hemmings, took him aside.  "Glad to hear you say
+that about going too, Mr. Scorrier; we must be careful--Pippin's such
+a good fellow, and so sensitive; and our friend there--a bit heavy in
+the hand, um?"
+
+Scorrier did in fact go out with Hemmings.  The secretary was sea-
+sick, and his prostration, dignified but noisy, remained a memory for
+ever; it was sonorous and fine--the prostration of superiority; and
+the way in which he spoke of it, taking casual acquaintances into the
+caves of his experience, was truly interesting.
+
+Pippin came down to the capital to escort them, provided for their
+comforts as if they had been royalty, and had a special train to take
+them to the mines.
+
+He was a little stouter, brighter of colour, greyer of beard, more
+nervous perhaps in voice and breathing.  His manner to Hemmings was
+full of flattering courtesy; but his sly, ironical glances played on
+the secretary's armour like a fountain on a hippopotamus.  To
+Scorrier, however, he could not show enough affection:
+
+The first evening, when Hemmings had gone to his room, he jumped up
+like a boy out of school.  "So I'm going to get a wigging," he said;
+"I suppose I deserve it; but if you knew--if you only knew...! Out
+here they've nicknamed me 'the King'--they say I rule the colony.
+It's myself that I can't rule"; and with a sudden burst of passion
+such as Scorrier had never seen in him: "Why did they send this man
+here?  What can he know about the things that I've been through?"  In
+a moment he calmed down again.  "There! this is very stupid; worrying
+you like this!" and with a long, kind look into Scorrier's face, he
+hustled him off to bed.
+
+Pippin did not break out again, though fire seemed to smoulder behind
+the bars of his courteous irony.  Intuition of danger had evidently
+smitten Hemmings, for he made no allusion to the object of his visit.
+There were moments when Scorrier's common-sense sided with Hemmings--
+these were moments when the secretary was not present.
+
+'After all,' he told himself, 'it's a little thing to ask--one letter
+a month.  I never heard of such a case.'  It was wonderful indeed how
+they stood it!  It showed how much they valued Pippin!  What was the
+matter with him?  What was the nature of his trouble?  One glimpse
+Scorrier had when even Hemmings, as he phrased it, received "quite a
+turn."  It was during a drive back from the most outlying of the
+company's trial mines, eight miles through the forest.  The track led
+through a belt of trees blackened by a forest fire.  Pippin was
+driving.  The secretary seated beside him wore an expression of faint
+alarm, such as Pippin's driving was warranted to evoke from almost
+any face.  The sky had darkened strangely, but pale streaks of light,
+coming from one knew not where, filtered through the trees.  No
+breath was stirring; the wheels and horses' hoofs made no sound on
+the deep fern mould.  All around, the burnt tree-trunks, leafless and
+jagged, rose like withered giants, the passages between them were
+black, the sky black, and black the silence.  No one spoke, and
+literally the only sound was Pippin's breathing.  What was it that
+was so terrifying?  Scorrier had a feeling of entombment; that nobody
+could help him; the feeling of being face to face with Nature; a
+sensation as if all the comfort and security of words and rules had
+dropped away from him.  And-nothing happened.  They reached home and
+dined.
+
+During dinner he had again that old remembrance of a little man
+chopping at a castle with his sword.  It came at a moment when Pippin
+had raised his hand with the carving-knife grasped in it to answer
+some remark of Hemmings' about the future of the company.  The
+optimism in his uplifted chin, the strenuous energy in his whispering
+voice, gave Scorrier a more vivid glimpse of Pippin's nature than he
+had perhaps ever had before.  This new country, where nothing but
+himself could help a man--that was the castle!  No wonder Pippin was
+impatient of control, no wonder he was out of hand, no wonder he was
+silent--chopping away at that!  And suddenly he thought: 'Yes, and
+all the time one knows, Nature must beat him in the end!'
+
+That very evening Hemmings delivered himself of his reproof.  He had
+sat unusually silent; Scorrier, indeed, had thought him a little
+drunk, so portentous was his gravity; suddenly, however he rose.  It
+was hard on a man, he said, in his position, with a Board (he spoke
+as of a family of small children), to be kept so short of
+information.  He was actually compelled to use his imagination to
+answer the shareholders' questions.  This was painful and
+humiliating; he had never heard of any secretary having to use his
+imagination!  He went further--it was insulting!  He had grown grey
+in the service of the company.  Mr. Scorrier would bear him out when
+he said he had a position to maintain--his name in the City was a
+high one; and, by George! he was going to keep it a high one; he
+would allow nobody to drag it in the dust--that ought clearly to be
+understood.  His directors felt they were being treated like
+children; however that might be, it was absurd to suppose that he
+(Hemmings) could be treated like a child...!  The secretary paused;
+his eyes seemed to bully the room.
+
+"If there were no London office," murmured Pippin, "the shareholders
+would get the same dividends."
+
+Hemmings gasped.  "Come!" he said, "this is monstrous!"
+
+"What help did I get from London when I first came here?  What help
+have I ever had?"
+
+Hemmings swayed, recovered, and with a forced smile replied that, if
+this were true, he had been standing on his head for years; he did
+not believe the attitude possible for such a length of time;
+personally he would have thought that he too had had a little
+something to say to the company's position, but no matter...!  His
+irony was crushing....  It was possible that Mr. Pippin hoped to
+reverse the existing laws of the universe with regard to limited
+companies; he would merely say that he must not begin with a company
+of which he (Hemmings) happened to be secretary.  Mr. Scorrier had
+hinted at excuses; for his part, with the best intentions in the
+world, he had great difficulty in seeing them.  He would go further--
+he did not see them!  The explosion...!  Pippin shrank so visibly
+that Hemmings seemed troubled by a suspicion that he had gone too
+far.
+
+"We know," he said, "that it was trying for you...."
+
+"Trying!" "burst out Pippin.
+
+"No one can say," Hemmings resumed soothingly, "that we have not
+dealt liberally."  Pippin made a motion of the head.  "We think we
+have a good superintendent; I go further, an excellent
+superintendent.  What I say is: Let's be pleasant!  I am not making
+an unreasonable request!"  He ended on a fitting note of jocularity;
+and, as if by consent, all three withdrew, each to his own room,
+without another word.
+
+In the course of the next day Pippin said to Scorrier: "It seems I
+have been very wicked.  I must try to do better"; and with a touch of
+bitter humour, "They are kind enough to think me a good
+superintendent, you see!  After that I must try hard."
+
+Scorrier broke in: "No man could have done so much for them;" and,
+carried away by an impulse to put things absolutely straight, went on
+"But, after all, a letter now and then--what does it amount to?"
+
+Pippin besieged him with a subtle glance.  "You too?" he said--
+"I must indeed have been a wicked man!" and turned away.
+
+Scorrier felt as if he had been guilty of brutality; sorry for
+Pippin, angry with himself; angry with Pippin, sorry for himself.  He
+earnestly desired to see the back of Hemmings.  The secretary
+gratified the wish a few days later, departing by steamer with
+ponderous expressions of regard and the assurance of his goodwill.
+
+Pippin gave vent to no outburst of relief, maintaining a courteous
+silence, making only one allusion to his late guest, in answer to a
+remark of Scorrier:
+
+"Ah! don't tempt me! mustn't speak behind his back."
+
+A month passed, and Scorrier still--remained Pippin's guest.  As each
+mail-day approached he experienced a queer suppressed excitement.  On
+one of these occasions Pippin had withdrawn to his room; and when
+Scorrier went to fetch him to dinner he found him with his head
+leaning on his hands, amid a perfect fitter of torn paper.  He looked
+up at Scorrier.
+
+"I can't do it," he said, "I feel such a hypocrite; I can't put
+myself into leading-strings again.  Why should I ask these people,
+when I've settled everything already?  If it were a vital matter they
+wouldn't want to hear--they'd simply wire, 'Manage this somehow!'"
+
+Scorrier said nothing, but thought privately 'This is a mad
+business!'  What was a letter?  Why make a fuss about a letter?  The
+approach of mail-day seemed like a nightmare to the superintendent;
+he became feverishly nervous like a man under a spell; and, when the
+mail had gone, behaved like a respited criminal.  And this had been
+going on two years!  Ever since that explosion.  Why, it was
+monomania!
+
+One day, a month after Hemmings' departure, Pippin rose early from
+dinner; his face was flushed, he had been drinking wine.  "I won't be
+beaten this time," he said, as he passed Scorrier.  The latter could
+hear him writing in the next room, and looked in presently to say
+that he was going for a walk.  Pippin gave him a kindly nod.
+
+It was a cool, still evening: innumerable stars swarmed in clusters
+over the forests, forming bright hieroglyphics in the middle heavens,
+showering over the dark harbour into the sea.  Scorrier walked
+slowly.  A weight seemed lifted from his mind, so entangled had he
+become in that uncanny silence.  At last Pippin had broken through
+the spell.  To get that, letter sent would be the laying of a
+phantom, the rehabilitation of commonsense.  Now that this silence
+was in the throes of being broken, he felt curiously tender towards
+Pippin, without the hero-worship of old days, but with a queer
+protective feeling.  After all, he was different from other men.  In
+spite of his feverish, tenacious energy, in spite of his ironic
+humour, there was something of the woman in him!  And as for this
+silence, this horror of control--all geniuses had "bees in their
+bonnets," and Pippin was a genius in his way!
+
+He looked back at the town.  Brilliantly lighted it had a thriving
+air-difficult to believe of the place he remembered ten years back;
+the sounds of drinking, gambling, laughter, and dancing floated to
+his ears.  'Quite a city!' he thought.
+
+With this queer elation on him he walked slowly back along the
+street, forgetting that he was simply an oldish mining expert, with a
+look of shabbiness, such as clings to men who are always travelling,
+as if their "nap" were for ever being rubbed off.  And he thought of
+Pippin, creator of this glory.
+
+He had passed the boundaries of the town, and had entered the forest.
+A feeling of discouragement instantly beset him.  The scents and
+silence, after the festive cries and odours of the town, were
+undefinably oppressive.  Notwithstanding, he walked a long time,
+saying to himself that he would give the letter every chance.  At
+last, when he thought that Pippin must have finished, he went back to
+the house.
+
+Pippin had finished.  His forehead rested on the table, his arms hung
+at his sides; he was stone-dead!  His face wore a smile, and by his
+side lay an empty laudanum bottle.
+
+The letter, closely, beautifully written, lay before him.  It was a
+fine document, clear, masterly, detailed, nothing slurred, nothing
+concealed, nothing omitted; a complete review of the company's
+position; it ended with the words: "Your humble servant, RICHARD
+PIPPIN."
+
+Scorrier took possession of it.  He dimly understood that with those
+last words a wire had snapped.  The border-line had been overpassed;
+the point reached where that sense of proportion, which alone makes
+life possible, is lost.  He was certain that at the moment of his
+death Pippin could have discussed bimetallism, or any intellectual
+problem, except the one problem of his own heart; that, for some
+mysterious reason, had been too much for him.  His death had been the
+work of a moment of supreme revolt--a single instant of madness on a
+single subject!  He found on the blotting-paper, scrawled across the
+impress of the signature, "Can't stand it!"  The completion of that
+letter had been to him a struggle ungraspable by Scorrier.  Slavery?
+Defeat?  A violation of Nature?  The death of justice?  It were
+better not to think of it!  Pippin could have told--but he would
+never speak again.  Nature, at whom, unaided, he had dealt so many
+blows, had taken her revenge...!
+
+In the night Scorrier stole down, and, with an ashamed face, cut off
+a lock of the fine grey hair.  'His daughter might like it!' he
+thought....
+
+He waited till Pippin was buried, then, with the letter in his
+pocket, started for England.
+
+He arrived at Liverpool on a Thursday morning, and travelling to
+town, drove straight to the office of the company.  The Board were
+sitting.  Pippin's successor was already being interviewed.  He
+passed out as Scorrier came in, a middle-aged man with a large, red
+beard, and a foxy, compromising face.  He also was a Cornishman.
+Scorrier wished him luck with a very heavy heart.
+
+As an unsentimental man, who had a proper horror of emotion, whose
+living depended on his good sense, to look back on that interview
+with the Board was painful.  It had excited in him a rage of which he
+was now heartily ashamed.  Old Jolyon Forsyte, the chairman, was not
+there for once, guessing perhaps that the Board's view of this death
+would be too small for him; and little Mr. Booker sat in his place.
+Every one had risen, shaken hands with Scorrier, and expressed
+themselves indebted for his coming.  Scorrier placed Pippin's letter
+on the table, and gravely the secretary read out to his Board the
+last words of their superintendent.  When he had finished, a director
+said, "That's not the letter of a madman!"  Another answered: "Mad as
+a hatter; nobody but a madman would have thrown up such a post."
+Scorrier suddenly withdrew.  He heard Hemmings calling after him.
+"Aren't you well, Mr. Scorrier?  aren't you well, sir?"
+
+He shouted back: "Quite sane, I thank you....
+
+The Naples "express" rolled round the outskirts of the town.
+Vesuvius shone in the sun, uncrowned by smoke.  But even as Scorrier
+looked, a white puff went soaring up.  It was the footnote to his
+memories.
+
+February 1901.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of VILLA RUBEIN AND OTHER STORIES
+by John Galsworthy.
+
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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Villa Rubein et al, by John Galsworthy
+#7 in our series by John Galsworthy
+
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+Title: Villa Rubein et al
+
+Author: John Galsworthy
+
+Release Date: May, 2001 [Etext #2639]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[Most recently updated: December 9, 2001]
+
+Edition: 11
+
+Language: English
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+
+
+
+
+THE WORKS OF JOHN GALSWORTHY
+
+VILLA RUBEIN AND OTHER STORIES
+
+Contents:
+Villa Rubein
+A Man of Devon
+A Knight
+Salvation of a Forsyte
+The Silence
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+Writing not long ago to my oldest literary friend, I expressed in a
+moment of heedless sentiment the wish that we might have again one of
+our talks of long-past days, over the purposes and methods of our
+art.  And my friend, wiser than I, as he has always been, replied
+with this doubting phrase "Could we recapture the zest of that old
+time?"
+
+I would not like to believe that our faith in the value of
+imaginative art has diminished, that we think it less worth while to
+struggle for glimpses of truth and for the words which may pass them
+on to other eyes; or that we can no longer discern the star we tried
+to follow; but I do fear, with him, that half a lifetime of endeavour
+has dulled the exuberance which kept one up till morning discussing
+the ways and means of aesthetic achievement.  We have discovered,
+perhaps with a certain finality, that by no talk can a writer add a
+cubit to his stature, or change the temperament which moulds and
+colours the vision of life he sets before the few who will pause to
+look at it.  And so--the rest is silence, and what of work we may
+still do will be done in that dogged muteness which is the lot of
+advancing years.
+
+Other times, other men and modes, but not other truth.  Truth, though
+essentially relative, like Einstein's theory, will never lose its
+ever-new and unique quality-perfect proportion; for Truth, to the
+human consciousness at least, is but that vitally just relation of
+part to whole which is the very condition of life itself.  And the
+task before the imaginative writer, whether at the end of the last
+century or all these aeons later, is the presentation of a vision
+which to eye and ear and mind has the implicit proportions of Truth.
+
+I confess to have always looked for a certain flavour in the writings
+of others, and craved it for my own, believing that all true vision
+is so coloured by the temperament of the seer, as to have not only
+the just proportions but the essential novelty of a living thing for,
+after all, no two living things are alike.  A work of fiction should
+carry the hall mark of its author as surely as a Goya, a Daumier, a
+Velasquez, and a Mathew Maris, should be the unmistakable creations
+of those masters.  This is not to speak of tricks and manners which
+lend themselves to that facile elf, the caricaturist, but of a
+certain individual way of seeing and feeling.  A young poet once said
+of another and more popular poet: "Oh! yes, but be cuts no ice.
+"And, when one came to think of it, he did not; a certain flabbiness
+of spirit, a lack of temperament, an absence, perhaps, of the ironic,
+or passionate, view, insubstantiated his work; it had no edge--just a
+felicity which passed for distinction with the crowd.
+
+Let me not be understood to imply that a novel should be a sort of
+sandwich, in which the author's mood or philosophy is the slice of
+ham.  One's demand is for a far more subtle impregnation of flavour;
+just that, for instance, which makes De Maupassant a more poignant
+and fascinating writer than his master Flaubert, Dickens and
+Thackeray more living and permanent than George Eliot or Trollope.
+It once fell to my lot to be the preliminary critic of a book on
+painting, designed to prove that the artist's sole function was the
+impersonal elucidation of the truths of nature.  I was regretfully
+compelled to observe that there were no such things as the truths of
+Nature, for the purposes of art, apart from the individual vision of
+the artist.  Seer and thing seen, inextricably involved one with the
+other, form the texture of any masterpiece; and I, at least, demand
+therefrom a distinct impression of temperament.  I never saw, in the
+flesh, either De Maupassant or Tchekov--those masters of such
+different methods entirely devoid of didacticism--but their work
+leaves on me a strangely potent sense of personality.  Such subtle
+intermingling of seer with thing seen is the outcome only of long and
+intricate brooding, a process not too favoured by modern life, yet
+without which we achieve little but a fluent chaos of clever
+insignificant impressions, a kind of glorified journalism, holding
+much the same relation to the deeply-impregnated work of Turgenev,
+Hardy, and Conrad, as a film bears to a play.
+
+Speaking for myself, with the immodesty required of one who hazards
+an introduction to his own work, I was writing fiction for five years
+before I could master even its primary technique, much less achieve
+that union of seer with thing seen, which perhaps begins to show
+itself a little in this volume--binding up the scanty harvests of
+1899, 1900, and 1901--especially in the tales: "A Knight," and
+"Salvation of a Forsyte."  Men, women, trees, and works of fiction--
+very tiny are the seeds from which they spring.  I used really to see
+the "Knight"--in 1896, was it?--sitting in the "Place" in front of
+the Casino at Monte Carlo; and because his dried-up elegance, his
+burnt straw hat, quiet courtesy of attitude, and big dog, used to
+fascinate and intrigue me, I began to imagine his life so as to
+answer my own questions and to satisfy, I suppose, the mood I was in.
+I never spoke to him, I never saw him again.  His real story, no
+doubt, was as different from that which I wove around his figure as
+night from day.
+
+As for Swithin, wild horses will not drag from me confession of where
+and when I first saw the prototype which became enlarged to his bulky
+stature.  I owe Swithin much, for he first released the satirist in
+me, and is, moreover, the only one of my characters whom I killed
+before I gave him life, for it is in "The Man of Property" that
+Swithin Forsyte more memorably lives.
+
+Ranging beyond this volume, I cannot recollect writing the first
+words of "The Island Pharisees"--but it would be about August, 1901.
+Like all the stories in "Villa Rubein," and, indeed, most of my
+tales, the book originated in the curiosity, philosophic reflections,
+and unphilosophic emotions roused in me by some single figure in real
+life.  In this case it was Ferrand, whose real name, of course, was
+not Ferrand, and who died in some "sacred institution" many years ago
+of a consumption brought on by the conditions of his wandering life.
+If not "a beloved," he was a true vagabond, and I first met him in
+the Champs Elysees, just as in "The Pigeon" he describes his meeting
+with Wellwyn.  Though drawn very much from life, he did not in the
+end turn out very like the Ferrand of real life--the, figures of
+fiction soon diverge from their prototypes.
+
+The first draft of "The Island Pharisees" was buried in a drawer;
+when retrieved the other day, after nineteen years, it disclosed a
+picaresque string of anecdotes told by Ferrand in the first person.
+These two-thirds of a book were laid to rest by Edward Garnett's
+dictum that its author was not sufficiently within Ferrand's skin;
+and, struggling heavily with laziness and pride, he started afresh in
+the skin of Shelton.  Three times be wrote that novel, and then it
+was long in finding the eye of Sydney Pawling, who accepted it for
+Heinemann's in 1904.  That was a period of ferment and transition
+with me, a kind of long awakening to the home truths of social
+existence and national character.  The liquor bubbled too furiously
+for clear bottling.  And the book, after all, became but an
+introduction to all those following novels which depict--somewhat
+satirically--the various sections of English "Society" with a more or
+less capital "S."
+
+Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one's work, it is
+interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the
+emotional and critical sides of his nature, first one, then the
+other, getting the upper hand, and too seldom fusing till the result
+has the mellowness of full achievement.  One can even tell the nature
+of one's readers, by their preference for the work which reveals more
+of this side than of that.  My early work was certainly more
+emotional than critical.  But from 1901 came nine years when the
+critical was, in the main, holding sway.  From 1910 to 1918 the
+emotional again struggled for the upper hand; and from that time on
+there seems to have been something of a "dead beat."  So the conflict
+goes, by what mysterious tides promoted, I know not.
+
+An author must ever wish to discover a hapless member of the Public
+who, never yet having read a word of his writing, would submit to the
+ordeal of reading him right through from beginning to end.  Probably
+the effect could only be judged through an autopsy, but in the remote
+case of survival, it would interest one so profoundly to see the
+differences, if any, produced in that reader's character or outlook
+over life.  This, however, is a consummation which will remain
+devoutly to be wished, for there is a limit to human complaisance.
+One will never know the exact measure of one's infecting power; or
+whether, indeed, one is not just a long soporific.
+
+A writer they say, should not favouritize among his creations; but
+then a writer should not do so many things that be does.  This
+writer, certainly, confesses to having favourites, and of his novels
+so far be likes best: The Forsyte Series; "The Country House";
+"Fraternity"; "The Dark Flower"; and "Five Tales"; believing these to
+be the works which most fully achieve fusion of seer with thing seen,
+most subtly disclose the individuality of their author, and best
+reveal such of truth as has been vouchsafed to him.
+
+JOHN GALSWORTHY.
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+MY SISTER
+
+BLANCHE LILIAN SAUTER
+
+
+
+
+VILLA RUBEIN
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+Walking along the river wall at Botzen, Edmund Dawney said to Alois
+Harz: "Would you care to know the family at that pink house, Villa
+Rubein?"
+
+Harz answered with a smile:
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+"Come with me then this afternoon."
+
+They had stopped before an old house with a blind, deserted look,
+that stood by itself on the wall; Harz pushed the door open.
+
+"Come in, you don't want breakfast yet.  I'm going to paint the river
+to-day."
+
+He ran up the bare broad stairs, and Dawney followed leisurely, his
+thumbs hooked in the armholes of his waistcoat, and his head thrown
+back.
+
+In the attic which filled the whole top story, Harz had pulled a
+canvas to the window.  He was a young man of middle height, square
+shouldered, active, with an angular face, high cheek-bones, and a
+strong, sharp chin.  His eyes were piercing and steel-blue, his
+eyebrows very flexible, nose long and thin with a high bridge; and
+his dark, unparted hair fitted him like a cap.  His clothes looked as
+if he never gave them a second thought.
+
+This room, which served for studio, bedroom, and sitting-room, was
+bare and dusty.  Below the window the river in spring flood rushed
+down the valley, a stream, of molten bronze.  Harz dodged before the
+canvas like a fencer finding his distance; Dawney took his seat on a
+packingcase.
+
+"The snows have gone with a rush this year," he drawled.  "The Talfer
+comes down brown, the Eisack comes down blue; they flow into the
+Etsch and make it green; a parable of the Spring for you, my
+painter."
+
+Harz mixed his colours.
+
+"I've no time for parables," he said, "no time for anything.  If I
+could be guaranteed to live to ninety-nine, like Titian--he had a
+chance.  Look at that poor fellow who was killed the other day!  All
+that struggle, and then--just at the turn!"
+
+He spoke English with a foreign accent; his voice was rather harsh,
+but his smile very kindly.
+
+Dawney lit a cigarette.
+
+"You painters," he said, "are better off than most of us.  You can
+strike out your own line.  Now if I choose to treat a case out of the
+ordinary way and the patient dies, I'm ruined."
+
+"My dear Doctor--if I don't paint what the public likes, I starve;
+all the same I'm going to paint in my own way; in the end I shall
+come out on top."
+
+"It pays to work in the groove, my friend, until you've made your
+name; after that--do what you like, they'll lick your boots all the
+same."
+
+"Ah, you don't love your work."
+
+Dawney answered slowly: "Never so happy as when my hands are full.
+But I want to make money, to get known, to have a good time, good
+cigars, good wine.  I hate discomfort.  No, my boy, I must work it on
+the usual lines; I don't like it, but I must lump it.  One starts in
+life with some notion of the ideal--it's gone by the board with me.
+I've got to shove along until I've made my name, and then, my little
+man--then--"
+
+"Then you'll be soft!  "You pay dearly for that first period!"
+
+"Take my chance of that; there's no other way."
+
+"Make one!"
+
+"Humph!"
+
+Harz poised his brush, as though it were a spear:
+
+"A man must do the best in him.  If he has to suffer--let him!"
+
+Dawney stretched his large soft body; a calculating look had come
+into his eyes.
+
+"You're a tough little man!" he said.
+
+"I've had to be tough."
+
+Dawney rose; tobacco smoke was wreathed round his unruffled hair.
+
+"Touching Villa Rubein," he said, "shall I call for you?  It's a
+mixed household, English mostly--very decent people."
+
+"No, thank you.  I shall be painting all day.  Haven't time to know
+the sort of people who expect one to change one's clothes."
+
+"As you like; ta-to!"  And, puffing out his chest, Dawney vanished
+through a blanket looped across the doorway.
+
+Harz set a pot of coffee on a spirit-lamp, and cut himself some
+bread.  Through the window the freshness of the morning came; the
+scent of sap and blossom and young leaves; the scent of earth, and
+the mountains freed from winter; the new flights and songs of birds;
+all the odorous, enchanted, restless Spring.
+
+There suddenly appeared through the doorway a white rough-haired
+terrier dog, black-marked about the face, with shaggy tan eyebrows.
+He sniffed at Harz, showed the whites round his eyes, and uttered a
+sharp bark.  A young voice called:
+
+"Scruff! Thou naughty dog!"  Light footsteps were heard on the
+stairs; from the distance a thin, high voice called:
+
+"Greta! You mustn't go up there!"
+
+A little girl of twelve, with long fair hair under a wide-brimmed
+hat, slipped in.
+
+Her blue eyes opened wide, her face flushed up.  That face was not
+regular; its cheek-bones were rather prominent, the nose was
+flattish; there was about it an air, innocent, reflecting, quizzical,
+shy.
+
+"Oh!" she said.
+
+Harz smiled: "Good-morning!  This your dog?"
+
+She did not answer, but looked at him with soft bewilderment; then
+running to the dog seized him by the collar.
+
+"Scr-ruff! Thou naughty dog-the baddest dog!"  The ends of her hair
+fell about him; she looked up at Harz, who said:
+
+"Not at all!  Let me give him some bread."
+
+"Oh no! You must not--I will beat him--and tell him he is bad; then
+he shall not do such things again.  Now he is sulky; he looks so
+always when he is sulky.  Is this your home?"
+
+"For the present; I am a visitor."
+
+"But I think you are of this country, because you speak like it."
+
+"Certainly, I am a Tyroler."
+
+"I have to talk English this morning, but I do not like it very much-
+-because, also I am half Austrian, and I like it best; but my sister,
+Christian, is all English.  Here is Miss Naylor; she shall be very
+angry with me."
+
+And pointing to the entrance with a rosy-tipped forefinger, she again
+looked ruefully at Harz.
+
+There came into the room with a walk like the hopping of a bird an
+elderly, small lady, in a grey serge dress, with narrow bands of
+claret-coloured velveteen; a large gold cross dangled from a steel
+chain on her chest; she nervously twisted her hands, clad in black
+kid gloves, rather white about the seams.
+
+Her hair was prematurely grey; her quick eyes brown; her mouth
+twisted at one corner; she held her face, kind-looking, but long and
+narrow, rather to one side, and wore on it a look of apology.  Her
+quick sentences sounded as if she kept them on strings, and wanted to
+draw them back as soon as she had let them forth.
+
+"Greta, how can, you do such things?  I don't know what your father
+would say!  I am sure I don't know how to--so extraordinary--"
+
+"Please!" said Harz.
+
+"You must come at once--so very sorry--so awkward!"  They were
+standing in a ring: Harz with his eyebrows working up and down; the
+little lady fidgeting her parasol; Greta, flushed and pouting, her
+eyes all dewy, twisting an end of fair hair round her finger.
+
+"Oh, look!"  The coffee had boiled over.  Little brown streams
+trickled spluttering from the pan; the dog, with ears laid back and
+tail tucked in, went scurrying round the room.  A feeling of
+fellowship fell on them at once.
+
+"Along the wall is our favourite walk, and Scruff--so awkward, so
+unfortunate--we did not think any one lived here--the shutters are
+cracked, the paint is peeling off so dreadfully.  Have you been long
+in Botzen?  Two months?  Fancy!  You are not English?  You are
+Tyrolese?  But you speak English so well--there for seven years?
+Really?  So fortunate!--It is Greta's day for English."
+
+Miss Naylor's eyes darted bewildered glances at the roof where the
+crossing of the beams made such deep shadows; at the litter of
+brushes, tools, knives, and colours on a table made out of packing-
+cases; at the big window, innocent of glass, and flush with the
+floor, whence dangled a bit of rusty chain--relic of the time when
+the place had been a store-loft; her eyes were hastily averted from
+an unfnished figure of the nude.
+
+Greta, with feet crossed, sat on a coloured blanket, dabbling her
+fnger in a little pool of coffee, and gazing up at Harz.  And he
+thought: 'I should like to paint her like that.  "A forget-me-not."'
+
+He took out his chalks to make a sketch of her.
+
+"Shall you show me?" cried out Greta, scrambling to her feet.
+
+"'Will,' Greta--'will'; how often must I tell you?  I think we should
+be going--it is very late--your father--so very kind of you, but I
+think we should be going.  Scruff!"   Miss Naylor gave the floor two
+taps.  The terrier backed into a plaster cast which came down on his
+tail, and sent him flying through the doorway.  Greta followed
+swiftly, crying:
+
+"Ach! poor Scrufee!"
+
+Miss Naylor crossed the room; bowing, she murmured an apology, and
+also disappeared.
+
+Harz was left alone, his guests were gone; the little girl with the
+fair hair and the eyes like forget-me-nots, the little lady with
+kindly gestures and bird-like walk, the terrier.  He looked round
+him; the room seemed very empty.  Gnawing his moustache, he muttered
+at the fallen cast.
+
+Then taking up his brush, stood before his picture, smiling and
+frowning.  Soon he had forgotten it all in his work.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+It was early morning four days later, and Harz was loitering
+homewards.  The shadows of the clouds passing across the vines were
+vanishing over the jumbled roofs and green-topped spires of the town.
+A strong sweet wind was blowing from the mountains, there was a stir
+in the branches of the trees, and flakes of the late blossom were
+drifting down.  Amongst the soft green pods of a kind of poplar
+chafers buzzed, and numbers of their little brown bodies were strewn
+on the path.
+
+He passed a bench where a girl sat sketching.  A puff of wind whirled
+her drawing to the ground; Harz ran to pick it up.  She took it from
+him with a bow; but, as he turned away, she tore the sketch across.
+
+"Ah!" he said; "why did you do that?"
+
+This girl, who stood with a bit of the torn sketch in either hand,
+was slight and straight; and her face earnest and serene.  She gazed
+at Harz with large, clear, greenish eyes; her lips and chin were
+defiant, her forehead tranquil.
+
+"I don't like it."
+
+"Will you let me look at it?  I am a painter."
+
+"It isn't worth looking at, but--if you wish--"
+
+He put the two halves of the sketch together.
+
+"You see!" she said at last; "I told you."
+
+Harz did not answer, still looking at the sketch.  The girl frowned.
+
+Harz asked her suddenly:
+
+"Why do you paint?"
+
+She coloured, and said:
+
+"Show me what is wrong."
+
+"I cannot show you what is wrong, there is nothing wrong--but why do
+you paint?"
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+Harz shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"You've no business to do that," said the girl in a hurt voice; "I
+want to know."
+
+"Your heart is not in it," said Harz.
+
+She looked at him, startled; her eyes had grown thoughtful.
+
+"I suppose that is it.  There are so many other things--"
+
+"There should be nothing else," said Harz.
+
+She broke in: "I don't want always to be thinking of myself.
+Suppose--"
+
+"Ah! When you begin supposing!"
+
+The girl confronted him; she had torn the sketch again.
+
+"You mean that if it does not matter enough, one had better not do it
+at all.  I don't know if you are right--I think you are."
+
+There was the sound of a nervous cough, and Harz saw behind him his
+three visitors--Miss Naylor offering him her hand; Greta, flushed,
+with a bunch of wild flowers, staring intently in his face; and the
+terrier, sniffing at his trousers.
+
+Miss Naylor broke an awkward silence.
+
+"We wondered if you would still be here, Christian.  I am sorry to
+interrupt you--I was not aware that you knew Mr. Herr--"
+
+"Harz is my name--we were just talking"
+
+"About my sketch.  Oh, Greta, you do tickle!  Will you come and have
+breakfast with us to-day, Herr Harz?  It's our turn, you know."
+
+Harz, glancing at his dusty clothes, excused himself.
+
+But Greta in a pleading voice said: "Oh! do come!  Scruff likes you.
+It is so dull when there is nobody for breakfast but ourselves."
+
+Miss Naylor's mouth began to twist.  Harz hurriedly broke in:
+
+"Thank you.  I will come with pleasure; you don't mind my being
+dirty?"
+
+"Oh no! we do not mind; then we shall none of us wash, and afterwards
+I shall show you my rabbits."
+
+Miss Naylor, moving from foot to foot, like a bird on its perch,
+exclaimed:
+
+"I hope you won't regret it, not a very good meal--the girls are so
+impulsive--such informal invitation; we shall be very glad."
+
+But Greta pulled softly at her sister's sleeve, and Christian,
+gathering her things, led the way.
+
+Harz followed in amazement; nothing of this kind had come into his
+life before.  He kept shyly glancing at the girls; and, noting the
+speculative innocence in Greta's eyes, he smiled.  They soon came to
+two great poplar-trees, which stood, like sentinels, one on either
+side of an unweeded gravel walk leading through lilac bushes to a
+house painted dull pink, with green-shuttered windows, and a roof of
+greenish slate.  Over the door in faded crimson letters were written
+the words, "Villa Rubein."
+
+"That is to the stables," said Greta, pointing down a path, where
+some pigeons were sunning themselves on a wall.  "Uncle Nic keeps his
+horses there: Countess and Cuckoo--his horses begin with C, because
+of Chris--they are quite beautiful.  He says he could drive them to
+Kingdom-Come and they would not turn their hair.  Bow, and say 'Good-
+morning' to our house!"
+
+Harz bowed.
+
+"Father said all strangers should, and I think it brings good luck."
+>From the doorstep she looked round at Harz, then ran into the house.
+
+A broad, thick-set man, with stiff, brushed-up hair, a short, brown,
+bushy beard parted at the chin, a fresh complexion, and blue glasses
+across a thick nose, came out, and called in a bluff voice:
+
+"Ha! my good dears, kiss me quick--prrt!  How goes it then this
+morning?  A good walk, hein?"  The sound of many loud rapid kisses
+followed.
+
+"Ha, Fraulein, good!"  He became aware of Harz's figure standing in
+the doorway: "Und der Herr?"
+
+Miss Naylor hurriedly explained.
+
+"Good!  An artist!  Kommen Sie herein, I am delight.  You will
+breakfast?  I too--yes, yes, my dears--I too breakfast with you this
+morning.  I have the hunter's appetite."
+
+Harz, looking at him keenly, perceived him to be of middle height and
+age, stout, dressed in a loose holland jacket, a very white, starched
+shirt, and blue silk sash; that he looked particularly clean, had an
+air of belonging to Society, and exhaled a really fine aroma of
+excellent cigars and the best hairdresser's essences.
+
+The room they entered was long and rather bare; there was a huge map
+on the wall, and below it a pair of globes on crooked supports,
+resembling two inflated frogs erect on their hind legs.  In one
+corner was a cottage piano, close to a writing-table heaped with
+books and papers; this nook, sacred to Christian, was foreign to the
+rest of the room, which was arranged with supernatural neatness.  A
+table was laid for breakfast, and the sun-warmed air came in through
+French windows.
+
+The meal went merrily; Herr Paul von Morawitz was never in such
+spirits as at table.  Words streamed from him.  Conversing with Harz,
+he talked of Art as who should say: "One does not claim to be a
+connoisseur--pas si bete--still, one has a little knowledge, que
+diable!"  He recommended him a man in the town who sold cigars that
+were "not so very bad."  He consumed porridge, ate an omelette; and
+bending across to Greta gave her a sounding kiss, muttering: "Kiss me
+quick!"--an expression he had picked up in a London music-hall, long
+ago, and considered chic.  He asked his daughters' plans, and held
+out porridge to the terrier, who refused it with a sniff.
+
+"Well," he said suddenly, looking at Miss Naylor, "here is a
+gentleman who has not even heard our names!"
+
+The little lady began her introductions in a breathless voice.
+
+"Good!"  Herr Paul said, puffing out his lips: "Now we know each
+other!" and, brushing up the ends of his moustaches, he carried off
+Harz into another room, decorated with pipe-racks, prints of dancing-
+girls, spittoons, easy-chairs well-seasoned by cigar smoke, French
+novels, and newspapers.
+
+The household at Villa Rubein was indeed of a mixed and curious
+nature.  Cut on both floors by corridors, the Villa was divided into
+four divisions; each of which had its separate inhabitants, an
+arrangement which had come about in the following way:
+
+When old Nicholas Treffry died, his estate, on the boundary of
+Cornwall, had been sold and divided up among his three surviving
+children--Nicholas, who was much the eldest, a partner in the well-
+known firm of Forsyte and Treffry, teamen, of the Strand; Constance,
+married to a man called Decie; and Margaret, at her father's death
+engaged to the curate of the parish, John Devorell, who shortly
+afterwards became its rector.  By his marriage with Margaret Treffry
+the rector had one child called Christian.  Soon after this he came
+into some property, and died, leaving it unfettered to his widow.
+Three years went by, and when the child was six years old, Mrs.
+Devorell, still young and pretty, came to live in London with her
+brother Nicholas.  It was there that she met Paul von Morawitz--the
+last of an old Czech family, who had lived for many hundred years on
+their estates near Budweiss.  Paul had been left an orphan at the age
+of ten, and without a solitary ancestral acre.  Instead of acres, he
+inherited the faith that nothing was too good for a von Morawitz.  In
+later years his savoir faire enabled him to laugh at faith, but it
+stayed quietly with him all the same.  The absence of acres was of no
+great consequence, for through his mother, the daughter of a banker
+in Vienna, he came into a well-nursed fortune.  It befitted a von
+Morawitz that he should go into the Cavalry, but, unshaped for
+soldiering, he soon left the Service; some said he had a difference
+with his Colonel over the quality of food provided during some
+manoeuvres; others that he had retired because his chargers did not
+fit his legs, which were, indeed, rather round.
+
+He had an admirable appetite for pleasure; a man-about-town's life
+suited him.  He went his genial, unreflecting, costly way in Vienna,
+Paris, London.  He loved exclusively those towns, and boasted that he
+was as much at home in one as in another.  He combined exuberant
+vitality with fastidiousness of palate, and devoted both to the
+acquisition of a special taste in women, weeds, and wines; above all
+he was blessed with a remarkable digestion.  He was thirty when he
+met Mrs. Devorell; and she married him because he was so very
+different from anybody she had ever seen.  People more dissimilar
+were never mated.  To Paul--accustomed to stage doors--freshness,
+serene tranquillity, and obvious purity were the baits; he had run
+through more than half his fortune, too, and the fact that she had
+money was possibly not overlooked.  Be that as it may, he was fond of
+her; his heart was soft, he developed a domestic side.
+
+Greta was born to them after a year of marriage.  The instinct of the
+"freeman" was, however, not dead in Paul; he became a gambler.  He
+lost the remainder of his fortune without being greatly disturbed.
+When he began to lose his wife's fortune too things naturally became
+more difficult.  Not too much remained when Nicholas Treffry stepped
+in, and caused his sister to settle what was left on her daughters,
+after providing a life-interest for herself and Paul.  Losing his
+supplies, the good man had given up his cards.  But the instinct of
+the "freeman" was still living in his breast; he took to drink.  He
+was never grossly drunk, and rarely very sober.  His wife sorrowed
+over this new passion; her health, already much enfeebled, soon broke
+down.  The doctors sent her to the Tyrol.  She seemed to benefit by
+this, and settled down at Botzen.  The following year, when Greta was
+just ten, she died.  It was a shock to Paul.  He gave up excessive
+drinking; became a constant smoker, and lent full rein to his natural
+domesticity.  He was fond of both the girls, but did not at all
+understand them; Greta, his own daughter, was his favourite.  Villa
+Rubein remained their home; it was cheap and roomy.  Money, since
+Paul became housekeeper to himself, was scarce.
+
+About this time Mrs. Decie, his wife's sister, whose husband had died
+in the East, returned to England; Paul invited her to come and live
+with them.  She had her own rooms, her own servant; the arrangement
+suited Paul--it was economically sound, and there was some one always
+there to take care of the girls.  In truth he began to feel the
+instinct of the "freeman" rising again within him; it was pleasant to
+run over to Vienna now and then; to play piquet at a Club in Gries,
+of which he was the shining light; in a word, to go "on the tiles" a
+little.  One could not always mourn--even if a woman were an angel;
+moreover, his digestion was as good as ever.
+
+The fourth quarter of this Villa was occupied by Nicholas Treffry,
+whose annual sojourn out of England perpetually surprised himself.
+Between him and his young niece, Christian, there existed, however, a
+rare sympathy; one of those affections between the young and old,
+which, mysteriously born like everything in life, seems the only end
+and aim to both, till another feeling comes into the younger heart.
+
+Since a long and dangerous illness, he had been ordered to avoid the
+English winter, and at the commencement of each spring he would
+appear at Botzen, driving his own horses by easy stages from the
+Italian Riviera, where he spent the coldest months.  He always stayed
+till June before going back to his London Club, and during all that
+time he let no day pass without growling at foreigners, their habits,
+food, drink, and raiment, with a kind of big dog's growling that did
+nobody any harm.  The illness had broken him very much; he was
+seventy, but looked more.  He had a servant, a Luganese, named
+Dominique, devoted to him.  Nicholas Treffry had found him overworked
+in an hotel, and had engaged him with the caution: "Look--here,
+Dominique! I swear!"  To which Dominique, dark of feature, saturnine
+and ironical, had only replied: "Tres biens, M'sieur!"
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+Harz and his host sat in leather chairs; Herr Paul's square back was
+wedged into a cushion, his round legs crossed.  Both were smoking,
+and they eyed each other furtively, as men of different stamp do when
+first thrown together.  The young artist found his host extremely new
+and disconcerting; in his presence he felt both shy and awkward.
+Herr Paul, on the other hand, very much at ease, was thinking
+indolently:
+
+'Good-looking young fellow--comes of the people, I expect, not at all
+the manner of the world; wonder what he talks about.'
+
+Presently noticing that Harz was looking at a photograph, he said:
+"Ah! yes! that was a woman!  They are not to be found in these days.
+She could dance, the little Coralie!  Did you ever see such arms?
+Confess that she is beautiful, hein?"
+
+"She has individuality," said Harz.  "A fine type!"
+
+Herr Paul blew out a cloud of smoke.
+
+"Yes," he murmured, "she was fine all over!"  He had dropped his
+eyeglasses, and his full brown eyes, with little crow's-feet at the
+corners, wandered from his visitor to his cigar.
+
+'He'd be like a Satyr if he wasn't too clean,' thought Harz.  'Put
+vine leaves in his hair, paint him asleep, with his hands crossed,
+so!'
+
+"When I am told a person has individuality," Herr Paul was saying in
+a rich and husky voice, "I generally expect boots that bulge, an
+umbrella of improper colour; I expect a creature of 'bad form' as
+they say in England; who will shave some days and some days will not
+shave; who sometimes smells of India-rubber, and sometimes does not
+smell, which is discouraging!"
+
+"You do not approve of individuality?" said Harz shortly.
+
+"Not if it means doing, and thinking, as those who know better do not
+do, or think."
+
+"And who are those who know better?"
+
+"Ah! my dear, you are asking me a riddle?  Well, then--Society, men
+of birth, men of recognised position, men above eccentricity, in a
+word, of reputation."
+
+Harz looked at him fixedly.  "Men who haven't the courage of their
+own ideas, not even the courage to smell of India-rubber; men who
+have no desires, and so can spend all their time making themselves
+flat!"
+
+Herr Paul drew out a red silk handkerchief and wiped his beard.  "I
+assure you, my dear," he said, "it is easier to be flat; it is more
+respectable to be flat.  Himmel! why not, then, be flat?"
+
+"Like any common fellow?"
+
+"Certes; like any common fellow--like me, par exemple!"  Herr Paul
+waved his hand.  When he exercised unusual tact, he always made use
+of a French expression.
+
+Harz flushed.  Herr Paul followed up his victory.  "Come, come!" he
+said.  "Pass me my men of repute! que diable! we are not anarchists."
+
+"Are you sure?" said Harz.
+
+Herr Paul twisted his moustache.  "I beg your pardon," he said
+slowly.  But at this moment the door was opened; a rumbling voice
+remarked: "Morning, Paul.  Who's your visitor?"  Harz saw a tall,
+bulky figure in the doorway.
+
+"Come in,"' called out Herr Paul.  "Let me present to you a new
+acquaintance, an artist: Herr Harz--Mr. Nicholas Treffry.  Psumm
+bumm! All this introducing is dry work."  And going to the sideboard
+he poured out three glasses of a light, foaming beer.
+
+Mr. Treffry waved it from him: "Not for me," he said: "Wish I could!
+They won't let me look at it."  And walking over, to the window with
+a heavy tread, which trembled like his voice, he sat down.  There was
+something in his gait like the movements of an elephant's hind legs.
+He was very tall (it was said, with the customary exaggeration of
+family tradition, that there never had been a male Treffry under six
+feet in height), but now he stooped, and had grown stout.  There was
+something at once vast and unobtrusive about his personality.
+
+He wore a loose brown velvet jacket, and waistcoat, cut to show a
+soft frilled shirt and narrow black ribbon tie; a thin gold chain was
+looped round his neck and fastened to his fob.  His heavy cheeks had
+folds in them like those in a bloodhound's face.  He wore big,
+drooping, yellow-grey moustaches, which he had a habit of sucking,
+and a goatee beard.  He had long loose ears that might almost have
+been said to gap.  On his head there was a soft black hat, large in
+the brim and low in the crown.  His grey eyes, heavy-lidded, twinkled
+under their bushy brows with a queer, kind cynicism.  As a young man
+he had sown many a wild oat; but he had also worked and made money in
+business; he had, in fact, burned the candle at both ends; but he had
+never been unready to do his fellows a good turn.  He had a passion
+for driving, and his reckless method of pursuing this art had caused
+him to be nicknamed: "The notorious Treffry."
+
+Once, when he was driving tandem down a hill with a loose rein, the
+friend beside him had said: "For all the good you're doing with those
+reins, Treffry, you might as well throw them on the horses' necks."
+
+"Just so," Treffry had answered.  At the bottom of the hill they had
+gone over a wall into a potato patch.  Treffry had broken several
+ribs; his friend had gone unharmed.
+
+He was a great sufferer now, but, constitutionally averse to being
+pitied, he had a disconcerting way of humming, and this, together
+with the shake in his voice, and his frequent use of peculiar
+phrases, made the understanding of his speech depend at times on
+intuition rather than intelligence.
+
+The clock began to strike eleven.  Harz muttered an excuse, shook
+hands with his host, and bowing to his new acquaintance, went away.
+He caught a glimpse of Greta's face against the window, and waved his
+hand to her.  In the road he came on Dawney, who was turning in
+between the poplars, with thumbs as usual hooked in the armholes of
+his waistcoat.
+
+"Hallo!" the latter said.
+
+"Doctor!" Harz answered slyly; "the Fates outwitted me, it seems."
+
+"Serve you right," said Dawney, "for your confounded egoism! Wait
+here till I come out, I shan't be many minutes."
+
+But Harz went on his way.  A cart drawn by cream-coloured oxen was
+passing slowly towards the bridge.  In front of the brushwood piled
+on it two peasant girls were sitting with their feet on a mat of
+grass--the picture of contentment.
+
+"I'm wasting my time!" he thought.  "I've done next to nothing in two
+months.  Better get back to London!  That girl will never make a
+painter!"  She would never make a painter, but there was something in
+her that he could not dismiss so rapidly.  She was not exactly
+beautiful, but she was sympathetic.  The brow was pleasing, with
+dark-brown hair softly turned back, and eyes so straight and shining.
+The two sisters were very different!  The little one was innocent,
+yet mysterious; the elder seemed as clear as crystal!
+
+He had entered the town, where the arcaded streets exuded their
+peculiar pungent smell of cows and leather, wood-smoke, wine-casks,
+and drains.  The sound of rapid wheels over the stones made him turn
+his head.  A carriage drawn by red-roan horses was passing at a great
+pace.  People stared at it, standing still, and looking alarmed.  It
+swung from side to side and vanished round a corner.  Harz saw Mr.
+Nicholas Treffry in a long, whitish dust-coat; his Italian servant,
+perched behind, was holding to the seat-rail, with a nervous grin on
+his dark face.
+
+'Certainly,' Harz thought, 'there's no getting away from these people
+this morning--they are everywhere.'
+
+In his studio he began to sort his sketches, wash his brushes, and
+drag out things he had accumulated during his two months' stay.  He
+even began to fold his blanket door.  But suddenly he stopped.  Those
+two girls!  Why not try?  What a picture!  The two heads, the sky,
+and leaves!  Begin to-morrow!  Against that window--no, better at the
+Villa!  Call the picture--Spring...!
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The wind, stirring among trees and bushes, flung the young leaves
+skywards.  The trembling of their silver linings was like the joyful
+flutter of a heart at good news.  It was one of those Spring mornings
+when everything seems full of a sweet restlessness--soft clouds
+chasing fast across the sky; soft scents floating forth and dying;
+the notes of birds, now shrill and sweet, now hushed in silences; all
+nature striving for something, nothing at peace.
+
+Villa Rubein withstood the influence of the day, and wore its usual
+look of rest and isolation.  Harz sent in his card, and asked to see
+"der Herr."  The servant, a grey-eyed, clever-looking Swiss with no
+hair on his face, came back saying:
+
+"Der Herr, mein Herr, is in the Garden gone."  Harz followed him.
+
+Herr Paul, a small white flannel cap on his head, gloves on his
+hands, and glasses on his nose, was watering a rosebush, and humming
+the serenade from Faust.
+
+This aspect of the house was very different from the other.  The sun
+fell on it, and over a veranda creepers clung and scrambled in long
+scrolls.  There was a lawn, with freshly mown grass; flower-beds were
+laid out, and at the end of an avenue of young acacias stood an
+arbour covered with wisteria.
+
+In the east, mountain peaks--fingers of snow--glittered above the
+mist.  A grave simplicity lay on that scene, on the roofs and spires,
+the valleys and the dreamy hillsides, with their yellow scars and
+purple bloom, and white cascades, like tails of grey horses swishing
+in the wind.
+
+Herr Paul held out his hand: "What can we do for you?" he said.
+
+"I have to beg a favour," replied Harz.  "I wish to paint your
+daughters.  I will bring the canvas here--they shall have no trouble.
+I would paint them in the garden when they have nothing else to do."
+
+Herr Paul looked at him dubiously--ever since the previous day he had
+been thinking: 'Queer bird, that painter--thinks himself the devil of
+a swell!  Looks a determined fellow too!'  Now--staring in the
+painter's face--it seemed to him, on the whole, best if some one else
+refused this permission.
+
+"With all the pleasure, my dear sir," he said.  "Come, let us ask
+these two young ladies!" and putting down his hose, he led the way
+towards the arbour, thinking: 'You'll be disappointed, my young
+conqueror, or I'm mistaken.'
+
+Miss Naylor and the girls were sitting in the shade, reading La
+Fontaine's fables.  Greta, with one eye on her governess, was
+stealthily cutting a pig out of orange peel.
+
+"Ah! my dear dears!" began Herr Paul, who in the presence of Miss
+Naylor always paraded his English.  "Here is our friend, who has a
+very flattering request to make; he would paint you, yes--both
+together, alfresco, in the air, in the sunshine, with the birds, the
+little birds!"
+
+Greta, gazing at Harz, gushed deep pink, and furtively showed him her
+pig.
+
+Christian said: "Paint us?  Oh no!"
+
+She saw Harz looking at her, and added, slowly: "If you really wish
+it, I suppose we could!" then dropped her eyes.
+
+"Ah!" said Herr Paul raising his brows till his glasses fell from his
+nose: "And what says Gretchen?  Does she want to be handed up to
+posterities a little peacock along with the other little birds?"
+
+Greta, who had continued staring at the painter, said: "Of--course--
+I--want--to--be."
+
+"Prrt!" said Herr Paul, looking at Miss Naylor.  The little lady
+indeed opened her mouth wide, but all that came forth was a tiny
+squeak, as sometimes happens when one is anxious to say something,
+and has not arranged beforehand what it shall be.
+
+The affair seemed ended; Harz heaved a sigh of satisfaction.  But
+Herr Paul had still a card to play.
+
+"There is your Aunt," he said; "there are things to be considered--
+one must certainly inquire--so, we shall see."  Kissing Greta loudly
+on both cheeks, he went towards the house.
+
+"What makes you want to paint us?" Christian asked, as soon as he was
+gone.
+
+"I think it very wrong," Miss Naylor blurted out.
+
+"Why?" said Harz, frowning.
+
+"Greta is so young--there are lessons--it is such a waste of time!"
+
+His eyebrows twitched: "Ah! You think so!"
+
+"I don't see why it is a waste of time," said Christian quietly;
+"there are lots of hours when we sit here and do nothing."
+
+"And it is very dull," put in Greta, with a pout.
+
+"You are rude, Greta," said Miss Naylor in a little rage, pursing her
+lips, and taking up her knitting.
+
+"I think it seems always rude to speak the truth," said Greta.  Miss
+Naylor looked at her in that concentrated manner with which she was
+in the habit of expressing displeasure.
+
+But at this moment a servant came, and said that Mrs. Decie would be
+glad to see Herr Harz.  The painter made them a stiff bow, and
+followed the servant to the house.  Miss Naylor and the two girls
+watched his progress with apprehensive eyes; it was clear that he had
+been offended.
+
+Crossing the veranda, and passing through an open window hung with
+silk curtains, Hart entered a cool dark room.  This was Mrs. Decie's
+sanctum, where she conducted correspondence, received her visitors,
+read the latest literature, and sometimes, when she had bad
+headaches, lay for hours on the sofa, with a fan, and her eyes
+closed.  There was a scent of sandalwood, a suggestion of the East, a
+kind of mystery, in here, as if things like chairs and tables were
+not really what they seemed, but something much less commonplace.
+
+The visitor looked twice, to be quite sure of anything; there were
+many plants, bead curtains, and a deal of silverwork and china.
+
+Mrs. Decie came forward in the slightly rustling silk which--whether
+in or out of fashion--always accompanied her.  A tall woman, over
+fifty, she moved as if she had been tied together at the knees.  Her
+face was long, with broad brows, from which her sandy-grey hair was
+severely waved back; she had pale eyes, and a perpetual, pale,
+enigmatic smile.  Her complexion had been ruined by long residence in
+India, and might unkindly have been called fawn-coloured.  She came
+close to Harz, keeping her eyes on his, with her head bent slightly
+forward.
+
+"We are so pleased to know you," she said, speaking in a voice which
+had lost all ring.  "It is charming to find some one in these parts
+who can help us to remember that there is such a thing as Art.  We
+had Mr. C--- here last autumn, such a charming fellow.  He was so
+interested in the native customs and dresses.  You are a subject
+painter, too, I think?  Won't you sit down?"
+
+She went on for some time, introducing painters' names, asking
+questions, skating round the edge of what was personal.  And the
+young man stood before her with a curious little smile fixed on his
+lips.  'She wants to know whether I'm worth powder and shot,' he
+thought.
+
+"You wish to paint my nieces?" Mrs. Decie said at last, leaning back
+on her settee.
+
+"I wish to have that honour," Harz answered with a bow.
+
+"And what sort of picture did you think of?"
+
+"That," said Harz, "is in the future.  I couldn't tell you."  And he
+thought: 'Will she ask me if I get my tints in Paris, like the woman
+Tramper told me of?'
+
+The perpetual pale smile on Mrs. Decie's face seemed to invite his
+confidence, yet to warn him that his words would be sucked in
+somewhere behind those broad fine brows, and carefully sorted.  Mrs.
+Decie, indeed, was thinking: 'Interesting young man, regular
+Bohemian--no harm in that at his age; something Napoleonic in his
+face; probably has no dress clothes.  Yes, should like to see more of
+him!'  She had a fine eye for points of celebrity; his name was
+unfamiliar, would probably have been scouted by that famous artist
+Mr. C---, but she felt her instinct urging her on to know him.  She
+was, to do her justice, one of those "lion" finders who seek the
+animal for pleasure, not for the glory it brings them; she had the
+courage of her instincts--lion-entities were indispensable to her,
+but she trusted to divination to secure them; nobody could foist a
+"lion" on her.
+
+"It will be very nice.  You will stay and have some lunch?  The
+arrangements here are rather odd.  Such a mixed household--but there
+is always lunch at two o'clock for any one who likes, and we all dine
+at seven.  You would have your sittings in the afternoons, perhaps?
+I should so like to see your sketches.  You are using the old house
+on the wall for studio; that is so original of you!"
+
+Harz would not stay to lunch, but asked if he might begin work that
+afternoon; he left a little suffocated by the sandalwood and sympathy
+of this sphinx-like woman.
+
+Walking home along the river wall, with the singing of the larks and
+thrushes, the rush of waters, the humming of the chafers in his ears,
+he felt that he would make something fine of this subject.  Before
+his eyes the faces of the two girls continually started up, framed by
+the sky, with young leaves guttering against their cheeks.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+Three days had passed since Harz began his picture, when early in the
+morning, Greta came from Villa Rubein along the river dyke and sat
+down on a bench from which the old house on the wall was visible.
+She had not been there long before Harz came out.
+
+"I did not knock," said Greta, "because you would not have heard, and
+it is so early, so I have been waiting for you a quarter of an hour."
+
+Selecting a rosebud, from some flowers in her hand, she handed it to
+him.  "That is my first rosebud this year," she said; "it is for you
+because you are painting me.  To-day I am thirteen, Herr Harz; there
+is not to be a sitting, because it is my birthday; but, instead, we
+are all going to Meran to see the play of Andreas Hofer.  You are to
+come too, please; I am here to tell you, and the others shall be here
+directly."
+
+Harz bowed: "And who are the others?"
+
+"Christian, and Dr. Edmund, Miss Naylor, and Cousin Teresa.  Her
+husband is ill, so she is sad, but to-day she is going to forget
+that.  It is not good to be always sad, is it, Herr Harz?"
+
+He laughed: "You could not be."
+
+Greta answered gravely: "Oh yes, I could.  I too am often sad.  You
+are making fun.  You are not to make fun to-day, because it is my
+birthday.  Do you think growing up is nice, Herr Harz ?"
+
+"No, Fraulein Greta, it is better to have all the time before you."
+
+They walked on side by side.
+
+"I think," said Greta, "you are very much afraid of losing time.
+Chris says that time is nothing."
+
+"Time is everything," responded Harz.
+
+"She says that time is nothing, and thought is everything," Greta
+murmured, rubbing a rose against her cheek, "but I think you cannot
+have a thought unless you have the time to think it in.  There are
+the others!  Look!"
+
+A cluster of sunshades on the bridge glowed for a moment and was lost
+in shadow.
+
+"Come," said Harz, "let's join them!"
+
+At Meran, under Schloss Tirol, people were streaming across the
+meadows into the open theatre.  Here were tall fellows in mountain
+dress, with leather breeches, bare knees, and hats with eagles'
+feathers; here were fruit-sellers, burghers and their wives,
+mountebanks, actors, and every kind of visitor.  The audience, packed
+into an enclosure of high boards, sweltered under the burning sun.
+Cousin Teresa, tall and thin, with hard, red cheeks, shaded her
+pleasant eyes with her hand.
+
+The play began.  It depicted the rising in the Tyrol of 1809: the
+village life, dances and yodelling; murmurings and exhortations, the
+warning beat of drums; then the gathering, with flintlocks,
+pitchforks, knives; the battle and victory; the homecoming, and
+festival.  Then the second gathering, the roar of cannon; betrayal,
+capture, death.  The impassive figure of the patriot Andreas Hofer
+always in front, black-bearded, leathern-girdled, under the blue sky,
+against a screen of mountains.
+
+Harz and Christian sat behind the others.  He seemed so intent on the
+play that she did not speak, but watched his face, rigid with a kind
+of cold excitement; he seemed to be transported by the life passing
+before them.  Something of his feeling seized on her; when the play
+was over she too was trembling.  In pushing their way out they became
+separated from the others.
+
+"There's a short cut to the station here," said Christian; "let's go
+this way."
+
+The path rose a little; a narrow stream crept alongside the meadow,
+and the hedge was spangled with wild roses.  Christian kept glancing
+shyly at the painter.  Since their meeting on the river wall her
+thoughts had never been at rest.  This stranger, with his keen face,
+insistent eyes, and ceaseless energy, had roused a strange feeling in
+her; his words had put shape to something in her not yet expressed.
+She stood aside at a stile to make way for some peasant boys, dusty
+and rough-haired, who sang and whistled as they went by.
+
+"I was like those boys once," said Harz.
+
+Christian turned to him quickly.  "Ah! that was why you felt the
+play, so much."
+
+"It's my country up there.  I was born amongst the mountains.  I
+looked after the cows, and slept in hay-cocks, and cut the trees in
+winter.  They used to call me a 'black sheep,' a 'loafer' in my
+village."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Ah! why?  I worked as hard as any of them.  But I wanted to get
+away.  Do you think I could have stayed there all my life?"
+
+Christian's eyes grew eager.
+
+"If people don't understand what it is you want to do, they always
+call you a loafer!" muttered Harz.
+
+"But you did what you meant to do in spite of them," Christian said.
+
+For herself it was so hard to finish or decide.  When in the old days
+she told Greta stories, the latter, whose instinct was always for the
+definite, would say: "And what came at the end, Chris?  Do finish it
+this morning!" but Christian never could.  Her thoughts were deep,
+vague, dreamy, invaded by both sides of every question.  Whatever she
+did, her needlework, her verse-making, her painting, all had its
+charm; but it was not always what it was intended for at the
+beginning.  Nicholas Treffry had once said of her: "When Chris starts
+out to make a hat, it may turn out an altar-cloth, but you may bet it
+won't be a hat."  It was her instinct to look for what things meant;
+and this took more than all her time.  She knew herself better than
+most girls of nineteen, but it was her reason that had informed her,
+not her feelings.  In her sheltered life, her heart had never been
+ruffled except by rare fits of passion--"tantrums" old Nicholas
+Treffry dubbed them--at what seemed to her mean or unjust.
+
+"If I were a man," she said, "and going to be great, I should have
+wanted to begin at the very bottom as you did."
+
+"Yes," said Harz quickly, "one should be able to feel everything."
+
+She did not notice how simply he assumed that he was going to be
+great.  He went on, a smile twisting his mouth unpleasantly beneath
+its dark moustache
+
+"Not many people think like you! It's a crime not to have been born a
+gentleman."
+
+"That's a sneer," said Christian; "I didn't think you would have
+sneered!"
+
+"It is true.  What is the use of pretending that it isn't?"
+
+"It may be true, but it is finer not to say it!"
+
+"By Heavens!" said Harz, striking one hand into the other, "if more
+truth were spoken there would not be so many shams."
+
+Christian looked down at him from her seat on the stile.
+
+"You are right all the same, Fraulein Christian," he added suddenly;
+"that's a very little business.  Work is what matters, and trying to
+see the beauty in the world."
+
+Christian's face changed.  She understood, well enough, this craving
+after beauty.  Slipping down from the stile, she drew a slow deep
+breath.
+
+"Yes!" she said.  Neither spoke for some time, then Harz said shyly:
+
+"If you and Fraulein Greta would ever like to come and see my studio,
+I should be so happy.  I would try and clean it up for you!"
+
+"I should like to come.  I could learn something.  I want to learn."
+
+They were both silent till the path joined the road.
+
+"We must be in front of the others; it's nice to be in front--let's
+dawdle.  I forgot--you never dawdle, Herr Harz."
+
+"After a big fit of work, I can dawdle against any one; then I get
+another fit of work--it's like appetite."
+
+"I'm always dawdling," answered Christian.
+
+By the roadside a peasant woman screwed up her sun-dried face, saying
+in a low voice: "Please, gracious lady, help me to lift this basket!"
+
+Christian stooped, but before she could raise it, Harz hoisted it up
+on his back.
+
+"All right," he nodded; "this good lady doesn't mind."
+
+The woman, looking very much ashamed, walked along by Christian; she
+kept rubbing her brown hands together, and saying; "Gracious lady, I
+would not have wished.  It is heavy, but I would not have wished."
+
+"I'm sure he'd rather carry it," said Christian.
+
+They had not gone far along the road, however, before the others
+passed them in a carriage, and at the strange sight Miss Naylor could
+be seen pursing her lips; Cousin Teresa nodding pleasantly; a smile
+on Dawney's face; and beside him Greta, very demure.  Harz began to
+laugh.
+
+"What are you laughing at?" asked Christian.
+
+"You English are so funny.  You mustn't do this here, you mustn't do
+that there, it's like sitting in a field of nettles.  If I were to
+walk with you without my coat, that little lady would fall off her
+seat."  His laugh infected Christian; they reached the station
+feeling that they knew each other better.
+
+The sun had dipped behind the mountains when the little train steamed
+down the valley.  All were subdued, and Greta, with a nodding head,
+slept fitfully.  Christian, in her corner, was looking out of the
+window, and Harz kept studying her profile.
+
+He tried to see her eyes.  He had remarked indeed that, whatever
+their expression, the brows, arched and rather wide apart, gave them
+a peculiar look of understanding.  He thought of his picture.  There
+was nothing in her face to seize on, it was too sympathetic, too much
+like light.  Yet her chin was firm, almost obstinate.
+
+The train stopped with a jerk; she looked round at him.  It was as
+though she had said: "You are my friend."
+
+At Villa Rubein, Herr Paul had killed the fatted calf for Greta's
+Fest.  When the whole party were assembled, he alone remained
+standing; and waving his arm above the cloth, cried: "My dears! Your
+happiness!  There are good things here--Come!"  And with a sly look,
+the air of a conjurer producing rabbits, he whipped the cover off the
+soup tureen:
+
+"Soup-turtle, fat, green fat!"  He smacked his lips.
+
+No servants were allowed, because, as Greta said to Harz:
+
+"It is that we are to be glad this evening."
+
+Geniality radiated from Herr Paul's countenance, mellow as a bowl of
+wine.  He toasted everybody, exhorting them to pleasure.
+
+Harz passed a cracker secretly behind Greta's head, and Miss Naylor,
+moved by a mysterious impulse, pulled it with a sort of gleeful
+horror; it exploded, and Greta sprang off her chair.  Scruff, seeing
+this, appeared suddenly on the sideboard with his forelegs in a plate
+of soup; without moving them, he turned his head, and appeared to
+accuse the company of his false position.  It was the signal for
+shrieks of laughter.  Scruff made no attempt to free his forelegs;
+but sniffed the soup, and finding that nothing happened, began to lap
+it.
+
+"Take him out! Oh! take him out!" wailed Greta, "he shall be ill!"
+
+"Allons! Mon cher!" cried Herr Paul, "c'est magnifique, mais, vous
+savez, ce nest guere la guerre!"  Scruff, with a wild spring, leaped
+past him to the ground.
+
+"Ah!" cried Miss Naylor, "the carpet!"  Fresh moans of mirth shook
+the table; for having tasted the wine of laughter, all wanted as much
+more as they could get.  When Scruff and his traces were effaced,
+Herr Paul took a ladle in his hand.
+
+"I have a toast," he said, waving it for silence; "a toast we will
+drink all together from our hearts; the toast of my little daughter,
+who to-day has thirteen years become; and there is also in our
+hearts," he continued, putting down the ladle and suddenly becoming
+grave, "the thought of one who is not today with us to see this
+joyful occasion; to her, too, in this our happiness we turn our
+hearts and glasses because it is her joy that we should yet be
+joyful.  I drink to my little daughter; may God her shadow bless!"
+
+All stood up, clinking their glasses, and drank: then, in the hush
+that followed, Greta, according to custom, began to sing a German
+carol; at the end of the fourth line she stopped, abashed.
+
+Heir Paul blew his nose loudly, and, taking up a cap that had fallen
+from a cracker, put it on.
+
+Every one followed his example, Miss Naylor attaining the distinction
+of a pair of donkey's ears, which she wore, after another glass of
+wine, with an air of sacrificing to the public good.
+
+At the end of supper came the moment for the offering of gifts.  Herr
+Paul had tied a handkerchief over Greta's eyes, and one by one they
+brought her presents.  Greta, under forfeit of a kiss, was bound to
+tell the giver by the feel of the gift.  Her swift, supple little
+hands explored noiselessly; and in every case she guessed right.
+
+Dawney's present, a kitten, made a scene by clawing at her hair.
+
+"That is Dr. Edmund's," she cried at once.  Christian saw that Harz
+had disappeared, but suddenly he came back breathless, and took his
+place at the end of the rank of givers.
+
+Advancing on tiptoe, he put his present into Greta's hands.  It was a
+small bronze copy of a Donatello statue.
+
+"Oh, Herr Harz!" cried Greta; "I saw it in the studio that day.  It
+stood on the table, and it is lovely."
+
+Mrs. Decie, thrusting her pale eyes close to it, murmured:
+"Charming!"
+
+Mr. Treffry took it in his forgers.
+
+"Rum little toad!  Cost a pot of money, I expect!"  He eyed Harz
+doubtfully.
+
+They went into the next room now, and Herr Paul, taking Greta's
+bandage, transferred it to his own eyes.
+
+"Take care--take care, all!" he cried; "I am a devil of a catcher,"
+and, feeling the air cautiously, he moved forward like a bear about
+to hug.  He caught no one.  Christian and Greta whisked under his
+arms and left him grasping at the air.  Mrs. Decie slipped past with
+astonishing agility.  Mr. Treffry, smoking his cigar, and barricaded
+in a corner, jeered: "Bravo, Paul!  The active beggar!  Can't he run!
+Go it, Greta!"
+
+At last Herr Paul caught Cousin Teresa, who, fattened against the
+wall, lost her head, and stood uttering tiny shrieks.
+
+Suddenly Mrs. Decie started playing The Blue Danube.  Herr Paul
+dropped the handkerchief, twisted his moustache up fiercely, glared
+round the room, and seizing Greta by the waist, began dancing
+furiously, bobbing up and down like a cork in lumpy water.  Cousin
+Teresa followed suit with Miss Naylor, both very solemn, and dancing
+quite different steps.  Harz, went up to Christian.
+
+"I can't dance," he said, "that is, I have only danced once, but--if
+you would try with me!"
+
+She put her hand on his arm, and they began.  She danced, light as a
+feather, eyes shining, feet flying, her body bent a little forward.
+It was not a great success at first, but as soon as the time had got
+into Harz's feet, they went swinging on when all the rest had
+stopped.  Sometimes one couple or another slipped through the window
+to dance on the veranda, and came whirling in again.  The lamplight
+glowed on the girls' white dresses; on Herr Paul's perspiring face.
+He constituted in himself a perfect orgy, and when the music stopped
+flung himself, full length, on the sofa gasping out:
+
+"My God!  But, my God!"
+
+Suddenly Christian felt Harz cling to her arm.
+
+Glowing and panting she looked at him.
+
+"Giddy!" he murmured: "I dance so badly; but I'll soon learn."
+
+Greta clapped her hands: "Every evening we will dance, every evening
+we will dance."
+
+Harz looked at Christian; the colour had deepened in her face.
+
+"I'll show you how they dance in my village, feet upon the ceiling!"
+And running to Dawney, he said:
+
+"Hold me here!  Lift me--so!  Now, on--two," he tried to swing his
+feet above his head, but, with an "Ouch!" from Dawney, they
+collapsed, and sat abruptly on the floor.  This untimely event
+brought the evening to an end.  Dawney left, escorting Cousin Teresa,
+and Harz strode home humming The Blue Danube, still feeling
+Christian's waist against his arm.
+
+In their room the two girls sat long at the window to cool themselves
+before undressing.
+
+"Ah!" sighed Greta, "this is the happiest birthday I have had."
+
+Cristian too thought: 'I have never been so happy in my life as I
+have been to-day.  I should like every day to be like this!'  And she
+leant out into the night, to let the air cool her cheeks.
+
+"Chris!" said Greta some days after this, "Miss Naylor danced last
+evening; I think she shall have a headache to-day.  There is my
+French and my history this morning."
+
+"Well, I can take them."
+
+"That is nice; then we can talk.  I am sorry about the headache.  I
+shall give her some of my Eau de Cologne."
+
+Miss Naylor's headaches after dancing were things on which to
+calculate.  The girls carried their books into the arbour; it was a
+showery day, and they had to run for shelter through the raindrops
+and sunlight.
+
+"The French first, Chris!"  Greta liked her French, in which she was
+not far inferior to Christian; the lesson therefore proceeded in an
+admirable fashion.  After one hour exactly by her watch
+(Mr. Treffry's birthday present loved and admired at least once every
+hour) Greta rose.
+
+"Chris, I have not fed my rabbits."
+
+"Be quick! there's not much time for history."
+
+Greta vanished.  Christian watched the bright water dripping from the
+roof; her lips were parted in a smile.  She was thinking of something
+Harz had said the night before.  A discussion having been started as
+to whether average opinion did, or did not, safeguard Society, Harz,
+after sitting silent, had burst out: "I think one man in earnest is
+better than twenty half-hearted men who follow tamely; in the end he
+does Society most good."
+
+Dawney had answered: "If you had your way there would be no Society."
+
+"I hate Society because it lives upon the weak."
+
+"Bah!" Herr Paul chimed in; "the weak goes to the wall; that is as
+certain as that you and I are here."
+
+"Let them fall against the wall," cried Harz; "don't push them
+there...."
+
+Greta reappeared, walking pensively in the rain.
+
+"Bino," she said, sighing, "has eaten too much.  I remember now, I
+did feed them before.  Must we do the history, Chris?"
+
+"Of course!"
+
+Greta opened her book, and put a finger in the page.  "Herr Harz is
+very kind to me," she said.  "Yesterday he brought a bird which had.
+come into his studio with a hurt wing; he brought it very gently in
+his handkerchief--he is very kind, the bird was not even frightened
+of him.  You did not know about that, Chris?"
+
+Chris flushed a little, and said in a hurt voice
+
+"I don't see what it has to--do with me."
+
+"No," assented Greta.
+
+Christian's colour deepened.  "Go on with your history, Greta."
+
+"Only," pursued Greta, "that he always tells you all about things,
+Chris."
+
+"He doesn't! How can you say that!"
+
+"I think he does, and it is because you do not make him angry.  It is
+very easy to make him angry; you have only to think differently, and
+he shall be angry at once."
+
+"You are a little cat!" said Christian; "it isn't true, at all.  He
+hates shams, and can't bear meanness; and it is mean to cover up
+dislikes and pretend that you agree with people."
+
+"Papa says that he thinks too much about himself."
+
+"Father!" began Christian hotly; biting her lips she stopped, and
+turned her wrathful eyes on Greta.
+
+"You do not always show your dislikes, Chris."
+
+"I?  What has that to do with it?  Because one is a coward that
+doesn't make it any better, does it?"
+
+"I think that he has a great many dislikes," murmured Greta.
+
+"I wish you would attend to your own faults, and not pry into other
+people's," and pushing the book aside, Christian gazed in front of
+her.
+
+Some minutes passed, then Greta leaning over, rubbed a cheek against
+her shoulder.
+
+"I am very sorry, Chris--I only wanted to be talking.  Shall I read
+some history?"
+
+"Yes," said Christian coldly.
+
+"Are you angry with me, Chris?"
+
+There was no answer.  The lingering raindrops pattered down on the
+roof.  Greta pulled at her sister's sleeve.
+
+"Look, Chris!" she said.  "There is Herr Harz!"
+
+Christian looked up, dropped her eyes again, and said: "Will you go
+on with the history, Greta?"
+
+Greta sighed.
+
+"Yes, I will--but, oh! Chris, there is the luncheon gong!" and she
+meekly closed the book.
+
+During the following weeks there was a "sitting" nearly every
+afternoon.  Miss Naylor usually attended them; the little lady was,
+to a certain extent, carried past objection.  She had begun to take
+an interest in the picture, and to watch the process out of the
+corner of her eye; in the depths of her dear mind, however, she never
+quite got used to the vanity and waste of time; her lips would move
+and her knitting-needles click in suppressed remonstrances.
+
+What Harz did fast he did best; if he had leisure he "saw too much,"
+loving his work so passionately that he could never tell exactly when
+to stop.  He hated to lay things aside, always thinking: "I can get
+it better."  Greta was finished, but with Christian, try as he would,
+he was not satisfied; from day to day her face seemed to him to
+change, as if her soul were growing.
+
+There were things too in her eyes that he could neither read nor
+reproduce.
+
+Dawney would often stroll out to them after his daily visit, and
+lying on the grass, his arms crossed behind his head, and a big cigar
+between his lips, would gently banter everybody.  Tea came at five
+o'clock, and then Mrs. Decie appeared armed with a magazine or novel,
+for she was proud of her literary knowledge.  The sitting was
+suspended; Harz, with a cigarette, would move between the table and
+the picture, drinking his tea, putting a touch in here and there; he
+never sat down till it was all over for the day.  During these
+"rests" there was talk, usually ending in discussion.  Mrs. Decie was
+happiest in conversations of a literary order, making frequent use of
+such expressions as: "After all, it produces an illusion--does
+anything else matter?"  "Rather a poseur, is he not?"  "A question,
+that, of temperament," or "A matter of the definition of words"; and
+other charming generalities, which sound well, and seem to go far,
+and are pleasingly irrefutable.  Sometimes the discussion turned on
+Art--on points of colour or technique; whether realism was quite
+justified; and should we be pre-Raphaelites?  When these discussions
+started, Christian's eyes would grow bigger and clearer, with a sort
+of shining reasonableness; as though they were trying to see into the
+depths.  And Harz would stare at them.  But the look in those eyes
+eluded him, as if they had no more meaning than Mrs. Decie's, which,
+with their pale, watchful smile, always seemed saying: "Come, let us
+take a little intellectual exercise."
+
+Greta, pulling Scruff's ears, would gaze up at the speakers; when the
+talk was over, she always shook herself.  But if no one came to the
+"sittings," there would sometimes be very earnest, quick talk,
+sometimes long silences.
+
+One day Christian said: "What is your religion?"
+
+Harz finished the touch he was putting on the canvas, before he
+answered: "Roman Catholic, I suppose; I was baptised in that Church."
+
+"I didn't mean that.  Do you believe in a future life?"
+
+"Christian," murmured Greta, who was plaiting blades of grass, "shall
+always want to know what people think about a future life; that is so
+funny!"
+
+"How can I tell?" said Harz; "I've never really thought of it--never
+had the time."
+
+"How can you help thinking?" Christian said: "I have to--it seems to
+me so awful that we might come to an end."
+
+She closed her book, and it slipped off her lap.  She went on: "There
+must be a future life, we're so incomplete.  What's the good of your
+work, for instance?  What's the use of developing if you have to
+stop?"
+
+"I don't know," answered Harz.  "I don't much care.  All I know is,
+I've got to work."
+
+"But why?"
+
+"For happiness--the real happiness is fighting--the rest is nothing.
+If you have finished a thing, does it ever satisfy you?  You look
+forward to the next thing at once; to wait is wretched!"
+
+Christian clasped her hands behind her neck; sunlight flickered
+through the leaves on to the bosom of her dress.
+
+"Ah! Stay like that!" cried Harz.
+
+She let her eyes rest on his face, swinging her foot a little.
+
+"You work because you must; but that's not enough.  Why do you feel
+you must?  I want to know what's behind.  When I was travelling with
+Aunt Constance the winter before last we often talked--I've heard her
+discuss it with her friends.  She says we move in circles till we
+reach Nirvana.  But last winter I found I couldn't talk to her; it
+seemed as if she never really meant anything.  Then I started
+reading--Kant and Hegel--"
+
+"Ah!" put in Harz, "if they would teach me to draw better, or to see
+a new colour in a flower, or an expression in a face, I would read
+them all."
+
+Christian leaned forward: "It must be right to get as near truth as
+possible; every step gained is something.  You believe in truth;
+truth is the same as beauty--that was what you said--you try to paint
+the truth, you always see the beauty.  But how can we know truth,
+unless we know what is at the root of it?"
+
+"I--think," murmured Greta, sotto voce, "you see one way--and he sees
+another--because--you are not one person."
+
+"Of course!" said Christian impatiently, "but why--"
+
+A sound of humming interrupted her.
+
+Nicholas Treffry was coming from the house, holding the Times in one
+hand, and a huge meerschaum pipe in the other.
+
+"Aha!" he said to Harz: "how goes the picture?" and he lowered
+himself into a chair.
+
+"Better to-day, Uncle?" said Christian softly.
+
+Mr. Treffry growled.  "Confounded humbugs, doctors!" he said.  "Your
+father used to swear by them; why, his doctor killed him--made him
+drink such a lot of stuff!"
+
+"Why then do you have a doctor, Uncle Nic?" asked Greta.
+
+Mr. Treffry looked at her; his eyes twinkled.  "I don't know, my
+dear.  If they get half a chance, they won't let go of you!"
+
+There had been a gentle breeze all day, but now it had died away; not
+a leaf quivered, not a blade of grass was stirring; from the house
+were heard faint sounds as of some one playing on a pipe.  A
+blackbird came hopping down the path.
+
+"When you were a boy, did you go after birds' nests, Uncle Nic?"
+Greta whispered.
+
+"I believe you, Greta."  The blackbird hopped into the shrubbery.
+
+"You frightened him, Uncle Nic!  Papa says that at Schloss Konig,
+where he lived when he was young, he would always be after jackdaws'
+nests."
+
+"Gammon, Greta.  Your father never took a jackdaw's nest, his legs
+are much too round!"
+
+"Are you fond of birds, Uncle Nic?"
+
+"Ask me another, Greta!  Well, I s'pose so."
+
+"Then why did you go bird-nesting?  I think it is cruel"
+
+Mr. Treffry coughed behind his paper: "There you have me, Greta," he
+remarked.
+
+Harz began to gather his brushes: "Thank you," he said, "that's all I
+can do to-day."
+
+"Can I look?" Mr. Treffry inquired.
+
+"Certainly!"
+
+Uncle Nic got up slowly, and stood in front of the picture.  "When
+it's for sale," he said at last, "I'll buy it."
+
+Harz bowed; but for some reason he felt annoyed, as if he had been
+asked to part with something personal.
+
+"I thank you," he said.  A gong sounded.
+
+"You'll stay and have a snack with us?" said Mr. Treffry; "the
+doctor's stopping."  Gathering up his paper, he moved off to the
+house with his hand on Greta's shoulder, the terrier running in
+front.  Harz and Christian were left alone.  He was scraping his
+palette, and she was sitting with her elbows resting on her knees;
+between them, a gleam of sunlight dyed the path golden.  It was
+evening already; the bushes and the flowers, after the day's heat,
+were breathing out perfume; the birds had started their evensong.
+
+"Are you tired of sitting for your portrait, Fraulein Christian?"
+
+Christian shook her head.
+
+"I shall get something into it that everybody does not see--something
+behind the surface, that will last."
+
+Christian said slowly: "That's like a challenge.  You were right when
+you said fighting is happiness--for yourself, but not for me.  I'm a
+coward.  I hate to hurt people, I like them to like me.  If you had
+to do anything that would make them hate you, you would do it all the
+same, if it helped your work; that's fine--it's what I can't do.
+It's--it's everything.  Do you like Uncle Nic?"
+
+The young painter looked towards the house, where under the veranda
+old Nicholas Treffry was still in sight; a smile came on his lips.
+
+"If I were the finest painter in the world, he wouldn't think
+anything of me for it, I'm afraid; but if I could show him handfuls
+of big cheques for bad pictures I had painted, he would respect me."
+
+She smiled, and said: "I love him."
+
+"Then I shall like him," Harz answered simply.
+
+She put her hand out, and her fingers met his.  "We shall be late,"
+she said, glowing, and catching up her book: "I'm always late!"
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+There was one other guest at dinner, a well-groomed person with pale,
+fattish face, dark eyes, and hair thin on the temples, whose clothes
+had a military cut.  He looked like a man fond of ease, who had gone
+out of his groove, and collided with life.  Herr Paul introduced him
+as Count Mario Sarelli.
+
+Two hanging lamps with crimson shades threw a rosy light over the
+table, where, in the centre stood a silver basket, full of irises.
+Through the open windows the garden was all clusters of black foliage
+in the dying light.  Moths fluttered round the lamps; Greta,
+following them with her eyes, gave quite audible sighs of pleasure
+when they escaped.  Both girls wore white, and Harz, who sat opposite
+Christian, kept looking at her, and wondering why he had not painted
+her in that dress.
+
+Mrs. Decie understood the art of dining--the dinner, ordered by Herr
+Paul, was admirable; the servants silent as their, shadows; there was
+always a hum of conversation.
+
+Sarelli, who sat on her right hand, seemed to partake of little
+except olives, which he dipped into a glass of sherry.  He turned his
+black, solemn eyes silently from face to face, now and then asking
+the meaning of an English word.  After a discussion on modern Rome,
+it was debated whether or no a criminal could be told by the
+expression of his face.
+
+"Crime," said Mrs. Decie, passing her hand across her brow--"crime is
+but the hallmark of strong individuality."
+
+Miss Naylor, gushing rather pink, stammered: "A great crime must show
+itself--a murder.  Why, of course!"
+
+"If that were so," said Dawney, "we should only have to look about
+us--no more detectives."
+
+Miss Naylor rejoined with slight severity: "I cannot conceive that
+such a thing can pass the human face by, leaving no impression!"
+
+Harz said abruptly: "There are worse things than murder."
+
+"Ah! par exemple!" said Sarelli.
+
+There was a slight stir all round the table.
+
+"Verry good," cried out Herr Paul, "a vot' sante, cher."
+
+Miss Naylor shivered, as if some one had put a penny down her back;
+and Mrs. Decie, leaning towards Harz, smiled like one who has made a
+pet dog do a trick.  Christian alone was motionless, looking
+thoughtfully at Harz.
+
+"I saw a man tried for murder once," he said, "a murder for revenge;
+I watched the judge, and I thought all the time: 'I'd rather be that
+murderer than you; I've never seen a meaner face; you crawl through
+life; you're not a criminal, simply because you haven't the
+courage.'"
+
+In the dubious silence following the painter's speech, Mr. Treffry
+could distinctly be heard humming.  Then Sarelli said: "What do you
+say to anarchists, who are not men, but savage beasts, whom I would
+tear to pieces!"
+
+"As to that," Harz answered defiantly, "it maybe wise to hang them,
+but then there are so many other men that it would be wise to hang."
+
+"How can we tell what they went through; what their lives were?"
+murmured Christian.
+
+Miss Naylor, who had been rolling a pellet of bread, concealed it
+hastily.  "They are--always given a chance to--repent--I believe,"
+she said.
+
+"For what they are about to receive," drawled Dawney.
+
+Mrs. Decie signalled with her fan: "We are trying to express the
+inexpressible--shall we go into the garden?"
+
+All rose; Harz stood by the window, and in passing, Christian looked
+at him.
+
+He sat down again with a sudden sense of loss.  There was no white
+figure opposite now.  Raising his eyes he met Sarelli's.  The Italian
+was regarding him with a curious stare.
+
+Herr Paul began retailing apiece of scandal he had heard that
+afternoon.
+
+"Shocking affair!" he said; "I could never have believed it of her!
+B--- is quite beside himself.  Yesterday there was a row, it seems!"
+
+"There has been one every day for months," muttered Dawney.
+
+"But to leave without a word, and go no one knows where!  B--- is
+'viveur' no doubt, mais, mon Dieu, que voulezvous?  She was always a
+poor, pale thing.  Why! when my---" he flourished his cigar; "I was
+not always---what I should have been---one lives in a world of flesh
+and blood---we are not all angels---que diable!  But this is a very
+vulgar business.  She goes off; leaves everything---without a word;
+and B---is very fond of her.  These things are not done!" the
+starched bosom of his shirt seemed swollen by indignation.
+
+Mr. Treffry, with a heavy hand on the table, eyed him sideways.
+Dawney said slowly:
+
+"B--- is a beast; I'm sorry for the poor woman; but what can she do
+alone?"
+
+"There is, no doubt, a man," put in Sarelli.
+
+Herr Paul muttered: "Who knows?"
+
+"What is B--- going to do?" said Dawney.
+
+"Ah!" said Herr Paul.  "He is fond of her.  He is a chap of
+resolution, he will get her back.  He told me: 'Well, you know, I
+shall follow her wherever she goes till she comes back.'  He will do
+it, he is a determined chap; he will follow her wherever she goes."
+
+Mr. Treffry drank his wine off at a gulp, and sucked his moustache in
+sharply.
+
+"She was a fool to marry him," said Dawney; "they haven't a point in
+common; she hates him like poison, and she's the better of the two.
+But it doesn't pay a woman to run off like that.  B--- had better
+hurry up, though.  What do you think, sir?" he said to Mr. Treffry.
+
+"Eh?" said Mr. Treffry; "how should I know?  Ask Paul there, he's one
+of your moral men, or Count Sarelli."
+
+The latter said impassively: "If I cared for her I should very likely
+kill her--if not--" he shrugged his shoulders.
+
+Harz, who was watching, was reminded of his other words at dinner,
+"wild beasts whom I would tear to pieces."  He looked with interest
+at this quiet man who said these extremely ferocious things, and
+thought: 'I should like to paint that fellow.'
+
+Herr Paul twirled his wine-glass in his fingers.  "There are family
+ties," he said, "there is society, there is decency; a wife should be
+with her husband.  B--- will do quite right.  He must go after her;
+she will not perhaps come back at first; he will follow her; she will
+begin to think, 'I am helpless--I am ridiculous!'  A woman is soon
+beaten.  They will return.  She is once more with her husband--
+Society will forgive, it will be all right."
+
+"By Jove, Paul," growled Mr. Treffry, "wonderful power of argument!"
+
+"A wife is a wife," pursued Herr Paul; "a man has a right to her
+society."
+
+"What do you say to that, sir?" asked Dawney.
+
+Mr. Treffry tugged at his beard: "Make a woman live with you, if she
+don't want to?  I call it low."
+
+"But, my dear," exclaimed Herr Paul, "how should you know?  You have
+not been married."
+
+"No, thank the Lord!" Mr. Treffry replied.
+
+"But looking at the question broadly, sir," said Dawney; "if a
+husband always lets his wife do as she likes, how would the thing
+work out?  What becomes of the marriage tie?"
+
+"The marriage tie," growled Mr. Treffry, "is the biggest thing there
+is!  But, by Jove, Doctor, I'm a Dutchman if hunting women ever
+helped the marriage tie!"
+
+"I am not thinking of myself," Herr Paul cried out, "I think of the
+community.  There are rights."
+
+"A decent community never yet asked a man to tread on his self-
+respect.  If I get my fingers skinned over my marriage, which I
+undertake at my own risk, what's the community to do with it?  D'you
+think I'm going to whine to it to put the plaster on?  As to rights,
+it'd be a deuced sight better for us all if there wasn't such a fuss
+about 'em.  Leave that to women!  I don't give a tinker's damn for
+men who talk about their rights in such matters."
+
+Sarelli rose.  "But your honour," he said, "there is your honour!"
+
+Mr. Treffry stared at him.
+
+"Honour!  If huntin' women's your idea of honour, well--it isn't
+mine."
+
+"Then you'd forgive her, sir, whatever happened," Dawney said.
+
+"Forgiveness is another thing.  I leave that to your sanctimonious
+beggars.  But, hunt a woman!  Hang it, sir, I'm not a cad!" and
+bringing his hand down with a rattle, he added: "This is a subject
+that don't bear talking of."
+
+Sarelli fell back in his seat, twirling his moustaches fiercely.
+Harz, who had risen, looked at Christian's empty place.
+
+'If I were married!' he thought suddenly.
+
+Herr Paul, with a somewhat vinous glare, still muttered, "But your
+duty to the family!"
+
+Harz slipped through the window.  The moon was like a wonderful white
+lantern in the purple sky; there was but a smoulder of stars.
+Beneath the softness of the air was the iciness of the snow; it made
+him want to run and leap.  A sleepy beetle dropped on its back; he
+turned it over and watched it scurry across the grass.
+
+Someone was playing Schumann's Kinderscenen.  Harz stood still to
+listen.  The notes came twining, weaving round his thoughts; the
+whole night seemed full of girlish voices, of hopes and fancies,
+soaring away to mountain heights--invisible, yet present.  Between
+the stems of the acacia-trees he could see the flicker of white
+dresses, where Christian and Greta were walking arm in arm.  He went
+towards them; the blood flushed up in his face, he felt almost
+surfeited by some sweet emotion.  Then, in sudden horror, he stood
+still.  He was in love!  With nothing done with everything before
+him!  He was going to bow down to a face!  The flicker of the dresses
+was no longer visible.  He would not be fettered, he would stamp it
+out!  He turned away; but with each step, something seemed to jab at
+his heart.
+
+Round the corner of the house, in the shadow of the wall, Dominique,
+the Luganese, in embroidered slippers, was smoking a long cherry-wood
+pipe, leaning against a tree--Mephistopheles in evening clothes.
+Harz went up to him.
+
+"Lend me a pencil, Dominique."
+
+"Bien, M'sieu."
+
+Resting a card against the tree Harz wrote to Mrs. Decie: "Forgive
+me, I am obliged to go away.  In a few days I shall hope to return,
+and finish the picture of your nieces."
+
+He sent Dominique for his hat.  During the man's absence he was on
+the point of tearing up the card and going back into the house.
+
+When the Luganese returned he thrust the card into his hand, and
+walked out between the tall poplars, waiting, like ragged ghosts,
+silver with moonlight.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Harz walked away along the road.  A dog was howling.  The sound
+seemed too appropriate.  He put his fingers to his ears, but the
+lugubrious noise passed those barriers, and made its way into his
+heart.  Was there nothing that would put an end to this emotion?  It
+was no better in the old house on the wall; he spent the night
+tramping up and down.
+
+Just before daybreak he slipped out with a knapsack, taking the road
+towards Meran.
+
+He had not quite passed through Gries when he overtook a man walking
+in the middle of the road and leaving a trail of cigar smoke behind
+him.
+
+"Ah! my friend," the smoker said, "you walk early; are you going my
+way?"
+
+It was Count Sarelli.  The raw light had imparted a grey tinge to his
+pale face, the growth of his beard showed black already beneath the
+skin; his thumbs were hooked in the pockets of a closely buttoned
+coat, he gesticulated with his fingers.
+
+"You are making a journey?" he said, nodding at the knapsack.  "You
+are early--I am late; our friend has admirable kummel--I have drunk
+too much.  You have not been to bed, I think?  If there is no sleep
+in one's bed it is no good going to look for it.  You find that?  It
+is better to drink kummel...!  Pardon!  You are doing the right
+thing: get away!  Get away as fast as possible!  Don't wait, and let
+it catch you!"
+
+Harz stared at him amazed.
+
+"Pardon!" Sarelli said again, raising his hat, "that girl--the white
+girl--I saw.  You do well to get away!" he swayed a little as he
+walked.  "That old fellow--what is his name-Trrreffr-ry!  What ideas
+of honour!"  He mumbled: "Honour is an abstraction!  If a man is not
+true to an abstraction, he is a low type; but wait a minute!"
+
+He put his hand to his side as though in pain.
+
+The hedges were brightening with a faint pinky glow; there was no
+sound on the long, deserted road, but that of their footsteps;
+suddenly a bird commenced to chirp, another answered--the world
+seemed full of these little voices.
+
+Sarelli stopped.
+
+"That white girl," he said, speaking with rapidity.  "Yes! You do
+well! get away!  Don't let it catch you!  I waited, it caught me--
+what happened?  Everything horrible--and now--kummel!"  Laughing a
+thick laugh, he gave a twirl to his moustache, and swaggered on.
+
+"I was a fine fellow--nothing too big for Mario Sarelli; the regiment
+looked to me.  Then she came--with her eyes and her white dress,
+always white, like this one; the little mole on her chin, her hands
+for ever moving--their touch as warm as sunbeams.  Then, no longer
+Sarelli this, and that!  The little house close to the ramparts!  Two
+arms, two eyes, and nothing here," he tapped his breast, "but flames
+that made ashes quickly--in her, like this ash--!" he flicked the
+white flake off his cigar.  "It's droll!  You agree, hein?  Some day
+I shall go back and kill her.  In the meantime--kummel!"
+
+He stopped at a house close to the road, and stood still, his teeth
+bared in a grin.
+
+"But I bore you," he said.  His cigar, flung down, sputtered forth
+its sparks on the road in front of Harz.  "I live here--good-morning!
+You are a man for work--your honour is your Art!  I know, and you are
+young!  The man who loves flesh better than his honour is a low type
+--I am a low type.  I! Mario Sarelli, a low type! I love flesh better
+than my honour!"
+
+He remained swaying at the gate with the grin fixed on his face; then
+staggered up the steps, and banged the door.  But before Harz had
+walked on, he again appeared, beckoning, in the doorway.  Obeying an
+impulse, Harz went in.
+
+"We will make a night of it," said Sarelli; "wine, brandy, kummel?  I
+am virtuous--kummel it must be for me!"
+
+He sat down at a piano, and began to touch the keys.  Harz poured out
+some wine.  Sarelli nodded.
+
+"You begin with that?  Allegro--piu--presto!
+
+"Wine--brandy--kummel!" he quickened the time of the tune: "it is not
+too long a passage, and this"--he took his hands off the keys--"comes
+after."
+
+Harz smiled.
+
+"Some men do not kill themselves," he said.
+
+Sarelli, who was bending and swaying to the music of a tarantella,
+broke off, and letting his eyes rest on the painter, began playing
+Schumann's Kinderscenen.  Harz leaped to his feet.
+
+"Stop that!" he cried.
+
+"It pricks you?" said Sarelli suavely; "what do you think of this?"
+he played again, crouching over the piano, and making the notes sound
+like the crying of a wounded animal.
+
+"For me!" he said, swinging round, and rising.
+
+"Your health!  And so you don't believe in suicide, but in murder?
+The custom is the other way; but you don't believe in customs?
+Customs are only for Society?"  He drank a glass of kummel.  "You do
+not love Society?"
+
+Harz looked at him intently; he did not want to quarrel.
+
+"I am not too fond of other people's thoughts," he said at last; "I
+prefer to think my own.
+
+"And is Society never right?  That poor Society!"
+
+"Society!  What is Society--a few men in good coats?  What has it
+done for me?"
+
+Sarelli bit the end off a cigar.
+
+"Ah!" he said; "now we are coming to it.  It is good to be an artist,
+a fine bantam of an artist; where other men have their dis-ci-pline,
+he has his, what shall we say--his mound of roses?"
+
+The painter started to his feet.
+
+"Yes," said Sarelli, with a hiccough, "you are a fine fellow!"
+
+"And you are drunk!" cried Harz.
+
+"A little drunk--not much, not enough to matter!"
+
+Harz broke into laughter.  It was crazy to stay there listening to
+this mad fellow.  What had brought him in?  He moved towards the
+door.
+
+"Ah!" said Sarelli, "but it is no good going to bed--let us talk.  I
+have a lot to say--it is pleasant to talk to anarchists at times."
+
+Full daylight was already coming through the chinks of the shutters.
+
+"You are all anarchists, you painters, you writing fellows.  You live
+by playing ball with facts.  Images--nothing solid--hein?  You're all
+for new things too, to tickle your nerves.  No discipline!  True
+anarchists, every one of you!"
+
+Harz poured out another glass of wine and drank it off.  The man's
+feverish excitement was catching.
+
+"Only fools," he replied, "take things for granted.  As for
+discipline, what do you aristocrats, or bourgeois know of discipline?
+Have you ever been hungry?  Have you ever had your soul down on its
+back?"
+
+"Soul on its back?  That is good!"
+
+"A man's no use," cried Harz, "if he's always thinking of what others
+think; he must stand on his own legs."
+
+"He must not then consider other people?"
+
+"Not from cowardice anyway."
+
+Sarelli drank.
+
+"What would you do," he said, striking his chest, "if you had a
+devil-here?  Would you go to bed?"
+
+A sort of pity seized on Harz.  He wanted to say something that would
+be consoling but could find no words; and suddenly he felt disgusted.
+What link was there between him and this man; between his love and
+this man's love?
+
+"Harz!" muttered Sarelli; "Harz means 'tar,' hein?  Your family is
+not an old one?"
+
+Harz glared, and said: "My father is a peasant."
+
+Sarelli lifted the kummel bottle and emptied it into his glass, with
+a steady hand.
+
+"You're honest--and we both have devils.  I forgot; I brought you in
+to see a picture!"
+
+He threw wide the shutters; the windows were already open, and a rush
+of air came in.
+
+"Ah!" he said, sniffing, "smells of the earth, nicht wahr, Herr
+Artist?  You should know--it belongs to your father....  Come, here's
+my picture; a Correggio!  What do you think of it?"
+
+"It is a copy."
+
+"You think?"
+
+"I know."
+
+"Then you have given me the lie, Signor," and drawing out his
+handkerchief Sarelli flicked it in the painter's face.
+
+Harz turned white.
+
+"Duelling is a good custom!" said Sarelli.  "I shall have the honour
+to teach you just this one, unless you are afraid.  Here are pistols-
+-this room is twenty feet across at least, twenty feet is no bad
+distance."
+
+And pulling out a drawer he took two pistols from a case, and put
+them on the table.
+
+"The light is good--but perhaps you are afraid."
+
+"Give me one!" shouted the infuriated painter; "and go to the devil
+for a fool"
+
+"One moment!" Sarelli murmured: "I will load them, they are more
+useful loaded."
+
+Harz leaned out of the window; his head was in a whirl.  'What on
+earth is happening?' he thought.  'He's mad--or I am!  Confound him!
+I'm not going to be killed!'  He turned and went towards the table.
+Sarelli's head was sunk on his arms, he was asleep.  Harz
+methodically took up the pistols, and put them back into the drawer.
+A sound made him turn his head; there stood a tall, strong young
+woman in a loose gown caught together on her chest.  Her grey eyes
+glanced from the painter to the bottles, from the bottles to the
+pistol-case.  A simple reasoning, which struck Harz as comic.
+
+"It is often like this," she said in the country patois; "der Herr
+must not be frightened."
+
+Lifting the motionless Sarelli as if he were a baby, she laid him on
+a couch.
+
+"Ah!" she said, sitting down and resting her elbow on the table; "he
+will not wake!"
+
+Harz bowed to her; her patient figure, in spite of its youth and
+strength, seemed to him pathetic.  Taking up his knapsack, he went
+out.
+
+The smoke of cottages rose straight; wisps of mist were wandering
+about the valley, and the songs of birds dropping like blessings.
+All over the grass the spiders had spun a sea of threads that bent
+and quivered to the pressure of the air, like fairy tight-ropes.
+
+All that day he tramped.
+
+Blacksmiths, tall stout men with knotted muscles, sleepy eyes, and
+great fair beards, came out of their forges to stretch and wipe their
+brows, and stare at him.
+
+Teams of white oxen, waiting to be harnessed, lashed their tails
+against their flanks, moving their heads slowly from side to side in
+the heat.  Old women at chalet doors blinked and knitted.
+
+The white houses, with gaping caves of storage under the roofs, the
+red church spire, the clinking of hammers in the forges, the slow
+stamping of oxen-all spoke of sleepy toil, without ideas or ambition.
+Harz knew it all too well; like the earth's odour, it belonged to
+him, as Sarelli had said.
+
+Towards sunset coming to a copse of larches, he sat down to rest.  It
+was very still, but for the tinkle of cowbells, and, from somewhere
+in the distance, the sound of dropping logs.
+
+Two barefooted little boys came from the wood, marching earnestly
+along, and looking at Harz as if he were a monster.  Once past him,
+they began to run.
+
+'At their age,' he thought, 'I should have done the same.'  A hundred
+memories rushed into his mind.
+
+He looked down at the village straggling below--white houses with
+russet tiles and crowns of smoke, vineyards where the young leaves
+were beginning to unfold, the red-capped spire, a thread of bubbling
+stream, an old stone cross.  He had been fourteen years struggling up
+from all this; and now just as he had breathing space, and the time
+to give himself wholly to his work--this weakness was upon him!
+Better, a thousand times, to give her up!
+
+In a house or two lights began to wink; the scent of wood smoke
+reached him, the distant chimes of bells, the burring of a stream.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+Next day his one thought was to get back to work.  He arrived at the
+studio in the afternoon, and, laying in provisions, barricaded the
+lower door.  For three days he did not go out; on the fourth day he
+went to Villa Rubein....
+
+Schloss Runkelstein--grey, blind, strengthless--still keeps the
+valley.  The windows which once, like eyes, watched men and horses
+creeping through the snow, braved the splutter of guns and the gleam
+of torches, are now holes for the birds to nest in.  Tangled creepers
+have spread to the very summits of the walls.  In the keep, instead
+of grim men in armour, there is a wooden board recording the history
+of the castle and instructing visitors on the subject of
+refreshments.  Only at night, when the cold moon blanches everything,
+the castle stands like the grim ghost of its old self, high above the
+river.
+
+After a long morning's sitting the girls had started forth with Harz
+and Dawney to spend the afternoon at the ruin; Miss Naylor, kept at
+home by headache, watched them depart with words of caution against
+sunstroke, stinging nettles, and strange dogs.
+
+Since the painter's return Christian and he had hardly spoken to each
+other.  Below the battlement on which they sat, in a railed gallery
+with little tables, Dawney and Greta were playing dominoes, two
+soldiers drinking beer, and at the top of a flight of stairs the
+Custodian's wife sewing at a garment.  Christian said suddenly: "I
+thought we were friends."
+
+"Well, Fraulein Christian, aren't we?"
+
+"You went away without a word; friends don't do that."
+
+Harz bit his lips.
+
+"I don't think you care," she went on with a sort of desperate haste,
+"whether you hurt people or not.  You have been here all this time
+without even going to see your father and mother."
+
+"Do you think they would want to see me?"
+
+Christian looked up.
+
+"It's all been so soft for you," he said bitterly; "you don't
+understand."
+
+He turned his head away, and then burst out: "I'm proud to come
+straight from the soil--I wouldn't have it otherwise; but they are of
+'the people,' everything is narrow with them--they only understand
+what they can see and touch."
+
+"I'm sorry I spoke like that," said Christian softly; "you've never
+told me about yourself."
+
+There was something just a little cruel in the way the painter looked
+at her, then seeming to feel compunction, he said quickly: "I always
+hated--the peasant life--I wanted to get away into the world; I had a
+feeling in here--I wanted--I don't know what I wanted!  I did run
+away at last to a house-painter at Meran.  The priest wrote me a
+letter from my father--they threw me off; that's all."
+
+Christian's eyes were very bright, her lips moved, like the lips of a
+child listening to a story.
+
+"Go on," she said.
+
+"I stayed at Meran two years, till I'd learnt all I could there, then
+a brother of my mother's helped me to get to Vienna; I was lucky
+enough to find work with a man who used to decorate churches.  We
+went about the country together.  Once when he was ill I painted the
+roof of a church entirely by myself; I lay on my back on the scaffold
+boards all day for a week--I was proud of that roof."  He paused.
+
+"When did you begin painting pictures?"
+
+"A friend asked me why I didn't try for the Academie.  That started
+me going to the night schools; I worked every minute--I had to get my
+living as well, of course, so I worked at night.
+
+"Then when the examination came, I thought I could do nothing--it was
+just as if I had never had a brush or pencil in my hand.  But the
+second day a professor in passing me said, 'Good! Quite good!'  That
+gave me courage.  I was sure I had failed though; but I was second
+out of sixty."
+
+Christian nodded.
+
+"To work in the schools after that I had to give up my business, of
+course.  There was only one teacher who ever taught me anything; the
+others all seemed fools.  This man would come and rub out what you'd
+done with his sleeve.  I used to cry with rage--but I told him I
+could only learn from him, and he was so astonished that he got me
+into his class."
+
+"But how did you live without money?" asked Christian.
+
+His face burned with a dark flush.  "I don't know how I lived; you
+must have been through these things to know, you would never
+understand."
+
+"But I want to understand, please."
+
+"What do you want me to tell you?  How I went twice a week to eat
+free dinners!  How I took charity!  How I was hungry!  There was a
+rich cousin of my mother's--I used to go to him.  I didn't like it.
+But if you're starving in the winter"
+
+Christian put out her hand.
+
+"I used to borrow apronsful of coals from other students who were as
+poor--but I never went to the rich students."
+
+The flush had died out of his face.
+
+"That sort of thing makes you hate the world!  You work till you
+stagger; you're cold and hungry; you see rich people in their
+carriages, wrapped in furs, and all the time you want to do something
+great.  You pray for a chance, any chance; nothing comes to the poor!
+It makes you hate the world."
+
+Christian's eyes filled with tears.  He went on:
+
+"But I wasn't the only one in that condition; we used to meet.
+Garin, a Russian with a brown beard and patches of cheek showing
+through, and yellow teeth, who always looked hungry.  Paunitz, who
+came from sympathy!  He had fat cheeks and little eyes, and a big
+gold chain--the swine! And little Misek.  It was in his room we met,
+with the paper peeling off the walls, and two doors with cracks in
+them, so that there was always a draught.  We used to sit on his bed,
+and pull the dirty blankets over us for warmth; and smoke--tobacco
+was the last thing we ever went without.  Over the bed was a Virgin
+and Child--Misek was a very devout Catholic; but one day when he had
+had no dinner and a dealer had kept his picture without paying him,
+he took the image and threw it on the floor before our eyes; it
+broke, and he trampled on the bits.  Lendorf was another, a heavy
+fellow who was always puffing out his white cheeks and smiting
+himself, and saying: 'Cursed society!'  And Schonborn, an aristocrat
+who had quarrelled with his family.  He was the poorest of us all;
+but only he and I would ever have dared to do anything--they all knew
+that!"
+
+Christian listened with awe.  "Do you mean?" she said, "do you mean,
+that you--?"
+
+"You see! you're afraid of me at once.  It's impossible even for you
+to understand.  It only makes you afraid.  A hungry man living on
+charity, sick with rage and shame, is a wolf even to you!"
+
+Christian looked straight into his eyes.
+
+"That's not true.  If I can't understand, I can feel.  Would you be
+the same now if it were to come again?"
+
+"Yes, it drives me mad even now to think of people fatted with
+prosperity, sneering and holding up their hands at poor devils who
+have suffered ten times more than the most those soft animals could
+bear.  I'm older; I've lived--I know things can't be put right by
+violence--nothing will put things right, but that doesn't stop my
+feeling."
+
+"Did you do anything?  You must tell me all now."
+
+"We talked--we were always talking."
+
+"No, tell me everything!"
+
+Unconsciously she claimed, and he seemed unconsciously to admit her
+right to this knowledge.
+
+"There's not much to tell.  One day we began talking in low voices--
+Garin began it; he had been in some affair in Russia.  We took an
+oath; after that we never raised our voices.  We had a plan.  It was
+all new to me, and I hated the whole thing--but I was always hungry,
+or sick from taking charity, and I would have done anything.  They
+knew that; they used to look at me and Schonborn; we knew that no one
+else had any courage.  He and I were great friends, but we never
+talked of that; we tried to keep our minds away from the thought of
+it.  If we had a good day and were not so hungry, it seemed
+unnatural; but when the day had not been good--then it seemed natural
+enough.  I wasn't afraid, but I used to wake up in the night; I hated
+the oath we had taken, I hated every one of those fellows; the thing
+was not what I was made for, it wasn't my work, it wasn't my nature,
+it was forced on me--I hated it, but sometimes I was like a madman."
+
+"Yes, yes," she murmured.
+
+"All this time I was working at the Academie, and learning all I
+could....  One evening that we met, Paunitz was not there.  Misek was
+telling us how the thing had been arranged.  Schonborn and I looked
+at each other--it was warm--perhaps we were not hungry--it was
+springtime, too, and in the Spring it's different.  There is
+something."
+
+Christian nodded.
+
+"While we were talking there came a knock at the door.  Lendorf put
+his eye to the keyhole, and made a sign.  The police were there.
+Nobody said anything, but Misek crawled under the bed; we all
+followed; and the knocking grew louder and louder.  In the wall at
+the back of the bed was a little door into an empty cellar.  We crept
+through.  There was a trap-door behind some cases, where they used to
+roll barrels in.  We crawled through that into the back street.  We
+went different ways."
+
+He paused, and Christian gasped.
+
+"I thought I would get my money, but there was a policeman before my
+door.  They had us finely.  It was Paunitz; if I met him even now I
+should wring his neck.  I swore I wouldn't be caught, but I had no
+idea where to go.  Then I thought of a little Italian barber who used
+to shave me when I had money for a shave; I knew he would help.  He
+belonged to some Italian Society; he often talked to me, under his
+breath, of course.  I went to him.  He was shaving himself before
+going to a ball.  I told him what had happened; it was funny to see
+him put his back against the door.  He was very frightened,
+understanding this sort of thing better than I did--for I was only
+twenty then.  He shaved my head and moustache and put me on a fair
+wig.  Then he brought me macaroni, and some meat, to eat.  He gave me
+a big fair moustache, and a cap, and hid the moustache in the lining.
+He brought me a cloak of his own, and four gulden.  All the time he
+was extremely frightened, and kept listening, and saying: 'Eat!'
+
+"When I had done, he just said: 'Go away, I refuse to know anything
+more of you.'
+
+"I thanked him and went out.  I walked about all that night; for I
+couldn't think of anything to do or anywhere to go.  In the morning I
+slept on a seat in one of the squares.  Then I thought I would go to
+the Gallerien; and I spent the whole day looking at the pictures.
+When the Galleries were shut I was very tired, so I went into a cafe,
+and had some beer.  When I came out I sat on the same seat in the
+Square.  I meant to wait till dark and then walk out of the city and
+take the train at some little station, but while I was sitting there
+I went to sleep.  A policeman woke me.  He had my wig in his hand.
+
+"'Why do you wear a wig?' he said.
+
+"I answered: 'Because I am bald.'
+
+"'No,' he said, 'you're not bald, you've been shaved.  I can feel the
+hair coming.'
+
+"He put his finger on my head.  I felt reckless and laughed.
+
+"'Ah!' he said, 'you'll come with me and explain all this; your nose
+and eyes are looked for.'
+
+"I went with him quietly to the police-station...."
+
+Harz seemed carried away by his story.  His quick dark face worked,
+his steel-grey eyes stared as though he were again passing through
+all these long-past emotions.
+
+The hot sun struck down; Christian drew herself together, sitting
+with her hands clasped round her knees.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+"I didn't care by then what came of it.  I didn't even think what I
+was going to say.  He led me down a passage to a room with bars
+across the windows and long seats, and maps on the walls.  We sat and
+waited.  He kept his eye on me all the time; and I saw no hope.
+Presently the Inspector came.  'Bring him in here,' he said; I
+remember feeling I could kill him for ordering me about!  We went
+into the next room.  It had a large clock, a writing-table, and a
+window, without bars, looking on a courtyard.  Long policemen's coats
+and caps were hanging from some pegs.  The Inspector told me to take
+off my cap.  I took it off, wig and all.  He asked me who I was, but
+I refused to answer.  Just then there was a loud sound of voices in
+the room we had come from.  The Inspector told the policeman to look
+after me, and went to see what it was.  I could hear him talking.  He
+called out: 'Come here, Becker!'  I stood very quiet, and Becker went
+towards the door.  I heard the Inspector say: 'Go and find Schwartz,
+I will see after this fellow.'  The policeman went, and the Inspector
+stood with his back to me in the half-open door, and began again to
+talk to the man in the other room.  Once or twice he looked round at
+me, but I stood quiet all the time.  They began to disagree, and
+their voices got angry.  The Inspector moved a little into the other
+room.  'Now!' I thought, and slipped off my cloak.  I hooked off a
+policeman's coat and cap, and put them on.  My heart beat till I felt
+sick.  I went on tiptoe to the window.  There was no one outside, but
+at the entrance a man was holding some horses.  I opened the window a
+little and held my breath.  I heard the Inspector say: 'I will report
+you for impertinence!' and slipped through the window.  The coat came
+down nearly to my heels, and the cap over my eyes.  I walked up to
+the man with the horses, and said: 'Good-evening.'  One of the horses
+had begun to kick, and he only grunted at me.  I got into a passing
+tram; it was five minutes to the West Bahnhof; I got out there.
+There was a train starting; they were shouting 'Einsteigen!'  I ran.
+The collector tried to stop me.  I shouted: 'Business--important!'
+He let me by.  I jumped into a carriage.  The train started."
+
+He paused, and Christian heaved a sigh.
+
+Harz went on, twisting a twig of ivy in his hands: "There was another
+man in the carriage reading a paper.  Presently I said to him, 'Where
+do we stop first?'  'St. Polten.'  Then I knew it was the Munich
+express--St. Polten, Amstetten, Linz, and Salzburg--four stops before
+the frontier.  The man put down his paper and looked at me; he had a
+big fair moustache and rather shabby clothes.  His looking at me
+disturbed me, for I thought every minute he would say: 'You're no
+policeman!'  And suddenly it came into my mind that if they looked
+for me in this train, it would be as a policeman!--they would know,
+of course, at the station that a policeman had run past at the last
+minute.  I wanted to get rid of the coat and cap, but the man was
+there, and I didn't like to move out of the carriage for other people
+to notice.  So I sat on.  We came to St. Polten at last.  The man in
+my carriage took his bag, got out, and left his paper on the seat.
+We started again; I breathed at last, and as soon as I could took the
+cap and coat and threw them out into the darkness.  I thought: 'I
+shall get across the frontier now.'  I took my own cap out and found
+the moustache Luigi gave me; rubbed my clothes as clean as possible;
+stuck on the moustache, and with some little ends of chalk in my
+pocket made my eyebrows light; then drew some lines in my face to
+make it older, and pulled my cap well down above my wig.  I did it
+pretty well--I was quite like the man who had got out.  I sat in his
+corner, took up his newspaper, and waited for Amstetten.  It seemed a
+tremendous time before we got there.  From behind my paper I could
+see five or six policemen on the platform, one quite close.  He
+opened the door, looked at me, and walked through the carriage into
+the corridor.  I took some tobacco and rolled up a cigarette, but it
+shook, "Harz lifted the ivy twig, "like this.  In a minute the
+conductor and two more policemen came.  'He was here,' said the
+conductor, 'with this gentleman.'  One of them looked at me, and
+asked: 'Have you seen a policeman travelling on this train?'  'Yes,'
+I said.  'Where?'  'He got out at St.  Polten.'  The policeman asked
+the conductor: 'Did you see him get out there?'  The conductor shook
+his head.  I said: 'He got out as the train was moving.'  'Ah!' said
+the policeman, 'what was he like?'  'Rather short, and no moustache.
+Why?'  'Did you notice anything unusual?'  'No,' I said, 'only that
+he wore coloured trousers.  What's the matter?'  One policeman said
+to the other: 'That's our man!  Send a telegram to St. Polten; he has
+more than an hour's start.'  He asked me where I was going.  I told
+him: 'Linz.'  'Ah!' he said, 'you'll have to give evidence; your name
+and address please?'  'Josef Reinhardt, 17 Donau Strasse.'  He wrote
+it down.  The conductor said: 'We are late, can we start?'  They shut
+the door.  I heard them say to the conductor: 'Search again at Linz,
+and report to the Inspector there.'  They hurried on to the platform,
+and we started.  At first I thought I would get out as soon as the
+train had left the station.  Then, that I should be too far from the
+frontier; better to go on to Linz and take my chance there.  I sat
+still and tried not to think.
+
+"After a long time, we began to run more slowly.  I put my head out
+and could see in the distance a ring of lights hanging in the
+blackness.  I loosened the carriage door and waited for the train to
+run slower still; I didn't mean to go into Linz like a rat into a
+trap.  At last I could wait no longer; I opened the door, jumped and
+fell into some bushes.  I was not much hurt, but bruised, and the
+breath knocked out of me.  As soon as I could, I crawled out.  It was
+very dark.  I felt heavy and sore, and for some time went stumbling
+in and out amongst trees.  Presently I came to a clear space; on one
+side I could see the town's shape drawn in lighted lamps, and on the
+other a dark mass, which I think was forest; in the distance too was
+a thin chain of lights.  I thought: 'They must be the lights of a
+bridge.'  Just then the moon came out, and I could see the river
+shining below.  It was cold and damp, and I walked quickly.  At last
+I came out on a road, past houses and barking dogs, down to the river
+bank; there I sat against a shed and went to sleep.  I woke very
+stiff.  It was darker than before; the moon was gone.  I could just
+see the river.  I stumbled on, to get through the town before dawn.
+It was all black shapes-houses and sheds, and the smell of the river,
+the smell of rotting hay, apples, tar, mud, fish; and here and there
+on a wharf a lantern.  I stumbled over casks and ropes and boxes; I
+saw I should never get clear--the dawn had begun already on the other
+side.  Some men came from a house behind me.  I bent, and crept
+behind some barrels.  They passed along the wharf; they seemed to
+drop into the river.  I heard one of them say: 'Passau before night.'
+I stood up and saw they had walked on board a steamer which was lying
+head up-stream, with some barges in tow.  There was a plank laid to
+the steamer, and a lantern at the other end.  I could hear the
+fellows moving below deck, getting up steam.  I ran across the plank
+and crept to the end of the steamer.  I meant to go with them to
+Passau!  The rope which towed the barges was nearly taut; and I knew
+if I could get on to the barges I should be safe.  I climbed down on
+this rope and crawled along.  I was desperate, I knew they'd soon be
+coming up, and it was getting light.  I thought I should fall into
+the water several times, but I got to the barge at last.  It was
+laden with straw.  There was nobody on board.  I was hungry and
+thirsty--I looked for something to eat; there was nothing but the
+ashes of a fire and a man's coat.  I crept into the straw.  Soon a
+boat brought men, one for each barge, and there were sounds of steam.
+As soon as we began moving through the water, I fell asleep.  When I
+woke we were creeping through a heavy mist.  I made a little hole in
+the straw and saw the bargeman.  He was sitting by a fire at the
+barge's edge, so that the sparks and smoke blew away over the water.
+He ate and drank with both hands, and funny enough he looked in the
+mist, like a big bird flapping its wings; there was a good smell of
+coffee, and I sneezed.  How the fellow started!  But presently he
+took a pitchfork and prodded the straw.  Then I stood up.  I couldn't
+help laughing, he was so surprised--a huge, dark man, with a great
+black beard.  I pointed to the fire and said 'Give me some, brother!'
+He pulled me out of the straw; I was so stiff, I couldn't move.  I
+sat by the fire, and ate black bread and turnips, and drank coffee;
+while he stood by, watching me and muttering.  I couldn't understand
+him well--he spoke a dialect from Hungary.  He asked me: How I got
+there--who I was--where I was from?  I looked up in his face, and he
+looked down at me, sucking his pipe.  He was a big man, he lived
+alone on the river, and I was tired of telling lies, so I told him
+the whole thing.  When I had done he just grunted.  I can see him now
+standing over me, with the mist hanging in his beard, and his great
+naked arms.  He drew me some water, and I washed and showed him my
+wig and moustache, and threw them overboard.  All that day we lay out
+on the barge in the mist, with our feet to the fire, smoking; now and
+then he would spit into the ashes and mutter into his beard.  I shall
+never forget that day.  The steamer was like a monster with fiery
+nostrils, and the other barges were dumb creatures with eyes, where
+the fires were; we couldn't see the bank, but now and then a bluff
+and high trees, or a castle, showed in the mist.  If I had only had
+paint and canvas that day!"  He sighed.
+
+"It was early Spring, and the river was in flood; they were going to
+Regensburg to unload there, take fresh cargo, and back to Linz.  As
+soon as the mist began to clear, the bargeman hid me in the straw.
+At Passau was the frontier; they lay there for the night, but nothing
+happened, and I slept in the straw.  The next day I lay out on the
+barge deck; there was no mist, but I was free--the sun shone gold on
+the straw and the green sacking; the water seemed to dance, and I
+laughed--I laughed all the time, and the barge man laughed with me.
+A fine fellow he was!  At Regensburg I helped them to unload; for
+more than a week we worked; they nicknamed me baldhead, and when it
+was all over I gave the money I earned for the unloading to the big
+bargeman.  We kissed each other at parting.  I had still three of the
+gulden that Luigi gave me, and I went to a house-painter and got work
+with him.  For six months I stayed there to save money; then I wrote
+to my mother's cousin in Vienna, and told him I was going to London.
+He gave me an introduction to some friends there.  I went to Hamburg,
+and from there to London in a cargo steamer, and I've never been back
+till now."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+After a minute's silence Christian said in a startled voice: "They
+could arrest you then!"
+
+Harz laughed.
+
+"If they knew; but it's seven years ago."
+
+"Why did you come here, when it's so dangerous?"
+
+"I had been working too hard, I wanted to see my country--after seven
+years, and when it's forbidden!  But I'm ready to go back now."  He
+looked down at her, frowning.
+
+"Had you a hard time in London, too?"
+
+"Harder, at first--I couldn't speak the language.  In my profession
+it's hard work to get recognised, it's hard work to make a living.
+There are too many whose interest it is to keep you down--I shan't
+forget them."
+
+"But every one is not like that?"
+
+"No; there are fine fellows, too.  I shan't forget them either.  I
+can sell my pictures now; I'm no longer weak, and I promise you I
+shan't forget.  If in the future I have power, and I shall have
+power--I shan't forget."
+
+A shower of fine gravel came rattling on the wall.  Dawney was
+standing below them with an amused expression on his upturned face.
+
+"Are you going to stay there all night?" he asked.  "Greta and I have
+bored each other."
+
+"We're coming," called Christian hastily.
+
+On the way back neither spoke a word, but when they reached the
+Villa, Harz took her hand, and said: "Fraulein Christian, I can't do
+any more with your picture.  I shan't touch it again after this."
+
+She made no answer, but they looked at each other, and both seemed to
+ask, to entreat, something more; then her eyes fell.  He dropped her
+hand, and saying, "Good-night," ran after Dawney.
+
+In the corridor, Dominique, carrying a dish of fruit, met the
+sisters; he informed them that Miss Naylor had retired to bed; that
+Herr Paul would not be home to dinner; his master was dining in his
+room; dinner would be served for Mrs. Decie and the two young ladies
+in a quarter of an hour: "And the fish is good to-night; little
+trouts! try them, Signorina!" He moved on quickly, softly, like a
+cat, the tails of his dress-coat flapping, and the heels of his white
+socks gleaming.
+
+Christian ran upstairs.  She flew about her room, feeling that if she
+once stood still it would all crystallise in hard painful thought,
+which motion alone kept away.  She washed, changed her dress and
+shoes, and ran down to her uncle's room.  Mr. Treffry had just
+finished dinner, pushed the little table back, and was sitting in his
+chair, with his glasses on his nose, reading the Tines.  Christian
+touched his forehead with her lips.
+
+"Glad to see you, Chris.  Your stepfather's out to dinner, and I
+can't stand your aunt when she's in one of her talking moods--bit of
+a humbug, Chris, between ourselves; eh, isn't she?" His eyes
+twinkled.
+
+Christian smiled.  There was a curious happy restlessness in her that
+would not let her keep still.
+
+"Picture finished?" Mr. Treffry asked suddenly, taking up the paper
+with a crackle.  "Don't go and fall in love with the painter, Chris."
+
+Christian was still enough now.
+
+'Why not?' she thought.  'What should you know about him?  Isn't he
+good enough for me?'  A gong sounded.
+
+"There's your dinner," Mr. Treffry remarked.
+
+With sudden contrition she bent and kissed him.
+
+But when she had left the room Mr. Treffry put down the Times and
+stared at the door, humming to himself, and thoughtfully fingering
+his chin.
+
+Christian could not eat; she sat, indifferent to the hoverings of
+Dominique, tormented by uneasy fear and longings.  She answered Mrs.
+Decie at random.  Greta kept stealing looks at her from under her
+lashes.
+
+"Decided characters are charming, don't you think so, Christian?"
+Mrs. Decie said, thrusting her chin a little forward, and modelling
+the words.  "That is why I like Mr. Harz so much; such an immense
+advantage for a man to know his mind.  You have only to look at that
+young man to see that he knows what he wants, and means to have it."
+
+Christian pushed her plate away.  Greta, flushing, said abruptly:
+"Doctor Edmund is not a decided character, I think.  This afternoon
+he said: 'Shall I have some beer-yes, I shall--no, I shall not'; then
+he ordered the beer, so, when it came, he gave it to the soldiers."
+
+Mrs. Decie turned her enigmatic smile from one girl to the other.
+
+When dinner was over they went into her room.  Greta stole at once to
+the piano, where her long hair fell almost to the keys; silently she
+sat there fingering the notes, smiling to herself, and looking at her
+aunt, who was reading Pater's essays.  Christian too had taken up a
+book, but soon put it down--of several pages she had not understood a
+word.  She went into the garden and wandered about the lawn, clasping
+her hands behind her head.  The air was heavy; very distant thunder
+trembled among the mountains, flashes of summer lightning played over
+the trees; and two great moths were hovering about a rosebush.
+Christian watched their soft uncertain rushes.  Going to the little
+summer-house she flung herself down on a seat, and pressed her hands
+to her heart.
+
+There was a strange and sudden aching there.  Was he going from her?
+If so, what would be left?  How little and how narrow seemed the
+outlook of her life--with the world waiting for her, the world of
+beauty, effort, self-sacrifice, fidelity!  It was as though a flash
+of that summer lightning had fled by, singeing her, taking from her
+all powers of flight, burning off her wings, as off one of those pale
+hovering moths.  Tears started up, and trickled down her face.
+'Blind!' she thought; 'how could I have been so blind?'
+
+Some one came down the path.
+
+"Who's there?" she cried.
+
+Harz stood in the doorway.
+
+"Why did you come out?" he said.  "Ah! why did you come out?"  He
+caught her hand; Christian tried to draw it from him, and to turn her
+eyes away, but she could not.  He flung himself down on his knees,
+and cried: "I love you!"
+
+In a rapture of soft terror Christian bent her forehead down to his
+hand.
+
+"What are you doing?" she heard him say.  "Is it possible that you
+love me?" and she felt his kisses on her hair.
+
+"My sweet! it will be so hard for you; you are so little, so little,
+and so weak."  Clasping his hand closer to her face, she murmured: "I
+don't care."
+
+There was a long, soft silence, that seemed to last for ever.
+Suddenly she threw her arms round his neck and kissed him.
+
+"Whatever comes!" she whispered, and gathering her dress, escaped
+from him into the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+Christian woke next morning with a smile.  In her attitudes, her
+voice, her eyes, there was a happy and sweet seriousness, as if she
+were hugging some holy thought.  After breakfast she took a book and
+sat in the open window, whence she could see the poplar-trees
+guarding the entrance.  There was a breeze; the roses close by kept
+nodding to her; the cathedral bells were in full chime; bees hummed
+above the lavender; and in the sky soft clouds were floating like
+huge, white birds.
+
+The sounds of Miss Naylor's staccato dictation travelled across the
+room, and Greta's sighs as she took it down, one eye on her paper,
+one eye on Scruff, who lay with a black ear flapped across his paw,
+and his tan eyebrows quivering.  He was in disgrace, for Dominique,
+coming on him unawares, had seen him "say his prayers" before a
+pudding, and take the pudding for reward.
+
+Christian put her book down gently, and slipped through the window.
+Harz was coming in from the road.  "I am all yours!" she whispered.
+His fingers closed on hers, and he went into the house.
+
+She slipped back, took up her book, and waited.  It seemed long
+before he came out, but when he did he waved her back, and hurried
+on; she had a glimpse of his face, white to the lips.  Feeling faint
+and sick, she flew to her stepfather's room.
+
+Herr Paul was standing in a corner with the utterly disturbed
+appearance of an easy-going man, visited by the unexpected.  His fine
+shirt-front was crumpled as if his breast had heaved too suddenly
+under strong emotion; his smoked eyeglasses dangled down his back;
+his fingers were embedded in his beard.  He was fixing his eye on a
+spot in the floor as though he expected it to explode and blow them
+to fragments.  In another corner Mrs. Decie, with half-closed eyes,
+was running her finger-tips across her brow.
+
+"What have you said to him?" cried Christian.
+
+Herr Paul regarded her with glassy eyes.
+
+"Mein Gott!" he said.  "Your aunt and I!"
+
+"What have you said to him?" repeated Christian.
+
+"The impudence!  An anarchist!  A beggar!"
+
+"Paul!" murmured Mrs. Decie.
+
+"The outlaw!  The fellow!"  Herr Paul began to stride about the room.
+
+Quivering from head to foot, Christian cried: "How dared you?" and
+ran from the room, pushing aside Miss Naylor and Greta, who stood
+blanched and frightened in the doorway.
+
+Herr Paul stopped in his tramp, and, still with his eyes fixed on the
+floor, growled:
+
+"A fine thing-hein?  What's coming?  Will you please tell me?  An
+anarchist--a beggar!"
+
+"Paul!" murmured Mrs. Decie.
+
+"Paul!  Paul!  And you!" he pointed to Miss Naylor--"Two women with
+eyes!--hein!"
+
+"There is nothing to be gained by violence," Mrs. Decie murmured,
+passing her handkerchief across her lips.  Miss Naylor, whose thin
+brown cheeks had flushed, advanced towards him.
+
+"I hope you do not--"she said; "I am sure there was nothing that I
+could have prevented--I should be glad if that were understood."
+And, turning with some dignity, the little lady went away, closing
+the door behind her.
+
+"You hear!" Herr Paul said, violently sarcastic: "nothing she could
+have prevented!  Enfin! Will you please tell me what I am to do?"
+
+"Men of the world"--whose philosophy is a creature of circumstance
+and accepted things--find any deviation from the path of their
+convictions dangerous, shocking, and an intolerable bore.  Herr Paul
+had spent his life laughing at convictions; the matter had but to
+touch him personally, and the tap of laughter was turned off.  That
+any one to whom he was the lawful guardian should marry other than a
+well-groomed man, properly endowed with goods, properly selected, was
+beyond expression horrid.  From his point of view he had great excuse
+for horror; and he was naturally unable to judge whether he had
+excuse for horror from other points of view.  His amazement had in it
+a spice of the pathetic; he was like a child in the presence of a
+thing that he absolutely could not understand.  The interview had
+left him with a sense of insecurity which he felt to be particularly
+unfair.
+
+The door was again opened, and Greta flew in, her cheeks flushed, her
+hair floating behind her, and tears streaming down her cheeks.
+
+"Papa!" she cried, "you have been cruel to Chris.  The door is
+locked; I can hear her crying--why have you been cruel?"  Without
+waiting to be answered, she flew out again.
+
+Herr Paul seized his hair with both his hands: "Good!  Very good!  My
+own child, please!  What next then?"
+
+Mrs. Decie rose from her chair languidly.  "My head is very bad," she
+said, shading her eyes and speaking in low tones: "It is no use
+making a fuss--nothing can come of this--he has not a penny.
+Christian will have nothing till you die, which will not be for a
+long time yet, if you can but avoid an apoplectic fit!"
+
+At these last words Herr Paul gave a start of real disgust.  "Hum!"
+he muttered; it was as if the world were bent on being brutal to him.
+Mrs. Decie continued:
+
+"If I know anything of this young man, he will not come here again,
+after the words you have spoken.  As for Christian--you had better
+talk to Nicholas.  I am going to lie down."
+
+Herr Paul nervously fingered the shirt-collar round his stout, short
+neck.
+
+"Nicholas!  Certainly--a good idea.  Quelle diable d'afaire!"
+
+'French!' thought Mrs. Decie; 'we shall soon have peace.  Poor
+Christian!  I'm sorry!  After all, these things are a matter of time
+and opportunity.'  This consoled her a good deal.
+
+But for Christian the hours were a long nightmare of grief and shame,
+fear and anger.  Would he forgive?  Would he be true to her?  Or
+would he go away without a word?  Since yesterday it was as if she
+had stepped into another world, and lost it again.  In place of that
+new feeling, intoxicating as wine, what was coming?  What bitter;
+dreadful ending?
+
+A rude entrance this into the life of facts, and primitive emotions!
+
+She let Greta into her room after a time, for the child had begun
+sobbing; but she would not talk, and sat hour after hour at the
+window with the air fanning her face, and the pain in her eyes turned
+to the sky and trees.  After one or two attempts at consolation,
+Greta sank on the floor, and remained there, humbly gazing at her
+sister in a silence only broken when Christian cleared her throat of
+tears, and by the song of birds in the garden.  In the afternoon she
+slipped away and did not come back again.
+
+After his interview with Mr. Treffry, Herr Paul took a bath, perfumed
+himself with precision, and caused it to be clearly understood that,
+under circumstances such as these, a man's house was not suited for a
+pig to live in.  He shortly afterwards went out to the Kurbaus, and
+had not returned by dinner-time.
+
+Christian came down for dinner.  There were crimson spots in her
+cheeks, dark circles round her eyes; she behaved, however, as though
+nothing had happened.  Miss Naylor, affected by the kindness of her
+heart and the shock her system had sustained, rolled a number of
+bread pills, looking at each as it came, with an air of surprise, and
+concealing it with difficulty.  Mr. Treffry was coughing, and when he
+talked his voice seemed to rumble even more than usual.  Greta was
+dumb, trying to catch Christian's eye; Mrs. Decie alone seemed at
+ease.  After dinner Mr. Treffry went off to his room, leaning heavily
+on Christian's shoulder.  As he sank into his chair, he said to her:
+
+"Pull yourself together, my dear!" Christian did not answer him.
+
+Outside his room Greta caught her by the sleeve.
+
+"Look!" she whispered, thrusting a piece of paper into Christian's
+hand.  "It is to me from Dr. Edmund, but you must read it."
+
+Christian opened the note, which ran as follows:
+
+
+"MY PHILOSOPHER AND FRIEND,--I received your note, and went to our
+friend's studio; he was not in, but half an hour ago I stumbled on
+him in the Platz.  He is not quite himself; has had a touch of the
+sun--nothing serious: I took him to my hotel, where he is in bed.  If
+he will stay there he will be all right in a day or two.  In any case
+he shall not elude my clutches for the present.
+
+"My warm respects to Mistress Christian.--Yours in friendship and
+philosophy,
+
+"EDMUND DAWNEY."
+
+
+Christian read and re-read this note, then turned to Greta.
+
+"What did you say to Dr. Dawney?"
+
+Greta took back the piece of paper, and replied: "I said:
+
+"'DEAR DR. EDMUND,--We are anxious about Herr Harz.  We think he is
+perhaps not very well to-day.  We (I and Christian) should like to
+know.  You can tell us.  Please shall you?  GRETA.'
+
+"That is what I said."
+
+Christian dropped her eyes.  "What made you write?"
+
+Greta gazed at her mournfully: "I thought--O Chris! come into the
+garden.  I am so hot, and it is so dull without you!"
+
+Christian bent her head forward and rubbed her cheek against Greta's,
+then without another word ran upstairs and locked herself into her
+room.  The child stood listening; hearing the key turn in the lock,
+she sank down on the bottom step and took Scruff in her arms.
+
+Half an hour later Miss Naylor, carrying a candle, found her there
+fast asleep, with her head resting on the terrier's back, and tear
+stains on her cheeks....
+
+Mrs. Decie presently came out, also carrying a candle, and went to
+her brother's room.  She stood before his chair, with folded hands.
+
+"Nicholas, what is to be done?"
+
+Mr. Treffry was pouring whisky into a glass.
+
+"Damn it, Con!" he answered; "how should I know?"
+
+"There's something in Christian that makes interference dangerous.  I
+know very well that I've no influence with her at all."
+
+"You're right there, Con," Mr. Treffry replied.
+
+Mrs. Decie's pale eyes, fastened on his face, forced him to look up.
+
+"I wish you would leave off drinking whisky and attend to me.  Paul
+is an element--"
+
+"Paul," Mr. Treffry growled, "is an ass!"
+
+"Paul," pursued Mrs. Decie, "is an element of danger in the
+situation; any ill-timed opposition of his might drive her to I don't
+know what.  Christian is gentle, she is 'sympathetic' as they say;
+but thwart her, and she is as obstinate as....
+
+"You or I!  Leave her alone!"
+
+"I understand her character, but I confess that I am at a loss what
+to do."
+
+"Do nothing!"  He drank again.
+
+Mrs. Decie took up the candle.
+
+"Men!" she said with a mysterious intonation; shrugging her
+shoulders, she walked out.
+
+Mr. Treffry put down his glass.
+
+'Understand?' he thought; 'no, you don't, and I don't.  Who
+understands a young girl?  Vapourings, dreams, moonshine I....  What
+does she see in this painter fellow?  I wonder!'  He breathed
+heavily.  'By heavens! I wouldn't have had this happen for a hundred
+thousand pounds!'
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+For many hours after Dawney had taken him to his hotel, Harz was
+prostrate with stunning pains in the head and neck.  He had been all
+day without food, exposed to burning sun, suffering violent emotion.
+Movement of any sort caused him such agony that he could only lie in
+stupor, counting the spots dancing before, his eyes.  Dawney did
+everything for him, and Harz resented in a listless way the intent
+scrutiny of the doctor's calm, black eyes.
+
+Towards the end of the second day he was able to get up; Dawney found
+him sitting on the bed in shirt and trousers.
+
+"My son," he said, "you had better tell me what the trouble is--it
+will do your stubborn carcase good."
+
+"I must go back to work," said Harz.
+
+"Work!" said Dawney deliberately: "you couldn't, if you tried."
+
+"I must."
+
+"My dear fellow, you couldn't tell one colour from another."
+
+"I must be doing something; I can't sit here and think."
+
+Dawney hooked his thumbs into his waistcoat: "You won't see the sun
+for three days yet, if I can help it."
+
+Harz got up.
+
+"I'm going to my studio to-morrow," he said.  "I promise not to go
+out.  I must be where I can see my work.  If I can't paint, I can
+draw; I can feel my brushes, move my things about.  I shall go mad if
+I do nothing."
+
+Dawney took his arm, and walked him up and down.
+
+"I'll let you go," he said, "but give me a chance!  It's as much to
+me to put you straight as it is to you to paint a decent picture.
+Now go to bed; I'll have a carriage for you to-morrow morning."
+
+Harz sat down on the bed again, and for a long time stayed without
+moving, his eyes fixed on the floor.  The sight of him, so desperate
+and miserable, hurt the young doctor.
+
+"Can you get to bed by yourself?" he asked at last.
+
+Harz nodded.
+
+"Then, good-night, old chap!" and Dawney left the room.
+
+He took his hat and turned towards the Villa.  Between the poplars he
+stopped to think.  The farther trees were fret-worked black against
+the lingering gold of the sunset; a huge moth, attracted by the tip
+of his cigar, came fluttering in his face.  The music of a concertina
+rose and fell, like the sighing of some disillusioned spirit.  Dawney
+stood for several minutes staring at the house.
+
+He was shown to Mrs. Decie's room.  She was holding a magazine before
+her eyes, and received him with as much relief as philosophy
+permitted.
+
+"You are the very person I wanted to see," she said.
+
+He noticed that the magazine she held was uncut.
+
+"You are a young man," pursued Mrs. Decie, "but as my doctor I have a
+right to your discretion."
+
+Dawney smiled; the features of his broad, clean-shaven face looked
+ridiculously small on such occasions, but his eyes retained their air
+of calculation.
+
+"That is so," he answered.
+
+"It is about this unfortunate affair.  I understand that Mr. Harz is
+with you.  I want you to use your influence to dissuade him from
+attempting to see my niece."
+
+"Influence!" said Dawney; "you know Harz!"
+
+Mrs. Decie's voice hardened.
+
+"Everybody," she said, "has his weak points.  This young man is open
+to approach from at least two quarters--his pride is one, his work an
+other.  I am seldom wrong in gauging character; these are his vital
+spots, and they are of the essence of this matter.  I'm sorry for
+him, of course--but at his age, and living a man's life, these
+things--"  Her smile was extra pale.  "I wish you could give me
+something for my head.  It's foolish to worry.  Nerves of course!
+But I can't help it!  You know my opinion, Dr. Dawney.  That young
+man will go far if he remains unfettered; he will make a name.  You
+will be doing him a great service if you could show him the affair as
+it really is--a drag on him, and quite unworthy of his pride!  Do
+help me!  You are just the man to do it!"
+
+Dawney threw up his head as if to shake off this impeachment; the
+curve of his chin thus displayed was imposing in its fulness;
+altogether he was imposing, having an air of capability.
+
+She struck him, indeed, as really scared; it was as if her mask of
+smile had become awry, and failed to cover her emotion; and he was
+puzzled, thinking, 'I wouldn't have believed she had it in her....'
+"It's not an easy business," he said; "I'll think it over."
+
+"Thank you!" murmured Mrs. Decie.  "You are most kind."
+
+Passing the schoolroom, he looked in through the open door.
+Christian was sitting there.  The sight of her face shocked him, it
+was so white, so resolutely dumb.  A book lay on her knees; she was
+not reading, but staring before her.  He thought suddenly: 'Poor
+thing!  If I don't say something to her, I shall be a brute!'
+
+"Miss Devorell," he said: "You can reckon on him."
+
+Christian tried to speak, but her lips trembled so that nothing came
+forth.
+
+"Good-night," said Dawney, and walked out....
+
+Three days later Harz was sitting in the window of his studio.  It
+was the first day he had found it possible to work, and now, tired
+out, he stared through the dusk at the slowly lengthening shadows of
+the rafters.  A solitary mosquito hummed, and two house sparrows, who
+had built beneath the roof, chirruped sleepily.  Swallows darted by
+the window, dipping their blue wings towards the quiet water; a hush
+had stolen over everything.  He fell asleep.
+
+He woke, with a dim impression of some near presence.  In the pale
+glimmer from innumerable stars, the room was full of shadowy shapes.
+He lit his lantern.  The flame darted forth, bickered, then slowly
+lit up the great room.
+
+"Who's there?"
+
+A rustling seemed to answer.  He peered about, went to the doorway,
+and drew the curtain.  A woman's cloaked figure shrank against the
+wall.  Her face was buried in her hands; her arms, from which the
+cloak fell back, were alone visible.
+
+"Christian?"
+
+She ran past him, and when he had put the lantern down, was standing
+at the window.  She turned quickly to him.  "Take me away from here!
+Let me come with you!"
+
+"Do you mean it?"
+
+"You said you wouldn't give me up!"
+
+"You know what you are doing?"
+
+She made a motion of assent.
+
+"But you don't grasp what this means.  Things to bear that you know
+nothing of--hunger perhaps!  Think, even hunger!  And your people
+won't forgive--you'll lose everything."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"I must choose--it's one thing or the other.  I can't give you up!
+I should be afraid!"
+
+"But, dear; how can you come with me?  We can't be married here."
+
+"I am giving my life to you."
+
+"You are too good for me," said Harz.  "The life you're going into--
+may be dark, like that!" he pointed to the window.
+
+A sound of footsteps broke the hush.  They could see a figure on the
+path below.  It stopped, seemed to consider, vanished.  They heard
+the sounds of groping hands, of a creaking door, of uncertain feet on
+the stairs.
+
+Harz seized her hand.
+
+"Quick!" he whispered; "behind this canvas!"
+
+Christian was trembling violently.  She drew her hood across her
+face.  The heavy breathing and ejaculations of the visitor were now
+plainly audible.
+
+"He's there!  Quick!  Hide!"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+With a thrill at his heart, Harz kissed her, then walked towards the
+entrance.  The curtain was pulled aside.
+
+It was Herr Paul, holding a cigar in one hand, his hat in the other,
+and breathing hard.
+
+"Pardon!" he said huskily, "your stairs are steep, and dark! mais en,
+fin! nous voila!  I have ventured to come for a talk."  His glance
+fell on the cloaked figure in the shadow.
+
+"Pardon! A thousand pardons!  I had no idea!  I beg you to forgive
+this indiscretion!  I may take it you resign pretensions then?  You
+have a lady here--I have nothing more to say; I only beg a million
+pardons for intruding.  A thousand times forgive me!  Good-night!"
+
+He bowed and turned to go.  Christian stepped forward, and let the
+hood fall from her head.
+
+"It's I!"
+
+Herr Paul pirouetted.
+
+"Good God!" he stammered, dropping cigar and hat.  "Good God!"
+
+The lantern flared suddenly, revealing his crimson, shaking cheeks.
+
+"You came here, at night!  You, the daughter of my wife!"  His eyes
+wandered with a dull glare round the room.
+
+"Take care!" cried Harz: "If you say a word against her---"
+
+The two men stared at each other's eyes.  And without warning, the
+lantern flickered and went out.  Christian drew the cloak round her
+again.  Herr Paul's voice broke the silence; he had recovered his
+self-possession.
+
+"Ah! ah!" he said: "Darkness! Tant mieux!  The right thing for what
+we have to say.  Since we do not esteem each other, it is well not to
+see too much."
+
+"Just so," said Harz.
+
+Christian had come close to them.  Her pale face and great shining
+eyes could just be seen through the gloom.
+
+Herr Paul waved his arm; the gesture was impressive, annihilating.
+
+"This is a matter, I believe, between two men," he said, addressing
+Harz.  "Let us come to the point.  I will do you the credit to
+suppose that you have a marriage in view.  You know, perhaps, that
+Miss Devorell has no money till I die?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And I am passably young! You have money, then?"
+
+"No."
+
+"In that case, you would propose to live on air?"
+
+"No, to work; it has been done before."
+
+"It is calculated to increase hunger!  You are prepared to take Miss
+Devorell, a young lady accustomed to luxury, into places like--this!"
+he peered about him, "into places that smell of paint, into the
+milieu of 'the people,' into the society of Bohemians--who knows? of
+anarchists, perhaps?"
+
+Harz clenched his hands: "I will answer no more questions."
+
+"In that event, we reach the ultimatum," said Herr Paul.  "Listen,
+Herr Outlaw!  If you have not left the country by noon to-morrow, you
+shall be introduced to the police!"
+
+Christian uttered a cry.  For a minute in the gloom the only sound
+heard was the short, hard breathing of the two men.
+
+Suddenly Harz cried: "You coward, I defy you!"
+
+"Coward!" Herr Paul repeated.  "That is indeed the last word.  Look
+to yourself, my friend!"
+
+Stooping and fumbling on the floor, he picked up his hat.  Christian
+had already vanished; the sound of her hurrying footsteps was
+distinctly audible at the top of the dark stairs.  Herr Paul stood
+still a minute.
+
+"Look to yourself, my dear friend!" he said in a thick voice, groping
+for the wall.  Planting his hat askew on his head, he began slowly to
+descend the stairs.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+Nicholas Treffry sat reading the paper in his room by the light of a
+lamp with a green shade; on his sound foot the terrier Scruff was
+asleep and snoring lightly--the dog habitually came down when Greta
+was in bed, and remained till Mr. Treffry, always the latest member
+of the household, retired to rest.
+
+Through the long window a little river of light shone out on the
+veranda tiles, and, flowing past, cut the garden in two.
+
+There was the sound of hurried footsteps, a rustling of draperies;
+Christian, running through the window, stood before him.
+
+Mr. Treffry dropped his paper, such a fury of passion and alarm shone
+in the girl's eyes.
+
+"Chris! What is it?"
+
+"Hateful!"
+
+"Chris!"
+
+"Oh! Uncle!  He's insulted, threatened!  And I love his little finger
+more than all the, world!"
+
+Her passionate voice trembled, her eyes were shining.
+
+Mr. Treffry's profound discomfort found vent in the gruff words: "Sit
+down!"
+
+"I'll never speak to Father again!  Oh! Uncle! I love him!"
+
+Quiet in the extremity of his disturbance, Mr. Treffry leaned forward
+in his chair, rested his big hands on its arms, and stared at her.
+
+Chris!  Here was a woman he did not know!  His lips moved under the
+heavy droop of his moustache.  The girl's face had suddenly grown
+white.  She sank down on her knees, and laid her cheek against his
+hand.  He felt it wet; and a lump rose in his throat.  Drawing his
+hand away, he stared at it, and wiped it with his sleeve.
+
+"Don't cry!" he said.
+
+She seized it again and clung to it; that clutch seemed to fill him
+with sudden rage.
+
+"What's the matter?  How the devil can I do anything if you don't
+tell me?"
+
+She looked up at him.  The distress of the last days, the passion and
+fear of the last hour, the tide of that new life of the spirit and
+the flesh, stirring within her, flowed out in a stream of words.
+
+When she had finished, there was so dead a silence that the
+fluttering of a moth round the lamp could be heard plainly.
+
+Mr. Treffry raised himself, crossed the room, and touched the bell.
+"Tell the groom," he said to Dominique, "to put the horses to, and
+have 'em round at once; bring my old boots; we drive all night...."
+
+His bent figure looked huge, body and legs outlined by light, head
+and shoulders towering into shadow.  "He shall have a run for his
+money!" he said.  His eyes stared down sombrely at his niece.  "It's
+more than he deserves!--it's more than you deserve, Chris.  Sit down
+there and write to him; tell him to put himself entirely in my
+hands."  He turned his back on her, and went into his bedroom.
+
+Christian rose, and sat down at the writing-table.  A whisper
+startled her.  It came from Dominique, who was holding out a pair of
+boots.
+
+"M'mselle Chris, what is this?--to run about all night?"  But
+Christian did not answer.
+
+"M'mselle Chris, are you ill?"  Then seeing her face, he slipped away
+again.
+
+She finished her letter and went out to the carriage.  Mr. Treffry
+was seated under the hood.
+
+"Shan't want you," he called out to the groom, "Get up, Dominique."
+
+Christian thrust her letter into his hand.  "Give him that," she
+said, clinging to his arm with sudden terror.  "Oh! Uncle! do take
+care!"
+
+"Chris, if I do this for you--"  They looked wistfully at one
+another.  Then, shaking his head, Mr. Treffry gathered up the reins.
+
+"Don't fret, my dear, don't fret!  Whoa, mare!"
+
+The carriage with a jerk plunged forward into darkness, curved with a
+crunch of wheels, and vanished, swinging between the black
+treepillars at the entrance....
+
+Christian stood, straining to catch the failing sound of the hoofs.
+
+Down the passage came a flutter of white garments; soft limbs were
+twined about her, some ends of hair fell on her face.
+
+"What is it, Chris?  Where have you been?  Where is Uncle Nic going?
+Tell me!"
+
+Christian tore herself away.  "I don't know," she cried, "I know
+nothing!"
+
+Greta stroked her face.  "Poor Chris!" she murmured.  Her bare feet
+gleamed, her hair shone gold against her nightdress.  "Come to bed,
+poor Chris!"
+
+Christian laughed.  "You little white moth!  Feel how hot I am!
+You'll burn your wings!"
+
+Harz had lain down, fully dressed.  He was no longer angry, but felt
+that he would rather die than yield.  Presently he heard footsteps
+coming up the stairs.
+
+"M'sieu!"
+
+It was the voice of Dominique, whose face, illumined by a match, wore
+an expression of ironical disgust.
+
+"My master," he said, "makes you his compliments; he says there is no
+time to waste.  You are to please come and drive with him!"
+
+"Your master is very kind.  Tell him I'm in bed."
+
+"Ah, M'sieu," said Dominique, grimacing, "I must not go back with
+such an answer.  If you would not come, I was to give you this."
+
+Harz broke the seal and read Christian's letter.
+
+"I will come," he said.
+
+A clock was striking as they went out through the gate.  From within
+the dark cave of the phaeton hood Mr. Treffry said gruffly: "Come
+along, sir!"
+
+Harz flung his knapsack in, and followed.
+
+His companion's figure swayed, the whiplash slid softly along the
+flank of the off horse, and, as the carriage rattled forward, Mr.
+Treffry called out, as if by afterthought: "Hallo, Dominique!"
+Dominque's voice, shaken and ironical, answered from behind: "M'
+v'la, M'sieu!"
+
+In the long street of silent houses, men sitting in the lighted cafes
+turned with glasses at their lips to stare after the carriage.  The
+narrow river of the sky spread suddenly to a vast, limpid ocean
+tremulous with stars.  They had turned into the road for Italy.
+
+Mr. Treffry took a pull at his horses.  "Whoa, mare! Dogged does it!"
+and the near horse, throwing up her head, whinnied; a fleck of foam
+drifted into Harz's face.
+
+The painter had come on impulse; because Christian had told him to,
+not of his own free will.  He was angry with himself, wounded in
+self-esteem, for having allowed any one to render him this service.
+The smooth swift movement through velvet blackness splashed on either
+hand with the flying lamp-light; the strong sweet air blowing in his
+face-air that had kissed the tops of mountains and stolen their
+spirit; the snort and snuffle of the horses, and crisp rattling of
+their hoofs--all this soon roused in him another feeling.  He looked
+at Mr. Treffry's profile, with its tufted chin; at the grey road
+adventuring in darkness; at the purple mass of mountains piled above
+it.  All seemed utterly unreal.
+
+As if suddenly aware that he had a neighbour, Mr. Treffry turned his
+head.  "We shall do better than this presently," he said, "bit of a
+slope coming.  Haven't had 'em out for three days.  Whoa-mare!
+Steady!"
+
+"Why are you taking this trouble for me?" asked Harz.
+
+"I'm an old chap, Mr. Harz, and an old chap may do a stupid thing
+once in a while!"
+
+"You are very good," said Harz, "but I want no favours."
+
+Mr. Treffry stared at him.
+
+"Just so," he said drily, "but you see there's my niece to be thought
+of.  Look here!  We're not at the frontier yet, Mr. Harz, by forty
+miles; it's long odds we don't get there--so, don't spoil sport!"  He
+pointed to the left.
+
+Harz caught the glint of steel.  They were already crossing the
+railway.  The sigh of the telegraph wires fluttered above them.
+
+"Hear 'em," said Mr. Treffry, "but if we get away up the mountains,
+we'll do yet!"  They had begun to rise, the speed slackened.  Mr.
+Treffry rummaged out a flask.
+
+"Not bad stuff, Mr. Harz--try it.  You won't?  Mother's milk!  Fine
+night, eh?"  Below them the valley was lit by webs of milky mist like
+the glimmer of dew on grass.
+
+These two men sitting side by side--unlike in face, age, stature,
+thought, and life--began to feel drawn towards each other, as if, in
+the rolling of the wheels, the snorting of the horses, the huge dark
+space, the huge uncertainty, they had found something they could
+enjoy in common.  The, steam from the horses' flanks and nostrils
+enveloped them with an odour as of glue.
+
+"You smoke, Mr. Harz?"
+
+Harz took the proffered weed, and lighted it from the glowing tip of
+Mr. Treffry's cigar, by light of which his head and hat looked like
+some giant mushroom.  Suddenly the wheels jolted on a rubble of loose
+stones; the carriage was swung sideways.  The scared horses,
+straining asunder, leaped forward, and sped downwards, in the
+darkness.
+
+Past rocks, trees, dwellings, past a lighted house that gleamed and
+vanished.  With a clink and clatter, a flirt of dust and pebbles, and
+the side lamps throwing out a frisky orange blink, the carriage
+dashed down, sinking and rising like a boat crossing billows.  The
+world seemed to rock and sway; to dance up, and be flung flat again.
+Only the stars stood still.
+
+Mr. Treffry, putting on the brake, muttered apologetically: "A little
+out o'hand!"
+
+Suddenly with a headlong dive, the carriage swayed as if it would fly
+in pieces, slithered along, and with a jerk steadied itself.  Harz
+lifted his voice in a shout of pure excitement.  Mr. Treffry let out
+a short shaky howl, and from behind there rose a wail.  But the hill
+was over and the startled horses were cantering with a free, smooth
+motion.  Mr. Treffry and Harz looked at each other.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+Mr. Treffry said with a sort of laugh: "Near go, eh?  You drive?  No?
+That's a pity!  Broken most of my bones at the game--nothing like
+it!"  Each felt a kind of admiration for the other that he had not
+felt before.  Presently Mr. Treffry began: "Look here, Mr. Harz, my
+niece is a slip of a thing, with all a young girl's notions!  What
+have you got to give her, eh?  Yourself?  That's surely not enough;
+mind this--six months after marriage we all turn out much the same--a
+selfish lot!  Not to mention this anarchist affair!
+
+"You're not of her blood, nor of her way of life, nor anything--it's
+taking chances--and--" his hand came down on the young man's knee,
+"I'm fond of her, you see."
+
+"If you were in my place," said Harz, "would you give her up?"
+
+Mr. Treffry groaned.  "Lord knows!"
+
+"Men have made themselves before now.  For those who don't believe in
+failure, there's no such thing.  Suppose she does suffer a little?
+Will it do her any harm?  Fair weather love is no good."
+
+Mr. Treffry sighed.
+
+"Brave words, sir!  You'll pardon me if I'm too old to understand 'em
+when they're used about my niece."
+
+He pulled the horses up, and peered into the darkness.  "We're going
+through this bit quietly; if they lose track of us here so much the
+better.  Dominique! put out the lamps.  Soho, my beauties!"  The
+horses paced forward at a walk the muffled beat of their hoofs in the
+dust hardly broke the hush.  Mr. Treffry pointed to the left: "It'll
+be another thirty-five miles to the frontier."
+
+They passed the whitewashed houses, and village church with its
+sentinel cypress-trees.  A frog was croaking in a runlet; there was a
+faint spicy scent of lemons.  But nothing stirred.
+
+It was wood now on either side, the high pines, breathing their
+fragrance out into the darkness, and, like ghosts amongst them, the
+silver stems of birch-trees.
+
+Mr. Treffry said gruffly: "You won't give her up?  Her happiness
+means a lot to me."
+
+"To you!" said Harz: "to him!  And I am nothing!  Do you think I
+don't care for her happiness?  Is it a crime for me to love her?"
+
+"Almost, Mr. Harz--considering...."
+
+"Considering that I've no money!  Always money!"
+
+To this sneer Mr. Treffry made no answer, clucking to his horses.
+
+"My niece was born and bred a lady," he said at last.  "I ask you
+plainly What position have you got to give her?"
+
+"If she marries me," said Harz, "she comes into my world.  You think
+that I'm a common...."
+
+Mr. Treffry shook his head: "Answer my question, young man."
+
+But the painter did not answer it, and silence fell.
+
+A light breeze had sprung up; the whispering in the trees, the
+rolling of the wheels in this night progress, the pine-drugged air,
+sent Harz to sleep.  When he woke it was to the same tune, varied by
+Mr. Treffry's uneasy snoring; the reins were hanging loose, and,
+peering out, he saw Dominique shuffling along at the horses' heads.
+He joined him, and, one on each side, they plodded up and up.  A haze
+had begun to bathe the trees, the stars burnt dim, the air was
+colder.  Mr. Treffry woke coughing.  It was like some long nightmare,
+this interminable experience of muffled sounds and shapes, of
+perpetual motion, conceived, and carried out in darkness.  But
+suddenly the day broke.  Heralded by the snuffle of the horses, light
+began glimmering over a chaos of lines and shadows, pale as mother-
+o'-pearl.  The stars faded, and in a smouldering zigzag the dawn fled
+along the mountain tops, flinging out little isles of cloud.  From a
+lake, curled in a hollow like a patch of smoke, came the cry of a
+water-bird.  A cuckoo started a soft mocking; and close to the
+carriage a lark flew up.  Beasts and men alike stood still, drinking
+in the air-sweet with snows and dew, and vibrating faintly with the
+running of the water and the rustling of the leaves.
+
+The night had played sad tricks with Mr. Nicholas Treffry; his hat
+was grey with dust; his cheeks brownish-purple, there were heavy
+pouches beneath his eyes, which stared painfully.
+
+"We'll call a halt," he said, "and give the gees their grub, poor
+things.  Can you find some water, Mr. Harz?  There's a rubber bucket
+in behind.
+
+"Can't get about myself this morning; make that lazy fellow of mine
+stir his stumps."
+
+Harz saw that he had drawn off one of his boots, and stretched the
+foot out on a cushion.
+
+"You're not fit to go farther," he said; "you're ill."
+
+"Ill!" replied Mr. Treffry; "not a bit of it!"
+
+Harz looked at him, then catching up the bucket, made off in search
+of water.  When he came back the horses were feeding from an india-
+rubber trough slung to the pole; they stretched their heads towards
+the bucket, pushing aside each other's noses.
+
+The flame in the east had died, but the tops of the larches were
+bathed in a gentle radiance; and the peaks ahead were like amber.
+Everywhere were threads of water, threads of snow, and little threads
+of dewy green, glistening like gossamer.
+
+Mr. Treffry called out: "Give me your arm, Mr. Harz; I'd like to
+shake the reefs out of me.  When one comes to stand over at the
+knees, it's no such easy matter, eh?"  He groaned as he put his foot
+down, and gripped the young man's shoulder as in a vise.  Presently
+he lowered himself on to a stone.
+
+"'All over now!' as Chris would say when she was little; nasty temper
+she had too--kick and scream on the floor!  Never lasted long
+though....  'Kiss her! take her up! show her the pictures!'  Amazing
+fond of pictures Chris was!"  He looked dubiously at Harz; then took
+a long pull at his flask.  "What would the doctor say?  Whisky at
+four in the morning!  Well!  Thank the Lord Doctors aren't always
+with us."  Sitting on the stone, with one hand pressed against his
+side, and the other tilting up the flask, he was grey from head to
+foot.
+
+Harz had dropped on to another stone.  He, too, was worn out by the
+excitement and fatigue, coming so soon after his illness.  His head
+was whirling, and the next thing he remembered was a tree walking at
+him, turning round, yellow from the roots up; everything seemed
+yellow, even his own feet.  Somebody opposite to him was jumping up
+and down, a grey bear--with a hat--Mr. Treffry!  He cried: "Ha-
+alloo!"  And the figure seemed to fall and disappear....
+
+When Harz came to himself a hand was pouring liquor into his mouth,
+and a wet cloth was muffled round his brows; a noise of humming and
+hoofs seemed familiar.  Mr. Treffry loomed up alongside, smoking a
+cigar; he was muttering: "A low trick, Paul--bit of my mind!"  Then,
+as if a curtain had been snatched aside, the vision before Harz
+cleared again.  The carriage was winding between uneven, black-eaved
+houses, past doorways from which goats and cows were coming out, with
+bells on their necks.  Black-eyed boys, and here and there a drowsy
+man with a long, cherry-stemmed pipe betwen his teeth, stood aside to
+stare.
+
+Mr. Treffry seemed to have taken a new lease of strength; like an
+angry old dog, he stared from side to side.  "My bone!" he seemed to
+say: "let's see who's going to touch it!"
+
+The last house vanished, glowing in the early sunshine, and the
+carriage with its trail of dust became entombed once more in the
+gloom of tall trees, along a road that cleft a wilderness of
+mossgrown rocks, and dewy stems, through which the sun had not yet
+driven paths.
+
+Dominique came round to them, bearing appearance of one who has seen
+better days, and a pot of coffee brewed on a spirit lamp.  Breakfast
+--he said--was served!
+
+The ears of the horses were twitching with fatigue.  Mr. Treffry said
+sadly: "If I can see this through, you can.  Get on, my beauties!"
+
+As soon as the sun struck through the trees, Mr. Treffry's strength
+ebbed again.  He seemed to suffer greatly; but did not complain.
+They had reached the pass at last, and the unchecked sunlight was
+streaming down with a blinding glare.
+
+"Jump up!" Mr. Treffry cried out.  "We'll make a finish of it!" and
+he gave the reins a jerk.  The horses flung up their heads, and the
+bleak pass with its circling crown of jagged peaks soon slipped away.
+
+Between the houses on the very top, they passed at a slow trot; and
+soon began slanting down the other side.  Mr. Treffry brought them to
+a halt where a mule track joined the road.
+
+"That's all I can do for you; you'd better leave me here," he said.
+"Keep this track down to the river--go south--you'll be in Italy in a
+couple of hours.  Get rail at Feltre.  Money?  Yes?  Well!"  He held
+out his hand; Harz gripped it.
+
+"Give her up, eh?"
+
+Harz shook his head.
+
+"No?  Then it's 'pull devil, pull baker,' between us.  Good-bye, and
+good luck to you!"  And mustering his strength for a last attempt at
+dignity, Mr. Treffry gathered up the reins.
+
+Harz watched his figure huddled again beneath the hood.  The carriage
+moved slowly away.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+At Villa Rubein people went about, avoiding each other as if detected
+in conspiracy.  Miss Naylor, who for an inscrutable reason had put on
+her best frock, a purple, relieved at the chest with bird's-eye blue,
+conveyed an impression of trying to count a chicken which ran about
+too fast.  When Greta asked what she had lost she was heard to
+mutter: "Mr.--Needlecase."
+
+Christian, with big circles round her eyes, sat silent at her little
+table.  She had had no sleep.  Herr Paul coming into the room about
+noon gave her a furtive look and went out again; after this he went
+to his bedroom, took off all his clothes, flung them passionately one
+by one into a footbath, and got into bed.
+
+"I might be a criminal!" he muttered to himself, while the buttons of
+his garments rattled on the bath.
+
+"Am I her father?  Have I authority?  Do I know the world?  Bssss!  I
+might be a frog!"
+
+Mrs. Decie, having caused herself to be announced, found him smoking
+a cigar, and counting the flies on the ceiling.
+
+"If you have really done this, Paul," she said in a restrained voice,
+"you have done a very unkind thing, and what is worse, you have made
+us all ridiculous.  But perhaps you have not done it?"
+
+"I have done it," cried Herr Paul, staring dreadfully: "I have done
+it, I tell you, I have done it--"
+
+"Very well, you have done it--and why, pray?  What conceivable good
+was there in it?  I suppose you know that Nicholas has driven him to
+the frontier?  Nicholas is probably more dead than alive by this
+time; you know his state of health."
+
+Herr Paul's fingers ploughed up his beard.
+
+"Nicholas is mad--and the girl is mad!  Leave me alone!  I will not
+be made angry; do you understand?  I will not be worried--I am not
+fit for it."  His prominent brown eyes stared round the room, as if
+looking for a way of escape.
+
+"If I may prophesy, you will be worried a good deal," said Mrs. Decie
+coldly, "before you have finished with this affair."
+
+The anxious, uncertain glance which Herr Paul gave her at these words
+roused an unwilling feeling of compunction in her.
+
+"You are not made for the outraged father of the family," she said.
+"You had better give up the attitude, Paul; it does not suit you."
+
+Herr Paul groaned.
+
+"I suppose it is not your fault," she added.
+
+Just then the door was opened, and Fritz, with an air of saying the
+right thing, announced:
+
+"A gentleman of the police to see you, sir."
+
+Herr Paul bounded.
+
+"Keep him out!" he cried.
+
+Mrs. Decie, covering her lips, disappeared with a rustling of silk;
+in her place stood a stiff man in blue....
+
+Thus the morning dragged itself away without any one being able to
+settle to anything, except Herr Paul, who was settled in bed.  As was
+fitting in a house that had lost its soul, meals were neglected, even
+by the dog.
+
+About three o'clock a telegram came for Christian, containing these
+words: "All right; self returns to-morrow.  Treffry."  After reading
+it she put on her hat and went out, followed closely by Greta, who,
+when she thought that she would not be sent away, ran up from behind
+and pulled her by the sleeve.
+
+"Let me come, Chris--I shall not talk."
+
+The two girls walked on together.  When they had gone some distance
+Christian said:
+
+"I'm going to get his pictures, and take charge of them!"
+
+"Oh!" said Greta timidly.
+
+"If you are afraid," said Christian, "you had better go back home."
+
+"I am not afraid, Chris," said Greta meekly.
+
+Neither girl spoke again till they had taken the path along the wall.
+Over the tops of the vines the heat was dancing.
+
+"The sun-fairies are on the vines!" murmured Greta to herself.
+
+At the old house they stopped, and Christian, breathing quickly,
+pushed the door; it was immovable.
+
+"Look!" said Greta, "they have screwed it!"  She pointed out three
+screws with a rosy-tipped forefinger.
+
+Christian stamped her foot.
+
+"We mustn't stand here," she said; "let's sit on that bench and
+think."
+
+"Yes," murmured Greta, "let us think."  Dangling an end of hair, she
+regarded Christian with her wide blue eyes.
+
+"I can't make any plan," Christian cried at last, "while you stare at
+me like that."
+
+"I was thinking," said Greta humbly, "if they have screwed it up,
+perhaps we shall screw it down again; there is the big screw-driver
+of Fritz."
+
+"It would take a long time; people are always passing."
+
+"People do not pass in the evening," murmured Greta, "because the
+gate at our end is always shut."
+
+Christian rose.
+
+"We will come this evening, just before the gate is shut."
+
+"But, Chris, how shall we get back again?"
+
+"I don't know; I mean to have the pictures."
+
+"It is not a high gate," murmured Greta.
+
+After dinner the girls went to their room, Greta bearing with her the
+big screw-driver of Fritz.  At dusk they slipped downstairs and out.
+
+They arrived at the old house, and stood, listening, in the shadow of
+the doorway.  The only sounds were those of distant barking dogs, and
+of the bugles at the barracks.
+
+"Quick!" whispered Christian; and Greta, with all the strength of her
+small hands, began to turn the screws.  It was some time before they
+yielded; the third was very obstinate, till Christian took the screw-
+driver and passionately gave the screw a starting twist.
+
+"It is like a pig--that one," said Greta, rubbing her wrists
+mournfully.
+
+The opened door revealed the gloom of the dank rooms and twisting
+staircase, then fell to behind them with a clatter.
+
+Greta gave a little scream, and caught her sister's dress.
+
+"It is dark," she gasped; "O Chris! it is dark!"
+
+Christian groped for the bottom stair, and Greta felt her arm
+shaking.
+
+"Suppose there is a man to keep guard!  O Chris! suppose there are
+bats!"
+
+"You are a baby!" Christian answered in a trembling voice.  "You had
+better go home!"
+
+Greta choked a little in the dark.
+
+"I am--not--going home, but I'm afraid of bats.  O Chris! aren't you
+afraid?"
+
+"Yes," said Christian, "but I'm going to have the pictures."
+
+Her cheeks were burning; she was trembling all over.  Having found
+the bottom step she began to mount with Greta clinging to her skirts.
+
+The haze above inspired a little courage in the child, who, of all
+things, hated darkness.  The blanket across the doorway of the loft
+had been taken down, there was nothing to veil the empty room.
+
+"Nobody here, you see," said Christian.
+
+"No-o," whispered Greta, running to the window, and clinging to the
+wall, like one of the bats she dreaded.
+
+"But they have been here!" cried Christian angrily.  "They have
+broken this."  She pointed to the fragments of a plaster cast that
+had been thrown down.
+
+Out of the corner she began to pull the canvases set in rough, wooden
+frames, dragging them with all her strength.
+
+"Help me!" she cried; "it will be dark directly."
+
+They collected a heap of sketches and three large pictures, piling
+them before the window, and peering at them in the failing light.
+
+Greta said ruefully:
+
+"O Chris! they are heavy ones; we shall never carry them, and the
+gate is shut now!"
+
+Christian took a pointed knife from the table.
+
+"I shall cut them out of the frames," she said.  "Listen!  What's
+that?"
+
+It was the sound of whistling, which stopped beneath the window.  The
+girls, clasping each other's hands, dropped on their knees.
+
+"Hallo!" cried a voice.
+
+Greta crept to the window, and, placing her face level with the
+floor, peered over.
+
+"It is only Dr. Edmund; he doesn't know, then," she whispered; "I
+shall call him; he is going away!" cried Christian catching her
+sister's
+
+"Don't!" cried Christian catching her sister's dress.
+
+"He would help us," Greta said reproachfully, "and it would not be so
+dark if he were here."
+
+Christian's cheeks were burning.
+
+"I don't choose," she said, and began handling the pictures, feeling
+their edges with her knife.
+
+"Chris!  Suppose anybody came?"
+
+"The door is screwed," Christian answered absently.
+
+"O Chris!  We screwed it unscrewed; anybody who wishes shall come!"
+
+Christian, leaning her chin in her hands, gazed at her thoughtfully.
+
+"It will take a long time to cut these pictures out carefully; or,
+perhaps I can get them out without cutting.  You must screw me up and
+go home.  In the morning you must come early, when the gate is open,
+unscrew me again, and help carry the pictures."
+
+Greta did not answer at once.  At last she shook her head violently.
+
+"I am afraid," she gasped.
+
+"We can't both stay here all night," said Christian; "if any one
+comes to our room there will be nobody to answer.  We can't lift
+these pictures over the gate.  One of us must go back; you can climb
+over the gate--there is nothing to be afraid of"
+
+Greta pressed her hands together.
+
+"Do you want the pictures badly, Chris?"
+
+Christian nodded.
+
+"Very badly?"
+
+"Yes--yes--yes!"
+
+Greta remained sitting where she was, shivering violently, as a
+little animal shivers when it scents danger.  At last she rose.
+
+"I am going," she said in a despairing voice.  At the doorway she
+turned.
+
+"If Miss Naylor shall ask me where you are, Chris, I shall be telling
+her a story."
+
+Christian started.
+
+"I forgot that--O Greta, I am sorry! I will go instead."
+
+Greta took another step--a quick one.
+
+"I shall die if I stay here alone," she said; "I can tell her that
+you are in bed; you must go to bed here, Chris, so it shall be true
+after all."
+
+Christian threw her arms about her.
+
+"I am so sorry, darling; I wish I could go instead.  But if you have
+to tell a lie, I would tell a straight one."
+
+"Would you?" said Greta doubtfully.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I think," said Greta to herself, beginning to descend the stairs, "I
+think I will tell it in my way."  She shuddered and went on groping
+in the darkness.
+
+Christian listened for the sound of the screws.  It came slowly,
+threatening her with danger and solitude.
+
+Sinking on her knees she began to work at freeing the canvas of a
+picture.  Her heart throbbed distressfully; at the stir of wind-
+breath or any distant note of clamour she stopped, and held her
+breathing.  No sounds came near.  She toiled on, trying only to think
+that she was at the very spot where last night his arms had been
+round her.  How long ago it seemed!  She was full of vague terror,
+overmastered by the darkness, dreadfully alone.  The new glow of
+resolution seemed suddenly to have died down in her heart, and left
+her cold.
+
+She would never be fit to be his wife, if at the first test her
+courage failed! She set her teeth; and suddenly she felt a kind of
+exultation, as if she too were entering into life, were knowing
+something within herself that she had never known before.  Her
+fingers hurt, and the pain even gave pleasure; her cheeks were
+burning; her breath came fast.  They could not stop her now!  This
+feverish task in darkness was her baptism into life.  She finished;
+and rolling the pictures very carefully, tied them with cord.  She
+had done something for him!  Nobody could take that from her!  She
+had a part of him!  This night had made him hers!  They might do
+their worst!  She lay down on his mattress and soon fell asleep....
+
+She was awakened by Scruff's tongue against her face.  Greta was
+standing by her side.
+
+"Wake up, Chris!  The gate is open!"
+
+In the cold early light the child seemed to glow with warmth and
+colour; her eyes were dancing.
+
+"I am not afraid now; Scruff and I sat up all night, to catch the
+morning--I--think it was fun; and O Chris!" she ended with a rueful
+gleam in her eyes, "I told it."
+
+Christian hugged her.
+
+"Come--quick! There is nobody about.  Are those the pictures?"
+
+Each supporting an end, the girls carried the bundle downstairs, and
+set out with their corpse-like burden along the wall-path between the
+river and the vines.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+Hidden by the shade of rose-bushes Greta lay stretched at length,
+cheek on arm, sleeping the sleep of the unrighteous.  Through the
+flowers the sun flicked her parted lips with kisses, and spilled the
+withered petals on her.  In a denser islet of shade, Scruff lay
+snapping at a fly.  His head lolled drowsily in the middle of a snap,
+and snapped in the middle of a loll.
+
+At three o'clock Miss Naylor too came out, carrying a basket and pair
+of scissors.  Lifting her skirts to avoid the lakes of water left by
+the garden hose, she stopped in front of a rose-bush, and began to
+snip off the shrivelled flowers.  The little lady's silvered head and
+thin, brown face sustained the shower of sunlight unprotected, and
+had a gentle dignity in their freedom.
+
+Presently, as the scissors flittered in and out of the leaves, she,
+began talking to herself.
+
+"If girls were more like what they used to be, this would not have
+happened.  Perhaps we don't understand; it's very easy to forget."
+Burying her nose and lips in a rose, she sniffed.  "Poor dear girl!
+It's such a pity his father is--a--"
+
+"A farmer," said a sleepy voice behind the rosebush.
+
+Miss Naylor leaped.  "Greta! How you startled me!  A farmer--that is-
+-an--an agriculturalist!"
+
+"A farmer with vineyards--he told us, and he is not ashamed.  Why is
+it a pity, Miss Naylor?"
+
+Miss Naylor's lips looked very thin.
+
+"For many reasons, of which you know nothing."
+
+"That is what you always say," pursued the sleepy voice; "and that is
+why, when I am to be married, there shall also be a pity."
+
+"Greta!" Miss Naylor cried, "it is not proper for a girl of your age
+to talk like that."
+
+"Why?" said Greta.  "Because it is the truth?"
+
+Miss Naylor made no reply to this, but vexedly cut off a sound rose,
+which she hastily picked up and regarded with contrition.  Greta
+spoke again:
+
+"Chris said: 'I have got the pictures, I shall tell her'; but I shall
+tell you instead, because it was I that told the story."
+
+Miss Naylor stared, wrinkling her nose, and holding the scissors wide
+apart....
+
+"Last night," said Greta slowly, "I and Chris went to his studio and
+took his pictures, and so, because the gate was shut, I came back to
+tell it; and when you asked me where Chris was, I told it; because
+she was in the studio all night, and I and Scruff sat up all night,
+and in the morning we brought the pictures, and hid them under our
+beds, and that is why--we--are--so--sleepy."
+
+Over the rose-bush Miss Naylor peered down at her; and though she was
+obliged to stand on tiptoe this did not altogether destroy her
+dignity.
+
+"I am surprised at you, Greta; I am surprised at Christian, more
+surprised at Christian.  The world seems upside down."
+
+Greta, a sunbeam entangled in her hair, regarded her with
+inscrutable, innocent eyes.
+
+"When you were a girl, I think you would be sure to be in love," she
+murmured drowsily.
+
+Miss Naylor, flushing deeply, snipped off a particularly healthy bud.
+
+"And so, because you are not married, I think--"
+
+The scissors hissed.
+
+Greta nestled down again.  "I think it is wicked to cut off all the
+good buds," she said, and shut her eyes.
+
+Miss Naylor continued to peer across the rosebush; but her thin face,
+close to the glistening leaves, had become oddly soft, pink, and
+girlish.  At a deeper breath from Greta, the little lady put down her
+basket, and began to pace the lawn, followed dubiously by Scruff.  It
+was thus that Christian came on them.
+
+Miss Naylor slipped her arm into the girl's and though she made no
+sound, her lips kept opening and shutting, like the beak of a bird
+contemplating a worm.
+
+Christian spoke first:
+
+"Miss Naylor, I want to tell you please--"
+
+"Oh, my dear!  I know; Greta has been in the confessional before
+you."  She gave the girl's arm a squeeze.  "Isn't it a lovely day?
+Did you ever see 'Five Fingers' look so beautiful?"  And she pointed
+to the great peaks of the Funffingerspitze glittering in the sun like
+giant crystals.
+
+"I like them better with clouds about them."
+
+"Well," agreed Miss Naylor nervously, "they certainly are nicer with
+clouds about them.  They look almost hot and greasy, don't they....
+My dear!" she went on, giving Christian's arm a dozen little
+squeezes, "we all of us--that is, we all of us--"
+
+Christian turned her eyes away.
+
+"My dear," Miss Naylor tried again, "I am far--that is, I mean, to
+all of us at some time or another--and then you see--well--it is
+hard!"
+
+Christian kissed the gloved hand resting on her arm.  Miss Naylor
+bobbed her head; a tear trickled off her nose.
+
+"Do let us wind your skein of woof!" she said with resounding gaiety.
+
+Some half-hour later Mrs. Decie called Christian to her room.
+
+"My dear!" she said; "come here a minute; I have a message for you."
+
+Christian went with an odd, set look about her mouth.
+
+Her aunt was sitting, back to the light, tapping a bowl of goldfish
+with the tip of a polished finger-nail; the room was very cool.  She
+held a letter out.  "Your uncle is not coming back tonight."
+
+Christian took the letter.  It was curtly worded, in a thin, toppling
+hand:
+
+"DEAR CON--Can't get back to-night.  Sending Dominique for things.
+Tell Christian to come over with him for night if possible.--Yr.
+aff. brother,       NICLS. TREFFRY."
+
+"Dominique has a carriage here," said Mrs. Decie.  "You will have
+nice time to catch the train.  Give my love to your uncle.  You must
+take Barbi with you, I insist on that."  She rose from her chair and
+held Christian's hand: "My dear!  You look very tired--very!  Almost
+ill.  I don't like to see you look like that.  Come!"  She thrust her
+pale lips forward, and kissed the girl's paler cheek.
+
+Then as Christian left the room she sank back in her chair, with
+creases in her forehead, and began languidly to cut a magazine.
+'Poor Christian!' she thought, 'how hardly she does take it! I am
+sorry for her; but perhaps it's just as well, as things are turning
+out.  Psychologically it is interesting!'
+
+Christian found her things packed, and the two servants waiting.  In
+a few minutes they were driving to the station.  She made Dominique
+take the seat opposite.
+
+"Well?" she asked him.
+
+Dominique's eyebrows twitched, he smiled deprecatingly.
+
+"M'mselle, Mr. Treffry told me to hold my tongue."
+
+"But you can tell me, Dominique; Barbi can't understand."
+
+"To you, then, M'mselle," said Dominique, as one who accepts his
+fate; "to you, then, who will doubtless forget all that I shall tell
+you--my master is not well; he has terrible pain here; he has a
+cough; he is not well at all; not well at all."
+
+A feeling of dismay seized on the girl.
+
+"We were a caravan for all that night," Dominique resumed.  "In the
+morning by noon we ceased to be a caravan; Signor Harz took a mule
+path; he will be in Italy--certainly in Italy.  As for us, we stayed
+at San Martino, and my master went to bed.  It was time; I had much
+trouble with his clothes, his legs were swollen.  In the afternoon
+came a signor of police, on horseback, red and hot; I persuaded him
+that we were at Paneveggio, but as we were not, he came back angry--
+Mon Die! as angry as a cat.  It was not good to meet him--when he was
+with my master I was outside.  There was much noise.  I do not know
+what passed, but at last the signor came out through the door, and
+went away in a hurry."  Dominique's features were fixed in a sardonic
+grin; he rubbed the palm of one hand with the finger of the other.
+"Mr. Treffry made me give him whisky afterwards, and he had no money
+to pay the bill--that I know because I paid it.  Well, M'mselle, to-
+day he would be dressed and very slowly we came as far as Auer; there
+he could do no more, so went to bed.  He is not well at all."
+
+Christian was overwhelmed by forebodings; the rest of the journey was
+made in silence, except when Barbi, a country girl, filled with the
+delirium of railway travel, sighed: "Ach! gnadige Fraulein!" looking
+at Christian with pleasant eyes.
+
+At once, on arriving at the little hostel, Christian went to see her
+uncle.  His room was darkened, and smelt of beeswax.
+
+"Ah! Chris," he said, "glad to see you."
+
+In a blue flannel gown, with a rug over his feet, he was lying on a
+couch lengthened artificially by chairs; the arm he reached out
+issued many inches from its sleeve, and showed the corded veins of
+the wrist.  Christian, settling his pillows, looked anxiously into
+his eyes.
+
+"I'm not quite the thing, Chris," said Mr. Treffry.  "Somehow, not
+quite the thing.  I'll come back with you to-morrow."
+
+"Let me send for Dr. Dawney, Uncle?"
+
+"No--no!  Plenty of him when I get home.  Very good young fellow, as
+doctors go, but I can't stand his puddin's--slops and puddin's, and
+all that trumpery medicine on the top.  Send me Dominique, my dear--
+I'll put myself to rights a bit!"  He fingered his unshaven cheek,
+and clutched the gown together on his chest.  "Got this from the
+landlord.  When you come back we'll have a little talk!"
+
+He was asleep when she came into the room an hour later.  Watching
+his uneasy breathing, she wondered what it was that he was going to
+say.
+
+He looked ill!  And suddenly she realised that her thoughts were not
+of him....  When she was little he would take her on his back; he had
+built cocked hats for her and paper boats; had taught her to ride;
+slid her between his knees; given her things without number; and
+taken his payment in kisses.  And now he was ill, and she was not
+thinking of him!  He had been all that was most dear to her, yet
+before her eyes would only come the vision of another.
+
+Mr. Treffry woke suddenly.  "Not been asleep, have I?  The beds here
+are infernal hard."
+
+"Uncle Nic, won't you give me news of him?"
+
+Mr. Treffry looked at her, and Christian could not bear that look.
+
+"He's safe into Italy; they aren't very keen after him, it's so long
+ago; I squared 'em pretty easily.  Now, look here, Chris!"
+
+Christian came close; he took her hand.
+
+"I'd like to see you pull yourself together.  'Tisn't so much the
+position; 'tisn't so much the money; because after all there's always
+mine--"  Christian shook her head.  "But," he went on with shaky
+emphasis, "there's the difference of blood, and that's a serious
+thing; and there's this anarch--this political affair; and there's
+the sort of life, an' that's a serious thing; but--what I'm coming to
+is this, Chris--there's the man!"
+
+Christian drew away her hand.  Mr. Treffry went on:
+
+"Ah! yes.  I'm an old chap and fond of you, but I must speak out what
+I think.  He's got pluck, he's strong, he's in earnest; but he's got
+a damned hot temper, he's an egotist, and--he's not the man for you.
+If you marry him, as sure as I lie here, you'll be sorry for it.
+You're not your father's child for nothing; nice fellow as ever
+lived, but soft as butter.  If you take this chap, it'll be like
+mixing earth and ironstone, and they don't blend!"  He dropped his
+head back on the pillows, and stretching out his hand, repeated
+wistfully: "Take my word for it, my dear, he's not the man for you."
+
+Christian, staring at the wall beyond, said quietly: "I can't take
+any one's word for that."
+
+"Ah!" muttered Mr. Treffry, "you're obstinate enough, but obstinacy
+isn't strength.
+
+"You'll give up everything to him, you'll lick his shoes; and you'll
+never play anything but second fiddle in his life.  He'll always be
+first with himself, he and his work, or whatever he calls painting
+pictures; and some day you'll find that out.  You won't like it, and
+I don't like it for you, Chris, and that's flat."
+
+He wiped his brow where the perspiration stood in beads.
+
+Christian said: "You don't understand; you don't believe in him; you
+don't see!  If I do come after his work--if I do give him everything,
+and he can't give all back--I don't care!  He'll give what he can; I
+don't want any more.  If you're afraid of the life for me, uncle, if
+you think it'll be too hard--"
+
+Mr. Treffry bowed his head.  "I do, Chris."
+
+"Well, then, I hate to be wrapped in cotton wool; I want to breathe.
+If I come to grief, it's my own affair; nobody need mind."
+
+Mr. Treffry's fngers sought his beard.  "Ah! yes.  Just so!"
+
+Christian sank on her knees.
+
+"Oh! Uncle! I'm a selfish beast!"
+
+Mr. Treffry laid his hand against her cheek.  "I think I could do
+with a nap," he said.
+
+Swallowing a lump in her throat, she stole out of the room.
+
+By a stroke of Fate Mr. Treffry's return to Villa Rubein befell at
+the psychological moment when Herr Paul, in a suit of rather too
+bright blue, was starting for Vienna.
+
+As soon as he saw the carriage appear between the poplars he became
+as pensive as a boy caught in the act of stealing cherries.  Pitching
+his hatbox to Fritz, he recovered himself, however, in time to
+whistle while Mr. Treffry was being assisted into the house.  Having
+forgotten his anger, he was only anxious now to smooth out its after
+effects; in the glances he cast at Christian and his brother-in-law
+there was a kind of shamed entreaty which seemed to say: "For
+goodness' sake, don't worry me about that business again! Nothing's
+come of it, you see!"
+
+He came forward: "Ah! Mon cher!  So you return; I put off my
+departure, then.  Vienna must wait for me--that poor Vienna!"
+
+But noticing the extreme feebleness of Mr. Treffry's advance, he
+exclaimed with genuine concern:
+
+"What is it?  You're ill?  My God!"  After disappearing for five
+minutes, he came back with a whitish liquid in a glass.
+
+"There!" he said, "good for the gout--for a cough--for everything!"
+
+Mr. Treffry sniffed, drained the glass, and sucked his moustache.
+
+"Ah!" he said.  "No doubt!  But it's uncommonly like gin, Paul."
+Then turning to Christian, he said: "Shake hands, you two!"
+
+Christian looked from one to the other, and at last held out her hand
+to Herr Paul, who brushed it with his moustache, gazing after her as
+she left the room with a queer expression.
+
+"My dear!" he began, "you support her in this execrable matter?  You
+forget my position, you make me ridiculous.  I have been obliged to
+go to bed in my own house, absolutely to go to bed, because I was in
+danger of becoming funny."
+
+"Look here, Paul!" Mr. Treffry said gruffly, "if any one's to bully
+Chris, it's I."
+
+"In that case," returned Herr Paul sarcastically, "I will go to
+Vienna."
+
+"You may go to the devil!" said Mr. Treffry; "and I'll tell you what-
+-in my opinion it was low to set the police on that young chap; a
+low, dirty trick."
+
+Herr Paul divided his beard carefully in two, took his seat on the
+very edge of an arm-chair, and placing his hands on his parted knees,
+said:
+
+"I have regretted it since--mais, que diable!  He called me a coward-
+-it is very hot weather!--there were drinks at the Kurhaus--I am her
+guardian--the affair is a very beastly one--there were more drinks--I
+was a little enfin!"  He shrugged his shoulders.  "Adieu, my dear; I
+shall be some time in Vienna; I need rest!"  He rose and went to the
+door; then he turned, and waved his cigar.  "Adieu! Be good; get
+well!  I will buy you some cigars up there."  And going out, he shut
+the door on any possibility of answer.
+
+Mr. Treffry lay back amongst his cushions.  The clock ticked; pigeons
+cooed on the veranda; a door opened in the distance, and for a moment
+a treble voice was heard.  Mr. Treffry's head drooped forward; across
+his face, gloomy and rugged, fell a thin line of sunlight.
+
+The clock suddenly stopped ticking, and outside, in mysterious
+accord, the pigeons rose with a great fluttering of wings, and flew
+off'.  Mr. Treffry made a startled, heavy movement.  He tried to get
+on to his feet and reach the bell, but could not, and sat on the side
+of the couch with drops of sweat rolling off his forehead, and his
+hands clawing his chest.  There was no sound at all throughout the
+house.  He looked about him, and tried to call, but again could not.
+He tried once more to reach the bell, and, failing, sat still, with a
+thought that made him cold.
+
+"I'm done for," he muttered.  "By George! I believe I'm done for this
+time!"  A voice behind him said:
+
+"Can we have a look at you, sir?"
+
+"Ah! Doctor, bear a hand, there's a good fellow."
+
+Dawney propped him against the cushions, and loosened his shirt.
+Receiving no answer to his questions, he stepped alarmed towards the
+bell.  Mr. Treffry stopped him with a sign.
+
+"Let's hear what you make of me," he said.
+
+When Dawney had examined him, he asked:
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Well," answered Dawney slowly, "there's trouble, of course."
+
+Mr. Treffry broke out with a husky whisper: "Out with it, Doctor;
+don't humbug me."
+
+Dawney bent down, and took his wrist.
+
+"I don't know how you've got into this state, sir," he said with the
+brusqueness of emotion.  "You're in a bad way.  It's the old trouble;
+and you know what that means as well as I.  All I can tell you is,
+I'm going to have a big fight with it.  It shan't be my fault,
+there's my hand on that."
+
+Mr. Treffry lay with his eyes fixed on the ceiling; at last he said:
+
+"I want to live."
+
+"Yes--yes."
+
+"I feel better now; don't make a fuss about it.  It'll be very
+awkward if I die just now.  Patch me up, for the sake of my niece."
+
+Dawney nodded.  "One minute, there are a few things I want," and he
+went out.
+
+A moment later Greta stole in on tiptoe.  She bent over till her hair
+touched Mr. Treffry's face.
+
+"Uncle Nic!" she whispered.  He opened his eyes.
+
+"Hallo, Greta!"
+
+"I have come to bring you my love, Uncle Nic, and to say good-bye.
+Papa says that I and Scruff and Miss Naylor are going to Vienna with
+him; we have had to pack in half an hour; in five minutes we are
+going to Vienna, and it is my first visit there, Uncle Nic."
+
+"To Vienna!" Mr. Treffry repeated slowly.  "Don't have a guide,
+Greta; they're humbugs."
+
+"No, Uncle Nic," said Greta solemnly.
+
+"Draw the curtains, old girl, let's have a look at you.  Why, you're
+as smart as ninepence!"
+
+"Yes," said Greta with a sigh, touching the buttons of her cape,
+"because I am going to Vienna; but I am sorry to leave you, Uncle
+Nic."
+
+"Are you, Greta?"
+
+"But you will have Chris, and you are fonder of Chris than of me,
+Uncle Nic."
+
+"I've known her longer."
+
+"Perhaps when you've known me as long as Chris, you shall be as fond
+of me."
+
+"When I've known you as long--may be."
+
+"While I am gone, Uncle Nic, you are to get well, you are not very
+well, you know."
+
+"What put that into your head?"
+
+"If you were well you would be smoking a cigar--it is just three
+o'clock.  This kiss is for myself, this is for Scruff, and this is
+for Miss Naylor."
+
+She stood upright again; a tremulous, joyful gravity was in her eyes
+and on her lips.
+
+"Good-bye, my dear; take care of yourselves; and don't you have a
+guide, they're humbugs."
+
+"No, Uncle Nic.  There is the carriage!  To Vienna, Uncle Nic!"  The
+dead gold of her hair gleamed in the doorway.  Mr. Treffry raised
+himself upon his elbow.
+
+"Give us one more, for luck!"
+
+Greta ran back.
+
+"I love you very much!" she said, and kissing him, backed slowly,
+then, turning, flew out like a bird.
+
+Mr. Treffry fixed his eyes on the shut door.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+After many days of hot, still weather, the wind had come, and whirled
+the dust along the parched roads.  The leaves were all astir, like
+tiny wings.  Round Villa Rubein the pigeons cooed uneasily, all the
+other birds were silent.  Late in the afternoon Christian came out on
+the veranda, reading a letter:
+
+"DEAR CHRIS,--We are here now six days, and it is a very large place
+with many churches.  In the first place then we have been to a great
+many, but the nicest of them is not St. Stephan's Kirche, it is
+another, but I do not remember the name.  Papa is out nearly all the
+night; he says he is resting here, so he is not able to come to the
+churches with us, but I do not think he rests very much.  The day
+before yesterday we, that is, Papa, I, and Miss Naylor, went to an
+exhibition of pictures.  It was quite beautiful and interesting (Miss
+Naylor says it is not right to say 'quite' beautiful, but I do not
+know what other word could mean 'quite' except the word 'quite,'
+because it is not exceedingly and not extremely).  And O Chris! there
+was one picture painted by him; it was about a ship without masts--
+Miss Naylor says it is a barge, but I do not know what a barge is--on
+fire, and, floating down a river in a fog.  I think it is extremely
+beautiful.  Miss Naylor says it is very impressionistick--what is
+that?  and Papa said 'Puh!' but he did not know it was painted by
+Herr Harz, so I did not tell him.
+
+"There has also been staying at our hotel that Count Sarelli who came
+one evening to dinner at our house, but he is gone away now.  He sat
+all day in the winter garden reading, and at night he went out with
+Papa.  Miss Naylor says he is unhappy, but I think he does not take
+enough exercise; and O Chris! one day he said to me, 'That is your
+sister, Mademoiselle, that young lady in the white dress?  Does she
+always wear white dresses?' and I said to him: 'It is not always a
+white dress; in the picture, it is green, because the picture is
+called "Spring.'"  But I did not tell him the colours of all your
+dresses because he looked so tired.  Then he said to me: 'She is very
+charming.'  So I tell you this, Chris, because I think you shall like
+to know.  Scruff' has a sore toe; it is because he has eaten too much
+meat.
+
+"It is not nice without you, Chris, and Miss Naylor says I am
+improving my mind here, but I do not think it shall improve very
+much, because at night I like it always best, when the shops are
+lighted and the carriages are driving past; then I am wanting to
+dance.  The first night Papa said he would take me to the theatre,
+but yesterday he said it was not good for me; perhaps to-morrow he
+shall think it good for me again.
+
+"Yesterday we have been in the Prater, and saw many people, and some
+that Papa knew; and then came the most interesting part of all,
+sitting under the trees in the rain for two hours because we could
+not get a carriage (very exciting).
+
+"There is one young lady here, only she is not any longer very young,
+who knew Papa when he was a boy.  I like her very much; she shall
+soon know me quite to the bottom and is very kind.
+
+"The ill husband of Cousin Teresa who went with us to Meran and lost
+her umbrella and Dr. Edmund was so sorry about it, has been very much
+worse, so she is not here but in Baden.  I wrote to her but have no
+news, so I do not know whether he is still living or not, at any rate
+he can't get well again so soon (and I don't think he ever shall).  I
+think as the weather is very warm you and Uncle Nic are sitting much
+out of doors.  I am sending presents to you all in a wooden box and
+screwed very firm, so you shall have to use again the big screw-
+driver of Fritz.  For Aunt Constance, photographs; for Uncle Nic, a
+green bird on a stand with a hole in the back of the bird to put his
+ashes in; it is a good green and not expensif please tell him,
+because he does not like expensif presents (Miss Naylor says the bird
+has an inquiring eye--it is a parrat); for you, a little brooch of
+turquoise because I like them best; for Dr. Edmund a machine to weigh
+medicines in because he said he could not get a good one in Botzen;
+this is a very good one, the shopman told me so, and is the most
+expensif of all the presents--so that is all my money, except two
+gulden.  If Papa shall give me some more, I shall buy for Miss Naylor
+a parasol, because it is useful and the handle of hers is 'wobbley'
+(that is one of Dr. Edmund's words and I like it).
+
+"Good-bye for this time.  Greta sends you her kiss.
+
+"P. S.--Miss Naylor has read all this letter (except about the parasol)
+and there are several things she did not want me to put, so I have
+copied it without the things, but at the last I have kept that copy
+myself, so that is why this is smudgy and several words are not spelt
+well, but all the things are here."
+
+Christian read, smiling, but to finish it was like dropping a
+talisman, and her face clouded.  A sudden draught blew her hair
+about, and from within, Mr. Treffry's cough mingled with the soughing
+of the wind; the sky was fast blackening.  She went indoors, took a
+pen and began to write:
+
+
+"MY FRIEND,--Why haven't you written to me?  It is so, long to wait.
+Uncle says you are in Italy--it is dreadful not to know for certain.
+I feel you would have written if you could; and I can't help thinking
+of all the things that may have happened.  I am unhappy.  Uncle Nic
+is ill; he will not confess it, that is his way; but he is very ill.
+Though perhaps you will never see this, I must write down all my
+thoughts.  Sometimes I feel that I am brutal to be always thinking
+about you, scheming how to be with you again, when he is lying there
+so ill.  How good he has always been to me; it is terrible that love
+should pull one apart so.  Surely love should be beautiful, and
+peaceful, instead of filling me with bitter, wicked thoughts.  I love
+you--and I love him; I feel as if I were torn in two.  Why should it
+be so?  Why should the beginning of one life mean the ending of
+another, one love the destruction of another?  I don't understand.
+The same spirit makes me love you and him, the same sympathy, the
+same trust--yet it sometimes seems as if I were a criminal in loving
+you.  You know what he thinks--he is too honest not to have shown
+you.  He has talked to me; he likes you in a way, but you are a
+foreigner--he says-your life is not my life.  'He is not the man for
+you!'  Those were his words.  And now he doesn't talk to me, but when
+I am in the room he looks at me--that's worse--a thousand times; when
+he talks it rouses me to fight--when it's his eyes only, I'm a coward
+at once; I feel I would do anything, anything, only not to hurt him.
+Why can't he see?  Is it because he's old and we are young?  He may
+consent, but he will never, never see; it will always hurt him.
+
+"I want to tell you everything; I have had worse thoughts than these-
+-sometimes I have thought that I should never have the courage to
+face the struggle which you have to face.  Then I feel quite broken;
+it is like something giving way in me.  Then I think of you, and it
+is over; but it has been there, and I am ashamed--I told you I was a
+coward.  It's like the feeling one would have going out into a storm
+on a dark night, away from a warm fire--only of the spirit not the
+body--which makes it worse.  I had to tell you this; you mustn't
+think of it again, I mean to fight it away and forget that it has
+ever been there.  But Uncle Nic--what am I to do?  I hate myself
+because I am young, and he is old and weak--sometimes I seem even to
+hate him.  I have all sorts of thoughts, and always at the end of
+them, like a dark hole at the end of a passage, the thought that I
+ought to give you up.  Ought I?  Tell me.  I want to know, I want to
+do what is right; I still want to do that, though sometimes I think I
+am all made of evil.
+
+"Do you remember once when we were talking, you said: 'Nature always
+has an answer for every question; you cannot get an answer from laws,
+conventions, theories, words, only from Nature.'  What do you say to
+me now; do you tell me it is Nature to come to you in spite of
+everything, and so, that it must be right?  I think you would; but
+can it be Nature to do something which will hurt terribly one whom I
+love and who loves me?  If it is--Nature is cruel.  Is that one of
+the 'lessons of life'?  Is that what Aunt Constance means when she
+says: 'If life were not a paradox, we could not get on at all'?  I am
+beginning to see that everything has its dark side; I never believed
+that before.
+
+"Uncle Nic dreads the life for me; he doesn't understand (how should
+he?--he has always had money) how life can be tolerable without money
+--it is horrible that the accident of money should make such
+difference in our lives.  I am sometimes afraid myself, and I can't
+outface that fear in him; he sees the shadow of his fear in me--his
+eyes seem to see everything that is in me now; the eyes of old people
+are the saddest things in the world.  I am writing like a wretched
+coward, but you will never see this letter I suppose, and so it
+doesn't matter; but if you do, and I pray that you may--well, if I am
+only worth taking at my best, I am not worth taking at all.  I want
+you to know the worst of me--you, and no one else.
+
+"With Uncle Nic it is not as with my stepfather; his opposition only
+makes me angry, mad, ready to do anything, but with Uncle Nic I feel
+so bruised--so sore.  He said: 'It is not so much the money, because
+there is always mine.'  I could never do a thing he cannot bear, and
+take his money, and you would never let me.  One knows very little of
+anything in the world till trouble comes.  You know how it is with
+flowers and trees; in the early spring they look so quiet and self-
+contained; then all in a moment they change--I think it must be like
+that with the heart.  I used to think I knew a great deal, understood
+why and how things came about; I thought self-possession and reason
+so easy; now I know nothing.  And nothing in the world matters but to
+see you and hide away from that look in Uncle Nic's eyes.  Three
+months ago I did not know you, now I write like this.  Whatever I
+look at, I try to see as you would see; I feel, now you are away even
+more than when you were with me, what your thoughts would be, how you
+would feel about this or that.  Some things you have said seem always
+in my mind like lights--"
+
+A slanting drift of rain was striking the veranda tiles with a cold,
+ceaseless hissing.  Christian shut the window, and went into her
+uncle's room.
+
+He was lying with closed eyes, growling at Dominique, who moved about
+noiselessly, putting the room ready for the night.  When he had
+finished, and with a compassionate bow had left the room, Mr. Treffry
+opened his eyes, and said:
+
+"This is beastly stuff of the doctor's, Chris, it puts my monkey up;
+I can't help swearing after I've taken it; it's as beastly as a
+vulgar woman's laugh, and I don't know anything beastlier than that!"
+
+"I have a letter from Greta, Uncle Nic; shall I read it?"
+
+He nodded, and Christian read the letter, leaving out the mention of
+Harz, and for some undefined reason the part about Sarelli.
+
+"Ay!" said Mr. Treffry with a feeble laugh, "Greta and her money!
+Send her some more, Chris.  Wish I were a youngster again; that's a
+beast of a proverb about a dog and his day.  I'd like to go fishing
+again in the West Country!  A fine time we had when we were
+youngsters.  You don't get such times these days.  'Twasn't often the
+fishing-smacks went out without us.  We'd watch their lights from our
+bedroom window; when they were swung aboard we were out and down to
+the quay before you could say 'knife.'  They always waited for us;
+but your Uncle Dan was the favourite, he was the chap for luck.  When
+I get on my legs, we might go down there, you and I?  For a bit, just
+to see?  What d'you say, old girl?"
+
+Their eyes met.
+
+"I'd like to look at the smack lights going to sea on a dark night;
+pity you're such a duffer in a boat--we might go out with them.  Do
+you a power of good!  You're not looking the thing, my dear."
+
+His voice died wistfully, and his glance, sweeping her face, rested
+on her hands, which held and twisted Greta's letter.  After a minute
+or two of silence he boomed out again with sudden energy:
+
+"Your aunt'll want to come and sit with me, after dinner; don't let
+her, Chris, I can't stand it.  Tell her I'm asleep--the doctor'll be
+here directly; ask him to make up some humbug for you--it's his
+business."
+
+He was seized by a violent fit of pain which seemed to stab his
+breath away, and when it was over signed that he would be left alone.
+Christian went back to her letter in the other room, and had written
+these words, when the gong summoned her to dinner:
+
+"I'm like a leaf in the wind, I put out my hand to one thing, and
+it's seized and twisted and flung aside.  I want you--I want you; if
+I could see you I think I should know what to do--"
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+The rain drove with increasing fury.  The night was very black.
+Nicholas Treffry slept heavily.  By the side of his bed the night-
+lamp cast on to the opposite wall a bright disc festooned by the
+hanging shadow of the ceiling.  Christian was leaning over him.  For
+the moment he filled all her heart, lying there, so helpless. Fearful
+of waking him she slipped into the sitting-room.  Outside the window
+stood a man with his face pressed to the pane.  Her heart thumped;
+she went up and unlatched the window.  It was Harz, with the rain
+dripping off him.  He let fall his hat and cape.
+
+"You!" she said, touching his sleeve.  "You!  You!"
+
+He was sodden with wet, his face drawn and tired; a dark growth of
+beard covered his cheeks and chin.
+
+"Where is your uncle?" he said; "I want to see him."
+
+She put her hand up to his lips, but he caught it and covered it with
+kisses.
+
+"He's asleep--ill--speak gently!"
+
+"I came to him first," he muttered.
+
+Christian lit the lamp; and he looked at her hungrily without a word.
+
+"It's not possible to go on like this; I came to tell your uncle so.
+He is a man.  As for the other, I want to have nothing to do with
+him!  I came back on foot across the mountains.  It's not possible to
+go on like this, Christian."
+
+She handed him her letter.  He held it to the light, clearing his
+brow of raindrops.  When he had read to the last word he gave it her
+back, and whispered: "Come!"
+
+Her lips moved, but she did not speak.
+
+"While this goes on I can't work; I can do nothing.  I can't--I won't
+bargain with my work; if it's to be that, we had better end it.  What
+are we waiting for?  Sooner or later we must come to this.  I'm sorry
+that he's ill, God knows!  But that changes nothing.  To wait is
+tying me hand and foot--it's making me afraid!  Fear kills!  It will
+kill you!  It kills work, and I must work, I can't waste time--I
+won't!  I will sooner give you up."  He put his hands on her
+shoulders.  "I love you!  I want you!  Look in my eyes and see if you
+dare hold back!"
+
+Christian stood with the grip of his strong hands on her shoulders,
+without a movement or sign.  Her face was very white.  And suddenly
+he began to kiss that pale, still face, to kiss its eyes and lips, to
+kiss it from its chin up to its hair; and it stayed pale, as a white
+flower, beneath those kisses--as a white flower, whose stalk the
+fingers bend back a little.
+
+There was a sound of knocking on the wall; Mr. Treffry called feebly.
+Christian broke away from Harz.
+
+"To-morrow!" he whispered, and picking up his hat and cloak, went out
+again into the rain.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+It was not till morning that Christian fell into a troubled sleep.
+She dreamed that a voice was calling her, and she was filled with a
+helpless, dumb dream terror.
+
+When she woke the light was streaming in; it was Sunday, and the
+cathedral bells were chiming.  Her first thought was of Harz.  One
+step, one moment of courage!  Why had she not told her uncle?  If he
+had only asked!  But why--why should she tell him?  When it was over
+and she was gone, he would see that all was for the best.
+
+Her eyes fell on Greta's empty bed.  She sprang up, and bending over,
+kissed the pillow.  'She will mind at first; but she's so young!
+Nobody will really miss me, except Uncle Nic!'  She stood along while
+in the window without moving.  When she was dressed she called out to
+her maid:
+
+"Bring me some milk, Barbi; I'm going to church."
+
+"Ach! gnadiges Frdulein, will you no breakfast have?"
+
+"No thank you, Barbi."
+
+"Liebes Fraulein, what a beautiful morning after the rain it has
+become!  How cool!  It is for you good--for the colour in your
+cheeks; now they will bloom again!" and Barbi stroked her own well-
+coloured cheeks.
+
+Dominique, sunning himself outside with a cloth across his arm, bowed
+as she passed, and smiled affectionately:
+
+"He is better this morning, M'mselle.  We march--we are getting on.
+Good news will put the heart into you."
+
+Christian thought: 'How sweet every one is to-day!'
+
+Even the Villa seemed to greet her, with the sun aslant on it; and
+the trees, trembling and weeping golden tears.  At the cathedral she
+was early for the service, but here and there were figures on their
+knees; the faint, sickly odour of long-burnt incense clung in the
+air; a priest moved silently at the far end.  She knelt, and when at
+last she rose the service had begun.  With the sound of the intoning
+a sense of peace came to her--the peace of resolution.  For good or
+bad she felt that she had faced her fate.
+
+She went out with a look of quiet serenity and walked home along the
+dyke.  Close to Harz's studio she sat down.  Now--it was her own; all
+that had belonged to him, that had ever had a part in him.
+
+An old beggar, who had been watching her, came gently from behind.
+"Gracious lady!" he said, peering at her eyes, "this is the lucky day
+for you.  I have lost my luck."
+
+Christian opened her purse, there was only one coin in it, a gold
+piece; the beggar's eyes sparkled.
+
+She thought suddenly: 'It's no longer mine; I must begin to be
+careful,' but she felt ashamed when she looked at the old man.
+
+"I am sorry," she said; "yesterday I would have given you this, but--
+but now it's already given."
+
+He seemed so old and poor--what could she give him?  She unhooked a
+little silver brooch at her throat.  "You will get something for
+that," she said; "it's better than nothing.  I am very sorry you are
+so old and poor."
+
+The beggar crossed himself.  "Gracious lady," he muttered, "may you
+never want!"
+
+Christian hurried on; the rustling of leaves soon carried the words
+away.  She did not feel inclined to go in, and crossing the bridge
+began to climb the hill.  There was a gentle breeze, drifting the
+clouds across the sun; lizards darted out over the walls, looked at
+her, and whisked away.
+
+The sunshine, dappling through the tops of trees, gashed down on a
+torrent.  The earth smelt sweet, the vineyards round the white farms
+glistened; everything seemed to leap and dance with sap and life; it
+was a moment of Spring in midsummer.  Christian walked on, wondering
+at her own happiness.
+
+'Am I heartless?' she thought.  'I am going to leave him--I am going
+into life; I shall have to fight now, there'll be no looking back.'
+
+The path broke away and wound down to the level of the torrent; on
+the other side it rose again, and was lost among trees.  The woods
+were dank; she hastened home.
+
+In her room she began to pack, sorting and tearing up old letters.
+'Only one thing matters,' she thought; 'singleness of heart; to see
+your way, and keep to it with all your might.'
+
+She looked up and saw Barbi standing before her with towels in her
+hands, and a scared face.
+
+"Are you going a journey, gnadiges Fraulein?"
+
+"I am going away to be married, Barbi," said Christian at last;
+"don't speak of it to any one, please."
+
+Barbi leant a little forward with the towels clasped to the blue
+cotton bosom of her dress.
+
+"No, no!  I will not speak.  But, dear Fraulein, that is a big
+matter; have you well thought?"
+
+"Thought, Barbi?  Have I not!"
+
+"But, dear Fraulein, will you be rich?"
+
+"No! I shall be as poor as you."
+
+"Ach! dear God! that is terrible.  Katrina, my sister, she is
+married; she tells me all her life; she tells me it is very hard, and
+but for the money in her stocking it would be harder.  Dear Fraulein,
+think again!  And is he good?  Sometimes they are not good."
+
+"He is good," said Christian, rising; "it is all settled!" and she
+kissed Barbi on the cheek.
+
+"You are crying, liebes Fraulein!  Think yet again, perhaps it is not
+quite all settled; it is not possible that a maiden should not a way
+out leave?"
+
+Christian smiled.  "I don't do things that way, Barbi."
+
+Barbi hung the towels on the horse, and crossed herself.
+
+Mr. Treffry's gaze was fixed on a tortoise-shell butterfly fluttering
+round the ceiling.  The insect seemed to fascinate him, as things
+which move quickly always fascinate the helpless.  Christian came
+softly in.
+
+"Couldn't stay in bed, Chris," he called out with an air of guilt.
+"The heat was something awful.  The doctor piped off in a huff, just
+because o' this."  He motioned towards a jug of claret-cup and a pipe
+on the table by his elbow.  "I was only looking at 'em."
+
+Christian, sitting down beside him, took up a fan.
+
+"If I could get out of this heat--" he said, and closed his eyes.
+
+'I must tell him,' she thought; 'I can't slink away.'
+
+"Pour me out some of that stuff, Chris."
+
+She reached for the jug.  Yes! She must tell him! Her heart sank.
+
+Mr. Treffry took a lengthy draught.  "Broken my promise; don't
+matter--won't hurt any one but me."  He took up the pipe and pressed
+tobacco into it.  "I've been lying here with this pain going right
+through me, and never a smoke!  D'you tell me anything the parsons
+say can do me half the good of this pipe?"  He leaned back, steeped
+in a luxury of satisfaction.  He went on, pursuing a private train of
+thought: "Things have changed a lot since my young days.  When I was
+a youngster, a young fellow had to look out for peck and perch--he
+put the future in his pocket.  He did well or not, according as he
+had stuff in him.  Now he's not content with that, it seems--trades
+on his own opinion of himself; thinks he is what he says he's going
+to be."
+
+"You are unjust," said Christian.
+
+Mr. Treffry grunted.  "Ah, well! I like to know where I am.  If I
+lend money to a man, I like to know whether he's going to pay it
+back; I may not care whether he does or not, but I like to know.  The
+same with other things.  I don't care what a man has--though, mind
+you, Chris, it's not a bad rule that measures men by the balance at
+their banks; but when it comes to marriage, there's a very simple
+rule, What's not enough for one is not enough for two.  You can't
+talk black white, or bread into your mouth.  I don't care to speak
+about myself, as you know, Chris, but I tell you this--when I came to
+London I wanted to marry--I hadn't any money, and I had to want.
+When I had the money--but that's neither here nor there!"  He
+frowned, fingering his pipe.
+
+"I didn't ask her, Chris; I didn't think it the square thing; it
+seems that's out of fashion!"
+
+Christian's cheeks were burning.
+
+"I think a lot while I lie here," Mr. Treffry went on; "nothing much
+else to do.  What I ask myself is this: What do you know about what's
+best for you?  What do you know of life?  Take it or leave it, life's
+not all you think; it's give and get all the way, a fair start is
+everything."
+
+Christian thought: 'Will he never see?'
+
+Mr. Treffry went on:
+
+"I get better every day, but I can't last for ever.  It's not
+pleasant to lie here and know that when I'm gone there'll be no one
+to keep a hand on the check string!"
+
+"Don't talk like that, dear!" Christian murmured.
+
+"It's no use blinking facts, Chris.  I've lived a long time in the
+world; I've seen things pretty well as they are; and now there's not
+much left for me to think about but you."
+
+"But, Uncle, if you loved him, as I do, you couldn't tell me to be
+afraid!  It's cowardly and mean to be afraid.  You must have
+forgotten!"
+
+Mr. Treffry closed his eyes.
+
+"Yes," he said; "I'm old."
+
+The fan had dropped into Christian's lap; it rested on her white
+frock like a large crimson leaf; her eyes were fixed on it.
+
+Mr. Treffry looked at her.  "Have you heard from him?" he asked with
+sudden intuition.
+
+"Last night, in that room, when you thought I was talking to
+Dominique--"
+
+The pipe fell from his hand.
+
+"What!" he stammered: "Back?"
+
+Christian, without looking up, said:
+
+"Yes, he's back; he wants me--I must go to him, Uncle."
+
+There was a long silence.
+
+"You must go to him?" he repeated.
+
+She longed to fling herself down at his knees, but he was so still,
+that to move seemed impossible; she remained silent, with folded
+hands.
+
+Mr. Treffry spoke:
+
+"You'll let me know--before--you--go.  Goodnight!"
+
+Christian stole out into the passage.  A bead curtain rustled in the
+draught; voices reached her.
+
+"My honour is involved, or I would give the case up."
+
+"He is very trying, poor Nicholas!  He always had that peculiar
+quality of opposition; it has brought him to grief a hundred times.
+There is opposition in our blood; my family all have it.  My eldest
+brother died of it; with my poor sister, who was as gentle as a lamb,
+it took the form of doing the right thing in the wrong place.  It is
+a matter of temperament, you see.  You must have patience."
+
+"Patience," repeated Dawney's voice, "is one thing; patience where
+there is responsibility is another.  I've not had a wink of sleep
+these last two nights."
+
+There was a faint, shrill swish of silk.
+
+"Is he so very ill?"
+
+Christian held her breath.  The answer came at last.
+
+"Has he made his will?  With this trouble in the side again, I tell
+you plainly, Mrs. Decie, there's little or no chance."
+
+Christian put her hands up to her ears, and ran out into the air.
+What was she about to do, then--to leave him dying!
+
+On the following day Harz was summoned to the Villa.  Mr. Treffry had
+just risen, and was garbed in a dressing-suit, old and worn, which
+had a certain air of magnificence.  His seamed cheeks were newly
+shaved.
+
+"I hope I see you well," he said majestically.
+
+Thinking of the drive and their last parting, Harz felt sorry and
+ashamed.  Suddenly Christian came into the room; she stood for a
+moment looking at him; then sat down.
+
+"Chris!" said Mr. Treffry reproachfully.  She shook her head, and did
+not move; mournful and intent, her eyes seemed full of secret
+knowledge.
+
+Mr. Treffry spoke:
+
+"I've no right to blame you, Mr. Harz, and Chris tells me you came to
+see me first, which is what I would have expected of you; but you
+shouldn't have come back."
+
+"I came back, sir, because I found I was obliged.  I must speak out."
+
+"I ask nothing better," Mr. Treffry replied.
+
+Harz looked again at Christian; but she made no sign, sitting with
+her chin resting on her hands.
+
+"I have come for her," he said; "I can make my living--enough for
+both of us.  But I can't wait."
+
+"Why?"
+
+Harz made no answer.
+
+Mr. Treffry boomed out again: "Why?  Isn't she worth waiting for?
+Isn't she worth serving for?"
+
+"I can't expect you to understand me," the painter said.  "My art is
+my life to me.  Do you suppose that if it wasn't I should ever have
+left my village; or gone through all that I've gone through, to get
+as far even as I am?  You tell me to wait.  If my thoughts and my
+will aren't free, how can I work?  I shan't be worth my salt.  You
+tell me to go back to England--knowing she is here, amongst you who
+hate me, a thousand miles away.  I shall know that there's a death
+fight going on in her and outside her against me--you think that I
+can go on working under these conditions.  Others may be able, I am
+not.  That's the plain truth.  If I loved her less--"
+
+There was a silence, then Mr. Treffry said:
+
+"It isn't fair to come here and ask what you're asking.  You don't
+know what's in the future for you, you don't know that you can keep a
+wife.  It isn't pleasant, either, to think you can't hold up your
+head in your own country."
+
+Harz turned white.
+
+"Ah! you bring that up again!" he broke out.  "Seven years ago I was
+a boy and starving; if you had been in my place you would have done
+what I did.  My country is as much to me as your country is to you.
+I've been an exile seven years, I suppose I shall always be I've had
+punishment enough; but if you think I am a rascal, I'll go and give
+myself up."  He turned on his heel.
+
+"Stop!  I beg your pardon!  I never meant to hurt you.  It isn't easy
+for me to eat my words," Mr. Treffry said wistfully, "let that count
+for something."  He held out his hand.
+
+Harz came quickly back and took it.  Christian's gaze was never for a
+moment withdrawn; she seemed trying to store up the sight of him
+within her.  The light darting through the half-closed shutters gave
+her eyes a strange, bright intensity, and shone in the folds of her
+white dress like the sheen of birds' wings.
+
+Mr. Treffry glanced uneasily about him.  "God knows I don't want
+anything but her happiness," he said.  "What is it to me if you'd
+murdered your mother?  It's her I'm thinking of."
+
+"How can you tell what is happiness to her?  You have your own ideas
+of happiness--not hers, not mine.  You can't dare to stop us, sir!"
+
+"Dare?" said Mr. Treffry.  "Her father gave her over to me when she
+was a mite of a little thing; I've known her all her life.  I've--
+I've loved her--and you come here with your 'dare'!"  His hand
+dragged at his beard, and shook as though palsied.
+
+A look of terror came into Christian's face.
+
+"All right, Chris! I don't ask for quarter, and I don't give it!"
+
+Harz made a gesture of despair.
+
+"I've acted squarely by you, sir," Mr. Treffry went on, "I ask the
+same of you.  I ask you to wait, and come like an honest man, when
+you can say, 'I see my way--here's this and that for her.'  What
+makes this art you talk of different from any other call in life?  It
+doesn't alter facts, or give you what other men have no right to
+expect.  It doesn't put grit into you, or keep your hands clean, or
+prove that two and two make five."
+
+Harz answered bitterly:
+
+"You know as much of art as I know of money.  If we live a thousand
+years we shall never understand each other.  I am doing what I feel
+is best for both of us."
+
+Mr. Treffry took hold of the painter's sleeve.
+
+"I make you an offer," he said.  "Your word not to see or write to
+her for a year!  Then, position or not, money or no money, if she'll
+have you, I'll make it right for you."
+
+"I could not take your money."
+
+A kind of despair seemed suddenly to seize on Mr. Nicholas Treffry.
+He rose, and stood towering over them.
+
+"All my life--" he said; but something seemed to click deep down in
+his throat, and he sank back in his seat.
+
+"Go!" whispered Christian, "go!" But Mr. Treffry found his voice
+again: "It's for the child to say.  Well, Chris!"
+
+Christian did not speak.
+
+It was Harz who broke the silence.  He pointed to Mr. Treffry.
+
+"You know I can't tell you to come with--that, there.  Why did you
+send for me?"  And, turning, he went out.
+
+Christian sank on her knees, burying her face in her hands.  Mr.
+Treffry pressed his handkerchief with a stealthy movement to his
+mouth.  It was dyed crimson with the price of his victory.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+A telegram had summoned Herr Paul from Vienna.  He had started
+forthwith, leaving several unpaid accounts to a more joyful
+opportunity, amongst them a chemist's bill, for a wonderful quack
+medicine of which he brought six bottles.
+
+He came from Mr. Treffry's room with tears rolling down his cheeks,
+saying:
+
+"Poor Nicholas!  Poor Nicholas!  Il n'a pas de chance!"
+
+It was difficult to find any one to listen; the women were scared and
+silent, waiting for the orders that were now and then whispered
+through the door.  Herr Paul could not bear this silence, and talked
+to his servant for half an hour, till Fritz also vanished to fetch
+something from the town.  Then in despair Herr Paul went to his room.
+
+It was hard not to be allowed to help--it was hard to wait!  When the
+heart was suffering, it was frightful!  He turned and, looking
+furtively about him, lighted a cigar.  Yes, it came to every one--at
+some time or other; and what was it, that death they talked of?  Was
+it any worse than life?  That frightful jumble people made for
+themselves!  Poor Nicholas!  After all, it was he that had the luck!
+
+His eyes filled with tears, and drawing a penknife from his pocket,
+he began to stab it into the stuffing of his chair.  Scruff, who sat
+watching the chink of light under the door, turned his head, blinked
+at him, and began feebly tapping with a claw.
+
+It was intolerable, this uncertainty--to be near, and yet so far, was
+not endurable!
+
+Herr Paul stepped across the room.  The dog, following, threw his
+black-marked muzzle upwards with a gruff noise, and went back to the
+door.  His master was holding in his hand a bottle of champagne.
+
+Poor Nicholas!  He had chosen it.  Herr Paul drained a glass.
+
+Poor Nicholas!  The prince of fellows, and of what use was one?  They
+kept him away from Nicholas!
+
+Herr Paul's eyes fell on the terrier.  "Ach! my dear," he said, "you
+and I, we alone are kept away!"
+
+He drained a second glass.
+
+What was it?  This life!  Froth-like that! He tossed off a third
+glass.  Forget!  If one could not help, it was better to forget!
+
+He put on his hat.  Yes.  There was no room for him there!  He was
+not wanted!
+
+He finished the bottle, and went out into the passage.  Scruff ran
+and lay down at Mr. Treffry's door.  Herr Paul looked at him.  "Ach!"
+he said, tapping his chest, "ungrateful hound!"  And opening the
+front door he went out on tiptoe....
+
+Late that afternoon Greta stole hatless through the lilac bushes; she
+looked tired after her night journey, and sat idly on a chair in the
+speckled shadow of a lime-tree.
+
+'It is not like home,' she thought; 'I am unhappy.  Even the birds
+are silent, but perhaps that is because it is so hot.  I have never
+been sad like this--for it is not fancy that I am sad this time, as
+it is sometimes.  It is in my heart like the sound the wind makes
+through a wood, it feels quite empty in my heart.  If it is always
+like this to be unhappy, then I am sorry for all the unhappy things
+in the world; I am sorrier than I ever was before.'
+
+A shadow fell on the grass, she raised her eyes, and saw Dawney.
+
+"Dr. Edmund!" she whispered.
+
+Dawney turned to her; a heavy furrow showed between his brows.  His
+eyes, always rather close together, stared painfully.
+
+"Dr. Edmund," Greta whispered, "is it true?"
+
+He took her hand, and spread his own palm over it.
+
+"Perhaps," he said; "perhaps not.  We must hope."
+
+Greta looked up, awed.
+
+"They say he is dying."
+
+"We have sent for the best man in Vienna."
+
+Greta shook her head.
+
+"But you are clever, Dr. Edmund; and you are afraid."
+
+"He is brave," said Dawney; "we must all be brave, you know.  You
+too!"
+
+"Brave?" repeated Greta; "what is it to be brave?  If it is not to
+cry and make a fuss--that I can do.  But if it is not to be sad in
+here," she touched her breast, "that I cannot do, and it shall not be
+any good for me to try."
+
+"To be brave is to hope; don't give up hope, dear."
+
+"No," said Greta, tracing the pattern of the sunlight on her skirt.
+"But I think that when we hope, we are not brave, because we are
+expecting something for ourselves.  Chris says that hope is prayer,
+and if it is prayer, then all the time we are hoping, we are asking
+for something, and it is not brave to ask for things."
+
+A smile curved Dawney's mouth.
+
+"Go on, Philosopher!" he said.  "Be brave in your own way, it will be
+just as good as anybody else's."
+
+"What are you going to do to be brave, Dr. Edmund?"
+
+"I?  Fight!  If only we had five years off his life!"
+
+Greta watched him as he walked away.
+
+"I shall never be brave," she mourned; "I shall always be wanting to
+be happy."  And, kneeling down, she began to disentangle a fly,
+imprisoned in a cobweb.  A plant of hemlock had sprung up in the long
+grass by her feet.  Greta thought, dismayed: 'There are weeds!'
+
+It seemed but another sign of the death of joy.
+
+'But it's very beautiful,' she thought, 'the blossoms are like stars.
+I am not going to pull it up.  I will leave it; perhaps it will
+spread all through the garden; and if it does I do not care, for now
+things are not like they used to be and I do not, think they ever
+shall be again.'
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+The days went by; those long, hot days, when the heat haze swims up
+about ten of the forenoon, and, as the sun sinks level with the
+mountains, melts into golden ether which sets the world quivering
+with sparkles.
+
+At the lighting of the stars those sparkles die, vanishing one by one
+off the hillsides; evening comes flying down the valleys, and life
+rests under her cool wings.  The night falls; and the hundred little
+voices of the night arise.
+
+It was near grape-gathering, and in the heat the fight for Nicholas
+Treffry's life went on, day in, day out, with gleams of hope and
+moments of despair.  Doctors came, but after the first he refused to
+see them.
+
+"No," he said to Dawney--"throwing away money.  If I pull through it
+won't be because of them."
+
+For days together he would allow no one but Dawney, Dominique, and
+the paid nurse in the room.
+
+"I can stand it better," he said to Christian, "when I don't see any
+of you; keep away, old girl, and let me get on with it!"
+
+To have been able to help would have eased the tension of her nerves,
+and the aching of her heart.  At his own request they had moved his
+bed into a corner so that he might face the wall.  There he would lie
+for hours together, not speaking a word, except to ask for drink.
+
+Sometimes Christian crept in unnoticed, and sat watching, with her
+arms tightly folded across her breast.  At night, after Greta was
+asleep, she would toss from side to side, muttering feverish prayers.
+She spent hours at her little table in the schoolroom, writing
+letters to Harz that were never sent.  Once she wrote these words: "I
+am the most wicked of all creatures--I have even wished that he may
+die!"  A few minutes afterwards Miss Naylor found her with her head
+buried on her arms.  Christian sprang up; tears were streaming down
+her cheeks.  "Don't touch me!" she cried, and rushed away.  Later,
+she stole into her uncle's room, and sank down on the floor beside
+the bed.  She sat there silently, unnoticed all the evening.  When
+night came she could hardly be persuaded to leave the room.
+
+One day Mr. Treffry expressed a wish to see Herr Paul; it was a long
+while before the latter could summon courage to go in.
+
+"There's a few dozen of the Gordon sherry at my Chambers, in London,
+Paul," Mr. Treffry said; "I'd be glad to think you had 'em.  And my
+man, Dominique, I've made him all right in my will, but keep your eye
+on him; he's a good sort for a foreigner, and no chicken, but sooner
+or later, the women'll get hold of him.  That's all I had to say.
+Send Chris to me."
+
+Herr Paul stood by the bedside speechless.  Suddenly he blurted out.
+
+"Ah! my dear!  Courage!  We are all mortal.  You will get well!"  All
+the morning he walked about quite inconsolable.  "It was frightful to
+see him, you know, frightful!  An iron man could not have borne it."
+
+When Christian came to him, Mr. Treffry raised himself and looked at
+her a long while.
+
+His wistful face was like an accusation.  But that very afternoon the
+news came from the sickroom that he was better, having had no pain
+for several hours.
+
+Every one went about with smiles lurking in their eyes, and ready to
+break forth at a word.  In the kitchen Barbi burst out crying, and,
+forgetting to toss the pan, spoiled a Kaiser-Schmarn she was making.
+Dominique was observed draining a glass of Chianti, and solemnly
+casting forth the last drops in libation.  An order was given for tea
+to be taken out under the acacias, where it was always cool; it was
+felt that something in the nature of high festival was being held.
+Even Herr Paul was present; but Christian did not come.  Nobody spoke
+of illness; to mention it might break the spell.
+
+Miss Naylor, who had gone into the house, came back, saying:
+
+"There is a strange man standing over there by the corner of the
+house."
+
+"Really!" asked Mrs. Decie; "what does he want?"
+
+Miss Naylor reddened.  "I did not ask him.  I--don't--know--whether
+he is quite respectable.  His coat is buttoned very close, and he--
+doesn't seem--to have a--collar."
+
+"Go and see what he wants, dear child," Mrs. Decie said to Greta.
+
+"I don't know--I really do not know--" began Miss Naylor; "he has
+very--high--boots," but Greta was already on her way, with hands
+clasped behind her, and demure eyes taking in the stranger's figure.
+
+"Please?" she said, when she was close to him.
+
+The stranger took his cap off with a jerk.
+
+"This house has no bells," he said in a nasal voice; "it has a
+tendency to discourage one."
+
+"Yes," said Greta gravely, "there is a bell, but it does not ring
+now, because my uncle is so ill."
+
+"I am very sorry to hear that.  I don't know the people here, but I
+am very sorry to hear that.
+
+"I would be glad to speak a few words to your sister, if it is your
+sister that I want."
+
+And the stranger's face grew very red.
+
+"Is it," said Greta, "that you are a friend of Herr Harz?  If you are
+a friend of his, you will please come and have some tea, and while
+you are having tea I will look for Chris."
+
+Perspiration bedewed the stranger's forehead.
+
+"Tea?  Excuse me!  I don't drink tea."
+
+"There is also coffee," Greta said.
+
+The stranger's progress towards the arbour was so slow that Greta
+arrived considerably before him.
+
+"It is a friend of Herr Harz," she whispered; "he will drink coffee.
+I am going to find Chris."
+
+"Greta!" gasped Miss Naylor.
+
+Mrs. Decie put up her hand.
+
+"Ah!" she said, "if it is so, we must be very nice to him for
+Christian's sake."
+
+Miss Naylor's face grew soft.
+
+"Ah, yes!" she said; "of course."
+
+"Bah!" muttered Herr Paul, "that recommences.'
+
+"Paul!" murmured Mrs. Decie, "you lack the elements of wisdom."
+
+Herr Paul glared at the approaching stranger.
+
+Mrs. Decie had risen, and smilingly held out her hand.
+
+"We are so glad to know you; you are an artist too, perhaps?  I take
+a great interest in art, and especially in that school which Mr. Harz
+represents."
+
+The stranger smiled.
+
+"He is the genuine article, ma'am," he said.  "He represents no
+school, he is one of that kind whose corpses make schools."
+
+"Ah!" murmured Mrs. Decie, "you are an American.  That is so nice.
+Do sit down!  My niece will soon be here."
+
+Greta came running back.
+
+"Will you come, please?" she said.  "Chris is ready."
+
+Gulping down his coffee, the stranger included them all in a single
+bow, and followed her.
+
+"Ach!" said Herr Paul, "garcon tres chic, celui-la!"
+
+Christian was standing by her little table.  The stranger began.
+
+"I am sending Mr. Harz's things to England; there are some pictures
+here.  He would be glad to have them."
+
+A flood of crimson swept over her face.
+
+"I am sending them to London," the stranger repeated; "perhaps you
+could give them to me to-day."
+
+"They are ready; my sister will show you."
+
+Her eyes seemed to dart into his soul, and try to drag something from
+it.  The words rushed from her lips
+
+"Is there any message for me?"
+
+The stranger regarded her curiously.
+
+"No," he stammered, "no! I guess not.  He is well....  I wish...." He
+stopped; her white face seemed to flash scorn, despair, and entreaty
+on him all at once.  And turning, she left him standing there.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+When Christian went that evening to her uncle's room he was sitting
+up in bed, and at once began to talk.  "Chris," he said, "I can't
+stand this dying by inches.  I'm going to try what a journey'll do
+for me.  I want to get back to the old country.  The doctor's
+promised.  There's a shot in the locker yet!  I believe in that young
+chap; he's stuck to me like a man....  It'll be your birthday, on
+Tuesday, old girl, and you'll be twenty.  Seventeen years since your
+father died.  You've been a lot to me....  A parson came here today.
+That's a bad sign.  Thought it his duty!  Very civil of him!
+I wouldn't see him, though.  If there's anything in what they tell
+you, I'm not going to sneak in at this time o' day.  There's one
+thing that's rather badly on my mind.  I took advantage of Mr. Harz
+with this damned pitifulness of mine.  You've a right to look at me
+as I've seen you sometimes when you thought I was asleep.  If I
+hadn't been ill he'd never have left you.  I don't blame you, Chris--
+not I!  You love me?  I know that, my dear.  But one's alone when it
+comes to the run-in.  Don't cry!  Our minds aren't Sunday-school
+books; you're finding it out, that's all!"  He sighed and turned
+away.
+
+The noise of sun-blinds being raised vibrated through the house.  A
+feeling of terror seized on the girl; he lay so still, and yet the
+drawing of each breath was a fight.  If she could only suffer in his
+place!  She went close, and bent over him.
+
+"It's air we want, both you and I!" he muttered.  Christian beckoned
+to the nurse, and stole out through the window.
+
+A regiment was passing in the road; she stood half-hidden amongst the
+lilac bushes watching.  The poplar leaves drooped lifeless and almost
+black above her head, the dust raised by the soldiers' feet hung in
+the air; it seemed as if in all the world no freshness and no life
+were stirring.  The tramp of feet died away.  Suddenly within arm's
+length of her a man appeared, his stick shouldered like a sword.  He
+raised his hat.
+
+"Good-evening!  You do not remember me?  Sarelli.  Pardon! You looked
+like a ghost standing there.  How badly those fellows marched!  We
+hang, you see, on the skirts of our profession and criticise; it is
+all we are fit for."  His black eyes, restless and malevolent like a
+swan's, seemed to stab her face.  "A fine evening!  Too hot.  The
+storm is wanted; you feel that?  It is weary waiting for the storm;
+but after the storm, my dear young lady, comes peace."  He smiled,
+gently, this time, and baring his head again, was lost to view in the
+shadow of the trees.
+
+His figure had seemed to Christian like the sudden vision of a
+threatening, hidden force.  She thrust out her hands, as though to
+keep it off.
+
+No use; it was within her, nothing could keep it away!  She went to
+Mrs. Decie's room, where her aunt and Miss Naylor were conversing in
+low tones.  To hear their voices brought back the touch of this world
+of everyday which had no part or lot in the terrifying powers within
+her.
+
+Dawney slept at the Villa now.  In the dead of night he was awakened
+by a light flashed in his eyes.  Christian was standing there, her
+face pale and wild with terror, her hair falling in dark masses on
+her shoulders.
+
+"Save him!  Save him!" she cried.  "Quick! The bleeding!"
+
+He saw her muffle her face in her white sleeves, and seizing the
+candle, leaped out of bed and rushed away.
+
+The internal haemorrhage had come again, and Nicholas Treffry wavered
+between life and death.  When it had ceased, he sank into a sort of
+stupor.  About six o'clock he came back to consciousness; watching
+his eyes, they could see a mental struggle taking place within him.
+At last he singled Christian out from the others by a sign.
+
+"I'm beat, Chris," he whispered.  "Let him know, I want to see him."
+
+His voice grew a little stronger.  "I thought that I could see it
+through--but here's the end."  He lifted his hand ever so little, and
+let it fall again.  When told a little later that a telegram had been
+sent to Harz his eyes expressed satisfaction.
+
+Herr Paul came down in ignorance of the night's events.  He stopped
+in front of the barometer and tapped it, remarking to Miss Naylor:
+"The glass has gone downstairs; we shall have cool weather--it will
+still go well with him!"
+
+When, with her brown face twisted by pity and concern, she told him
+that it was a question of hours, Herr Paul turned first purple, then
+pale, and sitting down, trembled violently.  "I cannot believe it,"
+he exclaimed almost angrily.  "Yesterday he was so well!  I cannot
+believe it!  Poor Nicholas!  Yesterday he spoke to me!"  Taking Miss
+Naylor's hand, he clutched it in his own.  "Ah!" he cried, letting it
+go suddenly, and striking at his forehead, "it is too terrible; only
+yesterday he spoke to me of sherry.  Is there nobody, then, who can
+do good?"
+
+"There is only God," replied Miss Naylor softly.
+
+"God?" said Herr Paul in a scared voice.
+
+"We--can--all--pray to Him," Miss Naylor murmured; little spots of
+colour came into her cheeks.  "I am going to do it now."
+
+Herr Paul raised her hand and kissed it.
+
+"Are you?" he said; "good! I too."  He passed through his study door,
+closed it carefully behind him, then for some unknown reason set his
+back against it.  Ugh! Death! It came to all! Some day it would come
+to him.  It might come tomorrow!  One must pray!
+
+The day dragged to its end.  In the sky clouds had mustered, and,
+crowding close on one another, clung round the sun, soft, thick,
+greywhite, like the feathers on a pigeon's breast.  Towards evening
+faint tremblings were felt at intervals, as from the shock of
+immensely distant earthquakes.
+
+Nobody went to bed that night, but in the morning the report was the
+same: "Unconscious--a question of hours."  Once only did he recover
+consciousness, and then asked for Harz.  A telegram had come from
+him, he was on the way.  Towards seven of the evening the long-
+expected storm broke in a sky like ink.  Into the valleys and over
+the crests of mountains it seemed as though an unseen hand were
+spilling goblets of pale wine, darting a sword-blade zigzag over
+trees, roofs, spires, peaks, into the very firmament, which answered
+every thrust with great bursts of groaning.  Just beyond the veranda
+Greta saw a glowworm shining, as it might be a tiny bead of the
+fallen lightning.  Soon the rain covered everything.  Sometimes a jet
+of light brought the hilltops, towering, dark, and hard, over the
+house, to disappear again behind the raindrops and shaken leaves.
+Each breath drawn by the storm was like the clash of a thousand
+cymbals; and in his room Mr. Treffry lay unconscious of its fury.
+
+Greta had crept in unobserved; and sat curled in a corner, with
+Scruff in her arms, rocking slightly to and fro.  When Christian
+passed, she caught her skirt, and whispered: "It is your birthday,
+Chris!"
+
+Mr. Treffry stirred.
+
+"What's that?  Thunder?--it's cooler.  Where am I?  Chris!"
+
+Dawney signed for her to take his place.
+
+"Chris!" Mr. Treffry said.  "It's near now."  She bent across him,
+and her tears fell on his forehead.
+
+"Forgive!" she whispered; "love me!"
+
+He raised his finger, and touched her cheek.
+
+For an hour or more he did not speak, though once or twice he moaned,
+and faintly tightened his pressure on her fingers.  The storm had
+died away, but very far off the thunder was still muttering.
+
+His eyes opened once more, rested on her, and passed beyond, into
+that abyss dividing youth from age, conviction from conviction, life
+from death.
+
+At the foot of the bed Dawney stood covering his face; behind him
+Dominique knelt with hands held upwards; the sound of Greta's
+breathing, soft in sleep, rose and fell in the stillness.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+One afternoon in March, more than three years after Mr. Treffry's
+death, Christian was sitting at the window of a studio in St. John's
+Wood.  The sky was covered with soft, high clouds, through which
+shone little gleams of blue.  Now and then a bright shower fell,
+sprinkling the trees, where every twig was curling upwards as if
+waiting for the gift of its new leaves.  And it seemed to her that
+the boughs thickened and budded under her very eyes; a great
+concourse of sparrows had gathered on those boughs, and kept raising
+a shrill chatter.  Over at the far side of the room Harz was working
+at a picture.
+
+On Christian's face was the quiet smile of one who knows that she has
+only to turn her eyes to see what she wishes to see; of one whose
+possessions are safe under her hand.  She looked at Harz with that
+possessive smile.  But as into the brain of one turning in his bed
+grim fancies will suddenly leap up out of warm nothingness, so there
+leaped into her mind the memory of that long ago dawn, when he had
+found her kneeling by Mr. Treffry's body.  She seemed to see again
+the dead face, so gravely quiet, and furrowless.  She seemed to see
+her lover and herself setting forth silently along the river wall
+where they had first met; sitting down, still silent, beneath the
+poplar-tree where the little bodies of the chafers had lain strewn in
+the Spring.  To see the trees changing from black to grey, from grey
+to green, and in the dark sky long white lines of cloud, lighting to
+the south like birds; and, very far away, rosy peaks watching the
+awakening of the earth.  And now once again, after all that time,
+she felt her spirit shrink away from his; as it had shrunk in that
+hour, when she had seemed hateful to herself.  She remembered the
+words she had spoken: "I have no heart left.  You've torn it in two
+between you.  Love is all self--I wanted him to die."  She remembered
+too the raindrops on the vines like a million tiny lamps, and the
+throstle that began singing.  Then, as dreams die out into warm
+nothingness, recollection vanished, and the smile came back to her
+lips.
+
+She took out a letter.
+
+"....O Chris!  We are really coming; I seem to be always telling it
+to myself, and I have told Scruff many times, but he does not care,
+because he is getting old.  Miss Naylor says we shall arrive for
+breakfast, and that we shall be hungry, but perhaps she will not be
+very hungry, if it is rough.  Papa said to me: 'Je serai
+inconsolable, mais inconsolable!'  But I think he will not be,
+because he is going to Vienna.  When we are come, there will be
+nobody at Villa Rubein; Aunt Constance has gone a fortnight ago to
+Florence.  There is a young man at her hotel; she says he will be one
+of the greatest playwriters in England, and she sent me a play of his
+to read; it was only a little about love, I did not like it very
+much....  O Chris! I think I shall cry when I see you.  As I am quite
+grown up, Miss Naylor is not to come back with me; sometimes she is
+sad, but she will be glad to see you, Chris.  She seems always sadder
+when it is Spring.  Today I walked along the wall; the little green
+balls of wool are growing on the poplars already, and I saw one
+chafer; it will not be long before the cherry blossom comes; and I
+felt so funny, sad and happy together, and once I thought that I had
+wings and could fly away up the valley to Meran--but I had none, so I
+sat on the bench where we sat the day we took the pictures, and I
+thought and thought; there was nothing came to me in my thoughts, but
+all was sweet and a little noisy, and rather sad; it was like the
+buzzing of the chafer, in my head; and now I feel so tired and all my
+blood is running up and down me.  I do not mind, because I know it is
+the Spring.
+
+"Dominique came to see us the other day; he is very well, and is half
+the proprietor of the Adler Hotel, at Meran; he is not at all
+different, and he asked about you and about Alois--do you know,
+Chris, to myself I call him Herr Harz, but when I have seen him this
+time I shall call him Alois in my heart also.
+
+"I have a letter from Dr. Edmund; he is in London, so perhaps you
+have seen him, only he has a great many patients and some that he has
+'hopes of killing soon'! especially one old lady, because she is
+always wanting him to do things for her, and he is never saying 'No,'
+so he does not like her.  He says that he is getting old.  When I
+have finished this letter I am going to write and tell him that
+perhaps he shall see me soon, and then I think he will be very sad.
+Now that the Spring is come there are more flowers to take to Uncle
+Nic's grave, and every day, when I am gone, Barbi is to take them so
+that he shall not miss you, Chris, because all the flowers I put
+there are for you.
+
+"I am buying some toys without paint on for my niece."
+
+"O Chris! this will be the first baby that I have known."
+
+"I am only to stay three weeks with you, but I think when I am once
+there I shall be staying longer.  I send a kiss for my niece, and to
+Herr Harz, my love--that is the last time I shall call him Herr Harz;
+and to you, Chris, all the joy that is in my heart.--Your loving
+
+"GRETA."
+
+
+Christian rose, and, turning very softly, stood, leaning her elbows
+on the back of a high seat, looking at her husband.
+
+In her eyes there was a slow, clear, faintly smiling, yet yearning
+look, as though this strenuous figure bent on its task were seen for
+a moment as something apart, and not all the world to her.
+
+"Tired?" asked Harz, putting his lips to her hand.
+
+"No, it's only--what Greta says about the Spring; it makes one want
+more than one has got."
+
+Slipping her hand away, she went back to the window.  Harz stood,
+looking after her; then, taking up his palette, again began painting.
+
+In the world, outside, the high soft clouds flew by; the trees seemed
+thickening and budding.
+
+And Christian thought:
+
+'Can we never have quite enough?'
+
+
+December 1890.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+MY FATHER
+
+
+
+A MAN OF DEVON
+
+
+I
+
+"MOOR, 20th July.
+
+.......It is quiet here, sleepy, rather--a farm is never quiet; the
+sea, too, is only a quarter of a mile away, and when it's windy, the
+sound of it travels up the combe; for distraction, you must go four
+miles to Brixham or five to Kingswear, and you won't find much then.
+The farm lies in a sheltered spot, scooped, so to speak, high up the
+combe side--behind is a rise of fields, and beyond, a sweep of down.
+You have the feeling of being able to see quite far, which is
+misleading, as you soon find out if you walk.  It is true Devon
+country-hills, hollows, hedge-banks, lanes dipping down into the
+earth or going up like the sides of houses, coppices, cornfields, and
+little streams wherever there's a place for one; but the downs along
+the cliff, all gorse and ferns, are wild.  The combe ends in a sandy
+cove with black rock on one side, pinkish cliffs away to the headland
+on the other, and a coastguard station.  Just now, with the harvest
+coming on, everything looks its richest, the apples ripening, the
+trees almost too green.  It's very hot, still weather; the country
+and the sea seem to sleep in the sun.  In front of the farm are half-
+a-dozen pines that look as if they had stepped out of another land,
+but all round the back is orchard as lush, and gnarled, and orthodox
+as any one could wish.  The house, a long, white building with three
+levels of roof, and splashes of brown all over it, looks as if it
+might be growing down into the earth.  It was freshly thatched two
+years ago--and that's all the newness there is about it; they say the
+front door, oak, with iron knobs, is three hundred years old at
+least.  You can touch the ceilings with your hand.  The windows
+certainly might be larger--a heavenly old place, though, with a
+flavour of apples, smoke, sweetbriar, bacon, honeysuckle, and age,
+all over it.
+
+The owner is a man called John Ford, about seventy, and seventeen
+stone in weight--very big, on long legs, with a grey, stubbly beard,
+grey, watery eyes, short neck and purplish complexion; he is
+asthmatic, and has a very courteous, autocratic manner.  His clothes
+are made of Harris tweed--except on Sundays, when he puts on black--a
+seal ring, and a thick gold cable chain.  There's nothing mean or
+small about John Ford; I suspect him of a warm heart, but he doesn't
+let you know much about him.  He's a north-country man by birth, and
+has been out in New Zealand all his life.  This little Devonshire
+farm is all he has now.  He had a large "station" in the North
+Island, and was much looked up to, kept open house, did everything,
+as one would guess, in a narrow-minded, large-handed way.  He came to
+grief suddenly; I don't quite know how.  I believe his only son lost
+money on the turf, and then, unable to face his father, shot himself;
+if you had seen John Ford, you could imagine that.  His wife died,
+too, that year.  He paid up to the last penny, and came home, to live
+on this farm.  He told me the other night that he had only one
+relation in the world, his granddaughter, who lives here with him.
+Pasiance Voisey--old spelling for Patience, but they pronounce, it
+Pash-yence--is sitting out here with me at this moment on a sort of
+rustic loggia that opens into the orchard.  Her sleeves are rolled
+up, and she's stripping currants, ready for black currant tea.  Now
+and then she rests her elbows on the table, eats a berry, pouts her
+lips, and, begins again.  She has a round, little face; a long,
+slender body; cheeks like poppies; a bushy mass of black-brown hair,
+and dark-brown, almost black, eyes; her nose is snub; her lips quick,
+red, rather full; all her motions quick and soft.  She loves bright
+colours.  She's rather like a little cat; sometimes she seems all
+sympathy, then in a moment as hard as tortoise-shell.  She's all
+impulse; yet she doesn't like to show her feelings; I sometimes
+wonder whether she has any.  She plays the violin.
+
+It's queer to see these two together, queer and rather sad.  The old
+man has a fierce tenderness for her that strikes into the very roots
+of him.  I see him torn between it, and his cold north-country horror
+of his feelings; his life with her is an unconscious torture to him.
+She's a restless, chafing thing, demure enough one moment, then
+flashing out into mocking speeches or hard little laughs.  Yet she's
+fond of him in her fashion; I saw her kiss him once when he was
+asleep.  She obeys him generally--in a way as if she couldn't breathe
+while she was doing it.  She's had a queer sort of education--
+history, geography, elementary mathematics, and nothing else; never
+been to school; had a few lessons on the violin, but has taught
+herself most of what she knows.  She is well up in the lore of birds,
+flowers, and insects; has three cats, who follow her about; and is
+full of pranks.  The other day she called out to me, "I've something
+for you.  Hold out your hand and shut your eyes!"  It was a large,
+black slug!  She's the child of the old fellow's only daughter, who
+was sent home for schooling at Torquay, and made a runaway match with
+one Richard Voisey, a yeoman farmer, whom she met in the hunting-
+field.  John Ford was furious--his ancestors, it appears, used to
+lead ruffians on the Cumberland side of the Border--he looked on
+"Squire" Rick Voisey as a cut below him.  He was called "Squire," as
+far as I can make out, because he used to play cards every evening
+with a parson in the neighbourhood who went by the name of "Devil"
+Hawkins.  Not that the Voisey stock is to be despised.  They have had
+this farm since it was granted to one Richard Voysey by copy dated
+8th September, 13 Henry VIII.  Mrs. Hopgood, the wife of the bailiff-
+-a dear, quaint, serene old soul with cheeks like a rosy, withered
+apple, and an unbounded love of Pasiance--showed me the very
+document.
+
+"I kape it," she said.  "Mr. Ford be tu proud--but other folks be
+proud tu.  'Tis a pra-aper old fam'ly: all the women is Margery,
+Pasiance, or Mary; all the men's Richards an' Johns an' Rogers; old
+as they apple-trees."
+
+Rick Voisey was a rackety, hunting fellow, and "dipped" the old farm
+up to its thatched roof.  John Ford took his revenge by buying up the
+mortgages, foreclosing, and commanding his daughter and Voisey to go
+on living here rent free; this they dutifully did until they were
+both killed in a dog-cart accident, eight years ago.  Old Ford's
+financial smash came a year later, and since then he's lived here
+with Pasiance.  I fancy it's the cross in her blood that makes her so
+restless, and irresponsible: if she had been all a native she'd have
+been happy enough here, or all a stranger like John Ford himself, but
+the two strains struggling for mastery seem to give her no rest.
+You'll think this a far-fetched theory, but I believe it to be the
+true one.  She'll stand with lips pressed together, her arms folded
+tight across her narrow chest, staring as if she could see beyond the
+things round her; then something catches her attention, her eyes will
+grow laughing, soft, or scornful all in a minute! She's eighteen,
+perfectly fearless in a boat, but you can't get her to mount a horse-
+-a sore subject with her grandfather, who spends most of his day on a
+lean, half-bred pony, that carries him like a feather, for all his
+weight.
+
+They put me up here as a favour to Dan Treffry; there's an
+arrangement of L. s. d. with Mrs. Hopgood in the background.  They
+aren't at all well off; this is the largest farm about, but it
+doesn't bring them in much.  To look at John Ford, it seems
+incredible he should be short of money--he's too large.
+
+We have family prayers at eight, then, breakfast--after that freedom
+for writing or anything else till supper and evening prayers.  At
+midday one forages for oneself.  On Sundays, two miles to church
+twice, or you get into John Ford's black books....  Dan Treffry
+himself is staying at Kingswear.  He says he's made his pile; it
+suits him down here--like a sleep after years of being too wide-
+awake; he had a rough time in New Zealand, until that mine made his
+fortune.  You'd hardly remember him; he reminds me of his uncle, old
+Nicholas Treffry; the same slow way of speaking, with a hesitation,
+and a trick of repeating your name with everything he says; left-
+handed too, and the same slow twinkle in his eyes.  He has a dark,
+short beard, and red-brown cheeks; is a little bald on the temples,
+and a bit grey, but hard as iron.  He rides over nearly every day,
+attended by a black spaniel with a wonderful nose and a horror of
+petticoats.  He has told me lots of good stories of John Ford in the
+early squatter's times; his feats with horses live to this day; and
+he was through the Maori wars; as Dan says, "a man after Uncle Nic's
+own heart."
+
+They are very good friends, and respect each other; Dan has a great
+admiration for the old man, but the attraction is Pasiance.  He talks
+very little when she's in the room, but looks at her in a sidelong,
+wistful sort of way.  Pasiance's conduct to him would be cruel in any
+one else, but in her, one takes it with a pinch of salt.  Dan goes
+off, but turns up again as quiet and dogged as you please.
+
+Last night, for instance, we were sitting in the loggia after supper.
+Pasiance was fingering the strings of her violin, and suddenly Dan (a
+bold thing for him) asked her to play.
+
+"What!" she said, "before men?  No, thank you!"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because I hate them."
+
+Down came John Ford's hand on the wicker table: "You forget yourself!
+Go to bed!"
+
+She gave Dan a look, and went; we could hear her playing in her
+bedroom; it sounded like a dance of spirits; and just when one
+thought she had finished, out it would break again like a burst of
+laughter.  Presently, John Ford begged our pardons ceremoniously, and
+stumped off indoors.  The violin ceased; we heard his voice growling
+at her; down he came again.  Just as he was settled in his chair
+there was a soft swish, and something dark came falling through the
+apple boughs.  The violin!  You should have seen his face!  Dan would
+have picked the violin up, but the old man stopped him.  Later, from
+my bedroom window, I saw John Ford come out and stand looking at the
+violin.  He raised his foot as if to stamp on it.  At last he picked
+it up, wiped it carefully, and took it in....
+
+My room is next to hers.  I kept hearing her laugh, a noise too as if
+she were dragging things about the room.  Then I fell asleep, but
+woke with a start, and went to the window for a breath of fresh air.
+Such a black, breathless night!  Nothing to be seen but the twisted,
+blacker branches; not the faintest stir of leaves, no sound but
+muffled grunting from the cowhouse, and now and then a faint sigh.  I
+had the queerest feeling of unrest and fear, the last thing to expect
+on such a night.  There is something here that's disturbing; a sort
+of suppressed struggle.  I've never in my life seen anything so
+irresponsible as this girl, or so uncompromising as the old man; I
+keep thinking of the way he wiped that violin.  It's just as if a
+spark would set everything in a blaze.  There's a menace of tragedy--
+or--perhaps it's only the heat, and too much of Mother Hopgood's
+crame....
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+"Tuesday.
+
+......I've made a new acquaintance.  I was lying in the orchard, and
+presently, not seeing me, he came along--a man of middle height, with
+a singularly good balance, and no lumber--rather old blue clothes, a
+flannel shirt, a dull red necktie, brown shoes, a cap with a leather
+peak pushed up on the forehead.  Face long and narrow, bronzed with a
+kind of pale burnt-in brownness; a good forehead.  A brown moustache,
+beard rather pointed, blackening about the cheeks; his chin not
+visible, but from the beard's growth must be big; mouth I should
+judge sensuous.  Nose straight and blunt; eyes grey, with an upward
+look, not exactly frank, because defiant; two parallel furrows down
+each cheek, one from the inner corner of the eye, one from the
+nostril; age perhaps thirty-five.  About the face, attitude,
+movements, something immensely vital, adaptable, daring, and
+unprincipled.
+
+He stood in front of the loggia, biting his fingers, a kind of
+nineteenth-century buccaneer, and I wondered what he was doing in
+this galley. They say you can tell a man of Kent or a Somersetshire
+man; certainly you can tell a Yorkshire man, and this fellow could
+only have been a man of Devon, one of the two main types found in
+this county.  He whistled; and out came Pasiance in a geranium-
+coloured dress, looking like some tall poppy--you know the slight
+droop of a poppy's head, and the way the wind sways its stem.... She
+is a human poppy, her fuzzy dark hair is like a poppy's lustreless
+black heart, she has a poppy's tantalising attraction and repulsion,
+something fatal, or rather fateful.  She came walking up to my new
+friend, then caught sight of me, and stopped dead.
+
+"That," she said to me, "is Zachary Pearse.  This," she said to him,
+"is our lodger."  She said it with a wonderful soft malice.  She
+wanted to scratch me, and she scratched.  Half an hour later I was in
+the yard, when up came this fellow Pearse.
+
+"Glad to know you," he said, looking thoughtfully at the pigs.
+
+"You're a writer, aren't you?"
+
+"A sort of one," I said.
+
+"If by any chance," he said suddenly, "you're looking for a job, I
+could put something in your way.  Walk down to the beach with me, and
+I'll tell you; my boat's at anchor, smartest little craft in these
+parts."
+
+It was very hot, and I had no desire whatever to go down to the
+beach--I went, all the same.  We had not gone far when John Ford and
+Dan Treffry came into the lane.  Our friend seemed a little
+disconcerted, but soon recovered himself.  We met in the middle of
+the lane, where there was hardly room to pass.  John Ford, who looked
+very haughty, put on his pince-nez and stared at Pearse.
+
+"Good-day!" said Pearse; "fine weather!  I've been up to ask Pasiance
+to come for a sail.  Wednesday we thought, weather permitting; this
+gentleman's coming.  Perhaps you'll come too, Mr. Treffry.  You've
+never seen my place.  I'll give you lunch, and show you my father.
+He's worth a couple of hours' sail any day."  It was said in such an
+odd way that one couldn't resent his impudence.  John Ford was seized
+with a fit of wheezing, and seemed on the eve of an explosion; he
+glanced at me, and checked himself.
+
+"You're very good," he said icily; "my granddaughter has other things
+to do.  You, gentlemen, will please yourselves"; and, with a very
+slight bow, he went stumping on to the house.  Dan looked at me, and
+I looked at him.
+
+"You'll come?" said Pearse, rather wistfully.  Dan stammered: "Thank
+you, Mr. Pearse; I'm a better man on a horse than in a boat, but--
+thank you."  Cornered in this way, he's a shy, soft-hearted being.
+Pearse smiled his thanks.  "Wednesday, then, at ten o'clock; you
+shan't regret it."
+
+"Pertinacious beggar!" I heard Dan mutter in his beard; and found
+myself marching down the lane again by Pearse's side.  I asked him
+what he was good enough to mean by saying I was coming, without
+having asked me.  He answered, unabashed:
+
+"You see, I'm not friends with the old man; but I knew he'd not be
+impolite to you, so I took the liberty."
+
+He has certainly a knack of turning one's anger to curiosity.  We
+were down in the combe now; the tide was running out, and the sand
+all little, wet, shining ridges.  About a quarter of a mile out lay a
+cutter, with her tan sail half down, swinging to the swell.  The
+sunlight was making the pink cliffs glow in the most wonderful way;
+and shifting in bright patches over the sea like moving shoals of
+goldfish.  Pearse perched himself on his dinghy, and looked out under
+his hand.  He seemed lost in admiration.
+
+"If we could only net some of those spangles," he said, "an' make
+gold of 'em!  No more work then."
+
+"It's a big job I've got on," he said presently; "I'll tell you about
+it on Wednesday. I want a journalist."
+
+"But I don't write for the papers," I said; "I do other sort of work.
+My game is archaeology."
+
+"It doesn't matter," he said, "the more imagination the better.  It'd
+be a thundering good thing for you."
+
+His assurance was amazing, but it was past supper-time, and hunger
+getting the better of my curiosity, I bade him good-night. When I
+looked back, he was still there, on the edge of his boat, gazing at
+the sea.  A queer sort of bird altogether, but attractive somehow.
+
+Nobody mentioned him that evening; but once old Ford, after staring a
+long time at Pasiance, muttered a propos of nothing, "Undutiful
+children!"  She was softer than usual; listening quietly to our talk,
+and smiling when spoken to.  At bedtime she went up to her grand-
+father, without waiting for the usual command, "Come and kiss me,
+child."
+
+Dan did not stay to supper, and he has not been here since.  This
+morning I asked Mother Hopgood who Zachary Pearse was.  She's a true
+Devonian; if there's anything she hates, it is to be committed to a
+definite statement.  She ambled round her answer, and at last told me
+that he was "son of old Cap'en Jan Pearse to Black Mill.  'Tes an old
+family to Dartymouth an' Plymouth," she went on in a communicative
+outburst.  "They du say Francis Drake tuke five o' they Pearses with
+'en to fight the Spaniards.  At least that's what I've heard Mr.
+Zachary zay; but Ha-apgood can tell yu."  Poor Hopgood, the amount of
+information she saddles him with in the course of the day!  Having
+given me thus to understand that she had run dry, she at once went
+on:
+
+"Cap'en Jan Pearse made a dale of ventures.  He's old now--they du
+say nigh an 'undred.  Ha-apgood can tell yu."
+
+"But the son, Mrs. Hopgood?"
+
+Her eyes twinkled with sudden shrewdness: She hugged herself
+placidly.
+
+"An' what would yu take for dinner to-day?  There's duck; or yu might
+like 'toad in the hole,' with an apple tart; or then, there's--Well!
+we'll see what we can du like."  And off she went, without waiting
+for my answer.
+
+To-morrow is Wednesday.  I shan't be sorry to get another look at
+this fellow Pearse....
+
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+"Friday, 29th July.
+
+.......Why do you ask me so many questions, and egg me on to write
+about these people instead of minding my business?  If you really
+want to hear, I'll tell you of Wednesday's doings.
+
+It was a splendid morning; and Dan turned up, to my surprise--though
+I might have known that when he says a thing, he does it.  John Ford
+came out to shake hands with him, then, remembering why he had come,
+breathed loudly, said nothing, and went in again.  Nothing was to be
+seen of Pasiance, and we went down to the beach together.
+
+"I don't like this fellow Pearse, George," Dan said to me on the way;
+"I was fool enough to say I'd go, and so I must, but what's he after?
+Not the man to do things without a reason, mind you."
+
+I remarked that we should soon know.
+
+"I'm not so sure--queer beggar; I never look at him without thinking
+of a pirate."
+
+The cutter lay in the cove as if she had never moved.  There too was
+Zachary Pearse seated on the edge of his dinghy.
+
+"A five-knot breeze," he said, "I'll run you down in a couple of
+hours."  He made no inquiry about Pasiance, but put us into his
+cockleshell and pulled for the cutter.  A lantern-Jawed fellow, named
+Prawle, with a spiky, prominent beard, long, clean-shaven upper lip,
+and tanned complexion--a regular hard-weather bird--received us.
+
+The cutter was beautifully clean; built for a Brixham trawler, she
+still had her number--DH 113--uneffaced.  We dived into a sort of
+cabin, airy, but dark, fitted with two bunks and a small table, on
+which stood some bottles of stout; there were lockers, too, and pegs
+for clothes.  Prawle, who showed us round, seemed very proud of a
+steam contrivance for hoisting sails.  It was some minutes before we
+came on deck again; and there, in the dinghy, being pulled towards
+the cutter, sat Pasiance.
+
+"If I'd known this," stammered Dan, getting red, "I wouldn't have
+come."  She had outwitted us, and there was nothing to be done.
+
+It was a very pleasant sail.  The breeze was light from the south-
+east, the sun warm, the air soft.  Presently Pasiance began singing:
+
+"Columbus is dead and laid in his grave,
+Oh! heigh-ho! and laid in his grave;
+Over his head the apple-trees wave
+Oh! heigh-ho! the apple-trees wave....
+
+"The apples are ripe and ready to fall,
+Oh! heigh-ho! and ready to fall;
+There came an old woman and gathered them all,
+Oh! heigh-ho! and gathered them all....
+
+"The apples are gathered, and laid on the shelf,
+Oh! heigh-ho! and laid on the shelf;
+If you want any more, you must sing for yourself,
+Oh! heigh-ho! and sing for yourself."
+
+
+Her small, high voice came to us in trills and spurts, as the wind
+let it, like the singing of a skylark lost in the sky.  Pearse went
+up to her and whispered something.  I caught a glimpse of her face
+like a startled wild creature's; shrinking, tossing her hair,
+laughing, all in the same breath.  She wouldn't sing again, but
+crouched in the bows with her chin on her hands, and the sun
+falling on one cheek, round, velvety, red as a peach....
+
+We passed Dartmouth, and half an hour later put into a little wooded
+bay.  On a low reddish cliff was a house hedged round by pine-trees.
+A bit of broken jetty ran out from the bottom of the cliff.  We
+hooked on to this, and landed.  An ancient, fish-like man came
+slouching down and took charge of the cutter.  Pearse led us towards
+the house, Pasiance following mortally shy all of a sudden.
+
+The house had a dark, overhanging thatch of the rush reeds that grow
+in the marshes hereabouts; I remember nothing else remarkable.  It
+was neither old, nor new; neither beautiful, nor exactly ugly;
+neither clean, nor entirely squalid; it perched there with all its
+windows over the sea, turning its back contemptuously on the land.
+
+Seated in a kind of porch, beside an immense telescope, was a very
+old man in a panama hat, with a rattan cane.  His pure-white beard
+and moustache, and almost black eyebrows, gave a very singular,
+piercing look to his little, restless, dark-grey eyes; all over his
+mahogany cheeks and neck was a network of fine wrinkles.  He sat
+quite upright, in the full sun, hardly blinking.
+
+"Dad!" said Zachary, "this is Pasiance Voisey."  The old man turned
+his eyes on her and muttered, "How do you do, ma'am?" then took no
+further notice.  And Pasiance, who seemed to resent this, soon
+slipped away and went wandering about amongst the pines.  An old
+woman brought some plates and bottles and laid them casually on a
+table; and we sat round the figure of old Captain Pearse without a
+word, as if we were all under a spell.
+
+Before lunch there was a little scene between Zachary Pearse and Dan,
+as to which of them should summon Pasiance.  It ended in both going,
+and coming back without her.  She did not want any lunch, would stay
+where she was amongst the pines.
+
+For lunch we had chops, wood-pigeons, mushrooms, and mulberry
+preserve, and drank wonderful Madeira out of common wine-glasses.  I
+asked the old man where he got it; he gave me a queer look, and
+answered with a little bow:
+
+"Stood me in tu shillin' the bottle, an' the country got nothing out
+of it, sir.  In the early Thirties; tu shillin' the bottle; there's
+no such wine nowadays and," he added, looking at Zachary, "no such
+men."
+
+Zachary smiled and said: "You did nothing so big, dad, as what I'm
+after, now!"
+
+The old man's eyes had a sort of disdain in them.
+
+"You're going far, then, in the Pied Witch, Zack?"
+
+"I am," said Zachary.
+
+"And where might yu be goin' in that old trampin' smut factory?"
+
+"Morocco."
+
+"Heu!" said the old man, "there's nothing there; I know that coast,
+as I know the back o' my hand."  He stretched out a hand covered with
+veins and hair.
+
+Zachary began suddenly to pour out a flood of words:
+
+"Below Mogador--a fellow there--friend of mine--two years ago now.
+Concessions--trade-gunpowder--cruisers--feuds--money--chiefs--Gatling
+guns--Sultan--rifles--rebellion--gold."  He detailed a reckless,
+sordid, bold scheme, which, on the pivot of a trading venture, was
+intended to spin a whole wheel of political convulsions.
+
+"They'll never let you get there," said old Pearse.
+
+"Won't they?" returned Zachary.  "Oh yes, they will, an' when I
+leave, there'll be another dynasty, and I'll be a rich man."
+
+"Yu'll never leave," answered the old man.
+
+Zachary took out a sheet of paper covered with figures.  He had
+worked the whole thing out.  So much--equipment, so much--trade, so
+much--concessions, so much--emergencies.  "My last mag!" he ended, "a
+thousand short; the ship's ready, and if I'm not there within a month
+my chance is as good as gone."
+
+This was the pith of his confidences--an appeal for money, and we all
+looked as men will when that crops up.
+
+"Mad!"  muttered the old man, looking at the sea.
+
+"No," said Zachary.  That one word was more eloquent than all the
+rest of his words put together.  This fellow is no visionary.  His
+scheme may be daring, and unprincipled, but--he knows very well what
+he's about.
+
+"Well!" said old Pearse, "you shall have five 'undred of my money, if
+it's only to learn what yu're made of.  Wheel me in!"  Zachary
+wheeled him into the house, but soon came back.
+
+"The old man's cheque for five hundred pounds!" he said, holding it
+up.  "Mr. Treffry, give me another, and you shall have a third of the
+profits."
+
+I expected Dan to give a point-blank refusal.  But he only asked:
+
+"Would that clear you for starting?"
+
+"With that," said Zachary, "I can get to sea in a fortnight."
+
+"Good!" Dan said slowly.  "Give me a written promise!  To sea in
+fourteen days and my fair share on the five hundred pounds--no more--
+no less."
+
+Again I thought Pearse would have jumped at this, but he leaned his
+chin on his hand, and looked at Dan, and Dan looked at him.  While
+they were staring at each other like this, Pasiance came up with a
+kitten.
+
+"See!" she said, "isn't it a darling?"  The kitten crawled and clawed
+its way up behind her neck.  I saw both men's eyes as they looked at
+Pasiance, and suddenly understood what they were at.  The kitten
+rubbed itself against Pasiance's cheek, overbalanced, and fell,
+clawing, down her dress.  She caught it up and walked away.  Some
+one, I don't know which of us, sighed, and Pearse cried "Done!"
+
+The bargain had been driven.
+
+"Good-bye, Mr. Pearse," said Dan; "I guess that's all I'm wanted
+for.  I'll find my pony waiting in the village.  George, you'll see
+Pasiance home?"
+
+We heard the hoofs of his pony galloping down the road; Pearse
+suddenly excused himself, and disappeared.
+
+This venture of his may sound romantic and absurd, but it's matter-
+of-fact enough.  He's after L. s. d.!  Shades of Drake, Raleigh,
+Hawkins, Oxenham!  The worm of suspicion gnaws at the rose of
+romance.  What if those fellows, too, were only after L. s. d....?
+
+I strolled into the pine-wood.  The earth there was covered like a
+bee's body with black and gold stripes; there was the blue sea below,
+and white, sleepy clouds, and bumble-bees booming above the heather;
+it was all softness, a summer's day in Devon.  Suddenly I came on
+Pearse standing at the edge of the cliff with Pasiance sitting in a
+little hollow below, looking up at him.  I heard him say:
+
+"Pasiance--Pasiance!" The sound of his voice, and the sight of her
+soft, wondering face made me furious.  What business has she with
+love, at her age?  What business have they with each other?
+
+He told me presently that she had started off for home, and drove me
+to the ferry, behind an old grey pony.  On the way he came back to
+his offer of the other day.
+
+"Come with me," he said.  "It doesn't do to neglect the Press; you
+can see the possibilities.  It's one of the few countries left.  If I
+once get this business started you don't know where it's going to
+stop.  You'd have free passage everywhere, and whatever you like in
+reason."
+
+I answered as rudely as I could--but by no means as rudely as I
+wanted--that his scheme was mad.  As a matter of fact, it's much too
+sane for me; for, whatever the body of a scheme, its soul is the
+fibre of the schemer.
+
+"Think of it," he urged, as if he could see into me.  "You can make
+what you like of it.  Press paragraphs, of course.  But that's
+mechanical; why, even I could do it, if I had time.  As for the rest,
+you'll be as free--as free as a man."
+
+There, in five words of one syllable, is the kernel of this fellow
+Pearse--"As free as a man!"  No rule, no law, not even the mysterious
+shackles that bind men to their own self-respects!  "As free as a
+man!"  No ideals; no principles; no fixed star for his worship; no
+coil he can't slide out of!  But the fellow has the tenacity of one
+of the old Devon mastiffs, too.  He wouldn't take "No" for an answer.
+
+"Think of it," he said; "any day will do--I've got a fortnight....
+Look! there she is!  "I thought that he meant Pasiance; but it was an
+old steamer, sluggish and black in the blazing sun of mid-stream,
+with a yellow-and-white funnel, and no sign of life on her decks.
+
+"That's her--the Pied Witch! Do her twelve knots; you wouldn't think
+it!  Well! good-evening!  You'd better come.  A word to me at any
+time.  I'm going aboard now."
+
+As I was being ferried across I saw him lolling in the stern-sheets
+of a little boat, the sun crowning his straw hat with glory.
+
+I came on Pasiance, about a mile up the road, sitting in the hedge.
+We walked on together between the banks--Devonshire banks, as high as
+houses, thick with ivy and ferns, bramble and hazel boughs, and
+honeysuckle.
+
+"Do you believe in a God?" she said suddenly.
+
+"Grandfather's God is simply awful.  When I'm playing the fiddle, I
+can feel God; but grandfather's is such a stuffy God--you know what I
+mean: the sea, the wind, the trees, colours too--they make one feel.
+But I don't believe that life was meant to 'be good' in.  Isn't there
+anything better than being good?  When I'm 'good,' I simply feel
+wicked."  She reached up, caught a flower from the hedge, and slowly
+tore its petals.
+
+"What would you do," she muttered, "if you wanted a thing, but were
+afraid of it?  But I suppose you're never afraid!" she added, mocking
+me.  I admitted that I was sometimes afraid, and often afraid of
+being afraid.
+
+"That's nice!  I'm not afraid of illness, nor of grandfather, nor of
+his God; but--I want to be free.  If you want a thing badly, you're
+afraid about it."
+
+I thought of Zachary Pearse's words, "free as a man."
+
+"Why are you looking at me like that?" she said.
+
+I stammered: "What do you mean by freedom?"
+
+"Do you know what I shall do to-night?" she answered.  "Get out of my
+window by the apple-tree, and go to the woods, and play!"
+
+We were going down a steep lane, along the side of a wood, where
+there's always a smell of sappy leaves, and the breath of the cows
+that come close to the hedge to get the shade.
+
+There was a cottage in the bottom, and a small boy sat outside
+playing with a heap of dust.
+
+"Hallo, Johnny!" said Pasiance.  "Hold your leg out and show this man
+your bad place!"  The small boy undid a bandage round his bare and
+dirty little leg, and proudly revealed a sore.
+
+"Isn't it nasty?" cried Pasiance ruefully, tying up the bandage
+again; "poor little feller!  Johnny, see what I've brought you!"  She
+produced from her pocket a stick of chocolate, the semblance of a
+soldier made of sealing-wax and worsted, and a crooked sixpence.
+
+It was a new glimpse of her.  All the way home she was telling me the
+story of little Johnny's family; when she came to his mother's death,
+she burst out: "A beastly shame, wasn't it, and they're so poor; it
+might just as well have been somebody else.  I like poor people, but
+I hate rich ones--stuck-up beasts."
+
+Mrs. Hopgood was looking over the gate, with her cap on one side, and
+one of Pasiance's cats rubbing itself against her skirts.  At the
+sight of us she hugged herself.
+
+"Where's grandfather?" asked Pasiance.  The old lady shook her head.
+
+"Is it a row?"  Mrs. Hopgood wriggled, and wriggled, and out came:
+
+"Did you get yure tay, my pretty?  No?  Well, that's a pity; yu'll be
+falin' low-like."
+
+Pasiance tossed her head, snatched up the cat, and ran indoors.  I
+remained staring at Mrs. Hopgood.
+
+"Dear-dear," she clucked," poor lamb.  So to spake it's--" and she
+blurted out suddenly, "chuckin' full of wra-ath, he is.  Well,
+there!"
+
+My courage failed that evening.  I spent it at the coastguard
+station, where they gave me bread and cheese and some awful cider.  I
+passed the kitchen as I came back.  A fire was still burning there,
+and two figures, misty in the darkness, flitted about with stealthy
+laughter like spirits afraid of being detected in a carnal-meal.
+They were Pasiance and Mrs. Hopgood; and so charming was the smell of
+eggs and bacon, and they had such an air of tender enjoyment of this
+dark revel, that I stifled many pangs, as I crept hungry up to bed.
+
+In the middle of the night I woke and heard what I thought was
+screaming; then it sounded like wind in trees, then like the distant
+shaking of a tambourine, with the high singing of a human voice.
+Suddenly it stopped--two long notes came wailing out like sobs--then
+utter stillness; and though I listened for an hour or more there was
+no other sound ....
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+"4th August.
+
+......For three days after I wrote last, nothing at all happened
+here.  I spent the mornings on the cliff reading, and watching the
+sun-sparks raining on the sea.  It's grand up there with the gorse
+all round, the gulls basking on the rocks, the partridges calling in
+the corn, and now and then a young hawk overhead.  The afternoons I
+spent out in the orchard.  The usual routine goes on at the farm all
+the time--cow-milking, bread-baking, John Ford riding in and out,
+Pasiance in her garden stripping lavender, talking to the farm hands;
+and the smell of clover, and cows and hay; the sound of hens and pigs
+and pigeons, the soft drawl of voices, the dull thud of the farm
+carts; and day by day the apples getting redder.  Then, last Monday,
+Pasiance was away from sunrise till sunset--nobody saw her go--nobody
+knew where she had gone.  It was a wonderful, strange day, a sky of
+silver-grey and blue, with a drift of wind-clouds, all the trees
+sighing a little, the sea heaving in a long, low swell, the animals
+restless, the birds silent, except the gulls with their old man's
+laughter and kitten's mewing.
+
+A something wild was in the air; it seemed to sweep across the downs
+and combe, into the very house, like a passionate tune that comes
+drifting to your ears when you're sleepy.  But who would have thought
+the absence of that girl for a few hours could have wrought such
+havoc!  We were like uneasy spirits; Mrs. Hopgood's apple cheeks
+seemed positively to wither before one's eyes.  I came across a
+dairymaid and farm hand discussing it stolidly with very downcast
+faces.  Even Hopgood, a hard-bitten fellow with immense shoulders,
+forgot his imperturbability so far as to harness his horse, and
+depart on what he assured me was "just a wild-guse chaace."  It was
+long before John Ford gave signs of noticing that anything was wrong,
+but late in the afternoon I found him sitting with his hands on his
+knees, staring straight before him.  He rose heavily when he saw me,
+and stalked out.  In the evening, as I was starting for the
+coastguard station to ask for help to search the cliff, Pasiance
+appeared, walking as if she could hardly drag one leg after the
+other.  Her cheeks were crimson; she was biting her lips to keep
+tears of sheer fatigue out of her eyes.  She passed me in the doorway
+without a word.  The anxiety he had gone through seemed to forbid the
+old man from speaking.  He just came forward, took her face in his
+hands, gave it a great kiss, and walked away.  Pasiance dropped on
+the floor in the dark passage, and buried her face on her arms.
+"Leave me alone!" was all she would say.  After a bit she dragged
+herself upstairs.  Presently Mrs. Hopgood came to me.
+
+"Not a word out of her--an' not a bite will she ate, an' I had a pie
+all ready--scrumptious.  The good Lord knows the truth--she asked for
+brandy; have you any brandy, sir?  Ha-apgood'e don't drink it, an'
+Mister Ford 'e don't allaow for anything but caowslip wine."
+
+I had whisky.
+
+The good soul seized the flask, and went off hugging it.  She
+returned it to me half empty.
+
+"Lapped it like a kitten laps milk.  I misdaoubt it's straong, poor
+lamb, it lusened 'er tongue praaperly.  'I've a-done it,' she says to
+me, 'Mums-I've a-done it,' an' she laughed like a mad thing; and
+then, sir, she cried, an' kissed me, an' pusshed me thru the door.
+Gude Lard! What is 't she's a-done...?"
+
+It rained all the next day and the day after.  About five o'clock
+yesterday the rain ceased; I started off to Kingswear on Hopgood's
+nag to see Dan Treffry.  Every tree, bramble, and fern in the lanes
+was dripping water; and every bird singing from the bottom of his
+heart.  I thought of Pasiance all the time.  Her absence that day was
+still a mystery; one never ceased asking oneself what she had done.
+There are people who never grow up--they have no right to do things.
+Actions have consequences--and children have no business with
+consequences.
+
+Dan was out.  I had supper at the hotel, and rode slowly home.  In
+the twilight stretches of the road, where I could touch either bank
+of the lane with my whip, I thought of nothing but Pasiance and her
+grandfather; there was something in the half light suited to wonder
+and uncertainty.  It had fallen dark before I rode into the straw-
+yard.  Two young bullocks snuffled at me, a sleepy hen got up and ran
+off with a tremendous shrieking.  I stabled the horse, and walked
+round to the back.  It was pitch black under the apple-trees, and the
+windows were all darkened.  I stood there a little, everything
+smelled so delicious after the rain; suddenly I had the uncomfortable
+feeling that I was being watched.  Have you ever felt like that on a
+dark night?  I called out at last: "Is any one there?"  Not a sound!
+I walked to the gate-nothing!  The trees still dripped with tiny,
+soft, hissing sounds, but that was all.  I slipped round to the
+front, went in, barricaded the door, and groped up to bed.  But I
+couldn't sleep.  I lay awake a long while; dozed at last, and woke
+with a jump.  A stealthy murmur of smothered voices was going on
+quite close somewhere.  It stopped.  A minute passed; suddenly came
+the soft thud as of something falling.  I sprang out of bed and
+rushed to the window.  Nothing--but in the distance something that
+sounded like footsteps.  An owl hooted; then clear as crystal, but
+quite low, I heard Pasiance singing in her room:
+
+"The apples are ripe and ready to fall.
+Oh! heigh-ho! and ready to fall."
+
+I ran to her door and knocked.
+
+"What is it?" she cried.
+
+"Is anything the matter?"
+
+"Matter?"
+
+"Is anything the matter?"
+
+"Ha-ha-ha-ha!  Good-night!" then quite low, I heard her catch her
+breath, hard, sharply.  No other answer, no other sound.
+
+I went to bed and lay awake for hours....
+
+This evening Dan came; during supper he handed Pasiance a roll of
+music; he had got it in Torquay.  The shopman, he said, had told him
+that it was a "corker."
+
+It was Bach's "Chaconne."  You should have seen her eyes shine, her
+fingers actually tremble while she turned over the pages.  Seems odd
+to think of her worshipping at the shrine of Bach as odd as to think
+of a wild colt running of its free will into the shafts; but that's
+just it with her you can never tell.  "Heavenly!" she kept saying.
+
+John Ford put down his knife and fork.
+
+"Heathenish stuff!" he muttered, and suddenly thundered out,
+"Pasiance!"
+
+She looked up with a start, threw the music from her, and resumed her
+place.
+
+During evening prayers, which follow every night immediately on food,
+her face was a study of mutiny.  She went to bed early.  It was
+rather late when we broke up--for once old Ford had been talking of
+his squatter's life.  As we came out, Dan held up his hand.  A dog
+was barking.  "It's Lass," he said.  "She'll wake Pasiance."
+
+The spaniel yelped furiously.  Dan ran out to stop her.  He was soon
+back.
+
+"Somebody's been in the orchard, and gone off down to the cove."  He
+ran on down the path.  I, too, ran, horribly uneasy.  In front,
+through the darkness, came the spaniel's bark; the lights of the
+coastguard station faintly showed.  I was first on the beach; the dog
+came to me at once, her tail almost in her mouth from apology.  There
+was the sound of oars working in rowlocks; nothing visible but the
+feathery edges of the waves.  Dan said behind, "No use!  He's gone."
+His voice sounded hoarse, like that of a man choking with passion.
+
+"George," he stammered, "it's that blackguard.  I wish I'd put a
+bullet in him."  Suddenly a light burned up in the darkness on the
+sea, seemed to swing gently, and vanished.  Without another word we
+went back up the hill.  John Ford stood at the gate motionless,
+indifferent--nothing had dawned on him as yet.  I whispered to Dan,
+"Let it alone!"
+
+"No," he said, "I'm going to show you."  He struck a match, and
+slowly hunted the footsteps in the wet grass of the orchard.  "Look--
+here!"
+
+He stopped under Pasiance's window and swayed the match over the
+ground.  Clear as daylight were the marks of some one who had jumped
+or fallen.  Dan held the match over his head.
+
+"And look there!" he said.  The bough of an apple-tree below the
+window was broken.  He blew the match out.
+
+I could see the whites of his eyes, like an angry animal's.
+
+"Drop it, Dan!" I said.
+
+He turned on his heel suddenly, and stammered out, "You're right."
+
+But he had turned into John Ford's arms.
+
+The old man stood there like some great force, darker than the
+darkness, staring up at the window, as though stupefied.  We had not
+a word to say.  He seemed unconscious of our presence.  He turned
+round, and left us standing there.
+
+"Follow him!" said Dan.  "Follow him--by God! it's not safe."
+
+We followed.  Bending, and treading heavily, he went upstairs.  He
+struck a blow on Pasiance's door.  "Let me in!" he said.  I drew Dan
+into my bedroom.  The key was slowly turned, her door was flung open,
+and there she stood in her dressing-gown, a candle in her hand, her
+face crimson, and oh! so young, with its short, crisp hair and round
+cheeks.  The old man--like a giant in front of her--raised his hands,
+and laid them on her shoulders.
+
+"What's this?  You--you've had a man in your room?"
+
+Her eyes did not drop.
+
+"Yes," she said.  Dan gave a groan.
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Zachary Pearse," she answered in a voice like a bell.
+
+He gave her one awful shake, dropped his hands, then raised them as
+though to strike her.  She looked him in the eyes; his hands dropped,
+and he too groaned.  As far as I could see, her face never moved.
+
+"I'm married to him," she said, "d' you hear?  Married to him.  Go
+out of my room!"  She dropped the candle on the floor at his feet,
+and slammed the door in his face.  The old man stood for a minute as
+though stunned, then groped his way downstairs.
+
+"Dan," I said, "is it true?"
+
+"Ah!" he answered, "it's true; didn't you hear her?"
+
+I was glad I couldn't see his face.
+
+"That ends it," he said at last; "there's the old man to think of."
+
+"What will he do?"
+
+"Go to the fellow this very night."  He seemed to have no doubt.
+Trust one man of action to know another.
+
+I muttered something about being an outsider--wondered if there was
+anything I could do to help.
+
+"Well," he said slowly, "I don't know that I'm anything but an
+outsider now; but I'll go along with him, if he'll have me."
+
+He went downstairs.  A few minutes later they rode out from the
+straw-yard.  I watched them past the line of hayricks, into the
+blacker shadows of the pines, then the tramp of hoofs began to fail
+in the darkness, and at last died away.
+
+I've been sitting here in my bedroom writing to you ever since, till
+my candle's almost gone.  I keep thinking what the end of it is to
+be; and reproaching myself for doing nothing.  And yet, what could I
+have done?  I'm sorry for her--sorrier than I can say.  The night is
+so quiet--I haven't heard a sound; is she asleep, awake, crying,
+triumphant?
+
+It's four o'clock; I've been asleep.
+
+They're back.  Dan is lying on my bed.  I'll try and tell you his
+story as near as I can, in his own words.
+
+"We rode," he said, "round the upper way, keeping out of the lanes,
+and got to Kingswear by half-past eleven.  The horse-ferry had
+stopped running, and we had a job to find any one to put us over.  We
+hired the fellow to wait for us, and took a carriage at the 'Castle.'
+Before we got to Black Mill it was nearly one, pitch-dark.  With the
+breeze from the southeast, I made out he should have been in an hour
+or more.  The old man had never spoken to me once: and before we got
+there I had begun to hope we shouldn't find the fellow after all.  We
+made the driver pull up in the road, and walked round and round,
+trying to find the door.  Then some one cried, 'Who are you ?'
+
+"'John Ford.'
+
+"'What do you want?' It was old Pearse.
+
+"'To see Zachary Pearse.'
+
+"The long window out of the porch where we sat the other day was
+open, and in we went.  There was a door at the end of the room, and a
+light coming through.  John Ford went towards it; I stayed out in the
+dark.
+
+"'Who's that with you?'
+
+"'Mr. Treffry.'
+
+"'Let him come in!' I went in.  The old fellow was in bed, quite
+still on his pillows, a candle by his side; to look at him you'd
+think nothing of him but his eyes were alive.  It was queer being
+there with those two old men!"
+
+Dan paused, seemed to listen, then went on doggedly.
+
+"'Sit down, gentleman,' said old Pearse.  'What may you want to see
+my son for?'  John Ford begged his pardon, he had something to say,
+he said, that wouldn't wait.
+
+"They were very polite to one another," muttered Dan ....
+
+"'Will you leave your message with me?' said Pearse.
+
+"'What I have to say to your son is private.'
+
+"'I'm his father.'
+
+"'I'm my girl's grandfather; and her only stand-by.'
+
+"'Ah!' muttered old Pearse, 'Rick Voisey's daughter?'
+
+"'I mean to see your son.'
+
+"Old Pearse smiled.  Queer smile he's got, sort of sneering sweet.
+
+"'You can never tell where Zack may be,' he said.  'You think I want
+to shield him.  You're wrong; Zack can take care of himself.'
+
+"'Your son's here!' said John Ford.  'I know.'  Old Pearse gave us a
+very queer look.
+
+"'You come into my house like thieves in the night,' he said, 'and
+give me the lie, do you?'
+
+"'Your son came to my child's room like a thief in the night; it's
+for that I want to see him,' and then," said Dan, "there was a long
+silence.  At last Pearse said:
+
+"'I don't understand; has he played the blackguard?'
+
+"John Ford answered, 'He's married her, or, before God, I'd kill
+him.'
+
+"Old Pearse seemed to think this over, never moving on his pillows.
+'You don't know Zack,' he said; 'I'm sorry for you, and I'm sorry for
+Rick Voisey's daughter; but you don't know Zack.'
+
+"'Sorry!' groaned out John Ford; 'he's stolen my child, and I'll
+punish him.'
+
+"'Punish!' cried old Pearse, 'we don't take punishment, not in my
+family.'
+
+"'Captain Jan Pearse, as sure as I stand here, you and your breed
+will get your punishment of God.'  Old Pearse smiled.
+
+"'Mr. John Ford, that's as may be; but sure as I lie here we won't
+take it of you.  You can't punish unless you make to feel, and that
+you can't du.'"
+
+And that is truth!
+
+Dan went on again:
+
+"'You won't tell me where your son is!' but old Pearse never blinked.
+
+"'I won't,' he said, 'and now you may get out.  I lie here an old man
+alone, with no use to my legs, night on night, an' the house open;
+any rapscallion could get in; d' ye think I'm afraid of you?'
+
+"We were beat; and walked out without a word.  But that old man; I've
+thought of him a lot--ninety-two, and lying there.  Whatever he's
+been, and they tell you rum things of him, whatever his son may be,
+he's a man.  It's not what he said, nor that there was anything to be
+afraid of just then, but somehow it's the idea of the old chap lying
+there.  I don't ever wish to see a better plucked one...."
+
+We sat silent after that; out of doors the light began to stir among
+the leaves.  There were all kinds of rustling sounds, as if the world
+were turning over in bed.
+
+Suddenly Dan said:
+
+"He's cheated me.  I paid him to clear out and leave her alone.
+D' you think she's asleep?"  He's made no appeal for sympathy, he'd
+take pity for an insult; but he feels it badly.
+
+"I'm tired as a cat," he said at last, and went to sleep on my bed.
+
+It's broad daylight now; I too am tired as a cat....
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+"Saturday, 6th August.
+
+.......I take up my tale where I left off yesterday....  Dan and I
+started as soon as we could get Mrs. Hopgood to give us coffee.  The
+old lady was more tentative, more undecided, more pouncing, than I
+had ever seen her.  She was manifestly uneasy: Ha-apgood--who "don't
+slape "don't he, if snores are any criterion--had called out in the
+night, "Hark to th' 'arses' 'oofs!"  Had we heard them?  And where
+might we be going then?  'Twas very earrly to start, an' no
+breakfast.  Haapgood had said it was goin' to shaowerr.  Miss
+Pasiance was not to 'er violin yet, an' Mister Ford 'e kept 'is room.
+Was it?--would there be--?  "Well, an' therr's an 'arvest bug; 'tis
+some earrly for they!"  Wonderful how she pounces on all such
+creatures, when I can't even see them.  She pressed it absently
+between finger and thumb, and began manoeuvring round another way.
+Long before she had reached her point, we had gulped down our coffee,
+and departed.  But as we rode out she came at a run, holding her
+skirts high with either hand, raised her old eyes bright and anxious
+in their setting of fine wrinkles, and said:
+
+"'Tidden sorrow for her?"
+
+A shrug of the shoulders was all the answer she got.  We rode by the
+lanes; through sloping farmyards, all mud and pigs, and dirty straw,
+and farmers with clean-shaven upper lips and whiskers under the chin;
+past fields of corn, where larks were singing.  Up or down, we didn't
+draw rein till we came to Dan's hotel.
+
+There was the river gleaming before us under a rainbow mist that
+hallowed every shape.  There seemed affinity between the earth and
+the sky.  I've never seen that particular soft unity out of Devon.
+And every ship, however black or modern, on those pale waters, had
+the look of a dream ship.  The tall green woods, the red earth, the
+white houses, were all melted into one opal haze.  It was raining,
+but the sun was shining behind.  Gulls swooped by us--ghosts of the
+old greedy wanderers of the sea.
+
+We had told our two boatmen to pull us out to the Pied Witch!  They
+started with great resolution, then rested on their oars.
+
+"The Pied Witch, zurr?" asked one politely; "an' which may her be?"
+
+That's the West countryman all over!  Never say you "nay," never lose
+an opportunity, never own he doesn't know, or can't do anything--
+independence, amiability, and an eye to the main chance.  We
+mentioned Pearse's name.
+
+"Capt'n Zach'ry Pearse!"  They exchanged a look half-amused, half-
+admiring.
+
+"The Zunflaower, yu mane.  That's her.  Zunflaower, ahoy!"  As we
+mounted the steamer's black side I heard one say:
+
+"Pied Witch!  A pra-aper name that--a dandy name for her!"  They
+laughed as they made fast.
+
+The mate of the Sunflower, or Pied Witch, or whatever she was called,
+met us--a tall young fellow in his shirtsleeves, tanned to the roots
+of his hair, with sinewy, tattooed arms, and grey eyes, charred round
+the rims from staring at weather.
+
+"The skipper is on board," he said.  "We're rather busy, as you see.
+Get on with that, you sea-cooks," he bawled at two fellows who were
+doing nothing.  All over the ship, men were hauling, splicing, and
+stowing cargo.
+
+"To-day's Friday: we're off on Wednesday with any luck.  Will you
+come this way?"  He led us down the companion to a dark hole which he
+called the saloon.  "Names?  What! are you Mr. Treffry?  Then we're
+partners!"  A schoolboy's glee came on his face.
+
+"Look here!" he said; "I can show you something," and he unlocked the
+door of a cabin.  There appeared to be nothing in it but a huge piece
+of tarpaulin, which depended, bulging, from the topmost bunk.  He
+pulled it up.  The lower bunk had been removed, and in its place was
+the ugly body of a dismounted Gatling gun.
+
+"Got six of them," he whispered, with unholy mystery, through which
+his native frankness gaped out.  "Worth their weight in gold out
+there just now, the skipper says.  Got a heap of rifles, too, and
+lots of ammunition.  He's given me a share.  This is better than the
+P. and O., and playing deck cricket with the passengers.  I'd made up
+my mind already to chuck that, and go in for plantin' sugar, when I
+ran across the skipper.  Wonderful chap, the skipper!  I'll go and
+tell him.  He's been out all night; only came aboard at four bells;
+having a nap now, but he won't mind that for you."
+
+Off he went.  I wondered what there was in Zachary Pearse to attract
+a youngster of this sort; one of the customary twelve children of
+some country parson, no doubt-burning to shoot a few niggers, and for
+ever frank and youthful.
+
+He came back with his hands full of bottles.
+
+"What'll you drink?  The skipper'll be here in a jiffy.  Excuse my
+goin' on deck.  We're so busy."
+
+And in five minutes Zachary Pearse did come.  He made no attempt to
+shake hands, for which I respected him.  His face looked worn, and
+more defiant than usual.
+
+"Well, gentlemen?" he said.
+
+"We've come to ask what you're going to do?" said Dan.
+
+"I don't know," answered Pearse, "that that's any of your business."
+
+Dan's little eyes were like the eyes of an angry pig.
+
+"You've got five hundred pounds of mine," he said; "why do you think
+I gave it you?"
+
+Zachary bit his fingers.
+
+"That's no concern of mine," he said.  "I sail on Wednesday.  Your
+money's safe."
+
+"Do you know what I think of you?" said Dan.
+
+"No, and you'd better not tell me!"  Then, with one of his peculiar
+changes, he smiled: "As you like, though."
+
+Dan's face grew very dark.  "Give me a plain answer," he said: "What
+are you going to do about her?"
+
+Zachary looked up at him from under his brows.
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Are you cur enough to deny that you've married her?"
+
+Zachary looked at him coolly.  "Not at all," he said.
+
+"What in God's name did you do it for?"
+
+"You've no monopoly in the post of husband, Mr.  Treffry."
+
+"To put a child in that position!  Haven't you the heart of a man?
+What d' ye come sneaking in at night for?  By Gad!  Don't you know
+you've done a beastly thing?"
+
+Zachary's face darkened, he clenched his fists.  Then he seemed to
+shut his anger into himself.
+
+"You wanted me to leave her to you," he sneered.  "I gave her my
+promise that I'd take her out there, and we'd have gone off on
+Wednesday quietly enough, if you hadn't come and nosed the whole
+thing out with your infernal dog.  The fat's in the fire!  There's no
+reason why I should take her now.  I'll come back to her a rich man,
+or not at all."
+
+"And in the meantime?" I slipped in.
+
+He turned to me, in an ingratiating way.
+
+"I would have taken her to save the fuss--I really would--it's not my
+fault the thing's come out.  I'm on a risky job.  To have her with me
+might ruin the whole thing; it would affect my nerve.  It isn't safe
+for her."
+
+"And what's her position to be," I said, "while you're away?  Do you
+think she'd have married you if she'd known you were going to leave
+her like this?  You ought to give up this business.
+
+"You stole her.  Her life's in your hands; she's only a child!"
+
+A quiver passed over his face; it showed that he was suffering.
+
+"Give it up!" I urged.
+
+"My last farthing's in it," he sighed; "the chance of a lifetime."
+
+He looked at me doubtfully, appealingly, as if for the first time in
+his life he had been given a glimpse of that dilemma of consequences
+which his nature never recognises.  I thought he was going to give
+in.  Suddenly, to my horror, Dan growled, "Play the man!"
+
+Pearse turned his head.  "I don't want your advice anyway," he said;
+"I'll not be dictated to."
+
+"To your last day," said Dan, "you shall answer to me for the way you
+treat her."
+
+Zachary smiled.
+
+"Do you see that fly?" he said.  "Wel--I care for you as little as
+this," and he flicked the fly off his white trousers.  "Good-
+morning...!"
+
+The noble mariners who manned our boat pulled lustily for the shore,
+but we had hardly shoved off' when a storm of rain burst over the
+ship, and she seemed to vanish, leaving a picture on my eyes of the
+mate waving his cap above the rail, with his tanned young face bent
+down at us, smiling, keen, and friendly.
+
+...... We reached the shore drenched, angry with ourselves, and with
+each other; I started sulkily for home.
+
+As I rode past an orchard, an apple, loosened by the rainstorm, came
+down with a thud.
+
+"The apples were ripe and ready to fall,
+Oh! heigh-ho! and ready to fall."
+
+I made up my mind to pack, and go away.  But there's a strangeness, a
+sort of haunting fascination in it all.  To you, who don't know the
+people, it may only seem a piece of rather sordid folly.  But it
+isn't the good, the obvious, the useful that puts a spell on us in
+life.  It's the bizarre, the dimly seen, the mysterious for good or
+evil.
+
+The sun was out again when I rode up to the farm; its yellow thatch
+shone through the trees as if sheltering a store of gladness and good
+news.  John Ford himself opened the door to me.
+
+He began with an apology, which made me feel more than ever an
+intruder; then he said:
+
+"I have not spoken to my granddaughter--I waited to see Dan Treffry."
+
+He was stern and sad-eyed, like a man with a great weight of grief on
+his shoulders.  He looked as if he had not slept; his dress was out
+of order, he had not taken his clothes off, I think.  He isn't a man
+whom you can pity.  I felt I had taken a liberty in knowing of the
+matter at all.  When I told him where we had been, he said:
+
+"It was good of you to take this trouble.  That you should have had
+to!  But since such things have come to pass--" He made a gesture
+full of horror.  He gave one the impression of a man whose pride was
+struggling against a mortal hurt.  Presently he asked:
+
+"You saw him, you say?  He admitted this marriage?  Did he give an
+explanation?"
+
+I tried to make Pearse's point of view clear.  Before this old man,
+with his inflexible will and sense of duty, I felt as if I held a
+brief for Zachary, and must try to do him justice.
+
+"Let me understand," he said at last.  "He stole her, you say, to
+make sure; and deserts her within a fortnight."
+
+"He says he meant to take her--"
+
+"Do you believe that?"
+
+Before I could answer, I saw Pasiance standing at the window.  How
+long she had been there I don't know.
+
+"Is it true that he is going to leave me behind?" she cried out.
+
+I could only nod.
+
+"Did you hear him your own self?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+She stamped her foot.
+
+"But he promised! He promised!"
+
+John Ford went towards her.
+
+"Don't touch me, grandfather!  I hate every one!  Let him do what he
+likes, I don't care."
+
+John Ford's face turned quite grey.
+
+"Pasiance," he said, "did you want to leave me so much?"
+
+She looked straight at us, and said sharply:
+
+"What's the good of telling stories.  I can't help its hurting you."
+
+"What did you think you would find away from here?"
+
+She laughed.
+
+"Find?  I don't know--nothing; I wouldn't be stifled anyway.  Now I
+suppose you'll shut me up because I'm a weak girl, not strong like
+men!"
+
+"Silence!" said John Ford; "I will make him take you."
+
+"You shan't!" she cried; "I won't let you.  He's free to do as he
+likes.  He's free--I tell you all, everybody--free!"
+
+She ran through the window, and vanished.
+
+John Ford made a movement as if the bottom had dropped out of his
+world.  I left him there.
+
+I went to the kitchen, where Hopgood was sitting at the table, eating
+bread and cheese.  He got up on seeing me, and very kindly brought me
+some cold bacon and a pint of ale.
+
+"I thart I shude be seeing yu, zurr," he said between his bites;
+"Therr's no thart to 'atin' 'bout the 'ouse to-day.  The old wumman's
+puzzivantin' over Miss Pasiance.  Young girls are skeery critters"--
+he brushed his sleeve over his broad, hard jaws, and filled a pipe
+"specially when it's in the blood of 'em.  Squire Rick Voisey werr a
+dandy; an' Mistress Voisey--well, she werr a nice lady tu, but"--
+rolling the stem of his pipe from corner to corner of his mouth--"she
+werr a pra-aper vixen."
+
+Hopgood's a good fellow, and I believe as soft as he looks hard, but
+he's not quite the sort with whom one chooses to talk over a matter
+like this.  I went upstairs, and began to pack, but after a bit
+dropped it for a book, and somehow or other fell asleep.
+
+I woke, and looked at my watch; it was five o'clock.  I had been
+asleep four hours.  A single sunbeam was slanting across from one of
+my windows to the other, and there was the cool sound of milk
+dropping into pails; then, all at once, a stir as of alarm, and heavy
+footsteps.
+
+I opened my door.  Hopgood and a coast-guardsman were carrying
+Pasiance slowly up the stairs.  She lay in their arms without moving,
+her face whiter than her dress, a scratch across the forehead, and
+two or three drops there of dried blood.  Her hands were clasped, and
+she slowly crooked and stiffened out her fingers.  When they turned
+with her at the stair top, she opened her lips, and gasped, "All
+right, don't put me down.  I can bear it."  They passed, and, with a
+half-smile in her eyes, she said something to me that I couldn't
+catch; the door was shut, and the excited whispering began again
+below.  I waited for the men to come out, and caught hold of Hopgood.
+He wiped the sweat off his forehead.
+
+"Poor young thing!" he said.  "She fell--down the cliffs--'tis her
+back--coastguard saw her 'twerr they fetched her in.  The Lord 'elp
+her mebbe she's not broken up much!  An' Mister Ford don't know!  I'm
+gwine for the doctor."
+
+There was an hour or more to wait before he came; a young fellow;
+almost a boy.  He looked very grave, when he came out of her room.
+
+"The old woman there fond of her?  nurse her well...?  Fond as a
+dog!--good!  Don't know--can't tell for certain!  Afraid it's the
+spine, must have another opinion!  What a plucky girl!  Tell Mr. Ford
+to have the best man he can get in Torquay--there's C---.  I'll be
+round the first thing in the morning.  Keep her dead quiet.  I've
+left a sleeping draught; she'll have fever tonight."
+
+John Ford came in at last.  Poor old man!  What it must have cost him
+not to go to her for fear of the excitement!  How many times in the
+next few hours didn't I hear him come to the bottom of the stairs;
+his heavy wheezing, and sighing; and the forlorn tread of his feet
+going back!  About eleven, just as I was going to bed, Mrs. Hopgood
+came to my door.
+
+"Will yu come, sir," she said; "she's asking for yu.  Naowt I can zay
+but what she will see yu; zeems crazy, don't it?"  A tear trickled
+down the old lady's cheek.  "Du 'ee come; 'twill du 'err 'arm mebbe,
+but I dunno--she'll fret else."
+
+I slipped into the room.  Lying back on her pillows, she was
+breathing quickly with half-closed eyes.  There was nothing to show
+that she had wanted me, or even knew that I was there.  The wick of
+the candle, set by the bedside, had been snuffed too short, and gave
+but a faint light; both window and door stood open, still there was
+no draught, and the feeble little flame burned quite still, casting a
+faint yellow stain on the ceiling like the refection from a buttercup
+held beneath a chin.  These ceilings are far too low!  Across the
+wide, squat window the apple branches fell in black stripes which
+never stirred.  It was too dark to see things clearly.  At the foot
+of the bed was a chest, and there Mrs. Hopgood had sat down, moving
+her lips as if in speech.  Mingled with the half-musty smell of age;
+there were other scents, of mignonette, apples, and some sweet-
+smelling soap.  The floor had no carpet, and there was not one single
+dark object except the violin, hanging from a nail over the bed.  A
+little, round clock ticked solemnly.
+
+"Why won't you give me that stuff, Mums?" Pasiance said in a faint,
+sharp voice.  "I want to sleep."
+
+"Have you much pain?" I asked.
+
+"Of course I have; it's everywhere."
+
+She turned her face towards me.
+
+"You thought I did it on purpose, but you're wrong.  If I had, I'd
+have done it better than this.  I wouldn't have this brutal pain."
+She put her fingers over her eyes.  "It's horrible to complain!  Only
+it's so bad!  But I won't again--promise."
+
+She took the sleeping draught gratefully, making a face, like a child
+after a powder.
+
+"How long do you think it'll be before I can play again?  Oh! I
+forgot--there are other things to think about."  She held out her
+hand to me.  "Look at my ring.  Married--isn't it funny?  Ha, ha!
+Nobody will ever understand--that's funny too!  Poor Gran!  You see,
+there wasn't any reason--only me.  That's the only reason I'm telling
+you now; Mums is there--but she doesn't count; why don't you count,
+Mums?"
+
+The fever was fighting against the draught; she had tossed the
+clothes back from her throat, and now and then raised one thin arm a
+little, as if it eased her; her eyes had grown large, and innocent
+like a child's; the candle, too, had flared, and was burning clearly.
+
+"Nobody is to tell him--nobody at all; promise...!  If I hadn't
+slipped, it would have been different.  What would have happened
+then?  You can't tell; and I can't--that's funny!  Do you think I
+loved him?  Nobody marries without love, do they?  Not quite without
+love, I mean.  But you see I wanted to be free, he said he'd take me;
+and now he's left me after all!  I won't be left, I can't!  When I
+came to the cliff--that bit where the ivy grows right down--there was
+just the sea there, underneath; so I thought I would throw myself
+over and it would be all quiet; and I climbed on a ledge, it looked
+easier from there, but it was so high, I wanted to get back; and then
+my foot slipped; and now it's all pain.  You can't think much, when
+you're in pain."
+
+>From her eyes I saw that she was dropping off.
+
+"Nobody can take you away from-yourself.  He's not to be told--not
+even--I don't--want you--to go away, because--"But her eyes closed,
+and she dropped off to sleep.
+
+They don't seem to know this morning whether she is better or
+worse....
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+"Tuesday, 9th August.
+
+It seems more like three weeks than three days since I wrote.  The
+time passes slowly in a sickhouse...!  The doctors were here this
+morning, they give her forty hours.  Not a word of complaint has
+passed her lips since she knew.  To see her you would hardly think
+her ill; her cheeks have not had time to waste or lose their colour.
+There is not much pain, but a slow, creeping numbness....  It was
+John Ford's wish that she should be told.  She just turned her head
+to the wall and sighed; then to poor old Mrs. Hopgood, who was crying
+her heart out: "Don't cry, Mums, I don't care."
+
+When they had gone, she asked for her violin.  She made them hold it
+for her, and drew the bow across the strings; but the notes that came
+out were so trembling and uncertain that she dropped the bow and
+broke into a passion of sobbing.  Since then, no complaint or moan of
+any kind....
+
+But to go back.  On Sunday, the day after I wrote, as I was coming
+from a walk, I met a little boy making mournful sounds on a tin
+whistle.
+
+"Coom ahn!" he said, "the Miss wahnts t' zee yu."
+
+I went to her room.  In the morning she had seemed better, but now
+looked utterly exhausted.  She had a letter in her hand.
+
+"It's this," she said.  "I don't seem to understand it.  He wants me
+to do something--but I can't think, and my eyes feel funny.  Read it
+to me, please."
+
+The letter was from Zachary.  I read it to her in a low voice, for
+Mrs. Hopgood was in the room, her eyes always fixed on Pasiance above
+her knitting.  When I'd finished, she made me read it again, and yet
+again.  At first she seemed pleased, almost excited, then came a
+weary, scornful look, and before I'd finished the third time she was
+asleep.  It was a remarkable letter, that seemed to bring the man
+right before one's eyes.  I slipped it under her fingers on the bed-
+clothes, and went out.  Fancy took me to the cliff where she had
+fallen.  I found the point of rock where the cascade of ivy flows
+down the cliff; the ledge on which she had climbed was a little to my
+right--a mad place.  It showed plainly what wild emotions must have
+been driving her!  Behind was a half-cut cornfield with a fringe of
+poppies, and swarms of harvest insects creeping and flying; in the
+uncut corn a landrail kept up a continual charring.  The sky was blue
+to the very horizon, and the sea wonderful, under that black wild
+cliff stained here and there with red.  Over the dips and hollows of
+the fields great white clouds hung low down above the land.  There
+are no brassy, east-coast skies here; but always sleepy, soft-shaped
+clouds, full of subtle stir and change.  Passages of Zachary's
+Pearse's letter kept rising to my lips.  After all he's the man that
+his native place, and life, and blood have made him.  It is useless
+to expect idealists where the air is soft and things good to look on
+(the idealist grows where he must create beauty or comfort for
+himself); useless to expect a man of law and order, in one whose
+fathers have stared at the sea day and night for a thousand years--
+the sea, full of its promises of unknown things, never quite the
+same, a slave to its own impulses.  Man is an imitative animal....
+
+"Life's hard enough," he wrote, "without tying yourself down.  Don't
+think too hardly of me!  Shall I make you happier by taking you into
+danger?  If I succeed you'll be a rich woman; but I shall fail if
+you're with me.  To look at you makes me soft.  At sea a man dreams
+of all the good things on land, he'll dream of the heather, and
+honey--you're like that; and he'll dream of the apple-trees, and the
+grass of the orchards--you're like that; sometimes he only lies on
+his back and wishes--and you're like that, most of all like that...."
+
+When I was reading those words I remember a strange, soft, half-
+scornful look came over Pasiance's face; and once she said, "But
+that's all nonsense, isn't it...?"
+
+Then followed a long passage about what he would gain if he
+succeeded, about all that he was risking, the impossibility of
+failure, if he kept his wits about him.  "It's only a matter of two
+months or so," he went on; "stay where you are, dear, or go to my
+Dad.  He'll be glad to have you.  There's my mother's room.  There's
+no one to say 'No' to your fiddle there; you can play it by the sea;
+and on dark nights you'll have the stars dancing to you over the
+water as thick as bees.  I've looked at them often, thinking of
+you...."
+
+Pasiance had whispered to me, "Don't read that bit," and afterwards I
+left it out....  Then the sensuous side of him shows up: "When I've
+brought this off, there's the whole world before us.  There are
+places I can take you to.  There's one I know, not too warm and not
+too cold, where you can sit all day in the shade and watch the
+creepers, and the cocoa-palms, still as still; nothing to do or care
+about; all the fruits you can think of; no noise but the parrots and
+the streams, and a splash when a nigger dives into a water-hole.
+Pasiance, we'll go there!  With an eighty-ton craft there's no sea we
+couldn't know.  The world's a fine place for those who go out to take
+it; there's lots of unknown stuff' in it yet.  I'll fill your lap, my
+pretty, so full of treasures that you shan't know yourself.  A man
+wasn't meant to sit at home...."
+
+Throughout this letter--for all its real passion--one could feel how
+the man was holding to his purpose--the rather sordid purpose of this
+venture.  He's unconscious of it; for he is in love with her; but he
+must be furthering his own ends.  He is vital--horribly vital!  I
+wonder less now that she should have yielded.
+
+What visions hasn't he dangled before her.  There was physical
+attraction, too--I haven't forgotten the look I saw on her face at
+Black Mill.  But when all's said and done, she married him, because
+she's Pasiance Voisey, who does things and wants "to get back."  And
+she lies there dying; not he nor any other man will ever take her
+away.  It's pitiful to think of him tingling with passion, writing
+that letter to this doomed girl in that dark hole of a saloon.  "I've
+wanted money," he wrote, "ever since I was a little chap sitting in
+the fields among the cows....  I want it for you now, and I mean to
+have it.  I've studied the thing two years; I know what I know....
+
+"The moment this is in the post I leave for London.  There are a
+hundred things to look after still; I can't trust myself within reach
+of you again till the anchor's weighed.  When I re-christened her the
+Pied Witch, I thought of you--you witch to me...."
+
+There followed a solemn entreaty to her to be on the path leading to
+the cove at seven o'clock on Wednesday evening (that is, to-morrow)
+when he would come ashore and bid her good-bye.  It was signed, "Your
+loving husband, Zachary Pearse...."
+
+I lay at the edge of that cornfield a long time; it was very
+peaceful.  The church bells had begun to ring.  The long shadows came
+stealing out from the sheaves; woodpigeons rose one by one, and
+flapped off to roost; the western sky was streaked with red, and all
+the downs and combe bathed in the last sunlight.  Perfect harvest
+weather; but oppressively still, the stillness of suspense....
+
+Life at the farm goes on as usual.  We have morning and evening
+prayers.  John Ford reads them fiercely, as though he were on the eve
+of a revolt against his God.  Morning and evening he visits her,
+comes out wheezing heavily, and goes to his own room; I believe, to
+pray.  Since this morning I haven't dared meet him.  He is a strong
+old man--but this will break him up....
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+"KINGSWEAR, Saturday, 13th August.
+
+It's over--I leave here to-morrow, and go abroad.
+
+A quiet afternoon--not a breath up in the churchyard!  I was there
+quite half an hour before they came.  Some red cows had strayed into
+the adjoining orchard, and were rubbing their heads against the
+railing.  While I stood there an old woman came and drove them away;
+afterwards, she stooped and picked up the apples that had fallen
+before their time.
+
+"The apples are ripe and ready to fall,
+Oh! heigh-ho! and ready to fall;
+There came an old woman and gathered them all,
+Oh! heigh-ho! and gathered them all."
+
+......They brought Pasiance very simply--no hideous funeral
+trappings, thank God--the farm hands carried her, and there was no
+one there but John Ford, the Hopgoods, myself, and that young doctor.
+They read the service over her grave.  I can hear John Ford's "Amen!"
+now.  When it was over he walked away bareheaded in the sun, without
+a word.  I went up there again this evening, and wandered amongst the
+tombstones.  "Richard Voisey," "John, the son of Richard and
+Constance Voisey," "Margery Voisey," so many generations of them in
+that corner; then "Richard Voisey and Agnes his wife," and next to it
+that new mound on which a sparrow was strutting and the shadows of
+the apple-trees already hovering.
+
+I will tell you the little left to tell....
+
+On Wednesday afternoon she asked for me again.
+
+"It's only till seven," she whispered.  "He's certain to come then.
+But if I--were to die first--then tell him--I'm sorry for him.  They
+keep saying: 'Don't talk--don't talk!' Isn't it stupid?  As if I
+should have any other chance!  There'll be no more talking after to-
+night!  Make everybody come, please--I want to see them all.  When
+you're dying you're freer than any other time--nobody wants you to do
+things, nobody cares what you say....  He promised me I should do
+what I liked if I married him--I never believed that really--but now
+I can do what I like; and say all the things I want to."  She lay
+back silent; she could not after all speak the inmost thoughts that
+are in each of us, so sacred that they melt away at the approach of
+words.
+
+I shall remember her like that--with the gleam of a smile in her
+half-closed eyes, her red lips parted--such a quaint look of mockery,
+pleasure, regret, on her little round, upturned face; the room white,
+and fresh with flowers, the breeze guttering the apple-leaves against
+the window.  In the night they had unhooked the violin and taken it
+away; she had not missed it....  When Dan came, I gave up my place to
+him.  He took her hand gently in his great paw, without speaking.
+
+"How small my hand looks there," she said, "too small."  Dan put it
+softly back on the bedclothes and wiped his forehead.  Pasiance cried
+in a sharp whisper: "Is it so hot in here?  I didn't know."  Dan bent
+down, put his lips to her fingers and left the room.
+
+The afternoon was long, the longest I've ever spent.  Sometimes she
+seemed to sleep, sometimes whispered to herself about her mother, her
+grandfather, the garden, or her cats--all sorts of inconsequent,
+trivial, even ludicrous memories seemed to throng her mind--never
+once, I think, did she speak of Zachary, but, now and then, she asked
+the time....  Each hour she grew visibly weaker.  John Ford sat by
+her without moving, his heavy breathing was often the only sound;
+sometimes she rubbed her fingers on his hand, without speaking.  It
+was a summary of their lives together.  Once he prayed aloud for her
+in a hoarse voice; then her pitiful, impatient eyes signed to me.
+
+"Quick," she whispered, "I want him; it's all so--cold."
+
+I went out and ran down the path towards the cove.
+
+Leaning on a gate stood Zachary, an hour before his time; dressed in
+the same old blue clothes and leather-peaked cap as on the day when I
+saw him first.  He knew nothing of what had happened.  But at a
+quarter of the truth, I'm sure he divined the whole, though he would
+not admit it to himself.  He kept saying, "It can't be.  She'll be
+well in a few days--a sprain! D' you think the sea-voyage....  Is she
+strong enough to be moved now at once?"
+
+It was painful to see his face, so twisted by the struggle between
+his instinct and his vitality.  The sweat poured down his forehead.
+He turned round as we walked up the path, and pointed out to sea.
+There was his steamer.  "I could get her on board in no time.
+Impossible!  What is it, then?  Spine?  Good God!  The doctors....
+Sometimes they'll do wonders!"  It was pitiful to see his efforts to
+blind himself to the reality.
+
+"It can't be, she's too young.  We're walking very slow."  I told him
+she was dying.
+
+For a second I thought he was going to run away.  Then he jerked up
+his head, and rushed on towards the house.  At the foot of the
+staircase he gripped me by the shoulder.
+
+"It's not true!" he said; "she'll get better now I'm here.  I'll
+stay.  Let everything go.  I'll stay."
+
+"Now's the time," I said, "to show you loved her.  Pull yourself
+together, man!"  He shook all over.
+
+"Yes!" was all he answered.  We went into her room.  It seemed
+impossible she was going to die; the colour was bright in her cheeks,
+her lips trembling and pouted as if she had just been kissed, her
+eyes gleaming, her hair so dark and crisp, her face so young....
+
+Half an hour later I stole to the open door of her room.  She was
+still and white as the sheets of her bed.  John Ford stood at the
+foot; and, bowed to the level of the pillows, his head on his
+clenched fists, sat Zachary.  It was utterly quiet.  The guttering of
+the leaves had ceased.  When things have come to a crisis, how little
+one feels--no fear, no pity, no sorrow, rather the sense, as when a
+play is over, of anxiety to get away!
+
+Suddenly Zachary rose, brushed past me without seeing, and ran
+downstairs.
+
+Some hours later I went out on the path leading to the cove.  It was
+pitch-black; the riding light of the Pied Witch was still there,
+looking no bigger than a firefly.  Then from in front I heard
+sobbing--a man's sobs; no sound is quite so dreadful.  Zachary Pearse
+got up out of the bank not ten paces off.
+
+I had no heart to go after him, and sat down in the hedge.  There was
+something subtly akin to her in the fresh darkness of the young
+night; the soft bank, the scent of honeysuckle, the touch of the
+ferns and brambles.  Death comes to all of us, and when it's over
+it's over; but this blind business--of those left behind
+
+A little later the ship whistled twice; her starboard light gleamed
+faintly--and that was all....
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+"TORQUAY, 30th October.
+
+....Do you remember the letters I wrote you from Moor Farm nearly
+three years ago?  To-day I rode over there.  I stopped at Brixham on
+the way for lunch, and walked down to the quay.  There had been a
+shower--but the sun was out again, shining on the sea, the brown-red
+sails, and the rampart of slate roofs.
+
+A trawler was lying there, which had evidently been in a collision.
+The spiky-bearded, thin-lipped fellow in torn blue jersey and sea-
+boots who was superintending the repairs, said to me a little
+proudly:
+
+"Bane in collision, zurr; like to zee over her?"  Then suddenly
+screwing up his little blue eyes, he added:
+
+"Why, I remembers yu.  Steered yu along o' the young lady in this yer
+very craft."
+
+It was Prawle, Zachary Pearse's henchman.
+
+"Yes," he went on, "that's the cutter."
+
+"And Captain Pearse?"
+
+He leant his back against the quay, and spat.  "He was a pra-aper
+man; I never zane none like 'en."
+
+"Did you do any good out there?"
+
+Prawle gave me a sharp glance.
+
+"Gude?  No, t'was arrm we done, vrom ztart to finish--had trouble all
+the time.  What a man cude du, the skipper did.  When yu caan't du
+right, zome calls it 'Providence'!  'Tis all my eye an' Betty Martin!
+What I zay es, 'tis these times, there's such a dale o' folk, a dale
+of puzzivantin' fellers; the world's to small."
+
+With these words there flashed across me a vision of Drake crushed
+into our modern life by the shrinkage of the world; Drake caught in
+the meshes of red tape, electric wires, and all the lofty appliances
+of our civilization.  Does a type survive its age; live on into times
+that have no room for it?  The blood is there--and sometimes there's
+a throw-back....  All fancy!  Eh?
+
+"So," I said, "you failed?"
+
+Prawle wriggled.
+
+"I wudden' goo for to zay that, zurr--'tis an ugly word.  Da-am!" he
+added, staring at his boots, "'twas thru me tu.  We were along among
+the haythen, and I mus' nades goo for to break me leg.  The capt'n he
+wudden' lave me.  'One Devon man,' he says to me, 'don' lave
+anotherr.'  We werr six days where we shuld ha' been tu; when we got
+back to the ship a cruiser had got her for gun-runnin'."
+
+"And what has become of Captain Pearse?"
+
+Prawle answered, "Zurr, I belave 'e went to China, 'tis onsartin."
+
+"He's not dead?"
+
+Prawle looked at me with a kind of uneasy anger.
+
+"Yu cudden' kell 'en!  'Tis true, mun 'll die zome day.  But therr's
+not a one that'll show better zport than Capt'n Zach'ry Pearse."
+
+I believe that; he will be hard to kill.  The vision of him comes up,
+with his perfect balance, defiant eyes, and sweetish smile; the way
+the hair of his beard crisped a little, and got blacker on the
+cheeks; the sort of desperate feeling he gave, that one would never
+get the better of him, that he would never get the better of himself.
+
+I took leave of Prawle and half a crown.  Before I was off the quay I
+heard him saying to a lady, "Bane in collision, marm!  Like to zee
+over her?"
+
+After lunch I rode on to Moor.  The old place looked much the same;
+but the apple-trees were stripped of fruit, and their leaves
+beginning to go yellow and fall.  One of Pasiance's cats passed me in
+the orchard hunting a bird, still with a ribbon round its neck.  John
+Ford showed me all his latest improvements, but never by word or sign
+alluded to the past.  He inquired after Dan, back in New Zealand now,
+without much interest; his stubbly beard and hair have whitened; he
+has grown very stout, and I noticed that his legs are not well under
+control; he often stops to lean on his stick.  He was very ill last
+winter; and sometimes, they say, will go straight off to sleep in the
+middle of a sentence.
+
+I managed to get a few minutes with the Hopgoods.  We talked of
+Pasiance sitting in the kitchen under a row of plates, with that
+clinging smell of wood-smoke, bacon, and age bringing up memories, as
+nothing but scents can.  The dear old lady's hair, drawn so nicely
+down her forehead on each side from the centre of her cap, has a few
+thin silver lines; and her face is a thought more wrinkled.  The
+tears still come into her eyes when she talks of her "lamb."
+
+Of Zachary I heard nothing, but she told me of old Pearse's death.
+
+"Therr they found 'en, zo to spake, dead--in th' sun; but Ha-apgood
+can tell yu," and Hopgood, ever rolling his pipe, muttered something,
+and smiled his wooden smile.
+
+He came to see me off from the straw-yard.  "'Tis like death to the
+varrm, zurr," he said, putting all the play of his vast shoulders
+into the buckling of my girths.  "Mister Ford--well!  And not one of
+th' old stock to take it when 'e's garn....  Ah! it werr cruel; my
+old woman's never been hersel' since.  Tell 'ee what 'tis--don't du
+t' think to much."
+
+I went out of my way to pass the churchyard.  There were flowers,
+quite fresh, chrysanthemums, and asters; above them the white stone,
+already stained:
+
+        "PASIANCE
+
+        "WIFE OF ZACHARY PEARSE
+
+        "'The Lord hath given, and the Lord hath taken away.'"
+
+The red cows were there too; the sky full of great white clouds, some
+birds whistling a little mournfully, and in the air the scent of
+fallen leaves....
+
+May, 1900.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A KNIGHT
+
+
+
+TO
+
+MY MOTHER
+
+
+
+
+A KNIGHT
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+At Monte Carlo, in the spring of the year 189-, I used to notice an
+old fellow in a grey suit and sunburnt straw hat with a black ribbon.
+Every morning at eleven o'clock, he would come down to the Place,
+followed by a brindled German boarhound, walk once or twice round it,
+and seat himself on a bench facing the casino.  There he would remain
+in the sun, with his straw hat tilted forward, his thin legs apart,
+his brown hands crossed between them, and the dog's nose resting on
+his knee.  After an hour or more he would get up, and, stooping a
+little from the waist, walk slowly round the Place and return up
+hill.  Just before three, he would come down again in the same
+clothes and go into the casino, leaving the dog outside.
+
+One afternoon, moved by curiosity, I followed him.  He passed through
+the hall without looking at the gambling-rooms, and went into the
+concert.  It became my habit after that to watch for him.  When he
+sat in the Place I could see him from the window of my room.  The
+chief puzzle to me was the matter of his nationality.
+
+His lean, short face had a skin so burnt that it looked like leather;
+his jaw was long and prominent, his chin pointed, and he had hollows
+in his cheeks.  There were wrinkles across his forehead; his eyes
+were brown; and little white moustaches were brushed up from the
+corners of his lips.  The back of his head bulged out above the lines
+of his lean neck and high, sharp shoulders; his grey hair was cropped
+quite close.  In the Marseilles buffet, on the journey out, I had met
+an Englishman, almost his counterpart in features--but somehow very
+different!  This old fellow had nothing of the other's alert,
+autocratic self-sufficiency.  He was quiet and undemonstrative,
+without looking, as it were, insulated against shocks and foreign
+substances.  He was certainly no Frenchman.  His eyes, indeed, were
+brown, but hazel-brown, and gentle--not the red-brown sensual eye of
+the Frenchman.  An American?  But was ever an American so passive?  A
+German?  His moustache was certainly brushed up, but in a modest,
+almost pathetic way, not in the least Teutonic.  Nothing seemed to
+fit him.  I gave him up, and named him "the Cosmopolitan."
+
+Leaving at the end of April, I forgot him altogether.  In the same
+month, however, of the following year I was again at Monte Carlo, and
+going one day to the concert found myself seated next this same old
+fellow.  The orchestra was playing Meyerbeer's "Prophete," and my
+neighbour was asleep, snoring softly.  He was dressed in the same
+grey suit, with the same straw hat (or one exactly like it) on his
+knees, and his hands crossed above it.  Sleep had not disfigured
+him--his little white moustache was still brushed up, his lips
+closed; a very good and gentle expression hovered on his face.  A
+curved mark showed on his right temple, the scar of a cut on the side
+of his neck, and his left hand was covered by an old glove, the
+little forger of which was empty.  He woke up when the march was over
+and brisked up his moustache.
+
+The next thing on the programme was a little thing by Poise from Le
+joli Gilles, played by Mons. Corsanego on the violin.  Happening to
+glance at my old neighbour, I saw a tear caught in the hollow of his
+cheek, and another just leaving the corner of his eye; there was a
+faint smile on his lips.  Then came an interval; and while orchestra
+and audience were resting, I asked him if he were fond of music.  He
+looked up without distrust, bowed, and answered in a thin, gentle
+voice: "Certainly.  I know nothing about it, play no instrument,
+could never sing a note; but fond of it!  Who would not be?"  His
+English was correct enough, but with an emphasis not quite American
+nor quite foreign.  I ventured to remark that he did not care for
+Meyerbeer.  He smiled.
+
+"Ah!" he said, "I was asleep?  Too bad of me.  He is a little noisy--
+I know so little about music.  There is Bach, for instance.  Would
+you believe it, he gives me no pleasure?  A great misfortune to be no
+musician!"  He shook his head.
+
+I murmured, "Bach is too elevating for you perhaps."
+
+"To me," he answered, "any music I like is elevating.  People say
+some music has a bad effect on them.  I never found any music that
+gave me a bad thought--no--no--quite the opposite; only sometimes, as
+you see, I go to sleep.  But what a lovely instrument the violin!"
+A faint flush came on his parched cheeks.  "The human soul that has
+left the body.  A curious thing, distant bugles at night have given
+me the same feeling."  The orchestra was now coming back, and,
+folding his hands, my neighbour turned his eyes towards them.  When
+the concert was over we came out together.  Waiting at the entrance
+was his dog.
+
+"You have a beautiful dog!"
+
+"Ah! yes.  Freda.  mia cara, da su mano!"  The dog squatted on her
+haunches, and lifted her paw in the vague, bored way of big dogs when
+requested to perform civilities.  She was a lovely creature--the
+purest brindle, without a speck of white, and free from the
+unbalanced look of most dogs of her breed.
+
+"Basta! basta!"  He turned to me apologetically.  "We have agreed to
+speak Italian; in that way I keep up the language; astonishing the
+number of things that dog will understand!"  I was about to take my
+leave, when he asked if I would walk a little way with him--"If you
+are free, that is."  We went up the street with Freda on the far side
+of her master.
+
+"Do you never 'play' here?" I asked him.
+
+"Play?  No.  It must be very interesting; most exciting, but as a
+matter of fact, I can't afford it.  If one has very little, one is
+too nervous."
+
+He had stopped in front of a small hairdresser's shop.  "I live
+here," he said, raising his hat again.  "Au revoir!--unless I can
+offer you a glass of tea.  It's all ready.  Come! I've brought you
+out of your way; give me the pleasure!"
+
+I have never met a man so free from all self-consciousness, and yet
+so delicate and diffident the combination is a rare one.  We went up
+a steep staircase to a room on the second floor.  My companion threw
+the shutters open, setting all the flies buzzing.  The top of a
+plane-tree was on a level with the window, and all its little brown
+balls were dancing, quite close, in the wind.  As he had promised, an
+urn was hissing on a table; there was also a small brown teapot, some
+sugar, slices of lemon, and glasses.  A bed, washstand, cupboard, tin
+trunk, two chairs, and a small rug were all the furniture.  Above the
+bed a sword in a leather sheath was suspended from two nails.  The
+photograph of a girl stood on the closed stove.  My host went to the
+cupboard and produced a bottle, a glass, and a second spoon.  When
+the cork was drawn, the scent of rum escaped into the air.  He
+sniffed at it and dropped a teaspoonful into both glasses.
+
+"This is a trick I learned from the Russians after Plevna; they had
+my little finger, so I deserved something in exchange."  He looked
+round; his eyes, his whole face, seemed to twinkle.  "I assure you it
+was worth it--makes all the difference.  Try!"  He poured off the
+tea.
+
+"Had you a sympathy with the Turks?"
+
+"The weaker side--"  He paused abruptly, then added: "But it was not
+that."  Over his face innumerable crow's-feet had suddenly appeared,
+his eyes twitched; he went on hurriedly, "I had to find something to
+do just then--it was necessary."  He stared into his glass; and it
+was some time before I ventured to ask if he had seen much fighting.
+
+"Yes," he replied gravely, "nearly twenty years altogether; I was one
+of Garibaldi's Mille in '60."
+
+"Surely you are not Italian?"
+
+He leaned forward with his hands on his knees.  "I was in Genoa at
+that time learning banking; Garibaldi was a wonderful man!  One could
+not help it."  He spoke quite simply.  "You might say it was like
+seeing a little man stand up to a ring of great hulking fellows; I
+went, just as you would have gone, if you'd been there.  I was not
+long with them--our war began; I had to go back home."  He said this
+as if there had been but one war since the world began.  "In '60," he
+mused, "till '65.  Just think of it!  The poor country.  Why, in my
+State, South Carolina--I was through it all--nobody could be spared
+there--we were one to three."
+
+"I suppose you have a love of fighting?"
+
+"H'm!" he said, as if considering the idea for the first time.
+"Sometimes I fought for a living, and sometimes--because I was
+obliged; one must try to be a gentleman.  But won't you have some
+more?"
+
+I refused more tea and took my leave, carrying away with me a picture
+of the old fellow looking down from the top of the steep staircase,
+one hand pressed to his back, the other twisting up those little
+white moustaches, and murmuring, "Take care, my dear sir, there's a
+step there at the corner."
+
+"To be a gentleman!"  I repeated in the street, causing an old French
+lady to drop her parasol, so that for about two minutes we stood
+bowing and smiling to each other, then separated full of the best
+feeling.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+A week later I found myself again seated next him at a concert.  In
+the meantime I had seen him now and then, but only in passing.  He
+seemed depressed.  The corners of his lips were tightened, his tanned
+cheeks had a greyish tinge, his eyes were restless; and, between two
+numbers of the programme, he murmured, tapping his fingers on his
+hat, "Do you ever have bad days?  Yes?  Not pleasant, are they?"
+
+Then something occurred from which all that I have to tell you
+followed.  There came into the concert-hall the heroine of one of
+those romances, crimes, follies, or irregularities, call it what you
+will, which had just attracted the "world's" stare.  She passed us
+with her partner, and sat down in a chair a few rows to our right.
+She kept turning her head round, and at every turn I caught the gleam
+of her uneasy eyes.  Some one behind us said: "The brazen baggage!"
+
+My companion turned full round, and glared at whoever it was who had
+spoken.  The change in him was quite remarkable.  His lips were drawn
+back from his teeth; he frowned; the scar on his temple had reddened.
+
+"Ah!" he said to me.  "The hue and cry!  Contemptible!  How I hate
+it!  But you wouldn't understand--! "he broke off, and slowly
+regained his usual air of self-obliteration; he even seemed ashamed,
+and began trying to brush his moustaches higher than ever, as if
+aware that his heat had robbed them of neatness.
+
+"I'm not myself, when I speak of such matters," he said suddenly; and
+began reading his programme, holding it upside down.  A minute later,
+however, he said in a peculiar voice: "There are people to be found
+who object to vivisecting animals; but the vivisection of a woman,
+who minds that?  Will you tell me it's right, that because of some
+tragedy like this--believe me, it is always a tragedy--we should hunt
+down a woman?  That her fellow-women should make an outcast of her?
+That we, who are men, should make a prey of her?  If I thought
+that...."  Again he broke off, staring very hard in front of him.
+"It is we who make them what they are; and even if that is not so--
+why! if I thought there was a woman in the world I could not take my
+hat off to--I--I--couldn't sleep at night."  He got up from his seat,
+put on his old straw hat with trembling fingers, and, without a
+glance back, went out, stumbling over the chair-legs.
+
+I sat there, horribly disturbed; the words, "One must try to be a
+gentleman!" haunting me.  When I came out, he was standing by the
+entrance with one hand on his hip and the other on his dog.  In that
+attitude of waiting he was such a patient figure; the sun glared down
+and showed the threadbare nature of his clothes and the thinness of
+his brown hands, with their long forgers and nails yellow from
+tobacco.  Seeing me he came up the steps again, and raised his hat.
+
+"I am glad to have caught you; please forget all that."  I asked if
+he would do me the honour of dining at my hotel.
+
+"Dine?" he repeated with the sort of smile a child gives if you offer
+him a box of soldiers; "with the greatest pleasure.  I seldom dine
+out, but I think I can muster up a coat.  Yes--yes--and at what time
+shall I come?  At half-past seven, and your hotel is--?  Good! I
+shall be there.  Freda, mia cara, you will be alone this evening.
+You do not smoke caporal, I fear.  I find it fairly good; though it
+has too much bite."  He walked off with Freda, puffing at his thin
+roll of caporal.
+
+Once or twice he stopped, as if bewildered or beset by some sudden
+doubt or memory; and every time he stopped, Freda licked his hand.
+They disappeared round the corner of the street, and I went to my
+hotel to see about dinner.  On the way I met Jules le Ferrier, and
+asked him to come too.
+
+"My faith, yes!" he said, with the rosy pessimism characteristic of
+the French editor.  "Man must dine!"
+
+At half-past six we assembled.  My "Cosmopolitan" was in an old
+frock-coat braided round the edges, buttoned high and tight, defining
+more than ever the sharp lines of his shoulders and the slight kink
+of his back; he had brought with him, too, a dark-peaked cap of
+military shape, which he had evidently selected as more fitting to
+the coat than a straw hat.  He smelled slightly of some herb.
+
+We sat down to dinner, and did not rise for two hours.  He was a
+charming guest, praised everything he ate--not with commonplaces, but
+in words that made you feel it had given him real pleasure.  At
+first, whenever Jules made one of his caustic remarks, he looked
+quite pained, but suddenly seemed to make up his mind that it was
+bark, not bite; and then at each of them he would turn to me and say,
+"Aha! that's good--isn't it?"  With every glass of wine he became
+more gentle and more genial, sitting very upright, and tightly
+buttoned-in; while the little white wings of his moustache seemed
+about to leave him for a better world.
+
+In spite of the most leading questions, however, we could not get him
+to talk about himself, for even Jules, most cynical of men, had
+recognised that he was a hero of romance.  He would answer gently and
+precisely, and then sit twisting his moustaches, perfectly
+unconscious that we wanted more.  Presently, as the wine went a
+little to his head, his thin, high voice grew thinner, his cheeks
+became flushed, his eyes brighter; at the end of dinner he said: "I
+hope I have not been noisy."
+
+We assured him that he had not been noisy enough.  "You're laughing
+at me," he answered.  "Surely I've been talking all the time!"
+
+"Mon Dieu!" said Jules, "we have been looking for some fables of your
+wars; but nothing--nothing, not enough to feed a frog!"
+
+The old fellow looked troubled.
+
+"To be sure!" he mused.  "Let me think! there is that about Colhoun
+at Gettysburg; and there's the story of Garibaldi and the Miller."
+He plunged into a tale, not at all about himself, which would have
+been extremely dull, but for the conviction in his eyes, and the way
+he stopped and commented.  "So you see," he ended, "that's the sort
+of man Garibaldi was!  I could tell you another tale of him."
+Catching an introspective look in Jules's eye, however, I proposed
+taking our cigars over to the cafe opposite.
+
+"Delightful!" the old fellow said: "We shall have a band and the
+fresh air, and clear consciences for our cigars.  I cannot like this
+smoking in a room where there are ladies dining."
+
+He walked out in front of us, smoking with an air of great enjoyment.
+Jules, glowing above his candid shirt and waistcoat, whispered to me,
+"Mon cher Georges, how he is good!" then sighed, and added darkly:
+"The poor man!"
+
+We sat down at a little table.  Close by, the branches of a plane-
+tree rustled faintly; their leaves hung lifeless, speckled like the
+breasts of birds, or black against the sky; then, caught by the
+breeze, fluttered suddenly.
+
+The old fellow sat, with head thrown back, a smile on his face,
+coming now and then out of his enchanted dreams to drink coffee,
+answer our questions, or hum the tune that the band was playing.  The
+ash of his cigar grew very long.  One of those bizarre figures in
+Oriental garb, who, night after night, offer their doubtful wares at
+a great price, appeared in the white glare of a lamp, looked with a
+furtive smile at his face, and glided back, discomfited by its
+unconsciousness.  It was a night for dreams!  A faint, half-eastern
+scent in the air, of black tobacco and spice; few people as yet at
+the little tables, the waiters leisurely, the band soft!  What was he
+dreaming of, that old fellow, whose cigar-ash grew so long?  Of
+youth, of his battles, of those things that must be done by those who
+try to be gentlemen; perhaps only of his dinner; anyway of something
+gilded in vague fashion as the light was gilding the branches of the
+plane-tree.
+
+Jules pulled my sleeve: "He sleeps."  He had smilingly dropped off;
+the cigar-ash--that feathery tower of his dreams--had broken and
+fallen on his sleeve.  He awoke, and fell to dusting it.
+
+The little tables round us began to fill.  One of the bandsmen played
+a czardas on the czymbal.  Two young Frenchmen, talking loudly, sat
+down at the adjoining table.  They were discussing the lady who had
+been at the concert that afternoon.
+
+"It's a bet," said one of them, "but there's the present man.  I take
+three weeks, that's enough 'elle est declassee; ce n'est que le
+premier pas--'"
+
+My old friend's cigar fell on the table.  "Monsieur," he stammered,
+"you speak of a lady so, in a public place?"
+
+The young man stared at him.  "Who is this person?" he said to his
+companion.
+
+My guest took up Jules's glove that lay on the table; before either
+of us could raise a finger, he had swung it in the speaker's face.
+"Enough!" he said, and, dropping the glove, walked away.
+
+We all jumped to our feet.  I left Jules and hurried after him.  His
+face was grim, his eyes those of a creature who has been struck on a
+raw place.  He made a movement of his fingers which said plainly.
+"Leave me, if you please!"
+
+I went back to the cafe.  The two young men had disappeared, so had
+Jules, but everything else was going on just as before; the bandsman
+still twanging out his czardas; the waiters serving drinks; the
+orientals trying to sell their carpets.  I paid the bill, sought out
+the manager, and apologised.  He shrugged his shoulders, smiled and
+said: "An eccentric, your friend, nicht wahr?"  Could he tell me
+where M. Le Ferrier was?  He could not.  I left to look for Jules;
+could not find him, and returned to my hotel disgusted.  I was sorry
+for my old guest, but vexed with him too; what business had he to
+carry his Quixotism to such an unpleasant length?  I tried to read.
+Eleven o'clock struck; the casino disgorged a stream of people; the
+Place seemed fuller of life than ever; then slowly it grew empty and
+quite dark.  The whim seized me to go out.  It was a still night,
+very warm, very black.  On one of the seats a man and woman sat
+embraced, on another a girl was sobbing, on a third--strange sight--a
+priest dozed.  I became aware of some one at my side; it was my old
+guest.
+
+"If you are not too tired," he said, "can you give me ten minutes?"
+
+"Certainly; will you come in?"
+
+"No, no; let us go down to the Terrace.  I shan't keep you long."
+
+He did not speak again till we reached a seat above the pigeon-
+shooting grounds; there, in a darkness denser for the string of
+lights still burning in the town, we sat down.
+
+"I owe you an apology," he said; "first in the afternoon, then again
+this evening--your guest--your friend's glove!  I have behaved as no
+gentleman should."  He was leaning forward with his hands on the
+handle of a stick.  His voice sounded broken and disturbed.
+
+"Oh!" I muttered.  "It's nothing!"'
+
+"You are very good," he sighed; "but I feel that I must explain.  I
+consider I owe this to you, but I must tell you I should not have the
+courage if it were not for another reason.  You see I have no
+friend."  He looked at me with an uncertain smile.  I bowed, and a
+minute or two later he began....
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+"You will excuse me if I go back rather far.  It was in '74, when I
+had been ill with Cuban fever.  To keep me alive they had put me on
+board a ship at Santiago, and at the end of the voyage I found myself
+in London.  I had very little money; I knew nobody.  I tell you, sir,
+there are times when it's hard for a fighting man to get anything to
+do.  People would say to me: 'Afraid we've nothing for a man like you
+in our business.'  I tried people of all sorts; but it was true--I
+had been fighting here and there since '60, I wasn't fit for
+anything--"  He shook his head.  "In the South, before the war, they
+had a saying, I remember, about a dog and a soldier having the same
+value.  But all this has nothing to do with what I have to tell you."
+He sighed again and went on, moistening his lips: "I was walking
+along the Strand one day, very disheartened, when I heard my name
+called.  It's a queer thing, that, in a strange street.  By the way,"
+he put in with dry ceremony, "you don't know my name, I think: it is
+Brune--Roger Brune.  At first I did not recognise the person who
+called me.  He had just got off an omnibus--a square-shouldered man
+with heavy moustaches, and round spectacles.  But when he shook my
+hand I knew him at once.  He was a man called Dalton, who was taken
+prisoner at Gettysburg; one of you Englishmen who came to fight with
+us--a major in the regiment where I was captain.  We were comrades
+during two campaigns.  If I had been his brother he couldn't have
+seemed more pleased to see me.  He took me into a bar for the sake of
+old times.  The drink went to my head, and by the time we reached
+Trafalgar Square I was quite unable to walk.  He made me sit down on
+a bench. I was in fact--drunk.  It's disgraceful to be drunk, but
+there was some excuse.  Now I tell you, sir" (all through his story
+he was always making use of that expression, it seemed to infuse
+fresh spirit into him, to help his memory in obscure places, to give
+him the mastery of his emotions; it was like the piece of paper a
+nervous man holds in his hand to help him through a speech), "there
+never was a man with a finer soul than my friend Dalton.  He was not
+clever, though he had read much; and sometimes perhaps he was too
+fond of talking.  But he was a gentleman; he listened to me as if I
+had been a child; he was not ashamed of me--and it takes a gentleman
+not to be ashamed of a drunken man in the streets of London; God
+knows what things I said to him while we were sitting there!  He took
+me to his home and put me to bed himself; for I was down again with
+fever."  He stopped, turned slightly from me, and put his hand up to
+his brow.  "Well, then it was, sir, that I first saw her.  I am not
+a poet and I cannot tell you what she seemed to me.  I was delirious,
+but I always knew when she was there.  I had dreams of sunshine and
+cornfields, of dancing waves at sea, young trees--never the same
+dreams, never anything for long together; and when I had my senses I
+was afraid to say so for fear she would go away.  She'd be in the
+corner of the room, with her hair hanging about her neck, a bright
+gold colour; she never worked and never read, but sat and talked to
+herself in a whisper, or looked at me for a long time together out of
+her blue eyes, a little frown between them, and her upper lip closed
+firm on her lower lip, where she had an uneven tooth.  When her
+father came, she'd jump up and hang on to his neck until he groaned,
+then run away, but presently come stealing back on tiptoe.  I used to
+listen for her footsteps on the stairs, then the knock, the door
+flung back or opened quietly--you never could tell which; and her
+voice, with a little lisp, 'Are you better today, Mr. Brune?  What
+funny things you say when you're delirious!  Father says you've been
+in heaps of battles!"'
+
+He got up, paced restlessly to and fro, and sat down again.  "I
+remember every word as if it were yesterday, all the things she said,
+and did; I've had a long time to think them over, you see.  Well, I
+must tell you, the first morning that I was able to get up, I missed
+her.  Dalton came in her place, and I asked him where she was.  'My
+dear fellow,' he answered, 'I've sent Eilie away to her old nurse's
+inn down on the river; she's better there at this time of year.'  We
+looked at each other, and I saw that he had sent her away because he
+didn't trust me.  I was hurt by this.  Illness spoils one.  He was
+right, he was quite right, for all he knew about me was that I could
+fight and had got drunk; but I am very quick-tempered.  I made up my
+mind at once to leave him.  But I was too weak--he had to put me to
+bed again.  The very next morning he came and proposed that I should
+go into partnership with him.  He kept a fencing-school and pistol-
+gallery.  It seemed like the finger of God; and perhaps it was--who
+knows?"  He fell into a reverie, and taking out his caporal, rolled
+himself a cigarette; having lighted it, he went on suddenly: "There,
+in the room above the school, we used to sit in the evenings, one on
+each side of the grate.  The room was on the second floor,
+I remember, with two windows, and a view of nothing but the houses
+opposite.  The furniture was covered up with chintz.  The things on
+the bookshelf were never disturbed, they were Eilie's--half-broken
+cases with butterflies, a dead frog in a bottle, a horse-shoe covered
+with tinfoil, some shells too, and a cardboard box with three
+speckled eggs in it, and these words written on the lid: 'Missel-
+thrush from Lucy's tree--second family, only one blown.'"  He smoked
+fiercely, with puffs that were like sharp sighs.
+
+"Dalton was wrapped up in her.  He was never tired of talking to me
+about her, and I was never tired of hearing.  We had a number of
+pupils; but in the evening when we sat there, smoking--our talk would
+sooner or later--come round to her.  Her bedroom opened out of that
+sitting--room; he took me in once and showed me a narrow little room
+the width of a passage, fresh and white, with a photograph of her
+mother above the bed, and an empty basket for a dog or cat."  He
+broke off with a vexed air, and resumed sternly, as if trying to bind
+himself to the narration of his more important facts: "She was then
+fifteen--her mother had been dead twelve years--a beautiful, face,
+her mother's; it had been her death that sent Dalton to fight with
+us.  Well, sir, one day in August, very hot weather, he proposed a
+run into the country, and who should meet us on the platform when we
+arrived but Eilie, in a blue sun-bonnet and frock-flax blue, her
+favourite colour.  I was angry with Dalton for not telling me that we
+should see her; my clothes were not quite--my hair wanted cutting.
+It was black then, sir," he added, tracing a pattern in the darkness
+with his stick.  "She had a little donkey-cart; she drove, and, while
+we walked one on each side, she kept looking at me from under her
+sunbonnet.  I must tell you that she never laughed--her eyes danced,
+her cheeks would go pink, and her hair shake about on her neck, but
+she never laughed. Her old nurse, Lucy, a very broad, good woman, had
+married the proprietor of the inn in the village there.  I have never
+seen anything like that inn: sweethriar up to the roof!  And the
+scent--I am very susceptible to scents!"  His head drooped, and the
+cigarette fell from his hand. A train passing beneath sent up a
+shower of sparks.  He started, and went on: "We had our lunch in the
+parlour--I remember that room very well, for I spent the happiest
+days of my life afterwards in that inn....  We went into a meadow
+after lunch, and my friend Dalton fell asleep.  A wonderful thing
+happened then.  Eilie whispered to me, 'Let's have a jolly time.'
+She took me for the most glorious walk.  The river was close by.
+A lovely stream, your river Thames, so calm and broad; it is like the
+spirit of your people.  I was bewitched; I forgot my friend, I
+thought of nothing but how to keep her to myself.  It was such a day!
+There are days that are the devil's, but that was truly one of God's.
+She took me to a little pond under an elm-tree, and we dragged it, we
+two, an hour, for a kind of tiny red worm to feed some creature that
+she had.  We found them in the mud, and while she was bending over,
+the curls got in her eyes.  If you could have seen her then, I think,
+sir, you would have said she was like the first sight of spring....
+We had tea afterwards, all together, in the long grass under some
+fruit-trees.  If I had the knack of words, there are things that I
+could say."  He bent, as though in deference to those unspoken
+memories.  "Twilight came on while we were sitting there. A wonderful
+thing is twilight in the country!  It became time for us to go.
+There was an avenue of trees close by--like a church with a window at
+the end, where golden light came through.  I walked up and down it
+with her.  'Will you come again?' she whispered, and suddenly she
+lifted up her face to be kissed. I kissed her as if she were a little
+child.  And when we said good-bye, her eyes were looking at me across
+her father's shoulder, with surprise and sorrow in them.  'Why do you
+go away?' they seemed to say....  But I must tell you," he went on
+hurriedly, "of a thing that happened before we had gone a hundred
+yards.  We were smoking our pipes, and I, thinking of her--when out
+she sprang from the hedge and stood in front of us.  Dalton cried
+out, 'What are you here for again, you mad girl?'  She rushed up to
+him and hugged him; but when she looked at me, her face was quite
+different--careless, defiant, as one might say--it hurt me.  I
+couldn't understand it, and what one doesn't understand frightens
+one."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+"Time went on.  There was no swordsman, or pistol-shot like me in
+London, they said.  We had as many pupils as we liked--it was the
+only part of my life when I have been able to save money.  I had no
+chance to spend it.  We gave lessons all day, and in the evening were
+too tired to go out.  That year I had the misfortune to lose my dear
+mother.  I became a rich man--yes, sir, at that time I must have had
+not less than six hundred a year.
+
+"It was a long time before I saw Eilie again.  She went abroad to
+Dresden with her father's sister to learn French and German.  It was
+in the autumn of 1875 when she came back to us.  She was seventeen
+then--a beautiful young creature."  He paused, as if to gather his
+forces for description, and went on.
+
+"Tall, as a young tree, with eyes like the sky.  I would not say she
+was perfect, but her imperfections were beautiful to me.  What is it
+makes you love--ah! sir, that is very hidden and mysterious.  She had
+never lost the trick of closing her lips tightly when she remembered
+her uneven tooth.  You may say that was vanity, but in a young girl--
+and which of us is not vain, eh?  'Old men and maidens, young men and
+children!'
+
+"As I said, she came back to London to her little room, and in the
+evenings was always ready with our tea.  You mustn't suppose she was
+housewifely; there is something in me that never admired
+housewifeliness--a fine quality, no doubt, still--" He sighed.
+
+"No," he resumed, "Eilie was not like that, for she was never quite
+the same two days together.  I told you her eyes were like the sky--
+that was true of all of her.  In one thing, however, at that time,
+she always seemed the same--in love for her father.  For me!  I don't
+know what I should have expected; but my presence seemed to have the
+effect of making her dumb; I would catch her looking at me with a
+frown, and then, as if to make up to her own nature--and a more
+loving nature never came into this world, that I shall maintain to my
+dying day--she would go to her father and kiss him.  When I talked
+with him she pretended not to notice, but I could see her face grow
+cold and stubborn.  I am not quick; and it was a long time before I
+understood that she was jealous, she wanted him all to herself.  I've
+often wondered how she could be his daughter, for he was the very
+soul of justice and a slow man too--and she was as quick as a bird.
+For a long time after I saw her dislike of me, I refused to believe
+it--if one does not want to believe a thing there are always reasons
+why it should not seem true, at least so it is with me, and I suppose
+with all selfish men.
+
+"I spent evening after evening there, when, if I had not thought only
+of myself, I should have kept away.  But one day I could no longer be
+blind.
+
+"It was a Sunday in February.  I always had an invitation on Sundays
+to dine with them in the middle of the day.  There was no one in the
+sitting-room; but the door of Eilie's bedroom was open.  I heard her
+voice: 'That man, always that man!'  It was enough for me, I went
+down again without coming in, and walked about all day.
+
+"For three weeks I kept away.  To the school of course I came as
+usual, but not upstairs.  I don't know what I told Dalton--it did not
+signify what you told him, he always had a theory of his own, and was
+persuaded of its truth--a very single-minded man, sir.
+
+"But now I come to the most wonderful days of my life.  It was an
+early spring that year.  I had fallen away already from my
+resolution, and used to slink up--seldom, it's true--and spend the
+evening with them as before.  One afternoon I came up to the sitting-
+room; the light was failing--it was warm, and the windows were open.
+In the air was that feeling which comes to you once a year, in the
+spring, no matter where you may be, in a crowded street, or alone in
+a forest; only once--a feeling like--but I cannot describe it.
+
+"Eilie was sitting there.  If you don't know, sir, I can't tell you
+what it means to be near the woman one loves.  She was leaning on the
+windowsill, staring down into the street.  It was as though she might
+be looking out for some one.  I stood, hardly breathing.  She turned
+her head, and saw me.  Her eyes were strange.  They seemed to ask me
+a question.  But I couldn't have spoken for the world.  I can't tell
+you what I felt--I dared not speak, or think, or hope.  I have been
+in nineteen battles--several times in positions of some danger, when
+the lifting of a finger perhaps meant death; but I have never felt
+what I was feeling at that moment.  I knew something was coming; and
+I was paralysed with terror lest it should not come!"  He drew a long
+breath.
+
+"The servant came in with a light and broke the spell.  All that
+night I lay awake and thought of how she had looked at me, with the
+colour coming slowly up in her cheeks
+
+"It was three days before I plucked up courage to go again; and then
+I felt her eyes on me at once--she was making a 'cat's cradle' with a
+bit of string, but I could see them stealing up from her hands to my
+face.  And she went wandering about the room, fingering at
+everything.  When her father called out: 'What's the matter with you,
+Elie?' she stared at him like a child caught doing wrong.  I looked
+straight at her then, she tried to look at me, but she couldn't; and
+a minute later she went out of the room.  God knows what sort of
+nonsense I talked--I was too happy.
+
+"Then began our love.  I can't tell you of that time.  Often and
+often Dalton said to me: 'What's come to the child?  Nothing I can do
+pleases her.'  All the love she had given him was now for me; but he
+was too simple and straight to see what was going on.  How many times
+haven't I felt criminal towards him!  But when you're happy, with the
+tide in your favour, you become a coward at once...."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+"Well, sir," he went on, "we were married on her eighteenth birthday.
+It was a long time before Dalton became aware of our love.  But one
+day he said to me with a very grave look:
+
+"'Eilie has told me, Brune; I forbid it.  She's too young, and
+you're--too old!' I was then forty-five, my hair as black and thick
+as a rook's feathers, and I was strong and active.  I answered him:
+'We shall be married within a month!'  We parted in anger.  It was a
+May night, and I walked out far into the country.  There's no remedy
+for anger, or, indeed, for anything, so fine as walking.  Once I
+stopped--it was on a common, without a house or light, and the stars
+shining like jewels.  I was hot from walking, I could feel the blood
+boiling in my veins--I said to myself 'Old, are you?' And I laughed
+like a fool.  It was the thought of losing her--I wished to believe
+myself angry, but really I was afraid; fear and anger in me are very
+much the same.  A friend of mine, a bit of a poet, sir, once called
+them 'the two black wings of self.'  And so they are, so they are...!
+The next morning I went to Dalton again, and somehow I made him
+yield.  I'm not a philosopher, but it has often seemed to me that no
+benefit can come to us in this life without an equal loss somewhere,
+but does that stop us?  No, sir, not often....
+
+"We were married on the 3oth of June 1876, in the parish church.  The
+only people present were Dalton, Lucy, and Lucy's husband--a big,
+red-faced fellow, with blue eyes and a golden beard parted in two.
+It had been arranged that we should spend the honeymoon down at their
+inn on the river.  My wife, Dalton and I, went to a restaurant for
+lunch.  She was dressed in grey, the colour of a pigeon's feathers."
+He paused, leaning forward over the crutch handle of his stick;
+trying to conjure up, no doubt, that long-ago image of his young
+bride in her dress "the colour of a pigeon's feathers," with her blue
+eyes and yellow hair, the little frown between her brows, the firmly
+shut red lips, opening to speak the words, "For better, for worse,
+for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health."
+
+"At that time, sir," he went on suddenly, "I was a bit of a dandy.  I
+wore, I remember, a blue frock-coat, with white trousers, and a grey
+top hat.  Even now I should always prefer to be well dressed....
+
+"We had an excellent lunch, and drank Veuve Clicquot, a wine that you
+cannot get in these days!  Dalton came with us to the railway
+station.  I can't bear partings; and yet, they must come.
+
+"That evening we walked out in the cool under the aspen-trees.  What
+should I remember in all my life if not that night--the young
+bullocks snuffling in the gateways--the campion flowers all lighted
+up along the hedges--the moon with a halo-bats, too, in and out among
+the stems, and the shadows of the cottages as black and soft as that
+sea down there.  For a long time we stood on the river-bank beneath a
+lime-tree.  The scent of the lime flowers!  A man can only endure
+about half his joy; about half his sorrow.  Lucy and her husband," he
+went on, presently, "his name was Frank Tor--a man like an old
+Viking, who ate nothing but milk, bread, and fruit--were very good to
+us!  It was like Paradise in that inn--though the commissariat, I am
+bound to say, was limited.  The sweethriar grew round our bedroom
+windows; when the breeze blew the leaves across the opening--it was
+like a bath of perfume.  Eilie grew as brown as a gipsy while we were
+there.  I don't think any man could have loved her more than I did.
+But there were times when my heart stood still; it didn't seem as if
+she understood how much I loved her.  One day, I remember, she coaxed
+me to take her camping.  We drifted down-stream all the afternoon,
+and in the evening pulled into the reeds under the willow-boughs and
+lit a fire for her to cook by--though, as a matter of fact, our
+provisions were cooked already--but you know how it is; all the
+romance was in having a real fire.  'We won't pretend,' she kept
+saying.  While we were eating our supper a hare came to our clearing-
+-a big fellow--how surprised he looked!  'The tall hare,' Eilie
+called him.  After that we sat by the ashes and watched the shadows,
+till at last she roamed away from me.  The time went very slowly; I
+got up to look for her.  It was past sundown.  I called and called.
+It was a long time before I found her--and she was like a wild thing,
+hot and flushed, her pretty frock torn, her hands and face scratched,
+her hair down, like some beautiful creature of the woods.  If one
+loves, a little thing will scare one.  I didn't think she had noticed
+my fright; but when we got back to the boat she threw her arms round
+my neck, and said, 'I won't ever leave you again!'
+
+"Once in the night I woke--a water-hen was crying, and in the
+moonlight a kingfisher flew across.  The wonder on the river--the
+wonder of the moon and trees, the soft bright mist, the stillness! It
+was like another world, peaceful, enchanted, far holier than ours.
+It seemed like a vision of the thoughts that come to one--how seldom!
+and go if one tries to grasp them.  Magic--poetry-sacred!"  He was
+silent a minute, then went on in a wistful voice: "I looked at her,
+sleeping like a child, with her hair loose, and her lips apart, and I
+thought: 'God do so to me, if ever I bring her pain!'  How was I to
+understand her? the mystery and innocence of her soul!  The river has
+had all my light and all my darkness, the happiest days, and the
+hours when I've despaired; and I like to think of it, for, you know,
+in time bitter memories fade, only the good remain....  Yet the good
+have their own pain, a different kind of aching, for we shall never
+get them back.  Sir," he said, turning to me with a faint smile,
+"it's no use crying over spilt milk....  In the neighbourhood of
+Lucy's inn, the Rose and Maybush--Can you imagine a prettier name?  I
+have been all over the world, and nowhere found names so pretty as in
+the English country.  There, too, every blade of grass; and flower,
+has a kind of pride about it; knows it will be cared for; and all the
+roads, trees, and cottages, seem to be certain that they will live
+for ever....  But I was going to tell you: Half a mile from the inn
+was a quiet old house which we used to call the 'Convent'--though I
+believe it was a farm.  We spent many afternoons there, trespassing
+in the orchard--Eilie was fond of trespassing; if there were a long
+way round across somebody else's property, she would always take it.
+We spent our last afternoon in that orchard, lying in the long grass.
+I was reading Childe Harold for the first time--a wonderful, a
+memorable poem!  I was at that passage--the bull-fight--you remember:
+
+"'Thrice sounds the clarion; lo! the signal falls,
+The din expands, and expectation mute'--
+
+"when suddenly Eilie said: 'Suppose I were to leave off loving you?'
+It was as if some one had struck me in the face.  I jumped up, and
+tried to take her in my arms, but she slipped away; then she turned,
+and began laughing softly.  I laughed too.  I don't know why...."
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+"We went back to London the next day; we lived quite close to the
+school, and about five days a week Dalton came to dine with us.  He
+would have come every day, if he had not been the sort of man who
+refuses to consult his own pleasure.  We had more pupils than ever.
+In my leisure I taught my wife to fence.  I have never seen any one
+so lithe and quick; or so beautiful as she looked in her fencing
+dress, with embroidered shoes.
+
+"I was completely happy.  When a man has obtained his desire he
+becomes careless and self-satisfied; I was watchful, however, for I
+knew that I was naturally a selfish man.  I studied to arrange my
+time and save my money, to give her as much pleasure as I could.
+What she loved best in the world just then was riding.  I bought a
+horse for her, and in the evenings of the spring and summer we rode
+together; but when it was too dark to go out late, she would ride
+alone, great distances, sometimes spend the whole day in the saddle,
+and come back so tired she could hardly walk upstairs--I can't say
+that I liked that.  It made me nervous, she was so headlong--but I
+didn't think it right to interfere with her.  I had a good deal of
+anxiety about money, for though I worked hard and made more than
+ever, there never seemed enough.  I was anxious to save--I hoped, of
+course--but we had no child, and this was a trouble to me.  She grew
+more beautiful than ever, and I think was happy.  Has it ever struck
+you that each one of us lives on the edge of a volcano?  There is, I
+imagine, no one who has not some affection or interest so strong that
+he counts the rest for nothing, beside it.  No doubt a man may live
+his life through without discovering that.  But some of us--!  I am
+not complaining; what is--is."  He pulled the cap lower over his
+eyes, and clutched his hands firmly on the top of his stick.  He was
+like a man who rushes his horse at some hopeless fence, unwilling to
+give himself time, for fear of craning at the last moment.  "In the
+spring of '78, a new pupil came to me, a young man of twenty-one who
+was destined for the army.  I took a fancy to him, and did my best to
+turn him into a good swordsman; but there was a kind of perverse
+recklessness in him; for a few minutes one would make a great
+impression, then he would grow utterly careless.  'Francis,' I would
+say, 'if I were you I should be ashamed.'  'Mr. Brune,' he would
+answer, 'why should I be ashamed?  I didn't make myself.'  God knows,
+I wish to do him justice, he had a heart--one day he drove up in a
+cab, and brought in his poor dog, who had been run over, and was
+dying: For half an hour he shut himself up with its body, we could
+hear him sobbing like a child; he came out with his eyes all red, and
+cried: 'I know where to find the brute who drove over him,' and off
+he rushed.  He had beautiful Italian eyes; a slight figure, not very
+tall; dark hair, a little dark moustache; and his lips were always a
+trifle parted--it was that, and his walk, and the way he drooped his
+eyelids, which gave him a peculiar, soft, proud look.  I used to tell
+him that he'd never make a soldier!  'Oh!' he'd answer, 'that'll be
+all right when the time comes!  He believed in a kind of luck that
+was to do everything for him, when the time came.  One day he came in
+as I was giving Eilie her lesson.  This was the first time they saw
+each other.  After that he came more often, and sometimes stayed to
+dinner with us.  I won't deny, sir, that I was glad to welcome him; I
+thought it good for Eilie.  Can there be anything more odious," he
+burst out, "than such a self-complacent blindness?  There are people
+who say, 'Poor man, he had such faith!'  Faith, sir!  Conceit!  I was
+a fool--in this world one pays for folly....
+
+"The summer came; and one Saturday in early June, Eilie, I, and
+Francis--I won't tell you his other name--went riding.  The night had
+been wet; there was no dust, and presently the sun came out--a
+glorious day!  We rode a long way.  About seven o'clock we started
+back-slowly, for it was still hot, and there was all the cool of
+night before us.  It was nine o'clock when we came to Richmond Park.
+A grand place, Richmond Park; and in that half-light wonderful, the
+deer moving so softly, you might have thought they were spirits.  We
+were silent too--great trees have that effect on me....
+
+"Who can say when changes come?  Like a shift of the wind, the old
+passes, the new is on you.  I am telling you now of a change like
+that.  Without a sign of warning, Eilie put her horse into a gallop.
+'What are you doing?' I shouted.  She looked back with a smile, then
+he dashed past me too.  A hornet might have stung them both: they
+galloped over fallen trees, under low hanging branches, up hill and
+down.  I had to watch that madness!  My horse was not so fast.  I
+rode like a demon; but fell far behind.  I am not a man who takes
+things quietly.  When I came up with them at last, I could not speak
+for rage.  They were riding side by side, the reins on the horses'
+necks, looking in each other's faces.  'You should take care,' I
+said.  'Care!' she cried; 'life is not all taking care!'  My anger
+left me.  I dropped behind, as grooms ride behind their mistresses...
+Jealousy!  No torture is so ceaseless or so black....  In those
+minutes a hundred things came up in me--a hundred memories, true,
+untrue, what do I know?  My soul was poisoned.  I tried to reason
+with myself.  It was absurd to think such things!  It was unmanly....
+Even if it were true, one should try to be a gentleman!  But I found
+myself laughing; yes, sir, laughing at that word."  He spoke faster,
+as if pouring his heart out not to a live listener, but to the night.
+"I could not sleep that night.  To lie near her with those thoughts
+in my brain was impossible!  I made an excuse, and sat up with some
+papers.  The hardest thing in life is to see a thing coming and be
+able to do nothing to prevent it.  What could I do?  Have you noticed
+how people may become utter strangers without a word?  It only needs
+a thought....  The very next day she said: 'I want to go to Lucy's.'
+'Alone?'  'Yes.'  I had made up my mind by then that she must do just
+as she wished.  Perhaps I acted wrongly; I do not know what one ought
+to do in such a case; but before she went I said to her: 'Eilie, what
+is it?'  'I don't know,' she answered; and I kissed her--that was
+all....  A month passed; I wrote to her nearly every day, and I had
+short letters from her, telling me very little of herself.  Dalton
+was a torture to me, for I could not tell him; he had a conviction
+that she was going to become a mother.  'Ah, Brune!' he said, 'my
+poor wife was just like that.'  Life, sir, is a somewhat ironical
+affair...!  He--I find it hard to speak his name--came to the school
+two or three times a week.  I used to think I saw a change, a purpose
+growing up through his recklessness; there seemed a violence in him
+as if he chafed against my blade.  I had a kind of joy in feeling I
+had the mastery, and could toss the iron out of his hand any minute
+like a straw.  I was ashamed, and yet I gloried in it.  Jealousy is a
+low thing, sir--a low, base thing!  When he asked me where my wife
+was, I told him; I was too proud to hide it.  Soon after that he came
+no more to the school.
+
+"One morning, when I could bear it no longer, I wrote, and said I was
+coming down.  I would not force myself on her, but I asked her to
+meet me in the orchard of the old house we called the Convent.  I
+asked her to be there at four o'clock.  It has always been my, belief
+that a man must neither beg anything of a woman, nor force anything
+from her.  Women are generous--they will give you what they can.  I
+sealed my letter, and posted it myself.  All the way down I kept on
+saying to myself, 'She must come--surely she will come!'"
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+"I was in high spirits, but the next moment trembled like a man with
+ague.  I reached the orchard before my time.  She was not there.  You
+know what it is like to wait?  I stood still and listened; I went to
+the point whence I could see farthest; I said to myself, 'A watched
+pot never boils; if I don't look for her she will come.'  I walked up
+and down with my eyes on the ground.  The sickness of it!  A hundred
+times I took out my watch.... Perhaps it was fast, perhaps hers was
+slow--I can't tell you a thousandth part of my hopes and fears.
+There was a spring of water, in one corner.  I sat beside it, and
+thought of the last time I had been there--and something seemed to
+burst in me.  It was five o'clock before I lost all hope; there comes
+a time when you're glad that hope is dead, it means rest.  'That's
+over,' you say, 'now I can act.'  But what was I to do?  I lay down
+with my face to the ground; when one's in trouble, it's the only
+thing that helps--something to press against and cling to that can't
+give way.  I lay there for two hours, knowing all the time that I
+should play the coward.  At seven o'clock I left the orchard and went
+towards the inn; I had broken my word, but I felt happy.... I should
+see her--and, sir, nothing--nothing seemed to matter beside that.
+Tor was in the garden snipping at his roses.  He came up, and I could
+see that he couldn't look me in the face.  'Where's my wife?' I said.
+He answered, 'Let's get Lucy.'  I ran indoors.  Lucy met me with two
+letters; the first--my own--unopened; and the second, this:
+
+"'I have left you.  You were good to me, but now--it is no use.
+          EILIE.'"
+
+"She told me that a boy had brought a letter for my wife the day
+before, from a young gentleman in a boat.  When Lucy delivered it she
+asked, 'Who is he, Miss Eilie?  What will Mr. Brune say?'  My wife
+looked at her angrily, but gave her no answer--and all that day she
+never spoke.  In the evening she was gone, leaving this note on the
+bed....  Lucy cried as if her heart would break.  I took her by the
+shoulders and put her from the room; I couldn't bear the noise.  I
+sat down and tried to think.  While I was sitting there Tor came in
+with a letter.  It was written on the notepaper of an inn twelve
+miles up the river: these were the words.
+
+"'Eilie is mine.  I am ready to meet you where you like.'"
+
+He went on with a painful evenness of speech.  "When I read those
+words, I had only one thought--to reach them; I ran down to the
+river, and chose out the lightest boat.  Just as I was starting, Tor
+came running.  'You dropped this letter, sir,' be said.  'Two pair of
+arms are better than one.'  He came into the boat.  I took the sculls
+and I pulled out into the stream.  I pulled like a madman; and that
+great man, with his bare arms crossed, was like a huge, tawny bull
+sitting there opposite me.  Presently he took my place, and I took
+the rudder lines.  I could see his chest, covered with hair, heaving
+up and down, it gave me a sort of comfort--it meant that we were
+getting nearer.  Then it grew dark, there was no moon, I could barely
+see the bank; there's something in the dark which drives one into
+oneself.  People tell you there comes a moment when your nature is
+decided--'saved' or 'lost' as they call it--for good or evil.  That
+is not true, your self is always with you, and cannot be altered;
+but, sir, I believe that in a time of agony one finds out what are
+the things one can do, and what are those one cannot.  You get to
+know yourself, that's all.  And so it was with me.  Every thought and
+memory and passion was so clear and strong!  I wanted to kill him.  I
+wanted to kill myself.  But her--no!  We are taught that we possess
+our wives, body and soul, we are brought up in that faith, we are
+commanded to believe it--but when I was face to face with it, those
+words had no meaning; that belief, those commands, they were without
+meaning to me, they were--vile.  Oh yes, I wanted to find comfort in
+them, I wanted to hold on to them--but I couldn't.  You may force a
+body; how can you force a soul?  No, no--cowardly!  But I wanted to--
+I wanted to kill him and force her to come back to me!  And then,
+suddenly, I felt as if I were pressing right on the most secret nerve
+of my heart.  I seemed to see her face, white and quivering, as if
+I'd stamped my heel on it.  They say this world is ruled by force; it
+may be true--I know I have a weak spot in me....  I couldn't bear it.
+At last I Jumped to my feet and shouted out, 'Turn the boat round!'
+Tor looked up at me as if I had gone mad.  And I had gone mad.  I
+seized the boat-hook and threatened him; I called him fearful names.
+'Sir,' he said, 'I don't take such names from any one!'  'You'll take
+them from me,' I shouted; 'turn the boat round, you idiot, you hound,
+you fish!...'  I have a terrible temper, a perfect curse to me.  He
+seemed amazed, even frightened; he sat down again suddenly and pulled
+the boat round.  I fell on the seat, and hid my face.  I believe the
+moon came up; there must have been a mist too, for I was cold as
+death.  In this life, sir, we cannot hide our faces--but by degrees
+the pain of wounds grows less.  Some will have it that such blows are
+mortal; it is not so.  Time is merciful.
+
+"In the early morning I went back to London.  I had fever on me--and
+was delirious.  I dare say I should have killed myself if I had not
+been so used to weapons--they and I were too old friends, I suppose--
+I can't explain.  It was a long while before I was up and about.
+Dalton nursed me through it; his great heavy moustache had grown
+quite white.  We never mentioned her; what was the good?  There were
+things to settle of course, the lawyer--this was unspeakably
+distasteful to me.  I told him it was to be as she wished, but the
+fellow would come to me, with his--there, I don't want to be unkind.
+I wished him to say it was my fault, but he said--I remember his
+smile now--he said, that was impossible, would be seen through,
+talked of collusion--I don't understand these things, and what's
+more, I can't bear them, they are--dirty.
+
+"Two years later, when I had come back to London, after the Russo-
+Turkish war, I received a letter from her.  I have it here."  He took
+an old, yellow sheet of paper out of a leathern pockethook, spread it
+in his fingers, and sat staring at it.  For some minutes he did not
+speak.
+
+"In the autumn of that same year she died in childbirth.  He had
+deserted her.  Fortunately for him, he was killed on the Indian
+frontier, that very year.  If she had lived she would have been
+thirty-two next June; not a great age....  I know I am what they call
+a crank; doctors will tell you that you can't be cured of a bad
+illness, and be the same man again.  If you are bent, to force
+yourself straight must leave you weak in another place.  I must and
+will think well of women--everything done, and everything said
+against them is a stone on her dead body.  Could you sit, and listen
+to it?"  As though driven by his own question, he rose, and paced up
+and down.  He came back to the seat at last.
+
+"That, sir, is the reason of my behaviour this afternoon, and again
+this evening.  You have been so kind, I wanted!--wanted to tell you.
+She had a little daughter--Lucy has her now.  My friend Dalton is
+dead; there would have been no difficulty about money, but, I am
+sorry to say, that he was swindled--disgracefully.  It fell to me to
+administer his affairs--he never knew it, but he died penniless; he
+had trusted some wretched fellows--had an idea they would make his
+fortune.  As I very soon found, they had ruined him.  It was
+impossible to let Lucy--such a dear woman--bear that burden.  I have
+tried to make provision; but, you see," he took hold of my sleeve,
+"I, too, have not been fortunate; in fact, it's difficult to save a
+great deal out of L 190 a year; but the capital is perfectly safe--
+and I get L 47, 10s. a quarter, paid on the nail.  I have often been
+tempted to reinvest at a greater rate of interest, but I've never
+dared.  Anyway, there are no debts--I've been obliged to make a rule
+not to buy what I couldn't pay for on the spot....  Now I am really
+plaguing you--but I wanted to tell you--in case-anything should
+happen to me."  He seemed to take a sudden scare, stiffened, twisted
+his moustache, and muttering, "Your great kindness! Shall never
+forget!" turned hurriedly away.
+
+He vanished; his footsteps, and the tap of his stick grew fainter and
+fainter.  They died out.  He was gone.  Suddenly I got up and
+hastened after him.  I soon stopped--what was there to say?
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+The following day I was obliged to go to Nice, and did not return
+till midnight.  The porter told me that Jules le Ferrier had been to
+see me.  The next morning, while I was still in bed, the door was
+opened, and Jules appeared.  His face was very pale; and the moment
+he stood still drops of perspiration began coursing down his cheeks.
+
+"Georges!" he said, "he is dead.  There, there!  How stupid you look!
+My man is packing.  I have half an hour before the train; my evidence
+shall come from Italy.  I have done my part, the rest is for you.
+Why did you have that dinner?  The Don Quixote!  The idiot!  The poor
+man!  Don't move!  Have you a cigar?  Listen!  When you followed him,
+I followed the other two.  My infernal curiosity!  Can you conceive a
+greater folly?  How fast they walked, those two! feeling their
+cheeks, as if he had struck them both, you know; it was funny.  They
+soon saw me, for their eyes were all round about their heads; they
+had the mark of a glove on their cheeks."  The colour began to come
+back, into Jules's face; he gesticulated with his cigar and became
+more and more dramatic.  "They waited for me.  'Tiens!' said one,
+'this gentleman was with him.  My friend's name is M. Le Baron de---.
+The man who struck him was an odd-looking person; kindly inform me
+whether it is possible for my friend to meet him?'  Eh!" commented
+Jules, "he was offensive!  Was it for me to give our dignity away?
+'Perfectly, monsieur!'  I answered.  'In that case,' he said, 'please
+give me his name and ad dress....  I could not remember his name, and
+as for the address, I never knew it...!  I reflected. 'That,' I said,
+'I am unable to do, for special reasons.'  'Aha!' he said, 'reasons
+that will prevent our fighting him, I suppose?  'On the contrary,' I
+said.  'I will convey your request to him; I may mention that I have
+heard he is the best swordsman and pistol-shot in Europe.  Good-
+night!'  I wished to give them something to dream of, you
+understand....  Patience, my dear!  Patience!  I was, coming to you,
+but I thought I would let them sleep on it--there was plenty of time!
+But yesterday morning I came into the Place, and there he was on the
+bench, with a big dog.  I declare to you he blushed like a young
+girl.  'Sir,' he said, 'I was hoping to meet you; last evening I made
+a great disturbance.  I took an unpardonable liberty'--and he put in
+my hand an envelope.  My friend, what do you suppose it contained--a
+pair of gloves!  Senor Don Punctilioso, hein?  He was the devil, this
+friend of yours; he fascinated me with his gentle eyes and his white
+moustachettes, his humility, his flames--poor man...!  I told him I
+had been asked to take him a challenge.  'If anything comes of it,' I
+said, 'make use of me!'  'Is that so?' he said.  'I am most grateful
+for your kind offer.  Let me see--it is so long since I fought a
+duel.  The sooner it's over the better.  Could you arrange to-morrow
+morning?  Weapons?  Yes; let them choose.'  You see, my friend, there
+was no hanging back here; nous voila en train."
+
+Jules took out his watch.  "I have sixteen minutes.  It is lucky for
+you that you were away yesterday, or you would be in my shoes now.  I
+fixed the place, right hand of the road to Roquebrune, just by the
+railway cutting, and the time--five-thirty of the morning.  It was
+arranged that I should call for him.  Disgusting hour; I have not
+been up so early since I fought Jacques Tirbaut in '85.  At five
+o'clock I found him ready and drinking tea with rum in it--singular
+man! he made me have some too, brrr!  He was shaved, and dressed in
+that old frock-coat.  His great dog jumped into the carriage, but he
+bade her get out, took her paws on his shoulders, and whispered in
+her ear some Italian words; a charm, hein! and back she went, the
+tail between the legs.  We drove slowly, so as not to shake his arm.
+He was more gay than I.  All the way he talked to me of you: how kind
+you were! how good you had been to him!  'You do not speak of
+yourself!' I said.  'Have you no friends, nothing to say?  Sometimes
+an accident will happen!'  'Oh!' he answered, 'there is no danger;
+but if by any chance--well, there is a letter in my pocket.'  'And if
+you should kill him?' I said.  'But I shall not,' he answered slyly:
+'do you think I am going to fire at him?  No, no; he is too young.'
+'But,' I said, 'I--'I am not going to stand that!'  'Yes,' he
+replied, 'I owe him a shot; but there is no danger--not the least
+danger.'  We had arrived; already they were there.  Ah bah!  You know
+the preliminaries, the politeness--this duelling, you know, it is
+absurd, after all.  We placed them at twenty paces.  It is not a bad
+place.  There are pine-trees round, and rocks; at that hour it was
+cool and grey as a church.  I handed him the pistol.  How can I
+describe him to you, standing there, smoothing the barrel with his
+fingers!  'What a beautiful thing a good pistol!' he said.  'Only a
+fool or a madman throws away his life,' I said.  'Certainly,' he
+replied, 'certainly; but there is no danger,' and he regarded me,
+raising his moustachette.
+
+"There they stood then, back to back, with the mouths of their
+pistols to the sky.  'Un!' I cried, 'deux! tirez!' They turned, I
+saw the smoke of his shot go straight up like a prayer; his pistol
+dropped.  I ran to him.  He looked surprised, put out his hand, and
+fell into my arms.  He was dead.  Those fools came running up.  'What
+is it?' cried one.  I made him a bow.  'As you see,' I said; 'you
+have made a pretty shot.  My friend fired in the air.  Messieurs, you
+had better breakfast in Italy.'  We carried him to the carriage, and
+covered him with a rug; the others drove for the frontier.  I brought
+him to his room.  Here is his letter."  Jules stopped; tears were
+running down his face.  "He is dead; I have closed his eyes.  Look
+here, you know, we are all of us cads--it is the rule; but this--
+this, perhaps, was the exception."  And without another word he
+rushed away....
+
+Outside the old fellow's lodging a dismounted cocher was standing
+disconsolate in the sun. "How was I to know they were going to fight
+a duel?" he burst out on seeing me.  "He had white hair--I call you
+to witness he had white hair.  This is bad for me: they will ravish
+my licence.  Aha! you will see--this is bad for me!"  I gave him the
+slip and found my way upstairs.  The old fellow was alone, lying on
+the bed, his feet covered with a rug as if he might feel cold; his
+eyes were closed, but in this sleep of death, he still had that air
+of faint surprise.  At full length, watching the bed intently, Freda
+lay, as she lay nightly when he was really asleep.  The shutters were
+half open; the room still smelt slightly of rum.  I stood for a long
+time looking at the face: the little white fans of moustache brushed
+upwards even in death, the hollows in his cheeks, the quiet of his
+figure; he was like some old knight....  The dog broke the spell.
+She sat up, and resting her paws on the bed, licked his face.  I went
+downstairs--I couldn't bear to hear her howl.  This was his letter to
+me, written in a pointed handwriting:
+
+"MY DEAR SIR,--Should you read this, I shall be gone.  I am ashamed
+to trouble you--a man should surely manage so as not to give trouble;
+and yet I believe you will not consider me importunate.  If, then,
+you will pick up the pieces of an old fellow, I ask you to have my
+sword, the letter enclosed in this, and the photograph that stands on
+the stove buried with me.  My will and the acknowledgments of my
+property are between the leaves of the Byron in my tin chest; they
+should go to Lucy Tor--address thereon.  Perhaps you will do me the
+honour to retain for yourself any of my books that may give you
+pleasure.  In the Pilgrim's Progress you will find some excellent
+recipes for Turkish coffee, Italian and Spanish dishes, and washing
+wounds.  The landlady's daughter speaks Italian, and she would, I
+know, like to have Freda; the poor dog will miss me.  I have read of
+old Indian warriors taking their horses and dogs with them to the
+happy hunting-grounds.  Freda would come--noble animals are dogs! She
+eats once a day--a good large meal--and requires much salt.  If you
+have animals of your own, sir, don't forget--all animals require
+salt.  I have no debts, thank God!  The money in my pockets would
+bury me decently--not that there is any danger.  And I am ashamed to
+weary you with details--the least a man can do is not to make a fuss-
+-and yet he must be found ready.--Sir, with profound gratitude, your
+servant,
+
+"ROGER BRUNE."
+
+
+Everything was as he had said.  The photograph on the stove was that
+of a young girl of nineteen or twenty, dressed in an old-fashioned
+style, with hair gathered backward in a knot.  The eyes gazed at you
+with a little frown, the lips were tightly closed; the expression of
+the face was eager, quick, wilful, and, above all, young.
+
+The tin trunk was scented with dry fragments of some herb, the
+history of which in that trunk man knoweth not....  There were a few
+clothes, but very few, all older than those he usually wore.  Besides
+the Byron and Pilgrim's Progress were Scott's Quentin Durward,
+Captain Marryat's Midshipman Easy, a pocket Testament, and a long and
+frightfully stiff book on the art of fortifying towns, much thumbed,
+and bearing date 1863.  By far the most interesting thing I found,
+however, was a diary, kept down to the preceding Christmas.  It was a
+pathetic document, full of calculations of the price of meals;
+resolutions to be careful over this or that; doubts whether he must
+not give up smoking; sentences of fear that Freda had not enough to
+eat.  It appeared that he had tried to live on ninety pounds a year,
+and send the other hundred pounds home to Lucy for the child; in this
+struggle he was always failing, having to send less than the amount-
+the entries showed that this was a nightmare to him.  The last words,
+written on Christmas Day, were these "What is the use of writing
+this, since it records nothing but failure!"
+
+The landlady's daughter and myself were at the funeral.  The same
+afternoon I went into the concert-room, where I had spoken to him
+first.  When I came out Freda was lying at the entrance, looking into
+the faces of every one that passed, and sniffing idly at their heels.
+Close by the landlady's daughter hovered, a biscuit in her hand, and
+a puzzled, sorry look on her face.
+
+September 1900.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+MY BROTHER
+
+HUBERT GALSWORTHY
+
+
+
+
+SALVATION OF A FORSYTE
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+Swithin Forsyte lay in bed.  The corners of his mouth under his white
+moustache drooped towards his double chin.  He panted:
+
+"My doctor says I'm in a bad way, James."
+
+His twin-brother placed his hand behind his ear.  "I can't hear you.
+They tell me I ought to take a cure.  There's always a cure wanted
+for something.  Emily had a cure."
+
+Swithin replied: "You mumble so.  I hear my man, Adolph.  I trained
+him....  You ought to have an ear-trumpet.  You're getting very
+shaky, James."
+
+There was silence; then James Forsyte, as if galvanised, remarked: "I
+s'pose you've made your will.  I s'pose you've left your money to the
+family; you've nobody else to leave it to.  There was Danson died the
+other day, and left his money to a hospital"
+
+The hairs of Swithin's white moustache bristled.  "My fool of a
+doctor told me to make my will," he said, "I hate a fellow who tells
+you to make your will.  My appetite's good; I ate a partridge last
+night.  I'm all the better for eating.  He told me to leave off
+champagne!  I eat a good breakfast.  I'm not eighty.  You're the same
+age, James.  You look very shaky."
+
+James Forsyte said: "You ought to have another opinion.  Have Blank;
+he's the first man now.  I had him for Emily; cost me two hundred
+guineas.  He sent her to Homburg; that's the first place now.  The
+Prince was there--everybody goes there."
+
+Swithin Forsyte answered: "I don't get any sleep at night, now I
+can't get out; and I've bought a new carriage--gave a pot of money
+for it.  D' you ever have bronchitis?  They tell me champagne's
+dangerous; it's my belief I couldn't take a better thing."
+
+James Forsyte rose.
+
+"You ought to have another opinion.  Emily sent her love; she would
+have come in, but she had to go to Niagara.  Everybody goes there;
+it's the place now.  Rachel goes every morning: she overdoes it--
+she'll be laid up one of these days.  There's a fancy ball there to-
+night; the Duke gives the prizes."
+
+Swithin Forsyte said angrily: "I can't get things properly cooked
+here; at the club I get spinach decently done."  The bed-clothes
+jerked at the tremor of his legs.
+
+James Forsyte replied: "You must have done well with Tintos; you must
+have made a lot of money by them.  Your ground-rents must be falling
+in, too.  You must have any amount you don't know what to do with."
+He mouthed the words, as if his lips were watering.
+
+Swithin Forsyte glared.  "Money!" he said; "my doctor's bill's
+enormous."
+
+James Forsyte stretched out a cold, damp hand "Goodbye! You ought to
+have another opinion.  I can't keep the horses waiting: they're a new
+pair--stood me in three hundred.  You ought to take care of yourself.
+I shall speak to Blank about you.  You ought to have him--everybody
+says he's the first man.  Good-bye!"
+
+Swithin Forsyte continued to stare at the ceiling.  He thought: 'A
+poor thing, James! a selfish beggar!  Must be worth a couple of
+hundred thousand!'  He wheezed, meditating on life....
+
+He was ill and lonely.  For many years he had been lonely, and for
+two years ill; but as he had smoked his first cigar, so he would live
+his life-stoutly, to its predestined end.  Every day he was driven to
+the club; sitting forward on the spring cushions of a single
+brougham, his hands on his knees, swaying a little, strangely solemn.
+He ascended the steps into that marble hall--the folds of his chin
+wedged into the aperture of his collar--walking squarely with a
+stick.  Later he would dine, eating majestically, and savouring his
+food, behind a bottle of champagne set in an ice-pail--his waistcoat
+defended by a napkin, his eyes rolling a little or glued in a stare
+on the waiter.  Never did he suffer his head or back to droop, for it
+was not distinguished so to do.
+
+Because he was old and deaf, he spoke to no one; and no one spoke to
+him.  The club gossip, an Irishman, said to each newcomer: "Old
+Forsyte!  Look at 'um!  Must ha' had something in his life to sour
+'um!"  But Swithin had had nothing in his life to sour him.
+
+For many days now he had lain in bed in a room exuding silver,
+crimson, and electric light, smelling of opopanax and of cigars.  The
+curtains were drawn, the firelight gleamed; on a table by his bed
+were a jug of barley-water and the Times.  He made an attempt to
+read, failed, and fell again to thinking.  His face with its square
+chin, looked like a block of pale leather bedded in the pillow.  It
+was lonely!  A woman in the room would have made all the difference!
+Why had he never married?  He breathed hard, staring froglike at the
+ceiling; a memory had come into his mind.  It was a long time ago--
+forty odd years--but it seemed like yesterday....
+
+It happened when he was thirty-eight, for the first and only time in
+his life travelling on the Continent, with his twin-brother James and
+a man named Traquair.  On the way from Germany to Venice, he had
+found himself at the Hotel Goldene Alp at Salzburg.  It was late
+August, and weather for the gods: sunshine on the walls and the
+shadows of the vine-leaves, and at night, the moonlight, and again on
+the walls the shadows of the vine-leaves.  Averse to the suggestions
+of other people, Swithin had refused to visit the Citadel; he had
+spent the day alone in the window of his bedroom, smoking a
+succession of cigars, and disparaging the appearance of the passers-
+by.  After dinner he was driven by boredom into the streets.  His
+chest puffed out like a pigeon's, and with something of a pigeon's
+cold and inquiring eye, he strutted, annoyed at the frequency of
+uniforms, which seemed to him both needless and offensive.  His
+spleen rose at this crowd of foreigners, who spoke an unintelligible
+language, wore hair on their faces, and smoked bad tobacco.  'A queer
+lot!' he thought.  The sound of music from a cafe attracted him; he
+walked in, vaguely moved by a wish for the distinction of adventure,
+without the trouble which adventure usually brought with it; spurred
+too, perhaps, by an after-dinner demon.  The cafe was the bier-halle
+of the 'Fifties, with a door at either end, and lighted by a large
+wooden lantern.  On a small dais three musicians were fiddling.
+Solitary men, or groups, sat at some dozen tables, and the waiters
+hurried about replenishing glasses; the air was thick with smoke.
+Swithin sat down.  "Wine!" he said sternly.  The astonished waiter
+brought him wine.  Swithin pointed to a beer glass on the table.
+"Here!" he said, with the same ferocity.  The waiter poured out the
+wine.  'Ah!' thought Swithin, 'they can understand if they like.'  A
+group of officers close by were laughing; Swithin stared at them
+uneasily.  A hollow cough sounded almost in his ear.  To his left a
+man sat reading, with his elbows on the corners of a journal, and his
+gaunt shoulders raised almost to his eyes.  He had a thin, long nose,
+broadening suddenly at the nostrils; a black-brown beard, spread in a
+savage fan over his chest; what was visible of the face was the
+colour of old parchment.  A strange, wild, haughty-looking creature!
+Swithin observed his clothes with some displeasure--they were the
+clothes of a journalist or strolling actor.  And yet he was
+impressed.  This was singular.  How could he be impressed by a fellow
+in such clothes!  The man reached out a hand, covered with black
+hairs, and took up a tumbler that contained a dark-coloured fluid.
+'Brandy!' thought Swithin.  The crash of a falling chair startled
+him--his neighbour had risen.  He was of immense height, and very
+thin; his great beard seemed to splash away from his mouth; he was
+glaring at the group of officers, and speaking.  Swithin made out two
+words: "Hunde! Deutsche Hunde!" 'Hounds! Dutch hounds!' he thought:
+'Rather strong!'  One of the officers had jumped up, and now drew his
+sword.  The tall man swung his chair up, and brought it down with a
+thud.  Everybody round started up and closed on him.  The tall man
+cried out, "To me, Magyars!"
+
+Swithin grinned.  The tall man fighting such odds excited his
+unwilling admiration; he had a momentary impulse to go to his
+assistance.  'Only get a broken nose!' he thought, and looked for a
+safe corner.  But at that moment a thrown lemon struck him on the
+jaw.  He jumped out of his chair and rushed at the officers.  The
+Hungarian, swinging his chair, threw him a look of gratitude--Swithin
+glowed with momentary admiration of himself.  A sword blade grazed
+his--arm; he felt a sudden dislike of the Hungarian.  'This is too
+much,' he thought, and, catching up a chair, flung it at the wooden
+lantern.  There was a crash--faces and swords vanished.  He struck a
+match, and by the light of it bolted for the door.  A second later he
+was in the street.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+A voice said in English, "God bless you, brother!"
+
+Swithin looked round, and saw the tall Hungarian holding out his
+hand.  He took it, thinking, 'What a fool I've been!'  There was
+something in the Hungarian's gesture which said, "You are worthy of
+me!"
+
+It was annoying, but rather impressive.  The man seemed even taller
+than before; there was a cut on his cheek, the blood from which was
+trickling down his beard.  "You English!" he said.  "I saw you stone
+Haynau--I saw you cheer Kossuth.  The free blood of your people cries
+out to us."  He looked at Swithin.  "You are a big man, you have a
+big soul--and strong, how you flung them down! Ha!"  Swithin had an
+impulse to take to his heels.  "My name," said the Hungarian, "is
+Boleskey.  You are my friend."  His English was good.
+
+'Bulsh-kai-ee, Burlsh-kai-ee,' thought Swithin; 'what a devil of a
+name!'  "Mine," he said sulkily, "is Forsyte."
+
+The Hungarian repeated it.
+
+"You've had a nasty jab on the cheek," said Swithin; the sight of the
+matted beard was making him feel sick.  The Hungarian put his fingers
+to his cheek, brought them away wet, stared at them, then with an
+indifferent air gathered a wisp of his beard and crammed it against
+the cut.
+
+"Ugh!" said Swithin.  "Here! Take my handkerchief!"
+
+The Hungarian bowed.  "Thank you!" he said; "I couldn't think of it!
+Thank you a thousand times!"
+
+"Take it!" growled Swithin; it seemed to him suddenly of the first
+importance.  He thrust the handkerchief into the Hungarian's hand,
+and felt a pain in his arm.  'There!' he thought, 'I've strained a
+muscle.'
+
+The Hungarian kept muttering, regardless of passers-by, "Swine! How
+you threw them over!  Two or three cracked heads, anyway--the
+cowardly swine!"
+
+"Look here!" said Swithin suddenly; "which is my way to the Goldene
+Alp?"
+
+The Hungarian replied, "But you are coming with me, for a glass of
+wine?"
+
+Swithin looked at the ground.  'Not if I know it!' he thought.
+
+"Ah!" said the Hungarian with dignity, "you do not wish for my
+friendship!"
+
+'Touchy beggar!' thought Swithin.  "Of course," he stammered, "if you
+put it in that way--"
+
+The Hungarian bowed, murmuring, "Forgive me!"
+
+They had not gone a dozen steps before a youth, with a beardless face
+and hollow cheeks, accosted them.  "For the love of Christ,
+gentlemen," he said, "help me!"
+
+"Are you a German?" asked Boleskey.
+
+"Yes," said the youth.
+
+"Then you may rot!"
+
+"Master, look here!" Tearing open his coat, the youth displayed his
+skin, and a leather belt drawn tight round it.  Again Swithin felt
+that desire to take to his heels.  He was filled with horrid
+forebodings--a sense of perpending intimacy with things such as no
+gentleman had dealings with.
+
+The Hungarian crossed himself.  "Brother," he said to the youth,
+"come you in!"
+
+Swithin looked at them askance, and followed.  By a dim light they
+groped their way up some stairs into a large room, into which the
+moon was shining through a window bulging over the street.  A lamp
+burned low; there was a smell of spirits and tobacco, with a faint,
+peculiar scent, as of rose leaves.  In one corner stood a czymbal, in
+another a great pile of newspapers.  On the wall hung some old-
+fashioned pistols, and a rosary of yellow beads.  Everything was
+tidily arranged, but dusty.  Near an open fireplace was a table with
+the remains of a meal.  The ceiling, floor, and walls were all of
+dark wood.  In spite of the strange disharmony, the room had a sort
+of refinement.  The Hungarian took a bottle out of a cupboard and,
+filling some glasses, handed one to Swithin.  Swithin put it gingerly
+to his nose.  'You never know your luck! Come!' he thought, tilting
+it slowly into his mouth.  It was thick, too sweet, but of a fine
+flavour.
+
+"Brothers!" said the Hungarian, refilling, "your healths!"
+
+The youth tossed off his wine.  And Swithin this time did the same;
+he pitied this poor devil of a youth now.  "Come round to-morrow!" he
+said, "I'll give you a shirt or two."  When the youth was gone,
+however, he remembered with relief that he had not given his address.
+
+'Better so,' he reflected.  'A humbug, no doubt.'
+
+"What was that you said to him?" he asked of the Hungarian.
+
+"I said," answered Boleskey, "'You have eaten and drunk; and now you
+are my enemy!'"
+
+"Quite right!" said Swithin, "quite right! A beggar is every man's
+enemy."
+
+"You do not understand," the Hungarian replied politely.  "While he
+was a beggar--I, too, have had to beg" (Swithin thought, 'Good God!
+this is awful!'), "but now that he is no longer hungry, what is he
+but a German?  No Austrian dog soils my floors!"
+
+His nostrils, as it seemed to Swithin, had distended in an unpleasant
+fashion; and a wholly unnecessary raucousness invaded his voice.  "I
+am an exile--all of my blood are exiles.  Those Godless dogs!"
+Swithin hurriedly assented.
+
+As he spoke, a face peeped in at the door.
+
+"Rozsi!" said the Hungarian.  A young girl came in.  She was rather
+short, with a deliciously round figure and a thick plait of hair.
+She smiled, and showed her even teeth; her little, bright, wide-set
+grey eyes glanced from one man to the other.  Her face was round,
+too, high in the cheekbones, the colour of wild roses, with brows
+that had a twist-up at the corners.  With a gesture of alarm, she put
+her hand to her cheek, and called, "Margit!"  An older girl appeared,
+taller, with fine shoulders, large eyes, a pretty mouth, and what
+Swithin described to himself afterwards as a "pudding" nose.  Both
+girls, with little cooing sounds, began attending to their father's
+face.
+
+Swithin turned his back to them.  His arm pained him.
+
+'This is what comes of interfering,' he thought sulkily; 'I might
+have had my neck broken!' Suddenly a soft palm was placed in his, two
+eyes, half-fascinated, half-shy, looked at him; then a voice called,
+"Rozsi!" the door was slammed, he was alone again with the Hungarian,
+harassed by a sense of soft disturbance.
+
+"Your daughter's name is Rosy?" he said; "we have it in England--from
+rose, a flower."
+
+"Rozsi (Rozgi)," the Hungarian replied; "your English is a hard
+tongue, harder than French, German, or Czechish, harder than Russian,
+or Roumanian--I know no more."
+
+"What?" said Swithin, "six languages?"  Privately he thought, 'He
+knows how to lie, anyway.'
+
+"If you lived in a country like mine," muttered the Hungarian, "with
+all men's hands against you!  A free people--dying--but not dead!"
+
+Swithin could not imagine what he was talking of.  This man's face,
+with its linen bandage, gloomy eyes, and great black wisps of beard,
+his fierce mutterings, and hollow cough, were all most unpleasant.
+He seemed to be suffering from some kind of mental dog-bite.  His
+emotion indeed appeared so indecent, so uncontrolled and open, that
+its obvious sincerity produced a sort of awe in Swithin.  It was like
+being forced to look into a furnace.  Boleskey stopped roaming up and
+down.  "You think it's over?" he said; "I tell you, in the breast of
+each one of us Magyars there is a hell.  What is sweeter than life?
+What is more sacred than each breath we draw?  Ah! my country!"
+These words were uttered so slowly, with such intense mournfulness,
+that Swithin's jaw relaxed; he converted the movement to a yawn.
+
+"Tell me," said Boleskey, "what would you do if the French conquered
+you?"
+
+Swithin smiled.  Then suddenly, as though something had hurt him, he
+grunted, "The 'Froggies'?  Let 'em try!"
+
+"Drink!" said Boleskey--"there is nothing like it"; he filled
+Swithin's glass.  "I will tell you my story."
+
+Swithin rose hurriedly.  "It's late," he said.  "This is good stuff,
+though; have you much of it?"
+
+"It is the last bottle."
+
+"What?" said Swithin; "and you gave it to a beggar?"
+
+"My name is Boleskey--Stefan," the Hungarian said, raising his head;
+"of the Komorn Boleskeys."  The simplicity of this phrase--as who
+shall say: What need of further description?--made an impression on
+Swithin; he stopped to listen.  Boleskey's story went on and on.
+"There were many abuses," boomed his deep voice, "much wrong done--
+much cowardice.  I could see clouds gathering--rolling over our
+plains.  The Austrian wished to strangle the breath of our mouths--to
+take from us the shadow of our liberty--the shadow--all we had.  Two
+years ago--the year of '48, when every man and boy answered the great
+voice--brother, a dog's life!--to use a pen when all of your blood
+are fighting, but it was decreed for me!  My son was killed; my
+brothers taken--and myself was thrown out like a dog--I had written
+out my heart, I had written out all the blood that was in my body!"
+He seemed to tower, a gaunt shadow of a man, with gloomy, flickering
+eyes staring at the wall.
+
+Swithin rose, and stammered, "Much obliged--very interesting."
+Boleskey made no effort to detain him, but continued staring at the
+wall.  "Good-night!" said Swithin, and stamped heavily downstairs.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+When at last Swithin reached the Goldene Alp, he found his brother
+and friend standing uneasily at the door.  Traquair, a prematurely
+dried-up man, with whiskers and a Scotch accent, remarked, "Ye're
+airly, man!"  Swithin growled something unintelligible, and swung up
+to bed.  He discovered a slight cut on his arm.  He was in a savage
+temper--the elements had conspired to show him things he did not want
+to see; yet now and then a memory of Rozsi, of her soft palm in his,
+a sense of having been stroked and flattered, came over him.  During
+breakfast next morning his brother and Traquair announced their
+intention of moving on.  James Forsyte, indeed, remarked that it was
+no place for a "collector," since all the "old" shops were in the
+hands of Jews or very grasping persons--he had discovered this at
+once.  Swithin pushed his cup aside.  "You may do what you like," he
+said, "I'm staying here."
+
+James Forsyte replied, tumbling over his own words: "Why! what do you
+want to stay here for?  There's nothing for you to do here--there's
+nothing to see here, unless you go up the Citadel, an' you won't do
+that."
+
+Swithin growled, "Who says so?"  Having gratified his perversity, he
+felt in a better temper.  He had slung his arm in a silk sash, and
+accounted for it by saying he had slipped.  Later he went out and
+walked on to the bridge.  In the brilliant sunshine spires were
+glistening against the pearly background of the hills; the town had a
+clean, joyous air.  Swithin glanced at the Citadel and thought,
+'Looks a strong place! Shouldn't wonder if it were impregnable!'  And
+this for some occult reason gave him pleasure.  It occurred to him
+suddenly to go and look for the Hungarian's house.
+
+About noon, after a hunt of two hours, he was gazing about him
+blankly, pale with heat, but more obstinate than ever, when a voice
+above him called, "Mister!" He looked up and saw Rozsi.  She was
+leaning her round chin on her round hand, gazing down at him with her
+deepset, clever eyes.  When Swithin removed his hat, she clapped her
+hands.  Again he had the sense of being admired, caressed.  With a
+careless air, that sat grotesquely on his tall square person, he
+walked up to the door; both girls stood in the passage.  Swithin felt
+a confused desire to speak in some foreign tongue.  "Maam'selles," he
+began, "er--bong jour-er, your father--pare, comment?"
+
+"We also speak English," said the elder girl; "will you come in,
+please?"
+
+Swithin swallowed a misgiving, and entered.  The room had a worn
+appearance by daylight, as if it had always been the nest of tragic
+or vivid lives.  He sat down, and his eyes said: "I am a stranger,
+but don't try to get the better of me, please--that is impossible."
+The girls looked at him in silence.  Rozsi wore a rather short skirt
+of black stuff, a white shirt, and across her shoulders an
+embroidered yoke; her sister was dressed in dark green, with a coral
+necklace; both girls had their hair in plaits.  After a minute Rozsi
+touched the sleeve of his hurt arm.
+
+"It's nothing!" muttered Swithin.
+
+"Father fought with a chair, but you had no chair," she said in a
+wondering voice.
+
+He doubled the fist of his sound arm and struck a blow at space.  To
+his amazement she began to laugh.  Nettled at this, he put his hand
+beneath the heavy table and lifted it.  Rozsi clapped her hands.  "Ah
+I now I see--how strong you are!"  She made him a curtsey and whisked
+round to the window.  He found the quick intelligence of her eyes
+confusing; sometimes they seemed to look beyond him at something
+invisible--this, too, confused him.  From Margit he learned that they
+had been two years in England, where their father had made his living
+by teaching languages; they had now been a year in Salzburg.
+
+"We wait," suddenly said.  Rozsi; and Margit, with a solemn face,
+repeated, "We wait."
+
+Swithin's eyes swelled a little with his desire to see what they were
+waiting for.  How queer they were, with their eyes that gazed beyond
+him!  He looked at their figures.  'She would pay for dressing,' he
+thought, and he tried to imagine Rozsi in a skirt with proper
+flounces, a thin waist, and hair drawn back over her ears.  She would
+pay for dressing, with that supple figure, fluffy hair, and little
+hands!  And instantly his own hands, face, and clothes disturbed him.
+He got up, examined the pistols on the wall, and felt resentment at
+the faded, dusty room.  'Smells like a pot-house!' he thought.  He
+sat down again close to Rozsi.
+
+"Do you love to dance?" she asked; "to dance is to live.  First you
+hear the music--how your feet itch!  It is wonderful!  You begin
+slow, quick--quicker; you fly--you know nothing--your feet are in the
+air.  It is wonderful!"
+
+A slow flush had mounted into Swithin's face.
+
+"Ah!" continued Rozsi, her eyes fixed on him, "when I am dancing--out
+there I see the plains--your feet go one--two--three--quick, quick,
+quick, quicker--you fly."
+
+She stretched herself, a shiver seemed to pass all down her.
+"Margit! dance!" and, to Swithin's consternation, the two girls--
+their hands on each other's shoulders--began shuffling their feet and
+swaying to and fro.  Their heads were thrown back, their eyes half-
+closed; suddenly the step quickened, they swung to one side, then to
+the other, and began whirling round in front of him.  The sudden
+fragrance of rose leaves enveloped him.  Round they flew again.
+While they were still dancing, Boleskey came into the room.  He
+caught Swithin by both hands.
+
+"Brother, welcome! Ah! your arm is hurt! I do not forget."  His
+yellow face and deep-set eyes expressed a dignified gratitude.  "Let
+me introduce to you my friend Baron Kasteliz."
+
+Swithin bowed to a man with a small forehead, who had appeared
+softly, and stood with his gloved hands touching his waist.  Swithin
+conceived a sudden aversion for this catlike man.  About Boleskey
+there was that which made contempt impossible--the sense of
+comradeship begotten in the fight; the man's height; something lofty
+and savage in his face; and an obscure instinct that it would not pay
+to show distaste; but this Kasteliz, with his neat jaw, low brow, and
+velvety, volcanic look, excited his proper English animosity.  "Your
+friends are mine," murmured Kasteliz.  He spoke with suavity, and
+hissed his s's.  A long, vibrating twang quavered through the room.
+Swithin turned and saw Rozsi sitting at the czymbal; the notes rang
+under the little hammers in her hands, incessant, metallic, rising
+and falling with that strange melody.  Kasteliz had fixed his glowing
+eyes on her; Boleskey, nodding his head, was staring at the floor;
+Margit, with a pale face, stood like a statue.
+
+'What can they see in it?' thought Swithin; 'it's not a tune.'  He
+took up his hat.  Rozsi saw him and stopped; her lips had parted with
+a faintly dismayed expression.  His sense of personal injury
+diminished; he even felt a little sorry for her.  She jumped up from
+her seat and twirled round with a pout.  An inspiration seized on
+Swithin.  "Come and dine with me," he said to Boleskey, "to-morrow--
+the Goldene Alp--bring your friend."  He felt the eyes of the whole
+room on him--the Hungarian's fine eyes; Margit's wide glance; the
+narrow, hot gaze of Kasteliz; and lastly--Rozsi's.  A glow of
+satisfaction ran down his spine.  When he emerged into the street
+he thought gloomily, 'Now I've done it!' And not for some paces did
+he look round; then, with a forced smile, turned and removed his hat
+to the faces at the window.
+
+Notwithstanding this moment of gloom, however, he was in an exalted
+state all day, and at dinner kept looking at his brother and Traquair
+enigmatically.  'What do they know of life?' he thought; 'they might
+be here a year and get no farther.'  He made jokes, and pinned the
+menu to the waiter's coat-tails.  "I like this place," he said, "I
+shall spend three weeks here."  James, whose lips were on the point
+of taking in a plum, looked at him uneasily.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+On the day of the dinner Swithin suffered a good deal.  He reflected
+gloomily on Boleskey's clothes.  He had fixed an early hour--there
+would be fewer people to see them.  When the time approached he
+attired himself with a certain neat splendour, and though his arm was
+still sore, left off the sling....
+
+Nearly three hours afterwards he left the Goldene Alp between his
+guests.  It was sunset, and along the riverbank the houses stood out,
+unsoftened by the dusk; the streets were full of people hurrying
+home.  Swithin had a hazy vision of empty bottles, of the ground
+before his feet, and the accessibility of all the world.  Dim
+recollections of the good things he had said, of his brother and
+Traquair seated in the background eating ordinary meals with
+inquiring, acid visages, caused perpetual smiles to break out on his
+face, and he steered himself stubbornly, to prove that he was a
+better man than either' of his guests.  He knew, vaguely, that he was
+going somewhere with an object; Rozsi's face kept dancing before him,
+like a promise.  Once or twice he gave Kasteliz a glassy stare.
+Towards Boleskey, on the other hand, he felt quite warm, and recalled
+with admiration the way he had set his glass down empty, time after
+time.  'I like to see him take his liquor,' he thought; 'the fellow's
+a gentleman, after all.'  Boleskey strode on, savagely inattentive to
+everything; and Kasteliz had become more like a cat than ever.  It
+was nearly dark when they reached a narrow street close to the
+cathedral.  They stopped at a door held open by an old woman.  The
+change from the fresh air to a heated corridor, the noise of the door
+closed behind him, the old woman's anxious glances, sobered Swithin.
+
+"I tell her," said Boleskey, "that I reply for you as for my son."
+
+Swithin was angry.  What business had this man to reply for him!
+
+They passed into a large room, crowded with men all women; Swithin
+noticed that they all looked fit him.  He stared at them in turn--
+they seemed of all classes, some in black coats or silk dresses,
+others in the clothes of work-people; one man, a cobbler, still wore
+his leather apron, as if he had rushed there straight from his work.
+Laying his hand on Swithin's arm, Boleskey evidently began explaining
+who he was; hands were extended, people beyond reach bowed to him.
+Swithin acknowledged the greetings with a stiff motion of his head;
+then seeing other people dropping into seats, he, too, sat down.
+Some one whispered his name--Margit and Rozsi were just behind him.
+
+"Welcome!" said Margit; but Swithin was looking at Rozsi.  Her face
+was so alive and quivering!  'What's the excitement all about?' he
+thought.  'How pretty she looks!'  She blushed, drew in her hands
+with a quick tense movement, and gazed again beyond him into the
+room.  'What is it?' thought Swithin; he had a longing to lean back
+and kiss her lips.  He tried angrily to see what she was seeing in
+those faces turned all one way.
+
+Boleskey rose to speak.  No one moved; not a sound could be heard but
+the tone of his deep voice.  On and on he went, fierce and solemn,
+and with the rise of his voice, all those faces-fair or swarthy--
+seemed to be glowing with one and the same feeling.  Swithin felt the
+white heat in those faces--it was not decent!  In that whole speech
+he only understood the one word--"Magyar" which came again and again.
+He almost dozed off at last.  The twang of a czymbal woke him.
+'What?' he thought, 'more of that infernal music!' Margit, leaning
+over him, whispered: "Listen! Racoczy! It is forbidden!" Swithin saw
+that Rozsi was no longer in her seat; it was she who was striking
+those forbidden notes.  He looked round--everywhere the same unmoving
+faces, the same entrancement, and fierce stillness.  The music
+sounded muffled, as if it, too, were bursting its heart in silence.
+Swithin felt within him a touch of panic.  Was this a den of tigers?
+The way these people listened, the ferocity of their stillness, was
+frightful...!  He gripped his chair and broke into a perspiration;
+was there no chance to get away?  'When it stops,' he thought,
+'there'll be a rush!'  But there was only a greater silence.  It
+flashed across him that any hostile person coming in then would be
+torn to pieces.  A woman sobbed.  The whole thing was beyond words
+unpleasant.  He rose, and edged his way furtively towards the
+doorway.  There was a cry of "Police!"  The whole crowd came pressing
+after him.  Swithin would soon have been out, but a little behind he
+caught sight of Rozsi swept off her feet.  Her frightened eyes
+angered him.  'She doesn't deserve it,' he thought sulkily; 'letting
+all this loose!' and forced his way back to her.  She clung to him,
+and a fever went stealing through his veins; he butted forward at the
+crowd, holding her tight.  When they were outside he let her go.
+
+"I was afraid," she said.
+
+"Afraid!" muttered Swithin; "I should think so."  No longer touching
+her, he felt his grievance revive.
+
+"But you are so strong," she murmured.
+
+"This is no place for you," growled Swithin, "I'm going to see you
+home."
+
+"Oh!" cried Rozsi; "but papa and--Margit!"
+
+"That's their look-out!" and he hurried her away.
+
+She slid her hand under his arm; the soft curves of her form brushed
+him gently, each touch only augmented his ill-humour.  He burned with
+a perverse rage, as if all the passions in him were simmering and
+ready to boil over; it was as if a poison were trying to work its way
+out of him, through the layers of his stolid flesh.  He maintained a
+dogged silence; Rozsi, too, said nothing, but when they reached the
+door, she drew her hand away.
+
+"You are angry!" she said.
+
+"Angry," muttered Swithin; "no! How d'you make that out?"  He had a
+torturing desire to kiss her.
+
+"Yes, you are angry," she repeated; "I wait here for papa and
+Margit."
+
+Swithin also waited, wedged against the wall.  Once or twice, for his
+sight was sharp, he saw her steal a look at him, a beseeching look,
+and hardened his heart with a kind of pleasure.  After five minutes
+Boleskey, Margit, and Kasteliz appeared.  Seeing Rozsi they broke
+into exclamations of relief, and Kasteliz, with a glance at Swithin,
+put his lips to her hand.  Rozsi's look said, "Wouldn't you like to
+do that?"  Swithin turned short on his heel, and walked away.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+All night he hardly slept, suffering from fever, for the first time
+in his life.  Once he jumped out of bed, lighted a candle, and going
+to the glass, scrutinised himself long and anxiously.  After this he
+fell asleep, but had frightful dreams.  His first thought when he
+woke was, 'My liver's out of order!' and, thrusting his head into
+cold water, he dressed hastily and went out.  He soon left the house
+behind.  Dew covered everything; blackbirds whistled in the bushes;
+the air was fresh and sweet.  He had not been up so early since he
+was a boy.  Why was he walking through a damp wood at this hour of
+the morning?  Something intolerable and unfamiliar must have sent him
+out.  No fellow in his senses would do such a thing!  He came to a
+dead stop, and began unsteadily to walk back.  Regaining the hotel,
+he went to bed again, and dreamed that in some wild country he was
+living in a room full of insects, where a housemaid--Rozsi--holding a
+broom, looked at him with mournful eyes.  There seemed an unexplained
+need for immediate departure; he begged her to forward his things;
+and shake them out carefully before she put them into the trunk.  He
+understood that the charge for sending would be twenty-two shillings,
+thought it a great deal, and had the horrors of indecision.  "No," he
+muttered, "pack, and take them myself."  The housemaid turned
+suddenly into a lean creature; and he awoke with a sore feeling in
+his heart.
+
+His eye fell on his wet boots.  The whole thing was scaring, and
+jumping up, he began to throw his clothes into his trunks.  It was
+twelve o'clock before he went down, and found his brother and
+Traquair still at the table arranging an itinerary; he surprised them
+by saying that he too was coming; and without further explanation set
+to work to eat.  James had heard that there were salt-mines in the
+neighbourhood--his proposal was to start, and halt an hour or so on
+the road for their inspection; he said: "Everybody'll ask you if
+you've seen the salt-mines: I shouldn't like to say I hadn't seen the
+salt-mines.  What's the good, they'd say, of your going there if you
+haven't seen the salt-mines?"  He wondered, too, if they need fee the
+second waiter--an idle chap!
+
+A discussion followed; but Swithin ate on glumly, conscious that his
+mind was set on larger affairs.  Suddenly on the far side of the
+street Rozsi and her sister passed, with little baskets on their
+arms.  He started up, and at that moment Rozsi looked round--her face
+was the incarnation of enticement, the chin tilted, the lower lip
+thrust a little forward, her round neck curving back over her
+shoulder.  Swithin muttered, "Make your own arrangements--leave me
+out!" and hurried from the room, leaving James beside himself with
+interest and alarm.
+
+When he reached the street, however, the girls had disappeared.  He
+hailed a carriage.  "Drive!" he called to the man, with a flourish of
+his stick, and as soon as the wheels had begun to clatter on the
+stones he leaned back, looking sharply to right and left.  He soon
+had to give up thought of finding them, but made the coachman turn
+round and round again.  All day he drove about, far into the country,
+and kept urging the driver to use greater speed.  He was in a strange
+state of hurry and elation.  Finally, he dined at a little country
+inn; and this gave the measure of his disturbance--the dinner was
+atrocious.
+
+Returning late in the evening he found a note written by Traquair.
+"Are you in your senses, man?" it asked; "we have no more time to
+waste idling about here.  If you want to rejoin us, come on to
+Danielli's Hotel, Venice."  Swithin chuckled when he read it, and
+feeling frightfully tired, went to bed and slept like a log.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Three weeks later he was still in Salzburg, no longer at the Goldene
+Alp, but in rooms over a shop near the Boleskeys'.  He had spent a
+small fortune in the purchase of flowers.  Margit would croon over
+them, but Rozsi, with a sober "Many tanks!" as if they were her
+right, would look long at herself in the glass, and pin one into her
+hair.  Swithin ceased to wonder; he ceased to wonder at anything they
+did.  One evening he found Boleskey deep in conversation with a pale,
+dishevelled-looking person.
+
+"Our friend Mr. Forsyte--Count D....," said Boleskey.
+
+Swithin experienced a faint, unavoidable emotion; but looking at the
+Count's trousers, he thought: 'Doesn't look much like one!'  And with
+an ironic bow to the silent girls, he turned, and took his hat.  But
+when he had reached the bottom of the dark stairs he heard footsteps.
+Rozsi came running down, looked out at the door, and put her hands up
+to her breast as if disappointed; suddenly with a quick glance round
+she saw him.  Swithin caught her arm.  She slipped away, and her face
+seemed to bubble with defiance or laughter; she ran up three steps,
+stopped, looked at him across her shoulder, and fled on up the
+stairs.  Swithin went out bewildered and annoyed.
+
+'What was she going to say to me?' he kept thinking.  During these
+three weeks he had asked himself all sorts of questions: whether he
+were being made a fool of; whether she were in love with him; what he
+was doing there, and sometimes at night, with all his candles burning
+as if he wanted light, the breeze blowing on him through the window,
+his cigar, half-smoked, in his hand, he sat, an hour or more, staring
+at the wall.  'Enough of this!' he thought every morning.  Twice he
+packed fully--once he ordered his travelling carriage, but
+countermanded it the following day.  What definitely he hoped,
+intended, resolved, he could not have said.  He was always thinking
+of Rozsi, he could not read the riddle in her face--she held him in a
+vice, notwithstanding that everything about her threatened the very
+fetishes of his existence.  And Boleskey!  Whenever he looked at him
+he thought, 'If he were only clean?' and mechanically fingered his
+own well-tied cravatte.  To talk with the fellow, too, was like being
+forced to look at things which had no place in the light of day.
+Freedom, equality, self-sacrifice!
+
+'Why can't he settle down at some business,' he thought, 'instead of
+all this talk?' Boleskey's sudden diffidences, self-depreciation,
+fits of despair, irritated him.  "Morbid beggar!" he would mutter;
+"thank God I haven't a thin skin."  And proud too!  Extraordinary!
+An impecunious fellow like that!  One evening, moreover, Boleskey had
+returned home drunk.  Swithin had hustled him away into his bedroom,
+helped him to undress, and stayed until he was asleep.  'Too much of
+a good thing!' he thought, 'before his own daughters, too!'  It was
+after this that he ordered his travelling carriage.  The other
+occasion on which he packed was one evening, when not only Boleskey,
+but Rozsi herself had picked chicken bones with her fingers.
+
+Often in the mornings he would go to the Mirabell Garden to smoke his
+cigar; there, in stolid contemplation of the statues--rows of half-
+heroic men carrying off half-distressful females--he would spend an
+hour pleasantly, his hat tilted to keep the sun off his nose.  The
+day after Rozsi had fled from him on the stairs, he came there as
+usual.  It was a morning of blue sky and sunlight glowing on the old
+prim garden, on its yew-trees, and serio-comic statues, and walls
+covered with apricots and plums.  When Swithin approached his usual
+seat, who should be sitting there but Rozsi
+
+"Good-morning," he stammered; "you knew this was my seat then?"
+
+Rozsi looked at the ground.  "Yes," she answered.
+
+Swithin felt bewildered.  "Do you know," he said, "you treat me very
+funnily?"
+
+To his surprise Rozsi put her little soft hand down and touched his;
+then, without a word, sprang up and rushed away.  It took him a
+minute to recover.  There were people present; he did not like to
+run, but overtook her on the bridge, and slipped her hand beneath his
+arm.
+
+"You shouldn't have done that," he said; "you shouldn't have run away
+from me, you know."
+
+Rozsi laughed.  Swithin withdrew his arm; a desire to shake her
+seized him.  He walked some way before he said, "Will you have the
+goodness to tell me what you came to that seat for?"
+
+Rozsi flashed a look at him.  "To-morrow is the fete," she answered.
+
+Swithin muttered, "Is that all?"
+
+"If you do not take us, we cannot go."
+
+"Suppose I refuse," he said sullenly, "there are plenty of others."
+
+Rozsi bent her head, scurrying along.  "No," she murmured, "if you do
+not go--I do not wish."
+
+Swithin drew her hand back within his arm.  How round and soft it
+was!  He tried to see her face.  When she was nearly home he said
+goodbye, not wishing, for some dark reason, to be seen with her.  He
+watched till she had disappeared; then slowly retraced his steps to
+the Mirabell Garden.  When he came to where she had been sitting, he
+slowly lighted his cigar, and for a long time after it was smoked out
+remained there in the silent presence of the statues.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+A crowd of people wandered round the booths, and Swithin found
+himself obliged to give the girls his arms.  'Like a little Cockney
+clerk!' he thought.  His indignation passed unnoticed; they talked,
+they laughed, each sight and sound in all the hurly-burly seemed to
+go straight into their hearts.  He eyed them ironically--their eager
+voices, and little coos of sympathy seemed to him vulgar.  In the
+thick of the crowd he slipped his arm out of Margit's, but, just as
+he thought that he was free, the unwelcome hand slid up again.  He
+tried again, but again Margit reappeared, serene, and full of
+pleasant humour; and his failure this time appeared to him in a comic
+light.  But when Rozsi leaned across him, the glow of her round
+cheek, her curving lip, the inscrutable grey gleam of her eyes, sent
+a thrill of longing through him.  He was obliged to stand by while
+they parleyed with a gipsy, whose matted locks and skinny hands
+inspired him with a not unwarranted disgust.  "Folly!" he muttered,
+as Rozsi held out her palm.  The old woman mumbled, and shot a
+malignant look at him.  Rozsi drew back her hand, and crossed
+herself.  'Folly!' Swithin thought again; and seizing the girls'
+arms, he hurried them away.
+
+"What did the old hag say?" he asked.
+
+Rozsi shook her head.
+
+"You don't mean that you believe?"
+
+Her eyes were full of tears.  "The gipsies are wise," she murmured.
+
+"Come, what did she tell you?"
+
+This time Rozsi looked hurriedly round, and slipped away into the
+crowd.  After a hunt they found her, and Swithin, who was scared,
+growled: "You shouldn't do such things--it's not respectable."
+
+On higher ground, in the centre of a clear space, a military band was
+playing.  For the privilege of entering this charmed circle Swithin
+paid three kronen, choosing naturally the best seats.  He ordered
+wine, too, watching Rozsi out of the corner of his eye as he poured
+it out.  The protecting tenderness of yesterday was all lost in this
+medley.  It was every man for himself, after all!  The colour had
+deepened again in her cheeks, she laughed, pouting her lips.
+Suddenly she put her glass aside.  "Thank you, very much," she said,
+"it is enough!"
+
+Margit, whose pretty mouth was all smiles, cried, "Lieber Gott! is it
+not good-life?"  It was not a question Swithin could undertake to
+answer.  The band began to play a waltz.  "Now they will dance.
+Lieber Gott! and are the lights not wonderful?"  Lamps were
+flickering beneath the trees like a swarm of fireflies.  There was a
+hum as from a gigantic beehive.  Passers-by lifted their faces, then
+vanished into the crowd; Rozsi stood gazing at them spellbound, as if
+their very going and coming were a delight.
+
+The space was soon full of whirling couples.  Rozsi's head began to
+beat time.  "O Margit!" she whispered.
+
+Swithin's face had assumed a solemn, uneasy expression.  A man
+raising his hat, offered his arm to Margit.  She glanced back across
+her shoulder to reassure Swithin.  "It is a friend," she said.
+
+Swithin looked at Rozsi--her eyes were bright, her lips tremulous.
+He slipped his hand along the table and touched her fingers.  Then
+she flashed a look at him--appeal, reproach, tenderness, all were
+expressed in it.  Was she expecting him to dance?  Did she want to
+mix with the rift-raff there; wish him to make an exhibition of
+himself in this hurly-burly?  A voice said, "Good-evening!"  Before
+them stood Kasteliz, in a dark coat tightly buttoned at the waist.
+
+"You are not dancing, Rozsi Kozsanony?" (Miss Rozsi).  "Let me, then,
+have the pleasure."  He held out his arm.  Swithin stared in front of
+him.  In the very act of going she gave him a look that said as plain
+as words: "Will you not?"  But for answer he turned his eyes away,
+and when he looked again she was gone.  He paid the score and made
+his way into the crowd.  But as he went she danced by close to him,
+all flushed and panting.  She hung back as if to stop him, and he
+caught the glistening of tears.  Then he lost sight of her again.  To
+be deserted the first minute he was alone with her, and for that
+jackanapes with the small head and the volcanic glances!  It was too
+much!  And suddenly it occurred to him that she was alone with
+Kasteliz--alone at night, and far from home.  'Well,' he thought,
+'what do I care?' and shouldered his way on through the crowd.  It
+served him right for mixing with such people here.  He left the fair,
+but the further he went, the more he nursed his rage, the more
+heinous seemed her offence, the sharper grew his jealousy.  "A
+beggarly baron!" was his thought.
+
+A figure came alongside--it was Boleskey.  One look showed Swithin
+his condition.  Drunk again!  This was the last straw!
+
+Unfortunately Boleskey had recognised him.  He seemed violently
+excited.  "Where--where are my daughters?" he began.
+
+Swithin brushed past, but Boleskey caught his arm.  "Listen--
+brother!" he said; "news of my country!  After to-morrow...."
+
+"Keep it to yourself!" growled Swithin, wrenching his arm free.  He
+went straight to his lodgings, and, lying on the hard sofa of his
+unlighted sitting-room, gave himself up to bitter thoughts.  But in
+spite of all his anger, Rozsi's supply-moving figure, with its
+pouting lips, and roguish appealing eyes, still haunted him.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Next morning there was not a carriage to be had, and Swithin was
+compelled to put off his departure till the morrow.  The day was grey
+and misty; he wandered about with the strained, inquiring look of a
+lost dog in his eyes.
+
+Late in the afternoon he went back to his lodgings.  In a corner of
+the sitting-room stood Rozsi.  The thrill of triumph, the sense of
+appeasement, the emotion, that seized on him, crept through to his
+lips in a faint smile.  Rozsi made no sound, her face was hidden by
+her hands.  And this silence of hers weighed on Swithin.  She was
+forcing him to break it.  What was behind her hands?  His own face
+was visible!  Why didn't she speak?  Why was she here?  Alone?  That
+was not right surely.
+
+Suddenly Rozsi dropped her hands; her flushed face was quivering--it
+seemed as though a word, a sign, even, might bring a burst of tears.
+
+He walked over to the window.  'I must give her time!' he thought;
+then seized by unreasoning terror at this silence, spun round, and
+caught her by the arms.  Rozsi held back from him, swayed forward and
+buried her face on his breast....
+
+Half an hour later Swithin was pacing up and down his room.  The
+scent of rose leaves had not yet died away.  A glove lay on the
+floor; he picked it up, and for a long time stood weighing it in his
+hand.  All sorts of confused thoughts and feelings haunted him.  It
+was the purest and least selfish moment of his life, this moment
+after she had yielded.  But that pure gratitude at her fiery, simple
+abnegation did not last; it was followed by a petty sense of triumph,
+and by uneasiness.  He was still weighing the little glove in his
+hand, when he had another visitor.  It was Kasteliz.
+
+"What can I do for you?" Swithin asked ironically.
+
+The Hungarian seemed suffering from excitement.  Why had Swithin left
+his charges the night before?  What excuse had he to make?  What sort
+of conduct did he call this?
+
+Swithin, very like a bull-dog at that moment, answered: What business
+was it of his?
+
+The business of a gentleman!  What right had the Englishman to pursue
+a young girl?
+
+"Pursue?" said Swithin; "you've been spying, then?"
+
+"Spying--I--Kasteliz--Maurus Johann--an insult!"
+
+"Insult!" sneered Swithin; "d'you mean to tell me you weren't in the
+street just now?"
+
+Kasteliz answered with a hiss, "If you do not leave the city I will
+make you, with my sword--do you understand?"
+
+"And if you do not leave my room I will throw you out of the window!"
+
+For some minutes Kasteliz spoke in pure Hungarian while Swithin
+waited, with a forced smile and a fixed look in his eye.  He did not
+understand Hungarian.
+
+"If you are still in the city to-morrow evening," said Kasteliz at
+last in English, "I will spit you in the street."
+
+Swithin turned to the window and watched his visitor's retiring back
+with a queer mixture of amusement, stubbornness, and anxiety.
+'Well,' he thought, 'I suppose he'll run me through!'  The thought
+was unpleasant; and it kept recurring, but it only served to harden
+his determination.  His head was busy with plans for seeing Rozsi;
+his blood on fire with the kisses she had given him.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+Swithin was long in deciding to go forth next day.  He had made up
+his mind not to go to Rozsi till five o'clock.  'Mustn't make myself
+too cheap,' he thought.  It was a little past that hour when he at
+last sallied out, and with a beating heart walked towards Boleskey's.
+He looked up at the window, more than half expecting to see Rozsi
+there; but she was not, and he noticed with faint surprise that the
+window was not open; the plants, too, outside, looked singularly
+arid.  He knocked.  No one came.  He beat a fierce tatto.  At last
+the door was opened by a man with a reddish beard, and one of those
+sardonic faces only to be seen on shoemakers of Teutonic origin.
+
+"What do you want, making all this noise?" he asked in German.
+
+Swithin pointed up the stairs.  The man grinned, and shook his head.
+
+"I want to go up," said Swithin.
+
+The cobbler shrugged his shoulders, and Swithin rushed upstairs.  The
+rooms were empty.  The furniture remained, but all signs of life were
+gone.  One of his own bouquets, faded, stood in a glass; the ashes of
+a fire were barely cold; little scraps of paper strewed the hearth;
+already the room smelt musty.  He went into the bedrooms, and with a
+feeling of stupefaction stood staring at the girls' beds, side by
+side against the wall.  A bit of ribbon caught his eye; he picked it
+up and put it in his pocket--it was a piece of evidence that she had
+once existed.  By the mirror some pins were dropped about; a little
+powder had been spilled.  He looked at his own disquiet face and
+thought, 'I've been cheated!'
+
+The shoemaker's voice aroused him.  "Tausend Teufel!  Eilen Sie, nur!
+Zeit is Geld!  Kann nich' Langer warten!"  Slowly he descended.
+
+"Where have they gone?" asked Swithin painfully.  "A pound for every
+English word you speak.  A pound!" and he made an O with his fingers.
+
+The corners of the shoemaker's lips curled.  "Geld! Mf!  Eilen Sie,
+nur!"
+
+But in Swithin a sullen anger had begun to burn.  "If you don't tell
+me," he said, "it'll be the worse for you."
+
+"Sind ein komischer Kerl!" remarked the shoemaker.  "Hier ist meine
+Frau!"
+
+A battered-looking woman came hurrying down the passage, calling out
+in German, "Don't let him go!"
+
+With a snarling sound the shoemaker turned his back, and shambled
+off.
+
+The woman furtively thrust a letter into Swithin's hand, and
+furtively waited.
+
+The letter was from Rozsi.
+
+"Forgive me"--it ran--"that I leave you and do not say goodbye.  To-
+day our father had the call from our dear Father-town so long
+awaited.  In two hours we are ready.  I pray to the Virgin to keep
+you ever safe, and that you do not quite forget me.--Your
+unforgetting good friend,  ROZSI"
+
+When Swithin read it his first sensation was that of a man sinking in
+a bog; then his obstinacy stiffened.  'I won't be done,' he thought.
+Taking out a sovereign he tried to make the woman comprehend that she
+could earn it, by telling him where they had gone.  He got her
+finally to write the words out in his pocket-book, gave her the
+sovereign, and hurried to the Goldene Alp, where there was a waiter
+who spoke English.  The translation given him was this:
+
+"At three o'clock they start in a carriage on the road to Linz--they
+have bad horses--the Herr also rides a white horse."
+
+Swithin at once hailed a carriage and started at full gallop on the
+road to Linz.  Outside the Mirabell Garden he caught sight of
+Kasteliz and grinned at him.  'I've sold him anyway,' he thought;
+'for all their talk, they're no good, these foreigners!'
+
+His spirits rose, but soon fell again.  What chance had he of
+catching them?  They had three hours' start!  Still, the roads were
+heavy from the rain of the last two nights--they had luggage and bad
+horses; his own were good, his driver bribed--he might overtake them
+by ten o'clock! But did he want to?  What a fool he had been not to
+bring his luggage; he would then have had a respectable position.
+What a brute he would look without a change of shirt, or anything to
+shave with!  He saw himself with horror, all bristly, and in soiled
+linen.  People would think him mad.  'I've given myself away,'
+flashed across him, 'what the devil can I say to them?' and he stared
+sullenly at the driver's back.  He read Rozsi's letter again; it had
+a scent of her.  And in the growing darkness, jolted by the swinging
+of the carriage, he suffered tortures from his prudence, tortures
+from his passion.
+
+It grew colder and dark.  He turned the collar of his coat up to his
+ears.  He had visions of Piccadilly.  This wild-goose chase appeared
+suddenly a dangerous, unfathomable business.  Lights, fellowship,
+security!  'Never again!' he brooded; 'why won't they let me alone?'
+But it was not clear whether by 'they' he meant the conventions, the
+Boleskeys, his passions, or those haunting memories of Rozsi.  If he
+had only had a bag with him!  What was he going to say?  What was he
+going to get by this?  He received no answer to these questions.  The
+darkness itself was less obscure than his sensations.  From time to
+time he took out his watch.  At each village the driver made
+inquiries.  It was past ten when he stopped the carriage with a jerk.
+The stars were bright as steel, and by the side of the road a reedy
+lake showed in the moonlight.  Swithin shivered.  A man on a horse
+had halted in the centre of the road.  "Drive on!" called Swithin,
+with a stolid face.  It turned out to be Boleskey, who, on a gaunt
+white horse, looked like some winged creature.  He stood where he
+could bar the progress of the carriage, holding out a pistol.
+
+'Theatrical beggar!' thought Swithin, with a nervous smile.  He made
+no sign of recognition.  Slowly Boleskey brought his lean horse up to
+the carriage.  When he saw who was within he showed astonishment and
+joy.
+
+"You?" he cried, slapping his hand on his attenuated thigh, and
+leaning over till his beard touched Swithin.  "You have come?  You
+followed us?"
+
+"It seems so," Swithin grunted out.
+
+"You throw in your lot with us.  Is it possible?  You--you are a
+knight-errant then!"
+
+"Good God!" said Swithin.  Boleskey, flogging his dejected steed,
+cantered forward in the moonlight.  He came back, bringing an old
+cloak, which he insisted on wrapping round Swithin's shoulders.  He
+handed him, too, a capacious flask.
+
+"How cold you look!" he said.  "Wonderful! Wonderful! you English!"
+His grateful eyes never left Swithin for a moment.  They had come up
+to the heels of the other carriage now, but Swithin, hunched in the
+cloak, did not try to see what was in front of him.  To the bottom of
+his soul he resented the Hungarian's gratitude.  He remarked at last,
+with wasted irony:
+
+"You're in a hurry, it seems!"
+
+"If we had wings," Boleskey answered, "we would use them."
+
+"Wings!" muttered Swithin thickly; "legs are good enough for me."
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+Arrived at the inn where they were to pass the night, Swithin waited,
+hoping to get into the house without a "scene," but when at last he
+alighted the girls were in the doorway, and Margit greeted him with
+an admiring murmur, in which, however, he seemed to detect irony.
+Rozsi, pale and tremulous, with a half-scared look, gave him her
+hand, and, quickly withdrawing it, shrank behind her sister.  When
+they had gone up to their room Swithin sought Boleskey.  His spirits
+had risen remarkably.  "Tell the landlord to get us supper," he said;
+"we'll crack a bottle to our luck."  He hurried on the landlord's
+preparations.  The window of the, room faced a wood, so near that he
+could almost touch the trees.  The scent from the pines blew in on
+him.  He turned away from that scented darkness, and began to draw
+the corks of winebottles.  The sound seemed to conjure up Boleskey.
+He came in, splashed all over, smelling slightly of stables; soon
+after, Margit appeared, fresh and serene, but Rozsi did not come.
+
+"Where is your sister?" Swithin said.  Rozsi, it seemed, was tired.
+"It will do her good to eat," said Swithin.  And Boleskey, murmuring,
+"She must drink to our country," went out to summon her, Margit
+followed him, while Swithin cut up a chicken.  They came back without
+her.  She had "a megrim of the spirit."
+
+Swithin's face fell.  "Look here!" he said, "I'll go and try.  Don't
+wait for me."
+
+"Yes," answered Boleskey, sinking mournfully into a chair; "try,
+brother, try-by all means, try."
+
+Swithin walked down the corridor with an odd, sweet, sinking
+sensation in his chest; and tapped on Rozsi's door.  In a minute, she
+peeped forth, with her hair loose, and wondering eyes.
+
+"Rozsi," he stammered, "what makes you afraid of me, now?"
+
+She stared at him, but did not answer.
+
+"Why won't you come?"
+
+Still she did not speak, but suddenly stretched out to him her bare
+arm.  Swithin pressed his face to it.  With a shiver, she whispered
+above him, "I will come," and gently shut the door.
+
+Swithin stealthily retraced his steps, and paused a minute outside
+the sitting-room to regain his self-control.
+
+The sight of Boleskey with a bottle in his hand steadied him.
+
+"She is coming," he said.  And very soon she did come, her thick hair
+roughly twisted in a plait.
+
+Swithin sat between the girls; but did not talk, for he was really
+hungry.  Boleskey too was silent, plunged in gloom; Rozsi was dumb;
+Margit alone chattered.
+
+"You will come to our Father-town?  We shall have things to show you.
+Rozsi, what things we will show him!"  Rozsi, with a little appealing
+movement of her hands, repeated, "What things we will show you!"  She
+seemed suddenly to find her voice, and with glowing cheeks, mouths
+full, and eyes bright as squirrels', they chattered reminiscences of
+the "dear Father-town," of "dear friends," of the "dear home."
+
+'A poor place!' Swithin could not help thinking.  This enthusiasm
+seemed to him common; but he was careful to assume a look of
+interest, feeding on the glances flashed at him from Rozsi's restless
+eyes.
+
+As the wine waned Boleskey grew more and more gloomy, but now and
+then a sort of gleaming flicker passed over his face.  He rose to his
+feet at last.
+
+"Let us not forget," he said, "that we go perhaps to ruin, to death;
+in the face of all this we go, because our country needs--in this
+there is no credit, neither to me nor to you, my daughters; but for
+this noble Englishman, what shall we say?  Give thanks to God for a
+great heart.  He comes--not for country, not for fame, not for money,
+but to help the weak and the oppressed.  Let us drink, then, to him;
+let us drink again and again to heroic Forsyte!"  In the midst of the
+dead silence, Swithin caught the look of suppliant mockery in Rozsi's
+eyes.  He glanced at the Hungarian.  Was he laughing at him?  But
+Boleskey, after drinking up his wine, had sunk again into his seat;
+and there suddenly, to the surprise of all, he began to snore.
+Margit rose and, bending over him like a mother, murmured: "He is
+tired--it is the ride!"  She raised him in her strong arms, and
+leaning on her shoulder Boleskey staggered from the room.  Swithin
+and Rozsi were left alone.  He slid his hand towards her hand that
+lay so close, on the rough table-cloth.  It seemed to await his
+touch.  Something gave way in him, and words came welling up; for the
+moment he forgot himself, forgot everything but that he was near her.
+Her head dropped on his shoulder, he breathed the perfume of her
+hair.  "Good-night!" she whispered, and the whisper was like a kiss;
+yet before he could stop her she was gone.  Her footsteps died away
+in the passage, but Swithin sat gazing intently at a single bright
+drop of spilt wine quivering on the table's edge.  In that moment
+she, in her helplessness and emotion, was all in all to him--his life
+nothing; all the real things--his conventions, convictions, training,
+and himself--all seemed remote, behind a mist of passion and strange
+chivalry.  Carefully with a bit of bread he soaked up the bright
+drop; and suddenly he thought: 'This is tremendous!'  For a long time
+he stood there in the window, close to the dark pine-trees.
+
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+In the early morning he awoke, full of the discomfort of this strange
+place and the medley of his dreams.  Lying, with his nose peeping
+over the quilt, he was visited by a horrible suspicion.  When he
+could bear it no longer, he started up in bed.  What if it were all a
+plot to get him to marry her?  The thought was treacherous, and
+inspired in him a faint disgust.  Still, she might be ignorant of it!
+But was she so innocent?  What innocent girl would have come to his
+room like that?  What innocent girl?  Her father, who pretended to be
+caring only for his country?  It was not probable that any man was
+such a fool; it was all part of the game-a scheming rascal!
+Kasteliz, too--his threats!  They intended him to marry her!  And the
+horrid idea was strengthened by his reverence for marriage.  It was
+the proper, the respectable condition; he was genuinely afraid of
+this other sort of liaison--it was somehow too primitive!  And yet
+the thought of that marriage made his blood run cold.  Considering
+that she had already yielded, it would be all the more monstrous!
+With the cold, fatal clearness of the morning light he now for the
+first time saw his position in its full bearings.  And, like a fish
+pulled out of water, he gasped at what was disclosed.  Sullen
+resentment against this attempt to force him settled deep into his
+soul.
+
+He seated himself on the bed, holding his head in his hands, solemnly
+thinking out what such marriage meant.  In the first place it meant
+ridicule, in the next place ridicule, in the last place ridicule.
+She would eat chicken bones with her fingers--those fingers his lips
+still burned to kiss.  She would dance wildly with other men.  She
+would talk of her "dear Father-town," and all the time her eyes would
+look beyond him, some where or other into some d--d place he knew
+nothing of.  He sprang up and paced the room, and for a moment
+thought he would go mad.
+
+They meant him to marry her!  Even she--she meant him to marry her!
+Her tantalising inscrutability; her sudden little tendernesses; her
+quick laughter; her swift, burning kisses; even the movements of her
+hands; her tears--all were evidence against her.  Not one of these
+things that Nature made her do counted on her side, but how they
+fanned his longing, his desire, and distress!  He went to the glass
+and tried to part his hair with his fingers, but being rather fine,
+it fell into lank streaks.  There was no comfort to be got from it.
+He drew his muddy boots on.  Suddenly he thought: 'If I could see her
+alone, I could arrive at some arrangement!'  Then, with a sense of
+stupefaction, he made the discovery that no arrangement could
+possibly be made that would not be dangerous, even desperate.  He
+seized his hat, and, like a rabbit that has been fired at, bolted
+from the room.  He plodded along amongst the damp woods with his head
+down, and resentment and dismay in his heart.  But, as the sun rose,
+and the air grew sweet with pine scent, he slowly regained a sort of
+equability.  After all, she had already yielded; it was not as if...!
+And the tramp of his own footsteps lulled him into feeling that it
+would all come right.
+
+'Look at the thing practically,' he thought.  The faster he walked
+the firmer became his conviction that he could still see it through.
+He took out his watch--it was past seven--he began to hasten back.
+In the yard of the inn his driver was harnessing the horses; Swithin
+went up to him.
+
+"Who told you to put them in?" he asked.
+
+The driver answered, "Der Herr."
+
+Swithin turned away.  'In ten minutes,' he thought, 'I shall be in
+that carriage again, with this going on in my head!  Driving away
+from England, from all I'm used to-driving to-what?'  Could he face
+it?  Could he face all that he had been through that morning; face it
+day after day, night after night?  Looking up, he saw Rozsi at her
+open window gazing down at him; never had she looked sweeter, more
+roguish.  An inexplicable terror seized on him; he ran across the
+yard and jumped into his carriage.  "To Salzburg!" he cried; "drive
+on!"  And rattling out of the yard without a look behind, he flung a
+sovereign at the hostler.  Flying back along the road faster even
+than he had come, with pale face, and eyes blank and staring like a
+pug-dog's, Swithin spoke no single word; nor, till he had reached the
+door of his lodgings, did he suffer the driver to draw rein.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+Towards evening, five days later, Swithin, yellow and travel-worn,
+was ferried in a gondola to Danielli's Hotel.  His brother, who was
+on the steps, looked at him with an apprehensive curiosity.
+
+"Why, it's you!" he mumbled.  "So you've got here safe?"
+
+"Safe?" growled Swithin.
+
+James replied, "I thought you wouldn't leave your friends!"  Then,
+with a jerk of suspicion, "You haven't brought your friends?"
+
+"What friends?" growled Swithin.
+
+James changed the subject.  "You don't look the thing," he said.
+
+"Really!" muttered Swithin; "what's that to you?"
+
+He appeared at dinner that night, but fell asleep over his coffee.
+Neither Traquair nor James asked him any further question, nor did
+they allude to Salzburg; and during the four days which concluded the
+stay in Venice Swithin went about with his head up, but his eyes
+half-closed like a dazed man.  Only after they had taken ship at
+Genoa did he show signs of any healthy interest in life, when,
+finding that a man on board was perpetually strumming, he locked the
+piano up and pitched the key into the sea.
+
+That winter in London he behaved much as usual, but fits of
+moroseness would seize on him, during which he was not pleasant to
+approach.
+
+One evening when he was walking with a friend in Piccadilly, a girl
+coming from a side-street accosted him in German.  Swithin, after
+staring at her in silence for some seconds, handed her a five-pound
+note, to the great amazement of his friend; nor could he himself have
+explained the meaning of this freak of generosity.
+
+Of Rozsi he never heard again....
+
+This, then, was the substance of what he remembered as he lay ill in
+bed.  Stretching out his hand he pressed the bell.  His valet
+appeared, crossing the room like a cat; a Swede, who had been with
+Swithin many years; a little man with a dried face and fierce
+moustache, morbidly sharp nerves, and a queer devotion to his master.
+
+Swithin made a feeble gesture.  "Adolf," he said, "I'm very bad."
+
+"Yes, sir!"
+
+"Why do you stand there like a cow?" asked Swithin; "can't you see
+I'm very bad?"
+
+"Yes, sir!"  The valet's face twitched as though it masked the dance
+of obscure emotions.
+
+"I shall feel better after dinner.  What time is it?"
+
+"Five o'clock."
+
+"I thought it was more.  The afternoons are very long."
+
+"Yes, sir!" Swithin sighed, as though he had expected the consolation
+of denial.
+
+"Very likely I shall have a nap.  Bring up hot water at half-past six
+and shave me before dinner."
+
+The valet moved towards the door.  Swithin raised himself.
+
+"What did Mr. James say to you?"
+
+"He said you ought to have another doctor; two doctors, he said,
+better than one.  He said, also, he would look in again on his way
+'home.'"
+
+Swithin grunted, "Umph! What else did he say?"
+
+"He said you didn't take care of yourself."
+
+Swithin glared.
+
+"Has anybody else been to see me?"
+
+The valet turned away his eyes.  "Mrs. Thomas Forsyte came last
+Monday fortnight."
+
+"How long have I been ill?"
+
+"Five weeks on Saturday."
+
+"Do you think I'm very bad?"
+
+Adolf's face was covered suddenly with crow's-feet.  "You have no
+business to ask me question like that!  I am not paid, sir, to answer
+question like that."
+
+Swithin said faintly: "You're a peppery fool!  Open a bottle of
+champagne!"
+
+Adolf took a bottle of champagne--from a cupboard and held nippers to
+it.  He fixed his eyes on Swithin.  "The doctor said--"
+
+"Open the bottle!"
+
+"It is not--"
+
+"Open the bottle--or I give you warning."
+
+Adolf removed the cork.  He wiped a glass elaborately, filled it, and
+bore it scrupulously to the bedside.  Suddenly twirling his
+moustaches, he wrung his hands, and burst out: "It is poison."
+
+Swithin grinned faintly.  "You foreign fool!" he said.  "Get out!"
+
+The valet vanished.
+
+'He forgot himself!' thought Swithin.  Slowly he raised the glass,
+slowly put it back, and sank gasping on his pillows.  Almost at once
+he fell asleep.
+
+He dreamed that he was at his club, sitting after dinner in the
+crowded smoking-room, with its bright walls and trefoils of light.
+It was there that he sat every evening, patient, solemn, lonely, and
+sometimes fell asleep, his square, pale old face nodding to one side.
+He dreamed that he was gazing at the picture over the fireplace, of
+an old statesman with a high collar, supremely finished face, and
+sceptical eyebrows--the picture, smooth, and reticent as sealing-wax,
+of one who seemed for ever exhaling the narrow wisdom of final
+judgments.  All round him, his fellow members were chattering.  Only
+he himself, the old sick member, was silent.  If fellows only knew
+what it was like to sit by yourself and feel ill all the time!  What
+they were saying he had heard a hundred times.  They were talking of
+investments, of cigars, horses, actresses, machinery.  What was that?
+A foreign patent for cleaning boilers?  There was no such thing;
+boilers couldn't be cleaned, any fool knew that!  If an Englishman
+couldn't clean a boiler, no foreigner could clean one.  He appealed
+to the old statesman's eyes.  But for once those eyes seemed
+hesitating, blurred, wanting in finality.  They vanished.  In their
+place were Rozsi's little deep-set eyes, with their wide and far-off
+look; and as he gazed they seemed to grow bright as steel, and to
+speak to him.  Slowly the whole face grew to be there, floating on
+the dark background of the picture; it was pink, aloof, unfathomable,
+enticing, with its fluffy hair and quick lips, just as he had last
+seen it.  "Are you looking for something?" she seemed to say: "I
+could show you."
+
+"I have everything safe enough," answered Swithin, and in his sleep
+he groaned.
+
+He felt the touch of fingers on his forehead.  'I'm dreaming,' he
+thought in his dream.
+
+She had vanished; and far away, from behind the picture, came a sound
+of footsteps.
+
+Aloud, in his sleep, Swithin muttered: "I've missed it."
+
+Again he heard the rustling of those light footsteps, and close in
+his ear a sound, like a sob.  He awoke; the sob was his own.  Great
+drops of perspiration stood on his forehead.  'What is it?' he
+thought; 'what have I lost?'  Slowly his mind travelled over his
+investments; he could not think of any single one that was unsafe.
+What was it, then, that he had lost?  Struggling on his pillows, he
+clutched the wine-glass.  His lips touched the wine.  'This isn't the
+"Heidseck"!' he thought angrily, and before the reality of that
+displeasure all the dim vision passed away.  But as he bent to drink,
+something snapped, and, with a sigh, Swithin Forsyte died above the
+bubbles....
+
+When James Forsyte came in again on his way home, the valet,
+trembling took his hat and stick.
+
+"How's your master?"
+
+"My master is dead, sir!"
+
+"Dead!  He can't be!  I left him safe an hour ago."
+
+On the bed Swithin's body was doubled like a sack; his hand still
+grasped the glass.
+
+James Forsyte paused.  "Swithin!" he said, and with his hand to his
+ear he waited for an answer; but none came, and slowly in the glass a
+last bubble rose and burst.
+
+December 1900.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+To
+
+MY SISTER
+
+MABEL EDITH REYNOLDS
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SILENCE
+
+I
+
+In a car of the Naples express a mining expert was diving into a bag
+for papers.  The strong sunlight showed the fine wrinkles on his
+brown face and the shabbiness of his short, rough beard.  A newspaper
+cutting slipped from his fingers; he picked it up, thinking: 'How the
+dickens did that get in here?'  It was from a colonial print of three
+years back; and he sat staring, as if in that forlorn slip of yellow
+paper he had encountered some ghost from his past.
+
+These were the words he read: "We hope that the setback to
+civilisation, the check to commerce and development, in this
+promising centre of our colony may be but temporary; and that capital
+may again come to the rescue.  Where one man was successful, others
+should surely not fail?  We are convinced that it only needs...."
+And the last words: "For what can be sadder than to see the forest
+spreading its lengthening shadows, like symbols of defeat, over the
+untenanted dwellings of men; and where was once the merry chatter of
+human voices, to pass by in the silence...."
+
+On an afternoon, thirteen years before, he had been in the city of
+London, at one of those emporiums where mining experts perch, before
+fresh flights, like sea-gulls on some favourite rock.  A clerk said
+to him: "Mr. Scorrier, they are asking for you downstairs--Mr.
+Hemmings of the New Colliery Company."
+
+Scorrier took up the speaking tube.  "Is that you, Mr. Scorrier?  I
+hope you are very well, sir, I am--Hemmings--I am--coming up."
+
+In two minutes he appeared, Christopher Hemmings, secretary of the
+New Colliery Company, known in the City-behind his back--as "Down-by-
+the-starn" Hemmings.  He grasped Scorrier's hand--the gesture was
+deferential, yet distinguished.  Too handsome, too capable, too
+important, his figure, the cut of his iron-grey beard, and his
+intrusively fine eyes, conveyed a continual courteous invitation to
+inspect their infallibilities.  He stood, like a City "Atlas," with
+his legs apart, his coat-tails gathered in his hands, a whole globe
+of financial matters deftly balanced on his nose.  "Look at me!" he
+seemed to say.  "It's heavy, but how easily I carry it.  Not the man
+to let it down, Sir !"
+
+"I hope I see you well, Mr. Scorrier," he began.  "I have come round
+about our mine.  There is a question of a fresh field being opened
+up--between ourselves, not before it's wanted.  I find it difficult
+to get my Board to take a comprehensive view.  In short, the question
+is: Are you prepared to go out for us, and report on it?  The fees
+will be all right."  His left eye closed.  "Things have been very--
+er--dicky; we are going to change our superintendent.  I have got
+little Pippin--you know little Pippin?"
+
+Scorrier murmured, with a feeling of vague resentment: "Oh yes.  He's
+not a mining man!"
+
+Hemmings replied: "We think that he will do."  'Do you?' thought
+Scorrier; 'that's good of you!'
+
+He had not altogether shaken off a worship he had felt for Pippin--
+"King" Pippin he was always called, when they had been boys at the
+Camborne Grammar-school.  "King" Pippin! the boy with the bright
+colour, very bright hair, bright, subtle, elusive eyes, broad
+shoulders, little stoop in the neck, and a way of moving it quickly
+like a bird; the boy who was always at the top of everything, and
+held his head as if looking for something further to be the top of.
+He remembered how one day "King" Pippin had said to him in his soft
+way, "Young Scorrie, I'll do your sums for you"; and in answer to his
+dubious, "Is that all right?" had replied, "Of course--I don't want
+you to get behind that beast Blake, he's not a Cornishman" (the beast
+Blake was an Irishman not yet twelve).  He remembered, too, an
+occasion when "King" Pippin with two other boys fought six louts and
+got a licking, and how Pippin sat for half an hour afterwards, all
+bloody, his head in his hands, rocking to and fro, and weeping tears
+of mortification; and how the next day he had sneaked off by himself,
+and, attacking the same gang, got frightfully mauled a second time.
+
+Thinking of these things he answered curtly: "When shall I start?"
+
+"Down-by-the-starn" Hemmings replied with a sort of fearful
+sprightliness: "There's a good fellow!  I will send instructions; so
+glad to see you well."  Conferring on Scorrier a look--fine to the
+verge of vulgarity--he withdrew.  Scorrier remained, seated; heavy
+with insignificance and vague oppression, as if he had drunk a
+tumbler of sweet port.
+
+A week later, in company with Pippin, he was on board a liner.
+
+The "King" Pippin of his school-days was now a man of forty-four.  He
+awakened in Scorrier the uncertain wonder with which men look
+backward at their uncomplicated teens; and staggering up and down the
+decks in the long Atlantic roll, he would steal glances at his
+companion, as if he expected to find out from them something about
+himself.  Pippin had still "King" Pippin's bright, fine hair, and
+dazzling streaks in his short beard; he had still a bright colour and
+suave voice, and what there were of wrinkles suggested only
+subtleties of humour and ironic sympathy.  From the first, and
+apparently without negotiation, he had his seat at the captain's
+table, to which on the second day Scorrier too found himself
+translated, and had to sit, as he expressed it ruefully, "among the
+big-wigs."
+
+During the voyage only one incident impressed itself on Scorrier's
+memory, and that for a disconcerting reason.  In the forecastle were
+the usual complement of emigrants.  One evening, leaning across the
+rail to watch them, he felt a touch on his arm; and, looking round,
+saw Pippin's face and beard quivering in the lamplight.  "Poor
+people!" he said.  The idea flashed on Scorrier that he was like some
+fine wire sound-recording instrument.
+
+'Suppose he were to snap!' he thought.  Impelled to justify this
+fancy, he blurted out: "You're a nervous chap.  The way you look at
+those poor devils!"
+
+Pippin hustled him along the deck.  "Come, come, you took me off my
+guard," he murmured, with a sly, gentle smile, "that's not fair."
+
+He found it a continual source of wonder that Pippin, at his age,
+should cut himself adrift from the associations and security of
+London life to begin a new career in a new country with dubious
+prospect of success.  'I always heard he was doing well all round,'
+he thought; 'thinks he'll better himself, perhaps.  He's a true
+Cornishman.'
+
+The morning of arrival at the mines was grey and cheerless; a cloud
+of smoke, beaten down by drizzle, clung above the forest; the wooden
+houses straggled dismally in the unkempt semblance of a street,
+against a background of endless, silent woods.  An air of blank
+discouragement brooded over everything; cranes jutted idly over empty
+trucks; the long jetty oozed black slime; miners with listless faces
+stood in the rain; dogs fought under their very legs.  On the way to
+the hotel they met no one busy or serene except a Chinee who was
+polishing a dish-cover.
+
+The late superintendent, a cowed man, regaled them at lunch with his
+forebodings; his attitude toward the situation was like the food,
+which was greasy and uninspiring.  Alone together once more, the two
+newcomers eyed each other sadly.
+
+"Oh dear!" sighed Pippin.  "We must change all this, Scorrier; it
+will never do to go back beaten.  I shall not go back beaten; you
+will have to carry me on my shield;" and slyly: "Too heavy, eh?  Poor
+fellow!"  Then for a long time he was silent, moving his lips as if
+adding up the cost.  Suddenly he sighed, and grasping Scorrier's arm,
+said: "Dull, aren't I?  What will you do?  Put me in your report,
+'New Superintendent--sad, dull dog--not a word to throw at a cat!'"
+And as if the new task were too much for him, he sank back in
+thought.  The last words he said to Scorrier that night were: "Very
+silent here.  It's hard to believe one's here for life.  But I feel I
+am.  Mustn't be a coward, though!" and brushing his forehead, as
+though to clear from it a cobweb of faint thoughts, he hurried off.
+
+Scorrier stayed on the veranda smoking.  The rain had ceased, a few
+stars were burning dimly; even above the squalor of the township the
+scent of the forests, the interminable forests, brooded.  There
+sprang into his mind the memory of a picture from one of his
+children's fairy books--the picture of a little bearded man on
+tiptoe, with poised head and a great sword, slashing at the castle of
+a giant.  It reminded him of Pippin.  And suddenly, even to Scorrier-
+-whose existence was one long encounter with strange places--the
+unseen presence of those woods, their heavy, healthy scent, the
+little sounds, like squeaks from tiny toys, issuing out of the gloomy
+silence, seemed intolerable, to be shunned, from the mere instinct of
+self-preservation.  He thought of the evening he had spent in the
+bosom of "Down-by-the-starn" Hemmings' family, receiving his last
+instructions--the security of that suburban villa, its discouraging
+gentility; the superior acidity of the Miss Hemmings; the noble names
+of large contractors, of company promoters, of a peer, dragged with
+the lightness of gun-carriages across the conversation; the autocracy
+of Hemmings, rasped up here and there, by some domestic
+contradiction.  It was all so nice and safe--as if the whole thing
+had been fastened to an anchor sunk beneath the pink cabbages of the
+drawing-room carpet!  Hemmings, seeing him off the premises, had said
+with secrecy: "Little Pippin will have a good thing.  We shall make
+his salary L----.  He'll be a great man-quite a king.  Ha-ha!"
+
+Scorrier shook the ashes from his pipe.  'Salary!' he thought,
+straining his ears; 'I wouldn't take the place for five thousand
+pounds a year.  And yet it's a fine country,' and with ironic
+violence he repeated, 'a dashed fine country!'
+
+Ten days later, having finished his report on the new mine, he stood
+on the jetty waiting to go abroad the steamer for home.
+
+"God bless you!" said Pippin.  "Tell them they needn't be afraid; and
+sometimes when you're at home think of me, eh?"
+
+Scorrier, scrambling on board, had a confused memory of tears in his
+eyes, and a convulsive handshake.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+It was eight years before the wheels of life carried Scorrier back to
+that disenchanted spot, and this time not on the business of the New
+Colliery Company.  He went for another company with a mine some
+thirty miles away.  Before starting, however, he visited Hemmings.
+The secretary was surrounded by pigeon-holes and finer than ever;
+Scorrier blinked in the full radiance of his courtesy.  A little man
+with eyebrows full of questions, and a grizzled beard, was seated in
+an arm-chair by the fire.
+
+"You know Mr. Booker," said Hemmings--"one of my directors.  This is
+Mr. Scorrier, sir--who went out for us."
+
+These sentences were murmured in a way suggestive of their uncommon
+value.  The director uncrossed his legs, and bowed.  Scorrier also
+bowed, and Hemmings, leaning back, slowly developed the full
+resources of his waistcoat.
+
+"So you are going out again, Scorrier, for the other side?  I tell
+Mr. Scorrier, sir, that he is going out for the enemy.  Don't find
+them a mine as good as you found us, there's a good man."
+
+The little director asked explosively: "See our last dividend?
+Twenty per cent; eh, what?"
+
+Hemmings moved a finger, as if reproving his director.  "I will not
+disguise from you," he murmured, "that there is friction between us
+and--the enemy; you know our position too well--just a little too
+well, eh?  'A nod's as good as a wink.'"
+
+His diplomatic eyes flattered Scorrier, who passed a hand over his
+brow--and said: "Of course."
+
+"Pippin doesn't hit it off with them.  Between ourselves, he's a
+leetle too big for his boots.  You know what it is when a man in his
+position gets a sudden rise!"
+
+Scorrier caught himself searching on the floor for a sight of
+Hemmings' boots; he raised his eyes guiltily.  The secretary
+continued: "We don't hear from him quite as often as we should like,
+in fact."
+
+To his own surprise Scorrier murmured: "It's a silent place!"
+
+The secretary smiled.  "Very good!  Mr. Scorrier says, sir, it's a
+silent place; ha-ha! I call that very good!"  But suddenly a secret
+irritation seemed to bubble in him; he burst forth almost violently:
+"He's no business to let it affect him; now, has he?  I put it to
+you, Mr. Scorrier, I put it to you, sir!"
+
+But Scorrier made no reply, and soon after took his leave: he had
+been asked to convey a friendly hint to Pippin that more frequent
+letters would be welcomed.  Standing in the shadow of the Royal
+Exchange, waiting to thread his way across, he thought: 'So you must
+have noise, must you--you've got some here, and to spare....'
+
+On his arrival in the new world he wired to Pippin asking if he might
+stay with him on the way up country, and received the answer: "Be
+sure and come."
+
+A week later he arrived (there was now a railway) and found Pippin
+waiting for him in a phaeton.  Scorrier would not have known the
+place again; there was a glitter over everything, as if some one had
+touched it with a wand.  The tracks had given place to roads, running
+firm, straight, and black between the trees under brilliant sunshine;
+the wooden houses were all painted; out in the gleaming harbour
+amongst the green of islands lay three steamers, each with a fleet of
+busy boats; and here and there a tiny yacht floated, like a sea-bird
+on the water.  Pippin drove his long-tailed horses furiously; his
+eyes brimmed with subtle kindness, as if according Scorrier a
+continual welcome.  During the two days of his stay Scorrier never
+lost that sense of glamour.  He had every opportunity for observing
+the grip Pippin had over everything.  The wooden doors and walls of
+his bungalow kept out no sounds.  He listened to interviews between
+his host and all kinds and conditions of men.  The voices of the
+visitors would rise at first--angry, discontented, matter-of-fact,
+with nasal twang, or guttural drawl; then would come the soft patter
+of the superintendent's feet crossing and recrossing the room.  Then
+a pause, the sound of hard breathing, and quick questions--the
+visitor's voice again, again the patter, and Pippin's ingratiating
+but decisive murmurs.  Presently out would come the visitor with an
+expression on his face which Scorrier soon began to know by heart, a
+kind of pleased, puzzled, helpless look, which seemed to say, "I've
+been done, I know--I'll give it to myself when I'm round the corner."
+
+Pippin was full of wistful questions about "home."  He wanted to talk
+of music, pictures, plays, of how London looked, what new streets
+there were, and, above all, whether Scorrier had been lately in the
+West Country.  He talked of getting leave next winter, asked whether
+Scorrier thought they would "put up with him at home"; then, with the
+agitation which had alarmed Scorrier before, he added: "Ah! but I'm
+not fit for home now.  One gets spoiled; it's big and silent here.
+What should I go back to?  I don't seem to realise."
+
+Scorrier thought of Hemmings.  "'Tis a bit cramped there, certainly,"
+he muttered.
+
+Pippin went on as if divining his thoughts.  "I suppose our friend
+Hemmings would call me foolish; he's above the little weaknesses of
+imagination, eh?  Yes; it's silent here.  Sometimes in the evening I
+would give my head for somebody to talk to--Hemmings would never give
+his head for anything, I think.  But all the same, I couldn't face
+them at home.  Spoiled!"  And slyly he murmured: "What would the
+Board say if they could hear that?"
+
+Scorrier blurted out: "To tell you the truth, they complain a little
+of not hearing from you."
+
+Pippin put out a hand, as if to push something away.  "Let them try
+the life here!" he broke out; "it's like sitting on a live volcano--
+what with our friends, 'the enemy,' over there; the men; the American
+competition.  I keep it going, Scorrier, but at what a cost--at what
+a cost!"
+
+"But surely--letters?"
+
+Pippin only answered: "I try--I try!"
+
+Scorrier felt with remorse and wonder that he had spoken the truth.
+The following day he left for his inspection, and while in the camp
+of "the enemy" much was the talk he heard of Pippin.
+
+"Why!" said his host, the superintendent, a little man with a face
+somewhat like an owl's, "d'you know the name they've given him down
+in the capital--'the King'--good, eh?  He's made them 'sit up' all
+along this coast.  I like him well enough--good--hearted man,
+shocking nervous; but my people down there can't stand him at any
+price.  Sir, he runs this colony.  You'd think butter wouldn't melt
+in that mouth of his; but he always gets his way; that's what riles
+'em so; that and the success he's making of his mine.  It puzzles me;
+you'd think he'd only be too glad of a quiet life, a man with his
+nerves.  But no, he's never happy unless he's fighting, something
+where he's got a chance to score a victory.  I won't say he likes it,
+but, by Jove, it seems he's got to do it.  Now that's funny!  I'll
+tell you one thing, though shouldn't be a bit surprised if he broke
+down some day; and I'll tell you another," he added darkly, "he's
+sailing very near the wind, with those large contracts that he makes.
+I wouldn't care to take his risks.  Just let them have a strike, or
+something that shuts them down for a spell--and mark my words, sir--
+it'll be all up with them.  But," he concluded confidentially, "I
+wish I had his hold on the men; it's a great thing in this country.
+Not like home, where you can go round a corner and get another gang.
+You have to make the best you can out of the lot you have; you won't,
+get another man for love or money without you ship him a few hundred
+miles."  And with a frown he waved his arm over the forests to
+indicate the barrenness of the land.
+
+Scorrier finished his inspection and went on a shooting trip into the
+forest.  His host met him on his return.  "Just look at this!" he
+said, holding out a telegram.  "Awful, isn't it?" His face expressed
+a profound commiseration, almost ludicrously mixed with the ashamed
+contentment that men experience at the misfortunes of an enemy.
+
+The telegram, dated the day before, ran thus "Frightful explosion New
+Colliery this morning, great loss of life feared."
+
+Scorrier had the bewildered thought: 'Pippin will want me now.'
+
+He took leave of his host, who called after him: "You'd better wait
+for a steamer!  It's a beastly drive!"
+
+Scorrier shook his head.  All night, jolting along a rough track cut
+through the forest, he thought of Pippin.  The other miseries of this
+calamity at present left him cold; he barely thought of the smothered
+men; but Pippin's struggle, his lonely struggle with this hydra-
+headed monster, touched him very nearly.  He fell asleep and dreamed
+of watching Pippin slowly strangled by a snake; the agonised, kindly,
+ironic face peeping out between two gleaming coils was so horribly
+real, that he awoke.  It was the moment before dawn: pitch-black
+branches barred the sky; with every jolt of the wheels the gleams
+from the lamps danced, fantastic and intrusive, round ferns and tree-
+stems, into the cold heart of the forest.  For an hour or more
+Scorrier tried to feign sleep, and hide from the stillness, and
+overmastering gloom of these great woods.  Then softly a whisper of
+noises stole forth, a stir of light, and the whole slow radiance of
+the morning glory.  But it brought no warmth; and Scorrier wrapped
+himself closer in his cloak, feeling as though old age had touched
+him.
+
+Close on noon he reached the township.  Glamour seemed still to hover
+over it.  He drove on to the mine.  The winding-engine was turning,
+the pulley at the top of the head-gear whizzing round; nothing looked
+unusual.  'Some mistake!' he thought.  He drove to the mine
+buildings, alighted, and climbed to the shaft head.  Instead of the
+usual rumbling of the trolleys, the rattle of coal discharged over
+the screens, there was silence.  Close by, Pippin himself was
+standing, smirched with dirt.  The cage, coming swift and silent from
+below, shot open its doors with a sharp rattle.  Scorrier bent
+forward to look.  There lay a dead man, with a smile on his face.
+
+"How many?" he whispered.
+
+Pippin answered: "Eighty-four brought up--forty-seven still below,"
+and entered the man's name in a pocket-book.
+
+An older man was taken out next; he too was smiling--there had been
+vouchsafed to him, it seemed, a taste of more than earthly joy.  The
+sight of those strange smiles affected Scorrier more than all the
+anguish or despair he had seen scored on the faces of other dead men.
+He asked an old miner how long Pippin had been at work.
+
+"Thirty hours.  Yesterday he wer' below; we had to nigh carry mun up
+at last.  He's for goin' down again, but the chaps won't lower mun;"
+the old man gave a sigh.  "I'm waiting for my boy to come up, I am."
+
+Scorrier waited too--there was fascination about those dead, smiling
+faces.  The rescuing of these men who would never again breathe went
+on and on.  Scorrier grew sleepy in the sun.  The old miner woke him,
+saying: "Rummy stuff this here chokedamp; see, they all dies drunk!"
+The very next to be brought up was the chief engineer.  Scorrier had
+known him quite well, one of those Scotsmen who are born at the age
+of forty and remain so all their lives.  His face--the only one that
+wore no smile--seemed grieving that duty had deprived it of that last
+luxury.  With wide eyes and drawn lips he had died protesting.
+
+Late in the afternoon the old miner touched Scorrier's arm, and said:
+"There he is--there's my boy!"  And he departed slowly, wheeling the
+body on a trolley.
+
+As the sun set, the gang below came up.  No further search was
+possible till the fumes had cleared.  Scorrier heard one man say:
+"There's some we'll never get; they've had sure burial"
+
+Another answered him: "'Tis a gude enough bag for me!"  They passed
+him, the whites of their eyes gleaming out of faces black as ink.
+
+Pippin drove him home at a furious pace, not uttering a single word.
+As they turned into the main street, a young woman starting out
+before the horses obliged Pippin to pull up.  The glance he bent on
+Scorrier was ludicrously prescient of suffering.  The woman asked for
+her husband.  Several times they were stopped thus by women asking
+for their husbands or sons.  "This is what I have to go through,"
+Pippin whispered.
+
+When they had eaten, he said to Scorrier: "It was kind of you to come
+and stand by me!  They take me for a god, poor creature that I am.
+But shall I ever get the men down again?  Their nerve's shaken.  I
+wish I were one of those poor lads, to die with a smile like that!"
+
+Scorrier felt the futility of his presence.  On Pippin alone must be
+the heat and burden.  Would he stand under it, or would the whole
+thing come crashing to the ground?  He urged him again and again to
+rest, but Pippin only gave him one of his queer smiles.  "You don't
+know how strong I am!" he said.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+He himself slept heavily; and, waking at dawn, went down.  Pippin was
+still at his desk; his pen had dropped; he was asleep.  The ink was
+wet; Scorrier's eye caught the opening words:
+
+"GENTLEMEN,--Since this happened I have not slept...."
+
+He stole away again with a sense of indignation that no one could be
+dragged in to share that fight.  The London Board-room rose before
+his mind.  He imagined the portentous gravity of Hemmings; his face
+and voice and manner conveying the impression that he alone could
+save the situation; the six directors, all men of commonsense and
+certainly humane, seated behind large turret-shaped inkpots; the
+concern and irritation in their voices, asking how it could have
+happened; their comments: "An awful thing!"  "I suppose Pippin is
+doing the best he can!"  "Wire him on no account to leave the mine
+idle!"  "Poor devils!"  "A fund?  Of course, what ought we to give?"
+He had a strong conviction that nothing of all this would disturb the
+commonsense with which they would go home and eat their mutton.  A
+good thing too; the less it was taken to heart the better!  But
+Scorrier felt angry.  The fight was so unfair!  A fellow all nerves--
+with not a soul to help him!  Well, it was his own lookout!  He had
+chosen to centre it all in himself, to make himself its very soul.
+If he gave way now, the ship must go down!  By a thin thread,
+Scorrier's hero-worship still held.  'Man against nature,' he
+thought, 'I back the man.'  The struggle in which he was so powerless
+to give aid, became intensely personal to him, as if he had engaged
+his own good faith therein.
+
+The next day they went down again to the pit-head; and Scorrier
+himself descended.  The fumes had almost cleared, but there were some
+places which would never be reached.  At the end of the day all but
+four bodies had been recovered.  "In the day o' judgment," a miner
+said, "they four'll come out of here."  Those unclaimed bodies
+haunted Scorrier.  He came on sentences of writing, where men waiting
+to be suffocated had written down their feelings.  In one place, the
+hour, the word "Sleepy," and a signature.  In another, "A. F.--done
+for."  When he came up at last Pippin was still waiting, pocket-book
+in hand; they again departed at a furious pace.
+
+Two days later Scorrier, visiting the shaft, found its neighbourhood
+deserted--not a living thing of any sort was there except one
+Chinaman poking his stick into the rubbish.  Pippin was away down the
+coast engaging an engineer; and on his return, Scorrier had not the
+heart to tell him of the desertion.  He was spared the effort, for
+Pippin said: "Don't be afraid--you've got bad news?  The men have
+gone on strike."
+
+Scorrier sighed.  "Lock, stock, and barrel"
+
+"I thought so--see what I have here!" He put before Scorrier a
+telegram:
+
+"At all costs keep working--fatal to stop--manage this somehow.--
+HEMMINGS."
+
+Breathing quickly, he added: "As if I didn't know! 'Manage this
+somehow'--a little hard!"
+
+"What's to be done?" asked Scorrier.
+
+"You see I am commanded!" Pippin answered bitterly.  "And they're
+quite right; we must keep working--our contracts!  Now I'm down--not
+a soul will spare me!"
+
+The miners' meeting was held the following day on the outskirts of
+the town.  Pippin had cleared the place to make a public recreation-
+ground--a sort of feather in the company's cap; it was now to be the
+spot whereon should be decided the question of the company's life or
+death.
+
+The sky to the west was crossed by a single line of cloud like a bar
+of beaten gold; tree shadows crept towards the groups of men; the
+evening savour, that strong fragrance of the forest, sweetened the
+air.  The miners stood all round amongst the burnt tree-stumps, cowed
+and sullen.  They looked incapable of movement or expression.  It was
+this dumb paralysis that frightened Scorrier.  He watched Pippin
+speaking from his phaeton, the butt of all those sullen, restless
+eyes.  Would he last out?  Would the wires hold?  It was like the
+finish of a race.  He caught a baffled look on Pippin's face, as if
+he despaired of piercing that terrible paralysis.  The men's eyes had
+begun to wander.  'He's lost his hold,' thought Scorrier; 'it's all
+up!'
+
+A miner close beside him muttered: "Look out!"
+
+Pippin was leaning forward, his voice had risen, the words fell like
+a whiplash on the faces of the crowd: "You shan't throw me over; do
+you think I'll give up all I've done for you?  I'll make you the
+first power in the colony!  Are you turning tail at the first shot?
+You're a set of cowards, my lads!"
+
+Each man round Scorrier was listening with a different motion of the
+hands--one rubbed them, one clenched them, another moved his closed
+fist, as if stabbing some one in the back.  A grisly-bearded, beetle-
+browed, twinkling-eyed old Cornishman muttered: "A'hm not troublin'
+about that."  It seemed almost as if Pippin's object was to get the
+men to kill him; they had gathered closer, crouching for a rush.
+Suddenly Pippin's voice dropped to a whisper: "I'm disgraced
+Men, are you going back on me?"
+
+The old miner next Scorrier called out suddenly: "Anny that's
+Cornishmen here to stand by the superintendent?"  A group drew
+together, and with murmurs and gesticulation the meeting broke up.
+
+In the evening a deputation came to visit Pippin; and all night long
+their voices and the superintendent's footsteps could be heard.  In
+the morning, Pippin went early to the mine.  Before supper the
+deputation came again; and again Scorrier had to listen hour after
+hour to the sound of voices and footsteps till he fell asleep.  Just
+before dawn he was awakened by a light.  Pippin stood at his bedside.
+"The men go down to-morrow," he said: "What did I tell you?  Carry me
+home on my shield, eh?"
+
+In a week the mine was in full work.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+Two years later, Scorrier heard once more of Pippin.  A note from
+Hemmings reached him asking if he could make it convenient to attend
+their Board meeting the following Thursday.  He arrived rather before
+the appointed time.  The secretary received him, and, in answer to
+inquiry, said: "Thank you, we are doing well--between ourselves, we
+are doing very well."
+
+"And Pippin?"
+
+The secretary frowned.  "Ah, Pippin! We asked you to come on his
+account.  Pippin is giving us a lot of trouble.  We have not had a
+single line from him for just two years!"  He spoke with such a sense
+of personal grievance that Scorrier felt quite sorry for him.  "Not a
+single line," said Hemmings, "since that explosion--you were there at
+the time, I remember!  It makes it very awkward; I call it personal
+to me."
+
+"But how--" Scorrier began.
+
+"We get--telegrams.  He writes to no one, not even to his family.
+And why?  Just tell me why?  We hear of him; he's a great nob out
+there.  Nothing's done in the colony without his finger being in the
+pie.  He turned out the last Government because they wouldn't grant
+us an extension for our railway--shows he can't be a fool.  Besides,
+look at our balance-sheet!"
+
+It turned out that the question on which Scorrier's opinion was
+desired was, whether Hemmings should be sent out to see what was the
+matter with the superintendent.  During the discussion which.
+ensued, he was an unwilling listener to strictures on Pippin's
+silence.  "The explosion," he muttered at last, "a very trying time!"
+
+Mr. Booker pounced on him.  "A very trying time!  So it was--to all
+of us.  But what excuse is that--now, Mr. Scorrier, what excuse is
+that?"
+
+Scorrier was obliged to admit that it was none.
+
+"Business is business--eh, what?"
+
+Scorrier, gazing round that neat Board-room, nodded.  A deaf
+director, who had not spoken for some months, said with sudden
+fierceness: "It's disgraceful!"  He was obviously letting off the
+fume of long-unuttered disapprovals.  One perfectly neat, benevolent
+old fellow, however, who had kept his hat on, and had a single vice--
+that of coming to the Board-room with a brown paper parcel tied up
+with string--murmured: "We must make all allowances," and started an
+anecdote about his youth.  He was gently called to order by his
+secretary.  Scorrier was asked for his opinion.  He looked at
+Hemmings.  "My importance is concerned," was written all over the
+secretary's face.  Moved by an impulse of loyalty to Pippin, Scorrier
+answered, as if it were all settled: "Well, let me know when you are
+starting, Hemmings--I should like the trip myself."
+
+As he was going out, the chairman, old Jolyon Forsyte, with a grave,
+twinkling look at Hemmings, took him aside.  "Glad to hear you say
+that about going too, Mr. Scorrier; we must be careful--Pippin's such
+a good fellow, and so sensitive; and our friend there--a bit heavy in
+the hand, um?"
+
+Scorrier did in fact go out with Hemmings.  The secretary was sea-
+sick, and his prostration, dignified but noisy, remained a memory for
+ever; it was sonorous and fine--the prostration of superiority; and
+the way in which he spoke of it, taking casual acquaintances into the
+caves of his experience, was truly interesting.
+
+Pippin came down to the capital to escort them, provided for their
+comforts as if they had been royalty, and had a special train to take
+them to the mines.
+
+He was a little stouter, brighter of colour, greyer of beard, more
+nervous perhaps in voice and breathing.  His manner to Hemmings was
+full of flattering courtesy; but his sly, ironical glances played on
+the secretary's armour like a fountain on a hippopotamus.  To
+Scorrier, however, he could not show enough affection:
+
+The first evening, when Hemmings had gone to his room, he jumped up
+like a boy out of school.  "So I'm going to get a wigging," he said;
+"I suppose I deserve it; but if you knew--if you only knew...! Out
+here they've nicknamed me 'the King'--they say I rule the colony.
+It's myself that I can't rule"; and with a sudden burst of passion
+such as Scorrier had never seen in him: "Why did they send this man
+here?  What can he know about the things that I've been through?"  In
+a moment he calmed down again.  "There! this is very stupid; worrying
+you like this!" and with a long, kind look into Scorrier's face, he
+hustled him off to bed.
+
+Pippin did not break out again, though fire seemed to smoulder behind
+the bars of his courteous irony.  Intuition of danger had evidently
+smitten Hemmings, for he made no allusion to the object of his visit.
+There were moments when Scorrier's common-sense sided with Hemmings--
+these were moments when the secretary was not present.
+
+'After all,' he told himself, 'it's a little thing to ask--one letter
+a month.  I never heard of such a case.'  It was wonderful indeed how
+they stood it!  It showed how much they valued Pippin!  What was the
+matter with him?  What was the nature of his trouble?  One glimpse
+Scorrier had when even Hemmings, as he phrased it, received "quite a
+turn."  It was during a drive back from the most outlying of the
+company's trial mines, eight miles through the forest.  The track led
+through a belt of trees blackened by a forest fire.  Pippin was
+driving.  The secretary seated beside him wore an expression of faint
+alarm, such as Pippin's driving was warranted to evoke from almost
+any face.  The sky had darkened strangely, but pale streaks of light,
+coming from one knew not where, filtered through the trees.  No
+breath was stirring; the wheels and horses' hoofs made no sound on
+the deep fern mould.  All around, the burnt tree-trunks, leafless and
+jagged, rose like withered giants, the passages between them were
+black, the sky black, and black the silence.  No one spoke, and
+literally the only sound was Pippin's breathing.  What was it that
+was so terrifying?  Scorrier had a feeling of entombment; that nobody
+could help him; the feeling of being face to face with Nature; a
+sensation as if all the comfort and security of words and rules had
+dropped away from him.  And-nothing happened.  They reached home and
+dined.
+
+During dinner he had again that old remembrance of a little man
+chopping at a castle with his sword.  It came at a moment when Pippin
+had raised his hand with the carving-knife grasped in it to answer
+some remark of Hemmings' about the future of the company.  The
+optimism in his uplifted chin, the strenuous energy in his whispering
+voice, gave Scorrier a more vivid glimpse of Pippin's nature than he
+had perhaps ever had before.  This new country, where nothing but
+himself could help a man--that was the castle!  No wonder Pippin was
+impatient of control, no wonder he was out of hand, no wonder he was
+silent--chopping away at that!  And suddenly he thought: 'Yes, and
+all the time one knows, Nature must beat him in the end!'
+
+That very evening Hemmings delivered himself of his reproof.  He had
+sat unusually silent; Scorrier, indeed, had thought him a little
+drunk, so portentous was his gravity; suddenly, however he rose.  It
+was hard on a man, he said, in his position, with a Board (he spoke
+as of a family of small children), to be kept so short of
+information.  He was actually compelled to use his imagination to
+answer the shareholders' questions.  This was painful and
+humiliating; he had never heard of any secretary having to use his
+imagination!  He went further--it was insulting!  He had grown grey
+in the service of the company.  Mr. Scorrier would bear him out when
+he said he had a position to maintain--his name in the City was a
+high one; and, by George! he was going to keep it a high one; he
+would allow nobody to drag it in the dust--that ought clearly to be
+understood.  His directors felt they were being treated like
+children; however that might be, it was absurd to suppose that he
+(Hemmings) could be treated like a child...!  The secretary paused;
+his eyes seemed to bully the room.
+
+"If there were no London office," murmured Pippin, "the shareholders
+would get the same dividends."
+
+Hemmings gasped.  "Come!" he said, "this is monstrous!"
+
+"What help did I get from London when I first came here?  What help
+have I ever had?"
+
+Hemmings swayed, recovered, and with a forced smile replied that, if
+this were true, he had been standing on his head for years; he did
+not believe the attitude possible for such a length of time;
+personally he would have thought that he too had had a little
+something to say to the company's position, but no matter...!  His
+irony was crushing....  It was possible that Mr. Pippin hoped to
+reverse the existing laws of the universe with regard to limited
+companies; he would merely say that he must not begin with a company
+of which he (Hemmings) happened to be secretary.  Mr. Scorrier had
+hinted at excuses; for his part, with the best intentions in the
+world, he had great difficulty in seeing them.  He would go further--
+he did not see them!  The explosion...!  Pippin shrank so visibly
+that Hemmings seemed troubled by a suspicion that he had gone too
+far.
+
+"We know," he said, "that it was trying for you...."
+
+"Trying!" "burst out Pippin.
+
+"No one can say," Hemmings resumed soothingly, "that we have not
+dealt liberally."  Pippin made a motion of the head.  "We think we
+have a good superintendent; I go further, an excellent
+superintendent.  What I say is: Let's be pleasant!  I am not making
+an unreasonable request!"  He ended on a fitting note of jocularity;
+and, as if by consent, all three withdrew, each to his own room,
+without another word.
+
+In the course of the next day Pippin said to Scorrier: "It seems I
+have been very wicked.  I must try to do better"; and with a touch of
+bitter humour, "They are kind enough to think me a good
+superintendent, you see!  After that I must try hard."
+
+Scorrier broke in: "No man could have done so much for them;" and,
+carried away by an impulse to put things absolutely straight, went on
+"But, after all, a letter now and then--what does it amount to?"
+
+Pippin besieged him with a subtle glance.  "You too?" he said--
+"I must indeed have been a wicked man!" and turned away.
+
+Scorrier felt as if he had been guilty of brutality; sorry for
+Pippin, angry with himself; angry with Pippin, sorry for himself.  He
+earnestly desired to see the back of Hemmings.  The secretary
+gratified the wish a few days later, departing by steamer with
+ponderous expressions of regard and the assurance of his goodwill.
+
+Pippin gave vent to no outburst of relief, maintaining a courteous
+silence, making only one allusion to his late guest, in answer to a
+remark of Scorrier:
+
+"Ah! don't tempt me! mustn't speak behind his back."
+
+A month passed, and Scorrier still--remained Pippin's guest.  As each
+mail-day approached he experienced a queer suppressed excitement.  On
+one of these occasions Pippin had withdrawn to his room; and when
+Scorrier went to fetch him to dinner he found him with his head
+leaning on his hands, amid a perfect fitter of torn paper.  He looked
+up at Scorrier.
+
+"I can't do it," he said, "I feel such a hypocrite; I can't put
+myself into leading-strings again.  Why should I ask these people,
+when I've settled everything already?  If it were a vital matter they
+wouldn't want to hear--they'd simply wire, 'Manage this somehow!'"
+
+Scorrier said nothing, but thought privately 'This is a mad
+business!'  What was a letter?  Why make a fuss about a letter?  The
+approach of mail-day seemed like a nightmare to the superintendent;
+he became feverishly nervous like a man under a spell; and, when the
+mail had gone, behaved like a respited criminal.  And this had been
+going on two years!  Ever since that explosion.  Why, it was
+monomania!
+
+One day, a month after Hemmings' departure, Pippin rose early from
+dinner; his face was flushed, he had been drinking wine.  "I won't be
+beaten this time," he said, as he passed Scorrier.  The latter could
+hear him writing in the next room, and looked in presently to say
+that he was going for a walk.  Pippin gave him a kindly nod.
+
+It was a cool, still evening: innumerable stars swarmed in clusters
+over the forests, forming bright hieroglyphics in the middle heavens,
+showering over the dark harbour into the sea.  Scorrier walked
+slowly.  A weight seemed lifted from his mind, so entangled had he
+become in that uncanny silence.  At last Pippin had broken through
+the spell.  To get that, letter sent would be the laying of a
+phantom, the rehabilitation of commonsense.  Now that this silence
+was in the throes of being broken, he felt curiously tender towards
+Pippin, without the hero-worship of old days, but with a queer
+protective feeling.  After all, he was different from other men.  In
+spite of his feverish, tenacious energy, in spite of his ironic
+humour, there was something of the woman in him!  And as for this
+silence, this horror of control--all geniuses had "bees in their
+bonnets," and Pippin was a genius in his way!
+
+He looked back at the town.  Brilliantly lighted it had a thriving
+air-difficult to believe of the place he remembered ten years back;
+the sounds of drinking, gambling, laughter, and dancing floated to
+his ears.  'Quite a city!' he thought.
+
+With this queer elation on him he walked slowly back along the
+street, forgetting that he was simply an oldish mining expert, with a
+look of shabbiness, such as clings to men who are always travelling,
+as if their "nap" were for ever being rubbed off.  And he thought of
+Pippin, creator of this glory.
+
+He had passed the boundaries of the town, and had entered the forest.
+A feeling of discouragement instantly beset him.  The scents and
+silence, after the festive cries and odours of the town, were
+undefinably oppressive.  Notwithstanding, he walked a long time,
+saying to himself that he would give the letter every chance.  At
+last, when he thought that Pippin must have finished, he went back to
+the house.
+
+Pippin had finished.  His forehead rested on the table, his arms hung
+at his sides; he was stone-dead!  His face wore a smile, and by his
+side lay an empty laudanum bottle.
+
+The letter, closely, beautifully written, lay before him.  It was a
+fine document, clear, masterly, detailed, nothing slurred, nothing
+concealed, nothing omitted; a complete review of the company's
+position; it ended with the words: "Your humble servant, RICHARD
+PIPPIN."
+
+Scorrier took possession of it.  He dimly understood that with those
+last words a wire had snapped.  The border-line had been overpassed;
+the point reached where that sense of proportion, which alone makes
+life possible, is lost.  He was certain that at the moment of his
+death Pippin could have discussed bimetallism, or any intellectual
+problem, except the one problem of his own heart; that, for some
+mysterious reason, had been too much for him.  His death had been the
+work of a moment of supreme revolt--a single instant of madness on a
+single subject!  He found on the blotting-paper, scrawled across the
+impress of the signature, "Can't stand it!"  The completion of that
+letter had been to him a struggle ungraspable by Scorrier.  Slavery?
+Defeat?  A violation of Nature?  The death of justice?  It were
+better not to think of it!  Pippin could have told--but he would
+never speak again.  Nature, at whom, unaided, he had dealt so many
+blows, had taken her revenge...!
+
+In the night Scorrier stole down, and, with an ashamed face, cut off
+a lock of the fine grey hair.  'His daughter might like it!' he
+thought....
+
+He waited till Pippin was buried, then, with the letter in his
+pocket, started for England.
+
+He arrived at Liverpool on a Thursday morning, and travelling to
+town, drove straight to the office of the company.  The Board were
+sitting.  Pippin's successor was already being interviewed.  He
+passed out as Scorrier came in, a middle-aged man with a large, red
+beard, and a foxy, compromising face.  He also was a Cornishman.
+Scorrier wished him luck with a very heavy heart.
+
+As an unsentimental man, who had a proper horror of emotion, whose
+living depended on his good sense, to look back on that interview
+with the Board was painful.  It had excited in him a rage of which he
+was now heartily ashamed.  Old Jolyon Forsyte, the chairman, was not
+there for once, guessing perhaps that the Board's view of this death
+would be too small for him; and little Mr. Booker sat in his place.
+Every one had risen, shaken hands with Scorrier, and expressed
+themselves indebted for his coming.  Scorrier placed Pippin's letter
+on the table, and gravely the secretary read out to his Board the
+last words of their superintendent.  When he had finished, a director
+said, "That's not the letter of a madman!"  Another answered: "Mad as
+a hatter; nobody but a madman would have thrown up such a post."
+Scorrier suddenly withdrew.  He heard Hemmings calling after him.
+"Aren't you well, Mr. Scorrier?  aren't you well, sir?"
+
+He shouted back: "Quite sane, I thank you....
+
+The Naples "express" rolled round the outskirts of the town.
+Vesuvius shone in the sun, uncrowned by smoke.  But even as Scorrier
+looked, a white puff went soaring up.  It was the footnote to his
+memories.
+
+February 1901.
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of VILLA RUBEIN AND OTHER STORIES
+by John Galsworthy.
+
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